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DRUID LORD
Relics Of The Dead

Hells Headbangers (2022)
Rating: 8/10

Conjuring grotesque images of ancient clandestine orders, dripping monolith and slime coated ruins, is the latest sacrificial offering from anomalous archdeacons of the arcane, Druid Lord.

Festering crypts heave to the clammy drudgery of humid, boggy riffs as vocal flatulence creates misty pockets of pea-soup fog and damp percussion infiltrates those peaty layers like ashen bones used to stir a quagmire.

On the Orlando, Florida-based band’s third full-length album, Druid Lord continues its esoteric march through cesspools, catacombs and quarries of slurry, accessing doomy, dreary potholes of putridity. Creaky jaws open to exhale gnashing riffs of devastating weight, locking bloody horns with blubbery bass drones, thereby stirring vast cauldron of mulch.

The melancholic doom whine of ‘Thirteen Days Of Death’ whiffs of spiralling sombreness, and it’s clear that vocalist Tony Blakk has been gargling frog spawn since the last record – 2018’s Grotesque Offerings.

‘Mangled As The Hideous Feed’ trudges through ominous mists to provide gloomy grandeur and gargoyle-summoning chords of sludge. In fact, each dripping, oozing cut is carved like a slow-motion wretch of innards as the bone-gnawing title track festers with archaic aplomb. Again, that bass bubbles like a thick, congealed cauldron, working in dismal tandem with percussive bell tolls.

‘Festering Tombs’ begins with a riff to accompany a despairing, clambering escape from a suffocating coffin. That dank, foul air swirls and clots, arteries clog and the rhythm section just crushes, reducing to ash every last sinew.

However, Druid Lord is not your standard doom-cum-death outfit, because somehow they create deep trenches of miasmic melody. ‘Immolated To Ashes’ is arguably the doomiest heap of inhuman slurry on the opus, while ‘Monarch Macabre’ creeps with murky intent.

Admittedly some tracks do seem to labour and slog, and the percussion does at times sound a bit lost as it struggles to combat the dense walls of gloom. Even so, the sound Druid Lord pokes up from the catacombs remains charmingly gazed, glazed and menacing.

Neil Arnold

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