Eparistera Daimones

A lot of metal albums claim to be the heaviest thing ever recorded but this may actually be it. Thomas Gabriel Fischer’s follow-up to the acclaimed Celtic Frost reunion in the mid-2000s took everything that made Monotheist such a shocking return to form and amped it up, peering even deeper into the darkness than his previous act and discovering only the slithering of ambiguous serpentine forms. “Goetia” slowly carves a chunk out of the listener’s soul upon first listen, but it’s not all sludge-and-trudge — “A Thousand Lies” feels like something Devin Townsend would write in conjunction with H.P. Lovecraft.