Album number two from this mysterious and secretive doom/death band who, over the course of three albums, has refused to reveal their identities, or release any background information on the band, or to promote their music in any form, lacking even a basic website, content to release their albums on the Russian label Solitude Productions with very little fanfare, in spite of the fact that their majestic, glacial gothic death/doom is some of the most beautiful and devastating atmospheric doom I've ever heard, a sound that I've described in the past as a cross between My Dying Bride/Paradise Lost and Dead Can Dance,

a tectonic sky-rending blast of ethereal ambience and grinding slow-motion doom, both breathtaking and ultra-heavy.

The band's second album II came out last year (2009) but we weren't able to get this in for the shop until now, but the wait on my part was totally worth it. Like Ea's other albums, II is doleful ultra-heavy funeral doom, divided into two massive twenty-minute-plus untitled tracks that fuse soaring doleful piano and delicate electronic melodies with crushing doomdeath, channeling the early Peaceville school of UK doomdeath like Paradise Lost, Anathema, and My Dying Bride, that classic sound of melancholy doom metal with growled, anguished vokills, but combine it with an ethereal gloom that reminds me of some of the later Dead Can Dance stuff, resulting in some of the most gorgeously melancholy and melodic funeral doom ever, with vast washes of cinematic synths, heavenly angelic choirs and gorgeous classical strings erupting into earth-shaking metallic crush or drifting off into passages of distant thunder and clean guitar that stretch out across great expanses of gleaming ambience before the band suddenly explodes back into a suffocating time-stretched doom riff. Pipe organs appear, great wheezing ecclesiastical drones buzzing through the glacial doom, and the music sometimes taking on the form of a Requiem Mass, albeit one carved out of great blocks of downtuned metallic heaviness. The music of Ea can also move into formless ambience in the passages of subtle keyboard drone, soft acoustic strum and dripping water, wind, the pulse of a heartbeat and other sounds, forming haunting stretches of minimal drift that appear between the monolithic riffs. Really fantastic death/funeral doom, highly recommended for anyone who welcomes the funereal crush of Skepticism, Thergothon, Morgion, Evoken, Worship, Esoteric, and the like.