Darkthrone — Circle The Wagons

180g / Black Vinyl / Made in Germany / Darkthrone foretold the presaging rise of a world-spanning black-crust movement by a few years, but they might have guessed that the pair would conduct an immediate about-face into more familiarly metallic terrain just as soon as that movement became so pervasively mainstream. This about-face is pretty much (but not entirely) the band's directive on 2010's tellingly named Circle the Wagons, which maintains certain unerring Darkthrone traditions (deliberately coarse production standards, a middle-school-notebook-quality cover drawing) along with new songs, such as "I Am the Graves of the ‘80s" and "Eyes Burst at Dawn," that resurrect the trusty and, yes, "crusty" vintage blackened thrash (Venom, Vulcano, etc.) that inspired the group to begin with. Other cuts, namely the implausibly infectious "Running for Borders," "Black Mountain Totem," and, to a lesser degree, the quickly decaying "Stylized Corpse" traverse a wide range of riffs, tempos, and even melodies with the questing spirit of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, all the while never losing sight of that trve kvlt aesthetic. - Eduardo Rivadavia