Japanese death/doom swamp-haunters Anatomia released their first demo in 2003. Songs like “Funeral Feast” revealed a band with little concern for making songs palatable. For almost two decades, Anatomia has collaborated with dozens of the gnarliest bands in the underground. Anatomia’s portion of each split album has represented Death Metal and Doom for connoisseurs of filth. The band isn’t an entry point into extremity for gateway fans. The songs feel dredged from a tar pit filled with unidentifiable cadavers. There’s no light, no reprieve, only casket-crushing riffs that release noxious fumes of decay. But on Anatomia’s new LP Corporeal Torment, the band uses half of the album to experiment with ambient noisescapes. An uncompromising attitude dominates Corporeal Torment down to the album’s final breaths. I hope your brain is primed and ready, because cult labels Me Saco Un Ojo Records hand Dark Descent have agreed to share the full album early. Grab a shovel and dig in before Anatomia releases these tracks officially on May 20th.
Chilling ambient begins opening track “Dismemberment.” Consider it the cleansing of the torture device before the rest of Corporeal Torment crushes your bones into grave dust. But it only takes a solitary minute for the album to reveal its true face. Anatomia is Death/Doom at the genre’s most caustic. The grooves are covered in ooze and leeches. The sludgy bass line introducing “Slime of Putrescence” rides a line between minimalist funeral doom and pitch-black sludge. But once that song’s pace picks up, it leaves a slug trail into your memory as one of the album’s highlights. The title of “Despaired Void” hints at the track’s despondent atmosphere. Instead of pure murky death, the song is a nightmarish haze of droning vocals and instruments that slowly vanish into the titular void. But twenty-minute closing track “Mortem” is half of the album’s run-time for a reason. It continues the poisoned soundscape of “Despaired Void,” and banishes the Doom riffs to a distant cemetery. The lengthy track may not possess the band’s usual skull-flattening distortion, but it feels like a dimension where life isn’t welcome. “Mortem” feels like it captured echoes of extinct life in deep space. Think of it like a galactic graveyard.
Succumb to the crushing heaviness of Anatomia and enter the despaired void by pressing play below.