Crucial Blast Records, US (http://www.crucialblastshop.net/) This long running doom cult from China has the distinction of being, well, a doom cult from China. I had never even heard of a Chinese doom metal band before I found out about Hyponic, so I was curious to hear what kind of doom metal comes out of Hong Kong (where Hyponic are based). Their 2005 album The Noise Of Time recently made it'sway to Crucial Blast, and it's been controlling the office stereo for weeks now. Man, this is heavy, HEAVY stuff, virtually somnambulant doom metal that is unmistakeably in the vein of Esoteric, Thergothon, Evoken, Skepticism, with gutteral death metal vocals over geological drums and severly detuned guitars. So far, so good, I'm a big fan of this form and love to hear new variants on glacial deathdoom. Uh, but then around three minutes in to the opening title track, things get weird...the creeping death doom suddenly up and disappears, leaving behind a swirling miasma of way-fucked space FX, distant doom chords, ghoulish vocals trapped in eternal delay chains, all of this floating in a noxious black cloud of druggy psychedelic murkiness. AWESOME. This thick drug fog goes on for another couple of minutes, and then the drums re-enter, a plodding stretched out beat reverberating every 15 seconds or so, and it's slowly joined by sickening atonal guitar noise and hellish female choral vocals that made my fucking skin crawl. Eventually, the deathdoom reemerges again, but even slower this time, as the monolithic riffage and monstrous vocal incantations guide the song into oblivion. That song is freaking awesome, like a bizarre interpretation of Esoteric's lysergic doom as a soundtrack for deeply creeped out Asian horror imagery. The rest of the songs (there are only four total, but they average 8-10 minutes in length) are just as crushing and psychedelic, with dense guitar noise layered over the slo-mo plod; there is also a flute that shows up in the middle of "Subconcious Attack" and it sounds positively evil, and "The Dead The Stranger" fuses some really freaked out, FX-damaged soloing over a hammering dronefest that closes the track. But the highlight of the album for me is the final song, "Hymn To The Dark". Here, Hyponic back off from the walls of psychedelic fx-drenched noise that permeate the earlier tracks, and jam on a pulverizing funeral doom riff over which the guitarist breaks out an amazing bluesy space rock solo that sounds like David Gilmour playing over Thergothon. Slow, menacing, and intensely beautiful. I've got a new favorite doom album here, even though it took over three years for this thing to finally reach my ears, and it's highly recommended to anyone into death-doom/funeral doom, especially if you dig the trippier proponents of the style like Disembowelment and Esoteric.