Band:	Towards Darkness
Album:	Towards Darkness
Style:	Death doom metal
Release date:	December 2004

01. Drifting
02. Abscence
03. The Beacon / Interception
04. Despair
05. Vile Requiem
06. Towards Darkness

Listening to this album is like smoking a cigarette: at first your lungs reject the strength of the chemicals, but eventually they grow accustomed to the kick and take the smoke in stride. Then your breathing relaxes and your pulse steadies as the world seems to make sense again, like everything you questioned before doesn't matter because your dreams have been fulfilled. Eventually this action becomes habit and the body begins to crave the nicotine - to crave the feeling of fulfillment... Well today my nicotine is Towards Darkness by The Mass, and it is definitely addicting.

Released back in 2004, this French Canadian quartet renamed themselves the following year to (surprise!) Towards Darkness. Under that moniker the band released Solemn, indicating a more extreme direction within the doom genre. But for now we dissect what makes their original sound so enticing.

The album takes its time from the get-go and doesn't care whether or not you're interested in waiting around for it to pick up pace. Daunting riffs and murky drumming force their way through just over 45 minutes of playback while you writhe in agony against the power of the band's artful repetition. At times the pitch of Kevin Jones's vocals can be overwhelming, crashing like a tidal wave against a large rock formation, but as he roars in sync with the sauntering pace of the instruments, the ending comes together so smoothly. It's almost as if the album was recorded as one long song broken up into separate parts, similar to Process Of Guilt's Erosion.

Something that might be overlooked during the initial playback is the album's atmosphere. The somber introductions to each song and subsequent interludes throughout create an overall feeling of despair while the heavier sections completely eliminate any trace of warmth, yet Towards Darkness maintains a certain degree of ease, most likely due to its flow. Personally I find this sort of album mandatory to listen to from beginning to end, as there are too many barriers crossed between each song to just start listening halfway through. And with "Despair" clocking in at six-and-a-half minutes as the shortest song, you know that listening to this album will be a bit of a chore, but rest assured: the reward is well worth the effort.

In short, if you're shopping for an unfiltered death doom album that will completely knock you out into a dismal void and scatter your limbs across the universe to the tune of a vile requiem, look no further than Towards Darkness. It's a cancer everyone can enjoy.