���� Now available as a double LP on black vinyl in gatefold packaging from Spanish label Throne Records, issued in a limited edition of two hundred copies.

���� These Japanese funeral doom crushers are finally back, returning with their debut full length album six years after their previous eponymous EP that I raved about back when it was released. Issued via Japanese label Weird Truth Productions alongside the likes of extreme doom elites like Ataraxie, Indesinence, Mournful Congregation, Worship, Imindain and Funeralium, the four-song slab Dense Fog delivers crushing, meditative doom from these former members of deathsludge titans Coffins and cult black metallers Deathchurch, each track an ode to self-immolation set to immense time-freezing heaviness that moves in glacial drifts across the album.

���� The three main songs that make up Dense Fog are obviously rooted in that classic funereal doom aesthetic, drawing from the classic sounds of Skepticism and Therogthon as the band lays down these titanic glacial dirges that crawl across the album at agonizingly torturous tempos, but they do bring some unique touches of their own to this sound. The music has a grim beauty to it, the colossal riffs often shaping themselves into a cold, funerary grandeur, the drooling, caveman growls countering that stately heaviness with feral, abject horror that almost suggests the presence of some mad Shinto monk grunting and groaning over the rumbling slow-mo chords and syrupy drumming. There's also quite a bit of a slowcore influence that seeps into the more subdued moments on the album, long stretches where the heaviness suddenly falls away and we're left with just the sound of a rumbling bass guitar and chiming minor key chords slowly drifting through the darkness, the drummer reduced to a super-minimal backbeat as the sound shifts into something much more akin to the spare, wintry gloom of Codeine; the title track, the shortest song on here at just under four minutes, is a purely instrumental example of that icy, fog-enshrouded funerary slowcore. Those shimmering guitar textures creep all over the album though, right into the almost Badalamenti-like atmosphere that hangs over portions of the monstrous closing track "Jigai - Kill Yourself", and there's a guest appearance from Mournful Congregation guitarist Justin Hartwig, where he contributes a stunning guitar solo at the end of opener "Blindness" that really yanks at your heartstrings. Indeed, anyone into the funerary majesty of Mournful Congregation should check this out, as well as fans of the heavily atmospheric massiveness of Corrupted and the general vibe of the Weird Truth roster.