After a stack of vinyl and cassette releases, the Washington-based black industrial demons in Blue Sabbath Black Cheer finally released a full-length collection of their music on Cd, most of it previously released but now hard to find material, with a handful of unreleased tracks that are exclusive to this disc. And it's brutal stuff, a variety of 7", 12" and cassette tracks that's some of their heaviest recorded material. By now, BSBC have established themselves as one of the cruelest industrial noise duos out there, infusing their grinding abstract noisescapes with a blackened metallic heaviness that makes their music much heavier and nastier than most "noise" outfits. It's vile black industrial sludge, crushing droning low end that churns beneath chaotic masses of harsh distortion, squirming electronic detritus, bestial roaring vocals, and monolithic metallic buzz, a strange hybrid of Throbbing Gristle and Sunn, UK power electronics and black ambience, all sculpted into their own bludgeoning visage that can shift from solemn sepulchral drift or throbbing industrial crawl into skull-crushing maelstroms of pure black noize holocaust.

The featured tracks explore all known aspects of their hellish factory din. The first track comes off of the Eva 7" that came out on Daisy Cutter, a grinding lumbering cacophony of crashing metal recorded live, churning low end violence and ultra distorted death metal vokills, pounding mechanical percussion deep beneath an inferno of black distortion, piercing streams of feedback and roiling harsh noise, with some gnarled horns from Geoff Walker from improv-noise-rock behemoths Gravitar. The next track is shorter and more minimal, a murky drumbeat looped over and over, surrounded by gurgling demonic voices, syrupy horns, washes of chthonic drone and pitch-shifted orchestral strings, strange mysterious gurgles and chittering hidden in the deep, inky shadows of their Lustmordian necro ambience. Peals of blackened riffage float through smoldering electronics, distant crashing/slamming metal, and demonic roars of "Genocide" (originally off of their split with Pig Heart Transplant), as extreme high pitched feedback tones and anguished screams lash against the pound and creep, like Wolf Eyes gone blacknoise. "Maggot" (from the It's Battery Acid, You Slime compilation) is a squirming, seething mass of synthesizer filth and clanking metal, guttural growls and gnashing jaws prowling through the dank junknoise dungeon, while the following untitled track is a shimmering nocturnal driftscape of stretched out chthonic drone and soft circular scraping, using source material provided by noise legends New Blockaders to craft a bleak minimal ambience a la Organum, laced with ominous minor key shadows and weighted with deep layers of subterranean rumblings and low-end, slow-motion metal abuse, becoming more malevolent and noisy and abrasive. The last track (from the excellent Lp that came out on Troniks) is the harshest of them all, an agonizing mass of high end frequencies and metallic screech, like strings pitched extraordinarily high and set against distant grinding percussive noises and dragged metal and low-end whir.

The disc's centerpiece is the massive seventeen-minute "Borre Fen / Untitled", which combines the track from the Borre Fen Lp on What We Do Is Secret with a collaboration with Anakrid that originally came out on the Mutually Assured Destruction Vol. 1 Lp. This is Blue Sabbath in full-on, pants-shitting terror mode. At first, it's another awesome slab of blighted dronemusic, oceanic waves of black drift and distant creaking noises slowly whirling through the void, slowly unfolding into a vast black stygian landscape. Pretty soon, though, the sound descends into total nightmare, as guttural inhuman shrieks and monstrous sighs begin to rise out of fields of formless rumble and a steadily growing cacophony of metallic creaks and scrapes, swells of processed vocalizations become stretched into demonic smears of pain and horror. A percussive clanking builds in strength, becoming a pounding locomotive grind, as more and more gasping death groans and screams appear, the sound becoming extremely chaotic, vicious bestial vocals processed into nightmarish slavering violence, then collapsing into minimal stretches of gong-like reverberations and mysterious metallic timbres at the end. It's an intense and terrifying soundtrack to the torments of Hell if I've ever heard one.

Crucial listening for fans of blackened industrial evil. If stuff like Stalaggh, MZ412, Nordvargr, Megaptera, Stratvm Terror, early Robedoor, Abruptum, Melek-Tha, Diagnose: Lebensgefahr, and Velehentor infects your speakers on a regular basis, you've got to get on top of this excellent collection. Presented in a Stumptown style gatefold jacket with black on black printing, and limited to 500 copies.