Now that several of their older titles on Regain are once again available to us, we have finally managed to get a bunch of Abruptum's import CDs in stock at Crucial Blast. I've been spending the last month getting reacquainted with these demented Swedish black metallers while working on writing up the reviews for these discs, and have basically fallen in love with 'em all over again. Out of all of the bands that made up the second wave of the Scandinavian black metal movement of the early 90's, there was none weirder than Abruptum. Their sound was a black pit of anguished screams and chaotic, mostly improvised ambient noise and mutated metal, and not surprisingly Abruptum were disliked by many black metal fans who came to their albums expecting something more, um, "structured".

Abruptum's second album In Umbra Malitiae Ambulabo... was the band's second and also had the distinguished honor of being the final release to come out through Euronymous' Deathlike Silence label before his murder at the hands of Varg Vikernes. Released in 1994, the album consisted of another single epic track created by the duo of Evil and It, and is slightly more structured than the hellish cacophony of their debut Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me . The diminutive It continues to deliver his tortured wailing and shrill shrieks over improvised drumming, mangled riffing that seems to unravel on itself, and a chaotic symphony of noises, evil orchestral strings, and black ambient textures, but the duo also begins to introduce other elements like crushing, droning riffs, 80's sounding synthesizers playing horror film score type passages, scraping violin strings, ponderous doom metal dirges, and samples of dripping water and other dungeony sounds. There are parts of this album where it starts to sound more like some sort of deranged industrial doom metal, lumbering and massive, though the music is just as improvised and seemingly disorganized as their previous work. These moments of tangible riffing and actual melodies and the drumming make this a heavier exercise in Abruptum's free-improv black metal as brief as those parts might be, and the combination of these parts and those awesomely cheesy 80's-horro keyboard sounds with It's blubbering, wailing, grunting, moaning and altogether anguished vocal performance makes this a delirious listen. As always, Abruptum evoke the hallucinatory hellish visions of Bosch and Grunewald through their utterly evil, trance-like improvisations and murky ambient goatworship. All of Abruptum's releases are essential for anyone into weird, fucked-up blackened "metal", but this album is one of their more epic sounding works and is a good place to start if you haven't yet experienced these weirdos yet. Recommended.