Album Review: Ritual Mass – “Cascading Misery” (Death Metal)

Written by Kep

Sometimes I like to challenge a new death metal album to fuck me up real good. Like I’ll literally say it out loud: “alright, fuck me up (band)” right as I hit play on the first track. Why do I do this? Probably because I’m weird and a bit of a loser, but that’s not the point. The point is that good death metal should make an impact. I want to finish that record feeling like I just a) lost a fight against a tornado of knives, b) got dragged by the ankles through a sewer dug into a swamp, c) spent thirty minutes with my head beneath a concrete block while someone sledgehammered it to bits, or d) some combination of a), b), and c). I’ll give you two guesses as to whether Ritual Mass managed this, and the first one doesn’t count. 

Yes, Ritual Mass received the “fuck me up” challenge and proceeded to really, truly fuck me the hell up, and for that I love them. Cascading Misery is an exercise in suffocating torment, an altogether miserable and frightening ordeal of wholesale abject darkness. Earlier this year I called Ossuary’s Abhorrent Worship “tantamount to being slowly pulverized by a rusty rock crusher in an abandoned mine”—it’s a delightful album—and the Cascading Misery experience is similar, but instead of a rock crusher it’s just enormous boulders, stained black with old blood, and it’s not a mine, it’s a sacrificial chamber, and the whole thing is agonizingly slow and brutal and it’s like you journeyed to that terrible place as an act of penance and this is your willing punishment. Cavernous and callous in its steadfast cruelty, this is an album of pure pain, inflicted with ruthless efficiency. 

Six years after their debut EP this four-piece has delivered an unbelievably good record as their first full-length offering. If you like your death metal on the slower side, filthy as sin, and so bleak it hurts, this is a can’t miss record. There are bits of Incantation and Funebrarum and Krypts, plus shades of the ceremonial and cavernous that call the more churning side of Spectral Voice to mind. The riffs are angular and aggressive but a sense of futility seeps from them, anger and hate but few traces of anything akin to hope; violence that lashes out but can’t escape its shackles, grim struggle that’s smothered from the inside. I’m leaning on imagery here because it feels like Ritual Mass has done the same: the atmosphere is carefully crafted to conjure these feelings, from the first distorted long tones of “Obsidian Mirror” that give way to burning tremolos, to the final fade into harsh crackling static at the end of “Disquiet”. Make no mistake, this band wants you to be unnerved as much as they want you banging your head. 

Greg Wilkinson’s spacious but hard-hitting production lends a skilled hand to these repulsive riffs. There’s grime and grit aplenty, but things are never so murky as to hide the actual horrors behind a wall of noise; it’s genuinely affecting to truly hear the chaotic way P. Trona and R. Mauck’s guitars flail and spray beneath N. Dudash’s harrowing roar in “Immeasurable Hell”. Riffs like the one that leads off “Frozen Marrow” need that gutty punch that puts real power beneath their groove, and the thick undulating tremolo waves of “Looming Shapeless Entity” feel strong enough to belly up the ground beneath your feet. Drummer G. Austin dances across the cymbals and they light up like flying sparks. Moments of calm, like the one midway through “Disquiet”, transport you to echoing halls of inky blackness, where the guitars swirl in muted colors against the dark. 

All of this is a testament to the songwriting of Ritual Mass: the approaches are diverse, the riff designs never stagnate. Songs evolve through sheer force, bending hideously around corners propelled by inhuman solos and brute force alteration. For example, opener “Obsidian Mirror” does a lot of great things, but the passage that hooked me came a little after four minutes in: the texture opens up, allowing what was a merciless tremolo riff to become something more obtuse and alien, before a brutal chug passage slips in seemingly from nowhere, ripping a moment of strange reflection violently back to earth. 

Each of Cascading Misery’s six tracks is excellent, but the visceral brutality of the title track and the14-minute voyage of gloom that is closer “Disquiet” have really stuck with me. They are two facets of the same cursed gem: one an efficient, bruising assault of frantic blasting juxtaposed against the pummeling of menacing death marches, the other an unsettling, transportive multi-section journey that culminates in an overwhelmingly powerful display of towering horror. 

THE BOTTOM LINE

If you like the sort of death metal that will absolutely wreck your shit, Cascading Misery is the album for you. This is unbelievably great stuff for a debut, terrifying in its ferocity and unflinching in its nihilistic ugliness, 100% ready to fuck you up in a way you won’t soon forget. Ritual Mass gets two big thumbs up from me.