Eight years have elapsed since Porto’s sinister Death metallers The Ominous Circle announced their arrival with a murky, abstract and deranged manifestation on 2017’s debut album ‘Appalling Ascension’. The album was a display of densely packed achromatic aggression that brought with it a looming sense of something unknown that seemed both malicious and deliberately obscured. Album number two, which is entitled ‘Cloven Tongues of Fire’ (a brilliant album title if you ask me) serves to refresh the strengths of the band’s mature debut whilst delivering upon enhanced production qualities, and perhaps less of a black ink-toned musical hue on this particular outing.
After the volume swelling, sustained dirty guitar abstractions that alight the opening instrumental, the band malevolently drones their way into the tumult of ‘Lowest Immanations’. The song is saturated in a cloaking veil of both sustained and tremolo-picked doomy guitars whilst the deep, raspy vocals of Simón Lopez expand their way above the instrumentation like a cloud of noxious gas. The track evolves through its droned nature towards something more vital, and during its closing moments, energetic guitar solos and furious drums kick the intensity towards the figurative ceiling. The following track ‘Through Tunnels Ablaze’ resumes the high intensity with a much more prominent sense of haste. I love the short section of harsh noise that emerges around the two and a half minute mark. This is followed by a sombre lead guitar melody that beckons impending doom whilst the percussion restlessly gains in its intensity.
After another short instrumental track of dissonant transitional droning, the song ‘Black Flesh, Sulfur, and All Inbetween’ crawls through an abstract progression akin to Incantation worship. Guitar arpeggios with diminished accents complement the core scaffolding of the song. Although by this point in the tracklist the song does little to deliver upon fresh ideas, this questionable variety is moderately redeemed however by another great drum performance courtesy of stickman Marcelo Aires. Fortunately, the track that succeeds it; ‘Writhing, Upturning, Succumbing’ is a considerably more enticing and attention-worthy listening experience. I love the monstrous crescendo of the song structure with its deep, tremor-inducing guitar chugs and the vocal performance that reaches a level of audible psychopathy that is often utilised on particularly malicious Black Metal records. It’s a real highlight of the album. The record’s finale seems oddly middle-of-the-road relative to the prior tracks in terms of my enjoyment. Again, the percussion is consistently intriguing and the vocals feature some nice additional layering for some added depth. I appreciate the variety and transitional nature of the guitars in the song, but the riffs themselves are rather underwhelming and seem to be just a hair too similar to those found on previous songs. I feel that the track also fails to reach a fitting conclusion and instead seems to awkwardly die out in a gradual aimless loss of intensity.
When examined as a whole experience, the production on ‘Cloven Tongues of Fire’ allows the band more breathing room compared to their debut, but the album is rather unfortunately held back by a few moments where the group’s instrumental writing seems to be running on scarce creative fumes. That said, for the majority of its runtime, the album respectfully holds its own with displays of mature writing and even the occasional moment of dissonant Death/Doom finesse.
