It’s amazing how much I Shalt Become has evolved over the years. Their debut album Wanderings remains a masterpiece of depression and certainly a classic of US black metal. Poison, the band’s latest release, is something of an experiment for lone member S. Holliman, and musically the album is such a departure from the I Shalt Become’s core depressive sound that it doesn’t even sound like the same band. Moving away from the typical DSBM sound seems like a good direction for the band, but few fans will be prepared for what Poison actually has to offer.

The moaning guitars and fuzzed-out production of past releases has been almost completely scrapped in favor of keyboards and other orchestral elements, with only the occasional background growls linking the album to I Shalt Become’s black metal past. The keyboard melodies and arrangements still carry a strong sense of despair, and in fact a few tracks end up being pretty frightening, but the end result is nowhere near as suffocating and bleak as the band’s early albums were. In fact, the orchestral elements and minimal percussion brings I Shalt Become’s sound fairly close to that of Poland’s Hellveto, although it’s not quite as fine-tuned.

Perhaps even more interesting than the musical changes is the apparent subject matter of the album. The track ‘Black Swan Events’ presumably refers to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book on the importance of impactful, highly improbable events (a book which, incidentally, I hated), something that I certainly never expected to see on a black metal album. With ‘Leaving Watership Down’, I Shalt Become is the second band, after Fall of Efrafa, that I’ve come across recently to have taken inspiration from Richard Adams’s excellent novel. Finally, ‘Harlow’s Vertical Chamber Apparatus’ refers to an immensely disturbing and cruel set of animal experiments performed in the 70’s. ‘Pit Of Despair’, Harlow’s preferred name for the apparatus, probably would’ve provided a much better song title, but I guess maybe Holliman is trying to educate his listeners. Mission accomplished.

I’m kind of on the fence about I Shalt Become’s complete shift in approach and its effectiveness, but Poison is certainly one of the year’s most innovative and controversial releases. I’ve been hoping that the band one someday come out with something that equaled the catatonic bleakness of Wanderings’s opener ‘Fragments’, and now it’s clear that that’s probably not ever going to happen, but I Shalt Become’s new direction may prove to yield some pretty interesting stuff in the future as well, so that’s a trade-off I can live with. But in the meantime, I think I’ll go listen to ‘Fragments’ a few more times.

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