Now available on CD once again courtesy of Handmade Birds...

Released just as this anarchist-leaning one-man black metal-influenced band was beginning to gain a wider audience beyond the American black metal/experimental metal underground on the heels of his impressive Social Disservices album, the original vinyl release of Panopticon's Kentucky quikcly went out of print. People have been clamoring for it though, and this interesting fusion of mountain music and American blackened metal is finally back in print on CD via Handmade Birds.

It's the same blast of imaginative, Appalachian-flavored black metal as before, though. Kentucky carries on in the tradition of leftist, nature-loving, anarcho-leaning metal that main member Austin Lunn has been creating over the course of four albums and numerous splits with the likes of Wheels Within Wheels, Lake Of Blood and Skagos. On this album, Lunn creates a chronicle of the history and plight of the Kentucky coal mining communities of Appalachia, their story written in tears and sweat and black phlegm, the lyrics dealing with over a century of worker struggles that are rarely recognized outside of the region. Lunn brings this all to life with his sprawling black metal arrangements, crushing guitars and awesome soaring melodies turning these songs into dramatic stories of suffering and struggle, but they are also fleshed out with other instruments, with violins and tin whistles and banjos all appearing throughout these songs. Especially banjo. It's that instrument that has gained this album a lot of its notoriety, as Lun slips from those crushing black metal epics into folky protest songs, and from there into some gorgeously haunting tracks of genuine bluegrass music that suddenly transport Panopticon's music to somewhere else entirely.

Opening with cascading waves of banjo picking and acoustic guitar, the instrumental intro "Bernheim Forest In Spring" kicks right with a traditional folk jig, a dark mournful melody riding on the violins and fast-paced bluegrass picking, that banjo right up in the mix, beginning the album with the lush Appalachian vibe that becomes it's signature sound. From there, the music launches into the blasting hyperspeed black metal of "Bodies Under The Falls", but that folky feel is still there, threading through the ripping black metal riffs, haunting flutes drifting over the buzzsaw guitars and blasting drums and sweeping solos, the guitar suddenly erupting into weirdly discordant leads, everything woven together into a strange and frenzied sound. There are dark Maiden-esque harmonies that rise over the band's blazing tempos, but then around halfway through, it suddenly shifts into something unexpected, a super-distorted sort of rock, almost like some old Mineral or Texas Is The Reason song filtered through a storm of blast-beats and blackened shrieks, finally drifting off once more at the end into that lush haunting Appalachian folk music.

The second disc likewise starts off with old mountain music, more of those strains of eerie dark bluegrass, but this time "Come All Ye Coal Miners" ends up being all bluegrass, the song taking up half of the entire side. It's actually a protest ballad that has lyrics originally written by 60's folk singer Sarah Ogan Gunning, and later in the track Lunn layers the sound with some spoken word audio from some old documentary on the coal miners, which turns into a segueway into the intense catchy blackened metal of "Black Soot And Red Blood". With soaring vocal harmonies smeared across the background, this heavier song drops off into a strange sample-laden spaciousness later on, a kind of folk-flecked slowcore interspersed with slow, swarming blackness. After that, the music keeps alternating between that blazing black metal and those moments of super catchy Mineral-esque rock, and those stomping bluegrass songs and coal town laments, the heaviness often drifting out into eerie atmospheric jangle, lots of pensive guitar melodies circling over mysterious voices and sample-laden sound collages that layer recordings of rural social activists and folk singers like Florence Reece with recordings of violins tearing through the droning black metal. Later on, there's a blistering cover of an old folk song written by Appalachian folk singer Jean Ritchie that Lunn transforms into something fierce and blackened, and the album closes with the pure bluegrass of the title track, finishing this off with a final rush of stunning stark beauty and pine-scented ambience.

As much as I've dug the older Panopticon albums I've picked up, Kentucky shows a whole new level of depth and progression for the band, blending together Lunn's various influences and musical obsessions into something that ends up being quite unique, especially within the realm of black metal. Highly recommended.