��� Initial word on the new album from Texas band Chest Pain had me imagining that their stuff was going to sound something like Gasp, that old California outfit who were quite possibly the weirdest of all of the bands to come out of the powerviolence scene of the 90s. While Chest Pain's trippy blastcore will indeed be right up your alley if you're into bands like Gasp, Iron Lung, Suffering Luna and Man Is The Bastard, their music doesn't sound quite like any of 'em. The back cover of the sleeve for Weltschmerz is emblazoned with a quote from Schopenhauer's On the Suffering of the World, pointing towards a skewed pessimistic 'tude compared to most PV outfits, philosophical undercurrents not often seen in bands belting out this sort of brutal din.

��� Opening with a blast of belligerent feedback, Weltschmerz immediately sinks its teeth into the listener with a furious, discordant brand of power-violence, the gruff, intensely pissed off barking vocals and the staccato, stop-and-go hyper-speed hardcore undeniably influenced by Infest's classic violent blastcore. But by the fourth song "Culturalized", these guys start to roll out big blats of crushing, almost Sabbathian sludge, the spastic aggression becoming tempered with the surges of doom-laden heaviness and whirring, spacey effects that start to swoop across the background. From there things begin to get gradually more off-kilter, more of those slow, effects-stained dirges emerging out of the thrashing frenzy, sudden gales of psychedelic guitar noise and fucked up, echo-drenched vocal delirium, bizarre gibbering electronics and putrid synthesizer noise, each song mutating into more deranged forms. By the time that you get to "Sex Fear", what you're hearing starts to sound like some wild mashup of classic Slap-A-Ham/Deep Six style powerviolence and Butthole Surfers-esque acid-punk. And towards the end of the record, they really start to hammer down these slow, grueling dirges that are almost Swans-like in their dissonant brutality, like the weird industrial-tinged pummel of both "Hikikomori" and "Ghola", all wrapped in ghostly electronic noise. Some seriously punishing hardcore punk shows up as well, blazing mid-tempo outbursts that are absolutely blood-boiling, and even when Chest Pain are blasting away at a thousand miles per hour, they still grind out some pretty catchy tuneage beneath the heart-attack inducing tempos and blistering noise. Killer stuff.

��� On black vinyl limited to five hundred copies, includes a printed insert and a big foldout poster.