Band:	Fossilization
Album:	Leprous Daylight
Style:	Death doom metal
Release date:	September 08, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Archæan Gateway
02. Once Was God
03. Oracle Of Reversion
04. At The Heart Of The Nest
05. Leprous Daylight
06. The Night Spoke The Tongue Of Flames
07. Eon
08. Wrought In The Abyss

The death to Jupiterian's doom.

There's a lot of talk of whether "death doom" and "doom death" are separate genres or whether the two can be used interchangeably. The line isn't very clear, especially since a lot of the times they are used interchangeably so it's a bit hard to tell apart one from the other. But as a rule of thumb, the genre that comes first in the naming is the nuance and the last is the skeleton. Is it doom with growls? Probably death doom. Is it death metal with some doomy slow paces sections? Probably doom death. Or is it the other way around? Why don't we have a definite authority in genre naming? It sure would be sunshine and rainbows if all websites that worked with genres went by this, but now you can't really tell which is which by genre alone. Generally you also have to go by the cover art too. Or the band name. Can you guess which one of these two Fossilization is?

Now the entire reason that I made this entire section is that Fossilization is a duo comprised of two Jupiterian members. Well, one of them, the drummer, was already a member of Jupiterian when Fossilization was formed but he didn't play on any of the albums just yet, which the other, the "everythingelser", is a founding member. In my review of the latest Jupiterian, I made it quite clear that they're more on the doom side of the equation, with plenty of sludge sprinkled in. So it seems like Fossilization is the opposite side of the (death [doom) death] coin.

With how big of a sound this cavernous kind of doom death has been in the past couple of decades, the sound has reached a certain saturation that makes it difficult for newer stuff to make an impact. There's something about how well Leprous Daylight operates that evades that, firstly because of how the meaty production accentuates the oppressive atmosphere without leaving any part of the songwriting to suffer in the background. Gutturals and blasts and all that are commonplace for the genre, but it's mostly the way these flow alongside the riffs and the way the album alternates tempos and injects the slower doom/sludge bits that leaves the impression that the songwriting is pretty dynamic by chunky death metal standards.

There's a lot that Fossilization do right in a straight-forward meat-and-potatoes way for doom death, and also a lot that feels more specific to them, especially in the way the doom/sludge injections feel adjacent to the stuff they do in Jupiterian, and how the dynamic tempo and riff changes leave the album as neither overtly technical nor repetitive. Just sweet sweet pummeling.