A simple staccato folk melody is plucked on a lone acoustic guitar while children weep in the background and the voice of woman with a British accent loops

over and over, "...I'm so devestated, I get nothing out of life...I can't see anything in the future, I wish that they'd just kill me too...", her

voice becoming layered upon itself, the words repeating over and over. This is the creepy beginning to an amazing new cassette that I just received from the

band Dead Times from Providence, Rhode Island. This new band features members of The Body, the drums/guitar duo that released a couple of cds/7"s of titanic

sludge a couple of years ago. Dead Times are just as heavy and apocalyptic in tone as The Body, but these guys take a very different approach as they combine

elements of doomy black metal, old school industrial and martial folk into a series of five pounding endtime visions. Using guitar and electronics, Dead

Times move through passages of extreme slow-motion Swans sludginess with machine-like rhythms grinding over distorted basslines and foul shrieking vocals,

loops of decaying harmonium-like melodies awash in tape hiss, monstrous blasts of dirgy Abruptum-esque blacknoise, unsettling sound collages, and parts that

sound like an intensely blown-out, wheezing and blackened industrial-doom version of Der Blutharsch. And at the same time, behind the punishing pneumatic

rhythms and scorched black metal vocals and nightmarish samples, there's actually some really beautiful sounds found here, especially when the harmonium-like

melodies appear. It's a strange meeting between European martial industrial music and abstract black/doom, somewhere in between Der Blutharsch and Von Thronstahl, and Abruptum and the weirdo Satanic machine-musik of Beherit's H418ov21.C. Limited to 250 hand-numbered copies, and comes with silkscreened artwork.