I’ve been listening to, thinking, and talking about Incantation a lot lately. If I had wanted a palate cleanser after our monumental ranking piece, I could have chosen a better promo than Fossilization’s caverncore debut full-length Leprous Daylight. São Paulo’s V and P are no strangers to the AMG gauntlet, making up half of sludge doom outfit Jupiterian, whom we’ve favorably reviewed twice. For this project, the Brazilian duo, like their New Jersey forebearers, make grimy death metal full of searing tremolo riffs, disgustingly guttural vocals, and wretched doom stretches. It’s an ideal soundtrack for lurking in crypts or desecrating holy spaces, but having just spent countless hours with the true masters of their niche, can Leprous Daylight hold a candle to such befouled darkness?
With my head already so full of John McEntee’s career output, it’s easy if overly reductive to point to correlations on Leprous Daylight. Lead single “Once Was God” leans very Diabolical Conquest, for instance, while “At the Heart of the Nest” is more Vanquished In Vengeance. That signature easy oscillation between blazing death metal gallops and doomy footslogs are also on point throughout. This may all sound like overt worship, but thankfully Fossilization is more than pastiche. As Leprous Daylight progresses, hints of Jupiterian creep into the album, at first in sludgy spirit, but eventually in structure as well. The two doomiest tracks, “Eon” and “Wrought In the Abyss,” close out the album with a sound that splits the difference between “Once Was God” and something like “Starless” from Protosapien. Sludge a turn-off for you? don’t worry. This is still firmly in death/doom territory.
If scuzzy riffcraft and clattering complexity interest you, you’ll want to give this one a spin or ten. Fossilization excel at the kind of burly tremolo riffs that buzz and scrape through the muck while filling the air with an oppressive closeness. Case in point is the opening riff to first proper track “Once Was God,” which combines with dexterous machine gun drumming to blast the doors right off in the opening salvo. The band applies such riffs in shades, like the more subtle but no less sinister one at the 1:45 mark in the title track. Production gives a nice low, chunky tone to the guitars while maintaining a metallic tang, like a hammer strike on an anvil or tasting the iron in your own blood. On the other side of the spectrum, some of the doom passages push as close to majestic as they can without inducing whiplash given the grittiness of the median sound. The most extreme examples of this arrive in the final minute of “Wrought In the Abyss,” as well as one minute into “At the Heart of the Nest,” but both instances are so smoothly integrated into the clamorous whole that nothing feels jarring.
Such smooth transitions and natural flow between ideas are a distinct feature of Leprous Daylight. This is certainly a net positive and a testament to V and P’s outstanding musicianship, but it’s also a slight detriment. More on that in a minute. This album is immersive in the sense that the moment you hit play, you’re borne along twists, turns, and tempo changes on dense, restless waves of riffs and drum fills with few perches upon which to find footing for contemplation. Even the slower doom passages relentlessly mutate underfoot in order to pack as many riffs in as possible. The entire album flashes by in 37 minutes, making Leprous Daylight an exhilarating listen. That said, it takes more than a few listens to commit passages to memory. There are plenty of top-notch riffs here, but not much in the way of immediate hooks, and some listeners may find they don’t have the patience to parse these depths. Those familiar with the Incantations and Dead Congregations of the world won’t have this issue.
With Leprous Daylight, Fossilization has delivered on the promise they showed on their acclaimed 2021 EP and 2022 split with Ritual Necromancy. As much as I like sludge doom, this is superior to V and P’s work in Jupiterian, and may just be the better Incantation record of 2023. The more they lean into their own idiosyncrasies, the better future releases can be, but for now, they’ve made an enviable debut record.
Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps kbps mp3
Label: Everlasting Spew Records
Websites: fossilization.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/fossilization
Releases Worldwide: August 8th, 2023
