Innumerable Forms is the fetid brain loogie of Jon DeTore, who, along with pals Jensen Ward of Iron Lung, Chris Ulsh of Mammothgrinder, and Connor Donegan of Genocide Pact, has wrought upon the Earth a genuinely malevolent force of oppressive morbidity. Innumerable Forms is a necrotic, frost-ravaged take on Finnish death metal combined with American doom in the vein of Brooklyn’s Winter, imbued with a palpable rage carried over from DeTore's days in the Boston power-violence group Mind Eraser and with a knack for darkly penetrating melodies honed from his years playing in power metal groups Sumerlands and Magic Circle. Their third LP,
Pain Effulgence, is just as crushingly moribund as its older siblings, feeling like a torturous preamble to a final crushing tragedy, like Sisyphus losing his footing on the soft peaty ground of a Tartarus incline, and watching helplessly as the boulder he had been pushing slowly topples backwards towards his prone and vulnerable form, about to transform him into a pulpy grist. "Impulse" begins with a coffin-rattling howl before leaden riffs begrudgingly pry a leprous melody from its cursed sonic foundation; "Blotted Inside" is bleak and ominous, hanging its gargantuan grooves over the listener like a crow-pecked carcass of an accused warlock; while "Overwhelming Subjugation" unleashes a formidable, all-consuming deluge of acid sludge-punk; and "Austerity and Attrition" churns out a final light-swallowing dirge of doom that only the most depraved of God's rejects could muster the blasphemous nerve to peer into as if it were a mirror.
Pain Effulgence is cold liquid anguish incarnate, the kind that burns in the best sort of way.
