I was going through my available Murderous Vision releases here in the shop, and realized that I'd never given MV's The Times Without Gods a proper write-up for the C-Blast catalog. Whelp, this great dark ambient / death industrial album just turned twenty years old recently, so let's get at it.

Yeah, Times came out back in 2002, one of the earlier albums in what would turn into a fairly dense catalog of music over the years from Murderous Vision. Being such an early piece of work, this tens to stick with what would probably be considered a more "traditional" dark ambient approach: It's a mix of the sacred and the erotic, the rapturous and the wretched. The track titles evoke divine, eschatological scenery: "I Must Set This World Aflame", "Like Lambs To Slaughter", "Fall Before Christ", "Cries Of Mankind". Accordingly the aural mood that comes into shape when the album begins is dark and moderately dreadful and certainly ominous; Creepy blurred choral tones hover high above a sustained mid-range drone, an electronic pulse pouring out of unseen solid state tech while a nightmare of bloodthirsty Seraphim sweep across the dawn sky. The disc evolves constantly though, like all Murderous Vision albums; that persistent and chilling introduction is soon joined by moody symphonic synthesizer arrangements, cold and minimal, a swell of chilly strings accompanied by spare but monstrous pitch-shifted mutterings and prayer, distant invisible rattling and clanks echoing beneath the surface.

That "spoken word", incantatory presence moves amongst the bizarre abstract voice-based soundscapes and whirring electronic thrum that follows, taking this into some pretty dire industrialized malevolence on tracks like "All Dead", hitting on certain aspects of pre-y2k "ritual ambience" and clearly invoking the Cold Meat Industries vibe with what materializes into a kind of deeply unsettling death industrial / dark ambient music. Petrus was obviously drawing inspiration from contempos like Brighter Death Now and early Mz.412, even some of the nascent "dungeon synth" sounds of the era - back then I used to typically refer to that kind of thing as "dark neo-classical", but there was (and is) a difference between something like the strings-draped darkwave of In The Nursery n' In Slaughter Natives, and the low-fi hypogean electronics of the tapes found on Dark Age Productions; all of these textures emerge through tracks like "Christ" and "Crimson Offering", seeping out of the black earth into the circuits and instrumentation and larynxes rthat are at work here.

At the same time though, Petrus has always had a tendency to paint his visions with the diverse palette, and even here you get some elements of power electronics, Teutonic space synth (that Berlin School vibe whooshess and sweeps all over this album), shades of psychedelic EVP-esque sound collage, pure dark ambience, the nine tracks are all built up layer upon layer, molded into sonically dense micro-worlds of spectral strangeness. All slathered in reverb and echo, rushes of caustic static and melting religious music, operatic female voices and thunderous pneumatics, tribal drumming and primal percussive beats melding with muffled roars of mechanical grinding and immense rhythmic throb emanating from below the bedrock, filling the space, the room, the world with this massive, gargantuan fog of sound haunted by this series of strange incantations and proclamations, those spoken-word aspects riding on the waves of black electronics and cosmic vastness that surge across the sixty-odd minutes of Times Without Gods, before you're led amongst the bizarre doom-folk ritual of closer "Journey Onward".

Definitely one of the crucial albums in the Murderous Vision discography, this is as dark as this band gets, dark and grandiose and stunning in its sprawling, spooky beauty.