If ever there were an album title that gave the game away, then the 2007 debut from this now-defunct Australian depressive black metal duo Austere would take the prize, the cake, the plate, the table, and the whole damned marquee – dripping in blood from the wrists of a million suicidal loons, obviously – were such a presentation ever to take place, of course. But the recently re-released Withering Illusions And Desolation (Wintereich Productions) is not about celebration. This is about despair, about futility, about the utter hopelessness of existence and our feeble failure to either discover or impose meaning on the foolish acts that constitute the absurdity that is our waking life.Continue reading →