Digipack still available (10 euros)

Habsyll - MMVIII (2009)
Heavy and slow, yeah obviously, but it's HOW heavy (very) and HOW slow (ummm, so slow the songs seem to have almost zero forward momentum) that makes Habsyll something much more than a metal band or a doom band, it's almost like twentieth century classical played with downtuned guitars and massive drums. So much space, the notes and drum beats miles apart, the drums not so much beats and rhythms (although those do pop up occasionally) as brief explosions or percussive squalls, more for dynamics and texture, or if they are actually engaged in some sort of actual beat, it's mind bendingly abstract and extended and slow to the point of hovering around 2 or 3 bpm. Think Khanate, Monarch, Moss, Bunkur, Fleshpress? You're already thinking too fast, too structured, too riffy. This is some excessive extremist radical dooooooooom, the sort of chug and plod and buzz and bombinate that makes the rest of those bands sound like speed metal.
But in this slow sprawl, and these long stretches of decay, these sudden flurries of drum splatter and downtuned chug, there is a buried beauty, occasionally, these disparate parts mesh into a brief flicker of melody, or a single epic majestic hook filled swell, before slipping back into blackness. And once or twice the band ramps it up, and locks into some serious pounding crushing black hole sludge, but even then, it's a crawl, a glacial black ooze tempo, and before too long, the band abandon any sense of rhythm or tempo, opting instead to drift through some wide open stretch of outerspace ultra doom emptiness.
The guitars go from grinding and sharp, to muddy and massive, the chugs flung into the ether and carried along on streaks of whirring hiss and blackened buzz, spitting out huge jagged shards of feedback, and long smears of blurred anti-riffage, the bass is a massive cloud of low end, throbbing and pulsing, exploding like a brick wall to the side of the head before slipping back into a shadowy rumble, the vocals a caustic demonic shriek, raspy and hellish, slipping into an almost hysterical falsetto, and just as often offering up some alien ululations, and the drums, oh the drums, any drummer can tell you how hard it is to play slow, but they're talking slowcore slow, or even regular doom slow, this is something else entirely, this is doom drumming gone free jazz, pound and skitter in equal measure, meting out beats one at a time, like some sleek black submarine releasing depth charges.
Two lengthy epics, 17 minutes and nearly 29 minutes, neither very traditionally doomlike, but both most definitely doom, maybe more 'doom', than most actual doom we've heard. Like staring into the abyss, or looking up at a black moonless night sky, these sounds are the sounds of emptiness, of bottomless depths, of never ending expanses of space and time, the end of the world, the birth of new universes, the sound of black holes, of exploding stars, the soundtrack to the end of the world, to the end of everything. Slow and heavy and low and spaced out and damaged and fucked up and strangely beautiful and mysterious and abstract and far out and completely kick ass while remaining very very very difficult listening indeed!

“Unbelievably heavy and slow amplifier overload from France! Two long tracks of uber-doom which is seemingly devoid of any coherant structure and exists only to open up a black void in your stereo speakers through which to suck out your very soul. Habsyll sound to me like a less happy-go-lucky Khanate, or Monarch without the hipster irony. Totally morbid! ” (AWWFN)

This album released by a lot of labels for different regions and countries, some of them are : Obskure Sombre Records(Canada), PsycheDOOMelic(Austria), tUMULt (USA), At War With False Noise(UK), Skyr Records, Bande Noire Rds (France), Odio Sonoro(Spain)… Anyway, the album consisted of 2 tracks. The overall playing time is around 45 minutes. The sound is an unstoppable drone and distortion noise from guitars, slow and rythmless doom drums. Some experimental harsh and brutal vocals spreading around the shitty and dark atmosphere. This is a great noisy drone doom release, quite experimental, really slow and a bit harsh and sludgy. It can be the fellow track of some experimental doom black metal tracks Electric Wizard used to play. Album Review by Sovereign

Thrasher magazine:

HABSYLL MMVII(tUMULt, co-production multiple labels)--On the other end of the doom spectrum, this is not for the melodic-minded, Brutal to say the least, chronically slow-paced, cataclysmically uncompromised. Tile ritual oddness and dooming drone variables are what get me: so damn barbaric and repressive.

"Clearly Khanate fans is the first thing that springs to mind = instant little underground audience for this lot! These dudes clearly know what they are doing - and clearly have their own thing going on. Huge swathes of noise, odd drumming, odd sounds, it really sounds fucked up - totally slow and brutal and grimm. This is awesome. Will also keep tabs on this. 9/10" (Holy Roar Records)

Habsyll - "MMVIII" CD

HABSYLL from France are absolutely incompatible to the masses. Not only the band logo is hardly to decode without having studied hieroglyphs. The music or better the noise on their debut album “MMVIII” hardly offers comprehensible song structures. Thereby HABSYLL necessarily proceed with a certain degree of creativity. Both tracks („I“ und „II“) remember me noticeable strong of Khanate’s early releases, but don’t bear comparison with their destructive potential at all. “MMVIII” is in fact nasty Noise/Drone Doom and absolutely nothing for melody loving mopes. Swaying left and right doesn’t work, to sing along doesn’t as well, unless you’re sounding like Kermit lying under a buzz saw, gurgling every day with salt acid in place of mouthwash and eating steel needles for breakfast. I now agonize myself with Khanate’s first album what HABSYLL should as well at the next opportunity. Maybe the Frenchmen are able to convince me at their European tour in May, who knows!?

Addition: After having enjoyed Khanate, enough sleep and multiple listening to HABSYLL’s album I feel forced to fix the review to be fair. Logically the tunes must have sounded thin and less differenced to me at low volume. At room filling loudness level “MMVIII” offers impressive vibratory tendencies. Not in the sense of swaying left and right (read above), I rather have to prevent my furniture from tearing out of anchorage and oscillating through the room. HABSYLL make certain pressure at the eardrums, nearly hurting when the bass frequencies superpose and the drums are castigated with enormous power. Primarily the first title called “I” is bristling with lust for destruction and leaving just ashes and mental devastation. From the 6th minute of title “II” that what I called unstructured noise above turns into a hostile blast of nasty distorted riffs combined with stomach walls breaking drum torture and bloodcurdling screams/grunts. From the 10th minute the song again disperses into unspectacular noise bush with stertorous vocal background. Mathematically spoken both titles offer 17 + (29 - 25) = 21 minutes of vicious Drone destruction. After artistic concessions and necessary subtractions from the points for performance there results a fixed quantification:
6/10 DMF-Points


Judas Kiss Magazine:
No, that’s not a mistake in the record label details, this debut album from French ‘tremendo drone-doom’ merchants Habsyll has been co-released by no fewer than six different labels from the UK, Austria, France, Spain, Canada and the USA. Maybe it was just too heavy for any one label to handle, because by anyone’s standards this is one monstrously heavy motherfucker. This does mean, though, that if you’re thinking of buying MMVIII, you’d be well advised to check with the label closest to you, since there are likely to be savings to be made on postage and exchange rates.

Habsyll hail from Toulouse, and the band consists of guitarist / vocalist Yann, bassist Fred, and drummer / vocalist Nicoblast, who is a member of numerous other bands, including the black metal band Sughurim and ‘faerical punk blasters’ Nuit Noire. MMVIII contains two long tracks, totalling 45 minutes. The first track is waggishly entitled ‘II’, and the second track ‘I’, but that would seem to be the extent of Habsyll’s sense of humour, because unlike their fellow French doomsters Monarch, the music of Habsyll is an irony-free zone. The question here is how slow can you go, and Habsyll’s answer is very, very slow indeed. ‘I’ lasts for nearly 29 minutes, managing to make the 17-minute ‘II’ seem relatively speedy, though in fact both tracks move about as fast as the process of natural selection.

The drums don't keep time so much as build up to periodic spasms of activity, but if you were being metronomic about it, these tracks ooze along at something like 2 bpm. Around the middle of ‘I’, the drums develop into a rapid, low pattering beat, but the effect is more one of mimicking fear-drenched tachycardia than injecting any kind of rock’n’roll dynamism into the proceddings. Habsyll obviously bear comparison with bands like Sunn O))), Khanate, Catacombs and Moss, though the ugly squalls of feedback and slamming, discordant guitar here testify to a noise-rock lineage derived from the likes of early Swans, Jesus Lizard and Shellac rather than straightforward doom metal. The vocals are a series of visceral, anguished screams, the bass is an ever-present low-end drone, and the whole recording is saturated with an annihilating, pit-of-the-stomach feeling of negation and dread.

Every now and then, the disparate strands of Habsyll’s sound seem to coalesce and gain in momentum, but these flurries of speed are like the last desperate scrabblings and twitches of a vast wounded beast, sprawled out and dying alone on a dark and desolate plain, and they soon subside as life seeps away. It’s grandiose, yet infinitely painful at the same time. When Slayer sang of ‘slow death, immense decay,’ in ‘Angel Of Death’ (ironically, a pretty fast song), they could have been predicting the advent of Habsyll. This is über-doom for bottom-feeders seeking a new low, and lightweight doom-dabblers need not apply. Habsyll are destined for underground appeal, but those hardcore few who find this music endurable will probably value it for its incredible extremity, and with their debut album, Habsyll have secured a reputation as a name to conjure with at the grimmest and most blackened end of the doom spectrum.

The number of labels involved in this release is reflected in the opulence of the packaging, and MMVIII comes housed in an eight-panel digipack with scratchy grey-on-black artwork on the exterior and an endless expanse of black on the inside. There are several more upcoming releases from Habsyll planned, including a split single with The Austrasian Goat and a Kraftwerk cover for a tribute album, and the band is touring continental Europe at the time of writing.