When presented with many of the "depressive black metal" bands that are making the rounds nowadays, one wonders just how genuine their expression of despair is. Not so with Endless Dismal Moan, a Japanese one man band that ended in 2008 when sole member Chaos9 (aka Takuya Tsutsui) killed himself. There is veracity to this work that imports it with an enhanced feeling of morbidity and despair. Released posthumously, Curse Of Underground is the final album from this cult black metal/industrial artist, with more of the warped, hallucinatory black metal, industrial textures, and strange electronic ambience that gave his music it's sickening, otherworldly glare.

The seven tracks are all titled "Curse", and begin with distant metallic rumbling and gasping gargles echoing throughout a subterranean soundscape while muted keys float and warble dissonantly in the background. A short interlude of minor key keyboard and minimal guitar follows, then the third track delivers the first shot of real black metal, but it's far from standard fare. Blasting electronic drums fall like torrential rainfall deep beneath a slowly unwinding minor key guitar figure, sheets of trebly white noise and interjections of gothic synthesizer, then the music slips into a halting, off-kilter waltz-like section, the vocals beyond unintelligible, just a swarm of screeching, hissing gargles that are situated behind everything. The fourth track isn't as furious; the electronic drums still blast away at torrential speed, but they're so buried that they become little more than another layer of hiss while a solemn, dour funeral march proceeds over top, swarming guitars buzzing over dissonant arpeggios and another more prominent drumbeat that marches forward in a military cadence. The next song is heavier, more frenzied industrialized doom, all atonal and blasting juxtaposed with slow, lurching drums and seriously atonal keyboards and more of that ubiquitous white noise that clings to all surfaces of this dismal black filth. Track six goes back to another industrial plod, a sparse thunderous blast of metallic detuned piano slowly pounding away high above a glowing red wasteland of industrial factories and black smokestacks, and then it ends with the slow, repetitive dirge of "Curse7", a swarming mass of sinister minor key arpeggios, funereal pacing and a moving, dramatic piano melody that reaches out across eight minutes of dour, suicidal procession into the void, very eerie and beautiful closer to this disc.

Released by the Japanese black metal/industrial/what the fuck label Sabbathid, this disc comes in a dvd style case with an insert card and a larger foldout that features Chaos9's creepy, appropriately bleak abstract artwork. Recommended to fans of early Blut Aus Nord, Black Funeral, and likeminded experimental, electronic-tinged black metallers.