Whoa. This British black/doom band appeared out of nowhere with debut album To Pay The Debt Of Nature, and it's one of the most fucked/tortured albums of its kind to come through the doors here. Bearing a thoroughly ugly and misshapen sound, Black Crow King mashes together chunks of drunken, shambling doom metal, extreme electronic noise, crusty blood-gargling vocals and some of the most whacked guitar noodling this side of a Sloth album, producing something that sounds undeniably "off". I was hooked by the second song, where monolithic slabs of slow-mo guitar drift over what seems to be a totally improvised drum performance, and church organs are blurred into gorgeous majestic melodies rising in deformed clouds of whirr and buzz over clanking pianos and surges of ultra-abrasive doom-slop. This mutant blackened sludge-psych is the product of sole member Corvus Rex, who some of you may know from the blackened power electronics outfit Project: Void, whose awesome Anthropogenic Process cassette was released by Crucial Blast earlier this year. It was that connection that initially led me to check out BCK, but I was knocked out by how fucked and hideous this sounds, an irradiated cacophony comprised of random piano and horror-movie synths, blasts of Goslings-esque sludge beauty, string sections, jarring riffs that contort unpredictably through the filthy lumbering heaviness and Abruptumish chaos, all polluted with a crapload of brain-damaged electronics and random drum machine splatter that continuously pushes this over the edge into total mania. The production is white-hot, the guitars and vocals pushed all the way into the red until they erupt into chunks of pure distortion, and there's a meandering, stream-of-consciousness quality to these songs that makes this sound pretty schizo, and keeps evoking the twisted improvisational spirit of Abruptum the more I listen to it, some alternate-world version of Abruptum that somehow managed to get its hands on Joe Preston's drum machine for Thrones and set the controls to "freak-out". So yeah, Black Crow King's brand of lunacy is going to be far too weird for most, especially if you are looking for a more straight-forward approach to doom metal, but for those into the far fringes of bizarro doom inhabited by Korperscwache, Black Mayonnaise, The Whorehouse Massacre, Reclusa, Hallowed Butchery, Rigor Sardonicous and old Sloth, this is definitely worth checking out...