The follow-up to their debut Lp The Leprosy Of Unreality, Contagion brings us more of this Midwestern duo's murky frenzied barbarism, and it's even wilder this time around. When I wrote up their last album here at C-Blast, I described them as sounding a bit like a blackened doom version of Mazzy Star, but that's not quite as applicable here. The lineup is still the same, with singer Hellfire handling all of the vocals while Adam creates the music, but their sound is faster and more barbarous on Contagion, this woozy, deformed psychedelia that bears a vague resemblance to primitive black metal at the same time that the band buries themselves under a mountain of low-fi filth and abstracted heaviness.
A wave of black magma surges over the opening moments of "Prologue", as Hellfire coos and moans over the dissonant sludge, her soft tuneless singing drifting like wisps of ectoplasmic lunacy manifesting in the air above the slow motion trudge. Sounds a lot like Goslings, really, a messed-up dreamy wash of fractured sludgy heaviness and blackened noise. But then the band tears into the next song "Erosive", and everything changes substantially. Blastbeating drums race beneath murky sludgy black metal riffs, everything still extremely dissonant and buried under a heavy layer of sonic filth and rotting matter, Hellfire's washed-out voice lazily floating over the barbaric blackened thrash. It's incredibly messed-up but extremely intoxicating, a gluey mess of psychedelic black drone metal that is somehow really heavy and vicious sounding even with those cooing little girl vocals and the deliberate hazy, low-fi recording.
The whole album is just as abstract and atonal, the next song "Accipiter" beginning in a blur of minimal black metal riffing and slipshod blasting, but then it suddenly drops out as just a single slow pounding drum takes over and gauzy keyboard ambience drifts in alongside a haunting vocal melody, morphing the song into a strange lunar ritual, super minimal and eerie sounding as it stretches onward, till it finally explodes back into that barbaric noisy black metal. On "Statue", the duo slip into a stumbling doom-laden dirge that crawls along glacially, Hellfire's dreamy off-key vocals contrasting with the lurching diseased sludge that comes crumbling down around them. There's some weird industrial sounds that show up too, like the percussive clanking, abrasive noises and twisted guitar abuse on "Moonburnt" that becomes fused to the murky black blast. When the disc finishes with "Immolation II", it unleashes it's nosiest, most blown out song yet, a smeared mess of ethereal singing and thunderous thrashing drums, the guitars and other instruments rising and falling in massive waves of distortion and warped tremolo riffs, everything lost in a blizzard-blast delirium of volume and dissonance.
The disc comes in a hand-stamped Kraft gatefold jacket that includes a large full-color poster with the lyric sheet printed on the reverse. Issued in a limited edition of 250 copies.