Wormlust released an absolute gem of horrific black-ambient this year in Svarthol; a record good enough, in fact, to get me to fork out for this split from last year with Ireland’s Haud Mundus. On Oblivio Appositus, though, you can largely forget Svarthol’s washed-out expanses of proggy clean ambiance. Both bands are largely on the same hideous page here, offering a portmanteau of misshapen and grumbling depressive black metal. And, if you are in the mood, it is a captivating forty minutes of music.

Haud Mundus open with two contributions. The 13-minute monstrosity that is Veins of Stone is slithering and formless, repeatedly dying away into passages of abstract noise and sinister melody, before kicking up again into pulsating, barbarous riffing that evokes a more muscular Ruins of Beverast. It’s hard to find any real structure to it, but perhaps this doesn’t really matter if you are craving the aural equivalent of being dragged through a thorny ditch by your hair, for the entire duration of an icy winter night. And that’s why you buy sort of thing, isn’t it? Forever Desiccate the Seed initially seems more shapely, opening with some almost Opeth-ian 6/8 melodic fire, but this too derails again and again into ghastly catacombs of hissing death sound effects and grimly mumbling clean melodies.

Not to be outdone, Wormlust follows this Lovecraftian weirdness with something quite similar. This Icelandic project’s contributions are an exceptionally dark brace of tracks, winding slowly through crawling, dissonant riffs and dripping, fuzzy ambiance to create something quite spectacularly horrible. The Larvean Inauguration opens with a formlessly writhing mess of hazy black metal guitar and rusty percussion, building up a kind of shambling steam into a decayed procession of groaning non-riffs. I can’t think of anything which just sounds as unrelentingly pestilential, and as cacklingly otherworldly.

If you search, you will find melodies here, sometimes touching ones, but don’t listen to it for that reason. If you pay attention you will also find riffs, often crunching and menacing, but don’t listen to it for that reason, either. Listen to Oblivio Appositus because it is a frightening record, which evokes unfathomable cosmic horror in your mind as powerfully as any film or literature. This is what black metal should really be about.