���A peculiar and ultimately quite haunting EP from the New England duo Fatalism (featuring members of black metal atavists One Master), whose music has been described by some as falling somewhere among the current wave of shoegaze-influenced black metal outfits like Alcest and Cold Body Radiation. That's not what I'm hearing here at all, however. To my ears, Fatalisms cavernous, echoing dirges evoke an even older sound; as the plodding metallic guitars and driving backbeat kick off the opening song "Isabelle", Mystery Of Death slips into a strange and dreamlike haze of repetitious heavy post-punk that for all the world resembles a narcotized, black metal-infected take on the spookshow atmosphere of early 80s deathrock, those echoing monotonous vocals, the reverb-enshrouded guitar leads, the simple, dreary melodies - it all reminds me of a more doom-laden, DXM-drenched take on the morbid punk of early Christian Death, and even more so the heavy, spaced out graveyard vibe of Mighty Sphincter.

��� Granted, the endlessly echoing, monotone vocals on Mystery may be initially off-putting to a lot of listeners (and are in some ways similar to the droning delivery of Charnel House�s Black Blood from last year), but as these four songs unfold across the EP, the dozy, half-spoken lines ripple across Fatalism's chugging riffs and ethereal keyboard fog like something from a dream, and when the music surges into something more aggressive, the effect can be rather surreal. It's on the second track "Isolde" that this strange, hallucinatory death rock vibe fully collides with the duo's black metal background, as the swirling gloom and funereal dirges slowly build into something much heavier and more vicious, thunderous double bass and blackened tremolo riffs blasting out of the gloom. But then they follow that with the rather catchy delay-soaked post-punk delirium of "Isle", an infectious keyboard-drenched bit of overdriven noise-drenched gloompop that is just as ghostly and effects-laden as everything else on this release. And they cap it off with a track called "Gloom Reaper", which is essentially a death-rock reconstruction of Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear The Reaper" with tongue firmly in cheek, but it's actually cooler than you would expect, that instantly recognizable classic rock melody transmuted into something even more spectral and drugged out, a hauntingly beautiful sprawl of dazed darkwave that gradually drifts and fades into the abyss.

��� Packaged in a clamshell plastic case, this includes both a cassette and a 3" CDR version of the recording, housed on plastic hubs inside the package.