From Bandcamp, “On "Rift," AMPHISBAENA opens up their dense sonic palette even wider: never content with their baseline of obscure blackened death metal, they turn their eight-string guitars and modular synthesizers towards doom metal, ambient and even prog. Not for genre purists, "Rift" spirals from cavernous murk to hyper-blasting chaos to atonal ambiance and back again. "Rift" is the wound that will never heal. It is the gulf between opposites, the dual perspective that AMPHISBAENA embodies. Between chaos and structure, melody and dissonance, fast and slow, life and death, the past and the future, the twin serpents cross at the balance point, floating above the bottomless abyss. Traverse the Rift! Just mind that you don't - fall in.”

The album has seven songs, and the title track is first, divided into three movements. The first begins with a moment of clean guitars, but distorted ones follow, with horrid vocals. The entire song has a somber wright to it that loads up on your back and slowly crushes you. Segueing into the second movement, moments of light usher in the sound, together with melancholy melodies. It’s a short lived few minutes of utter depression. The third and final movement is more chaotic. The vocals are layered, thick, and the guitar work is impressive. “Braying of 70,000” features many tense moments, accompanied by rhythmic drums, and animal noises. “Scaled Ekpyrotic Splinters” has a darker, and heavier sound, coming from guitar dissonance and deadly vocals.

“Exponentially Falling…Upward” has elements of Doom mixed into the Black and Death Metal album, especially considering the slow and low crawl of the music. The bass and guitars move together, creating a landscape of despair. “Congress with the Void” is the final song…three minutes of mood, despondence, and little else. This was a curious album, that felt a bit unfinished for me, and perhaps that is the point. The past and the future make up someone’s life, and that is a difficult, lengthy story to tell. In the end, maybe our lives don’t really amount to much, or at least, not as much as the story itself. I would love to hear more from the band.