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".

The latest and last actual full length from Abruptum, the Swedish black metal duo who were easily the most fucked-up, far out band to come out of the original black metal movement, whose early albums were hour-long exercises in demented improvised "black metal", free-form noise, and the shrieks and wailing of the members engaged in self-torture. Over the top and pretty ridiculous, sure, but also totally EVIL sounding. I've been spending a lot of time with Abruptum lately as we finally added their albums that are still available and in print to our catalog (you'll find their In Umbra Malitiae Ambulabo, In Aeternum in Triumpho Tenebrau, De Profundis Mors Vas Cousumet and Obscuritatem Advoco Amplect�re Me discs in stock this week as well), and their recordings still stand as some of the most bizarre stuff to ever get labeled as "black metal".

2004's Casus Luciferi is a much different album than their earlier ones, and is more like a Satanic version of Cold Meat style death industrial at times, although Abruptum's unique hellish ambience again puts this in it's own weird territory. It begins with the thumping and pounding of a muffled drumline, booming kettledrum rhythms heard from a distance that is joined by some seriously fucked up and mangled guitar playing, super distorted, super detuned riffage slithering and buzzing over weird whistling wind sounds. This eventually dissipates and a series of massive orchestral swells appear, like a symphony of strings and woodwinds surging into sustained drones for several minutes. The end of the track joins all of these elements, the martial drumming and deformed riffs and dark orchestral ambience melting together with shrieking demonic voices into a fog of blackened, droning murk.

"In Actu Oculi" is next, a churning mass of blown-out, ultra-distorted bass riffage so gnarly sounding that you can just barely make out the grinding riff buried underneath of the grit and filth. Over this floats haunting female chanting, tolling bells, waves of caustic white noise and crackling low-end rumble. "Ex Inferno Inferiori" starts off as a quiet murmur of throbbing bass frequencies that is gradually joined by more of that hellish, blown-out guitar noise, blasts of crumbling distorted heaviness sliding in pitch and creating a super heavy slab of ambient drone. Throughout this one, strange tinny noises and distant cicada swarms swirl across the background.

The final track "Gehennae Perpetuae Cruciatus" opens with a glacial industrial rhythm, massive thunderclaps of tympani-esque percussive blasts and harrowing violin strings scraping far off in the distance, with pregnant pauses of almost complete silence appearing every few minutes. In a way, this is the least abrasive piece of music on the disc, but it's also the scariest sounding, and could easily work as part of a horror film score.

The droning Industrial rhythms and dark ambience of this album sets it apart from the rest of the Abruptum catalog, and it's the most composed of any of their works. As always, the music here is a soundtrack to hellish visions of eternal suffering and demonic torture, a sonic counterpart to Bosch's images of Hell (and as a matter of fact, a closeup of part of one of Bosch's paintings is featured as the interior spread of the booklet for Casus Luciferi, depicting two demons in the act of sodomizing some poor bastard), but here Abruptum go for pure mood and atmosphere. Recommended.