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AUSTRASIAN GOAT  self-titled  LP   (213 Records)   16.98
self-titled IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Some of you guys might remember Julien Louvet from his old band Shallnotkill, a French band that combined epic rock, sludge metal, and apocalyptic hardcore into a unclassifiable heaviness that I dug so much that we made a point to carry everything from the band that we could get our hands on. Shallnotkill disbanded a few years ago, and I hadn't heard much of anything from any of the members until earlier this year, when Julien contacted me to let me know about his new project, The Austrasian Goat. The band is a new one-man venture that Julien kicked off with this self-titled LP, which has actually been out of print for awhile, but we did manage to get a small quantity for C-Blast. I knew we'd be getting something dark and heavy from his new band, but this is actually more abstract and much doomier than what I had expected, over forty minutes of a weird sort of murky, demonic doom ritual that plunges into vastly blacker regions of netherdrift than anything else Julien has been involved in, a haunting, cavernous combo of apocalyptic graveyard sludge and screeching, frostbitten black metal wound together into huge, sprawling fields of hypnotic darkness. The band takes it's name from an obscure geographic reference from the Dark Ages that was used for a mysterious region located somewhere in between Germany and France which had remained a pagan region up until the eighteenth century, and these and other esoteric scrawlings creep through the murky black doom on this record, a lament for the death of a pre-Christian culture that takes shape with the intensely nihilistic lyrics . Austrasian Goat's music is a creeping funeral dirge; plodding ultraheavy drums, swathes of grim minor key ambient keyboards, corroded slo-mo riffing creeping at a tectonic pace, and almost medieval sounding orchestral parts combine with Louvet's rasping, echo-chamber shriek into a bleak, atmospheric funeral fog interspersed with brief passages of dark ambience or weeping orchestral strings, a sort of crushing, abstract necro-misery somewhere in between Nortt, Skitliv and Burning Witch...and Grief, too, whose misanthropic influence is not so much heard as it is felt, and which is backed up by the cover of Grief's 'I Hate The Human Race' that is also included here that closes the end of side A. Misery and anguish seep into every corner and crevice of Austrasian Goat's sound, and if you like your doom and black metal miserable and hateful, I dunno if it can get much lower than this. The record comes in a chipboard jacket printed with black artwork, and again, is out of print!