Ars Magna, along with God Is Myth and Autopsy Kitchen, has become one of my favorite labels dealing in underground black metal, and the latest batch of
releases we've gotten from them has been amazing across the board...Valhom, Trist, Procer Veneficus, Zargof, Black Hole Generator, all awesome and unique
pushers of total blackness. But Chaos Moon might be my favorite album from the label to date, and it certainly had me completely freaking the fuck out the
first time I played this in the C-Blast warehouse. When it comes to black metal, I'm automatically drawn to anything that has any kind of psychedelic quality
to it, and the first thing that struck me about Chaos Moon is how fucking awesome their logo is. What can I say, I'm from the old guard. If I haven't heard a
band before but they have a kickass album cover or a freaking rad logo, you're going to pique my attention. Anyways, yeah, Chaos Moon's logo rules,
it's in total opposition to the spiky, unintelligible logo aesthetic that most BM bands use. While their logo is just as impossible to decipher, it's a
gooey, tentacled piece of artwork that looks more like comic book title lettering or an image from a Call Of Cthulhu art poster than a black metal
band logo. Awesome. How does the music stack up? Total melodic holocaust. Chaos Moon's guitars are razor sharp shred, tempos range from loping midtempo to
hyperspeed blasting, and the vocals are freaked-out, run through ridiculous amounts of delay and echoing all over the place, giving the songs an added
trippiness, and the use of synthesizers here is way beyond the norm. Blazing blackened riffery often flows into epic dark ambient parts with slowly swirling
layers of drone that approach Troum-levels of dark blissful beauty, but man, it's the guitar melodies on Languor that just destroy. The
first half of the album is all speedfreak velocity and psychotic thrashing until the seven minute dronewave that closes out "Simulcrum Of Mirrors" halfway
through the album. But after that, the songs suddenly become so majestically melodic that they start to sound like a way more ferocious Velvet Caccoon. Like
in "The Palterer", with it's glorious poppy melody at the core of a frenzied black metal attack with the vocals suddenly screaming into meltdown mode,
sounding somewhat like Corporate Death from Macabre, and then the song suddenly turns into a heartwrenching beautiful dreampop jam, total 4AD style? Amazing.
That's followed by "Hymn To Iniquity", the nearly 10-minute apex of the album, which kicks off in a dreamy black metal frenzy and then turns into the most
heavenly synthbliss shoegaze pop, like a song from The Cure's Disintegration fused with ripping black metal guitars and demonic shrieking, utterly
hellish and beautiful and MASSIVE. And it just gets even more beautiful and majestic with the closing track "Countless Reverie In Mare", a 12 minutes epic of
synth-heavy, doomy dreamy blackness, with a central melodic riff repeated over and over while piano melodies and thick washes of synthesizer and those
gnarled goblin shrieks swarm over it, later shifting into another impossibly emotional melodic riff even more gorgeous than the last. Another contender for
my favorite album of 2007. Anyone that is into this current wave of shoegaze/dreampop influenced black metal like Alcest, Amesoeurs, Caina, Lurker Of
Chalice, Procer Veneficus, you need to hear this album NOW. Highest recommendation.