REEKMIND – Glints From The Crematorium

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7.0

• Bands:
  REEKMIND
• Duration: 00:25:24
• Available from: 07/24/2026
• Label:

• Night Terrors Records

Just over a year after their debut album “Mired In The Reek Of Grief”, the Australians Reekmind already seem to have found a way to refine their formulas, arriving at a better defined, more detailed sound, effective in communicating their murky feelings. The album released in March 2025 moved discreetly in the undergrowth of the most trivial, slimy and spiteful death-doom, willingly indulging even the turbidities of the most anxiety-inducing sludge.
He did it, however, remaining a bit blocked both on a rhythmic level and on that of the ideas introduced into the riffing and in the conception of the structures of the individual tracks. The result was an undoubtedly pleasant publication for fans of the sector, on the contrary quite immature and basic for those who wanted something more elaborate, tasty and full of nuances.

With this EP “Glints From The Crematorium” it is evident the correction of some defects manifested in the debut and a better focus of one's energies, to now arrive at a decidedly more interesting overall result.
Of the three tracks offered (the last, “Rehearsal in A Body Of Death”, present only in the physical formats of the EP) is the first one to catalyze our attention: a river-composition, over thirteen minutes long, in which one's idea of ​​pain and death in music is broken down into a thousand streams coherent with each other. The death-doom takes a turn that is now deadly punitive, now more subtle and abstract, enhancing a narrative and bard-like vein of putrescence already surfaced in “Mired In The Reek Of Grief” and now rendered with a much different authority.
What is striking about “Flesh Draped On A Pitiful Frame” is not so much the inventiveness, but rather the ability to create a certain atmosphere and then make it sway and transmute into something slightly different within it, alternating heavy and rigorous midtempos and abstract and ambiguous moments. The lesson of Incantation and its best followers, such as the Krypts, reworked without major deviations but with a healthy taste for the overwhelming note full of lugubrious pathos.

“Cyst Megalith” changes the score slightly, settling on coordinates closer to the debut, while offering a series of truly suffocating and malignant passages, underlining in this case a rather minimal pace.
In the slower plots, the sound framework is often supported by an obsessive riffing, if not by the reverberation of the guitars over a rather sparse rhythmic set, while the accelerations, when present, refer to an even more primitive and desolate imagery, from the dawn of death metal.
A song perhaps less rich in ideas than “Flesh Draped On A Pitiful Frame”, but filthy and hopeless as expected from an old-fashioned death metal band.
“Rehearsal in a Body Of Death” is also good, if possible even more basic, corrupt and poisonous, where sparse, disjointed accelerations connect ruminative guitar phases of a few, cursed, notes, on rhythms that seem to fade into the most total immobility.

We could define Reekmind as a 'regressive' group, which not only looks at the tradition of death metal, but even tries to strip it of that minimum of embellishments and evolutions that even the most gloomy fringes of the sector have assimilated over time: not here, the advance of progress is rejected, they try to impose a message, an idea of ​​rotting that does not fear the assault of impurities.
And although we believe that the atmospheric nuances, albeit in a bloody context, exhibited in “Flesh Draped On A Pitiful Frame” significantly raise the artistic level of the band, everything that is around it, so corrupt and scabrous, is what fully embodies the soul of Reekmind.
There is room for further improvements, of course, to offer brighter colors and give a more marked personality to what is played, trying to liven up the rhythms at the same time; their being so basic and primitive is a characteristic fact of the band, God forbid, yet a few more imaginative touches wouldn't go amiss in infusing the whole with greater impact. Having said that, we are faced with a substantial EP, a harbinger of good omens for the second full-length in progress.