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The word was out early in the year about this odd pairing of Revenge/Axis Of Advance members C. Ross and James Read (also of the mighty Kerasphorus and Cremation) and singer A.A. Nemtheanga from Celtic black/folk metallers Primordial, and when the advance Mp3 from their recording hit the 'net, it left a lot of baffled looks on the extreme metal message board community. It was a little hard to imagine what a band would sound like with those war metal vets fronted by Nemtheanga dramatic vocal presence, and the preliminary taste of Indoctrine suggested something quite unlike anything that we'd heard from any of their other bands. After finally getting the debut album from Blood Revolt and listening to it from start to finish, it's still a somewhat jarring and difficult listen, but I've also thoroughly come to love this disc, 'cuz it's one of the most original and powerful black metal albums that I've heard all year.
There's alot about Indoctrine that makes it stand out. The first thing that strikes the listener is the strange juxtaposition of Nemtheanga's clear, declaratory voice and lunatic delivery with the bestial, schizophrenic metal that Read and Ross unleash. And the music is fucking ferocious, clearly rooted in the supreme Canadian black/war metal violence of their other bands, with Read blasting and hammering his drum kit like a coked-up gorilla, his trademark style of somewhat sloppy, utterly vicious drumming injecting a nuclear black energy into the brutal thrash riffs and maniac black/death metal. At the same time, the band throws in some additional elements like pounding D-beat crust, the creeping, foul doom of "My Name In Blood Across The Sky", and even some surprisingly catchy pogo punk riffs, like on "Bite The Hand, Purge The Flesh". It's definitely more varied than what these guys do in, say, Revenge, with more melodic and catchy hooks infecting the violent, chaotic thrash, but there's no shortfall of ferocity. Nemtheanga's overwrought vocals clash with this sound, delivering the bleak narrative in a mixture of powerful, operatic singing and harsher shrieks, and it comes out sounding remarkably unique. His vocals wander across the album, the lyrics describing a plotline involving armed urban warfare, a lone wolf resistance fighter, and ultimately the martyrdom of the central character, all of which makes for unusual and interesting subject matter for a black/death concept album. It's an awesome, albeit quirky mix of supreme Canadian black metal ferocity and powerful, impassioned vocals with more brains than usual at work behind the bestial assault...definitely one of 2010's most idiosyncratic extreme metal albums, and an amazing debut that blew away my expectations for what this was going to sound like. This is highly recommended to fans of Revenge, Kerasphorus and other Read-related projects, and anyone into psychotic, nihilistic black/death metal who's interested in hearing a unique vocal approach outside of the standard guttural grunting and shrieking that we usually hear.
Track Samples:
Sample : Bite the Hand, Purge the Flesh
Sample : My Name In Blood Across the Sky
Sample : Salvation At the Barrel of a Gun

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Now available in a limited edition 180 gram vinyl release, limited to 500 copies and packaged with an MP3 download card/code for the entire album.
The early 16 albums have been long overdue for reissue. With the demise of their longtime label Theologian/Pessimiser Records earlier this past decade, most of the 16 catalog became increasingly hard to track down, and their Bacteria Sour releases were even more rare and sought after. Now with a new album Bridges To Burn out on new label Relapse, a reissue campaign is underway to make these albums available once again, remastered and with all new album layouts, starting with their most crucial discs, 1993's Curves That Kick and 1996's Drop Out. Both of these discs are absolutely essential for anyone into the grinding, stop-and-go sludge rock of 16, and either one is a perfect starting point for anybody that's not yet familiar with their brand of sledgehammer heaviness.
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 : Curves That Kick
Sample : Resin

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Already sold out from the label and out of print, this 7" is the first appearance from these Finnish noisecore legends in almost two decades, their last being that split 7" with Man Is The Bastard that came out in the early 90's. Old school noisecore and PV fans know what's up, though. While their output was minimal to say the least, Aunt Mary produced some seriously savage free-grind back in the day, and this Ep feels like hardly a day has passed since the last time that these maniacs battered my skull with their formless, barbaric din. The vile, pornographic cover artwork and confrontational, offensive imagery that's plastered across Almost Dead's full-color sleeve might look familiar (and deeply disturbing) to some folks, as it shares a similar assault collage aesthetic as the artwork found on Bizarre Uproar releases; that's because Pasi Markkula, the guy behind the Finnish harsh noise/power electronics of BU and Xenophobic Ejaculation is also one of the members of this outfit. No electronics here, though; if there are, they are unidentifiable underneath the brutal, low-fi junk noise / noisecore cacophony that Aunt Mary pukes up in a vicious torrent of blasting noise and fucked-up grind. The "songs", or whatever you want to call them, are delivered in super-short shock blasts of formless guitar vomit and guitar squonk, ridiculously messy and BRUTAL drum battery that sounds like the drummer is hammering away on an old oil drum with a rusted aluminum pipe, demonic howls with the effects on the vocals completely out of control, all blasted in five second eruptions of pure skullfuck. Sort of like old Anal Cunt, which isn't surprising, but more primitive (if you can even imagine that) and at the same time more psychedelic, with those wild, loopy shrieks and brief detours into monstrous doom slop, and some supremely mutant guitar playing that inadvertently gets into Sharrock-like territory with all of the strangled dissonance and honking, furious chords. It's still noisecore though, a blast of seriously abusive, yet classic blurr blast; fans of the old Aunt Mary 7"s should be pleased, and anyone into the likes of Seven Minutes Of Nausea, Anal Cunt, and Sore Throat owe it to themselves to pick up anything from these frenzied Finns. The 7" was released by AWWFN in a limited edition of 300 copies.

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Weird, cavernous, bloozy garage skum from this duo out of Louisville, kind of a surprise offering from Robotic Empire. It's been descibed as "shoegazey" by some, probably because of the copious amounts of reverb that soak into every nook and cranny of these seven songs, but Bad Secrets sound to my ears more like the kind of drug-n'-booze addled noise rock outfits that were slithering out of downtown New York City back in the mid to late 80's, the sort of thing that might have appeared on Rough Trade or Homestead. The guys behind this are drummer Dan Davis (also of Kodan Armada) and guitarist Evan Patterson, the latter known for his involvement in some fine contempo pigfuck/noise rock outfits like Breather Resist, Young Widows and Black Cross. In this configuration, though, Patterson goes for a more drugged and dissonant sort of clamor, the two musicians shambling through these creepy swamp-stained dirges, a vague industrial quality sticking to everything as the twangy, skronking guitar wigs out over a pounding, percussive oil-drum throb, the songs partially formed, and apparently partially improvised as well. The recording is suitably dank and dingy, the aforementioned reverb-heavy sound has it's murkiness amplified by the low fi four-track production. Haunted, stoned gothic noise rock riddled with slurred, drawling vocals and ghostly wails, subterranean metallic scrape and trippy stereo panning, clanking riffs and chaotic drum freak outs, and weird production fuckery that ranges from sped-up tape noise and sudden drop-outs to grainy needle pops and room noise. Imagine Pussy Galore on Quaaludes, or Nick Cave stalking some ancient crypt, and you're in the general vicinity. The guitars utilize some neat shimmery Morricone-esque twang on some of the tracks, too, and the band occasionally even goes off into something resembling a nocturnal version of surf rock at times. Things get pretty "out" and psychedelic throughout this little record, but the duo are still able to produce some seriously catchy noise rock jams like "Gimmee Sound" and "Go And Leave". It's a cool offering of subterranean garage skuzz, presented on an unusual 9" size vinyl record in a silk-screened sleeve, and includes a cd version of the record. We've got this on both the "metallic red"(custom pinkish red) and "evil eye" (red/white/black) editions, each one limited to a couple hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Come With Me
Sample : Go and Leave
Sample : Vultures Cometh

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Weird, cavernous, bloozy garage skum from this duo out of Louisville, kind of a surprise offering from Robotic Empire. It's been descibed as "shoegazey" by some, probably because of the copious amounts of reverb that soak into every nook and cranny of these seven songs, but Bad Secrets sound to my ears more like the kind of drug-n'-booze addled noise rock outfits that were slithering out of downtown New York City back in the mid to late 80's, the sort of thing that might have appeared on Rough Trade or Homestead. The guys behind this are drummer Dan Davis (also of Kodan Armada) and guitarist Evan Patterson, the latter known for his involvement in some fine contempo pigfuck/noise rock outfits like Breather Resist, Young Widows and Black Cross. In this configuration, though, Patterson goes for a more drugged and dissonant sort of clamor, the two musicians shambling through these creepy swamp-stained dirges, a vague industrial quality sticking to everything as the twangy, skronking guitar wigs out over a pounding, percussive oil-drum throb, the songs partially formed, and apparently partially improvised as well. The recording is suitably dank and dingy, the aforementioned reverb-heavy sound has it's murkiness amplified by the low fi four-track production. Haunted, stoned gothic noise rock riddled with slurred, drawling vocals and ghostly wails, subterranean metallic scrape and trippy stereo panning, clanking riffs and chaotic drum freak outs, and weird production fuckery that ranges from sped-up tape noise and sudden drop-outs to grainy needle pops and room noise. Imagine Pussy Galore on Quaaludes, or Nick Cave stalking some ancient crypt, and you're in the general vicinity. The guitars utilize some neat shimmery Morricone-esque twang on some of the tracks, too, and the band occasionally even goes off into something resembling a nocturnal version of surf rock at times. Things get pretty "out" and psychedelic throughout this little record, but the duo are still able to produce some seriously catchy noise rock jams like "Gimmee Sound" and "Go And Leave". It's a cool offering of subterranean garage skuzz, presented on an unusual 9" size vinyl record in a silk-screened sleeve, and includes a cd version of the record. We've got this on both the "metallic red"(custom pinkish red) and "evil eye" (red/white/black) editions, each one limited to a couple hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Come With Me
Sample : Go and Leave
Sample : Vultures Cometh

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Another one of the limited-edition 7"s that At War With False Noise cranked out over the past year, the Black Sun / They Are Cowards split showcases one meaty track each from two of the UK's heaviest underground sludge/noise metal crews. The Ep is limited to a mere 300 copies, and comes in a double sided fold-over sleeve.
Already established on AWWFN as a heavy proposition via their Paralyser Lp on the label from a while back, Black Sun return here with a new jam called "Code Black" that's equally as crushing as what they were doing on their album. It opens up with gouts of violent feedback, as the band lurches forward into a pounding mid-tempo crush, mean and sludgy, with a mix of harsh, freaked out screaming and beefier bellowing roars over top. This driving metallic noise rock jam grinds away for a couple of minutes with lots of noisy riffing and a palpable malevolence, and then slips into a slower, stomping dirge at the end, dragging you down into the muck. It crushed quite nicely, and reminds me of a more straightforward and grinding version of Anodyne.
Then, on the flipside, the band They Are Cowards emerge with a pulverizing slab of heaviness called "First and Only". Featuring some members of the renowned UK doom metal outfit Atavist, They Are Cowards are also seekers of oblivion through the riff, but achieve it with a much more savage strategy. When the song kicks off, it's awesome, oppressive doom, grinding and glacial, but it quickly tears into a skull-hammering blend of Celtic Frost-style crush and angular Am Rep violence. Might sound like an odd combo, but these guys definitely destroy, moving from one crushing, concrete-heavy riff to another, and switching off between faster hardcore style blasts of speed and power with sickening vokills, to slower, Frostian sludge and jagged off-time beatings. I'd love to hear more from this band.

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Now available on limited-edition vinyl!
The first album from this time-warping band from Toronto is a new fave over here alongside the debut from Devil's Blood, and just like Devil's Blood, this is some of that killer proto-doom revivalism that has been coming out of the wormwoodwork lately, a la likeminded bands like Burning Saviours, Witchcraft, Graveyards and Dead Man. Blood Ceremony are one of the heavier outfits playing this style, in my opinion, loaded with burly Iommi-influenced riffing, a total Sabbath/Pentragram vibe, but with rich, witchy female singing and a serious sheen of old school Hammond organ covering everything, that vintage organ sound up front and as much a lead instrument as the heavy guitars. I can't get enough of this album, and was fully sold once the second song "I'm Coming With You" rolls in and we're suddenly greeted by some 70's sounding prog-rock flute, which establishes itself as the real lead instrument in Blood Ceremony's arsenal, the flute trilling over the rest of the album alongside the heavy Sabbath riffs like a flowery, progged out mix of Pentagram, Jefferson Airplane and Jethro Tull, early 70's hippie-doom crossed with progressive rock and Canterbury folk. Singer Alia O'Brien is the one behind both the flute and the Hammond, and the combination of her dramatic singing with the flute playing and trippy Hammond organ tones give Blood Ceremony it's unique sound, like hearing Pentagram crossed with some 70's dark prog band; the riffs are just as crucial to the sound, though, lumbering bludgeoning slabs of fuzzed out downer riffage, heavy and doomy and soaked in Iommi's bongwater, not full-on metal but defintiely doomy as hell. Then there are the song titles and lyrics for songs like "Into The Coven", "Master Of Confusion", "A Wine Of Wizardry" and "Hop Toad", all of which conjure up images of early 70's Hammer movies and hippie-era black magic and blacklight posters...great stuff. Bewitching and heavy black magic-obsessed rock that evokes the obscure arcana of European occult rock and downer prog bands like Jacula, Black Widow, Coven, Necromandus through the retro-psychdoom of Jex Thoth . Recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : Hymn to Pan
Sample : Master of Confusion

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The word was out early in the year about this odd pairing of Revenge/Axis Of Advance members C. Ross and James Read (also of the mighty Kerasphorus and Cremation) and singer A.A. Nemtheanga from Celtic black/folk metallers Primordial, and when the advance Mp3 from their recording hit the 'net, it left a lot of baffled looks on the extreme metal message board community. It was a little hard to imagine what a band would sound like with those war metal vets fronted by Nemtheanga dramatic vocal presence, and the preliminary taste of Indoctrine suggested something quite unlike anything that we'd heard from any of their other bands. After finally getting the debut album from Blood Revolt and listening to it from start to finish, it's still a somewhat jarring and difficult listen, but I've also thoroughly come to love this disc, 'cuz it's one of the most original and powerful black metal albums that I've heard all year.
There's alot about Indoctrine that makes it stand out. The first thing that strikes the listener is the strange juxtaposition of Nemtheanga's clear, declaratory voice and lunatic delivery with the bestial, schizophrenic metal that Read and Ross unleash. And the music is fucking ferocious, clearly rooted in the supreme Canadian black/war metal violence of their other bands, with Read blasting and hammering his drum kit like a coked-up gorilla, his trademark style of somewhat sloppy, utterly vicious drumming injecting a nuclear black energy into the brutal thrash riffs and maniac black/death metal. At the same time, the band throws in some additional elements like pounding D-beat crust, the creeping, foul doom of "My Name In Blood Across The Sky", and even some surprisingly catchy pogo punk riffs, like on "Bite The Hand, Purge The Flesh". It's definitely more varied than what these guys do in, say, Revenge, with more melodic and catchy hooks infecting the violent, chaotic thrash, but there's no shortfall of ferocity. Nemtheanga's overwrought vocals clash with this sound, delivering the bleak narrative in a mixture of powerful, operatic singing and harsher shrieks, and it comes out sounding remarkably unique. His vocals wander across the album, the lyrics describing a plotline involving armed urban warfare, a lone wolf resistance fighter, and ultimately the martyrdom of the central character, all of which makes for unusual and interesting subject matter for a black/death concept album. It's an awesome, albeit quirky mix of supreme Canadian black metal ferocity and powerful, impassioned vocals with more brains than usual at work behind the bestial assault...definitely one of 2010's most idiosyncratic extreme metal albums, and an amazing debut that blew away my expectations for what this was going to sound like. This is highly recommended to fans of Revenge, Kerasphorus and other Read-related projects, and anyone into psychotic, nihilistic black/death metal who's interested in hearing a unique vocal approach outside of the standard guttural grunting and shrieking that we usually hear.
Track Samples:
Sample : Bite the Hand, Purge the Flesh
Sample : My Name In Blood Across the Sky
Sample : Salvation At the Barrel of a Gun

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After a stack of vinyl and cassette releases, the Washington-based black industrial demons in Blue Sabbath Black Cheer finally released a full-length collection of their music on Cd, most of it previously released but now hard to find material, with a handful of unreleased tracks that are exclusive to this disc. And it's brutal stuff, a variety of 7", 12" and cassette tracks that's some of their heaviest recorded material. By now, BSBC have established themselves as one of the cruelest industrial noise duos out there, infusing their grinding abstract noisescapes with a blackened metallic heaviness that makes their music much heavier and nastier than most "noise" outfits. It's vile black industrial sludge, crushing droning low end that churns beneath chaotic masses of harsh distortion, squirming electronic detritus, bestial roaring vocals, and monolithic metallic buzz, a strange hybrid of Throbbing Gristle and Sunn, UK power electronics and black ambience, all sculpted into their own bludgeoning visage that can shift from solemn sepulchral drift or throbbing industrial crawl into skull-crushing maelstroms of pure black noize holocaust.
The featured tracks explore all known aspects of their hellish factory din. The first track comes off of the Eva 7" that came out on Daisy Cutter, a grinding lumbering cacophony of crashing metal recorded live, churning low end violence and ultra distorted death metal vokills, pounding mechanical percussion deep beneath an inferno of black distortion, piercing streams of feedback and roiling harsh noise, with some gnarled horns from Geoff Walker from improv-noise-rock behemoths Gravitar. The next track is shorter and more minimal, a murky drumbeat looped over and over, surrounded by gurgling demonic voices, syrupy horns, washes of chthonic drone and pitch-shifted orchestral strings, strange mysterious gurgles and chittering hidden in the deep, inky shadows of their Lustmordian necro ambience. Peals of blackened riffage float through smoldering electronics, distant crashing/slamming metal, and demonic roars of "Genocide" (originally off of their split with Pig Heart Transplant), as extreme high pitched feedback tones and anguished screams lash against the pound and creep, like Wolf Eyes gone blacknoise. "Maggot" (from the It's Battery Acid, You Slime compilation) is a squirming, seething mass of synthesizer filth and clanking metal, guttural growls and gnashing jaws prowling through the dank junknoise dungeon, while the following untitled track is a shimmering nocturnal driftscape of stretched out chthonic drone and soft circular scraping, using source material provided by noise legends New Blockaders to craft a bleak minimal ambience a la Organum, laced with ominous minor key shadows and weighted with deep layers of subterranean rumblings and low-end, slow-motion metal abuse, becoming more malevolent and noisy and abrasive. The last track (from the excellent Lp that came out on Troniks) is the harshest of them all, an agonizing mass of high end frequencies and metallic screech, like strings pitched extraordinarily high and set against distant grinding percussive noises and dragged metal and low-end whir.
The disc's centerpiece is the massive seventeen-minute "Borre Fen / Untitled", which combines the track from the Borre Fen Lp on What We Do Is Secret with a collaboration with Anakrid that originally came out on the Mutually Assured Destruction Vol. 1 Lp. This is Blue Sabbath in full-on, pants-shitting terror mode. At first, it's another awesome slab of blighted dronemusic, oceanic waves of black drift and distant creaking noises slowly whirling through the void, slowly unfolding into a vast black stygian landscape. Pretty soon, though, the sound descends into total nightmare, as guttural inhuman shrieks and monstrous sighs begin to rise out of fields of formless rumble and a steadily growing cacophony of metallic creaks and scrapes, swells of processed vocalizations become stretched into demonic smears of pain and horror. A percussive clanking builds in strength, becoming a pounding locomotive grind, as more and more gasping death groans and screams appear, the sound becoming extremely chaotic, vicious bestial vocals processed into nightmarish slavering violence, then collapsing into minimal stretches of gong-like reverberations and mysterious metallic timbres at the end. It's an intense and terrifying soundtrack to the torments of Hell if I've ever heard one.
Crucial listening for fans of blackened industrial evil. If stuff like Stalaggh, MZ412, Nordvargr, Megaptera, Stratvm Terror, early Robedoor, Abruptum, Melek-Tha, Diagnose: Lebensgefahr, and Velehentor infects your speakers on a regular basis, you've got to get on top of this excellent collection. Presented in a Stumptown style gatefold jacket with black on black printing, and limited to 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Untitled
Sample : Genocide
Sample : Maggot

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Compared to the last couple of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer records that have come in through our door, this one sounds almost serene, at least for the first half where BSBC delve into some of the most atmospheric blackened dronescapes that I've heard from them. Still evil sounding stuff, though, and their cohorts in Griefer follow up with a side of relentless brutal power electronics that still sets the kill-level pretty high. Up first is the sidelong epic "We Hate You" from Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, beginning as a monstrous, earth-shaking ur-drone, a massive glacial slow-motion churn of underground rumbles and deep horn-like blasts that are stretched out into infinite roaring drones buried beneath layers of glitch and crackle. Throughout the first few minutes, huge earthquake-like rumblings continuously surface, the sound formed into a massive muted tectonic roar, like an incredibly deep, low-frequency slab of wall-noise. As it goes on, though, more sinister sounds emerge from the muck; bestial time-stretched screams and hellish moans that are extended into endless smears of vokill horror, and off in the distance, strange clanking noises and crashing sounds, a gradual rhythmic pounding that sounds like someone bashing out an irregular beat on an empty cargo container. Everything becomes buried under thick waves of static and blown-out bass throb, a hypnotic slab of blackened industrial noise, but with the second half, the slurred, demonic screams and guttural distorted vocals finally appear, howling above the grinding, rumbling black drift, becoming a sort of blackened, infernal power electronics, slowly rumbling and crawling towards the end as the sound break down into a mass of backwards riffage, black buzzing drones and arctic drift.
They share the record with Griefer from up north, who combine vicious power electronics with a sprawling apocalyptic ambience; fucking great stuff on their side. The side starts off with a massive distorted synth drone that evolves into a looped string-like high end scrape that gets pretty unnerving, then shifts into sheets of swarming fuzz and glitch that flow over super distorted and over modulated vocals. Early on, "Criminal Aggregators" sounds like this hellish alien power electronics assault, but then it becomes something more as simple hammered oil-drum rhythms materialize, joined with additional high electronic whine and buzzing, turning into a thick, oppressive soundscape. Then with "SMS Ransomware", the clanging metal percussion disappears and is replaced with an almost martial industrial rhythm and ascending sine wave drones that sound like air raid sirens, more super-distorted vocals again gnashing their way through the abstract electronic sounds. "Dancho Danchev" is another baleful power electronics assault, the vocals less distorted and more intelligible over the ominous rumbling drones and pounding metallic percussive rhythm, and the side ends with the awesome skulking evil PE of "SS8 Interceptor", layered drill-like tones screaming and whining within a vortex of pulsating black energy, with the distorted vocals locked in a fearsome cadence overhead. Reminds me of Streicher , Barzel, Fire In The Head, Slogun, that sort of crushing, malevolent power electronics, but with a horrific, futuristic ambience added that makes this as atmospheric as it is aggressive.
The record comes on nauseous-looking green and brown colored vinyl and is packaged in silk-screened jackets with two printed cardstock inserts, limited to 200 copies.

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More than a decade after they were originally released, the first two Boris albums are finally making an appearance on vinyl courtesy of Southern Lord, who has reissued Absolutego and Amplifier Worship on 180 gram vinyl in gorgeous heavyweight tip-on gatefold jackets that feature new package design from Stephen O'Malley.
Here's the crucial 1996 debut album from Japanese power drone / sludge / metal trio Boris, released domestically on doom metal powerhouse Souther Lord. This Super Low Frequency Version (an obvious reference to the Earth influence splattered all over this album) gives you new artwork and an additional bonus track, "Dronevil2", for a combined 2 tracks in 73 minutes, with "Absolutego" clocking in at close to 65 minutes (here split across multiple sides of the multi-album set by way of some creative editing). Freaking monolithic feedback-soaked slomo glacial drone-sludge. An essential part of the contemporary drone metal canon alongside Sunn O))) , Khanate, Growing, Isis, and Earth.

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More than a decade after they were originally released, the first two Boris albums are finally making an appearance on vinyl courtesy of Southern Lord, who has reissued Absolutego and Amplifier Worship on 180 gram vinyl in gorgeous heavyweight tip-on gatefold jackets that feature new package design from Stephen O'Malley.
A crucial exercise in extreme riff seismology. This 1998 full length from Japan's Boris was re-released by Southern Lord, and definitely brings the heavy, all Earth-worship as played by some jacked up Detroit rock outfit by way of Japanese drone/doom mind-benders. Super low-end riffage butts up against extended amplifier hum and feedback-drone, consciousness raising, eternal fuzz bliss and mega-slow sludge assault peppered with crushing Motor City rock freakouts. Five tracks, but man, are they long...The first song, "Huge", begins with a monstrous, repetitive doom riff before descending into an earth shaking free-drone jam. "Ganbou-Ki" continues the massive riff into a cosmic howling percussion workout and feedback orgy, sort of Boredoms -esque but heavy as hell. "Hama" rips into a ferocious, howling rock blast, then shifts gears into a KILLER circular drone-rock / feedback / psyche-guitar blowout, like Circle meets Comets On Fire or something. "Kuruimizu" brings in a pretty instrumental melody, like something you’d here from Godspeed You Black Emperor or Tristeza, after an onslaught of buzz and distortion...an eye of the hurricane, all gorgeous and glistening and sad, as "Vomitself" comes in and flattens your life with a stumbling,sub-sonic Godzilla-size riff and howling vocals. Absolutely recommended to fans of Corrupted, Earth, Khanate, Melvins, Earth, Sunn O)))...you get the picture. A masterpiece of innovative,psychedelic detuned virtuosity.

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The 2008 album from Brooklyn metal fusionists Candiria, Kiss The Lie finally appeared four years after their previous album What Doesn't Kill You... and followed a long period of tribulation for the band that included a catastrophic van wreck, major turmoil within the band's lineup, and their break with Century Media and subsequent issues with label Type-A. The album turned out to be their most accessible release of their career, with a soaring, pop-tinged art-metal sound that feels more like Tool or Faith No More at times than the crushing, jazz/hip-hop/death metal fusion of their earlier records. It feels like the band wanted to move beyond the pure aggression of their early work, but by becoming proggier and artier, Candiria's sound has lost a little of what made them so unique early on, with much of Kiss The Lie reminding me heavily of later Cave In and Faith No More. Most of the rough edges have been smoothed away, and the lush, soaring pop elements vastly overshadow the heavier aspects of Candiria's music, the death metal heaviness and jazz fusion now appearing infrequently; and frontman Carley Coma delivers less of his panic-stricken screaming and gruff, narcotized hip-hop delivery, instead largely going for a kind of Patton-esque croon throughout the album. The huge Meshuggah style off-time grooves are still present though, and when the band kicks in to heavy mode, they still crush. Don't get me wrong, it's actually a solid album, just a significant departure from the brilliant Zorn-ified jazz-death-core that made The Process of Self-Development and Beyond Reasonable Doubt some of the forward-thinking metal albums of the late 90's.
The album opens with "Icarus Syndrome (Alternatve, Extended Mix)", where the abrasive and the atmospheric come together in equal measure; the song blends the grim, staccato angular metal and Carly Coma's blunt flow found in earlier Candiria jams with the more atmospheric textures and spacey ambience that's continued to creep into their work over the years, locking into a furious tripped-out space funk groove at the end that reveals an all new side to Candiria's sound. The pummeling angular sludge that starts off "Sirens" gives way to more of these spacey atmospherics, the song becoming a sort of chunky prog-pop, followed by the dark, moody trip-hop of "Reflection Eleven" which delivers Coma's most soulful singing on the album, his velvet croon drifting above the slow shuffling rhythm and sheets of jazzy guitar, some metallic guitar chug eventually rising up from the smoky haze, at the end breaking into chamber strings and piano and shimmering guitar twang. Slightly harder is "The Sleeper / Thorns For The Dying (Alternative Mix) ", where chugging metallic rock and crunchy Kyuss-esque riffing merge with sky-climbing guitar atmospherics and soaring multi-layered vocals on the chorus, then shifts into a crushing math-metal groove, massive stuttering metal riffage over double-bass thunder and Coma's rapid-fire flow, breaking off yet again at the end into dreamy, fusiony space-pop. Female vocals start off "Legion", right before the monstrous doom-laden guitars and drums kick in, and the song drops into a crushing off-time doom dirge that finally brings some serious heaviness, then lurches into a totally CLASSIC whacked out math-metal groove with those freaked out hip hop vocals. The song also works in some more multi-layered clean vocals and spacey guitars, breaking off into strange ambient interludes, then back into the mutant Meshuugah-meets-alien-hip-hop math metal. "Alicia (Alternative Mix)" is pure ambience, an evocative blues/jazz fusion guitar solo blending with electric drones, chimes, and floating amplifier rumble, bits of backwards sound and hissing cymbals sweeping over the twilight glow. "A Rose Dies In Eden" at first take shape as some more Faith No More-esque art metal, but then evolves into a churning tribal math metal freakout, swirling with spacey fx and warped hip hop vocals. "Ascend (Alternative Mix)" starts off all skittery electronica laced with airy acoustic guitar and flitting fx and Rhodes keys, then erupts into a soaring melodic crush, followed by the grooving, crushing mathmetal prog of "It Starts With A Splinter, It End With A Knife (Alternative Mix)". The epic screamo of "Genuine" then leads into the last song, "Omaha Nights", another blissed-out twilight space-fusion instrumental, with jazzy drumming and Gilmour-esque blues leads streaking through the night sky, the band getting into deep improv territory.
This is a proggier, more complex Candiria, and Kiss The Lie does require repeated listens to absorb it all. It's on a similar trajectory as what Cynic and Dillenger Escape Plan has been doing lately, branching off from their avant-garde heaviness into more of an experimental pop/prog sound. Fans should dig it though, and it's definitely one of Candiria's better albums.
Limited to 500 copies. Comes in a full color gatefold package with artwork by Seldon Hunt.

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With the emergence of their own label Rising Pulse, the members of Candiria have started up a series of compilations titled Toying With The Insanities that gives them the opportunity to present fans with material from the Candiria orbit, such as remixes and solo material. The second installment in this series has a selection of well-known underground artists doing remix work on some older Candiria songs, along with instrumental solo tracks that delve deeper into the member's love of jazz fusion and ambient music.
Volume II opens with Ben Weinman of Dillenger Escape Plan doing a remix of "Paradigm Shift" (from Beyond Reasonable Doubt) , which chops up and bitcrushes the original into a splattery, mangled blast of metallic hip-hop stutter, glitches and electronic detritus furiously swirling around the jagged guitars and lightning-quick vocal sputter. The remix of "Faction (Deadverse Remix)" from Alap Momin of Dalek brings out the massive boom-bap to the forefront of the track and turns it into a noise-drenched slab of trip-hop heaviness with massive layers of MBV-level pink distortion and occasional forays into syrupy drum n bass, and is one of my favorite selections on this Lp. That's followed by "The Radio Was Dead", a solo peice from Candiria drummer Kenneth Schalk that spins off into some mysterious, murky exotica, all tribal beats and psychedelic drift. The side is then closed out by "Outerlude" from Schalk and Candiria guitarist John LaMacchia, performing another moody, spacey instrumental blues/jazz/prog fusion piece that's in the same vein as the evocative instrumentals on Candiria's last album Kiss The Lie.
The b-side begins with a dubbed-out hip-hop/techno-funk redux of "Mental Politics" from L.I.M.A., followed by a remix of "Year One" from LaMacchia that turns the original into a sweeping orchestral electronica, flecked with minimal dub beats, swells of strings, hand drums, dreamy processed trombone, and deep low-frequency throb. The last track is a new track titled "James Brown" from the improv jazz dub fusion group Ghosts Of The Canal, which features several of the Candiria guys getting very deep and very out with some sprawling, Rhodes-laced propulsive jazz and massive dub-style bass.
The sounds documented in this series will probably appeal more to fans of Candiria's more experimental side, as there's less of their math-metal heaviness going on here. Interesting stuff though, especially if you like the Ghosts Of The Canal and Spylacopa stuff that these guys have released.
Comes in a full color jacket, limited to 300 copies.

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This new band from Sanford Parker (studio guy extraordinaire and member of Chi-town psych-sludge metallers Minsk) and Bruce Lamont (Yakuza) just issued their first release through Relapse, a limited edition 12" featuring two original songs, a remix from Justin Broadrick, and a Swans cover, and it's not at all what I was expecting. Circle Of Animals is a throwback to the heavy industrial rock sound of the late 80's, something that I've been a big fan of going all the way back to the glory days of Wax Trax, Atavistic, and Invisible. Invisible War almost sounds like something that could have come out on Invisible back in the early 90's, the title track opening this as a pounding, hammering industrial rock dirge, laced with piano stabs, droning synths, metallic scrape, and harsh distorted yelling, sounding a LOT like a cross between early Swans and Land Of Rape And Honey era Ministry, definitely a big Chicago industrial rock vibe going on here, and man, does that sound great to my ears. The other original, "Lessen Human Suffering" features drummer Dave Witte and serves up a faster paced industrial metal jam, Witte serving up some pounding double bass fury, the swirling dark guitars and grim metallic riffs grinding beneath the sinister Nick Cave-esque vocals, the band lurching through chaotic industrial off-time thrash in the background, blasting off into spaced out territory and sounding like a very strange mix of Kylesa-style psych metal and crunching Wax Trax industrial. The b-side features a remix of "Invisible War" from Jesu/Godflesh mastermind Justin Broadrick, who reshapes it into a speaker-rattling quasi-dubstep industrial dirge anchored to a massive bass riff, and blasted with abrasive electronic noise and tribal rhythms, huge blurts of synth squelch and scattered breakbeats and spacey fx. The side closes with a cover of the Swans song "Fool" that actually hews pretty close to the original, albeit with more metallic crunch going on. A very interesting first offering from this new band...
Released in an edition of 550 copies and packaged in a black DJ style jacket.

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The first release from the new experimental noise/rock label Mind Flare Media sure is a weird one. Comparative Anatomy are a duo of two bassists armed with samplers and drum machines who create an absurd mix of drum machine grind, bizarro industrial metal, and Boredoms/Bungle/Ween style weirdness. On Mammalia, the band uses nothing but sampled animal noises as the "vocals" with each song featuring a different animal in the role as "singer", so you get ten tracks of spastic, heavy cut-up noise rock fronted by squealing dolphins, barking dogs, hippos, cats, camels, seals, and other wildlife; yeah, this is as ridiculous as it sounds, but fans of fucked-up experimental weirdo rock and brain-damaged grindcore should dig this, it's schizophrenic logic twisting around martial drums and simple pummeling bass riffs, spastic grind laced with cheap Casio keyboard melodies and looped animal noises, all kinds of electronic noises and effects running throughout the tracks, one minute the band sounds like some kind of mutant Casio death metal outfit, the next it turns into sampled Middle Eastern female singing, Primus-esque bass funk riffs and industrial drum machine pummel, or becomes alien Tropicalia infused with random beeping, looped big band samples, and mangled doom metal. Definitely a bit of Naked City/Mr Bungle genre-hopping influence to this stuff, but Comparative Anatomy continually return to some form of cartoon metal crush, songs like "Peter Rabbit the Great's Carrot Phalanx", "Swarm of Camels", "Puppy Hatred", "Eruption of Cats" sounding sort of like Carl Stalling scoring a drum-machine grind band with cartoon critters behind the microphone...
Track Samples:
Sample : Elephantality
Sample : Monolith Of Acorns

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I just found out about this chunky magazine after the minds behind it contacted C-Blast out of the blue. Already on it's fifth issue, this exceptionally designed and edited pro-printed mag is well put together and looks terrific, a perfect bound magazine printed in black and white with a layout that's somewhat similar to Unrestrained (R.I.P.), packed with 128 pages of text, photos and artwork.
Convival Hermit focuses on all of the dark, obscure music that I'm generally obsessed with. You could call Convivial Hermit a black metal zine, but once you start leafing through it's many pages, it's clear that editor Yuri has much wider musical tastes beyond the BM spectrum. Issue five covers all kinds of stuff that I dig: dark industrial, black metal, doom, visual art, occult folk, and even has some intelligent, well-written articles on film, including lengthy interviews with Finnish funeral doom masters Skepticism and Czech avant-garde black metal legends Master's Hammer, an article on British occult folk legends Comus, and a huge label feature on Russian doom metal label Solitude Productions. There are interviews with dark ambient master Raison D'etre, Chinese neo-folk artist Baishui, West Virginian naturalist black metallers Nechochwen, Korean (!) black metallers Sad Legend, Russian black metallers Walknut, Norway's Wallachia, Sweden's Algaion, German neo-folk outfit Rome, experimental psych/folk guitarist Steven R. Smith (aka Ulaan Khol), Lovecraft-obsessed funeral doomsters Fungoid Stream, Brazilian doom metallers Helllight, French death metal squad Affliction Gate, Spanish black metallers Beelzeb, and more black metal coverage on bands like Drengskapur, Adversam, and Aorlhac. In addition, there's that article on Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, an essay on the art of the underground extreme music comp[ilation (with a look back at classic comps like Land Of The Rising Noise: Music From Japan and Death Is Just The Beginning), an interview with legendary French illustrator Chris Moyen and Chinese black metal/neo-folk label Pest Productions/Midnight Records, a long piece on a Behemoth/Septic Flesh show in Philadelphia, and a thoughtful essay on record stores and their role in the underground/extreme music and art culture. On top of that, there's over 200 extremely in-depth dvd, magazine, book and record reviews. Definitely one of the better underground/extreme music rags out there and highly recommended.
A limited number of issue five also comes with a compilation CD from the Chinese black metal label Pest Productions, featuring a variety of bands on the label including Bauda, Heretoir, Dopamine, Midwinter, Zuriaake, Dark Fount, Dysthymia, Hinsidig, Vergissmeinnicht, In The Abyss, and Skeletal Augury...

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This disc combines the complete recordings of the Italian band Thanatologist, an early 90's goregrind band who played a style of blasting death spew comparable to Carcass, and the band that rose out of the ashes of Thanatologist around 2004, Entropic Degrade Behind Phylogeny, who took their goregrind influences into noisier, industrial territory. Not too surprising when you realize that one of the members of Thanatologist/Entropic Degrade is also in the harsh noise/industrial duo Splinter Vs Stalin...
The Thanatologist tracks appear on the second half of the disc, four tracks that had originally been recorded for a 7" release in the mid-90's but which ended up shelved after the label that was supposed to release it ended up disappearing. These are the only recorded tracks from the band aside from a demo, all pure Carcass worship, heavily influenced by Reek Of Putrefaction but rising above the hordes of Carcass-clones with some genuinely killer riffs and songs, the guitars vomiting squealing noisy leads all over the guttural screams and blasting drums; "Embryopathical Alteration (Clinical and Sarcastic)", the last song on here, is my favorite of the bunch...a rocking, super catchy blast of groovy goregrind mayhem that blends that Reek-era Carcass worship with their weird guitar noises.
But it's the weirdly named Entropic Degrade Behind Phylogeny that's the real freak show here. Several of the members of Thanatologist formed this group after the demise of their previous band, and although Entropic Degrade... also comes from a goregrind influenced sound, the mutant grind that they created is much weirder than anything they had done before. An industrialized goregrind, maybe, especially the very first track "Maternal", which sounds like the rhythmic blast of a pneumatic press behind cacophonic chunks of gore-soaked blastnoise, crushing clipped guitars and distant detonations and weird electronic noises mixed with over modulated bass lines and evil vocoder spoken word vocals, totally bizarre and EVIL, like Carcass crossed with Neubauten. That track is fucking amazing. The next thirteen tracks are more straightforward chaotic death/grind, but it's still pretty twisted, the chaotic, blasting grindfrenzy filled with blown-out bass, howling, screeching vokills, messy blasting drums, ringing snare blasts and weird effects and noises, the riffs all angular and convoluted, the death vomit vokills heavily processed with electronic effects. Reminds me a bit of Gore Beyond Necropsy, and anyone into weirdo goregrind like GBN and the Czech death/grind scene should check these guys out.
The disc comes in a beautiful full color digipack featuring the bizarre, surreal doodle artwork of singer Lorenzo Ariono, and includes a booklet with complete lyrics.
Track Samples:
Sample : ENTROPIC DEGRADE BEHIND PHYLOGENY - They Have Names
Sample : ENTROPIC DEGRADE BEHIND PHYLOGENY - Earth Weight Is Me
Sample : ENTROPIC DEGRADE BEHIND PHYLOGENY - Maternal
Sample : THANATOLOGIST - Virulant Gestation
Sample : THANATOLOGIST - Embryopathic Alteration
Sample : THANATOLOGIST - Docimacy

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A vicious new slab of power electronics from Italy's Fecalove, aka Nicola Vinciguerra. My first exposure to Fecalove's murderous power electronics was through the super limited releases fromm the band that Vinciguerra has issued on his Italian division of Turgid Animal which he operates; everything that I've heard so far from this project has been supremely savage, purely visceral PE that's at the evil end of the spectrum, influenced by the likes of Whitehouse and Sutcliffe Jugend, but with nasty black metal style vocals that give these electro-terror shock attacks a real demonic vibe.
The a-side track "Deadweight" is exactly this sort of devilish power electronics. An omnipresent harsh electrical buzz runs through it, a thick static drone that underscores the ugly nihilistic lyrics and fucking evil vocals that start in almost immediately; where a lot of PE can be static and lacking in dynamics, this is not...it's a number of different parts arranged into something resembling an actual song, moving between a couple of different sections and making for a dramatic, terrifying dose of heavy electronic hate. On the flipside, "When" appears as a stirring call to a return to total bestial savagery, a seething power electronic dirge of flesh-tearing high-end feedback, massive low-end synth throb and those evil distorted vokills, blasting your skull with electronic violence until it ends in a violent salvo of crashing scrap metal.
Comes on pink vinyl in a hand-numbered limited edition of 200 copies, and packaged in a full-color sleeve.

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One of the extreme metal/industrial underground's most unique bands, Gnaw Their Tongues arises again with a new album of majestic, orchestral death-terror called L'arrivée de la Terne Mort Triomphante, a series of five hymns to the death shroud, a celebration of dissolution. This Dutch one-man avant black/doom/industrial band is responsible for two of the most chilling albums of abstract heaviness to have been released in recent years (An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood and All The Grand Magnificence Of Perversity, both from Crucial Blast), but with this new full-length, Gnaw Their Tongues peels back additional layers of it's bombastic horror to reveal moments of euphonic beauty more than we've heard on the previous albums.
This is still harrowing stuff, though. The album opens with soaring choirs of the damned and a cacophony of tortured shrieks and demonic howling underneath a crushing, sludgy bass riff and pounding elephantine drumming, total blackened doom that's soon joined by peals of dissonant strings and softer droning cellos and violins. As you get deeper into " L'arrivée de la terne mort triomphante", there are moments of severe beauty that emerge, brief passages of fragile piano and mournful strings, the soft crackle of ancient vinyl grooves and French horns. These moments repeat throughout the album, lots of symphonic shadow that drifts amidst the pounding industrial blackness, but they never last for long as the spiraling woodwinds and cyclical piano figures inevitably become subsumed into the blasts of malevolent orchestral might. The fearsome martial drums and brass fanfares at the beginning of "Les anges frémissent devant la mort" eventually evolve into stretches of abstract industrial percussive pummel over droning strings and organ, and then into a stunning cinematic finale. That's followed by the clanking doom, swarming black buzz and sheet-metal cacophony of "La mort dans toute son ineffable grandeur/splendeur", the most industrial-sounding track on the album. "Le Chant De La Mort" is a lurching, blown-out death march that shifts into an infernal dubbed-out dirge, and the closing track " Le trône blanc de la mort (de white throne of death)" rumbles through funereal classical drift, waves of horns, strings, percussion surging into a series of dark, mournful shapes at first, but are then shattered by pounding doom metal drums and wailing choir voices, becoming an utterly grim blackened dirge with distorted shrieking vocals that are wracked with agony, ending the album with a suffocating atmosphere of death. At its heaviest, it's like funeral doom bathed in modern orchestral music, a cross between Penderecki and pitch-black doom filth, pulverizing and intensely evil.
Of course, this is essential for fans of previous Gnaw Their Tongues albums, but it's equally recommended to fans of both abstract blackened weirdness of bands like Emit, Abruptum, and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and the bleak Wagnerian industrial of In Slaughter Natives and Shinjuku Thief. Like the previous two Gnaw Their Tongues releases on Crucial Blast, this comes in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket (which is exclusive to the North American release of this disc). Released for North America and all other non-European/UK territories by Crucial Blast.
Track Samples:
Sample : L'arrivée de la terne mort triomphante
Sample : Les anges frémissent devant la mort
Sample : La mort dans toute son ineffable grandeur
Sample : Le Chant De La Mort
Sample : Le trône blanc de la mort

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Goatsnake are another one of those bands that in my mind should have been hugely popular. The L.A. doom rockers released two consecutive albums that in my opinion rank as some of the best doom records of the past twenty years, their debut I and the monumental second album Flower Of Disease. Combining a classic doom sound with singer Pete Stahl's soaring, soulful vocals (which sound vaguely like those of Cult front man Ian Astbury) and an uncanny songwriting prowess (seriously, these guys wrote songs that were so catchy that they could have easily have landed on the radio if weren't for the fact that they're so goddamn crushing), Goatsnake seemed like they could have totally taken over, but instead, the band broke up briefly, just as their label Man's Ruin was in it's death-throes, and both albums quickly slipped out of print for some time. Now that the band has reunited with it's original lineup and become an active concern once again, we're finally seeing the back catalog being reissued through Southern Lord on both cd and vinyl, one of the latest being a deluxe 180 gram vinyl re-ish of the compilation I + Dog Days, which combines Goatsnake's surly debut album with the Dog Days Ep on a double platter set with two unreleased tracks and full liner notes from the band.
When Man's Ruin originally released I, it was as solid a debut as you could ask for. The band featured seasoned vets of the doom and hardcore scene (Guy Pinhas and Greg Rogers of The Obsessed, Pete Stahl from Wool and Scream, and Greg Anderson from Engine Kid, Sunn O))), Thorr's Hammer and Brotherhood), and they crafted a brand of driving, catchy doom that could shift in an instant between extreme downer sludge and rocking, anthemic power. Their sound was equal parts Saint Vitus and The Cult, Melvins and Alice In Chains and Black Sabbath, and yet it sounded incredibly fresh to me when this came out, due to how catchy their songwriting was. Greg Anderson's distinctive wailing, biting blues solos were a signature element, as was Pete Stahl's soulful croon, and the skull-cracking rhythm section gave Goatsnake a fearsome undertow. The album starts strong with opener "Slippin' The Stealth", a driving rocker that leads into the oily, harmonica-slathered Sab-groove of "Innocent". Those first two songs are seriously catchy, but then "What Love Remains" comes in and shifts the album into pure doom, a stomping saurian trudge, a dismal morose plod through abject lovesickness, winding up bit by bit until the band finally explodes into a faster rocking groove, one of their most devastating riffs ever. Next is the sledgehammer blooze-doom march of "IV", and the punishing Vitus-style crusher "Mower", it's lopsided doom metal shifting into pure biker rock, and the bizarre Melvins-esque "Dog Catcher", which in fact features some fucked up post-production tweaking by Buzz from the Melvins. The coolly sinister "Lord Of Los Feliz" is next, and then the delirious fist-pumping "Trower" that ends the album, which segues from a massive doom rock groove into lush strings from guest musician Petra Haden (That Dog) and layered ululating male/female vocals, a stunning chamber music interlude that eventually fades back into stomping doom.
The Dog Days Ep that is included here came out about a year later, just prior to their follow-up album Flower Of Disease. A collection of covers and originals, Dog Days feels more doomed and darker and slower than the first album, opening with the somber, crawling dread of "The Orphan", breaking into the short upbeat rocker "Long Gone", and then sinking into a gluey haze with their supremely soulful and syrupy rendition of Free's "Heartbreaker", with some rich Hammond organ coating the chorus. Then comes the devastating centerpiece of the Ep, the nearly eight minute monstrous crush of "Raw Curtains", originally from their split with Burning Witch on Hydra Head, and probably the heaviest goddamn song this band ever recorded, a chugging behemoth of evil down tuned doom with Stahl cooing wordlessly high overhead. Then it's on to "Man Of Light", another catchy soulful rocker that originally appeared on a 7" on Warpburner back in 1998, followed by an elephantine, spaced out cover of Sabbath's "Who Are You" which again features Petra Haden contributing some sorrowful cello/violin alongside some seriously gooey Hawkwind style cosmic effects and rumbling drones. The side closes with the bonus track "Knuckleduster", the b-side to the Warpburner 7", appearing here for the first time since that 7" went out of print in the late 90's. The double Lp version of I + Dog Days is another gorgeous heavyweight gatefold package from Southern Lord, printed in black and metallic gold with simple, Satanic artwork that fits this doom metal monolith perfectly. Highly recommended.

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Goatsnake are another one of those bands that in my mind should have been hugely popular. The L.A. doom rockers released two consecutive albums that in my opinion rank as some of the best doom records of the past twenty years, their debut I and the monumental second album Flower Of Disease. Combining a classic doom sound with singer Pete Stahl's soaring, soulful vocals (which sound vaguely like those of Cult front man Ian Astbury) and an uncanny songwriting prowess (seriously, these guys wrote songs that were so catchy that they could have easily have landed on the radio if weren't for the fact that they're so goddamn crushing), Goatsnake seemed like they could have totally taken over, but instead, the band broke up briefly, just as their label Man's Ruin was in it's death-throes, and both albums quickly slipped out of print for some time. Now that the band has reunited with it's original lineup and become an active concern once again, we're finally seeing the back catalog being reissued through Southern Lord on both cd and vinyl, the latest being a vinyl and cd re-ish of their second album Flower Of Disease from 2000.
With the Dog Days Ep that came out shortly before the release of their second album, Goatsnake seemed to be getting darker and slower, and this album is definitely the band at their darkest, a perfect mix of Saint Vitus and Kyuss, The Cult meets sinister biker doom, with heavier songs, slower tempos, and overall a much more "doomed" vibe than ever before. From the crushing, laid-back doom of opener "Flower of Disease" to the chugging soul-sludge of "Prayer for a Dying", the band still delivered the monster grooves, the guitars tuned low, the drumming and pace ponderous, the production crystal clear and powerful. Stahl's vocals still shine, giving the band their trademark rock feel with his unique, soulful delivery, and the songwriting is top notch, with songs like "Easy Greasy" kicking in all drunk and summer-wasted before it tumbles over the abyss into crushing doom, and "A Truckload of Mamma's Muffins" delivering one of Goatsnake's finest slabs of salty, swaggering, saurian blooze-rawk. All of the songs crush, though, from the rocking "El Coyote" and "Live to Die" to the grim crawling doom of "The Dealer" and the impassioned eight minute closer "The River", and they often bring out some sounds and instrumentation that you might not expect from a doom metal album like this, like the almost R&B style backing vocal harmonies, and the harmonica, lap steel, jaw harp, piano and chamber strings that all appear throughout Flower Of Disease. A now-classic slab of California doom, essential for anyone into the slow and low. Long out of print after the original label Man's Ruin shut down almost immediately after it's release, Flower Of Disease is at long last once again in print on both cd and vinyl from Southern Lord.
Track Samples:
Sample : Flower of Disease
Sample : Live to Die
Sample : Prayer for a Dying

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Goatsnake are another one of those bands that in my mind should have been hugely popular. The L.A. doom rockers released two consecutive albums that in my opinion rank as some of the best doom records of the past twenty years, their debut I and the monumental second album Flower Of Disease. Combining a classic doom sound with singer Pete Stahl's soaring, soulful vocals (which sound vaguely like those of Cult front man Ian Astbury) and an uncanny songwriting prowess (seriously, these guys wrote songs that were so catchy that they could have easily have landed on the radio if weren't for the fact that they're so goddamn crushing), Goatsnake seemed like they could have totally taken over, but instead, the band broke up briefly, just as their label Man's Ruin was in it's death-throes, and both albums quickly slipped out of print for some time. Now that the band has reunited with it's original lineup and become an active concern once again, we're finally seeing the back catalog being reissued through Southern Lord on both cd and vinyl, the latest being a vinyl and cd re-ish of their second album Flower Of Disease from 2000.
With the Dog Days Ep that came out shortly before the release of their second album, Goatsnake seemed to be getting darker and slower, and this album is definitely the band at their darkest, a perfect mix of Saint Vitus and Kyuss, The Cult meets sinister biker doom, with heavier songs, slower tempos, and overall a much more "doomed" vibe than ever before. From the crushing, laid-back doom of opener "Flower of Disease" to the chugging soul-sludge of "Prayer for a Dying", the band still delivered the monster grooves, the guitars tuned low, the drumming and pace ponderous, the production crystal clear and powerful. Stahl's vocals still shine, giving the band their trademark rock feel with his unique, soulful delivery, and the songwriting is top notch, with songs like "Easy Greasy" kicking in all drunk and summer-wasted before it tumbles over the abyss into crushing doom, and "A Truckload of Mamma's Muffins" delivering one of Goatsnake's finest slabs of salty, swaggering, saurian blooze-rawk. All of the songs crush, though, from the rocking "El Coyote" and "Live to Die" to the grim crawling doom of "The Dealer" and the impassioned eight minute closer "The River", and they often bring out some sounds and instrumentation that you might not expect from a doom metal album like this, like the almost R&B style backing vocal harmonies, and the harmonica, lap steel, jaw harp, piano and chamber strings that all appear throughout Flower Of Disease. A now-classic slab of California doom, essential for anyone into the slow and low. Long out of print after the original label Man's Ruin shut down almost immediately after it's release, Flower Of Disease is at long last once again in print on both cd and vinyl from Southern Lord.
Track Samples:
Sample : Flower of Disease
Sample : Live to Die
Sample : Prayer for a Dying

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Finally back in print! This is the fourth and last album that Gorguts put out before the band went on an indefinite hiatus in 2001 that just let up this past year when the French Canadian metallers reconvened with a new lineup that included members of Dysrhythmia and Behold The Arctopus, and was the follow-up to their career-defining masterpiece Obscura, still one of the most challenging, avant-garde death metal albums of all time. Everyone wondered how Gorguts could follow up the bizarre, ultra-dissonant alien death metal of that album, and in response the band came back with something that was part Obscura, and part old school Gorguts, dialing down some of the over-the-top skronk and atonal riff weirdness while reinstating some of the sound of their technical early 90's albums The Erosion of Sanity and Considered Dead; the result is not as challenging and far-out as the previous album, but it's still a fantastic combination of their avant-garde skronkiness and crushing death metal riffage. The album is full of convoluted time signatures, those trademark discordant guitar sounds, the scrapes and squeals and bizarre chords, and the songs are assembled in strange, complex arrangements that are generally far outside of typical death metal, with angular interlaced riffs often shifting and repeating over and over, like on the mind-warping skronky death metal blastage of opener "Inverted", and the jarring, doom-laden insanity of "Behave Through Mythos". Compared to Obscura, however, the vocals are less extreme, with singer Luc Lemay delivering a deeper, more guttural vocal style than the psychotic wheezing screams that he emitted on the previous record. Also of note is the lengthy "The Quest For Equilibrium", which combines eerie keyboards and gongs for a neo-classical ambience that leads into one of the album's more doom-laden moments. Overall, though, this is a more straightforward and focused album than its predecessor, and an essential disc for Gorguts fans (and anyone into extreme tech/prog death). This new limited edition reissue from Deepsend presents the disc in digipack packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : Elusive Treasures
Sample : Inverted

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One of the most surreal and disturbed offerings from Disaro (besides "witch house" figureheads Mater Susperia Vision) is Grill Grill's self titled disc, a n utterly nightmarish delirium of warped hip-hop samples, industrial murk, and bizarre instrumental music. This doesn't sound like anyone else on the label (or anywhere else), and is poof positive of just how broad of a genre tag this whole "witch house" thing really is. One thing that Grill Grill does have in common with other bands in this weird low-fi scene is how they've cloaked themselves in mystery, with little to no information to be found on them online. Like some of the bands on Disaro, these guys also draw from the syrupy, druggy beats of Houston's chopped n' screwed hip hop scene as well as the most fucked-up dub sounds, but they layer some really weird shit over those dank, dark cavernous rhythms. For instance, the disc opens with some pilfered, screwed sound bites of Houston rapper Mike Jones that have been heavily mangled, and then these weird Native American flutes start to drift in over somnambulant drum machines, which is suddenly interrupted by random high powered gunfire. Then it moves through pitch shifted chipmunk spoken-word bits and saccharine Casio gospel instrumentals, some creeped-out Throbbing Gristle-style industrial crawl and gobs of hallucinatory electronic effects, samples of fundamentalist Christians spouting off end time prophecies over old school break beats and jubilant low-fi synth music. Out of nowhere, there's this amazingly bent cover of "Something In The Way" that's all screwed and chopped and slowed to a doomed crawl, like some kind of hellish cough syrup remix of the original, followed by more absolutely fucked sounding apocalyptic slow-motion hip hop weirdness that sounds like DJ Screw spinning some dark ambient LPs. There are stretches of doleful, gorgeous instrumental piano music and weird collages of cinematic choral music and freaked out vocals and tribal music, fractured acoustic melodies and drug-addled munchkin sing-alongs, slowed n' throwed Tom Waits-esque melodies, swirling didgeridoo drones and blissed-out, seriously glazed vocal euphoria, the whole stoned mess ending with screams of hysterical horror over the sound of children's choirs and pounding industrial rhythms. One of the most warped of all of the "witch house" bands that I've been listening to...
Like the other Disaro cdrs, this disc comes in a simple slimline jewel case with a full color cover, and hand-numbered in a run of 100 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Something In The Way featuring DirtyPrid3
Sample : Utta

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The debut full length from The Guilt Of..., the new industrial duo of Mike Williams (Eyehategod/Outlaw Order/Arson Anthem) and Ryan McKern (Wolvhammer). If you've followed Eyehategod for a while, you mightn have noticed that Williams has often cited the aesthetics of early industrial on the visuals and artwork of Eyehategod, in particular the grisly images put forth by SPK, and the bleak, nihilistic music of SPK (as well as Throbbing Gristle) is obviously a primary influence on the warped, deformed electronics that Williams and McKern create as The Guilt Of. The sound is at times comparable to early industrial works like Information Overload Unit, but Williams's hysterical, ragged screams and the occasional distorted guitars give this a weird sludgy metal feel that creeps in from time to time. The combination of primitive industrial, fractured sludge metal guitar slop, and noise/sample collage that appears on these six tracks makes for some strange, drugged soundscaping, with all of the dark, nihilistic imagery and atmosphere that permeates all of Williams's work. Simple plodding drum machines spit out repetitive beats that throb underneath the filthy droning buzz of synthesizers and traces of fractured melodies spinning within the murk; the background is alive with creaking metallic noise and gurgling Moog-like bass. The industrial dirges are creepy and minor key, grim death-marches over minimal electro thump, shafts of synth strings and searing, distorted synth sludge blasting upwards, and blown out guitar noise writhing and convulsing around Williams's gnarled, nightmarish lyrics, which he vomits and howls out, making this at times veer into a kind of sludgy power electronics assault. The first few tracks are all bent, plodding industrial atavism, but later the disc moves into delirious collages of spoken word over dark industrial noisescapes, and sampled Japanese flute melodies, tape noise, and mangled synths on "Allergic To The Infamous Healer". The track "Void Of Regressions" is a bizarre cacophony of Skullflowery guitar noise, drugged chanting, primitive electro rhythms, chugging metal guitar, swirling electronics and blackened vokills, one of the heavier and more hellish tracks here, and "Mechanics Of The Unheard Catalyst" delivers another weird hybrid of formless metal and old school industrial with it's meandering metallic guitar wandering over piles of looped rhythmic samples and thick synth squelch, buzzing drones and fucked-up, processed power electronics and damaged machinery; later, a fractured drum loop comes in, almost like an old school breakbeat, while a guitar shreds in the distance, as the song devolves into a clanking industrial groove. The frustrated, hopeless vibe ends with the droning electronic noise, feedback, and murky synths of the final song "Words Of The Given Past", with more monstrous, blackened growling vokills, chiming melodies, ominous whispers, looped sampled voices and bits of Willaims's spoken word. This sort of hallucinatory, mangled industrial has some of the mutant industrial vibe as some of Maniac's recent recordings with Sehnsucht and Andrew Lilles, but it's nastier stuff, with a feverish sickness seething beneath their sputtering machines and slithering sample-ridden electronic creep. Limited to 200 copies, in jewel case packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : A Federal Bail To Poverty
Sample : Allergic To The Infamous Healer
Sample : Void Of Regression

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Bay Area thrashers Heathen, like most of the progressive thrash metal bands from the late 80's/early 90's that I'm a fan of, ended up in the history books as a third tier outfit after their demise and were somewhat forgotten outside of the underground thrash cult. The band has since reformed and put out a new album on Candlelight in recent years, but their high point is still their second album from 1991, Victims Of Deception, which originally came out on Roadrunner Records. This album is a prog-thrash masterpiece, a politically-charged, vehemently anti-religious screed that described a dystopian present through long, eight minute songs loaded with soaring, tough melodic vocals, complex harmonies and sweeping arpeggios, ripping thrash riffs, stop-on-a-dime time changes, galloping riffs and whiplash-inducing mid-tempo chug, and it's all put together into these sprawling, complicated arrangements that obviously take their influence from progressive rock. The riffs can be comparable to 80's Metallica, and you can hear the influence of And Justice For All on Heathen's songwriting in the epic arrangements and classically influenced guitar solos that frequently appear throughout Victims Of Deception. At the same time, the band isn't afraid to show off their love of classic early heavy metal; you can hear it in the catchy hooks and riffs, and especially when Heathen breaks out a cover of "Kill The King" from 70's heavy metallers Rainbow that shows up halfway through the disc. That early heavy metal and NWOBMH influence shows up in all of their songs, the proggy thrash assault tempered with killer melodic riffs and catchy, anthemic choruses, and that's a large part of why Victims is a standout in the pantheon of second-wave prog-thrash albums, a top-notch fusion of catchy riffage and dizzying complexity, especially on songs like "Opiate Of The Masses" and "Timeless Cell Of Prophecy". The prog quotient remains high though, with lots of odd time signatures and sudden time changes, ultra-technical guitar work, and the album features an instrumental called "Guitarmony" that delivers a synth-guitar shred workout that tech-thrash fans will love.
Out of print from Roadrunner for years, this 2006 Metal Mind reissue includes a bonus track in the form of a rollicking cover of "Hellbound" by NWOBHM legends Tygers Of Pan Tang, which had previously only been available on the rare Japanese release of Victims Of Deception , as well as new liner notes. Released in a limited edition of 2000 copies. Highly recommended to anyone into classic progressive thrash a la Coroner, Toxik, Realm, And Justice For All era Metallica, Watchtower and Blind Illusion.
Track Samples:
Sample : Guitarmony
Sample : Hellbound [*]
Sample : Opiate of the Masses

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A pairing of two crushing noise/pysch sludge bands from the UK underground, Hey Colossus (longtime faves of mine) and Dethscalator, a newer band that I'm hearing for the first time here, on the new imprint Black Labs, a sub-label of Riot Season.
Hey Colossus are up first, rocking out on three new songs of deep, dark, instrumental metallic space/hypno rock, some of their most Hawkwind influenced material that I've heard. The first song "Eyes For An Eye" starts off spacey and pychedelic, a miasma of backwards electronics, slurred voices, Hawkwindy effects, lots of cosmic whir and throb, and the a droning bassline enters amidst streaks of delayed guitar feedback, after a couple minutes erupting into a massive spaced out doom jam, all soaked in fx and delay, huge pummeling drums sunken in the background, the vocals drowning in fx, sounding vaguely like Electric Wizard on their most Hawkwind-fueled space drug trips, electronic noises swarming alongside clouds of feedback, the music stopping and starting, shifting between the massive dirge-like heaviness and brief stretches of pure psyched-out trippiness, gradually building into a crushing single chord drone jam that finally collapses under its own weight. The following track "Unlive Wire" is a more brooding, hypnotic trance-rocker, with propulsive motorik drums and soaring echoplex driving this spaced-out krautrock jam into eternity, while the final song "Ain't No Love In The Mallet" closes the side with a massive blown out psych noise jam, a monstrous drone metal workout of waves of black flanger fx, droning downtuned ur-riffage, like a doom metal jam being played underneath an ocean of malfunctioning computer systems and intercepted cosmic transmissions and squealing saxophone-like howls.
On the other side, Dethscalator throw out some crushing, trancey stoner metal/noise rock hybrid, a weird mix of Am Rep skuzz and ponderous doom riffs, Jesus Lizard crossed with black drug-sludge. The first song "Festival Of Sticks" sums their warped style up with it's hammering sludge-metal and bludgeoning circular damaged-blooze riffs, the singer snarling and distorted, drooling out his best David Yow impression with his disturbing combination of manic taunts and yelps, and I'm pretty sure that I'm hearing some flute in their there somewhere. There's definitely a Pissed Jeans/Black Elk/Jesus Lizard vibe going on here, the songs "Canadians", "You Know Nothing About Cars Or Martial Arts" and "Kicking The Horns Off A Bull" full of murderous hypnotic riffing and distorted paranoid vocals, but with their strange psychedelia appearing as random electronic noises and fx.
Released in a limited edition of 500.

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Track Samples:
Sample : The Hidden Sun
Sample : Wanderer Of The Wastes

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An older, apparently out of print 7" from the ass-kicking Texas thrash band Iron Age. I raved about their new album on Tee Pee a few months back, a blazing fusion of iron-clad crossover thrash a la Cro-Mags, Corrosion Of Conformity, Leeway, Crumbsuckers, and wild psychedelic elements, which made for a really original sound, one minute achieving thrash metal satori with some of the meanest, hardest crossover this side of the millennium, the next moment blasting into a brain-glazing dronefield of prayer bowl reverberations and stoned chants. One of my top favorite albums of the past year, for sure. Well, here's some more Iron Age, a limited edition 7" that came out a while back that features an exclusive track called "The Way Is Narrow" on the a-side, a total crossover rager, five minutes of thrash fury, hardcore riffs slamming into massive metallic chug, once again invoking the furious classic sound of bands like Leeway and COC and Cro-Mags, but with their own particular brand of tough-as-nails riffing, and those awesome snarling vokills. This jam might not be as fast as some of their stuff, but it's fucking hard, and rips into some killer Metallica-style harmonized shredding towards the end.
Then, on the b-side, you get a cover song, but not a classic thrash or hardcore cover like you might expect. Instead, Iron Age breaks out a cover of "Satori Part One" by the legendary Japanese psych/prog band Flower Travellin' Band, and man, it stomps. Iron Age take that awesome Sabbath-meets-Crimson dirge of the original, and transform it into a malevolent slab of rocking, doomed metal, with wailing reverb-soaked guitar and the central guitar lead sounding even more evil this time around. Killer!
Limited edition of 500 copies, on clar vinyl.

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While the band is better known for their more widely available releases on Holy Mountain (which I do intend to get in stock at C-Blast shortly, along with their new upcoming album Reality Has Got to Die that we'll have in stock within the next few weeks), La Otracina drummer and mastermind Adam Kriney has been releasing loads of privately pressed discs from his band in tiny editions through his own Colour Sounds Recordings label, and I gotta say, some of these discs have become my favorite releases from the band. Released earlier in the year, La Otracina's Beyond The Smoke is definitely a fave, sort of a teaser release with a raw demo version of one of the songs that will appear on their new album, along with two improvisations, but furiously psychedelic and, with the first track, very fucking metal. This is certainly the most metal looking of their limited discs, too, what with that evil demonic dragon illustration on the cover, but none of this is surprising; La Otracina have been getting heavier and proggier and more metallic with each new release, evolving into a sort of psychedelic space metal that draws from classic bands like King Crimson and Hawkwind, the noisy fringes of Japanese psych, and the chugging riffs of early 80's speed metal. If that sounds like I'm describing Finnish hypno-rippers Circle, yeah, there are some similarities between the two bands; but La Otracina are a full on space rock band, taking off on long stretches of deep space/deep abyss exploration and melting minds in the process.
Beyond The Smoke delivers just over twenty minutes of heavy voidal jamming, with the ratio of cosmic metallurgy and far-out prog improvisation coming out to about 1:2. It starts off rocking; the eight minute "Beyond The Smoke" at first sounds like the theme music from Dr Who reformed into some monstrous space rock jam, then the band heaves into pounding metallic doom rock, sounding a lot like Pentragram, but with swirling cosmic synthesizers, then kicks into some pounding metal gallop with soaring acid guitar. The song makes its way through a killer passage of convoluted prog rock, certainly heavy and rocking, but with some rad baroque guitar riffery and angularity going on, one moment reminding me of Rising-era Rainbow, the next working out some crazy King Crimson-style prog. And then all of a sudden, the band suddenly shifts gears right at the end into a seriously stomping heavy metal riff that ends the jam with a savage roar. Killer stuff. The epic "Ballad Of The Hot Ghost Mama / Hazy Lafayette Departure", on the other hand, is almost ten minutes of hazy, moody improvisation, a shadowy wash of distant cymbals, far-out acid guitar noodling, huge clouds of reverb and baleful ambience. The drums start to lock into some free-jazz style playing after a while, while the guitar drifts even further into a quasar, the band moving deeper and further into creeped-out Hawkwind territory, forming into a rocking groove towards the end. And then "A Shapeless Void" finishes even further out, a blitz of free-jazz drumming, howling guitar squall, synthesizers emitting creepy witch-howls, a total doom and gloom improv blast, the guitar bending into some Sabbathian figures over super low bass rumble and washes of star-devouring synth.
Like most of the La Otracina discs on Colour Sounds, this comes in a simple hand-assembled colored paper sleeve, and is super limited, only about 100 copies issued.

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Nope, this is not a split between Spanish Euro-horror obsessed death metallers Machetazo and Chicago blackened doom-noize crew Winters In Osaka. That would be a weird enough pairing. Instead, this is a "remix" record, more or less, that sees Winters In Osaka taking a couple of Machetazo tracks and cutting them up, dousing them in freaked out, furious electronic harshness, and spewing them back out as brutal noisy, glitchy remixes that sound ten times more extreme than the originals. And that's saying something, considering how awesomely brutal Machetazo's atavistic deathgrind is. The 7" features two tracks, both from Machetazo's savagely brilliant album Munda Cripta that I raved about here at C-Blast when it came out last year. Each one has been processed and mutated by Winters In Osaka, the resulting remixed tracks transformed into horrific blasts of electronically infested deathgrind slathered with bizarre effects, extreme vocal processing, slurping oscillator noise, Bastard Noise-style locust swarms, and thick sheets of Merzbowian roar that nearly obliterate the grinding riffs. The songs are chopped up, stuttered, re-arranged into strange new shapes, with sudden fade outs and drop outs and other jarring production fuckery where the death metal is washed away in a tide of fuzz and scooped-out low end, the track rendered a murky industrial scrapescape for a few minutes, swept with brutal harsh noise and layered screams, turning into something abstract and mangled, and actually sounding a bit like French death-tronix blasters Whourkr. It rips. Comes on gray colored vinyl, limited edition of 250 copies.

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Total synthesizer destruction. Getting Caught is the first release from Seattle's Masturbatory Dysfunction, a one-woman synth-noise outfit who debuts here with eight lengthy tracks of crunchy electronic abuse that falls somewhere in between minimal death industrial and extreme synth blast. This stuff is as burly as Sixes, with lots of cold droning synthesizer buzz and sinister dronescapes surrounded with a strange spaciousness, the result of the material having been recorded in a music retail store; apparently, the lady who's behind Masturbatory Dysfunction would go into a major music equipment store in Seattle on her lunch break and blast out walls of noise on the synthesizers that the store had on display, which she would record on a portable recording device. There were several of these "recording sessions" that produced the source material for this album, some of which had to be obnoxiously loud and grating, and yet she managed to assemble all of this material without getting kicked off the premises. The end material was later digitally edited and organized, and mastered at abusive volume levels. It's wild that she was able to pull this off without getting the bum's rush, because a lot of this material is seriously abrasive. The title Getting Caught is an obvious allusion to her surreptitious recording techniques, but it also has creepier, more sinister connotations with tracks like "It Was A Mistake ", "Late Night Filth" and "Bye Mom". Sound wise, the tracks almost feel like field recordings at times, spacious and organic due to the synthesizers blending with the natural room ambience, but as the pieces move through grim, minimal minor-key chordal dirges and clouds of crackling high end static, they become punishing full-bore distortion assaults, walls of overdriven distorted synth shaped into crushing throbbing rhythms and brutal turbulent noise, weighted down with some heavy duty low-end turbine violence. Hypnotic, brain-flattening powerdrone and grim rhythmic plod combines with blasts of spastic 8-bit video game chaos and crushing static hum. The last track is the least brutal, almost pretty actually; a series of very minimal two-note melodies and sustained drones fuse into an oscillating chordal flux, which at first is droning and hypnotic, but gets heavier later on as thick choppy buzzing builds into a massive amplified engine roar. This disc is a powerful piece of industrial synth abuse, and is another excellent dose of extreme electronics for fans of the Bloodlust! aesthetic.
Track Samples:
Sample : Late Night Filth
Sample : Think It Through

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Finally back in print on vinyl after a couple of years!
Melt Banana's third album Teeny Shiny delivers another hyperspeed onslaught of sugar-OD spazz thrash with even catchier hooks and LOTS of weird turntablist/drum n bass-isms this time around. Terminally insane, equally confrontational and cute, Melt Banana continued to evolve and streamline their sound with these 11 songs without losing an ounce of their godlike freakiness. The No Wave skronk and mutant noise eruptions of their previous albums are still in force, but have been refined into the closest the band has ever come to writing actual "pop" songs. Of course, Melt Banana's vision of pop is a 1000 mph blast of pop-punk run amok with singer Yako's manic cheergirl yelps and Agata's mind-frying shrapnel guitar playing, which alternately sound like a meth-amped DJ scratching 3 different records, a laser gun going off, and an unstoppable thrashcore riff machine. All that amidst an offensive of air raid sirens and hip-hop beats, explosions and electrocuted video game shrieks, drum'n'bass-influenced noise blasts, digital hardcore and more, a mystical hyperspeed hardcore adrenaline freakout beamed straight into your cortex. An essential album from one of our favorite bands on the planet.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Crime
Sample : Pollution

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Track Samples:
Sample : [Untitled]
Sample : [Untitled]

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Mountain Of Judgement was yet another band from the incredibly prolific and busy Chad Davis, whose other bands and projects (which include space rockers U.S. Christmas, the death industrial and power electronics outfits Subklinik and Mortuor, doom metallers Hour Of 13, and occult death metallers Set) have all received constant play around here; I'm always happy to see something new from thus guy. Along with some other former members of Davis's old sludgecore band Seven Foot Spleen, he'd put together this burly space/psych metal outfit back around 2003, and the music on this eponymous disc was recorded between 2003 and 2009. The band has since split up, but left behind a hefty slab of psychedelic metal that has some obvious similarities to U.S. Christmas (namely, the heavy influence of 70's era Hawkwind), but heavier, a lumbering sludge metal crew augmented with synthesizers, combining classic space rock sounds with a ponderous contempo doom assault on this hour-plus debut.
The intro to the opening song "Neptunes Reign" lays it all out, with sweeping nebulous synths soaring over crushing stoned sludge metal, the riffs huge and droning, the drummer bashing out slow-motion elephantine beats, the zoned-out vocals sung in a chant-like cadence. If it sounds like these guys are evoking a heavy Sleep vibe, you'd be correct. Much of this disc reminds me of early Sleep, and fans of the stoner metal gods will probably dig Mountain Of Judgement's take on this sound. This is much more spacey and acid-fried, though; while the pounding gooey lava-lamp metal grinds through massive Sabbathian depths, those synthesizers are way out in front, splattering the sludge with endless black hole drones, whooshing lift-off fx, and deep-space oscillations. These guys wear their love for classic 70's space rock proudly on their sleeves, particularly drawing from the music of Hawkwind and Ash Ra. Throughout the disc, the metal will often drift away and be replaced by long stretches of moody psychedelic jamming and swathes of pure fx freakery, and when the crushing Sab-riffage re-emerges, it's joined with soaring clean vocals (that can give this a classic heavy metal vibe) and some killer wailing psych-guitar freakouts. And the song "Globule" is a standout, a crushing, surprisingly catchy chunk of space-pop-sludge.
And much like how U.S. Christmas sometimes blends their Southern rock influences into their driving space rock, there's a bit of Southern booziness that can be heard in Mountain Of Judgement's sound, too. You can definitely hear it on the last track "Magic Eye", where, for just a second, the band enters a zone where they sound remarkably like Electric Wiz covering something by Lynyrd Synyrd.
Their hefty psych-doom owes a lot to their influences, but their combination of kosimiche freakout and narcotized doom is one of the better ones that I've heard. It's like hearing Sleep jamming with Dik Mik and Klaus Schulze, or Electric Wizard with the mysticism and space rock worship cranked to the max and the darkness turned down a bit, their controls set for some distant interstellar destiny instead of black oblivion. Recommended to fans of the aforementioned bands looking for their next fix of blasted drug-sludge.
Track Samples:
Sample : Globule
Sample : Neptunes Reign
Sample : The Witch

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Track Samples:
Sample : Put some sugar in my cup, please
Sample : Trapped in the jar

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Riding atop the recent wave of black metal/noise hybrids who combine the bleak frosty riffs and blackened ferocity of underground BM with blown-out and corrosive strains of industrial noise (see also WOLD, Emit, Grief No Absolution, Enbilulugugal, Vargr), the Australian one-man band Nekrasov has so far made a substantial mark in the realm of extremist necro-racket with a series of limited edition, brutally abrasive albums (Cognition Of Splendid Oblivion, The Form Of Thought From Beast, etc) that have mostly been self-released, save for some recent offerings on labels like Siege Of Power and Chrome Leaf. Early on, Nekrasov's sound was steeped in caustic noise, a blazing industrialized black metal assault that was doused in heavy levels of irradiated distortion and Merzbowian skree. But more recently, it's mutated into less metallic regions, alternating the hyperblast black metal with forays into crushing, demonic wall-noise and blasted ambience. Now, Nekrasov is back with a new full length (the first for Crucial Blast), and it's the most advanced slab of their blacknoize terror that we've heard so far. An octagonal prism of isolationist drone, flesh-rending mechanical black metal, abstract otherworldly beauty, claustrophobic industrial dread, and the most violent, suffocating strains of harsh noise, Extinction is pure cyclonic contempt for humanity.
The eight-song disc combines hyperspeed cybernetic blastscapes and bleak black metal riffage, the tracks often revealing snarled minor key melodies that are buried deep beneath blizzard blasts of machinegun drum machines, the drums veering through nerve-fraying rhythmic shifts, and acidic croaks bathed in black hiss. Triumphant frost-bitten riffs scream out of maelstroms of violent distortion, and Choral voices soar through a cyclone of helicoptering blastbeats and sheets of blown-out, ultra distorted drone, streaked with bits of gorgeous vibraphone-like melody, somber Hammond-like organ drones and looped synth, sometimes breaking off into grinding slo-motion industrial throb or swirling kosimiche drift. The tracks on Extinction go back and forth between the noisier, more industrial like material and overt black metal, though the two sides of Nekrasov's sound are always present together. When the sound does move into pure noise, it's either vast fields of minimal ambient drift, metallic clank and distant percussive sounds, utterly bleak Lustmordian soundscapes, or crushing, almost HNW-style slabs of molten noise, scouring waves of hellish skree and crushing slow-motion tidal surges of jet-black sonic syrup flecked with dubbed-out blasts of tectonic crush and electronic glitches that ripple across the void.
Closing the album, the title track descends even further into black industrial crush, a monstrous, almost seventeen-minute long sprawl of plodding, simple drum pound echoing within a slowly swirling fog of distorted fx, churning, billowing black ambience, buried black buzz, an endless whirlpool of blown-out synthesizers and the immense black breath of leviathan lungs heaving deep below the surface.
Like everything else from Nekrasov, this album is loaded with blasting inhuman drumming and ferocious riffing that form into noise-drenched trance-scapes of bestial industrial BM, but the attention to texture and sound sculpture elevates this above most mechanized black metal projects, with immersive layers of electronic sound, creative stereo panning techniques, and other production tricks that create a harsh, alien atmosphere that is pretty unique to Nekrasov's sound. This is a scorching new chapter from one of our favorite bands out there right now fusing black metal and noise.
The cd version comes packaged in a full color six-panel digipack.
Track Samples:
Sample : We are just an indifferent interpretation of the black plague
Sample : Disillusion
Sample : Matter is the bastard
Sample : Void into nonvoid master
Sample : Pre-fetal non-mantra
Sample : Chant the name of god in a thousand languages until all is blood and feces
Sample : No room for liberation found 'here' or 'now'
Sample : Extinction

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A killer limited-edition cassette that delivers some new tracks of demented, diseased, meandering sludge from Persistence In Mourning, and a lengthy new track of crushing distortion-trance from the French master of HNW, Vomir.
The first side has Persistance In Mourning, an American funereal doom outfit who has had a couple of releases on Universal Tongue and At War With False Noise; they offer up three tracks of miserable, bass-heavy doom crawl, influenced by classic death/funereal doom like Thergothon and Evoken, but with some noisy, electronic elements incorporated into their sound. The beginning of the first track "We Are The Lost" is a rumbling sorrowful bass line winding through pools of grit and fuzz and dissonant minor key guitar, the drums totally absent at first, surrounded by harsh, wretched screams. Then the drums drop in, glacial and massive, along with some sung vocals backed by those blackened shrieks, and it starts to sound a little like some suicidal doom cover of a Sebadoh song, super heavy and utterly morose, but also strangely pretty. That's followed by a cover of "Epoch Of Denial" by Dutch death metallers Sinister, here transformed into something infinitely slower and more oppressive, and bathed in squealing electronics and hissy distortion. Strange backwards spoken word and fluttering 8-bit electronic gunk squirms right into the last song "Stinking Of Fever", a mass of gritty noize flux and ghastly guitar chords floating in filth, demonic reverse voices, the whole thing really abstract, a mysterious fractured soundscape; eventually, the guitar coalesces into a simple melody rising high above the murky chaos, then the heaviness flows in, a massive slow moving doom riff drifting disembodied as distorted, power electronics style vocals echo and reverberate overhead, a strange mix of funereal, somber doom and electronic detritus, but again, strangely pretty...
On the other side of the cassette, Vomir (as usual) completely flattens the brain with a single eighteen minute track of crushing, pitch-black harsh distortion avalanche, a seemingly endless pulverizing maelstrom of bone-splintering bottom end and swirling black magma that rolls over you without pause. There's a massive bass presence on this track, a monstrous grinding low end throb beneath the crunch and scrape and roar, and it almost sounds as if incredibly distorted and over-modulated demonic voices are speaking from within the heart of the nuclear storm. Fans of the French wall-master will not be disappointed...this is one of Vomir's more terrifying slabs of HNW annihilation.
The tape comes in a cool understated package: it's enclosed in a black fold-over cardstock case that's held together with a Velcro clasp, and includes a full color double sided insert card, each copy hand-numbered in an edition of 100 copies.

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Track Samples:
Sample : Candy-O
Sample : No Pieces Fit
Sample : The High Road

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Although the band has been around for around a decade, this Southern California industrial death metal outfit is largely unknown outside of their home base, sporadically releasing small batches of their mechanized death metal to local audience which have all gone out of print shortly after release. This is the first widely available release of theirs to be made available, a collection of previously unreleased material out on Black Goat, the label run by some of the members of Pro-Death. The band features members of various Black Goat-affiliated black industrial/ambient projects like The Slaughtered Lamb, A Taste For Decay, and Welter In Thy Blood, as well as a member of anti-human goregrinders Cattle Decapitation, and their brand of cyber-death has trace levels of all of those sounds, a hybrid of crushing down tuned death metal and mechanical drum programming and electronic noise, often sounding a bit like a rawer, crustier Fear Factory. They use lots of aggressive film samples and sound bites taken from films like Evil Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre as well as corrosive noise to augment their guttural death metal, and thankfully the drum machines are used for more than just double-bass rhythms, mixing in fractured skittery breakbeats and hyper speed gabber blasts along with the more standardized death/grind drumming patterns. Chugging riffage is plated onto fucked-up, processed rhythms and mangled electronica, the songs alternately grooving and blasting, with clanking Neubauten scrap metal/junk percussion hammered in the background, and the vocals trading off with alternately high, screeching snarls and grunting beast-gargles. It's like a cross between Carcass or Mortician, and the heavy industrial metal of Skinny Puppy / Ministry / Godflesh, with some bleak black ambience woven into the album. The best example of that is the ten minute "Charnel Houses" that appears halfway thru the album, pure blackened industrial ambience with monstrous distorted screeches swooping over a desolate waste of black smokers and flesh-grinding machinery, immense thunderous reverberations booming in the distance, the vocals becoming ultra-distorted, evil slow motion horn blasts appearing amidst the sound of falling acid rain, the track slowly morphing into horrific blackened power electronics. The combination of black ambience and industrial and death metal works well, and Pro-Death fall into the same sort of mecha-horror as bands like Landfill, Candiru, Dead World, Submit-era Pitchshifter, Optimum Wound Profile, Malformed Earthborn and Proton Burst. I don't hear this sort of stuff all that often anymore, and Pro-Death are a cool addition to the ranks of cyborg grind, recommended for fans of this kind of bludgeoning machine death.
Track Samples:
Sample : 1000 Reasons To Kill Yourself
Sample : Charnel Houses
Sample : Earth's Disease

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Just found a couple of these in our warehouse, less than four copies of this long out of print Raccoo-oo-oon disc on Release The Bats...once they're gone, they're gone forever, so move quick if you're interested!
The enigmatically named Raccoo-oo-oon bound out of their haunted woods with this Swedish CD release of the debut cassette these cats put out in an edition of nothing a few years ago. Beautifully packaged in black Arigato pack covered in mystical golden scrawl, Is Night People is a dreamy conglom of free-rock splutter, psychedelic woodland punk mantras, masses of echoing vocals trailing upwards into the sky, pummeling No Wave fits, and raw psych/folk moves. Raccoo-oo-oon is one of the more interesting bands floating around in the psych-punk ether right now, 'cuz along with all of the trippy freeform howling, they can also just as easily lay down some killer heavy hypno dirge and drugged noise punk, and the combination is pretty stunning. The sax/effects/tribal drumming swirl together into ecstatic rites over which are poured cascades of beautifully fucked vocals that are delayed into infinity...think Here Comes The Indian-era Animal Collective but with a propensity for eruptions of heavy narco/noise rock that bury everything under a sea of feedback and buzzsaw amp noise and jazzed up Evol style moves. Excellent, and recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample :

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Track Samples:
Sample : Believing And Obeying
Sample : Empty

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One of the more recent tapes to come out on the Recycled Music Series, RU-486's contribution to the series is another nerve-wracking assault of junk noise, field recordings and demonic urban ambience that this noise project seems to specialize in. The band drags the listener through a jarring, discomfiting mania of screeching, grinding scrap metal abrasion and mutant power electronics, whipping through fields of brutal oscillator flux blackened shrieks and death metal style vokills, and harsh feedback abuse - the feedback is incredibly agonizing, squealing, stabbing shards of high-end amplifier scream that drill iron spikes through various co-ordinates of your skull. Blasts of distortion whirl into violent maelstroms of chaotic white noise, super heavy and rumbling (but too chaotic and spastic to qualify as HNW), the extreme high frequency metallic scrape and violent cacophonies of colliding junk metal evoking the junk noise symphonies of Japan's K2, but are also infested with howling fractured melodies and weird melodic vocals, random banging and stomping and lots of random volume drop-outs. Harsh, tortured electronic noise forged into absolute obliteration. Comes in a duct-tape covered cover.

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Track Samples:
Sample : The Lightning Chaser
Sample : Serpent's Knight
Sample : Sleaze
Sample : Trial By Fire

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Track Samples:
Sample : Blood Room
Sample : Untitled

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A strange little cassette of graveyard electro-prog from the Italian band Spettro Family. This ten minute, two track tape was released in a ridiculously tiny edition of twenty copies, half of which we grabbed for C-Blast, and features an odd blend of phantasmagoric industrial, mildewed old Italian horror movie scores, and field recordings.
The first side is a spectral haze of pilfered Italian music bathed in tape hiss, stretches of rotten analogue synthesizer creep, cold sheets of blaCK space drift, WITH some really classic sounding Italo-prog sounds seeping in, a little Goblin/Claudio Simonetti washed with rumbling death industrial synths and minimal drones. On the second side, the band gets noisier with treated drum sounds, squirming blown out synth whoosh and crackle, an abstract noisescape that suddenly shifts into sampled orchestral soundtrack music, all brass and tympani, then once again abruptly shifts into some primitive, shambling electro-creep that drapes horror movie keyboards over a simple bass line and robotic drumming. It's quite catchy and eerie sounding, like a damaged, meandering low-fi version of old Italo-horror-prog, but then at the very end erupts into a blast of distorted noise and samples and static.

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Two side of hardcore earfuck from Keith Brewer's long running Texan noise project Taint, released on the Recycled Music Series of refurbished cassettes from RRRecords. Brewer has been spewing his Whitehouse-influenced brand of power electronics filth going all the way back to the early 90's, but on this cassette, he goes for a more abstracted and psychedelic harsh noise approach. The material offered here is still pretty vicious, beginning with an atonal metallic melody that repeats itself over squalls of distorted feedback and scraping noise, hysterical yelling way off in the background and intercepted fragments of rock music and random voices rising to the surface. The sound is all grimy and low fi as you descend through murky rumbling rhythms and looped blocks of grinding distortion, the orgasmic screams of women and muscular grunting obscured by shrieking feedback and blats of distorted bass and guitar, insane cackling laughter and strange sawing noises, faint flute-like flutterings and the sounds of dragging metal, sonar pings, ultra-brutal guitar noise, monstrous screams, machine noise, K2 style eruptions of junknoise chaos, deep low-end sludge and near-noisecore level blasts of screaming sped-up violence. Taint's Recycled cassette is a frenzied orgy of psychosexual agony and gut-churning electronic evil, its atmosphere heavy with sickness and insanity.
As with all of the Recycled Music cassettes, this is dubbed onto a commercial cassette release in a duct-tape covered j-card.

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It's been a long, long time since I've picked up anything new from Thrones. The last record that Joe Preston's massive one man band put out was the Day Late, Dollar Short album on Southern Lord, and that was over five years ago. Granted, Preston had been busy during this time, playing bass and touring the country with High On Fire and Harvey Milk, but man, I think that Thrones are always going to be my favorite band of his. Ever since the first time that I heard Sperm Whale, I've been a huge fan of Thrones's strange, robotic sludge, and there's nothing else like Thrones, period. So I can wait five years if need be in order to get some new music from the band, and this new 7" on Belgian label Conspiracy is pretty fucking great, as expected. Two songs, the first "Wage War" is a stomping robotic crusher, a triumphant war march riff straddling the militant drum machine beats, sounding a bit like a mechanized High On Fire jam actually, massive, sludgy, pounding, super heavy, but distinctly Thrones, with Preston's trademark sledgehammer bass sound and that clanking drum machine driving the rhythm. "Trmph Lfe" on the b-side sounds more like the Thrones of old, all lurching and lopsided, bone-rattling bass winding ever upwards around a weirdly melodic riff, the drum machine veering from odd waltzing rhythms to splattery robotic pummel, the song breaking off for long stretches of hazy, liquid ambience before falling back into the rubbery, slo-mo sludge.
Short but sweet! Comes in a full color jacket with video stills of the towering ant-cities taken from the classic 70's sci-fi mindbender Phase IV on the front and back covers. Recommended!

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Track Samples:
Sample : Black Dahlia
Sample : Blind Man At Mystic Lake
Sample : Self Portrait

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Track Samples:
Sample : Side Winder
Sample : Simple Touch
Sample : Willpower

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Track Samples:
Sample : Dot Matrix
Sample : Marked

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Some of my earliest experiences with the Earache bands and the late 80's grind/death scene coming out of the UK came in the form of the Hardcore Holocaust compilation cassettes and Peel Sessions full lengths that came out on the Strange Fruit label. Those classic early recordings of bands like Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror, The Stupids, Bolt Thrower, those Strange Fruit discs were my introduction to all of the brutal underground noize that was coming out during that period. Those old Peel Sessions releases have all been out of print for years, but Earache just compiled the complete Peel Sessions for their flagship bands on this massive 3-disc set that features scorching performances from some of the UK grind scene's most seminal outfits. I couldn't ask for a better lineup on this - you get the crucial Peel sets from Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower, Carcass, Extreme Noise Terror and Godflesh, as well as sets from lesser known (but still RIPPING) thrash bands like Unseen Terror, Heresy, and Intense Degree.
The first disc packed with multiple sessions from Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror; the Napalm Death sets are possibly the band's most extreme and bestial recording ever, drawing heavily from Scum, the songs played at nuclear tempos, the vocals distorted and animalistic, everything blown to hell, all three sets (from 1987 through 1990) doused in gasoline and blasting violently, with the band delivering a skull-shredding cover of Siege's "Walls" that I've never heard anywhere else. Awesome. Then there's the total grind/crust overload of the Extreme Noise Terror sessions, a thrashier and more hardcore style assault, total crustcore violence, unhinged D-beat drumming blasting through manic detuned riffs and the turbo-demon vokills.
On disc two, Carcass are raw and crushing, a frenzied, impossibly chaotic grind assault that includes devastating renditions of classic tracks like "Empathological Necroticism", and are followed by the thunderous crusty death metal of Bolt Thrower, their set drenched in reverb, starting with the thrashing "Forgotten Existence" and then making their way through their crucial late 80's death metal jams.
Godflesh start off the third disc with a sixteen minute set that includes "Tiny Tears", "Wound (Not Wound)", "Like Rats", and "Pulp", these versions filthier and rougher than the studio versions; this set is particularly notable for featuring Kevin Martin (The Bug / Ice / God / Techno Animal) blasting some screeching, hellish free-jazz saxophone blurt over the last half of "Pulp", dropping some scathing Borbetomagus-like sax noise over Godflesh's pounding industrial metal. Then it's Unseen Terror's awesome blistering Brit ultrathrash, their fusion of classic hardcore and death metal so ridiculously aggressive and fast, ending with a supersonic cover of "It's My Life" from NYC hardcore band Madball; followed by speedcore legends Heresy, who blaze through a bunch of short, catchy blastcore jams, their super-fast hardcore thrash riddled with poppy, anthemic hooks. It ends with Intense Degree's insanely fast grinding speedcore assault, ferocious and sort of Siege-esque, with a raging rendition of their classic jam "Skate Bored".
The set comes in a cardboard slipcase and includes a thick booklet that features an interview with Mick Harris on the influence that John Peel and his BBC show had on the burgeoning grindcore scene in the UK in the 80's along with liner notes and photos.
Track Samples:
Sample : Cadaveric Incubator of Endo Parasites
Sample : In Battle There Is No Law
Sample : Like Rats
Sample : Multi National Corporations
Sample : Sick of Stupidity

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This ongoing series of 7" compilations from Nuclear War Now rules; each installment has featured four bands from around the world raising the flag for scummy, blackened thrash metal, free of polish and posturing. The fourth edition of Outbreak Of Evil brings us another four obscure black/thrash bands, and there's some really bad filth on here.
First up are US thrashers Possessor (who feature members of thrashcore legends Holier Than Thou? and Annihilation Time) with an awesomely sloppy track of drunken, violent Bulldozer/Venom style speed metal, some incredibly wrecked and strangled vocals, and an altogether brain-damaged and mangled sound that totally rips. Those mutants are followed by fellow Yanks Bludwulf from Rochester, which features a guy named Reverend Sinn on vocals that I remember from a crust punk band called The End back in the '90s, along with some dudes from Toxic Holocaust; their song "Nightbreed" is a killer blast of raw, catchy metalpunk that's part Venom, part GISM, part LA sleaze and part UK stench, and I've got to get my hands on more of their stuff, fast.
On the other side, Mexico's Strikemaster barrels through the thrash blitz of "Thrashing The Blind School", Bay Area inspired riffing and impassioned yelling and hammering drums all rushing together in a energetic, loose blast of ragged early Metallica worship with some really fucking weird drum sounds. Japan's Metal Skull is last with the weirdest track on the Ep, a song called "Satanical Holocaust Massacre”, which actually sort of sounds like something from Ruins or Magma, someone whistling over a jagged off-time bass/drum groove, very prog sounding with weird organ sounds (or is that guitar?) locked into an aggressive, repetitious, ominous groove...a very weird entry on this compilation, and a perfect example of why I love these NWN comps so much.

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Uh oh. Here's what happens when you give Seth Putnam from Anal Cunt license to put together his own compilation album of like-minded sickos and sociopaths, as as expected, it ain't pleasant. This infamous comp came out back in 2004 but it wasn't available to us until now, so now at long last we can all revel in the absolutely hateful and ridiculous PC-baiting racket that Putnam assembled here, with a lineup that ranges from the brutal Boston hardcore and grind of AxCx, Seige, and PTL Klub, to several offerings from the notorious Ohio "tardcore" scene, to punishing sludge from the likes of Eyehategod, Angry Hate, and the mighty Kilslug.
The Lp opens with Anal Cunt's blazing punky one-two noisecore punch of "Ha Ha Holocaust" and "We're Not 'In Da House' You Fucking Wigger", and then delivers a track of over-the-top anti-PC thrash metal from Chicago's Raunchous Brothers that makes the previous Anal Cunt jams sound like fucking peace-punk. Seriously offensive stuff. Then Boston downer freaks Kilslug are up with a previously unreleased track of primo sludgepunk slime called "Glowing Kanibals", followed by four songs of low-fi, brain-damaged Casio punk slop from Fossil Fuel, aka Dave Schall, aka Food Fortunata of Sockeye, the godfather of the Ohio "tardcore" scene. Fossil Fuel is sort of an idiotic punk version of Sockeye, with ridiculous songs like "I Fuck Cripples", "Tie Up You", "Everybody Die", and "Nat'l Monuments Suck". Next us a track of ultra-hateful drum machine grindcore from Mudoven, and the side closes out with a very early recording of EyeHateGod's "My Name Is God And I Hate You" that was recorded in 1989, opening with heavy looped samples, then lurching into the ultra raw, ultra low-fi dirge, a terminally ugly and feedback soaked recording that sounds like it was recorded on a battered old four track deck.
Side two starts off with the ridiculous tongue-in-cheek heavy metal assault of "Metal Head" from Connecticut goofball heshers Nasty Disaster, followed by Nunslaughter's gruesome black metal primitivist blasphemy "Resurrection" and the anthemic "Back For Blood" from Canadian heavy metal lifer Thor, an early version of the song that later appeared on his 2004 album Triumphant. And then we get a previously unreleased track from legendary Boston hardcore/grinders Siege called "Cameras" that was recorded in 1991 when the band briefly reunited with Seth Putnam on vocals, a vicious, super short blast of grindcore that is all too brief. Angry Hate are another Putnam project, where he plays awesomely demented, noisy sludge punk alongside Larry Lifeless from Kilslug/Upsidedown Cross; their "Bad Mood" is total cacophony, ultra skronky and dissonant slow motion damage with drunken yowling from Lifeless, the sound equal parts Brainbombs and Kilslug and Hijokaidan. Killer! Then another blast of "tardcore", this time from Krapper Keeper (the duo of Food Fotunata and Michael Pilmer from the old noise band Silica Gel); their "Captain America Jerked Off On Your Dad" is a mess of janky drum machine beats and stoopid hardcore vocals. The side wraps up with four raging live tracks from Boston thrash punks PTL Klub that were recorded in 1999 at a reunion show in Cambridge, MA.
WIth its ridiculous album artwork, outrageously hateful and absurd music, and overt "fuck you" vibe, this comp isn't for the easily irritated or offended; but for fans of Seth Putnam's terminally nihilistic and anti-PC sense of humor, this was made for you. Comes with a big full color foldout poster, and limited to 720 copies.

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Canada is birthing some ferocious extremist hardcore all of a sudden. Like The Endless Blockade over in Toronto, Montreal's Vile Intent furiously invokes the sound of early 90's West Coast powerviolence and does it right, sounding immensely pissed off and ready to cleave skulls with a vicious blastcore sound that references the classic Crossed Out 7" on Slap A Ham but drags the sludgy slow parts into more extreme and doom-laden slabs of heaviness. The seven songs on this 7" center around slow crushing dirges that suddenly explode into hyper fast grinding chaos and monstrous feedback-splattered hardcore with gruff, extremely agitated screams, loaded with devastating sludge passages scattered amongst all of the lighting quick violence, and wicked howling feedback guitar that worms it's way throughout the burly riffage on songs like "Pnuemoorthax", "Masquerade" and "All Talk". Naturally, I hear echoes of Infest, Crossed Out and Man Is The Bastard in here, and this Ep is highly recommended if you're into the neo-PV extremism of Endless Blockade, Hatred Surge, Iron Lung, and SU19B, especially SU19B, whose crushing sludge-encrusted blastcore has a lot in common with what these maniacs are doing. Total savagery. Comes in a cool silkscreened sleeve with a cutout cover, limited to 500 copies.

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Already sold out from the label, this is the first ever vinyl release from Vomir, and fans of the French harsh noise wall master will want to move quick if you want to grab this slab of crushing distorto-trance, as we've got less than ten copies of it in stock.
L'homme Sature is two sides of supreme harsh noise wall, the first titled "Sclérose Et Monotonie, Dans L'isolement, Impassible Meurtrier De Soi", the second "Dans La Récusation Du Monde Social, Le Chemin Vers Le Renoncement À Toute Interpénétration", each one a roughly fourteen minute roar of infinite black fire, massive smoldering lava-flows of black distortion that go through constant subtle shifts in speed and texture that require deep immersion to be able to fully appreciate. As with anything that Vomir does, these slabs of HNW create a state of total psychic immolation, the rolling waves of mid-range crunch and speaker vomit full of low-end frequencies and some very interesting bass fluctuations that can be heard writhing deep within the maelstrom. It's the sound of an infinite avalanche, the cracking of the earth's crust as meditative emptiness; no fade outs, no edits, each side just slamming to a halt as the blazing wall of scorching, smoking distorted noise just cuts out suddenly, instantly dropping you back in to the world. This is essential HNW at its absolute bleakest and most suffocating. Packaged in black sleeves with pasted-on covers on the front and back, and released in a limited edition of 300 copies.

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The Bay Area duo Water Borders appear here with a six song Ep for Disaro that delivers some great weirdo goth industrial. Compared to some of the other Disaro "witch house" outfits like Mater Suspiria Vision, Grill Grill, Modern Witch and Fostercare, this isn't as whacked out and drug-addled, but is still some mighty odd electro-creep that fits right in with that general scene. The members of Water Borders had previously played in a band called New Thrill Parade that I caught a couple years ago when they were on tour with Wildildlife, and some of the ecstatic weirdness of that band has definitely crossed over to Water Borders. I loved this disc as soon as I heard it; the band taps into that vintage goth sound that I dig so much, but warps it into something much stranger and more freaked out, the songs forged from haunting keyboard lines, deep bass drops and these really deep, dramatic, loopy crooning vocals, the sound driven by minimal, pulsating electro rhythms, and laced with all kinds of sinister sounds, creepy goblin chanting and ghostly female vocals, simple pounding industrial rhythms, metallic clanking, bleak synthesizer ambience and primitive Casio beats. And there's a totally lunatic batcave rendition of Del Shannon's "Runaway" at the end. Weird and warped, gothy and catchy, at times sounding like a dubbed-out, gothic Coil...really cool first release from these guys, and I'm looking forward to hearing more from them. Released in a slimline jewel case, in a hand-numbered edition of 100 copies.

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Just found a couple of these in our warehouse, less than four copies of this long out of print Dove Yellow Swans disc on Release The Bats...once they're gone, they're gone forever, so move quick if you're interested!
YELLOW SWANS return with this collection of previously released CD-r and cassette material circa May/June 2004, remastered, disassembled, and reconstructed/edited into a new full length album. The YELLOW SWANS delve into some crucial wasteland sonics, populated by manic drugged junk electronics, alien drone stuttering,mutant processed vocals, spastic drum machines and damaged electronica beats, and brutal feedback waves that are powered with the SWANS expert dynamic alchemy. 6 songs and 47 minutes of malevolent, head-rupturing free noise tronix from one of the best distorto abstractionists from the current Baty Area, culled from the Dusk cassette originally released on the band’s own imprint, Jyrk, the Demonic CD-r on Hung Like A Horse, and the Drill CD-r on SNSE. Fans of Wolf Eyes / Hair Police school of blown-apart noise rock, sublime drone shimmer (a la SUNROOF! ),and crunchy harsh noise (a la MERZBOW and harder BASTARD NOISE) will dig. Release The Bats did a killer job on the discs gorgeous, full-color Dual Plover influenced Digipack, sporting a black-felt interior and cover art from elfin folkster Devendra Banhart.
Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample :

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MENACE RUINE The Die Is Cast CD (Alien8 Recordings) 11.98
MGR vs SIRDSS Impromptu CD (Neurot) 13.98
MOE! STAIANO MOEKESTRA Inescapable Siren CD (Amanita) 13.98
MOE!STAIANOS MOEKESTRA 2 Rooms Of Uranium Inside 83 Markers CD (Edgetone) 14.98
MOUTHUS Saw A Halo CD (Load) 11.98
MURDEROUS VISION Lifes Blood Deaths Embrace CD (Live Bait) 10.98
MY CAT IS AN ALIEN / CHRISTIAN MARCLAY & OKKYUNG LEE From The Earth To The Spheres CD (Small Voices) 11.98
NADJA Radiance Of Shadows CD (Alien8 Recordings) 13.98
NAGELFAR Virus CD (Van) 11.98
NARROWS Benjamin CD (Wantage) 12.98
NARROWS Benjamin LP (Wantage) 12.98
NOISEGATE Suspended Animation Ambient Vol.1 CD (Tumult) 12.98
NORTH What You Were CD (Cavity) 12.98
ON s/t CD (Celebrate Psi Phenomena) 16.98
PERTH EXPRESS s/t CD (Teenage Disco Bloodbath) 11.98
POCAHAUNTED / ROBEDOOR Hunted Gathering 2xCD (Digitlis) 15.98
POCCOLUS s/t CD (Supernal) 13.98
PYRAMIDS self titled 2xCD (Hydra Head) 13.98
QUEST FOR BLOOD with YUKIHIRO ISSA self titled CD (Ektro) 14.98
RAVENTALE Long Passed Days CD (Badmoodman) 11.98
RUHR HUNTER Moss As Memory CD (Glass Throat) 14.98
RUHR HUNTER / CHAOS AS SHELTER CD (Glass Throat) 11.98
RUINS OF BEVERAST Rain upon the Impure CD (Van) 11.98
SERVILLE SECT Stratospheric Passenger CD (Sounds Of Battle And Souvenir Collecting) 11.98
SIGHTINGS Through The Panama CD (Load) 11.98
SPEKTR Ex Fugit CD (Candlelight) 9.98
SPITE EXTREME WING Magnificat CD (Behemoth) 11.98
SWALLOW THE SUN Hope CD (Candlelight) 11.98
SWITCHBLADE s/t CD (Cyclop Media) 13.98
TAINT Secrets CD (Candlelight) 13.98
THE WIRE ORCHESTRA Futuristic Hymns & Broken Down Gospels Vol. 1 CD-R (MT6) 5.98
THEE MALDOROR KOLLECTIVE Themes For Proxima CD (Foreshadow) 11.98
TIME OF ORCHIDS Melonwhisper CD (self-released) 13.98
TIME OF ORCHIDS Sarcast While CD (Tzadik) 13.98
TODESSTOSS Spiegel der Urängste / Sehnsucht CD (Wroth Emitter) 11.98
TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION Zen And The Art Of Total Fucking Destruction CD (Translation Loss) 12.98
TRANSMISSION0 Memory Of A Dream CD (Candlelight) 9.98
TRIST Stiny CD (Ars Magna) 9.98
TULSA DRONE Songs From A Mean Season CD (Perpetual Motion Machine) 9.98
TUMULUS Live Balkan Path CD (Wroth Emitter) 11.98
U.S. CHRISTMAS Eat The Low Dogs CD (Neurot) 14.98
USSA / HEIRS OF ROCKAFELLER split CD (MT6) 5.98
VANESSA VAN BASTEN La Stanza Di Swedenborg CD (Radiotarab) 11.98
VARGHKOGHARGASMAL Drowned In Lakes CD (Tumult) 13.98
VARIOUS In Nomine Satanas, The First Curse CD 11.98
VELVET CACOON Dextronaut 2xCD (Full Moon Productions) 14.98
VERDUNKELN Einblick in den Qualenfall CD (Van) 11.98
VINTERRIKET Wege In Die Vergangenheit 2002-2004 CD (Badmoodman) 11.98
VULTURE CLUB Live Young Die Fast And Leave An Exquisite Corpse CD (Utech) 14.98
WOLD LOTMP CD (Profound Lore) 13.98
WOLD Stratification CD (Profound Lore) 13.98
WOLF EYES Dread CD (Hanson) 13.98
WOLF EYES Slicer CD (Hanson) 13.98
WOLF EYES WITH JOHN WIESE Collection CD (Hanson) 15.98
WOLFMANGLER Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves CD (Aurora Borealis) 11.98
WOODS OF INFINITY Hopplos Vantan CD (Supernal) 11.98
XASTHUR A Gate Through Bloodstained Mirrors 2xCD (Hydra Head) 14.98
YELLOW SWANS AT All Ends CD (Load) 11.98
YIDUAN Foggy Town CD (So Rock!) 11.98
YIDUAN Hymn CD (So Rock!) 11.98
ZAIMPH La Nuit Electrique CD (Utech) 14.98

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