This album had already been highly recommended to me by fellow fans of the more blown-out, distorted and abstracted strains of black metal, but I was still pretty amazed when I finally sat down and listened to Poems For The Aching, Swords For The Infuriated, the stunning debut full length from the Israeli one-man black metal band Animus. This project is shrouded in mystery, no track titles, the songs instead identified by numbers, the sole member choosing anonymity, and no lyrics...the booket itself contains only some arcane writing and minimal woodcut art. This sense of mystery extends even moreso across the music - with six tracks running just a total of 50 minutes, Animus crafts a majestic brand of epic yet introspective black metal dronebliss; while the raw materials are what I was expecting from a denizen of the loner black metal realm, the dark and ominous minor key melodies, brittle guitars pushed through extreme levels of distortion, and bleak, minimalist song structures, etc., Animus nevertheless creates a unique and entrancing cloud of dreamlike black buzz that is almost painfully beautiful. Like "Part 3", which drowns a heartbreakingly gorgeous melody in a pool of trebly distortion and Animus' sandpaper death-croak, a sorrowful dreampop lullaby buried in white noise and amp hiss. Or "Part 4" and it's repetitive, soaring melodic hook gliding over a black surface of Burzumic fuzz and cavernous reverb and pulsing drum machine blasts swallowed up in the swirling fog. Animus mostly crawls along at a slow, dirgey pace though, a murky midtempo trudge, sometimes sounding like a fuzz drenched, more melodic version of Skepticism. This album has some of the catchiest, most melodic black metal dirge ever, it's as bleak and depressing and trance inducing as Xasthur, but those melodic hooks have more in common with the more recent Drudkh releases, Velvet Cacoon's dreamy hiss, and some wraithlike version of shoegaze summoned up from black corners. Highly recommended.