Serpentshrine-Besetting the Altar MC

The debuting album released nine years before, now remastered creating a murkier veil into the record where shapes emerge only to once again to be dissolved into this dark haze. While the record still carries the peculiar off-kilter riffs that seem to twist against their own spine, bending heavy metal forms into something faintly avant garde. With this remaster, they are no longer the skeletal frame, at least for the heavy metal side. Instead, they are submerged beneath a more assertive bass which rises to engulf the structure, swallowing brightness and dragging the sound into a more cavernous register. The drumming, too, recedes into this engulfing fog where it once struck with cleaner and puncturing tone, it now pulses from behind that veil, becoming a distant heartbeat below the melody. What emerges from this transformation is a more vigorous identity, the blackened heavy metal hybridity of the original dissolves into something decisively more avant-garde and more blackened in spirit. The aggression remains, but in another form which makes the record even bleaker than before. In this remastered form, "Besetting the Altar" might become less approachable yet more intoxicating, an opacity that becomes strength.
Limited to 50 copies

Southern Rampart 2026.