Portrayal of Guilt : "Devil Music"

At first, you might be fooled into thinking this is a more straightforward metal album, at least until you get to "Burning Hand" which has the atmosphere and dissonance that you might have come to love from these guys. They do however open up the album with some solid grooves. There is less black metal menace or grindcore explosions, but it still works. There is an abundance of chaos, as the drummer attacks the riffs. The second song has some interesting guitar sounds. Odd angular spaces let in strange places. They lock this into a solid grooving head bobbing riff. Almost a Helmet or nu-metal sense of movement. The vocals stay at a scornful rasp. While he is a wild man, the drummer is really making himself felt on this album. 

"Where Angels Come to Die" is one of the first songs that strikes me as black metal, Though I have not always thought of these guys as a black metal band, but as a band influenced by it. They do throw in a creepy middle section into the song, and deliberately make things stompy, before embracing the blast beats, which has not always been their thing. The title track finds things delving even further into darkness. The percussion takes on a more industrial crunch. That is before they blast off into a cosmic abyss. We are very much supportive of any excursions into an abyss here. The lyrics are spat out in a manner that you can understand he is exclaiming that he wants to watch you suffer and feel your pain. This is beautiful. When I read the lyrics on their Bandcamp it painted another picture, one that seemed to use BDSM as a metaphor perhaps, this may or may not be for the devil but either way it feels like the band is their inner darkness. 

The plot twist comes after the title track where they take the same five songs they originally presented and discard the guitars. They replace the metallic sounds with string, and are darker in so doing. 'One Last Taste of Heaven " is too close to call, if pressed which version is better. I think the unnerving dissonance is given a more chilling sensation on the string rendition of "Untitled". It reminds me a little of Sleepy Time Gorilla Museum. The spoken vocals that were buried in "Burning Hand' are given more focus in the new arrangement of the song.  "Where Angels Come to Die" is stripped of the black metal sounds, leaving the scowling vocals to be exposed in their hateful intentions. The guitars raging around the title track pounded the point of the lyrics home with more conviction in the original version. I am only rounding this down to a 9, due to the fact I would prefer five more songs, but feel their experiment was successful and a bold artistic statement, now with that out of their system hopefully another full-length waits in the wings?