The Skull Defekts have done it again, wielding their instruments like maces.

If the first song on the album weren't so patterned, one might think that their CD player was broken. Trading between skips, glitches, and various drones-cut-short, the hidden structures of "Sex Fracture" etch themselves into your eardrums.

"Carved in Bones" calms down a little, throbbing instead of breaking. The soundtrack of a hospital-like factory that produces crimes against nature, Henrik Rylander, Jean-Louis Huhta, and Joachim Nordwall (this album's cast) drag you down the hallways whether you want to go or not. But as with most horror movie, actually seeing the source of the fear takes all the fright out of t, and you end up seduced by the unique, if twisted, logic of the landscape.

"Breathing Your Face" seems like the culmination of the manufacturing in "Carved in Bones": a room full of clattering monstrositites. Here the creators' peculiar moterly tenderness shows, keeping every scattered note herded together by the drone of an inventor's pride. Even in the brief moments when insanity threathens to take over, the clatters are slowly reigned in again and brought back into their perverse order. If the song contiued this frenetically for the full 9 minutes and 30 seconds, it might get tiring, but it slowly exhausts itself instead, becoming more of a lullaby for robots.

The last song, "Six Six for Eyes", resembles "Carved in Bones" but with the sinister level ramped up. If this is the same factory of horrors, it's been emptied of life through a catastrophe caused by something born there. The hallways are dark, lit only by the intermittent red glow of emergency lighting that is timed to an alarm. The previous seduction of possibilities is gone, replaced by their hauntng absences. If those creatures had souls, do their spirits remain? But what harm can a spirit truly do, having no flesh and blood, no will over the material world itself? The greatest damage comes in what fills that void, a soul-sucking, head-splitting terror of the unknown. 9/10 -- Eden Hemming Rose (5 September, 2007)