This, as you may discern from the artwork and album title, is a very particular kind of black metal: somewhat like Void Meditation Cult, Cultes des Ghoules or Venus Star, it is bizarrely meditative in tone, thriving on slow-moving grooves and repetition, and comparable to stoner doom in its search for a trance-like state. Despite (I suppose because of) the simplicity of their music, Hic Iacet do this kind of thing really well, with lots of wallowing in ceremonial atmosphere, crudely minimalist riffs, nicely balanced against occasional bursts of more up-tempo black metal.

Tracks are dispersed between longer (7-10 minutes) and shorter ones (3-5 minute) ones. The latter tend to move a bit faster, with cudgelling riffs built around rudimentary but quite catchy guitar patterns, closer in spirit to the likes of Cultes des Ghoules than anything more blasting and Nordic. The longer ones can obviously stretch out a bit more, like the opening title track with its meandering and unfocused, but increasingly thunderous, sequence of down-tempo hooks (accentuated at one point by weird Jim Morrison-esque Eastern guitar twanging), or the brooding Into the Bowels of the Absolute. The latter is really enhanced by the eerie percussion that surfaces midway through before bubbling away again. In fact, the occult atmospherics are a recurrent highlight across the Cosmic Trance…- the invocatory nasal chanting that opens Mahakala, for instance; it renders the album comparable in tone to a black metal kindred spirit to Necros Christos.

Anyway, this is worthwhile. It locates quite a fertile little niche, playing on the potential middle ground between black metal and more stoner-influenced ideas in a way that not many other projects do. It is a simple and crude album, in many ways, but it also has a lot of hooks and a lot of atmosphere.