Ahab return with their fourth full-length album. I loved their debut Call of the Wretched Sea, but their follow-up Divinity of Oceans left me unimpressed, and so I skipped The Giant and lost track of the band. Thankfully this new one finds them back at the tiller, producing quality Funeral Doom.

This is a band that has found fertile thematic ground in the ocean, and they have this time made a concept album about William Hope Hodgson's classic horror novel of the same title. The bizarre, horrific narrative of men lost at sea and beset by strange terrors makes a perfect subject for this dark, moody album. This still does not have the massive sweep of their debut, but it shows a return to their tense, uneasy songwriting style of old, with the twisting, twining riffs that build the tension and despair higher and higher as the album goes on. You have to pay attention, and let the music carry you off to a twilight land of seaborne horrors, and it will do so. A solid work from an iconoclastic band.