Danish death/doom duo A & K return from 2022’s Volatile Forms, having trimmed the lineup to themselves, each taking up portions of the bass, adding to their respective drums and guitars, and now unleashing Cranial Devastation upon us. Well, let’s hope so. You can’t just drop a title like that and not deliver. Actually, you can, and we’ve seen it far too frequently before.

‘Regurgitation Of Ancient Manifest’, thankfully, drips with bass-drenched plod, oozing slow yet vile malignance from every festering pore. RUNEMAGICK comes to mind, a less off-the-rails KHANATE due to the focus employed. Around the 2:20 mark, the focus mentioned before is mangled, slammed into by caterwauling riffery and a palpitation-inducing drum assault before being tossed into a vat of sludge that makes the La Brea Tar Pits look like a pristine Icelandic lake in comparison. Escalating the butchery level, ‘Isolation’s Hold’ is IRON MONKEY on amphetamines until the section at 1:20-1:42 separates your head from your neck, rips out your spinal cord through the opening and begins to flail at you with it, a Cro-Magnon in blood frenzy.

‘Phantosmial Stench Of Decay’ returns to the deliberate dinosauric pace, heavy-footed yet intentional, though chaotic in mindset, more purposeful in execution than we’ve heard DEAD VOID thus far. Closing/collapsing the album proper, the title track mangles, at times WINTER-like in its desire to get there when it fucking gets there and in its own fucking time. If you’ve come this far into the album – and certainly into the band or style – you’re already well aware that doom of this sort (especially when laced with sludge as is much of this) demands almost as much of its listener as of its performers. This is not music to be taken or digested lightly, nor should it be. It’s supposed to hurt, and – if you happen to achieve some sense of “peace” after an album’s listening – not necessarily leave you feeling “better”. More that you’ve survived yet another psychic and/or physical assault. A Cranial Devastation, if you would.
Review By: Lord Randall

DEAD VOID
Cranial Devastation
Dark Descent Records / Me Saco Un Ojo