Yeah, so you noticed; Small Stone Records sent me a whole bunch of albums over in one batch, and I’m kinda hacking on through ‘em as best I can – they’ve got a pretty impressive rate of output for a niche-genre independent label, y’know (not to mention bargain prices – $13 for a CD is pretty decent, so don’t be shy about buying). Next on the block is Eye Tree Piby Obiat, a globe-trotting doomy metal outfit consisting of two Poles, a Hungarian and a Brit, and they make a noise without precedent, at least in my experience – my best stab at taxonomy would be to place them somewhere in between classic doom metal and dark ambient. There’s some elements of psychedelia in there too, but it’s not the cheery fairground sixties stuff – this is the strychnine horror-show seventies psyche, the black-light posters and bad drugs business. Not for the faint-hearted, in other words.

From the creepy intro of “Poison Thy Honey” – with its initially-gentle cymbal work, haunting guitar bits and Zen monk drone vocals – and onwards, Obiat are Sabbathy to the max, with slow scraping riffs and wailing ritual-in-the-forest lyrics that veer quite close to sounding like Ozzy from time to time… well, like Ozzy when he could still sing, that is. Listen to “Delights”or “NoMad NoMind”and tell me you can’t hear the ghost of the old bat-eater coming through, pushed to the reverberant rear end of the soundfield by a wall of roaring guitar.

There are hints of the spacious post-metal style of outfits like Isis, as well; “Serpent’s Rites” is all echoing clean lead-lines at the start, a gradual tension building up until the drums begin to roll like thunder on the horizon and the deep guitars come marching forth like prehistoric giants to lay waste to civilisation as we know it. Then there’s a lull, an eye of the storm punctuated by more vocal groans and string-scraping sounds that finally gives way to a glacial trudge across a desolate landscape of gloom and despair. And just to clarify: that’s a positive thing.

Musically, Obiat are almost crude – there’s little in the way of fancy soloing or clever time signatures on Eye Tree Pi, though the drumming is admirably precise without being mechanical – but they’ve got a knack for apocalyptic atmospherics, with their stately pace and careful dynamic choices lending a cinematic vibe to the proceedings. The dark tones of the guitar and bass are super, very much fit for purpose, but I’m not so keen on the percussion, which boasts a thin and boxy snare sound and short cymbals – I’d have liked a little more cut-through from the upper section of the drumkit, personally, though that submerged sound may be exactly whatObiat were after, reproducing as it does the effects of a few too many beers on top of a gut-full of small pointy-capped mushrooms. Er, so I’ve been told. Ahem. Yes.

But let’s not quibble too much – after all, when you find yourself having to complain about the sound of individual elements of the kit, it’s usually because there’s nothing more obvious to moan about. Eye Tree Pi is an interesting album, forming as it does a kind of bridge between the epic sludge of post-metal and the soundtrack work of artists like Lustmord (the latter exemplified here by the windswept melancholia of “Passive Attack”), and it’ll make an ideal soundtrack to your next solitary evening at home with the water-pipe. But I suspect that Obiat are at their best playing live, and I’ll be watching the gig listings closely for my chance to find out.