Kåabalh is Death/Doom Metal band from France that fuse a 90's classic Death Metal sound with a suffocating style of abysmal Doom to go along with their grim destruction.  Simply put, this album is a dirge of grimy and sickening extreme metal.  If there was a soundtrack for putting dirty over the casket of the dead, their self titled debut album would be the score. The first track, "Cabal," is the shortest of the album but a great intro to the gloom that awaits you on the remaining tracks.   The song is mostly music, with the vocals coming in towards the end to make the atmosphere all the more harrowing.  The riffs strike a great balance between a nice Death Metal tone and really dark sludge; both Damned and Pierre are spot on in maintaining this balance.  It isn't a very fast track, of course but there in lies what makes the album so great: Kåabalh show us that just because something is slow and lumbering doesn't mean it has to be quiet or melodic; the six tracks contained within are as heavy as anything else I've heard this year.

A large part of the rumbling beast that makes up their sound is Fab's pervasive drumming.  His double bass sound so thunderously deep.  If one thought of this band as a tank, Fab would definitely be the machine's tracks. Bassist Marco isn't any slouch in this department either because the vibration off his bass alone could rattle speakers to pieces if they were turned up too loud.  Even without the other members, this band is a one man wrecking crew—his bass guitar definitely fills the band's sound. The second track, "Acheron," is proof of his feats; the 3:29 mark is where his bass lines drop like an atomic bomb. "The Complete Darkness," creates a chilling atmosphere with the usage of dismal guitar leads against the grain of the riffs.  Like the dead being ferried down river styx, the impressive cymbal and double bass work push the song further into the darkness.  The songs ends on a high note with impressive riffs and frantic drumming.

The final track, "Deaths Ovation," takes all the elements of the previous songs and heightens like its a scary ode to the band's own sound.  The track just presents such an graveyard landscape of tortured instrumentation.   I've listened to, and reviewed, a lot of Doom this year, a lot of which incorporated Death Metal as well-as such, I can't say this blew me away quite as well as some of the others but is without a doubt a near perfect representation of how corrosive Death Metal can be and how extreme Doom can get.