Dusk/Subside

Personnel: Ben James (vocals); Matthew Skarajew, Mark Cullen (guitar); Paul Mazziotta (drums).
Audio Mixer: Inverloch.
Recording information: 3 Phase Studios, Melbourne, Australia (2010-2011); Deakin Sound Design (2010-2011); 3 Phase Studios, Melbourne, Australia (2011); Deakin Sound Design (2011).
For a band releasing its first official product, Melbourne, Australia's Inverloch sure have a lot of baggage to answer for. That's because guitarist Matthew Skarajew and drummer Paul Mazziotta made their names with experimental death/doom pioneers Disembowelment (diSEMBOWELMENT, to their friends), whose sole LP, 1993's Transcendence Into the Peripheral, still reverberates with genre cognoscenti, and has become something of an inescapable shroud cast over their subsequent musical lives. So much so that, in 2010, Skarajew and Mazziotta finally decided to stop staving off the inevitable and joined forces with vocalist Ben James, guitarist Mark Cullen, and bassist Tony Bryant in a new project named d.USK -- their undisguised mission being to try and move Disembowelment's musical vision forward, nearly 20 years after it stalled in paralysis. This project, in turn, became Inverloch and 2012's Relapse Records-released Dusk/Subside EP offers a first glimpse of their resuscitative efforts, via three deeply atmospherics tracks filled with emotional and dynamic extremes befitting Disembowelment's original philosophical legacy. Striking EP bookends, "Within Frozen Beauty" and "Shadows of the Flame," in particular, ruthlessly maul unsuspecting listeners, summarily countering timid intros and outros with ferociously blastbeaten outbursts, then relenting somewhat with melodic guitar work and more deliberate riffs that finally afford some breathing room. By comparison, central track "The Menin Road," with its so-slow-it's-nearly-stopped tempo, detuned instrumentation, guttural voices, and splashy cymbals perfectly epitomizes the funeral doom-style descended, in part, from Disembowelment's ancient experiments; so while it's amusing to see Inverloch playing it so "safe" as to chew on their descendants' regurgitated gruel, it's supposed that they, of all people, are entitled to it. In any case, it's obvious that these three tracks are but a taste of what has been and could still be, should the members of Inverloch manage to summon the courage and creativity to fulfill their stated mission in the future. That shall be seen. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia