���Perfect timing! Just as we're about to list the new Malleus Maleficarum 12" from Argentinum Astrum that came out recently on Forcefield (the band's first new release in years), a handful of copies of the 2009 EP from this Knoxville, Tennessee necro-sludge outfit surfaced in our stockroom. This long out of print disc was the second release from the band, and has a similar sound as the first track on that new 12", spewing a kind of tortured, blackened doom across one long untitled song that stretches out for nearly twenty minutes long, seething with the band's ugly, filth-encrusted fusion of abject, Khanate-esque sludge and raw black metal violence.

���This nameless exercise in grueling blackened agony opens with a hateful lava-flow of molten downtuned riffage and screeching high-pitched screams, the sound quickly degenerating into a horrific tangle of doom-laden riffs that fracture into gouts of polluted feedback and mangled string noise. It almost begins to venture into the sort of abstract, splintered blackness that Khanate explored, tinges of a kind of demonic psychedelia squirming through the cracked blackened sludge. At least, that's up until the point that the band suddenly swings into a slimy, whiskey-stained groove deeper into the track, unleashing some deranged, bluesy doom that wanders through a haze of warbling synthesizer noise and rumbling bass. From there, Argentinum Astrum's sound continues to mutate, this sprawling noise-addled dirge drifting out into vast fields of demonic drone-doom, where huge waves of Sunn-esque heaviness wash across the backdrop of atmospheric misery that stretches in every direction. Those echoing screams blossom into a chorus of howls and shrieks that are increasingly layered on top of each other, blurred into a choir of the damned, the sound shifting deeper into a rumbling blackened dronescape, smeared in terrible cries of suffering, slipping from surges of that sludgy slow-motion heaviness into violent eruptions of raw, chaotic black metal, as the final moments become swept up in an ice-storm of minor key tremolo shred and droning buzzsaw riffs spilling out over the blastbeat frenzy.

���Just as their latest 12" shifts further into blasting black metal fury, this disc likewise moved further into the realm of black metal than their debut, exchanging some of the deformed Abruptumisms of their previous disc for a slightly more structured sound; it's still pretty chaotic, though, with a sickening , mentally unstable vibe that they use to good effect to bend the listener's brain, as their frantic, fucked-up black doom spreads across this disc like a swarm of sonic pestilence.