Livid – “Beneath This Shroud, The Earth Erodes” [Album Review]

Livid’s latest starts off slowly and quietly. “Descend” features simple guitar tones over the odd little bit of atmospheric bass. It’s a lovely sound, but it doesn’t represent what Beneath This Shroud, The Earth Erodes is all about. This is a cool progressive doom record that can be pretty heavy in places. Whilst “Descend” brings up memories of playing through the depressing worlds of The Last of Us, the rest of the record is something more of an onslaught of slow fuzzy riffs and dark vocals.

“Nothing” is slow to get going, but really should have been the album opener ahead of “Descend”. Weighing in at 7:25, there’s a fair amount of song to get through, but you’ll do so with ease. The slow, chugging riff and hard hitting drums are what doom does best. Cole Benson’s vocals are deep, powerful and dark – going along perfectly with the dark tones present throughout the record. Perhaps nothing quite as dark as in “Sins of God”. This is a track I’d label aggressively slow and punishing. It’s an excellent song, but definitely not one to put on if you’re feeling depressed.

Indeed, there’s nothing life affirming or particularly pleasant about the entirety of Beneath This Shroud, The Earth Erodes. Instead, it offers you five tracks of pure quality, dark, heavy doom. It never gets complicated, either. Livid know that what people want from doom is sludgy, chugging riffs galore and that’s what you are treated to here. There’s a bit of string bending and guitar solo stuff in “The Fire”, but rather than proving virtuosic, it is there to add atmosphere. This is a record all about the atmosphere, atmosphere that can make your skin crawl with its dark grooves – something “The Fire” achieves more so than any other track on the album.

“Into Nothing” picks up from where “Descend” left off. The album has come full circle. Instead of offering little but a bit of atmosphere, however, this 11:51 behemoth builds and builds into something truly great. You get an awesome use of the band’s dual guitars around the two-minute mark that really encloses you into the band’s groove-laden sound. It’s another fantastic track in this brilliant record. Beneath This Shroud, The Earth Erodes is a great doom record with four awesome tracks out of five. “Descend” is okay, but would have worked better as part of a song, not an entire one – as it pretty much is in “Into Nothing”.

Beneath This Shroud, The Earth Erodes Track Listing:

01. Descend
02. Nothing
03. Sins of God
04. The Fire
05. Into Nothing

Run Time: 44:24
Release Date: July 14, 2017

Check out the band’s song “The Fire”