Tomb Mold - Enduring Spirit [CD]

After releasing three albums in three years and then spending the next four in the wilderness, Tomb Mold has been reborn on fourth album The Enduring Spirit, a thoroughly unabashed step into vast new territories. Yet for all it's frenetic daring and audacious exploration, it is never anything other than unmistakably Tomb Mold. While the expanding Tomb Mold architecture could be heard on last year's self-released Aperture Of Body tape, it comes into clear focus throughout The Enduring Spirit. Certainly Derrick Vella's time creating within and expanding the doom genre in Dream Unending has seeped into the flesh of Tomb Mold, not to mention Payson Power and Max Klebanoff's explorations in their own Daydream Plus project. With album opener "The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)" the band's angular dimension shifting riffing appears right out of the gate as the track travels through varying degrees of progressive death metal and some of the band's most extreme material yet. "Will Of Whispers" enters with a jazz-like fantasy sequence before careening into a blinding white light barrage, tasteful guitar leads and back to a dreamy serpentine pattern, encompassing whole universes in it's nearly seven minute run-time. The back half of the record continues the voyage into what's possible with the outward expansion of death metal norms, reaching the zenith of eleven plus minute album closer "The Enduring Spirit Of Calamity," an otherworldly journey into a vortex where all things converge in space and time and generating the tree of life via luminous celestial composition. With four years away, a band with boundless creative energy, as Tomb Mold are, were certain to expand the scope of their vision, and on The Enduring Spirit they've shaped a record with a cinematic environment that offers unlimited avenues of exploration, both for themselves and the listener.