Review: Fossilization – Advent of Wounds
In the desert just a few hours away from my humble abode exists a forest. Not a forest like the one that your mind has conjured at this exact moment, but a forest of stone. An empty wasteland that once resided at the equatorial region on the Pangea super-continent before the grand splitting during the Triassic period about 225 million years ago. The fauna and wildlife, now shifted north to its current location, along with a sharp rise in elevation from further tectonic activity that created the Colorado Plateau 60 million years ago, became trapped in what is now referred to as the Painted Desert. It was during this great migration-forced climate change that a phenomenon occurred creating what is today the Petrified Forest National Park. As volcanic ash buried the fallen trees, silicon dioxide began to seep into the wood itself, replacing the biological structures with quartz crystallization, along with iron oxide, giving the density and color variations we now observe today.
Thankfully, due to our present timeline and advancements in various scientific fields, you can now personally experience the same processes that turned a lush forest ecosystem into a barren wasteland of rock, sediment, and fossil. This comes courtesy of fast-uprising Brazilian death/doomers Fossilization and their sonic interpretation of systematically morphing one’s own body into a hardened entombment. But with their sophomore album Advent of Wounds, are we set to experience continued and inescapable matter hardening or will it leave the listener soft instead?
If, for some unexplainable reason, you are unaware of Fossilization, then first of all: SHAME! Second, you are now capable of experiencing the depth-shaking brutality for the first time, an endeavor I myself am incredibly jealous of. Their debut album, Leprous Daylight, was a titanic slab of doom-infused OSDM that focused its assault on the listener with blistering blasts and cavernous riffs that ended up being in my personal Top 10 in 2023. It’s an album I still listen to with some regularity, but with the follow up, I am pleased to proclaim that nothing has diminished even slightly. In fact, this is easily a release that feels like the bigger and meaner brother to the debut. Guitarist, bassist, and vocalist V states:
From the start, my goal was to make an album even more brutal than Leprous Daylight, from sheer death metal brutality to the miserable melancholy of the doom-laden spirit of early Anathema, Paradise Lost, and early Katatonia. You can also hear many black metal influences across the record…
The main differentiator for Advent of Wounds is simply a stronger focus on songwriting and composition. Not to say that this album dives into, or even tests the waters of prog, but the flow between riffs feels more natural. Even the hard stops that transition (or don’t) between one riffing idea and another are stark and snap your brain to attention like a threat warning. The black metal influences that surface are reserved for precise moments leading to maximum effect instead of their constant inclusion leading to diminishing effectiveness. (For example, the quick opening riff in “Disentombed and Reassembled by the Ages” or the blackened “drone” style riff over blasts and gurgles in “Scalded by his Sacred Halo,” which also possesses nuanced electronic atmosphere and a guest vocal performance by Justin Stubbs of Father Befouled and Encoffination.)
Everything you expect to find from a project that plays cavernous doom-tinged OSDM through a modern-day lens is undoubtedly present; however, the riffs and bombarding percussion strike with the same intensity as the Chicxulub impact crater. Waves of sonic blasts, tremolos, and doom transitions aim to blanket all in its Sol-blackening expansion. Life becomes overwhelmed and inevitably succumbs to the dust and ash. But it’s the time-enduring encapsulation of said life that gives rise to the monumental crushing experience that is Advent of Wounds. Even the slight blackened touches swirl around the compositions like an ammonite, both entrancing and forcing your attention to the apex like a winding journey into the Earth’s crust as you too become immortalized in stone.
Presenting itself across a brisk 35-minute runtime significantly assists in taking on the task that is this album. It is proof that a naturally occurring biological and geological phenomenon that normally requires millions of years can succinctly be forced into one’s brain matter in a slightly lesser time-frame. Though brief, the bleak ancient tar pits left behind as evidence of the extinction of previous life cycles of our little rock act as reminder that one day, our own civilization and species will likely follow suit on a long enough timeline. Fossilization have crafted the exact soundtrack to what this species-ending cataclysm would sound like.
4/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Advent of Wounds releases February 13 through Everlasting Spew Records.
