Crypt Sermon is epic doom metal as it was always meant to be.
The Stygian Rose is their third album and follow-up to the somewhat lackluster
The Ruins of Fading Light, which dropped back in 2019. Their 2015 release,
Out of the Garden, descended like a lightning strike on the US metal scene, compelling many to credit Crypt Sermon with single-handedly resurrecting interest in epic doom metal as a viable sub-genre once again. Crypt Sermon's sound is heavily influenced by Candlemass for sure, but also American compatriots, Solitude Aeturnus, so you can expect lots of eastern guitar scales, dancing rhythms, and mountain-shaking, battle-cry vocals.
The Stygian Rose puts to bed many of the black metal influences that the band had previously leaned into on
The Ruins of Fading Light, which is really for the best. Their love for this style was sufficiently demonstrated on the 2017 flexi single tribute to Mayhem titled
De Mysteriis Doom Sathanas, and it is a warranted act of redress that this most recent album sees them consciously clawing their way back to the killing fields where they earned their darkly noble knighthood with a sagacious play towards the brawnier details of swords & sorcery. Like most of their best songs, "Glimmers In The Underworld" tells the tale of bravery and corruption in relief before hubris, exhibiting the fatalistic charm of the group's bleakly heroic baptism of blood and vice with razor-sharp, cut-to-the-bone grooves and cyclonic vocal harmonies that resemble a tempest of grand mal-inducing psychic fulguration, "Down in the Hollow" takes you on a twisting slump into a warped and forbidden romance with an illicit chthonic seraphim of benighted allure, while "Scrying Orb" adds campy elements of occulted arena rock, and the closing title track (it's very common for the band to put the song that bears the album's name as the closer) is amongst the slower and more psychedelic dirges on offer while functioning admirably as both a ballad and a banger. Clasp
The Stygian Rose tightly and feel the cathartic cut of its thorns as it rewards your devotion with punitive instruction and cruel cupidity in proportion to the inglorious valor with which it is coveted.
