Absu - In The Eyes of Ioldanach
Review: Massively influenced by Slayer, this latest release from the boys from Plano continues their progression toward articulating their aggressive and death metal-based approach to the mystical genre of black metal, evolving their music both toward a more centrally structured approach in the newer atonal style and an older-school integration of fairly random riffs to a core rhythm and vocal melody. While the heritage elements of this music remain the chorus-based structuring and vocal melodic centering, the divergence is in ambient structures of high-speed dissonant variation, hiding within the center of otherwise more conventional pieces attributes of the nihilism of black metal.
Most impressively these songs are executed with higher speed and precision than previous Absu works, with more intricate lead riffing allowing them to use structures of shifting resolution to create stepped spaces through which they can enter any of the other passages in a song, allowing a cyclic recombinant phraseology that empowers the micro-riff variations the band uses to emphasize shadow variations on the primary melodic progression in each song. To support this percussion rolls through bursts of polyrhythm into gradually decomposing riffing returning to the driving energy which powers each song with tempos of massive speed and a complexity derived from growth of simple independent functions within each beat, alluding to while not aesthetically referencing the frenetic power of a computer-administrated world.
1. VITRIOL 
2. Hallstatt
3. Manannan
4. Never Blow Out The Eastern Candle
As expected from past releases, the heavy influence of older King Diamond shows in the chorus patterns and heavy metal-style riffing interlaced with the death metal on this release, as well as in the abundant flourishes of demonic vocals squirted from the drying vocal chords of a vocalist squeezed between competing rhythms of the same rubric within each piece. Overall coherence and the essence of directed but unpolarized art are much enhanced on this release, making this reviewer conclude that it is the highest point of evolution Absu have yet attained.