Now available in the original jewel case form.

The German "dark metal" band Bethlehem started out back in 1991 as a mixture of black metal, doom and death metal and have undergone a number of changes both in style and in personnel over the years, with newer albums leaning more towards goth/industrial sounds. Their 1996 album, however, is in my opinion their harshest and bleakest work, and is notable for probably being the seed for the entire depressive/suicidal black metal sound that developed in the wake of this record's initial release. The band had been possessed with a morbid fascination with death and suicide since the beginning, but this preoccupation with suicide reached an apex with Dictius Te Necare, combining an intensely raw and abject emotional breakdown with fierce, atmospheric black metal and some of the most agonized, high-pitched shrieks that you'll ever hear. The frantic, insane sounding shrieks on Dictius foreshadow the similar heart-ripping vocal deliveries of bands like Marblebog, Hyadningnar, Deinonychus and especially Silencer. These screams are tempered with schizophrenic whispering and the rare Tom Warrior-style deathgrunt, and the delivery (and the fact that all of the lyrics are screamed in German) gives this a totally mental vibe that few black metal bands have been able to match since. Admittedly, the singer does sound perilously close to a teutonic Grover from Sesame Street at times, but there's no denying the abject misery and hopelessness conveyed through this music. Musically, this is raw, filthy black metal laced with crushing doom; standouts include "Die Anarchische�", a fearsome mid-tempo blackened assault layered with recordings of surf, minor key clean guitar and those panicked black shrieks drifting through black fog over the second half of the track, and "Aphel - Die schwarze Schlange", diseased rocking BM with one of the album's most vicious riffs, very Celtic Frost-esque, then veers out into some bizarre goblin-gargle atmospherics and spacious black drift with piano swirling among the blasting drums and swarming guitars. A masterwork of seriously weird, unstable black metal, essential for those into disturbed, negatory, depressive blackness.