First of all, a big thank you too Century Media for adding digital sound marks (read: beeps) to the promotional copy. Although considerably less rage-inducing than the `Your listening to the new album from...` voice-over that other labels tend to incorporate, this still is very annoying. Imagine concentrating on a piece of music while your microwave reminds you every 30 seconds that your pizza needs attention. This new weapon against all evil illegal copying might backfire, simply because the repeated monotonous beeps keep you from really getting into the atmosphere of the album itself, thereby missing little details, intra-song variety and the overall sound the band set out to accomplish. I might just add that in a recently published article in a renowned Dutch newspaper it was made clear, that, as it is today, the metal music industry did not suffer from the rise of internet and download networks, thereby confirming the common knowledge that Metalheads are loyal buyers. So please, free us from the beeps and make a reviewers job less miserable.

Anyway, since Celtic Frost are far more important than a rant against beeps I gave it my best to listen and get into this album whatever the obstacles. It took me some time but here we are. After thirteen years of silence the legendary innovators of extreme metal (except maybe for the `Cold Lake` slip of the pen) are back and trying to make another important contribution to the scene. Did they pull it of? Well, I guess they did. While their basic sound is not all that harsh and extreme anymore compared to the death/black metal nowadays, they absolutely come across as something a little different.

With thick walls of distorted guitars as a background they experiment with acoustic passages, operatic singing, clean vocals and a lot of atmospheric interludes. The music stays within the accepted borders of extreme metal however and doesn`t make any of the wild leaps the band shocked fans with at the time of their `Into The Pandemonium`. This doesn`t mean that we`ve heard it all before, though. The slow and low-key guitars drag on the songs, reminiscent of the more doomy riffs of Black Sabbath, and create space for the duets between Fischer and Simone Vollenweider, gothy lamentations, wailing back feeding guitars and even sporadic staccato death metal riffs. What completely impresses me is their ability to sound incredibly dark and heavy, without relying on technical and digital tricks to create this ambience. It is as if the old gods of extreme metal have found and kept for themselves all these years that little secret of how to tap into the cold, obscure and misanthropic part of your psyche and mesmerize you with their entirely original intense and bleak music. Maybe living in the most despicably introvert and decadent country in Europe results in feelings of utter depression and hopelessness, thereby creating the paradox of actually contributing to a good thing coming out of that mountain farmer-state. Absolutely recommended.