Like a hibernating curse resurrected out of the depths of antiquity, Texan extreme metal mummies
Absu
returned from a nine-year recording hiatus in 2009, bearing an eponymous fifth album that fully reconfirmed their status as the world's preeminent -- OK, possibly only -- true purveyors of "mythological occult metal." Never mind that, though: the point here is that
have always stood alone, at first for being one of the few American bands to deliver convincing post-Inner Circle black metal during the early '90s, but later because group leader
Proscriptor
simply refuses to leave his mausoleum without draping his songs in mystifying layers of dense,
Lovecraftian
arcana. Released in 2011, the curiously named
Abzu
is no exception, and though apparently assembled quickly relative to its predecessor and marked by a brief running time (just 36 minutes, of which 15 are covered by one epic suite), it too has the regal bearing of a major musical "event." It's also rich in both extreme metal fundamentals and enough amusing quirks to once again distinguish
's vision from most of the competition, including piercing squeals ("Earth Ripper"), blackened thrash breakaways ("Skrying in the Spirit Vision"), and Spanish guitars ("Circles of the Oath"), not to mention the oft-recurring Celtic music ingredients. Thematically, the latter track delves into the Kabbalah, another, "Abraxas Connexus," into Gnosticism, and the spectacularly named "Ontologically, It Became Time & Space" into...who the f**k knows (though one suspects a mixture of Greek mythology, the Sothis mythos, and dark matter physics) while conically veering between
Bathory
and
Behemoth
and beyond. To put it simply, it's irresistibly confounding. And then there's the aforementioned epic, "A Song for Ea," which unfurls all of six distinct songs within a song, immersed one and all in Sumerian religion and specifically the mythical Abzu, from whence all of the earth's fresh subterranean waters supposedly flow. Catch the drift? Bottom line is that
's intriguing musical visions may fade into lengthy silence now and again, but whenever they emerge with something new, fans of thought-provoking black metal would do well to listen up. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia