If you are one of these people that prefers his/hers Black Metal with more progressive elements, extreme technicality and a sinister as fuck element to it...in other words if you cried like a baby when AKERCOCKE decided to call it a day then you will find VOICES to be completely up you alley.

VOICES is the new band of David Gray and Peter Benjamin, both ex-members of AKERCOCKE, along with Sam Loynes (who has been a live member for AKERCOCKE in the past). So I guess you pretty much get the idea, and VOICES debut album, "From The Human Forest Create a Fuge of Imaginary Rain", is the closest thing you are going to get to a new AKERCOCKE album.

Well, first of all if you want to compare them with AKERCOCKE, I think that you will find VOICES leaning a bit more towards the black meta side rather balancing between black and death metal, with not as much of the clean parts that AKERCOCKE used to incorporate in their sound, for example ritualistic parts like in "Leviathan" from "Choronzon" or their much cleaner and relaxed songs, for instance "Lex Talionis" from "Words That Go Unspoken, Deeds That Go Undone", which are not found in "From The Human Forest Create a Fuge of Imaginary Rain", at least not in the same form.

So what you get with VOICES? Well, you will find the album filled with dissonant guitar melodies (some of which definitely have a VOIVOD influence on them, for example the opening song, "Dnepropetrovsk"), a really cool Black Metal ambiance with weird vocals on the background (screams? I don't even know what those are) that definitely add to making the album sound more menacing, for instance in songs such as "Fragmented Illustrations of Anger" . The vocals on this album are the grim type of black metal vocals, with a few clean bits (not close to the amount of clean vocals that AKERCOCKE had) which sound really daunting, for instance the really impressive part in "This Too Shall Pass", and then you can include to that some female vocals (just in a couple of songs, like "Eyes Become Black" and "Creating The Museum of Rape").

On top of that you are also granted a few nice additions, like the clean or acoustic passages, for instance the ending of "Unawareness of Human Emotion" and the even more impressive "Creating The Museum of Rape" with the great use of acoustic guitar in the track. If that is not enough, the band is also experimenting with quite cool tempo changes, something that comes from their incredible level of musicianship. The drums are fucking insane, the work on the bass deserves equal praise; the guitars sound is sharp and venomous with a really great performance and the keyboard parts on the album work brilliantly lifting the tracks even further.

So as I said before, if you prefer the progressive / intelligent type of Black Metal, with a chaotic element to it (listen to "Everything You Believe Is Wrong"), with epic tracks, such as the ten minute long "Sexual Isolation", and with dissonant, hard to get melodies, like for example in "Eyes Become Black" (closest thing VOICES have to a hit track, clean vocals on this song are monumental) and "Endless" then VOICES first album will mesmerize you, they sure did that to me.