WRITTEN IN WATERS

Ved Buens Ende put forth on Written In Waters a bizarre style of avant-black metal, reeling from genre to genre like the Norwegian corpsepaint crowd's answer to Mr Bungle. Able to lurch suddenly from esoteric jazz-metal noodling to furiously raw black metal rants - and, even more impressively, make this sudden shift sound perfectly natural - the band's sound lives up to the album title: anything you assert about their music is a statement written on water, true only momentarily and then rendered meaningless the next time their sound shifts. Latter-day black metal experimentalists who haven't heard this one already would be well advised to do so, because there's a long way to go yet before your average avant-black band manages to catch up with what these guys are up to.