Of all of the Czech grindcore bands that I've been listening to over the past decade, the most well known would probably be !T.O.O.H.! , also known as Total Obliteration Of Humanity. These weirdos released an album years ago called Pod Vladou Bice that was an instant hit around here, a brutally heavy, seriously tweaked grindcore album that stood out from the rest of the Czech grind scene with their skilled chops, complex songwriting and a tendency to throw a bunch of different styles (psych, jazz, pop punk, etc) into their vicious techgrind blender. That album (released on the obscure but very cool mutoid-grind label Plazzma) managed to reach a decent amount of ears outside of the Czech underground, and in 2005 the band reached a wider audience with the release of their album Order And Punishment on the short-lived Earache subsidiary Elitist, where they were labelmates with fellow metal mutants Ephel Duath. Heavier and less zany than their previous disc, this album nevertheless pushed T.O.O.H.'s zonked deathgrind into further realms of progginess, infusing the chunky, complex heaviness with trace elements of jazz fusion and neo-classical melody, and topping it all off with their nutty shrieking vocals that have always kind of reminded me of Macabre. The songs on this album are subversively catchy for a deathgrind band, and by all rights this should have been a huge hit in the extreme metal scene. Which it probably would have become, if it hadn't been for the acrimonious split between Elitist and Earache a mere few months after it was released, which effectively buried the album. This definitely needs to be heard by anyone into wonky, tech-head deathgrind though. Imagine early Athiest on whippits and a serious Zappa obsession, and loaded with insane fusiony soloing, jazzy basslines, n' spastic crunchy death metal riffage. I love Czech grind almost across the board - anytime I hear a death/grind band from this corner of Europe, it sounds like they are out of their minds - but T.O.O.H. were probably the most coherent and skilled band to come out of this scene so far. Recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : Abu-Hassan
Sample : Analyza Zahnedy (Analysis of the Shitstain)
Sample : Konec Kontinentalniho Kontejneru (Conclusion of the Continental ...)

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10LEC6 (pronounced "dis-lec-six") and their nocturnal Parisian disco punk first surfaced on a self-released 7" in 2005, which has been re-released on disc and 12" by Troubleman. Formed by a couple of French art school kids infatuated with post-punk and hardcore and the original drummer of Daft Punk, 10LEC6 use wiry bass guitar lines, martial drums, found sounds, and percussion to create their jumpy, hyper dance punk jams. I really dug the variety of percussive instruments used here, congos, bongos, shakers and more all rattling away, and the tribal rhythms that these instruments create sort of makes the band sound like a mutation of 1979 art punk a la Crass and Slits and anarchos DIRT mixed with Bow Wow Wow's bouncy new wave and shot through with brief blasts of primitive hardcore thrash. Plus, singer Emi's killer lead vocals eerily recall Eve Libertine of Crass, further turning this EP into a weird timewarp. Join Us! sports some fuckin' creepy artwork that recreates the original 7" layout. This CD re-issue is released as a limited edition of 1,000 copies.

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Join Us! IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

The 12" vinyl version of Parisian dance-punkers debut EP.
10LEC6 (pronounced "dis-lec-six") and their nocturnal Parisian disco punk first surfaced on a self-released 7" in 2005, which has been re-released on disc and 12" by Troubleman. Formed by a couple of French art school kids infatuated with post-punk and hardcore and the original drummer of Daft Punk, 10LEC6 use wiry bass guitar lines, martial drums, found sounds, and percussion to create their jumpy, hyper dance punk jams. I really dug the variety of percussive instruments used here, congos, bongos, shakers and more all rattling away, and the tribal rhythms that these instruments create sort of makes the band sound like a mutation of 1979 art punk a la Crass and Slits and anarchos DIRT mixed with Bow Wow Wow's bouncy new wave and shot through with brief blasts of primitive hardcore thrash. Plus, singer Emi's killer lead vocals eerily recall Eve Libertine of Crass, further turning this EP into a weird timewarp. Join Us! sports some fuckin' creepy artwork that recreates the original 7" layout. This CD re-issue is released as a limited edition of 1,000 copies.

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The Spanish Hardcore scene hasn't exactly been known for ferocious extreme HC outfits; in the late 90's, there was All Ill, an obscure outfit that released one hell of a neck-snapping album that injected a ton of meth energy into an in-the-red, Infest style blast whiteout. And then there was 12 Audillos, whose OTT thrash/blast/noise is some of the most pulverizing post-powerviolence ever. The band's sole CD release, issued here in the States via respected thrashcore imprint Six Weeks, crashes over you with a mega-crushing, cyclonic blastcore storm of ultra distorted whiteout riffs played at 1,000 miles per hour, tornado blastbeats, and a singer who sounds like he's struggling to narrate these tales of despair through a throatful of broken glass and gasoline. Total mach 10 aggression that melts together the most rabid elements of West Coast powerviolence, classic 80's Hardcore vitriol, and neurotic destruction; imagine a murderous hybrid of Siege, Infest, Neurosis' apocalyptic buildups, Rorschach, and the mangled Tuetonic metalcore of bands like Systral, Acme, and Morser, splicing turbulent freakouts of controlled thrash chaos with slow, eerie interludes and hyperspeed meltdowns that turn into pure noise cataclysm. This disc collects their hard-to-find self released EP with 2 unreleased songs, and also includes enhanced CD-ROM features with live footage of an explosive 12 Aullidos show. Awesome, twisted, crazed destructo-core!

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Zoloft Smile IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

It always baffles me to think that 16 never became a huge band. I mean, these guys were the ultimate in picking up where Helmet left off after Meantime, a perfect marriage of bonecrushing stop-and-go riffage and primal youth angst and hige hooks, all filtered through the burliness of the West Coast extreme hardcore scene of the early 90's and endorsed by Pushead, for chrissakes. I dunno, maybe it was the seething negativity and lurid tales of retribution that scared people off, or maybe it was the band's commitment to increasingly intensify their rage over the course of five albums. Sadly, 16 called it a day right after releasing this fucking monster of an album in 2003, after slogging it out for over a decade in the underground. But at least they left us with one of the heaviest albums in their discog, eleven sludge-loaded tales of urban decay, domestic despair, revenge and hatred and abject misery. Terminally negative downer tirades, distorto hammer riffs, machinelike rhythmic propulsion, like pre-Betty Helmet conspiring with Eyehategod to drain you of your will, with tastefully applied spacey effects and stoopidly crushing grooves laying waste to everything. Freaking awesome album, right up there with their classic Drop Out and Blaze Of Incompetance. Recommended.

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Right around the same time that Relapse signed the recently reformed 16 and announced that the band would be putting out a brand new album, there was a unsurprising burst of interest in these Southern Cali nihilists from within the extreme metal scene that had newcomers to 16's sound checking out their past releases. The last album that 16 released, Zoloft Smile, went out of print pretty soon thereafter. It's still out of print here in the US, but I just found some copies of the German release of the album through one of our suppliers and grabbed a bunch for the C-Blast shop. I know that a bunch of our customers have been looking for a copy of this crushing 2003 album, so here's your chance at last.
Here's the original listing for the At A Loss release of Zoloft Smile: It always baffles me to think that 16 never became a huge band. I mean, these guys were the ultimate in picking up where Helmet left off after Meantime, a perfect marriage of bonecrushing stop-and-go riffage and primal youth angst and hige hooks, all filtered through the burliness of the West Coast extreme hardcore scene of the early 90's and endorsed by Pushead, for chrissakes. I dunno, maybe it was the seething negativity and lurid tales of retribution that scared people off, or maybe it was the band's commitment to increasingly intensify their rage over the course of five albums. Sadly, 16 called it a day right after releasing this fucking monster of an album in 2003, after slogging it out for over a decade in the underground. But at least they left us with one of the heaviest albums in their discog, eleven sludge-loaded tales of urban decay, domestic despair, revenge and hatred and abject misery. Terminally negative downer tirades, distorto hammer riffs, machinelike rhythmic propulsion, like pre-Betty Helmet conspiring with Eyehategod to drain you of your will, with tastefully applied spacey effects and stoopidly crushing grooves laying waste to everything. Freaking awesome album, right up there with their classic Drop Out and Blaze Of Incompetance. Recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Born To Lose
Sample : Damone
Sample : You're Not My Real Dad

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Bury Me Deep is the first new release that I've heard from 16 Bitch Pile-Up since the band relocated to San Francisco from Ohio and pared their numbers down to the current power trio lineup of Sarah Bernat, Sarah Cathers, and Shannon Walter. Right off the bat, my eyes are glued to the awesome package for Bury Me Deep, which was designed by Damion Romero. The album design looks like a ultra-trashy splatter video cover straight off of the video store shelf circa 1988, with bold purple electric neon lettering and the tag line "...the beaches were covered in blood...and so were the bitches!" roaring across the album cover. If you've got a love (as I do) for that breed of straight-to-video grime from the 80's, you'll love this cover...it's one of the more imaginative "noise" covers I've seen lately. Digging inside, the booklet folds open into a poster with several photos of the girls, sprawled out and posed dead on som litter-covered beach and covered in gross gore, the killer photography courtesy of David Lim of Tralphaz. Killer nasty imagery that totally sets the mood for the hour of heavy terror drone-noise contained on the disc. Bury Me Deep plays like a single extended piece chopped up into chapters, like the film-scores of several mindless exploitation videos melted down into a pool of psychedelid gloopy melted tonal drift and layered action, moving through passages of splatter movie soundtrack, scraping textured noise, thickened vocal syrup, and deep, heavy drones submerged in creepfest samples. Limited edition of 1,000.

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Originally released on the Pathological label run by Kevin Martin (The Bug, Ice, God, Techno Animal) in the 1990s, 16-17 and their album Gyatso was probably the closest in spirit to Martin's own band God - fierce, heavy jazz-core that wrapped the total energy and primal howl of free-jazz around a crushing industrial/rock backbone. These Swiss improv jazzcore legends were masters at creating tension between the free, chaotic voices of shrill, screeching saxophones and sliced n' diced samples, and the staccato drumming of Knut Remond and monstrous, circular basslines, which on Gyatso were supplied by Godflesh's G.C. Green. I recently listed the Savage Land double CD re-release of 16-17's crucial early albums from the 1980's that had been released through Early Recordings, and while those albums were amazing blats of extreme hardcore jazzpunk, this 1994 disc is the heaviest stuff that the band has ever done, with the thick, full production the band had always needed. Holy shit, is this intense. Each track generally revolves around a single central rhythmic grind made up of a crushing sludgy bassline and a brutal martial drumbeat, jagged and angular, which is then pounded into the ground through relentless hypnotic repetition while Alex Buess shoots fire out of his skull via sax and bass clarinet and guitarist Markus Kneubuhler splatters electronic motes and stabs of distorted guitar above it all. Kevin Martin himself engineered the album, and he even contributes some dub-style effects and echoes to the mix. Might just be the heaviest jazz I've ever heard, a pummeling, trance-inducing matchup between John Zorn's Painkiller and Godflesh and Brotzmann's Machine Gun Sessions . Totally crushing. The whole album batters you with track after track of sick, punishing hypno-jazzcore, and there are a couple of additional noise-soaked deconstructions/remixes that have been included at the end of the album to complete the assault. Digitally remastered by Weasel Walter from the Flying Luttenbachers.This crucial reissue is essential for anyone into extreme free-jazz and bands like Alboth, Last Exit, Painkiller, Flying Luttenbachers, etc., and comes with a thick booklet that contains detailed new liner notes by Jason Pettigrew (Alternative Press) that draw from interviews with the band that discuss the history of 16-17, and cool new artwork. Highly recommended.
Track Samples:
Sample : Attack-Impulse
Sample : Flamethrower
Sample : Intravenous

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Back in stock!
Early Recordings is a two-CD set from the legendary Swiss avant- rock/deathjazz group 16-17, whose early releases have been out of print for eons and have been nigh-impossible to land one's mitts on. Savage Land came to the rescue bigtime though, pairing up the band's 1986 16-17 and 1989 When All Else Fails albums, and also adding on the mega rare Hardkore & Buffbunker cassette that 16-17 put out in 1984 on the Vision label, and had Weasel Walter from The Flying Luttenbachers remaster everything.
So what's 16-17 all about? BLAZING HARDCORE JAZZ VIOLENCE. As soon as you hit "play" on 16-17, the entire geneology of the past 25 years of hardcore skronk becomes immediately clear. The band was first formed in Basel, Switzerland in 1983 by Markus Kneubuhler (electronics, guitar), Nicolas Knut Redmond (drums) and Alex Buess (saxophone), and they employed Buess' saxophone in a rock band format to play a kind of "jazz" that was utterly unlike anything else at the time, a super harsh and chaotic hardcore No Wave attack that was equal parts Borbetomagus powerskronk, thugged out neanderthal krautrock, and incendiary hardcore with industrial/noise undercurrents. They predated the whole John Zorn/Painkiller/Last Exit hardcore jazz scene by at least a couple of years, and you can hear the impact that 16-17 had on everyone from Flying Luttenbachers and God to Alboth! and Painkiller. Buess' sax is the centerpiece of 16-17's violent churn, a neverending screaming stream of squonking, screeching blurt, sometimes sounding like actual jazz lines, but largely slicing through the air like a chain of razorblades, backed up by the PCP-fueled motorik beats and grungy riffage being slammed out on Kneubuhler's self-built guitars. For years 16-17 was known to only a few in the underground, despite bonding with Swans, whom they supported on a couple of tours, and even working with Alec Empire's Digital Hardcore label on an Ep that the label released in 1998. Now we know, and these early, crucial recordings are finally available to be heard, an essential piece of the extreme music puzzle. This stuff still holds up in a big way, an utterly crushing assault of vicious freejazz hypnocore harshnoise destruction. Mega recommended. The anthology consists of two CDs packaged in jewel cases, and contained in a printed cardboard slipcase.
Track Samples:
Sample : BROWBEATEN BEAT
Sample : 16-17-Early Recordings
Sample : 16-17-Early Recordings
Sample : 16-17-Early Recordings

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This happens to be a different lineup of the Pittsburgh weirdo-wavers The 1985 than the one that featured John Roman from Microwaves on drums; this is regardless a highly enjoyable platter of energetic, zonked no-wave/post punk that sounds like it was vomited out of some back alley behind the Rhode Island School Of Design. The three songs on here are, for the most part, much more Public Image Ltd. than Arab On Radar, but fans of skronky, abrasive dance punk will probably still dig this in a big way. "The Long Weekend" is just so damn catchy with it's pounding motorik disco beat and wailing guitars coming together with Joe Vernet's yowling vocals, it sounds a bit like a noisy P.I.L./krautrock hybrid and it works great. And "Latin Watches" brings a mutant 80's dancefloor vibe to a spazzy assault that rolls off of these grooves like a sugarshocked combo of Chinese Stars and the VSS. The b-side is the corker, however, a sidelong track called "(Even) More" that in any sane worl d would have been a top 10 noise pop/no wave/dancepunk hit. This jam is unbelievably catchy, and marries a simple but crunchy guitar riff and retro synthoid electronics over a wonderfully inhuman electronic drumbeat while soft warbly vocals coo melodically and feedback and other noisy buzzing swirls around. Super dreamy and hooky, with a droning melody that'll be stuck in yer skull for at least a day or two.

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Before Microwaves, before Zombi, there was The 1985, a heavy, skronky noise rock band from Pittsburgh that was around from 1996 to 2000. The band released two LPs while they were around, one of which was 1999's Nerve Eighty, a burly bit of nervous aggro that weilds a loud, angular attack that's a bit heavier than much of what was coming out of the noise punk scene around that time. Along with their tourmates in Arab On Radar, The 1985 were originators of that blend of twitchy, distorted guitars and the dancey rhythms of experimental punk outfits Crass, Gang Of Four and Public Image, Ltd., but these guys were the heavier of the bunch, their guitars bashing out some great rusted-out riffage and grating electroshock feedback while the rhythm section would dig in with heavy grooves that anchored their chaotic, sexually charged freakouts. Kinda has a Jesus Lizard/Big Black feel to it at times. We just picked up some copies of this disc from John Roman from Microwaves, who had previously played drums in The 1985, and you can hear where Microwaves took the herky-jerky noise of his former band and added a serious dose of metallic skullburn to create the thrashy no wave of the 'Waves. Pretty crucial noise rock for fans of Microwaves, Arab On Radar, and Skin Graft noise punk.
Track Samples:
Sample : cosmo with children
Sample : she works weekends
Sample : warning shot

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A sort of an apocalyptic industrial soundtrack project, 20.SV is one Lebanese electronic composer Osman Arabi, who has released a number of cassettes on various deep-underground noise labels around the globe over the past few years as well as collaborating with black noise technicians Stallagh. This is the first 20.SV release on disc, though, and it's a gripping five-part suite of menacing ambient designs that channel visions of post-industrial/post-nuclear horror through grim power electronics frequencies and grueling low-end distortion drones, all of which succeed in evoking images of dead cities and an atmosphere poisoned by radiation, and toxic winds screaming across the charred landscape of a nuclear holocaust. Electronic sinewaves are warped into emulating the sounds of computer-guided bombs being dropped on cities, and grinding mechanical textures are unleashed into bulldozing loops that crush their way across the withered landscape. Acid Vomit Human Genocide is ultra bleak, extremely imaginative heavy drone/industrial/abstraction, equal parts Sutcliffe Jugend and Gruntsplatter and post-apocalyptic film soundtrack, with whooshing electronic phasing swooping down over dark heavy ambient drones and weird alien feedback frequencies manipulated into terrifying FX. An amazing album of horrific industrial drone visions that will haunt you. Packaged in a full color wallet sleeve.

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It's not all that often that we're presented with extreme music from the Middle East, but when we are, it's almost always an intense experience. This black-industrial project is the brainchild of Lebanese artist Osman Arabi, whose last CD (the excellent Acid Vomit Human Genocide) really impressed me when we first discovered it a couple of months ago. That album contained a series of harsh, hellish post-apocalyptic visions, mixing nightmarish synth ambience, tightly controlled feedback loops, and heavy duty low-frequency drone into radioactive dronescapes. Heavy and unsettling, it's easy to see why blacknoise terrorizers Stalagggh chose to collaborate with 20.SV on remixes of their recordings. With this new disc, 20.SV returns with a single 30+ minute track titled ""Insects"" that continues to map out those bleak, hypnotic landscapes of industrial wreckage and threatening alien frequencies, and conjures slow-drifting clouds of shrill feedback tones and shimmering metallic buzz that swirl over ominous minor-key synthesizer doom and distorted low-frequency throb. The track ebbs and flows across it's half hour expanse, and the feedback textures and waves of distortion are carefully sculpted into a strange environment that reminds me of Bastard Noise gone dark-ambient drone. From the excellent, eerie wasp photography in the package design, to the intricately assembled sound design, it's as if 20.SV was trying to create an ambient-blacknoise soundtrack to a nature program documenting malevolent insect life on some distant planet. Packaged in a full color wallet sleeve.

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20.SV has been releasing these grim aural prophecies for a couple of years, and Apocalyptic Desert is the third disc in the series, following Acid Vomit Human Genocide and Insects (both of which we also have in stock). It's the product of Lebanese experimental noise artist Xardas, who is also behind the ritualistic black industrial of Seeker, one of his other projects that we carry here at C-Blast. Where Seeker is heavy and bleak and drenched in black ambience, 20.SV is pure chaos, an assault of over the top harsh industrial noise that evokes visions of a blasted and ruined Earth poisoned by radioactivity and festering with the rotting refuse of humanity. All of these discs are challenging and extreme even by noise standards, and this one doesn't slack. One drawn out twenty-eight minute track of hideous low-end grind, decayed radio signals drifting over ultra-distorted guitar noise, overdriven synths and harsh, corrosive noise, distorted subsonic rumbles, electrical pulses and generator hum rising off of charged machinery, menacing midrange drones, and vicious bursts of high-end feedback and digital filth, occasionally revealing snippets of looped guitar melody rotting in the hulking mass of evil electronic scum that 20.SV strafes his apocalyptic wasteland with. Yikes. Gutteral, bestial vocals emerge as well, totally inhuman and sounding like the puking grunts and leprous vocalizations of some gamma-blasted hellspawn. It's like old Ramleh on steroids with psychotic goregrind vocals squirting out of the radioactive noise - terrifying, intensely grating stuff. Along the lines of projects like Navicon Torture Technoligies and Messiah Complex, but even more caustic. Comes in a full color wallet sleeve.
Track Samples:
Sample : Apocalyptic Desert

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This is a recent 3-song EP disc from Japan's finest executors of TERRORIZER/NAUSEA -influenced grindcore thrash, manned by former members of MELT BANANA, CROW, and a host of other Japanese thrash faves. These tunes are freaking FAST but shift away from the ultragrind DISCORDANCE AXIS worship of their previous releases...on this EP, 324 incorporates some heavy fucking crustcore velocity with cool melodic undertones (sort of like TRAGEDY), while still launching into those insane grindcore blasts. One of the best Japanese grind acts out there.

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We picked up a stack of the hard-to-find HG Fact release of 324's Boutoku No Taiyo LP direct from the band's Japanese label, HG Fact at a really cheap price; what we weren't aware of though was that these records all suffer from varying degrees of shelf wear, which we want to make very clear to anyone thinking about picking up this record. The vinyl is all in mint, unplayed condition, but the jackets for these records all have a visible amount of wear along the top half of the cover - not so bad that the artwork is messed up or anything, but enough is there that the jackets are basically "used" quality. That said, this is a crucial dose of crushing, vaguely arty Japanese grindcore, and we're offering these up SUPER CHEAP...we've only got 20 copies of the vinyl and will not be getting these back in stock!
The crucial 2000 mini-album from one of Japan's heaviest grindcore trios. Featuring former members of Melt Banana, Satanic Hell Slaughter, and Crow, 324 dropped this 14 song, 24 minute blast of primal blast energy at the turn of the century, and it remains one of the band's most crushing statements...noisy, controlled, HEAVY grindcore with an early Napalm Death/Earache Records vibe, ferocious and punk as fuck while having these really developed lyrical and thematic ideas happening alongside some amazing hooks and inventive riffing. Every song here is a skullcrusher, blasting out ultra catchy downtuned riffs over D-beat drumming and whirlwind blastbeats, deep, monstrous vocals, grooving sludgy breaks, and a general apocalyptic vibe, like a Japanese answer to the crusty grind of Terrorizer and Disassociate. There aren't that many bands that manage to be this artful and unrelentingly brutal and catchy at the same time, and it's not that surprising that Discordance Axis were BIG advocates for these guys while they were still around, going so far as to release this slab of grind genius on vinyl in the US via DA singer Jon Chang's Studio Grey imprint, and tour with 324 in Japan. Definitely something you should check out if you're into the more cerebral grind of bands like Pig Destroyer, Discordance Axis, Napalm Death, and Disassociate.

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324: our favorite Japanese grind band going right now, with their noisy, apocalyptic rush of metallic, ultraheavy grindpunk and dark vibes. Seriously awesome heaviness that's just as great as Napalm Death's best, and easily the most ferocious grind band to emerge from Japan since Die! You Bastard. Rebelgrind is the second full length from these Tokyo denizens after 10 years of crushing heads, and it delivers everything these cats excel at, moving between endtime hardcore that reminds us of Integrity and Tragedy, brutal and raw grind straight outta the Earache school of blast-thought, anthemic rock riffs transmitted at bone powdering density, and immense throat destruction that serves as a megaphone of nihilistic visions. Quality. 14 songs in half an hour. Dressed in weirdly esoteric artwork. Pretty crucial for fans of Napalm Death, Disassociate, Discordance Axis, Pig Destroyer, and any insane fast and crushing heaviness!

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Boutoku No Taiyo IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

The crucial 2000 mini-album from one of Japan's heaviest grindcore trios. Featuring former members of Melt Banana, Satanic Hell Slaughter, and Crow, 324 dropped this 14 song, 24 minute blast of primal blast energy at the turn of the century, and it remains one of the band's most crushing statements...noisy, controlled, HEAVY grindcore with an early Napalm Death/Earache Records vibe, ferocious and punk as fuck while having these really developed lyrical and thematic ideas happening alongside some amazing hooks and inventive riffing. Every song here is a skullcrusher, blasting out ultra catchy downtuned riffs over D-beat drumming and whirlwind blastbeats, deep, monstrous vocals, grooving sludgy breaks, and a general apocalyptic vibe, like a Japanese answer to the crusty grind of Terrorizer and Disassociate. There aren't that many bands that manage to be this artful and unrelentingly brutal and catchy at the same time, and it's not that surprising that Discordance Axis were BIG advocates for these guys while they were still around, going so far as to release this slab of grind genius on vinyl via DA singer Jon Chang's Studio Grey imprint, and tour with 324 in Japan. Definitely something you should check out if you're into the more cerebral grind of bands like Pig Destroyer, Discordance Axis, Napalm Death, and Disassociate.

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More unique, electronic/post-rock/avant pop from our current favorite Italian label, Small Voices. This debut full length from Italian trio 3EEM (comprised of saxophonist Fabrizio Bazzoni, guitarist Danilo Corgnati, and electronics tweaker Valerio Zucca Paul (aka Abstract Q) combines infectious avant-dub, spacey trip-hop beats, airy guitar drones a la Labradford , and circular krautrock with alternating melodic tenor sax lines and manic, nervous free blowing. The end result is totally hypnotic, like bits and pieces of a 60's spy film on endless repeat mashed up with electronic noise and static white-outs, trumpet solos, and Middle Eastern melodies. Pretty killer stuff, especially the album closer, "24 Apes", which clocks in at 24 minutes of loopy, jazzy, noisy bliss, like Fennesz and Scorn jamming with Massive Attack and Mogwai. An excellent hybrid of avant-jazz and post rock.

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The anxiously awaited new full length from LA's 400 BLOWS. Ignore the hype: these guys offer up a potent brand of stripped down, minimalist, mathy punk sludge, equal parts modern LA punk, Wire, and Eyehategod, all rapid sideways drumming, perforating atonal guitar, and singer Skot's sneering nasal assault. This new shit is way catchier than previous releases; a bunch of songs on Angel's Trumpets... almost sound like sing-songy schoolyard taunts, but with crushing axe riffage,obviously. A bruising follow up to Black Rainbow.

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A long awaited followup to The Telestic Disfracture from 2001 (has it really been that long?), the Boston drum n' guitar duo 5ive are back with a seven-song monolith of psychedelic riff metal that presents some of their most beautiful and earth-moving music yet. Hesperus surrounds itself in the misty atmosphere of the coastal environs of Gloucester, Massachusetts, from the evocative photos of the Gloucester waterfront that cover the album's digipack, to the song titles "Kettle Cove", "Big Sea", and album opener "Gulls", and taking it's titular inspiration from the classic macabre poem "The Wreck Of The Hesperus" from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The album kicks in with a searing machine drone as rumbling guitar distortion looms into view, and then erupts into thunderous drumming and massive riffing of "Gull", huge droning riffage and melodic guitar lines screaming through a wall of dense fuzzbox grit - and sounding more like a heavier, more hypnotic drone-rock version of Kyuss than I ever remember them sounding like before. From there, 5ive move into the vaguely arabesque swirl of "Big Sea", swirling drones and restrained rolling drums underpinning a series of gigantic repetitive riffs and proggy changeups. The rest of the album follows the same path, the two musicians crafting mighty riff/percussion raveups that go from quietly subdued valleys of simmering post-rock to explosive stoner-metal trances, and despite the hypnotic quality of the riffs and the absence of vocals, the ride is consistently engaging as Charlie Harrold thunders his way through constantly evolving rhtyhms and guitarist Ben Carr pairs his fuzzslab riffing with multilayered melodies and tons of drugtrip FX boxes. These guys were always one of my favorite instrumental bands, emitting a sonic power that totally belies their two- piece status. All of their releases are pretty essential if yer into this kind of hypnotic heavy rock, so check this out if the music of Kyuss, Loop, Pelican, Old Man Gloom, Earth and Tarantula Hawk all share shelf space in yer music collection. The CD is packaged in a high-gloss digipack with a big foldout 11" x 17" poster.
Track Samples:
Sample : Big Sea
Sample : 5IVE-Hesperus

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Versus, 5ive's follow up to last year's rad split 12" with Kid 606, is actually just a digital reformatting of the 2 songs that made up the 5ive side ("Reso-I" and "Soma"), with the addition of two excellent remixes from Justin Broadrick (Jesu/Godflesh/Final) that bookend the 5ive tracks. The 5ive originals are mighty instrumental jams, possessed of the same dusty, Morricone-esque spirit as Earth's last two albums that cranking the distortion up when the duo kick into crushing dirge metal mode. The band's seemingly spare guitar/drums two-piece setup is pretty much forgotten by the time they launch into the first devestating riff. The album opens with "Soma Stage 1", the first part of Broadrick's remix, a spacey dirge that has that signature Jesu/bliss feel to it. That's followed by "Reso-I", a heavy and hypnotic slab of western-tinged post-rock with repetitive jangly guitar figures and rolling drums that builds into a massive meditative riff that rolls along on a huge droning groove. The second song, "Soma", is a devestatingly heavy sludge/math/post-rock avalanche that focuses on a wonderfully ominous central riff that builds in intensity until it crumbles into an effects-heavy spaceout. Broadrick's "Soma (Stage 2)" remix wraps Versus up with an eight minute heavy blissout that's worth picking up the disc for on it's own, a beautiful epic riff repeated over and over as continuous layers of backwards swirling keyboards and feedback are added, very Jesu/Mogwai like. Very cool!

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Another richly-textured distortion storm from RRR by someone called 666 Volt Battery Noise. I wasn't able to track down any information on this project anywhere, which sucks as I really enjoyed the turbulent brain-flattening this hour long disc laid on me. The four tracks on here are LONG, ranging from 9-23 minutes, and each one is a dense ocean of swarming, squiggling, fried-out distortion and feedback tones in the vein of The Rita, Cherry Point, and Knurl, with what sound to me like vocals run through a mile-long chain of distortion pedals. Now, maybe it's only because I've been listening to so much of this type of stuff lately that it's fucking with my inner ear, but 666 Volt's wash of noise feels a little, uh, softer, more hypnotic than what The Rita and Cherry Point are doing; listening to this disc makes me feel like someone has tossed my head into a concrete mixer filled with steel wool pads and set it to spin, a ""soft"" but abrasive blast of white noise enveloping your senses, the sound of billions of pixelated insects swarming in and around your skull, your third eye opening to reveal an eternity of buried riffs and melodies. Like I said, it's probably just me; this is some heavy duty distortion wipeout aktion. Packaged in a xerox-damaged wallet sleeve in the archetypal PURE/RRR steez.
Track Samples:
Sample : 666 VOLT BATTERY NOISE-Audio Super-Predator

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Another richly-textured distortion storm from RRR by someone called 666 Volt Battery Noise. I wasn't able to track down any information on this project anywhere, which sucks as I really enjoyed the turbulent brain-flattening this hour long disc laid on me. The four tracks on here are LONG, ranging from 9-23 minutes, and each one is a dense ocean of swarming, squiggling, fried-out distortion and feedback tones in the vein of The Rita, Cherry Point, and Knurl, with what sound to me like vocals run through a mile-long chain of distortion pedals. Now, maybe it's only because I've been listening to so much of this type of stuff lately that it's fucking with my inner ear, but 666 Volt's wash of noise feels a little, uh, softer, more hypnotic than what The Rita and Cherry Point are doing; listening to this disc makes me feel like someone has tossed my head into a concrete mixer filled with steel wool pads and set it to spin, a "soft" but abrasive blast of white noise enveloping your senses, the sound of billions of pixelated insects swarming in and around your skull, your third eye opening to reveal an eternity of buried riffs and melodies. Like I said, it's probably just me; this is some heavy duty distortion wipeout aktion. Packaged in a xerox-damaged wallet sleeve in the archetypal PURE/RRR steez.

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split IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

I'm amazed I was able to get this in stock - this incredibly hard to find 3" CD was released as a joint venture between Bizarre Leprous Productions and Merciless Core Records, two labels from the Czech Republic whom I've never had any luck with getting stuff from in the past, let alone a 3" CD released back in the late 90's that features two of the sickest improv-grind outfits of all time! Yeah, this disc is a must-have for fans of extreme grind/noisecore/noise, with one long track each from the Czech freegrind band PTAO and legendary teutonic destroyers 7 Minutes Of Nausea. PTAO starts it off with their untitled ten-and-a-half minutes of total blasting carnage, a demonic grindscape of echo-chamber grindcore, freeform punk slop, samples of orchestral Mozart pieces, and blast after blast of ripping formless death metal set to puree. This stuff is fucking awesome, and any fan of weirdo grindcore or noisecore who hasn't heard PTAO is going to crap themselves once they hear these maniacs.
Anybody that's already a fan of "noisecore" is undoubtedly familiar with 7 Minutes Of Nausea (or 7MON, as they are frequently abbreviated). Along with Anal Cunt, Meatshits, and Fear Of God, these guys were not only one of the more well known noisecore bands, but also one of the weirdest. Their contribution to this split is "Feedbackselfdeath", and like the PTAO material, it's one long track made up of a bunch of microsecond outbursts, but their stuff is even less musical and more bizarre than the PTAO side...it's tough to get across how fucked this actually sounds, and how psychotic it sounds: the whole track is a series of rumbling subsonic noise that might be a group of bass drums being tossed down an elevator shaft, over which the band layers harsh, sudden blasts of distorted guitar riffing that is blurred into pure noise, and creepy Gregorian monk chants. Each "song" is over in a matter of seconds, with those creeped out monk chants filling the space in between blasts. The vocals that are splattered over this fucked-up soundscape totally take the cake, though...switching between brutal gutteral grunts, deranged muttering and Infest-esque roaring, Mick from 7 Minutes Of Nausea delivers some of the craziest vocal sounds I've ever heard. The guy sounds like he's literally schizophrenic. If you're looking for some really way-out grind or intensely heavy free-noise stuff, this disc is right up yer alley. Comes in a 3" fold-out sleeve.

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Forced Boat IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Talk about a troubled release...this 7"" from Chicago comedy grinders 7000 Dying Rats was recorded back in 2002 but due to an assortment of pressing plant problems, many of which stemmed from the band's ""appropriation"" of various pop culture flotsam, this EP was delayed for years, and finally saw the light of day in 2006. It's kinda weird hearing 7000 Dying Rats back in action all of a sudden, with this ""lost"" EP finally coming out, the new Season In Hell album that just showed up, and the band being featured in a recent article on ""comedy grind"" in Decibel magazine. I thought their last album, Sound Of No Hands Clapping, was genius, a bizarro cut-n-paste freakout somewhere in between the Butthole Surfers, Anal Cunt, Naked City, and Lawnmower Deth, so all of this new Rats action is more than welcome.
The Forced Boat 7"" is a kind of hodgepodge of 7000 Dying Rats insanity, a collage of brutal grinding blurr, funereal violins, tape montages, with the EP's centerpieces consisting of a manic, drunken cover of 'Any Way You Want It', and a meth'd up rendition of Sabbath's 'Paranoid', the first half of which is delivered with distorted megaphone vocals and crunchy guitars, but then the second half is played on acoustic guitars and banjos. This is a very weird, very goofy EP that's not necessarly the best introduction to the Rats delirious assault (I'd direct the curious to check out either Season In Hell or Sounds Of No Hands Clapping first), but if you're already into these guys, the 10 minutes or so of ridiculousness on this platter is pretty zonked. Released in a a limited edition pressing of 440 copies on clear pink colored vinyl, in a full color sleeve with do-it-yourself 7"" center labels sporting the faces of Don Knotts and Steven Segal and an insert sheet describing the full saga of the EP's release.

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Chicago's 7000 Dying Rats return after five years of silence with a new full length of their self-styled ""comedy grind"" heaviness, loaded with 28 tracks of grindcore/goofball skit/genre-fucking weirdness that's so full of in-jokes that I gave up trying to keep up, and just let their insane, Naked City-style approach sweep me along in a wave of weirdness. If the album cover depicting a bat-winged Indian god farting bats out of it's ass in Hell doesn't clue you in to the brilliance of Season In Hell, you'll get the picture by song three. When these guys play it heavy, it's crushing, like with the ridiculously Slayerized deathcore of second song ""Altar Of Goat Skulls"", which takes a sudden left turn into cheesy Nightmare On Elm Street style synthesizers and samples from some obscure occult horror movie. Or the plodding Frostian sludge of ""Bigfoot Destroy"". I noticed that the metal songs and sections have a similiar sludgy thrash sound as Lair Of The Minotaur, due in no small part to Lair guitarists Steve Rathbone and Donald James Barraca both playing in 7000 Dying Rats. Weasel Walter from Flying Luttenbachers plays drums as well, along with a constantly shifting lineup that reads like a who's who of the Chicago underground. And of course there are all of the goofy bits in between the heavier stuff, like tons of awesomely cheesy 80's style keyboard interludes, atonal violin scraping, terminally dumb white-boy hip-hop, the heartfelt ballad ""Your Studied Indifference is Duly Noted"", the glammy cock rocker ""Rock n Roll Weapon"" that coulda been an Eagles Of Death Metal b-side. 7000 Dying Rats also turn Sabbath's ""Paranoid"" into a tripped-out techno/bluegrass meltdown, and present us with ""Hellcatcher"", a retarded medley of satanic bass-noise and live recordings of drunken covers of Journey's ""Any Way You Want It"" and Judas Priest's ""Living After Midnight"". “Ballad of Chico” is a hilarious, epic space-prog freakout. And Scott Kelley from Neurosis appears on ""A Real Kneeslapper"", a weird ambient-drone track with Kelley telling a story that I'm still not getting. The whole album is confusing like that, blenderizing off-the-cuff silliness, metal parody, bits of stage and studio banter, and genuine grind/death devestation.

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After a long while, this classic piece of retarded genius is back in stock! 7000 Dying Rats have been appearing on the radar a bit over the past year with that killer new album on He Who Corrupts and a 7" that came out on Scenester Credentials, but it was their second album from 2001 that the Chicago comedy grinders released on Tumult that first put them on the map. The band's lineup featured a who's-who of the then-current Chicago metal/noise underground, including Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers/Hatewave/Lake Of Dracula on drums and Steve Rathbone from Lair Of The Minotaur, and they deliver an often confusional but tightly executed collage of extreme grind, fucked up comedy bits and hilariously stoopid sampling, and some more experimental, abstract shit. The humour tends towards weird in-jokes that probably only the members of 7000 Dying Rats actually "get", but that doesn't make this any less entertaining, especially if you dig it when genre-hopping grind is capable of getting this fucking absurd. "The Queen Of Vermin" opens the album with John Carpenter-esque synthesizers, orchestral samples, and a woman's voice announcing the coming rat apocalypse, and then rips into "This Close"'s crazed onslaught of raw, metallic grind and rippin' NWOBHM riffage. That segues into the retarded hard rock jam "Strippers On Ecstacy", completed with nut-grabbing falsetto crooning, and the even goofier medley of Beverley Hills 90210 samples and noisecore blast of "Rat's Ass (Judas Priestly)". The rest of the album continues on an increasingly ridiculous trajectory of brutal grind and full-blown noisecore spliced with synth pop, surprisingly adept funk jams, comedy skits on par with Neil Hamburger, lot's of 80's hair metal love, creepazoid Italian cannibal movie tributes, tape collage, and brain damaged hip-hop. It's easy to compare this to Mr. Bungle, but these guys are WAY more heavy and brutal, heavy on the grind and ass-rock, performed by terminal heshers completely wasted on cheap beer and dirtweed but still sentient enough to construct some seriously brainfucking cut-and-paste grind damage. Obviously, if you're a fan of bands like Anal Cunt, Mr. Bungle, Fuck...I'm Dead, and even the genre splicing of Naked City (though this shit is way more rough around the edges) and the whacked out death metal of Faxed Head, this'll be right up yer alley.

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Forced Boat IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

Talk about a troubled release...this 7" from Chicago comedy grinders 7000 Dying Rats was recorded back in 2002 but due to an assortment of pressing plant problems, many of which stemmed from the band's "appropriation" of various pop culture flotsam, this EP was delayed for years, and finally saw the light of day in 2006. It's kinda weird hearing 7000 Dying Rats back in action all of a sudden, with this "lost" EP finally coming out, the new Season In Hell album that just showed up, and the band being featured in a recent article on "comedy grind" in Decibel magazine. I thought their last album, Sound Of No Hands Clapping, was genius, a bizarro cut-n-paste freakout somewhere in between the Butthole Surfers, Anal Cunt, Naked City, and Lawnmower Deth, so all of this new Rats action is more than welcome.
The Forced Boat 7" is a kind of hodgepodge of 7000 Dying Rats insanity, a collage of brutal grinding blurr, funereal violins, tape montages, with the EP's centerpieces consisting of a manic, drunken cover of 'Any Way You Want It', and a meth'd up rendition of Sabbath's 'Paranoid', the first half of which is delivered with distorted megaphone vocals and crunchy guitars, but then the second half is played on acoustic guitars and banjos. This is a very weird, very goofy EP that's not necessarly the best introduction to the Rats delirious assault (I'd direct the curious to check out either Season In Hell or Sounds Of No Hands Clapping first), but if you're already into these guys, the 10 minutes or so of ridiculousness on this platter is pretty zonked. Released in a a limited edition pressing of 440 copies on clear pink colored vinyl, in a full color sleeve with do-it-yourself 7" center labels sporting the faces of Don Knotts and Steven Segal and an insert sheet describing the full saga of the EP's release.

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Chicago's 7000 Dying Rats return after five years of silence with a new full length of their self-styled "comedy grind" heaviness, loaded with 28 tracks of grindcore/goofball skit/genre-fucking weirdness that's so full of in-jokes that I gave up trying to keep up, and just let their insane, Naked City-style approach sweep me along in a wave of weirdness. If the album cover depicting a bat-winged Indian god farting bats out of it's ass in Hell doesn't clue you in to the brilliance of Season In Hell, you'll get the picture by song three. When these guys play it heavy, it's crushing, like with the ridiculously Slayerized deathcore of second song "Altar Of Goat Skulls", which takes a sudden left turn into cheesy Nightmare On Elm Street style synthesizers and samples from some obscure occult horror movie. Or the plodding Frostian sludge of "Bigfoot Destroy". I noticed that the metal songs and sections have a similiar sludgy thrash sound as Lair Of The Minotaur, due in no small part to Lair guitarists Steve Rathbone and Donald James Barraca both playing in 7000 Dying Rats. Weasel Walter from Flying Luttenbachers plays drums as well, along with a constantly shifting lineup that reads like a who's who of the Chicago underground. And of course there are all of the goofy bits in between the heavier stuff, like tons of awesomely cheesy 80's style keyboard interludes, atonal violin scraping, terminally dumb white-boy hip-hop, the heartfelt ballad "Your Studied Indifference is Duly Noted", the glammy cock rocker "Rock n Roll Weapon" that coulda been an Eagles Of Death Metal b-side. 7000 Dying Rats also turn Sabbath's "Paranoid" into a tripped-out techno/bluegrass meltdown, and present us with "Hellcatcher", a retarded medley of satanic bass-noise and live recordings of drunken covers of Journey's "Any Way You Want It" and Judas Priest's "Living After Midnight". “Ballad of Chico” is a hilarious, epic space-prog freakout. And Scott Kelley from Neurosis appears on "A Real Kneeslapper", a weird ambient-drone track with Kelley telling a story that I'm still not getting. The whole album is confusing like that, blenderizing off-the-cuff silliness, metal parody, bits of stage and studio banter, and genuine grind/death devestation.

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This collaboration between A Crown Of Amaranth and Conversations About The Light came out about a year ago on the Italian label Eibon, but I accidently buried the copies that we got for Crucial Blast in a corner of the C-Blast warehouse, which were just discovered when we were moving everything into a larger location recently. I've been a fan of both of these projects individually for awhile now, releasing a CD-R from A Crown Of Amaranth through the Crucial Bliss series about 2 years ago that was an amazing collection of deep-space drone n' megaheavy metallic abstraction, and carrying multiple releases of intense ambient electronic doom and black drift from Conversations About The Light. So the idea of an album of music created by both artists working together sounded like it was going to be amazing. And it definitely is. The Clearing is a concept album, with each track corresponding to a chapter in a short story that is printed in the 12-page booklet, which follows a character named Espin and his slow, surreal descent into insanity. The music beings with "Power Outage Tapestries", a horrific blast of disembodied black metal guitars floating far off in the blackness behind drifiting minor key synth pulses and fearsome distorted roars, almost sounding like a more ambient Xasthur track. After this, the album makes it's way through a changing landscape populated by serene black ambience, field recordings of dogs barking, skittering electronic textures, solemn melodies being played on what sound like processed electric guitars, crushing stygian drone a la Lustmord or Gruntsplatter combined with the sounds of a shovel digging at earth, psychedelic noise and field recordings stitched together into nightmarish collages, serene post-rock melodies swimming in reverb and drifting lazily backwards, blasts of ghoulish feedback, John Carpenter-style synth pulses, monstrous synthetic industrial dirges, all ending in a flurry of chirping songbirds. It's a deeply unsettling, strangely beautiful slab of abstract blackness, similiar to the last two Vomit Orchestra discs that we listed in last week's update, combining harsh electronic noise, dark ambient, musique concrete, and blackened guitars into a worldess nightmare narrative.

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Whoa, this German band's 12" full length tore face off instantly with it's raging, chaotic amalgam of arty, chaotic hardcore and progressive jazz-grind. Featuring members of Calling Gina Clark and The Apoplexy Twist Orchestra, these guys deliver impossibly complex Dillnger Escape Plan-esque fretboard meltdown and convoluted song structures over a relentless, stuttering, dissonant assault of Per Koro style Teutonic hardcore and ferocious wall-of-noise grind that is broken up with passages of spacey, psychedelic jazz and shimmery drones. Imagine a fusion of jazz-grind masters Virulence, screamy modern hardcore like Off Minor, Saetia, and Forstella Ford, and the apocalyptic crush of Systral. This album is totally nuts, a mind-bending anarchic avant-hardcore/grind riot from the same label that brought us that kickass White Mice live CD-R and the Cousins Of Reggae LP. The vinyl is housed in a cool black/white/grey screenprinted jacket with glossy insert sleeve.

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This EP is the first new release from this German avant-grind that we've heard since that blazing LP that came out on Oh No No a couple of years ago. I've been hoping that I'd get to hear some more of their cacophonic, jazz-damaged blastcore, and while this disc is a total tease with only three songs and a mere twelve minutes of music, this stuff really kills. A Fine Boat, That Coffin impressed us before with their churning complex brand of art-damaged grindcore that seemed to combine that 90's fall-on-the-floor Gravity sound with raging grind and even some of that awesome Per Koro/Bremen sound, and these three jams continue in that vein, each song stiched from impossibly complex shredding, eerie samples, insanely technical song arrangements, high pitch shrieking vocals, monstrous slow-motion doom, and seething dissonant riffs that recall the ferocious sounds of bands like Acme and Morser. But those dark jazz parts that the band breaks off into every now and then are what make this really unique. The jazz stuff is an acquired taste, but if the idea of hearing a band that mixes together the tricky jazz-grind of Virulence with the armageddon blast of Systral sounds like a rad idea to you, then this band is what is you need. Dark, proggy, immensely heavy and chaotic, A Fine Boat The Coffin is primo weirdo grind, and this EP has been getting a ton of play around the Crucial Blast office. The disc has a killer visual presentation too, packaged in a full color jewel case and pressed onto a clear cd.
Track Samples:
Sample : Morse Zeichen
Sample : Zettel und Stift

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This killer new Midwestern avant-grindcore outfit debuts with this six song CD of paranoid, cerebral heaviness that is influenced and informed by the dystopian sci-fi works of writer Philip K. Dick. One not need be familiar with Dick's writing, however, to get your hooks dug into A Scanner Darkly's futurist grind/sludge/drone/noise, generated from a surprisingly dense guitar/drums/keyboards/vocals lineup, and rife with lethal post-Slayer thrash riffs, strangely catchy major-key doom rock breakdowns and alien sludge crawl like Black Mayonnaise doing some weird variation on mathy metalcore, squalls of sweet luscious feedback overdrive (these guys LOVE feedback) and squealing free-guitar/amp freakout, bright major-key futuristic fastcore meltdown, with the final looong track "Four Years, False memories" sounding akin to Earth and K.K. Null channeling the sounds of an intergalactic cruiser moving through deep space while a loop of Japanese singing spirals into out into the blackness. Haunting stuff. A Scanner Darkly moves between the spheres of intelli-grind populated by Pig Destroyer and Discordance Axis, monstrous ultra-drone a la Sunn and Earth, Nasum's blazing blastcrust, and a whopping spurt of Melvins worship. A thoroughly weird and wonderful neo-grind blast, we can't wait to hear more from these cats.

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Here's some screamy modern hardcore of the darkest variety. The A side is "Your Concrete Eyes", a dirgy, heavy sludgepunk blast with nasty ripped-throat shrieks and splattered in waves of feedback delay. Side B opens with "Cancer Is The Cure", an apocalyptic tantrum of blackened metalcore and crushing riffage ending in brutal noise spasm, and closes with the scratchy,crackling loops and awesomely messy grindthrash of "Step Off The Corpse Path", complete with a bass guitar breakdown that made me want to tear the walls down. Definitely one of the best hardcore EP's I've laid my mitts on in 2005, falling somewhere between modern metallic 'core and TRAGEDY/FROM ASHES RISE crust epics but with some vicious noise and feedback abuse added for good measure. Mastered by Jim Plotkin (OLD, KHANATE), and comes housed in a super nice silkscreened sleeve with neat ink interplay/graphics.

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Also available on limited edition colored vinyl, swirled red/black/clear wax, in a gorgeous heavy gatefold package that also includes a digital download card for the entire album.
Starting with their 2008 debut and the amazing split with Nadja Primitive North, A Storm Of Light have quickly risen above the rest in a sea of bands following in the footsteps of Neurosis. It helps when you have an actual member of Neurosis on board, and Josh Graham (also of Red Sparowes and Battle Of Mice) brings a very similar apocalyptic vibe to his new band, mixing together slow, leaden metallic heaviness and epic rock steeped in portentous atmosphere. The first album didn't bother hiding it's origins in the end-time sludge-metal of Neurosis, but Forgive Us Our Trespasses, the band's second full length, sees A Storm Of Light evolving their sound into something both doomier and more accessible, thanks in large part to Graham's powerful, emotive vocals. As with the previous releases, the prophetic ecological nightmares of industrial collapse and the almost suffocating sense of foreboding ride on massive waves of tectonic heaviness, but where the debut rose directly from the raw genetic matter of Neurosis with only a subtle extrapolation on that band's signature sound, A Storm Of Light sounds a little more symphonic this time around, with lush electronic textures accompanying the massive riffs, the prominent use of cello and violin on several tracks, and the presence of three female singers who have been brought in to contribute a mix of vocal styles. There's even a banjo that appears on the three "Law Of Nature" tracks that are spread across the album, which also features Lydia Lunch doing a spoken-word thing over the delicate twang and eerie ambience...creepy stuff. One of the other guest singers is Jarboe from Swans, who lends her ethereal voice to two different songs ("The Light In Their Eyes" and "Across The Wilderness"); Nerissa Campbell (who also appeared on Primitve North) sings on another three tracks (" Amber Waves Of Gray", "Arc Of Failure (Law Of Nature Pt 2)" and " Mindnight"). This array of female voices and the dark washes of orchestral strings (courtesy of Marika Hughes of Charming Hostess and Carla Kihlstedt of Charming Hostess/Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) turn A Storm Of Light's massive slow-motion metal into majestic slabs of sound, their oceanic riffage and soaring vocals mixing with soundtrack-style synthesizers and strings and haunting ambience and ultimately sounding fairly different from Neurosis, spacey and cinematic and lush. Of course, Neurosis fans are going to love this, but these guys are definitely growing into their own sound. The disc is gorgeously packaged with a thick booklet and comes in a printed o-card, all of which have the same sort of digitally manipulated photo-collage artwork that appeared on their previous releases, a now signature visual aesthetic that depicts surreal ruined cityscapes and abandoned technology overrun by wildlife and geological upheaval.
Track Samples:
Sample : Alpha - Law Of Nature Part I
Sample : Amber Waves Of Gay
Sample : The Light In Their Eyes
Sample : Midnight

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In the great orbit that surrounds the bright burning creative nexus that is Neurosis, there have been a multitude of musical projects from the members that seem to reach out towards every possible corner of dark, underground sonics. Blood And Time, Tribes Of Neurot, Culper Ring, Harvestman, Red Sparowes, Battle Of Mice, and A Storm Of Light are all occasional projects or full-blown bands that members have branched out with, and out of all of these, A Storm Of Light is the heaviest, and the closest sonically to the massive tribal metal of Neurosis. This new band was formed by Josh Graham, the visual/video artist for Neurosis who has also worked with Battle Of Mice and Red Sparowes over the past few years (all of which are amazing bands, especially Battle Of Mice, whose debut album was one of my favorite albums of 2006 and contained an intensely personal soul excavation through the combined weight of metallic dirge, Julie Christmas' intoxicating vocals, and gripping ethereal rock), and he's joined by members of Tombs, Satanized, and most impressively, the mighty Vinnie Signorelli from Swans/Unsane/Foetus on drums. I'm a megafan of every band that Vinnie has been involved with, and it was his name that initially drew me to check out the debut from A Storm Of Light. I was a little surprised at first by how much this new band sounds like Neurosis themselves, all the way down to Graham's gravelly growl, lumbering minor-key riffs, and the brooding, apocalyptic dirges that drive most of the music on And We Wept The Black Ocean Within; in fact, you could put this on back to back with Neurosis' 2007 album Given To The Rising and stylistically, the two albums would flow together almost seamlessly. There are some special touches that A Storm Of Light apply to their take on this sound, like in "Vast And Endless" where the band lays down a crushing compressed Godflesh like rhythm that continues throughout the album. And the band creates dense layers of electronic noise and cinematic synthesizer ambience in each song that give this a spacier feel than the last Neurosis album. The songs are tied together by dark themes of oceanic destruction and drowning that fit the pressurized dirges, and several interludes appear in between the larger metallic tracks, brief flashes of ominous tidal drift and weeping piano melodies, swirling aquatic drones and symphonies of creaking ships that rumble in the darkness for an eternity. A companion piece to the Neurosis catalog, no doubt, but one with an almost orchestral feel that will fully satiate anyone jonesing for the next Neurosis album to appear.
Track Samples:
Sample : Black Ocean
Sample : Wast and Endless

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Also available as a beautiful heavyweight double LP gatefold, on limited edition colored vinyl!
In the great orbit that surrounds the bright burning creative nexus that is Neurosis, there have been a multitude of musical projects from the members that seem to reach out towards every possible corner of dark, underground sonics. Blood And Time, Tribes Of Neurot, Culper Ring, Harvestman, Red Sparowes, Battle Of Mice, and A Storm Of Light are all occasional projects or full-blown bands that members have branched out with, and out of all of these, A Storm Of Light is the heaviest, and the closest sonically to the massive tribal metal of Neurosis. This new band was formed by Josh Graham, the visual/video artist for Neurosis who has also worked with Battle Of Mice and Red Sparowes over the past few years (all of which are amazing bands, especially Battle Of Mice, whose debut album was one of my favorite albums of 2006 and contained an intensely personal soul excavation through the combined weight of metallic dirge, Julie Christmas' intoxicating vocals, and gripping ethereal rock), and he's joined by members of Tombs, Satanized, and most impressively, the mighty Vinnie Signorelli from Swans/Unsane/Foetus on drums. I'm a megafan of every band that Vinnie has been involved with, and it was his name that initially drew me to check out the debut from A Storm Of Light. I was a little surprised at first by how much this new band sounds like Neurosis themselves, all the way down to Graham's gravelly growl, lumbering minor-key riffs, and the brooding, apocalyptic dirges that drive most of the music on And We Wept The Black Ocean Within; in fact, you could put this on back to back with Neurosis' 2007 album Given To The Rising and stylistically, the two albums would flow together almost seamlessly. There are some special touches that A Storm Of Light apply to their take on this sound, like in "Vast And Endless" where the band lays down a crushing compressed Godflesh like rhythm that continues throughout the album. And the band creates dense layers of electronic noise and cinematic synthesizer ambience in each song that give this a spacier feel than the last Neurosis album. The songs are tied together by dark themes of oceanic destruction and drowning that fit the pressurized dirges, and several interludes appear in between the larger metallic tracks, brief flashes of ominous tidal drift and weeping piano melodies, swirling aquatic drones and symphonies of creaking ships that rumble in the darkness for an eternity. A companion piece to the Neurosis catalog, no doubt, but one with an almost orchestral feel that will fully satiate anyone jonesing for the next Neurosis album to appear.
Track Samples:
Sample : Black Ocean
Sample : Wast and Endless

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Starting with their 2008 debut and the amazing split with Nadja Primitive North, A Storm Of Light have quickly risen above the rest in a sea of bands following in the footsteps of Neurosis. It helps when you have an actual member of Neurosis on board, and Josh Graham (also of Red Sparowes and Battle Of Mice) brings a very similar apocalyptic vibe to his new band, mixing together slow, leaden metallic heaviness and epic rock steeped in portentous atmosphere. The first album didn't bother hiding it's origins in the end-time sludge-metal of Neurosis, but Forgive Us Our Trespasses, the band's second full length, sees A Storm Of Light evolving their sound into something both doomier and more accessible, thanks in large part to Graham's powerful, emotive vocals. As with the previous releases, the prophetic ecological nightmares of industrial collapse and the almost suffocating sense of foreboding ride on massive waves of tectonic heaviness, but where the debut rose directly from the raw genetic matter of Neurosis with only a subtle extrapolation on that band's signature sound, A Storm Of Light sounds a little more symphonic this time around, with lush electronic textures accompanying the massive riffs, the prominent use of cello and violin on several tracks, and the presence of three female singers who have been brought in to contribute a mix of vocal styles. There's even a banjo that appears on the three "Law Of Nature" tracks that are spread across the album, which also features Lydia Lunch doing a spoken-word thing over the delicate twang and eerie ambience...creepy stuff. One of the other guest singers is Jarboe from Swans, who lends her ethereal voice to two different songs ("The Light In Their Eyes" and "Across The Wilderness"); Nerissa Campbell (who also appeared on Primitve North) sings on another three tracks (" Amber Waves Of Gray", "Arc Of Failure (Law Of Nature Pt 2)" and " Mindnight"). This array of female voices and the dark washes of orchestral strings (courtesy of Marika Hughes of Charming Hostess and Carla Kihlstedt of Charming Hostess/Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) turn A Storm Of Light's massive slow-motion metal into majestic slabs of sound, their oceanic riffage and soaring vocals mixing with soundtrack-style synthesizers and strings and haunting ambience and ultimately sounding fairly different from Neurosis, spacey and cinematic and lush. Of course, Neurosis fans are going to love this, but these guys are definitely growing into their own sound. The disc is gorgeously packaged with a thick booklet and comes in a printed o-card, all of which have the same sort of digitally manipulated photo-collage artwork that appeared on their previous releases, a now signature visual aesthetic that depicts surreal ruined cityscapes and abandoned technology overrun by wildlife and geological upheaval.
Track Samples:
Sample : Alpha - Law Of Nature Part I
Sample : Amber Waves Of Gay
Sample : The Light In Their Eyes
Sample : Midnight

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The debut album from A Storm Of Light (reviewed and listed here at C-Blast a few months ago) was terrific, a killer slab of oceanic-themed Neurosis influenced tribal sludge that delivered both crushing metallic weight and a moody, Swans-esque feel, which makes since seeing as how the band features members of both of those bands. Now we've got this new record from A Storm Of Light, and it's shared with our favorite dreamsludge duo Nadja, with both bands teaming up for a colossal slab of dreamy, industrial-tinged ambient dirge-metal massiveness.
The first side consists of two tracks from A Storm Of Light, titled "Brother" and "Sister". "Brother" starts off, a dark brooding dirge of swirling keyboards and pounding drums, alternating sections of expansive low-end drift, dubby martial snares and deep, crooning male vocals trading off against a dreamy female voice against the bombastic choruses where the band erupts from the brooding Swans-like tension into massive Neurosis/Isis style heaviness. Guitars grind and rumble, the male vocals explode into furious roaring, the drums switch from the glacial industrial pummel to rolling waves of thunderous crush, building into a symphonic dirge that moves in oceanic swells of volume and power. The end of the song drifts off on waves of buzzing cosmic drone, then lurches into "Sister", where the band changes into a more angular, shambling dirge. The vocals are more strained and sinister sounding on this one, and the guitars are matched by an equally heavy layer of howling synthesizers and somber minor key piano, with synths everywhere sparking off whooshing space effects and trippy effects. The heaviness peels back a few minutes in, exposing a lengthy passage of soft guitar playing, distant tribal drums pounding way off behind veils of smoke and fog, the male vocals sounding much like the singer from the Church all of a sudden, the female singer becoming much more prominent as their two voices entertwine, the grinding guitars and rumbling drones finally surging back up to the surface and washing over the song, finishing it out in a crushing, super heavy metallic dirge thats intensely epic and dramatic.
On their side, Nadja follow up with a single massive track called "I Make From Your Eyes The Sun". It begins as a soft, hushed haze of dolorous guitar chords, minimal percussion and muted feedback droning in the background, the drums soft and brushed as a gorgeous piano line slowly enters in surrounded by all kinds of ethereal drones and barely-percerptible chimes and streaks of backwards guitar. It's soft and beautiful and immensely dreamy, and slowly grows into a cloudburst of ultra distorted heaviness signaled by a booming drumroll a couple of minutes in. Less grinding and industrial sounding as some of Nadja's recent stuff, here the guitars are wrapped in glorious gauzy fuzz, thick and syrupy, melting over the minimal mechanical drums, Aidan's dreamy vocals blurred and warped by the swirling waves of fuzz and hiss. A glacial, noise-drenched pop melody is drowned in the dense distortion and caustic buzz, and it starts to sound like a massively distorted Slowdive, all shoegazey and swirled with strange flute-like fluttering, but still extremely heavy, particularly when the riff becomes darker and doomier in the middle, turning into an almost Godflesh-like mecha-groove grinding through the airy feedback and swirling clouds of buzz. Towards the end, this crushing metallic riff is absorbed into a thick soup of blissed out synth, the whole sound boiling down into a smeared expanse of deconstructed rhythms and fractured drum machine pummel, guitars blossoming into formless layers of glorious orchestral drone, until the song finally fades out in a haze of backwards melody and murky buzz.
The third side features the last two tracks, both of which are remix/collaborations between the two bands. The first one has Nadja taking the A Storm Of Light song "Brother" and mutating it into something much closer to Nadja's sound, muting the crushing metallic guitars and pounding tribal rhythms into a tidal surge of low-end rumble and oceanic swells of feedback. At first it's all soft and eerie, the looped guitars washed in reverb and echo, swirling synthesizers, smears of backwards percussion and melody appearing across the blurred expanse of drone, then suddenly an utterly monstrous sludge riff drops in with zero warning, the dirge-metal crush made even heavier by Nadja's layering of additional feedback and synths and oppressive night-sky ambience, the riff and lumbering drums wound into an infinite loop, everything distorted and bathed in effects, and eventually the drums fade off, leaving just the massive swirl of distorted riffage and rumbling feedback floating through space. And on the last track, A Storm Of Light does the reverse, taking the Nadja song and reshaping it into something very different from the original. The riffs and beats are taken apart and restructured into something darker and more electronic sounding, the vocals way up front and much more prominent, the riff barely recognizeable as it's blurred into a creepy ambient buzz, the drums cut up into fragmented beats, all very industrial sounding; when the drums drop out towards the end, it turns into a seriously dark piece of gothic ambience as vocals and looping synth melody and noisy, pneumatic sounds drift skyward, contorting into a weird psychedelic coda at the very end.
And then there is the fourth side, which doesn't have any music; instead, it's an eye-popping laser etching that features an amazingly detailed piece of artwork cut into the vinyl, one of the coolest etchings that I've seen. Both records are pressed on a dark, gorgeous black/red vinyl coloration, and the whole thing is presented with one of the coolest vinyl packages that I've seen lately, which is no surprise seeing as how this came out on Robotic Empire. The heavy gatefold jacket features amazing full color artwork depicting a bizarre arctic fantasy world of polar bears and snow owls and ancient crumbling monuments, all resting beneath a vast black sky filled with aurora borealis and distant galaxies, and inside there's a full color lyric insert as well as a CD version of the album that contains all of the music. Seriously recommended!

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Now available on "Aurora Forge" (red/grey) colored vinyl.
The debut album from A Storm Of Light (reviewed and listed here at C-Blast a few months ago) was terrific, a killer slab of oceanic-themed Neurosis influenced tribal sludge that delivered both crushing metallic weight and a moody, Swans-esque feel, which makes since seeing as how the band features members of both of those bands. Now we've got this new record from A Storm Of Light, and it's shared with our favorite dreamsludge duo Nadja, with both bands teaming up for a colossal slab of dreamy, industrial-tinged ambient dirge-metal massiveness.
The first side consists of two tracks from A Storm Of Light, titled "Brother" and "Sister". "Brother" starts off, a dark brooding dirge of swirling keyboards and pounding drums, alternating sections of expansive low-end drift, dubby martial snares and deep, crooning male vocals trading off against a dreamy female voice against the bombastic choruses where the band erupts from the brooding Swans-like tension into massive Neurosis/Isis style heaviness. Guitars grind and rumble, the male vocals explode into furious roaring, the drums switch from the glacial industrial pummel to rolling waves of thunderous crush, building into a symphonic dirge that moves in oceanic swells of volume and power. The end of the song drifts off on waves of buzzing cosmic drone, then lurches into "Sister", where the band changes into a more angular, shambling dirge. The vocals are more strained and sinister sounding on this one, and the guitars are matched by an equally heavy layer of howling synthesizers and somber minor key piano, with synths everywhere sparking off whooshing space effects and trippy effects. The heaviness peels back a few minutes in, exposing a lengthy passage of soft guitar playing, distant tribal drums pounding way off behind veils of smoke and fog, the male vocals sounding much like the singer from the Church all of a sudden, the female singer becoming much more prominent as their two voices entertwine, the grinding guitars and rumbling drones finally surging back up to the surface and washing over the song, finishing it out in a crushing, super heavy metallic dirge thats intensely epic and dramatic.
On their side, Nadja follow up with a single massive track called "I Make From Your Eyes The Sun". It begins as a soft, hushed haze of dolorous guitar chords, minimal percussion and muted feedback droning in the background, the drums soft and brushed as a gorgeous piano line slowly enters in surrounded by all kinds of ethereal drones and barely-percerptible chimes and streaks of backwards guitar. It's soft and beautiful and immensely dreamy, and slowly grows into a cloudburst of ultra distorted heaviness signaled by a booming drumroll a couple of minutes in. Less grinding and industrial sounding as some of Nadja's recent stuff, here the guitars are wrapped in glorious gauzy fuzz, thick and syrupy, melting over the minimal mechanical drums, Aidan's dreamy vocals blurred and warped by the swirling waves of fuzz and hiss. A glacial, noise-drenched pop melody is drowned in the dense distortion and caustic buzz, and it starts to sound like a massively distorted Slowdive, all shoegazey and swirled with strange flute-like fluttering, but still extremely heavy, particularly when the riff becomes darker and doomier in the middle, turning into an almost Godflesh-like mecha-groove grinding through the airy feedback and swirling clouds of buzz. Towards the end, this crushing metallic riff is absorbed into a thick soup of blissed out synth, the whole sound boiling down into a smeared expanse of deconstructed rhythms and fractured drum machine pummel, guitars blossoming into formless layers of glorious orchestral drone, until the song finally fades out in a haze of backwards melody and murky buzz.
The third side features the last two tracks, both of which are remix/collaborations between the two bands. The first one has Nadja taking the A Storm Of Light song "Brother" and mutating it into something much closer to Nadja's sound, muting the crushing metallic guitars and pounding tribal rhythms into a tidal surge of low-end rumble and oceanic swells of feedback. At first it's all soft and eerie, the looped guitars washed in reverb and echo, swirling synthesizers, smears of backwards percussion and melody appearing across the blurred expanse of drone, then suddenly an utterly monstrous sludge riff drops in with zero warning, the dirge-metal crush made even heavier by Nadja's layering of additional feedback and synths and oppressive night-sky ambience, the riff and lumbering drums wound into an infinite loop, everything distorted and bathed in effects, and eventually the drums fade off, leaving just the massive swirl of distorted riffage and rumbling feedback floating through space. And on the last track, A Storm Of Light does the reverse, taking the Nadja song and reshaping it into something very different from the original. The riffs and beats are taken apart and restructured into something darker and more electronic sounding, the vocals way up front and much more prominent, the riff barely recognizeable as it's blurred into a creepy ambient buzz, the drums cut up into fragmented beats, all very industrial sounding; when the drums drop out towards the end, it turns into a seriously dark piece of gothic ambience as vocals and looping synth melody and noisy, pneumatic sounds drift skyward, contorting into a weird psychedelic coda at the very end.
And then there is the fourth side, which doesn't have any music; instead, it's an eye-popping laser etching that features an amazingly detailed piece of artwork cut into the vinyl, one of the coolest etchings that I've seen. Both records are pressed on a dark, gorgeous red/grey vinyl coloration, and the whole thing is presented with one of the coolest vinyl packages that I've seen lately, which is no surprise seeing as how this came out on Robotic Empire. The heavy gatefold jacket features amazing full color artwork depicting a bizarre arctic fantasy world of polar bears and snow owls and ancient crumbling monuments, all resting beneath a vast black sky filled with aurora borealis and distant galaxies, and inside there's a full color lyric insert as well as a CD version of the album that contains all of the music. Seriously recommended!

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It's been awhile since we were last graced with new A) TORTURE MECHANISM stuff,with ATM pedla-basher Ryan Copeland and company taking recent detours into space-psyche territory with the Desensitized Robots project, but the wait for TORTURE MECHANISM output was well worth it...these three new tracks are pure psychedelic distortion drone|noise, setting forth wooshing black winds coarsing through deep, steel-plated cavern systems and across oceans teeming with tiny electronic lifeforms. Streams of tar-thick amplifier crunch ooze over a creeped out music-box melody, and loops of electronic distortion break apart and scatter in all directions. The third track, "Tears Of Glass", remains my favorite piece of music from Ryan ever, a radiant pool of crystalline, eternally-delayed guitars that stretches across infinity and swirls around a core of molten distortion, sounding like a lost track from MY BLOODY VALENTINE's Loveless featuring a guest performance from U2's The Edge circa-The Joshua Tree, and mixed by Merzbow. A breathtaking, all-too-short piece of supreme shoegaze drone. A varied but cohesive EP (clocking in at just over 14 minutes in length), with arcane artwork designed by Crucial Blast and packaged in a full color DVD case with painted disc.

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After god knows how long, Baltimore psychedelic noise crew A) Torture Mechanism return with a new recording and a heavier, more freaked out sound that will no doubt surprise anyone that remembers their side of the Merzbow split CD from 1999. Stoner electronics wiz Ryan Copeland is still the driving force behind A)TM, joined here by Alex Strama from MT6 Records/Wire Orchestra on assorted instrumentation and substances, but this self-titled full length (almost an hour in length) is a far more diverse release than anything A) Torture Mechanism has done before. The duo takes the core elements of the snakey free improv and early industrial-meets-harsh-electronics sounds of their early releases and dive straight into a jet-black sea of heavy psychedelic noise and ambient industrial drug metal that often uncovers passages of immense, woozy beauty. An arsenal of instruments is used here, everything from synths, guitars, drums, bass, fender rhodes, acoustic guitars, trunpet, various percussion, miles of effects pedals, tone generators, etc., all incorporated into these thick walls of brain melting sludge and cosmic noise, and the sound here is sometimes inpenetrably dense. Some of these songs take on a sinister dronechug hue, sort of like Skullflower playing the blues before slipping into beastly grooves of Michigan-style noise rock with huge growling loops bearing down on you hungrily. There is also a noticeable shoegazer/space rock influence on some of these jams when the heavily processed and delayed guitars come into view , usually revolving around a downcast melody soaked in effects. There is a ton of massively distorted guitar on here, too, much of which is courtesy of Crucial Blast honcho Adam Wright, blasting out miles of roaring amp drone and worshipping at the altar of Broken Flag, along with some diseased, disembodied Iommi style riffing that crawls out from out of nowhere. The last half of the disc is the heaviest, when the band turns into a charred amalgam of Earth 2's drone metal, Wolf Eyes / Universal Indians style junk creep, and lo-fi Hawkwindian psychedelia. Fucking A. Comes in crusty xeroxed cardstock sleeve.

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Where did this French band come from? All I know aside from the fact the band hails from Metz, France and that their new self-titled album just came out on In The Red, is that these cats just jackhammered my fucking skull with one of the burliest legit noise rock albums of 2008. Ugh! No metallicisms anywhere on this, this self-titled debut is just pure skuzz-rock. A.H. Kraken heave up a brand of brutal, brain-damaged noise-soaked punk that bears comparisons to crucially greasy bands like Flipper, Pussy Galore (another great noise rock band that has been documented on In The Red), Drunks With Guns, Cherubs, and Brainbombs, while staking out their own sound. This record (and CD - this is one of those dual-format releases where you get a CD version that is included with the vinyl) features a stoned looking young femme on the cover sporting a Slipknot shirt and a rifle, and she appears to be locked, loaded, and ready to blow somebody's goddamn head off. The record features eleven songs that do nothing to eleviate any tension you might be feeling...this music is ugly as fuck, with atonal riffs played over and over again by two guitar players that do not sound like they are using any kind of standard tuning, a bassist that plunks out fat basslines that really don't much to do with whatever songs the rest of the band is playing, which actually gives some of these jams a weird, jazzy feel, and the drummer is the most rock solid part, bashing out simple but bludgeoning beats that firmly anchor the skronky, atonal tunes and busting out some clattery, clanging junkyard percussion that on a couple of songs turns into a Pussy Galore/No Wave type cacophony that is pretty sweet. The vocals are total slop, a male voice that screeches, wails, squeals, all in French of course. I have no idea what he's bugging out about, but with songs called "Kevin Costner Est Un Acteur Americain" and "Drop Sex", I'll let my imagination run wild, thank you very much. Yeah, if you love noise rock, Brainbombs, US Maple, Pussy Galore, Drunks With Guns, Flipper and similiarly brain damaged rock as much as I do, you'll love this record. Recommended!
Track Samples:
Sample : Axe vertical
Sample : Cette fille est a genoux
Sample : De Type caucasien

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In my eternal quest for total heaviness, I'm frequently brought back to the realm of the drone, that realm where tones and sounds are stretched out into infinity (or as close to infinity as an LP, CD, or cassette will permit...) and are transmuted into pure sound. And there surfaces some sublime sonic heaviness with those who craft the drone, from Phil Niblock's thick washes of minimalist throb all the way to the metallic sub-harmonic drift of Sunn O))), Black Boned Angel, and early Earth. It's in between these reference points that I often stumble across some of the coolest drone music out there, like as with this recent album from New Zealand's Anthony Milton. Some of you might know Milton from his Mrytu! project, which has released a couple of rad, ritualistic black-drone-sludge titles that we've been carrying. But Anthony Milton is probably more widely known for his exquisite drone compositions, which is the setting that we find him in with Orla. The story behind this album is this: Milton was given an Orla reed organ from a friend who picked it up at a garage sale, and after receiving some influence from Charlamagne Palestine's concepts of the religious quality of drone music, took it upon himself to experiment with the Orla organ as the predominant sound source. The result is this amazing album that the Finnish label Ikuisuus just released not too long ago, and it features five tracks of beautiful, entrancing drones that are accompanied only by the occasional recording of rain or other field recording. Each peice ranges from the sublime to the crushing - "As the Rain Comes Down" opens the disc with a radiant series of spiralling chord drones before moving into the subsonic tectonic rumbling and Sunroof-ish overtones of "Sky Voltage" and "Ribscraper", while the final track "Chamber Lull" features only a calm, drifting hum over which Milton plucks and bows away at the spring pegs of the organ keys. At it's loudest and heaviest, Orla achieves the ecstatic buzz of some of Sunn O))) and Earth's most abstract drifts, but actually comes closer to the blown out minimalist fuzzslabs of Growing and Growing side-project Total Life. A beautiful, mind erasing drone album, lavishly packaged in an 8-panel gatefold digipack printed in gold, black, and grey inks, with mysterious images of the organ's interior workings.
Track Samples:
Sample : Ribscraper
Sample : Sky Voltage

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Finland has given us plenty of fucked up black metal bands; Beherit, Impaled Nazarene, Clandestine Blaze, Wyrd, and Trollheim's Grott all spring to mind. It seems to me that the Finnish metal scene is a fertile environment for weird, punky blackness in particular, but while the debut album from Aanal Beehemoth straddles both the blasted catharsis of punk and the negation and atavism of black metal, Forest Paranoid is in it's own weird world, a freakish splooge of psychedelic necropunk that drips filth and junkie sweat from their reverb-soaked jams.
The whole album is whacked out, from the photos of members Deathly Fightor and Crazy Bomber in over-the-top corpse paint and their faces contorted into gruesome kabuki-like grimaces, smoking joints and shooting junk, to their band name (what the fuck does Aanal Beehemoth even mean?), but it's their music that is really frying my brain. A grotty sort of garage punk, fast and loose and catchy as hell, but filtered through utterly weirdo black metal with the vocals jammed through a bunch of trippy effects. Take a look at the influences that the band lists on their MySpace page - Hellhammer, early 80's Finnish punks Kaaos, the outsider garage rock of The Shaggs, Gism, Elvis, and Black Flag...that might give you an idea of what's festering on this album.
The album was recorded on a 4-track, and the raw production fits these damaged blackpunk anthems perfectly; it feels like yer hearing the band jamming at full force down in some slime-covered dungeon, grinding out their three minute buzzsaw anthems in abandon, slinging crazy acid-guitar solos, dreamy organ freakouts that sound like the band dragged a beat up old Hammond into the middle of their cave, mutant blasts of ghostly ambience and electronic effects, and best of all, surprising bits of pretty psychedelic melody and trippy guitar lines that show up in almost every song. Imagine if you took a primal 60's garage punk outfit like the Stooges, or the Sonics, or the MC5, ripped them out of their timeline and transported them to a snowy Scandanavian forest circa now, and left 'em to their own devices with only a crate of Kossu and copies of Darkthrone's Plaguewielder, GISM's Detestation and Celtic Frost's Morbid Angels to guide them through the void. It fits right in on Suffering Jesus alongside the psychedelic 70's rock/black metal of Tjolgtjar, but where Tjolgtjar is deadly serious with his weirdo occultic themes and wonky black-acid-metal, the tongues of the Aanal Beehemoth is firmly planted in it's collective cheek, as evidenced by songs like "From Aanal With Love" and "Loaded Head Empty Veins". Regardless, this freaking rocks.
Track Samples:
Sample : Nuclear Hell
Sample : Penetrator
Sample : Witch Hunt

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This is by far the weirdest thing we’ve heard from the up and coming Firedoom label (an offshoot of Finland’s Firebox Records). Aarni’s art-damaged, lo-fi avant-doom can only barely be described as “metal”, as these space cadets formulate a psychedelic and thoroughly weird doom/psych/folk mutation with ample amounts of acoustic instrumentals and ambient keyboards floating around a bizarre jazzy atmosphere that’s pretty much unlike anything I’ve ever heard, a bizarre brand of spacey n’ pastoral instrumental folk with lots of flute and other “woodsy” instruments, with weirdly delicate, shambling doom metal dirges and eerie soundscapes mixed in with a singer who sounds sort of like a narcoleptic Michael Gira. Imagine the folksy doom of Agalloch mixed with drug-addled synth ambience and the gloomy metal of Solstice and Amorphis. Or Skepticism meeting Deinonychus at a folk/prog festival. Or early My Dying Bride if they were a psych-folk/noise group with Doors-style hammond keyboards. Or Mr. Bungle’s LSD-addled, Lovecraft-obsessed little brother playing Sisters Of Mercy and Katatonia and Jethro Tull covers all at the same time while busting out ridiculous Joe Satriani-style power metal leads. It’s that fucked. There are also parts that remind me of Maudlin Of The Well, but this is far more lysergic than that outfit ever was. Bathos delivers nine tracks in 65 minutes, and the songs flow in and out of each other with little in the way of traditional rock structure, making this album more of a single organic piece of music that has been separated into chapters. Vocals, when they appear (the bulk of the album is instrumental) range from baritone chanting, clean crooning and strange robotic moaning, and occasional death roars or blackened rasps, and the lyrics are in various languages (Finnish of course, but also French, English, Latin, Swedish, and even ancient Egyptian! ), which further amplifies the dreamlike weirdness of the album. Despite all of these different elements being combined together, the arrangements and instrumentation are quite spare and efficient, a sort of futuristic, quasi-post-rock doomjazzfolk mutation….pretty otherworldly-sounding stuff. There’s additional bonus tracks from their 2001 demo that includes an off-the-wall cover of Slayer’s “Dead Skin Mask”. Weird stuff.

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Quite possibly the weirdest Finnish "doom" band ever, Aarni returns with their second album of bizarre space-cadet art metal; as always, Aarni's music is almost impossible to nail down. When we listed their last album Bathos a few years ago, I called them "art-damaged, lo-fi avant-doom", and that still holds true for the most part, except with this new album Aarni are rocking a much better production, it's heavier and more full sounding than before, and the band has moved even further away from what you would normally recognize as "doom metal".
Just looking at the album cover and going through the booklet for Tohcoth tells you that this is weird shit. The album cover is a freaked out collage of a cartoonish Lovecraftian octopoid monster wreaking havoc in a huge crowd of people while a tower hovers in midair nearby. The rest of the packaging has cartoon artwork of the band depicting them as weird Vedic multi-armed gods, keytar-playing Victorian dandies and, um, an old lady with hair curlers holding a rolling pin as she wafts out of a crock pot like some kind of genie? And despite listing a full band lineup in the booklet (with the "members" Comte de Saint-Germain, Doomintroll, and Mrs. Palm all included in the credits), I'm pretty sure that Aarni is really just a one-man band, the project of one Master Warjomaa, who also plays in the much less bizarre doom band Umbra Nihil. In Aarni though, Master Warjomaa plays all of the instruments and handles all of the vocals except for the majority of the drumming, and Tohcoth continues his fascination with stitching together old school deathdoom a la My Dying Bride or Paradise Lost with mutant jazz, demented 70's prog rock and krautrock with textured electronic noise and Aleister Crowley samples into a set of seriously fucking weird songs that are obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. The heavier stuff sounds like a weird bedroom version of old school deathdoom, all plodding guitars and glacial tempos but played over a chintzy drum machine, with the infrequent deathgrunt belted out over top. But the doomy parts are only a small part of this album; the rest of Tohcoth includes some loosely played Pink Floyd -inspired rock with deep, uber-dramatic and Gothy baritone singing that reminds me of Michael Gira from Swans, trippy blackened prog-metal that is kind of like hearing Agalloch on peyote buttons, trumpets, speed metal riffs, clean folk guitars, Caribbean rhythms, lots of awesome 70's style Moog synths beamed straight off of Emerson Lake And Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery and Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans...man, this whole album sounds like it might have started off as crushing Euro doom metal, but somehow fell into a timewarp and was zapped back to the early 70's where it was discovered by a bunch of shaggy haired prog rockers and rewritten/reshaped into an overblown, overindulgent Lovecraft-obsessed progressive rock epic, but then got zapped back to the present day with it's DNA all scrambled, and became this. It's pretty whacked out. Black Sabbath, Camel, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Kayo Dot, Opeth, RObert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Hakim Bey, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Salvidor Dali, David Lynch, Monty Pythons Flying Circus, David Cronenberg, Patrick McGoohan...."
Patrick McGoohan? The British character actor from the cult 60's series The Prisoner? What the hell. It's just one more strange non sequitur in an album that's freakin' filled with them. Aarni's brain-damaged, prog overloaded is pretty genius though. A wonky mix of epic 70's progressive rock, Skepticism, King Crimson, Agalloch, My Dying Bride, Hawkwind, Candlemass, folk metal, the dark electro-gloom-pop of Beyond Dawn, and Captain Beefheart? It's that weird. And awesome. Awesomely weird.
Track Samples:
Sample : Chapel Perilous
Sample : Iku-Turso
Sample : The Hieroglyph

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ABANDON   In Reality We Suffer   CD   (Thrash And Burn)    12.98

In Reality We Suffer IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

This awesome blast of downbeat, anguished, progressive mega-sludge was released back in 2004 and has been issued through several different labels, but I only recently found out about Abandon via the Finnish version of their unstoppable In Reality We Suffer. This is seriously heavy stuff...72 minutes of grueling ultra DOOM that flows like a black tar river, pure negativity combining the massiveness of Neurosis circa Through Silver In Blood with the raw as hell, vomitous dirge of Grief and occasionally shot through with these strange, clean, vaguely post-rock/lounge jazz guitar chords that hover between the band's rumbling sludge reverberations. Bleak dissonant chords clash over droning, gooey basslines and crushing caveman drumming; the band's two headed throat spits out contrasting shades of vocal horror over winding, labyrinthine riffs that creep at a glacial rate. This oozes bleak, pitch black sludge that's as heavy as fellow plate shifters Corrupted, Khanate, Warhorse, Old Man Gloom, Melvins, Godflesh, and Buried At Sea. In Reality We Suffer was released through Earache Records/Codebreaker in the UK and the Us, but this is the original Scandinavian version, packaged in a neat glossy digisleeve style wallet with an eight-page full color booklet stapled to the inside so the entire sleeve opens up like a small book, illustrated with hellish, hand drawn artwork. Released in an edition of 500.

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ABANDONED HEARTS CLUB   The Initial Confessions Of...   CD   (Init)    4.98

This Canadian band came out of nowhere a couple of years ago, dropped a handful of amazing, fucked-up grind/metal jams on us that combined ultra heaviness with wild electronic fuckery, made a small appearance on Hydra Head, subsequently got signed by Abacus Records, and then seemed to drop right back off of the face of the planet. What in the hell happened? These guys were pretty awesome, really. Featuring members of New Day Rising and Spread The Disease, their four song debut on Init came with supremely weird artwork from Jeremy Wabiszczewicz of Daughters/Monsters In Disguise design, and the tunes are a too-brief eruption of intelligent, adventurous grind that fell somewhere in between an even heavier Botch, the first Daughters EP gone space-prog, and a towering heap of sound generators spitting out trippy computer noise. And man, is this stuff HEAVY. The riffing is pretty whack, going from brutal metal chugging to slippery fretboard freakouts and full blown guitar noise, and the vocals sound alot like Spread The Disease, an awesome crusty rasp that sounds fucking insane. Crushing, spacey, blasting, psychedelic...these guys would have been HUGE if they hadn't broken up. Amazing stuff. We've got this EP on both CD and 7", and both are fantastic looking objects that Init went all-out for; the CD is a clear fan-disc job with a big brain screened onto the disc, and the 7" is an awesome looking three-color die-cut cover with screen printed artwork.
Track Samples:
Sample : The Abstraction of Form and Function
Sample : The Failure a Posteriori

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