Azell are a two piece, female-fronted doom/sludge metal band, featuring the gut-wrenching vocals of Courtney Napier. Their debut album, Death Control, sets tales of alien abduction, unfathomable powers and the torturous ending of human existence to a soundtrack of colliding worlds…
“Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything but death, I knew death was our only way out.”
- Harlan Ellison – I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream
From the forests and floodplains of Louisville, Kentucky, comes a sound of ancient, earthshaking power, of portentous doom and monolithic sludge. Death Control is the formidable debut album from Azell and from its depths a legion of giants marches forth, moving at the pace of planets. Each note is a sombre, back breaking burden laid reverently upon the shoulders of the listener and these songs cannot be rushed, these implacable titans cannot be induced to lift their pace. Days can pass between chords as these gargantuan sonic edifices mark their stately progress. There is an otherworldly might that radiates from songs like ‘Chemical Chains’, a dark groove that rumbles beneath the crust of the crawling damnation that is ‘Apocalypse Verdict’, a transportative, cavernous darkness that draws you in, like the irresistible breath of a slumbering god, pulsing from the vastness of ‘Echoes Of Eternity’…and then there is the desperate, claustrophobic terror of standout track and new single, ‘A.M.’, a jarring, discordant invoking of a tale of absolute nerve-shredding horror and never ending, hopeless captivity. This may be the first full length album to emerge under the Azell banner by creative duo Courtney and David Napier, but these songs feel ancient, as if they were formed by the collision of tectonic plates when the earth was young. Hypnotic in their sheer heaviness, Azell are destined to crush everything that stands in the way of their inevitable, intractable progress.
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