After five years of silence and meticulous work, Vancouver, British Columbia-based melodic death metal collective DUNGEON SERPENT returns with their second album Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms, their first record for Profound Lore Records.
Having already constructed a standout style of death metal with their World Of Sorrows debut, sharply focused upon fusing morbid and romantic strains of extreme metal from before metal’s turn-of-the-century involution, DUNGEON SERPENT now boldly looks to a future of their own creation and stretches their limbs to new horizons, breathing new life into the ruined world presented in the first album. Thus, Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms is a work of grand ambition and unbowed passion, not content to merely fine-tune and repeat what has already been done in a bygone age.
Yet with this expansion, DUNGEON SERPENT’s Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms presents a work united as a great whole. Each of the six pieces are tonally distinct but thematically bound and flow into a monolithic whole. With Arawn handling all vocals, guitars, keyboards, and bass, the vision is executed with greater clarity, enhanced skill, focus and the addition of new members to the horde, such as drummer Bhraonáin (Fake Dust). The music is now played with a speed and ferocity well beyond what was achieved on the first album, and the technique of the core instrumentation is more eclectic, drawing more freely from black metal, brutal death metal, and even as far as jazz and grind, as well as a sharper mix that allows elements such as agile basslines to be heard with much more clarity. The music cleanly flows between this ferocity and an almost cosmic sense of orchestral grandiosity, owing to the expanded instrumentation within the songs, chiefly mystical keyboards in the Hellenic tradition and violins provided by string player and contemporary composer Anju Singh (The Nausea), as well as many other adventurous atmospheric and textural flourishes.
Mixed and mastered by Damian Herring of Horrendous at his Subterranean Watchtower Studios (Blood Incantation, Ripped To Shreds, Sentient Horror), and completed with cover art by dark artist Marc Potts, Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms is a work that expresses both the untempered rawness and ferocity but also the latent musical potential within the truest essence of death metal in one breath, realized and entwined as extensions of one and the same principle.
With the album’s lead single, “Rainland’s Elegy,” Arawn reveals, “I am very happy with this choice of single. I think this is in many ways the most creative song on this album and we pulled off some of our most interesting ideas to date here, especially the big middle section which combined Dismember style sequenced patterns with modal jazz influenced chord movements and bass solos playing around the key changes. It is definitely the most advanced song on the album and most clearly demonstrates what I am trying to do with DUNGEON SERPENT overall. The music video was a very DIY affair filmed on essentially no budget, but this makes it extremely fucking true to the cult and genuine.”
Watch the video for DUNGEON SERPENT’s “Rainland’s Elegy” HERE and find the song on all streaming services HERE.
Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms will be released on LP, CD, and digital platforms on October 30th. Preoders for all formats and presaves are available now via Profound Lore HERE.
Watch for additional previews of the record to be issued over the coming weeks.
Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms Track Listing:
1. A Wanderer’s Dirge/Ashes From The Temple
2. Festering Malediction (The Fifth Kingdom)
3. Rainland’s Elegy (The Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms)
4. Garden Of Grotesque Forms (Act I. Lineage Of Failure, Act II. Dreamlike Odyssey)
5. Tranquil Sleep Of The Dead, Endless Seas Aflame
6. Cast Through (Outro)
DUNGEON SERPENT:
Arawn – vocals, guitars, keyboards, bass
Bhraonain – drums
Nausea – violins
https://linktr.ee/DungeonSerpent
https://dungeonserpentmdm.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/dungeonserpent.official
https://profoundlorerecords.com
https://www.profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/profoundlorerecords
https://www.facebook.com/profoundlorerecords
https://x.com/profoundlore
The post DUNGEON SERPENT: Vancouver Melodic Death Metal Entity To Release Lamentations Of The Shadowkingdoms LP On Profound Lore Records October 30th; “Rainland’s Elegy” Video And Preorders Posted first appeared on Earsplit Compound.