��Though Will Killingsworth is probably best known for his involvement in the acclaimed "screamo" bands Ampere and Orchid, the one record of his that holds a special place on my LP shelf is the album from The Toll, Killingsworth's solo sludge project that put out just this one pulverizing album on Youth Attack back in 2010. That album is still one of the heaviest goddamn records I own, filled with a kind of abject, ultra-distorted sludge metal somewhat similar to Wicked King Wicker, a massive, crawling heaviness deformed by extreme distortion that pushes the album into the realm of blackened, crumbling noise-doom. While I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for another Toll record, I was stoked to see that Killingsworth has popped up again with another band that also has a similarly deformed, crushing wavelength.

�� Taking it's name and sleeve artwork from the classic experimental cinema of Kenneth Anger, Demonbrother features Killingsworth teaming up with Andrew Jackmauh, a member of hardcore bands Cut The Shit and Failures. The five songs featured here on the duo's debut 12" are grueling, grinding blasts of lumbering heaviness that sound like some seriously pissed-off hardcore band being played back at half speed, a sinister, super-sludgy assault of mean-spirited three-chord crush. The label describes this, somewhat tongue in cheek, as the "slowest American power violence record", but I can see what they're talking about; there's definitely a whiff of stuff like Man Is The Bastard and Crossed Out in this stuff. Things never really speed up beyond a bludgeoning, glue-encrusted backbeat, though, the droning riffs enshrouded in feedback and chaotic amplifier noise, while eerie wailing effects echo off in the background. On the track "Schrei IV", the band stumbles into a gale of howling feedback and sampled voices, someone slowly pounding on a single drum, the sound whipped into a dreamlike haze of high-end drone and murky samples and strange looping sounds, vaguely Swans-like; when everything finally crashes in together, the sudden explosive force of the feedback and sludgy guitars and caveman drumming erupts with enough blasting power to take the back of your head off. And the grinding riffage of "End Of The Tether" rolls over the listener like the heaviest of the old HeadDirt outfits, amplifiers screaming into oblivion, ominous melodies slithering out of the monstrous distorted riffage, powerful and anthemic, again like some triumphant hardcore hook that has been slowed down to 16 rpm, all snarling slow-motion savagery enfolded within a thick fabric of feedback squeal. This stuff is heavy as hell, a twisted, vaguely trippy assault of crushing tar-pit hardcore that feels like this record has been soaking in a barrel of bile for the past week.

��Includes a digital download.