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Catacombs - Biography


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Biography

A distant rumble. The earth crumbles. Heads cave in, bowels shudder. Foundations moan, and then collapse. A lonesome lullaby lingers like fog. A sepulchral bellow breaks the trance, but then leads it further into the primordial maw. Time evaporates. Coma. Your day is ruined. Verily, the sound of CATACOMBS debut for the CULT, In the Depths of R'lyeh. However, such mastery of terrorizing tectonics goes back a decade, forever gestating in the womb. Not surprisingly, Catacombs is the sole vision of one Xathagorra Mlandroth.

Originally hailing from New Jersey and currently residing in Arizona, Xathagorra has been a pioneer and figurehead in the extreme doom/death genre since his first release in 1996, of the legendary doom/death entity Hierophant. Extreme doom/death has always been a natural style for Xathagorra, before the aesthetic had even really formed into a recognizable genre. Being extreme on a personal level as an individual, he naturally strived for the lowest tones and heaviest riffs possible, which manifested into the extreme style of doom/death for which he's known.

With three releases under the now well-cult Hierophant banner, Xathagorra endeavored take his brand of extreme doom/death to the next level. That next level would be Catacombs, a more evolved and more extreme style of ultra-doom/death, and an even more unique aesthetic. The first Catacombs release, a thirty-minute EP, brought to the genre an unrelenting heaviness and suffocating darkness previously not experienced by those into such an extreme form of music.

But with In the Depths of R'lyeh, unfathomably, those limits are crushed and then ground into the dust from whence they came. Exactly a decade after his first foray into the realm of extreme doom/death and three years after the first Catacombs release, In the Depths of R'lyeh offers arguably the darkest, dankest, most forlorn, and truly heaviest in EVERY sense of the term, but especially pertaining to the natural realm extreme doom/death record ever created. Here Catacombs breaks new ground again, in every sense of both terms with its unique, uncompromising style, a heaviness most monolithic and palpably dark atmospheres that emit no light whatsoever. Thus, abandon hope NOW.

An amalgam of colossal heaviness sonically and, metaphorically, cyclopean atmospheres of haunting, beyond-the-shade darkness, altogether bordering on the macabre and most definitely unsettling, In the Depths of R'lyeh will soon be mentioned in the same breath as such defiant legends as Disembowelment, Unholy, Skepticism, Thergothon, and Winter.

In spring 2007 Echoes Through The Catacombs will be re-released in a 4 track version with 2 additional remasters of original tracks

(Source: www.moribundcult.com/band_catacombs.html)