���Now available on vinyl in gatefold packaging courtesy of Flenser, issued in a limited run of five hundred copies.

��� Swarming with the stench of rot and veined with a throbbing black malevolence, IV.I.VIII is the terrifying new album from the Indianapolis band Coffinworm, crawling with terminally hideous black sludge that these guys have been puking up ever since they formed out of the ashes of avant-grinders Black Arrows of Filth & Impurity. The music on IV also reveals some interesting atmospheric new textures to the band's filthy, ultra-heavy sound, using piano, synthesizers and other ancillary instruments to add additional shades of dread and misery to their nihilistic crush. Opener "Sympathectomy" erupts into a maelstrom of blasting black metal and filthy D-beat driven crust, the band thrashing violently as the singer swoops in with his terrifying high-pitched screams and guttural howling; when Coffinworm suddenly drops gear into their trademark creeping blackened sludge, the tempo change threatens the listener with a vicious case of whiplash. Washes of dissonant chordal texture and malefic minor key arpeggios creep across the lurching doom-laden dirge, and as the song continues to uncoil its putrid black tentacles, strange echoing noises begin to materialize at the periphery. Shifting back and forth between that deformed crawl and the chaotic crusty black blast.

��� That first song unleashes a queasy ash-choked atmosphere that proceeds to spread out across the rest of the album, the following song "Instant Death Syndrome" exuding a similar sodden assault of shambling sludge and dissonant, almost Deathspell-esque blackened riffage, contaminated with rot and decay, then later slipping into a twisted blues-damaged drone-dirge broken into a shuffling, off-kilter crawl. "Black Tears" picks the pace up, grinding out an infectious mid-tempo groove that cuts through the band's violent nihilistic musings, leading it into a squall of suffocating distorted noise at the end, and "Lust vs. Vengeance" crushes the light from beneath it's propulsive caveman cadences and evil echoing guitars, before emitting blasts of jet-black cosmic synthesizer that soar over the devastation. I don't remember Coffinworm making this much use of synthesizer textures on their previous releases, and it's an effective element to tracks like "Of Eating Disorders And Restraining Orders", another titanic dirge that churns violently around the slow, saurian plod of the drummer, breaking off into brief interludes of mutated drone that seems to be oozing out of some ichor-splattered Hammond organ, coiling around sickly discordant melodies and spilling out into dank fields of trippy, dub-like percussive echoes and disturbing samples. After the brutal crustcore of closer "A Death Sentence Called Life" rages over more of that eerie etheric synthdrift, Coffinworm even haul out an acoustic guitar for the finale, the album drifting into oblivion as minor key chords drift out in a somnambulant haze.