Cronos Compulsion - Lawgiver

Angry Metal Guy

We here at AMG spend a fair amount of time pontificating on album length. Why some 72-minute, Silmarillion-based black metal contains no bloat whatsoever, but a 40-minute thrash album can suffer from fatty-track disease is proprietary information, which we don’t share with readers. I mention this because I was surprised to discover that Denver-based Cronos Compulsion’s¹ debut album Lawgiver—dubbed by the label as ‘a genre-defying blend of death-doom, chaotic metal, and noise-laced breakdowns’—clocks in at a scant 24 minutes. Now, I’ve never been one to associate death-doom with brevity, so I was anxious to dive into my analysis of Lawgiver, wondering how Cronos Compulsion would incorporate their intriguingly dichotomous array of genre tags into such a tight package.

Cronos Compulsion play death metal, and at times, they play it at a doom’s pace. Far from doom, however, is the album opener, “Obligate Condition,” which crashes through your speakers like Kool-Aid Man through a wall in a massive wave of sound full of turgid, sludgy riffs, blast beats, and guttural vocals. Cavernous, cave-man-ic, and knuckle-dragging, Cronos Compulsion use tons of brute force to deliver their rant against late-stage capitalism and the basest instincts of humanity. There are tons of Incantationanigans² at play on Lawgiver; Wil Wilson’s vocals, in particular, so closely mirror those of John McEntee that I had to reference the promo blurb to confirm John wasn’t filling a guest spot. Wilson’s and Raye Mokarry’s guitar attack causes suffering through brutality with solo-less, chest-caving chuggery (“Mortal Dissolution,” “Gyre of Decaying Filth”) and discordant dissonance (“Neolithic Meditations,” “Lawgiver”). Zach Johnson’s blasts, cymbal crashes, and fills keep things drumming along, while Addison Herron-Wheeler’s bass grounds Cronus Compulsion’s sound with spinal heaviness. Cronus Compulsion are good at what they do—Lawgiver is proof of that—I’m just not sure they do enough of it.

Lawgiver by Cronos Compulsion

As effective as a sledgehammer, Lawgiver is crushing in its simplicity. With no bells, whistles, or frills, Cronos Compulsion chops away at its opponents one slug at a time. Reworked from their 2021 Cursed and Decaying EP, “Neolithic Meditations” is Lawgiver’s most developed track and, at four minutes, its longest, furiously swirling with discordant riffs, cool lead runs that sadly get swallowed up by the production at times, and some trademark Incantation harmonic pinching. I also enjoyed “Sun Devouring Wound,” with its light, inquisitive guitar introduction that immediately evoked a mystery movie scene, where the lead detective, with one eyebrow cocked and finger on chin, contemplates the significance of a new clue. This respite occurs in the space of thirty seconds before the track evolves into a devastatingly doomy plod-fest, with Wilson’s growls sounding particularly decimating.

Like an Oreo cookie, it’s Lawgiver’s middle that offers the most flavor for my tastes and marks one of Cronos Compulsion’s flaws. While most often, albums are critically weighted to either the front or back, Lawgiver carries the weight in its beer belly. From the first swig of “Obligate Condition,” which only clocks one minute, sixteen seconds, through “Ancestral Remains,” the first four tracks are fine but feel half-finished, like decent sections removed from longer compositions and presented here as standalone songs. While the front suffers from unrealized ideas, the back contains Lawgiver’s biggest misstep. Album closer “Incursion of Deific Chaos” is a mix of unsettlingly, and not in a good way, restless riffs, drunken, out-of-tune guitar leads, and the end-‘o-song kicker: a full minute of noisy, squeaky, bleepy feedback screeches that are horribly annoying and end so abruptly it had me looking to see if I’d lost my speaker connection.

Cronos Compulsion play decent doomy death metal. I didn’t find anything particularly chaotic about their music; it’s pretty straightforwardly brutal, and they should immediately dissociate themselves from any ‘noise’ category. For example, the last minute of Lawgiver perfectly meets the Metallica definition of “The Thing That Should Not Be.” With some added focus on composition, giving room for ideas to expand and develop—a well-placed guitar solo here and there would be nice—Cronos Compulsion could be pretty lethal. There are plenty of bones on this skeleton to which meatier, more defined muscles could be attached, and I’ll be watching Cronos Compulsion to see what they do after exiting the gym.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320kbps mp3
Label: Avantgarde Music (Unorthodox Emanations) | Bandcamp
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: July 11th, 2025

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