EXCARNATED ENTITY - MASS GRAVE HORIZON CD

Excarnated Entity was stillborn under lifeless skies in the year 2018. Originally hailing from Seattle, the quartet features current and former members of Anhedonist and Triumvir Foul. From the beginning, Excarnated Entity‘s aim has been to deliver desolate-yet-powerful DEATH METAL DOOM. They self-released their Stillborn in Ash demo in May 2019, which quickly caught the attention of various labels. It immediately got reissued on tape by Extremely Rotten Productions, followed by vinyl and CD reissues on Nuclear Winter with new artwork/design and remixed audio.

In mid-2020, Excarnated Entity relocated to Portland, Oregon and underwent a handful of lineup changes before reaching their current formation. With the new lineup in place, work on their debut album was finally completed. Mass Grave Horizon paints a hopeless vision of the future, drearily dredging death metal’s darkest depths and locating majestically miserable doom among those ominously bubbling landscapes. Following a two-minute instrumental introduction, Excarnated Entity kick in with a classic downtuned death metal surge before gutting its underbelly, revealing the morose melodicism of earliest My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost. As the eight-song/44-minute album plays on, its attendant song titles vividly illustrate said vision – “Carcinogen Shroud,” “Corridor of Flame,” and “The Butcher’s Pulpit” among them – and one can further detect shades of Trouble, Cathedral, Solitude Aeturnus lurking within those ruins. It’s a massively dense-yet-spacious sound, and the quartet’s songwriting suitably incorporates slow twists of the knife, but always in a deliberate and linear fashion. And, come climactic closer “Gallery of Defeat,” your fate is sealed and your soul spent…and Excarnated Entity stand stoic, unmoved and unmovable.