Falling comfortably into that realm of black metallers-gone-progressive rock that the Italian label Code666 has done a pretty good job of cornering over the past twenty years or so, the 2010 album Angst sees this German band pursuing their obtuse but strikingly crafted art-metal down the ole' rabbithole deeper tha ever, with big swathes of this, their third album, journeying beyond the edges of metal completely at times. It's got me hooked, I'll tell you that. I've been a fan of their subsequent album Apnoe which I've stocked here at C-Blast for awhile, and I like stepping backwards through the discography of a band like this to get a more interesting reverse vantage point on their evolution. Looking deeper into the past, you have a band that was already ambitiously creative when they crafted their (already) strange but frost-encrusted Fluch / Sog in den Wahnsinn demo from 2003, but in a relatively short period of time transformed into something more akin to a kind of psych-tinged heavier art-rock outfit. There's been a number of constants through erach of Todtgelichter's recordings, primarily that of atmopsheric fullness and emotional weight. Even on that demo they were incoporating jangly gloom-rock passages and funereal piano arrangements into the blasts of anguished, icy black metal. But here on Angst it's a radical new world, albeit one still streaked with vivid and violent smears of that original blackness.

There's a sense of freefalling through a spectral, nocturnal urban environment throughout this album, which seems to reveal a subtle conceptual quality binding the songs to one another, especially apparent when you dig into the coldly poetic lyrics (which are a mix of German and English language). But musically, it is also heavy as hell; the band whips up a storm of rhythmic power, soaring female and male vocals paired with tortured blackened shrieks, the huge-sounding guitars twisting haunting and somber melodies around huge, jagged riffs and blasts of mesmeric groove, opener "Café Of Lost Dreams" sort of resembling the modern progressive metal of Mastodon or Opeth. But the black metal influences are still swarming, as massive blastbeats and tremolo-picked riffing erupts outside of the more atmopsheric passages. That opener is a real asskicker, really grabbing you by the collar. It twists and winds through a complex structure of dreamily beautiful prog and those heavier, more aggro moments, and this flows onward through the rest of the eight songs on Angst. Songs like "Bestie" lay down metallic crunch and sheets of gleaming guitar , and when the feirce female vocals arrive it can be a little reminiscient of The Gathering's later "rock" sound, but that black metal vibe is always there, lurking around the corner, manifesting in different ways. The band also drifts out into fields of controlled instrumental noise and immense drone that will close songs out in a mega-flare of trippy heaviness. These boiling dronescapes and clanking industrial-tainted segueways appear often, further adding to the vibe that you're listening to something vast and cohesive. It really took me a second playthrough of Angst to really wrap my noggin around this apparent saga. Nowhere as frantic as many bands that blend these sounds together, Todtgelichter pull off something here that's more in line with the more recent Ulver and Katatonia albums, even Deafheaven, with a strong rock firmament framing it all, while skillfully implementing not only those intense shifts into blastbeat tempos and downright vicious black metal-esque passages, but also the electronic textures, the synthesizers and (rather Moog-y sounding) organ and creepy sound-samples into a coherent, exciting whole. It's fucking rad, loaded with quasi-pop earworms and beastly riffs both (you'll get sucked into "Neon", I swear it). Really their best work to date; just my opinion, but I think Todtgelichter would have been huge if they were an American band.