Metal
20 Buck Spin · 16 October 2026
“…And Therein Plant, Unto Their Souls Asunder” spends five and a half minutes clawing away with angular guitars and tremolo, and then lets a violin and a viola into the coda. Andrea Morgan plays them, and it is the only place on the record where bowed strings take the foreground. Everything else is Gabriele Gramaglia, credited with guitars, vocals, bass, synths and sound design, with Claudio Invidia on drums and a guest solo from Giorgio Trombino.
Gramaglia is from Milan and he does not stop. He runs Cosmic Putrefaction, Vertebra Atlantis and Turris Eburnea, and he spoke for the label I, Voidhanger while its founder was in hospital; Lugubrious Garment is the drawer he opened for death metal coarser and older than the rest of his work. The intention shows in the riffs, which run straight, and in passages that brush against first-wave black metal. What is harder to square is that the two things that stay with you are precisely the least coarse: that string coda, and the second half of “Profaned Fountain Of Leaden Waters”, which loosens, turns melodic and sounds exactly like Cosmic Putrefaction. The project meant to be the other one ends up shining where it resembles the first.
The record was written, recorded, mixed and mastered between autumn 2025 and spring 2026 at his own Crepuscular Sound Studio, and the mix leaves air between the instruments instead of flattening them: the bass registers as an instrument rather than as background vibration. Additional vocals are credited to Yr-nhhngr. The titles run long and nearly all of them bolt two ideas together with a comma (“Innocence As A Burden, Guilt As A Weapon”, “Transient Wounds, Spiritual Wilt”), and Mariya Popyk’s cover does the same: grey bodies fused into one another beneath a mountain range. Seven tracks, forty minutes, and the last one is called “Eden Fades Like Blurred Nightmares”.
Rating: 8.2/10
Text by Roger Estivill