This ia actually a rerecorded, totally reworked version of an album that this Russian doom/death band originally released way back in 2001. Normally, I

find it kind of whack when bands re-record older albums, but a) I had never heard the original When The Dead Boughs Will Awake From The Dreams,

which was actually more of a self-released demo than an official "album" and b) this new album is a pretty fucking wicked slab of melodic deathdoom, so we'll

have to let it slide. Ekklesiast have been around for over a decade but aren't too well known outside of their home country, like most Russian doom bands,

even though fans of crushing deathdoom would probably go apeshit for these guys. The music is rooted in the early Peaceville doom/death style, taking cues

from the sounds of early Anathema and My Dying Bride but most of all Paradise Lost, that crushing, depressive melancholy doom metal style, which I can never get enough of, but Ekklesiast put their own menacing edge on the music with a combination of super-gruff gutteral death metal vocals that are sung in Russian, and if you've listened to Russian deathdoom before, you know that the coarse, consonant-heavy language sounds especially vicious when used with this kind of music. The singer from Ekklesiast sounds like he's hawking up a fistful of phlegm half of the time, and it's even weirder when you realize that this savage, bestial voice is actually singing Christian lyrics...yeah, Ekklesiast definitely align themselves with Christianity, but you'd never know it from how miserable and brutal this music is. It's nothing like old-school Xtian doomsters Trouble, that's for sure. Musically, it sounds like a combination of Icon are Paradise Lost and the melancholy metallic pop of Katatonia's Last Fair Deal Gone Down with gnarly death metal vocals and a tendency to break off into the occasional bit of brutal Slayer-style riffing. Big thumbs up!