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Sort of odd to think that I've never featured a new Napalm Death album in the coveted "spotlight" position on any of our catalog updates over the last decade, considering that the Birmingham grindcore pioneers are a) one of my favorite bands of all time and b) have been producing some of their edgiest, noisiest work just in the past few years. That definitely wasn't going to happen with their fifteenth album Utilitarian, though. It's been almost three years since their last record, the excellent 2009 Lp Time Waits For No Slave, and their latest is sort of a landmark release in that it arrives on the band's thirtieth anniversary. As with the previous record, the guys in Napalm again cite the influence of early industrial music, the post-punk gloom of Joy Division and the wall-of-sound extremism of later My Bloody Valentine on their songwriting process; while those influences are always subtle, Napalm continues to experiment with their sound in interesting new ways, contrasting their patented gasoline-soaked grindmetal assault with lots of slower, moodier material, passages that use clean layered vocals to create ominous apocalyptic chorales, and grinding industrial-tinged textures that manifest in everything from the often mechanical, angular rhythms to Mitch Harris's abrasive atonal chords and the bits of grimy factory ambience that lurk among these sixteen tracks.
The instrumental opener "Circumspect" sets the bleak dystopian vibe by marrying monstrous sludgy dissonance and grinding industrialized heaviness to swirling spacey ambience and static-drenched radio transmissions from a battlezone, then viciously rips into the full-bore grindcore of "Errors In The Signals" where the band flexes both their flawless blastcore chops and some of the most vicious blitzing crust thrash that you're likely to hear from a bunch of middle-aged guys. Naturally, the song "Everyday Pox" is one of my favorites; bringing in guest saxophonist John Zorn to spew a load of flesh-melting free-jazz gunk all over the grueling grind and slower, doom-laden parts, this song is fucking ferocious. It's one brutal sonic assault after another, from the Orwellian warnings and pulverizing death metal of "Protection Racket" and the rocking, jagged-edged crustmetal and dual-vocal hysteria of "The Wolf I Feed" that suddenly spins off into some haunting Fear Factory-esque machinemetal with robotic harmonized vocals and churning mechanical rhythms, to the awesome iron-plated thrash of "Fall On Their Swords" that erupts into majestic Gregorian-style chanting and an arresting apocalyptic crescendo, and the highly catchy end time-alert "Collision Course". Everyone has their favorite eras of the Napalm Death catalog, lots of folks worship at the irradiated altar of their earliest genre-defining albums, while others consider Napalm's early 90's death metal offerings to be their strongest material. Me? I honestly think that, while Scum will always inhabit a special stinking open wound in my heart; their last couple of records are unfuckwithable. I love the industrial elements that the band has continued to play with, and the massive, almost gothic power of the Utilitarian songs "Leper Colony" and the aforementioned "Swords" blow my skull apart every time that I spin this monstrosity. The bulldozing sound of Napalm Death hasn't softened an iota, and Utilitarian delivers all of the distorted violence and eschatological panic that fans will be looking for. Highly recommended...
Track Samples:
Sample : Circumspect
Sample : Everyday Pox
Sample : A Gag Reflex
Sample : Leper Colony
Sample : Quarantined

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This classic industrial black metal album hasn't been the easiest for me to find, especially (perversely enough) on CD, but it finally turned up through one of my suppliers recently. It's time for you to pick this up if you dig mechanized, futuristic black metal, 'cuz Aborym were (and are) one of the best...
Not as off-the-hook bizarre as Dodheimsgard but much more electronically enhanced than bands like Mysticum or Thorns, Aborym would develop their mix of classic second wave Norwegian black metal and electronic music into a much more sophisticated sound on later albums during the early 00's. Kali Yuga Bizarre was still a fine blast of brain-frying electro-infected baroque blackness from this European collective, though. Kicking off with the icy majesty of "Wehrmacht Kali Ma", the disc makes its way through a shadowy labyrinth of frostbitten black buzz and odd carnival-esque melodies, diving suddenly into the synth-heavy black metal of "Horrenda Peccata Christi" that twists through spasms of frenetic drum n' bass and throbbing industrial metal, and slow doom-laden passages backed with soaring orchestral keyboards. The vocals are handled by both lead vocalist Yorga SM and legendary black metal frontman Attila Csihar, who both spew a litany of demonic croaks, Latin incantations, and draconian imperatives while the rest of the band claws their way through these ten tracks of hallucinatory industrial black metal. And that's heavy on the "hallucination"; haunted pipe organs rise out of the mist, industrial percussion rattles in the distance, and deep monk-like chanting drifts in the background, and there's the constant presence of 80's style horror movie keyboards throughout Kali Yuga, on tracks like "Hellraiser", the slow reverberating pace, heavy bass line and gloomy keys evokes the sound of 80's darkwave before the music decomposes into weird effect-laden nightmare ambience. The track "Roma Divina Urbs" flows out of that into the sound of booming kettledrums and medieval horns resembling something off of the Conan The Barbarian soundtrack, and then Aborym bursts into a blackened metal version of the same arrangement now laced with electronic harpsichord sounds and frenzied blast beats, with dramatic clean vocals appearing later in the song. This unpredictable lunatic vibe is all over this album.
On the flipside, "Tantra Bizarre" delivers one of the album's most majestic songs with Attila's bizarre moaning vokills, one killer melodic hook after another, and a wild mix of shredding guitar solos and some very strange shrieking sounds that dive-bomb throughout the whole track. "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus" is one of the album's most twisted tracks, a hellish mishmash of hardcore techno, Black Mass atmospherics, blackened tremolo riffing, distorted bass lines and synths, and blown-out break beats all wound together into a delirious funhouse nightmare. A maniacal voice rants in Italian while a church choir sings, and then the band rips into the ferocious blackthrash of "Metal Striken Terror Action". That's followed by the delirious gothic blackness of "The First Four Trumpets", which resembles something from Fields Of The Nephilim, down to the deep Carl McCoy-esque vocals. The final bonus track "Tantra Bizarre (Co30 Version)" takes certain elements of the original version and gloms it all back together into a frantic skittering hardcore techno jam, a massive bass line slithering among the distorted fast-paced break beats and swarming synth, blackened shrieks and bizarre gasping vocals swooping back and forth, foreshadowing the more drum n' bass infected direction the band would take on later albums like With No Human Intervention.
Track Samples:
Sample : The First Four Trumpets
Sample : Hellraiser
Sample : Roma Divina Urbs
Sample : Tantra Bizarre

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Track Samples:
Sample : Christ Hole
Sample : Interminable Night
Sample : Rebirth Into Perversion

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Track Samples:
Sample : Christ Hole
Sample : Interminable Night
Sample : Rebirth Into Perversion

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Gah, Actuary is all over place lately; these guys just keep cranking out their oft-bizarre nightmare industrial music, and on this tape they're doing another collaborative project, here hooking up with Aderlating (the improv-black-psych side project from Mories of Gnaw Their Tongues. Aderlating brings more of it's improvised infernal mania to it's appearance on this tape, which is put together around the concept of each artist contributing percussion to each others tracks. The result might be my fave Actuary recordings to date.
The garbled processed screams that introduce Actuary's "Interior Interloper" kick their side right into swarming horror from the start, unleashing a bunch of strained, distorted howls of PE-style violence over a backdrop of furious static distortion, pounding sampled percussion, bizarre rhythmic loops, and a thick layer of flesh melting hiss that coats every inch of the psychotic industrial assault. At times, it sounds as if Actuary are trying to smash huge hunks of K2-style junknoise into something resembling a 'groove', but then they'll end up collapsing into a squirming heap of over-modulated feedback, writhing musical fragments, mangled tape noise and walls of fx-blasted static. This mode of assault drops off when the second track "Feast Or Famine" comes in, switching gears into a monstrous drum-circle of pounding tribal percussion from Aderlating that becomes surrounded by demonic growls, high keening horn-like drones, all sorts of chirping electronics, and again, that sticky coating of granular hiss that hangs on everything like black mold, and gradually turns into something resembling a midnight Moroccan devil ritual entangled in thick trails in opium smoke.
That sonic is turned all the way up on Aderlating's side, beginning with the blasting black metal trance of "Goat Mass". This song is insane, a free-for-all skullfuck of improvised drumming, mechanized blast beats, harsh hellish screams, weird electronic effects and synths, black metal riffs so distorted and murky that they come out as a blur of swarming botfly noise. The first few minutes are vicious, a mess of black noize mayhem, but then it transforms into an even weirder free-jazz infected improv jam over the second half of the track. The other Aderlating track "Sadist Devil Children" picks right up from there with another filthy free-noise/drum freak-out, mashing together old 60's devil-worship film samples with wild, unhinged drumming (courtesy of the Actuary guys), clattering scrap-metal, putrid wordless vocalizations, and some extremely deformed bass riffage. It's not like anything I've heard from Aderlating, like this fucked-up PCP-fueled mash up of Abruptum and Merzbow's recent improv-drumming noise workouts. Love it !!!
Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies, with full-color artwork/packaging.

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More Actuary, more creeping industrial menace, more psychic abrasion. On Chosen Curse, the SoCal void-pilots hitch a ride with Winters In Osaka for a quick jaunt straight down the yawning throat of Hell. The guys in Actuary have so far been pretty good at selecting bands on their splits that actually compliment their sound, rather than just taking up space on the other side of the record.
Actuary's "False Relics" journey's further into the realms of cybernetic industrial horror that this band has been progressively exploring with each new release. It's a hailstorm of broken glass and menacing distorted synths that sweep in and lead right into the track's chaotic noisescape, quickly rising in intensity and volume from that glitch-ridden mass of swirling electronic noise and processed bells into a destructive tidal wave of harsh blast, sampled screams and ultra-distorted heaviness that consumes and pulverizes everything in it's path. Definitely hits the spot.
Depending on the record, I've heard Winters In Osaka unleash everything from Godfleshian industrial crush to total abstract noise, so I wasn't sure what to expect this time around. Their track "Floors" begins with soft cinematic ambience at first, delicate electronic notes sparkling against a pitch-black void, but as a steady rising swell of rumbling bass comes rushing in, it quickly becomes much more threatening and transforms into the sort of ghastly infernal ambience that these guys excel at. Those high, shimmering tones maintain a constant presence throughout the track, even as a huge wall of distortion nearly consumes the entire sound field, becoming an almost wall-like block of black static through which faint traces of melody can be heard. Bursts of abrasive rhythmic noise and vast trumpeting bass tones take flight at the very end, when everything suddenly crashes to a stop.
On colored vinyl, and presented in a gorgeous looking record that features brightly colored, occult-themed sleeve art that was created by Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues / Aderlating) and Kevin Fetus (Lack Of Interest / Fetus Eaters / Bacteria Cult).

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Track Samples:
Sample : II
Sample : III

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Only have a handful of these and it's now out of print. Aksumite is one of the killer black metal-influenced punk bands on the Colloquial Sound tape label, and this was (I believe) their first cassette for the label. It's a grimy, somewhat hysterical, and very low-fi sound that jams a primitive black metal influenced attack through a blunt hardcore assault, a style that I can't get enough of right now when it's played with this level of sonic mayhem and ugliness. The tape kicks off with an ominous doom-laden intro of creeping guitar melody and lumbering stop-start drums awash in shimmering feedback and amp buzz, then it blasts off into the raw blackened thrashpunk of "No Soil Overturned In The Master's Field", the swarming two-chord riffs drenched in reverb, the band alternating between full-tilt hardcore velocity and bashing out a noisy, anthemic breakdown, the whole recording slathered in excessive reverb that gives this a huge cavernous feel. The singer has a real wild vocal delivery, his killer possessed vocals served up in a psychotic mess of slobbering, vomiting screams and howling delay-drenched insanity. The band rip into the thrashing blackened hardcore of "Endlessly, Remorselessly", with it's bizarre vocal effects and noisy recording, and the intense catchy HC of "Laid Bare Upon The Stone", the song laced with ferocious blast beats and chugging, warped thrash parts, the guitars dissonant and filled with jangling, clanging chords. "Blood Cult" tangles up a mess of Celtic Frost worship, sloppy blackthrash, and D-beat speedfreakery, and "Particles Of Faith" drops more of their blazing black metal riffing into big whacks of sludge-riddled heaviness, leading up to the closing outro where they end the tape with a reprise of eerie clean guitars and slow, pounding drums from the first track. I really dug Aksumite's howling blackened hardcore on this tape, it's right in there with bands like Willing Feet, Ives, even the newer Darkthrone stuff, but with more of an awkward rhythmic twitchiness. If the other tapes on Colloquial Sound have moved you, this will too, and fans of Primal Vomit's black metal/punk aesthetic should check Aksumite out as well. Manufactured on blood-red cassettes and released in a hand-numbered edition of one hundred copies...
Track Samples:
Sample : Endlessly Remorselessly
Sample : Overturned In The Masters Field

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Track Samples:
Sample : Death Dealer
Sample : God is War
Sample : Sadistic Vindicator

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Alms is a solo project from guitarist Nathan Young, who I had previously been aware of due to his work in the psych-doom-ambient duo Ajilvsga. With Alms, Young sculpts minimal, slow-moving ampdrift that moves from hushed clouds of hypnotic buzz to heavier fields of low-fi metallic drone, and it's an intoxicating performance that's featured on this half hour long cassette. Taken from a live performance that was aired on an Albuquerque radio show in early 2011 (and split across the two sides of the tape), "Annihilation Of The Self" was apparently created primarily from Young's manipulation of a bowed amplified guitar soaked in thick, oily Metalzone style distortion. It's not at all like the Earth-style sludge-trance you might expect, though. The piece is more abstract and ambient, and after the first few minutes of minimal thrum begins to morph into a single monstrous hum that hovers and drifts slowly through a blizzard of hiss, the sustained buzzing tone stretched into infinity. That droning chord drops out for periods of time, leaving behind just a roaring wall of muted, washed-out static, and will then slowly fade back in from behind, slightly shifting into a very simple chord change that is barely perceptible at first, it's so buried beneath the maelstrom-like wall of fuzz. From there, Young slowly introduces other drones and textures, lower static humming and massive ominous chordal drift, washes of metallic flanged effects and deep speaker-rattling frequencies, even a few brief moments of Sunn O)))-like crush, but the sound continuously returns to the central, originating drone throughout the entire track, even as things begin to dissolve and crumble across the last half into smoldering fields of washed-out chordal buzz, and a ponderous bass pulse emanates from the depths in random bursts. It's pretty cool stuff if you're into this sort of crushing improvisational guitar drone/noise, and is recommended to fans of Vulture Club, Fulci, RST and the like. Those looking for form within their droning heaviness will not find it here, but for fans of pitch-black amp-stasis and crushing tectonic rumble, I recommend cranking this loud. The tape includes information regarding accessing a digital download of the recording, and is limited to fifty copies.

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Track Samples:
Sample : God Damn the Sun
Sample : The Great Ram
Sample :

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Track Samples:
Sample : Here Come the Wolf
Sample : The Messenger
Sample : Sonic Mass, Pt. 2

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Track Samples:
Sample : Here Come the Wolf
Sample : The Messenger
Sample : Sonic Mass, Pt. 2

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The Amebix fever continues here at C-Blast with the acquisition of two high-quality pins that were issued by the punks over at Profane Existence. Both of them are cool heavy-duty nickel and enamel pins, this one bearing that iconic "Splat Head" image that has adorned Amebix's records since the early 80s, one of the more recognizable images from this seminal era of apocalyptic post-punk. The pin measures roughly 3/4" across, and comes in a tiny black velvet pouch, apparently produced in a run of three hundred.

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The Amebix fever continues here at C-Blast with the acquisition of two high-quality pins that were issued by the punks over at Profane Existence. Both of them are cool heavy-duty nickel and enamel pins, this one bearing the iconic Amebix logo that has adorned their records since the early 80; it's still one of the more recognizable band logos from this seminal era of apocalyptic post-punk. The pin measures roughly 1" across, and comes in a tiny black velvet pouch, apparently produced in a run of three hundred.

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A new re-issue of the first album from Belgian sludge metallers Amenra, featuring two songs off of their Mass II Ep as a bonus (all of which also appeared together on the first disc of the double CD collection that came out on Init a few years ago).
Like Cult Of Luna, there isn't a whole lot of mystery as to where Amenra are copping their sound from; as soon as one of their monolithic riffs kick in, there's no mistaking the Neurosis/Isis influence on their sound, and these Belgians essentially mine the heaviest elements of both - the chunky, percussive mono-chord riffing of early Isis and the slow-burning, sky-blackening riff-towers that Neurosis perfected on Through Silver In Blood. There's a reason why Amenra have gathered a fanatical cult following over in Europe, however. These guys aren't just another Neurosis rip-off band...they've taken that pounding, epic sludge and turned it into something far bleaker and more sinister than either of their influences, and I can't think of another band that has put such a crazed spin on this sound.
Back in the 1990's, several members of Amenra played in a band called Spineless that was tied in with the notorious H-8000 scene in Belgium. The H-8000 bands took the concept of combining hardcore and metal to a whole new level, and lots of the stuff that was coming out from that scene was essentially brutal thrash metal infused with a hardliner straightedge and vegan philosophy. Most of the bands that were involved with that scene disappeared, but around the turn of the decade, Spineless was recreated as Amenra, taking their ferocious metalcore and jacking that into a heavy Neurosis influence. The band began to align themselves with a sort of spiritual consciousness that was later documented in a self-published, 166 page book (!), and their music evolved into a much heavier version of mid-90's Neurosis, tuning lower and adding colossal amounts of heaviness to their riffs...and their riffs were phenomenal. Definitely one of things that make this band so great. Sure, they sound a lot like Neurosis and Isis, but they come up with riffs that are so crushing and powerful that it doesn't faze me at all. It's like hearing an evil, blackened, ultra-down tuned version of Through Silver In Blood, with freaked-out, hysterical vocals a la Jacob Bannon from Converge and an extremely economical approach to the riffs. A single song (which rarely comes in under ten minutes) usually centers around a single, punishing riff that the band coils tighter and tighter as the song progresses, and their music takes on a hypnotic intensity through their use of repetition, even when they launch into a fucking bludgeoning riff that sounds like Godflesh busting out some Kyuss at 12 rpms, blotting out the sun with the sheer mass of their sound. And they add some cool unique touches, like ethereal female vocals and deep, dramatic male singing that sounds a little like Maynard Keenan from Tool, passages of dark jangly indie rock that build into heavier sections, and on their latest album IIII, some slightly more complex and progressive song arrangements. They never sacrifice the heaviness, though. Ever.
These early tracks rank as some of the heaviest sludge/doom metal I've ever heard, and all of this stuff is essential listening for anyone who's already hooked on their punishing black hypno-tribal-dirge. The two Lps are housed in a nice matte-finish gatefold sleeve, and the release is limited to a pressing of 1,000 copies.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Genealogy of Disease
Sample : Infernal Wake

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Track Samples:
Sample : Contamination
Sample : Delirious
Sample : The Dead Will Walk the Earth

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Track Samples:
Sample : Devoid of a Soul
Sample : He Who Dwells in Darkness
Sample : The Hunt
Sample : Twilight of the Dead

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I've been a fan of these two European grindcore bands for ages, both of 'em offering an edgier version of contemporary grind that each has carved into it's own unique image, from the churning jazz/noise infested grind of Psychofagist, to the cold, inhuman mechanical heaviness of Antigama. Their respective sounds are considerably different, but a split album that teams them up together makes perfect sense to me, so here you go...
Antigama's half of the split has four new songs of their industrialized deathgrind: the mechanical blast and lurch of the opening song "Missing The Past" taps into that mid-90's era Napalm Death sound like so much of Antigama's stuff, attacking the listener with controlled blasts of chunky staccato riffing, machine-like percussion and distorted megaphone vocal-hate. They unfurl long stretches of threatening dark ambience on "Paranoia Prima", where the brief eruptions of industrial grind are juxtaposed with distant metallic percussion, staticky radio voices, and Lustmordian drones. "For Just One Breath" is weirdly groovy grindmetal with jazzy walking bass lines and more of their trademark clattering drum patterns, and that's followed by the ethereal closing piece "Finito", a hazy wash of soft synths that resembles the newer Jesu stuff. A really interesting batch of new tunes from these guys.
But Psychofagist shatter that tranquility pronto with their own skronky avant-garde grindcore, beginning with the ear-wrecking angularity and dissonance of "Apophtegma Nonsense" that combines an almost no-wave style atonality with their shockblasts of jagged grind. "Carne Tremula Marcia" blends twangy guitar with a series of extreme noisy freak outs and bleating chords, digging in further to the bizarre jazz/no wave damaged metal, the frenzied percussive assault and bass mayhem resembling the Flying Luttenbachers more than anything, albeit mucho heavier. The band attacks all of their songs on this split with that sort of ferocious, jagged abandon, even when they lock into something that resembles more straightforward grindcore and the singer finally comes in bellowing in his crazed guttural roar, there's still all kinds of weird jazzy stuff going on around the periphery, jazz-style guitar licks, diminished chords, complex drum patterns, etc. The song "Initiation" features some intensely heavy slower parts, massive sludgy dissonant anti-grooves slithering through the wreckage of their blasting death-skronk, lurching Godflesh-esque dirges that pummel relentlessly at your skull as they fade into the distance, and "Aritmia" breaks out the slap-bass and confounding time signatures for one of their shorter jazzgrind assaults. Antigama finish with a cover of the Tom Waits song "Misery Is The River Of The World" that they transform into a harsh, blasting sonic assault that more closely resembles the likes of Gorguts, breaking into some smoky saxophone playing at the very end. 100% blazing anti-music indeed...
Track Samples:
Sample : PSYCHOFAGIST - Carne Tremula Marcia
Sample : PSYCHOFAGIST - Misery Is The River Of The World (Tom Waits Cover)
Sample : ANTIGAMA - Missing The Past
Sample : ANTIGAMA / PSYCHOFAGIST-9 Psalms Of An Antimusic To Come

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Does anyone outside of the United Kingdom know about these guys? I fuckin' flipped over their last album The Voyage of the Pessimistic Philosoph, which came out six years ago on the same label; the quirky mixture of blackened, brutal hardcore and thuggish noise rock that The Art Of Burning Water created on that record crushed in a big, big way, but despite my raving, it seems like they've gone on to fly further beneath the radar than ever. Didn't even know they were still around when Super-Fi dropped this new Lp in my lap, all decked out in black, minimal layout, an almost ascetic look to the thing. I couldn't slap it onto my deck fast enough though, and was once again quite flattened by what The Art has to offer. Apparently this stuff was recorded in 2007 but sat around on someone’s back burner, so the pummeling metallic chaos and grudge-fuck riffs sound like a direct continuation of their previous effort. Beginning with a gorgeous blurred out, distorted piano intro, Head Of The Tempest launches into a series of nine violent outrages of potent blackened hardcore, burly noise rock, and angular sludge, with standout drumming from skinpounder Jason who whips his kit into convulsive surges of complex, churning rhythm and force beneath the spiky angular metallic riffs, the sound frequently evoking a much more evil, blackened version of Mastodon. More than anything, it's always been front man Grief and his hysterical strangled vocals that have given Art Of Burning Water their unique psychotic edge, his throat veering dervish-like from gritty, low howling to agonized screaming to off-balance yowling with a very distinct British accent, the vocal parts used sparingly as the band grinds through long stretches of instrumental bludgeon. The riffs are MASSIVE, derived from a strain of ugly, Am Rep style noise rock that's outfitted with crushing metallic weight, and stretches of thunderous hypnotic drumming and trippy samples/effects lead off into weird almost industrial percussive freak-outs. The awesome closing track "Toymaker" is The Art at their most ferocious and fearsome, the singer's strangulated screams looped endlessly over a grueling slo-motion dirge-chug that's fucking monstrous. Recommended in a big way if you're into real heavy, real pissed metallic noise-rock mayhem with an evil, off-kilter quality. I can't wait to hear what they'll be doing next, as I've heard that The Art now have Dave Cochrane of Head Of David / Greymachine / Transitional / Ice fame playing bass for 'em. Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies on black vinyl.
Track Samples:
Sample : Avoid All Windows And Oceans
Sample : Dear Lord...
Sample : Embrace You Density
Sample : Head of The Tempest
Sample : ART OF BURNING WATER-Head Of The Tempest

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Michael Frenkel's latest album of black kosmische drift under the Aspectee name is actually the first release from the German artist that I've heard, even though he's been recording and releasing dark ambient records for years with earlier projects like Evoke Scurvee. The stamp of the Black Drone imprint on Aspectee's second album Jour Cinq was reason enough for me to pick this disc up, and fans of the label will find this to be another satisfying dose of subterranean ambience, comprised largely of icy, muted synthesizer figures circling around vast cavernous spaces filled with lush reverb and endless abyssal darkness. There's a myriad of mysterious sounds flitting through the void of Jour Cinq, ranging from ominous voices trailing off into the depths, strange creaking sounds and scraping noises and various field recordings, swells of terrifying orchestral strings and distant war-horns sounding off in the deep, smears of washed-out piano, ghostly EVP-like transmissions flickering in the gloom, fragments of backwards sound and clanking metal, gusts of arctic wind, hazy choral voices, the sound constantly seeming to pulse with menace as Frenkel flows through the dim gloom of vast underworld passageways. On some parts of the album ("Poudure", "Roter Wald") Frenkel ventures into an eerie cinematic territory that's really similar to Tangerine Dream at their most sinister, sometimes bringing minimal electronic rhythms into the mix, but more often he simply constructs layer upon layer of chthonic drift that slowly blooms out of the depths, with later tracks venturing into blacker regions of sonic terror nearer to the likes of Lustmord and Atrium Carceri. Aspectee doesn't veer too far from the classic stygian ambient sound, but fans of the more dread-filled, less hospitable depths of dark drone/kosmische music a la Northaunt, Vinterriket, Phaenon, early Encomiast, and False Mirror will probably find this as satisfying as I did.
Track Samples:
Sample : Betrayal
Sample : Poudure
Sample : Roter Wald

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Track Samples:
Sample : ASTRO - Deep Wind II (Multicellular Dream)
Sample : CORNUCOPIA - Deep Wind I

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If you are going to own one live album from the Rastafarian thrash warriors Bad Brains, it's gotta be 1988's Live, released on SST Records. Recorded during the period between their classic I Against I and the more metallic Quickness, the thirteen song set on this Lp is culled from assorted performances while the band was touring the planet in support of I Against I throughout 1987, and a better live document of the Bad Brains in the live setting does not exist in my opinion. The set is a perfect mix of songs from the band's career up to this point, their combo of blistering Rasta-fueled thrash metal, crazed hardcore punk, and soulful dub reggae displayed with unstoppable ferocity on tracks like "I", "At The Movies", "The Regulator", "Right Brigade", and "I Against I". The first several songs on the Lp blaze by at mach speed, delivering a ripping thrash assault for the bulk of the a-side before they finally slow down for the stoned reggae revolution-anthem "I & I Survive". The b-side is even crunchier, with some of their heaviest songs from that period showing up ("Re-Ignition", "Sacred Love") alongside crucial jams like "F.V.K.", "She's Calling You", "Secret 77" and "Coptic Times". With Naomi Petersen's iconic photos, the crushing production courtesy of master knob-twister Phil Burnett (which is of such consistent, powerful quality that for the longest time I thought the album was taken from just one concert), and the fire-breathing performances from the Brains' at the peak of their power, this has remained one of my all time favorite records, not just from the Bad Brains catalog, but from this entire era of hardcore/crossover. Very highly recommended, and absolutely essential to Bad Brains fans both new and old.

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Bait features bassist Snapa and guitarist/vocalist Rob "Mid" Middleton who both previously played together in the influential early crustmetal band Deviated Instinct; this is apparently the band that they formed after the demise of D-Instinct, but instead of the punishing stenchcore of that band, Bait goes for more of a jagged, noise-rock influenced sound (somewhat closer in feel to Mid's other industrial-crust band Spine Wrench) on this kinda-rare 7" that came out earlier this past decade. On this debut Ep, Bait belt out four songs of vicious mid-tempo metallic crush fused to slower, more angular sludgy breakdowns, and Mid delivers his vocals in an intensely harsh and scathing howl that made my blood run cold. The music on Every Lie I've Ever Lived sort of comes off like latter day Today Is The Day, Unsane and Meatjack but even more metallic, mashing massive muscular rock riffs with blasting feral thrash and angular crunch along with those distorted megaphone vocals. It's a very cool mix of Am Rep grime and lurch, and sludgy, bone-crushing heaviness, a sound that I am always in the mood to hear, and the abstract sketches of desperation that make up the lyrics add to the panicked, desperate tone on this record that really gets your nerves twitching. It's put together into a nice package, the 7" housed in a heavy glossy booklet with the lyrics printed in red ink on sheets of translucent vellum with Mid's artwork spread throughout (always in the mood to see that, too - Mid is responsible for scads of great art that you've already seen on classic covers from Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror). Extremely limited - I was only able to pick up a couple of these records for the shop.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Forgotten Days
Sample : The Green Slime Pt. 1
Sample : Invaders From Within Pt. 1
Sample : Smoke Jumper
Sample : BAKER, AIDAN-The Spectrum Of Distraction

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Track Samples:
Sample : Arkh / Vohvar / Isor
Sample : Striations

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Track Samples:
Sample : Arkh / Vohvar / Isor
Sample : Striations

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This masterwork of offbeat scatological grindcore from Japan's Bathtub Shitter is back in print, re-mastered and re-issued in a nice six-panel digipack edition by Rip Roaring Shit Storm Records out of the UK, with two bonus tracks (including one from their split with Misery Index), limited to five hundred copies.
More Japanese scat-obsessed grind weirdness from Bathtub Shitter! Yep, Dancehall Grind is another installment in the ongoing series of limited-edition CD releases of Bathtub Shitter material that's been released through the band's own (S)hit Jam Records imprint. There's a freaking cult that's formed around these guys, as they are one of the weirdest, heaviest Japanese grind bands in action, and I freaked when we got this disc in. Dancehall Grind is the latest full length from the Shitter, recorded throughout 2004-2005, and rocks 13 songs of brand new material from these pot-hoovering, shit-philosophizing, grinding groove gods as well as a cover of D.R.I.'s "Time Out". The disc opens with a short, goofy, Nintendo-type 8 bit melody, but immediately launches into the Shitter's unique hybrid of crushing, rocking thrash metal and crusty grindcore, like a mutant mishmash of old school Japanese grinders S.O.B. and Boredoms, Brutal Truth and Mr. Bungle, stoner rock and pulverizing Celtic Frost sludge and awesome Exodus thrash. You'd better believe that this thrashes...blazing thrash metal mega-riffs smash into weird yet massive grooves that could almost be described as "funky", jackhammer grind blasts get entangled in bursts of super catchy metallic pop-punk, garage rock licks and slap-funk bass appear over slow sludge metal breakdowns and insane blast beats. There's the airy fingerpickin' acoustic interlude titled "Shit Drop", and the fucked up closer "Stihs Latem" that has them playing backwards. The 7 minute-plus "Rest In Piss" is a total deathgrind/prog mindmelt, it's convoluted riffs and tempo shifts stretching out far beyond the duration of a typical grind jam, becoming trancelike as the slow, off time funk-sludge riff alternates with supersonic blast beats. It's all over the fucking place. And Bathtub Shitter's vocalist Masato Henmarer Morimoto vomits up some of the most insane, ridiculous throat performances possible over the band's chaotic musical arrangements, effortlessly changing up between super-guttural, lung-busting gorebeast growling, snotty hardcore hollerin', and a freaked-out, impossibly high-pitched shriek that sounds like a hysterical, coked-up anime cheerleader. And it all works so perfectly, the vocals and schizoid grind shifts make this an awesome, comical, ridiculous, rumbling shitstorm of gnarly grind weirdness.
Track Samples:
Sample : Everybody Has The Wet
Sample : Re-Shit
Sample : Shit Drop (Instrumental)
Sample : Skate Of Bulgaria
Sample : BATHTUB SHITTER-Dance Hall Grind

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Just when I think I've got a handle on what makes up the Beherit discography, something like At The Devil's Studio 1990 comes along and completely fuckin' confuses me again. Really, at this point, their early output is such a jumbled, disorganized mess that I'm developing the opinion that 1995's Drawing Down The Moon really was the first actual album from these experimental Finnish black metal demons. Before this, Beherit's pre-Drawing recordings are a mishmash of ultra-raw demos and rehearsal tapes that have been released on the Werewolf Semen And Blood and /The Oath of Black Blood discs that have both been touted by various mouths as the band's "first album", but this recording from 1990 apparently predates that stuff. Of course, I had to get my claws on this - this is awesome early filth that is spectacular in it's noisiness, and does appear to be the earliest studio session put to tape. A ferocious, fucked-up black/death metal recording, for sure, At The Devil's Studio was apparently recently found by one of the band members who had previously thought the master to be lost, and hearing it now shows how Beherit early on helped to create the whole bestial black/death aesthetic. At it's core, this is frenzied blackened death metal with brutal noisy riffing, cacophonic drumming, and some of the fucking weirdest black/death vocals ever, the belching, mewling vocals warped even further by using bizarre effects and insane pitch-shifted gargling noise. Yikes. I'd have to say that this recording sounds even more insane than the Oath Of Black Blood session, the music very often disintegrating into total swirling low-fi chaos, the guitar frequently mutating into nearly incoherent, blood-soaked anti-riffs, the band exploding into an ultra-primitive blackgrind barbarism. This disc contains a bunch of early versions of songs that would also appear on the Oath Of Black Blood release and later splits and Eps ("Grave Desecration", "Demonomancy", "The Oath Of Black Blood", "Witchcraft"), but it also has some never-before-released tracks like "Whores Of Belial" and "At The Devil's Churns" that make it essential for Beherit fanatics. Not only highly recommended to Beherit disciples and hardcore black/death junkies, but also to any of you guys who are fans of seriously demented blackened punk/noise and noisecore who might not already be familiar with the garbled Satanic genius of Beherit. Awesome.
Track Samples:
Sample : Grave Desecration Vengeance
Sample : Six Days With Sadistic Slayer
Sample : Whores of Belial

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Just when I think I've got a handle on what makes up the Beherit discography, something like At The Devil's Studio 1990 comes along and completely fuckin' confuses me again. Really, at this point, their early output is such a jumbled, disorganized mess that I'm developing the opinion that 1995's Drawing Down The Moon really was the first actual album from these experimental Finnish black metal demons. Before this, Beherit's pre-Drawing recordings are a mishmash of ultra-raw demos and rehearsal tapes that have been released on the Werewolf Semen And Blood and /The Oath of Black Blood discs that have both been touted by various mouths as the band's "first album", but this recording from 1990 apparently predates that stuff. Of course, I had to get my claws on this - this is awesome early filth that is spectacular in it's noisiness, and does appear to be the earliest studio session put to tape. A ferocious, fucked-up black/death metal recording, for sure, At The Devil's Studio was apparently recently found by one of the band members who had previously thought the master to be lost, and hearing it now shows how Beherit early on helped to create the whole bestial black/death aesthetic. At it's core, this is frenzied blackened death metal with brutal noisy riffing, cacophonic drumming, and some of the fucking weirdest black/death vocals ever, the belching, mewling vocals warped even further by using bizarre effects and insane pitch-shifted gargling noise. Yikes. I'd have to say that this recording sounds even more insane than the Oath Of Black Blood session, the music very often disintegrating into total swirling low-fi chaos, the guitar frequently mutating into nearly incoherent, blood-soaked anti-riffs, the band exploding into an ultra-primitive blackgrind barbarism. This disc contains a bunch of early versions of songs that would also appear on the Oath Of Black Blood release and later splits and Eps ("Grave Desecration", "Demonomancy", "The Oath Of Black Blood", "Witchcraft"), but it also has some never-before-released tracks like "Whores Of Belial" and "At The Devil's Churns" that make it essential for Beherit fanatics. Not only highly recommended to Beherit disciples and hardcore black/death junkies, but also to any of you guys who are fans of seriously demented blackened punk/noise and noisecore who might not already be familiar with the garbled Satanic genius of Beherit. Awesome.
Track Samples:
Sample : Grave Desecration Vengeance
Sample : Six Days With Sadistic Slayer
Sample : Whores of Belial

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Just when I think I've got a handle on what makes up the Beherit discography, something like At The Devil's Studio 1990 comes along and completely fuckin' confuses me again. Really, at this point, their early output is such a jumbled, disorganized mess that I'm developing the opinion that 1995's Drawing Down The Moon really was the first actual album from these experimental Finnish black metal demons. Before this, Beherit's pre-Drawing recordings are a mishmash of ultra-raw demos and rehearsal tapes that have been released on the Werewolf Semen And Blood and /The Oath of Black Blood discs that have both been touted by various mouths as the band's "first album", but this recording from 1990 apparently predates that stuff. Of course, I had to get my claws on this - this is awesome early filth that is spectacular in it's noisiness, and does appear to be the earliest studio session put to tape. A ferocious, fucked-up black/death metal recording, for sure, At The Devil's Studio was apparently recently found by one of the band members who had previously thought the master to be lost, and hearing it now shows how Beherit early on helped to create the whole bestial black/death aesthetic. At it's core, this is frenzied blackened death metal with brutal noisy riffing, cacophonic drumming, and some of the fucking weirdest black/death vocals ever, the belching, mewling vocals warped even further by using bizarre effects and insane pitch-shifted gargling noise. Yikes. I'd have to say that this recording sounds even more insane than the Oath Of Black Blood session, the music very often disintegrating into total swirling low-fi chaos, the guitar frequently mutating into nearly incoherent, blood-soaked anti-riffs, the band exploding into an ultra-primitive blackgrind barbarism. This disc contains a bunch of early versions of songs that would also appear on the Oath Of Black Blood release and later splits and Eps ("Grave Desecration", "Demonomancy", "The Oath Of Black Blood", "Witchcraft"), but it also has some never-before-released tracks like "Whores Of Belial" and "At The Devil's Churns" that make it essential for Beherit fanatics. Not only highly recommended to Beherit disciples and hardcore black/death junkies, but also to any of you guys who are fans of seriously demented blackened punk/noise and noisecore who might not already be familiar with the garbled Satanic genius of Beherit. Awesome.
Track Samples:
Sample : Grave Desecration Vengeance
Sample : Six Days With Sadistic Slayer
Sample : Whores of Belial

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Track Samples:
Sample : Untitled 3
Sample : Untitled 1

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Big-time anticipation for this when the formation of the band was announced a year or so ago, just based on the names involved; Chuck Dukowski, founding member of Black Flag and one of the main brains behind SST Records, joining up with Eugene Robinson from Oxbow/Whipping Boy (the former a previous SST act themselves) to play a bunch of tunes that Dukowski originally wrote back during his tenure in Black Flag? It sounded very promising, although even as a fan of both men's assorted endeavors over the years, I'd been having a tough time envisioning exactly what Black Face would end up sounding like. Well, the first offering from the group was finally bestowed upon us in the form of this teasing two-song 7" that Hydra Head recently released, and although it took a couple of spins for me to really sink my teeth into it, I'm very much stoked on it. The band is rounded out on this record by original Oxbow drummer Tom Dobrov and guitarist Milo Gonzalez from The Chuck Dukowski Sextet, and they end up cranking out an aggressive, atonal punk assault that sounds undeniably like that of the more abstract, experimental Black Flag material, all the way down to Gonzalez's surprisingly Greg Ginn-esque leads and skronk-riffing. The a-side "I Want Kill You" is a mangled ripper, the rhythm section barreling through the song in spurts of angular, jagged movement as the guitar howls out wiry, dissonant runs and Robinson's murderous seething rage soaks completely through. The b-side is further out there, grooving mutant blues and spacey guitar sounds shooting through the bludgeoning intensity of "Monster", the band venturing into a kind of muscular, lurching psychedelia. An impressive debut, I'm looking forward to the next 7" that is supposed to be coming out later this spring...

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Another Legion Blotan tape of twisted, noisy and raw raw RAW black metal...sort of. On one side of the tape you have the Spanish band Ostots whose gnarled doom n' gloom has also been heard on recent Ep offerings from Seedstock, and on the other is a band called Black Howling that plays a kind of blackened downer rock that's more wrecked jangle than BM aggression.
Black Howling's "Cursed By The Ancient Forest" is a seventeen-minute long song that falls within the parameters of what some people call "depressive black metal", a descriptor that's getting more and more vague. Like so much of that sort of stuff, it's more gloomy, wretched rock than metal, and the strange, noisy post-punk guitars, stumbling guitar melodies and driving rhythms hit my brain matter like a withered mutation of early Cure. The jangly guitars push through a heavy fog of low-fi hiss and tape noise while the singer screeches insanely way off in the background, coming together as a weird mix of no-fi indie rock and black metal vocals. It's really ugly and messed-up for sure, with lots of snarled tape noise and a murky-as-hell recording, but this is all part of the appeal for me, the melodies making Black Howling's music weirdly pretty in its wretchedness. Like a strange version of "depressive" black metal interpreted through the noisy jangle of some old Homestead records band, this long song goes through a number of different parts, shifting into other gloomy melodies and driving rock, always maintaining the moody, noisy central melody, later breaking off into long stretches where the band drops out and one guitarist is left strumming the somber acoustic melody while flute-like keyboards lilt behind him. Worth checking out if yer a fan of stuff like Hypothermia, Amesoeurs and Trist...
On the other side, Ostots's "Lurraren Erraietan" is a fine match for Black Howling's anguished blackened jangle. It's another epic, too; a meandering eighteen minute long song that has some of the same elements (jangling melodic guitars, tons of gloomy atmosphere, the shreiking black metal style vocals, the murky low-fi rehearsal recording), but does something different with 'em by blending their driving, steady rock with stretches of abject doom and overall a much more metallic, heavy sound. When Ostots really slow it down, they get into noisy rumbling territory with anguished spoken vocals and a big bottom-heavy metallic crunch, almost like an old goth/post-punk band slowing down to a rumbling doom metal crawl; some of the more driving riffs that show up on "Lurraren" even remind me of early Sisters Of Mercy, and the very end of the song drifts out into a short coda of gloomy, Goblin-esque keyboards. Very cool. I really dug this too, and am already looking for more stuff from this Spanish trio.
Limited to one hundred copies.

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S'more sweet extreme skull-damage from Phage, pairing up a harsh noise elder with one of the new punks, and serving it up in a really nice silk-screened sleeve, the artwork comprised of a steaming mix of explicit leather daddy porn, scenes of violent murder, and industrial corruption.
Black Leather Jesus plants it's steel-toed boot firmly across the back of your neck with "Sissy Training", a five-minute harsh noise workout that smears huge globs of blooping synth, junk-noise chaos and shrieking feedback over the thick, raging wall of low-end distortion. Too busy and frantic and laced with assorted synthesizer detritus to ever form into pure wall-trance, this brutal distorted ejaculate is spewed violently over the length of the side and peaks into pure catharsis at just the right moment. BLJ fans will not be disappointed.
Pollutive Static's side ("Mechanical Synesthesia (Man And Machine)") is a nice long bout of electric shock assault built on a foundation of grinding harsh noise, but layered with some interesting quasi-melodic figures and a churning rhythmic undercurrent. This is actually the first recording from Hal Hutchinson's HN project that I've listened to, and while it's notably different from his other, more PE-influenced works, it's brutality is just as intemperate as the rest of his catalog. I'm reminded of some of the more psychedelic moments found on K2, Incapacitants and Pain Jerk albums with all of the howling synthesizer tones and effects that surface throughout the track, but it's more violent than anything else, slamming into an abrupt cut-off at the end just as my skull thought it was going to bulge from the avalanche of electronic chaos.
Limited to three hundred copies.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Ancient Realm Of Anti-Anthropocentrism
Sample : Bottomless Grave
Sample : Seasons In Sepuchural Depths

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I'm not shy about my love of older industrial metal bands. Over the past several years, I've been searching out some of the more obscure bands that came out of that particular era of underground metal (think late 80s through the early 90s) and have come up with killer reissues of albums from bands like Optimum Wound Profile, Pitch Shifter, and Treponem Pal, but I've also come across some older releases that just showed up in a dark corner of one of our suppliers warehouses. Like Blood From The Soul's debut album To SPite The Gland That Breeds. A lesser-known album from the early 90's Earache catalog, To Spite The Gland That Breeds is a crunchy blast of electronically-tinged industrial metal that I always wanted to give another look. An interesting collaboration between Lou Koller (front man for New York hardcore mainstays Sick Of It All) and Napalm Death bassist Shane Embury (who wrote all of the music for this project), BFTS came out of that industrial metal sound of the early 90s but in my opinion has aged a little better than a lot of similar stuff from the same era. That's due to the sound being really rooted in the churning industrialized death metal that Napalm Death themselves were consumed with at the time, taking it and blending it with massive mechanized rhythms and crushing breakbeats, and also incorporating lots of industrial ambience, factory drones and grinding noise. To Spite... has this threatening dystopian atmosphere that clings to the chugging breakbeat-driven mecha-metal and paranoid introspective lyrics, seriously heavy stuff that'll probably appeal to any fans of the atonal, icy guitar riffing and experimental feel of Napalm Death's Fear, Emptiness, Despair and Diatribes and the early 90's Godflesh albums. Embury's riffs are crushing as usual, and Koller's pissed-off yowl is a better match for this sort of machine metal than you might expect; I was always a fan of SOIA's older stuff so this wasn't a tough sell for me when it came out even if the pairing seemed weird to other metal fans. Some other interesting stuff on the album includes the dub-flecked industro-doom of "Nature's Hole", which sounds like some Vitus-strength doom treated with winding snake-charmer leads and the sort of slow , robotic reverb-heavy industrial rhythms of Scorn, and the mechanized motorik propulsion and shoegazer wall of sound guitars on "Suspension Of My Disbelief". It's the closing title track that gets really abrasive, a long sprawling industrial dirge of slow, punishing Swans-style heaviness with plodding, cavernous drums and waves of howling feedback and guitar noise, slithering black synthesizers and sinister samples strewn across the creeping glacial crush. This disc is definitely worth checking out if you're into early 90s Napalm Death and industrial metal, and it's still one of my favorite albums in this style...
Track Samples:
Sample : Blood from the Soul
Sample : Natures Hole
Sample : Painted Life
Sample : To Spite
Sample : Blood from the Soul

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Autophobia is one of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer's recent cassette offerings, but be warned - this has been sold out from the band and label for a while and the handful of copies that I was able to get for the C-Blast shop are the last ones that I'll have. Fans of this prolific black industrial sludge group will want to get their talons on this tape immediately, it's one of the more punishing and abstract recordings that they've produced in the past year and fills up your skull-holes like a mass of malevolent, amoebic black horror. Autophobia is a single long piece that is split across the two sides of the cassette, a nearly twenty minute black industrial dirge that starts with a steady, massive rhythmic blasting of extremely distorted noise that sort of resemble the sound of mortar explosions occurring off in the distance, and other layers of droning sound gradually form around the crashing waves of lumbering, saurian heaviness. Slowly drifting clouds of amplifier rumble and reverb appear around the grinding noise, and as it goes on, you can hear these fragments of musical sound that drift in and out off in the background, indistinct shards of melody that threaten to coalesce into something more, but are always consumed back into the churning noise. After awhile, the vocals start to sweep in, monstrous and massively distorted roaring and screaming that rises and falls over the surging oceanic distortion and metallic noise, and it seriously heavy towards the end of the side, almost approaching a wall of noise at times but always centering itself around that crushing glacial chug.
The second half picks up from that point, stripping away much of the distortion at first and slowing the massive tectonic grinding into a more abstract dronescape of reverberating sheet-metal and smoldering, crackling static. As the latter half of the piece continues to develop, though, it ends up growing into similar levels of immense volume and power, becoming a slow-motion maelstrom of metallic roar and scrap-metal crush, those chunks and fragments of orchestral sound again seeping through into the monolithic black ocean of distortion alongside those demonic vocalizations.
Limited to one hundred copies.

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This is all that you will get from Body Cop. Even for those of us living in the general DC area, you would have had to been in the know to have been in attendance at one of the few shows that this band played during their brief existence. I remember hearing about them around the time the band had started up, hearing that the band was pure Swans-worship, and try as I might, I couldn't find anything from 'em, no web presence, no Myspace page, nothing. It wasn't until Fan Death released this self titled tape in conjunction with the band that I could finally hear what the local buzz was about. Now that I've been listening to this five-song, half-hour long tape, their one and only release, the fact that I never caught Body Cop in a live setting when they were doing the occasional basement show in the DC/VA area stings me even more. With members of DC deathcrust warriors Ilsa and the short-lived screamo/grind band Flowers In The Attic, Body Cop does indeed wear the rotting, bilious influence of early Swans right smack on it's collective sleeve, with obnoxiously slow atonal dirges, pounding saurian drums, lots of feedback and clanging guitar chords; but singer Kiki Tropea Suthard does this combination of howling excoriation and spoken-word delivery that is intense and harsh in it's own way, her howling vocals reciting some cool minimalist nihilistic poetry over the lumbering noise-punk. One of the band members is also in charge of pure electronic noise, so the music is constantly under barrage from an array of grinding distorted drones, harsh feedback manipulated into trippy waveforms, and other excessive amp-abuse that turns this into a really abrasive listening experience. It's low-fi and very mangy sounding, Kiki's shrieks and verbal scorn seeming to be drifting from down the hall somewhere, but the rhythm section plows through the murk with bulldozer force, and the guitars are choked and beaten constantly, spewing chunks of agonized axe-screech and twisted discordant crunch that never seems to coalesce into anything resembling an actual riff. It's a killer tape, loaded with some of the nastiest, gnarliest no-wave influenced hate-sludge in recent memory, and a fine final document of their brief run.

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Track Samples:
Sample : The Challenger Deep

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Visions Of The End is about as far as you can possibly get from the cult death metal, black metal and gothic doom that Ars Magna usually supplies me with, but it's not totally without precedent - if you enjoyed that Trancelike Void Ep Where The Trees Can Make It Rain that came out on the label a year or so back, Bosse's elegant and autumnal funereal-folk offers some of that same euphoria. This is the first release from New York City based artist Richard Bosse that I've listened to, though it follows a handful of previous titles that included releases on similarly black metal-aligned imprints like Those Opposed and Choir Of Delusion n' included a split record with the aforementioned T-Void. Though this is essentially one man and his acoustic guitar, it's not hard to see why Bosse's music has always been connected to certain sectors of the black metal underground; Richard Bosse crafts these gorgeous shadowy folk songs that are almost entirely instrumental, layering haunting twilight melodies that repeat over and over, laid over simple, somber acoustic strum that he accompanies with soft droning sounds, ethereal keys, piano and mandolin-like buzz that slowly emerge across the six songs on Visions. Those electronic backing sounds are understated and melt right into soft washes of electric guitar hum, all a minimal backdrop for the rich buzzing and droning texture of the guitar, the scrape of fingers across the strings a constant human presence. There are moments on this disc where the music becomes a little reminiscent of later-era Swans when that band was at their most ethereal and delicate, and I can also hear some echoes of the gloomier corners of the Glass Throat catalog and Drudkh's Songs of Grief and Solitude trailing off through this collection of somber, shadow-cast melancholia. Bosses's music would probably appeal to the neo-folk crowd, but there's also elements of widescreen grandeur that materialize with the washes of droning melodic beauty and cascading strings that even touch on the sort of "post-rock" majesty that you'd hear from bands like Explosions In The Sky and Mogwai, albeit in a much more hushed and ethereal manner. It's a really moving collection of songs that has turned in to one of my favorite recent dark-acoustic albums. Recommended.
Comes in a gatefold jacket.
Track Samples:
Sample : I
Sample : III
Sample : V

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Man, it's been a long, long time since I've heard anything from this Bay Area band, and figured them for kaput. But no, lo and behold we've got this brand new Lp (well, not that new, this did come out several months ago, but I dragged my heels on picking it up for the shop) from Brainoil, with seven songs of furious, sludgy hardcore that shows that this trio (whose members also happen to play in Laudanum, Stormcrow and Whatch Them Die) are not only still kicking, but still hammering out some of the heaviest shit in Oakland. The opening title track drills it home: a thunderous concoction of crushing Sabbathoid grooves wrapped around mildly angular riffing, the song shifting gears multiple times as they push forward with bludgeoning down tuned thrash that slips down into that swampy, monstrous slow-motion swing and even slower passages of grinding crush. Brainoil's tar-coated heaviness has always been closely related to the blues-influenced scum-boogie of Eyehategod, Buzzoven and Weedeater, but there's more of an overt hardcore element to their music, that mucky Bay Area crust seeping into their already quite ugly racket - fans of Eyehategod side project Outlaw Order and Ohio's sludge warlords Fistula would no doubt especially dig Brainoil's sound, as all three bands share a common appetite for jarring dynamic shifts between breakneck speed and lumbering ultra-heavy dirge. When Brainoil really crank the tempo up, it's some of the best stuff on the Lp; the song "Opaque Reflections" is one of album's absolute scorchers, erupting from one of their crushing slow riffs into a tornado of ferocious D-beat drumming and blazing fast crustcore, and on "Feet Cling To The Rotting Soil", the band whips up a vicious rocking thrash assault that's got some killer riffing and a brutal metalpunk edge. Hell, the whole b-side of this thing is one ripping thrash attack after another, shot up with just the right dose of Sabbathy sludge. Raging stuff, it's good to hear something new and bruising from these guys; fans of sludgy, brutal hardcore should grab Death and try slapping it on alongside some Corrosion Of Conformity and Black Cobra for maximum vertebrae wreckage. Comes with a black and white insert and a huge 24" x 24" black and white poster designed by Feeding.

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Back in stock, on both Cd and limited edition colored vinyl...
These pioneering grindlords are one of extreme metal's most unapologetically experimental bands, and since getting back together after a long hiatus in 2009, they've been producing harsh, noise-laced blast violence that's every bit as confrontational and edgy as their classic 90's output. That by itself is why I've been such a fan of Brutal Truth over the years, but I've also always appreciated their fatalist worldview that doesn't bother itself too much with proposing a bunch of anarchist platitudes, instead laying out the message loud and clear: we're fucked, and we're at this very moment in the throes of that the BY guys have long referred to as our "slow motion apocalypse". Not the cheeriest thought for anyone who turns to grindcore for a lil' bit of cathartic fun, but that's hardly why I listen to this stuff. Brutal Truth's latest shows that there still isn't a dull edge to be found on these grind vets, as End Time backs up it's eschatological visions with a crushing onslaught of experimental noise, brutal grindpunk, industrial heaviness and punishing sludge.
The opening song "Malice" gets this rolling with a killer atonal dirge, the band slowly lurching over a spasm of noisy chords and twitchy no-wave splattered heaviness, alternating between an angular sludgy anti-groove and faster, more frantic thrashing, then blasts into the spastic grind of "Simple Math", which ends up slipping into an off-kilter bit of southern rock riffing over the blasting grind at the end. Rich Hoak's octopoidal drumming flies all over the place on End Time, and propels this stuff into whirlwinds of chaos; after listening to the disc a couple of times, a lot of the rhythms and riffs on End Time feel more jagged than usual, almost "mathy", making some of this stuff sound incredibly angular thanks to the extremely dissonant riff-style of new guitarist Eric Burke, whose playing gives the new BT stuff a woozy, off-balance quality. And Kevin's awesome frenzied howl is as bestial as always- NOBODY sounds like this guy, his vocals are some of the best in grind, ever. The title track is another short chunk of dissonant grind etched in strange mathematics, but as usual, the band pulls out an awesome hooky riff amid the spastic blast chaos, even slipping into an unexpected melodic rock part at the very end. The album is primarily made up of these kinds of shorter, compact assaults of complex grindcore delivered in minute-and-a-half long bursts, the angular thrash riffs colliding with the skronky, atonal guitar parts, the drumming frenzied and loose, as always informed by the extremes of free-jazz percussion that has long influenced Hoak's playing in BT. There's blazing D-beat and hardcore punk that erupts on songs like "Small Talk" and "Lottery"; whenever these guys break out the hardcore stuff it fucking rips, but they always twist it and deform it into their unique cyclonic chaos. Other tracks like ".58 Caliber" blend harsh guitar noise, wild drumming and samples into an improv-thrash workout. There's a couple of collaborations on the album, frist with Italian noise artist Robert Piotrowicz on the grueling, sludgy "Warm Embrace Of Poverty", where nauseating feedback is incoporated into the crushing sludgepunk, and the song "Gut-Check" has the Chicago industrial sludge band Winters In Osaka contributing some additional toxic electronics. The end of the Lp closes with the grinding doom-laden death metal dirge "Drink Up", super slow and heavy, and on the Cd version finishes with a fifteen-minute bonus track called "Control Room", a furious free-improv noise workout with furious double-bass drumming and jazzy blasting beneath huge swathes of amplifier rumble and power electronics-style feedback abuse, layers of murky samples, harsh guitar skree, all kinds of strange electronic pulses and glitches, the sound very dense and layered, an industrialized improv blastscape that becomes very hypnotic the further you get into it's dense rumbling chaos.
Track Samples:
Sample : Control Room
Sample : Crawling Man Blues
Sample : End Time
Sample : Gut-Check
Sample : Malice

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Back in stock, on both Cd and limited edition colored vinyl...
These pioneering grindlords are one of extreme metal's most unapologetically experimental bands, and since getting back together after a long hiatus in 2009, they've been producing harsh, noise-laced blast violence that's every bit as confrontational and edgy as their classic 90's output. That by itself is why I've been such a fan of Brutal Truth over the years, but I've also always appreciated their fatalist worldview that doesn't bother itself too much with proposing a bunch of anarchist platitudes, instead laying out the message loud and clear: we're fucked, and we're at this very moment in the throes of that the BY guys have long referred to as our "slow motion apocalypse". Not the cheeriest thought for anyone who turns to grindcore for a lil' bit of cathartic fun, but that's hardly why I listen to this stuff. Brutal Truth's latest shows that there still isn't a dull edge to be found on these grind vets, as End Time backs up it's eschatological visions with a crushing onslaught of experimental noise, brutal grindpunk, industrial heaviness and punishing sludge.
The opening song "Malice" gets this rolling with a killer atonal dirge, the band slowly lurching over a spasm of noisy chords and twitchy no-wave splattered heaviness, alternating between an angular sludgy anti-groove and faster, more frantic thrashing, then blasts into the spastic grind of "Simple Math", which ends up slipping into an off-kilter bit of southern rock riffing over the blasting grind at the end. Rich Hoak's octopoidal drumming flies all over the place on End Time, and propels this stuff into whirlwinds of chaos; after listening to the disc a couple of times, a lot of the rhythms and riffs on End Time feel more jagged than usual, almost "mathy", making some of this stuff sound incredibly angular thanks to the extremely dissonant riff-style of new guitarist Eric Burke, whose playing gives the new BT stuff a woozy, off-balance quality. And Kevin's awesome frenzied howl is as bestial as always- NOBODY sounds like this guy, his vocals are some of the best in grind, ever. The title track is another short chunk of dissonant grind etched in strange mathematics, but as usual, the band pulls out an awesome hooky riff amid the spastic blast chaos, even slipping into an unexpected melodic rock part at the very end. The album is primarily made up of these kinds of shorter, compact assaults of complex grindcore delivered in minute-and-a-half long bursts, the angular thrash riffs colliding with the skronky, atonal guitar parts, the drumming frenzied and loose, as always informed by the extremes of free-jazz percussion that has long influenced Hoak's playing in BT. There's blazing D-beat and hardcore punk that erupts on songs like "Small Talk" and "Lottery"; whenever these guys break out the hardcore stuff it fucking rips, but they always twist it and deform it into their unique cyclonic chaos. Other tracks like ".58 Caliber" blend harsh guitar noise, wild drumming and samples into an improv-thrash workout. There's a couple of collaborations on the album, frist with Italian noise artist Robert Piotrowicz on the grueling, sludgy "Warm Embrace Of Poverty", where nauseating feedback is incoporated into the crushing sludgepunk, and the song "Gut-Check" has the Chicago industrial sludge band Winters In Osaka contributing some additional toxic electronics. The end of the Lp closes with the grinding doom-laden death metal dirge "Drink Up", super slow and heavy, and on the Cd version finishes with a fifteen-minute bonus track called "Control Room", a furious free-improv noise workout with furious double-bass drumming and jazzy blasting beneath huge swathes of amplifier rumble and power electronics-style feedback abuse, layers of murky samples, harsh guitar skree, all kinds of strange electronic pulses and glitches, the sound very dense and layered, an industrialized improv blastscape that becomes very hypnotic the further you get into it's dense rumbling chaos.
Track Samples:
Sample : Control Room
Sample : Crawling Man Blues
Sample : End Time
Sample : Gut-Check
Sample : Malice

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Now available as a posh import digipack edition!
Long before doom metal burst into popularity with both metalheads and non-metalheads alike at the end of the 90's, there was Cathedral, the British band that helped to reshape the sound of doom and push it into new areas of sonic extremism, and who became the flagship band for Rise Above Records, the label that would bring such titans of slow n' low heaviness as Church Of Misery, Moss, Electric Wizard, Unearthly Trance, Witchcraft, Orange Goblin, Sunn O))), Sleep and Goatsnake to your stereo. During the 80's, there were a handful of bands that continued to fly the flag of trad doom that Sabbath kickstarted, Saint Vitus, Candlemass, Trouble, and the whole Maryland doom crowd, for instance, but there wasn’t anybody as slow or as heavy as Cathedral, who took the notion of the crawling Sabbathian riff to whole new levels of torpor. Formed after singer Lee Dorrian bailed from grindcore pioneers Napalm Death in 1989, Cathedral combined the heaviest modes of classic doom with Dorrian's unique vocal style, a love of 70's prog rock, and a guitar sound that seems as if it had been carved out of slabs of pure granite. They signed to Earache and released their debut album Forest Of Equilibrium, which has become one of the all time classics in the doom metal pantheon; later albums would pursue a groovier, more rocking sound that the band pretty much perfected on 1993's The Ethereal Mirror. Both of these crucial early albums have just been reissued by Earache in expanded packages that have the original albums bundled with previously out-of-print bonus material, and each comes with a DVD that features a documentary on the making of the album; both are fucking ESSENTIAL for doom metal fans.
When Cathedral's Forest Of Equilibrium came out in 1990, there really wasn't anything else like it; the British doomsters had produced one of the most crushing, sorrowful doom albums up to that point, heavy on the Sabbath influence of course, but IMMENSELY slower and heavier and more extreme, with Lee Dorrian's deep distinctive growl still holding over some of the grit and hellfire from his brief stint as the frontman for UK grinders Napalm Death. Not only that, but there was a heavy 70's prog rock influence going on with the trippy flutes and psychedelic flourishes that appeared sporadically throughout the album, a unique touch that would later influence legions of newer doom crews. The duo of guitarists Garry Jennings and Adam Lehan crafted monolithic, suffocating heavy slow-motion riffs that crept over the pounding glacial drumming, creating some of the heaviest metal ever heard up to that point. But the album starts off with a sense of disorientation as the flue and acoustic guitar of the intro piece "Picture Of Beauty And Innocence" suggest something much more airy and light, only to pave the way for the sickly harmonies and slurred doom of "Commiserating The Celebration". One of the only eruptions of speed on the album is the short song "Soul Sacrifice", which starts off as a pounding grooving sludge jam, but then evolves into a ripping Judas Priest-like riff. Aside from that song, though, the band moves through these epic, ultra-long songs (several come close to the ten minute mark) like a wave of molasses, coloring their ponderous Sabbath influenced doom with morose, despair-filled minor-key melodies and those meandering Comus-like flutes.
The end of the cd features the legendary Soul Sacrifice EP, which some consider to be one of Cathedral's finest releases; there's an extended version of the title track, which also appears on Forest Of Equilibrium, as well as three exclusive tracks, "Autumn Twilight", "Frozen Rapture", and ""Golden Blood (Flooding)", all of which continue in the same oppressive style of doom as Funeral.
And the Return To The Forest DVD features a forty-minute documentary that goes into great depth on the recording of Forest Of Equilibrium with in-depth interviews with the members of the band, discussions about the formation of Cathedral, footage of early shows, getting signed to Earache, and even a fairly extensive conversation with artist Dave Patchett who designed Cathedral's hallucinatory, Boschian album art. As with the documentary for Ethereal Mirror, there's a ton of amazing information included here, and the dvd is worth the admission price all on its own.
And on top of all of that, both reissues are packaged with newly re-designed booklets and inserts that present Patchett's artwork in extended form. Both reissues come highly recommended, and are totally essential for any doom fans that don't already have these classic albums in their collection.
Track Samples:
Sample : Autumn Twilight
Sample : Reaching Happiness, Touching Pain
Sample : Serpent Eve
Sample : Soul Sacrifice

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Back in stock, this time with a gloss-finish jacket.
On the last Crucial Blast new arrivals list, I talked up the new album from a band called Celeste from France that had blown me away upon first hearing it, a crushing mixture of ultra-heavy metallic dirge and discordant black metal with a distinct French flavor to it. I compared Misanthrope(s) to both older Neurosis (specifically, the oppressive apocalyptic vibe of Through Silver In Blood-era Neurosis) and the evil experimental black metal of bands like Glorior Belli and Deathspell Omega, without the overblown philosophical lyrics and intellectual nihilism. That doesn't mean that Celeste isn't surrounded by it's own enigmatic aura - the completely indecipherable lyrics and surreal artwork that makes up the packaging for the band's first album Nihiliste(s) is creepy and mysterious enough - but Celeste are much more concerned with caving your skull in through a relentless, almost unbearable application of ultra-heavy riffage and ponderous tempos. 2008's Nihiliste(s) is slower and heavier compared to the second album, with fewer blasts of black metal ferocity and speed; instead, the blackness is almost totally soaked into the slow, doomy riffing and tangles of chaotic mathy guitar, putting this album closer to the hellish sludge of Omega Massif, Amen Ra and Overmars. The riffs are discordant and gnarly, and shift between passages of atmospheric glacial groove and skullcrushing pummel, the vocals are harsh and torn, at times reminding me of a blackened and snarling version of Jacob Bannon (Converge), and the drumming is huge, complex, way more complex than most sludge bands, with tons of tightly-wound fills and an almost industrial percussive pound. The sixth track "Tu Regardes Trop Fort, Tu penses Trop Fort, Tu Parles Trop Fort" kinda sums the whole album up, starting off with a huge angular riff and sinister leads, then exploding into fragmented blastbeats and hectic black metal for a moment before shifting into some martial militant snares that build into another explosive crescendo of blackened metallic sludge.
Track Samples:
Sample : On Pendra Les Femmes et Les Enfants En Premier
Sample : Mais Va Vendre Ton Pendain
Sample : Comme S'il Suffisait De Lever Le Doigt Pour Refaire

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Back in stock, this time in a new gloss-finish jacket.
There's something special about how the French are able to take a sound that has been beaten to death - that of the apocalyptic metallic dirge that Neurosis pioneered on their Through Silver In Blood and developed further by Isis over the course of their first few albums - and twist it into something both bleaker, darker, and at the same time elegant and stentorian. Just off of the top of my head, there's Overmars, Year Of No Light, Omega Massif and HKY, four bands who all trace their cyclopean sludge metal sound back to Neurosis's revolutionary art-metal, but who all sound radically different from one another and from the more straightforward music that most of their American peers have been creating. From HKY's cosmic industro-doom psychdirge to the sky-reaching Disintegration worship of Year Of No Light and the blackened avant sludge opera of Overmars, it's obvious that French metallers are some of the best at taking this omnipresent sound and reinventing it in a way that few others are capable of doing.
The latest French band to be added to the list is Celeste, who just released their third album Misanthrope(s) on the excellent German label Denovali, which has brought us a number of quality albums from Daturah, Kodiak, Heirs, and other artful European sludge/metal outfits. Coming from Denovali, I had a hunch that Celeste were going to along the same lines as most of their other releases, which tend to run along the lines of post-rock influenced heaviness, but this is much heavier than anything else on the label, and definitely much, much darker, too. As soon as Misanthrope(s)'s opening track "Que Des Yeux Vides Et Séchés" blasts forth from the speakers, you can hear the Neurosis influence on the mighty, chugging riffage and tortured screams, but as the song continues to violently wind it's way onward, the increasingly spiteful tone of the vocals and the sheets of dissonant buzzing guitars that coil around the thunderous tribal drums and hypnotic dirgey riffs, and the holocaustal black metal intro of "Toucher Ce Vide Béant Attise Ma Fascination" seamlessly falls into punishing sludge with a truly devastating riff that rises up halfway through, it become clear that Celeste are also drawing deep from the oily black pool of French black metal. The nine songs on this album aren't exceptionally long for this style of atmospheric sludge metal, with most averaging around six minutes, but Celeste create some supremely crushing riff-trances in the time they have, combining grinding downtuned Neurosis-esque crush with the sort of dissonant guitar textures that you'd normally expect from a Glorior Belli or Deathspell Omega album. Like most other bands in this style, Celeste also work in some softer extended instrumental sections that build into explosive crescendos of heaviness (as on "Mais Quel Plaisir De Voir Cette Tête D'enfant Rougir Et Suer" and "La Gorge Ouverte Et Décharnée" - every single song title on Misanthrope(s) is a freakin' mouthful), but even in these more subdued moments, Celeste never get soft, creating tense buildups that put you on edge rather than soothe you with melodic frippery. No, this album keeps it caustic and black as fuck from start to finish, and set the tone with an unremittingly bleak and nihilistic bent to their lyrics, like what Year Of No Light would sound like with their dreamy sludge inverted and drenched in light-devouring malevolence. Clearly, Celeste are shooting for something more than just another attempt at cloning the signature sounds of Neurosis and Isis.
Track Samples:
Sample : Toucher ce vide béant attise ma fascination
Sample : Que des yeux vides et séchés
Sample : Comme pour leurrer les regards et cette odeur de cadavre

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Track Samples:
Sample : And Your Steles Shall Burn
Sample : Black Devotion
Sample : Saint Dawn

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It didn't even dawn on me that I was already somewhat familiar with the work of improv/noise artist Antoine Chessex before I picked this tape up from Blossoming Noise. I grabbed it initially based on the recommendation of BN and the accompanying sound samples, which hooked me with the suggestion of sax-laced industrial murk. That's something I perpetually have an appetite for, but some subsequent research made me realize that Chessex is no stranger to harsh experimental heaviness, having been a member of the experimental sludge metal band Monno as well as the jazz/improv/black doom duo Calcination, who put out an awesome disc on Utech several years ago, as well as having performed with the Metal Music Machine line-up of Jazkamer and the Burial Chamber Trio (Greg Anderson, Oren Ambarchi & Attila Csihar).
The ascetic look of the cover totally belies the brutal, malevolent power found on this album, a cassette re-issue of a limited Lp release; it's not the Borbeto-worshop that I initially expected, but it's still pretty damn extreme. Chessex runs his tenor saxophone through a Marshall amplifier stack alongside electronic noise to create these sprawling drone/noise pieces, and it's amazing stuff, bleak realms of scrape and buzz and subterranean hum, more of a grim industrial album than anything resembling free-improv. Each side of the tape is a single epic track of destructive skree, the first side fading in with an oceanic surge of low rumbling noise and wailing sax tones that's incredibly unsettling, and even resembles something you'd hear on one of the more abstract black noise albums that we carry...but then it suddenly drops out, and we move into a sparser sonic terrain of minimal rumbling tones and electrical buzz, moving through various sections of extended amplified drone looped and layered into blocks of sinister, shadowy thrum and tense chordal drift. After a couple minutes of this activity, the sound suddenly bursts into a louder, more clarified wall of sound, the murkiness suddenly dropping away as it rises into this monolithic power-drone exercise. The sound thick and distorted, becoming something more akin to the crushing amp-drone workouts of early Sunn, Earth, Black Boned Angel, etc, and then the screaming vocal-like sax noise comes in and it becomes even more brutal and confrontational , the sound of the horn bent into choked, snarling, howling sounds , totally tortured, resembling some kind of power electronics/blackened drone hybrid that later shifts into more subdued industrial grindscapes filled with churning metallic rhythms and avalanches of sheet-metal rumble.
The second side starts with high, almost air-raid siren like tones that stretch out for several minutes, then the sax tones begin to fray into softly undulating drones. From there, the sound heads into the coolest passage of the album, where Chessex begins to pile layer upon layer of an evil, minor key sax figure until it coalesces into something resembling a black metal riff being looped incessantly around jets of grinding noise and thunderous amp rumble. This queasy, black-jazz workout takes up a huge portion of the b-side, before ending up becoming subsumed into an even more vicious free-noise blowout and pneumatic loop-orgy that shows up to devour almost the entire second half of the side. In fact, these apocalyptic dronescapes remind me of Japanese sax/noise ensemble Disclocation whenever the horn materializes, crossed with some kind of abstracted blackened industrial. Hopefully Chessex will be back with more of this sort of stuff...
Highly recommended.

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With the second issue of Chips & Beer, this new metal mag has already developed it's own distinct voice, one that exalts a back-to-basics attitude and appreciation for classic underground metal, a distaste for pretension, and an appreciation for the visual black arts that I can definitely get behind. I'm starting to feel like this rag fills up a weird, previously unidentified space that existed between the classic Forced Exposure magazine and Metal Forces, though that could just be me. Regardless, it's a solid read with lots of opinionated writing that doesn't balk at calling shit out as they see it. This issue has interviews with Swedish death metallers Morbus Chron, Virginia DM stalwarts Deceased, Ian Christe from metal-centric publisher Bazillion Points, black thrashers Midnight, artist Halsey Swain, a Stewart Voegtlin interview with the bassist of The Mentors, a massive piece on King Diamond that also includes a bunch of album reviews and chronological info, Obsequiae, Finnish illustrator Ola Larsson (the genius behind the striking artwork for Disma's latest), Joe Preston of Thrones, power metallers Twisted Tower Dire, an examination of Black Sabbath's Mob Rules, weird doodles, and lots of (often scathing) record reviews.

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Track Samples:
Sample : III
Sample : VI

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This nearly hour-long tape collects an assortment of out-of-print and unreleased recordings that date back to 2002-2003 from the dark industrial noise project Clew Of Theseus, some of the material having previously appeared on COT's splits with Sewer Election, and 3" CDRs on Chondritic Sound.
Side one starts off with a loud blast of apocalyptic horror via the two-part 'Home', where long streaks of caustic feedback and high-pitched noise are blended with what sound like distant dying air-raid sirens and deep rhythmic rumblings, which then veer off into a volcanic landscape of sputtering distortion and choppy manipulated feedback chaos. From there, the material heads off into a kind of spacious improvised dark ambience, the recordings littered with sparse junk-metal abuse and the natural reverb of some vast cavernous interior, with fairly long stretches of near silence creating tension in the pauses between the abrasive metallic noises and bursts of feedback. The two tracks that make up "No Room Left In Heaven" are intensely violent, cacophonic blasts of extreme high frequency feedback-squeal whipping out of thickly tangled masses of crashing metal, distorted synth, and looped percussive noise that almost suggests a more rhythmically inclined version of one of K2's junknoise orgies, and the second of these tracks unloads a blast of crushing noise that merges some banging sheet-metal rhythms with smoldering distortion and soaring oscillator-like chirps that allows some menacing synthesizers to emerge right around the point when the track peaks out into a full-on noise wall.
On the second side, the sound shifts into the almost Lustmord-esque black drift of "5:14", the distant factory noises, distorted synths and ghostly wailing coming together into a nice dread-laced smear of industrial creep, but then shifts gears again into the epic track "Meth Cook Sets Apartment Ablaze" which takes up almost the entire side. This almost twenty minute piece (originally released as a 3" CD) returns to the junk-noise approach, but here it's sculpted into something much more detailed and frenzied. The mash up of the extreme sheet-metal abuse, quick cuts, and roaring feedback and squealing, squiggling synth noise is extremely dynamic, a drawn-out collapse that relentlessly scrapes and screeches and howls through the entire length of the track, subjecting the listener to the most chaotic and ear-abusing material on the tape. After that barrage of skullscrape, the side closes with another shorter bookend ambient piece akin to the first.
Recommended to fans of Knurl, K2, Government Alpha, Vaults: Volume 1 comes as a pro-manufactured chrome cassette packaged in a screen-printed cloth bag, released in a limited edition of one hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Home 1
Sample : Meth Cook Sets Apartment Ablaze

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I say it again - Actuary are all over the place right now. Just looking at this week's new arrivals, I've got at least three recent releases of theirs that have been added to the shop, and then there's the full-length Actuary disc that is coming out in the near future on my own Crucial Blaze imprint. This prolific work schedule has produced some really cool noise-assaults that range from horrific black industrial experiments, surreal ambience and brutal scrap yard noise assaults, the latter being their preferred mode of attack on this new 7" split with improv/noise/pranksters Cock ESP. The Cali industrial noise group offer up a single track of possessed junk-noise called "Depersonalization OF Settings" that summons a gruesome, lumbering nightmare of screeching metal, heavily distorted sine wave fuckery, extreme feedback, and juddering mechanical rhythms that are obscured underneath all of the brutal scrape and shriek. It's sort of along the lines of the extreme junknoise constructs of K2 and Ahlzagailzehguh, but with more emphasis placed on the loud bass tones that swoop and dive over the avalanche-crunch of collapsing metal.
On Cock ESP's side, the notorious Minneapolis noise group present three new tracks that are both incredibly vicious and supremely weird, all of which appears to have been recorded live (and are all titled with drug references like "Meth Wish III", "The Correct Use Of Dope", "I Would Do Anything For Drugs"). The songs careen through ultra-violent power electronics with shrieking female vocals, short bursts of almost-noisecore mayhem, random chatter from audience members, and lots of weird effects. Their side is over with pretty quickly, which is too bad - it's some of the most intense new stuff that I've heard from Cock ESP lately. I've always been a big fan of the band when they lock in to their more vicious, physically intimidating brand of improvised noise, and this lands squarely in that style...

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A now out-of-print vinyl reissue of the 2005 collection of early odds-and-ends from Japanese deathsludge beasts Coffins, Sacrifice Of Evil Spirit features eight songs that were all recorded around 2003-2004 and released as a demo, documenting some of the earliest material from the band; in fact, this ended up becoming their first official release when the Cd was first released on Living Dead Society midway through the decade. Since then, of course, Coffins have gone on to win over a devout and bloodthirsty cult of fans who lust for their punk-infected doom laden death metal atavism, and these re-mastared demo and live tracks are crucial listening for hardcore Coffins devotees. The first three tracks ("Black Storm", the title track, "Into The Coffin") are from the Sacrifice Of Evil Spirit demo, and the sound is virtually the same as the pulverizing downtuned doom/death of their more recent albums, crushing massive riffage of the Celtic Frost/Autopsy/Asphyx variety spread over a mix of thunderous mid-paced thrash and crawling doom that emits a bonecrushing gravitational pull whenever they downshift into one of their lumbering dirges. This is insanely heavy stuff, especially on "Into The Coffin" where the band really slow things down, churning out an earth-rattling battle march for shambling undead armies.
That's followed by a mix of other material from the same era, beginning with a killer sludgy cover of Venom's "Warhead" where the black thrash metal classic is melted down into rotten black ooze. There's a set of live tracks from 2004 ("The Unspeakable Pain" and "Warhead" again), a 2003 rehearsal recording of "Unspeakable Pain", and finally a "noise remix" of "Black Storm" from the demo that is exclusive to this re-issue; I don't know if the band did this track themselves or if someone else did the remix, as there is no info on it anywhere on the jacket, and it's pretty short, but the blast of obnoxious bestial noise is a fine enough way to wrap this album up. This vinyl reissue features some brand new artwork from the skilled gore-visualizer Putrid that gives this a classic rotting look, and it's released in a limited hand-numbered edition of five hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Into The Coffin
Sample : Sacrifice To Evil Spirit
Sample : Warhead

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I've been increasingly infatuated with Disease Foundry's tiny catalog of tape releases that came in the door this month. There's nothing fancy about anything this label does; the packaging on this tape from Concrete Isolation Box and the S-21 tape are simple full color sleeves, minimal artwork and virtually no liner notes, and while the RU-486 tape is a nice chunky tape release with an even cooler looking special edition version available direct from the label, it's still based on a very old-school set of packaging aesthetics. The music on the tapes is straight harsh noise, nothing groundbreaking, but the guy behind this imprint clearly has a tuned ear for straight electronic savagery, because all of these tapes have caved my head in quite nicely via repeated listens, of which there have been quite a few. CIB is probably the most fucked-up of the lot, and the one that I’ve kept coming back to over and over again, a four track release that barely hits the half hour mark but does pack in a helluva blast of psychedelic power electronics in it's short running time. I'd never listened to this Finnish band before, but like most of their brethren from this corner of Europe, there's a killer tweaked/lysergic vibe to these brutal noise assaults, dousing the monstrous distorted screams and sampled voices in heaping gobs of reverb and echo, and frying out the bass frequencies so what is mostly left behind is a smoldering charred undercurrent that contributes to the tapes already low-fi filthy feel. Strange radar pings emanate like ghostly transmissions from far below the surface, and menacing voices that seem like they could be intercepted from military radio communication come ripping through the cascading static. What you really want to get this tape for, though, is the track "Defect Innocence" that takes up the whole second side. Starting off with strange muffled vocal noises and garbled bass-buzz that coalesce into something resembling the flanged drone of a mutated didgeridoo, the track is slowly overtaken by layers of rumbling engine noise, percussive rattling and rhythmic scraping that becomes this abstract, rather hypnotic piece of industrial skuzz infested with very creepy wordless vocals and tortured howling, breaking off at points into harrowing sections of pure vocal anguish. Nice. Fans of Strom.ec, Cloama and Bizarre Uproar should check this out.
Limited to one hundred copies, packaged in a plastic evidence bag with a 1" logo pin and black and white cardstock cover.

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Although Jovian Black Opera is a completely different beast than the noisy guitar drones, harsh noise wall experiments and blackened psychedelia that I usually get from Prairie Fire Tapes, this cassette has quickly turned into my all-time favorite release from the label. This full-length tape comes from a fairly new project called Crabskull, the product of a Winnipeg-based Dub DJ named Chrys Fournier who also plays drums in a stoner rock band called Scab Smoker. As Crabskull, Fournier produces one of my favorite sounds on the planet: skittering industrial dubscapes built out of slow, hypnotic break beats, echoing snares, grimy dark ambient sounds, and copious amounts of dystopian paranoia and urban unease. Of course, we're talking about a sound that is directly descended from the Scorn school of darkhop/industrial dub, but while most newer artists who approach this sound tend to end up working within the realm of dubstep and/or extreme drum n' bass, Crabskull's music remains rooted in the slower creeping break beats of mid-90s Scorn, and it would no doubt have ended up with at least one disc on Economised Records if that label was still in action. It's not a purely retro exercise in 90s break beat darkness though, as Fournier crafts some terrific pitch-black soundscapes and bizarre, vaguely Lovecraftian imagery on Jovian Black Opera that bring this style of nightmarish slow-motion trip-hop into a realm of murky distorted doom-laden bass drones, lush, dreamy female vocals and opera singing, terrifying samples looped into swooping hellish shrieks, smatterings of dissonant jazz piano, creepy backwards chanting, whirling shortwave static, bits of menacing funk guitar and orchestral strings warped into hallucinatory smears of abstracted sound, horror-movie synthesizers, some massive low-end metallic heaviness, and killer trumpet sounds on one track that are used to wonderfully creepy effect. This tape totally blew me away - anyone missing the malevolent gritty beats and asphalt ambience of Scorn, Ocosi and Techno Animal, you need to check this out asap...

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Track Samples:
Sample : Caesium-137
Sample : Evakuierung
Sample : Neutron

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Track Samples:
Sample : Cellar Holes from a Lifetime Ago
Sample : Endless Midnight
Sample : Ghost City

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It took a while for me to check out this newer black industrial/psych/noise ensemble, but now that I've obtained their Garden Of Forking Ways Lp and this limited-edition tape I've become extremely enamored of their gritty Stygian psychedelia. Descent Into The Maelstrom came out on Cd-r on a small Peruvian label last year, and was subsequently reissued on cassette by the guys in Locrian through their Land Of Decay imprint in a tiny edition of ninety-three copies; any fan of the abstract, blackened ambience and experimental metal that their label is known for will probably dig this, too.
The opening track "Adrift at Sea" is a relatively short atmospheric track with delicate looped guitar melodies swirling around surges of deep, rumbling drones and distorted noise, and demonic mutterings and fuzz-coated shrieks drifting like languid smoke wisps through the haze. The next track "Tempest’s Edge" is where the band really stretch out, constructing a nightmare soundscape writhing with far-off black metal guitar leads, random vocal noises and more looped minor key melodies, loads of delay and echo and other effects blanketing the recording, soaking this in a thick, cloying cough-syrup fog. Crushing subterranean drones rise and fall deep below the surface, shifting and growing in intensity and volume over the duration of the song, like distant blasts of ambient doom in the vein of Black Boned Angel or early Sunn O))). Bizarre ululations, unintelligible whispering and chanting voices appear, giving this the feel of a Chthonic cult ritual backed by an experimental doom metal group. By the time that they reach " Mouth of the Beast", the last song on the a-side, those grinding metallic drones are almost completely burned off as the band moves into more ambient territory, soft wavering drones and light crackling static drifting beneath echoing chants and monstrous roars while fragments of woodwinds float upwards, and a slow percussive thump appears as the sound morphs into a kind of acid-drenched power electronics at the very end.
On "Walls of the Abyss", Cultus Sabbati further explore that spacey PE/ambient sound through the use of rumbling synth tones, heavily distorted and delayed black metal-style shrieks and hissing, glacial throb, peals of brutal feedback, then drifting into the minimal abyssal ambience of "Beneath the Waves" before finally closing with the title track, another warped, lysergic soundscape filled with howling prayers, the hum of amplified feedback, washes of blighted heaviness and cackling voices, with some twangy meandering guitar appearing later on, giving parts of this a strange, sun-baked haziness.
A fantastic cassette of infernal black psych, highly recommended if yer into the likes of Lustmord, MZ.412, and the black ambience of artists like Kerovnian, Raven's Bane, Hyios, Metaconqueror and Dapnom.

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Only have a couple copies of this in stock, as it went out of print immediately after we ordered it for the C-Blast shop. The Weight Of Tension is a twenty minute long tape from Custodian that features a series of crushing loop-based junk-noise assaults that were recorded back in 2010, and it's as brutal and brain-smashing as all of the other releases that I've heard from Jon Engman's harsh noise project. Before he started getting known in noise circles for his harsh electronic/junk abuse, Engman had a long history of playing in gore-grind and death metal bands such as Artery Eruption, Brodequin, Foetopsy, and Screaming Afterbirth, and he brings a similar level of relentless aggression to these noise pieces, barely ever letting up from the onslaught of crashing metal and extreme distortion.
The a-side starts with a couple of minutes of massive, deafening blasts of rhythmic scrap-metal roar, but then the rhythmic churn gradually starts to break down and the sound collapses into an all-out cacophony of metal and noise. Its filled with detail and super-intense, blending electronic noise into the junk-metal avalanche in a manner that accentuates the crashing chaos with textured feedback, delay effects, and corrosive static. This whole first side appears to be delineated into short discrete tracks as the sound will drop out every minute or so, giving me the impression that this is a collection of assorted shorter recordings that were then re-assembled into a new sequence for this tape.
The second side is extremely brutal, more crushing metal-abuse flooded with severe high-end feedback and percussive mortar-blasts of distorted noise, and again that looping rhythmic churn rears it's head, dragging the metallic scree and scrape over a pounding slow-motion jackhammer pulse, a massive and apocalyptic wall of over-modulated destruction.
Comes in a fold-over Arigato style box

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Track Samples:
Sample : Box Up My Bones
Sample : Carbon-Based Anatomy
Sample : Elves Beam Out

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Track Samples:
Sample : Box Up My Bones
Sample : Carbon-Based Anatomy
Sample : Elves Beam Out

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Track Samples:
Sample : Contemplation
Sample : Repentance
Sample : Supplication

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One of the groups affiliated with the obscure Les Apôtres De l'Ignominie circle of black metal/black doom bands, Darvulia are another strange French black metal outfit that I've been into for awhile, with several murky, psychedelic albums on the Battleskrs label. The Belladone tape is a newer release, actually a re-issue of a 7" that came out back in 2003 that's pretty short but completely ripping. With a deliberately muddy recording that suggests that the members of Darvulia recorded these songs underneath a sewer grate somewhere in Toulouse. The three songs featured on this Ep are more of the murky, deformed black metal that this band is known for, with twisted, angular riffs that are pretty reminiscent of Deathspell Omega, but they also incorporate other sounds that make this more peculiar like weirdly placed bits of low-fi graveyard ambience and odd rhythmic parts. The first track is a downright bizarre piece for just vocals and guitar that lets loose with some warped LLN-esque ambience, but then the second song "Sorcieres" comes in with a rush of blazing low-fi hate, killer malevolent riffs swarming around the choked, snarling vocals of frontman Kobal (also a member of Sektarism and Malhkebre) and the shambling drumming. This is much rawer than a lot of the French BM that I've been listening to, with an ugly sickly feel with slower lurching riffage that sort of resembles some kind of wretched blackened noise-rock. Lastly, the third track is a faster, speedy blast of dissonance and murky riffing that slips into a killer rocking riff later on, with a level of punk urgency to this one that finished the Ep in a ferocious snarling blast of fuzz.
Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Belladone
Sample : Sorci·res
Sample : Vespérale mélancolie

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Ten songs packed onto a single ten-minute 7"? You know this is going to be fast, brutal stuff, and Dead In The Dirt deliver stupendously with this debut Ep on Southern Lord. These Southern upstarts (hailing from Atlanta) play brutal blasting blackened hardcore, a sound that I've been hearing a lot from this label lately, but fuck it - I really can't get tired of this kind of stuff. In Dead In The Dirt's case, it's a mix of barbaric d-beat driven crustcore, primitive death metal and early black metal done very well, served up in minute-long doses of unbridled violence with crushing Frostian riffage comes bulldozing out of 500 mph blastbeat whirlwinds, chaotic tremolo riffs and guitars smeared with gore, bone fragments, and a weird processed tone that give the riffs an added layer of grime on top of their Napalm Death-strength chug. Their rhythm section sounds MASSIVE, contributing a huge low-end undertow beneath DITD's churning blackened grindcrust, and whenever the band dives into one of their slower chugging breakdowns (which happens a lot), it's devastating. They've also got that classic crust two-singer lineup with vocalists Blake Connelly and Bo Orr, one guy offering deep death-metal style guttural roars while the other trades off with insane high-pitched screams, which adds to the whole Napalm Death / Extreme Noise Bastard / Hellbastard vibe but with more of a bottom-heavy, gnarled death metal edge. There's also a cover of the song "Skin Graft" that was originally written by 90's Canadian blastcore heroes Left For Dead, and DITD give it a wicked metallic spin on their version. If you're into the charred, dire hardcore practiced by bands like Nails, Trap Them, All Pigs Must Die, Masakari, Black Breath and His Hero Is Gone, this is definitely recommended...

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Track Samples:
Sample : Die
Sample : First We Take Manhattan
Sample : Sawney Bean
Sample : Sheath and Knife
Sample : Waiting Around to Die
Sample : The Young Girl Cut Down in Her Prime

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Track Samples:
Sample : Die
Sample : First We Take Manhattan
Sample : Sawney Bean
Sample : Sheath and Knife
Sample : Waiting Around to Die
Sample : The Young Girl Cut Down in Her Prime

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Track Samples:
Sample : I Wish I Was Eighteen Again
Sample : The Green Leaves of Summer
Sample : Is Anybody Going to San Antonio?

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I'm a new convert to the Finnish black metal band Dead Reptile Shrine, having never listened to this band before I got a stack of their cassette releases fairly recently from Anti-humanism. Dunno why I didn't get clued in to this band earlier, their bizarre, blackened brain-damaged psychedelia is fucking genius, and is exactly the kind of thing that I hunt down for Crucial Blast. A lot of this stuff from Finland is still undiscovered country for me, but I aim to rectify this personal shortcoming as quickly as possible. Thanks to Wierd Forest who just released this brand new double Lp from Dead Reptile Shrine, I'm at least beginning to get caught up on the many strange offerings from this incredibly odd band that lurks way out on the very edge of what we consider "black metal".
One of the most wrecked and bizarre albums I've ever heard out of the black metal underground, The Sun Of Circles And Wood is so much closer in sound to the improvised slop-rock of Bunnybrains than anything you'd normally refer to as BM. It's mainly the esoteric imagery, the transgressive feel, the animalistic fervor of black metal that Dead Reptile Shrine appropriate, but musically it's something completely different.
This orgy of damaged blackened shamble begins with the "Circle Of Stars" of the first side, where the music emerges on the opening song "Summer Forest's Magic" as a sort of warped shuffling dirge of freely improvised guitar, the guitarist strangling his instrument and producing all sorts of atonal chords and broken melodies, while the rhythm section meanders seemingly aimlessly through this noisy, drugged weirdness, and the singer moans and chants in a series of unintelligible mutterings and ravings as other voices moan and wail in the background. The next song stumbles out of a short burst of mangled noise as a bizarre post-punk jam, slow and menacing but incredibly brain damaged sounding at the same time, a garagey black doom jam with wild ranting vocals and more of that wrecked meandering guitar, like a bizarre cross between Abruptum and cult outsider garage-pop group The Shaggs. Elsewhere, they coalesce into something that only slightly more resembles black metal, a furious low-fi swarming of murky guitars and blastbeats and slow, croaked recitations buried under a heavy blanket of hiss and effects, and there's some killer psychedelic blackened rock going on with some of these songs, where they will suddenly snap out of their crazed shambling blackened punk into a KILLER hook. Over on the other side, the band gets spacey in an early Floyd way on "Jihad Princess", analogue synth sounds bleeping over heavy caveman drumming and distorted klaxon-like warning blasts of distorted keyboard. There's some weird electronic/industrial soundscapery going on with "The Point", and then "Ave Maria" unleashes another quasi-black metal blast of warped cymbal crashes, gargling demonic vocals and crazed Latin chanting, and droning, atonal guitars, while a mutated pop hook materializes on "Possessed By Infinity" amid howling noisy freaked-out rock.
The other record is titled "Circle Of Trees", and begins with "Summoner Of Clarity", a strange abstract night-ritual of buzzing low-fi electronics and weird, psychedelic effects swirling around short bursts of what sounds like some sort of tribal percussion, a mix of voices present through the track as a deep male voice recites incantations and other less identifiable throats moan, chant and howl in the shadows. There's some monastic chanting that appears, and extremely distorted guitar sounds smeared across the constant heavy bass-throb of a synthesizer while electronic chimes sound off sporadically. That's followed by more fractured blackened buzzing guitar and high pitched whining shrieks and messed up drumming on "Weapon, Crucifixion And Drowning", and the weird spoken word, kettledrum rhythms and jangly guitar of "Blasphemous Coven". The side degenerates into further blackened punk meltdowns, low-fi chunks of Venom-on-Quaaludes weirdness tumbling through a fog of reverb, descents into ridiculously noisy, over-modulated black metal, cinematic synthscapes and short passages of creepy Goblin-esque ambience...
Can't recommend this enough to all of you more adventurous fans of underground blackness and dementia; anyone into bands like Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, Furze, Funereal Moon, Dead Raven Choir, Circle Of Ouroborus - if any of those are in your collection, you really should check out Dead Reptile Shrine, who quite possibly out-weirds them all...
Beautifully packaged in a striking full-color gatefold jacket, accompanied by a black and white insert. Limited to five hundred copies.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Hymn to the Ancients
Sample : Impure Blessings (Dark Angel of the Four Wings)
Sample : Joined in Darkness
Sample : Spawn of the Ancient Summoning

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In all of French black metal, you would be hard pressed to find a stranger and more depraved gang than Diapsiquir. Formed in the mid-90s and with several supremely bizarre discs of industrialized, experimental black metal under their belt, this band is the creation of mastermind Toxik Harmst, also a member of the latter-day lineup of fellow French BM terrorists Arkhon Infaustus. It's been six years since the last time that Toxik H. and Diapsiquir came out with a new full length (2005's Virus S.T.N.), and from the sound of their latest A.N.T.I. (which stands for "Amer Nerveux Toxique Instable"), it appears that they had completely lost their minds in the interim. Long in possession of onw of the widest weird streaks in all of French black metal, Diapsiqur have outdone even themselves with this new album of depraved, opiate-laced vision, mashing together weird French hip-hop with violent black metal riffs, drk jazz and broken electronic rhythms, grandiose theatrical music and sinister industrial overtones casting shadow across passages of acid-pop brilliance, and furious metallic punk together into a delirious vision of Satanic excess.
The bizarre industrial metal and carnival music of the first track begins the album in a drugged delirium of chaotic energy that, after a minute or so, suddenly veers off into a very weird French hip hop jam, the drunken flow of ther lyrics combining with another vocalist who delivers his lines in an inebriated channson style, as the fluttering guitar and broken breakbeats shuffle along languidly, then spinning off yet again into more oddball industrial metallic chug, squelchy synthesizers, childlike female vocals, traditional French folk music played on acoustic guitars, the music constantly shape shifting every few moments. The singer often belts out his vocals in a weepy, impassioned croon, and when those sung vocals appear, the band invokes visions of some fucked fusion of Serge Gainsbourg, Mr Bungle and the most spastic, freaked-out fringes of French black metal.
Then, with the second song "Peste", the band delivers a catchy, ominous pop song, blackened guitars underscoring the vocal hooks and driving dark alt rock, sliding into woozy doom-laden heaviness, more of that crazed hip-hop flow over slow, dissonant black metal riffing, wild bursts of white soul, soulful trumpets and tinny tremolo riffs, and multiple vocalists wailing all at once. It's intoxicating and delirious, and actually really similar to late-era Manes, but even more bizarre and schizophrenic than those guys ever were. From there, grim electronic ambience leads into tangles of wrecked guitar noise and glorious church choirs of he short interlude "Fuel", then transforming into the evil damaged jazz/blues doom of the title track. The song "Ennui" brings more of that frantic French pop to a battery of blastbeats, lurching circus-metal riffs, haunted pipe organs. folk guitar, and "Seul" is one of the catchiest songs on the album, starting off as a kind of melodic punk but evolving into something intensely debauched. The rest of the album is as unpredictable, constantly slipping from the furious hip-hop flow into a ragged industrial breakbeats, vicious dissonant guitar parts reminiscent of Blut Aus Nord forming into mutant pop hooks, an evil, perverse agenda tangible beneath the almost joyous genre-smashing insanity. I know that many of you will see the hip-hop references and have an immediately negative reaction, but the way that Diapsiquir blends this sound into their blackened industrial psychosis works perfectly to create the atmosphere of urban filth and decay that is synonymous with their sound. Fucking genius - unlike anything else, although fans of Manes and Carnival In Coal fans should definitely check this out....
Track Samples:
Sample : A.m.a.c.c.
Sample : A.N.T.I.
Sample : Peste
Sample : Seul

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Track Samples:
Sample : Ars Populi
Sample : Lux Obscura
Sample : Promessa Din Un'anima Bruciata

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The first is of this new-is Xerox thrash zone makes a great first impression via some solid writing, coverage of a mix of sounds and styles that already have a high level of appeal to my ears, better-than-usual layout and just a general sense of enthusiasm and effort that is always essential when dealing with this kind of old-school punkzine. It's brought to us by the folks behind To Live A Lie Records, who already have some experience publishing a set of cool thrashcore photo zines a while back, here teaming up with a number of writer pals and band types. Working back to front, their debut has forty-four pages packed with reviews both long and short that start at hardcore but spread out with open ears from there to all possible realms of underground heaviness and extremism, info on accessing the excellent To Live A Lie podcast (a highly recommended move if you've got a lust for the fast-n'-brutal), some anecdotal show reviews, high quality B&W pics of grindcore bands demolishing various, anonymous basements, a killer, intelligently-written interview with Bastard Noise by Jim Walkley, other Q&A sessions with the likes of Hummingbird Of Death, Looking For An Answer and ACxDC (the thrashcore band), and a couple pages of columns in the classic MRR vein. So yeah, there's something very warm and familiar about reading through Don't Be Swindle, it's got the look and feel of the kind of saddle-stitched hardcore zines that I used to devour in the early 90s, but it's spotlight is shining on nothin' but contempo blast units and the noisiest fringes of modern hardcore...very cool!

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Irish hardcore / sludgecrust thugs Drainland follow up their Southern Lord Cd collection And So Our Troubles Began from last year with this new split Lp with another emerald isle band called Trenches. On their side, Drainland deliver three new songs collectively sub-titled "The Abduction Diary". Beginning with eerie warbling notes rising off of an ancient dust-covered Wurlitzer organ, the band slowly builds a morbid atmosphere that leads into the monstrous lurching evil of "Stairs", a tale of imprisonment and subjugation told through the bludgeoning sludgecore assault that the band violently hammers down, suddenly veering from noisy, putrid dirge to spastic, near grind-levels of speed and ferocity. The song travels through strange dissonant melodies and more quirky, off-time tarpit crush, an Am Rep infested blast of vile hardcore that segues into the blastbeat riddled horror of "Parallel Venoms", where they finally lock into a massive grueling blooze-soaked groove. By the end of the side, Drainland finally move into the crawling doom of the last song, a glacial downtuned plod that explodes into a final assault of speedy downtuned hardcore thrash, then into a stretch of industrial noise, sheets of minimal factory hum, and nearly blackened chiming guitars crawling over the last several minutes of the side, a climax of swirling chaos. Filthy and negative, violent low-end HC brutality - these guys are better than most at assimilating various extreme hardcore/metal sounds (powerviolence, doom metal, hardcore) without sounding slapdash.
Trenches counter with a single song called "Vaccine", a sprawling fourteen minute piece that moves from eerie clean guitars and spacious instrumental rock into massive leaden metallic dirge that develops into a crushing Sabbathain groove with harsh ripped-throat screams. It winds through a constant changing landscape of mathy metallic skronk and blackened sludge hintng at the combined influence of Neurosis, Cavity, the violent chaos of the Bremen metalcore scene, and the extreme fringes of doom metal. Pretty cool, never heard 'em before this but I'm duly impressed...
Limited to five hundred copies.

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The latest album from Virginia's Drugs Of Faith, Corroded is their best stuff yet, and one the sickest hardcore albums of 2011. I'm way late on getting this thing on the shelf here at C-Blast, but better now than never as it's a goddamn monster, one of the best discs to come out on Selfmadegod in the past couple of years and very highly recommended to any of you into ferocious, dissonant hardcore and grind. These guys have continued to be one of the American undergrounds best-kept secrets ever since they got together. Even though the band features guitarist/lead singer Richard Johnson, a local DC/MD area figurehead in the underground extreme music scene and member of influential grind band Enemy Soil (as well as a current member of Agoraphobic Nosebleed) that a lot of folks affectionately call the "grindfather", Drugs Of Faith aren't as well known, probably due to rarely playing outside of the DC area. Their crushing metallic grindpunk is fucking devastating, however, taking the churning chaotic wall-of-sound violence of Napalm Death and further extracts the raw hardcore element, blending discordant noise-rock abrasion and quirky HC with flamethrower blastbeat attacks and massive sludgy grooves. I loved their early stuff, but this newer material really blows my hair back - I remember howling in Richard's face in a drunken euphoria after the last time I saw them play about how much I thought they reminded me of the mighty Die Kreuzen; my brain might be clearer at this moment, but their sound still channels that similar kind of hectic, dissonant hardcore vibe, one that few other bands have been able to access. Corroded's fourteen songs are served up in short, adrenalized chunks of aggression, the maniacal riffs and noisy guitars welded to smart, critical lyrics and the rhythm sections driving, propulsive attack. When the band does slow down, it's into these awesome moody rocking parts like on "Hidden Costs" where the sound gets almost shoegazey, and there are parts of this album where I'm even reminded of Jawbox and Killing Joke quite a bit, but the more melody-driven parts lose none of their dark, heavy vibe; the rock/blast equation is weighted toward the former, and that's a big part of why I love this album so much. Instead of a non-stop blastfest, Drugs of Faith offer an equally aggressive but much more varied sound with big noise-rock style hooks scattered all over. So much more memorable and infectious than most of the "grind" that hits my ears nowadays, but hardly accessible - there's even a cover of the His Hero Is Gone song "Hinges" that shows up towards the end that the band turns into a blast of massive sludgy destruction with J.R. Hayes (Pig Destroyer) lending vocals. Again, one of my favorite albums of 2011...
Track Samples:
Sample : The Age of Reason
Sample : Foreign Climates
Sample : Vignette

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Also available on limited-edition vinyl. I'll have the first Dwarr re-issue Animals listed and available here at C-Blast pretty soon, but I didn't really get clued in to this eccentric basement rocker until I heard this latest release, a re-issue of Dwarr's debut album Starting Over. I'd been reading lots of glowing reviews from trusted sources of Dwarr's stuff, but wasn't sure if it was the kind of crunch that I'd want to actually stock here. One listen to this album, though, and I was converted. Described by various lips as "outsider doom metal", "proto-metal psychedelia" and other suggestive terms, Dwarr's music is all of that and yet something totally unique. The guy behind this is one Duane Warr, a South Carolina factory worker who wrote and recorded these albums almost entirely on his own in the mid-80s and self-released them as private pressings with limited distribution. In the decades since, Dwarr's records turned into highly sought after collectors items among fans of deep-underground heavy weirdness, which led to Drag City re-issuing them within the past two years. No wonder that this stuff has built the cult following that it has; Dwarr's music sounds like a very personalized translation of early metal from the 70s, raw and unpolished, heavily influenced by Black Sabbath and Pentagram as you'd expect, but filtered through Duane's quirky interpretation of that proto-doom sound, where the slow, shambling dirges are dosed with far-out psychedelic meanderings and blasts of out-of-control shredding. There's something very "off" about these songs, but that's definitely part of the weird magic of Dwarr. Most of the songs on Starting Over are pretty slow, crawling along at a very Sabbathoid pace, but the guitar solos are completely insane and are one of the most unique features of his music. Amid the dirgey riffing and somewhat tinny (but somehow still heavy, in a weird way) drumming, Dwarr throws in bits of damaged psych, often meandering off into loose Floydian jams with flutes, piano and saxophone occasionally making an appearance, traces of prog rock influence appearing with the more off-beat riffs and arrangements. The recording has a really hand-crafted feel, not entirely low-fi but definitely raw, but the songs are so wild and weird and trippy that it hardly detracts from the experience, and in fact enhances the whole otherworldly feel that this has. His vocals are pretty distinctive too, somewhat sounding like Ozzy but way more somnambulant, his singing always laid back and vaguely miserable. And the guitar playing....it's pretty brilliant. Not to everyone's tastes, sure, but there's no denying that this guy can shred. His guitar is super tinny and pushed way up in the mix, run through an assortment of chorus and other effects, and throughout every song Dwarr whips out these insane squiggly solos and hyper-fast leads that are unlike anything you've heard on a "doom" album. In fact, there's a song on here called "Christmas Shopping" that honestly sounds more like a no-wave thrash freakout that you'd hear on a Weasel Walter record than anything resembling Sabbath or Pentagram. Really amazing stuff, thank Christ that Drag City re-issued this stuff and saved it from mp3 blog obscurity. Check this out if you're into stranger regions of doom-laden psychedelia, I'm pretty sure you've heard nothing like it...
Track Samples:
Sample : Cannabinol: The Elation
Sample : March of the Insects
Sample : Screams of Terror

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I'll have the first Dwarr re-issue Animals listed and available here at C-Blast pretty soon, but I didn't really get clued in to this eccentric basement rocker until I heard this latest release, a re-issue of Dwarr's debut album Starting Over. I'd been reading lots of glowing reviews from trusted sources of Dwarr's stuff, but wasn't sure if it was the kind of crunch that I'd want to actually stock here. One listen to this album, though, and I was converted. Described by various lips as "outsider doom metal", "proto-metal psychedelia" and other suggestive terms, Dwarr's music is all of that and yet something totally unique. The guy behind this is one Duane Warr, a South Carolina factory worker who wrote and recorded these albums almost entirely on his own in the mid-80s and self-released them as private pressings with limited distribution. In the decades since, Dwarr's records turned into highly sought after collectors items among fans of deep-underground heavy weirdness, which led to Drag City re-issuing them within the past two years. No wonder that this stuff has built the cult following that it has; Dwarr's music sounds like a very personalized translation of early metal from the 70s, raw and unpolished, heavily influenced by Black Sabbath and Pentagram as you'd expect, but filtered through Duane's quirky interpretation of that proto-doom sound, where the slow, shambling dirges are dosed with far-out psychedelic meanderings and blasts of out-of-control shredding. There's something very "off" about these songs, but that's definitely part of the weird magic of Dwarr. Most of the songs on Starting Over are pretty slow, crawling along at a very Sabbathoid pace, but the guitar solos are completely insane and are one of the most unique features of his music. Amid the dirgey riffing and somewhat tinny (but somehow still heavy, in a weird way) drumming, Dwarr throws in bits of damaged psych, often meandering off into loose Floydian jams with flutes, piano and saxophone occasionally making an appearance, traces of prog rock influence appearing with the more off-beat riffs and arrangements. The recording has a really hand-crafted feel, not entirely low-fi but definitely raw, but the songs are so wild and weird and trippy that it hardly detracts from the experience, and in fact enhances the whole otherworldly feel that this has. His vocals are pretty distinctive too, somewhat sounding like Ozzy but way more somnambulant, his singing always laid back and vaguely miserable. And the guitar playing....it's pretty brilliant. Not to everyone's tastes, sure, but there's no denying that this guy can shred. His guitar is super tinny and pushed way up in the mix, run through an assortment of chorus and other effects, and throughout every song Dwarr whips out these insane squiggly solos and hyper-fast leads that are unlike anything you've heard on a "doom" album. In fact, there's a song on here called "Christmas Shopping" that honestly sounds more like a no-wave thrash freakout that you'd hear on a Weasel Walter record than anything resembling Sabbath or Pentagram. Really amazing stuff, thank Christ that Drag City re-issued this stuff and saved it from mp3 blog obscurity. Check this out if you're into stranger regions of doom-laden psychedelia, I'm pretty sure you've heard nothing like it...
Track Samples:
Sample : Cannabinol: The Elation
Sample : March of the Insects
Sample : Screams of Terror

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Also available on teal marbled vinyl.
An endless powerblast of screaming psych guitar wailing over a thunderous rhythm section, Earthless' Sonic Prayer has finally been repressed by Gravity, available again for hardcore stoner/psych freaks to bomb their mind with. I've been hooked on this album all week! Before singing to Tee Pee, Earthless released this acid-guitar feast on the legendary San Deigo hardcore label Gravity (along with another live 10" that is also available again and is listed in this week's new arrivals list). The disc features guitarist Isaiah Mitchell (ex-Nebula), bassist Mike Eginton (Electric Nazarene) and drummer Mario Rubalcaba (Rocket From The Crypt/Hot Snakes/Clikitat Ikatowi) playing two massive jams of heavy-ass psych rock that total a whopping 42 minutes, which means that each of these tracks features zonked-out extended playing that takes Mitchell's awesome Hendrix-style guitar playing way, way out into freeform psych guitar dirges and wah-wah loaded electric guitar trance states laid out over the massively pounding backbeats busted out by the Rubalcaba/Eginton rhythm section. The first track "Flower Travelin' Man" acknowledges the legendary Japanese psych outfit with an epic seventeen minute jam that starts out with Eginton playing a circular, Geezer Butler style bassline over a huge drumbeat that sounds alot like the one in Zep's "Immigrant Song", forming a pulsating rhythm that Mitchell unleashes his swirling solos and Hawkwind style cosmic fx over into infinity. Massive! The second track "Lost In The Cold Sun" takes us into even heavier territory, a distorted, Eastern-sounding guitar line playing over and over as the slow, doomy bass riff and dirgy drumming kicks in, eerie siren noises wailing off in the background. That central guitar riff transforms from meandering leads to Hendrixian shred and back again, always roped to the plodding, doomy rhythm as the song becomes heavier and darker and more spaced out, whizzing space rock fx swirling around, the riff turning all sludgy and Sabbath-like. If yer into heavy, druggy space rock, Hawkwind, trancey hypno-heaviness like Circle and Pharaoh Overlord, the early Comets On Fire stuff, and even Sleep, you'll no doubt dig everything that Earthless has put out. Great stuff!
Track Samples:
Sample : Flower Travelin' Man
Sample : Lost in the Cold Sun

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Yeah, the Black Mark imports that I've been getting for C-Blast are expensive as hell, but I just can't pass on finally stocking all of the available titles from Edge Of Sanity on the label. This Swedish death metal band is one of my favorites, and that goes for their entire discography - their later work is some of the best experimental death metal ever (with albums like Purgatory Afterglow and Crimson ranking as some of the best prog-death albums you'll ever hear), but even their earlier, more primitive death metal fuckin' killed, loaded with crushing riffage, inventive songwriting and seeds of the wild creativity that would continue to sprout throughout their career. The earliest of all of the Edge Of Sanity re-issues on Black Mark is this new picture disc Lp release of their first proper demo Kur-Nu-Gi-A (the name of the underworld in Babylonian mythology), originally released back in 1990 not long after the band first formed. This is the first time that the demo has been re-released in it's entirety, and has been remixed and re-mastered by frontman / mastermind Dan Swano, and man, this sounds pulverizing. Early Edge Of Sanity was pretty firmly set in the black, rotting mold of early Swedish death metal a la Grotesque and Nihilist, playing mostly mid-paced downtuned heaviness spotted with bursts of thrashing terror and descents into doom-ridden passages of crawling chromatic sludge. The offbeat experimentation of their later work is only faintly heard here with some of the quirky leads and the weird keyboard parts that appear alongside some of the jagged, off-time slower riffs, and even a strange appearance of what sounds like a frenzied flute solo that materializes on "The Day Of Maturity", and the closing track "Serenade For The Dead" is a brief electronic instrumental coda of haunting choral synths and 80's soundtrack keyboards. It's meat-and-potatoes death metal played with serious aggression and intensity, but it's from one of the best bands to ever come out of the Swedish death metal underground in my opinion, and this demo is supremely crushing metal that's essential listening for fans interested in the early Swedish scene. In addition, I really think that you've got to listen to all of Edge Of Sanity's releases to really get an appreciation for the wildly creative arc of their evolution, from practitioners of top-notch mausoleum metal to explorers of far-out, goth-tinged avant-death. This picture disc is a very cool-looking (albeit pricey) collector's item that prominently features the ever-popular detail of a skeletal demon casting terror upon the masses from Jan van Eyck's famous Last Judgment tryptich...

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Track Samples:
Sample : Annunciation Of The Viscera
Sample : Crypt Of His Communal Devourment
Sample : Rites Of Ceremonial Embalm'Ment

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The Black Scorpio Underground make another appearance on the C-Blast list with this split cassette shared with another LA noise group called Endometrium Cuntplow; the long running industrial Underground is a fairly new discovery over here, but I've really enjoyed all of the tapes and discs that have thus far shown up from the band. Their side of this tape (released on their own label Hate Mail in a run of ninety-eight copies) is from the more subdued side of BSU, three long tracks of abstract low-fi industrial scrape and suffocating feedback rituals, the high pitched drones drilling through the black space as random objects are hammered in the background, strange looped samples drift in and out of focus, everything awash in low-fi murkiness and sonic grime, the sound becoming swallowed up by ominous droning synths and vast fields of ambient filth, haunted by the ghostly call to prayer of a Muezzin high above a rotting cityscape.
I must admit, my initial expectations weren't too high for a band called Endometrium Cuntplow, but whatever reservations I had over that band name, I'm actually really impressed with their side of this tape. The first EC track is "Storms Of Loneliness (Part 1)" and it's a chilly, minimal dronescape with distant pulsating synth tones, softly thrumming vibrations, later shifting into more ominous metallic ambience and an all-around blackened austere feel that reminds me a lot of early Bianchi (always a sound I'm interested in hearing). The second part of "Storms" picks up from there, heading into murkier regions filled with blotted chirping sounds, restrained electronic reverberations and more cold, inhuman pulsations, pounding metal echoing in the background, waves of over-modulated feedback sweeping over the track. Not sure if they're specifically aiming for such a vintage death industrial sound, but man, they've nailed it. The last track "Shallow Graves" is the most grating of the bunch, a collage of junk noise and shortwave signals wrestling within an amorphous fog of metallic amp-hum. I have no clue if all of their stuff is in this vein, but I dig this.
Track Samples:
Sample : Rapist Diplomat
Sample : Storms Of Lonliness

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Track Samples:
Sample : Light Of The Night
Sample : Total Dark
Sample : Two Eyes Into The Obscurity

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This latest Ep of horrendous scum-sludge metal from Fistula (again sporting some neat artwork from Grief's Eric Harrison) should have a sticker requiring that the listener sign up for mandatory skull-reinforcement plastered across the front of it. Listening to Loser, it seems like these Ohio miscreants just get heavier with each new record; the first song on this 12" "Picking Up Chicks" sounds like a Celtic Frost jam that has had a tubful of hot glue and cheap blotter acid dumped on top of it, slowed down to a gut-quivering crawl that soaks up the slow motion doom and vomitous vocals in huge amounts of background noise and low-end filth, with some nauseating cement-mixer rumbling going on down below the surface. Could be one of the heaviest goddamn songs that I've ever heard from Fistula. After that sonic beating, the band blasts through a stretch of reverberating drones into "I'm Glad Nate's Not In AxCx", a nod to their pals in the legendary Boston noisecore squad that gets spilled across this short dose of fucked-up thrashcore, and then the side ends with a ridiculously bass-heavy assault of crossover thrash on "The Hounds", the drummer pounding away violently with huge double-bass drumming beneath the crusty speed-freak riffs. That trails off into one final doomed dirge at the end where another saurian, bone-crushing riff lumbers through a thick fogbank of swirling reverb and effects that are provided by one of the guys from space-sludge metallers Sollubi.
Over on the flipside, "Mutant Tooth" bashes out more of your grey matter with another massively down tuned crustcore assault, followed by the grueling, gluey deathsludge of "Coma Forever", which is another prime example of Fistula's perfected fusion of Hellhammer/early Frost style chromatic ultra-heaviness and their distinctive brand of narcotized sewer-fumes, again dragging their stomping caveman sludge into another long passage of murky ambient hum, erupting into super-heavy downtuned grind, and slipping off into long passages of ever-slower, increasingly heavier death-doom that is just as pulverizing and unhealthy as anything you'll hear from the likes of Coffins or Cianide, culminating with the absolute graveyard cave-in of the title track that finishes the album.
Limited to five hundred copies, Includes a digital download code.
Track Samples:
Sample : Coma Forever
Sample : The Hounds
Sample : Loser

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Track Samples:
Sample : The Beginning of the End of Extraction (Evolutional Slow Down)
Sample : Descent to the Netherworld
Sample : On a Crater's Verge
Sample : Zeta 2 - Reticuli

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Track Samples:
Sample : Exhume the Corpse of their Fake Saviour
Sample : Morador del Infierno
Sample : Unholy Goat of the Necro Abyss

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Chances are you've never heard of Ingen Vag. I myself had never heard of this tiny Swedish label until very recently, but this DIY imprint has put out a really cool mix of minimal black drone and mutated death rock alongside more abstract, experimental sounds that I got a chance to explore a bit for the shop. All of the stuff that I've gotten from Ingen Vag is now out of print from the label, so you'll want to take note of that fact if any of this stuff does happen to pique your interest...
The Snittet tape comes from an obscure, minimal blackened synth-drone project from Rickard Daun, a member of the Swedish psych-rock band Flowers Must Die and the experimental psychdrone duo Fria Konstellationen. With Gaerra, Daun scrapes away just about everything from his dark industrial drone-music but a pulsating radioactive core, and the resulting minimal black drone ends up inhabiting the same delirious terror-zone as the best minimalist horror film scores. This tape features a single twenty minute track that's spread across two sides of the cassette; the first side of Snittet begins with a murky haze of layered warbling synth drones and ominous looped machine noise that gives off an older industrial feel, akin to early SPK and Bianchi with it's simple, repetitive form centered around a central high pitched feedback drone, and the utterly claustrophobic atmosphere that takes shape over the course of the piece. This continues on across the entire side, the sound shifting slightly from a grinding mechanical rhythm to a less structured dronescape, but with the central feedback drone and faint movements of eerie, minor-key chordal drift maintained throughout the entire piece. Really dark, minimal, and desolate industrial dronecreep spread over rhythmic mechanical rumbling, I've been returning to this tape a couple times since it came into the shop... The equally minimal packaging includes crude, primitive collage art on the fold-out cover, and like the other Ingen Vag tapes is extremely limited, issued in an edition of just thirty copies.

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This obscure duo from Yorkshire, England was spearheaded by George Proctor (White Medal/Mutant Ape), experimenting with the raw stuff of primitive black metal and dragging it into a bizarre realm of industrial clamor and extreme low-fidelity filth that would soon morph into his current black metal band White Medal. Released in 2010, this tape was the only thing that Gammel Sed ever put out, and if you've heard other tapes from Legion Blotan, then you'll probably know that this is extremely raw and low-fi, the four-track recording bathed in hiss, the music recorded live to tape and probably created under the influence of unnamed hallucinogens. In other words, this isn't pretty. Proctor and his partner Jon Nordstrum bang through six "songs" of incredibly murky black metal buried beneath a heavy blanket of noise and hiss and static, but instead of the usual blasting or thrashing drums, the percussion sounds like someone is pounding lead pipes on oil barrels somewhere in the background, so you get this weird effect of hearing an especially crude black metal demo combined with weird clanking metal-on-metal percussion that's somewhat reminiscent of Einstürzende Neubauten or early Test Dept. Much of the music on this demo resembles a damaged Burzumic black metal outfit with junkyard percussion, but the riffs and mournful minor key melodies are actually really well written and sound thoroughly evil in spite of the crudity of the whole affair. They add some simple, ghostly keyboard lines to a couple of the songs, and the vocals are the expected guttural exhalations and hateful venom delivered in a nasty, echoing rasp, but even these sound pretty fucking weird underneath all of the murkiness and effects. Everything sounds so distant and washed out, it's actually a rather psychedelic listening experience if you are able to tolerate (or better yet, appreciate) Gammel Sed's filthy recording quality and psychotic performance. The tape comes in a black and white cover, and is limited to three hundred copies.

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Track Samples:
Sample : I
Sample : II

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Now available on vinyl!
This album just came out with surprisingly little fanfare, but it's not just an unexpectedly heavy and doom-laden release from the usually electronic-centric Ohm Resistance, but it also features a lineup with some renowned musicians that's had me eager to hear this. Gator Bait Ten is an obscure project that has apparently been in existence since the late 90s, but Harvester is the first album from the band, which is headed up by M. Gregor Filip from The Blood Of Heroes and Simon Smerdon (aka Mothboy) along with Submerged and Ted Parsons (Prong/Jesu/Swans/Godflesh/Teledubgnosis). It's all instrumental, taking the deep ominous grooves and speaker-rattling, bone-shaking low-end of dubstep and applying it to slow-motion sludge metal, creating this killer atmospheric heaviness that combines swirling doom, gargantuan rhythmic groove, apocalyptic vibes, and a gloomy, dreamy aspect that reminds me of The Cure throughout the album. There's definitely a lot going on here that is right up my alley.
The disc begins with the low rev of an engine rumbling and the slow fade in of black subterranean drift, billowing clouds of Lustmordian darkness seeping in. Then the band drops in with a massive super heavy dirge, blown out buzzing bass guitar, glacial drumming, and eerie psychedelic guitar sliding and bending over the molten sludge, with streaks of high end feedback and dissonant chords ringing in the background, like droning doom metal smeared in spacey effects and loaded with deep almost dubstep-like bass rumble. "Groundswell" is a massive lurching industrial sludge groover, very Godflesh-like (a recurring refernce point throughout these songs), and "Trace Depth" opens with swirling guitar ambience, lilting drones and rich feedback hum, all pretty and mesmeric, till Parsons comes in pounding out a heavy lopsided beat and the songs switches into spacious slow motion crush as the swirling nebulae of droning guitar and bass builds and billows and fills the air like a more kosimiche Earth jam. The short interlude "Little Things" is a moody bass riff played over more wavering dark ambience and droning drift, then "Still Heat" lays down more massive slow drumming as layers of guitar, drone, and bass buzz are layered on, a pretty melody taking form beneath the throbbing drones and moody Cure-esque guitars, becoming something like a cross between the pretty down tuned crush of Jesu and the trance inducing pummel of Swans. The rest of Harvester is likewise heavy and lumbering and textural, introducing subtle voice samples into the dreamlike background mix of electronic ambience and looped drones and fx. The title track shows up towards the end, and it's one of the bleakest, most doom-laden tracks on the album. Massively detuned bass slides over the glacial drums, sinister leads creeping across the slow crawl of industrialized sludge, dark electronic melodies and fx and synths, like Godflesh slowed to a syrup-crawl within roiling clouds of dark electronic drift. Then the isolationist ambient finale opens with electronic flutter and looped ambient drift, another slow building dronescape of space effects and pulsating bass.
This is not at all what you'd expect from Ohm Resistance, which is better known for releasing the punishing post-apocalyptic dubstep and post-jungle of bands like The Blood Of Heroes, Submerged, Silent Killer, and Scorn. It's much more in the vein of bands like A Storm Of Light or Nadja, heavy and highly atmospheric, but infused with carefully constructed electronics and the sort of stark black ambience that would have been at home on a Pathological release back in the 90s. Really cool stuff, and I'm looking forward to hearing more soon from this resurrected outfit.
Track Samples:
Sample : Harvester
Sample : Still Heat
Sample : Trawl

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Recently reissued by Tesco Org. in a new re-mastered edition that comes packaged in an attractive black digipack with spot-varnish printing, Leichenlinie is the first album from the notorious German death industrial group Genocide Organ, first released way back in 1989 in a handmade edition that was initially limited to a pressing of two hundred and ninety-one copies. It's a little strange to think that this album is over twenty years old, but the choking, abject horror of Leichenlinie sure hasn't dissipated a bit in the last two decades, and if you are a fan of death industrial and the blackest recesses of power electronics, this is mandatory listening; much of what you now hear in the extreme industrial music scene was in no small part informed by the throbbing black violence of Genocide Organ's seminal early work. As with their later releases, the trio used stark, unflinching scenes of warfare, genocide, and wholesale human degradation as the raw material for their black art, with zero fucking concern for the sensitivities of their potential listener (this disregard for niceties has caused them to become one of the more "controversial' groups within the European noise/industrial underground, which of course just makes 'em all the more appealing to me...). The music on Leichenlinie is pitch-black, corrosive, structurally simple with each track built out of heavy bass loops and harsh repetitive synthesizer figures; the rhythms tend to come from the hypnotic bashing of pipes on metal, bursts of syncopated static, skull-rattling over modulated bass, heavy clanking, all creating this heavy trance-like feel while the band surrounds these basic pounding rhythms and loops with vicious distorted screams, massive distorted electrical pulses, ominous drones wavering in the darkness, the sampled voices of human beings in the throes of mortal suffering. The pulsating early industrial works of Maurizio Bianchi definitely seems to be an influence on their sound, but the Organ drags that sound into heretofore unexplored depths of misery and horror. On tracks like "Stalins Orgeln", Genocide Organ recreates the stomp of amassed armies marching across scorched earth while the screeching metal of flesh-rending machinery fills the air; later, on "1...2...Tot", the heaving carcinogenic electronics, gusts of toxic gas and distant screams form a chilling death camp ambience. Indeed, any one moment off of this album could double as a horror film score if the actual subject matter of Leichenlinie wasn't so unrelentingly grim, and few industrial groups from this era mined the black vein of nightmarish suffering and mass death as effectively as Genocide Organ. Tesco added two very rare bonus tracks to this Cd reissue, "Amazade y Negri" and "This is no lie", which had previously appeared on the extremely limited Monochrome Meditator cassette released on the Japanese label SSSM in 1991; both are ghoulish, oppressive blots of black throb that actually work quite well as a finale to the album proper. Recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ave Satani
Sample : Come Orgasm
Sample : Face of Horror

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With all of the highly stylized, heady music coming out from the American black metal underground right now (much of which is sounding less and less like anything that you'd actually call "black metal"), having Glass Coffin nail-gun your skull with it's gnarled, scumbag satanic thrash and drug/booze-addled hatred is a pleasant change of pace over here at C-Blast. Up till now, I've only come across a couple of releases from this one-man band; a split tape with Tombstalker, a Cd-r on Black Goat , a split 7" with maudlin necro droner Moloch. All of that stuff ripped, but Glass Coffin's ferocity and filthiness reached a fever pitch on the new album Remnants Of A Cold Dead World. When the band sent the recording to me earlier last year, it immediately tore my head off upon the first listen and replaced my worthless skull with a charred and smoking wooden cross jammed upside-down into the burnt stump.
This new full-length blast of ugly, low-fi black metal from Kentucky's Glass Coffin features ten tracks of dissonant minor-key dread and charred distortion injected into vicious punk-damaged blackness. Although he's probably better known for his previous work with the likes of sludgy noise rock beasts Cadaver In Drag, assorted black noise experiments under his own name, and as one half of the ambient noise duo Swamp Horse, this is no mere flirtation with black metal. Glass Coffin's garagey, fuzz-blasted black filth is fully fanged, a ferocious thrash attack that blends together lethal Hellhammer-influenced atavism, nail-gargling attacks on the Lamb and weak scum, eruptions of nuclear black noise, supremely shambling drumming, and a heavy hardcore punk influence combined with some whacked-out blues moves (and even some traces of blown-out Appalachian twang) that situates these songs somewhere in the same bent terrain of North American black metal between the likes of Tjolgtjar, Canis Dirus, and Blood Cult, and the violent blackened punk of Devil's Dung, Akitsa and Willing Feet. This is ugly, fucked-up music that celebrates murder, perversion, hatred and graveyard hallucinations - a new favorite of mine, for sure. Kill or be killed!
The disc is accompanied by a sixteen-page black and white art zine that's filled with Josh Lay's crude, blasphemous artwork of LSD-soaked intestinal regurgitation, amorphous heaps of Lovecraftian monstrosity, church burning, Baphometic demons with frozen rictus grins, and other charnel-pit visions, wrapped in a black-on-black obi-band. There's also a set of black and white vinyl Glass Cofin stickers, a lyric/info insert, and a set of two 1" buttons included in this set. Each copy comes in a clear dvd-style case, and is hand-numbered and released in an edition of two hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : I Am Satans Sword
Sample : Spectral Hemorrhage
Sample : Unholy Ritual
Sample : With Vacant Eyes, I Kill Again

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Starting to be a recurring band-name thing here at C-Blast, this "gnaw". Of course you've got Gnaw Their Tongues evoking their black visions of demonic self-flagellation, and then there's Alan Dubin's hellish avant-sludge ensemble Gnaw. Now I've got this death industrial project called Gnawed that I'm quickly getting obsessed with. It could turn into a similar situation as what has happened with "bestial". Compounding the potential confusion is the fact that Gnawed is just as terrifying and crushing as either of those aforementioned bands. Indeed, the Devolve cassette could well be the heaviest goddamn industrial tape I've heard all year. Released by Phage Tapes, this mini-album begins with a short track of rumbling, metallic groan and crunch, a straight industrial noise piece that sets up the inhospitable, threatening atmosphere that quickly takes over every inch of the music. After this, Gnawed punches into a horrific mechanical dirge titled "Evolve" where blasts of percussive noise crash over a constant engine-like roar and waves of vast orchestral drift, forming a kind of pummeling death industrial assault layered with extremely heavy, distorted bass tones and harsh bone-scraping feedback. But it's the next track that stove my fucking head in - "Unnatural Selection", a monstrous power electronics onslaught that buries extreme feedback and swirling oceanic noise underneath a steady grinding machine rhythm while the singer's harsh, almost death metal style screaming is belted out through a thick cloud of echo and reverb. It's like hearing the plodding machine-sludge of a band like Dead World or early Pitch Shifter being devoured by a blackened power electronics outfit. Seriously heavy stuff. Over on side two, the title track is comprised of a similar slow motion machine-grind, the sound of massive gears and pneumatic presses locking into a crushing rhythm as an avalanche of metal scrap and screeching amplifiers and those hellish guttural vocals echoing wildly over the nightmare cacophony. It's somewhat crumbling and abstract at first, but as it goes on, the track reshapes itself into a massive earth-shaking dirge with spacey electronic effects spiraling chaotically in the distance. The final track is even more shapeless, a clanging din of scrap metal abuse, grinding black drones, and howling winds contaminated with radiation. Pretty awesome...highly recommended to fans of such noisy industrial ultra-heaviness as Dissecting Table, Reclusa, Pig Heart Transplant, etc. Limited to one hundred copies.

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As much as I love Henrik Nordvargr Björkk's assorted projects (Vargr/Nordvargr, Toroidh, Folkstorm, etc), none of 'em quite channel the devilish, blackened electro-evil of his legendary black industrial band Mz.412 the way that Goatvargr does. Goatvargr is a collaborative duo that Nordvargr shares with U.S. harsh noise artist Andy O’Sullivan (aka Goat) that produces some of the heaviest, blackest industrial ever. Black Snow Epoch is their second album, and it's just as much of a fucking monstrosity of black industrial and bestial power electronics, a terrifying ordeal of occult frequencies and satanic violence.
The opener "Goatsbane/Scapewolf" suspends the looped, tortured sobs of women above a roaring black fire pit of rhythmic industrial crush, fragmented black metal guitars and hissing distortion, super heavy and murderous, like the sound of a demonic torture mechanism grinding away through masses of men, women, children, devouring them whole, belching bloodmist and tears and unrequited screams for mercy, a fearsome introduction to this album, but then it gets really sickening with "Bearer, Begetter, The Sovereign Wolf", an almost danceable industrial grinder that reminds me of MZ.412's most rhythmic material, a horrific mechanical loop that sounds like a kick drum layered over polished steel blades emerging and retracting with a crushing distorted synth riff repeating over it, swarms of black buzzing noise surrounding the pulsating industrial groove; if you've ever wondered what Skinny Puppy would have sounded like if they had come out of a black metal background, I suspect it might have been something similar to this song.
Goatvargr's black industrial is seriously heavy stuff. On "Dark Eyed And Frost Scorned", they stack these crushing blown-out synth drones to the ceiling, creating massive hovering black drones that become the surface for brutal harsh noise workouts, flamethrower attacks of distortion and random speakershred, the screaming chaos forming into misshapen bouts of horrific death industrial; the following song "Goatwalking" (you are seeing a recurring theme here, right?) tones it down with sprawling black ambience, steam-press hissing and far-off mechanical rumblings occurring from behind a veil of minimal static, then evolves into a skittering industrial loop cloaked in synthesizer dread. That combination of industrial rhythm, filthy low-end synths, monstrous distorted vocals and crushing noise continues on "Razed Under Cloven Hoof And Bloody Maw", but then you come to the tracks "Wall Of Goat" and "Wall Of Wolf", the former evoking scenes of a black ocean crashing against a lunar shore, strange animal mutterings in the shadows, high pitched feedback piercing the air, and the presence of a massive subterranean grinding slowly surfaces, vast Sunn-like dronemetal crush seeping up from below amid streaks and clouds of cosmic electronics and other, more distant orchestral rumblings; the latter track destroying this placid nocturnal driftscape with a violent harsh noise assault that's really pretty fucking jarring. The awesome abyssal descent of the final track "A Black Drum Droning" wraps all of this up with a long creeping mass of black rumbling ambience and growling black-hole synths, resembling a heavier, more evil version of 70's space music that happens to be possessed with the sound of howling wolves and tortured screams.
Very, very recommended to fans of Theologian, Nordvargr/Vargr, Project:Void, Deadwood, and of course, the mighty MZ.412. Comes with a foldout poster cover.
Track Samples:
Sample : A Black Drum Droning
Sample : Dark Eyed and Frost Scorned
Sample : Goatwalking
Sample : Wall of Goat

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Possibly the last release from Gomeisa, Death Poems is an interesting variation on the harsh noise wall aesthetic that his previous works have centered around. The first side of the tape features a twenty-plus minute piece that starts with minimal fluttering bass tones that slowly pick up speed and then drops out into an extended stretch of near -silence. From there, waves of static slowly rise up, crashing in the distance, and then suddenly surging in volume, until the track finally kicks in with a spasmodic assault of bass-heavy flutter, at times reminding me of some of The Rita's more minimal moments. Those burbling bass tones frequently disappear back into the swirling static, and also erupt into brutal, but somewhat muted walls of fluctuating feedback rumble.
The second side is more minimal, long stretches of pure static flecked with crackling granular noises and minute sputtering electronics, sometimes shifting into higher register hiss, sometimes disappearing into an abyss of silence, sometimes erupting with bubbling electronic flotsam and carcinogenic distortion, but for the most part maintaining a pure void-state of constant hiss that completely surrounds the listener. It's some of the more clinical harsh noise that I've heard, but also really hypnotic in the way that this kind of pushes you into an extended state of brain-void; if you've ever nodded out in front of a screen of white noise and found it completely mesmerizing, this recording takes that experience to the level of art form...
Released in a limited edition of fifty copies, on pro-dubbed cassettes that include a digital download code.

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Grain Count (aka Pat Klassen) is an obscure noise artist from Winnipeg who has released a cool limited-edition cassette of minimalist harsh noise wall on the Prairie Fire imprint. This screen-printed tape titled Ikeda Build (in homage to the influence of Japanese experimental composer Ryoji Ikeda on this recording) features a twenty minute long field of dampened speaker crackle, corrosive noise and electrical hum titled "Blood Ceiling" that is much closer in feel and effect to the tactile contact-mic experiments of The Rita than the more overwhelming walls of black static favored by artists like Vomir and Cherry Point. This allows Grain Count to explore a more subdued and hypnotic sound experience on this tape, surrounding a constant mid-range hum that seems to be emanating from some distant unseen point with the constant flow of low, charred distortion that flutters and bubbles like black magma across the surface of the track. The changes in speed and texture that occur throughout this are sometimes abrupt, but can also be subtle and barely perceptible, which makes this more of a "headphone album" than your typical harsh noise tape - indeed, Ikeda Build definitely comes across as more of a meditative noise piece than most of the HNW that I get here, though as it makes it's way towards the end of the track, the rumbling wall of distortion considerably picks up it's levels of intensity and violence. It's especially recommended to fans of The Rita, Werewolf Jerusalem and other noise artists who work with more controlled, textural bursts of extreme electronics...
Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies.

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Also available from Tee Pee in a gatefold Lp edition.
Listening to as much black metal and brutal noise as I do on a daily basis, I've found that one of the finest palette cleansers is the sound of a good, solid occult-tinged blues-rock band like the Swedish quartet Graveyard, who debuted with this nine song self-titled album back in 2007 that I'm now stocking for the first time here at C-Blast.I don't listen to a whole lot of garagey, retro-style rock these days, but Graveyard (much like their countrymen in Witchcraft, Dead Man and Burning Saviours) inject their rollicking 70's hard rock with a heavy dose of early doom a la Sabbath and Pentagram, darkening their sound with some sweet chunks of heavy riffing, mysterious visuals, apocalyptic visions, and at least one reference to the Horned One while keeping their sound pretty well rooted in Cream-style hard rock. Unsurprisingly, they've kinda been tagged as a knockoff of Witchcraft by some, which isn't entirely unreasonable when you see the band photo (the members all look they were just time-warped from a pot-smoke filled Gothenburg basement circa 1974) and hear the very similar brand of stoned, Sabbath-flecked psychedelia on this album, as Witchcraft beat 'em to this sort of languid proto-metal by several years. Doesn't faze me, though. These guys tear off some smokin' guitar shred and sport some pretty solid songwriting chops, crafting catchy tunes on this disc like "Thin Line" and "Submarine Blues", and their singer has a soulful, rough-edged croon that bears a slight resemblance to the vocals of Glenn Danzig without sounding at all derivative, matching the music perfectly. Sweden has been a hotbed for this sort of stuff for years now, but I'm really only interested in the bands that imbue their retro proto-doom with at least a bit of malevolence, which Graveyard does sufficiently, maybe more so than some of their peers...
Track Samples:
Sample : Evil Ways
Sample : Thin Line
Sample : Submarine Blues
Sample : Satan's Finest

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Listening to as much black metal and brutal noise as I do on a daily basis, I've found that one of the finest palette cleansers is the sound of a good, solid occult-tinged blues-rock band like the Swedish quartet Graveyard, who debuted with this nine song self-titled album back in 2007 that I'm now stocking for the first time here at C-Blast.I don't listen to a whole lot of garagey, retro-style rock these days, but Graveyard (much like their countrymen in Witchcraft, Dead Man and Burning Saviours) inject their rollicking 70's hard rock with a heavy dose of early doom a la Sabbath and Pentagram, darkening their sound with some sweet chunks of heavy riffing, mysterious visuals, apocalyptic visions, and at least one reference to the Horned One while keeping their sound pretty well rooted in Cream-style hard rock. Unsurprisingly, they've kinda been tagged as a knockoff of Witchcraft by some, which isn't entirely unreasonable when you see the band photo (the members all look they were just time-warped from a pot-smoke filled Gothenburg basement circa 1974) and hear the very similar brand of stoned, Sabbath-flecked psychedelia on this album, as Witchcraft beat 'em to this sort of languid proto-metal by several years. Doesn't faze me, though. These guys tear off some smokin' guitar shred and sport some pretty solid songwriting chops, crafting catchy tunes on this disc like "Thin Line" and "Submarine Blues", and their singer has a soulful, rough-edged croon that bears a slight resemblance to the vocals of Glenn Danzig without sounding at all derivative, matching the music perfectly. Sweden has been a hotbed for this sort of stuff for years now, but I'm really only interested in the bands that imbue their retro proto-doom with at least a bit of malevolence, which Graveyard does sufficiently, maybe more so than some of their peers...
Track Samples:
Sample : Evil Ways
Sample : Thin Line
Sample : Submarine Blues
Sample : Satan's Finest

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Listening to as much black metal and brutal noise as I do on a daily basis, I've found that one of the finest palette cleansers is the sound of a good, solid occult-tinged blues-rock band like the Swedish quartet Graveyard, who debuted with this nine song self-titled album back in 2007 that I'm now stocking for the first time here at C-Blast.I don't listen to a whole lot of garagey, retro-style rock these days, but Graveyard (much like their countrymen in Witchcraft, Dead Man and Burning Saviours) inject their rollicking 70's hard rock with a heavy dose of early doom a la Sabbath and Pentagram, darkening their sound with some sweet chunks of heavy riffing, mysterious visuals, apocalyptic visions, and at least one reference to the Horned One while keeping their sound pretty well rooted in Cream-style hard rock. Unsurprisingly, they've kinda been tagged as a knockoff of Witchcraft by some, which isn't entirely unreasonable when you see the band photo (the members all look they were just time-warped from a pot-smoke filled Gothenburg basement circa 1974) and hear the very similar brand of stoned, Sabbath-flecked psychedelia on this album, as Witchcraft beat 'em to this sort of languid proto-metal by several years. Doesn't faze me, though. These guys tear off some smokin' guitar shred and sport some pretty solid songwriting chops, crafting catchy tunes on this disc like "Thin Line" and "Submarine Blues", and their singer has a soulful, rough-edged croon that bears a slight resemblance to the vocals of Glenn Danzig without sounding at all derivative, matching the music perfectly. Sweden has been a hotbed for this sort of stuff for years now, but I'm really only interested in the bands that imbue their retro proto-doom with at least a bit of malevolence, which Graveyard does sufficiently, maybe more so than some of their peers...
Track Samples:
Sample : Evil Ways
Sample : Thin Line
Sample : Submarine Blues
Sample : Satan's Finest

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Sold out from the label, this 10" Ep (brought to us by the Italian black industrial label Trips Und Traume) has The Guilt Of teaming up with TUT flagship band Ivs Primae Noctis for a short but pummeling dose of twisted industrial filth where each band offers two new tracks...
The first song from The Guilt Of... is "Social Recall Rewind", which starts off with random clattering noises and smashed metal ringing out across a wide open space, but then suddenly explodes into a bizarre blackened cybergrind assault, the programmed drum machine beats stuttering and spasming while an ultra-processed distorted guitar spits out white-noise riffs alongside Mike's shrieking vocals; the blasting tinny blackgrind then shatters apart into bursts of skittering breakbeat chaos and insane howling, squiggly guitar leads scurrying over the fractured industrial metal, getting pretty tangled up in a mess of noise and broken beats at the end. The other song is "The Ides Ballot", and it's more of a pounding industrial rock tune, a primitive drum machine pounding in steady 4/4 throb behind a metallic, out-of-tune guitar riff and sloppy tuneless solo, a mix of sampled voices and newscasts and Mike's pissed-off yowl delivered through a busted microphone, the song turning into a weird blast of cyborg hardcore at the very end. It's some of my favorite stuff from the band.
The two songs that come from Ivs Primae Noctis are completely crazed - on "Use Your Mindtricks", the band combines a pounding techno beat with creepy electronic drones, blasts of robotic grindcore, blackened tremolo riffing and batshit quiggly guitar shred, and super-distorted snare rushes with lead vocalist Miss Violetta shrieking like an Italian cheerleader in the throes of demonic possession. It's more of their nutzoid Lydia Lunch-on-crack meets-cyber black metal/no wave mayhem, while "The 8th Plague" twitches violently in the clutches of blown-out bass beats and weird clean guitar parts and childlike cooing vocals that blossom into more fucked-up blackened electro psychosis.
Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies on white vinyl, and packaged in a cool fold-out jacet that unfolds into the shape of an upside-down cross.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Morbid Cipher9
Sample : Tal Coat Raw
Sample : Under The Wirehead

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Now available on limited edition cassette via the French imprint Zanjeer Zani, issued in a limited edition of one hundred copies.
Another disc that's taken me forever to write up, Habsyll's MMVIII is a contender for heaviest album of the year, even though there's barely anything that you could call a riff on here, and it's arguable if you could really call this "metal" at all. It's the debut album from the French trio that features one of the guys from Fantastikol Hole, a freakazoid avant-electro-grind band that I've championed here at Crucial Blast for several years, and a former member of fairy-obsessed blackpunk weirdos Nuit Noire, but none of that background history will prepare you for the colossal, matter-destroying heaviness that Habsyll creates. Two "songs" totaling forty-five minutes, each one a monolithic sprawl of black hole ultra-heaviness, almost totally devoid of anything resembling groove or propulsion; far more abstract and glacial than even the likes of Corrupted, Monarch or Khanate, Habsyll's fearsome wastelands of deformed, downtuned guitar and deconstructed anti-rhythms are more like the avant-sludge exhortations of Khylst. The sound is seemingly without structure, with huge buzzing riffs pulled apart over expansive fields of black static and minimal feedback, the vocals appearing as a mix of wheezing demonic whispers and bestial snarls that sometimes shift into a weird freaked-out wail, the drums rarely ever locking into a rhythm, rather erupting in fragmented bursts of almost free-jazz like rumble, or simple mechanical pulses, often not appearing at all as just jagged, grinding chords and guitar noise ooze across the charred and cratered dronescape. There are long passages of crumbling distorted noise and buzzing drone that are suddenly bombed by massive avalanches of violent free-form drumming and crushing slow-motion riffage, and sometimes the sound builds into a freny of near-blastbeats and roaring low-end crush, but even when the band cranks up the energy level and shifts into one of these chaotic passages, it's still super abstract, a brief blast of grinding sludge that ultimately collapses into another vast abyss of blackened ambient dread.
Track Samples:
Sample : I
Sample : II

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Originally released in a long-gone limited edition for a Canadian tour a few years ago, the second album from Vancouver doom metallers Haggatha has been reissued on Choking Hazard. Featuring the former drummer from the cult sludge metal band Goatsblood (and 3 Inches Of Blood), this band has largely moved beyond the devout Eyehategod / Grief worship of their 7" from 2009 into a more distinct sound of their own where they carve out huge blocks of downbeat nihilistic doom that shares the same balance of slow crushing blood-encrusted heaviness and grim atmospheric melody as Thou, Salome, Haarp, Moloch and Dark Castle, while adding some subtle blackened influences and lots of ringing clean guitars that bring a slow-core influence to some of the album's quieter moments. Their melodic leads are frequently quite haunting, weaving memorable guitar lines and soaring harmonies around the crushing riffs, delicate clean arpeggios drifting up from the openings left by the receding doom riffs. These guys are thankfully devoid of "post-rock" aspirations, their sound is pretty stripped down and rough, thank god. And II is far from lacking in groove, too; the band is constantly uncoiling one massive Sabbathoid groove after another. And FUCK, the vocals are killer....anguished, hissing freaked out shrieks and panick-stricken howls that provide a cool, psychotic counterpoint to the moody, massive doom metal. Haggatha aren't doing any reinvention, but they play their style of somber, dramatic sludgemetal very well, with a talent for crafting dramatic, interesting riffs and incorporating some cool vague black metal influence in some of the evil-sounding arpeggios (such as on the windswept epic "Gulag" that opens the b-side). Goatsblood fans will obviously want to check out what Haggatha are doing, as they more or less pick up where that band left off, dragging that putrid sludge into more atmospheric regions.
Released in a limited edition of two hundred fifty copies.

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Available on 180 gram vinyl in a gatefold jacket.
Up until recently, I was mostly unfamiliar with Hate Forest, having heard only a smattering of their music in the past even though I've been a fan of Drudkh for years, but now that I've been getting in their new reissues on Osmose and Back In Black, I'm becoming pretty obsessed with their albums. Hate Forest's evil and epic black metal adds some surprising industrial and experimental touches to their sound, but there's no mistaking this for anything other than black metal, with that strange, ancient feeling of mystery that seems to permeate the music of so many bands from the Ukrainian black metal scene. These amazing albums are now available on both Cd from Osmose Productions in gatefold packaging with new artwork and expanded booklets, as well as on deluxe vinyl from Back In Black.
Battlefields from 2003 was Hate Forest's third album, released on the British label Supernal Music, a good fit with the sort of quirky, misanthropic black metal that the label was known for championing. The seven tracks on the album mark some of Hate Forest's most emotionally stirring music, a blend of blazing hateful black metal, Ukrainian folk music, and experimental elements that evoke the horrors and triumphs of war, and in total make for some of the most unique black metal to ever come out of the Slavic BM underground. The opening song is a short folk vocal arrangement that sends chills up my spine whenever I hear it, a sorrowful, triumphant crying out of women's voices that sounds both ancient and urgent. A perfect introduction to the smoldering terror of Battlefields, leading into the epic nine minute track “With Fire And Iron". Horrific, death metal-esque vokills rage over a clanking backbeat, a slow almost militaristic rhythm that sounds more like something from a martial neo-folk album from Der Blutharsch or Von Thronstahl, and swarming clouds of buzzing, washed out guitar, then it shifts into a vicious combination of that clanking industrial percussion and a driving, mid-paced black metal riff, that distinct epic sound that's indicative of Ukrainian black metal clearly heard in there, but joined by this weird mechanized pounding, which later adds in some booming tympani style drums. The repetitive riffs that curl around the constant pounding drums also add to the industrial feel, and then at the end we hear bells tolling overhead, and suddenly the song seems to invert, the music suddenly playing backwards as it fades out.
Another short folk song appears next, setting up the next sprawling track "Our Fading Horizons". Black orchestral ambience drifts in, an oceanic wash of ominous sound sweeping in alongside more of those tolling church bells, and crushing doom-laden chords slowly fading into view. Then the band kicks into another martial warmarch, rattling battlefield snare drums leading this blackened dirge across scorched bloodstained fields, the monstrous vocals switching back and forth to haunting choral vocals. The song shifts into furious double bass drumming as those choruses reappear, and then suddenly it kicks into overdrive, the guitars becoming a vicious mosquito-blur, the drums launching into a weirdly mechanized blast beat while another marching rhythm appears behind them at the same time, creating this strange multi-layered black blast gradually joined by more kettledrums and other orchestral sounds.
The third folk song is the most mournful, sounding like a funeral lament, the weathered voice rich with heartache. And then, "Glare Over Slavonic Lands", the final black metal song of the album, taking all of the martial percussion, clanking drums, battle choirs and black guitarswarm, monstrous proclamations and majestic riffs of the previous songs and forging them into a spellbinding wardirge. Lush synths and washes of ethereal drift appear throughout the track as it moves from crawling power to driving force, never lightening the utterly solemn atmosphere that the band creates so effectively here. It's followed by the album's final track, which is nothing more than the sound of weeping Ukrainian mothers and sobbing children wracked with the agony of loss, the impassioned singing amid their anguish making this an arresting finale.
Track Samples:
Sample : Glare Over Slavonic Lands
Sample : Our Fading Horizons
Sample : With Fire and Iron

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Lovingly presented on analogue tape by Kaos Kontrol, Hebosagil's latest album Ura is pure uncut sludge-hate doled out in seven skull-mashing doses that cranks up the anger a notch or two beyond the levels found on their killer debut album Colossal that came out back in 2008. These Finnish bruisers have gone through a bit of a stylistic change since their first album. The debut was one of the most distorted, blown-out, extreme sludgecore albums I've ever heard, but since then they've begun to straddle the line between that sort of sludgy, doom-influenced metal and the burliest sounds of the Am Rep/Touch & Go 90s (think bands like Unsane and Jesus Lizard). This is crushing stuff, and while the new songs on Ura don't have the massive slabs of molten speaker-wrecking distortion that the band used to fling around, this is still mighty heavy. The songs are more developed and dramatic now, pulsating with menace, with wailing Southern rock leads and traces of muscular boogie sliding into the cracks of their lurching, dissonant noise-rock, and spiteful, guttural vocals that puke the lyrics out in Finnish. Now that I'm thinking about it, they actually have a lot more in common now with another Finnish band that I'm a big fan of, Throat. Hebosagil is definitely the heavier of the two, though, with less of an overt punk influence and an inclination to drop into these titanic grooves that steamroll over your skull. The bassist is prone to slipping into subdued circular lines that creep up like hypnotic locked-grooves, which will suddenly erupt into noisy, bludgeoning grooves, and elsewhere pulls out these cool, rubbery anti-funk rhythms that add a unique feel to Ura's twitchy heaviness. There's more than just grueling lurching heaviness too, songs like "Taloni On Tulessa" seethe with blasts of lurching hardcore and excellent use of feedback-as-atmospheric-weapon, but when they do slow down considerably on songs like "Vala" and "Majatalo", the band evokes a feeling of abject wretchedness that wahes over me like a warm glow...
Released in a limited edition of two hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Majatalo
Sample : Ovet auki
Sample : Taloni on tulessa

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Noise-doom alert: Highgate's still-pulverizing debut album is now out on vinyl from Vendetta/Psychic Assault with new album art, issued in a hand-numbered edition of three hundred copies...
This album presents a single 54 minute track that is an examination of manmade armageddon, warfare and nuclear horror as told through Highgate's noxious fusion of minimalist deathdoom, electronic noise, and raw black metal. The Kentucky trio debut with this harrowing album that just came out from Israel's Total Rust imprint, a label that is quickly defining itself with a top notch roster of extreme, experimental-minded doom metal artists like Paganus, The Knell, Funeralium, Mourning Dawn, and Wraith Of The Ropes. Highgate's song-long epic doesn't even have a title, but the anonymity of the song adds to the fearful atmosphere that Highgate create...it's a real bad trip as the band winds through a dreary battlefield littered with corpses, moving from crushing detuned doom metal with sickening anguished screams, to plaintive guitar over whirring black static and into the pure dead void of delayed undead howls and shortwave drone that appears twelve minute in to the album. When the band eventually crashes back in from that eerie dronescape, a new riff rears it's head, slightly brighter and bluesier, a bit more catchy, but still devestatingly heavy, swimming in effects and feedback. Every five to ten minutes they move onto another riff as Highgate's World War III narrative unfolds, each one as heavy and grim as the last, shifting in speed from midtempo trudge to super slow creep, always surrounded by background noise and drones, evolving into a kind of triumphant doomy black metal dirge at the end with some awesome mangled guitar playing that really pushes the wah pedal into yer skull. Finally, this gives way to an incredibly catchy final ten minutes that become a kind of ultraheavy, doomed gloompop dirge, like a freaked out, blackened and crusty Katatonia track, clean guitar and post-punk bassline a la Joy Division wrapped around gnarly sludge riffing, finally decomposing into a loop of crushing distortion noise that ends the album.
Highgate's debut is a killer slab of negatory, nihilistic doom that moves through a range of moods, all of 'em dark. Their mix of noise and doom and black metal is deftly handled, coming somewhere near a mix of Thergothon, Fistula, Katatonia, and Burzum; definitely recommended to fans of extreme black doom.
Track Samples:
Sample : Track 1

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A familiar name to anyone who frequented noisecore and grindcore mail-order lists back in the 90s, Hypochristians back with a full length album of their insane grind/noise gibberish after a long period of silence. Terror During Prayer is the first new Hypochristians stuff that I've heard in years, and while the recording sounds like it's a bit clearer and thicker and the performances seem to be tighter and less over-the-top chaotic as I remember from their old tape and 7" releases, this is still a noisy, filthy blast assault that retains all of the violence and hatred (and blurred blast noise) as their old stuff. The thirteen songs are unabashedly cut from the same grimy, blood-stained cloth as early Napalm Death and Fear Of God, with primitive death metal riffs sped up to brain-melting speeds over frantic PCP-fueled thrash and insane blastbeats that frequently fly totally out of control and turn the sound into a cyclone of total noise, and an awesome blown-out super heavy bass tone. The vocals (shared among three of the members) are pretty fucking nasty, the lead singer spitting out an assortment of wordless vomit, guttural belching, cackling laughter, bizarre pitch-shifted screams as well as other weird vocal effects, bizarre non-verbal freakouts where they sound like a band of gorillas jacked up on angel dust. It often comes very close to turning into all-out noisecore when they erupt into their almost Merzbow-like eruptions of noise; fans of Unholy Grave in particular really need to check out Hypochristians, as both bands have a lot in common with all the noise and drooling bast chaos. Primitive, noisy bass-heavy filth is all this record delivers, and it's as sickening and skull-scraping as I hoped it was going to be. Awesome brain-damaged album art, too; the jacket has all kinds of ghastly illustrations of corpse molestation, church burnings, nun-fucking, and wholesale slaughter of the clergy at the hands of winged demons from artists Ray Rivera (Black Putrefaction / Lucifers Foreskin) and Robert Mena.

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Track Samples:
Sample : A Momentary Vision Of Light & Hope
Sample : Resurgence Of Mors Sexualis
Sample : Worlds Are Wounds Of Desolation

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Track Samples:
Sample : Deadrain
Sample : Mudhorse
Sample : Scum on Bones

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Chances are you've never heard of Ingen Vag. I myself had never heard of this tiny Swedish label until very recently, but this DIY imprint has put out a really cool mix of minimal black drone and mutated death rock alongside more abstract, experimental sounds that I got a chance to explore a bit for the shop. All of the stuff that I've gotten from Ingen Vag is now out of print from the label, so you'll want to take note of that fact if any of this stuff does happen to pique your interest...
You can keep all of the correctly-coiffed, backwards-looking post punk wannabe outfits that have been stinking up the joint over the past ten years. If I've got a lust to listen to some real dark shit, I'm going turn to the sort of low-fi goth slime that a band like Inkubator offers with their Berusad cassette. While weak bands made up of pups who hadn't even been born yet when Only Theatre Of Pain first came out stumble around writing lame Joy Division knockoffs and dream of scoring credit card commercials, these guys are lurking in some dirty basement somewhere in Sweden banging away on cheap instruments and playing a genuinely unsettling sort of murky, low-fi death rock/post-punk. This short six-song cassette sounds like it was recorded back in 1984, with simple, plodding drum machine rhythms, droning bass lines that repeat over and over, eerie synthesizer lines and pulsating bass throb, recorded with a really filthy, sub-4-track quality. At first, Inkubator sort of resembles early Sisters Of Mercy, but the vocals are completely wrecked, delivered in an inebriated, brain-damaged croon that does sort of resemble Andrew Eldritch, but only if the black clad goth-rock icon had just been freshly lobotomized. This tuneless ugliness in the vocals and (to a lesser degree) in the bassist's off-kilter grooves gives Inkubator a really wretched, 'off' feel that I find very appealing, especially on the deranged pop of the title track and the drooling blackened synthpop of "Faller Hart Pa Betong". Like any good death rock band, the bass tends to lead the tracks, while the synths are used to create a backdrop of weird pulsating noise and melody; the rhythms shift from the more mechanical throb of the first side to the caveman tribal drumming on the second, and there's also some some clattering industrial experiments on here as well, like on "Nattmanen". From start to finish, the whole recording has this sloppy, ramshackle feel, the sound wobbling in and out, sometimes dropping out for a second, but in spite of this messiness, Berusad is strangely hypnotic, an infectious and mesmeric dose of fucked-up sewer goth. Recommended to any of you who wished that the band Cold Cave was actually made up of brain-damaged post-apocalyptic mutants...
Track Samples:
Sample : INKUBATOR-Berusad
Sample : Nattmanen

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Track Samples:
Sample : Eight
Sample : Six
Sample : Three

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Back in print on vinyl from Hydra Head, this time on re-mastered heavyweight wax in another limited edition...
We've been waiting for this one for months and months, and now that I've got it in and have listened to it about a hundred times, I can say that this is hands down one of the best albums to come out in 2005. Now, I'm a huge fan of the last Godflesh album, Hymns, even though that album was somewhat reviled by critics and fans for it's more "rock" based approach...and yeah, there are a couple of weak spots on Hymns that don't really work too well, but there are also some awesome melodic moments on the album that point to where Godflesh mainman Justin Broadrick was taking his musical vision-in particular, the last, untitled track on Hymns that sounds like nothing less than Godflesh's take on Codeine style glacial post-rock/indie rock. For me, that untitled track stands as one of the single most brilliant moments in Godflesh's career, a perfect marriage of melody and heaviness and experimentation. Of course, Godflesh broke up right after the release of Hymns, which brings us to Broadrick's new outfit, JESU. Picking up exactly where Hymns left off with that godlike hidden track, this self-titled full length (the follow up to last year’s criminally under-distributed and mostly unavailable debut, Heartache) takes the repetition and heaviness of Godflesh's most legendary work, increases the crush factor by 1,000, and through dense layers of ringing, rippling harmonics, unbelievably beautiful melodies, and Broadrick's haunting clean/sung vocals (something only hinted at in prior Godflesh releases), has created an immensely heavy,devastating indie pop album. It's a masterpiece, totally flawless in my opinion, like MY BLOODY VALENTINE and CODEINE buried under a mountain of crushing distorted riffs, slow, glacial epics driven by sad, but hopeful, minor key melodies and dissonant avalanche dirges. And it's not just slowness and heaviness without purpose-these 8 songs are actually songs, unforgettable and heartbreaking and deeply personal. Absolutely, unquestionably recommended. Comes in a cool die-cut jacket.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Bite marks
Sample : Pretty girls into ovens
Sample : The wolves are frozen \ Farewell winter kisses

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The first full length album from this Russian duo is actually more than just another funereal/death doom album like most of the discs that come in our door from Russia; these guys have an impressive sound that combines extreme death doom with elements of dark classical music, darkwave, Pink Floyd-esque rock, and kosmiche music on My Light My Flesh. It's ambitious stuff that they go for here, blending vast doom metal heaviness with electronic ambience and washes of ethereal gloom that transform Kairi's sound into something that slightly resembles a metallic Dead Can Dance at times.
The first song "Part I (The Proximity)" begins with light dissonant piano drifting up out of the depths, but then it begins to transform into a strange kind of celestial ambience as distorted vocals enter in along with an eerie Theremin melody and waves of droning metallic guitar drift and blackened synths. That leads into "Part II (The Light)" where the doom metal first makes itself known, with a maudlin, almost bluesy guitar lead playing over slow, deliberate drums crawling through clouds of incandescent Tangerine Dream-style synth. There's a rough, unpolished feel to the music despite the rather lush arrangements, and when the male vocal harmonies show up halfway through, leading into more moody piano, it's obvious that you're not hearing another run-of-the-mill death doom outfit.
The duo combine dark synths and piano again on "Part III (The Flesh)", with kettledrums pounding sporadically early on the song while a monstrous guttural growl seeps in, and with no metallic guitars in sight. As more lush synth strings slowly appear, it takes on the form of some sort of creepy neo-classical but with foul death metal style vocals drifting in and out. These string arrangements are composed pretty skillfully, adding a lot to the grim, dramatic atmosphere across the album. It finally gets 'heavy' on the fourth track when a raw, chugging doom death riff emerges amid growling vocals and some strangely tinny, low-fi drums, weird electronic effects and processed wordless vocals (which according to the band don't use actual lyrics, but rather some weird made-up language) appear through the song, resembling a rougher, more experimental Morgion; then it'll suddenly segue into a passage of sorrowful, romantic piano before dropping back into the raw mournful doom.
But then there's "Part V (The Past)" with it's almost 80s-stadium pop worthy synths and choral harmonies, a stunning introduction that sounds as if they're going to break into Simple Minds -style pop, but then goes off into some wonderfully moody bluesy guitar, sheets of warm Hammond-like organ, softly sung harmonized vocals and dark electronic drift that feels almost Floydian, but after awhile this too evolves into something else, a long stretch of solemn slowcore with deep guttural growls slowly billowing across a backdrop of field recordings and mysterious industrial ambience, eventually making it's way back to that sweeping 80's pop cinematic ambience at the end.
The album ends with the strange atmosphere-drenched sorrow of "Part VI (The End)", again bringing raw, rough melodic guitar that winds around those lush soundtracky synths and piano and crawling pace of the drums, bits of chiming clean guitar blending in with the distant monstrous growls and lush harmonized vocal, then trails out into a wash of soaring dark kosimiche bliss...
Recommended to fans of Ea, Fungoid Stream, Until Death Overtakes Me, My Dying Bride's more experimental albums, and Skeptisim.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Flesh
Sample : The Past
Sample : The Proximity

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Track Samples:
Sample : Locust Nexus
Sample : Through the Spiral Void

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Track Samples:
Sample : Black Triangle
Sample : Equinox
Sample : Razorblades

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Black in stock...
Of all of the discs that I picked up a few years ago from the "witch-house" label Disaro, the one that stood out the most was the Ep from King Dude. A solo project from TJ Cowgill who also plays in the blackened grind/crust band Book Of Black Earth and runs the Actual Pain fashion line, King Dude is simple, infectiously catchy acoustic folk, brimming with gloomy pop hooks crafted from the steady urgent strumming chords and clouds of cavernous reverb. Acoustic folk isn't something that I typically carry here at C-Blast, true, but King Dude's songs on both that Disaro disc and this newer Lp (which was originally released as a limited edition cassette on Bathetic) managed to crawl deep beneath my skin, the often doom-laced sound full of droning hooks that seem to be forged out of an old-school British folk sensibility influenced by the likes of Incredible String Band, Comus and Marc Wilkinson's score for Blood On Satan’s Claw (you can really here this influence on songs like "Why Must I Go On", which has a vague Wicker Man feel to it), but this sometimes gloomy, sometimes jaunty sounding sound is married to more of an apocalyptic, downcast vibe, much like that of the neo-folk scene while it conjures images of graveyard specters and secret midnight rituals. Cowgill's haunting lead guitar is used sparingly, weaving delicate lines of spider-silk melody on songs like "Our Everlasting Life", and some eerie female vocals make an appearance in spots, ghostly feminine harmonies drifting behind the strum of Cowgill's guitar. Then there's a cover of the song "Harry Rag" by The Kinks that shows up on the b-side, which King Dude transforms here into something much, much gloomier. The material on this record is all taken from that Bathetic cassette release, the out-of-print Black Triangle 7" Ep that came out on Clan Destine Records, and one previously unreleased song. Fantastic, twilight-colored folk that comes recommended to followers of the likes of Hexvessel, Roses Never Sleep, Der Blutharsch, Crow Tongue, Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat and Stone Breath...
Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies.

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This mysterious, industrial-laced doom-folk duo features members of Burial Hex and weirdo black metallers Wormsblood but sounds like neither; I haven't heard their previous releases (which include a split with Burial Hex and releases on Paradigms Recordings, Hinterzimmer and Brave Mysteries), but Gratitudes is quite impressive. Tough to nail this one down to any particular school of sound; Kinit Her cite the influence of classic neo-folk artists and other, more ancient musical traditions, but what they come up with on this album is far more abrasive and malevolent sounding than I was initially expecting...
The opening moments of Gratitudes appear among a blast of deep grinding heaviness, an almost Earth-style rumbling of detuned, distorted guitar heaviness that has been warped into over-modulated tremors, but then that's joined by a group of chanting voices incanting in strange tongues over the rumbling drones and the sound of rattling percussive instruments. Loud, terrifying screams and garbled monstrous utterances suddenly rise up from out of nowhere, casting a fearful shadow over what has already pretty quickly turned into a weirdly menacing psych-folk jam in the vein of Master Musicians Of Bukkake, and various bits of warped and processed electronic noises continue to writhe in the background, and seep through into the nightmarish ritual. After several minutes, that's suddenly jarred by the appearance of fast, jangly guitars that seem to threaten an impending rush of black metal style riffing, but instead the music veers off into a languid, sorrowful folk-dirge with swells of cymbal rising up beneath the soft strum of acoustic guitars and what sounds like a group of slightly off-tune trumpets blowing a sad, pretty lament, the chanting voices coming back in along with weeping violins and more of those strange electronic sounds. Snarling, goblin-like vocals appear alongside clattering drums and more folky strings drifting on that sorrow-filled funeral melody, for a while turning this into a creepy bit of blackened folk-dirge streaked with ghostly high-end cries and fluttering bird-like shrieks. Later, the sound of a massive bone-horn appears, rumbling across the nightmare soundscape as fearsome noises and screeches rage on the surface, squalls of putrid horns and bestial howls lurk beneath the steady drone of the horn, and then an acoustic guitar drops in and the band kicks into a grim folk song. Deep male vocals sing over the eerie, noise-infested folk music, sounding like blackened neo-folk flecked with screaming electric guitar leads, and the songs that follow travel through similar territory, moving through more haunting vocal melodies, aggressive martial drumming and dissonant violins, propulsive rhythms and delirious pagan visions, bits of madrigal song and black lysergic ambience, the music often venturing from moody, medieval psych-folk into ghastly noise, the guitars infected with subtle elements of blackened evil, even when the band kicks into one of their catchy folk-anthems like "Principal Vibrations". Those of you into the more malignant folk-forms like Hexvessel, Comus, Current 93, Horders, Sylvester Anfang II and Cult Of Youth will want to investigate further...
Track Samples:
Sample : Gratitudes I
Sample : Walled
Sample : Walless

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Track Samples:
Sample : Ancient Timer
Sample : Helmet Overgrown with Weeds
Sample : Senseless Fire Ritual

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Track Samples:
Sample : Mirrors Paradise
Sample : New World Order
Sample : Prophecies of Fire

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Track Samples:
Sample : Bizarre Cosmic Industries
Sample : Planetary Black Elements
Sample : The Sulphur Feast

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Track Samples:
Sample : Cybertrash
Sample : Hollow Earth
Sample : Stillborn Universe
Sample : Via Negativa

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Last time we heard from the duo of legendary Swedish industrial artist Peter Nystrom (Megaptera, Negru Voda) and Kristoffer Oustad from the industrial avant-black metal band V:28 was on the brakeHEAD album back in 2006. For their latest, the Kristoffer Nystroms Orkester returns with a darker, creepier sound and an obsession with the floor plan of the fictional hotel from Stephen King's The Shining. Compared to the grinding industrial of the previous disc, Overlook Hotel works on more of a psychological level, evoking dread and emptiness over and over again as the listener passes through each track.
Beginning with an eerie looped female vocal, the record takes shape slowly as deep pulsating electronics and abstract rhythmic sounds fade in and form into a hypnotic electrical field of black energy, the sound evolving into a swarming static-flecked drone before suddenly breaking into a heavy mechanical rhythm on "The Colorado Lounge", an almost breakbeat-like rhythm pounding beneath the trails of ominous minor key creep and abrasive noisy textures. From the start, this is the most cinematic sounding music that I've heard from KNO, the blend of hazy dark ambience and machine-like rhythm sounding like it could work exceedingly well as a film score. When conjuring images of this notorious site (best known of course as the evil sentient ski resort from Stephen King's The Shining, though you won't find any direct references to that book here), though, this inhabits a strange surreal dreamworld, consistently threatening and filled with a sense of lurking dread, but the washes of cloudy metallic drone and richly layered synthesizer drift and metallic percussion often take the album into a kind of surreal nocturnal terrain that's closer to Hoor-Paar-Kraat than the relentlessly horrific death industrial of Nystrom's work with Megaptera. Some of the tracks on the album move into a kind of minimal haunted techno pulse that reminds me of the black electronic Kompakt-like moves of some of Nordvargr's material, but then break down into the sound of distant chains being dragged and rustled amid deep ambient drones. Other songs deliver jackhammer blasts of industrial drumming that wouldn't sound out of place on a Ministry album, volleys of crushing wall-shaking percussion pounding away incessantly beneath fields of evil voice samples and electronics. There's moments of pure horror to be found here as well though, in the blasts of smoldering MZ.412-esque industrial and creaking factory death-marches that come into view in the last third of the record, and the closing symphonic swells of unearthly horns and wavering drones on "The Dormer". If you're a fan of Nystrom's other projects, this is very highly recommended. Released as both a digipack Cd and a limited-edition Lp in an edition of 217 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Broom Closet
Sample : The Dormer
Sample : The Green Room

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Last time we heard from the duo of legendary Swedish industrial artist Peter Nystrom (Megaptera, Negru Voda) and Kristoffer Oustad from the industrial avant-black metal band V:28 was on the brakeHEAD album back in 2006. For their latest, the Kristoffer Nystroms Orkester returns with a darker, creepier sound and an obsession with the floor plan of the fictional hotel from Stephen King's The Shining. Compared to the grinding industrial of the previous disc, Overlook Hotel works on more of a psychological level, evoking dread and emptiness over and over again as the listener passes through each track.
Beginning with an eerie looped female vocal, the record takes shape slowly as deep pulsating electronics and abstract rhythmic sounds fade in and form into a hypnotic electrical field of black energy, the sound evolving into a swarming static-flecked drone before suddenly breaking into a heavy mechanical rhythm on "The Colorado Lounge", an almost breakbeat-like rhythm pounding beneath the trails of ominous minor key creep and abrasive noisy textures. From the start, this is the most cinematic sounding music that I've heard from KNO, the blend of hazy dark ambience and machine-like rhythm sounding like it could work exceedingly well as a film score. When conjuring images of this notorious site (best known of course as the evil sentient ski resort from Stephen King's The Shining, though you won't find any direct references to that book here), though, this inhabits a strange surreal dreamworld, consistently threatening and filled with a sense of lurking dread, but the washes of cloudy metallic drone and richly layered synthesizer drift and metallic percussion often take the album into a kind of surreal nocturnal terrain that's closer to Hoor-Paar-Kraat than the relentlessly horrific death industrial of Nystrom's work with Megaptera. Some of the tracks on the album move into a kind of minimal haunted techno pulse that reminds me of the black electronic Kompakt-like moves of some of Nordvargr's material, but then break down into the sound of distant chains being dragged and rustled amid deep ambient drones. Other songs deliver jackhammer blasts of industrial drumming that wouldn't sound out of place on a Ministry album, volleys of crushing wall-shaking percussion pounding away incessantly beneath fields of evil voice samples and electronics. There's moments of pure horror to be found here as well though, in the blasts of smoldering MZ.412-esque industrial and creaking factory death-marches that come into view in the last third of the record, and the closing symphonic swells of unearthly horns and wavering drones on "The Dormer". If you're a fan of Nystrom's other projects, this is very highly recommended. Released as both a digipack Cd and a limited-edition Lp in an edition of 217 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Broom Closet
Sample : The Dormer
Sample : The Green Room

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Track Samples:
Sample : Suicide Suite

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Track Samples:
Sample : Post march of radiance
Sample : No links with...
Sample : Filth

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Track Samples:
Sample : Altar of Darkness
Sample : Hic Fuit Locus Traitor
Sample : I Am the Black Plague

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Track Samples:
Sample : Hurricane Blue
Sample : Osprey
Sample : Verdammt

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Track Samples:
Sample : Blinded By Starlight
Sample : Hearts Will Grow Heavy
Sample : No Longer Can I See The Sun

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All of a sudden, I'm discovering these bands left and right that are reviving a rather classic sort of gothic hardcore punk, but bringing it howling into the Armageddon twilight of the early 21st century with a heavier, burlier attitude. Lost Tribe are one such band who alongside Deathcharge and Cross Stitched Eyes are playing some of the coolest deathrock-influenced hardcore out there right now, and all of 'em have been dominating my stereo lately. Lost Tribe from Richmond, VA is the latest of these bands, and their self-titled Lp on Blind Prophet is a rager. It's all black-on-black gloom and cemetery ambiance hanging over the propulsive, cavernous punk that's obviously influenced by the likes of Sisters Of Mercy, Christian Death and UK Decay as much as Rudimentary Peni and Discharge. The album opener "Fading Into The Fog" is borderline anthemic, with an understated but effective use of synthesizer adding additional grey textures to the hooky, driving hardcore. That synth is used to add a number of different sounds to Lost Tribe's batcave-tinged hardcore, ranging from washes of warm Wurlitzer-like buzz to liturgical organ sounds to weird spacey effects. Their guitarist spins lots of vintage-sounding leads over the driving punk, with a biting guitar tone and reverb-drenched sound that reminds me of Christian Death quite a bit, always a cool sound to mine when you're playing this kind of stuff. The song "White Noise" is another highly catchy song on this Lp, buzzing with shades of metallic crunch amid some wild backing Hammond organ sounds, and it's followed by the furious pulse of "Vexed" and the almost Black Flag-meets-deathrock power of "Gunk". Some slower dirgier songs appear such as the instrumental "Interlude", and the killer haunted house lurch of "Forever", giving the album a variety of tempos while keeping it dark and ominous throughout. This is some of the catchiest music that I’ve heard out of that current deathrock/crust crop, and most of this record is quite effective at burrowing into your head with it's ominous hooks. You'll want to check these guys out if you're a fan of that new Deathcharge Lp from 2011, the vibe is a familiar one, though Lost Tribe take it in a more classic punk direction...
Issued in a limited edition of five hundred copies, in a black jacket with black spot-varnish printing with a printed lyric insert.

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Man, I've been waiting to hear this for over a year! The 2011 full-length disc Without Me is the newest album of crushing industrial doompop from Love Is Nothing, another project from Leech of Theologian/Navicon Torture Technologies that has been around since the earlier this past decade. Playing a kind of noisy, industrial-laced dreamsludge that sounds to me like a cross between Theologian's black synths, darker strains of trip-hop, the somber dark pop of early Cure, and the overdriven melodic heaviness of bands like Jesu, Nadja and The Angelic Process, this band is pretty terrific. More recently, Love Is Nothing has become a larger collaborative effort, and Without Me is apparently a joint effort between Leech and Carrie Ingber, the former bassist for Brooklyn noise pop band Zambri, with Ingber composing the bulk of the music for this album. There are also appearances from a variety of NYC area artists from the avant/metal community like guitarist John Lamacchia (Candiria/Spylacopa), dark ambient composer Derek Rush, the members of the NYC noise rock band Tournament, and Mike Hill of Tombs/Anodyne.
The sound on this album is massive, drowning in melancholic heartache, the grinding waves of distortion and synth-buzz washing over processed guitars and heavy drumming. On the opener "Lost Memories Like Severed Limbs" ghostly melodic vocals, lush droning guitar textures and repeated guitar melodies cycle above washes of layered synth and hypnotic lopped drums and tribal beats, and the second track "Abuse" takes the blown-out dreamy trip-hop sludge of the opening song and combines it with a huge shot of Disintegration era Cure, Lamacchia's guitar adding delicate, melancholy melodies to the swirling slow motion gloom, the guitars dropping out as thick waves of dreamy synth take over. That slow, ponderous Cure-style post-punk is the central sound here, even as the songs shift into lumbering metallic heaviness as on "The Trail's Gone Cold", where Ingber's heavy bass sounds more than ever like that of Cure bassist Simon Gallup.
The dreamier songs alternate with harder-edged tracks that have more of a pronounced industrial feel; these more fractured, industrial style rhythms emerge on "(Love Is) The Lynchpin", bringing a vague, stuttering dubstep feel to the grim gloompop, heavier metallic riffing droning beneath the sweeping black-hole synthesizers. And on the dystopian trip-hop of "I Am So Exquisitely Empty", the band stares deep into the abyss, carried on distorted dubby snares and huge growling synthdrones and majestic synthesized strings, the instruments melted into a wall of sound and jet-engine drones.
But "Second Best" stands out with a sound that's much closer to newer darkwave, almost like a Cold Cave song possessed with the pitch-black synths of Theologian and a shuffling techno rhythm; it's on this song that Mike Hill adds his sheets of metallic guitar grit and symphonic shoegazey distortion to the infectious bad-dream synthpop, which ultimately disappears into several minutes of oceanic ambience and crumbling industrial noise at the end.
The last song "Not In This Place" is a multi-part epic that goes on for more than twelve minutes, starting off with an awesome, extremely catchy pop arrangement with layered male and female singing through a curtain of distortion, super catchy gloompop hooks, the sound big and blown out, again sounding almost like a Cold Cave tune being remixed by Justin Broadrick, but that only lasts for a couple of minutes, eventually trailing off into a long stretch of dark ambience and choral drones slowly drifting through blackness, a clanking distorted breakbeat coming in later on, the last several minutes of the song transforming into a dreamy sort of gothic industrial trip-hop.
Love Is Nothing doesn't release a ton of stuff, nor does the band play out live very often, so they're not very well known outside of the NYC area. This music is so accessible even in spite of the noise and gloom and crushing metallic drones, though, I could imagine this becoming huge...highly recommended!
This professionally manufactured disc comes in a slimline jewel-case with full color artwork, and includes a full color Love Is Nothing sticker.
Track Samples:
Sample : Abuse
Sample : Love Is The Lynchpin
Sample : Second Best

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Track Samples:
Sample : Codec of Becoming God
Sample : Pitch Beneath Eternity
Sample : Soar

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Track Samples:
Sample : Nothingness Way
Sample : Obscurus Religiosus
Sample : Première Louange

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These psychedelic mutants pay further homage to the black death-goddess Kali with this new live album out on Important. It's got a different look from the candy-colored deathcult visions found on their last couple of Totem albums, this time sporting a neat retro 80's look on the album jacket created by Aaron Turner and Faith Coloccia (Mammifer), but the music is familiar material if you own the Totem trilogy of records, as all eight tracks featured here are drawn from those albums, in longer versions that see the band expanding on the original studio tracks via stretched out improvisation. In the live setting, the Master Musicians evoke a dense drugged fog of deep, earth-rumbling metallic drones and clattering percussion breakouts, scraped strings and sinister minor key violins, massive horns groaning in the background, clanking gamelan melodies and ecstatic witch-wailing, and someone uttering mysterious invocations in a deep raspy croak that could have come off of a black metal record. And that's just the first track "Womb Choosing". It's just as creepy and abstract as you continue on, through vast clouds of sitar buzz and lush black clouds of synthesizer haze, Middle Eastern melodies twisted into strange futuristic sounds above the hypnotic throb of metallic percussion and crazed prog-rock style keyboard solos stretching into infinity. Choruses of joyous prayer-chants rise above complex shuffling rhythms and simple throbbing bass lines, winding into circular psych-jams laced with wild cosmic electronics and effects. that lead into gorgeous Tangerine Dream/Ash Ra-like driftscapes. Over on the b-side, the band lays down some soaring Floydian blues guitar over a vast cinematic expanse of dark synthesizers on "Listen To The Winds All Directions", then moves into a narcotized live version of "St. Germainwolf" that drenches the listener in blankets of sumptuous raga buzz before descending into the ominous black psych of "Ashtar's Command", a chilling finale that incorporates guest vocalist Runhild Gammelsaeter (legendary voice behind doom metallers Thorr's Hammer and black prog horror duo Khlyst) and her wailing ululating vocals over huge whale-song vibrations, sparse booming drums, buzzing electronics, swells of Sunn O)))-like amp-drift, and waves of formless orchestral sound slowly crashing over the audience for over ten minutes. Great stuff, packaged in a heavy gloss gatefold jacket, and limited to one thousand copies.

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Track Samples:
Sample : The Blade of Oblivion
Sample : The Wandering Light

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A cool split pairing up Japan's noise-god Merzbow with the newer industrial-sludge duo The Guilt Of. Each artist presents a side-long track, both of 'em seriously abrasive and brutal sonic assaults that compliment each other nicely.
Merzbow's "Oh Lucy" sticks with Masami Akita's current mode of psychedelic percussion-heavy noise, starting off with a light touch as a cloud of glitchy electronic noises, warbling feedback and gaseous hiss billows out across the first couple of minutes, some gating metal-on-metal sounds and popping noises appearing through the haze, as well as some massive burbling distorted bass. But once the drums come in, at first dropping an almost techno-like 4/4 throb, it quickly ratchets up the chaos. From here, the rest of the track becomes a writhing maelstrom of extreme glitchnoise and warped tape sounds, feedback squelch and mangled junknoise, that omnipresent percussive bass-drum throb maintaining a constant presence throughout the track while other percussive patterns form and break apart continuously within the roiling mass of noise; later, ominous distorted synthesizer riffs emerge and slither through the churning electronic chaos. Psychedelic in the way that all of Merzbow's recent brutal percussion-based recordings have been.
Fans of the filthier side of industrial probably know the New Orleans duo The Guilt Of... by now; the duo of Mike IX Williams (Eyehategod / Arson Anthem / Outlaw Order) and Ryan McKern (Wolvhammer) have gotten a lot of space here at C-Blast ever since I fell in love with their fucked-up electro-abuse on the Bloodlust! disc from a couple of years ago. Here they bring us "Tipping Foul Into The Dirt", a gloom-drenched industrial punk dirge that begins with a somber piano figure over growling low-end electronic murk and free-form drumming, then moves off into abstract soundscapes of looped voice samples, brutal distorted synthesizers, and slabs of massive grinding bass that are strafed by Williams's frantic screams. Some chilling blackened ambience emerges amid bursts of violent power electronics halfway in, and McKern unleashes his doom-metal guitar over the second half of the side when the duo lurch into a dismal heap of industrial sludge metal and deranged samples. This is substantially different from the creaking, diseased SPK/Throbbing Gristle influenced industrial of their other prior releases, but is just as bleak and inhospitable a listening experience.
Limited to five hundred copies.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Cor Maleficus
Sample : Sanctus(Viae Perversae)
Sample : Sapentia

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Holy shit does this record crush. Misantropic's insomnia is a bulldozing crustmetal motherfucker that is easily my favorite of all of the crust/hardcore albums that have come out on Southern Lord in the past year. It's actually a vinyl re-issue of the Swedish band's debut mini-album that came out on Cd on Halvfabrikat Records in 2010, presented here re-mastered with new, classier artwork and issued in a limited edition. Basically, these guys are simply recycling the classic metallic hardcore of bands like Deviated Instinct and Anti-Cimex and tackling familiar crust bugaboos like animal exploitation, class warfare, genocide and organized religion, but Misantropic somehow manage to take this sound and pump it full of so much nuclear aggression that it sounds new again to my ears, charging up the D-beat fueled thrash with a crushing metallic tone, driving ultra-heavy bass, ferocious steel-plated riffs and smatterings of Slayer-esque leads that just devastate everything in it's path. those guitars on Insomnia are asphalt-heavy, churning out massive Dis-riffage at thrash metal levels of intensity, and the drummer is a locomotive force of furious dis-beat racing at top speed through the seven songs. Also adding to the overdriven ferociousness of this record are the vocals of frontwoman Gerda, whose reverb-n'-echo drenched roar just about inspires me to immediately engage in warfare every time this hits the turntable, and the band are highly skilled at shifting from the fast thrash into pulverizing rocking mid-tempo parts that sound utterly fucking VICIOUS. Take the classic lady-fronted metallic crust sound of Sacrilege U.K. and inject about ten times more heaviness and violence into it and you'll have an approximation of the atomic crush of Insomnia. Highly recommended!!!

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Track Samples:
Sample : Asylum
Sample : Edge of the Sky
Sample : Killing Fields

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Track Samples:
Sample : Eyes
Sample : Machine
Sample : Twilight burns

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Track Samples:
Sample : Eyes
Sample : Machine
Sample : Twilight burns

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Track Samples:
Sample : Asylum
Sample : Edge of the Sky
Sample : Killing Fields

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Kirkebrennen is one of the grimmest tapes that came in from Phage, featuring two very long tracks of black industrial and PE and seething Christ-hate from the pairing of Murderous Vision and Nyodene D. Both of these Ohio artists display a violent contempt for Christianity in their respective styles, with the long-running Murderous Vision turning out some nightmarish blackened industrial alongside Nyodene D's satanic junk-noise ecstasy...
Murderous Vision's "The Horned Beast Of Golgotha" begins with a Euro horror sample that I don't recognize before breaking into a bizarre industrial groove that seems to be built out of the bass line and drum beat from "Radar Love”, looped around blasting gusts of demonic vocal slime and extreme distortion, evolving into a dense psychedelic mass of blackened power electronics. The track slowly breaks down as it progresses, until it finally becomes this delirious cloud of rumbling percussive noise, wordless utterances slipping off of monstrous tongues, and bleary, buried fragments of melody and sampled sound that struggle to surface from beneath the thick waves of hiss and delay. I don't remember hearing anything like this on any of Murderous Vision's older releases, but it's fucking killer...I would love to hear more new material in this vein.
On the b-side, Nyodene D begins "Dominus Sathanas" in a similar manner with a sample of Lavey's Satanic principles that goes on for a couple of minutes before hurtling into a wall of vicious noise. More Satanic samples are collaged together with pounding Neubauten-esque metal rhythms and caustic distortion, shifting from states of pure skull-crushing wall noise to jackhammer industrial throb to roaring junk-noise-like avalanches that remind me of K2. It's a bit different from the more straight-forward death industrial sounds on the other Nyodene D releases that I've picked up recently, but it has every bit of that evil, hateful vibe that permeates everything this project does. You definitely want this if Nyodene's Pogrom cassette and the Caged Dog 7" were to your liking...
Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies.

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A newer vinyl re-issue of the four-song 2009 Ep Doomsday Derelicts, this 12" also christens the new label Diabolus Templum Sanus Industries out of Chicago. Featuring new artwork from Seldon Hunt and a new package design, this new edition of Doomsday Derelicts tacks on a whole extra side of live tracks and offers it on red vinyl with an 11" by 17" poster.
All of the original Ep tracks are blazing; the opener "Bones" is chunky, violent black metal with a whirlwind blastbeat assault and ringing, majestic riffing, the band slipping in and out of a murderous thrash riff and burly double bass breakdowns laced with the sound of tolling bells, everything cloaked in a heavy dose of reverb. The following track "Life Of Fire" is one of their rocking anthemic songs, melding regal rock hooks with furious mid-tempo buzzsaw aggression, and "Hellish Overdose" is pure Motorhead-fueled black thrash with one of the best rocking breakdowns on the Ep. There's more gargling blackened thrash on "Pitch Black Cadence", a crushing battle-march cadence giving way to ragged blasting black metal, and the side wraps up with a cover of Nunslaughter's "Raid The Convent".
The b-side features five live tracks that were recorded in Tempe, Arizona on tour in 2009; the set is a mix of material from the newer Assassins era, Instinct: Decay, and even one off of the second self-titled album. What is particularly cool about this recording is the presence of their ripping cover of "I Kill Everything I Fuck" by GG Allin which the band has used to close their set with on tour, and this version is just as punishing as when I saw them play it in Baltimore while on the road with Marduk. Essential for Nachtmystium fans....
Issued in a limited edition of four hundred copies.

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Sort of odd to think that I've never featured a new Napalm Death album in the coveted "spotlight" position on any of our catalog updates over the last decade, considering that the Birmingham grindcore pioneers are a) one of my favorite bands of all time and b) have been producing some of their edgiest, noisiest work just in the past few years. That definitely wasn't going to happen with their fifteenth album Utilitarian, though. It's been almost three years since their last record, the excellent 2009 Lp Time Waits For No Slave, and their latest is sort of a landmark release in that it arrives on the band's thirtieth anniversary. As with the previous record, the guys in Napalm again cite the influence of early industrial music, the post-punk gloom of Joy Division and the wall-of-sound extremism of later My Bloody Valentine on their songwriting process; while those influences are always subtle, Napalm continues to experiment with their sound in interesting new ways, contrasting their patented gasoline-soaked grindmetal assault with lots of slower, moodier material, passages that use clean layered vocals to create ominous apocalyptic chorales, and grinding industrial-tinged textures that manifest in everything from the often mechanical, angular rhythms to Mitch Harris's abrasive atonal chords and the bits of grimy factory ambience that lurk among these sixteen tracks.
The instrumental opener "Circumspect" sets the bleak dystopian vibe by marrying monstrous sludgy dissonance and grinding industrialized heaviness to swirling spacey ambience and static-drenched radio transmissions from a battlezone, then viciously rips into the full-bore grindcore of "Errors In The Signals" where the band flexes both their flawless blastcore chops and some of the most vicious blitzing crust thrash that you're likely to hear from a bunch of middle-aged guys. Naturally, the song "Everyday Pox" is one of my favorites; bringing in guest saxophonist John Zorn to spew a load of flesh-melting free-jazz gunk all over the grueling grind and slower, doom-laden parts, this song is fucking ferocious. It's one brutal sonic assault after another, from the Orwellian warnings and pulverizing death metal of "Protection Racket" and the rocking, jagged-edged crustmetal and dual-vocal hysteria of "The Wolf I Feed" that suddenly spins off into some haunting Fear Factory-esque machinemetal with robotic harmonized vocals and churning mechanical rhythms, to the awesome iron-plated thrash of "Fall On Their Swords" that erupts into majestic Gregorian-style chanting and an arresting apocalyptic crescendo, and the highly catchy end time-alert "Collision Course". Everyone has their favorite eras of the Napalm Death catalog, lots of folks worship at the irradiated altar of their earliest genre-defining albums, while others consider Napalm's early 90's death metal offerings to be their strongest material. Me? I honestly think that, while Scum will always inhabit a special stinking open wound in my heart; their last couple of records are unfuckwithable. I love the industrial elements that the band has continued to play with, and the massive, almost gothic power of the Utilitarian songs "Leper Colony" and the aforementioned "Swords" blow my skull apart every time that I spin this monstrosity. The bulldozing sound of Napalm Death hasn't softened an iota, and Utilitarian delivers all of the distorted violence and eschatological panic that fans will be looking for. Highly recommended...
Track Samples:
Sample : Circumspect
Sample : Everyday Pox
Sample : A Gag Reflex
Sample : Leper Colony
Sample : Quarantined

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Track Samples:
Sample : All Souls
Sample : Stained Glass Revelations
Sample : Lamentations & Ashes

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Track Samples:
Sample : All Souls
Sample : Stained Glass Revelations
Sample : Lamentations & Ashes

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Track Samples:
Sample : Dark Territory
Sample : The Dobruja Virus
Sample : THe Drill
Sample : The Fourth Coffin
Sample : Silent Force Entry
Sample : Television State

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Now released on vinyl, with all of the included tracks appearing together on vinyl for the first time ever (although this vinyl edition does not include the bonus tracks featured on the Cd version). This 2xLp edition of the new Souls At Zero re-issue features new artwork, a deluze tip-on gatefold jacket, 180 gram vinyl, printed inner sleeves, on black vinyl in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.
The psychedelic hardcore/tribal metal classic Souls At Zero is now reissued with a new package design and artwork from Neurot's in house visual designer Josh Graham (A Storm Of Light) that uses images from the original album and updates them into a striking new layout.
I keep going back and forth as to which of Neurosis's albums from the early 90's are my favorite. When Neurot recently reissued the band's albu, I completely fell in love all over again with that disc's monstrous percussive onslaughts, the crusty hardcore transforming into huge psychmetal mantras, and the chamber music elements that were featured all throughout the album. But after pulling out their previous record Souls At Zero again for the first time in several years, I'm encountering the same reaction to this stuff, which is even more fierce and urgent, the band just coming off of the more straightforward thrash of their earliest releases, and experimenting here with prog and psych elements in great depth for the first time. The sound that Neurosis was creating on Soul At Zero would be fleshed out more on subsequent albums, but there's a savagery here that I think was dialed down a bit afterwards. Bottom line, Souls and Enemy together capture the band in evolution, and are essential records for fans of their epic sludgemetal.This is the original 1999 Neurot re-release of Souls At Zero that features three bonus tracks.
Originally released on Alternative Tentacles in 1992, Souls At Zero was the third album from these Bay Area heavies, and marked their major shift away from their origins as a conventional crusty thrash outfit into the slower, more experimental and expansive sound that Neurosis has pioneered over the past two decades. This album introduced a kind of orchestrated, tribal prog-crust that we'd never heard before, with guest strings contributed by Kris Force from Amber Asylum; ambitious and sprawling, Souls... blended together a myriad of influences into Neurosis's heavy, apocalyptic sound that included chamber music, industrial, psychedelia, and post-punk, the latter appearing as some very Amebix/Killing Joke influenced parts that show up all over this record. Even though the next record Enemy Of The Sun would pursue a similar combination of sounds, Souls At Zero remains unique in Neurosis's catalog and in my opinion is their most "prog" sounding album in many ways, with only small amounts of the dramatic slow-burn that the band would perfect later in their career.
Opener "To Crawl Under One's Skin" begins the album with the sound of tolling bells and metallic drones that lead into a garbled paranoid mass of processed samples and electronic noise. That intro sets off a wall of churning tribal rhythms and apocalyptic air-raid guitars that forms into fearsome heaviness laced with frantic screaming vocals, thrash metal-like riffing, and some unexpected flashes of dub in the hypnotic throbbing bass lines. The drumming on this song (and the rest of the album) is HUGE, walls of tribal rhythms that thunder through the music. Then the epic nine-minute title track appears, opening with piano and wiry guitar that turns into a lumbering ominous riff, kicking into towering heaviness soon enough, the kind of glacial heaviness that would become the band's signature, but here is matched with a bleak post-punk vibe that shifts into a crushing stop/start groove underscored by eerie guitar lines and keyboards. That's followed by a short interlude called "Zero" that reprises the main riff from the previous song overlaid with sampled voices, and then the dramatic hypno sludge of "Flight" which grinds away at a single huge riff swallowed by icy synthesizers and trippy vocals that ring out like a dire warning of pending Armageddon; halfway through, it changes into a grim chamber piece with acoustic guitars, cello, violin, and flute, with eerie whispering drifting though it. The next two songs "The Web" and "Stripped" are more crushing tribal metal, and then "Sterile Vision" comes in and trades off between chugging metallic crush and more of those fantastic chamber strings, piano, and trumpet. The eight minute "Takeahnase" is more gloomy post-punk-stained heaviness imbued with gothic drama, and the album proper ends with the folk-flecked outro "Empty". Seriously intense stuff that never lets up at any point, this album is a powerfully grim vision of societal collapse and apocalyptic awakening.
Track Samples:
Sample : Souls at Zero
Sample : Sterile Vision

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NEUROSIS   Enemy Of The Sun (re-issue)   2 x LP   (Relapse)    37.00

Now released on vinyl, with all of the included tracks appearing together on vinyl for the first time ever (although this vinyl edition does not include the bonus tracks featured on the Cd version). This 2xLp edition of the new Enemy Of The Sun re-issue features new artwork, a deluze tip-on gatefold jacket, 180 gram vinyl, printed inner sleeves, released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.
Almost twenty years after its release, Neurosis's fourth album Enemy Of The Sun from 1993 is still a high water mark of experimental, adventurous heaviness, and remains my favorite of all of their albums. The band would go on to further hone their brooding, explosive metallic post-rock sound with Through Silver In Blood and the stunning Times Of Grace album, but here they were at their most ferocious and dramatic, in my opinion; after introducing the experimental elements that made their previous album Souls At Zero an astonishing new evolutionary step from Neurosis, Enemy found them polishing and perfecting this sound into something even more majestic and powerful, still drawing from their early crust/metal origins but embellishing the music with even more strings, woodwinds and horns, a constant presence of looped samples and industrial textures (a la Swans, an admitted influence on the band), and an uncanny ability to craft their massive riffs and arrangements into dramatic quiet/loud dynamics that sowed the seeds for a million bands currently milking this sound...
The first song on Enemy Of The Sun is classic Neurosis, the song opening with creepy sampled dialogue and backwards samples, very Swans-esque, joined by a slow shuffling drum pulse and deep, morose bass guitar, the band wound into a seriously tense intro that continues to build and build until at last everything explodes into a monstrous rhythmic dirge, a crushing stop-and-go groove surrounded with keening feedback and harmonic guitar noise; the sample voices and strange musical fragments continue to seethe underneath the music as it continues onward, shifting back and forth between the lurching piano-driven tension and explosive heaviness, ending up in a longer stretch of eerie chamber prog towards the end before crashing back into an almost Amebix-esque throb laced with industrial noises and synths, then finishes off back in the grinding doom-laden death march...
Then there's the second track "Raze The Stray", which gets even more punishing; the song starts off with a lone female voice keening mournfully over droning synths, a vaguely Middle Eastern sounding lament soaring over a sorrowful minor key piano and softly drifting acoustic strum that then erupts into a crushing, frenzied metallic blast of power, huge tribal drums, devastating doom-laden riffage and orchestral synths pounding into an apocalyptic fever, then shifting back into the somber atmospheric ambience before the band veers off into some seriously heavy, angular metal, which over the second half transforms into a sort of mathy doom metal dirge, massive guitars and crushing heaviness underscored by tense stretches of almost industrial-like guitar noise, staccato strings (courtesy of guest musician Kris Force from Amber Asylum) and winding bass.
The rest of the album travels through an unpredictable series of end time visions, from the sinister industrial noise and sampled Vietnam era news report of the Buddhist monk who self-immolated at a busy Saigon intersection that makes up "Burning Flesh in Year of Pig", to the scorching industrial crustcore of "Cold Ascending"; while songs like the title track and "The Time Of The Beasts" combine crushing metallic chug with haunting chamber strings and synths and foreshadow the metallic post-rock sound that would become synonymous with Neurosis later in the 90s. One of the standout tracks on this album doesn't even feature guitars; the nearly 16 minute "Cleanse", which was the last song on the original release of Enemy Of The Sun, is a monstrous tribal drum workout that is really reminiscent of Crash Worship, with the members of Neurosis joined by a cavalcade of guest musicians on drums, didgeridoo and noise, including Mason Jones (Subarachnoid Space), and noise weirdo Nada, stirring up a massive meditative orgy of pound-n'-drone.
Track Samples:
Sample : Cleanse
Sample : Enemy of the Sun
Sample : Lost

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NIGHT BITCH   Sex And Magic   CD   (Psychedoomelic)    11.98

Dig old school doom metal? Feverish depictions of lascivious, debauched sex? Adulating the horned one? Welcome to the sweat-soaked visions of Night Bitch.
Fans of occult doom rockers Hour Of 13 wouldn't need to be told that front man Phil Swanson can also be found behind the mic in the band Night Bitch; as soon as the Connecticut metallers kick into the opening song "L'inferno" on their 2011 mini-album Sex And Magic, Swanson's distinctive voice is instantly recognizable. In fact, I wouldn't blame you a bit if you actually mistook any of these songs for Hour Of 13 originals. Don't think from the band name that this is some kind of joke band; the old-school doom-laden metal that Night Bitch practices is dead serious, and is very much in the same vein as that of Hour Of 13, and the band even features a couple of other guys who have stood in as occasional live members of the aforementioned band. This is driving, catchy metal that nods towards the influence of classic Pentagram, Saint Vitus, the Obsessed, and Witchfinder General, heavily concerned with occult themes, mighty riffs and monster hooks, occasionally breaking into atmospheric clean guitar parts or brief bursts of thrashing speed, but achieving full power whenever the band lumbers through their infectious doom on songs like "Ritual Of Self", the menstrual sex-ritual of "Bloodmoon", and the creeping dread of "Night Bitch". Yeah, it doesn't take long after spinning this that you start to pick up on Night Bitch's reveal their true obsession: delirious sexual lust under the sanction of the Horned Master. You can dig deeper into that by reading the lyrics to Sex And Magic, but the title of the disc itself says it all. I'm a big fan of Swanson's singing and have loved everything that I've heard him on, so Night Bitch and Sex And Magic have unsurprisingly become a new favorite of mine. This first came out on cassette on No Visible Scars, but was re-issued here by the Hungarian doom metal label Psychedoomelic in a full color digipack. Highly recommended - you should check this out if any combination of feral sexual imagery and classic doom metal sounds like your bag...
Track Samples:
Sample : Blood Moon
Sample : L'inferno
Sample : Nightbitch

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NO FUNERAL   Six Song EP   LP   (Wands)    16.98

No Funeral's debut record is a fuckin' scorcher. I checked this out solely based on the label, as Wands was also responsible for that killer Sutekh Hexen 12" Luciform that's also on this week's new arrivals list. No Funeral do something totally different though, a brand of wicked, rabid blackened hardcore that falls somewhere in between the charred hardcore thrash that Southern Lord has been totally obsessed with over the past year, and the sort of blown-out, ragged bestial punk that bands like Malveillance and Sexdrome excel at playing. I love the witchcraft imagery and violent pessimism of the lyrics, which all goes down quite nicely with their feral sound and the singer's hysterical reverb-drenched screaming. The first song opens with a whirling fog-bound mass of black ambience before the band tears right in to "Muck", the throwback mangy riffs ripped right out of some blazing Midwestern hardcore 7" from 1983, but it's all bathed in evil keening guitar leads and a thick layer of black soot, and as No Funeral bursts through each subsequent song, they keep that combination of anthemic buzzsaw hardcore and rotting, crypt-metal ambience going in equal amounts, the super-catchy leads even starting to remind me of old death rock guitar parts as the eerie melodies wind around the simple three-chord assaults, and the drummer banging away on something in the background that makes it sound like he's rattling a bunch of chains and pounding on an iron cemetery gate at the same time he's hammering out the charged HC tempos, and there's more of that grinding industrial ambience throughout the record. This is killer stuff, catchy as hell, savage and sinister as fuck, and fans of the new Deathcharge stuff really need to 'em out as well as anyone into the BM-influenced punk of bands like Akitsa, Malveillance, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ancestors, Sump, Grinning Death's Head, Horrid Cross, Raspberry Bulbs and Willing Feet... Released in a limited edition of three hundred fifty copies.

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NO TREND   Tritonian Nash-Vegas Polyester Complex   CD   (Touch & Go)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Copperhead
Sample : Cry of the Dirtballs
Sample : Freak
Sample : Overweight Baby Boom Critter

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NOX   Thul Okgha   CASSETTE   (Frozen Wing Records)    7.00

The first Nox cassette Enigma (also included on this week's new arrivals list) was a strange enough mix of Middle Eastern sounds, occult industrial and blackened French weirdness, but this second cassette from the band (and their last) achieves a new level of bizarre. I had described their previous releases as a combination of dark electronica and techno elements with dark ambience and smatterings of black industrial heaviness, with nods towards the likes of Muslimgauze and abstract French ambience, but here the mysterious and anonymous group create an even more hallucinatory series of soundscapes, again using tribal rhythms and sampled electronic beats, but now incorporating Native American chanting and imagery, cavernous ritual mutterings and ecstatic rambling vocals, distorted metallic guitar leads, more of those Middle Eastern sounding melodies, all of this becoming intertwined into these druggy industrial trance-states brimming with mystical weirdness. There are parts of this album where saxophones and flutes emerge over pounding hypnotic drums and it takes on the air of a Turkish bazaar, thick with opium smoke and the scent of clandestine spices, the background alive with rambling, unintelligible voices, and then the band will break into an extended Middle Eastern flavored psych jam with guitar and Oud winding over frenetic hand drums, before slipping into field recordings of birdsong. There's other parts where it's a kind of bizarre ambient darkjazz, the saxophone slowly drifting amid the sound of rainfall and gargling, vomitous black metal vocals, and then it'll suddenly turn into another psychotic psych jam, the retching vocals rising over shambling drumming and delicate harp sounds and acoustic guitar, breaking into distorted synth and a pounding doom-laden drumbeat. It's at moments like these that this tape turns into something like hearing Abruptum jamming with The Master Musicians of Jajouka. The second side is where this crazed black psych improv really takes shape, and it's spectacular in it's demonic weirdness, and on the final track "On Nag Mohawk" it transforms into this epic blackened avant-electronica that is pretty fucking amazing, again reminiscent of Abruptum's ghastly dungeon-murk, but infused with the mesmeric beats of Muslimgauze-style electro-hypnosis, and pounding militant industrial rhythms. This is easily the strangest of all of the bands that I've discovered through the French black industrial label Frozen Wing...
Track Samples:
Sample : Lo'kh Ite
Sample : Una' Gash

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NOX   Enigma   CASSETTE   (Frozen Wing Records)    7.00

The most mysterious of the Frozen Wing bands, the French group Nox is faceless, nameless, with almost no background information to be found anywhere, save for the limited text that they provide in each of their cassette releases, and the occult communications found within their eerie post-industrial hallucinations. Inside the sleeve for Enigma, the shadowy outfit delivers the following declaration, translated from the French :
"Nox encourages adultery. Nox encourages theft.Nox encourages lying. Nox encourages hatred. Nox encourages revenge. Nox encourages suicide."
It's the sort of manifesto you'd expect from a gang of snarling black metallers. But Nox is a far cry from black metal, despite their presence on Frozen Wing, a label that has carved out a nice little niche for itself as a source for the weirder underbelly of French black industrial/ambience. While there are some metallic elements that appear in Nox's music, this is more like a strange type of sinister baroque electronica, blending together Middle Eastern woodwind melodies, shuffling Tribal house rhythms, gothic strings and piano, choral voices, dark ambience, surges of droning, sludgy metallic guitar, booming blown-out drums, wobbly post-punk bass lines, and essentially no vocals aside from the wordless chanting and choir vocals that show up here and there. Both Muslimgauze and Coil are obvious influences on Nox's music, but so too is the weirder fringe of black industrial, apparent in the chugging metallic muck, martial percussion and horror-soundtrack loops and piano of "J'entends La Voie". Strange stuff, with cryptic track titles, even more cryptic text inside the sleeve (what does S.V.L.S.O. mean?), and the b-side of the cassette left completely blank. This was just one of two cassettes that Nox released in 2009 (the other being Thul Okgha , also featured in this week's new arrivals list), and after these tapes came out the mysterious French group has never been heard from since...

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NYODENE D   Pogrom   CASSETTE   (Phage Tapes)    7.00

Another solid dose of pitch-black, densely structured power electronics that utilizes a lot of junk-noise elements on this recording, featuring two very long tracks from this increasingly impressive new American death industrial/PE project.
The roughly fifteen-minute a-side track "Marched Into The Streets" is an excoriation of genocide illustrated through the slow buildup of crashing metal and clanking percussive noise over a faint rhythmic pulse, creating an ominous, chaotic soundscape that is later joined with distorted vocals delivered in a furious bellowing roar. It's a monstrous, shifting mass of junk-noise and horrific power electronics, using delay and echo on the churning walls of crashing metallic noise to create an immense, disorienting effect, the thunderous racket looping around and around, with eerie synthesizer melodies coming into view and proceeding to creep across the background, reminding me of some of the harsher recent Prurient material. Pretty intense.
The other track is "Via Dolorosa", a heavier and more malevolent death industrial piece that opens with more echoing slamming noises and crashing, creaking metal laid over a steady black synth throb and sinister speaking voices detailing atrocities linked to the genocide in Rwanda, the slithering distorted synthesizer drones worming through the track over looped junk noise; the noise is more restrained on this track, more rhythmic, making for a more hypnotic sound that invokes visions of scorched villages, mutilation and mass murder. This malevolent electronic hatred is right up your alley if you're a fan of low-fi, multi-layered PE along the lines of Climax Denial, Grunt, and Prurient.
Includes a black and white insert with lyrics and text, limited to one hundred copies.

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NYODENE D   Caged Dog / Common Criminal   7" VINYL   (Phage Tapes)    8.99

Nyodene D once again offers a new batch of brutal death industrial/power electronics that's heavily influenced by revolutionary rhetoric and humanist values, this time referencing the IRA activist Bobby Sands who died after a hunger strike in prison in 1981. This inspiration produces two tracks of fearsome industrial on Caged Dog that as brutal as his other cassettes on Phage.
The a-side "Caged Dog" combines a vicious junk-noise orgy that sounds like huge chunks of scrap metal, automobile chassis and other metallic garbage rolling around in slow-motion inside of a massive turbine while layers of furious screams and reverb-drenched moans are stacked on top, creating this oppressive mix of percussive metal-on-metal carnage and monstrous power electronics.
On the other side, "Common Criminal" brings the massive black synth pulsations and rumbling death-industrial horror that Nyodene D has really begun to excel at. The atmosphere on this one is thick with dread, pregnant with pending violence, the massive electronic drones swelling and filling the air just below the murderous distorted vocals. The vibe is very similar to classic European PE, but Nyodene D gives the track its own special, festering touch. Vicious.
Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies.

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ODA RELICTA   Lux Aeterna   CD   (Twilight)    12.98

One of my favorite recent discoveries on the Twilight label is Oda Relicta, a Ukrainian band whose main members include the electronic artist Olegh Kolyada and composer Mykhayil A.Shukh, both members of the 90s dark ambient project First Human Ferro. With this new project, they collaborate with an assortment of other musicians to create a mix of dark neo-classical, ominous industrial ambience and liturgical music, which on the 2010 mini-album Lux Aeterna takes the form of a beautifully bleak genocide-opera. This disc captures the live performance of the requiem of the same name performed live at the Gori and Vorsel Meetings festivals held in Georgia and the Ukraine, respectively. This grim requiem opera was inspired by the mass death of hundreds of thousands of children who perished in the Black Famine in the Ukraine from 1932-1933, and the music evokes a series of emotions that tend to gravitate towards melancholia and apocalyptic dread. The disc begins with the fragile chiming tones and church bells of "Introitus" as the group journeys through fields of dark abstract ambience and ringing tones processed into reverberant echoes. The chilling voice of soprano Tamara Lagunova hovers alongside the bass vocals of Igor Dikov and Valeriy Kostin's sorrowful tenor, the ghostly, sometimes terrifying vocal performance of the three singers becoming intertwined with the angelic voices of the Child's Choir of the Donetsk Musical School as the opera conjures visions of mass famine and suffering, with rare moments of light breaking through. The music is primarily a combination of apocalyptic classical music and vast abyssal ambience streaked with metallic percussion, piano, and synthesizers, the latter contributing waves of kosimiche ambience that towards the end of this disc begin to wash over passages of somber beauty. Lux Aeterna is a deeply affecting piece of music that alternates between heavenly grandeur and funereal darkness, recommended to fans of Elend, Arcana, the Septic Flesh offshoot Chaostar, and Ad Ombra...
Released in a limited edition digipack limited to two hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Lacrimosa
Sample : Lux Aeterna
Sample : Requiem Aeternam

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ODA RELICTA   Leper Mass   CD   (Twilight)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Leper Mass Introitus
Sample : Leper Mass pt IV
Sample : Leper Mass pt VI

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OIMOEN, HARALD & LEW, BRIAN   Murder In The Front Row   BOOK   (Bazillion Points)    39.98

Brian Lew and Harald Oimoen were two rabid metal fans from the San Francisco Bay Area armed with cameras in the early 1980s who found themselves caught in the epicenter of the burgeoning thrash scene, and throughout the decade they captured on film moments of youthful ferocity and documented some of the greatest thrash metal bands of all time. Their images from this era have been collected in this killer new book from Bazillion Points, who continue to cement their reputation as the best metal-centric publisher on the planet (see their other recent tomes Metalion: The Slayer Diaries and Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79–'83 also listed in this week's new arrivals list). Murder In The Front Row is an eye-popping 272 page hardbound tome loaded to the gills with more than four hundred photographs of thrash metal, crossover and death metal outfits from the Bay Area and beyond, with tons of amazing candid pics of the big names (Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Exodus, Slayer, all of 'em looking shockingly young) and other crucial speed-demons like Forbidden, DRI, Testament, Heathen, Possessed, Death Angel, Vio-Lence, Suicidal Tendencies, Poison Idea, The Mentors, and more. A lot of these pics are of the bands performing live (and you might recognize some of them - these photographers were responsible for taking some of the most iconic images from this era of metal history), but there are just as many shots of the bands hanging out together, getting loaded, acting like goofballs, and raising hell. There's also lots of photos that capture the Bay Area metal scene at large, the fans, the insane stage-diving maneuvers, the inebriated mayhem, and there are even a bunch of pics of Debbie Albono, the beloved "den mother" of the Bay Area thrash scene. If you're a fan of the Bay Area scene, you probably won't be able to tear your eyes away from this hefty book. Several written essays from Alex Skolnick (Testament), Robb Flynn (Vio-lence), Gary Holt (Exodus), and Ron Quintana (Metal Mania fanzine) round this out. Great stuff, lots of thrashing, nail-studded, denim-armored eye candy to soak up...any serious thrash metallers bookshelf should have this on it.

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ORTHODOX   Baal   LP   (Alone -Spain-)    24.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Ábrase la tierra
Sample : Alto Padre
Sample : Iatromantis

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ORTHODOX   Baal   CD   (Alone -Spain-)    17.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Ábrase la tierra
Sample : Alto Padre
Sample : Iatromantis

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OV   Pleasure   CASSETTE   (Primal Vomit)    5.00

There have been plenty of black metal albums where the presence of the bass guitar is negligible, if even noticeable. Black metal has long placed more of an emphasis on the guitar, the riffs, the atmosphere that can be created from minor key arpeggios and searing chromatic leads. But it's a rare thing to hear a band play black metal completely sans guitars, which is what the Floridian duo Ov do on their new five-song demo Pleasure. Using just drums, bass, and vocals, members C. and S. (who have also done time in other Primal Vomit-related bands like Ives, Ill Tolerance, No Pleasure in Life and Vomikaust) blast through this murky set of blackened death metal, the songs wound tight around simple, barbaric riffs, weirdly poppy hooks, harsh rasping vocals, bouts of feedback abuse and random noise, and lots of punk-fueled, grinding mid-tempo violence. The music is mostly pounding and fast-paced, with the occasional detour into slower, moodier dirge or total blasting mayhem; with the whole duo lineup, one might me tempted to thing that this is along the same lines as the atavistic blackened hardcore of Bone Awl; there are definitely some elements of that sound found on this tape, but Ov actually hew much closer to a primitive death/thrash vibe, with traces of some subtle Ross Bay worship going on, although it all happens to be delivered via the inherently murky and blunted attack produced by the bass guitar riffs and basic arrangements. Everything is ragged and roughly assembled, with all of the urgency, ugliness and noisiness that make the Primal Vomit tapes such an enjoyable listen for me. Pretty cool, I’m looking forward to hearing more of Ov's brand of misanthropic blunt-force blackness. The tape comes in a black and purple Xeroxed sleeve housed inside of a zip-lock plastic bag with a vinyl sticker, released in a limited run of four hundred copies.

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PANOPTICON   Social Disservices   2 x LP   (The Flenser)    29.98

Now out of print, we only have a couple of copies of the double Lp edition of Panopticon's latest full-length...
Panopticon's Social Disservices is the third album from this one-man black metal band from Kentucky. The guy behind this band is one Austin Lunn, also a member of the experimental doom metal outfit Seidr; since 2005, Lunn has been exploring various tangents of black metal with Panopticon that have ranged from assaults of experimental blasting aggression to epic, melancholic majesty heavily influenced by epic post-rock. With Social Disservices, Lunn delivers a four-song concept album where the songs are long, sprawling epics composed of many interlocking parts, swirling with buzzsaw blackened heaviness and vast rocking grandeur, a heavy prog influence behind the expansive arrangements and complex songwriting. This prog-fueled experimental black metal becomes a backdrop for Lunn's indictment of the American social service system and specifically it's ineffectual treatment of children, a subject that Lunn discusses at length in the liner notes to the album.
The album begins with the sounds of children's voices that appear at the start of "Resident", before suddenly exploding into ferocious black metal, an assault of blasting drums, slippery guitar riffs, and distant howling vocals wound around a simple but eerily effective central melody. The music shifts in and out of the blasting aggression, a wall of sound of haunting background ambience and raging droning riffage, with eerie violins seeping into the mix, taking over as a lead instrument throughout the song as the heart-wrenching violin melodies rise above the frantic labyrinthine black metal. The drumming is super chaotic and frantic, getting tangled up in wild flurries of lightspeed fills and rolls, later shifting into slower passages of guitar dissonance and electronic ambience.
Again, you hear the sound of screaming, crying babies introduce the second song "Client", as deep rumbling tremors slowly rise to the surface and the blackened metal rushes in, majestic, a slightly off-key guitar harmony rising over the blasting drums, then dropping into slower, more majestic heaviness for awhile. Those harmonies wind all throughout the song, contrasting with jangly clean guitars and distant washes of steel-guitar-like twang. The background of this song is made up of layers of drones and swirling ambience and electronics, which all become as important to Panopticon's sonic maelstrom as the guitars and drums; the music staggers and twitches constantly, arranged into seemingly haphazard structures that reveal a larger sprawling organization that seems to be guided by Lunn's powerful melodic leads.
There's an almost industrialized lurch that starts off the beginning of "Subject" as layers of keening drones and ethereal guitar noise billow out around the slow, chugging doom; the sound is fried out, heavily distorted, all of the instruments and vocals covered in a layer of corroded crunch. But then the song transforms into something entirely different, all of the noisy lurching heaviness dropping out and being replaced by soft chimes, gauzy ethereal vocals all wound together in dreamy harmony, shimmering tremolo leads spinning out into the ether, and as the heavier guitars and drums finally kick back in and the second half of the song erupts into this intensely catchy blackened rock.
The album closes with the twenty-minute "Patient", which begins with more slower, swirling majestic heaviness, the violins reappearing again, more melancholy and sorrowful then ever atop surging waves of double-bass drumming and roaring blackened riffage. Ghostly flute-like melodies drift in, leading the music into fields of gentle guitar strum and kosmiche electronic drift, stretches of gorgeous slow-core erupting into blazing black metal with more twin guitar harmonies soaring off into Maiden-esque heights, and then to moody chamber strings and folk-tinged melodies before finally wrapping up with several final minutes of evocative nocturnal wildlife sounds and distant night sounds...
Available on both limited-edition vinyl and digipack cd.
Track Samples:
Sample : Resident
Sample : Subject

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PANOPTICON   Social Disservices   CD   (The Flenser)    12.98

Panopticon's Social Disservices is the third album from this one-man black metal band from Kentucky. The guy behind this band is one Austin Lunn, also a member of the experimental doom metal outfit Seidr; since 2005, Lunn has been exploring various tangents of black metal with Panopticon that have ranged from assaults of experimental blasting aggression to epic, melancholic majesty heavily influenced by epic post-rock. With Social Disservices, Lunn delivers a four-song concept album where the songs are long, sprawling epics composed of many interlocking parts, swirling with buzzsaw blackened heaviness and vast rocking grandeur, a heavy prog influence behind the expansive arrangements and complex songwriting. This prog-fueled experimental black metal becomes a backdrop for Lunn's indictment of the American social service system and specifically it's ineffectual treatment of children, a subject that Lunn discusses at length in the liner notes to the album.
The album begins with the sounds of children's voices that appear at the start of "Resident", before suddenly exploding into ferocious black metal, an assault of blasting drums, slippery guitar riffs, and distant howling vocals wound around a simple but eerily effective central melody. The music shifts in and out of the blasting aggression, a wall of sound of haunting background ambience and raging droning riffage, with eerie violins seeping into the mix, taking over as a lead instrument throughout the song as the heart-wrenching violin melodies rise above the frantic labyrinthine black metal. The drumming is super chaotic and frantic, getting tangled up in wild flurries of lightspeed fills and rolls, later shifting into slower passages of guitar dissonance and electronic ambience.
Again, you hear the sound of screaming, crying babies introduce the second song "Client", as deep rumbling tremors slowly rise to the surface and the blackened metal rushes in, majestic, a slightly off-key guitar harmony rising over the blasting drums, then dropping into slower, more majestic heaviness for awhile. Those harmonies wind all throughout the song, contrasting with jangly clean guitars and distant washes of steel-guitar-like twang. The background of this song is made up of layers of drones and swirling ambience and electronics, which all become as important to Panopticon's sonic maelstrom as the guitars and drums; the music staggers and twitches constantly, arranged into seemingly haphazard structures that reveal a larger sprawling organization that seems to be guided by Lunn's powerful melodic leads.
There's an almost industrialized lurch that starts off the beginning of "Subject" as layers of keening drones and ethereal guitar noise billow out around the slow, chugging doom; the sound is fried out, heavily distorted, all of the instruments and vocals covered in a layer of corroded crunch. But then the song transforms into something entirely different, all of the noisy lurching heaviness dropping out and being replaced by soft chimes, gauzy ethereal vocals all wound together in dreamy harmony, shimmering tremolo leads spinning out into the ether, and as the heavier guitars and drums finally kick back in and the second half of the song erupts into this intensely catchy blackened rock.
The album closes with the twenty-minute "Patient", which begins with more slower, swirling majestic heaviness, the violins reappearing again, more melancholy and sorrowful then ever atop surging waves of double-bass drumming and roaring blackened riffage. Ghostly flute-like melodies drift in, leading the music into fields of gentle guitar strum and kosmiche electronic drift, stretches of gorgeous slow-core erupting into blazing black metal with more twin guitar harmonies soaring off into Maiden-esque heights, and then to moody chamber strings and folk-tinged melodies before finally wrapping up with several final minutes of evocative nocturnal wildlife sounds and distant night sounds...
Available on both limited-edition vinyl and digipack cd.
Track Samples:
Sample : Resident
Sample : Subject

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PBK + JOSH LAY   self-titled   CDR   (Syndrom Records)    11.98

An excellent new disc of nightmare industrial drift from this one-off collaboration between black noise artist Josh lay (of whom I'm sure many you already know from his many solo albums, his old noise/sludge duo Cadaver In Drag, and of course his current weirdo black metal band Glass Coffin) and Philip Klinger, who was part of the fertile American post-industrial scene starting in the late 80's under the name PBK. There's been some resurgence of PBK's activity lately, with a recent reissue of late 80's material that came out on Cathartic Process, but this is the first new release that I've heard from the project. Teamed up with Lay, it's not surprising that this material is a much darker listening experience than the gritty ambient noise of his older recordings, bringing together PBK's signature improvised synthesizer noise with the kind of horrific electronic filth that Lay is known for.
The two tracks are each nearly fifteen minutes long, epic abstract soundscapes of psychedelic synth noise and spacey effects swooping over dark monochromatic drones and deep rumbling drift. Ghostly processed voices flit and drift across the thick, roiling black fog, strange indistinct mutterings and tortured howls that will sometimes come together to make this sound like a strange fusion of EVP phenomena and old school power electronics. Murky speaker-noise will materialize out of the sonic grime, surging in fits and starts, resembling the grinding of a malfunctioning engine, while all sorts of unsettling scraping noises, machine whirr, growling sounds and electrical buzzing drift in and out. The second track is the creepiest, swarming with inhuman voices and alien frequencies, the droning synths and looping electronic textures sounding much more corroded and deteriorating here. Warped recordings of bloodcurdling screams and monstrous roaring rip through the dimly-lit tapestry of shifting, wavering drones, and sounds of horrific violence and metal tearing through flesh bleed through the murk like grainy field recordings of assorted atrocities being transmitted from another dimension, partially obscured by the ever-swirling wall of black psychedelic electronics.
Track Samples:
Sample : Untitled 1
Sample : Untitled 2

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PENETRATION PANTHERS   Perpetual 80's   7" VINYL   (A389 Records)    8.98

Another terrific band from D.C. Grave from the West Coast apocalypse rippers Gehenna, who has also recently blasted my skull with this narcotized psych-doom band Witch-Lord and the blackthrash of Sangraal. Everything this guys touches is gold, in my opinion. With Penetration Panthers, D.C. Grave teams up with drummer Donovan Williams and guitarists Shane Oakley (Gravehill) to play a kind of hardcore throwback to, you guessed it, the mid-80's underground, and specifically dredging up a mangled, stomping brand of punk puke that hints at both a rocking take on Flipper's negatory acid-punk, and the twitchy, doom-laden crunch of My War-era Black Flag. The three-song Perpetual 80's Ep fucking rips, opening with the driving title track, a distortion-smeared blast of catchy, raw punk rock, then pounding on your head with the slower, sleazier "Lipstick On Leather", where the sludgy hardcore is laced with wild solos and Grave's snotty vocal delivery. The b-side is taken up by the last song "Wasted Mind", and it's the catchiest song on here - a vicious three-chord beating set to more loose, brutal punk and doused in just the right amount of distortion on everything, the song tapping into the menacing anthemic quality of the best early 80's SoCal hardcore while stamping it with their own contorted signature, filtered through the fucked-up aggro delirium of the Cult Of The Seven Crowns. If you dug the recent stuff from hardcore all-star band Off! but wished they were a bit uglier and more fucked-up, you need to hear the Panthers a.s.a.p.
Limited to five hundred copies.

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PERSISTENCE IN MOURNING / KOUFAR   split   CASSETTE   (Phage Tapes)    6.50

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PEST   self-titled   CASSETTE   (Primal Vomit)    5.98

Now available as a limited edition pro-manufactured cassette from Primal Vomit.
Here's another rad black metal record that I just got turned on to while checking out the Nuclear War Now back catalog, a self-titled 12" from Germany's Pest that came out a year or so ago, a vinyl only release, and it's an awesome assault of cavernous blackthrash and weird ambience that pays homage to the second wave of Scandinavian black metal while at the same time forging their own brand of teutonic hysteria. This record features five tracks, a combination of reworked versions of songs that appeared on their debut album Ara from 1999 and brand new tracks, and as soon as the needle slips into "Es Lebe Der Tod" the Norwegian black metal influence is obvious, the sound a blackened whirlwind of buzzing riffs and scraped-throat howls, blasting drums and swirling dissonant leads, the primitive buzzsaw thrash of early Mayhem and Darkthrone channeled into chaotic blasts of cavernous roar. This strange reverberating atmosphere in Pest's music makes it sound like the band recorded their songs in a massive cathedral, the music echoing off of the walls and forming a massive wash of sound, low fi and raw but really powerful and immersive. On top of that, Pest throw in some interesting atmospheric touches that spin this out into left field, with chaotic blackened thrash assaults suddenly dissolving into washes of shadowy dark ambience, stretches of vast subterranean murk that suddenly explode into dissonant riffage, and wild psychotic laughter suddenly appearing out of nowhere. Then there's the song "Am Ende Des Weges" , which isn't black metal at all, but rather a dark instrumental piece with slowly waltzing accordian, piano and horn-like sounds lurching around blackened metallic chords like some warped nightmarish cabaret. On the flipside, Pest take samples of Popul Vuh's Nosferatu soundtrack and use them as interludes at the beginning and end of the side. There is a subtle kosmiche quality to Pest's music on this record beyond those samples though, with droning keyboards appearing throughout, hovering in the background behind the roaring reverb-drenched blackthrash like dark, threatening clouds.
Track Samples:
Sample : Inferno
Sample : Pest
Sample : Am Ende Des Weges

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PIG HEART TRANSPLANT   Weapon / Gut Pleasures   7" VINYL   (Iron Lung Records)    6.98

Already sold out from the label, Weapon is one of the latest 7" missives from the ever-shifting industrial sludge ensemble Pig Heart Transplant, headed up by Jon Kortland (the guy behind art project FEEDING as well as neo-power violence outfits Iron Lung and Dead Language). The band has been responsible for some of the heaviest Swans-influenced industro-sludge pummel of recent times, and all of their records are cherished slabs of abject horror here at C-Blast. And PHT have never sounded heavier than they do on "Weapon". The a-side song is a crushing slow-motion dirge with a single crushing riff repeated ad nauseum over the pounding industrialized drums and squalls of feedback and pungent black amplifier hum. It's the sound of early Filth-era Swans amplified to a death metal level of heaviness and aggression, made all the more hellish thanks to the singer's snarling, bestial vocals and deep, booming chants. Fucking killer, and absolutely essential for fans of the band. The other song "Gut Pleasures" grinds away on the b-side with equal intensity, the band (here a massive seven-piece outfit that also includes members of Silentist, Walls, ) riding on waves of cavernous reverb and drone, a winding, angular bass line creeping over the tank-tread crush of the slow tribal drumming and the bestial roaring vocals.
Packaged in a minimal black and white textured jacket, Weapon/Gut Pleasures is limited to five hundred copies, and very recommended to all fans of crushing, mechanized sludge.

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POLLUTIVE STATIC   Burning Faith   CASSETTE   (Phage Tapes)    6.50

The British noise/industrial artist Hal Hutchinson has been making a name for himself by way of his prolific output with the death industrial project Execution Support Act and the brute-force noise outfit Meatgrinder, along with a bunch of other projects that I haven't had a chance to check out yet. The guy has cranked out an impressive amount of noise over the past two years, and what I've heard so far is pretty great, and consistently brutal, with one of his latest titles (released under his own name) issued on vinyl through the mighty Freak Animal label. Each of Hutchinson's projects seems to focus on a very specific variation of harsh noise or extreme industrial, and in the case of Pollutive Static, the focus appears to be on the construction and implementation of extremely violent, skull-crushing noise walls. The Burning Faith cassette is one of many recent tape offerings from PS, issued on a pro-manufactured tape by Phage in an edition of two hundred copies with a full color two-sided cover. The unflinching brutality of the two-part piece "Burning Faith" is delivered via an overpowering wall of discordant noise, which Hutchison constructs by layering massive doses of chaotic feedback and squealing overloaded amplifiers, vast oceanic distortion, bizarre screaming, sudden eruptions of junknoise abuse, bursts of manipulated shortwave frequency, and even some maniacal improvised guitar skronk that gives this a somewhat unique feel. It's pure harsh noise though, heavily detailed and dense with all kinds of activity, so relentless and impenetrable that it's impossible not to be swept up and utterly consumed by the maelstrom of churning electronic roar. It's most definitely not for wimps, never slackening from the sheer massiveness of Hutchinson's noise-wall, burying the listener under a non-stop avalanche of low-end roar while slashing away with the high-pitched feedback all the way to the end. Absolutely vicious stuff, and worth checking out if you're into the likeminded wall-destruction of Last Rape, Rough Sex Quartet and The Cherry Point.

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POP. 1280   Thirteen Steps   7" VINYL   (Blind Prophet)    6.50

Didn't know much of anything about this band prior to slapping it on the turntable other than a) the creepy cathode-glazed sleeve art that caught my eye and b) the stamp of the Blind Prophet logo that suggested something ominous and twisted sounding.
The record begins with the throbbing post-punk dirge of "Thirteen Steps", which hooked me pretty quickly with the slashing guitars and almost anthemic energy of the vocals, darkly tinged and threatening punk with a nice noisy edge and a dissonant quality to the guitars, the rhythm section tightly wound as they lurch through the lockstep off-beat groove until the song careens into this killer pounding climax at the end. It's all over way too quickly and had me scrambling to flip this baby over for more.
Just a killer as the preceding tune, "Dead Man" comes on all paranoid and lumbering, like some bastard whelp stamped with the still-smoking brand of early Swans and The Birthday Party, surprisingly heavy after the grimy angular punk of the a-side. Fucking great stuff here, possessed with a seething, bass-heavy menace stinking of the best of the mid-80's pigfuck circle but infested with traces of synthesizer and electronic noise that sound wholly contemporary...fans of True Radical Miracle and Bodycop should plant their ears on this band right now.
Can't wait to hear more from this band. Limited to five hundred hand-numbered copies.

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PROPAGANDA & HOLY WRIT OF THE PROCESS CHURCH   Sex Issue / Fear Issue / Death Issue   LARGE BOOK   (Ajna Offensive)    47.98

The infamous Process Church of the late 60s not only infected a large quadrant of the industrial music underground when it's denizens began exploring the tenets and imagery of this mysterious end time-cult back in the 80s, but also crept into some of the darker corners of hardcore and metal, largely thanks to Dwid from Integrity who has long had an obsession with this enigmatic group (and who has used certain Process images, themes and symbols for a bunch of different Integrity albums). My own interest in apocalypse cults and their literature has had me wanting to explore the Process Church at depth, but for years their self-published magazine and other texts have been nearly impossible to find unless you were willing to shell out an outrageous amount of cash. A book came out recently called Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment, written by former Process member Timothy Wyllie and published by Feral House, which offers an insider's look at the background and evolution of the black-clad cult, it's roots in Gnostic theology, the connections to pop personalities of the era like Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and Parliament's George Clinton, and the various controversies that have surrounded it's activities. I haven't been able to pick that tome up yet for the shop, but here we've got another book that was released as a companion piece to Wyllie's volume, also published by Feral House in conjunction with black metal label Ajna Offensive. Propaganda And Holy Writ Of The Process Church Of The Final Judgment is a gorgeous hardback book that collects the three most notorious issues of the Process Church's official organ, known as the Sex, Death and Fear issues of Process Magazine. Sold on street corners across the globe by Church members completely dressed in black, Process Magazine was a propaganda tool, sinister surrealist art, and quasi-mystical prank all wrapped up in one eye-popping newsprint rag, and while the reproductions that are featured in this book are apparently not 100% complete (some digging around on the internet has produced claims that a couple of pages are missing from at least one of the issues), this is still a fantastic book that finally gives me the opportunity to gorge my eyes on all of the bizarre writing, wild psychedelic artwork and various manifestos that the Process Church was spreading in the late 60s. The graphic design is amazing, and the writing from the members of the Process group are laced with copious amounts of black humor and are often pretty hilarious, clearly suggesting that things were not exactly as they seemed and that the folks involved didn’t take themselves completely seriously. Anyone fascinated in the Process Church (especially if you've read Love, Sex fear Death) will want to read this collection, but even casual fans of the darker underbelly of the Hippie Era, the LSD-laced Satanic art of the late 60s/early 70s, and apocalypse cults in general will find a lot of stuff in this book to sink your canines into.
Limited to 1,200 copies.

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PROSANCTUS INFERI   Pandemonic Ululations Of Vesperic Palpitations   LP   (Hells Headbangers)    15.98

I've been gobbling up whatever I can find from this Ohio death metal duo; their Red Streams Of Flesh tore me a new one when I picked it up a couple of months ago from Nuclear War Now!, it's relentless blasting chaos taking the influence of early blackened death masters like Beherit and Blasphemy and adding a warped dissonance to the guitar work that is reminiscent of the more freaked-out shreddery found on Morbid Angel, Demilich and Incantation albums. Plastered with some classic Francis Bacon artwork, this older record from Prosanctus Inferi comes to us from Hell's Headbangers and again features the duo of Jake Kohn (vocals, guitars) and Jeremy Spears (drums), both known quantities to me (Kohn having been a member of the bizarro industrial black metal band Black Funeral and current death metal throwbacks Father Befouled, and Spears coming out of the prog-death trio Deadsea). As with the more recent Red Streams, the duo summon a vicious maelstrom of crude, chaotic death metal. The thirteen tracks on this Lp rarely slow down beyond a crazed thrash tempo, with nearly constant assaults of swirling blastbeat fury and chaotic drumming that sounds as if drummer Spears(here going under the name "Antichristus") is hammering away on every single cymbal he has at his disposal. There are a couple brief passages of churning chaotic sludge that appear on tracks like "Pontifical Undulations Of Blasphemic Gesticulation" and "Sacreligious Desecration In Execelsis" (all of the song titles are equally absurd and obtuse), but mostly these guys are set to full-on blast. Their blackened, tentacular blackgrind also incorporates bizarre samples and a clanking black industrial outro, which has Jake's gaseous vile exhortations layered together into monstrous incomprehensible deathgasps and some weird major key melodies suddenly snaking through the barbaric riffing. Psychotic, brutal stuff, so chaotic and layered and dissonant that it often comes close to invoking the psychedelic chaos of Portal, but blasting that sound via a more bestial level of aggression more akin to the black/death of Blasphemy and Angelcorpse....

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PROSANCTUS INFERI   Red Streams Of Flesh   CD   (Nuclear War Now! Productions)    10.98

Now released on CD by Nuclear War Now; these guys seem to be flying under the radar, but you really need to hear this if you're a fan of extreme death metal chaos. This disc is fucking amazing.
Crawling on misshapen limbs out of some stinking abattoir in Columbus, Ohio comes Prosanctus Inferi, a new duo that features Jake Kohn (also of Father Befouled, Encoffination and Black Funeral), and Jeremy Spears from tech-metallers Deadsea. They've released some stuff prior to this 12" on Nuclear War Now, but this is the first I've heard from them. Red Streams Of Flesh is a stunning blast of chaotic, carnal chaosdeath that clocks in at just nineteen minutes, but within that timeframe manages to assault the listener with a million flailing tendrils of cyclonic blackened death metal that has some wonderfully crazed riff structures and a lunatic drum performance that keeps me on edge throughout the entire record. Some cursory reading about the band brings me to reference points like Profanatica, early Morbid Angel and Necrovore, but this would just be raw genetic matter; Prosanctus Inferi sounds very new to me, a writhing amorphous mass of carnivorous evil that neither descends into the maelstrom of utter chaos, nor retains a rigid form. The backbone is crude, late 80s death metal, but it's mutated into bizarre, spiky riffs arranged into labyrinthine formations and swirling atonal madness seething with Kohn's unique hissing deathgasps, with Spears setting his drums to an almost constant blast, save for when he lurches into one of the several jagged, halting anti-grooves that spring up from time to time. The band also effectively (ie, sparsely) employs some ambient samples and textures such as the heartbeat-like pulse, gaseous demonic breathing, high-pitched feedback and tolling church bells that introduce "Virgin Subterfuge Chorus".
And it's over far too soon. Prosanctus Inferi have produced one of the year's most alien death metal records, and I can't wait to hear their upcoming full length on NWN slated for 2012.
Track Samples:
Sample : Fumigating Portentious Sacriligium
Sample : Hairs of Incest
Sample : Virgin Subterfuge Chorus
Sample : Viscuous Enthropic Ennui

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PRURIENT   Stun Gun   7" VINYL   (Quasi Pop)    12.98

Released on the European label Quasi-Pop on green/black vinyl in a limited edition of three hundred fifty copies, Stun Gun features two exclusive Prurient tracks recorded in 2010 that includes a guest performance from Alberich on synthesizer. For those fans that have wailed to the heavens over Prurient's recent forays into jet-black darkwave, this may be your panacea. Within seven minutes, Dominick Fernow and company unleashes hell, an evocation of the Boogeyman: first through the meat-flaying industrial horror of "He Scratches At The Window", where a slow-motion nightmare is unfolded over massive percussive blasts of bass, psychotic vocals, and an effects-warped nebula cloud of abused scrap metal, blackened noise and drooling lust; then, by way of the terrifying feedback molestation and rumbling machine-throb of the b-side track "He Hides Under the Bed", Fernow's frantic, infuriated screams laced with a promise of sexual savagery, the screeching frequencies seeming to mimic the sound of fingernails against a metal bed-frame, the pulsating bass evoking the bloodrush of carnal destruction. It's Prurient's most fearsome and troubling material of the last few years, in my opinion. Highly recommended. Comes in a full-color sleeve.

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PUTRESCENT FOG   Necropurulent Fumes   CASSETTE   (Despondent Depreciation)    5.00

Necropurulent Fumes IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Over the past couple of weeks, an extremely obscure new project called Putrescent Fog has become one of my latest new obsessions. Rising out of the primordial black birth fluids that the Despondent Depreciation and Degenerate Slime labels call home, Putrescent Fog is comparable to much of the output that I've been hearing from this tiny corner of the black/gore/noise underground, obviously descended from the vile, vomit-smeared horror of the gorenoise scene, but taking the key elements of that sound (the totally inhuman guttural vocal noises, the way that everything sounds as if it's being run through a combination of pitch shifters and effects pedals, the monstrous rumbling heaviness, the churning sonic chaos) and dragging 'em into far more abstract and experimental regions. Possibly my favorite thing about Putrescent Fog is that this "band" (probably just one guy, but who knows) sounds exactly like the name suggests. It is a perfect example of the goresludge word-made-flesh. The ten "songs" that are featured on the Necropurulent Fumes tape (which also bears the cool distinction of being a glow-in-the-dark cassette!) are short (often merely a minute long) blasts of shapeless low-end noise bearing poetic titles like "Demonic Phlegmonia", "Whispers Of Pestilence", "Black Cemetary Mist, and "Vomit The Waters Of Styx", and are comprised of distant percussive rattling, massive bass-heavy reverberations, and ridiculously guttural inhuman bellowing and gastrointestinal burbling that pretty much makes the likes of Vomitoma and Anal Birth sound like tech-death. Ok, that might be overdoing it a bit., but Putrescent Fog's rumbling sewer-scapes are nowhere close to sounding like structured music; this is so much closer to actual industrial noise than anything else I've listened to within the gorenoise realm. In fact, I think that another reason why I dig this psychedelic black filth is how close it feels to the coffin-pounding black noise and churning sonic perversion of Havohej's most abstract recordings, which have always been a favorite of mine. Like that project, this is for extremely select tastes only; only enthusiasts of hardcore graveyard noise and the most pestilent fringes of black industrial will appreciate this, but if you are part of this cadre of the sonically depraved, I recommend both this tape and the Inevitable Act Of Degradation 3" Cd, also on Despondent Depreciation.

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PUTRESCENT FOG   The Inevitable Act Of Degradation   3" CD   (Despondent Depreciation)    6.50

The Inevitable Act Of Degradation IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Already almost out of this extremely limited disc! This twenty-odd minute Ep offers the heaviest material that I've heard from Putrescent Fog. While the Necropurulent Fumes was a nearly beatless puke-scape of shapeless black drift, sub-guttural vocal noises, and crushing waves of sewer ooze crawling over you in slow motion, the four tracks on Degradation are powered by super-heavy programmed drums that give this the same sort of mechanized death-doom feel as you get with Reclusa. The industrial rhythms smash and grind through the first track "Degenerate" like a Godflesh track dragging itself through thick black treacle, while thick, cloying gorenoise fumes completely enshroud the rotting dirge, and the second track "Deteriorate" is even heavier, with massive rumbling riffage droning beneath the gurgling vocal-slop and robotic mecha-drums. This stuff sounds so similar to Reclusa that fans of the recent Anticonscience full-length that I recently released on Crucial Blaze/Infernal Machines will find a lot here to love. But where Reclusa has more of a propulsive (albeit totally glacial) flow to it's industrial death-doom scuzz, Putrescent Fog tends to be a bit more abstract on this disc, especially when you get to the two short final tracks; on "Dilapidate", noxious flanged drones and random percussive rumblings echo across the septic ambience, and closer "Disintegrate" sinks it's machine beats and down-tuned guitar slime even deeper beneath the monstrous gastro-intestinal reverberations. Considerably different from the amorphous, almost Havohej-like sewer-noise of the other cassette, I still really dug this as well; ultra heavy and incredibly fucked-up mechanical gorenoise and ambient corpse concrete that just sucks me right in with it's suffocating, slime-drenched undertow.
The disc comes in a miniature jewel case with full color artwork, and is limited to a hand-numbered edition of just twenty copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Degenerate
Sample : Deteriorate
Sample : Dilapidate

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RABHA   The Defiant Demos   CDR   (Small Doses)    5.99

Combining the diseased, noise-smeared heaviness of extreme blackened doom metal with the brutal feedback and speaker abuse of power electronics may sound like an ill-fated experiment, but Rabha pull off a wonderfully noxious sonic assault on their debut release, The Defiant Demos. The band is another project from Andy Lippoldt, who's also behind the experimental doom band Persistence In Mourning, the blackened industrial psychedelia of Gorgontongue, and the black noise duo RL:ZZ with Unearthly Trance's Ryan Lipynsky, teamed up with M. Chami from Disgust/Koufar. I've been listening to Persistence in Mourning for awhile, but it's only been recently that I've been discovering Lippoldt's other bands; Rabha probably wins out for the noisiest and most extreme of the lot. The four songs on Defiant are loud, ugly blots of crawling tar-pit metal, the riffs carved out of great blocks of Sabbath/Vitus style doom, rolling across plodding drums that are covered in glue, the recording raw and dirty. But the Rabha guys severely abuse their filthy low-fi doom metal by blasting it with all manner of deformed electronics, extreme feedback that slashes and drills through the recording, and spewing all manner of vile, murderous ramblings through a distorted megaphone that's situated way, way up in the mix; the first time the vocals kick in, I almost jumped out of my seat. The mix of the extreme harsh screams and the rampant feedback and noise is what contributes the power electronics vibe to Rabha's sound, but it's a really raw, nauseating approach to PE that's incorporated here; I wouldn't be surprised if these guys spend a lot of their time listening to the likes of Grunt, Taint, Sick Seed and other Filth & Violence-related acts. Sometimes the power electronics take over almost completely, like on "My Nightmare"; the drums are virtually absent from this track, while a menacing guitar melody is played beneath the processed, ultra-fucked-up vocals and noxious high-frequency feedback. The last one is a real bruiser, too. "Writhing Within The Walls" features someone pounding out a basic steady beat on a bass drum in the background while a chaotic mess of overloaded amplifiers, scraped microphones, junk noise, and grinding bass tones rain down on the listener. Low-fi, messy, hateful industrial scum-sludge - I really dig this shit, it offers some of the same grimy kicks as the noise/sludge outfits that have released stuff on Heart & Crossbones (ie, Grave In The Sky, Dead Peni, Lietterschpich). Can't wait to hear more! The disc came out on Small Doses in one of their very small doses; only eighty-six copies of this were pressed, packaged in a black and white sleeve.
Track Samples:
Sample : A defiant Grip (On The Throat Of Decency)
Sample : Decaying Sloth
Sample : Writhing Within The Walls

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RAMIREZ, RICHARD + RED HOOK   split   CASSETTE   (Phage Tapes)    6.98

Here is another blistering recent offering of extreme electronic noise from Phage Tapes. Harsh noise fans need no introduction to Richard Ramirez; the guy has been cranking out some of the most brutal electronic blastscapes in the American noise scene for over two decades, under his own name as well as a myriad of side-projects that includes SS Electronics, Last Rape, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, Werewolf Jerusalem, Priest In Shit and a billion others. On The Atrocity Bible, Ramirez has hooked up with fellow Texan noise artists Sean Matzus, aka Red Hook, for this massive freeform offensive of brutal noise that runs close to an hour. And man, is this crushing. he two artists slam an assortment of manipulated feedback, grotesque vocals, battered radio transmissions, fluctuating static, sampled audio taken from hardcore gay porn, tormented scrap-metal and cosmic electronics into each of the two side-long tracks. The session reeks of sadistic violence, domination, extreme physical abuse, and is completely and thoroughly psychedelic in it's relentless sonic assault upon your skull. The duo rarely settle into straight "wall" formations, but instead keep their maelstrom of electronics and junk metal moving constantly, the sound shifting and morphing in infinite directions over the course of each side, sometimes falling back into a huge rumbling ocean of spacey effects and grinding distortion, at other times combining fractured melodic elements with merciless sheet-metal violence similar to the junkyard avalanches of prime K2 material, and at other points meshing the sound of flesh being tested to the breaking point as waves of black static crash across fragments of amp noise and weird atonal melodies come screaming out of broken metal girders.
The tape comes in a three-color screen printed cover, issued in a limited edition of one hundred copies.

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RAMLEH   Be Careful What You Wish For   CD   (Sympathy For The Record Industry)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Maryland Sheriff Factory
Sample : The New York Conning Tower
Sample : Seattle Nun Trailer

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RAVEN'S BANE   Misery Preserved   CD   (Baphomet)    9.98

Black metal fans may not immediately recognize the name Robert Cruzan, but most likely they know Cruzan from either his pseudonym Ixithra (the name he goes by in the long-running American black metal band Demoncy) or Wicked Warlock (his title in the legendary Profanatica, with whom he played briefly in the early 90s). This guy's fingerprints are on two of the earliest and most influential USBM bands, and we're talking real black metal, pestilential death-worshipping sexually-depraved BM; I fucking love both of these bands, and Demoncy's Joined In Darkness is a minor masterpiece of minimalist black metal. But until recently, I was woefully unaware that Cruzan also had a project called Raven's Bane that specialized in a much different, but equally malevolent sound. In the early part of the last decade, both of the albums that Cruzan released as Raven's Bane were re-issued by Baphomet Records, and both are very enjoyable exercises in minimal, nightmarish death industrial that you could have told me had come out on Slaughter Productions, and I wouldn’t have doubted you at all...
2004's Misery Preserved would be the second and last of the Raven's Bane albums; it doesn't stray too far from the ultra-bleak death-scapes that Cruzan previously explored on the debut, but some of the ghastly frequencies that he dials in do seem to be a bit heavier this time around. There's seven tracks on this disc, and each obsessively focuses on a single rumbling drone-concept that gets stretched to the point of cranial wipeout. Opener "Precipice", for example, starts this off with a meditation on a looped abyssal drone that sounds like dark ambient music heard from the outside of a bathysphere, while the following track lays down some murky distorted doomed-drones that slowly undulate beneath the hypnotic whirr and slow rhythmic throb of sampled metallic reverberations. These creepy cavernous rumblings are highly minimal, with very little outside activity intruding upon the monotonous dread at the center of each piece - most listeners would probably find this boring, but for those of us who are easily entranced by the black pulsations of similar artists like Maurizio Bianchi and Atrax Morgue, these graveyard-drones are pretty addictive. The rest of the album is more of this dark, suffocating factory-pulse, each long track buried in a thick, murky haze, rhythmic metallic pounding rising up from the depths, sometimes sounding like a low-fi recording of heavy war-drums rumbling beneath an ocean of black fog, or resembling a crushing, doom-laden dirge lost at the bottom of a vast abyss, obscured by distant swirling chimes and washed-out Satanic chanting. Yeah, this is definitely a heavier offering from Raven's Bane, with the ritualistic aspects of the project becoming much more prominent the further into the album you get, weird monstrous moaning and emanating from black pits while prayer-bells ring incessantly, murky organ-tones wafting through the blackness, and rhythmic percussive noises pound hypnotically far beneath your feet...
Highly recommended to anyone who loves the putrescent electronics of Atrax Morgue, the pitch-black crypt ambience of early Lustmord, and the corroded minimal throb of early industrial music in equal measure...
Track Samples:
Sample : Drain
Sample : Precipice
Sample : Soulstrip

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RAVEN'S BANE   Sorrow Breeds   CD   (Baphomet)    9.98

Black metal fans may not immediately recognize the name Robert Cruzan, but most likely they know Cruzan from either his pseudonym Ixithra (the name he goes by in the long-running American black metal band Demoncy) or Wicked Warlock (his title in the legendary Profanatica, with whom he played briefly in the early 90s). This guy's fingerprints are on two of the earliest and most influential USBM bands, and we're talking real black metal, pestilential death-worshipping sexually-depraved BM; I fucking love both of these bands, and Demoncy's Joined In Darkness is a minor masterpiece of minimalist black metal. But until recently, I was woefully unaware that Cruzan also had a project called Raven's Bane that specialized in a much different, but equally malevolent sound. In the early part of the last decade, both of the albums that Cruzan released as Raven's Bane were re-issued by Baphomet Records, and both are very enjoyable exercises in minimal, nightmarish death industrial that you could have told me had come out on Slaughter Productions, and I wouldn’t have doubted you at all...
Sorrow Breeds was the second album from Raven's Bane, and originally came out on Live Bait Recording Foundation back in 2001 in a limited edition of one hundred copies. After that went out of print, Baphomet picked it up and re-issued it a few years later in a larger edition that I've finally gotten around to stocking here at C-Blast. How in the hell did I miss these discs when they first came out? This stuff is great, bleak lightless death-ambient that billows out across Sorrow Breeds's eleven long tracks in amorphous smears of black ambience and distant grinding shadow-rituals that delivers the same monochromatic black-pit vibe as artists like Dapnom, Kerovnian, Kaniba, Silcharde, Hyios and Aymrev Erkroz Prevre and the more "ambient" selections of the Slaughter Productions catalog. Ixithral conjures vast washed-out soundscapes that thrum with the sound of clanging machines echoing far off in the distance on the opening track "Plaguehost", moving on to murky mechanical humming that emanates from somewhere deep below the listener's feet, the rhythmic sound of metal striking metal creating a constant metronomic pulse way off on the edge of perception. Planetary masses dissolve into cosmic clouds of black ether that drift apart across space, and processed kettledrums boom throughout the depths of "Morbid Consummation". Massive drones are transformed into cavernous reverberations buried beneath miles of earth and rock, mysterious field recordings and rushing water (possibly falling rain?) is heard beneath pulsating black electronics and vaporous dungeon fumes, and dank cave-winds blow infinitely across immense metal landscapes stripped of all signs of life. This collection of bleak, blasted deathdrone and hypnotic turbine-horror is great stuff, recommended to anyone who loves the putrescent electronics of Atrax Morgue, the pitch-black crypt ambience of early Lustmord, and the corroded minimal throb of early industrial music in equal measure...
Track Samples:
Sample : Morbid Consummation
Sample : The Nesting
Sample : Plaguehost

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RECLUSA   The Anticonscience   CASSETTE   (Crucial Blast - Infernal Machines Series)    5.00

A while back, I was turned on to the band Diseased Oblivion by way of their split with Sewer Goddess, and was impressed with the filthy, fucked-up deathdoom that made up their side of that split. While looking into their other releases, I found out that one of the members of the band also had another project, this one called Reclusa, which had released a bunch of tapes on a variety of tiny underground imprints. I checked out Reclusa, and was floored by how ridiculously heavy and disgusting the music was; it didn't even sound like metal to me, but inhabited another realm of twisted, abstract heaviness closer to industrial noise, while utilizing massive down tuned riffs and elements of death metal that were left to putrefy into noxious formless slime. Reclusa mixed together filthy sub-Godflesh / (early) Pitch Shifter machine pummel, putrescent guttural vocal-fumes, ultra bleak dark ambience, weird bits of diseased dub, deformed deathdoom, blasts of orchestral terror, & murky industrial noisescapes, and the result is hopeless, terminally nihilistic ugliness that skulks in a dark corner somewhere in between the likes of Black Mayonnaise, The Human Quena Orchestra, Aderlating, and the nastiest strains of underground gorenoise.
Of course, this led to my wanting to get Reclusa on our Crucial Blaze series. And here it is, a new full length disc called The Anticonscience that offers a seventy-seven minute descent into vile, absurdly heavy low-fi mechanized horror from this cult Ohio outfit. Previously released in a limited edition CDR/CHAPBOOK set, we have now released this skullcrushing slab of industrial sewer death on cassette as well, packaged in a 5" x 7" full color sleeve with a Reclusa sticker and a twenty-page chapbook of nightmarish artwork and writing, hand-numbered and released in a limited edition of forty-nine copies.
The album opens with "98.6F", a pulverizing machine dirge, a pounding drum machine grinding in mechanical slow motion alongside slithering, ridiculously down tuned and crushing death metal riffs and eerie fuzz-soaked lead guitar that slowly drifts over the lumbering heaviness. As it oozes forward, other sounds enter in, the industrial death doom fading away as humming power lines and deep-earth rumbling raises to the surface, crackling machine parts and looped metallic whir flitting around the sprawling industrial soundscape that takes form, a sinister death industrial nightmare shaping itself out of the devastation left by the previous bout of mecha-sludge. That robotic sludge wave does finally return later on, even heavier and more monstrous than before, the guitars reappearing deformed and heavily flanged, the drum machines pounding out Godflesh-esque machine rhythms, and the "vocals" appearing as a bestial gaseous bellow drifting out of chasms in the earth. After that is "Frozen Embrace", which is even slower and bleaker, combining bloodcurdling orchestral strings and gloomy clean guitar and tectonic blasts of down tuned, massively distorted riffcrush, like industrial funeral doom mixed with some weird hellish, time-stretched darkwave outfit.
From there, Reclusa moves from the nightmarish industrial soundscape "Systematic Abandonment" into more crushing slow motion heaviness, angular death metal riffs slowed down to molten treacle and poured over slow spastic beats, the drums treated with heavy amounts of echo and delay, creating a weird dub-like effect as the beats shudder and echo over the grueling sewer doom. Blown-out riffchug uncoils within massive clouds of black fog. Super-distorted synthesizers bleat and buzz while those monstrous gasping vocal noises continue to pour forth from deep below. The track "Solitary Definement" combines the sounds of running water and a creepy harp melody with choral synths and booming tympani for a bleak neo-classical tinged dirge before it morphs into a grinding mass of deathdoom chuggery and sheet metal/steel pipe percussion. Stray chunks of drum machine bludgeon become lost in howling storms of volcanic ash and fire, breaking down into utterly hostile fields of harsh noise. And on "Chernobyl Winter", the band constructs a sprawling nine minute death ritual of Neubauten-esque rhythms and chthonic rumble that blots out all light by the time it reaches it's conclusion.
It's like a doomdeath album being played at half speed while someone splices in Throbbing Gristle and Wolf Eyes. Or what Dead World or early Pitchshifter might have sounded like if they had collaborated with one of the uglier denizens of the Cold Meat label. Either way, Reclusa pulls back thick, heavy curtains of dead flesh to reveal a seething, rotting world of abject horror within these suffocating, oppressive soundscapes.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Anticonscience
Sample : The Black Whirlpool
Sample : Frozen Embrace
Sample : In the Shadow of Jade

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REGOSPHERE   Gutter Swarm   CASSETTE   (Phage Tapes)    7.00

Recorded in conjunction with a 2010 tour, Gutter Swarm is one of the first offerings from this malevolent industrial project, issued on Phage in a chunky vinyl cassette box. While this newer noise outfit comes out of the American heartland, the diseased sounds that are on display on Gutter Swarm are wholly informed by the morbid electronics of classic European industrial, particularly the sounds of artists like Maurizio Bianchi, Mauthausen Orchestra, Atrax Morgue, and early Megaptera; seeing those influences being cited by the band, I knew this was probably going to be my kind of slime.
Andrew Quitter is the guy behind Regosphere, and he does avoid being just another retro-death-industrial homage. By adding some very unnerving field recordings and instrumental elements to the tracks, Quitter creates a thick layer of urban unease that hangs heavy over these tracks. Regosphere's unsettling noisescapes are formed out of minimal waves of buzzing static layered on top of pulsating obsidian drones and threatening electrical currents, fluttering synth tones and crumbling walls of blackened distortion, metallic creaks and chirps sculpted into eerie drones, the looped whine of sirens, recordings of birds, crushing looped machine-noise. The first several tracks are more experimental, drone-based pieces, with lots of looping sounds and random room ambience and mysterious environmental sounds. It's not until the last song on the a-side "Monochrome Existence' that Quitter blasts a crushing rhythmic industrial dirge with ultra-distorted evil vocals, finishing off the side in a grey haze of abject nihilism.
The b-side is harsher stuff across the board. On "Social Restraint", Quitter splatters a rockslide of chunky distorted noise and low-end hum with high frequency chirping and currents of electrical power. A torrential roar of static is at the psychedelic, wall-like foundation of "Overwhelmed", where the ghostly traces of doomed chords drifting out of a piano are swallowed by the maelstrom, which does eventually peel back only to reveal cancerous pulsations of black bass and the smoke-spewing innards of an infernal engine. It's not until the very last track, 'Grey Winter", where things calm down, the noise is washed out and replaced with an icy field of soft crackling hiss, ominous piano notes echoing through the desolate twilight atmosphere, stray snatches of voices and random percussive sounds swirling in clouds of delay, closing the tape out in fine gloomy manner.
There’s a lot of variety in Regosphere's layered compositions even as it stays true to the death industrial aesthetic, a pulsating black organ at the center of each soundscape. Limited to one hundred copies, packaged in a vinyl case with a silk-screened cover and a full-color insert.

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REGRESS   Issue Two   MAGAZINE A5   (Regress Zine)    6.99

The brains behind Regress really need to up the print run for their sleek little black metal zine. When the first issue came out a year ago, the goddamn thing was already totally sold out and out of print by the time that I learned that it even existed; I managed to pick up some of the second issue upon it's publication, but it too went out of print immediately thereafter. So if you want one of these, you'd better move quick as there's less than ten of them here on the shelf. No wonder that copies of Regress tend to evaporate; the zine is published in a tiny print run of one hundred and seventy five copies, and it's one of the best looking underground metal zines out there right now, period. The focus of the zine is aimed squarely on the filthiest, furthest-out depths of black metal and its various peripheries, and pretty much covers my favorite stuff: abjectly anti-social black metal scum, unapologetic human-hate, black noise, etc. This ish has interviews with the likes of Vucub Cane, Nastran, Grave Miasma, Sutekh Hexen, Svartrit, One Tail One Head, and a piece with Terence Hannum of Locrian that examines his visual art and installation work. Like I mentioned, the layout is great, with lots of inky blackness, chopped-up cut-and-paste imagery, abstract textures and carcinogenic toner abuse thats a perfect visual accompaniment to the subject matter. One of the things that’s amusing about Regress is how combative the interviews can be. Presented in a traditional Q&A style format, there's lots of bad attitude and unfriendly responses that make this a zillion times more interesting than the slop you'll read in larger, glossier metal rags. I'm already craving the next installment...

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RU-486   Concealed Weaponry 2005-2010   CASSETTE   (Disease Foundry Recordings)    10.98

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RUINS   Alone   CD   (Skin Graft)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Glaschzenck
Sample : Jemvlesqapp
Sample : Stonehenge

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S-21   To Keep You Is No Benefit. To Destroy You Is No Loss   CASSETTE   (Disease Foundry Recordings)    5.99

Richard Ramirez abuses me for the second time this week with this limited edition cassette on Disease Foundry. As S-21, Ramirez teams up with Austin Caustic from Concrete Violin/Black Leather Jesus for a violent power electronics orgy of extreme flesh-abuse that focuses its mad lolling eye upon the atrocities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The guys in S-21 don't get too bogged down in a history lesson here, but the title on this tape comes from a cruel slogan wielded by the genocidal Cambodian Communists in the Khmer Rouge; the band name itself stands for "Security Prison 21", an infamous death factory complex also known as the "anteroom of death" that the KR regime operated, where torture, murder and degradation were standard operating procedures. These images of extreme cruelty become the canvas upon which Ramirez and Caustic create the noxious, crushing sounds on To Keep You Is No Benefit.... This long unbroken track is filled with putrid black electronics totally lacking in any sort of sophistication, but these crude mechanical sounds of horror are intoxicating: masses of monstrous insectile buzzing and electrical hiss, screaming feedback and thick, oily amplifier noise , ugly, sputtering distortion and susurrant tape hiss that resembles the sound of acid burning through flesh, the gasoline stink of torture-engines running non-stop through the night, garbled vocals entombed in massive levels of distortion and low-end gunk, chunks of metal being bashed, crushed, bent, broken, and through it all, over the entire side, the rumbling engine continues to throb and belch black smoke in the background, This is cruel, hateful extreme noise, a blast of torturous evil carved from molten agony.
Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies, To Keep You Is No Benefit... comes in a simple full-color paper sleeve inside of a plastic zip-bag, and includes a 1" pin.

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SALE FREUX   Subterraneus   CD   (Misanthropic Art Productions)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Les Ailes Souterraines
Sample : Londres, 1666
Sample : Repaire D'Iris Noirs

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SANDOR RADO / MILJONER DODA   split   CASSETTE   (Ingen Vag)    5.99

Chances are you've never heard of Ingen Vag. I myself had never heard of this tiny Swedish label until very recently, but this DIY imprint has put out a really cool mix of minimal black drone and mutated death rock alongside more abstract, experimental sounds that I got a chance to explore a bit for the shop. All of the stuff that I've gotten from Ingen Vag is now out of print from the label, so you'll want to take note of that fact if any of this stuff does happen to pique your interest...
This split cassette features two obscure electronic artists who both experiment with very minimal, very desolate sonic voids. I've never heard any of their other stuff, but on this tape both Miljoner Döda and Sandor Rado craft fragile, almost desiccated dark electronics and bleak winter ambience that's pretty irresistible to me.
The two tracks from Sandor Rado ("Ramels Väg" and "En Utomplanetarisk Plats") uncoil across his side with undulating waves of minimal black drone, the sound centered on a simple static pulse surrounded like a beacon by ghostly howls and fragments of electronic noise and Theremin-like sounds that blink in and out, echoing across a vast black void. This is some of the iciest sounding music I've heard in ages, as well as some of the most desolate - as these muted buzzing dronescapes stretch into the distance, they seem to hover like some dead wavelength in black space, sometimes joined by layers of smoldering black static or soft, eerie guitar notes smothered in delay, but often returning to a kind of death-stasis.
At first, Miljoner Döda's side starts off with something that resembles a processed didgeridoo drone sculpted into a snaking black sine wave, slowly joined by eerie synthesizer melodies that cast the track into a kind of minimal kosimiche space. After a couple of minutes, though, those dark synths come to the forefront and are combined with some minimal spacey guitar drift and cosmic electronics that resembles early 70's space music but tints the sound with deformed dissonance. Very nice...
Released in a limited edition of forty tapes.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ramels Vag
Sample : Vredens Krater

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SATURNALIA TEMPLE   Aion Of Drakon   LP   (Ajna Offensive)    19.99

Track Samples:
Sample : Aion of Drakon
Sample : Ancient Sorceries
Sample : Black Magic Metal

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SCHRAT   Schattenwahn   CD   (Misanthropic Art Productions)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Beschwörung
Sample : Eruption
Sample : Mal Der Schande

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SCORN   Yozza   12"   (Ohm Resistance)    9.98

Also available on vinyl, packaged in a blank black DJ jacket.
In the wake of last year's excellent Refuse; Start Fires, Scorn's Mick Harris (formerly of grind legends Napalm Death and Painkiller) has produced a a new Ep of brutal, malevolent industrial dub that's more blown out and corrosive than usual, while continuing to use the live drums that Scorn began to incorporate on Refuse. The four new tracks that are featured on Yozza are Scorn at it's heaviest, the shotgun snare drums and deep wobbly bass shaped into robotic time signatures, a throbbing, skulking dubstep monstrosity that's quite different from the sparse, down-tempo ambient dub of his 90's output on Earache Records. Here, the pounding industrial-dub beats of "Piper" crawl with a nightmarish 70's horror vibe, producing one of the heaviest Scorn tracks I've heard in ages, with a pulverizing bass assault grinding across a surreal nocturnal landscape lit by halogen lights and blanketed in black ash. The stuttering, lurching rhythms and fractured tectonic dub-bass that appears on "Turn Ting Up" turns it into a sort of warped, pitch-black cybernetic dancehall mutation that is laced with murderous drill tones and wobbly low-end pulsations. "Shake Hands" picks up the tempo with it's malevolent industrialized raggacore throb, unleashing a crushing break beat attack infested with growling machines and gut-rumbling low end, and closing with the gruesome black dubstep of "Names".
Track Samples:
Sample : Names Not Down Not Coming In
Sample : Piper

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SEA OF TREES   Aokigahara   CD   (Misanthropic Art Productions)    10.98

The debut Ep from Sea Of Trees falls into the general realm of melancholic, elegiac black metal that the Korean label Misanthropic Art specializes in, and is one of my favorite discs that I've gotten from the label this month. Sea Of Trees is a project from one of the members of a Dutch black metal band called Nachtvorst (who I'm not familiar with), and takes it's name and the title of this disc from the ghostly Aokigahara forest at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan. The three tracks that all make up "Aokigahara" move through a combination of blasting, raw black metal that uses some really fantastic doleful melodies, and softer interludes where the music is carried by just drums and acoustic guitar. It's incredibly sad sounding stuff, but also beautiful and majestic, with awesome melodic tremolo riffing that really moved me; the sound of Sea Of Trees is comparable to what you might get if the members of the Japanese post-hardcore band Envy formed a black metal band, with melodic parts that very much remind me of classic Envy like All the Footprints You've Ever Left and the Fear Expecting Ahead set to blasting, howling BM fury...
"Aokigahara I" begins with lilting folk guitars drifting through spacious reverb for a minute before the band erupts into their slow, melancholy black metal. Early on, the slower, doom-laden drumming carries the buzzing, distorted guitars and their gloomy melodies over backing acoustic strumming, and the vocalist comes in with a harsh high-pitched shriek that quickly turns into an exasperated, weeping vocal style that's sort of comparable to Nattramn from Silencer. For black metal, this song is incredibly emotional and pretty, with those guitar melodies that remind me so much of Envy, but then the band will suddenly explode into furious blasting and razor-sharp tremolo riffs, a scathing BM assault that later downshifts into slower galloping speeds. After that, there's a short acoustic guitar track ("Aokigahara II") that connects the two main songs, leading right into the final track "Aokigahara III", a slower, more doom-laden song that continues the anguished feel of the previous music but comes out heavier and more aggressive, the band winding through a series of lumbering riffs and faster blastbeat-laced parts that continue to break off into more of those fantastic sorrowful melodies. Really great stuff from this band, I'm looking forward to hearing more from them soon, hopefully - absolutely recommended for those into black metal that evokes powerful feelings of heartache, abject loneliness, isolation and loss rather than blood thirst and violence...
Misanthropic Art's stuff always looks great, and this disc is really striking, with beautiful high contrast photography and a partially translucent disc.
Track Samples:
Sample : Aokigahara I
Sample : Aokigahara III

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SEKTARISM   Hosanna Sathana   CASSETTE   (Zanjeer Zani Production)    6.50

Somewhat modeled after the legendary French black metal collective LLN, the small n' obscure Les Apôtres De l'Ignominie (or "Apostles of Ignominy") circle is made up of a triad of strange Satanic black metal bands that include Darvulia and Malhkebre alongside a shadowy doom metal band called Sektarism. I'm a big fan of all of these bands, but out of all of them, Sektarism is easily the most fucked-up sounding of the lot. A couple of years ago, I listed a Cd release from Sektarism called L'Offrande, which featured one long song of stumbling, shambling doom that was swept up in a murky basement atmosphere of drunken Satanic ritual and hateful ravings, with a really low-fi and noisy recording that was maybe a step or two above 4-track quality, and with so much rumbling feedback and dissonant guitar noise that I described that recording as a weird combination of blackened ritualistic doom in the vein of Trees and Bloody Panda, and the most destroyed, distorted moments of Fushitsusha's Pathétique as filtered through the rotting skull-meat of a French opium addict. Sounds pretty great, right? That Ep won me over immediately, but it wasn't until just a few weeks ago that I came upon the other two releases that Sektarism had put out in the wake of L'Offrande. Only released on cassette by the equally mysterious new imprint Zanjeer Zani Production, the professionally assembled and printed Le Testament and Hosanna Sathana tapes just came out last year (2011), and each follows the same route as the first Ep: a long, sprawling blackened garage-doom jam that wanders drunkenly through an extremely low-fi haze of extreme misanthropic hatred, narcotics, noisy primitive doom, and shrieking Satanic flesh-lust. If you are one of the few that have already fallen under the black spell of Sektarism's shambling, seemingly improvised sludge, these more recent recordings are essential.
Hosanna Sathana is the second Sektarism tape, and again, it's one long, nearly half-hour track that grabs huge fistfuls of blasphemous imagery and Satanic vomit and smears it all against a backdrop of stumbling, low-fi doom metal. And again, it's raw as hell, the meandering and formless drug-damaged Satanic garage doom shrouded in room hiss and ambient murk. The song starts off with chugging Frostian riffs and droning murky chords rumbling amid buzzing spacious ambient room sounds as the drummer plows ahead, seemingly improvising at times as the band chugs through spacious droning sludge and primitive doom metal. Eklezjas'Tik Berzerk's unintelligible mewling shrieks and moans rise out of the background, reciting strange French lyrics that celebrating death-worship, disease and Satanism, constantly shift from ecstatic chanting to bizarre possessed mewling to guttural, orgasmic barking as the rest of the band wanders in and out of strange psychedelic jamming. The riffs collapsing into billowing clouds of effects and feedback, the bass droning incessantly and often circling endlessly on simple hypnotic grooves while the drummer drifts into lots of jazzy fills and improvised rhythm changes. To me, "Hosanna Sathana" seems more abstract and droning than the other Sektraism tapes, with more forays into long stretches of rumbling amp-drone and feedback hum, and at times taps into a similar exploratory vibe as Spanish avant-doom metallers Orthodox, albeit one that is far more wretched and diseased sounding...
Released in a limited edition of ninety-nine copies.

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SEKTARISM   Le Testament   CASSETTE   (Zanjeer Zani Production)    6.50

Somewhat modeled after the legendary French black metal collective LLN, the small n' obscure Les Apôtres De l'Ignominie (or "Apostles of Ignominy") circle is made up of a triad of strange Satanic black metal bands that include Darvulia and Malhkebre alongside a shadowy doom metal band called Sektarism. I'm a big fan of all of these bands, but out of all of them, Sektarism is easily the most fucked-up sounding of the lot. A couple of years ago, I listed a Cd release from Sektarism called L'Offrande, which featured one long song of stumbling, shambling doom that was swept up in a murky basement atmosphere of drunken Satanic ritual and hateful ravings, with a really low-fi and noisy recording that was maybe a step or two above 4-track quality, and with so much rumbling feedback and dissonant guitar noise that I described that recording as a weird combination of blackened ritualistic doom in the vein of Trees and Bloody Panda, and the most destroyed, distorted moments of Fushitsusha's Pathétique as filtered through the rotting skull-meat of a French opium addict. Sounds pretty great, right? That Ep won me over immediately, but it wasn't until just a few weeks ago that I came upon the other two releases that Sektarism had put out in the wake of L'Offrande. Only released on cassette by the equally mysterious new imprint Zanjeer Zani Production, the professionally assembled and printed Le Testament and Hosanna Sathana tapes just came out last year (2011), and each follows the same route as the first Ep: a long, sprawling blackened garage-doom jam that wanders drunkenly through an extremely low-fi haze of extreme misanthropic hatred, narcotics, noisy primitive doom, and shrieking Satanic flesh-lust. If you are one of the few that have already fallen under the black spell of Sektarism's shambling, seemingly improvised sludge, these more recent recordings are essential.
The third of the Sektarism tapes, Le Testament meanders through it's black-lit delirium for almost twenty minutes, the music loose and probably mostly improvised, the sound filthy and covered in cobwebs, carrying on with more of their gnarled, raw doom metal that wanders off into noisy jamming, shapeless dirges and bizarre behavior throughout the whole song. The drooling vocals of front man Eklezjas'Tik Berzerk offer up endless Satanic devotion in an incoherent stream of profanities and vileness delivered in French, and the performance is cloaked in a drugged, occult atmosphere with such a garage-level production that it feels as if you are listening to something much older than this actually is. Sektarism stumbles through sparsely arranged dirges and heavy spacious riffs that crawl over Shamaanik B.'s messy drumming, the band frequently staggering to a sudden halt and abruptly shifting into another riff, or collapsing into a long stretch of feedback and amp noise. Wiry blackened guitar leads appear over the chugging doom riffs, and the winding bass slithers across pounding tribal rhythms and sheets of polluted feedback, and by the end of "Le Testament", the band wanders off into a din of scraped guitar strings blanketed in effects, gargling vocal noises, and droning feedback. There's a few precedents for the kind of low-fi black doom that Sektarism practices - it has kind of the same garagey, ramshackle feel as old Upsidedown Cross, Finnish improv-doom metallers Night Must Fall, Persistence In Mourning’s noisy sludge, and the murky black mess of Alkerdeel - but the stain of demented French black metal clings to this foul music, becoming a form of blighted metal all its own...
Limited to ninety-nine copies.

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SEKTARISM   L'Offrande   CASSETTE   (Zanjeer Zani Production)    6.50

Now available on limited edition cassette from the narco-scum at Zanjeer Zani, limited to a mere ninety-nine copies.
A single seventeen-minute track of blackened, Satan-worshipping doom called "L'Offrande" (or "The Offering") from France's Sektarism, who debuted with this Ep on the Insidious Poisoning imprint that I just discovered through one of our French suppliers. I have no idea who's in this band, their page on metal-archives.com is pretty barren, but this disc is fucking gnarly sounding. It’s blackened doom, incredibly (ridiculously?) bleak and miserable sounding as the band lumbers through a frequently shapeless doom-dirge that's sometimes crushingly heavy and pummeling, sometimes floating through a squealing cloud of visceral feedback and thunderous amplifier noise that gets into psychedelic out-guitar improve territory at times. These freaks evoke a brand of droning, monotonous crawl with a similar nightmarish ritualistic vibe as bands like Trees, Burning Witch and Bloody Panda, other comparisons might include the suicidal blackened doom of Nortt and black funeral doom weirdoes Senthil, but Sektarism are a bit more fucked-up and psychotic, incorporating elements of black metal into their sound and fronted by a deranged singer who moans and chants and wails like a shaman in the throes of visions, hurling seemingly random blasphemies against the oozing wall of dissonant guitar noise and spacious rumble, with these stretches of howling blackened amp-howl that sounds like the band is wandering into a narcotic haze, with moments that approach Fushitsusha-style guitar destruction. And they aren’t kidding around about their love for Satan; based on my limited grasp of the French language, the lyrics for "L'Offrande" read like poetry for a sacrificial rite. It’s sloppy, stumbling and totally evil psych-doom, way more raw and droning and noisy than the likes of Trees, but just as twisted and creepy sounding.
Track Samples:
Sample : L'Offrande

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SEKTOR 304   Subliminal Actions   CD   (Malignant)    9.99

Track Samples:
Sample : By The Throat
Sample : A Carving On Metal Skin
Sample : Terminal Stage
Sample : Vultures

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SEPTIC FLESH   The Great Mass   LP   (Season Of Mist)    23.00

Track Samples:
Sample : A Great Mass of Death
Sample : Ocean of Grey
Sample : Theriantrophy
Sample : The Vampire From Nazareth

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SEPTIC FLESH   The Great Mass   CD   (Season Of Mist)    13.98

Track Samples:
Sample : A Great Mass of Death
Sample : Ocean of Grey
Sample : Theriantrophy
Sample : The Vampire From Nazareth

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SERVANTS OF THE APOCALYPTIC GOAT RAVE   self-titled   CD   (Sublight Records)    13.98

This is the only album that ever surfaced from this short-lived side project, released on the now defunct Sublight label back in 2006. I just recently stumbled across it through one of the distributors I work with and as soon as I saw the name and that it was a side-project from Jason Köhnen aka Bong-Ra, I had to check it out. Working with Belgian breakcore producer Sickboy, Kohnen delivered a ripping collection of black magic obsessed breakcore, furious electronic mayhem designed for disciples of the "Goatrave". Combining blasphemous imagery, ridiculous Satanic kitsch, truckloads of horror movie samples from the 60s and 70s, and sampled European horror movie scores with brutal spastic breakcore, the Servants offer up the most over-the-top Satanic beat-chaos ever. Long Euro-horror film samples and evil dissonant piano music becomes intros for blasting satanic breakcore assaults, and soundscapes of moaning undead monks and chanting witches blend with string sections lifted from soundtrack sessions for ancient Hammer horror movies. Ultra-distorted bass buzzes and grinds beneath the violent skittering drum n' bass freakouts and high-speed distorted kick drums, and blazing distorted rave synths are fused to blasts of skull-rattling gabba beats. The beats on this disc are fucked up and ferocious, skittering stuttering spastic cut-up rhythms that are almost as contorted and warped and pummeling as those of Shitmat, but they're wreathed in swirling opium den ambience, rattled by maniacal roto-tom freak-outs and the ritual drumming of a black mass, the sound suddenly swelling with Omen-style Latin chorales and monstrous industrial drones. The imagery is part Electric Wizard-style blacklight satanism, part tongue-in-cheek self-referencing, and the tracks have these absurd titles like "Tomb Of The Black Light Serpent Goddess", "Rave Bird with Sirens in White Gloves", and "Goat Rave versus The Instruments Of Torture". Most of the voices that appear on the album are sampled from cult Euro-horror films of the 60's and 7-0's, but there are some bizarre demonic gargling invocations and goblin-shrieks that also appear on a couple of tracks. The whole album is loaded with this stuff, lots of references to the works of Mario Bava, Italian gialli, Brit horror icon Peter Cushing, late 60's satanic pop culture, 90's rave culture, tons of layered samples, the pounding metallic breakcore racing through patchwork hallucinations of human sacrifice, sweaty witch-sex, and drug-chugging goat worship. Awesome....
Track Samples:
Sample : Blood of Three Virgins
Sample : Goat Rave versus The Instrument of Torture
Sample : Tomb of the Black Light Sperpent Goddess

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SIGH   Gallows Gallery   CD   (The End)    10.98

OK, so we've had the original release of Gallows Gallery that came out on Baphomet in stock ever since it came out, but I went ahead and picked up the more recent re-issue of the album that came out on The End that features a re-mixed and re-mastered version of the album as well as six bonus tracks that are exclusive to this version (as well as slightly altered album art). I never really understood why they switched labels and re-issued this a mere year after the first one came out; sure, this redux is an improvement sound-wise, but I personally didn't mind the rougher recording of the Baphomet album. Anyways, at this point I would recommend this as the definitive version to own if for no other reason than the presence of the additional tracks, which include a mix of demo material and alternate takes from the album sessions.
Here's my original write-up for the first version of the album :
We've been waiting for this follow up to 2001 masterpiece that was Sigh's Imaginary Sonicscape, and boy does it deliver, just not quite in the way we were expecting. Less "psychedelic", at least stylistically, than Imaginary Sonicscape, whose Venom-influenced metal was mutated by a brain baking conglom of Goblin-style prog rock, Hammond organs out the wazoo, and a total psych overload that converts your spinal column into a lava lamp, Gallows Gallery takes Sign on an even further trajectory from their origins as the OG black metal outfit that was supposed to release their first album on Euronymous' Deathlike Silence label before he got stabbed to death. We're not even really hearing anything close to black metal on Gallows Gallery...nah, this is total power metal, all bombastic Iron Maiden-on-steroids guitar harmonies and insanely dense, heroic vocal harmonies, but totally fucked up and hijacking all sorts of non-metal sounds into the mix, just as we'd expect from these guys...incorporating classical music, melodic punk, jazz, J-pop, and good old 80's heavy metal, as well as the sonic weapon experimentation that's caused some minor question marks about this release. There's also all sorts of "non-metal" instrumentation (Fender Rhodes, clavinet, sitar, tabla, gong, Yamaha DX-7, Taisho-Koto (a type of electric banjo), Tibetan bells, Minimoog, Theremin, glockenspiel, and samplers)...and a crapload of guest musicians: Gunface (The Red Chord), Gus G. (Firewind, ex-Dream Evil), Niklas Sundin (Dark Tranquility), and Paul Groundwell (Thine) all drop guitar solos, Bruce Lamont ducks in with a sweet saxophone solo (the song "In A Drowse" is our fave track off the album and sports a killer sax/guitar hook), and Killjoy from Necrophagia and Metatron from Meads Of Asphodel show up to narrate on two of the songs. The whole album is so immensely catchy and anthemic, like an avant-garde power metal Anime soundtrack, or a metallized Yes-scored Nintendo game score. Definitely the heaviest shit these guys have done so far. Absolutely recommended!!
Track Samples:
Sample : Confession to Be Buried
Sample : Jazzy Outtake 1 [*]
Sample : Messiahplan
Sample : Pale Monument

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SILCHARDE   De Martyrs A Bourreaux   CD   (Frozen Wing Records)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Laissé Pour Mort
Sample : La Sixième Porte De L'Astral..
Sample : Le Diocèse De Marteau

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SILCHARDE   Sortilege de Mecreant   CD   (Frozen Wing Records)    11.98

Before I discovered the French label Frozen Wing, I had been looking high and low for anything from the mysterious French group Silcharde, whose releases had been proving to be pretty elusive beyond the super-limited cassettes that I originally found on Infernal Kommando. I fell in love with those tapes and the murky black phantasmagoria that they contained, so I was stoked to find that there were three different full-length discs that were all released on Frozen Wing.
Sortilège De Mécréant is the first full length disc from Silcharde, seven tracks of deformed industrial drone and fragments of black metal melody. The tracks are largely woven around simple rhythmic elements, such as the steady slow pulse of a hi-hat cymbal that continues through the entire title track, as fragments of blackened guitar, tribal drumming, and sheets of hazy reverb-soaked noise drift across the canvas. The dissonant, evil guitar figures that emerge throughout Sortilège are the one thread that connects this to the more experimental edges of Frenchy black metal; mostly this shares a similar ghostly, demented atmosphere as the weird ambient side-projects that were part of the Les Légions Noires like Moëvöt and Amaka Hahina. This is dreamlike, formless music, full of strange wailing sounds drift through the blackness, distant murmurs and grunts echoing endlessly through catacomb passageways. There's nothing here resembling "lyrics", just tortured grunts and sobs barely recognizable as human, appearing in dark corners of the soundspace. Crashing gongs, thick clouds of prayer-bowl hum and bowed-cymbal drone reverberate throughout underground chambers lined with walls of stacked skulls, and percussion instruments appear mainly in the form of huge cymbal crashes, gong-like reverberations, and brief flurries of tribal pummel. It's hard to tell when one song ends and the next begin; everything melts together in a gauzy wash of sound. The band does veer from this sound at the very end of the album, on a "hidden" bonus track where Silcharde wraps a bunch of crackling lock-groove loops around those crashing cymbals and demonic roaring, closing the album with an unexpected swell of harsh industrial grinding.
This falls somewhere in between the likes of Lustmord (circa Monstrous Soul) and Inade, and the tweaked black insanity of LLN bands like Moevot and Satanicum Tenebrae, and is (along with the other two discs on Frozen Wing) recommended to any fans of weird black ambience...
Limited to five hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Le Terme D'Une Agonie
Sample : Vice Et Vertu En La Folie

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SISSY SPACEK   Dash   LP   (Gilgongo)    15.98

This is the twenty-one song Dash Ep that also appears on the more recent Cd release, also on Gilgongo. The Dash Ep that came out late last year is a savage slab of noisecore, probably my fave record of all of the recent Sissy Spacek offerings. It's got forty-one tracks of improvised hardcore mangle and extreme low-fi grindnoise, total destruction from a lineup that included Lasse Marhaug from Jazkamer and Will Strangeland (No Age / Silver Daggers / Tearist) joining the core duo of John Wiese and Corydon Ronnau.
The material from the Dash cassette/12" that are featured here is Sissy Spacek in top nuclear-skullshred mode, whipping through forty-some tracks of extreme noisecore fused with pure harsh noise. It's as abrasive as anything I've ever heard from them, each short twenty second blast exploding out of the speakers in a cacophonous din of shrieking feedback, ramshackle blastbeats and collapsing hardcore thrash, heaps of scrap-metal destruction, garbled nonsensical screams and guttural noises, a thick cloud of toxic hiss and feedback enveloping the entire recording. If Incapacitants and Hanatarash had ever hooked up with Anal Cunt for a collaborative 7" back in the early 90s, it would no doubt have sounded very similar to this. The cut-up/collage techniques that Wiese and company utilized on their earlier noisecore-concrete recordings doesn't seem to be as prominently employed here; instead, they simply go apeshit with an all-out improvised grind attack that channels pure bestial energy and speeds it all up to 1000 mile per hour blasts of sonic violence.
This is some of the harshest noisecore/blurr I've heard in years. Total earshred.
Track Samples:
Sample : Anneal
Sample : Birth Control
Sample : Bone Flour
Sample : Burmese Yellow Cake
Sample : Fire Extinguisher
Sample : SISSY SPACEK-Dash
Sample : Killer Slook

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SISSY SPACEK   Dash / Anti-Clockwise   CD   (Gilgongo)    12.98

Part of the recent Sissy Spacek Cd reissue series that came out on Gilgongo, all of which are already sold out from the label...
This roughly twenty minute long disc from noisecore / improv band Sissy Spacek has fifty-eight tracks of extremely short, brutal noisecore that's taken from their Dash 12" that also came out on Gilgongo a while back, and an import 7". It's total destruction from a lineup that included Lasse Marhaug from Jazkamer and Will Strangeland (No Age / Silver Daggers / Tearist) joining the core duo of John Wiese and Corydon Ronnau.
The material from the Dash cassette/12" that are featured here is Sissy Spacek in top nuclear-skullshred mode, whipping through forty-some tracks of extreme noisecore fused with pure harsh noise. It's as abrasive as anything I've ever heard from them, each short twenty second blast exploding out of the speakers in a cacophonous din of shrieking feedback, ramshackle blastbeats and collapsing hardcore thrash, heaps of scrap-metal destruction, garbled nonsensical screams and guttural noises, a thick cloud of toxic hiss and feedback enveloping the entire recording. If Incapacitants and Hanatarash had ever hooked up with Anal Cunt for a collaborative 7" back in the early 90s, it would no doubt have sounded very similar to this. The cut-up/collage techniques that Wiese and company utilized on their earlier noisecore-concrete recordings doesn't seem to be as prominently employed here; instead, they simply go apeshit with an all-out improvised grind attack that channels pure bestial energy and speeds it all up to 1000 mile per hour blasts of sonic violence.
The tracks from the Anti-Clockwise 7" (originally released in a tiny limited edition through A Dear Girl Called Wendy) are dropped right into the middle of the disc, book ended on each side by the material from the Dash record, and why not? It's all cut from the same blood-stained, gasoline-soaked cloth, relentless microblasts of ultra-noisy noisecore spliced with total junknoise chaos. Both records produce some of the harshest noisecore/blurr I've heard in years. Total earshred.
Track Samples:
Sample : Anneal
Sample : Birth Control
Sample : Bone Flour
Sample : Burmese Yellow Cake
Sample : Fire Extinguisher
Sample : SISSY SPACEK-Dash / Anti-Clockwise
Sample : Killer Slook

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SISSY SPACEK   Grisp   CD   (Gilgongo)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Jerk Loose
Sample : Real Trash
Sample : Tribulation

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SISSY SPACEK   Rip   CD   (Gilgongo)    12.98

While the other Sissy Spacek discs on Gilgongo that Iive reviewed on this week's new arrivals list were mostly made up of the band's extreme low-fi noisecore, Rip captures the band in their more abstract mode of operation as they engage in harsh, disorienting exercises in music concrete extremism, cut-up improvised assaults, and savage noise hallucinations. Core members Corydon Ronnau and John Wiese appear alongside a bunch of various guest collaborators that include members of Yellow Swans, Death Sentence Panda and Open City, performing in both live situations and studio sessions, and it's pretty much total brutality all the way through. Wiese takes piles of sound that include random live noise, violent percussion freak outs, avalanches of junk, electronic slop, horrific throat noise that sounds like Randy H.Y. Yau is somewhere off-camera puking his skull out, and brief fragments of formless grindcore, and stitches it all back together for these ten tracks of concrete cut-up mayhem. And mayhem it is, man; I'm reeling by track four, the onslaught of mangled tape-machine vomit and drum clatter having peppered my skull like bits of grenade frag, putrid howls, saxophone squonk and the sound of a drum kit being hurled forcefully down an elevator shaft over and over leaving me dizzy from the lightspeed shape shifting that these assorted snippets of sonic violence are subjected to. When "Terminal" hits me around the midway point, the cumulative effect iis such that I feel like I'm being blasted by both Japanese junk-noise terrorist K2 and cult noisecore freaks World at the exact same time that a building is being demolished outside my window. I don't why I thought that this was going to be any less pulverizing than the noisecore Sissy Spacek discs; might have been the close-up pic of the femanine rump on the cover that lead me to think I was in for something a little more "sensitive".
Track Samples:
Sample : Face Glue
Sample : Open Fire
Sample : Terminal

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SISSY SPACEK   Freaked With Jet   CD   (Gilgongo)    12.98

Part of the extensive Cd reissue campaign that Gilgongo kicked off last year, Freaked With Jet is a compilation of assorted older 7"s from the noisecore / improv / electro-acoustic noise ensemble Sissy Spacek, featuring drummer Charlie Mumma, noisician John Wiese and vocalist Corydon Ronnau. As soon as you see the track list and notice that the disc contains seventy-five tracks, it's obvious that we're dealing with Sissy Spacek's noisecore material on this disc. Gathering together the Gutter Splint, Vanishing point, Vacuum, Fortune and Epistasis Eps as well as their side from the split with Agathocles on Ultra Eczema, this is a pretty thorough documentation of the band's nuclear shock grindnoise recording circa 2008, which was when all of this stuff was recorded. I've stocked a couple of the 7"s here at C-Blast before, and those reviews are included below; the others that I wasn't previously familiar with are in the same vein of completely improvised micro-burst noisecore in the vein of Seven Minutes Of Nausea, early Anal Cunt, early Sore Throat, Nihilist Commando and the like. For me, these Cd reissues are a fucking godsend, because as much as I love noisecore, the 7" format is a huge pain in the ass for me, and it's great to be able to get earfucked by these recordings without constantly having to flip a record over every couple of minutes. One of the things that I really dig about these particular Sissy Spacek recordings is that the band has completely replaced the usual blurr of guitar noise with pure electronic vomit, splattering Mumma's trash-can blastbeats and epileptic drumming with harsh feedback, metallic scrape, and blasts of distortion.
On the Fortune/The Eyes Of Men tracks, the band delivers an immediate, improvised grind assault that's just as skull-rupturing as their earlier grindnoise cut-up collages. These twenty-six tracks are thirty second explosions of noisy thrash, blast beats, mangled noise, blown-out screams, and scraping electronic splurt, not cut-up and spliced together like the early Ep material, and instead are more like brutal short shocks of free-noise and hyper speed hardcore smashed together into micro bursts of furious energy, seriously HARSH, and extremely low-fi. There's no guitar or bass, just drums and vocals and Wiese unleashing piercing electronics, taking the vocals themselves and processing them into harsh clots of noise, everything racing at breakneck speed, like an atomic blast of Neos crossed with 7 Minutes Of Nausea and Masonna.
The stuff from the Vanishing Point flexi-disc is also a return to the drums/electronics/vocals lineup and face-shredding, chopped-up noisecore that originally hooked me on Sissy Spacek. Seven ultra-short tracks of improvised blur that blasts by in a minute and a half, compressed blasts of extreme low-fi blurrcore that combine hyperspeed blast beats and noisy guitar slop with distorted, unintelligible screams mangled vocalizations and an undercurrent of cement-mixer noise that give this a real harsh, teeth-scraping abrasiveness.
Vicious! Highly recommended if you're into the brutal shock-violence of Fear Of God, Arsedestroyer, Nikudorei, Nihilist Commando, Funeral Mongoloids, Minch, and 7 Minutes Of Nausea...
Track Samples:
Sample : Berserk
Sample : The Eyes Of Men
Sample : Gutter Splint
Sample : Kakistocracy
Sample : SISSY SPACEK-Freaked With Jet
Sample : Mechanical Separation

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SISSY SPACEK   Harm   CD   (Troniks)    10.98

Harm is the latest blast of improv holocaust from Sissy Spacek, arriving on the heels of that recent batch of limited edition Cd reissues from the band that came out on Gilgongo (and which are all now out of print from the label - see my listings for those discs for the last copies available). This five-track Ep is of the band in my favorite mode of operation - brutal, low-fi noisecore that mashes their hyper speed freeform grindnoise with a wonderfully noxious boombox recording quality that gives me the same sort of shock-kicks that I used to get off of listening to old crappy dubs of tapes from Seven Minutes Of Nausea, Patareni, AxCx, Violent Headache, and Gerogerigegege. There's five tracks on Harm clocking in at a around twenty five minutes or so, but each track appears to be comprised of a mix of shorter electrocution attacks and longer harsh noise workouts. And that's something that there is a lot of here - the core lineup of John Wiese, Corydon Ronnau, and Charlie Mumma is joined by the esteemed Phil Blankenship, who some of you might know as the head of the mighty Troniks imprint, but who everyone should know as the force behind the equally mighty Cherry Point, a long-time favorite of mine from the American harsh noise scene, and he makes his presence known quite clearly. As if the cacophony of caveman-on-speed drumming and brick-pick guitar savagery and hysterical vocal gibberish wasn't enough to light your synapses on fire, Blankenship comes in and douses the proceedings with plenty of brutal, speaker-wrecking feedback and extreme distortion that at some points (the entire length of "Decoder", for instance) assaults the listener with a veritable wall of cement-mixer noise. There's a few smatterings of the kind of improvisational abstract fuckery that the guys in Sissy Spacek like to mess around with when they're not spewing noisecore jizz all over the place, too; "Nude Strike" and "Rat Hole" are back-to-back exercises in extremely murky freeform clatter and cable-skizz abuse that just make the grinding chaos sound all the more vicious when they come back around to the vomitous screeching terror and deformed nuclear hardcore of the closer "Aktion Cookies". It's hot shit that will especially excite any of you mutants who dig listening to The Haters and Tokyo Anal Dynamite and Anal Cunt's 88 Song E.P. all in the same sitting. Limited to only two hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Decoder
Sample : Events

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SKROL   New Laws New Orders   CD   (Twilight)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Dogma And Ritual
Sample : Lex Lacerations
Sample : Return To Chaos

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SLAKTARE   From Fall Of Leaves To Painful Wrath   2 x CD   (Misanthropic Art Productions)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Lunaris
Sample : Von Nebel Ward Bedeckt Das Land

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SLAUTER XSTROYES   Winter Kill   CD   (Forged In Fire / Rockadrome)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Black Rose and Thorns
Sample : City of Sirtel
Sample : Winter Kill

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SLAUTER XSTROYES   Free The Beast   CD   (Forged In Fire / Rockadrome)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Free the Beast
Sample : Mass Confusion
Sample : Wicked Bitch

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SLEETMUTE NIGHTMUTE   Night Of Long Knives   LP   (Fast Weapons)    15.98

Talk about a wait...nearly ten years after the band acrimoniously broke up in the midst of a tour, Sleetmute Nightmute's Night Of Long Knives has finally been dusted off and released on vinyl. I remember back when these neurotic no-wave noisejunkies were around, I think I might have even gotten a demo from 'em; I definitely remember digging their crazed, noisy blastpunk and the raging dual female singers. I hadn't heard any of their stuff in years though and was surprised to see this Lp suddenly pop up a few months ago. The band might be long gone, but this is still a killer record that fans of wonky, dissonant art-grind and no-wave influenced thrash will dig a lot, aiming as it does for the damaged frontal lobes of those who drool after the likes of Silentist, Flying Luttenbachers, Total Shutdown, Deep Jew and likeminded skronk dealers. Night Of Long Knives is a assault of scattershot noisy hardcore with the two ladies belting out these bratty gang-chants, the guitarist contorting the strings into bizarre chords and chunks of atonal skronk, laying down droning tremolo riffs and sharp jangly anti-melodies while the rhythm section fires off angular lop-sided grooves and stop/start blastbeat attacks and blasting messy jagged thrash. Some of the songs are pounded out as slower, clanging dirges, while others just completely break apart into walls of guitar noise. I bet that these guys spent a lot of time listening to early Sonic Youth, too, the out-of-tune guitar assault sort of conjures images of Confusion Is Sex and Bad Moon Rising pumped full of cheap speed and set aflame. Also noteworthy is that Charlie Mumma, sometime-drummer for noisecore / improv / cut-up ensemble Sissy Spacek, played drums on this album. I've been worn out on a lot of the newer no-wave influenced stuff, but when that influence is combined with the aggression and speed of hardcore and grind, my ears tend to perk up. This was originally slated to come out on Troubleman in 2003 before it was shelved, and would have fit right in next to the harsher bands on the label like Orthrelm, Flying Luttenbachers, and Black Dice...
Released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.

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SPAZZ   La Revancha   LP   (625 Thrash)    14.98

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SPECIAL INTERESTS   Issue Six   MAGAZINE   (Freak Animal)    8.50

Totally flaked on stocking this at C-Blast when it first came out, but just in case you still need to grab this for your SI collection shelf, I've got it in stock. As always, Special Interests feeds my hunger for the more abrasive and aggressive fringes of underground electronic music, avant-garde weirdness, black industrial / power electronics / harsh noise, musings on trangressive art and the aesthetics of the culture, etc., etc., and the sixth issue of SI has my fave lineup of articles and text yet, with some really knockout pieces that supplied me with a couple of days of good reading. You get long, informative interrogations with Swedish industrial noise artist Treriksroset, misanthropic Power Electronics master Slogun, cut-up psychnoise duo Perispirit (which happens to feature Ricardo Donoso from Crucial Blast's own avant-deathdoom outfit Ehnahre), Finnish sound artist Mike Taanila, an interview with the guys at As Loud As Possible magazine, interviews with Gnaw Their Tongues, Ke/Hil, Control and Black Boned Angel, the totalitarian industrial group Militia, and the "Essentials" column featuring fave-lists from Pekka PT (Sick Seed), GX Jupitter-Larsen, and Chris Groves (Night Science). There's a neat article on what is currently going on across the map of the U.S. industrial underground, a piece penned by GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters) on industrial cassette culture, and as always, several pages of extensive reviews on an assortment of extreme/outsider/transgressive books and zines, and loads of industrial/power electronics/noise albums and tapes all get examined by the SI staff, followed by a pair of grisly photo-collage pieces from Waltteri M. The highlight of the issue, though, is Arvo Zylo's very long and very in-depth interview with Boyd Rice; this is honestly worth the cover price all on its own. This is also notable for being the first issue of Special Interests to go to the magazine's new larger format. As always, highly recommended...

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SPECIAL INTERESTS   Issue Seven   MAGAZINE   (Freak Animal)    8.50

The latest (early 2012) issue of the Finnish noise zine Special Interests is, as always, one of my essential reads. It didn't take long for Mikko Aspa's publishing venture to fully fill a particular hole that had existed in the subterranean press for some time; sure, As Loud As Possible totally blew me away with it's massive inaugural issue, but that mag looks like it's only going to be coming out on a quasi-annual basis, and it doesn't quite get it's bloody mitts as deep into the sewer as SI does. Some of the language issues that have dogged the mag since the beginning are still there (the English text can be a little clumsy at times, as it's a second language for some of the writers) but the information and message rings loud and clear, and any halfway literate fan of power electronics, industrial, harsh noise, dark ambient and other abrasive experimental forms should have a spot cleared away on their coffee table for each and every new issue. This time around, the mag is in the larger size format that started with issue six and printed on the usual high-quality paper stock, and it's got the usual eye/brain-popping array of writing and art smeared across the fifty-some pages: there's a long interview with Jason Crumer (Aluminum Noise / Facedowninshit / various solo noise efforts), a lengthy interview with the legendary Dave Phillips from the pioneering Swiss grind/noise band Fear Of God and experimental noise ensemble Schimpfluch-Gruppe (this is an excellent read, with a solid line of inquiry from Arvo Zylo), more Mikko Aspa interrogations unleashed upon the likes of Fumio Kosakai (C.C.C.C / Incapacitants, etc) and harsh electronics project Encephalophonic, a piece on neo-folk upstarts Cult Of Youth, an article on "noise documentaries" and the filmmakers who assemble them, a couple of really interesting in-depth pieces on the guys behind the noise/black metal label Posh Isolation and the excellent Phage Tapes imprint, and of course, a crapload of detailed, well-written reviews on all kinds of recent offerings from the realms of PE, noise, avant-garde extremism, transgressive art books, etc. The tail end of the issue has got another installment of the "Essentials" column where a couple of key artists give us the run-down on the shit that they were influenced by (this time it's written by the guys behind Wertham, Dieter Muh, and the mighty Mike Dando of Con-Dom), a discussion with Klaus Hansen (Ashley C/Novo Progresso) on the aesthetics of the cassette tape within the context of industrial music, and the last two pages feature some wild collage art from herr Aspa himself. A top-notch effort as always...

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SS ELECTRONICS   Recycled Music Series   CASSETTE   (RRRecords)    4.50

Noise icon Richard Ramirez might have the most extensive listing of bands and projects of anyone on Discogs.com. Pull up his entry on the site, and you'll see a list of projects that almost scrolls right off the fuckin' page. Lots of these bands are well known to me (his solo work under his own name, of course, as well as Werewolf Jerusalem, An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter, Last Rape, etc) while the majority of list is all news to me. One of these lesser known projects of Ramirez's is S.S.Electronics, who released this short cassette in 2005 on the RRRecords Recycled Tape Series. Compared to his other stuff, the sounds on this tape are more over-modulated harsh noise than PE, but PE elements appear throughout the recording, which ends up being a low-fidelity noise collage steeped in an obsession with homosexual skinhead culture and films. Ever seen Bruce LaBruce's No Skin Off My Ass? Richard has, and this skuzzy noise/drone exercise is an homage to it and similar films, fetishizing boots and braces, shaved skulls and dangling cocks, queer skin porn and nazisploitation through the imagery found on the (very NSFW) S.S. Electronics website and encoded in the long stretches of extreme feedback manipulation, bursts of crunchy static and sudden squelchy jump-cuts that resemble a malfunctioning Atari 2600 game soundtrack that are found on this tape, moving through rumbling mechanical drones and churning feedback loops, samples, avalanches of densely-layered, violent junk-noise, slabs of massive, brutal bass-heavy noise wall (which make up pretty much the entire second side), and short assaults of skull-crushing bass abuse. All of these noise tracks are often formed into heavily rhythmic and pulsating loops that give rise to seething vocals and excerpts from what sound like gay-sex themed radio programs, and things can get pretty menacing when that noisy racket is suddenly focused into one of these grinding machine mantras...
Track Samples:
Sample : SS Electronics - Recycled
Sample : SS Electronics - Recycled

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SSORC   Infidel Eternal   LP + 7"   (Magic Bullet)    16.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Bury my coffin by my own hands
Sample : Caller of the typhoon
Sample : The relentless agony intimidat

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STARKWEATHER / OVERMARS   split   LP   (Deathwish)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Armed Memory
Sample : Last Sail Sinking
Sample : Nightmare Factory
Sample : Solitary - Following The Sperm Whale (Once Again)

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STEEL HOOK PROSTHESES   Cut Off The Nose To Spite The Face   2 x CD   (Szymic Records)    18.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Scourge Of The Earth
Sample : Under The Knife
Sample : Vehemence
Sample : Violent Wand

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SUBURBANITE   self-titled   7" VINYL   (Youth Attack)    10.98

First off, the design of this 7" from NYC hardcore outfit (which includes members of black metal/noise rock band Castevet and the defunct art-thrash outfit Bucket Full Of Teeth) is a fucking knockout. The jacket features a series of eerie, ambiguous photographs and images all rendered in somewhat murky grayscale, and it folds out into an eye-popping six-panel sleeve that has the 7" pocket (with a die-cut center hole) constructed into the jacket itself. The record itself is pressed on heavy clear vinyl, and it actually has the 45 RPM adaptor included in the center hole, a nice touch for those of us who either don't own an adaptor or (like myself) are prone to constantly misplacing it. But on to the music itself - Suburbanite play a classic, back-to-basics brand of early American hardcore that avoids sounding dated or deliberately retro due to a) the burly, distorted recording quality, and b) the undiluted ferocity of their performance. The seven short songs packaged onto this record are ugly, anti-social blasts of hooky, brutal hardcore that have a noticeably Oi! influence (you can really hear it on songs like "Winter Soldier" and "Not The Same"), which of course is going to sound awfully reminiscent of Negative Approach. And it does, tearing through the violent thrash and stomping steel-toed punk with a direct, no-frills attack that really gets my plasma boiling. I love this sort of hateful, negative noisy hardcore, and fans of likeminded contemporaries like Vile Gash, Raw Nerve, and Total Abuse will no doubt dig this debut Ep as well.
Limited to five hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Don't Ask
Sample : Not The Same
Sample : When They Fucking Turn On You
Sample : Winter Soldier

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SUMMON THE CROWS   One More For The Gallows   CD   (Southern Lord)    13.98

I know that it's not everyone's bag, but for me, Southern Lord's recent crop of thrash/hardcore has been fucking top-notch, and Summon The Crows's offering for the label has been on top of my stereo-heap ever since it came in the door. This Norwegian band play vicious, slightly blackened stench-thrash that skews more towards the crossover end of the spectrum, balancing crushing metallic riffing and some very Slayer-ized lead-work with loads of D-beat worship and crazed hardcore abandon, never slipping over into sloppiness, but with the kind of feral manic energy that makes this stuff so powerful. Emblazoned with ominous artwork and smatterings of occult imagery, One More For The Gallows is grim, apocalyptic stuff, full of visions of a humanity hurtling headfirst down into global cataclysm, defiant screams against ancient power structures, systematic abuse of the natural world set to ripping thrash with a heavy Teutonic influence (you can really hear the impact that classic Kreator and Destruction has had on their songwriting) and bulldozing metallic crustcore, with cool dissonant guitar parts, an AWESOME distorted bass tone that growls and grinds through the album, screaming solos, and virtually none of the grindcore elements that usually show up in bands like this. Some subtle black metal-esque touches can be heard throughout the album, like on the sinister dissonant chords on "Black Hole", and the vocals are gruff, almost death metal bellowing. These guys are skilled at breakneck tempo shifts, too; whenever they shift gears from the blazing thrash into rocking mid-tempo sections, it sounds savage, and hits me with the same force as the likes of Doom. I wouldn't say that Summon The Crows do a whole lot to evolve the metallic crust sound too much further beyond where it's been at for the last twenty years, but this is a style of brutal, malevolent metal/punk that I really don't get bored with when it's performed at this level of violence. Recommended to fans of Black Breath, The Secret, Alpinist and All Pigs Must Die...
Released in a machine-numbered edition of 1,000.
Track Samples:
Sample : Beasts of the Night
Sample : Security Über Alles
Sample : The Slavedrivers of Ur

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SUNN O)))   ØØ Void / The Iron Soul Of Nothing (Sunn meets Nurse With Wound)   2 x CD   (Southern Lord)    15.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Ra At Dusk
Sample : Rabbit's Revenge
Sample : Richard
Sample : Dysnystaxis (Nurse with Wound Remix)
Sample : Ra at Dawn (Nurse with Wound Remix)

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SUTCLIFFE JUGEND   With Extreme Prejudice   CD   (Cold Spring)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Carnage
Sample : Fuckrage
Sample : I Have Kissed This Sick, Sick World Goodbye

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SUTCLIFFE JUGEND   Blue Rabbit   CD   (Crucial Blast)    9.99

Appearing in the early 80's as an offshoot of the legendary UK power electronics band Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend soon went to to become an equally confrontational and extreme purveyor of the early PE/industrial sound, producing some of the most abrasive and violent electronics albums ever with their early Come Organisation releases We Spit On Their Graves and Campaign . Since then, Sutcliffe Jugend has continued to pursue a unique sonic vision that combines transgressive subject matter and dark, cerebral musings on violence and sexual perversion with explorations into the use of brutal feedback and synthesizer damage. In the past decade, however, the band has delved into darker, more restrained (at least on a sonic level) sounds alongside their harsher work, and Blue Rabbit is the latest such offering, unfolding like a night-terror across the album's eight tracks. You won't find any of SJ's trademark power electronics sound here, nor the dark throbbing industrial of their recent album With Extreme Prejudice for Cold Spring Records; this is a darker, more unsettling experience, heavy with an atmosphere of doom and smoldering violence, as if Sutcliffe Jugend sought to channel the creaking dread of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste through a series if blood-freezing psychosexual nightmares.
The first song "Solace" begins with washes of black tidal drift and eerie creaking sounds, wheezing string-like drones, the scrape of bones against the rusted strings of a cello, brief flashes of piano, and strange low-frequency muttering, snatches of melody drift in and out of clarity, while a male voice murmurs just below the surface of this seasick soundscape. The vocals never break into the kind of high, manic screaming that you'd hear on previous SJ albums, instead appearing as a malevolent presence, a depraved narrator lurking in the dark corners of Blue Rabbit. The album creeps through ever more disturbing scenes, from the sparse electro-acoustic collage of percussive noises, asthmatic scraping strings and reedy feedback tones that make up "Seed", a collage of warbly electronic tones, the thump of an oil tank, evil whispers guiding the listener through these aural hallucinations, the track eventually resembling some nightmare free-improv session.
Then there is "The Bad Mannered Prophet", an almost orchestral dark ambient epic unlike anything that I have ever heard from Sutcliffe Jugend, magisterial and haunting, a stirring dark melody and sounds of distant chanting looping repeatedly beneath a creaking, crashing oceanic soundscape. And the rest of the album drifts further through these realms of bad-dream ambience, strange somnambulant improv and the sounds of organ, murmuring voices, mewling cries, jazzy bass frozen into a glacial drip, minimalist drones that waver and fade against the darkness, the slow scrape of the bow across strings processed into buzzing, wasp-like tones, clouds of billowing melodious keyboard, the songs at times resembling the din of a house of clocks gone haywire, finally culminating in the frenzied depravity of "The Death Of Pornography".
For fans of the band that are primarily familiar with their harsher output on Come Org and Cold Spring, this is a revelation; a seething quasi-ambient nightmare that lingers with the listener, enhanced in it's creep factor by the unsettling paintings from Sutcliffe Jugend's Kevin Tomkins that make up the album art. Comes in a full-color digipack.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blue Rabbit
Sample : The Good Child
Sample : Offal
Sample : Seedless

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SUTEKH HEXEN   Luciform   LP   (Wands)    16.98

Just one of many new records that this California black metal/noise duo has issued this past year, Luciform is their first full-length and it's a skull-shredding assault of extreme blackened howl. They investigate the light-bearer through a combination of screeching epic black metal riffage and savage noise that really blew me out on this Lp, with some surprisingly discernable guitar parts appearing through the holocaust fires that are fanned across these six tracks.
The album is introduced with a blast of distortion, a melancholy guitar melody rising out of the intense wash of speaker grit and fuzz, the sound possessed with a maudlin beauty as "The Great Whore" begins to take shape. But this quickly breaks apart, that melody suddenly taking off as what started out as a rather traditional sounding black metal riff backed by blasting tinny drums is abruptly drowned in a colossal wave of extreme noise, the blackened metal subsumed into a swirling, grimy ocean of distortion and noise that sounds like some second wave black metal band being devoured by a Skullflower-sized blast of ear wrecking amp filth. This sets the stage for Sutrekh Hexen's M.O. on Luciform, a rendering of classic black metal form through extreme harsh noise abuse, and while there's a ton of bands working with a similar aesthetic, there's something about the way that Sutekh Hexen keeps their haunting melodies at the forefront of their black noise assaults that makes this more musical than the ultra-violent industrial black metal/noise hybrid of Nekrasov, or the surreal blizzard blasts of Wold. Granted, if you're a fan of those bands, then this record will probably become a fast fave, but I also think that this might be a little more palatable to "regular" black metal fans who might be turned off by the OTT extremism of those aforementioned outfits.
It does get more abstract and twisted as you get deeper into Luciform, dropping into the long stretch of minimal black ambience that appears out of the blastnoise of "In Worship, They Weep His Name", and pushing the layered, formless violence of "Chains" so far into the red that it really starts to take on a psychedelic quality, but then bam, the noise drops out for a second about halfway through as a killer blackthrash riff suddenly kicks in, and then the song blasts off again, this time into a more thrashy, still incredibly noisy assault, the drummer blastbeating non-stop within the maelstrom of ultra-distorted tremolo riffing and throat-shredding screams pulled apart into infinite streaks of throat-horror. A hushed voice speaks over the dramatic minor key melody that begins "Serpents" on the b-side, the guitar and voice wreathed in the lunar glow of subdued amplifier drones; within minutes, this too transforms into a cloudbreak of overdriven speaker hiss and dense distorted haze that rains down and completely envelops the moody guitars and blasting drums. On "Seraph", the band shifts into a kind of punk-infected primitive thrash before it morphs into an unexpected swinging groove, something resembling a stoner rock riff set against the incessant locomotive blasting and blast-furnace din. Again, it's a balance between the focus of the riff and the disorienting effect of the cacophonic din that sucks me in. The closing song "The Hermetic" cranks up the treble, the high-end enhanced to a hornet's nest buzz that combined with the vocals shifting into a more frantic, bestial screaming style, ends the record on a hysteric note, the noise threatening to completely consume the band throughout the entire song as bursts of static continuously assault the song.
On colored vinyl in a limited edition of 350 copies, includes a double-sided black and white insert.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Great Whore
Sample : The Hermetic
Sample : In Worship They Weep His Name

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T.O.M.B.   UAG   CD   (Crucial Blast)    9.98

For nearly a decade now, the shadowy collective known as T.O.M.B. (or Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) have been creating a particular brand of industrial death worship with some of creepiest recordings that I've heard out of this realm. I discovered the band through their 2007 album Macabre Noize Royale on Todestrieb, whose grating industrial rhythms, blasts of blackened noise and malformed black metal left my skull a charred husk, and I've been following their clandestine electro-acoustic experiments and rituals of corpse-abuse ever since. Now, T.O.M.B. have brought us their latest album (and first for Crucial Blast) UAG (or Undercovered Ancient Gateways, and it follows the group of crypt-crawlers through eleven tracks of suffocating black ambience and lifeless industrial pummel that strips away most of the black metal elements of previous releases, crafting a more abstract, ambient sound this time around.
The band has largely distinguished their approach to black industrial because of the sound sources they use; making their way into abandoned sanitariums, morgues, decaying crypts, and other sites of psychological and spiritual distress (such as the Pennhurst State Hospital in Pennsylvania, and Kentucky's infamous Waverly Hills), the members of T.O.M.B. capture the natural ambience of these locations with field recorded sounds, and engage in pounding percussive workouts by banging and hammering on the very walls and structures of these sites. These rumbling industrial rituals result is a mix of Neubauten-esque bashing and rhythmic forms combined with crushing harsh industrial noise and lightless black ambient voids, sculpted into a uniquely haunted industrial ambience on UAG. As far as references go, I hear traces of death industrial (a la Atrax Morgue / Subklinik / Mauthausen Orchestra / Brighter Death Now) here, as well as the black industrial weirdness of bands like Abruptum, MZ412, and Stalagggh, but there's also echoes of Lustmord's early work here as well in the cavernous black spaces that T.O.M.B. explores.
There is no narrative here, nothing resembling "mood music"; each track flows directly into the next, the album crawling and breathing as a single malevolent organism. The title track opens the album with massive metallic reverberations rumble through vast cavernous realms of darkness and roaring subterranean maelstrom, corrosive distorted noise washing over the pounding sheet-metal percussion and almost tribal-like rhythms, like the howling of the dead emanating from the bowels of the earth. Then "Torment" creeps in, layering agonized distorted howls and monstrous moaning vocalizations over sweeping noise and a pulsating distorted synth, the whole sound drifting through an echo-chamber of hallucinatory horror, then slipping into the swelling subterranean rumblings, juddering machine rhythms and pounding cemetery gate rhythms of "Mausoleum Witchcraft". The subsequent depths of the Underground Ancient Gateways are further infested with these rattling infernal engines and massive rumbling dronescapes, violent metal percussion, ghostly effects and mysterious sounds drifting across the abyssal emptiness, various nightmarish vocalizations, the pounding drums and other hammered objects a constant presence.
Some of the album's more disturbing moments appear on the psychedelic noise eruption "Blood Vortex" that resembles one of CCCC's extreme synth-noise meltdowns, a mass of swarming electronic glitch whirling over smeared drones and distant machine noise that apparently used actual blood as a sound source; the snarling, teeth-gnashing blood ritual chaos of the "Tribe Of The Corpse" gives way to the dank Lustmordian depths of "Graveyard Requiem"; and the twelve-minute "EMPLEH", where the cavernous ambience transforms into twisted atonal guitar noise, distant cries, and eerie howls cloaked in thick black fog, later revealing warped, quasi-black-metal shapes as it drifts deeper and deeper into the pit. The closest that the album ever approaches anything resembling black metal, though, is on the psychotic blastscape "Leech", where those faint, programmed blastbeats drift up out of a hazy dungeon ambience amid snarling demonic vocals and reverb-soaked synthesizers. The one piece on UAG that really gets under my skin though is "Cadaver Transmissions", a recording of contact mic scrapings across the rotting flesh of an actual corpse, backed by echoing black drift, creating the blackest of ambient soundscapes on what is already a supremely unsettling listening experience.
Highly recommended to fans of blackened industrial and black ambience. Comes in a full-color digipack.
Track Samples:
Sample : Cadaver Transmissions
Sample : Empleh
Sample : Mausoleum Witchcraft
Sample : Perverse Crematory Pleasures
Sample : Tribe of the Corpse
Sample : Uncovered Ancient Gateways

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TERRA SANCTA   Sunken | Buried | Forgotten   CD   (Malignant)    8.98

Not a full-fledged album, Sunken | Buried | Forgotten is a new three-song Ep from Terra Sancta, the dark ambient project from Australian Greg Good. Good has always surrounded his electronic dronescapes with images of boundless desert wastelands and ancient civilizations that tap into an almost Lovecraftian feeling of awe and vastness, but here that feeling turns to far-flung emptiness and lightlessness.. The material that's presented on this disc was initially recorded for an upcoming album, but since these three tracks ended up going in a bleaker, blacker direction, Good opted to released them together as a separate document. The vast deep-earth drones and malevolent black ambience found on this disc is supremely oppressive, each track an utterly bleak slab of formless black industrial drift. The first track spreads out with the sound of keening high pitched feedback drones and metallic whirr expanding into thick gusts of shimmering black fog, distant scrapes and rumblings cloaked in reverb and delay, this cavernous ambience alive with mysterious far-off sounds and densely layered drones that evoke immense underground spaces, and vast ancient machinery rumbling at the earth's core. The second track "Buried" is more complex, with the sound of somber orchestral strings floating down through ever deeper layers of subterranean blackness, gorgeous black synthesizers humming and hovering in the lightless void, here conjuring strains of some sort of modern classical piece being performed above a boundless stygian ocean. And the last track is pure black drift, sweeping monolithic drones and spacious reverb billowing out across an abyss as vague traces of those sustained Ligeti-esque strings flicker in the gloom, the sound growing louder and more overpowering as it goes on, becoming a roaring maelstrom of chthonic ambience. These crushing, starless drones are truly monolithic, you'll want to explore this disc obviously if you're already familiar with Terra Sancta's dark ambience, but fans of Yen Pox, TenHornedBeast, Caul, Phaenon and Collapsar should hear this as well.
Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies, presented in a four-panel digipack.
Track Samples:
Sample : Forgotten
Sample : Sunken

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THEOLOGIAN   The Transfigurations   CDR   (Annihilvs)    5.98

Track Samples:
Sample : The Transfigurations
Sample : The Transfigurations
Sample : The Transfigurations

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THROAT   Licked Inch Fur   LP   (At War With False Noise)    19.98

After a run of supremely thuggish 7" Eps that I've raved about here at C-blast, the Finnish noise-rock band finally produced a longer piece of work last year with this four song 12" called Licked Inch Fur. The record came out as a joint effort between At War With False Noise, Kaos Kontrol and a couple of other labels, and the grinding angular assault on display here is just as brutal as the stuff on their 7"s. There's a dank reek that comes off this record, like someone brought this album back tucked under their arm after a long tour through musty back rooms with cheap wall paneling, filthy yellowed bed sheets, unidentifiable fluid stains on the carpet, dark basements, messy drug dens. This wasted vibe seeps into every second of the dissonant ugly sludge-rock on Licked Inch Fur, and it's fantastic. Songs like "Stampede", "Wake Down" and "Piggie" glom together more of Throat's bludgeoning bottom-heavy riffing that's wound tight around the rhythm section's lurching power, often offering their slower crushing dirges at brain-smashing levels of aggression, but also throwing in a lot of faster, more urgent parts that keep the music from stagnating in pools of grimy sludge for too long. There's lots of powerful tribal drumming and noisy guitar work that hints at the apocalyptic force of older Neurosis, and their jagged riffing and noisy high-end guitar scrape has a lot of extra weight from Throat's massive metallic crunch. They've always had a heavy 90's noise rock influence with echoes of Melvins, Fudge Tunnel, Unsane and Hammerhead rippling through the bulldozing feedback-soaked heaviness, but Throat put a harsher, more aggressive edge on their songs, cranking up the sludge quotient, the singer belting out his anti-social rants in a bloodied howl, without losing the ability to turn out a catchy hook such as that found on "Piggie". The heaviest song on Licked Inch Fur is the last one, though; "Poolpisser" crawls through a tar-haze dirge that finds the band at their slowest, dishing a nearly doom-laden slab of slow motion crush that's got some dirty, twangy guitar going on within the eerie melody lurking just beneath the surface of this song. Throat gets better every time I grab a new record from them, and anyone into heavy, dark noise-rock really needs to start listening to these guys now.
Track Samples:
Sample : Piggie
Sample : Poolpisser
Sample : Stampede

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THROAT   Pee   7" VINYL   (Kaos Kontrol)    8.99

Some of the best sludge rock has been coming out of Finland lately, and at the very top of that heap is Throat. Their grueling low-slung dirge rock offers nods to the early 90's heyday of this kind of ugly, angular racket without ever sounding like an exercise in nostalgia, thanks in large part to the total ferocity with which these bass-thugs attack their music. This limited edition 7" (issued by Kaos Kontrol, only three hundred and thirty copies pressed) gives us another two new songs, "Prison Shower" and "Pet Peeves", short but skull-cracking blocks of crushing, twitchy sludginess that will give fans of bands like Tad, Unsane, The Jesus Lizard, Black Elk, Pissed Jeans and Oxbow a nice buzz. The first song is one of the meanest sounding songs from the band so far, a bludgeoning battery of skronky, lopsided riffing, and howled vocals slightly doused with distortion, a pounding percussive drive and more than a hint of pending violence. The flipside is noisier, the rhythm section locking into a vicious staggering groove while the guitar slashes and stabs with dissonant chords and noxious stop/start key changes, then slipping into a more driving, rocking passage about halfway through before finally turning into this massive dragging dirge at the end that fucking pulverizes even as it piles a ton of ominous atmosphere onto the proceedings. Love the Sub Pop visual references of the record sleeve, too. Recommended as always to fans of hateful, brute-force sludge-rock.

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THY CATAFALQUE   Rengeteg (Limited Edition)   CD   (Season Of Mist)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Fekete Mezok
Sample : Holdkomp
Sample : Minden Test Fu

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THY CATAFALQUE   Roka Hasa Radio (re-issue)   CD   (Epidemie)    11.98

Finally back in print, Thy Catalfaque's Roka Hasa Radio has been re-issued just as their new album for Season Of Mist Rengeteg is coming out. This new version of the album comes in standard jewel case packaging.
This new album from Hungarian avant-metallers Thy Catalfaque is breathtaking. This band has that Arcturus-influenced sound that so many black/death metal bands from Eastern Europe have been tapping into, with lots of mind-boggling stylistic shifts mid-song, long proggy arrangements, the use of operatic vocals and other arty, experimental touches, and Thy Catalfaque certainly fits in comfortably on the Czech label Epidemie alongside other similarly avant-minded bands like Demimonde and Azure Emote. that makes this latest album from Thy Catalfaque (their widely available release following a string of limited cdr titles that stretch back to 1999) so amazing is the strength of the songwriting; the band combines ferocious black metal with trip-hop, drum n' bass, Eastern European folk music and elements of 70's prog rock, and in lesser hands this combination of sounds could easily come off as a convoluted mess. Bu Thy Catalfaque has really polished their approach over the past ten years, and each one of these songs is tightly composed, complex and kaleidoscopic to be sure, but also moored by majestic melodies and a dramatic style of arranging that makes this one of the best experimental metal albums in that post-Zorn/Bungle aesthetic that I've heard this year.
The album starts with two epic tracks, "Szervetlen" and "Molekuláris Gépezetek", the former over eleven minutes in length, the latter almost twenty. "Szervetlen" begins with deep rumbling ambience, low swirling tones and distant metallic whir that slowly build in volume until spacey Moog-like synths and shredding tremolo riffing fades in, and the song turns into crushing mid-paced black metal layered with cosmic textures. The black metal heaviness eventually drops out, leaving behind a murky electronic rhythm and proggy Goblin-esque synth arpeggios that intertwine for a minute, and then takes off into a haunting, infectious bit of skittering drum n' bass colored by a Hungarian folk melody. The blackened guitars and pounding, industrialized drumming returns later on, joined by the proggy keys and bits of electronica, then morphs into a weird, abstract doom-dirge with jagged stop/start riffing grinding through fields of crystalline glitchery and spaceship-control electronic noises before finally turning into a gorgeously dark prog rock outro. Then "Molekuláris Gépezetek" kicks in, a synth-heavy chugging black metal monster, very Arcturus-esque, full of woozy synths over crunchy thrash riffage, weird waltzing rhythms and furious double bass drumming, then veers into a spaced-out expanse of psychedelic synths, soaring fx-laden guitar, dramatic male vocals obscured by a thin sheen of distortion, all sounding like a metallic take on 80's Pink Floyd, and then again makes an abrupt turn, this time into a furious vortex of blast beats and beautiful choral synths, like an Emperor song gone psychedelic. This fades into a blur of keyboard ambience for a moment, and then a fuzzy, unstoppable trip-hop drum loop kicks in, skittering beneath a bed of folky flutter, warbling electronics, sampled vocals, serpentine woodwinds, and then a female singer suddenly appears, singing a gorgeous folk melody over the dreamy trip-hop that stretches out for more than six minutes before the beats and vocals decay into the background and leave behind traces of ghostly piano and flute that continue to follow that eerie Hungarian folk tune that has wound it's way through the entire song. And then towards the end, everything crashes back in together, the glorious female vocals, the massive blackened riffage, the thunderous double-bass, the spacey RIck Wakeman-esque synths all fused together in an epic blast of trip-hop inflected industro-prog-metal. Nice! And supremely catchy, too...the melody/hook on this song, as crazy as the stylistic jumping around gets, will definitely stick in your head for a while.
After the nearly half-hour opening of those two songs, the remaining seven follow a similar course while keeping the song lengths around six minutes or so. There's the epic galloping folk/black metal charge of "Köd Utánam" that seems to filter the Django theme through a Hungarian folk song melody, while the band whips up a furious display of Emperor-meets-Yes symphonic prog metal overload, while "Űrhajók Makón" drops the metal entirely for a mesmeric trip through folk-flavored 70's prog and lilting psychedelia, again fronted by those tantalizing female vocals. "Piroshátú" starts off as another lighter piece that blends together vintage prog rock and folk, but gets progressively heavier and more metallic as the song heads towards its conclusion. "Esőlámpás" is another sweeping metallic epic, with a stadium-ready anthemic hook that sounds like Arcturus becoming possessed by the spirit of an 80's synth-pop group, while “Kabócák, Bodobácsok" takes form as an experimental classical-synth workout that turns into a dark cinematic soundtrack piece. "Őszi Varázslók" infuses symphonic black metal with soulful male vocals and Moogs out the wazoo, and then the album closes with the moody folk/prog of "Fehér Berek".
The album almost feels like it's more prog rock than actual metal, but whenever the metal does kick in, it's devastating, with a thick (if slightly murky) production that kicks you in the chest, usually right after Thy Catalfaque has just spent the previous five minutes soothing you with some shadowy folk melody and cosmic prog. It's like Enslaved and Ulver crossed with Massive Attack and Yes, and fans of proggy post-black metal alchemists like Manes, Lux Occulta, Arcturus, and even later Ulver need to give this a listen.
Track Samples:
Sample : Esölámpás
Sample : Kabócák, bodobácsok
Sample : Köd utánam
Sample : Ürhajók Makón

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TORT   self-titled   CD   (Total Rust)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Earl Estruch
Sample : Gnosis of the Dead
Sample : Valhalla

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TOXIK   Think This   CD   (Metal Mind)    16.98

I keep working down a long list of albums that I made when I first read Jeff Wagner's Mean Deviation, a checklist of all of the prog-thrash and weird speed-metal records that are still in print in one form or another. My goal is to eventually stock every available classic prog-thrash record here at Crucial Blast, and so far I've made a small dent in that list with recent acquisitions of Believer, Sadus, Watchtower and similar outfits all in stock for you ‘bangers who like your thrash complicated and weird. The latest such addition to my prog-thrash section at C-Blast is Toxik's 1989 album Think This, a favorite of mine from way back and one of the wildest Roadrunner reissues that Metal Mind has put out. On the surface, newcomers to Toxik might assume this to be another third tier thrash effort from the late 80s, it's got the Ed Repka cover art, the conceptual song titles, an air of dystopian paranoia...but when you throw this in to your stereo, these New York rippers start wrapping huge lengths of barbed-wire tech metal around your skull.
By the time that Toxik released their sophomore album in 1989, they had already staked out a name as a solid, perfectly serviceable East Coast thrash metal outfit with a thing for relatively complicated arrangements and grandiose Orwellian themes. Their debut World Circus was a pretty cool thrash album, even if it didn't set the world on fire at a time when we were swimming in second-wave thrash bands. But this New York band made a quantum leap forward in terms of musicianship and progginess when Think This was dropped onto the metal crowd. An ethereal, almost Goblin-like instrumental intro begins the opening title track, leading up to the jarring, staccato thrash that kicks right in like a boot to the teeth, the guitarists winding their instruments through some incredibly angular riffs and strange, dissonant chords - it's clear from the beginning that these guys were working on a whole new level with this album, working in a tech-thrash vein similar to what bands like Watchtower, Heathen, Fates Warning and Coroner were doing around the same time. This is brainy stuff, a quasi-concept album concerning techno-paranoia and media control that draws samples and references from Ralph Bakshi's classic 1977 animated apocalypse epic Wizards. The guitarists match their chugging palm-muted crunch and rapid-fire tempos with bizarre riffs and labyrinthine song structures that echo the paranoia of the lyrics and subject matter, but also still manage to belt out some anthemic moments like the galloping power metal that kicks in on the chorus to "Spontaneous", and the cloying nostalgia of the ballad "There Stood The Fence", a Queensrÿche-like tune that almost sounds like it should have been a minor radio hit. But the really technical stuff is brain-warping, tracks like "Technical Arrogance" giving Watchtower a run for their money, even slipping in some Meshuggah-like calculus-chug in spots. Anyone into the progressive / avant-garde thrash of bands like Watchtower, Mekong Delta, Anacrusis, and Coroner should check out this album for sure. This reissue from the Polish label Metal Mind also features two previously unreleased instrumental demo tracks for the album, as well as extensive new liner notes detailing the history of the band and the album...
Released in a limited machine-numbered edition of 2,000 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Think This
Sample : Spontaneous
Sample : Black and White
Sample : Wir NJN 8/In God

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TRIBES OF NEUROT   Silver Blood Transmissions   CD   (Relapse)    14.98

Tribes Of Neurot's 1995 album Silver Blood Transmission was later reissued by Relapse in a digipack, and as the first album from this industrial offshoot of avant-metallers Neurosis, it's a recommended slab of apocalyptic industrial heaviness and abstract soundscapery. A kind of freely organized collective that would see the members of Neurosis moving around in different configurations and bringing in different collaborators, Tribes Of Neurot was able to move through different sounds without restriction, with tendencies towards improvisation and pure noise that wouldn't fit within the more rigid parameters of their main band. Often using Neurosis's studio recordings as source material for their soundscapes, more often than not the guys in TON would transform their material into something that is totally unrecognizable from the original music using samplers, synthesizers, effects units, mixing boards, and walls of live and sampled percussion. This is what you get with Silver Blood Transmission, a companion to Neurosis's classic Through Silver in Blood that transfigures their music into a mixture of tribal noise-ritual, industrial metal, and sprawling, grimy space rock.
Beginning with "Primordial Uncarved Block", Tribes Of Neurot begin with nearly sub-sonic bass frequencies rumbling at the edges of perception as metallic guitar feedback slowly swells forth in short bursts of sound; it's a really minimal electro-acoustic dronescape at first, but then heavy distant tribal percussion slowly comes in later in the track. That leads right into the almost ten minute tectonic loopscape and subterranean grind of "Wolf Lava", slowly built from samples of rhythmic noise, gritty feedback drone, and other guitar generated noise that is treated through extensive use of delay and other effects. Slowly, a series of repeating eerie melodies come spinning out of the black ether, joined by the looping howls of wolves, clanking metal, and other nebulous nocturnal noises. On the massive flame-invocation "Fires Of Purification", Jason Roeder and Scott Kelley team up on drums to pound out a hypnotic tribal wall of rhythm, but then disappear for the shambling Hawkwind-on-PCP space jam freak-out of "The Accidental Process", cosmic synths and shuffling percussive loops rattling and whooshing alongside blasts of abstract metallic heaviness and sampled noise, all held together by a recurring ominous guitar riff that threads it's way through the entire track.
When "Fall Back To Stone" starts off, it combines minimal electronic rhythms and cold threatening ambience with syncopated blasts of industrial noise, abstract piano melodies, and mysterious chiming sounds, but gradually becomes a chilling cinematic darkness filled with pipe organs, metallic percussion, an awesome gothic orchestral dirge of booming kettledrums and looped industrial drones. Tribal drums and metallic rattling and dubbed-out echo take over "A Manifestation By Modern Means" the hypnotic pounding of various drums, rainsticks and other percussion instruments meld with the harsh banging of metal and looped machine noise. Peals of feedback and flute race through the trance-state of sampled native voices are layered into quasi-mystical ‘scapes, and grinding distorted guitars lend a constant bottom-heavy weight to the music. "Continuous Regression"'s auditory hallucinations become a miasma of processed guitar riffs, phased percussion and chaotic electronic effects, broken radio transmissions and bizarre Hawkwind-style space-synth goop, and closer "Closing In" drapes a ton of samples, tape recordings, and field recordings over huge washes of psychedelic delay and rumbling bass drones. The amplified bellowing of bowed bass tones and scattered tympani also appear amid the howling distant drones of "Achtwan", a sparsely arranged sprawl of doom-laden ambient heaviness and orchestral dread that stretches outward for nearly twenty-four minutes, the peals of thunderous processed bass resembling the blast of massive horns, joined by the haunting wordless vocals of Amber Asylum's Kris Force which drift in wisps of eerie operatic wailing across the abyss. It's the majestic and pitch-black centerpiece of Silver Blood Transmissions, one of my favorite all-time Tribes Of Neurot tracks...
Track Samples:
Sample : Achtwan
Sample : Continuous Regression
Sample : Wolf Lava

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TRIST / LONESUMMER   split   CD   (Ars Magna)    8.98

Track Samples:
Sample : LONESUMMER - Mundane Dreams About Flash Floods
Sample : LONESUMMER - No More Bonfires
Sample : TRIST- Vábení Pokojné Tmy

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TRUE RADICAL MIRACLE   Cockroaches   LP   (Iron Lung Records)    14.98

A new vinyl re-issue of the debut album from the Australian band True Radical MNiracle, who take their name from the cult BMX'r movie Rad that I'm sure a bunch of fellow Gen X'rs remember well. This cult hardcore outfit features members of the avant-doom band Whitehorse, but the music that these guys play is a slithering anti-social fusion of noise rock and hardcore that has that uniquely tweaked and noisy feel that you always get when you hear one of thse bands that come crawling out the fecund Australian underground. This came out on Iron Lung, which usually gives you a general idea as to what sort of stuff we're talking about: these are royally fucked sounds, but True Radical Miracle are unmistakably a hardcore band, just happens to be one that drops in haunting piano intros and pulverizing industrial dirge and unsettling ambient sections into their lurching tuneage. Wild stuff, I've seen 'em being compared to early Swans and The Bad Seeds on this album, and you'll definitely pick up those fumes coming off of Cockroaches, but there's an equal vein of brutal SST-flavored punk running through this that gives it an addtional shot of violence.
The soft, jazzy piano that opens Cockroaches feigns sensitivity, but when the band kicks in to the angular noisy hardcore of "Two Weeks Off", the sound is blunt, assaultive, a sneering jagged beating expressed through a weird songwriting style that's part speedy aggression and part fractured pummel, introducing True Radical Miracle's odd sound that suggests a sound that Black Flag might have cultivated if the band had been totally obsessed with Swans's Filth and the combined Bad Seeds catalog. The recording here is spacious, the bass guitar way up front in the mix, the guitarist serving up washes of dissonant noise and sharp blasts of atonal chords and brute no-wave skronk, a spaciousness to the sound that gives you the impression that you are listening to the band play in someone's laundry room. The vocalist abuses the delay on his vocals perfectly, his snarls tripping across the sketchy noise-punk like the interior screams of a psychopath. This deranged air is enhanced by the continued appearance of those short piano interludes and passages of tense industrial ambience that keep appearing between the songs proper. There's some incredibly heavy shit going on here, like the lockstep lurch and psych-guitar slime spread around on "I Did It Their Way", and the mangy feedback infested dirge "The Worms Have Won"l, and the meandering improvisation and no-wave sludge of "I Am Forever". Ugly and deeply troubled music. This record is fucking great, and obviously a perfect fit for the Iron Lung roster - somewhat arty, but wholly abrasive hardcore. No wonder people are finally flipping out over these guys, now that they're getting attention here in the States. Keep an eye out for their newest Lp that I should have listed in next week's new arrivals update. Comes with a full color insert, and includes a digital download.

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ULCERATE   Of Fracture And Failure   CD   (Neurotic)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Defaeco
Sample : The Mask of the Satyr
Sample : Praise and Negation

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UMBERTO   Prophecy Of The Black Widow   CD   (Not Not Fun)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Night Stalking
Sample : Temple Room
Sample : Widow of the Web

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UMBERTO   Prophecy Of The Black Widow   LP   (Not Not Fun)    15.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Night Stalking
Sample : Temple Room
Sample : Widow of the Web

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UNEARTHED   Death Kiss   CDR   (Prairie Fire)    7.98

Having already scorched skulls within the noise underground with his morbid harsh noise projects Ghoul and Corpse Candle, Robert Meldrum moved on to the realm of pure HNW with the Unearthed project. Released in 2010 and apparently one of his very first efforts under the Unearthed name, is an hour-long blast of extreme meditative static, starting with "Giving Death A Kiss", and finishing with the epic forty-two minute "Trinity'. The former is a solid block of hypnotic over-modulated static that leans more towards the softer, monochromatic end of the HNW spectrum as he unleashes a whirlpool-like roar of amplified speaker crackle and mid-range fuzz with almost no perceptible change in attack or tone, and nearly devoid of frequency spikes or other surface activity. When operating in this style, the sound and effect is very similar to Vomir's more restrained work, an unrelenting wave of perpetual colorless static. On the other hand, "Trinity" is a chaotic crumbling mass of blackened crunch pouring out of the speakers. The texture of this track is very different, using lots of mid-range distortion and rattling, corroded noise and it's all layered on top of a deeper, rumbling undercurrent of bass-heavy static. It's much more engaging and abrasive compared to the static hum of the opening piece, and has a nice, brain-flattening effect when played at extreme volume levels. Obviously, fans of Meldrum's other noise projects will probably be interested in hearing his HNW work, and fans of both Vomir and The Rita who are looking for more of that sort of extreme noise-squall may want to check out Unearthed as well. The disc was released by Prairie Fire in a tiny limited run of thirty copies in a simple cardstock sleeve, which is already sold out and out of print from the label; the copies that I was able to obtain from Prairie Fire were the very last of 'em.
Track Samples:
Sample : Giving Death A Kiss
Sample : Trinity

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UNHOLY   The Second Ring Of Power   CD + DVD   (Peaceville)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Covetous Glance
Sample : Dreamside
Sample : Lady Babylon

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UNHOLY   Gracefallen   CD   (Peaceville)    13.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Athene Noctua
Sample : Reek of the Night
Sample : ...of Tragedy

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UNKERD WOOD   Demo I   CASSETTE   (Legion Blotan)    6.00

More killer weirdo "black metal" from Legion Blotan; this time it's from an offshoot of experimental British black metallers Satanhartalt called Unkerd Wood, and this project is so noisy and gnarled that it's questionable if you can really call this black metal at all. The three songs on Demo I begin with the trappings of classic low-fi black metal, the frost-bitten minor key tremolo riffing, the scorched vocals, the atmosphere of regal violence, but this is quickly compounded with weird churning background rhythms that sound like there's a gang of percussionists hammering on what sounds like ancient oil drums (an Einstürzende Neubauten / Test Dept influenced percussive assault that is also employed by the band Gammel Sod, albeit in a much different, more primitive manner) way, way off in the distance, the clack of sticks and random cymbal hits and thumping offbeat rhythms coming together into a chaotic wall of off-time pummel beneath the sinister blackened riffs and screeching echo-chamber vocals. And on top of all of that is a thick layer of distorted grit and feedback and caustic noise, turning it into a strange, mutated type of black industrial. And that's the first track, "Signing Your Name". On the cassette's centerpiece track "Shaman Ov Blyth", it's even more abstract, the guitars buried even deeper, the backing tribal rhythms and metallic banging further obscured beneath more bizarre electronic effects and noise, the song moving in a herky-jerky lurch, propelled by the pounding noisy industrial beats, squiggly guitar leads worming through the static and hiss. The guitars manage to crawl out of the muck towards the latter half of the song and take flight with delay-drenched solos, while the rhythm section locks into an evil martial groove. By the time that the band hits the final song "Woven Path", it's all basically crumbled into a formless mass of black noise, the guitars sometimes recognizable in the churning static and wailing bass tones, bits of blackened riffing and screaming solos half-glimpsed through the clanking, thunderous murk. By this point, dear reader, you should know if this kind of fucked-up necro noise is your bag or not. Personally, this has become one of my favorite Legion Blotan tapes. Limited to three hundred copies, in black and white packaging,

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VARIOUS ARTISTS   Old Ways, Once More   CASSETTE   (Legion Blotan)    6.50

I'm a big fan of cassette compilations. Even moreso when it's a compilation of strange, highly abreasive black metal scum. Legion Blotan services a very specific audience, one that's got a craving for mutated, noisy, incredibly fucked-up music coming from a strange small corner of the European black metal underground, so this stuff is not for everyone. Seriously. You've got to be a real goblin to dig this compilation of exclusive no-fi black metal and barbaric black noise from the Legion Blotan, where all of the bands utilize archaic recording techniques and delivberately achieve the cruddiest, dirtiest recording quality they can, each band puking up their own unique, abrasive, ugly brand of black metal. Me? I've listened to Od Ways Once More at least a half dozen times this week. This tape fuckin' blisters.
Legion Blotan's flagship band White Medal (featuring label boss and Mutant Ape noise-terrorist George Proctor) opens the compilation with a crushing low-fi blackdoom assault titled "Northumbrian Tyrants", draping regal fuzz-soaked riffs over stomping Celtic Frost-esque sludge and bathing the whole song in a black cloud of four-track murkiness that becomes a cyclone of black chaos at the end. Punishing, as always. Axnaar follow with four songs of their peculiar brand of grotty psychedelic no-fi necropunk, the recording so filthy and blown-out that everything sort of blurs together in a rumbling mess of echoing panther screams and garbled backwards snarling, simple repetitive two-chord riffs drenched in delay, crackling noise, sudden blasts of bizarre effects erupting through the din, and pounding hardcore-style drums buried deep beneath several feet of grave-soil. Absolutely fucked - I love this stuff. Never heard Dumhammer Nat before this, but the two songs that they contribute are pretty killer, primitive blackened metal with throaty guittural vocals that have a distinct Brit accent and more catchy Frostian riff, offering up some of the catchiest songs on the tape. I can't wait to hear more from this band. The tinniest recording comes from the mysterious Wóddréa Mylenstede, who offer two untitled songs of fast, majestic melodic black metal that sound so brittle, it's as is you are hearing some obscure second-wave Norwegian black metal demo that was recorded andplayed back on an ancient phonograph cylinder. The side closes with the song "Holtwudu" from black abstractionists Satanhartalt, a dismal, intoxicating bit of improvised graveyard ambience with rotted piano notes that wander among shambolic percussion, murky atonal guitar and droning bass, eventually becoming a lumbering mass of ghastly doom haunted by strange knocking noises, muted horn blasts, and swirling clouds of dank, toxic corpse-gas, further evolving into long stretches of rumbling, muddy industrial noise, creepy whistling, and churning black ambience...fans of Aderlating should check out this band pronto.
Sump are another key band on the Legion Blotan roster, and the five songs that they have contributed to Old Ways are primo blackened hardcore, which these guys do better than almost anyone. Songs like "Wood Mill / Lady Of The Lake" rip at near thrash speeds, more of metallic bite to the riffing than usual even as some of the songs have these anthemic hooks that sound almost "poppy", while the drumming is the standard barbaric HC stomp that infests all of their music. Nobody does the Negative Approach-gone-black metal sound like Sump, and all of these tracks are fucking vicious. Nothing, however, rivals the band Balisong when it comes to absolute no-fi putresence. Their three untitled tracks are the nastiest recordings on the entire tape, so raw and noisy that it sounds like you're listening to a live micro-cassette recoridng of a blackened punk band jamming two rooms away while someone is operating a very loud rock tumbler right next to the microphone. It's obnoxious and abrasive and very, very ugly, and with all of the bizarre vocal effects, warping tape noise, crashing cymbals and busted-speaker static, the result is a beautifully damaged blast of violent septic slime. Last is Vanyar, whose rather classic black metal timewarps me back to the early 90s with the icy, magesterial guitars and visions of noctural Nordic-influenced grandeur that are channeled through long, sprawling songs dripping with atmosphere; they've got two songs here, and I was left lusting for more as soon as the tape came to an end.
Note: this is the "unmarked: version of the cassette without the on-shell printing. Packaged inside of a PVC bag with a sixteen-page booklet that includes one page of lyrics, liner notes, and artwork from each of the bands.
Track Samples:
Sample : SUMP - Wood Mill
Sample : WHITE MEDAL - Northumbrian Tyrants

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VARIOUS ARTISTS   Disgust / Gnawed / Nyodene D / RU-486   2 x CASSETTE   (Phage Tapes)    11.98

This double-cassette compilation from Phage might not be very long (each artist's side only features one track), but they make up for that with this assemblage of top-notch material from everyone involved; in fact, I think that this set is one of the heaviest fuckin' death industrial/PE releases that I've heard all year. With exclusive stuff from Nyodene D, Gnawed, RU-486 and Disgust, this gives fans of extreme electronic violence a cross-section of some of the heaviest and most potent artists working in this grimy corner of the industrial noise underground.
Disgust start it off with a fearsome blast of black electronics titled "Mercy", which begins with a long ominous sample from a news report involving murder, then erupts into a massive distorted synthesizer riff that's so blown out and crushing that it almost resembles a doom metal riff being filtered through throat-clogging amounts of speaker howl, black ash, and cranked over modulation. The harsh, layered vocals are treated with heavy amounts of delay but are carefully preserved in all of their larynx rending hysteria, producing one hell of a heavy, metallic take on death industrial. I'd never heard this project prior to this compilation, but now I'm a confirmed fan. On the other side of this first tape, Gnawed shambles out of the feedback-filth with "Kill What I Eat", another concrete slab of looped noise and amp-scream sculpted into crushing industrial grooves that roll like spiked tank treads on a gore-splattered half-track rolling across the corpse littered wastes of some nightmare deathworld. And just like it did on that amazing cassette Devolve that also came out on Phage, this evokes this previous unheard fusion of extreme industrial-sludge heaviness with demonic power electronics like nothing I've heard before. This is one of the heaviest, most savage projects in the Phage catalog, without a doubt.
Tape two leaves you with little pause for breath, though the distant thunderblasts of klaxon synth and the crunch and scrape of shoveled grave-earth creates a more subdued atmosphere of dread on Nyodene D's "The Measure of a Man". This newer PE project has made an impression on me as of late with his deft use of black ambient sound and pulsating drone within the structure of fairly traditional power electronics, and this piece is of the same level of quality and seething malevolence. And last up is "Kathoey" from RU-486, who has at least one other recent release on this week's new arrivals list, part of a fairly prolific year of output that's continued to deliver some really nasty rhythmic death industrial from the Mississippi based outfit. The core of RU-486's sound is a massively distorted PE assault formed upon thick, bone-rattling layers of synthesizer drone, guttural vocals and lyrical observations of sexual debasement that bears a strong resemblance to older Prurient, but this sound is joined by abrasive junk-metal textures that transforms it into an ugly, ear-grinding beast of it's own. Great shit.
Like all of the other stuff that I've gotten from Phage, the packaging and presentation is great; the pro-made tapes are housed together in an oversized plastic case with a three-color screen printed cover insert (which includes lyrics, thankfully!). It's extremely limited, of course, released in an edition of one hundred and twenty five copies. I really can't recommend this enough if you're a fan of the heaviest strains of American PE.

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VARIOUS ARTISTS   Climax Denial/ Discordance/ Human Larvae/ Moribund/ Sewer Goddess/ Sharpwaist   6 X CASSETTE BOXSET   (Phage Tapes)    25.00

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VARIOUS ARTISTS   Drum Machinegun   CD   (Relapse)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : DATACLAST - July 1999
Sample : NOISM - Invisible Enemy Detected
Sample : JET JAGUAR Kr3 KILL SPREE - 17½ Charred Clown Cadavers Crammed in a Pink and Purple Hearse as ...
Sample : SUBMACHINE DRUM - Hey Stupid
Sample : AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED - Sma
Sample : NEMO - Auek: Bongwater Cooled Cpu
Sample : MECHA BONGZILLA - Sex Slave Educator
Sample : COCOON - Slap Your Fae

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VARIOUS ARTISTS   Four Burials   CD   (The Flenser)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : ORTHODOX - Heritage
Sample : OTESANEK - Seven Are They
Sample : LOSS - (To Pass Away) Death March Towards My Ruin

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VARIOUS ARTISTS   White Eye Of Winter Watching   2 x CASSETTE   (Hospital Productions)    20.00

I spent an entire evening listening to this killer compilation / label-sampler that Hospital recently released, and felt like I was re-discovering a huge whack of extreme electronic artists and industrial bands that this esteemed label has worked with. Lots of familiar names on this double-cassette set, but a big chunk of the lineup was new to me, and there were more than a few new favorites that i picked up from this. White Eye is essentially a three-hour long mission statement from Hospital Productions that runs you through just about every band that they've worked with. The lineup that Dominick assembled for this project is fucking phenomenal. You've got the influential power electronics of groups such as Genocide Organ, Deathpile, The Grey Wolves, Ethnic Acid, Consumer Electronics, Ramleh, Con-Dom; the putrid American electronics of Vatican Shadow, FFH, Whorebutcher, Viodre, Alberich, Ahlzagailzehguh, Exploring Jezebel, KP, Yellow Tears, Sickness and Praying For Oblivion; newer death ambient artists like Lussuria and Stillbirth; experimental industrial sounds from NON, Mlehst, ASM, Controlled Bleeding, Militia, Sleepchamber, Smell & Quim, Spastic Colon, Emil Beaulieau, The Haters, and Outermost; a Sutcliffe Jugend / Prurient collaboration; harsh noise from Ames Sanglantes and Japanese masters Incapacitants and Thirdorgan; and plenty of artists that I'm being introduced to here for the first time like Bus De La Lum, Human Liberation Technology, Gaze Campaign, Forcible Confinement, Anti-Aquarian, Contrepoison, Geography Of Hell, Anal Drill, Mangled Clit, Blackhumor, Deterge, Gasolineman, HIV Corner, Flutter, Cloister, Karasyozoku, and Age Of Enlightenment.
Some of the highlights that I noted while soaking up all of the filth and despair: Genocide Organ's "Wintergewitter" is one of the legendary projects more ambient tracks, a hazy, low-fi blur of sampled voices, howling ominous feedback, and subdued bass drones that shift in and out of view. "Icicle Under The Ruse" is a detail-heavy slab of horrific industrial rumbling and insectile noise from Gaze Campaign, and Deathpile contributes a vicious blast of black fire via "Back On The Prowl II". Whorebutcher's "Dead Voices In The Frozen Air" blends corroded bass drones with grinding rhythms and murderous metal-on-bone scrapings, and is followed by a vicious live assault from Consumer Electronics performing their extremely distorted power electronics in New York City. ASM's "219 (excerpt)" goes beyond PE into one of the most insane and psychedelic sounding chunks of speaker abuse found on this comp, and Viodre serves up a punishing free-noise assault with blasting drums and hysterical vocals that comes awfully close to sounding like a particularly extreme example of early 90s noisecore. Albeit fairly short, "Roto-Guitar 1979" is a heavy, oppressive blanket of low-end industrial drone from Boyd Rice's NON, and fits in perfectly alongside the dark machine ambience of many newer acts on the comp. Militia's "Ueb Immer Treu Und Redlichkeit" combines metal percussion, haunting female vocals and a black orchestral pulse for one of the more unique offerings here, and is followed by the hypnotic rhythmic evil of Alberich's " Snow Is Falling In The Ruins Of Stalingrad" and Vatican Shadow's excellent "Soviet Union's Vietnam War". The EVP-flecked black ambience of Lussuria's "Protection & Power" is more of the chilling ghostdrift that this project is known for, and the Age Of Enlightenment blasts out a pitch-black wall of junk-static that I would really, really like to hear more of. And Ramleh's track is easily the most beautiful peice of music in here, a gorgeous wash of heavy kosmiche amp-drone titled "Baikal Tableau".
All of this is assembled into a large plastic jewel case with full color artwork, a fold-out insert, and a clear Hospital Productions sticker, released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Back On The Prowl II
Sample : Demerger At Random
Sample : End Of Autumn (excerpt)
Sample : Protection & Power
Sample : Soviet Union's Vietnam War
Sample : Torture And Abuse
Sample : Ultimate Control Ultimate Oppression

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VEE, TESCO & STIMSON, DAVE   Touch & Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79-'83   BOOK   (Bazillion Points)    29.95

One of the best things about the recent rise in high-quality underground pubs is the interest in documenting some of the more crucial n' influential zines that were part of shaping the topography of subterranean culture in the 80s and 90s. Elsewhere on this week's new-stuff list you'll find the mammoth collection of the Swedish extreme metal zine Slayer that was also published by Bazillion Points, and their latest effort in this field is the almost-as-massive Touch & Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79-'83, which collects the entire twenty-two issue run of this seminal, nay, essential early U.S. hardcore punk fanzine within a weighty 548 page softbound book with a deluxe embossed cover (that's a young John Brannon from Negative Approach scowling at you from that cover), printed fold over fly leafs and black and white endpapers plastered with show flyers from amazing Detroit area shows, the whole look and layout in the typical stunning quality that I've come to expect from B-Points.
Most folks probably know the name Touch & Go from the long-running indie / noise-rock label, but before that label was taken over by Necros bassist Corey Rusk, Touch & Go was this ratty, impudent little zine run by Meatmen mastermind Tesco Vee and Dave Stimson. Starting in 1979, Touch & Go was one of the earliest zines to document the then-embryonic American hardcore scene, and it did so with a mix of cut-and-paste design aesthetics, live band pics, snarky record reviews that cover everything from hardcore to underground psych to early industrial, vicious lambasting of assorted punk scene types, huge doses of Reagan-rage, gobs of lists, gruesome hand-drawn artwork (including some rad early Pushead stuff), scene reports, and irreverent interviews that covered everything that was going on within the U.S. hardcore and post-punk crowds during this period of time. Both Stimson and Vee have really distinctive voices that give these issues plenty of personality, with razor-sharp wit and no compunctions about telling you what they think of a particular record and/or band, be it genius or dogshit. The look of these old issues is classic hardcore xerox, collages photos and high-contrast artwork interspersed with typewritten text, laying down what would become a template for like-minded zines that would follow. Their first several issues were all rants and reviews, but once the guys started hitting up bands with their lines of enquiry, the interviews are with a killer selection of bands that cross the entire hardcore spectrum of the early 80s: Die Kreuzen (!!), Tar Babies, Negative Approach, SSD, Faith, Poison Idea, Insurrection, Crucifix, Void, Misfits, L-Seven, Minor Threat, Necros, 7 Seconds, Crucifucks, Iron Cross...fuck! I'm still making my way though this book - it's like a crash course in first wave hardcore as seen through the eyes of a couple of Michigan deviants. Highly recommended!

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VELEHENTOR   Dyatlov Pass   3 x CD   (Infinite Fog)    24.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Dyatlov Pass
Sample : Man-Pupy-Njër
Sample : Otorten I
Sample : Otorten III
Sample : Otorten V
Sample : Otorten VII

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VELEHENTOR + VISHUDHA KALI + CLOSING THE ETERNITY   Ishopanishad   CD   (Vegvisir Music)    12.98

Capturing a live performance from 2007, Ishopanishad is an impressive piece of dark ambient ritual that arose from a collaboration between three established artists within the Russian occult industrial underground: the Ekaterinburg-based Velehentor is one that I've been following for several years now, having released some really great recordings of stygian ritualistic drone-music that often toe the line between dark ambience and black industrial, and Closing The Eternity is another one-man project whose work I've enjoyed through some solid albums on Epidemie, Drone Records and Infinite Fog. On the other hand, I wasn't previously familiar with Vishudha Kali, the solo effort of an artist named Andrew Komarov who exclusively uses vocal sounds to create his abstract, unearthly dronescapes, but his contribution to this album is really interesting, using his voice to manufacture additional layers of droning sound that add an almost sacred feel to the music. The three artists come together on Ishopanishad's three long pieces (which are all essentially just chapters of one long performance) to sculpt lush physharmonium drones and flurries of chiming bells, resonant throat singing and chanting, the distant reverberations of kettledrums ringing like thunderclaps beyond the horizon, and a variety of TIbetan acoustic instruments such as the Buddhist dung chen, ting gzhang, the lag rnga hand-drum, the ritual drill bu prayer-bell, and thigh-bone trumpets (rkang gling). These instruments are used to create long, sustained drones and lush layers of sound that manage to resemble swathes of kosimiche synthesizer, and it's really cool how these acoustic instruments are able to form such sustained sheets of dark sound, although I'm pretty sure that some minor effects and processing were used in order to mold these sounds into the epic drones that appear here. Ishopanishad feels ancient and mesmerizing, a combination of ominous electronic music influences and primordial Tibetan ritual billowing out in vast clouds of warm enshrouding whirr and buzz across the second half of the album, the instruments and voices washing away in a glimmering blur of softly pulsating drones that slowly drift and tumble through the darkness, while mysterious rattling sounds echo from out of the depths. This one is a must-hear for fans of the subterranean shamanic drones of the Aural Hypnox label and it's associated artists (Halo Manash, Aeoga, Arktau Eos, Zoät•Aon), it's got a lot of the same drugged, death-rite vibe...
Limited to 976 copies, the disc comes in an ornate package that includes several fold-out panels and a printed vellum inner sleeve.
Track Samples:
Sample : I
Sample : II

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VESTIGAL LIMB   Anoxic Lair   CASSETTE   (Rainbow Bridge)    6.00

Haven’t heard anything from this monstrous psychedelic harsh noise outfit in a while, probably not since their split with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. Anoxic Lair is heavy stuff though, a mix of brutal industrial noise and psychedelic weirdness and demonic undertones that make this worthy of checking out if yer a fan of Blue Sabbath. Each of the two massive sidelong tracks on the cassette are a half hour in length, and like their older stuff draws a lot of it's sound from classic 90s harsh noise (Black Leather Jesus, Macronympha, Sickness, that kind of stuff). I don't know if the bass guitar that has been used on past releases is being used here, but there's definitely a massive low end crush to this recording that gives the harsh noise a heavier edge with what could be called "riffs" appearing throughout the two sides, heavy recurring noise loops that give the music a grinding, rhythmic power. Compared to most harsh noise, Vestigal Limb's material isn't haphazardly constructed, and you can hear patterns and arrangements all throughout the sprawling grindscape.
The tape begins with grinding distorted noise loops that build into a steady rhythmic foundation, backed by a constant wall of crunchy, smoldering distortion. Guttural engine-like buzzing appears and threads its way through the sputtering, heaving mass of speaker-vomit, which increasingly becomes more infested with static. After awhile, this evolves into a less chaotic (but still quite heavy) stretch of throbbing, rhythmic synth-noise that locks into this brain-melting inhuman 'groove', and it's this rhythmic electronic bass throb that becomes the heart of Vestigial Limb's sprawling industrial nightmare across the remainder of the side. The sound is heavy, with a thick low-end presence that is never overwhelmed by all of the screaming feedback and distorto-synth chaos. It's got this dirge-like momentum, slow but deliberate, the greasy grind of flesh-chewing machinery operating inside of a toxic acid fog. Not your run of the mill harsh noise wall at all. The other side moves through heavy layered drones running through more howling storms of bestial mechanical roars and junk-noise/feedback violence, early on digging into a somewhat hypnotic buzzscape but then gradually ratcheting up the pressure until it begins bursting at the seams with jagged chopped-up electronic chaos, then evolves into a massive industrial dirge that close the album.
Released in a limited edition of forty copies, packaged in a hand-numbered black and white package.

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VIKERNES, VARG   Sorcery And Religion In Ancient Scandinavia   BOOK   (Abstract Sounds)    48.98

Sorcery And Religion In Ancient Scandinavia IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

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VINTERRIKET   Wege In Die Vergangenheit 2002-2004   CD   (Othal)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Aura II
Sample : Das Winterreich
Sample : Winterschatten
Sample : Züngelnde Winterflammen

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VINTERRIKET   Grauweiss   DVD   (Aphelion Productions)    16.98

Of all of the black metal artists that followed in the footsteps of Varg Vikernes and swapped out their guitars for synthesizers to play ominous, purely electronic music, there are only two that I feel really achieved the kind of kosimiche-influenced grandeur that many of their peers strived towards: the first is Ildjarn, whose Hardangervidda project remains one of my favorite pieces of arctic ambience; the other is Christoph Ziegler's solo project Vinterriket (the Swedish for "Winter Realm"), which evolved from the twisted black metal of his early work into a kind of moody, washed-out synthesizer music. There's none of the cavernous ambience of Lustmord or Yen Pox to be found here; instead, Vinterriket draws from the cinematic electronic music of German bands like Tangerine Dream and Popul Vuh, crafting long, meandering compositions that tend to center around simple, melancholy minor key melodies that repeat over and over, slowly drifting by like storm clouds high above the Scandinavian mountain ranges. Some of my favorite Vinterriket releases have been ones that included video content as bonus material, as Ziegler is also a skilled cinematographer able to capture beautiful footage of the Scandinavian wilderness on film, images of barren trees stripped by icy winter winds, shadowy thickets and thick copses of evergreens, and isolated snow-covered mountains, all captured in a washed-out monochrome style that looks exactly the same as the evocative, colorless images that can be found on all of his album covers. Vinteriket's wintry electronic music takes on an additional gloomy beauty when combined with these video images, and I had long hoped that he would eventually release an actual DVD that presented a more extensive selection of video and music in this vein. It finally came together on Grauweiss, a full length Dvd that was released by Aphelion in a limited edition of one thousand copies, packaged in a digipack with a sixteen-page booklet filled with Ziegler's stark Nordic landscapes. It's a moving piece of bleak video art and grim electronic drift, featuring two separate pieces that run from fifteen minutes to half an hour in length, each one combining the sound of rushing arctic winds and glacial kosmiche synths with the grey visions of frozen wilderness that's almost completely devoid of any human presence. You can check out a promotional clip of this DVD on Youtube at this URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tgMhtyGs4M
Highly recommended if you're into the music of Northaunt, Phaedra-era Tangerine Dream, Paysage D'Hiver, Sieghetnar, and the Ildjarn-Nidhogg HardangerviddaM records.

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VINTERRIKET   Eiszwielicht   CD   (Aphelion Productions)    13.98

You will not find a better soundtrack for snow-swept winter afternoons enshrouded by vast gun metal grey skies than the music of Vinterriket. A longtime favorite of mine, Venterriket is the cult solo electronic project from Christoph Ziegler (also of Atomtrakt / Chregu / Dânnâgôischd / Nebelkorona), who has over the past decade and a half crafted a sound that is, more or less, an interpretation of 70s German electronic music through the lens of black metal. Using only synthesizers, Vinterriket creates long-form instrumental pieces that have echoes of the bleak, melancholic atmosphere of the most sorrowful strains of black metal, but sounds a whole lot more like a darker, murkier take on Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. I'm always looking for more Vinterriket that I don't already stock here at C-Blast, and recently two of the band's releases on Aphelion became available to us, one of 'em being the excellent 2008 enhanced mini-album Eiszwielicht. Packaged in a digipack case and limited to one thousand copies, Eiszwielicht features two long tracks of Nordic blizzard ambience and a bonus video which can be viewed on your computer.
The twelve-minute "Eistränen" is another beautiful piece of bleak Arctic synthesizer music with sorrowful, almost funereal melodies slowly unfolding across the sound of winter wind rushing through the ancient forests of Scandanavia, the music shifting from moments of fragile, pensive beauty to more ominous passages where the keyboards and underlying drones subtly shift into darker shadows. It's prime Vinterriket, with that uniquely washed-out, monochromatic Moog-scape sound that draws upon the influence of the darkest corners of 70's space music and kosmische music and transports it deep into desolate nocturnal regions.
The second track "Eisleere" owes even more of its sound to that classic analogue ambience of 70's German space electronics. Once again, Vinterriket captures the desolate feeling of northern wastes and vast tundra and ice-covered mountain ranges through his recordings of wind blasting through snow-capped evergreens and over endless expanses of rock and ice, and places sweeping cosmic synths and synthetic strings over top of the frozen soundscape, the eerie electronic orchestrations merging with whooshing fx that remind me a lot of Klaus Schulze's deep-space journeys. It's cold, evocative music that achieves the kind of grandeur that most other keyboard-wielding black metallers and Nordic hermits fumble for, highly recommended if you're into the music of Northaunt, Phaedra-era Tangerine Dream, Paysage D'Hiver, Sieghetnar, and the Ildjarn-Nidhogg HardangerviddaM records.
. In addition to the two exclusive audio tracks, the Ep also features an Mpeg video file for the song "Eisleere" that has slow-moving shots of winter landscapes, frozen forests, and other snowy wilderness locations filmed in reverse-negative and set to the haunting arctic ambience; it's a cool companion to the Grauweiss DVD that’s also listed this week.
Track Samples:
Sample : Eisleere
Sample : Eistraenen

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VOID   self-titled   CD   (Dupilcate Records)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Babylon
Sample : Ego Tranquilizer
Sample : Where Red Limbs Stir

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VOIVOD   War And Pain   LP   (War On Music)    21.00

Took me long enough, but I've finally got this crucial 1984 debut of barbaric sci-fi thrashcore from the Canadian avant-metal gods in stock on both the Metal Blade issued Cd and the more recent vinyl re-issue that was put together by the fine minds over at War On Music. I'd like to think that anyone who frequents the Crucial Blast shop is going to be a fan of Voivod on some level, right? I mean, in the annals of weird, experimental, wildly creative thrash metal, these guys are total legends, right up there with Celtic Frost, and everything that Voivod released in the 1980's is in my opinion totally fuckin' essential. Yes, we all know that Voivod didn't fully evolve into the left-field metal genius that they have become legendary for until 87's Killing Technology, but I've been of the opinion that their earlier speed-metal work hasn't gotten quite the amount of appreciation that it deserves. War And Pain, the band's first full length for Metal Blade, is indeed a crude, unpolished assault of early 80's thrash, but it's still much weirder than most of their then-peers, with more than just a little of the nascent Voivod steez already in place.
One of the things that seems to often get overlooked when people talk about War And Pain is just how much hardcore punk is at the root of the sound of this album. The guys in Voivod were obviously big fans of what Venom and Motorhead were doing, and that rabid, proto-blackened speed metal is a big influence on these songs, but so too was the rawness and abandon (and blitzkrieg speed) of the crazier fringes of American hardcore. Pretty much every thrash metal band was citing the same source material by midway through the decade, but Voivod's early work is seminal metalpunk that still sounds every bit as ferocious now as it did twenty five years ago. Then there's the quirky breakdowns, Snake's awesome yowling vocals, Piggy's manic riffing that already hints at the bizarre stylings of his later work, with angular proggy wonkiness showing up on songs like "Warriors", "Nuclear War" and the title track, and of course the weird lyrics that drew from their infatuation with post-apocalyptic science fiction - all of this points towards Voivod's deep appreciation of 70's prog that, while nowhere near as apparent as their later albums, is still definitely part of War And pain's sonic DNA. But man, it's first n' foremost all about thrash Armageddon, and Voivod rips it non-stop across this record. Crucial stuff!
Track Samples:
Sample : Blower
Sample : Nuclear War
Sample : Voivod
Sample : Warriors of Ice

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VOIVOD   War And Pain   CD   (Metal Blade)    14.98

Took me long enough, but I've finally got this crucial 1984 debut of barbaric sci-fi thrashcore from the Canadian avant-metal gods in stock on both the Metal Blade issued Cd and the more recent vinyl re-issue that was put together by the fine minds over at War On Music. I'd like to think that anyone who frequents the Crucial Blast shop is going to be a fan of Voivod on some level, right? I mean, in the annals of weird, experimental, wildly creative thrash metal, these guys are total legends, right up there with Celtic Frost, and everything that Voivod released in the 1980's is in my opinion totally fuckin' essential. Yes, we all know that Voivod didn't fully evolve into the left-field metal genius that they have become legendary for until 87's Killing Technology, but I've been of the opinion that their earlier speed-metal work hasn't gotten quite the amount of appreciation that it deserves. War And Pain, the band's first full length for Metal Blade, is indeed a crude, unpolished assault of early 80's thrash, but it's still much weirder than most of their then-peers, with more than just a little of the nascent Voivod steez already in place.
One of the things that seems to often get overlooked when people talk about War And Pain is just how much hardcore punk is at the root of the sound of this album. The guys in Voivod were obviously big fans of what Venom and Motorhead were doing, and that rabid, proto-blackened speed metal is a big influence on these songs, but so too was the rawness and abandon (and blitzkrieg speed) of the crazier fringes of American hardcore. Pretty much every thrash metal band was citing the same source material by midway through the decade, but Voivod's early work is seminal metalpunk that still sounds every bit as ferocious now as it did twenty five years ago. Then there's the quirky breakdowns, Snake's awesome yowling vocals, Piggy's manic riffing that already hints at the bizarre stylings of his later work, with angular proggy wonkiness showing up on songs like "Warriors", "Nuclear War" and the title track, and of course the weird lyrics that drew from their infatuation with post-apocalyptic science fiction - all of this points towards Voivod's deep appreciation of 70's prog that, while nowhere near as apparent as their later albums, is still definitely part of War And pain's sonic DNA. But man, it's first n' foremost all about thrash Armageddon, and Voivod rips it non-stop across this record. Crucial stuff!
Track Samples:
Sample : Blower
Sample : Nuclear War
Sample : Voivod
Sample : Warriors of Ice

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VOMITOMA   The Abortuary   CD   (Rotten Foetus)    9.98

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VOMITOMA   Coagulated Dialysis Of Partially Disintegrated Viscerosolids   CD   (Vaginal Apocalypse)    9.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Adipocerotic Sewagasm
Sample : Pulpified Reproductive Splatter
Sample : Vomitswamp of mutated abortions

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VON   Satanic Blood   CD   (Hammerheart)    11.98

This Cd (released on the European label Hammerheart) only contains the original Satanic Blood demo from 1991, unfortunately; until Nuclear War Now! gets around to re-issuing their more comprehensive Satanic Blood Angel discography, this is the only available Von recording still in print. And it's still essential listening to anyone interested in the primitive cesspool of early US black metal...
Formed in 1987, this California band became what is probably the first ever American black metal band, playing a brand of sloppy thrashing blackness that itself would end up influencing bands like Beherit, Watain (who took their name from a VON song), Ildjarn, Leviathan, and even Sweden's Dark Funeral. Not to mention just about every single fucked-up outsider black metal band that's come down the pike since. The entire roster of Rusty Axe owes their very existence to the music of VON, which the label proved by releasing that VON tribute compilation last year. And what a sound these freaks had. Blazing primitive thrash with sloppy hypnotic riffs that barely used more than four chords, fast and thrashing and kind of punky, heavily influenced by the music of Venom and Hellhammer, but with reverb-soaked guitars and utterly evil and diseased sounding leads that made their songs sound totally fucked up. The drumming is mostly a constant monotonous thrash beat, but every once in a while the band slows down into a gloom-and-doom-filled dirge. And then there are the vocals, a bizarre guttural growl floating in a thick cloud of reverb and echo effects that made Von sound ridiculously surreal and trippy. This stuff was groundbreaking when it came out, though hardly anyone gave a shit at the time. And while tons of metal bands flirted with satanic imagery in the 80's, VON took a really strange approach to the subject, with bizarre demonic artwork, language and minimalist lyrics that were pretty far out. A blurry, sloppy, droning satanic black metal attack that sounds like something straight out of hell (or maybe a mental ward, at the very least). Essential listening for disciples of true black metal atavism.
Track Samples:
Sample : Watain
Sample : Christ Fire

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VOND   Selvmord   CD   (Candlelight)    13.98

It's been out of print from Candlelight for awhile, but some copies of this blackwave album from the great goblin have recently materialized out of the ectoplasm...
An outlet for the "dark side" of former Emperor bassist Mortiis, Vond was a side-project, or maybe more accurately an offshoot of, the darkwave that Mortiis became known for after leaving the Norwegian black metal legends. Mortiis released three albums under the Vond name during the mid-90s, and at first there really wasn't much to distinguish Vond from what he was doing as Mortiis. The difference was apparently more in overall tone than sound, I suppose - the album title is Norwegian for "suicide", and the whole album revolves around themes of suicide and hopelessness; yikes, just the album design for the first Vond disc Selvmord is certainly way darker than anything Mortiis has ever plastered on one of his cds, with a black and white cover image of a naked Mortiis (sans his troll makeup and pointed ears) hanging out in a blood-spattered bathroom, sitting on the edge of a bathtub and holding a knife to the throat of a young woman. An image that apparently got this banned in Germany when it first came out, too, but the minor controversy around Selvmord's sleeve design seems out of place once you hear how pretty this music is. There is nothing here that connects this with black metal or metal at all, in fact, and is instead a series of very long, very repetitive synth-based tracks, a kind of soundtracky gothic ambience that mixes together liturgical organs, Ren Faire-style wind instruments, orchestral strings, some nods to Tangerine Dream and German synthesizer music, baroque dark ambience and minimalist horror movie keyboard music. There are some minor industrial touches that appear briefly, mostly on the the third track "Reisen til en ny verden" in the form of some booming orchestral percussion (kettledrums, etc) and shuddering mechanical clang that appears in the middle of the track, but aside from that You could have told me that this was an early Projekt release and I wouldn't have batted an eye. If you liked the early Mortiis stuff like Født Til Å Herske then you really need to hear Vond, and fans of gloomy synth-driven darkwave and Ildjarn's later kosmiche / Tangerine Dream-worshipping phase should check this out, too. This reissue of Selvmord came out on Candlelight back in 2004 to apparently very little fanfare, as I found a bunch of copies of this super-cheap.
Track Samples:
Sample : Nar Livet Tar Farvel
Sample : Reisen Til en NY Verden
Sample : Slipp Sorgen Løs

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VRESNIT   Tunvet   CD   (Vegvisir Music)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Tunvet

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WHITEHOUSE   Erector   LP   (Very Friendly)    22.00

"Extreme Electronic Music - Please acquire with due caution."
Thus states the warning on back cover of Whitehouse's crucial debut album from 1981. They really weren't kidding, either. By today's standards, Whitehouse's first album sounds almost ascetic when you compare it side-by-side with the blastwalls of noise employed by many current power electronics artists, but cranked to upper levels of volume and allowed to run it's course on your deck, Erector is a goddamn demon. The opening title track, for example, is little more than a minimal juddering bass frequency fluttering underneath the controlled bursts of static white noise that are interspersed between the squealing high-pitched feedback and distorted, processed vocals that howl and whine high up in the mix. But as minimal as this recording is, it's still extremely abrasive listening, evoking the drooling lust of a sexual predator transmitting an assortment of obscenities via short succinct blasts of electronic shock. The same formula is repeated on "Shitfun", but the high frequency sounds are even harder on the ears and nervous system, the feedback tones almost disappearing into the upper range while noxious bass rumbles and microphone abuse are strewn over Bennett's fey, ranting vocals. On the other side, the band switches to a simple fluctuation electronic pulse on "Socratisation Day", sounding like a warning signal being emitted from a malfunctioning mainframe computer while other wriggling feedback tones and a steady stream of granular hiss appear. When Bennett's voice comes in, it's a ghastly processed howl that is almost impossible to understand. The album's most menacing track though is the closer, "Avisodomy"; here, Bennett dials down the hysterics and instead offers a contemptuous sneer and orgasmic wailing as the synths spew bubbling rivulets of black filth and shrill, noxious, fluttering feedback. Essential early power electronics required listening for any newcomer to the art form for a true understanding of what "PE" truly means. Prurient, Masonna, Genocide Organ, The Grey Wolves, Nicole 12, Wolf Eyes, Bizarre Uproar - it all seeps from the putrid black lacerations of Erector.
Finally available again on vinyl thanks to Very Friendly's recent reissue campaign of the Whitehouse back catalog, this record features the original censored artwork (created by Stephen Stapleton from Nurse With Wound) and an otherwise super-minimal jacket design that includes a jet-black blank inner sleeve. A perfect visual summation of the voids captured in the grooves of this record.

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WHITEHOUSE   Bird Seed   2 x LP   (Very Friendly)    28.98

Another of Very Friendly's recent Whitehouse vinyl reissues. When I saw the band perform live in D.C. a few years ago on their most recent excursion to the US, Whitehouse's set featured some of the material off of what was (at the time) their most recent album, 2003's Bird Seed. That material was probably the most aggressive of the performance, not surprising since Bird Seed is one the pioneering power electronics duo's most skull-cracking albums, slamming you over the head immediately when the two and a half minute excoriation of "Why You Never Became A Dancer" unleashes it's pounding distorted percussion and scornful vocals, sounding like a stuttering gabber track being used as a backdrop for a brutal examination of your combined failures. Then it's on to the awesome distorted synth mangle of "Wriggle Like A Fucking Eel", again with the frantic, hateful spoken word style vocals ranting wildly over the severely over-modulated low notes generated by the synthesizer, and layers of higher drill-tone drones and assorted other speaker abuse. There's a more restrained delivery offered on the long track "Philosophy", an ominous melody playing behind the buzzing, squealing feedback while the nightmarish lyrics are recited in a plaintive voice, before they start bending the feedback into ear-bursting high frequency drones.
The title track takes up the entire b-side, and is something entirely different. Ostensibly the most disturbing piece of audio on the record, this is a nearly fifteen minute montage of recorded testimonials and police interviews with rape victims, prostitutes, family members of victims of abuse, all constructed by Peter Sotos. The cumulative effect of the explicit, unflinching dialogue is unsettling, offering a long stare into an abyss of failure abject suffering, child murder, sadism and abuse - readers of Sotos's written work will be familiar with the nihilistic tone of this audio collage.
The C side opens with "Cut Hands Has The Solution", which seems to be where Bennett took the name for his new "Afro-noise" project Cut Hands; the sound here also hints at the mix of primitive percussion and noise that Cut Hands is focused on, with a simple pounding backbeat serving to underscore his distorted ranting, and it's followed by the pummeling blown-out rhythms, brutal synth squelch and swooping flanged noise-loop of "Munkisi Munkondi", where African language vocals are employed against the violent juddering rhythms.
The final side is an "extended instrumental version" of the track "Wriggle Like A Fucking Eel" that had previously appeared on a limited 12" single released a year or two prior to Bird Seed; it's a sped-up noise/percussion freak-out, frenetic drumming squashed into over modulated pounding , rattling around within a blizzard of shrill feedback and distortion.
Like much of Whitehouse's more recent work, this presents a more focused, complex approach to their sound. It's still merciless in it's assault upon the listener, but behind the ear-trauma, there are new layers of experimentation and noise-language being used here that offer more depth to the listening experience.
Track Samples:
Sample : Bird Seed
Sample : Cut Hands Has the Solution
Sample : Why You Never Became a Dancer

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WICKED KING WICKER   The Destruction Ritual   CASSETTE   (Waves Of Decay)    6.99

An interesting detour from the extreme distorto-sludge horror that this New York duo have been doing over the past few years, The Destruction Ritual is a recent limited cassette that features two long sides of psychedelic machine muck that retains their claustrophobic density while treating us to a more abstract, noisy set of tracks.
The tape unleashes a nice, long tidal surge of blackened sonic slime, beginning with the nearly twenty minute title track that takes up the first side. The massive, crushing doom metal riffs and extreme distortion that make up Wicked King Wicker's trademark sound is almost entirely absent here, and instead the band pumps out a filthy black fog of meandering guitar noise and copious amounts of delay, waves of effects-pedal abuse, grinding slow-motion amp-vomit that resembles their signature riffing slowed down to a nearly static rumble, and it's all coated with endless hissing vocals and guttural gargling. These guys have always been heavily influenced by Skullflower and you can still here that band's formless noise rock imprinted onto "Ritual’s feedback-soaked slime-pysch, but this also heads out further into industrial noise than anything else I've heard from 'em, and at times taps into the same kind of moldering sonic fug as Finnish psychnoise heathen Haare. The b-side track "The Agony Of Rebirth" continues in much the same vein, a slow motion avalanche of swirling black syrup-sludge that crawls even slower than the preceding track. It resembles a blackened doom metal track slowed down to 1/10th speed and then draped with all kinds of ridiculously overloaded delay effects and haunted-house reverb, and spinning out into grinding grimy lock-grooves of low-end rumble, which I guess is exactly what I'm hearing here. Pretty much had me in a daze by the halfway mark, and I can only imagine how this would sound with a bloodstream full of downers. Time will tell, I guess.
The tape comes in hand-screened cover, and is limited to two hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Agony Of Rebirth
Sample : The Destruction Ritual

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WILLING FEET   self-titled   7" VINYL   (Peace and Quiet Recordings)    6.50

Where did this band come from? Man, this 7" fucking blew my head off the first time I spun it, blazing headlong through three (four, if yer counting the one short intro) tracks of noisy, d-beat fueled hardcore with a nasty blackened streak running through it. Willing Feet tear through their distorted thrash completely sans inhibition, taking the basic three-chord structure and speedlust of early hardcore and slathering on heaps of speakershred distortion and an impressive vocal attack that sounds like the singer is being strangled as he attempts to bust out his morbid, death-obsessed ravings over the 100 mile per hour blitzkrieg 'core. Just about every single one of the reviews that I saw online for this record throw out Absurd and Ildjarn as reference points for Willing Feet's filthy blackened punk; I don't know what anyone is thinking comparing this to the caveman stomp of early Absurd, but the Ildjarn comparison is slightly more apt, if we're talking about the primitive buzzsaw thrash of the band circa Strength And Anger. Take that sound and weld it to the atomic roar and mangled feedback hysteria of early Negative Approach with unique, utterly psychotic vocals, and you're much closer to what's actually going on with this record. I love the carnage that opens the second side, as well; just as it sounds like the band are on the brink of kicking into some sort of demented Skullflower-like noise dirge, it all comes together into a crushing buildup that slowly grinds upwards till the band breaks out into a ripping, monochrome blast of hardcore stinking of blown speakers and fresh blood. It's a rager. Dyin' to hear more from this band.
Limited to three hundred copies.

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WINTERBLUT   Grund: Gelenkkunst   2 x CD   (Red Stream)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Vom Endlosen Schrei
Sample : Wenn ein Tropfen Faellt

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WOOLEY / LOONEY / SMITH / WALTER   Scowl   CD   (ugEXPLODE)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Carps Daemon
Sample : Scan Meltdown
Sample : Tomb Trisects

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WORN VESSEL   The Refuse Of Nature   CASSETTE   (Worthless Recordings)    5.00

Dunno where Worn Vessel are from, but they sure sound European. This tape of cancerous industrial dirge is the first offering from this mysterious project, peddling an ancient brand of filthy noise that you could pass off for some obscure cassette released on a label like Slaughter Productions or Broken Flag. It's a promising start for this project, delivering evil, throbbing synthesizer muck beneath sepulchral vocals.
The Refuse Of Nature is heavy, rhythmic industrial soaked in a grim, grime-covered atmosphere, comprised of huge grinding loops of machine noise and distorted synthesizer drone. The tracks are formed from huge clots of throbbing, bass-heavy noise, then slowly build upon that foundation by gradually adding additional layers of sinister minor-key chord changes, whirring mechanical sounds. There's a musicality to this that is often missing from contemporary bands in the same style, the "riffs" played out on the roaring synth give tracks like "Where Were You" a majestic feel. On the more abstract tracks, it's all washed-out factory ambience, long stretches of thick electrical buzz spread out across the seven-minute "Where Were You (Part 2)", a sprawling death ambient exercise that is continuously disturbed by eruptions of fluttering reverb-drenched noise, hissing steam, engine judder, and what sounds like putrid death metal style roars wafting up out of sulfurous holes.
I can definitely hear the influence of early Italian industrial (Bianchi, Mauthausen Orchestra) throughout these tracks, especially when you get over to the second side and tape begins to work it's way through the more minimal flatline drones and ghastly feedback on "I Do What I Hate". Really cool, putrescent industrial that drives off all of the light in the room. Recommended...
Released in a limited edition of fifty copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : I Do What I Hate
Sample : Where Were You

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WRECK & REFERENCE   Black Cassette   LP   (The Flenser)    18.98

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WRNLRD   Death Drive   10" VINYL   (Flingco Sound System)    18.98

Back in stock!
One of the most recent records to come out from this mysterious avant-garde metal project on the Flingco label, Death Drive is a four-song Ep of deformed metallic horror from another dimension, as bizarre and mutated as the rest of Wrnlrd's catalog. Usually described as a black metal band, Wrnlrd is really something very different, a kind of outsider metal shot up with trace amounts of whacked-out Appalachian music and weird instrumentation that really defies any attempt at categorization. I'm trying to think of a comparable band that's this bent, and I'm coming up empty. Nobody sounds like Wrnlrd, and Wrnlrd sounds like nothing else.
The Ep begins with the furious, fuzz-soaked black dirge of "Precursor", where the deformed riffs come crawling off of guitars dripping with low-fi distortion and trebly hiss, a weird buzzing bass tone lurking beneath the thick swarm of noise, the drums stumbling in slow motion as they drag themselves through a heavy coating of hot tar. That's over with after a minute or two, and then it lurches right into "Grave Dowser", an even stranger bit of slo-mo black doom; the guitars are just as fucked sounding on this one, as if their being played through super cheap, low-grade amplifiers, but this weird synthetic sound is an intrinsic part of Wrnlrd's mutant black metal. Ethereal female singing can be heard in the background, a girl's lilting voice drifting through the shadows while feral distorted screams tear through the staggering sludge, awkward tremolo riffs and clouds of putrid hiss. These shorter tracks seem like a buildup to the last song on the first side, "Midnight Ride"; it's got Dwid from Integrity lending his distinctive, hoarse howl to what sounds awfully like a messed-up Integ riff laid over a black swarm of processed guitar shred and sludgy riffage. As with the other tracks, this is seriously deformed and off-kilter, the blackened metal dragged through all manner of sonic filth, wild bluesy leads screaming over the atonal riffs and lumbering bass. Huge smears of backwards sound and pedal steel guitar rush over the woozy black sludge, and then suddenly the sound of a harmonica comes out of nowhere at the end of the song, turning an already killer blast of mutated black dirge into surreal folk-flecked psychedelia.
Over to the b-side, you're treated to the hazy piano instrumental "Luster", the somber keys softly drifting through ambient room sound and random environmental noises and distant muffled voices, a dejected aural hallucination that leads right into the final title track where a wheezing accordion drone flows into a spastic outburst of electronic mayhem and more of those lurching Integrity-esque riffs. It's heavy and sludgy, the metallic crunch of the guitars totally suffused with that processed fuzz, the riff contorting and warping while spidery bass lines creep underneath till it falls apart at the end into a heap of chugging off-time guitar and fragile melodic picking over rhythmic vinyl hiss.
Way, way out there. Black sonic magic for enthusiasts of acid nightmares. Gorgeously assembled by Flingo as usual, the vinyl packaged in a stylish, diecut black sleeve that includes a digital download of the album and a poster.
Track Samples:
Sample : Death Drive
Sample : Grave Dowser
Sample : Midnight Ride

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