I though Cortisol's last album Meat was pretty badass. The Quebecois doom band's name always sorta weirded me out (if you don't know what Cortisol is, look it up), but the band appeared on the scene with a solid debut of epic, quirky funereal doom that received a lot of play here. Sorta reminded me of stuff like Skepticism and Thergothon, you know, reeeaaaallly long songs, plodding hypnotic tempos, monstrous gutteral roars, but with some occasional post-rockish elements that worked really well. Definitely a cool debut. Well, Cortisol is back, not with a new album but a re-issue of their debut S-12, which was originally self-released in 2004. And it's even weirder than Meat. Really weird, actually. The music is still totally rooted in ultra slow, ultra crushing glacial DOOM, but the arrangements are all fucked up, eerily dissonant riffs droning forever then suddenly dropping out entirely, the band taking these strange detours into melodic passages with weird mathy time signatures while softly grunted death vocals seem to be run through a changing array of effects. There's long sections of droning feedback and amplifier rumble, ghostly windchime sounds floating around bombblasts of detuned doom, clean and distorted guitars layered together to create rich textures. But it's the demented vocals of Ariana Fleury (ex-Augury) that really ratchet up the weirdness on S-12; when she makes her grand appearance on the industrialized 'Infinite Supply Of Nothing", it's suddenly as if you were listening to a collaboration between New England doom legends Warhorse and Diamanda Galas, as Ariana's theatrical vocals leap and mutate continuously over an ungodly bonecrushing doomsludge riff. The album gets weirder and heavier after that, combining monstrous death vox freakery and those insane female vocals over confounding glacial doom metal; on "Infinite Supply Of Jobs Of All Sorts", Cortisol create a mindbending industrial doom/looped noise hybrid that sounds like Bastard Noise swarming over Godflesh; "Carnac Myotonia" starts off with haunting crooning vocals over an offtime dirge that reminds me of Kayo Dot, then turns into a hypnotic deathcrawl. Hands down one of the most innovative extreme doom albums I've picked up, highly recommended to fans of far-out doom/sludge like Great American Desert, Drear, Thrones, and Aarni.