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BASTARD NOISE  The Progression Of Sickness  10" VINYL   (Deep Six)   9.99


The Skull's back with this two-song Ep that goes even further into the progged-out hardcore/power violence sound that bandleader Eric Wood pioneered in Man Is The Bastard. Since Bastard Noise turned into a full band a few years ago and evolved from brutal cosmic electronics into its current incarnation as a blasting, angular avant-hardcore outfit, the band has produced some of the most savage extreme music to emerge over the past few years. Needless to say, anyone that's been pining away for Man Is The Bastard's unique bass-heavy brand of blastprog needs to pick up all of the new B. Noise records pronto.

The Progression Ep is loaded with more of this stuff, and marks the arrival of new B-Noise drummer Jesse Appelhans from cult prog maniacs Upsilon Acrux. Beginning with the jagged, angular thrash of "The Contrarian", the band hurls itself into a super-violent eruption of hyper-speed hardcore riffs and warped noise rock anti-grooves, shrieking electrocuted-monkey vocals and bowel-rupturing guttural bellowing. The first half of the song is one of Bastard Noise's most vicious assaults, period, but then the latter half suddenly drops out into one of Wood's signature fields of psychedelic oscillator fuckery and buzzing, celestial ambience.

The other side features "Kicking The Hornets Nest", a sludgy battering-ram dirge that staggers and lurches with each distorted blast of bass guitar and spasmodic drumming, later turning into a weirdly catchy punk hook with Wood letting rip with some of his awesome bass-shred. The song dips into some almost Sabbathian doom at one point, swarming with more of those crazed fluttering electronic noises and brain-warping Theremins. Fuckin' brutal!