With their seventh studio album, the instrumental doom metal of Bongripper is kept to its usual formula, though with fewer (titled) tracks than ever before.  Split into “Slow” and “Death”, the album rolls along on slow-hammer poundings from bass and drums, with the grimy-toned guitar laying a layer of sharper nastiness over the booming riffs.  Despite limiting themselves to just two tracks, the band seems lacking in inspiration and execution when compared to earlier works, with much less distinction between the different movements and a narrower range of instrumental interaction dynamics at play. 

A few bridges do offer brief changes of pace, but end up having little bearing on the overall direction of the song-writing.  What deviation there is from the base-line beats and bass plugging brings just too little to the table to off-set or justify the lengthy runs of dullness surrounding them, and in the end, it feels like something the band put out not from any particular enthusiasm for the material presented, but simply to keep themselves in the metalhead public eye.  Hopefully this is just a stop-gap on the way to something of greater effort and interest, but given their track record with attempts to provide anything that measures up to 2010′s Satan Worshiping Doom, it doesn’t seem that likely.