The Extinct Dreams is another of these funereal doom metal bands from Russia with serious Teutonic space music influences; I'm constantly hearing stuff like this coming out of Russia as doom metallers in the former USSR sure do seem to love their synthesizers. This second album from the band stood out though with its unexpected blasts of chaotic grind that are strewn here and there throughout the Thergothon/Skepticism influenced doom, adding an overt death metal element to the music along with the all of the arty, psychedelic spaciness.

The album opens with a short intro piece of whooshing synthesizers and lush kosimiche textures, total 70s style space music a la Ash Ra or Tangerine Dream that grows threatening towards the end as the keys are taken over by a plodding industrial rhythm. This leads right into the second track, a sprawling fifteen minute funeral doom odyssey of slow mournful riffs and sparse glacial drums, breaking off early on into a gorgeous pastoral folk/chamber passage, the delayed strings and acoustic guitar softly played against deep shadowy ambience, rich and resonant. When the vocalist finally comes in, it's a deep male voice crooning in that dramatic, slightly "off" manner that so many Russian doom bands have. The sound here is sorrowful and emotional, but things get heavy soon enough as the band crashes back in with the massive, spacious doom; think Skepticism, Thergothon, Evoken, these guys channel that same sound here, with guttural death metal growling and blackened shrieks, huge slow riffs, but slipping in and out of these almost Opeth-like atmospheric parts and washes of Floydian guitar soaring high above the morose metal, and dropping off into long passages of cosmic whoosh with distant choral voices and cosmic synthscapes a la Tangerine Dream.

The last track is all of seventeen minutes in length, opening with crushing doomdeath plowing through the darkness, slow and lumbering, drifting eventually into dark clouds of symphonic strings and ethereal guitar. This drifts along for long stretches before dropping back into the deathdoom' the next time that the band drifts out of the heaviness, it's into a somber piano instrumental that leads into an even more dramatic riff, now fronted with these really impassioned sung vocals, the metallic crunch pushed to the back a bit as melodic guitars come to the fore, and this turns into a sort of chamber doom, the drums becoming stripped down and minimal, the demonic vocals phased and whooshing over a bed of cellos and other strings, weaving in and out of dark chamber music and morose doom. And then out of nowhere, the drums suddenly kick into ferocious blast beats, but the guitars remain slow and solemn, and it becomes this strange atmospheric blasting that sort of reminds me of the weird folk/death of Molested a little, before the song winds down into metallic rhythmic clanking and drifting ambience.

Packaged in a full color digipack.