Album Review: Craft - White Noise and Black Metal

Craft was quiet for quite a while before this. Granted, they've been quiet since as well, but at least there is a precedent for it now. After drummer and founding member Daniel Halen quit in 2005, the band briefly considered breaking up, with the ultimate fate of the group remaining unclear even after 2011's Void, where Dirge Rep of Enslaved filled in behind the kit. White Noise & Black Metal was Craft's first album in seven years, heralding their triumphant return to a Darkthrone-devoted cleave of severely sharp and acerbically aggressive black metal, an invigorating blast of arctic misanthropy and cosmic angst that exhumes the genre's simple, bleak, and world-wearing forecast for humanity and serves as bait for the rotten, scale-shedding eels that squirm in writhing heaps below the surface tension of the soul- carving up the frost-fortified ramparts into intricate etches and runic arcs, a tormented intercourse of vesica piscis through which dark auras pulse and old grudges flow to attain a ripe bloody luster. WN&BM is a cleaner-produced album than its predecessor, the platework here acquiring the polish of an unnatural and sickly shade of silver- in spite of this turn towards refined, translucent shades of mayhem, there is a surprising live-recording quality to these tracks, making it possible to imagine yourself in a dungeon-like practice space submerged beneath a barn in the Swedish rurals, petrified and dragging oneself across the floor as these riff revenants raise a sigil-scrawled, phantasmal citadal of white-burning annihilation from the blackening earth of a cellar floor with the adumbral iridescence of their sinister symphony, the gust from their amplifiers coursing cold down your collar like the breath of a sky-swallowing wolf, and the thump of their grooves reverberating through your chest like a hammer striking iron. Honestly, I had a lot of fun with this release when it came out in 2018, not just because it rules in an ontological sorta way, but because at the time I was working with an incredibly annoying washed-up hipster who dropped out of New York to settle in Chicago as a sort of "Plan B" and settlement with his own ambitions. He was the kind of guy who "liked a little bit of everything," so long as "everything" was something approved by that month's flavor of byline-boasting shitshovelers, more commonly known to the public as "tastemakers." We were in a shared workspace, and I knew I could always throw it on to piss him off, especially when he suggested that we listen to something like Deafheaven or the like. It is ingrained in my lobes how this record never failed to carve a grimace across his perpetual five-o'clock shadow, deep enough to threaten to crack his gaunt, frail jawline intwine. I learned then that Craft is capable of casting a dark cloud over all of the right kind of people, and for that, they will always have my respect.

The Season of Spite (Mist) is upon you! 

Album Review: Blood of the Wolf - V:Indomitable

Chicago metal, underappreciated, yet undeterred. Despite receiving little to no love across the rest of this cursed land, the Second City is really second to none when it comes to spawning immensely visceral and bottom-buck-nasty musical marauders. Take blackened death metal project Blood of the Wolf, for instance. Every time they unveil a new record, it rolls off the proverbial press like a half-rendered and thoroughly shredded deer carcass plummeting onto the hood of your car from an overpass on the Dan Ryan- an ominous blast of boiling, flesh-withering blastbeats and peeling staccato riffage that is as outrightly threatening as it is cogently carnal- an externalization of a blood-starved beast's gnawing, insatiable hunger, poured through the siphon of the dialect of aural extremity. If you think you're in the mood for a band that will give you inner ear damage on a scale commensurate with an undersized detachment of lupine louts commandeering your auditory canals for their filthy pillaging and bloody contests of will, then look no further than last year's V: Indomitable- seemingly named as a promise, and executed with enmity. Blood's brand of death metal adheres closely to the playbooks of late '90s black metal practitioners Hate and Spearhead, delivering cruel waves of relentless, unsaturated percussion, with anguished and torturous guitar grooves, and volcanic vocal performances that could make the devil himself wet his tunic in panic. The production on this album is pretty much impeccable, and the mixing is balanced and smart, leaving nothing to be desired in terms of capturing the fire and fury of the band's performance. Inside you are two wolves, and they both cower, paler than sheep's wool in the shadow of this chord-churning, chaos-courting, canis-carnivorous beast. Indomitable, indeed. 

Album Review: Coffret De Bijoux - My Limbs Are Not Mine

Of all the tattered flesh shrouds and spectral shades she slips through, Coffret de Bijoux appears to be maturing into Alice Simard's most compelling and sonically adventurous manifestation. The vicious Québec-based virtuoso has quite the rap sheet, splitting her time and a swath of eardrums across a range of abominable aural bêtes noires; whether she is flexing her carrion-fed, brutal-death shredding chops with Codex Crudelitas, communing with the gods of inter-neuro-grid with the Lain-inspired cybergrind exe. FILESHAREMAIDEN, or gutting the idols of restraint with the dauntingly anointed goregrind sauvage Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy- there is no height of extremity too lofty, or aquifer of dissonance too low, that to drill to its depths would be unimaginable. Which brings us back to Coffret de Bijoux; outwardly, it is a depressive atmospheric black metal project- the first releases under its mantle were ghastly and otherworldly, devoid of recognizable human warmth (or verbal expression) and submerged in the oily dew of void-burn existential perturbation, an orientation towards sound that culminated in the pinnacle of 2025's wen jalè jalè gunala, a fraying web of gossamer that shrieks and rends its own soft flesh in a fitful attempt at self-reorganization and recognition, tortured form that threatens to spontaneously combust through the friction of its interior traivol. There was perhaps a considerable dose of Damian Anton Ojeda's Trhä in the alchemist's vessel out of which Coffret de Bijoux emerged, especially in the way that emotion tends to leak out all over performance like black lacquer seeping from a cracked inkwell, but there is certainly more to its chemical composition than simply a reflective polymerization of her peers. Last year, Coffret de Bijoux also introduced this world to the project's emo chip-tune side with the sullenly angelic and blindingly enigmatic intablej' u ana, which could have convincingly fronted as a Weatherday and Këkht Aräkh collaboration and left me uncertain about its true origins. This willful and restless transmutation is again evident on my limbs are not mine, which, as far as I can tell, is Alice's first (mainly) English-language release with Coffret De Bijoux, as well as her first full and proper punk record- scraping together brisk, punchy third-wave emo-inspired grooves, pop-punk melodies, and early metalcore riffs to beat back the night with a force of resilience possessed only by the perpetually young at heart. Incredibly, the record retains enough of its black metal allele to not result in too dramatic or off-puttingly divergent a turn for the project on the whole, but rather offers an opportunity to comprehend the richness of the vein of influences and inspirations that conspire to produce the genius of Coffret de Bijoux's spellbinding cache. From the rattling rollick and arresting seraphic avowal of "i need to see" all full of loose screws and bent halos, to the sweetly venomous coo of "nuit d'automne," to the veiled hunger and agitatedly exposed decampment of "i never recollect," through to the quietly wounded, organ-transplanting, and giallo-stained lament of the title-track, and finally the crushing return to form on the tearful, ruminating spectre and closer "pillow poise remembering"- my limbs are not mine extends the tensile subluxation of Alice's spirit as embodied in Coffret de Bijoux in a manner that magnifies the luster and ethereal shine of its fractured intricacy and interior.

Album Review: 1349 - Massive Cauldron of Chaos

Like most people who claim the ignoble mantle and nerd de plume of audiophile, I'm still catching up on releases from 2025 (formerly the dumbest year on record, a record that was subsequently surpassed by the first week of 2026). Of the things that I'm glad that I've scooped out of the eye of the abyss is 1349's live record Winter Mass. Recorded around the time that the lockdowns were lifted in (presumably) Oslo (or some other godless, frigid plateau), this live record is a raw but vital procession of ugly and void-gouging sound that demonstrates pertinently just why the band has been able to maintain an audience for close to three decades on this cursed ball of dirt we call a planet. Unavoidably (at least for me), hearing Winter Mass has made me nostalgic for the album that introduced me to the band in the first place, 2014's Massive Cauldron of Chaos. It's not, as far as I know, considered one of their better albums, but it's also not one of their worst- it just tends to be the one that I think about most whenever I'm reminded of 1349... which is any time the subject of medieval diseases comes up (which in my life is more than you'd think for someone who is neither a physician nor a historian, but who does watch an awful lot of Apothecary Diaries). Named for the year that the black plague finally overtook Norway, 1349's most obvious references stylewise are groups like Mayhem and early Satyricon, although there are instances of Kreator-esque thrash riffage, most notable on the clamoring gnaw of gothic angst “Slaves,” the second song off the album I'm presently examining. In general, MCoC is a return to the band’s coldly masterful, blood-nourished roots. The previous decade was one of experimentation for the group, releasing boundary-pushing albums Revelations of the Black Flame in 2009 and Demonoir in 2010, both of which were received with hyperbolic consternation by corpse-painters who prefer to keep things fast and nasty. This superfluous ire was mostly quelled by MCoC’s return to form though, with Ravn’s raspy forked-tongue vocals, Archaon’s peeling shred torrents, and the super-human speed of drummer Frost’s legendary percussion laying waste to the expectations of their audience, and further treating them to a dip in a bubbling lake of acid swirling with a crimson foam of vicera-churned froth on “Cauldron,” rending them like a rag doll in a tug of war between two competing zombified pit bulls on “Exorcism,” disfiguring them beyond recognition on the bruisingly unshackled melee of “Chained,” and then mercilessly desecrating their remains on the groovy gang press of “Postmortem.” 1349 would indulge in more abstract forms of expression on subsequent releases, 2019's The Infernal Pathway and 2024's The Wolf & the King, but the stewing malignance of MCoC was undoubtedly the odious succor needed to  breathe fresh hellfire into the group, rallying them to carry their campaign of darkness into the 21st Century.

Bringer of a long dusk of discord (Season of Mist).

Album Review: 구룡 (Kuryong) - 백두의 소환 (Summoning of Paektu)

I debated with myself long and hard about whether or not I wanted to say anything about this album, and in the end, the side of me that favored writing a post won out, mostly because I happen to like this release a lot sonically, but also, against my better judgment, I find it amusing. But before I go any further, I just want to say for the record that I hate this kind of stuff and I am generally opposed to it. What kind of stuff you may ask? Stuff like people uploading metal and punk projects to the internet while claiming to be from a country where there is a perception that these types of music are either uncommon, outright prohibited, or both. Over the past decade, the worst offenders in this regard (in my estimation at least) have been black metal and crust punk music from people claiming to be from Muslim majority countries. They are usually embarrassingly exposed from the outset by writing the titles to their songs in Arabic running left to right, but even worse than being liars, these projects are usually pretty suck-ass, soulless, and derivative. Everyone's favorite example of this sort of scam seems to be Ghost Bath, i.e., the North Dakota atmoblack band who initially made their bag claiming to be from China (a country that has no shortage of metal bands in it), but I could actually care less about another personalityless "blackgaze" band. For context, Kuryong (which Google keeps translating for me as Kowloon- a place in China that no longer exists), claims on their Bandcamp, and through a number of uploads to Youtube via channels that post a lot of underground metal, that they are part of a North Korean propaganda project, actually based in the DPRK and sponsored by the government there. Sure... the government of the DPRK is looking to increase warm feelings and tolerance for itself in the West and the world more broadly by releasing black metal music... the most openly hostile and nihilistic form of heavy music there is... great f*cking strategy. What's next? Are they going to hire actors to re-enact a GG Allin set at the next UN General Assembly meeting? I can't claim to be an expert on all things (or any things) North Korean, but I'm willing to bet that a band like this, with this image and sound, is not how THAT (or any) government wants to present itself to the world. So it's nearly 100% guaranteed the backstory of this demo is bull-pucky from a sniff test angle, but then there is the actual proof, manifest, that this is not a North Korean project, this being the fact that IT HAS A BANDCAMP AND YOUTUBE PRESENCE! It's literally against Bandcamp's Terms of Service to use their platform if you are a citizen of, or located in, North Korea, and any money obtained from such an internet presence via sales would violate so, so, so many US sanctions and laws. In addition, YouTube is extremely cautious about letting stuff from sanctioned countries onto their platform because they don't want to get fined or prosecuted by the US government- they will take down a channel run by a woman in North Korea who does nothing but fish and visit waterfalls in order to avoid these complications- there is no reason to believe they wouldn't immediately kill something like this demo as well if they thought there was any chance of it having its origin in the DPRK. So what IS the likely story behind Kuryong's Summoning of Paektu? Well as some people on Reddit and YouTube have already pointed out, the band does appear to actually be singing (shrieking) in Korean, so that probably rules out some Idaho farm boy having a goof. It also means that this is likely a hoax (or likely more accurately a facade) of someone(s) from either South Korea or somewhere else in Asia (potentially making this an even more intriguing and frankly dangerous endeavor than it appears on its surface- because being pro-DPRK, even as a joke, is very, very, incredibly illegal in South Korea). But what is the REALLY REAL story behind Kuryong's Summoning of Paektu? It freakin rips! It doesn't matter where it's from, this is a despairingly ugly, bleak and harrowingly caustic cask of second-wave styled black metal that sounds like it was recorded in the depths of a sunken tomb only to rise like a cloud of diseased bats to blot out the sun and suck the marrow from your bones. A horrid whirlwind of blightingly odious sound that licks and gnaws the ears like a gale formed of biting insects and razor wire. A wretched and consciously vicious emergence of insatiable malignance and pestilent sound that harkens to darker prospects just beyond the field of our apprehension and the light of our intellect and reason. I really don't care who did this, or where they are actually from, but I want to hear more, either under Kuryong's present guise, or whatever other mask they care to don in order to face the world.

Album Review: Abriction - Forbidden Bounds

I've been thinking a lot more about death than usual. A couple of weeks ago something busted in the vent to the dryer in my house and took up residence in my basement amongst my belongings. I couldn't locate it or even tell what it was for days, but kept finding its nuggets as well as trails of shredded blankets, cardboard boxes, and electrical wires (it had a REAL taste for ethernet cables in case you're wondering) just about everywhere. Then one day, the evisceration of my belongings ceased, and a few days after that, I found, by smell, the carcass of a rabbit in one of the storage areas. It had evidently starved to death, or died of thirst, something... I only wish I had found it sooner because by the time I came upon it, the poor dead varmint was in repose on a bed of writhing maggots- sections of its flank having already collapsed inward into black troughs out of which a runnel of wiggling things aimlessly oozed. If I had been able to spot and catch the little scamp earlier, I could have released it and saved it from this fate- alas, its natural skittishness and the floor plan of my basement conspired to turn it into a forensics challenge. This event has unexpectedly led me to wonder what kind of rut I've designed for myself, and it is leading me to a place I'd rather not be several years down the trail from today, a trap of my own making with no hope of pivoting course. The unfortunate reality is that you can't know if you're doing something stupid, so long as you're following your inclinations, which, like the rabbit that made my home its tomb, means one's best instincts (seeking shelter, hiding from larger animals... chewing on electrical wiring for sustenance) become the surest route to self-disposal. I can't say honestly that there are any habits I indulge that are obvious preludes to doom, but it's hard to shake the ambient anxiety all the same. Someone whose instincts seem spot on to me at the moment though is the Bronx-based black metal project Abriction. Her latest LP Forbidden Bounds is aiding in the ebb of these directionless fears that have swept over me recently by lending me the benefit of its biting catharsis, as it paints a portrait of reality far bleaker than the one I currently inhabit. The album is a meditation on the paralytic psychic-static of loneliness, the gulf in consciousness between souls (even presumably close ones), and the tendency of life to be eaten by ash as easily as a cigarette is consumed by its ember- classic bitter, neverending winter, and cold night for forlorn spirits type material. It's an impressive solo black metal project and a resoundingly piquant effort that goes well beyond the typical blackened void-inhaling drone and d-beat pummel that typifies endeavors of this sort. It seems tempting to silo Meredith Salvatori's (that is, the singular woman behind Abriction) work into the "blackgaze" camp* due to the project's atmospherically dense and morosely melodic tendencies, but the riffage, direful gashes of groove and scaths of disjointed rhythm displayed on Forbidden Bounds appear to have as much pedigree in pop-punk, trip-hop, deathcore, nu-metal and video game OSTs as they do in relation to anything Alcest or Bosse-de-Nage have given spiteful form to over the course of their distinctive careers. The whole and inseparable integration of disparate but counterposing trains of angst-animated euphony are so smooth and effortless here that even describing them as chimeric would be misleading, as their synthesis is so complete that the only source of dissonance they exhibit is in the overwhelming force of alienation their combined form gives expression to- it is less a manticore-type situation and more a representation of a member of the mink tribe in union as human and beast all in the same... and under the influence of a full moon, naturally. The best comparison by example that is raised by Abriction's efforts on this record is actually not a metal project at all, but the hyperpop of underscores, and similarly oriented artists, who playfully arrange familiar yet categorically distinct templates to fashion their masterworks; in this way Abriction treats all genres and past modes of expression as a kind of raw clay from which she scrapes and sculpts to suit her vision and impress her intention upon, molding these sounds to the bleak, malignant curvature of her mind. As of this writing, there seems to be a slow consciousness building amongst fans of Abriction's lengthy and growing discography that her 2024 LP Banshee is the most preferable articulation of all her variable permutations, but this harder-landing, teeth-baring, and less atmospherically-soluble form found on Forbidden Bounds is pressing the frontier of her potential in an even more fruitful and darkly splendid direction and I hope to see it continue. Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to go leave some crackers on the floor of my basement so that no one else inadvertently starves down there, and then shoot my therapist a check-in email to see if we can't get something on the books for next week.

* Because apparently the only unorthodox black metal band anyone is aware of anymore is Deafheaven, so everything becomes "blackgaze" if it tends towards complex shades of moodiness rather than outright nihilism these days.

Album Review: Black Salvation - Uncertainty is Bliss

Dark, heavy, seedy psychedelic rock out of Leipzig Germany. Uncertainty is Bliss is the Relapse Records debut of Black Salvation, the controlled substance-enhanced side project of Uno Bruniusson, lead singer of modern death-rock band Grave Pleasures. It’s hedonistically hypnotic and brimming with magical maleficence, reminiscent of labelmates Ecstatic Vision, but with less guitar wankery. Bruinusson embraces an economical approach to his song-craft, gifting these tracks a tense logic of restraint and secrecy that enhances their shrouded and darkly transcendent appeal. Check out the bluesy bulging chords and tread-jumping groves of “Floating Torpids," the subterranean mysticism, tunneling groves, and mercurial mood shifts of “Breathing Hands," and the haunted, sludgy, suspended and distended 9-minute jam “A Direction is Futile" for a taste of that desolate yearning that beckons to you from beyond the sheath of this mortal veil.

On Relapse... because I am apparently once again covering records from big metal labels... It's like I'm back in 2021 or something.  

Album Review: Bereft - Lands

Blackened sludge metal out of Madison, WI to give voice to a once sacred, now defiled and ravaged terrain, Bereft play a deeply atmospheric hybrid of black metal and sludge metal, placing them in a uniquely crushing category of extreme metal with other chimeric monstrosities like Stone Titan and Chicago’s own Lord Mantis (circa their 2017 LP Lands- the subject of this write up). Think Agalloch meets Baroness, with all the aspirational and uplifting parts sucked out and replaced by earth-cracking, tarry guitar dirges and despair-inducing primal howls. This is bleak, acerbic, and enveloping metal music that is as compelling as it is desolate... and it’s pretty fackin' desolate. Lands is Bereft’s second album and first with Prosthetic Records. Brace yourself for the leviathanic “We Wept” with its lumbering, impossibly heavy bass which collides with knotted guitar dirges under pained howls and other vocal lamentations before exploding into a fury of tremolo-picking and ruthless blast beats, “The Ritual” which leads in with Agalloch-esc ambient guitars before unfurling into weighty funeral march with an ever-quickening tempo which ramps up into a tug-of-war between swampy mid-tempo chords and a dissonant stomp of blast beats and demonic guitars, and (lastly) the devastating fourteen minute closer, “Waning Light” with its gargantuan, rolling riffs that produce the auditory sensation of being swallowed in the yawning mow of a tremor with brief reprieves of rippling ethereal guitars to break the filthy, clausterphobic tension. This land isn't your land, this land isn't my land, this land belongs to the dead. 

We can rebuild your record collection... make it better, faster, stronger, and heavy as fuck (Prosthetic Records)

Album Review: Ails - The Unraveling

Ails was the second phase of vocalist Laurie Shanaman and guitarist Christy Cather’s life work of reshaping the American metal scene. The duo first played together in the phenomenal black metal band Ludicra, where they advanced a fresh take on the acidic hail-storm of second-wave blast-beats and tremulous, while adding a momentous sense of atmosphere and vamperic folk-rock, complemented by Shanaman’s amphibious growl and the occasional clean singing segment. Ails on their LP, The Unraveling, is a less straightforward rock project than their previous band. Here they double down on bleak, damp atmosphere, not in a metal hipster, “ambient” or shoegazey kind of way, instead embracing elements of death-doom a la Hooded Menace, while striving to write serrated, alienating riffs that fulfill the eldritch covenant of their Nordic forbearers. The harsh whirlwind of cresting tremulous, coiling grooves, acid-plaque feedback, and wounded female vocal squalls may not be welcoming to the uninitiated, but given a chance, these tortured missives can be a cathartic departure for you and your more adventurous listeners. 

The Unraveling is Ails’s debut LP released by the practitioners of dark, inscrutable sound curation over at The Flenser, and unfortunately, it may also be their last as it was released in 2018, and they have yet to produce a successor. Another vibrant alternative metal project, cut down in its youth by expositio, or maybe lack thereof...

Album Review: This Curse is Gift - A Throne of Ash

Digging into the black, sodden wilds to find hexes and dark enclaves of deep aura with Swedish blackened hardcore oath-keepers, This Gift is a Curse. Rising from the muck of mirthless quagmires and the heap of half-drowned and burnt cast-offs that suffuse and populate the modern world, TGC make hell a place on earth on their third LP, A Throne of Ash. While the band stakes their turf on the well-trodden, viscera-coated bridge that arches between second-wave black metal and crusty hardcore, there is an added depth of desperate searching anguish to the proceedings that help TGC stand out from their petulant peers, claiming the high ground for themselves atop a twisted hoshi and monument to turbulent spiritual angst. One such aspect that defines the group's eldrich embodiment of animus energy is the frankly chilling occult aesthetic they’ve adopted for their album art and stage personas. Surrounded and adorn with hoods, twisted crowns, and devilish-looking farm equipment, they present as a secret society to themselves- one in possession of knowledge that was better off buried or lost to time. I'm not one to doubt the depths of the void they slithered out of; their music is proof enough of their ascent from the pit of raw arcane rupture. The chaotic "Wolvking" is haunted by some of the more esoteric and bone-chilling sounds the band has to offer, while "Wormwood Star" seethes with dark radiance in a rippling pool of black oily rhythms, and the daring death-wish “In Your Black Halo” is pure, unspoiled noise-core. More straightforward hardcore can be found on the Converge-indebted “Gate Dweller” and the power-violence imbued "Thresholds," where you truly get the sense of something ancient and foul invading the plain of Euclidian reason. Plunge into the crimson pyre and arise a regent on A Throne of Ash, awaiting a new dark dawn when you may relinquish your crown to an even more formidable terror. 

*Clears throat for Donovan impression.* Must be the Season of [the] Mist, yeah!

Album Review: Possession - Exorkizein

With a band like Belgium's Possession you could easily assume you know what to expect from them, but then I think you'd likely be wrong. Sure, Possession looks like a second-wave black metal band- and they assiduously are- but comprehending a thing is different than experiencing it, and you really do need to experience Exorkizein firsthand. Possession released the record in 2017 as their first LP, and have yet to follow it up with a sequel. Of course, when you nail it on the first try, why take another swing? Especially when the first is still sailing through the air like a lightly singed bat escaping a smoldering belfry. Groups like Bathory cast a long shadow, and Possession certainly has staked out territory in that legend's sinister pall, but beyond the tremendous spin-tingling tremolos and arresting reptilian howls, their dark aura is manifested most potently through the atmosphere they cultivate. It's not a heavy ambiance, like Hooded Menace, but one of brisk peril and bewilderment, conjured by distant maniacal shouts, half-croak incantations, and highly engrossing cutaways that align to impress upon the listener that something truly diabolical is afoot. The album sounds like the arc of an unfolding calamity, baited by hubris and blind avarice. A satanic blaze that consumes a monastery and all its inhabitance as punishment for their transgressions against God and nature in a force majeure of cleansing absolution and exercise by fire- evil feasting upon evil, flame dosing flame, rot cured by conflagration, burning until nothing is left by ash and brittle bones, and the memory of a nightmare that came alive as a warning to all mankind. 

Become ungovernable with Invictus Productions.

Album Review: Ragana - All's Lost

Spring Colors Challenge - Day 10: California (the Color)*

Revisiting Ragana's All's Lost is like going through old photos and finding one that you don't remember having been taken. At least that's the way it feels to me, and it brings back a lot of memories. Some good. Others not so much. All's Lost dropped at a time when I was in a transitionary period in my life. I had been moving around a lot and having to start my life over from scratch ever couple of months. On top of that, I had finally decided to give heavy metal a try after having actively avoided it for years. I didn't understand what I was hearing on All's Lost then, but it seemed like it was coming from a deep, aching place. Its starkness and rough agitation seemed like a total scandal, but there was something about it that was altogether natural and familiar as well. Needless to say, I wasn't scared off. I recently checked out the group's latest LP, Desolation's Flower, which they released last year through The Flenser, and it prompted me to follow up with the 2022 remaster of the band's debut. The contrast between the releases is undeniable, with their most recent album finally reaching the summit of form they embarked on as early as 2013's Unbecoming. But recognizing their diverging paths doesn't cause a reencounter with their origins to be any less vindicating. All's Lost is still unique, even amongst black metal bands who have fully embraced the shoe-polish admiring, Ulver aestheticist click who attained grudging acceptance in the wake of Sunbather. Their outlier amongst outsiders status is owed to the fact that the duo of Maria Stocke and Coley Gilson bring a kind of witchy, love-punk energy to pine-dwelling, rain-soaked, American third-wave black metal, normally associated with groups like Wolves in the Throne Room- a kind of vibe you'd expect from a Kill Rock Stars signee, rather than somebody who'd know about, let alone have a favorite album by, Panopticon. There are even parts of All's Lost that almost give me a glimpse of what might have happened had Bratmobile given themselves a corpse-paint make-over and decided to devote their lives to furnishing free musical therapy and emotional counseling to bats and other nocturnal creatures. There is a beguiling manner in which Maria and Coley approach the material and songwriting on this release that is playful, even naive. Like a youth running into the woods to gather ingredients for a potion without any clear idea of what they're looking for, nor the intended effect of the concoction they aspire to brew- they are simply being called by the abundance of nature to seek out its secrets, leaving their imagination to fill in the gaps as necessary. It may begin with make-believe, but the lessons that are learned through the amusement of exploration can become the foundation for rituals and a formidable command of one's environment in later years. After all, the basis of all magic is the belief that the unreal can become tangled, that all that is there is not apparent from the surface, and that there are depths beyond the veil that the vessel of this world cannot expect to contain. Similarly, there is something irreducible about All's Lost, that, in defiance of its simplicity, remains captivating even as the duo define their legacy and shape their fate elsewhere. The album doesn't stand in the shadow of their later work, as much as in its only dark arena of reverie. 

*March rolls on and I continue my streak of writing a fresh album review every day inspired by a different color. Today's color is one that shares a name with our 31st state. It is named for a fictional island ruled by women, where no man who values his life should tread. California is also the place where the colonial project of the USA met its contiguous continental limit. There is nowhere else to go once you reach California. Still, people follow their dreams there year after year, and all those broken lives end up piling up into one long epitaph. California represents the absolute limit of one's individual potential and prospects- once there, you either confront that part of yourself that chased you to that sunny graveyard, or you go insane. Maybe both. Put another way, it's a place that only the bleakness of black metal can do justice to. 

Album Review: Këkht Aräkh - Pale Swordsman

 Spring Colors Challenge - Day 1: Black*

There has been for some time an inexplicable notion that I've carried with me about one-man, black metal maestro Këkht Aräkh's second LP, Pale Swordsman. That dim hunch grinding between the gear-teeth in my thought-pit is that, despite all signs to the contrary, this is a sping-time album. Of course, when I looked it up, low-and-behold, the album dropped in April of 2021. There are times when even the daftest of my intuitions prove correct. This, apparently, is one of those times. But the serendipity of a release date is all about spreadsheets, logistics, and record-label blarney- what about the substance? How spring-like are Pale Swordsman's words, sounds, and stride? Well, if we're being honest, very spring-like- if statistics on depressive ideation are an acceptable reference point. As you may well know, spring is a dark time for a lot of people. The decreased sunlight and forced isolation of the colder months of the year can wreak havoc on people's minds and emotions. Following winter's chill with a damp and unpredictable period that usually combines heavy rain, hail, and sporadic heat waves certainly does not do any favors for the nerves of folks who are readily affected by such things. In the depths of the seclusion and erratic nature of the environment, some very dark thoughts can creep in. It's in this low sling where one might find the entrance to Këkht Aräkh's keep. His second LP, Pale Swordsman, draws heavily from early US side DSBM, with its dry, heaving cries, the clattering serrated anguish of its grooves, and the cold distant pull of its tremolos, all gestures of despondence evoking the struggle of someone attempting to beat back the demons that have incubated in a broth of alienation, deep in inside his bowls, and are now clawing their way up and out the man's throat. Pale Swordsman is fairly typical, if slightly more compelling, than most singularly composed, second-wave indebted black metal albums, but what will likely catch your attention immediately, and stick with you long after your initial listen, is not the blitz but the balladry which Këkht Aräkh etches around and between the expected storms of frost barbarian razzia. Piano interludes drift in like rumors from a far-off land, and are received as genuinely brief, brittle and beautiful, performed with a pained delicacy and weariness as if there was a marked fear that the keys may turn to dust beneath the player's dancing fingers- a combination of frailty and resigned realism that recounts a lust for things lost- an ache like an old scar which continues to tease and burn like embers of a funeral pyre below bruised the skin. The album's woeful cultivation of romanticism is allowed to effectively bloom and fully part with inhibition on the closing track rawly opulent and emotive "Swordsman," which may be the best, and only, existent example of Midgard emo to surface in the modern age. Worrier he may be, Këkht Aräkh is not one to fear wearing his heart over his chainmail. 

I see your future in a scattering of Sacred Bones. 

* I often write about how inspiring I find the music that I review, but rarely do I allow such an inspiration to influence my day-to-day. I've felt like this was a missed opportunity for a long time. I would pick up an album, allow it to draw some thoughts out of me, and then go on my day (or, realistically, go to bed) after I click the "Publish" button on an article. This month, I've decided to change things up and allow the influence of a single album to linger with me for longer (30 days to be exact). That's why in the month of March I will be writing an album review ever day. It is my version of Hemlock's songwriting project May, an exercise to prove my skills and push to see how much I can give to this blog and my readers. As an added dose of flair, I will allow a color to influence my selection of album to write about and/or flesh out the tone my reflections. Today is the first day of the challenge, and the first color my unruly ass has selected is black. Get ready because this exercise will likely only get weirder the longer I run with it. - Mick

Metal Monday: Dryad, Hellion, Bones & Witch Vomit

It's another Monday. A simple, terrible, miracle. A Monday. Time to get motivated for another week of grueling, meaningless effort as a shambling human shell. Such drudgery isn't without its benefits, although I'm failing to recall any at the moment. Hmmmm.... Here is an idea. While I work on the quandy of our existence, why don't you check out some brutal metal albums to calm your nerves? No sense in us doubling our efforts. Especially, if all we're going to do is come up empty-handed. 

Dryad - The Abyssal Plain (Prosthetic Records)

The depths of the sea called out to humankind. Pulling us back to its sunless cradle. A familial siren cascades up from the churning chasm of the devouring mother's subaquatic womb. Her culling cry is even heard inland, and some howl back in a zealous, rapturous hiss. Iowa's Dryad makes themselves willing vessels for this ancient madness on their visceral and Poseidonion debut LP, The Abyssal Plain. Beckoning forth a baying tempest of black metal, and armored by a scabbard exoskeleton of crust punk, they delve into a sinking sense of airless dread, caressed by a current of acrid incursions and sinister presages curried by a shrowd finely woven dungeon synths. Dryad wastes no time bailing out their harvest, heaving stygian phantasms onto the wharf of your mind, where these eldritch things sprawl and writhe and wind their tendrils into the quivering clefts of your senses. The catch is good, and now the shore is littered with horrors beyond comprehension. 

Hellion - The Magic Within (Awakening Records)

Columbia's Hellion are endowed with a dark, primitive aura, a vicious primal hunger that rumbles from the very soil of the jungle, blind from anger and driven by an insatiable appetite. Their third full-length, The Magic Within, lunges forth, teeth bared, like the skeleton of a decayed jaguar, whose trapped soul suddenly reacquires its former urge to kill, and swiftly makes a go at your neck. The dark forest rebel band makes their deadly presence known by peppering your carcass with toothy waves of repeating thrash grooves, summoned by the sacrificial throaty trill of a black metal spell pilfered from Impurity, an impromptu and roughshod weapon that shoots up from a cold pool of mud, blood, and liquified carrion; biting and rending your flesh like an ax shaving through the bark of a tree. Theirs is a magic that comes from a dark place indeed. 

Bones - Vomit (Disorder-Recordings)

Brusingly kinetic death metal from the acres-wide meat locker known as Chicago. This gruff and uncompromisingly muscular group disgorges all their angst over the course of nine, stomach emptying tracks on their fourth LP, Vomit. The grooves on this god-forsaking brawler will catch you in the paunch with a boot and then sink its knee into your nose as soon as you're doubled over. And you'll probably ask these bad dudes for another as soon as you swish the blood out of your gums and reset your septum. Bones delivers the kind of punishment that is as addictive as a cold flash of vengeance; and just as satisfying too. 

Witch Vomit - A Scream From The Tomb Below (Memento Mori)

We end with another dark ritual. Another cthonic murmuration, this time rising like a death rattle from the side of a mountain, a stone barrier between our world and sphere of exile used to contain a crooked serpentess and scion of sin. Its mighty, scaled coils shaking the very fabric of reality with its inpatient thrash, causing the air to fill with a sickening rumble that shudders the humors until they dispel into disarray. Witch Vomit's A Scream From The Tomb Below will assemble all the beldams and hex-weavers of the banished and forgotten places to a single rancid pyre, a stewing pit where they may prepare the offerings of their final orgastic, wicked sabbath; presided over by a baneful guttural gurgle that tears open the sky in a torrent of acid rain and underwritten by a ripple of explosive grooves that could strip a cliff face of its graduate and leave nothing but a disfigured monument to bedlam in its place. Witch Vomit's searing death metal smirch harbors a painful echo that will spread through time until the cycle of rejuvenation and apocalyptic resolution can begin again under the cataract gaze of heartless stars. 

 

Metal Monday: Ninth Circle, Animalize, Soul Remnants, and Oxygen Destroyer

It's another Metal Monday folks. That special moment every couple of weeks when I plug some metal releases that I've been listening to. One of the greatest aspects of heavy metal is that it tends to get right to the point. To that end... 

Ninth Circle - Dis, Emerge (Self-Released)

If you're going to go to hell, why stop at the fourth, fifth, or even eighth ring? Just go all the way. Dive head first into the center of the abyss and give it some gusto! Who knows? The swirl of chaos and disembodied horror might even rise to meet you. That seems to be the hope on Dis, Emerge, the debut from Texas blackened crust and thrash band Ninth Circle. Its a grizzly and well-bile-oiled monstrosity that forges a path to its own damnable ends without restraint or remorse, sounding like some twisted spiritual bonding of Kvelertak and Watain and breath of fresh, cold hell to set the mood at a backyard beer fest near you. It will inspire a mosh of revenants so amusingly frenetic and foul that it could cause the devil to heave up partially masticated bits of Judas all over his hoves from a combination of motion-sickness and excitement. Need I go on? Dis, Emerge is disambiguously good at being bad.  

Animalize - Tapes from the Crypt (Dying Victims Productions)

Resuscitated by popular demand, France's Animalize reissued their 2020 debut Tapes from the Crypt on vinyl earlier this year. It's not hard to understand the demand once you've seen this beast in the wild- its a leopard-printed burst of deadly rock and roll fury, swift as a jungle cat, determined as a dive-bombing eagle, and proud as a lion extracting a rib from a vanquished gazelle (or luckless tourist). Tracks like "Jungle Dance" are crowd-pleasing frolics played at speeds that would give Enforcer whiplash, while hungry numbers like "Meatnight Race" combine the tasty licks and camp of classic-era hair metal with the deadly resolve and executioner's grin of Iron Madden, with a prayer going up to mighty Judas Priest in the album's final moments in the form of the lockjaw iron bite and road warrior credo of "L'Aigle de la Route." You can't cage that which can't be tamed. 

Soul Remnants - Raising The Sacrificial Dagger (Self-Released)

I learned about Soul Remnants when talking with Cody of Cryostasium a couple of months back, and I'm not sure how they remained hidden from me before that point. These guys are unbelievable! Raising The Sacrificial Dagger is their fourth LP and kind of picks up where their 2017 Ouroboros left off, constituting a reentry point into an incredibly vicious but refined variety of overdriven American melo-death, a skewering of the perceptions of pain and pleasure that would even have Pinhead taking notes. At this point, Soul Remnants riffs are as catchy as anything Hypocrisy is laying down at this late stage in their career, maybe even catchier, as the intensity of the playing never really lets up, not during the chorus, not during the bridge, or even the outros- they are maxing out the effort with every distortion summoning strum and driving percussive wallop. The vocal performances are particular exciting, with singer Mitchell Fletcher sounding like he's half hyena about three-fourths of the time, and during the remaining quarter, he sounds like he's challenging you to a fight from the opposite side of the bar while your drowning in the drippy stooper of a bad, psilocybin trip. With Raising The Sacrificial Dagger, Soul Remnants have carved for themselves an idol of rogue ambition worthy of your adoration. 

Oxygen Destroyer - Sinister Monstrosities Spawned By the Unfathomable Ignorance of Humankind (Redefining Darkness Records)

God, what a mess. Oh, you thought I was talking about Oxygen Destroyer's music? Nope. They're tight as hell. What I mean is the brazen path of destruction they leave in their wake. It's like a scaly typhoon just split the town in half like a fortune cookie... and it didn't even buy us dinner first. Oxygen Destroyer's second LP Sinister Monstrosities... is a tribute to classic kaiju cinema, from American entries like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, to admirable UK efforts like Gorgo, to definitive Japanese titles like War of the Gargantuas. True to its inspirations, the album is relentless, unstoppable, and able to melt steel building frames with its radioactive halitosis. It's on the technical side of the death-thrash equation, but with a strong emphasis on groove, and singer Lord Kaiju's notably gesticular performances, the band deploys its skills effectively to embark on a captivating and raucous rampage. Like the end of most monster movies though, and despite the carnage that the titular beast has unleashed, you'll find yourself missing the gargantuan presence of Oxygen Destroyer once their swath of terror through your town has led them back to the open sea. However, their bittersweet departure will only make their return in a much-anticipated sequel all the more triumphant... hopefully you've upped your home insurance coverage by then. 

Metal Monday: Rolo Tomassi, Vanda, Warcoe & Lord Dying

Alas, another Monday is upon us and I have therefore taken up the burden of trudging my way down to the belly of my metal vaults to retrieve some malformed treasures to bestow upon you. We're starting out with the highly conceptual new album from UK's Rolo Tomassi and ending with a lash of brutality from Portland's Lord Dying. There is no theme this week. These are just some of the metal albums I listened to today and that I felt inspired to write about. 

Rolo Tomassi - Where Myth Becomes Memory (MNRK Heavy)

It's hard to keep a bead on where the UK's Rolo Tomassi is headed next with their sound. The only thing that is certain is that they will always be on the move. First taking shape in the metalcore scene of the mid-00s, they have fashioned for themselves many different permutations over the years, from shoegaze rockers, to acid jazz jockies, to ambient architects, to sonic cosmonauts, only to finally come back to roost in their metalcore roots, darker and more dangerous sounding than before. Their latest album Where Myth Becomes Memory is the latest incarnation of their perfidious, shadowy cosmic-core phase. The last in a three-part series (following 2015's Grievances and 2018's Time Will Die And Love Will Bury It), the band takes the time on this album to contrast their dichotomous aural belligerence with increasingly golden guitar tones and a bath of cleansing feedback, which showers the progressive unfurling of their designs in an air of forgiveness and redemption. Part feral space horror; 2/3rds divine epiphany; all the stuff of legends. 

Vanda - Covenant of Death (Majestic Mountain Records)

Vånda is a truly wicked-sounding band. They emerge from Stockholm as if they've just rushed out of the deep woods- blood streaked across their faces, wild mayhem in their eyes, hair thick, wet and gnarled as if they've been sweating petroleum, and with fire leaping up from the footprints left by every galloping step. Their steps spark and ignite their surroundings as they move with maligned intention- a farce of humanity cast by the devil himself. A human-shaped avalanche of death that is now bearing down upon you. Apocalyptic imagery aside, Vånda's debut Covenant of Death most assuredly hits a sour, satisfying balance of death-thrash and black metal in a way that few bands can. They're like Watain if they focused less on shock value and more on the structure of their songs, or Necrophobic but with more earthy grit and a firm undertow of incurable gothica. Covenant of Death will leave you headbanging the whole time that you're fleeing for your life.

Warcoe - The Giant's Dream (Morbid And Miserable Records / Forbidden Place Records)

Italy's Warcoe nails the occult ambiance and aura that a lot of '60s heavy metal was able to tap into on their debut LP The Giant's Dream. Relying on melodic guitar grooves to do the bulk of the lifting on these tracks, they paint a picture of arcane practices and bring the essence of ancient knowledge thundering into the breach of the modern world. When I hear these high-cast, burning guitar riffs lumbering through the cool muddy pound of percussion, I am visited by visions of wizards pouring over ancient texts to discover the secrets of turning dragon scales into gold, or various tales of misfortune, such as a poor shepherd who stumbles into a tomb of forgotten treasures where he encounters a scroll that turns him into a great hungry wolf. It's hard to imagine containing the untamed, willful and timeless motion of these songs within the confines of a single eight-track album. You might as well be trying to push a glacier across the tundra with your bare hands, yet Warcoe proves themselves more than man enough for the task. The Giant's Dream is truly a beast and Warcoe are both its progenitor and its master. 

Lord Dying - Poisoned Altars (Relapse Records)

To me, Lord Dying belongs to that era of the mid-'10s when sludge metal appeared to be finding new inroads into the realms of death metal and hard rock with results that, improbably, had some hooky commercial potential to them. Red Fang appears to be the most successful of the band to come out of that milieu, but Lord Dying had a lot going for them as well, as a darker and more outwardly punishing version Inter Arma and a more direct and less cosmically inclined version of early Mastodon, Lord Dying on their second LP Poisoned Altars have wrought forth an absolutely crushing affair that still manages to pack in some captivating hooks among all the deluge of bruising riffs. And when I say captivating, I mean it! Tracks like "A Wound Outside of Time" and "Offering Pain (and An Open Minded Center)" literally feel like they are trying to warp themselves around you with snaky grooves and put you in a headlock. Every half-choked, half-sung line forcefully ejected from singer Erik Olson mouth feels like a narrowly missed haymaker, rushing past you and creating a frightening vacuum in its wake. Ultimately, I think the key to their aggression can be unlocked by clues found on the track "Suckling at the Teat of a She-Beast" which feels like a combination of crust punk and West-Coast chopper rock, that will educate you in the ways of their brutality in the most hostile ways possible. Lord Dying went in a more space-rock and psychedelic route with their 2019 album Mysterium Tremendum, but 2015's Poison Altars is still the pinnacle of their discography, in my opinion. Long live Lord Dying! 

Album Review: Asenath Blake - Tribeckoning Songs

I think there is more to a fear of the dark than meets the eye. Or, in this case, doesn't. The cold sweat that slickens your palms. The labored breathing. The thickening of your saliva into an ominous dank soup. These are all responses, not to what you can't see, but to what you hope you won't see. 

Whatever you are afraid of, whatever you believe could be around the next corner as you fumble like a fawn in bramble against your own muted sense of observation, you simply know that you do not want to encounter it. Even if it were mid-day, or you were partaking in a stroll through a partially lit street at dusk, or cowering in the dead of night during a storm, when you can count on a sudden bolt of lightning to illuminate your way from a distance- whatever lurks out of sight, you can only pray it stays out of sight- and that you, in turn, continue to evade its hungry scanning glare as well.

It's strangely emancipating to admit to one's limits, and even more so when such an admission comes with the realization that it would not benefit you to overcome these limits. Is it better to fear a tiger is before you, only to have one then appear? Or to fear the tiger but pass by it without evidence of its whereabouts, stepping through its hunting grounds onwards to safety? If you have any sense of self-preservation, it has to be the latter.

Life has this timbre more often than not. Every step you take in the world, you are beset by forces you cannot explain or fully rationalize. Social, political, quantum, cosmic, and spiritual- a fog of invisible weights and pullies. Events transpire fates turn, the stars align or disperse- seemingly without explanation. And yet, you continue to move, without full knowledge of what the day will bring. Often better off for not knowing. If you saw all the strings being tugged around you, you'd not just be more likely to trip, you might lose your mind in the web of its convulsive madness. 

It is better to view the chaos of the world through a cipher. Like a candlestick in the dark. Enough light to guide you while lending a glimpse of the mystery beyond the golden ring it casts- but not bright enough to draw any unwanted attention- especially from something that wouldn't think twice about invading the faint defenses of your flickering halo. Welsh black magus Asenath Blake can be such aid on her album Tribeckoning Songs. The practicing pagan and one-woman band uses her shrieking vocal presence and inimitable playing style to cast a circle of protection around you in order to permit your passage through a weeping chasm of shivering dread and close encounters with the uncanny. 

Her howls are like those of a jackal, cackling incantations so as to bring its prey under the control of a terror-stricken trance, and coax it from its hovel to be devoured. The medieval-sounding synths and winsome grooves speak to the inhospitality of the imperceptible surroundings and the depth of the darkness that shrouds your egress. The frantic drum work bays like a pack of dogs, rushing through the woods in all directions in fulfillment of some malignant quest for their wicked master. And the weird, clean guitar leads act as much as a spell as a direct assault upon whatever senses that are not damped by the lightless acres encircling you in a boundless sea of inky bitterness. 

Tribeckoning Songs is your telescoping easement through the disarray of a universe that is principally intolerant to the incursions of your understanding or presence. It will only allow you to see so much, though. Albeit enough to know that beyond its perimeter lies an abyss that would swallow you without a thought and without a trace. 

Album Review: Homeskin - Integument Crystallization

 
Homeskin is a solo black metal project of audio engineer and heavy sound architect Garry Brents. I'm not sure what the intentions for the project are, of whether he went into it with any other goal than to make wild, raw and depressive black metal. However oblique his motivations, the effects on the receiving end are indisputable- Homeskin is a vigorously compelling nightmare. 

Garry's latest release Integument Crystallization is his first of 2022 and follows two excellent EP in 2021. Like all of his albums, Integument Crystallization was recorded and uploaded to Bandcamp in less than 20 hours, meaning that there is a minimal gestation period between when these songs flow out of the artist's consciousness, through his instruments and throat, captured by a recording device, and then foisted upon your ears. It's almost as raw as a live set but retains the aura and intrigue of an occult recording- one emerging from parts unknown by people of obscure and wicked origins. I'm always impressed when a black metal project is able to maintain this kind of tension. Preserving some essential, diabolical energy and clandestine intrigue, while not being shy about letting you in on the identity of the man behind the curtain. 

Part of what helps Homeskin achieve its essence of intrigue is just how very human it feels and how it leverages that humanity to illicit a sense of terror in the listener. The vocal work on Integument Crystallization is amongst some of the rawest I have ever heard. It is a cliche to say that a black metal singer sounds like they are in literal pain, but Garry literally sounds like he is actually being skinned alive here. He isn't singing as much as he is deliriously shrieking. It's a lot to take in on your first couple of listens and the way that it is embedded in the corrosive production and feedback significantly heightens the desperation on display. The way that the feedback works is also alarming, as it has this wrapped and tarnished quality, like it was the victim of some careless submersion in saltwater, where every bend and moment of strain will make you feel like you've suffered a kind of acute inner ear damage. I actually thought I might have been losing my hearing a bit while listening to the album, only to hit the pause button and feel my sense of spatial awareness return to normal. This has not happened to me while listening to an album before, and as I said, it is extremely disconcerting.

The last element to this horror show I'd like to draw your attention to, and possibly the most key, is the combination of the drum work and guitar melodies that all this murk and peril is tacked to. These aren't your traditional blast-beats and icy guitar combos, even if they are played about as fast. Instead, the rhythms and melodies of these songs are closer to that of alternative rock and post-punk, only mercilessly sped up, to the point of being cruel. These decidedly unmetal grooves have the opposite effect of what you would expect, causing tracks like "Between Paint Drying and the Fear of Broken Pipe Dreams" to sound like someone overdubbed an exorcism over a copy of Loveless, and parts of "Peel Then Sink" give the impression of what Pere Ubu would have produced had they fallen in with a heretical splinter sect of the Church of Satan. Oddly enough, "Crystalline" even has a kind of progressive quality to its structure that is not just reminiscent of '90s shoegaze but '00s J-Rock as well, with a superimposition of Hammer Horror organs shrowding its facade like a death mask. 

All of these awful facets and fearfully expressive motifs align to telecast a vision of a man fighting for his life against paranatural forces, and hardly winning. Integument Crystallization is incredibly fucked up and exhilarating, and brimming with horrible promise. Don't deprive yourself of its dark pleasures.