Honored sonic surrealists Arcturus lay down before you their latest work, "The Sham Mirrors." In a time when the terms "avant-garde" and "progressive" are thrown around too loosely in the metal lexicon, "The Sham Mirrors" arrives to defy such easy tags. It explodes like a supernova throughout its 43-minute duration; it lays another mighty brick in the tower these explorers have been building since 1991... The new album remains metal at its core while dragging the genre through endless tunnels of light, color and sound that it has never before seen. The Trickster Garm showcases his previously-unexplored falsetto range; Hellhammer offers a percussive display that teeters between the organic and the inhuman; Sverd's keys pepper the spaces with masterful confidence. In a perfect world (far from the one we inhabit), lead-off track "Kinetic" would be a global hit single. Six songs later, the album closes with the cosmic 10-and-a-half minute opus, "For to End Yet Again," itself alone worthy of a lifetime of inspection. Note for note, song for song, "The Sham Mirrors" is likely Arcturus's grand achievement, pulling together various facets of their previous releases and molding it into a bold new shape.