Band:	Ossuarium
Album:	Living Tomb
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	February 01, 2019
A review by:	RaduP

01. Intro
02. Blaze Of Bodies
03. Vomiting Black Death
04. Corrosive Hallucinations
05. Writhing In Emptiness
06. End Of Life Dreams And Visions Pt. 1
07. Malicious Equivalence
08. End Of Life Dreams And Visions Pt. 2

My only problem with the huge amount of great death metal releases lately is that I'm running out of words to uniquely describe them.

If you remember my Outer Heaven review from last year, I was basically making the same points. I'd suggest you read that first since it also echoes my sentiment on this album, and also because the only comment on it is from a spam bot. But since I can't just lazily say "refer to my other review" and be done with it, I'm gonna milk my neurons and come up with a way to review this while secretly hoping that old school death metal this year won't be as good as last year's - because 2018 was crazy for OSDM and even though I reviewed a lot of albums of said genre the one that got nominated to the MSA was one that I hadn't. That good.

So finally talking about Ossuarium themselves, huh? Well they're from Portland, they released a demo before this, and their debut, Living Tomb is released through 20 Buck Spin, a label notorious for such death metal of consistent quality. They play death-doom, also known as OSDM's slow and filthy counterpart. Now putting exactly into words why listening to this album is any different from any other from the sea of similar albums is kinda tough. The world is really scraping the death-doom barrel lately.

But the album is great. It does what it should do and it does it well and interesting enough not to be completely generic. There's always a slight dissonant moment (and not dissonant in the similarly generic dissonant death metal way) that feels slightly off but just off enough so it sounds uncanny rather than wrong. Ossuarium also do the "mood-building" slow parts of their music much better than their counterparts, who mostly treat it as some sort of intermission, but here they are very effectively integrated in the music, so much so that when the meat-and-potatoes mid-paced cavernous sections hit, it can actually feel less engaging. The production still leaves a lot to be desired, but the songwriting packs some actual punch and I'm glad that there's finally an album that allows me to say things about it.

There's still a lot left to build, mostly on the production side, but seeing the huge step taken between their demo and this debut, I think we'll be hearing from Ossuarium again. Until then, enter the living tomb.