Rating: 9.5

Country: USA

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: Solitude Productions

Track list:
1. Forever Dying
2. Where No Light Hath Shone
3. Forever Dying
4. Where No Light Hath Shone
5. The Weight Of Winter
6. From The Dust Of Grave
7. Ancient Moonlight
8. Shades Of Aqueous Essence

Total playing time 01:06:54

Band Website: Hierophant

Hierophant - The Tome

Xathagorra Mlandroth - All Instruments and Vocals

With the low, thunderous growl of the vocals and simultaneous advent of the bleak music, everything around you, precious and warm, is blown far, far away, leaving you forlorn and miserable with not a soul in sight; it is as if the distant inevitable future had been fast forwarded by an impatient and disgusted God and somehow you alone were made to endure it. Suddenly, you find yourself surrounded by bare, lifeless trees whose twisted branches stick out like sharp fingernails of unchecked growth of a senile shrivelled woman, which seem to scratch against the icy winds drifting across this area to create overpowering fuzzy noises that all but drown out the life beating inside of you. Shivering, you stumble your way through this godforsaken landscape, humming faint, haunting tunes to give you temporary solace from a certain nervous breakdown.

This is the kind of experience Hierophant's minimalist funeral doom music will impose on you, the impact that it will have on you. Indeed, their songs are not to be listened or to be described; they are to be felt, to be experienced. Waves of fuzz wash over your reposed body, the chilled, electrified water almost shocking you with every contact. Resonant vocals rumble through the atmosphere, sounding as if some gargantuan celestial creature above is anguishing in pain. Faint keyboard tunes levitate between the two dominating layers, passing through the music unimpeded in a ghostly manner, subliminally entering the mind of the listener and taking complete possession of it. These sweet, innocuous tunes, amplified due to their stark contrast with the swathes of fuzz, cripple the listener and make you feel unbearably desolate and eaten from inside. It will make you feel that way whenever you replay it in your head, even when pinned to the ground in the midst of a stampeding crowd: the player may die out but the tune will remain immortal. I'm talking of the two songs that comprise The Tome, one of the greatest doom EPs ever created.

The same two songs are remastered and included in the 1996 EP, The Weight of Winter. The scathing fuzz is toned down in favour of a healthier sound but that sadly diminishes some of its bleakness. Thankfully, the experience remains more or less the same: just imagine yourself experiencing the same harrowing events described in the first paragraph but this time wearing warm and somewhat comfortable clothing. This EP additionally features a beautiful self-titled song that is musically different from the ones on The Tome; this one sounds analogous to old Skepticism, and later on in the song to early Evoken. Serious and gloomy with a deep heavy sound, its music is like a dying beached whale, mourning and lashing its tail in vain to get back to where it belongs. It is a slow albeit heart-rending track that would pose a threat to your life not because of its bleakness, but due to the copious amounts of emotions that it painfully generates, and being the longest song so far (lasting nearly 13 minutes) it has enough time to do that.

Rounding off this wonderful discography reissue on a gold disc is their 2000 EP, Autumn Dusk. The music on this EP sounds markedly different from their previous works. It is now numbingly heavy death/doom that sounds more influenced by Thergothon. After experiencing their previous material, this one is like turning around to find a cosy house in which you enter and sit down by the fireplace, still feeling pretty damn lonely and miserable. Very slowly the music plods out of your speakers, what it lacks in speed it makes up for with its behemothian heaviness. The absence of keyboards is conspicuous but mellow tunes do make a casual reluctance appearance every now and then and linger around to do some emotional damage. Good but not quite as stirring, Hierophant sound like a totally different poor beast on Autumn Dusk. Hearing this, it is not hard to imagine what Xathagorra Mandroth intended to do next – disband Hierophant and under a new moniker release an improved death/doom album that would come to be called Echoes Through The Catacombs.

January 25th, 2008