From Bandcamp, "GRAVES FOR GODS present "Last Light Fades," their follow up to 2022's debut. All ambitions are retained and enhanced. More violence. More tragedy. More hope. "Last Light Fades" is a journey through time. From the birth, rise and fall of the Roman Empire, through to the modern age. It's a masterclass of indoctrination and manipulation. Of the corruption of man through Idolatry and Divinity. To walk blind through dark ages. To roam and rebuild. To rise for the fall. When the Last Light Fades."  The album has five songs, and "Perpetua Fell" is first. The pace is slow, the power high, and the gutturals as expansive as the deepest cave in the earth. It plods forward until the half-way mark, when clean tones take over for a spell. When the gutturals return, they are even dustier.

"The Dark Age" was one of the worst times in the documented history of the world, and there's a reason they were called that. The hypnotic pattern of the guitars works well with the guttural vocals. Throw in some thick, meaty bass notes, and you have a recipe for darkness. "Unholy Ghost" is a short, three minutes, which is an unusual run time for a Doom song. It's an instrumental and uses a good deal of ambiance and texture in it, almost like a blind man reaching out in the darkness for guidance. "Covered in Blood" seems like it takes days, weeks, even months to play through. This is of course the tongue-in-cheek knock on the genre…that after 82 days, you are only through the first song. Give it time, however, because it will slowly numb you like the cold winds and sub-freezing temperatures of the Antarctic.

The title track closes the album, and the clean guitar tones are a nice surprise for me. When the harsh riffs hit, each one is like a giant stomping his feet into the earth, breaking holes that run deeper than they eye can see. This was a positively dreadful album, in every positive meaning of that phrase. An ominous feeling of doom kept increasing as the album moved, akin to getting another piece of bad news on top of another. By the end, I just felt defeated, and totally slave to its charms.