Ageless Summoning – Corrupting the Entempled Plane (Review)

Ageless Summoning are a death metal band from the UK and this is their debut album.

Featuring members of Abyssal, Inculcator, and Of Spire and Throne, Corrupting the Entempled Plane contains 49 minutes of ancient death metal that’s baleful and absolutely packed with evil riffs.

Boasting a sturdy foundation of Morbid Angel and Immolation influences, Ageless Summoning proceed to build on this with skilled vision, producing an album that’s part-hero worship, and part spiritual continuation. Delivering a style of death metal that seethes with malevolence and grim, otherworldly atmosphere, Ageless Summoning do well to balance their obvious influences with their own personality. The end result is a very satisfying and enjoyable slab of foul death metal that achieves the lofty aim of taking strengths from the masters, while creating something worthy to exist in its own right.

The songs are largely mid-paced and slower, although faster sections certainly appear. The overall songwriting goal seems to be one of malevolent atmosphere via immersive and engaging riffs, but without sacrificing death metal’s inherent brutality. As such, the music is able to spread its darkness through well-written structuring, dynamics, and immense riffcraft, allowing the album to stand proudly on its own merits, without hiding behind excessive technicality, speed, or similar.

Yes, Ageless Summoning create their death metal with consummate skill. The only misstep they make is the depressingly common one of including an utterly pointless interlude track that achieves nothing and just breaks up the mood and momentum that the album had until that point. Even with this though, Corrupting the Entempled Plane is a formidable slab of death metal.

This is an old-school death metal album that has a timeless feel to it. Despite its clear influences, I’ve enjoyed Corrupting the Entempled Plane far more than I was expecting to, and highly recommend any fan of menacing death metal nastiness to check this out as a priority.