After five years of silence and meticulous work Dungeon Serpent returns with their second album Lamentations of the Shadowkingdoms. Having already constructed a standout style of death metal with World of Sorrows sharply focused upon fusing morbid and romantic strains of extreme metal from before metal's turn-of-the-century involution, Dungeon Serpent now boldly looks to a future of their own creation and stretches their limbs to new horizons, breathing new life into the ruined world presented in the first album. Thus this new album is a work of grand ambition and unbowed passion, not content to merely fine-tune and repeat what has already been done in a bygone age. Yet with this expansion, Lamentations of the Shadowkingdoms presents a work united as a great whole. Each of the six pieces are tonally distinct but thematically bound and flow into a monolithic singular entity. This vision is executed with greater clarity, enhanced skill, focus and the addition of new members to the horde, such as drummer Bhraonáin (Fake Dust). The music is now played with a speed and ferocity well beyond what was achieved on the first album, and the technique of the core instrumentation is more eclectic, drawing more freely from black metal, brutal death metal, and even as far as jazz and grind, as well as a sharper mix courtesy of Subterranean Watchtower Studios that allows elements such as agile basslines to be heard with much more clarity. The music cleanly flows between this ferocity and an almost cosmic sense of orchestral grandiosity, owing to the expanded instrumentation within the songs, chiefly mystical keyboards in the Hellenic tradition and violins provided by string player and contemporary composer Anju Singh (The Nausea), as well as many other adventurous atmospheric and textural flourishes. Lamentations of the Shadowkingdoms is a work that expresses both the untempered rawness and ferocity but also the latent musical potential within the truest essence of death metal in one breath, realized and entwined as extensions of one and the same principle.