���A collection of harrowing necro-psychedelia hallucinations from the early oughts, reissued on CD from shadowy black metal imprint GoatowaRex a couple of years ago, which we're just now finally getting in stock. The Dark Bleeding Gods collects two long out of print cassette releases from this mysterious British band that just recently released a brand new album through Crucial Blast; frequently aligned with the whole "black noise" aesthetic, this disc is another example of how such labels fail to properly capture the eldritch weirdness of this outfit.

��� Emit's The Dark Bleeding EP came out on cassette back in 2003 from Total Holocaust Records, the four tracks making up some of the harshest stuff this project ever produced. Opening with the intensely over-modulated howl of "The Pain Of Bleeding", this material proceeds to wander through a dreamlike fog of monstrously deformed dirge-like riffage, completely destroyed doom-laden guitar melodies, and terrifying screams that blast through the suffocating haze of echo and reverb that hangs heavy over the whole recording. This stuff is sickly and psychedelic and disturbing, at times coming together into a maniacal blurt of freeform blackened sludge and extreme effects overload that seems to head into Fushitsusha territory, crazed improvised solos and slurred shredding spilling out over insane cackling vocals and surges of syrupy echoplex slime. Echoing blackened drones blast across blighted wastes, culminating with the crazed, murky orchestrations of "Unknown I (Greets Me Again)", where weird dissonant organs become garbled and tangled in clots of nightmarish tape noise, a meandering, mind-melting chaos unfolding in slow motion across this final ten minute track like a madman wildly gesticulating at a pipe organ, the frenzied pounding of keys slowed down and sliced apart.

��� The melting gothic guitars that drip over the opening moments of Emit's 2004 tape The Dark Gods points towards the band's more recent work, the sort of ghostly ambience and cavernous psychedelia found on his latest full-length Spectre Music; at the same time, there's still a lot of that residual black metal murk creeping through these seven tracks, evil guitar leads snaking around the echoes of ominous church bells and mangled electronic noise, hair-raising shrieks suddenly flying out of the reverberant gloom, stoned murmurings echoing beneath the crawling dissonant chords. Once again, this stuff can't be properly described as noise, but rather a thoroughly blackened, necro-fueled version of experimental improv, like what Abruptum might have evolved into if It and Evil had gotten hooked on the PSF Records catalog whilst creating In Umbra Malitiae Ambulabo. That comparison might send black metal purists screaming for the door, but I love it. The other tracks on Gods range from more of those ominous avant-guitar wanderings and surges of black ambient vomit, clanking doom laden riffs adrift on waves of drugged-out amp-drone, ringing gongs and church organs, and then it'll suddenly float out into a brief stretch of ghostly folk music, a haunting vocal melody fading out over solemn acoustic strum. There's one track here, "In Darkness Let Me Dwell", that at first explodes into actual black metal, a sudden blast of sloppy low-fi madness that almost immediately slinks back down into a wrecked dirge, the rattling drum kit quickly sucked back into the swarming lysergic guitar noise, the vocals a deranged howl heard through a wall of speaker-shredding static. And the closer "You Pray For Death" in some ways foreshadows the orchestral black doom of Gnaw Their Tongues with it's slavering assault of garbled noise, frenzied percussion and horror-score bombast. Amazing.

��� Very limited stock on this one!