As long as I’ve been doing this, if I had a dollar for everytime Morbid Angel or ‘Steve Tucker era’ or Immolation was mentioned in PR speak I’d be rich enough to quit my day job. If I then hedged those same dollars that the music would be as promised, I would effectively lose my whole ass. With that said, you can imagine my initial thought when the debut full length, Corrupting the Entempled Plane, from Ageless Summoning landed in our inbox with this same PR speak. Good thing is, for this one, my hedge bet pays off.

Ageless Summoning call the UK home and have amongst its ranks members of Spire & Throne, Haar, and Abyssal, just to name a few. To say this band has a lengthy pedigree in all things death and extreme, and the wherewithal to create it, would be a severe understatement. Add to that a shit hot EP in 2018 with Demo MMXVIII that commands a pretty penny on Discogs at this point just due to, yes, the shit hotness of said demo. It’s seemingly a recipe for success. Or, at the very least, a running head start.

Fast forward to now and, spoiler alert, we have a winner. The band said “we felt that the unique atmosphere and mythos conjured by that slower-paced (Morbid Angel), brutal (Immolation), and hypnotic style (Steve Tucker era) were underappreciated and overlooked…” indeed. However, I’ll go further to say it’s rarely ever done properly or to any sort of level that doesn’t seem like a direct damn rip off. Anybody with any musical ability can distort, pinch that harmonic, and/or insert moody-feely atmospheric interludes. But, it takes some brains and creativity to really make it sing, and stick, and stand out amongst the throngs of imitators.

To discuss: opener “Usurper of the Void” dices it up from the jump with intricate drums, a rhythm section that sounds large enough to sever and split California off the map, and guitars that meander between macho solos and keeping the melody murky and nasty. Somewhere within all the chaos, the three headed atmospheric swamp demon rears its head and it’s apparent this band takes their influences very seriously. Yet, the extremely technical construction behind the notes, the riffs, and even the atmosphere sounds fresh. “Epoch of Souls” chugs and lurches its way into a feeding frenzy of neck snapping cadence while “Toward the Fractal Absolute” highlights the band’s ability to inject some seriously catchy groove here and there and make it sound like the best thing since sliced bread.

The only issue I have with this album is that after the eight gloriously sick tracks loosely covered above (plied and stretched one way or another from the previous descriptions), mood setter “Invocation” is pretty much useless at this point in the album. I mean, I get it; it’s dank and dark but this far along in an already dank and dark album, this type of interlude isn’t needed to establish any real point. Then, closer “Salvation In Ash” is the one track where they go ‘cover band.’ And, going back to my hedging a bet thing, here’s where I lose a little money back to the house. After all the creativity and killer ideas to this point, this is meat and potatoes death metal at best. Nothing wrong with meat and potatoes death metal, it’s just a lukewarm choice to close this otherwise stellar debut.

Barring the last two tracks, Ageless Summoning have an outstanding debut album on their hands with Corrupting the Entempled Plane and capitalize on all the reasons their demo was, and still is, so shit hot. For the most part they do an excellent job using their influences as just reference points rather than allowing those to drown their burgeoning identity, and further, their relevance. This may not be the first essential death metal album of 2023, but it is definitely essential.

— Josh

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Corrupting the Entempled Plane will be available July 21 on Dark Descent Records. For more information on Ageless Summoning, visit their Facebook page.