For almost fifteen years, blackened Baton Rouge death metallers Catholicon have been assaulting the underground with their quirky combination of dissonant doom-laden death metal and blasphemous black metal, but 2009 saw the band putting the kibosh on the project and heading off to new pursuits. More black metal than anything, Catholicon injected their sound with a heavy amount of doomed death metal with strange contorted riffs that was obviously influenced by the angular, dissonant death of Incantation, along with some very subtle touches of Bayou sludginess, blasting grind, and lots of really cool, tastefully used dark ambience and electronics. These latter elements, the dark electronic drones and strings, only appear occasionally and never detracts from the crushing heaviness and pervasive feeling of evil that's all over Catholicon's music, but they make this a really interesting and textured slab of blackened heaviness that I've been listening to a LOT lately.

As their final adieu, the band released this double disc set that consists of their final album Of Ages Past and an extensive DVD-ROM archive of material that offers up a staggering amount of music and video to explore. The album has ten studio tracks (including a cover of Sodom's "Remember the Fallen") and an alternate mix of "Blood Ink for the Book of Life", all crushingly heavy, doomed blackened death with those weird sludgy riffs, the bass WAY up in mix and playing these fluid bass lines that sometimes sounds like they are using a fretless bass, all of this creating a massive low-end that forms into pounding mid-paced doomed death draped in dissonant minor key blackness, and faster blackened thrash. The vocals are total death metal, super deep and beastly guttural grunts mixed with higher-pitched shrieks, and this mix of styles is a big part of Catholicon's unique sound. So too are the weird rhythmic parts and fucked-up drumming that's all over this, like the manic off-time rhythms on "Lament Configuration", and the angular riffs and slow doom-laden parts are really creative and strange sounding, reminding me of how savant allot of Incantation's stuff can be (who in fact are probably the closest comparison to Catholicon's blackened death, albeit with much more of a black metal influence, natch), and there's even some weird little Ved Buens Ende-ish dissonant blackened weirdness on "Revel In The Ashes".

The DVD-ROM archive that comes with this set is the real treasure trove for Catholicon fans, though. Titled Excommunicated: Catholicon Compendium 1994-2009, this disc contains almost twenty-four hours of audio and four hours of video footage, and has pretty much everything that Catholicon recorded outside of the other three studio albums, as well as a bunch of Catholicon-related stuff. Every demo, promo recording, rehearsal tape, live video, outtake, and unreleased track from the band going back to 1994 is collected here, all re-mastered for this release. And as you go back through their archives, you'll find some seriously weird and fucked-up black/death metal; before the band evolved into the tightly-wound, dissonant, Incantation-influenced black/death, their music was much more primitive and chaotic, with Burzum-like keyboards and weird stumbling riffs.

The disc includes Catholicon's Children of the Lost Generation and Redemption demos, the Live From the Static Age + Blacklight Rehearsals recordings, lost tracks from the Lost Chronicles sessions, the original version of Lost Chronicles of the War in Heaven, live soundboard tapes from the 90's, an unmastered version of Treatise on the Abyss, their final shows from 2009, and tons more.

Then there are the Catholicon side-projects that are included, like the demos from the blackened Satanic deathgrind band Temple of Amon, Absynth's creepy dark ambient/industrial experiments, a bunch of demos of utterly bonkers blackened techno/synthpop weirdness from Blasphyre, the bizarre dark ambience, pilfered horror film scores, industrial noise and psychedelic guitar noodling of MPR, and Peckernut's goofy scatological hardcore punk.

There's also a folder with x-rated material from Catholicon pin-up/t-shirt model girl Misty Haze, TONS of liner notes, many of which are pretty funny and self-deprecating, and other writings from the band. It's an amazingly exhaustive look at the entire career of this cult US blackened death metal band, and absolutely essential for fans.