Welcome to the Ice Age!!, loudly proclaims Vikram Bhat with a banshee shriek which rips your soul and threatens mutilate your mind for the next half an hour with one of the darkest albums ever to come out of this sub-continent. This is how B’lore based band Dying Embrace quickly get into overdrive {over your souls that is!!} with Grotesque Entity which sets the mood for all bleakness and desolation with their debut ‘Serenades of Depravity’. Dying Embrace, India’s most evil band till date has evolved from the previous cradle of evil, Misanthrope a death metal act in B’lore. Dying Embrace is India’s answer to the likes of Deicide, Cannibal Corpse and Obituary! Dying Embrace is fronted by Vikram Bhat lending his insane shrieks, Jimmy Palkhivala the guitarist who’s the reason behind all the morbidity on this album, Daniel M. David bashing the skins and Jai Kumar providing the doomy bass lines. In a country where not even a percent of the population listen to metal these foursome had the balls to come up with this Death Metal album, and did what they thought true to themselves and not selling out. Heavily influenced by the single most evil band of all time Black Sabbath, the entire album has very depressive and which were mainly conjured up Jimmy’s evil mind and the satanic rituals being carried out by Vikram, Daniel and Sarge in an attempt to spawn evil all over India. The album has some very good songs namely As Eternity Fades, Death Trap and Elegy for the Damned. And the speed at which Vikram growls away on Degeneration is simply gonna bowl you over. The album always has this dark and very doomy atmosphere to it as is evident by the album cover designed by Vikram Bhat himself. This infernal darkness is contributed majorly due to the unique and homegrown style of guitaring, which Jimmy uses. His wailing guitar constantly reminds you of complete destruction & desolation and that’s exactly how you’re gonna feel after giving these guys a sound listen. But, unfortunately the album suffers from a bad mix which is why one all the songs Vikram’s growls are constantly in the background. Daniel’s drumming and rolls make you feel as though your head were trapped in torque wrench squeezing your sanity out of it every few seconds. Dying Embrace’s logo is unperceived by normal eyesight and you’ve gotta be part of their music to see it. This doom/death album might take a helluva lot of time to be digested and appreciated partly attributed to the extremeness of their lyrics, but the good music will certainly get you. But, you like all things morbid, gruesome and macabre ‘Serenades of Depravity’ is definitely set after your heart. I would give the album a rating of 7 [due to the bad mix on it]. "Enter this morbid realm of intricate madness, haunting heaviness, sonic-depressive, mind mangling, mass-obliteration, .. DIE!!!" – taken from the album sleeve note. Check out Dying Embrace’s Official Website here