Israeli one-man bedroom black metal band Animus is back with another mouthful of an album title and another solid disc of mournful, Burzum-influenced black metal, their second for underground American BM label Ars Magna. Why isn't this band more known in the avant-black metal scene following the band's first album Poems For The Aching from two years ago? Poems was a dreamy blast of treble-overload and fuzzwreathed melodic blackness that resembled the murky post-punk influenced music of Velvet Cacoon and Lurker Of Chalice heard through a blizzard of white noise and tape hiss, and the music was painfully beautiful, achingly beautiful with it's downcast melodies obfuscated by sheets of blurred noise. So great. Things are a little different with this second album: half of the album's six songs (all of which are untitled) are in that Burzumic black metal vein, with no audible bass, the guitars so distorted and mixed so harshly in the red that they all melt into sheets of caustic fuzz, and stumbling drums that are way up front in the mix, the plodding doomic beats and marching rhythms and ramshackle blastbeats right in your face, surrounded by the blizzard winds of trebly amp hiss and anguished moans. But the other half of the album isn't really black metal at all. Instead, Animus offsets the wintry BM buzzdrone half with stuff like the darkly shadowed acoustic guitars, orchestral strings, piano and cellos of the second track that sounds like a particularly dreary (but heartbreakingly beautiful) piece from Godspeed You Black Emperor. The third track is primarily acoustic guitar joined by gutteral black metal vocals, a blackened folk song with some amazing flamenco style playing that shows up in the second half. And the fifth track is an eight minute slab of isolationist drone with just the barest smattering of distant blackened rasps floating over the grim, low-key ambient fuzz and electronic tones, which reminds me of M. Bianchi's bleak industrial drones. Obviously this is a much more varied and textured album than the debut, a mix of the noise-drenched Burzumic black metal and some excellent detours into blackened folky post-rock and dark industrial, and these experimental elements add some very cool new shadows to Animus' beautifully depressing blackness.