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It's been six years since the Japanese sludgelords Corrupted have flattened us with a new album of their glacial sludge. Released on Nostalgia Blackrain, the label operated by Corrupted drummer Chew, Garten Der Unbewusstheit marks a turning point for the band, being the last album to feature the lineup of bassist/vocalist Hevi and guitarist Talbot alongside drummer Chew. This lineup produced classic albums such as Paso Inferior, Llenandose De Gusanos and Se Hace Por Los Suenos Asesinos, and with their leaving the band, Chew has stated that Corrupted will proceed with a new lineup for future releases that will take the sound in new directions. With this album, though, we're already introduced to a musical side of Corrupted that'll surprise a lot of listeners.
The first song "Garten" quietly appears with a delicate clean guitar melody playing out over simple, minimal drumming that is little more than the rhythmic chime of a cymbal, with only spare bass drum hits and the occasional snare disturbing the tranquil atmosphere, a kind of skeletal, super minimal slowcore that's somewhat like something you'd hear from Codeine, but a few shades darker. When the vocals finally come in, they are a hushed growled whisper, deep and ominous as the somber guitars are joined by an eerie, almost jazzy melody, and then it all crashes down. The guitars surge into heavy crashing chords, the drumming becomes heavier and more powerful, that hushed croon rising into a monstrous growl, but instead of the tectonic sludge of their older works, this is much more melancholic and majestic, still layered with those clean chiming guitars and soaring effects even at it's heaviest, and still sounding rather Codeine-ish. Over the song's half hour length, the band moves between these lengthy passages of beautiful fragility and the eruptions of towering heaviness, until it finally flows seamlessly into "Against The Darkest Days". This second track is very brief, an interlude which begins with creeping autumnal shadows of the first half of the album and moving into a single acoustic guitar playing a beautiful somber piece that leads right into the final song, the half hour long "Gekkou No Daichi".
That slow, sorrowful acoustic melody carries over through the beginning of the song, the gentle strum spreading out through the first few minutes. Then the roar of a heavier distorted second guitar creeps in, the two intertwining in a dark cloud, and it all erupts into a massive, majestic dirge, the achingly pretty main melody drifting among the rumbling down tuned heaviness and soaring high end guitars, the vocals becoming a deep monstrous roar as this glacial slowcore lament slowly unfolds across the length of the piece, the sound seriously heavy but also much more dreamy and ethereal than what I'm used to hearing from Corrupted, especially when the guitars soar skyward with gorgeous ascendant melodies. Around the midway point, the band slips into a lumbering slow-burning dirge that is streaked with incandescent feedback and walls of shimmering guitar, while the drums slip from the pounding elephantine crush into jazzier percussion flourishes. As the song approaches the final third, all of this starts to once again build in intensity, the drums becoming more powerful and pounding, the guitars weaving more complex melodies and building into this amazing cinematic crescendo that is even more dramatic sounding that what has come before, a towering wall of distorted melody and roaring low-end amplifier noise, crushing and incredibly beautiful. By the end, the drums fall apart, and the song rides out on a wave of receding cymbal hiss and raging distortion as the acoustic guitar returns, ending Garten Der Unbewusstheit with another softly played almost Spanish-tinged piece.
It's undeniably powerful music, even if the shift into a more melodic, spacious sound might not be what fans of the band's blackest doom were expecting from a new Corrupted album. They've never sounded more majestic than they do here, though, and after listening to Garten non-stop over the past few weeks, I look forward to seeing how the band will continue to evolve as they move into the next chapter of their existence.
Track Samples:
Sample : Garten
Sample : Gekkon no Daichi

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Just found a few copies of this rather hard-to-find picture disc edition of Aborym's classic 1999 debut album, and it's a beaut, with full color artwork on both sides and a version of their song "Tantra Bizarre" that is exclusive to this release.
Not as off-the-hook bizarre as Dodheimsgard but much more electronically enhanced than bands like Mysticum or Thorns, Aborym would develop their mix of classic second wave Norwegian black metal and electronic music into a much more sophisticated sound on later albums during the early 00's. Kali Yuga Bizarre was still a fine blast of brain-frying electro-infected baroque blackness from this European collective, though. Kicking off with the icy majesty of "Wehrmacht Kali Ma", the disc makes its way through a shadowy labyrinth of frostbitten black buzz and odd carnival-esque melodies, diving suddenly into the synth-heavy black metal of "Horrenda Peccata Christi" that twists through spasms of frenetic drum n' bass and throbbing industrial metal, and slow doom-laden passages backed with soaring orchestral keyboards. The vocals are handled by both lead vocalist Yorga SM and legendary black metal frontman Attila Csihar, who both spew a litany of demonic croaks, Latin incantations, and draconian imperatives while the rest of the band claws their way through these ten tracks of hallucinatory industrial black metal. And that's heavy on the "hallucination"; haunted pipe organs rise out of the mist, industrial percussion rattles in the distance, and deep monk-like chanting drifts in the background, and there's the constant presence of 80's style horror movie keyboards throughout Kali Yuga, on tracks like "Hellraiser", the slow reverberating pace, heavy bass line and gloomy keys evokes the sound of 80's darkwave before the music decomposes into weird effect-laden nightmare ambience. The track "Roma Divina Urbs" flows out of that into the sound of booming kettledrums and medieval horns resembling something off of the Conan The Barbarian soundtrack, and then Aborym bursts into a blackened metal version of the same arrangement now laced with electronic harpsichord sounds and frenzied blast beats, with dramatic clean vocals appearing later in the song. This unpredictable lunatic vibe is all over this album.
On the flipside, "Tantra Bizarre" delivers one of the album's most majestic songs with Attila's bizarre moaning vokills, one killer melodic hook after another, and a wild mix of shredding guitar solos and some very strange shrieking sounds that dive-bomb throughout the whole track. "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus" is one of the album's most twisted tracks, a hellish mishmash of hardcore techno, Black Mass atmospherics, blackened tremolo riffing, distorted bass lines and synths, and blown-out break beats all wound together into a delirious funhouse nightmare. A maniacal voice rants in Italian while a church choir sings, and then the band rips into the ferocious blackthrash of "Metal Striken Terror Action". That's followed by the delirious gothic blackness of "The First Four Trumpets", which resembles something from Fields Of The Nephilim, down to the deep Carl McCoy-esque vocals. The final bonus track "Tantra Bizarre (Co30 Version)" takes certain elements of the original version and gloms it all back together into a frantic skittering hardcore techno jam, a massive bass line slithering among the distorted fast-paced break beats and swarming synth, blackened shrieks and bizarre gasping vocals swooping back and forth, foreshadowing the more drum n' bass infected direction the band would take on later albums like With No Human Intervention.
Released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.

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The 2004 album Damned And Mummified from Californian death metal mutants Abcess is back in stock after a period of unavailability, and it's an essential chapter in the career of this terminally weird side project from members of death metal legends Autopsy. The songs on Damned... are loaded with hideous doom-laden psychedelic death metal slime, at times reminiscent of Autopsy, but with weird gasping, snarling vocals that are run through an exorbitant amount of delay and other effects, lurching primitive death metal riffs find themselves reshaped into monstrously stoned Sabbathian grooves, insanely dissonant guitar solos and discordant almost Voivod-ian riffs, and lots of weird effects and noises. There are a number of tracks on here where Abscess get into their bulldozing sludgy hardcore punk modem, like "Swallow The Venom", "Tattoo Collector" and the bludgeoning title track, and there's an equal amount of crushing doom death and raging tribal drum freak outs strewn throughout this disc. It also has one of my favorite Abscess songs, "Twilight Bleeds", which has the band mixing together haunting doom-laden lead guitars and sludgy, lurching doom with a trippy mess of bizarre noises, maniacal gargles, bluesy soloing, and even some backing acoustic guitar and a couple of bursts of brutal hardcore that all adds up to one of their heaviest, catchiest tracks. They reached a pinnacle of glorious other-dimensional weirdness on their swan song Dawn Of Inhumanity, but this is still a killer disc from these death sludge freaks, and the music on Damned... continues to suggest to me what Celtic Frost could have sounded like if they had eaten a ton of mushrooms during their recording sessions. Anyone into offbeat death metal who isn't already a fan of Abscess should check them out ASAP. Oh, and the artwork on this disc is terrific; it's got a mix of bizarre drawings from Abscess front man Chris Reifert (which always have this weird Boiled Angel vibe) and illustrations from the masterful Dennis Dread on the cover.
Track Samples:
Sample : Inferno of Perverse Creation
Sample : Lust for the Grave
Sample : Twilight Bleeds

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This 7" has been out of print for awhile, but I've dug some up from the depths of the Crucial Blast warehouse this week. Released with two different full color covers to totally infuriate collectors and Acid Witch obsessives, Midnight Mass / To Magic, Sex And Gore delivers two monstrous tracks of the band's awesome psychedelic sludgy death metal Walpurgisnacht. Each of these different versions features artwork for one of the two songs, and they look fuckin' killer; as a fanatic for creepy, old EC Comics style artwork, I had to pick up both of 'em.
On "Midnight Mass", the song begins with an Goblin-style keyboard intro combined with some sampled audio from an old witchcraft film (which I'm not able to place), and then it kicks into the crushing chugging doom death, monstrous slow motion Sabbathian deathsludge backed by those killer horror movie style keyboards and soaring psychedelic leads. The other track "To Magic, Sex And Gore" is equally crushing, a blast of groovy doomed death with a pulverizing classic Sab-riff slowed down to a bone crushing crawl and backed by keyboards straight out of a 70's Hammer film. Awesome!
Both versions are extremely limited, and will not be restocked when they sell out.

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This 7" has been out of print for awhile, but I've dug some up from the depths of the Crucial Blast warehouse this week. Released with two different full color covers to totally infuriate collectors and Acid Witch obsessives, Midnight Mass / To Magic, Sex And Gore delivers two monstrous tracks of the band's awesome psychedelic sludgy death metal Walpurgisnacht. Each of these different versions features artwork for one of the two songs, and they look fuckin' killer; as a fanatic for creepy, old EC Comics style artwork, I had to pick up both of 'em.
On "Midnight Mass", the song begins with an Goblin-style keyboard intro combined with some sampled audio from an old witchcraft film (which I'm not able to place), and then it kicks into the crushing chugging doom death, monstrous slow motion Sabbathian deathsludge backed by those killer horror movie style keyboards and soaring psychedelic leads. The other track "To Magic, Sex And Gore" is equally crushing, a blast of groovy doomed death with a pulverizing classic Sab-riff slowed down to a bone crushing crawl and backed by keyboards straight out of a 70's Hammer film. Awesome!
Both versions are extremely limited, and will not be restocked when they sell out. ONLY ONE COPY LEFT OF THIS VERSION!!!!

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One of several side-projects to emerge from the Wolvserpent camp, Aelter is the solo effort of Wolvserpent guitarist Blake Green. With Aelter, Blake explores a similar realm of dark majestic sound to Wolvserpent, with his massive downtuned guitar roar and bleak minor key melodies being the common thread between the two projects. But where Wolvserpent blends this chugging Melvins-esque heaviness and haunting slowcore arpeggios with violins, pounding drums, and a propensity for extended hypno-dirges, Aelter dispenses with the drums almost completely and goes for a more cinematic approach using layered keyboards and gorgeous harmonized voices that reminds me of something you would have heard on Beggers Banquet or 4AD being fused to a malevolent black heaviness. Both of the Aelter albums were only released on vinyl in limited editions of a few hundred copies and are close to going out of print completely, but we've got a limited number of both records in stock.
The second Aelter album Follow You Beloved (released on vinyl in 2011) grows even darker, much of the prettiness from the first album leeched out by the swelling blackness, but still rife with moments of fragile beauty. The drums are also more prominent here, making this the heavier of the two albums by far. The first side is "Beloved", which begins with a solemn organ line joined by equally funereal piano notes awash in lunar glow. It transforms into a desolate guitar instrumental, reverby guitar twang unfolding around delicate acoustic picking and washes of ethereal synth that almost has a Badalamenti tint to it; then the drums come in, heavy and plodding, just as the airy fragile layered vocals materialize and the sound appears as some kind of shadow-cast, doom laden slowcore. It's really gorgeous stuff, moving through passages where everything drops out and just a single electric guitar chimes in the darkness, a simple minor key figure repeated over and over, and spacey orchestral synths gradually drift in as a steady sinister bass pulse echoes through the darkness. Like the earlier work, this makes me think of drone metallers Earth crossed with swirling darkwave pop, heavy and ominous but shot through with gorgeous moody melody. The song finally returns to the dark lumbering heaviness as everything drops back in, sheets of delayed guitar and what sounds like a mandolin swirling around the treacly drums and that central melody that threads throughout the song, turning even heavier and blacker as massive distorted doom riffage slowly pours in and the music slows down, changing into a blackly majestic Western-tinged doom in it's last few minutes.
On the other side, "Follow You" takes us once more into eerie Badalamenti-like haze of sorrowful reverb guitar and haunting droning keys joined by deep bass notes and cello-like sounds, and then suddenly drops into doomed crush, slow ponderous drums and crushing glacial guitars continuing the main melody, distant ethereal vocals layered in eerie harmony behind the grim doom-laden heaviness, eventually flowing out into a mass of choral darkness later in the song when the music drops out and the vocals come to the fore. Later, it transforms back into the heavy droning funeral procession from before, the riff repeating over and over again, a droning, swirling processional dirge adorned with droning keyboards.
Limited to a mere 85 copies, and packaged in a hand-screened, hand-numbered insert with a foldout poster insert.
Track Samples:
Sample : Beloved web sample
Sample : Follow You web sample

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One of several side-projects to emerge from the Wolvserpent camp, Aelter is the solo effort of Wolvserpent guitarist Blake Green. With Aelter, Blake explores a similar realm of dark majestic sound to Wolvserpent, with his massive downtuned guitar roar and bleak minor key melodies being the common thread between the two projects. But where Wolvserpent blends this chugging Melvins-esque heaviness and haunting slowcore arpeggios with violins, pounding drums, and a propensity for extended hypno-dirges, Aelter dispenses with the drums almost completely and goes for a more cinematic approach using layered keyboards and gorgeous harmonized voices that reminds me of something you would have heard on Beggers Banquet or 4AD being fused to a malevolent black heaviness.
Both of the Aelter albums were only released on vinyl in limited editions of a few hundred copies and are close to going out of print completely, but we have now gathered both Dusk Dawn and Follow You Beloved together in a double disc set.
The first Aelter record Dusk Dawn from 2009 from is now out of print on vinyl and featured two side-long tracks. The first half "Dusk" begins much like something you would hear from Wolvserpent, an eerie guitar figure slowly plucked over heavy, rumbling doom metal chords, the dark menacing sound slowly unfolding in a manner similar to newer Earth but with a much more sinister vibe. But then this gloomy dirge starts to transform into something that is not so much like Wolvserpent as lush gauzy synthesizers wash in alongside ethereal choral voices, the sound drifting and uncoiling without the propulsion of drums or any other percussion, just a cloudy black fog of doom-laden darkwave underscored with those heavy rumbling guitars. This sound is utterly gorgeous, like some strange mixture of Earth's bleak ambient heaviness and the dark ethereal downer pop of Clan Of Xymox or some similar darkwave outfit. The second track travels deeper into this lush shadowy ambience, the guitars dropping out for long stretches of time as gorgeous high-end drones and shimmering dream-pop keyboards. The vocals begin to appear way off in the distance, slowly fading inwards as the guitars again materialize with chugging downtuned crunch and somber minor key melodies unwinding overhead. And when the vocals build into a majestic multi-part harmony, this becomes incredibly beautiful, like some drifting dreampop epic descending into darkness, finally combining with a minimal piano melody at the end. Limited to three hundred hand-numbered copies, packaged in a silkscreened wraparound sleeve.
Track Samples:
Sample : dusk
Sample : Dawn

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ANGEL OF DECAY   Bleeding On The Flowers   CD   (Bloodlust!)    12.98

The Bloodlust! label is another one that I've been slowly making my way through, having missed out on most of the label's offerings of grimy, grim industrial noise when they first came out in the latter half of the last decade. One of these is this disc from Angel Of Decay, which has become one of my new faves since getting it in stock. It's a collection of two half-hour long tracks of crumbling black factory ambience from this short lived project from Jonathan Canady. You've no doubt come across Canady's work in one form or another over the years, as this guy has been involved with the vicious power electronic and death industrial groups Deathpile and Blunt Force Trauma, industrial metallers Dead World, the newer noise group Nightmares alongside David Reed (Luasa Raelon/Envenomist) and Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded), and was the in-house art guy for Relapse Records for several years. Originally released on cassette back in 2007, AOD's Bleeding On The Flowers explores new stygian depths and nightmare terrain from Canady through the use of various vintage analog synthesizers.
The title track is a churning mass of machine noise and the monotonous chug of massive engines, rumbling rotors and other mechanical drones all bathed in delay and reverb. Grinding black synths crawl across this blasted industrial backdrop as howling distorted vokills descend upon it, resembling the fury of demons raging over a symphony of steel presses and buzzsaws. This fusion of industrial dronescape terror and oppressive, stentorian power electronics is covered in sonic filth, but it's also juiced up with a seriously heavy recording that combine together for a powerful, hellish listening experience.
The second track "Sick, Insane And Half Dead" is more minimal, smoldering distant distortion and peals of high end feedback swelling up alongside blackened gasping vokills and murkier washes of machine noise. From there, this travels through various stretches of grinding synth damage, harrowing passages of screeching drone, waves of crackling machine noise and the earth-shaking rumble of gargantuan turbines, all of these evoking further visions of demonically possessed ironworks that are filled with howling ghostly vocalizations, relentless pounding rhythms and swooping shrieking entities. Man, this is terrifying stuff all the way to the end; fans of the harshest Cold Meat Industries output will want to hear this for sure.
Released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Bleeding On The Flowers
Sample : Sick, Insane and Half Dead

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ASBAAR   Corona Veil Aurei   CD   (Black Drone)    11.98

The new Black Drone imprint has been turning out a great series of dark ambient albums with more variety than you might expect; this disc from Asbaar is one of the label's latest, a slab of excellent minimal black ambient from Spanish artist Marc Merinee, who is also known for his involvement in the Cold Meat martial industrial group Eldar as well as the dark ritual prog band Equimanthorn (which also features members of Absu and Hexentanz, and is a huge favorite of mine...). Those fans of Eldar who check out Asbaar will hear a few similarities between the two projects in Merinee's solo work, but with Asbaar he pursues a more stripped-down and abstract form of dark industrial, this one made up of longer, more expansive tracks broken up with shorter interlude-like pieces. Once you start listening to Corona Veil Aurei, you're quickly embraced by vast metallic reverberations echoing within endless, lightless underground chambers, where mysterious unidentifiable sounds occur at the edges of hearing and abstract machinelike clank and echoing noises dissolve into the blackness without end. At its core, Asbaar crafts a massive abstract blackness that's pretty similar to Lustmord, the vast cavernous drift filled with the same sort of Lovecraftian dread and mystery. But there's an added mystic element to this that also suggests a kinship with the blackened Finnish drone rites of bands like Halo Manash, Zoät-Aon, Aeoga and Arktau Eos. These elements appear as inhuman mutterings and chanting that drifts up from deep beneath the earth, those monstrous voices cloaked in swarms of creepy insectile buzz and flutter, disappearing behind the omnipresent drone of distant engines. Massive distorted cosmic synths start to show up with the third track "Agnosia" amid percussive noises and abstract glitchy sounds, but it's on "Lumur" where the sound really changes into a more fearsome soundscape, with eerie distant sirens sliding up and down in pitch, strange synthetic wailing and the far-off buzz of swarming locusts all filling the depths. From there, the faint sounds of bells and chimes emerge followed by sinister reptilian throat singing and nightmarish chanting, swells of formless black drift and metallic whirr bellowing out of the depths, joined by dissonant synthetic strings and pitch-black kosimiche synth-drone. The whole album moves equally between the more minimal Lustmordian crypt-drift and the heavier, caustic Cold Meat style sound, while maintaining a nightmarish feel throughout all ten tracks. Chilling stuff, highly recommended to any fans of serious ambient dread.
The disc comes in a six-panel digipack with a full color twelve page booklet with photos by Manel O. Company and writing from Merinee, and is limited to 480 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Agnosia
Sample : Emanatio
Sample : Instinctus

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BIANCHI, MAURIZIO   Industrial Murder / Menstrual Bleeding   CD   (Phage Tapes)    14.98

A welcome reissue of another of Bianchi's early 80's albums, Industrial Murder is one of the earliest recorded full lengths from this influential Italian industrial artist. Prior to this, the album had only been available as a long out-of-print Lp that was issued in the early 90s by Banned Productions. Like all of his early work, this album festers with a kind of diseased black electronics that is still as psychologically disturbing today as it was thirty years ago.
Recorded around the same period of time (1981-1982) that Bianchi was producing his nauseating industrial classics Endometrio and Symphony For A Genocide, Industrial Murder / Menstrual Bleeding is early Bianchi at his cancerous best, utilizing a minimal set of tools (such as drum machine, battered synth and distortion boxes) to create these sprawling noisescapes filled with wobbly buzzing rhythms, noxious throbbing bass, extreme over-modulated judders and weird air-raid siren like peals of high-end howl. This stuff sounds like the apocalypse.
Part One: Industrial Murder is one the most rhythm-driven recordings that I've heard from this era of Bianchi's output. It starts off with a brutal blast of over-modulated feedback noise, but then a clanking machinelike loop appears, becoming a constant pounding pulse that continues on as more fluttering, rumbling electronic noise swarms in. Now, this is hardly danceable, but it does hammer out an ever changing barrage of metal-on-metal clank and monotonous drum machine rhythms that produce a highly hypnotic effect, even when this nearly half-hour piece is overwhelmed with loud feedback hum, putrid stretched-out synth noise, damaged melodies, electronic sirens and massive juddering bass throb. The second half Menstrual Bleeding is pretty much of the same bent, although at first the track is a bit more monotonous and plodding. It soon starts to squirm and squeal, though, shifting into an undulating mass of distorted synth blurt and processed rhythmic glitchnoise.
Comes in a silk-screened arigato pack, and is limited to 300 copies (and already sold out from the label!).
Track Samples:
Sample : Industrial Murder
Sample : Menstrual Bleeding

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BLACK DEPTHS GREY WAVES   Nightmare Of The Blackened Heart   CD   (Aesthetic Death)    11.98

It's been years since I've heard new stuff from Clint Listig; his Dragonflight label put out some interesting dark ambient and neo-folk albums in the early half of the last decade, and this output included some interesting records from his own projects which included the neo-folk outfit As All Die, the symphonic doom metal band Long Winters Stare, and the dark ambience of When Joy Becomes Sadness. It appears that Listig is back with a new outfit called Black Depths Grey Waves, a duo with a character named Saint Ov Gravediggers, who I've heard before from the obscure, underappreciated black industrial doom band Ordo Tyrannis; their Vasa Iniquitatis album (Flood The Earth, 2006) received a lot of play around here back when it came out. Here, the two musicians have teamed up for this black industrial outfit whose debut for Aesthetic Death combines a harsh noise aesthetic with the blackest sort of ambient drone and a heavy dose of occult subject matter. This is really cool stuff. The three tracks on Nightmare... submerge heavily processed incantations, warped minor key synthesizer melodies and backwards black metal riffs, and pitch-black bass-heavy drones in clouds of swarming black static; on the opener "The Hunt For Greater Truth", the sound suggests a meeting between the satanic industrial rituals of MZ412 and the crackling static walls of Werewolf Jerusalem. It's an unexpected mix of sounds, but it works well here. The middle track "3rd Candle For The Fallen" is more hallucinatory and layered, a swirling fog of metallic drones and roaring subterranean wind and crackling shortwave static; through this murky wall of sound you can detect all kinds of strange whirrs and whispers and melted backwards-running melodies, eventually joined once again by that withered gasping voice reciting strange Crowleyian verses. The last track is the highlight here, though; "Final Key To Pure Thought" is a Robitussin-soaked dirge with a gluey doom metal riff that is played backwards and looped over and over while corrosive static washes over it, and a processed goblin-voice snarls over top alongside pitch shifted bestial howling. With this, the duo conjures something akin to hearing Blue Sabbath Black Cheer performing the background music for a black mass. Grim stuff that makes for a supremely brain-blackening listening experience.
Comes in digipack packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : Final Key To Pure Thought
Sample : The Hunt For Greater Truth

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BRAIN TUMORS   self-titled   7 INCH VINYL   (Fashionable Idiots)    6.50

Here's an awesome debut Ep from a hardcore punk band out of Minneapolis called Brain Tumors that had me raging instantly the first time I threw it on the deck. It's on Fashionable Idiots, and like most of the stuff that I've heard from the label, it's wonky hardcore with a quirky style of it's own. The six songs on this platter are fast, ferocious blasts of hardcore that come from the Negative Approach/Die Kreuzen school of brute thrash, always a winner in my book, but injects it with manic solos, jangly, sort of twangy guitars, and some angular skronk. Oh, and the singer is a goddamn maniac, spitting and frothing and howling out his lyrics, belting them out in a nearly unintelligible mess of anti-social ranting. I can't wait to hear more from these guys, you'll want to check this Ep out if you're infatuated with the new crop of mutant hardcore bands that have been coming out on Iron Lung and Fashionable Idiots and Parts Unknown. The record comes in a disgusting four-color silk-screened sleeve, and is limited to six hundred copies.

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BROKEN NOTE   Flood   12 INCH   (Ad Noiseam)    10.98

This British group is responsible for some of the heaviest, most extreme dubstep I've ever heard, and their Flood 12", a vinyl-only limited release from Ad Noiseam, brings more of that awesome apocalyptic dub-dread. Crushing, subwoofer-wrecking bass and ultra-distorted stuttering 4/4 beats are mixed with sampled strings, eerie voices, contorted synth lines and even some brooding post-rock atmospherics to create a peculiarly doom-laden form of dubstep that is just as heavy as anything you'll hear from Necro Deathmort or The Blood Of Heroes, and probably even heavier. Each side features two tracks: first up is the massive lurching doom-laden dubstep of the title track, followed by the brilliantly assembled "Aporia", which opens with cavernous black ambience before slipping into a bleak Scorn-esque dubscape with bits of soundtrack-style strings and muffled techno rhythms, sinister cinematic samples and dark choral voices.
Over on the b-side, an impressive intro of orchestral stabs and skull-imploding bass leads into the brutal wobbling synth-bass of "Mask Of Gas" (the only non-exclusive track on this record, having previously appeared on the band's 2009 album Terminal Static), with pulverizing beats that are so heavy, they could have been lifted from a deathcore album; this track achieves massive metallic heaviness. And "Bad Acid" features lush pads and bursts of distorted synth that spasm into a brutal mash of distorted beats, slithering blown-out bass, sampled vocals from some maniacal ragga toaster, all fused into a mass of sputtering spastic dubdoom.
This is as brutal and as violent as I've heard dubstep get. Highly recommended!

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BURZUM   Hlidskjalf (180 gram)   LP   (Back On Black)    20.00

Burzum's second "prison album" Hliðskjálf from 1999 has recently been reissued on Cd through Vikerne's new imprint Byelobog Productions and on deluxe vinyl through Back On Black, giving me a chance to go back over this mucho-maligned album from Norwegian black metal's most hated personality. Everyone knows the story behind this and the preceding album Dauði Baldrs (1997); both were recorded during Varg Vikerne's imprisonment for the murder of Euronymous and multiple church-burnings, using only a synthesizer and tape recorder (the only equipment that he was permitted to use in prison), and went in an entirely different musical direction from his earlier black metal works, instead crafting a kind of dark medieval electronic music. When these albums were released, most fans scorned the new direction that Vikernes took with Burzum, dismissed by most as a half-baked change in style on the level of Cold Lake. Not to mention that Vikernes' scarcely concealed white power/National Socialist leanings didn't do much to endear his prison albums to folks, either. The controversial aspects of Burzum's work aside, I actually dug Hliðskjálf much more than I thought I would when I first heard it. Of course it has nothing to do with black metal aesthetically; the only things that connect this with Burzum's early albums is the pagan/Norse subject matter that has always been a big part of Vikernes' art. Musically, this isn't the inept Casio slop that some have unfairly described it as being; although the music is pretty minimal on Hliðskjálf, there's a bit of variety here, from the industrial-tinged synthesizer soundtrack of the opener "The Heart Of Tuisto" (which reminds me of some of the cooler horror movie scores that Full Moon was producing in the early 90s) and the booming tympani and synthetic horns on the ominous medieval dirge "The Death Of Woutan". Some Tangerine Dream influence shows up throughout the disc (especially on "The Ride Of Ansugardaz" and "Empathy"), as does stretches of layered looping dark ambience, and some elements of World Serpent-esque neo-folk. Yeah, there's some admittedly cheesy electronic neo-classical that appears on a couple of tracks, but as a whole the album is an interesting bit of Nordic neo-classical darkness that's worth a second look. Both versions of this reissue look great: the new vinyl reissue on Back On Black features a gorgeous gatefold sleeve and 180 gram colored vinyl, while the Cd edition of Byelobog comes in cool slipcase packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : Frijôs Einsames Trauern
Sample : Tuistos Herz

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BURZUM   Hlidskjalf (Reissue)   CD   (Byelobog Productions)    18.00

Burzum's second "prison album" Hliðskjálf from 1999 has recently been reissued on Cd through Vikerne's new imprint Byelobog Productions and on deluxe vinyl through Back On Black, giving me a chance to go back over this mucho-maligned album from Norwegian black metal's most hated personality. Everyone knows the story behind this and the preceding album Dauði Baldrs (1997); both were recorded during Varg Vikerne's imprisonment for the murder of Euronymous and multiple church-burnings, using only a synthesizer and tape recorder (the only equipment that he was permitted to use in prison), and went in an entirely different musical direction from his earlier black metal works, instead crafting a kind of dark medieval electronic music. When these albums were released, most fans scorned the new direction that Vikernes took with Burzum, dismissed by most as a half-baked change in style on the level of Cold Lake. Not to mention that Vikernes' scarcely concealed white power/National Socialist leanings didn't do much to endear his prison albums to folks, either. The controversial aspects of Burzum's work aside, I actually dug Hliðskjálf much more than I thought I would when I first heard it. Of course it has nothing to do with black metal aesthetically; the only things that connect this with Burzum's early albums is the pagan/Norse subject matter that has always been a big part of Vikernes' art. Musically, this isn't the inept Casio slop that some have unfairly described it as being; although the music is pretty minimal on Hliðskjálf, there's a bit of variety here, from the industrial-tinged synthesizer soundtrack of the opener "The Heart Of Tuisto" (which reminds me of some of the cooler horror movie scores that Full Moon was producing in the early 90s) and the booming tympani and synthetic horns on the ominous medieval dirge "The Death Of Woutan". Some Tangerine Dream influence shows up throughout the disc (especially on "The Ride Of Ansugardaz" and "Empathy"), as does stretches of layered looping dark ambience, and some elements of World Serpent-esque neo-folk. Yeah, there's some admittedly cheesy electronic neo-classical that appears on a couple of tracks, but as a whole the album is an interesting bit of Nordic neo-classical darkness that's worth a second look. Both versions of this reissue look great: the new vinyl reissue on Back On Black features a gorgeous gatefold sleeve and 180 gram colored vinyl, while the Cd edition of Byelobog comes in cool slipcase packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : Frijôs Einsames Trauern
Sample : Tuistos Herz

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CELESTIIAL   Desolate North   LP   (Handmade Birds)    16.98

One of the primary MO's of the new Handmade Birds imprint appears to be releasing limited edition reissues of cult underground metal albums in highly attractive new packaging designs, such as the recent reish of Blut Aus Nord's Mort. This new Lp version of Desolate North from forest-doom shaman Celestiial is in the same vein, presenting the music from the original Bindrune Cd release with new artwork (by Faith Coloccia of Everlovely Lightningheart/Mamiffer) in a beautiful gatefold package that features black and white woodland photography for the album art, limited to only 250 copies. The Cd edition has been out of print for several years, so at the moment this is your only chance to get a physical edition of this album. Here's the original write-up that I did for the Bindrune release back when that version came out:
The one-man primordial deathdoom band Celestiial slooowly drifts through an ethereal woodland terrain that's alive with the sounds of rain and chirping birdsong, forming an ominous atmosphere that is very similiar to Skepticism in its stately lumbering, but Celestiial is more organic and mystical, more like a cross between those Finnish funeral masters and the fragile druidic doom-folk of Chet Scott's projects (Elemental Chrysalis, Ruhr Hunter, Svart Ugle, etc). Actually, as the album progresses, it loosens it's tethers to the doom form, mainly through the distant hiss of slowly pulsating cymbals and barely discernable drums and the buried drone of the almost non-existant guitar. The dreamy death growls blanketed in reverb are similiarly distant and blurred, while the woodland sounds are at the forefront, the grey haze of rainfall and wildlife sometimes obscuring the beautiful Windham Hill-style New Age string and flute arrangements and heavier passages. That's not to say that Celestiial isn't crushingly heavy, which it is...the heaviness here is a suffocating ambient dread, a witnessing of the impermanent self surrounded by nature. Desolate North contains 8 tracks that work together as a single 45 minute suite, and the album is definitely best absorbed in it's entirety. Highly recommended to followers of the funeral doom ambience of Nortt, the otherworldly ooze of Esoteric and Disembowelment, and the Glass Throat family of dark sylvan droneology.

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CHIPS & BEER   Issue 1   MAGAZINE   (20 Buck Spin)    5.00

There is always room on my shelves for another high quality metal rag as long as it's got a ton of personality, and the first issue of Chips & Beer offers up plenty. Created by the guys behind the TheLeftHandPath.com website and Dave at 20 Buck Spin, this fanzine-style mag (full color cover, black and white newsprint on the inside) is a blast to read, with 96-some pages of stuff of interest. In order: there's a page of alcoholic drink recipes from Annick Giroux (Cauchemar); a lengthy conversation with underground gore/metal illusterator Putrid; an Eerie Von comic; an interview with black metallers Negative Plane; a look at the new book Glorious Times that offers a pictorial history of American death metal; more lengthy interviews with Bobby Liebling (Pentagram) and Mark Shelton (Manilla Road), followed by an in-depth Manilla Road discography; a conversation with artist Benjamin Vierling that includes several examples of his amazing, surreal imagery; talks with metallers Christian Mistress, nightmarish Swedish death metallers Vanhelgd; a piece from Stewart Voegtlin on AC/DC's Let There Be Rock; a well-written reviews section; a four-page Pink & White comic that includes cameos by King Diamond and Ghost, from newcomers R. Storey & M. Moseley Smith. It's a great read from start to end, enhanced by a simple but effective layout, lots of artwork, and just a general high level of quality across the whole issue. A look at the bands and artists covered will tell you if this is up your alley or no. It's earned a spot on shelf, for sure. Recommended.

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CITIZENS ARREST   A Light In The Darkness   7 INCH VINYL   (Off The Disk)    7.98

Along with that crazy 7" box-set from Off The Disk that I reviewed on our last new arrivals list, the long-dormant Swiss label has also resurrected this classic slab of extreme hardcore from the short lived New York band Citizens Arrest which has been out of print for over a decade. Probably best known outside of extreme music circles as one of the early bands of indie rocker Ted Leo, these guys came roaring out of the NY hardcore scene in 1989 with a brutal blend of Infest/Siege-influenced blastcore and furious old first-wave hardcore a la Negative Approach / Void / SS Decontrol, and one of the most vicious vocal performances ever in the form of frontman Daryl Kahan. Kahan's throat unleashes an awesome bestial howl that has been accurately described as "some unholy alliance between the first Bathory lp, the Void split, and John Brannon" by Chris Corry over at Bidhardcore.com, and it's easy to see how he later moved on to even more extreme bands like Abazagorath, Taste Of Fear, Forced Expression, Funebrarum, now holding down one of the guitar positions in death metal atavists Disma.
Anyways, A Light In The Darkness was the band's first 7" and came out in '89 on the Wardance label, and it introduced their super-fast aggression with six songs of raw, compressed power. Reissued to coincide with the band's recent reformation (which led to a blistering live set at the 2011 Maryland Deathfest - these guys were one of my favorite sets of the entire weekend), A LIght In The Darkness is back in print, issued in a deluxe gatefold jacket in a limited hand-numbered edition.
The Don Fury produced Ep begins with a steady tide of dark ambience before the band rips into the grinding anti-cop anthem "Serve And Protect", a brutal blasting metallic hardcore eruption that combines a distinct youth crew vibe with the over-the-top blast violence of Siege. Then it's on to ripping speed attacks like "In The Distance" and "Fortress", which further reveal the New York hardcore DNA that was present in Citizen's Arrest music, but amplified to nuclear strength levels of noise and speed. The bonus track "I Won't Allow" (originally off of the Look At All The Children Now compilation LP) begins with a catchy pogo intro before launching into another hyperspeed volley of hardcore riffs and locomotive drumming. On the b-side, the title track and "Woodstock" kick out more anthemic mid-tempo hardcore jams, fueled on a total classic NYC hardcore sound but with a mucho heavier attack and with the distortion and grind dialed way the fuck up, then sets the whole thing on fire with the dual knockout psychoblasts of "Without Peace" and "Death Threat".
Essential listening for fans of extreme hardcore / powerviolence.

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CONSUMER ELECTRONICS   Teenage Nuremburg   CD-R   (RRRecords)    7.98

This old recording from the early British noise project Consumer Electronics just resurfaced recently on RRRecords as a CDr, and it sounds as nasty and abusive now as it ever did back when it was first released. The solo project of a young Philip Best of Whitehouse/Ramleh infamy, Consumer Electronics took a more primitive (yet no less ferocious) approach to constructing severe electronic abuse, and this mid-90s release on the Pure series cuts right through your headmeat with six lengthy assaults of extreme industrial violence. Although the disc was originally released in 1995, the actual recordings all date back to 1982-1983 and are culled from rare cassette and limited vinyl projects. The sound of Teenage Nurmeburg is a kind of murky, dread-soaked proto power electronics, with tracks such as "Sex Deaths", "Genesis Of A Child Star" and "Fusing Devices" (all of which could have doubled as song titles for Whitehouse) lashing out at the listener with looped percussion buried under sheets of tape hiss, loads of low-fidelity slime and airplane hangar reverb crawling across the concrete floor, and weird electronic zaps and synth effects. Best's vocals have a heavily flanged, deformed effect that make 'em sound much stranger than what he did on those Whitehouse albums around the same time, and sometimes erupts into monstrous guttural roars that have a shocking effect when they suddenly blare out over the sordid backdrop of cavernous rumblings, high pitched squeals, strange samples of British youth behaving obnoxiously, and musical fragments and chunks of pop songs. It can go from extremely caustic and nauseating feedback/synth abuse into something that can be surprisingly rhythmic, even hypnotic at times, which of course just adds to the uneasy feeling that permeates all of Consumer Electronics. Also of note is the monolithic opening title track, a nightmarish blat of filthy basement electronics that was recorded back in 1983 and features guest material from John Murphy of industrial pioneers SPK. Comes in a multi-color xeroxed sleeve.
Track Samples:
Sample : Sex Deaths
Sample : Teenage Nuremburg

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CORRUPTED   Garten Der Unbewusstheit   CD   (Nostalgia Blackrain)    19.99

It's been six years since the Japanese sludgelords Corrupted have flattened us with a new album of their glacial sludge. Released on Nostalgia Blackrain, the label operated by Corrupted drummer Chew, Garten Der Unbewusstheit marks a turning point for the band, being the last album to feature the lineup of bassist/vocalist Hevi and guitarist Talbot alongside drummer Chew. This lineup produced classic albums such as Paso Inferior, Llenandose De Gusanos and Se Hace Por Los Suenos Asesinos, and with their leaving the band, Chew has stated that Corrupted will proceed with a new lineup for future releases that will take the sound in new directions. With this album, though, we're already introduced to a musical side of Corrupted that'll surprise a lot of listeners.
The first song "Garten" quietly appears with a delicate clean guitar melody playing out over simple, minimal drumming that is little more than the rhythmic chime of a cymbal, with only spare bass drum hits and the occasional snare disturbing the tranquil atmosphere, a kind of skeletal, super minimal slowcore that's somewhat like something you'd hear from Codeine, but a few shades darker. When the vocals finally come in, they are a hushed growled whisper, deep and ominous as the somber guitars are joined by an eerie, almost jazzy melody, and then it all crashes down. The guitars surge into heavy crashing chords, the drumming becomes heavier and more powerful, that hushed croon rising into a monstrous growl, but instead of the tectonic sludge of their older works, this is much more melancholic and majestic, still layered with those clean chiming guitars and soaring effects even at it's heaviest, and still sounding rather Codeine-ish. Over the song's half hour length, the band moves between these lengthy passages of beautiful fragility and the eruptions of towering heaviness, until it finally flows seamlessly into "Against The Darkest Days". This second track is very brief, an interlude which begins with creeping autumnal shadows of the first half of the album and moving into a single acoustic guitar playing a beautiful somber piece that leads right into the final song, the half hour long "Gekkou No Daichi".
That slow, sorrowful acoustic melody carries over through the beginning of the song, the gentle strum spreading out through the first few minutes. Then the roar of a heavier distorted second guitar creeps in, the two intertwining in a dark cloud, and it all erupts into a massive, majestic dirge, the achingly pretty main melody drifting among the rumbling down tuned heaviness and soaring high end guitars, the vocals becoming a deep monstrous roar as this glacial slowcore lament slowly unfolds across the length of the piece, the sound seriously heavy but also much more dreamy and ethereal than what I'm used to hearing from Corrupted, especially when the guitars soar skyward with gorgeous ascendant melodies. Around the midway point, the band slips into a lumbering slow-burning dirge that is streaked with incandescent feedback and walls of shimmering guitar, while the drums slip from the pounding elephantine crush into jazzier percussion flourishes. As the song approaches the final third, all of this starts to once again build in intensity, the drums becoming more powerful and pounding, the guitars weaving more complex melodies and building into this amazing cinematic crescendo that is even more dramatic sounding that what has come before, a towering wall of distorted melody and roaring low-end amplifier noise, crushing and incredibly beautiful. By the end, the drums fall apart, and the song rides out on a wave of receding cymbal hiss and raging distortion as the acoustic guitar returns, ending Garten Der Unbewusstheit with another softly played almost Spanish-tinged piece.
It's undeniably powerful music, even if the shift into a more melodic, spacious sound might not be what fans of the band's blackest doom were expecting from a new Corrupted album. They've never sounded more majestic than they do here, though, and after listening to Garten non-stop over the past few weeks, I look forward to seeing how the band will continue to evolve as they move into the next chapter of their existence.
Track Samples:
Sample : Garten
Sample : Gekkon no Daichi

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CROM   Cocaine Wars 1974-1989   LP   (Forest Moon)    14.98

Out of print for years, the weirdo power-violence/heavy metal mayhem of Cocaine Wars is now available on vinyl...
Here's my old review of the Cd: I loved the extreme hardcore scene of the 1990's. Especially all of the West Coast, Slap A Ham, Fiesta Grande, "powerviolence" stuff. And especially all of the terminally weird bands that were coming out of the West Coast hardcore explosion, bands like Man Is The Bastard, Gasp, Suffering Luna. And Crom. Based out of L.A., Crom were hands down one of the weirdest bands to come out of this whole scene, an enigmatic outfit that never toured and rarely even played their hometown, putting out a bunch of 7"s and splits and compilation tracks before they assembled The Cocaine Wars 1974-1989, their only full length album to date. It's like some kind of fucked up concept album fixated on Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian, weaving together tons of samples from the Conan movies with brutal, awesomely sloppy and noisy grind/hardcore a la Crossed Out and Man Is The Bastard, 80's metal, and chunky thrash metal riffage, strewn across a cut-n-paste landscape of pilfered samples of Black Sabbath's 'Changes' and BOC's 'Don't Fear The Reaper', 70's pop hits, howling winds, funk metal riffs, riffs stolen straight off of Van Halen, Leeway, Celtic Frost, DRI, Slayer and tons of other, hilarious stage banter from Venom, collaged into a hallucinogenic drug dream sprouting from the cracked open skull of the past three decades of heavy metal, closing out in an eight minute expanse of icy wind, flamenco guitars, and explosive grind. This sounds like absolutely nothing else that came outta the Cali extreme HC scene, it's almost more of a plunderphonic tape collage experiment soaked in bong juice and 80's fantasy airbrush art, seriously fucked up and hilarious, but equally heavy and completely insane. And yet as chaotic as all of the different samples and sludge/grind parts and sound effects seem to be, everything is stitched together in a way that, uh, makes sense. And it's all delivered in a full color case adorned with some crazy quasi-Frazetta album cover art of a leather-bikini clad warrior-huntress riding the tundra astride her saddled polar bear steed; fold the booklet out and it reveals a mighty barbarian god snortin' lines off of the same glacier.

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DE GRIMSTONE, RAQUEL   Depths Of The Nile   7 INCH VINYL   (Zhark International)    6.98

The many different incarnations and alter egos of breakcore/electronic artist Rachael Kozak make it a daunting project to try to track all of her stuff down. I've only started to delve into the huge body of recordings that she has produced since the late 90s, mainly focusing on the harsher, black metal influenced stuff that Kozak started experimenting with later in the last decade. There's a lot of stuff that's not as brutal but is still plenty dark, too, and that's where this 7" Ep released under the Raquel De Grimstone moniker falls. Similar to the material that she records as Hecate, there were three 7"s released as Grimstone, each one delivering a mix of experimental breakcore and occult subject matter, with many references to the works of Aleister Crowley woven into the imagery. So far, Depths Of The Nile is the only RDG 7" I've been able to find for the shop, the third and final 7" in her trilogy of releases.
The a-side title track is very similar to the sort of hellish blackened b-core that Rachel creates under the Hecate banner; beginning with an assortment of witchy voices and strange backwards chanting and swells of ambient rumble, the fractured percussive patterns soon drop in, at first splattery and broken up, then dropping into a fast-paced skittery drum n' bass assault while she recites a series of occult proclamations amid bits of distorted death metal guitar shrapnel, spookified keyboards, psychedelic effects and quick bursts of double bass drumming that fade in and out in the background. "Shapeshifters" starts off the b-side with a furious fusion of choppy splatterbreak and raggacore rhythms, demonic toasting, electronic noise and fx, and distorted, almost industrial beats, followed by a short phone message that closes the side. Totally surreal and feverish bass-heavy breakcore darkness; if you're into Hecate, you'll definitely want to hear this stuff as well.

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DE INFERNALI   Symphonia De Infernali   CD   (Metal Mind)    16.98

What a weird footnote in the history of European black metal this is. Released in 1997 on Nuclear Blast, Symphonia is the one and only album from De Infernali, the "dark ambient" side project from Jon Nödtveidt from legendary Swedish death/black metallers Dissection (assisted here by Damien Midvinter who handles the bulk of the programming). Only it's not something that I would describe as dark ambient, but rather sounds like a very odd sort of Satanic, vehemently anti-Christian techno / electronica that resides in the shadow of 90's black metal as far as it's attitude is concerned. There are some very atmospheric moments on the album where Nödtveidt crosses over into Elend-like territory, but more often this finds itself wired to a pounding, total 90's style techno assault. Needless to say, any hardcore Dissection fan that picked this up probably ran shrieking for the hills by the time they hit track number two on Symphonia De Infernali. That's not to say that this isn't worth checking out though, especially if you are fascinated by the detours into electronic music undertaken by so many black metallers. In fact, as far as "techno" albums go, this one is pretty wild/weird, and most certainly very fucking evil.
At first, Nödtveidt goes for a kind of grim, funereal neo-classical sound on opener "Into The Labyrinths Of Desolation", layering dark repeated piano and slowly whooshing electronic fx over the sounds of woodwinds and string sections, evoking the Luciferian orchestrations of the aforementioned Elend. But once that's over and Nödtveidt kicks in to "Ave Satan", well, then it's glow-stick time, baby. Primitive pounding techno beats create a throbbing pulse beneath Nödtveidt's heavily distorted demonic vocals, trebly blackened guitar shredding, and clanking orchestral synth hits, reminding me of a crazed mash up between Thrill Kill Kult and looped blackened guitar solos. Another similar sort of pounding techno attack rears it's head on "Atomic Age", but then we get more cosmic ambience and malevolent symphonic strings on the very Tangerine Dream-like "Orcus Cursus".
And then you get the satanic techno hit "Sign Of The Dark", which could have been a major dancefloor single in the 90s if anyone actually gave a shit about this kind of stuff. The opening intro of stirring strings and snare rushes leads into the pulsating techno pop, and suddenly we're hearing death metal legend Dan Swano (Edge Of Sanity/Pan.Thy.Monium/Karaboudjan) delivering his deep, gothic croon over the synthetic throb. Yeah, when you hear this track, it's easy to see how black metellars would have been blowing steam out of their eye sockets when hearing this back in 1997.
The final portion of Symphonia is a mix of experimental electronics and neo-classical sounds. The three-part instrumental "Revival / Paroxysmal Winds / Forever Gone" begins with more of that gothic ambience that runs throughout the album, massed strings, chimes and a doleful piano melody woven into an apocalyptic incantation and explosive sound fx, followed by short Satanic spoken word/classical soundtrack exercise "Liberation", and ending with the weird industrial/computer noise piece "X".
Now reissued on the Polish label Metal Mind, this new edition of Symphonia comes in a garish digipack with liner notes and a lyric booklet, limited to 2,000 hand-numbered copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ave Satan
Sample : Orcus Cursus
Sample : Sign of the Dark
Sample : X

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EARTHLESS   Sonic Prayer (BLUE VINYL)   LP   (Gravity)    14.98

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

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ELECTRIC WIZARD   Come My Fanatics   2xLP   (Rise Above)    38.00

Rise Above has again repressed this classic monolith of British doom metal on vinyl, although this latest version of Come My Fanatics does not include the bonus 7" Ep that was packaged with earlier versions of the 2xLp.
Not surprisingly, you can pretty much trace the arc of Electric Wizard's long and sloooow descent into hellish satano-hippie debauchery just by checking out the album artwork for each of the reissues that Candlelight recently released here in the US. The band's eponymous debut was an extremely heavy, psychedelic offering that was still firmly rooted in the titanic crawl of Cathedral and Sabbath's long shadow. Jumping ahead to Dopethrone, the bong-sucking devil on the album's cover and it's charred palette of black and gold inks perfectly captures the smoking wreckage of the Wizard's ultimate orgy of stoned doom corrosion. In between the two we've got 1997's Come My Fanatics, and the first time I set eyes on this album (when it was originally released over here in the states as a double-disc set with the self-titled debut), I knew that there was going to be dark shit afoot. Set against a backdrop of Aurora Borealis-esque cosmic haze and a single black planet hanging in the sky, a group of seriously sinister looking dudes in cloaks are engaged in something clearly illicit and/or contributing to the downfall of humanity. Open up the album and your eyes are burned through with a diseased-looking tableaux of lava lamp ooze, and the booklet features assorted images of the members of Electric Wizard in varying stages of utter bakeage along with crude drawings of an acid-head Lucifer, a hookah-sucking chick with the Electric Wiz logo crawling outta her nethers...and that's not even getting to the total bad vibes and grindhouse visions of Come My Fanatics lyrics. The music matches the band's darker outlook, Jus Oborn's detuned guitar suddenly sounds way filthier than it did before, the songs are slower, it sounds like the light is being slowly sucked out of their music as each song progresses. There's more effects abuse too, hinting at the pitch-black psych that would fully blossom on Dopethrone..."Wizard In Black" and "Doom Mantia" especially send the Wiz's black tar riffs through a rippling veil of Hawkwind style warpage. Unquestionably essential for Electric Wizard disciples.
Track Samples:
Sample : Son of Nothing
Sample : Wizard in Black

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ELECTRO QUARTERSTAFF   Gretzky   2xLP   (War On Music)    16.98

Now reissued as a double Lp package on War On Music...
The debut album of wildy fucked-up pinball dizziness from the all-instrumental triple-guitar shred ensemble Electro Quarterstaff! That's right, bub, Winnipeg's Electro Quarterstaff employ three axemen in their ranks, along with a drummer who sounds like he's been snorting No-Doz for the past week straight, and there's not a bassist or vocalist in sight. Who needs 'em when Gretzky is all about the shred, the three guitarists spitting off slippery, labyrinthine riffs, 1000mph runs up and down the fretboard, and pinch harmonics everywhere, the different guitar parts layered and intertwined with each other over a blasting, stop-on-a-dime drummer rolling out all kinds of crushing thrash metal drive and complex polyrhythms. An obvious comparison would be The Fucking Champs, but this is like The Fucking Champs combined with Morbid Angel, Gorguts, and early Metallica, the sound of old school thrash being torn apart by the octopoidal tentacles of some tech-prog-shred monstrosity. But even with songs that are made up of countless epic riffs and constantly changing sections, Electro Quarterstaff also know how to keep it catchy and rockin'. Surrounded by the awesome psychedelic paintings of Blaine Throttle, Gretzky also has the Champs-y habit of giving their songs goofy, amusing titles ("The Right To Arm Bears", "Eyepatch Romance", "Something's Awry In The Hetfield Of Dreams"). As complex and tech as this album is, I love how rooted this is in classic Thrash Metal. Those total Bay Area style riffs that serve as the meat of the Quarterstaff's shred tapestries make this an one of my fave instrumental Metal albums, right up there with Suzukiton's Service repair Handbook, Behold...The Arctopus' Nano-Nucleonic, and Hematovore's debut.

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EXTERMINATE   Pact   7 INCH VINYL   (Nuclear War Now! Productions)    6.00

Unleashing a holocaust of obliterating black death noise from the rotten bowels of Chile, Exterminate joined forces with Nuclear War Now! for this supremely noxious 7" that came out back in 2008. It's some of the noisiest "war metal" that I've come across; it's obviously influenced by the Ross Bay Cult and the mighty Blasphemy, but these guys crank up the bestial noise and chaos to even more crazed extremes. Pact begins with an intro piece of black industrial ambience, then bursts into the putrescent blackened deathnoise of "The Triumph Of Unholy Black Blood", shifting between grinding, cavernous hyperspeed blackened death metal with monstrous puking vokills overloaded with reverb and almost totally indiscernible riffs, to deep rumbling ambience and swarms of grinding low-fi chaos that turns into a kind of cacophonous black noise that ends with the title track. Over on the b-side, the band staggers through the angular death metal chaos of "Genuflextioninummoc", and then descends into another brief passage of black crypt ambience with "Consecration (OutRot)". That gives way to an unlisted cover of the Blasphemy song "Atomic Nuclear Desolation" which blasts off the final grooves like a gust of blackened noisecore toxic gas.
For something that sounds this ugly and rabid, it looks fucking gorgeous. The record comes in an elaborate package that includes a printed inner sleeve, a twelve-page booklet loaded with artwork, lyrics and some awesomely absurd band photos.

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GORGUTS   From Wisdom To Hate   LP   (War On Music)    14.98

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

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HAGGATHA   III   7 INCH VINYL   (Choking Hazard)    6.50

Ok, so maybe it's not the most original thing that I've ever heard, as these Vancouverites (featuring the drummer from Goatsblood and 3 Inches Of Blood) are obviously devout worshippers of Eyehategod and Grief. But man, it's so fucking heavy; the two tracks on Haggatha's latest piece of tarpit vinyl are on the same crushing level as other top tier sludgecore outfits like Cable and Lords Of Bukkake. For Haggatha, it's the actual hardcore rumbling around in these molten blooze dirges that gives 'em the secret sauce, like on the first side when the band lurches out of the creeping blackened sludge of "55 Year Old Fucking Liar" into a grinding mid-tempo punk riff, and the noxious crust on the b-side jam "Pinkus" that erupts into a massive souped-up Kyuss-style boogie. It's on this second song that Haggatha manages to capture the Eyehategod sound better than any other band I've heard, down to the peculiarly sour guitar leads and the singer's sickly howl. Sludge fans looking for some more gluey heaviness should give 'em a listen. They've got a recent Lp that I'll be listing here at C-Blast soon, and like this is a thunderously heavy slab of depresso-metal, so keep an eye out.
Limited to five hundred copies.

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HANNUM, TERRENCE & ALEXANDER BINDER   Dark Matter / Dunkle Materie   ART BOOK - SLIM   (Land Of Decay)    20.00

A new offering fron Terrence Hanum's ongoing series of limited-run art books, Dark Matter/Dunkle Materie is another collaborative effort, this time in co-operation with German photographer Alexander Binder. One-half of kosmische black drone duo Locrian, Hannum has produced a hefty stack of these art zines for the past year or so, and I've been totally hooked on 'em, trying to get each one as they've been released. Dark Matter/Dunkle Materie is set up as a split-zine (anyone remember those?), with one half of the book featuring various dream-like, surrealistic video stills taken from a video art piece titled Epiclesis that Hannum created, the other dedicated to Binder's nightmarish washed-out photography. The center spread of the book has a black sleeve affixed to one of the pages, which holds a DVD with the Epiclesis piece. As always, the images presented here seem to be taken from a world caught in perpetual twilight, where bodies disappear into shadow, and ghostly characters drift beneath a blotted-out sun. And again, the properties of the Xeroxed zine are as much a part of the art as are the photos and still. Images of amplifiers, burning candle wicks, and cables hover within large spaces of inky toner blackness, and detail is blurred into distortion. Total crepuscular eye-candy. This forty-page zine is presented in a printed black envelope, and is limited to two-hundred copies.

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HUMAN HERD / SCHIZOID   Never Despair / The Next Extreme   7 INCH VINYL   (D-Trash)    9.99

Two evil Canadian electronic artists are teamed up on this new 7" from D-Trash, and one of 'em is Schizoid, the long running Toronto digital hardcore project that has been tirelessly flying the flag for DHR style mayhem for well over a decade.
First is Human Herd. Never heard of them before this, but I really dig their "Never Despair". It's a weird bit of twitchy evil industrial, combining brain-damaged blackened guitars, Satanic imagery, a spastic hissing break beat, distorted narcoleptic vocals and a nauseating bass drop that keeps repeating every few seconds. It's like a messed-up mash of Skinny Puppy, some weird evil breakcore off of the Zhark International label, and an extremely stoned industrial black metal project. Very strange, and I want to hear more as soon as possible.
Flip it over, and Schizoid is next with "The Next Extreme", an alternate mix of a track off of an upcoming album. This is the first new Schizoid I've heard since, I dunno, 2005? It's been years, I know that. And this is quite the return; Schizoid has always had a black metal influence active in his pounding digital hardcore/breakcore, but it's so out in front here that this seems like a much heavier, much more violent Schizoid I'm hearing. It's a fried, distortion-scorched mash-up of pounding gabber beats, harsh ultra-distorted shrieks, black metal guitars, and another heavy layer of noise to further ugly it up. It's like the gabber parts of Morbid Angel's Illud Divinum Insanus made ten times heavier and noisier and more vicious. Hopefully there's going to be a lot more of this on whatever Schizoid has coming out next.
Limited to 300 copies.

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HUMAN QUENA ORCHESTRA   Politics Of The Irredeemable / Means Without Ends (bundle)   2xCD   (Crucial Blast)    9.98

While supplies last, I'm offering a free copy of the first Cd from The Human Quena Orchestra with any order for the Politics Of The Irredeemable album; here's your chance to experience their first two offerings of extreme industrial sludge before the new album on Handmade Birds comes out later this year...
Human Quena Orchestra first took shape as a solo project from Ryan Unks, who had previously played guitar in the final lineup of the Pittsburgh metal band Creation Is Crucifixion. After moving from CIC, Unks began to work on a new project that would incorporate elements of black metal, crushing drone music, extreme psychotropic noise and psychedelic/krautrock influences into a sound that would be much heavier any of his previous projects. The first album from Human Quena Orchestra was released in 2007 on Daft Alliance; Means Without Ends was a disturbing, introspective slab of blackened industrial doom that stood out in stark contrast from the rest of the slow n' low extreme doom scene, utilizing layers of harsh textured distortion and electronics to create a caustic form of monstrous doom that shared as much of industrial music's cold, machine-like aesthetic as it did the ultra-slow riffage of the most extreme variants of doom metal. At the same time that the bands debut was taking shape, Unks was joined by another former member of Creation Is Crucifixion, Nathan Berlinguette (who was also a member of the dark ambient project M.Kourie and the deathdrone duo 5/5/2000). With the addition of Berlinguette's skilled application of dark ambience and expansive soundscapes, Human Quena Orchestra began to move into even more textured territory which has culminated with the second HQO full-length, The Politics of the Irredeemable, a series of apocalyptic visions and epiphanies of endtime realization, prophetic screeds that look to a future rendered pustulent and war-stricken by the failed machinations of the human race, presented as six chapters that enter your consciousness through a delivery system of extreme industrial dread. The Politics of the Irredeemable is crushing and oppressive, a crawl through abstract fields of low-end sound that move from punishing blasts of ultra-heavy machine-doom and earth-shaking tectonic riffs, to thick fogs of black electronic ambience that shimmer with subsonic pulses and celestial drones, the presence of malevolent electricity crackling in the air around the lumbering, nightmarish electro-sludge monstrosity of the Human Quena Orchestra. And at the same time, there are passages of immense beauty on this album that lurk at the peripheries of HQO's malevolent crush; the track "Aspirations" for instance, where pummeling slow-motion industrial percussions grinds in an infinite loop beneath a swirling nightsky of kosmiche synthesizers and heavenly, blissed-out ambience, the drums becoming like distant mortar blasts heard over the horizon as terrified screams ring out and stars fall dead from the skies. Total deathmachine grind ambience.
The CD is packaged in a heavy gatefold jacket with murky, dismal images of blasted city streets and torched monuments, with lyrics and quotations relevant to the apocalyptic themes on the album printed on the inside jacket. Comes with three 1" color buttons featuring artwork from the album.
The debut Human Quena Orchestra album Means Without Ends has been out for a couple of years, but I'm at long last getting it listed here, just in time for the release of the brand new HQO album Politics Of The Irredeemable which just came out this week (and which is also available in this weeks new arrivals list). This is where it started for me; it wasn't too long after I heard the inhuman heaviness of this disc that I decided that I wanted, nay, needed to put out their next album. Oof, this shit is on a whole other level of heaviness. When this debut came out, band mastermind Ryan Unks had already been fine-tuning his monstrosity for some time; following a stint playing in the cult mathgrind band Creation Is Crucifixion, he decided that he wanted to start playing an entirely different kind of music, one that was influenced more by his obsession with industrial music, classic krautrock records, doom metal, etc. What he came up with, with the help of fellow former CIC member Nathan Berlinguette, is something so far removed from speed or tempo that it feels like gravity is being fucked with when you listen to it. It's a record that occupies a space on my list of heaviest albums of all time, as a matter of fact. Nine tracks of extreme slow-motion industrial doom filth, covered in bile and sweat. Monstrous and suffocating, dropping a twenty-ton hammer of subsonic riff and lumbering static percussion, a mechanical beat so crushing and immense that it's more like a mortar going off than anything resembling drums. The riffs aren't just mere doom metal riffs, they're processed and manipulated into gnarled sheets of caustic buzz and super-hot corrosive grind, and drowned in a massive low-end rumble that feels like machinery vibrating underneath your feet. If this is doom, it's the harshest, most blown-out doom this side of Grave In The Sky, with every instrument distorted and stretched and imbued with an oppressive weight.
And that's only a part of what makes this so amazing. Because underneath the monstrous machinelike glacial grind, there's this whole world of bleak, washed out, seriously blackened drones, with all kinds of high-voltage powerline buzz and dark shimmery kosmiche drift, throbbing low end ambience and minimal hum. Alot of the album is spent focusing just on these long stretches of sustained drone, creating a placid expanse of thrumming vibrations or slowly swirling pools of bottom-heavy drift spreading out before it's demolished by the return of the massive pneumatic machinedoom crush. Heavy, heavy, heavy. Think Godflesh and Pitchshifter, but slowed waaaaaay down, dragged down to a tectonic 8 bpm crawl, or early Swans cranked to earsplitting levels of distortion and volume and drenched in corrosive toxic noise.
Somehow this traverses both dark, meditative industrial ambience and an impossibly brutal mechanical grind, splitting apart and fusing back together across the length of the album, and forming into something that's both beautifully bleak and suffocatingly heavy. It's very different from the much more ambient approach on the new album Politics, and is about as heavy as this sort of thing can get; crucial stuff for fans of the heaviest fringes of extreme doom, Godflesh and Cop era Swans, Khanate, Monarch, and Corrupted, Lustmord, Skullflower and Black Boned Angel, and all other forms of vast droneological blackness and skullcrushing mecha-heaviness. The disc is presented in a cool foldout sleeve with detailed artwork created by Nickolas Mohanna.
Track Samples:
Sample : believer
Sample : theballadofaynrand
Sample : Progress
Sample : Mores (Part Two)
Sample : Denial (Part One)
Sample : HUMAN QUENA ORCHESTRA-Politics Of The Irredeemable / Means Without Ends (bundle)

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KING DUDE   My Beloved Ghost   LP   (Bathetic)    15.98

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MCCOY, MARK   Cathexis   ART BOOK - SLIM   (Teenage Teardrops)    14.98

He's probably best known for playing in the hardcore bands Charles Bronson and The Oath, and the blackened noisepunk outfit Ancestors, but Mark McCoy has also been active with a dark, introspective brand of visual arts for almost as long. He's issued a couple of books of his work so far, but the first that I've been able to get is Cathexis, a small perfect-bound book wrapped in a textured black cover with gold embossed letters, and containing sixty-eight high-quality pages of full color photography. The publisher Teenage Teardrops describes this as a collection of photographs where "memory of sexual experience is depicted as a failure to permanently fuse physical and psychological desire. These decayed and fading images of people and places illustrate recollections of intimacy as revised into ones' own personal fiction. Presented as mental snapshots, the photographs become evidence not of actual events, but of a desperate reach for certainty." This aim results in a series of images where the nude female form dissolves into a murky wash of fleshy pinkness, blurred dark cloth, the pliable curve, buildings are caught in the red glow of witchfire, and figures are caught in submission. It captures a ghostly, abstracted lust that reminds me of the feel and look of many of Prurient's works, which makes sense when you consider that both McCoy and Dominick Fernow approach many of the same subjects in their work. Just from a visual standpoint, this is an eerie series of images; a kind of dark impressionistic dreamscape that feels as if you're catching quick video stills captured a sordid surrealist underground film.
Limited to 400 copies.

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MEZEKTET   self-titled   CASSETTE   (Wolvserpent)    7.50

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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MOLOCH   Ein Düsterer Winter Kommt   CASSETTE   (Legion Blotan)    6.50

Also available as a limited edition cassette from Legion Blotan.
Ein Düsterer Winter Kommt is one of a multitude of recent releases from Moloch, a Ukrainian one-man black metal band that I've been getting into a lot lately. Moloch's releases can range from bleak, miserable black metal to pure kosimiche-influenced ambience to strange fusions of the two, and this Ep leans more towards the black metal end of things with this single song (split into two halves) of depressive dread.
On the a-side, "Ein Düsterer Winter Kommt I" begins with slow pounding drums and droning wintry keyboards, and then Moloch's moody muttering comes in alongside the buzzing minor key guitars. The sound is wholly grim and depressing, a washed-out, almost funereal lament set to a swarming, icy post-punk drum machine throb. His vocals grow more despondent as the song continues, wailing and weeping and snarling, transforming this into a wrist-slitting dirge.
The other side is the second part of the song, where the sound gets slower and more doom-laden and dreary. The drums are slower here; the keyboards largely stripped away, the guitars a hazy cloud of dissonant buzzing and grim minor key drone, Moloch speak-singing over the slow propulsive drive of this deformed death-march.
Fantastic stuff for those who enjoy wallowing in the sound of hopelessness.

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MOUTHEATER   Colonial   12 INCH   (Last Anthem Records)    13.98

I love no-bullshit hardcore. I adore scumbag noise rock. Mix the two together, and I'm all yours. Moutheater is the latest band that I've started to get all googly over in this regard, after the Virginia band bashed my goddamn brains in with this bruiser of a 12" that came out earlier this year. Never heard of 'em before this came in to the shop, but this band of thugs sound like a bunch of seasoned vets, combining the malevolent lurch of the Jesus Lizard and Melvins and that whole Am Rep/Touch And Go noise rock thing with grinding hardcore to lethal effect. The end result is equal parts twitchy and bone-shattering. The four songs found on Colonial go from full-force lopsided thrash assaults to slower, brooding heaviness, the apex of which is "Enslaved", the first song on the flipside that combines a lethal Helmet-esque anti-groove with a vat of venomous lyrics and snarling spiteful vocals, and some fantastic atmospheric guitar work that adds an interesting uneasy feeling to the angular crush. That's followed by another top-notch chunk of aggro with the swirling, crushing dirge "Nauseous", which manages to resemble something akin to Neurosis being fronted by David Yow. Sounds pretty killer, right? The real simple artwork and album design gives this a pure hardcore visual aesthetic, while the music is a more complex, seething mass of aggression that makes for one of the best new noise rock/ hardcore hybrids I've heard lately. Sounds like it could have come out on Iron Lung Records, as a matter of fact, and any of you mutants who lust after that label's output should tune your radar on to this record, STAT.
Comes with a digital download.

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MUSEUMS OF SLEEP   self-titled   CASSETTE   (Prairie Fire)    7.00

The first release from duo Museums Of Sleep, this tape features three lengthy tracks of intensely textured and tactile HNW. The quality of these pieces isn't too surprising; both members have produced high quality harsh noise recordings that I've previously enjoyed Norwegian Andreas Brandal with his Flesh Coffin project, and Cole Peters with the fuzz monoliths of Gomeisa. Both artists bring their own approach to harsh noise for this collaboration, and brain-void results...
At first, there is only the sound of a murderous voice skulking in the shadows, hissing off in the background; but then the Museums open wide with a geyserblast of low-end distortion, instantly erecting a thick, suffocating wall of bass-heavy harsh noise that crashes across "And Suddenly The Air Grew Hard". The wall of static shifts slightly from a heavy rumbling roar to a more acidic gush of swirling crunch, maintaining a constant, brain-blotting intensity. More mordant in feel than Peters' other HNW project Gomeisa, the first side of the tape actually moves through a couple of different shifts in complexity and texture, transforming into a much denser maelstrom of white noise that rivals the consuming roar of a massive waterfall on the second track "Rapunzel". On the b-side, though, it's a single untitled sixteen minute piece that releases a whirlpool of crushing distortion devoid of the subtle textural changes of the previous tracks, instead blowing black wind through your skull nonstop through the entire duration of the side. At high volume, this is absolutely pulverizing, pure nuclear wall laced with massive bass judders that produces the same time-obliterating effect as the work of Vomir and Alo Girl. In other words, it’s highly recommended to disciples of the Wall.
Released in a limited edition of fifty copies.

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NASA SPACE UNIVERSE   Across The Wounded Galaxies   LP   (Shogun Records)    14.98

I've almost totally forgotten how boring hardcore has been over the past two decades. There has been a renaissance lately of bands tapping the same pulsating vein that brought us the more weird and manic 80's hardcore bands like Die Kreuzen, United Mutation, Void, and I can't stop lapping it up. Newest obsession of mine to add to the list: NASA Space Universe, whose twangy thrash is about as strange as their band name. Actually, strange isn't the right word (these Cali mutants are playing a kind of jangly, frantic hardcore that's just devoid of any of the metal elements that most hardcore has nowadays), but quirky definitely is. The twelve songs on their first full length Lp Across The Wounded Galaxies are short, tricky blasts of atonal fast hardcore that whips by at neck-snapping velocity; the guitars have that high end, trebly sound that doesn't use a lot of distortion and is more jangly than anything, with some awkward skronky moves that can't help but be compared to the sort of fucked axe slinging that Greg Ginn was known for, and the rhythm section powers through the songs with a loose, barely controlled ferocity, with low-slung post-punk-ish bass lines that wind and coil around the pounding drums. The music is a wild, frenzied assault of hyperfast punk with those jagged guitars adding a serious spike to your nerve endings, but its NASA's singer Kevin who really juices this with a manic, panic-stricken hysteria. His high yelping squawks sound like those of a pubescent kid in the throes of a grand-scale freak-out, squawking out the bizarre coded lyrics for songs like "Denzel Washington D.C. Forty", "Twap", and "Come On Eileen Bung On My Face'. It's sort of like a way brattier, more freaked-out early Die Kreuzen, maybe; anyone into this sort of brain-warping hardcore needs to hear these guys. The album comes in one of the creepiest looking record sleeves of the year, too; on it's cover, a wanton fish-lipped nun glares lustfully off of the jacket through dead black eyes. This thing has haunted my dreams for days.

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NEUROSIS   Sovereign (Reissue)   CD   (Neurot)    14.98

Sovereign was the first release on Neurot, the label formed in 2000 by the members of Neurosis for their various side-projects as well as reissues of their older, pre-Relapse albums; out of print for a couple of years, this disc has just been reissued by Neurot with a previously unreleased bonus track and new artwork from Hydra Head's Aaron Turner featured on the new slipcase packaging. The original release of Sovereign featured four songs and was just over thirty minutes of music, all produced by Steve Albini and featuring a combination of their signature brand of apocalyptic dirge-metal and the sort of industrial-laced experiments that the members further explored with the offshoot project Tribes Of Neurot. The sound is fleshed out even further with the addition of cello, tuba, trombone and violin provided by guest musicians like Kris Force (Amber Asylum) and Jackie Gratz (Amber Asylum, Giant Squid, Grayceon). So you get tracks like "Prayer", a monstrous metallic sludgefeast that blends those trademark moody, minor key guitar melodies and post-rock influenced instrumental sections with surges of devastating heaviness, followed by the droning noise-infested crush of "An Offering", where long stretches of didgeridoo-like down-tuned drone slinks among the crushing leaden chug and winding proggy riffage. In the middle is "Flood", one of their bruising tribal drum workouts where a wall of rolling toms and martial snares pound relentlessly within a haze of metallic drones and electronic effects, an ominous riff circling round and round at the center of the percussive frenzy. The centerpiece, of course, is the title track, a thirteen minute epic that moves through more pummeling tribal percussion trances into abstract dronescapes of thick, grinding Sunn-esque guitar ooze and looped bells, suddenly erupting into a sickening sludgecrust assault with crazed shrieking vocals, eerie electronic loops, and weird mathy guitar parts, then later slipping into a majestic Gothic heaviness across it's latter half. The new bonus track "Misgiven" is a surprisingly abrasive noise-soaked industrial sludge dirge that appears at the end; it sounds like something off of one of their Tribes Of Neurot albums, a long rumbling down-tuned crawl of drums and sluggish bass, brain-scraping electronic tones piercing the air like sonic spikes, gleaming razor-tones slicing through a cloud of feedback and circuitry-whir, the bass guitar bailing out at the end as the drums continue plodding through the weird noisy dubscape.
Track Samples:
Sample : An Offering
Sample : Prayer
Sample : Sovereign

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NO COMMENT   Common Senseless   7 INCH VINYL   (Deep Six)    6.00

Eventually, the discussion of extreme hardcore and powerviolence always comes around to No Comment. One of the earliest bands of the West Coast "powerviolence" scene alongside Neanderthal, Infest, Capitalist Casualties and Crossed Out, No Comment carved their chunks of condensed brutality out of classic hardcore punk sped up to insane velocity. While not as balls-out weird as Neanderthal nor as vicious as Crossed Out, these guys still delivered some of the sickest Cali blastcore of the late 80s/early 90s. The 1989 Ep Common Senseless was their first release, a nine song blast of relentless light speed hardcore loaded with stop-on-a-dime hairpin turns and sudden rhythmic changes that'll leave you breathless, sounding somewhat like a souped-up DRI on a cocktail of methamphetamines, gasoline and electroshock therapy. Whirlwind thrash riffs sprout some twangy guitar leads and berserk shredding, while the furious lyrics attack vivisection, factory farming, and the general destruction of the planet at the hands of humanity, delivered via Andrew Beattie's ferocious, rabid mile-a-minute roar. The record blazes, with just a couple of slower moments; there's that weird psych intro on "Farmer Hitler John" and the mid-tempo skank that opens "Special Circumstances", but it all whips back up into adrenalized speed. Both this and the recent reissue of No Comment's Downsided 7" are classic slabs of psychoblast hardcore, essential for any collection of extreme hardcore and powerviolence. Includes a xeroxed lyric sheet.

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NO COMMENT   Downsided   7 INCH VINYL   (Deep Six)    6.00

Also recently reissued by Deep Six along with their debut Ep Common Senseless, the second 7" Ep from No Comment from 1992 (originally released on the mighty Slap A Ham Records) offers more of their brutal stop-on-a-dime blastcore. By now, the band sounded tighter than ever, and heavier, too; the recording on Downsided is meatier, the guitarist employs more dissonant, noisy chords and textures this time around, and front man Andrew Beattie sounded absolutely psychotic, seemingly frothing at the mouth throughout these eleven songs. Yeah, there are eleven songs packed onto this 7", each one averaging out at about thirty seconds of twisting ultraspeed hardcore, each one spasming and lurching through sudden stop-and-go changes. They occasionally slow down into a bone-breaking breakdown, like at the end of "Hacked To Chunks" and the alternating blasts and grinding sludge of "Lament"; then there's the weird plodding psychedelic dirge "Curtains" that throws a curveball at the very end of the record. What No Comment were doing in 1992 wasn't grindcore, but it was just as brutal as anything going on over at Earache at the time, and still holds up as some of the most violent, vicious hardcore ever recorded. Essential! Comes in a big foldout poster sleeve.

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NORTHAUNT   Barren Land   CASSETTE   (Todestrieb)    6.50

The classic album of dark Nordic drift Barren Land came out on Cd through the now-defunct Fluttering Dragon label in 2001, and has remained a powerful evocation of desolate nocturnal beauty. A few years ago, the UK black metal label Todestrieb issued the album on pro cassette with a bonus track exclusive to this release, and I've finally managed to grab some for the shop. The sound of Northaunt would probably find favor among Kranky Records fans just as much as it would among those followers of the icy drift of Vinterriket and the Cold Meat Industries and Cyclic Law rosters, with it's mix of environmental recordings, minimal guitar and piano, dark melodic ambience and subtle use of samples. Recorded throughout the wilds of Norway and Greenland, Barren Land contains some of Northaunt's most desolate, isolated soundscapes.
The album starts off with a backdrop of minimal crackle and hiss, the sound of arctic winds rushing over a desolate tundra region, the sound utterly frigid, icy, and then the synths slowly drift into view, long ominous drones formed from layered keys that stretch far out toward the horizon, imbued with a bleak barren beauty that evokes images of desolate frost-covered fields and snow-capped hilltops. But this sound grows into something more musical on the next track, where synthetic woodwinds and strings emerge into a maudlin melody that floats through shadow-streaked battlefields and copses of evergreen trees bathed in twilight glow. Northaunt continues to move between these more musical, folk-ish passages and long stretches of disquieting blackened murkiness, sometimes disappearing into fields of soft, heaving crypt-drift, distant rustlings and hushed whispered voices, or abrasive passages of rumbling low-end noise. On other tracks, the music diffuses into a murky haze of buried piano melody, fluttering feedback drone and washed-out noise that resembles a darker, more apocalyptic version of Sigur Ros's early work; and elsewhere, the rich wavering hum of something resembling a Hammond organ shimmers above deep, rumbling field recordings, and travels into lightless abysses where harsh northern winds are reshaped into washes of Lustmordian desolation. The latter half of the album features some surprisingly pretty moments, where incandescent drones rise over achingly beautiful acoustic guitars, piano, celestial electronics and mysterious environmental sounds that seem to summon the dawn after the long black winter that has come before, and mournful piano becomes a ghostly requiem against the crackle of a bonfire, the weeping of a young girl, the backwards muttering of a shaman, the rising black buzz of a wall of corrosive distorted guitar, which builds into a massive industrial dirge, then a smoldering black waste of monochrome hiss and flutter by album's end.

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NUX VOMICA   Asleep In The Ashes   CASSETTE   (Aborted Society)    6.50

This killer progressive crust album from Nux Vomica is now available on cassette...
The band started out in Baltimore, but ironically, it wasn't until they relocated all the way across the country to Portland that I finally got off of my ass and checked them out. I knew that the band featured some of the guys from Wake Up On Fire, who I really dug; they were one of the psychedelic crust bands that were active in Baltimore for a brief period in the early '00s, playing heavy, somewhat Dystopia-influenced sludginess that utilized some haunting cello and tribal percussion. Their record on Torture Garden Picture Co. was pretty neat. Anways, after Wake Up On Fire disbanded, some of the members reconvened as Nux Vomica, whose early stuff was fast, thrashy crustcore, solid, ripping stuff, but nothing out of the ordinary. Their sound started to develop into something different after their first album, apparently the result of listening to Temporary Residence records and taking some cues from the whole Godspeed-influenced epic crust scene, and by the time they recorded their second album Asleep In The Ashes and released it late last year on Aborted Society, Nux Vomica had evolved into something much proggier and more epic. This album is fantastic; the crusty, Scandanavian influenced thrash of their early releases is all here, but now it's mixed with the sort of epic builds and eerie psychedelia you get after listening to repeated sessions of Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. This sound has been around, I've been digging the likes of Fall Of Efrafa, Remains Of The Day, Embers, Garmonbozia and other crusty hardcore bands who mix in chamber strings and other non-thrash instruments into their raging anarcho thrash, but Nux Vomica bring a more metallic edge to this sound that really makes this stand out. Their epic guitar melodies and pounding tribal rhythms are met with swarming black metal riffs and screeching blackened vokills, bursts of galloping thrash metal, even some hints of Swedish death metal, the fast parts driven by crushing d-beat drumming, a definite Dis-influence running all through this album; they work the heaviness and thrash around pounding tribal rhythms and well-placed instrumental sections that appear and stretch out for long stretches over many of the tracks, weaving a somber, moody atmosphere through the songs that make the heavier, faster parts so much more powerful. Unlike bands like Garmonbozia and Embers, Nux Vomica don't use any strings, but instead craft all sorts of spacey psychedelic ambience and Western twang and slow, smoldering builds with their guitars, using effects and droning riffs to create their often symphonic chamber-rock vibe. There's also frequent use of dark folk-inflected melodies, harmonium-like drones and hushed vocal harmonies, always building into crushing heaviness, like on "The Discussants" which moves from sludgy, droning Isis-like riffage to swirling doom-laden crust to moody chamber rock to furious thrash every few measures, seamlessly putting all together into a sprawling prog-crust epic. Nux Vomica end up sounding much more ferocious than most other bands in this style, but will appeal to anyone that digs that brooding, atmospheric crust sound.
Features striking full color album art from tattoo artist Jason Angst.
Track Samples:
Sample : Walk Through The Ashes
Sample : Where Minds Can't Grow

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O.68   Elend   CD   (Ominous Silence)    11.98

Track Samples:
Sample : Kremation
Sample : The Lowest Day
Sample : Mother Of Negation

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PARASITE / VERMAPYRE   split   7 INCH VINYL   (Holy Terror Records)    9.98

The Parasite side knocked my fucking head off. "Warning 1" screams out of the gate with a ripping mid-tempo blast of Japanese metalpunk that sounds like a more metallic, more blackened G.I.S.M., and that alone should have you scrambling to order this 7". This first song has a majestic Maiden-esque guitar harmony, blackened punk hook, and general air of apocalyptic arrogance that has compelled me to listen to this side over and over and over. It's that goddamn awesome. The second song "Warning 2" is a faster thrashier number, a murderous hardcore assault soaked in distortion and the singer's psychotic, echoing screams, and riding on a thunderous d-beat charge. I'm going to flip if these guys put out an album.
And on the b-side we have three tracks from Vermapyre, which I believe is a clandestine project from Dwid Hellion of Integrity. If Dwid's not involved with this, than whoever handles the vocals is a fucking dead ringer. That gruff, demented howl sounds even nastier than usual when it's set against Vermapyre's low-fi psychotic fusion of old hardcore and the warped black metal of the Les Légions Noires. The first song "Thee Cold Invocation" has all of the brain-damaged awkwardness, discordant riffing and the garbage-can atmospherics of the classic LLN albums, a noisy mess of clanging sinister riffs and screeching vocals that collapse into a long stretch of creepy, unsettling ambience, mysterious sampled sounds and electronic noise that seems to take some cues from Boyd Rice's NON. Then "Return Of The Sorcerer" drops in with savage blackened thrashcore that sounds remarkably like newer Integrity. Goddamn awesome. I know I'm gushing here, but this is seriously one of the best splits I've heard in ages. Highest recommendation to fans of blackened HC and morbid metalpunk.

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PHBTK   Verfall / Melachoir   2x CASSETTE   (Cathartic Process)    9.50

Although I'm a longtime fan of Jeph Jerman's work with the improv noise-jazz collective Blowhole, I never explored his electro-acoustic solo project Hands To. In fact, I think that these recordings might be the first time that I've heard anything from Jerman outside of Blowhole. I'm extremely pleased to hear this stuff though, as it is primo audio desolation. This double cassette release is a reissue of the long out-of-print recordings from the collaboration between Jerman's Hands To project and noise artist PBK (aka Phillip B. Klingler) which came out in the late 80s. On these re-mastered recordings, the duo forged a hostile soundworld, a symphony of smelter and steelworks that some referred to as "assault ambient". The grating, grinding ambience is certainly a forerunner to the sort of grim industrial wastes currently traveled by the likes of Clew Of Theseus, Sewer Election, and Emaciator.
From the start, Verfall is a nightmarish trip. The two artists create a claustrophobic soundscape of mechanical noise and factory ambience that is both harshly abrasive and hypnotic. High-pitched whining tones hover over a rumbling racket of metallic rattling and reverberant machine noise, evoking visions of a swarming factory-hive busy with some sinister labor, the field of sound richly detailed even as it is swathed in a thick blanket of reverb and noisy whoosh. The eight tracks vary from atmospheric junk-noise ‘scapes to crushing cyclones of metallic noise that almost evolve into wall-like masses of sound, weird rhythmic dirges that almost sound like some sort of fucked-up, insanely over-modulated noise rock, and some terrifying black-hole ambience that arises on the two-part title track, with burbling, crackling synth drones, gleaming black drift, and rumbling bass tones that have the same infernal factory feel as the other pieces, but transports it somewhere far out into the most desolate reaches of deep space. The second album Melachoir is a much more brutal affair, beginning with the psychedelic junk-noise skullmelt of "Arcight" and proceeding through trippy oceans of delay, metallic clank, and swirling fx, chunks of orchestral sound that are carved into clanging stentorian rhythms and looped over and over, but it also features PHBTK's eeriest moments in the haunting ghostly melodies, warbling ethereal drones, strange chant-like murmurs and other vocal mutterings, and build into some monstrous drones that fully suck the listener in to the environmental sounds of their dead black planet. Some of the later tracks on the second side head off into really surreal territory, chaotic swarms of glitchy electronic noise, chopped up samples, digital detritus, unidentified horror movie samples, and massive sheet-metal rhythms.

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PLUTOCRACY   Off The Pigs   LP   (Forest Moon)    14.98

The Doomryderz are back! This is the first new platter of grind from these West Bay maniacs in a decade, and they sound as brutal and tight as ever. I remember having my face ripped off by their last Lp Sniping Pigz, and this Lp delivers the same level of deranged grind weirdness. Plutocracy played a vicious brand of metallic grindcore that was obviously influenced by the Earache classics, with supersonic blast beats, crushing down-tuned riffage, monstrous growling vocals, but they wrapped this violent grindmetal assault in all kinds of weirdness on their albums like long film samples, inside jokes involving the "Doomryderz" crew, TONS of marijuana references, noise, and gangsta rap. For whatever reason, Plutocracy never got huge n extreme metal circles, but form those of us who followed 'em, these guys delivered some of the most bent grind records of the '90s.
And they pick up right where they left off on Off The Pigs, serving up seven new tracks of crazed "dank-core" fueled by their hatred of cops and undying love of weed, now joined by new drummer Eli from Oakhelm and Fall Of The Bastards. The record kicks off with a hip-hop track from DJ Eons, making this one of the only grindcore albums you'll ever heard with a gangsta rap intro, but then dives right into the blast with one song after another of crushing mangled grind, the two singers battling it out with a mix of deep monstrous growls and insane screeching trading off back and forth. The songs blast and lurch, going from super-fast blast beat grind to plodding angular breakdowns and awkward stop/start parts, all performed with extreme precision, especially impressive considering just how stoned these guys must have been when they recorded the album. There's a couple of cool guest appearances too; Lord Balsakk from the mighty grindfreaks Agents Of Satan contributes vocals, and there's an awesome noise track on the second side called "Funeral Pork Harvest" that has Bastard Noise dropping in a long blat of extreme electronic horror and swarming circuit-buzz with awesome witch-shrieks and deep death metal like guttural vokills. It fucking destroys.
Limited edition of 500 copies.

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PRAXIS   Profanation: Preparation For A Coming Darkness   CD   (M.O.D. Technologies)    14.98

I almost blew a sprocket when this showed up on my doorstep earlier this year. A new Praxis album? The last time I heard anything from this long running experimental improv-dub-funk-metal super group, it was a live album recorded from 2004; prior to that, their last studio effort was 2001's Warszawa. This newest album from Praxis was supposed to have come out back in 2008 and is touted as being their final album, but for some reason involving label/contract issues; it was only released in Japan. So here we are three years later, and Profanation is finally available over here in the states. And what an ambitious album this turned out to be. As much as I wish for a return to the blitzkrieg avant-grind weirdness of Sacrifist, I'm always interested in hearing what this band has morphed into, and on Profanation, we get the insane mix of thrash metal, drum n' bass, psychedelic funk, texture-heavy scratching, mutated metal, and brain-melting weirdness that has been their signature for the last decade. As always, the core band is made up of Bill Laswell, guitar virtuoso/weirdo Buckethead, P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and drummer Bryan Mantia, but they've brought on a small army of guest musicians that include Mike Patton, Iggy Pop, Serj Tankian, Wu-Tang protégé Killah Priest, Rammellzee and a host of others.
Profanation begins with the faint raga drones and robotic incantations of "Caution" that quickly shape shifts into bizarre industrial thrash metal complete with squealing sax and greasy turntable scratching, leading right into the Faith No More-esque hip-hop flavored art metal of "Worship". Then it's on to the spastic, aggressive metallized drum n' bass of "Ancient World", whose massive groove is built on fast paced break beats, Laswell's fluid bass, and various electronic noises, distorted riffing and soaring effects. Later on, the song slows down and changes into a weird mashup of spacey shredding, heavy dub and blast beats. Then there’s "Furies" with Iggy Pop handling the lead vocals, crooning and snarling over chunky, electronics-laced industrial metal dirge, which sounds veyr strange, but is weirdly catchy too. "Galaxies" is pure hip-hop featuring Killah Priest, built out of Bernie Worrell's warm organ hooks and a lush West Coast funk groove. Serj Tankian from System of a Down takes over the mic on "Sulfur And Cheese" as the band lunges through an angular metal wig-out that's book ended by a killer melodic sequence. It's back to the metallic drum n' bass frenzy on "Larynx", this time joined by Mike Patton and Belgian d'n'b producers Future Prophecies, and it's one of the best tracks on the album. Rammellzee drops some more intergalactic jibber-jabber on the trippy heavy funk of "Revelations Part 2" which sort of sounds like something off of the first Mr Bungle record.
Another highlight and contender for my favorite track on Profanation is "Ruined", a swirling burbling duet between Laswell and drummer Tatsuya Yoshida from Japanese prog blasters Ruins, and it's exactly what you'd expect from these two musicians going head-to-head. Slithering liquid bass coils around Yoshida's frantic-yet-controlled drumming, sounding something like a much jazzier Ruins song at first, but then halfway through it abruptly changes into dark pulsating dub, slow and trippy and heavy, then just before the end of the song, hurtles suddenly back into the aggro prog thrashing. Also noteworthy is the fantastic twilight dub of "Babylon Blackout" that features Otomo Yoshihide (Ground Zero/ONJO/Filament) contributing electronics to the throbbing, heavy dub. A kind of futuristic drum n' bass/funk metal fusion takes form on "Garbage God's", and "Endtime" acts as the album closer, a gorgeous bit of atmospheric instrumental rock. The last two tracks are live recordings of "Wedge" and "Subgrid", both heavy robo-funk / shred metal / abyssal dub improv workouts that don't appear on the Japanese release.
I have to admit, the musical ideas and genre-hopping insanity come at you so quickly and so furiously that I'm pretty exhausted by the end of this album. But it's an exhilarating chaos, on the same page as Mr. Bungle and Faith No More but far more diverse and experimental. Seems like a fitting final chapter to their long and storied career, no?
Comes in a six-panel digipack in full-color slipcase packaging.
Track Samples:
Sample : [Untitled] [*]
Sample : Ancient World
Sample : Babylon Blackout
Sample : Larynx

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REDROT   Psycho Bondage   LP   (Bloodlust!)    15.98

Try keeping up with Ryan Oppermann's output. It's not easy, let me tell you. The guy has so many different (and distinct) projects that he's involved with, many of which are quite active and releasing new material, that I'm always finding something new from him I haven't heard before. Klinikal Skum, Xombie, Post-Mortem Junkie, and of course the mighty black industrial project Neuntöter Der Plage are all faves, but then I find out about this new Lp from Redrot, another project that I had never even heard of, but which seems to have been releasing stuff since 2002. Based on the heaving machine evil of Psycho Bondage, this is probably the heaviest shit that Oppermann has done. I'm talking about machine-press, pneumatic hissing, and extreme bondage-heavy, the four tracks constructed out of assorted layers of pounding, whirring, thundering machine rhythms and nauseous synthesizer noises, and Oppermann's moaning repetitive mantras. The four long tracks all have this monotonous, diseased feel, the weirdly groovy undercurrent of crushing mechanical rhythms giving this the feel of a seriously warped and demonic brand of Wax Trax industrial, but fused to the oozing, autopsy-table horror of the best death industrial (with echoes of everything from early SPK to Brighter Death Now to Atrax Morgue). The relentless crush and rumble of the rhythms also bring a Swans-like heaviness to the proceedings, so when I say this is heavy, I'm talking heavy, the metallic grind and syrupy distorted beats sometimes slowing down to a slow-motion detonation that feels like mortars going off. The more I listen to Psycho Bondage (and the louder I play it), the more this seems like a death industrial/power electronics record infused with the inexorable grind of the heaviest industrial doom; except where glacial riffs would be, there's the wheezing and buzzing of rotten synths and sputtering effects pedals, the howling hellish growls and screams and sado-mantras stretching and diffusing, turning into flutters of vocal vomit slung against the necrotic industrial backdrop. Really, the last track "Crawling Dead Sex" sums it all up.
Limited to 525 copies on black vinyl.

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RESISTANT CULTURE   Welcome To Reality   CD   (Profane Existence)    9.98

Now in stock on Cd...
Resistant Culture are a Los Angeles area crust/grind band who have been around since the early 90's, going by the name Resistant Militia and releasing records on cult labels like Wild Rags before changing their lineup around and switching the name to it's current form. The band wasn't widely known outside of the L.A. area (I hadn't even heard of 'em until recently), and was probably best known for having Napalm Death guitarist Jesse Pintado in it's ranks. Pintado was still in Resistant Culture when he died suddenly in 2006, and the band's 2006 album Welcome To Reality would become the last recording that Pintado would appear on. Tragedy aside, this is also where the band started to develop a buzz in the crust/grind underground, not just for their brutal Terrorizer-gone-stench grindmetal, but also for an interesting and very quirky assimilation of some, uh, very non-grind sounds....
Resistant Culture play an extremely solid brand of metallic crustcore loaded with brutal death metal-style vocals trading off against hysterical shrieks, crushing steel-plated D-beat drumming, distorted blower-bass, massive downtuned riffs, it's all kind of an even mix of crushing stenchcore a la Extinction Of Mankind, Stormcrow, Warcollapse, Extreme Noise Terror, etc., but with a heavy old school death metal element to their sound with all of the wailing lead guitars and rigid double-bass driven drumming. On top of that, you get furious anarcho style lyrics that focus on native peoples, ecological issues, and anti-corporate warfare with all of the primal rage and stripped-down furor of any number of Profane Existence records. Where things get wiggy on Welcome To Reality is when Resistant Culture incorporate some element of Native American music into their punishing grindcore. Yeah, Native American music, a mix of actual instrumentation and triggered samples that thrust this into the demento-zone whenever they appear.
The first two songs ("Hang On To Nothing" and "Ecocide") open the album with a furious one-two punch of D-beat driven grindcrust, which leads into the equally thrashy and crushing "It's Not Too Late", but almost as soon as this song gets underway, the band shifts into this weird percussive breakdown with heavy chugging guitars and omninous leads over Native American-style percussion and chanting. The song then goes back and forth between the chanting/percussion and the all-out thrash, and the way that they do it is really weird, almost krautrocky, and definitely sets you up for the rest of the what-the-fuck moments that pop up sporadically on this album. "Misery" and "The Struggle Continues" are another pair of straightforward eruptions of metallic crust, followed by "Sentient Predator", which starts off with a more grindy, blastbeat-ridden attack. But then a minute and a half in, the song suddenly slows down into an angular, almost industrial Godflesh-like dirge, and once again those wailing native chants show up, along with what sound like rainsticks (fucking rainsticks) while the guitars chug this huge dissonant riff. Very odd. Then there's "Elder Wisdom", an instrumental acoustic guitar piece with traditional flutes. The next couple songs return to the crust, and at this point I'm starting to hear more of a crushing industrial-metal quality to some of their riffs, like a mix of metallic crust and early Fear Factory. There are more short classical guitar interludes, and samples of forest nightlife, the supremely catchy anarcho-anthem "Civilized Aggression", and a cover of Discharge's "Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing", which would have been a real mindfuck if they had stuck some Native American chanting in there. And the album ends with "Land Keeper", which is hands-down the most insane sounding song on here, starting off as a tribal percussion jam with animal sounds floating around in the background (including a goddamn coyote), and is joined by a crushing death metal riff that's played over the thumping tribal drums and rattles while the singer does this gutteral version of Native chanting, trading off against the samples of actual Native singing. What the hell?
Their mix of ultra-heavy crustmetal and traditional native music is going to be an acquired taste, I think. While the album definitely leans more towards the straightforward grind side of their sound (and that stuff most defintiely RAGES), the parts where the sampled chanting and flutes rattles show up are pretty damn weird. Open minded crust and grind fans, on the other hand, will probably FLIP over this!
Track Samples:
Sample : Sentient Predator
Sample : Land Keeper
Sample : Elder Wisdom

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RITA, THE   The Rack   CD   (Handmade Birds)    12.98

The latest full length disc from The Rita continues to explore the more detailed and tactile soundscapes of deep crackling distortion and speaker-belch that Sam McKinlay dived into on the Skate / Snorkel LP and the The Voyage Of The Decima MAS disc. The Rack features two twenty-plus minute tracks of fetishistic noise made up of crackling, visceral gusts of electronic detritus and amplified crunch; where most HNW artists go for the oppressive wall-of-static approach, McKinlay makes use of silence and empty space that exists in the cracks between the blasts and blurts of hyper-distorted feedback and microphone abuse, here derived from the sounds of knives and nylon. The first piece is subtitled "Knifing And Slitting", focusing on the sound of the fabric of the universe being torn apart, an endless seam being violently ripped, the sound of tearing stretched and extended into infinity. The second (subtitled "Covering The Legs, The Feet", evoking a different sort of potential paraphilia) is only slightly less brutal, a vast smoldering sheet of black smoke and bubbling concrete that's underscored with a constant subliminal low end rumble, swarming with an infinite array of microscopic crackles and explosions. As with all of MacKinley's work, you hear strange aural hallucinations that become hyper-magnified when submerged into the extreme durations of his noisescapes, and it produces a unique effect on the listener that's very different from what anyone else is doing within the realm of HNW. Part of the Dark Icons series on Handmade Birds, this is another high quality release from The Rita that's highly recommended to enthusiasts of innovative harsh electronics. Packaged in a 5" x 5" sleeve, and limited to 300 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Knifing And Slitting
Sample : Covering The Legs, The Feet

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RUDIMENTARY PENI   No More Pain   LP   (Outer Himalayan)    16.50

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

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

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SATANS ALMIGHTY PENIS   Pulsing Feral Spire   CD   (Pagan Flames Productions)    9.98

I wouldn't blame you if you took a look at that band name and thought that this is some kind of dumb joke band. That's not the case, though. Satan's Almighty Penis are many things - vile, repulsive, caustic, offensive, laced with transgressive black humor - but they are definitely not joking around when it comes to unleashing their searing experimental blast chaos. Per their statement on their site, they couldn't be clearer: "Satans Almighty Penis is violent, underground, experimental black Metal. S.A.P. is not a joke, and is above all not a parody of Black Metal. Our music represents rebellion, hatred, and violence against the music industry, against the unquestioning cattle who walk among us, and against the ignorance of religion which brainwashes and blinds so many from thinking for themselves. We perform this music because it is our true path and it is the ultimate artistic expression of the darkness we embrace within ourselves."
This offbeat black metal duo invokes the demon within the machine, dishing out awesomely warped black metal hysteria that injects an old school frosty BM influence into a hellish mainframe of psychedelic electronics and bizarre soundscaping on this, their second album. Pulsing Feral Spire is filled with weird off time blasting, shrill trebly guitar leads and swirling angular arpeggios, lots of fucked-up squiggly soloing, and the hysterical high-pitched screams of vocalist Syntax A, who was formerly a member of blacknoize outfit Enbilulugugal. The songs are bizarrely structured, often descending into whirling maelstroms of cosmic electronics and looped blackened guitar, and laced with weird breaks where there's nothing but monstrous back-and-forth growling that pans from speaker to speaker, like beasts from hell engaged in some sort of conversation, or blasts of extreme digital noise. After eight tracks of this warped black metal chaos, the album comes to "We Shall All Be Forgotten", a massive murky dirge that closes the album with sixteen minutes of blackened doom-laden dirge, washed out and drained of all color, the sound muffled and ultra murky as if you were hearing some crushing abstract black-doom band playing underwater, creating a dreamlike blur of lumbering washed out blackness smeared into a Tim Hecker-ish wash of rumbling formlessness. It's the sort of Havohej-esque black metal weirdness that would have been right at home on the Rusty Axe label; in fact, these guys were featured on one of that label's Under The Axe compilations, which should give you an idea as to how messed-up this is. And it's got an awesome full-color cover from Zornow, the horror comic artist responsible for those amazing Enbilulugugal album covers and the Godzilla and Day Of The Dead comic books.
Track Samples:
Sample : We Shall all be Forgotten
Sample : Haunting the Spaces Between
Sample : From Lust to Necromancy

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SATANS ALMIGHTY PENIS   Thy Foulness Cum   7 INCH VINYL   (Pagan Flames Productions)    6.00

Along with the latest album from the band, I've also found this older 2006 Ep from the life-hating perverts in Satan's Almighty Penis, who have become one of my favorite bands on the Pagan Flames roster. It's more ferocious, fucked-up experimental black metal from this duo, smeared on a blood red vinyl platter, and bound in a fantastic looking package that includes both cover art and an 11" x 17" foldout poster from renowned splatter-comic artist Jeff Zornow; I love this guys work on black metal records, which you can also find on releases from Blood Cult and Enbilulugugal.
First song "Sacrifyx" is all noisy, chaotic black metal primitivism, a putrid blast of messed-up blastbeat drums, out of control treble-overload riffing, maniacal gargling shrieks and swirling plumes of feedback and electronic noise. Total savagery. Then comes "Leper Apocalypse", an awesomely sloppy mix of galloping blackened thrash and frenzied blasting slamming into weird rhythmic changes and again surrounded by a hellish storm of noise, layered vokills, and warped guitar damage, collapsing at the end into a messed-up black noise free-for-all.
The b-side features the misanthropic anthem "Scarred For Human Life", a thrashy dose of blackened Bathory-esque punk vomit carved out of catchy riffage and pounding drums, which then changes into a more baroque black metal blast strafed with trebly tremolo melodies, and shifts into fuzz-soaked slow doom misery at the end.
Released in a hand-numbered edition of 500 copies.

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SETE STAR SEPT   Gero Me   10 INCH VINYL   (Rage For All)    10.98

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SIXX   Sister Devil (Die Hard Edition)   2xLP   (Nuclear War Now! Productions)    29.99

We now have the limited edition "diehard" version of the Sister Devil reissue from Nuclear War Now. This amazing slab of blackened, satanic death rock from members of Von is presented here as a double 12" edition packaged in a gorgeous textured tip-on gatefold jacket with silver foil stamp and spot gloss printing and includes a large Sixx poster, an insert sheet, a copy of the Ugly Self poetry zine that Sixx's Goat published in 1993, a vinyl sticker, and a large embroidered Sixx patch.
Nuclear War Now! Have allready won my affection tenfold over when earlier this year they reissued the long out-of-print Von set that I had been waiting forever to get my hands on, but this new reissue of the even kultier Sixx has me in such a deep state of label-crush that I'm reeling. Twenty years on, the influence that Cali mutants Von have had on the evolution of black metal has been thoroughly documented; their seminal Satanic Blood and Blood Angel demos made a profound impact on the burgeoning black metal underground, and together remain some of the weirdest, most unearthly underground metal ever. Far less known, though, is that the members of Von reformed as another band called Sixx right after Von was formally dissolved, a totally different sonic beast with the exact same lineup of Von, but with a radically different approach. Instead of the ultra-raw, droning Satanic black metal of Von, Sixx played a brand of creepy, intensely brooding deathrock that was more like Christian Death, Bauhaus, Samhain, Joy Division, early Sisters Of Mercy and Kommunity FK, total batcave stuff, but with a distinctly deranged and evil vibe that could only have come from the warped minds behind Von.
This shit is an epiphany if you've been getting into all of the recent black metal/deathrock crossover that's been emerging recently. Fans of current bands like Hateful Abandon, Soror Dolorosa, Joyless, Thränenkind and Caina in particular need to hear the music of Sixx, as these guys foreshadowed the blending of BM and grim post-punk that would become so popular almost twenty years later; like Soror Dolorosa, there's hardly any trace of the metallic aspects of black metal to be found here, but the bleak, depressive atmosphere and feeling of total blackness of BM itself is still present, and some of the DNA of Von still manages to creep through, like the gutteral grunts that echo through "On The Dead", or the same sort of stripped-down, trancey, ritualistic song structures, and in the murky cave ambience that lurks throughout Sister Devil. But aside from that, Sixx are all throbbing bass and motorik drumming, moody minor-key guitar minimalism and deep gothy vocals, strangely catchy in spite of their utter creepiness, like a satanic Joy Division maybe, and fans of that classic deathrock/goth sound from the 80's who have never heard Sixx before may just discover a new favorite band after hearing this. Sixx were only active for a brief moment in time, playing just a couple of shows in the Bay Area and releasing a single demo in 1991 before disbanding and fading into even deeper obscurity, but Nuclear War Now! has reissued that recording on both LP and CD, remastered and with all new artwork. Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Black Ride
Sample : On The Dead
Sample : Sister Devil
Sample : Unnatural

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SKY BURIAL   Dream Decimator   CASSETTE   (Cathartic Process)    6.50

Sky Burial's nightmarish industrial soundscapes are too often labeled "dark ambient", when that is only a small aspect of what you hear on any one of this project's releases. It's the work of Mike Page, also of the power electronics/harsh noise project Fire In The Head; with Sky Burial, Page treads the line between a sort of midnight kosmiche beauty and suffocating abyssal chaos and ends up in this surreal dreamworld of mutant textures and terrifying utterances that really doesn't sound like anyone else out there right now. I dig this stuff so much that we've got a new release from Sky Burial coming out soon on the Crucial Blaze series, and while that has been cooking in the C-Blast lab, this also-new cassette just came out on Cathartic Process to further provide my needed fix.
Dream Decimator offers an excellent hour-long set of digital isolationist terror and dystopian industrial weirdness that doesn't take long to crawl in uner your skin. On the first side, sustained mid-range keyboard drones hover over a blackened waste littered with rusted metal, broken machinery, and thunderous subterranean rumblings. Chiming bells echo over vast fields of Lustmordian blackness, as is the amplified roar of scraped, abused metal. After a long stretch of whirling scrap-metal and pitch-black static drones, the sound of drums suddenly appear to pound out a heavy rolling rhythm, giving the creeping black ambience a massively heavy percussive drive and injecting the industrial ambience with a powerful newfound heaviness. This percussive power will continue to emerge at various stages throughout Decimator, slipping into patches of fractured industrial dirge that can evoke the psychedelic tribal drum workouts found on some of Neurosis's early albums, and slow washes of shimmering gong that ripple across those sustained keening drones. Intense stuff.
The second side heads deeper into realms of vaporous black drift; heaving pulsations of black fog blasting through cavernous depths, the tectonic thrum of subterranean chambers disturbed by processed noises and hallucinatory field recordings. Fearsome black synths rush in after several minutes, rising into a cacophony of circular buzz saw loops and vicious insectile chittering. Slurred Gregorian chants drift out from beneath crashing metal avalanches and the distant pneumatic throb of underground machinery. Eventually, it ends up in a swirling fog of coruscating tones and heavenly drones, rising continuously towards the heavens until it burns off into a sinister electronic pulse.

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SPAZZ / BRUTAL TRUTH   split   7 INCH VINYL   (Deep Six)    5.98

How much speed can you take? This repress of the 1996 7" Ep (originally released by Bovine Records) featuring Spazz and Brutal Truth going head to head is a shot of gasoline straight to the vein. First up is Spazz, with three songs ("Spazz Vs Mother Nature", "Nuge On A Stick" and "Donker") of their trademark Infest-meets-the-muppets goofball blastcore. It's been a while since I've pulled any of my Spazz records out to listen to, so I'd almost forgotten how ridiculously heavy this band was. Even when playing at light speed, Chris Dodge's bass rattles your fillings. Then there's the banjo and mouth harp that show up on the weird breakdown section on "Spazz Vs Mother Nature", and the warped slippery grooves and mid-tempo circle pit part on the last song. Weird and blazing, as was their way.
Brutal Truth's side is even more, uh, brutal; it starts with the strange noisy chaos of "Pork Farm" (which would later appear in more polished form on their Sounds of The Animal Kingdom album) that's part grindnoise meltdown, part avant garde deathgrind, Rich Hoak doing his many-armed free-jazz-on-PCP drumming. That's followed by a smokin' cover of Die Kreuzen's "Rumours" that the guys add an extra dose of their grindpunk heaviness too; and "Foolish Bastard" (also a pre-Sounds track) finishes the side with a quick, violent grindcore blast.

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SU19B / DREADEYE   split   7 INCH VINYL   (Regurgitated Semen)    6.50

Straight out of Japan, here's some crazed destructo-blast etched onto black petroleum for your cathartic pleasure. On one side, an apocalyptic fusion of extreme sludge and supersonic blastcore; on the other, hyperfast power violence worship pumped full of PCP and shot directly into your skull.
Su19b are first up with three songs of their skull crushing grind/sludge, which has always and aptly been compared to a cross between Corrupted and Crossed Out. These guys live up to it, too. Gooey bulldozer sludge riffs and spastic drums morph into ferociously messed-up grindcore and just as quickly melt down into Corrupted-like pools of black tar, with slurred, slobbering vocals and a filthy, feedback-infested recording job, ending with a weird outro of glacial plodding drums, thick black feedback, and hysterical howling and gasping wordless vocals. Brutal!
Dreadeye counter with their own blast of hyperspeed blastcore violence. Three songs that like Su19b alternate the blasting speed with slow, crushing heaviness, but their slow parts are slightly more up-tempo, massive Frostian crush that crawls out of the chaos storms of blastbeats and shrieking vokills and Infest-style riffs, with a singer who gurgles in a putrid incoherent goregrind growl in between the throat-ripping screams. Loved this stuff, and I'm keeping an eye peeled for more of their stuff.
Released in a limited edition of 500 copies.

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SUJO / KORPERSCHWACHE   split   CD-R   (Inam)    5.00

Track Samples:
Sample : SUJO - Verges
Sample : SUJO - Siem Burns
Sample : KORPERSCHWACHE - The Golden Hammer
Sample : KORPERSCHWACHE - Divine Teeth

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TENDERIZOR   Touch The Sword   LP   (Sicksicksick)    13.50

OK, so there's obviously some tongue-in-cheek humor behind this band; you've got this thrash band from Albuquerque called Tenderizor, fer chrissakes, who have named their first 12" Touch The Sword and have a huge Teutonic eagle emblazoned across the cover. Normally I'd have passed this up on first sight, guessing that it would be some goofy metal piss-take. What gave me pause was when I saw that these guys included some members of the weirdo stoner/psych metal band Leeches Of Lore, who I think are pretty cool. So I gave it a spin, and was impressed by just how fucking crushing this record turned out to be. In a nutshell, Tenderizor belt out oddball thrash metal with druggy psych-sludge touches and references to some weirdo mysticism, and apparently opened up for Acid Mothers Temple in their hometown at one point. Pretty cool.
This thing kicks off with clusters of finger-tapped notes that stack up as it goes on, sounding like something from Orthrelm for a moment until the whole band drops in. When the rest of the band shows up, it's with a slow, pounding buildup reminiscent of something you'd hear on an older 80s metal album, rough but triumphant. Then it surges into a ripping thrash metal assault with chunky palm-muted riffing and over-the-top shredding matched by drumming that alternates between a lightning quick gallop and full-on blastbeats, and a singer who belts out an awesome snarling screech that vaguely reminds me of an even more freaked-out version of Bobby Ellsworth from Overkill. As the record continues through this pummeling power thrash attack, it winds through some oddball twists and turns, from sorta-mathy, angular breakdowns and blasts of noisy double bass mayhem to some psychedelic touches. One of these moments is found at the beginning of "Pittbull" where the band gets spacey and swirling and trippy, right before they kick into a grinding mid tempo riff that leads into the garagey melodic metal of the second half. Another is found on the celestial drones that open up the wigged-out lumbering psych-dirge "Bitch Corrector".
Yes, they have a song called "Bitch Corrector".
The whole second side of the record heads in a slower, sludgier direction, but is no less quirky. The spastic howling thrash is more often interjected with slow Frostian riffage, which is always welcome in my book, and then there's the Legend Of Zelda-meets-King Diamond histrionics of the title track that truly sounds as badass as the description that I just gave for it. It all wraps up with the thrash throwback "Gilded Knight" that ends the album with fist-pumping, neck-snapping fury. Very cool stuff all around. By the end of it, I came to the conclusion that there's a serious whiff of Karp hanging over this album. These guys have that same sorta-goofy attitude to just about everything except for the music itself, which rips from start to finish. So yeah, imagine if instead of worshipping at the altar of the Melvins and belting out massive sludgy punk anthems, Karp had become a bullet-belt draped thrash metal band, it's quite possible that this is what it would have looked like.
The record is limited to 500 copies on red vinyl, and comes with a digital download code.

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VEKKA, ILKKA   Death Psychedelia   ART BOOK - SLIM   (Crucial Blaze)    8.98

Like most people who have had their eyes melted by his work, I'm pretty sure that the first time I was exposed to Ilkka Vekka's visual art was through one of his releases with his psychedelic industrial noise/drone project Haare. The majority of Haare's tapes, discs and 7"s bear Vekka's signature style of acid-damaged collage and ghoulish death imagery, giving them a unique visual language that synchs up perfectly with the dense, deafening walls of blackened noise and factory-floor cacophony that he summons from out of some black hole. Vekka's artwork has also been popping up in other places within the underground noise/metal realm recently, such as the eye-popping covers that were commisioned for the Finnish noise magazine Special Interests in 2010. Like the artwork on the Haare releases, these covers are kaleidoscopic blasts of color and geometric figures and occult symbology that feel as if they are drawing equally from both the psychedelic poster art of 60's artists like Martin Sharp and Barney Bubbles, and the stark high-contrast nightmare imagery found within the cassette covers and Lp sleeves of 80's industrial culture. It's a potent fusion of messy psychedelia and corrosive cut-up images that Vekka has developed.
This zine collects a number of Vekka's pieces, and is divided into roughly two sections. The first focuses on all new black and white collage pieces that appear here for the first time; the second half of the chapbook features a number of album cover details and Haare-related art, including a couple of full-color reproductions. All of these lysergic visions gathered together here are deranged, hallucinatory and visually intoxicating, and are only a small portion of the ever growing body of work that Ilkka Vekka continues to create. The thirty-eight page zine includes an index of the art pieces, a partial Haare discography, and comes in a black hand-numbered envelope printed with the black Ilkka Vekka logo, a set of vinyl stickers, and a set of four full-color 1" badges. Released in a limited edition of 100 copies.

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VELNIAS   Sovereign Nocturnal   LP   (Vendetta)    16.98

Velnias's acclaimed debut Sovereign Nocturnal is finally available on vinyl thanks to the folks at Vendetta Records out of Germany. Released in a limited edition of 300 copies on black vinyl, this Lp features the same music as the original Cd release on God Is Myth, but has completely different album art as well as new artwork included on the printed inner sleeve.
The debut full length from Velnias gives us three epic tracks of atmospheric, doomy black metal that takes it's influence from the classic Norwegian sound and reshapes it into a mesmerizing, progressive new form all their own that's had me thoroughly entranced. The Midwestern trio takes cues from bands like Enslaved and Emperor with their huge, triumphant riffs, harsh blackened screams and frost-bitten aura, but the music is mostly mid-paced, slowed down to a mid tempo doomy march, the whole vibe of the album cast over with darker shadows and a sense of deep melancholy. And the songs are stretched way out, each one is twelve to fifteen minutes long, which gives the band plenty of time to craft sprawling blackened epics that incorporate a bunch of different sounds. There are folky acoustic interludes that emerge in between the heavier epic parts, and some fluttery clean guitar and almost pastoral instrumentals that are reminiscent of Opeth. Huge tom-tom rhythms rise up, almost like one of those bottom-heavy percussive dirges you'd hear on an Isis album; recordings of thunderstorms and forestscapes appear throughout the album to color the dark, sylvan atmosphere, and riffs are stretched out and repeated over and over, creating a hypnotic effect as they drape their riffs in buzzing guitar interplay. Velnias are skilled at creating these really cool layered textures with the guitars, sometimes even sliding into haunting, discordant parts that sound like blackened bits of Slint's Spiderland, and one of the album's highlights is the last few minutes of "Risen Of The Moor" where the band moves from crushing, epic blackened doom into a massive percussive workout, a feedbacking guitar howling endlessly over a rolling, pummeling wave of tribal drums. Very cool. Fans of both Agalloch and Enslaved's brand of proggy black metal will especially dig Velnias' epic sound.
Track Samples:
Sample : Into Arms Of Oak
Sample : Sovereign Nocturnal

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VENTA PROTESIX   Depraved girls with premaxillary hyperdontia   7 INCH VINYL   (Lips Infection)    9.98

More electronic dental-drill digital cruelty from Venta Protesix! With each new 7" that I've gotten from this Italian noise act, the glitch-agony is increasingly more controlled and obsessively constructed for maxmimum nerve damage. On Depraved Girls..., Venta Protesix merges this extreme electronic attack with deviant sexual imagery and themes concerned with dental paraphilia and Japanese girls, which adds to the sweetly uncomfortable vibe emanating from this slab of petroleum filth; indeed, one of the tracks is titled after a website that apparently features nothing but photos and commentary on gorgeous young Japanese females with mildly fucked-up teeth. Other tracks on the Ep are less subtle; "Sexual abuse on the dental hygienist" leaves little to the imagination. Soundwise, this is in the same vein as previous VP Eps, each track constructed out of series of abstract beeps and sustained sinewaves, which on the a-side coalesce into a simple two-note plodding tonal pulse that eventually flatlines into clipped sirens and speaker rattling judder, later going from manic hard drive meltdown to broken Atari soundchip chaos. Over on the flipside, the glitchpain starts off more frantic with malfunctioning primitive arcade game bleeps and deep rumbling static hum, but then settles into a thick steady electrical buzz-drone that slowly shifts in intensity over the rest of the side.
If you are of the opinion that Whitehouse was the final word on extreme electronics, try listening to Venta Protesix. When listening to this or any other VP records, headphones are recommended for maximum skull abuse...you'll just want to watch the volume.

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VOLTIGEURS / HORSEBACK   split   10 INCH VINYL   (Turgid Animal)    15.98

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WINTER   Into Darkness   CD   (Southern Lord)    14.98

For the longest time only available as a pricey import disc, Winter's seminal doomcrust album Into Darkness has been reissued domestically by Southern Lord with a thick booklet of artwork, lyrics and show flyers, but minus the Eternal Frost Ep that appeared on previous CD editions...
For fans of extreme doom, few bands are as seminal and influential and crucial as Winter. This trio from Long Island emerged back in the early 90's playing a style of ultra-slow death metal that instantly achieved cult status in the doom/death scene, with plodding, syrupy tempos, gooey guitars tuned way way down, and gutteral, grunting vocals that would lay down the template for thousands of sludgey metal bands that have followed in Winter's footsteps. Their music was heavily influenced by Celtic Frost, and you can hear it immediately in the Warrior-esque grunts and lumbering sludge riffs, but Winter took that sound a step further, making it crustier, slower, trippier, piling on the distortion and reverb. Beyond the heavy Frost influence, Winter also drew from the classic doom of Sabbath, stench-ridden UK hardcore and the pre-Frost blackskuzz of Hellhammer for their creeping sludgecrust, distilled into thick, downtuned riffage often smeared in flanger effects, spiky, chaotic solos, glacial drumming, and grisly downer grooves. There's also a weird psychedelic element to Winter, which most of the bands that have been influenced by 'em seem to forget about; if you put your ears close to the oozing sludge, you'll hear strange Hammond organ drones, electronic noises, and bits of sampled screaming and stranger vocal sounds stuck deep in Winter's muck.
Anyone who has gotten into the new wave of extreme doom that's appeared over the past few years owes it to themself to check Winter out, as their groundbreaking ultrasludge helped to plant the seeds for the glacial heaviness that has taken form with bands like Corrupted, Electric Wizard, Thergothon, Esoteric, Moss, Monarch, Disembowelment, and pretty much all other purveyors of apocalyptic tarpit metal that have followed in the wake of this punishing album.
Track Samples:
Sample : Eternal Frost
Sample : Goden

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Copyright 2011 Crucial Blast -- Site created by Web-Synthesis

Copyright 2009 Crucial Blast -- Site created by Web-Synthesis

Copyright 2009 Crucial Blast -- Site created by Web-Synthesis