��� Some more killer stuff from out the Chilean black metal underground. Black Grail's debut album Misticismo Regresivo unleashes a terrifying blast of cavernous mayhem that falls somewhere in between the frenzied savagery of the classic South American death-thrash sound and the occult weirdness of All The Witches Dance-era Mortuary Drape. With quotes from Emil Cioran and Alejandro Jodorowsky interspersed among the band's arcane Spanish-language lyrics and surrealistic drawings (all of which can be found in the thick twenty-four page booklet that comes with Regresivo), Black Grail offers an unusually heady mix of raw, morbid metal and eccentric songwriting, one that exudes a dank, delirious atmosphere across these songs.

��� Starting with the reverb-heavy production, this thing just echoes with a vintage eeriness; it almost sounds like something from a quarter of a century ago. Kicking into the ragged black thrash of opener "Di�logo entre Arcanos" amid a chaotic blur of distant swarming tremolo riffs and screaming guitar leads, the band follows the booming tom-heavy drum work and screeching vocals down into the obscure, dungeon-like atmosphere. That first, mostly instrumental track charges this with a chaotic, maniacal current that leads into the rest of the album; when they ravenously tear through "La CIudadela de Shiva", it's a release of pure devilswarm ferocity, the music shifting recklessly between blistering blackened thrash riffs and slower, moodier doom-laden darkness, while the singer's rabid screams and strange chant-like moans collide and intertwine in the shadows. That chaotic quality gives this a unique intensity, with much of the album erupting into bizarre discordant blastscapes and weirdly arrhythmic passages of insane atonal guitar shred and stuttering, blasting drums, twisting that classic South American black/death sound into something stranger. It's vicious stuff, with lots of cool atmospheric touches, like the instrumental track "Elevaci�n Frustrada" that appears mid-album, a spooky, organ-drenched piece of gothic kosmische darkness, or the passage of ophidian psychedelia that introduces "Plegaria Cat�rtica", the first few minutes sounding like something that could have come off of an old 70's era French prog rock record, up until it savagely erupts into another one of their hysterical black metal blasts. Killer stuff, and cool packaging, presented in a full-color slipcase with metallic foil stamped artwork.