Outre-Tombe - Abysse Mortifère

A feral beast with dulled teeth.

(Originally submitted to the Metal Archives on December 17th 2021) 

I’m gonna be honest, part of me didn’t want to write this review. Outre-Tombe’s been a band I’ve held close to my heart over the past couple of years, with their sophomore Nécrovortex being my go-to comfort album. Naturally, when they announced Abysse Mortifère I immediately hopped on Bandcamp and preordered it, full of excitement. I listened to it as soon as I could, and it turned out to be the biggest disappointment of the year.
The main thing that drags this album down by quite a lot for me is the production. I cannot wrap my head around how they managed to botch it this badly after Nécrovortex’s “loud-but-not-brickwalled” production. The guitars, while not necessarily bad, are so high up in the mix that they drown most of the other instruments here, especially the bass. The bass is so hard to hear it might as well not even be there, it only shows up during the slower moments of the album, and is all but gone at any other time. The drums don’t fare much better either. The snare’s sound is inconsistent, sometimes sounding good and other times piercing through the mix with a very metallic and almost pingy sound, while the kick drums sound slightly muffled. While some might praise it as “old-school”, to me it comes off as sloppy and haphazard.
All that is made worse by the fact that this album might just have the best songwriting out of the band’s three albums to date. Seriously, every song is chock full of great riffs, feral vocals and frenzied solos. My god, the solos. Most of the tracks here have one or two solos, and all of them kick ass to an absurd degree, and I say that as someone who’s not particularly big into that type of stuff. “Cenobytes” has two back-to-back leads that are made all the better by the riff changes underneath, and that’s just one example. It’s just all around excellent death metal songwriting, and they showcase that on tracks like “Dessosé” and “Tombeau du Glace” as well, whose excellent tempo shifts and crushing riffing are a death metal fan’s wet dream. I’m inclined to say that it almost made up for the aforementioned production, but excellent songwriting can only do so much. Had that aspect of the album been better, it could’ve easily gone pound-for-pound with their sophomore, and it’s a shame that it’s being held back like that.
Abysse Mortifère makes me sad. Underneath all this sloppy grime there’s genuinely excellent death metal waiting to be dug up, its lustre is diminished because of some bad decisions. I love Outre-Tombe, I really do, and like I said at the start, part of me didn’t want to write this review. But I cannot help but express my disappointment with this record. It’s a shame that one single mistake managed to sour such great songs. While I’ll definitely be listening to this album for quite some time, because the songs just kick ass, I cannot help but lament what could’ve been.
Highlights: Cenobytes, Dessosé, Tombeau du Glace

Rating: 75% 

  

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