���My teeth are still rattling from this. Form Destroyer is the debut full-length from Auditor, the latest project from Brandon Elkins, who had previously rattled our skulls with the glitched-out industrial dubscapes and doom-laden electronics of Iron Forest (who released that killer Body Horror disc on Crucial Blaze a while back), and before that with the haunting experimental blackness of his old project A Crown Of Amaranth who also appeared on one of the Crucial Blast sub-labels around a decade ago. Elkins's music has kept getting heavier with each new project, incorporating heavier elements of dub, rhythmic industrial sounds and doom-laden metal, making his more recent projects particularly punishing. And in many ways Auditor picks right up where Iron Forest left off with Body Horror, constructing a series of monstrous malformed blasts of lurching industrial heaviness smeared in echoing dub-style percussion and gut-rumbling bass. More metallic than ever, in fact.

��� But with Auditor, that dub-damaged sound also gets twisted into something even harsher, with those crushing low-slung rhythms plated in massive low-end and chiseled into breakbeat-like rhythms, over which Elkins layers some pretty oppressive orchestral ambiance and bleak industrial drones. Vast swathes of dystopian ambiance are draped over the grotesque Godfleshian boom-bap and veins of clanking mutant dub that pulse malignantly throughout the album. And it gets pretty nightmarish pretty quick, moving from the noisy, cacophonous chaos of opener "Protocol 1" that spreads out into a wall of staticky drone streaked in sinister melody, into the demonic industrial dirge of "And Vomit As You Devour Them" that sounds like some vile mutation of an old Wax Trax 12". From there it gets relentlessly bleaker, piling ominous sampled voices over those skittering, pneumatic rhythms and bursts of bone-splintering bass, washes of oceanic black ambiance sweeping across the echoing beats and droning distorted bass guitar, snarls of putrid over-modulated feedback twining around squalls of distant guitar noise.

��� The tone of the album gets significantly heavier across the second half though, as "Betrayer Of Sleep" suddenly drops the tempo down even more and the sound transforms into an utterly evil crawl of industrial doom, a glacial riff skulking through a haze of sparse, hammered drums, the vocals dispensed in a murderous reptilian whisper, everything adorned in decaying strands of howling feedback. I'm momentarily reminded of some weird synthesized version of bands like Thergothon or Evoken, but powered by a fucked-up mechanical backbeat, the drumming sounding "live" but also hopelessly fractured into something more abstract, with barely any forward momentum at all, which just adds to the oppressive atmosphere of the whole thing. And then the closer, a nearly fifteen minute holocaust of distorted chaos and terrifying choral screams (courtesy of Joan Hacker of Factoria) that gradually disperse into an epic blown-out finale, ghastly howls streaking high above a field of smoldering blackened electronics and dirge-like bass rumble, an evil mesmeric symphony of black noise spreading edgelessly through the cosmos, riding on waves of monstrous distorted doom riffs cloaked in carnivorous static, eventually burning off into a rather strange hallucinatory stretch of dreamy jazziness lit up with tracers of lingering vocals, floating through a deep black carcinogenic haze. Between that immense deathdrone voidscape and the crushing cracked industrial heaviness of the previous tracks, this sort of comes off like a blacknoise-infected Scorn, a malevolent dubstep monstrosity slowed down to a torturous crawl.

��� Comes in digipack packaging.