The Angelic Process - Coma Waering

This is a record that's heavy on the guitar buzz. It scratches your eardrums and fills your head while at the same time being utterly beautiful. If, like me, you enjoy your shoegaze mixed with metal, this is for you. However, this isn't your melodic Jesu. This is like My Bloody Valentine and Wolf Eyes hooking up with Xasthur to explore the realms of dark and gorgeous noise.

Coma Waering is stunning. It starts out fierce and thick, with a low end growl and plodding drums, and about 30 seconds in, it explodes with a towering wall of noise. There's a brief lull with some echoing guitar plucks and sparse splashing cymbals but like I said, it only lasts for 30 seconds or so before ripping another hole in your head. And Coma Waering only expands from there. The second track, The Sun In Braids, finds you sifting through the noise to find faded vocals buried beneath the layers. The title track, however, is where you find the true greatness on this album. Amidst all of the noise found on Coma Waering, it somehow manages to standout and be more epic than the rest.

The Angelic Process mostly follow the loud-quiet-loud formula, but the quiet parts don't last very long and they only serve to help you appreciate how loud it really gets. Just when you get accustomed to the punishment, everything falls out and leaves you with just some drums and quiet static, while your ears are ringing. When it comes roaring back, you sit and think that when you lose your hearing at 55, it'll totally have been worth it. By the end of it all, you're completely destroyed but it leaves you begging for more.

Coma Waering was released by Paradigms in a limited edition of 750 and it comes in some really great packaging. It's in a hand stamped, over-sized brown envelope that's sealed, which made the collector in me really not want to open it. But alas, it needed to be opened and inside is the CD sleeve, with appropriate imagery and the track listing printed on the backside of it. Beautiful down to the last detail.