Now that that is over, the first thing I have to say about the music on this album is that the cover art absolutely fits. This is the sound of nightmares. Take the echoes-from-The-Void weirdness of Ulcerate, the hellish roar of Behemoth, and the low-end-heavy riffs of Incantation and that is a general idea of what Dysphotic sounds like. And yet, it is even creepier and heavier than all of that. The album starts out at high intensity, sounding like the wails at the gates of Hell, and it never lets up from there.
The highlight of the album is the amazing drumming of Ben Durfee. The drums are constantly in motion, thundering along with barbarous rhythms whether during rumbling riffs or dissonant noise. And the drumming grabs onto the listener's attention with its punishing brutality and absolutely refuses to relent.
Dysphotic is at their best when they are playing lumbering, monolithic riffs at ponderous speed. It is at those times that their heaviness comes through most. The songs are mostly split between those slow-paced songs and breakneck-paced songs. The faster-paced tracks tend to sound more like old-school death metal bands like Morbid Angel, which is fine, but they tend not to stand out quite as much.
I was damn impressed by this debut full-length by the New Mexico-based black/death metal band. It is one of the heaviest and creepiest albums I have heard in some time. Not many albums can attain the blasphemous spirit of Incantation's Onward to Golgotha, but Dysphotic comes damn close.
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