OVERMARS´Born Again is a fucking devestating piece of music that documents the band evolving even further from the simplistic Isis/Neurosis comparisons that have dogged their previous releases. The album descends deep into themes of self-immolation, horror, and rebirth, and becomes a harrowing narrative as it moves through a series of different musical moods. Overmars had already established their atmospheric, electronically-tainted sludge-metal sound on their excellent 2005 album Affliction, Endocrine...Vertigo and all of the previous splits with Donefor, Iscariote, Fugüe and Icos, but Born Again is something new from the band; this forty-minute epic moves from pulverizing industrial dirge blanketed with heavily textured layers of processed guitar and fearsome gutteral roars intermixed with captivating female vocals, to passages of haunting dark ambience and bottom-heavy churn, and a magesterial finale that stretches gloom-ridden moody riffage, vaporous electronics and dramatic male/female singing across the song's final fifteen minutes, a tense, slow buildup that erupts into an earth-shaking crescendo of super heavy riffage. Immensely bleak and heavy, Born Again brings together elements of Godflesh's industrial pummel, black metal, tribal dirge , the violent nihilism of Swans, doomy death metal, and even some black strains of psychedelia into a monumental metallic black hole . Like I said, I really loved their last album Affliction, which I thought was an interesting variation on the Neurosis/psychedelic sludge sound with its heavy use of electronics, and if you liked that album as much as I did, I'm pretty sure that you'll be blown away by this darker new form that the band has taken. This Crucial Blast release of Born Again features a distinctly different album design than the original version on Appease Me, and is also packaged in a four-panel digipack.