Black metal is often defined by that buzzing drone. Usually, for bands like Norway's much-imitated Darkthrone, that buzz sounds like iron clattering in some foul pit, broadcast to you over a broken radio connection. It's the noise of satanic mills, in other words; the grinding of war machines being hauled by the orcs of Saruman. But for Botanist the buzz is higher, clearer, more crystalline, less like orcs than like feral elves or swarms of great gleaming bees. The dulcimer and the drums fuse into a single percussive blur—a ringing timbre that's a kind of spiky, twisted mirror image of shoegaze's ecstasy.

Like black metal and folk, black metal and shoegaze have affinities ... affinities that Botanist's approach makes unusually clear. Donovan's gentle whimsy or My Bloody Valentine's high-volume transcendence—there's an otherworldliness in both of those, a desire for magic that's the emotional core of their music. Whether you're wearing your love like heaven with Donovan or blown a wish with My Bloody Valentine, you're moving into a clearer, more translucent world, where flesh and death dissolve into a fey, shimmering joy.

That feyness is in Botanist too. It's just that the joy that rises up has been resolutely sundered from its last human link, so you end up celebrating not the release from the body and the mundane, but the extermination of both. On "Mandrake Legion," the cascading dulcimer starts to approximate a choral voice. There's almost an echo of Enya or Vangelis there—a gentle breeze of New Age uplift whispering about "Mankind's ashes" and "Wailing horror." Sail away, sail away, and Orinoco flow will strip the flesh from your bones.

The brilliance of Botanist, then, is that he takes all these things that are not metal—gentle British folk, shoegaze, New Age—and shows you that they are, in fact, more metal than metal. The dreams of obliterating force or of rotted bodies returned from the dead—Cannibal Corpse and Emperor and Gallhammer—are all just more human byproducts. Fearing them is just honoring our own stain: putting our own meat on a hook and gibbering before it. If you really want the true unflinching coldness of anti-life, Botanist says, you need to stop and smell the flowers.

The last track on the album, "Rhycholaelia Glauca" is a description of the title orchid, laden with technical botanical terminology and set to a slow, dissonant processional, as if the plant has come in glory to take its crown. "Oblong pseudobulbs fusiform / Mountainous epiphyte / On cork bark grows / Oblong pseudobulbs fusiform," Otrebor gags while the dulcimer rings. "Aromatic sweetness / fill the air." It sounds like he's celebrating his own asphyxiation. For Botanist a better world, a more joyful world, a world of a new age, is one in which humans have gone back to the mulch that spawned them. To care for the world is to loathe the parasites that crawl upon it. Botanist hates more purely because he loves—which is why his metal that seems like many things that are not metal often sounds like the most uncompromising metal of all.