One of the recent releases that we've picked up from Romanian label Valse Sinistre Production, Closed Room's self-titled debut is a strange mixture of atmospheric prog rock, black metal influences, gloom-pop and experimental trip hop from this Belarusian band. The label describes the album's sound as something that would appeal to fans of "Amesoeurs, Forgotten Woods, Ulver, David Lynch" and I can't really argue with that - there's a definite dreamy, black metal-influenced sound here that is reminiscent of bands like Alcest and Amesoeurs, and the female vocals are pretty gorgeous, but there's also a weirder experimental streak at work here that takes the album into passages of Voivodian discordance and displays a weird style of songwriting that ventures into some highly abstract and unpredictable song arrangements.

What I was really reminded of when this album first started up is the later Gathering albums, whose mix of trip-hop and metallic heaviness is somewhat comparable to Closed Room's haunting boom-bap soundscapes, but imagine that If_then_else-era Gathering sound melded with droning blackened tremolo guitars and the occasional blast of full-on frostbitten black metal, and you'll be close. Despite those latter elements, black metal diehards will find this far too poppy for their tastes, most likely, but for those who dig stranger, artier experiments with black metal/gloom-rock genre-bending, this is interesting stuff. There are some really haunting trip-hop style passages that emerge on songs like "Black Hall", as big Massive Attack-style beats creep beneath eerie spoken word samples, waves of restrained guitar noise and ominous piano melody and the singer's wailing vocals. Other tracks venture into a kind of deformed art-pop like "Fly To The Sunrise", which almost sounds like Velocity Girl or some other early 90s girl-fronted jangle pop outfit, but with guitars that are just slightly more bent and darkened, a thread of dissonant ugliness running through the song even as it locks its super-catchy hook into your head - and it's then that the band suddenly erupts into blastbeating drums and a ripping black metal riff, still playing that same catchy hook but transforming it into a killer icy black metal blast even while the singer keeps singing in that sweet melodic voice. Its an awesome blast of blackened, miserable pop.

There's a few more of the trip-hop style songs on here, "In The Closed Room" with its weird robotic-demon vocals and bluesy piano/guitar, followed by the weird dissonant nightmarishness and mutant R&B strains of "White Bed Sheet". Other songs unwind into a kind of lush dark prog rock ("Winter Sun") flecked with jazzy clarinet and more of that soaring Floydian blues shred, or the weirdly jazzy black metal of "Blue Velvet" where disturbing Nattramn-esque shrieks suddenly appear alongside clanking industrial weirdness and spacey fx-drenched guitars. Classical piano and strings appear on "Slowing Down Breathe", strafed with blasts of radio static, and the album closes with the experimental, grim trip-hop of "The Barrier", where more of those shuffling jazzy rhythms are met with droning distorted guitar, gradually morphing into one final blast of crushing black metal.

Like I said, this isn't a black metal album, but black metal listeners with a taste for weirder, more experimental kinds of rock might find this to be as interesting and infectious as I did. Everything that I've picked up from Valse Sinistre looks great, with really eye-catching packaging designs, and the same goes for this, packaged in an attractive glossy digipack that comes with an eight page booklet, both highlighted by A.N. 23's evocative photography. Limited to five hundred copies.