Funereal ultradoom probably doesn't get much more bleak, dismal and crushing than Catacombs. This newly reissued CD comes to us from the Russian doom label

Solitude, and it features the first Catacombs album from 2003 that had been originally released as a super limited CD-R on Antinomian. Extreme doom fans are

now able to not only wallow in the crawling crypt ambience of the original 15 minute epics "Consigned To Flames Of War" and "Echoes Through The Catacombs",

but also alternate remastered versions of those same two tracks, making this a pretty completist study of the album. Anyone into the cult deathdoom band

Heirophant will want to add this to their collection, and vice-versa, as Catacombs was essentially a continuation of the droning tomb doom of Hierophant

mastermind Xathagorra Mlandroth, and even the packaging for this disc is similiar to that of the new Hierophant discography CD that we listed in our last

store update.

Ultra slow, creeping deathdoom riffage, haunting piano melodies wrought with despair, reverb-drenched gutteral roars drifting up from some unseen monstrous

underground presence...guitars tuned so low and vocals so deep that they sound more like the scraping of tomb lids and deep cavequakes, nauseating guitar

drones wind around gorgeously depressing piano figures, and the drums grind machinelike through thick reverb. Catacombs created some of the most harrowing

and atmospheric Lovecraftian doom metal ever with this mini-album, a miserable slow motion nightmare that fans of Esoteric, Thergothon, Skepticism, and

Disembowelment are going to find pretty essential.