SERPENTINE PATH · Emanations | CD

Jewel case CD.

Background information about 'Emanations'

There is a particular kind of weight that only a handful of records manage to carry, and "Emanations" is one of them. Serpentine Path — the unholy alliance of Tim Bagshaw and Stephen Flam, both veterans of the New York doom underground — take the slow-motion crush of their debut and drag it somewhere even darker, more claustrophobic and considerably more pissed off. The riffs do not so much arrive as they do loom: huge, tar-thick slabs of downtuned guitar that hang in the air just long enough to make you nervous before the next one lands. It is doom, yes, but doom with a hardcore pulse and a death metal snarl, all of it smeared together into something that feels genuinely unwell.

What makes this record so gripping is how little it cares about being pretty. The vocals are barked and buried, the drums swing between a funeral march and a full-on stampede, and the low end is so dense you can practically chew it. Tracks like the opener and the closing crawl feel less like songs than like weather systems — you do not listen to them so much as survive them. And yet, for all the ugliness, there is craft here: the riffs are memorable, the dynamics are smart, and the whole thing is sequenced so that the heaviness keeps escalating rather than flattening out. This is the sound of seasoned players who know exactly how much punishment a listener can take, and who are only too happy to find the limit.

For fans of: Winter, Autopsy, Asphyx, Hooded Menace, Coffins

Track listing

1. Essence Of Heresy
2. House Of Worship
3. Treacherous Waters
4. Claws
5. Disfigured Colossus
6. Systematic Extinction
7. Torment

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