Upon hearing Decrepit Flesh Relic, the first album from Civerous, one was left with a feeling of intense suffocating weight and agonal prostration in the service of bone-breaking death hymns. With the towering new album, Maze Envy, LA’s most creatively destructive death / doom ensemble let loose a freshly evolved but no less brutal conflagration of immersive horror and morbid lamentation.

Where death / doom may often stay in safe and unadventerous realms of narrow focus, Maze Envy presents a more far-reaching breadth of ambition, where unusual technicality, progressive atmospheres, string flourishes and chaotic mysticism radiate a purple light of the soul’s ascension from the black oceans of dread Civerous inhabit. Chain-dragging dirge, blackened blasting, and the savage ferocity of Lord Foul’s hellish vocal exorcisms exalt Maze Envy with a hellish grandeur within its myriad paths to oblivion.

With a massively crushing sound, Maze Envy is end times music for an age in which that reckoning feels unfathomably close. Civerous batter the senses into a state of labyrinthian turmoil from which emergence is ever more implausible.