Though this isn't new by any stretch (having been released by Pale Horse in '09), it's still the coolest-looking cassette package that I've picked up this year (rivaled only by the demented woodshop design of Gas Mask Horse's Full Moon Hysteria). The tape comes in a standard case with a black and white xeroxed cover, but it's housed inside of a handmade wooden box lined in black velvet, that has an upside-down crucifix attached to the top that partially conceals an actual Eucharist host, the box then held together with twine. Very cool looking, and limited to just 200 hand-numbered copies.

Originally released on Cd in 2008 on S�rp�n� H�li Music, Dysangelist is the sole album from Dictator, an obscure one-man band from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, surely one of the only extreme metal bands that I've ever encountered from this corner of the world. The album features a strange, hallucinatory mixture of blackened doom metal and black industrial ambience, the epic twenty-minute songs shifting from long stretches of murky drones and filthy sewer atmospherics into some low-fi but very dramatic funereal doom, the riffs carved out of pure Peaceville deathcrawl, the vocals a distant echoing howl that makes deciphering the lyrics impossible. The drums are a regal, minimal pounding in the background, sometimes disappearing behind the clouds of blackened guitar drone and reverb for periods of time, and the vocals swoop and squeal, sometimes rising in a blur of many voices, demented howling and weeping and stern baritone singing all emerging from the raw funereal dirge. The music breaks down several times across a single song, drifting into a tarpit fog of synth strings and random noises and those distant buzzing tremolo riffs coming out of the gloom, at times resembling some weird neo-classical version of Abruptum, at others erupting into an incredibly majestic climax of basement-deathdoom. It's interesting how the low-fi quality of the recording actually enhances the sound of the keyboards; underneath the hiss and murk, the sounds have a real orchestral weight to them that's often lacking on albums like this. Some blackened liturgical ambience appears as well, male voices rising in solemn hymn, minimal piano notes falling like ash at a crematorium, then the thunder of fists pounding on oil-tanks. Killer finale, too; the last track ends up drifting off into this cloud of black fog, a glacial classical piano piece slowly floating through the abyss while Lovecraftian behemoths breathe and slumber in the deep, or like hearing Elend perform inside of a bathysphere.

Anyone who's been looking for a band who dips their funereal doom metal into the chaos-pit, look no futher. Terminally grim and suffocating blackened funeral doom and monolithic crypt-ambience recommended to fans of Nortt, Tyranny, Wormphlegm, and Funeralium.