I'm a new convert to the Finnish black metal band Dead Reptile Shrine, having never listened to this band before I got a stack of their cassette releases fairly recently from Anti-humanism. Dunno why I didn't get clued in to this band earlier, their bizarre, blackened brain-damaged psychedelia is fucking genius, and is exactly the kind of thing that I hunt down for Crucial Blast. A lot of this stuff from Finland is still undiscovered country for me, but I aim to rectify this personal shortcoming as quickly as possible. Thanks to Wierd Forest who just released this brand new double Lp from Dead Reptile Shrine, I'm at least beginning to get caught up on the many strange offerings from this incredibly odd band that lurks way out on the very edge of what we consider "black metal".

One of the most wrecked and bizarre albums I've ever heard out of the black metal underground, The Sun Of Circles And Wood is so much closer in sound to the improvised slop-rock of Bunnybrains than anything you'd normally refer to as BM. It's mainly the esoteric imagery, the transgressive feel, the animalistic fervor of black metal that Dead Reptile Shrine appropriate, but musically it's something completely different.

This orgy of damaged blackened shamble begins with the "Circle Of Stars" of the first side, where the music emerges on the opening song "Summer Forest's Magic" as a sort of warped shuffling dirge of freely improvised guitar, the guitarist strangling his instrument and producing all sorts of atonal chords and broken melodies, while the rhythm section meanders seemingly aimlessly through this noisy, drugged weirdness, and the singer moans and chants in a series of unintelligible mutterings and ravings as other voices moan and wail in the background. The next song stumbles out of a short burst of mangled noise as a bizarre post-punk jam, slow and menacing but incredibly brain damaged sounding at the same time, a garagey black doom jam with wild ranting vocals and more of that wrecked meandering guitar, like a bizarre cross between Abruptum and cult outsider garage-pop group The Shaggs. Elsewhere, they coalesce into something that only slightly more resembles black metal, a furious low-fi swarming of murky guitars and blastbeats and slow, croaked recitations buried under a heavy blanket of hiss and effects, and there's some killer psychedelic blackened rock going on with some of these songs, where they will suddenly snap out of their crazed shambling blackened punk into a KILLER hook. Over on the other side, the band gets spacey in an early Floyd way on "Jihad Princess", analogue synth sounds bleeping over heavy caveman drumming and distorted klaxon-like warning blasts of distorted keyboard. There's some weird electronic/industrial soundscapery going on with "The Point", and then "Ave Maria" unleashes another quasi-black metal blast of warped cymbal crashes, gargling demonic vocals and crazed Latin chanting, and droning, atonal guitars, while a mutated pop hook materializes on "Possessed By Infinity" amid howling noisy freaked-out rock.

The other record is titled "Circle Of Trees", and begins with "Summoner Of Clarity", a strange abstract night-ritual of buzzing low-fi electronics and weird, psychedelic effects swirling around short bursts of what sounds like some sort of tribal percussion, a mix of voices present through the track as a deep male voice recites incantations and other less identifiable throats moan, chant and howl in the shadows. There's some monastic chanting that appears, and extremely distorted guitar sounds smeared across the constant heavy bass-throb of a synthesizer while electronic chimes sound off sporadically. That's followed by more fractured blackened buzzing guitar and high pitched whining shrieks and messed up drumming on "Weapon, Crucifixion And Drowning", and the weird spoken word, kettledrum rhythms and jangly guitar of "Blasphemous Coven". The side degenerates into further blackened punk meltdowns, low-fi chunks of Venom-on-Quaaludes weirdness tumbling through a fog of reverb, descents into ridiculously noisy, over-modulated black metal, cinematic synthscapes and short passages of creepy Goblin-esque ambience...

Can't recommend this enough to all of you more adventurous fans of underground blackness and dementia; anyone into bands like Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, Furze, Funereal Moon, Dead Raven Choir, Circle Of Ouroborus - if any of those are in your collection, you really should check out Dead Reptile Shrine, who quite possibly out-weirds them all...

Beautifully packaged in a striking full-color gatefold jacket, accompanied by a black and white insert. Limited to five hundred copies.