���This monstrous 2008 album from British deathdoom titans Esoteric has just gotten the deluxe vinyl treatment from longtime collaborators Aesthetic Death, the same label who first brought us Esoteric's suffocatingly heavy mixture of glacial deathcrawl and empyrean psychedelia back in the 90s with the albums Epistemological Despondency and Pernicious Enigma. On their fourth album, Esoteric still pursued the slowest strains of dejected metallic dread into a bizarre abyss where no one follows, making for some of the heaviest, most chthonic deathdoom I've ever laid ears on. Released in a limited, hand-numbered edition of eight hundred fifty copies, this new vinyl version of Maniacal Vale is goddamn massive, housed in a triple gatefold jacket with a printed insert, Kati Astraeir's sepia-scorched album art spinning on the cover like some infernal mandala; we've also got the original Season of Mist double CD edition back in stock, as well.

��� Those early albums from Esoteric comprised some of the most extreme doomdeath to emerge from the 90s, sprawling eruptions of raw, psychedelic, echo-laden heaviness that are still some of the strangest and most skull-flattening slabs of UK doomdeath I've ever heard, a twisted mutation of the classic Peaceville sound. But by the time the band brought us Maniacal Vale, their immense sound had moved deeper into more textured depths, employing washes of vast Floydian spaciness and soaring, emotionally punishing guitar melodies over their glacial crush. Where earlier albums were marked by a kind of twisted, reverb-drenched primitivism, here Esoteric moves a little closer to the utterly bleak emotional terrain of bands like My Dying Bride and Lost Paradise-era Paradise Lost, their crushing slow-motion death metal often unfolding into a kind of wretched elegance, though their sound always remains rooted in pitch-black soil. Greg Chandler's vicious scream rips through the gorgeous nocturnal gloom that wafts around their churning riffs, following them down into long descents into echoing, black hole ambience, delay-drenched guitars turning into black liquid and streaming through vast subterranean voids, drugged-out clouds of rumbling, almost kosmische psychedelia that makes it so much heavier and skull-crushing when the song suddenly lurches back into that slo-mo dirge, that majestic heaviness swarming with clusters of spiraling, almost classical-style guitar melodies tumbling through space, erupting into violent gales of blastbeats and ghastly shrieks. The oppressive astral crush of that first disc is only offset by the blastbeat-driven lysergic death metal of "Caucus Of Mind", which eventually topples into a final oceanic mass of whirring synths and transmissions from some distant black quasar, melting down into a sprawl of horrific ambience at the end as the band collapses in on itself.

��� Over on the second disc, the music shifts between the heart-stopping slowness of tracks like "Silence", while the darkly gorgeous guitars and gloomy atmosphere of the intro could almost pass for something off of Fields Of The Nephilim's Elizium. And the twenty-two minute closer "Ignotum Per Ignotius" is Esoteric at their most stretched out and smothering, an utterly massive meeting of epic, void-staring heaviosity and viscid black synthdrift, the latter sucking the whole thing into a wormhole by the final moments of the album. Utterly titanic.