Rabble, Whores, Usurers is the first new album from the Ukrainian dungeon synth / plague-ambient project Dark Ages since 2006's spellbinding A Chronicle Of The Plague, which had been the band's last album for UK black metal label Supernal. Somewhere in the interim, Dark Ages released a third album on an obscure Finnish label, but Rabble is the true follow-up to that 2006 disc, the final chapter in Dark Ages's mournful, medieval themed trilogy that had reached out across the previous decade, and apparently the final release from the band.

Featuring prominent members of the Ukrainian black metal underground (Roman Saenko of Drudkh / Blood Of Kingu / Hate Forest and Vlad of Drudkh / Old Silver Key), Dark Ages's music comes from a much more kosmische connection, blending dark orchestral sounds with washes of grim synthesizer rumble, and their stuff is some of the best of its kind. It's actually a lot more varied than you might expect - there are eerie string sections and buried horn-like tones that drift languidly beneath swarms of tremulous violin-like drone, and soft, sorrowful melodies that slowly tumble through the gloom. Right off the bat, opener "Leprosy" crafts an exquisitely mournful mood, sounding like some slow motion requiem, the sounds stained in the tears of Ukraine's long history of suffering and conflict, while tracks like "Chastity" combine gleaming electronic ambience with strange melodies spilling from tiny delicate carillons. As angelic female choirs streak across the bruised violet glow of a twilight horizon, the steady thump of a kick drum beats hypnotically through the entire track, the sound sad and sacred and filled with reverence for the power of death.

The guttural rattle of a piano's innards reverberate beneath smears of dark doomed jazziness on "Avarice", as bleary French horns stretched and melted into ghostly drones, and random cymbals patter in the distance. On "Deformity", peals of pipe organ are released in blasts of dissonant power, a nightmarish gothic ambience that resembles the sound of some madman filling a cathedral with blasting atonal organ. Martial snares ring out over "Malice", those ominous synth-strings resurfacing again as a lush orchestral ambience, and the dark new age drift of "Depravity" later gives way to the bewitching nebulous midnight swells of closer "Sin". A gorgeous, grim series of soundscapes that seem to bridge the dark synthdrift of classic tangerine Dream and some of the creepier strains of medieval folk music, each track painting a bleak sonic portraits of an ancient Europe swept with plague and death and suffering. Great stuff that fans of vintage "dungeon music", Mortiis, Dim Arcana (who they actually share cover art with), Atomtrakt, and the Austrian Uruk-Hai should definitely check out...