** 2026 Stock ** Park of Reason feels like a crossroads in Paul Chain’s labyrinthine catalogue, a place where his roots in funereal doom collide head‑on with his more expansive psychedelic and progressive urges. The record opens onto familiar terrain - slow, iron‑heavy riffs, drums that land like tolling bells, bass sinking into the subsoil - but almost immediately, fissures appear in the surface: organs flare in lurid colours, lead guitars spiral outward instead of simply bearing down, and Chain’s invented‑language vocals hover above the mix like a radio transmission from a parallel rite. The “park” of the title suggests a fenced‑off zone, yet the music keeps pressing at its own perimeter, trading confinement for a strange, spiralling freedom.

Structurally, the album privileges long forms and patient escalation, allowing themes to bloom, decay and reappear in altered states. Sections of near‑stillness - a lone keyboard figure, a murmured vocal, a guitar phrase hanging in reverb - sit next to sequences of crushing density, where every instrument seems to occupy the same molten frequency band. Lyrically, or perhaps extra‑linguistically, Chain leans into his signature glossolalia, using sound and cadence to suggest spiritual unease, ecstatic breakage and the sheer inarticulacy of certain experiences. Park of Reason ultimately plays like a guided walk through an inward landscape: there are clear paths and recurring landmarks, but also blind corners, sudden drops and vistas that refuse to resolve, affirming Paul Chain as a singular cartographer of doom’s more hallucinatory edges.