All hail Dave Slave! Though he's probably best known in extreme metal circles as the bass player for maniacal Aussie black/death lunatic squad Sadistik Exekution, Dave Slave has been dishing out an entirely different (though no less demented) brand of sonic skum over the past decade with his current project Doomed And Disgusting. The band's recordings have remained pretty obscure outside of Australian metal circles, but D&D's 2005 album of drug-addled demonic weirdo doom insanity Satan's Nightmare just got a nice reissue treatment courtesy of Nuclear War Now, with new and improved album art that replaces the ridiculous original CD art with something a little more dignified. The music on this thing is still totally brain-scrambling, though. I'd never heard this project till now, but it promptly squashed me with this weird, lysergically-fucked brand of oddball doom.

     Dave Slave sets his visions of Satanic ritual, blasphemous communion, torture chambers, vampyric mania, and other danse macabre against a backdrop of cheesy 80's era horror movie synths, eerie minor key guitar and ghostly voices that make up the intro track "Chanting Souls", but that goes straight into the brain-damaged doom of "Ceremonial Sacrifices", rolling out a delirious mix of chorus-drenched doom riffs and Dave's weird vocal delivery that shifts between an echoing blackened rasp and Gothy chant-like singing. His somber Sabbathian riffs spurt atonal leads that mingle with the more Middle Eastern-inspired scales that appear throughout some of these songs, and ghosthouse pipe organs and druggy carnival keyboards warble in the background. It's essentially old-school doom metal, but with a creepier, weirder vibe that blends his molten riffs with backing choral sounds like something from a Fabio Frizzi score, which can get downright rabid at times, turning into an unintelligible nest of seething demonic blabbering. Songs sometimes just shamble to a stop, metallic percussion clanks in the depths like someone banging on pipes during this sickly Sabbathoid ritual, and the guitars seem to constantly teeter on the edge of going out of tune, which adds to the unsettling, hallucinatory vibe, classic doom creeping through a haze of brain damaged DXM insanity. Definitely memorable in its own demented way, this album delivers some supremely evil, messed-up doom that's part Witchfinder General-style schlock, part Upsidedown Cross / Kilslug-esque punksludge. Limited to two hundred fifty copies.