I got into Hood through their most recent record, Outside Closer, which I still consider to be the better of the two. This is their more celebrated record, although its follow-up has clearly the stronger selection of songs in my opinion. This is a bleak, uncompromising album. Hood have mastered the sound of wintery desolation like no-one else, and with song titles like 'Lines Low to Frozen Ground' and 'The Winter Hit Hard', it doesn't come as much as a surprise. Anticon rappers Why? and Doesone make discreet but valuable contributions, their trademark nasal mutterings providing brief relief to Hood's sometimes dirge-like Indie. In fact, the juxtaposition works so well you are left wanting more, but that is usually a good thing. Opener 'They Removed All Trace That Anything Had Ever Happened Here' is a perfect example of this - building steadily from inauspicious electronica into a tense, melancholic indie soundscape, a yabbbering looped rap from Doesone creeps in towards the end to augment the perfectly realised production. Similarly 'You Show No Emotion At All' and 'When Branches Bare' literally creak and crack and shiver with their wintery atmospherics, Doesone making a star turn at the end of the latter with the line: 'We spit in the pond to give the fish something to prey to'. A sublime moment. 'Enemy of Time' is a sobre ballard while 'The Winter Hit Hard' is cavernous dub with shards of icy tension crashing through the speakers - and is probably a bit like freezing to death. 'My Brittle Youth' is the closest thing on the album resembling a single, with some nice guitar and up-front-and-personal lyricism, and fades out to a monstrous industrial meltdown that threatens but never quite engulfs the listener. 'This Is What We Do To Sell Out(S)' begins with ear-piercing glitch in the manner of Autechre before the gentlest of voices and guitar breeze in like a lullabye. Things thaw out a little after this point, but its still a striking album, even if you are rarely in the mood to listen to it. If you like this, you may also like the funereal Anticon collaboration with The Notwist, 13 & God - now that is heavy-going.