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GRAVE GHOUL
Face The Fire

Dismal Fate (2025)
Rating: 7.5/10

UK death metal dude Ryan Wills is a man of many horrors when it comes not only to his movie interests but also his music. Responsible now for a few projects, including Seven Doors, and the less metal but more atmospheric Freudstein, Ryan gets round to dishing up this debut full-length album from Grave Ghoul.

Mixed and mastered by Mortuary Ghoul, Gruesome And Macabre is the expected array of death metal bludgeoning that initially erupts from the swamp of riffs and Ryan’s grisly guttural vocals. Inspired as usual by the crusty horror movies of the halcyon era, the album is most potent when delivered through ghastly mid-paced dynamics as witnessed via the churning ‘The Emptying Of The Graves’.

My only quibble herebis the drums, which I assume are programmed? Either way they sound too mechanical at times, and there were occasional moments when they distracted me from the bludgeoning. There’s certainly a lot more atmospheric death metal out there, but Grave Ghoul instead relies on a more punishing dynamic. The riffs are severely heavyweight, going toe-to-toe with the vocals as slower gnashing rhythms give way to melodious streaks where the axe work meanders with melancholic prowess.

At its most brutal, Grave Ghoul pummels with the short yet pounding ‘Drilled’ and the savage ‘Autosarcophagy’, a literal hammer attack to the skull as Ryan’s deep bellows echo around his diaphragm. Then there are the mid-paced cauldron stirrers, case in point ‘The Spectral Dead’ with its Mortician-styled fuzz chugs. Somewhere in between is the slightly more sprightly ‘Within The Woods’ which isn’t exactly a gory gallop but it does have a spring to its traipse.

Each track presents itself as a prime succulent slab of metal straight from the butcher’s block, in particular ‘Cathedral Of Tombs’ and the aforementioned ‘The Spectral Dead’. The former a galloping, guzzling grinder featuring cereal box drums and juicy riffs, the latter a meat n’ potatoes Mortician mash up. Meanwhile, ‘Shambling Eyeless Corpses’ lives up to its title as a slithering mass of vomit, the vocals mere clot-congealed yawns of oozing horror. Such fetid miasma leads us into closing song, the lumbering ‘A Shrine Of Bones’, once again proving that Grave Ghoul is a far more suffocating blanket with those sewer globules of putridity.

A more than solid debut then from Ryan Wills who gleefully stamps on your sorry carcass with each death-drizzled riff, reducing your skin to a floppy costume draped over your crushed bones. Even the maggots are laughing and moshing at your sorry state of pulverised pulp.

Neil Arnold

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