This recent Nuclear War Now "30th Anniversary Edition" reissue features the original album on CD, cassette and deluxe 180-gram LP. The reissue features improved cover art clarity (sourcing the original NASA photo used for the initial release), along with extensive new liner notes and album history written by J. Campbell and rare photos (for the CD and LP edition (these are not included in the cassette format). The LP is presented in a (very) heavyweight case-wrapped jacket with leather-like texturing, and a 12"-size forty-four page booklet. It's massive, an an essential piece of early avant-garde Finnish black metal at its most fearless and adventurous.

My original review of the previous edition on Candlelight, revised and updated:

The earlier Beherit recordings were insanely chaotic and primitive blurts of blackened death metal that bore a somewhat similar bestial vibe as the fucked-up Brazilian scumthrash of bands like Sarcafago, Vulcano and Sextrash, but when 1993 rolled around and these Finns dropped their first full-blown full length Drawing Down The Moon, it was serious what the fuck time. The band's sound had gotten MUCH weirder for this album, though at first you wouldn't notice anything different from their early recordings...

The disc opens with a short synth into with a deep distorted voice proclaiming fealty to Satan while angelic voices sing in the background, then rips right into "Salomom's Gate", all brutal simplistic thrashing riffage and Nuclear Holocausto's psychotic gurgling vocals that sounds an awful lot like the scummy deaththrash they were playing on The Oath of Black Blood. But as the song continues, the arrangement gets all weird, riffs kind of wander off or stop abruptly, droning keyboards pop up randomly, and the band ends things on a slow, sludgy doom riff that just fades off. The next track "Nocturnal Evil" is another blazing thrasher, primitive four chord riffs sounding more like hardcore punk scoured by extreme distortion and blown speakers than anything, and those vocals...Nuclear Holocausto's gargling rasp goes all over the place, one minute raging in the background, and a second later his vocals suddenly shoot WAY UP IN THE MIX and in your face. In contrast, "Sadomatic Rites" starts off total doom, a massive death metal riff played at half speed while spacey synths swell in the background, eventually picking up speed and turning into a chugging mid-paced monster halfway through, becoming sloppier and sloppier, the drums and guitars falling all over themselves as the song, again, fades out into deep space.

The first minute of "Black Arts" has a sample of what sounds like the crackling and hissing of a burning pyre alongside some kind of inhuman grunting, then switches to mid-tempo death metal with even more whacked out vocals running through some kind of effects. Then there is "Nuclear Girl", a short two minute track of dubbed out drums, sinister minor-key synth, droning guitar and bleeping electronics, a psychedelic instrumental interlude that sets up the mangled punky death metal of "Unholy Pagan Fire", and it's from here on that Beherit seriously pile on the strangeness. Atavistic death metal riffs merge with wall-of-noise blackened buzzsaw guitars, weird Tangerine Dream synth sounds keep popping up all over the place along with other electronic noises, the vocals switch back and forth from hideous gargles to hushed whispers and ridiculous computer-processed spoken word parts where Nuclear Holocausto recites all sorts of Satanic blasphemies over a backdrop of muddy guitar noise. Seriously, the vocals on Drawing Down The Moon are some of most bizarre in the black metal canon, and it's not hard to see how this set the stage for later BM weirdos like Furze and Striborg.

One of the more notorious tracks on Drawing is "Summerlands", which is basically a really dark New Age track with spoken word vocals and Zamfir-esque flutes piping over a plodding drumbeat and the sounds of a forest at night, another jarring left turn in the middle of what is already a very strange black/death metal record. That's followed by new versions of the songs "Werewolf Semen And Blood" and "Thou Angel Of The Gods" from the first record, both blasts of filthy black metal with more of that insane vocal mixing and echoed layering, and then closes with "Lord Of Shadows And Goldenwood", a mix of droning death-doom and cosmic ambience that ends in a wave of massive blackened synthesizer roar.

The band was clearly out of their fucking minds when they recorded this album. The combination of filthy atavistic black metal and their bizarre version of "cosmic" 70s-era style electronic ambience and experimentation is both inspired and totally nuts, and to this day, there seems to be a general consensus that Drawing Down The Moon is one of the weirdest albums that ever emerged from black metal's "Second Wave". I've seen just as many people online write this album off as utter dogshit as I've seen proclaim it as the work of avant-garde genius, so depending on just how damaged you like your old school black metal, your mileage will vary. Me? I fucking worship this album. It's absolutely crucial listening for anyone into eccentric and outré black/death metal, one of the very few albums from this era that achieves the same sort of otherworldly strangeness as Abruptum's early recordings. Highest recommendation to disciples of both the Satanic and the absurd.