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Experimentation can be a wonderful thing. It can create new sounds and forms of all the arts, it pushes boundaries and uses one genre to fertilize another ("You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!") Used properly, it can create new worlds. Unfortunately, too often experimentation is just a euphemism for pretension, as it is here. Lantlos are of that school of musicians who are mixing Black Metal with post-rock and the abomination known as shoegaze and producing nothing but a lot of self-indulgent crap.

This has gone so far from the frontiers of metal that to even call it that is questionable, and besides that I don't know why they want to, when their focus is so obviously jazz and indie rock rather than anything that has to do with metal. The harsh chords and vocals scattered throughout the music here seem to serve no real purpose except to lay claim to some kind of badassery which the rest of the songs do not warrant. There are good melodies and some visceral moments buried in this album, but they are surrounded by a sea of dreary, mopey drivel that will make you want to drown everyone involved in it. If I thought this was driven by any sort of real feeling I might be more forgiving, but the shapeless songs and meandering compositions prove that the only emotion at work here is a smug sense of superiority at everyone who doesn't understand how deep and intelligent this music is supposed to be. Smirking pretension from people who should have been beaten up more as teenagers.