Review by Alex on May 18, 2019.

As slow as a sloth’s breath, legendary Encoffination return with their 4th corpse awaiting to be encased, titled, We Proclaim Your Death O' Lord. I had to revisit Encoffination’s old material just to reacquaint myself with the workings of the band; hearing the mammoth stomp of O’ Hell Shine in Thy Whited Sepulchres and the gloomy galore of III - Hear Me, O' Death (Sing Thou Wretched Choirs) among other works of spiritual contamination, I began to realize just how significant of a record this latest entry would be for the band. Those albums were good but always showed Encoffination’s potential to deliver something of higher effect with the progression of time. Has this latest recording done that? To an extent yes. 

The music on here is funeral/death/doom to the bone, the opening track "Ebony Skulls" makes it clear with mauling drums, cataclysmic-low guttural registers and a bass tone that will wreck your speakers. We Proclaim Your Death O' Lord is no joke, if you thought 2014’s effort was crushing get ready to be squished by the force of gravity in this of charnel-house of suffocation. The music sounds exactly how you would expect songs with such titles to sound. Greeted by carvings on the record such as “Ebony Skulls”, “Graveside Monoliths”, “The Keys of Hell and Death”, “Robe and Crown” and the 8-minute exequies of “Mysterium Fidei”, every moment absorbed calls for a repeated listen. This is funeral death doom with a serious emphasis on bass and atmosphere. Imagine Grave Upheaval but slower. Encoffination paint a dreary, spacious yet swallowing realm of that will keep you hooked to every chord. Like a slow descend through the crust of the earth while jockeying the hand of gravity, these 7 requiems pound at the door of your fears with no discretion. The distortion pedals cape the thunderous growls and catastrophic guitar power-chords like the mortcloth sheathing over a casket. Easily one of the heaviest records of the sub-genre to be released in 2019 thus far, if not the heaviest. 

Encoffination appears to have found the right balance of death and doom metal, I feel some slow eerie guitar solos could have been introduced to give We Proclaim Your Death O' Lord an amplified spectral province. The church bells fit and are used when necessary in so further stretching the jaws of the record towards an eerie foreboding sensation, but only to an extent, hence the record really needed some slow sinking solos to show contrast to the heavy bass and more-specifically, assist the tonnage of the atmosphere already developed. Plus, I would have liked if the organs played a greater role in the music apart from being featured on “Ebony Skulls”. Perhaps on the next record Encoffination will incorporate that aspect, but as for now I'm pleased with what has come since their last oblation. 

We Proclaim Your Death O' Lord is etched deep with a ritualistic zeal, thus, Encoffination has contrived a funerary obelisk of atavistic evocations and vestiges.

Rating: 8.8 out of 10