Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Esoteric - Epistemological Despondency (1994)

Esoteric as a word is defined as being 'intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with specialised knowledge or interest' which is absolutely applicable to this monstrosity of a record.  I do not think that I am an expert in funeral doom by any stretch of the imagination but the content I found on the six tracks present on this debut release is anything but confined to just one sub-genre of music.  There is no doubt (even without reading the liner notes that Ben refers to in his review) that this was a record for an exclusive club and that you would not necessarily know whether you were in that club or not until you started listening to the record.

I like my music as extreme as the next cave-dwelling Metal Academy scribe but there are moments on Epistemological Despondency were even I begin to struggle.  It may be the less than successful deployment of the death metal elements or the horrific noise intrusions and oddly muffled (maybe too down tuned) instruments - or in fact all of the above - but something is definitely off for me here.  There are not a lot of moving parts I sense, yet they some how bash into one another far too much like an extra-large dodgem set up at a fair with only 6 cars on it.  Logically they have a bigger area to move around in yet somehow they still continue to bump into one another.

It could be that I have come to this record too late and that the boundaries of acceptable extremity in my music have been stretched enough already at my age for me to be able to judge this record appropriately without the context of what it was trying to do in 1994.  Whether I am 18 or 47 though I do not think that Epistemological Despondency is for me.  There is too much to get through, being delivered by sparse component parts for me to want to get behind the cluttered arrangements and oppressive presentation to be bothered to understand what it actually wants to say about justified belief or opinion (if we take the album title by its intended definition of course).