Band: Tomb Mold | Album: The Enduring Spirit | Genre: Death metal, Progressive metal | Year: 2023
From: Toronto, Canada | Label: 20 Buck Spin
For fans of: Blood Incantation, Edge of Sanity
Tomb Mold is a name I’ve heard tossed around in the past. I was vaguely aware of them, and that people generally liked them, but I wasn’t even really sure what subgenre of metal they played. So when they dropped their first new album in four years and people started praising it as this wonderful prog metal release, I felt like I had to give it a listen.
The Enduring Spirit kicks off with “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)”. It’s got a tight, complex, nasty main riff, and that title really nails the pretension of prog-death well. The playing is fantastic, and there are lots of neat flourishes. This is one of my favorite songs on the album. The following “Angelic Fabrications”, though, is considerably more generic. It’s not bad, but it’s pretty run-of-the-mill blackened death metal.
“Will of Whispers”–or at least its quiet parts–just sounds like a Cynic song. If I want to listen to Cynic, I’ll listen to Cynic. They’ve got a very distinctive sound, and these passages feel a bit like a shadow. The verses pummel considerably harder than anything Cynic ever did, but they also lack any real character. The riffs are complex and proggier than your average death metal cut, but it doesn’t really shine. (Also, I hate pinch harmonics, and this band uses them a lot.)
The opening riff of “Fate’s Tangled Thread”–despite the pinch harmonics–is pretty good. It’s distinctive and fittingly twisty for a song with this title. There’s a doomy passage near this cut’s middle that I like a lot. In the song’s second half, they switch up the riffs a bit, and I get echoes of certain prog-thrash acts, like Coroner.
“Flesh as Armor”, in addition to being a sick song title, feels more purposeful than some of the longer songs here. There’s a certain urgency to this cut that I buy into more than elsewhere on The Enduring Spirit. The guitar lines remain knotted and ugly, and the track moves forward coherently.
“Servants of Possibility” has the most interesting music thus far. The particular chord and modal choices are unique, and the switch-ups between riffs and passages feels better-thought-out than on other songs.
The album ends with the eleven-minute “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity”. The opening riff is the most immediately-attention-grabbing of all the songs here, channeling classic prog-death like Edge of Sanity. The songwriting here is the band at their best and most original. There’s an actual sense of drama to this track, as opposed to just being blasted in the face with riffs that don’t vary in intensity.
There’s another very Cynic-y (Cynical?) passage here too, and it is somewhat distracting. The jazzy guitar noodling doesn’t add a lot. This quieter section eventually moves away from obvious Cynicisms, and that’s when it becomes more enjoyable. It’s dark and moody, and I really like the wobbly clean guitar tone they utilize. The band eventually ups the intensity for the conclusion, and it makes for a strong end to the album.
The Enduring Spirit is a decent prog-death metal album. The main issue is that it doesn’t really do anything new. I’ve heard all these songs from other bands before. Seeing the discourse online, though, I feel like Rev. Lovejoy talking about Gabbo: Everyone’s saying “Tomb Mold” this and “Tomb Mold” that, but no one is saying “Witch Ripper” this or “Entropia” that! This is more a death metal album with some progressive leanings than the other way around, so if you’re really into death metal, you’ll probably like this a lot. But if you’re like me, and put more emphasis on the “prog,” you may come away underwhelmed.
Score: 70/100
The Elite Extremophile 