I'm always eager to listen to music proclaiming itself to be avant-garde, as although most of the time it's just a bunch of stoned musicians making rubbish noise, sometimes something beautiful and genre-defining will emerge. Not in the case of Khlyst's debut release though, which is mostly awful. This album is a near fifty-fifty mix of freestyle black metal drone and tedious ambience, and just to further the band's obvious disdain for its own music, the tracks are merely numbered rather than named. Guitarist James Plotkin does nothing to impress here in the drone sections, sounding like he's tuning up all the time and playing the exact same slow riff behind ...  Read the complete review