Witch Vomit - Funeral Sanctum

Witch Vomit is a death metal band from Portland, Oregon who formed in 2012.  Their new album, “Funeral Sanctum” is their third full length album, in addition to a demo and three EPs.

“Funeral Sanctum” is a brisk 30 minutes, spread across ten tracks, two of which are instrumental interludes.  This is a short but sweet and blistering piece of death metal that offers monuments of wreckage across its runtime without ever overstaying its welcome or feeling like anything was left out.  

The basics of their sound have been retained—brutal, disgusting death metal that can go from lighting speed to doomed crawl. Throw in a bit of black metal too for good measure and their sound is always abrasive, always cavernous and never lets up.  

“Funeral Sanctum” leans into a melody a bit more and features their tightest song writing to date.  In fact, I’d say a lot of this album is surprisingly catchy.  Despite that, and a little more focus on melody, Witch Vomit do not sacrifice their sound, even an inch.

The album opens with “Dying Embers,” a short intro that does a solid job in building up the album’s momentum early on. It is dark, unnerving and leads right into “Endless Fall.”

This song opens with fury and inhumane growls.  The riffs are intricate but not technical, a balance between old school and a modern extreme approach.  Groove and what amounts to melody for this band grace the middle portion of the song.  The ending is a cacophony of drums and a wild guitar solo.

“Serpentine Shadows,” opens with a melodic guitar lick that quickly switches to their classic colder-than-a-grave guitar tone.  Flurries of melody are intertwined into the savage riffs, ensuring the band is always a ravenous beast no matter what approach it takes. 

A slow, crushing groove opens up “Black Wings of Desolation,” and the lead guitar expertly winds up the song into a feeding frenzy that breaks out just before the one minute mark passes.  This is a bulldozer of a track but as the song progresses and the riffs open up, my head could not stop banging.  This is one of the longer songs on the track and feels much more fleshed out.

But the minute-long “Endarkened Spirits” showcases it’s always about quality not quantity—and they fit more into a minute than a lot of bands do in six.  This is rifftastic song that is among their most caustic and brutal. 

The title track ends the album with a loud groan and the ever approaching night.  This is an corpse cold death metal song that is a prime example of not only this album’s sound but the a great representation as a whole of what the band themselves is all about. 

At this point in their rotten, disgusting career, Witch Vomit have solidified themselves as major players in the American death metal scene.  “Funeral Sanctum” keeps the bands signature sound while also expanding it in the best ways.  This band is unstoppable now.