Besotten release Eye of the Monolithicrypt tomorrow, 6 November, through Transcending Obscurity Records.
Five songs: Mist of Decay, Bathed in Insufferable Light, Cruentation, Storming the Cerebral Citadel and Bloodcairn. Two of them pass ten minutes, which is what makes a five track list a full album rather than an EP with ambitions.
Death doom written at that length lives or dies on whether the slow parts are doing something. Cruentation, the word in the middle of the record, is the old belief that a corpse bleeds again in the presence of its killer, and a band that reaches for that is not writing filler around a riff.
Transcending Obscurity have built their catalogue on exactly this: bands nobody has heard of, given a real pressing and a long lead time. The label announces its records months ahead and then holds the date, which is rarer than it should be at this end of the business.