Hail the Black Goat, once again. All of the stuff that the label has been putting out from this small, incestuous circle of blackdoom/industrial noise obsessed freaks has been consistently satisfying. The debut from A Taste For Decay comes out of that same grimy, necrotic dronecult and features one of the members from Welter In Thy Blood, another of the Black Goat affiliated groups, as well as a guest appearance from Alan Dubin (Gnaw/Khanate/OLD) who lends his demonic vocalizations to one of the longer tracks on the disc. The sound is less metallic and riff-based than the other bands on the label, but these six tracks of occult black ambience and abstract doom are still plenty heavy, blended together into a blackened, nightmare soundscape.
The first track is all filthy, rumbling drones carved out of distorted guitar and molten feedback, cutting through thick grinding industrial blackness that stretches out into infinity, endless oceanic waves of minimal low-end thrum, and disturbed by ominous creaking sounds, like hearing a rotting ship adrift on a stygian sunless sea and navigating towards the keening siren of feedback in the distance.
The next track is a Nurse With Wound-esque nightmare of random creepiness, starting off with weird, monstrous chuckling, clanking chains, scraped metal, a machine-like clang and whir in the background, a bleak sort of factory-drift that slowly reveals huge doom metal guitars approaching in the distance, and murderous whispers conspiring nearby in the shadows. Hypnotic loops of metallic drone and murky synths emerge over time, bells begin to toll ominously way off on the horizon, and it all builds slowly and incrementally into a hellish din of roaring noise and blackened ambience.
An acoustic guitar introduces the third track, the eerie strum drifting over buzzing machine noise and more of that bleak factory atmosphere that seems to pervade the entire album...more muted and subliminal than the previous tracks, this forms into a hushed industrial nightmare of droning strings and far off guitar buzz, which then lurches into the suffocating death industrial drone of the subsequent track.
The eleven minute "Approaching Fresh Throats" features Dubin's ghoulish vokill contributions over a slow-motion cacophony of buzzing bass tones, disembodied whispers stretching out across the abyss, a spacious ghoulish ambience full of deep-earth rumble and dank crypt ambience. The first half of this is seriously creepy and oppressive, but later it shifts into a more expansive soundscape of mysterious field recordings, the patter of rainfall, bells, metal striking metal, with those minimal bass swells continuing to rumble in the background.
The album closes with more eerie field recordings and found sounds, dark expansive ambience laced with the buzzing of black flies, a music box chiming a familiar childhood melody, wind chimes singing softly in the cold wind of an oncoming storm, and as this abstract ambience continues to unfold, a distant swarming buzz can be heard just over the horizon, and a soft metallic whir seeps in as the sound of children playing materializes in the background, the sound haunting at first, but growing more and more sinister as the track comes to a close...
Terrific nightmarish ambience that blends aspects of black ambient and CMI-style death industrial and abstract metallic drone into a hallucinatory smear of sound, echoing the ghastly formlessness of Abruptum, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer and early Sunn in it's heavier moments, but mostly inhabiting a much more subtle realm of shadowy crypt-drift that's still pretty damn enthralling. The disc is limited to an edition of 1000 copies.