The last few albums from the UK black metal experimentalist Caina that have come out on Profound Lore are much loved around here with their perfect mix of the gorgeous gloomy 4AD style dreampop shot through with a vaguely blackened undercurrent, so I was really stoked to find out that a brand new Caina disc had come out on the Portugese label Universal Tongue recently. With four tracks clocking in at just under a half hour, it's more of a lengthy EP than a full album, but it's got all of the stuff that makes Caina such a strange and mysterious sounding band, bringing together dreamy blissed-out beauty and some surprisingly brutal blackness...

The disc starts off with the short track "The Approaching Chastisement", a gorgeous bit of ethereal dreampop that sounds like it could have easily appeared as an obscure 7" from 4AD twenty years ago, a warm hazy wash of lush synthesizers and sweeping shoegazey guitar chords and blissed-out choral beauty laid out over symphonic strings and a straightforward drumbeat. The song is as sweetly majestic as any of Jesu's more recent pop offerings, but the prettiness is demolished as soon as the song leads into "Drilling The Spire", a seven minute blur of woozy, rotting black metal riffage, searing distorted melodies wavering in and out of tune and hellish reverb-soaked growls that lurch through the song's fucked-up spatial structure, the dirgey off-kilter riffing alternately turning epic and doomy or halting and angular, brief passages of abstract ambience and programmed blastbeats sometimes interrupting the mutant black metal. And then, voila, at the four minute mark this all melts into another absolutely breathtaking wash of moody dreampop, mottled synths bleeding into spacey melodic strum, heavier distorted riffing slowly creeping in, turning the climax into a kind of proggy shoegaze rock.

"To Pluck The Night Up By Its Skin" is another weird mix of abstract black metal and melodic prettiness, starting off with a martial drum beat and melodic bassline before dropping in the rich clusters of dreamy black metal buzz and the oddly melodic blackened vocals, downer black metal blended evenly with morose gloompop and swells of proggy synth, but then a few minutes in it all fades out, and shifts into a bizarre ambient passage with samples of Jim Jones speaking over reverbed pings, slowly building into a lurching stop/start riff that continues to change shape from jangly blackened pop to scorched buzz.

"You Worship The Wrong Carpenter" closes the disc with killer Carpenter/Goblin-esque synth over a simple skittering drumbeat as soft dreamy guitar strum and angelic choral synths descend, a mix of vintage soundtrack progginess and hazy electronica-tinged post rock. But then halfway in a lone, slightly-effected guitar enters and leads the song into an epic stretch of blasting drums, angular buzzing riffs, and swirling celestial ambience swept up in a majestic prog-metal outro. It's all instantly identifiable as Caina, but these tracks are also some of the weirder and more abstract jams that I've heard from the band so far...

Digipack packaging, in a limited edition of 500 copies.