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An insanely heavy collaboration between industrial sludge beasts Pig Heart Transplant and black industrialists Blue Sabbath Black Cheer that turned out to be exactly as rib-crushing as I thought it would be. Right off the bat, the opening track (all of 'em are untitled) pours forth in a slow-motion wave of vomitous low-end crush and deformed doom-laden riffage, rumbling detuned heaviness laced with monstrous pitch-shifted roars and demonic growling that is stretched out into syrupy smears of inhuman hunger. As this first track continues to uncoil it's great, heaving mass across the beginning of this disc, those bestial roars are subsumed into what sound like doom metal riffs that have been slowed down to one-tenth speed and broken apart by damaged recording equipment and malfunctioning guitars, further enshrouded by waves of distant factory din and those massive tectonic reverberations. From there, the music gets slower and uglier and more desolate, moving into massive blasts of percussive power and reverberating metallic rhythms, smears of dub-like delay applied to huge sheet-metal movements, and the hellish creaking and squealing of infernal machinery bent to its task of tearing apart flesh and powdering bone.
What makes this some of the heaviest stuff I've heard from either of these bands is the pulverizing guitar/bass sound that writhes throughout these five long tracks, giving this a much heavier and more metallic weight than usual from either of these outfits. And those guttural ghastly vocals sound like something off of a death metal album, dipped in toxic slime and stretched into even more hideous exhortations. It's all really fucking hideous; there are moments on this disc where the sound suddenly lurches into a shambling forward momentum that's insanely heavy, like the tail end of the second track where the squealing mechanical noisescape suddenly gives wet, messy birth to a lumbering mecha-dirge that almost resembles something off of Streetcleaner being slowed down to quarter speed and drenched in an ocean of dubby effects and hissing noise. Or the mangled noise-doom that kicks off the fourth track with its slow, massive drumming and swirling maelstrom of crackling static noise over a bone-rattling bass riff. The other tracks move between that sort of punishing industrial mega-dirge and more atmospheric scrapescapes, entering into crushing rhythmic loops overlaid with those demonic howls, and more subdued stretches of minimal hum and whirr. The last track in particular shows the two groups working together to craft a climactic apocalyptic scene, where the sound of sprawling industrial complexes emerges, vomiting vile chemicals onto the earth and pitch-black clouds of foul smog, dissolving into sparse fields of controlled static, deep subterranean rumblings and clanking metallic rhythm, suddenly transforming the sound into a kind of nightmarish slow-motion power electronics assault. Altogether one of the most intense albums that I've heard from either Pig Heart Transplant or Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and about as heavy and horrific as this sort of blackened industrial sludge can get.
Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies.