A stunning new album of orchestral doom from this Slovakian duo. Although, when I say "doom", I'm not talking about doom metal...rather, Phragments bring together slow, ponderous tribal drums, dark orchestral strings, and malevolent dark ambience to create a sort of ominous industrial chamber-doom for Earth Shall Not Cover Their Blood, and boy is this album a downer. If the music wasn't grim enough, the vocals (when they appear) are dark and dramatic and totally forlorn, and the lyrics deal in hopeless endtime visions of a ruined earth burnt black by humanity. Grim and despondant but also imbued with an ashen grandeur and an epic heaviness that makes this something that fans of more adventurous downer-crush should investigate. The opening title track blends the drifting Lustmord-like drones with distant war-drums and deep resonant cellos and gongs for an eight minute instrumental, and when the drums start to rise up towards the end, it's as if you're hearing some dark orchestra piece performing with the guys in Neurosis hammering out a wall of booming tribal percussion. It's not until the second track "Over Deadlands" that the vocals appear, a deep male voice crooning over a sinister loop of violins and crushing tribal drums and deep bass, like Swans performing a black magic ritual. The music drops out in the middle and leaves behind just a dark droning synth line, but then kicks back in, heavier and distorted, the vocals now alternating a blackened distorted rasp with the clear deep singing...creepy, heavy stuff. The rest of the album follows suit, moving from almost purely ambient passages of dark symphonic drone and grim soundtrack-like strings ("As Hope Turns To Ashes"), sorrowful industrial dirge ("The Fogs Have Risen", "Chant Of The Forsaken", The Return"), and hellish, doom-laden dread punctuated with monstrous, almost black metallish vocals (""The Kin Of Cain"), the sound always dark, always somber, always centered around minimal industrial throb, surges of powerful tribal drumming and thunderous tympani, and the murky atmospheric wash of those orchestral strings, deep groaning brass, and somber drones. Imagine Lustmord combined with Amber Asylum and Test Dept, Swans crossed with In Slaughter Natives, a doom-filled apocalyptic chamber music, dark and beautiful and chilling... fans of that recent Aghast reissue will probably dig this, as well as those into the dark martial industrial of Nordvargr's Toroidh project. Comes in a six panel digipack.