Bandcamp Hand a death/doom record to Greg Chandler and you know roughly what you are buying. The Esoteric frontman, working from his Priory studio in Birmingham, mixed and mastered Exanimis, the fourth full-length from the Norwich band Consecration (a five-piece who have been at this since 2010, with Cinis in 2022 their most recent statement), and he also did the artwork. What lands at full release on Nuclear Winter Records is eight tracks of death/doom with guest contributions from Paul Jones of Enchantment and Rich Mumford of Malediction. For now only two of them are streaming as advance singles, so treat what follows as a first impression rather than a verdict on the whole record.
On the evidence of those two cuts, Consecration have committed hard to dirt. “Herald of Darkness” is the heavier end of it, an extremely dense, low-mid-saturated wall where down-tuned guitars and a booming, undefined bass fuse into a single mass and the deep gutturals sit so far back they read as texture more than as a voice. The drums sound like an unvarnished rehearsal room, the kick missing its click, the snare half-buried, and the master is compressed right up to the edge of distortion. It is uncompromising and genuinely murky, and whether that reads as atmosphere or as mud will depend on how much you like your death/doom to sound like it was recorded inside a collapsing building.
“Submerged in Sand” is the more persuasive of the pair, because it lets some air in. The mix is still dense and low-mid heavy, but the guitars have a biting, sawing definition, the gutturals come forward dry and intelligible, and a mid-song tempo change and a guitar solo give the track the dynamic breathing room that “Herald” deliberately withholds. That contrast is encouraging, because it suggests the full album might balance the pure-density approach against actual movement rather than staying pinned to the wall for fifty minutes.
Based on the two advance singles only. The shared character is a dense, low-mid-heavy wall-of-sound that puts raw atmosphere ahead of frequency definition, with a master pushed near the clipping point. “Herald of Darkness” is the more extreme: heavily saturated, down-tuned guitars merge with a booming undefined bass into a single low-end mass, the drums sound like an unvarnished rehearsal room (kick lacking click-attack, snare buried, cymbals airless rather than harsh), and the deep gutturals sit far back as texture rather than lead, with minimal intelligibility. “Submerged in Sand” opens the sound up: still dense and low-mid-forward, but with biting, sawing guitars that keep decent string separation, dry and intelligible gutturals sitting present on the bed, an artificially clicky kick offset by an organically roomy snare and clean cymbals, and a tempo-change break plus a solo that supply dynamic relief. The recurring strength is the committed, dirty character; the recurring weakness is low-end frequency stacking that turns the densest passages to mush.
Streaming so far: Herald of Darkness (the dense, murkiest end) and Submerged in Sand (the one that opens up, with a mid-song tempo shift and solo).
Two songs is not a record, and the three-star mark above is a holding position, not a final call. What the singles establish is a clear aesthetic: filthy, low-slung, Greg-Chandler-murky death/doom that is more interested in weight than in clarity. Whether Exanimis sustains that across eight tracks, or whether the wall starts to feel like a single unbroken note, is the thing worth coming back to once the full album is streaming. The promise is there in “Submerged in Sand”; the risk is everything sounding like “Herald of Darkness.”
