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Dread Witch - Tower of the Severed Serpent - Reviewed By thoseonceloyal! Thursday April 13 2023, 5:42 PM

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Dread Witch - Tower of the Severed Serpent - Reviewed By thoseonceloyal ! Check it out here at this link: https://thoseonceloyal.wordpress.com/2023/03/06/review-dread-witch-tower-of-the-severed-serpent/

Review by Sandre the Giant

Danish sludge doom band Dread Witch have arrived on the scene dragging their behemoth debut ‘Tower of the Severed Serpent’ along with them. It is out now through Bandcamp and is full of dark and atmospheric tunes.

Opener ‘The Tower’ crawls out with a howling wind and a sludgy, groaning riff that rumbles with a supreme menace. The vocal fury soon follows; a bilious roar that scythes through your senses as the atmospheric evil starts to build. Each monolithic chug starts cracks forming in the surroundings, and as the record continues everything starts to crumble around us. ‘Serpent God’ is almost death/doom in its weight, but always amintains a steady sludgy groove underneath the brutality. There’s even a discordant church bell tolling, a must in the Killchain’s book for a truly perfect doom record. ‘Leech’ is a masterpiece of atmospheric tension, a lurching cathartic explosion of sludge intensity appearing in waves between eerie quieter moments. When that synth leads you out of it, oh man…

The whole album roils and churns like a ship cast upon the deepest and darkest of oceans, thunderous storms battering against it. At any moment, the atmospheric deep reaches to claim its victim and the band struggle to stay above water. The truly astonishing level of heaviness here is something to behold. The oppressive groan of ‘Wormtongue’ is Triptykon-esque in so many ways, vocally and the emotional heft of the cold clean melodic lines. It is an absolute monster, and probably my favourite track. ‘Into the Crypt’ is a little bit more straightforward brutality before the bleak agony of closer ‘Severed’ rumbles to its inevitable conclusion.

Dread Witch are so damn heavy and this is only their debut?? It’ll be hard to find anything this accomplished, this confident, this mammoth on a debut record anywhere in 2023. ‘Tower of the Severed Serpent’ is an absolute must for anyone who enjoys the miasmic, knuckle dragging onset of tectonic devastation. Stunning stuff, and I’ve not been this confident in a band’s future in a long time. thoseonceloyal

Release Date: January 27th, 2023

FFO: Conan, Triptykon, Devin Townsend

Location: Aarhus, Denmark

Short Bio: DREAD WITCH is a doom metal band hailing from Aarhus, Denmark. Formed in 2022, DREAD WITCH consists of Andreas Cadaver (ex-Stone Cadaver) on guitar, Mikael Rise (Scamp) on vocals and guitar, Dennis Larsen (ex-Olm) on drums, Leifur Nielsen (The World State, ex-Horned Almighty) on bass and Pelle Santana on lead guitar. DREAD WITCH plays dark, atmospheric and heavy music with, as Deathrattle Podcast put it, "riffs of gravitational force and neutronium density".

Check them out on YouTube!