…AND OCEANS

Despite the legions of myopic purists that seek to keep black metal firmly tethered to the past, the genre has always been a fertile breeding ground for subversives and mischief-makers. …AND OCEANS have arguably been a low-key presence over the years, but particularly since releasing "A.M.G.O.D." in 2001, the Finns have steadily built an extraordinary catalogue of resolutely left-field extremity. Reconvening after a lengthy hiatus in 2017, …AND OCEANS have continued to push their sound into new, unprecedented realms, and "The Regeneration Itinerary" feels like the culmination of all that fearlessness. This is a black metal album in the same way that a pop-up tent is a cathedral.

They have form, of course. Two previous albums, "Cosmic World Mother" (2020) and "As In Gardens, So In Tombs", re-established the unfathomably unimaginative …AND OCEANS sound, with its gleeful plundering of industrial, electronica and psychedelic atmospheres. This time around, creative driving force Timo Kontio uses the same musical palate, but these songs are both more refined and more vicious than their recent counterparts. As ever, much of the joy comes from the complexity of it all. With an abundance of perverse detours and disruptions, even the more straightforwardly metallic moments are wonderfully strange. Opener "Inertiae" captures the unhinged delight of this band's creative journey, with a bedrock of imperious black metal shrouded in a barrage of ornate and disorientating elements, from machine-like rhythmic pulses to ghostly walls of alien keyboards. It is a heady and hypnotic brew that reaches its zenith of efficacy on "Prophetical Mercury Implement": a dazzling amalgam of big budget black metal and avant-garde maximalism that sounds like all-out war and delirious, tripped-out euphoria rolled into one sumptuously detailed whirlwind of ideas.

When …AND OCEANS go for the throat, they are as brutal as BEHEMOTH, but at least 50 percent weirder. "The Fire In Which We Shall Burn" is a puritanical act of death metal savagery, and a riveting diversion from the crazed experimentation elsewhere. It is followed by the macabre, disco-metal stomp of "The Ways Of Sulphur", which would be the catchiest song that the Finns have ever released, but for the presence of "Towards The Absence Of Light": a symphonic black metal gem by any sane standard, and one with a disarming emotional kick. Only the closing "The Terminal Filter" works harder to get the blood pumping, driven by pitiless blastbeats and awash with sparkly eyed, transcendental keyboard surges, it puts an immaculate seal on an album that is both true to its creators' ethos and hellbent on demanding more from black metal than mere familiarity. This is a fascinating adventure and one of this year's most immersive metal records. Here's to doing things differently.