Anybody who is into Black Metal should know who KRALLICE is by now. For the few of you that possibly haven't, this New York City-based super group of sorts that have been producing some of the most bizarre and haunting Black Metal of the twenty-first century. The most notable member of the band's roster is guitar player Colin Marston who you may recognize from either BEHOLD... THE ARCTOPUS or the new bass player for Death Metal legends GORGUTS, but he has put a lot of his time towards mastering and producing some high-quality metal albums from such artists as ARTIFICIAL BRAIN, LITURGY and PANOPTICON. People who say that modern metal is not worth their time have ignorantly overlooked the work of KRALLICE who is continuing to lead that charge with this, their fifth full-length album, "Ygg Huur".

There is certainly a lot more melody to these songs than on other albums of theirs. This is just one of the many things that differentiates "Ygg Huur" from past KRALLICE releases. Another example is how much more organized the songs seem from the songs off of their self-titled album "Krallice" from 2008, which is an essential album for anyone into Avant Garde Black Metal. The songs on "Ygg Huur" still ring with that Avant Garde abnormality but the music doesn't sound nearly as alien as it did in the past. Tracks like "Wastes of Ocean" and "Bitter Meditation" shows much more restraint from KRALLICE so the guitar riff oddities only peak through occasionally. Overall, "Ygg Huur" is the band's most straightforward album to date.

One of the things that I usually catch as a weakness for most records, the very short time lapse of "Ygg Huur" actually benefits this album. Just slightly over half an hour long, the album stops itself short which prevents the music from "Ygg Huur" from becoming stale in one listen. The album becomes conceptualized in the process of condensing the music down to six beefy sounding tales of subliminal technique through Death Metal music. The sound is familiar but the composition is so melodically bewildering that you can never identify their style to something you have heard before

KRALLICE combines the spastic shredding you could hear on a CONVERGE or PSYOPUS record with elements I have heard from "true" Norwegian Black Metal bands like TAAKE and DARKTHRONE. KRALLICE is a band that never seizes to push the boundaries of how they experiment with Black Metal. At their worst, KRALLICE is still way more complex and technical than the majority of Metal bands out there.

"Ygg Huur" would be a great album to the fans of Black Metal and older KRALLICE material. I think if somebody hasn't gotten into these guys by now, listening to "Ygg Huur" may still open a door for a new fan to delve into a whole scene of trippy Black Metal sickness. This was a great record but certainly not for newcomers to Extreme Metal. So play this album for the whole family!