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BURNT SKULL  Sewer Birth  LP   (12XU)   16.98


��Having been released on 12XU, the small indie label run by Matador/Homestead honcho Gerard Cosloy that's also home to albums from bands like Spoon and Silkworm, there's a chance that Sewer Birth could end up getting overlooked by a large swathe of the extreme metal crowd. Such an even would be highly unfortunate, as this new Austin based band has blasted out one of the heaviest fucking records of 2014 with Sewer Birth, constructing a perfect combination of relentless, inhuman industrial metal a la Streetcleaner-era Godflesh, and the most vicious strains of Amphetamine Reptile style noise rock. This album is punishing.

�� The whole reason I originally picked this record up was because the duo featured Dustin Pilkington, a former member of noise-damaged hardcore punks Total Abuse. I loved his previous band and was really interested in hearing what he was doing now, but aside from a shared lust for noise, the bone-crushing racket that Burnt Skull stir up on Sewer Birth comes from a completely different direction. The first song rips your face off right from the word go, "Harm" pounding off the beginning of the album like some rabid, locomotive death machine, punishing pneumatic drums grinding away in a kind of slipshod off-beat rhythm played at a skull-flattening volume level, while the guitars become all tangled up in a mess of spiky discordant chords and swirling, nauseous no-wavey dissonance. And those vocals, jesus...an inhuman, raspy, unintelligible hiss that sounds more like the work of black metal frontman than anything. But while this is most definitely some extremely heavy and noisy damage that Burnt Skull blast out, it's remarkably infectious, those disgusting riffs smearing feral noise rock vomit all over the drummer's crushing mechanical rhythms, his drumming so powerful and heavy and demolishing it sounds as if they might be layering actual drum machines in on top of the actual drums. And the guitar tone is monstrous, detuned and distorted and crushing, fully filling up the space left by the absence of bass guitar. No clue if these guys are as agonizingly heavy on stage as they are here, but on record, this duo sounds like a band at least three times as large, a massive noise-infested mechanized sludgecrush of damaged and deformed blood-drenched riffage and demonic drum kit detonations. There's a couple of faster tracks like "God Hole" and "No Cross" that erupt into discordant fury and feedback abuse, like some industrial-damaged version of hardcore punk; some other songs end up decomposing into ambient slimescapes laced with grinding amplifier drones, mysterious voices and waves of coruscating feedback, or drift out into pounding oil-drum rhythms surrounded by a heavy black fog of subterranean rumble and crumbling electronic effects. One of the heaviest of all of these songs is the title track that starts off the b-side, another scorched Godfleshian monstrosity of lumbering machinelike deathdirge, and "Infinite Flesh" takes the abject sludgepunk of Brainbombs and transforms it into a vile, industrialized ultra-dirge glistening with wet Cronenbergian visions, before finally closing with the utterly grim black ambience of "Abysm / Rotting Plain". I love this album. Those of you into stuff like Today is The Day, Brainbombs, Rusted Shut, Lewd, and other insanely blown-out, crushing noise rock outfits should get their hands on this pronto. Includes a digital download.