With its second album (or third, if you consider 2011’s Interminable Night an LP), the San Francisco quartet Acephalix expands its crustcore punk sound into the nether regions of death metal, and it sounds like a natural evolution. “Bastard Self” opens with a few vestiges of the band’s preceding crust trappings. But before the verse becomes a chorus, the heavy-handed guitar riffs morph from crust to sludge, making plenty of room for guttural vocal bellows that have more in common with Entombed. Speaking of Entombed, the title track, “Deathless Master,” has garnered a few positive comparisons to that band’s Wolverine Blues album—most notably in the song’s bridge. But it’s really the musicianship here that separates Deathless Master from the earlier Aporia, which almost sounds like a completely different band. The drumming in “Tomb of Our Fathers” is especially tighter than before. It's complemented with a bass that sounds locked-in, rather than trying to keep up. The guitars pay tribute to the forefathers of doom metal, with hints of Tony Iommi in the lumbering “Raw Life.”