����� Along with those killer older Akatombo releases that we recently picked up, we also got the latest album from Scottish expat Paul Thomsen Kirk�s heavily atmospheric post-industrial outfit, Sometime, Never. And just from the first track, it establishes itself as the darkest and heaviest album from the project yet. This Hiroshima-based artist initially caught my ear after the band tuned us in to their back catalog; I dug that stuff immediately, the dark, often dystopic vibe emanating from much of that material was reminiscent of Scorn, but that sort of dub-infected electronic music was just one aspect of Kirk's outfit.
����� On Akatombo's fourth album, though, he gives us what's probably the most malevolent Akatombo album of them all, these ten tracks spilling across the album in a rush of nocturnal ambience and punishing rhythms, locked into that throbbing, jet-black industrial breakbeat that always seems to be lurking just beneath the surface. When opener "Snark Und Troll" kicks in, it layers murky sampled voices and swells of sinister looped music over a pulsating, slightly distorted drum loop and deep bassline, about as creepy as Akatombo gets, mesmeric and dark and droning, the low frequency bass wobbling and reverberating over that crunchy, crackling breakbeat. And "Mission Creep" delivers even more beat-heavy electronic blackness, with distorted rhythms skittering beneath crushing low-frequency rumblings, shrouded in ghostly androgynous wailing and hit with blasts of deformed bass whom. Let me tell ya, if you've been mourning the departure of Scorn from this rotten globe, this Akatombo stuff is quite effective at filling that particular little hole in your heart.
����� The rest of Sometime is pretty uniformly bleak, each unfolding into grim drones and harsh looped sounds strung over the hypnotic rhythmic heaviness. The bass and beats tend to be distorted, abrasive, adding to the incessant, threatening vibe. But it's also rhythmically varied, moving from faster quasi-tribal drum loops to that glacial death-dub to brutal shuffling breaks. Parts of this even slip into an almost metallic heaviness, the bass transforming into a buzzing, bludgeoning thud that gets pretty intense on tracks like "Matching Muzzles", "Vincere Vel Mori" and "Convict A45522". Elsewhere, Kirk will shift into something a little jazzier, or dispense with those beats entirely and unfurl a strange soundscape with what sounds like fragments from a horror film score becoming intertwined with bits of synth-bass, sinister digging sounds, and distant, disembodied voices. And it all hits an apex of heaviness toward the end with "Cold Call", which heads into overt industrial metal territory, almost like Godflesh draped in what sounds like gorgeous Arabic female voices and ominous orchestral swells.
����� All of Akatombo's albums are worth checking out, but this one is particularly recommended if you're into the industrial dub of Techno Animal and Scorn, Wordsound-style darkhop/illbient, and the winding sensuous beatscapes of Muslimgauze. Comes in gatefold packaging with a pair of printed inserts.