What happens when you get a supergroup featuring the most well known bands in extreme music today ranging from Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice, Khemmis, Primitive Man and Vasaeleth? Well, this Colorado based band known as Black Curse has been storming and brewing the underground music scene for quite sometime and with 2020’s Sepulchral Voice Records release of Endless Wound, the hype surrounding this album is without shadow of a doubt well worth the wait. Musically, they play a contemporary, modern, somewhat blackened, and even doomy style of death metal but also incorporating elements of black metal due to it’s cohesive and structured sound’s within the album’s production and even these tracks contain old school doom metal roots that surprisingly works for what it is.
This album not only demonstrated Black Curse’s maturity, growth and understanding what they’ve created for the music, but each song reminded me a lot of the earliest stages of extreme music preferably Incantation so to speak and their influences drawn to the music speaks full volume of how well crafted their songwriting is truly the biggest highlight upon listening to the album consecutively on high repeat. Moments when the listener hears the tracks from Enraptured by Decay, Endless Wound, and Charnel Rift to the explosive opening sections of Finality I Behold, this is the definition of unholy blend of both death and black metal while the formula, tone and musical compositions are not a novelty by any means, what matters for the album is the crystal clear dynamics of the disgusting, flourishing and distinguish sounds that certainly isn’t a easy task to manage, but for what Black Curse have created is simply put, a stable balance between various genres is clearly a clever way incorporating blackened signatures to it’s common death metal counterparts which therefore makes the album creative, artistic and even progressive during the secondary half of the album. From it’s distinctive, demonic and atmospheric ranged styled vocals to the aggressive blast beat fillers, contagious bass and guitar melodies and a doomy, lurky and Celtic Frost-esque cavernous leads to close the album, Endless Wound is destined to be one of the most discussed and unique extreme metal releases of 2020 and beyond for many years to come.
Overall Score: 9.5/10
Review by Jake Butler
