Review by Rexorcist for Esoteric - Metamorphogenesis (1999)

If you had read my previous review of the 105-minute long Esoteric album, The Maniacal Vale, you're probably familiar with my one criticism of the album: the length made it repetitive.  So you'd probably think the five-star rating for Metamorphogenesis comes from the fact that it's only 40 minutes long, and is there shortest album, especially since repetition is a staple of funeral doom.  Um, no.  That honestly has so little to do with it that it's not even worth mentioning.  It's true that Esoteric have a tendency to draw out their albums to an extent that harms the release itself.  This has been true since their second album, The Pernicious Enigma, which was a one-trick pony in every single way.  But the real glory of Metamorphosis comes from the fact that it's so jam-packed with new ideas, twists and musical influences that some have even described the album as "batshit insane."  Considering what we typically get for doom metal, we need an album or two that gets batshit insane.  I'd have loved for the album to be longer, but we still got 40 minutes of brilliance.  It's no longer a repetitive shift from funeral doom to death doom to psychedelic doom.  What we have hear is an eternally progressing 40-minute work that throws in random moments of drone metal, post-metal, straight-up death metal and more.  And each piece of the puzzle delivers a loud blast of rage that's trying hard to fight its own melancholy but always succumbs like a normal human does.  The best combination of musicianship and production that doom can have is the very reason this album exists: a production-oriented 40-minute epic of atmosphere and emotion, giving us something that Esoteric have never replicated.