On looking at the murky black and grey hand-numbered slipcover that holds the jewelcase and the harsh, abstract artwork that accompanies Unable To Abide The Silence Of This World, you would be right to assume that this is going to be some seriously grim industrial music. Geometric symbols and wreaths of eagle heads circle a blurry photo of a charred forest, and the rest of the inserts and packaging for the album is similiarly murky and threatening in appearance. And once the discs begins to spin, this debut from the UK power electronics unit Shift does indeed creep through a slow-moving, brooding domain of blackened machine rhythms, hissing drones, and crushingly heavy industrial noise. The first few tracks skulk from grey slabs of washed out distorted white noise and grinding power electronics with vicious gutteral screams ripping through the fog of amplifier buzz, but it's on the third track that Shift reveal themselves as purveyors of utterly monstrous machine-dirge. "Crying" is a twelve-minute nightmare of massive, suffocating industrial doom-throb, a black miasma of fluttering feedback and swooping oscillator noise, vomiting death roars and ominous melodies buried deep in the meat of Shift's electronic wreckage, and a pounding, piston-like rhythm that sounds and feels like a mighty metal gear press crunching over and over in a thunderous martial loop, a thunderclap of rusted metal and oiled gears turning bones into dust and flesh into water. By itself, it's one of the heaviest black-industrial jams ever. The rest of the album explores similiar territory, a corrosive wasteland of demonic industrial throbs and churning, rhythmic noise, martial rhythms slick with oil and distorted acid-hiss, subsonic rumbling and hellish vocals, corroded noise loops and grinding bass, a hideous apocalyptic noisescape. I'm reminded of the evil power electronics/industrial noise of Control and Goatvargr, and at times even the ritualistic subterranean rumblings of Tenhornedbeast (particularly in early minutes that give birth to the grinding machine-doom clatter and buzzsaw ambience of "Look Now") and the Death Industrial stylings of Cold Meat artists like Brighter Death Now. But Shift are much harsher and heavier than any of those entities (save maybe for Goatvargr), a murky, bass-heavy and terminally doomed vision of power electronics generated through analogue synths, effects pedals, contact mics, sheet metal, and samplers. The disc is limited to 300 hand-numbered copies and packaged in the handassembled slipcase.