Five years on from their Osmose-released debut, Hanc Aciem Sola Retundit Virtus (The Algolagnia Divine), FIDES INVERSA strike with their second album, Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans. In those five years, the Italian band have been honing their onstage assault all across the stages of Europe, their rituals becoming real celebrations of zealotry. That experience surely shows across the bold, finessed canvas of Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, where "black metal" is rendered not as a definition but as an alternately life-giving/life-destroying force. Classicist yet paying no lip service to tradition, FIDES INVERSA invested their very souls in the creation of this second opus: exhaustive spiritual research and a total immersion inside the darkest manifestations of what the German theologist Rudolf Otto called "the numinous." The divine, in its most terrifying forms, takes life from chaotic sounds and revealed words whose intent is to represent the mystic terror and the undefeatable fascination of Death, the human nullification, in favor of a complete prostration to the One whose light is spread out of the darkest vacuum. Ascend and descend with FIDES INVERSA's Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans...