Temple Of Void – The Crawl Review

[Cover art by Travis Smith]

Personally, I enjoy it when a band opens an album by kicking in your door and lighting your home on fire. Detroit doesn’t have a Devil’s Night reputation for nothing after all. The Murder Mitten’s Temple Of Void launches album number five, The Crawl, with nearly 30 seconds of eastern-melody-inflected guitar leads on “Poison Icon.” In fact, roughly a third of the song’s runtime ends up being filled with equally fiery leads. Does the rest of the album throw six more barrels of gasoline onto the blaze to create a towering inferno? No, but they wouldn’t be a very good death-doom band if they didn’t show off that slow, simmering coals can be just as potent as the 20-foot bonfire that accompanies every Midwestern high schooler’s barnyard party. Even “Poison Icon” doesn’t plant its foot on the gas pedal the whole time, as glimmers of Isis post-metal and a few gothic touches help to announce that these lads plan to sit firmly in the jam room for this one.

2022’s Summoning The Slayer was when Temple Of Void really announced its intention to expand its sound; The Crawl picked up that mantle and ran with it. They still give the ardent fans of their more pure debut plenty to chew on with straightforward tracks like “The Crawl” and bruising, trudging closer “The Twin Stranger,” but the majority of the album fuses plenty of non-metal influences into this deathly poutpourri. In particular, post-punk and simpler hard rock concepts have taken a greater hold on the songwriting. “Godless Cynic” opens with a drum and bass passage that was clearly inspired by The Cure, but a good chunk of the song is ridden over by an air-raid style of noisy guitar while the other guitar jams, runs, and hunts underneath it. The core riffs in the song, however, are often quite simple and could easily be what you’d expect from a hard rock band, but they’re buttressed by heavier elements and gnarlier guitar parts, making it less apparent that the band is looking for simpler hooks. Overall, the simplicity of the riffs is often belied by extra flourishes of notes or transitions that make sure you don’t focus on them for too long. The title track has a stretch with a very basic riff, but it always ends with a few extra, varying guitar notes that help it to feel like it’s working toward something.

Hell, “A Dead Issue” brings in synths and this big bruiser of a dummy riff that if you stripped out the vocals, I’d believe you if you told me Zakk Wylde wrote it 20 years ago for Ozzy on Black Rain. Not content to make it that easy, however, Temple Of Void spends the second half of the song flying into space and letting the guitar simply meander, clamber and explore as if the band had recently binged Colors. The combination of that song and “Thy Mountain Eternal” that follows exemplifies what The Crawl really is: a band seemingly bored with their roots and wanting to open up the conceptual coloring book to work outside the lines. “Thy Mountain Eternal” spends nearly seven minutes jamming out and simply letting the song go to find new corners. The entire second half feels like the listener is simply following the guitars on their own journey to an end neither of us knows.

One of the biggest shifts for The Crawl was bringing the band down to four members by having vocalist Mike Erdody take on second-guitar duties. While I can’t say whether or not that shift influenced the uptick and quality of the leads or the band’s interest in jamming out, as those could have been a natural progression, I do think it helped further cement one of Erdody’s underrated skills – knowing when to let the other instruments do the talking. That second half of “Thy Mountain Eternal” is all the more impactful and enjoyable because the guitars are given space to breathe and explore. Erdody’s vocals continue to be monstrously deep yet surprisingly clear, and they’re made all the better by being implemented well and kept out of the way during key stretches. A lot of vocalists don’t know when to shut the hell up, but Erdody is not one of them.

There are a couple of minor issues that negatively impact the record. The aforementioned noise focus during “Godless Cynic” does overwhelm the song a bit and neuter some of the killer guitar work. Additionally, “Soulburn” would’ve been a much stronger closer than “The Twin Stranger.” The former fuses a gothic, post-punk synth, bass, and drum combo with hard-rocking riffs befitting a big arena performance before getting to a slower, repeated riff to close. That closing section feels very open and like something the band would close a live set with in order to give each player one more shot to improvise and take the spotlight for a few seconds. In fact, I wish they flipped the order of the last two tracks, snipped the boring one-minute sound effect outro of “The Twin Stranger,” gave the time to the end of “Soulburn” to do exactly that, and let the band members close the album on a more raucous, powerful note.

Ultimately, if the new influences appearing on Summoning The Slayer turned you off of Temple Of Void, The Crawl sure as hell isn’t bringing you back. If, however, you’re down to let your death doom have a whole lot of other ideas, you’ll likely find yourself having a good time with this one.