More of that bizarre freaked-out blackness known as "True Sheffield Black Psychedelia"! If you're a junkie for the weirdest, most "out" black metal out there, it's hard not to get pretty obsessed with the Frequency Thirteen catalog and all of the bands on the label that's based in Sheffield, England. All of this stuff is so weird and heavy and blackened and infectious that I've been listening to it constantly over the past few weeks, getting totally immersed in the mutant miasma of krautrock and klosmiche psych and noise-drenched black metal and damaged grindcore that all of these bands spew out, especially the blow-out brainfuck necrokrautrock of Skultroll and the utter mutant mania of Black Vomit. The brand new Black Vomit album Jungle Death was a shoe-in for our featured release this week, but we also have two cd-rs from Frequency Thirteen that pair up Black Vomit with other likeminded bands like the mighty Dukkha and the lysergic buzzblast of Rape Rack!

Three of the tracks are from the mighty Black Vomit, whose disgusting moniker belies the fact that these weirdos are also capable of creating some utterlty gorgeous and mesmerizing dark psychedelia unlike anything I've ever heard. Their first track "Squalltomb" is a thick slab of beautiful murky psych heaviness, a swirling murk-filled miasma of krautrocky percussion rumbling underneath waves of swirling shimmering synths and echoing feedback, surges of furious double-bass rising up from the fog, almost like a washed out, softer Nadja jam wrapped around a throbbing drum loop and buried beneath dense blankets of warm distortion and swirling space fx and industrial grit. This song is awesome, a blissed out hypno-sludge jam that I could spin all day. The next Black Vomit jam is "Eblis", is much longer at eleven minutes, and much more savage; fractured blastbeats and insanely blown-out riffs are smeared in fx and noise, a black clot of buzzing chaos blasting at hyperspeed. Halfway through it morphs into a buzzing, static-drenched dronedirge, riffage barely even there, just a rumbling mass of heavy distorted rumble, then exploding at the end into a psychotic blacknoise freakout littered with weird voices, natural sounds and crackling static. "The Sooty Stink Of Saturn" is the last Black Vomit track, and they let themselves sprawl out over a nearly twenty minute free-drone jam, heavy and epic and ominous, starting with pounding tribal drums and heavy sheet-metal in a fog of blackened hum and crushing corrosive ambience. The drums end up disappearing after a while, leaving us in a super minimal expanse of shifting low end and cavernous sound, a massive thunderous drone that stretches on and on, totally hypnotising in it's infinite presence, until the drums crash back in, turning the last few moments of the track into a chaotic industrial-tribal freakout, thick drones and scorching psychedelic drift washing over the relentless percussive pummel.

The Dukkha tracks are alternated in between the Black Vomit material, and they fit right in with their blats of massive slow-motion psychdirge. The first Dukkha track "Clod" is almost twenty three minutes long, a monstrous hypnotic dirge based around a throbbing Sabbathoid riff wound around the metronomic pound of the drums, the bass weaving thick thunderous low end, shrieking black metal vocals buried in the background beneath layers of fx and distortion, the saurian droneriff alternately crushing and dissonant, always draped in thick layers of crumbling distortion and cloudy arpeggios. Occasionally the riff breaks off into an almost Sleep-y doom boogie, or the drums fall apart into a chaotic mass of fumbling fills, but always it returns to that massive stoned ur-sludge groove, grinding over and over with Gore-like repetition. The second Dukkha track "Tarmac Salad" is far more tripped out, the drums stripped away, the guitars stretched into a static drone, vocals smeared and distended into weird alien gibberish, mindmelting fx covering everything. Still doomy and hypnotic and crushing, but way more abstract and damaged, a druggy mess of zonked out acid rock soloing, psychedelic guitar noise, splattery electronic fx, waves of menacing feedback and fucked up, Abruptum-like screams.

I LOVE this shit.