Fossilization – Leprous Daylight (Review)

Fossilization are a Brazilian death metal band and this is their debut album.

Since first encountering Fossilization’s doomed death metal on their split with Ritual Necromancy, I have been looking forward to hearing more from the band. Now their debut Leprous Daylight is here; 37 minutes of foul death metal malevolence delivered to the unsuspecting masses.

The doom elements that were heard on Fossilization’s split songs are still here in places, but the aggression levels across Leprous Daylight have been ramped up. The blast beats are extremely vicious, with virulent riffs and murderous, twisting melodies that are severely bleak and drip with the sort of venomous woe that can stop hearts. Fossilization deal in dark, malefic music. Leprous Daylight wants you dead, wants you rotting in the ground, alone and forgotten, and from the sound of the songs on this imposing album, it has the will and ability to realise this.

For violently crushing intensity shot through with doom vibes that permeate the music like lethal cancers, Leprous Daylight is hard to beat. The album is malignant and ripe with festering evil. Despite an underpinning doom influence that can be felt like an aftermath in the songs, Leprous Daylight is blisteringly hostile. It’s a savagely brutal affair, but one that’s controlled by merciless hands that know how to punish and mutilate. There’s no light here, only darkness and melancholic despair, but the darkness is a textured one, gritty and raw.

The songs, although unrelentingly brutal and harsh, do not lack for emotive content and sinister macabre atmosphere. The cruel overlords behind Fossilization, (who are also in Jupiterian), have crafted an album that has a surprising amount of depth and substance to it for something so malicious and corrupt. Leprous Daylight offers an exemplar of grim death metal darkness, one that’s hard to put down once it has you in its formidable embrace.

I hoped for good things, and I got greatness. Fossilization have created a monster, one which will surely destroy us all.

All hail.