Now available on limited edition cassette from the narco-scum at Zanjeer Zani, limited to a mere ninety-nine copies.

A single seventeen-minute track of blackened, Satan-worshipping doom called "L'Offrande" (or "The Offering") from France's Sektarism, who debuted with this Ep on the Insidious Poisoning imprint that I just discovered through one of our French suppliers. I have no idea who's in this band, their page on metal-archives.com is pretty barren, but this disc is fucking gnarly sounding. It�s blackened doom, incredibly (ridiculously?) bleak and miserable sounding as the band lumbers through a frequently shapeless doom-dirge that's sometimes crushingly heavy and pummeling, sometimes floating through a squealing cloud of visceral feedback and thunderous amplifier noise that gets into psychedelic out-guitar improve territory at times. These freaks evoke a brand of droning, monotonous crawl with a similar nightmarish ritualistic vibe as bands like Trees, Burning Witch and Bloody Panda, other comparisons might include the suicidal blackened doom of Nortt and black funeral doom weirdoes Senthil, but Sektarism are a bit more fucked-up and psychotic, incorporating elements of black metal into their sound and fronted by a deranged singer who moans and chants and wails like a shaman in the throes of visions, hurling seemingly random blasphemies against the oozing wall of dissonant guitar noise and spacious rumble, with these stretches of howling blackened amp-howl that sounds like the band is wandering into a narcotic haze, with moments that approach Fushitsusha-style guitar destruction. And they aren�t kidding around about their love for Satan; based on my limited grasp of the French language, the lyrics for "L'Offrande" read like poetry for a sacrificial rite. It�s sloppy, stumbling and totally evil psych-doom, way more raw and droning and noisy than the likes of Trees, but just as twisted and creepy sounding.