Despite the spread of globalisation and the lightspeed transfer of music through the Internet reaching all known points of the globe, I'm still surprised

sometimes when we discover metal bands from countries that I would never have expected to have any kind of underground metal scene, let alone capable of

producing more experimental, avant-garde strains of metal. Dusk is exactly that sort of band, a duo of Faraz Anwer and Babar Shaikh, two multi-

instrumentalists who hail from Pakistan's capital city of Karachi and who create a kind of electronically-enhanced progressive death metal. Actually, it's

tough to call the stuff on Jahilia death metal at all, really...Dusk's music is an experimental, eclectic collage of sound that does dip into some

brutal plodding industrial death metal and dramatic growling vocals, but just as often combines it with insane Malmsteen style shredding or lush

orchestration, veering off into fields of electronic ambience, Arabic chanting, and what sound like field recordings of a Pakistani marketplace, or suddenly

dropping in with these intensely beautiful and emotional piano ballads that border on total cheese, but which end up sounding amazing as they are cut and

pasted in between slabs of convoluted cyber-death riffing. Dusk are all over the place, and anyone looking for a more straightforward foray into

industrial/electronic metal will probably end up utterly confused by the constantly changing song structures and seemingly random shifts between styles; but

fans of weird, ambient outsider metal should find this album pretty interesting, especially if you think that the idea of combining vaguely gothic

progressive death metal like Katatonia and Opeth with Prong, electronica, pop-metal balladry, and traditional Pakistani music sounds like it might adequately

gum up your grey matter.