Brand new album from the reunited cult Norwegian black metal crew Forgotten Woods, their first new stuff in 10 years and their first for new label 20 Buck Spin who apparently has designs to re-release the band's back catalog. Pretty strange stuff here, the band formed back in 1991 and so are part of that whole original wave of frostbitten Scandi-BM, but from what we've heard, Forgotten Woods has always been one of the weirder bands to emerge from that scene. Race Of Cain certainly looks strange, the 6-panel digipack mysteriously decorated with old sepia-tinged photographs of a young girl in a clown costume, little children seemingly at Sunday school, a drawing from Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, and drawings of the reproductive cycle of the housefly. Their music is even stranger...at it's core, Forgotten Woods play a really raw, noisy and aggro take on old school black metal that's definitely reminiscent of Burzum, with exquisitely mangy drumming and a guitar tone so baked in mid-range that it makes our teeth rattle...but they're also really psychedelic, suddenly throwing in quietly somber and immensely beautiful guitar instrumentals that drown you in reverb and dark melodies, or suddenly loosing weird effects on their scorching midtempo black metal that seems to make everything sound out of phase. Most of the songs lumber along at a midtempo pace, and there's a couple parts where they almost sound like a really buzzy, gnarly 70's boogie-metal outfit, like on "One Day". And then there's "The Principle And The Whip", an amazingly beautiful and super catchy song with softly sung female vocals that sounds more like some old dreamy indie rock outfit than anything remotely black metal...yet Forgotten Woods drape so much Luciferian imagery and utterly charred buzz across this album that you can't call it anything but black metal. The last track "Third Eye (New Creature)" is really dramatic, starting off as a grim blast of thrashy black metal with scathing lyrics admonishing herd-think in all of it's forms, and then it fades out into a lengthy segment from the long running evangelical radio show Talk Back With Bob Larson, where the host carries on an ongoing argument with a guest who extolls his beliefs in Social Darwinism. It's a heady, heated conversation that lasts for 7 minutes or so, and then suddenly the band kick back in with a fucking AWESOME riff and crushing rock beat, sounding like some beastly stoner rock outfit being blasted out of a man-sized transistor radio. Nice! Race Of Cain is right up there with other proponents of free-thinking weirdo black metal like Sigh, Tjolgtjar, Benighted Leams, Ved Buens Ende, and Fluerety, and fellow fans of arty yet shredding blackness need to check these guys out! Highly recommended.