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Portland's Deathcharge started off as another in a long line of Discharge-worshipping crust bands, but over the past couple of years the band had begun to reveal another obsession, a lust for the darkest strain of 80's death rock and UK goth that first started to infect their music in earnest on their 2005 Ep The Hangman / New Dark Age . That two song 7" didn't sound like anybody else at the time that it came out, with a terminally dark, driving sound that slowed down their bulldozing crust to a more rocking tempo, coloring the crushing hardcore with a brooding goth rock vibe that was especially apparent in the singer's newfound baritone croon reminiscent of Sisters Of Mercy's Andrew Eldritch. It would be another six years before Deathcharge would follow that 7" up with a new release, their first full length Lp in fact, which came out on Unseen Forces a few months ago. That Lp sold out almost immediately and it's taken a couple of months for a repress to appear, but now we've got this amazing album of grim, goth-influenced crust in stock and it's been dominating my stereo all month, with a pretty good shot at being in my top five favorite records of '11.
At it's filthy black heart, Deathcharge's sound is rooted in the sort of grimy Discharge/Motorhead metalpunk that I never get tired of listening to, with crushing D-beat drumming driving the vicious punk riffs and dystopian atmosphere. That's exactly what you get when the first song kicks in, a dirty, rocking blast of crusty hardcore, but then the vocals come in, and if you hadn't heard the Hangman 7", it's a surprise - a moaning, affected death rock croon that throughout the album reminds me of a strange mix of Andrew Eldritch, hardcore howl, and Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs (the latter especially on the very last song) that sounds incredibly cool and distinctive against the raging hardcore. The second song has a little more of a classic death rock vibe, with tribal drums and effects-heavy guitar and spiky, serpentine bass, and when the band kicks into the rocking verse, the guitar leads have this killer menacing sound that reminds me of Rikk Agnew's playing on Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain. There are also interesting dark ambient passages of rumbling Lustmordian drift and ominous voices that are used to segue into more of the dark metallic punk. Flipping over to side two, we're hit with what has become my favorite song on the album (which is untitled, as are all of the songs on the Lp), a ripping deathrock/crust anthem with those moaning vocals and some of the album's catchiest melodies, here more than ever sounding like a fusion of early Sisters Of Mercy and dark crust punk. That's followed by another blast of ferocious hardcore, with swooping flanging effects all over the lead guitar that also throws off some killer bluesy metal shredding, and the last couple of songs are a mix of all of this, some more fist-pumping mid tempo punk aggression, speedy crusty thrash, brief pitch-black drones that bring us to the stirring heavy death rock of the final song.
Deathcharge manages to bring these sounds together in a way that doesn't come off as pastiche to me, but also hits all my buttons with it's fusion of catchy rocking gloom and hardcore power. It's one of the most interesting hardcore punk albums that I've heard all year, and I don't see my self taking this off of the turntable anytime soon...
Track Samples:
Sample : Unknown Title
Sample : Unknown Title
Sample : Unknown Title
Sample : Unknown Title

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It hasn't been easy for collectors and fans of the cult Italian anarcho/experimental hardcore band Contropotere to find their releases, most of them having gone out of print yeras ago. I was excited to find out that their 1989 album Nessuna Speranza Nessuna Paura had been reissued recently on the Italian label Gonna Puke Retro, though, and went after it as soon as I could get a hold of the label. Contropotere were never very well known over here in the US, but their combination of anarcho-punk, thrash metal, industrial music, and psychedelia was pretty unique when they started out in the late 80s, foreshadowing the kind of experimentation that would become a lot more commonplace in the following decade with bands like Neurosis, PESD, Nàda and Galloping Coroners.
Back when this Lp first came out, Contropotere would get these comparisons to Amebix, mainly because of their connection to the squatter punk culture and their use of synthesizers I suppose, which were still a rarity in crust/hardcore circles at the time. They didn't really sound anything like Amebix though, the music on Nessuna Speranza is so much weirder and more experimental, the lyrics screamed/sung in Italian, the whole album cloaked in this really reverb-heavy production, and the band weaves through a myriad of sounds and styles here in a manner that didn't resemble anything else in hardcore punk at the time. The opening track "Urizen" begins with clanking chains and metallic percussion while a female voice slowly chants over it, an ominous, occult vibe permeating the sound. Then the band goes into the actual song, a gloomy, goth-tinged form of Italian hardcore punk that's fast and ferocious, with angry male and female vocals, breaking down into some rocking mid-tempo parts laced with awesome speed metal style guitar solos, and then ends with the sound of random voices and percussion. Then there's the nine minute "Inquisitor" where they start off all Sabbathy and doom laden, a slow creeping hardcore dirge overlaid with witchy screams and growled male vocals, but then later launches into another fast hardcore assault with weird effects, more chanting voices, and some somewhat complex bass playing that leads this into an unexpected psych-rock freak-out where they drop into a long stretch of tribal drumming. The thrash picks back up from there, and leads into "Demoni E Dei"'s strange mix of flamenco guitar, folky violin and psychedelic delay effects and tape noise that are mixed in with samples of tribal shaman and a heavy, dirgey riff before blasting off yet again into more thrashpunk. The album keeps shifting from the thrash into rumbling industrial noise, odd metallic dirges, and chanting vocals, bringing us to the second side where things get even more "out".
This second half starts with the operatic prog-crust of "Disumana Res" where swirling guitars and keyboards meet those dramatic female vocals, thunderous double bass drumming and dark doom-laden guitars, moving into some lurching thrash that later on gives way to a solo piano piece that ends the song. "Non Indietreggiare" is another epic track that starts with a kind of baroque prog-folk played on accordion, piano, and strings, but builds into grinding metallic crust that closes with a quick flurry of classical piano, and the closing title track has eerie chimes ringing out as effects-heavy guitars and processed vocals swoop in, the slow pounding drums taking this into an abstract noisy jam where spoken word vocals rise over the atonal scrape of guitar strings, plodding bass, and pounding Neubaten-esque industrial percussion that transforms into a pummeling Swans-like dirge.
Released in a limited edition of seven hundred and fifty copies, and includes a fold-out poster/lyric sheet. Please note - all of the copies that I received from the label arrived here with slightly dinged corners and some minor corner creases. Nothing too serious, but please be aware of this if you're really particular about this sort of thing
Track Samples:
Sample : Inquisitor
Sample : Nessuna Speranza, Nessuna Paura
Sample : Rovine

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Once again, back in stock on both Cd and Lp, with the vinyl edition packaged in a glossy black gatefold package.
Cough's 2008 debut Sigillum Luciferi continues to be one of the most popular doom metal albums that we have here at C-Blast, a constant seller three years after it's release. Of course, the band has gained quite a bit more visibility now that they are on Relapse and have released the acclaimed sophomore effort Ritual Abuse, but there's no denying the crushing power of their first album, which remains one of the best slo-mo metal debuts of the past decade. On Sigillum, this Richmond, VA band does not reinvent the wheel, but they do effectively take control of the psychedelic blackened doom sound, becoming masters of the slow build in the process. The album opener "Killing Fields" is a prime example of this; the song takes several minutes to build from a simple drum plod and droning high end feedback before the band finally lurches forward into the syrupy doom-groove, and when it kicks in the effect is stunning, erupting like black lava into the lumbering slow motion sludge metal crush of gluey Sabbathoid riffs, which rumble through a cavernous ambience that casts so much darkness on Cough's doom metal. The band's vocals pair together a clean, drawn out punk snarl with high pitched blackened shrieks, and this adds a constant threat of violence to the music, bolstered by the torpor inducing riffs that draw from the obvious influences (Eyehategod, Buzzoven, Weedeater, that whole school of swampy blooze metal), but they also inject a heavily narcotized, black hole psych vibe that draws from the 70's acid horror of Electric Wizard, lacing the songs with lysergic rock solos, howling Theremins and Hawkwind-style synth whoosh.
The first half of "Hole In The Infinte" is all hideous, snarling sludge, blackened shrieks and massive billowing reverb over crushing magma riffs, but then drops the vocals for the latter half and sinks into a brain-glazing morass of space rock fx and monstrous black riff that slowly winds down into entropy; that is followed by "288 Years Of Sin", pure Eyehategod worship with sickly feedback infecting a crushing head nodding riff-trance. The song "Northern Plague" opens with a pro-suicide sample before dropping a saurian bass line and spacious drum trudge into a pit of horrific shrieks and snarled feedback, turning into a swingin', blackened swamp groove, followed by the dismal dirge and soaring despair-heavy vocals of "Shallow Grave", and the closing tectonic power-mantra "Lyssavirus" that ends the album with nine minutes of skullcrush.
Track Samples:
Sample : Killing Fields
Sample : Northern Plague

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Once again, back in stock on both Cd and Lp, with the vinyl edition packaged in a glossy black gatefold package.
Cough's 2008 debut Sigillum Luciferi continues to be one of the most popular doom metal albums that we have here at C-Blast, a constant seller three years after it's release. Of course, the band has gained quite a bit more visibility now that they are on Relapse and have released the acclaimed sophomore effort Ritual Abuse, but there's no denying the crushing power of their first album, which remains one of the best slo-mo metal debuts of the past decade. On Sigillum, this Richmond, VA band does not reinvent the wheel, but they do effectively take control of the psychedelic blackened doom sound, becoming masters of the slow build in the process. The album opener "Killing Fields" is a prime example of this; the song takes several minutes to build from a simple drum plod and droning high end feedback before the band finally lurches forward into the syrupy doom-groove, and when it kicks in the effect is stunning, erupting like black lava into the lumbering slow motion sludge metal crush of gluey Sabbathoid riffs, which rumble through a cavernous ambience that casts so much darkness on Cough's doom metal. The band's vocals pair together a clean, drawn out punk snarl with high pitched blackened shrieks, and this adds a constant threat of violence to the music, bolstered by the torpor inducing riffs that draw from the obvious influences (Eyehategod, Buzzoven, Weedeater, that whole school of swampy blooze metal), but they also inject a heavily narcotized, black hole psych vibe that draws from the 70's acid horror of Electric Wizard, lacing the songs with lysergic rock solos, howling Theremins and Hawkwind-style synth whoosh.
The first half of "Hole In The Infinte" is all hideous, snarling sludge, blackened shrieks and massive billowing reverb over crushing magma riffs, but then drops the vocals for the latter half and sinks into a brain-glazing morass of space rock fx and monstrous black riff that slowly winds down into entropy; that is followed by "288 Years Of Sin", pure Eyehategod worship with sickly feedback infecting a crushing head nodding riff-trance. The song "Northern Plague" opens with a pro-suicide sample before dropping a saurian bass line and spacious drum trudge into a pit of horrific shrieks and snarled feedback, turning into a swingin', blackened swamp groove, followed by the dismal dirge and soaring despair-heavy vocals of "Shallow Grave", and the closing tectonic power-mantra "Lyssavirus" that ends the album with nine minutes of skullcrush.
Track Samples:
Sample : Killing Fields
Sample : Northern Plague

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For the longest time, Edge Of Sanity's releases on Black Mark have been impossible for me to track down, but at long last they've become available through one of our suppliers and I'm finally able to carry what are some of the coolest, weirdest death metal records to ever come out of Sweden. The only thing is, is that they are somewhat pricey, and for some reason the Until Eternity Ends Ep costs just as much as the full length albums, even though it only has four songs. That aside, if you're a fan of visionary multi-instrumentalist/producer Dan Swano and his progressive, genre-defying death metal band Edge Of Sanity, you'll want to grab any and all of these fantastic discs.
Released in 1994 in between their melodic death metal classic The Spectral Sorrows and the innovative prog-death album Purgatory Afterglow, Until Eternity Ends was a stop-gap release that effectively bridges the divide between those two full-lengths. The first three songs on the Ep fall within the rocking, mostly mid-paced melodic death metal of Spectral; opener "Until Eternity Ends" is supreme melodic Swedish death, rocking and anthemic with killer riffs and a crushing guitar tone, but when the vocals come in, it's something very different, a kind of doomy goth metal, Swano singing in a deep distorted croon that sounds sort of like Peter Steele from Type O Negative. The death n' roll of "Eternal Eclipse" slips into moody vocal harmonies and another melodic chorus, and "Bleed" teases with a rocking intro before it launches into total thrash metal with a massive groovy breakdown for the chorus.
All three are fierce, catchy doses of EOS's brand of Swedish death, but they save the Ep's most memorable song for last with a cover of The Police's "Invisible Sun", which is surprisingly true to the original save for the addition of the heavy metallic guitars, Swano singing in a rich crooning voice, transforming this into haunting, metallic goth.
Track Samples:
Sample : Eternal Eclipse
Sample : Invisible Sun
Sample : Until Eternity Ends

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Here's another reissue disc from The Fortieth Day, the grim industrial side project from Bloodyminded members Mark Solotroff and Isidro Reyes. I've been slowly making my way through the collection of Fortieth Day discs that Solotroff has been releasing on his Bloodlust! label, because as much as I dig the high-frequency terror of Bloodyminded, I find myself coming back to the intense blackened industrial dronescapes of this project much more often.
Pelusium 540 AD, the title a reference to the first recorded outbreak of Black Plague, was released on cassette in 2007 on the Australian label Cipher Productions, and appears here remastered on disc for the first time. Like most of the other Fortieth Day releases, it's made up of two half hour tracks of monstrously heavy and relentlessly bleak machine dronesludge that the duo create using drum machines, bass, synth and guitar, with thick, oceanic waves of black bass rumble and roiling low-frequency smog seething underneath a constantly shifting surface of looped mechanical noises, droning feedback, swells of eerie melodic drift, scraping rhythms, smears of corroded chug run backwards. The first track is massive, monstrous, a dense and hypnotic blast of tectonic machinedirge, while the second is more abstract, a storm of jet-engine drones and howling feedback. A factory-din filled with sparse percussive cracks and random banging and repetitive rattling, the first eight minutes a rumbling, droning wall of low end noise, but then hints of melody start to surface, streaks of feedback and electronics bending into pretty little fragments of melodic sound that flit over the oppressive murk. It's a bleak, apocalyptic noisescape way out on the heavier end of the spectrum, with a heavy undercurrent of bonerattling bassdrone and amp-filth that makes this of interest to fans of the sort of industrial anti-rock that you might have heard on HeadDirt back in the early 90s.
Track Samples:
Sample : I
Sample : II

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One of the most recent C-Blast new arrivals lists, I reviewed a 7" that we got in stock from an upstate New York band called Gas Chamber, which impressed me with it's mix of blazing power violence tainted hardcore and quirky, skilled bass playing. Well, now we've got the debut full length from the band, and it's just as cool as that Ep was, once again with a burly, ferocious blastcore sound that draws from the combined influence of bands like Siege, Crossed Out and Infest, as well as the spasmodic hardcore of early Die Kreuzen and United Mutation, injecting their own noisy wildness into the mix. The album spins a series of tales of familial murder and apocalyptic visions as "Price For Greatness" opens with Lp with some crackling, abrasive electronic noise before launching into the speedy chorus-heavy thrash. The spastic heavy hardcore is shot up with jangly, effects-soaked guitars blasts of crazed speed and manic snarling vocals, and later heads into some slower noisy dirge and a few powerviolence-inspired blasts of total chaos. And again, the bassist really stands out in the mix, playing these weird but very cool jazzy runs and angular bass parts that at one point actually had me envisioning some bizarro meeting between Jaco Pastorius and Mike Watt from the Minutemen against a brutal hardcore backdrop. With those killer quirky bass parts adding a manic, technical edge to the songs, that first side of this record is a goddamn rampage. Over on the b-side, things get a little weirder; they start back up with another hardcore blast with the twitchy, Void-esque brutality of "The Nineteenth Hole", but after driving spikes into your skull for a minute with that song, Gas Chamber suddenly drops into the scraping post-industrial noise barrage "Experiment On Direction" that builds into an explosion of blistering thrash. There's some trippy noise experimentation that pops up on "Last Of The Dogs", and the record closes with the oddball psychedelic HC of "Drug Induced Coma" and it's moody death rock bass intro and ramshackle thrash. And throughout all of this, the songs sink their hooks into you, delivering an offbeat but vicious hardcore album that's really moved these guys to the top of the hardcore heap. Recommended!

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Here's the second cassette of pitch-black industrial ambience on Cathartic Process from DM Turner's mysterious outfit The Teratologist. It manages to surpass the suffocating abysmal terror of the first as it ventures further into pure dark ambient territory previously mapped out by the likes of Jarl, Lustmord, and Lull, while continuing to utilize heavy metallic textures that create a more synthetic, abrasive experience that is made all the more fearsome with the introduction of some monstrous time-stretched chanting.
The first side begins with deep, massive choral like drones and the sounds of metal bending and reverberating deep within a lightless abyss; chant-like ululations echo far down below, while slow moving sheets of Lustmordian darkness drift and rumble, and orchestral string-like drones are stretched far across the yawning void. Terrifying metallic screeches echo through the dark, later transforming into soft shimmering tones and clouds of prayer bowl whirr. The second half travels through a more abrasive din of factory sounds, sheets of metal hammered in the distance, power tools and jackhammers grinding against iron blocks, all orchestrated into an ominous symphony of industrial noise, eventually moving into pure rumbling mechanical drones and deep, bone rattling subterranean ambience and metallic buzz...

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Torus is another musical project from Adam MacGregor, who has played in a bunch of Pittsburgh extreme music outfits like Brown Angel, Microwaves, Conelrad and Creation Is Crucifixion. He's working solo with Torus, though, and it's a much different sound that he's created on this cassette tape from Dynamo Sound; blending together deformed bass guitar, broken-down rhythms and decomposing electronics, Torus produces a heavier take on the primitive industrial of SPK and Throbbing Gristle, and is comparable to some of Wolf Eyes more grinding material.
Imprecation 2 begins with the relentless pounding plod of a drum machine splattered with spastic electronic noise, and proceeds to pile on squealing feedback and garbled digital slop, smears of crackle and hiss and distorted blurt oozing from damaged synthesizers, blasts of bass-heavy whir and machine grind with these really strange sounding robotic vocal mutterings. It's bleak and heavy and relentless, a fractured dirge formed from the sound of factory machinery slowly degrading and crumbling around a monotonous black pulse.
On the other side, a slower bass pulse begins to rumble underneath looped distorted vocals, rhythmic blocks of static and high frequency electronics, and bat-like shrieks flutter against bursts of extreme high-frequency sine-wave abuse, all set against a backdrop of constant crackling static and heavily distorted synth rumble. After awhile, the track reconfigures itself into a pounding machine groove, a hissing pneumatic throb from a distorted kick drum pushing through streaks of feedback, squealing tape noise and other electronic detritus that forms into a cloud of swarming sound, later introducing a heavy bass guitar chord that lumbers through the increasingly violent and turbulent electronics.

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Just dug up this older disc on Turgid Animal from the one-man Norwegian band Utarm, who you may have heard on the split cassette with Sadness Saturn that was recently released on Handmade Birds. Not sure why more people aren't fawning over Utarm, as their imperial industrial blackness is pretty fucking fantastic. On Minus The Divine, the band (a guy named Sindre Foss Skancke, to be precise) comes off like a cross between a more blackened Goslings and Gnaw Their Tongues, or an unholy fusion of Swans and Abruptum, bringing together industrial clank and black orchestral crush, blasts of distorted doombliss and blackened riffage.
Opener "The Greatest Lie" begins with minimal swells of deep ghostchant and woodwinds for a minute, then explodes into a wall of droning, super-distorted guitar crush, the sound processed and driven to the point where it sounds like horns being blasted through a massive sound system, a majestic wall of crumbling distorted sound with swells of symphonic strings surging around it, whooshing electronics, strange hushed voices and tortured wailing, abrasive industrial scrape and clank all whirling around this sinister blasting cacophony. As it grows in intensity, the din is joined by more industrial percussion, huge echo-laden snare hits that have a stern martial feel, for a moment resembling something from Swans being bathed in radioactive noise, surrounded by creaking clanking slithering sounds, with hellish howls of pain echoing through the droning orchestral horror. Towards the end, it suddenly changes into massive buzzing blown-out doom that's obscured by a blizzard of blackened shrieks and noisy electronic glitchery, turning into a blackdoom version of Nadja streaked in evil and filth and misery.
There's a short interlude that follows, more anguished shrieking rising over some out-of-tune minor key guitar, minimal piano and electronic tones, and then comes the sprawling thirteen minute title track, a crushing dirge riff riding on waves of ultra-distorted drone and speaker blowing buzz, again reminding me of both Goslings and Nadja with all of the crumbling distorted melody and extreme low-end crunch, but there's nothing pretty here. This minor key doom riff drifts through a black fog, sometimes dropping out except for a single guitar drone that will suddenly rush to the foreground before being subsumed back into the crawling ambient black dirge. It does get more melodic and ethereal as it goes on, but halfway through the song abruptly changes into a throbbing, blackened industrial sewer of demonic vocal utterances, blasts of thunderous bass, abstract guitar creep and insanely blown-out keyboards, like some epic ambient black industrial soundtrack. The remainder of the album goes from more blackened noisy sludge into choruses of damned souls screaming beneath majestic riffage, and finally ends with this long, spacious track of industrial noise and sparse piano over a skeletal drumbeat, a stripped-down blackened slow core stained with the sound of hushed demonic whispers and gusts of graveyard air.
Limited to 300 copies.
Track Samples:
Sample : Flesh And Flames
Sample : The Greatest Lie

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Another older release that I stumbled on from Six Weeks, this'll be of interest for fans of the weirder fringes of European hardcore. Over here in the US, Valse Triste have remained an obscurity outside of a small circle of weirdo hardcore fans, despite having been active in the Finnish punk scene for over twenty years. Their stuff is fucking great though, a mix of brutal Finnish hardcore and quirky songwriting and musicianship that doesn't sound like any other single band that I can think of. Influenced by both classic Finn HC like Terveet Kadet and Bastards and early US hardcore along with Discharge and the artier, noisier stuff on SST, Valse Triste blend together catchy, crusty pogo punk, ultra distorted thrash with that vicious chainsaw attack that's unique to Finnish HC, and the use of two bassists who add some heavy duty low-end oomph to their sound and leap around with some cool Minutemen/NoMeansNo acrobatics. The band also employed two vocalists, one with a deeper snarling delivery and the other belting out a snotty shouting vocal style. Combine all of that with their surreal lyrics, the weird song arrangements, and oddball songs like "Onnettomat Oliot" where they evoke this bizarre psychedelic version of Oi! punk, and you get one of the most unique sounding hardcore bands to come out of the Finnish underground. Kompilaatio is, as the name suggests, a collection of Valse Triste's first six 7"s, all long out of print, including the Sietämisen Olematon Keveys, Hyvästi Nielurisat , Varokaa Kuulaa!, and Pala Palalta Eps, their track from the Alternative Action comp, the self-titled 7", their side of the split with Z, and four unreleased demo songs. The further along you go into the disc, the music becomes more quirky and twisted as the band brings in warped carnival music samples, noisy dissonant riffs, bits of dark post-punk, industrial samples and Finnish children's songs, with two of the strangest being the synth-laden robotic punk of "Don't Touch That Frog" and the pummeling post-punk dirge "Luut" off of the Pala Palalta 7". It's great to have all of this rare early material collected here, showcasing their roots in anthemic buzzsaw thrash and their evolution into a catchier, more experimental sound.
Track Samples:
Sample : Don't Touch That Frog
Sample : Kaksi Suuntaa

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Two sides of Canadian grind and powerviolence, including some new material from the mighty Wadge...
Wadge's side has more of this one-man band's warped grindmetal, though here it's less influenced by old-school grindcore and more by extreme thrash. A drum machine is again used for the rapid-fire blast beats and furious speedbursts, but the riffing is straight thrash, both songs "Sir Gimply Biscuits Of Gibletshire III" and "Topsy's Curse" serving up some violent cyborg mayhem at top speed. Before it's all over, Wadge throws out a blistering cover of "Maim To Please" from legendary Canuck crossover rippers Slaughter.
On the other hand, you get some incendiary Infest-worship with Soil Of Ignorace, tearing through six songs of brutal blastcore that blends together vicious death metal vocals and down tuned D-beat mayhem with spastic, angular blasts of supersonic power violence. Nothing wimpy here, the massively distorted bass propelling the band into some almost noisecore levels of oblivion. Fuck it, the second half of this side really does veer into noisecore territory, blasting into formless tornado assaults of deformed guitar racket and blurred drumming in it’s last writhing moments. Brutal.

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

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