A long liturgical jam, a multi-inspired stoner/doom metal ritual that comes to us from the Australian desert via Wormholedeath in this warm autumn of 2018. Sumeru bring to life this long, monolithic dance among the warm stones of natural altars, in the shadow of which ancient beliefs and customs continue to mark the lives of men, after their ep-format self-titled first work and their long-distance debut released four years ago (Holy Lands). Summon Destroyer is the new chapter, a new dance that loses itself in the night and makes use of a sound that combines drugged stoner parts, slow doom/sludge litanies and extreme death-like accelerations. All this is cloaked in a thick evocative blanket, which for eight tracks surrounds us like a breath-breaking fog, entering the body and bringing with it hallucinatory visions of rituals forgotten in time. Inanis Kultus is a sigh, a noise in the distance that gets closer and closer as it prepares us for the entrance to The Temple, which exhibits seventies riffs and slow doom marches, while the title track and Embrace The Cold shake up the apparent stalemate with cadenced hard rock rhythms full of sick groove. Summon Destroyer is a difficult work in which the tension remains very high, broken by Kala Ratri, a sort of intro that takes us to the second part of the work opened by the extreme metal of Durga! Durga! followed by the straightforward Rivers Of Lethe, the fastest track on the entire album. A New Ritual concludes this new Sumeru effort with nine minutes of stoner/doom/sludge that lead to bodily and mental exhaustion: the heavy atmospheres pervaded by a mystical tension become even more pressing until the conclusion. A fascinating album, heavy and monolithic, which finds its strongest inspirations in the unhealthy atmospheres of ancient rituals. (A.Centenari – MetalEyes 19/11/2018)

2018 – Wormholedeath