CIVEROUS "Decrepit Flesh Relic"
By Dr. Abner Mality
This week's deep, dark, hole in the ground stab at torturous death/doom comes courtesy of CIVEROUS, whose logo is composed of fangs and tumors but which looks like a furry blue bedroom slipper. Do these guys bring us anything different at all in their overstuffed micro-genre?
They surely worship heavily at the altar of DISEMBOWELMENT, a band whose seminal work lies more than 30 years in the past. When that Australian band first appeared, there was nothing quite like their mix of ultra-slow death metal and gloomy Gothic twang. Now the field is no longer so vacant or ground-breaking. CIVEROUS certainly have the ugly, gross side of cavernous death metal down pat, complete with inhumanly deep growls and even more deeply distorted guitar. The minor key clean Gothic twanginess of DISEMBOWELMENT is also present in many songs; the trouble is, it all sounds the same in every track and increases in frequency as the album crawls along.
I cannot say it is done poorly, as there are several monumentally heavy passages that grind against the skull. Neither can I say there is anything outstanding in the CIVEROUS playbook that will raise it above the fetid swamp of the cavernous death/doom genre. Such is life in late 2021.