Don't you just love album titles that immediately draw you in and make you crave to know what lies within? "Feeding the Crawling Shadows", SARGEIST's latest offering, is exactly one such title that filled me with anticipation and dare I even say a small bit of trepidation. This album marks the fourth full-length album by the notorious Black Metal band from Finland, and is perhaps one of the releases I was most looking forward to in 2014.

With the 2010 album "Let the Devil In", SARGEIST danced on the precipice of the abyss of accessibility, and so it was with some wariness and a small sense of apprehension that I first pushed play on the new album, hoping the band had not taken things a step too far and plummeted into the void. I almost immediately regretted ever having doubted the band, for what came oozing out of my speakers was a primordial and raw sludge that contained enough blast beats to power a small nuclear reactor. On this album SARGEIST again tread a very fine line, this time this time tethering on the edge of going back to their roots and just plain regression. On the one hand, this album is rawer than the more melodious "Let the Devil In", but at the same time does not have the hunger and the power of the first album, "Satanic Black Devotions". Sound-wise, I would say the album falls between these two extremes. Which is not to say that "Feeding the Crawling Shadows" somehow falls short of its predecessors, but merely that it amalgamates the two different sounds that SARGEIST has mustered.

The title track "Feeding the Crawling Shadows" slowly insinuates its way into your consciousness before launching into a frozen frenzy around the halfway mark. Containing some songs that clearly follow in the light of "Let the Devil In", such as "In Charnel Darkness", with its almost catchy guitar lines, the album also contains insidiously darker and murkier tracks like "Return of the Rats". "The Shunned Angel" is perhaps my personal favourite on the entire album, with its powerful and sepulchre atmosphere, haunting guitar riffs, and grim but ensnaring vocals, although "Inside The Demon's Maze" comes in a very close second, with its searing and tormented agony that entangles your soul and takes you to the very pits of hell.

Overall, I get the impression that the stronger tracks on "Feeding the Crawling Shadows" are all clustered in the second half of the album, which makes me almost want to skip over the first half, although these too have their highlights. Nevertheless, on the whole, this album is an auditory onslaught of pure rawness, and with it, SARGEIST prove once again why it is that they stand head and shoulders above so many contemporary Black Metal bands.