���Already sold out from the label, so move fast if you want to pick up the latest release from shadowy black metal/punk outfit Ancestors (not to be confused with the neo-psych band on Tee Pee), headed up by Youth Attack label boss and former Das Oath/Charles Bronson member Mark McCoy. New stuff from this band only appears every once in a while, but it's always intensely abrasive and murderous-sounding filth, and In Death delivers four new songs of that caustic, cacophonic low-fi blackened metal, inside one of the coolest 7" packages I've seen in ages - more on that in a moment.

��� Musically, this EP is hideous. Ancestors' stuff has always flayed a similar set of nerve-endings as Black Cilice's majestic no-fi din, with previous releases tipping over into some seriously speaker-destroying noisiness tempered with barbaric hardcore-informed riffs. This 7" isn't as insanely blown-out as some of their previous stuff, but it's still exceedingly raw. Songs like "That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do " and "Reliquary Ashes" combining raging fast-paced tempos and simple, violent riffage lifted from classic early hardcore, but it's strained through a black murk of hiss and distortion with a putrid gargling vocal attack that renders the lyrics utterly unintelligible, a bizarre droning croak that stretches into a preverbal shriek over the crushing blackened heaviness. Guitars are whipped into squalls of queasy, evil guitar solos and sickly, dissonant melodies amid the frenzied thrash and pummeling tempo changes, sometimes shifting down into a crushing Frostian heaviness. As usual, though, there are stirring melodic touches that briefly emerge out of the band's feral tumult as well.

��� But maybe the coolest thing about this 7" is the "hidden track", accessible by pushing down on the cover of the gatefold jacket, where a device inside the cover begins playing an intense blast of evil blackened murk that borders on total necrotic noise, the violent snarling chaos emanating from the sleeve in a tinny blast of transistor evil, similar to those old VHS box covers for movies like The Dead Pit and Metamorphosis that would light up and howl when you pushed them.