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I've been trumpeting about how rad I think this band is for years, but they've still yet to get much attention over here in the States; hopefully with the release of their latest album Il Secondo Tragico and the now-permanent status of saxophonist Luca T Mai of Zu fame, Italy's Psychofagist might finally start to find more ears over here. I can't imagine anyone into extreme, adventurous grindcore not digging this band...each of their releases has moved even further into their awesome hybrid of jazz/prog/avant grind, and now with two saxophonists in the band and a tighter set of songs than they've ever had before, Psychofagist has delivered what I believe to be their finest record yet.
As before, Psychofagist's sound is equal parts technical death metal and blazing grindcore with an odd style of riffing and a penchant for angular, difficult arrangements, but where the saxophones would appear intermittently on previous releases, here they are out in front, as much of a lead instrument as the guitars, and it sounds ferocious. Luca T Mai's baritone sax is teamed up with the alto sax of also-guitarist Stefano Gerrian, and the two will tear off into these fierce free-jazz skronkfests backed by the warped death metal riffs and crushing grind. The dual vocals from Gerrian and bassist Marcello Sarino trade off with wheezing panicked screams and burly bellowing, and the songs tumble into chaotic, complex blasts of heaviness that can get pretty dizzying, guitars swerving from contorted death metal crush to Sharrock-style atonal guitar mangle, slipping into depths of crushing industrialized dirge on songs like "Defragmentation Rotunda", and ripping through fields of seriously intense hardcore reed blowing that smacks of a heavy Brotzmann influence. There's more electronic FX and synths present on this album, too, contributed by guest musicians like Eraldo Bernocchi (Black Engine / Sigillum S / Charged), Saverio, and noisician SEC_, and someone named AmenazA (who had also appeared on Psychofagist's The Optician EP from last year) again contributes flute for the band. Flute? Sax? Obviously, this isn't your typical grind album. No, Il Secondo Tragico actually feels like it has more in common with the industrial jazz-core of God, Naked City's Torture Garden, and the Painkiller-inspired jazz/dub/metal of Black Engine than death/grind, but Psychofagist's sound is still closely tied in to an aggressive tech-death attack, and the mix of these two sides of their sound makes for a fucking KILLER combo.
And even after listening to this band for the past five years, they still manage to completely throw me for a loop with some of the stuff that they pull on this disc. The bassist goes nuts on a bunch of the songs, banging out some very Les Claypool like funk-skronk on the opening track and elsewhere on the album, merging thick rubbery basslines and massive slap-bass freakouts with blasting free-jazz skronk and angular grindcore. That first track gets pretty nuts as a matter of fact, by the end of it sounding like Ayler and Primus and Gorguts all slugging it out at once! Then there's the bluegrass banjo that appears at the beginning of the song "Defragmentation Rotunda", the spaced out scum-blues on "Nouvelle De Spasticite", and the squealing sax blowouts that roar in tandem over the grinding crush of "Tema: Collasso", sounding like Last Exit colliding with Brutal Truth up until the band slides straight into a trippy jazz/bossa nova interlude...wild! There's the pure free jazz workout of "Biodegradazioni" that heads into Last Exit/Zu territory, wafts of weird electronic glitchery that flit through the grinding assaults, and passages of creeping bluesy menace, like on "Corpuscles" where the band slips into an almost Oxbow style avant-blues dirge with skeletal guitar winding around an inebriated sax line and deep muttered vocals.
Yeah, not typical grind by a long shot. It's no mindless mess, either, and the band delivers their strongest set of songs so far with this album. Imagine Gorguts, Last Exit and Zu combined into a blasting, sax-splattered jazzgrind juggernaut, and you've got a rough idea of what's up. A fucking ripper, for sure, and highly recommended to anybody into ferocious, far-out jazz-damaged grind! Comes in a full color jewel case package inside of a printed slipcase.
Track Samples:
Sample : Biodegradazioni
Sample : Defragmentation Rotunda
Sample : Pithecanthropus Sapiens Sapiens
Sample : Uomo o Merda

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Back in stock!
What a teamup! Longrunning drum-machine grinders Agoraphobic Nosebleed are back with three new jams, "Self Detonate", "Degenerate Liar", and "Alcoholocaust", performed by the core duo of guitarist/drum programmer/speaker waster Scott Hull (also of Pig Destroyer fame) and vocalist J. Randall, and with additional lead vocals from Benumb singer Pete on "Degenerate Liar". A scathing assault of sludgy noise-rock informed power dirge, crushing thrash metal riffing, and 5000 mph hypergrind annihilation. Smokin'! Total Fucking Destruction are on the b-side with the freaked out psychedelic noise/funk/drug rock jam "Last Night I Dreamt We Destroyed The World" that degenerates into Rich Hoak's manic trademark blastbeat wipeout and some damaged FX abuse, followed by a raging speedcore cover of the Exploited's "Sid Vicious Was Innocent"! Pressed on limited edition thick opaque blue vinyl. And the package for this 7" is AWESOME - the outer cover features brightly colored illustrations of reptilian skateboarding demons tearing up some ramp against a psychedelic backdrop of skulls, all created by famed artist Florian Bertmer, with trippy spiral shapes printed in clear spot varnish and swirling out from the center...and the inside of the jacket features wicked photographs of a kid with his fuckin' nose ripped off, giving a big thumbs up to the camera (hence the Frontside Nosegrind title...). Badass!

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This disc has been out of stock at C-Blast for ages, but we've finally got this back in stock...
Minnesota's Battlefields contribute another entry to the swelling ranks of the post-Neurosis throng with this 4-song, 30+ minute debut, but they suceed in putting their own thumbprint on the sound with a potent mixture of extended instrumental gloom and weighty, feral metalcore that the band have cloaked in themes and imagery related to their interest in ancient civilisations, occultic Archeology, and "hidden histories". 'Tides Upon The Crescent City' opens with a panorama of chiming delayed guitars, shuffling, almost jazzy percussion, and looped feedback, evocative stuff that conveys the apocalyptic biblical sunset of the album artwork (which is pretty striking, I gotta say). Right off the bat I'm digging the way these guys have incorporated samplers into their setup, adding tastefully applied textures to their atmospheric post-rock buildup, and makes me think of a tenser Red Sparowes. At least it did up until the 5 minute mark, when the band suddenly erupts into a volley of majestic deathcore, layering torn shrieks and gutteral death bellows over martial snare and crushing riffage. 'Intimations Of Antiquity' and 'A Lifeless Polar Desert' equally serve up an endtime cocktail of richly textured ambient rock passages colliding with intense, angular metalcore ...a combination that puts them somewhere between Red Sparowes, the more recent Neurosis albums, and the dissonant ferocity of older Converge attacks. Sounds like a strange mixture on paper, but I'm really into the way these guys have pulled it off. The last track 'The Blood And Time At The End Of The World' is the albums doomiest number, arising with a killer Sabbathian godzilla riff that evolves into a churning dirgecore mantra laced with amazing tripped out cosmic guitar melodies. If Battlefields can continue to strike this balance between the stratospheric rock passages and their dramatic, crushing metalcore assaults, I think they'll have really nailed something. It's a strong debut that fans of arty contempo metalcore will find pretty compelling.

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Attention, goat metallers: US label Emetic has just coughed up this amazing-looking picture disc LP release for Beherit's first album The Oath Of Black Blood, with killer slaytanic artwork on both sides from Chris Moyen and packaged with a full-color 11" x 17" Beherit poster! This slab of classic, terminally damaged satanic black metal chaos is limited to 500 copies, and I'm pretty sure that these are going to blow out of here pretty soon.
Here's the review that I wrote for the cd version of the album:
Now, here's some really filthy black metal. A volatile force in early 90's black metal, Beherit hailed from Finland and made quite an impression on black metal fans with their first CD release Oath Of Black Blood, released in 1992. Their brand of black metal was seriously raw and noisy, recorded so low-fi that there's a constant noxious tape hiss that seeps between the cracks of their music, and the playing is so chaotic to the point where Beherit's guitar riffs and uber-sloppy blastbeat drumming and psychotic vocals constantly falls in and out of synch with one another, creating an intensely feral sound heavily influenced by early grindcore and death metal as well as early Sarcofago. Later albums would explore more ambient, experimental territory, but Beherit's earliest tracks are toxic flashpoints of vileness that rank as some of the most crazed, fucked-up black metal from that era. These guys channeled pure evil through their chaotic, eccentric chainsaw guitar riffing, relentless neanderthal blastbeat drumming, but it's frontman Holocausto and his whacked out vocals that especially burn my nerve endings; throughout these short, barbaric eruptions of black metal, Holocausto spews a stream of bizarre croaking, demonic whispers, blasphemous hissing, sickening vomit sounds, and trippy processed moaning that sound totally fucking inhuman. It's so "out" and freakish that the music almost borders on Abruptum territory with all of the eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, noises, effects and brief ambient outros that appear all over these songs, though Beherit indeed played "songs" with real riffs and a semblence of structure, in spite of how noisy and extreme this stuff gets. And there are times when Beherit does devolve into a black miasma of turbulent distortion and percussion, mainly towards the ends of songs like "Beast Of Damnation" and "Demonomancy", the simplistic riffing and blasting drums melting together into a viscous blob of hellish violence. If you can't get enough of the more violent, fucked-up and noisy fringes of black metal, bands like Vargr, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Nekrasov, Abruptum, Von, Blasphemy, etc., then you really need to go back to Beherit, who were one of the first bands to deliver black metal at it's most primal, it's most insane and chaotic state.
Track Samples:
Sample : Black Mass Prayer
Sample : Dawn of Satans Millenium
Sample : The Oath of Black Blood
Sample : Witchcraft

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It's hard not to think of Genghis Tron when listening to Cutting Pink With Knives; the London electro-blasters have been steadfastly honing their synth-heavy grind/spazz/pop sound for awhile now, and their mix of vintage 80's electronic pop elements, metallic guitars and programmed blastbeats and drumming gives more than a passing nod to Tron's Cloak Of Love EP. They do it really well, though, and add enough of their own quirkiness to this style that their second album Populuxxe sees the band coming into their own distinctive sound. I've heard plenty of synth-centered bands in the wake of Genghis Tron and An Albatross and The Locust, and Cutting Pink is definitely one of the best, going in an even poppier direction than Genghis Tron ever did on their earlier releases. The earlier stuff that I've listened to from CPWK was spazzier, grindier, and a lot more chaotic, but on this 2007 disc the band evolved into a surprisingly melodic and accessible sound that combined their jagged grind and freaked out synth blasts with bits of old-school hip hop (in the old school breakbeats that pop up every now and then), anthemic 80's rock, pure pop melody, digital hardcore, weird cosmic drum n' bass, and jazzy keys, wound up into super short songs that rarely ever crack the two minute mark. With so many different elements colliding together in these manic bursts of sound and energy, you'd expect it to sound like a total mess, but Cutting Pink has somehow turned into an honest to goodness pop band with the ability to craft this craziness into actual songs and hooks. The album keeps things short and quick, with sixteen songs in twenty-five minutes, each track an epileptic blast of screamy anthemic grindpop, similar to a poppier version of Cloak era Tron mixed with Blood Brothers, maybe, doing the schizo switch from spastic electro-grind to infectious and ethereal synthpop and proggy poppy neo-screamo, sunny electronic melodies and horns merging with screeching vocals and emotive sung parts, hyperfast blastbeats and blasts of hectic thrash smashing into robotic vocoder singing, backwards melodies, electronica, breakbeats, piano...whew. Imagine Reggie And The Full Effect if they transformed into a spastic grindcore outfit. This album is probably far too sugary and poppy and screechy for hardcore grind and metal fans, but those of you into the proggy, pop-infected blast of An Albatross and Genghis Tron should check it out for sure. I love it, personally. Packaged in a thick full color gatefold jacket with a full color insert booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : Cosmic Explosion of the Velvets
Sample : Pyramids
Sample : See Emm Sea
Sample : St. Lazare

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The mangled, agonizing brand of doom metal of Disjecta Membrae is described as "grotesque vomitive doom" by the French duo, a reference to the bizarre vocal approach that the band uses to create their uniquely demented sound. Demented only scratches the surface, really; this shit is FILTHY, reeking with hellish atmosphere, and as the liner notes state, the music strives to create an "audio manifestation of Medieval Hell, Agony, Torture, Pain and Hate". It's a project from Asmael LeBouc, who you might know from the French doom band Funeralium; as the main member of Disjecta Membrae, LeBouc plays all of the instruments and handles a portion of the vocals, with some additional vocal contributions from someone named "Jumblehole". Uh, right.
LeBouc's style of hellish blackened doom reminds me a lot of Abruptum; all of the vocals are nonverbal noises, no lyrics, just twisted screams and howling, and the liner notes that come with the disc go into some detail about the band's deliberate avoidance of lyrics. The whole point behind this band is to create a warped nightmare atmosphere, and they do this enthusiastically as they stagger through this single epic track. The nearly twenty-minute "Taedium Vitae" starts off with weird grunting noises, hissing vokills, the screams of the tortured and damned echoing off in the distance, surrounded by the clanking of chains, weird low-end squelchy noises and other chaotic elements, creating a very Abruptum-esque ambience in the first few moments. The music quickly erupts into a massive hellish doom trudge, though, with the vomitous vocals kicking in fully, the garbled screams and moans and bestial grunting all layered on top of one another, a nightmarish din of retching and vomiting and groaning over a massive simple two-chord doom metal riff that repeats over heavy plodding drums, the slobbering, mewling, wheezing, animalistic grunts and howls getting more and more crazed and inhuman, not really sounding like voices at all, but more like the insane wailing of subhuman beasts out of a nightmare.
As the track evolves, strange atonal guitar noises emerge in the cracks between the lumbering doom riffing, the song eventually morphing into a jagged, off time dirge for a few minutes, almost Godflesh like, and throughout the track, the sounds of clanking chains and other noises reemerge, adding to the already sickly, dreadful atmosphere. Then, in the last few minutes, the grueling chaotic doomdirge breaks down into a heaving mass of chaotic drumming, low-end drone and squealing amp noise that collapses into a slab of blackened industrial drift, an eerie melody spinning out across a vast field of grinding machine rumble, metallic shimmer, throbbing engines, very dark and Lustmordian as the track winds down to a close. This sounds fucking insane.
Musically, this is some bleak, evil-sounding stuff, but it's the vocals that really make Disjecta Membrae so interesting, the litany of multiple voices all appearing at once, making this sound like some industrial doomdeath jam being performed in a mental ward, or maybe Blut Aus Nord gone deathdoom and fronted by a gang of slavering orcs. Fans of both Skitliv and Abruptum, check this out! The disc came out on the excellent Spanish label Black Mass in a limited edition of 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Taedium Vitae

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Another dose of deformed doomed blackness that came in this week from the Black Mass label (along with that sickoid disc from Disjecta Membrae), Towards Pleroma is a killer debut EP from the band Domains, a Spanish death metal duo. And when I say death metal, I'm talking about old school, diseased, slime-covered, barbaric death metal in the vein of early Incantation, Asphyx, Morgoth, Celtic Frost and Goatlord; ancient, occult death metal insanity smeared across seven songs of gutteral pounding blasphemy, each one a blackened ritual of death-worship and septic skullcrush. Domains have that awesome throwback sound that anyone into the current wave of "NOSDM" (or New School of Old School Death Metal, as coined by the guys over at Decibel Magazine) and death metal atavism will go fucking apeshit for. Brutal riffs, weirdly catchy hooks stitched into the grueling, often doomed and slow-moving riffing, blasting barbaric heaviness with sudden upsurges of thrashing speed, crushing guitar tones...this is my favorite sort of death metal, and Domains are already highly skilled in the form, delivering that noxious brutal heaviness and dank subterranean atmosphere while adding in some interesting touches of their own in the form of some sparse bits of Deathspell-esque ambience and warped, evil minor key melodies. The brief intro track "Privilege Awakes" opens the disc with chiming guitar notes and monstrous minor key creep, then launches full-bore into the crushing death metal of "Mastery", where fast paced thrashing DM becomes interlocked with pulverizing Frost-ian doom and ominous guitar solos soaked in reverb that crawl right out of the pit. Volleys of bulldozing double bass and blackened tremolo riffs lead into the awesome midpaced deathsludge of "Heretics...As Wolves", where Domains dip into some sickening discordant chromatic riffing, and the band even brings in some melody on the last track "Abysses", with a searing bluesy solo that erupts from the crushing DM assault. Totally bad-ass, all the way down to the killer quasi-legible band logo and the grisly occult-themed artwork that adorns Towards Pleroma. The disc comes in at just under a half hour, but every minute is pure bestial death metal punishment; the disc has been on constant replay over here lately, and I'm definitely looking forward to hearing more from Domains...
Track Samples:
Sample : Abysses
Sample : Heretics As Wolves
Sample : Mastery

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Back in stock!
Here's a killer split with our two favorite post-hardcore bands from the early 90's, Salt Lake City's avant-jazz/hardcore titans ICEBURN and post-rock crushers ENGINE KID. ICEBURN's side consists of "Danses", a lengthy improvisation on themes from Stravinsky's "The Rite Of Spring". Man, when this came out back in 1994, this split must have baffled legions of hardcore kids. ICEBURN alternate angry,sludgy riffage with pastoral, squiggly jazz thats totally breathtaking and beautiful. "Danses" might be one of our favorite recordings ever from ICEBURN, with it's promiment melodic figures and crushing dirge-riff, like some itinerant Am Rep noise rock band absorbing Miles Davis into it's gaping maw. Some pretty sinister stuff. This is followed by a live alternate version of the same piece. ENGINE KID's side actually sees the KID heading off into some pretty jazzy, ICEBURN-ish territory! At least that's how it starts, a droning instrumental post-rock passage with guitar strings being scraped and feedback softly howling - and then the band lurches into a freaking heavy dirge, a mega crunchy math-rock riff repeated like a mantra, GODFLESH-style, pummeling your skull with it's cyclical heaviness. ENGINE KID's post-SLINT/CODEINE style is still in full effect here, as is the sludgy,post-metal heaviness that we love so much from this band, but it's definitely jazzier,dronier stuff, very in tune with ICEBURN's material. I can't imagine anyone into stuff like OLD MAN GLOOM or PELICAN not loving a song like "Trailhead At Lake 22" (the opener on ENGINE KID's side). Oh, and for those that don't know, ENGINE KID also features one Greg Anderson on vocals and guitar, who went on to form Southern Lord Records and the bands SUNN O))), GOATSNAKE, BURNING WITCH, etc., after the demise of ENGINE KID in the mid-90's.
Track Samples:
Sample : Engine Kid - Hiking the Circumference of the Mountaintop Lake
Sample : Iceburn - Danses

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Back in stock!
Boss 12" vinyl version of this crucial out-hardcore split!
Here's a killer split with our two favorite post-hardcore bands from the early 90's, Salt Lake City's avant-jazz/hardcore titans ICEBURN and post-rock crushers ENGINE KID. ICEBURN's side consists of "Danses", a lengthy improvisation on themes from Stravinsky's "The Rite Of Spring". Man, when this came out back in 1994, this split must have baffled legions of hardcore kids. ICEBURN alternate angry,sludgy riffage with pastoral, squiggly jazz thats totally breathtaking and beautiful. "Danses" might be one of our favorite recordings ever from ICEBURN, with it's promiment melodic figures and crushing dirge-riff, like some itinerant Am Rep noise rock band absorbing Miles Davis into it's gaping maw. Some pretty sinister stuff. This is followed by a live alternate version of the same piece. ENGINE KID's side actually sees the KID heading off into some pretty jazzy, ICEBURN-ish territory! At least that's how it starts, a droning instrumental post-rock passage with guitar strings being scraped and feedback softly howling - and then the band lurches into a freaking heavy dirge, a mega crunchy math-rock riff repeated like a mantra, GODFLESH-style, pummeling your skull with it's cyclical heaviness. ENGINE KID's post-SLINT/CODEINE style is still in full effect here, as is the sludgy,post-metal heaviness that we love so much from this band, but it's definitely jazzier,dronier stuff, very in tune with ICEBURN's material. I can't imagine anyone into stuff like OLD MAN GLOOM or PELICAN not loving a song like "Trailhead At Lake 22" (the opener on ENGINE KID's side). Oh, and for those that don't know, ENGINE KID also features one Greg Anderson on vocals and guitar, who went on to form Southern Lord Records and the bands SUNN O))), GOATSNAKE, BURNING WITCH, etc., after the demise of ENGINE KID in the mid-90's.
Track Samples:
Sample : Engine Kid - Hiking the Circumference of the Mountaintop Lake
Sample : Iceburn - Danses

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Nice! Life Is Abuse has been kinda quiet lately, at least since the last Dystopa album came out, but the label has re-emerged from hibernation with a super-nice double LP release of The Coronation, the latest album from Bay Area sludgebeasts Laudanum. It's a limited vinyl edition, of course, with only 300 copies pressed on heavy black vinyl, and packaged inside of a thick full color jacket with a fantastic oversized silkscreened poster and printed insert included. This thing looks great!
Laudanum's The Coronation is only the second album from the Oakland noise/sludge band, and it took them a full five years to follow up their debut The Apotheker that came out on the now defunct Unknown Controller label. They've stayed active by putting out an EP and a split with Stormcrow that came out earlier this year, but to really get the full effect of Laudanum's dystopian industrial doom, you gotta hear it in the context of a full album, each track just another chapter in the hellish, nightmare whole that paints a portrait of urban decay and psychic disintegration through both skullcrushing heaviness and isolationist ambience...
With this newly issued by the fine forces behind 20 Buck Spin, it makes since that so much of Laudanum's sound is based in massive crushing doom, and when these guys get heavy, it's unbelievably heavy, huge downtuned bulldozer doom riffs formed from simple but apocalyptic three chord riffs, total old school ultradoom delivered with massive rib-shaking basslines and a dueling vocal attack that has the gutteral roar of Nathan Misterek (formerly of Graves At Sea) sparring with drummer/vocalist Becky Hawk's vicious witch-screams. When the band falls into their doomy, tarpit heaviness, they evoke the inexorable lumbering mecha-doomcrust of early Pitchshifter and Graves At Sea's monstrous sludge but with more Sabbath slathered over the riffs, insanely heavy shit that on it's own would make this a killer album of grim malefic doomcrush, but it's what Laudanum weave in and around the heavier parts that make this album such a tension-filled experience.
Coronation has seven tracks, but really only half of the album is full on metallic heaviness; the other half is made up of long sections, even entire tracks of just minimal industrial drone and claustrophobic isolationist ambience. Lots of bands nowadays use dark drones as intros or as backdrops for their music, but with Laudanum, these passages are hardly secondary. The cold black hum and caustic grind of "Procession" that opens the album, the roaring black jetroar drone and metallic spaciousness that devours the first seven minutes of "Apotheosis", it's all carefully designed and resolutely bleak, a suffocating isolationist atmosphere that merges with the pitch-black riffage and glacial tempos to drown you in dread. Imagine the early industrial dronescapes of Maurizio Bianchi and the cavernous, resonant dark ambience of Lustmord combining with earth-flattening doom. Massive, nihilistic, lugubrious heaviness that's further colored by the band's use of dissonant looped guitar lines, ghostly vocals and deep throaty spoken/chanted parts, passages of softly strummed guitar over deep harmonic drones... one of the heaviest releases in this week, for sure. All of you that are into the industrial-tainted heaviosity of bands like Pig Heart Transplant (who actually shares a member with Laudanum!), Human Quena Orchestra, Hordes Of Satan, Black Sun, etc etc etc, you'll want to add this to your list... Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : In Obscura
Sample :

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First released on cassette earlier this year, Locrian's Rain Of Ashes has just been released on cd by the French label Basses Frequences in a limited edition of 400 copies, packaged with an eight page full color booklet and obi. Here's the original review that I wrote for the tape release (which we still have in stock):
Finally got to see these guys back in July when they toured through Baltimore...Locrian treated a small but enthusiastic audience at the Talking Head to a half hour set of stunning kosmiche drone and blackened post-rock abstraction, with one of the loudest, most fog-filled performances I've ever seen at that joint. The two members of Locrian positioned themselves on the small stage, the guitarist hunkered down in front of his amp, his armada of effect pedals at arm's length, the keyboardist looming over a stack of analogue synths, reel-to-reel tape machines (!), and various other effects devices and sound generators, and they proceeded to knock us all flat with a thunderous wave of deep-space psychdrone flecked with strange Slinty guitar figures and surpremely tasty vintage synth tones. They sounded like a blackened kosmiche krautrock band blasting at nuclear-strength volume when they reached the apex of their set, but it took a long time to get there as they slowly piled on more and more layers of drone and circular guitar and immense bottom-end heaviness. Before going to the show, I had just heard a smattering of their recorded output but was largely new to what Locrian were doing, but by the end of their set I was totally sold.
Just before the show, Locrian had performed live on a radio show at Universaity Of Maryland, and this half-hour performance has been captured as Rain Of Ashes, a limited edition cassette released by the very cool Fan Death Records that just started up recently. It's limited to 200 copies, and comes in full color package. The a-side features the full "Rain Of Ashes", while the b-side has the same track, but in reverse.
"Rain Of Ashes" feels like it's mostly improvised, starting off with soft smears of delayed guitar and warbling drones, building slowly into a swirling mass of black sound, deep kosmiche keyboards and deep gusts of subterannean hiss and tracers of dissonant guitar flowing together, and then gradually a simple four note melody appears, played on a very 70's sounding synth, dark and descending and quite pretty, and this melody begins to loop over and over and over, turning into a cluster of melodic notes as additional keyboards enter and play the same melody, reminsicent of Shulze and the synthscores of Carpenter/Howarth, and this stretches out for quite a while. Eventually, the melodic keys fade off, and we move into a darker expanse of buzzing, blackened guitar rumble, throbbing piano notes, shrieking wordless black metal-esque vocalizations, eerie guitar melodies suspended over an increasingly fearsome soundscape that builds into a hellish cacophony of shrieking vocals and grinding blacknoize that gets really Abruptum-like at the end. It's the sound of soaring through celestial starfields, then falling endlessly into a horrific black abyss.
Hearing the same music in reverse on the b-side, it's even more unearthly and woozy, a black blur of melted feedback and gorgeously warped melodies and dubbed-out ambience that stretches out forever, and I'm thinking that these guys need to make all of their stuff available like this...
Absolutely breathtaking black-kosmiche dronebliss, you can bet that I'll be getting more Locrian stuff in stock here as soon as possible. Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Rain Of Ashes
Sample : Sehsa Fo Niar

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Back in stock!
Rad looking new 12" vinyl version of the recent self-titled CD from San Francisco black metallers Ludicra, on sweet white wax and with one side of the vinyl screenprinted in black ink with the bands logo !
Killer new 3 song mini album from San Fran's urban black metallers Ludicra! There's 22 minutes of music here, all recorded from the same session that made up their Another Great Love Song album from last year. That album crushed us, and these songs are just as good. Actually, the second song here, "Walk The Path Of Ash", might just be my favorite Ludicra song ever, a mighty loping metal anthem with a central melancholic melody that vaguely reminds me of late era Swans, building into a bleak, majestic thrash breakdown with killer dual harmony guitar lines and sky reaching harmonized clean vocals. Awesome, arty battle thrash. Ludicra's Christie Cather and Laurie Sue Shanaman still team up on the singing, and I still think that their combined tortured shrieks are some of the most harsh, harrowing female vocals in the black/death metal spectrum. Of course, Ludicra also incorporate some very un-black metal elements into their songs too, injecting post rock and prog vibes into the thrash attack and bringing in Amber Asylum's Kris Force on violin and Jackie Perez-Gratz on cello.

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This is the first album from the Brazilian grind/noise/gore troop M.D.K., released back in 2005 on the now defunct Vomit Noise label. It took me forever to finally check these guys out as I had for the longest time simply assumed that they were another generic Carcass clone, but recent inspection reveals that this band is substantially more fucked-up and mutated than I had initially assumed. The band stumbles at top speed through fifteen tracks of vile, brutal, and totally inept death/grind; it's sloppy, totally anti-technical stuff, but M.D.K. turns it upside down with some bizarre riffing and TONS of chaotic grindnoize that's pretty fucking intense. The band's lyrics (if you can call them that), song titles and artwork is unsurprisingly obsessed with serial killers and gore flicks (uh, "Serial killer of dead cadavers", "Crimes Satanicos", "Eviscerated", "Morbido banquete de carne humana", and the hilariously titled "Sick freaks doing fucks" for starters...), and their brain-damaged splatter comic art and retarded layouts is pretty much what I'd expect, but the songs get into some seriously fucked-up death/grind territory, most of 'em clocking in around three minutes and made up of obscure foreign splatter movie samples, sloppy, off-kilter blastbeats that suddenly collapse into sputtering, spastic anti-rhythms, insane vomiting vokills that alternately puke and retch and hiss and spit, incoherent blasts of low-end riffing, and chaotic, improvisational drumming that turns this into a kind of splattery death metal-influenced noisecore. There's a manic, random quality to this stuff that makes it really intense, the band seemingly incapable of settling into anything resembling a groove and constantly tumbling in and out of time with one another, and the guitarist continuously belts out these really fucked-sounding riffs that actually remind me of Gorguts at times! The songs are cut into bizarre jagged arrangements that seem to lurch randomly, stitched together from disparate chunks of blasting chaos and slow grinding splattery sludge, wobbling back and forth between primitive damaged death metal and holocaust blasts of noisecore with that almost improv-like drumming. M.D.K. is hardly trying to be "out", but their performance is so messed up and chaotic that it ends up being pretty far out anyways. Gnarly!
Track Samples:
Sample : C.D.S.H.
Sample : O Anatomista
Sample : Ritos Macarbros
Sample : Suffocating

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The newest album from these Brazilian sickos, Cuntanasia (have no idea what that means, but it sounds gross regardless) isn't quite as balls-out chaotic and insane as the earlier releases from M.D.K., but it's still a ridiculously fucked-up gore/noise/grind tornado that fires off one splatterbomb after another. M.D.K.'s maniac noizegrind continues it's carnivorous, giblet-drenched rampage on this disc, again combining chaotic noisecore and mutant deathgrind into short hallucinatory blasts, the drummer flying off in spastic flurries of blastbeats and quirky non-stop fills that half of the time sound like he's improvising, the crazed seizures coming off almost free-jazzy at times, the singer's warped multi-vocal blasts of high-pitched sneers, retching growls, low guttural wordless grunts and other bizarre non-verbal sounds sounding like a squad of demons all yelling in your ear at once. The riffs on Cuntanasia are as messed-up as ever, the songs slipping from more straightforward deathgrind modes into some seriously fucked-up riffing and atonal chords, with more of those smatterings of almost Gorguts-y dissonance and weirdness that took me by surprise on their first album, as well as sometimes slipping into the occasional passage of devastating death metal dirge, or a bizarre off-time antigroove. The recording quality on this disc is alot cleaner and heavier and more "produced" this time around, compared to the utterly mangy sound of M.D.K.'s debut album, but it ain't all that polished, and is still a brain-damaged spazz-gore grindblast loaded with tons of horror movie samples woven in to the intros and sometimes run through trippy effects, blasts of all-out grindnoise, and absurdly disgusting album art and song titles. This shit is nuclear! Mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate / Old Lady Drivers / Phantomsmasher).
Track Samples:
Sample : M.D.K.-Cuntanasia
Sample : Sodomia Sangrenta
Sample : Suculento Torso

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The reissue of Mainliner Sonic is now available from the new fuzzbomb speedfreak psych label Assommer, in a full color jacket and pressed on heavy clear vinyl.
This classic 1997 album from Mainliner came out on Charnel Music and has been out of print for several years, and has just been reissued on cd by the Chinese label Collapsar Records. This was album number two from the self-styled "psychedelic solid free attack group", who during their short five year career created some of the most obliterating, maxed-out powerpsych that's ever crashed through my eardrums, electrocuting their aggro ultra-psych freakouts with a ridiculously in-the-red recording/performing style that makes their music sound like classic High Rise/freakout rock filtered through a haze of blistering distorted noise, like Hendrix at his most inhinged being fed into a tidal wave of Merzbowian blast. This followed their classic Mellow Out and saw founding members Nanjo Asahito (High Rise / Splendor Mystic Solis) and "motor psycho" guitarist Kawabata Makoto (Acid Mothers Temple) now joined by drum-diety Yoshida Tatsuya of Ruins fame. It's a five song attack of extremely distorted and noise-damaged psych-rock mayhem that might even exceed the insane overdriven distortion of their debut. How that can even be possible, I dunno, but songs like "Tsukisasaru" and "Blue Pieces" take that blown-out Sabbath/Stooges/Blue Cheer influence and jam it into a total black hole of fuzz and distortion, the bloozy mongoloid riffing and searing solos blaring through a blizzard of melting amplifier muck that makes these jams stick to the inside of your skull in huge greasy chunks. Yoshida's drumming is both punishing and complex as he swerves between aggressive polyrhytmic pounding and huge grooves, but he's almost totally subsumed by the waves of guitar noise and feedback and CRUNCH that drench this album. Easily some of the most distorted and brutal psych ever recorded, this reaches some truly terrifying levels of fried-out brutality when cranked to maximum levels of volume. A big thumbs up goues out to Collapsar for reissuing this crucial Mainliner slab, which any fan of psychedelic rock of the Japanese and/or extreme/insane variety is going to want to add to their collection pronto. Crushing !!!!
Track Samples:
Sample : Last Day
Sample : Mainliner Sonic
Sample : Tsukisasaru

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My obsession as of late with the fusion of harsh noise/industrial and black metal knows no end, and NDE have provided me with my latest fix, courtesy of UK label Cold Spring. The band and label have been evasive about the who's and what's behind this outfit, and even the visuals on this album are rife with mystery, the album art featuring faceless black-robed figures standing in abandoned churchyards and crumbling cathedrals, no song titles, no lyrics, no band information, the music produced by a seemingly faceless entity. A little bit of digging on the web turned up the following information: NDE is a Belgian duo whose members have had prior involvement with the industrial projects Legion Ultra, Eisengrau, Cold Flesh Colony, and Mürnau, but as NDE explore an entirely different mode of blackened thought, combining harsh industrial textures, martial percussion, and black metal into a seriously grim and scorched blast. If you're into Vargr, Gnaw Their Tongues / Aderlating and Nihill, then NDE will be your cup of blacknoize, but the duo sculpt their own unique form of noise-tempered blackness here. Each of the eight songs on Krieg Blut Ehre Asche are simply titled by roman numeral, and pretty much all make up one mammoth piece of music that sprawls across the entire disc, each track flowing directly into the next, creating a mysterious and abstract soundscape that shifts between harsh necrotic black metal, pounding death industrial and blistering noise. It's like hearing Mayhem jamming with In Slaughter Natives at times.
The opening track introduces crushing industrial percussion that echoes through enormous underground chambers, the blasts of kettledrums shaking the earth as distorted chanting appears overhead and the rhythm forms into a massive martial cadence, the drums growing louder and heavier as they are surrounded by an ever-increasing panic of cd glitch, mangled electronic noise, and garbled vocal noise. And then, it suddenly EXPLODES into noisy, muddy black metal chaos, fucked-up mangled screams ripping through a blur of programmed blastbeats and screeching metallic noise and murky blackened riffs, which lead into "Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part II". More massive kettledrum cannonshots and CRUSHING percussive blasts appear, building into a super heavy industrial dirge with freaked out super distorted shrieks and high pitched piercing feedback skree a la Sutcliffe Jugend, tolling bells, and hellish choirs wailing in the distance.
The black metal guitars reappear eventually, a mosquito-swarm of trebly distorted buzz swirling around chaotic, arrhythmic drums and snarling vocals, the sound erupting into a harsh power electronics-style squeal before shifting again into towering orchestral majesty and swarms of squiggly twisted black metal riffing with bits of symphonic synth peeking through, all of the black metal metal elements buried beneath a storm of noise and crazed percussion. The next track begins with the sound of swooping sine waves and what at first sounds like distorted, processed French horns, but which actually reveal themselves to be moaning background vocals. Pounding Swans-esque drums enter with a massive industrial thud, building into another grim slab of martial industrial infused with insane black metal guitars and vocals.
Track number five is my favorite on the disc; it starts off with creepy classical strains rumbling beneath more PE-style feedback and strained, excoriating vocals, the snarling vox and synths slowly swelling in intensity as the music builds into a frenzy of martial black industrial, epic choral voices and terrifying female opera voices and fucked up noise becoming forged into an awesomely creepy passage, like Gnaw Their Tongues fused with a black metal Ministry. Next, the music becomes slower and doomier, slowing into a massive doomed dirge marching on pounding slow martial war drums through majestic hellish choir voices, random noise and an atmosphere of total evil, and then erupts once again into scathing blackened power electronics on the seventh track, turning into a hateful storm of gnarled blacknoize and throbbing muted gabber-like jackhammer beats, later evolving into a diseased blackened industrial crawl, booming mortar drums exploding around processed vocals, insane screams, and wailing feedback that melt into a retching hellish chaos.
And the closing track is where the band comes closest to "pure" black metal, taking off on an icy BM riff soaring over blasting drums and trebly razor edged guitars and bestial vox, for a moment sliding into a perversely groovy bridge where the drums take on an almost breakbeat-like rhythm before slipping back into a winding, woozy hellscape of blasting drum machines, putrid riffs, scorched vocals, blistering distortion and constantly changing riffs and time signatures, total chaos, total insanity.
NDE create as dark and devilish an album as anything I've heard lately, a perfect blending of cavernous hateful black metal and Cold Meat-style death industrial. If the Mayhem/In Slaughter Natives reference piqued your interest, this is definitely for you, but fans of likeminded bands like Gnaw Their Tongues, Skitliv, and Abruptum will dig this too. It gets pretty abstract and noisy, and traditional BM fans might find it too fucked-up sounding, but it's quickly become a current favorite over here at C-Blast.
Track Samples:
Sample : Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part I
Sample : Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part III
Sample : Krieg Blut Ehre Asche Part VIII

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Wow, here is a real throwback to the sort of industrial thud-rock that I thought had largely died out back in the early 90's. Listening to Of Swine And Swill's debut album, I'm immediately reminded of those oddball post-industrial underground rock bands that were appearing all over the place in the late 80's, bands like Grotus, Cop Shoot Cop, and Babyland. Some really reto sounds going on here, and sometimes it feels like this album could have appeared on Charnel Music or Wax Trax back around 1992. At the same time, Of Swine And Swill incorporate some acid-trip space rock synths into their music, and they aren't shy at all about professing their admiration of UK space rockers Hawkwind; there's also elements of early industrial, and Cold Meat / Lustmord-influenced dark ambience, and dark folk that all find their way into this idiosyncratic stew, sometimes sounding like a mutant pop-tainted Swans? Weird. Even more unexpected is that Of Swine And Swill is the creation of John Potter and Stephen Petrus from the death industrial band Murderous Vision, although I suppose that's not all that surprising whenever you hear these songs wander into dark industrial territory. Still the most eclectic music that I've ever heard from these guys.
The album opens with the odd shambling psych-dirge of "Heaven And Earth Versus Time", a march of tinny Casio drums led by a wheezing melody played on an accordian and the dreamy strains of sitar, eventually joined by chanting vocals, a gloomy guitar melody, and martial snares, turning this into a weird folk-flecked industrialized 80's gloom-pop jam. "Sunrise And Sedation" combines pounding tribal drums and distant guitar figures woven into hypnotic shapes, a heavy industro-rock throb colored by swells of orchestral sound, shimmering gongs and soundtracky strings. Another pounding tribal drum workout guides "Blurred Mosaic", layered with fuzzy analogue synths and electronics that form a trip-hop-like feel that's helped out by the vocals of Alisha Potter, lending the song an almost Portishead-like vibe; while the instrumental "In This Night Of Shattered Glass" kicks in heavy, piling pummeling doomy drums and somber acoustic strum on top of thick swathes of looped machine noise and lush strings, making this one of the album's most Swans-esque moments.
On "Moogy", a distorted heavy duty industrial drum loop grinds through a cloud of vintage synth fuckery and thick, heavy ambience, and "To Watch A Life Drain" is another grinding industrial rock dirge, shooting chaotic sandblaster guitar noise over a hypnotic industrial beat and looping basslines, wild psychedelic freeform soloing, heavily delayed snarling vocals, sax, electronics...reminds me a LOT of Grotus. The rest of the album shifts into even spacier realms with the pure industrial noisescape of "A Corroded Symphony" and the strange combination of deep space psychedelia, windswept Western-tinged post rock a la Souvenirs Young America and lurching noise rock and Lusmordian subterranean ambience that comprises "Of Swine And Swill"; the icy hellish industrial drift a la Inade or Caul of "Alone", and the bluesy acoustic psych and Western strum of closer "Snakedance", which finishes the album in a druggy haze of distant chanting and minimal percussion. Weird mix for sure, combining pounding industrial rock and psychedelia and dark ambience into an unlikely but interesting combination. Comes with an eight page full color booklet, and limited to 1,000 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : In This Night Of Shattered Glass
Sample : Moogy
Sample : To Watch A Life Drain

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The Hawthorne Street vinyl reissue of March Into The Sea is available once again, now in it's second pressing (the copies we have are all on caramel brown colored vinyl). The record is packaged in a full color jacket with the same artwork as the cd version on Hydra Head, and includes a printed insert.
A two-song "single"/Ep in preparation for the new full length coming this summer from Pelican! Pretty mighty at just over 30 minutes, this disc features the full,unedited version of "March Into The Sea", a 20 minute epic with beautiful and massive instrumental indie metal that starts out with a churning maelstrom of thunderous guitars and rolling drums, giving way to Mogwai -esque post-rockisms building to an explosion of distortion. The second half of the song features sad, heavily strummed acoustic guitars and piano and flute, dissolving into a wash of placid drones. This is followed by Justin Broadrick's remix of "Angel Tears" from Pelican's Australasia, where he turns the already quite beautiful song into an even more sky-reaching epic, with angelic guitar tones stretched and processed into pure shoegaze bliss, the main riff repeating ad infinitum, as massive layes of chiming distortion, melodic drones and cosmic feedback swirl around, ending in rhythmic beat-driven synth-bliss. Wow. WOW. Really fucking beautiful. Like The Cure's Disintegration as played by a crushingly heavy sludge-metal band. This EP is essential just for the remix track, let alone the new song.

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I've been trumpeting about how rad I think this band is for years, but they've still yet to get much attention over here in the States; hopefully with the release of their latest album Il Secondo Tragico and the now-permanent status of saxophonist Luca T Mai of Zu fame, Italy's Psychofagist might finally start to find more ears over here. I can't imagine anyone into extreme, adventurous grindcore not digging this band...each of their releases has moved even further into their awesome hybrid of jazz/prog/avant grind, and now with two saxophonists in the band and a tighter set of songs than they've ever had before, Psychofagist has delivered what I believe to be their finest record yet.
As before, Psychofagist's sound is equal parts technical death metal and blazing grindcore with an odd style of riffing and a penchant for angular, difficult arrangements, but where the saxophones would appear intermittently on previous releases, here they are out in front, as much of a lead instrument as the guitars, and it sounds ferocious. Luca T Mai's baritone sax is teamed up with the alto sax of also-guitarist Stefano Gerrian, and the two will tear off into these fierce free-jazz skronkfests backed by the warped death metal riffs and crushing grind. The dual vocals from Gerrian and bassist Marcello Sarino trade off with wheezing panicked screams and burly bellowing, and the songs tumble into chaotic, complex blasts of heaviness that can get pretty dizzying, guitars swerving from contorted death metal crush to Sharrock-style atonal guitar mangle, slipping into depths of crushing industrialized dirge on songs like "Defragmentation Rotunda", and ripping through fields of seriously intense hardcore reed blowing that smacks of a heavy Brotzmann influence. There's more electronic FX and synths present on this album, too, contributed by guest musicians like Eraldo Bernocchi (Black Engine / Sigillum S / Charged), Saverio, and noisician SEC_, and someone named AmenazA (who had also appeared on Psychofagist's The Optician EP from last year) again contributes flute for the band. Flute? Sax? Obviously, this isn't your typical grind album. No, Il Secondo Tragico actually feels like it has more in common with the industrial jazz-core of God, Naked City's Torture Garden, and the Painkiller-inspired jazz/dub/metal of Black Engine than death/grind, but Psychofagist's sound is still closely tied in to an aggressive tech-death attack, and the mix of these two sides of their sound makes for a fucking KILLER combo.
And even after listening to this band for the past five years, they still manage to completely throw me for a loop with some of the stuff that they pull on this disc. The bassist goes nuts on a bunch of the songs, banging out some very Les Claypool like funk-skronk on the opening track and elsewhere on the album, merging thick rubbery basslines and massive slap-bass freakouts with blasting free-jazz skronk and angular grindcore. That first track gets pretty nuts as a matter of fact, by the end of it sounding like Ayler and Primus and Gorguts all slugging it out at once! Then there's the bluegrass banjo that appears at the beginning of the song "Defragmentation Rotunda", the spaced out scum-blues on "Nouvelle De Spasticite", and the squealing sax blowouts that roar in tandem over the grinding crush of "Tema: Collasso", sounding like Last Exit colliding with Brutal Truth up until the band slides straight into a trippy jazz/bossa nova interlude...wild! There's the pure free jazz workout of "Biodegradazioni" that heads into Last Exit/Zu territory, wafts of weird electronic glitchery that flit through the grinding assaults, and passages of creeping bluesy menace, like on "Corpuscles" where the band slips into an almost Oxbow style avant-blues dirge with skeletal guitar winding around an inebriated sax line and deep muttered vocals.
Yeah, not typical grind by a long shot. It's no mindless mess, either, and the band delivers their strongest set of songs so far with this album. Imagine Gorguts, Last Exit and Zu combined into a blasting, sax-splattered jazzgrind juggernaut, and you've got a rough idea of what's up. A fucking ripper, for sure, and highly recommended to anybody into ferocious, far-out jazz-damaged grind! Comes in a full color jewel case package inside of a printed slipcase.
Track Samples:
Sample : Biodegradazioni
Sample : Defragmentation Rotunda
Sample : Pithecanthropus Sapiens Sapiens
Sample : Uomo o Merda

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This killer slab of psychedelic occult doom-scuzz has been released as a sweet limited -edition vinyl release by the Dutch label Monumentum in a gatefold jacket with two-color printing.
Heres the review that I wrote for the original cd release on Psychedoomelic:
It sounds like the reto-occult-rock bug has bitten the guys over at Psychedoomelic based on the latest two albums that they've sent us. First we have that weird debut disc from Deadmask, who mixed together crushing Vitus/Obsessed worshipping doom metal with ultra-dramatic female vocals and hints of 70's occult rock like Coven while dropping a handful of cover tunes on us. Then there's the other, a full length from a Swedish trio called Saturnalia Temple that was formed by members of Count Raven, Therion, Nocturnal Rites, Dead Congregation and Kaamos. Saturnalia Temple also blend together a love of old dark psychedelia and doom metal, but their blueprint is entirely different. The band emerged in 2007 with a five song demo that eneded up getting released as an official cassette release through the Greek label Nuclear Winter Records, and that tape has been building a buzz within the underground doom scene ever since with it's gnarly, crushing drug-doom. That led to Psychedoomelic stepping in to release Ur on CD, and this killer edition features all of the music from the demo and packages it up nicely in a six-panel digipack that keeps the rudimentary metal demo aesthetic intact with high-contrast primitive artwork and low-rent typewritten lyrics.
The first thing that I noticed when I heard Saturnalia Temple is how much these guys sound like Electric Wizard. Their soporific riffs are gnarled and immensely downtuned, and they have a similiar satanic black stickiness as what the Wiz was doing on their classic Dopethrone album. There's buzzsaw blower bass and grisly sludge riffs stretched into infinity, reducting Sabbathoid blooze riffs into a noxious black tar that leave behind massive snailtrails of bongresin and liquified brainmatter across the stretched out jams as the band loses themselves in pulverizing psychedelic groove and relentless hypno-riff mantras. Fans of Dopethrone will most likely go apeshit for these guys. However, as you get deeper into the songs, it becomes apparent that Saturnalia Temple are actually doing something a little different. The band break out some monolithic drones, spewing out huge globs of buzzing amplifier stasis that would make Dylan Carlson proud, especially on the glacial ur-drone of the opener "Enter The Temple Of Saturn".There are these slimy, primitive death metal parts that pop up in a couple of places, there's some tripped-out delayed grunt vocals echoing off of the cavern walls of the song "Mount Meru Is Tall" that sounds like Tom G. Warrior blasted on acid, and much moreso than Deadmask, you can REALLY hear the influence of 70's occult rock like Black Widow and Coven. Not just that, but there's also a bit of 60's psych influence going on here, like when the vocalist breaks out into drugged out singing on songs like "Devils Eyes" and "Dreaming Out Death", and in the killer acid-rock soloing that the guitarist smears across a couple of tracks. Lyrically, Saturnalia Temple are fully immersed in bizarre satanic babble, and they invoke a weird vibe through both their lyrics and music that turns this into a killer slab of narcotized satanic psychdoom.
Track Samples:
Sample : mount meru is tall
Sample : ur pt land pt

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Just dug up some of the limited-edition vinyl for this pummeling debut from Cali metallers Saviours...
Saviours appeared with a thunderclap on this 3 song EP that features the songs 'Circle Of Servants Bodies', 'Satanic Scriptures', and 'Christhunt', a crushing, detuned riff-fest that includes singer/guitarist Austin Barber, drummer Scott Batiste, and guitarist Mag Delana, all three of which were formerly members of the longrunning Cali hardcore band Yaphet Kotto. Their new incarnation as Saviours brings together the group's combined love of old school 80's metal and proto-thrash, satanic stoner imagery, sludgy Iommi-by-way-of-Matt Pike doomage, and lots of sick twin guitar harmonies. But Barber belts out some great venemous snarls that totally betray the bands hardcore roots, and along with the grungy recording gives Warship a much rougher, filthier vibe than that of many of their contemporaries that are likewise digging up first wave Metal (see Early Man, Priestess, etc) for the new century. Saviours aren't breaking any radical new ground with their hard charging battle metal, but now that Boulder is broken up, Saviours are gonna be my go-to outfit for those times when I just want to rock out to some dirgy, crusty thunder metal.

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Skandinavisk Misantropi is the first actual album from the mutant Swedish blackdoom outfit Skitliv, who had already caught me under their diseased spell with the Amfetamin disc that came out on Cold Spring a while back. That disc was a top-notch assemblage of studio material and live recordings that did a great job of introducing Skitliv's unique, enigmatic brand of misanthropic heaviness, but it really only hinted at how crazed their music was going to fully become.
With this album, though, the band has really developed into something lethal. After listening to Amfetamin again and again, I was expecting to hear more of that fractured, abstracted blackened doom, and while there is plenty of that going on with Skandinavisk, Skitliv have expanded their sound as well, becoming even darker and more ominous and MUCH heavier. Where their earlier material was more of shambling, demented doom metal, here that doomy crawl is infused with even more blackened textures, but more melodic too, with the barbed-wire riffs and scathing vocals of front man Maniac (of Mayhem fame, natch) merging with gloomy minor key melodies and offbeat guitar parts - which come via guitarist Niklas Kvarforth, also of Ondskapt / Manes / Shining , and his distinctive moody style is a huge part of Skitliv's grim, otherworldly sound. The songs can get pretty catchy, especially compared to the stumbling sickliness of their earlier recordings, and often the music dips into an awesome melodic doominess suggestive of a blackened, apocalyptic Anathema or My Dying Bride, with huge Sabbathian riffs uncoiling around the moody, almost gothic melodies. Elsewhere, Skitliv moves through passages of abstract minimal slowcore (like on "Hollow Devotion") and formless black drift laced with spacey electronic effects, washes of lush textural noise and murky minor key melodies, strange overlapping voices murmuring over waves of dreamlike ambience. The album also features a pretty incredible lineup of guest musicians, which includes Attila Csihar (Sunn O))) / Mayhem / Aborym), Andrew Liles (Nurse With Wound / Current 93), Gaahl (Gorgoroth), and David Tibet from Current 93, who again joins Skitliv following his spoken word contributions to Amfetamin, here appearing on an entire track that does sound a lot like Current 93, but obviously much heavier and blacker, his frenzied voice carried over ominous clean guitar strum and shards of piano, dark and apocalyptic, before erupting in a blast of harsh blackened distortion.
The rest of the album continues on a schizophrenic course, fueled by the utterly misanthropic visions of Maniac as the music erupts into squalls of furious black metal buzz and crushing Sab-style doom, then shifts to lurching abstract gloom-pop like hooks and dramatic melodic guitars and strange spacey ambience. It all comes to a head with the thirteen minute closing track "Scumdrug", a massive scorched doom epic formed from strains of delicate piano and somber clean guitar, melancholy minor key figures unfurling beneath monstrous sneering vokills and crushing doomy heaviness rumbling off in the distance, starting off as a swirling blackened waltz but slowly evolving into a nightmarish din of random voices and grinding noise, blasts of distortion and bizarre electronic sounds, similar to the NWW-influenced soundscapes on the Maniac/Liles/Czral disc that I reviewed a few weeks back, ending the album on a hallucinatory note that befits this supremely warped album. Recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : Densetsu
Sample : Slow Pain Coming
Sample : Towards the Shores of Loss (Vulture Face Kain)

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Yes, we can blame a lot of the atrocious dude-rock that's crawled out of the gutter in the past two decades on Soundgarden, who inadvertently inspired a flood of shitty imitators after the release of their 1994 album Superunknown. But Soundgarden's early output is unfuckwithable in my book. These hair farmers from Seattle stood out in stark relief against the backdrop of post-hardcore and indie rock in the later half of the 1980s with their unique combination of Sabbath sludge, druggy psychedelia, subtle shades of hardcore and a heavy 70's rock influence; I remember how completely different they sounded from anything else going on back then the first time that I listened to Louder Than Love. There really wasn't anything else like 'em in the American underground. The formidable voice of frontman Chris Cornell and the heroic, skewed riff-genius of guitarist Kim Thayil propelled the band's sound, and they brought a crushing metallic vibe to the burgeoning alternative rock underground. One of my favorite records from Soundgarden's early days is the 1988 platter Ultramega OK, which I just picked up on vinyl for the C-Blast shop. I didn't think that this was even available anymore on wax, but here it is, the SST record that predated their gradual rise to alt rock fame, still simmering with the trippy, sludgy psych-metal rawness of their pre-major label days. This Lp is a dark, sludgy mass of heaviness, fusing together their Led Zep and Sabbath influences with a Stooges-like swagger and some kickass hardcore punk muscle, filled with trippy psychedelic fuckery, lurching Sabbathoid doom, crunchy guitar rock and Thayil's amazing soloing, the songs swinging from creeping metallic dirge to more rocking numbers (like the lurching crunch of single "Flower") to the howling hardcore of "He Didn't". Theres's a couple of quirky spots, like the "cover" of John Lennon's "One Minute Of Silence" that closes the album, but for the most part Ultramega OK delivers a moody, pounding slab of metallic heaviosity that's still one of my favorite records of the pre-"grunge" Seattle underground.
Track Samples:
Sample : Circle of Power
Sample : Flower
Sample : He Didn't

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Icy, ultra-fast Italian black metal is what Spite Extreme Wing specializes in, and while the band unfortunately split up not long after the release of their 2008 album Vltra, their small but potent catalog of albums delivers some of the finest, most ferocious Italian black metal that I have in my collection. Founding members of the Italian organization B.M.I.A. (Black Metal Invitta Armata) along with Janvs, Tronus Abyss, Hiems and others, Spite Extreme Wing were resolutely focused on blistering, majestic black metal with intelligent, philosophical subject matter, although their topics of interest frequently involved esoteric ideologies that sensitive listeners might want to investigate further before picking up any of their albums. On Non Dvcor, Dvco, the band specifically targets the writings of Italian metaphysician, occultist and philosopher Julius Evola, who was primarily known for his involvement with the Italian Fascist movement prior to Italy's defeat in World War II. Evola's writings are pretty far out, combining themes as diverse as from metaphysics, Tantric sex, Buddhism, Hermeticism, mountain climbing, Taoism, and the Holy Grail, and there's some similarities between Evola's odd ideas and those of the wacko French writer Savitri Devi, who also tried to connect early 20th Century fascism with Hindu/Eastern philosophies.
Musically, though. Spite Extreme Wing is pre ferocity, mixing together blasting, vaguely dissonant black metal and Teutonic thrash influences and some subtle industrial elements into a furious black storm. The album opens with a short intro of pounding martial percussion and ominous orchestral strings, a little like old Der Blutharsch, before ripping into the first song "A Chi L'ignoto?", a blast of blazing militant black metal with AWESOME thrashing riffs and super epic, magnificent hooks, a massive bottom end keeping the music crushing, lots of wicked razorwire tremelo riffing, pummeling double bass, and singer Argento's scorched, pissed off screams, the whole song driven by a fierce Dis-beat momentum. The song "In Su La Vetta" starts off with some moody, proggy synth strings, then shifts into heavy dirgey riffing layered with somber acoustic guitars. Then there's the killer blackthrash of "Il sole di notte e la rivolta", and more Tangerine Dream-esque synths float through "Disperazione - il ciclosi chiude", heralding the songs transformation into pounding black dirge. The songs stretch out into epic lengths, often eight minutes or longer, the songs formed into complex arrangements and filled with dark triumphant melodies, shifting seamlessly from soaring mid-paced majesty to hyperfast blastbeat fury. I'm reminded of Italian black metallers FOrgotten Tomb as well as Marduk, DIssection and Darkthrone, but the sound is distinctly Italian, with that icy, contemplative atmosphere so specific to Italian black metal, and the Italian language makes for some seriously malevolent sounding lyrics. The band also adds some bits of swirling ambient noise and the rumble of munitions fire and somber instrumental interludes into the songs, adding to the sinister, evil feel of Spite Extreme Wing's black metal attack.
Non Dvcor, Dvco is packaged with a thick twenty-two page booklet that is filled with images, lyrics and extensive liner notes written in both Italian and English, giving extensive background on the themes and lyrics of the album.
Track Samples:
Sample : La torre del silenzio
Sample : Non dvcor,dvco

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I never thought that I'd come across new copies of this LP again. We've been sold out of Ride The Blade for years, but apparently one of our suppliers unearthed a small quantity of still-unopened copies of this Lp that I was able to pick up. The catch, however, is that these records all have a very slight amount of discoloration on the upper right hand corner of the jacket, and these corners have been slightly bent. The damage is very minor, but those of you who are picky about having your records in perfectly mint condition will want to think twice before ordering this.
Here's the original blurb that I wrote about Ride The Blade back in 2005:
We're huge fans of Seattle's sadly defunct Teen Cthulhu; their debut full length Ride The Blade is one of the most imaginative albums to appear out of the extreme hardcore scene in the past decade, mixing together elements of symphonic black metal with brutal fastcore, like Infest meets Cradle Of Filth, a grim, mystical assault of sludgy grindcore, arty sludge, and thick thrash augmented with bombastic black metal keyboards, choir chants, and dueling hardcore/black metal-esque vocals. So awesome! Everything about Ride The Blade rules, from their name (one of our fave band names of all time!) and the grim suicide art of their album sleeve, to the weird snippets of electronic noise and minimalist melodic piano that appear...a killer, ridiculously catchy black/grind/fastcore album that we continue to blast triumphantly years after it's release. Recommended!

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It's good to see the older Troum material being reissued, most of the German dronemasters earlier releases were issued in such extremely small runs that most collectors have almost no chance of tracking them down, at least without paying the ridiculously highy prices that Troum and Maeror Tri releases often command on Ebay. The Russian dark ambient label Abgurd has just reissued two of Troum's out-of-print 10" EPs together on a single disc, and the Daur 10" that's included here is actually the first official Troum release, a limited EP that came out back in 1998 on Cohort Records in a limited run of 300 copies. The other 10" featured on this disc is the Ljubimaya EP, which came out in 2003 on the Russian industrial label Waystyx in a run of 455 copies. It's an interesting mixture of Troum's different modes of operation, the earlier material leaning more towards the duo's earlier industrial post-rock , the more recent material heavier and more abstract. The Ljubimaya material opens the disc, starting with the seven-plus minute title track that unfurls in a grey cloud of minor key chordal shift, the guitars warped and processed into massive cathedral structures of shimmering cavernous drone, the feedback manipulated to sound like cascades of cosmic strings, strafed by a simple repeating guitar figure that circles through space. The vibe is grim, almost medieval, and yet delicate sounds can be heard deep below the dark ambient drift, like the nearly imperceptible sounds of birds chirping. "Meerestraum" is darker and more abstract, a mass of black billowing clouds of rumbling overtones, distant clanging of metal echoing through the abyss, an ominous and heavy doomdriftscape in the vein of Lustmord and Yen Pox. And indeed, Yen Pox themselves contribute source material to the track "Distracted Protection"; on this fifteen minute track, Troum forges Yen Pox's black drones into a deep rumbling dronescape, a single massive planetary hum pulsing, heavy, massive, expanding, gradually joined by more layered drones and slow, subtle shifting chords, easily the heaviest piece on the disc, achieving an almost Sunn-like density.
The Daur 10" also featured three tracks, but the sound here is significantly different, and it's pretty obvious that Troum were still working with the same sort of approach that the members used in their previous band Maeror Tri. The first track "Daur" is very Maeror Tri-like, processed guitar notes drifting eerily over rumbling industrial drones and percussion, a sort of synthetic industrial post-rock, the guitar notes seeming to bend and melt in midair, becoming heavier and heavier as the underlying drones build in intensity and volume, turning the music into a nightmarish metallic soundscape. "Venustas" builds lush synth-like layers of sound around layered guitar arpeggios, the piece turning into something akin to a horror movie score with chiming guitars and dense layers of ominous drone, the fragments of guitar melody repeating over and over, the whole song brief but completely gorgeous and immersive, and really reminiscent of a darker Tangerine Dream. Lastly, "Krypte" introduces another low, eerie guitar melody that circles across cloud formations of Tangerine Dream-like synth shimmer and orchestral ambience, the music here much brighter and more majestic compared to the darker and creepier sound of the previous trracks, but it's still burnished in a shadowy twilight glow, an industrial-tinged krautrocky blissout. This is amazing stuff.
Essential for Troum fans, and for anyone into dark, heavy, guitar-centric drone/ambience. Imported from Russia, and limited to just 500 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Daur
Sample : Krypte
Sample : Ljubimaya

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Doomy, proggy, depressive, ornate...all of these describe the music of Universe217, a strange Greek prog-doom band that released this full length in 2007, described by some as sounding like "Swans meets My Dying Bride", an interesting sounding mix to my ears for sure, but that's only part of what's going on with this disc, one of the stranger and more avant-garde albums that has come out on the Dutch Burning World label. The music is slow, heavy, and definitely very doomy sounding, the riffs massive and drenched in morose atmosphere, but also angular and winding, the band taking their dark heaviness into convoluted arrangements that often remind me of French prog rock. And then there's singer Tania, whose dramatic vocal style is really reminiscent of both Jarboe from Swans and Julie Christmas from Battle Of Mice/Made Out Of Babies; her singing gives the unique proggy doom metal an operatic touch. Not all of the album is slow and atmospheric; there's a couple of songs where the band kicks into a slightly higher gear and belt out some angular mid-tempo rock, or slips into mysterious jazzy atmospherics.
The first song is all slow, creeping doom, a tripped out funeral dirge with strange gurgling vocals and wailing operatic singing, all layered together as the song shifts into a long stretch of spacey ambience and muted muted acoustic guitars and glacial drums, moving through sprawls of murky black psychedelia into grim, ornate prog-doom, at times reminding me of a funeral doom band fronted by Diamanda Galas, Tania's rich, soulful voice transforming into ferocious screams at the drop of a hat. The following song is groovier, but just as dark, pulsating bass and psychedelic delayed vocals and jagged riffing, the proggy lurch suddenly erupting into a midpaced rocker that feels like an old darkwave post-punk jam, throbbing, propulsive, and seriously rocking before it ends up returning to slower metallic doom and lumbering angular heaviness, a kind of weird mathy gloom-rock.
The remainder of the album travels through more of those angular, proggy doom riffs, massive symphonic guitars and majestic doom metal, the layered sound becoming virtually orchestral at times; at others, Universe217 eases into slow swirling crawls through shadowy lounge music on "Swallow", a creeping abyssal torche song, and the dark nocturnal noir jazziness of "Harmless". The song "Nobody's Sincere" is another slab of exotic, jazz-flecked grimness, it's lush sonic textures formed from chiming mandolin-like drones, hand percussion, piano and accordians along with the dirgey drumming and undercurrent of lurching heaviness, resembling a jazzier, doomier Swans; and closer "I Dont Give A Damn" starts off with mesmeric Middle Eastern drones and swirling percussion before surging into crushing monstrous doom.
Packaged in a nice matte gatefold jacket with a full color booklet.
Track Samples:
Sample : Harmless
Sample : In Your Head
Sample : Swallow

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Prior to picking up this disc from one of my Russian suppliers, the only exposure that I've had to the music of Anton Sheforostov was through his other dark ambient project Closing The Eternity, who released an excellent disc of immense nocturnal dronescapes on Epidemie earlier this year. That project focused more on deep subterranean ambience with an obvious Lustmord influence, but his other solo project Velehentor moves through even blacker oceans of sound, with an intensely bleak and nightmarish aesthetic that probably owes more to the time that Sheforostov has spent playing in Russian black metal bands like Valhalla and Nuclear Winter (where he played under the more mysterious monikers of Satt and 121). Velehentor has been around since the late 90's, but From The Gloom Of Graves is the first disc from this project that I've been able to track down; most of their releases are pretty tough to find, released on tiny Russian labels in limited editions. It's terrific black industrial ambience, though, and anyone into the sort of fusion of bleak 80's industrial and ultra-grim ambience that's been explored by the likes of Cisfinitum, Luasa Raelon, Reutoff, Endura and Northaunt will probably love this.
Every track is a wash of pitch-black drone and crawling dread, vast Lustmord-esque drift and suffocating waves of doom-ridden atmosphere, with several of the tracks featuring heavy percussion that either appears as rigid formations of martial drumming, or the slow and hypnotic pounding of tribal drums. Lots of murky, muted synthesizers show up, too; much of this stuff has ominous, arpeggiated synth riffs that remind me of older Tangerine Dream, which is always cool to hear, but there's also lots of strange electronic sounds whose sources are harder to identify, odd buzzing drones and strange insectile purring that creeps out of the shadows that creep along the edges of these grim, echoing soundscapes. Calling this album a downer is an understatement; every movement that Velehentor makes is steeped in utter negation and blackness, each track a new expanse of negative coldness, the almost dreamy texture of the Tangerine Dream-like synths ultimately frozen by the icy industrial blackness. The somber spoken word passages that show up throughout the album add a mysterious ritual-like element, a deep male voice layered in delay, the words drifting off to decay in the void, surrounded by delicate strains of piano and funereal synth and swirling blizzards of soft white noise, these cloudy masses of black drift pierced by rare strains of dissonant guitar or booming, dubbed-out snares. This album virtually begs to be heard in a room with all of the lights off, or better yet, in a cave or crypt, uninterrupted by light or sound. I love the packaging for From The Gloom Of Graves, too; a pure black digipack with shiny black varnish printing, perfect mysterious look for the grim ambient psychic terrain explored inside. Limited edition of 460 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ptomaine Trance: Undead Ones Of The Gloom
Sample : Stonewells Of Aeternity
Sample : The Bell: Rutual Of Dethronement

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Now available on cd from the Polish metal label Selfmadegod!
Out of the bazillion neo-thrash bands that have sprout up like weeds in recent years, only a handful really stand out; it's easy enough to strap on the white Nike high-tops, pull out the sleeveless denim vest and rip off every Exodus and Vio-lence riff that you can find the tabs for, but back during the heyday of thrash metal in the 80's, my favorite bands were the ones who didn't sound like every other Bay Area speed unit; the ones who, through their own unique quirks or warped vision, sounded pretty unique. The operatic histrionics of Hirax, Voivod's otherwordly sci-fi thrash, the brutal industrial-tinged crossover of early Prong, Mordred's wonky funkiness, and the crazy prog-thrash of bands like Mekong Delta, Blind Illusion, Coroner, Sadus, and the fusion-y insanity of late-era Defiance all rocked my world, and still do. It's a bummer that I'm not hearing more bands from the recent thrash resurgence taking a more idiosyncratic approach, which is why I've been digging Voetsek so much lately. It took me fucking forever to finally hear these co-ed thrashers, but I instantly fell in love with Voetsek's insane chipmunk thrash after picking up their latest album Infernal Command. Holy shit, does this band smoke! Basically, Voetsek play a combination of crossover thrash and classic Cali thrash metal that they dismantle into it's core components and compress into ultra-short blasts that usually top out at about a minute. The riffs go from ripping speedpunk to chunky palm-muted thrash in the blink of an eye, and everything sounds like it's been sped up double-time. What propels Voetsek's ultrathrash into new realms of insanity is singer Ami Lawless, whose impossibly high-pitched scream makes her sound like a cartoon animal getting its trachea ripped out; her screeching delivery will no doubt turn off thrash purists, but I think it's an integral part of what makes these cats sound so nuts. Plus, the band has an undeniable feminist streak that totally sets 'em apart from the rest of the thrash scene, just look at their album titles (The Castrator Album? Yikes!) and silly song titles ("Tampons Should Be Free", "Ode To Porno Grind Boys", and a tribute to the early 20th century womens rights activist Alice Paul - hardly your typical thrash topics), but it's all filtered through their goofy sense of humor, no heavy handed social commentary here. Voetsek are definitely doing something different.
2008's Infernal Command is Voetsek's most vicious record so far, and it has not only the best production of any of their releases, but also the tightest performance, with the rapid-fire thrash metal riffing and brain-melting virtuoso shredding now at the fore of their blistering, punky thrash. There are only seventeen songs this time, and they're a little longer too, with some reaching two minutes or more, making them epics by Voetsek standards. As before, their sound is equal parts Bay Area thrash metal (think Exodus, Death Angel, Vio-lence) and Cali powerviolence (Capitalist Casualties), but the they're now letting the riffs breathe more, launching into longer jams with more mid-paced thrash heaviness without sacrificing any of their insane energy, and it just makes these songs that much catchier. The sound is clearly much more metal with crazy Yngwie-style shred splattered all over the place, and there's even some very subtle black metal stylings that creep through on a couple of tracks, but their cutting humor hasn't been diluted a bit, as seen in songs like "Mucho Macho", "Self-Righteous Fuckdom", and "W.W.L.D. (What Would Lemmy Do?)"). And again, the chipmunk-on-meth chattering vocals of frontlady Ami Lawless hold court over Veotsek's maniacal thrash, going from deep death metal grunts and racing upwards to those batshit-crazy high-pitched cartoon screams. Awesome. Couple of odd moments too, like the robotic vocoder vocals that show briefly early in the album, and the inexplicable cover of Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" reworked into a furious speed-metal anthem that closes the album. Like I've mentioned in my overviews of the earlier Voetsek albums, Ami's vocals and irreverent approach to 80's thrash will probably turn off some of the stauncher purists, but for the rest of you who dig your thrash fast and freaked-out, you must hear this! Awesome album art from Andrei Bouzikov (Municipal Waste, Cannabis Corpse) too, who does an eerie Repka-like piece for the cover.
Track Samples:
Sample : Blueprint for the Perfect Circle Pit
Sample : Dismember Mama
Sample : Family Ties
Sample : Strange Fruit

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