This is a new thing I’m trying out, where I find a band that I have never heard of before, and probably who are split up and their stuff has become impossible to find/buy for a reasonable price. This week: Catacomb, blackened death metal from France, a new haven of aural devastation with the rise of Deathspell Omega and Gojira. But in 1993, Catacomb released ‘In the Maze of Kadath’, an EP of horrifying, suffocating death metal. Lovecraftian in inspiration, and definitely of the Old Ones in sound, ‘In the Maze of Kadath’ is an undiscovered gem to me. If this came out now, I’d regard it as special. It has that one thing that many new death metal bands are going for, and that’s atmosphere. It’s eerie, reeking of evil and ancient malevolence. The cover is of the Elder God Chthulu, rising from the ocean to spread madness. The striking greyscale cover marks it out from day-glo blood splatter death metal records, and the sound contained within is definitely of a different quality.
I found the EP in full on YouTube which I have linked below, for me the stand out tracks being the harrowing ‘Hallucinated Mountains’ and the crawling ‘Nemesis’. A must for all old school death metal fans
The Killchain 