PESTILENTIAL SHADOWS is a Black Metal hand hailing from Australia. Formed in 2003, this will be the band’s seventh studio album. Not much else information was available about the band, so we will have to let the music do the talking. The album has eight songs, and the title track is first. Talk about somber…the opening tones are very depressive, and paint a landscape of dread and hopelessness, but from there, aggression and rage kick in. “Erebus Divination” comes out of the gate with a slow and powerful riff, and a grind in the kick drums. It’s all about the deep places underneath the earth here. Some of the tones that follow are dissonant, and the bass work is pronounced; something you don’t often encounter in Black Metal.

“Despondent” is very melancholy, and shows the band at the other end of the spectrum. When the distorted riff hits, it feels very depressing indeed. Black Metal bands can dip their feet in either rage or hopelessness, or a combination of the two. “Death-Knell” has a fast picked riff that is somewhat adventurous, but the intense rage continues strongly, combined with some somber tones. The section approaching the halfway mark also features some clean guitar tones and evil spoken words. “Where Sunlight Goes to Die” is another rager, and the riffs shift subtly at times. It holds a steady pace going forward, with that wall of sound that often accompanies the genre. “Aherbelts” roars out of the gates like a diesel engine kicking over. Once is starts, it rolls forward like a machine roaming the earth, leveling everything in its path.

“Cold Entropy” has a slower and more calculated sound, still riding the fence between rage and hopelessness. Entropy is the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. “Embraced by the Spirit-Realm” is the final cut, and it begins with some fog lifting early in the morning hours while everything is still quiet. What follows is an explosion of sound. The song does indeed drift into the spirit realm at times, and out of the shadows at others. Overall, this was a solid album. Although a good deal of it was steeped in the history of the FWOBM, there was enough experimentation to warrant a good grade without it coming off the rails altogether.