Album Review: Ossuary – “Abhorrent Worship” (Death Metal)

Written by Kep

Ossuary have been around for a while—a decade at this point, in fact—but I remember being cognizant of a sudden rise in their visibility last year. It corresponded with a bunch of metalheads getting their first taste of Ossuary live, on a pair of tours that they rocked in true old school road-grinding fashion. Mind you, at the time they hadn’t yet released a full-length; they were winning folks over with a couple demos and an EP’s worth of tracks, performed in the sort of authentic straight up heavy way that makes you run to the merch table after the set to grab some shit. Shots of guitarist/vocalist Izzi Plunkett looking unbelievably badass, her neck craned upward toward a high-set mic, Lemmy-style, abounded on social media. Everyone agreed: this band has the goods. And now they’re set to deliver those goods straight to your earholes in long-play fashion with Abhorrent Worship.

Backed by tandem extreme metal powerhouses Darkness Shall Rise Productions and Me Saco Un Ojo Records, the Wisconsin trio present a six-track (and ideal 37-minute) experience tantamount to being slowly pulverized by a rusty rock crusher in an abandoned mine. This is fucking boneyard death metal. It’s gloriously nasty stuff, monolithic and sinister, unhurried in its callous demonstration of strength, oppressively heavy and suffocating in its sheer size. The guitar tone will envelop you in a dizzying miasma of staggering sound, absolute world-ending levels of enormous and abrasive. The rhythm section of bassist Matt Jacobs and drummer Nick Johnson is equally huge and just brutal, merciless in its deliberate thudding blows, primal and barbaric. Plunkett is a slavering beast of a vocalist, snarling and howling, like you can almost hear the curl of a scarred lip and the gleam of fangs. She chokes and gnarls and fries all over this thing, her sounds set well into the texture instead of over top of it. Other bands wish they felt this cohesively terrifying. 

Ossuary’s lurching, smothering brand of death metal is truly apocalyptic stuff. It’s bursting at the stitches with chugs that will shake the foundation of your goddamn house: creating thick churning clouds with razor wire lines snaking out from them, leveling city blocks between passages of threatening bladed riffs. Ponderous 6/8 rhythms that swing widely like an out of control wrecking ball bear down, punching and bruising and demolishing left and right. There’s an aesthetic to it, is what I’m saying: stone hard and brutal, boulders and earth tumbling toward your skull, smothering and head-spinningly cacophonous. 

The songwriting is smart without being overly sophisticated. There are bonecrunching meter shifts—the one from 6/8 to 4/4 in “Inborn Scourge Unbound”, for example, is a breath-stealing bodyslam of a thing—and bursts of breakneck blasting speed that sweep you up in a landslide of unstoppable battering chaos. I honestly find it pretty remarkable how Ossuary can find a low, dirty groove and sit on it for a good long while without the song starting to feel stagnant; like, there are slow chug-based riffs in expansive closer “Barren Lamentation” that the band milks for damn near a full minute, but when they get to that shift into something a bit more free and swinging, it’s like arriving at an always-intended destination. 

And despite me saying the word “chug” several times so far here—and Ossuary does love a good chug, so it’s with good reason—the guitar work from Plunkett is far more than just bruising grooves. Abhorrent Worship is replete with absolutely vile pinches and the sort of lumbering angular riffs that compel you to destroy your neck muscles. It’s like the instruments themselves are trying to flatten you while also ripping out chunks of your torso. Fourth track “Instinctual Prostration” is ground zero if you want to hear something chock full of the sort of riffs they favor: the opening section and the two big grooves in the back half are insanely heavy, stank face-inducing shit. There’s only one solo on the record, near the end of “The Undrownable Howl of Evil”, and it’s a good one, sort of hazy and swirling in burning colors over a flood of noise below—makes me wish there were more. 

THE BOTTOM LINE

I think it’s more than safe to say that Ossuary have met and exceeded expectations here with Abhorrent Worship. This is every bit the repulsive, devastating primal death metal LP fans of the band were hoping for. Descend with me to the bonebreaking ritual circle and be crushed.