Yes, it can be pretty difficult to take music seriously, in part because its practitioners are so serious themselves. Few things invoke a giggle fit quite as effectively as the sight of a sallow 15-year-old wearing black lipstick, black lace, and a tragic facial expression, listening to funereal music with Latin lyrics and lots of cellos. And this album's cover art doesn't really give one hope for anything less hackneyed -- between the dark forest, the 19th century church facade, and the statue of a weeping angel, it's got just about every cliche covered. So the stylistic variety and occasional rich complexity of the music it contains come as a very pleasant surprise. The album opens with (no, really, give it a chance) by , a dark but not heavy exploration of ethereal North African melisma and electronic textures; it gets even more interesting with 's a song whose muscular structure nicely offsets the singer's self-consciously spooky delivery, and hits its peak on by , a song that combines what sound like (but probably aren't) British football chants with thick rhythms, resulting in a dense and forbidding soundscape that sounds something like a cross between and . Other highlights include the gothic of and the rather heavy metalish . Highly recommended to anyone interested in the outer territories of the scene. ~ Rick Anderson