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A fantastic new album from the crushing industrial prog ensemble led by bassist James Hugget that takes their punishing robo-Zeuhl workouts one step further into pure awesomeness with the addition of singer Elaine di Falco. The band's last album The Dematerialized Passenger was a big hit here at C-Blast two years ago when it came out, and that disc has remained one of my favorite slabs of sludge/prog/free jazz heaviosity ever since. The group's membership spans the Atlantic with American musician James Huggett (bass guitar, guitar, electronics and drum programming) and UK musicians Martin Archer (alto and soprano sax, bass clarinet, violin, electronics) and Mick Beck (bassoon) all returning from the last album, and joined by Myrrhia Resneck on baritone sax, Mike Ward on flute and bass flute and the aforementioned Ms. di Falco on vocals and piano. Combat Astronomy are a punishing fusion of complex Godflesh style drum machine rhythms and Magma influenced prog that plows through a dense storm of free jazz horns and uber cool noir-jazz sax lines that honk and squeal alongside the brutally heavy e-bass riffs rumbling and snaking around the mechanoid doom rhythms, those drum machine beats executed in severe, militaristic rhythms that move in strange time signatures. And like on the previous album, these complex arrangements move through a haze of electronic effects and heavy ambient drones, coating the tracks in a cold, textural aura.
The big difference between this new album and their last one is Elaine di Falco, a former member of the prog groups Caveman Shoestore and Thinking Plague whose smoky singing style brings a whole 'nother shade to the previously all-instrumental outfit. Her haunting voice adds elements of melody and intimacy that were almost totally absent from the cold, inhuman repetition and blazing jazzisms on The Dematerialized Passenger while acting as another contrasting instrument in juxtaposition with the other musicians, and moves from multi-tracked vocal harmonies to soft sultry crooning, swirling above the grinding rhythm section and clusters of sparring horns. I'm really hoping that she continues to work with the group of future recordings. Highly recommended and extremely cool jazz/prog heaviness for fans of both jazzcore bands like Painkiller, 16-17 and Last Exit and the mechanistic doom of Godflesh.

Track Samples:
Sample : COMBAT ASTRONOMY-Dreams No Longer Hesitate
Sample : Lightning In Her Eyes
Sample : Touch The Moon

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Originally released on the Pathological label run by Kevin Martin (The Bug, Ice, God, Techno Animal) in the 1990s, 16-17 and their album Gyatso was probably the closest in spirit to Martin's own band God - fierce, heavy jazz-core that wrapped the total energy and primal howl of free-jazz around a crushing industrial/rock backbone. These Swiss improv jazzcore legends were masters at creating tension between the free, chaotic voices of shrill, screeching saxophones and sliced n' diced samples, and the staccato drumming of Knut Remond and monstrous, circular basslines, which on Gyatso were supplied by Godflesh's G.C. Green. I recently listed the Savage Land double CD re-release of 16-17's crucial early albums from the 1980's that had been released through Early Recordings, and while those albums were amazing blats of extreme hardcore jazzpunk, this 1994 disc is the heaviest stuff that the band has ever done, with the thick, full production the band had always needed. Holy shit, is this intense. Each track generally revolves around a single central rhythmic grind made up of a crushing sludgy bassline and a brutal martial drumbeat, jagged and angular, which is then pounded into the ground through relentless hypnotic repetition while Alex Buess shoots fire out of his skull via sax and bass clarinet and guitarist Markus Kneubuhler splatters electronic motes and stabs of distorted guitar above it all. Kevin Martin himself engineered the album, and he even contributes some dub-style effects and echoes to the mix. Might just be the heaviest jazz I've ever heard, a pummeling, trance-inducing matchup between John Zorn's Painkiller and Godflesh and Brotzmann's Machine Gun Sessions . Totally crushing. The whole album batters you with track after track of sick, punishing hypno-jazzcore, and there are a couple of additional noise-soaked deconstructions/remixes that have been included at the end of the album to complete the assault. Digitally remastered by Weasel Walter from the Flying Luttenbachers.This crucial reissue is essential for anyone into extreme free-jazz and bands like Alboth, Last Exit, Painkiller, Flying Luttenbachers, etc., and comes with a thick booklet that contains detailed new liner notes by Jason Pettigrew (Alternative Press) that draw from interviews with the band that discuss the history of 16-17, and cool new artwork. Highly recommended.

Track Samples:
Sample : Attack-Impulse
Sample : Flamethrower
Sample : Intravenous

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In the great orbit that surrounds the bright burning creative nexus that is Neurosis, there have been a multitude of musical projects from the members that seem to reach out towards every possible corner of dark, underground sonics. Blood And Time, Tribes Of Neurot, Culper Ring, Harvestman, Red Sparowes, Battle Of Mice, and A Storm Of Light are all occasional projects or full-blown bands that members have branched out with, and out of all of these, A Storm Of Light is the heaviest, and the closest sonically to the massive tribal metal of Neurosis. This new band was formed by Josh Graham, the visual/video artist for Neurosis who has also worked with Battle Of Mice and Red Sparowes over the past few years (all of which are amazing bands, especially Battle Of Mice, whose debut album was one of my favorite albums of 2006 and contained an intensely personal soul excavation through the combined weight of metallic dirge, Julie Christmas' intoxicating vocals, and gripping ethereal rock), and he's joined by members of Tombs, Satanized, and most impressively, the mighty Vinnie Signorelli from Swans/Unsane/Foetus on drums. I'm a megafan of every band that Vinnie has been involved with, and it was his name that initially drew me to check out the debut from A Storm Of Light. I was a little surprised at first by how much this new band sounds like Neurosis themselves, all the way down to Graham's gravelly growl, lumbering minor-key riffs, and the brooding, apocalyptic dirges that drive most of the music on And We Wept The Black Ocean Within; in fact, you could put this on back to back with Neurosis' 2007 album Given To The Rising and stylistically, the two albums would flow together almost seamlessly. There are some special touches that A Storm Of Light apply to their take on this sound, like in "Vast And Endless" where the band lays down a crushing compressed Godflesh like rhythm that continues throughout the album. And the band creates dense layers of electronic noise and cinematic synthesizer ambience in each song that give this a spacier feel than the last Neurosis album. The songs are tied together by dark themes of oceanic destruction and drowning that fit the pressurized dirges, and several interludes appear in between the larger metallic tracks, brief flashes of ominous tidal drift and weeping piano melodies, swirling aquatic drones and symphonies of creaking ships that rumble in the darkness for an eternity. A companion piece to the Neurosis catalog, no doubt, but one with an almost orchestral feel that will fully satiate anyone jonesing for the next Neurosis album to appear.

Track Samples:
Sample : Black Ocean
Sample : Wast and Endless

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Also available as a beautiful heavyweight double LP gatefold, on limited edition colored vinyl!
In the great orbit that surrounds the bright burning creative nexus that is Neurosis, there have been a multitude of musical projects from the members that seem to reach out towards every possible corner of dark, underground sonics. Blood And Time, Tribes Of Neurot, Culper Ring, Harvestman, Red Sparowes, Battle Of Mice, and A Storm Of Light are all occasional projects or full-blown bands that members have branched out with, and out of all of these, A Storm Of Light is the heaviest, and the closest sonically to the massive tribal metal of Neurosis. This new band was formed by Josh Graham, the visual/video artist for Neurosis who has also worked with Battle Of Mice and Red Sparowes over the past few years (all of which are amazing bands, especially Battle Of Mice, whose debut album was one of my favorite albums of 2006 and contained an intensely personal soul excavation through the combined weight of metallic dirge, Julie Christmas' intoxicating vocals, and gripping ethereal rock), and he's joined by members of Tombs, Satanized, and most impressively, the mighty Vinnie Signorelli from Swans/Unsane/Foetus on drums. I'm a megafan of every band that Vinnie has been involved with, and it was his name that initially drew me to check out the debut from A Storm Of Light. I was a little surprised at first by how much this new band sounds like Neurosis themselves, all the way down to Graham's gravelly growl, lumbering minor-key riffs, and the brooding, apocalyptic dirges that drive most of the music on And We Wept The Black Ocean Within; in fact, you could put this on back to back with Neurosis' 2007 album Given To The Rising and stylistically, the two albums would flow together almost seamlessly. There are some special touches that A Storm Of Light apply to their take on this sound, like in "Vast And Endless" where the band lays down a crushing compressed Godflesh like rhythm that continues throughout the album. And the band creates dense layers of electronic noise and cinematic synthesizer ambience in each song that give this a spacier feel than the last Neurosis album. The songs are tied together by dark themes of oceanic destruction and drowning that fit the pressurized dirges, and several interludes appear in between the larger metallic tracks, brief flashes of ominous tidal drift and weeping piano melodies, swirling aquatic drones and symphonies of creaking ships that rumble in the darkness for an eternity. A companion piece to the Neurosis catalog, no doubt, but one with an almost orchestral feel that will fully satiate anyone jonesing for the next Neurosis album to appear.

Track Samples:
Sample : Black Ocean
Sample : Wast and Endless

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Digging even further back into the crates of esteemed stoner rock imprint Meteorcity, I've pulled out this self titled debut from Ohio cult doom faves Abdullah for re-investigation. Christ knows that back in 2000 when this album originally came out, we had more than enough mediocre sub-Sabbath knockoffs sucking up oxygen in the heavy underground rock scene, but Abdullah managed to stand out from the sea of faceless, boring Sab/Kyuss clones with a dark soulful sound that drew just as many comparisons to the Northwest grunge rock as it did to early American doom metal. This self-titled disc merged crushing Vitus/Obsessed style riffage with trippy melodies, tons of airy acoustic guitars, wah-soaked psych solos, and some passages of primo St. Vitus style crawl in songs like "Earth's Answer" and "Proverbs In Hell". A lot of people have compared singer Jeff Shirilla to Layne Staley from Alice In Chains, which I do hear in some of the dramatic choruses, but much of his deep, heartfelt singing actually reminds me of a younger, more polished Wino. Like Solace, Abdullah are peddlin' a more rocking, accessible brand of doom rock, but that's not to say that this isn't heavy stuff. The slow doomy riffs are just balanced with an equal amount of uptempo Sabbathian hooks and laid-back, stoned acoustic playing. There's some cool retro-crunch on this album; fans of The Obsessed and Goatsnake should give 'em a listen.

Track Samples:
Sample : Awakening the Colossus
Sample : Earth's Answer

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Vinyl only import of the debut album from this blackened British grind/sludge/crust band, who are pretty much unknown over here on these shores despite being active in the UK underground for several years now. You should check these guys out pronto, though, if yer into sickeningly heavy sludge and dire apocalyptic warnings, 'cuz these cretins have knocked out five tracks of insanely heavy anarcho-violence on this five song record that blends together urgent and grim anarcho punk with hyperblasting black metal and awesomely epic crusty doom. They remind me of the old UK band Hard To Swallow, who were also an uncatagorizeable mix of grind and sludge and other elements a little harder to pin down, but After The Last Sky bring a big helping of BLACK METAL to the proceedings, as they shift between gloomy, bass-heavy parts that are reminiscent of Amebix to frantic, dissonant raw black metal riffing and ultrafast blastbeats a la Marduk with insane sounding screeched vocals that sound like someone screaming, weeping and blowing their fucking appendix out simultaneously, switching so abruptuly that it blows yer hair back, and just when the grindy black metal seems on the verge of going so fast and becoming so freaked out that someones head is going to explode, the band falls back into a crushing, majestic doom riff that just flattens you. The song "Fire!Salvation!" is one of the highlight of the album with it's frenzied grinding buzz and heartwrenching melodic lead that's played over the slow part, but all of these songs are crushing and raw and vicious, all the way up until the track "I Weep For The First Bluebell Of Spring" where the buzzing, psychotic black metal gives way to a somber acoustic guitar part that eventually builds into a crushing, droning Mogwai-esque crescendo. From there, the last track, "Land Of Gluttony And Rape" breaks out some awesome epic guitar leads over one of the album's most chaotic tracks, blasting black metal that winds knots around itself with tangles of choppy, intricate riffing, finally downshifting into bloozy, swampy sludge before dissipating into a cloud of ambient noise that lingers for several minutes before fading into blackness.

Track Samples:
Sample : AFTER THE LAST SKY-And This Is Progress?

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Nice, some new French filth from the consistently-killer black metal label Flamme Noir. The discs that I have thus far grabbed from this label have all blown me away, from the cold, satanic mecha-black metalof C.Y.T., to the furious hate-filled distortion whiteouts and murderous buzzsaw ambience of Drastus. The kind of stuff that seems to drop the temperature in the room a couple of degrees whenever you put it in the deck. Now we've got a new Flamme Noir outrage to run by you, and bud, this thing is pretty fucked. On the surface, Alien Deviant Circus appears to be black metal, of that peculiarly French variety with icy, dissonant guitars that form into strange riffs and unexpected song structures. But it's not long before this album reveals it's twisted agenda as looped film samples, volleys of pounding tribal drums, looped machine noises, skittery breakbeats, savage gabba beats lifted from a Bloody Fist 12", swells of orchestral majesty and slabs of malevolent black ambience are all layered together into evil industrial dirges, which make jarring, almost frightening transitions into feirce buzzing black metal riffs and hyperspeed blastbeat programming. Style-wise, Alien Deviant Circus are closer to the industrial/electro-black metal of bands like Manes, Dødheimsgard, Mysticum, Black Hole Generator and Aborym than the current crop of French avant-gardists, but there is still that perverse French sensibility still burning at the core of these hallucinogenic tracks. Could be because ADC actually has a member of Mutiilation in it's lineup, one of the original members of the notorious Les Légions Noires. This doesn't sound at all like Mutiilation though, with the mangled drum programming and bleeping digital effects that swarm through these tracks; at times, this sounds more like Deathspell Omega buried by explosive gabba beats and sheets of electronic fuckery, or a more hypnotic version of Dødheimsgard with heavy tribal beats. Fans of the aforementioned bands should check this out, or if yer into the weird industrial/black metal deathscapes of C.Y.T. and Spektr. Blazing, warped sci-fi industrial black metal, with an overtly Satanic credo that reads like this:
Art, philosophy and drugz are the way ov this awakening towards Satan. We shall awake in order to match our vibration to his source and to arrange the manifste according to our will…
Let’s draw our strengh from decay, let us sawmp with this source ov creativity, expression and death!!!
Order shall never rise from disorder again!!!
Dethroned mankind shall end his cycle in pain and dishonor!!!
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…
Vae victis, and they’ll be numerous!!!
Oderint dum metuant!!!
The CD is limited to 500 copies, and has some great devilish sci-fi artwork included in the packaging, all created by the singer from what I can tell. Recommended!

Track Samples:
Sample : Eschaton
Sample : Follow The Left Hand Path
Sample : Kaly Maha Devi

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Absolutely DEVESTATING new album from French deathdoom lords Ataraxie! Their last album on Weird Truth, Slow Transcending Agony, flew out of here in a flash when we listed it earlier this year and we sold out of it almost immediately. From what I've noticed, it looks like Ataraxie are becoming pretty popular in the death/doom field. It's not surprising, 'cuz Ataraxie are one of the heaviest, catchiest deathdoom bands that I've been listening to lately. Their music is clearly descended from the classic deathdoom pioneers like Disembowelment, Thergothon, Evoken, Winter, and early My Dying Bride, with long, epic songs of crushing downtuned death metal guitars sluggishly grinding over thundering drums, soaring lead guitars that etch these amazing emotional melodies into Ataraxie's overcast skies, and best of all, darkly majestic riffs that are catchier than you might expect. And there are sudden unpredictable bursts of speed where the band lurches into blastbeating death metal that appear throughout the album that remind me a lot of seminal deathdoomers Disembowelent. The singer's demonic vocalizations fit the soul-wrenching doom perfectly, a combination of creepy whispering, desperate hysterical screams, and unbelievably deep death grunts delivered dramatically over the music. There is a heavy veil of darkness and hopelessness that falls over all of Anhedonie, in the softer passages where the band stretches out huge droning chords that hang endlessly in midair,racked with despair, through the weird ambient parts of just blastbeats, sickening evil screams and howling feedback and the omnipresent doom riffs...crushing. A fantastic slab of creative, epic deathdoom, highly recommended!

Track Samples:
Sample : Avide de Sens
Sample : Silence of Death

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Here's a real crazed album from a few years ago that I just got tuned in to, the second full length from a South Carolina band unfortunately named Avenging Disco Godfathers Of Soul. I'd seen this record around but never checked it out due to that ridiculous name and the assumption that this was going to be more godawful screamo, but that's not the case at all. The vocals are for the most part screamed, a harsh bloody howl, but the music turned out to be pretty cool and way more interesting than some run of the mill metallic modern hardcore. These guys play a weird breed of sinister mathy metallic core, chaotic grindcore, electronic synth parts that sound kind of like old 8-bit/chiptune melodies, abstract jazz, and some instrumental stuff that sounds like a spastic take on Carl Stalling's cartoon themes, with xylophones, electronic rototoms and other synthetic percussion, and John Carpenter-esque synths turning up in these manic blasts. Naked City is one obvious reference point here; Avenging Disco Godfathers sound like they might have been chugging down long sessions of listening to Grand Guignol and Torture Garden alongside Daughter's Canada Songs, old Goblin soundtracks and Riz Ortolani's score for Cannibal Holocaust, Converge's Petitioning The Empty Sky and the robotic punk of The VSS'Nervous Circuits. The grind stuff disappears almost completely towards the end of the record, as they band descends into total electronic horror music with warbling tape and synths swirling together into a mass of electronic noise and hysterical screams, weird burbling sounds and tinkling chimes, like some Delia Derbyshire acid trip from hell. After this came in and I started spinning it a bunch, we dug around online and found out that this band actually has former members of Index For A Potential Suicide, whose killer LP was reviewed not too long ago here at C-Blast. I can see the connection between the warped nerve-damaged avant grind of IFAPS and this weird jazz/mathmetal/punk/horror experimentation that Avenging Disco deals on this ten song LP.

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Now available on vinyl, presented in a gorgeous gatefold package with a printed inner sleeve that really does justice to John Baizley's great artwork. The LP also includes a plastic dropcard that gives you an account password to access a free digital download of the album.
I've been looking forward to this split ever since it was first announced at the end of last year - a split album featuring two bands from Savannah, Georgia, each one in possession of their own unique progressive, crusty metal: Baroness with their epic, melodic crustcore-prog and Unpersons's manic, gloriously weird combination of the Jesus Lizard and metallic pummel. Featuring more amazing artwork from Baroness' John Dyer Baizley, A Grey Sigh In A Flower Husk brings these two together for just over a half-hour of raging power, which begins with two new Baroness tracks that serve as an appetite-whetter for their upcoming album for Relapse. Yeah, there's only two songs from 'em here, but it's almost 18 minutes of music on their half of the split and frankly, both of these songs CRUSH IT. "Teiresias" is the shorter of the two, a mighty riff feast that twists and turns through winding metallic crush and spidery twin-guitar harmonies, which explodes brilliantly and suddenly in the middle of the song with a passage of downtuned sludgy majesty that sounds like The FUcking Champs meets Torche, at least to my overcaffienated brain. Their second track is called "Cavite", and this is Baroness at their sprawling, proggy best, a labyrinth of chugging guitars and Maiden-eqsue harmonies, hypnotic riffchug heard through a cheap microphone which suddenly erupts into panoramic prog-metal, a dreamy middle passage through spacey post-rock, and a freaked-out drum solo. Awesome! These guys take the best elements of The Champs and epic crustlords Tragedy, Neurosis and Mastodon and turn out a mighty metallic assault that continues to kick my ass each time I spin these jams.
So how do Baroness' buddies and fellow Savannah-ites measure up on this shared split? Pretty solid, actually. Unpersons have been generally overlooked despite having a couple of releases on Life Is Abuse and At A Loss, but their fusion of Jesus Lizard's manic noise rock and crusty metal is completely crushing, as is displayed with their 4 songs here. The riffs go from hammering sludge to more jagged and jangly chords, and Kylesa drummer Carl McGinley bashes the crap out of his kit, anchoring the band with furious fills and offbeat rhythms. It's the vocals that really set Unpersons apart though, a psychotic mewling meltdown that's very reminsicent of David Yow. Unperson's highlight here is the final track "A Small Gesture, A Thousand Small Happy Gestures (Shone In The Dust)", a lengthy freakout that drops some flattening bomb-string action in amongst their psychotic post-punk flavored heaviness. It's massive neo-noise rock, as unhinged as recent releases from Black Elk and Akimbo, and an excellent companion to Baroness on this split. Highly recommended!!

Track Samples:
Sample : baroness - cavite
Sample : unpersons - a thousand

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Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel) isolationist dronemetal monstrosity is back, heavier than ever on this new full length disc; this time, he's joined by fellow New Zealand artist (and a C-Blast customer from way back) James Kirk, who some of you might know from his NZ free-noise group Sandoz Lab Technicians. Acting in newfound duo mode, we get something a little different on this BBA monolith...
It's just one massive continuous hour long track, a sinister expanse of dark ambience that opens with flurries of tinkling chimes, deep echoing resonances, eerie far-off rumblings, and distant streaks of high-pitched sound existing in cavernous black space. In time, a single electric guitar appears, but instead of crushing downtuned chords or rumbling amplifier waves, it's a simple, plaintive series of strummed chords that hang in midair and decay into the blackness, dark and dolorous, a Codeine riff strummed in slow motion and floating through a vast underground chasm. This slowly drifting, minor key melody is beautifully dreamy, even as strange grunting sounds begin to drift up from the abyss, low, snarling pig-like sounds hovering back at the edge of your hearing. This continues for awhile, the slow chords and dark drift stretching out over half an hour and creating a narcotized haze until suddenly THAT RIFF finally crashes in, thirty minutes in, a monolithic jet-engine grinding that erupts out of the void. It's deafening and ultra distorted, a blackened digitally processed drone roaring over monstrous, minimal drums and shimmering electronic debris and dense layers of tonal fluctuations, the riff shuddering and shifting in space, sending out cascades of feedback and speaker buzz. It's like some modulated, processed version of Corrupted, a massive black hole of grinding, industrial dirge. The final fifteen minutes or so of the track settles into a feedback soaked dronescape, the distorted guitars dissipating and leaving only smears of howling, high-end feedback in their place, until the sound finally breaks down into a fragile whir of prayer-bowl tones and looping metallic clinks that fades away into silence. Another top-notch slab of meditative, earth-swallowing drone from Campbell and co, packaged beautifully in a black digipack with black gloss printing.

Track Samples:
Sample : endless coming into life

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Black Elk’s eponymous 2006 debut on Crucial Blast was a ferocious rush of ultra-heavy, jagged noise rock with a penchant for creating moments of lethal build-and-release, some wonderfully malevolent riffage with a massive, bottom-heavy undertow, and creepy, often disturbing lyrics delivered via the wailing, yowling throat of singer Tom Glose. Glose’s singing has often invoked comparisons to that of David Yow from Jesus Lizard, and Black Elk do seem to channel the demented power of the Chicago noise rock legends alongside their other influences (sludge metal, late 90's math-damaged hardcore, even hints of black metal, etc.), taking their influences and filtering them through their super-heavy metallic filter. If you were a big fan of that whole Am Rep/Touch And Go/noise rock scene from back in the 90's, and like yer gnarly rock crushing and psychotic sounding, you'd probably fall in love with Black Elk the first time you heard 'em.
Here we are two years later after the released of that killer debut, and we're totally knocked flat by Black Elk's second album Always A Six, Never A Nine. If you liked their first album, I'll bet my lunch that this new one will blow you away. From the suggestive album title and Tom Glose's deeply weird lyrics to the ten songs of aggro wreckage and crushing, noise-rock influenced heaviosity, this goddamn album is one the raddest post-Am Rep exercises in riff-induced panic, molten rock and menacing bad-assery sitting in my stereo pile right now. That metallic Jesus Lizard/Melvins influenced sound that their first album delivered - the jagged, angular riffs and math-deformed rhythms slithering through delirious night sweats and paranoia - has been further developed into a set of songs that altogether border on the epic. And Tom's singing is even more crazed and freaked-out sounding than before. Which is saying alot. The band has also begun to incorporate some atmospheric elements like flourishes of piano, layered ambience, and, um, some rather "blackened" guitar moves that add some deep new shadows to Black Elk's fearsome set, and at the same time, the band has written their catchiest music so far for Never A Six..., with some fantastic, jangly melodic hooks surfacing in the midst of songs like "Brine" and "Winter Formal".
This CD is packaged in a deluxe Stoughton gatefold jacket that includes an eight-panel insert with lyrics and artwork.

Track Samples:
Sample : My Last Shred Of Decency
Sample : Hospital
Sample : She Pulled Machete

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Finally listing the new Boris, sheesh...I'm sure most of you Boris fans have already picked up yer copy of Smile either on CD or on the more recently released double LP version, but for those stragglers that still haven't grabbed this yet, we've got the limited-edition Southern Lord release of Boris' newest album Smile that comes with the bonus DVD of Boris music videos.
To begin with, this CD edition of Smile looks fucking amazing, with all new artwork from Stephen O'Malley that is completely different from the Japanese release; the packaging is printed in bright orange and silver metallic inks, and includes a sixteen-page booklet that is filled with lyrics, drawings and photos of the band, with a nifty foldout back cover...the case itself has a partial smiley face sticker stuck to it, and each one of these CD/DVD sets is machine numbered out of 3,000 copies and now sold out from the label and most other sources. Once these are gone, we'll just have the regular single disc version in stock. It's also important to note that the track listing on the Southern Lord CD edition of Smile is different from the Japanese release...some of the songs on this version are longer than on the Japanese one, whereas the untitled final track on this version is fifteen minutes long versus nineteen on the Japanese disc, and the song "Statement" that appears here is a longer version of the track "Message" on the Japanese disc, and with a different mix. The confusing differences between the Southern Lord disc and the Japanese disc and the CD and vinyl versions have been discussed at length elsewhere, so we'll just proceed on to the jams:
Smile once again sees Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara joined up with Boris, continuing the collaboration that started on the Rainbow album that came out last year on Drag City. When I saw Boris in D.C. over the summer, Kurihara was touring with them as well, so I'm wondering if he's now a full fledged member of the band? Anyways, I love hearing his searing psychedelic guitar in Boris' music, and he's all over a bunch of the tracks on this album. The album continues from where Pink and Rainbow left off, taking the blown-out, slow motion heavy poppiness of the former and the sunbaked psychedelia of the latter. The first song is one of album's prettiest, a cover of "Flower Sun Rain" from the cult Japanese psych band PYG that's all dreamy, reverb drenched guitars and minimal drumming, heartfelt singing and background harmonies, whirring effects and streaks of searing, solarized psych guitar, all exploding into a huge gorgeous crush of distorted riffage and wah overload at the end. "Buzz-In" follows, starting with a baby babbling in Japanese, then kicks into massive distorted garage metal with heavy, thrashing drums, that crunchy, crushing riff, swirled with gobs of fx-drenched feedback and backwards tape textures. "Laser Beam" is another devestating garage rocker, a sickoid Motorhead style riff bashed out on guitars and bass that are all ultra distorted and blown out, screaming over the thrashing fast paced beat, a weird fuzznuke soloing burning a hole through the song and loud orchestral style hits clanging in the background, collapsing in on itself at the end and becoming a soft, lovely blur of dubby percussion and hushed acoustic guitar.
The rest of the album is just as great, from the super blown garage metal stomp and extreme distortion overload of the live staple "Statement"; the gorgeous dreamy pop of "My Neighbor Satan" and it's buried, almost drum n' bass like electronic rhythms, heavy distorted guitar grinding under a bed of lovely melodies and soulful melodic vocals; the droning, sludge guitar waves and corrosive guitar leads and crumbling riffage of "Ka Re Ha Te Ta Sa Ki -- No Ones Grieve". The record closes out with a massive untitled track that stretches out to fifteen minutes, and it features Stephen O'Malley (Sunn /Khanate) lending his guitar textures to the piece. Beginning with a subdued dronescape of fragile guitar melodies and backwards moving leads over dark, airy drift, it's briefly blasted with a violent surge of super-distorted psych guitar and pounding drums before suddenly falling back into the dreamy slow motion psych dirge. Hazy, narcotized singing and gentle psych guitars wind together, until they build into a tidal wave of crushing, glacial distorto-riffage and striated with ghostly feedback and fx-soaked soloing.
The DVD that comes with this limited edition version is pretty killer, with three professionally shot music videos for the songs "Statement", "My Neighbor Satan", and "Pink".

Track Samples:
Sample : Flower Sun Rain
Sample : My Neighbor Satan
Sample : Statement

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Here's the domestic vinyl for Boris' latest album Smile, a gorgeous double LP release that features new artwork from Stephen O'Malley (which is amazing to look at) printed in blacks and metallic silver and bright oranges printed onto a reflective "mirror" stock, and presented in a thick gatefold sleeve and pressed on thick 180 gram orange vinyl in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. From here it gets confusing though, because this domestic vinyl release of Smile is not only musically different from the Japanese vinyl release, but it's different from the domestic CD on Southern Lord as well. There are two bonus tracks that do not appear on the CD ("Vein" and "After Me"), the version of "My Neighbor Satan" on the domestic LP has a different mix from the CD version, and the versions of "Flower Sun Rain" and the untitled final song that have different mixes from the CD version and/or are longer, uncut versions of the tracks that appeared in slightly shorter, edited form on the CD. It's all pretty confusing, even for Boris completists.
Here's the review for the CD version:
To begin with, this CD edition of Smile looks fucking amazing, with all new artwork from Stephen O'Malley that is completely different from the Japanese release; the packaging is printed in bright orange and silver metallic inks, and includes a sixteen-page booklet that is filled with lyrics, drawings and photos of the band, with a nifty foldout back cover...the case itself has a partial smiley face sticker stuck to it, and each one of these CD/DVD sets is machine numbered out of 3,000 copies and now sold out from the label and most other sources. Once these are gone, we'll just have the regular single disc version in stock. It's also important to note that the track listing on the Southern Lord CD edition of Smile is different from the Japanese release...some of the songs on this version are longer than on the Japanese one, whereas the untitled final track on this version is fifteen minutes long versus nineteen on the Japanese disc, and the song "Statement" that appears here is a longer version of the track "Message" on the Japanese disc, and with a different mix. The confusing differences between the Southern Lord disc and the Japanese disc and the CD and vinyl versions have been discussed at length elsewhere, so we'll just proceed on to the jams:
Smile once again sees Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara joined up with Boris, continuing the collaboration that started on the Rainbow album that came out last year on Drag City. When I saw Boris in D.C. over the summer, Kurihara was touring with them as well, so I'm wondering if he's now a full fledged member of the band? Anyways, I love hearing his searing psychedelic guitar in Boris' music, and he's all over a bunch of the tracks on this album. The album continues from where Pink and Rainbow left off, taking the blown-out, slow motion heavy poppiness of the former and the sunbaked psychedelia of the latter. The first song is one of album's prettiest, a cover of "Flower Sun Rain" from the cult Japanese psych band PYG that's all dreamy, reverb drenched guitars and minimal drumming, heartfelt singing and background harmonies, whirring effects and streaks of searing, solarized psych guitar, all exploding into a huge gorgeous crush of distorted riffage and wah overload at the end. "Buzz-In" follows, starting with a baby babbling in Japanese, then kicks into massive distorted garage metal with heavy, thrashing drums, that crunchy, crushing riff, swirled with gobs of fx-drenched feedback and backwards tape textures. "Laser Beam" is another devestating garage rocker, a sickoid Motorhead style riff bashed out on guitars and bass that are all ultra distorted and blown out, screaming over the thrashing fast paced beat, a weird fuzznuke soloing burning a hole through the song and loud orchestral style hits clanging in the background, collapsing in on itself at the end and becoming a soft, lovely blur of dubby percussion and hushed acoustic guitar.
The rest of the album is just as great, from the super blown garage metal stomp and extreme distortion overload of the live staple "Statement"; the gorgeous dreamy pop of "My Neighbor Satan" and it's buried, almost drum n' bass like electronic rhythms, heavy distorted guitar grinding under a bed of lovely melodies and soulful melodic vocals; the droning, sludge guitar waves and corrosive guitar leads and crumbling riffage of "Ka Re Ha Te Ta Sa Ki -- No Ones Grieve". The record closes out with a massive untitled track that stretches out to fifteen minutes, and it features Stephen O'Malley (Sunn /Khanate) lending his guitar textures to the piece. Beginning with a subdued dronescape of fragile guitar melodies and backwards moving leads over dark, airy drift, it's briefly blasted with a violent surge of super-distorted psych guitar and pounding drums before suddenly falling back into the dreamy slow motion psych dirge. Hazy, narcotized singing and gentle psych guitars wind together, until they build into a tidal wave of crushing, glacial distorto-riffage and striated with ghostly feedback and fx-soaked soloing.


Track Samples:
Sample : Flower Sun Rain
Sample : My Neighbor Satan
Sample : Statement

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Along with the limited edition vinyl for Capricorns excellent debut, we also picked up some of the UK instrumentalists self-titled CD from a few years back, now in stock for the first time here at C-Blast. Early on, Capricorns featured members from several well-known British metal bands, including Iron Monkey, Orange Goblin, and Dukes of Nothing, but played a mostly vocal-free, superheavy style of atmospheric sludge; their first album Ruder Forms Survive was where I was introduced to their powerful longform instrumentals, but I never got around to checking out their very first three-song EP that Rise Above put out in 2004 until just now. These songs ("Comrades In Tears", "Queen Of Bruises", and "Transcendental Evisceration") are as complex and heavy as the music on their first album; each song moves between haunting atmospherics and dark moodiness, and massive riffage and pummeling percussive thunder. Drummer Chris Turner brings his distinctive style of rolling, tumbling rhythms that propelled the druggy biker metal of Orange Goblin, and here his drumming creates a seething undertow of rhythmic activity that contrasts with the brooding arpeggios and repetitive heavy riffs. You might draw some comparisons between Capricorns and the epic arrangements of early Pelican, though my ears hear something much darker and proggier - these long, doleful jams move through similiar terrain of peaks and valleys as Pelican, but the riffs are more aggressive, the drumming much more complex and dynamic. The band also makes good use of spacey electronic textures and interesting time signatures, and like with their other releases that I have, there is only one track here that features vocals; when those show up, it's a gruff roar that suits the heaviness just fine. A band to check out if yer into the heavy instrumental style of groups like 5ive, Suzukiton, Zebulon Pike and dark, soundtracky stuff like Zombi and Morkobot.

Track Samples:
Sample : Comrades in Tears
Sample : Transcendental Evisceration

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Along with the limited edition vinyl for Capricorns excellent debut, we also picked up some of the UK instrumentalists self-titled CD from a few years back, now in stock for the first time here at C-Blast. Early on, Capricorns featured members from several well-known British metal bands, including Iron Monkey, Orange Goblin, and Dukes of Nothing, but played a mostly vocal-free, superheavy style of atmospheric sludge; their first album Ruder Forms Survive was where I was introduced to their powerful longform instrumentals, but I never got around to checking out their very first three-song EP that Rise Above put out in 2004 until just now. These songs ("Comrades In Tears", "Queen Of Bruises", and "Transcendental Evisceration") are as complex and heavy as the music on their first album; each song moves between haunting atmospherics and dark moodiness, and massive riffage and pummeling percussive thunder. Drummer Chris Turner brings his distinctive style of rolling, tumbling rhythms that propelled the druggy biker metal of Orange Goblin, and here his drumming creates a seething undertow of rhythmic activity that contrasts with the brooding arpeggios and repetitive heavy riffs. You might draw some comparisons between Capricorns and the epic arrangements of early Pelican, though my ears hear something much darker and proggier - these long, doleful jams move through similiar terrain of peaks and valleys as Pelican, but the riffs are more aggressive, the drumming much more complex and dynamic. The band also makes good use of spacey electronic textures and interesting time signatures, and like with their other releases that I have, there is only one track here that features vocals; when those show up, it's a gruff roar that suits the heaviness just fine. A band to check out if yer into the heavy instrumental style of groups like 5ive, Suzukiton, Zebulon Pike and dark, soundtracky stuff like Zombi and Morkobot.

Track Samples:
Sample : Comrades in Tears
Sample : Transcendental Evisceration

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Prepare to have yer head ripped off by this new disc of extreme Quebecois deathgrind, pal. And like most of the French Canadian death/grind bands that I listen to, the freaks behind Clearwater Deathblow have been drinking some ill water from somewhere below the Montreal streets, infecting their hyperblast grind with the kind of contorted riff weirdness and schizophrenic song structures that seem to be synonymous with grindcore from this corner of the world. The mood on Parasite Cleansing is one of total apocalypse, if the album title didn't hint at that already...the cover art shows a holocaust of meteors laying waste to a city (Montreal itself, perhaps?), while the thirty tracks collected on the disc are served up in minute and a half blasts of insanely fast deathgrind that touches on a mix of ecological issues, politics, and splatstick humor. It's all about the riffs and the blasts though, and CD assault the senses with machinegun blastbeat drumming and ridiculously complex fills that sound like they are actually being performed by a drum machine, and crushing downtuned guitars that don't get too complicated, instead going for vicious staccato thrash riffs delivered at supersonic speed. The guitar solos, on the other hand, are totally batshit. When the guitarists really let loose with these wonky, atonal shredding, it sounds like Luc Lemay from Negativa/Gorguts tearing up his fretboard over the extreme punky grind of Nasum or newer Napalm Death. Nice!

Track Samples:
Sample : Braincells Ashtrat
Sample : Cold
Sample : It Seems
Sample : Narco-Empire

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Last years Legendary Demo disc introduced Clouds as a manic conglom of hardcore punk, sludgy stoner grooves, some proggy tendencies and loads of heavy-duty bloozy boogie headed up by Adam McGrath, one of the guitarists from legendary metalcore pioneers Cave In. There was a sloppy, distinct 70's rock vibe in both the songwriting and the swaggering delivery of the tunage on that album that referenced everything from Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart to Sabbath and dub that a bunch of us with a taste for quirky stoner rock grooved on, but which appeared to pass by the rest of the metal/stoner crowd. Now, this follow up album raises their game significantly and sounds like they've been hard at work over the past year honing their sound and coming up with a sound that's just as riff-heavy and rocking as before, but is now injected with a major dose of sludgy metallic heaviness and honest-to-goodness pop songwriting that I never saw comin'. The opening song "Empires In Basements" kicks this off with a massively heavy sludge jam with some gooey Melvins style riffage and a killer anthemic hook that sounds a LOT like Torche; "Feed The Horse" follows that up with an upbeat, spacey metallic rock jam, once again reminding me of Torche but with a bouncy sing-along chorus way more bouyant than you'd hear from Torche. And then "The Bad Seat" throws a weird curveball, a swinging staccato pop song complete with piano, sounding like New Pornagraphers more than anything? "Heisenberg Says" is all ferocious garage rock stomp and freaked out soloing with squiggly electronic noises flying all over the place, and "Motion Of The Ocean" returns to the crush with a blast of fierce thrashing motormetal. Clouds throw it all together, the huge power-chord laden choruses and anthemic singalongs, chunks of sludge rock and frenzied Karp style heaviness, spacey psychedelia and dramatic pop weirdness, shades of later Cave In and even Pink Floyd, all wrapped up into a colossal sludgepop epic that fans of Torche and Floor and super-heavy metallic catchiness will LOVE.

Track Samples:
Sample : Empires in Basements
Sample : Feed the Horse
Sample : Glass House Rocks

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A fantastic new album from the crushing industrial prog ensemble led by bassist James Hugget that takes their punishing robo-Zeuhl workouts one step further into pure awesomeness with the addition of singer Elaine di Falco. The band's last album The Dematerialized Passenger was a big hit here at C-Blast two years ago when it came out, and that disc has remained one of my favorite slabs of sludge/prog/free jazz heaviosity ever since. The group's membership spans the Atlantic with American musician James Huggett (bass guitar, guitar, electronics and drum programming) and UK musicians Martin Archer (alto and soprano sax, bass clarinet, violin, electronics) and Mick Beck (bassoon) all returning from the last album, and joined by Myrrhia Resneck on baritone sax, Mike Ward on flute and bass flute and the aforementioned Ms. di Falco on vocals and piano. Combat Astronomy are a punishing fusion of complex Godflesh style drum machine rhythms and Magma influenced prog that plows through a dense storm of free jazz horns and uber cool noir-jazz sax lines that honk and squeal alongside the brutally heavy e-bass riffs rumbling and snaking around the mechanoid doom rhythms, those drum machine beats executed in severe, militaristic rhythms that move in strange time signatures. And like on the previous album, these complex arrangements move through a haze of electronic effects and heavy ambient drones, coating the tracks in a cold, textural aura.
The big difference between this new album and their last one is Elaine di Falco, a former member of the prog groups Caveman Shoestore and Thinking Plague whose smoky singing style brings a whole 'nother shade to the previously all-instrumental outfit. Her haunting voice adds elements of melody and intimacy that were almost totally absent from the cold, inhuman repetition and blazing jazzisms on The Dematerialized Passenger while acting as another contrasting instrument in juxtaposition with the other musicians, and moves from multi-tracked vocal harmonies to soft sultry crooning, swirling above the grinding rhythm section and clusters of sparring horns. I'm really hoping that she continues to work with the group of future recordings. Highly recommended and extremely cool jazz/prog heaviness for fans of both jazzcore bands like Painkiller, 16-17 and Last Exit and the mechanistic doom of Godflesh.

Track Samples:
Sample : COMBAT ASTRONOMY-Dreams No Longer Hesitate
Sample : Lightning In Her Eyes
Sample : Touch The Moon

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Filled with heartrending beautiful synthesizer melodies and awesome cosmic keys, this Bulgarian duo stand out bigtime with this stunning new album of blackened melodic doom that just came out recently from Ars Magna. Perfectly Calm belies it's title with crushing epic doom metal laced with those signature electronic elements that are a huge, huge part of their sound - the core sound of Darkflight is super slow, lumbering doom in the tradition of My Dying Bride, Thergothon, and Disembowelment, all massive crushing minor-key riffage and thunderous drumming drenched in reverb, and with harsh blackened growls soaring over top, the songs huge and epic sounding, every track filled with amazingly beautiful melodic soloing and soaring majestic melodies, ultra heavy and utterly filled with sorrow and longing.
All of that by itself would make this one of the better funeral/death doom albums that I've heard this year, no doubt about it, but with the fucking devestating keyboard melodies and sheets of spacey, heavily textured Tangerine Dream-style ambient synthesizers that swoop and blurt and fill almost every corner of this album, it immediately becomes one of my favorite albums of 2008, and quite possibly my fave doom album of the year. This music is so beautiful and spacey and insanely heavy, filled with not just those killer kosmiche synths and unbelievable melodies, but also swells of sorrowful violin strings, dark droning buzzsaw feedback, bleak folky acoustic interludes, and what even sound like huge brass fanfares buried down in the buzzing blackened guitars and thunderous slow-motion beats, bringing additional levels of epicness to the music. It's funereal New Age cosmic doom immersed in 70's style prog electronics, more melodic and beautiful than any other black/doom outfit in recent memory. Highly recommended!

Track Samples:
Sample : Distant Pain
Sample : Indifferent

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Public Guilt Commissioned this compilation of remixes for the Darsombra track "Nymphaea", which appeared on the debut album Ecdysis in 2006. It's one of the best tracks from the Baltimore one-man psych/dirge project, a throbbing kraut-y bass groove riding on waves of melodic distorted guitar and droning distorted ambience, and lends itself nicely to a variety of interpretations and mutations. The original studio recording of "Nymphaea" opens the disc, and it's then followed by twelve different artists all doing their own unique reconfig of the song, and the lineup includes a bunch of my favorite drone/ambient/noise groups, including Max Bondi, Ala Muerte (both of who shared their own collaborative limited edition CDR on Public Guilt not long ago, a really fantastic little dose of blown-out, blissed out ambient crunch), Pulsoc, Japanese speedjunknoise god Guilty Connector, Magicicada, Swiss turntable droneologist Strotter Inst., Destructo Swarmbots, Blood Fountains (the new dark ambient project from artist Stephen Kasner), Decimation Blvd. with Darla Hood, The Heirs Of Rockefeller, Le Knell, and last but not least, the new C-Blast house band Perfekt Teeth. These interpretations run the gamut from strange drone-pop numbers littered with the sounds of children's toys, to pulsating dronescapes with an amazing soulful female voice singing in Latin, massive slabs of blown-out ambient sludge, guitar-heavy riffscapes, and minimalist deconstructions of the original track's skeletal form, each track extrapolating on "Nymphaea"'s throbbing bass and vaguely Middle Eastern sounding guitar lines. Pretty damn great, and I bet that even drone fans who have never heard the original Darsombra album would dig this disc heavily. Released in a limited edition of 250 copies and packaged in a very cool silkscreened sleeve with a translucent vellum insert, all designed by artist Chase Middaugh, who has put together the artwork for releases from Suishou No Fune, Aidan Baker, and Heavy Winged, among others.

Track Samples:
Sample : Ala Muerte _ nymphaea caerulea
Sample : Darsombra _ nymphaea
Sample : Perfekt Teeth _ Nympahea Escape Remix

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Like their fellow Alabamoids Rwake, Deadbird play somber, psychedelically-tinged sludge metal with both music and visual art that evokes dark backwoods mysticism, hard narcotics, animal totems, elemental forces and self-realization. It's heavier on the grey matter than yer typical Sabbath-plunderer, and all of these mystical overtones that both Rwake and Deadbird share are traceable back to the originators of crushing, spiritual metal, Neurosis. Both bands also share some of the same members, but beyond these common threads, Deadbird unveils a massive lumbering sound of their own on their second album Twilight Ritual. Six sprawling tracks, the shortest one nearly six minutes long. Crushing detuned guitars create an undertow of monstrous sludge that shifts in tempo from pummeling grooves to huge, apocalyptic dirges, sometimes erupting in energy into faster, thrashy crustcore. Huge weighty riffs are ground out over and over, while epic dual guitar harmonies soar overhead and the gutteral battlechants are stretched out and harmonized themselves. When in fully earthcrushing form, Deadbird suggest some alternate world where Neurosis and Crowbar merged into a single bulldozing force, equally epic and oppressive, punishingly heavy and mesmerizing. But there are other elements at work here that make Twilight Ritual more than just an exercise in gravitational pull: the plaintive clean guitar strum and Codeine-like slowcore parts, awesome, Maiden-esque guitar harmonies, somber acoustic folk ballads, proggy guitar lines and arrangements, the soulful, raw-throated singing. It's immense and despondant music with alternating shades of light and darkness, one of the more progressive (and more melodic) sludge metal albums that I've listened to lately. Awesome album art and layout from Baroness' John Baizley rounds this out, with a full color six-panel digipack package and stunning illustrations.

Track Samples:
Sample : Into The Clearing
Sample : Rule Discordia

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Here's another amazing reissue from the Polish label Metal Mind. Amazing in that both the label actually decided to reissue what is one of the weirdest death metal albums of all time, and also in that the label gave this another one of their high quality packaging jobs, making this totally essential for both fans of the Austrian band Disharmonic Orchestra who have been missing this long out-of-print album from their collection, and enthusiasts of severely warped death metal. The band's first album Expositionsprophylaxe from 1990 found a home with fans of creative death metal who grooved on their quirky riffing and general oddball aesthetic that had them compared somewhat to the more interesting death and thrash bands of that time like Celtic Frost and Voivod. But when their second album, 1992's Not To Be Undimensional Conscious rolled around, even the more adventurous metalheads were trying to figure out what to make of it. From the surreal, New Wave style cover art from Gerhard Klopf to the absurd band photo on the back of the album that pictured the members kneeling among a pile of stuffed animals with freaked-out stares on their faces, this sure didn't look like a death metal band, and it just becomes weirder once you start spinning this. The music on Not To Be Undimensional Unconscious is definitely death metal, there are the requisite gutteral vocals, the ferocious double bass drumming and blastbeats, the crushing riffs...but the way that it's all put together just sounds completely fucked up and warped. The bass is the first thing that jumps out at you, because bassist Herwig Zamernik essentially plays a heavy funk style complete with bass slaps and percussive plucks and crazy fretboard runs that sound totally alien next to the blasting death metal. The riffs are all contorted, too, going from straightforward thrashy riffing to jazzoid chord structures and more melodic parts, and drummer Martin Messner fills the music with awesome, off the wall rhythms, furious jazzy fills and technical patterns. The songs go through weird twists and turns, and there is a tendency on a lot of the songs to slip into these subversively catchy choruses that almost sound poppy. Then there's the song "The Return Of The Living Beat", which is a remake of a song that appeared on their split with Pungent Stench from 1989 - at one point in the middle of the song, the band actually breaks down and starts busting out this totally goofy, brain-damaged old school hip hop part. And instrumental "Time Frame" combines death metal riffing, some mutoid version of jazz fusion, and Casio-powered prog rock in the space of six minutes. I'm betting that Disharmonic Orchestra were really influenced by the genre-defying Into The Pandemonium when they were putting this album together, but what they ended up with turned out to be much weirder and definitely goofier. The closest contempos for this album that I can come up with are bands like Cynic, Pestilence and Atheist with their prog/jazz/fusion leanings; but again, this album is far weirder, existing in it's own weird world where funk, prog-damaged riffing, imbecilic rapping, and whirlwind deathmetal blur together. Probably an acquired taste to anyone whose not a rabid fan of bizarro-death/thrash, but if you do happen to be a fan of the weirder end of death and thrash metal from this era (Voivod, Garlik D'eth, Cynic, Into The Pandemonium-era Frost, you get my drift), you should give these guys a listen.
Another excellent package from Metal Mind, the gold pressed disc presented in a full color digipack with a mulitpage booklet with all of the lyrics. Oh yeah, and they also included the tracks from Disharmonicn Orchestra's 1989 EP Successive Substitution on here as a bonus.

Track Samples:
Sample : A Mental Sequence
Sample : Like Madness From Above
Sample : DISHARMONIC ORCHESTRA-Not To Be Undimensional Unconscious

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Back before Southern Lord became the extreme doom/drone/black metal juggernaut that is it today, the label released several records that were much closer to the late 90's stoner rock sound than the crushing doom metal that has become the Lord's calling card. One of those bands was The Want, a band from New Jersey who released their debut album on Southern Lord in 2000 called Greatest Hits Vol. 5. The Want definitely stood out from the darker, doom metal side of the label with their heavy, upbeat hard rock that garnered a lot of comparisons to Led Zeppelin. After that album came out, I didn't hear much at all from the band and it's members, and they appeared to slip into obscurity.
Then comes this new album from a band called Eighteen Wheels Burning that was just released by stoner rock's last guiding light, Meteorcity, and it turns out that this band features a couple of members of The Want, namely bassist Jeff Mackey and guitarist Adam Valk. Like The Want, Eighteen Wheels Burning take a total retro-70's approach to their hard rock, with dark bluesy riffing and heavy rocking drums, rough but earnest singing, and a raw, dry recording that has a definite old-school sound to it. Lots of cowbell, pounding rhythms, lengthy bouts of stoned wah-drenched soloing and the occasional trippy guitar effect, too. The sound is drawn directly from the likes of Mountain, Cactus, Grand Funk Captain Beyond, Budgie, and other more obscure 70's heavy rock, grooving and pummeling, heavy and tripped out boogie crunch, with just a smattering of that Zep swing carried over from The Want, but added with the occasional burst of hardcore energy and thrashing speed, or slower, Sabbath-style doominess. Pretty cool. In gatefold style packaging.

Track Samples:
Sample : mobscene
Sample : tears of the moon
Sample : third reich trucker

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The brainscrambling 2005 album from Italy's Ephel Duath is one weird metal album. The Italian band released their album, through the legendary metal label Earache after putting out some amazing records on Code666 and Elitist, and it's a continuation of their mutant vision of jazz and prog-infected black metal that continues to confound three years after it's release. Really, Ephel Duath go way beyond the black metal label, with crushing metalcore, jazz, and prog rock all figuring into their overall sound. Pain Necessary To Know is a dizzying concoction of schizophrenic song structures and deep jazz explorations, fierce blackened screams and lush jazz horns, trumpets and saxophones, crushing angular riffage grinding over thrashing, stop/start rhythms, and awesome fluid drumming. Drummer Davide Piovesan is one of the band's greatest strengths, the guy is a fifty year old jazz percussionist who didn't have any metal background whatsoever before joing Ephel Duath; and yet his drumming in Ephel Duath totally smokes most other black/death metal skinsmen with a complex, expressive rhythmic attack that utilizes tons of crazy fills and polyrhythms. Equal parts John Zorn and Dillenger Escape Plan, Yakuza and Mr. Bungle, with ambient industrial drones, Emperor-esque symphonic BM, funk basslines, bizarre time signatures, dissonant chord clusters, Zappa inspired weirdness and chiming bells, abstract electronica and softly sung vocals all glommed together into a confusional, ADD enhanced avant-jazz-metal trip. The centerpiece of the album is the three part "Vector" trilogy, the three parts scattered throughout the disc randomly and make up the album's most spacey, atmospheric tracks. Highly recommended.

Track Samples:
Sample : New Disorder
Sample : Vector, Third Movement

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A companion piece to Ephel Duath's blackened jazzmetal opus Pain Necessary To Know from 2005, this collection of remixes appeared in '07 through Earache and has the adventurous Italian metallers handing their recordings over to Eraldo Bernocchi, a reknowned Italian engineer and founding member of the early Italian ritual-industrial outfit Sigillum S., to reshape their complex prog/jazz/metal into dark new electronic shapes. Bernocchi has also been known to frequently collaborate with Bill Laswell and Mick Harris from Painkiller, and he brings a similiar mode of heavy dark dub to the nine tracks on this disc. Each one of these tracks is virtually unrecognizeable from the original source material, fully deconstructed and torn apart, and I'm only able to catch brief snippets of sound that I can actually trace back to Pain Necessary To Know. It's essentially all new material, reformed into a twisted collection of crushing Laswellian dub and spastic drum n' bass fused with blackened guitars and jazzy horns, brutal breakcore, distorted guitar lines melted directly into evocative synth hooks, ominous Aphex Twin style skitter, gothy trip-hop, scattered and chopped up vocals, super abstract and rhythmically dense , layered with electronic effects and sheets of dark ambience. The nine tracks are all titled "Hole" and ordered numerically, which further distances these reconstructions from Ephel Duath's original songs. Fans of anything from Scorn to Shitmat and Venetian Snares would be into this, and the album would probably appeal to those who loved the electro-prog of Genghis Tron's latest album Board Up The House, but this is mainly essential for fans of Ephel Duath and their Pain Necessary To Know album who want to hear the band blast off even further into the technovoid.

Track Samples:
Sample : Hole I
Sample : Hole IX

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Pick up any old, xeroxed mailorder list from one of those long gone noisecore tape labels that were around back in the 1990's, and yer sure to find Extreme Hair Stench listed somewhere on there. This German one-man band has been around since 1992, the project of a guy named Andy Kramer who has released dozens of cassettes and CDRs of bizarre and abstract low-fi noise collages through labels like Chaotic Noise, Be A Freak, and Billy Nocera's pre-Razorback label Stupidity Records, among others. I always dug Extreme Hair Stench's weird tapestries of audio scum and grinding electronic noise, and was surprised to see something new from the project pop up recently. This six track CDR on R.O.N.F. blends together harsh noise, experimental sound collage and heavy drone in classic EHS style, opening with a lengthy track of muffled death metal riffing and distant death roars drowning in oceans of reverb, and then moving through swirling waves of laserblast FX, harsh oscillator manipulations, brief samples of eerie female singing (taken from an obscure album from the 60's psych band White Noise), huge roaring infernos of distorted noise and grinding jet-engine drone, throbbing industrial loops, avalanches of murky sonic soup and melted vocal tracks, weird electronic squiggles and tape manipulation, scrambled radio transmissions in all sorts of different languages blended together into a dense dreamlike babble, huge crumbling walls of crunchy low-end, demonic mumbling vocals, brutal blasting junknoise, crushing slabs of Merzbowian noise terror, all of this sometimes rising up in a suffocating tsunami of sound like hearing one hundred different turntables all spinning different records simultaneously. Imagine a dementia-afflicted mix of Stockhausen, Hanatarash, and Negativland to start with, but it gets skuzzier and weirder as you make yer way through this warped soundworld. The disc also has the 1994 demo cassette Nothing To Hear, Nothing To See And Nothing To Say included as the last track; the disc comes in a jewel case with full color handassembled packaging, numbered out of only 75 copies.

Track Samples:
Sample : thunderstorm tangle
Sample : zauberberg session

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Awesome deathtronix from Mike Page and his Fire In The Head project, which sadly appears to be no more. This limited edition disc was put put by the Japanese label Deserted Factory in 2005, and I picked up the last copies that the label had; each disc is hand-numbered out of 200 copies. I'm a big fan of Fire In The Head's crushing mix of power electronics, cosmic noise and brain-flattening drone, and how he ties his harsh audio sculptures together with dark, apocalyptic imagery. FITH is probably the only noise/industrial project on the planet that has ever "covered" a Cro-Mags song, which is saying something. This eight track disc is some of Mike's heaviest stuff, moving from the Skullflowery skree of the opening track "Silent Few" and it's harsh blasts of high end feedback and crushing blackened droneriffs, to the dense layers of clotted distortion and feedback and howling wordless vocals of "Trepanation", which reveals a grimly majestic melody buried underneath the chaos in it's last moments. The rest of the disc goes from clanking quasi-industrial rhythms buried under oceans of distortion, dark reverberating ambience, chunks of what sounds like mangled guitar noise a la Ramleh, even fragments of decaying melodies that slither through these symphonies of distortion, sheet metal and swirling feedback. The disc finally reaches it's climax with "Through Jaded Eyes", which unleashes a grinding caustic drone that is so devestatingly crushing that it rivals the heaviest Skullflower or Grey Daturas jam. Nice. Reference points range from the harsh, fast-moving noise of Japanese artists like Guilty Connector and Pain Jerk, the Power Electronics/Death Industrial mutations of Navicon Torture Technologies, and the corroded machine disease of early Broken Flag projects.

Track Samples:
Sample : through jaded eyes
Sample : trepanation

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Mexico's answer to Abruptum? Yeah, pretty much, as this obscure black metal outfit from Mexico has been playing a similiarly fucked-up, improvised mutation of black metal as that of the Swedish improv-black metal weirdos. Funeral Moon has been around since 1993 but they've only been known to a handful of necro-trogs in the black metal underground due to the difficulty of tracking down Funeral Moon's recordings and the fact that underground metal from south of the U.S. border is usually ignored here in the States. This amazing new disc from Autopsy Kitchen seeks to remedy the situation and actually combines two seperate releases from Funeral Moon into one for a heavy dosage of bizarro black metal abstraction, which I have been playing virtually non-stop since this came in last week. The disc combines Funeral Moon's long out of print 1996 vinyl only LP Grim...Evil... with an unreleased collection of new songs titled Satan's Beauty Obscenity, which actually starts this off. These four new tracks are weird and unsettling blats of shambling blackness that move from grim, crude black metal to creepy dark ambience, 80's horror movie keyboards, odd electronic noises, and sardonic spoken-word peices dealing with Satanic ritual thought performed over weird synthesizer pieces; you can hear the influence of early black metallers like Burzum whenever the former appears, but the demented, stumbling riffing and atonal ambience that make up most of this stuff is pure Abruptum, albeit with FM's own fucked-up vision. The opening track "The Last Prophecy" starts the disc off with a spoken word piece enshrouded by dismal droning synths and strange vocoder voices, then shifts abruptly into the thrashing low-fi skuzz of "Black Sphere", it's mutoid black metal smeared with robotic screeching and strange, almost synthetic-sounding guitars. The last two of the newer recordings are slower and creepier, lumbering through deformed blackened riffage and more of FM's trademark satanic funhouse atmosphere.
The Grim...Evil... material is generally along the same lines, but the recording is even more wrecked and low-fi, the guitars rendered as a mosquito hum over distant, muffled drums and a thick veneer of shit and blood, while vocalist Impure Ehiyeh croaks his obsceneties in a hateful spew over the rush of primitive, hideous buzz. The filthy, diseased sounding guitar tone and hellish atmosphere gives this early recording a nasty vibe that recalls the out of control chaos of early Beherit as much as the formless dungeon skum of Abruptum.
Man, this is some top notch outsider black metal/ambient that fans of weird BM will love - it's amazing that these recordings have been hidden for so long. If you're a fan of the weirder, more abstract end of black metal like Abruptum, Beherit, Nordvargr, and Subliminal Murder, check this out.

Track Samples:
Sample : Luna Funebre
Sample : The Last Prophecy

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Also listing this on CD, since we just picked up the last available copies of the limited vinyl version.
Gallhammer have turned into a cult phenomenon since their CD/DVD set The Dawn Of... came out, and otaku doomheads the world over have become obsessed with this cult Japanese outfit. For a band that took their core sound from the primitive proto-black metal of Hellhammer, Gallhammer have slowly evolved into something far more interesting than just another old school black/sludge tribute band, as their latest album proves; the all-girl trio of Vivian Slaughter, Mika Penetrator and Risa Reaper started off playing Amebix and Hellhammer covers before the members really even knew how to play their instruments, but as they have progressed from their 2004 debut Gloomy Lights through the demos and live performance collection The Dawn Of Gallhammer from 2006 to their latest, album numer two Ill Innocence, I hear Gallhammer further channeling a gloomy 80's post-punk sound through their sludgy downer metal. The girls have always cited a variety of influences and interests, and that's why Gallhammer have been such an interesting band, aside from the crushing riffage and ghoulish atmospherics. The band still sounds pretty fucking raw, but Ill Innocence has a lot of variety over it's ten songs, too. It's like they're channeling the experimental spirit of late 80's Celtic Frost, in a way. The opener “At the Onset of the Age of Despair” harks back to those gnarly Amebix/Hellhammer influences, lumbering through a primitive riff backed by Vivian Slaughter's shrieks, and "Speed Of Blood" speeds up into buzzing, Darkthrone style riffs and sloppy blasts. From here though the band moves into bleaker and more adventurous territory, and the song titles set the mood for their sound: "Delirium Daydream", "Ripper In The Gloom", "World To Be Ashes" and "SLOG" dynamically bring together atavistic black metal barbarism and mesmerising instrumentals, moody post-punk melodies and primal heaviness, wintery slowcore strum and ripping blackened punk. SOme of the album's heavier, faster crust assaults are found on "Killed By The Queen" and "Blind My Eyes", and "Blind My Eyes" stands out with some unexpected yelping vocals from the drummer that sound just like Yasuko from Melt Banana! This is way more than mindless Hellhammer-worship; there are smatterings of early Siouxsie And The Banshees and Joy Division to be heard behind the barbaric slow-motion doom, dissonant Amebix-style crust and plodding black metal. Highly recommended, and presented in a super-classy six panel digipack printed in silver metallic inks and minimalist artwork, with a thick booklet of lyrics and art inside.

Track Samples:
Sample : At the Onset of the Age of Despair
Sample : Delirium Daydream
Sample : Ripper in the Gloom
Sample : SLOG

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Just got these in, the limited edition double LP version of Gallhammer's latest album. It's a beautiful gatefold jacket with metallic silver printing and printed inner sleeves. And it is also sold out and out of print from the label, so these are the last copies that we are getting.
Gallhammer have turned into a cult phenomenon since their CD/DVD set The Dawn Of... came out, and otaku doomheads the world over have become obsessed with this cult Japanese outfit. For a band that took their core sound from the primitive proto-black metal of Hellhammer, Gallhammer have slowly evolved into something far more interesting than just another old school black/sludge tribute band, as their latest album proves; the all-girl trio of Vivian Slaughter, Mika Penetrator and Risa Reaper started off playing Amebix and Hellhammer covers before the members really even knew how to play their instruments, but as they have progressed from their 2004 debut Gloomy Lights through the demos and live performance collection The Dawn Of Gallhammer from 2006 to their latest, album numer two Ill Innocence, I hear Gallhammer further channeling a gloomy 80's post-punk sound through their sludgy downer metal. The girls have always cited a variety of influences and interests, and that's why Gallhammer have been such an interesting band, aside from the crushing riffage and ghoulish atmospherics. The band still sounds pretty fucking raw, but Ill Innocence has a lot of variety over it's ten songs, too. It's like they're channeling the experimental spirit of late 80's Celtic Frost, in a way. The opener “At the Onset of the Age of Despair” harks back to those gnarly Amebix/Hellhammer influences, lumbering through a primitive riff backed by Vivian Slaughter's shrieks, and "Speed Of Blood" speeds up into buzzing, Darkthrone style riffs and sloppy blasts. From here though the band moves into bleaker and more adventurous territory, and the song titles set the mood for their sound: "Delirium Daydream", "Ripper In The Gloom", "World To Be Ashes" and "SLOG" dynamically bring together atavistic black metal barbarism and mesmerising instrumentals, moody post-punk melodies and primal heaviness, wintery slowcore strum and ripping blackened punk. SOme of the album's heavier, faster crust assaults are found on "Killed By The Queen" and "Blind My Eyes", and "Blind My Eyes" stands out with some unexpected yelping vocals from the drummer that sound just like Yasuko from Melt Banana! This is way more than mindless Hellhammer-worship; there are smatterings of early Siouxsie And The Banshees and Joy Division to be heard behind the barbaric slow-motion doom, dissonant Amebix-style crust and plodding black metal. Highly recommended, and presented in a super-classy six panel digipack printed in silver metallic inks and minimalist artwork, with a thick booklet of lyrics and art inside.

Track Samples:
Sample : At the Onset of the Age of Despair
Sample : Delirium Daydream
Sample : Ripper in the Gloom
Sample : SLOG

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French metallic hardcore is some of the most emotive and dramatic you'll hear, as evidenced by bands like Cortez, Tantrum, Metronome Charisma, Submerge, hell, pretty much anything on the Basement Apes and Radar Swarm labels. The French have an excellent knack for putting together crushing metallic riffage and majestic, intensely moving melodies without resorting to throwing in lame alt-rock choruses to try to come off as "sensitive". The second album fron the French band Gary Suicidal Kids Commando is another solid blast of epic, atmospheric hardcore that reminds me of some of the other bands that they pal around with, but GSKC also add a bunch of interesting stuff to their sound that's had me playing this album over and over lately. At their core, GSKC play a super-heavy and frantic style of metallic hardcore with complex riffing and amazing epic guitar harmonies, and fronted by some really anguished, emotionally wrecked vocals that go from layers of raspy shreiking to high pitched yelps and bestial death metal roaring. Japan's Envy comes to mind when I listen to this, and I'm betting that GSKC has been heavily influenced by the impassioned hardcore/epic rock that Envy's more recent albums have featured, but there are also huge apocalyptic dirges that invoke mid-90's Neurosis, occasional samples of orchestral film music that are looped over and over (which sounds vaguely like Morricone, but I'm not sure if it's an original piece or something that the band lifted), an entire instrumental track of nothing but gloomy cello, another track that features a great extended sax solo over sludgy, propulsive riffage, and songs that shift suddenly from cello-backed mathy arpeggios and intricate drumming to manic thrashing metalcore, like smatterings of Slint and Rachels heard alongside a freaked out, uber-metal version of Envy. This disc came out on the Scottish label Rimbaud, which has brought us some great noise-rock/sludge records in the past from Killing Spree, Hey Colossus, and Bracket.Retards.Bracket.

Track Samples:
Sample : enfant massacre
Sample : les morts
Sample : il clan dei siciliani

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The brand new vinyl release of Genghis Tron's stunning second album Board Up The House, a double LP on black vinyl with a full color poster insert, and an eye-popping laser etching on the D-side.
Genghis Tron followed up their 2006 album Dead Mountain Mouth on Crucial Blast with the claustrophobic, desperate Board Up The House, their first album for metal behemoth Relapse Records. The band had a lot to live up to for their sophomore album - Dead Mountain Mouth was a pretty amazing debut from the young band, and they've spent the past couple of years touring on that material. They ended up coming out with their most epic music yet with Board Up The House, and it's a stunning album that moves beyond the spastic, magesterial grind and video-game electronica of Dead Mountain Mouth into tension-riddled prog territory. Their sound here is darker and moodier than before, the chaotic metallic grind blasts laced with complex drum programming, skittering electronica, weird production tricks, lush new wave synthesizers, and singer Mookie's newfound range of vocals that add clean, vocoded crooning to his arsenal of psychotic screams. The synth sounds and longer dronier section on Board sound a lot at times like the 70's synth soundtracks of Italian prog rockers Goblin or John Carpenter, and by default Zombi too, but these epic sprawling soundracky bits are tangled together with the jagged grindcore and crushing riffing and Hamilton's shredding leads. The ten minute closing track "Relief" brings it all together, starting off as a heavy dreamy dirge, slow and languorous and kind of Neurosis-y, a grinding bassline building over pounding programmed drums, the clean vocal melody shifting into panic as the track turns into a devestating melodic groove that loops over and over, the dreamy guitars and buzzing synthesizers and vocal harmonies locked into a hypnotically repetitive dirge, keyboards swelling and building in volume, the song finally disappearing in a cloud of crashing cymbals.

Track Samples:
Sample : Board Up the House
Sample : GENGHIS TRON-Board Up The House
Sample : Relief
Sample : GENGHIS TRON-Board Up The House

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Genghis Tron followed up their 2006 album Dead Mountain Mouth on Crucial Blast with the claustrophobic, desperate Board Up The House, their first album for metal behemoth Relapse Records. The band had a lot to live up to for their sophomore album - Dead Mountain Mouth was a pretty amazing debut from the young band, and they've spent the past couple of years touring on that material. They ended up coming out with their most epic music yet with Board Up The House, and it's a stunning album that moves beyond the spastic, magesterial grind and video-game electronica of Dead Mountain Mouth into tension-riddled prog territory. Their sound here is darker and moodier than before, the chaotic metallic grind blasts laced with complex drum programming, skittering electronica, weird production tricks, lush new wave synthesizers, and singer Mookie's newfound range of vocals that add clean, vocoded crooning to his arsenal of psychotic screams. The synth sounds and longer dronier section on Board sound a lot at times like the 70's synth soundtracks of Italian prog rockers Goblin or John Carpenter, and by default Zombi too, but these epic sprawling soundracky bits are tangled together with the jagged grindcore and crushing riffing and Hamilton's shredding leads. The ten minute closing track "Relief" brings it all together, starting off as a heavy dreamy dirge, slow and languorous and kind of Neurosis-y, a grinding bassline building over pounding programmed drums, the clean vocal melody shifting into panic as the track turns into a devestating melodic groove that loops over and over, the dreamy guitars and buzzing synthesizers and vocal harmonies locked into a hypnotically repetitive dirge, keyboards swelling and building in volume, the song finally disappearing in a cloud of crashing cymbals.

Track Samples:
Sample : Board Up the House
Sample : GENGHIS TRON-Board Up The House
Sample : Relief
Sample : GENGHIS TRON-Board Up The House

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Barely got this one in stock, due to the first pressing of the Temporary Residence installment selling out within a week or so! This is the first of the Board Up The House Remixes 12" series that is being put together by five different labels, Temporary Residence, Anticon, Lovepump United, Relapse, and yers truly here at Crucial Blast. Each one of these 12"s features various remixes of songs from Genghis Tron's latest album, the prog-colored masterwork that is Board Up The House, and are pressed on colored vinyl and packaged in full color sleeves that have been "re-mixed" by original cover artist Jon Beasley. The Temporary Residence record kicks the series off with a knockout lineup of remixers that includes Justin Broadrick from Jesu/Godflesh, Rob Crowe from Pinback/Goblin Cock/Heavy Vegetable, Steve Moore from Zombi, and Eluvium.
The first track is from Steve Moore, and he turns the album's title track into a gloriously creepy Italo-horror throb, taking the twilight progginess of the original song and morphing it into a totally 80's style synth piece a la Goblin or John Carpenter, just like we were hoping for. You could easily mistake this for an actual Zombi track with the buried swells of orchestral synth-strings and pulsating drum machine beat and hypnotic bassline, and the awesome synth hook that kicks in towards the end. I can close my eyes an immediately see images from Fulci's City Of The Living Dead or Argento's Phenomena crusing past my orbs. Awesome.
For Broadrick's remix of "Colony Collapse", I was expecting the kind of blurry, blow-out distorto blissout that he gave to remixes for Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Isis. Instead, he takes a chunk of rhythm from the song and reshapes it into a bouncing, crunchy percussive loop that almost sounds like a distorted dancehall beat, like something you'd hear from Broadrick's longtime collaborator Kevin Martin and his Razor X Productions stuff. Over this grinding loop, he drapes the track in all kinds of fuzzed out Jesu-like distortion, splatters the vocals into abstract smears of fx-damaged screaming, and brings in some pretty orchestral strings, shimmering streaks of feedback and noise. The result is a weird, dreamy slab of blissed-out, metallic trip-hop, heavy and eerie but really, really beautiful, too.
Rob Crowe's remix is the weirdest when he takes the song "Things Don't Look Good" and chops it all up, stitching the parts back together into a manic mess of chamber strings, weird tribal drumming, acoustic guitars and atonal piano, dousing the track in effects and spacey electronic noises, eventually becoming a wall of heavy tandem drumming that builds and builds, then abruptly shifts into a metallicized version of the original song.
Eluvium closes the record out by taking the song "Ergot" and stretching the guitars and keys out to infinity, removing the drums and transforming the track into a blissed out expanse of fuzzy ambient drone. The original chords and melodies are all smeared and obliterated, leaving just a slow swirling melodic haze and swells of deep shimmer, streaks of high end skree drifting across the horizon of Eluviums' solar hymn, reminiscent of Sunroof or Tim Hecker. Immensely beautiful. The record comes on rad gold/grey swirled vinyl in full color packaging, and it's already sold out from the label. Don't drag yer heels!

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A four-part concept EP from this Seattle group that gets so bizarre and epileptic I've had to come back to it several times to try to get a sense of what the fuck these guys are doing. Formerly a duo, Girth has now enlisted members of the obscure (but punishing) Seattle band Swarming Hordes and Brad Mowen (aka B.R.A.D., of Burning Witch/ASVA/The Accused fame) on vocals in order to execute this new chapter of their existence. The four songs that make up Sleeper, Awaken flow together as one larger nineteen minute piece, and each segment is a high energy blast of guitar/drum/keyboard/vocal based prog-spazz that seems to have been composed by utterly deranged mutants who have been dosed to the gills on Magma's 1,001 Degrees Centigrade, Scorn's Colossus, Univers Zero, late 80's speed metal and Throbbing Gristle's Second Annual Report . This is insane, disorientating speedskronk composed in intricate structures of fast thrash riffing, chaotic jazz seizures, stretched out slabs of ambient threat, skittering free improv percussion and whiteouts of blazingly fast blastbeats, deformed, dissonant guitars echoing through space, and hyperactive Moog solos. I'm totally at a loss as to what the concept behind these tracks are, with my only guide being the titles ("Confusion", "Betrayal", "Alone", and "Chaos", in that order) and the strange quotes that accompany them on the back of the CD case. Imagine Painkiller mixed with Orthrelm, a schizophrenic jazz/deathdub/speed assault that changes shape every fifteen seconds or so, throwing you off balance as the group splatters you with their mathy riffs and contorted guitar figures, psychedelic Slayer solos soaked in spaced-out digital delay, octopoidal drum assaults and passages of murderous calm, while Brad vomits a torrent of cosmic deathroar across the amphetamine rush of Girth's hyper-detailed avant-speedprog hallucination. This is a fucking brain shredder, crazed heavy prog on meth for fans of Tarantula Hawk, Crom-Tech, and Naked City. Includes great artwork from John Santos.

Track Samples:
Sample : alone
Sample : confusion

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Nope, in spite of the title, yer not going to hear any Hawkwindy space rock or anything like that; instead, this is the grubby new debut from Git Some, a Denver band which has a couple of members of the mucho-missed Planes Mistaken For Stars. The disbandment of Planes Mistaken For Stars was a complete downer last year; I was a latecomer to their brand of grungy, gnarled indie rock, having gotten into them with their album Up In Them Guts, and only got to see them live once. To me, PMFS sounded like a dirty, crusty, somewhat metallic version of The Afghan Whigs, dark and emotionally heavy, with a knack for crushing, deviously catchy riffs and awesome lyrics dripping with desperation and frustration. Their last album Mercy was their best, but the band threw in the towel too damn soon, announcing their breakup a mere few months after the albums release. Some of the members had other bands that they were involved with (like the gothy alt-country of Ghost Buffalo), but none of them seemed to come close to the power that Planes had.
Now there's Git Some, a newer band from Denver that features guitarist Chuck French and bassist Neil Keener from Planes Mistaken For Stars, and while their sound is very different from the gnarled, doomy indie rock of Planes, Git Some are the heaviest band that I've heard so far to have crawled from the ashes of PMFS. In fact, these guys are much skuzzier than their previous band, playing a raucous sort of post-punk somewhere in between Black Flag's feral intensity and the jagged, hardcore-informed rock of early 90's bands like Jesus Lizard, Drive Like Jehu and Circus Lupus. Which is a recipe I dig in a big way. Wiry guitar gristle wraps around thick distorted bass guitar, rubbery grooves are furiously executed over pounding, tightly wound drums; and the singer's hoarse, bloodied yelling is perfect for Git Some's thrashing noise-punk, like David Yow on a meth binge.
We have this ripping album on both CD and vinyl; the vinyl comes in a full color gatefold sleeve on limited edition red colored vinyl, with a coupon for a digital download of the album for yer MP3 device.

Track Samples:
Sample : Glowing Shadows
Sample : GIT SOME-Cosmic Rock
Sample : Wish Cigarette

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Nope, in spite of the title, yer not going to hear any Hawkwindy space rock or anything like that; instead, this is the grubby new debut from Git Some, a Denver band which has a couple of members of the mucho-missed Planes Mistaken For Stars. The disbandment of Planes Mistaken For Stars was a complete downer last year; I was a latecomer to their brand of grungy, gnarled indie rock, having gotten into them with their album Up In Them Guts, and only got to see them live once. To me, PMFS sounded like a dirty, crusty, somewhat metallic version of The Afghan Whigs, dark and emotionally heavy, with a knack for crushing, deviously catchy riffs and awesome lyrics dripping with desperation and frustration. Their last album Mercy was their best, but the band threw in the towel too damn soon, announcing their breakup a mere few months after the albums release. Some of the members had other bands that they were involved with (like the gothy alt-country of Ghost Buffalo), but none of them seemed to come close to the power that Planes had.
Now there's Git Some, a newer band from Denver that features guitarist Chuck French and bassist Neil Keener from Planes Mistaken For Stars, and while their sound is very different from the gnarled, doomy indie rock of Planes, Git Some are the heaviest band that I've heard so far to have crawled from the ashes of PMFS. In fact, these guys are much skuzzier than their previous band, playing a raucous sort of post-punk somewhere in between Black Flag's feral intensity and the jagged, hardcore-informed rock of early 90's bands like Jesus Lizard, Drive Like Jehu and Circus Lupus. Which is a recipe I dig in a big way. Wiry guitar gristle wraps around thick distorted bass guitar, rubbery grooves are furiously executed over pounding, tightly wound drums; and the singer's hoarse, bloodied yelling is perfect for Git Some's thrashing noise-punk, like David Yow on a meth binge.
We have this ripping album on both CD and vinyl; the vinyl comes in a full color gatefold sleeve on limited edition red colored vinyl, with a coupon for a digital download of the album for yer MP3 device.

Track Samples:
Sample : Glowing Shadows
Sample : GIT SOME-Cosmic Rock
Sample : Wish Cigarette

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Godflesh's self-titled debut is generally overshadowed by it's legendary follow-up Streetcleaner, and while the band's 1989 masterpiece is undeniably one of the greatest extreme music albums of all time, their eight song debut is just as crucial and influential on the entire spectrum of industrial metal and metallic avant-rock. This is where Justin Broadrick and G. C. Green first created their sound, a pummeling, mechanistic cross between the pounding, negatory NYC sludge of the Swans, grindcore's discordant, downtuned guitars, and the grinding, pistoning clang of factories spewing clouds of black filth in