Summoning The Night is the latest album from my current favorite Portuguese black metal band, Black Cilice, featuring more stunning, blown-out ramshackle majesty from this one-man outfit. Six songs of low-fi blackness that have that same unpolished, "Black Chamber" rehearsal-space recording style as all of the band's other recordings, which for me is a great part of the appeal behind Black Cilice's murky, mysterious black metal. That grimy, subterranean aesthetic, along with the atmospheric, emotional quality of the songwriting, makes Black Cilice's music a strange beast; noisy and drenched in reverb, yet buried not very deep beneath all of that rawness and roughness is some intensely moving songcraft, powerful melodies washing across the din of clanking drums and repetitive tremolo riffs, the instruments dissolving into one another as they transform into a wall of sound. The layered guitar noise builds into some shockingly gorgeous guitar-skree blowouts throughout Summoning The Night that are at times seemingly only a few steps removed from the sound of some super-raw live recording of a classic shoegaze outfit, blown out beyond all recognition.

This ain't no "blackgaze" though, despite how catchy and pretty some of these layered melodic riffs can become; songs like "Judgment" and "Chaos And Evil" are furious, ice-encrusted blasts of blackness, those bizarre wailing vocals a smear of abject misery glowing in the distance, seemingly wordless howls that almost seem to be electronically processed. The songs suddenly shift into barbaric, stomping, almost punk-like riffs at times, causing seismic eruptions of violent power whenever the songs suddenly swing into one of these vicious temp changes. And there's that hallucinatory feel to Black Cilice's stuff that continues to remind me of some of the noisier projects that came out of the French Black Legions (particularly Vampires of Black Imperial Blood-era Mutiilation), with a slight out-of-phase quality to everything, probably due to the sheer distorted overload of the recording, a quality that further transforms these songs into something deformed yet dreamlike, the blasting echo-drenched churn of the guitars reaching blissed-out levels of harmonic overload. With Summoning, Black Cilice continues to produce some of the catchiest noise-damaged black metal that I've been listening to lately - can't recommend this or his other albums enough for fans of regal, no-fi black metal.