Solitude Productions, 2008

...When The Dead Boughs Will Awake From The Dreams is the second offering from the Russian trio Ekklesiast, a band formed in 1994.

Everything about this is in Russian, so I had troubles finding out what the name of the band and the title for this new album is. All of the lyrics are naturally written and sung in group’s mother tongue and it makes it hard to understand for the majority of our readers. I think it would have been nice thing if the band or their label provided some kind of translation or promotional sheet.

When it comes to the musical content itself; I would say that this is yet another of many in a raw metal releases combining the aggressiveness and brutality of death metal with melancholy and darkness of doom metal. The band incorporates the occasional use of keyboards, as back-up to the overall nice singing and slow, deep and down-tuned and slow guitars. The vocals are most of the time clean, but also with some deep grunted parts which are quite nice.

I find this record to be rather mystical and bizarre than interesting and definitely not unique. I’ve heard many bands playing similar kind of music lately and it all sounds just familiar. The only thing that separates Ekklesiast from the majority is their focus on Christianity, so I guess you can call them a ‘Christian Doom’. However, if you’re die-hard fan of this genre and fan of East-European death/doom metal then you might also find this CD interesting. For all the others; waste of time as this material is too odd, too long and simply too boring. 

For more information on the band visit www.myspace.com/ekklesiast