Consuming the Tangible

From June 11, 2024

There are bands that are slaves to genre, and bands beholden to none. The journey from the first to the second can often be rife with fractures both small and large, but thankfully Pennsylvania’s Crypt Sermon have charted a true path over the course of three albums. Their latest, The Stygian Rose, arrives with phantom tendrils that lead back to their doom and traditional roots, but the trail is littered with cast aside homages and influences, all prefixes abandoned in favor of the one, the only word that matters.

Metal. Of the most righteous kind.

Read the rest over at Nine Circles.

Album #3 was the moment Crypt Sermon went from fun live experience with okay albums to fun live experience with albums that lived up to said live experience. It’s not that any of the albums were bad; both 2015’s Out Of The Garden and 2019 sophomore effort The Ruins of Fading Light showed the promise of what could happen when traditional metal and doom collide, but never quite solidified on record. The Stygian Rose turns up the aggression and attack of the guitars, and with Brooks Wilson’s signature vocals tracks like the absolute pummeling “Heavy Is The Crown of Bone” soar.

Haven’t really taken this album out too much in the past year, but damn if it isn’t hitting just right this morning.