Just threw this Lp on the turntable just as snow began to blow outside the window of the C-Blast office here on a March afternoon, thick snowflakes suddenly filling the air at the moment that Fell Voices's swirling black metal began to fill the room...couldn't have asked for better timing for this killer record to kick in.

The debut album from the American black metal band Fell Voices had so much of a buzz around it when it came out a year or two ago that we sold out of every single copy that we had in stock before I even had a chance to get it reviewed on the C-Blast website. It's finally back in print from Human Resources, so if you missed out the first time, this killer slab of sprawling progressive BM is once again available, this time with a new black and white poster insert. And for fans of the band's second record that followed, you'll definitely want to go back and pick up this epic two-song release.

Yeah, it's only two songs, one on each side; as raw as this band can be, their songs are really pretty intricately structured. The first side, "As Air To Flame, So Time To Oblivion" moves through a number of interconnected passages, beginning with a blasting wall of murky cavernous black metal with sheets of droning tremolo riffing that is an obvious nod to the influence of Weakling and Wolves In The Throne Room, but this ventures off into later passages of gnarled, mid-paced blackened thrashpunk stomp, and complex lurching breakdowns where the thick, grinding bass guitar drones beneath twisted angular riffs and pounding drums. These parts will break off into somber stretches of rainfall, the eerie hiss of rain becoming a backdrop for distant buzzing guitar drones and softly wavering feedback, and then the band comes back in with a slow, almost funereal dirge that's again layered with those haunting tremolo drones, the drums creeping at a leaden, doomed pace and erupting into slow controlled blasts of double bass thunder, thick swirls of metallic buzzing coiling around the instrumental dirge. The heaviness will drop out and leave behind a single guitar slowly plucking out a simple but ominous series of notes while nocturnal bird songs and that continued rainfall drifts along the background, shifting back and forth from the desolate slow-core crawl of the quieter moments and the doomed crush when the band crashes back in with their slow motion blackened doom. The final few minutes of the song finds the band finally lurching back into the speedy blasting, tearing through a majestic thrashing hook that imbues the song with even more dread and hopelessness as it comes to a close.

"To You I Call...", the b-side track, is similarly intense. The song begins with a wash of pitch-black guitar drones, layered in a symphonic mass of sound, before the band eventually launches into another of their churning assaults of droning riffage and thunderous drumming and ominous muted melody. This builds into a another passage of majestic black metal that sprawls out across much of the length of the track, flowing from haunting tremolo riffs and murderous distant vocals underscored by the droning presence of the bass and the drummer's complex patterns, into slower, winding instrumental sections and some rather off-kilter riffing, but always returning to a stunning central melodic riff that drives the heart of the song, an almost folk-tinged, emotionally potent melodic hook that's stuck around in my head for a while after the record has stopped spinning. The most violent moment of the album arrives at the very end, when the band blasts off into ferocious, densely layered black metal cloaked in gauzy reverb, the guitars drenched in delay and becoming a cloud of sound, the drums gradually burning off until the final minutes of the song are transformed into a haunting atmospheric ambience made up of soft choral voices, delicate piano and flecks of clean guitar. Pretty amazing, I've been returning to this album over and over again. Definitely one of the better new bands to emerge from the U.S. black metal underground....