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Crushing eschatological violence. 2009's In The Constellation Of The Black Widow from British industrial death/black crushers Anaal Nathrakh is as extreme as anything the band has produced so far, a ten song blast of hellish, apocalyptic violence that signaled a return to the full-on feral fury of earlier albums like The Codex Necro and When Fire Rains Down From The Sky, Mankind Will Reap As It Has Sown. It was on those early releases that the band quickly established themselves as one of the most intense newer black/death bands to have surfaced at the dawn of the 2000s. Certainly one of the most pissed off sounding bands, that's for sure. After getting blasted with the withering misanthropy of those early works, it's tough coming up with another band that exudes as much anti-human vitriol within the death metal spectrum as these guys.

Their nihilistic tone was tempered somewhat by Anaal Nathrakh's growing inclusion of power metal-style vocal heroics and soaring melody as their career continued, though. I'd always been a fan of those more melodic qualities that the band incorporated into the ultra-violent, twisted deathblast on later albums, but in many ways Constellation was a return to form, with the demonic vocal outbursts that switch on a dime between insanely harsh shrieks and guttural growls taking center stage versus David Hunt's majestic baritone, the convoluted, savage riff-arrangements, the slashing, dissonance of the guitars, the corrosive electronic noise, and those furious programmed drum machines ripping through these ten tracks like artillery fire. And corrosive electronic noise that made their debut one of my favorite black/death album ever. That barbaric industrialized death metal riffage and blackened hyperblast is colored by additional textures like ghostly voices and samples that lurk beneath the metallic onslaught, and there are frequent outbursts of psychotic guitar solos, vicious electronic glitchery and weird industrial samples that explode out of nowhere, constantly keeping these songs in a state of panicked tension. One of their more ferocious records, this sees Anaal Nathrakh chronicling our slow-motion apocalypse better than most, delivering another amazingly brutal slab of supremely epic death/black metal.