Album Review: Fossilization - Advent Of Wounds
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
For all the things that Fossilization are doing, one thing that they definitely aren’t is fucking around. This is depraved music for bedraggled coffin feeders, lecherous dwellers of starless catacombs that wrench open the rotting pine to feast on the bloating corpses within. There’s a clear debt owed to incantation, as much in the tyrannical heaviness of it as the rank vileness. Simple elements combine in this uncomfortable, disquieting way in an album that feels as though its surfacing somehow, breaching up through the planet crust in frantic splashes of exhumed magma from warrens carved miles below. How else to interpret the tenebrous clamour of “Scalded by His Sacred Halo”, fulminating plucked chords chanting out over the scaly pulse of deep tremolo line? That it’s heavy is true, but different albums are heavy in different ways; Fossilization are a cavernous rumble, the incalculable magnitude of a ‘quake in the tectonic depths, and the terror of being cramped and stuffed into a thinning fissure as bit by bit clenching walls crunch in ever tighter.
There is a sizeable quantity of doom here – less so the fuzzy blues riffs through billowing clouds of ganja smoke variety, more the impending sense of unavoidable horror type. But it’s the moments – of which there are plenty – when the band decides that the drumkit has gone far too long without punishment and beat the snare like it told them it’s safe word was “harder” that most had my horns aloft. “Cremation of a Seraph” fires out the starting blocks with it’s arse on fire like it just broke out of a cartel cellar. Towering cliff faces of saw-edged distortion slamming with appalling violence into you with the cumulative force of a train derailment. Meanwhile, a blastbeat endurance test stands pummelling igneous fists into you over and over in this scathing, vituperative onslaught of a performance. It’s never technical exactly, but it’s flashy in the way an explosion is, overwhelming with concussive shock and awe. At their best, listening to Fossilization is like being hogtied in a blast furnace, able to do nothing but scream before the oncoming roar chars the meat from your bones.
At their worst...well, they’re still kicking impossible amounts of ass. It might come down to my preference for speed and aggression, but I did initially find the slower portions of the release marginally less convincing than the faster ones. That isn’t to say that the slower songs are subpar or that slower sections don’t have their place – far from it. “While the Light Lasts” is a creature of oozing draped tendons, the sprint of it’s midsection all the more threatening for the languor of its bookends. In fact, the more I listen to “Advent of Wounds”, the more the sense grows that I may be mining these musty fathoms for complaints. It’s normally a sign of a strong album that one must go prospecting for drawbacks as opposed to having them slump into your lap, especially when “Temple of Flies and Moss” ultimately showcases the wisdom of their songwriting choices, with a choking plague of a melody played first with a sombre, trudging beat that then accelerates past the sound barrier into an utterly repulsive passage of contagious, sickening splendour.
There was a certain buzz around Fossilization’s debut. The sceptical type might have been inclined to withhold judgement, suspecting perhaps that Fossilization might prove a fleeting diversion with no real staying power. If that outline describes you, let this sophomore effort function as evidence that Fossilization deserved the hype then, and still deserve it now. Hostile, misanthropic, and darker than balrog shit, if you want a dreary February spiced up with the knifing terror of being lost and hunted through nameless caverns who knows how far from the sunlight, then “Advent of Wounds” is a must-have dose of masochism for you.
