Dean Blunt’s mission to confound continues, and confounding Black Metal most certainly is. For its first half, this is his indie-pop record: the presiding sound, with filigree electric guitar patterns laid over acoustics, to subdued effect, is Felt. Yet these are rarely songs: the tracks are more usually repeated musical phrases, becoming songs only because they happen to occupy a song-like length of time. Then, halfway through the album, comes Forever, all 13 minutes of it, starting with a drum-machine rhythm, two alternating keyboard chords, a piano line, and wordless female vocals, presumably from his frequent collaborator Joanne Robertson, which gradually mutates into something, well, not very different. That’s followed by nearly nine minutes of X, the combination of the two seemingly intended to make the listener forget what came before, because the rest of the album doesn’t sound a bit like Felt, with elements of dub (Punk), formless noise (Country), soft-pop-meets-rap-meets-cut-up (Hush). It’s an extraordinary album, but not necessarily in a good way: it seems like a dare to the listener to work out the point of it all. It’s so opaque that it feels as if there’s no way in, as if it’s enveloped in a fug of weed smoke so dense as to obscure what lies at the centre. Concepts of good or bad don’t really apply here: Black Metal simply is.
