Arguably, one of the most important elements of Atmospheric Black Metal is the atmosphere.  It is what creates the vast landscapes and themes that can make for truly beautiful music, especially in a genre that can become as stale and repetitive as Black Metal.  I have always had a very soft spot for Black Metal with its various quirks and personality disorders, especially the over the top Satanic side of the more Scandinavian realms of the genre.  So it is pretty nice when a band like STOIC DISSENTION turn up and slap me in the face with a soggy hand covered in atmosphere, leaving me dripping in soundscapes with an almost dream like quality.

The second full length album from these dark Coloradan seers is "Autocthon" which was, in ancient Greece a way of saying "people born of the earth"; which in even simpler  and sightly more modern terms mean natives to the land/the indigenous.  The album explores the annals of untold history and plunges head-first into the messy end of early religious systems and rituals, all whilst maintaining a firm grip on the primitive side of man which is something that survives today in each of us.

The album opens quite inconspicuously with the sounds of the outdoors being overlaid by some pretty standard Black Metal musicianship.  Dissonant chords picked over a lazy and trudging drum beat are set against vocal work that could have come straight out of an old BURZUM record dealing with the heavier matters involved in Middle Earth.  As it goes, it sounds pretty damn good.

You can instantly feel that this is not going to be just like every other Black Metal album as the tempo simply refuses to pick up at all and you find yourself slowly getting sucked ears first into a never-ending pool of sludgy joy.

This is where the whole Post Rock thing loses points, sure you can make music that is ambient and enchanting but what about the darker side of emotion?  I don't just want to sit there for 10 minutes listening to a song that builds to a slower crescendo than my Grandmother's climaxes, sometimes I want to sit there for 10 minutes and listen to something that doesn't build up, in fact it slows down several times until my brain is moving slowly enough to start going back in time.  This is the magic of STOIC DISSENTION, they can batter you with all the distortion and death rattles that they want but their music is innately beautiful and needs nothing else.  It's a bit like listening to an incredibly dark cover of anything that GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR have released whilst sacrificing a kitten to Nirti or some other such God.

The album continues in this same pace and theme with some very interesting and refreshing breaks into experimental sounds that cross Jazz, Acoustic and Electronic musical styles with a good amount of finesse and style that has got to be admired.  It all ends with a return to the good old Black Metal (well, mostly) in the final song "The Eldritch And The Atavistic" with some almost ferocious sections and plenty of demonic vocal work.

In short, if you want carnage, mayhem and violence then this album may send you off to sleep but if you are feeling a craving for something cerebral and genuinely interesting then this may well be the one for you.