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Released almost simultaneously with our own new Funerary Call offering, Nightside Emanations is filled with the same lush netherworld ambience as Fragments From The Aethyr while using a distinctly different approach. The whole feel is different, from the fantastic surrealistic album art courtesy of Russian occult/symbolist painter Denis Kostromitin (whose work has also graced the covers of recent albums from Horseback, Ride For Revenge and Dead Reptile Shrine) to the sparse soundscapes littered with random noises and bits of mysterious-sounding field recordings, this has a much more 'mystical' feel to it than the classically-tinged graveyard visions of Fragments.... The instrumentation used on this recording feels more organic and atavistic, the sounds created using wood and bones and antlers, excavated stone and pieces of scrap-metal wielded by hand to craft these richly detailed fields of ritualistic movement and sepulchral ambience.
The disc moves through ever more shadowy chambers, beginning with the fearsome guttural invocations and black drift of "Wands Of Fire", where the sound of crackling flame becomes a locus of death-meditation around which swirl strains of ominous minor key melody, ringing gongs and vast desolate drones. Its followed by the chaotic clatter that opens the title track, which becomes a haze of dire droning textures and harrowing musical fragments that inject an intense dosage of dread into the almost ceremonial feel of lone drum and prayer bowls resonating through this great lightless space, the tension occasionally fractured by eruptions of bestial noise or massive industrial rumblings. This moves in a more cinematic direction on "Thee I Invoke" as dark magisterial synths rise and fall in waves of twilight drone over slow pounding tympani, the panic-stricken wail of synthetic strings and the hypnotic chanting of eyeless priests, these sounds transforming into a nightmare delirium of backward orchestras and howling choirs and inhuman tongues. An awakening presence is evoked on the hallucinatory ritual "Seven Candles Burning", wailing electronic voices sounding out their frustrations while the clanking of metal and chimes count out the seconds until oblivion. "The Calling" has what sound like ancient horns blasting in slow motion across a rain- drenched waste, and the disc ends with the dramatic climax of "Upon The Heath", where the orchestral voices and sounds rise again and are joined by a wall of drummers swaying in trance, ghastly vocalizations and distant mystic choirs trailing through the darkness like tendrils of smoke.
One of Funerary Call's more dark ambient -leaning albums, this is one that fans of Ruhr Hunter, Archon Satani, Zero Kama, Herbst9, Tenhornedbeast and the shamanic black drone-rituals of the Aural Hypnox label are also highly advised to check out. Comes in a gorgeous, super-striking dvd-sized digipack.
Track Samples:
Sample : Nightside Emanations
Sample : Thee I Invoke
Sample : Upon The Heath

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An awesome collection of mid-90s EP tracks from Japanese black thrashers Abigail, from earlier in their career before the band evolved into the pussy-obsessed necro-punks that have released such classic slabs of carnal metal as Forever Street Metal Bitch, Intercourse And Lust and Sweet Baby Metal Slut. It's hard not to gush about these guys; Abigail are one of my favorite "black metal" bands of all time, and certainly my favorite Japanese black metal band right alongside avant-garde weirdoes Sigh (the two bands have in fact shared members at various points over the past twenty years). However, Abigail's version of black metal is a cruder, snottier beast, much closer in sound and spirit to Venom and the newer blackened, speed-metal punk of bands like Midnight, Speedwolf, and Syphilitic Vaginas, even hinting at the grungy ultra-distorted punk stomp of bands like Malveillance and Sump at times, with ripping punk-influenced guitar riffs, Yasuyuki's weird snarling, choking vocal delivery, and lots of wickedly catchy hooks.
The twelve songs collected on The Lord Of Satan come from the band's split with Funeral Winds and the Confound Eternal and Descending from a Blackened Sky Eps, all from 1993 through 1996. While there's still TONS of that sloppy, blackened speedpunk going on with these early songs, there's also lots of actual black metal too, where the band will suddenly launch into a blazing blast attack (like on "We Shall Not Await The Dawn" and the feral savagery of "Swing Your Hammer"), something which you hear a lot less of on their newer albums. Abigail always throw in all kinds of neat, quirky touches into their black thrash as well, like the melodic backing "woah-oh's" on "Dawn" that add a weird Misfits flourish to the blackened blasting fury, and the KILLER synthesizer track "Darkness Steals" that closes the first side of the album and sounds like a cross between Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and a late 80's horror movie soundtrack. There's more creepy electronic music on the b-side with "Descending From A Blackened Sky", where sky-gazing synthesizers and a simple keyboard melody play over deep bass tones and a slow pounding drumbeat. These weird little interludes add a lot to the depraved dungeon-glow that surrounds Abigail's warped Nipponese blackthrash.
We've got both the vinyl edition of The Lord Of Satan that comes in a deluxe heavyweight glossy gatefold that also includes a black and white lyric insert and a large Abigail poster, and a high quality Cd edition.
Track Samples:
Sample : Attack With Spell
Sample : Darkness Steals
Sample : The Lord Of Satam
Sample : Descending From A Blackened Sky
Sample : COnfound Eternal

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Back in stock after more than two years of unavailability!
Now that several of their older titles on Regain are once again available to us, we have finally managed to get a bunch of Abruptum's import CDs in stock at Crucial Blast. I've been spending the last month getting reacquainted with these demented Swedish black metallers while working on writing up the reviews for these discs, and have basically fallen in love with 'em all over again. Out of all of the bands that made up the second wave of the Scandinavian black metal movement of the early 90's, there was none weirder than Abruptum. Their sound was a black pit of anguished screams and chaotic, mostly improvised ambient noise and mutated metal, and not surprisingly Abruptum were disliked by many black metal fans who came to their albums expecting something more, um, "structured".
Recently reissued by Regain, the Swedish black metal label run by one of the guys in Marduk, Abruptum's Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectére Me is the first album from the notorious Swedish improv-black metallers Abruptum, and even still this is some of the most insane and psychotic sounding "black metal" ever recorded. Both this and Abruptum's In Umbra Malaitae Ambulabo in Aternum in Triumpho Tenebrarum were originally released by Euronymous on his Deathlike Silence label before his murder, all of which has been documented in the book Lords Of Chaos, but Abruptum have remained something of a footnote in the history of Scandinavian black metal. Their music was simply too bizarre for most black metal fans to parse, and their earlier material feels like it has more in common with free jazz than traditional black metal. On this first album, the duo of Evil and It conjured a hellish hallucinatory fog of tortured screams, rumbling black ambience, mangled guitar noise and abstract riffs that start off sounding like black metal riffs but quickly turn into something different, strange noises and clankling sounds, pummeling double bass drumming and freeform improvised percussion, and hysterical blackened shrieks run through all kinds of effects processors. And the production is weird, with tape dropouts and sudden spikes in volume where guitars or vocals suddenly become VERY loud appearing all over the single, hour long track (split into two halves on this CD). This is also where the whole legend started that involved the members of Abruptum torturing themselves in the studio, recording themselves as they whipped, cut, burned themselves and poured boiling water on each other - totally ridiculous, but you can't deny that Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectére Me is some of the most evil music ever, a sonic manifestation of the demonic horror that is envisioned in Bosch's Hell and Fall Of The Damned paintings. Anyone that digs the fucked up, free-form "black metal"/ blackened noise of bands like Emit and Stalaggh needs to hear Abruptum, since this is where it all began. Crucial.

Track Samples:
Sample : Part 1
Sample : Part 2

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Now re-issued on cassette, which is the original format that this classic Rasta speedpunk album came out on back in '82...
With what is essentially ground zero for American hardcore, the Bad Brains’ self titled debut from 1982 (originally released by ROIR on cassette) remains one of the most influential and ferocious records to ever come out of the underground. The impact that this Lp had on extreme music as we know it is hard to overstate - just about every corner of metal and punk in the 80s was in some way touched by the music that these four young black musicians from Washington DC created here. Blending together reggae, dub, and a hyperspeed hardcore assault into an unclassifiable sound that is still as unique sounding as it was thirty years ago, this first Lp is an essential slab of genre-crushing music that's absolutely essential for fans of hardcore punk and adventurous thrash. It's got that iconic album cover image of the DC Capitol building being destroyed by a bolt of lightning from the heavens, and the songs are amazing, every one of the hardcore punk songs is a ripper and unforgettable, and even the reggae tracks fit perfectly on this record (and much more seamlessly than they would on later albums). At the time of it's release, this was the fastest shit EVER, instantly creating the template for hardcore and yet instantly defying the constricts of hardcore with it's touches of jazziness, the skilled musicianship, the wailing metal solos, HR's possessed vocal performance, the stop-on-a-dime time changes...it's a work of collective genius. This is one of my favorite records of all time, the euphoric punk thrash anthems "Don't Need It", "Sailin' On", an "Attitude", the ferocious rocker "The Regulator", the supersonic thrash of "Banned In DC", the dub reggae resistance anthem of "Leaving Babylon" complete with steel drum sounds and dub echo/reverb effects, all of this is crucial listening, now reissued by ROIR on cassette on the original classic tape format.
Track Samples:
Sample : Banned in D.C.
Sample : F.V.K. (Fearless Vampire Killers)
Sample : Pay to Cum
Sample : Right Brigade

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Track Samples:
Sample : Feast of the Damned
Sample : Sentenced to Life
Sample : Endless Corpse
Sample : Mother Abyss

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One of my favorite current black noise artists, Demonologists has consistently produced high-quality and supremely vicious assaults of demonic electronic noise over the past few years, with their full-length disc / art zine set Miscarriage Of The Soul being one of my personal highlights of the Crucial Blaze series. With this split cassette, Demonologists return to C-Blast with more of their hellish noise, and are accompanied by their comrades in sonic extremism, HHL.
Demonologists provide us with four tracks of their extreme blackened savagery on the a-side. Their signature harsh noise assault continues relentlessly across the side, beginning with the violent wall of distortion and layered feedback of "Consumed By Grief And Despair" and continuing through the Merzbowian roar of "Blood Noir" and "Bloodsucker Malpractice" to the brief closing chaos of "Child Sized Coffins". But like with most of this group's material, these brutal sex/death hallucinations are infested with additional sounds and layers of atmospheric drone that elevate this above a simple brute-force noise attack. In among the churning maelstroms of mid-range static roar and amplifier overload, Demonologists penetrate the ocean of noise with swaths of haunting celestial ambiance, monstrous screams, brief glimpses of corrupted church choirs, waves of majestic kosmische power come crashing down around spires of smoldering black electronics, and what sound like insanely deformed black metal guitar riffs seething and swarming within the frenzy of distortion.
The flipside of this tape features two long tracks from HHL, a noise artist from Portland, Oregon that has only appeared on the HN scene fairly recently, but whose recordings thus far have delivered a solid harsh noise aesthetic that on this tape falls in somewhere between the hypnotic, suffocating black walls of The Rita and the heaviest junk-noise avalanches of K2. Titled "Shame Gauge" and "Reflecting Disgust", these two ten minute pieces bombard the listener with a constant storm of low-end static, howling speaker abuse, and collapsing walls of metallic noise surging upwards in a powerblast of electronic destruction.
This is the harshest entry into the Infernal Machines series, without question. Issued in a full color sleeve in a limited edition of one hundred copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blood Noir
Sample : Child Sized Coffins
Sample : Shame Gauge
Sample : Reflecting Disgust

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One of my all-time favorite "black metal" albums is re-issued by Peaceville in a new double disc set that includes antire disc's worth of instrumental rehearsal tracks and one unreleased song from the Supervillain Outcast studio sessions, all exclusive to this release...
Possibly the avant-black metal album of 2007? After eight long years, Norwegian black metal mutants Dødheimsgard (now referring to themselves as simply "DHG") have risen anew with their fourth album, Supervillain Outcast, and man is this one an awesome, ambitious assault of sleek, futurist blackness. Doesn't come as too much of a shock really, since the band's last album (1999's 666 International) saw them evolving into a digitally-enhanced machine, fusing Dødheimsgard's raw, furious Norwegian black metal with dark industrial and electronica elements. But with Supervillain Outcast , Dødheimsgard have tripped into new obsidian realms, like a black metal warning being beamed back to us from some dystopian, Blade Runner future, and it's a grim, smog-filled vision that I've been blasting nonstop since we got this in. The album begins with "Dushman", a barely one-minute loop of Muslimgauze style Middle Eastern ambience that explodes into the atonal black metal fury of "Vendetta Assassin", which morphs into a brutally catchy machine-groove thrash attack overlapped with awesome synthoid textures and weird insectoid bleeps flaring at the corners of your peripheral vision. "The Snuff That Dreams Are Made Of" is one of my favorite jams on the album, a crushing martial rhythm and precision deathriff onslaught carried on the silicon wings of digitized powerdrill whirrs and synthesized Middle Eastern fanfares. "Foe X Foe" emerges as a mass of bizarre, waltzing rhythm and fractured death metal. And things defintiely get weirder, more unearthly: "All Is Not Self" sounds like the Psychedelic Furs surrounded by stuttering breakbeats, factory sounds, and choral chanting, while "Secret Identity" is a haunting interlude of clean, harmonized chanting. Songs are tied together with found-sounds and ethno-ambient prettiness. Whiplash breakbeats scuttle beneath syncopated, cybernetically-enhanced Meshuggah-esque grooves. The vocals are handled by newcomer Kvohst (formerly of black metallers Code), and he unleashes an amazing array of voices that move through brutal roars, doo-wop harmonies, creepy understated whispering, clean darkwave-pop croons. And as harsh and CRUSHING and mindbending as Supervillain Outcast is from start to finish, it's equally an amazingly catchy, hooky album, I mean really catchy, I've been blasting this disc in it's entirety all week and still haven't gotten my fill of Dødheimsgard's near-future hallucination. An awesome, trippy, breakbeat-infused black metal/industrial/dance/glitch/tech-metal/gloom-pop epic. Fucking amazing. Definitely in the running for my favorite metal album of the year. The album artwork is awesome too, depicting a manga style cloaked figure sending out hordes of death's-head flies swarming over a murky, polluted city skyline. Highly, HIGHLY recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Senseoffender
Sample : Addicted to Perdition [Instrumental]
Sample : Ghostforce Soul Constrictor
Sample : 21st Century Devil
Sample : Vendetta Assassin
Sample : Apocalypticism

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

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Electric Wizard's debut album is available once again on vinyl, released by Rise Above in a striking gatefold package...
In honor of Electric Wizard's recent induction into the Decibel Magazine "Hall Of Fame", which was just awarded to their milestone album Dopethrone from 2000, we've got all of their crucial deluxe re-issues available through Crucial Blast for you doomhounds that are missing these mighty platters from yer library. Repackaged in sweet digipack cases with enhanced and expanded artwork, brand new liner notes, great photos captured during each album's respective era, and bonus tracks, these Electric Wizard reissues are essential for any real fan of dope-huffing, spine crushing British DOOM.
Originally released in 1995, Electric Wizard's self-titled debut emerged from the pit with an elephantine heaviness that was pretty well unmatched. Available here in the States as a double CD along with 1997's Come My Fanatics, Electric Wizard is finally available as a standalone album in a sweet digipack with all of of Dave Patchett's amazing psychedelic artwork, and with two previously unavailable bonus tracks, "Illimitable Nebulie" and "Mourning Prayer Part 1" from the unreleased Doom Chapter demo. While their debut wasn't nearly as wrecked and planet-crushing as their classic Dopethrone album, this is still a devestating dose of superheavy stoner doom, running the stoned science fiction visions and Lovecraftian nightmares of band leader Jus Oborn through cosmic post-Sabbath stomp and blue-collar nihilism ("But look around you, what have you got / no hope, no future, no fuckin' job..."). Absolute crushing hippie doom from the darkside. Essential.
Track Samples:
Sample : Devil's Bride
Sample : Mourning Prayer

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Elend's masterpiece of blackened orchestral majesty The Umbersun was first released on Music For Nations in the late 90's, but it's more recent release history has been a little strange, with two different re-issues of the album comng out on different labels, the first through Polish metal re-issue label Metal Mind, the other a more definitive edition from the French Orphika label. The Orphika edition is the one to get as it was re-mastered under the direction of the musicians themselves and also boasts a gorgeous package design, but as it's also very hard for me to get in stock, I'm also carrying the Metal Mind version from 2006 which comes in a digipack with twelve-page booklet and features the original MFN album artwork.
One of the most harrowing and apocalyptic neo-classical albums of the 90s, The Umbersun was the fourth album from the French/Austrian ensemble Elend, whose name translates from the German to "misery". And that's just one of the dark emotions that this group evokes through their lush and grandiose music; some other key emotional responses to this album might include awe, dread, even abject fear. As the final installment in Elend's ambitious Officium Tenebrarum trilogy, 1998's The Umbersun is their masterpiece, at least in my opinion; a Satanic liturgical opera that centers around Lucifer's denouncement of God, and the Morning Star's subsequent fall from grace into darkness. It's told through a stunning mix of industrial/electronic elements and actual strings, brass and other orchestral instrumentation, and even features the presence of an actual twenty-voice choir; a symphony of magisterial orchestral music with soaring operatic female singing, vast choral parts, wailing witch-howls, and some judiciously used harsher male vocals that appear in a number of spoken word parts, which at times approach an almost black metal level of intensity. These voices are set against the spiraling minor key creepiness of Elend's orchestral backdrop of bombastic French horns, booming kettledrums, haunting strings, piano and droning brass, with subtle industrial undercurrents appearing as dark electronic ambience and distant grinding textures. In many ways, the music of The Umbersun is a direct precursor to the current work of Gnaw Their Tongues, who also combines industrial elements with a blackened form of classical orchestral music; this album will also be of interest to fans of Shinjuku Thief, especially their Witch Trilogy. A classic of hellishly beautiful dark orchestral grandeur, and one of the finest examples of 90s era neo-classical blackness.
Track Samples:
Sample : Apocalypse
Sample : In The Embrasure Of Heaven

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Ah, some new noise-scum from Fetus Eaters! It's been awhile since the last dose of Fetus came through here (the split with Maggot Colony from a couple of years ago), but this gang of Southern Cali weirdoes (led by Kevin Fetus, also of experimental creep-noise sculptors Bacteria Cult and Relapse grinders Murder Construct) is still at it, spewing out bizarre grindcore with a seriously tweaked experimental streak, often throwing free jazz horns and broken musical toys and insane vocal hysteria into their stew of blastbeats and barbaric death metal riffing. Their track "Praise Fetus" is a new blast of crazed lysergic grind from the band, and is reason enough to puick this little platter up (only if you have a turntable capable of playing a 5" record, of course). They share this 5" with another Cali band called Megatron who blasts away through four brief songs of extremely noisy and chaotic Infest-style powerviolence complete with lyrics that are totally obsessed with Transformers, natch.
This tiny disc of weirdo ultra-blast is limited to three hundred copies and comes on purple vinyl in a full color sleeve.

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The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths. Featuring three extended descents into jet-black drift, funereal chamber music, monstrous metallic noise, booming ritualistic percussion, slit-throat recitations of formless horror, and further abyssal abominations.
Fragments From The Aethyr presents a triptych of long, sprawling pieces that descend through dark layers of cinematic sonic horror. The music shifts between violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music backed by booming kettledrums and traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead, to blasts of crushing shapeless doom where huge metallic chords thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden dronemetal rumbling through the strata of Funerary Call's demonic industrial nightmares. The sound of Fragments sometimes resembles a Bela Bartok piece drifting through a fog of black-mass ambience and the murmerings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power, as on the nearly twenty minute centrepiece of the album "Fragments".
There are noisy elements that appear here that threaten to push the music into ear-destroying industrial cacophony at times, but even when the sound is at it's most chaotic, it's held together by the searing melodies of the stringed instruments, tethering the plumes of black industrial noise to the graveyard ambience that soaks deep into the surface of the album.
Absolute lightlessness from this seminal artist, highly recommended to fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Megaptera, Nordvargr, TenHornedBeast, MZ.412 and Aghast. Released in a matte-finish digipack from Crucial Blast.
Track Samples:
Sample : Libation
Sample : Fragments
Sample : Transference From The Void

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Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.

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Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.

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Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.

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Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.

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Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.

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This is a combo package that includes the Cd digipack with the Funerary Call shirt.
Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.
The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths. Featuring three extended descents into jet-black drift, funereal chamber music, monstrous metallic noise, booming ritualistic percussion, slit-throat recitations of formless horror, and further abyssal abominations.
Fragments From The Aethyr presents a triptych of long, sprawling pieces that descend through dark layers of cinematic sonic horror. The music shifts between violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music backed by booming kettledrums and traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead, to blasts of crushing shapeless doom where huge metallic chords thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden dronemetal rumbling through the strata of Funerary Call's demonic industrial nightmares. The sound of Fragments sometimes resembles a Bela Bartok piece drifting through a fog of black-mass ambience and the murmerings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power, as on the nearly twenty minute centrepiece of the album "Fragments".
There are noisy elements that appear here that threaten to push the music into ear-destroying industrial cacophony at times, but even when the sound is at it's most chaotic, it's held together by the searing melodies of the stringed instruments, tethering the plumes of black industrial noise to the graveyard ambience that soaks deep into the surface of the album.
Absolute lightlessness from this seminal artist, highly recommended to fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Megaptera, Nordvargr, TenHornedBeast, MZ.412 and Aghast. Released in a matte-finish digipack from Crucial Blast.
Track Samples:
Sample : Libation
Sample : Fragments
Sample : Transference From The Void

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This is a combo package that includes the Cd digipack with the Funerary Call shirt.
Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.
The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths. Featuring three extended descents into jet-black drift, funereal chamber music, monstrous metallic noise, booming ritualistic percussion, slit-throat recitations of formless horror, and further abyssal abominations.
Fragments From The Aethyr presents a triptych of long, sprawling pieces that descend through dark layers of cinematic sonic horror. The music shifts between violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music backed by booming kettledrums and traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead, to blasts of crushing shapeless doom where huge metallic chords thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden dronemetal rumbling through the strata of Funerary Call's demonic industrial nightmares. The sound of Fragments sometimes resembles a Bela Bartok piece drifting through a fog of black-mass ambience and the murmerings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power, as on the nearly twenty minute centrepiece of the album "Fragments".
There are noisy elements that appear here that threaten to push the music into ear-destroying industrial cacophony at times, but even when the sound is at it's most chaotic, it's held together by the searing melodies of the stringed instruments, tethering the plumes of black industrial noise to the graveyard ambience that soaks deep into the surface of the album.
Absolute lightlessness from this seminal artist, highly recommended to fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Megaptera, Nordvargr, TenHornedBeast, MZ.412 and Aghast. Released in a matte-finish digipack from Crucial Blast.
Track Samples:
Sample : Libation
Sample : Fragments
Sample : Transference From The Void

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This is a combo package that includes the Cd digipack with the Funerary Call shirt.
Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.
The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths. Featuring three extended descents into jet-black drift, funereal chamber music, monstrous metallic noise, booming ritualistic percussion, slit-throat recitations of formless horror, and further abyssal abominations.
Fragments From The Aethyr presents a triptych of long, sprawling pieces that descend through dark layers of cinematic sonic horror. The music shifts between violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music backed by booming kettledrums and traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead, to blasts of crushing shapeless doom where huge metallic chords thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden dronemetal rumbling through the strata of Funerary Call's demonic industrial nightmares. The sound of Fragments sometimes resembles a Bela Bartok piece drifting through a fog of black-mass ambience and the murmerings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power, as on the nearly twenty minute centrepiece of the album "Fragments".
There are noisy elements that appear here that threaten to push the music into ear-destroying industrial cacophony at times, but even when the sound is at it's most chaotic, it's held together by the searing melodies of the stringed instruments, tethering the plumes of black industrial noise to the graveyard ambience that soaks deep into the surface of the album.
Absolute lightlessness from this seminal artist, highly recommended to fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Megaptera, Nordvargr, TenHornedBeast, MZ.412 and Aghast. Released in a matte-finish digipack from Crucial Blast.
Track Samples:
Sample : Libation
Sample : Fragments
Sample : Transference From The Void

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This is a combo package that includes the Cd digipack with the Funerary Call shirt.
Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.
The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths. Featuring three extended descents into jet-black drift, funereal chamber music, monstrous metallic noise, booming ritualistic percussion, slit-throat recitations of formless horror, and further abyssal abominations.
Fragments From The Aethyr presents a triptych of long, sprawling pieces that descend through dark layers of cinematic sonic horror. The music shifts between violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music backed by booming kettledrums and traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead, to blasts of crushing shapeless doom where huge metallic chords thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden dronemetal rumbling through the strata of Funerary Call's demonic industrial nightmares. The sound of Fragments sometimes resembles a Bela Bartok piece drifting through a fog of black-mass ambience and the murmerings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power, as on the nearly twenty minute centrepiece of the album "Fragments".
There are noisy elements that appear here that threaten to push the music into ear-destroying industrial cacophony at times, but even when the sound is at it's most chaotic, it's held together by the searing melodies of the stringed instruments, tethering the plumes of black industrial noise to the graveyard ambience that soaks deep into the surface of the album.
Absolute lightlessness from this seminal artist, highly recommended to fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Megaptera, Nordvargr, TenHornedBeast, MZ.412 and Aghast. Released in a matte-finish digipack from Crucial Blast.
Track Samples:
Sample : Libation
Sample : Fragments
Sample : Transference From The Void

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This is a combo package that includes the Cd digipack with the Funerary Call shirt.
Released in tandem with the new Funerary Call album Fragments From The Aethyr, this exclusive shirt design from Crucial Blast features the striking album art from writer / artist / musician / occultist Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule printed on a black Gildan garment in detailed black and dark gold inks. This high quality print is in my opinion one of the best shirt designs that we've issued through Crucial Blast to date. Available in sizes small through XXL.
The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths. Featuring three extended descents into jet-black drift, funereal chamber music, monstrous metallic noise, booming ritualistic percussion, slit-throat recitations of formless horror, and further abyssal abominations.
Fragments From The Aethyr presents a triptych of long, sprawling pieces that descend through dark layers of cinematic sonic horror. The music shifts between violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music backed by booming kettledrums and traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead, to blasts of crushing shapeless doom where huge metallic chords thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden dronemetal rumbling through the strata of Funerary Call's demonic industrial nightmares. The sound of Fragments sometimes resembles a Bela Bartok piece drifting through a fog of black-mass ambience and the murmerings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power, as on the nearly twenty minute centrepiece of the album "Fragments".
There are noisy elements that appear here that threaten to push the music into ear-destroying industrial cacophony at times, but even when the sound is at it's most chaotic, it's held together by the searing melodies of the stringed instruments, tethering the plumes of black industrial noise to the graveyard ambience that soaks deep into the surface of the album.
Absolute lightlessness from this seminal artist, highly recommended to fans of Gnaw Their Tongues, Megaptera, Nordvargr, TenHornedBeast, MZ.412 and Aghast. Released in a matte-finish digipack from Crucial Blast.
Track Samples:
Sample : Libation
Sample : Fragments
Sample : Transference From The Void

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Finally got this minor masterwork of Finnish deathnoise back on the shelf...
Funeral Of Souls is one of the latest black-acid industrial hallucinations from Finnish noise artist Ilkka Vekka, whose Haare project has produced some of the heaviest dins of blackened racket in recent memory. And on this album, Haare is blacker than ever, unleashing another apocalyptic maelstrom of sound across two monstrous tracks (each one nearly twenty minutes long), each one a roaring, rushing mass of amoebic synthesizer chaos and murky amplifier rumble, metallic scrape and cryptic hidden melodies.
The first of these tracks "Psychiatric Disasters" begins with roaring blizzard winds whipping around pounding percussive noises and murky, buried drones, like standing at the edge of a raging inferno, witnessing a stave church burning to the ground in the middle of the night while snow and wind violently sweeps through the air. Distant tremolo-like buzz swarms at the edges of sound, amid clouds of various effects and electronics, and whispers and shouts and goblinoid shrieks echo through the wintry chaos as oil drums and scrap metal are hurled into the ashes and, deep below, a steady orchestral rumbling emanates from beneath the Earth's crust.
"Funeral Of Souls" drops that swarming black buzz even deeper into the fog and summons great swirling clouds of delay-soaked feedback and echoing guitars along with random percussion lost in the churning nightmist. Strange otherworldly melodies and soaring seabeast songs rise up out of this chaos, roaring guitar drones and shapeless black sludge writhing within monstrous black clouds of swarming flies, with ultra-distorted, blackened vocals appearing after a couple of minutes to guide Haare's monstrous psychedelic violence straight down into the pit.
Track Samples:
Sample : Funeral Of Souls
Sample : Psychiatric Disasters

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Mr. Hutchinson's recent cassette offering Brutal Mechanics is another bout of extreme industrial bludgeon from the prolific UK noise artist (he's also been assaulting us with other noise projects like Execution Support Act, Pollutive Static, and Meatgrinder). As with the other recordings presented under his actual name, this leans towards the rough, skull-cracking end of the junk noise spectrum, forming each of the two long tracks around a cacophony of shrieking high-end feedback that squeals and whistles through the whole ordeal, a constant crashing of scrap-metal debris and heavy machinery being violently upended and hurled around the room, and a really thick haze of low-fi muck that gloms onto the whole production. The first side is called "Ruin", and offers up a cathartic rush of junkyard chaos and trash-compactor destruction in the vein of older K2 works, brutal and merciless in it's abrasive delivery. Side two is untitled, but is more of the same, with less metal-on-metal abuse and more of a mangled electronic attack at the forefront, lacing the low-fi noise and feedback with a thick, black drone buzzing underneath almost the entire track. These sounds come surrounded by collages of grotesque full-color imagery from Bitewerks that marry the sheet-metal violence to vivid visions of oral subjugation, deformed children, cold spiked stretches of barbed-wire, and vintage bondage pics that enhance the overall atmosphere of filthiness and physical collapse. Doesn't seem to be any real over-arching concept behind this tape, just pure psychedelic carnage, vomited out of a machine-shop in hell. Hutchinson might not be adding a whole lot to the junk-noise aesthetic that was pioneered by K2, but this sure does inspire me to rip something apart...
Released as a professionally manufactured cassette with on-shell printing, limited to 100 copies.

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Initially making himself known to C-Blast by way of his older death industrial/power electronics projects Meatgrinder and Execution Support Act and his excellent harsh wall project Pollutive Static, UK noise artist Hal Hutchinson has since gone on to release more and more material with more of a "junk-noise" approach under his own name, and so far everything that I've picked up has been pretty damn good. As you might expect if you're a fan of this sort of extreme scrap yard mayhem, Hutchinson springs off from the sheet-metal avalanche sounds of mid-90s K2, and throws on an extra layer of filthy low-fi skuzz onto his recordings to add a little more savagery to the mix. This entry into the RRRecords Recycled Music Series from 2010 is another tape-only release in this vein, presenting two long tracks per side of murky, filthy junk-noise that (likely due to the "recycled" cassette being used) sounds like the rhythmic grinding of pneumatic machines and massive bilges operating beneath a heavy layer of peat and black tar, or the sound of an ancient barge slowly disassembling as it struggles to make it's way across a vast black ocean. Compared to the other Hutchinson tape reviewed on this week's list Brutal Mechanics, this sounds like a total sludge-fest, the grinding, rumbling noises and clanking rhythms cloaked beneath a heavy low-end presence, the sounds slowed down to a shambling, corroded crawl, interrupted by the occasional blast of ear-rending feedback or high-end metallic screech. It probably ranks as the "heaviest" of Hutchinson's "solo" recordings under his own name, and Hutchinson himself compares it to his Freak Animal album Taste Of Iron (which I haven't had a chance to hear yet, but aim to pick up at my earliest opportunity).
Track Samples:
Sample : Untitled
Sample : Untitled

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A stunning new album of jet-black synthdoom from Josh Hydeman, who you may or may not recognize as one of the guys from nudist power electronics creepos Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck. Working solo, Hydeman crafts six expansive tracks of heavy, doomed synthesizer music on Madison's Fence that carries over some of the same dreadful vibes as his other, harsher project. The atmosphere here is a much more restrained one, though, the long tracks carved out of droning layered keyboards and buzzing black electronics, each piece casting a thick twilight gloom across the album. This permanent gloom really takes hold on the second track "“Ash Covered Field", where Hydeman starts to weave in some heavy, murky guitar work that almost resembles a doom metal riff stripped of most of it's distortion, sent adrift over the thick textural buzz and gleaming obsidian electronics, like an Earth song permeated with wheezing ambient synths and industrial grit. That's followed by more synth-centric pieces where the eerie melodies cycle over and over, hinting at shades of John Carpenter's early film scores while at the same time infesting the corners of these tracks with seething power electronic elements.
This potent combination of doomed guitar crawl and black ambient synth continues on over to the second side, which begins with my favorite track on the album "Deadhorse". Again, it reminds me a lot of Carpenter's gleaming analogue 80's soundtracks, but with that glacial guitar clanging and creeping over those icy keys, it becomes something vastly more apocalyptic. The heaviest moment on Madison's Fence comes at the very end on the track "Volcano" when the guitars surge forward in a crushing wave of blackened Sunn O)))-style ambient sludge, washing over the faint swirling electronics.
A fucking fantastic blast of subterranean dread, highly recommended to fans of abyssal black electronics a la Wilt, Luasa Raelon, Angel Of Decay, and Theologian...

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One thing I don't come across often is creepy, heavy Icelandic psych-rock, so I was instantly curious about the band Icecross when I first heard about them a couple of years ago on some message board conversation about early 70s proto-metal bands. It took forever to finally track their music down as it's gone in and out of print over the years, being released on a number of different labels as well as being bootlegged a couple of times. Eventually I came to what appears to be the most recent version of the self-titled album from this obscure band, a rare Italian (I think?) import of the only record that the sinister Icelandic psych-rockers Icecross ever released during their short career. Several of the songs on Icecross have a definite proto-metal feel, and fans of Captain Beyond, Dust, early Pentagram and Sabbath would probably dig Icecross, but these guys were more of a rollicking psychedelic rock outfit with progressive touches. A really dark one though, much darker than most bands I've heard from this era; the songs are laced with creepy Middle Eastern flavored solos and ominous lurching riffs, and the singer occasionally puts these weird demonic distortion and effects on his voice. The weird occult-themed lyrics and wailing possessed vocals really kick in on the bizarre nightmare psych of "1999", but even the more pastoral, folky songs like "A Sad Mans Story" are seriously dark and gloomy, the moody singing drifting over softly strummed guitars and tinkling piano beneath low, black clouds. The blasphemous psychedelic prog rock of "Jesus Freaks" is probably where Icecross gets most of their notoriety from, with it's evil sounding vibe and the heavy, quasi-Sabbathian crunch; hard to believe that these guys were producing something that heavy and dark this early in the decade. There's a couple of exceptions to all of the doom n' gloom, like the good-time boogie rock of "Wandering Around", but for the most part Icecross's music is at least partially cloaked in shadow, their loose, shambling psychedelia revealing a cloven hoof more than once throughout the album. Who should really be checking Icecross out are fans of all of those newer occult rock revivalists like Witchcraft, Graveyard, and Devil's Blood along with hardcore fans of vintage macabre psych/prog like Coven, Black Widow, and Jacula/Antonius Rex...
Track Samples:
Sample : 1999
Sample : Jesus Freaks
Sample : Nightmare

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Isis's highly influential 2004 album is once again re-issued on vinyl, this time on black wax and presented in a heavyweight gatefold jacket printed on reverse-board stock for the 2012 edition.
Released in a heavy gatefold package with different artwork than the CD release, this is a stunning vinyl edition of Isis's 2004 album Panopticon, an album that remains one of their most powerful and thought-provoking records. Panopticon was the band's third album, a sprawling concept piece whose themes and artwork centered around complex prison designs that were created by the 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and later extrapolated upon by Foucault. The idea behind the Panopticon is that an enormous prison system could be maintained by using an all-seeing observer positioned in the center of a massive circular structure, and this Orwellian notion fuels the epic, expansive music. And musically, this album sees Isis moving further from the obvious Neurosis influence in the first two albums and into their own sound, a more melodic and dreamy version of Neurosis's crushing dirge metal that still uses awesome downtuned sludge and earthshaking riffs when the songs explode into their bombastic crescendos, but relies more on brooding mathrock and lush, Ride-like shoegaze for the greater part of their dark, epic riffscapes. On Panopticon, the music is more thoughtful and emotive than ever, the songs carefully crafted slabs of melody and minor key riffs that contrast with explosive metallic crush, a perfect fusion of Mogwai and Neurosis.
All of the seven tracks on Panopticon are majestic smoldering rock epics that build inevitably to release, and the songs are strengthened by all of the clean vocals that Aaron Turner started to utilize more on this album. As heavy as this is, Isis was by now already evolving into something much more avant-rock than sludge metal, a massively heavy post rock outfit with crushing riffs and haunting angular guitars, even sounding like some beefed up version of Slint at times, but with a seething hardcore intensity burning away beneath the songs. Heavy stuff both musically and thematically, and it makes this still one of my favorite Isis records. Recommended.

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This split album features exclusive material from husband-and-wife sludge duo Jucifer and Canadian doom mutants Show Of Bedlam, with the common denominator being the presence of powerful female vocalists fronting a quirky brand of slow-motion crush.
Jucifer's "side" of the split is first, and the duo steamroll over you with four monstrous tracks (titled of rumbling, putrid deathsludge that's in the same vein as their awesome Throned In Blood album from 2010. Look, I've been a fan of Jucifer's going back to their earlier sludge-pop stuff on Velocette, and that stuff is still pretty great, but this new atavistic death metal thing that they're doing now is fucking awesome, part Hellhammer filth, part Melvins stomp. These songs are among the heaviest the band has ever done, gruesome slow-motion sludge and vomitous feedback drone oozing across the earthquake drums of "Hiroshima", and then they tear into the crusty metalpunk of "Invincible Armies", a throwback to classic speed metal filth, Amber delivering her vocals in a classic speed metal howl. "Good Provider" is another ripper, speedy crossover thrash caked in sludgy black blood and hot tar, weaving breakneck through blasting speed and angular riffing, and then "Soldiers Of White Light" drops in with it's swampy groove, and lo-and-behold Amber comes back in crooning in that haunting little-girl voice of hers, and it sounds wicked up against the noxious low-fi sludge.
A tough act to follow in any situation, but man, Show Of Bedlam manage to knock my block off, even after the intensity of the Jucifer tracks. Being another sludgy, doom-laden metal band with a strong female singer, this Montreal-based band (which includes members of French Canadian sludge outfits Seized and Toward Darkness) is a good fit with Jucifer. Their five songs are slow, pounding dirges wrapped around a pounding rhythm section, huge classic doom metal riffs, and the singer's somewhat saucy delivery; that might suggest that this is another band along the lines of Blood Ceremony and Jex Thoth, but while fans of those bands would probably really dig Show Of Bedlam's sound, this is something different, a weirder take on dark doom, the vocals more "punk". They almost remind me of a cross between Courtney Love and Poly Styrene when she lets out the wild yelps and narcotized groans, but the music itself is more evil too, shimmering guitars laid over HUGE riffs, like a weird mutation of post-punk and Saint Vitus. I'd love to hear more from 'em...
Track Samples:
Sample : Jucifer - Hiroshima
Sample : Jucifer - Soldiers Of White Light
Sample : Show Of Bedlam - 6th Floor
Sample : Show Of Bedlam - Transparent Wig

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One of two Kaniba albums that were released on the Autumn Winds label, Death Songs was the last recording put out under this name prior to changing to Kanibal Hymn. As with the other Kaniba disc, this pretty much picks up right where Finnish black-noise artist J. Dread (the guy behind each of these projects) left off with Terrorgoat, exploring more of his death-obsessed industrial visions and chthonic atmospherics. Seven lengthy tracks of dark minimal ambience and tribal drumming, pulsating glacial synths and demonic menace make up the album; the opener "Leland sets the dire mood with a wash of whirring electronics and vague blackened drift that plays out over pounding polyrhythmic drumming, somewhat reminiscent of the ritual death ambience of Archon Satani. The following track brings in a wider array of sounds, eerie looping noises and muted melodies spinning in an abyss surrounded by bits of digital glitchery and slimy, monstrous reverberations that waft up from below. Eerie clock chimes swirl around the cold metallic drones and nightmarish electronic muck of "Afraid I Was Too Late". Blown, distorted noise seeps into "I Have Made It Through The Tunnel", folding its corrosive tentacles around the deformed Victrola melody that warbles in the background, and the ominous sound of the doom-laden bass and the pounding pneumatic rhythms roaring through the blackness. An almost Goblin-esque chiming of bells forms over more pounding drums drives the bad-dream haziness of "She Stood In The Crowd..." (one of the album's best tracks, I think) through more of that brutal (but controlled) noise, and "Koresh" resembles a 70s horror movie score being performed by The Human Quena Orchestra with its multiple layers of haunting soft keyboard-creep descending down over the distant rumbling dread of machinelike heaviness. The very last track "Hush Now Little Baby, Don't Cry" is the most jarring, as a harsh bright metallic rhythm becomes the focus of the track, repeating over and over as ominous string-like tones. Even with that closer, this is one of Kaniba/Kanibal Hymn's most subdued recordings, opting for a morbid death-ambient sound over the often brutal black noise of his other offerings. Limited to 300 copies, and packaged in a simple but striking black and white sleeve.
Track Samples:
Sample : Leland
Sample : She Was Screaming As She Fell But I Never Heard Her Hit
Sample : I Have Made It Through The Tunnel
Sample : Boresh

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What a delicious piece of junkie vomit this is. Used to have to offer up body fluids and/or serious cash to get my hands on any actual physical documents of these infamous Boston sludgepunks, but no longer. Bringing Back The Dead is a limited edition live set that features Kilslug slogging through a bunch of old and new songs at their twentieth year anniversary show in Boston in 2007. The eight songs on the disc are pulled from all across their tiny discography ("Crying In The Church", "Into A Hole", "666", "March Of The Skeletons", "Spread For Satan", "Autopsy Performing", "Power Of Darkness") and also includes the classic "Warlocks Witches Demons" off the 1982 7" of the same name, and a handful of songs from their one and only album Answer The Call. There's also some stuff in this set that I'd never heard before. If you're not already a slobbering disciple of the cult of Kilslug, just imagine a more evil, more fucked up, and much heavier version of Flipper, with way more of Sabbath influence going on, dressed up in all kinds of fucked-up Satanic imagery, transgressive behavior, drug abuse, and pill-fueled visions. I can't imagine Eyehategod ever existing if it weren't for the slimy drug-addled sludge that Kilslug pioneered (in their own brain damaged way) back in the early 80s. Ugly, catchy, slobbering retardo-punk heaviness that sounds just as fucked and violent here as it did two decades ago. These guys definitely did not mellow with age, especially lead singer Larry Lifeless (who also played in the equally messed-up sludge metal band Upsidedown Cross). That creep sounds as out of his skull as ever during this set (his stage banter is fucking hilarious), moaning and whining and honking through these slow motion anthems to Satan and dejection, and I was just waiting for a jet of puke to come flying out of my speakers whilst listening to this here in the office at top volume. Vile. Available as both a limited-edition cdr release in hand-assembled packaging, and a vinyl version in a spray-painted sleeve limited to 300 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Crying In The Church
Sample : Power Of Darkness
Sample : Spread For Satan
Sample : Warlocks, Witches & Demons

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What a delicious piece of junkie vomit this is. Used to have to offer up body fluids and/or serious cash to get my hands on any actual physical documents of these infamous Boston sludgepunks, but no longer. Bringing Back The Dead is a limited edition live set that features Kilslug slogging through a bunch of old and new songs at their twentieth year anniversary show in Boston in 2007. The eight songs on the disc are pulled from all across their tiny discography ("Crying In The Church", "Into A Hole", "666", "March Of The Skeletons", "Spread For Satan", "Autopsy Performing", "Power Of Darkness") and also includes the classic "Warlocks Witches Demons" off the 1982 7" of the same name, and a handful of songs from their one and only album Answer The Call. There's also some stuff in this set that I'd never heard before. If you're not already a slobbering disciple of the cult of Kilslug, just imagine a more evil, more fucked up, and much heavier version of Flipper, with way more of Sabbath influence going on, dressed up in all kinds of fucked-up Satanic imagery, transgressive behavior, drug abuse, and pill-fueled visions. I can't imagine Eyehategod ever existing if it weren't for the slimy drug-addled sludge that Kilslug pioneered (in their own brain damaged way) back in the early 80s. Ugly, catchy, slobbering retardo-punk heaviness that sounds just as fucked and violent here as it did two decades ago. These guys definitely did not mellow with age, especially lead singer Larry Lifeless (who also played in the equally messed-up sludge metal band Upsidedown Cross). That creep sounds as out of his skull as ever during this set (his stage banter is fucking hilarious), moaning and whining and honking through these slow motion anthems to Satan and dejection, and I was just waiting for a jet of puke to come flying out of my speakers whilst listening to this here in the office at top volume. Vile. Available as both a limited-edition cdr release in hand-assembled packaging, and a vinyl version in a spray-painted sleeve limited to 300 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Crying In The Church
Sample : Power Of Darkness
Sample : Spread For Satan
Sample : Warlocks, Witches & Demons

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Iron Lung Records brings us another killer slab of mutant hardcore punk, this time from a Pittsburgh band called Kim Phuc (featuring Ben Smartnick who also briefly played in both Circle Of Dead Children and Integrity) who debut here with their first full length Lp. The band plays heavy, driving modern punk on Copsucker with a sinister vibe lurking through all of the songs, which you can chalk up to the guitarist's use of menacing minor key riffs and eerie leads. In fact, there's a lot of stuff on here in the guitars that reminds me of classic West Coast death rock like Christian Death or Burning Image, but that vague influence is absorbed into a much heavier, more aggressive hardcore energy that gets downright brutal on some of the metallic, staccato riffing and bursts of murderous speed that appear all over the Lp; this approach reminds me a little of Crime Desire, though these guys sound about ten times meaner. In addition, the singer has this cool pissed-off yowl that adds a lot to Kim Phuc's overall menace, a delivery that kind of reminds me of Keith Morris (Black Flag/Circle Jerks), but it might just be the general Cali hardcore influence in Kim Phuc's music that's putting that notion in my head. The record never gets boring, the songs alternating between fast-paced rippers, driving almost motorik mid-tempo power, and slower, grinding dirges in equal measure, all tainted with that twisted, noisy, subtly ghoulish vibe. One of my favorite new offerings from the Iron Lung camp, for sure.
Only available on vinyl, and includes an 11" x 17" poster.
Track Samples:
Sample : Black Triangle
Sample : Equinox
Sample : Razorblades

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Kylesa's psych-crust assault Time Will Fuse It's Worth is finally back in print on vinyl courtesy of Alternative Tentacles, remastered and packaged with revised package design and new artwork.
Ok, so now that I've had my ass kicked by Kylesa's latest album Time Will Fuse It's Worth, I'm moving in reverse through their discog to try and sort out what I missed when I turned my ears to their previous works in the past. To Walk A Middle Course is the Savannah, GA band's 2005 debut for Prosthetic, and while they hadn't yet achieved the dense psych-crust drive they locked in on with Time..., this album is a solid trudge through Kylesa's alchemical psych/sludge/crust with a dry production that gives this a rawer vibe a la the 90's metallic crust works of His Hero Is Gone and other Prank Recs affiliated sounds. Dueling male/female vocals a la X give the songs a desperate, pleading edge, and when they are juxtaposed against the epic, emotional melodies, it's powerful stuff. The music draws on a variety of sounds ranging from nasty Peaceville/Nausea/Axegrinder crust, post-punk/goth rock hooks, burly stoner-doom raveups, 80's style hardcore, watery psychedelic effects and cool electronic ambient loops, darkly atmospheric post-rock , Mastodon/Keelhaul progmetalcore, Sabbathian sludge, all mashed together into a nasty, fang-bearing attack of scorched-earth, bottom-heavy lysergic crustmetal, the collision of crucial apocalyptic punk with the kinds of artistic manuevers Neurosis has experimented with since the mid 90's. Highly recommended.

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Kylesa's psych-crust assault Time Will Fuse It's Worth is finally back in print on vinyl courtesy of Alternative Tentacles, remastered and packaged with revised package design and new artwork.
I dunno, I always thought that Kylesa were ok, even saw them a couple times right around the time that they first got together and thought their live presence was pretty intense, but for whatever reason their music never really blew me away or anything in past days. I was never the biggest Damad fan either, not that the two bands sounded all that alike, but the whole recipe just never fired off my synapses in any big way. So it was pretty weird when I listened to Time Will Fuse It's Worth for the first time and it finally registered, frankly sending me into paroxysms of headbanging ecstasy. Their latest album is the first with their new dual drummer lineup from what I can tell, and it's seriously heavy and rocking, rocking in a way that Torche is rocking, cruise missile rocking, totally massive blowing-out-of-my-speakers-at-top-volume rocking, the dual vocals of Phillip Cove and Laura Pleasant frantically clambering over righteous drop-tuned riffs that rage and steamroll like Matt Pike via High On Fire on bennies, rumbling mantric metal propelled at a neck-wilting mid-tempo pace through most of the album over titanic tandem tribal drumming while spacey, ambient electronics and surreal samples appear like sigils of warning in a smog choked sky. Yeah, I think I get it now, it's like the band managed to tie together the stray tangents of the gnarliest Axegrinder/Antisect crust with massive modern progmetalcore muscle a la Mastodon, total gutter psychedelia, and a sudden melodic rifftastic genius that should catalog Kylesa's axeman Phil Cope somewhere next to Pike, Wino, Steve Brooks, and the dudes from Baroness. Tripped out crustmetal visions for a new black age, finally reaching it's climax with an extended twin drum jam that brings this album to an awesome finish.

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LSFB is a new outfit from some of the desert-lurking worm-worshippers who were in the Pheonix noise project Nyarlathotep that put out a pretty cool disc on Housepig a couple of years ago. Up till now, that was the last I'd heard from that band and it's main member John Luna, who has also been an occasional collaborator with Bastard Noise. Now working under the name LSFB, Luna again conjures up a highly abrasive, nicely delirious wash of metal abuse, crackling black drift, monstrous chthonic ambience, and howling feedback-mantras vomited up from the gaping black jaws of the Lovecraftian obscenities that appear to be one of the key inspirations behind Luna's noise projects. It's very psychedelic; even when LSFB kicks into overdrive and the tracks explode into a cyclone of electronic screech and junk-metal chaos, the sounds become blurred together in such a way that you feel as if you're hearing this nightmarish cacophony through a skull filled with high quality depressants, everything muffled and awash in grit and black ash, a savage wind whipping through the burnt-out wasteland, glimpses of symphonic majesty seen all too briefly through the oppressive darkness of a nuclear winter. Mournful horns loop around the grey barren expanses like slow soaring carrion birds, and metal and machinery creaks and groans as it's buffeted by irradiated winds blasting across a cracked, dead planet. In some ways, this reminds me of a more subdued take on the type of blackened industrial soundscapes that 20.SV used to produce. One of the the most disturbing of the recent (summer '12) batch of tapes on Cathartic Process for sure, and a highly recommended slab of industrial horror from this promising project...
Track Samples:
Sample : Eye Of Retaliation
Sample : Honeymoon In Haiti
Sample : Silver Womb Stolen Tomb

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This collaboration with Isophlux label boss Shad Scott (aka Metal Beast) may be the least oppressive sounding of all of the Lustmord-related albums I have, as it delves more into complex, distorted electronic music with more emphasis on rhythms and beats than soul-devouring blackness, but it's still going to be of interest to fans of Lustmord's dark ambient soundscapes. This recording is the result of a 1997 live performance on the southern California radio station KUCI, with both artists mostly improvising their material. After that set, the recording underwent further editing and reconstruction to produce this forty-seven minute album.
Lustmord's trademark bass drones lurk all over the first track "Broadcast Frequencies Converge", but they are relegated to the background as blasts of rhythmic electronic drone and glitch and weird guitar-like sounds tumble through the hazy apocalyptic soundscape. Muted strings and synthetic orchestral sounds start to come in later on, giving this a bit of that dark cinematic feel that you get with much of Lustmord's more recent work. But then the second song "Open Towers Emerge" introduces the lightless ambient drones to Metal Beast's blown out break beats and distorted metallic synth chords, and it heads off into dance floor industrial territory (albeit with some seriously crushing sonic elements). The music continues to evolve from there, shifting into abstract glitchery and massive doom-laden rhythms, crunchy cyborg boom-bap that falls between the minimal black throb of Scorn and the heavily distorted and wrecked break beat experiments that Alec Empire was involved with, and swathes of gorgeous ambient electronica. "Torens Parts" is one of the creepier tracks, putting samples of distressed strings and metallic abrasions to effective use, creating a feeling of subtle dread as the clouds of beautiful glowing synthesizer drift out across a shuffling, buried techno pulse and dubby effects.
The last couple of tracks are the darkest by far. "Phleisch" and "Heavy Manners" are particularly Scorn-like with their dark dub atmospherics and shuffling rhythms, and "Manners" works some fearsome brass swells into the darkened ambience. The closer "Transmission Fades", although barely four minutes long, is the purest gust of Lustmordian blackness on the disc, weaving tendrils of black smoke around whooshing electronic noise and rumbling factory ambience.
Track Samples:
Sample : Torens Parts
Sample : Phleisch
Sample : Transmission Fades

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Back in stock once again after a prolonged period of inavailabilty...
The long-lost D.I.Y. CD from Man Is The Bastard was originally released on Slap A Ham Records in 1995, and contains a whopping 53 songs of megabrutal MITB destruction! D.I.Y. is actually more of a collection of splits, 7" EPs, and unreleased material than a proper album, with their tracks taken from the splits with Pink Turds in Space, Aunt Mary, UND, Bizarre Uproar, Crossed Out, Pink Flamingos, the Backward Species EP, Abundance of Guns EP, and their jams from the Anger and English comp. But this shit is absolutely essential for MITB fans that don't want to shell out the crazy dough on Ebay to get their hands on all of this nuclear tuneage. MITB's dual bass-guitar-fueled, avant-hardcore destruction is some of my favorite music ever, and it's good to have this disc available again. These jams cover the entirety of Man Is The Bastard's potent sound: primal early powerviolence and grinding extreme hardcore, weird jazzy chords and song structures, dueling vocals that switch from high-pitched death screeches to awesomely powerful deep barks a la Infest, quick blasts of catchy but brutal punk rock, brutal chirping insectile oscillator electronics, crushing caveman drumming and slow sludgy dirges, complicated technical riffing with shades of prog rock and west coast psychedelia that is all but devoured in the grim storm of MITB's blast rage, and awesome rage-filled lyrics decrying animal exploitation, consumer society, and power/class struggles. Immensely powerful and mega-heavy music. Fans of Eric Wood's post-MITB Bastard Noise project will thrill to the pure electronics tracks on here as well, which forshadow the locust electronics he would go on to evolve and explore over the course of BN's massive discography. The 20-page booklet included here includes the artwork and much of the lyrics and content from the original vinyl releases that these songs appeared on, and showcases Man Is The Bastard's killer graphic design style, which is part humorous hardcore surrealism, and part nightmarish endtime chronicle, a perfect accompaniment to their over-the-top heaviness and devestating social commentary. Essential.

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Now back in print via a second edition from Wolvserpent...
This cassette of experimental psychdeath is the result of yet another offshoot from Idaho chamber-doom duo Wolvserpent. As Mezektet, both members of the 'Serpent team up with Garek Druss, the force behind the amazing black kosmische synthscapes of A Story Of Rats. The connection that this project has to Wolvserpent is pretty obvious as soon as this starts to play; the first side begins with slowly creeping violins and acoustic guitars surrounded by a grey haze, a deeply eerie sort of chamber folk playing a circular sinister melody while whirling metallic drones thrum in the background, and deep piano or cello like bass notes buzz beneath the morose doom-folk. This wouldn't be at all out of place on one of Wolvserpent's albums.
But then suddenly all of that drops away, and the sound is replaced with howling organ-like notes swirling over a furious cavernous blast of double bass drums and black metal riffing that's drenched in heavy amounts of reverb, putrescent witch-howls stretching across the dense, furious maelstrom of murky filth, a damaged, corroded blackened death metal riff grinding away over and over beneath layers of spectral keyboards. As it goes on, the dungeon death metal pummel keeps circling around, the strings and synthesizers slowly rise again to the surface, and it evolves into this strange and hallucinatory mix of grimy low fi death metal loop and blood curdling chamber music, almost like hearing an old Paradise Lost track ripped apart and mixed back together by an industrial noise group, the latter half of the track becoming a melted, murkier wash of strings and drones before finally fading off into silence.
The second side starts with a more classic kosmische sound, synth strings massing over minimal cavernous synth, joined by somber acoustic guitar and some minimal percussive shuffle. Compared to the previous side, things are a little less evil sounding this time, with a streak of melancholy melody running through the trancey dark folk dirge. As an electric guitar crawls in, all reverby and swaddled in shimmering tremolo, it casts a darkwave-esque shadow across the music, becoming ever more blackly beautiful, the violin coming to the fore weeping a sorrowful melody. The band then surges into another minimal death metal dirge, this time slower and lumbering, murky distorted crush buzzing beneath an increasingly chaotic flurry of Rhodes piano, moaning chanted vocals, the drums pounding out a martial rhythm while swirling drones form into a surreal death march.
This is a fucking fantastic album, anyone into Wolvserpent/Pussygutt/Aelter will want to check this out, as will fans of experimental heavy blackness like Menace Ruine, Aderlating, Mamaleek, Detritivore, Wormsblood, etc.
Limited to 120 hand-numbered copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Mezektet Web Sample

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Nadja's 2007 album Thaumogenesis has been re-issued yet again in another limited edition run, this time on the band's own imprint Broken Spine...
I'm a big fan of drone guitarist Aidan Baker over here, having released some of his solo material through the Crucial Bliss imprint over the past couple of years, and his glacial melodic sludge duo Nadja with bassist Leah Buckareff is an amazing conglom of Aidan's beautiful, slow-blooming ambient guitar forms and a slow motion heaviness that's closer to Finnish funeral doom than anything. I can't get enough of Nadja, so amazingly beautiful and melodic and crushingly heavy, like amplifier bliss compatriots Goslings, Jesu and Angelic Process, their music gliding through celestial spheres on slabs of ethereal dreamsludge.
The hour long Thaumogenesis drifts up out of a mist of distant, quiet droning keyboards and a fragile, minimal arpeggio melody that is suddenly buried in loud, crushing guitars and lush droning electricty about five minutes in. There's a drum machine buried in this dense swirling fog, beating out a Skepticism-slow funeral march, as the melodic guitar riffs ooze forward dipped in overdriven fuzz and sizzling distortion, pushed to the disintegrating point, the sludgy powerchords crumbling as they crawl out of white-hot amplifier speakers. The sparkling, radiant symphonic drones formed from feedback and keyboards create an almost kosmiche series of textures, and Buckareff's bass notes are leviathan blots of obsidian, room-shaking low-end tone that hover monolithically over the shifting movements that make up this single epic track. Imagine a massive instrumental fusion of Godflesh's relentless percussive minimalism, the glowing guitar-based melodic drone bliss of Troum, and Skepticism's hypnotic slo-mo crawl. Thaumogenesis also has the best production yet from Nadja, and the mastering job from James Plotkin pushes the duo's fuzzed out drone metal into a new level of heaviness, the myriad layers of grit, buzz, and gleaming hum sounding richer and thicker than before. Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Thaumogenesis

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As soon as the gorgeous grey synthesizers drift in at the beginning of Des Nachts In Tristen Nebeln, you can tell that this is another project from Christoph Ziegler, the prolific mind behind former black metal act (and current dark kosmiche entity) Vinterriket and the militant industrial band Atomtrakt. The keyboards and dark regal atmosphere on this album are very similar to his grim synthscapes found on latter-day Vinterriket albums, but what separates Nebelkorona from his other projects is the noticeable darkwave influence in these songs. Those folky keyboard sounds, sheets of droning Tangerine Dream-esque drift and ghostly piano melodies are backed by simple, driving drum programming and more of a gloomy gothic rock feel than his other bands, especially when his sinister hushed whispering appears. Sort of sounds like something you'd hear from the Projekt label, but Ziegler also incorporates a lot of vintage synthesizer sounds and ornate orchestral arrangements that also remind me of some of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack work (further into the disc, Ziegler starts to add more strings and woodwind sounds into his arrangements) as well as smatterings of a Goblin influence (the title track is a prime example of this). It's all very dark and very pretty, with passages of whooshing Nordic winds rushing through snow-covered woodlands and the distant howls of wolves in the dead of winter inhabiting the same space as shadowy break-beats and evil dissonance creeping into the intricate piano work. One of the highlights of the disc is the strange gothic trip-hop of "Dämmerung im Herbst" and "Blätter im Wind" off of Nebelkorona's Dämmerung Im Herbst 7" from 2004, where those aforementioned break-beats run through the entire track, a weird but interesting contrast with the grim neo-classical sounds at the forefront of the music. Maybe a bit too dramatic for those looking for pure dark ambience without the rhythmic elements and sorrowful orchestral touches, but Vinterriket fans should at least check out Nebelkorona's bleak, melancholy kosmiche visions.
Limited to one thousand copies, Des Nachts... also includes thirty minutes of additional video content, a thick sixteen-page booklet, and a cardstock slipcase.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blätter im Wind

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That ridiculously awkward band name isn't the only weird thing about the debut disc from this weirdo Japanese doompsych duo. This disc's got a weird conglomeration of styles going on - the cover art is super murky and indistinguishable, and the band logo and album title are all laid out in blocky Crass-style stenciled lettering. The band's sigil is a play on the classic anarchy sign. The band's name itself makes absolutely no sense. And then you hit play, and the music unfolds into a stunning blackened doom ritual that totally blew my ears apart. From the first couple of minutes where Negativeaidguerrilla Realm let loose with soft chiming sounds before they get busy with their crawling tectonic heaviness, and then start laying down these huge open chords over the rumbling heaviness, it's apparent that this band (a duo, amazingly enough) are fusing the darkest depths of Tokyo's psychedelic rock sound to the monstrous doom of Corrupted. It sounds fucking amazing. This isn't the easiest music to decode, as it's one goddamn song spread out over half an hour, but if you can hang, this thing will transport you to a pitch-black nightside realm that is quite different from anything else on the Weird Truth label. There's huge stretches of Vanitopia where there is absolutely no percussion at all, and it's just the guitarist playing this massive doom-laden psych dirge over a rumbling bass drone, sounding a hell of a lot like Fushitsusha slowed down immensely to Paso Inferior-like tempos. Needless to say, this stuff is intensely bleak and desolate, but around the midway point, it shifts from that rumbling doom-laden psychedelia into a passage of tranquil guitar that then leads into the sound of lush acoustic guitar strings, a flurry of almost flamenco-style strumming that comes from out of nowhere. The last third of the album then shifts it's focus to the acoustic guitar for several minutes, before dropping off into a final crushing dirge, this time heavily led by the bass guitar. A huge, vaguely Morricone-esue riff grinds through till the end, finally coming apart into a brief outro of chiming synthesizer sounds at the very end...
Definitely one of the more unique 'doom' discs that I've picked up lately. Released in a limited edition of one thousand copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : NEGATIVEAIDGUERRILLA REALM-Vanitopia

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Wm. Rage is one half of black industrialists (and C-Blast faves) Blue Sabbath Black Cheer as well as a participant in Nihilist Assault Group and Pig Heart Transplant, but as Nervous Corps he breaks out on his own to explore a combination of minimal harsh noise meditation (similar to Werewolf Jerusalem and some of the more textural work from The Rita) and extremely bleak strains of minimalist industrial drone. His side of this cassette burbles through three tracks (one of 'em, 'Grand Imperialist', a whopping eighteen minutes long) of crackling, sputtering black static and blown-speaker grit, more violent walls of caustic distortion, eventually leading into the clouds of keening machine-drone, smoldering ampburn and infinite metallic hum on that aforementioned sprawling third track that evokes the total emptiness of a cold, lifeless, desolate void.
With titles like 'Temple Of Eternal Exsanguination', 'Vicious Mutilated Womb' and 'Hoarder Of The Deceased' , the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking that Crown Of Bone were some sort of drooling death metal outfit. Instead, this new project from a former member of Demonologists produces a skin-flaying brand of blackened bestial noise that combines wall-like maelstroms of acidic distortion, fragments of what sounds like psychedelic black metal guitar, and throat-clogging electronic filthstorms with the sound of monstrous demonic roaring and gnashing teeth, an ultra-violent mutation of harsh noise that sometimes sounds awfully close to a blackened death metal band's demo reduced/de-mixed by one of the more rabid Japanese practitioners of extreme electronic circuit-puke. The Crown has been vomiting up a torrent of stuff like this lately, and I've been lapping all of it up voraciously - definitely one of my favorite 'black noise' bands at the moment.
Released in a limited edition of fifty copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : NERVOUS CORPS - Climax Denial
Sample : NERVOUS CORPS - Grand Imperialist
Sample : CROWN OF BONE - Temple Of Eternal Exsanguination
Sample : CROWN OF BONE - Hoarder Of The Deceased

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A devastating album from black ambient master Nordvargr, Abandoned By Life... came out a couple of years ago on the Brazilian label Essence Music. Though I'm only now stocking it here at C-Blast, it's a highly recommended slab of crushing black drift from this former mastermind behind Swedish black industrialists MZ.412. The disc features just two songs, but they're both monolithic blasts of black hellfire, each one stretching out for well over twenty three minutes.
The first "In Oceans Abandoned By Life I Drown..." begins with the surging and receding waves of massively distorted metallic drone, like a wall of metal guitars grinding out a single power chord as they drift on a turbulent sea of corroded electronics. It's incredibly heavy, almost like an industrial remix of a doom metal track, but then it shifts later on into a more placid state, that monstrous grinding heaviness burning off and being replaced by sheets of floating feedback and metallic thrum, a dense and hypnotic expanse of deep ambient hum, but this only lasts for a moment before the really heavy shit starts to drop in. Halfway through, this punishing doom metal riff fades in and takes over, a slow motion black churn that sounds a hell of a lot like Sunn O))) or Black Boned Angel, but edged with a grimier layer of rusted electronic noise and fetid feedback. That riff just keeps repeating over and over, a grinding saurian mantra tumbling into an oblivion of distant pounding and subterranean wind at the end. Terminally cool.
"...To Live Again As A Servant Of Darkness" pretty much picks up from there, resurfacing after that brief bit of dark ambience into another skulldozing wave of molten sludge, droning distorted chords buzzing and roaring over a massive steady percussive blast off in the background, muffled scraping and fluttering noises appearing just beneath the surface. Monstrous ambient doom that just sits there in space and sucks in everything around it like a devouring black hole for nearly half an hour, laced with grinding pneumatic rhythms, harsh buried vocals, warbling electronic tones, and looped glitches that finally morph this into a vast black industrial mass, swirling infinitely through the void till it's met by a fractured break-beat drowning inside of it's roiling chaos.
As with most of Essence's releases, this comes in a beautiful six-panel full-color digi-sleeve package, and is limited to just 800 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : in oceans abandoned by life i drown...
Sample : ...to live again as a servant of darkness

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Got hooked on this band through their debut cassette on Primal Vomit, but that was just a glimmer of the weirdness found on this full length disc. While most of the stuff that you'll hear on Primal Vomit tends towards raw blackened punk and blazing low-fi black metal filth, NRIII stood out like a sore thumb with it's pulsating midnight electronics and bizarre industrial creep-factor. I loved that tape, but on Solus Patior, this Florida-based band sounds even more unique as they blend together elements of power electronics, black noise, IDM and Scorn-esque rhythms. On the twelve minute opener " Delirious", the disc begins with the sound of rainfall, the hiss of droplets crashing to earth, but then a huge blown-out synth comes in, joined by these disgusting snarling goblinoid vocals, wheezing and cackling over the rumbling synth-riff that keeps repeating itself over and over, sounding for a moment like a strange black-noise version of Theologian. Chaotic computer noises, random beeps and bloops come cascading down over this hypnotic blackened synthesizer melody, and those weird, demonic screeches continue to be vomited underneath the crackling electronics, until it all disappears down a burbling, bleeping black hole of electronic slop.
As the album goes on, we're treated to strange electronic soundscapes filled with minimal tones and abstract rhythmic clicks, bizarre vocal sounds and those omnipresent goblin shrieks joining with creepy percussive sounds drenched in bucket loads of psychedelic delay, and blasts of crude 8-bit granular distortion. A lot of low-fi junk-noise and cosmic synth fuckery shows up throughout the tracks, sometimes appearing as a fucked-up industrial dirge that leads into a brutal, heavily distorted Godflesh-esque breakbeat, or becoming dark ambient soundscapes rattled with the sounds of abused sheet-metal. There's also passages of weird ambient electronica where looped drumbeats gallop around in circles beneath eerie Theremin-like tones, but then build into a furious torrent of tribal drums and incendiary noise. And then comes the blasting violence of "Capitalism", only two minutes long but it's total compressed savagery, a mesmerizing synthetic tremolo riff cycling over the wall of hiss and blown out blastbeats pushed into supersonic velocities, like a Nekrasov song run through a wall of shoegazer guitar.
"Occupation" is another stand-out mindfuck as it launches into a cacophony of broken drum n' bass skittering around at top speed, bleating free-jazz saxophone splattered across the electronic chaos, while a variety of bestial voices and sputtering noises erupt in the background. This tips over into the extreme distorted doom of "Suffering", a massively blown-out industrial dirge plowing through clouds of toxic gas and flocks of bat-winged devils.
NRIII totally defies categorization, which is fine with me. It definitely has a huge malevolent streak, and fans of the weirder fringes of blackened industrial will especially want to check this out. At times, it's sort of like hearing a black metal vocalist fronting a Consumer Electronics set being recorded over a choppy landline. Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Delirious
Sample : Secretion
Sample : Vermin

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Now re-issued on vinyl.
Shredding Voivodian sci fi thrash from this new duo of guitarist/singer Mick Barr and drummer Brooks Headley, who used to play in the political hardcore punk band Born Against as well as Universal Order Of Armageddon, Wrangler Brutes, Mens Recovery Project, and who's also a renowned pastry chef in NYC. I love this band - it's definitely influenced by black metal, but where Barr's other black metal influenced band Krallice sounds huge and majestic and dense, this is much more primitive and stripped down, citing Darkthrone as one of their main inspirations, but sounding like this weird fusion of Mick's old band Crom-Tech and the earlier pre-Nothingface Voivod stuff and archaic blackthrash.
Like you would expect, there's lots of the trebly tremolo shredding that Mick is known for, but he also whips out these awesome deformed riffs that are really skronky and dissonant, and can at times be very evocative of Piggy's guitar playing in Voivod. The drumming from Headley is fast and furious, usually galloping at thrash speeds, but also veering into extended pounding tribal rhythms and dizzying exercises in off-time angularity and the duo throw in abstract guitar noises, percussive scraping, and swells of thunderous war-drum pummel into their atonal thrash. Vocalwise, Mick's screeching is run through a massive wind tunnel style reverb that really smacks of old black metal and the lyrics are appropriately apocalyptic. It's possible that this might be my favorite band of Mick's so far. I love the stuff that he's been doing with Krallice and Ocrilim lately, but this album has been on the deck non-stop lately, and is totally sating my lust for weird, fucked-up thrash. It's frenzied, futuristic stuff with smatterings of the sort of intricate, ascendant melodies that Krallice is known for along with walls of Chatham-esque guitar drone, but even when Oldest is at their most epic, the album is still surrounded by a very cold, very ferocious vibe. Then there's the last track "Fertility Rituals", which is nearly devoid of Mick's skronky, dissonant shredding and instead delivers a KILLER blast of warped blackened thrash with spiraling leads that sounds a LOT like a blacker version of Killing Technology era Voivod. This disc rules.

Track Samples:
Sample : Fertility Rituals
Sample : Survivalist Compounds
Sample : Tower Mockery

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Track Samples:
Sample : Ataraxia
Sample : Lathe Biosas
Sample : Taraxis

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Usually I steer clear of "best of" compilations, especially those that are made up of chunks of music from other key albums in a band's discography, but since much of Pestilence's early catalog is out of print again, this disc is worth picking up by newcomers to the Dutch avant-death metallers as well as containing some early rare compilation material and six previously unreleased live tracks that may be of interest to completists. Originally released by Roadrunner back in 1995, this re-issue of Mind Reflections is on the Polish archive label Metal Mind, released on their standard golden disc format and limited to a pressing of 2,000 machine-numbered copies. The collection of tracks ranges from the crushing late 80s death metal of the earlier albums Consuming Impulse and Malleus Maleficarum through their more technical and experimental work on Testimony Of The Ancients and Spheres, zig-zagging through various evolutionary points in Pestilence's career. While it's the later stuff that really knocks my prog-death lovin' socks off, Pestilence's early albums of straight-forward death metal are pretty fuckin' fantastic in their own right, especially the ghastly thrash on Consuming Impulse which is still one of my favorite Euro-death albums from this era. Tracks like "The Process Of Suffocation" are savage blasts of primal death metal armed with killer riffs and well-crafted guitar parts, while "Land Of Tears" and "Twisted Truth" dish out soaring harmonies and a more epic feel as the band explores more angular, complex arrangements and some of the jazzy elements that would really kick in on their later stuff. Unfortunately, there's only one song off of their brilliant Spheres album from 1993, "Mind Reflections", a skronky, twitching avant-death workout that features that album's strange fusion of jazz-influenced leads, ethereal synths, jagged off-kilter riffing, and heavy prog. Its the inclusion of the song off of the rare 1987 compilation Teutonic Invasion - Part II that will be of interest to hardcore Pestilence fans, as this is the only place you'll find it outside of dropping some major coin on an original pressing of the LP.
The disc is rounded out by six live tracks that were recorded by Dutch National Radio at their 1992 Dynamo Festival appearance; the recording quality is excellent, and captures the band at the height of their power, playing material from all three of their previous albums.
Track Samples:
Sample : Twisted Truth
Sample : Mind Reflections
Sample : Land Of Tears
Sample : Hatred Within*
Sample : Chemotherapy(Live)*

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Phaenon's first album Submerged was a solid debut from the Maryland-based dark ambient artist, combining the obvious Lustmordian influences with the vast minimal roar of interstellar static, hinting at a kind of cosmic black ambience largely devoid of dramatic synth moves. But on his follow-up album His Master's Voice, Szymon Tankiewicz's Phaenon evolves into even more desolate soundscapery, blending some very subtle cinematic electronics with expansive fields of emptiness and stray radio signals drifting infinitely through the great black void. The album combines the direct influence of Stanislaw Lem's philosophical science fiction novel His Master's Voice (direct quotes from the book appear throughout the packaging) and its story of human scientists attempting to decipher transmissions from an alien intelligence from across the vastness of space (and the myriad of ethical debates that follow) are tied in to the amazing and haunting artwork from Eric Lacombe and the massive black-hole soundscapes that drift out of Phaenon's abyss. These elements come together perfectly for what is one of the eeriest albums of abyssal electronics that I've heard since the last Inade full-length. I'm pretty sure that fans of that German black ambient artist are going to resonate with Phaeonon's music on a similar level, as these slowly swirling soundscapes have a similar sonic DNA: slow, wafting clouds of metallic whirr and shapeless clusters of synth-drone, distant surges of ominous low-end reverberations, stretches of doom-laden black drift, streaks of kosmische synth that burns white-hot scars across an ancient starless void, ghostly electronic howls that materialize way out on the periphery of perception, synthetic horn-like blasts drifting through space, metallic drones glinting in the blackness, all part of these densely layered soundscapes that billow out in an orchestral mass of blackened sound. It is often harrowing listening, the sounds coming together into moments of perfect aural dread that eventually climaxes with a stunning final act of deep-space synthdrift and isolationist thrum.
Comes in a striking digipack presentation.

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Who is the Prowler? Even by Worthless Recordings standards, this is light on background info. An anonymous harsh noise project appearing for the first time, The Prowler takes it's name from one of the best obscure 80's slasher movies ever made (in my humble opinion), a 1981 film directed by Joe Zito that boasted grotesque pitchfork kill-scenes and extreme cranial trauma from fx master Tom Savini that rank as some of the best ever - The Prowler is worth watching for that infamous bayonet-through-the-head sequence alone. I gotta assume that the copious bloodshed in The Prowler was the creative spark behind this epic harsh noise wall, which violently roars across the two sides of the cassette like a biblical flood of black blood covering the earth. The whole recording clocks in at over forty five minutes and demonstrates very little dynamic flux; this is the kind of HNW that churns in place endlessly, a droning maelstrom of low-end crunch and rumble that's heavy on the distortion, swirling around the listener like an infinite wave of volcanic lava and fire, loud and crushing and suffocating, a meditation on total immolation. For hardcore harsh heads only, this is the type of wall recording that fills your skull with fluttering black fire from start to finish, transforming your awareness into a total dead zone. Another solid tape of brute force from Worthless, recommended if you've been digging their other HNW titles from Burial Ground and Cold Comfort.
Limited to 50 copies.

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The follow-up companion piece to Prurient's controversial Bermuda Drain, the Time's Arrow Ep continues in the same vein of crepuscular electronica and cold synth dread that ran through that album, offering up more of Dominick Fernow's alluring fusion of malevolent darkwave and grim industrial sounds.
The a-side is made up of the title track and an epilogue. Rattling drum loops cruise beneath glowing black synthesizers and Fernow's eerie spoken word narration about infamous Hollywood murder victim Elizabeth Short, also known as the "Black Dahlia", the song moving horizontally as new glimmering electronic melodies and lush chordal shadow are continuously draped over this sleek industrial darkwave track. It's like a bastard fusion of something from Tangerine Dream's brilliant score to Risky Business and Floodland-era Sisters Of Mercy. Which would explain why it's one of the best things I've heard all year. I could care less about all of the bellyaching I've seen over Prurient's recent music; this stuff sounds amazing, the sounds pooling across my ears and brain like liquid blackness, icy and driving and merciless. The track that follows is titled "Time's Arrow (Unsolved)" and is basically what would have appeared as a b-side remix. The rhythm is rougher, the sound slightly more jagged, but it's still mesmerizing and jet-black.
Over on the second side, we get three different odds and ends. The first, "Let's Make A Slave (De-Shelled)" is an alternate version of a song off the recent Bermuda Drain album. Exponentially more savage than the original, here the blackened electronica is penetrated by brutal high end feedback and skull-damaging noise as well as variations in the vocal track. "Maskless Face" is, I believe, exclusive to this Ep. Pounding drums alternate with controlled blasts of noise, and Fernow howls a litany of threats and demands; it's the closest to power electronics that we get on this record. The instrumental piece "Slavery In The Bahamas" is also new to this disc, a vicious mash-up of junk noise and fractured high-speed rhythms that at a couple of points seems like it's about the reform into some sort of spastic drum n' bass attack, but it never quite gets there. After a few minutes of that sputtering chaos, it melts down into a field of pure black electroshock, laying down waves of roaring metallic noise, feedback and ominous guitar-like drones over a sea of crackling, smoking distortion.
Released on both slimline Cd and limited edition vinyl, which includes a digital download card.

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The follow-up companion piece to Prurient's controversial Bermuda Drain, the Time's Arrow Ep continues in the same vein of crepuscular electronica and cold synth dread that ran through that album, offering up more of Dominick Fernow's alluring fusion of malevolent darkwave and grim industrial sounds.
The a-side is made up of the title track and an epilogue. Rattling drum loops cruise beneath glowing black synthesizers and Fernow's eerie spoken word narration about infamous Hollywood murder victim Elizabeth Short, also known as the "Black Dahlia", the song moving horizontally as new glimmering electronic melodies and lush chordal shadow are continuously draped over this sleek industrial darkwave track. It's like a bastard fusion of something from Tangerine Dream's brilliant score to Risky Business and Floodland-era Sisters Of Mercy. Which would explain why it's one of the best things I've heard all year. I could care less about all of the bellyaching I've seen over Prurient's recent music; this stuff sounds amazing, the sounds pooling across my ears and brain like liquid blackness, icy and driving and merciless. The track that follows is titled "Time's Arrow (Unsolved)" and is basically what would have appeared as a b-side remix. The rhythm is rougher, the sound slightly more jagged, but it's still mesmerizing and jet-black.
Over on the second side, we get three different odds and ends. The first, "Let's Make A Slave (De-Shelled)" is an alternate version of a song off the recent Bermuda Drain album. Exponentially more savage than the original, here the blackened electronica is penetrated by brutal high end feedback and skull-damaging noise as well as variations in the vocal track. "Maskless Face" is, I believe, exclusive to this Ep. Pounding drums alternate with controlled blasts of noise, and Fernow howls a litany of threats and demands; it's the closest to power electronics that we get on this record. The instrumental piece "Slavery In The Bahamas" is also new to this disc, a vicious mash-up of junk noise and fractured high-speed rhythms that at a couple of points seems like it's about the reform into some sort of spastic drum n' bass attack, but it never quite gets there. After a few minutes of that sputtering chaos, it melts down into a field of pure black electroshock, laying down waves of roaring metallic noise, feedback and ominous guitar-like drones over a sea of crackling, smoking distortion.
Released on both slimline Cd and limited edition vinyl, which includes a digital download card.

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Sweden's Pyramido barf up another of their mucho hideous psych-sludge assaults on their second album (and follow-up to 2009's Sand). Some of you mud-pilots might know and love that album, which I originally described as "massive slow-motion bloozecrush that take Sabbathoid riffs and stretch 'em way out and splatter the mess with vicious screamed vocals". Well, not a whole lot has changed since then, but Pyramido have fleshed out their gruesome sludgecore with some cool new sounds on this album, allowing electronic noise and effects, a Mellophone, and vibraslap to find their way into their heavy-duty tarpit metal. The band spreads out over all of the songs, stretching 'em out for seven minutes or more as they grind out a series of droning, crushing riffs and long bouts of seriously trance-inducing heaviness, the singer spewing charred hatred over the turgid grooves. As with their earlier stuff, this is taken largely from the same mold as Bongzilla, Weedeater, Beaten Back To Pure, Church Of Misery, and Iron Monkey, combining bluesy, Sabbathoid swing with gnarled, crusty overtones a la Eyehategod, but this time around Pyramido also explore more of their psychedelic side, using those aforementioned instruments to add some neat textural touches to their music, taking off into some dark, spacey passages on songs like "Left To Rot". But then they also throw out something like "Saltstoder", which abandons all of the heaviness for a haunting synth-led psych instrumental that ends up being one of the best tracks on the album. And on "Onward", these eerie trumpet-like horn sounds (which I think are from the Mellophone, but I'm realizing that I don't really know what the hell a Mellophone is) come in on the chorus, and give this song more of that unique atmospheric touch. Then there's the cold black metal riffing that introduces "Hollow Words" before the band starts veering between blooze-addled groove and explosive crusty hardcore. Like Brainoil, these guys drag just as much ugly hardcore into their music as they do classic doom sounds, which produces something much more interesting and urgent than just another mind-numbing bash n' drag.
Track Samples:
Sample : Hollow Words
Sample : Saltstoder
Sample : Walking Blind

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There is no shortage of mechanized filth on this debut disc from Italian industrial black metallers Rohesfleisch. The band flagrantly touts their obsession with the mystical aspects of cannibalism (their name itself means "raw flesh / meat" in German), a theme that runs in and out of the impressive electro-savagery that these mutants offer up. The five tracks on First Journey To Flesh Of Human Nature come in fast and ferocious in just under a half hour, beginning with a brutal electronic noise soundscape before violently whiplashing between ultra-noisy machinegun bursts of raw black metal and clanking basement dirges that sound like the two members of Rohesfleisch are slamming their guitars against the walls while someone is pounding a set of oil drums with a sledgehammer and another set of hands is splicing together tape of Italian radio transmissions, the sounds of breaking glass, and garbled electronics. In other words, I'm hearing a lot of Einstürzende Neubauten in here, which may very well be accidental, but it's still a welcome element when listening to a band of this ilk.
When Rohesfleisch do opt to take off at five hundred miles per hour on tracks like "Lost Earthly Attitude" and "Jesus Brandes", they sound supremely vicious, the guitar and bass dissolving into a murky buzz of distortion, Zeyros's snarling vocals getting tangled up in a mess of snot and blood while the drum machine rattles away like a goddamn anti-tank gun. Lots of downright weirdness is festooned over these songs, too, like the part on "Kill Still Stands" where the band goes from one of their hyperspeed black noise metal blasts into a passage of wailing tortured vocals and the sounds of someone being electrocuted, while the drums shamble around in the background amid some insane over-the-top guitar shredding. On other songs, you're faced with the sound of extreme feedback puncturing blasts of rotting black metal while ghastly female wailing drifts across the background, or the sound of a woman weeping uncontrollably is contrasted with thunderous sheet metal percussion and blown-out icy blackened arpeggios. This is all conveyed through a unruly low-fi production job that perfectly fits their vile, fucked-up soundscapes. Seems heavily influenced by Mysticum, but these guys are way more wrecked and deformed.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Endearing Meal
Sample : Jesus Brandes

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Chicago's The Ropes spew out six short, fiery blasts of low-fidelity hardcore punk on this deluxe re-issue of their self-titled debut. It's got the Youth Attack logo on it, so you'll probably already have an inkling of what this sounds like; fast-paced primitive thrash pummel that is definitely in that same gnarled, noisy mode of atavistic hardcore shared by bands like Total Abuse, Vile Gash, Raw Nerve, Hoax, and Nazi Dust. A big Void/Negative Approach influence is behind this, of course, but The Ropes attack their songs with an unhinged energy and violent noisiness that hardly makes this sound dated or a bland homage to psycho-core of yore. The vocals of lead singer Aaron Aspinwall are real gruff and guttural and one of the band's secret weapons, frothing at the mouth as he spits out the succinct negatory lyrics, all of which revolve around minimalist musings on death, futility, worthlessness, negativity. And the guitars whip up some killer leads when they aren't buzz-sawing at your face with their three-chord assaults. A total throwback, but The Ropes deliver it with a massive amount of ferocity, making this 7" a top-shelf slab of murderous fuckoid hardcore.
Fantastic package design, too. The record comes in a customized foldout sleeve that also contains a thick glossy sixteen page booklet with the lyrics and sinister, high-contrast black and white photography and artwork by Will Boone.

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This was the first release from Rotorvator that I heard, and it's the catalyst that led me to work with this bizarre Italian black industrial band on a new art print/album set that's going to be coming out soon on the Crucial Blaze series. Released by the band themselves in a limited edition of one hundred and fifty hand-numbered copies, Nahum is a cacophony of mechanical violence and swarming black noise metal that hits some of the same quivering nerve-endings as other Crucial Blast favorites like Wold, Nekrasov, Gnaw Their Tongues, Wrnlrd and Sutekh Hexen. At least, that is, at first listen...it doesn't take long before this disc reveals a unique direction in black industrial that really hooked me in after I discovered these guys.
The short intro track is what could lead you to think that this is going to be a brutal din of swarming guitar noise and monstrous distortion, the sound whipped up into a violent maelstrom of blackened riffs and fractured blasting percussions and layer upon layer of skull shredding electronic hate, but then it suddenly veers right into the longer song "Blessed Eyes", and it's something else entirely. Pounding electronic rhythms and heavy bass tones take over from the guitars, a slower lurching industrial jam that still has those vile demonic vocals screeching over it all, but the sound is much closer to older Skinny Puppy slowed down to a nauseating crawl, with weird effects and diseased-sounding synths at the forefront of the songs. "Sinking Cathedrals" is like this too, but on this one there's more mangled blackened guitar draped over the plodding electro-dirge, and the singer gets more and more hysterical as it goes on, his choked, warbling screams becoming more panic-stricken and anguished as the song grows more dissonant and nightmarish, finally drifting into a sea of dreadful cetacean cries. Pretty goddamn intense.
Then "Peace On Earth" comes in, and it's even more fucked and amazing than the preceding songs. At first it's this roar of chiming sounds, a wash of almost Jesu-like guitars and heavy distorted bass, but then this horrific guttural roar drops in and it abruptly changes into crushing black industrial dirge, searing feedback over monstrous droning bass and weirdly muted drums. And then almost as quickly as it switched gears before, the band explodes into an awesome epic black metal assault, raging icy tremolo riffs and those monstrous roaring vocals soaring over spastic drum machine rhythms, shifting back and forth between blasts of blackened majesty and deformed industrial dirge through the rest of the song.
All of this stuff comes together as one on the last song "Bridal Chamber", closing the album with it's weirdest and most abstract track. It staggers from more of that majestic industrial black metal to crumbling walls of doom-laden noise, back to lush shoegazey guitars drifting over putrid mechanical grinding and abrupt turns into nightmarish blackened electro.
Highly recommended for anyone into black industrial and blackened noise. Released in a limited edition of 150 hand numbered copies, presented in a 7" sleeve with a set of four double-sided black and white cards.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blessed Eyes
Sample : Bridal Chamber
Sample : Sinking Cathedrals

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Track Samples:
Sample : Dopesmoker
Sample : Sonic Titan

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Never thought I'd see it, but LA psych-blasters Suffering Luna have released a new record with new material and some bonus live stuff, a decade after they seemed to quietly disappear from view in the West Coast underground. Always one of the more obscure and lesser known bands in the Southern Cali grind/power violence/extreme hardcore scene, Suffering Luna were also one of the strangest and more psychedelic-tinged bands to come out of that region, combining death metal influences, weirdo space rock tendencies, and fucked-up hardcore into a unique tweaker-blast heaviness wrapped up in pungent cheeba smoke and suppressed violence. Nobody but Gasp even came close to being as supremely weird as Suffering Luna, who were as influenced by the likes of Hawkwind, Can and Last Exit as they were by Man Is The Bastard and Neurosis.
This new Lp looks to fuck your head up as soon as it starts. Opener "Sea Of Drugs" whips up a frenzy of Latin percussion and swirling Hawkwind-like electronics, sludgy metallic guitars and fluttering synths, the multiple singers alternating between guttural roars and spaced-out chanting, bits of melodic singing creeping into the trippy, grungy psychedelia. Way more confusional and whacked out than I remember them sounding back in the 90s...
Three-part sludge-prog epic "Paranoid Delusions (I. Up For Days, II. Whipping The Horse's Eyes, III. Rising Moon)" nearly chews up the entire first side as the band creeps through clouds of evil acid guitar and monstrous chanting, slow tribal rhythms and swooping electronic noises, dissolving into the second and third "chapters", a whirling hallucinatory fog of gurgling effects and cosmic blurt, demonic backwards chanting, dub-like drums and cymbals drenched in delay. After that, "Oh, Black Pyramid" closes the side with a bizarre krautrocky jam that takes those dubby drums and bleeping squelchy electronics and loops them around buzzing distorted synth chords and heavily processed staccato guitars.
After the druggy weirdness of the first side, you'd expect the album to just drift off further into space. But "Go Ask Alice" detonates the beginning of the flipside with a brutal blastcore assault that starts off with raging hyperspeed thrash, then drops into a shambling slower part vaguely like something from Neurosis, eerie jangling melodies met with crunching heaviness, gruff roars spiraling out into the void, the bassist leading the song with some surprisingly expressive melodies. The rest of the side tends towards the heavier side of their sound too, as Suffering Luna lurches through sinister Sabbathain dirges glazed wit space rock electronics, more bizarre ogre-chants, slow sludgy mathiness, weird Man Is The Bastard-style squelch freakouts, sudden eruptions of volcanic noisecore, wild Hendrixian guitar shred splattered across heavy metallic hypno-chug. It ends with the whacked-out sound collage/death metal sludge of "El Pueblo Re. 213", a blistering death-dirge that blends the kind of grim sample fuckery off of old Eyehategod albums with a spaced-out sludgecrust assault.
Track Samples:
Sample : Sea Of Drugs
Sample : Paranoid Delusions (i. Up for Days, ii. Whipping the Horse's Eyes, iii. Rising Moon)
Sample : Oh Black Pyramid

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Consisting of a single thirty-four minute track, Path To Yirah is the one and only release from this mysterious black ambient project, a re-issue of a highly limited cassette that was originally put out by the band themselves. There is nothing in the booklet (which is laid out like a classical libretto, very cool looking) that clues you in to who is behind Symphonia Sacrosancta Phasmatvm. A little digging around online, however, informs us that this is an offshoot of Reverorum Ib Malacht, an equally mysterious avant-garde black metal/black ambient outfit that blew my mind earlier this past decade with their What Do You Think Of The Old God, We Call Him Judas? tape, and who recently issued their final album on Ajna last year, the sprawling liturgical blackness known as URKAOS. Being a big fan of Reverorum's recorded output (at least of what I've been able to track down), I was dying to hear this project. The music on Path To Yirah bears a definite resemblance to the murky cathedral-like ambience of Reverorum's music, but here it's stripped of all of the black metal elements, no distorted guitars, no deformed chanting, no buried blasting drums. This is closer to neo-classical music, composed of washed-out strings and ominous horns, some minimal bass or guitar threading it's way through the track, the music slowly unfolding across it's duration. It could pass for a particularly dreary film score, a black orchestral performance that sounds as if it's drifting up out of some vast pit, the violins and cellos that surge to the surface imbuing this with a sorrowful glow, while deeper beneath the surface lies a much more sinister intent. Might sound like an odd comparison, but the more I listen to this, the more it reminds me of Danny Elfman's score to Clive Barker's Nightbreed, if someone had taken that score and slowed it down to half speed and then soaked it in a vat of black Lustmordian reverb.
Track Samples:
Sample : SYMPHONIA SACROSANCTA PHASMATVM-Path To Yirah

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The desolate, grinding ambience on Theta's His Eyes Were Black... is one of my favorite offerings from Cathartic Process's 2012 output. This is the first I've heard from this seemingly brand new duo, but they've nailed down a distinct sound on this cassette that falls somewhere in between the noisiest fringes of dark ambience and a kind of junk-noise infested industrial soundscapery that dives deep into black pits of mechanical horror. The single-sided tape features one massive forty-five minute track that shifts from hypnotic metallic drones and minimal electronic loops into blasts of seriously horrific aural slime that sound like a sewer system giving birth to a host of hellish monstrosities.
The foundation of the first side is pure looping hypnosis, a squall of metal crashing down from great heights and heavy machinery toiling inside of a wind tunnel, repetitive whirring drones cycling around and around, infinitely humming in the great black depths of this monstrous forge, the recording blasted and murky and oppressive, the sounds mostly lacking in any real detail so as to induce the greatest amount of unease and dread in the listener as the nightmare factory grinds and chugs and hums at skull-flattening volume levels somewhere off in the greater depths of a vast abyss. Later on though, they haul out some monstrous guitar sounds that begin to howl and rumble through the increasing violence of the electronic storm, and at it's peak it's as if you're hearing an extremely low-fi recording of some sludgy, doom-laden Skullflower-style band playing live way off in the distance while a maelstrom of brutal junkyard scrape, garbled swarming maggot-clots of cassette noise, and corrosive jet-engine roar nearly overwhelms it all. Highly recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : is Eyes Were Black And I Could See The Circuitry Beneath
Sample : is Eyes Were Black And I Could See The Circuitry Beneath

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Strangely overlooked by many in the extreme noise scene, Viodre's recorded output includes some of the most brutal electronic skullfucks I've had the pleasure of experiencing (the split with Ahlzagailzehguh immediately springs to mind). I'm sure that the audience for this long running noise duo (made up of Bryan Gilroy and Jared Turinsky) will reach new ears now that his terrific new album Interpol Alchemi has been released by Hospital Productions, but on my end, I've been going back and tracking down some of his older releases, starting with this disc released by Cathartic Process back in 2002. UUEE Serve Me High is ten tracks of merciless electronic destruction that moves from massively processed avalanches of junk-noise chaos to manipulated field recordings that sound like they were captured at the moment of civilization's collapse, on to slightly calmer passages of ambient city noise and psychedelic fx overload. There are long stretches of this disc that take my skull apart like the best of K2 or Incapacitants, but Viodre also demonstrates a kind of bestial logic behind these extreme noise collages that allow for much more active listening than just another brainblast of distortion and feedback. Walls of black static bloom out of clouds of fragmented voices and musical loops, and jet-roar feedback blasts through fields of seemingly random ambient room sounds. This gets really surreal when Viodre collaborates with famed Swiss experimental noise artist Sudden Infant on "Ripples I.T.B.S.", a short piece of juddering electronics, television ghosts and warped tape collage. One of my favorite tracks on Serve Me High is "Constellations (4th Of July)", which borders on being an ambient piece; on it, the blasting cut-up noise is replaced with a vast cavernous room ambience filled with distant bleeps and chirps, sudden swells of hellish processed feedback, and a general feeling of suppressed horror that runs through the whole track. Even at this point, Viodre was producing some highly lethal strains of extreme noise.
Track Samples:
Sample :
Sample : Space/Power/Time/Velvet/Birdfeeder Collarbones
Sample : Constellations (4th Of July)

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One of French noise artists Vomir's latest HNW assaults is this two track cassette from Forever Escaping Boredom, a neat little label from down South that has also sent us some equally brutal new tapes from Vasectomy Party and Crucifix Eye. I had to pop Vomir's tape in first, of course, and it's exactly what I was expecting/wanting to hear. The two sides are titled "Untitled I" and "II", each a roaring oceanic tumult of mid-range distortion and fluctuating speaker-crackle that is amplified to skull-busting levels of power, resembling an avalanche of debris and concrete and black lava that seems to carry on forever, washing over you and dragging you with it's massive rumbling undertow. No dynamics, almost imperceptible shifts in tone and texture, this is classic Vomir, a monstrous, formless black maelstrom of overdriven static that evokes the roar of cosmic entropy at a microcosmic scale.
There is nothing here that distinguishes this recording from the rest of the Vomir discography. Aside from some newer releases that have focused on the buzzwall of sound created by Perrot's experiments with acoustic guitar as a sound source, almost all Vomir releases have the same blank, featureless visage. Vomir's approach to HNW remains orthodox, the palette of sound minimal to the extreme. It's completely hypnotic if you have the taste for this sort of long-form aural chaos/destruction, but it will not convert anyone who isn't already a serious devotee of the HNW aesthetic. But for hardcore wall-junkies, this is some of the most skillfully constructed amp-crunch trance you're going to find. This delivers a good half hour or so of pure monolithic mind-blot.
The tape is nicely presented with a pro-produced cassette packaged in a glossy black and white j-card. Vomir fanatics will not be disappointed.

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This prog-thrash classic is now available as a limited-edition double Lp set from Back On Black, issued on colored 180 gram vinyl in a gatefold jacket with different album art/design than the Rockadrome CD edition.
Demonstrations In Chaos is a scorching collection of early demos from influential Texas 80's prog-thrashers Watchtower is some of the craziest thrash you'll ever hear. The band possessed many of the trademarks of early 80s thrash - intense, wailing vocals, dystopian subject matter, breakneck tempos - but Watchtower contorted that sound into insanely complex arrangements and performed with jazz-like precision that was obviously heavily influenced by progressive rock and fusion. Their music is an acquired taste that baffled a lot of 'bangers back in when they first appeared, but since then Watchtower has been heralded as a pioneering progressive metal band that took thrash metal into weird, new challenging directions and laid the foundation for what we generally refer to as "math metal", precursors to the edgy, experimental metal of bands like Athiest, Cynic, Coroner, Anacrusis, Behold...The Arctopus, and other prog-influenced thrash and death metallers.
This collection reissued on Forged In Fire features liner notes and flyers from the early years of the band, and covers their early demo tracks along with a smattering of live and rehearsal material. The "Boss tapes" recordings from 1983 reveal that Watchtower was already a highly skilled thrash outfit early on, with songs like "Meltdown" and "Asylum” marked by quirky leadwork and vocal patterns, with hints of the oddball time changes that would later become their calling card. The most interesting song from this recording is "Argonne Forest", a complex, dizzying avant-thrash workout with confounding rhythmic complexity.
By the time that you reach the four demo tracks from 1987, we see the band evolving into a much more advanced and intricately plotted tech-thrash that's leaps and bounds beyond their ambitious early recordings, bringing the complexity and chops of bands like King Crimson and Mahavishnu Orchestra to thrash metal aggression. Watchtower’s virtuosic rhythm section (one of the best ever in thrash metal) is crucial to their sound, weaving through jaw-dropping time signatures and tempo changes.
The recordings that follow are primarily of interest to hardcore Watchtower fans, with a pair of rough boom box recordings offering some insight into their songwriting process, a ferocious live recording of "Ballad Assassin" from 1985, and an early recording of "Meltdown" that appeared on the Cottage Cheese From the Lips of Death: A Texas Hardcore Compilation from 1983 where Watchtower appeared alongside the likes of Butthole Surfers, Really Red, Stickmen With Rayguns, and Big Boys.
Track Samples:
Sample : Asylum
Sample : Cathode Ray Window [#]
Sample : Cimmerian Shadows
Sample : Hidden Instincts [Demo Version]

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This classic slab of early prog-thrash is finally available on vinyl, re-issued by Back On Black on limited edition 180 gram colored vinyl...
A total mind-blower when it came out in 1985, Watchtower's debut album Energetic Disassembly hit the thrash crowd right between the eyes with one part ripping thrash metal assault, one part fusiony tech musicianship and songwriting that was way beyond what anyone else was doing at the time. These eight songs deliver the ferocious angular metal assault that made 'em famous, each song brimming with razor-edged riffs wound into dizzying complex structures, moving in and out of various tempos and time signatures without warning, whipping their intricate thrash metal into often baffling forms. The bass guitar is a lot more prominent here than on most thrash albums, tearing through crazy jazz-informed runs and fusion-style shredding (check out the totally bonkers basswork on "Cimmerian Shadows", my goddamn jaw hit the floor the first time I heard it), and the rhythm section as a whole is one of the most formidable units in the 80s thrash pantheon. Jason McMaster's crazed falsetto vocals on Energetic Disassembly (which would eventually be tempered when he joined LA hair metallers Dangerous Toys later on) has always been one of the things that many thrash fans couldn't wrap their heads around, as the guy's singing can get incredibly over-the-top; imagine Rob Halford with his nuts caught in a steam press. But for me, this is a crucial part of Watchtower's insane sound, as integral to their unique prog-thrash genius as all of the wild virtuosic shredding and mathematical riff arrangements.
An essential album for fans of 80's avant-thrash metal, Energetic Disassembly is as important to the development of progressive and experimental thrash as Dimension Hatröss and To Mega Therion as far as I'm concerned.
Track Samples:
Sample : Cimmerian Shadows
Sample : Energetic Disassembly
Sample : Meltdown
Sample : Tyrants in Distress

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Originally released in the US by Profound Lore, Winterfylleth's Ghost... has been re-issued by Candlelight in a new version that also features two bonus tracks that consist of early unreleased versions of songs that would later appear on their latest album The Mercian Sphere...
Opening with a ferocious onslaught of D-beat charged grindcrust, Winterfylleth (Old English for "Winter Full Moon") arrive with a savage outburst of their self-proclaimed "English Heritage Black Metal" on their debut album The Ghost Of Heritage. That label gives you an idea of the themes behind their music, that being a focus on ancient Anglo-Saxon history, English warfare, pre-Christian traditions, and a staunch pride in the history of England. While many black metal bands that center their music around notions of nationalism and cultural pride tend to at least flirt with some dubious political and racial philosophies, Winterfylleth (which features members of Uk doomsters Atavist and pagan black metallers Wodensthrone) seem to bypass all of that stuff and simply focus on historical narratives and the natural grandeur of the English countryside through their blazing, folk-tinged black metal. And blazing this baby is, with nine tracks of epic blackened thrash and hypnotic riffing, comparable to both Drudkh and Wolves In The Throne Room with hints of the classic Norwegian BM of early Enslaved and Ulver. Buzzing, droning guitars emit grim melodic lines and slip into haunting passages of lush acoustic guitar strum and morose male chorals that create a haunting woodland atmosphere in between the snarling mid-paced black/folk metal. Lots of folk-influenced black metal stuff ends up sounding cheesy to my ears, but Winterfylleth rip from start to finish, and even the moody folk parts sound powerful and epic. That's the thing that really makes this album stand out - the melodies and hooks behind Winterfylleth's songs are really well written and memorable, making this much catchier than yer typical folky BM album. Definitely for those into The Meads of Asphodel, Isengard, Hate Forest, Primordial, and all of the aforementioned bands.
Track Samples:
Sample : Casting the Runes
Sample : Man Tor (The Shivering Mountain)

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