Band:	Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean
Album:	Obsession Destruction
Style:	Doom metal, Sludge metal
Release date:	May 2023

01. The Altar
02. Summer Comes To Multiply
03. Hole In My Head
04. The Gates Have Closed And They Will Never Open
05. The Chalice
06. Ten Thousand Years Of Unending Failure
07. Every Day A Weeping Curse
08. In The Feral Grace Of Night, May The Last Breath Never Come

Thou shalt turn Massachusetts into a swamp and evoke crushing sludge at the bottom of the ocean.

It's a bit hard to avoid obvious comparisons when your band name is literally taken from a Thou song, and when you participate in a tribute album to them. Acts like Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean do make it increasingly obvious how influence is not monopolized by pioneering acts but relatively new acts like Thou still shaped the development of sludge. I don't want to dismiss the achievements of Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean, but it is worth acknowledging that they have been walking on the shoulders of giants. And with a bunch of EPs and a pretty short debut back in 2017, they're making a bigger splash with an hour long, Lewandowski (RIP) cover art graced, crusher of a recalibrating LP.

Without dismissing the achievements of their previous releases, which were also not entirely Thou clones, Obsession Destruction sounds like a band viciously attempting to find their own sound. The main source of inspiration still remains, even if Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean's anonymous vocalist doesn't quite have Bryan Funck's broken shards vocals, so you'll find plenty of meat and potatoes modern sludge within the hour of runtime that Obsession Destruction has. There's a reason why that sound works so well and the band still relies on it so much. Slow crushing dirges and shrieks is a winning combination. But I'm more interested in the moments where it's clear that Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean wants to transcend it's main influence.

There's plenty of the sludge here whose atmospheric focus does get it closer to something like Neurosis with coarser vocals, especially on songs like "The Altar" or "Ten Thousand Years Of Unending Failure". There's a lot of long-form songwriting, so there are moments like the closing of "Every Day A Weeping Curse" that may feel like the sound drags on too much. However there's quite a lot in terms of pace and sound variety, at least by sludge standards, with the contrast between the short crusher "Hole In My Head" and the moodiness within "The Gates Have Closed And They Will Never Open" being an obvious example. None of this strays too far from the source, and over the course of one hour some excess does occur, but Obsession Destruction remains a pretty expansive album.

There's room for even more grandeur in Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean's sound, but Obsession Destruction proves that injecting grandeur into their sound might yield more unique results.