Evil Dungeon Crawler – The Unending Vomiting of Northern Blasphemies – Review by Robert Mallett

Can you imagine the terror of a dungeon existence?

In the cold, bleak landscape of Northumberland in the far north of England, Roman dungeons were the occupying army’s underworld. These were horrific environments, brutal in the extreme, functioning as places of detention and humiliation that instilled a profound dread in the inmate as they awaited their fate. Roman public punishments were not child’s play and the Empire’s execution techniques have been well documented for their barbarity and outright cruelty.

Pons Aelius, today known as Newcastle upon Tyne, was part of the militarised frontier world that characterised Hadrian’s Wall. Here, local sandstone was pressed into the fortresses, roads and garrison outposts that created a system of control. The Roman fortress did not exist merely to defend Roman-controlled territory from the northern tribes. On the contrary, it menacingly evoked the dominating presence of the Roman shadow. Hidden from public view, deep underground, the dungeon was the obvious, and ultimate dark underside of Roman occupation. The dungeon was the icy chamber below the fort, the dark hell that lay beneath the ordered geometrical symbolism of Roman power.

Heralding from Newcastle upon Tyne, Evil Dungeon Crawler started life in 2023. The brainchild of its founding member Envus, a man with a passion for Shadow World Money Gang memes, the name first surfaced as an online alias that enabled him to exchange ideas on sci-fi and dark fantasy artwork. In due course, this evolved into a Black Metal entity, with the persona of Envus evolving into a metaphysical avatar of despair, imprisoned not by the long departed Roman legionaries but by the crippling chains of totalitarian Christianity and a modern world filled with the mentally ill, the addicted, the gullible and the psychotic.

Evil Dungeon Crawlers’ mysterious releases exude the claustrophobic horror of incarceration in the cold, isolated and bleak world of Northumberland. Lonesome Demos, a compilation of demo recordings performed by Envus, is a truly desolate sonic experience that takes one deep into the concept of dungeons, both literal and psychological. This is no place for the casual listener. The profound sense of isolation, hatred, and the will to vomit black putrid filth on the modern world and its manifest failures is the driving force here. This is Black Metal undercut with a uniquely raw sense of decay, nighttime river mists, grey skies and urban solitude.

But new ep The Unending Vomiting of Northern Blasphemies, featuring additional band members Morgulbane (drums), Kilgore (guitars), and Archaon (bass), takes the dungeon terror and despair to a new, dynamic sonic high. And this, let me tell you, is yet another vitally important release in the annals of UK Black Metal.

‘Aggressive’ doesn’t do it justice. ‘Hateful’ is mere hyperbole compared to what is being projected here. ‘Blasphemy’, the supreme expression of disgust for ‘god’, against any idea of holiness or redemption, is jammed down your neck, again and again, with five tracks that take fire and brimstone to a darker, more malign place. A place where priests and clergy, money barons, politicians and all such degenerate figures of the modern world are locked up in perpetuity and forced to endure the terrors of the metaphorical dungeon with these five sonic bludgeons cranked at maximum volume. Forever.

The Unending Vomiting of Northern Blasphemies is a brilliant invocation of UK Black Metal darkness, taken to a new level of extremity, and yet another example of how our friends over at Wulfhere Productions are carving out this country’s rightful place as the world Black Metal capital. The blasphemy here is not mere religious heresy, but a rejection of human mores and non-existent values, howled from deep within the dungeon deep in the mind.

Evil Dungeon Crawler is possessed by a crawling spirit in a collapsing mind, vomiting Northern blasphemies into the dark until nothing human remains.