Here is yet another stellar slab of strange Canadian black metal that has recently surfaced on the powerhouse label Profound Lore, which also recently brought us that awesome A.M.S.G. album that I raved about elsewhere on this weeks new arrivals list. This time we head over to the other side of Canada, where we find the debut EP Necheshirion from the Montreal-based duo Gevurah, who serve up five tracks of their complex, richly atmospheric black metal that's heavily draped in Luciferian theology and religious Satanism, visions of serpent symbolism and some pretty heavy philosophical malevolence. That stuff is all set against Gevurah's seething backdrop of warped, dissonant black metal, the dense lyrics delivered through a powerful, almost ritualistic vocal performance. Listening to Necheshirion and reading along with the lyrics and album notes, you definitely get the feeling that these guys are dead serious about the concepts that they explore through their vicious black metal, and the music backs up their intense ideology. It's a twisted, churning assault of blackened heaviosity that these guys whip up here, the discordant riffs blossoming into pummeling fast paced black metal, swarms of droning dissonant riffage glazed in a cold, evil sheen of discordance that adds much to Gevurah's hypnotic blast assault, and hints at the influence of such French black metal bands as Antaeus, Deathspell Omega and Aosoth. After opening with the surge of slow, crawling dread that spreads out across the first few minutes of the disc, the band soon kicks in to high gear with tracks like "The Essence Unbound", "Flesh Bounds Desecrated" and "The Throne Of Lucifer", each one a blistering hymn to the Luciferian archetype, a call to enlightenment through violence and bloodshed. Gevurah's music shifts from contorted black metal chaos into lurching mid-tempo passages where the swirling minor key guitars form into eerie atonal melodies, or it'll suddenly veer out of that blazing blastbeat-driven blackness into a brief outro of slashing orchestral terror. The whole half-hour disc is loaded with these amazing little moments of sonic terror that give this an increasingly unsettling, textured feel, drawing further into itself the din of nightmares, until the band finally reaches the fifth and final track, a savage cover of "Entering Timeless Halls" by Swedish black metallers Malign that closes the EP with one last blast of ferocious death worship.

   Beautifully packaged in a four panel digipack, with the booklet bound directly into the packaging.