In the Red

Long Island natives Unearthly Trance seemed to be trying almost too hard on their unnaturally corrosive 2003 debut full-length, Season of Séance, Science of Silence — an album so determined to push the known boundaries of crusty, deathly doom to unexplored depths of sonic extremity, that attention to songcraft proper occasionally had to take a back seat to the sheer terror they were trying to convey. So much so that some listeners may find their next outing, In the Red, positively accessible by comparison, thanks to the noticeably shorter, more manageable lengths, and discernibly rock-based riffs forged for initial offerings like "Penta(grams)" and the surprisingly fast-paced "It Is the Never and Forever That You Fear." But it doesn't take long for the trio to leap back into the abyss, using additional tracks "Possession in Poverty" and "Turning Piss Into Gold" to delve into the hell of drug addiction, and prove that frontman Ryan Lipynsky can write about subjects other than the occult. To wit, molten feedback cacophonies like the title track and the cavernous "Deathothic" find him wandering through the bowels of a volcano and imagining cyclopean worlds of Lovecraftian design, respectively. All told, this makes for an album-length, near-death experience of slightly less blackened, oppressive and grotesque proportions than Unearthly Trance's previous work; but the band's increased maturity and newfound party tricks arguably makes it all the more interesting.