I can appreciate that about a band. I respect it when a group basically throws all considerations for their expected audience out the window and just does what feels right- letting the rabble make sense of their art in whatever manner their faculties will permit. There isn't a whiff of pandering on Abyss of Wrathful Deities, just dark and stormy death metal- fixate on mortality and the irreversible strength of the abyss's pull, while finding itself transfixed by the banality by mortal cruelty as addressed by Eastern traditions and philosophies.
Inspiration drawn from funeral practices in India and China bare their bones through the rotten bag of tarp-like skin that Grave Miasma drape themselves with- taking the form of unusually haunting interludes performed on a sitar, but also, through the themes of the album itself. One of the more notable examples of which is "Rogyapa," whose title is a reference to the practice of sky burials. In some high-altitude areas, where the soil is too rocky to permit a proper burial, corpses are disposed of through ceremonies where the body is parted out and fed to vultures. "Rogyapa" treats the practice with characteristic anguish, beginning with blasts and thrashy guitar shrieks before transitioning into Grave Miasma's more traditional Incantation-esque slice, embodied in mirthless crests of Bold Thrower-styled grooves.
"Erudite Decomposition" exhibits graduated tremolo scales as a feature of its cracked and worn blackened-death rattle, luring you in with the perfume of death and guiding you up the steep and pale pavé leading to a collapsed mausoleum brimming with restless spirits. "Demons of the Sand" has a somewhat contorted groove to it that binds like the wages of sin- chained to your aching spine,- a burden that is in no way relieved by the ghastly and sparse outro that concludes the track. Harshness is kind of Grave Miasm's thing, but if I had to pick a high point for the band's ruthlessness, it would have to be the fire barrage of "Exhumation Rites," whose conflagration in the opening section, through the galloping joust of the grooves following the first tempo change, feels like you are attempting to outrun a cavalry squad dispatched by the four horsemen of the apocalypse to specifically reduce you to a clod of blood and hairy clumps of pressed flesh.
My one complaint is that Abyss of Wrathful Deities is that it in some ways, Grave Miasma reproduces the sound that they settled into on their Endless Pilgrimage EP back in 2016- streamlining it without adding much variation. But in general, I like what I hear on Abyss of Wrathful Deities. It's as ugly as the face of death itself and any small gripes I have wither the observance to band's mastery of form.
