Also available as a double LP set on heavy vinyl, packaged in a full color heavy gatefold jacket with gold and black printed inner sleeves...and, of course, quite limited.

As Abigor puts it, they play "play True Austrian Black Metal exclusively". Which apparently means black metal as played by intergalactic fucking reptoids. Seriously, Fractal Possession is one of the craziest black metal albums I've heard recently. The longrunning black metal clan returned in 2007 with this new album after close to half a decade of nada which included a brief breakup for a year or so, then reconvened with a whole new cast of characters. And if anything, the band blasted has blasted even deeper into the sci-fi metal territory that they were exploring on their previous album Satanized, and apparently alienating a bunch of their fans with their new evolved approach to 21st century black metal along the way. Me, I fucking love this album.

The first few albums from Abigor were entirely different from what we've got here, more in the vein of Nordic-influenced melodic black metal, buzzing and majestic but marked by extreme levels of aggression forged into a style of their own that made 'em pretty popular with fans of traditional black metal back in the 90's. When their 2001 album Satanized came around, though, Abigor's sound took off into a whole new direction, infusing their black metal with a cold, inhuman sheen and futuristic atmosphere and becoming an intensely complex and industrialized version of their previous epic blackened self. If you've heard that album and are a fan of the bizarre, sci-fi black metal that Abigor evolved into, then Fractal Possession definitely won't disappoint.

As soon as I pick up Fractal Possession, I find myself entering the confusional techno-hell of Abigor just by looking at this album - the CD version is packaged in a gorgeous hardback digibook, covered in abstract gold-tinted artwork and stylized inverted pentagrams, definitely staying true to their Satanic black metal roots in iconography alone, and the twelve-page booklet is filled with demonic woodcuts and surreal photos of urban decay and alien entities, beautifully printed in white, grey and metallic gold inks.

But once the album begins, yer immediately overwhelmed by Abigor's warped cosmic blackness. The disc opens with a glitchy intro of factory clang and skittering industrial beats and whirring drill sounds as a lone dissonant guitar figure appears, playing this jagged little melody over increasing layers of industrial machine sound, robotic engines clanking and bleeping, and ominous soundbites of dialogue, and then suddenly the band erupts into the sputtering black electro blast of "Project Shadow", a chopped up black hellscape of insanely squiggly guitars and shimmering harmonies, the guitar shredding all woven into these intricate clusters of spastic notes, ferocious blastbeats and croaked vocals racing throughout the insane stop/start arrangements. It's impossible to not think of Mick Barr from Orthrelm when you hear these guitars with the over-the-top shredding and flurries of angular notes (I'm not the first to hear it, as the Mick Barr/Orthrelm comparison has been made in a bunch of other reviews of this album). It's like hearing Mick playing over the industrial black metal of Dodheimsgard, but it's even more fucked up sounding than DHG already are. From there, the album moves through similiar angular black metal forms, fierce precision blastbeats and crushing percussive dirges meeting with soaring black melodies and those hypershred leads, each song turning into a complex tangle of mechanical rhythms and hellish alien melody. In between the blastbeats and shred eruptions, Abigor drop in all sorts of odd little segueways, like brief flashes of blackened kosmiche ambience, walls of orchestral guitar drone, discordant math-metal, epic Viking-esque clean vocals and drunken Gothy crooning, mutant Gorguts-esque no wave deathriffage, galloping traditional metal, or evocative acoustic guitar strum that appears before your eyes in an instant, then disappear just as quickly as Abigor fall back in with their choppy alien buzzsaw attack. This jarring, ultra-dynamic sound turned off alot of trad black metal fans when this album first came out, but in my opinion it's one of the best avant-black metal albums of the past ten years, surpassing even Dodheimsgard in their audacious sci-fi approach, intense and original and most definitely weird as fuck, but ultra heavy too, almost more like death metal than black metal much of the time as heavy as this is, but always cloaked in their own unique alien interplanetary futuristic blackness. Highly recommended!