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The Obelisk Radio Add of the Week: Neptune’s Inferno, Abyss

If you like your sludge with more than a touch of the inhumane, Long Island resident Vincent Napolitano has got six songs and a name-your-price download with your name on them. Napolitano is the sole member of and driving force behind Neptune’s Inferno, whose debut long-player, Abyss, is out now through Death Valley Records. The album is a collection of thick, bludgeoning, misanthropic riffs, played slow and set to thunderous-sounding drum programming as a bed for Napolitano‘s layers of throat-ripping growls and screams. If nothing else, the 43-minute outing has the right title, since by the time the ultra-lumbering “Chiropteris” storms into its second half, you long since feel like you’ve been pulled down a well.

The largesse of sound is a big part of the album’s success. With a recording produced by Bleach Eater guitarist/vocalist Don Millard and engineered by Joe Cincotta at Full Force Studio, Napolitano pushes beyond one-man-project resonance and well into a full-band appeal. There are moments where the cymbal sounds are clearly programmed — the “hi-hat” in “Night Fever” and the “ride” in “Sonic Invasion” come to mind — but it’s not like Abyss is otherwise going for such a natural, accessible feel. Extremity is the purpose, and if there are flourishes of industrial at work in some of the material, that doesn’t necessarily detract from the album’s overall affect. “Vision Spell” sets a steady march and offers few frills around its riffing, screaming, lumbering approach, but the song’s victory is in the lack of restraint in its vomitous crawl. One does not get hit in the head with hammer and marvel at the nuance.

An 11:38 capstone arrives in “Frost Trails under the Blackened Sun,” feeding back into one last gleefully-repugnant plod. It finishes with the onset of gritty machine-noise drone, but it’s the march that makes the song a standout more than anything, a break around six and a half minutes in bridging the gap basically between the two songs it otherwise might’ve been. Whether it’s bands like Grime, or Wizard’s Beard or Morbid Wizard, Fistula or any of their depraved ilk, the world is not short on extreme sludge, and Napolitano has his work cut out for him in finding a niche for the massive tones he emits on Abyss, but especially for a first album, the clarity of intent served up here feels like forewarning of cruelties yet to come.

Hear Abyss now as part of the 24/7 stream of The Obelisk Radio, and get a sampling of the album via the player below, snagged from the Neptune’s Inferno Bandcamp:

Neptune’s Inferno, Abyss (2014)

Neptune’s Inferno on Thee Facebooks

Death Valley Records on Thee Facebooks

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