One of a cluster of one-man black metal practitioners - alongside Leviathan, Draugar, Crebain and Nortt - as well as one of the most uncompromising figures in the USBM underground for the better part of a decade, Xasthur mastermind Malefic has seen his profile rise significantly over the past year, owed in large part to his contributions to Sunn 0)))'s Black One as well as guest appearances during their incendiary live performances. While there's no denying that he shares a certain doomed aesthetic with the Grimm Robed ones, his output as Xasthur relies less on ceremonial pretense than it does on cold, bleak atmospherics and the claustrophobic rage that underpins much of the violence inherent in our modern age.

After tasting the fruits of critical and (relative) commercial success, it would have been easy for Malefic to draft in Anderson and O'Malley and reimagine the cinematic dirge of Black One in order to suit his own purposes. Instead, he's cast all that aside and delivered Subliminal Genocide, an album forged from the depths of hopeless damnation, as well as the ascendant morbid grandeur that serves as its epilogue. "The Prison of Mirrors" is borne of icy desolation, smears of infinitely processed guitars stretching out over a vast aural wasteland, blast-beats howling like war wolves against the backdrop of a burning church and Xasthur’s dronevil howl. A veil of Burzmic fuzz envelops “Pyramid of Skulls” like a burial shroud, Malefic’s brooding scream fighting to emerge beneath wave after wave of pummeling drums and dopesick dirge. The whole epic plays out like a slow-motion black mass, with Malefic serving as its high priest, cloaked in black sackcloth and brandishing the most unwieldy of crosses.

Hard as it may be to fathom, beneath the endless wash of ultra-distorted guitar, relentless pulse and frostbite-inducing keyboards, there is an ethereal beauty that runs deep through the heart of Subliminal Genocide that belies its blackened facade. Those with the wherewithal to stare Malefic dead in the eye for this seventy-minute journey will undoubtedly walk away believing that his killer instinct is, in fact, forged from the heart of a poet and the hands of a master craftsman. This is black metal from the surface of the sun-blissed out and buried, ceremonial and desolate and built of equal parts damnation and redemption. – Jason Jackowiak (2006, The Daily Copper)