This Virginia-based outfit made quite an impression around here with this self-titled disc. Marked by the use of cavernous reverb, pulsating skull-throbbing drones, and black metal style vokill horror, Frailty Of Angels doesn't hide the fundamental influence that Bastard Noise's heavy "caveman electronics" has had on their nihilistic industrial soundscapes, but does take the sound into a colder, exponentially more monstrous direction that makes this one of the best power electronics-style discs that we've picked up this year. It's pretty goddamn great.

The fourteen minute opening track "Extinction Swarm" has all of the ingredients of Frailty's bleak inhuman sound; deep pulsating electronic noise births cicada-swarms of abrasive glitch, invaded by utterly demonic guttural gargles that sound like they were lifted off an old death metal record, deep and bellowing like the newer Bastard Noise stuff, but even deeper and more deathly. And the sound here is far more desolate, minimal grinding buzz surrounded by an arctic atmosphere, spacious and barren, like , nightmarish power electronics drifting through a cavernous underground hangar, the sound keeps swelling with super-distorted waves of mid-range white noise and layers of crackling static while apocalyptic visions of televised war casualties and genocide are growled over top, a constantly shifting and evolving field of electrical activity, shrill scraping and mechanical squeals swept up in the blizzard-blasts of hiss and squalls of chirping 8-bit noise, evoking the feeling of being stalked by some monstrous entity within an abandoned underground bunker.

The remaining tracks are equally grim. A short blast of sinister drone opens "No Future", leading into sputtering oscillator mayhem, a dronescape of buzzing power cables and tiny drills. Bestial grunts spew over cold abyssal sonar signals and smoldering black ambience on "Die Alone". Mangled power electronics, ear-shredding feedback, and distorted mumbling vocals come together on the ten minute "Watching A Trainwreck" that movesthrough dense clots of grating industrial maelstrom and seething black atmospheres, sudden blasts of murky television transmissions and grueling exercises in feedback abuse. "No Life" rushes in and sweeps over you like a fast-moving cloud of black vapor, more reverb-heavy black metal style croaks over abrasive industrial scrape, hypnotic screaming, and weird bleating horn-like sounds all whipped into a hellish blizzard of black sound. The final untitled track closes with another extended wave of distorted sine wave mayhem that is so fuzzed out, it sounds like someone playing massively distorted guitar while a portal to another dimension hums ominously, letting monstrous breathing sounds, swarming locusts, and flesh/metal abominations crawl through into our world.

Gotta recommend this to anyone into the more blackened neo-power electronic sounds of Navicon Torture Technologies/Theologian and Iron Fist Of The Sun. Comes in a minimal all-white digipack with a black symbol screen printed onto the cover, with a lyric insert included inside, limited to fifty hand-numbered copies.