header_image
ALDEBARAN  Buried Beneath Aeons  12"   (Parasitic)   14.99


    Back in stock. I've been gradually making my way through the entire discography of Portland, OR band Aldebaran, who have been producing some of the finest contemporary doom/death around ever since forming around a decade ago. I'm a big fan of drummer Tim Call and his various other bands, which ranges from the black metal of Howling Wind and Ardour Loom to the blackened doom-crust of Nightfell to his stints as the live drummer for C-Blast faves like Saturnalia Temple and Mournful Congregation, but Aldebaran is one of his longest running outfits, with a number of fantastic albums of crushing, cosmic doomdeath albums under their belt.

    The 2011 EP Buried Beneath Aeons features just one song from the band, but it's an epic, a half-hour long crawl through hellish depths of molten downtuned doom and ascending on wings of soaring, solemn majesty. As with the rest of Aldebaran's work, "Buried Beneath Aeons" combines otherworldly Lovecraftian imagery and themes of cosmic horror with their creeping tectonic crush, evoking antediluvian intelligences and awakening gods with their mix of monstrously lumbering death metal and sorrowful guitar parts. They're tapping into an old and well-worn sound with this stuff, of course, but Aldebaran combine all of these elements into something much more effective and unearthly than most, skillfully weaving those eldritch vibes through these waves of glacial death metal, crafting stunning, sepulchral melodies that course and creep through the various passages of winding riffery that emerge over the course of the record. Tribal drumming and crushing funereal tempos intertwine as the riffs shift, moving from one impressive depth-charge eruption of slow-mo heaviness to another, the guitars sometimes shedding their molten black weight in favor of plaintive chords that shimmer with heavy doses of reverb, like the passage of almost Earth-esque gloom that rings out over the very beginning of "Buried". Naturally, you'll hear echoes of the classic doom/death of early My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost in this stuff, but the ghostly guitar parts and the almost Neurosis-esque drumming that reappears throughout the record give Aldebaran's music its unique touch. The killer album art from acclaimed illustrator Dan Seageave perfectly matches the towering, titanic feel of their music, and it's reproduced on the big fold-out poster that comes with the album. Pressed on one hundred eighty gram vinyl, and issued in a limited run of five hundred copies.


Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample :
Sample :