The newest album from the Pakistani experimental metal band Dusk is even more abstract than their previous disc, Jahilia, leaving the industrial/death metal elements of that album behind almost completely in exchange for a form of dark electronica that has more in common with Ulver and Thee Maldorer Kollective's recent material. As much as I dug the utter weirdness of Jahilia, with all of it's crude metal riffing, syrupy piano ballads, and Pakistani music cobbled together into a confusing but certainly interesting out-metal hallucination, Dusk has made the jump into a far more focused form of dark music with Contrary Beliefs. The electronic elements are brought to the forefront here, layering dark ambient synths and deep drones with drum n' bass loops and evocative field recordings. Some of the standout tracks include "Karachi Circus", and it's dreamy dronescape filled with repetitive, sweetly melodic 8-bit hooks, swirling space ambience, and recordings of birds singing; the sinister industrial squelch dirge of "National Suicide Toll" that sounds like Skinny Puppy with a death metal vocalist on heavy drugs jamming away on a Hammond organ; and "Ladder Of Regret"'s spacey Jungle rhythms. The highlight of the album however has got to be the nearly 10 minute track "Strange Sleep Sequence" that comes at the end, and which combines hypnotic Eastern classical folk ragas and grim ambient synthesizers, and the result is pretty damn bewitching. The CD is packaged in a thick digipack case that Epidemie has been using for several of their most recent releases, I've never seen this particular type of case used by another other label, and it looks/feels great, filled with killer high-contrast imagery with a vague black metal aesthetic. Limited edition of 500 copies.