While Kenose was only my first introduction to Deathspell Omega, it had me hooked instantly and solidified the band into blacks metal’s elite after Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice, the album that saw this French band progress and evolve from standard black metal to their current, labyrinthine, deformed, and twisted take on black metal.

As Good as I thought Kenose was, Fas, is just on a whole new level of serpentine, disturbing and transcendental, shimmering black malevolence and brilliance. After the intro “Obombration” (which serves as the title of the outro also), the opening track alone “The Shrine of Mad Laughter” (arguably one of the most amazing songs of the year), bursts forth from the speakers like 10 different black metal albums playing at once, while a hornets nest spews forth its angry contents. It is truly ‘order from chaos’ with its violent almost indecipherable cacophony, but yet undulating, tangibly menacing and on some perverse level, sickening precise. And that’s before the songs mid point descent into ambient psychosis, tortured angelic cries and nerve wrecking few moments of closing silence. It’s this mix of rabid black metal furor and the well utilized, often paralyzing ambient segues that make Fas stick with you deep into your psyche. Sure, many black metal bands mix up ambience and antagonism, (Blud Aus Nord, Negura Bunget, Shining, Xasthur, etc) but Deathspell Omega have the art down pat, mixing the sheer violence of say Antaeus with the suicidal, horror filled ambience of Leviathan.

“Bread of Bitterness” follows suite but adds a layer of demented orchestration and chanting to the mix and again with the tension inducing silence to close the track as you brace for the onslaught. Instead, you are greeted with the lurching, atonal lope of “The Repellent Scars of Abandon And Election” that starts as if it could be the blues or jazz as if it were played in a backstreet bar of some alternate hell before erupting with the foul gusts of chaotic seething grandeur personified. The dreamy start to “A Chore For The Lost” is rudely (and sleep shatteringly) interrupted by an explosion of oppressive disharmony and swirling vortex while vocalist with Mikko Aspa unleashes his most poisonous and varied effort on the album.

Ultimately Fas-Ite, Malidicti In Ignem Aeternum is uncompromisingly vitriolic yet sublimely structured with misanthropic layering and depth. It results in what looks to be the black metal album, with possibly the exception of the new Leviathan swansong, that all other black metal albums of 2007 will be judged against and they will fail miserably.

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