The suffocating darkness of archaic, lithic walls… The oneiric, labyrinthine descent into timeless caverns… Ancient waters carve deeper and deeper, leading the wailing spectres down, towards the void, all-consuming darkness above and beneath, opaque, silent…WITHERER’s debut full-length, “Shadow Without a Horizon,” ruthlessly plummets into the furthest subterranean corners of blackened death/doom metal. These five evocations seal the listener within the earth’s bloodless veins, as writhing black/death passages convulse alongside ritualistic funeral doom, spiraling downwards, onwards, until finally all that is left is the endless abyss of the cosmos, indistinguishable from the pitch blackness of the earth’s deepest vaults.

The album has five songs, and “First Umbra” is first; a 15-minute opus of heavy, sludgy guitars, dissonance, and scratchy harsh vocals that cut like sharp fingernails. At times, the vocals turn guttural, and heavy bass notes drop like meteors from the sky. The entire song paints a desolate, snow-covered landscape of sub-freezing temperatures; a place no human can occupy. “Devourer of All Graveyards” is another horrid offering, and you can hear tortured screams in the background. The dissonance is so thick, it covers the song with a layer of blackness that cant’ be washed off. The clean vocal wails after the halfway mark just make the song that much more depressing.

“The Wailing Hours” eases in with soft tones that remind me of the coming of Death on his pale white horse. You can’t see him, but with each step the horse takes, more things die. The sound of cold rain follows his passing. “Solar Collapse Mandala” begins with the frozen winds from the North. From there, it’s another super thick plate of dissonance that you can’t shake. Guitars build in layers, harsh vocals are added, and heavy bass notes and drums hold it all together. The 15-minute “Praises” is the final cut. After some opening bass notes, there is a fairly straightforward riff that even has a bit of melody in it, but these fleeting moments are both short lived and dashed by utter blackness.

This was a delightfully despicable album, and I mean that in the best of ways. The band’s brand of Doom and Death is indeed dark…like the void of a black hole, and once sucked inside one, these are the sounds I would expect to hear…the sounds of torture, and, ultimately, death.