Anyone following Nine Circles closely over the past year will have noticed I’m not much of a death metal guy. In fact it looks like only three reviews I’ve done so far have had any focus on death metal acts, and even for those albums other styles were incorporated. I don’t dislike it, but despite being heavily into tech death in my college years much of the genre has fallen off for me in full favor of my beloved black metal (unless of course you’re Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice, and now Tomb Mold). Nowadays a death metal album has to effectively incorporate a healthy dose of black metal influence or do something else pretty special to grab my attention. Ulthar’s Anthronomicon/Helionomicon did both of those things close to the start of 2023, and now another album has come along to do the same close to year’s end. Abhorrent Dimensions is the second full-length from Finland’s Sepulchral Curse, who take a foundation of ass-beating death metal and infuse it with a variety of other stylistic tendencies that — when combined with a tremendous vocal performance — result in one of the finest death metal albums of the year.

There’s any number of ways to go about an opening track; the ambient or acoustic intro, the short opener that merely gives a taste of what’s to come, and much more. Abhorrent Dimensions does the opening track right with “Onward the Legions” which had me hooked at first listen. A fantastic mix of pummeling death metal riffage alternating with more mid-paced blackened dissonance, leading up to a glorious finale featuring both a barrage of black metal chords and some surprising melodicism — this perfectly sets the stage for what’s to come on the rest of the album. Despite the black metal influences that are sprinkled here and throughout the rest of the album, there’s one decisive factor that roots the album in death metal: the vocals.

Perhaps it’s my relative naivete with the genre, but I wouldn’t normally find myself enamored with any vocal performances in death metal. But the growls of Sepulchral Curse vocalist Kari Kankaanpää are so damn low and (for lack of a better descriptor) so fucking brutal, in the sense that they’re almost painful to listen to; you can practically hear his vocal chords ripping. Sure, there’s not a whole lot of variety in them, but when they sound the way they do that’s not much of a detriment. I’m not sure if he has much of a speaking voice left after recording the album, but rest assured it makes Corpsegrinder sound like Frank Sinatra.

So we’ve got blackened death metal and an impossibly heavy vocal performance, but what else does Abhorrent Dimensions have to offer? Thankfully, a lot. Perhaps the most crushing riff I’ve heard this year on “Among the Wretched Columns,” a healthy dose of eerie, plodding death doom (replete with an atmospheric clean guitar section) with the aptly titled “Graveyard Lanterns,” and my favorite track on the album: “Stagnant Waters.” There’s an impressive display of melodicism that creeps its way into the song after a couple minutes in both riffs and leads; the entirety of the stop at several points to let the lead guitar shine through, and it works perfectly. There might be a disconnect between such melody and the vocals, but Sepulchral Curse pull it off so well. I really hope to see the band explore this aspect in the future.

Abhorrent Dimensions is a death metal album I decided to take a chance on, and it sure paid off. While consistently rooted in death metal, there’s ultimately so much more going on here than you would expect at first glance. Melody, brutality, and everything in between, this is death metal as it should be in 2023. I’m anxiously awaiting whatever Sepulchral Curse have in store for the future.

— Colin

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Abhorrent Dimensions is available now through Transcending Obscurity. For more information on Sepulchral Curse, check out their Facebook and Instagram pages.