Whilst we wait patiently for new material from the resuscitated Red Harvest, it's something of a pleasure to hear from that other pusher of aural industrial espionage, Australian terror squad The Amenta! Revelator is their first new album and indeed material since 2013's Flesh Is Heir, and unlike certain other industrial metal outfits (Italy's Aborym, here's to you and what you used to be!) they haven't devolved into sub-Nine Inch Nails pop-rock. Indeed, the first sounds you hear on opener An Epoch Ellipsis is distorted guitar riffing and clattering drums before the band launch into a blackened torrent, following on nicely from Flesh Is Heir's approach. Revelator is something of a mix of that and previous, moodier piece n0n, just as willing to jackhammer your skull with an industrial pounding as it is to create an atmospheric soundscape, often doing both at once with vocalist Cain having both an aggressive roar and a more despairing clean singing voice. Of course, this is hardly a new approach, and yet it's good that this both reminds you of the Fear Factory approach and surpasses it.

Revelator is certainly several stages of progressiveness beyond the blunt industrial hammering of Cazares and co, not least for the variety here. We have Kali Yuga-referencing single Sere Money, a slower almost alt-rock piece arranged around a mix of groovy riffs and more textural, weirder guitars along with a subtly encroaching electronic backing that helps the track into its effectively nightmarish wandering - perhaps a little too long at five and a half minutes, here. Yet it fits well into the tracklisting before the more vocal-oriented Silent Twin, a relatively minimalist piece with acoustic strums and distant, hovering buzzing riffs implying a future threat, and throughout the album The Amenta do well in balancing all these disparate elements to their sound. Psoriastatis brings the riffs and aggression back immediately thereafter, for example, and the more vibrant mixture of styles on Parasight Lost with plenty of death metal-influenced chugging works far better overall than the slightly dragging mood pieces such as Twined Towers and Wonderlost. The former being eight minutes and the latter being two minutes long should be a hint that more needs to be done in that regard...

Yet the album really needs both light and dark to succeed, and it's instructive that there are no real bad pieces here. Anything criticised in the above paragraph still is more than effective when given patient ears, and the album's pacing means that overall it's quite well balanced between atmospheric meandering and more immediate aggression. Albums from The Amenta are difficult to score as they're not obvious examples of pure molten musical genius until quite a few listens in. But they definitely are interesting and fairly unique in the greater metalsphere, even before you consider the lack of progression in the industrial influenced-realm for all its promise. A very specific type of metalhead will definitely find much appeal from The Amenta's discography, and Revelator is no different.