The enduring spirit (CD, fra Tomb Mold

After releasing three albums within three years and taking a subsequent four-year hiatus, Tomb Mold has been reborn on their fourth album, 'The Enduring Spirit', a thoroughly audacious step into new territories. However, amidst all the frenetic boldness and daring exploration, 'The Enduring Spirit' remains unmistakably Tomb Mold.

While the expanding Tomb Mold architecture was already evident on last year's self-released tape, 'Aperture of Body', particularly on the final track 'Prestige of Rebirth', it takes center stage on 'The Enduring Spirit'. The influence of Derrick Vella's creation and expansion of the doom genre with Dream Unending undoubtedly flows through Tomb Mold, not to mention Payson Power and Max Klebanoff's explorations in their own project, Daydream Plus.

The album opener, 'The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)', immediately showcases the band's angular, dimension-shifting riffing, as the track navigates through various stages of progressive death metal and some of the band's most extreme pieces to date. 'Will Of Whispers' begins with a jazzy fantasy sequence before delving into a dazzling white light fire, tasteful guitar leads, and back to a dreamlike serpentine pattern that spans entire universes in its nearly 7-minute runtime.

The second half of the album continues the journey into what is possible with the expansion of death metal norms, culminating in the over 11-minute closing track, 'The Enduring Spirit Of Calamity'. This otherworldly journey delves into a whirlpool where all things converge in space and time, creating the tree of life through a luminous celestial composition.