Tomb Mold – The Enduring Spirit Review

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, flora and fauna, it’s a beautiful night here at Menacing Square Garden, and what a fight night it is. There’s the usual flurry of hushed excitement and politely suppressed bloodlust in the arena as the fans file in for tonight’s big match. Returning to the squared circle for their first extended bout in four years are the death metal darlings in Toronto’s Tomb Mold.

This match was announced barely a week before the starting bell, so it landed without much advance press – no official weigh-in, no ringside interviews, no trash-talking hype videos – but anticipation is still feverish. As the crowd starts to fill in the stands, let’s go to the tapes for a quick refresher on the previous three prizefights.

Tomb Mold scrambled out of the gates in 2017 as a scrappy bare-knuckle brawler with the ravenous, clattering scuzz of Primordial Malignity. They leaned into an aggressive stance, favoring a series of quick, punishing jabs interspersed with bass-twanging body blows like Severed Survival boiled in Finnish death metal.

Returning to the ring in 2018 with Manor of Infinite Forms, Tomb Mold had clearly hit the gym, bulking up to middleweight class and introducing some fancier footwork. In cleaning up their production, they rounded off a few too many edges and lost some of the filthy charm of the debut, but the songs moved with an extra swagger and strut and they really moved close to a knockout on the tumbling cadence and slithering licks of “Abysswalker.”

And again, just one year later Tomb Mold returned for a rematch on 2019’s Planetary Clairvoyance, an album that found them using their weight to its fullest extent but easing back to allow for a bit of cosmic atmosphere that served to offset and underscore the tricky heft of their wildly cocksure riffs. They accomplished such an impressive sprawl in those still-compact 38 minutes that it was easily the most impressive bout of their career to date.

But sit tight, fight fans. The house lights are down and the contender is making their way to the ring for tonight’s title fight. Will it be a Thrilla… or Vanilla? The Frozen Chosen, or the Hoser Posers? Get ready for… The Honcho from Toronto, the Scenario in Ontario, Tooooooomb Mooooooold.

Round 1: “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)”

Max Klebanoff’s “Painkiller”-esque drums sound the opening bell and round 1 is underway. Tomb Mold looks light on their feet from the start here, but what’s this? After an opening salvo that slices and squiggles, Derrick Vella’s bass around the 0:50 mark shows off a Tomb Mold that seems to be putting a markedly progressive pep in their deathgressive step. Payson Power comes bounding off the ropes with a cosmic wailing solo and let me tell you, sports fans, this is not the Tomb Mold we last saw pounding the bag. Around 3:18 they lock into a unison sprint, but the movement quickly snaps back. Boxing fans have seen moves like these before, maybe in particular with the welterweight elegance of Death’s Individual Thought Patterns.

Round 2: “Angelic Fabrications”

We’re into round 2 of this fight, and Tomb Mold is still pace-setting with a blasting drum succession of quick jabs and windmilling guitars, but at 1:00 they start dancing. Vella’s bass leads a sassy, hip-hop bounce with its huge, rounded tone. Midway through they start grappling, waiting for the ref to break it up before hanging back and doing some cruising. The crux of Tomb Mold’s technique here is to keep swinging and swinging – they peal out riff after riff, but don’t necessarily wait for all of them to stick. Constant forward motion, that’s the ticket as the bell brings another round home.

Round 3: “Will of Whispers”

Round 3 opens with a dreamy, post-punk fantasia of clean guitars and lite-funk bass. Tomb Mold take a seat on their corner stool, guzzling water and clearing the stars from their head. Klebanoff’s deep, hoarse death-roar is even more oppressive against the extra-clean tones here. Around 1:36, Vella’s and Power’s guitars (and Vella’s bass) start full-on tweaking, skipping and dancing around the ring with a queasy, fret-hopping run. This round finds some of the most successful indulgence of spacey atmospherics and progressive riffing of the entire match. The specter of Cynic’s Focus (the undisputed, one-time champion of beautiful alien prog/jazz death) looms large in the round, especially as the guitars spin out chiming harmonics and legato melody lines.

Round 4: “Fate’s Tangled Thread”

After a sweet coasting round, Tomb Mold answers the opening bell here with a woozy, lurching rhythm as if they’ve just gotten up from a knockdown blow. The classic progressive death metal vibes that are so pronounced in Tomb Mold’s performance tonight are often – as on this song – augmented by nods to busier, more modern prog-death fighters like Obscura or Spawn of Possession. And yet, even when Tomb Mold lets their fists fly in those wild forms, they aren’t as lightning-quick or focused on truly overloading with dozens of arpeggiated hook-combos. That, more than anything else, might define Tomb Mold’s current place in the lineage of death metal bruisers: their songs aren’t as indelibly memorable as Death, Atheist, or Edge of Sanity, but they also aren’t as fully enamored of tech overload. Each round spends its time tumbling from sprint to hop to feint, each pummeling groove a satisfying and dangerous invitation, but sometimes with the kind of ‘whatever sticks’ bravado that makes a seasoned opponent roll their eyes. But then, that’s exactly the sort of complacency that leaves an adversary open to the gut punch and uppercut combo they never saw coming, and “Fate’s Tangled Thread” closes out with 2.5 minutes of true knockout caliber. Vella and Power trade off wild solos and dense, emotional verses such that the round finishes, breathlessly, like a death metal power-ballad fugue.

Round 5: “Flesh as Armour”

Halfway through this primetime bout, gloves taut and glistening with sweat in the spotlight glare, Tomb Mold jumps out from the corner. Klebanoff is a hairpin-turn drummer, switching between tom-heavy mini-fills and straight-out blasting, underlining the twangy lurch of the grooves with a steady patter. This round closes out with a heads-down flurry of straightforward punches, Tomb Mold just about draping themselves on their opponent and trying for body shots as they shake off their fatigue.

Round 6: “Servants of Possibility”

The bass and guitar unison that leads off round 6 finds Tomb Mold in a slippery cruising mode, a late-match groover that isn’t trying to introduce any ambitious new combos, but that hangs in the game and works toward an incipient second wind as the final round looms. The crowd is dazzled by the punches, but if you asked them to sketch out the pattern, it’s doubtful they would remember any individual combo here. Was the last round jab-jab-uppercut? Hook-cross-jab-jab-duck-body shot? Such is the quandary of the aspiring heavyweight: do you aim to dazzle and awe with sheer technique, inviting tone, and brute force? Or do you go for the hook that knocks them flat and has them dreaming about it from the other side of a KO?

Round 7: “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity”

We’re heading into the final round of tonight’ match-up, folks, and the judges understand Tomb Mold negotiated their contract to draw this one out to eleven minutes. It’s a bold strategy, Canada, so let’s see if it pays off for them. That pep is back as they open, but minute to minute, the tactics are changing. At 1:25, they slip into a woozy three-step, hoping to land some glancing blows in waltz time, but then 3:01 finds them dropping back to straight, galloping punches. Klebanoff’s subtle drumming keeps up a skittering energy in the calm, progressive New Age midsection that ushers in several melancholy guitar solos. The punches have mostly stopped here, and the phased, aquatic tones show Tomb Mold circling thoughtfully. The crowd can sense the imminent final bell, and around 9:25 the band starts ramping up its final flurry of energy. A post-rock guitar squeals atop the fray at 10:00 and a last-minute hookshot solo carries it home. Ringside observers are saying this final round probably should have been split into two or three shorter rounds to allow Tomb Mold to hone the various techniques they’ve thrown around, but it’s hard to fault any of the individual combos they’ve brought to the arena tonight.

Post-Match

And with the final bell, young and old, in here and out there, that’s a wrap on The Enduring Spirit. It’s pandemonium in the ring as everyone and their dog rushes to render judgment. From us here on the microphone, a word of caution to be suspicious of any pollywog or prognosticator calling this the match of the year before the cuts have been patched and the sweat has dried. It’s been a busy year of exhibitions in the boxing world, with powerful demonstrations by fighters as varied as Conjureth, Incantation, Carnosus, Gorod, 7H. Target, Anachronism, Negative Vortex, Tentacult, Horrendous, Lost Harvest, Alkaloid, VoidCeremony, Cemetery Dwell, and Fabricant. In their fourth title fight, Tomb Mold – the Trio with Brio, the Smooth Band with Fast Hands – showed a lot of class and mettle. Their streamlined prog attack boasts an impressive range, but we’ll have to keep going back to the replays to see if all those new moves really stick.

Well, to all you in the stands and everyone listening at home, this is highly unusual. In all my years of announcing, I’ve never seen such a thing, but the ringside judges are holding up their match cards, and it looks like… yes, it looks like they are delivering their decision as an image:

Posted by Dan Obstkrieg

Happily committed to the foolish pursuit of words about sounds. Not actually a dinosaur.

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