Summer Series Part 3: Esoteric - The Maniacal Vale

Okay... now I realize that given that they're a doom band, Esoteric don't quite fit into what I'm trying to do with this series, but I want to review them anyway, because,

a) I'm SUPER stoked on this record, and
b) I really think they're pushing the boundaries of this kind of music, which I appreciate.

They could, perhaps, reasonably be considered a "type 1" heavy band in my ecology, but fuck it... I digress.

I have been waiting for Esoteric's new Season of Mist double album, "The Maniacal Vale" for what feels like forever and it has finally arrived.

And yeah, it fucking crushes.

I think Esoteric really came into their own with their last album, "Subconscious Dissolution into the Continuum." Not that they were bad before that, or anything, but I think that's the album that really set them up as standing over their doom metal peers. "The Maniacal Vale" does what bands are supposed to do after they up the ante with an album like that: it deepens and broadens their sound without losing any of what makes them kick ass.

The textures and melody and atmosphere that makes them stand above so many other doom bands are all still there, along with the crushing brutality, but the sound has been expanded to include a wide range of sounds which flesh out the songs.

But, whatever. Fuck it.

You know what Esoteric sounds like, right?

A friend of mine was saying that all you really need to do to write a good metal review is come up with ludicrous, hyperbolic similes to describe how heavy and/or brutal and/or pummeling the record is. So to honor that observation, I'm going to spend the rest of the review coming up with ludicrous, hyperbolic similes to describe how fucking ridiculously heavy the new Esoteric record is. Enjoy.

Ludicrous Hyperbolic Similes About How Heavy the New Esoteric Record Is:

1) Listening to the new Esoteric record is like waking up underwater with the lifeless body of your closest friend tied to your foot with a rusty chain, keeping you from swimming to the surface. No matter how much water your lungs fill with, however, you can't die. You just keep sinking further and further, the light above you shrinking in the distance.

2) Listening to the new Esoteric record is like being tied to a chair by a crazy old man and slowly suffocated to death by being force fed dirt from a rusty spoon by his toothless, cackling daughter.

3) Listening to the new Esoteric record is like being tied by all four of your limbs to the ground in an open plain with the sun beating down on you. As your skin begins to blister and crack, you hear the faint sound of some kind of herd of large mammals stampeding towards you. For hours you just have to lie there, the sound getting louder, the sun getting hotter, and the vibrations of the earth pulsating underneath you, hoping that the stampede heads your way so you die a quick death rather than a slow one from starvation and dehydration.

4) Listening to the new Esoteric record is like being eaten by a boa constrictor who has been magically imbued with the personality of the meanest boss you've ever had. As he eats you he criticizes you for not getting your work done fast enough.

5) Listening to the new Esoteric record is like being one of the last living mammals that died out when the ice age happened. You know it's just getting more and more brutally cold, but the area you have to hide from the encroaching sheets of ice just get smaller and smaller, and they're inhabited by saber tooth tigers who don't give a fuck that it's cold out and want to eat you.

6) Listening to the new Esoteric record is like walking through a never-ending wall of gelatin that gets thicker and thicker, making it harder and harder to breathe, until your limbs eventually give out from exhaustion and you just have to accept your fate as forever trapped in a boundless plane of dense sludge.

7) Listening to the new Esoteric record is like being buried under a putrid pile of thousands of aborted fetuses. As you think to yourself "suffocating under a pile of fetuses has to be the worst way anyone has ever died," the fetuses suddenly become sentient and begin slowly eating you for food.

8) Listening to the new Esoteric record is like being a six year old who's woken up in the night by his parents who tell him that they don't love him anymore, kill his pet gerbil, nail him into a coffin with the gerbil's corpse, then throw him in a river. When the boy closes his eyes all he can see are his parents giving all his toys away to all kids in the neighborhood who used to pick on him.

So there you have it: ludicrous, hyperbolic similes to describe how fucking heavy the new Esoteric record is.

Cause it is.

Fucking. Heavy.

For real.

Get it.

Now.

Esoteric playing my favorite song from their last record.
Please note the headset mic.
That's a lot of members, by the way. Insert your own "LEGION OF DOOM" joke here.

Esoteric on MySpace