Here you have something that is among the best in its genre; doom metal.

I first stumbled across this band when I was browsing through the vids of a friend of mine on YouTube. I liked what I heard and decided to check out the band more because it was so spectacular.

The title of this record is "Journey through Lands Unknown" and it does sound very cheesy and cliché for a doom metal record. But here it does actually fit very well because it does very much take you on a journey through some unique landscapes where you have not been before.

Indeed this is doom metal but it is very varied and unusual. It takes the atmospheric and somewhat progressive style of My Dying Bride, adds lots of the epic style of Candlemass even some of the powerful pounding of Nile to name a few things.

Opening up very strangely with the sampling of an arriving locomotive from the 19th century along with a train whistle, this doesn’t set the mood or anything but it gives you the feeling that you are about to travel into the album. After this some atmospheric keyboard enters with some narrative and after 3 minutes the journey has truly began.

Many of the tracks opening up softly and then plunges deeper into the majestic but gloomy realms where life has vanished for some reason. Except for the interlude every track is longer than 5 minutes, which gives them lots of space to fill out every weird idea Pantheist has to offer us.

As we all know there is quite many bands with lots of creativity but end up doing an album that doesn’t go anywhere, however here the band manages to not to fail into that pit-fall and creates a very coherent album even though it goes up and down like a rollercoaster. (To be read as progressive).

For such a diverse album the vocals need to special also, right? Here that is really the case with very much variety. But with three vocalists I don't really expect anything else, but I am not sure who does what. Anyhow, the dominant vocal style is growling which is very powerful and intangible, it does not show emotion still it is a needed part to make this album complete.

Very often a clean voice occurs and it is a very diverse one going from high to low well. Whoever it is who performs it, it does sound similar to Vintersorg of the band with the same name when he sings in the lower register. This is really great because I am big fan of Vintersorg and his voice.

It is very short but at one of the songs some vocals similar to Tom Warrior's Nordic warrior style singing is to be found. It does not add much, but it is a quite interesting to hear something unexpected. The croaking shrieks that found their way unto this is somewhat unexpected, but they add lot of the emotion this album provokes.

Guitars being down tuned very much and lots of sweeping makes it quite standard for a good doom metal act still they manages to add something to the norm. What I mean is that the strumming is much more powerful than most doom metal bands out there. This resembles Morbid Angel and Nile when they are in their slower moments, which is nothing but really awesome.

Another thing that deserves some attention is the keyboards which take up lots in the mix, never overwhelming though. The melodies from the keyboard do sound so natural I do often believe it is not a keyboard, but a little orchestra recruited for the album.

Mostly it is grandiose and just breathtaking sounds with very much variety. Sometimes the variety becomes too much even, some sounds does not even fit to the overall concept of this album. On at least two of the songs a sound which would fit on a funk song appear and it ruins much of the feeling in that very moment and I almost cringe. A Swedish rock band from the 90's called The Creeps had a very similar effect on many of their songs, there it did fit with the party image the band had, but here it is just out of place.

The bass follows the riffs played on the guitars and have quite much prominence, but it does not add so much to the sound in general. Drums are majestic and have some heavy pounding without sounding like they have a shitload of triggers inserted. I think this is unusual but it does sound very good for this album.