Inversum (Neurot) is a spectre; a whispering guide to internal torment. It prepares the scenario, distracts and occupies you before leaving you to the horrors of your own mind. Where this journey goes is of your own making, the suggestion and probing of the menacing soundtrack is merely the catalyst.

Dark Buddha Rising‘s fifth album, and the opening of their “Third Cycle”, consists of two sprawling twenty plus minute tracks, ‘E S O’ and ‘E X O’, that serve as an opportunity for mental exploration; the two extended fields facilitating a voyage of the mind. The images, and the level of meditation, allowed into the opportunity their soundscape provides will be specific to each listener, but this dark, ominous procession of building tension brings with it the prospect to submerge into their world.

Each track offers a similar pattern, which dynamically allows this to work as a cyclical journey, endlessly concluding in nightmarish cacophony. The initiation is gradual, the build-up menacing, as minutes of cloud gather in the mind, feedback subliminal and ever present, swelling and pitching, before doomy guitars hew a crossroads into the path, and slow, heavy riffs serve as an amphidromic point, an epicentre for the trance of repetition. Haunted, withdrawn vocals filter in and out, sometimes terrified, sometimes terrifying, at other moments softer, more enticing, before the intensity shifts. The tension pulls tighter and, from being in control of the vision, the host starts to loosen our restraints, juddering us from one unreality of our own making to an ordeal shaped by the blackened minds of others, as tortured denouements flail and rasp at the edges of our consciousness. Yet there is no slaying of the demon, bloodlust is left unsated, satisfaction rent from us, due to a sudden curtailing of proceedings, as the cycle begins its brooding again, sans a feeling of closure.

Dark Buddha Rising promote and celebrate the “Black Arts of Psychedelia”, but even those of us unaltered of state can achieve absorption in their ritualistic art. At times brooding, always oppressive, the encapsulating journey of Inversum requires immersion. Take its hand, and it will lead you to unsettling plains.

7.5/10

STEVE TOVEY