Just when you think that they can't possibly get any heavier, Ohio sludgelords Fistula come and drop this ten-megaton slab of demonic deathsludge on us, which threatens to shatter every bone in your puny skeletal frame in the process. Jesus, this is heavy. One look at the cover tells you that something is different, there's a brand new logo, all spiky and black metallish, with a big 'ol upside-down cross where the "T" in Fistula should be, emblazoned on the awesomely messed-up-looking cover art (which is reproduced in more detail on the insert) of a goat-horned, peg-legged demon casting his gaze across a wretched wasteland of hanging corpses and dead trees. Yikes! This looks like an old demo cover for some long-forgotten death metal band from 1990. It all comes together once you throw the disc in and the first song "The Pessimist" kicks in, all bulldozing low-end riffage and sneering garbled shrieks, and you realize, holy shit, Fistula has gone death metal! Well, maybe not quite, but We, The Beast does see the band suddenly morphing into an even heavier and more death metallish sound, as if they've been devouring massive amounts of Cianide, Bolt Thrower, Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, Grave, Autopsy and Asphyx in the past year since Burdened by Your Existence. Their punishing, nihilistic sludge/thrash is now infected with a massive old-school death metal vibe, which I guess has always been present in their music, but I don't remember them ever sounding this insanely heavy. I'm talking depth-charge heavy.

The recording quality has a lot to do with this vibe, I think; the recording is heavily reverbed, cavernous, feedback everywhere, and sounds a whole lot like an old first wave death metal album, a perfectly murky, thunderous sound quality for their pummeling concrete-heavy scum-doom. The signature Fistula sound hasn't really changed, it's still a bruising combination of super-slow, noxious sludge and faster mid-paced crossover thrash riffs, but they throw in some seriously fast thrashy riffs and jackhammer double-bass on tracks like "The Pessimist" that propel this into new levels of skullcrush, as does the bestial gallop of "Bipolar Bear" that erupts into a blast of violent thrash at the end, and the way that "The Teething" crams together both Grief-strength sludge and a killer thrashpunk raveup in just fifty seconds. Other songs include "Die, You're A Fucking Cop" and "We Don't Need You" and the curiously optimistic sounding "New Found Hope", which is the closest that Fistula gets to anything resembling melody on the disc, a monstrous doomdirge with soulful drunken wailing, a ridiculously downtuned riff, and earthshaking drums that sound like small builidings collapsing in on themselves. And the last track "Depression Session" is the longest song on here, almost eight minutes of meandering death metal, blaxploitation samples, recordings of screaming women lifted from some splatter movie, and bits of electronic noise.

This band doesn't get nearly enough attention, in my humble opinion, but they should. Anyone into bands like Coffins, Cianide, Anatomia, Spun In Darkness, Hooded Menace and Asphyx need to hear this album pronto. It's easily one of the heaviest fucking discs of 2009.

Packaged in a dvd case with a foldout insert, and limited to just five hundred copies.