"Stardog" keeps mining the entrenched groove for all it's worth, at times coming off like a drunken Ministry if Al Jourgensen forgot to turn on the drum machine. The press release describes this as "mastodontic [sic] song frameworks" and frankly I don't have any more charming way of putting it than that. Unremittingly leaden and atavistic -- in a good way, of course -- _Idolum_ strips it all down to an almost aboriginal state of trance... your body's moving, but the mind is otherwise engaged in back-of-the-eyelid flights of psychotropic fantasy.

According the record label, "idolum" is a Latin term referring to the dual concepts of "ghost" and "idea" transmitted concurrently, concentrically... whatever. Presumably all a vague and, yes, pretentious nod to the Platonic outlook that phenomena beheld by the senses is a mere imperfect representation of some idealized Form in the mind of God. _Idolum_, the album, makes no direct overtures to aural divinity, but easily transcends the band's previous stabs at immortality.