Now available on vinyl!

This album just came out with surprisingly little fanfare, but it's not just an unexpectedly heavy and doom-laden release from the usually electronic-centric Ohm Resistance, but it also features a lineup with some renowned musicians that's had me eager to hear this. Gator Bait Ten is an obscure project that has apparently been in existence since the late 90s, but Harvester is the first album from the band, which is headed up by M. Gregor Filip from The Blood Of Heroes and Simon Smerdon (aka Mothboy) along with Submerged and Ted Parsons (Prong/Jesu/Swans/Godflesh/Teledubgnosis). It's all instrumental, taking the deep ominous grooves and speaker-rattling, bone-shaking low-end of dubstep and applying it to slow-motion sludge metal, creating this killer atmospheric heaviness that combines swirling doom, gargantuan rhythmic groove, apocalyptic vibes, and a gloomy, dreamy aspect that reminds me of The Cure throughout the album. There's definitely a lot going on here that is right up my alley.

The disc begins with the low rev of an engine rumbling and the slow fade in of black subterranean drift, billowing clouds of Lustmordian darkness seeping in. Then the band drops in with a massive super heavy dirge, blown out buzzing bass guitar, glacial drumming, and eerie psychedelic guitar sliding and bending over the molten sludge, with streaks of high end feedback and dissonant chords ringing in the background, like droning doom metal smeared in spacey effects and loaded with deep almost dubstep-like bass rumble. "Groundswell" is a massive lurching industrial sludge groover, very Godflesh-like (a recurring refernce point throughout these songs), and "Trace Depth" opens with swirling guitar ambience, lilting drones and rich feedback hum, all pretty and mesmeric, till Parsons comes in pounding out a heavy lopsided beat and the songs switches into spacious slow motion crush as the swirling nebulae of droning guitar and bass builds and billows and fills the air like a more kosimiche Earth jam. The short interlude "Little Things" is a moody bass riff played over more wavering dark ambience and droning drift, then "Still Heat" lays down more massive slow drumming as layers of guitar, drone, and bass buzz are layered on, a pretty melody taking form beneath the throbbing drones and moody Cure-esque guitars, becoming something like a cross between the pretty down tuned crush of Jesu and the trance inducing pummel of Swans. The rest of Harvester is likewise heavy and lumbering and textural, introducing subtle voice samples into the dreamlike background mix of electronic ambience and looped drones and fx. The title track shows up towards the end, and it's one of the bleakest, most doom-laden tracks on the album. Massively detuned bass slides over the glacial drums, sinister leads creeping across the slow crawl of industrialized sludge, dark electronic melodies and fx and synths, like Godflesh slowed to a syrup-crawl within roiling clouds of dark electronic drift. Then the isolationist ambient finale opens with electronic flutter and looped ambient drift, another slow building dronescape of space effects and pulsating bass.

This is not at all what you'd expect from Ohm Resistance, which is better known for releasing the punishing post-apocalyptic dubstep and post-jungle of bands like The Blood Of Heroes, Submerged, Silent Killer, and Scorn. It's much more in the vein of bands like A Storm Of Light or Nadja, heavy and highly atmospheric, but infused with carefully constructed electronics and the sort of stark black ambience that would have been at home on a Pathological release back in the 90s. Really cool stuff, and I'm looking forward to hearing more soon from this resurrected outfit.