Artist: Ashen Pall
Title: False Idol, Hollow Crown
Type: EP
Label: Digital
North America is currently a fertile breeding ground for some of the dirtiest extreme metal out there, and Vancouver’s Ashen Pall are no exception. Following their recent debut album, they continue to lay down a marker with their ‘False Idol, Hollow Crown’ four track EP. Opening with the title track, a malevolent, dense mixture of death, doom and black metal erupts from the speakers with the vocals buried pretty low in the mix, almost becoming an additional instrument. The sound is dirty and sludgy, but this works really well as the claustrophobic sound wraps itself around you.
Momentum is kept going as ‘Crows’ brings the doom side of things to the fore with its plodding tempo which builds as the track progresses with a haunting melody taking centre stage. ‘Witches’ Grove’ begins with a simple melody, sinister at first but soon opens out and becomes more accessible, almost upbeat before the track unfolds itself with a dense wall of sound which swirls and rumbles around you as it becomes all encompassing. The EP is brought to a close by ‘Nameless’, another barely penetrable wall of glorious noise.
Over the course of these four tracks, Ashen Pall have delivered a masterclass in dense, claustrophobic, crushing blackened death-doom metal and although what they do is not breaking any new ground, they do it well and I look forward to see how they progress from here and hopefully will get the chance to catch them live at some point.
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