Review by Sonny for Esoteric - The Maniacal Vale (2008)

This album, in common with many funeral doom releases, is not for the faint-hearted. It's extreme length (101 minutes) and heavily introverted lyrics make it an inaccessible listen for many. But for the patient, who have maybe cut their teeth on more accessible extreme metal, this is a supremely rewarding listen and one of the premier doom albums of all time.
Whilst the lyrics are indeed introspective, focussing as they do on pain, loss and death, the music, despite being pulverizingly slow and heavy, also has a spacy expansiveness that acts as a counterpoint to the morbidity of the words and the desperation of the growling, howling vocals, evoking the majesty of the universe and outer realms, as if offering the listener an alternative to such morbid introspection.
Despite the length of the album and the reputation of funeral doom for being monolithic, this actually has quite a bit of variation, from earthy plodding to soaring majesty, and stupefying bleakness to visceral savagery. There's even some full-on uptempo death metal during the (relatively) short closer to disc one, Caucus of Mind.
The whole is an extreme metal band on top form, both songwriting and performance-wise, supremely confident in what they are doing and not willing to compromise in any way. It may be a fanciful thought, but after listening to such supremely satisfying extreme music as this, seemingly tapped in to the unspoken truths of life and the universe, it sometimes feels impossible to go back to (relatively) meaningless and unchallenging mainstream metal. This really is one of those albums that may genuinely change how you feel about the music you listen to.