A Day Of Nights has been out for a little while, but it's taken me awhile to list this in the store 'cuz, well, I've been having a hard time

figuring out how to describe this album. Which usually means that we're onto something really cool. Brooklyn-based Battle Of Mice came together just

over a year and a half ago, a project formed by Josh Graham from Red Sparowes and Neurosis, Julie Christmas from Made Out Of Babies, and Joe Hamilton from

Book Of Knots. They debuted on that terrific Triad three way split (which we have listed as well in this weeks store update), and followed that

pretty quickly with A Day Of Nights, an awesome art-metal narrative that appears to chronicle the breakdown of the romantic relationship between

members Graham and Christmas in painful, harrowing detail. I haven't heard something this personal and emotionally raw since Swans leader Michael Gira

released his solo album Drainland. The music is appropriately grim and emotional, a crushing, sweeping miasma of metallic noir-rock rife with

dynamic riffing, dark gloomy melodies, and crushing bouts of doomy sludge, an intense and atmospheric combination of Neurosis urban tribal dirge, Tool's arty

alt-metal, the panoramic metalgaze majesty of Red Sparowes, vitriolic breakup letters, screamed accusations, and hallucinatory poetry. So awesome and

heartrending and epic, it's unbelievable that this virtually new band could achieve this with thier first album. But it's Julie Christmas' singing that

totally elevates A Day Of Nights to pop perfection, her range of vocals here far more diverse than her work with the metallic noiserock of Made Out

Of Babies, moving between psychotic paranoid breakdowns, hysterical, violent screaming assaults, almost spoken-word confessions, and soaring singing that

sends my heart into my throat every time I listen to this album. Which is alot. Beyond recommended.