Slow, dark, mysterious, hopeless… this are just a few adjectives that can best describe the type of feelings and music Comatose Vigil displays in their debut album “Not a gleam of Hope” a very accurate title by the way. This Russian band like you might imagine by my short intro have dedicated themselves to pour the most obscure funeral doom metal some of us have heard; so depressive yet evil, slow yet full of musical arguments, well crafted yet boring if you are not a total fanatic of funeral doom!

Funeral Doom and the music by bands like Comatose really baffle me, they posses so much beauty and horror that the interpretation of their songs can come from two totally opposite sites of the spectrum and still make sense to me, and that’s precisely what happens on “Not A Gleam Of Hope”: they have this beautiful layout segments that bring images of old ghost stories involving some beautiful girl and a tragic history of death and romance to mind, and other episodes were their music just falls into a void, of droning tunes that only serve to amplified some of the more mediocre riffs on the album.

This Moscow trio, knows when and how to inject some “emotions” on this fatalistic symphony, a good proof of this, is the humongous song “Cataracts”, a track that despite its length (20 minutes) can provide some good transitions and a nice atmosphere creation, right between a lot of monotonous tunes, and that is what hurts Comatose, the almost drone aspect of some of their interludes, moments in which it sounds like they ran out of ideas an decided to just emulate some previous tunes that might sound dark to them but that simply end up boring me to the point of depression (I think that is actually their idea!).

Not A Gleam Of Hope is a record for “connoisseurs” for funeral doom scholars, so please if you are like me, stay away from this record.