��Been awhile since I've listened to these guys, but the latest album from French doom-death beasts Ataraxie quickly reminded me just how soul-crushing this band's music can be. Indeed, their third album L'Etre Et La Nausee is one of the finest new doomdeath albums in recent memory, and finds the band further refining their monstrously heavy sound. Spread out across two discs, Nausee unleashes the sort of sickeningly heavy glacial death metal that Ataraxie have long been known for, but their flirtations with heartbreaking melodies and a skillful use of quieter passages turn this into more than just another grueling slog through the sub-Disembowelment depths.

�� As the first track "Procession Of The Insane Ones" slowly unfolds, the band employs a sparse arrangement of clear clanging chords that slowly drift through the gloom, but that quickly crashes into their signature slow-motion crawl as the band's signature glacial death metal sinks in. The singer's ravenous, reverb-drenched howls blow through here in gusts of monstrous agony, billowing throughout the band's bludgeoning doom. This epic opener stretches out for more than twenty minutes, erupting into faster-paced rumbling death metal and descending into effective passages of funereal slowcore, where the heaviness drops away to reveal just the sound of sorrowful reverb-heavy guitars weeping over distant, spacious drums and the singer's half-spoken lamentations. In moments like these, Ataraxie manages to achieve an atmosphere of elegant abject despair that almost compare to Japan's Corrupted, contrasting the violently oppressive weight of their molten metallic crush with moments of maudlin, delicate beauty. And when those emotional, brightly jangling guitars are dropping in over the churning deathmetal, I'm also reminded of some of those early 90s French emo bands like Anomie and Ivich, traces of that sound seemingly seeping into Ataraxie's crushing misery. It's a cool and rather unique touch.

�� Later on, Ataraxie accelerate into even more furious blastbeat-riddled power on tracks like "Face The Loss Of Your Sanity", without losing any of that pervasive miserableness, later shifting into an incredibly eerie stretch of apocalyptic jangle, with mathy, almost Slintlike guitars creeping over the drummer's sudden descent into booming, tribal rhythms. Droning dissonant chords slowly build into a majestic climax as the guitars climb to nearly Floydian heights of grandeur over the rumbling amplifier drones and elephantine advance of the rhythm section, followed by a brief sojourn into the instrumental Codeine-esque gloom of "Etats D'�me".

�� The second disc features just two tracks: the relatively shorter "Dread The Villains" unleashes more of their blasting dismal deathcrush, sinister dissonant tremolo riffs suddenly downshifting into pulverizing sludge, then later evolving into sweeping fields of almost kosmische ambience from layered and processed guitar feedback that sound surprisingly synthlike, stretching out in cold black veins of cosmic hum over massive rumbling bass drones. And the nearly half-hour "Naus�e" doesn't really achieve any sort of forward momentum until nearly halfway through the song, the behemoth riffage undulating in slow-motion over the punishing glacial pace until it finally heaves forward into a crushing wave of double bass drumming and spidery minor-key guitar, building to an intense climax.

�� One of the best current doom-death bands out there, Ataraxie's latest blends a distinctly French feel with their primal, Disembowelment influenced ultra-crush, smothering the listener beneath a dense, cold blanket of bleak downtuned crush, sporadic blast-violence and eruptions of frantic, expressive melancholy melody. Recommended.