BESOTTEN - Eye of the Monolithicrypt

Hailing from Portland, BESOTTEN bring together death/doom metal’s lumbering tempos, decay-evoking vocal character, and dark melodies across five tracks on their debut full-length, "Eye of the Monolithicrypt". Following a previously released demo and split, the album embraces the genre’s traditional sense of heaviness while allowing its compositions to take shape at varying speeds and lengths. Spanning 36 minutes, the record establishes its character through a contrast between shorter, straightforward death metal passages and longer compositions exceeding ten minutes, where the doom influence becomes more pronounced.

What defines the guitars is not simply the weight of the slow-moving riffs, but their unsettling harmonic character. The guitar lines resist any sharp, reassuring melodic resolution, feeding the tracks’ dark atmosphere, while repetition occasionally limits the music’s development. ‘Bathed in Insufferable Light’ and ‘Bloodcairn’ make particular use of their extended runtimes to explore the ponderous mechanics of doom metal. The vocals sit atop the riffs, their echoing, guttural character reinforcing the sense of decay in these passages. Even so, the longer compositions do not maintain an equally clear sense of progression throughout; some transitions feel more like extensions of the existing atmosphere than moments that take the tracks in a new direction.

The more dynamic side of BESOTTEN’s songwriting emerges on ‘Cruentation’. Moving from controlled rhythmic momentum built around a crushing riff into blast beats, the track shifts towards death metal’s faster, more aggressive side. ‘Storming the Cerebral Citadel’ continues in the same vein, although in its faster passages, the rhythmic activity does not always achieve a balanced relationship with the other elements of the composition. These moments demonstrate that the band can be effective at higher speeds, while also reminding us that death/doom metal’s distinctive weight is about more than simply slowing things down. BESOTTEN are most convincing when the interplay between heavy riffs and rhythm gives the music a clear sense of direction.

The album’s production is an important part of this musical identity. Rather than creating a conventional, cavernous echo, the guitars’ dense, compressed tone generates a raw, suffocating weight that seems to bear down on the listener. The use of echo and reverb expands this harsh texture, reinforcing the vocals’ unsettling presence within the instrumentation. The drums remain clearly defined, preserving the rhythmic backbone of the slower passages, while the flow of double-bass drumming adds momentum, particularly in the more extended sections of ‘Bloodcairn’. Guitar solos and groove-driven riffs occasionally break up the otherwise uniform progression, but given the length of the closing track, the transitions between sections could have been shaped with greater care. The resulting sonic world is convincing, but strong production alone cannot compensate for shortcomings in the development of the compositions.

The funeral doom influence that becomes more pronounced around the midpoint of ‘Bloodcairn’ is one of the album’s most intriguing aspects. Without abandoning death metal’s physical weight, the music shifts towards a more mournful progression, while unsettling melodic touches occasionally evoke the disquieting atmosphere of black metal. The momentum builds towards the end of the track before subsiding once more into a melodic closing passage. This section shows that BESOTTEN need not rely exclusively on raw, crushing riffs. More pronounced melodic turns and carefully developed transitions could take the band’s existing musical language towards something more distinctive.

"Eye of the Monolithicrypt" makes no attempt to break away from death/doom metal’s established traditions. The intersection of INCANTATION’s crushing death metal riffing and MY DYING BRIDE’s mournful melodic approach offers a useful reference point for understanding the album’s identity, but this proximity occasionally overshadows BESOTTEN’s own compositional character. Not all five tracks are equally memorable, and the ideas in the longer passages, in particular, would benefit from further development. Nevertheless, the band’s ability to move between slow and fast tempos, its dense production, and its atmospheric instincts in the passages approaching funeral doom prevent this debut from being merely a collection of familiar genre elements.

BESOTTEN have room to develop the sonic world established on this debut through more distinctive compositions. While "Eye of the Monolithicrypt" successfully captures death/doom metal’s crushing weight and decayed aesthetic, its lasting impact will depend not on how convincingly it establishes this atmosphere, but on how far the band can transform it into musical ideas of their own.

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