Last Plane to Jakarta would like to register its shock at how nobody, and we do mean "pretty much nobody," seems to have much to say about Bloody Panda's Pheromone, due 4/24 from Level Plane. Hype Machine finds nothing; Clusty's blog search (which is the best thing going right now, by the way, despite some load times that're occasionally PS1-reminiscent) gives up 61 hits, most of them old. Pheromone is four songs and forty minutes long, and it reminds me of the rainy day on which I bought Nico's "My Heart Is Empty" 12" approximately one million years ago. I played it at the wrong speed, by accident; I was actually kind of disappointed when the vocals kicked in, 'cause I'd thought it was just this grand cavernous cathedral of dirge. Which it was, in its own way. Just not in the way I'd thought.

Pheromone is that Nico record as it existed for me in a brief window of not-knowing: enormous and slow, removed from the world, and really not as deserving of the Khanate comparisons that seem to be the jumping-off point for most people. The mood here, its deep-toned frigid blacklit shimmer, is about as far from the seething white-hot burn of Khanate as the Anonymous 4 is from Joy Division. I've been listening to it for about a month, and it warrants the word "stunning" in a way that not much music does: not in the sense of "I was quite surprised by just how much I liked it," or "it announces its excellent brashly and loudly," but rather in the sense of "somebody has hit me in the head with a great big rock and I am not sure how long I've been out cold." There's something religious about this music; it's somewhere between an incantation trying to conjure up spirits and a mourning song meants to keep them quietly at rest. When the tempo picks up, as at the end of the third track, "Fever," it's difficult for me not to feel like the world is about to end. It's got that nuclear fog narcotic stupor walk-in deep-freeze vibe. Maybe metal bands are immune to blog buzz? I can't imagine it, but that a band this great - a Brooklyn band this great, no less - are managing to sustain semi-invisibility in this day and age is both frustrating (since they're aweomse) and somewhat gratifying (since invisibility trumps both flying and super-strength, as any right-thinking eight-year-old knows).

It's been such an insanely great year for metal so far that I haven't said much, both because I might jinx it and because it's hard to know where to start. But at this point it doesn't matter if I wield the most fearsome jinx in the universe, because there's already such an embarassment of great 2007 metal that it doesn't even matter if everybody else lays eggs for the rest of the year.

The one release which you must check out, even if the stuff only interests you casually, is Laethora's March of the Parasite. Laethora is from Sweden and they play death metal, which is like saying "they're from Iowa and they eat pork," but they balance their audible love for the old-school with a few novel twists. First, there's a little whiff of early Katatonia in their melodic interludes (also known as "the slow parts"). Second, they're not above the occasional passing doom riff - not doom in the Southern Lord dick-measuring-contest sense*, but in the Sabbath/Purple/Pentagram sense. This puts them in a weird spot, since doom riffs are like augmented blues riffs, and the most death metal is openly antagonistic toward blues structures. Baroque, not blues - that's the death metal pedigree. But Laethora dooms it up when they feel like it, and they double-kick 'til they get sick of it, and they even drop in little gothy/NIN intros 'n' outros when the mood suits them (check "The Scum of Us All" for pretty much all of these tendencies in play at once). What's more, the band, or their producer at least, has enough sense to keep the guitars sounding like guitars instead of overprocessed blurs; metalcore guitars have all but obliterated actual guitar tone from the scene, and it's nice to actually hear a dirty pickslide or a proper "Eruption"-squeal rearing its head like the alien outta that one guy's chest. Add to all that some absolutely crushing riffs an audible love of the proper HxCx - chantable chorus! fist-pump cues! dude screamin' "you fucking bastards!" real high! - and you have a record that has captivated and encouraged me for over a month now. Their pedigree, if it matters to you, includes members of Dark Tranquility, which ought to seal the deal for anybody who's still got his finger on the trigger.

*all respect to Southern Lord, obviously, we are not haters, but anybody who says he doesn't know what I mean is lying

I don't know that I'd call Bloody Panda's Pheromone "demanding," just because I am a little suspicious of what that word means when it's deployed in a music-crit context: does it or does it not mean "you're not going to enjoy this"? Which would be a lie in the present case: few experiences are more immediately rewarding than getting to the last third of Pheromone, and reaching the point at which its vocabulary becomes mine. There's a period of resistance through the first track, kind of like the first five or ten minutes of a lot of free jazz shows, where (say) Vandermark blows staccato placekeeper notes through his mouthpiece in order to find the zone. It's both a lull-you-in strategy and an admission that the process is necessary on either side of the fourth wall. By the end of Pheromone I feel as if I've been floating in the ocean, the tide going out at the same time as the storm-clouds were gathering. Its climax, which occurs over a mournful eight minutes or so, is like the baby-carriage in Battleship Potemkin running on a slo-mo loop.

So I start the album over. What else am I to do? And then the first song (I suspect that song titles are something of a formality with Bloody Panda, but for the record, the first song here is called "Untitled") reveals itself a little more: the quieter section around the three-minute mark rises airily above the din, and the clean entrance of the bass and some wind-y instrument midway through seem more momentous.

There are all kinds of rote catalogue descriptions for a record like this: "repays repeated listening," "a grower," and a variety of synonyms for "complex." I don't know about all that; it seems like there's a very particular thing at work on Pheromone, a sort of secret style of prayer. "Complex" need not mean "unduly eggheaded." Here, let it mean "bigger than it looks at first." Do look as closely as you can.