Norway’s avant-garde Black Metal duo EMANCER deliver the open-minded extreme music fan their fourth full-length, which turns out to be a fascinating piece of work for people who enjoy bands experimenting with and breaking the rather strict stylistic boundaries of Black Metal. From programmed drums, spacy, spheric keyboard sounds, clean sung passages to even embedding the melody from a classic C64-computer game ("Last Ninja 2") in one of the songs EMANCER show that they either have the guts to dare taking some musical risks or that they are simply not of the best mental health, of course that’s a matter of opinion… The rather traditional Black Metal elements like cold sounding guitars, hateful, grim and gloomy vocals are very much present as well and prevent the band from going into a funny computer-game-meets-Black-Metal direction, "The Menace Within" is a dark and atmospheric album with some very unique ideas that fortunately never go too far, but culminate in actually pretty memorable songs. Along with the interesting lyrics and the first-class production EMANCER’s variant of individualistic, inventive, catchy and contemporary Black Metal should be interesting for everyone into the newer Moonfog-releases, ARCTURUS or FLEURETY. So, give it try! Band website: www.emanceronline.com Label website: www.goldenlakeprods.co.uk