Cauldron Black Ram Stalagmire

The crude horde that be the Cauldron Black Ram emerges yet once more from wat’ry tomb to besiege hapless poseurs and put to manacles weak would-be picaroons. Being the third of albums to sail under the banner of Cauldron Black Ram, the new recording is a commanding effort of sludgy, crossboned black death metal and slimy, rum-sodden doomed debauchery. The brigands from the far side of the world prove well versed in the execution of this unfair trade, delivering knavish punishment unto unprepared ears in the form of Stalagmire.

Bear witness to the sordid melody at the opening of the “Maw” and be ushered violently into cave where “luckless beggars only want for open sky.” Doomed seafarers spew forth “A Litany of Sailors Sins” wherein their anthemic call “What dire straights we are in” foreshadows the final echo of men given to lust for plunder. And that old reprobate from earlier days of the black ram, Black Douglass again here appears in “The Devil’s Trotters.”

A scurrilous tale indeed, Stalagmire puts Cauldron Black Ram in league with similar ugly contemporaries who pay heed to old, distasteful gods and outlaw tradition, yet forge a singular path of their own making. Be it black / death / doom / thrash, all goes into the strange brew mixed in the Cauldron Black Ram. Horrible, horrible end for ye who enter thus.