��Totally demented psychedelic Japanese black metal outfit Darkcell delivers its second album (and debut for black metal imprint Moribund), the one-man band offering some seriously fucking deranged dissonant blackness laced with moments of bizarre industrialized circus music, stirring cinematic synth, and tons of weird electronic effects. Even though I've been a huge fan of Japanese black metal bands like Sigh and Abigail, it really wasn't until recently that I started to get seriously obsessed with the more obscure reaches of the Japanese black metal underground. After discovering the Zero Dimensional label, I've begun to develop a potentially unhealthy lust for this stuff, spending far too many hours online tracking down and listening to some of the strangest black metal I've heard in years. Although Darkcell isn't affiliated with the Zero Dimensional crowd, the band's latest album Nightmare Document Part II definitely delivers a similar strain of Far East necro-delirium, with a somewhat schizoid sound that sounds nothing like any other Japanese black metal band I've heard.

�� Darkcell is hardly another exercise in plodding bedroom black metal, though, instead dragging the listener by the hair through a strange, often dreamlike frenzy of off-kilter thrash and atonal riffing, the recording liberally layered with warbling keyboards and murky, discordant ambience. Furious D-beat driven passages are spiked with crushing blackened riffage, and the songs suddenly detour into waltz-like funhouse music and passages of reverb-drenched post-punk guitar and synthetic French horns, or washes of cinematic orchestral sound, or weird segueways into pounding, mid-tempo grooves where those weird off-key keyboards clash with swells of spacey effects and galloping frostbitten riffs. Indeed, there's a constant off-kilter vibe to Darkcell's music, the arrangements all have a haphazard, even random feel to them, creating a heavy vibe of psychic unease that's increasingly hard to shake, even when the music suddenly rights itself and returns to another one of the ripping black metal riffs. The drum machine is sometimes abused to ridiculous extremes, spitting out insanely fast fills or blasts that are so over the top that there's no attempt to make it even barely resemble an actual human drummer. And the vocals are truly insane, a choked goblin scream cloaked in reverb that billows wildly through the songs like a shrieking black wind. Darkcell's guitar sound is equally damaged, sometimes becoming so distorted and processed and trebly that it sounds more like a synthesizer, and the music is constantly changing, filled with abrupt and jarring shifts and segueways, suddenly swinging from those surreal slower passages to the more anthemic black blasts without warning. There's a hint of Xasthur's surrealist low-fi black metal in here, but there's also some completely crazed electronic waltz stuff that comes out of nowhere, or sudden bursts of fuzz-drenched acid-guitar shred, or demented absinthe-drenched industrial dirges draped in Tangerine Dream-style synths, blasting black noise fluttering with apocalyptic woodwind melodies, or moments like the sun-dappled 80's soundtrack drift of "Fog" where the music will suddenly whip out some beautifully eerie guitar melody or monstrous epic riff that'll take your breath away. This shit is insane. Can't recommend it enough to fans of seriously demented outsider black metal...