Bile Caster - Writhing Between Birth and Death

Bile Caster is a UK based doom/sludge metal band who formed in 2019. “Writhing Between Birth and Death,” is their debut EP; they have also released a demo and a split. The EP contains three songs at just under 30 minutes runtime so it has a decent amount of material. Regardless, it's always quality not quantity and this EP is nothing but killer extreme doom from the first second to the last.

Musically, it is centered around the slow tempo and thick, cavernous riffs of death doom.  But the tone of the instruments captures the abrasiveness of sludge. The combining of these two styles results in songs that are deep and dark but extremely biting.  

The vocals are fantastic and some of the best I’ve heard in this second half of 2024.  The low growls have just the right amount of echo, as if the vocalist is crying out in torment from some cavern far below the earth.

Each song is longer than the one before it, a detail that I found intriguing; it felt as if I was really delving deeper and deeper as I went through each song.  This adds a sense of mystery and foreboding that is absent from a lot of doom, even extreme ones.  The crushing is straightforward but I found the experience to be anything but that.  Though they all consist of similar ideas and themes, each song sounds unique from the others.

“Abscess,” opens weighty riffs that spend a few seconds pounding before letting the distortion drip off each note, offering stormy clouds that hang over the proceedings.  Much like the title might suggest, the song feels like it is swelling up with something.  All the pain across all the dark paths build up on top of each other as the seconds tick by.  But instead of exploding, it fills up with puss around the 6 minute mark.  The song sounds like there is something rumbling within itself, a beast within a beast clawing to escape.  

Imperiled helplessness and suffocating hopelessness is the foundation of “Trapped.” The drums and bass add on the pressure, each moment of the song acting like the increasing burden of pressure.  At just over the halfway point, the song sort of collapses into itself resulting in a sort of panic desperation.  Not in the sense of hope that one might live but with the finality of knowing death is imminent.  

The final song, “Harrowing,” gets more tortuous as it shifts from crawling riffs to an uptick in the tempo.  The low bass and liminal spaces during the sound bytes drench the song in horror, trading riffs for atmosphere but in a minimalistic way that swallows all the light around.  Imagine being dragged naked and blindfolded across the floor of a cave and thrown into ice cold water at the end.  This would be the soundtrack for such a horrible situation. 

Bile Caster’s “Writhing Between Birth and Death” a stunning debut EP that hits the sweet spot between nasty heaviness and the dreary world of death that doom so often resides in.