French doom metallers Eibon might not be as well known as a lot of other bands in their field, but these guys have been consistently putting out some of the coolest prog-tinged doom even as far back as the previous, pre-Eibon band the members were involved in, Horrors Of The Black Museum. The members of Eibon have been threading strands of dark, menacing prog rock through their sprawling, spine-crushing doom epics from the beginning, and it's probably the best exemplar of this particular sound aside from the mighty Pantheist. I was an instant fan of Eibon's first album on Aesthetic Death, a crushing slab of grim, nihilistic deathdoom that revealed subtle traces of psychedelia within the album's pitch-black grooves. But with II, they've expanded and experimented with their sound a little further, dropping some killer krautrockesque elements and searing psychedelic synthesizer throughout these two epic-length tracks that sprawl out for more than twenty minutes apiece.

   The album's first track "The Void Settlers" starts off with a frenetic blast of sludgy metal, the band weaving through some crushing angular riffage and lurching rhythms, a super-heavy, propulsive intro that the band hammers out for a while before the they finally drop over the edge into one of their monstrously slow, glacial dirges. When Eibon really slow things down, it feels as if all of the air is suddenly sucked out of the room, a dynamic shift in speed and power that elevates Eibon's doom above many of their peers who are content with just pounding away at their same torporific tempo without end. As that glacially oozing riffage spreads out and the drums heave forward, straining against the waves of black amplifier rumble, layers of eerie, ghostly ambience and sickly atonal guitar melodies and mysterious wailing noises slowly creep in, adding a strange spectral atmosphere to the creeping heaviness. Those dissonant guitar sounds end up developing into something much spacier as this goes on, delay drenched leads howling over the increasingly complex riffing, the sound growing more complex, more proggy as the song continues to unfold, even slipping into a killer motorik groove towards the end that suddenly morphs this into something more trippy and unexpected, blackened and blasting and strangely krautrock-esque...

   The first few minutes of "Elements Of Doom" begin with an eerie abstract soundscape of minimal, minor key guitar lilting over swirling, crackling static and distant subterranean rumblings, slowly weaving an atmosphere of building dread. That minimal sonic creep is suddenly blasted apart when the band abruptly drops in with another crushing slo-mo slab of heaviness, though, as discordant blackened guitars and evil gargling screams churn over the elephantine drumming. As with the previous song, this is a sprawling, sometimes labyrinthine descent into angular, glacial doom that has sudden and dramatic detours into proggy, complex heaviness, suddenly shifting into feral blasting black metal, or the stretches of that dark minimal ambience that reappear from the beginning, and it ends with a long sequence of dark, gorgeous Tangerine Dream-style synthesizer drift that closes the album.

   A fantastic doom album, probably one of the best you're going to hear this year. Like I mentioned early on, if you're a fan of the monstrous prog-influenced doom of Pantheist, or even the sounds of Umbra Nihil, Unholy or similar proggy, uber-heavy doom outfits, both this and Eibon's first album are recommended listening. Nice packaging, too, the disc presented in a heavyweight tip-on sleeve.