��San Francisco's dulcimer-driven one-man band Botanist brings us more of his brilliant plant-worshipping black metal with this new split, which sees him teaming up with another San Fran outfit, Palace of Worms. I snoozed for the longest time on Palace of Worm's previous stuff on Flenser, but their side of this split is killer stuff, and makes for a fantastic compliment to Botanist's strange verdant visions.

�� Botanist is up first, his side titled EP I: The Hanging Gardens Of Hell; once again delivering an unconventional vision of black metal using just vocals, drums and hammered dulcimer which more often resembles some ramshackle blackened drone-rock veined with black threads of withered folk than anything you'd typically describe as "metal". The first song "Tillandsia" is in that same rollicking mode as the music on the Mandragora album, the drums racing beneath the strange chiming overtones and washes of eerie droning guitar, a sound that continues to remind me of Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth strapped to the back of blazing black metal-style tempos and possessed by distant, gasping vocals. The lyrics again read like some strange chronicle of arcane botanical hallucinations, apocalyptic arboreal visions of weeds and vines and roots crawling across the earth, burying human civilization beneath a bed of green. More avant noise rock than metal, in fact, but still pretty powerful. And again, this guy is gifted with crafting sheets of melodic sound, the songs breaking away into haunting plaintive melodies woven from that hammered dulcimer, or clustering together into masses of chiming sound like on the thunderous "Senecio", shot through with dissonant glare, or the hushed, almost hymnlike beauty of "Tradescantia Pallida". Lovely stuff.

�� On Palace Of Worm's side, though, the album shifts into much darker and more menacing territory. The three-part "Ode To Joy" kicks in with buzzing minor key balck metal riffs and mostly mid-paced rocking tempos, flecked with some vintage synthesizer textures, bits of 80's style soundtracky ambience glimmering above the off-kilter rhythms and sudden shifts from ferocious tremolo riffing into more awkward, off-kilter angularity. There's some killer gothy touches that appear through these three tracks, the echo-drenched scraped strings and wiry reverb-soaked melodies putting off some classic deathrock fumes here and there, but there's always another violent eruption of rickety blastbeats and hoarse, layered screaming and epic riffage right around the corner, a hallucinatory vibe wafting off the recording thanks to sole member Balan's unusual layering of atonal keyboards and howling pipe organs with the ragged ugly black metal, and his use of almost math-rock style time signatures and spiky dissonance with soaring, delay-drenched rock solos. Love this stuff!