Continuing to surround themselves in mystery and anonymity, the secretive and shadowy doom metal band Ea has released a new album every few years, with their third and latest just out on the Russian doom label Solitude Productions. Ea's unwillingness to divulge their identities or location or partake in any kind of promotion for their albums (let alone tour) has obviously relegated them to obscurity in the metal underground, but the elite few that have searched this band out have found an incredibly breathtaking, majestic brand of deathdoom that blows most of their peers away. I've been a big fan of Ea ever since the first album, and their other two discs are equally amazing, drama-filled slabs of atmospheric deathdoom, but on Au Ellai, the sound is more majestic and sweeping than ever.

The band returns with a new disc of solemn, incredibly melancholy doom metal and filmic soundtrack ambience, the early Peaceville deathdoom sound an obvious influence, but Ea build upon the style by making the piano the lead instrument, with bleak, utterly sorrowful piano melodies running through the album, a sort of classically-colored deathdoom enhanced with neo-classical sounds and massive song lengths. Much of the time, the crushing guitars drop out completely, and there's just the gorgeously sorrowful piano playing beneath a choir of female voices and male chanting, almost like a grim, funereal Dead Can Dance, but then those guitars will crash back in after a while and overwhelm you with waves of glacial melancholic heaviness and exquisitely crafted melodic leads. The vocals are an impossibly deep inhuman death growl in the deathdoom tradition, but these harsh growls are contrasted with the constant presence of glorious heavenly choirs. Hell, the twenty-four minute opener "Aullu Eina" alone is worth the price of admission, one of the most beautiful doom metal songs I've ever heard, a massive symphony of twilight strings and dense washes of Tangerine Dream style synthesizers, eerie music-box melodies and stunning ethereal vocal harmonies, proggy Hammond organ hovering over delay-soaked psychedelic guitars and crushing slabs of downtuned doom, a majestic combination of atmospheric chamber music, Tangerine Dream, gothic 4AD Records ambience and Disembowelment grade doomdeath. The songs are LONG, it takes the band almost an hour to move through the three tracks, each one an epic symphony of glacial gothic crush.

Au Ellai is already one of my favorite new doom albums, a top runner for my top ten doom metal albums for 2010 for sure, and highly recommended for anyone who welcomes the funereal crush of Skepticism, Thergothon, Morgion, Evoken, Worship, Esoteric and the like.