Let's take a look at this new disc that comes to us from the Quebec black metal underground. The cover shows a sepia-toned photograph of a bottle of pills spilling onto the floor. The booklet has more images of pills, held in an outstretched hand, and a huge menacing looking dagger. All look negative enough, but then you flip the case over and yer staring at a photograph of the creep behind Malveillance, standing in front of his bedroom mirror, arm outstretched as he snaps a shot of himself standing there in his pink jockeys like he just climbed out of bed. What could this sound like?

Brutal, minimalistic, skullshredding noisecrust. Vicious, uber-atavistic blackened scumpunk, along the lines of Bone Awl, Akitsa, Wold, Absurd and Ildjarn - that's what you get on L'appel du Neant / Le Froid du Nord, a collection of Malveillance's out-of-print cassettes: Le Froid du Nord from 2005, and 2006's L'appel du Neant, both of which were released on Harsh Brutal Cold Productions. Malveillance put their own spin on that kind of blown out crusty savagery though, even more punk rock and thrashing, simplistic mono-riffing blasted over and over again, slathered in filth and distortion, pounded through trance inducing repetition over pummeling D-beat, Discharge-style drums, the vocals a feral screech. The recording for these cassettes is low-fi and raw, but thick and gnarly and super aggro. Like how Akitsa are like some blasted, blackened version of Oi!, Maleveillance are their crusty hardcore punk cousins, fierce and fucked up. The weirdest thing about this album is the whopping eight Ramones covers that are on here, and one cover of "You're Tripping" by pop punk mainstays The Queers! That might sound counterintuitive, but Malveillance takes these pop punk songs and makes them their own, taking songs like "The KKK Took My Baby Away" and "Commando" and "I Don't Want To Be Learned" and douse 'em in distortion and speed and venom, turning them into thrashing, evil blasts of super catchy necropunk. Even the Queers song sounds totally insane filtered through Malveillance's filth. Awesome. I can't get enough of Malveillance and his blackened trance punk.