Album Of The Week: Nachtmystium Silencing Machine

I've already written in this space that black metal, by and large, is just a thing that I don't get. The tinny guitar tones, the hummingbird-fast drum assault, the total abandonment of recognizable song-form -- none of it makes a whole lot of sense to me. But the one straight-up black metal album that grabbed me in that dark place in the soul -- my favorite unadulterated black metal album of all time, if I stop and think about it for a minute -- is Instinct: Decay, the 2006 LP from the Chicago band Nachtmystium. That one had everything I don't like about the genre, but it all came together into a mysterious atmospheric rasp that dodged in and out of experimental noise and somehow tapped into a raw instinctual fury that I never managed to hear in the band's Scandinavian forebears, no matter how often I tried. It probably helped that the album came out around the same time I was getting heavily back into comic books for the first time since childhood, and I remember it made a pretty badass accompaniment to the Avengers: Disassembled trade. But for whatever reason, Instict: Decay resonated for me like a faraway feral wolf-howl. After that album, Nachtmystium strayed from the black metal blueprint on their next two full-lengths, playing around with black-light acid-rock and new-wave robo-synths, and I probably liked both of those albums even better than Instinct: Decay. But with their new Silencing Machine, they're back to that old black metal pummel-rasp, sounding somehow refreshed for it. The album doesn't tickle my lizard brain the same way Instict: Decay did, but it reminds me of everything I first liked about them in their ferocious form.