Phantom - Angel of Disease

Renewing the assault on all senses with a powerful follow-up to the sanity destroying blackened death metal terror of Withdrawal, Phantom emerge once again from the pits of Hell itself to sculpt from pure, fiendish, discordant sounds a new, somewhat more abstract take on their trademark guttural and madness inducing black metal, using a wide panoply of textures, riffing techniques and stylistic contrasts to augment rhythmic narratives through unparalleled demonic intensity to create what is essentially, the most abominable and macabre blackened death metal imaginable.

Fittingly for such a challenging album as Angel of Disease, riffs are not just played in a tired, predictable sequence one after the other, as with most modern extreme metal, but are instead contorted, morphed, transmuted, tortured, defiled, and made to embrace odd and unnatural sounds in which an organic order can nonetheless be discerned be the most intuitive and attentive listeners, congealing across songs through the repeated use of similar figures, tones and patterns to connect an internal outline of events to what is otherwise a difficultly comprehensible cacophony of raw, blasphemous, morbid and absolutely sickening madness. Angel of Disease is as delirious as it is vile. Chaos in lead guitars deliberately unhinging tonal containers for the use of atonal and contorted sounds manage to ease transition between the evanescent, amorphous vocabulary of blackened death metal riffing which creates atmosphere, intensity and, most of all, melodic and harmonic tonal placement to the frenzy.

Often compared to Miasma, Onward to Golgotha and Phantom's own following masterpiece of horror The Epilogue to Sanity for its heavy use of chromaticism, discordant soundscapes and abstract motif interplay, Angel of Disease might be the hardest, least accessible, most unyielding - and yet, paradoxically, most rewarding - listening experience of all black metal and death metal. A must have for all extreme metal fans.

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