Band:	Septic Mind
Album:	Начало [The Beginning]
Style:	Funeral doom metal
Release date:	November 2010

01. Начало
02. Уводящий
03. Покинувшие мир

Nachalo (The Beginning) starts off with one of those Evoken-like guitar tones... the clean, yet still dirty guitar with a little reverb... The tone that sets off your "Spidey sense" and gives you just enough warning to find a door frame in which to duck and cover before the impending slow motion train wreck of torment ensues and lays you to waste.

Sure enough, foreboding, suffocating doom follows shortly thereafter.

The Russian duo Septic Mind layeth down the pain in this and take their time tormenting their listeners. Nachalo might only list three songs on the album, but those three stretch on for over 60 minutes... For those of you not majoring in math, that's 20 minutes - or your average sitcom - per track. Wowzers.

The music itself switches from Funeral Doom to ambient noise at various times. Not particularly quickly... it's basically an indeterminable amount of time of them pushing one style, adjustment to the other for another seemingly endless period of time, then shifting back to the first. (Ok, so I wasn't timing the changes with a stop watch.) The effect is basically like slowly crushing your windpipe, then letting up to allow you to suck in air, precious air, before they resume throttling you.

Seriously, the funereal opening couple minutes (with Whovian noises to boot) of "The Ones Who Left This World", the third and final track on the album, is vile enough to kill all plant life within 10 meters/yards/parsecs of your speakers, and will cause all domestic pets smaller than Guinea pigs in hearing range to convulse uncontrollably until merciful ambient release sets in.

As one might think of an album with 60 minutes of music, and only three songs, things develop s l o w l y.

Very slowly.

I actually read the collected works of Ernest Hemingway in between drum beats to "The Misleading." And if you think that's something, I was also able to watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy - extended versions - before the drums even kicked in on that particular track.

Well, it's almost all slower.. until we come to a two minute span in the last 1/3rd of "The Ones Who Left Behind", in which the drummer starts guzzling liquid amphetamines and somehow manages to push the tempo to triple digit territory. By that point in the album, you've been slow riding for so damned long that this burst might as well have skipped straight past warp speed and hit plaid.

For those of you ADHD types that demand fun-superexciting- EXPLOSIONSBOOM shit happens at regular intervals to keep you hooked to music, this is a bad thing. You should probably avoid this release. Then again, my reviews occasionally meander beyond Haiku length, so such peoples just skipped all the blah blah blah wordswordswords and glanced straight at the score. Fuck them for being lazy. However, considering the average funeral doom fan probably digs tempos so slow you can age Scotch in between spins of an album, this is a positive. Your patience is rewarded. Well, not really. It's punished. But that's the point of doom, isn't it? Misery loves company. Suffer. Bastard.

The doomed Russian duo have created an album that is a wonderful blend of crushing punishment and fantastic release... This album is a great, versatile soundtrack, fitting in whether you slit your wrists while toasting bread in the bath tub as you are being buried alive in your porcelain coffin or just to jam to as you kick back and Astral travel your ass to Ganymede.

Buy this record. Either you'll love it and will give me e-high fives for turning you on to such a monument of awesome... or you'll hate it and I'll feast on your tears about what a downer it was or how it needed more car chases.