No, sorry, false alarm. This album (the band’s third full-length) ain’t The One that’ll make you sit bolt upright in your lazy boy, spilling food, drink and illicit substances as you blaze through the manifold stages of metallic epiphany (‘86 Slayer, ‘94 At The Gates, etc.). But really, in 2005, who’s going to offer truly original fare within the constricting, unbelievably stylized genre of melodic black/death metal? New vocalist BJ Cook pretty much sticks to his Lindberg/Friden playbook, providing the shrieky sheen that coats riff, song and eardrum with sticky, trebly goodness. Meanwhile, drummer/songwriter Tino LoSicco stalks clench-fisted beneath crypts walled up and saturated with thick, chalky, aeonian dust, authoring a concept album the context and logic of which remains decipherable only to hisself, thanks to perennially incoherent and sometimes hilarious lyrics (“Iniquity’s return in crepuscular glory”? “Disambiguation in the Unlight”? Um, okay, Tino.). Withal, though, the album transcends its eccentricities by punctuating a number of tracks with clever, melodic interludes and codas that venture beyond the blackened pale, the band slyly waiting until three, four or five minutes into a tune before revealing their decidedly non-genre fetishes. Which creates a permanent and quite exhilarating state of unease in the listener, a sense of strange things lurking beyond your torchlight as you stride down the dungeon corridor in search of treasure. Rise up, O headbanger, and “end the scarlet thread”. Or something.

» epochofunlight.net