Vehemency The grounds of depressive black metal are crowded with a plethora of bedroom projects with cheap drum machines pinging in the background, but with Inhuman Hate’s third full-length Twilight of a Lost Soul my ears are safe from that. Inhuman Hate has avoided all the clumsiness and offers a rather impressive piece of melancholic, doom-influenced black metal with heavy sound.

Indeed, first to notice is the bassy, professional sound full of downtuned riffs. The 16-minute beginning track sets the blueprint for the rest of the murky album with its variaton from slow, brooding doom metal sections to more black metalish attacks of tremolo. Forgotten Tomb comes to my mind throughout the whole album, and I would say - though some might disagree - that there’s occasionally even a flavour of Agalloch in the calmest, less-distorted sections. The third track seems somewhat unnecessary, at least as a stretched 6-minute piece, because it’s basically an ambient track with some screams on top. It’s a nice idea, but an abridged version would have worked better.

Whereas the whole album is performed pretty admirably, it still lacks a tad of own identity. The atmosphere is there, the production works, I dig the vocalist’s masculine growling (and all the clean vocals on the fourth track), the interplay between instruments is commendable and so forth, but I can’t help feeling that this has been done before. In that sense, Inhuman Hate swims in a bit too safe waters, being a grey album amidst all the other grey albums - but fortunately somewhat above the average, nonetheless. Twilight of a Lost Soul is worthy of recommendation to fans of all the darkest black/doom metal hybrids.