Black Curse

Colorado's Black Curse, the quartet of Zach Coleman (drums), Eli Wendler (vocals), Morris Kolontyrsky (bass) and Jon Campos (guitars), debuted with Endless Wound (Sepulchral Void, 2020), four years in the making, a formidable summa of "blackened" death metal. Each song is not only dense and powerful but also benefits from carefully architected tempo shifts. The roaring sensory assault of Charnel Rift turns into an agonizing, bluesy passage with loud meowing guitar distortions. Torrential drumming and an infernal growl open Crowned in (Floral) Vice but the music stops after not even two minutes, and then resumes in a doom-ier vein and pierced by Campos' guitar noise. After the opening cacophony, the seven-minute Enraptured by Decay harkens briefly back to Led Zeppelin's bluesy hard-rock before a catastrophic collective epilepsy which then implodes in a spacey form of psychedelic doom. The nine-minute Finality I Behold is the ultimate hurricane, both a catartic release of evil instincts at lightning speed and a cascading panorama of moribund sounds, a mystical theater of atrocities. No less gripping are the three minutes of relentless mayhem Seared Eyes and creepy abstract-gothic intermezzo Lifeless Sanctum. Ironically the band falls flat only in the very title-track, Endless Wound, where the limitations of their unhinged interplay prevail over the benefits.