The debut album from this obscure Russian experimental doom band is a strange, disconnected dreamworld, where crushing death doom dissipates suddenly into haunting, minimalist guitar instrumentals and vast expanses of black electronic ambience. Like much of the stuff that I've been picking up lately from the Wroth Emitter, Stygian Crypt and Solitude labels, the sound here is unmistakeably rooted in super slow, bleak doom metal, but it's like there's something getting lost in the translation that turns Aglaomorpha's version of doom into something weirder. The atmosphere in Perception is grim and sorrowful, pure melancholy that seeps from the odd existential lyrics into the crushing riffs and plodding tempo of these twelve jams, and it sounds like the epic funeral trudge of bands like My Dying Bride, Shape OF Despair, and prog doomsters Mar De Grises had a hand in influencing Aglaomorpha's sound. But the song structures are out of whack, massive crushing doom dirges suddenly just disappear, leaving only pitch black ambience and rumbling cavernous drones. Orchestral keyboards drift over murky recordings of urban life, and a series of beautiful piano pieces appear with tracks like "Revelation (epilogue)". Blasts of blazing black metal guitars scream out of the void only to disappear in a blink, replaced by a fragile guitar melody. Droning guitars swarm and wobble, bent into vaguely distorted tones and fucked up angular riffs that recall the mutant textures of Blut Aus Nord's recent albums. The vocals seem to be delivered by two different singers, though since the album is almost totally devoid of band information I'm only guessing; harsh hellish screams constantly trade off against deep monstrous gutteral roars. Aglaomorpha's surreal blackened doom is definitely something that fans of experimental, adventurous doom and black metal will want to check out. The mix of crushing, vaguely industrial sounding death-doom, dark chamber rock, even darker droning ambience, and fractured black metal is deeply warped, somewhere in between Shape Of Despair, Amber Asylum, Blut Aus Nord, and Aural Hypnox style driftscapes.