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It's not every day I get a promo that leaves me struggling to say more than "Wow", but with their first full-length, Israel's Edellom have done just that. Based on their description as a Gothic Doom/Death/Black band, I was expecting this to be something in the vein of old Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, and I was absolutely right, as this has the fingerprints of Gothic and Turn Loose the Swans all over it. What I wasn't expecting was for this to be just as good as both of those albums, and in some ways even better.

Sirens is over an hour of brooding, oppressive Gothic Death/Doom with crushing, doomy riffs and guttural grunts interwoven with gloomy, sometimes beautiful melodic leads and the haunting vocals of Maria Raven Burdelov, whose warm, seductive mid-range sometimes gives way to commanding, almost unearthly wails. They also add in the expected keys and even some violins in places, and they try to vary their sound a bit by speeding up into more deathy sections, even featuring some brutal thugging on "Verge". However, these parts don't always fit in with the rest of the songs very well, and really the album is at its best when it lets the moody melodies and Burdelov's singing take center stage, as they do on "The Black Sorceress" and the excellent "Death of Annabelle". There are places where this album overstays its welcome, and an hour of this stuff can be a bit much, but for the most part this serves as proof that even in the day and age of bands like Delain and Autumn steering Gothic Metal in a more accessible direction, there's still room for the darker, heavier side of the genre to stand out. An impressive debut.