Abstracter – Cinereous Incarnate (Review)

Abstracter are a blackened doom band from the US and this is their third album.

Abstracter are firm favourites here at Wonderbox Metal. Make sure you check out Tomb of Feathers, Wound Empire, and their split with Dark Circles.

Abstracter’s latest album is probably their most crushing and bleak yet. Mixing doom, sludge, crust, death metal, and black metal into a caustic, filthy mix, Cinereous Incarnate drips with malevolence and seeps malignant evil from every damaged pore it has. This hybrid approach has worked very well for the band over the years, but I’d probably say that Cinereous Incarnate is the band’s most well-realised and complete work of dark art so far.

The band delivery lengthy portrayals of blighted, devastated landscapes, taking the listener on a tour through a nightmare landscape of disease, despair, and ruin. Apocalyptic atmosphere wars with outright brutality, while blackened misanthropy corrupts what little melody there might have originally been. Savage sludge riffs morph into crushing doom workouts, while noise and drone elements add further layers of dirt and thick grime to the proceedings.

This is probably the band’s most diverse offering to date, mixing their various influences well across the songs. There’s probably a bit more emphasis on ugly brutality and upbeat violence on this record than there is in some of their other work too, but fear not, there’s still more than enough slow, destructive doom here to get trapped under.

It’s all delivered via the strongest recording the band have yet to benefit from, through a haze of pitch-black corruption and plague-ridden anguish. With an industrialised feeling of impersonal hatred and utter disregard for life, Abstracter have once again succeeded in giving their nightmarescapes such a well-formed and well-delivered musical framework, that you really could be listening to the aural equivalent of the end of the world.

Before this album Abstracter were already an impressive and remarkable proposition. Now, however, they have taken their darkness to an entirely new level.

Make sure this album is on your wish list.

Essential.