Band:	Faal
Album:	The Clouds Are Burning
Style:	Black metal, Doom metal
Release date:	March 2012

01. My Body Glows Red
02. The Insistance's Wish
03. Tempest
04. The Clouds Are Burning

When is epic fail epic win?

When it's Faal's epic four track full-length The Clouds Are Burning.

Many moons ago, my Doom Pusher, Marcel, sent me a package with a bunch of t-shirts, promo materials, and disks. Faal's Abhorrence - Salvation was probably my favorite of the goodies inside.

A couple years later, they have finally followed up the EP with the monstrous album, The Clouds Are Burning. While early in the year, I imagine this will still be near the top of the ridiculous musical goodie bag that is 2012.

Faal play a blackened form of doom metal - combining the standard low end growls with counterpoint rasps to tweak the mood. Other times sees the slow moving riffs paired against thundering rapid fire drums. Doom is an expansive, stylistically varying genre, and Faal have no problem dooming outside the box and shifting from the thundering glacial creep of most extreme doom acts and into the midpace swagger-driven riffs of traditional doom acts, such as in the opening riff of "Tempest". Hell, they even push the boundaries to, gasp, fast-paced black metal pounding midway through "The Insistance's Wish".

Further factor in some leads, keyboard backing and hellish psychedelia a la Esoteric and you are in for one hell of a ride. (Side note - Esoteric's Greg Chandler was involved in the mixing and mastering of this monstrosity.)

Their willingness to explore beyond formulas A and B (A - 70 minutes, 3 songs, 0.15bpm; B - 70 minutes, 3 songs, shifting to ambient passages then back to crushing doom, all at 0.15bpm), yet with that overwhelming vibe of crushing despair present at all times, makes this a dynamic listen. It does a masterful job of sucking the listener in and dragging them under, with the shifts in approach and speed simply being different currents of the water in which you drown.

So, at least for today, epic Faal is epic win.