Artist: Jehovah Lashing
Country: USA
Label: Profaner Records
Formats: Cassette Tape
Year: 2025
With only an 18 minute playing time Jehovah Lashing’s debut album was the longest of the band’s two albums, hardly worth calling a “full-length”. In that regard, this new album, ‘Eternal Pyre Beneath The Wings Of Night’, is a record-breaker at a whopping 23 minutes. As a staunch advocate of short releases in general, I had no complaints, and musically, the band certainly had something to offer fans of the more raw side of Extreme Metal.
Especially the aforementioned self-titled debut was a great aural beating that blended Black Metal, Death Metal and Grindcore in almost equal measures. The second, ‘Pulped Deity’, that offered 21 tracks in 16 minutes, was still largely the same, but it started to show a bit of melody as well. That trend is continued on this third album. While you might initially think, after the first track, that the band is deliberately trying to throw you off guard with a fairly melodic opening song, that notion fades as it becomes clear that the entire album seems to be built around that more melodic concept.
As a whole the album is not as dark, aggressive or raw as the first two recordings, but those elements are not entirely thrown overboard. In fact ‘Eternal Pyre Beneath The Wings Of Night’ actually feels like a jumble of all sorts of things. This is something that could work well on its own and lead to an interesting result, but unfortunately that’s not the case here. At times the band sounds as fierce as ever, then it slows down again and brings to mind ’90s Doom/Death Metal with plenty of semi-catchy melodies. The deep grunts are still present, though they don’t always come through clearly due to the erratic musical backdrop. As a result, the outcome is somewhat uneven, and while there are certainly a few nice tracks and ideas on this latest release, which, for the record, was originally released digitally back in 2025 but only recently got a physical release, it just isn’t enough to truly win me over. I’m certainly not averse to melody and even have a soft spot for that idiosyncratic ’90s doomy metal, but this just doesn’t quite cut it. I rather stick with the debut album, even if that runs only for 18 minutes. Props for the great artwork though!
