Along with the Owlscry cassette, I've also picked up another interesting experimental black metal tape this week from Dead Medium, this one from a band called Depths that play desolate backwoods black metal that mixes together catchy, crude BM, traces of violent atavistic hardcore and infernal noise.

The opener "Flesh Into Scars" is a din of deafening drones and distant drums smashing away furiously way off in the background, almost totally obscured by a loud whirring layer of amp-hum that makes this sound more like some old UK industrial drone rock tape than a black metal release, at first. But then it turns in to more of a black metal sound after a few minutes, the song moving between a furiously noisy wall of thrash colored by a deeply sorrowful minor key guitar part, and the howling, echoing screams of the singer, with this slower, jangly sound worked in that makes me think of a much more ramshackle-sounding Lifelover. The violence increases quite a bit on "Primera Alma", a faster, more frenzied black metal song that still ends up dropping off into more of that wonderful gloomy doom-tinged heaviness, the bass guitar taking over with a creeping doom riff as clouds of feedback, scraped strings and other guitar noises rise like trails of opium smoke off of the track. Then the tape starts heading down into deeper, more abstract levels of improvised black ambience, the drummer wildly improvising while monstrous screams and huge, brain-blotting clouds of amp-drone fill the air; the last several minutes of the side finds itself squarely in the realm of the free-form black filth of Abruptum and Pentemple, and it sounds fucking killer.

The b-side unleashes a cyclone in "Black Dog Nights", which comes screaming off this tape in a blast of necro-hardcore that is totally unexpected, but completely awesome, a super-murky blackened punk assault that's as furious and catchy as anything by Malveillance or Ives, with a huge bone-rattling breakdown, gaseous shrieks and a throbbing bass-line leading the song into the maw of oblivion, finally exploding into a hectic HC blast at the end that sounds like Void filtered through the slime of early BM. Very nice. The last song "To Be Nothing" finishes the tape with a slower, moody dirge that has an almost folkish feel, waltzing drums and a melancholy main riff madly circling around the final minutes of the cassette.

I've really dug all of the tapes that I've grabbed from Dead Medium thus far, and fans of the raw, low-fi horrors found on Legion Blotan/Turgid Animal should really check this label out�