First off, Carrion Wraith scores points for their badass ultra-detailed logo. As you know, a killer logo is usually a portent of good music, and Carrion Wraith's thick, bloated root-like lettering that winds downwards like some sort of demonic tuber into what looks like a possessed deer skull is cool enough to set the bar pretty high. These French Canadian black metallers come though with the goods though, delivering seven lengthy songs of icy, distortion-drenched blackened misery. Singing in both French and English, vocalist Monarque delivers his visions of forest-demons and black woodlands ruled over by an undead Deer Lord ( also called the Carrion Wraith - uh, just read the booklet...) in a proper phlegm-spewing rasp, and the music is thick and hypnotic and buzzing, the distorted guitars cloaking dreary riffs and melodies in harsh trebly fuzz. The minor key riffs often have a blurry, dissonant quality that reminds me of Xasthur, but this tends to be much faster than Malefic's depressive black metal. Switching between blastbeats and punky mid-tempo rhythms, Carrion Wraith lace their sorrowful black buzz with bits of black ambience and lengthy field recordings of water birds and forest life, but mostly this is about awesome, heart-rending epic melodies, and every one of these songs is filled with them - my favorite being the utterly moving "L'Abysse De La Folie", which has one of the saddest-sounding black metal melodies ever. Definitely recommended for folks into Xasthur, Silencer, terminally downer black metal in general, and undead deer wraiths.