Ectoplasma – White-Eyed Trance

Band: Ectoplasma
Title: White-Eyed Trance
Label: Memento Mori
Release Date: 31 October 2019
Country: Greece
Format reviewed: Digital Promo

If you follow Blessed Altar Zine from our start, you probably have read that ECTOPLASMA delivered one of the best death metal albums for 2018 – “Cavern of Foul Unbeings”. This was clearly stated in our review. Furthermore, the album was an integral part of my top 50 2018 AOTY list, as well as Eldritch of Death’s 2018 AOTY list.

So with such high prise, I was really stoked when we received the promo of ECTOPLASMA’s brand new album “White-eyed Trance”. This is the third full-length by the band so far, and let me put it out straight from the beginning – it is another superb old school death metal production!

Emotional: The record is simply great! Highly enjoyable for every death metal fan! It is brutal, heavy, morbid. With a total running time of almost 43 minutes, the guys from ECTOPLASMA are just keeping the true death metal alive, playing it according to all canons of the genre.

Rational (emotional in other words): This is a death metal album made how it should be – with a bow to all death metal gods from the glorious past, as well as contemporary and original AF. The nine tracks simply grab you by the throat since the very beginning and terminate you in the end – highly energetic, diverse, devastating, stinking of rotting corpses and soil.

Warning: the album contains heavy growling true death metal vocals, double bass drumming, great bass lines, awesome riffs and some awesome haunting hallucinatory solos to underline the nightmare experience.

My favorite track of the “White-eyed Trance” is definitely “White-Eyed Trance: Choronzonic Covenant”. I would advise you to pay also attention to the opener “Eviscerated in the Howling Winds”, “Ghostly Emanations in the Mortuary” and “Alucadra, The Daughter of Darkness”. The album ends with a huge cover of DEVASTATION’s “Souls of Sacrifice” song, from their classic 1991 “Idolatry” album.

The present review would go shorter as planned. Why? Well, ECTOPLASMA just did it again. In my opinion “White-eyed Trance” is among the best death metal albums released so far in 2019. It is a 360-degrees experience of true glorious death metal. You push play and leave it since the beginning and till its end, because it is a top-notch old school death metal done right! I urge you, go and bury yourself in ECTOPLASMA! 9/10 Count Vlad