Albums like Lucid Interval and Exploiting Dysfunction put Cephalic Carnage in the upper echelons of death/grind, so when Willowtip put out this EP back in 2002, the unexpected downshift in speed threw everyone for a loop. Known for playing complex and hyper-labyrinthine grind, these pot-fueled Colorado grind maniacs pulled a total 180 and headed straight into doom metal territory for this nineteen-minute track. It was originally slated to be the first in a three-part series that ultimately never happened, and Halls of Amenti eventually went out of print. Relapse has just reissued the disc, packaging it in a full color digipack and dropping the killer clear-disc layered layout of the original, but it's enough just to have this slab of mutant doom back in print after all of these years.

"Halls Of Amenti" starts as a creeping Sabbathian plod, massive doom metal riffage with ultra-deep monstrous vokills, but six minutes in, everything falls away and is replaced by haunting clean vocal harmonies, acoustic strum, a minimal doom riff in the background; it's almost folky sounding for a moment, but then the whole band crashes back in with a tangled frenzy of somber folk melody, chaotic drumming, those moaning vocals layered with deeper deathgrowls, the sound shifting back and forth between the crushing doom and the eerie psych-flecked strum, bits of electronic glitch flittering at the edges. After a minute or two the music once again falls away into minimal drone, then the doom drops in once again, crashing through the stillness, rising into a vicious psychotic doomdirge, a mass of wailing vocals and monstrous growls and massive doomdeath, eventually moving into a hectic, mathy angular math-sludge workout of stuttering riffage and vaguely martial rhythms, droning electronic noise and effects becoming more and more prominent, in the end finally turning this into a freaked-out electronics-infested angular sludge freak-out fading away into nothingness...

At the time, not at all what I would have expected from these guys, an Ep that's aligned with the ultra-slow sludge of Corrupted, Esoteric, Bunkur, Thergothon and Skepticism, but since the original release of Halls Of Amenti, they've continued to explore the slower, more doom-influenced side of their music (though nothing has been as snaillike and doomed as this disc!).