Band:	Death Karma
Album:	The History Of Death & Burial Rituals Part II
Style:	Black metal, Death metal
Release date:	November 2018

01. Haiti - Voodoo
02. Tibet - Sky Burial
03. Scandinavia - Ship Burial
04. New Zealand - Mongrel Mob
05. Egypt- Pharaohs
06. Indonesia - Tana Toraja
07. Czech Republic - Ossuary
08. Japan - The Sea Of Silent Trees [Japan vinyl & CD version bonus]

Usually when albums about death are memorable, it's due to how personal they feel. Death Karma, a project by Cult Of Fire members, took the cultural approach to talking about death. Here's the second part of their "study" of death rituals from around the world.

Cult Of Fire turned a few heads with their esoteric, Oriental-infused black metal album Ascetic Meditations Of Death back in 2013. Around the same time, Infernal Vlad and Tom Coroner started their own little side project called Death Karma, which would release its debut in 2015; that was part one of the album series of which this review's subject is also a part: The History Of Death & Burial Rituals, wherein each song talks about death and burial rituals from a specific region or country. Quite an ambitious record, and opinions were divided on the first part. How does the second one fare?

The first thing that I noticed is that it was quite obvious that Death Karma have noticed the criticism of their previous record, mainly the "songs don't musically convey their theme" one. Which is fair - the way that they did was far too subtle. That isn't really the case here; each song does get a bit more of a significant flavour and a bit of folkish or local ritualistic influence to go along with the melodic black/death riffage, which is another strong point of the album. Infernal Vlad's songwriting skills are on full display here, but there's one thing that gets quite in the way.

The production is godawful. That was quite an issue with the previous one as well, but I feel like here the really compressed and munchy production really mangles everything in an unfitting way, so much so that it actually really takes away from the potential enjoyment of the music, much more so than any possible disjuncture that giving each track its flavour would have. But hey, if they listened to the "reflect the culture" criticism of the previous record, they'll probably listen to this production one as well for their follow-up. So if the band gets to read this, maybe I should also direct you to this.

No matter what I say in this interview, it's not gonna come close to actually reading the lyrics and the concepts and the artworks done for the physical release, so the least I can do is direct you to their Bandcamp page, where they do talk a bit about the concept behind each song.