TIMEGHOUL are one of those true rarities, and the culmination of all dreams as a tape or CDR trader, especially in an era of overexposure for everything ”underground”: uncelebrated heroes of quality death metal.

One can feel the throbbing pulse of other genre stalwarts, particularly of INCANTATION and similar acts, but there clearly have been influences of all types in shaping TIMEGHOUL’s creation; so many, in fact, that upon casual listen this music can appear wholly thrown together. Indeed, the idea to song ratio is staggering, but the riffs coalesce well enough to force the songs to work in their relation to their overarching aesthetic.

Microcosmically, the vocals are conceptually definitive: mostly the traditional low-end work (and well-done in that regard), there are occasional breaks of drone-sung voice to accompany the dreamier intervals of slow guitar harmony. They match the rhythmic chaos, often brazen, with which the music has been written, where tempo and meter shifts collide wildly and continuously throughout each song. Although this effect is common in faster bands of SUFFOCATION-type lineage, they are used here well thanks to the otherworldly flavor of the entire presentation, and have a similar to feel to what was accomplished with the raging vortex of the earliest KATAKLYSM material. Even where the music is more obvious this trend continues, and excellently so: there are rhythmic ideas with basic death metal riffs that have been applied by anybody else, ever, within the context of this genre.

Again, upon casual listen, many of these riffs can appear to have no lineage amongst this chaos, but a more careful examination reveals this is not so. These songs continue often only with the simple anchoring of two-note melodies for contiguous passages. As alluded to, this is not always the truth, nor should it be, to let some sense of uncertainty prevail. Thus, although the songs periodically seem to move without direction, this sounds more to be a purposeful input and not the accident of inexperienced arrangers. The music moves strangely, sometimes abruptly, sometimes gently, but with a complex fluidity that is hard to characterize nonetheless. For many reasons, this band is similar to DARK MILLENNIUM in their fanciful musings, without the European heavy metal orientation of much of that bands work. What do remain for comparison are the doomier introspective moments, the unpredictability, and a wonderful beauty in all of it.

Remarkably, despite the obvious quality in construction and execution of these songs, not to mention the original vision with which they were conceived, this band faded into obscurity following a two song promo EP two years after this release, unsigned and generally (still) unknown. Whether they were the casualty of an unseeing or misunderstanding death metal scene is irrelevant, as is the fact that their influence was extremely minor at best: they have received representation here to help circumvent these past obstacles. This is death metal of a caliber that has not been experienced as a norm in many years since.