Now available as a double LP set that also includes the DVD with the 21 minute "Miserere" film, limited to 500 copies, and packaged in a heavy gatefold package

Even on their first album Pheromone, Brooklyn art/psych doomsters were edging away from the confines of extreme doom and exploring ritualistic black-psych terrain that felt closer to the ghostly Japanese psychedelia of bands like Shizuka and Fushitsusha, while being possessed of a ghoulish, creepy

atmopshere accentuated by the distinctive vocals of singer Yoshiko Ohara. The lumbering angular riffs sure are heavy though, heavy enough to sate any

doom-freak while offering one of the most unique sounds in the current art-metal spectrum. Ohara's vocals have always been one of Bloody Panda's most

defining qualities, with her voice inhabiting a constant fog of reverb and coming off as a mix of Yoko Ono's expressive shrieks and the narcotic croon of

post-Velvets Nico...hardly the typical voice for a band trafficking in riffs and tempos this weighty, as her moans and cries are trailed by black smears of

pipe organ, low-slung bass, and ritualistic percussion. Now the band find themselves on a new label (the continually impressive Profound Lore) and with a new

album, Summon, with seven songs reaching on for close to an hour...the music has become more abstract than before, opening with the droning

doom-riffs and churning tribal drums of "Gold" that surge beneath one of the albums most moving vocal melodies, and swathed in buzzing organ and feedback,

which leads into the relatively straightforward death-sludge of "Pusher". A high-pitched electronic drone pierces through the entire song, giving a queasy

off-center feel to the lurching doom.

"Saccades" is presented in two parts, the first a two minute intro of shrieking and subsonic machine throb that leads into the second half's epic heaviness,

which has bursts of blasting, chaotic drumming and endless rolling tribal rhythms, and weird complex riffs that remind me of the old French prog band Shub

Niggurath, turning this song into a sort of massive doomy Zeuhl jam. Then comes the album's centerpiece "Miserere", a twenty-one minute epic of stunning

glacial heaviness and explosive power that travels through fields of emotionally wrecked sludge and gothic graveyard ambience that suddenly explodes in

flurries of black metal-like blastbeats and dissonant riffbuzz, while deep male throat singing and wafts of pitch black ambience buzz in the background.

After that, the last two tracks ("Grey" and "Hashira") bring the keyboards front and center and drift through gorgeous, haunting realms of slow-motion

psychedelia that are less aggressive than the rest of the album, but still quite intense.

Obviously, Bloody Panda fans won't be disappointed. The raw psychic terrain explored on Summon has a lot in common with recent albums from Asva and Khanate too, which themselves broke with many of the tenants of doom metal, and anybody that enjoyed those discs should check this out as well.

The album is also accompanied by a dvd that features a short twenty-one minute film for "Miserere", which features a mixture of murky live performance footage, surreal, Takashi Miike-esque images, and warped new wave video effects that make for a creepily psychedelic visual experience that matches the epic song nicely.