The new album from Deadwood! In my opinion, this is one of the most criminally overlooked bands on Cold Spring next to Skitliv; the last album from this Swedish black industrial project, 8 19, was a fearsome slab of electronic evil that combined the aesthetics of severely harsh black metal with cold industrial noise as well as anything that Nordvargr has presented us with lately. Desolate and dread-inducing, the bleak deathscapes that Deadwood constructed on that album are right up there alongside the likes of MZ412, Abruptum, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Nordvargr and Wraiths in my book.

It's been three years, but now we finally have a new album from Deadwood, and it's a scorcher. As before, Deadwood's primary member is Daniel Jansson, who some of you guys might recognize as one of the members of the Swedish black metal squadron Blodulv, and he returns with seven lengthy new tracks of blistering blackened noise, each track boasting such menacing titles as "Bloodcult", "Null And Void", "Deteriorate", and "Ordo Infernal", and spewing out a noxious aural nightmare of distorted black ambience, slurred black metal howls and ghoulish whispers, powerful blasts of rumbling power electronics, and swathes of caustic distortion. The opening track starts the album off with a cloudy mass of hissing electronic noise and cavernous ambience, deep and black and menacing, and filled with distant whirring sounds and distressed digital flotsam, like Wolf Eyes jamming over one of Satori's black ambient rituals. But then it's off to the harsh chaos of "Null And Void" with it's corrosive metallic noise and infinite necro riffage stretched out over a wasteland of murderous vocal incantations, junk metal grinding together in slow motion and reverberating endlessly, streaks of high end skree ripping across the blasted drones. Somewhat reminiscent of some of Prurient's recent output, actually. Same goes for "Kadaverdisciplin" as it alternates between looping slabs of subdued distorted ambience and threatening growls, and billowing clouds of incandescent fuzz, a kind of blackened power electronics.

"Forakt" returns to the more abstract material that we heard on the previous album, and it also stands out as the one track to feature guest vocals from the infamous black metal vocalist Maniac (of Mayhem/Skitliv), and his schizoid performance contorts between mewling cries and spoken word and monstrous growls while Jansson weaves creaking noises, scraped guitar strings, frightening electronic effects and endlessly delayed noise together into a seriously trippy blackened dubscape. The rest of the album follows suit, serving up all kinds of horrific subsonic sound events, hellish low-end driven power electronics, vast stretches of slimy, filth-covered ambience, and black metal riffs deconstructed into bits of abstract buzz and scrape. There are passages where it sounds like you are hearing a massively distorted string section rise up out of the glitchy, buzzing murk, and bits of majestic cosmic drift occasionally appear at the edges of Deadwood's demonic abstract ambience, but for the most part this is pitch-black, nasty shit, full of pounding distorted tribal rhythms, weird saturated black metal style vocals, and dense squalls of harsh noise. It's equal parts Skitliv and Merzbow, Wolf Eyes and Abruptum, blackened and crushing and harsh as fuck, and much closer to noisy, formless black metal than the icy death industrial that Cold Spring is famous for. For fans of both black industrial AND the weirder, more experimental end of the black metal gutter though, this is essential!