Posted on: March 27th, 2010 Eibon’s self-titled MCD reviewed at Crucial Blast Records
Check this the review of the Eibon’s self-titled MCD from Crucial Blast Records:
Here’s release number deux from the Parisian doom band Eibon, which we’ve had floating around here in the Crucial Blast shop for a while but never got around to actually putting together a review for it. I pulled this disc out recently and remembered how bitching this short but pulverizing collection of songs is, so here we go…this is the first full release from the band, following a split that they did back in 2007 with Hangman’s Chair (also from France, and also stupidly crushing – you doomsters need to check them out too!), and here unleash their black tar heaviness across two epic songs, each one spreading out for more than ten minutes, each a pummeling, bass-heavy wall of lumbering doom with moments of creepy atmosphere. the band has a couple of former members of the band Horrors Of The Black Museum, yet another French doom band who I’m a huge fan of, and while Eibon doesn’t incorporate the crazy Goblin-esque progginess and horror movie soundtrack elements that made Horrors Of The Black Museum so unique, there are some subtler atmospheric sounds that seep into these songs.
At their heaviest, this is pure molten death-infected doom, with massive detuned guitars grinding across lumbering ultra heavy drumming, the vocalist spewing horrific snarling screams, some Eyehategod, old school doomdeath, and classic European doom metal all worked into their sound, with streaks of hellish feedback and droning low-end buzz crawling over the chugging dirge, never getting too slow, instead lumbering forward in a massive pounding groove, sometimes slipping into eerie acoustic passages, or drifting into fields of backwards tape noise, sampled opera vocals, bleak psychedelic guitar or atmospheric ambience, but always returning to that incredibly crushing dirge.
The second track “Staring At The Abyss” is a bit more varied, opening up unexpectedly with the desolate strummed melody of an acoustic guitar, but that is quickly devoured by a black wave of distorted doom, a crushing metallic version of the same acoustic riff that started the song off, only now it’s insanely heavy and blown-out and crawling. Some triumphant guitar melodies begin to emerge, along with bits of dissonant detuned guitar and those scathing vocals, and after a couple of minutes the song quiets into a weird shuffling psych dirge, clean meandering psychedelic guitar and spacey Hawkwind-ish electronic effects emerge for a few minutes before the band crashes back into that crushing central riff, delving even deeper into the slow trudging heaviness before the song begins to gradually dissolve in a fog of minimal drone.
AS always, Aesthetic Death delivers the goods with another massive dose of DOOM. Packaged in a four panel digipack.