I first heard this Austin outfit on their 2015 split with Godhunter, where they almost stole the record from one of my favourite underground sludge bands at the time. Destroyer of Light even put their own super-slow-mo take on a Pentagram classic, which certainly made me take notice. And now they’re back with their second full-length album landing on local label Heavy Friends Records. If your friends like heavy music, they might wanna seek this one out.
We enter the chamber with “Whispers Into the Threshold,” a doomy instrumental intro that leads us into the proper eight-minute opener “Into the Smoke.” If you’re expecting a song with said title to sound like some sorta cross between Sleep and Weedeater, well, you’re actually not too far off. Some of the riffs on here wouldn’t sound outta place with either outfit, while the clean-ish vocals come closer to the former… at least until they take a more melodic approach right around the five-minute mark, throwing a bit of Pallbearer into the mix for good measure.
“The Virgin” begins with chanting vocals after a horror-movie soundclip, then comes grooving up slowly, sounding sorta like an OM tune as the wordless chanting soon takes the form of words while maintaining the same cadence. They do drop a few heavy riffs in here, though, along with the more-melodic vocals heard on the back half of the previous track, with a brief burst of aggressive sludge thrown in at around 5:30. After an instrumental interlude, “Lux Crusher” crushes with some straight-ahead trad-doom riffs and a buncha killer breakdowns just shy of five minutes in.
“Prisoner of Eternity” plows ahead at a Pallbearer-inspired pace, before 10-minute epic “Buried Alive” slows things to a crawl, with sparsely accompanied vocals driving another mellow proceeding. They definitely seem to have taken a mellower approach since the Godhunter split, but the end result still sounds pretty good.
destroyeroflight.bandcamp.com/album/chamber-of-horrors
