��Gotta love a record that bears a quote from Cows author Matthew Stokoe. Since arising from the ashes of Toronto powerviolence punishers The Endless Blockade, Column Of Heaven has quickly turned into one of the most interesting grindcore bands to emerge in recent years, with an intensity level that seems to be perpetually cranked into overdrive. Their 12" blew me away with it's savage combination of death metal influences, extreme electronic noise and barbaric powerviolence, but on this EP, they mutate into something slower and more industrialized.

��Opening with the eerie sound of a numbers station broadcasting from somewhere deep in the shortwave ether, "Anaphora: Flesh Prison" lurches into violent movement, a tangle of angular bass-heavy riffage and vicious drumming that suddenly launches into alternating bouts of ultra-violent grindcore and lumbering psychedelic dirge. The music shifts suddenly from blastbeat-riddled chaos into the sound of almost military-like drumming and chiming guitars, echo-drenched growling vocals and those ghostly female voice from the numbers station reappearing in the depths, the sound overtaken by an almost Swans-like level of repetitious slow-motion pummel, before finally dissolving into a storm of bellowing voices and growling distorted synthesizers, the final minutes of the track giving over to a sort of ultra-heavy power electronics attack, dense and bass-heavy and threatening.

�� The flipside features a sludgy assault of bass-driven aggression, the low-end churn of "Epiklesis: How Glorious This Hour" resembling the industrial grind of early Godflesh, especially in the eerie ascendant guitar leads and blasts of distorted discordant chords, but the vocals are a deep death metal roar, bathed in delay and other electronic effects. The first half of the track lurches and staggers within clouds of whirling electronics and that monstrous rhythmic pummel; when it begins to shift form, though, it turns into something a whole lot more abstract, a stumbling noise-damaged dirge that follows those growling vocals into stretches of bleak kosmische ambience, before returning at last to the crushing mechanized heaviness that closes the record. Absolutely lethal. Includes a digital download code.