One of the premier American death industrial artists, Stephen Petrus and his long-running death industrial project Murderous Vision has been producing some of the blackest industrial driftscapes in the field since the late 90s. The latest from the Cleveland-area artist is Engines & Disciples, his first new full length in two years, a sweeping nine-track descent into rumbling jet-black factory cities, smoke-shrouded death dirges crawling through a vast subterranean world lit only by the dull glow of some dying nether-sun.

Tracks like "Nightmare Made Flesh And Bone (Part One)" wash across the album in waves of blackened synthdrift and ominous drone, a kind of jet-black electronic ambience strafed with distant metallic noises and obscured rhythmic currents, vast and heavy and malevolent, laced with the groan of steel girders and swells of orchestral murk, with strange, almost ritualistic vocalizations that murmur up out of the depths. It recalls the bleakest 70's space music and the most cinematic strains of post-industrial dark ambience, resounding with the occasional thud of rhythmic hammering upon the walls of some monstrous metallic chamber. Sounds swell and surge across each track, shifting from a vast Lustmordian heaviness to a seething dreamlike fog of nightmare chaos, the more abrasive noise found on tracks like "Peeling Away Necrotic Flesh" at the meeting place between squealing electronics streaking over swirling oceans of static, and fragments of moody melody obscured within the thick fog of distortion. Engines continues to move between that gorgeous dark ambience and the harsher noisescapes, gleaming kosmische electronics drifting through the abyss, the distorted pounding of drums echoing through the depths, parts of this resembling a Tangerine Dream concert taking place within the heart of a rapidly rotting planetoid. Elsewhere Petrus crafts a symphony of shifting sheet-metal that swirls into a reverberant sonic delirium, akin to a more ambient take on K2-style metallic noise. Other tracks unfurl into smoldering sprawls of corrupted electronics and howling abyssal winds, ominous noisescapes that glimmer with buried, partially glimpsed melodies and creepy sepulchral synth noises, opening into ravenous black overmodulated dronescapes. One of the album's standout tracks is "Immaculate Deception", a crushing industrial dirge weighted with downtuned metallic bass riffs and a rumbling percussive undertow buried beneath a storm of droning electronics and distortion, like some cacophonic industrial metal outfit bleeding through a wall of machine noise, which gets even more harrowing as the ultra-distorted verbal hate of guest vocalist Andrew Grant (The Vomit Arsonist) is unleashed across the track. Creepy, dense and psychedelic, this is one of the most evil sounding Murderous Vision albums the project has brought us. Comes in digipack packaging designed by Andre Coelho of Sektor 304.