CRUCIAL BLAST WEBSTORE: NEW ARRIVALS FOR TUESDAY, JANUARY 26TH 2010
The featured release for this week is the debut disc from a UK duo called Necro Deathmort, a weird name, kinda silly when you first see it in print, but the music that this mysterious group concocts is even more absurd, a deliriously demented fusion of blackened drones and crushing doom riffage and distorted heaviness with MASSIVE dubbed out electronic beats and slurred breaks and distorted bass. Imagine a cross between Scorn and some blackened doomdrone outfit and you'll have a rough idea what this band sounds like. Pretty bizarre and amazing.
Here's some of the other new titles and restocks that have come in:
the ripping Kreator-meets-Watchtower-meets-Voivod prog-thrash of Vektor's Black Future...
a killer double-disc reissue of Scorn's Evanescence and Ellipsis, crucial early 90's darkdub from Mick Harris (ex-Napalm Death)... Those Who Dwell Beyond, a skin-crawling collection of black drone metal from Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere, Gate To Void, and Aeon Nought...
the first release from SCHREI AUS STEIN , the new black ambient/black metal project from the mind behind Encomiast... Remains Of A Burning World, a killer new cassette of blackened orchestral doomdrone from Robe....
several new releases from Realicide, all serving up that groups vicious brand of gabber/hardcore/jungle mayhem and social commentary...
the new LP III from black metal weirdo Ovskum...
the deathdrone creep of Oblong Box's Premature Burial, inspired by classic isolationist ambient and old 60's/70's horror scores...
brutal speecore/gabber/hardcore techno from DJ Immolation...
Relapse's recent reissue of the 1999 album from British noise/industrial/rock creeps Bodychoke, with members of Sutcliffe Jugend...
Battlefield's new limited edition one-sided 12" of the Entourage Of The Archaic EP...
a new special edition CD/DVD set for Absu's amazing 2009 self-titled album, as well as the limited edition deluxe vinyl release...
Endname's raw, crunchy prog/sludge/space metal...
the debut full length from Russian droneologists Dozelimit, who combine gritty industrial noise with gorgeous nocturnal guitar ambience...
Culted's excellent debut disc of abyssal industrial-tinged doom metal...
the new album of dark droning bliss and stygian electronic maneuvers from Anduin...
a bunch of Beherit restocks - essential stuff for anyone into fucked up old-school black metal...
the very first 7" from Black Dice, from long before they became the darlings of the art-punk scene and were still trashing rooms with their violent noise-damaged hardcore thrash...
the limited cloth-wrapped edition of Jigoku, the debut release from the amazing grind/ambient project Body Hammer...
a limited edition deluxe vinyl package of Cannabis Corpse's latest EP of pot-worshipping death metal...
the double disc set of Flux's Protoplasmic (avant industrial guitarscapes from Khanate's Jim Plotkin) and SLAB!'s Descension , an obscure but amazing 'slab' of industrial goth noise sludge ....
restocks of Godflesh's Messiah, Guapo's Twisted Stems, and Anaal Nathrakh's latest....
the disturbed black metal dementia of Haeresiarchs Of DIS... GRO J1655-40, the first release from drone/industrial/dirge crushers Keplers Odd (which features members of Culted)...
another CRUCIAL live disc from freejazz/improv rock/skronk thrashers Last Exit, featuring the legendary Sonny Sharrock and Peter Brotzmann...
a seriously creepy slab of dark ambience and blackened orchestral dread from LIKE DRONE RAZORS THROUGH FLESH SPHERE...
Acid Mother's mastermind Kawabata Makoto's new disc of dark expansive interstellar drones... III, a recently released disc of free-jazz-brut thrash from Mothguts, the best stuff I've heard from 'em yet...
the hellish abstract black/doom/drone of OS's Twelve Truths LP....
the electronic noise/hardcore thrash violence of Praey, featuring members of Realicide...
the hard-to-find Desert/Bastards 7" from violin-armed crustpunks Sake...
the rare import Lp release of SLAGMAUR's bizarro carnival black metal epic Skrekk Lich Kunstler....
two seperate discs of grim blackened noise from We've Come For What's Ours, the newest project from Mason Jones (Subarachnoid Space/Trance)...
Of course, there's much more mutant heavy music to be had...keep reading below to check out all of the amazing new music that we have in this week's new arrivals list!
You can now click on the cover image for any title that we carry here at Crucial Blast to see a pop-up photograph of the actual item! Not all of our older titles that we have in stock have product photographs attached to them, but almost anything new that we get in stock will have this feature. The pop-up photo feature can be wonky (like most things) if you are using Internet Explorer, but works perfectly in Firefox and other browsers.
FEATURED RELEASE
NECRO DEATHMORT This Beat Is Necrotronic CD (Distraction) 11.98
Necro Deathmort? Based on the name, I thought that this album was going to be far sillier than it turned out to be, but this is actually pretty serious business, a mix of several different sounds, distorted industrial breakbeats, elements of dubstep, droning doom metal, dark ambience, glitchy electronica all mixed together into an awesome, menacing slab of metallic doom-laden dub-step weirdness. I found out about Necro Deathmort after reading Scott Seward's review of the disc in a recent issue of Decibel, and his glowing review (and references to experimental dub metal, Ice, and The Bug) led me to getting in contact with the UK label that put out This Beat Is Necrotronic. The mix of apocalyptic dubstep/electronica and blackened heaviness that this band does is right up my alley, a totally unexpected cross between heavy doomdrone and Kevin Martin style rhythmic dread that I've been unable to remove from my stereo all month.
The album opens with a short intro noise piece called "Woburn Plate Corner" that's just thirty-six seconds of electronic bleeps and noise and samples, but then it kicks in to the first real song "Spilth" with massive booming funky distorted kick drums and a stuttering blown out industrial/break beat rhythm, a crushing skull-pounding distorto bass line (that almost sounds like it belongs in a death metal song) rumbling over the stuttering, hiccupping dubstep-like beats, squelchy synths and swirling white noise, super menacing and fucked-up sounding, but really catchy, too. They get slower and sorta jazzy on "Hurt Me I'm Bored", which stretches out a bit more, slowly building the intensity of the sound as bleeping 8-bit electronics and deep droning analogue synth is layered over an ominous slab of spacey grooving electro-doom, the groove sprawling out as the stripped-down drums pound beneath haunting minor key guitars and a wobbly electronic melody, bits of white noise and glitch and buzz swirling around the propulsive low-end throb; as the track progresses, the guitars build in heaviness and intensity, becoming more and more crushing until finally they erupt into a punishing doom metal riff as the electronic beats fall away, turning into a slow, lumbering doomcrush that's still laced with caustic electronic noise and winding segments of bluesy lead guitar weaving around the down tuned metallic crush. "I Can See Through Time" is a cloud of ominous ambient whir and buzzing chopped-up drones, dubbed out blasts of low end drifting through swirling krautrock synths and gleaming melodic ambience, which flows right in to the staccato trip-hop groove and dark washes of ambient drone of "Return To Planet Atlas"; huge booming beats and distorted speaker-wrecking bass grind through a miasma of fluttering high-end electronics and spacey FX, sounding a lot like Techno Animal or Scorn but way more scorched and distorted and evil. The surreal "Necro Effigy" mixes in recordings of frogs and hallucinatory voices with the skittering jagged beats and damaged distorted glitchery, and the short ambient piece "Broadcast" almost sounds like a fragment of a John Carpenter composition, a mysterious drifting expanse of rumbling low-end, layered voices and circular bass. That leads right in to the dark jazzy beatscape of "I Fought The Law And The Law Won (Because Fighting Is Against The Law)", dreamy synths and clean shadowy guitar drifting above languid beats, almost like an electronica-laced Bohren And Der Club Of Gore. A crushing black hole drone starts off "Techniclolour Minstrel Show" with massive doomdrone levels of heaviness, but as smeared echoing percussion begins to take form, the track evolves into bleary ambience. And "Origami Werewolf" delivers another Scorn-esque industrial break beat jam with droning distorto guitar and chugging riffage, a propulsive doom-hop workout made up of grinding metallic heaviness, washes of howling guitar noise, deep pounding beats and clouds of swirling high end feedback. This Beat... concludes with the epic 12+ minute "The Ultimate Testament", which opens with subtle drift and minimal creak and scrape, then rises into an amazingly hypnotic dubbed out doomdrone trudge, drums pounding out a simple stripped down rhythm with the snare drenched in reverb and echo and decaying into the blackness, ominous guitar leads droning overhead, other guitars distorted and stretched into horn-like tones, the atmosphere utterly black and portentous, massive blasts of Sunn-esque amp-roar soaring, lighter melodies bending and wavering closer to the surface. It's so majestic and dramatic, seemingly building ever so slowly towards some kind of release that never arrives, instead collapsing into an abstract minimal sprawl of dubby snares and thunderous bass drums echoing in a vast spacious void for several minutes, the percussive blasts coming further and further apart until the track reaches the end.
Describing this stunning album as doom-infected dubstep or blackened apocalyptic dub only gives part of the picture; Necro Deathmort actually create something much more, an immense and crushing world of black sound that ultimately doesn't sound like anyone else. The packaging is really cool too, the disc presented in a black and white six-panel foldout sleeve with twisted woodcut-style artwork created by Dominic Hailstone, the director of videos for Mogwai and Isis and the creator of those terrifying creature effects in the video for Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy". So highly recommended, but you better move quick, as this is limited to just 500 copies!Track Samples: Sample : Broadcast Sample : Necro Effigy Sample : Spilth Sample : The Ultimate Testament
NEW ADDITIONS
16-17 Early Recordings 2xCD (Savage Land) 21.98
Back in stock! Early Recordings is a two-CD set from the legendary Swiss avant-
rock/deathjazz group 16-17, whose early releases have been out of print for eons and have been nigh-impossible to land one's mitts on. Savage Land came to
the rescue bigtime though, pairing up the band's 1986 16-17 and 1989 When All Else Fails albums, and also adding on the mega rare
Hardkore & Buffbunker cassette that 16-17 put out in 1984 on the Vision label, and had Weasel Walter from The Flying Luttenbachers remaster
everything.
So what's 16-17 all about? BLAZING HARDCORE JAZZ VIOLENCE. As soon as you hit "play" on 16-17, the entire geneology of the past 25 years of
hardcore skronk becomes immediately clear. The band was first formed in Basel, Switzerland in 1983 by Markus Kneubuhler (electronics, guitar), Nicolas Knut
Redmond (drums) and Alex Buess (saxophone), and they employed Buess' saxophone in a rock band format to play a kind of "jazz" that was utterly unlike
anything else at the time, a super harsh and chaotic hardcore No Wave attack that was equal parts Borbetomagus powerskronk, thugged out neanderthal
krautrock, and incendiary hardcore with industrial/noise undercurrents. They predated the whole John Zorn/Painkiller/Last Exit hardcore jazz scene by at
least a couple of years, and you can hear the impact that 16-17 had on everyone from Flying Luttenbachers and God to Alboth! and Painkiller. Buess' sax is
the centerpiece of 16-17's violent churn, a neverending screaming stream of squonking, screeching blurt, sometimes sounding like actual jazz lines, but
largely slicing through the air like a chain of razorblades, backed up by the PCP-fueled motorik beats and grungy riffage being slammed out on Kneubuhler's
self-built guitars. For years 16-17 was known to only a few in the underground, despite bonding with Swans, whom they supported on a couple of tours, and
even working with Alec Empire's Digital Hardcore label on an Ep that the label released in 1998. Now we know, and these early, crucial recordings are finally
available to be heard, an essential piece of the extreme music puzzle. This stuff still holds up in a big way, an utterly crushing assault of vicious
freejazz hypnocore harshnoise destruction. Mega recommended. The anthology consists of two CDs packaged in jewel cases, and contained in a printed cardboard
slipcase.Track Samples: Sample : BROWBEATEN BEAT Sample : 16-17-Early Recordings Sample : 16-17-Early Recordings Sample : 16-17-Early Recordings
ABSU self-titled (DELUXE EDITION) CD + DVD (Candlelight) 14.98
Candlelight has released 2009's stunning comeback album from Texan black metal mystics Absu as a new limited edition cd/dvd set for collectors, with new artwork, new packaging (including a printed slipcase), and of most interest to Absu fans, a professionally produced DVD that was filmed in June of 2009 in Montreal, Quebec, which features a blistering set that includes a ton of material from the new album and a handful of classic earlier tracks.
Eight long years have gone by since the last time that we had a new album of "Mythological Occult Metal" from Texas thrashers Absu, the last one being 2001's amazing Tara, and there's been some shakeup in the ranks since then. The only remaining original member is drummer/vocalist Sir Proscriptor McGovern, who also plays in Mesopotamian blackthrashers Melechesh as well as the occultic ambient/prog projects Equimanthorn and Proscriptor), and he's put together a new Absu lineup in the wake of departing members Equitant and Shaftiel. No need to sweat though, because this new, revamped version of Absu is just as ripping and magick-obsessed a thrashathon as you'd hope. Simply titled Abu, this discharges thirteen tracks of esoteric blackened thrash that's equal parts mystic investigation and Teutonic speedmetal, like a methed out Kreator musing on serious spiritual/occult concepts and multi-part examinations of magickal theory like "Of the Dead Who Never Rest in Their Tombs Are the Attendance of Familiar Spirits Including: A.) Diversified Signs Inscribed B.) Our Earth of Black C.) Voor" . Wait, what? Yeah, Absu have always been a headier proposition than yer typical black metal junk, drawing their lyrical and visual inspiration from ancient Sumerian and Gaelic mythology and beyond, and backing it up with ferocious, complex thrash that continues to get quirkier with each new album. They aren't rehashing Tara - there's lots of slower, midpaced riffage, and some awesome Ash Ra-grade Mellotron and the occasional injection of siderial synthesizer - but that freaked-out Absu sound is still as fierce as ever. The riffs are ferocious and ripping, and laid out in strange sprawling arrangements, strewn with awesome psychotic soloing. Lots of unpredictable twists and turns and convoluted time signatures. And Proscriptor remains one of black metal's most proficient drummers, whipping up furious tempests of tumultuous percussive fills and choppy thrash, as well as coming up with most of Absu's arcane subject matter. So good to have a new album from these guys. There are some guest contributions from members of Melechesh, Enthroned, Zemial and Mayhem, and former member Equitant does make an appearance in a brief cameo. The band has morphed a bit, but this album is still a blazing slab of blackened thrash that I've been playing nonstop.Track Samples: Sample : 13 Globes Sample : Night Fire Canonization Sample : …Of The Dead Who Never Rest In Their Tombs Are The Attendance Of Familiar Spirits…Including: Sample : Those Of The Void Will Re-Enter
ABSU self-titled LP (Back On Black) 28.98
Now available as a dope double Lp set on Back On Black, on 180 gran vinyl and packaged in a heavy full color gatefold package!
Eight long years have gone by since the last time that we had a new album of "Mythological Occult Metal" from Texas thrashers Absu, the last one being 2001's amazing Tara, and there's been some shakeup in the ranks since then. The only remaining original member is drummer/vocalist Sir Proscriptor McGovern, who also plays in Mesopotamian blackthrashers Melechesh as well as the occultic ambient/prog projects Equimanthorn and Proscriptor), and he's put together a new Absu lineup in the wake of departing members Equitant and Shaftiel. No need to sweat though, because this new, revamped version of Absu is just as ripping and magick-obsessed a thrashathon as you'd hope. Simply titled Abu, this discharges thirteen tracks of esoteric blackened thrash that's equal parts mystic investigation and Teutonic speedmetal, like a methed out Kreator musing on serious spiritual/occult concepts and multi-part examinations of magickal theory like "Of the Dead Who Never Rest in Their Tombs Are the Attendance of Familiar Spirits Including: A.) Diversified Signs Inscribed B.) Our Earth of Black C.) Voor" . Wait, what? Yeah, Absu have always been a headier proposition than yer typical black metal junk, drawing their lyrical and visual inspiration from ancient Sumerian and Gaelic mythology and beyond, and backing it up with ferocious, complex thrash that continues to get quirkier with each new album. They aren't rehashing Tara - there's lots of slower, midpaced riffage, and some awesome Ash Ra-grade Mellotron and the occasional injection of siderial synthesizer - but that freaked-out Absu sound is still as fierce as ever. The riffs are ferocious and ripping, and laid out in strange sprawling arrangements, strewn with awesome psychotic soloing. Lots of unpredictable twists and turns and convoluted time signatures. And Proscriptor remains one of black metal's most proficient drummers, whipping up furious tempests of tumultuous percussive fills and choppy thrash, as well as coming up with most of Absu's arcane subject matter. So good to have a new album from these guys. There are some guest contributions from members of Melechesh, Enthroned, Zemial and Mayhem, and former member Equitant does make an appearance in a brief cameo. The band has morphed a bit, but this album is still a blazing slab of blackened thrash that I've been playing nonstop.Track Samples: Sample : 13 Globes Sample : Night Fire Canonization Sample : …Of The Dead Who Never Rest In Their Tombs Are The Attendance Of Familiar Spirits…Including: Sample : Those Of The Void Will Re-Enter
AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED / TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION Frontside Nosegrind (RED VINYL) 7 INCH VINYL (Bones Brigade) 6.98
Back in stock, now on RED vinyl!
What a teamup! Longrunning drum-machine grinders Agoraphobic Nosebleed are back with three new jams, "Self Detonate", "Degenerate Liar", and
"Alcoholocaust", performed by the core duo of guitarist/drum programmer/speaker waster Scott Hull (also of Pig Destroyer fame) and vocalist J. Randall, and
with additional lead vocals from Benumb singer Pete on "Degenerate Liar". A scathing assault of sludgy noise-rock informed power dirge, crushing thrash metal
riffing, and 5000 mph hypergrind annihilation. Smokin'! Total Fucking Destruction are on the b-side with the freaked out psychedelic noise/funk/drug rock jam
"Last Night I Dreamt We Destroyed The World" that degenerates into Rich Hoak's manic trademark blastbeat wipeout and some damaged FX abuse, followed by a
raging speedcore cover of the Exploited's "Sid Vicious Was Innocent"!
Pressed on limited edition thick opaque red vinyl. And the package for this 7" is AWESOME - the outer cover features brightly colored illustrations of
reptilian skateboarding demons tearing up some ramp against a psychedelic backdrop of skulls, all created by famed artist Florian Bertmer, with trippy spiral
shapes printed in clear spot varnish and swirling out from the center...and the inside of the jacket features wicked photographs of a kid with his fuckin'
nose ripped off, giving a big thumbs up to the camera (hence the Frontside Nosegrind title...). Badass!
ANAAL NATHRAKH In The Constellation Of The Black Widow CD (Candlelight) 13.98
Back in stock!
2009's In The Constellation Of The Black Widow from British industrial death/black crushers Anaal Nathrakh is as extreme as anything the band has produced so far, a ten song blast of hellish, apocalyptic violence that signals a return to the feral full-on fury of their earlier albums The Codex Necro and When Fire Rains Down From The Sky, Mankind Will Reap As It Has Sown. Those early releases quickly established the band as one of the most intense underground metal groups around, certainly one of the most pissed sounding, and it's tough trying to come up with another band that evokes as much misanthropy and nihilistic 'tude as these guys do. I liked the melodic qualities that Anaal Nathrakh has been flirting with on their last few albums, but this is a real return to form, with the sickening vocal outbursts that switch on a dime between insanely harsh shrieks and gutteral death metal growls and epic clean singing, the complex arrangements, dissonant riffage, furious programmed drum machines and corrosive electronic noise that made their debut one of my favorite black/death album ever. There are still monstrously epic moments aplenty though, with VITRIOL's soaring power-metal baritone appearing at all of the right moments, and Anaal Nathrakh keep the album tightly wound at right around thirty-five minutes. The barbaric industrialized death metal riffage and hyperblast black metal is colored by additional textures like the ghostly voices and samples that lurk underneath the metallic onslaught, and there are frequent outbursts of psychotic guitar solos, vicious electronic glitchery and weird industrial noise that explode out of nowhere, constantly keeping the songs in a state of panicked tension. Few bands chronicle the sound of the endtimes as well as Anaal Nathrakh do, and Constellation is another amazingly brutal slab of their supremely epic death/black metal.Track Samples: Sample : In The Constellation Of The Black Widow Sample : The Lucifer Effect
ANDUIN Abandoned In Sleep CD (SMTG Limited) 9.98
Some more fantastic dark ambience from Anduin, the solo project from Jonathan Lee who's also a member of Souvenir's Young America. This second Anduin album follows up a couple of great collaborative releases, the Bending Of Light disc with Jasper Tx and the live 7" Black River with Svarte Greiner (which is actually included here as a single unbroken track as a bonus track not on the Lp version), and travels into darker, deeper regions of eerie ambience than before.
There's an element of dark electronica that's apparent on Abandoned In Sleep that wasn't on the previous releases, at least not to this extent. The tracks are still heavy on the swirling, dreamy drift and melodious shadowdrone, but Lee introduces massive low-end bass and collages of rhythmic clicks and scraping sounds that add a rhythmic throb to much of the sound here. The sound is ever-changing, too, thanks to the presence of several guest contributors that include Xela, Stephen Vitiello, Jasper TX, and Gareth Davis who offer either source material or actual studio collabs, and Lee takes these recordings and samples and materials and crafts them into fields of dark lugubrious, gorgeous and lushly layered but wrapped in a dreamy kosmich heaviness. Earth-shaking bass throb reverberates through mysterious abstract clatter and sheets of obsidian synth, swells of distorted horns and metal scrape, the sound of harmonica, such an integral part of Souvenir's Young America's sound, appearing here on certain tracks, haunting and ghostly as it floats across rumbling depth-charge bass, eerie keening vocals, the sound so heavy and creepy, flecked with little fragments of sound like breaking glass, saxophones, electronic glitch and whir, clanging metal and pops and clicks. Found sounds and field recordings also figure heavily into Abandoned's dreamlike shadow-world, overlaying incidental sounds of creaking doors and footsteps and hard-drive hum on clouds of warm melted drone and shuffling industrial rhythms and distant grinding gears, often sounding like Scorn scoring an avant-garde Western. In fact, it feels like some dubstep influence has found it's way into Anduin's dark kosmiche music, as in the doom-laden liquid bass tremors on tracks like “Content of a Black Box”, and the sputtering low-end rhythm of “Octagonal Forms”, bringing a killer new edge to Anduin's sound.
The cd version also includes three bonus tracks: an untitled piece, the track "Filed Away" which was created for an installation piece, and the complete live collab with Svarte Greiner "Black River" - The first half of "Black River" is a churning fog of murky low-end rumble and nocturnal whirr with muted swells of murky orchestral strings and heavy feedback, deep subterranean throb, and metallic high-end feedback leaving streaks of melodic glare across a vast black cloudbank, immense and ominous. The second side picks up from there and descends deeper into the black pulsating mist, that deep, heavy electrical pulse still humming away in the background and oscillating back and forth, while strands of feedback and flecks of haunting melody waft through the darkness. Track Samples: Sample : Contents Of A Black Box Sample : Labyrinthian Void Sample : Octagonal Forms Sample : Our Future Is A Debt
ANDUIN Abandoned In Sleep LP + CD (SMTG Limited) 14.98
Also available as a limited-edition vinyl release housed in a thick matte chipboard jacket, and includes the cd version (with the additional non-lp tracks) in a simple plastic sleeve.
Some more fantastic dark ambience from Anduin, the solo project from Jonathan Lee who's also a member of Souvenir's Young America. This second Anduin album follows up a couple of great collaborative releases, the Bending Of Light disc with Jasper Tx and the live 7" Black River with Svarte Greiner (which is actually included here as a single unbroken track as a bonus track not on the Lp version), and travels into darker, deeper regions of eerie ambience than before.
There's an element of dark electronica that's apparent on Abandoned In Sleep that wasn't on the previous releases, at least not to this extent. The tracks are still heavy on the swirling, dreamy drift and melodious shadowdrone, but Lee introduces massive low-end bass and collages of rhythmic clicks and scraping sounds that add a rhythmic throb to much of the sound here. The sound is ever-changing, too, thanks to the presence of several guest contributors that include Xela, Stephen Vitiello, Jasper TX, and Gareth Davis who offer either source material or actual studio collabs, and Lee takes these recordings and samples and materials and crafts them into fields of dark lugubrious, gorgeous and lushly layered but wrapped in a dreamy kosmich heaviness. Earth-shaking bass throb reverberates through mysterious abstract clatter and sheets of obsidian synth, swells of distorted horns and metal scrape, the sound of harmonica, such an integral part of Souvenir's Young America's sound, appearing here on certain tracks, haunting and ghostly as it floats across rumbling depth-charge bass, eerie keening vocals, the sound so heavy and creepy, flecked with little fragments of sound like breaking glass, saxophones, electronic glitch and whir, clanging metal and pops and clicks. Found sounds and field recordings also figure heavily into Abandoned's dreamlike shadow-world, overlaying incidental sounds of creaking doors and footsteps and hard-drive hum on clouds of warm melted drone and shuffling industrial rhythms and distant grinding gears, often sounding like Scorn scoring an avant-garde Western. In fact, it feels like some dubstep influence has found it's way into Anduin's dark kosmiche music, as in the doom-laden liquid bass tremors on tracks like “Content of a Black Box”, and the sputtering low-end rhythm of “Octagonal Forms”, bringing a killer new edge to Anduin's sound.
The cd version also includes three bonus tracks: an untitled piece, the track "Filed Away" which was created for an installation piece, and the complete live collab with Svarte Greiner "Black River" - The first half of "Black River" is a churning fog of murky low-end rumble and nocturnal whirr with muted swells of murky orchestral strings and heavy feedback, deep subterranean throb, and metallic high-end feedback leaving streaks of melodic glare across a vast black cloudbank, immense and ominous. The second side picks up from there and descends deeper into the black pulsating mist, that deep, heavy electrical pulse still humming away in the background and oscillating back and forth, while strands of feedback and flecks of haunting melody waft through the darkness. Track Samples: Sample : Contents Of A Black Box Sample : Labyrinthian Void Sample : Octagonal Forms Sample : Our Future Is A Debt
BATTLEFIELDS Entourage Of The Archaic LP (Init) 14.98
A limited edition (300 copies) one-sided LP of Battlefields's crushing Entourage Of The Archaic EP, which had previously been released as a limited cd through Init. This sweet-looking record is pressed on one-sided colored marble vinyl and is packaged in a heavy clear mylar sleeve that has artwork from Minneapolis tattoo artist Heath Rave screenprinted on the one side, and includes a handnumbered insert card and a download card for a digital copy of the record.
These tundra warriors return with their followup to the excellent 2006 album Stained With The Blood Of An Empire, their burly debut that merged a seething tribal doomcore fury influenced by Neurosis with that screamathon deathcore sound that is native to the Dakotas and surrounding regions. That album was crushing, evocative, and stood out from the pack of bands that simply ape Neurosis and Isis. So now it's a year later, and from the sounds on this CD single, it sounds like Battlefields are taking the same route that their forward-thinking peers in Rosetta, Mouth Of The Architect and Year Of No Light are opting for - continued experimentation and mutation of the apocalyptic dirge sound that ultimately moves them further and further from the realm of mere clonedom. This disc features a single 13 minute track that is leagues ahead of their previous work, an expansive psych-metal jam that begins as a field of tinny electronic noise and lonely piano notes that are gra
dually joined by slow scraping violin-like notes and dark rumbling ambience. Eventually the entire band kicks in with crushing, crusty sludge metal, massive riffing and death metal vocals and wah-soaked guitar leads rolling out oppressively. The band plunges into passages of quieter, ambient rock that remind me somewhat of Red Sparowes, though Battlefields have their own mystical quality to the softer instrumental twists and turns. Pretty great, certainly recommended for those into the aforementioned bands like Rosetta and MOTA as well as Tides, Across Tundras, Pelican, and Time To Burn.Track Samples: Sample : Track 1
BEHERIT The Oath Of Black Blood CD (Season Of Mist) 14.98
The official re-release of Beherit's The Oath Of Black Blood from Season Of Mist, presented in a digipack with gnarly album art from Chris Moyen.
Now, here's some really filthy black metal. A volatile force in early 90's black metal, Beherit hailed from Finland and made quite an impression on black metal fans with their first CD release Oath Of Black Blood, released in 1992. Their brand of black metal was seriously raw and noisy, recorded so low-fi that there's a constant noxious tape hiss that seeps between the cracks of their music, and the playing is so chaotic to the point where Beherit's guitar riffs and uber-sloppy blastbeat drumming and psychotic vocals constantly falls in and out of synch with one another, creating an intensely feral sound heavily influenced by early grindcore and death metal as well as early Sarcofago. Later albums would explore more ambient, experimental territory, but Beherit's earliest tracks are toxic flashpoints of vileness that rank as some of the most crazed, fucked-up black metal from that era. These guys channeled pure evil through their chaotic, eccentric chainsaw guitar riffing, relentless neanderthal blastbeat drumming, but it's frontman Holocausto and his whacked out vocals that especially burn my nerve endings; throughout these short, barbaric eruptions of black metal, Holocausto spews a stream of bizarre croaking, demonic whispers, blasphemous hissing, sickening vomit sounds, and trippy processed moaning that sound totally fucking inhuman. It's so "out" and freakish that the music almost borders on Abruptum territory with all of the eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, noises, effects and brief ambient outros that appear all over these songs, though Beherit indeed played "songs" with real riffs and a semblence of structure, in spite of how noisy and extreme this stuff gets. And there are times when Beherit does devolve into a black miasma of turbulent distortion and percussion, mainly towards the ends of songs like "Beast Of Damnation" and "Demonomancy", the simplistic riffing and blasting drums melting together into a viscous blob of hellish violence. If you can't get enough of the more violent, fucked-up and noisy fringes of black metal, bands like Vargr, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Nekrasov, Abruptum, Von, Blasphemy, etc., then you really need to go back to Beherit, who were one of the first bands to deliver black metal at it's most primal, it's most insane and chaotic state.Track Samples: Sample : Black Mass Prayer Sample : Dawn of Satans Millenium Sample : The Oath of Black Blood Sample : Witchcraft
BEHERIT The Oath Of Black Blood LP (Emetic) 17.98
The Oath Of Black Blood IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER
Here's the official LP re-release of Beherit's The Oath Of Black Blood from Emetic, presented in a full color jacket with gnarly album art from Chris Moyen, and a full color 11" x 17' poster of the guys in Beherit (who look like they were barely out of high school when the photo was taken!).
Now, here's some really filthy black metal. A volatile force in early 90's black metal, Beherit hailed from Finland and made quite an impression on black metal fans with their first CD release Oath Of Black Blood, released in 1992. Their brand of black metal was seriously raw and noisy, recorded so low-fi that there's a constant noxious tape hiss that seeps between the cracks of their music, and the playing is so chaotic to the point where Beherit's guitar riffs and uber-sloppy blastbeat drumming and psychotic vocals constantly falls in and out of synch with one another, creating an intensely feral sound heavily influenced by early grindcore and death metal as well as early Sarcofago. Later albums would explore more ambient, experimental territory, but Beherit's earliest tracks are toxic flashpoints of vileness that rank as some of the most crazed, fucked-up black metal from that era. These guys channeled pure evil through their chaotic, eccentric chainsaw guitar riffing, relentless neanderthal blastbeat drumming, but it's frontman Holocausto and his whacked out vocals that especially burn my nerve endings; throughout these short, barbaric eruptions of black metal, Holocausto spews a stream of bizarre croaking, demonic whispers, blasphemous hissing, sickening vomit sounds, and trippy processed moaning that sound totally fucking inhuman. It's so "out" and freakish that the music almost borders on Abruptum territory with all of the eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, noises, effects and brief ambient outros that appear all over these songs, though Beherit indeed played "songs" with real riffs and a semblence of structure, in spite of how noisy and extreme this stuff gets. And there are times when Beherit does devolve into a black miasma of turbulent distortion and percussion, mainly towards the ends of songs like "Beast Of Damnation" and "Demonomancy", the simplistic riffing and blasting drums melting together into a viscous blob of hellish violence. If you can't get enough of the more violent, fucked-up and noisy fringes of black metal, bands like Vargr, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Nekrasov, Abruptum, Von, Blasphemy, etc., then you really need to go back to Beherit, who were one of the first bands to deliver black metal at it's most primal, it's most insane and chaotic state.Track Samples: Sample : Black Mass Prayer Sample : Dawn of Satans Millenium Sample : The Oath of Black Blood Sample : Witchcraft
BLACK DICE self-titled 7 INCH VINYL (Gravity) 4.98
If you've never heard the early Black Dice recordings and only know the band from their albums Beaches And Canyons or their more recent offerings on Paw Tracks, boy are you ever in for a surprise. Before these Rhode Island art school grads started flexing their inner Eno and began experimenting with electronic textures and krautrock-inspired soundforms, they carved out big bloody chunks of berserk avant-hardcore thrash that sounded a whole hell of a lot like Void immersed in ear-wrecking bursts of harsh noise, a raucous and violent assault of sludgy hardcore, blown out to oblivion, ultra noisy and chaotic, and completely fucked and insane sounding. Black Dice never sounded more psychotic than on their very first self-titled 7" on Gravity Records from 1998, a six song beating of filthy chaos and feedback-soiled thrash that includes the noxious hardcore dirge of "Lambs Like Fruit", "Synapse Synapse" gnarled mid-paced thrash and the angular noise freak-out of "To The Lions". On the b-side, we get the bestial noise-punk of "Narcissus & Echo", the disintegrating, collapsing thrash of "New Design", and the tribal drumming and volleys of acidic guitar noise and gargling vox and messed up riffs of "Rereading". The songs are barely two minutes long, riffs falling apart, drumming so chaotic that it seems as if the entire drum kit is about to fly apart, the band barely keeping in time with one another. Packaged in a full color jacket with a glossy insert, this EP is one of the most scathing fucked-up hardcore records of the late 90's in my opinion - highly recommended.
BODY HAMMER Jigoku CD (The Path Less Traveled) 9.98
The debut album from the one-man electrogrind band Body Hammer delivers some intensely wacked out blastchaos that's pretty indefinable. There's lots of brutal programmed blasting and ultrafast riffing here, it's definitely got that drum machine/electronic grind sound going on, but these elements are combined with tons of dark ambience and weird electronic soundscaping which give Jigoku a strange industrial soundtrack feel. It's really unique, and definitely recommended to fans of extreme experimental grindcore.
The first track "Severe Durol Torture" starts off slow and creepy, an alien creepscape with an eerie minor key piano drifting into grinding detuned guitar sludge, gasping vocals and weird electronic noises, and then rips into the hypergrind chaos of "The Bystander Effect", all spastic grind riffage and mach 10 blastbeats, reminding me of both Noism and Discordance Axis quite a bit. "Blue Eyed Assassin" follows with a mere fourteen seconds of insane harmonized guitar squiggle and abstract grindnoize, then "Digital Direct Drive" returns to atmospheric horrific ambience, huge slabs of crushing metallic drone, screaming tortured vokills, and eerie synths cloaked in darkness and reverb, a terrifying industrial doom dirge crawling through Body Hammer's shadowy futuristic soundworld. More short, spastic blasts of angular processed grind follow, "MPD Psycho", "No Fucking Way", "The Principles And Practices Of Nihilism", all of them microbursts of dissonant grindcore, insanely fast programmed blastbeats, blackened industrial murk and digital FX, sometimes as short as four seconds long.
On the last third of Jigoku, though, Body Hammer's sound shifts into a slower, more ambient direction, almost like Abruptum crossed with spacey industrial noise. There's low-fi, heavily distorted industrial blackdirge with blown-out vokills and plodding riffage that melts down into slabs of caustic white noise, putrid guitar mangle and pounding metallic percussion, and then "Deeper Into The Abyss" introduces blackened tremolo riffing that writhes around monstrous blackdoom ambience, a thick fog of cavernous reverb, delicate piano and scraping noise thundering across a bleak, evil ambient metal wasteland. The title track is next, a disturbing soundtracky dronescape with more murderous raspy vokills, a simply creepy piano melody and clean shimmery guitars mixed in with blasts of rotten black dirge riffage, trippy effects, huge uncoiling ropes of black bass, sounding like an 80's horror movie theme filtered through some alien blacknoize nightmare. After that, the sound gets more spacious as insanely detuned bass chugs through an underworld of whining siren like tones and weeping feedback, and then the last track appears, total silence for a good five minutes, and then it suddenly erupts into about a minute of blistering choppy white noise and strange disembodied voices.
Some seriously crazed, surrealistic hypergrind going on here, like Infidel Castro mixed with Abruptum and Discordance Axis maybe, a strange, otherworldly chaos that's both brutal and incredibly detailed. The disc comes in a dvd case with full color packaging, and for a limited time we have a limited edition version that's also packaged in a patterned cloth wrapper with extra buttons and stickers.Track Samples: Sample : The Bystander Effect Sample : Deeper Into The Abyss Sample : Jigoku Sample : Red Pyramid
BODYCHOKE Cold River Songs CD (Relapse) 14.98
Being a big fan of the whole UK post-industrial scene, the Pathological, Freek, Broken Flag and Headdirt labels, bands like Skullflower, Ramleh, Splintered, Slab!, etc., it's weird that I never got into the band Bodychoke before. Part of it is that their stuff has been out of print for years and I just never came across any of their albums, but Bodychoke also came along later in the 90's, around the time that this scene began to drift deeper underground. Thanks to Relapse for reissuing this 1998 album, though, because this stuff rules. Cold River Songs originally came out on the Purity label, and has been presented here in a remastered form with three bonus tracks (originally from the limited Completion cdr) and new artwork and album design.
The band was formed by members of power electronics legends Sutcliffe Jugend and Whitehouse, a massive noise rock unit that fused together industrial rhythms, crushing riffage, dark dramatic baritone vocals that sound a whole lot like Michael Gira from Swans, and nihilistic lyrics. By the time that Bodychoke recorded their third and final album Cold River Songs, they had evolved into a sinister combination of the pummeling mechanistic heaviness of Godflesh, the grim and dramatic crush of Swans, and the gloomy post-punk of Joy Division and Nick Cave.
The album starts off with the heavy guitar noise and tribal drumming of "Control", ominous martial snares coming in, the sound very Swans-like, and then it changes into a frenzied noise rock jam, screaming vocals and seething riffage, bits of electronic noise and cello, a pummeling industrial noise rock groove. The next track "Cold River Song" is a longer jam that starts off with atmospheric clean guitar strum and drums, the cello coming back in and giving the sound an epic, dolorous feel, and as the song stretches out for almost ten minutes, the softer post-rock sound is contrasted with violent eruptions of distorted riffs and pounding percussion, building slowly to the chaotic crescendo at the end. More cello dominates "Your Submission", whose sparse bass lines and skittering dubby percussion at first creates a dark, brooding vibe, Paul Taylor's deep crooning vocals and the electronic noises adding to the moody post-rock crawl, but then the track erupts into a super heavy spaced out tribal jam with screamed vocals, corrosive slabs of guitar noise, pounding militaristic snares, scraped cello strings, a pounding industrial post-punk heaviness that segues right into the song "Victim". This track starts off almost like a chamber rock piece, eerie cello drones and electronic ambience and tribal percussion slowly building to another frenzied noise rock eruption, squalls of guitar noise and heavy drumming pounding out a hypnotic waltzing groove, similar to later-era Swans or Killing Joke.
The Swans comparison is most obvious on "Ideal Home", though. It's a standout track that's much more somber and restrained than the rest of the album, a slow moody dirge that's led by the bass guitar and cello and surrounded by clean guitars and violins and subtle percussion, dramatic and brooding and very Swans-like, especially when the distinctly Gira-like singing comes in. And "Aftermath", which closed the original album, is another ominous post-punk jam, almost entirely instrumental save for some deep chanting choir-like vocals, the sound minimal and spacey, droning horns and moaning cello mixing with minor key guitar and sprawling dramatic ambience, finally building into squalls of psychedelic, Skullflowery noise guitar. The three bonus tracks at the end are similar, winding noise-laced rock with explosive feedback, haunting cello strings, pounding Killing Joke-style drumming, and fierce screamed vocals. This album is so heavy and haunting; I can't get enough of it, and can't believe that I've just now discovered it. A definite recommendation for anyone into heavy noise rock, Uk industrial, that sort of thing; this is one of the best albums that I've ever heard from that era of underground UK heaviness!Track Samples: Sample : Control Sample : White Light Killer
CANNABIS CORPSE The Weeding LP (Tank Crimes) 12.98
On regular 12" vinyl, on hot pink vinyl (that most death metal of vinyl colors), limited to 500 copies, with a foldout insert.
Hell yeah, my favorite pot-obsessed old school death metal band has returned with another blast of gutteral brutality! The mighty Cannabis Corpse is back with this four-song EP The Weeding, with members Weedgrinder, Hallhammer, Nikropolis and Landphil once again breaking out the early-90's death blitz and bestial denim-clad heaviness with their awesome, ultra-obsessive lyrics all about smokin' bud. They aren't the first metal band to sing exclusively about weed, but I can't think of anyone who has taken it to the imaginative extremes these maniacs have, combing both bizarre sci-fi marijuana narratives and direct references to Cannabal Corpse in the same breath, and incorporating this ridiculousness into a straight-faced death metal attack that sounds like it birthed somewhere right outside of Tampa in 1990. Part of this is an elaborate joke, of course, but the music is so crushing and legit that even the stoniest death metaller will be hard pressed not to love these guys. Comedic and crushing, the EP starts off with "Shit Of Pot Seeds", a raging dose of complex death metal, total Cannibal Corpse worship, but, you know, with lyrics about the toxic horrors of what happens to your gastrointestinal system after ingesting pot seeds, the song fulla sick changeups between thrashy DM and slower chugging breakdowns, loads of technical shredding, deep gutteral bellows, and some eerie dual guitar harmonies showing up towards the end. "Vaporaized" starts off more dirgey and atmospheric, but quickly enough launches into a furious speedy death metal assault with awesome evil soloing, putrid blasts of vocal slime, jackhammer blastbeats, and complex jagged riffing, followed by the punishing double-bass driven grooves of "Skull Full Of Bong Hits" and the slightly more melodic "Sickening Photosynthesis", which has more of those diseased guitar harmonies and lots of melodic bass work. And as always, no Cannabis Corpse release is complete without the fantastic full color artwork of Andrei Bouzikov, who delivers another eye-popping piece of sentient marijuana bud mayhem, with two battling bud-warriors engaged in mortal combat in some sort of Thunderdome-like scenario. Another killer fucking slab of THC-infested death metal brutality! And for those of you keeping score, the band also features members of Battlemaster and Municipal Waste.Track Samples: Sample : Sickening Photosynthesis Sample : Vaporized
CANNABIS CORPSE The Weeding (DELUXE EDITION) 8 INCH VINYL (Tank Crimes) 19.98
Tank Crimes just released the newest Cannabis Corpse EP as a deluxe collectors package, with a thick 8" square picture disc with full color artwork on both sides, a 4" x 7" vinyl Cannabis Corpse "Bong Hits" sticker, a poster/lyric foldout sheet, and an 13" x 18" full color Cannabis Corpse "Vaporized" poster, all packaged together in an onversized zip-lock bag, and issued in a limited edition of 420 copies (of course!).
Hell yeah, my favorite pot-obsessed old school death metal band has returned with another blast of gutteral brutality! The mighty Cannabis Corpse is back with this four-song EP The Weeding, with members Weedgrinder, Hallhammer, Nikropolis and Landphil once again breaking out the early-90's death blitz and bestial denim-clad heaviness with their awesome, ultra-obsessive lyrics all about smokin' bud. They aren't the first metal band to sing exclusively about weed, but I can't think of anyone who has taken it to the imaginative extremes these maniacs have, combing both bizarre sci-fi marijuana narratives and direct references to Cannabal Corpse in the same breath, and incorporating this ridiculousness into a straight-faced death metal attack that sounds like it birthed somewhere right outside of Tampa in 1990. Part of this is an elaborate joke, of course, but the music is so crushing and legit that even the stoniest death metaller will be hard pressed not to love these guys. Comedic and crushing, the EP starts off with "Shit Of Pot Seeds", a raging dose of complex death metal, total Cannibal Corpse worship, but, you know, with lyrics about the toxic horrors of what happens to your gastrointestinal system after ingesting pot seeds, the song fulla sick changeups between thrashy DM and slower chugging breakdowns, loads of technical shredding, deep gutteral bellows, and some eerie dual guitar harmonies showing up towards the end. "Vaporaized" starts off more dirgey and atmospheric, but quickly enough launches into a furious speedy death metal assault with awesome evil soloing, putrid blasts of vocal slime, jackhammer blastbeats, and complex jagged riffing, followed by the punishing double-bass driven grooves of "Skull Full Of Bong Hits" and the slightly more melodic "Sickening Photosynthesis", which has more of those diseased guitar harmonies and lots of melodic bass work. And as always, no Cannabis Corpse release is complete without the fantastic full color artwork of Andrei Bouzikov, who delivers another eye-popping piece of sentient marijuana bud mayhem, with two battling bud-warriors engaged in mortal combat in some sort of Thunderdome-like scenario. Another killer fucking slab of THC-infested death metal brutality! And for those of you keeping score, the band also features members of Battlemaster and Municipal Waste.Track Samples: Sample : Sickening Photosynthesis Sample : Vaporized
CULTED Below The Thunders Of The Upper Deep CD (Relapse) 11.98
Elsewhere on this week’s new arrivals update I wrote about the recently released debut from the band Keplers Odd, who combine crushing guitar/bass sludge and industrial noise and who feature members of UK black industrialists Deadwood and this band, Culted. The limited edition disc that Relapse released from Keplers Odd is what led to the label picking up this band, and it's one of the doomiest things that I've heard from Relapse in years. Culted is a trans-continental project with three members based in Canada and singer Daniel Jannson located over in Sweden, but through file transfers and email have created a punishing debut that combines industrial darkness and extreme doom into a crushingly heavy slab of slow-mo malevolence. Jannson's harsh, blackened raspy vokills sound like they're drifting up out of an abandoned mine shaft, and add to the bleak, cavernous feel of Culted's blackened doom. Guitars move from punishing droning doom to dissonant riffage that has a vague Deathspell quality, and the black metal influence on Culted's sound is really obvious. There's symphonic keyboards that emerge out of the gloom, keening orchestral feedback, and heavy tribal drumming that sometimes gives the songs a Swans-like bombast, albeit one that's drowning in an oppressive and utterly miserable atmosphere. Crushing slow-motion deathdoom riffs meet psychedelic wah guitar, skittering jazzy percussion and clanging oil drum pound appear alongside the grinding dirge-like drumming, and the band injects ample amounts of ambient pipe organ like drones and swells of kosmich synthesizer into their crawling black thunder. Some really industrial sounding elements creep through into the sound all throughout Below The Thunders, wafts of dark electronic ambience, crushing distorted synths, bits of claustrophobic Throbbing Gristle-esque noise, and the rolling toms and tribal rhythms show up consistently, hitting a peak on the track "Gunburn" where Culted breaks into a combination of grisly deathdoom crush and Test Dept. style percussion. Very cool. These guys are as grim and blackened as it gets, channeling the same sort of portentous, apocalyptic density as Monotheist-era Celtic Frost, early Swans, psychdeathdoomers Esoteric, and Laudanum. The packaging is fucking sweet, too; the disc comes in a digipack with a die cut cover that allows a portion of the booklet to show through.Track Samples: Sample : Gunburn Sample : The Latter Fire Sample : Social Control
DJ IMMOLATION A Product Of Dementia CD-R (Realicide Youth) 5.98
A vicious blast of meth-demon techno from the Realicide Collective, A Product Of Dementia is the debut disc from Cincinnati's DJ Immolation, doling out seventeen tracks of blistering jackhammer terrorcore/speedcore that includes spoken word samples from Robert Inhuman (Realicide). No weak "happy hardcore" bullshit here, DJ Immolation cranks up the crushing distorted bass lines and chainsaw synths across these tracks, fusing together nihilistic vibes, fragmented samples of old school hip-hop and the Misfits and American Psycho and comedian Bill Hicks along with tons of other mean-spirited sound bites, grindcore-strength blast beats, maniacal calliope melodies, brutal skittering chopped-up Shitmat-style breaks, frantic drum n' bass weaving in and out of brutal distorted kick drums, monstrous death metal style vokills, remixes of Realicide material, bits of harsh industrial chaos and old 8-bit video game sounds, whipped into 600 mph speedcore raveups that extol the glories of mass murder, copious narcotic ingestion, and total depravity. This is what I'm talking about when I tell people that I listen to "techno". This disc fits in nicely on my shelf next to Rotterdam Terror Corps, Delta 9, Nasenbluten, Paratoxic and Word Of God...brutal shit! Comes in screenprinted/xeroxed packaging, and limited to one hundred copies.Track Samples: Sample : Bloodlust Sample : Live Or Die Sample : Ultraviolence Sample : You Da Devil
DOZELIMIT Constructions Of The Highest Architecture CD (R.A.I.G.) 11.98
One thing's for sure - Dozelimit really love their delay pedals. There's hardly a moment on their debut album Constructions Of The Highest Architecture where the Russian duo aren't bathing their haunting guitar lines and rumbling amp drones in delay, making this exercise in dark metallic dronecraft super spacey and dreamy. These guys also have the distinction of being one of the only (maybe the first?) Siberian bands that I've ever carried at Crucial Blast. Anyways, this disc features seven untitled tracks from Dozelimit, all slow, down-tuned guitar based soundscapes that combine crushing doomdirge heaviness, endless stretches of shimmering feedback, and buzzing industrial machine drones that often resembles a doomier Troum, or even the instrumental sludge/drone project Fulci that yours truly has been involved with. The opener layers gentle delay-flecked guitar strum over descending sheets of metallic drone and shimmer, the dark, cinematic guitar figures that slowly emerge from the gloom have an almost jazzy feel, the softer ambience merging with super-heavy ambient doomdrone and dark rumbling synths. The following track has more floating fragile guitar figures combining with melodious high-end drones to form echoing fragmented melodies that ripple through black space, hovering high above swirling murky seas of tape hiss and granular noise. The guitars move from slowly bending notes that form into a sort of deep-space blues into sheets of blackened tremelo and minimal ambient hum, and heavy rattling vibrations appear, as if from some leviathan engine grinding in the void. Most of the album is this mingling of gorgeous guitar ambience and heavy industrial throb, circular melodies and luminescent ambience stretched across space, the guitar notes decaying into darkness, mutated into strange swarms of high end chitter and nocturnal hum, swirling into clusters of percussive sounds into a kind of psychedelic blackened space music, like Cisfintum or Mauriozio Bianchi mixed with the guitarscapes of MGR. But the last two tracks drop the hammer, unleashing a black wave of crushing ambient doom riffage a la early Sunn, slow drifting slabs of monstrous down tuned heaviness and blackened tremolo riffing slathered in droning electronics, weird glitchy noise, and sweeps of oscillator tones that could have been lifted from a Delia Derbyshire score, sculpted into bleak stuttering doomscapes.
Presented in black-on-black packaging with raised-print artwork.Track Samples: Sample : I Sample : V Sample : VI
ENDNAME Dreams Of A Cyclops CD (R.A.I.G.) 11.98
The first album from this Moscow-based instrumental space-metal group has the heavy prog feel that you'd expect from an album on R.A.I.G., but it's injected into a super heavy sludge/doom weightiness that often sounds like a kind of stately prog-doom. These guys have been compared to Pelican a bit, and there's definitely some of that sound going on here, but EndName add a bunch of their own eccentric sounds and turn it into something uniquely theirs, a mix of instrumental King Crimson-influenced prog, winding doom riffing, space rock atmospherics and quirky electronic soundscaping that puts an emphasis on heavy, hypnotic grooves, incorporating lots of synthesizer, Frippy guitar work, tribal percussion and even didgeridoo into their odd art-metal.
The proggy math-doom workout of opener "Inception" goes from stuttering Meshuggah-like riffage and cascading sheets of processed guitar into a repetitious, sinister doom metal riff driven by a lurching angular rhythm and constant harmonic squeals. "North" is slow pounding doom metal mixed with symphonic synth strings and pounding industrial clang, a lumbering cinematic doom instrumental that opens up into weirdly sunny melodic passages, soaring fx-heavy guitar solos, and some baroque Ren Faire keyboards towards the end that makes this sound like some weird proggy 80's doom. The fourteen minute "Eclipse" has Floydian guitar atmospherics flowing into an epic 80's metal/cop show groove with propulsive drums and melodic metallic riffing, a killer hook at the center of it, breaking of into tribal hand-drum percussion and atmospheric droning; halfway into it, the track starts to sound like older Pelican jamming with a drum circle before slipping back into that killer quasi-disco groove, then gets all spacey at the end with odd countrified guitars and more hand percussion. Heavy stop-start riffing dominates "Beyond The Scope" with an almost Helmet/Gore style groove, heavy angular sludge rock with creepy spacey lead guitar.
"Dissolution" opens with delayed didgeridoo drones and spacey synth drift, a deep cosmic ambience streaked with backwards guitar, chimes, buried electronic pulse, and synth strings, a total krautrock-inspired dronescape a la Tangerine Dream / Klaus Schulze, an eerie descending melody gradually returning to the ominous didgeridoo buzz. And closer "Dissociation" returns to the massive processed slabs of progged out sludge metal with another lumbering stop/start riff and more sheets of FX-heavy guitar, crushing plodding drone-riffage and swirling cosmic synths merging into a slow and propulsive groove, the drums a mechanical tick-tock pulse, riffs constantly changing and chugging, the drums blasting off into volleys of ferocious double bass later on, joined by percussive clang and crashing cymbals, mutating into a frenzy of spaced out thrash metal riffing at the very end.Track Samples: Sample : Dissolution Sample : Inception Sample : North
A two-fer-one package from Relapse that bundles two of their more obscure releases from the 90's; both of these albums are pretty terrific, and if you're a fan of avant-garde post-industrial heaviness and experimental guitar-based ambience, highly recommended. Each disc comes in it's own complete packaging, but the two cds are housed in a printed slipsleeve.
First, Flux's art-industro-pop album Protoplasmic:
Um, it's sorta hard to believe that this far-out guitar pop is from the bassist from doomlords Khanate, especially if you weren't familiar with all of James Plotkin's earlier projects. But this was one of the avant-guitarist's primary projects in the 90's after the demise of experimental goof-grinders Old Lady Drivers, recorded around the same time that he was collaborating with Mick Harris from Scorn, who actually produced this album. That produced a cross-pollination of ideas that take shape on Flux's one and only album Protoplasmic from 1997, which sounds like a mix of futuristic trip-hop and heavy dreamy roboto mecha-pop filtered through Plotkin's mutant guitar. More than ten years later, Flux still sounds totally unique. The rhythms are weird and angular, broken jagged beats and fractured breaks that alternate with more rigid percussion that comes close to Scorn or Godflesh's heavy drum programming, but the guitars are crafted into lush, dreamy abstract textures and jagged melodic lines that give this a weird post-punk feel. Plotkin enlisted vocalist Ruth Collins to recite a combination of spoken word poetry and ethereal fx-soaked harmonies, and he himself delivers some neat robotic vocoder crooning in a couple of tracks. At times, I'm reminded of the angular anti-funk of Wire, but combined with dark, spacey beatscapes. However, once you get to the last half of the album, things get decidedly darker and more ominous. The song "Stretched Out" moves into shadowy regions, evoking the creepy darkhop/industrial dub of Scorn with distorted vocals over heavy programmed break beats and throbbing basslines, dark electronic drones and electronic fx.
"Airtrap" has Collins delivering another spoken word piece over dark rising drones and distorted synth sounds and chittering insectile noise a la Throbbing Gristle. But then the last track "Immanence" returns the big jagged drum machine beats and synth guitar sounds from earlier, almost jazzy and ecstatic, with glorious buzzing drones and huge looping bass locked into the propulsive grooves, sounding vaguely like Italian prog blasted through a wall of sci-fi synth.
The second disc in the package, Slab!'s dark industrial funk/sludge opus Descension:
Featuring members of esteemed UK avant/rock/noise bands like Sweet Tooth, Ice and God, Slab! were a similar sort of post-industrial crushsquad who went for a unique avant sound that tapped into both the industrial sludge of Godflesh and the nihilistic pummel of Swans, as well as a heavy post-punk and free jazz vibe, with a bit of Foetus thrown in. It's interesting that I got this disc in the same week that I picked up that Bodychoke reissue on Relapse, as both bands come from a similar sound, although Slab! were much more eclectic and weird. This Relapse reissue from the late 90's collects both the Descension Lp and the tracks from the People Pie 12", both of which came out on Ink Records back in 1987-88. This is pretty crucial stuff for fans of the UK noise rock scene of the late 80's; Slab! were a seriously heavy band that back in the day were compared to everything from Swans to Big Black to Material and The Birthday Party, which gives you an idea of how far-ranging their sound could be.
The first two songs set the trajectory for where Slab! are headed: menacing, near-whispered vocals and bleak oppressive ambience creeping over a massive hypnotic industrial sludge groove of "Tunnel Of Love"'s grinding robotic drums, electronic noise and crushing bass, then followed by sheets of dissonance,
gothy Depeche Mode-ish crooning, oil drum percussion, rumbling bass and pummeling mechanical grind of "Undriven Snow", which sort of sounds to me like a new wavey Godflesh.
"Dr Bombay" begins with heavy guitar noise and softly bleating horns, dark and jazzy, before launching into an unexpectedly funky industrial jam, multiple drummers playing in tandem, massive rumbling bass, the band launching into a sort of industrial strength no wave funk with free jazz horns. Reminds me of
16-17 a bit, but less abrasive, more heavy and hypnotic and, er, danceable. It all drifts off into pure free jazz territory for a minute, before dropping back into that propulsive groove, and then after another bout of skronky, splattery free jazz towards the end, the song shifts into a pounding industrial dirge, total Godflesh-like heaviness.
The next song "Dolores" features piano, shuffling electro rhythms, break beats, and deep dramatic vocals in a nightmarish electro jam, the vocals a Gira/Danzig-like baritone croon, big rocking basslines, trancey rhythmic beats, surges of strings and horns, like Godflesh mixed with orchestral samples and dark post-punk.
"The Animals" is a slow fragmented dirge with backwards tape noise and demonic pitch shifted vocals, simple plodding bass, creepy samples, simple pounding percussion, drifting off halfway in into minimal dark ambience, then returning to a free jazz-damaged version of the original dirge, subtle squawking horns bleating and echoing at the edges of the music, the drums building into a dense echoing wall of tribal pummel, the track becoming more hallucinatory, the guitar skronkier and more abstract and Sharrock-like.
"Gutter Busting" is another pounding industrial post-punk funk dirge with fiery horns and stuttering industrial breakbeats, crushing and Scorn-esque, with weird clean backing vox. The Swans vibe returns with "Flirt" (especially in the vocals), and "Mooseland" begins with improv drumming and guitar noise, bits of abstract piano, very free jazz, then blasts off with distorted bass guitar churning against the skittery jazzy rhythms. Both "Loose Connection Somewhere" and "Big Sleeper" also mix free jazz clatter and Swans'style pummel, and "People Pie" at first seems like another industrial sludge assault, but then pulls out exuberant R&B backing vocals on the chorus (!). The last track "Railroad" is a haunting jazz-sludge quake, all plodding bone-rattling bass , distorted heaviness, druggy chanting, a mechanical monstrous groove stumbling through psychedelic looped samples and narcotized horns.
Fucking awesome stuff, I dunno why more people didn't get into this band and album when Relapse reissued it, but it's remained one of the more overlooked and obscure reissues that Relapse ever put out. If you are into bands like Godflesh, Head Of David, God, Splintered, Cosmonauts Hail Satan, Bodychoke, Terminal Cheesecake and the like, though, you need to hear this. The disc includes an eight page booklet that has liner notes, band bio, discography info, lyrics and more.Track Samples: Sample : Gutter Busting Sample : Tunnel of Love Sample : FLUX - Stretched Out Sample : FLUX - Unknown Codes
GODFLESH Messiah CD (Relapse) 13.98
After YEARS of being out of stock here, Godflesh's Messiah is finally back on the shelves here!
In a way this was the final Godflesh release, coming out right after Hymns, although the music on Messiah had originally been recorded in 1994 and released several years later as a limited edition fan-club release on Avalanche Recordings, the post-HeadDirt imprint operated by Godflesh mastermind Justin Broadrick. Long sought after, the Messiah EP and it's four songs was a crucial piece of the Godflesh body of work, and the title track is considered by many (myself included) to be one of the band's finest songs. The tracks "Wilderness Of Nirrors", "Sungod", and "Scapegoat" are equally crushing, with grinding bass pulses, dancey Manchester-style breakbeats and trippy, distorted drum n' bass, dub fx swirling through the droning feedback, mesmerizing guitar noise, and dreamy somnambulant singing on Justin's part that is much more in the vein of what he's been doing lately with Jesu than the other Godflesh material from this same time period. Less metal, more electronic than Selfless, but still immense and crushing and apocalyptic sounding, these jams are some of my favorite Godflesh songs.
And then there are the "dub" versions of the songs which are featured on the second half of this release which were remixed the following year in 1995, alternate versions of each track that are still recognizeable but rendered even darker, more hypnotic and druggy, the various elements of heavy drum machine beats and feedback and already stoned-sounding vocals glazed over with reverb and delay, each one a lysergic dance remix spinning off into the void surrounded by lovely clean guitar sounds, endlessly looped snare drums, snippets of sinister guitar harmonics shooting skyward. The atmosphere for these "dub" remixes isn't as relentless and focused on the pulverizing power of the beats as, say, what Broadrick was doing on the Songs Of Love And Hate In Dub remix album; this is more trippy and psychedelic, trancey and brain melting, and by far the most zoned-out of the Godflesh remixes. Essential for Godflesh fans, obviously, and anyone that has only recently become familiar with Broadrick's music through Jesu or J2 needs to start working their way back through the Godflesh catalog to experience some of the greatest heavy underground experimentation of the late 20th century, and I'm thinking that Messiah would be as good a place to start as any.
GUAPO Twisted Stems CD (Aurora Borealis) 10.98
Only have a few copies of this in stock, the limited edition 2006 EP from Guapo. Since this EP came out, Guapo have gone on to become one of the more popular underground prog bands, releasing stuff on the high profile Ipecac label run by Mike Patton, touring the US, generally makeing people go apeshit over their amazingly heavy and frenzied neo-prog genius, and with good reason. These guys are right up there with Ruins as torchbearers of powerful post-Magma prog. Anyone that's a fan of either Magma or Ruins needs to pick up anything from Guapo that you can get your hands on. Like I mentioned, though, this EP may go pretty fast. Aurora Borealis only made 500 of these, and we just dug up less than six copies that we'd had accidently hidden in a corner of our warehouse for the past year and a half, and it's highly doubtful that I'll be able to restock this once they are gone. Released to coincide with Guapo's 2006 US tour, the Twisted Stems EP features two songs "The Heliotrope" and "The Selenotrope", two different sides to Guapo's dark fusion of Zeuhl prog worship and shadowy post-rock.
These two tracks will surprise anyone expecting to hear more of Guapo's muscular Magmoid prog. Instead of their trademark dramatic riffing and bombastic arrangements, these two songs opt for a much moodier sound, crafting long stretches of slow, shuffling jazzy post-rock, with dark piano, shuffling, brushed drums, a menacing burbling bassline swathed in shadow. When the second track kicks in, that ominous jazzy crawl is slowly melded with creepy subterranean clatter, gongs, chains, cymbals, their smoke-wreathed clang echoing along with far-off lashes of acid guitar while the chugging propulsive bass surges beneath the murky jazzy creep. Very cool. Packaged in a cardboard wallet sleeve, and sealed by a black glossy label across the top.
HAERESIARCHS OF DIS Overture CD (Fatima Productions) 10.98
Just discovered this obscure one man black metal band from California through one of my customers, who sent a copy of Overture for me to check out a couple of months ago. It took me awhile to finally check it out, but once I did, I instantly fell under this album's black spell; combining both classic symphonic black metal sounds (in particular, an obvious nod to Emperor) and a seriously demented experimental streak, Hæresiarchs of Dis is both bombastic and bizarre, with a guitar sound that stands out by sounding ridiculously saturated and trebly, almost processed and electronic in fact, and all kinds of weird sonic textures that find their way into these eleven tracks.
The opener "Prelude Vestibule" begins with distorted distant riffing and eerie drifting moans, washes of abrasive ambient noise, and then a percussive booming appears, like the dread far-off pounding of a war drum in the depths, while weird demonic groans and dark synth melodies and massive swells of bass and cello-like drones rumble through the blackness, creating an evil, ritualistic ambience. But then "1st Movement: Memento Mori" kicks in to hyper speed black metal, harsh and distorted, with high pitched snarling vokills, insanely trebly tremolo riffing, blast beats that have a rigid, programmed feel. Towards the end of the song, it shifts into an awesome loping groove, with female choirs and majestic riffing, a thick sheen of distortion covering everything, the music slipping from odd percussive breakdowns back into the hyperfast industrialized black metal attack. "2nd Movement: Nocturnal Me" is another long track with more of that processed industrial BM sound, symphonic synths and flanged guitars soaring as the sound lurches into a lumbering black dirge joined by more choirs, orchestral percussion, and strings. Suddenly after a few minutes, it shifts into a fierce blackthrash assault for a while before again slipping into the midtempo lurch, now surrounded by deep off-key singing, whirling carnival keys, more of those choral voices, and gets weirder and more surreal before going back to yet another KILLER blackthrash riff and unexpected ultra fast gabber style drum machines.
The rest of Overture keeps piling on the dementia. Tracks like "5th Movement: Raping Azrael", "Intermezzo Atrum Votum" and "6th Movement: Consummatum Est" move from epic Wagnerian black metal bombast to bizarre ritualistic chanting and elvish Celtic folk, evil improvised murk and classic frostbitten buzz. "Etude Synth Jesus" has pitch-black kosmiche synths blending with sacred choral music, warped percussion and weird backwards vocals, all building to a droning, double-bass blasting black metal trance, and other tracks introduce surprising sounds like flute and even an accordion (played by someone named "Gilles de Rais") into the awesome riffage and sinister chaos. It's equal parts Emperor and Abruptum, Arcturus and Aborym swept up in an occult miasma of low-fi avant-BM. Check this out if yer into deranged black metal weirdness. Comes in an eight-panel digipack.Track Samples: Sample : Memento Mori Sample : Nocturnal Me Sample : Synth Jesus
IREPRESS Sol Eye Sea I (PURPLE/BROWN) 2xLP (Translation Loss) 23.98
Also available on purple/brown colored vinyl in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, packaged in an extremely cool-looking, full color gatefold package.
When I first found out about Irepress, it was through reviews of their first album Samus Octology that Translation Loss reissued a few years ago. I was reading about this band and kept seeing them compared to bands like Isis and Mouth Of The Architect and that current breed of epic cinematic sludge, but when I finally picked the album up, I was surprised by how little they sounded like those bands, and how proggy Irepress actually was. Sure, there is definitely some of that sludgy metallic heft on their debut, some massive crunchy riffage and spacey guitars that's wound into angular shapes, but Irepress took that metallic heaviness and wove it into these complex compositions that were waaaaay more intricate than what I was expecting. Irepress brought an awesome, off-the-charts progginess to their music, with songs made up of lots of different parts, fusing together soaring spacey ambience and intense mathy riffage, and the drumming was over the top, capable of breaing out into some crazy 70's fusion rhythms or shuffling jazz one second, and ultra-crushing mathmetal pound the next. The mix of sounds seemed really eclectic at first, but as you listened to Samus Octology, their weird proggy logic makes more sense and the songs reveal incredible melodic hooks within the confusing arrangements and constantly changing riffscape.
That debut revealed a very weird but seriously cool new band that managed to combine so many of my favorite sounds into a single powerful sounds, bringing together gorgeous cosmic drift and crushing mathy metal, epic metallic dirge and trippy, ultra-complex prog, mutant fusion jazz and lush shoegazer ambience into a mind bending whole. But as cool as that album was, the band stepped up their game even more for their second album, Sol Eye Sea I, which just came out on Translation Loss. I was blown away by their follow-up the first time I heard it - the musicianship has gotten even tighter and sicker, the music is more adventurous and the compositions, the way that Irepress put it all together, well, it's fucking genius this time around.
Just check out the nearly 11 minute opening track "Diaspora", where Irepress whip out just about every sound in their bag in a unbelieveably epic display of prog grandeur. The song starts with crushing mathematical chug, almost like a Meshuggah riff, as multiple guitars begin to appear playing contrasting leads, then suddenly the riff parts and reveals a gorgeous clean guitar melody. Almost immediately the band crashes right back in, again playing a punishing mathmetal riff but taking it in a new, more angular direction, with those ethereal clean guitars appearing alongside, then changes direction again and alternates a dreamy sludge riff with a slowly grooving instrumental that almost sounds like jazz fusion. And this is only three minutes in. From here, the song winds through awesome jazzy post-rock and propulsively funky prog, complete with handclaps, super complex guitar arrangements, weird little guitar effects that sound like the kind of scratch effects that Tom Morello used in Rage Against The Machine, and then back again into angular, thrashy metal. Later, the band drops out leaving just a soft dreamlike ambience that is eventually joined by moody orchestral strings and textural guitar effects, like ambient chamber rock, then an awesome Maiden-esque dual guitar harmony suddenly ascends skyward and the band locks into another immense prog workout, heavy sludgy riffage lumbering beneath celestial guitar arpeggios and 8-bit synth bass hooks, several different guitars all playing different parts in tandem and it sounds so complex and dense and almost overwhelming, but at the same time the music is so insanely catchy, way catchier than any other metallic prog band that I can think of at the moment, and it actually reminds me more of Mars Volta than anything, the riffs and hooks and arrangements are energetic and intricate and loaded with noodly guitar melodies, the technical skills are off the wall, but they drop these crushing metal riffs in at all the right spots, like hearing the Mars Volta being spliced with bits of Meshuggah and Pelican.
The next song "Rhintu" is shorter at just over three minutes, but Irepress packs in a laid-back jazzy groove with fuzzy electronic textures and backwards-looped drums for the first half, then turns it around into a majestic Jesu-esque dirge for the second, finishing it off in a blur of sharp, processed guitar chords and kinetic jazz rhythms. Then there's "Barrageo", which starts off with more awesome jazzy drumming and krauty synthesizers and more of those gorgeous ethereal tremelo-picked guitars chiming over it all, synthetic guitar notes flitting around and those handclaps back again, then some sickening dual fretboard runs break in and we get some very brief vocals, a harsh gutteral roar that suddenly soars upwards into a soprano harmony. Holy shit. Then it's off to heavy fuzz-drenched metallic riffing, throbbing rhythmic prog and dark, almost Goblin-esque guitar arpeggions, angular mathy riffs, intense thrash metal riffs, insane polyrhythmic drumming, chunky stuttering metalcore fused to heavenly cosmic synths, endless bursts of dreamy prog, screamed vocals and those soaring male vocal harmonies again, back and forth, weaving from one passage to another so seamlessly and quickly that you blink and you're in an entirely different place than you were a second ago, pulled back and forth between massive angular heaviness and lush, hyper-melodic prog.
The rest of Sol Eye Sea I is just as awesome and overwhelming and beautiful, from the delicate piano of "Daniel Sen" to the bizarre dubstep/prog/post-rock and lovely female vocals and burly mathmetal and synth soundtrack bliss of "Cyette Phiur" and the futuristic drum n bass/video game fantasia of "Fletchie"...oh man, this album has so much going on that it's nearly impossible to map out all of the different directions that these songs go in. It's like hearing Genghis Tron fused with King Crimson and Maudlin Of The Well - a weird set of comparisons, but that's what keeps popping into my head whenever I'm trying to describe how nuts and totally fucking AWESOME Sol Eye Sea I is. And that doesn't come close to really describing what's going on here. There's plenty of amazing prog-influenced bands out there right now, and way more instrumental groups than we really need, but I can't think of another band that has hooks that are this catchy and memorable while displaying some of the sickest chops I've heard in years. Fuck, this rules!
Absolutely recommended! This album has made a nice comfortable place for itself on my Best-Of list for '09, and while it seems to me that there's a strange lack of buzz on this album, I'm betting that people will be bugging out about Sol Eye Sea I soon enough.Track Samples: Sample : Cyette Phiur Sample : Diaspora Sample : Rhintu
KEPLERS ODD GRO J1655-40 CD (Desolation House) 13.98
One of the heaviest releases on Relapse's now finis Desolation House imprint, GRO J1655-40 was the first release from Keplers Odd, an industrial dirge outfit that features members of both blackened doom industrialists Culted and blacknoize demons Deadwood. The group uses electronics, guitar and bass to create bleak industrial doomdirges that evoke hulking rusted machinery, vast empty silos and wastelands of abandoned factories and crumbling infrastructure; these monstrous noisescapes are formed out of grinding guitar noise and seemingly improvised riffage that grinds through thick squalls of caustic noise, machine roar, and gritty factory ambience. The album reminds me of both Skullflower and later Ramleh stuff, a definite UK industrial vibe going on here, but way heavier and encumbered with a massive doomdrone gravitational pull. Aussie noise/sludge/drone heavies Halo are another reference point, but Keplers Odd are much more abstract and noisy. In fact, sometimes the band stirs up a massive grating storm of sheetmetal chaos that rivals that of Canadian metallurgist demon Knurl, and there’s loads of ecstatic feedback freakouts and blazing guitar drone - a harsh noise fans dream, for sure. The riffier sections are where the band moves into early Earth / Skullflower territory, dragging two chord doom riffs through a shrieking sea of screaming industrial howl and rumbling reverberating pound, but this is so much noisier and industrial and abrasive than those bands, free-guitar improv workouts matched with Merzbow-level bouts of electronic corrosion, crushing metallic drone-guitar buried under rumbling sheet metal quakes and roaring avalanches of scrap metal, and on some tracks there appear old warped recordings of what sounds like early 20th century German or Swedish popular music that creep through the din, the damaged warbling melodies sounding alien and dreamlike. Even at their noisiest and most abrasive though, Keplers Odd keep their noisescapes anchored to roiling drones and an almost constant low-end presence. The final two tracks are the heaviest, both massive Sunn-esque dirges filled with wailing vocal noises, crushing down tuned dronesludge, swirling industrial scrape and screech, a devastating and apocalyptic eruption of industrial doom. Limited to 1000 copies, and packaged in a six-panel digipack.Track Samples: Sample : 060417.3 Sample : 060604.4 Sample : 060625.4
LAST EXIT Headfirst Into The Flames: Live In Europe CD (Downtown Music Gallery) 12.98
Consisting of material recorded during their 1989 European tour, Headfirst Into The Flames is one of Last Exit's more nuanced recordings. The free/jazz/rock supergroup (which features drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, guitarist Sonny Sharrock, Peter Brotzmann on sax, and bassist Bill Laswell) still delivers some of the heaviest, most ferocious improv jazz I've ever heard, but this disc delivers several different levels of power, from creeping demented blues dirges to tough-as-nails skronk-thrash workouts with a constant blistering dialogue between the musicians.
If the reason you listen to Last Exit is pure catharsis, don't worry - Headfirst definitely delivers the brutal skronkfest. Immediately, Sharrock splatters his slack-string atonal shred all across opener "Lizard Eyes", opening the set with a blast of fluid chaos. But then the band shows off their formidable rhythmic muscle when they kick in to "Don’t Be A Cry Baby, Whatever You Do", as Laswell and Jackson lay down a smoldering backing groove while Sharrock smears thick gobs of effects and wah-abuse over Brotzmann's screaming reeds. It's one of their slower, more restrained numbers, but its a scorcher regardless, the band sliding easily in and out of a pounding groove that makes Brotzmann's hard blowing come off even more volcanic. A solo guitar piece at first, Sharrock starts off "So Small" with more raging speed shredding, his bursts of feedback distorted and drenched in chorus effects, the racing atonal speed picking resembling an intro to a thrash metal song, spitting out blues licks and textured amp noise until the rest of the band injects a pounding boogie, Laswell looping a circular bass line around Jackson's pummeling midpaced beat, streaks of razor-edged sax and bloozy blowing rising up from his bell, the last couple of minutes so thick and pounding that they almost rival a Brainbombs jam! The rest of the set moves through ferocious free-jazz-thrash jams and the dark circular jazz-dirge of "A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows" that evolves into chaotic stomping blues-boog with some of Laswell's most muscular playing I've heard on tape, bursts of ferocious speed often backed up by Jackson's whirlwind blast beat attacks, and the heavy dub/skronk hypnosis and Middle Eastern horn patterns of "Jesus! What Gorgeous Monkeys We Are". Last Exit were always amazingly adept at shifting seamlessly between the all-out free-jazz fury and slithering grooves, and that's never more apparent than on Headfirst...crucial assault-jazz that rocks like a motherfucker, and essential listening for any of you guys into Flying Luttenbachers, Weasel Walter Quartet, Naked City's "Torture Garden", Mothguts, Ettrick, etc. Packaged in a six-panel digipack with both cool cover art and song titles taken from the late avant-garde British poet Kenneth Patchen.Track Samples: Sample : A knight of ghosts and shadows Sample : Don't be a cry baby whatever you do Sample : Headfirst into the flames
LIKE DRONE RAZORS THROUGH FLESH SPHERE + MIGUEL P Aurum Nostrum Non Est Aurum Vulgi CD (Black Mass) 11.98
Ah, Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere, that bizarrely named blackdrone outfit that I've just gotten turned on to and subsequently have become obsessed with, whose appearance on the Those Who Dwell Beyond I describe as something akin to demonic blackened ambient dub. I really can't get enough of this band, although it looks like their releases are going to be hard to track down. Indeed, this split with avant-guitarist Miguel Prado is the only other release of theirs I've found so far. The three tracks that LDRTFS contribute to this album are plenty heavy, and not only do they share space with the dark, clanging guitar drones of Prado (a prolific collaborator who has worked with guitarist Julien Skrobek and avant/black/noise sculptors KTL), but the disc also features a lengthy collab piece between both artists at the end.
Like Drone Razors begin with a series of massive black hole reverberations, eruptions of growling tectonic drift and distorted synths, soft swirling smears of black orchestral ambience, high end shrieking tones, droning cellos, and bits of industrial clang and creep coming together into a sort of blackened kosmiche dronemusic, dense and crushing. The second track is pretty different, sounding like a blackened, infernal version of Scorn with huge bass drops way off in the distance, crushing blackened doom riffs, trails of creepy high end melody; it's like a hellish trip-hop instrumental streaked with wheezing accordion-like drones and pure blackened ambience, like Portishead gone satanic black ambient with blackened doom guitars buzzing in the background. Awesome! Last is a twenty minute dronescape of rumbling guitar drift and lilting high end melodies, roaring space synths, Troum meets Tangerine Dream but with vast bottom end thunder, roiling luminescent storms of blissed out megadrone that slowly becomes darker and more ominous as wailing voices from hell and Gregorian chants and waves of distorted guitar drag the kosmiche bliss-out into the depths...
Miguel Prado's "side" is titled "Descripción de un Combate", and consists of four tracks of abstract improv industrial guitar noise. What sounds like scraping metal and resonant steel sheets are actually the sound of Prado's heavily manipulated and processed guitar, which he uses to forge metallic drones mixed with amp buzz and cable sputter, creates dark, rumbling worlds of minimal subsonic thrum, tense dronescapes and blasts of heavy noise. Pretty cool stuff that's similiar to Troum/Maeror Tri, but harsher.
The eighth and final track "Aurum Nostrum Non Est Aurum Vulgi" is where Like Drone Razors and Miguel Prado finally team up, a twelve minute dronescape that opens with soft subterranean vibrations, metallic chimes lingering in the darkness, a far-off doom-laden bass line, haunting minor key guitar strings, the sound like that of an oud being played in some deep, dank, moss-covered cave, wreathed in the soft metallic whirr of prayer bowls being rubbed and deep, subsonic synth notes rumbling at almost imperceptible frequencies...a dark, mesmeric ambience, and a perfect ending for this disc.
Presented in a gold handscreened envelope with a vellum insert sheet.Track Samples: Sample : Miguel Prado - Execro Sample : Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere and Miguel Prado - Aurum Nostrum Non Est Aurum Vulgi Sample : Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere - Untitled
MAKOTO, KAWABATA The Tales Of The Dream Planet CD (Housepig) 9.98
With a solo Kawabata Makoto at the helm and some terrifically cheesy album graphics (of a naked woman doing yoga while floating around the cosmos), you'd probably think that this is going to be a spacey psych-rock freak-out along the lines of Acid Mothers Temple. That's not the case though; instead the AMT mastermind presents a disc of epic guitar drones that are more like the industrial post-rock ambience of Troum and the improv guitar drones of Oren Ambarchi. And it's all pretty great, perfect late night music to drift off to, the first track going on for forty-six minutes (yikes!), the second slightly shorter at just seventeen minutes long. Both pieces focus on extended guitar drones and amp ambience stretched into vast cloud formations that are run through various effects and end up sounding a lot like longform synth drones. The first, "She Came from the Shining Sea", reminds me of Tangerine Dream mixed with the isolationist ambient of Lull and Main, light shimmering drones and ethereal chordal drift softly swirling, while darker waves of lower-frequency drone hovering just beneath the surface. The second track "Kiss on the Dream Planet" is more minimal, an expanse of soft feedback and swells of low muted tones, not unlike the ultra-minimal experiments in drone from Kevin Drumm's recent offerings. Excellent cosmic guitardrone that comes as a surprise coming from someone more associated with high-octane acid guitar mayhem and ultra-distorted psychedelia. The disc comes in a full-color plastic dvd snapcase and is limited to five hundred copies.Track Samples: Sample : Kiss On The Dream Planet Sample : She Came From The Shining Sea
MOTHGUTS III CD-R (Thor's Rubber Hammer) 7.98
What the hell happened to these guys? Last time I heard em on tape, they struck me as a fun but fairly standard skronk-grind outfit, but they've obviously been working on their chops a LOT since the last time that heard em...this disc, released last year on the cool noise/jazz label Thor's Rubber Hammer out of D.C, shows Mothguts to have evolved into a much proggier, creepier, and HEAVIER sounding beast than I ever remember them being. The New Jersey-based jazz blasters (and apparent Diceman disciples) channel the brute-skronk power of Last Exit, Painkiller, Zu, Dying Ground and Naked City's Torture Garden, matching squealing expressive sax and wiry, abstract guitar with a crushing rhythm section. The songs on III are visceral eruptions of power, crushing bass lines locking onto pummeling drums; guitarist Chris Welcome tends to stay away from straightforward riffing, instead emitting these rapid bursts of speed picking and clustered dissonance, reminding me at times of Sonny Sharrock's playing in Last Exit whenever those guys would really crank up the fury; and the incendiary blowing from Anthony Ware shifts frequently between furious free-jazz blast and eerie, shadowy melodic playing. In fact, on several of the songs, the band surprised me by shifting into slower, more somber sections of dark down-tempo prog/jazz heaviness that reminds me of French prog rock (Magma/Shub Niggurath) mixed with the harmolodic sound of Ornette Coleman. I love that sound, and the way that Mothguts go from brutal improv-jazz-thrash to that creepier mode gives this music a unique touch. It gets really heavy though, and on several tracks the rhythm section achieves levels of crush that borders on death metal; half the time, it sounds like the drummer appears to believe that he's actually in a death metal band, unleashing brutal volleys of double bass, bursts of thrashing speed and manic blastbeats - this is way heavier than most jazz-thrash outfits. Imagine if Last Exit had been totally plugged in to thrash metal and death metal and Euro prog, mixing slithering horn-glazed prog with blistering high-speed thrashcore splattered with fierce alto sax into furious stop-on-a-dime arrangements. Despite the goofball song titles (like "Only God Can Motherfuck This Pussy", "Krazyglued Into Broken Glass Boxing Gloves", "The Nacht Time Is The Racht Time", "Jizz Factory" ), this is serious stuff, a total shredder that's one of my newest favorite "free jazz" discs. Recommended! Comes in a screenprinted sleeve packaged in thick Mylar pouch, and includes a Mothguts sticker. Limited to 150 copies.Track Samples: Sample : Hipsters Vs Satan Sample : Krazyglued Into Broken Glass Boxing Gloves
NECRO DEATHMORT This Beat Is Necrotronic CD (Distraction) 11.98
Necro Deathmort? Based on the name, I thought that this album was going to be far sillier than it turned out to be, but this is actually pretty serious business, a mix of several different sounds, distorted industrial breakbeats, elements of dubstep, droning doom metal, dark ambience, glitchy electronica all mixed together into an awesome, menacing slab of metallic doom-laden dub-step weirdness. I found out about Necro Deathmort after reading Scott Seward's review of the disc in a recent issue of Decibel, and his glowing review (and references to experimental dub metal, Ice, and The Bug) led me to getting in contact with the UK label that put out This Beat Is Necrotronic. The mix of apocalyptic dubstep/electronica and blackened heaviness that this band does is right up my alley, a totally unexpected cross between heavy doomdrone and Kevin Martin style rhythmic dread that I've been unable to remove from my stereo all month.
The album opens with a short intro noise piece called "Woburn Plate Corner" that's just thirty-six seconds of electronic bleeps and noise and samples, but then it kicks in to the first real song "Spilth" with massive booming funky distorted kick drums and a stuttering blown out industrial/break beat rhythm, a crushing skull-pounding distorto bass line (that almost sounds like it belongs in a death metal song) rumbling over the stuttering, hiccupping dubstep-like beats, squelchy synths and swirling white noise, super menacing and fucked-up sounding, but really catchy, too. They get slower and sorta jazzy on "Hurt Me I'm Bored", which stretches out a bit more, slowly building the intensity of the sound as bleeping 8-bit electronics and deep droning analogue synth is layered over an ominous slab of spacey grooving electro-doom, the groove sprawling out as the stripped-down drums pound beneath haunting minor key guitars and a wobbly electronic melody, bits of white noise and glitch and buzz swirling around the propulsive low-end throb; as the track progresses, the guitars build in heaviness and intensity, becoming more and more crushing until finally they erupt into a punishing doom metal riff as the electronic beats fall away, turning into a slow, lumbering doomcrush that's still laced with caustic electronic noise and winding segments of bluesy lead guitar weaving around the down tuned metallic crush. "I Can See Through Time" is a cloud of ominous ambient whir and buzzing chopped-up drones, dubbed out blasts of low end drifting through swirling krautrock synths and gleaming melodic ambience, which flows right in to the staccato trip-hop groove and dark washes of ambient drone of "Return To Planet Atlas"; huge booming beats and distorted speaker-wrecking bass grind through a miasma of fluttering high-end electronics and spacey FX, sounding a lot like Techno Animal or Scorn but way more scorched and distorted and evil. The surreal "Necro Effigy" mixes in recordings of frogs and hallucinatory voices with the skittering jagged beats and damaged distorted glitchery, and the short ambient piece "Broadcast" almost sounds like a fragment of a John Carpenter composition, a mysterious drifting expanse of rumbling low-end, layered voices and circular bass. That leads right in to the dark jazzy beatscape of "I Fought The Law And The Law Won (Because Fighting Is Against The Law)", dreamy synths and clean shadowy guitar drifting above languid beats, almost like an electronica-laced Bohren And Der Club Of Gore. A crushing black hole drone starts off "Techniclolour Minstrel Show" with massive doomdrone levels of heaviness, but as smeared echoing percussion begins to take form, the track evolves into bleary ambience. And "Origami Werewolf" delivers another Scorn-esque industrial break beat jam with droning distorto guitar and chugging riffage, a propulsive doom-hop workout made up of grinding metallic heaviness, washes of howling guitar noise, deep pounding beats and clouds of swirling high end feedback. This Beat... concludes with the epic 12+ minute "The Ultimate Testament", which opens with subtle drift and minimal creak and scrape, then rises into an amazingly hypnotic dubbed out doomdrone trudge, drums pounding out a simple stripped down rhythm with the snare drenched in reverb and echo and decaying into the blackness, ominous guitar leads droning overhead, other guitars distorted and stretched into horn-like tones, the atmosphere utterly black and portentous, massive blasts of Sunn-esque amp-roar soaring, lighter melodies bending and wavering closer to the surface. It's so majestic and dramatic, seemingly building ever so slowly towards some kind of release that never arrives, instead collapsing into an abstract minimal sprawl of dubby snares and thunderous bass drums echoing in a vast spacious void for several minutes, the percussive blasts coming further and further apart until the track reaches the end.
Describing this stunning album as doom-infected dubstep or blackened apocalyptic dub only gives part of the picture; Necro Deathmort actually create something much more, an immense and crushing world of black sound that ultimately doesn't sound like anyone else. The packaging is really cool too, the disc presented in a black and white six-panel foldout sleeve with twisted woodcut-style artwork created by Dominic Hailstone, the director of videos for Mogwai and Isis and the creator of those terrifying creature effects in the video for Aphex Twin's "Come To Daddy". So highly recommended, but you better move quick, as this is limited to just 500 copies!Track Samples: Sample : Broadcast Sample : Necro Effigy Sample : Spilth Sample : The Ultimate Testament
NEW FLESH self-titled CASSETTE (Fan Death) 4.98
One of my favorite Baltimore area bands to see live, The New Flesh have been kicking out the ultra-distorted noise/punk jams for more than seven years, kinda acting as B-more's answer to Rusted Shut as they ply a similar form of extreme blown-out three-chord thuggery at absolutely skull-melting levels of overdrive and in-the-red amp abuse. Live, The New Flesh are chaos incarnate, their bass/drums/guitar lineup grinding out noise rock jams played at stupidly loud levels and creating an effect similar to that of having two slabs of concrete being rubbed on each side of your skull, but even on tape, these guys fucking kill. Fan Death recently reissued the band's self-titled demo from 2003, with six songs / twenty minutes of serious heaviness that's somewhere in between the blown out crush-rock of Geisha/Part Chimp and the balls-out free-rock skuzz of Harry Pussy. Simple three chord hardcore punk riffs are run through a concrete mixer and poured out with grinding ear-shredding levels of distortion, the sound jacked all the way into the red, incredibly harsh and aggro, fucking feedback splattered EVERYWHERE, shrieking vocals over bludgeoning brain-damaged riffs and out-of-tune guitar noise and grungy distorted basslines. The recording on this demo is pretty low-fi, but what the hell; this thing should have clarity? The tape features the songs "Knock Down Drag Out", "Price To Pay", "Future", "Plan B", and the brutal, near-grindcore blast feast of "Letter", negative blasts if vicious noise-punk brutality with insane noise guitar "solos" and a noticeable No Wave influence, although it's buried under a monstrous stumbling heaviness. Limited to 200 pro-pressed cassettes.
OBLONG BOX Premature Burial CD-R (Housepig) 6.50
A killer collection of out-of-print and unreleased material from horror-drone master Oblong Box, whose fearsome combination of dark ambience, noise and formless metallic synth heaviness has been crawling out of the dungeon in the form of various super-limited cdrs and tapes for the last few years. The tracks are collected from the untitled 3xCD noise compilation on Public Guilt, the split tape with Fossils and SB, the Pictures From The Fire cdr and their track from the 804Noise Fest 2006, with an unreleased track at the end.
Opener "Black Needles" comes from the Public Guilt compilation; it's a black murky doomscape of muffled wailing wind winding upwards through deep chasms and ancient tunnel systems, joined by deep rumbling noise and the sound of a massive horn being blasted in the depths, metallic guitar drone and weird mewling cries, distant voices echoing through the caves, the whole din creepy and cavernous. "One Monday We Killed Them All” combines the sound of harsh scraping metal, deep fluttering tremors, sounds of heavy machinery, a tense industrial dronescape gradually morphing into a deep-space fug of choppy oscillating tones, psychedelic fx, throbbing synths, strange moaning, and waves of feedback and muted high end tones, something like an old horror movie score run through bizarre space noise effects.
"Pussyfooting" is a short blast of sweeping synth and granular distortion, like waves of black ochre crashing against the shore of some stygian sea, streaked with swells of distorted analogue synth and nebulous electronic fx. "The Burning Of The Red Lotus Temple" creates a surreal soundtrack-like collage of digging sounds, wailing, ghostly labored breathing, all suspended above a roiling sea of black rumbling ambience, which gets more and more chaotic as chunks of crunchy crumbling noise appear, the sound of being buried alive, of hearing dirt being thrown on the coffin while trapped inside, the thunder of your blood hammering in your ears, sound becoming more warped and distended as you're buried beneath increasing layers of fx and noise.
"I Serve The Master" opens with a sample from Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), then drifts through a black ambient dronescape of resonant drones, echoing metallic clang, and sounds of a chisel chipping away at some hard surface. "The Fog (Maritime II)" is all deep distorted throb and screeching demonic ambience, massive doom riffage buried far below echoing synth tones and abstract noise. That's followed by the swarming looped noise and distorted industrial scrape of "Lucite", and the final, previously unreleased track "The Tunnels" is a grim drone dirge, swells of distorted synth drone evoking black thunderclouds, boiling above deep groaning cello-like drone and chiming tones.
I really dig Oblong Box's creepy crypt-dwelling drone/noise, and this collection is a solid set of sinister, cinematic soundscapes. Comes in a plastic snapcase with full-color artwork.Track Samples: Sample : I Serve The Master Sample : Lucite Sample : The Burning Of the Red Lotus
OS Twelve Truths LP (Self Released) 12.98
These guys came out of nowhere with a debut Lp that sheds little light on who is behind it; the record itself is virtually devoid of information, with just abstract artwork on the front cover spelling out the band name OS, and the insert just has more abstract line drawings, no track titles, no band member information, nothing to betray the entities behind this disturbing mass of oozing, abstract blackness. It's a creeping, inchoate blackness full of pummeling down tuned heaviness and abrasive frequencies that reminds me of both the doomed black slime of bands like Trees, Bunkur, Whitehorse and Moss, and the more abstract and aberrant sounds of Abruptum, Wicked King Wicker, Habsyll, Argentinum Astrum and Gnaw Their Tongues.
The first side is a black mass of doomy guitars, distant wheezing chants, and monstrous rumblings, a syrupy blackdoom dirge with wailing anguished screams wafting out of the shadows, moving in a shambling off time lurch, the drums spaced out and minimal, a thick black fog enshrouding the loose riffing, weird atonal guitar noises suddenly piercing the blackness, like a much MUCH doomier Abruptum, maybe. There's definitely an improvised feel to this stuff, although the heavy doom riffage continues through the entire track. Yeah, it really does remind me of Abruptum at their slowest, or maybe a vastly slower, decomposing Hellhammer, with tons of reverb and droning feedback swirling around like crypt-vapors, and actually not all that unlike that Disjecta Membrae album that I reviewed on the last new arrivals list. It's tortured, hellish doom-damage that wields feedback as instrument, rotting guitar notes suspended in midair, everything smeared into a glacial blackdoom ritual. The vocals are seriously fucked-up, like hearing someone having nails pounded into their flesh, and then towards the end, the music begins to reveal glints of melody, for a brief moment allowing a bit of light to crack through the grim blackness before shifting right back into the black crush, heavier and slightly faster this time, ending the song as a grinding propulsive dirge drowning in looped backwards feedback, amp noise, and rattling sheet metal. The screams become more heavily treated by electronic effects, the track shifts from one creeping riff to another over the last half of the track, becoming a slowing Sabbathian crawl, increasingly infected with whirring space FX and terrifying processed vocals...
Flipping over, the second side picks up almost exactly where they left off, opening in a black murky haze of backwards guitar, pitch-shifted devil voices, dissonant chords that slowly coalesce into another messed-up Sabbathian dirge, huge slow riffing surrounded by sheets of atonal guitar and amp rumble, the pitch of the whole song shifting subtly as it progresses, getting queasy and disorientating. And then the vocals burst in, a freaked out squall of heavily delayed screams like someone being tortured at the far end of an echo chamber, changing into monstrous guttural roars as the music slows abruptly, going from plodding deathdirge into glacial diseased black doom. After awhile, the riff falls away and the band slips into a huge rumbling field of grinding black ambience and fx overload, a creepy minor key blackened melody slithering through the side, fucked-up slurred vocals, then lurches back into the frenzied slow motion doomchaos for moment before the song fades off.
Nicely packaged in a black linen sleeve with screenprinted artwork in metallic gold ink, and includes an insert. Limited to 400 hand-numbered copies.
OVSKUM Atto III LP (Obscure Origins) 17.98
The first release from Obscure Origins is the debut vinyl release from the enigmatic Italian black metal outfit Ovskum, a re-issue of a self-titled cassette that came out on Insikt in 2006 teamed with the track from the Ovskum/Necrolust split cdr. These five tracks deliver some seriously deranged and otherworldly blackness, much slower and more angulan your typical black metal band, the sound is all blown out and super distorted, the songs moving at a pounding mid-tempo pace, the riffs shift between sludgy droning heaviness and contorted jagged riffs.
The a-side begins with martial percussion and snarled sheets of dissonant guitar that grows into a pounding, distorted dirge that's more like blown-out industrial rock than black metal, heavy and plodding, with screeching vokills buried way down in the mix, and howling tremolo riffs slicing through the murky atmosphere, the guitars super heavy and dense, the sound droning, and it gets all spacey after awhile when everything falls away and there's just the rumbling of amps and dissonant chiming guitars stretched out into a hypnotic grimy dronescape, thick layered feedback and high end noise forming a drifting ambient interlude before the music kicks back into the martial marching snares, clanging atonal riffing and lurching bass. It's like ancient Norwegian blackness filtered through the pounding primal urk of old Am Rep 7" singles. The other song on the side is another lurching black crusher, a slow sludgy dirge with majestic minor key guitar and awesome ominous riffing.
On the flipside, Ovskum reappear with thirteen minutes of ambient guitar sprawl, blackened riffs drifting out over a smoldering surface of corroded noise and subterranean rumble, droning guitar notes piercing the fog, an abstract creepy riffscape unfolding for several minutes until the drums drop in, and then the song changes suddenly into another pounding jagged dirge, stumbling riffs and plodding slo-mo pound veering into warped blasting, the drumming getting all off-kilter and delirious, becoming a shambling blast beneath hypnotic high end guitar figures circling overhead. And the fourth and last track just forgets about the drums completely, unleashing an intense, ominous slowcore drift of blown out guitar repeating a single morose riff over and over, a completely creepy and gorgeous ending to the record.
Limited to 490 copies, and packaged in a black jacket with a large vinyl logo affixed to the front and a twenty-page booklet filled with creepy illustrations from artist and Ovskum compatriot Morte404.
OWL XOUNDS Teenagers From Mars LP (Colour Sounds) 12.98
Back in stock!
Burly free jazz workouts from the rhythm section duo of drummer Adam Kriney (also of heavy psych-rockers La Otracina and the brutal jazzcore outfit Rust Ionics) and upright bassist Gene Janas, who as Owl Xounds team up with various third parties for extreme improv jazz blowouts that tend towards the fast, loud, and punishing end of ESP-influenced free jazz. For this limited edition LP, Owl Xounds teams up with Austrian saxophonist Mario Techtern, who has previously played with the Viennese avantgarde jazz collective Reform Art Unit alongside Linda Sharrock, Sunny Murray and Leena Conquest as well as more recent appearances with Weasel Walter's new Quartet/Sextet/Trio actions.
The title is obviously a Misfits reference, and it's a nod to Adam's roots in hardcore and punk rock that eventually led him into more experimental, "out" regions with his music. I can definitely hear a seething punk energy in the four extended jams on Teenagers From Mars, mainly in the way that Adam launches out of tense, freeform percussion into quick bursts of thrash. The opening track "The Afflicted Interest" has the rhythm section building a heavy thunderous roar of clattery drumming and scraped bass strings that Rechtern strafes with ferocious spirals of skronk and lightning fast runs. The first minute or two of "Our Motives Are Subject To Change" contrast quick sax trills with barely-there percussion and agonized bass abuse, but it quickly enough blasts into high speed skronk with near blastbeat drumming rearing up in spurts while leaving room for a searing solo from Rechtern. The last track on the A side "Collide a Scope and the Whistle of Doom" is a quieter, meditative piece with some great dialogue between Kriney's energetic rhythms and Rechtern's sax, the two locking into a tense interplay until halfway through when the whole group starts to weave circles of ominous black fire.
The B side is taken up by a twenty minute track called "X-ounds Memory", and Rechtern sits back for much of the beginning to allow the bass and drums to build into a nervous groove, then jumps back in with manic sax trills while the drums splatter across the room, making waves of percussive force beneath the creepy bass scrapes and high-end stabs that Janas scatters across the rest of the jam. The side ebbs and flows from violent skronk to more dreamy Middle Eastern tinged mutterings, but it's mostly raw, edgy power delivered at high volume. It's one of my favorite Kriney-related releases that we've picked up for Crucial Blast, and fans of blitzkrieg free jazz like Peter Brotzmann, John Zorn, Weasel Walter Quartet, Blue Humans, etc.
Comes on translucent gold vinyl in a handmade jacket with artwork pasted onto the front and back, and limited to 400 copies.
PRAEY self-titled CD-R (Realicide Youth) 5.98
Just when I thought that hardcore punk had been squeezed of every last drop of creativity, this recent eruption of bands mining the early 80's American HC sound has been kicking my ass, bands like Total Abuse, Cult Ritual, Drunkdriver, Slices, Brain Handle, and Walls all delivering ferocious fast hardcore with a heavy helping of NOISE that gives this classic sound an apocalyptic update. This band from Saint Louis (now apparently relocated to the New England area) called Praey has joined these ranks with a bitch of an EP that just came out on Realicide Youth. The trio includes Mavis Concave, a member of Realicide who has also released some solo extreme gabber/noise material, but there's none of the DIY gabber that I usually associate with Realicide Youth going on here; Praey play fast, spastic hardcore, recorded raw and in-the-red, a furious primal thrash attack that draws heavily from old 80's hardcore. I'm specifically hearing the gnarled, ultrafast thrash of bands like Deep Wound, FU's and Siege in here, but these guys crank the feedback and gain to sickoid levels, smearing harsh high-end skree and wailing noise over the distorted three-chord riffs. Eight tracks of this gets my adrenaline jacked. A blast of horrendous noise opens the disc, which tears straight into the jarring hardcore thrash of "Banker's Glove", brutal out-of-tune riffage over sloppy thrashing drums, weaving into a pummeling slow breakdown before taking off again. "But How" is a slow brooding dirge with ripped-throat vox and messed up detuned guitar racket that slips into fields of improvised guitar noise and feedback and free-improv, then "Objective Subjective" blares through a minute of blistering high speed aggression. The cover of Negative Approach's "Pressure" unleashes frantic thrash and sputtering free noise, and "Dead End Touch", one of the discs longest tracks, is a stumbling mess of tribal drumming and spoken vox that segues into screaming and chirpy tape noise, then slips into a crushing slo-mo Melvins-y dirge. "Freeze Frame"s blazing thrash is mixed with crashing metallic percussion, and Praey's cover of Realicide's "Shit For Reality" reformats the songs as a total circle pit inciter with a huge sing along chorus and fucked up Ginn-esque riffing, starting out as early 80's hardcore mania, but then evolving into a blasting improv noise freak-out. The disc ends with a couple of shredded live recordings, closing the EP in a blur of broken strings and drumsticks and bloody lips and black eyes. It's like a hybrid of Deep Wound and Prurient, sort of. Definitely noisy as hell, and fast and fucked up and FIERCE. Packaged in screenprinted/xeroxed sleeve, includes a fold-out poster and vinyl sticker, and limited to 150 copies.Track Samples: Sample : Banker's Glove Sample : But How? Sample : Shit For Reality
REALICIDE Resisting The Viral Self CD + ZINE (Realicide Youth) 9.98
Finally got the newest Realicide album in stock! Resisting The Viral Self is the most ambitious and eclectic work so far from the Cincinnati gabber/punk activists, still rooted in brutal gabber techno, digital hardcore and screeching crust/grind influences, but now adding all kinds of other sounds into their high-powered electronic warfare, namely spastic drum n' bass breaks and warped hip-hop flow. They've always had hints of these elements in their sound before, but they've never explored them to the extent that they do on Resisting, which is probably due to the various guest artists that they brought into the recording of the album, including noise/gabber/breakcore circuit bender Vankmen, underground avant-hip hop surrealist Evolve, and Ryan Faris of noise rockers Capital Hemorrhage. The album has eighteen tracks that mix up hammering speedcore beats, vicious Rotterdam techno, and Planet Mu-style insanity with ominous samples, clanking industrual rhythms, crushing sampled grindcore riffs, blasts of metallic bass drops and apocalyptic hip-hop breaks. As always, front man Robert Inhuman introduces many of the tracks with brief spoken word bits that are actually pretty fucking stirring and pissed-off, and the gabber stuff on this album is seriously crushing, the huge distorted kick drums punching a hole straight through the album, the relentless beats interspersed with twitchy electro breaks and massive distorted basslines. These guys have never sounded heavier or more vitriolic than they do here. At the same time, the tracks are wway more varied than Realicide's earlier material, frequently switching up the jackhammer speedcore with killer rhythmic changes, and actually having a sort of song structure to the tracks that sometimes makes this stuff super catchy and anthemic sounding. The vocals are pretty different from the standard sampled/shouted approach you usually here in speedcore; Robert's harsh hysterical screaming and ranting spoken word bits constantly sound like he's about to rupture an artery, and are clearly drawn from hardcore punk and grind. The look of the album also draws heavily from hardcore, specifically the UK speed/thrash/stench/crust underground with all of the crude collage art, peace punk stencil fonts and the scrawled anti-authoritarian and socio-political lyrics. Man, this album kills - a raging gabber / industrial / speedcore / jungle / grind mutation with an unrepentant apocalyptic worldview, intelligently rendered.
The cd version of the album also contains eighteen bonus tracks, which are mostly faster and more grindy and blasting than the rest of the album, each track a super short microblast of grinding gabber speed violence and collaged samples and shredded screaming, with almost all of them clocking in at under a minute.
Both the cd and the lp versions also come with a thick thirty-two page xeroxed hardcore-style fanzine that's filled with loads of high contrast photos, collage art, liner notes, lots of lengthy (and I mean lengthy) essays on the anarchistic ideology behind the band, lyrics and in-depth lyric explanations, hand drawn artwork, commentary from the band on how they got into gabber and speedcore as an extension of grindcore and anarcho-punk (which I thought was pretty interesting), a neat essay on tape collage/cup-up art, and lots more.
Cd version comes in a full color wallet with a vinyl Realicide sticker.Track Samples: Sample : The Absent Rapist Sample : Can't Relate Sample : HxC Figurehead (Rmx) Sample : Neutralizing Opiate Sample : The Shit Punx Hate 2
REALICIDE Resisting The Viral Self LP (Realicide Youth) 11.98
Finally got the newest Realicide album in stock! Resisting The Viral Self is the most ambitious and eclectic work so far from the Cincinnati gabber/punk activists, still rooted in brutal gabber techno, digital hardcore and screeching crust/grind influences, but now adding all kinds of other sounds into their high-powered electronic warfare, namely spastic drum n' bass breaks and warped hip-hop flow. They've always had hints of these elements in their sound before, but they've never explored them to the extent that they do on Resisting, which is probably due to the various guest artists that they brought into the recording of the album, including noise/gabber/breakcore circuit bender Vankmen, underground avant-hip hop surrealist Evolve, and Ryan Faris of noise rockers Capital Hemorrhage. The album has eighteen tracks that mix up hammering speedcore beats, vicious Rotterdam techno, and Planet Mu-style insanity with ominous samples, clanking industrual rhythms, crushing sampled grindcore riffs, blasts of metallic bass drops and apocalyptic hip-hop breaks. As always, front man Robert Inhuman introduces many of the tracks with brief spoken word bits that are actually pretty fucking stirring and pissed-off, and the gabber stuff on this album is seriously crushing, the huge distorted kick drums punching a hole straight through the album, the relentless beats interspersed with twitchy electro breaks and massive distorted basslines. These guys have never sounded heavier or more vitriolic than they do here. At the same time, the tracks are wway more varied than Realicide's earlier material, frequently switching up the jackhammer speedcore with killer rhythmic changes, and actually having a sort of song structure to the tracks that sometimes makes this stuff super catchy and anthemic sounding. The vocals are pretty different from the standard sampled/shouted approach you usually here in speedcore; Robert's harsh hysterical screaming and ranting spoken word bits constantly sound like he's about to rupture an artery, and are clearly drawn from hardcore punk and grind. The look of the album also draws heavily from hardcore, specifically the UK speed/thrash/stench/crust underground with all of the crude collage art, peace punk stencil fonts and the scrawled anti-authoritarian and socio-political lyrics. Man, this album kills - a raging gabber / industrial / speedcore / jungle / grind mutation with an unrepentant apocalyptic worldview, intelligently rendered.
Both the cd and the lp versions also come with a thick thirty-two page xeroxed hardcore-style fanzine that's filled with loads of high contrast photos, collage art, liner notes, lots of lengthy (and I mean lengthy) essays on the anarchistic ideology behind the band, lyrics and in-depth lyric explanations, hand drawn artwork, commentary from the band on how they got into gabber and speedcore as an extension of grindcore and anarcho-punk (which I thought was pretty interesting), a neat essay on tape collage/cup-up art, and lots more.
Lp version comes in a full color jacket with a vinyl Realicide sticker.Track Samples: Sample : The Absent Rapist Sample : Can't Relate Sample : HxC Figurehead (Rmx) Sample : Neutralizing Opiate Sample : The Shit Punx Hate 2
REALICIDE The Choice Is Yours 12 INCH (Void Tactical Media) 10.98
Another recent slab from gabber-punks Realicide, The Choice Is Yours is a collaboration between the Cincinatti techno-blasters and the Detroit-based apocalyptic electro label Void Tactical Media that specifically designed these four tracks as extended pieces tailor-made for DJ use. But you don't have to be a speedcore DJ to dig into this killer 12", you just need to be prepared for a relentless onslaught of paranoid electronic mayhem and skull-cracking gabber. All four of these tracks build on recordings from the Resisting The Viral Self album (also listed in this weeks new arrivals update), taking fragments of the original tracks and reshaping them into longer, more epic blast anthems.
The a-side rips into opener "The Choice Is Yours", a brutal speedcore assault, jackhammer blasting snares smashing up against slippery industrial break beats, shrieking vokills and sampled mutant hip-hop flow, the sound veering from brutal to trance-inducing in the blink of an eye as Realicide slip from dystopian hip-hop to brutal gabber to sinister EBM rhythms, hard-edged and fucking hammering with bits of industrial and even dubstep creeping into the sound.
"The Passive Observer" also goes for the jugular with a vicious jungle-meets-gabber speed attack, violent beats and harsh shrieks blasting through skittering speed frenzy at first, then ripping into a skull-pounding Bloody Fist style bass blast with Realicide's trademark peace-punk style cheer/chants.
"No War Can Be Won" opens the b-side with a mashup of several older Realicide tracks ("Xenophobic HxC", "Neutralizing Opiate", and "Autonomy") rebuilt into a super abstract industrial-gabber-dub assault; deep demonic vocals loops, swirling industrial ambience, pounding percussion, surges of gabber beats building from a grim dubbed-out throb into crushing, hiccuping, super-distorted techno pummel, blown out synth bass, the beats loaded with dubby reverb, and fronted by energetic cheer-squad shouts that also give this track an odd peace punk/Crass vibe. The other track on this side is "Open Eyes 2", beginning with pulsating synth and bass, evolves into creeped out old school industrial with pounding jackhammer percussion and a throbbing hardcore techno beat, then abruptly veers into violent EBM action mixed up with fucked-up breakbeats.
You can barely make out the original source material in these gabber-punk wipeouts. Essential for fans of Realicide's brutal hybrid of crust/gabber/industrial. The record comes in a hand-screened DJ sleeve with poster inserts, limited to three hundred copies.
ROBE. Remains Of A Burning World CASSETTE (Thor's Rubber Hammer) 6.98
These Midwestern murkpilots are turning into one of my new favorite deathdrone outfits. Remains Of A Burning World is a recently issued cassette that came out on the DC noise/jazz label Thor's Rubber Hammer (also home to some scorching discs from Wasteland Jazz Unit and Mothguts), and is the most demonic pit-drift that I've heard from Robe.
The opener "Deep Darkness" is a vast rumbling doomscape, a murky, muddied ocean of low end sound riddled with massive earth-tremors, grinding tectonic activity, waves of soul-devouring blackened ambience, the roar of metal groaning in the distance, huge sub-earth vibrations and streaks of wailing high end skree. Fearsome, doomdrone-level heaviness that sounds like a recording of oceans in hell, full of tidal surges of crushing industrial drone heaviness and glimmers of melody bleeding through the fug. The title track follows with a nearly thirteen minute expanse that's more minimal and sparse sounding, distant percussive pound like oil drums being pummeled and filtered through electronic FX, the juddering sludge of detuned bass guitar strings blatting out thick slabs of metallic heaviness, metal chimes and prayer bowl tones, swells of grim horns and synth strings forming a heavy black ambience, almost like a blackened Lustmord backed by an apocalyptic brass band.
The blackness never lets up through the rest of the album. There's lumbering inchoate doom metal-esque riffing that plods through blizzards of white noise, swirling whiteouts of warped big band music, deep guttural growling, crushing ambient sludge, deep swirling orchestral ambience, gothic cavernous doomdrone, all heavy as hell and seriously creepy. Sometimes, fragile bits of melodic glimmer shows through the low-end drift, or huge washes of delayed cymbal shimmer ripple across the black depths, but Robe. stick pretty close to the lower depths here, crafting a desolate, terrifying soundworld out of malefic droning horn-like swells, strangely warped percussive noises, drifting fragments of tribal drumming, and black industrial ambient sludge that sometimes sounds like an old Tangerine Dream record drenched in extreme amp noise, or a dusty, sun-warped Lustmord Lp being spun backwards, or the sound of Arvo Part time-stretched and slowed to a geological crawl and buried beneath field recordings of cracking glaciers and magma eruptions. Best stuff from 'em so far, a killer
fusion of death industrial, doomdrone and hellish modern orchestral sounds; fans of Abruptum's "Casus Luciferi", Neuntoter Der Plage, and Aderlating's most atmospheric moments should pick this up. Comes in full color packaging with a vellum insert, on a professionally manufactured cassette, limited edition of one hundred copies.
Following a stream of craftily packaged CD-R releases from his various other free/psych/improv projects (La Otracina, Owl Sounds Exploding Galaxy, Blizzards, etc), Colour Sounds operator and freak-out drummer extraordinaire Adam Kriney opts to get LOUD with this killer LP from the free-improv/grind/jazz brut ensemble that has Kriney pillaging his drumkit alongside Dual members Ed Chang (alto sax) and Doug Theriault (guitars). Totally blinding power-improv workouts with Chang's extended sax eruptions spitting out a volley of white-hot squeaks and squeals like machine sparks over a din of crashing, blastbeating drumming and textured guitar noise. The trio frequent puts on the brakes and wraps themselves around some mesmerizing free-jazz, but most of Moving/Pictures is intense, insane primal skronk conjured from the same fires that birthed the likes of Last Exit, Painkiller, Ruins, Borbetomagus, and Peter Brotzmann's heavier material, and meant to be played LOUD. Presented on transparent blue vinyl in a clear plastic sleeve with a plastic sticker inscribed with the band logo and minimal album credits, in a limited edition of 311 copies.
SAKE The Desert / Bastards 7 INCH VINYL (Hopscotch) 3.98
An obscure 90's hardcore punk outfit from Northern California, Sake only released a couple of records during their brief existence, but their music was one of the more interesting sounds to come out of the whole crust/hardcore scene of that time. In fact, Sake were one of the first bands that I can think of (aside from Swiss thrashers Cwill) that incorporated the eerie sound of violins into their crusty metallic hardcore, and I'd be surprised if this band wasn't at least a minor influence on more recent string-enhanced bands like Embers, Remains Of The Day, Wake Up On Fire and Garmonbozia. Released in 1997, the The Desert / Bastards 7" came out around the same time as their split LP with Submission Hold, and features two songs: "Desert" is the a-side, opening with dark brooding violin drones and a Middle Eastern-tinged melody that plays out for a while, until the rest of the band suddenly drops in with a doom-laden bass line and jagged hardcore riffage, harsh choked vocals, the violin still going, mix the haunting folk strings with gnarled crusty hardcore that breaks off into brief passages of folky melody or faster bursts of galloping punk laced with twangy violin, like some sort of blazing crustcore hoedown. On the b-side, "Bastards" is a pissed-off rant on gender roles played out through sludgy angular doompunk, the violin set aside as violinist Aolani switches over to shrieking female vocals and a bratty X Ray Spex-esque wail, the band winding through jagged rhythms, unpredictable grooves, winding bass lines, sorta like Dystopia, Logical Nonsense and early Neurosis. A cool, powerful little record of progressive crustcore. Some of the members of Sake would later form the NoCal stoner/sludge rock band The Hitch, who released an EP on Boredom Noise. On black vinyl, packaged om a glued jacket with an insert.Track Samples: Sample : Bastards Sample : The Desert
SCHREI AUS STEIN Talus CD-R (Starlight Temple Society) 5.98
Schrei Aus Stein is the new project from Ross Hagen, who you might know from his long-running ambient/drone project Encomiast, who has released several excellent discs of gorgeous downcast dronemusic, including several on the Crucial Bliss imprint. I heard some of this material earlier last year when Ross first started working on this project, and I've been looking forward to hearing this first release ever since; here, the twilight ambience of Encomiast is extrapolated into a sort of abstract, droneological black metal, combining the lush melodic dronescapes with a hazy, mid-paced blackened crawl, similar in feel to Burzum and Velvet Cacoon, but also hinting at the gloomy melodic sounds of the 4AD label and Joy Division. Fans of moody post-punk influenced black metal like Caina, Lurker Of Chalice, and Toil will love this.
Grimly gorgeous dronescapes form from deep rumbling tremors and elegiac pipe organ, thick sheets of distorted and reverb-heavy guitar echoing across the grey, misted terrain; cymbals and swells of electronic noise later join in, filling the air and turning this into a bleak droning trancebuzz after a few minutes, gorgeous and propulsive as simple drumming comes in, the washes of distorted electronics and organs sometimes threatening to completely overwhelm the sound, the simple plodding mid-tempo drumming and epic gloomy guitars bleeding through the blizzard and harsh raspy vocals submerged deep in the mix. On "Lenticulars", a simple skeletal rock beat joins reverby post-punk guitars before the band kicks into dense layers of shoegazey guitar noise and blackened buzzing riffage, a simple two chord riff streaked with luminous melody and supported by a super-catchy gothy bass line; when the morose raspy vocals finally come in, it starts to sound like a seriously blackened and doomy Cure song. Later, it breaks off into ambient noise, all scraping guitar textures and distant ululating female vocals hazed with distortion, and the dreamy, hallucinatory dronescape grows harsher and darker until the band comes back in with another gloomy Joy Division-esque post punk dirge with harsh screeching vocals, the drums building into a furious double-bass rumble beneath the circular bass and swooping noise and fx, turning into a weird blackened hypno-psych workout. "Couloir"'s metallic guitars drone and buzz in thick layers of fx, a swirling mass of metallic guitar drone almost like Growing at first, until the massive rhythm section kicks in with another pounding bass/drum groove. The almost nineteen-minute "Foehn" is all slow building and doomy, a somber post-rock build with soaring riffs and simple motorik drumming stretching out beneath endless shimmering drones and Troum-like guitar drift. Closer "Crevasses" starts with huge slabs of crushing melodic guitar, Sunn meets Codeine, becoming even prettier as the drums and bass coalesce underneath and the song turns into a doom-laden slowcore jam, some slightly jazzy chords melting beneath the droning distorted crunch and drifting off into an expanse of smeary white noise fuzz. Then the track suddenly lurches into a chaotic blasting wave of progged-out black metal blur, droning razorblade guitars soaring beneath a frantic streaks of fx-soaked flute and synths, gorgeous melodic minor key leads leaving tracers across the blackness, then slowing into a another dreamy stretch of blurred slowcore prettiness now joined with those chaotic spacey synths and flutes, before ending in a haze of looping synths and cosmic fug.>br>
Presented in a dvd snapcase with monochromatic imagery and a xeroxed insert, and limited to two hundred copies.Track Samples: Sample : Couloir Sample : Crevasses Sample : Serac
SCORN Evanescence / Ellipsis 2xCD (Earache) 15.98
I was so stoked to see this double disc set come out from Earache. I've been a fan of Mick Harris's apocalyptic industrial dub/breakbeat project Scorn for years, but have had a hell of a time getting my hands on a copy of the remix album Ellipsis before now. Earache just released this new set that combines both Scorn's classic early 90's album Evanescence, and that follow-up remix album Ellipsis together, remastered and packaged in a oversize slipcase; when these albums originally came out, Earache was still primarily known for releasing grindcore and death metal, and Scorn's dark electronica/dub was radically different from what people were used to hearing from the label, let alone the former drummer for grindcore pioneers Napalm Death and jazz/grind/dub geniuses Painkiller. Both of these releases are considered to be among the best in the Scorn catalog, and this set is essential for fans of Harris's brand of crushing beatscapes and dystopian ambience.
If you're familiar Scorn's most recent experiments in extreme depth-charge bass and doomdub, 1994's Evanescence almost sounds like an entirely different project. Early in the 90's Scorn started off as more of a nightmare version of trip-hop, constructing heavy, hypnotic breakbeats that are layered beneath grim electronic drones, menacing minor key synths, and tripped out vocals, the music immersed in darkness and dread and dystopian paranoia. Several tracks on the album feature guest guitars and synths from James Plotkin (OLD/Khanate/Phantomsmasher), and the mix of darkly melodic guitar and the booming hip-hop influenced breakbeats make these tracks some of Scorn's most accessible. The album starts off with the dark, doom-ridden trip-hop of "Silver Rain Fell", then moves into the grim jazzy ambience, lilting guitars, feedback swells and ominous loping basslines of "Light Trap". "Falling" combines narcotic tribal drum loops, lush orchestral strings and swirling ambience, then shifts to the grinding machine processional of "Automata" and the almost gothic dance-rock dubthrob of "Days Passed". "Dreamspace" is a malevolent industrial dub/trip-hop trance with huge percussive bass pulses, sinister synth lines and processed vocals, and stomping kick-drum loops underscore the druggy Depeche Mode-esque melancholy of "Exodus", which breaks off into a bizarre didgeridoo workout halfway through the track. Hard-edged EBM rhythms and creepy dark ambience come together on "Night Tide", and the swirling pitch-black dub heaviness of "The End" is indicative of where later Scorn material would head, with warm swells of muted strings and horns, blackened raspy vocals, eerie electronic textures, and rhythmic synth noise evoking a crepuscular subterranean vibe. Evanescence ends with the purely ambient darkness of "Slumber", which begins as just a whirring electronic pulse but slowly evolves into a dronescape of strings and other warped and melting orchestral sounds tumbling into the abyss, very reminiscent of Mick Harris's other, more ambient project Lull.
1995's Ellipsis is a very different sort of album. This disc, which has been out of print for years, is a compilation of remixed Scorn material taken from Evanescence and reworked by an impressive lineup of guest collaborators that include Coil, Autechre, Meat Beat Manifesto, and PCM. It opens with Meat Beat Manifesto funking up "Silver Rain Fell" in their distinct style, stretching it out for almost nine minutes but sticking pretty close to the sound of the original. Harris does his own remix of "Exodus", which also makes some subtle changes to the track, but Coil take the source material in a much darker and more infernal direction for their rework of "Dreamspace". The UK industrial legends stretch the track out to almost twelve minutes, creating a wheezing, creaking trip-hop nightmare coated in grimy distortion, sinister bass, demonic voices, but then turn the second half into an epic orchestral ambient peice, letting looped strings drift over muted drums and skittering electronics, and it's without a doubt one of the highlights of Ellipsis. Next, Bill Laswell (who had performed with Harris in Painkiller) turns "Night Ash Black (Slow Black Underground River Mix)" into an even longer dose of epic dubdirge that's almost a whopping sixteen minutes long. Laswell stretches out the didgeridoo drones of the original version across a stygian chasm, drifting black ambience and rumbling drones inhabiting the first few minutes before a CRUSHING bassline drops in alongside a steady hi-hat keeping time, the track turned into a monstrous doomed-out darkhop dirge, super heavy and sinister, with samples of Harvey Keitel from Bad Lietunient looping in the background. If you thought that the original version of this track was pretty heavy, wait till you hear this....
Scanner follows and deconstructs Scorn's throbbing low end beats for "Night Tide (Flaneur Electronique Mix)", stripping it down to the rudimentary rhythm and fusing the beats to creepy samples. Autechre's re-imagining of "Falling (FR 13 Mix)" isn't as wacked out as I thought it might be when I first spun this disc, but it's still a twisted and fractured take on the original, the beats chopped and clipped, distorted and skipping across a minimal dark soundscape populated with all sorts of clicks and glitches and rhythmic pops and dub effects. Probably the most radical reshaping of Scorn's music comes from P.C.M., an obscure drum n' bass project that would later take part in continued collaborations with Mick Harris; these pioneers of dark, heavy jungle take the eerie melody from "The End" and strap it to a combination of spastic, pounding junglist rhythms and digital dub grooves. Germ's remix of "Automata" is also another dark drum n bass workout, but here the remix is slower and heavier and closer to the pounding industrial throb of the original. The disc ends with Harris once again remixing his own material, giving "Light Trap" a stripped down, blissed out redux, the end result both jazzy and dark, but quite mesmeric and pretty. Essential for Scorn fans and those into Dalek, Tackhead and Justin Broadrick's heavy dub/beat experiments in Godflesh, Ice and Techno Animal.Track Samples: Sample : SCORN-Evanescence / Ellipsis Sample : SCORN-Evanescence / Ellipsis Sample : SCORN-Evanescence / Ellipsis Sample : SCORN-Evanescence / Ellipsis Sample : SCORN-Evanescence / Ellipsis Sample : SCORN-Evanescence / Ellipsis
SKAT INJECTOR The Unexpected Penis 7 INCH VINYL (Free Thinkers Union Records) 6.50
The Unexpected Penis is some vile shit. Vile, PCP-addled, brilliantly devastating shit. The repulsive ass-mask sleeve art alone will turn off all but the most debased mutants, but this lil slab of extreme gabber-grind holds some punishing aural violence for those with the guts (and/or total lack of good taste) to plug in. Ugh, where to begin? These Brits mash up ultra-fast distorted beats, demented synth and guitar noise and ugly shrieking vocals into a noxious blur that sounds like a bizarro cross between crude black metal, GG Allin, Dataclast, and Boredoms filtered through the gloriously perverted phantasmagoria of Mike Diana's Boiled Angel zine. Three songs per side: The a-side starts with "From Filthy Bowels To Famished Mouths", brutal programmed speedcore kickdrums ripping through woozy synth noise and demented carnival melodies, splattered with loads of harsh noise and fucked-up FX freakery. "Clawhammer Hysterectomy" is blackened computer grind crossed with gabber and vomitous industrial noise with shrieking vokills and fractured breakbeats and ultrafast splittercore blurr, and "Fisted Urethra" delivers nuclear-blast speedcore/noise/chop-up insanity. The b-side blasts through the woozy gabbergrind and electrocuted chipmunk screams of "Bukkake Vengence", "Sounding With Steak Knives" horrific Merzbowian noise and suffocating screams, and the acid feast of hyperspeed cassette melodies, female chipmunk vox, distorted death metal screams and spastic 100000 mph blasts that make up "House Of 1000 Facials". Awesome. Includes a Skat Injector sticker. Already out of print from both the band and the label, we were able to snag the last seven copies of this abomination.
The cover art alone was enough to draw me to this record; a corpse-painted figure, dressed in black with a top hat, arms spread wide and unfurling a cloak behind him as he hovers above the orchestra pit in a packed opera house, like a frozen still from a silent horror film. Pretty creepy and strange looking, but it's only hints at the bizarre blackened weirdness captured in these grooves. This is the first album that I've picked up from the Norwegian band Slagmaur, and it's fucking amazing, a warped and epic descent into bombastic orchestral darkness, brooding gothic atmosphere, deranged black metal, and creepy industrial ambience...
Opener "Eik Som Klør" starts the album with a daze of looped orchestral majesty and distorted black metal shrieks, swells of backwards noise and majestic samples erupting into Wagnerian bombast, totally evil and triumphant sounding, and then a screaming woman materializes, some sample from a horror movie that goes into a fragment of whimsical piano before the band drops in to a pounding, industrial-tinged black metal dirge. The sound is all dissonant chords and propulsive mid-paced drumming, woozy off-kilter melodies, moaning vocals in the background, a sickly nightmare atmosphere; eventually the actual vocals emerge, a distorted bestial snarl buried under layers of fx and delay and hiss, trippy and demonic as that voice ripples across the rocking industrial pound, a single carnival-like riff repeating over and over, a hallucinatory vibe completely taking over...eventually the riff changes into a gloomy, surprisingly catchy death rock hook, then it just stumbles to a close towards the end, the goblinoid vocals taking over for a moment, then the song changes shape again, this time into a slow swirling cloud of shadowy gloompop guitar melody and rumbling dark ambience, sorta 4AD like, dreamy and murky, but still quite evil sounding with those mutated devil growls lurking at the edges...
The rest of Skrekk Lich Kunstler is just as sick and surreal: "Norwegian Giant" begins with murky orchestral swells, down tuned strings and brass and woodwinds heaving and swelling in slow motion, sort of like Gnaw Their TOngues, with terrified wails echoing in the distance, an intensely grim and cinematic atmosphere that explodes into another midpaced metallic goth dirge, here with a monstrous metal riff matched with epic swells of brass and fearsome blackened tremolo guitars, harsh shrieking vocals, crushing and awesome. The vocals just get more crazed as the album progresses, multiple voices become layered on top of each other, the songs stagger to abrupt halts and make abrupt shifts into doom-laden atmospheric ambience with just moaning cellos and staccato strings and abstract percussion, a spacious chamber doom dirge that evolves into killer soundtracky instrumental sections, shifting in and out of swarming midtempo black gloom, industrial percussion, even heavier orchestral sheets of sound, warped slow motion dirges, stretches of haunting piano melody and singing choirs, seasick riffing, blasts of distorted low-end klaxons.
Limited edition of five hundred copies, presented in a gatefold jacket with a printed inner sleeve and a glossy poster insert.Track Samples: Sample : Die Eldres Klage Sample : Mordfor Sample : Norwegian Giant
VARIOUS ARTISTS Those Who Dwell Beyond CD (Black Mass) 11.98
Black Mass curates this three-band compilation that features a mix of dark heavy sounds, from nightmarish orchestral ambient doom to blackened psychedelic kosmiche music to grim atmospheric gloompop drift, and all of it is great. I've already been digging the band Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere that opens this disc, after picking up their excellent collaboration with avant-guitarist Miguel Prado, but the other two bands that appear on Those Who Dwell Beyond are new to my ears.
The mysterious blackdrone entity Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere opens the album with a thirty-two minute epic called "I Invoke", an intensely ominous black dronescape that moves between massive stygian rhythmic throb and slabs of thunderous ambient doom that sounds like an ultra-heavy blackened version of Scorn, with massive bass drops rumbling way off in the distance, surges of crushing blackened doom riffage, crawling sheets of black drift, distant choral singing that sounds lost in the depths of an infernal pit, high pitched sine waves, and the slow groaning wail of cellos drifting through the darkness and gradually joined by violins and horns that sound slightly warped and out of tune. This sprawling dronescape mixes together abstract chamber music sounds and crushing blackdrone, laced with strains of folk melody that float and tumbling in slow motion into the sulphurous abyss, ground beneath the pounding force of slow, throbbing rhythmic bass, eerie strings and horns bent and deformed, like an Arvo Part performance slowed to a crawl and spun backwards. But about twelve minutes in, actual drums materialize, pounding out a super slow spacious beat, sort of Swans-like, an angular juddering rhythm that lasts for a minute before all of a sudden the earth cracks open, and the sound is transformed without warning into a savage tempest of ultra-distorted blacknoise and insanely pitchshifted vocals, the music now unbelievably harsh and oppressive, like hearing a deathdoom band slowed down to an insanely slow tempo and with the distortion pushed into speaker-shredding levels of noize. Eventually, this blacknoize holocaust dissipates, and we're returned to the swirling black miasma from earlier, an infinite expanse of subterranean catacomb drone, the strings and horns now replaced by an ever present distorted rumbling and strange noises, voices muttering in Latin, clanking chains, weird backwards effects, rattling percussive sounds, and in the last few minutes of the track, a single distorted demonic voice appears, intoning a strange ritual spell as massive kettle drums thunder in the distance. What a trip. It has a
similar fearsome hallucinatory vibe as Revorvorum Ib Malacht, but much more abstract and shapeless.
Gate To Void follow that with three tracks of superb wrist-slashing/pill-devouring black ambience. The first, "LIfeless (A Journey Towards The Inner Death)" mixes clean guitar and orchestral synths in the beginning, then shifts into a formless mass of fx and percussive chimes and rumbling drones, moving back and forth between keyboards and strings and thick waves of dense fx-soaked electronics and the sound of a crackling bonfire. The cover of Xasthur's "Forgotten Depths Of Nowhere" is rendered as a solemn synth piece, like Tangerine Dream drowning in suicidal melancholy, the music reshaped into incredibly sad and somber washes of analogue synthesizer drone, with delicate piano and choking sobs appearing later in the track, sending it even deeper into depths of abject misery and loss. And "Dreams Of Cosmic Failure" is a collaborative effort between Gate To Void and Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere, twelve minutes of pitch black drone filled with rumbling distorted synth, airy keyboard drift, metallic reverberations, streaks of shimmery feedback, echoing pulses decaying into the shadows, a great Lustmordian vastness with vague shapes of doom-metal guitar wavering in the far horizon. Fans of Vinterriket, you should especially investigate this band.
And Æon Nought closes the disc with two long tracks of gorgeously ghoulish ambience. The first track "Mined Fades Away" blends a depressingly morose guitar melody with tinny, gong-like percussion, high pained shrieks, softly whispered female vocals, and hypnotic electronic drones, a strangely romantic and melodic black ambience covered in a fuzzy low-fi haze, almost poppy in a gloomy, weepy, 4AD sort of way, especially when the piano comes in towards the end playing a beautiful melancholy melody. The other track "Monolith/Prelude to the Previous Universe" is heavier on the drone and whir, a mostly Lustmordian expanse of black ambience colored by sorrowful piano at the end.
Nice packaging that consists of a six-panel foldout sleeve with creepy high-contrast black and white artwork, with the disc attached to the jacket by a foam hub.Track Samples: Sample : Aeon Nought - Monolithe Sample : Gate To Void - Lifeless Sample : Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere - I Invoke
VEKTOR Black Future CD (Heavy Artillery) 13.98
Black Future IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER
I've read a handful of reviews of this album that have come out in the past few months since Black Future came out, several of which accused Vektor of ripping off Voivod's sound wholesale. I dunno what it is that these people are listening to, because Vektor hardly sounds like a Voivod tribute band to my ears. I'm presuming that Vektor's spiky, mechanistic logo (which definitely looks like something that Away would have designed) and the dystopian sci-fi themes in their artwork and lyrics (and songs titles like "Destroying the Cosmos", "Dioxyribonucleic Acid", "Dark Nebula", and "Accelerating Universe) are what's generating all of the comparisons to the Canadian sci-fi thrash metal masters, but musically, the sound of Black Future is straight Teutonic thrash, run through Vektor's super-progged out astro-physics processors but not lacking one ounce of vicious riffage. Ok, yes, once you get deeper into the album (starting around "Destroying The Cosmos"), the guitarists do begin to bring out some dissonant skronky chords and weirdo riffing that's obviously influenced by the brilliantly wonky style of Voivod guitarist Piggy, but these moments only appear fleetingly as brief blips of technoid weirdness that are quickly enough absorbed back into the blistering high speed thrash assault. Vektor's sound is both ripping and progressive, combining a heavy Kreator/Destruction/later-era Sodom influence with spiraling, expansive arrangements that incorporates harsh blackened riffing, galloping thrash metal, dizzying transitions into jazz-fusion inspired sections, wild harmonized shredding, wicked snarling vocals (that resemble those of Germanic thrashers Destruction quite a bit), electronic effects, eerie acoustic guitars, ominous black-hole synthesizer accompaniment, and furious speed picking woven up into songs that sometimes stretch on for more than ten minutes, allowing Vektor to race through a myriad of proggy concepts. The music begins to move into more psychedelic territory at the end of the album with a pair of monstrous jams, each filled with bubbling outer-space synths and soundtracky electronics and intricate thrash arrangements, morphing complex prog-thrash into brooding post-rock codas with haunting flurries of guitar tremolo and acoustic strum, Tangerine Dreams-esque cosmic ambience blooming, then torn apart by bursts of fierce galloping thrash metal. Fucking killer! Highly recommended if yer into the tech-thrash of Sadus, Voivod, Mekong Delta, early Atheist, Watchtower and even the metallic prog of newer bands like Behold...The Arctopus. Includes a large oversized foldout poster/booklet.Track Samples: Sample : Asteroid Sample : Dark Nebula Sample : Hunger For Violence Sample : Oblivion
WE'VE COME FOR WHAT'S OURS Even On The Darkest Day CD-R (Self Released) 8.98
The other disc that just came in from the newish noise-guitar project We've Come For What's Ours is just as brutal and chaotic as the Aura Police album, but here the sound moves through some slightly more atmospheric and droning regions, making Even On The Darkest Day just a smidge less out-and-out skull crushing than it's companion. It's still not for wimps, though. The newest project from guitarist/psychnoise overlord Mason Jones (formerly of Subarachnoid Space and Trance, and lately of Numinous Eye), WCFWO deals in nuclear-strength improv blasts of guitar and electronics that are detonated at apocalyptic levels of volume and aggression; "Even On The Darkest Day" burns its way through nearly forty minutes of howling brutal psychedelic noise, a swirling, churning chaos of over modulated guitar skronk, roaring jet-engine noise, deep buzzing drones, malfunctioning 8-bit electronic mayhem,
massive distorted synths blasting fluctuating waves of electronic crunch, swarms of warped space-fx, clanging guitar/amp racket, and super-heavy slabs of blown-out doomdrone. It's another hellish blastwave of monolithic guitar inferno, gouged with chunks of frenzied, abrasive improv-skronk guitar that
turn Darkest Day into something resembling Sonny Sharrock's Guitar crossed with the atomic guitar noise of Japan's Solmania. But as I mentioned before, this disc also has the occasional foray into regions of pure drone that weren't as apparent on the other WCFWO disc; sometimes, the roiling, ear-wrecking chaos breaks off into fields of massive, buzzing cosmic drone formed from towering walls of distorted synth, flecked with moments of glittering alien beauty in the cracks between the crushing noise, and later on, the album moves into exultant drones similar to some of the early Growing stuff, huge roaring slabs of radiant buzz that levitate like obelisks of white light into the stratosphere. Another dose of seriously brutal, earth-scorching out-guitar improv noise annihilation for fans of Solmania, Incapacitants, Skullflower, Hijokaidan, and Total. Both discs are simple cd-rs with handwritten text, packaged in a hand-screened gatefold jacket.Track Samples: Sample : Even on The Darkest Day
WE'VE COME FOR WHAT'S OURS Response Of The Aura Police CD-R (Self Released) 8.98
Both of the discs that We've Come For What's Ours have released are brutal, noise-irradiated out-guitar assaults of skull-cracking proportions, but this one is probably the noisiest and most extreme of the two. Like the other disc, Response Of The Aura Police is a single massive track that goes on for almost fifty minutes, and piles on endless heaps of psychedelic guitar noise and crushing low-end meltdown. Featuring Mason Jones from Subarachnoid Space/Trance/Numinous Eye/Culper Ring on guitar and god-knows-what-else, "Response" gets into some of the most chaotic and noisy territory that I've ever heard Mason wander into, an epic amp eruption that's sort of similar to the distorted occult amp-fug rituals that Mandragora Records puts out, a la Crackhouse and Paradise Camp 23, and has a lot in common with the most blown-out and holocaustal Skullflower/Total material. The track blasts through a seemingly endless maelstrom of mangled atonal shredding, thick gouts of distorted amp buzz, waves of extreme pedal-fuckery and swooping FX, heavy washes of damaged synthesizer melody and wicked psych-guitar leads that snake through the suffocating murk. Most of the time, WCFWO amass a thick, heavily layered sound that resembles a Skullflower jam trapped in a tar pit, but some of the guitar playing gets pretty skronky, bent notes and strangled chord shapes screaming off the guitar like a Sonny Sharrock improv set gone hyperspeed and set against a backdrop of brutal Merzbowian noise. As the album progresses, we're assaulted by stun-blasts of high pitched Sunroof-like skree and distorted drones, manic oscillator freakouts, heavily distorted photon-cannon blasts, all kinds of mechanical whirr and buzz and swirling, glitched out electronics, sometimes even slipping into brief sections of crushing shapeless heaviness that borders on doomdrone, or revealing faint traces of what almost sounds like fast, thrashy drumming buried deep beneath the noise and skree and scrape. Finally, the sound builds into intense epic walls of distorted synth towards the end, before finally fading off into a dull hum that stretches out for several minutes until it disappears into the ether. Yeah, this disc is some savage noise guitar action, fans of the noisier Skullflower/Mirag recordings and both Solmania (especially Solmania!) and Incapacitants will all dig this. Both discs are simple cd-rs with handwritten text, packaged in a hand-screened gatefold jacket.Track Samples: Sample : Response Of The Aura Police
WEAKLING Dead As Dreams CD (Tumult) 14.98
Another crucial Tumult title back in stock, and it's one of the most important, essential US black metal albums ever. Dead As
Dreams was the only album that San Francisco's Weakling ever released, and it featured a member of Drag City math-metallers The Fucking
Champs, which I think might have baffled some diehard black metal fans at first. But this album has gone on to become a cult classic in the
field of underground black metal in the years since it's release; I remember when this album first came out and I picked up a copy off of Andee
at Tumult, I was completely knocked out by how immense and trance-inducing Weakling's songs were. It's all unmistakably black metal, sure, each
song is a dense wall of buzzing distorted guitars and unusually (for black metal, at least) dynamic drumming, morose minor key melodies, harsh
anguished screams, evil keyboard motifs, drawing inspiration from the raw Norwegian black metal of Immortal, Mayhem and Burzum, but the songs
were really long, the shortest one clocking in at 10 minutes, with complicated guitar riffs and twisting, undulating song
arrangements, riffs repeating over and over and heavy walls of buzzing guitar drone rising up out of the murk, trance inducing in it's
repetition but also completely confounding when they kick into to their awesome passages of keyboard-heavy prog metal. Amazing droning
blackness, intricate and entrancing, as Mayhem style riffs melt into cosmic synth effects and brutal midtempo thrash, slow doomy crawls are
outlined by ethereal melodies, folky guitars emerge from blackened battledrone. Parts of Dead As Dreams remind me of Fleurety's
masterpiece of bizarre black metal Mid Tid Skal Komme, but Weakling are a much fiercer, hypnotic beast, "eternal music" applied to
scorching black metal violence. This album utterly destroys, and it's essential for anyone into progressive, mindmelting black metal and
droning, cinematic heaviness.
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NECRO DEATHMORT This Beat Is Necrotronic CD (Distraction) 11.98)
16-17 Early Recordings 2xCD (Savage Land) 21.98)
ABSU self-titled (DELUXE EDITION) CD + DVD (Candlelight) 14.98)
ABSU self-titled LP (Back On Black) 28.98)
AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED / TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION Frontside Nosegrind (RED VINYL) 7 INCH VINYL (Bones Brigade) 6.98)
ANAAL NATHRAKH In The Constellation Of The Black Widow CD (Candlelight) 13.98)
ANDUIN Abandoned In Sleep CD (SMTG Limited) 9.98)
BATTLEFIELDS Entourage Of The Archaic LP (Init) 14.98)
BEHERIT The Oath Of Black Blood CD (Season Of Mist) 14.98)
BEHERIT The Oath Of Black Blood LP (Emetic) 17.98)
BLACK DICE self-titled 7 INCH VINYL (Gravity) 4.98)
BODYCHOKE Cold River Songs CD (Relapse) 14.98)
CANNABIS CORPSE The Weeding LP (Tank Crimes) 12.98)
CANNABIS CORPSE The Weeding (DELUXE EDITION) 8 INCH VINYL (Tank Crimes) 19.98)
CULTED Below The Thunders Of The Upper Deep CD (Relapse) 11.98)
FLUX / SLAB Protoplasmic / Descension 2xCD (Relapse) 10.98)
GODFLESH Messiah CD (Relapse) 13.98)
HAERESIARCHS OF DIS Overture CD (Fatima Productions) 10.98)
IREPRESS Sol Eye Sea I (PURPLE/BROWN) 2xLP (Translation Loss) 23.98)
KEPLERS ODD GRO J1655-40 CD (Desolation House) 13.98)
MOTHGUTS III CD-R (Thor's Rubber Hammer) 7.98)
OS Twelve Truths LP (Self Released) 12.98)
OVSKUM Atto III LP (Obscure Origins) 17.98)
OWL XOUNDS Teenagers From Mars LP (Colour Sounds) 12.98)
ROBE. Remains Of A Burning World CASSETTE (Thor's Rubber Hammer) 6.98)
SAKE The Desert / Bastards 7 INCH VINYL (Hopscotch) 3.98)
SCORN Evanescence / Ellipsis 2xCD (Earache) 15.98)
SLAGMAUR Skrekk Lich Kunstler LP (Lux InfernVm) 17.98)
WEAKLING Dead As Dreams CD (Tumult) 14.98