��Back in stock! The precursor to their latest album of killer blackened jazz/prog/metal from this Greek outfit. There's been some great stuff coming out of Greece lately in the realm of blackened prog, with the likes of Hail Spirit Noir and Aenaon both getting a lot of heavy play around here. A particularly jazz-influenced outfit that includes members of Hellenic black metallers Varathron, Aenaon debuted with their 2011 album Cendres Et Sang, which the avant-garde metallers released on the very prog-centric black metal label Code666.

�� The music combines elements of dark jazz, progressive rock, black metal and math rock into an ambitious, sometimes operatic sound that's pretty impressive. Christos Agouridakis's lyrical saxophone opens the album, delivering dark, complex lines that drift over the churning, blackened mathmetal crush of "Suncord", the sax later winding around passages of sinister, almost Slint-y guitar parts and some expressive and complex percussive work. At their heaviest, Aenaon unleash a crushing, complex math-thrash assault that brings a heavily blackened malevolence to their touches of Meshugga-esque angularity, as well as some wonderfully eerie guitar leads, atmospheric electronic textures, and flourishes of trippy Hammond organ. Along with the jazz elements, the drummer's performance is one of the most distinguishing aspects of Aenaon's music, with a precise, almost mechanical style that can give certain parts of Cendres a vaguely industrial feel. That machinelike precision can be heard on a lot of the blastbeats as well, and when heard in concert with the electronic textures and bursts of abstract glitchery, can make this somewhat reminiscent of a proggier, jazz-damaged Dodheimsgard at times. There's lots of spacey synthesizer textures alongside that Hammond organ and even a grand piano, all woven into the band's complex time signatures and dense arrangements, a hevay King Crimson influence permeating the crushing blackened metal. Towards the end of the album, Aenaon move even further into evocative jazz-tinged ambience with the lurching power of "Black Nerve", which features one of the album's most impressive saxophone sequences; it's followed by a haunting re-imagining of David Lynch's "In Heaven" from the soundtrack to his surrealistic 1977 midnight movie masterpiece Eraserhead, with guest vocalist Thomais Chatzigianni contributing her rich bluesy wail over the eerie piano music before the band explodes into a punishing metallic version of the song, that eerie aching melody transformed into a massive metallic rage. This album might not be as out-there as the stuff that their country mates Hail Spirit Noir have been doing, but this is still some compelling stuff for fans of contemporary black prog, and it's especially recommended if you're a fan of the bombastic jazz-streaked heaviness found with bands like Ephel Duath, Yakuza, Carnival in Coal and Unexpect.