���� And down we go. We just picked up the cassette version (limited to three hundred copies) of this great album from Portland, OR depth-crawlers Aldebaran, as well as restocked the original CD release on Profound Lore; if you're into the more chthonic realms of funereal deathdoom, Embracing is well worth picking up. It's the most recent full-length from the band, which includes former and current members of bands like Ritual Necromancy, Howling Wind, Nightfell, Wolves In The Throne Room, as well as the guy from noise outfit Okha, and continues to surround itself in allusions to classic Weird literature, Lovecraftion cosmic horror and otherworldly imagery that's a perfect fit for the monstrous sadness of their music.

���� Aldebaran's sound is obviously seriously heavy, but one of the things that makes this stuff stand out in the sea of funeral doom dreck is their skill at weaving longform melodies through the titanic, glacial riffs, letting the songs fall into long stretches of solemn, contemplative quietude. Those moments on Embracing often sound more like some gloomy early 90s slowcore outfit, up until the mountain of metallic crush finally crashes down on everything. You can really hear it in the stark, understated grace of opener "Occultation Of Hali's Gates", which early on reminds me of the glacial beauty of bands like Codeine and Low, a somber, slow-burning instrumental introduction that takes awhile to develop into swells of distorted guitar and peals of howling feedback. Flowing into the massive sprawl of "Forever In The Dream Of Death" and "Sentinel Of A Sunless Abyss", the music then turns epic as these two half-hour long songs unfold, each a multi-part saga slowly developing from that glacially-paced instrumental passages into their surges of metallic heaviness. But it always comes, the guitars crashing in with their majestic, almost hymn-like riffs, the drums slow and deliberate, a series of earthbeating tectonic reverberations, all building to that moment when the guttural roar of the singer suddenly punctuates the gloom. Really powerful stuff that's never sounded better than it does on Embracing, cold and sorrowful and desolate, death metal turned elegiac. It's downright beautiful, draped in lush Hammond-like organ and wound in those drawn-out, gorgeous melodic riffs and flecked with traces of mournful twang. A sound that fans of Thergothon, Evoken, Skepticism and Asunder are well familiar with, but Aldebaran are at the top of the heap when it comes to this sort of stuff, with killer songwriting that always teeters on the edge between the hushed, wintry beauty of their quieter moments, and the charred, colossal crush of their deathly funereal doom.