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ALRAUNE  The Process Of Self-Immolation  LP   (Gilead Media)   19.99


����Now available on limited-edition vinyl.

���� The Process of Self-Immolation is the debut full-length from Nashville black metallers Alraune, a newer band made up of current and former members of Yautja and Mourner; it's the follow-up to their well-received tape that came out on Graceless Recordings not too long ago. Combining a rhythmically complex brand of blackened metal with Slinty math rock influences and intense, emotional delivery, these guys have whipped up one of the more impressive debuts to appear this year, with a confident approach towards fusing elegant icy melodies with a vicious Scandinavian-inspired attack.

���� The brief intro track opens the album with the sounds of mournful, low-fi folk, the distorted buzz of the strings ringing out through a murky haze, before the band launches violently into the blazing black metal of "Exmordium". Alraune's sound immediately reveals the sort of soaring melodic sensibilities found in fellow American BM outfits like Krallice, Fell Voices and Ash Borer, that classic Nordic-influenced sound underscored by eerily pretty minor key melodies and cascades of spidery arpgeggiated notes that seem to draw from early 90's math rock just as much as they do from the frostbitten chordal forms of black metal. And as the album progresses, more of that mathiness emerges through the violent blastbeat-driven wintervisions, vicious buzzsaw riffs and rampaging d-beat tempos suddenly hurtling out of the chaos before slipping into some off-kilter, angular breakdown or wash of creepy dissonant instrumental guitar. There's a raw, low-fi edge to Process that really works in its favor, contrasting with the ambitious complexity of the songs and the Slinty digressions and eruptions into soaring, keening droning guitar leads that streak over the thunderous blasting epics like "Simulacra". The vocals have a strange distorted sheen than clings to them, at times sounding as if those desperate screams and shrieks are being transmitted out of a crackling transistor radio as the elegant, mournful tremolo riffs swarm madly around, slipping into some terrific little moments of phantasmic beauty, like how the end of "Kissed By The Red" goes from the aggressive, majestic metallic blast into the sound of Scottish folk singer Isla Cameron singing "O Willow Waly", taken from Jack Clayton's 1961 supernatural classic The Innocents. And at the end, Alraune drag their ragged frenzy down to an almost doom-laden pace on the closing title track, the song lumbering through an epic sprawl of slow pummeling tempos, blazing blastbeats and wretched screaming that leads towards the powerful combination of frantic blackened tremolo riffs and pounding tribal rhythms that take over the second half of the song.

���� A promising start from this new entry in the USBM field, Process skillfully combines haunting melodic dissonance, raw savagery and a distinct progressive edge into a powerful and mournful sound of their own. Killer stuff. Comes in digipack packaging.


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