I found it really difficult to review this album. Not because it’s bad, but rather because it’s an hour long and only consists of 5 songs, with the opening “In Darkened Slumber” being an ambient amble in a fen that allows to you to truly get lost in your thoughts as you wander, before the Norwich based quintet add their full weight to “A Sentinel for the Fragile” with its heavy guitars by Liam Houseago and Jordan Grant, the slow and precise drum beatings by Jorge Figueiredo joined by Shane Amies’s rumbling bass and Daniel Bollans’s low drawn out growls and rasps.

This is the second album by the band that was formed in 2010 and they continue on their path of lengthy doom laden death metal with “In Somnus Ego Morrior (In My Sleep I Die)” clocking in just shy of 13 minutes, where a very MDB feeling guitar lead breaks out just before the song ends.

“An Elegy for the Departed” is also filled with the harmonious tremolo guitars during the interludes between verses where rather abrasive vocals are used rather than the deep roar employed on the other songs.

They end the album off with “To Welcome the Grey”, where the simple bass plucking has slow drum tapping and whispered growls for the first quarter of the song, before it changes to guitar plucking then distorted riffs and the required growls that go with them as the pace of the drumming picks up until everything slows down once more and fades out for the next few minutes.

All in all, it delivers exactly what you’d expect from a doom death band, plenty of slow death riffs and doomy feeling songs that leave you wanting for some levity again.

(7/10 Marco Gaminara)

https://www.facebook.com/Consecration666

https://consecration666.bandcamp.com/album/fragilium-album-2019