***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! “You’ve got to give Chris Bruni and Profound Lore Records some credit—Krallice? Cobalt? Hammers of Misfortune? Portal? Alcest? Amesouers? Tell me that isn’t an elite label based on those releases alone. Well, after raising some eyebrows with the debut EP from this Irish black metal act, Profound Lore has raised the bar again with the debut full length album from ALTAR OF PLAGUES, and those sporting a hemp clad boner for Wolves in the Throne Rooms’s latest (and deserving) opus, had better pay attention. White Tomb is 2 parts (split into 4 actual songs), and 50 minutes of organic, ambient black metal played with a taught looseness with hints of shoegazer introspection. Where Wolves in the Throne Room imbue nature’s misty, craggy beauty and damp forests, Altar of Plagues, while still delivering an evocative grandeur and epic, haunting beauty, seems to be more grounded; Not industrial but rusty and brittle—like a barren, human-less landscape in the future after an epidemic infection has wiped out the human race, leaving concrete jungles rotting and deteriorating with foliage. White Tomb is mother-nature reclaiming her territory.” German import.