After a demo released last year, the Germans Into Coffin make their debut with this full length based on a death doom adherent to the orthodoxy of the genre, especially for what concerns the rough and less melodic aspects. The guys from Hesse go to fit perfectly at the point where the heaviness of classic doom intersects with the virulence of death, taking as a possible reference a band like Winter, but further enriching the sound with more than one shade of black mold. Into Coffin on the whole behave much better than other similar realities dealt with recently, such as fellow countrymen The Fog or the revived Dutch Spina Bifida, because they prove to be good interpreters of harsh and slow sounds that return positive feelings thanks to an execution without frills but always precise and enhanced by a good production. Clearly, Into Pyramid Of Doom is a work that, net of some ambient temptation, tends to be rather uniform in its dark pace, an aspect that is also accentuated by the attention given by Into Coffin more to the sound impact than to the creation of captivating atmospheres; it follows that the enjoyment of a work like this depends a lot on personal taste, so those who are more inclined to the melodic doom death can also neglect this record while, on the contrary, those who prefer more direct and oozy sounds could find not little satisfaction. Moreover, ours don’t limit themselves to propose bradycardic scores but, often, they launch themselves in effective accelerations that, if they can’t be defined really peculiar elements or symptomatic of a particular compositional variety, they succeed in the intent to break, at least in part, the monolithic pace of the album. As a track to listen to get a better idea of the proposal I would recommend the final Black Ascension, a track that in just over ten minutes exhibits in an exhaustive way the spectrum of sound within which the German band moves. Into a Pyramid of Doom is not a work that will leave its mark in the years to come, but it is not even negligible, in light of the competence and conviction exhibited during the work by Into Coffin.

2016 – Terror from Hell Records