It's been six years since the Japanese sludgelords Corrupted have flattened us with a new album of their glacial sludge. Released on Nostalgia Blackrain, the label operated by Corrupted drummer Chew, Garten Der Unbewusstheit marks a turning point for the band, being the last album to feature the lineup of bassist/vocalist Hevi and guitarist Talbot alongside drummer Chew. This lineup produced classic albums such as Paso Inferior, Llenandose De Gusanos and Se Hace Por Los Suenos Asesinos, and with their leaving the band, Chew has stated that Corrupted will proceed with a new lineup for future releases that will take the sound in new directions. With this album, though, we're already introduced to a musical side of Corrupted that'll surprise a lot of listeners.

The first song "Garten" quietly appears with a delicate clean guitar melody playing out over simple, minimal drumming that is little more than the rhythmic chime of a cymbal, with only spare bass drum hits and the occasional snare disturbing the tranquil atmosphere, a kind of skeletal, super minimal slowcore that's somewhat like something you'd hear from Codeine, but a few shades darker. When the vocals finally come in, they are a hushed growled whisper, deep and ominous as the somber guitars are joined by an eerie, almost jazzy melody, and then it all crashes down. The guitars surge into heavy crashing chords, the drumming becomes heavier and more powerful, that hushed croon rising into a monstrous growl, but instead of the tectonic sludge of their older works, this is much more melancholic and majestic, still layered with those clean chiming guitars and soaring effects even at it's heaviest, and still sounding rather Codeine-ish. Over the song's half hour length, the band moves between these lengthy passages of beautiful fragility and the eruptions of towering heaviness, until it finally flows seamlessly into "Against The Darkest Days". This second track is very brief, an interlude which begins with creeping autumnal shadows of the first half of the album and moving into a single acoustic guitar playing a beautiful somber piece that leads right into the final song, the half hour long "Gekkou No Daichi".

That slow, sorrowful acoustic melody carries over through the beginning of the song, the gentle strum spreading out through the first few minutes. Then the roar of a heavier distorted second guitar creeps in, the two intertwining in a dark cloud, and it all erupts into a massive, majestic dirge, the achingly pretty main melody drifting among the rumbling down tuned heaviness and soaring high end guitars, the vocals becoming a deep monstrous roar as this glacial slowcore lament slowly unfolds across the length of the piece, the sound seriously heavy but also much more dreamy and ethereal than what I'm used to hearing from Corrupted, especially when the guitars soar skyward with gorgeous ascendant melodies. Around the midway point, the band slips into a lumbering slow-burning dirge that is streaked with incandescent feedback and walls of shimmering guitar, while the drums slip from the pounding elephantine crush into jazzier percussion flourishes. As the song approaches the final third, all of this starts to once again build in intensity, the drums becoming more powerful and pounding, the guitars weaving more complex melodies and building into this amazing cinematic crescendo that is even more dramatic sounding that what has come before, a towering wall of distorted melody and roaring low-end amplifier noise, crushing and incredibly beautiful. By the end, the drums fall apart, and the song rides out on a wave of receding cymbal hiss and raging distortion as the acoustic guitar returns, ending Garten Der Unbewusstheit with another softly played almost Spanish-tinged piece.

It's undeniably powerful music, even if the shift into a more melodic, spacious sound might not be what fans of the band's blackest doom were expecting from a new Corrupted album. They've never sounded more majestic than they do here, though, and after listening to Garten non-stop over the past few weeks, I look forward to seeing how the band will continue to evolve as they move into the next chapter of their existence.