With 2010’s career-defining Blackjazz, Norwegian band Shining (not to be confused with the Swedish depressive black metal outfit of the same name) held back from polishing the roughness that was always present around its sonic edges. Despite moving away from its origins as an acoustic jazz ensemble and into the realm of extreme metal over the latter part of the ‘00s, even when it went all- out crazy, there was a surprising restraint on the part of the musicians. Take the groove-riff saxo- phone of “The Red Room”, one of the highlights from 2007’s excellent Grindstone; on the album version, it sounds solid enough, but in its live iteration—captured with magnetic intensity on 2012’s Live Blackjazz—it becomes something else entirely.