One of several full-length albums that came out in 2010 from the obscure, yet insanely prolific (with somewhere in the vicinity of sixteen albums in the can since 2007) one-man black metal outfit Benighted In Sodom, Dismal Ethereality: Stellar Celestial Void delivers more of this band's strange strain of suffocating dense, doom-laden black metal with six epic tracks that reach upwards of a half hour or longer in length. I'd been peripherally aware of Benighted In Sodom for awhile, and had been a fan of the Beauty. Darkness. Chaos. three-way split that he appeared on alongside Frostmoon Eclipse and Chaos Moon, but I never got around to checking more of his stuff until I came across this album, released on the tiny black metal label Singularity Publishing. Along with Benighted In Sodom, sole member Matron Thorn has also been briefly involved with cult German black metallers Bethlehem (even performing on their St�nkfitzchen EP roughly around the same time that he was recording Dismal Ethereality) and is also a member of the avant-garde death metal outfit �vangelist. But it's his massive output and signature style of bleary, gloomy black metal that he's best known for in underground metal circles. It was with this album that something finally clicked with me in regards to Benighted In Sodom's music, the album's plodding, deliberately monotonous drum machines and wavering, smeared keyboards and distant swarming black metal riffs suddenly peeling back and revealing a sound that echoed with some of my favorite things: I could hear traces of classic 80's darkwave, Pornography-era Cure, and classic UK shoegaze in Dismal Ethereality's music, and more than anything else, the bleak, achingly beautiful sound of Ionia-era Lycia. But that's all sublimated into a murky din of buzzing minor key metallic guitar and agonized screams, an atmosphere of abject misery that owes just as much to the likes of Shining, Burzum and those suicide-obsessed black metallers Bethlehem.

On this album, Thorn has turned the music of Benighted In Sodom into an ode to decay and entropy, the music formed around a simple formula of repetitive riffs and gloom-drenched, warbly guitar melodies layered on top of one another, an abject 'gazey blackness drowning in an ocean of fuzz and hiss, carried away by the almost mechanical ticktock pulse and slow shuffle of the drum machine, sometimes shifting into these weirdly mixed floor-tom rhythms that rumble out of the waves of dense, suffocating guitar-gloom. The six tracks that sprawl across Dismal Ethereality are mostly instrumental, the harsh, wretched screams appearing sparingly, and when they do show up, are buried deep in the swirling blown-out roar of guitars and keyboards. The songs seem to loop around themselves, the miserable melodies repeating over and over, droning endlessly around Benighted's blackened pulse, and it's that aspect of this album that brings this sound that much closer to the heavy shoegaze fog of bands like Slowdive and the glacial goth of early Lycia. That heavy gloompop sound remains constant through the album, only breaking when the bleak, monochrome synths and industrial ambience of "The Algophile" appears later on, an interlude of desolate drone teeming with visions of suffering and suicide and extreme mental illness. Fantastic stuff.

Limited to three hundred copies.