header_image
BLOOD FROM THE SOUL  To Spite The Gland That Breeds  CD   (Earache)   9.98


I'm not shy about my love of older industrial metal bands. Over the past several years, I've been searching out some of the more obscure bands that came out of that particular era of underground metal (think late 80s through the early 90s) and have come up with killer reissues of albums from bands like Optimum Wound Profile, Pitch Shifter, and Treponem Pal, but I've also come across some older releases that just showed up in a dark corner of one of our suppliers warehouses. Like Blood From The Soul's debut album To SPite The Gland That Breeds. A lesser-known album from the early 90's Earache catalog, To Spite The Gland That Breeds is a crunchy blast of electronically-tinged industrial metal that I always wanted to give another look. An interesting collaboration between Lou Koller (front man for New York hardcore mainstays Sick Of It All) and Napalm Death bassist Shane Embury (who wrote all of the music for this project), BFTS came out of that industrial metal sound of the early 90s but in my opinion has aged a little better than a lot of similar stuff from the same era. That's due to the sound being really rooted in the churning industrialized death metal that Napalm Death themselves were consumed with at the time, taking it and blending it with massive mechanized rhythms and crushing breakbeats, and also incorporating lots of industrial ambience, factory drones and grinding noise. To Spite... has this threatening dystopian atmosphere that clings to the chugging breakbeat-driven mecha-metal and paranoid introspective lyrics, seriously heavy stuff that'll probably appeal to any fans of the atonal, icy guitar riffing and experimental feel of Napalm Death's Fear, Emptiness, Despair and Diatribes and the early 90's Godflesh albums. Embury's riffs are crushing as usual, and Koller's pissed-off yowl is a better match for this sort of machine metal than you might expect; I was always a fan of SOIA's older stuff so this wasn't a tough sell for me when it came out even if the pairing seemed weird to other metal fans. Some other interesting stuff on the album includes the dub-flecked industro-doom of "Nature's Hole", which sounds like some Vitus-strength doom treated with winding snake-charmer leads and the sort of slow , robotic reverb-heavy industrial rhythms of Scorn, and the mechanized motorik propulsion and shoegazer wall of sound guitars on "Suspension Of My Disbelief". It's the closing title track that gets really abrasive, a long sprawling industrial dirge

of slow, punishing Swans-style heaviness with plodding, cavernous drums and waves of howling feedback and guitar noise, slithering black synthesizers and sinister samples strewn across the creeping glacial crush. This disc is definitely worth checking out if you're into early 90s Napalm Death and industrial metal, and it's still one of my favorite albums in this style...


Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample :
Sample :
Sample :
Sample :