This latest vinyl-only release from the blackdoom industrial noise behemoth Blue Sabbath Black Cheer is actually a collection of rare out-of-print live

material taken from one of the band's early tape releases and an obscure compilation, with one new previously unreleased track included for good measure. As

per the usual with these guys, it's a limited edition release, but the packaging is one of the best that they've come up with, with some really strange

imagery and a cool print job that makes this one of their coolest looking records.

The two a-side tracks are both from the Dead cassette that came out on Scumbag Tapes, and it's Blue Sabbath Black Cheer at their heaviest. The

first one, "Borre Fen", sounds like a more spacious Gnaw Their Tongues piece; it starts off with huge waves of deep black ambience washing up over piles of

industrial clang and stabs of symphonic strings, and then pull back to reveal monstrous growling vocals and harsh grating metal sounds creeping out of the

abyss. As the track continues, murky machine noises and dense whirring ribbons of dubbed-out bass and scraping scrapmetal swirl together into a nightmare

soundscape of crushing black industrial ambience with howling anguished vocals and bestial pitch-shifted death metal roars that sound like they are wafting

up from hell itself, and eventually the band lurches into a crescendo of crumbling blacknoise and pounding oildrum percussion. It's one of the most horrific

things I've ever heard from these guys. The next track "Black Acid" is equally heavy, beginning with a guitar grinding out thick buzzing powerchords against

a churning backdrop of static air-raid sirens and crackling black electricity. Within moments, the droning sludgeguitar and harsh noise are whipped into a

frenzy, turning into a cacophonous mass of super-heavy distorted chaos, almost bordering on power electronics. Howling feedback drones pierce the filth, and

slurred, inhuman vocals roar furiously through the torrent of noise, almost drowning out the screams of total abject suffering that echo in the background.

Imagine a more droning, ambient Stalaggh with huge black pustules of mega-distorted Total-like guitar skree and drone erupting everywhere, while damned souls

are stripped of their flesh somewhere out of sight.

The first of the tracks on the flipside comes from the Feral Debris Vol II compilation from 2007, and is more along the lines of the more recent

Blue Sabbath stuff - a thick, murky slab of inpenetrable black drone infested with malfunctioning tape noises, gurgling gutteral vocals, writhing clusters of

electrical buzz, the sound spread out and omninous, not so much crushing but still immensely heavy and threatening, especially when terrified screams and

gasping agonized howls start to appear alongside those hideously distorted demon-roars, which become so massive and engulfing that it feels like the earth

itself is tearing apart and turning into a great black all-devouring chasm. The untitled track that follows is a previously unreleased piece, droning

feedback hum and crumbling distorted loops and shafts of squealing high-end skree, blackened dronenoise roar slithering out of the pit, drowning in piles of

industrial clang and stinking once-human offal and crushing distorted sludge...and then this roar of sound drops out for a couple of minutes, leaving behind

smears of bassy amp hum and hellish puking snarls and delicate feedback filigree that hover in the air, slowly building in intensity back into a wall of

blazing hellish noizeblast, equal parts Abruptum and The Rita, the screams of the torn-apart swimming in an ocean of caustic sound, finally turning into a

powerful roaring distorto-drone at the end, before fading into the blackness.

Yeah, this is definitely one of the heaviest Blue Sabbath releases. Even though the material comes from a couple of different sources, it comes together

perfectly as a single nightmare vision on the record, and since most of us never had a chance of grabbing the original tapes/cdrs when they came out, this is

pretty much new music. The record is gorgeously packaged in a black jacket with spot varnish printing and creepy cover artwork of a decaying elk head wrapped

in twine and hanging in midair, and it includes an 11" by 11" cardstock insert. Limited edition of five hundred.