The earlier Beherit recordings were insanely chaotic and primitive blurts of blackened death metal that had a similiar bestial vibe as the fucked-up Brazilian scumthrash of bands like Sarcafago, Vulcano and Sextrash, but when 1993 rolled around and these Finns dropped their first full-blown full length Drawing Down The Moon, it was serious what the fuck time. The band's sound had gotten MUCH weirder for this album, though at first you wouldn't notice anything different from their early recordings...the disc opens with a short synth into with a deep distorted voice proclaiming fealty to Satan while angelic voices sing in the background, then rips right into "Salomom's Gate", all brutal simplistic thrashing riffage and Nuclear Holocausto's psychotic gurgling vocals that sounds an awful lot like what the scummy deaththrash they were playing on The Oath of Black Blood. But as the song continues, the arrangement gets all weird, riffs kind of wander off or stop abruptly, droning keyboards pop up randomly, and the band ends things on a slow, sludgy doom riff that just fades off. The next track "Nocturnal Evil" is another blazing thrasher, primitive four chord riffs sounding more like hardcore punk scoured by extreme distortion and blown speakers than anything, and those vocals...whoa...Nuclear Holocausto's gargling rasp goes all over the place, one minute raging in the background, and a second later his vocals are all of a sudden WAY UP IN THE MIX and in your face. In contrast, "Sadomatic Rites" starts off total doom, a massive death metal riff played at halfspeed while spacey synths swell in the background that eventually picks up speed and turns into a chugging midpaced monster halfway through, then becomes sloppier and sloppier, the drums and guitars falling over themselves as the song fades out towards the end.

The first minute of "Black Arts" has a sample of what sounds like the crackling and hissing of a burning pyre and some kind of inhuman grunting, then switches to mid-tempo death metal with even more whacked out vocals run through some kind of effects. Then there is "Nuclear Girl", a short two minute track of dubbed out drums, sinister minor-key synth, droning guitar and bleeping electronics, a psychedelic instrumental interlude that sets up the mangled punky death metal of "Unholy Pagan Fire", and it's from here on that Beherit pile on the weirdness. Atavistic death metal riffs merge with wall-of-noise blackened buzzsaw guitars, weird Tangerine Dream keyboards keep popping up all over the place as well as other electronic noises, the vocals switch back and forth from hideous gargles to hushed whispers and ridiculous computer-processed spoken word parts where Nuclear Holocausto recites all sorts of Satanic blasphemies over a backdrop of muddy guitar noise. The vocals on Drawing Down The Moon are some of most bizarre in the black metal canon, and it's not hard to see how this set the stage for later BM weirdos like Furze and Striborg to do their thing.

One of the more notorious tracks on Drawing is "Summerlands", which is basically a really dark New Age track with spoken word vocals and Zamfir style flutes piping over a plodding drumbeat and sounds of a forest at night, and it's a total left turn in the middle of what is already a pretty strange black/death metal album. After that there's a new version of the older track "Werewolf Semen And Blood" and "Thou Angel Of The Gods", both blasts of filthy black metal with more of that insane vocal mixing and echoed layering, and the album closes with "Lord Of Shadows And Goldenwood", a mix of droning deathdoom and cosmic ambience that ends in a wave of massive blackened synthesizer roar.

The band was clearly out of their fucking minds when they recorded this album. The combination of filthy atavistic black metal and their bizarre version of New Age-y ambience is both inspired and totally inept, and there is a general consensus that Drawing Down The Moon is one of the weirdest albums to come out of the second wave of black metal. I've seen just as many people online write this album off as utter dogshit as I've seen proclaim it as the work of avant-garde genius, so depending on just how damaged you like yer old school black metal, your mileage will vary. This is absolutely crucial listening for anyone into eccentric and outsider black/death metal though, and is one of the few albums from this era that achieves the same sort of otherworldly strangeness as Abruptum's early recordings. Recommended to disciples of the Satanic and the absurd.