The long awaited new album from one of my favorite ambient bliss-metal outfits ever! Weighing Souls is the first new full-length album from The Angelic Process in something like four years; their Coma Waering CD that came out on Paradigms in 2006 was actually a re-issue of a CD-R that The Angelic Process founder K. Angylus recorded back in 2002; prior to that, the project had released the super-limited 2001 cassette ...And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey right here on Crucial Blast. Needless to say, we've all been waiting for awhile now for new music from the band, which grew into a duo a coupla years back when K. (who handles the guitars, vocals, drums, and electronic blastwalls) was joined by a lady named M. Dragynfly, who plays bass as well as contributing additional vocals and electronic textures, further filling out the band's blissed-out, widescreen dronemetal sound. Weighing Souls With Sand seems to frame a narrative about death, loss, despair, and self-realization, and I gotta say that this album sees the band perfecting everything that I've ever loved about this band. Each of the ten songs here are achingly beautiful monoliths of heartrending melody, radiating out of dense walls of fuzzed out, simple but crushing metallic riffs. Those guitars are so processed and ultra blown out and distorted that they reach the point of becoming a massive ball of white light, suffocating and celestial, through which the strained melodic singing and keening wails, all equally distorted and obfuscated by white noise, appear soaring through the wall of lush fuzz. The drums somehow sound gigantic and primordial, like tribal war beats thundering across vast canyons. They also cut through the wall-of-sound with occasional passages of restrained, almost mechanical drumming and quieter ambient drones, before exploding back into the oceans of heavenly buzz. It's like the ritualistic dirge of Neurosis filtered through My Bloody Valentines' Loveless and Merzbowian levels of white noise. Along with likeminded bliss blasters The Goslings, Nadja, and Jesu, The Angelic Process are creating some of my favorite music being made currently, carving intense beauty out of corrosive noise and distortion. Weighing comes in a gorgeous digipack case illustrated with beautiful burning imagery designed by the band. Highly highly recommended.