After their latest album Fuimus, Non Sumus� recently flattened me, I went back to track down the rest of Comatose Vigil's releases. The Russian funeral doom band has only put out two albums and an Ep over the last seven years, the slow pace of their output befitting a band that exists within this realm of extreme glacial heaviness. With their 2005 debut Not A Gleam Of Hope, Comatose Vigil delivered a nearly perfect blend of crushing slow motion doom metal, glacial death metal heaviness, sweeping cinematic keyboards and electronics, and softer musical interludes that exude a tangible gloom from the somber rippling strings and dark clouds of delay that waft out of Comatose Vigil's cavernous music. The four songs are as long and drawn out as you'd expect from a record like this, the shortest one clocking in at over eleven minutes, but Comatose Vigil avoid the common mistake that a lot of extreme doom metal bands make, constructing their songs out of increasingly dramatic riffs and ambient passages instead of merely relying on mind-numbing repetition, showcasing a higher level of songwriting than is usual for this genre. The riffs on Gleam, while fairly straightforward, are both massively heavy and effectively evocative of a world descending into permanent gloom, where the sun is slowly burning out and all that's left are skies choked with ash, and bone-wracking despair is the order of the day.

Comatose Vigil make good use of their keyboards, crafting a seriously grim backdrop of choral voices and synthetic strings that resembles both the darkest textures of classic gothic rock and the operatic dread of an apocalyptic film score, sometimes revealing glimpses of Tangerine Dream-style majesty. There's also the occasional black ambient soundscape that emerges on tracks like "Cataracts", massive rumbling industrial drones and growling bass tones introducing the deathmarch drums and stately doom-riffage. The last song "Galleries Of Coma" is the most sinister of the lot, adding a nightmarish dissonance to the crawling doom while the guitars wash out into a wave of black hiss and distant buzz, and later transforms into a terrifying din of choral voices and chromatic violin sounds, which resembles the sound of Jerry Goldsmith's "Ave Satani" being played back on ancient, rotting tape reels.

It really doesn't get more abject than this. Comatose Vigil revels in its nihilistic resignation, a suicide oath transformed into slow-motion symphony of low-end riff-ooze and cosmic drift. Both this and it's follow up Fuimus... are recommended to hardcore funeral doom junkies and fans of dread-merchants like Thergothon, Esoteric, Tyranny, early Skepticism and the crushing ennui of existence within a vast, uncaring universe...

Comes in a jewel case package housed in a cardboard slipcase.