In my writeup for my favorites of 2023, I waxed poetically (as I am prone to do) about the challenges of wearing your influences on your sleeve a little too much. One potential offender, Fabricant, overcame this issue by adjusting for the time that had passed, imagining a Demilich that never stopped making music and took in new ideas without ever losing track of who they were. Fathomless Ritual is a Demilich worship band as well and similarly don’t feel like a total ripoff. Unlike Fabricant, Fathomless Ritual steer closer to the original band but still maintain a sound and attitude that is different. While their olden idols sported a twangy and at times modulated sound, Fathomless Ritual have a more common modern death metal sound. Grimy and from the sewers, murky and less decipherable, Fathomless Ritual would stick out less on a normal death metal billing, and only by listening intently can the audience notice the wonky syncopation and the surprisingly abstract time-signature fuckery. This is a strength, to a degree, and in a way it does enhance the groove that was always inherent to the Finnish style, Demilich in particular.
At the same time, the sound does nudge the band into a specific subset of Demilich riffage. Fathomless Ritual favor a certain speed and a certain groove, because going above or below it would mean that the chosen sound is no longer conductive to heaviness. Go too fast and too much rhythmic detail gets lost and go too slow and the syncopation becomes unnoticeable, removing a lot of the groove present in the sound. There is no individual section on Hymns for the Lesser Gods that does not work, nor is there a riff that fails to make my head nod in agreement. But as an album it all starts meshing together into a type of riff salad where I cannot remember as much of the album as I should after its over. Demilich had a lot of variety in subtle ways, and if a band cannot replicate those ways in a similarly subtle manner, maybe it would be more productive to develop the sound similarly to how Fabricant did it. Overall Hymns for the Lesser Gods is a decent album full of great riffs. But great riffs don’t always make great songs, and great songs don’t always make much more than a decent album.
