The long awaited return of one of my favorite woodland doom folk duos, the Elemental Chrysalis, which features Chet Scott of Ruhr Hunter, Glass Throat Recordings and shamanic sludgemetal project Blood Of The Black Owl, and James Woodhead from At The Head Of The Woods. Their previous album The Calocybe Collection from 2005 was one of my favorite albums from Chet's Glass Throat imprint, a dark mystical descent into a shadowy forest world filled with droning acoustic guitars and deep baritone voices that floated over moss-covered stones and through huge ancient trees that blotted out the sun. It's been three years since that album first graced my ears, but their followup The Dark Path To Spiritual Expansion is even more dark and beautiful and doomy, a massive two-disc double album with long epic songs, sometimes stretching out twenty minutes or longer. Each disc containing four songs, the whole set packaged in a gorgeous six-panel oversized gatefold sleeve, a breathtaking package illustrated with amazing artwork of an ancient tree with a wooden door surrounded by smaller trees, knotted and covered in mushrooms, their limbs weaved together to create the name The Elemental Chrysalis. Inside, an evocative photo of a twilight mountainscape looming high over a huge lake. All of it printed in dark green and black. and the interior filled with lyrics, linernotes and album credits, and each disc mounted onto the sleeve on a rubber nub.

Where the first album was a drifting forestscape of acoustic strum and deep drones, the music is now a dark, slow moving folk sound, with a rich acoustic guitar as the focal instrument. Each plucked string and scraped pick is fully rendered, filling the space around each song with deep ringing notes and the driting decay of buzzing strings. The album opens with "In Through A Desert Door Of A Wooded Heart", and for most of it's twenty minutes consists of a rich dark melody played over and over, completely hypnotizing, eventually joined by deep rumbles, the hum of hazy Farfisa organ, a male voice intoning worldess vocals, spacey keyboards, the song stretching out and wandering through a gorgeous field of ghostly ambience. Distorted doomy guitars drift deep underneath the folk, but are always just on the periphery, a subtle rumbling presence. The tracks that follow are similiarly grim and beautiful and trance inducing, the acoustic guitar alternately joined by other instruments and sounds like bouzouki, cello, violins, piano, field recordings of woodland sounds, bells and gong, tympani drums, and the ancient traditional sounds of dulcimer and ocarina, psaltery and celestaphone. The Elemental Chrysalis take me back to the seventies folk of The Wicker Man soundtrack and the witchy music of Comus, but with an oh-so-subtle undercurrent of heavy ambient darkness. So beautiful and mysterious and grim, with bits of almost electronic sounding keening tones that reminds me of the rural dread conveyed in the original film score for Jeff Lieberman's backwoods dread classic Just Before Dawn. Slow, creeping forest twang, doomy and dark, the vocals a perfect combination of deep chanting and soft baritone singing, creepy throat singing and ghostly wails. Chet Scott and company have never let me down, but I was still blown away by how amazing this album is, an organic, autumnal funeral procession through untouched forests and ravines, psychedelic and lethargic, folky but massive. Highly recommended !!!