Available on both gatefold CD, and a stunning deluxe 2xLP edition that comes in a thick case-wrapped gatefold jacket with a foldout color poster, a massive twenty-page LP sized booklet, and an obi strip.

Ever since being announced late last year, this new album from weirdo French deathdoom outfit Chaos Echoes has been eagerly awaited around the C-Blast office. These guys had already started to garner some buzz around their earlier EPs, and their first proper full length was being touted as one of the more unusual and avant-garde releases to come from Nuclear War Now this year. And they weren't foolin' - Transient emanates a mysterious, narcotic vibe that's quite unlike anything else to come from the esteemed underground metal label, an intoxicating blend of droning chthonic deathdoom, roiling blackened death metal, and ritualistic sun-blasted ambience that sweeps across the beginning of the album like the sounds of a deathcult procession making it's way through a sweltering bazaar. The sounds of chimes and ringing feedback lilts over the steadily encroaching waves of downtuned heaviness, but when the band finally kicks into "Senses of the Nonexistent", they unleash a haltingly syncopated doom-dirge that moves in long strides over the lockstep pummel of the rhythm section and a chorus of distant chanting.

The album settles quickly into that ritualized atmosphere, unfolding like a monstrous droning doom-trance, inexorably growing in force and expanding in rhythmic power, and I'm reminded of both the occult Hawkwindian hypno-sludge of Saturnalia Temple and the krautrock-influenced black throb of Aluk Todolo while listening to this, echoing in the way that these Frenchmen grind out their fearsome, repetitious heaviness. That opening track flows right into the next, paving the way for a sprawling multi-part epic, the music drifting from out of that monstrous grinding deathdoom into dense fields of psychedelic guitar drone and rumbling black drift, long stretches of feedback-drenched ambience and Earth-en amplifier roar cutting huge swathes through the album as they lead into more of that titanic slow-moving metallic crush. The doom-laden riffs often fray apart into swells of swarming blackened buzz or howling psych-shred, then swallowed up in a churning maelstrom of dragged-out blackened riffage and mournful sub-blasted dirge. Later on, they lavish the churning rhythmic workout that dominates the nearly fifteen minute "Advent of My Genesis" with druggy Hammond organs, and blur into a strange, almost Penderecki-esque field of dissonant modern classical darkness that comes out of the cyclonic blasting chaos . Along with that killer Hammond accompaniment, the band also makes use of synthesizers and electric piano, adding additional sonic textures and swells of sinister jazziness to their hallucinatory assault, even dipping into almost Sunn-like experimental soundscapery at times. And the closer is Transient's shining moment, a long and labyrinthine descent into the depths of blackened prog called "Soul Ruiner" that sounds for all the world like a black metal-tinged Univers Zero track, complex rhythmic interplay and off-kilter time signatures meeting grinding minor key riffage and spiraling guitars, croaked demonic vocals billowing through a black fog amid blasts of terrifying feedback and amp rumble, eventually mutating into a frenzy of blastbeats and droning tremolo riffs, prayer bells and dazed chanting that stretches like a mass of black tendrils through the close of the album. Awesome.