“Unawakening” is the debut album from Astral Sleep. This band plays heavy and slow doom/death with some elements of funeral doom. Due to the fact that the members of the band have a lot of different influences, you can hear some additional parts, outside the doom metal shoebox, too. Because of this, you can compare this band with bands like Aarni or Umbra Nihil.

“Unawakening” contains five tracks and tells the story of a transformation and falling into some kind of coma. The song ‘End Of Ages’ starts very easy and during the first 5 minutes you hear some mellow sounds and then the riffs take it all over. It’s a good song with varied vocals, both clean and grunts. The clean vocals need improvement though. That’s definitely a weak point. The song ‘Expression’ contains also the clean vocals and this puts the quality of the track down. This is really a pity. On ‘Cosmic Key’ you don’t hear any clean vocals. This song is very dark and heavy and doesn’t repeat itself. It ends with a fine, NWOBHM orientated, double guitar riff.

“Unawakening” has become a fine debut with some interesting tracks. The only point of critic I have is that they must focus on the clean vocals, as they are very weak. But besides that, there isn’t much to complain about. So when you’re into the more extreme sound of doom, I advice you to check this one out.