Every time San Jose’s Mortuous sneak a doom passage into their thunderous death metal assault, it feels like watching a closer known for his 100-mph heat suddenly throw a knuckleball. The band will be blasting away, full speed ahead, when a side door opens and a weepy My Dying Bride violin melody slinks out; or a suffocating vortex of sound will momentarily dissipate to let a plaintive, funereal riff slip through. It’s high-wire stuff, and Mortuous make it look easy.

Upon Desolation, the band’s second album, is thrillingly difficult to pin down. Incantation and Autopsy revolutionized death metal in its wild early days by cross-pollinating it with doom, but the former were mostly concerned with making it sound inhuman and evil, while the latter hitched it to a punkish groove. Mortuous are clear disciples of those bands when working in their death metal guise, but the way they incorporate doom elements into their sound has more in common with the elegance of the Peaceville Three, or early Katatonia. The combination of gracefulness, groove, and sheer heaviness that the band achieves on Upon Desolation is rare. It’s become their signature in a crowded death metal landscape, one they’re steadily rising to the top of. (Brad Sanders, Decibel Magazine.)