Out of all of the industrial metal bands that emerged through the 90s, Dead World have always seemed to me to be one of the most fearsome. Though the band has slipped somewhat into obscurity since disbanding at the end of the 90s, they were responsible for some of the harshest mechanized heaviness to come out of this particular period in underground metal. The band was the brainchild of artist Jonathan Canady, also known for his work with Deathpile (which took it' s name from one of the tracks on Thanatos), Nightmares, Angel Of Decay, and Blunt Force Trauma, joined on this album by David Williams on synthesizers and electronics. Early on, Dead World released a couple of grinding monstrosities on Release, the experimental sub-label of Relapse Records, but it wasn't until the band's final album Thanatos Descends (released in 1996 on Bloodlust!/Malsonus) that it achieved full nuclear power, delivering one of the heaviest and most nightmarish offerings of dystopian machine-metal this side of Streetcleaner. Issued in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, Thanatos Descends like most albums of it's type owes a considerable debt to Godflesh's pioneering mecha-grind, but Dead World pushed this sound out into even more corrosive realms of industrial ambience and electronic violence, alternating the slow, skull-crushing dirges with extreme noise and an atmosphere that reeked with the stench of rotting corpses, the smoke of burning cities, and the acrid odor of gunpowder.

Dead World took the downtuned mechanical crush of Streetcleaner and dragged it into a filthy hole of death metal slime and corrosive power electronics in a way that I'd never heard previously. The vocals are deep, guttural, and heavily distorted, a distant roar beneath the grinding machine-death grooves and concrete riffs, while the programmed double bass drumming and the chunky, barbaric riffs come right out of early 90s death metal on songs like "Warhammer", "The Scourge", "Violator". These songs writhe with scenes of extreme sexual violence, blood-soaked killing fields, and dystopian horror, set to blasts of pneumatic power that range from droning, hypnotic heaviness crawling in slow motion to the faster mecha-death pummel of "Deathpile". But the multi-part "Thanatos" pieces that alternate between the industrial-death songs are pure industrial noise. Earlier on, these tracks appear as blasts of extreme feedback and high-end drone across volleys of tribal drumming, sometimes vaguely resembling the extreme cosmic noise destruction of CCCC. Later, they venture into weird dissonant ambience formed out of synthesizer strings and sparse percussion, these bizarre atonal soundtrack-like pieces occasionally turning into brief passages of Goblin-esque creep before they spread back out into long, abstract experimental noisescapes. These two sides of the album come together on the final two tracks, where the dying squelch of a mainframe computer is devoured by washes of doom-laden guitar noise and skittering rhythms, before turning into the propulsive industrial sludge of "Thanatos V", where huge orchestral blasts and spacey synths appearing over machine rhythms and crushing bass riffs.

This album holds a pretty high position on my own personal list of favorite industrial metal albums. It's up there with Optimum Wound Profile's Lowest Common Dominator, early Pitch Shifter, and Scorn's Vae Solis but is also vastly heavier than any of 'em, and has more in common with the more extreme, flesh-rending apocalypses of recent industrial doom mongers like Human Quena Orchestra, Wicked King Wicker and Vennt. Although Thanatos Descends was released in a limited edition over fifteen years ago, I've managed to obtain a small quantity of this original pressing for C-Blast, and it's highly recommended for anyone into the harshest realms of post-Streetcleaner heaviness.