One surefire way to hook me in to your drugged-out doom is to open your album with a primo Vincent Price sample, which is what Funeral Orchestra do in the opening moments of "Rite Of Lust". We hear the master of terror speaking from a sample taken from his classic Corman-produced Poe anthology Tales Of Terror, leading us straight into the plodding low-fi doom murk. These guys obviously have taste. Featuring Nicklas Rudolfsson from deathdoom drugonauts Runemagick, Funeral Orchestra is another Swedish band plying noxious, atavistic doom metal, but their style of doom is less about monstrous riffs and more about loooong, sprawling trance-like jams formed out of primitive Frost/Hellhammer style riffs played into infinity, and drowned in a fuzzy, distorted recording and fronted by echoing drug-trip vocals. The band calls this shit "Apocalyptic Trance Ritual Doom", and all of the members simply identify themselves as "Priest 1", "Priest 2", and so on, and perform live in black cloaks and expressionless gold masks, so they are pretty caught up in the whole Frost-riff-as-om-ritual concept. And it fucking rules. This disc is a compilation of demo and unreleased stuff, and the five songs featured here drag you down into a dank pit of crawling black ambience, ugly crumbling doom riffs, creeping funereal slowness, sickening black metal gurgles, pounding, almost industrial-like drums, psychedelic guitar leads, film samples and deranged monastic chanting, and most of all, a relentlessly bleak wall of trance-inducing riff monotony. Imagine Thergothon crossed with Electric Wizard, it's that dense, hypnotic and wasted, endlessly plodding dungeon-crawling dronemantras covered in sheets of sustained feedback and amplifier rumble. Ugh. The whole thing sounds diseased and decayed. If yer a junkie for blackened, hypnotic ur-filth, this one's for you. Comes in a digipack in a hand-numbered limited edition of 999 copies.