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CHARNEL HOUSE  The Leprosy Of Unreality  LP   (SYGIL)   11.98


Charnel House is a new Midwestern black metal-ish duo with a guy named Adam handling all of the instruments, and a girl named Hellfire on vocals, and they play a strange mixture of super low-fi warped nightmare blackened slowcore and primitive, psychedelic black metal that at times sounds like a blackdoom Mazzy Star. That sounds strange, but it's the one comparison that keeps entering my head every time that I listen to this Lp, the band's first. Released on Sygil, the small label operated by the guys in the equally damaged black/doom band OS, The Leprosy Of Unreality is scrawled in such a murky, low fi production that the music sounds as if its buried beneath years of dust and mold, the guitars washed out and buzzing in the background, the drums likewise murky and flat, but instead of merely sounding like a grungy basement recording, this sounds ancient and mysterious, warped by exposure to subterranean dampness and decay, as if the band was recorded playing in a hidden sub-basement, the recording captured on a moss-covered reel to reel. Then you have Hellfire's ghostly, narcoleptic voice, drifting across the album languidly, a disembodied moan trapped between worlds, sounding eerily like Hope Sandoval trapped in some musty underground tomb.
The album starts with "Law Of Opposites", a seriously detuned guitar grinding out a mangled doom riff, the sound steeped in murk and grime, the drums creeping slowly, barely noticeable in the background, playing a simple plodding backbeat as Hellfire's undead moan appears, swaddled in sepulchral reverb. This is one of the songs that makes me think of Mazzy Star; ghoulish, blackened, utterly creepy slowcore, like a skeletal low-fi doom version of Mazzy Star, ghostly and lingering, rumbling industrial noise off in the background, hissing cymbals drifting through massive reverb and cavernous echo. I could seriously listen to an entire album of this, but Charnel House have other ideas. The dolorous slowcore drift is ripped apart with the following track "Orison", a mangled low-fi instrumental black metal chaos, going from noisy blasting fury into off-kilter dissonant riffs, clanging noise rock guitars colliding over sloppy blastbeats, total frenzy, followed by another minimalist noisy black metal blast in "Paroxysm", where a chunky, doomy riff repeats itself endlessly over a blastbeat as Hellfire's ghostly cooing vocals drift back in, the song becoming creepy, abstract BM weirdness.

The second side tumbles further into abstract black murk. "Immolation" is another chaotic wash of dissonant guitars and stumbling blastbeats, those spooky vocals drifting like EVP, the track eventually breaking down into a dreamy, blackened dronescape. "Passage (Out from Illusion)" is pure black ambient drone, abstract guitar noise and cthonic drones burrowing beneath feedback hum and scraped strings, and the last song "Grave Digging", another instrumental, ends the album with one last hellswarm of blackened tremolo riffs and muffled, distant blastbeats, so far off and indistinct that you can barely make them out, just a thunderous rumbling on the periphery, a swirling, off-kilter black blast that almost sounds like something from Portal, but far murkier and more spectral...

Comes in a simple parchment cardstock jacket with high contrast black art, limited to 250 copies.