BEYONDITION's new album "Abysmal Night" is the sonic equivalent of the last third of "Poltergeist" or "The Conjuring".  It's when shit goes completely off the rails and the souls of the dead are at the "find out" part of "fuck around and find out".  The old school death metal band from Duisburg, Germany are no spring chickens- the band has been around since 2015, and all three members have been members of over a dozen bands within the German scene. That being said, this is their first full-length release since a demo back in 2017, and their allegiance to the horror-filled imagery of late '80s and early '90s death is gloriously revealed on this nine-song slab of aural terror.

"Abysmal Night" is haunted house rock. It's the sound of things that go bump in the night. Album highlight "The Executioner" features a sobbing victim whose head is clearly under the axe, as bass player and lead vocalist Matin Vasari taps into every inch of his bloodied diaphragm and phleghm-filled lungs to growl his way through a story of death. The song, like many of the others, features some simple yet effective keyboards in the background, and Vasari slips in some reverb-drenched clean vocals to counterpunch the prolonged abdominal grunts. None of the songs are particularly intricate, but this does nothing to take away from their effectiveness. "Skull Harvest" sounds like a bunch of scared teenagers running away from an axe-murderer: the riffs are simple and groovy, as if they were written in the basement of your parent's house. Part of me would like to think they practice in a dungeon, where I'm hoping they've been working on their Tomb of Annihilation D&D campaign after each sweaty, fear-filled practice.

In the end BEYONDITION isn't breaking any new ground with "Abysmal Night," but in terms of effective cinematic horror-inspired old school death metal, it is pretty spot on. While the album doesn't roll a whole lot of critical hits, they are pretty good at tossing the 11s and 12s.  It's a fun album, in the end, and varied enough to never  be particularly boring. I'm sure Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi would be very proud of these German auteurs of horror and pain.