India’s Dhwesha are a shrewd trio of blackened doom death metallers with a lot of talent and an inordinate sound that juggles gruesome, heavy, filthy death metal and maintains a sense of musicality putting forth full-blown hefty aggression even in the lightest, warmest riffs. Beastly and ungodly wrath seeps from the speakers like coagulated blood inside a horrendous bruise, that with the addition of Indian instruments basically describes the awesomely fearsome sounds of their first-full length, Sthoopa.
All eight of these crushing songs are composed in carefully structured designs, each made with an organic flora of mildly muddled and robustly raw tones. Launching off a sick introduction solo, the first song, “Sattva Bali,” instantly draws attention. “Hoy! Sala” is a hard-hitting rhythmic flow that’ll surely take you on a ride through its viscosity. “Yuddhabhumi” has quite a cool composition and hot style: introduced by a blow of a horn, centered on a body armored in opaque sounds, ending with a most excellent tribal-esque drum solo that is neither too long nor too short but strides to get feet uncontrollably stomping like a rampaging elephant.
The only thing that could possibly ruin this album for folks is having someone point out that the deep gutturals sound like vociferous burps. Nevertheless, the vocals match well with the overall low, dense and compressed sound of the album. All levels and pitches of bass are definitely dominate here.
The album art is simple but very detailed and artistic, plus the old-school black metal-ish logo of theirs looks great on it. Dhwesha seem to take all steps in putting together an album quite seriously and thoughtfully. If you want to hear a decent unconventional doom metal record, one couldn’t ask for much more than Sthoopa. It’s heavy, unique, has a fair length of approximately forty minutes and a suitable number of eight tracks. Sometimes the outros are a bit long but that somewhat adds to the album’s repeatable playability. It’s a grandly thunderous listen and a tuneful storm to be listened to over and over.