Now in stock on both Cd (limited to five hundred copies) and limited edition Lp with printed innersleeve, released an edition of four hundred copies on black vinyl.

One of 2011's best (and most overlooked) heavy albums, Dead Elephant's Thanatology took the crushing, lurching, sometimes spacey noise rock/sludge metal fusion of their 2008 debut Lowest Shared Descent and cranked up the metallic heaviness and intensity and strange, jazz-flecked atmospherics to new heights. Sitting somewhere in between Neurosis and Unsane and the more psychedelic realms of slo-mo metal, Dead Elephant are often angular and ultra-heavy, blending Am Rep-esque grooves with glacial doom-laden power, and on their latest album combine this sound with smart conceptual ideas that quote everything from legendary Italian author and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini to occult imagery to drug advocate Timothy Leary.

Opening with the howling feedback and junkyard din of "Bardo Thodol", Dead Elephant drops in a massive droning riff alongside some spaced-out, ethereal chanting that gives the first few minutes of the song a very Sleep/Om-esque feel, an ominous hypnotic dirge that erupts into bone-crushing heaviness as the rest of the band fall in. AS the song progresses, though, the band begins to warp the riff into winding, angular shapes, introducing strange electronic noises and backwards music, eventually drifitng into a passage of eerie ambience and what sound like bagpipes and air raid sirens amid massive bass drones and celestial effects, until everything suddenly rushes back in with a grinding, seruiously crushing sludge riff and eerie, keening guitars. All throughout this song, the vocals appear in brief bursts of fearsome reverb-drenched howl and deeper, more monstrous roaring, everything glazed in delay and rippling across the lumbering sludgemetal.

Then there's the "On The Stem" which starts off with haunting orchestral music taken from a 1930s Italian funeral march, deep sinister strings and bells crafting a melancholy melody as those dark spacey synths and electronic textures begin to seep in, like some cosmic-influenced folk music joined by soft narcotized singing that builds into a cloud of gorgeous harmonized voices. Then the thunder comes, the band again surging forward into another massive sludgy dirge, evil riffing uncoiling around the distorted, pissed-off screams and bits of ominous minor key guitar, the music suddenly growing more spiky and complex, the drummer shifting into choppier, off-kilter rhythms, dipping into stretches of strange math rock-like jaggedness.

The other two songs offer similar shifts in aggression, the shorter "Destrudo" delivering some bludgeoning angular noise rock with the most hysteric vocal performance on the disc, a supercharged pigfuck assault doused in added levels of distortion, leading into the sixteen minute closer "A Teardrop On Your Grave / Downfall Of Xibalba" which in some ways ends up being the highlight of the whole album. Wisps of creepy piano drift over swells of feedback and sparse, shuffling percussion, giving the first several minutes of "Teardrop" a dark jazzy feel that's not all that dissimilar from the midnight jazz-ambience of Bohren And Der Club Of Gore. The shimmering guitar that comes in sounds like something from an Angelo Badalamenti score, while glimpses of heavier, more doom-laden guitarcrush can be seen at the outer edges of this crepuscular ambience. But as a malevolent guttural drone takes shape around the halfway point, the song transforms into something else entirely, the band swelling up into a MASSIVE sludgemetal assault draped in howling Tangerine Dream-like synths and washes of orchestral majesty, a thick layer of fuzz and grit suddenly descends over everything, taking over the end of the album with its heaviest blast of psychedelic sludge and ultra-heavy noise-rock lurch.