The latest album from French black metal abstractionists Blut Aus Nord can't even really be called "black metal" at this point - their last album, the

critically acclaimed The Work Which Transforms God, had already mutated their heavily ambient, icy blackness into a kind of seasick, doomy metal

whose guitars slipped in and out of Slint-y math figures, chaotic buzzsaw thrash, and wobbly chords that sounded like they were floating in and out of tune,

all surging over a punishing mechanized pulse that felt like the drum machine from Godflesh's Streetcleaner moving in reverse. But with

Mort, Blut Aus Nord have completely slipped into the Forbidden Zone, presenting what is basically a single 47 minute track that is divided into

eight chapters, almost entirely instrumental, and which drags you down into a murky, drug-induced state of horror populated with amorphous riffs that sound

like their being played by Luc Lemay on heavy 'shrooms, winding guitar lines layered over one another and shifting in and out of tune, warbly and surreal

sounding, while the terminally off-time Godfleshy drums pound erratically and dead monk chants and viscous growls drip across the music's pitch-black canvas

of subterranean rumbles and gooey melting circus keyboards. At time, Mort starts to sound like a free jazz band moving through glue and flickering

out of our dimension, constantly being swallowed up in the syrupy murky blackness, and clean, emotionally crushing singing emerges at times out of the muddy

chaos to . Super asbtract and twisted, moving at a slow, lurching, lopsided crawl, sort of like a fucked up combination of Xasthur and newer Wolf Eyes and

Abruptum, sad and surreal, weird and dreamlike, a masterpiece of hallucinatory post-black metal.