Worship Metal Album Of The Week – Druid Lord – Relics Of The Dead

Tweet

Druid Lord’s latest collection of grotesque offerings spews up a smorgasbord of unsavoury treats for death/doom lovers to chew on. These fetid Floridians aren’t exactly prolific – fans have waited 8 years for Relics Of The Dead – but then death/doom isn’t renowned for its speedy approach, so we can forgive them for such tardiness.

At its rotten core, Relics of the Dead is neanderthal death/doom delivered with such a lumpen, laboured and laborious approach that your attention should surely dissipate after just the first few minutes of Relics Of The Dead’s self-titled, bum-numbing opener and yet, such a convincingly morbid atmosphere of prevailing dread is established that you simply cannot turn away (or, turn it off).

This continues with “Thirteen Days Of Death” and when the pace increases as the ‘death’ takes over the ‘doom’, the desire to maim, mutilate and murder reaches fever pitch as Druid Lord hold you firmly in their hideous grasp. The sinister acoustics of “Nightside Conjuring” offer respite but the marauding onslaught of the undead shall not be halted, and the groaning mass of oozing malevolence soon returns with the likes of “Festering Tombs” and “Monarch Macabre”.

A supernatural horror-fest made flesh, Relics of the Dead’s haunting sounds of the decaying, demented dead crawling from their graves to rip you apart limb from limb echoes the extremities of horror cinema (Andrea Bianchi’s cult classic Burial Ground aka The Zombie Dead springs to mind)…..which also brings to mind that age-old equation: Horror + Death + Doom = Happy Metallers. 8/10

Druid Lord‘s Relics Of The Dead was released on January 21st, 2022 via Hells Headbangers Records