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Drone Machines had originally come out earlier in the year as a self-released CDr, but was quickly picked up by Heart & Crossbone for a wider Cd release; the label is a perfect fit, their recent explorations into bleak, dub-influenced industrial doom aligning neatly with the machine-driven ultra-sludge that this one man band creates. That Author & Punisher is indeed a one man band is only part of why this project is so amazing; the sole mastermind behind this is Tristan Shone, who not only operates the arsenal of sound machines and equipment that he uses to create this massive mechanized sludge-metal all on his own, but also designed and manufactured all of it as well. Like the title says, the machines are the basis for Author & Punisher's sound, though this is much less about drone and much more about pulverizing rhythmic heaviness. It's almost impossibly heavy, a perfectly executed assault of grinding, heaving, ultra bass-heavy industrial pummel that immediately made this one of my favorite new albums... The sound is dense and crushing, at first focused on monstrous exhalations and rapturous chanting that join over huge swaths of low end drone, and then the mechanized drums begin lunging and lurching, a surging rhythmic machine grind taking form on opener "sand Wind And Carcass", a massive abstracted industrial metal dirge, over modulated distortion rumbling over massive percussive pummel, fields of desolate ambience suddenly opening up for a minute and then becoming swallowed up by the machines, distorted bass slowing to a crawl, the riffs becoming warped, various electronic manipulations going on as the music chugs forward, obviously the result of Shone wrangling his machines and sculpting the sound. Hearing all of this lock in together, the machines working in concert to create this monolithic robotic assault, is pretty mind-blowing. Continuing on, "Burrow Below" features some pulverizing dubstep-level bass squelch, and lurches into a devastating Godflesh-like mecha groove, ultra-downtuned lockstep riff and pneumatic drum machine grinding together in a crushing dub-doom groove, with Shone's sneering, malevolent vocals. Godflesh is the easiest comparison to what Author & Punisher is doing, obviously a big influence on Shone, but that classic Streetcleaner sound is warped and mutated into something more mechanical and inhuman, with more processed electronics, eerie melodic fragments appearing in the singing and the dense layers of drone and industrial texture, horrific screams time-stretched to the breaking point, the guitars and bass themselves processed and turned into synth-like blocks of distorted noise, or mangled into looped drones, phased bass and oscillating buzz.
Drone Machines is an ultra-intense blast of industrial metal performed by enslaved heavy machinery, and at it's most intense, sounds like a symphony of hellish steel presses and tank-tread drum machine rhythms, blasting warped low-end bass and shifting frequencies across a chaotic grindscape of malfunctioning electronics and drones, the doomed grind seizing up, the riffs fracturing, the whole thing becoming a monstrous alien construct splattered with junk metal carnage. A fucking amazing debut, anyone into grinding industrial doom, Godflesh, Halo, Human Quena Orchestra, Grave In The Sky, Dead World, any of that malicious, mechanical metallic crush has got to hear this...
Track Samples:
Sample : Blue Flame
Sample : Doppler
Sample : NTG Part 1 - Time

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Although a remastered and repackaged new version of Curves That Kick was reissued earlier this year on Relapse Records, I couldn't pass up grabbing these stray copies of the original Bacteria Sour Cd when one of our suppliers dug some up during one of their warehouse cleanings. The Bacteria Sour disc has been out of print for ages, and while the Relapse reissue does boast a much better (and heavier) mastering job, the new version doesn't have the original Pushead album artwork, presumably due to licensing/rights issues. Which makes this original release of interest to Pushead collectors and 16 uber-fanatics. We have a very, very limited number of these Bacteria Sour discs in stock, less than six, and we'll most likely never have these available in the shop again.
Originally released on Pushead's Bacteria Sour label, Curves That Kick was the band's debut album, a crushing twelve-song beating that introduced their extremely pissed-off, negative, groove-heavy metallic rock to the underground. With a sound that essentially combined the punishing heaviness of the Melvins with gnarled hardcore punk and the bludgeoning percussive riffs of Strap It On-era Helmet, the LA band made a name for themselves pretty quickly within the extreme hardcore/grind/metal scene in southern California, aided in part by their connection to Pushead and his boutique label. Their minimalist stop-and-go attack is mixed with bursts of thrashy speed on tracks like "Nova" and the very Black Flag-ish "Sedatives", but most of Curves That Kick smashes you over the head with relentless, discordantly noisy riffs played in a crushing mechanical 4/4 groove. Sludgy, brutal and metallic, 16 were also skilled in writing fucking AWESOME riffs, and this album (along with Drop Out) is loaded with 'em, massive catchy riffs that are impossible to resist, any of these songs could have been huge hitys with the alt-metal crowd in the early 90's. To this day, 16 were one of the few bands to find the perfect middle ground between the nihilistic sludge of bands like Buzzoven and Eyehategod, and the aggressive noise rock of the Amphetamine Reptile label.
Track Samples:
Sample : Chum
Sample : Resin

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Along with the handful of copies of the original out-of-print Curves That Kick cd on Bacteria Sour that we just obtained through one of our suppliers while they were cleaning out their warehouse, we also picked up an unearthed stack of the likewise long out-of-print Tocohara 7" that 16 released on Bacteria Sour in 1994. This extremely hard to find 7" Ep features two songs from the Cali sludge rockers, the title track "Tocohara" and their pummeling, percussive downer anthem "16". Both of these songs later appeared in re-recorded versions on the legendary Drop Out album, but here sound a little quicker, a little more punchy, each one a lunging attack of sludgy concussive hardcore aggro and grooving low-end battery, which I've described in the past as a perfect combination of the Melvins's detuned lumber and the stop-and-go percussive aggression of early Helmet. A killer set of early 16 jams that come in a full color sleeve designed by Bacteria Sour label boss Pushead. On black vinyl.

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Along with the small number of copies of the out of print early Crucial Blast titles from Rune and Katastrofialue that recently surfaced as part of a return that just arrived here from one of our old distributors, I also found a couple of copies of the Cd from blackened death/crust beasts All Is Suffering. A collection of studio and Ep material, The Past: Vindictive Sadisms Of Petty Bureaucrats has been out of print since at least 2005, and is one of the label's earliest efforts. It's also one of the only releases from a a little known but amazing band from southern Maryland who blew me away during their short span of existence with an apocalyptic mixture of old school death metal, imperial black metal, ultra-bleak ambience, majestic doom, and a definite Scandinavian crust influence. Not many people heard 'em when they were around as the band rarely played live and never toured outside of the area, and only released one other 7" Ep after this disc came out, but every single person that I've talked to about the band fucking loved them. Here's my original description of the disc from when it first came out, with all hyperbole intact:
"Fueled by war and corruption, The Past:Vindictive Sadisms Of Petty Bureauracrats collects both new studio recordings and demo and EP tracks from this visionary Maryland grind/crust band. All Is Suffering combine rabidly violent grindcore and epic black/death metal with monastic chants, blackened drones, incredibly catchy melodies, and a cosmic endtime ambiance. Some have compared them to His Hero Is Gone meets Marduk. Fourteen blasts of adventurous, grim, and vicious disgust for diseased humanity."
So there you go. Less than four in stock!
Track Samples:
Sample : Mauthausen
Sample : Through Deep Snow Darkness Stalks the Hunters

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Track Samples:
Sample : Premier Contact
Sample : Quatrième Contact
Sample : Totalité

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Track Samples:
Sample : Premier Contact
Sample : Quatrième Contact
Sample : Totalité

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Earache has given a pair of early Anaal Nathrakh releases the reissue-bundle treatment that they've bestowed upon more and more of their back catalog, giving extreme metal fans an opportunity to beef up their collection with nicely boxed dual Cd sets of material that, in most cases, had gone out of print for a while. Taking their 2001 debut album The Codex Necro and it's follow-up/companion Ep When Fire Rains Down From The Sky... from 2002, the label here presents a reissue set of this UK black metal band's earliest releases that will fully school any newcomer to the vicious, advanced 21st century industrial-necro violence of members V.I.T.R.I.O.L. and Irrumator, complete with the bonus tracks that were included with the original Earache reissues. The entire Anaal Nathrakh catalog is incredible, and even this early in their existence, the band was creating some of the most nihilistic, bestial black metal I've ever heard.
When The Codex Necro originally came out in 2001, the album received rabid accolades from the European metal press and appeared on numerous year end best-of lists. And rightfully so; here was a band that combined the blazing, frostbitten ferocity of classic second wave black metal with a futuristic industrial sheen, but instead of delving into the sort of warped dancefloor tactics that other electronically-enhanced BM outfits were experimenting with around the turn of the decade, Anaal Nathrakh forged this sound into something so hateful and apocalyptic that the album threatens to blowtorch the flesh right off of your face. Crushing black blast fused with a bizarre electronic edge, with some truly insane production techniques that were unlike anything I'd heard at the time. The seminal BM of bands like Mayhem and Darkthrone is obviously at the root of their sound, but it's mutated and spliced into something even faster and meaner. A heavy death metal influence finds it's way into Anaal Nathrakh's sound, making this so much heavier than most black metal, but the band also weaves in bizarre melodic touches, insane mechanized drum patterns, irradiated electronic ambience, perverted Gregorian chants, weird wah-stained riffs, even veering unexpectedly into some frantic drum 'n' bass breaks on "Paradigm Shift - Annihilation". Then there are the vocals, extreme and processed screams, maniacal high-pitched falsetto shrieks that sound like a cybernetic Rob Halford, and insane, bestial grunts, the vocals constantly changing shape, giving the music a constant psychotic energy, an incomprehensible gnashing of teeth. An amazing debut that left a permanent boot mark on the face of British black metal. The album originally came out in the UK on the Mordgrimm label, but in 2005 Earache released it in the US with four bonus tracks that were taken from Anaal Nathrakh's Peel Session from 2003, which included members of Napalm Death and Cradle Of Filth as auxilliary members...
Released as a follow up to Codex, the 2003 Ep When Fire Rains Down From The Sky, Mankind Will Reap As It Has Sown delivers a half hour assault of maniacal necro violence from British black metaller Anaal Nathrakh. A vicious six-song exercise in apocalyptic blast hate from the duo of Irrumator and V.I.T.R.I.O.L., with much of the bizarre production fuckery and electronic enhancement that made their debut so wickedly alien sounding now stripped away for a more straightforward, grind black/death attack. You won't find any of the sudden junglist outbreaks, electronically processed vocals, bizarre ambience or industrial clatter, but they still keep their sound in total end time overdrive, blasting out hyper fast, violent black metal scorched in nuclear fire and etched in misanthropic hatred. The sound is still pretty fractured and insane, the blastbeats hurtling into the stratosphere, the arrangements full of jagged stops and frenzied riffage, and of course, those psychotic vocals, a hellish tapestry of tortured screaming, bestial grunting, and wailing cries that feel as though they are emanating from the bowels of an asylum, with some additional throat damage contributed by Attila Csihar (Sunn O))) / Mayhem / Aborym). Like the debut, this was released in the UK on Mordgrimm, but was later reissued for the US by Earache with three bonus tracks taken from Anaal Nathrakh's 2005 BBC Rock Show appearance.
Both discs are packaged together in a full color box.
Track Samples:
Sample : Paradigm Shift - Annihilation
Sample : ANAAL NATHRAKH-The Codex Necro / When Fire Rains Down From The Sk
Sample : Cataclysmic Nihilism
Sample : ANAAL NATHRAKH-The Codex Necro / When Fire Rains Down From The Sk

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Fitting right at home with the classic old-school doom metal and trad metal that Shadow Kingdom has made their forte, Argus are another high quality offering of underground doom that the Pittsburgh label has wisely added on to their ever expanding roster. Before Shadow Kingdom came onto the scene a few years ago, there had been a longstanding void for this sort of cult old school metal that they specialize in, but these guys have become one of the best labels around dealing in this stuff, with a stellar lineup of both newer bands that carry the torch of true doom and heavy metal, and some much needed reissues that include a host of crucial Maryland doom albums from the late 80's/early 90's glory days of the scene.
Argus are right at home among all of this doomed goodness. Hailing from the same Pittsburgh area environs that's home to Shadow Kingdom, the band mines a vintage doom metal sound that they've already mastered with their self-titled debut. It comes naturally, seeing as how the band features a couple of doom metal alumni in front man Butch Balich (formerly of doom legends Penance) and Kevin Latchaw (Abdullah). Combining soaring, epic dual guitar harmonies with massive doom riffs and lumbering Sabbathain swing, Argus carve out wicked, chugging metal that's enhanced by Balich's powerful mid-range vocals. Those killer guitar harmonies and some of the arrangements give Argus a somewhat proggy feel, at times reminding me of While Heaven Wept, or Hammers Of Misfortune and Lord Weird Slogh Feg, but more rooted in epic doom. Some other cool touches that appear on the eight song album include the creepy pipe organs and choir voices that introduce "The Damnation of John Faustus", and frequent fist-pumping anthemic hooks...trad doom fans are going to love these guys. They pull off a classic sound without sounding "retro", with some solid songwriting on top of it all. Highly recommended if you're into Candlemass, Trouble, Solitude Aeturnus, Pale Divine, and Penance.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Damnation of John Faustus
Sample : Devils, Devils

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Here is another older Blossoming Noise title that I just picked up for the first time, a 2005 disc from Japanese sound sculptor Akifumi Nakajima's Aube, titled Chain[Re]Action. As with any of Aube's recordings, he is capable of summoning an entire world of sound out of a single sound source, and on this album, it’s a metal chain that is used as the source of these haunting, sometimes terrifying textural dronescapes, which Nakajima invokes purely out of the recorded sounds of the metal links of the chain. The tracks shift from minimal fields of high-pitched, ringing bell-tike tone drone that steadily increases in volume and intensity until it becomes a blinding white blast of sonic light, to passages of even more minimal clinking noises, barely-there scrapings, all-enveloping aural swarms of metallic screech, distant cicada-like buzzing and electrical hum, portentous sonar-like emanations, and the delay-soaked thrum of alien engines. Nakajima is a master of sound manipulation and design, of achieving contrast between abrasiveness and fragility, and the haunting, richly textured ambience he creates here is nothing short of dark magic. The two middle tracks in particular ("Re[sound]" and "Recondite") are effectively eerie descents into chthonic machine drift. The signature track however is the closing "Spasmodic Repetition", a massive, seething thirteen-minute dronescape formed from the looped sounds of chains being dragged and rattled, traced into writhing, scraping rhythms and sinister serpentine activity. The disc comes in a full color wallet slip-case, and is limited to 1,000 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Re[sound]
Sample : Spasmodic Repetition

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A killer pairing of two of the more adventurous outfits currently working within the realm of the slow and low, each delivering their own unique version of mind-blotting doom/drone. The first side has Montreal's Aun contributing two new tracks of swirling, beat-driven black psychedelia, and the second caves in on itself with a stunning black pit of body-destroying improv-ultradoom from France's Habsyl...
Aun starts their side with the dark, languorous shoegazer drone guitars and sheets of swirling electronic tones of "Druids", with some heavy duty boom-bap trance shambling in and turning it into a sort of MBV-influenced space rock drift crossed with some dark, doomy trip-hop, much like the sound of Aun's latest album on Important. Washes of blackened feedback become expanses of deep cosmic drift, the slow break beat drumming emerging into a field of strange psychedelic guitar noodlings, droning feedback and distorted, metallic riffage, getting darker and more ominous as it goes on, propulsive and strangely melodic as well, those swells of guitar crashing over the swirling industrial ambience in the background, heavy and rumbling rhythmic crush, like some charred, doom-laden Massive Attack-esque atmosphere. The other track, "Fall Out", drops another propulsive groove into a blackened, industrial dronescape. The motorik beat propels the sound forward across a droning guitar riff and dark kosimiche synths and effects, becoming another sinister mechanical throb, the sound eerie and desolate, deep wheezing and clanking metal appearing over the smoldering industrial backdrop, bits of shifting ambient sound and glitchery moving at the edges...
In response, Habsyll unleash the twenty-three minute "IV", a massive side-long expanse of black improv doom that starts off with a few minutes of minimal metallic clatter that eventually shifts into a creepy, rumbling soundscape. A deep bass pulse appears, hovering in a cloud of distant gong-like booms, strange wheezy organ melodies and streaks of feedback, cavernous reverberations and mutated Middle Eastern melodies, until suddenly the drums begin to scuttle in after a couple of minutes, heralding the massive slab of metallic crush that rumbles in, the sound coalescing into a huge wall of motionless black doom. This glacial, barely moving heaviness fills the space, grinding in place, the guitars breaking down into disintegrating washes of distortion, the drummer summoning swarms of cymbal hiss, then suddenly surging forward with huge halting blasts of distorted metallic sludge, the chords left to hover and echo and dissipate over the super spare drums. It takes a few minutes for the vocals to finally appear; when they do, it's a pair of terrifying throat tearing themselves open, one voice letting loose with low, vomitous snarls, the other lost in a frenzy of high-pitched, maniacal shrieks. The drums finally begin to move again after a while, slowly getting more active, breaking into abstract, jazzy fills for a while before locking into a pummeling dirge, then suddenly erupting with the rest of the band into a furious, fast-paced freakout, a thrashing, angular burst of speed and energy that quickly falls apart back into a black static crawl, slowly dissolving once again into pitch black formlessness as the drums decay and disappear, breaking off one last time at the end into a pounding crush of heaviness before decomposing into washes of feedback and drift and electronic warble and total darkness. Much like their debut album that I reviewed/listed a while back, this is total void music, taking the abstracted doom of Khanate down into the blackest depths of free-improvisation.
Beautifully presented by Public Guilt in a high quality jacket with artwork by Stephen Kasner, in a limited edition of 500 copies on 180 gram vinyl. Includes a digital download code.

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Drone Machines had originally come out earlier in the year as a self-released CDr, but was quickly picked up by Heart & Crossbone for a wider Cd release; the label is a perfect fit, their recent explorations into bleak, dub-influenced industrial doom aligning neatly with the machine-driven ultra-sludge that this one man band creates. That Author & Punisher is indeed a one man band is only part of why this project is so amazing; the sole mastermind behind this is Tristan Shone, who not only operates the arsenal of sound machines and equipment that he uses to create this massive mechanized sludge-metal all on his own, but also designed and manufactured all of it as well. Like the title says, the machines are the basis for Author & Punisher's sound, though this is much less about drone and much more about pulverizing rhythmic heaviness. It's almost impossibly heavy, a perfectly executed assault of grinding, heaving, ultra bass-heavy industrial pummel that immediately made this one of my favorite new albums... The sound is dense and crushing, at first focused on monstrous exhalations and rapturous chanting that join over huge swaths of low end drone, and then the mechanized drums begin lunging and lurching, a surging rhythmic machine grind taking form on opener "sand Wind And Carcass", a massive abstracted industrial metal dirge, over modulated distortion rumbling over massive percussive pummel, fields of desolate ambience suddenly opening up for a minute and then becoming swallowed up by the machines, distorted bass slowing to a crawl, the riffs becoming warped, various electronic manipulations going on as the music chugs forward, obviously the result of Shone wrangling his machines and sculpting the sound. Hearing all of this lock in together, the machines working in concert to create this monolithic robotic assault, is pretty mind-blowing. Continuing on, "Burrow Below" features some pulverizing dubstep-level bass squelch, and lurches into a devastating Godflesh-like mecha groove, ultra-downtuned lockstep riff and pneumatic drum machine grinding together in a crushing dub-doom groove, with Shone's sneering, malevolent vocals. Godflesh is the easiest comparison to what Author & Punisher is doing, obviously a big influence on Shone, but that classic Streetcleaner sound is warped and mutated into something more mechanical and inhuman, with more processed electronics, eerie melodic fragments appearing in the singing and the dense layers of drone and industrial texture, horrific screams time-stretched to the breaking point, the guitars and bass themselves processed and turned into synth-like blocks of distorted noise, or mangled into looped drones, phased bass and oscillating buzz.
Drone Machines is an ultra-intense blast of industrial metal performed by enslaved heavy machinery, and at it's most intense, sounds like a symphony of hellish steel presses and tank-tread drum machine rhythms, blasting warped low-end bass and shifting frequencies across a chaotic grindscape of malfunctioning electronics and drones, the doomed grind seizing up, the riffs fracturing, the whole thing becoming a monstrous alien construct splattered with junk metal carnage. A fucking amazing debut, anyone into grinding industrial doom, Godflesh, Halo, Human Quena Orchestra, Grave In The Sky, Dead World, any of that malicious, mechanical metallic crush has got to hear this...
Track Samples:
Sample : Blue Flame
Sample : Doppler
Sample : NTG Part 1 - Time

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Bad Brains are one of the few bands whose live albums I regularly pull out to listen to; they embodied the "crucial energy" of hardcore in the live setting more than any other band in the early 80's, and I've listened to all of their old live albums (Spirit Electricity, The Youth Are Getting Restless, and especially Live from 1988) countless times over the past twenty years. Their live documentation on record was terrific, but until a few years ago, there was hardly any high quality live concert footage of their classic 80's era available; that is, until that Live At CBGB's DVD came out on MVD, inarguably the best live video document ever released of the legendary Rastafarian hardcore gods. That DVD featured an exhaustive setlist that was culled from three consecutive shows at CBGB's that were spread over the Christmas holiday in 1982, and includes just about every song from that period that you could possibly want to see them perform live. At the time, the energy and ferocity of Bad Brains was unrivaled in hardcore, and their incendiary performances captured on that DVD proved the point. With amazingly high-quality film and audio, the footage captures the band in the throes of ecstatic fury, surrounded by punks hurtling across the stage and the dancefloor as the band tore through a set list that drew heavily from their early ultra-fast thrashers with a handful of Rastafarian dub/reggae jams.
So now MVD has taken a chunk of these performances and has assembled a new vinyl-only full length album of live material in a limited edition black-and-red splatter colored vinyl pressing, and it fucking smokes. There was a Cd release of the '82 CBGB's performances too, but this has a completely different set of material than that disc, fourteen tracks in all. This Lp features a lot of their reggae/dub material, but the heavy mix and mastering gives the dubbed-out reggae jams a much more bass-heavy, apocalyptic vibe than on previous Bad Brains live discs, and the sequencing of the tracks is perfect, with the speedy, ferocious blasts of Rastafarian thrash sandwiched between the massive reggae workouts of "The Meek" and "Unity Dub". Most of the songs found here are off of their Rock For Light album, but what makes this crucial for hardcore Bad Brains fans is the inclusion of the aforementioned "unity Dub", which to the best of my knowledge has never appeared on any other Bad Brains record, and the only live recording of "Rally Round Jah's Throne". Then there are the blistering hyper speed versions of classic songs like "Banned In DC", "FVK", "How Low Can a Punk Get" and "Right Brigade". Might be the "heaviest" sounding of all of the live Bad Brains albums, but regardless, it's a crucial set of the band at the height of their quasi-mystical, Rastafarian thrash powers, and absolutely recommended to fans. Issued in a limited pressing of just 500 copies.

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Back before the Rogue Astronaut album and the split with Endless Blockade came out, I was always stoked when a new Bastard Noise album came in. You knew that at the very least, Eric Wood and company would deliver another mental blast of sci-fi electronic chaos that would bludgeon you with some of the most extreme oscillator/pedal freakouts imaginable. But when the band started to radically evolve their sound starting with the Rogue Astronaut album, I began to get pretty obsessed with what they were doing, adding a new level of heaviness to the Bastard Noise template, incorporating brutal guttural vocals, and seemingly beginning to return, however slightly, back towards the crushing proggy hardcore sound of Man Is The Bastard, from which BN originally sprang. And when their split with Endless Blockade came out earlier this year, it confirmed exactly what I had been hoping; Wood back on bass, the lineup configuring into an actual band, bringing in an actual drummer, and combining their vicious space-locust noisescapes with pummeling progged-out powerviolence that virtually picks up where Man Is the Bastard left off. Which brings us to the new Bastard Noise album A Culture Of Monsters. It picks up right where the Endless Blockade split left off, with the new vision of BN fully taking form, taking the sound Of Man Is The Bastard and adding the signature Bastard Noise electronics, and incorporating a MUCH heavier prog influence. The result is some of the most crushing music from this group since Mancruel. The opening title track is a spoken word piece from Nathan Martin (formerly of Creation Is Crucifixion) that sets the apocalyptic mood of the album, which launches right into "Pincer's Movement", a pummeling prog-sludge workout, a sort-of anthemic chorus wrapped around a bass-heavy sludgecore attack, blanketed in alien electronics and chirping oscillator abuse, ultra deep guttural death metal style growls, all spacey and psychedelic but SUPER heavy and groovy, with some amazing bass playing and drumming, like MITB crossed with King Crimson or something. "Me and Hitler" is demonic prog-funk weirdness, gruff shouts trading off with snarling high pitched vokills, complex bass riffing and rhythmic shifts locking into jarring time signature changes, then unleashing a crushing sludgy riff and squealing electronics five minutes in. For a moment, everything falls away and it's just a simple bass melody playing slowly while soft crooning harmonized vocals float across the ether, a dreamy driftscape stretching out for another five minutes, then drops back in with another triumphant riff assault. The album's most surprising moment comes with "If Another World...", a short but beautiful piece of ambient jazz drift, with falsetto vocals smeared over gentle Rhodes piano, totally unexpected and utterly gorgeous. Then "Through Modern Existence (The March of the Trolls)" stomps in, almost like a death metal Ruins jam, spastic guttural powerviolent prog with complex angular bass workouts and thrashy drums, deep grunting vokills trading off with gruff MITB/Infest style shouting, tons of chirping buzzing fx, the whole assault super complex and dizzying and crammed into a mere two minutes. The punishing heaviness and bouncy bass riffs of "Lumberton" turns into a killer stop/start groove, but then suddenly shifts gears into total FUSION JAZZ, Rhodes keys drifting over straight jazz bass lines and layered rhythms, the switch is immediate and seamless, and from there the band continues to weave back and forth between the brutal prog crush and jazz...it's another stunning moment on the album that comes out of nowhere, they pull it off perfectly, and finally kick back into the majestic riff that opened the song at the end. Then the album ends with the ten minute epic "Interior War", crushing slo-mo riffage and bestial vokills combined with electronic fx that pans from speaker to speaker, the song almost taking on a stoner rock swing at times, then flowing into a long stretch of pure minimal ambience, then back into another spastic, jazzy death-prog assault with busy drumming, until it finally finishes in a cloud of cosmic ambience and creepy electronic flux.
It defies expectations of what a Bastard Noise album could sound like. It's the band's most adventurous and BRUTAL album yet. If you dug what they were doing on the split with Endless Blockade, A Culture Of Monsters will cave your skull in. Highly recommended!
Available on both cd and vinyl, with both presented in a full color gatefold package with a full color insert/booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : If Another World...
Sample : Lumberton
Sample : Pincers' Movement

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Also available in a limited edition gatefold vinyl.
Back before the Rogue Astronaut album and the split with Endless Blockade came out, I was always stoked when a new Bastard Noise album came in. You knew that at the very least, Eric Wood and company would deliver another mental blast of sci-fi electronic chaos that would bludgeon you with some of the most extreme oscillator/pedal freakouts imaginable. But when the band started to radically evolve their sound starting with the Rogue Astronaut album, I began to get pretty obsessed with what they were doing, adding a new level of heaviness to the Bastard Noise template, incorporating brutal guttural vocals, and seemingly beginning to return, however slightly, back towards the crushing proggy hardcore sound of Man Is The Bastard, from which BN originally sprang. And when their split with Endless Blockade came out earlier this year, it confirmed exactly what I had been hoping; Wood back on bass, the lineup configuring into an actual band, bringing in an actual drummer, and combining their vicious space-locust noisescapes with pummeling progged-out powerviolence that virtually picks up where Man Is the Bastard left off. Which brings us to the new Bastard Noise album A Culture Of Monsters. It picks up right where the Endless Blockade split left off, with the new vision of BN fully taking form, taking the sound Of Man Is The Bastard and adding the signature Bastard Noise electronics, and incorporating a MUCH heavier prog influence. The result is some of the most crushing music from this group since Mancruel. The opening title track is a spoken word piece from Nathan Martin (formerly of Creation Is Crucifixion) that sets the apocalyptic mood of the album, which launches right into "Pincer's Movement", a pummeling prog-sludge workout, a sort-of anthemic chorus wrapped around a bass-heavy sludgecore attack, blanketed in alien electronics and chirping oscillator abuse, ultra deep guttural death metal style growls, all spacey and psychedelic but SUPER heavy and groovy, with some amazing bass playing and drumming, like MITB crossed with King Crimson or something. "Me and Hitler" is demonic prog-funk weirdness, gruff shouts trading off with snarling high pitched vokills, complex bass riffing and rhythmic shifts locking into jarring time signature changes, then unleashing a crushing sludgy riff and squealing electronics five minutes in. For a moment, everything falls away and it's just a simple bass melody playing slowly while soft crooning harmonized vocals float across the ether, a dreamy driftscape stretching out for another five minutes, then drops back in with another triumphant riff assault. The album's most surprising moment comes with "If Another World...", a short but beautiful piece of ambient jazz drift, with falsetto vocals smeared over gentle Rhodes piano, totally unexpected and utterly gorgeous. Then "Through Modern Existence (The March of the Trolls)" stomps in, almost like a death metal Ruins jam, spastic guttural powerviolent prog with complex angular bass workouts and thrashy drums, deep grunting vokills trading off with gruff MITB/Infest style shouting, tons of chirping buzzing fx, the whole assault super complex and dizzying and crammed into a mere two minutes. The punishing heaviness and bouncy bass riffs of "Lumberton" turns into a killer stop/start groove, but then suddenly shifts gears into total FUSION JAZZ, Rhodes keys drifting over straight jazz bass lines and layered rhythms, the switch is immediate and seamless, and from there the band continues to weave back and forth between the brutal prog crush and jazz...it's another stunning moment on the album that comes out of nowhere, they pull it off perfectly, and finally kick back into the majestic riff that opened the song at the end. Then the album ends with the ten minute epic "Interior War", crushing slo-mo riffage and bestial vokills combined with electronic fx that pans from speaker to speaker, the song almost taking on a stoner rock swing at times, then flowing into a long stretch of pure minimal ambience, then back into another spastic, jazzy death-prog assault with busy drumming, until it finally finishes in a cloud of cosmic ambience and creepy electronic flux.
It defies expectations of what a Bastard Noise album could sound like. It's the band's most adventurous and BRUTAL album yet. If you dug what they were doing on the split with Endless Blockade, A Culture Of Monsters will cave your skull in. Highly recommended!
Available on both cd and vinyl, with both presented in a full color gatefold package with a full color insert/booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : If Another World...
Sample : Lumberton
Sample : Pincers' Movement

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Expect no peace here. At first, Richard Ramirez and crew fuck with the listener by starting off their installment in RRR's Recycled Music Series with some exuberant Mariachi music that has you thinking that someone fucked up the dubbing, but then it starts to get completely blown out and finally melts down into a vicious wall of high end skree, rumbling bass, and churning feedback, forming into the sort of brutal harsh wall assault that Black Leather Jesus is known for. Both sides of the cassette deliver crushing skull-warping distortion that's shot through with tons of paint-scraping high end frequencies, but as it gets deeper into each side, all kinds of bizarre sounds begin to emerge like distorted specters through the wall of noise. You begin to hear the Mariachi recordings bleeding through the filth, obscured by the raging blizzard of grit and buzz, and strange vocal samples, intercepted radio transmissions from Motown radio stations, demonic moaning, snarled cassette loops and distorted found-music samples all materialize and are subsequently blown apart into clouds of ash by the relentlesss assault of grinding amp-roar. It’s another brutal and psychedelic set of walls from this Texan outfit. As with all of the Recycled Music tapes, this comes in a duct-tape covered j-card and cassette.

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An obscurity from the glory days of the Bay Area thrash metal scene, Blind Illusion's The Sane Asylum was one of the weirdest records to ever come out of the Bay Area thrash underground, although it’s weirdness has been overshadowed by the fact that the album features the team of Larry LaLonde and Les Claypool, who would go on to form Primus after leaving Blind Illusion soon after it’s release. Unsurprisingly, The Sane Asylum has been mostly relegated to the footnotes in the history of Primus, but anyone into left-field thrash/speed metal from this era will want to check this out, because it doesn’t really sound like anything else that I’ve heard come out of the thrash scene. The original release has been out of print for years like most of the records that came out during this period, and although I’d known of its existence for years, I never got around to actually hearing it until it was recently reissued. Since then, this whacked-out album has become one of my favorite late 80's prog/weirdo thrash records, right up there with the likes of Sadus, Heathen, and Mordred. The Sane Asylum was the one and only album from the band, released in 1988 on Combat Records after almost a decade of activity in and around the Bay Area; when Blind Illusion first started out in the late 70’s, the band was just another heavy progressive rock outfit, but as they trudged forward into the 1980’s, they gradually morphed into a warped thrash metal outfit with an ever changing lineup of members revolving around bandleader Mark Biedermann (who would later go on to play guitar on another crucial Bay Area prog-thrash album, Heathen's Victims Of Deception, as well as playing briefly with Blue Oyster Cult). By the time that Blind Illusion came together to finally record their debut, the band had taken on former Possessed guitarist LaLonde and bass virtuoso Claypool, whose respective styles can be heard all over the album. What they ended up with was a wickedly bent slab of weirdo thrash that combined prog arrangements, echo-chamber vocals and weird psychedelic sounds with blazing, convoluted thrash metal, occasionally tossing in bits of oddball funk, bizarre fx, piano, and even Hammond organ and a children's choir on the song "Metamorphosis Is A Monster". More than anything though, it sounds like these guys were really into Rush, and you can hear that influence all throughout the sprawling prog-thrash epics like "Death Noise" and in Claypool's frequent and prominent bass work; the songs are made up of numerous sections, moving unpredictably from one time signature to the next, and often veer off into complex jams and shredfests like on "Vengeance Is Mine" and "Smash the Crystal". The mix of Rush, thrash metal, and weirdo fx turns this into one the weirdest 80's thrash metal albums ever. I really dug this, unsurprisingly, but it’s definitely of most interest to fans of more adventurous, eccentric 80’s metal; traditional thrash fans might find Blind Illusion just a little too weird. Metal Mind Productions gave this their deluxe re-mastered collector's edition treatment, presenting it in digipack packaging that features an eight page booklet with new liner notes, and released in a machine numbered edition of 2,000 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Death Noise
Sample : Metamorphosis Is a Monster
Sample : Smash the Crystal

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Dope double-CD reissue of the mindblowing fourth album from France's Blut Aus Nord, their most critically acclaimed release and the album that has garnered the band attention from far outside of the confines of the underground black metal scene. You can probably chalk that up to the fact that The Work Which Transforms God moves further outside of the parameters of black metal moreso than with any of their previous releases. The album was first released in 2003 in France, and it's sort of a concept album that deals with the band's philosophy of forward-thinking, new perceptions of reality, and constant evolution, although no lyrics are included here and it's all open to interpretation. Now we've got this new version reissued for the US through Candlelight and packaged with a second CD that contains the entire Thematic Emanation Of Archetypal Multiplicity EP. Growing weirder and more abstract with each release, Blut Aus Nord unleash some grim, searing black metal here, think early Emperor or Darkthrone, but at the same time they take that sound and warp it, melt it, mutating their filth-encrusted black metal buzz into a surreal drug trip filled with icy industrial ambience, deep gore gurgling vocals, huge stretches of drifting black dronescapes, passages of dub-like machine psych, and those queasy guitars that warble and lurch like someone is messing with the tuning pegs while they're playing the song. Those seasick guitar chords and guitar lines add alot of the unearthly ambience that makes this album so intense, permeated with an intangible, dreamlike dread. There's all kinds of rhythmic action happening here too, the drum machine sometimes grinding out a mechanized dirge a la Godflesh's Streetcleaner, or layering twisted tribal percussion that moves in and out of the background. The pinnacle of the album is the final song, "Procession Of The Dead Clowns", a lumbering ten minute dirge with spare, glacial drumming and a sorrowful, keening guitar melody, almost like a Jesu song but way more funereal and dismal and grim.
The second disc features the Thematic Emanation Of Archetypal Multiplicity EP, a more recent release from Blut Aus Nord that has five tracks of eerie, doomy dirges, fucked-up industrial clang, dank fields of black drone drifting over sparse drum machine beats, Gregorian-style chants, a weird breakbeat-heavy industrial dance track, and more of their frozen, lysergic ambience.

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So far, this is the only release from this vile squad of mutants from the nuked-out side of Pittsburgh; the band might include members of Conelrad and Microwaves, but none of their other affiliations hint at the sonic scum that they create as Brown Angel. This tape features four tracks of fucked up, totally damaged industrial sludge and a cover, the original tracks a mixture of ULTRA low-fi industrial sludge scrape that's completely drenched in feedback and tape hiss, and mutant basement no-wave pummel that sort of comes off as a totally decomposed and washed-out take on the sort of hulking dirges that Swans pioneered. It's not heavy though, because the sound here is so incredibly low-fi, it all comes off intensely murky and hissy. The first track opens it up with the heavily corroded and murky blown-out melodic drone of a re-worked Indian melody, which ends up turning into a rusted rumbling throb by the end, laced with damaged sludge melodies and the aforementioned sheets of tape hiss. The following tracks ("White Flight", "Slugfucker", "Your Life In Heaven") are just as shit-fi and wrecked, if not more so, a grimy mess of growling, slobbering vocals and distant clanking caveman drums, growling bass and dissonant guitar buried under piles of garbage, swarming with howling feedback melodies and a weird omnipresent drone that sounds like it's emanating from some large piece of electrical equipment just out of view; at their most cohesive, this sounds vaguely like hearing some ancient live Swans recordings that were recorded onto an derelict micro cassette, buried in a sewer for a year or two, and then dug back up and dubbed off of a malfunctioning boombox. The tape closes with a mangled cover of Arab on Radar's "#5" that stands out for actually sounding like it was recorded on a piece of 20th century recording equipment, as well as being a punishing skronk-assault that sounds like Godflesh covering the AOR original with Kevin Tomkins delivering a PE style vocal assault over top. Be warned, this is ugly, ugly shit. Limited to 50 copies.

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Released in 1998 on Italian grindcore label Headfucker Records, the debut album from Denver's demented, pot-smoking tech-jazz-death-grind freakoids Cephalic Carnage was often unavailable to those of us here in the US for long stretches of time due to spotty distribution; eventually, the album was reissued in a remastered version by Relapse with some bonus tracks added on, and the new version sounds fantastic. I just came across a couple copies in our warehouse of the Subordinate/Headfucker release however, which might be of interest to collectors; this version, which is apparently now out of print from the label, features two tracks from their split with Impaled ("Observer to the Obliteration of Earth" and "Regurgitation Adnauseam and Fecal Decay") that don't appear on the current Relapse reissue. Here's the original review that I wrote for the album years ago when we first got the Headfucker release in stock :
This is the dizzying debut full length from Colorado hydro-grinders Cephalic Carnage, reissued by the Italian label Subordinate. Even on their first album, Cephalic were aeons ahead of the rest of the grindcore scene, combining ultra-lethal blastbeat action and chainsaw riffage with a bizarre combo of jazz breakdowns and electronic noise that comes from out of nowhere. The guitar playing and song structures brandish skull-melting technicality, yet the band manages to invest killer hooks and catchy riffs in all of their songs. The drumming is positively octopoid, and it takes multiple listens to Conforming to Abnormality to be able to follow everything going on behind the kit. Lenzig’s multi-faceted vocals range from inhuman death metal bellows to insane monkey shrieks and the band employs some unpredictable production techniques like sub-bass drops and fucked-up electronic break beats that take this way out of the parameters of traditional death/grind. Critically acclaimed upon its release, it’s good to have this seminal blast of experimental grind available again. Essential for fans of hyperblasting, dopesmoking, fucked-up hydro math grind...
Track Samples:
Sample : Exhumed Remains
Sample : Extreme of Paranoia
Sample : Jihad

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Charnel House is a new Midwestern black metal-ish duo with a guy named Adam handling all of the instruments, and a girl named Hellfire on vocals, and they play a strange mixture of super low-fi warped nightmare blackened slowcore and primitive, psychedelic black metal that at times sounds like a blackdoom Mazzy Star. That sounds strange, but it's the one comparison that keeps entering my head every time that I listen to this Lp, the band's first. Released on Sygil, the small label operated by the guys in the equally damaged black/doom band OS, The Leprosy Of Unreality is scrawled in such a murky, low fi production that the music sounds as if its buried beneath years of dust and mold, the guitars washed out and buzzing in the background, the drums likewise murky and flat, but instead of merely sounding like a grungy basement recording, this sounds ancient and mysterious, warped by exposure to subterranean dampness and decay, as if the band was recorded playing in a hidden sub-basement, the recording captured on a moss-covered reel to reel. Then you have Hellfire's ghostly, narcoleptic voice, drifting across the album languidly, a disembodied moan trapped between worlds, sounding eerily like Hope Sandoval trapped in some musty underground tomb.
The album starts with "Law Of Opposites", a seriously detuned guitar grinding out a mangled doom riff, the sound steeped in murk and grime, the drums creeping slowly, barely noticeable in the background, playing a simple plodding backbeat as Hellfire's undead moan appears, swaddled in sepulchral reverb. This is one of the songs that makes me think of Mazzy Star; ghoulish, blackened, utterly creepy slowcore, like a skeletal low-fi doom version of Mazzy Star, ghostly and lingering, rumbling industrial noise off in the background, hissing cymbals drifting through massive reverb and cavernous echo. I could seriously listen to an entire album of this, but Charnel House have other ideas. The dolorous slowcore drift is ripped apart with the following track "Orison", a mangled low-fi instrumental black metal chaos, going from noisy blasting fury into off-kilter dissonant riffs, clanging noise rock guitars colliding over sloppy blastbeats, total frenzy, followed by another minimalist noisy black metal blast in "Paroxysm", where a chunky, doomy riff repeats itself endlessly over a blastbeat as Hellfire's ghostly cooing vocals drift back in, the song becoming creepy, abstract BM weirdness.
The second side tumbles further into abstract black murk. "Immolation" is another chaotic wash of dissonant guitars and stumbling blastbeats, those spooky vocals drifting like EVP, the track eventually breaking down into a dreamy, blackened dronescape. "Passage (Out from Illusion)" is pure black ambient drone, abstract guitar noise and cthonic drones burrowing beneath feedback hum and scraped strings, and the last song "Grave Digging", another instrumental, ends the album with one last hellswarm of blackened tremolo riffs and muffled, distant blastbeats, so far off and indistinct that you can barely make them out, just a thunderous rumbling on the periphery, a swirling, off-kilter black blast that almost sounds like something from Portal, but far murkier and more spectral...
Comes in a simple parchment cardstock jacket with high contrast black art, limited to 250 copies.

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Cherry Point's Phil Blankenship is the master of grindhouse-themed HNW; combining visuals and themes from grotty exploitation and splatter movies, he injects his harsh noise with a dark, horrific energy. It's a great combo that's made him one of my favorite harsh noise artists. I've been carrying his releases on Troniks for awhile, but hadn't picked up his Recycled Music tape till now; compared to his Cd releases, this is rougher sounding, definitely a bit more low-fi, but the two sides of extra-strength junk noise chaos and harsh wall still pack a brutal punch.
The first side is a low-fi scrapyard metal orgy with lots of brutal looped samples of metal clank and roars all raging above a seething ocean of low-end murk and garbled feedback. Fucked-up musical loops and actual percussion begins to materialize as you get deeper into the stew, with bits of looped drumming and fragmented melodic elements peeking out from the avalanche of steel pipes and sheet metal and oil drums that Blankenship rains down from on high...harsh and abrasive for sure, but with a weird sense of order in the way that the slabs of noise are clearly separated into distinct "tracks", and flow from ear-crushing walls of metal abuse into slightly more subdued passages of percussive clatter and droning feedback.
The second side feels more structured, and is heavier on the use of looped sound. At first, it launches into full-on walls of distortion, but then starts to incorporated the grating sound of cassette reels amplified into a massive wall of squeak and squeal that loops over and over into a warped groove. All of a sudden, some random xylophone-like melody appears for a couple of minutes, then leads into some more looped sounds made up of high pitched bell like tones, fragmented melodies, and screeching drones. It gets a little creepy as a high pitched whine sears itself across your brain and these weird moans emerge from behind the grinding noise wall, then goes into even more nauseating sections of high end scrape and contact mic abuse, sudden eruptions of blown out and sped-up samples of Queen's "Stone Cold Crazy" and other random musical detritus, stretches of segmented screaming and other sonic weirdness that finally evolves into a massive wall of distortion at the end. More collage-like than most of the Cherry Point stuff that I have, but still crushing.

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Part mutant mix tape and part free-noise wig-out, Cock ESP's entry in the Recycled Music Series is, as I expected, one of the weirder RRR tapes that came in this week. This recording from the Minneapolis noise group is also one of the oldest Recycled tapes that I've picked up from RRRecords for the shop, having been released back in 1995. Like most of these tapes, there aren't any song titles, just two sides of formless weirdness. The first side starts off with several minutes of awful Southeast Asian easy-listening Casio pap echoing out of a melted cassette, the saccharine pop rendered all murky and deformed by an overdriven dub job, and it gets more distorted as it goes along until it finally gets obliterated by a harsh, slow moving wave of junk-noise and feedback abuse. The tape continues on through muffled answering machine messages from punk rock festival promoters, insanely distorted live recordings of Cock ESP, brain-melting echoplex freak outs, and other random mania, and it gets heavier and more chaotic the deeper in you get, with most of this sounding like the material had been taken from low-fi live recordings. The band eventually builds into a massive psychedelic junk noise jet-roar cacophony that goes on for more than ten minutes, carrying over to the other side where they immerse themselves in a gibbering, frenzied, oscillator-howling storm of noise and random room ambience and massive amounts of tape hiss and mic distortion. Towards the end of the second side, they slip in some samples taken from a 70's prog/psych record that goes on for a few minutes, and then switches back into more amorphous noise, brief snippets of found music, and random film samples.

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Split Ep featuring two dark, doom-laden folk/psych artists, Crow Tongue and Language Of Light. I picked this up initially for the Crow Tongue side as I loved the previous Crow Tongue discs that came out on Hand/Eye, but the Language Of Light song turned out to be pretty great, leading me to start checking out more from the band. They're up first on the record with a song called "The Tower", a gorgeous, shadowy waft of gothic drone-folk, possessed by minimal, barely-there percussion and violin, the recording hushed and bathed in dust, with delicate, breathy female vocals and male singing tying together into an eerie ghost-chant. The female voice behind Language Of Light comes from Rebecca Loftiss, who it turns out is a sometime collaborator with the dark-drone-noise family collective Ctephin that I've been getting into recently. A pretty amazing track that has me currently searching out more of their eerie cemetery psych.
On the flipside, Crow Tongue offers up another weird tribal drone-and-percussion trance called "Wind Chant", which follows in the same creep-filled, ghoulish bluegrass-dirge as their full length. Plunked banjo strings crawl over a primitive motorik beat, while the gruff, dramatic chanting of front man Timothy Renner (who psych-folk fans might also know from his other group, the dark Xian folk ensemble Stone Breath) drifts overhead, the drums taking on a propulsive, tribal feel as they tunnel ever deeper into shadow. Feels like a more upbeat, propulsive Dead Raven Choir gone krautrock, and fans of any of this dark, gothic outsider doom-folk stuff should check this out.
Comes in a sleeve illustrated with appropriately creepy artwork and includes a vinyl Crow Tongue sticker, limited to 300 copies on marble gray vinyl.

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Album number four from Jason Crumer, who in the past has produced heavily abrasive industrial noise and dark ambience with such projects as Amazing Grace, Now In Darkness World Stops Turning and American Band, as well as playing in the sludgepunk band Facedowninshit. Lately, he's focused on releasing his harsh noise soundscapes and grim droneworks under his own name, with an acclaimed album on Hospital from a couple of years ago called Ottoman Black. I'd lost track of Crumer's more recent offerings after the American Band album, but came across this album from late last year on Misanthropic Agenda when I was restocking some of the older MA catalog for the shop. More subdued than some of the other Crumer-related releases that I've picked up, Walk With Me is sinister industrial noise/ambience, composed of harsh textures, scrap yard abrasion, and corroded drones that often feel as if they have been constructed in the form of an abstract horror film score, crafted for jarring shocks and sudden descents into deep dread, shot through with moments of startling beauty.
A pervasive current of unease runs through the entire album. The first piece "Perfect Comfort" throws back the rug to reveal a hive of rattling and hissing percussive sound, a nest of serpents seething beneath a black churning sky, locust swarms chittering in stands of dead trees, distant rumblings of thunder, and a muffled percussive throb undulating deep below. By the 2:00 mark, my skin crawls. The clamor of pipes and metal fades in after a while, overwhelming the rattling sounds and turns the last six minutes into a massive orchestra of scrap yard violence, blurry distant operatic voices, and deep reverberant breathing, becoming a massive menacing drone by the end. Then "Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant" blends layers of processed minimalist piano into a blur of sound, clustered Phillip Glass-esque keys sparkling across the first few minutes before drifting off out of sight, then slowly returning amidst ringing drones and peals of scraping metal and blasts of distorted electronics, becoming more frenzied and chaotic as more layers of industrial screech and howl are piled on till it becomes a raging wall of noise, returning briefly to the clusters of piano before ending. Distant horn-like tones open "Love Is More important Than Pride" and repeat over and over, forming an eerie dronescape of looping horn blasts drifting across a vast distance, chased by trails of silvery feedback and emergent percussion, leading straight into "Sexual Artifacts" which casts the album in darker shadow, grating metal clank echoing across a yawning abyss as swells of low end dread seep up from the depths, a howling something off in the distance, long stretches of nothing but dark space and that recurring metal clang drifting up from the bottom of the pit, the tension shattered in a sudden, terrifying shock of metallic noise and high string-like drones and damaged piano.
"Walk With Me" at first takes shape as a soft buzzing that stretches outward for some time, then begins to slowly expand into a gently fluctuating block of drone, becoming more layered with buzz and grit, stretching out infinitely, a buzzing Niblock-style thrum, a mix of grinding motor buzz and buzzing electrical cables working together in concert to hit a perfect static harmony. The second half then begins to bloom into a symphonic cloud of drone and buzz, almost like an orchestra tuning up in slow motion while a massive engine rumbles in the background, the last few minutes of the track building into a crushing, all-devouring Sunroof-esque dronescape.
At last, Crumer returns to the seething discomfort that started the disc. The previous roaring drone leads right into "Pining", with the loops of string-like drones and rumbling undercurrents of machine noise now moving like a black tide across the surface of the track, great waves of looping, hypnotic drone and noise surging into a monumental wall of sound, finally igniting into a pulverizing blast of harsh noise, spastic, choppy, moving fast, a roaring assault of feedback/distortion warfare that closes the album in a magnificent act of immolation.
Presented in a full-color, six panel digipack.
Track Samples:
Sample : Love Is More Important Than Pride
Sample : Pining

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Following a series of limited Cd-rs and cassettes on Syzmic and a couple of other underground harsh noise imprints, Jon Engman's solo noise project Custodian lumbers back out of the junkyard for a half-hour album of pure electronic savagery for it's first full-blown cd release. The nine tracks featured here combine elements of ultra-chaotic Japanese noise a la Incapacitants and Pain Jerk, the static monolith roar of HNW, and some skillfully employed rhythmic touches that take Toil And Waste through apocalyptic, flesh-rending fields of grinding metal abuse and over-modulated feedback and into fearsome clots of undulating tentacles of black distortion, monstrous jaws grinding heaps of scrap metal and live power cables, and machine-like pneumatic rhythms that rise up out of the debris and filth like some kind of bestial flame-and-barbed-wire flinging techno-monstrosity seeking to disassemble any flesh -based organism it manages to get it's hooks into. Truly fearsome shit that sometimes locks into a skull-crushing doomed heaviness that takes this way beyond mere HNW territory...one of the heaviest and most nightmarish slabs of industrial that Syzemic has hurtled at my skull so far. There's a familiarity with space and tension that you can hear at work on this album as well that attacks your nervous system from the very beginning and never relents, as Custodian warps and shape shifts across the nine relatively short and compact blasts of hellish, grinding machine-death. An excellent harsh industrial/noise album that is packaged in the same manner as the other recent offerings from the label, the disc bound to the illustrated folder on a plastic hub and slipped inside of a plastic sleeve, and issued in a limited run of 250 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Part III
Sample : Part V

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Haven't heard anything from these guys in years and figured that the band has dispersed, but here we've got a brand new Ep from Dad They Broke Me, one of the coolest-named bands in the Melbourne, Australian underground (and featuring members of the Japanese-based psych-metal outfit Birushana), back with more of their utterly evil no-wave sludge metal. Their self-titled album from several years ago was a sickening slab of noise-rock influenced sludge, equal parts Zeni Geva and Jesus Lizard and Eyehategod, and I recommended it highly. Now, they've dropped an even uglier slab of their low-end heaviness that has cranked up the noise and insanity tenfold, and it fucking rules; the only downside is that it's a little short, with just five tracks, but that's ok when the music is this unrelentingly crushing. Rot is a blast of sickening, bestial sludge, angular feedback-soaked riffs oozing from guitars that constantly sound like they are melting/malfunctioning, the sound part Am Rep pummeling, part Eyehategod diseased slow-mo hardcore sludge, a savage deathcrust beating soaked in endless feedback and noise, and the snarling vocals are so distorted that they become totally unintelligible, adding to the violent, feverish feel of the songs. Fucking awesome.
The band doesn't get mired in slow trudging heaviness, though. Starting with "Sutured", the band hurl themselves into a lurching, stop-n-go pummel, an epic riff smashing through clouds of droning feedback and psychedelic guitar noise, the sound ultra dense, a swirling mass of chaotic sound driven by a monstrous anti-groove. The twitching becomes more violent on "Swine Filth Hate God", all surging dissonant sludgefuck with winding bass lines and spastic drumming, bathed in smoldering sheets of amp noise and frantic, gibbering shrieks. "Respitory Collapse" focuses pounding glacial sludge into a Swans-like dirge, at first taking shape as a massive doom-laden groove, then building into pounding faster-paced chaos later on before shifting back into a sludgy riff collapsing beneath tons of feedback, fx, noise, and distortion, a crumbling, disintegrating wall of amp filth. Then it's on to the faster, spastic two-minute hardcore blast of "Slag" that breaks down into scraping, screeching noise, and ends with the final murderous frenzy of "Gutted Slowly", a mangled blast of grindcore at first, then freezing up into a petrified dirge, a slow industrialized drum crawl and droning two chord bass riff grinding under howling guitar noise, becoming a totally malevolent wall of doom that eventually collapses further into pure harsh noise before finally reconvening into a murderous sludge assault.
This is intense stuff, a punishing, noisy blast of pure negativity; too bad that this appears to be the band's last release, as their drummer is permanently relocating to Japan. Rot is a devastating final chapter, a fusion of brute noise rock force a la Unsane/Zeni Geva/Jesus Lizard at their heaviest and vile, violent sludgecore, and highly recommended for fans of extreme heaviness. The Ep has been released on both Cd and Lp, with the Cd version issued in a super-limited run of 150 copies packaged in an Arigato style case with minimal artwork, and the Lp version in a deluxe screen printed package.
Track Samples:
Sample : Respiratory Collapse
Sample : Slag
Sample : Sutured

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Haven't heard anything from these guys in years and figured that the band has dispersed, but here we've got a brand new Ep from Dad They Broke Me, one of the coolest-named bands in the Melbourne, Australian underground (and featuring members of the Japanese-based psych-metal outfit Birushana), back with more of their utterly evil no-wave sludge metal. Their self-titled album from several years ago was a sickening slab of noise-rock influenced sludge, equal parts Zeni Geva and Jesus Lizard and Eyehategod, and I recommended it highly. Now, they've dropped an even uglier slab of their low-end heaviness that has cranked up the noise and insanity tenfold, and it fucking rules; the only downside is that it's a little short, with just five tracks, but that's ok when the music is this unrelentingly crushing. Rot is a blast of sickening, bestial sludge, angular feedback-soaked riffs oozing from guitars that constantly sound like they are melting/malfunctioning, the sound part Am Rep pummeling, part Eyehategod diseased slow-mo hardcore sludge, a savage deathcrust beating soaked in endless feedback and noise, and the snarling vocals are so distorted that they become totally unintelligible, adding to the violent, feverish feel of the songs. Fucking awesome.
The band doesn't get mired in slow trudging heaviness, though. Starting with "Sutured", the band hurl themselves into a lurching, stop-n-go pummel, an epic riff smashing through clouds of droning feedback and psychedelic guitar noise, the sound ultra dense, a swirling mass of chaotic sound driven by a monstrous anti-groove. The twitching becomes more violent on "Swine Filth Hate God", all surging dissonant sludgefuck with winding bass lines and spastic drumming, bathed in smoldering sheets of amp noise and frantic, gibbering shrieks. "Respitory Collapse" focuses pounding glacial sludge into a Swans-like dirge, at first taking shape as a massive doom-laden groove, then building into pounding faster-paced chaos later on before shifting back into a sludgy riff collapsing beneath tons of feedback, fx, noise, and distortion, a crumbling, disintegrating wall of amp filth. Then it's on to the faster, spastic two-minute hardcore blast of "Slag" that breaks down into scraping, screeching noise, and ends with the final murderous frenzy of "Gutted Slowly", a mangled blast of grindcore at first, then freezing up into a petrified dirge, a slow industrialized drum crawl and droning two chord bass riff grinding under howling guitar noise, becoming a totally malevolent wall of doom that eventually collapses further into pure harsh noise before finally reconvening into a murderous sludge assault.
This is intense stuff, a punishing, noisy blast of pure negativity; too bad that this appears to be the band's last release, as their drummer is permanently relocating to Japan. Rot is a devastating final chapter, a fusion of brute noise rock force a la Unsane/Zeni Geva/Jesus Lizard at their heaviest and vile, violent sludgecore, and highly recommended for fans of extreme heaviness. The Ep has been released on both Cd and Lp, with the Cd version issued in a super-limited run of 150 copies packaged in an Arigato style case with minimal artwork, and the Lp version in a deluxe screen printed package that also includes the Cd version and is limited to 372 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Respiratory Collapse
Sample : Slag
Sample : Sutured

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A reissue of previously released material from Swedish artist Thomas Ekelund; as Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, Ekelund creates dolorous, dystopian dream music from minimal synthesizer sounds and simple melodies. His haunting kosimiche driftscapes fit in nicely next to the likes of Locrian and Neil Jendon on the Land Of Decay imprint, which assembled this release out of material that had previously been issued on two extremely limited, out-of-print tapes, as well as a previously unreleased track, presented with new artwork from Terence Hannum of Locrian and gorgeous black-on-black printing. This is excellent black hole kosimiche music, beautifully dark space drift that's highly recommended to those into the likes of Svarte Grenier, Jasper TX, and Anduin...
The two-part "No Words" makes up the first side, two versions of the same piece presented back to back; the original begins as simple, minimal, cosmic synth drifting over clouds of grainy electronic filigree, eventually breaking to allow the arrival of a doom-laden bass line, becoming ever more Tangerine Dream-esque, sounding somewhat like an apocalyptic version of TD's theme for The Keep. Dark, ominous, the looped synth melody cycling high above sparse percussion and that hypnotic bass throb. Halfway in, it dissolves into sheets of arctic drone populated with mysterious scraping sounds, then later builds back into the ominous synth riff, a dramatic chord progression repeating over and over as the sound fades into blackness. The second track that follows is a much more minimal, reworked version, a faded shadow of the original, the chordal loop now appearing as washed out drones circling over a vast expanse of muted synth swells and dark drift, the descending bass line becoming a smear of soft low end synth buzz, but becoming a breathtaking new wave of cosmic drone in it's final minutes.
On the other side is a single long track, "Forget Forgive Regret". A bleak droneworld of muted metallic percussion ringing out over subterranean blackness, eventually filled with chittering, hissing electronics, the sound of hordes of black beetles swarming over the barren expanse of ambient drift. A distant percussive banging appears, gonglike reverberations hovering on the horizon, and faint whispers and smears of subliminal melody form in the foreground. Towards the end, bits of Morse code like glitch and backwards sound become apparent, rising up out of the incessant thrumming of the central black drone that runs throughout the track, a grim, desolate atmosphere clinging to the piece until the very end, when a haunting guitar melody takes form and a steady electronic throb appears, leading through the sparse dronescape until it finally blooms into a gorgeously bleak Hecker-like blizzard of distortion and melodic detritus that billows over a pulsating, Gas-like minimal techno bass throb that finishes the side.
Safe to say, fans of the other dark drone music that Land Of Decay specializes in will love this. It's pretty limited though, only 100 copies produced, so you'll want to move quickly.

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More of the heavy old school industrial and dark psychedelia that Death Factory first introduced me to on the split with Messiah Complex that came out on At War With False Noise. This 2006 entry in the Recycled Music Series delivers two full sides of grim industrial delirium, starting off with blown out musical loops and fragmented bits of what sounds like ultra-distorted jazz, then turns into a nightmare din of random samples, rhythmic blats of bass and grinding industrial percussion, with bleeping proto-electro rhythms taking form that start to make this resemble something from SPK, Throbbing Gristle or Wolf Eyes. After awhile, they throw in some spastic drum machine blastbeats and muffled speedcore rhythms, jackhammer gabber clank infested with rusted feedback, and then changes shape once again, shifting between the heavy creeping Wolf Eyes-style dirge and collages of scraping metal abuse, barrages of fx and processed samples, extreme pedal abuse freakouts emerging alongside sequences of almost techno-like rhythmic throb. On side b, the material is taken from a series of live recordings. Squelchy electronics fuse with brutal clank into a psychedelic freeform noise mess. Mangled guitar improv uncoils and twitches over ritualistic percussion and smears of backwards sound. Things start to get dreamier and more spaced-out towards the end, acid guitar leads burning through sound collages of guitar noise and pipe organs and cosmic drones, the sound veering completely into an out guitar freakout at the very end, with squealing, skronked guitar splattered over a spastic oscillator meltdown. The stuff on the split tape was more industrial, where this stuff leans more towards the free-improv side of things, but it's the combination of the two that makes Death Factory's stuff so interesting. Like the rest of the Recycled Music Series, this comes in a duct-tape covered package.

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Warfare Machines was the final album from German black/death doom duo Deinonchus, a war-obsessed screed delivered via a mix of driving, mid-tempo death doom and tortured black metal that came out in 2008. Ever since I got the new Bethlehem reissue on Red Stream in stock, I'd wanted to dig into the catalog of this offshoot band that featured members of Bethlehem and shared some of the same traits as the legendary dark metallers. Much of the older Deinonychus stuff is hard to find, but I finally tracked down this full length through the Italian label that just released the first album from Nihil Novi Sub Sole, the new martial industrial band from Deinonychus frontman Marco Kehren. The older Deinonychus stuff was pure death doom, but on their last album, the band went for a more straightforward death metal sound, with faster paced songs, mostly mid-tempo, and lots of thunderous double bass drumming and melancholy doom metal heaviness. The vocals were always one of Deinonychus's trademarks, usually delivered as a anguished, high pitched scream on older releases that sounded alot like the extreme vocals that Bethlehem used, but here the wailing screams are replaced with a more traditional death metal delivery, a deep gruff roar that still occasionally breaks into the hysteric panic of Marco's earlier performances. And where their older albums were consumed with suicidal hopelessness (again, much like their cohorts in Bethlehem), Warfare Machines is a bleak concept album about warfare and genocide, particularly dealing with World War II and often narrated from the perspective of a soldier. Some of the highlights of the album include the melancholy doom and doleful chanting vocals and stretches of monstrous death doom of "Napola", one of the slowest and heaviest songs on here, and the blazing Teutonic black metal of "MG-34", with it's dramatic intoned vocals and spiteful shrieks. The most intense track is probably the closer "Morphium", a short blast of black doom and twisted ambience, the riff becoming lost amidst swirling morse code transmissions and whispered military communiqués.
Deinonychus closed the book with their most direct, death metal influenced album, combining downer death metal and militant black blast and lots of driving Katatonia-like gloom. Great stuff. This comes with the jewel case enclosed in a printed o-card.
Track Samples:
Sample : Krematorium
Sample : MG-34
Sample : Morphium

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Track Samples:
Sample : Blackrot
Sample : Calvaire
Sample : Wine

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En Nihil is probably best known for their Death Keeps album that came out on Red Stream in the 90's, but the California based industrial/noise project produced a decent amount of tapes in smaller editions on various noise labels throughout the decade. En Nihil's Recycled Music cassette came out at some point before the project disbanded in 1998, and showcases the harsher, cut-up noise side of it's sound. Other En Nihil releases might explore a variety of areas, from churning tribal rhythms to pitch-black drone, rhythmic noise to surrealist sound collage, field recordings and gothic ambience and free improv, but on this tape, it's pure crushing noise, a lightless, hopeless void of grinding walls that fill up both sides. A maelstrom of low end rumble, metallic feedback, and chaotic high end frequency abuse, moving deliberately from massive static walls to violent cut-ups, violent feedback loops evolving into blocks of rhythmic distortion, descending into abrasive, psychedelic fx-pedal mayhem and massive torrents of echo and delay. This is probably the harshest recording I've heard from En Nihil, two gargantuan sides of psychedelic ear-hate that demand total submission.
As with all Recycled Music cassettes, this comes as a refurbished commercial tape labeled with duct tape and packaged in a duct-tape covered j-card.

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Here's another arm of the Locrian duo releasing solo material on Land Of Decay; Andre Foisy, the other half of Locrian alongside Terence Hannum, delivers a gorgeous little cassette of deep loop-based ambient shadow that might be the prettiest sounding tape that came in with this recent batch of Land Of Decay goods. The cassette features two tracks (which are repeated on the flipside) of glorious psych-drone, the first "The Great Disappointment" opening with a cascade of haunting looped strings, the ghostly distorted strum of a guitar drifting high above the steady thrum of deep-earth drone. The looped strings repeat continuously, with layers being gradually added, but with little forward momentum; it sort of reminds me of some of the more ambient minimalist stuff from the later Swans albums. After that comes another loop-based dronescape, "Call to Clarion: Flee That Flood", which makes up the bulk of the tape. At first, the track is comprised of a simple circular guitar loop that is gradually joined by eerie scraped violin drones, vaguely reminiscent of the Dirty Three, but as it progresses more layers of droning strings and percussive noises are piled on, and a piercing distorted feedback melody eventually emerges over the looping figures, the droning feedback and violins forming into a sort of buzzing raga, the sound getting darker and darker, becoming a pulsating psychedelic throb, growing heavier as streams of feedback and guitar noise slowly seep in. Later, it breaks down into a squall of malfunctioning guitar signals, the loops decaying into chunks of skree and buzz, getting more abstract and caustic, other guitar loops speeding up into blurs of hyper speed shred, huge doom-laden chords beginning to trumpet overhead, and in the last few minutes, it begins to sound like a mix of Phillip Glass and Locrian's ambient doom-drone and minimalist psych-guitar moves. Pretty damn terrific, and another must-get tape from the LOD crew. Limited to 250 copies.

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The black metal magazine Gallery of The Grotesque returns after a long, long hiatus, six years in fact since the last issue, and this is only the fifth issue to be published since Gallery started out back in 1999! What Gallery lacks in frequency, it makes up for with a massive amount of content: issue five is as thick as a fucking cookbook, professionally printed and perfect-bound and packed with 220 pages, printed on thick, high quality paper, and bound with a glossy cover; the zine is loaded with interviews with bands from all corners of the black metal underground, with lengthy discussions with Velvet Cacoon, Acheron, Black Witchery, Dead Congregation, Goatlord, Ares Kingdom, Profanatica, Nightbringer, Maledicere, Forgotten Woods, Crimson Moon, Black Majesty, Deiphago, Nyogthaeblisz, Destruktor, Wolfhetan, Scythian, Ignivomous, Perversor, and Roba El Khaliyeh, which range from fairly intellectual discussions of metaphysics and self-examination, to full-blown blasphemous Christ-hating rants. There's also a couple of interesting interviews with underground labels like Full Moon Productions, Nuclear War Now! Productions, Satanic Skinhead Propaganda and The Ajna Offensive, a great discussion with both of the guys behind Oaken Throne fanzine that was done before the magazine ceased publishing, and an interview with the De Sade/Sotos influenced underground S&M authoress Maija, which includes one of her short stories, plus lots of artwork and photos, and a smattering of record reviews. It's all assembled by Wilhelm from Starlight Temple Society, whose weird sense of humor makes some of the interviews awkwardly entertaining, and there's more of his bizarre satanic cartoon characters scattered throughout the issue as well. I've been a fan of Gallery's quirky coverage of the black metal underground since the last issue, so it's great to finally have a new issue to dig into. The magazine also comes with a compilation cd from Hell's Headbangers that features a ton of great underground black/death/necro horror, featuring tracks from The Royal Arche Blaspheme, Vomitor, Destruktor, Bestial Mockery, Inquisition, Profanatica, Sperm Of Antichrist, and many others.

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Back in stock!
As much as I love French metal bands, I'm often left scratching my head over some of the band names that they come up with. In the case of General Lee, I don't know if this French band saw something especially majestic and epic in either the Confederate general from the American Civil War or the car from The Dukes Of Hazzard that shared his name, but either way, it's a weird fucking name for a band that plays this sort of ultra emotive shoegazer metal. The music, however, is awesome. Even if you're one of these jaded types who has totally had it with the Neurosis-inspired metallic post-rock sound, General Lee are one those few bands that really do it right, putting their own stamp on the sound by taking it even deeper into shoegazer territory. The gruff, Neurosis-esque vocals, minor key riffs and apocalyptic dirges that peak throughout Hannibal Ad Portas point towards Through Silver In Blood and Times Of Grace as obviously being a huge influence on General Lee's sound, but from these heavy sections the band delves deep into passages of fragile, dreamlike beauty crafted on sheets of heavily delayed clean guitar, super-slow metronomic beats, gauzy electronic drones and ethereal vocal harmonies that actually make 'em sound like a massive hybrid of late 90's Neurosis, Slowdive and Codeine, which right there should have fans of Year Of No Light scrambling to hear this. The six songs that are featured here are really well written, the heaviness balanced perfectly with the dreamy melancholic melodies, the sound bleak and beautiful, monolithic and utterly mournful, and the more I listen to this disc, the more I love it. General Lee are heavier and slower than Year Of No Light, with more of a slowcore sound in their quieter moments, but the feel is really similiar. Anyone into that emotive metallic French sound shared by bands like Year Of No Light, Cortez, Overmars, and Omega Massif need to check these guys out, and even fans of Envy's dramatic emo-metal will likely love em. The disc is packaged in a cool arigato-style cardboard case with full color artwork of cloud-capped mountains, and comes with a small printed insert.
Track Samples:
Sample : Drifting
Sample : Hannibal Ad Portas
Sample : Tyrant

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It's a big year for Godflesh fans. I suppose I could have seen it coming with the excellent Godflesh reissues that Earache started cranking out a year ago, but it was still a little surprising when Justin Broadrick announced that he would be reuniting his legendary industrial metal band in 2010. Surprising, and pretty fucking terrific. And right on the heels of that announcement came word that Earache would be reissuing the band's defining statement, 1989's essential Streetcleaner, an album that has gone down in the books as one of the heaviest albums of all time. And hardcore Godflesh fans are going to be sated; remastered by Broadrick and sounding more bludgeoning and apocalyptic than ever, this new edition of Streetcleaner also comes with a second disc full of rare Streetcleaner era material, including the original mixes of the first side of the album; two punishing live songs from a performance in Geneca in 1990; raw, blown out rehearsal recordings of "Pulp", "Dream Long Dead" and "Christbait Rising" that fucking destroy; and the early guitar/drum machine demo tracks for the Tiny Tears Ep. In addition, the new Streetcleaner booklet features excellent new liner notes from Metal Hammer scribe Jonathan Selzer, and some minor but illuminating liner notes from Broadkrick himself. Essential for any Godflesh fan that's needed this classic album in their collection.
Here's the old Crucial Blast review for Streetcleaner: What needs to be said about Streetcleaner that hasn't already been put on the books? We all revel in the enormous blissed-out sludge and shoegazy metallic rock of Jesu, and I'm a pretty solid mark for anything that Justin Broadrick has had his hands in over the years (Final, Ice, Techno Animal, etc.), but it all comes back to THIS. After forming the pioneering grindcore band Napalm Death and recording a portion of their first album Scum, Broadrick made his way through the industrial rock of Head Of David and then hooked up with G.C. Green to form Godflesh. I remember when Streetcleaner came out in 1989, it was possibly the heaviest thing I had ever heard up to that point, a crushing concoction of booming drum machine beats that moved from tick-tock mechanical rhythms and militant martial snare beats to crushing breakbeats, with bludgeoning, simplistic riffs and squealing harmonics welded together above the pounding percussive attack and huge bass-heavy bottom end. Everything about this record was terrifying: the cover artwork of legions of crucified men in front of a towering wall of fire, a still taken from Ken Russell's legendary Altered States, to the rigid, fearsome music and thoroughly unfriendly vocals inside, and the song titles that evoke grim images of dystopian horror and technological annihilation like "Christbait Rising", "Like Rats", and "Locust Furnace". Definitely THE album to start with if you are a newcomer to Godflesh's nuclear-strength industrial metal. This CD version of Streetcleaner also contains four bonus songs that were initially intended for an EP that never materialized, included here at the end.
Essential.
Track Samples:
Sample : Christbait Rising
Sample : Like Rats
Sample : Wound [*]
Sample : Christbait Rising [Rehearsal April 1989][Take]
Sample : Deadhead [Demo Version][Original Demo Guitar & Machine 1988]

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Another gorgeous new art zine from Terence Hannum, from Chicago black kosimiche drifters Locrian. False Bloods is a twenty-eight page chapbook that has a similar presentation as the Cataract Of Fire & Blood art zine that Hannum published with fellow artist Elijah Burgher, which we also have listed in this week's new arrivals list; the 8.5" x 11" book features a black-on-black binding card and full color cover, the pages printed on quality paper. The artwork that is contained in False Bloods is much like the other images that I've seen from Hannum, lots of shadow spaces and black amplifier fetishism, piles of skulls and skeletal debris stacked in ossuaries, the images glazed with the grim, cold ambience of the abattoir. One of the things that distinguishes the work presented here is how Hannum has used the Xerox machine as an art instrument in and of itself, running sheets of artwork and photomontage repeatedly through the trays of the copy machine, creating streaks and smears of black toner that add a filthy, corroded appearance to these visions of black space, shadow, inky blackness, and obfuscated human remains. His gouache paintings of towering black amps are great to sink your eyes into, but the industrial-like collage work found here is my favorite thing about this zine. Like all of Hannum's art zines, False Bloods has been printed in an extremely limited edition, this one limited to just 47 copies...

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Most of you would probably know Terence Hannum for his work as one half of the Chicago-based kosmiche industrial duo Locrian, but he's also been keeping busy with his own artwork which has been featured in various Chicago area art spaces. Along with the exhibitions, Hannum assembles limited-edition art zines that he's printed and published through the Land Of Decay imprint, and they're fantastic looking art objects that go out of print fairly quickly. The Cataract Of Fire & Blood art zine came out earlier this year, but I've been able to grab a few for the shop before it disappears; presented in a black envelope with black screen printing sealed with black wax, this is a twenty page booklet that contains a mix of Hannum's moody images of shadow-cloaked amplifier stacks and black spaces, and the almost pastel-like full color illustrations of homoerotic occult rituals and flesh cutting by Elijah Burgher, another Chicago area artist whose work is fascinated with the secret rites of mysterious fraternal societies. Both artists imbue their work with occult symbology and a dark, surrealistic vibe, with Hannum's eerie amplifier fetishism contrasting sharply with Burgher's almost Crowleyan visions and the images are presented beautifully in this high quality chapbook-style document. Limited to 100 copies.

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One of Australia's most popular and long running punk bands, the Hard-Ons have been cranking out their brand of heavy, quirky punk since 1981, releasing classic albums like 1989's Love is a Battlefield of Wounded Hearts, collaborating with Henry Rollins, and becoming wildly popular in their home country and abroad (especially in Europe, where the band retains a massive fan base). I've usually seen the Hard-Ons described by people as a "pop punk" band, but while their music can be pretty damn catchy and poppy, these guys would wipe the floor with the sort of stuff that call itself pop punk nowadays. They've combined their driving thrashy punk and power pop hooks with full on thrash metal and shades of psychedelia, with some albums (like Most People Are Nicer Than Us) being pure thrash, and the band appropriating the Venom logo for their own fiendish purposes. Not you're typical pop punk band at all, and just the sort of punk that I totally get into, fast, catchy, totally unique and furious.
I haven't been able to get any of their older releases in stock as their distribution for their back catalog is spotty at best here in the U.S., but our comrade Jem at We Empty Rooms has just released a limited edition 7" from the Hard-Ons that we've picked up for the shop. It features four quick songs recorded live when the band performed at their 25th anniversary show at Sydney's legendary Annandale Hotel, and includes a never-before-released song. The four songs race through their very Australian sounding blend of snotty pop punk and thrash, starting with the super heavy metalpunk of "Everytime I Hear Techno" that morphs into total thrash metal, then into the short, brutal pop-thrash of "Apples And Oranges"; the b-side begins with the almost Slayer-ish "You, Sir can Fuck Off", and then goes into short, goofy "Taxi".
This limited edition 7" is issued in a run of 500 copies on multi-colored splatter vinyl, packaged in a silk-screened jacket and housed inside of a paper bag sealed with a sticker.

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What better place to start with a vinyl reissue for Hawkwind than the very beginning, the band's 1970 debut album where they first appeared in a druggy haze of deep-space psychedelia and electronic hard rock. The sound on Hawkwind had yet to evolve into the hard-edged cosmic proto-metal of Space Ritual, In Search Of Space, and Doremi Faso Latido; this has more in common with what Pink Floyd was doing around the same time, the songs shifting between trippy acoustic songs and more freeform psychedelic blues-rock jamming, with their nascent sci-fi fixation just beginning to form. Still, this is essential listening for Hawkwind fans, with some terrific early tunes from the band, some of which continued to be staples in their live set for years to come. The Lp opens with the sunny, acoustic psych of "Hurry On Sundown", which is probably the closest that Hawkwind ever came to writing something along the lines of the pure pop of the Beatles, but then it drifts towards the darker reaches of space with the second track "The Reason Is". Here's where their deep cosmic psychedelia first appears, an instrumental wash of otherworldly reverb and effects, clusters of ethereal guitar and tidal surges of cymbals, the propulsive rhythm section driving it ever deeper towards the black hole while echoing wordless vocals drift overhead. Then it's on to the exuberant psych rocker "Be Yourself", a groovy, extended jam that's highlighted by Nik Turner's ecstatic Ayler-esque sax skronk and Dik Mik's subtle synthesizers. It's followed by the two part epic "Paranoia", dark and creepy deep space psych, with minimal bass and drums and weird chanting, and the propulsive, motorik space-psych of "Seeing It As You Really Are". The album closes with another instrumental, "Mirror of Illusion", a darker, nebulous version of the blues choogle that churns at the roots of Hawkwind's music, with synthesizers, saxophone and soaring guitar drifting through the cosmos. Along with Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets, this is one of the starting points for space rock, and is required listening for fans of the form. 4 men With Beards has given this reissue an excellent treatment, with 180 gram vinyl and a heavy gatefold jacket, so now's the time if you've been searching for this seminal album for your space rock collection...

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Two years after the release of their debut album on Total Rust, Kentucky's Highgate returns with a new album of their crushing, crusty minimalist doom metal, stripped of much of the black metal that partially infested their debut, but still rife with the caustic noise that made that album so harsh and abrasive. The album features four tracks of monolithic crush, turgid black-tar dirges that stretch out for more than twelve minutes, the sledgehammer riffs repeating mercilessly over the spacious caveman pummel, with feedback/noise soaking into every inch of Highgate's sound. The first track on Shrines To The Warhead sets the mood for these endtime prophecies set to nuclear winter doom, with samples taken from a documentary on Appalachian snake-handling sects and Pentacostal faiths in the coal mining towns of Kentucky, and from there the band lurches into their bestial droning doom, the singer howling like a lunatic over their droning blackened riffs, snarling like an animal trapped at the end of a large steel pipe, his shrieks and grunts cloaked in reverb.
This is sickening, oppressive doom, in the tradition of Winter, Grief, Wreck Of The Hesperus, Toadliquor, Warhorse, but filthier, much filthier, the music slipping into a nauseating trance-state for long stretches of time, with the guitar often breaking off from the rest of the band for a few measures, playing a skeletal droning riff on it's own over and over, until the band crashes back in together, locking back into the hypnotic black crush. Bleak, intensely negative glacial punishment, with one of the only moments of relief coming at the end of "Of Ruins" when a plaintive piano appears between the cracks in the monstrous doom, a brief flash of light glimpsed over the crashing waves of bilious, black sludge, rotted power chords...
Track Samples:
Sample : Holy Poisoning
Sample : Warhead Rise

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Also available on vinyl, released in a handnumbered edition of 300 copies. Please note - all of the copies that we received from Germany have slightly creased lower right hand corners on the jackets.
Two years after the release of their debut album on Total Rust, Kentucky's Highgate returns with a new album of their crushing, crusty minimalist doom metal, stripped of much of the black metal that partially infested their debut, but still rife with the caustic noise that made that album so harsh and abrasive. The album features four tracks of monolithic crush, turgid black-tar dirges that stretch out for more than twelve minutes, the sledgehammer riffs repeating mercilessly over the spacious caveman pummel, with feedback/noise soaking into every inch of Highgate's sound. The first track on Shrines To The Warhead sets the mood for these endtime prophecies set to nuclear winter doom, with samples taken from a documentary on Appalachian snake-handling sects and Pentacostal faiths in the coal mining towns of Kentucky, and from there the band lurches into their bestial droning doom, the singer howling like a lunatic over their droning blackened riffs, snarling like an animal trapped at the end of a large steel pipe, his shrieks and grunts cloaked in reverb.
This is sickening, oppressive doom, in the tradition of Winter, Grief, Wreck Of The Hesperus, Toadliquor, Warhorse, but filthier, much filthier, the music slipping into a nauseating trance-state for long stretches of time, with the guitar often breaking off from the rest of the band for a few measures, playing a skeletal droning riff on it's own over and over, until the band crashes back in together, locking back into the hypnotic black crush. Bleak, intensely negative glacial punishment, with one of the only moments of relief coming at the end of "Of Ruins" when a plaintive piano appears between the cracks in the monstrous doom, a brief flash of light glimpsed over the crashing waves of bilious, black sludge, rotted power chords...
Track Samples:
Sample : Holy Poisoning
Sample : Warhead Rise

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In among the more well known noise projects whose Recycled Music tapes are listed this week in the new arrivals list, there are a handful of more obscure artists who caught my attention like Human Is Filth. This New England solo noise artist has only had a couple of releases and appears to have since disappeared since the release of this tape, and the only thing that I had ever heard from 'em prior to this was the Human Is Filth set that was captured on the Berwick videocassette on RRRecords. HIF produced a solid, crushing set of harsh noise on this installment in the Recycled Music Series though, starting off at first with what appears to be another exercise in extreme HNW blast, building huge walls of punishing static roar and swirling lava flows of crunchy, ultra-crushing speaker destruction, but pretty soon more rhythmic elements start to take hold, with looping rhythmic waves forming underneath the surging distortion, then shifting into a more psychedelic maelstrom of buried musical detritus, massive low end squelch, and rumbling slabs of droning crunch that becomes molded into a series of hypnotic, monolithic loops. Each side delivers a roughly twenty-two minute untitled blast of this crushing, loop-based harsh noise. The demolished musical elements that can be heard buried deep inside the whirling, roaring maelstrom of noise are barely perceptible, but definitely add a surreal quality to HIF's speaker-blowing distortion soundscapes that effectively throws me into a heavy narco-trance once you're about ten minutes in. At times, the looped, rhythmic blocks of noise achieve a monstrous rhythm that almost sounds like some ultra-distorted dance track being remixed by The Rita or Vomir, although there's nothing remotely danceable about any of this...it's more of a repetitive, quasi-melodic throb hammering away behind your eardrums while you're drowning underneath rolling waves of black tar, a relentless brutal engine-grind trance created by blocks of suffocating noise. There's an obvious kinship to the pure wall noise sculptures of artists like Cherry Point, The Rita, Sewer Election, and Vomir, but more than anything, Human Is Filth reminds me of the similar sort of rhythmic industrial roar of Italy's Dead Body Love.

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Track Samples:
Sample : [Untitled Track]
Sample : Crown of Decayed Salvation
Sample : Seraphic Irreverance

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The constantly shape shifting Jazkamer dropped this blast of insanity a couple of years ago on Smalltown Supersound, but it's mostly been covered by the experimental noise/sound art community that normally follows the Norwegian duo's activities. Who should really be checking this disc out are fans of brutal, skull-shredding noisecore, as is Jazkamer's homage to classic grindnoise a la Soul Discharge era Boredoms, early Anal Cunt, and Gerogerigegege. The band blasts out fifty-eight tracks in just seventeen minutes, each track a ferocious, cacophonic shock assault of screeching noise, blastbeats, and grating feedback. Hammering chaotic drums tumbling endlessly over bursts of howling guitar and screaming nonsensical vocals. Total mayhem, compacted into ten second micro-blowouts. If you thought that the album Metal Music Machine that they recorded as Jazkamer was crushing, this goes way, way beyond, into total hyperblast noize, squealing, piercing, painful feedback frequencies, volleys of spastic drumming, blastbeats, percussive chaos, shouts and yells and gargling screams and atonal, mangled guitar splooge, nothing resembling a riff anywhere, sounding like Masonna crossed with early Boredoms, or Hanatarash mixed with Anal Cunt, the blastbeat violence often falling apart into pure noisy clatter and screech. A real hardcore ear-assault that'll clear the room of all wimps...
Includes a thick full color glossy booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : Domination Delegates The Physical Violence On Which It Rests To The Dominated
Sample : Nothing Can Have Value Without Being An Object Of Utility
Sample : Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
Sample : Work And Truth, Two Conceptions Of The Future

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JENDON, NEIL   Male Fantasies   CASSETTE   (Land Of Decay)    7.50

Some more fantastic nocturnal kosmiche music from the Locrian guys and their Land Of Decay imprint, here issuing a limited cassette from fellow Chicago musician Neil Jendon. Fans of dark, deep-space synth music should definitely pick up anything from Jendon; his synthesizer/fx-pedal sculpted shadowbliss references all of the great 70's space music greats like Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Ash Ra, while plunging into blacker nebulae like that inhabited by newer star-death explorers Procyon-X, M87, Bestia Centauri and Phaenon. The opener "Red Nurse" unfurls lush layered analogue synth drones flying high overhead a roiling black sea of industrial rumble, like a Tangerine Dream piece drowning in the smoke rising from a stygian furnace. Huge delayed waves of low-end grind and rumbling tectonic plates almost blot out the delicate veins of melodic bliss and ethereal melody that slowly take shape, as it gradually glides into the next track "Vigilante!". Here, it becomes an arctic expanse of shimmering cosmic drone and shifting waves of hiss and fuzz and glitch, then moving into the pure nebulous blissout of "White Nurse"'s fields of angelic choral voices, vast gleaming drones, and incandescent drift laced with blurred strings and infinite stretches of rumbling synth. Great stuff. On the b-side, "Sister, Impure" rises like a black behemoth, the vibe much bleaker than the first side, with endless washes of grimy, volcanic ash-cloud synths, cold droning metal thrum, a harsh industrial dronescape that flows into the cold wastes of "Pillars Before The Sea", with the roaring synths dissipating into sheets of icy thrum, light synth strings eventually breaking through the gloom, and more electronic whir and buzz pouring in, turning into shimmery Theremin-like drones and transforming the rumbling dronescape into a hazey mass of cosmic whirr and electronic pulse. Utterly gorgeous and transportational black-hole drift, highly recommended to anyone who enjoyed his Cities In Flight cd on Bloodlust. Features artwork by Locrian's Terence Hannum, and released in a limited edition of 100 cassettes.

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KATASTROFIALUE   Tuskatakuu 1994-1998   CD   (Crucial Blast)    6.98

Just a couple copies of this blazing disc arrived in a return from one of our old distributors; it's been out of print for a while, so this is probably your last chance to pick up a new, unopened copy of this scorching collection of bestial Finnish crust/thrash! Here's the old description from the Crucial Blast site:
36 song semi-discography CD featuring unreleased and out-of-print material from this cult Finnish crustcore band. A must for fans of violent crust,raw-punk, and noisy blown-out thrash! Formed in 1992, the devastating Finnish ensemble Katastrofialue (roughly translated as "Disaster Area") delivered some of the most pulverizing scum-encrusted thrash of the past decade. The band combined an unrelenting early Discharge and Sore Throat influence with minimalistic (yet BRUTAL) metal stylings, head-crushing speed,and excruciating inhuman vocals. The band excelled at incendiary songwriting and memorable,gritty (yet sometimes beautiful?) atonal riffs laced with acidic vocals that employed their native tongue....expressing nihilistic,transcendentially intelligent and morbid ruminations on life through the lyrics.Awesome,brutal crustcore.This full length semi-discography CD features an unreleased studio album, their tracks from the Not Without A Fight double CD compilation on Crucial Blast, more unreleased studio tracks, and their material from the 1994 split 7" with Freak Show. Tuskatakuu '94-'98 comes packaged in a DVD style plastic case and features a booklet with lyrics, Finnish-to-English translations, liner notes, and more.

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KAYO DOT   Coyote   CD   (Hydra Head)    15.98

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KLEISTWAHR   The Return   LP   (Noiseville)    22.98

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KNURL   Recycled Music Series   CASSETTE   (RRRecords)    4.98

Canadian noise artist Alan Bloor has been creating brutal noisescapes as Knurl since 1994, and his work is some of the most intense you'll hear within the harsh noise canon. By using actual pieces of amplified metal, glass, and machine effluvium, Bloor creates powerful, dense blocks of noise that sound like avalanches of scrap metal and collapsing buildings, and listening to one of his recorded works can often be a terrifying experience. Like everything else from Knurl that I have, his entry in the Recycled Music Series is a top notch slab of industrial chaos, a mixture of brutal HNW and more dynamic junk-noise/scrap yard maelstrom that never allows the listener to rest easy in any one position for too long. Each side of the cassette shifts seamlessly back and forth between walls of trance-inducing low end roar and upper register blasts of feedback/metal violence, and even when Bloor sinks into a massive rumbling wall, this is still much more active and tumultuous than your standard HNW construct. The most noticeable shift in direction comes at the end of side two, when the roiling, grinding wall of metal starts to arrange itself into almost rhythmic loops of feedback, underscored by massive droning low-end frequencies, ending the tape with a crushing industrial pulse.

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KNUT   Wonder   CD   (Hydra Head)    15.98

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KOHOUTEK   Lossless Loss   LP   (Prophase)    24.98

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LA GRITONA   Demasiado Tonto Para Los Ninos Listos   2xCD   (Tortuga)    14.98

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LORDS OF BUKKAKE   Desorden y Rencor   CD   (Total Rust)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Alucarda
Sample : Alucarda
Sample : Llagas

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MAAAA   Sampo Distortion   CD   (24919 Records)    11.98

Warsaw-based industrial punks MAAAA first came to my attention through their new stateside release that just came out on the Mind Flare, which is going to be reviewed and listed in next week's new arrivals list; in the meantime we've got this slightly older disc that was released on their own label that I've managed to parse first. Even after hearing their newer material, this disc still held a number of surprises for me. MAAAA are not your typical knobs-on-ten pedal noise outfit, although they do keep this monstrous thirty-minute long track pretty damn deafening n' abrasive. But instead of just shredding the listener with a non-stop barrage of pure screech, they weave an unpredictable noisescape that starts off at first like a cosmic storm of junk noise clang and scrape and massive overdriven synth noise, somewhere along the lines of K2 and Pain Jerk, then suddenly at about the three minute mark, explodes into what sounds to me like a highly distorted, rampaging Finnish hardcore thrash band, then veers into some abstract K2-style metal abuse and sounds of howling dogs. So we're dealing with some extreme cut-up/noise collage stuff here, usually sticking within the realm of brutal, processed junk-noise chaos-storms and laser-cannon synth abuse, but later on the duo moves through long stretches of crushing noisy drone and strange field recordings of urban activity. These guys whip up an extreme crash-fest that'll rattle the skullplates of all but the most frenzied of industrial mutants, and it's no small thing to actually rival the sort of junkyard apocalypse that K2 (who these guys obviously draw alot of their influence from) is known for. Yikes! This import disc comes in a full-color digipack that includes a booklet, and was issued in a limited edition of 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Sampo Distortion
Sample : Sampo Distortion

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MENCHE, DANIEL   Flaming Tongues   CD   (Blossoming Noise)    4.98

I'd never gotten around to picking up this older 2005 disc from Menche until now, I've really just recently started to scratch the surface of what has turned into a rather massive catalog of recordings, but this collection of five lengthy, untitled tracks has ended up becoming one of my favorite recordings from this uber-prolific sound artist. The music on Flaming Tongues is totally abstract and heavily steeped in droneological otherworldliness, but it's far from some of the extreme noise recordings that I've heard from the guy. Each piece (which tend to run towards the twenty minute mark) is revealed as an expanse of haunting drone and layered percussive sound, with actual drumming and other percussive playing treated and stretched into rumbling, clattering rivers of activity streaming beneath glazed sheets of static high end drone, which on the first track sounds like a herd of drummers hammering away out of synch beneath a blossoming drone reminiscent of something from Jonathan Coleclough or Andrew Chalk. The album continues to channel this somewhat tribal rhythmic feel, rattling drums layered into furious tapestries of percussive sound and eerie horn like sounds looped into mesmeric dronescapes, at times sounding like legions of didgeridoos buzzing within swarms of desert locusts, or distorted hand drum mantras rumbling beneath gleaming celestial domes of crystalline electronic tones. A mesmerizing, hypnotic sound sculpture that ultimately moves beyond tension into a realm of smoldering infinite ambience. The disc comes in a full-color wallet sleeve, in a limited one-time pressing of 1,000 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : 1
Sample : 3

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MISS HIGH HEEL   The Family's Hot Daughter   CD   (Blossoming Noise)    14.98

Track Samples:
Sample : A Holocaust Offered To Soft-Moloch
Sample : Pity Squashed Your Flowers

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MIXMASTER SATAN   Recycled Music Series   CASSETTE   (RRRecords)    4.98

The Mixmaster Satan cassette in RRR's Recycled Music Series appears to be the only thing that this project ever released. If there's anything else out there, I've yet to find out about it. The tape suggests a truly schizoid mind at work behind this short-lived, obscure effort, which is best described as a batshit mix of post-apocalyptic mix tape action, NWW-esque sound collage, and brain-liquefying noize. Each side of the tape is a fragmented, erratic spew of fractured hip hop samples, ultra murky drumming workouts, fucked-up vocal loops, primitive hardcore techno/speedcore beats, super murky rap-metal samples, Scarface sound bites and other weirdness, all adrift on an ocean of tape hiss. This bizarre mix of knuckleheaded rap-metal, hardcore gabber, drum machine blast beats, over-modulated noise and raver violence is all buried under a thick crust of moldy low-fi production and corroded tape snot, and reminds me of something that Cock ESP would pull.
The second side is even more extreme / aggravating. As soon as side two starts, you're assaulted with some brutal sine wave abuse that extends for minutes at a time, then switches to buzzing feedback drone and fluctuating, less painful sine waves. After a couple of minutes of this, things start to get weird again, moving into blown out synth squelch and surreal sound collages of chopped-up spoken word poetry and horror movie dialogue, chirping oscillator abuse and sped-up children's music, old-school breakbeats and scratching mixed up with looped screams and horns, more of those brutal low-fi gabber beats start jackhammering out of nowhere, and it all ends in a delirious puke-panorama of grating high end noise and brain-damaged hip hop. Would probably go well with a benzo overdose...

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MORBID ANGEL   Heretic (Limited Edition Box)   2xCD   (Earache)    15.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Cleansed in Pestilence (Blade of Elohim)
Sample : Place of Many Deaths
Sample : Within Thy Enemy.....

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NIHIL NOVI SUB SOLE   Jupiter Temple   CD   (My Kingdom Music)    11.98

After the breakup of German black/death/doom metallers Deinonychus in 2008, front man Marco Kehren shifted his musical focus to less metallic pursuits, forming the new project Nihil Novi Sub Sole, a grim martial industrial outfit that centers around similar themes of warfare and desolation that his former band explored on their final album Warfare Machines, but in a dark ambient/industrial style that follows in the footsteps of Coph Nia, Atrium Carceri, Letum, Deutsch Nepal, Desiderii Marginis, Arditi and other Cold Meat related outfits. Jupiter Temple combines dark ambience and sinister orchestral music, militaristic percussion and soaring choirs, opening with pounding, martial snares, eerie Gregorian hymns, deep throaty chanting, droning cathedral organs, a really grim, liturgical version of martial industrial music, passages of dark piano leading into ominous German language samples cloaked in static, captured transmissions from distant war zones. The album moves through solemn, sorrowful orchestral music and dark funereal ambience, strings and woodwinds making up much of the instrumentation, and constant use of sampled voices and dialogue, which is pretty standard for this sort of Teutonic industrial music. Nihil Novi employs a heavy amount of Wagnerian bombast in its music, using distant booming tympani and lots of sinister brass to evoke feelings of dread and despair, clanking metal and growling synthetic bass contrasting with moments of gorgeous gothic dreaminess. The track "To Enslave & Destroy" is particularly harrowing, centering a recording of someone weeping as a monstrous clanking industrial rhythm underscores swarming black strings and droning synths, joined by a somber boy's choir. "Avvenimento Traumatico" is another standout track, with a haunting piano/string melody that is especially mournful and moving, and "Stigma" uses distorted woodwind tones and slow pounding kettledrums for a doomed, blackened, futuristic feel. The album sounds like a relentlessly grim film score, a solid mix of cinematic neo-classical darkness and bleak industrial that makes most funeral doom seem positively jubilant. The disc comes in a Dvd size digipack with a booklet, and is limited to 700 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Avvenimento Traumatico
Sample : To Enslave & Destroy

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PEACE CORPSE   Terror Of Quincy   LP   (Toxic Shock)    19.98

Hell yeah! The old records from Peace Corpse have been impossible to find, so Toxic Shock has earned a huge thumbs-up for finally reissuing some of their material. This 80's band from Pomona, California played quirky, dark hardcore that was influenced by a lot of the early goth stuff, and according to some sources actually started out as a parody of death rockers Christian Death. Their music eventually stood on it's own for it's demented, sludgy, wastoid vibe, sounding like a weird cross between TSOL and the mutant sludge punk of Flipper, with mangy grinding riffs, slow, doom-laden tempos, and the singer's unique, creepily fey vocals that helped contribute to the creepazoid goth feel. Peace Corpse's lyrics were a grim commentary on all sorts of stock 80's issues (media control, war, corrupt politicians, religion), but were delivered with more sarcasm and sharp-edged cynicism. The band only released one Ep (1983's Quincy's Lament 7") and one 12" (1985's Terror Of History during their existence, the latter being notable for featuring a young, pre-Man Is The Bastard Eric Wood on bass. Both of these records have been out of print for eons, but the entire Quincy's Lament and a chunk of the Terror Of History 12" have been collected on this new Lp, which is apparently the closest that we're going to get to having an actual Peace Corpse discography. It's a killer record that fans of demented 80's hardcore have got to check out if you haven't heard Peace Corpse, with nine tracks of their ghoulish sludgy punk, shambling mid-paced dementia, and wah-infused weirdness and classic songs like "Quincy's Lament", "Dead In A Pile Of Chairs", "President's Camouflage" and "One Way". The Terror Of History stuff still sounds totally unique, with my favorite Peace Corpse song "Mental Malady" adding some piano to their rollicking goth-tinged hardcore, the mutant hardcore of "Identity, The American Commodity", and the almost jazzy, theatrical "Distaste". Imagine a more aggressively punk version of what Christian Death and 45 Grave were doing around the same time mixed with some of Flipper's syrupy damage, and you'll have an inkling of what these guys were about. This reissue features the original cover art from Pushead, and includes a printed inner sleeve with credits, lyrics and photos, and pressed on black vinyl.

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PELICAN   After The Ceiling Cracked   DVD + 3 INCH CD   (Hydra Head)    18.98

Back in stock out of being unobtainable for ages...
Here's an incredibly packed video/digital collection from Pelican that's been in the works for awhile now, and it turned out to be one of Hydra Head's sweetest DVD packages that they've assembled. The DVD portion of After The Ceiling Cracked chronicles the instrumental indie-metallers in the live setting, with the centerpiece being a professionally filmed live concert filed at the Scala in London, England on December 20th, 2005. This concert is captured with a myriad of camera angles, high quality filming, and the presence of none other than Jesu's Justin Broadrick behind the mixing desk, controlling the live mix for the performance. I had heard about Broadrick's involvement with this concert recording and had wondered if he would be employing any of his mixing techniques that he uses to overdrive music into a blissed out wash of distortion, but here he plays it straight, capturing Pelican in the midst of a thunderous performance with a crystal clear clarity. It's a massive set, conisting of the songs "March Into The Sea", "Autumn Into Summer", "Nightendday", "Last Day Of Winter", "Aurora Borealis", "Sirius", and "Australasia". But there is a LOT more to be had on this DVD: live interview footage, additional live performances from Seattle, LA, Richmond, and Portland from between 2003 and 2006; live footage from the Emissions From The Monolith Festivals from both 2003 and 2004; an excellent music video for the song "Autumn Into Summer" that combines expressive, roughly drawn animation with gauzy, almost documentarian video footage; and an extensive gallery of stills that contains lots of photos of the band, live and otherwise, but more impressively, a hefty collection of concert posters for Pelican that go back several years - poster art fans will eat this shit up, as everyone from Seldon Hunt to Aaron Horkey is represented in here. Pelican have always been fortunate enough to have the best names in rock poster design on hand to create original works for them.
As if that wasn't enough, the DVD is packaged with a bonus 3" CD that contains the song "Pink Mammoth" (the major key reworking of the older song "Mammoth" that first appeared on the Pink Mammoth 10" at the end of last year, a track titled "End Of Seasons" that features Prefuse 73 remixing multiple Pelican songs into a glitchy IDMscape, and ""These Arms Are Pink Mammoths", an alternate version of the song that has the entire lineup of These Arms Are Snakes performing alongside Pelican. The title track "Pink Mammoth" is a reworking of the song "Mammoth" from Pelican's debut self-titled EP that takes the dark dirge of the original and revamped it as a towering major-key epic, all blissed out electronic swirl and huge poppy open chords, majestic and crushing and wholly beautiful. The overloaded electronic ambience sounds like this coulda been remixed by Jesu's Justin Broadrick, but the guitars are massive and poppy and crushing, like Dinosaur Jr gone super sludge metal, cascading sheets of mathy indie melody washing over Pelican's plodding crush.At the end of the track, everything fades away into a drifting cloud of shimmering blissed out effects and backwards shifting melody. Utterly breathtaking. I love the super melodic, indie rock direction that these guys have gone in since City Of Echoes, and this jam further proves that Pelican are one of the most magnificent metallic indie rock bands, period. The "End Of Seasons" remix has Prefuse 73 reworking a couple of different Pelican songs into a blissed out glitchy IDMscape. The songs "Aurora Borealis" from Australasia and the untitled acoustic jam off of Fire In Our Throats are dissected and mashed up into a crackling, fuzz-laced soundscape of sad acoustic guitars and stretched out mournful strains of cello, eventually revealing a rhythmic undercurrent of stuttering breakbeat and handclaps surrounded by a haze of beautiful melting harmonics and layered guitar gauze.
Awesome packaging as would be expected from Hydra Head: the DVD case contains both discs as well as a 12-page full color booklet that is filled with extensive liner notes, track information, credits, photos, and new artwork from Aaron Turner, and comes in a larger heavyweight cardstock slipcase that is covered with more of Turner's weird squiggly molecular artwork for the release. Obviously a must-get for Pelican fans. It's also a Region 0 DVD, which means that it's playable on pretty much all systems!
Track Samples:
Sample : Pink Mammoth
Sample : End of Seasons (Prefuse 73 Remix)

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PSYCHO   The Grind Years   CD   (Selfmadegod)    11.98

I've made numerous mentions of my love for the old Ax/ction Records and Fudgeworthy catalogs around here, both of which were pretty influential on the formation of Crucial Blast. Much of the insane noise that came out on Ax/ction has been out of print and hard to find, including the many releases of the band Psycho, the Boston grind/punk band that featured Ax/ction owner Charlie Infection on drums. Psycho were virtually the Ax/ction house band, releasing a bunch of 7"s and 12"s on the label throughout the 80's and 90's; the earlier stuff was straightforward fast hardcore punk, a variant of the speedy, frenzied thrash that the Boston area was producing in the early 80's, but somewhere along the line later in the decade, the lineup went through a couple of changes and the new version of Psycho emerged as a death metal and grindcore obsessed outfit that was way faster and more brutal and metallic than before. Psycho were incapable of completely shaking their hardcore roots though, and what they evolved into was a messed-up mash up of hardcore punk, primitive death metal, and early grindcore that never quite settles into any one sound. Which I always enjoyed about these guys; the fifty-two songs that collected on this new semi-discography Cd released by Polish grindcore label Selfmadegod hurtle through several manic manifestations of grindpunk, a raw, atavistic assault that mixes together lots of wonky, almost Black Flag-esque riffs and wailing , batshit guitar solos, occasional sloppy noisecore freakouts, parts where the band will be blasting at full grinding strength and then suddenly switch direction and tear into some super catchy, anthemic punk rock. There's a lot of early death metal influence in here, but it's played with raw punk abandon, the blastbeats are sloppy and frantic, the songs mostly clocking in at about a minute. As you go through the tracks, you can hear Psycho's sound becoming more and more metal, but they also got weirder, increasingly using weird pitch shifter effects on the vocals to get this bizarre processed devil-growl sound on many of the songs. There's also a lot of humor here, with goofy song titles that take jabs at the absurdity of death metal, and silly noisecore digs at classic rock dinosaurs like Led Zep. These guys ripped though, and Psycho's "grind era" produced some wickedly vicious grindpunk that'll appeal to fans of everything from Repulsion to early Napalm Death to Unholy Grave, sounding sort of like a cross between Siege and Black Flag at times, a lunatic blast-speed hardcore outfit tearing through sixty-second eruptions of total death. This disc collects all of the Psycho tracks from their splits with Anal Cunt, Nasum, Blood, Meatshits, Agathocles, Rot, and Satan's Warriors, as well as their tracks from the Mass Consumption 7" Ep, the Apocalyptic Convulsions compilation 10", the Audio Espionage compilation, and the Shrunken 7" Ep. There's also five video tracks taken from a live performances in Australia from 1992 included on the disc, and it comes with a thick twelve-page full color booklet with liner notes, all of the covers from their assorted 7"s and comps, and photos and artwork.
Track Samples:
Sample : Disturbed Revenge
Sample : Fish
Sample : Second Death
Sample : Stupid People 2

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RAMIREZ, RICHARD   Recycled Music Series   CASSETTE   (RRRecords)    4.98

The Recycled Music Series cassette from Texan noise demon Richard Ramirez is a set of brutal monolithic HNW that was released for the series a few years ago. I've been getting on a big Richard Ramirez/Werewolf Jerusalem kick lately, this guy and his various cohorts have been responsible for some of the better HNW and static drone releases coming out of the US that I've picked up recently, so it's good to finally get this tape into my collection. Like most of the Recycled tapes, this features two full sides of noise sans titles, just a murky, static ocean of muted low-fi rumble and softened crumbling walls of low-end earthquake tremor. The sound is minimal and static, a seemingly endless wall of washed-out drone-noise that pours through my skull like a legion of tympani players heard through a mountain of wet, moldering mattresses stacked on top of me, creating an effect that is similar to the feedback-looping guitar generated dronescapes that Lee Stokoe (Culver) produces. Eventually, Ramirez begins to form this roiling, restless sea of black fuzz into huge grinding blocks of distortion that lock into a vague rhythmic loop, intercut with snippets of old political talk radio shows, and becoming an unsettling industrial crawl towards the end. At this point, Ramirez leaves the harsh wall territory and evolves into crushing feedback drone that's more in a late 80’s Merzbow / Incapacitants / Pain Jerk mode. It's an immersive mix of harsh noise and pure drone wall that's less static than a lot of what I've heard from Ramirez lately. Comes in the signature Recycled style package of duct-tape covered j-card and cassette.

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RAPE & HONEY   issue three   MAGAZINE   (Rape & Honey)    4.00

The news that Oaken Throne has ceased publication earlier this year was traumatic news; even if the esteemed black metal magazine only came out once a year on average as it has over the past several years, the quality of writing and the scope of coverage and gorgeous layout design made the wait well worth it. Oaken Throne was one of the best underground magazines I've ever read, and its absence leaves a sizeable void in the underground press. Thankfully, the former editor of Oaken Throne John Mincemoyer quickly resurfaced with his own mini-zine called Rape & Honey that carries on much of the tradition of his previous effort. The difference being that Rape & Honey is a much smaller document that focuses on just a single band for each issue, but instead of having to scale down an interview for space and editorial restrictions, is able to present the piece fully uncut and in-depth. The latest issue featuring maniac black metallers Weapon and is the first issue that I've been able to pick up (the first two issues had featured black thrashers Razor Of Occam and black metal chaosticians Funeral Mist, respectively), and it's an excellent piece of underground metal journalism, nicely laid out with full color images, printed on quality paper, and with Mincemoyer's consistently high-quality writing. The interview with Weapon in this issue goes into great detail about the band's background in Indian mysticism, the connection between occult concepts and the ferocious warped BM found on their latest album Drakonian Paradigm. Along with the interview, the twelve-page zine also contains a full color center spread of Michaelangelo's Temptation of Adam and Eve, insert materials, a Rape & Honey postcard bearing the visage of the goddess Kali, an acetate reproduction of Mincemoyer's detailed review of Drakonian Paradigm.

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REVELATION   For The Sake Of No One   CD   (Shadow Kingdom)    13.98

Not content to simply reissue the extensive back catalog of old school Maryland doom metallers Revelation, heavy metal archivists Shadow Kingdom have also stepped up to released the new album from the recently reconvened combo, releasing their For The Sake Of No One late in 2009. Anyone that followed the mighty Revelation back during their Rise Above/Hellhound days knows that the band constantly evolved from one album to the next, with their earlier records drawing heavily from the traditional doom of Sabbath, Vitus, and Trouble, but then gradually incorporating more progressive elements as time went on. Coming fourteen years after their classic Yet So Far album, For The Sake Of No One remains on this proggy trajectory, with a sound that incorporates even more psychedelic and melodic qualities than before, while still sticking with the slow, the low, and the gloomy. The first thing that struck me when I first thre this on was how much the album reminds me of British psych-doom rockers Winters, not just in the nasally, plaintive melodic crooning, but also in the extremely melodic, almost poppy songwriting; these guys are consistently crushing, with songs like "A Matter of Days" and "Offset" delivering superbly dark and doleful atmospheric doom, but there are some amazingly gorgeous moments on here such as "Canyons", which almost comes off like some sort of dreamy, heavy slowcore at first, before it unfurls into a quasi-Sabbath groove and some soaring metal soloing that still keeps rooted in a sort of indie heaviness. The band mixes in their progressive rock influences (and especially a heavy Rush influence) along with psychedelia and pounding NWOBHM into their creeping massive doom, highlighting tracks like "Vigil" with its throbbing bass line and moody melodic lead work that moves into a rocking gallop at the end, and the slow, brooding doom of the title track that closes the album. I'd have to rate this as one of the most atmospheric and melodic Maryland doom albums that I have in my collection.
It should be noted that this album features the classic early Revelation lineup of John Brenner on guitar and vocals, bassist Bert Hall and drummer Steve Branagan, who all played on Rev's classic 1991 debut Salvation's Answer on Rise Above. This is also the exact same lineup as the band Against Nature, which is sort of weird...you've got two current bands with different names but the exact same lineup. You can make the distinction between Revelation's classic prog-tinged doom sound and the much proggier Against Nature, I guess, but fans of one band are certainly going to dig the other, their sounds are obviously somewhat intertwined. Revelation is definitely the doomier of the two bands though, and anyone into the classic Maryland doom sound of bands like Asylum, Iron Man, Wretched, Unorthodox, Pentagram, and Internal Void should pick up anything and everything from these doom elders.
Track Samples:
Sample : Canyons
Sample : A Matter of Days

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REVELATION   Yet So Far   CD   (Shadow Kingdom)    13.98

A reissue of the third full-length album from local 90's doom legends Revelation, originally released on Hellhound Records in 1995. For years, Revelation were one of Maryland doom's more overlooked bands, but their catalog has been rightfully receiving new exposure thanks to recent reissue efforts from labels like Shadow Kingdom, as well as renewed activity from the original lineup of the band, who has been playing live in the Baltimore area as of late. ...Yet So Far was the last album that the band released in the 90's before going into an extended hiatus and bassist Jim Hunter moving on to play in bands like While Heaven Wept and Twisted Tower Dire, and it featured a more soulful and progressive version of the Maryland doom sound that Hellhound had been championing. The combination of Dennis Cornelius's eerily Geddy Lee-esque vocals and Revelation's crunchy fusion of Sabbathian doom metal and a heavy Rush influence made for one of Maryland's most unique doom bands, and this album is loaded with their mournful proggy doom, with nine songs of crushing riffs, atmospheric guitar textures, faster passages of NWOBHM-influenced metal, the songs shifting from trudging doominess to faster grooving tempos on a regular basis, each song weaving through a variety pf parts. Some of this has a vaguely Alice In Chains-ish feel, while songs like "Morning Sun" and "Fallen" are pure Sabbath style doom. The closing title track is where the prog influences really come to the foreground; it's an off-kilter funhouse doom crawl that turns into a somber acoustic midsection, then shifts back into slow, epic doom metal, sort of like Kansas gone doom, but then tearing into somewhat technical mid-paced thrash at the end. Obviously, this reissue is a must get for Revelation and Maryland doom fans, the album fully remastered and presented with new liner notes, old band photos and complete lyrics, and it's recommended to anyone else who's into classic traditional doom, bands like Pentagram, Saint Vitus, Candlemass, Trouble, and Solitide Aeturnus, and for that matter, any of the stuff that Shadow kingdom puts out....
Track Samples:
Sample : Fallen
Sample : Soul Barer

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RUDIMENTARY PENI   No More Pain   CD   (Outer Himalayan)    13.98

Starting with No More Pain, I'm going to be gradually getting the entire in-print catalog of legendary punk weirdoes Rudimentary Peni in stock here at Crucial Blast; the band's label Outer Himalayan has recently become more accessible to me, so hopefully we'll be able to make all of their stuff available in short order. Rudimentary Peni are the darkest, most twisted band to come out of the early 80's anarcho-punk scene in Britain, arising during the same period as band's like Crass and Flux Of Pink Indians. Where those bands pursued an overtly political message, Rudimentary Peni were macabre, hallucinatory, their outrage filtered through the grim, death-obsessed visions of singer Nick Blinko, whose intensely detailed pen-and-ink album artwork instantly defined the band's unique aesthetic. Out of all of the anarcho punk bands, Rudimentary Peni were my favorite; they sounded like no one else, twisted and murky and frantic, their sound shifting between bizarre abstract punk and full on thrash. Their early albums Death Church and Cacophony are classic slabs of gloomy, occult punk. Since then, the band has become fairly legendary due to front man Nick Blinko's ongoing struggles with mental illness, which has seen him flitting in and out of the British asylum system while producing more of his striking, obsessively detailed artwork that has become pretty revered within the "outsider" art scene.
When I finally got my hands on Rudimentary Peni's No More Pain from 2008, I was floored. This sounded so much heavier and blacker than their earlier material, the songs super repetitive and simple, crushing three chord punk juggernauts, but played with a driving, bulldozing ferociousness that sounds remarkably like the more primitive, punk-influenced strains of underground black metal. The songs on No More Pain are like a more rocking, stripped down version of what bands like Bone Awl, Ancestors and Malveillance are doing, but of course RP were here first...there's a review of this Ep at Teethofthedivine that describes this as what it would sound like it "The Sex Pistols covered Darkthrone", and I can't think of a more accurate reference point for what this sounds like. The tunes here are devastating, ten songs of pounding, super catchy, super HEAVY punk rock, drums hammering at your skull, the simplistic riffs droning and hypnotic, Nick's seething vocals spitting out his awesome nihilistic, death worship lyrics, which is the theme of this Ep, the release from pain through death, which is as bleak and nihilistic a statement as you'd get from any black metal band. And it wraps up with a strange cover of "Pachelbel's Canon In E", which RP turns into slightly warped, oddly poppy punk, the melody casting a gleaming ray of sun across the morbid rictus grin of No More Pain...

Track Samples:
Sample : The Death of the Author
Sample : Grave Object
Sample : A Handful of Dust

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RUNE   Call Of Hearts   CD   (Crucial Blast)    6.00

A small handful of this old Ep from Rune just came in as part of a return from one of our old distributors. There are less than five of these on hand, and since it had already been out of print for years, these obviously won't last for long. Rune's three-song debut was released on Crucial Blast on CD (and on Clean Plate as a 7") back in 2000, and was the very first release from the Dayton, Ohio band. These guys would later go on to release a very well-received full length on Willowtip and a split with Kalibas on Relapse, but at this stage, they were a much more brutal and immediate force. The three tracks combined brutal downtuned death/grind riffs with spastic, complex guitar skronk, controlled bursts of noise, and passages of devastating glacial sludge. As I described it way back when it first came out: "crushing complex whirlwind blast". The band has been defunct for years, but their releases are still potent slabs of heaviness. One of the guys in the band also went on to form epic sludge-metal soundscapers Mouth Of The Architect.
This is the jewel case version of the CDep, by the way, and not the labor-intensive cardstock sleeve version that we also produced. Again, super limited!
Track Samples:
Sample : Call of Hearts
Sample : Four Season Landmark

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SPECIAL INTERESTS   issue three   MAGAZINE A5   (Freak Animal)    4.98

The killer new issue from one of the only regular periodicals covering the global noise/industrial/avant garde underground, editied and published by Mikko Aspa of Deathspell Omega/Grunt/Freak Animal. I climbed on board with Special Interests with the last issue and am totally addicted to this half-size zine now, impatiently looking forward to each new issue. The third installment is now available, featuring a glorious full-color cover featuring demonic collage artwork from I. Vekka (aka Haare), who also contributes additional psychedelic artwork that appears in the issue; there's an extensive, in-depth interview with experimental noise/collage artist Sudden Infant that covers the group's history and ideology, and interviews and articles on noise artists like Isomer, Xiphoid Dementia, Leif Elggren, hardcore PE/noise unit Fire In The Head, UK power electronics terrorizer Iron Fist Of The Sun, and French concrete/electro acoustic/industrial artist Jean-Marc Vivenza, all of which make for interesting reads. In addition, there's a heavy coverage of underground labels, with interviews with noise/dark ambient/experimental labels like C-Blast faves Malignant, Filth And Violence, Posh Isolation, Release The Bats Records, Urashima, and Abgurd, extensive and well-written record reviews, the recurring Top 10 Essentials column with guests Pasi Markkula (Bizarre Uproar) and Rodger Stella (Macronympha), more writing on the aesthetics of underground cassette culture from Tommy Carlsson (Treriksröset / Abisko) and Aaron Dilloway (Hanson Records), and a Japanese tour diary from Mikko Aspa. The fifty-two pages are densely filled with text and artwork, once again packing a ton of reading between its covers. As always, an excellent navigation guide through the various strata of extreme avant-garde audio, and necessary reading for fans of true underground noise and industrial culture and art.

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THOU / MOLOCH   Tears That Soak A Callous Heart   LP   (Perpetual Motion Machine)    14.98

Thou have been maintaining their busy release schedule with a whole line of split records with likeminded bands, the latest being this split with Uk sludgecore brutes Moloch that has both bands vying to implode their respective side with crushing tar pit heaviness... Moloch are up first, offering three tracks of the sort of filthy black sludge that I first heard on their debut album on Choking Hazard. "Wroll", "Invertebrate", and "Dry COugh" ooze Eyehategod/Grief influenced black slime, down tuned blooze-riddled caveman riffs lumbering over glacial saurian stomp, the deep, roared vocals trading off with higher pitched snarls, the guitars forged into simple droning riffs, smeared with viscous feedback, the drums bashing out slow motion beats that are drenched in tar, with nihilistic lyrics about tectonic tides and the general worthlessness of the self, their oppressive, downtrodden doom punctuated with sudden succinct bursts of speedy thrash.
Then Thou follow with two massive songs; the first, "Fleurs de Mal" (a reference to Baudelaire, presumably?) shifts between ugly, pounding sludge and atmospheric spacey leads, vile howling vokills screeching into the abyss, the guitars unleashing dissonant leads that crawl underneath the skin, the riffs slipping into slightly off-time rhythms, throwing the melancholy melodic sludge off kilter, then revealing stretches of spacious clean guitar that break through the gloom before it all comes crashing back down again. The other track, "Lonliness Dances in the Gorgon's Stare" opens with wailing feedback before ripping into a killer old school doom metal riff, all Vitus-like, but with those feral snarling blackened vocals dragging it down into the filth, a crushing slab of doom that later shifts into a crushing melodic dirge later on, the sound becoming dramatic and majestic at the end, comparable to the soaring melodic moments of their album Thou.
Packaged in a heavyweight black and white sleeve with a heavyweight printed inner sleeve, on clear vinyl, limited to 1000 copies.

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THRONES   Sperm Whale   CD   (Kill Rock Stars)    12.98

Track Samples:
Sample : The Anguish of Bears
Sample : Oso Malo

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TOTAL ABUSE   Mutt   LP   (PostPresentMedium)    14.98

As of this moment, writing this blurb about their new album Mutt, Texas rippers Total Abuse are my favorite hardcore band. I was gushing over their self-titled debut that came out a while back on Deranged after getting totally enamored with their atavistic throwback to circa-1984 thrash, their infatuation with the writings of Peter Sotos, and the stark black and white visuals on their album and 7" sleeves that referenced both the primitive apocalyptic collage art of early American hardcore and the blunt monochrome look of old British industrial cassettes. Seemed like it was custom tailored to my taste in hardcore, a negatory, nihilistic blast of primitivist fury that feels dead serious, driven by murderous desire and staring at the world with an unblinking eye. Not to mention a fiercely noisy edge that felt like I was hearing some as-yet undiscovered psychotic hardcore band from the 80's being blasted out of shredded speakers and malfunctioning PA equipment.
Their last album and the Sex Pig 7" (the title of which is another direct Sotos reference) are still highly recommended to fans of psycho HC and get constant play around here, but their latest Lp Mutt just fucking blew me through the door. On the surface, the album is a direct continuation of the debut. The songs are once again short, brutal blasts of ancient hardcore played with maximum venom and power. The music and everything within it feels as if it's slathered in feedback, as if the band is hurling themselves against a wall of busted, squealing amplifiers. Songs like "Eunuch", "Fluid Exchange", "Buried", and "Caligula" mostly blast out brutal speed attacks somewhere in between Void and Negative Approach, infested with screaming high-end amp howl. Then the band shifts into a staggering dirge that stops the album dead in it's tracks, like when they stumble into the spastic noise and damaged Flipper/Kilslug-esque sludge of "Secret Passage I" and "Pure". There's nothing anthemic in the vocals; the singer delivers his hungry, desperate howl into the storm, his desperation syncing with the band into a wave of droning power. The apex of the album is the complete collapse into noise that comes with "Secret Passage II", a savage wall of guitar squall, squealing agonized feedback, and avalanche drum clatter. The aesthetics of Broken Flag applied to brutal, stripped down American hardcore.
The b&w fanzine style booklet that comes with the Lp features the lyrics, an integral part of Total Abuse's art. The lyrics are obviously influenced by Sotos's writings, the clipped, blunt, brutal lyrics expressing themes of total control, nihilism, loathing, oppression, depravity, violence and desire, directly and without glamour. It's an exploration of hunger that has more in common with Dom Fernow's work in Prurient than anything going on right now in hardcore.
Highest recommendation. Includes a code for an Mp3 download of the album.
Track Samples:
Sample : 14 Years Old
Sample : Flashing
Sample : Pure

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UNHOLY GRAVE   Grind Killers   CD   (Selfmadegod)    11.98

Another new arrivals list rolls in, and as usual there's some new racket from Unholy Grave hammering away, this time on a new full length album that came out on Selfmadegod, the Polish label that's brought us some fantastic grindcore recently from Psycho and Nyia. Grind Killers was recorded back in 2008 while Unholy Grave was on tour in Europe, and it's got everything that you've come to expect from 'em: twenty three tracks of brutal, low-fi grindcore, mostly older songs that have appeared on previous splits and Eps, recorded red-hot and live, the production raw and blown-out all to hell, and with those bizarre yowling, garbled vocals from front man Takaho Komatsu. Furious primitive grindcore with ferocious tribal drums, chaotic blastbeats, the occasional poppy hook, blown-out guttural vokills and weird high pitched howling and babbling, as always sounding to my ears like early Napalm Death with Eye from Boredoms on the mic, a comparison that never ceases to sum up the mangled grindpunk ferocity that these guys have mastered. You get song titles like "Maniacal Discharge", "Morbid Dark Angels", "Motorcharged", "Little Bastards", "Freedom To Eat", lyrics dealing with songs about starvation, terrorism, corporate control, warfare, their own rabid grindlust, all served up in haiku-like blasts of minimalist lyrical outrage. And they throw in a warped cover of the Ramones chestnut "Beat on the Brat" that totally blazes. Does this stand out from the gazillion other albums, Eps, and live discs that these maniacs have gushed out over the past two decades? Nope, but if you're a junky for their noisy, filth-encrusted grind, it'll sate your hunger. The disc looks fantastic, presented in a six panel digipack with complete lyrics and artwork presented in their trademark high-contrast collage style.
Track Samples:
Sample : Beat On The Brat [Ramones]
Sample : Confession
Sample : Death By Terror
Sample : Maniacal Discharge

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VERZIVATAR   Transcendent Infection   CD   (Mercenary Musik)    11.98

When these guys contacted me about carrying their new album, all it took for me to sign up was hearing that the band featured members of Marblebog and Vorkuta. Both of these Hungarian black metal bands have produced fantastic moody black metal in recent years, so this new project from drummer Hoarfrost and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Elzeril looked very promising. Verzivatar pursues a very different form of black metal than either of those projects, though you can probably hear traces of both in the duo's bleak, atmospheric sound. On Transcendent Infection they've crafted six songs of mostly mid-paced black metal gloom with cold, razor-sharp guitars, plodding bass lines, plenty of eerie minor key arpeggios, and passages of slow, doomy heaviness, with a distinctive vocal approach...the weird vocals from Elzeril are super intense and demented sounding, an extreme high pitched screech that reminds me of early Bethlehem, but mixed with quirky, nasally shouting. It's a unique style that adds a crazed feel to the songs. On the first few tracks (which have weird titles like "Smothery Movelessness" and "Lascivious Suffering Ecstasy"), Verzivatar alternate between blasting speed and mournful mid-paced black metal, but when they get to the last three songs, the sound settles into a melancholic vibe, slipping into these melodic, poppy riffs on " Decadent March of Purity" and "Blissful Extinction" that take this in a jangly, post-punk/goth punk direction, sort of comparable to Lifelover or Hypothermia crossed with Bethlehem and Pornography-era Cure. Probably the strongest connection to their other bands (namely Marblebog) is found in the lyrics, which are inspired by the mystery of nature, though these are as steeped in darkness and sorrow as everything else about this album. Its thirty five minutes of dark, melancholic black metal shot through with that grim, gothy post-punk sound, a terrific debut that sits comfortably next to similar faves like Animus, Hateful Abandon, and Lurker Of Chalice.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blissful Extinction
Sample : Smothery Movelessness

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VOMITOMA   A Liquid Harvest Of Putrefied Stomach Contents   CD   (Alarma)    11.98

Goregrind can never get gross enough. Just when it seemed like the gore scene had hit the most disgusting limits of Carcass-worship and scatological imagery, along comes a relatively new offshoot that seeks to get even stickier, the repulsive "gorenoise" scene. Loosely based around the combination of noise and goregrind (duh), and labels like Splatterfuck Tapes, Klysma Records, Fecal-Matter Discorporated, and Last House On The Right, I've been following a lot of this stuff for years, especially bands like Basket of Death and the newer Last Days Of Humanity. In the same way that noisecore took grind into the furthest reaches of sonic violence, so to does the aesthetic of grindnoise, except it's much more disgusting. Vomitoma are my latest gorenoise find. I came across their atrociously-titled album A Liquid Harvest Of Putrefied Stomach Contents on the Mexican label Alarma recently, and honestly fell in love with them as soon as I saw the spectacular Lovecraft-meets-sphincter-horror of their logo. The album is no cakewalk either, with 53 tracks of putrescent industrial goreblast stretching out for almost an hour; going a few steps further beyond the extremes of the most vile Carcass/Gut/Impetigo worship, Vomitoma wallow in vats of shapeless detuned bass-noise, and splatter hyperspeed drum machine blasts across their minute-long eruptions. Constructed into inhuman, often angular arrangements, the drum programming is so fast and chaotic that it becomes another layer of noise, except for those rare moments when the beats seem to form into something vaguely resembling a breakbeats. The septic, pitchshifted belch-grunts are so low and liquefied that they become burbling washes of adipocere and bizarre gastrointestinal effects that ooze over the throbbing, sludgy grind-noise. It's like ultra-heavy, chaotic drum-machine goregrind mixed with a heavy dose of industrial filth, and quite possibly the most ridiculously disgusting squidbeast puke/growl/belches I've ever heard, rivaling even those of Last Days Of Humanity. The requisite splatter movie samples are combined with even grosser sound bites taken from documentaries on intestinal parasites, and some of the tracks slip into some truly monstrous industrial splatter-sludge grooves, like on "Maggot-ridden Brainclog" and "She Gave Birth To A Pile Of Hookworms".
Uh, if you've gotten this far into this review, I'm going to assume that you're at least somewhat of a fan of this sort of stuff. If you still need a reference point, think Anal Birth and Basket Of Death, or the harshest goregrind band being remixed by Merzbow, or early Carcass crossed with Seven Minutes Of Nausea. It's as extreme as it gets in the realm of death metal/grind, beautifully vile and crushing for us mutants who revel in this kind of aural putrefaction, but everyone else will want to give this a wide berth. Limited edition of 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Fly Swarmed Maggot Mucus
Sample : Repulsive Rancid Reflux
Sample : Toxoplasmosis

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WICKED INNOCENCE   Worship   CD   (Headfucker Records)    10.98

It's interesting to me that one of the weirdest death metal bands of the 90's came out of Salt Lake City, and it's easy to wonder whether their pursuit of absolute chaos and insanity was at all informed by the ultra-conservative city where they were located. Although they enjoyed a small cult following during their existence, Wicked Innocence never achieved any widespread popularity, and in the eight years or so since the band last surfaced with a new recording, they've slipped into tech-death obscurity, sought out primarily by death metal fans investigating the weirder fringes of the genre, like myself. To be honest, I had heard about the band back when they were around, but didn't check them out until years later just because of their name. When I started to see them being mentioned in the same breath as Gorguts and Immolation though, it was time to check them out. Once I got into their catalog, I realized that Wicked Innocence (despite their glammy name) played some incredibly complicated and chaotic death metal, that became more and more bizarre and convoluted with each album they released in the 1990's. Their debut album Omnipotence on Napalm Records is considered a minor classic amongst fans of weirdo tech-death, but nothing comes close to the jaw-dropping audacity of their 1999 follow-up, Worship, which was released on the Italian grind label Headfucker Records. This of course is the same label that released the debut from their pals in Cephalic Carnage, and you can hear a kinship in the mental death/grind that these bands were developing around the same time. Musically, Worship traverses the outer avant-garde reaches of technical death metal where bands like Gorguts, Cephalic Carnage, Immolation, Demilich and Atheist intersect, with tons of chaotic, skronky riffs that often slip all the way into Obscura levels of dissonance and harshness, abrupt breaks into massive stoner rock riffage a la their pals in Cephalic Carnage, INSANE drumming with lots of bizarre counter-intuitive rhythms and super-fast fills flying all over the place, and some obvious mutant jazz-fusion influences that seep into the kaleidoscopic chords/riffs employed by the guitarists and the extremely complicated arrangements. Lots of overtly weird shit pops up throughout the album, ranging from the Indian flutes and acoustic balladry on "G.O.D." to the insane combination of funk breaks and odd tribal percussion with brutal off-time death metal on "Jealous And Self-Conscious". If they had just kept it at that, a blasting assault of dissonant, quirky death metal, then a lot of death metal fans would probably have been able to get on board with this album when it came out; however, the vocals are so fucking nuts, and so un-death-metal, this ended up either going way over the heads of most death metallers, or (more likely) just totally pissing them off. See, the singer lets out plenty of gutteral death-belches and puking vokills, but he mixes them up with this weird, crooning singing style that's completely out of place, but at the same time makes this sound wonderfully nuts, as if the singer is rapidly tuning into multiple personalities, babbling in a soulful wail one moment, then vomiting black bile a split second later. It certainly doesn't sound like this was a play for a wider audience; one listen to the completely fucked-up death metal these guys played proves that. If anything, it just weirds out their tech-death exponentially. Imagine a cross between Immolation and Obscura-era Gorguts and Cephalic Carnage, but with a singer channeling Eddie Vedder, Serj Tankian, and Mike Patton alongside his litany of bestial, bowel-rupturing growls. One of the most fucked sounding death metal albums ever, and a BIG favorite around here. Since Headfucker Records has been defunct for awhile, this album has been increasingly hard to track down; I picked up a handful from one of my Italian distributors recently, and it's now available through C-Blast for fans of truly weird and "out" tech-death.
Track Samples:
Sample : G.O.D.
Sample : Minus The Body
Sample : Worship

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WICKED KING WICKER   Outer Bounds Of Sound   LP   (Noiseville)    17.98

Been getting more and more new material from this titanic industrial doom duo, all of it crushing. Just had that new album on Cold Spring come in a while back, the nihilistic noise-riddled God Is Busy...Save Yourself, which cranked Wicked King Wicker's mechanical sludge into even more monstrous levels of tectonic crush, and now we've got this super-limited Lp on Noiseville (the label run by one of the members of WKW) that heads in the opposite direction, delivering a slab of almost pure noise that still retains some trace elements of that grinding heaviness.
The album starts with the thirteen minute "Spring Is the Easy Part", which opens with spastic, fast-paced blasts of glitchy electronic noise that sounds sped up, torrents of malfunctioning hard drive skree rushing overtop ultra-distorted riffage buried deep underneath the electronic chaos. Harsh buzzing drones, garbled 8-bit chip sounds and mangled cassette noise become entangled in the churning industrial soundscape, coming off as much more chaotic than the other Wicked King Wicker releases, and sounding more like Merzbow performing over a murky, heat-warped recording of damaged doom metal. Then it drops into "Burne Black", an echo-laden doomscape made up of swaths of flanged distortion, endless delay, rumbling subterranean drones and peals of feedback, a crushing industrial drone piece strafed with the incessant howl of a warning siren and processed guitar noise. The second side almost appears as a mirror image of the first. Another thirteen minute piece is first, starting off as a blast of black noise that slowly takes form into chunks of abstract doom metal riffage and slow motion percussion, the sound shifting in and out of focus between shapeless waves of black industrial pummel and more metallic heaviness. At times, it becomes so overdriven and distorted that it almost reaches HNW levels of density and static power, becoming a seething ocean of distortion, but at the same time monstrously heavy, with massive low end, and drums that finally free themselves from the murk and lock into a pounding earthquake pulse at the end. "Borne Black" ends the side with muted black ambience, smears of distorted guitar and looped electronics, a deep, subterranean doomdub-drift that swells at the end in a tangled mess of swarming feedback, percussive rattling and rippling high end guitar noise.
It's up there with their most abstract material, a super-heavy industrial meltdown that's as crushing and blackened as recent offerings from their peers in Skullflower and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. Issued in a limited edition of 300 copies, and packaged in a black jacket with metallic foil stamped jacket.

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WIESE, JOHN + GERRIT   Panoramic Glass And Mirror   LP   (Misanthropic Agenda)    13.98

Wiese and Gerrit follow up their previous collaboration The Disappearing Act with a new album of ultra-abstract layered sound, a harrowing electro-acoustic horror soundtrack whose first side is created from live recordings of John Wiese, and the second created in the studio. This is unsettling stuff; the two artists create a glitch-ridden soundscape of crackling drones, creepy found sounds and minimal ambience, often quiet and minimal, with only the faintest sonic activity occurring at the periphery of your hearing, and then they'll erupt into orgies of snarling, grunting vocal noises, like a din of demonic swine crowding around a corpse, the soundscape full of scraping noises and snuffling, chewing sounds. The album moves through abstract metal clatter and dragging sounds, abrasive electronic textures and high pitched sinewave drones, mysterious creaking and squealing, sometimes forming into hypnotic circular scraping, or invoking massive grinding textures that sound like huge slabs of obsidian rock being ground together in slow motion. Bat-like squeals of garbled high pitched electronics swoop overhead; reverberating gong-like percussion and prayer bowl drones melt down into minimal black drift.
It gets even creepier on the second side. Swarming viper nests of tangled high speed cassette tape garble and ambient room noise, warped musical samples turn into demonic minor key clots of high speed sound and random crashing and banging. Washes of minimal minor key piano (or harp, it's hard to tell) is processed into blurred electronic drone, and then disappears amid the sound of dripping water. At the end, it transforms into the damp, dank dungeon ambience, laced with eerie drones and swells of distorted strings, becoming an extremely creepy soundscape of demonic mutterings, stretched out cello-like drones, transmitter signals, and blown-out snarls, finally turning into a smear of minimal drones stretching out into the void.
Panoramic Glass And Mirror falls somewhere in between an avant-garde Japanese horror film score, the foley work for Ridley Scott's Alien, and the nauseating sound experiments of Randy Yau and Dave Phillips. Disturbing to say the least.
Released in a limited edition of 500.

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WOLFNUKE   Nightwar   CASSETTE   (Crucial Blaze)    4.50

The second document on the new Crucial Blaze imprint, Wolfnuke's Nightwar is a glorified demo, the first raw recorded work from this new Hagerstown, Maryland quartet that includes the C-Blast boss on bass and bellows, as well as a current member of long-running hardcore/grinders Strong Intention (Six Weeks / Coalition Records) on guitar. Wolfnuke seeks a different form of mayhem however, forging a furious, blackened thrash assault out of an unlikely combination of influences that include the obvious (classic second wave black metal and Teutonic thrash), the vitriolic crossover thrash of Cro-Mags's 1989 album Best Wishes, a lust for the driving, apocalyptic power of late 80's UK goth rock (Fields of The Nephilim, Sisters Of Mercy), and the violent aggression of Scandinavian hardcore. The four songs on Nightwar are universally fast-paced and dark as hell, starting with the nihilistic blackened thrash of "Beneath The Last Of The Neuro-Goat" and continuing through the blazing black metal-meets-crossover extermination vision of "Deathfire", the crushing mid-tempo blackened metalpunk of the title track and the anthemic matricide hallucination of closer "Filthwraith".
Originally made available as a free download and cassette at local performances earlier in the year, the Nightwar demo has been presented here as a limited edition cassette, limited to a print run of 100 copies. In addition, the recording is still available to be downloaded for free, which can be done at the following link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NJFXJAT8.
Track Samples:
Sample : Beneath The Lash Of The Neuro-Goat
Sample : Deathfire
Sample : Filthwraith
Sample : Nightwar

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WOLFNUKE   Nightwar   CD-R   (Crucial Blaze)    6.50

The second document on the new Crucial Blaze imprint, Wolfnuke's Nightwar is a glorified demo, the first raw recorded work from this new Hagerstown, Maryland quartet that includes the C-Blast boss on bass and bellows, as well as a current member of long-running hardcore/grinders Strong Intention (Six Weeks / Coalition Records) on guitar. Wolfnuke seeks a different form of mayhem however, forging a furious, blackened thrash assault out of an unlikely combination of influences that include the obvious (classic second wave black metal and Teutonic thrash), the vitriolic crossover thrash of Cro-Mags's 1989 album Best Wishes, a lust for the driving, apocalyptic power of late 80's UK goth rock (Fields of The Nephilim, Sisters Of Mercy), and the violent aggression of Scandinavian hardcore. The four songs on Nightwar are universally fast-paced and dark as hell, starting with the nihilistic blackened thrash of "Beneath The Last Of The Neuro-Goat" and continuing through the blazing black metal-meets-crossover extermination vision of "Deathfire", the crushing mid-tempo blackened metalpunk of the title track and the anthemic matricide hallucination of closer "Filthwraith".
Originally made available as a free download and cassette at local performances earlier in the year, the Nightwar demo has been presented here as a hand-numbered cd-r release in a print run of 250 copies and packaged in the Crucial Blaze signature library case with an insert card, a set of 1" buttons, and a vinyl sticker. It is also available on cassette, likewise limited to a print run of 100 copies. In addition, the recording is still available to be downloaded for free, which can be done at the following link: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NJFXJAT8.
Track Samples:
Sample : Beneath The Lash Of The Neuro-Goat
Sample : Deathfire
Sample : Filthwraith
Sample : Nightwar

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XIBALBA   Demo 2010   CASSETTE   (Nuclear War Now! Productions)    5.98

The return of Mexican psychedelic black metal primitives Xibalba! Taking inspiration from their fascination with Mayan occultism and heritage and the sound of early Norwegian black metal, Xibalba are responsible for two of the most unique black metal albums to come out of Mexico, Ah Dzam Poop Ek and Ancients, which combined a blazing Darkthrone influence with traditional Mayan instruments like rain sticks and hand drums and created a strange, otherworldly form of distinctly Mexican BM. Xibalba hadn't released anything new since the mid 1990's, but apparently the recent reissue campaign on the part of Nuclear War Now energized the band to record a new batch of songs, which have been made available here as a cassette only release on NWN. The sound has definitely changed a bit here; you won't hear the hallucinatory breaks into rain stick rhythms and jungle ambience that appeared on Ah Dzam Poop Ek, instead the band tears through five tracks of delirious, low-fi black thrash that's slightly more straightforward, though things still get pretty bizarre with these guys. The tape opens with an intro of dubbed-out whispers, creepy incantations, labored breathing, the distant trumpeting of ancient wind instruments; then the band launches into the blown out, low-fi blackened punkthrash of "Storm Of The Katunes", it's Motorhead-esque riffage and psychotic vocals swirling with weird fx and screaming whammy bar leads, the guitarist breaking off into some very weird chaotic riffing, while swarms of whispered vokills drenched in delay rush by. It's pretty demented sounding, but at the center of this is a very simple, repetitive riff that's hammered out over pounding thrash beats, delivered with the sort of single-minded ferocity you get from Akitsa or Malveillance. The next song is all pounding heavy metal strut, then gets very fucking weird as metallic, almost vocoded / treated vocals emerge over droning metal guitars, and spaced out, fx-drenched solos begin to scream across the dirge riffing. The rest of the tape delivers more of the furious blackened thrash possessed with those demented, lysergic vocalizations, more simple, punky riffing, evil leads and scorched croak vokills. A pretty vicious return from these Mayan black metal legends that has me eagerly looking forward to what they'll be doing next. Released as a pro-printed cassette with metallic gold printing on the j-card.

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YAKUZA   Of Seismic Consequence   CD   (Profound Lore)    13.98

Chicago's sax-wielding art/prog metal warriors Yakuza return with their new album on Profound Lore, Of Seismic Consequence ; while it's more understated and brooding an album than their Prosthetic releases, fans of their previous work should be more than satisfied with where the band has taken their atmospheric, jazz-stained sound. Yakuza have always been adept at combining melodic flourishes with complex songwriting, weighty metallic crunch and a healthy dose of proggy weirdness, with a sound that has often been compared to Isis. The music of Yakuza is generally a much faster and more complex force, though, building slow-burning metal into crushing crescendos of doomed heaviness and choppy, thrash metal riffage, while the baritone vocals of frontman/saxophonist Bruce Lamont (which continue to remind me of Steve Kilbey from The Church) appear just as often as his harrowing screams.
"The Ant People" opens with a round of tribal drums and stoned chanting that becomes more intense and furious as it goes on, finally exploding into blackened screams and washes of thick kosmiche synth drone that launches right into "The Thinning Herd". Here, the band finally kicks in to their angular prog-metal, crushing riffs welded to choppy time signatures, Bruce's soaring vocals leading the song into a majestic melodic crescendo; you could almost compare this to Tool, if it weren't for the vicious thrash metal riffs that snake throughout the song. "Stones And Bones" is another melodic song, resembling a faster, more angular Isis, going from prog metal into more jagged thrash and building into a crushing climax where Bruce finally pulls out his sax and belts out a smoldering, melodic sax line that ascends skyward across the end of the song.
The rest of Of Seismic Consequence continues to balance the moodier, more atmospheric side of Yakuza's sound with the bouts of metallic aggression; on "Be That As It May", the song takes it's time unfurling it's tribal rhythms and haunting sax, ominous guitar leads and those crooning vocals joining within the laid back psychedelic jamming...it's not till later that the band ventures into the thunderous heaviness, when the progged-out riffs erupt into elephantine crush, the sax becoming layered with effects, rising into a massive prog metal anthem. The eleven minute "Farewell To The Flesh" is slow, pummeling sludge, a jazz doom dirge, Neurosis meets Pink Floyd, as is "Testing The Waters"; "The Great War' and "Good Riddance" are shorter, thrashier jams, quick bursts of speed and aggression that lead into the concluding track "Deluge", a slowly building horn-soaked jazz-psych dirge that stretches out into epic length...
Presented in a six panel digipack with a full color booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : Good Riddance (The Knuckle Walkers)
Sample : Stones and Bones
Sample : Thinning the Herd

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