In 2008 the two-piece Norwegian collective known as Keldian released their opus Journey of Souls, and entered a period of radio silence. Soon rumors were swirling online – mostly about Justin Bieber’s love life, but also about Keldian’s future. Was the band done? Or was a third album getting ready to emerge?

But now Outbound is out, and I can see that the truth was neither of these things. The band isn’t done. And Outbound doesn’t just emerge, it comes at you in front of 180 tons of burning rocket fuel. Holy shit, this album kills! Maybe the best power metal release I’ve heard all year!

“Burn the Sky” fades in with baleful electronic drone, and then launches into an agitated uptempo thrasher with an huge-sounding chorus. I actually looked up the meaning of the lyrics and I wish I hadn’t – something trite and silly about American foreign policy. Oh well. “Earthblood” is more sedate, featuring acoustic guitars and female vocals, but the largeness and sense of grandeur remains.

Then there’s “Kepler and 100,000 Stars”, which switches between a Scorpions-like riff and fast bruising speed metal sections. “Never Existed” and “A Place Above the Air” are huge anthemic stadium-fillers, which is ironic since Keldian never plays live at all, let alone in a stadium. “The Silfen Paths” is lengthy and progressive, seeming to channel Pink Floyd more than Iron Maiden and Helloween, with a spacey bridge that serves as a reminder of Keldian’s origins as an ambient rock band.

But the band has saved the best for last. “FTL” is probably the greatest thing yet to bear the Keldian name. It does not have a boring moment from start to finish – nearly eight minutes of Mach 5 velocity with the band beating on you with their superior songwriting skill. There’s a brief quiet interlude in the middle, featuring JFK’s iconic moon landing speech and a soft reprise of the chorus. The final words uttered in this song seem to answer and challenge the chorus of “Burn the Sky”, adding a sense of closure to Outbound.

There’s nothing to say about Outbound except that my expectations were high and yet were totally surpassed. The band just kicks it up a notch all around – better singing and performing, a larger guitar presence, more organic production, and best of all…it’s really an album!

Keldian’s first two albums listened like collections of songs. This might seem like a strange complaint, since that’s the definition of what an album is. But there’s a difference between ten songs assembled without rhyme or reason, like bedraggled survivors plucked out of the water by a lifeboat, and ten songs working in unity for a common purpose, like a rowing crew. Outbound is the second kind of album. The sum is way better than the parts – and the parts are already amazing.

Crossing to Kill is a true crime book about the life and (t/cr)imes of Abdul Latif Sharif, a chemist who fled the US to Mexico to avoid deportation, and then apparently became a prolific rapist and killer of Ciudad Juarez’s working class women.

Sharif was arrested (leaving an embarrassingly long body trail)…but the rapes and murders of young women went right on happening. The clouds were gone, but the rain continued. Was Sharif bribing local gangs to commit crimes on his behalf, to make it seem like they’d arrested the wrong man? Or is Sharif part of a Clockwork Orange-esque change in Mexico, with Hispanic macho culture morphing into something much sicker?

This book offers analysis and speculation on the causes of the Ciudad Juarez murders. Whitechapel’s prose is very efficient – and this might be Crossing to Kill‘s Achilles Heel. After about forty pages he has recapped the murder spree up to date, and suddenly there seems little left to talk about. Much of the book is filled with topics of general interest to Whitechapel – soon we’re reading asides about the body types of Roman emperors, and a Catholic writer’s mistranslation of a word in Ecclesiastes. Crossing to Kill takes you far away from Mexico, and reads almost as a continuation of his earlier book Intense Device in some parts.

Crossing to Kill is probably better read as a book on crime and psychology than a specific book about Sharif’s crimes. Answers are few, and vague. Perhaps that’s the point, that all we have are guesses. But why read a book when there’s nothing waiting at the end except “I don’t know”? The official police reports will get you to the same place much faster.

Occasionally Whitechapel makes an incredible through-the-scope sniper shot of analysis, and sometimes he draws together unrelated subjects into an unexpected but persuasive whole. Other times – as when he speculates that Sharif could have been on steroids, based on some of his buddies being into Arnold Schwarzenegger movies – you get the sense of too little butter being spread across too much bread.

But there’s creepy and evocative ideas, such as when the murders are compared with an electron microscope, where small cells must be destroyed so that they can be analysed. The comparison with the young women of Ciudad Juarez is unmissable. Young women who would otherwise have lived their lives and have been forgotten are now receiving publicity, memorials, and prayers. They are being used as rallying points for feminists and morality campaigners and social justice groups. Indeed, they have unintentionally achieved kind of immortality. All they needed to do was die horribly.

It’s readable and far from dull, but I think Simon Whitechapel was the wrong person to write this book. This subject does not lend itself to scholarly analysis and armchair detective work. Crossing to Kill should have been written by a Mexican policia with twenty years of dirt under his fingernails.

If my head is a hotel, this book is a guest that stayed overnight, and left its wallet behind. It’s a tiny volume that can be read in about half an hour, but when you’re done, you’re left with a maddening sense of being entangled in unfinished business.

It’s about a group of metaphysically-minded mountaineers who, noting that mountains so often appear in metaphors, myths, and thought experiments, believe that there is an actual “Mount Analogue” somewhere on the globe…a literal metaphor, paradoxical though that sounds. They set out on a journey to find this hypothetical mountain, and in a far off non-Euclidean land, they succeed.

The book ends with them beginning to climb the mountain’s slope. The author died before he could finish the book, leaving the reader forever stranded at the foothills of what seems like an epiphany. If you want a comparison, this book reminds me of the third part of Gulliver’s Travels, the part few remember yet is in some ways the most thoughtful section of the book. It’s not really action-driven, and although it contains lots of interesting spectacles, it’s implicitly concerned with what’s happening inside the onlooker’s head.

For a book with its head in the clouds, Mount Analogue’s characters are often preoccupied with practical matters, such as bartering for supplies in foreign countries, and setting up outposts in case the quest takes longer than expected. Some of the mountaineers forsake their quest and return home – an enjoyable touch. Where’s the excitement in climbing a mountain if just anyone can do it?

But it’s also fantastic, involving humans made of negative space, and “peradams”: strange gemstones that can only be found by people truly in need of them. Again the Gulliver’s Travels comparisons come out, because he does not let the main thrust of the story distract him from interesting philosophical and moral asides. If he’d left these out, he might have successfully completed the book before his death. But it might also have been a poorer book, a less stimulating book.

Daumal’s wit and writing might be knee-slappingly Gallic (“A knife is neither true nor false, but anyone impaled on its blade is in error.”), but I think Mount Analogue also of course the “Time between Times” marking the demarcations of night and dawn. What’s a mountain except the space between heaven and earth? Or in this story’s case, the space between reality and metaphor?

I am interested to learn where Daumal was going with all this. Due to his death, I will never know. Mount Analogue is a rare thing – a great book that I’m not sure that you should read.