From the guitarist responsible for resurrecting Mayhem’s rotting corpse in the mid-90s comesfinds him cooking up splenetic torrents of his trademark riffage with a side order of ghoulish arpeggios. It’s all in petition to the orixás of Brazil’s Umbanda cult, a syncretic tradition using percussive rhythms and drone-like chants to elevate its practitioners into altered states of consciousness. Drummer César Vesvre’s intoxicating rhythmical pulses and Blasphemer’s anguished, almost Attilalike vocal theatrics on and provide the ceremonial proxies here, on a darkly twisted series of assignations with the not-so-sweet hereafter.
