Wasn't expecting to dig this nearly as much as I did, but new album Ia Pazuzu from Swedish industrial black metal vets Diabolicum is pretty much the best stuff the band has done. Back after a nearly fifteen year absence, the band still seethes with mechanized violence and misanthropic savagery, unleashing their electronically-abraded hatefulness across the nine-song album. It's been ages since I've pulled out any of their stuff to listen to, but this new one is goddamn ferocious, screaming off of the disc in a blur of hyperspeed blastbeats and eerie tremolo riffs, their songs underscored by a heavy dose of staticky distortion and some well-placed glitchery that gives it a sickening chromium sheen. It would appear that they were re-energized at least in part by the addition of new frontman Niklas Kvarforth from Shining, and his corrosive, violent bark works exceptionally well here; the parts where he slips into an anguished moan alongside the guest female vocals allow Ia Pazuzu to move through a sort of soulful darkness you don't often hear from this sort of stuff.

    It's all much powerful and moving than I expected, bolstered by guest appearances from members of Aborym and Naglfar, and with all kinds of killer stuff thrown into the blackened industrial maelstrom: sudden flurries of Hanneman-style guitar shred and blasts of howling guitar noise collide with those rust-blasted riffs and hyper-fast tempos, the songs reverberating with imperious backing choral voices and those soulful female vocals, stomping martial rhythms and sprawls of jet-black kosmische ambience erupting from the mix alongside segueways into murky, mutated techno and crackling electronic noise, creepy samples and glitchy melodies crawling beneath catchy hooks that are themselves buried beneath the hallucinatory chaos and swells of industrial clangor. Diabolicum's apocalyptic mood is a constant throughout Pazuzu, and when they head into the massive distorted synthesizers rumbling beneath the monstrous screams that appear on "The Abyss Of The Shadows", it all of a sudden shifts into something akin to a classic Cold Meat death industrial outfit; it's totally devoid of other instrumentation, an evil, suffocating wall of horrific electronics that slowly ascends beneath the freezing glare of a black sun and the fiery winds of a nuclear blast. After that, its back to more of their signature electronically-damaged black metal, but it's a hell of an interlude that just makes everything that follows sound all that much more maniacal. A real surprise - Diabolicum's mix of noisy black metal, technoid horror and putrid death industrial hardly sounds like something that's been fermenting for the past decade and a half. If you're into the likes of Mysticum, Grand Declaration Of War-era Mayhem and Aborym and crave another, newer call to violence, definitely check this one out.

    Comes in digipack packaging with booklet, and features more of Maxime Taccardi's terrific blood-stained artwork.