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Kade Storm is a man whose tale is as old as time itself. He's been running a one-man project for nearly two decades and only got around to recording material about ten years after forming it, waiting a good seven years before releasing his sophomore album, Ascension. He works in a style of Black/Doom that leans much more on the Doom with a down-tuned guitar sound and big riff sensibility, which gives a solid base for his distorted gargles and sharp melodic work to invoke an atmosphere of anxious dread. He does a fine job with all of this, in no small part because he has a great ear for crushing riffs, but he also has a bad tendency to stretch the compositions out longer than needed, particularly on the last few minutes of the album closer "The Exiled Heretic," which leads to some noticeable dead spots to slog through before getting back to the good part. Despite needing to tighten his songwriting a bit and maybe cut his runtime down a good 10 minutes or so, I think Kade has made a solid stab at a genre that's not as easy to get right as it sounds with this release, and that by itself makes this worth tracking down.