Carbon Tomb are a death metal band from Denmark and this is their debut album.
Carbon Tomb play dissonant death metal, with a touch of a blackened influence in places. Passage to a Neutron Star delivers a 34-minute exemplar of the style’s dark allure, offering both brutality and feeling.
Carbon Tomb’s intelligently crafted death metal is atmosphere-rich, but achieves this without sacrificing heaviness and aggression. It’s harsh presence is dynamic and varied, with the band focusing on songwriting and the needs of the music, while still immersing themselves in the flowing sea of dissonant darkness they find themselves in.
Passage to a Neutron Star offers up surface-level savagery blended with deeper substance. This allows the listener to enjoy the sheer force of the music’s harsh presence, or to become absorbed in the abyssal depths that Carbon Tomb build with malevolent ease. Ideally, you’d do both, as Passage to a Neutron Star warrants replays.
The songs are more dynamic than the dissonant style usually manages to be, and carry more energy. The music itself is tightly coiled and exact, although this is not at the expense of emotional content. The vocals take the opposite approach, given much more freedom to roam and organically roam where they will.
Passage to a Neutron Star is filler-free, with each track lasting the duration that it is meant to in order to get the job done. The music’s mixture of brutal heaviness and expressive detailing is infectious. The way the band structure and layer the songs works well for them, facilitating this duality of purpose. Carbon Tomb revel in their ability to unleash eloquent destruction.
Carbon Tomb have produced a strong album here. Passage to a Neutron Star is a beast. If bands like Artificial Brain, Devenial Verdict, Gorguts, Mors Verum, Replicant, Suffering Hour, and Ulcerate float your boat, then you’re going to want to get on board with what Carbon Tomb have to offer.
Very highly recommended.
Wonderbox Metal 