Esoteric
the maniacal vale

I do not understand why, very often, record labels decide to release their darkest and most hopeless works precisely during the time when everything becomes warmer and predominantly inclined towards cheerfulness: summer; so much so that it would be even heavier to listen to them if you are not already initiated into the most extreme and dark genres that our dear music offers (like me normally...eheh...).

In this case, we are talking about the genre, perhaps, the most apocalyptic, dark, sad, desolate, utterly hopeless that the world knows, along with the usual drone: funeral doom; Esoteric are on their fourth album, they are English, and have no desire to reassure or at least make the listener feel good, even a little: their sound is so damn saturated and exhausting that it darkens the idea in the blink of an eye that one is in the best (for most...) season of the year.

Slow, indeed very slow, mammoth in carrying and dragging on their shoulders enormous and destructive riffs like Etna, penetrating, psychedelic, at times ambient, catacomb-like, indeed funereal; all this might suggest a proposition quite boring and too heavy to digest; nothing could be more wrong: Esoteric are masters, and as good Englishmen, they stuff it all with bursts on the verge of Pink Floyd-like, while influencing it with certain American ambient-drone, then reassembling it into a bone-crushing boulder, with sudden accelerations that without warning revert to walking with a heavy and destructive pace.

2 CDs for more than 110 minutes of music ranging from Neurosis, to Skepticism, to Sunn0))), to Evoken, to early Cult of Luna (those of the Beyond), to Dolorian, with small accents of My Dying Bride, especially in the acoustic guitars; music for the blackest and sickest souls; a slow and sick descent into the hidden recesses of the human soul, a black representation of what happens in the mind of a man at the point of death, the very transition.

Here, doom takes truly new, interesting, and personal paths; there is no light in the world of Esoteric, only a cosmic suffocating and claustrophobic darkness.

If like me, you are a fan of doom and all the genres where the sun never rises, well, make this CD yours and you will experience the most surreal and psychologically extreme adventure of recent times; but if you are one of those metalheads who don't mind the sun and a tan, then in this case move on, this work could ruin your vacation (ha ha).

Superior!!