Temple Of Void are a new band from Detroit, Michigan, with e.g. Acid Witch’s Mike in the ranks. They recorded a demo that draw attention of Rain Without End Records, a sub-division of Naturmacht Productions, which offered them the opportunity to release their debut album on CD in an edition of 300 copies (FYI: the vinyl-edition and the cassette are available via Saw Her Ghost Records, and Temple Of Void independently release the digital version of this first full length). That debut, called Of Terror And The Supernatural, was recorded with Clyde Wilson at the Mount Doom Studio, with exception of the drums, and mix and mastering were done by Todd Konecny (Bright White Light Studio) and Tony Hamera respectively.
Of Terror And The Supernatural is a fifty five minutes journey through dark voids of the netherworlds. With this album, Temple Of Void bring extremely macabre, morbid, occult, archaic and obscure Old School Doom-Death Metal, flirting with the funeral Doom scene at the one hand and the Morbid Death scene at the other. The quality is high in most aspects: sound, song writing, performance. It isn’t that stupid, to put this talented band within the same regions as Asphyx, Ævangelist, Cathedral era Forest Of Equilibrium (or earlier stuff, evidently), Autopsy and the likes, mixed with elements from Incantation, Portal, Gutwrench, Hooded Menace, Acid Witch (in several aspects, not just Mike’s characteristic contribution or the few hypnotic additions – cf. a track like Invocation Of Demise), Evoken or Nar Mattaru. From time to time, and with some open-mindedness and / or fantasy, you might even disentangle impressive elements from mighty Bolt Thrower, very early My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost’s pre-Gothic-era. The stuff is enormously down-tuned, lugging, mammoth-heavy and off-speed, yet extremely intense and overwhelming in sound and execution. The average length is pretty long, but there is not one single composition (with exception of the acoustic intermezzo To Carry This Corpse Evermore; see next paragraph) that bores one single minute. And on top of it, despite the traditional basics, there is quite some variety at the one hand, and a very self-created execution / sound, courtesy of Temple Of Void only.
I do not think the short acoustic intermezzo To Carry This Corpse Evermore, which I just mentioned, has an additional value; and what’s more: the atmosphere is more or less the opposite of that what defines the core of this mostly oppressive album. But forget this remark, for Of Terror And The Supernatural is one of the best Doom-Death albums in quite a long time!
Oh yes, the CD-version comes in an edition of 300 copies only (I do not know about the tape)…