Also available on limited edition colored vinyl.

We've been hearing the influence of late 80's underground industrial rock appearing here and there lately with newer bands drawing influence from the works of Killing Joke, Ministry, Revolting Cocks, and similar bands, and as big fans of this era of alternative music, we're all about it. This new band from Chicago, which was ground zero for the hardest industrial rock bands of the time by way of the Wax Trax! Records, pays homage to this sound by incorporating the influence of bands like Swans, Killing Joke, Big Black and Ministry with a much more ambitious and modern brand of heaviness. Circle Of Animals is the duo of Sanford Parker (recording engineer for countless underground metal bands and member of Minsk/Buried At Sea/Twilight) and Bruce Lamont (from Chicago prog metallers Yakuza), who bring in an assortment of drummers for their recordings that has included formidable names like Dave Witte and Steve Shelley. The band synthesizes some of our specific favorite sounds from the 80s: the metallic machine crunch of Land Of Rape And Honey, the apocalyptic slow-motion pummel of Swans, the dark triumphant power of What's THIS For...!, and Destroy The Light sounds to our ears like some previously unimagined fusion of Wax Trax! and modern dirge metal. Lamont's distinctive soulful vocal style leads many of these songs, but it's the powerful rhythmic foundation that really dominates the music. As with "Invisible War", the song that kicks this disc off with a bang, a pounding mid tempo industrial metal pummel fronted by distorted vocals and a pounding mechanical drum battery, backed by droning keyboards and droning bass, heavy and hypnotic and very reminiscent of Ministry, even having a slight militaristic rigidness to it; then, the second half changes shape into a Killing Joke-esque tribal workout, rolling drums and howling synths and electronics raging over top of a catchy melodic hook beneath it all, rising skyward before lurching back down into that killer earlier pounding industrial metal.

We were mighty impressed with that first song, but while the rest of the disc has more of that machine-driven crunch, they also spread out into different sonic territory, too. The second song is more heaviness, "Seminal Animal" featuring Lamont's deep Gira-esque croon over lurching drums looping electronic noise, total early Swans worship that builds into a vicious machine-like grind; and "No Faith" opens with a volley of thrashing drumming before shifting into a crushing industrialized dirge metal assault with stentorian speechifying over a dramatic Neurosis-like riff and soaring orchestral synthesizers, a fucking awesome channeling of Killing Joke via Neurosis, seriously massive, with huge riffage and choral voices ending in a looped cluster of percussive loops and drifting machine noise.

But then "All Spirit/No Mind" comes in all slow and shambling, a harmonica floating softly over druggy circular chants and pounding dirge drums and grinding bass, and it sounds a lot like something from Yakuza, a lumbering angular groove with tumbling percussion layered in the background, a mysterious, delirious mystical tribal sludge jam that even sports some smokey jazz saxophone that creeps in towards the end.

A soulful, psychedelic vibe comes in on "And Together We Are Forever", the dark early 90's indie rock vibe actually reminding us of Afghan Whigs, weirdly enough, but it's matched with those machine-like drums and droning keyboards. "Lessen Human Suffering" is another metallic dirge, furious industrial drumming and a suspended doom riff kicking in with spacey electronic fx, later bursting into full on thrash and then into some almost danceable tribal rhythms, and "Poison The Lamb" has soulful female singing coming in over it's hypnotic, heavy throb.

The most divergent track on the album is the last, though. The closing title track ends this with a twelve minute space jam of Hawkwind synths flowing in from black space, filling the first few minutes with pure kosmiche drift; then another minimal synth loop comes in and repeats endlessly over the whoosh and rumble of the space drones, total Tangerine Dream/Ash Ra style ambience, and then the sax drifts in, joining additional layers of cinematic ambience. When the drums suddenly burst in with the minimal vocals, it turns into a John Carpenter-style pulse, picking up speed, becoming a propulsive, menacing krautrock-like groove that rides out to the very end.

The limited edition 12" that Circle Of Animals released a few months ago had us looking forward to their first full-length, but we're stoked to report that Destroy The Light went way beyond our expectations, welding a dramatic metal massiveness (that was only hinted at on their Ep) to their churning, hypnotic tribal-industrial groove, which is produced here by a cast of drummers that includes John Herndon from Tortoise, John Merryman from Cephalic Carnage, Dave Witte (Discordance Axis/Burnt By The Sun/Municipal Waste) and Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley. Definitely recommended!