��� Profoundly disturbed French black metallers De Silence Et D'Ombre deliver their latest dose of Lovecraft-obsessed mutant abjection with Vol IV: Worship The Hideous, and it definitely dug its weird talons into me. Marching forth on a wave of warped, vaguely industrialized black metal, this one-man band whips up some deranged off-kilter heaviness with these ten tracks, shifting between lurching mid-tempo grooves that can sometimes have a bit of Khold feel, to the sort of sickly dissonance often associated with French black metal outfits like Blut Aus Nord, and down into anguished depths of wasted funereal deathdoom. This void-crawler vomits up all manner of weird electronic noises over this filth, and the vocals border on schizophrenic, veering between monotone chant-like growls, a killer gothic croak, and monstrously distorted screams that echo insanely behind the chugging, sludge-smeared doom that erupts across tracks like "My Domain".

��� There are swathes of IV that are smeared with Iommi-style down-tuned misery and weird weeping vocalizations, hideous frog-like vocals are run through some kind of pitch-shifter to transform into a bizarre burbling amphibious croak, peals of keening feedback crash across disturbing, echo-laden spoken word sections, lysergic shrieks melt into chromium droid-moans. The weird spaced-out noise rock of "Spitting Blackend Mud" sounds like some Today is The Day-penned power-blast giving praise to Tsathoggua, only to erupt into frenzied mechanized blackgrind violence and slabs of massive Frostian riffage (that goddamn riff on "Alien Magic" in particular is a real skull-stomper). This stuff gets more fucked and agitated with each song, while also peeling back at times to reveal a glimpse of tortured beauty under all the blown-out blackened grooves and slime-slick necro-sludge; there's a positively stunning finale to "Worshp The Hideous" that closes with a wash of wistful, Jesu-like 'gaziness. It's not nearly as scatterbrained as I'm probably making this sound, either. Weird and offbeat, yes, but also focused in its weirdness. The liner notes don't help much in giving De Silence's sludgy blackened racket any clarity, most of it boiling down to a bunch of drug-addled rambling basement-dwelling ranting. Can't come up with any single bands to compare this to, which is always a plus; it's definitely shares some DNA with the more mental ends of the industrial black metal spectrum, but this sure as hell ain't no Mysticum; fans of the more offbeat ends of loner black metal inhabited by the likes of Furze and Striborg might want to dip into this stew of noxious, neurotic evil. Absolutely adore that crude, Lovecraftian cover art, too. Limited to five hundred copies.