A blistering seven-song cassette from Philly-area black metallers Esoterica, A Home For Rats explodes in a miniature white-hot supernova of swirling synthesizer gloom, dreampop-tinged majesty and blackened discordant guitars, imbuing the recording with a killer otherworldly atmosphere as songs like "III" seethe and blast in a cyclonic storm across the beginning of the cassette. Made up of members of Chaos Moon, Krieg, and Lithotome, this band achieves a psychedelic quality that could be compared to some of Chaos Moon's own atmospheric rock-influenced material, but Esoterica is overall a much more violent beast, with most of their songs hurtling over a monotonous tornadic blastbeat, the vocals a hateful, animalistic snarl appearing high up in the mix, while additional layered guitars create an effect akin to the mindless drone of a factory that seems to blur through the depths of nearly the entire recording.

     There's a definite dissonant element to this stuff, but it's balance out by the gorgeous synthwork and gauzy celestial guitar textures that are woven throughout the tape, incorporating an almost Loveless-like melodic power to Esoterica's bestial blastscapes. Add in those slower, churning grooves that cut open the guts of songs like "Dilated", and the stretches of gorgeous kosmische ambience that follow right on the heels of that grinding mid-paced heaviness, and you get an interesting, unusual take on violent, spaced-out black metal, offset with a few lengthy tracks of beautifully murky and cinematic ambient music that stretch out into bleary, heat-blurred vistas, resembling some Teutonic synth outfit performing a film score deep within the vaulted chambers of a derelict cathedral. These songs can take on a mysterious, liturgical quality as the sounds bleed together into a washed-out haze of haunting orchestral drift. It's hardly what you'd call "blackgaze", but it does draw from some similar influences to create something more vicious and powerful, while seeping with a strange sort of bleary, blackened ambient beauty that the band skillfully juxtaposes against their raging mystic blast. Loved this stuff. Limited to one hundred copies.