I guess I should’ve expected that Tomb Mold wouldn’t make another Planetary Clairvoyance. Ever chasing perfection through perpetual, incremental improvement, Tomb Mold moved their trademarked filth into proggier territory. Without veering into realms of cleanliness, Tomb Mold now offer the same grime as ever but in a more sophisticated and bizarrely beauteous form—reminiscent of Question, Death, and even Afterbirth on occasion. Unlike the cavebrained, Outer Heaven-esque bludgeoning of previous work, The Enduring Spirit emphasizes unconventional melodies, floating atmosphere, twisted time signatures swaps, and otherworldly noodling. It’s a guitar-forward record to be sure, but one which takes full advantage of the talented rhythm section’s wide range of patterns, rhythms, and counterpoint. Meanwhile, Tomb Mold’s signature cavernous roar remains as grisly and unintelligible as ever. This affords the record a threatening, alien character that instills a genuine sense of danger to what would otherwise be a very alluring piece of instrumental progressive death.
The Enduring Spirit’s belly ripples with its most defined and powerful muscle, providing an armored core strong enough to support the extremities of the record. Album highlights “Fate’s Tangled Thread,” “Flesh as Armour,” and “Servants of Possibility” combine the best of Tomb Mold’s past, present, and future. A wondrous Imaginarium of stellar solos, crushing grooves, and delicate flights of atmospheric fancy compose these exploratory tunes but also unite as one harmonized whole. You might be forgiven for perceiving a disconnect between this record’s myriad elements, but in these songs no such thing exists. Smooth transitions, logical evolutions of theme and tone, and smartly placed dalliances with the whimsical personify Tomb Mold’s strongest material, while their established sense of death and destruction remains intact and thriving. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but these Canadians prove amply capable for the task.
Aesthetically, The Enduring Spirit checks all of my boxes. However, despite the record’s uniqueness, I struggle to remember large swaths of it once the headphones come off. Opener “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)” is a bold and brave departure from the sound I came to know and love, with progressive leanings highly reminiscent of mid-period Death, and yet to my ears it lacks the same power and memorability of previous hits like “Planetary Clairvoyance.” While compositionally strong and beautifully designed, follow-up tracks “Angelic Fabrications” and “Will of Whispers” offer less than their more enduring neighbors in the way of standout features or compelling passages. Weird melodies and gorgeous atmosphere in these tracks provide a wondrous environment to get lost in, but when I wake up afterward I can’t remember the dreams anymore. The lounge-jazz death metal fusion of closer “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity” suffers a similar fate, despite being quite pretty and immersive. Partly a result of its overblown twelve-minute runtime, this epic track throws a smorgasbord of cool ideas at the wall. Many of them stick—such as the introductory blitz of riffs and blasts and the midsection’s gentle drift through extraterrestrial space—but the rest doesn’t contribute substantial content to support such an expansive runtime, thereby weakening the work as a whole.
I could undermine my own credibility here by mentioning that my shock at the stark changes Tomb Mold made to their musical direction posed a significant challenge to my enjoyment of their new record. But I’ve spun The Enduring Spirit a significant number of times, closing in on a dozen. In that time, I’ve recognized the brilliance of this record’s best material—and concluded that the shifts the band made were absolutely the right ones—even if there are a few wrinkles to iron out. The Enduring Spirit brings a fresh and vibrant flavor to a tired but beloved genre, and now a new threshold arises. Can Tomb Mold perfect their adventurous new style on their fifth release? Based on this qualified success, I’d put my money on yes.
Rating: Good!
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: FLAC
Label: 20 Buck Spin
Websites: tombmold.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/tombmold
Releases Worldwide: September 15th, 2023
Ferox
I came here to get my face stomped, but I wound up on an odyssey through death metal innerspace. Tomb Mold’s prog-engorged fourth long player marks a departure from their previous work. The Toronto trio have been flashing signs of getting antsy in their “elevated old school” niche for a minute now.1 From the baroque acoustic interludes on Planetary Clairvoyance opener “Beg for Life” to the expansive composition that closes recent EP Aperture of Body, the signals have been there if you’re paying attention. Even so, no one expected this. The album is so different than what came before that it almost feels like a clean break. If you’re like me, your first reaction might be something akin to: that’s not my Tomb Mold. The Enduring Spirit isn’t what I expected, or wanted, from one of my favorite bands. So what exactly is it?
The Enduring Spirit announces Tomb Mold’s new approach right out of the gate. Openers “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)” and “Angelic Fabrications” tear through complex compositions that are at least kissing cousins of the outfit’s earlier work. The album then departs for the prog hinterlands on a pair of mid-album seven-minute dynamos. “Will of Whispers” opens with a kind of smooth jazz fantasia that segues into frantic death metal, while Song O’The Year contender “Fate’s Tangled Thread” features bright soloing that occasionally feels like it would be at home on a Peter Frampton record. The transitions between these insanely disparate elements work far better than it seems like they should. Tomb Mold finds magic in the contrast between distorted, frenetic death metal riffing that evokes Faceless Burial and lead guitar lines that variously recall The Sound of Perseverance-era Death, King Crimson, and even for one fleeting moment Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme.” Once you recover from the shock of Tomb Mold’s radical change in direction, it becomes apparent that you’re listening to something really quite goddamn good. In fact, The Enduring Spirit is a surprising triumph for this restless act.
The guitars of Derrick Vella and Payson Power dominate The Enduring Spirit, guiding the listener through the slab’s whipsaw changes with skill and aplomb. The pair crafts riffs and leads that skitter toward and away from the underlying compositions in novel and even stunning ways. They navigate a host of tones and styles and engineer maybe a half-dozen moments that had me repeat the track as soon as it ended so I could absorb what I just heard. The crystalline, pulsing riff at 4:30 of “Will of Whispers” continues under the song’s phantasmagoric mid-section. The searing rock-drenched solos that elevate “Fate’s Tangled Thread” give way to the echoey, spaced-out lead lines of “Flesh as Armor”–and when you think the twin axemen have emptied their bag of tricks, Vella and Power unleash the mod stylings that accompany “Servant of Possibility.” The guitar work on The Enduring Spirit is evocative, challenging in all the right ways, and just an enormous amount of fun throughout.
There are flashes of the old Tomb Mold on The Enduring Spirit. “Flesh as Armor” drops a monster groove on your head at the 1:30 mark, as if to remind the Undeaths of the world that Tomb Mold still knows how it’s done. The album might have found a few more moments like this–and it might have carved out space for them by trimming eleven-minute closer “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity.” The soloing in the second half of that song is the one spot on the record that feels aimless and indulgent. For all the expansion of the outfit’s sound, Max Klebanoff’s vocals remain one-note death growls. Still: you’re unlikely to dwell on those nitpicks while unlocking the charms of The Enduring Spirit.
Tomb Mold’s latest announces them as a band that will have not just albums, but eras. There may yet be room for them to grow in this new epoch, but The Enduring Spirit sets a high bar for whatever comes next. Tomb Mold has passed from their exploration of old-school death into life as a progressive death metal act, making the transition with style and their sense of adventure intact. The Enduring Spirit isn’t what I wanted or expected from the outfit, but it turns out to be exactly what I need.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
