Former His Hero Is Gone bassist Carl Auge has been busy in the years following the breakup of that influential crustcore band, playing in the bands Dimlaia and Drain The Sky while becoming an accomplished painter and visual artist. With the first full length from Drain The Sky, Auge combines his evocative still lifes and abstract textures with the gloomy Neurosis-esque doom rock for a thick gatefold LP that uses three of his paintings in the jacket design. Drain The Sky debuted last year on a CDR release that Life Is Abuse released that I thought was pretty cool, and with their first album the band further explores the more shadowy, moody elements of the Neurosis sound. Between the slow-burning, brooding threnodies and the husky, burned-out singing, it's impossible not to be reminded of Neurosis' Through Silver In Blood, but Drain The Sky put an interesting personalized spin on the sound through George Wunderlich's intricate guitar playing, a combination of droning notes and melodic picking that is run through heavy delay effects, dark cascading melodies that lend an almost countrified feel to the music in the somber, quieter passages that make up the bulk of the album, a vibe that becomes even more evident when he brings out a banjo on some of the songs. Combine these somber atmospheric parts with the eruptions of crushing slow riffage or the sporadic blasts of thunderous thrash and you get a heavy, heavily melancholy slab of metallic, gothic gloom and grim Appalachian vibe, Neurosis muted and diffused with Godspeed You Black Emperor. Following the lead of recent releases from The Wayward, Nadja, and Torche, Haunted By Rivers is packaged with a CD version of the album.