If you go back and read the reviews that I've written over the past two years for albums on Solitude, Bad Mood Man, bands like Darkflight, Flegethon, etc., you'll notice that I've been hearing an awful lot of kosmiche and psych influences in these doom metal albums, as if there's this heavy undercurrent of space music and Tangerine Dream worship that has been seeping into the death/funeral/doom continuum. I might be imagining alot of this, and it's hard to follow up on my suspicions that we've got all of these deathdoom bands in Eastern Europe and Russia locked down in their basements with copies of Stratosfear, Dark Side Of The Moon and Stream from the Heavens endlessly spinning on their turntables since I can never find any interviews with most of these bands. There's definitely some big love for psychedelia going on in the deathdoom scene, though, and I'm constantly discovering cool, as-yet-unheard bands from this sector of the globe who are whipping out their synths en masse and pushing ultra-heavy doom deeper into the outer sectors.
Abstract Spirit's Liquid Dimensions Change is exactly this kind of album. The band is from Russia and has members of another cult funeral doom outfit called Comatose Vigil, and the music on here is first and foremost devestatingly heavy funeral doom, utterly punishing slow-motion riffs and plodding, ultra-heavy drumming, and impossibly deep vocals. Think Thergothon, Shape Of Despair, Skepticism, Evoken, Heirophant, Esoteric, Pantheist, etc.. The riffs are beyond heavy, the songs are epic monoliths of misery and horror that stretch up to fourteen minutes in length, and it feels like being suffocated beneath waves of crushing glacial death metal. That would be fine by itself, but Abstract Spirit make this even cooler by giving the songs a super atmospheric sheen, coating the lumbering, Cthulhian deathdoom with prominent church organs, horror soundtrack synths, symphonic strings, insanely majestic harmonies, choral voices, and yeah, some supremely trippy cosmic keyboards and psychedelic electronics that soar over the blackened dirgescapes. There are parts of Liquid Dimensions Change where the music turns into a massive infernal orchestra before being bulldozed by the monstrous doom riffs, and at other points the keyboards take on a gleaming, celestial gorgeousness that is total Tangerine Dream, whether the band realizes or not. And then there are also the weird appearances of jazz piano that show up in a couple of spots, which somehow just manages to imbue the music with an additional layer of unease. Fans of melodic funeral doom will love this, as well as anyone into the more psychedelic end of the death/funeral doom spectrum like Pantheist and Esoteric. Awesome!