And so the last release on the Type label, the relatively melodic and summery self-titled album by City Center, proves to have been no more than a twinkle-toed dummy. They have shimmied quickly back to the dark side, finding spaces occupied by team members Svarte Greiner and Xela, piercing my defences with a couple of blistering runs down the flank from William Fowler Collins and On. Damnit, how long till the football season starts, I’m going to run out of metaphors if I have to keep this up much longer.

Look at the cover of William Fowler Collins’s Perdition Hill Radio. You can tell that this is going to be dark. And so it proves to be, some deep black metal industrial ambience. Hailing from deepest and darkest New Mexico (well, he probably doesn’t, but if I said he lived in a nice flat in Albuquerque, just round the corner from the supermarket, with a couple of cats, your illusions would be shattered), William Fowler Collins has tuned his antenna to pick up the ghostliest of signals. If you look through the surface static into this deep well of noise, you can pick out dusty flecks of Americana, which briefly rise up before subsumed once more into the depths – and it is the depth of the record which, in case you hadn’t gathered, most impresses, perfectly captured from the rumbling low end to that crackling top. At its most clanking-metal or vocal-drone nightmarish (that will be “Slow Motion Prayer Circle“), I feel that Collins must have accidentally retuned his radio to Hades FM. Unsettling and decidedly unsummery stuff.

Look at the cover of On’s Your Naked Ghost Comes Back At Night. You can tell that this is going to be dark. Can’t you? Oh well. Perhaps if I told you that before release this record was entirely remixed by none other than Deathprod, you’d start to get the picture. Despite the members of On being Sylvain Chauveau and Pan American’s Steven Hess, Type have billed this as being, in a sense, “the lost Deathprod album”, and you can see why. This is a magnificent, glowering beast of a record which could happily slip itself almost unnoticed into that all-black box set. Helge Sten smears Chauveau’s guitar into a blur of reverb, and turns Hess’s percussion into a dead man’s footsteps (on a track called, “Erotique”, no less). His treatment of “Too Many Demons Still Haunt This Land” is so far from the source material that it is like listening to the end of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, in which Lucier’s voice is so eroded that it is no more than a head-rattling ambient buzz. I was impressed enough by Perdition Hill Radio, but this devilish new On album blows that into a horned helmet.

As the whistle blows to signal the end of an enthralling first half of 2009, Type are threatening to overrrun the opposition. Perdition Hill Radio is broadcasting now; Your Naked Ghost Comes Back on the 20th July.