Album Review: Cavern Deep – Part II – Breach (Bonebag Records)

Cavern Deep is a slow, heavy band, founded 2019, by members from Zonaria and Swedish retro riffsters Gudars Skymning. The band released its first self-titled concept album through Interstellar Smoke Records in 2021 and they’re back now with the follow-up, which was released on July 14th, 2023.

The second album is called ‘Part II – Breach’ and is a continuation on the concept of the first album. The story of one archaeologist and many men who ventured into the deep, discovering a previously unknown civilization.

Blending gloomy doom and bleak death-infused heaviness, but giving it a sci-fi twist thanks to the concept. Cavern Deep drag us back underground to find that the horrors of the first album have been enhanced with this sequel.

A refined effort that portrays the concept in a more unique way, Part II – Breach is an extremely immersive listen. From the moment we experience the eerie tones and experimental heavier intensity of opener Breach, it’s clear this album is going to challenge. Yet, it’s a challenge most will relish because Cavern Deep have such a fascinating sound and deliver a concept that pours from every note played and word sung.

Liable to make your skin crawl, Primordial Basin fills the mind with other-worldly disgust as Cavern Deep steal into the mind with melodious touches, dangerous doom expulsions, and haunting guest vocals provided by Susie McMullan of Brume. Then it’s all about a sense of death and destruction. Long past, but having left its scar upon the world. It is the evocative heaviness of A World Bereaved.

Johannes Behndig of Sarcophagus Now guests on the similarly toned, but more robust, Skeletal Wastes. Except here, Cavern Deep are fully exposing the price of such death and destruction. The sci-fi sense is heightened and it’s very easy to picture the monolithic horrors that the song aims to portray.

Sea Of Rust is the sound of hope fading, the sound of a poisoned world, and the sound of never-ending darkness. Cavern Deep making such an experience serene in places, but really hitting their stride when they bring the weight of such feeling down on to the mind. Before Susie McMullan returns to help show that the horror doesn’t end here, that it is just beginning.

A brilliant example of experimentation and conceptual creativity, Cavern Deep are telling a story like no-one else and most will be thoroughly hooked.

Cavern Deep – Part II – Breach Track Listing:

1. Breach
2. Primordial Basin (feat. Susie McMullan)
3. A World Bereaved
4. Skeletal Wastes (feat. Johannes Behndig)
5. Sea of Rust
6. The Pulse (feat. Susie McMullan)

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