EXCARNATED ENTITY - Mass Grave Horizon MC

n mid-2020, Excarnated Entity relocated to Portland, Oregon and underwent a handful of lineup changes before reaching their current formation. With the new lineup in place, work on their debut album was finally completed. Mass Grave Horizon paints a hopeless vision of the future, drearily dredging death metal’s darkest depths and locating majestically miserable doom among those ominously bubbling landscapes. Following a two-minute instrumental introduction, Excarnated Entity kick in with a classic downtuned death metal surge before gutting its underbelly, revealing the morose melodicism of earliest My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost. As the eight-song/44-minute album plays on, its attendant song titles vividly illustrate said vision – “Carcinogen Shroud,” “Corridor of Flame,” and “The Butcher’s Pulpit” among them – and one can further detect shades of Trouble, Cathedral, Solitude Aeturnus lurking within those ruins. It’s a massively dense-yet-spacious sound, and the quartet’s songwriting suitably incorporates slow twists of the knife, but always in a deliberate and linear fashion. And, come climactic closer “Gallery of Defeat,” your fate is sealed and your soul spent…and Excarnated Entity stand stoic, unmoved and unmovable.