Irish Metal' are not two words one would often hear put together, at least not as much as I would like. Galway's own ILENKUS are fresh out of the press with a followup to their 2011 opus, "Rule By Thieves", in the form of the 5-track "The Crossing", 5 tracks may come off a little disconcerting, but when the entire album clocks in at 37 minutes of jarring, jerking, darkly melodic, spastic and quasi-mathematical explosions of sound time no longer seems to exist.

To approach this album on a track-by-track basis is futile and meaningless, but to look at each track as a directional (or directionless) growth from the previous, you might just start to get a feel for it. "Devourer" is the first step out onto "The Crossing", and instantly comes across as a heavy, technical, Mathrock-like piece akin to THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN. The 'intro' ended as suddenly as it began, and such do the rise and falls in tempo and intensity of the track's movements. It transgresses somewhat aimlessly between periods of jarring, hammer-struck riffs and frantic blast-beats, to mellow threnodies of clean guitars, bass, drums and haunting, pained vocals. The music of the title track is aptly created around it's namesake; nearly 10 minutes long, it comes across as a mutated, unshelled TOOL track... At least, that was the impression of the first three minutes. The transitions here are much smoother, as one traverses bridges of airy, but heavy, riffs loosely tethered to reality. As the track comes to an end, everything; not literally just the tempo; everything, slows down.

The album may be separated by tracks and minutes, but the bars of this band's music staff are blurred; "Be A Weapon", beginning with a drawn-out, clean atmosphere, leads into a powerful series of passages of heavy Hardcore riffs topped with progressive flourishes. Comparisons could easily be made to IHSAHN's newer material. "Over the Fire, Under the Smoke", while stil retaining, in parts, the powerful ambience that the majority of the album has expressed, it contains the more 'metal' moments found on this record. By this time, the album has ascended to a myriad of constrictive and constricted riffs and moods, transcending the maze of gloom. "Goodbye Denial" sees a shift to a soundscape that is somehow rageful and inwardly solemn at the same time. The riffs and vocals are much more explosive and emotive, and amounts to a seemingly endless crescendo... Before nothingness.

This is the thinking music for the enthusiasts of truly strange metal, drawing from innumerable styles, to create something that cannot properly be expressed in written mediums.