Back in stock, found a few in the pit.

Just dug up a couple copies of this cassette from bizarre one-man Finnish outsider "black metal" outfit Dead Reptile Shrine, a band whose sound continues to bewitch and bewilder every time I listen to 'em. One of several Dead Reptile Shrine cassettes that were released by the now defunct Antihumanism, N.t.K. first appeared as a similarly limited CDr back in 2002, one of the band's very first releases. And it's a total brainwarp, opening with a weird shambling dirge of primitive percussive thud amid squealing feedback and distressed noise, an almost industrial-style intro that lurches beneath sinister whispered voices as "Nokturnal Thelema Krusifixion" gradually winds down into a rickety improvised dirge.

It's only with the second track "Rotting Flesh Laid On Altar" that Dead Reptile Shrine kicks in with his demented take on black metal, as the music swells up into a murky, low-fi racket of sludgy riffing, howling chantlike vocals and sneering shrieks all over that perpetually deranged drumming that perpetually falls in and out of time. It's a perfect example of the band's brain-damaged black metal, the music often degenerating into a shambling mess that still manages to possess a strange psychedelic quality, and as the album goes on, it delivers a weird kick akin to hearing some satanic outsider improv-folk outfit on ESP Records shot through with meandering distorted guitars and snarling rat-vocals.

     There's some gloriously tuneless stuff on here that's like the Shaggs (a band that they've been compared to before), slow, plodding black metal riffs collapsing into drooling mayhem, the vocals truly demented as they slip in and out of that fucked-up chanting, but those moments where it all comes together have a crushing, retarded power that I totally adore. Some songs erupt into noisy blasts of blastbeating drums and mangled blackened guitar, tornadic swarms of chaotic violence, only to give way to rambling, reverb-drenched folkiness, long stretches of mesmeric dungeon ambient or bursts of plodding, drunken hardcore punk, sometimes backed up warm, minimal synthesizer chords and laced with freeform guitar plucking, or wandering into ultra-abrasive stretches of over-modulated noise overlaid with traces of epic orchestral music ...and songs like "Power From Blasphemous Intent" twitch and blast with a hideous discordant violence that's as brain-scrambling as anything from later Havohej.

There's a twelve minute track on the b-side called "Of Silence, Sickness & War" that's also noteworthy, delivering a languid, shadow-streaked psychedelic jam that emanates a ghostly, murk-drenched atmosphere all its own. It's fucked. Raw and rambling and exquisitely messed-up. But in all this chaotic craziness, there's some amazingly catchy melodies that creep out of the seemingly random riffery and improvised din, a brilliantly brain-damaged strain of garage-grade necro-psychedelia that I can't get enough of, for fellow fans of the most demented, delirious outre black metal only...