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RITUAL MASS
Cascading Misery

20 Buck Spin (2025)
Rating: 8.5/10

The nondescript cover art adds further horror to what is already a mystifying slab of Pittsburgh death metal. Ritual Mass have been lurking in the shadows for over a decade now, dropping a demo, an EP, a single, a compilation and now, finally, a full-length.

Now, if ever there was an album that sounds like its cover art then it’s this one. Clean, bludgeoning and yet somehow beautiful, Cascading Misery is that enticing waterfall, the beckoning canvas, a blurred chasm, a cavern of hallucinatory spectres. The echoes of the intro made me feel as if I was slowly being sucked into a pothole, or even a pallid portal of swirling draughts and the stench of grey mould. When the riffs and percussion hit, it’s like being swept downward, inhaling every lung-munching bacteria and being scraped by shards of black glistening rock.

The Ritual Mass sound is unfathomable and bottomless, a miasma consisting of ancient spores spewed forth by stagnant rock pools containing lethal gases. The rush here is dismal, it decomposes the nerves and taints the skin and manifests itself as opening track ‘Obsidian Mirror’, a godawful barrage of mildewed and musty riffs dredged from the same congealed lake as US titans Incantation and lesser known UK glumsters Grave Miasma. Even when those miserable flusters pour, it’s still very much despairing and pungent as if moss has leaked fungal treacle but is battered by hailstones, also known as G. Austin’s brutal percussive display.

There’s no drop in the intensity as ‘Immeasurable Hell’ thunders across the tundra, blazing like the iciest comet scorching through the stratosphere. The instruments blend as unwavering abysmal tides, only occasionally slowing, but instead sprawling like the mouth of a fog-drenched abyss gaping and groaning at the zenith.

‘Disquiet’ is one of those harrowing intakes of breath, bringing with it a gloomy passage of death-doom where the guitars moan like sirens to signify imminent death. It’s an extremely immersive experience, dour faced, tormented and caked in filth cast from its own powdery fumes. The eerie drone of decay constantly permeates the already foul, fusty air as ‘Frozen Marrow’ chugs and churns like a belly full of ash.

Grim tidings and tides indeed, Ritual Mass doesn’t deserve routine wordage to describe their sound, hence my waffling like a madman regarding their infinite pit of horror. I dare you to scale the cold walls of this vast, immeasurable soundscape.

Neil Arnold

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