Corpse Garden – IAO 269

I absolutely loved Corpse Garden’s “Entheogen” album back in 2015. It was one of those albums where you just knew from the first track you were listening to something special. The band mixed the technical proficiency of latter day Death and the twisted atmospherics of Incantation and Gorguts. The songs twisted and turned and there was wonderful little atmospheric interludes between the tracks.

Corpse Garden follow up that fantastic album with “IOA 269” and this one is a bit of a weird one. This album is rawer dirty sounding affair. It has more of that grimy feel of Incantation. There’s more rage and rather that the clinical sound of the previous album it feels more live. I can picture the band playing in a small, humid rehearsal room banging these songs out. Songs like 'Aeon Of Hordes' and 'Death Hex' fly by like a hellish hurricane and then you get tracks like 'La Muerte' and 'Expanding The Vision' are ambient soundscapes with spoken word passages and the like.

This album has more in common on the whole with the likes of Converge or Neurosis than a straight ahead death metal album. It has mixed results and the album does kind of stop and start and the momentum of the flow of the album is unsettled.

Give the band their due they are evolving and haven’t churned out anything run of the mill. “IAO 269” sounds like a band going through a transition. When the transition is over and we see what the band have become will be the thing to look forward to.

An interesting album to say the least and well worth checking out but for newcomers their previous effort “Entheogen” is probably the better one to start with , then go on to this.

  1. Aeon Of Horus
  2. Death Hex
  3. Ain Soph Aur
  4. Selenomantic Ecstasies
  5. La Muerte: Principio Y Redención
  6. Iao 269
  7. The Elevenfold Vibration
  8. Expanding The Vision Call
  9. Loathing