The brainscrambling 2005 album from Italy's Ephel Duath is one weird metal album. The Italian band released their album, through the legendary metal label Earache after putting out some amazing records on Code666 and Elitist, and it's a continuation of their mutant vision of jazz and prog-infected black metal that continues to confound three years after it's release. Really, Ephel Duath go way beyond the black metal label, with crushing metalcore, jazz, and prog rock all figuring into their overall sound. Pain Necessary To Know is a dizzying concoction of schizophrenic song structures and deep jazz explorations, fierce blackened screams and lush jazz horns, trumpets and saxophones, crushing angular riffage grinding over thrashing, stop/start rhythms, and awesome fluid drumming. Drummer Davide Piovesan is one of the band's greatest strengths, the guy is a fifty year old jazz percussionist who didn't have any metal background whatsoever before joing Ephel Duath; and yet his drumming in Ephel Duath totally smokes most other black/death metal skinsmen with a complex, expressive rhythmic attack that utilizes tons of crazy fills and polyrhythms. Equal parts John Zorn and Dillenger Escape Plan, Yakuza and Mr. Bungle, with ambient industrial drones, Emperor-esque symphonic BM, funk basslines, bizarre time signatures, dissonant chord clusters, Zappa inspired weirdness and chiming bells, abstract electronica and softly sung vocals all glommed together into a confusional, ADD enhanced avant-jazz-metal trip. The centerpiece of the album is the three part "Vector" trilogy, the three parts scattered throughout the disc randomly and make up the album's most spacey, atmospheric tracks. Highly recommended.