Bandcamp Ascension is the kind of record that sounds like it was tracked in a flooded basement and mixed without ever turning the lights on, and that is entirely the intention. Oslo’s Nedgravd deal in raw, occult death-doom of the early-nineties Finnish-and-Incantation school, all cavernous reverb, sawing fuzz and growls buried so deep they read as another instrument crawling out of the dark. Judging this by clean-production standards would be pointless: the filth is the genre, and Nedgravd commit to it without apology.
What stops the murk from becoming a single grey smear is the band’s feel for collapse. “Qhurra (Storms Of…)” works the contrast between dragging passages and sudden eruptions while keeping just enough dynamic range that the master never fully flattens, and the closer “Black Blood Descension” pulls the album’s best trick, riding a hypnotic, compressed heavy wall through its first half before falling away into a surprisingly open, meditative ambient synth-drone. “Severed Gate Shroud” breaks its low-end wall with tempo shifts, blastbeats and feedback drones, and the title track is a genuine swerve, an organ-and-spoken-word industrial interlude that plays more like a horror radio drama than a metal song. For a debut this committed to one aesthetic, those detours matter.
The cost of that aesthetic is the obvious one. Across the record the high mids stack up into a harshness that fatigues, the low end smears guitars and bass into one undefined wall, and a couple of tracks (“Sentiential Incantation,” “Paragon Of Impiety”) sit in maximum saturation with barely a breath of dynamic relief. Even by raw death-doom standards this is a one-texture listen, and over a full album the relentless cellar murk asks a lot of patience. It is the sound the band wanted, but it is also the ceiling on it.
Ascension is a strong, atmospheric, genuinely dread-soaked debut that nails its filthy, occult corner of death-doom and shows enough structural smarts, those ambient collapses especially, to be more than a one-trick demo. For anyone who likes their death metal raw, cavernous and allergic to polish, there is real darkness to sink into here. A touch more variety in the murk, and Nedgravd would have something genuinely special.
Standout tracks: Qhurra (Storms Of…), Black Blood Descension, Severed Gate Shroud
