��The second and final release from New Zealand one-man band Exiled From Light is a massive double album that collects both the final recordings from the project and the tracks from sole member Mort's previous band Funereal. I really can't get enough of this stuff, another fantastic album of despondent, gloompop-infected black metal that falls under that whole vague "DSBM" banner, the music filled with sprawling mesmeric melodies, laced with mournful orchestral sounds and smatterings of doleful piano, some top-tier melancholy post-punk-tinged black metal completely suffused in an atmosphere of longing and grief, but set to some terrifically catchy, downcast gloompop hooks at times reminiscent of Brave Murder Day-era Katatonia.

�� The first disc opens with a wash of gorgeous, tremulous clean guitar, a dejected, wretched feral distant howl and echoing guitar notes trailing off over a steady slow backbeat as "We Writhe as Worms" takes shape. Right from the start, this stuff comes across as a kind of sorrowful, blackened gloom-rock, beautiful and bleak minor key arpeggios circling through the darkness, later swelling up into a swarm of blown-out blackened buzz, mournful tremolo riffs droning over the more aggressive double bass, like some blighted and miserable version of a classic Katatonia song. The music breaks down into slower, more jangly sections, and a vein of glimmering organ-like drone courses throughout much of this stuff, bringing a luminous quality to Exiled From Light's funereal sound.

�� The album continues to reveal these beautifully mournful melodic touches, the blazing aggression tempered with a touch of moody jangling guitar, vague shadows of the darkest post-punk lurking beneath the roiling double bass and swarming riffs. There are sudden ascents into plaintive, blasting gloompop majesty on songs like "The Bitter Taste of Tears", "The Essence of Hope, Drained" and "Clarity Viewed through Dying Eyes" that fans of Amesoeurs would adore, but Exiled From Light sours that sound slightly with discordance as the dreamy guitar leads sink into dissonant dread, or slip into passages of twisted doom-laden heaviness. The drumming is a lot more complex than the monotonous plod that plagues most "depressive" black metal bands, with an actual drummer offering more in the way of rhythmic variety, incorporating a mix of furious double bass, blastbeats, slower rocking tempos, and some really effective tribal pounding. And the songs are epics, most of 'em stretching out for twelve minutes or more, repetitive and hypnotic. The second disc features the material from Mort's pre-Exiled band Funereal, which is pretty much in the same vein, blasts of blazing frostbitten fury, howling abject vocals, passages of that cloudy, reverb-drenched jangle and droning keyboards, and layers of orchestral string sounds and minor key piano that wash over the heavier, more dirge-like music, the vocals shifting into a monstrous guttural growl, delivering some of the collection's most stirring music, a fusion of pummeling black dirge and soaring orchestral majesty.

�� Anyone obsessed with the gloomy, dolorous music of Trist, Austere, Apati, Hypothermia, and Drowning The Light will want to check this out. Limited to five hundred copies.