Ominous Crucifix-The Spell Of Damnation

Over the millions of old school DM worshippers, Mexico's Ominous Crucifix must be one of the most generic, straightforward ones. I've seen numerous bands garnishing their riffs with elaborate redundancy and addin striking features to empahasize the dynamicism, but really, this band wasn't really quite the spice I was looking for. ''The Spell Of Damnation'' can characterised with its solid riff structures, similar patterns, powerful backbone to enable the riffs strong and lasting and its terrible lack of linking different attributes together to improve originality or too add a bombastic touch to the album. The riffs are all hard-hitting, the atmopshere prevails for the most part and you can definetely get an old school Bolt Thrower/Benediction vibe, but that's really all that it offers.

There's a fair enough atmosphere prevalent on the album that obscures the music, the the encirclement of the this ambiguity is weak, as the riffs are perfectly comprehensible. The riffs are probably related to Bolt Thrower circa ''War Master'' especially, and they channel between mid-paced tremolo grooves and hefty yet fairly compelling death/thrash stomps. The reason this album didn't catch my interest (and probably many others' as well) is because there NO energy. No matter how good the riffs are, there is never something fresh to restore the energy and the patterns are so straightforward that the album travels like a long, numbing train ride, offering very little variation or contrast. Luckily the riffs we're talking about here are mostly decent ones, but then another poor quality of the album approaches and kills off almost all my enthusiasm. The vocals here, are even more shadowed then the riffs and ther style would fit more doomy death metal bands better than this one. They have no contast or energy to them just like the music itself, yet on top of such comprehensible, even simple death metal riffage, the vocals don't complement the music. ''Secular Omens Of Doom'' and ''Defiling The Altars of An Absent God'' offer some quality riffs with slightly faster tempos, but unfortunately that's the only refreshment Ominous Crucifix can provide on this album.

All the tracks in general follow similar patterns and structures but atleast the simplicity can provide some attention. There's really nothing technical, challenging or incomprehensible here, just a lack of good songwriting and perhaps some solid tracks and a nicely flowing array of powerful whirlwinds. I don't think any song here really outshines one another, but some are possibly more elaborately composed than the others. In conclusion, the rigid architecture of ''The Spell Of Damnation'' provides with some spunk and an irrelevent amount of excessebility that render it as one of the more common examples of OSDM.

Highlights:
Defiling The Altars Of An Absent God
Secular Omens Of Doom
Primitive Sin

Rating: 76%

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