Floridian one-man band Worm
debuted with the cassettes The Deep Dark Earth Underlies All ? (2014) and Nights In Hell (2016).
They became a duo on
Evocation of the Black Marsh (2017), a better implementation of their distorted death-metal, with powerful blitzkriegs
like Evil in the Mire
and Evocation of the Black Marsh.
Gloomlord (2020), however, recorded by a trio, marked a stylistic shift towards funeral doom-metal.
Rotting Spheres of Sentient Black starts lethargic but
has surges of black energy, with cavernous and thundering growls riding the oscillating dynamics.
The werewolf growl duets with a satanic shriek in Apparitions of Gloom while the guitars intone gothic melodies.
The heaviest moments come in Abysmal Dimensions which
nonetheless has also the most romantic break, followed by a feverish section, as if they wanted to atone for that weakness, before the atmospheric finale.
The project became a quartet on Foreverglade (2021): the original duo plus a guitarist and a drummer. The mix of
death-metal and doom-metal is more elegant here.
The eleven-minute Cloaked in Nightwinds is emblematic of how romantic guitar solos and stately keyboard counterpoint lead the growling and shrieking vocals into more evocative spaces: the gothic spirit is actually enhanced.
If Empire of the Necromancers is sophisticated for the sake of being sophisticated,
the ten-minute closer, Centuries of Ooze,
uses all the arsenal of death and doom
to sculpt a melancholic descent into hell (it actually ends with what sounds like monks chanting a requiem for the dead).
The album has abandoned the brutal edge death-metal for a lyrical form of atmospheric metal that sometimes borders on pop-metal
and matches the dynamics of prog-metal.
The centerpiece of the four-song EP Bluenothing (2022),
the eleven-minute Bluenothing, feels like a continuation of Centuries of Ooze, another concentrate of desperate melancholy, again with romantic guitar melodies and monk-like chanting.
