Album number four from Jason Crumer, who in the past has produced heavily abrasive industrial noise and dark ambience with such projects as Amazing Grace, Now In Darkness World Stops Turning and American Band, as well as playing in the sludgepunk band Facedowninshit. Lately, he's focused on releasing his harsh noise soundscapes and grim droneworks under his own name, with an acclaimed album on Hospital from a couple of years ago called Ottoman Black. I'd lost track of Crumer's more recent offerings after the American Band album, but came across this album from late last year on Misanthropic Agenda when I was restocking some of the older MA catalog for the shop. More subdued than some of the other Crumer-related releases that I've picked up, Walk With Me is sinister industrial noise/ambience, composed of harsh textures, scrap yard abrasion, and corroded drones that often feel as if they have been constructed in the form of an abstract horror film score, crafted for jarring shocks and sudden descents into deep dread, shot through with moments of startling beauty.

A pervasive current of unease runs through the entire album. The first piece "Perfect Comfort" throws back the rug to reveal a hive of rattling and hissing percussive sound, a nest of serpents seething beneath a black churning sky, locust swarms chittering in stands of dead trees, distant rumblings of thunder, and a muffled percussive throb undulating deep below. By the 2:00 mark, my skin crawls. The clamor of pipes and metal fades in after a while, overwhelming the rattling sounds and turns the last six minutes into a massive orchestra of scrap yard violence, blurry distant operatic voices, and deep reverberant breathing, becoming a massive menacing drone by the end. Then "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant" blends layers of processed minimalist piano into a blur of sound, clustered Phillip Glass-esque keys sparkling across the first few minutes before drifting off out of sight, then slowly returning amidst ringing drones and peals of scraping metal and blasts of distorted electronics, becoming more frenzied and chaotic as more layers of industrial screech and howl are piled on till it becomes a raging wall of noise, returning briefly to the clusters of piano before ending. Distant horn-like tones open "Love Is More important Than Pride" and repeat over and over, forming an eerie dronescape of looping horn blasts drifting across a vast distance, chased by trails of silvery feedback and emergent percussion, leading straight into "Sexual Artifacts" which casts the album in darker shadow, grating metal clank echoing across a yawning abyss as swells of low end dread seep up from the depths, a howling something off in the distance, long stretches of nothing but dark space and that recurring metal clang drifting up from the bottom of the pit, the tension shattered in a sudden, terrifying shock of metallic noise and high string-like drones and damaged piano.

"Walk With Me" at first takes shape as a soft buzzing that stretches outward for some time, then begins to slowly expand into a gently fluctuating block of drone, becoming more layered with buzz and grit, stretching out infinitely, a buzzing Niblock-style thrum, a mix of grinding motor buzz and buzzing electrical cables working together in concert to hit a perfect static harmony. The second half then begins to bloom into a symphonic cloud of drone and buzz, almost like an orchestra tuning up in slow motion while a massive engine rumbles in the background, the last few minutes of the track building into a crushing, all-devouring Sunroof-esque dronescape.

At last, Crumer returns to the seething discomfort that started the disc. The previous roaring drone leads right into "Pining", with the loops of string-like drones and rumbling undercurrents of machine noise now moving like a black tide across the surface of the track, great waves of looping, hypnotic drone and noise surging into a monumental wall of sound, finally igniting into a pulverizing blast of harsh noise, spastic, choppy, moving fast, a roaring assault of feedback/distortion warfare that closes the album in a magnificent act of immolation.

Presented in a full-color, six panel digipack.