Ramesses – Possessed by the Rise of Magick

There’s a stark, frost-ridden quality to opener Invisible Ritual that makes itself apparent within seconds, brought forth by buzzsaw guitars and vitriolic screams, and bolstered by a talent for conjuring off-kilter, almost pained, solos with a perverse sense of timing. Their other forte is how well they work within the ‘slower is better’ blueprint of doom, manipulating all possible perturbations of the word to evoke moments that crawl and linger one minute, then pound incessantly the next.

In Duel, a serpentine melody weaves its way around a beat that borders on the sensual but on the whole, this is the most traditional album that they have created to date, shunning obvious hooks and instead opting for smothering the listener with a Lovecraftian air of unease. Perhaps this has served to make the album a little one-dimensional, but when that dimension is so gripping it’s hard to feel let down.