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!
One of the craziest grindcore albums ever, !T.O.O.H.!'s third album �d A Trest received the vinyl treatment last year courtesy of American avant-garde label Cylindrical Habitat Modules. We've finally gotten this cult classic in stock, on black vinyl limited to five hundred copies, with completely different (and much more appropriate, in my opinion) album artwork. Here's my original review of the CD version of the album that was released by the now-defunct avant-metal label Elitist (which we still have in stock, as well)...
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!
Another denizen of the strange, impossible-to-pin-down electro/goth scene surrounding the Disaro label that has been tagged as "witch house", //TENSE//, like many of the bands that we've heard from this label (Modern Witch, Fostercare, The Present Moment) beams a skewed vision of 80s synth pop through a cracked and distorted lens marked with occult sigils. In this case, it's a dark brooding take on the EBM vibes of Front Line Assembly and Twitch-era Ministry that we hear creeping out of the Houston duo on Consume, their killer new EP of crepuscular industrial synthpop that stands out from much of the weirder, more fractured stuff on the label. This disc fixes our urge for some classic sounding dark industrial synth hookage quite nicely, and the cold, sterile production sounds like something Adrian Sherwood would have cooked up. The vocals are delivered in a weird affected British accent over pounding drum machines, deep synth bass and sinister keyboards, blasting out orchestral walls of sound, or crawling back into the throbbing malevolence of "TV Teach Me". There's a warped robotic EBM delirium that infects "Cash In (Night Version)", and the killer booming industrial breakbeat and space-funk keyboards on "Wasted Flesh" even remind us of Tackhead a little. "End Crawl" layers dreamlike sheets of synthesizer chaos and pulsating electronic darkness over a spare kick drum beat, and gets into seriously warped and nightmarish territory, which carries into that last couple of tracks ("Versus Man", "Between The Strike"). The disc delivers eight tracks of this mysterious nocturnal throb, great stuff for fans of classic EBM-tinged industrial rock who are down for a strange, occult-influenced take on the sound. Limited to one hundred hand-numbered copies.
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.
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.
If you're hip to the Italian label Aeternitas Tenebrarum Music Foundation, then you're probably a fan of the more experimental and progressive fringes of European black metal, something the label has been focused on from early on. While this 2010 debut from 11 As In Adversaries is further removed from black metal than most of the bands on the label, it's easy to see why it found a home here alongside the likes of Visthia, Tal'set, Disiplin and Semen Datura. Featuring two of the members of the French black metal cult Glorior Belli and apparently originally intended for that band until they realized that it would be better served by releasing it under a completely different band name, 11 As In Adversaries infuses a bit of BM influence into its angular heavy prog, though those black metal elements are generally petty subtle, taking form as violent blastbeat drumming and bits of evil, metallic riffing. What 11 As In Adversaries really sound like is a sinister, slightly blackened math-metal outfit, with lots of spiky, spidery guitar work and passionate sung/yowled vocals, off-kilter rock guitar leads, and winding complex songwriting.
There's a discordance and off-kilter quality to the riffs that'll remind you of Voivod's later work cica Angel Rat/The Outer Limits, but I also hear the sound of 90's metallic post-hardcore in here as well, faint traces of Quicksand and (especially) Iceburn in the chunky melodic riffs and "rockier" moments. But like the newer Glorior Belli stuff, this stuff really swings, fusing together blazing psychedelic guitar shred and some huge jagged riffs and smatterings of jazziness in the rhythm section. Some other tracks delve into experimental electronic music ("A Stealthy Freedom"), and there's a guest appearance from Shining front man Kvarforth, who lends his gnarled, deranged croon to "The Night Scalp Challenger". Most of this sounds to me like post-hardcore filtered through the blackened weirdness of Ved Buens Ende though, especially on the catchy, ferocious closer "Verses From Which To Whirl" where the lush guitar-heavy sound is fused to killer blackened riffs and the most aggro drumming on the album that finally spins out into a cyclone of blastbeats towards the end.
Definitely something different from the ATMF camp, but not without it's moments of savagery that should appeal to fans of the label's more left-field offerings, as well as those digging the recent spate of post-hardcore/black metal
influenced bands like Deafheaven and Celeste.
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!
Strictly limited to a one-time run of fifty cassettes, the second in 13th Apostle's conceptual trilogy of releases materializes here in an electrocuting shock of existential horror, following the ferocious interrogation of power electronics and Broken Flag-influenced extremity of 2022's Post Annihilism. Presented with a suitably minimalist, appropriately grotesque visual aesthetic, Swallow The Void And Erase Your Soul features four tracks that stream through your neurons like a wave of barbed wire and carbonized human remains, a sustained scream of world-weary loathing and spiritual exhaustion.
It's a goddamn nightmare.
It's also a distinct shift from the piercing onslaught of extreme power electronics of the first tape. Swallow The Void... erupts with massive bomb-blast heaviosity and ultra-distorted power that points towards the most putrid and pungent depths of death industrial. The opening track "N.U.I. (Infinite Ego Death Cell)" promptly batters the listener with steady, sinister blasts of low-end electronic crush as more complex rhythms emerge, joined by gnarly, teeth-gnashing vocals. An atmosphere of pure doom and desolation. Shifting between spare concussive dread and hypnotic evil. Treated samples of cosmic horror are woven into the rotting fabric of 13th Apostle's sound, and mutates into something more abrasive and caustic as it segues into the skull-drill electronic skree of "Ant In The Afterbirth". A war-scape of unyielding bass-blast, corrosive distortion, and increasingly chaotic death industrial.
The other half instantly picks back up as the title track drops you into a pitch-black abattoir of swirling ambient filth and metallic scrape, followed by a persistent, insanely distorted high-voltage deathdrone. Crackling electricity whips and dances through the air, distant sirens howl mindlessly in the depths. The sound shifts beneath the serrated, buzzing synth-drone, a vast yawning maw of devouring blackness slowly opening beneath your feet as 13th Apostle increases the violence of the churn. Everything drops out as horrifying screams explode from nowhere, opening the door to the hideous sampled monologue that possesses "At Least You Thought Of Me". Recollections of depravity and desecration drift like a foul fog across deep, tectonic pulsations; while the closing piece at first feels less frenzied than what came previously, it crawls deeper under your subcutaneous layer than anything else on this tape. It's a singular experience; Swallow sometimes broaches the unforgiving and explicit viciousness of Slogun and Genocide Organ, at other moments touching on the rot and desiccation of Atrax Morgue and Slaughter Productions, but it is ultimately much, much more intimate. It sits close to you. Whispering in your ear as the stench of the electronic carnage slowly begins to burn away. Leaving you with nothing.
Total hell.
Now available in a limited edition 180 gram vinyl release, limited to 500 copies and packaged with an MP3 download card/code for the entire album.
The early 16 albums have been long overdue for reissue. With the demise of their longtime label Theologian/Pessimiser Records earlier this past decade, most of the 16 catalog became increasingly hard to track down, and their Bacteria Sour releases were even more rare and sought after. Now with a new album Bridges To Burn out on new label Relapse, a reissue campaign is underway to make these albums available once again, remastered and with all new album layouts, starting with their most crucial discs, 1993's Curves That Kick and 1996's Drop Out. Both of these discs are absolutely essential for anyone into the grinding, stop-and-go sludge rock of 16, and either one is a perfect starting point for anybody that's not yet familiar with their brand of sledgehammer heaviness.
Originally released on Pushead's Bacteria Sour label, Curves That Kick was the band's debut album, a crushing twelve-song beating that introduced their extremely pissed-off, negative, groove-heavy metallic rock to the underground. With a sound that essentially combined the punishing heaviness of the Melvins with gnarled hardcore punk and the bludgeoning percussive riffs of Strap It On-era Helmet, the LA band made a name for themselves pretty quickly within the extreme hardcore/grind/metal scene in southern California, aided in part by their connection to Pushead and his boutique label. Their minimalist stop-and-go attack is mixed with bursts of thrashy speed on tracks like "Nova" and the very Black Flag-ish "Sedatives", but most of Curves That Kick smashes you over the head with relentless, discordantly noisy riffs played in a crushing mechanical 4/4 groove. Sludgy, brutal and metallic, 16 were also skilled in writing fucking AWESOME riffs, and this album (along with Drop Out) is loaded with 'em, massive catchy riffs that are impossible to resist, any of these songs could have been huge hitys with the alt-metal crowd in the early 90's. To this day, 16 were one of the few bands to find the perfect middle ground between the nihilistic sludge of bands like Buzzoven and Eyehategod, and the aggressive noise rock of the Amphetamine Reptile label.
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.
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.
The early 16 albums have been long overdue for reissue. With the demise of their longtime label Theologian/Pessimiser Records earlier this past decade, most of the 16 catalog became increasingly hard to track down, and their Bacteria Sour releases were even rarer and more sought after. Now with a new album Bridges To Burn out on new label Relapse, a reissue campaign is underway to make these albums available once again, re-mastered and with all new album layouts, starting with their most crucial discs, 1993's Curves That Kick and 1996's Drop Out. Both of these discs are absolutely essential for anyone into the grinding, stop-and-go sludge rock of 16, and either one is a perfect starting point for anybody that's not yet familiar with their brand of sledgehammer heaviness.
Ask a fan what their favorite 16 album is, and most likely they'll say Drop Out. The second album from the LA sludge metallers arguably remains their strongest work, with some of the catchiest, most crushing riffs and songs that the band ever wrote. Their sound and delivery was pretty fucking aggro on Curves The Kick, but this time around, things were way more pissed and negative, pent-up frustration and disillusionment with life that explodes across the ten songs in a murderous rage, strapped down to monstrous bass-driven grooves and crushing stop/start riffing. Their stripped-down, discordant mix of early Helmet, Melvins sludge and violent hardcore is sharpened to a lethal edge here, opening with the brutal chug of "Trigger Happy", then moves through seething sludge ("Pumpfake"), noisy syncopated post-hardcore ("Tocohara"), churning stop-on-a-dime sludge rock ("Sniper"), and minute-long hardcore thrash ferocity that borders on power violence ("Fucked For Life"). Everything is way darker than their debut, uglier, the lyrics steeped in themes of betrayal, self-loathing and despair, but the songs are also laced with subtle guitar and vocal effects that add a newfound psychedelic feel to 16's down tuned throb. Highly recommended - this is the album to start with if you want to get in 16!
The early 16 albums have been long overdue for reissue. With the demise of their longtime label Theologian/Pessimiser Records earlier this past decade, most of the 16 catalog became increasingly hard to track down, and their Bacteria Sour releases were even more rare and sought after. Now with a new album Bridges To Burn out on new label Relapse, a reissue campaign is underway to make these albums available once again, remastered and with all new album layouts, starting with their most crucial discs, 1993's Curves That Kick and 1996's Drop Out. Both of these discs are absolutely essential for anyone into the grinding, stop-and-go sludge rock of 16, and either one is a perfect starting point for anybody that's not yet familiar with their brand of sledgehammer heaviness.
Originally released on Pushead's Bacteria Sour label, Curves That Kick was the band's debut album, a crushing twelve-song beating that introduced their extremely pissed-off, negative, groove-heavy metallic rock to the underground. With a sound that essentially combined the punishing heaviness of the Melvins with gnarled hardcore punk and the bludgeoning percussive riffs of Strap It On-era Helmet, the LA band made a name for themselves pretty quickly within the extreme hardcore/grind/metal scene in southern California, aided in part by their connection to Pushead and his boutique label. Their minimalist stop-and-go attack is mixed with bursts of thrashy speed on tracks like "Nova" and the very Black Flag-ish "Sedatives", but most of Curves That Kick smashes you over the head with relentless, discordantly noisy riffs played in a crushing mechanical 4/4 groove. Sludgy, brutal and metallic, 16 were also skilled in writing fucking AWESOME riffs, and this album (along with Drop Out) is loaded with 'em, massive catchy riffs that are impossible to resist, any of these songs could have been huge hitys with the alt-metal crowd in the early 90's. To this day, 16 were one of the few bands to find the perfect middle ground between the nihilistic sludge of bands like Buzzoven and Eyehategod, and the aggressive noise rock of the Amphetamine Reptile label.
A new dose of extreme nihilistic sludge from 16! After a long hiatus (its been more than five years since their last album), the mighty 16 are back and totally on fire with their first new album for Relapse, Bridges To Burn, and from the first bludgeoning chords of "Throw In The Towel" it's clear that time sure hasn't softened any of their bitterness or murderous scorn. The SoCal sludge metallers deliver twelve new tracks of raging stop/start bass-heavy metallic noise rock that picks up where their last album (2002's Zoloft Smile) left off, matching catchy, vertebrae-wrecking hooks to simple, pummeling sludgy riffage and MASSIVE rhythmic chug (attributable to drummer Jason Corley, who was at one point played in C-Blast faves Fistula), fusing together the low-slung rumble of Melvins, the staccato riffing of Helmet, the angular swagger and churn of Jesus Lizard, and the occasional whiskey-soaked Eyehategod-esque swamp groove, combined with those furiously misanthropic and nihilistic lyrics and attitude that has always made this band one of the most pissed off outfits in the US metal underground. If there's anything that distinguishes Bridges To Burn from the previous albums, it's the fucking huge production that this album has, making it their heaviest album, in my opinion. The metallic side of their sound is heavier than ever too, with songs like "Skin And Bones" and "So Broken Down" dropping chunky thrash metal chug into the monstrous mid-tempo groove, and "Me & My Shadow" pounds away at a swampy Sabbathoid dirge that builds into a massive down tuned mechanical stomp that's one of the band's more doomed moments. Absolutely killer artwork from Orion Landau, too. Bridges is as crushingly cathartic as anything in 16's long and storied catalog.
Although a remastered and repackaged new version of Curves That Kick was reissued earlier this year on Relapse Records, I couldn't pass up grabbing these stray copies of the original Bacteria Sour Cd when one of our suppliers dug some up during one of their warehouse cleanings. The Bacteria Sour disc has been out of print for ages, and while the Relapse reissue does boast a much better (and heavier) mastering job, the new version doesn't have the original Pushead album artwork, presumably due to licensing/rights issues. Which makes this original release of interest to Pushead collectors and 16 uber-fanatics. We have a very, very limited number of these Bacteria Sour discs in stock, less than six, and we'll most likely never have these available in the shop again.
Originally released on Pushead's Bacteria Sour label, Curves That Kick was the band's debut album, a crushing twelve-song beating that introduced their extremely pissed-off, negative, groove-heavy metallic rock to the underground. With a sound that essentially combined the punishing heaviness of the Melvins with gnarled hardcore punk and the bludgeoning percussive riffs of Strap It On-era Helmet, the LA band made a name for themselves pretty quickly within the extreme hardcore/grind/metal scene in southern California, aided in part by their connection to Pushead and his boutique label. Their minimalist stop-and-go attack is mixed with bursts of thrashy speed on tracks like "Nova" and the very Black Flag-ish "Sedatives", but most of Curves That Kick smashes you over the head with relentless, discordantly noisy riffs played in a crushing mechanical 4/4 groove. Sludgy, brutal and metallic, 16 were also skilled in writing fucking AWESOME riffs, and this album (along with Drop Out) is loaded with 'em, massive catchy riffs that are impossible to resist, any of these songs could have been huge hitys with the alt-metal crowd in the early 90's. To this day, 16 were one of the few bands to find the perfect middle ground between the nihilistic sludge of bands like Buzzoven and Eyehategod, and the aggressive noise rock of the Amphetamine Reptile label.
Along with the handful of copies of the original out-of-print Curves That Kick cd on Bacteria Sour that we just obtained through one of our suppliers while they were cleaning out their warehouse, we also picked up an unearthed stack of the likewise long out-of-print Tocohara 7" that 16 released on Bacteria Sour in 1994. This extremely hard to find 7" Ep features two songs from the Cali sludge rockers, the title track "Tocohara" and their pummeling, percussive downer anthem "16". Both of these songs later appeared in re-recorded versions on the legendary Drop Out album, but here sound a little quicker, a little more punchy, each one a lunging attack of sludgy concussive hardcore aggro and grooving low-end battery, which I've described in the past as a perfect combination of the Melvins's detuned lumber and the stop-and-go percussive aggression of early Helmet. A killer set of early 16 jams that come in a full color sleeve designed by Bacteria Sour label boss Pushead. On black vinyl.
Now available on limited edition 180 gram vinyl!
The early 16 albums have been long overdue for reissue. With the demise of their longtime label Theologian/Pessimiser Records earlier this past decade, most of the 16 catalog became increasingly hard to track down, and their Bacteria Sour releases were even rarer and more sought after. Now with a new album Bridges To Burn out on new label Relapse, a reissue campaign is underway to make these albums available once again, re-mastered and with all new album layouts, starting with their most crucial discs, 1993's Curves That Kick and 1996's Drop Out. Both of these discs are absolutely essential for anyone into the grinding, stop-and-go sludge rock of 16, and either one is a perfect starting point for anybody that's not yet familiar with their brand of sledgehammer heaviness.
Ask a fan what their favorite 16 album is, and most likely they'll say Drop Out. The second album from the LA sludge metallers arguably remains their strongest work, with some of the catchiest, most crushing riffs and songs that the band ever wrote. Their sound and delivery was pretty fucking aggro on Curves The Kick, but this time around, things were way more pissed and negative, pent-up frustration and disillusionment with life that explodes across the ten songs in a murderous rage, strapped down to monstrous bass-driven grooves and crushing stop/start riffing. Their stripped-down, discordant mix of early Helmet, Melvins sludge and violent hardcore is sharpened to a lethal edge here, opening with the brutal chug of "Trigger Happy", then moves through seething sludge ("Pumpfake"), noisy syncopated post-hardcore ("Tocohara"), churning stop-on-a-dime sludge rock ("Sniper"), and minute-long hardcore thrash ferocity that borders on power violence ("Fucked For Life"). Everything is way darker than their debut, uglier, the lyrics steeped in themes of betrayal, self-loathing and despair, but the songs are also laced with subtle guitar and vocal effects that add a newfound psychedelic feel to 16's down tuned throb. Highly recommended - this is the album to start with if you want to get in 16!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This new duo featuring Ryan Huber of Inam Records / Sujo / Olekranon / Vopat is easily the darkest thing that I've heard from him, a blackened noise outfit that has already released a couple of super-limited Cdr titles that are already long out of print. Nine Angles is as bleak and cancerous sounding as any of the previous 303 Committee recordings I've heard, a fusion of haunting minimal soundscapes formed out of field recordings and subdued synthesizer drones, and more intensive ambient workouts that center around the use of roaring low-end keyboard drones, waves of crushing over-modulated distortion, and simple creepy melodies that spin out of the darkness, short loops of minor-key creep that soar over the gleaming twilight hum of the synths and undercurrents of crackling black electricity like stray bits of a black metal song intro that has been torn from it's moorings. Each of these four lengthy tracks slowly build into walls of blown-out sound, starting with clusters of melodious drone but gradually spreading outward into heavier, more distorted plumes of sound, somewhere in between Tim Hecker at his most apocalyptic and Theologian at his most mournful as they offer up shimmering nebulae of discordant electronic notes within storms of crushing black static. It's the final track "Bride of the south" where the field recordings fully come into play, the thirteen minute piece constructed out of mysterious sound events and environmental noises, distant roaring synthdrones and swirling clouds of low-fi grit, a sprawling dark ambient soundscape that is both menacing and starkly beautiful, it's gorgeous, grainy drift-visions draped in dead-grey Satanic imagery. Fantastic stuff. Like everything released through Huber's Inam imprint, Nine Angles is released in a tiny edition of just thirty-three hand-numbered copies, and comes in a textured sleeve with a vellum insert.
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.
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.
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!
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.
At long last, we've got the 324 back catalog on Japanese label HG Fact back in stock. Due to the crazy upward rise of the yen, these titles are more expensive now than the last time that we had them in stock, and it also looks like we're one of the only U.S. shops that have these on the shelves right now.
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.
At long last, we've got the 324 back catalog on Japanese label HG Fact back in stock. Due to the crazy upward rise of the yen, these titles are more expensive now than the last time that we had them in stock, and it also looks like we're one of the only U.S. shops that have these on the shelves right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Fuckin' ass-crushin' experimental Russian deathgrind nedriness from a band that I've been quietly obsessed with for nearly a decade. Their releases prior to 2023's Yantra Creating are a little tough to come by, being released on small, obscure Slavic labels for the most part. But now signed to Willowtip, these diabolical death-warpers are finally getting more of the visibility they deserve, and in this renaissance period of "weird death metal", 7 H. Target are king. They have the proper recipe : a balance between bizarre, otherworldly ambience and solid, crushing riff / groove structures, constant flights of imaginative musicianship and eldritch weirdness cast against a propensity for gargantuan tempo changes and riff-shifts that make me do the caveman-stomp all over my house. Yes, this seven-song album is a goddamn slam-salad, but behind every pulverizing breakdown and twisted riff, these guys bathe their music in a unique and anomalous atmosphere that you only get with the bizarrely named 7 H. Target (still working on figuring out what that band name references). But it's not riff mess like so many "tech" deathgrind outfits - the music here is very deliberate and diamond-sharp, impeccable songwriting that brings all of their strange elements together into a panoramic totality. Strange elements? Oh yeah. The band members themselves call this stuff “innovative psychotropic brutal death", and that pretty much nails it.
The music is ultra-violent, crazed, juiced on transcendent Tantric mysticism, Vedic cosmology and esoteric warfare, blending visions of apocalyptic events both past and future. Gossamer digital ambience surges into a cyclone of jagged riffing, discordant chords, complex time changes and rapid-fire shifts in tempo and intensity, the mad rush of opening song "Aghori" thrusting you headfirst into a massive meat grinder of off-the-wall deathgrind structures. But as mentioned before, 7 H. Target's dark magic is in part the way that these three guys (and collaborative cohorts) constantly tighten the rope and suddenly snap this blasting, squealing, seemingly disordered vortex into a demolishing breakdown groove or sludgy hook that all of a sudden makes what you are listening to jarringly catchy and contagious. There are interesting manipulations of Katalepsy front man Igor Filimontsev's vocals and the varied electronic elements, taking Igor's emetic, gut-busting roar and turning it inside out, creating strange fades and dropouts that along with the sleek ambient textures and electronic elements make all of this sound alien and inhuman. Nutso bass runs, bits of fusiony interstitial guitar stuff, some Spheres-era Pestilence touches, constant blasts of baffling shred, nuanced ambient layering, weird synth noises, there's a lot of stuff going on in each song alongside the signature pinging snare drum and wild polyrhythmic percussion, pig-squeal pinch harmonics and pukeoid gutturals. They've made a standout synthesis of over-the-top tech-death, offbeat and progressive-sounding spacey experimentation, and violence-provoking deathcore here.
The stuff that seems to divide some fans is the heavy presence of Indian folk and classical music elements, which are in keeping with their Vedic apocalypse concept. The third song "Shiva Yajur Mantra" in particular sticks out, fusing traditional Indian mridangam percussion, the hand-cymbal-like karatels and Maria Lutta's exotic Sanskrit singing around a background of choppy, off-kilter instrumental death metal. A kind of cybernetic bhajan devotional that transports the album to another plane entirely. Lutta appears later in the album on apex moment "Fire And Places For His Work", where the traditional Hindustani influences and folk-singing styles merge surprisingly well with the band's gruesome tech-slam overload. And closer "Meditation" lays out one final hyperblast assault before dissolving into a wash of dreamlike, gorgeous synth ambience that flows out into the ether. It all feels deeply alien.
Can't stop listening to this disc. The "flow" is fantastic. If there is a stand-out song on Yantra, it's right towards the end with that track "Fire And Places For His Work". Everything has built up to the crazed fusion explosion that goes supernova. This thing fires off synaptic connections I didn't know I had. For anyone hooked on the way-out experimentation and textural weirdness of bands like Wormed, Defeated Sanity, the warped alien-influenced prog-slam of Germany's Maximize Bestiality, those Czech mutants like !T.O.O.H.! and Lykathea Aflame, even certain elements of Discordance Axis, this album is an ideal portal to the gonzo techgrind weirdness that is 7 H. Target. Very recommended, guys.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Still don't know much about A Black People, the rather mysterious death rock/post punk outfit on Death Agonies And Screams who've returned here with their second cassette release; the band has kept all information regarding their lineup and location a secret thus far, though it's probably a safe bet that the key players are the same folks behind the label. Over the course of these two mini-albums (always manifesting physically on cassette only, at least so far), A Black People has become one of my favorite bands in this current death rock/dark post-punk resurgence that's been going on for awhile now, pursuing a more menacing vibe and aggressive attitude that's naturally right up my alley.
Issued by Death Agonies in a super-limited edition of just one hundred copies like its predecessor, Visceral Realists features six new songs that continue with the somewhat blown-out, fairly morbid post-punk of the first tape, just as dark and infectious as the earlier stuff, but also feeling a little less ragged around the edges than the previous release, with a slightly more polished sound. Still fantastic stuff, though; you've got the requisite Christian Death and Rudimentary Peni influences still coursing through Realists' grim mid-tempo pulse and the nihilistic, surreal imagery found in the lyrics. The band's sound is mainly driven by the ominous throb of the bassist, each song formed around a simple but catchy hook that is also tinged with some cool, subtle use of tape-noise fuckery and spacey effects that are thrown into the mix, songs like "Harlett" sometimes drifting into washes of trippy electronic ambience, and the singer's got this great derisive monotone sneer, moaning throughout the entire tape like an even more blase Rozz Williams. They crank the distortion up on some of the tracks, belting out droning fuzz-drenched riffs that buzz beneath the occasional swell of 'gazey distortion and dreamy tremolo drift that wash across songs like the uber-catchy "Sanctuary", and there are a few moments where the riffs even take on a metallic bite, adding to the menacing tone. The closer "Drowning" is another standout, finishing this off with a morose, heavy dirge that ends with a killer final blast of suffocating pessimism and miserable buzzsaw blackness. Like the previous tape, I can't recommend this enough if you're into the sort of miserablist punk and neo-deathrock stuff that's been coming out from likeminded gloom-punks like Blue Cross, Arctic Flowers, Dekoder, Crimson Scarlet, Night Sins, Funeral Parade, Blessure Grave and Liar In Wait.
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.
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.
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.
In addition to the band's latest full-length Beware The Sword You Cannot See, we also just picked up the preceding 2012 album A Shadowplay For Yesterdays from this strange steampunk-tinged black metal band. Envisioning themselves as characters from some late 19th century Victorian tragedy with names like Mister Curse, The Gentleman, Mr. T.S. Kettleburner, and Katheryne, Queen of the Ghosts (the latter actually being Kati Stone of My Dying Bride), A Forest Of Stars delivers an imaginative and anachronistic mix of withering black metal, Dickensian imagery, early 70's British folk rock influences, and epic prog rock that could only have come out of England. Released as both a standard jewel case edition and a deluxe digipak version that includes an embellished booklet and bonus track "Dead Love" that's only available on this and the double LP versions of the album.
England has certainly produced its share of eccentric, unusual black metal outfits, with the likes of Meads Of Asphodel and Fen bringing a distinctly English touch to their often offbeat and atmospheric music. The Yorkshire band A Forest Of Stars, though, might be the most British sounding band I've heard from the region, delivering an offbeat combination of ragged black metal, psychedelic folk influences, and a weird obsession with Victorian-era aesthetics that’s pretty unique. They start to build an ominous and dramatic feel with the spoken word narrative that's delivered over the atmospheric ambience of opener "Directionless Resurrectionist", but follow that up with the snarling, maudlin black metal of "Prey Tell Of The Church Fate"; shrill, eerie tremolo riffs wind into eerie folk-like melodies against the background, before the band blasts into a vicious blur of jangly, blackened guitars and rickety blastbeats, continuing to maintain that strange, antiquated vibe. That's in large part due to how A Forest of Stars weaves violin, flute, piano, acoustic guitar, old-style frame drums and tambourines into their ragged black metal, both over the band's ferocious blasting and in the spaces between, and the result on this and the rest of the album sounds incredibly rustic. This stuff is possessed with a gloomy grandeur, rumbling with massive double bass driven power and slipping into stretches of harrowing blackened despair, and passages of pure prog that take over songs like "A Prophet For A Pound Of Flesh", sending swirling kosmische synths washing over long, almost krautrock-esque rhythmic workouts, Katheryne's bewitching singing drifting in over those mesmeric sprawls, intertwining with Curse's gravelly croon to produce stirring vocal harmonies.
They employ strange electronic textures and synth noise to create some really immersive soundscapes, and gloriously weird moments like the dread-filled funereal oompah of "Gatherer of the Pure" that suddenly ascends into almost Floydian spaciness. I'm not the biggest fan of music that combines folk elements with black metal, but what makes this work is how ragged and vicious the black metal aspects of their sound are, delivering a raw and vicious black metal attack that contrasts well with the more psychedelic elements. All throughout Shadowplay, the sounds of funerary violins and psychedelic folk wafting from out of their majestic, weirdly rustic metal, and it gets pretty damn catchy, shot through with more than a few moments of seriously striking dark beauty and power, while also maintaining that haunting, twilight vibe through all of their songs.
In addition to the band's latest full-length Beware The Sword You Cannot See, we also just picked up the preceding 2012 album A Shadowplay For Yesterdays from this strange steampunk-tinged black metal band. Envisioning themselves as characters from some late 19th century Victorian tragedy with names like Mister Curse, The Gentleman, Mr. T.S. Kettleburner, and Katheryne, Queen of the Ghosts (the latter actually being Kati Stone of My Dying Bride), A Forest Of Stars delivers an imaginative and anachronistic mix of withering black metal, Dickensian imagery, early 70's British folk rock influences, and epic prog rock that could only have come out of England. Released as both a standard jewel case edition and a deluxe digipak version that includes an embellished booklet and bonus track "Dead Love" that's only available on this and the double LP versions of the album.
England has certainly produced its share of eccentric, unusual black metal outfits, with the likes of Meads Of Asphodel and Fen bringing a distinctly English touch to their often offbeat and atmospheric music. The Yorkshire band A Forest Of Stars, though, might be the most British sounding band I've heard from the region, delivering an offbeat combination of ragged black metal, psychedelic folk influences, and a weird obsession with Victorian-era aesthetics that’s pretty unique. They start to build an ominous and dramatic feel with the spoken word narrative that's delivered over the atmospheric ambience of opener "Directionless Resurrectionist", but follow that up with the snarling, maudlin black metal of "Prey Tell Of The Church Fate"; shrill, eerie tremolo riffs wind into eerie folk-like melodies against the background, before the band blasts into a vicious blur of jangly, blackened guitars and rickety blastbeats, continuing to maintain that strange, antiquated vibe. That's in large part due to how A Forest of Stars weaves violin, flute, piano, acoustic guitar, old-style frame drums and tambourines into their ragged black metal, both over the band's ferocious blasting and in the spaces between, and the result on this and the rest of the album sounds incredibly rustic. This stuff is possessed with a gloomy grandeur, rumbling with massive double bass driven power and slipping into stretches of harrowing blackened despair, and passages of pure prog that take over songs like "A Prophet For A Pound Of Flesh", sending swirling kosmische synths washing over long, almost krautrock-esque rhythmic workouts, Katheryne's bewitching singing drifting in over those mesmeric sprawls, intertwining with Curse's gravelly croon to produce stirring vocal harmonies.
They employ strange electronic textures and synth noise to create some really immersive soundscapes, and gloriously weird moments like the dread-filled funereal oompah of "Gatherer of the Pure" that suddenly ascends into almost Floydian spaciness. I'm not the biggest fan of music that combines folk elements with black metal, but what makes this work is how ragged and vicious the black metal aspects of their sound are, delivering a raw and vicious black metal attack that contrasts well with the more psychedelic elements. All throughout Shadowplay, the sounds of funerary violins and psychedelic folk wafting from out of their majestic, weirdly rustic metal, and it gets pretty damn catchy, shot through with more than a few moments of seriously striking dark beauty and power, while also maintaining that haunting, twilight vibe through all of their songs.
The digipak edition also adds on the bonus track "Dead Love", and features an extended, more extensive booklet.
More nihilistic noise from Diazepam, this split tape features two Italian outfits teaming up to deliver some sinister psychedelic skree and charred industrial filth. It's my first time hearing A Happy Death, and their ultra-heavy industrial blackness is good stuff, but I'd already been a fan of Shiver, a solo project from Mauro Sciaccaluga of Italian occult industrial/psych band Ur that delivers a strain of nightmarish, bestial industrial noise that's definitely worth checking out if you're into the more evil-sounding fringes of power electronics.
Latin prayers and cathedral bells pave the way for A Happy Death's putrid low-fi noise assault on the a-side, a battery of extreme blown-out distorted synth rumble and crackling burnt-out drones that quickly seep from your speakers into a haze of hateful noise. That first track "Laudamus Nihil" is intensely heavy and malevolent, and sort of resembles some low-fi doom metal recording being remixed by Dead Body Love, huge evil sounding riffs surfacing out of the smoldering static and crackling speakershred, oppressive and suffocating and crushing as it devolves into a more atmospheric mass of sound. Waves of fearsome feedback are layered over random environmental sounds, turning this into a murky locust-swarm of corroded noise. The other track is more straightforward, abrasive feedback and distorted crackle sweeping across clusters of tangled tape noise and ghostly percussive murmurs, but it's equally as atmospheric and effective.
The four tracks on Shiver's side are the first I've heard from the project since his The Taste Of Repent tape on Prairie Fire from a few years ago. The vibe is certainly the same, building up each long track into a seething psychedelic fog of frenzied guttural screams, brain-melting synthesizer drone, and putrescent electronic noise that is possessed by a pervasive threatening atmosphere. At times, this stuff can begin to sound like some particularly nightmarish score to an early 80s British sci-fi gore flick being played back on a decomposing cassette tape. Pretty grim, especially when those hazy, gloomy synthesizer melodies start to peer through all of that rumbling black muck, and the vocals transform into a terrifying, almost black metal-like shriek that rips through the whirling scrap-metal squeal and grating feedback abuse. Slow, pulsating rhythms emerge on later tracks, shifting the sound into a kind of static death-meditation as mysterious voices echo in the depths and swells of sinister metallic guitar melody and dark atmospheric sound rise to the surface. Definitely my favorite stuff from this project so far.
Like the other tapes I recently picked up from Diazepam, this has a similarly distressed look and feel, lettering hand-scratched onto the surface of the black cassette, the tape housed in an oversized cardstock sleeve, and it's limited to just one hundred copies.
One of the last releases from Autumn Wind before the label went on hiatus, Prime is the first Lp (actually a reissue of a limited cdr release from 2006) from A Minority Of One, a somewhat mysterious outfit from the Pacific Northwest that includes members of Crash Worship, avant-black metallers L'Acephale, and the experimental neo-folk project Waldteufel. The band delves into abstract, shadowy sound rituals and strange ethno-ambient beatscapes on Prime using electric guitar, bass, handmade drums, e-bow, horns, bull roarer, bells, prayer bowls, field recordings, samples of glass, water, as well as a drum sequencer. They summon up a sumptuous organic ambience made up of circular percussive sounds and whispers, clanking metal and whirring drones, which after a few minutes leads into the primitive boom-bap of an ancient drum machine, taking this into unexpected Scorn-like territory, the big dubbed out beats whirling over another metallic polyrhythm as strange shamanic chanting drifts in, and ending with everything fading out and being replaced with a locked groove of metallic thrum. Not at all what I was initially expecting from this group, but very cool...the second song "A Call To Action" has ominous horns blowing across a vast distance while sampled galloping percussive sounds echo in the foreground, and more and more horns are layered on top of each other, creating a strange surreal soundscape. The following tracks move through more eerie droning strings, more sampled looped sounds of hooves trampling the earth that eventually form into a clicking electronic rhythm; the track "Yarroway" (which originally appeared on the Infernal Proteus compilation from Ajna Offensive) blends over modulated synths with a distorted bass line and a loping, rubbery groove. On "The Newest Of Grey Days", thick distorted bass chords hum like huge blocks of buzzing Earth-ish drone, bits of delicate guitar winding at the edges. The last song "Felld" has another simple looped bass line locked into another infinite groove, swells of buzzing feedback and black amplifier smoke drifting through this buzzing, repetitious ambient piece that's sort of similar to the looped turntablescapes of Strotter Inst., finally fading off as those hoof beats come trampling back in, and end the record with a constant galloping loop repeating over and over. It's a weird experience that should be of interest to enthusiasts of the Glass Throat roster, post-industrial mysticism and occult drone-folk...
Darkest stuff yet from the NYC-based duo of Bryin Dall (of Thee Majesty and 4th Sign Of The Apocalypse) and Derek Rush (Compactor), who have worked together previously in a number of projects ranging from the experimental, surrealist goth of Loretta's Doll to the multi-faceted industrial music of Dream Into Dust and the occult soundscapery of Of Unknown Origin?. Describing their sound "damnbient", the duo craft a series of dank, phantasmal driftscapes on Before Your Eyes that are primed for listening to in the dark. Housed in a gatefold sleeve and printed inner sleeve that feature ghostly blue-tinged images of Victorian-era specters and ectoplasmic emissions, this album is spooky stuff, the ten songs drifting languidly through a midnight fog of distant wavering dissonance and murky drones that curl around cadaverous moans, swells of metallic shimmer and far-off clanking, weird echoing effects and washes of creepy minor key drift, slow washes of cello-like drone creeping low in the mix beneath the sound of strange chittering voices and the rapid flutter of insect-like wings, all of this stuff melting together into a hallucinatory din that stretches across the entire disc.
It starts off with the ghoulish industrial ambience of "Wading Through Floating Children", as the duo make their way through increasingly creepy underworld of murmurous sound: garbled inhuman voices sputter across fragments of evil orchestral murk like coded messages from an alien tongue; heavenly choir voices ascend over the shifting black waves of over-modulated electronics, like the sound of a High Mass being slowly sucked into a gaping, ravenous inter-dimensional black hole; howling discordant noise and clattering Aube-esque noise becomes caught in vague looping patterns beneath vast black dungeon exhalations and surges of incorporeal EVP; monstrous growls drift up out of that blackness, joined by the sounds of wailing theremin-like tones and brief glimpses of glitchy, Bernard Herrmann-esque strings, as a female voice is heard speaking backwards, out of phase, like a fragmented transmission from beyond the grave. This creepy Coil-influenced post-industrial nightmare comes into sharper focus on tracks like "They Only Eat Themselves" and "Folding The Fabric Of Time", as whirring, meditative mechanical rhythms begin to emerge from beneath a roiling ectoplasmic mass of guttural, demonic mutterings, sinister soundtracky ambience and chthonic death-pulses. One of the creepier albums to come out on Leech's (Theologian) Annihilvs imprint, this inhabits a similar nightmare zone as some of Atrium Carceri's more dreamlike moments, the black ambient of Kerovnian, and Accurst's formless horrorscape Fragments Of A Nightmare; if any of those names perk your ears up, this is one to check out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
��Four albums in, it's clear that A Storm Of Might is Josh Graham. The former Neurosis member and minister of visual propaganda has employed an impressive coterie of musicians over the course of the band's five year career, a collective curriculum vitae that has run the gamut from the iconic to the upstart, from Vinnie Signorelli (Swans, Foetus, Unsane) to Domenic Seita (Tombs), Pete Angevine (Satanized) to Geoff Summers (Batillus), with assorted guest appearances from other avant-rock and post-punk luminaries like Lydia Lunch and Jarboe scattered across A Storm Of Light's discography. With each album, though, the lineup shifts, the players change, even as the sound has remained consistent, firmly rooted in Graham's sonic vision of slow-moving doom-laden soundscapes and electronically-enhanced atmospheric dirge. On previous albums, this resulted in a sound fairly rooted in the sort atmospheric, darkly majestic sludge-metal that his old band Neurosis pioneered, but on Nations To Flames, Graham appears to have moved beyond that straightforward, Neurosis-influenced sludge metal into something more strident and distinctive, delivering an assault of belligerent percussive power and jagged metallic crunch that appears to draw more influence from the apocalyptic crush of later-era Killing Joke and even the more extreme sounds of early 90's-era industrial metal. That's a sound that I've always loved, so Nations hooked me in pretty quick; surrounded by sights and sounds of violent urban protest and cities swept in flames, Nations kicks in with the crushing staccato guitars, distorted megaphone howls and militant, snare-driven rhythms of opener "Fall", and I'm immediately catching a whiff of both Killing Joke and early 90s Ministry.
�� That sort of percussive, apocalyptic mechanical metal sound is here infused into something more majestic, though, the sludgy riffage and martial rhythms giving way to skillfully assembled samples and looped soundscapes. Like on the song "Omens", which reminds me even more of that Minstry-esque warzone metal, the apocalyptic atmosphere of previous albums becoming amplified tenfold, the melodies steeped in dark drama and an unshakeable sense of foreboding. The sheer aggression of A Storm Of Light's music has been amplified, transforming into churning, violent prog-metal with massive chugging riffs, a heavy layer of synthesizer sheen and cold electronics sweeping through the entire album. Massive tribal rhythms churn alongside droning, hypnotic riffage and densely layered samples on "Dead Flags" as the band evokes the album title in the howling, furious lyrics. Waves of howling feedback cascade across "Lifeless", almost threatening to drown out the jagged riffage and percussive heaviness. And once the ominous cinematic power of the instrumental "Soothsayer" really starts to kick in, it's almost as if these guys have crafted something that is equal part Beating The Retreat-era Test Dept. and the angular, fiery sludge metal of Mastodon or High On Fire; elsewhere, I'm reminded of both Neurosis and Psalm 69 with the grinding, distorted thrash of "Disintegrate". A previous guest collaborator, Soundgarden's Kim Thayil returns to contribute his guitar playing to the songs "The Fire Sermon", "Omen" and "The Year Is One", and his sound is unmistakable when it appears, his signature sinuous bluesy solos searing through the angular sludge-metal; Will Lindsay (Ahisma, Indian, Anatomy Of Habit, Middian, Nachtmystium, Wolves In The Throne Room) also appears, playing guitar on four of the songs. Again, though, this is Graham's vision, one that has evolved into something even darker and more threatening on Nations To Flames, a pounding metallic soundtrack to violent street protests, the atmosphere thick with smoke and tear gas fumes. Easily their most intense work yet.
Finally managed to get the vinyl version of this killer, oft-overlooked 2013 album from A Storm Of Light...
Four albums in, it's clear that A Storm Of Might is Josh Graham. The former Neurosis member and minister of visual propaganda has employed an impressive coterie of musicians over the course of the band's five year career, a collective curriculum vitae that has run the gamut from the iconic to the upstart, from Vinnie Signorelli (Swans, Foetus, Unsane) to Domenic Seita (Tombs), Pete Angevine (Satanized) to Geoff Summers (Batillus), with assorted guest appearances from other avant-rock and post-punk luminaries like Lydia Lunch and Jarboe scattered across A Storm Of Light's discography. With each album, though, the lineup shifts, the players change, even as the sound has remained consistent, firmly rooted in Graham's sonic vision of slow-moving doom-laden soundscapes and electronically-enhanced atmospheric dirge. On previous albums, this resulted in a sound fairly rooted in the sort atmospheric, darkly majestic sludge-metal that his old band Neurosis pioneered, but on Nations To Flames, Graham appears to have moved beyond that straightforward, Neurosis-influenced sludge metal into something more strident and distinctive, delivering an assault of belligerent percussive power and jagged metallic crunch that appears to draw more influence from the apocalyptic crush of later-era Killing Joke and even the more extreme sounds of early 90's-era industrial metal. That's a sound that I've always loved, so Nations hooked me in pretty quick; surrounded by sights and sounds of violent urban protest and cities swept in flames, Nations kicks in with the crushing staccato guitars, distorted megaphone howls and militant, snare-driven rhythms of opener "Fall", and I'm immediately catching a whiff of both Killing Joke and early 90s Ministry.
That sort of percussive, apocalyptic mechanical metal sound is here infused into something more majestic, though, the sludgy riffage and martial rhythms giving way to skillfully assembled samples and looped soundscapes. Like on the song "Omens", which reminds me even more of that Minstry-esque warzone metal, the apocalyptic atmosphere of previous albums becoming amplified tenfold, the melodies steeped in dark drama and an unshakeable sense of foreboding. The sheer aggression of A Storm Of Light's music has been amplified, transforming into churning, violent prog-metal with massive chugging riffs, a heavy layer of synthesizer sheen and cold electronics sweeping through the entire album. Massive tribal rhythms churn alongside droning, hypnotic riffage and densely layered samples on "Dead Flags" as the band evokes the album title in the howling, furious lyrics. Waves of howling feedback cascade across "Lifeless", almost threatening to drown out the jagged riffage and percussive heaviness. And once the ominous cinematic power of the instrumental "Soothsayer" really starts to kick in, it's almost as if these guys have crafted something that is equal part Beating The Retreat-era Test Dept. and the angular, fiery sludge metal of Mastodon or High On Fire; elsewhere, I'm reminded of both Neurosis and Psalm 69 with the grinding, distorted thrash of "Disintegrate". A previous guest collaborator, Soundgarden's Kim Thayil returns to contribute his guitar playing to the songs "The Fire Sermon", "Omen" and "The Year Is One", and his sound is unmistakable when it appears, his signature sinuous bluesy solos searing through the angular sludge-metal; Will Lindsay (Ahisma, Indian, Anatomy Of Habit, Middian, Nachtmystium, Wolves In The Throne Room) also appears, playing guitar on four of the songs. Again, though, this is Graham's vision, one that has evolved into something even darker and more threatening on Nations To Flames, a pounding metallic soundtrack to violent street protests, the atmosphere thick with smoke and tear gas fumes. Easily their most intense work yet.
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 colored vinyl (randomly selected), 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!
I was blown away by A Story Of Rats when I saw him open for Wolvserpent in Baltimore around a year ago. The solo project of Seattle musician Garek Druss, I only knew him previously for his contributions to Pussygutt's (who of course later changed their name tro Wolvserpent) Sea Of Sand Lp and the drone-metal group Tecumseh. Set up with only a rack of synths, Druss proceeded to construct a wall of black-hole ambience for nearly half an hour, moving from gorgeous cosmic drift to absolutely terrifying black ambience that seemed to swallow up the entire room. It was a perfect lead-in to Wolvserpent's ritualistic performance, and I was instantly lusting for more of Druss's music after that set.
Thought Forms is the most recent recording (and vinyl debut) from A Story Of Rats, and it's a minor masterpiece of pitch-black kosmiche music. That live set that I witnessed had some truly monstrous moments, but for the most part is hewed much closer to a classic space music sound than this album, and I couldn't help but be reminded of the darkest corners of 70's cosmic music (Tangerine Dream's Zeit, etc) once his set was finished. Here, though, Druss delves far deeper into the blackness, crafting two massive side-long tracks that drift ever so slowly through cavernous spaces deep beneath the surface of the earth, glacial feedback creeping in geological time above layers of grit and static and almost imperceptible subsonic rumblings. Above this minimal black dronescape, Druss introduces steady pulses of metallic thrum and distant-sounding growls, the occasional flash of a voice way off in the darkness, and various random environmental sounds. Obviously from that you can glean that this is very much in the vein of classic early 90s Lustmord, and this album really nails that totally desolate vibe that albums like Heresy and The Place Where The Black Stars Hang, especially on the first side. On the b-side, though, Druss does allow some light to creep into the desolate drift, bringing together rhythmic metallic drones and blurred choral voices with huge rumbling drones, creating something similar to the crepuscular industrial drones of Troum...
Eiderdown's release of Thought Forms comes on grey colored vinyl in a limited edition of three hundred copies, beautifully packaged in a textured screen-printed sleeve with artwork by Druss.
Hail the Black Goat, once again. All of the stuff that the label has been putting out from this small, incestuous circle of blackdoom/industrial noise obsessed freaks has been consistently satisfying. The debut from A Taste For Decay comes out of that same grimy, necrotic dronecult and features one of the members from Welter In Thy Blood, another of the Black Goat affiliated groups, as well as a guest appearance from Alan Dubin (Gnaw/Khanate/OLD) who lends his demonic vocalizations to one of the longer tracks on the disc. The sound is less metallic and riff-based than the other bands on the label, but these six tracks of occult black ambience and abstract doom are still plenty heavy, blended together into a blackened, nightmare soundscape.
The first track is all filthy, rumbling drones carved out of distorted guitar and molten feedback, cutting through thick grinding industrial blackness that stretches out into infinity, endless oceanic waves of minimal low-end thrum, and disturbed by ominous creaking sounds, like hearing a rotting ship adrift on a stygian sunless sea and navigating towards the keening siren of feedback in the distance.
The next track is a Nurse With Wound-esque nightmare of random creepiness, starting off with weird, monstrous chuckling, clanking chains, scraped metal, a machine-like clang and whir in the background, a bleak sort of factory-drift that slowly reveals huge doom metal guitars approaching in the distance, and murderous whispers conspiring nearby in the shadows. Hypnotic loops of metallic drone and murky synths emerge over time, bells begin to toll ominously way off on the horizon, and it all builds slowly and incrementally into a hellish din of roaring noise and blackened ambience.
An acoustic guitar introduces the third track, the eerie strum drifting over buzzing machine noise and more of that bleak factory atmosphere that seems to pervade the entire album...more muted and subliminal than the previous tracks, this forms into a hushed industrial nightmare of droning strings and far off guitar buzz, which then lurches into the suffocating death industrial drone of the subsequent track.
The eleven minute "Approaching Fresh Throats" features Dubin's ghoulish vokill contributions over a slow-motion cacophony of buzzing bass tones, disembodied whispers stretching out across the abyss, a spacious ghoulish ambience full of deep-earth rumble and dank crypt ambience. The first half of this is seriously creepy and oppressive, but later it shifts into a more expansive soundscape of mysterious field recordings, the patter of rainfall, bells, metal striking metal, with those minimal bass swells continuing to rumble in the background.
The album closes with more eerie field recordings and found sounds, dark expansive ambience laced with the buzzing of black flies, a music box chiming a familiar childhood melody, wind chimes singing softly in the cold wind of an oncoming storm, and as this abstract ambience continues to unfold, a distant swarming buzz can be heard just over the horizon, and a soft metallic whir seeps in as the sound of children playing materializes in the background, the sound haunting at first, but growing more and more sinister as the track comes to a close...
Terrific nightmarish ambience that blends aspects of black ambient and CMI-style death industrial and abstract metallic drone into a hallucinatory smear of sound, echoing the ghastly formlessness of Abruptum, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer and early Sunn in it's heavier moments, but mostly inhabiting a much more subtle realm of shadowy crypt-drift that's still pretty damn enthralling. The disc is limited to an edition of 1000 copies.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Part of the same Edmonton underground that birthed black/death warmongers Revenge, A.M.S.G. is the latest project from multi-instrumentalist Ryan Page, aka Angelfukk Witchhammer of Gloria Diaboli, Ouroboros and the mindfucking chaos-storm known as Rites of Thy Degringolade. With his latest band (whose name is an acronym for Ad Majorem Satanae Gloriam, or "For the Greater Glory of Satan"), Page remains committed to the intense Satanic imagery and philosophies that have marked his previous work, unleashing a vision of anti-human hatred and evil via a killer, experimental black metal assault across the band's debut album Anti-Cosmic Tyranny. I had already been looking forward to hearing this just based on how much I've dug his previous bands, but when I finally heard this disc and its complex, sometimes saxophone-smeared black delirium, I was totally sold. The music is, unsurprisingly, deeply rooted in the classic, icy blackness of second wave Nordic black metal, but A.M.S.G. take that sound and mutate it into something that ends up sounding new, blending in bits of violent noise and proggy song structures, and adding that dark jazzy quality via the sax into two of these tracks, which unsurprisingly ended up being my favorite on the disc. Anti-Cosmic tyranny opens with a blast of excoriating black noise, a mass of rumbling electronic chaos and low-frequency sonic rot that could easily be mistaken for The Rita, if it weren't for the harsh, monstrous vocals that scream across the blown-out black static. The band roars out of that churning amp-filth into the "Black Rites Of Black Shadows", unleashing a vicious black metal assault with spiraling baroque melodies and somewhat complex arrangements, and tons of grim, subterranean atmosphere. But just as the band drops into one of their slower, lurching passages of discordant gloom, we're greeted by that sudden appearance of saxophone, belting out some killer noir jazz lines over the blackened guitars and roiling drums. From there, the band continues to weave their weirdness into the violent, swarming black metal, making interesting use of chaotic off-kilter breakdowns and complex rhythms, the sudden tempo changes and odd meters recalling the swirling chaos of Page's old band Rites of Thy Degringolade.
There are some moments of straight forward blackened heaviness that absolutely rip, like the wicked old-school blackthrash of "Blood Bone And Blackthorn ", but those are contrasted with songs like "Reincarnation Of The Sun", which features reverb-drenched post-punk guitar smeared in psychedelic backwards sound and strange samples, and for a moment it slips into something that sounds more like the gnarled gloom rock of Circle Of Ouroborus. Some vicious, chittering electronic noise introduces "Sacrificial Chants Of Cosmic Separation", which later explodes into pummeling doom-laden heaviness and cascades of eerie chorus-drenched guitar before slipping into a cyclonic finale of blasting inchoate chaos. There are passages of liturgical chanting run through some weird vocoder-like effect, and the songs are limned with subtle touches of electronic noise, murky sample-laden soundscapes and crazed vocal effects that add further otherworldly ambience. Those wretched, ripped-throat screams deal in some pretty wordy lyrics, too; each song reads like a different Satanic prayer, a surrealist religious vision that Page delivers in a breathless, almost ecstatic fury. This stuff is fucking ferocious, a maniacal black metal assault laced with some killer experimental touches, crafting a strange, jazz-flecked mutation of classic black metal. A killer debut album.
Comes in jewel case packaging with a printed slipcover.
Aabsynthum's Inanimus is the most recent release from the cult Russian doom/experimental label Marche Funebre Productions, a label that I've been avidly following since the release of the Beyond Black Void debut album nearly a decade ago. The work of a single guy named Groza Gabriel, this Romanian one-man band plays a mix of orchestral drone music and titanic funeral doom that lurks on the more ambient edges of extreme doom.
The opening song "Initium" is pure gothic drone, ominous feedback, strings, bells and electronic hum stretching out in a wave of cosmic buzz as a minimal piano melody plays mournfully above it for several minutes. That leads into the monolithic "Are Themselves Simple Thoughts...", a twenty two minute chamber doom epic that slowly grows out of the sound of weeping violins and cellos and more of that massive bass drone, then lurches into massive crawling dirge with sparse distorted guitars, 10 bpm drums and monstrous guttural death metal roars.
It becomes apparent that Aabsynthum's music is deliberately monotonous, driven by an inexorable slow-motion death-crawl evocative of the steady, unwavering work of decay on organic matter, or the slow turn of the Earth through the vast uncaring emptiness of the cosmos. It's far from feel-good music like most funeral doom, but Aabsynthum are more droning and minimal than most, rarely introducing new sounds into the rumbling, swirling death-march, save for the occasional surge of Gregorian chant, or angelic choral voices or descending synth melody that marks a slight change in direction for these massive epic songs. Those subdued moments of almost liturgical beauty are pretty impressive, though, like when the androgynous choral voices begin singing in wordless hymn over church organs at the end of "Are Themselves...", and on the parts where the guitars drop out and the music drifts along in a cloud of sorrowful cello and dark keys that remind me of the music of composer Angelo Badalamenti.
To look for dynamics or evolution when listening to the utterly morbid music of Aabsynthum is to miss the point. Deliberately monochromatic, the four songs that make up Inanimus are embodied with the soul-crushing awareness of our ephemeral nature as we all come apart beneath the weight of time. It's absolute desolation, rendered as sonic ritual; anyone into the solemn gravitational crush of early Pantheist, Ea, Thergothon, and Skepticism should check this out.
The disc comes in a jewel case package with a cardboard slipcase.
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.
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.
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.
Just check out their thanks list: "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.
If you asked me to make a list of the most adventurous (and strangest sounding) doom metal bands around right now, both Aarni and Persistence In Mourning would be somewhere at the top of it. The two bands make a good pairing on this new split album that just came out from Witch Sermon, which features five new songs from each outfit, joined by Alessandro Falca's colorful, arcane album art. Both Persistence In Mourning and Aarni infuse their crawling metal with strange occult-tinged imagery and concepts, but they diverge from there into very different directions of slo-mo weirdness.
The first half of the disc features the unique and utterly strange prog-doom of Finland's Aarni, and it's as mystical and convoluted as their previous offerings. The band lurches from heavy, lop-sided doom to bizarre psychedelic soundscapes, where utterly stoned flute solos and gorgeous dark guitar meanders through hazy twilight shadows and field recordings of wild birds and honking geese. Aarni have always been prone to venturing into borderline "pop" sounds within their lysergic doom, and that appears here with the catchy "Land Beyond The Night", with it's part classic doom metal crunch, part gloomy alt rock jangle. But then they follow that bit of quirky doom-pop with the growling deformed sludge of "Lemminkainens Temple", an acid-damaged hallucination that sounds like Saint Vitus playing on broken instruments as they're slowly descending into a severe psilocybin-fueled breakdown. Their last song "Goetia" is the creepiest, the songs of wolves leading into strange verbal invocations and another warped heavy doom-metal freak-out, their heaviest riff dropping in among deep death metal style growls and eerie melodic guitar interludes, someone muttering in Finnish while weird cackling voices emerge in the background, and a church organ plays wildly over a crushing Frost-like dirge and the drummer's wild mix of tribal rhythms and break-beats.
A much uglier sound rears its head when Persistence In Mourning takes over. Creeping through their experimental doom metal shot through with moments of haunted beauty, this is oppressive, isolated heaviness that's based in raw, creeping funereal doom influenced by the likes of Skepticism and Thergothon, but from there Persistence In Mourning drapes it's morose crawling sludge with all kinds of squealing electronic noises and effects. The turgid riffs and minimal drums slowly drift through clouds of amp-squeal and Theremin-like effects, a thick layer of hiss and speaker-crackle covering the music, while the harsh, blackened shrieks drift up from below. The noise elements and simple, pounding drums give this a cold industrial feel, an interesting contrast with the fuzz-soaked primitive doom riffs and eerie chorus-drenched guitar melodies that float over the grungy doom, but then it'll drop off into passages of squelchy prog synth ooze and waves of phased distortion, or stretches of howling feedback and manipulated noise that transform the sound into a pure power electronic-style assault. One of the more interesting PiM tracks featured here is "Purification", whose haunting bass and piano melody, hellish vocals and putrid noise come together like a weird cross between a blackened power electronics assault and an Angelo Badalamenti piece. Just like all of PiM's other recordings, this is recommended stuff if you're a fan of both extreme funeral doom in the Skepticism vein and the electronic sludge mayhem of Bastard Noise.
It's an interesting variation of monolithic, crawling, ultra-down tuned war-sludge that this Spanish trio offers up on their debut full length, put out by the doomanoids over at Odio Sonoro. The six songs on The Call Of Shiva deliver CRUSHING asphalt-coated riffs that are obviously influenced by the Matt Pike school of heaviosity, nothing too technical and exactly the kind of mega-doom heaviness that you'd expect from anything with the Odio Sonoro stamp of approval, just massive droning slabs of mega heavy sludge and pounding mid-paced drumming, the sound relentlessly crushing. I'm hearing some Crowbar influence in here, too, and the deep, gruff vocals definitely remind me of the NOLA sludge metallers. Where Aathma distinguish themselves is the shift in vocal styles that comes in on the first track; that opener is plodding, doom-laden crush, equal parts High On Fire and Crowbar, incredibly heavy and leaden, but then the song suddenly shifts gears about halfway in, the sludge turning into a droning melodic riff, and then the vocalist starts singing in this deep dramatic voice, sort of like those of recently deceased Type O Negative front man Pete Steele. This crushing goth-tinged sludge begins to get increasingly more melancholy as the riff grinds on, the sound becoming more distorted and blown, becoming a blast of raging distorted noise at the end of the track.
Those deep baritone Type O-esque vocals continue to add an unconventional dimension to Aathma's sound, which as the album progresses, begins to add in the moodier gothic parts of Neurosis and the heaviest riffs from Streetcleaner-era Godflesh and early Isis alongside the crushing war-sludge. Heavy stuff, with some of the standout tracks including the moodier goth-sludge of "Snowdream" and "The End of the Snake". And "Oaks" ranks as one the heaviest jams on here, sounding like the band has taken the main riff from Nirvana's "Negative Creep" and slowed it down to 1/10th speed and tuned it to C, and "Voice" opens with some ominous piano chords that lead into the brooding deep vocals and dark slowcore spaciousness, but then morphs into more of that HOF-esque sludge. Every track on here is a crusher, until you reach the closer "Shiva The Destroyer", which ends the disc with five minutes of abstract improv-drone, random heavy tribal drums and distant whispers and swirling dark ambience and eerie effects unfurling in a trance inducing dose of formless doomdrone heaviness.
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.
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.
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. Holy shit! We've got clear vinyl for this baby too, only 400 made!
A collaboration between the harsh blacknoise of Abandoner and the slicing feedback-driven power electronics of Dead By A Thousand Cuts, this CD-R contains six tracks of evil, ultra-murky skree that is actually comparable to an subtly satanic version of Matt Bower's Total, particularly on tracks like "Thunders N Lightnings" and "Lower Your Flag" with their dense clotted masses of rumbling amplifier noise and chaotic feedback. Death By A Thousand Cuts is a noise project that I had already been familiar with, mainly from their split CD with Cattle Decapitation's Travis Ryan that came out a few years ago (and which we still have in stock here), but this was the first that I had heard from the NYC based project Abandoner. It turns out that Abandoner is actually the "noise" solo project of Jay Newman, who all of you doom metal fans will probably recognize as the drummer for Unearthly Trance, and he's joined here by his Unearthly Trance bandmate Darren Verni who contributes some scathing, grisly vocals on a few of the tracks. Choir of Dead Whores is super negatory guitar/electronic noise, shifting between those aforementioned blasts of Total-style amplifier carnage to heavy static drones and whirring electronic sounds, and even has Verni reciting the poetry of Charles Baudelaire over the final two tracks "The Gladly Dead" and "The Litanies Of Satan", both of which are awesome black fogs of nightmarish droning black metal guitar noise, Prurient-style feedback, and confrontational verbal venom. The disc is spraypainted in black paint, and comes in a black slimline jewelcase with an acetate/xerox insert cover, limited to 100 copies.
Like some long lost Elfenblut release, the latest album of solo work from San Francisco based multi-instrumentalist Leila Abdul-Rauf drifts across your field of hearing in a wash of unearthly reverb-drenched vocals, shadow-streaked ambient sound and delicate instrumentation. Gorgeous stuff that left me positively spellbound. If you only knew Rauf-Abdul from the heavier and more abrasive stuff that she's been involved with (like the grotesque philosophical death metal of Vastum, or Bay Area prog metallers Hammers Of Misfortune, or her stint with caveman prog-core outfit Bastard Noise), you might come to this expecting something a little harder. But Insomnia is far from it, a gauzy, bleary experience that fully enfolds the listener in its twilight beauty.
From the jazzy, horn-stained dreaminess of "Drift", to the ethereal choral vocals and bleak electronic drones that sweep across the opener "Midnight", Rauf-Abdul crafts a solemn, almost liturgical atmosphere that drifts through the whole album. The songs are carefully structured, filled with moments of fragile beauty and dusky, fog-shrouded drama. And that jazzy quality adds a unique feel; her mournful trumpet is a near constant presence throughout Insomnia, smearing moody, understated melodies across a number of the tracks. At the same time, other less immediately identifiable instruments drift like smoke-ghosts underneath sheets of gossamer sound, traces of piano and e-bowed guitar set adrift on waves of spacious reverb; cetaceous synths warble and moan through dense shimmering cloudscapes of kosmische grandeur, and some of those passages can have a similar luminous feel as something from Vangelis or late 70's Tangerine Dream. And while Abdul-Rauf's voice (both literal and instrumental) is the crux for this music, she's brought on a few friends to help actualize this music, including some brief guitar work from a member of Bay Area sludge-metallers Cardinal Wyrm.
It's really stunning stuff, dark and dolorous, and another unique release from Malignant's Antibody sub-imprint. A subtle, lovely album of autumnal gloom, absolutely recommended to those into the likes of Dead Can Dance, Caul, Amber Asylum and Dark Sanctuary. Comes in digipack packaging.
The grungy, Clevo-based doom/sludge/metal outfit Abdullah dropped their second album Graveyard Poetry a while back, and it's one of my favorite MeteorCity releases. On Graveyard Poetry, Abdullah continues to deliver their combination of crushing Sabbathy riffage and soulful, melodic vocals which have garnered some comparisons in the past to Dax Riggs (Acid Bath/Deadboy And The Elephant Men). The riffs and songs are much closer to true doom though, with dark, sludgy blues riffs that remind me of Saint Vitus, Trouble and Spirit Caravan, but then Abdullah throws some interesting elements that I didn't hear on their earlier releases, like some spacey Pink Floyd-esque guitar lines and haunting keyboards that appear every once in awhile, but the big difference here is the influence of (according to their European label) cult traditional heavy metal bands like New Wave Of British Heavy Metallers Diamond Head, Holocaust, and Tank, and cult San Fran old-schoolers Brocas Helm that has now crept into Abdullah's stoner metal on a handful of songs on the album ("Deprogrammed" especially!). On these songs, Abdullah veer from their dark brooding doomrock steez into killer mid-paced, almost thrashin' metal chuggery with killer dual-harmony guitars. I love the mixture of the NWOBHM sound and their grunge-rock influenced doomrock, and this album immediately stood out from the other stuff that was coming out on MeteorCity at the time.
Digging even further back into the crates of esteemed stoner rock imprint Meteorcity, I've pulled out this self titled debut from Ohio cult doom faves Abdullah for re-investigation. Christ knows that back in 2000 when this album originally came out, we had more than enough mediocre sub-Sabbath knockoffs sucking up oxygen in the heavy underground rock scene, but Abdullah managed to stand out from the sea of faceless, boring Sab/Kyuss clones with a dark soulful sound that drew just as many comparisons to the Northwest grunge rock as it did to early American doom metal. This self-titled disc merged crushing Vitus/Obsessed style riffage with trippy melodies, tons of airy acoustic guitars, wah-soaked psych solos, and some passages of primo St. Vitus style crawl in songs like "Earth's Answer" and "Proverbs In Hell". A lot of people have compared singer Jeff Shirilla to Layne Staley from Alice In Chains, which I do hear in some of the dramatic choruses, but much of his deep, heartfelt singing actually reminds me of a younger, more polished Wino. Like Solace, Abdullah are peddlin' a more rocking, accessible brand of doom rock, but that's not to say that this isn't heavy stuff. The slow doomy riffs are just balanced with an equal amount of uptempo Sabbathian hooks and laid-back, stoned acoustic playing. There's some cool retro-crunch on this album; fans of The Obsessed and Goatsnake should give 'em a listen.
Abe Vigoda's vibrant, nervous no wave seizures find a vinyl home on this 12 song LP issued by the awesome noise punks at Not Not Fun. Their tape releases on Not Not Fun are all kickass, but we needed a full length! Full of spastic hooks and wavering noise guitar figures over a tempest of rolling drums, Sky Route / Star Roof takes the screwdriver-to-the-fretboard attack of old school Sonic Youth to a dirgey nocturnal pop feast for maximum spasm. The DNA here definitely glows similiar to Unwound, old Sonic Youth, and Wives, but the songs often have a noisy heaviosity that surprised us. Pretty killer, really. Comes packaged in a great silkscreened black jacket, and released in an edition of 300. Apparently this is already sold out at Not Not Fun, so move quick!
���� Some great ghoulish black metal on this new one from Abhor, who embellish their satanic dungeon visions with understated gothic organ accompaniment. Their latest Ritualia Stramonium is haunted by the presence of that medieval-sounding pipe organ, which was what initially drew me to their moldering occult metal, lurking beneath the band's furious witchblast and adding a fantastically creepy and eldritch vibe.
���� These cloaked Italian black metallers have been at it for years, with Ritualia being their sixth album since forming in the late 90s, and the ominous metal they peddle on this disc is definitely of an old-school vintage, with lots of ferocious thrashing riffs and bursts of crushing, doom-laden Frostian heaviness. When that pipe organ kicks in with it's grandiose sound, though, it lends a cool proggy touch to this stuff, an element of gothic grandeur layered over the cackling, maniacal vocals and furious minor-key thrash. The singer's vocals are somewhat odd, as well, a schizoid torrent of gargling gibbering hatred and weird slurred chanting which add to the generally deranged feel of the album. Musically, it's fundamentally straightforward old-school black metal, though these guys do work in some interesting atonal guitarwork, the odd off-kilter bass riff, and murky, chaotic samples into the mix along with a couple of moments of nocturnal folkiness. And that organ sounds great, loud and brash in the mix as the baroque black-mass keys loom over Abhor's violent blackened thrash; there's a couple of moments on Ritualia (like the terrifically weird "I...the Witch") where that organ even sort of evokes some of the more ghoulish Italian creep-prog deliria of classic Goblin, Antonius Rex and Jacula. There's an aged, cobwebbed feel to this stuff, a macabre atmosphere that aligns them more with the likes of Mortuary Drape than with most contemporary Italian black metal, the sort of stuff that evokes images from Bava's Black Sunday and Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women.
One of my favorite contemporary Japanese black/thrash bands, Abigail has been kicking out their awesome blackened thrash hysteria since the early 90's with a wild, wonky mix of Venom and 80's garage thrash metal and that inherent weirdness that you usually expect to find in Japanese metal. Most of their stuff has been pretty hard to come by though, usually going out of print fairly quickly and/or being released on really small labels that can take some effort to track down, but a couple of Abigail's newer releases have popped up on the ultra-cult Nuclear War Now! label, making them a bit easier to stock here in the store. That's great news for those of us who are totally addicted to the raw, punky perverted speed metal and filthy sex obsessed lunacy that these cats (who include members of psych-metal gods Sigh and black thrashers Barbatos) traffic in, with albums like Forever Street Metal Bitch and Lust And Intercourse loaded with their scumbag thrashpunk and their deliberately ridiculous, adolescent Satanic sex fantasies of songs like "We're the Pussy Hunter" and "Teen Age Metal Fuck". Yikes!
This 7" EP from 2007 has Abigail hooking up with one of their 80's proto-thrash heroes, Brian Llapitan from cult American metallers NME, paying tribute to decased NME guitarist Kurt Struebing by covering a handful of their songs. Abigail has long cited the primitive black metal/thrash of NME as one of their key influences (along with the likes of Motorhead, Venom, and Bulldozer) on their own whacked-out pervo-thrash style, and on this four song EP the band tears through material off of NME's 1986 debut album Unholy Death, the first three tracks ("Black Knight", "Stormwarning / Blood & Souls" and "Lethal Dose") firmly in the Venom/Motorhead speed metal tradition, but the fourth track a peculiar cover of "Of Hell / Thunder Breaks Peace", which is improvised guitar noise, weird effects and demonic growling...pretty cool! The vocal duties are split across the two sides - Brian from NME handles the lead vocals on the first side, and Yasuyuki from Abigail does the b-side vocals. It's a blast. Comes in a B&W sleeve that's designed in the same style and layout as the original Unholy Death Lp jacket.
One of my favorite contemporary Japanese black/thrash bands, Abigail has been kicking out their awesome blackened thrash hysteria since the early 90's with a
wild, wonky mix of Venom and 80's garage thrash metal and that inherent weirdness that you usually expect to find in Japanese metal. Most of their stuff has
been pretty hard to come by though, usually going out of print fairly quickly and/or being released on really small labels that can take some effort to track
down, but a couple of Abigail's newer releases have popped up on the ultra-cult Nuclear War Now! label, making them a bit easier to stock here in the store.
That's great news for those of us who are totally addicted to the raw, punky perverted speed metal and filthy sex obsessed lunacy that these cats (who
include members of psych-metal gods Sigh and black thrashers Barbatos) traffic in, with albums like Forever Street Metal Bitch and Lust And
Intercourse loaded with their scumbag thrashpunk and their deliberately ridiculous, adolescent Satanic sex fantasies of songs like "We're the Pussy
Hunter" and "Teen Age Metal Fuck". Yikes!
Housed inside of a smutty high contrast album cover, Sweet Baby Metal Slut is the fourth and latest album from the devilthrash sex-fiends,
loaded with ten tracks of day-glo Baphometic sex fantasies and thrashing Motorhead/Venom meets hardcore punk meets GG Allin scumfuck mayhem. And whoo-boy,
does this album rip. Super catchy and infectious hook-laden thrash with those blackened muppet-squawking vocals from front man/bassist Yasuyuki Suzuki, one
kickass riff after another, and tons of speed, the songs whipped into a pounding D-beat fury, songs about "sexual metal holocaust", a frenzy of fast and
ragged fury flecked with drunken bits of 70's hard rock wankery, even slipping into some Southern rock tainted rawk on "Satanic Hell Slut". There's "Sweet
Bloody Cunt" with it's ridiculously poppy main hook, and the pure simplistic psycho thrash of "Witching Hell" and "Metal Evil Metal" and "Wild Fire Metal
Bitch"... Furiously thrashing metal at it's most savage and sex-crazed, with some of Abigail's catchiest tunes ever.
Nuclear War Now!'s vinyl release of Sweet Baby comes in a heavy gatefold package with sleazy hot pink artwork and includes a couple of inserts
and a Nuclear War Now! Festival poster.
Back in stock!
Now available on Cd, and just in time, as the vinyl release of this sicko blackened thrashpunk assault went out of print recently. The following is my review of the original vinyl release on Nuclear War Now; my lust for this album has remained unabated in the time since I jotted this down:
One of my favorite contemporary Japanese black/thrash bands, Abigail has been kicking out their awesome blackened thrash hysteria since the early 90's with a wild, wonky mix of Venom and 80's garage thrash metal and that inherent weirdness that you usually expect to find in Japanese metal. Most of their stuff has been pretty hard to come by though, usually going out of print fairly quickly and/or being released on really small labels that can take some effort to track down, but a couple of Abigail's newer releases have popped up on the ultra-cult Nuclear War Now! label, making them a bit easier to stock here in the store. That's great news for those of us who are totally addicted to the raw, punky perverted speed metal and filthy sex obsessed lunacy that these cats (who include members of psych-metal gods Sigh and black thrashers Barbatos) traffic in, with albums like Forever Street Metal Bitch and Lust And Intercourse loaded with their scumbag thrashpunk and their deliberately ridiculous, adolescent Satanic sex fantasies of songs like "We're the Pussy Hunter" and "Teen Age Metal Fuck". Yikes!
Housed inside of a smutty high contrast album cover, Sweet Baby Metal Slut is the fourth and latest album from the devilthrash sex-fiends, loaded with ten tracks of day-glo Baphometic sex fantasies and thrashing Motorhead/Venom meets hardcore punk meets GG Allin scumfuck mayhem. And whoo-boy, does this album rip. Super catchy and infectious hook-laden thrash with those blackened muppet-squawking vocals from front man/bassist Yasuyuki Suzuki, one kickass riff after another, and tons of speed, the songs whipped into a pounding D-beat fury, songs about "sexual metal holocaust", a frenzy of fast and ragged fury flecked with drunken bits of 70's hard rock wankery, even slipping into some Southern rock tainted rawk on "Satanic Hell Slut". There's "Sweet Bloody Cunt" with it's ridiculously poppy main hook, and the pure simplistic psycho thrash of "Witching Hell" and "Metal Evil Metal" and "Wild Fire Metal Bitch"... Furiously thrashing metal at it's most savage and sex-crazed, with some of Abigail's catchiest tunes ever.
An essential "sexual metal holocaust".
An awesome collection of mid-90s EP tracks from Japanese black thrashers Abigail, from earlier in their career before the band evolved into the pussy-obsessed necro-punks that have released such classic slabs of carnal metal as Forever Street Metal Bitch, Intercourse And Lust and Sweet Baby Metal Slut. It's hard not to gush about these guys; Abigail are one of my favorite "black metal" bands of all time, and certainly my favorite Japanese black metal band right alongside avant-garde weirdoes Sigh (the two bands have in fact shared members at various points over the past twenty years). However, Abigail's version of black metal is a cruder, snottier beast, much closer in sound and spirit to Venom and the newer blackened, speed-metal punk of bands like Midnight, Speedwolf, and Syphilitic Vaginas, even hinting at the grungy ultra-distorted punk stomp of bands like Malveillance and Sump at times, with ripping punk-influenced guitar riffs, Yasuyuki's weird snarling, choking vocal delivery, and lots of wickedly catchy hooks.
The twelve songs collected on The Lord Of Satan come from the band's split with Funeral Winds and the Confound Eternal and Descending from a Blackened Sky Eps, all from 1993 through 1996. While there's still TONS of that sloppy, blackened speedpunk going on with these early songs, there's also lots of actual black metal too, where the band will suddenly launch into a blazing blast attack (like on "We Shall Not Await The Dawn" and the feral savagery of "Swing Your Hammer"), something which you hear a lot less of on their newer albums. Abigail always throw in all kinds of neat, quirky touches into their black thrash as well, like the melodic backing "woah-oh's" on "Dawn" that add a weird Misfits flourish to the blackened blasting fury, and the KILLER synthesizer track "Darkness Steals" that closes the first side of the album and sounds like a cross between Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and a late 80's horror movie soundtrack. There's more creepy electronic music on the b-side with "Descending From A Blackened Sky", where sky-gazing synthesizers and a simple keyboard melody play over deep bass tones and a slow pounding drumbeat. These weird little interludes add a lot to the depraved dungeon-glow that surrounds Abigail's warped Nipponese blackthrash.
We've got both the vinyl edition of The Lord Of Satan that comes in a deluxe heavyweight glossy gatefold that also includes a black and white lyric insert and a large Abigail poster, and a high quality Cd edition.
Back in print, and back in stock...
An awesome collection of mid-90s EP tracks from Japanese black thrashers Abigail, from earlier in their career before the band evolved into the pussy-obsessed necro-punks that have released such classic slabs of carnal metal as Forever Street Metal Bitch, Intercourse And Lust and Sweet Baby Metal Slut. It's hard not to gush about these guys; Abigail are one of my favorite "black metal" bands of all time, and certainly my favorite Japanese black metal band right alongside avant-garde weirdoes Sigh (the two bands have in fact shared members at various points over the past twenty years). However, Abigail's version of black metal is a cruder, snottier beast, much closer in sound and spirit to Venom and the newer blackened, speed-metal punk of bands like Midnight, Speedwolf, and Syphilitic Vaginas, even hinting at the grungy ultra-distorted punk stomp of bands like Malveillance and Sump at times, with ripping punk-influenced guitar riffs, Yasuyuki's weird snarling, choking vocal delivery, and lots of wickedly catchy hooks.
The twelve songs collected on The Lord Of Satan come from the band's split with Funeral Winds and the Confound Eternal and Descending from a Blackened Sky Eps, all from 1993 through 1996. While there's still TONS of that sloppy, blackened speedpunk going on with these early songs, there's also lots of actual black metal too, where the band will suddenly launch into a blazing blast attack (like on "We Shall Not Await The Dawn" and the feral savagery of "Swing Your Hammer"), something which you hear a lot less of on their newer albums. Abigail always throw in all kinds of neat, quirky touches into their black thrash as well, like the melodic backing "woah-oh's" on "Dawn" that add a weird Misfits flourish to the blackened blasting fury, and the KILLER synthesizer track "Darkness Steals" that closes the first side of the album and sounds like a cross between Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and a late 80's horror movie soundtrack. There's more creepy electronic music on the b-side with "Descending From A Blackened Sky", where sky-gazing synthesizers and a simple keyboard melody play over deep bass tones and a slow pounding drumbeat. These weird little interludes add a lot to the depraved dungeon-glow that surrounds Abigail's warped Nipponese blackthrash.
We've got both the vinyl edition of The Lord Of Satan that comes in a deluxe heavyweight glossy gatefold that also includes a black and white lyric insert and a large Abigail poster, and a high quality Cd edition.
This long-lost platter of vicious, punk-infested Tokyo black-thrash from Abigail surfaced at just the right moment for yours truly; I've been cranking every Abigail record I own to the hilt lately, in feverish anticipation of their upcoming foray into the States for Maryland Death Fest, and the Confound Eternal 7" has been on repeat on my turntable ever since the records came in. This is one of the oldest releases from Abigail, a two-song 7" that was released back in 1996 on the short-lived Vancouver label Of God's Disgrace Productions, whose only other release that I know of was the Funerary Call Pronounced Unholy 7". Issued in a limited edition of five hundred copies, this has been a tough record to come by for fans of these Venom-worshipping Japanese black metal punks, and both of the tracks were later included on the The Lord Of Satan Cd / Lp collection that came out on Nuclear War Now; if you've got that release in your collection, then you already have this stuff. On their own, though, these two songs pack a killer wallop; a-side track "Mephistopheles" is ridiculously catchy, starting off with chiming clean guitars and a big melodic hook for the intro before kicking into some driving, sinister Frostian riffage and gargling unintelligible shrieks. A primo example of Abigail's punk-infected blackened metal, shifting between the buzzsaw thrash and that hooky melodic chorus, waiting till the very end to hurtle into their blastbeat-riddled chaos. On the other hand, "Confound Eternal" erupts almost immediately into ferocious blackened thrash on the flipside, blasting aggression and droning blackswarm riffing giving way to galloping breakneck thrash, Yasuyuki spitting blood in every direction. A real ripper. We picked up the last-ever copies of this 7", and quantities are limited...
��Available on both CD and gatefold LP.
��While not quite as balls-out weird as country mates Sigh, sleazoid Japanese black thrashers Abigail put their own eccentric spin on a classic black/thrash attack, and are still one of my favorite bands of this ilk from that corner of the globe. Their 1996 debut album Intercourse & Lust remains one of their most ferocious slabs of perverted black metal hysteria; originally released by the Aussie label Modern Invasion, Intercourse had been out of print for ages before Nuclear War Now unleashed this latest reissue on us, complete with the revised cover art that features Hokusai's infamous squidfuck masterpiece The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife. Beautiful!
�� The vicious Intercourse features nine tracks of Abigail's feral, slightly sloppy blackened thrash, with most of the album's lyrics written by Chuck Keller of Order From Chaos/Ares Kingdom. The music has a definite early Mayhem influence, along with a big ol' dose of classic Teutonic thrash, but Abigail mutate those influences into a blistering speed assault that cranks the sneering punk attitude up to a frenzied new level, and splatters their sound with some of the craziest goddamn guitar solos this side of Hell Awaits-era Hanneman. Much of this album races by at blistering blasting tempos, but there's a couple of ferociously rocking tracks like "Attack With Spell" where they drop some vicious, super-catchy Venomesque blackened punk onto the listener while front man Yasuyuki retches out a rabid array of distorted yelps and screams. A weird growling synth-bass-like effect shows up briefly on the snarling blast-orgy of "Strength Of Other World" that, for a brief moment in the middle of the track, breaks into this weird, proggy little interlude right before the band crashes back in to the blazing necro-punk assault. Yasuyuki's vocals reached a sublime level of insanity on this album, often rupturing into an insanely unhinged ultra-distorted yowl that's definitely reminiscent of Takaho from noise-grinders Unholy Grave. And the band gives us another one of their trademark weirdo synthesizer interludes on the title track, with spacey soundtracky synths and a delicate xylophone melody leading right into the oddly atmospheric multi-part closer "Hail Yakuza", a sprawling instrumental that features samples from cult Japanese crime flicks playing out over a slower, swirling, jangling black metal dirge before moving into odd waltzing rhythms and blasts of anthemic thrash. Killer stuff that's right up there with the classic Forever Street Metal Bitch album, essential for anyone in thrall to the "Black Metal Yakuza".
��Available on both CD and gatefold LP.
��While not quite as balls-out weird as country mates Sigh, sleazoid Japanese black thrashers Abigail put their own eccentric spin on a classic black/thrash attack, and are still one of my favorite bands of this ilk from that corner of the globe. Their 1996 debut album Intercourse & Lust remains one of their most ferocious slabs of perverted black metal hysteria; originally released by the Aussie label Modern Invasion, Intercourse had been out of print for ages before Nuclear War Now unleashed this latest reissue on us, complete with the revised cover art that features Hokusai's infamous squidfuck masterpiece The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife. Beautiful!
�� The vicious Intercourse features nine tracks of Abigail's feral, slightly sloppy blackened thrash, with most of the album's lyrics written by Chuck Keller of Order From Chaos/Ares Kingdom. The music has a definite early Mayhem influence, along with a big ol' dose of classic Teutonic thrash, but Abigail mutate those influences into a blistering speed assault that cranks the sneering punk attitude up to a frenzied new level, and splatters their sound with some of the craziest goddamn guitar solos this side of Hell Awaits-era Hanneman. Much of this album races by at blistering blasting tempos, but there's a couple of ferociously rocking tracks like "Attack With Spell" where they drop some vicious, super-catchy Venomesque blackened punk onto the listener while front man Yasuyuki retches out a rabid array of distorted yelps and screams. A weird growling synth-bass-like effect shows up briefly on the snarling blast-orgy of "Strength Of Other World" that, for a brief moment in the middle of the track, breaks into this weird, proggy little interlude right before the band crashes back in to the blazing necro-punk assault. Yasuyuki's vocals reached a sublime level of insanity on this album, often rupturing into an insanely unhinged ultra-distorted yowl that's definitely reminiscent of Takaho from noise-grinders Unholy Grave. And the band gives us another one of their trademark weirdo synthesizer interludes on the title track, with spacey soundtracky synths and a delicate xylophone melody leading right into the oddly atmospheric multi-part closer "Hail Yakuza", a sprawling instrumental that features samples from cult Japanese crime flicks playing out over a slower, swirling, jangling black metal dirge before moving into odd waltzing rhythms and blasts of anthemic thrash. Killer stuff that's right up there with the classic Forever Street Metal Bitch album, essential for anyone in thrall to the "Black Metal Yakuza".
As Abigor puts it, they play "play True Austrian Black Metal exclusively". Which apparently means black metal as played by intergalactic fucking reptoids. Seriously, Fractal Possession is one of the craziest black metal albums I've heard recently. The longrunning black metal clan returned in 2007 with this new album after close to half a decade of nada which included a brief breakup for a year or so, then reconvened with a whole new cast of characters. And if anything, the band blasted has blasted even deeper into the sci-fi metal territory that they were exploring on their previous album Satanized, and apparently alienating a bunch of their fans with their new evolved approach to 21st century black metal along the way. Me, I fucking love this album.
The first few albums from Abigor were entirely different from what we've got here, more in the vein of Nordic-influenced melodic black metal, buzzing and majestic but marked by extreme levels of aggression forged into a style of their own that made 'em pretty popular with fans of traditional black metal back in the 90's. When their 2001 album Satanized came around, though, Abigor's sound took off into a whole new direction, infusing their black metal with a cold, inhuman sheen and futuristic atmosphere and becoming an intensely complex and industrialized version of their previous epic blackened self. If you've heard that album and are a fan of the bizarre, sci-fi black metal that Abigor evolved into, then Fractal Possession definitely won't disappoint.
As soon as I pick up Fractal Possession, I find myself entering the confusional techno-hell of Abigor just by looking at this album - the CD version is packaged in a gorgeous hardback digibook, covered in abstract gold-tinted artwork and stylized inverted pentagrams, definitely staying true to their Satanic black metal roots in iconography alone, and the twelve-page booklet is filled with demonic woodcuts and surreal photos of urban decay and alien entities, beautifully printed in white, grey and metallic gold inks.
But once the album begins, yer immediately overwhelmed by Abigor's warped cosmic blackness. The disc opens with a glitchy intro of factory clang and skittering industrial beats and whirring drill sounds as a lone dissonant guitar figure appears, playing this jagged little melody over increasing layers of industrial machine sound, robotic engines clanking and bleeping, and ominous soundbites of dialogue, and then suddenly the band erupts into the sputtering black electro blast of "Project Shadow", a chopped up black hellscape of insanely squiggly guitars and shimmering harmonies, the guitar shredding all woven into these intricate clusters of spastic notes, ferocious blastbeats and croaked vocals racing throughout the insane stop/start arrangements. It's impossible to not think of Mick Barr from Orthrelm when you hear these guitars with the over-the-top shredding and flurries of angular notes (I'm not the first to hear it, as the Mick Barr/Orthrelm comparison has been made in a bunch of other reviews of this album). It's like hearing Mick playing over the industrial black metal of Dodheimsgard, but it's even more fucked up sounding than DHG already are. From there, the album moves through similiar angular black metal forms, fierce precision blastbeats and crushing percussive dirges meeting with soaring black melodies and those hypershred leads, each song turning into a complex tangle of mechanical rhythms and hellish alien melody. In between the blastbeats and shred eruptions, Abigor drop in all sorts of odd little segueways, like brief flashes of blackened kosmiche ambience, walls of orchestral guitar drone, discordant math-metal, epic Viking-esque clean vocals and drunken Gothy crooning, mutant Gorguts-esque no wave deathriffage, galloping traditional metal, or evocative acoustic guitar strum that appears before your eyes in an instant, then disappear just as quickly as Abigor fall back in with their choppy alien buzzsaw attack. This jarring, ultra-dynamic sound turned off alot of trad black metal fans when this album first came out, but in my opinion it's one of the best avant-black metal albums of the past ten years, surpassing even Dodheimsgard in their audacious sci-fi approach, intense and original and most definitely weird as fuck, but ultra heavy too, almost more like death metal than black metal much of the time as heavy as this is, but always cloaked in their own unique alien interplanetary futuristic blackness. Highly recommended!
Also available as a double LP set on heavy vinyl, packaged in a full color heavy gatefold jacket with gold and black printed inner sleeves...and, of course, quite limited.
As Abigor puts it, they play "play True Austrian Black Metal exclusively". Which apparently means black metal as played by intergalactic fucking reptoids. Seriously, Fractal Possession is one of the craziest black metal albums I've heard recently. The longrunning black metal clan returned in 2007 with this new album after close to half a decade of nada which included a brief breakup for a year or so, then reconvened with a whole new cast of characters. And if anything, the band blasted has blasted even deeper into the sci-fi metal territory that they were exploring on their previous album Satanized, and apparently alienating a bunch of their fans with their new evolved approach to 21st century black metal along the way. Me, I fucking love this album.
The first few albums from Abigor were entirely different from what we've got here, more in the vein of Nordic-influenced melodic black metal, buzzing and majestic but marked by extreme levels of aggression forged into a style of their own that made 'em pretty popular with fans of traditional black metal back in the 90's. When their 2001 album Satanized came around, though, Abigor's sound took off into a whole new direction, infusing their black metal with a cold, inhuman sheen and futuristic atmosphere and becoming an intensely complex and industrialized version of their previous epic blackened self. If you've heard that album and are a fan of the bizarre, sci-fi black metal that Abigor evolved into, then Fractal Possession definitely won't disappoint.
As soon as I pick up Fractal Possession, I find myself entering the confusional techno-hell of Abigor just by looking at this album - the CD version is packaged in a gorgeous hardback digibook, covered in abstract gold-tinted artwork and stylized inverted pentagrams, definitely staying true to their Satanic black metal roots in iconography alone, and the twelve-page booklet is filled with demonic woodcuts and surreal photos of urban decay and alien entities, beautifully printed in white, grey and metallic gold inks.
But once the album begins, yer immediately overwhelmed by Abigor's warped cosmic blackness. The disc opens with a glitchy intro of factory clang and skittering industrial beats and whirring drill sounds as a lone dissonant guitar figure appears, playing this jagged little melody over increasing layers of industrial machine sound, robotic engines clanking and bleeping, and ominous soundbites of dialogue, and then suddenly the band erupts into the sputtering black electro blast of "Project Shadow", a chopped up black hellscape of insanely squiggly guitars and shimmering harmonies, the guitar shredding all woven into these intricate clusters of spastic notes, ferocious blastbeats and croaked vocals racing throughout the insane stop/start arrangements. It's impossible to not think of Mick Barr from Orthrelm when you hear these guitars with the over-the-top shredding and flurries of angular notes (I'm not the first to hear it, as the Mick Barr/Orthrelm comparison has been made in a bunch of other reviews of this album). It's like hearing Mick playing over the industrial black metal of Dodheimsgard, but it's even more fucked up sounding than DHG already are. From there, the album moves through similiar angular black metal forms, fierce precision blastbeats and crushing percussive dirges meeting with soaring black melodies and those hypershred leads, each song turning into a complex tangle of mechanical rhythms and hellish alien melody. In between the blastbeats and shred eruptions, Abigor drop in all sorts of odd little segueways, like brief flashes of blackened kosmiche ambience, walls of orchestral guitar drone, discordant math-metal, epic Viking-esque clean vocals and drunken Gothy crooning, mutant Gorguts-esque no wave deathriffage, galloping traditional metal, or evocative acoustic guitar strum that appears before your eyes in an instant, then disappear just as quickly as Abigor fall back in with their choppy alien buzzsaw attack. This jarring, ultra-dynamic sound turned off alot of trad black metal fans when this album first came out, but in my opinion it's one of the best avant-black metal albums of the past ten years, surpassing even Dodheimsgard in their audacious sci-fi approach, intense and original and most definitely weird as fuck, but ultra heavy too, almost more like death metal than black metal much of the time as heavy as this is, but always cloaked in their own unique alien interplanetary futuristic blackness. Highly recommended!
From the goofy pixel artwork taken from that old 1980's computer game Oregon Trail that Abiku stuck on the CD sleeve for this double disc set, you'd never guess that the music on here is as brutal as it can sometimes end up being. The Baltimore based duo plays a kind of computer-generated noisecore/gabba/electropop hybrid with singer Jane Vincent screeching and singing over a blizzard of thumping four-on-the-floor speedcore beats, hyperspeed digigrind blastbeats, laser beams, and huge slabs of new agey ambient drone and damaged techno. That weirdo Baltimore/Wham City vibe is all over Abiku's tuneage, and some of this stuff even reminds me of Atom & His Package a little bit, but way weirder and totally immersed in noise and drum machine grind and fucked up techno and goth rock, art-damaged and industrial-tinged and quivering with a violent, exuberant energy. They're a part of the cool DIY warehouse dance punk scene that's been going on out in Baltimore lately, and although I haven't seen 'em yet, I bet they crush live. This CD-R set is actually a live collection from Abiku, the first disc contains a ton of MP3 files of live sets that the band recorded in basements and houses across the country when they toured the US in 2004, each show represented by a seperate folder designated by city, and there is close to nine hours of music collected here. Pretty massive, and the recoridngs are generally pretty decent, punchy and clear enough to give you a good idea of what it must have been like to be jammed in a crowded basement with the lights shut off while Jane goes psychotic over the jet engine roar of Abiku's laptop gabba-grind-goth-dancepop.
The second disc, though, is something different. There are a couple of live sets that are on here as well, but the last track, titled "Chaos Mix", is the centerpiece of this half of the set, an hour-plus track of all of the shows digitally collaged and layered together into a single massive brain liquifying soundscape. This track is nearly overwhelming. It's an ocean of swirling chaotic sound, like hearing one hundred different Napalm Death records and scratched up Suicide and La D�sseldorf albums all spinning simultaneously, melting into an endless whirlpool of molten electro-psychedelic goo.
This Baltimore duo have been around for a couple of years, but are just now coming out with their first real full-length, released through Baltimore's finest imprint for all things noisy and bonkers, MT6. The first time that I heard these cats was when they played with Wildildlife in a basement in Baltimore a few years ago, where the duo of Jane and Josh blasted the entire block with their deafening brand of mutant synth-disco/no wave/gabber/grind weirdness. Both of 'em rock some massive keytar-like appliances, and stick to a fairly rigid formula: songs are generally one-to-two minute micro-bursts of ominous synthesizer chords and whooshing, sweeping electronic noises over jackhammer drum programming that's somewhere in between techno/disco throb, drum-machine blastbeat, or violent gabber, depending on the song, while Jane utters a hair-raising high pitched scream over it all, or croons in a narcoleptic speak/sing cadence. They've been compared to bands like The Locust and Genghis Tron because of their synth-based instrumentation, but those references are wholly inaccurate. This shit is difficult and definitely not pretty, and almost totally devoid of what I'd call hooks - what this does sound like is brutal digi-grind beats trading off against mutant techno throb while the vocals channel the sound of Lydia Lunch with 75,000 volts of electricity being rocketed straight into her spinal column, while cheapo 8-bit melodies, harsh industrial textures, icy robo-funk synth basslines and atmospheric ambience scuttle out of the thick backdrop of synths and samplers that Abiku employ. I can hear trace elements of old school industrial like Clock DVA, Severed Heads and Controlled Bleeding in here, but these industrial qualities are cranked to mach ten and almost totally obliterated by the relentless computerized blastbeats. I just caught them again as the opener for the Brutal Truth/Pig Destroyer show that went down at the Talking Head last week, where Abiku took the stage in what looked like silver Lam� robes and proceeded to totally polarize the audience with their screeching, industrial techno-disco-blast. They're definitely one of the most brutal bands to inhabit the Baltimore freakscene, that's for sure. As far as this disc is concerned, Novelty isn't an actual new album, but rather a collection of tracks from their Novelty demo from 2002 and some later demos that have been reworked and rerecorded, along with an additional enhanced section of the disc that contains all of their demo tracks and singles that were recorded between 2002 and 2005, all available as MP3s, and since most of that stuff is way out of print, this is the last place you'll find these early Abiku jams.
We totally fell onto these guys by accident, discovering this handmade double-disc set after hooking up with Japanese noise label Dotsmart to grab some of their new JESUS OF NAZARETH CD. Self-described "bizarre hobby violent music group" ABISYEIKAH are an ultra enigmatic duo dealing in high-power psychedelic noisecore violence and insane/stoopid electronics/soundbite meltdowns. Jiyuumo Kattemo Onajida Nandemo Iikara Yacchimae! is a double CD-R set, with the first disc filled to the gills with 99 tracks of Japanese pop culture soundbite loops, stoned and stumbling casio-pop jams, hideous lo-fi noisecore with retarded vocals, like a FEAR OF GOD/ANAL CUNT hybrid fronted by Yamatsuka Eye, sliced with paint-peeling electronic noise and dance music...along with fucked up/drug damaged sludgy breakbeats and zonked techno, beyond-gutteral toilet-bowl-monster vocal psychedelia, beatboxing, squeaky electro-acoustic fuckery,childlike babbling, and loads more. Totally nuts. The second disc is even more abusive harsh noise mixed with mongoloid beats, chainsaw noisegrind eruptions, vomiting phone pranks, braindamaged rapping, and skull rupturing blast spread across 99 tracks. Insane shit, with nary a moments peace to be found in this 2 hour-plus scum marathon. The packaging is handmade and killer, a full color double-disc digisleeve gatefold thing with some crazed group pics.
If you're looking for the rawest, most atavistic sounds currently wafting out of the French necro underground, I doubt that there's a better place to start digging than the Infernal Kommando label. I've done a lot of ranting in the past about all of the assorted doses of foulness that I've picked up from the label, tapes from such primitive, low-fi black/thrash/punk abominations as Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, and the latest two Infernal Kommando tapes that we've gotten in come from a one-man band called Abject 666, another purveyor of primitive French filth. A project from one of the guys behind black thrashers Tank Genocide, Abject 666's cassettes have been described by the label as "raw, putrid and minimalist Black Metal...for fans of old Beherit, Zarach'Baal'Tharagh and Ildjarn." Didn't need much more prompting than that, so here we've got both of the cassette EPs on Infernal Kommando, both ugly, deformed blasts of messed-up black metal that sometimes veers into severe noise damage or warped soundscapery.
Reign Of Agony is the first of the two Abject 666 tapes, laying out the project's general MO with bits of pilfered horror movie scores (this time it's Christopher Young's Hellraiser Theme that gets lifted wholesale and slapped across the beginning of the tape), that theme playing out beneath Razor's garbled, delay-drenched mutterings, giving the opening minutes of the tape a deranged feel. Then it kicks in to the blown-out assault of noisy primitive black metal, the rest of the tape made up of short songs built from simple repetitive riffs, roaring over a mid-paced drum machine beat that at a couple of points had me thinking of a more "industrialized" Ildjarn. That's completely enshrouded in a pukey no-fi recording that turns into a wall of putrid black noise half the time. It's a real mess. The band also makes a couple of detours into raw Hellhammer / Frost-style sludge, and the vocals are completely fucked up, totally incomprehensible, a series of endlessly echoing death-croaks that get swallowed up in Abject 666's pounding hypnotic scum-storm. This stuff is definitely the most frenzied of the two Abject 666 tapes we've picked up, with tracks like "Sodomized Nazarene" erupting into almost Wold-like blasts of formless, black static horror. For fans of barbaric basement black thrash only...
Limited to one hundred copies.
If you're looking for the rawest, most atavistic sounds currently wafting out of the French necro underground, I doubt that there's a better place to start digging than the Infernal Kommando label. I've done a lot of ranting in the past about all of the assorted doses of foulness that I've picked up from the label, tapes from such primitive, low-fi black/thrash/punk abominations as Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, and the latest two Infernal Kommando tapes that we've gotten in come from a one-man band called Abject 666, another purveyor of primitive French filth. A project from one of the guys behind black thrashers Tank Genocide, Abject 666's cassettes have been described by the label as "raw, putrid and minimalist Black Metal...for fans of old Beherit, Zarach'Baal'Tharagh and Ildjarn." Didn't need much more prompting than that, so here we've got both of the cassette EPs on Infernal Kommando, both ugly, deformed blasts of messed-up black metal that sometimes veers into severe noise damage or warped soundscapery.
Tape number two from this fucked-up French blackthrash mutant, Vile Devotion features six tracks of Razor's mangy primitive black metal, opening up with a cribbed sample of Carpenter's iconic Halloween theme for the intro, before slithering off into the plodding, caveman necro-trance of the title track. Like the other Abject 666 tape that I picked up, this is mostly made up of pounding primitive thrash with tracks like "Visceral Abomination", "Infamous Agony" and "The Praise of Devil" stripping down to a single riff or two, buzzsaw three-chord punk riffs whipped into a chaotic roar of blown-out distortion and croaked, hateful vocals, the spiteful mess laid out over the skeletal mechanical pound of the drum machine. There's a heavy layer of reverb and hiss splattered over everything, and the songs tend to collapse into weird circular riffs where the drum machine completely drops out, or slips into pummeling passages of filthy Frostian sludge. Unsurprisingly, Abject 666's drunken black metal is often reminiscent of the repetitive, hypnotic violence of Ildjarn's Strength And Anger, but that sound becomes completely blanketed in rotting low-fi murk, ending with a faint ambient outro that sounds like an old Tangerine Dream piece breaking through a hiss-filled recording of ghostly knockings. Definitely has that murky, low-fi Infernal Kommando aesthetic all over it. I can't get enough of this stuff.
Limited to one hundred copies.
Sucks that we couldn't get any of the copies of this 7" that had the original artwork; the original sleeve sported some seriously vile, naive art that looked like something scraped out of the inside of Mike Diana's skull. Oh well. I can live with this slightly revised version, as it's still one of the nastiest sounding new noise-punk records I've stumbled across lately. Aborticidio are a Mexico City-based duo whose ultra-blown-out punk is so chaotic and noise-damaged that his seriously starts to verge on turning into total noisecore. Most stuff in this vein tends to stick pretty close to that now oft-copied Confuse sound, but these guys are fucked-up on a different level, barreling through five songs of fast-paced hardcore punk that is almost completely buried beneath screeching high-end gain and ear-shredding guitar noise, their brutal Dis-riffs submerged into the rampaging assault, the croaked shouts of the singer and the furious bass riffs the few aspects of musicality that emerge from this outrageous mess of treble-cranked filth. But then they close with the song "Let's Dance To The Noise Punk!", and this suddenly rips into an awesome pogo attack, a super catchy streetpunk anthem, albeit one still buried beneath outrageous amounts of low-fi hiss and murk and muck. Pretty demented stuff, especially when paired with their oddball art, which even in this "cleaned up" version features childlike drawings of drunken punks, mutilated torsos, and demonic molestation scrawled across the sleeve and booklet. Another one for any of you who dig the sonic aesthetics of power electronics applied to violent, fucked-up old-school punk. Limited to two hundred fifty copies.
Back in stock!
I haven't stocked this 2003 album from Aborym until now, but since their newest album Psychogrotesque recently came out and I've been listening to it constantly, I've been working on picking up whatever other Aborym titles are still in print for the shop. This was their third album following Kali-Yuga Bizarre and Fire Walk With Us!, both of which captured Aborym's ongoing evolution that began with their strange experiments in electronically-enhanced black metal in the mid 90s. By this point, their mix of satanic blackened techno and experimental shapeshifting black/death was fully formed, a brand of sleek futuristic BM terror that positioned Aborym alongside the likes of Mysticum, Anaal Nathrakh, Declaration Of War-era Mayhem and (especially) Dodheimsgard. Fronted by singer Attila Csihar's awesome demented vocalizations that range from throat singing, blackened shrieks, and chant like intonations, and powered by eerie samples and blasting industrial black metal, this is fearsome, violent music that repudiates the claims of commercialization that many BM purists levelled at bands like this who utilized electronic elements. Feel-good music, this ain't. And it's very much rooted in a classic black metal sound, machinelike blastbeat drumming performed with rigid precision, and dizzying arpeggio sweeps and classical-influenced soloing coating the sound with a brittle layer of ice, while bits of electronic ambience and effects are strewn throughout the ferocious mechanized black metal assaults. Like it states in the booklet, "Aborym plays alien-black-hard/industrial exclusively".
With No Human Intervention's opening title track is feral, mechanical black metal with a killer programmed blastbeat and blackened death riff that appears later in the song, shifting gears into galloping thrash and then revealing some minor techno elements that creep in, like programmed snare rushes and swells of orchestral electronic ambience. It still mostly sounds like an electronically enhanced classic black metal band, though. As the album goes on, the music mutates more and more as harsh, unexpected edits, caustic computer glitchery and synthetic ambience increasingly mixes with the warped, evil black blast and crushing slower death metal riffage. It's not till the fourth track "Humechanics-Virus" that Aborym finally starts to inject their bursts of drum n' bass and hardcore techno into the music; when this kicks in, the aggressive electronic beats come in blasts and blurts, pounding savage rhythms seething beneath catchy blackened melodic hooks and the hellish vocals. The track "Does Not Compute" stands out with looped machine noises, factory floor ambience and clanking rhythms opening the song, then turning into a jittery, hard-edged drum n' bass workout laced with electronic noises and a massive sinister bassline. The pure techno of "Cheronobyl Generation" is as close to actual dance music as Aborym gets here, but with it's scorched blackened shrieks and evil tone, it's hardly party music. The rest of the album is rife with more crazed electro-BM experimentation that ranges from weird Morbid Angel-like soloing
and orgasmic female moans, harpsichord sections backed by pummeling industrial beats and hoovering techno synths, and stretches of creepy slasher movie soundtrack music. The album constantly shifts and changes shape, with an almost Mr Bungle-like tendency for wild stylistic leaps. "The Triumph" even features an emotional ballad-like breakdown with synths and a soaring guitar solo that sounds like something off of an 80s hair metal album, right before the band kicks into an equally soaring kosimiche hallucination that combines the sounds of agonized screaming and demented carnival music.
A strange and unpredictable album, Intervention is one of my favorite electro/black metal records and highly recommended to fans of bizarre, experimental, digitally-possessed BM and the likes of Dodheimsgard and Blacklodge. This US release on Mercenary Musik also features an enhanced CD-Rom portion of the disc that features a music video for the title track "With No Human Intervention".
Just found a few copies of this rather hard-to-find picture disc edition of Aborym's classic 1999 debut album, and it's a beaut, with full color artwork on both sides and a version of their song "Tantra Bizarre" that is exclusive to this release.
Not as off-the-hook bizarre as Dodheimsgard but much more electronically enhanced than bands like Mysticum or Thorns, Aborym would develop their mix of classic second wave Norwegian black metal and electronic music into a much more sophisticated sound on later albums during the early 00's. Kali Yuga Bizarre was still a fine blast of brain-frying electro-infected baroque blackness from this European collective, though. Kicking off with the icy majesty of "Wehrmacht Kali Ma", the disc makes its way through a shadowy labyrinth of frostbitten black buzz and odd carnival-esque melodies, diving suddenly into the synth-heavy black metal of "Horrenda Peccata Christi" that twists through spasms of frenetic drum n' bass and throbbing industrial metal, and slow doom-laden passages backed with soaring orchestral keyboards. The vocals are handled by both lead vocalist Yorga SM and legendary black metal frontman Attila Csihar, who both spew a litany of demonic croaks, Latin incantations, and draconian imperatives while the rest of the band claws their way through these ten tracks of hallucinatory industrial black metal. And that's heavy on the "hallucination"; haunted pipe organs rise out of the mist, industrial percussion rattles in the distance, and deep monk-like chanting drifts in the background, and there's the constant presence of 80's style horror movie keyboards throughout Kali Yuga, on tracks like "Hellraiser", the slow reverberating pace, heavy bass line and gloomy keys evokes the sound of 80's darkwave before the music decomposes into weird effect-laden nightmare ambience. The track "Roma Divina Urbs" flows out of that into the sound of booming kettledrums and medieval horns resembling something off of the Conan The Barbarian soundtrack, and then Aborym bursts into a blackened metal version of the same arrangement now laced with electronic harpsichord sounds and frenzied blast beats, with dramatic clean vocals appearing later in the song. This unpredictable lunatic vibe is all over this album.
On the flipside, "Tantra Bizarre" delivers one of the album's most majestic songs with Attila's bizarre moaning vokills, one killer melodic hook after another, and a wild mix of shredding guitar solos and some very strange shrieking sounds that dive-bomb throughout the whole track. "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus" is one of the album's most twisted tracks, a hellish mishmash of hardcore techno, Black Mass atmospherics, blackened tremolo riffing, distorted bass lines and synths, and blown-out break beats all wound together into a delirious funhouse nightmare. A maniacal voice rants in Italian while a church choir sings, and then the band rips into the ferocious blackthrash of "Metal Striken Terror Action". That's followed by the delirious gothic blackness of "The First Four Trumpets", which resembles something from Fields Of The Nephilim, down to the deep Carl McCoy-esque vocals. The final bonus track "Tantra Bizarre (Co30 Version)" takes certain elements of the original version and gloms it all back together into a frantic skittering hardcore techno jam, a massive bass line slithering among the distorted fast-paced break beats and swarming synth, blackened shrieks and bizarre gasping vocals swooping back and forth, foreshadowing the more drum n' bass infected direction the band would take on later albums like With No Human Intervention.
Released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.
This classic industrial black metal album hasn't been the easiest for me to find, especially (perversely enough) on CD, but it finally turned up through one of my suppliers recently. It's time for you to pick this up if you dig mechanized, futuristic black metal, 'cuz Aborym were (and are) one of the best...
Not as off-the-hook bizarre as Dodheimsgard but much more electronically enhanced than bands like Mysticum or Thorns, Aborym would develop their mix of classic second wave Norwegian black metal and electronic music into a much more sophisticated sound on later albums during the early 00's. Kali Yuga Bizarre was still a fine blast of brain-frying electro-infected baroque blackness from this European collective, though. Kicking off with the icy majesty of "Wehrmacht Kali Ma", the disc makes its way through a shadowy labyrinth of frostbitten black buzz and odd carnival-esque melodies, diving suddenly into the synth-heavy black metal of "Horrenda Peccata Christi" that twists through spasms of frenetic drum n' bass and throbbing industrial metal, and slow doom-laden passages backed with soaring orchestral keyboards. The vocals are handled by both lead vocalist Yorga SM and legendary black metal frontman Attila Csihar, who both spew a litany of demonic croaks, Latin incantations, and draconian imperatives while the rest of the band claws their way through these ten tracks of hallucinatory industrial black metal. And that's heavy on the "hallucination"; haunted pipe organs rise out of the mist, industrial percussion rattles in the distance, and deep monk-like chanting drifts in the background, and there's the constant presence of 80's style horror movie keyboards throughout Kali Yuga, on tracks like "Hellraiser", the slow reverberating pace, heavy bass line and gloomy keys evokes the sound of 80's darkwave before the music decomposes into weird effect-laden nightmare ambience. The track "Roma Divina Urbs" flows out of that into the sound of booming kettledrums and medieval horns resembling something off of the Conan The Barbarian soundtrack, and then Aborym bursts into a blackened metal version of the same arrangement now laced with electronic harpsichord sounds and frenzied blast beats, with dramatic clean vocals appearing later in the song. This unpredictable lunatic vibe is all over this album.
On the flipside, "Tantra Bizarre" delivers one of the album's most majestic songs with Attila's bizarre moaning vokills, one killer melodic hook after another, and a wild mix of shredding guitar solos and some very strange shrieking sounds that dive-bomb throughout the whole track. "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus" is one of the album's most twisted tracks, a hellish mishmash of hardcore techno, Black Mass atmospherics, blackened tremolo riffing, distorted bass lines and synths, and blown-out break beats all wound together into a delirious funhouse nightmare. A maniacal voice rants in Italian while a church choir sings, and then the band rips into the ferocious blackthrash of "Metal Striken Terror Action". That's followed by the delirious gothic blackness of "The First Four Trumpets", which resembles something from Fields Of The Nephilim, down to the deep Carl McCoy-esque vocals. The final bonus track "Tantra Bizarre (Co30 Version)" takes certain elements of the original version and gloms it all back together into a frantic skittering hardcore techno jam, a massive bass line slithering among the distorted fast-paced break beats and swarming synth, blackened shrieks and bizarre gasping vocals swooping back and forth, foreshadowing the more drum n' bass infected direction the band would take on later albums like With No Human Intervention.
���� Supreme mechanical devilry! We've picked up a couple of older Aborym albums that, for some odd reason, we never stocked back when they first came out, despite the fact that I've been a big fan of this strange Italian black metal outfit. Their stuff is some of the best within the nebulous realm of 'industrial black metal'. Now that some of these older releases have received recent vinyl reissues, I figured we'd go ahead and pick up some of these back-catalog titles in an effort to turn some of you guys on to the furious, futuristic, often bizarre heaviness that this band has been blasting for the past twenty years.
���� First up is 2006's Generator, one of my favorite albums of theirs. Originally released on CD from Season Of Mist (and now available on vinyl from French label Dead Seed Productions), this dystopian nightmare is one of their heaviest. By this point, front-man Attila Csihar had left the band, replaced by Preben "Prime Evil" Mulvik (Mysticum), and Bard "Faust" Eithun (Emperor) became their permanent drummer, taking the place of the band's long-suffering drum machine. Marking a shift towards a more complex, atmospheric sound, the disc starts off with a surge of orchestral black ambience, rumbling, dissonant piano and malevolent choral vocals sweeping across deep, subterranean rumblings. But once it kicks into "Disgust And Rage (Sic Transit Gloria Mundi)", the album proceeds to unleash its furious industrialized black metal with a heightened sense of grandeur. That first song is a ferocious blast of technical blackened riffery enfolded with cold, regal power, infused with symphonic strings and icy electronic textures, growing stranger as it further unfolds with liturgical chant-like voices emerging amid flecks of digital debris and an increasingly synthetic feel. The band's signature fusion of symphonic black metal, electronic elements and winding song structures with occult-influenced, often eschatological imagery is once again in full force here; while not as bizarre as D�dheimsgard or as brutal as Mysticum, Aborym interjects stretches of sleek black drone, clanking rhythms, alien glitchery, and sputtering, sickly electronic beats, infesting the music with an inhuman technological malevolence.
���� And while the remainder of the album is loaded with that ferocious industrial black metal, they continue to layer the songs with strange shuffling percussive loops, Charles Manson samples, demented carnivalesque organs, bursts of pneumatic hiss and blaring synth horns, with "Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea " even mutating into a ferocious technoid ripper and "Man Bites God" (which features a returning guest spot from Csihar) at times transforming into something more resembling Skinny Puppy than black metal. But even at its weirdest, Generator maintains a clear connection to that classic Nordic black metal sound, full of frost-burnt drama and majesty.
���� Supreme mechanical devilry! We've picked up a couple of older Aborym albums that, for some odd reason, we never stocked back when they first came out, despite the fact that I've been a big fan of this strange Italian black metal outfit. Their stuff is some of the best within the nebulous realm of 'industrial black metal'. Now that some of these older releases have received recent vinyl reissues, I figured we'd go ahead and pick up some of these back-catalog titles in an effort to turn some of you guys on to the furious, futuristic, often bizarre heaviness that this band has been blasting for the past twenty years.
���� First up is 2006's Generator, one of my favorite albums of theirs. Originally released on CD from Season Of Mist (and now available on vinyl from French label Dead Seed Productions), this dystopian nightmare is one of their heaviest. By this point, front-man Attila Csihar had left the band, replaced by Preben "Prime Evil" Mulvik (Mysticum), and Bard "Faust" Eithun (Emperor) became their permanent drummer, taking the place of the band's long-suffering drum machine. Marking a shift towards a more complex, atmospheric sound, the disc starts off with a surge of orchestral black ambience, rumbling, dissonant piano and malevolent choral vocals sweeping across deep, subterranean rumblings. But once it kicks into "Disgust And Rage (Sic Transit Gloria Mundi)", the album proceeds to unleash its furious industrialized black metal with a heightened sense of grandeur. That first song is a ferocious blast of technical blackened riffery enfolded with cold, regal power, infused with symphonic strings and icy electronic textures, growing stranger as it further unfolds with liturgical chant-like voices emerging amid flecks of digital debris and an increasingly synthetic feel. The band's signature fusion of symphonic black metal, electronic elements and winding song structures with occult-influenced, often eschatological imagery is once again in full force here; while not as bizarre as D�dheimsgard or as brutal as Mysticum, Aborym interjects stretches of sleek black drone, clanking rhythms, alien glitchery, and sputtering, sickly electronic beats, infesting the music with an inhuman technological malevolence.
���� And while the remainder of the album is loaded with that ferocious industrial black metal, they continue to layer the songs with strange shuffling percussive loops, Charles Manson samples, demented carnivalesque organs, bursts of pneumatic hiss and blaring synth horns, with "Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea " even mutating into a ferocious technoid ripper and "Man Bites God" (which features a returning guest spot from Csihar) at times transforming into something more resembling Skinny Puppy than black metal. But even at its weirdest, Generator maintains a clear connection to that classic Nordic black metal sound, full of frost-burnt drama and majesty.
���� This vinyl edition on Dead Seed is pretty hefty, presented in a deluxe, heavyweight (and slightly oversized) casewrapped gatefold jacket and accompanied by a big foldout poster.
����� Supreme mechanical devilry! So we've picked up a couple of older Aborym albums that, for some odd reason, we never got in stock back when they first came out, despite the fact that I've been a fan of this Italian industrial black metal outfit for ages. Their stuff is some of the best within the nebulous realm of 'industrial black metal', as well as some of the weirdest. Now that some of these older Aborym releases have received recent vinyl reissues, I figured we'd go ahead and pick up some of their back-catalog titles in an effort to turn some of you on to the furious, futuristic, often bizarre heaviness that these maniacs has been blasting for the past twenty years.
����� On their 2010 album Psychogrotesque, Aborym delved inward for their inspiration, exploring visions of schizophrenia, violent psychosis and institutionalization over the course of these ten numerated tracks. Right from the start, this heads into a more offbeat and experimental direction compared to the crushing technoid black metal of their previous album. All of their signature traits (rigid, mechanized black metal, sweeping minor key synthesizer atmospherics, bursts of electronic glitchery and programmed rhythms) are here, but the songs themselves are more deranged and labyrinthine, their blasting violence getting caught in a web of convoluted arrangements and hallucinatory samples. Dance music elements come on strong early on, interjecting bursts of furious drum n' bass into the freezing symphonic black metal of "Psychogrotesque III", and there are eerie spoken word passages backed by grim industrial soundscapes, glacial drum loops and fragments of classical piano. There's lots of shape-shifting going on: slipping into mournful gothic metal where the vocals drop into a gloomy baritone croon; blasts of scorching rave-synth lead into stretches of skittering trip-hop-esque moodiness; jazzy saxophone like something out of an early 80's urban crime drama wails across the buzzsaw riffing; the singer's weird, reptilian croak is joined by operatic female vocals (courtesy of Karyn Crisis) that drift over sorrowful symphonic strings. Ferocious, jet-black hardcore techno kicks in on "Psychogrotesque VIII ", along with almost Eldritch-like vocals, and crushing kosmische interludes sweep across super-heavy blackened dirge. This evil, schizoid frenzy ends up culminating with a long final crawl through repetitious, crushing riffage and swells of apocalyptic ambience, stretches of bleak electronic noise and cinematic orchestral sounds eventually leading this towards a "hidden" track at the very end, where the band closes the album with a blast of distorted, despair-drenched industrial power.
����� Definitely a weirder, more acid-damaged and more eclectic album from Aborym, a band who's already prone to alienate black metal purists. And compared to the machinelike brutality of With No Human Intervention, this is a much less focused album, which in keeping with it's general themes is probably the point. Regardless, I dug the hell out of this more madcap descent into Aborym's peculiar strain of Italian industrial black metal madness, and it's worth checking out if you're into kindred spirits like Blacklodge, Dodheimsgard, and Mysticum.
����� Available on digipak CD and limited-edition double LP, in gatefold packaging with digital download.
����� Supreme mechanical devilry! So we've picked up a couple of older Aborym albums that, for some odd reason, we never got in stock back when they first came out, despite the fact that I've been a fan of this Italian industrial black metal outfit for ages. Their stuff is some of the best within the nebulous realm of 'industrial black metal', as well as some of the weirdest. Now that some of these older Aborym releases have received recent vinyl reissues, I figured we'd go ahead and pick up some of their back-catalog titles in an effort to turn some of you on to the furious, futuristic, often bizarre heaviness that these maniacs has been blasting for the past twenty years.
����� On their 2010 album Psychogrotesque, Aborym delved inward for their inspiration, exploring visions of schizophrenia, violent psychosis and institutionalization over the course of these ten numerated tracks. Right from the start, this heads into a more offbeat and experimental direction compared to the crushing technoid black metal of their previous album. All of their signature traits (rigid, mechanized black metal, sweeping minor key synthesizer atmospherics, bursts of electronic glitchery and programmed rhythms) are here, but the songs themselves are more deranged and labyrinthine, their blasting violence getting caught in a web of convoluted arrangements and hallucinatory samples. Dance music elements come on strong early on, interjecting bursts of furious drum n' bass into the freezing symphonic black metal of "Psychogrotesque III", and there are eerie spoken word passages backed by grim industrial soundscapes, glacial drum loops and fragments of classical piano. There's lots of shape-shifting going on: slipping into mournful gothic metal where the vocals drop into a gloomy baritone croon; blasts of scorching rave-synth lead into stretches of skittering trip-hop-esque moodiness; jazzy saxophone like something out of an early 80's urban crime drama wails across the buzzsaw riffing; the singer's weird, reptilian croak is joined by operatic female vocals (courtesy of Karyn Crisis) that drift over sorrowful symphonic strings. Ferocious, jet-black hardcore techno kicks in on "Psychogrotesque VIII ", along with almost Eldritch-like vocals, and crushing kosmische interludes sweep across super-heavy blackened dirge. This evil, schizoid frenzy ends up culminating with a long final crawl through repetitious, crushing riffage and swells of apocalyptic ambience, stretches of bleak electronic noise and cinematic orchestral sounds eventually leading this towards a "hidden" track at the very end, where the band closes the album with a blast of distorted, despair-drenched industrial power.
����� Definitely a weirder, more acid-damaged and more eclectic album from Aborym, a band who's already prone to alienate black metal purists. And compared to the machinelike brutality of With No Human Intervention, this is a much less focused album, which in keeping with it's general themes is probably the point. Regardless, I dug the hell out of this more madcap descent into Aborym's peculiar strain of Italian industrial black metal madness, and it's worth checking out if you're into kindred spirits like Blacklodge, Dodheimsgard, and Mysticum.
����� Available on digipak CD and limited-edition double LP, in gatefold packaging with digital download.
���� Supreme mechanical devilry! We've picked up a couple of older Aborym albums that, for some odd reason, we never stocked back when they first came out, despite the fact that I've been a big fan of this strange Italian black metal outfit. Their stuff is some of the best within the nebulous realm of 'industrial black metal'. Now that some of these older releases have received recent vinyl reissues, I figured we'd go ahead and pick up some of these back-catalog titles in an effort to turn some of you guys on to the furious, futuristic, often bizarre heaviness that this band has been blasting for the past twenty years.
���� The first-ever live album from cybernetic Italian black metallers Aborym, Groningen delivers a killer early live performance from the band, captured at a show at the Vera Club in Groningen, Holland in May of 2004. Packaged in a cool-looking reflective silver digipak, the disc presents a complete eight song, forty minute set from these depraved industrialized demons, when they were arguably at the height of their powers. The set is mostly made up of songs from the band's 2001 album Fire Walk With Us! ("Fire Walk With Us", "Total Black", "Love The Death As The Life") and 2003's With No Human Intervention ("Faustian Spirit Of The Earth", "Digital Goat Masque"); in addition, Aborym inject a handful of interstitial noise and electronic interludes with titles like "Harsh-Industrial Inferno" and "Techno-Industrial Inferno", tying together their album material in the live setting with throbbing, semi-improvised industrial dance workouts drenched in harsh distortion and clanking sampled rhythms, stretches of rumbling demonic ambience, or intensely chaotic and blackened blastscapes that swarm with evil looping guitar-swarms, shrieking electronics, pounding technoid rhythms and monstrous, putrid vocals. Pretty vicious, and intensely noisy at times.
���� And the album material is definitely some of my favorite stuff of theirs. While later albums would become more experimental and hallucinatory, eventually incorporating other elements like electronic music influences, jazzy saxophone, operatic vocals, etc., this early stuff is more straightforward, fusing their raw, second-wave style black metal to backdrops of violent hardcore techno, harsh synths and electronic noise, the drum machine programming transforming songs like "Total Black" into frost-encrusted black metal epics riddled with hyperfast electronic rhythms that more resemble the sound of rapidly skipping CDs than your standard blastbeat action. It's also the era of the band where Attila Csihar (Mayhem, Sunn, Tormentor) handled the vocals, and his deranged, drawled screams and trademark weirdness were undoubtedly a crucial component of Aborym's savage and blackened psybermagick back then.
���� The recording quality is pretty good; in some of the set's more over-the-top moments, the often complex layering of samples that Aborym employs can sometimes get a little lost in the mix, and parts of their set can get slightly muddled, but that's offset by the frenzied energy of the band's performance, making this an enjoyable listen for fans of Aborym's industrial madness.
Black metal psychonauts have been waiting eons for this: a fully authorized, impeccably assembled re-issue of the 1995 Evil Genius CD which compiled the earliest recordings from Swedish black metal group Abruptum. For the most part operated as a duo comprised of founding member It (a guy allegely so evil that he couldn't be given a human name) and Marduk member Evil, Abruptum hailed from Stockholm, Sweden, and worked to become "the essence of pure audio evil". Evil Genius was originally released in 1995 on Hellspawn Records, and the first edition received abit of notoriety when it was packaged with a razor blade and a sticker that instructed the listener to kill themselves. That shit, along with the persistent rumours over the years that It was a dwarf who tortured himself in the studio to achieve the anguished sounds found on their demos and albums, has formed some of the weirdest mythology around a black metal band that I've ever heard. Evil Genius includes the 1990 demo cassettes Hexum Galaem Zelog and The Satanist Tunes, as well as the Evil 7" EP from 1992, and the sounds on these early demos can barely be described as black metal, actually; the music is almost completely unstructered and improvised, barely ever picking up speed (although there are a couple of awesome blastbeat eruptions scattered around these tracks) and mostly lumbering along in a messy mid-tempo doom plod. It's all about atmosphere though, and Abruptum are masters of creating some of the blackest, most disturbing and diseased soundscapes you'll ever hear, a sludgy, murky pit of impossibly detuned proto-deathsludge riffs and stumbling blackdoom buzz, gothic synthesizers and tolling bells jumping in and out of the mix, insane anguished screams and monstrous grunts of Latin wordage appear at random, the drums plod along covered in black mud, totally drunken freeform guitar solo-noise splattered over all kinds of strange random creaks and noises, all drifting out of a subterranean basement-dungeon and drenched in reverb. A megalithic, mindbending descent into garbled psychedelic blackness. Listened to this for the first time in my living room with the lights out one night, and man, did it freak me the fuck out. This stateside remastered re-issue comes atcha from Southern Lord, and features all new artwork, brand new liner notes from It himself, and
the track "De Profundis Mors Vas Cousumet" from the Nordic Metal - A Tribute To Euronymous CD tacked on as a bonus track.
We now have this crucial piece of weird black metal history available on vinyl, with new artwork, in a black jacket with aweosome black gloss printing that has the Abruptum logo filling the album cover, and the back featuring that huge straightrazor and the track listing. The record comes in a really thick inner sleeve that has killer photos of Abruptum as well as the liner notes. Stunning!
Black metal psychonauts have been waiting eons for this: a fully authorized, impeccably assembled re-issue of the 1995 Evil Genius CD which compiled the earliest recordings from Swedish black metal group Abruptum. For the most part operated as a duo comprised of founding member It (a guy allegely so evil that he couldn't be given a human name) and Marduk member Evil, Abruptum hailed from Stockholm, Sweden, and worked to become "the essence of pure audio evil". Evil Genius was originally released in 1995 on Hellspawn Records, and the first edition received abit of notoriety when it was packaged with a razor blade and a sticker that instructed the listener to kill themselves. That shit, along with the persistent rumours over the years that It was a dwarf who tortured himself in the studio to achieve the anguished sounds found on their demos and albums, has formed some of the weirdest mythology around a black metal band that I've ever heard. Evil Genius includes the 1990 demo cassettes Hexum Galaem Zelog and The Satanist Tunes, as well as the Evil 7" EP from 1992, and the sounds on these early demos can barely be described as black metal, actually; the music is almost completely unstructered and improvised, barely ever picking up speed (although there are a couple of awesome blastbeat eruptions scattered around these tracks) and mostly lumbering along in a messy mid-tempo doom plod. It's all about atmosphere though, and Abruptum are masters of creating some of the blackest, most disturbing and diseased soundscapes you'll ever hear, a sludgy, murky pit of impossibly detuned proto-deathsludge riffs and stumbling blackdoom buzz, gothic synthesizers and tolling bells jumping in and out of the mix, insane anguished screams and monstrous grunts of Latin wordage appear at random, the drums plod along covered in black mud, totally drunken freeform guitar solo-noise splattered over all kinds of strange random creaks and noises, all drifting out of a subterranean basement-dungeon and drenched in reverb. A megalithic, mindbending descent into garbled psychedelic blackness. Listened to this for the first time in my living room with the lights out one night, and man, did it freak me the fuck out. This stateside remastered re-issue comes atcha from Southern Lord, and features all new artwork, brand new liner notes from It himself, and the track "De Profundis Mors Vas Cousumet" from the Nordic Metal - A Tribute To Euronymous CD tacked on as a bonus track.
Now that several of their older titles on Regain are once again available to us, we have finally managed to get a bunch of Abruptum's import CDs in stock at Crucial Blast. I've been spending the last month getting reacquainted with these demented Swedish black metallers while working on writing up the reviews for these discs, and have basically fallen in love with 'em all over again. Out of all of the bands that made up the second wave of the Scandinavian black metal movement of the early 90's, there was none weirder than Abruptum. Their sound was a black pit of anguished screams and chaotic, mostly improvised ambient noise and mutated metal, and not surprisingly Abruptum were disliked by many black metal fans who came to their albums expecting something more, um, "structured".
Abruptum's second album In Umbra Malitiae Ambulabo... was the band's second and also had the distinguished honor of being the final release to come out through Euronymous' Deathlike Silence label before his murder at the hands of Varg Vikernes. Released in 1994, the album consisted of another single epic track created by the duo of Evil and It, and is slightly more structured than the hellish cacophony of their debut Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me . The diminutive It continues to deliver his tortured wailing and shrill shrieks over improvised drumming, mangled riffing that seems to unravel on itself, and a chaotic symphony of noises, evil orchestral strings, and black ambient textures, but the duo also begins to introduce other elements like crushing, droning riffs, 80's sounding synthesizers playing horror film score type passages, scraping violin strings, ponderous doom metal dirges, and samples of dripping water and other dungeony sounds. There are parts of this album where it starts to sound more like some sort of deranged industrial doom metal, lumbering and massive, though the music is just as improvised and seemingly disorganized as their previous work. These moments of tangible riffing and actual melodies and the drumming make this a heavier exercise in Abruptum's free-improv black metal as brief as those parts might be, and the combination of these parts and those awesomely cheesy 80's-horro keyboard sounds with It's blubbering, wailing, grunting, moaning and altogether anguished vocal performance makes this a delirious listen. As always, Abruptum evoke the hallucinatory hellish visions of Bosch and Grunewald through their utterly evil, trance-like improvisations and murky ambient goatworship. All of Abruptum's releases are essential for anyone into weird, fucked-up blackened "metal", but this album is one of their more epic sounding works and is a good place to start if you haven't yet experienced these weirdos yet. Recommended.
Now that several of their older titles on Regain are once again available to us, we have finally managed to get a bunch of Abruptum's import CDs in stock at Crucial Blast. I've been spending the last month getting reacquainted with these demented Swedish black metallers while working on writing up the reviews for these discs, and have basically fallen in love with 'em all over again. Out of all of the bands that made up the second wave of the Scandinavian black metal movement of the early 90's, there was none weirder than Abruptum. Their sound was a black pit of anguished screams and chaotic, mostly improvised ambient noise and mutated metal, and not surprisingly Abruptum were disliked by many black metal fans who came to their albums expecting something more, um, "structured".
The latest and last actual full length from Abruptum, the Swedish black metal duo who were easily the most fucked-up, far out band to come out of the original black metal movement, whose early albums were hour-long exercises in demented improvised "black metal", free-form noise, and the shrieks and wailing of the members engaged in self-torture. Over the top and pretty ridiculous, sure, but also totally EVIL sounding. I've been spending a lot of time with Abruptum lately as we finally added their albums that are still available and in print to our catalog (you'll find their In Umbra Malitiae Ambulabo, In Aeternum in Triumpho Tenebrau, De Profundis Mors Vas Cousumet and Obscuritatem Advoco Amplect�re Me discs in stock this week as well), and their recordings still stand as some of the most bizarre stuff to ever get labeled as "black metal".
2004's Casus Luciferi is a much different album than their earlier ones, and is more like a Satanic version of Cold Meat style death industrial at times, although Abruptum's unique hellish ambience again puts this in it's own weird territory. It begins with the thumping and pounding of a muffled drumline, booming kettledrum rhythms heard from a distance that is joined by some seriously fucked up and mangled guitar playing, super distorted, super detuned riffage slithering and buzzing over weird whistling wind sounds. This eventually dissipates and a series of massive orchestral swells appear, like a symphony of strings and woodwinds surging into sustained drones for several minutes. The end of the track joins all of these elements, the martial drumming and deformed riffs and dark orchestral ambience melting together with shrieking demonic voices into a fog of blackened, droning murk.
"In Actu Oculi" is next, a churning mass of blown-out, ultra-distorted bass riffage so gnarly sounding that you can just barely make out the grinding riff buried underneath of the grit and filth. Over this floats haunting female chanting, tolling bells, waves of caustic white noise and crackling low-end rumble. "Ex Inferno Inferiori" starts off as a quiet murmur of throbbing bass frequencies that is gradually joined by more of that hellish, blown-out guitar noise, blasts of crumbling distorted heaviness sliding in pitch and creating a super heavy slab of ambient drone. Throughout this one, strange tinny noises and distant cicada swarms swirl across the background.
The final track "Gehennae Perpetuae Cruciatus" opens with a glacial industrial rhythm, massive thunderclaps of tympani-esque percussive blasts and harrowing violin strings scraping far off in the distance, with pregnant pauses of almost complete silence appearing every few minutes. In a way, this is the least abrasive piece of music on the disc, but it's also the scariest sounding, and could easily work as part of a horror film score.
The droning Industrial rhythms and dark ambience of this album sets it apart from the rest of the Abruptum catalog, and it's the most composed of any of their works. As always, the music here is a soundtrack to hellish visions of eternal suffering and demonic torture, a sonic counterpart to Bosch's images of Hell (and as a matter of fact, a closeup of part of one of Bosch's paintings is featured as the interior spread of the booklet for Casus Luciferi, depicting two demons in the act of sodomizing some poor bastard), but here Abruptum go for pure mood and atmosphere. Recommended.
Now that several of their older titles on Regain are once again available to us, we have finally managed to get a bunch of Abruptum's import CDs in stock at Crucial Blast. I've been spending the last month getting reacquainted with these demented Swedish black metallers while working on writing up the reviews for these discs, and have basically fallen in love with 'em all over again. Out of all of the bands that made up the second wave of the Scandinavian black metal movement of the early 90's, there was none weirder than Abruptum. Their sound was a black pit of anguished screams and chaotic, mostly improvised ambient noise and mutated metal, and not surprisingly Abruptum were disliked by many black metal fans who came to their albums expecting something more, um, "structured".
This EP from 2000 is one of Abruptum's last releases, a three song disc that features three very different sides of this infamous Swedish improv-black metal band. The disc opens with the most structured song that Abruptum has EVER released, "De Profundis Mors Vas Cousumet" from 1991, which had previously appeared on the Nordic Metal - A Tribute To Euronymous compilation. It begins with vintage horror movie synths and synthetic vocal choirs playing this over-the-top cartoon Gothic intro, and then moves into a crushing blackened doom jam, plodding drums and boiling double-bass underscoring grinding slo-mo riffage while gutteral vocals roar over top. Kinda sounds like Thergothon with some maniac screaming random blather in Latin over it, at least until random Casio sounds, electronic tinkling and other weird bits enter the picture...and a backing chorus of "lalala"'s that pops up for a brief moment towards the end? Utterly fucked up, and genius. That one is one of my favorite Abruptum songs ever. The other two on the disc are just as crazed,. but each in a very different way. Where the first song is the most "accessible" and structured that Abruptum has ever released, the second track "D�dsapparaten" recorded in 2000 is without a doubt the most abrasive and harsh, over eight minutes of crushing blackened NOISE that begins with a clanging bell but which almost immediately explodes into an avalanche of lead pipes and sheet metal, exploding amplifiers and the screams of the demonically possessed. It sounds an awful lot like Merzbow, MSBR or Incapacitants or some other blazing wall-of-noise Japanese distortion wrecking machine, but infused with pure evil. Stalaggh is another comparison, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if the guys behind Stalaggh were inspired to start their project after hearing this particular Abruptum track. And the third and final track "Massd�d" is a super brief (two and a half minutes) but ominous piece that combines a heavy, distorted synth squelch loop and marching troops into a hypnotic industrial jam that ends in a triumphant fanfare of anthemic orchestral music. As always, Abruptum succeed in creating an abstract, hellish atmosphere from both metallic and decidedly non-metallic sounds, and like all of their releases, this EP is essential to anyone into ultra-weird, improvised blackness.
Back in stock after more than two years of unavailability!
Now that several of their older titles on Regain are once again available to us, we have finally managed to get a bunch of Abruptum's import CDs in stock at Crucial Blast. I've been spending the last month getting reacquainted with these demented Swedish black metallers while working on writing up the reviews for these discs, and have basically fallen in love with 'em all over again. Out of all of the bands that made up the second wave of the Scandinavian black metal movement of the early 90's, there was none weirder than Abruptum. Their sound was a black pit of anguished screams and chaotic, mostly improvised ambient noise and mutated metal, and not surprisingly Abruptum were disliked by many black metal fans who came to their albums expecting something more, um, "structured".
Recently reissued by Regain, the Swedish black metal label run by one of the guys in Marduk, Abruptum's Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me is the first album from the notorious Swedish improv-black metallers Abruptum, and even still this is some of the most insane and psychotic sounding "black metal" ever recorded. Both this and Abruptum's In Umbra Malaitae Ambulabo in Aternum in Triumpho Tenebrarum were originally released by Euronymous on his Deathlike Silence label before his murder, all of which has been documented in the book Lords Of Chaos, but Abruptum have remained something of a footnote in the history of Scandinavian black metal. Their music was simply too bizarre for most black metal fans to parse, and their earlier material feels like it has more in common with free jazz than traditional black metal. On this first album, the duo of Evil and It conjured a hellish hallucinatory fog of tortured screams, rumbling black ambience, mangled guitar noise and abstract riffs that start off sounding like black metal riffs but quickly turn into something different, strange noises and clankling sounds, pummeling double bass drumming and freeform improvised percussion, and hysterical blackened shrieks run through all kinds of effects processors. And the production is weird, with tape dropouts and sudden spikes in volume where guitars or vocals suddenly become VERY loud appearing all over the single, hour long track (split into two halves on this CD). This is also where the whole legend started that involved the members of Abruptum torturing themselves in the studio, recording themselves as they whipped, cut, burned themselves and poured boiling water on each other - totally ridiculous, but you can't deny that Obscuritatem Advoco Amplectere Me is some of the most evil music ever, a sonic manifestation of the demonic horror that is envisioned in Bosch's Hell and Fall Of The Damned paintings. Anyone that digs the fucked up, free-form "black metal"/ blackened noise of bands like Emit and Stalaggh needs to hear Abruptum, since this is where it all began. Crucial.
You want some cognitive whiplash? Read reviews of Vi Sonus Veris Nigrae Malitiaes online. On Metal Archives alone , commentary on this cult weirdo black metal album goes from a scathing 5/100 rating to more metaphoric examinations of the album that produces a vastly higher score. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this disc remains as divisive and provocative as it still does. Here you get a band that was connected to the lauded original Nordic "Black Circle" with all the black metal lore that comes with it. But who pursued a seemingly psychotic and abstract sonic vision that offered little to metal fans mainly looking for ripping riffs. I remember an old review that Peter Sotos did in this newsletter where he had gotten ahold of one of Abruptum's albums and compared it to something much closer to Nurse With Wound than anything resembling heavy metal. And of course this was correct - the modus operandi of Abruptum was invoking a presence of real darkness, some tangible aspect of human evil, through what is essentially intense and discursive sound-collages.
Recorded in 1995 at Peter Tagtgren’s Abyss Studios, Vi Sonus is the only Abruptum album that is solely created and performed by the late, great IT (aka Tony Sarkka), as other member "Evil" was unavailable. This is all "It", a one-man show as he plumbs the filthiest recesses of the human psyche. It is the third album from the band (following the first two on Deathlike Silence) , originally appearing in 1996 on the semi-legendary US black metal label Full Moon Productions. Profound Lore's 2019 reissue presents the piece in four parts, but as one unbroken track. Just over an hour of abyssic improvisational horror. Slow, pounding drums echo in some subterranean chamber, surrounded by nauseating feedback that rises and falls in wave-like movements in the vastness. Wailing guitar noise that precedes a more urgent drum track backed by distant moaning and howling . A formless mass of percussive psychosis opens the album, with weird knocking sounds, unidentifiable chirps, ghostly scraping and shimmering cymbals. As that drumming eventually coalesces into an actual beat, a slow, torturous trudge, and the shrieking reverberant guitar settles into huge splatters of distorted drone and floor-shaking rumble, Vi Sonus Veris Nigrae Malitiaes curdles into a bizarre and amorphous blackened doom dirge. Those pained screams and shrieks and gasps echo throughout the background as the instruments slowly congeal into this massive, cavernous plod, stinking whiffs of riffage and astringent melody and slithering atonality hitting you on and off again.
That charred-black, shapeless doom breaks apart into more sprawls of scrabbly detuned guitar noise, electrified hum, and malodorous non-verbal vomit, clanking chains dragging somewhere off to your left, bursts of mangled blast beats and reptilian hissing, and this push-pull tension of form and formlessness is stretched out over the entire recording. Those fragments of deformed melody and constructed guitar parts move in and out of the shadows, with the only real constant being that steady amplifier hum and the endless vocalizations that sound way off in the background. The parts where it starts to resemble some totally fucked-up doom metal are scattered and brief; in the latter half of the album, it does get pretty heavy, but it never relinquishes that atmosphere of sickness and insanity. For the most part, those howls of agony are encircled by blobs of gooey, freeform guitar fills the air like fumes from a long-rotting corpse, backed by energetic but apparently directionless drumming. When Vi Sonus is at its most shattered and abstract, it's remarkably redolent of the jet-black psychedelic scrawl of Khanate, a mutated corpse-gnawing version of early 90s Skullflower, or the most nightmarish moments of Keiji Haino and Fushitsusha. It's quite different from the later, more "industrial" Abruptum releases, much closer in sound and feel to the darkest extremes of European improv. But with that ghastly, "necro" ambience native to the early second-wave Nordic black metallers.
This utterly abject extended pain-ritual still sounds as far-out and avant-garde now as it did when Full Moon released it back in 1996. Even though a thousand bands have mimicked Abruptum's shambling, oubliette-locked death-dirge and blackened noisescapes over the past quarter-century, nothing has quite captured the unique evocation of mental and physical illness and personal corruption that "It” pulled off on this disc. And like Corrupted, this is one of those albums that is best heard on CD; the degraded, radiating "music" captured here should be heard unbroken, with no pause to alleviate the ghoulishness ambience of it all.
Still one of the most whacked-out, bizarro moments in black metal history. A personal favorite, for sure. This CD reissue comes in a nicely embossed digipak that stays true to the look and feel of the original release.
Although they never achieving the same level of legendary status as Chris Reifert's previous band Autopsy, Abscess were an amazingly weird and heavy outfit that has been cranking out a demented cross between barbaric death metal slime and psychedelic sludgepunk since the mid-90's, releasing a couple of crucial discs on Relapse before moving on to UK label Peaceville for their last few releases. I actually hadn't paid much attention to their last couple of releases since Peaceville titles had been hard for me to track down for a while, but their latest album Dawn Of Inhumanity caught my attention immediately once I heard some of the preview tracks and laid my eyes on Dennis Dread's spectacularly wonky album artwork, a wild looking vision of levitating cloaked cultists, occult symbolism, and demonic alien-eyeball beasts. If you�re a fan of the older Abscess stuff, you know what to expect here; the songs on Dawn are in the same vein as previous Abscess offerings, an offbeat mix of caveman death metal, hardcore punk, Sabbathy doom, and crazed acid-guitar freakouts that crawl and lurch through a dank cloud of sewer ambience, with weirdo riffing and Voivod-esque skronk appearing alongside their punky blasts of guttural down tuned crush and primitive thrash. Their sound is heavy enough for Autopsy fans, but Abscess are so much weirder, the songs often wandering into bizarre noise freak outs (such as �The Rotting Land�, where the guys from Darkthrone can be heard gibbering and grunting within a chaotic free-noise mess), fucked-up tribal psychedelic death murk, even layering acoustic guitars within an otherwise roaring blast of rocking mid-paced death metal, and Reifert's vocals wheeze and grunt through a myriad of delay and echo effects that gives all of this a bent, cough-syrup covered vibe. Along with Dread's killer album art, the booklet that comes with Dawn is also filled with additional artwork from Reifert himself, who creates nightmarish primitive visions of black and red demons that somewhat resembles Mike Diana's artwork. It stinks that this turned out to be the band's final album, as they announced that the band was being put to rest soon after the release of Dawn Of Inhumanity, but they left on a high note with one of the year's wackiest death metal albums that continues to blare out of my stereo on a regular basis. Recommended!
The 2004 album Damned And Mummified from Californian death metal mutants Abcess is back in stock after a period of unavailability, and it's an essential chapter in the career of this terminally weird side project from members of death metal legends Autopsy. The songs on Damned... are loaded with hideous doom-laden psychedelic death metal slime, at times reminiscent of Autopsy, but with weird gasping, snarling vocals that are run through an exorbitant amount of delay and other effects, lurching primitive death metal riffs find themselves reshaped into monstrously stoned Sabbathian grooves, insanely dissonant guitar solos and discordant almost Voivod-ian riffs, and lots of weird effects and noises. There are a number of tracks on here where Abscess get into their bulldozing sludgy hardcore punk modem, like "Swallow The Venom", "Tattoo Collector" and the bludgeoning title track, and there's an equal amount of crushing doom death and raging tribal drum freak outs strewn throughout this disc. It also has one of my favorite Abscess songs, "Twilight Bleeds", which has the band mixing together haunting doom-laden lead guitars and sludgy, lurching doom with a trippy mess of bizarre noises, maniacal gargles, bluesy soloing, and even some backing acoustic guitar and a couple of bursts of brutal hardcore that all adds up to one of their heaviest, catchiest tracks. They reached a pinnacle of glorious other-dimensional weirdness on their swan song Dawn Of Inhumanity, but this is still a killer disc from these death sludge freaks, and the music on Damned... continues to suggest to me what Celtic Frost could have sounded like if they had eaten a ton of mushrooms during their recording sessions. Anyone into offbeat death metal who isn't already a fan of Abscess should check them out ASAP. Oh, and the artwork on this disc is terrific; it's got a mix of bizarre drawings from Abscess front man Chris Reifert (which always have this weird Boiled Angel vibe) and illustrations from the masterful Dennis Dread on the cover.
Death metal pioneer Chris Reifert will always be known first and foremost for his seminal doom/death outfit Autopsy, but my favorite stuff from the guy has always been post-Autopsy project Abscess, the hardcore punk-influenced death metal band that he started up in the mid 90s with fellow Autopsy member Danny Coralles. Abscess were an odd band, one that blended together crushing primitive death metal, Sabbathy doom-blooze, and bursts of feral fast-paced punk rock, all with a weird discordant quality to the guitars. There's a quirky, somewhat psychedelic vibe to much of their stuff that was only enhanced by the often bizarre artwork that adorned their albums, much of which was created by Reifert himself via bizarre illustrations that resembled Lovecraftian horrors as viewed through the lens of Mike Diana's Boiled Angel comic. Unfortunately, Abscess called it quits not too long ago, but Aphelion has gathered together a bunch of the band's rare out-of-print splits, demo recordings and live tracks for this new collection, and it's essential for fans of Abscess's brand of quirky, filthy death metal who missed out on the original releases. Bourbon, Blood And Butchery collects the songs off of their splits with Population Reduction, Bonesaw, and Eat My Fuk, a number of live tracks recorded between 2005 and 2009 (including songs from their sets at Los Angeles Murderfest and Maryland Deathfest), and a 1999 rehearsal demo, with album art from the mighty Dennis Dread.
The only one of these releases that we've been able to stock in the past is the split with Population Reduction, whose original write-up follows:
It sucks that San Francisco weirdoes Abscess recently called it quits after almost two decades of delivering their quirky stoner death, but some new material has still oozed out in the wake of their exit, like this slammin' split LP with fellow Cali grinders Population Reduction. The Abscess side of this record serves up eight new tracks of their blistering acid death from these underground vets/Autopsy members, nothing quite as wonky as what I heard on their phenomenal final album Dawn of Inhumanity, but still plenty warped, songs like "Nausea Without End", "Bourbon, Blood and Butchery", "Volcanic Psychosis" and "Senseless Waste of Space" grinding out putrid blasts of sticky, sickly dissonant death metal slime, punky thrash, Sabbathy riffing and those weird forays into a kind of noxious stoner rock grooviness that has been one of their trademarks since the beginning, and there's a very strange detour into the Pepto-Bismol jingle that briefly appears at the end. Abscess fuse together an old school death metal assault with hardcore punk and a subliminal psych influences and it's a style all of their own that I'm definitely going to miss, but these songs make their passing much easier to bear.
Beyond that material, the tracks from the split EPs with Bonesaw and Eat My Fuk are equally raw and crazed, tracks like "Born to be Doomed" and "Skulldozer" rampaging with souped-up Motorhead style thrash that breaks down into some wicked Sabbathian weirdness, while "Poison Messiah" assaults the listener with a killer blast of crazed heaviness that shifts between spastic, discordant grind, slower, Voivodian riffs and brief bits of bone-crushing glacial doom. There's a killer cover of the classic Black Flag song "Nervous Breakdown" that gets filtered through Abscess's putrid deathpunk vision, too. The live tracks are raw soundboard recordings, but they certainly sound ferocious enough, especially those taken from the band's 2009 appearance at Maryland Deathfest that I was fortunate enough to witness. The three rehearsal tracks are pretty raw as well, but feature some of the more brutal, death metal centric songs on this collection. Newcomers to Abscess's twisted, drug-addled death metal should certainly start with their semi-classic Seminal Vampires and Maggot Men, but for anyone already hooked on Abscess's quirky, tongue-in-cheek brand of weirdo death, this is great stuff.
It sucks that San Francisco weirdoes Abscess recently called it quits after almost two decades of delivering their quirky stoner death, but some new material has still oozed out in the wake of their exit, like this slammin' split LP with fellow Cali grinders Population Reduction. The Abscess side of this record serves up eight new tracks of their blistering acid death from these underground vets/Autopsy members, nothing quite as wonky as what I heard on their phenomenal final album Dawn of Inhumanity, but still plenty warped, songs like "Nausea Without End", "Bourbon, Blood and Butchery", "Volcanic Psychosis" and "Senseless Waste of Space" grinding out putrid blasts of sticky, sickly dissonant death metal slime, punky thrash, Sabbathy riffing and those weird forays into a kind of noxious stoner rock grooviness that has been one of their trademarks since the beginning, and there's a very strange detour into the Pepto-Bismol jingle that briefly appears at the end. Abscess fuse together an old school death metal assault with hardcore punk and a subliminal psych influences and it's a style all of their own that I'm definitely going to miss, but these songs make their passing much easier to bear.
Also comforting is the presence of their pals Population Reduction on the b-side, a two-piece band that makes a great showing here with seven songs of awesome thrash-infected grindcore that sounds to me like a perfect hybrid of late 80's Bay Area thrash metal and the monstrous cacophonic whirlwind of the early Earache roster. I've heard a bunch of other bands try to pull this sort of thing off before, but I don't think that anyone has mixed the two influences together as well as Population Reduction does here. Manic growling vokills rip through the speed-demon blastscapes of "Cannabis Holocaust" and "In with the Old, Out with the Cold", puking up the venomous tongue-in-cheek lyrics over arrangements that flow between ripping thrash metal and guttural atavistic death/grind, with the guitarists laying down a couple of shredding harmonized leads and some of the songs lurching through unpredictable stop-start seizures. One of the highlights of their side is "Cult Scam" which drops the most pit-inducing thrash riffs on the whole record into the middle of the song, and they wrap things up with a cover of "In Nephritic Blue" from Spanish death metallers Haemorrhage.
The record has Abscess's Chris Reifert doing the bizarre alien artwork featured on the jacket (I always love to see his stuff), and it's released in a limited edition of five hundred copies.
Just picked up some of the last-ever copies of the CD version of this split...
It sucks that San Francisco weirdoes Abscess recently called it quits after almost two decades of delivering their quirky stoner death, but some new material has still oozed out in the wake of their exit, like this slammin' split LP with fellow Cali grinders Population Reduction. The Abscess side of this record serves up eight new tracks of their blistering acid death from these underground vets/Autopsy members, nothing quite as wonky as what I heard on their phenomenal final album Dawn of Inhumanity, but still plenty warped, songs like "Nausea Without End", "Bourbon, Blood and Butchery", "Volcanic Psychosis" and "Senseless Waste of Space" grinding out putrid blasts of sticky, sickly dissonant death metal slime, punky thrash, Sabbathy riffing and those weird forays into a kind of noxious stoner rock grooviness that has been one of their trademarks since the beginning, and there's a very strange detour into the Pepto-Bismol jingle that briefly appears at the end. Abscess fuse together an old school death metal assault with hardcore punk and a subliminal psych influences and it's a style all of their own that I'm definitely going to miss, but these songs make their passing much easier to bear.
Also comforting is the presence of their pals Population Reduction on the b-side, a two-piece band that makes a great showing here with seven songs of awesome thrash-infected grindcore that sounds to me like a perfect hybrid of late 80's Bay Area thrash metal and the monstrous cacophonic whirlwind of the early Earache roster. I've heard a bunch of other bands try to pull this sort of thing off before, but I don't think that anyone has mixed the two influences together as well as Population Reduction does here. Manic growling vokills rip through the speed-demon blastscapes of "Cannabis Holocaust" and "In with the Old, Out with the Cold", puking up the venomous tongue-in-cheek lyrics over arrangements that flow between ripping thrash metal and guttural atavistic death/grind, with the guitarists laying down a couple of shredding harmonized leads and some of the songs lurching through unpredictable stop-start seizures. One of the highlights of their side is "Cult Scam" which drops the most pit-inducing thrash riffs on the whole record into the middle of the song, and they wrap things up with a cover of "In Nephritic Blue" from Spanish death metallers Haemorrhage.
The record has Abscess's Chris Reifert doing the bizarre alien artwork featured on the jacket (I always love to see his stuff), released in a limited edition.
There's something about gore-soaked South American death metal that really hits the spot. This new full length from Argentinian grinders Absemia features strong musicianship, while maintaining that fiercely raw and noisy edge that draws me to bands from this region of the world. Executing extremely brutal deathgrind that�s rough around the edges, with raw production values and a flair for ultra chaotic riffing and blastbeats, Absemia grind through 9 tracks of atonal, ugly, and clinical shred with guttural vocals and demented song structures that perfectly fit their Carcass-esque medical textbook song titles and splatter aesthetics. The leadwork and riffing on Morbopraxis toe the line between spastic chaos and atmospheric/disharmonic melody, and some great doomy slow passages pop up throughout the disc, breaking up what would otherwise be a nonstop noise gore tech blast fest. Packaging features typical South American psychosexual/autopsy themes, with splatterized, hand-rendered cover art. Features a CD-Rom enhanced video for Cronica Infeccion.
More high quality black metal from Italy! Absentia Lunae hail from Trieste, Italy, to be precise, and this quartet spins an icy whirlwind of progressive black metal that's right at home with the generally avant-garde aesthetic behind the Sol Invictus label. If the band's intricately assembled blasts of dissonant blackness weren't cool enough, Absentia Lunae also stand out as one of the few black metal bands that I've heard that have a woman in their lineup, and a lady lead guitarist named Climaxia to boot! She might have one of the coolest black metal pseudonyms that I've ever seen, but Climaxia is also a shredding riffmistress, which I already knew from hearing her awesome solo project Melencolia Estatica (which we'll have available here at Crucial Blast shortly). In Umbra Imperii Gloria has previously been released on limited edition LP on Serpens Caput Productions in 2006, and the music is intensely epic, blazing fast and complex like Spite Extreme Wing but with twisted atonal riffs and dark post-rock elements showing up in unexpected places. Songs move seamlessly between raw, aggressive blasting with speedy tremelo riffs and waltzy melodic passages, and there are tons of amazing, moving melodies all over this album, even when the drummer is blasting at inhuman speeds, and the drummer keeps things interesting by throwing in odd jazzy percussive patterns (often matched by equally jazz-influenced basslines), sudden tempo changes and weird shifts in time signature, often slipping into strange off-time rhythms. Cool vocals too, usually delivered in a hateful throat-shredding rasp but sometimes shifting into dramatic, almost operatic singing. And always, there are Climaxia's guitars, razorblade-sharp and trebly, slicing through Absentia Lunae's discordant blackness with ominous arpeggios, abstract chords and heartrending melodic figures, creating all kinds of otherworldly textures and alien riffs that the rest of the band deftly navigates. The melodies are so catchy and moving on In Umbra that I sometimes forget just how dissonant and off-kilter rest of the music is, but it's far closer in tone and feel to mathy, avant-garde black metallers like Deathspell Omega, newer Enslaved and (especially) Ved Beuns Ende than the more traditional Italian black metal that I've been listening to. Awesome stuff, and I'm most definitely looking forward to hearing more from Climaxia and company!
An impressive debut album from this Brazilian prog-doom trio. Abske Fides's 2012 disc comes to us from the Solitude Productions label out of Russia, and is one to check out if you're a fan of the dour, prog-tinged heaviness found in bands like Mar De Grises, Void Of Silence and some of the newer Pantheist material. These guys do a similar sort of slow-moving, atmospheric doom metal that employs complex songwriting, proggy instrumental passages and electronic textures throughout their music, and tie in grim philosophical musings and stark urban photography to weave the moody atmosphere that surrounds this album.
The disc opens with the slow mo skullcrush of "The Consequence Of The Other", slow, surging waves of droning sludge and blackened guitar melodies giving the somewhat Neurosis-esque dirge a discordant edge that adds to the song's grim, threatening feel. It takes on a stranger vibe as classical violins begin to appear, joined by the eerie wordless backing vocals of guest singer Marina Jovalangelo. Vocally, Abske Fides keep things interesting with a mixture of moody harmonized male singing, guttural death metal style growls and those occasional female vocals. The rest of the album features more of these long, drawn out arrangements, offering a bit of angularity and drama in each track without diminishing their overall heaviness; there's definitely a bit of a Tool/Isis feel to some of this, though Abske Fides are considerably more doom-laden, with a definite doom-death streak running through their music. They do make several detours away from the lumbering doom into well-crafted passages of brooding instrumental rock, almost math-rock like parts and the occasional burst of rocking power, but the focus mostly stays on the massive dissonant riffage and sorrowful funeral-bell guitars, a wicked distorted bass tone that adds an extra dose of gnarled ugliness to the music, pounding tribal rhythms and grueling doom-laden tempos laced with atmospheric drones, with samples and subtle synthesizers adding an extra layer of cold industrial texture to the music.
Then there's "Coldness", a song that opens with an extended introduction of bleak industrial noise and thrumming drones before the band suddenly drops into an unexpectedly bluesy bit of slow-mo prog, the soulful blues rock guitar winding around the hushed, icy slowcore like something out of an 80's era Pink Floyd record. Some other standout tracks include the song "4.48" with its super catchy, major key riffage wrapped in darker, droning crushing sludge, and the instrumental "Embroided In Reflections" that closes the album, a killer mix of jangly melody and distorted wah-drenched crunch that reminds me, strangely enough, of a Texas Is The Reason hook being doused in squalls of metallic crush, with haunting documentary film samples playing over it a la something from Godspeed You Black Emperor.
Its pretty cool stuff that these guys are doing here, the odd proggy parts and violins and synthesizers give this an interesting added dimension that definitely makes Abske Fides stand out among the ultra-glacial funeral doom that you usually hear coming from this label while still offering lots of crushing, crawling heaviness.
Punishing early-90's re-issue that collects the entire Ultrasonic LP and two tracks off of the Ultima Action LP from K.K. Null's pre-ZENI GEVA noise rock monster, originally released in the late 1980's and remastered onto one 68 minute disc. ABSOLUT NULL PUNKT's jams were recorded way back in 1986/1987 in Japan, and even after 20 years, this is still a SKULLCRUSHING series of death improv beatings. Consisting of a spare bass/drums/guitar trio (featuring drummer Seijiro Murayama, who was also the original drummer for Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha ), Ultrasonic Action delves into a combination of free improvised rock, caustic, feedback saturated punk slop, and plodding dirge that recalls early Swans, accompanied by primitive percussion and Null's terrifying death howls ...sort of an industrialized improv take on freeform sludge rock, but definitely much more fucked up than that delivered by Zeni Geva. Definitely paints a picture of what K.K. Null would go on to create with Zeni Geva and his other, later projects. Excellent, completely abrasive and ear shredding atonal rock destruction. Released on Zeni Geva's Nux Organization imprint.
2008's Absolute Magnitude is the latest album from the reunited Japanese noise/improv/industrial/rock duo Absolut Null Punkt, which features drummer Seijiro Murayama (who used to play in Fushitsusha back in the late 80's) and KK Null (from Zeni Geva, natch) teaming up for another go-round of blistering freeform noise blat. Some of the older ANP albums like Ultrasonic Action treaded closer to a kind of industrial thud-rock similar to that of Zeni Geva and Swans, but the recent ANP albums have gotten progressively more abstract and noisy, and WAY more psychedelic. Which is ace by me. Absolute Magnitude doesn't really have anything that I'd describe as a riff, and the duo certainly don't come near the crushing angular noise-metal of Zeni Geva, but Null's guitars do get pretty damn extreme on this disc, spewing out thick jets of howling, bleeping, soaring effects-blasted guitar noise that sound more like the sort of stuff you'd hear on one of his solo albums, only here it's backed by the propulsive drumming of Murayama, whose rhythms often slip into a killer hypnotic throb that turns some of this stuff into a sort of super-abstract computer-battle krautrock. On the other hand, the second track explodes into full-on chaos, Murayama bashing and skittering crazed anti-rhythms and clanging industrial percussion that smashes headon into Null's distorted, mangled spaceship FX. Gets pretty heavy, in fact.
The first track starts off with a six minute splatterfest of pounding, tear-down-the-walls improv drumming, dense squalls of harsh industrial noise rushing in from opposing directions, and bits of jacked-up synth squiggle and raygun photon blasts zipping around all over the place; all of that electronic
blat and Null's thoroughly mangled guitar skronk suggests the crazy spaceship chaos-scapes of his noisier solo stuff, but melded with a furious, almost free-jazz-style percussive assault. But when it hits the midway point, everything drops out except for a smattering of random bleating electronic noises, and then the band rebuilds the track slowly into a throbbing, pulsating sci-fi krautrock jam, the drums pulsating beneath robotic synths and streaking high-end effects, and it gets pretty dense and hypnotic as the band rides this noisy, psychedelic groove to the end.
But track two is way more abstract, a sprawling soundscape littered with busy tribal free-drumming that percolates in a haze of damaged synth noise, wheezy digital glitch, Null's weirdly processed guitar that he somehow manages to turn into a screaming sax-like bleat, stretches of spatial percussion and random sounds, and Moog-y synth arpeggios. And the third track essentially combines all of the elements that came before into a massive thirty minute jam that takes you from Nullsonic brand starship bleep to super-distorted industrial/free improv dirge to furious blasts of way-out guitar skronk and hammering drumbeats, wandering in and out of more of those wicked overdriven synth/drums workouts with wild looping prog-style arpeggios that circle around Murayama's treated drumming.
Comes in a full color digipack.
If you go back and read the reviews that I've written over the past two years for albums on Solitude, Bad Mood Man, bands like Darkflight, Flegethon, etc., you'll notice that I've been hearing an awful lot of kosmiche and psych influences in these doom metal albums, as if there's this heavy undercurrent of space music and Tangerine Dream worship that has been seeping into the death/funeral/doom continuum. I might be imagining alot of this, and it's hard to follow up on my suspicions that we've got all of these deathdoom bands in Eastern Europe and Russia locked down in their basements with copies of Stratosfear, Dark Side Of The Moon and Stream from the Heavens endlessly spinning on their turntables since I can never find any interviews with most of these bands. There's definitely some big love for psychedelia going on in the deathdoom scene, though, and I'm constantly discovering cool, as-yet-unheard bands from this sector of the globe who are whipping out their synths en masse and pushing ultra-heavy doom deeper into the outer sectors.
Abstract Spirit's Liquid Dimensions Change is exactly this kind of album. The band is from Russia and has members of another cult funeral doom outfit called Comatose Vigil, and the music on here is first and foremost devestatingly heavy funeral doom, utterly punishing slow-motion riffs and plodding, ultra-heavy drumming, and impossibly deep vocals. Think Thergothon, Shape Of Despair, Skepticism, Evoken, Heirophant, Esoteric, Pantheist, etc.. The riffs are beyond heavy, the songs are epic monoliths of misery and horror that stretch up to fourteen minutes in length, and it feels like being suffocated beneath waves of crushing glacial death metal. That would be fine by itself, but Abstract Spirit make this even cooler by giving the songs a super atmospheric sheen, coating the lumbering, Cthulhian deathdoom with prominent church organs, horror soundtrack synths, symphonic strings, insanely majestic harmonies, choral voices, and yeah, some supremely trippy cosmic keyboards and psychedelic electronics that soar over the blackened dirgescapes. There are parts of Liquid Dimensions Change where the music turns into a massive infernal orchestra before being bulldozed by the monstrous doom riffs, and at other points the keyboards take on a gleaming, celestial gorgeousness that is total Tangerine Dream, whether the band realizes or not. And then there are also the weird appearances of jazz piano that show up in a couple of spots, which somehow just manages to imbue the music with an additional layer of unease. Fans of melodic funeral doom will love this, as well as anyone into the more psychedelic end of the death/funeral doom spectrum like Pantheist and Esoteric. Awesome!
Eight long years have gone by since the last time that we had a new album of "Mythological Occult Metal" from Texas thrashers Absu, the last one being 2001's amazing Tara, and there's been some shakeup in the ranks since then. The only remaining original member is drummer/vocalist Sir Proscriptor McGovern, who also plays in Mesopotamian blackthrashers Melechesh as well as the occultic ambient/prog projects Equimanthorn and Proscriptor), and he's put together a new Absu lineup in the wake of departing members Equitant and Shaftiel. No need to sweat though, because this new, revamped version of Absu is just as ripping and magick-obsessed a thrashathon as you'd hope. Simply titled Abu, this discharges thirteen tracks of esoteric blackened thrash that's equal parts mystic investigation and Teutonic speedmetal, like a methed out Kreator musing on serious spiritual/occult concepts and multi-part examinations of magickal theory like "Of the Dead Who Never Rest in Their Tombs Are the Attendance of Familiar Spirits Including: A.) Diversified Signs Inscribed B.) Our Earth of Black C.) Voor" . Wait, what? Yeah, Absu have always been a headier proposition than yer typical black metal junk, drawing their lyrical and visual inspiration from ancient Sumerian and Gaelic mythology and beyond, and backing it up with ferocious, complex thrash that continues to get quirkier with each new album. They aren't rehashing Tara - there's lots of slower, midpaced riffage, and some awesome Ash Ra-grade Mellotron and the occasional injection of siderial synthesizer - but that freaked-out Absu sound is still as fierce as ever. The riffs are ferocious and ripping, and laid out in strange sprawling arrangements, strewn with awesome psychotic soloing. Lots of unpredictable twists and turns and convoluted time signatures. And Proscriptor remains one of black metal's most proficient drummers, whipping up furious tempests of tumultuous percussive fills and choppy thrash, as well as coming up with most of Absu's arcane subject matter. So good to have a new album from these guys. There are some guest contributions from members of Melechesh, Enthroned, Zemial and Mayhem, and former member Equitant does make an appearance in a brief cameo. The band has morphed a bit, but this album is still a blazing slab of blackened thrash that I've been playing nonstop. The band is slated to appear at this year's Maryland Death Fest too, one of their first live shows in ages, so we are doubly stoked on this re-emergence of the mighty Absu!
Candlelight has released 2009's stunning comeback album from Texan black metal mystics Absu as a new limited edition cd/dvd set for collectors, with new artwork, new packaging (including a printed slipcase), and of most interest to Absu fans, a professionally produced DVD that was filmed in June of 2009 in Montreal, Quebec, which features a blistering set that includes a ton of material from the new album and a handful of classic earlier tracks.
Eight long years have gone by since the last time that we had a new album of "Mythological Occult Metal" from Texas thrashers Absu, the last one being 2001's amazing Tara, and there's been some shakeup in the ranks since then. The only remaining original member is drummer/vocalist Sir Proscriptor McGovern, who also plays in Mesopotamian blackthrashers Melechesh as well as the occultic ambient/prog projects Equimanthorn and Proscriptor), and he's put together a new Absu lineup in the wake of departing members Equitant and Shaftiel. No need to sweat though, because this new, revamped version of Absu is just as ripping and magick-obsessed a thrashathon as you'd hope. Simply titled Abu, this discharges thirteen tracks of esoteric blackened thrash that's equal parts mystic investigation and Teutonic speedmetal, like a methed out Kreator musing on serious spiritual/occult concepts and multi-part examinations of magickal theory like "Of the Dead Who Never Rest in Their Tombs Are the Attendance of Familiar Spirits Including: A.) Diversified Signs Inscribed B.) Our Earth of Black C.) Voor" . Wait, what? Yeah, Absu have always been a headier proposition than yer typical black metal junk, drawing their lyrical and visual inspiration from ancient Sumerian and Gaelic mythology and beyond, and backing it up with ferocious, complex thrash that continues to get quirkier with each new album. They aren't rehashing Tara - there's lots of slower, midpaced riffage, and some awesome Ash Ra-grade Mellotron and the occasional injection of siderial synthesizer - but that freaked-out Absu sound is still as fierce as ever. The riffs are ferocious and ripping, and laid out in strange sprawling arrangements, strewn with awesome psychotic soloing. Lots of unpredictable twists and turns and convoluted time signatures. And Proscriptor remains one of black metal's most proficient drummers, whipping up furious tempests of tumultuous percussive fills and choppy thrash, as well as coming up with most of Absu's arcane subject matter. So good to have a new album from these guys. There are some guest contributions from members of Melechesh, Enthroned, Zemial and Mayhem, and former member Equitant does make an appearance in a brief cameo. The band has morphed a bit, but this album is still a blazing slab of blackened thrash that I've been playing nonstop.
Now available as a dope double Lp set on Back On Black, on 180 gran vinyl and packaged in a heavy full color gatefold package!
Eight long years have gone by since the last time that we had a new album of "Mythological Occult Metal" from Texas thrashers Absu, the last one being 2001's amazing Tara, and there's been some shakeup in the ranks since then. The only remaining original member is drummer/vocalist Sir Proscriptor McGovern, who also plays in Mesopotamian blackthrashers Melechesh as well as the occultic ambient/prog projects Equimanthorn and Proscriptor), and he's put together a new Absu lineup in the wake of departing members Equitant and Shaftiel. No need to sweat though, because this new, revamped version of Absu is just as ripping and magick-obsessed a thrashathon as you'd hope. Simply titled Abu, this discharges thirteen tracks of esoteric blackened thrash that's equal parts mystic investigation and Teutonic speedmetal, like a methed out Kreator musing on serious spiritual/occult concepts and multi-part examinations of magickal theory like "Of the Dead Who Never Rest in Their Tombs Are the Attendance of Familiar Spirits Including: A.) Diversified Signs Inscribed B.) Our Earth of Black C.) Voor" . Wait, what? Yeah, Absu have always been a headier proposition than yer typical black metal junk, drawing their lyrical and visual inspiration from ancient Sumerian and Gaelic mythology and beyond, and backing it up with ferocious, complex thrash that continues to get quirkier with each new album. They aren't rehashing Tara - there's lots of slower, midpaced riffage, and some awesome Ash Ra-grade Mellotron and the occasional injection of siderial synthesizer - but that freaked-out Absu sound is still as fierce as ever. The riffs are ferocious and ripping, and laid out in strange sprawling arrangements, strewn with awesome psychotic soloing. Lots of unpredictable twists and turns and convoluted time signatures. And Proscriptor remains one of black metal's most proficient drummers, whipping up furious tempests of tumultuous percussive fills and choppy thrash, as well as coming up with most of Absu's arcane subject matter. So good to have a new album from these guys. There are some guest contributions from members of Melechesh, Enthroned, Zemial and Mayhem, and former member Equitant does make an appearance in a brief cameo. The band has morphed a bit, but this album is still a blazing slab of blackened thrash that I've been playing nonstop.
Another recent Absu reissue from The Crypt, Barathrum V.I.T.R.I.O.L. is once again available on vinyl, this time in a standard, straightforward edition limited to nine hundred ninety-nine copies that features the original Gothic Records cover art from Tim Phillips along with a printed insert. The Texas occult metal band's 1993 debut album is where we first find the band joining forces with new drummer and vocalist Proscriptor, and was where the band finally evolved beyond the gruesome, grinding death metal of their earlier demo and EP material into the stranger, more unique sound that was rooted in the then-nascent Scandinavian black metal scene. The guys in Absu were hardly hopping on the Nordic bandwagon, though, as Barathrum delivered a distinctly weird take on that early black metal sound, already beginning to reveal the sort of twisted atmospheric quirks that Absu would continue to explore in greater depth later on throughout their career.
With the first track "An Involution Of Thorns", you get the sort of long, ghoulish ambient intro that was commonplace on black metal albums of the time, but even this gets turned into something more psychedelic in the hands of Absu, a swirling ritualistic haze of bleary synth, reptilian voices rising in chant, distant clanging sounds echoing through the twilight gloom. But from there the album erupts into a blazing black metal assault, racing through these seven tracks of blasting hateful blackness and vicious, stilted riffs, occasionally throwing in bizarre female operatic singing and gleaming synth-drones that show up in the middle of songs like "Descent To Acheron"; other tracks heavily feature Proscriptor's thunderous, idiosyncratic drumming, a gale force storm of percussive chaos and ultra-violent tempos, and the guitars sounded nothing like previous recordings, transformed here into regal blackened riffs streaked with insane atonal guitar solos. There's also the almost Mortiis-like dungeon music and martial weirdness of closer "An Evolution Of Horns", and the blasts of dark orchestral power that introduce "Infinite And Profane Thrones" give way to an almost quasi-industrial loopscape before it kicks into the song's heaving, trancelike assault. While they were still a ways off from the mind-bending insanity that would appear with their landmark album Tara and the prog-infused blackthrash of subsequent works, this album is still a minor classic of weird American black metal, and definitely essential for Absu fans interested in following the band's full creative arc.
���� Long before they became the titans of progressive, mystical black thrash that would produce the 2001 masterpiece Tara, Texan band Absu began life as a ripping death metal monstrosity in the very early 90s, debuting with the four-song Return of the Ancients demo. Now reissued on both CD and vinyl and bundled with the band's 1992 EP The Temples Of Offal, that demo showcases the earliest rotten writhings of this esteemed outfit, offering an early, pre-Proscriptor version of their sound that stands in stark contrast to the proggy "mythological occult metal" of their more recent work.
���� The three-song Temples Of Offal 7" (originally released on Gothic Records in 1992) makes up the first half of this collection, blasting out the band's early, monstrous death metal sound with some intensely violent excursions into grindcore territory (that includes some awesome bestial vocals that completely dispense with any attempt at coherence) and stretches of punishing dark doom that crawl out of the band's warped blastscapes like one of the protean humanoid horrors depicted on the sleeve art. There are only the merest hints of the esoteric mythological influences that later become more prominent in Absu's music; for the most part this early work is entrenched in visions of rot and charnel violence.
���� The band's debut demo Return Of The Ancients from 1991 is even more primitive, four songs of violent buzzsaw death metal shot through with a few moments of crawling, doom-laden heaviness and a couple outbursts of weird riffing that cuts through the demo's low-fi, murk-encrusted sound; that is, save for the spacey, almost kosmische ambience of "Sea Of Glasya" which drifts out of the middle of the demo in a wash of ominous, mesmeric celestial murk, hinting at the group's interest in atmospheric texture that they'd really begin to develop further on the debut album Barathrum: V.I.T.R.I.O.L.. The side is rounded out with a rehearsal recording of "Abhorred Xul [Azagthoth]", recorded when the band still went under the name Azathoth, and previously only available on the now out-of-print Barathrum boxset. It's raw stuff, of course, but still hideously powerful.
���� Includes an insert with lyrics, release info, vintage ads from the era, and reproductions of the original demo sleeve.
���� Now in stock on CD via Dark Descent.
���� Long before they became the titans of progressive, mystical black thrash that would produce the 2001 masterpiece Tara, Texan band Absu began life as a ripping death metal monstrosity in the very early 90s, debuting with the four-song Return of the Ancients demo. Now reissued on both CD and vinyl and bundled with the band's 1992 EP The Temples Of Offal, that demo showcases the earliest rotten writhings of this esteemed outfit, offering an early, pre-Proscriptor version of their sound that stands in stark contrast to the proggy "mythological occult metal" of their more recent work.
���� The three-song Temples Of Offal 7" (originally released on Gothic Records in 1992) makes up the first half of this collection, blasting out the band's early, monstrous death metal sound with some intensely violent excursions into grindcore territory (that includes some awesome bestial vocals that completely dispense with any attempt at coherence) and stretches of punishing dark doom that crawl out of the band's warped blastscapes like one of the protean humanoid horrors depicted on the sleeve art. There are only the merest hints of the esoteric mythological influences that later become more prominent in Absu's music; for the most part this early work is entrenched in visions of rot and charnel violence.
���� The band's debut demo Return Of The Ancients from 1991 is even more primitive, four songs of violent buzzsaw death metal shot through with a few moments of crawling, doom-laden heaviness and a couple outbursts of weird riffing that cuts through the demo's low-fi, murk-encrusted sound; that is, save for the spacey, almost kosmische ambience of "Sea Of Glasya" which drifts out of the middle of the demo in a wash of ominous, mesmeric celestial murk, hinting at the group's interest in atmospheric texture that they'd really begin to develop further on the debut album Barathrum: V.I.T.R.I.O.L.. The side is rounded out with a rehearsal recording of "Abhorred Xul [Azagthoth]", recorded when the band still went under the name Azathoth, and previously only available on the now out-of-print Barathrum boxset. It's raw stuff, of course, but still hideously powerful.
Originally published in late 2023, the first installment in the Abysm series has been reprinted due to demand in a new limited-edition of one hundred copies, each one hand-numbered and hand-assembled, after the first run blew out of here super-fast. This new "second edition" of Abysm Volume I: A-E features a new full-color cover and artwork different from the first version, with revised artwork from series artist KHVLTVS.
This is the first in an ongoing series of zine-style books under the Abysm banner, sub-titled "The Incomplete Crucial Blast Guide To Black Noise, Necro-Industrial, And Ambient Filth". Should give you somewhat of an idea of what this is all about: the Abysm series collects various writing, reviews, and short essays from yours truly (CB scribe Adam Allbright) that pulls from the Crucial Blast archives, featuring material that ranges from 1999 through 2024, over two decades of documenting the weird and malevolent. This half-size ( 8.5" x 5") tome is packed with over sixty black & white pages of ravenous writing on the field of "black noise", "black industrial", the noisiest fringes of black metal, the most depraved edges of blackened ambient music, and similar gnarly, mutated sound from the pit and the horizons of this rotting planet. With revised and updated writing, some never before published and others dredged from the further reaches of the ancient internet, this first issue focuses on bands from A to E, collating work on the likes of Abruptum, Demonologists, Emit, Aderlating, Aghast, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and many other denizens of the sub-necro underground. We're talking the creepiest, strangest, most unique music that I've discussed over the years. With a style that sometimes verges on prose-poetry, these writings appear as frantic scratches on the walls of the asylum, confronting the most horrific and mesmerizing weirdness emerging from underneath the underbelly of esoteric underground sound.
As with subsequent editions in the series, Abysm I is splattered with weird diabolical artwork and messed-up collage art alongside the writing. Likewise, each installment of Abysm features new and original artwork from Crucial Blast favorite KHVLTVS, whose crazed imagery graces both the inside and outside covers of each issue. Housed inside of a resealable mylar sleeve with an outer descriptive label.
The first of the ongoing new Abysm series to crawl forth of 2024, Volume I: F-K is bigger, thicker, and more demented than the preceding issue, with over eighty pages of writing and art. As with each issue of this series, this half-size (8.5" x 5.5") zine-style book is published in a limited-edition of one hundred copies, each one hand-assembled and hand-numbered. And again, Volume I: F-K boasts suitably monstrous and chaotic original artwork from collaborator KHVLTVS, whose imagery is spread across both the inner and outer cover of this slab of printed filth.
"The Incomplete Crucial Blast Guide To Black Noise, Necro-Industrial, And Ambient Filth" moves on alphabetically to bands and artists F through K, and continues to present a curated collection of writing, review, and short essay material from in-house Crucial Blast scribe Adam Allbright, with writing that spans 1999 through 2024, pulling from the depths of the Crucial Blast archives, far-flung and forgotten corners of the 2000's-era internet, and never-before-published hallucinations, this beast is boiling over with an in-depth documentation of the noisiest, weirdest, and most wrecked music and sound that has been emerging from the fringes of the black metal and death industrial scenes over the past many decades. This gets into the gnarliest blackened mutations and ear-scorching weirdness from the edges of the underground, here focusing on selected releases and material from the likes of Kerovnian, Gnaw Their Tongues, Kaniba, Funerary Call, Runhild Gammelsaeter, Fire In The Head, Goatpsalm, Haare, Gate To Void, Husere Grav, and ever more denizens of the sub-necro subterrain. Again, the writing ranges from album reviews to background history to sprawls of near prose-poetry delirium and stream-of-consciousness text splatter, spilling off these pages like distant ravings from a crumbling oubliette (not too far from reality if you've ever seen the office over here, really).
As with subsequent editions in the series, Abysm I: F-K is additionally charred with weird devil-worshipping artwork, bizarre visual poetry experiments, blasts of pseudo-Gnostic blasphemy, and messed-up collage art alongside the flood of writing. And likewise, each installment of Abysm features new and original artwork from Crucial Blast favorite KHVLTVS, whose crazed imagery graces both the inside and outside covers of each issue. Housed inside of a resealable mylar sleeve with an outer descriptive label.
** LIMITED TO 25 HAND-NUMBERED COPIES. EXTREMELY LIMITED ** This adds the CRUCIAL BLEUGH 12-page zine , which was printed for all of the pre-orders - I ran into a series of cursed printing issues while getting the Volume I: F-K issue produced, and this small mini-zine was initially printed for all of the folks who had to wait on their order while I was battling the printer. However, I'm left with just a couple of leftover issues, extremely low quantities. Crucial Bleurgh is twelve pages of ancient and unpublished writing on a smattering of noisecore and gorenoise releases and bands, some going back to 1999; if you're into noisecore / gorenoise / improvised blast blurr, this has the goods. Hand-assembled and hand-numbered!
The first of the ongoing new Abysm series to crawl forth of 2024, Volume I: F-K is bigger, thicker, and more demented than the preceding issue, with over eighty pages of writing and art. As with each issue of this series, this half-size (8.5" x 5.5") zine-style book is published in a limited-edition of one hundred copies, each one hand-assembled and hand-numbered. And again, Volume I: F-K boasts suitably monstrous and chaotic original artwork from collaborator KHVLTVS, whose imagery is spread across both the inner and outer cover of this slab of printed filth.
"The Incomplete Crucial Blast Guide To Black Noise, Necro-Industrial, And Ambient Filth" moves on alphabetically to bands and artists F through K, and continues to present a curated collection of writing, review, and short essay material from in-house Crucial Blast scribe Adam Allbright, with writing that spans 1999 through 2024, pulling from the depths of the Crucial Blast archives, far-flung and forgotten corners of the 2000's-era internet, and never-before-published hallucinations, this beast is boiling over with an in-depth documentation of the noisiest, weirdest, and most wrecked music and sound that has been emerging from the fringes of the black metal and death industrial scenes over the past many decades. This gets into the gnarliest blackened mutations and ear-scorching weirdness from the edges of the underground, here focusing on selected releases and material from the likes of Kerovnian, Gnaw Their Tongues, Kaniba, Funerary Call, Runhild Gammelsaeter, Fire In The Head, Goatpsalm, Haare, Gate To Void, Husere Grav, and ever more denizens of the sub-necro subterrain. Again, the writing ranges from album reviews to background history to sprawls of near prose-poetry delirium and stream-of-consciousness text splatter, spilling off these pages like distant ravings from a crumbling oubliette (not too far from reality if you've ever seen the office over here, really).
As with subsequent editions in the series, Abysm I: F-K is additionally charred with weird devil-worshipping artwork, bizarre visual poetry experiments, blasts of pseudo-Gnostic blasphemy, and messed-up collage art alongside the flood of writing. And likewise, each installment of Abysm features new and original artwork from Crucial Blast favorite KHVLTVS, whose crazed imagery graces both the inside and outside covers of each issue. Housed inside of a resealable mylar sleeve with an outer descriptive label.
This Dutch band features former and current members of Planet AIDS, Bunkur and Funeral Goat and has been lurking around the underground doom scene since earlier this past decade - in fact, it took seven years before Abysmal Darkening finally got around to putting out their first full length, after releasing one demo back in 2004. The band's excruciatingly slow progress may well have been infected by the extreme sluggishness of their music, which centers around a mix of slow grinding doom metal cut from the greasy black cloth of classic 80's dirge merchants like Saint Vitus, The Obsessed and Pentagram; a heavy dose of feral old school Nordic black metal a la Darkthrone; and some dour downcast moves into depressive black metal that they manage to meld pretty well with the blackened doom. No Light Behind has the huge sauropod riffs and bleak outlook that I want to hear whenever anyone mines that older style of doom, but singer Kev delivers these snarling crusty vocals and deeper growls (which often turn into a killer Abbath-like sneer) that add a fierceness to Abysmal Darkening's music, which really takes off whenever they suddenly break out of the Sabbathian dirge into raw, messy black metal blasts and mid-paced Burzum-esque gallop. The first time that this occurs (on the opener "Behold The Gods"), it sounds odd and unexpected, but as the album goes on, this mix of atavistic doom and manic blast evolves into their signature sound, like a weird mix of Darkthrone and Vitus that's shot through with an extra dose of abjest misery and oppressive dread. The six originals are laced with mournful guitar leads and moments of depressed blackened majesty, but the closer, a cover of the classic Sisters of Mercy song "Marian", is killer finale. Abysmal Darkening turn the song (which was already plenty dark and ominous in its original form) into slow, grief-stricken blackened doom, with that memorable melancholic hook winding down in slow motion as the lyrics are gasped in a horrific charred croak. Very nice.
Back in stock.
First released in a limited run by the band themselves, Abyssal's swirling death vortex Novit Enim Dominus Qui Sunt Eius has been reissued by Profound Lore in a limited edition digipack release with new artwork. This British outfit offers up a surrealistic, highly deformed blast of death metal that has some similar qualities as label-mates Portal, Mitochondrion, Antediluvian and Impetuous Ritual, while lacing their filthy black blast with their own unique strain of sonic weirdness. The album begins with a brief blackened dronescape that sprawls out for a minute, a vast black fog of low-end rumble and chthonic drift that begins to extend its tendrils outward, and then the band suddenly crashes in with "The Tongue Of The Demagogue", revealing their true form as a contorted blackened death metal monstrosity, composed of hypnotic droning riffs and discordant tremolo sections, the drummer careening through ever-shifting patterns of blast and dirge, the guitars straining against form as they undulate in bizarre slippery figures and are fractured into harshly discordant shapes. Right off the bat, these guys tap into a surrealistic sound that, although sounding quite different, will no doubt get them lots of comparisons to the likes of Mitochondrion, Portal and Antediluvian; there's definitely a shared hallucinatory quality to their music, and you can also hear some common DNA between Abyssal's churning atonal horror and the discordance and experimentation found in the later Blut Aus Nord albums. This is unmistakably rooted in death metal though, with inhuman guttural vocals, ultra-heavy churning chuggery and a punishing bottom-end at the heart of Abyssal's music. The other songs move through similarly suffocating terrain, darkly majestic riffs bending and melting around the scattershot arrangements and bilious black atmosphere, while a few of the shorter tracks drift into seething Lustmordian ambience and subterranean industrial horror, scattered among the longer death metal eruptions. When the trio opt to drop in to one of their monstrous grooves ("The Headless Serpent", the instrumental "Created Sick ; Commanded To Be Well"), these parts slither up from beneath the churning amorphous blastscapes to create a powerful, jarring shift in the band's churning chaos. There's also some vaguely jazzy moments that appear in the middle of "As Paupers Safeguard Magnates" and at the end of the closing track "The Last King" that give Abyssal's murky death metal an additional unique touch, and definitely makes this stand out from the rest of the Incantation-influenced crowd that has been dominating so much of underground death metal in recent times. This is one of my favorite albums to emerge from Profound Lore this year, an oppressive and hallucinatory assault that fans of the more avant-garde end of the death metal spectrum will definitely want to check out.
Limited to one thousand copies.
Oh man, did I love Abyssal's Novit Enim Dominus Qui Sunt Eius. The secretive British blackened death metal band's second album (and first for Profound Lore) delivered a surreal, swirling mass of sound that I described as falling in some weird, warped chasm in between the cacophonic murk of bands like Portal, Impetuous Ritual, Antediluvian and Mitochondrion, and the hallucinatory, experimental quality of some of Blut Aus Nord's material. Well, we're still adrift in that same black sea of dissonant heaviness, but Abyssal's songwriting has evolved considerably since that previous album. Antikatastaseis sucked me into it's yawning black gulfs as soon as I hit play, the blasting violence of "I Am The Alpha And The Omega" swarming over the listener as a mass of brutal scattershot blast beats that break apart into that fractured Incantational undertow that is a hallmark of Abyssal's sound, the song lurching through some disorienting time signature changes and stuttering blast-attacks even as the churning atonal riffs drown in down tuned distortion and evolve into surprisingly affecting melody; the latter half of this opening track alone is one of the most intense pieces of death metal I've heard lately, shifting from a thunderous climax into a stunning vapor-trail of achingly beautiful gothic organ.
And from there it moves into the sound of tribal drums and monstrous chanting, but demented and delirious and possessed of a strange, almost industrial-tinged atmosphere, before abruptly exploding into a vicious atonal assault, crushing heaviness spiked with that dissonant guitar sound, weaving fast and erratic through that spluttering but crushing rhythmic chaos. And once again it finds its way into passages of soaring melodic power, a recurring theme throughout Antikatastaseis, the music moving through breathtaking widescreen melodic majesty, but also rife with moments where Abyssal's black churn downshifts into a titanic doom-laden riff, and it's pulverizing in its heaviness; but there's also a lot of space, places where that violent blasting pulls apart into intense minimalist drone and stretches of light-devouring, jet-black ambience, parts where it sounds more like Shinjuku Thief than death metal, and delicate melodies creep from the depths in the quietest moments, like the tinny music-box melody that haunts the middle of "Veil Of Transcendence", continuing to play even as the band roars back in with their bulldozing deathchurn and blasting, that tiny melody repeating eerily throughout the entire rest of the song in spite of the crazed sonic violence that surrounds it, until it finally synchs with another utterly triumphant riff to powerful effect. Plenty of contemporary death/black metal outfits incorporate abstract soundscapery in their work to varying success, but Abyssal's rumbling drones and warped black ambience seamlessly integrates with the contorted doom-laden heaviness, or the propulsive progginess of "Chrysalis", or the climactic wall of sound of "Delere Auctorem Rerum Ut Universum Infinitum Noscas" that starts off as an almost Penderecki-esque wash of terrifying dissonance but transforms into a brutal, segmented deathblast. A kind of epic, blackened prog-death steeped in existential horror and executed with exquisite craftsmanship, gleaming with moments of striking majesty, and capped off with awesome cover art that perfectly evokes the lightless oceanic gulfs traversed in Abyssal's music.
� � Started up by Crown Of Bone mastermind / ex-Demonologist member Dustin Redington in 2012, Occult Supremacy is a CDR label focused on "Blackened Noise, White Noise, Death Industrial, HNW, Dark Ambient, Black Metal, Horror Drone"; in other words, exactly the sort of stuff that I can't stop listening to here at C-Blast. The label's crude aesthetic is pure 90's harsh noise, with each disc issued in a limited run of fifty copies and packaged in either a slimline jewel case or a plastic sleeve with minimal Xeroxed artwork, the discs themselves either scrawled on with black magic marker or blasted with abstract spray-paint patterns. But the sound that Occult Supremacy traffics in is total horror, heavily leaning towards the bleakest strains of harsh noise wall and experimental, noise-damaged black metal, and over the past year it has maintained a crazed release schedule that has already produced nearly forty discs, from a variety of artists that includes slightly more recognizable names from the harsh electronics underground (Vomir, Burial Ground, Luasa Raelon). While we haven't been able to get all of the Occult Supremacy titles in stock, we have managed to stock a pretty large selection of their titles, all of which are recommended listening to anyone into the filthiest depths of black noise, experimental black metal, and brutal electronic noise.
� � This is the first Abyzm release we've picked up for the C-Blast shop, although the guy behind this harsh noise project has been putting stuff like this out for more than a decade. His first disc for Occult Supremacy is a heavy one, though, delivering a solid set of crushing, oppressive HNW for you to completely zone out to. Boundaries features two twenty-five minute slabs of molten wall noise, each one a sprawling sonic inferno filled with roaring avalanches of black static; the first, "Vestigial", is a maelstrom of crushing low-end distortion and buzzing bass frequencies that spreads its monotonous rumbling power out into infinity, a sprawling sputtering wall of guttural static that carries some of the same crusty, trance-inducing properties as The Rita's charred electronic noisescapes. As the track unfolds, though, controlled bursts of pedal-noise and fluctuating distortion are used to create sudden, jarring shifts in sound. The second track "Myriad" is a seething, boiling mass of electronic squelch, a mountain of fracturing, fragmenting glass slowly collapsing to earth, the grinding noise of disintegration looped and amplified into a swirling, drone-like rumble. Both of these tracks are pretty intense, offering up severe bone-rattling distorto-scapes filled with all kinds of swarming activity and movement that continues to reveal itself to the obsessive listener at higher volume levels. Monotonous, droning HNW for void-enthusiasts into the likes of Vomir, Burial Ground and The Rita.
Limited to fifty copies.
Hugely nasty and barbaric death sludge from former members of HEMDALE, Clevo SXE thugs DIE HARD, and FISTULA, from one of the few areas of the country that seems to be capable of consistently birthing high-caliber lava metal. Forming in 2005 from the void left by the almighty FISTULA, ACCEPT DEATH sort of picks up where FISTULA left off, taking the monstrously downtuned, sludgy hate punk of the excellent Idiopathic album and their phlegm spewing split disc with BURMESE and slowing the music down even more, and adding even more noxious vocals on exquisitely stoopid/negatively titled jams like "Punish The Retarded", "Kill Everyone", and "Skinning The Face For Relief". This self titled debut album sounds like EYEHATEGOD gone mentally unstable death metal, retardedly slow and diseased FROST riffs obscuring deceptively catchy hooks underneath the boils and scar tissue while axeman Scott Stearns voms majorly corroded and damaged acid-guitar and squealing feedback over sudden blasts of gnarly ultraheavy thrash. Former HEMDALE singer Matt Rositano's schizo vocals do a constant switch between fucking unhinged mental patient rants and some ridiculously gruff death grunts, and sometimes emits effective moaning chants, like on "A Slow Funeral For A Lifetime Of Suffering". Makita from LOCKWELD / APARTMENT 213 lends some additional fucked up vocal damage to "Wallowing In Filth". Awesomely acrid power death sludge hatred that intersects the goo of IRON MONKEY, COFFINS, EYEHATEGOD, NOOSEBOMB, FISTULA, etc., with face flattening, primitive OBITUARY / CELTIC FROST style heaviness.
Released in an extremely limited run of one hundred and fifty copies, the vinyl version of the debut album from these Ohio deathsludge thugs is presented in a nice minimal jacket that has the AD logo foil stamped in metallic silver on the cover, and is pressed on black vinyl.
Here's our review of the original cd release on Retribute: Hugely nasty and barbaric death sludge from former members of Hemdale, Clevo straightedge thugs Die Hard, and Fistula, from one of the few areas of the country that seems to be capable of consistently birthing this sort of high-caliber lava metal. Forming in 2005 from the void left by the almighty Fistula (prior to their reformation soon thereafter), Accept Death more or less of picks up where Fistula left off, taking the monstrously downtuned, sludgy hate punk of the excellent Idiopathic album and their phlegm spewing split disc with BURMESE and slowing the music down even more, and adding even more noxious vocals on exquisitely stoopid/negatively titled jams like "Punish The Retarded", "Kill Everyone", and "Skinning The Face For Relief". This self titled debut album sounds like Eyehategod gone mentally unstable death metal, retardedly slow and diseased Frost riffs obscuring deceptively catchy hooks underneath the boils and scar tissue while axeman Scott Stearns voms majorly corroded and damaged acid-guitar and squealing feedback over sudden blasts of gnarly ultraheavy thrash. Former HEMDALE singer Matt Rositano's schizo vocals do a constant switch between fucking unhinged mental patient rants and some ridiculously gruff death grunts, and sometimes emits effective moaning chants, like on "A Slow Funeral For A Lifetime Of Suffering". Makita from Lockweld / Apartment 213 lends some additional fucked up vocal damage to "Wallowing In Filth". Awesomely acrid power death sludge hatred that intersects the goo of Iron Monkey, Coffins, Eyehategod, Noosebomb, Fistula, etc., with face flattening, primitive Obituary/Celtic Frost style death-crush.
We didn't discover Accurst's 2004 album Fragments of a Nightmare on the Coldflesh imprint until recently while looking through the Red Stream catalog, which was the main distributor for this disc. We had seen the name mentioned in some blog entries, and one online posting in particular that listed Fragments as one of the "scariest" dark ambient albums ever helped guide us in the direction of this album. It turned out to not be the Lustmord style dark cavernous drift that we were more or less expecting, but instead a very weird, and indeed very creepy slab of lysergic black soundscapery, sounding like a mix of minimal horror movie score and black demonic drift blended with the isolationist ambient sounds.
The ten tracks on Fragments are set up as individual chapters of an interconnected whole, making up a single album-long piece, each chapter wandering through strange aural realms of gargling, inhuman moans and shrieks, deep and ominous swells of rumbling bass, the looped crackle of vinyl forming into a mesmeric hiss, distant gong-like reverberations that echo throughout vast underground passageways, strange verbal incantations rising out of fissures and cracks in the walls, and the appearance of some very dissonant violin sounds combined with booming tympani-like percussion and metallic scraping noises. Slow heartbeat-like pulses emerge from the shadows and are met with muted, looped percussive rhythm; and all sorts of weird, nerve-wracking effects and samples flit through Accurst's ghoulish deathdrift, which often makes this album sound like someone mixing up old experimental horror movie scores from the 70's with Cold Meat style death industrial. Some interesting melodic elements creep through this stuff, too; bits of evil xylophone and eerie minimal piano figures that are repeated over and over, and ghostly voices wail in the distant gloom, occasionally forming into deep chanting that sounds like the utterances of undead monks, or erupting into bizarre gargling growls. We keep thinking of recordings of the dead, EVP phenomenon, the sounds of tortured beings trapped between worlds, those crepuscular recordings accompanied by super minimal instrumentation, with a recording quality that makes this sound remarkably old and decayed. Some vague reference points that might give you an idea if this is your sort of nocturnal crypt-ambience or not include artists like Aghast, MZ412, Atrium Carceri and some of Abruptum's later, less black metal influenced work, but Accurst go for a much more surreal and cinematic sound that achieves a different form of psychological horror. Regardless, it's highly recommended for fans of all dark, abstract horror-ambience.
Spaced out girl chants, fuzzbomb stoner doom riffage, lethargic stoned hypno-blues freakouts crawling in slow motion...hell yeah, it's the latest slab of psychedelic devil doom from San Francisco's Acid King, fronted by the terminally trippy sludge siren Lori S. III (available here on a recently issued vinyl LP edition from Kreation Records) is, as you mighta guessed, the third album from Acid King, after something like a six year abscence, and first came into being via CD in 2005 on Small Stone. This is also the last Acid King album to feature bassist Guy Pinhas, who many of you might remember from doom heavyweights The Obsessed and Goatsnake. On III, the band kicks out seven jams of monstrous, shambling Quaalude-doom laced with trash Satanism/biker goddess imagery, given a majorly bottom-heavy throb via Billy Anderson's weighty production. Lori's signature drone-moan, soaked in reverb, drifts over the songs as they wind through huge grooving slogs of plodding Sabbathian sludge and hypnotic, repetitious riffs, as occasional snatches of beautiful melody suddenly appear out of the fuzz of '2 Wheel Nation', 'Bad Vision', and 'On To Everafter'. Fucking awesome, it's like hearing Cherie Currie from The Runaways fronting the Goatsnake/Hawkwind Big Band after eating a tab or four. I love everything this band has done, and this latest slab is no exception; it's crucial to ya if yer into the smoke-wreathed, lysergic trance crush of Boris' more psychedelic moments, the FX overloaded sludge of Sons Of Otis, Ufomammut, early Electric Wizard, Dead Meadow, Sleep's Jerusalem, Om, etc. Leaves you wasted by the time the needle rises off the last groove. This LP edition comes in a full color jacket, on black vinyl.
A long-awaited vinyl reissue of my favorite Acid King album, the dark and crushingly creepy (or is it creepily crushing?) Busse Woods, in a super limited run of 500 copies on black vinyl. Singer/guitarist Lori S. and her dope-doom juggernaut has always been one of my favorite stoner sludge outfits, dropping some of the heaviest trance riffing ever, but it's always been Lori's bewitching, spaced out moan that made me love Acid king, her druggy vocals just seem to float like plumes of ethereal bong smoke over the huge, bottom-heavy Sabbathian guitars and slow, sludgy tempos. Busse Woods was the bands second full length and originally came out in 1999 through Man's Ruin, but after that label folded at the turn of the decade the album was reissued by Small Stone with a couple of bonus tracks. This limited edition vinyl version only has the six tracks from the original release, but it's still an essential slab of ultra-heavy psychedelic sludge that anyone into bands like Warhorse, Om, Electric Wizard, Mammatus, Sleep, The Obsessed, and Sons Of Otis will adore. The album's named after a forest preserve outside of Chicago where Lori spent her formative teenage years blasting loud rock and selling drugs, and songs like "Electric Machine", "Silent Circle", "Drive Fast, Take Chances", and the title track all reek of weed, beat-up dubbed cassettes of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Hallow's Victim and teenage devil worship. Each of these songs might center around a single riff, maybe two, but they're the heaviest riffs ever, massive, bass-heavy grooves and downtuned fuzzbomb guitar uncoiling as ridiculously hypnotic riff mantras that seem to plod on forever, everything surrounded with an eerie autumnal chill. Beyond crushing. And I still think that Acid King are what Sleep would have sounded like if they had been fronted by Joan Jett.
Now available as a limited edition picture disc, released through Kreation on the tenth anniversary of the original release of this Cali stoner metal thunderblast.
A long-awaited vinyl reissue of my favorite Acid King album, the dark and crushingly creepy (or is it creepily crushing?) Busse Woods, in a limited run of 500 copies. Singer/guitarist Lori S. and her dope-doom juggernaut has always been one of my favorite stoner sludge outfits, dropping some of the heaviest trance riffing ever, but it's always been Lori's bewitching, spaced out moan that made me love Acid king, her druggy vocals just seem to float like plumes of ethereal bong smoke over the huge, bottom-heavy Sabbathian guitars and slow, sludgy tempos. Busse Woods was the bands second full length and originally came out in 1999 through Man's Ruin, but after that label folded at the turn of the decade the album was reissued by Small Stone with a couple of bonus tracks. This limited edition vinyl version only has the six tracks from the original release, but it's still an essential slab of ultra-heavy psychedelic sludge that anyone into bands like Warhorse, Om, Electric Wizard, Mammatus, Sleep, The Obsessed, and Sons Of Otis will adore. The album's named after a forest preserve outside of Chicago where Lori spent her formative teenage years blasting loud rock and selling drugs, and songs like "Electric Machine", "Silent Circle", "Drive Fast, Take Chances", and the title track all reek of weed, beat-up dubbed cassettes of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Hallow's Victim and teenage devil worship. Each of these songs might center around a single riff, maybe two, but they're the heaviest riffs ever, massive, bass-heavy grooves and downtuned fuzzbomb guitar uncoiling as ridiculously hypnotic riff mantras that seem to plod on forever, everything surrounded with an eerie autumnal chill. Beyond crushing. And I still think that Acid King are what Sleep would have sounded like if they had been fronted by Joan Jett.
A crucial blast from the planet-tripping hippie collective Acid Mothers Temple, amassed from classic minimalism and crushing galactic psych! This LP features a single lengthy track per side: In C sees Acid Mothers Temple mutating the legendary Terry Riley composition as a gorgeous beaming of crystalline cosmic krautrock jamming filled with spacey laser synths, shimmering feedback ragas doused in reverb and shuffling motorik rhythms, the collective turning the meditative drones of the key of C into a heavy, frenzied, beautiful blast of light extending endlessly. Totally gorgeous. On the other hand, In E kickstarts Acid Mothers Temple into total heavy mode, busting out an entire side of heavyweight psychedelic thrum freakout that begins with peals of oozing bagpipe-like synthesizer drones giving way to Makoto's frenetic open E chord strumming that drives a ferocious 2-note dirge-riff for over 16 minutes, over a powerful speedy rock beat and swarms of swooping banshee electronics. Makes me think of some creeped out, interdimensional krautrock mutation of Chatham's Die Donnergotter. Tight. Definitely one of my fave AMT sides, total speed hypnosis wipeout. This slab features the AMT lineup of Kawabata Makoto (electric guitars, violin, zuruna, sythesizer), Tsuyama Atsushi (monster bass), Higashi Hiroshi (electric guitar, synthesizer), Cotton Casino (voice), Ichiraku Yoshimitsu (drums), and Terukina Noriko (vibraphone, glockenspiel). Limited edition of 1000 copies on 180 gram vinyl and presented in a full color gatefold sleeve with Riley's score printed on the back cover .
A two song studio full length from prolific Japanese cosmic-psych orbiters ACID MOTHERS TEMPLE. Features two extended tracks, opening with the half-hour long "La Le Lo", a lovely traditional Occitan piece somewhat similar to the band's La Novia release, based around the melodic vocals of Cotton Casino and Kawabata Makoto's dreamy, serpentine guitar and deep-space effects, closing in a wash of psych-guitar heroics and mellow bliss. It's followed by "Ambition dans le Miroir", an ACID MOTHERS original, engaging in a fifteen-minute medieval spacerock workout with Casino's gurgling, speaker-panning synth washes, a beautiful guitar melody, and some spacey electronics. Another excellent release from the masters. Packaged in a beautiful gatefold sleeve.
Freaking explosive double LP gatefold re-issue of the time-flattening 1999 album from mystical Japanese hippie squad Acid Mothers Temple, led by modern acid guitar master Kawabata Makoto. This was the first AMT reissue on Eclipse, preserving this massive heavy-psych freakout on nice, heavy HQ 180 gram vinyl in a beautiful heavy-duty gatefold sleeve with new artwork; not only are all of the tracks from the original CD release captured here, but "Blue Velvet Blues" has been restored to it's original 40 minute version, spanning sides C and D. The music? Otherworldly. This is one of AMT's earliest, darkest, most out-there and unearthly sounding albums. Across these four sides, Acid Mothers Temple conjures beautiful, monstrously heavy and damaged psychedelic rock via dreamy gauzy dronescapes and Hendrix-gone-nuclear shredfest, screaming feedback and amazingly destroyed solos melting down over a rhythm section that sounds like it's literally exploding; eruptive, crushing free-rock splatter; passages of blissed out, sweet acoustic folk with female singing soaked in reverb and cosmic electronic squiggles flying through the mist; extended 60's style acid jams with deranged guitar playing, sputtering drumming, and distant banshee vocals; underwater alien lounge music; and the breathtaking, tremelo-heavy slow-jam "Blue Velvet Blues" stretching out for over 30 minutes alongside weepy, dreamy theremin singing, fading out and then back into it's coda, swirling together into a huge, all-enveloping cloud of shimmery, miasmic drone that builds for close to half an hour. This is one of those albums that just sounds enormous, a single organic blast of magic that must be experienced from start to finish.
We just busted open a new box of Outfall Channel releases and related stuff this week, which is always a cause for celebration - these Cincy mutants have been releasing some of my favorite bizarro noise/grind/scum tapes and cd-rs of the past year, like those killer discs and cassingles from the dayglo avant-noisecore troupe Hentai Lacerator, that rad-looking handcrafted cd-r box from Fields Of Blood (and the blackened free-murk-doom transmissions captured on the disc itself), Robe's charred and rusted black rumbling, and the jacked-up, freeform hardcore jazz improv destruction of Capital Hemorrhage, all of which have been packaged up in cool, hand assembled sleeves and cases covered in all kinds of strange, tactile materials. Awesome to look at and hold, and thoroughly mindscrambling to listen to. Outfall Channel might just be the coolest DIY hardcore noise label out there right now.
So I get extremely stoked whenever new stuff arrives here from those guys. This new batch of stuff includes a new 7" split with Hentai Lacerator and Gaybomb, the fucking terrific debut issue of the new zine Sacrifice, a killer new disc from Robe called Depth that delivers more of that mysterious artists black sonic goo, and this caustic slab of severe drug feedback and harsh electronic rhythms from Acid Mouth, which from what little I have been able to learn about the project, is another project from whoever is behind Robe. This self-titled CD-R moves from pulsating, fastpaced feedback manipulations to harshly distorted drum corps workouts, slipping some heavily narcotized vocal loops and reverb channel powerfucks in amongst the blasts of psychedelic amp squeal and pummeling rhythms rattling away behind a thick veil of white noise. It's a pretty damaging noise excursion somewhere in between old school Test Dept. and some of the nastier Broken Flag stuff like early Ramleh, with song's titled "Electronic Bukkake", "Cum On Glass", and "Fuck It Let's Huff" to outline Acid Mouth's depraved visions. Packaged in a cd wallet that is covered in some kind of thick paint gunk over bits and pieces of vaguely vaginal illustrations that altogether looks nicely twisted, with a silkscreened insert foldout inside.
This 7" has been out of print for awhile, but I've dug some up from the depths of the Crucial Blast warehouse this week. Released with two different full color covers to totally infuriate collectors and Acid Witch obsessives, Midnight Mass / To Magic, Sex And Gore delivers two monstrous tracks of the band's awesome psychedelic sludgy death metal Walpurgisnacht. Each of these different versions features artwork for one of the two songs, and they look fuckin' killer; as a fanatic for creepy, old EC Comics style artwork, I had to pick up both of 'em.
On "Midnight Mass", the song begins with an Goblin-style keyboard intro combined with some sampled audio from an old witchcraft film (which I'm not able to place), and then it kicks into the crushing chugging doom death, monstrous slow motion Sabbathian deathsludge backed by those killer horror movie style keyboards and soaring psychedelic leads. The other track "To Magic, Sex And Gore" is equally crushing, a blast of groovy doomed death with a pulverizing classic Sab-riff slowed down to a bone crushing crawl and backed by keyboards straight out of a 70's Hammer film. Awesome!
Both versions are extremely limited, and will not be restocked when they sell out.
This 7" has been out of print for awhile, but I've dug some up from the depths of the Crucial Blast warehouse this week. Released with two different full color covers to totally infuriate collectors and Acid Witch obsessives, Midnight Mass / To Magic, Sex And Gore delivers two monstrous tracks of the band's awesome psychedelic sludgy death metal Walpurgisnacht. Each of these different versions features artwork for one of the two songs, and they look fuckin' killer; as a fanatic for creepy, old EC Comics style artwork, I had to pick up both of 'em.
On "Midnight Mass", the song begins with an Goblin-style keyboard intro combined with some sampled audio from an old witchcraft film (which I'm not able to place), and then it kicks into the crushing chugging doom death, monstrous slow motion Sabbathian deathsludge backed by those killer horror movie style keyboards and soaring psychedelic leads. The other track "To Magic, Sex And Gore" is equally crushing, a blast of groovy doomed death with a pulverizing classic Sab-riff slowed down to a bone crushing crawl and backed by keyboards straight out of a 70's Hammer film. Awesome!
Both versions are extremely limited, and will not be restocked when they sell out. ONLY ONE COPY LEFT OF THIS VERSION!!!!
After being out of print for a while following its release on the notorious death metal label Razorback Records, Acid Witch's 2008 debut Witchtanic Hellucinations was reissued late last year on Cd through Hell's Headbangers, followed by this posh new vinyl reissue of the album. Fans of this band's kooky psychedelic death/doom who slobbered all over the Halloween-centric presentation of their last Lp Stoned will find a similar set of goodies here; featuring a slightly revised look and layout, the 2013 redux of Hellucinations is otherwise identical to the old Razorback edition, with thirteen songs of Acid Witch's killer horror movie obsessed heaviness and groovy, fx-splattered doom (which also happens to feature Finnish sludgemonger Lasse Pyykk� of Hooded Menace / Vacant Coffin in his opnly full-length recording with the band). Starting off with a ridiculous intro track that sounds like something off of one of my old Halloween-themed spoken word Lps on the Caedmon imprint from the early 80s, Hellucinations quickly gets down into the bubbling swamp-muck with their mix of burly Sabbathian riffage, gurgling guttural death metal-style vocals, lysergic guitar spew and trippy electronic sounds, sounding not too unlike a more beastly version of Cathedral high on 70's occult horror films, the day-glo pastaland splatter epics of Lucio Fulci, and loads of vintage Halloween visuals. My kind of party.
Acid Witch throw in all sorts of weird touches in building their stoned basement fug across this album, with moaning voices drifting in from behind the rocking metallic chuggery, washes of spacey Hawkwindian synth-gloop surging out of their many passages of creeping, crawling doom, cauldrons bubbling beneath droning psychedelic guitar spew and nocturnal sounds and howling wolves introduce one pulverizing down tuned deathgroove after another. They even slip into some purely instrumental soundscapery on tracks like "Beastly Brew", where gusts of wah-drenched guitar meets slabs of cavernous black drift soaked in reverb, or the spires of gothic organs and dreamlike electronics that make up the brief interlude "Realm Of The Wicked". Those keyboards are one of my favorite aspects of Acid Witch's sound, their eerie analogue tones and shifts into gothic organ sounds obviously nodding in the direction of those vintage 80's horror movie scores from Goblin, Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter; where most bands would be content to use that sort of thing to simply introduce a song, Acid Witch incorporate those creepy, hallucinatory keyboards right into the meat of their music, evoking the feel of classic early 80s splat cinema even as the band is grinding out their monstrous doomdeath. I said the same thing about Stoned, and its just as applicable here - Acid Witch really does sound like the perfect fusion of Forest Of Equilibrium-era Cathedral and the kind of 80s-era horror-synth sound that I am a complete and total junkie for.
After being out of print for a while following its release on the notorious death metal label Razorback Records, Acid Witch's 2008 debut Witchtanic Hellucinations was reissued late last year on Cd through Hell's Headbangers, followed by this posh new vinyl reissue of the album. Fans of this band's kooky psychedelic death/doom who slobbered all over the Halloween-centric presentation of their last Lp Stoned will find a similar set of goodies here; featuring a slightly revised look and layout, the 2013 redux of Hellucinations is otherwise identical to the old Razorback edition, with thirteen songs of Acid Witch's killer horror movie obsessed heaviness and groovy, fx-splattered doom (which also happens to feature Finnish sludgemonger Lasse Pyykk� of Hooded Menace / Vacant Coffin in his opnly full-length recording with the band). Starting off with a ridiculous intro track that sounds like something off of one of my old Halloween-themed spoken word Lps on the Caedmon imprint from the early 80s, Hellucinations quickly gets down into the bubbling swamp-muck with their mix of burly Sabbathian riffage, gurgling guttural death metal-style vocals, lysergic guitar spew and trippy electronic sounds, sounding not too unlike a more beastly version of Cathedral high on 70's occult horror films, the day-glo pastaland splatter epics of Lucio Fulci, and loads of vintage Halloween visuals. My kind of party.
Acid Witch throw in all sorts of weird touches in building their stoned basement fug across this album, with moaning voices drifting in from behind the rocking metallic chuggery, washes of spacey Hawkwindian synth-gloop surging out of their many passages of creeping, crawling doom, cauldrons bubbling beneath droning psychedelic guitar spew and nocturnal sounds and howling wolves introduce one pulverizing down tuned deathgroove after another. They even slip into some purely instrumental soundscapery on tracks like "Beastly Brew", where gusts of wah-drenched guitar meets slabs of cavernous black drift soaked in reverb, or the spires of gothic organs and dreamlike electronics that make up the brief interlude "Realm Of The Wicked". Those keyboards are one of my favorite aspects of Acid Witch's sound, their eerie analogue tones and shifts into gothic organ sounds obviously nodding in the direction of those vintage 80's horror movie scores from Goblin, Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter; where most bands would be content to use that sort of thing to simply introduce a song, Acid Witch incorporate those creepy, hallucinatory keyboards right into the meat of their music, evoking the feel of classic early 80s splat cinema even as the band is grinding out their monstrous doomdeath. I said the same thing about Stoned, and its just as applicable here - Acid Witch really does sound like the perfect fusion of Forest Of Equilibrium-era Cathedral and the kind of 80s-era horror-synth sound that I am a complete and total junkie for.
The vinyl reissue features a revised album layout, and includes killer artwork from Zornow and Shagrat across the gatefold sleeve, a big foldout full-color poster of the cover art, and a custom window hanging that is designed in the style of those classic Halloween decorations from the 70s and 80s; comes on black and orange vinyl.
The latest vinyl version of Acid Witch's 2008 debut Witchtanic Hellucinations, released as a new Orange/Purple colored vinyl variant for 2015 via Hell's Headbangers. Fans of this band's kooky psychedelic death/doom who slobbered all over the Halloween-centric presentation of their last Lp Stoned will find a similar set of goodies here; featuring a slightly revised look and layout, this latest edition of Hellucinations is otherwise identical to the old Razorback edition, with thirteen songs of Acid Witch's killer horror movie obsessed heaviness and groovy, fx-splattered doom (which also happens to feature Finnish sludgemonger Lasse Pyykk� of Hooded Menace / Vacant Coffin in his only full-length recording with the band). Starting off with a ridiculous intro track that sounds like something off of one of my old Halloween-themed spoken word Lps on the Caedmon imprint from the early 80s, Hellucinations quickly gets down into the bubbling swamp-muck with their mix of burly Sabbathian riffage, gurgling guttural death metal-style vocals, lysergic guitar spew and trippy electronic sounds, sounding not too unlike a more beastly version of Cathedral high on 70's occult horror films, the day-glo pastaland splatter epics of Lucio Fulci, and loads of vintage Halloween visuals. My kind of party.
��Acid Witch throw in all sorts of weird touches in building their stoned basement fug across this album, with moaning voices drifting in from behind the rocking metallic chuggery, washes of spacey Hawkwindian synth-gloop surging out of their many passages of creeping, crawling doom, cauldrons bubbling beneath droning psychedelic guitar spew and nocturnal sounds and howling wolves introduce one pulverizing down tuned deathgroove after another. They even slip into some purely instrumental soundscapery on tracks like "Beastly Brew", where gusts of wah-drenched guitar meets slabs of cavernous black drift soaked in reverb, or the spires of gothic organs and dreamlike electronics that make up the brief interlude "Realm Of The Wicked". Those keyboards are one of my favorite aspects of Acid Witch's sound, their eerie analogue tones and shifts into gothic organ sounds obviously nodding in the direction of those vintage 80's horror movie scores from Goblin, Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter; where most bands would be content to use that sort of thing to simply introduce a song, Acid Witch incorporate those creepy, hallucinatory keyboards right into the meat of their music, evoking the feel of classic early 80s splat cinema even as the band is grinding out their monstrous doomdeath. I said the same thing about Stoned, and its just as applicable here - Acid Witch really does sound like the perfect fusion of Forest Of Equilibrium-era Cathedral and the kind of 80s-era horror-synth sound that I am a complete and total junkie for.
��The vinyl reissue features a revised album layout, and includes killer artwork from Zornow and Shagrat across the gatefold sleeve, a big foldout full-color poster of the cover art, and a custom window hanging that is designed in the style of those classic Halloween decorations from the 70s and 80s.
��� Acid Witch's 2008 debut Witchtanic Hellucinations is now available on limited-edition cassette, featuring thirteen songs of killer horror movie obsessed heaviness and groovy, fx-splattered doom (which also happens to feature Finnish sludgemonger Lasse Pyykk� of Hooded Menace / Vacant Coffin in his only full-length recording with the band). Starting off with a ridiculous intro track that sounds like something off of one of my old Halloween-themed spoken word Lps on the Caedmon imprint from the early 80s, Hellucinations quickly gets down into the bubbling swamp-muck with their mix of burly Sabbathian riffage, gurgling guttural death metal-style vocals, lysergic guitar spew and trippy electronic sounds, sounding not too unlike a more beastly version of Cathedral high on 70's occult horror films, the day-glo pastaland splatter epics of Lucio Fulci, and loads of vintage Halloween visuals. My kind of party.
��� Acid Witch throw in all sorts of weird touches in building their stoned basement fug across this album, with moaning voices drifting in from behind the rocking metallic chuggery, washes of spacey Hawkwindian synth-gloop surging out of their many passages of creeping, crawling doom, cauldrons bubbling beneath droning psychedelic guitar spew and nocturnal sounds and howling wolves introduce one pulverizing down tuned deathgroove after another. They even slip into some purely instrumental soundscapery on tracks like "Beastly Brew", where gusts of wah-drenched guitar meets slabs of cavernous black drift soaked in reverb, or the spires of gothic organs and dreamlike electronics that make up the brief interlude "Realm Of The Wicked". Those keyboards are one of my favorite aspects of Acid Witch's sound, their eerie analogue tones and shifts into gothic organ sounds obviously nodding in the direction of those vintage 80's horror movie scores from Goblin, Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter; where most bands would be content to use that sort of thing to simply introduce a song, Acid Witch incorporate those creepy, hallucinatory keyboards right into the meat of their music, evoking the feel of classic early 80s splat cinema even as the band is grinding out their monstrous doomdeath. I said the same thing about Stoned, and its just as applicable here - Acid Witch really does sound like the perfect fusion of Forest Of Equilibrium-era Cathedral and the kind of 80s-era horror-synth sound that I am a complete and total junkie for.
Just got this psychedelic deathsludge favorite back in stock on multiple formats for your next descent into horror-obsessed, dope-fueled delirium, including a new vinyl repress that includes an 18" X 24" full-color poster of the cover art.
Album number two from this demented Detroit doomdeath outfit, 2010's Stoned delivered ten new tracks of the schlock-fueled psychedelic heaviness that originally flattened my skull to a pile of pulp on their Witchtanic Hellucinations debut. Still drunk off a fetid brew of gore-splattered cinematic sleaze, 80's VHS worship, 70's psychedelic proto-metal, delirious basement occultism, ancient punk rock, denim-draped doom and old-school death filth, these guys have created an intoxicating heaviness with this stuff, their crushing, THC-tinged rumble emanating the autumnal glow of the Halloween season no matter what time of year you throw this album on.
The band's obsession with classic creep culture sees them paying homage to classic heavy metal horror movies like Trick Or Treat and Hammer classics like Witchfinder General, with lots of cultural references seeping through their lyrics and imagery. And as before, Stoned serves up samples from those sorts of ancient horror, occult and exploitation films, carefully edited into diabolical intros and laid out over moldy old-school synthesizer music like something from a lost Fabio Frizzi score. The intros and interludes on this album are pretty cool, definitely campy, but perfect for the atmosphere these guys create. That stuff usually gives way to their crushing downtuned doom metal, carved up into infectious, straightforward riffs that wind around your cerebral cortex like a parasitic worms. Musically, you can still hear a classic Cathedral-esque vibe in these molten, fuzz-encrusted riffs and the ponderous weight of Acid Witch's filthy, Sabbathian grooves, but their version of death/doom is so much more warped. The vocals are a putrid, gargling mess echoing over these gore-stained epics, while the songs stick to a mix of simple, rocking riffs and slower chorus sections, where they really lay the doom on thick.
There's also lots of keyboard action here. A rollicking, trippy Hammond organ sound haunts most of these songs, sometimes blending with killer 80's style Carpenterian synth, or breaking into a wicked, Deep Purple-esque keyboard solo like on "Live Forever". Definitely a big part of what makes Acid Witch's music so weirdly nostalgic. But amid all of this trippy psych-doom and basement witchery, probably the creepiest track on the whole album is the one that drops all of the metal; the crazed "Whispers In The Dark" really sticks out, starting off as a Gobliny piece of creepy, synth-heavy spook-prog, but over the course of the song slowly degenerating into a druggy, chaotic noisescape filled with hellish screams, bizarre FX and other ghastly sounds. Man, I love this stuff. Stoned is one of those albums that feels like it was custom made for me, fusing all of my obsessions into a pulverizing, pulpy blast of drugged black sludge.
����� Just got this psychedelic deathsludge favorite back in stock on multiple formats for your next descent into horror-obsessed, dope-fueled delirium, including a new vinyl repress that includes an 18" X 24" full-color poster of the cover art.
����� Album number two from this demented Detroit doomdeath outfit, 2010's Stoned delivered ten new tracks of the schlock-fueled psychedelic heaviness that originally flattened my skull to a pile of pulp on their Witchtanic Hellucinations debut. Still drunk off a fetid brew of gore-splattered cinematic sleaze, 80's VHS worship, 70's psychedelic proto-metal, delirious basement occultism, ancient punk rock, denim-draped doom and old-school death filth, these guys have created an intoxicating heaviness with this stuff, their crushing, THC-tinged rumble emanating the autumnal glow of the Halloween season no matter what time of year you throw this album on.
����� The band's obsession with classic creep culture sees them paying homage to classic heavy metal horror movies like Trick Or Treat and Hammer classics like Witchfinder General, with lots of cultural references seeping through their lyrics and imagery. And as before, Stoned serves up samples from those sorts of ancient horror, occult and exploitation films, carefully edited into diabolical intros and laid out over moldy old-school synthesizer music like something from a lost Fabio Frizzi score. The intros and interludes on this album are pretty cool, definitely campy, but perfect for the atmosphere these guys create. That stuff usually gives way to their crushing downtuned doom metal, carved up into infectious, straightforward riffs that wind around your cerebral cortex like a parasitic worms. Musically, you can still hear a classic Cathedral-esque vibe in these molten, fuzz-encrusted riffs and the ponderous weight of Acid Witch's filthy, Sabbathian grooves, but their version of death/doom is so much more warped. The vocals are a putrid, gargling mess echoing over these gore-stained epics, while the songs stick to a mix of simple, rocking riffs and slower chorus sections, where they really lay the doom on thick.
����� There's also lots of keyboard action here. A rollicking, trippy Hammond organ sound haunts most of these songs, sometimes blending with killer 80's style Carpenterian synth, or breaking into a wicked, Deep Purple-esque keyboard solo like on "Live Forever". Definitely a big part of what makes Acid Witch's music so weirdly nostalgic. But amid all of this trippy psych-doom and basement witchery, probably the creepiest track on the whole album is the one that drops all of the metal; the crazed "Whispers In The Dark" really sticks out, starting off as a Gobliny piece of creepy, synth-heavy spook-prog, but over the course of the song slowly degenerating into a druggy, chaotic noisescape filled with hellish screams, bizarre FX and other ghastly sounds. Man, I love this stuff. Stoned is one of those albums that feels like it was custom made for me, fusing all of my obsessions into a pulverizing, pulpy blast of drugged black sludge.
����� Just got this psychedelic deathsludge favorite back in stock on multiple formats for your next descent into horror-obsessed, dope-fueled delirium, including a new vinyl repress that includes an 18" X 24" full-color poster of the cover art.
����� Album number two from this demented Detroit doomdeath outfit, 2010's Stoned delivered ten new tracks of the schlock-fueled psychedelic heaviness that originally flattened my skull to a pile of pulp on their Witchtanic Hellucinations debut. Still drunk off a fetid brew of gore-splattered cinematic sleaze, 80's VHS worship, 70's psychedelic proto-metal, delirious basement occultism, ancient punk rock, denim-draped doom and old-school death filth, these guys have created an intoxicating heaviness with this stuff, their crushing, THC-tinged rumble emanating the autumnal glow of the Halloween season no matter what time of year you throw this album on.
����� The band's obsession with classic creep culture sees them paying homage to classic heavy metal horror movies like Trick Or Treat and Hammer classics like Witchfinder General, with lots of cultural references seeping through their lyrics and imagery. And as before, Stoned serves up samples from those sorts of ancient horror, occult and exploitation films, carefully edited into diabolical intros and laid out over moldy old-school synthesizer music like something from a lost Fabio Frizzi score. The intros and interludes on this album are pretty cool, definitely campy, but perfect for the atmosphere these guys create. That stuff usually gives way to their crushing downtuned doom metal, carved up into infectious, straightforward riffs that wind around your cerebral cortex like a parasitic worms. Musically, you can still hear a classic Cathedral-esque vibe in these molten, fuzz-encrusted riffs and the ponderous weight of Acid Witch's filthy, Sabbathian grooves, but their version of death/doom is so much more warped. The vocals are a putrid, gargling mess echoing over these gore-stained epics, while the songs stick to a mix of simple, rocking riffs and slower chorus sections, where they really lay the doom on thick.
����� There's also lots of keyboard action here. A rollicking, trippy Hammond organ sound haunts most of these songs, sometimes blending with killer 80's style Carpenterian synth, or breaking into a wicked, Deep Purple-esque keyboard solo like on "Live Forever". Definitely a big part of what makes Acid Witch's music so weirdly nostalgic. But amid all of this trippy psych-doom and basement witchery, probably the creepiest track on the whole album is the one that drops all of the metal; the crazed "Whispers In The Dark" really sticks out, starting off as a Gobliny piece of creepy, synth-heavy spook-prog, but over the course of the song slowly degenerating into a druggy, chaotic noisescape filled with hellish screams, bizarre FX and other ghastly sounds. Man, I love this stuff. Stoned is one of those albums that feels like it was custom made for me, fusing all of my obsessions into a pulverizing, pulpy blast of drugged black sludge.
Holy SHIT, are we happy to get this back in stock! Seeing as how this is one of THEE BEST Doom metal splits ever commited to aluminum, and we sold out of
'em the first time around before we could snag a copy for the Crucial Blast office CD rack, we had been hounding Game Two CEO Conan to repress this split
featuring the final studio recordings from Welsh melodic/stoned Doom outfit ACRIMONY and blazing tracks from Japan's serial-killer obsessed Doomlords CHURCH
OF MISERY. Conan finally got this thing back in print, and we highly recommend it to any fans of crushing DOOM. ACRIMONY's five tracks (never before
released, and recorded in 1999) are awesome, melodic, insanely catchy stonerized post-Sabbath psychedelic riffchug anthems, with ultracool vocals from singer
Dor and punishing, resin coated, slow as hell doom rock, with grooving asphalt riffs that easily challenge the likes of GOATSNAKE and ELECTRIC WIZARD for
sludgy superiority. Awesome. Seriously awesome. CHURCH OF MISERY follow with four unreleased slammers, two of which ("Race With The Devil"- a GUN cover, and
"Chilly Grave" )were written/recorded for an EP that ended up never being released, and two other crushers ("Cloud Bed" and "Kingdom Scum"), all of which
were recorded in 1996. Monstrous, wah-wah abusing stoner-Doom from these guys, who never fail to flatten us with their fuzz soaked riffage and city-levelling
tempos. Again, essential for fans of ultra heavy stoner Doom and gooey sludge metal.
Dark Songs Of The Prairie, the first full-length album from Denver's ACROSS TUNDRAS, holds eight portraits of heavy majesty carved out of massive syrup riffage and spacious melodies. Every time I listen to this album, it makes me think of hearing some mysterious 70's country rock outfit thawed out and refitted with mighty amplification, sludgecore tempos, and shoegazey shimmer that conjures up visions of the wide open prairies and looming mountains of the band's home territory. As weighty as the melodic heaviness coming from the from the whole "post-metal" camp, i.e. Pelican, Mouth Of The Architect, Isis, etc., but coming from a different place altogether with their dreamlike vocals and forays into blasted country/folk, ACROSS TUNDRAS draw a tangential line from Neil Young to HUM to NEUROSIS, and unleash a powerful new statement of rustic, crushing Americana. Features former members of Sioux Falls, SD post-hardcore outfits SPIRIT OF VERSAILLES and EXAMINATION OF THE... This is one of the best "heavy metallic rock" albums I've ever heard!
Killer four-song debut from Denver trio ACROSS TUNDRAS, made up of former members of Sioux Falls post-hardcore outfits SPIRIT OR VERSAILLES and EXAMINATION OF THE... Divides sculpts epic,windswept ballads out of huge syrupy melodic sludge riffs and heartfelt, gravelly singing, as spare, chiming guitars map out the snowcapped peaks and great expanses evoked by the band�s moniker. ACROSS TUNDRAS sort of touch on the modern metallic post-rock sound, a la Pelican,Isis,Neurosis, and Mouth Of The Architect, etc., but their minimalist-yet-majestic riffing and distinctly rustic, dusky hooks are more along the lines of GODFLESH jamming with Neil Young on Pentastar-era EARTH tunes. Beautiful and crushing. In any event, this is great shit, and Divides is hands-down one of our fave debut releases of 2005. Can�t wait to hear a full length from these guys! Great artwork from Paul Romano (MASTODON), too.
Released as a limited-run EP that the band was selling on their US tour back in September, Full Moon Blizzard has five new jams from Denver's country-sludge riders packaged in a hamdmade paper sleeve...we only got a couple of these off of the band when they came through Baltimore, and I'm not sure if we'll be able to restock it once these sell out. The disc opens with "Razorwire Blues", a drowsy rocker that 's pretty upbeat compared to their Dark Songs Of The Prairie stuff, but still has that Neil Young-gone-sludge metal vibe with distant howling vocals. "Thunderclap Stomp" has the thick sheen of reverb that enshrouded Dark Songs and sounds like it could've fit right onto that album; there's a killer hook here too, and some pretty aggressive metallic riffing before it slows down into a killer psychedelic zone-out for the last half of the song. "Oh, Bury Me Not..." is a thumping country-folk jam moving through a swirling fog of effects, heavy drumming, somber acoustic strum and layered vocals that are even more hazed out and stoned than usual for these guys. "Gallows Pole" follows, another slow motion countrified sludge jam, and the last track "Phantom Ride" marries a faintly distorted acoustic guitar and slow-galloping rhythms to a Harvest-esque melody. The three "louder" songs are basically demo versions of tunes that are slated to appear on Across Tundra's next full length, while the other two folk tunes are recordings that only appear on this disc. The recording is pretty raw, as everything was recorded live to tape and it's essentially an in-the-moment document of the band's new material captured through busted equipment and vintage amplifiers, but if you were into their Dark Songs album and the Divides EP, these jams definitely bring the heavy Tundra action. Eerie, druggy Western atmosphere from Denver's heaviest. The unmarked CD-R comes in a paper folder printed on an odd textured stock embossed with swirly patterns, along with a couple of insert/lyric sheets and an actual black bird feather.
Now available on heavy silver and black vinyl from Kreation.
Dark Songs Of The Prairie, the first full-length album from Denver's ACROSS TUNDRAS, holds eight portraits of heavy majesty carved out of massive syrup riffage and spacious melodies. Every time I listen to this album, it makes me think of hearing some mysterious 70's country rock outfit thawed out and refitted with mighty amplification, sludgecore tempos, and shoegazey shimmer that conjures up visions of the wide open prairies and looming mountains of the band's home territory. As weighty as the melodic heaviness coming from the from the whole "post-metal" camp, i.e. Pelican, Mouth Of The Architect, Isis, etc., but coming from a different place altogether with their dreamlike vocals and forays into blasted country/folk, ACROSS TUNDRAS draw a tangential line from Neil Young to HUM to NEUROSIS, and unleash a powerful new statement of rustic, crushing Americana. Features former members of Sioux Falls, SD post-hardcore outfits SPIRIT OF VERSAILLES and EXAMINATION OF THE... This is one of the best "heavy metallic rock" albums I've ever heard!
Powerful complex post-rock from France that offers an intricate blend of live-action drum&bass breakbeats,guitar noise and free jazz,heavy SCORN-like dub beats and swirling RAPOON-style drones as played by a post-industrial/fusion-metal outfit, using bowed strings,a variety of percussion kits,prepared guitar,computer feedback,saxophone,custom-built bass,and sampler. Quite heavy and bombastic at times, but also slipping into some total right-angle grooves and jazzy abstraction,and actually getting nice and dreamy when ACT falls into some processed sax blowing and scraping drones. Kinda reminds us of a thunderous mix of Tortoise and Young Gods and Kong. Eighteen songs in seventy-four minutes, totally rewarding, often beautiful music for fans of challenging post-rock.
Since forming late in the latter half of the past decade, the
California-based extreme noise outfit Actuary has been steadily cranking
out a stream of split releases that saw them sharing wax (or other
petroleum-based substances) with everyone from Merzbow, Bastard Noise and
Gnaw Their Tongues side-project Aderlating to cult underground noise spewers
like Winters In Osaka, Bacteria Cult, Juhyo and Fetus Eaters. Keeping up
with their prolific output has been a daunting task, but also a rewarding
one, as Actuary has been pretty consistent in quality, offering epic-length
blasts of abstract electronic chaos, extreme psychedelic circuit-fuckery and
monstrous synth abuse with each new release that are primed for some serious
sonic skull-melt.
On their first real full-length Cd 'The Reality Is, The Dream Is Dead',
Actuary returns to present us with four new tracks of intense noise that
covers all of the different aspects of their sound. The opener 'Spiritual
Armageddon' sends spasms of squelchy electronic carnage through a massive
rumbling dronescape, evoking visions of high-end robotics in the throes of
mass suicide in the bowels of some subterranean forge, interspersing the
blasts of crazed glitchery and hyper-speed tape-vomit with passages of dark,
reverberating factory ambience. 'Heat Of Eternal Punishment' blends together
scraping metallic tones and textures with more of that violently spastic
sine wave manipulation and sputtering distortion, later shifting into fields
of fearsome industrial soundscaping and layered, processed samples that
ratchet up the panic level to nearly unbearable heights. Corrosive buzz saw
drones flutter and fluctuate across the 'Pool Of Perpetual Torment',
building into crushing waves of percussive industrial pummel, malfunctioning
engine roar and mangled electronics. And on the final track 'Baptized In
Flames', the band works up a smoldering, apocalyptic noisescape infested
with the sounds of clanking metal chains, pulsating distorted synths, and
the howling of mutant cetaceans, and by the end of the album has transformed
into something resembling an entire megalopolis being consumed in a hell of
nuclear fire.
The malevolent, psychedelic electronics that Actuary exudes across
'Reality' takes the sort of brutal cyborg chaos found in the likes of
Bastard Noise and Government Alpha, and drenches it in a heavy coating of
dextromethorphan delirium, making for some of their heaviest noise so far.
Released in a limited, hand-numbered edition of two hundred copies as part
of the 'Crucial Blaze' series, 'The Reality Is The Dream Is Dead' also
features a thirty-two page art zine assembled by the band, filled with
strange, surrealistic artwork from members of the band as well as
contributions from FetusK, Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues), Chris Dodge (Spazz),
Jay Randall (Agoraphobic Nosebleed) and more...
Gah, Actuary is all over place lately; these guys just keep cranking out their oft-bizarre nightmare industrial music, and on this tape they're doing another collaborative project, here hooking up with Aderlating (the improv-black-psych side project from Mories of Gnaw Their Tongues. Aderlating brings more of it's improvised infernal mania to it's appearance on this tape, which is put together around the concept of each artist contributing percussion to each others tracks. The result might be my fave Actuary recordings to date.
The garbled processed screams that introduce Actuary's "Interior Interloper" kick their side right into swarming horror from the start, unleashing a bunch of strained, distorted howls of PE-style violence over a backdrop of furious static distortion, pounding sampled percussion, bizarre rhythmic loops, and a thick layer of flesh melting hiss that coats every inch of the psychotic industrial assault. At times, it sounds as if Actuary are trying to smash huge hunks of K2-style junknoise into something resembling a 'groove', but then they'll end up collapsing into a squirming heap of over-modulated feedback, writhing musical fragments, mangled tape noise and walls of fx-blasted static. This mode of assault drops off when the second track "Feast Or Famine" comes in, switching gears into a monstrous drum-circle of pounding tribal percussion from Aderlating that becomes surrounded by demonic growls, high keening horn-like drones, all sorts of chirping electronics, and again, that sticky coating of granular hiss that hangs on everything like black mold, and gradually turns into something resembling a midnight Moroccan devil ritual entangled in thick trails in opium smoke.
That sonic is turned all the way up on Aderlating's side, beginning with the blasting black metal trance of "Goat Mass". This song is insane, a free-for-all skullfuck of improvised drumming, mechanized blast beats, harsh hellish screams, weird electronic effects and synths, black metal riffs so distorted and murky that they come out as a blur of swarming botfly noise. The first few minutes are vicious, a mess of black noize mayhem, but then it transforms into an even weirder free-jazz infected improv jam over the second half of the track. The other Aderlating track "Sadist Devil Children" picks right up from there with another filthy free-noise/drum freak-out, mashing together old 60's devil-worship film samples with wild, unhinged drumming (courtesy of the Actuary guys), clattering scrap-metal, putrid wordless vocalizations, and some extremely deformed bass riffage. It's not like anything I've heard from Aderlating, like this fucked-up PCP-fueled mash up of Abruptum and Merzbow's recent improv-drumming noise workouts. Love it !!!
Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies, with full-color artwork/packaging.
I've been getting into Actuary quite a bit this year after hearing their sickening side of the split with Bastard Noise that came out a few months ago, along with their stuff that I just picked up on Love Earth Music. It comes out of a true-blue industrial music approach, but Actuary's music has this evil, sadistic energy to it that really reels me in. They make a good match for fellow Californians Bacteria Cult on this split 7", with both bands offering a single track of murderous electronic/industrial filth on a translucent blue slab of wax that is presented in a very nice-looking, kaleidoscopic full color sleeve.
Actuary's "The Self Defies The Soul" is a seething mass of nightmare death drone, possessed by recordings of an axe hacking through a torso and the accompanying shrieks of horror, and snatches of overheard conversation in desperate tones that are draped over a soul-charring synthesizer drone and feedback that scrapes against the edges of your nerves and time-stretched screams of extreme agony, all escalating into increasingly abrasive and harsh levels of crushing sun-blotting black distortion.
Offering an experience that is just as bleak, "Milgram's Participants" (which takes it's title and subject matter from controversial early 60s electro-shock experiments) from Bacteria Cult (featuring Chris Dodge from Spazz/Hellnation/Ancient Chinese Secret/East West Blast Test, Jay Howard from Circuit Wound / Wire Werewolves and Kevin Fetus from Fetus Eaters / Watch Me Burn) layers static-soaked voices over stretched and manipulated drum sounds, sheets of industrial hum and whirr, and slow-motion cymbal splashes, then introduces a crushing percussive loop that transforms the song into a malevolent factory dirge. Heavy stuff.
The Actuary onslaught continues as these prolific electro-terrorists drop another dose of their brutal psychedelic noise alongside some new brute-force locust-swarm electronics from Bastard Noise...
Bastard Noise's "Incineration Prayer" is one of their hardcore electronic meltdowns, beginning with a maniacal pedal / oscillator freak-out that sends globs of juddering bass tones, abrasive glitchy noises and gigantic amp-shaking drones flying around the room. This grows more violent as it goes on, a frenzy of squelch and squeal and rumbling rib-rattling heaviness, building into this massive murderous death-drone that worms it's way through the entire side. And then the vocals hit - a squirming mass of black metal-esque shrieks and gargling guttural horror that comes drifting in from the background, a nightmare wave of vomit and hostility that joins in with the whirring, squealing electronic noise. It's fucking terrifying when this starts to peak towards the end, and is as brutal and psychedelic and apocalyptic as anything off their newer albums.
Actuary are an unpredictable lot, sometimes dishing out experimental glitchscapes and blackened industrial, sometimes melting down into a bizarre grindnoise assault. Here, you get the more ambient side of Actuary's sound. The first of the two tracks on their side begins with steady waves of white noise and crackling feedback, a hushed oceanswirl of noise that resembles some of Werewolf Jerusalem's minimalist drone-walls. This swirling black sea of hiss later on becomes a murky mass of sampled radio signals and unintelligible voices, heavy low end drone and more abrasive noise, getting downright violent towards the end. The second is based around a deep, threatening low-end drone that undulates beneath various Morse code beeps, clipped CB transmissions, and faint synth noises trailing across the pitch black ambience, less in-your-face than the preceding material, but much more textural and malevolent.
Comes on grey vinyl in a jacket illustrated and designed by Fetus K.
Two Crucial Blast alumni teamed together for this solid split LP that came out in 2016 on the excellent Black Horizons label, with both bands belting out some bleak, intensely abrasive blackened noise dredged out of the sonic Styx.
Unsurprisingly for anyone who's already borne witness to the often nightmarish electronic hellscapes that LA-area noise vets Actuary has previously unleashed, their material on the A-side of this record is suffocatingly dark and oppressive stuff. The two tracks ("A Grand Tradition Of Overreaction" and "Concrete Outings ") each unfurl into huge swathes of rumbling machine noise and unnerving mewling drones that are further strafed with bits of malfunctioning high-voltage electronics, merciless junk-noise avalanches, screams of crushed computer hard drives, ultra-heavy low-end klaxon-like blasts, huge swells of violent, distorted throb and constant surges of immense, ravenous deep-space gamma-static. These guys have always worn their Bastard Noise influence proudly on their sleeve, and that style of fearsome psychedelic electronic overload pervades the entire side. All of their elements congeal into a roiling, fearsome, rhythmic mass of sound, hinting at times at the occult cosmic ambience of classic outfits like Herbst9 and Inade, while also emitting a hideous harsh-noise noise element that moves this into a far more abrasive and alien direction. The dread level is high here, every moment swathed in a strange apocalyptic vibe that both mesmerizes and discomforts, their controlled, heavy-as-fuck chaos issuing deadly levels of radiation.
Gnaw Their Tongues counters with an interesting blend of field recordings, free-form clatter and stygian ambience over on his side, with ululating voices and raucous shouting that at first manifests as feeling like you are racing through the dimly-lit back alleys of a Moroccan marketplace, but then quickly locates and plunges through a jagged hole in the earth as "Blood Rites Of The Hex Temple" descends through a black-fog delirium of dreadful orchestral brass, insectile percussion, whirring noise and booming tympani. Like some ketamine-fueled night-terror that is scored by a collaboration between Ligeti or Penderecki and Nurse With Wound, the rest of the side continues to unfold into an utterly chilling likeminded symphony of dread, as "Into The Fire Thou Servant of Pain " and "As Above So Below" spread out with blasts of dissonant and terrifying orchestral sound, gurgling murky electronics, swathes of witchy, screechy violin sections, groups of ceremonial chanting voices, tribal beats, and endless torrents of AMM-esque improvisational drumming, only later becoming possessed by the gibbering demonic shrieks that are Mories' trademark with this project. The use of acoustic sounds, freeform clatter and field recordings set this apart from what you might expect from a Gnaw Their Tongues experience. It's more of the band's signature sound, overwhelming and dense and abstract, and thoroughly hellish.
Very nicely presented with a beautifully laid out and minimalist visual aesthetic, using some really striking landscape photography to match the desolation that was undoubtedly left in the wake of this recording. Limited to three hundred copies.
The hyper-prolific Cali band Actuary (which sometimes features members of Bacteria Cult, Spazz, and grind weirdoes Fetus Eaters) continues to puke up more of their abstract dark industrial, a sound that seems to be growing more monstrous and deformed with each new release; on this outing, they share a one-sided flexi disc with Minneapolis noise duo Juhyo, and both groups deliver a short but effective track of heavy industrial atmospherics and pneumatic death-trance.
First up is Actuary's "Non Passive Failure"; it's a mesmerizing cloud of interstellar ambience, a billowing mass of incandescent drones and whirring electronics that become increasingly littered with an assortment of scratching noises, gritty textural sounds and eventually a rush of sinister synth notes ascending into the atmosphere as a wall of smoldering black distortion encroaches on the shimmering cosmic drift; by the end of the track, it becomes a pyre of electronic immolation.
Juhyo's "The Suffocation Colony" follows with an exercise in rhythmic noise fuckery and bursts of controlled harsh distortion, one that gradually evolves into a factory din of looping machine rumble, rhythmic flanger sweeps, juddering engines, and erupting into a malevolent wall of mechanical noise and haunting synthdrift at the end. Definitely in the same vein as the similarly bleak industrial sounds that were recently offered on their recent split with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer and Bacteria Cult.
Released on a red translucent flexi disc without a sleeve, no doubt in some tiny limited edition run.
Here is some more crushing skull-shred from Actuary, who has been taking over my stereo lately after a bunch of their releases landed on my desk all at once. I've got their new split with Bacteria Cult elsewhere on this week�s list of new arrivals, and here we have another split, this one with Black Scorpio Underground, another Californian noise group that has been around awhile from what I can tell, but up till now I haven't come across any of their stuff. Each band takes over a side of this cassette and dish out a mix of abstract sounds both hallucinatory and violent.
Up first is Actuary with "Stricken Host Lies Down", a gleaming abyssal dronescape of flanged metallic pulses receding into darkness, surrounded by glitchy electronic noises and heavy use of delay, which seems to be a signature part of their sound. The side starts off quietly with an eerie, minimal field of dark drift, but it soon erupts into a chaos of modulated squelch and glitch and thick buzzing drones; the chanting of demonic monks appears, their low hymn buried under layers of increasingly violent noise. By the end of the track, Actuary whips up a raging storm of sonic skullshred that is on par with the junknoise orgies of K2.
On the other side, The Black Scorpio Underground go for a weirder, more ritualistic din with their two tracks. The first, "Genital Minotaur", is an unnerving cut-up of singing voices and the blathering of TV evangelists over a simple hypnotic drumbeat, joined by clanking chains and squealing guitar noise. On the second, "Immolation/Revelation", the band sets off a harrowing descent into the grinding machinery of an infernal steelworks surrounded by vague voices muttering almost out of earshot as titanic slabs of metal grind together in harmony. I really dug this, and will be keeping an eye out for more from this obscure outfit.
More Actuary, more creeping industrial menace, more psychic abrasion. On Chosen Curse, the SoCal void-pilots hitch a ride with Winters In Osaka for a quick jaunt straight down the yawning throat of Hell. The guys in Actuary have so far been pretty good at selecting bands on their splits that actually compliment their sound, rather than just taking up space on the other side of the record.
Actuary's "False Relics" journey's further into the realms of cybernetic industrial horror that this band has been progressively exploring with each new release. It's a hailstorm of broken glass and menacing distorted synths that sweep in and lead right into the track's chaotic noisescape, quickly rising in intensity and volume from that glitch-ridden mass of swirling electronic noise and processed bells into a destructive tidal wave of harsh blast, sampled screams and ultra-distorted heaviness that consumes and pulverizes everything in it's path. Definitely hits the spot.
Depending on the record, I've heard Winters In Osaka unleash everything from Godfleshian industrial crush to total abstract noise, so I wasn't sure what to expect this time around. Their track "Floors" begins with soft cinematic ambience at first, delicate electronic notes sparkling against a pitch-black void, but as a steady rising swell of rumbling bass comes rushing in, it quickly becomes much more threatening and transforms into the sort of ghastly infernal ambience that these guys excel at. Those high, shimmering tones maintain a constant presence throughout the track, even as a huge wall of distortion nearly consumes the entire sound field, becoming an almost wall-like block of black static through which faint traces of melody can be heard. Bursts of abrasive rhythmic noise and vast trumpeting bass tones take flight at the very end, when everything suddenly crashes to a stop.
On colored vinyl, and presented in a gorgeous looking record that features brightly colored, occult-themed sleeve art that was created by Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues / Aderlating) and Kevin Fetus (Lack Of Interest / Fetus Eaters / Bacteria Cult).
If you've seen one of Gnaw Their Tongues's albums, it's easy to see the familiar traits when you look over the gatefold jacket that the disc comes in...there's that verbose album title, and songs with over-the-top occultic names like "Rope, Pig's Blood, Dead Flesh And Two Candles", "Cut Off My Penis In Praise Of Black Satan", "A Circle Drawn With Chalk On Wood", the murky artwork on the back cover that seems to show a cloaked figure standing before a nude woman with a couple of candles sticking out of her ass in some dank crypt-temple, the horrific cover art that has a screaming woman huddled in deep shadows, covered only by some kind of shroud, her eyes nothing but smudges of pure blackness...yep, the visuals and vibe make it pretty obvious that Aderlating is another project from Gnaw Their Tongues mainman Mories, and fans of GTT's pitch-black orchestral/industrial horror are going to love this too, even though Aderlating does indeed differ a bit from Mories's main band...
If anything, Aderlating is more stripped down and ambient than GTT, with wide expanses of swirling reverb and plodding industrial sounds and vast fields of Lustmordian cavedrift. The eight tracks move through passages of fearsome demonic ambience, blasts of caustic carrion wind and crushing death industrial rhythms, utterly massive subterranean drones, monstrous roaring and distant screams lost in a fog of hellish noise, huge grinding chunks of distorted doom riffage surfacing from out of the slime, deep satanic chants resounding from stygian depths, the sounds of wailing tortured voices welling up in bloodcurdling chorales, warped bits of melody and waves of rotted-out amp drone, washes of endless cymbal shimmer and pummeling martial percussion, hideous smears of abstract black metal guitar buried beneath dense layers of metallic clang and electronic detritus and diseased ambience...but where naw Their Tongues follows a similiar path by piling on immense orchestral strings and pounding tympani and building a suffocating wall of blackened symphonic chaos, Aderlating stretches that sound out into a more abstract and ambient expanse of formless industrial dread. At times, this sounds like a weird mix of classic Swedish death industrial, horror film soundtracks and free-jazz percussion. It has enough of that GTT DNA that Gnaw Their TOngues fans will definitely want to hear this, but it's definitely it's own beast. Totally great, and another excellent vision of infernal black horror from the master...limited to only 200 copies, packaged in a full color jacket.
A new limited edition cassette from this offshoot of the famed Dutch black industrial/doom outfit Gnaw Their Tongues. Aderlating has always been an outlet for GTT mastermind Mories to explore more ambient, subdued soundscapes. The Golden Mass certainly falls in that realm with five tracks of ghostly rumblings, ominous metallic drones, distant percussion and haunted aural apparitions that swirl and uncoil like the heavy smoke that rises over a subterranean black magic ritual. The opening title track is a nightmarish fog of monstrous whispers and chiming tones, distant bells and raging undercurrents of heavy distorted noise, at times sounding like some washed-out, muffled HNW piece occurring behind a veil of electronic voice phenomena. On "Rapture", though, you start to hear the terrifying orchestral sounds that Mories is known for, as he lays evil, dissonant violin and other sinister strings over vague horn sections and more swirling black fog, some strange creaking sounds slowly coming to the forefront, developing into an intensely disturbing, industrial tinged horror-score. The sound of clanking chains and grinding machinery takes over on "Wisdom From Pain", a violent foundry hallucination filled with pounding pneumatic presses and sheet-metal chaos.
The second side begins with the guttural buzz of Tibetan throat singing over the vast rumbling apocalypse of "Song For Mahapadma", a pitch-black industrial dronescape littered with clanking machinery, massive grinding drones, deep tectonic tremors and frenetic percussion. The last track "The Traditions Of Magyar Witchery" also revolves around powerful metal reverberations and heavy machine noises, but it unleashes a choir of ghostly voices and strange electronic sounds into the din, taking the abstract industrial ambience and transforming it into a hellish urban bedlam not unlike the mortuary industrial music of T.O.M.B.
Released in an edition of one hundred copies, with on-shell printing on red tinted cassettes and full-color packaging.
Like most of his other projects, Aderlating is steeped in an intense haze of nightmarish delirium and depravity, a sound that seethes within most of the projects from Dutch nightmare sculptor Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues, De Magia Veterum, Cloak Of Altering, Mors Sonat, etc.). But with Aderlating, the duo that Mories is in alongside Eric Eijspaart from noise project Mowlawner, the musicians craft a more abstract vision of disturbing death-worship that is considerably less rooted in extreme metal and more in black, formless industrial music. Gospel Of The Burning Idols is a new full-length from the group that features seven tracks of this chaotic, stygian sound, undulating with smoldering black distortion and eerie chamber-strings, vague strains of orchestral sound glimmering beneath the echoing clank of monstrous mechanical rhythms and those putrid, inhuman vocals.
While there's some tenuous sonic connection to Mories's work with Gnaw Their Tongues in the use of mutated orchestral samples, this is pretty much an entirely different beast, a nightmarish concoction of experimental black ambience that is marked with a furious percussive element that is a signature part of Aderlating's sound. All throughout the album, the music is set upon by blasts of flailing free-form drumming that give parts of this a demented free-jazz feel, a kind of abstract black doom but with fragmented orchestral moans, blasts of hellish power electronics and waves of suffocating swarming static in place of metallic riffage. The musical elements are mostly obscured beneath the crumbling walls of distorted noise and rumbling distorted synth, and at times this album takes on an almost HNW-like feel as waves of dense black static crash endlessly across the far-off symphonic strings and smears of soundtracky electronic texture. On tracks like "A Vulture's Tongue Disease", shambolic drums lurch and stumble beneath the sounds of deformed liturgical chanting and murderous croaked vocals, angelic choirs bleeding across the black cauldron of the night sky, coming together into a surreal din of heavy improvisational drumming and pitch-black ambience. "The Burial Gown Reeks Of Semen" unleashes a clanking cacophony of far-off percussive sound into a dank dungeon thrumming with hateful demonic gibberish and buzzing synthesizer, and on "Dragged To The Smouldering Pits Of Infinity" the duo delve even deeper into a strange sort of abyssal free-jazz, those roiling formless drums tumbling chaotically through the haze of haunted drift and dreary monochrome drone as snarling distorted voices snap at their tails.
The rest of Gospel maintains that midnight, nightmarish vibe, wandering deliriously through clouds of ghostly whispering and strange incantations, the sound of tolling church bells swallowed up by churning nocturnal fog. The sound suddenly surges into another one of those frenetic percussive freak-outs, crashing, pounding drums surrounded by sinister utterances and murky ambient rumble, that percussive free-jazz feel coursing through these delirious black industrial driftscapes, finally closing with the hallucinatory electronic din of the title track, where squirming feedback becomes fused to doom-laden cellos creeping in slow-mo through the vast, sulfurous depths.
Comes in a four-panel gatefold digisleeve.
��The duo of Maurice de Jong (Gnaw Their Tongues / Cloak Of Altering / Mors Sonat) and Eric Eijspaart (Mowlawner) are back with the second chapter in their Spear Of Gold And Seraphim Bone saga. As with the previous album, Aderlating unleash their particular brand of improv-heavy black industrial over the course of these eight tracks, and it's an almost totally oppressive listening experience. Gnaw their Tongues fans will no doubt appreciate the intense nightmarish quality of Aderlating's music, but what makes this stand out from the rest of Mories's projects is the formidable free-improv drumming that lurches and thunders throughout this album, bringing a twisted, almost free-jazz like kineticism to their sprawling, chaotic noisescapes.
��Opening with horrific squalls of ghostly anguish and rumbling industrial murk that tear through the beginning of "Per Luciferum Dominum Nostrum", Aderlating begins to unveil the album's eight descents into black delirium, the repetitive pounding of kettledrum-like rhythms thundering way down in the depths of their dirty, darkened mix, bleating horns and smears of surreal orchestral sound appearing over the noisy, abstract hellscape, veins of churning distorted noise pulsing with black energy as warped string sections come tumbling wildly out of the abyss - the first five minutes of Spear alone is the stuff of nightmares. As the album unfolds, swarms of insectile noise billow out in black clouds from sulfuric holes, and demented, agonized cries echo endlessly out of the depths. Tracks like "Worship Of Dead Gods" can resemble some of the more subdued Gnaw Their Tongues material, with smears of distant orchestral sound becoming blurred beneath monstrous tectonic rumblings and bursts of searing electronic noise, the sound bleary and amorphous, an abstract dreamlike blur of ghostly sound and distant infernal churn that is slowly overtaken by the band's signature use of frantic, improvised percussion.
�� There are moments of eerie gleaming beauty here as well, strains of soft symphonic strings bleeding out of deep rumbling noisescapes, washes of spectral minor key chamber ambience wafting across the blasted, charred apocalyptic wastes of Aderlating's aural landscape. On "The Seer Is Burning", they unfold a vast muted ambient sprawl of strange creaking noises, witchy murmurings, spurts of backwards glitch and clouds of dissonant symphonic strings that hang suspended in the gloom, amid far-off percussive noises and crashing sounds, and massive low-frequency pulses. In moments like those, it's like some abstract horror movie soundtrack, stitched together from mutated modern classical elements and field recordings of abandoned mental asylums. From there, the album moves through increasingly terrible realms of murky doom-laden heaviness, screaming choirs of fallen angels, monstrous moaning utterances and ghastly gasping voices, expanses of cold morgue ambience and reverberating metallic clank, sheets of smoldering distorted crackle, diseased pools of seething dungeon drift split apart by volleys of that violent free-improvised drumming, and rushes of terrifying EVP-esque voices from beyond the grave, all fused together and merged into dense, suffocating waves of black sound that can almost give you the impression that you're listening to some foul, necrotic version of European improvisers AMM.
�� Along with Aderlating's newest follow-up, we finally have this 2011 disc back in stock as well. The first in the duo's Spear Of Gold And Seraphim Bone series, this album continues in the vein of their previous excursions into rumbling blackened industrial, slimy dungeon ambience, and ferocious free-improv. Made up of members Mories (of Gnaw Their Tongues infamy, as well as a member of other, equally blackened and bizarre projects like Mors Sonat, Cloak Of Altering, and De Magia Veterum) and fellow Dutch noisemaker Eric Eijspaart (aka Mowlawner), Aderlating specializes in a particular brand of twisted sonic nightmare, one that billows out across Spear of Gold in phosphorescent flashes of chaotic horror that illuminate a churning, percussive undercurrent.
�� From the rattling chains, monstrous incantations and orchestral disorder that swarms over the beginning of "Black Emperor At The Temple�s Gate", the duo unleash an intensely murky, frenzied sound that shares the faintest similarity with the mutant symphonic dread of Gnaw Their Tongues. The pounding, freeform drumming that rumbles and rattles throughout the mix is, as always, one of Aderlating's signature qualities, like some caveman free-jazz percussive freak-out detonating way down in the depths, the crashing cymbals and rolling freight-train rhythms obscured by the dim light, seething beneath a veil of corroded factory ambience, choruses of ghostly sighs and deep, low-frequency drones. It's a fearsome mix of cinematic sound design, intensely abstracted black metal, pitch-black electronic ambience and an derangement of almost AMM-like percussive tumult that these guys whip up here, hellish wailing voices drifting up from the sulfurous bass-drenched depths, flecks of ghastly utterances mixed with putrid distorted glitchery, and then suddenly they'll explode into something like the title track, a swirling miasma of violent black metal and frantic blastbeats polluted with strange clanking sounds and swarming demonic shrieks, the sound all diffused and bleary, the blasting drums becoming increasingly lost in the sonic fog, further obscured by more random sheet metal clatter and nightmarish chorales. The centerpiece of the album, however, arrives with the epic "Engel Der Wrake"; for more than eighteen minutes, the band unleashes a mutated High Mass of ritualistic percussion and deformed chanting, which later transforms into bizarre, electronically-tinged black metal, the off-kilter blastbeats buried beneath bursts of blaring war-horns, marked by the sudden appearance of a single, malevolent vocal presence that hisses its reptilian malice over the hallucinatory black chaos before it all melts down into a vast expanse of mesmerizing orchestral drift and immense bass tones that pulse mindlessly in the depths. In a lot of ways, this is the most alien-sounding of all of Mories's many projects; fans of his work with Gnaw Their Tongues will obviously dig the dreadful vibe of this stuff, but ultimately Aderlating's hallucinogenic death-improv creeps through a particular layer of hell all its own.
�� Comes in slipcase packaging in a limited edition of five hundred copies.
This power-trio hails from Middletown, a small town that's just a couple of minutes down the road from Crucial Blast HQ here in Maryland, and while they have self-released a couple of discs since 2005, this is the first time that I've picked up their stuff to carry here at Crucial Blast. The band has been honing their brand of instrumental prog-sludge with these self released discs and tours along the East Coast, and with this new five song EP, Admiral Browning have really blossomed into something amazing. This is immensely heavy stuff that combines old school doom metal, prog, math rock, and psychedelia into a burly mass of complex, dizzying heaviness that doesn't really sound like anyone else. Fans of metallic riff-heavy instrumental bands like Karma To Burn, Suzukiton and Stinking Lizaveta will probably go berserk over this, but Admiral Browning doesn't sound like those bands. The doomy element is WAY heavier, the riffs huge and leaden like Saint Vitus, but from the crawling suarian doom the band leaps into spiralling shred, the guitars weaving from Greg Ginn style skronk to awesome Champs-like harmonies, angular math rock and spacey Floydian psychedelia. There's the massive Mastodon-meets-Saint Vitus crush of "Vortexer", the energetic guitar heroics of "Ol Martini Man" and even the campfire acoustic jam "No Good Stones". I love the way that the Maryland doom metal influence is so prominent here, while at the same time this is more than just doom, like other Maryland bands like Revelation and Life Beyond, these guys take that plodding Sabbath-influenced sound into proggier territory, though noone has done quite as heavily as Admiral Browning have with Magic Elixir. Recommended.
Nice digipack packaging, too.
Here's a pretty fuckin' bonkers demo of (brain)damaged outsider metal from Australia that came my way as part of a big box of stuff that we picked up from Starlight Temple Society. Starlight Temple Society seems to be a beacon for some really whacked out, low fi death n' black metal, and this four song tape is certainly ranking pretty high on my weirdometer... ADP is also about as obscure as a band can get, with no website or any information about them at all to be found online, and the jacket for the tape is totally devoid of info save for the track titles. The four songs on this tape are super low fi, fairly muddy, but also kinda huge sounding, as if ADP used an 8-track tape recorder inside of an empty church to record their demo. The first song is called "Genocide Diver" and it's a twisted bit of murky doom, slow reverb soaked riffs churning repeatedly over sloppy, straightforward drumming, weird atonal melodies contorting in the background, sickening wordless screams and brain-damaged chanting oozing across their raw dirge. Somewhat like what I would expect
a demo tape from Esoteric or Disembowelment to sound like if either of those bands ended up getting too fucking stoned and just started to let the tape roll. "Carcinogenic" is even more shapeless, and sounds like it might be mostly improvised: the drummer plays a minimal beat while the guitars melt into a gooey pile of primitive doom riffing that just up and stops every few measures, no vocals, nuthin', and then the end of the track become all clipped and phased as the music begins to run backward. Weird. "I Drunk Your Bones" barrels in with raw punky riffing, drooling pub chanting and a midtempo beat that sounds like some weird Oi! version of Venom or something. And as if this tape couldn't get any weirder, we get the last track "Darkest Grey", which returns to the raw doom of the first two songs, but goes completely off the deep end with a mix of bizarre vocal styles, one of which is ridiculously nasally and affected, the other one a deep gutteral snot-gurgling roar that goes way beyond being incomprehensible, and even breaking down into fits of coughing. The nasally vocals remind me a little of The Wizar'd, that wacky Australian doom metal band that put out a CD on Rusty Axe, and come to think of it, ADP sound exactly like the kind of damaged, weirdo metal I'd expect to hear from that label. This jam gets more fucked up as it progresses, with weird jazzy basslines, high pitched falsetto chanting, endlessly repeating dirge riffs, and other strangeness.
The European sludge offensive continues! Some of you might have caught these guys on the Waterloo compilation that came out a while back on Waterloo Records, but that was a good four years ago and through a series of label mishaps it's taken this long for their debut full length to make it's way over here, via the Spanish label Alone who picked the album up after the original label that released it bit the dust. Alone is a perfect home for this stuff, Adrift's complex sludge sitting comfortably next to other contempo arty/psych-warped tarpit-metal bands like Warachetype, Cuzo, El Paramo, and Orthodox. I thought their tracks on that comp were pretty cool, their slightly proggy take on Neurosis/Isis style sludge metal more interesting than a lot of this kind of stuff, and on Monolito they explore that sound further, adding a little more prog influence while keeping their riffs mired in asphalt crunch. The nine songs are more slightly more mathy and more angular than what you hear from your typical Neurosis disciples, and it seems like both Tool and King Crimson influences are at work here. Their sludge is heavy as hell though, massive down tuned riffs and lumbering tempos galore, layered with those math rock moments, angular basslines, drumming that weaves in and out of subtle time signature changes and punishing elephantine crush, the band sometimes slipping into a rocking Sabbathy groove or quick bursts of Dillenger / Killmen-esque math metal, or letting soaring space rock leads take flight, or drop into scummy, staggering swamp-doom. While these flourishes (which also include some eerie slide guitar sounds, some scathing black metal style shrieks, and druggy psychedelic effects) don't distance their music that far from the rest of the Neurosis/Isis influenced crowd, fans of this sort of crushing metallic math heaviness (a la Celeste, Minsk, Neila, Overmars, Kongh, General Lee, Battlefields, Cult Of Luna, Omega Massif, etc. ) are going to dig Adrift's slightly more oblique sludge battery.
Another sonic portrait of icy black drone from the Russian Abgurd label, Cold Sea Week is a new full length disc from the solo project Adriva aka Denis Shapovalov from the Russian city of Rostov-On-Don. He's also responsible for creating the grim industrial drones in the groups Sunchariot, Enmerkar, and Matter, and fans of the ominous ambience of that Sunchariot CD-R that we listed in the last Crucial Blast update in December will dig this at least as much. A three track disc, packaged in a simple full-color cardstock sleeve in a sealed mylar bag, the disc jacket featuring front and back paintings of cold, grey expanses of water beneath overcast skies, painted in a highly impressionistic style that fits with the heavy submerged dronescapes. Each lengthy track is a dense swirl of doomy minor key ambience and soft rumbling amplifier distortion, buried under leagues of looping percussion, rumbling synthesizer pulses, and deep bass tones. The sound is completely blurred, all of it's edges softened and smeared into a churning haunting hum. The last track is the most minimal, a shimmery subsonic ocean of amplifier hum turning over on itself in extreme slow motion, ghostly voices and soft focus melody emerging alongside the menacing far-off clangs of metal and feedback. Beautiful, dark drone works a la Troum, in another super limited run of only 100 copies.
All of the releases that have surfaced from the cult Russian outfit Adriva over the past decade have been issued in extremely tiny editions and are thus highly sought after by fans of the project's brand of dark occult-influenced industrial ambience. The 2007 disc Losung is no exception, released in a hand-numbered edition of one hundred copies on the obscure Russian label Strely Peruna in a large, hand-assembled folder with an assortment of insert materials. The guy behind Adriva is Denis Shapovalov, who fans of Slavic black metal might recognize from the band Sunchariot, and the desolate ritualistic sounds that are explored on Adriva's Losung share some common ground with the grim pagan death-rites of the later Sunchariot material when that band started to go into more of a 'dark ritual ambient' direction. These six tracks are pure hypnotic dread, each long piece constructed out of simple, rumbling percussive rhythms and looped drums that become the bedrock beneath sheets of metallic guitar drone and densely layered feedback that grind and roar in the background, sometimes turning the clanking, throbbing ambience into a wave of blackened amplifier sludge reminiscent of early Earth and OO Void-era Sunn O))). Mostly, though, Adriva's music is super abstract and stitched together with streaks of black sound, expansive tapestries of nocturnal hum and ceremonial pounding, bleak industrialized wastelands and mechanical drones that hint at the influence of Teutonic industrial dronelords Maeror Tri, buzzing black clouds of apocalyptic locust-chant, muffled female voices and warped, melting hymns, distant factory clanking, charred synthesizer drone, all of these sounds bathed in a cold crepuscular glow. As an added bonus, this edition of Losung also has the track 'Ultra Noir Fetish' that didn't appear on the original Observatory Records release.
Two of the most warped modern death metal acts team up for this split LP, each band delivering three new tracks of their deformed bestial DM. The two bands come from a similar place (influenced by the cruel discordance and sludgy chaos of prime Incantation and Immolation) and compliment the other nicely, though the approaches are distinctly their own.
Side "Leviathan" begins with a chilling din of roaring arctic winds and distant air raid sirens, a swirling, apocalyptic black fog of sound that leads into the regimented deathblast of Adversarial's "Swirling Chaos That Swallows Horizons". This is bestial blackened death metal to the core, crushing riffing and ultra-guttural belching riddled with violent machinegun blast beats. From there, the band starts to whip out spiky discordant riffs and bizarre dissonant shredding that puts off whiffs of both Voivod and Obscura-era Gorguts without straying from the blasting monstrous death metal. "Into The Waning Of Twilight's Death Ocean" is loaded with these caustic riffs and atonal leads, gasping, gaseous beast-roars drifting over the warped chords and inverted arpeggios, the speed rarely dropping below blast-level tempos. The harshest and most deformed riffing, though, is saved for "Spiraling Towards The Ultimate End", with howling atonal sounds coming out of the guitars that would send most No Wave outfits running for cover.
The three songs from Antediluvian are even more mutated. As with their amazing Through The Cervix Of Hawwah, these songs crawl through a toxic black muck made up of Incantation's DNA but emerge as something quite unique, an often formless, thoroughly avant-garde take on cavernous doom-laden death metal. The wailing discordant leads that come screaming across the murky blast of "Force Of Suns Of Adversary" obscures some even weirder noise and fret board-mangling hidden in the grinding amorphous heaviness, and "Dissolution Spires" slips in and out of shambling doom from the almost Portal-esque swirl of blackened chaos, with the bass guitar leading the song as strange slide-guitar sounds melt and bend over the fractured blast beats. An eerie minor key melody starts off "Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (I Am That I Am)", but it quickly evolves into a funeral dirge erupting with short blasts of grinding barbarism. This band rules, and these newer tracks further demonstrate why they've quickly grown into one of my favorite current DM outfits.
Highly recommended to fans of alien, avant-garde death metal. The record includes a large glossy poster and lyric sheet, and comes on black vinyl.
Seemingly now-dormant Larval Productions is just a stone's throw down the road from me, but I had no idea about the label until it cranked out that utterly psychedelic bestial brain-blurr from Jyotiṣavedāṅga in 2018. Then I was hooked. I got my hands on everything I could, including this meeting between two of the UK and Dutch black metal underground's more deliberately obscure outfits, issued in a limited run of two hundred. It kills. The fetid glue that seems to pull this split together is that both bands would appear to share a reverence for the low-fi, fucked-up, anti-human aesthetics of Les Légions Noires scene outta France, and I'm always game for some LLN appreciation. With two songs from each band, The Realm Of Rats And Pestilence spills out of the speakers like a pile of offal and ancient grave dirt.
Sounding freshly unearthed, Adytum is pure raw black metal primitivism, spitting out "Beneath The Ruins" and "Pestilence" in wonderfully harsh and stumbling bursts of lopsided aggression and shrieking hatefulness. I love this band. Simple, back-and-forth punk-style drumming moves at loping tempos while the guitar is throttled into a heap of broken riffs, off-kilter melodies, weird stops and starts - oh man, and it's so bathed in hiss and room ambience that it feels like I'm right there in the crypt (or practice space, or whatever). Borderline "outsider" black metal, played with unabashed degenerate glee, the reverb-cloaked howls spewing visions of death-worship and curses and plagues, everything shifting between that hammering punk-like barbarism and the weirder, off-time chugging riffs and melodies. And then there's that total hard rockin' guitar solo stealing through the night at the end of "Pestilence"? It's legit shit, and hits the same nerve spot for me as do bands like Xeukatre, Vetala, early Black Cilice, and the Legion Blotan at large.
Similarly gonked-out are Darkness Enshrouded The Mist, a Dutch one-man band (I think) that hammers you with a slower, more deliberate strain of black metal, still on the stripped-down and primitive side, with mid-tempo minor-key riffs blended with subtle dissonance, but like their vinyl-mates in Adytum, there are these parts in "A Realm Of Rats" and "Blood & Decay" where the musicality starts to fray at the edges, the riffs coming out slightly awkward, which for me just adds to the clandestine vibe of this stuff. With that first siong, it's nearly as punk-warped as Adytum, rooted in an identifiable early 90's mode; however, that second song makes a hard left into spooksville, "Decay" immediately floating up in a wave of ectoplasmic murk, everything melting at the edges ass this blurry, bleary blackened noise-drone rides out the rest of the EP, barely obscuring the voices of worship that drift beneath the surface - teasing at something almost Moevot-esque as it eases into distant silence...
Dig in.
While we've got 'em, we're offering a package deal for both AELTER's new double disc set Dusk-Dawn/Follow You Beloved AND the limited-edition Lp version of AELTER's Follow You Beloved that was released on the Wolvserpent imprint; both can be had together for $25.00.
One of several side-projects to emerge from the Wolvserpent camp, Aelter is the solo effort of Wolvserpent guitarist Blake Green. With Aelter, Blake explores a similar realm of dark majestic sound to Wolvserpent, with his massive downtuned guitar roar and bleak minor key melodies being the common thread between the two projects. But where Wolvserpent blends this chugging Melvins-esque heaviness and haunting slowcore arpeggios with violins, pounding drums, and a propensity for extended hypno-dirges, Aelter dispenses with the drums almost completely and goes for a more cinematic approach using layered keyboards and gorgeous harmonized voices that reminds me of something you would have heard on Beggers Banquet or 4AD being fused to a malevolent black heaviness. Both of the Aelter albums were only released on vinyl in limited editions of a few hundred copies and are close to going out of print completely, but we have now gathered both Dusk Dawn and Follow You Beloved together in a double disc set.
The first Aelter record Dusk Dawn from 2009 from is now out of print on vinyl and featured two side-long tracks. The first half "Dusk" begins much like something you would hear from Wolvserpent, an eerie guitar figure slowly plucked over heavy, rumbling doom metal chords, the dark menacing sound slowly unfolding in a manner similar to newer Earth but with a much more sinister vibe. But then this gloomy dirge starts to transform into something that is not so much like Wolvserpent as lush gauzy synthesizers wash in alongside ethereal choral voices, the sound drifting and uncoiling without the propulsion of drums or any other percussion, just a cloudy black fog of doom-laden darkwave underscored with those heavy rumbling guitars. This sound is utterly gorgeous, like some strange mixture of Earth's bleak ambient heaviness and the dark ethereal downer pop of Clan Of Xymox or some similar darkwave outfit. The second track travels deeper into this lush shadowy ambience, the guitars dropping out for long stretches of time as gorgeous high-end drones and shimmering dream-pop keyboards. The vocals begin to appear way off in the distance, slowly fading inwards as the guitars again materialize with chugging downtuned crunch and somber minor key melodies unwinding overhead. And when the vocals build into a majestic multi-part harmony, this becomes incredibly beautiful, like some drifting dreampop epic descending into darkness, finally combining with a minimal piano melody at the end.
The second Aelter album Follow You Beloved (released on vinyl in 2011) grows even darker, much of the prettiness from the first album leeched out by the swelling blackness, but still rife with moments of fragile beauty. The drums are also more prominent here, making this the heavier of the two albums by far. The first side is "Beloved", which begins with a solemn organ line joined by equally funereal piano notes awash in lunar glow. It transforms into a desolate guitar instrumental, reverby guitar twang unfolding around delicate acoustic picking and washes of ethereal synth that almost has a Badalamenti tint to it; then the drums come in, heavy and plodding, just as the airy fragile layered vocals materialize and the sound appears as some kind of shadow-cast, doom laden slowcore. It's really gorgeous stuff, moving through passages where everything drops out and just a single electric guitar chimes in the darkness, a simple minor key figure repeated over and over, and spacey orchestral synths gradually drift in as a steady sinister bass pulse echoes through the darkness. Like the earlier work, this makes me think of drone metallers Earth crossed with swirling darkwave pop, heavy and ominous but shot through with gorgeous moody melody. The song finally returns to the dark lumbering heaviness as everything drops back in, sheets of delayed guitar and what sounds like a mandolin swirling around the treacly drums and that central melody that threads throughout the song, turning even heavier and blacker as massive distorted doom riffage slowly pours in and the music slows down, changing into a blackly majestic Western-tinged doom in it's last few minutes.
On the other side, "Follow You" takes us once more into eerie Badalamenti-like haze of sorrowful reverb guitar and haunting droning keys joined by deep bass notes and cello-like sounds, and then suddenly drops into doomed crush, slow ponderous drums and crushing glacial guitars continuing the main melody, distant ethereal vocals layered in eerie harmony behind the grim doom-laden heaviness, eventually flowing out into a mass of choral darkness later in the song when the music drops out and the vocals come to the fore. Later, it transforms back into the heavy droning funeral procession from before, the riff repeating over and over again, a droning, swirling processional dirge adorned with droning keyboards.
One of several side-projects to emerge from the Wolvserpent camp, Aelter is the solo effort of Wolvserpent guitarist Blake Green. With Aelter, Blake explores a similar realm of dark majestic sound to Wolvserpent, with his massive downtuned guitar roar and bleak minor key melodies being the common thread between the two projects. But where Wolvserpent blends this chugging Melvins-esque heaviness and haunting slowcore arpeggios with violins, pounding drums, and a propensity for extended hypno-dirges, Aelter dispenses with the drums almost completely and goes for a more cinematic approach using layered keyboards and gorgeous harmonized voices that reminds me of something you would have heard on Beggers Banquet or 4AD being fused to a malevolent black heaviness. Both of the Aelter albums were only released on vinyl in limited editions of a few hundred copies and are close to going out of print completely, but we've got a limited number of both records in stock.
The second Aelter album Follow You Beloved (released on vinyl in 2011) grows even darker, much of the prettiness from the first album leeched out by the swelling blackness, but still rife with moments of fragile beauty. The drums are also more prominent here, making this the heavier of the two albums by far. The first side is "Beloved", which begins with a solemn organ line joined by equally funereal piano notes awash in lunar glow. It transforms into a desolate guitar instrumental, reverby guitar twang unfolding around delicate acoustic picking and washes of ethereal synth that almost has a Badalamenti tint to it; then the drums come in, heavy and plodding, just as the airy fragile layered vocals materialize and the sound appears as some kind of shadow-cast, doom laden slowcore. It's really gorgeous stuff, moving through passages where everything drops out and just a single electric guitar chimes in the darkness, a simple minor key figure repeated over and over, and spacey orchestral synths gradually drift in as a steady sinister bass pulse echoes through the darkness. Like the earlier work, this makes me think of drone metallers Earth crossed with swirling darkwave pop, heavy and ominous but shot through with gorgeous moody melody. The song finally returns to the dark lumbering heaviness as everything drops back in, sheets of delayed guitar and what sounds like a mandolin swirling around the treacly drums and that central melody that threads throughout the song, turning even heavier and blacker as massive distorted doom riffage slowly pours in and the music slows down, changing into a blackly majestic Western-tinged doom in it's last few minutes.
On the other side, "Follow You" takes us once more into eerie Badalamenti-like haze of sorrowful reverb guitar and haunting droning keys joined by deep bass notes and cello-like sounds, and then suddenly drops into doomed crush, slow ponderous drums and crushing glacial guitars continuing the main melody, distant ethereal vocals layered in eerie harmony behind the grim doom-laden heaviness, eventually flowing out into a mass of choral darkness later in the song when the music drops out and the vocals come to the fore. Later, it transforms back into the heavy droning funeral procession from before, the riff repeating over and over again, a droning, swirling processional dirge adorned with droning keyboards.
Limited to a mere 85 copies, and packaged in a hand-screened, hand-numbered insert with a foldout poster insert.
One of several side-projects to emerge from the Wolvserpent camp, Aelter is the solo effort of Wolvserpent guitarist Blake Green. With Aelter, Blake explores a similar realm of dark majestic sound to Wolvserpent, with his massive downtuned guitar roar and bleak minor key melodies being the common thread between the two projects. But where Wolvserpent blends this chugging Melvins-esque heaviness and haunting slowcore arpeggios with violins, pounding drums, and a propensity for extended hypno-dirges, Aelter dispenses with the drums almost completely and goes for a more cinematic approach using layered keyboards and gorgeous harmonized voices that reminds me of something you would have heard on Beggers Banquet or 4AD being fused to a malevolent black heaviness.
Both of the Aelter albums were only released on vinyl in limited editions of a few hundred copies and are close to going out of print completely, but we have now gathered both Dusk Dawn and Follow You Beloved together in a double disc set.
The first Aelter record Dusk Dawn from 2009 from is now out of print on vinyl and featured two side-long tracks. The first half "Dusk" begins much like something you would hear from Wolvserpent, an eerie guitar figure slowly plucked over heavy, rumbling doom metal chords, the dark menacing sound slowly unfolding in a manner similar to newer Earth but with a much more sinister vibe. But then this gloomy dirge starts to transform into something that is not so much like Wolvserpent as lush gauzy synthesizers wash in alongside ethereal choral voices, the sound drifting and uncoiling without the propulsion of drums or any other percussion, just a cloudy black fog of doom-laden darkwave underscored with those heavy rumbling guitars. This sound is utterly gorgeous, like some strange mixture of Earth's bleak ambient heaviness and the dark ethereal downer pop of Clan Of Xymox or some similar darkwave outfit. The second track travels deeper into this lush shadowy ambience, the guitars dropping out for long stretches of time as gorgeous high-end drones and shimmering dream-pop keyboards. The vocals begin to appear way off in the distance, slowly fading inwards as the guitars again materialize with chugging downtuned crunch and somber minor key melodies unwinding overhead. And when the vocals build into a majestic multi-part harmony, this becomes incredibly beautiful, like some drifting dreampop epic descending into darkness, finally combining with a minimal piano melody at the end.
Limited to three hundred hand-numbered copies, packaged in a silkscreened wraparound sleeve.
One of several side-projects to emerge from the Wolvserpent camp, Aelter is the solo effort of Wolvserpent guitarist Blake Green. With Aelter, Blake explores a similar realm of dark majestic sound to Wolvserpent, with his massive downtuned guitar roar and bleak minor key melodies being the common thread between the two projects. But where Wolvserpent blends this chugging Melvins-esque heaviness and haunting slowcore arpeggios with violins, pounding drums, and a propensity for extended hypno-dirges, Aelter dispenses with the drums almost completely and goes for a more cinematic approach using layered keyboards and gorgeous harmonized voices that reminds me of something you would have heard on Beggers Banquet or 4AD being fused to a malevolent black heaviness. Both of the Aelter albums were only released on vinyl in limited editions of a few hundred copies and are close to going out of print completely, but we have now gathered both Dusk Dawn and Follow You Beloved together in a double disc set.
The first Aelter record Dusk Dawn from 2009 from is now out of print on vinyl and featured two side-long tracks. The first half "Dusk" begins much like something you would hear from Wolvserpent, an eerie guitar figure slowly plucked over heavy, rumbling doom metal chords, the dark menacing sound slowly unfolding in a manner similar to newer Earth but with a much more sinister vibe. But then this gloomy dirge starts to transform into something that is not so much like Wolvserpent as lush gauzy synthesizers wash in alongside ethereal choral voices, the sound drifting and uncoiling without the propulsion of drums or any other percussion, just a cloudy black fog of doom-laden darkwave underscored with those heavy rumbling guitars. This sound is utterly gorgeous, like some strange mixture of Earth's bleak ambient heaviness and the dark ethereal downer pop of Clan Of Xymox or some similar darkwave outfit. The second track travels deeper into this lush shadowy ambience, the guitars dropping out for long stretches of time as gorgeous high-end drones and shimmering dream-pop keyboards. The vocals begin to appear way off in the distance, slowly fading inwards as the guitars again materialize with chugging downtuned crunch and somber minor key melodies unwinding overhead. And when the vocals build into a majestic multi-part harmony, this becomes incredibly beautiful, like some drifting dreampop epic descending into darkness, finally combining with a minimal piano melody at the end.
The second Aelter album Follow You Beloved (released on vinyl in 2011) grows even darker, much of the prettiness from the first album leeched out by the swelling blackness, but still rife with moments of fragile beauty. The drums are also more prominent here, making this the heavier of the two albums by far. The first side is "Beloved", which begins with a solemn organ line joined by equally funereal piano notes awash in lunar glow. It transforms into a desolate guitar instrumental, reverby guitar twang unfolding around delicate acoustic picking and washes of ethereal synth that almost has a Badalamenti tint to it; then the drums come in, heavy and plodding, just as the airy fragile layered vocals materialize and the sound appears as some kind of shadow-cast, doom laden slowcore. It's really gorgeous stuff, moving through passages where everything drops out and just a single electric guitar chimes in the darkness, a simple minor key figure repeated over and over, and spacey orchestral synths gradually drift in as a steady sinister bass pulse echoes through the darkness. Like the earlier work, this makes me think of drone metallers Earth crossed with swirling darkwave pop, heavy and ominous but shot through with gorgeous moody melody. The song finally returns to the dark lumbering heaviness as everything drops back in, sheets of delayed guitar and what sounds like a mandolin swirling around the treacly drums and that central melody that threads throughout the song, turning even heavier and blacker as massive distorted doom riffage slowly pours in and the music slows down, changing into a blackly majestic Western-tinged doom in it's last few minutes.
On the other side, "Follow You" takes us once more into eerie Badalamenti-like haze of sorrowful reverb guitar and haunting droning keys joined by deep bass notes and cello-like sounds, and then suddenly drops into doomed crush, slow ponderous drums and crushing glacial guitars continuing the main melody, distant ethereal vocals layered in eerie harmony behind the grim doom-laden heaviness, eventually flowing out into a mass of choral darkness later in the song when the music drops out and the vocals come to the fore. Later, it transforms back into the heavy droning funeral procession from before, the riff repeating over and over again, a droning, swirling processional dirge adorned with droning keyboards.
The third album to come from Wolvserpent-offshoot Aelter, III moves beyond the fantastic ethereal heaviness and synth-drenched darkwave of main member Blake Green's previous albums into mucho heavier realms of blackened gloom. There's a lot of the same mysterious, midnight ambience that you hear in Wolvserpent. But where that band delivers slo-mo crushing riffage and mesmerizing nocturnal vibes, this stuff travels further into the ether, emerging out of gorgeous murky synthesizers and harmonized choral voices into a haunting doomgaze finale.
The first half of "Clarity" drifts in slowly on a wave of warm, glimmering synthesizers, the shimmery glacial drones spreading out into infinity, a kind of blissed-out kosmische crawl that feels like something from Tangerine Dream or Steve Roach softly billowing out of your speakers. This heavenly twilight synth-glow spreads across almost the entire side, sheets of wavering chordal shift and muted cosmic drone overlapping one another, the sound of pure electronic dreamblur. Asit progresses though, the sound slowly darkens, grows more ominous as it transforms into towering spires of gothic drone that rise over the last several minutes of the side, suddenly shifting into a looping mass of guttural, murky synth-groan at the very end that resembles the pitch-shifted moaning of sightless monks woven into an unsettling death-chant.
But when the second side starts back up, the music suddenly changes into slow, droning blackened metal, eerie minor key guitars creeping across howling distant choral voices and washed-out droning synths and the pulsating throb of the drums and bass, the sound tense and ominous, almost like something from Year Of No Light slowed to a funereal pace and draped in nightmarish choirs. When the lead vocals come in, they're a deep, ethereal croon drenched in reverb, hinting at that blackened darkwave sound of Aelter albums past, but here pushed deeper into the swirling twilight fog. When the last half of the song comes in, it transforms yet again into a final long stretch of ghostly, jangly gloom with high, keening tremolo riffs rising over catchy minor key strum and a crushing distorted bass-riff, the melodies almost like something out of a Badalamenti score, woven with the gorgeous doom-laden gloompop and gothic synthdrift that finally consumes the song. Pretty amazing, and quite different from anything that I've heard from Aelter.
We have some of the last copies available of the vinyl edition of Aelter's III that came out on Handmade Birds, as its now sold out from the label; for those cassette-junkies out there, we also have the new limited-edition tape of III that the band just released on their own Wolvserpent label, limited to one hundred copies and presented in a gorgeous silk-screened black cardstock cover.
The third album to come from Wolvserpent-offshoot Aelter, III moves beyond the fantastic ethereal heaviness and synth-drenched darkwave of main member Blake Green's previous albums into mucho heavier realms of blackened gloom. There's a lot of the same mysterious, midnight ambience that you hear in Wolvserpent. But where that band delivers slo-mo crushing riffage and mesmerizing nocturnal vibes, this stuff travels further into the ether, emerging out of gorgeous murky synthesizers and harmonized choral voices into a haunting doomgaze finale.
The first half of "Clarity" drifts in slowly on a wave of warm, glimmering synthesizers, the shimmery glacial drones spreading out into infinity, a kind of blissed-out kosmische crawl that feels like something from Tangerine Dream or Steve Roach softly billowing out of your speakers. This heavenly twilight synth-glow spreads across almost the entire side, sheets of wavering chordal shift and muted cosmic drone overlapping one another, the sound of pure electronic dreamblur. Asit progresses though, the sound slowly darkens, grows more ominous as it transforms into towering spires of gothic drone that rise over the last several minutes of the side, suddenly shifting into a looping mass of guttural, murky synth-groan at the very end that resembles the pitch-shifted moaning of sightless monks woven into an unsettling death-chant.
But when the second side starts back up, the music suddenly changes into slow, droning blackened metal, eerie minor key guitars creeping across howling distant choral voices and washed-out droning synths and the pulsating throb of the drums and bass, the sound tense and ominous, almost like something from Year Of No Light slowed to a funereal pace and draped in nightmarish choirs. When the lead vocals come in, they're a deep, ethereal croon drenched in reverb, hinting at that blackened darkwave sound of Aelter albums past, but here pushed deeper into the swirling twilight fog. When the last half of the song comes in, it transforms yet again into a final long stretch of ghostly, jangly gloom with high, keening tremolo riffs rising over catchy minor key strum and a crushing distorted bass-riff, the melodies almost like something out of a Badalamenti score, woven with the gorgeous doom-laden gloompop and gothic synthdrift that finally consumes the song. Pretty amazing, and quite different from anything that I've heard from Aelter.
We have some of the last copies available of the vinyl edition of Aelter's III that came out on Handmade Birds, as its now sold out from the label. Limited to three hundred copies.
��Back in stock! The precursor to their latest album of killer blackened jazz/prog/metal from this Greek outfit. There's been some great stuff coming out of Greece lately in the realm of blackened prog, with the likes of Hail Spirit Noir and Aenaon both getting a lot of heavy play around here. A particularly jazz-influenced outfit that includes members of Hellenic black metallers Varathron, Aenaon debuted with their 2011 album Cendres Et Sang, which the avant-garde metallers released on the very prog-centric black metal label Code666.
�� The music combines elements of dark jazz, progressive rock, black metal and math rock into an ambitious, sometimes operatic sound that's pretty impressive. Christos Agouridakis's lyrical saxophone opens the album, delivering dark, complex lines that drift over the churning, blackened mathmetal crush of "Suncord", the sax later winding around passages of sinister, almost Slint-y guitar parts and some expressive and complex percussive work. At their heaviest, Aenaon unleash a crushing, complex math-thrash assault that brings a heavily blackened malevolence to their touches of Meshugga-esque angularity, as well as some wonderfully eerie guitar leads, atmospheric electronic textures, and flourishes of trippy Hammond organ. Along with the jazz elements, the drummer's performance is one of the most distinguishing aspects of Aenaon's music, with a precise, almost mechanical style that can give certain parts of Cendres a vaguely industrial feel. That machinelike precision can be heard on a lot of the blastbeats as well, and when heard in concert with the electronic textures and bursts of abstract glitchery, can make this somewhat reminiscent of a proggier, jazz-damaged Dodheimsgard at times. There's lots of spacey synthesizer textures alongside that Hammond organ and even a grand piano, all woven into the band's complex time signatures and dense arrangements, a hevay King Crimson influence permeating the crushing blackened metal. Towards the end of the album, Aenaon move even further into evocative jazz-tinged ambience with the lurching power of "Black Nerve", which features one of the album's most impressive saxophone sequences; it's followed by a haunting re-imagining of David Lynch's "In Heaven" from the soundtrack to his surrealistic 1977 midnight movie masterpiece Eraserhead, with guest vocalist Thomais Chatzigianni contributing her rich bluesy wail over the eerie piano music before the band explodes into a punishing metallic version of the song, that eerie aching melody transformed into a massive metallic rage. This album might not be as out-there as the stuff that their country mates Hail Spirit Noir have been doing, but this is still some compelling stuff for fans of contemporary black prog, and it's especially recommended if you're a fan of the bombastic jazz-streaked heaviness found with bands like Ephel Duath, Yakuza, Carnival in Coal and Unexpect.
��The second album from avant-garde Greek metallers Aenaon, the follow-up to their killer debut Cendres Et Sang that was featured on the last C-Blast new arrivals list. I loved the band's imaginative fusion of ambitious prog rock, dark jazz and violent black n' roll that made their debut one of the more unique offerings from Code666 at the time of it's release, and unlike a lot of bands that come from a similar black metal background whose music ends up moving into proggier directions, Aenaon continue to retain a strong connection to their blackened roots. Much of Extance features the band's crushing mathy angularity and blazing blackened aggression, but the eleven songs on this album are infested with strange outside sounds, taking their music into even more surreal directions than before.
�� On Extance, Aenaon continues to forge a strangely elegant sound that mixes an interesting assemblage of influences (classic prog rock, Hellenic black metal) into something that has gradually grown into a distinct sound of their own. You get plenty of the crushing mathy riffage, chunky staccato grooves and blasts of violent blackness that teemed throughout their debut, with those vicious raspy screams trading off against clear, harmonized crooning that brings a heavy dose of dark drama to the music, those vocal arrangements even sometimes shifting into a kind of maniacal, operatic delivery. The songs feature surges of spacey futuristic electronics, fragments of ragtime piano and strange alien glitchery amid the blackened prog, along with atmospheric classical piano sequences, jazzy vibraphone accompaniment, sudden descents into whirling Middle Eastern folk music, choral chants, soulful harmonica playing, and best of all, more of that searing moody saxophone that strafes Aenaon's violent metallic crush.
�� Fans of Enslaved, Sigh, and the recent solo albums from Emperor's Ihsahn will dig the killer progged-out black metal that emerges on songs like "Deathtrip Chronicle", especially when that crushing angular assault suddenly swerves out into a long stretch of sumptuous atmospheric jazz layered with swooping saxophone and washes of trippy Hammond organ. And songs like "Grau Diva" lay down some monstrous grooves, as that discordant, off-kilter blackened heaviness slips into a savage, infectious black n' roll riff. Aeneon infuse the whole album with these off-kilter moments and their knack for stirring melodies, with haunting minor key elegies drifting out of the complex blasting churn, the guitarists more concerned with memorable and emotive melodies than simply spewing out a self-indulgent shred-salad. Some interesting guest appearances show up, too; various tracks feature the talents of Mirai Kawashima (Sigh), Sindre Nedland (Funeral) and Haris (Hail Spirit Noir), and on "Funeral Blues", vocalist Tanya Leontiou from Greek evil doom-prog band Universe217 contributes her soulful, powerful voice over a song that does indeed get pretty bluesy, laying down a huge Sabbathian hook around a night-sea of glimmering pianos and blackened tremolo buzz. Along with Hail Spirit Noir, Aenaon are producing some of the most interesting and innovative black metal-influenced music coming out of Greece at the moment; anyone into the proggier end of contempo BM should definitely check these guys out.
More stunning ambient/drone/drift from Finland courtesy of Aural Hypnox. AEOGO trafficks in spacey drift reminiscent of RAPOON and HEEMAN, with distant shuffling and cosmic muttering drones. This is the debut release from this project, yet these eight tracks expertly weaves a haunting atmosphere through spiralling guitar feedback and textured drones, primitive percussion and rhythms, creepy atonal vocal abstractions and distant underground choirs,and layers upon layers of cavernous thrum, balancing organic dark ambience with blackened ritual vibes. Highly recommended to fans of MAEROR TRI and TROUM. Comes packaged in a special octagon-shaped cardboard cover that includes a six-panel textured cardboard sleeve. Limited to 1000 copies.
More excellent dark drone from ritual-ambient shamans Aeoga, whose scraping metals and shimmering feedback coalesce into some of the most beautiful and hallucinatory droneworks this side of Troum. But where Troum achieves great beauty and sublime submerged melodies, Aeoga's densely populated soundscapes utter the screams of amorphous unseen beasts in the abyss and majestic chorales of the undead. Even with every light on, Zenith Beyond The Helix-Locus is thoroughly unnerving. Filled with the distant hiss of cymbals, clattery echoes, dark heavy synthesizer hum, and heavily layered electronics, this is grim, shadowy twilight drone of the highest order...excellent. Whenever I listen to Aeoga, I feel like I'm deep underground, adrift in some forgotten Lovecraftian cavern system, surrounded by frightening sounds. Fans of Troum and Maeror Tri are highly advised to check out AEOGA, as well as enthusiasts of all things drone and cave-ambient. Like all Aural Hypnox releases, this is nicely packaged in a hand-assembled oversize gatefold sleeve. Limited to 1,000 copies.
Strange alien cosmic throb comprises this CDR album from the obscure Italian project AER, which is a solo deal from someone named "L.A.". Couldn't find
out anything else about this project, but the music speaks for itself - this is a heavy synth feast with gobs of dark, space-drifting buzz and shimmering
astral ambience right out of the 1980's that stretches out across infinity, conjuring images of exploding stars and eldritch nebulae, of dead planets hanging
in space and strange colors that are impossible for the human mind to fathom. The tracks are titled evocatively enough ("Oblivion", "Void Within", "Esoteric
Emanations", "Asymmetric Chambers", "Under A Crimsonj Sky", etc), and AER creates an effective synth-prog atmosphere that soaks the music in an unearthly
haze. Buzzing, synthetic drones and rumbling ambience move through the void and are surrounded by epic layered keyboard riffs and all sorts of little sonic
events, spacey melodies appear and disappear, pulsating moody basslines stalk through the darkness, and various alien electronic sounds emerge through the
murk. The classic space/kraut rock of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream is obviously a component of AER's DNA, but there's also a bit of the epic and
cinematic New Age of Vangelis and the rhythmic propulsion of some of Claudio Simonetti's post-Goblin 80's era soundtrack work in here as well. The music of
Light Beyond The Universe is bathed in a black cosmic light that puts this in a similiar realm as that of Neptune Towers, the ambient space music
project from Darkthrone's Fenriz, and fans of Fenriz's krauty black-hole descents are going to eat this up. Procyon-x and Zombi are also reference points;
though AER isn't as proggy and rock-based as the latter nor as isolationist and minimal as the former, this is right up your alley if yer a fan of either of
those projects. The disc comes in a small clamshell case with a sepia toned cover and a small insert card pasted to the interior of the case.
The second album from the trio Aethenor, a band that features Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O)))/Khanate/KTL/Burning Witch), Daniel O'Sullivan (of Zeuhl-worshipping UK prog masters Guapo), and Vincent De Roguin (of Swiss prog/metal/post-rockers Shora). Aethenor follows up their VHF debut Deep In Ocean Sunk The Lamp Of Light with this new excursion into otherwordly drones, frenetic free-improv percussion, and ghoulish electro-acoustic sonic textures that sounds nothing like what you would expect based on their other bands. Divided into three ten-minute-plus pieces, Betimes Black Cloudmasses explores a similiar creaking world of dark-toned drones and clattering percussion as the first record, seemingly informed by David Jackman's Organum collaborations with Eddie Provost, all creepy dark drift and throbbing low-end, strange metal clanking sounds and haunted organs, super slow moving glacial ambience that sounds more like an abstract film score to an old horror movie than out-and-out dark ambient. The album also features contributions from percussionists Nicolas Field and Alex Babel, who add flurries of splattery, FMP-style free jazz drumming to Aethenor's dark soundworld. The first track opens with distant, whistling high-end drones slowly coming into view, as a repetitive electronic pulse begins to throb like a black heart beating in the middle of a cloud of softly bending feedback and eerie minor key melodies that sound like they are coming out of a tape machine being played backwards. As the track progresses, all kinds of little sonic particles enter into the sound field, from ghostly moaning vocal-like utterances to warbling fragments of pipe organ melodies, and then halfway through the hypnotic ambience is jarred by a scream, and heavy metal chains being dragged across some hard surface. Swells of doomy low-end rumble and spacious percussion rise and recede, surrounded by chimes and thunderous exhaled breaths. Towards the end of the track, dreamy keyboard melodies become more prominent. The second track is even bleaker, a super abstract industrial improv freakout with both of the guest percussionists unleashing a torrent of frenzied free jazz drumming over some sinister sounding electronic sinewave fluctuations, ringing bells, grisly keyboard tinkling, and blasts of torrential noise that rise to a fever pitch. Later though, those chiming bells begin to form into a heavenly choir of nocturnal tones that begins to sound like some fractured 70's krautrock like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream, even as the melodious tinkling is overcome by the rumbling, splattery drumming and clusters of insectile drone. Then the third and final track appears, with all of the preceding sounds stripped away leaving only sparse, random keyboard notes and the dueling free jazz drumming tumbling over each other in dense clots of smacking sticks, bubbling percussion and rushes of cymbal noise. A few minutes into it, the clatter and keys are joined by muttering, worldess vocals, a stream of gutteral babble and grunting (courtesy of Ulver's Kristoffer Rygg) which reminds me of some of Attila Csihar's expressive throat mumble. The rest of the track goes from fluttering high-pitched squeals of feedback that are manipulated into bird-like chirps, distant shadows of distorted guitar, sprinkles of abstract piano and synthesizer, surges of freeform percussion, and creaking wooden noises, and in the last few minutes evolves into an absolutely breathtaking wash of kosmiche bliss. A superbly creepy album.
Packaged in a nice letterpress gatefold jacket with artwork from swiss designer Nicola Todeschini.
Also available on LP!
The second album from the trio Aethenor, a band that features Stephen O'Malley (Sunn O)))/Khanate/KTL/Burning Witch), Daniel O'Sullivan (of Zeuhl-worshipping UK prog masters Guapo), and Vincent De Roguin (of Swiss prog/metal/post-rockers Shora). Aethenor follows up their VHF debut Deep In Ocean Sunk The Lamp Of Light with this new excursion into otherwordly drones, frenetic free-improv percussion, and ghoulish electro-acoustic sonic textures that sounds nothing like what you would expect based on their other bands. Divided into three ten-minute-plus pieces, Betimes Black Cloudmasses explores a similiar creaking world of dark-toned drones and clattering percussion as the first record, seemingly informed by David Jackman's Organum collaborations with Eddie Provost, all creepy dark drift and throbbing low-end, strange metal clanking sounds and haunted organs, super slow moving glacial ambience that sounds more like an abstract film score to an old horror movie than out-and-out dark ambient. The album also features contributions from percussionists Nicolas Field and Alex Babel, who add flurries of splattery, FMP-style free jazz drumming to Aethenor's dark soundworld. The first track opens with distant, whistling high-end drones slowly coming into view, as a repetitive electronic pulse begins to throb like a black heart beating in the middle of a cloud of softly bending feedback and eerie minor key melodies that sound like they are coming out of a tape machine being played backwards. As the track progresses, all kinds of little sonic particles enter into the sound field, from ghostly moaning vocal-like utterances to warbling fragments of pipe organ melodies, and then halfway through the hypnotic ambience is jarred by a scream, and heavy metal chains being dragged across some hard surface. Swells of doomy low-end rumble and spacious percussion rise and recede, surrounded by chimes and thunderous exhaled breaths. Towards the end of the track, dreamy keyboard melodies become more prominent. The second track is even bleaker, a super abstract industrial improv freakout with both of the guest percussionists unleashing a torrent of frenzied free jazz drumming over some sinister sounding electronic sinewave fluctuations, ringing bells, grisly keyboard tinkling, and blasts of torrential noise that rise to a fever pitch. Later though, those chiming bells begin to form into a heavenly choir of nocturnal tones that begins to sound like some fractured 70's krautrock like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream, even as the melodious tinkling is overcome by the rumbling, splattery drumming and clusters of insectile drone. Then the third and final track appears, with all of the preceding sounds stripped away leaving only sparse, random keyboard notes and the dueling free jazz drumming tumbling over each other in dense clots of smacking sticks, bubbling percussion and rushes of cymbal noise. A few minutes into it, the clatter and keys are joined by muttering, worldess vocals, a stream of gutteral babble and grunting (courtesy of Ulver's Kristoffer Rygg) which reminds me of some of Attila Csihar's expressive throat mumble. The rest of the track goes from fluttering high-pitched squeals of feedback that are manipulated into bird-like chirps, distant shadows of distorted guitar, sprinkles of abstract piano and synthesizer, surges of freeform percussion, and creaking wooden noises, and in the last few minutes evolves into an absolutely breathtaking wash of kosmiche bliss. A superbly creepy album.
Packaged in a nice letterpress jacket with artwork from swiss designer Nicola Todeschini.
Loved the last two Aethenor albums. The creepy, creaking industrial dronescapes that this all-star band of avant-rock artists have been crafting on their
previous releases were dark, alien-sounding fields of organic ambience and strange percussive formations that didn't really sound like anything else that I
could put my finger on. Their sound has definitely changed, morphed, taken on a new cast for their third album Faking Gold & Murder, which sees the
core trio of Stephen O'Malley (you know, Sunn O))), Khanate, KTL, etc etc etc), Daniel O'Sullivan (Guapo) and Vincent De Roguin (Shora) joining with a number
of additional musicians, not the least of which is David Tibet from Current 93 who contributes a terrific vocal performance to what had previously been a
primarily instrumental project. The band also teams up with guitarist Alexander Tucker and percussionists Nicolas Field and Alex Babel, and the resulting
sound on Faking Gold & Murder is quite different from the Aethenor of before, and not what I was expecting when we first threw this on. The band
still weaves their shadowy drones and sheets of occultic ambience around massive prayer-bowl resonances and strange percussive scrapings and clattering, but
these four lengthy tracks also move into structured melodies and rhythmic passages that reveal a dark prog underbelly to Aethenor that wasn't apparent on the
last two albums.
All four tracks are untitled and reach upwards of ten minutes, and each track unveils an expanse of black starlit heavens hovering above heavy waves of
harsh distorted drone and crushing guitar rumblings, endless high end drones strafing the darkness and ominous melodies unravelling against the clouds of twinkling electronics and Rhodes piano. These rich dronescapes are blazed by sudden eruptions of powerful free-jazz drumming from Field and Babel, whose complex bursts of percussion contrast with the majestic black ambience and add much to the tension that runs all through the album. Tibet wanders through these mysterious fields of black drift and infernal melodies, singing and proclaiming above it, sounding something like a preacher giving a feverish, nightmarish sermon over clusters of electronics, clanking atonal piano and glockenspiel, flurries of cascading chimes and the furious free-jazz percussion, and O'Malley's rolling waves of distorted doom. There are similiarities with Current 93 of course, since Tibet's vocals and delivery are so distinctive, but Aethenor invoke a much heavier sound, dark and asbtract, sometimes pushing forward on thunderheads of manic drumming, riding on slow-motion surges of crushing riff. Best stuff yet from this continually impressive outfit, and definitely their heaviest. Comes in a beautiful black Stumptown style six-panel gatefold, decorated with mystical symbols and artwork designed by Nicola Todeschini and Vincent De Roguin and printed with metallic gold ink on the black letterpressed jacket.
Finally have the vinyl in stock, packaged in a deluxe letterpressed cardstock jacket created by the folks at Stumptown; it's a beautiful presentation for this heavy-duty Aethenor album.
Loved the last two Aethenor albums. The creepy, creaking industrial dronescapes that this all-star band of avant-rock artists have been crafting on their
previous releases were dark, alien-sounding fields of organic ambience and strange percussive formations that didn't really sound like anything else that I
could put my finger on. Their sound has definitely changed, morphed, taken on a new cast for their third album Faking Gold & Murder, which sees the
core trio of Stephen O'Malley (you know, Sunn O))), Khanate, KTL, etc etc etc), Daniel O'Sullivan (Guapo) and Vincent De Roguin (Shora) joining with a number
of additional musicians, not the least of which is David Tibet from Current 93 who contributes a terrific vocal performance to what had previously been a
primarily instrumental project. The band also teams up with guitarist Alexander Tucker and percussionists Nicolas Field and Alex Babel, and the resulting
sound on Faking Gold & Murder is quite different from the Aethenor of before, and not what I was expecting when we first threw this on. The band
still weaves their shadowy drones and sheets of occultic ambience around massive prayer-bowl resonances and strange percussive scrapings and clattering, but
these four lengthy tracks also move into structured melodies and rhythmic passages that reveal a dark prog underbelly to Aethenor that wasn't apparent on the
last two albums.
All four tracks are untitled and reach upwards of ten minutes, and each track unveils an expanse of black starlit heavens hovering above heavy waves of
harsh distorted drone and crushing guitar rumblings, endless high end drones strafing the darkness and ominous melodies unravelling against the clouds of twinkling electronics and Rhodes piano. These rich dronescapes are blazed by sudden eruptions of powerful free-jazz drumming from Field and Babel, whose complex bursts of percussion contrast with the majestic black ambience and add much to the tension that runs all through the album. Tibet wanders through these mysterious fields of black drift and infernal melodies, singing and proclaiming above it, sounding something like a preacher giving a feverish, nightmarish sermon over clusters of electronics, clanking atonal piano and glockenspiel, flurries of cascading chimes and the furious free-jazz percussion, and O'Malley's rolling waves of distorted doom. There are similiarities with Current 93 of course, since Tibet's vocals and delivery are so distinctive, but Aethenor invoke a much heavier sound, dark and asbtract, sometimes pushing forward on thunderheads of manic drumming, riding on slow-motion surges of crushing riff. Best stuff yet from this continually impressive outfit, and definitely their heaviest. Comes in a beautiful black Stumptown style six-panel gatefold, decorated with mystical symbols and artwork designed by Nicola Todeschini and Vincent De Roguin and printed with metallic gold ink on the black letterpressed jacket.
Back in stock, this is the newest album from the shape shifting improv ensemble Aethenor, which originally formed around the duo of Daniel O'Sullivan (Guapo) and Stephen O'Malley (Burning Witch, Sunn, KTL, Thorr's Hammer) and which now has them working with Steve Noble from Derek Bailey's Company/N.E.W./Tongues Of Fire and Ulver's Kristoffer Rygg. En Form For Bla is comprised of live recordings from three separate performances that went down in Oslo, Norway in 2010, where the group delved deep into strange dark realms of otherworldly doom-laden ambience, dark fusion atmosphere that at times resembles Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew filtered through spectral shadow, and eddies of powerful sonic movement. Mostly, the music is driven by Noble's fantastic detailed bursts of percussion and the warm, fluid Rhodes keys that O'Sullivan melts like black syrup over the sheets of guitar drift and amp rumble. The effect is enthralling, making this one of my favorite offerings from Aethenor yet, and easily their "jazziest".
"Jocasta" opens as soft looped thrum and abstract metal percussion leads into cymbal washes, deep resonant rumblings, smatterings of fusion-y Rhodes piano and warped jazz guitar, crashing into controlled swells of doom laden darkness and low end heaviness, but never ventures too far from the menacing ethereal improv. Rattling drum volleys appear beneath sparkling star clusters, then veer into strange nocturnal prog soundscapery and minimal dark ambience, a mix of delicate processed guitar, distorted bass tones, and pounding freeform drumming, eventually becoming super blown out and chaotic for a moment at the midway point, then abruptly slips into a clanking anti-groove, almost spacious free jazz blurt and stumble. After a powerful freeform drum freak-out, the track transforms into eerie deep space blissout later on, mixing almost kosimiche textures with the detailed percussive work.
The next track "Laudanum Tusk" is more abstract creepiness, ominous metallic scrapes and squeals over subdued drumming, barely there at times, creating this horror movie style atmosphere that builds to a stunning dark prog jam. "One Number of Destiny In Ninety Nine" takes shape as a strange glitchfest symphony of metal clatter and processed brass sounds, and "Something To Sleep is Still" sees volleys of blast beats sounding through a vast ambient jazz shadow alive with pulsating keys and super-distorted doom-laden bass rumble. More of that deep fluttering bass and rattling percussion scuttles around on "Vyomagami Plume", rumbling beneath gouts of cable sputter before birthing a lumbering and fractured prog jam that forms into something that resembles a chopped up, glitched out Goblin track.
This one is highly recommended for fans of dark, atmospheric improvisation, fans of Bohren and the Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation/Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, and Ulver's most recent work. Both editions are beautifully designed by O'Malley, the disc in a gatefold jacket and the double Lp presented on colored vinyl in printed inner sleeves.
The double Lp vinyl edition of En Form For Bla comes in an expanded jacket, with both records pressed onto thick white vinyl.
Back in stock, this is the newest album from the shape shifting improv ensemble Aethenor, which originally formed around the duo of Daniel O'Sullivan (Guapo) and Stephen O'Malley (Burning Witch, Sunn, KTL, Thorr's Hammer) and which now has them working with Steve Noble from Derek Bailey's Company/N.E.W./Tongues Of Fire and Ulver's Kristoffer Rygg. En Form For Bla is comprised of live recordings from three separate performances that went down in Oslo, Norway in 2010, where the group delved deep into strange dark realms of otherworldly doom-laden ambience, dark fusion atmosphere that at times resembles Miles Davis circa Bitches Brew filtered through spectral shadow, and eddies of powerful sonic movement. Mostly, the music is driven by Noble's fantastic detailed bursts of percussion and the warm, fluid Rhodes keys that O'Sullivan melts like black syrup over the sheets of guitar drift and amp rumble. The effect is enthralling, making this one of my favorite offerings from Aethenor yet, and easily their "jazziest".
"Jocasta" opens as soft looped thrum and abstract metal percussion leads into cymbal washes, deep resonant rumblings, smatterings of fusion-y Rhodes piano and warped jazz guitar, crashing into controlled swells of doom laden darkness and low end heaviness, but never ventures too far from the menacing ethereal improv. Rattling drum volleys appear beneath sparkling star clusters, then veer into strange nocturnal prog soundscapery and minimal dark ambience, a mix of delicate processed guitar, distorted bass tones, and pounding freeform drumming, eventually becoming super blown out and chaotic for a moment at the midway point, then abruptly slips into a clanking anti-groove, almost spacious free jazz blurt and stumble. After a powerful freeform drum freak-out, the track transforms into eerie deep space blissout later on, mixing almost kosimiche textures with the detailed percussive work.
The next track "Laudanum Tusk" is more abstract creepiness, ominous metallic scrapes and squeals over subdued drumming, barely there at times, creating this horror movie style atmosphere that builds to a stunning dark prog jam. "One Number of Destiny In Ninety Nine" takes shape as a strange glitchfest symphony of metal clatter and processed brass sounds, and "Something To Sleep is Still" sees volleys of blast beats sounding through a vast ambient jazz shadow alive with pulsating keys and super-distorted doom-laden bass rumble. More of that deep fluttering bass and rattling percussion scuttles around on "Vyomagami Plume", rumbling beneath gouts of cable sputter before birthing a lumbering and fractured prog jam that forms into something that resembles a chopped up, glitched out Goblin track.
This one is highly recommended for fans of dark, atmospheric improvisation, fans of Bohren and the Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation/Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, and Ulver's most recent work. Both editions are beautifully designed by O'Malley, the disc in a gatefold jacket and the double Lp presented on colored vinyl in printed inner sleeves.
���� MMXV's creepy Ligottian album art is what first caught my eye, depicting a figure in vaguely Victorian-era attire who has something quite horrible happening with (or to) its head. It's unusual and suggestive, like something that would accompany a piece of weird fiction. While the music on Aetherius Obscuritas's comes from a more traditionalist black metal background, it does live up to that cover with a regal, ragingly fast sonic assault that's tinged in technically intricate songwriting, moments of quirky oddness, and some really tasteful use of synthesizer that doesn't detract from the overall ugliness and power of the band's music.
���� This is the latest album from the Hungarian duo, delivering more of the powerful, speed-fueled black metal that main member Arkhorrl has been producing for over a decade now. It also sees the band moving further from the unmistakably Burzumic fuzz-drenched sound of their earlier drum-machine driven albums into a more skillful, complex and melodic sound that recalls the black grandeur of Dissection, while employing some interesting textural qualities of their own. That earlier stuff had somewhat of a similar feel to some other Hungarian black metal bands I'm a fan of, like Marblebog and Vorkuta, but on MMXV, Arkhorrl and drummer Zson bring more complex arrangements and vaguely progressive touches to that sound, with some unsettling discordant riffing entering the fray alongside the sweeping, majestic melodic blackened riffs, and a couple of songs like "M�reg" getting particularly jagged and dissonant. The drumming is also noteworthy, with occasional weird rhythmic fills that come out of nowhere, lending a frenzied air to certain moments on the album. Most of the songs fly at blasting, super-fast tempos, but there are some powerful tempo shifts into dreamy, synth-flecked waltz, or passages of mid-tempo folk-tinged atmospherics that bring added depth to their sound. And as with the other Hungarian black metal bands I dig, the glottal sound of Arkhorrl's lyrics meshes nicely with the menacing tone, sometimes slipping into a repulsive gurgle that sounds particularly demonic. Well-written, compositionally complex black metal does a pretty great job of merging sweeping nocturnal, folk-flecked atmosphere with technical musicianship and brutal aggression.
Usually, whenever we crank up a new released from RAIG, we expect some kind of crazy Russian prog to come jiggling out of the speakers, but Aethyr are very different from the label's usual fare. Messio is the first album from this Russian duo, a black-tar spill of occult industrial amp-sludge that blends a pungent ritual atmosphere with huge slugs of metallic black doom. RAIG always puts their releases together nicely, and Messio is especially striking, the disc enclosed in a hand-assembled all-black hardback gatefold jacket with silver embossed lettering and symbols on the cover, and a printed card with the album notes pasted to the interior of the cover. Nice!
The duo creates a kind of blackened instrumental ambient doom that fuses a primitive post-industrial influence to chthonic heaviness on this nearly hour-long album. Messio begins with a wave of rumbling, buzzing slabs of low-end amp roar and gooey ultra-distorted freeform riffage that undulates beneath ancient wax-cylinder recordings of 20th century occultist Aleister Crowley; there's the early Earth/Sunn vibe like you'd expect, but pretty soon the riffs become so twisted and contorted that it turns into something quite different, a sort of pitch-black ultra-heavy improv guitar/amplifier noise jam with bass so low they rattle the phlegm loose in your lungs, melting down into swirling bass drones that wash over the end of the piece. The second track "Ocultus I" takes a different approach, tying a massive slow motion doom riff to a simple plodding percussive rhythm, an echoing oil drum hammered beneath the lava-like serpentine doom riff with some fuzz-soaked, buzzing psych guitar meandering through the ten minute sludge trance. As it goes on, eerie choral-like voices begin to emerge out of the shadows like ululations from partially decomposed Gregorian monks, their looped, ominous chanting adding further shadow to this circular dirge-trance that's part Corrupted, part Neubatuen.
The next track "Mass II" is similar, in that it combines another simple droning doom riff that rides on waves of reverberating low end sludge pushed forward by the steady monotonous clank and pound of martial percussion. But here the sound is actually somewhat pretty, with a maudlin synthesizer melody playing out over the ominous doom, sounding just a little like something from Jesu, but stripped down and devoid of vocals. Later, the song becomes slightly faster and more urgent, a cavernous echoing subterranean Melvins-like crush that eventually returns to the somber sadness of the main melody, ending in a haze of droning keys, rumbling amps and more sampled speech from The Great Beast.
The remaining four pieces on Messio follow a similar route with clanking metallic rhythms banging away beneath Skullflowery psych guitar skree and droning feedback and thick, buzzing blackened distorted metallic sludge, each one unfolding into murky psych sludge that oozes with wailing guitar splatter that sears the blackness, the guitar sometimes shifting into screaming tremolo riffs that add a vague black metal element to the sound, or shifts into stretches of pure noise and incredibly deep low-end over modulated bass frequencies and washes of amplifier hiss pouring out of their speakers in black jets of distortion. Out of these, it's the twelve minute "Ave S" that heads deepest into psychedelic territory, blasting out huge squalls of psychedelic guitar fx and delayed feedback before it slides into a lugubrious acid-sludge plod reminiscent of Burnt Hills or a way heavier Fushitsusha, changing direction every few minutes and shifting between skeletal industrial doom and blown-out space-tripping psychdirge. It's the closer "Occultus III" that's actually the closest that the band gets to Sunn territory, ending the disc with a rumbling, drifting cloud of ambient sludge that fades into Crowley's final utterances, his surrounded by a mist of ancient hiss and crackle.
��� Just grabbed some of the last available copies of this older 2008 reissue of Afflicted's debut album Prodigal Sun, one of the more obscure prog-death albums that came out in the early 90s. Originally released on Nuclear Blast back in 1992, this latest version of the album was re-mastered and reissued by Metal Mind on a gold disc CD in a machine-numbered digipack edition of two thousand copies, with an eight-page booklet and new liner notes. It was another one of those albums that I first heard about while reading Jeff Wagner's avant-metal bible Mean Deviation; while Afflicted is only briefly mentioned in the book, Wagner's description of Prodigal Sun as "...a psychedelic wreck of brutality mixed with Eastern/Indian melodies, cosmic atmosphere, and passages of triumphant traditional metal..." was enough to put 'em on my list of albums to track down.
��� Despite being recorded at the legendary Sunlight Studios and coming from Sweden, Prodigal Sun was far from another bout of Entombed-cloned death metal; hell, even the photo of the band in the booklet makes 'em look more like Ozric Tentacles than a crypt-smashing Swedish death metal outfit. It's that quirkiness that's drawn a cult following amongst aficionados of oddball prog-death, and the strange, aggressive sound on this album really stands out from the predominant early 90s death metal. Right off the bat, Afflicted are going for a different sort of vibe, opening the disc with the droning buzz of an Indian raga and swells of eerie synth, but when first song "Harbouring The Soul" finally kicks in, these guys deliver an offbeat, spacey brand of death/thrash that gets pretty brain-warping. The songs are mostly fast-paced blasts of proggy death metal with lots of fx-drenched guitar and a flange-heavy bass sound, frontman Joakim Br�ms growling monstrously over the confusional song arrangements and twisted time signature changes keeping the whole album on an odd tilt. Weird bluesy breakdowns and searing guitar shred gets mixed in with classical music samples, weird, discordant Voivodian chords. Much like Coroner, Voivod, and later Edge Of Sanity, Afflicted had lofty prog-rock ambitions, but they could also grind as savagely as anyone, spiking their contorted prog-death with violent blastbeats and churning concrete-mixer riffs that balance out their more off-kilter, spaced-out passages. Prodigal Sun delivers an energetic rush of pummeling proggy heaviness, but the most striking moments are their more restrained, like the eerie wah-drenched psychedelia that shows up in the middle of "Rising To The Sun", or the drug-addled detours of "Spirit Spectrum" and the rousing, rocking grooves that cut through closer "Ivory Tower". It's an uneven album, with some songs being stronger than others, but it still delivers plenty of wonderfully violent prog-death that fans of offbeat death metal will want to check out. After this, the band shifted towards more traditional, power metal style, leaving this the one bold oddity in their discography, and by far my favorite stuff of theirs.
The first time I heard Afflictis Lentae was on the split 7" with The Austrasian Goat that came out on At War With False Noise, and ever since hearing that brief blast of nuclear blackthrash from this French lone wolf, I've been looking for more of his music. It didn't take long, as Infernal Kommando has just issued this cd collection of out-of-print material from this blackthrash maniac, and ever since I got our copies of From Nothing...To Nothing, I've been spinning this disc almost non-stop!
The album collects the seven tracks from the band's Saint Office LP, the Intolerance Deathsquad cassette, and the two tracks from the split with The Austrasian Goat, and all of this shit is blackthrash GOLD. I didn't even realize that Afflictis Lentae was a one-man band (the brainchild of a guy who goes by "Nuclear Thrash Gaichal") until I started looking into the band, the music is so tight and CRUSHING that it sounds like the product of a full band. But Gaichal handles all of the guitars, vocals and programming, crafting one awesome thrash riff after another, his voice soaring from an insane blackened shriek to deep, devilish growls to weird wailing in the blink of an eye, tons of Slayerized soloing and whammy-bar divebombs splattered all over, the sound a cross between the classic Teutonic thrash of Sodom and Kreator and the hyperblast black metal of Marduk, but with Tangerine Dream-y ambience drifting out of the cracks between songs, and strange samples, drunken bar-hall sing-alongs and murky drones lurking at the edges of the bestial blackthrash assaults. And the drum machine programming is out of fucking control. Usually, I tend to think that drum machines are a liability in speed/thrash bands, but Gaichal manages to eke a surprisingly natural drum sound, thick and dense and resonant...that is, of course, until he sets the drum machines for CHAIN GUN BLAST, where the drums suddenly sound like the mechanized blasting of machine guns going off. AWESOME. It's like hearing Sodom outfitted with industrial blasts and creepy electronic ambience. This is some of the rippingest French blackthrash ever, with killer song titles like "Exterminate and Dominate ", "Sadistic Messiah ", "The Eliminator ", and "Panzer Delirium ", and there's even a bestial blackened cover of Judas Priest's "Nightcrawler"! Recommended!
Vinyl only import of the debut album from this blackened British grind/sludge/crust band, who are pretty much unknown over here on these shores despite being active in the UK underground for several years now. You should check these guys out pronto, though, if yer into sickeningly heavy sludge and dire apocalyptic warnings, 'cuz these cretins have knocked out five tracks of insanely heavy anarcho-violence on this five song record that blends together urgent and grim anarcho punk with hyperblasting black metal and awesomely epic crusty doom. They remind me of the old UK band Hard To Swallow, who were also an uncatagorizeable mix of grind and sludge and other elements a little harder to pin down, but After The Last Sky bring a big helping of BLACK METAL to the proceedings, as they shift between gloomy, bass-heavy parts that are reminiscent of Amebix to frantic, dissonant raw black metal riffing and ultrafast blastbeats a la Marduk with insane sounding screeched vocals that sound like someone screaming, weeping and blowing their fucking appendix out simultaneously, switching so abruptuly that it blows yer hair back, and just when the grindy black metal seems on the verge of going so fast and becoming so freaked out that someones head is going to explode, the band falls back into a crushing, majestic doom riff that just flattens you. The song "Fire!Salvation!" is one of the highlight of the album with it's frenzied grinding buzz and heartwrenching melodic lead that's played over the slow part, but all of these songs are crushing and raw and vicious, all the way up until the track "I Weep For The First Bluebell Of Spring" where the buzzing, psychotic black metal gives way to a somber acoustic guitar part that eventually builds into a crushing, droning Mogwai-esque crescendo. From there, the last track, "Land Of Gluttony And Rape" breaks out some awesome epic guitar leads over one of the album's most chaotic tracks, blasting black metal that winds knots around itself with tangles of choppy, intricate riffing, finally downshifting into bloozy, swampy sludge before dissipating into a cloud of ambient noise that lingers for several minutes before fading into blackness.
Was never much of a fan of the whole "slam" sound that emerged in death metal towards the latter half of the 90s, save for a couple of bands whose inherent weirdness or insanity distinguished them from the hordes of sub-Suffocation clones that sprouted up across the globe. While I'm all for mindless brutality in metal, most of the stuff in this vein leaves me cold, and comes across as far too formulaic for my tastes. Go back to the early days before "slam" became a thing, though, and you'll dig up some genuinely odd death metal that was particularly extreme for the time. Declared by some as one of the progenitors of this style, Long Island, NY band Afterbirth puked up a small but influential body of work in the early 90s that would later be cited as one of the first bands to produce this combination of monstrous misshapen grooves, fucked-up ultra-guttural vocals and complex arrangements. Some C-Blast followers might recognize member Cody Drasser, who in recent years has produced dark droneological noisescapes with his Caulbearer project, but here he helped to unleash a putrid assault of demented discordant riffery and crushing slower tempos fronted by the utterly unintelligible guttural fumes of singer Matt Duncan. With just a demo, Afterbirth introduced a deranged variant of New York death metal with an extreme vocal style that was really only comparable to what Demilich were doing; in his liner notes to this collection, Internal Bleeding's Frank Rini describes these vocals as "the most guttural and brutal that I had ever heard", and Duncan's delivery definitely sounds less like it came from a human throat and more from a rabid animal trapped in a culvert. It sticks out as one of the more insane death metal vocal performances from that period.
During their brief run in the early 90s, Afterbirth only released that one demo and a rehearsal tape, all of which was collected and re-mastered for Foeticidal Embryo Harvestation, rounded out by a couple of live tracks. The main attraction is the Psychopathic Embrytomy demo from 1994, which blows four chunks of emetic, fucked-up death metal with songs like "Obliteration Of Human Tissue" and "Obstetric Bastardization". The sound quality is actually pretty good for a demo tape from this time period, and it's certainly heavy as hell, the songs erupting into tangles of colossal chromatic riffing and dissonant shred, smeared with those insanely guttural belched vocal noises. The songs shift spastically between bursts of violent blastbeat tempos and barbaric thrash and those slower, sludgy grooves and doom-laden passages that would prove to be a seminal influence on the nascent "slam" sound, with catchy riffs and an oddly flanged bass sound and unusual playing style (slap bass techniques, odd melodies) that's frequently pushed to the front of the mix.
The bands 1993 Rehearsal Demo is also pretty interesting, featuring earlier versions of the demo tracks (as well as an exclusive track "Rebirth") laced with snippets of horror film soundtrack music; the sound quality on this recording is naturally pretty raw, but Afterbirth sounded even more bizarre and brutal here, a ramshackle blast of murky, glottal horror that's a bit more frenzied and chaotic compared to the demo. The rest of the disc is rounded out by some soundboard recordings taken from shows in New York and Rhode Island, and feature later material that didn't appear on the demos, tracks like "Saving The Dead", "Crematorial Gates" and "Fleshwound" that pointed towards a more abrasively atonal direction that the band seemed to be taking prior to breaking up, and which potentially hint at a somewhat Gorgutsian brand of sickening discordant violence.
Comes in digipack packaging.
Revelation were always one of the more enigmatic bands to arise from the Maryland doom metal scene of the late 80's/early 90's, with a style that was more informed by progressive rock than the grittier Sabbathisms of their peers in Wretched, Unorthodox, and Internal Void. When I was assembling the Doom Capital compilation a few years ago, Revelation were one of the few bands that I had heard was still around and recording, but for one reason or another I had been unable to get ahold of anyone (this was before the Myspace explosion, obviously). Curious as to what the members of Revelation were up to, I didn't hear anything about them until recently, when I found out about a new band called Against Nature from Baltimore that was bascially comprised of the Revelation lineup from their debut album Salvation's Answer that came out on Rise Above back in 1991. Taking their name from a Revelation song, Against Nature combined the crushing bluesy riffing of Black Sabbath and Trouble with prog rock moves reminiscent of Rush and even Voivod at times, a distinctive brand of doom metal different from anyone else from the Doom Capital. This German import 7" is the first thing I've heard from 'em, but the two songs on here are killer, "Pluperfect", a new jam exclusive to this EP, and "Confusion", a new reworking of an old Revelation song from one of their early demos that never appeared on any of Revelation's albums proper. Limited edition of 500.
Here's some mood music from the blood-stained heathens over at Sygil. I've been lovin' their other recent releases, with that new disc from Charnel House front and center in my mind, one of the most skull-fracturing albums of fucked black noise metal I've heard all decade. Hot on the heels of that album comes Sygil's newest offering, a full-length cassette from a band called Agakus which is actually another loner outfit, one guy out there somewhere in the Midwest crafting some terrific black ambience that manages to inject the bleakest abyssal driftscapes possible with shards of haunting musicality.
There's a massive wave of almost kosmiche immenseness that begins the tape, the sound of The Keep-era Tangerine Dream by way of Charlamagne Palestine, the keys melting into rivulets of black quivering drone, slowly growing from unease to dread, real dread. And from there to vast fields of near nothing, minimal organ-like notes rumbling and disappearing into the shadows, shifting almost glacially into tense drones suspended over the massive reverberations of some massive inhuman technology activated somewhere miles below the earth's surface, an almost subliminal ambient massiveness. It goes on to stretches of ghostly guitar chords that hang and twist above more minimalist hum-scapes, the guitar passages resembling a deconstructed black metal chord progression, eerie dissonant notes cascading slowly over the infinite thrum.
This side really reminds me of Emit, without sounding like knockoff. The feel is similar: spare, weird, ethereal, like listening to a black metal guitarist playing somewhere off in the depths of catacombs beneath a massive cathedral, or hearing the hyper-amplified collapse of the dying earth.
The other side is considerably more extreme though. Blasts of monstrous roaring sound and distorted power are spaced out between long stretches of silence, causing the eruptions of black noise to jar the listener, and then a seriously foul army of tuneless guitars come howling into the depths, warped and melted tremolo riffs swarming around a vast hall, joined by strange deep drums being pounded slowly over waves of metallic noise. And when the slow motion rumble and sheets of diffused noise finally transform into the hellish black noise and ghastly screams that take over at the end, it's crushing; like some slow motion deathdoom march further dragged out and dragged apart into a pulverizing glacial dirge, almost like Human Quena Orchestra or Reclusa but even more washed out and stretched apart and crushing...
Can't recommend this one enough to blackened drone junkies and death ambient addicts. Massively heavy but almost entirely 'ambient', this falls somewhere in between the extreme slow-mo earthcrush of Human Quena Orchestra and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, the deep-earth drones of Lustmord and the demonic nocturnal weirdness of Emit and Vomit Orchestra. Comes in an odd Chinatown-style paper sleeve with printed stickers on it, and includes a Agakus sticker and a small insert. Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies.
This brilliant 2006 album from Agalloch marked a quantum leap for the band, who had already created a buzz for themselves with their previous release, The Mantle. Their earlier releases blended together black metal, Godspeed-style post rock, fragile folk music, and majestic slow motion heaviness into a highly evocative style that didn't sound like anything else happening at the time, but with Ashes Against The Grain, the Portland, OR quartet move into another realm that has just as much in common with old school shoegazer atmospheres as it does with the arty black metal that Agalloch had pioneered. The album opens with "Limbs", and the first minutes of this monolith deliver a melodic sludge wave that is as dreamily gorgeous as anything that Justin Broadrock has done with Jesu. It eventually gives way to a dark piano interlude though, and then plunges into slow, super dramatic black metal with a somber central melody and deep, raspy vocals, and the ending of the song turns into a moody metalgaze coda, again reminding me of Jesu, slow and somber and super melodic but heard through a darker, black metal informed lens. The next song "Falling Snow" picks up in speed and continues the shoegazey black metal, awesome rock drumming moving the amazing melodic hooks and crushing riffs forward, effects-soaked guitars laying down emotional, almost poppy melodies, and about halfway through the clean vocals kick in for the first time and it takes my fucking breath away, sounding like later-era Katatonia but with a more overt indie rock edge. Jesus, "Falling Snow" is easily one of the catchiest metal songs ever, if it weren't for those blackened hissing vocals you could probably pass this off as some long-lost, unusually heavy '90's shoegazer band.
"This White Mountain On Which You Will Die" is a brief bit of beautiful ambience, made up of ominous industrial loops and gauzy distortion, kinda like a flash of Eluvium or Tim Hecker style prettiness, and it moves right into the folky "Fire Above, Ice Below", a slow moving 10+ minute epic that shifts from dark strum to epic builds a la Mono accompanied by lovely vocal harmonies. The last quarter of the album is taken up by a three part suite titled "Our Fortress Is Burning", which begins with a proggy piano-driven instrumental, builds into a heavy hypnotic indie dirge with some searing psychedelic soloing, and then liquifies into a storm of droning feedback, ambient metal powerchords, heavy amplifier rumble, and swirling melody that closes the album. A masterwork of progressive, atmospheric metal - all throughout these songs I'm reminded of everything from Opeth to Jesu to Catherine Wheel to Katatonia to Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor, but Agalloch doesn't particularly sound like any one of these bands. Comes in a full color slipcase.
This brilliant 2006 album from Agalloch marked a quantum leap for the band, who had already created a buzz for themselves with their previous release, The Mantle. Their earlier releases blended together black metal, Godspeed-style post rock, fragile folk music, and majestic slow motion heaviness into a highly evocative style that didn't sound like anything else happening at the time, but with Ashes Against The Grain, the Portland, OR quartet move into another realm that has just as much in common with old school shoegazer atmospheres as it does with the arty black metal that Agalloch had pioneered. The album opens with "Limbs", and the first minutes of this monolith deliver a melodic sludge wave that is as dreamily gorgeous as anything that Justin Broadrock has done with Jesu. It eventually gives way to a dark piano interlude though, and then plunges into slow, super dramatic black metal with a somber central melody and deep, raspy vocals, and the ending of the song turns into a moody metalgaze coda, again reminding me of Jesu, slow and somber and super melodic but heard through a darker, black metal informed lens. The next song "Falling Snow" picks up in speed and continues the shoegazey black metal, awesome rock drumming moving the amazing melodic hooks and crushing riffs forward, effects-soaked guitars laying down emotional, almost poppy melodies, and about halfway through the clean vocals kick in for the first time and it takes my fucking breath away, sounding like later-era Katatonia but with a more overt indie rock edge. Jesus, "Falling Snow" is easily one of the catchiest metal songs ever, if it weren't for those blackened hissing vocals you could probably pass this off as some long-lost, unusually heavy '90's shoegazer band.
"This White Mountain On Which You Will Die" is a brief bit of beautiful ambience, made up of ominous industrial loops and gauzy distortion, kinda like a flash of Eluvium or Tim Hecker style prettiness, and it moves right into the folky "Fire Above, Ice Below", a slow moving 10+ minute epic that shifts from dark strum to epic builds a la Mono accompanied by lovely vocal harmonies. The last quarter of the album is taken up by a three part suite titled "Our Fortress Is Burning", which begins with a proggy piano-driven instrumental, builds into a heavy hypnotic indie dirge with some searing psychedelic soloing, and then liquifies into a storm of droning feedback, ambient metal powerchords, heavy amplifier rumble, and swirling melody that closes the album. A masterwork of progressive, atmospheric metal - all throughout these songs I'm reminded of everything from Opeth to Jesu to Catherine Wheel to Katatonia to Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor, but Agalloch doesn't particularly sound like any one of these bands.
This brilliant 2006 album from Agalloch marked a quantum leap for the band, who had already created a buzz for themselves with their previous release, The Mantle. Their earlier releases blended together black metal, Godspeed-style post rock, fragile folk music, and majestic slow motion heaviness into a highly evocative style that didn't sound like anything else happening at the time, but with Ashes Against The Grain, the Portland, OR quartet move into another realm that has just as much in common with old school shoegazer atmospheres as it does with the arty black metal that Agalloch had pioneered. The album opens with "Limbs", and the first minutes of this monolith deliver a melodic sludge wave that is as dreamily gorgeous as anything that Justin Broadrock has done with Jesu. It eventually gives way to a dark piano interlude though, and then plunges into slow, super dramatic black metal with a somber central melody and deep, raspy vocals, and the ending of the song turns into a moody metalgaze coda, again reminding me of Jesu, slow and somber and super melodic but heard through a darker, black metal informed lens. The next song "Falling Snow" picks up in speed and continues the shoegazey black metal, awesome rock drumming moving the amazing melodic hooks and crushing riffs forward, effects-soaked guitars laying down emotional, almost poppy melodies, and about halfway through the clean vocals kick in for the first time and it takes my fucking breath away, sounding like later-era Katatonia but with a more overt indie rock edge. Jesus, "Falling Snow" is easily one of the catchiest metal songs ever, if it weren't for those blackened hissing vocals you could probably pass this off as some long-lost, unusually heavy '90's shoegazer band.
"This White Mountain On Which You Will Die" is a brief bit of beautiful ambience, made up of ominous industrial loops and gauzy distortion, kinda like a flash of Eluvium or Tim Hecker style prettiness, and it moves right into the folky "Fire Above, Ice Below", a slow moving 10+ minute epic that shifts from dark strum to epic builds a la Mono accompanied by lovely vocal harmonies. The last quarter of the album is taken up by a three part suite titled "Our Fortress Is Burning", which begins with a proggy piano-driven instrumental, builds into a heavy hypnotic indie dirge with some searing psychedelic soloing, and then liquifies into a storm of droning feedback, ambient metal powerchords, heavy amplifier rumble, and swirling melody that closes the album. A masterwork of progressive, atmospheric metal - all throughout these songs I'm reminded of everything from Opeth to Jesu to Catherine Wheel to Katatonia to Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor, but Agalloch doesn't particularly sound like any one of these bands.
It's been years since the last time that I picked up a 7" with Agathocles on it, even though I've always been a fan of their faithful, tried-and-true old-school grind. The Belgian grinders are one of the few constants in underground grindcore, and have a discography that has by now reached absurd lengths with a prolific output that rivals Merzbow and Unholy Grave. Honestly, after I picked up the discography CDs of Agathocles 90's singles that Selfmadegod put out, I just couldn't bring myself to try to keep up with their subsequent hundreds of EPs. It's too daunting a task.
I jumped on this newish split EP with Agathocles when Logan Butler, one of the members of the other band on the split and a longtime Crucial Blast customer, got in touch to tell me about his project. His band goes by J. Briglia/L. Butler/D. Schoonmaker/J. Williams, like they are a jazz quartet or something, but their music is anything but. On the J. Briglia, L. Butler, D.Schoonmaker & J.Williams side of this 7", the "band with no name" (as they also sometimes call themselves) blast you in the face with three tracks of ultra-raw blackened thrash that sounds like old school West Coast extreme hardcore like Crossed Out or Infest mixed with truly scummy primitive black metal, each song a tangled chaotic blast of trebly buzzsaw riffs and sloppy blastbeats and pounding sludgy dirge and shrieking vocals, and then drown the whole thing in caustic, speaker-shredding noise a la Merzbow. Nice! The sound is extremely raw and blown, giving distorto-blackpunk bands like Akitsa and Malveillance a run for their money in the noise department, but the waves of electronic screech and molten burblings that wash over the blackened power-violence and ooze up between the cracks in the songs gives this a weird, noxious aura of it's own. This is what I'd imagine Gasp might have turned into if those guys had been ardent fans of the seriously low-fi underground black metal.
After that mayhem , the Agathocles songs almost sound comforting. If you've heard them before, you know what to expect with their six songs: blasting, detuned grindcore with dual vocalists, one belching out pissed-off socially conscious lyrics in a deep, gutteral voice, the other shrieking in that high-pitched, electroshock scream, tons of crusty Carcass-esque riffs, midpaced punky breakdowns, ferocious blastbeats, the works. Agathocles haven't evolved one step beyond the raw, anti-corporate grindcore that they started out with over twenty years ago, but dammit, they sound just as brutal and ferocious as ever. Limited to 400 copies.
���� Gear up for another speaker-scrambling noisecore attack! And when it comes to noisecore, I still can't get enough CSMD in my diet. That Dutch band is one of the best blurr outfits out there right now, fusing ferociously fucked-up electronic effects and spacey weirdness to their brutal, bass-heavy blast-chaos, with a bizarre sense of humor that sees them covering riffs from the Star Wars theme, worshipping tentacular alien life forms, and channeling 70's era American sci-fi television into their maniacal mess.
���� As far as their side to this recent split with Belgian grindpunks Agathocles goes, just imagine Hawkwind and Anal Cunt being mashed together in a sausage grinder and you'll have a general idea of what's up. On their half of this 7", you get a smattering of their brain-damaged surf-rock mixed in with the crazed echo-plex damaged chaos, but this stuff also sounds heavier than usual, the whirlwind blastnoise and churning anti-riffage often lurching abruptly into pulverizing slo-mo dirges and weird, insanely blown-out space rock freak-outs. But as always, the theremin playing is out of control, and the drug use is rampant. Quite possibly the living heirs to the throne of psychedelic garageblast left empty by the mighty C.S.S.O..
���� It's cool to see that Agathocles are still going, and are still as noisy as ever. This new stuff is especially raw though, more hardcore than grind, but when that bone-rattling bass guitar kicks in, I know exactly who it is I'm listening to. The guitar playing for these four songs is particularly wild, with lots of sloppy, atonal solos screaming over their primitive three-chord riffs, the drums a rapid clatter. Definitely feels a bit different from their older stuff, rougher and noisier and more chaotic, as if these guys had been overdosing on old Confuse vinyl during the songwriting process. Total noisepunk.
���� Now out of print, we nabbed a couple of copies of this blazing 7" featuring the murderous ultragrind of Agents Of Abhorrence and Extortion's brute-force blastcore, both bands hailing from Down Under.
���� First up, Australian blast-mongers Extortion hit in-the-red levels of hardcore ultraviolence with their seven songs, spitting hyperfast, hyper-venomous attacks that crank the seething rage of classic Infest and Crossed Out up about ten notches. Almost impossibly fast at times, these guys channel that crucial Cali powerviolence sound into a sharply focused assault that is unrelenting in it's anger and ferocity.
���� Agents of Abhorrence counter with their own supersonic savagery, continuing to lacerate the listener with a lethal concoction of precision drumming, non-Euclidean riffs, hideous strep throat screams and bone-crushing force across their four tracks. Sharp and technical, and stripped of any extraneous fat, this is high-grade contempo grindcore, akin in some ways to Discordance Axis's complexity and precision, but with their own uniquely frantic, nerve-shredding intensity powering this stuff. Pure terror.
Finally back in stock!
There was lots of strange musics that appeared on the periphery of black metal in the early 1990's, projects that were intrinsically linked to the black metal scene in one way or another but whose music didn't sound anything like actual black metal, at least not the kind of black metal that was becoming popular in the extreme metal underground. One of the best and most obvious examples of this kind of necro-mutation continues to be Abruptum, whose mix of deformed improvised riffing and crawling dungeon ambience went way over the heads of many fans of traditional Scandinavian black metal. Even more obscure was the band Aghast, a Norwegian duo of two women who only played together for a brief period of time and released just one album during their short existence, a limited edition release called Hexerei Im Zwielicht Der Finsternis that came out on the Swedish industrial label Cold Meat Industry in 1995, and which has been an extremely difficult album to track down ever since.
Not only did the ladies of Aghast come out of the early Norwegian lack metal scene, they were actually married to some of the most influential members of the scene at that time, Andrea Haugen (who would later go on to form the band Hagalaz Runedance) to Samoth from Emperor, and Tanja Stene to Fenriz from Darkthrone; you might also recognize Tanja Stene as the artist behind some of the iconic album artwork for Darkthrone, Burzum and Ulver from the early 90's, and it's safe to say that she's probably much more recognized for her contributions to early black metal art than her forays into ghostly black ambience. But Aghast's music is truly amazing stuff, and it was a crime that their album slipped into total obscurity for so long. At long last, Hexerei has finally been reissued, via Eternal Pride, and it's an amazing piece of nocturnal dread that fans of the more ambient ends of the avant-garde black metal spectrum, black ambience, and experimental horror film music will all fall in love with. The sound of Aghast is a mix of spectral, minimal synths, ghostly female vocals, and extreme layers of echo and other fx, but the way that Aghast shapes this sound into their mesmeric stygian drift is pretty unique. Heavy sheets of minimal low-end and swells of pulsating rumble drift slowly through expanses of vast emptiness, and above this dark ambience float dreamy female vocals, which vary from lusty narcotized moans to hair-raising witch-shrieks, echo-drenched chanting and demonic howls, like hearing Diamanda Galas leading a series of occult rituals in a huge cavern deep beneath the earth.
The music is sparse but chilling, with stretches of near silence opening up between the sounds of chimes and swells of orchestral strings, minimal violins and thick foglike ambience, everything obfuscated by a murky quality that gives the impression that this music has been moldering and decaying for years. Most of the music is without percussion, save for one track: "Totentanz", the most terrifying track on the album. Here, Aghast lay down a pounding tattoo of tympani drums that rumble beneath the sounds of wailing, laughing witches and processed strings, and it sounds a lot like the more percussive pieces from Goblin's fearsome soundtrack for Susperia, and I'd recommend Hexerei alone just for this awesome piece of psychedelic witch-ambience. But the whole album is fantastic, definitely very black and evil sounding and occulted, but unlike any other black ambient project that I can think of - really, the closest comparison that pops into my head when listening to Aghast is the creepy Japanese ghost-ambience of Onna-Kodomo, but the connection is more in spirit than actual sound. An amazing album of blackened dread and witchy ambience that is obviously highly recommended! Comes in a digipack featuring metallic silver print.
The all-girl Norwegian duo Aghast only put out one album, 1995's Hexerei Im Zwielicht Der Finsternis, but it remains one of my favorite records of spectral witch-ambience. a collection of phantasmagoric funeral hymns, nocturnal drift, and graveyard atmospherics that still sounds remarkably unique. After the release of their one and only album for Cold Meat, the ladies of Aghast (who were also very closely aligned with the nascent Norwegian black metal scene) would pursue other projects both musical and otherwise, with Tania Stene going on to create some iconic album artwork for a number of classic black metal albums; Andr�a Nebel followed up her wraith-like black ambient band with a number of albums of dark Nordic-flavored classical and folk music under the names Hagalaz' Runedance and Nebelhex�, neither of which I've really delved into too deeply, as they were all pretty far removed from the ghastly dream-drift of Aghast. Fast forward to the end of 2012, and Scott Derrickson's demonic shocker Sinister comes out in theatres and features a bunch of bands that get a lot of play here at C-Blast, the ultra-creepy soundtrack utilizing music from black ambient master Accurst, Ulver, Sunn O))), and most surprisingly to me, tracks from both Hexerai as well as all new music from by Andr�a Nebel under the name Aghast Manor.
Of course, I was hoping for some sort of follow-up to Hexerei, but Gaslights turns out to be something different; that delirious graveyard chill and ghostly crypt-ambience of her work in Aghast is definitely lurking in these songs, but Nebel takes it into a strange new direction as she crafts a vision of blackened goth-industrial that brings together dire militant industrial music, utterly creepy neo-classical/cabaret vibes, and a strange, narcotized sound that reminds me of a darker, more "witchy" version of Dead Can Dance. Songs like " Decademons" and "The Nun Of St. Claire Abbey" pummel the listener with stentorian rhythms and martial snare drums, eerie cries and funereal organs droning in the backgrounds, her gorgeous powerful voice shifting between an almost liturgical chanting and frenzied howls, while Nebel's whispered singing and witchy laughter on "Dance The Hanged Man's Jig" drift on soft strings and eerie piano music like some mysterious black-forest lullaby. The other songs are equally eerie, from the blackened synthesizers on "Cross The Bridge To Manmade Insanity" that guide this short song through a grim grave-littered wasteland, to the cinematic atmosphere of "La Petite Mort" where I can hear vague traces of Goblin's decadent prog as well as the orchestral apocalyptic power of latter day Swans.
As lush and dramatic as the music on Gaslights is, I can still hear that connection to the early 90s "dungeon ambient" scene in the droning strings, ominous synthesizers and vaporous sighs that drift like gossamer cobwebs through the twilight gloom of the Manor. The electronic elements shift into really dark territory as you approach the end of the album, the dread setting in on the pulsating synth-dirge "Fear" where cracked Wax Trax-like rhythms are combined with buzzing blackened guitars, and the dread-filled cavernous murk of "Waking Chtluhu". The creep factor hits it's peak with the final song "Suck My Drain", though, a pitch-black tumble through an abyss laced with demonic shrieks, waves of suffocating reverb and ghastly reverberations, deathly sighs and deformed screams of utter soul-devouring anguish that are created by both Nebel and Travis Ryan of Cattle Decapitation who makes a guest appearance here, an unexpected collaboration that turns in the single most evil moment on the disc. Fuckin' fantastic...
Naturally, any fans of Aghast will want to hear this return to the shadows, but Aghast Manor's strange blackened darkwave and Victorian death-visions are definitely it's own. Recommended.
Yet another label that we've just started to carry, Epidemie is kicking my ass with their diverse and mindblowing catalog of avant-heaviness that often
defies description. While most of the bands that Epidemie releases are undeniably metal, this disc is one of the exceptions, although it's also one of the
heaviest albums that we've picked up from the label.
Crushing industrial doomscapes and haunting orchestral ambience make up this album from the Czech duo Aghiatrias, which was formed by composer Vladim�r
Hirsch and sound-engineer Tom Saivon in 1999 as an offshoot of their symphonic industrial band Skrol. Ethos is the fourth album from Aghiatrias, and
it is about as heavy as this kind of classical-music informed industrial gets, layering dark ambient electronics, samples and electronic noise over slow,
grinding machine rhythms and blasts of epic orchestral instruments. Each of these tracks are massive, flowing seamlessly into each other as one epic extended
soundtrack, as booming timpani drums thunder behind loops of apocalyptic symphonies of what might be French horns, strings, piano, and crushing metallic
drones, blasts of harsh, abrasive noise and ghostly operatic vocals rise up from deep black ambient electronics, and when the rhythmic elements appear,
Aghiatrias suddenly become monstrously heavy as drums and machine pistons lock in together into a flattening industrialized doomdirge, or a massive
wall of tribal percussion. Total end-of-the-world filmscore stuff...imagine Christopher Young's score for Hellraiser II performed by members of
Lustmord, Test Dept., Wolf Eyes, and Godflesh. Released in a limited edition of 500 copies in one of the thickest, heaviest digipacks I've ever seen.
This entry in the Recycled Music Series of tapes from RRR is from the Australian free-noise project Agit8. This is the first recording that I've picked up from this band, after seeing them described as 'ultra brutal Australianoise' that seem to frequently employ the use of hand made noise instruments. The material on this tape is certainly brutal at times, although it's far from the pure harsh noise assault that I had been expecting at first. Instead, the music is a rough montage of sounds, almost like a mixtape of weird anti-rock moves that are pasted together haphazardly. Each side of the tape is a collage of brutally distorted noise loops, distressed cassette noise, field recordings of the chatter of concert audiences, room ambience, and other, less recognizeable sounds, low-fi recordings of stumbling, disintegrating rock that almost sounds like a noisier, even more low-fi version of the Dead C, scalding blasts of feedback, and a section where it sounds like Agit8 took a dozen different bootleg tapes of old thrash metal shows and layered them on top of each other to create a dense blast of harsh noise with metallic riffs and rattling bass guitars jutting through the wall of crunch and hiss. This stuff stands out from the rest of the RRR catalog with its engrossing (if chaotic) mix of sinister ambient field recordings, violent Prurient/Masonna style feedback scultpure, low fi Babel drones of mumbling masses, and fucked up abstract free-metal, and the second side alone qualifies this as one of the heavier Recycled Music tapes next to that crusher that Josh Lay just released in the series (which is also listed in this week's update).
The debut album from this obscure Russian experimental doom band is a strange, disconnected dreamworld, where crushing death doom dissipates suddenly into haunting, minimalist guitar instrumentals and vast expanses of black electronic ambience. Like much of the stuff that I've been picking up lately from the Wroth Emitter, Stygian Crypt and Solitude labels, the sound here is unmistakeably rooted in super slow, bleak doom metal, but it's like there's something getting lost in the translation that turns Aglaomorpha's version of doom into something weirder. The atmosphere in Perception is grim and sorrowful, pure melancholy that seeps from the odd existential lyrics into the crushing riffs and plodding tempo of these twelve jams, and it sounds like the epic funeral trudge of bands like My Dying Bride, Shape OF Despair, and prog doomsters Mar De Grises had a hand in influencing Aglaomorpha's sound. But the song structures are out of whack, massive crushing doom dirges suddenly just disappear, leaving only pitch black ambience and rumbling cavernous drones. Orchestral keyboards drift over murky recordings of urban life, and a series of beautiful piano pieces appear with tracks like "Revelation (epilogue)". Blasts of blazing black metal guitars scream out of the void only to disappear in a blink, replaced by a fragile guitar melody. Droning guitars swarm and wobble, bent into vaguely distorted tones and fucked up angular riffs that recall the mutant textures of Blut Aus Nord's recent albums. The vocals seem to be delivered by two different singers, though since the album is almost totally devoid of band information I'm only guessing; harsh hellish screams constantly trade off against deep monstrous gutteral roars. Aglaomorpha's surreal blackened doom is definitely something that fans of experimental, adventurous doom and black metal will want to check out. The mix of crushing, vaguely industrial sounding death-doom, dark chamber rock, even darker droning ambience, and fractured black metal is deeply warped, somewhere in between Shape Of Despair, Amber Asylum, Blut Aus Nord, and Aural Hypnox style driftscapes.
Here is a phenomenal new album of dark, gorgeous ambience and portentous heaviness from the Japanese solo project Agnus Dei, the pseudonym of one Naomi Hoca who creates all of the vocals and sounds on this album. Described by the label as �funeral dark drone�, Paternoster is the first official album from Agnus Dei, and just came out on the excellent Japanese psych label Musik Atlach (run by Sachiko from Overhang Party/Kousokuya). Hoca's music is heavy on the blackened ambience and psychedelic drone, but more than anything this is obsessed with classical sacred music, using long stretches of liturgical organ, medieval religious music and cut-up sections of baroque religious vocal hymn that are interwoven with the more crushing and formless sounds of overdriven guitar distortion and furious industrial noise to create a seriously nightmarish dronescape. While listening to this disc, I'm reminded of everything from Arvo Part to Lustmord to Corrupted at their most ambient, and even the more atmospheric and abstract moments of Bloody Panda, although you can't really call Agnus Dei "doom", even if much of this album sounds doom-ridden as hell.
The first track "Paternoster" is a seventeen minute epic of atmospheric musique concrete and liturgical doom that begins with grinding low-end noise and waves of massive Sunn-like low-end drone heaviness, but as the track slowly evolves, the sound is joined by samples of propaganda speeches, industrial noise, pilfered loops of traditional Latin Mass, the haunting sound of female choral voices, random voices speaking in various languages, Gregorian chants, looped applause, blasts of brutally loud jet-engine noise, long stretches of mournful church organs, and gongs all puzzled together into a surreal landscape that resembled something from Nurse With Wound polluted by jets of blackened industrial doom guitar and orchestral strings.
The other track, "Holocaust Missa", gets even darker and creepier with samples of WWII-era speeches enshrouded within the buzzing drone of minimalist church organs and waves of pure black drone and CRUSHING ambient doom-guitar, at times sounding a lot like Corrupted or Black Boned Angel, but eventually the grinding guitar drone fades away as ghostly female choral voices appear, dark and delicate as they drift across a blackened field of drone and buzz and distant battlefield sounds, flecked with samples of gorgeous classical piano and choral voices and the fearsome insanity of large-scale wartime rallies.
Highly recommended, and packaged in a simple glossy cardstock wallet sleeve with creepy religious-themed imagery.
These weren't cheap, but we scored some copies of this super-limited (less than 500 pressed, apparently) German import LP release of the now classic
Agoraphobic Nosebleed mini-album Honky Reduction that came out at the end of last year. Formed by guitarist/bassist/drum machine programmer Scott
Hull (who you probably also know from Pig Destroyer, and maybe even his harsh noise project Japanese Torture Comedy Hour) and vokillist/noisician Jay
Randall, Agoraphobic Nosebleed blasted into the grey matter of grind nuts everywhere when the nineteen-minute, twenty-six song CD was released in 1998. This
stuff was over the top when it came out- an onslaught of transgressive, misanthropic hallucinations mixed together with Jay's harsh vocals, insanely fast
drum machine blastbeats that would contort and warp into rhythmic patterns that no human drummer could possibly replicate, blasts of scathing
electronic noise, and Scott's crushing, complex grind riffage, all wrapped up in short, compressed songs that usually barely break the minute mark. Jay's
lyrics and song titles lean towards the confrontational and disturbing, with songs like "The Withering Of Skin", "LIves Ruined Through Sex", "Clawhammer And
A Ether Rag", and "Her Despair Reeks Of Alchohol" skulking the darkest recesses of the human condition, but conveyed through weird lyrics that address drug
conspiracies, consumerism, homophobia, and terrorism in surrealistic eruptions of profanity. On one hand, Honky Reduction is fucking hilarious, in a
crackpot, drug-addled way. Just look at the album cover (a 60's era blonde serving up sides of beef in some nightmarish butcher shop) and the rest of the
deranged, thoroughly un-PC imagery that is found throughout the album sleeve, or follow the lyrics, which are about as pitch-black as humor can get. The
negativity and the sheer brutality of the music is so intense, though, that there's no denying that these cats are dead fucking serious about the grind. No
joke band, here, no matter how freaked out their imagery gets. It's a disorientating grind album from one of my favorite grind bands ever, a bestial assault
all the way up to the Bastard Noise-inspired space noise jam that closes the album.
What will no doubt seal the deal for diehard Agoraphobic Nosebleed fans is the bonus 7" that R.S.R. packaged with this LP. Titled The Glue That Binds
Us, this EP comes in it's own full color jacket, and features thirteen songs of it's own, ten originals and three mind melting covers of Corrosion Of
Conformity ("Hungry Child", my favorite C.O.C. song of all time !!!) and DRI ("I'd Rather Be Sleeping" and "I Don't Need Society"). Not just that, but all of
the tracks on this EP sound like they had been recorded super hot and in the red, the already-caustic grindcore made all the more corrosive by piling on a
thick sheen of white noise and distortion. Awesome.
The masters of drum-machine fueled grindmetal return to resuscitate their famed PCP Torpedo EP, originally issued on 5" wax in 1999 and which has long been out of print. No one comes close to these guys when it comes to total crackhead drummachine grind, and that original EP displayed what is still some of Agoraphobic Nosebleed's most lethal blasts ever. Hydra Head went balls-out with this redux, beginning with the material housed on 2 discs: the first disc is the PCP Torpedo EP, consisting of 10 songs in 7 minutes, but those 7 minutes are pure compressed savagery, a souped up, highly stylized cyborg version of classic Earache grindcore that outfits Scott Hull's crushing grind riffs and Jay Randall's dissociative, misanthropic rantings with a barrage of relentlessly hyperspeed gabba/speedcore style machinegun beats, the only respite occuring when ANb bottom out into the occasional dissonant Godflesh-esque industroid dirge. These jams are punishing. Then there's the second disc, ANBRX, which is a collection of rethinks/remixes of the PCP Torpedo material from an assortment of speedcore/noise/extreme IDM artists including Vidna Obmana, Dev/Null with Xanopticon, James Plotkin, DJ Speedranch, Merzbow, Jansky Noise, Auek, Justin Broadrick, Drokz & Tails, Drokz, Hellz Army, Substance Abuse, and Submachine Drum. All of these tracks kill, with some of our faves including the gargantuan Godflesh invocation of Justin Broadrick's "Flesh Of Jesu" mix, DJ Speedranch's gibbering digital knife attack, and Hellz Army's brutal gabba translation. The packaging for this double CD set is off the hook...it comes in a deluxe gatefold digipack covered in psychedelic artwork depicting warehouses on fire, the flames streaming into the sky as multicolored pills rain down onto the streets. The inside panels are a kaleidoscopic sea of pills in all the colors of the rainbow. The PCP Tprpedo disc is a 3" fan disc with a clear outer ring and covered in tiny drawings of blue flames, the ANBRX disc ccovered in red flames. Total eye candy, and one of the best packaging designs of 2006 without a freaking doubt. An absolute must-have for Agoraphobic Nosebleed fans!
Previously available only as a bonus 7" that came with the German import vinyl for Agoraphobic Nosebleed's Honky Reduction, this mangy little EP is now available on it's own from R.S.R.; I think that the label must turned up a stray box of these 7"s, as we were only able to get about a dozen or so of these for C-Blast.
Formed by guitarist/bassist/drum machine programmer Scott Hull (who you probably also know from Pig Destroyer, and maybe even his harsh noise project Japanese Torture Comedy Hour) and vokillist/noisician Jay Randall, Agoraphobic Nosebleed take the feral violence of early grindcore and augment that shit with over-the-top modern blast-programming technology, infusing the whirlwind razor-riff attacks with supersonic blastbeats and synthesized jackhammer percussion that goes way beyond what any organic set of arms would be able to pull off.
Titled The Glue That Binds Us, this EP comes in it's own full color jacket, and features thirteen songs of it's own, ten originals and three mind melting covers of Corrosion Of Conformity ("Hungry Child", my favorite C.O.C. song of all time !!!) and DRI ("I'd Rather Be Sleeping" and "I Don't Need Society"). Not just that, but all of the tracks on this EP sound like they had been recorded super hot and in the red, the already-caustic grindcore made all the more corrosive by piling on a thick sheen of white noise and distortion. One of the songs features Aaron Ulcer on vocals, too; Aaron has one of the sickest screams I've ever heard, and his old band Ulcer was one of the best blastcore bands of the 90's, even though they were mostly overlooked by the hardcore scene when they were around, so I was fucking stoked to hear him spew his cheesegrater'd larynx all over the cover of DRI's "I Don't Need Society". Awesome!
This short little 5" platter is a mutual ode to the legendary Beantown hardcore band Gang Green, specifically their late 80's crossover era. The crazed grind duo Agoraphobic Nosebleed (here in duo mode with Scott Hull handling both guitar and drums, no drum machine this time) team up with West Coast rippers ANS to cover one Gang Green jam apiece, with ANS throwing out an additional original of their own. Pressed on "beer piss yellow" vinyl and housed in a great looking sleeve with killer booze-geyser skate-skull artwork from Tall Boy, this is a quick shot of nuclear energy for fans of old school crossover...
The guys in Agoraphobic Nosebleed pound out a cover of the classic Gang Green anthem "Alcohol" that's surprisingly straightforward, no blastbeats or crazed grind riffing, just a burly, faithful cover complete with wailing wah-wah rock solos, a straight thrash attack that time warps back to 1987.
On the flipside, ANS open with their own cover of another Gang Green beer-guzzlin' whiplash anthem, "Let's Drink Some Beer", which is likewise pretty faithful to the original, although ANS pump it up with an added shot of metallic muscle. It's a goddamn ripper. That's paired up with one of their own songs that's exclusive to this split, the heavy metallic punk-thrash of "Bl'azing Saddles", itself stuck in a late 80's time warp which appears to be what this Cali band specializes in; think DRI, Gang Green, No Mercy, Whermacht, that sort of blistering speed-core laced with ferocious midtempo pit-riots and plenty of high speed fury.
Holy shit. Could there be a more fearsome lineup? This split album came out on Relapse last year but we just recently picked up some of the limited edition vinyl, a full length split featuring all new exclusive material from the legendary drum-machine driven grinders Agoraphobic Nosebleed and neo-powerviolence thugs Apartment 213. And I guess you could call this a "concept" record, with the disturbing artwork from the acclaimed German artist Florian Betmer and the combined sociopathic rantings of both bands putting forth some really disturbing visions of familial discord. Listening to this split is like hearing an audiobook version of Goad's Answer Me!. Yikes. The Agoraphobic Nosebleed side of the split is something different: joined by Steve Makita from Apartment 213 on vocals, Scott Hull and Jay Randall scrape through three lengthy (for them) tracks that are almost devoid of the convoluted blastbeats that make up their previous releases. Instead, they channel a fucked up version of Man Is The Bastard and mutant noise rock through sludgy bass-heavy riffs that bend at unfriendly angles and slow, chaotic rythmic dirges, and with Steve Makita's terrifying roar, they manage to sound even scarier than usual. I know that there were alot of fans that were a little turned off by this slower, sludgier side of Agoraphobic, but I think this fuckin' rules. There's also a surprising turn at the end of "Ejector Seat" where the music suddenly opens up on a vast expanse of Popul Vuh like ambience - very rad.
Apartment 213 rule. They are one of only two bands to get the blessing of Eric Wood from Bastard Noise/Man As The Bastard as being legitimate "power violence" (the other being The Endless Blockade), which is a righteous endorsement, and they are the only band around that is doing the Infest sound and harnessing the same murderous power that those masters had. The Apt 213 side features seven songs, five of which originally appeared on their Vacancy 7" but were rerecorded for this split. Brutal, vicious blastcore that goes from hyperspeed grinding to slow, smoldering dirge. Intense and hateful, with songs called "Instrumental (In Child Rearing)", "Mutilation", and "Kill For Christ".
The record is pressed on thick vinyl, and the version that we have in stock is the swirled yellow/red sunburst color. Packaged in a full color jacket with a full color inner sleeve.
Back in stock...
Los Angeles grind weirdos Crom team up with Agoraphobic Nosebleed to deliver a short but brutal 7" that features five tracks of what-the-fuck powerviolence from the former and two new tracks of blazing drum-machine powered ultragrind from the latter. It's comin' to us courtesy of German scum peddlers R.S.R., who released the 7" on black vinyl in a limited run of 500 copies, and packaged it in a full color double sided sleeve which includes all of Agoraphobic Nosebleed's lyrics (thank christ) along with bizarre liner notes from Crom.
These are the first Agoraphobic Nosebleed tracks that I've heard with new vocalist Kat (from doom/sludge creeps Salome), and both "Pantheon Crack Torche" and " Home Invasion" seriously fucking shred. The first one is a blasting holocaust of angular grind/speed violence with paintscraping screamed vocals, monstrous growling, punishing sludge riffage, and ultra heavy drum programming. The second song is the longer of the two, and it's total fucking chaos, with singers Kat, Jay and Richard splattering their shrieks/screams/roars across Scott Hull's schizoid mangle of jagged thrash metal riffs, clusterbomb blastbeats revved up to an insane 500 bpm velocity, and slurred, lurching sludge, complete with crack epidemic metaphors and lyrics about having the LAPD run roughshod over your apartment and killing your entire family.
Crom spew five new tracks of hesher weirdness on their side: the Bavarian Metal tribute, Conan samples, boogie rock collage and discordant neanderthal powerviolence of "Swords And Sandals; "Talons Of Ibis" and its phased speed metal defrag that clocks in at 30 seconds; the longest track is "The Black Ring", it's sludgy feedback infested verse, whooshing Hawkwind effects and delayed snarls trailing off into infinity; "Mystics And Heretics" breaks off a ten second blurt of Infest-esque hatred; and closer "Tree Of Woe II" drifts in on a wave of fucked up effects and pounding drums, launches into what sounds like it's going to be an absolutely crushing doom metal riff, then suddenly vomits up an 80's pop sample and stops.
Back in stock, now on RED vinyl!
What a teamup! Longrunning drum-machine grinders Agoraphobic Nosebleed are back with three new jams, "Self Detonate", "Degenerate Liar", and
"Alcoholocaust", performed by the core duo of guitarist/drum programmer/speaker waster Scott Hull (also of Pig Destroyer fame) and vocalist J. Randall, and
with additional lead vocals from Benumb singer Pete on "Degenerate Liar". A scathing assault of sludgy noise-rock informed power dirge, crushing thrash metal
riffing, and 5000 mph hypergrind annihilation. Smokin'! Total Fucking Destruction are on the b-side with the freaked out psychedelic noise/funk/drug rock jam
"Last Night I Dreamt We Destroyed The World" that degenerates into Rich Hoak's manic trademark blastbeat wipeout and some damaged FX abuse, followed by a
raging speedcore cover of the Exploited's "Sid Vicious Was Innocent"!
Pressed on limited edition thick opaque red vinyl. And the package for this 7" is AWESOME - the outer cover features brightly colored illustrations of
reptilian skateboarding demons tearing up some ramp against a psychedelic backdrop of skulls, all created by famed artist Florian Bertmer, with trippy spiral
shapes printed in clear spot varnish and swirling out from the center...and the inside of the jacket features wicked photographs of a kid with his fuckin'
nose ripped off, giving a big thumbs up to the camera (hence the Frontside Nosegrind title...). Badass!
Back in stock!
What a teamup! Longrunning drum-machine grinders Agoraphobic Nosebleed are back with three new jams, "Self Detonate", "Degenerate Liar", and
"Alcoholocaust", performed by the core duo of guitarist/drum programmer/speaker waster Scott Hull (also of Pig Destroyer fame) and vocalist J. Randall, and
with additional lead vocals from Benumb singer Pete on "Degenerate Liar". A scathing assault of sludgy noise-rock informed power dirge, crushing thrash metal
riffing, and 5000 mph hypergrind annihilation. Smokin'! Total Fucking Destruction are on the b-side with the freaked out psychedelic noise/funk/drug rock jam
"Last Night I Dreamt We Destroyed The World" that degenerates into Rich Hoak's manic trademark blastbeat wipeout and some damaged FX abuse, followed by a
raging speedcore cover of the Exploited's "Sid Vicious Was Innocent"!
Pressed on limited edition thick opaque blue vinyl. And the package for this 7" is AWESOME - the outer cover features brightly colored illustrations of
reptilian skateboarding demons tearing up some ramp against a psychedelic backdrop of skulls, all created by famed artist Florian Bertmer, with trippy spiral
shapes printed in clear spot varnish and swirling out from the center...and the inside of the jacket features wicked photographs of a kid with his fuckin'
nose ripped off, giving a big thumbs up to the camera (hence the Frontside Nosegrind title...). Badass!
Long out of print, the 1994 release Delusions was Agretator's only full-length album. Released by Crypta Records, Delusions was followed by the Distorted Logic EP and one more demo before they more or less morphed into Darkane around 1998. In the years since, the band has been relegated to a footnote in Swedish death metal history, but their music is actually an interesting discovery for fanaticss of the sort of eccentric early 1990s death metal I'm generally obsessed with; while Darkane fans would probably find this primarily of interest as a precursor to that band's work, this stuff is a different sort of beast compared to Darkane's thrashing, melodic death metal. Some of those melodic stylings are hinted at throughout these nine songs, but this brand of death metal is grimier, dirtier, much more convoluted, as their songs combine hoarse, harsh vocals and winding, sinister leads with a staccato, obsidian-edged riffing style that produces some fairly complex and confusional moments. Those often sophisticated riffs frequently tangle themselves into unusual forms, sometimes slipping into a battering, mathy chug-attack, or passages of intricate, somewhat "jazzy" atmosphere. Ever-so-brief flashes of baroque harpsichord, acoustic guitar, and gleaming symphonic synthesizers appear amid the rapid-fire riff changes and intricately woven arrangements, which adds to this album’s offbeat vibe. But at the same time, Agretator crank the speed into thrash tempos, and when they aren't hammering you with those lopsided, weirdly Watchtower-ish lockstep riffs, it's a vicious speed attack.
Like their other recordings, this does suffer from somewhat thin production, but the level of energy and creativity on this album comes through in spades, giving us some killer head-turning moments like the spacey "Pointless Objection" and the off-kilter deathchug of "Human Decay". Overall, this mixture of complexity, offbeat composition, and moments of weird atmosphere connect Agretator's sound to similar territory as old-school tech / prog death legends like Atheist, Pestilence, Cynic and Death. Not as polished as those bands, obviously, but the crazed imaginative musicianship and lust for weird song structures comes on strong.
The last batch of songs on the disc come from the 1994 Kompakt Kraft compilation, which showcased a various assortment of Swedish bands from that time period. Both of these tunes are ripping, among the band's best, in fact (and featuring an improved, somewhat meatier production compared to the album material), with "Dull Reality" erupting into some bludgeoning, almost Meshuggah-esque mech-riffage that grinds you down into fractal patterns. Man, it's a blast.
As per usual, Dark Symphonies focuses on creating an exact duplicate of the original release, but augments this with a twelve-page booklet with lyrics, album notes and new liner notes from guitarist Christofer Malmstrom.
Long out of print, the 1994 release Delusions was Agretator's only full-length album. Released by Crypta Records, Delusions was followed by the Distorted Logic EP and one more demo before they more or less morphed into Darkane around 1998. In the years since, the band has been relegated to a footnote in Swedish death metal history, but their music is actually an interesting discovery for fanaticss of the sort of eccentric early 1990s death metal I'm generally obsessed with; while Darkane fans would probably find this primarily of interest as a precursor to that band's work, this stuff is a different sort of beast compared to Darkane's thrashing, melodic death metal. Some of those melodic stylings are hinted at throughout these nine songs, but this brand of death metal is grimier, dirtier, much more convoluted, as their songs combine hoarse, harsh vocals and winding, sinister leads with a staccato, obsidian-edged riffing style that produces some fairly complex and confusional moments. Those often sophisticated riffs frequently tangle themselves into unusual forms, sometimes slipping into a battering, mathy chug-attack, or passages of intricate, somewhat "jazzy" atmosphere. Ever-so-brief flashes of baroque harpsichord, acoustic guitar, and gleaming symphonic synthesizers appear amid the rapid-fire riff changes and intricately woven arrangements, which adds to this album’s offbeat vibe. But at the same time, Agretator crank the speed into thrash tempos, and when they aren't hammering you with those lopsided, weirdly Watchtower-ish lockstep riffs, it's a vicious speed attack.
Like their other recordings, this does suffer from somewhat thin production, but the level of energy and creativity on this album comes through in spades, giving us some killer head-turning moments like the spacey "Pointless Objection" and the off-kilter deathchug of "Human Decay". Overall, this mixture of complexity, offbeat composition, and moments of weird atmosphere connect Agretator's sound to similar territory as old-school tech / prog death legends like Atheist, Pestilence, Cynic and Death. Not as polished as those bands, obviously, but the crazed imaginative musicianship and lust for weird song structures comes on strong.
The last batch of songs on the disc come from the 1994 Kompakt Kraft compilation, which showcased a various assortment of Swedish bands from that time period. Both of these tunes are ripping, among the band's best, in fact (and featuring an improved, somewhat meatier production compared to the album material), with "Dull Reality" erupting into some bludgeoning, almost Meshuggah-esque mech-riffage that grinds you down into fractal patterns. Man, it's a blast.
As per usual, Dark Symphonies focuses on creating an exact duplicate of the original release, but augments this with a twelve-page booklet with lyrics, album notes and new liner notes from guitarist Christofer Malmstrom.
Bones Brigade slows down their usual mach-10 pace for the debut album from Aguirre, a French band that channels the negative gooey sludgecore vibes of Iron Monkey and Eyehategod and puts their own frantic hardcore edge on that sound. Calvaire had been released on vinyl a while back on the Blind Date label, but appears here for the first time on cd. Like both Iron Monkey and Eyehategod, there's a seething viciousness at the center of Aguirre's four lengthy bitter slow-motion diatribes that make up this album, easily traceable back to the member's collective background in the French hardcore scene; the songs on Calvaire use the slow, sludgy heaviness as a starting point for songs that often break into galloping mid-paced thrash a la High On Fire, or frenzied and chaotic passages that remind me of His Hero Is Gone and the French Canadian hardcore scene from the late 90's (Ire, Union Of Uranus, One Eyed God Prophecy, etc), which is something that I don't hear too often anymore. But mostly this is rooted in pounding, crusty, droning sludge, usually centering around a single grinding sludge riff with lots of dissonant chords, a thick dank hellish atmosphere hanging low over the songs, the introspective lyrics (sung in both French and English) leaning towards the nihilistic and delivered through a combination of deep emotive screams and higher pitched screams and anguish-wracked wailing. Heavy stuff, with half of the album going for epic song lengths of ten minutes or more, with just one song going in what could be described as a melodic direction; �[�]� is one of the slowest songs on the album, but there's a doleful melodic undercurrent that appears throughout the song that at times reminds me of Harvey Milk. That's definitely the exception though; the rest of this is malevolent and ugly, and closer to the likes of Cavity, Iron Monkey, Graves At Sea and early Overmars. A solid debut of sinister metallic sludge presented in digipack packaging and limited to 500 copies.
Even though their title stands for "Russian Association Of Independant Genres", R.A.I.G. has been mining some of the raddest, heaviest space rock action
from outside of the former Soviet Union, starting with the debut from U.S. Christmas that had just about every cosmic hesher that heard it praising 'em as
the best new psych rock outfit around, and now bringin' us to this hefty disc from an Australian power trio that I hadn't heard of before. It only took a
couple minutes of their music to glide across my ear canals before I decided that we had to get this album for the C-Blast store, and stat. I dug
around and it looks like Chixulub is Ahkmed's first album, even though the band has been around since 1998...leafing through the album booklet
(which is goddamn killer, but I'll get to that in a sec...), however, reveals that Chicxulub is actually a collection of two previously self-
released EP's, 2005's In Your Neck of the Dying Woods and 2003's Ahkmed.
At first, the songs on this disc sound like they are going to be super fuzzed out, epic instrumental rock a la Mono or Pelican or Mogwai, and I was even
reminded of their fellow Aussie sludge slingers Fire Witch: lotsa big fuzzy riffage, catchy hooks riding on big instrumental clean guitars that start off
mellow and wind up into explosive crescendos, trippy guitar fx swirling around brooding chords. But Ahkmed start to mix things up pretty quick, cranking up
the space rock FX really hard, the fuzzbomb guitars kicking out utterly wicked Sabbathian stoner riffs, and then everything suddenly surging forward
into a sick Krautrock style jam, acid guitar freaking out over propulsive amphetimine fueled drumming that cuts a swath across red desert wastelands, a burly
soulful drawl comin' out of nowhere and describing mystical vistas, then stumbling back into muted druggy psychedelia, soaring cosmic drones and lengthy
passages of spaced out ambience. The loud/soft, stomp-on-the-distortion dynamics are used to great effect on alot of these songs, but it's the massive
crushing Krautrock rhythms and super zonked, fx-splattered guitar that wanders all over the horizon of Chicxulub that makes my eyes roll back into
my head. Very crucial heavy psych - imagine Hawkwind, Finnish hypno-metallers Circle, the more recent Isis stuff, Acid Mothers Temple, Pink Floyd, Kyuss, and
Monster Magnet rolled into one big fat bong blast of psychedelic stoner post-rock. Man, the final track "Samar" just kicked in and it's horizontal motorik
drive and stomping acid metal grooves kill it.
And the package is freaking awesome. R.A.I.G. usually goes pretty creative with their stuff, but this is the coolest CD package that I've ever seen from the
label. A full color digifolder illustrated with strange images of floating rock hovering over an abstract landscape, which opens up to reveal a twelve page
booklet that is bound in to the internior of the jacket, and which features an array of surreal photographs of prehistoric looking cave warriors covered in
animal skulls, tattoos, animal hides, bones, and demonic ceremonial masks.
Highly recommended to fans of heavy psychedelia. This album rules.
Ahlzagailzehguh...quite the mouthful,huh? Sounds like the name of some ancient Elder God out of the Necronomicon, which is an apropos reference since Ahlzagailzehguh delivers some of the most evil, blackened noise thisn side of Richard Ramirez and The Rita. The NY harsh noise project has been dropping cluster bombs of charred wallnoise brutality for years, including a crushin' LP on Hospital Productions operated by Prurient's Dominick Fernow, which should give you an idea of the sort of attitude on display here. Ahlzagailzeguh's entry in RRRecords legendary Recycled Music Series is pure destructive noise, two untitled side-long tracks of brutal, fast-swirling black noise chopped up and slammed from speaker to speaker through the use of some really assaultive stereo panning.
You need to really crank this tape, too; there's so much detail in these chaotic walls, blasts of whiplash feedback and mangled guitar noise, razor-sharp electronic glitches, monstrous roaring vocals ripping through a curtain of filth, awesome demonic noises that sound like cassette player heads having strips of human skin run through them at high speed, and it all melts together into a wall of thick, rumbling, hyperviolent blackened dronenoise straight from hell. With all of the feedback and amplifier abuse going on in these lengthy pieces, it actually gets pretty close to the murderous power-skree of Matt Bower's Total, so fans of that project might want to look into this and other Ahlzagailzeguh releases, which I'll be working on trying to track down as soon as I can. As with all of the Recycled Series tapes, these cassettes are recorded onto random prerecorded cassettes from the RRR record store, and both the tape and the jacket are covered in duct tape scrawled in black magic marker.
The Vancouver-based experimental sludge duo Ahna has eluded me till now, but their latest 12" Empire turned out to be a ferocious introduction to their brand of blackened caveman crust. Just from listening to this, I would never have guessed that this band features the guy behind the excellent dark drone project Worker, who released a killer tape of minimal amp-crush on Prairie Fire a while back. You'll find no trace of anything remotely "ambient" in Ahna's primitive stomping sludge, that's for sure. The five songs featured on Empire visualize an anarchic future-is-now scenario of authoritarian rule and pandemic violence in the streets, played out across the maniacal blasts of bludgeoning, bass-heavy hardcore riffs, gobs of filthy, tar-thick sludge, and tempos that shift between creeping tree-sap heaviness and weird hypnotic blastbeat workouts. The drumming is tied in to some twisted, brain-damaged arrangements for the songs that give this a very strange vibe; by the time that I got to the song "Mental Corrosion" on the second side, it struck me that a lot of this stuff comes off as a weird cross between Man Is The Bastard trying to play super-primitive black metal, and the feedback-infested tectonic crawl of Trees, the simple, punk-like riffs and stripped down arrangements definitely revealing the band's love of Hellhammer's proto-black metal just as the band will suddenly veer into some massive rumbling doomscape of abstracted riffing and droning amp-noise, delivered in this odd, off-kilter mess of barbaric droning sludge and fractured blackened grind and jagged noise. And the vocals are fucking nuts, constantly shifting between a monstrous, gaseous bellow that sounds utterly inhuman and the high-pitched electrocuted goblin shriek of drummer/singer Anju Singh (also a skilled noise musician with a number of violin-based solo works under her belt), whose paint-peeling yowl is anything but feminine; all of this adds to the bizarre rabid feel of Ahna's music. This is some wonderfully violent shit, a mutated blast of Filth-era SWANS-esque bludgeon, off-kilter grindcore, and brain-damaged amp-vomit. Love it!
Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies.
Here's the anticipated album from Montreal hotshits AIDS WOLF, whose vaguely narcoleptic and dissonant No Wave stew slops around a half hour of ear splitting free-noise improvisation, art-damaged costume thrash, haunted drones, brittle hooks, and Chloe Lum's possessed kiddie-howls across The Lovvers near-half hour running time. It reminds us of a post-apocalyptic XBXRX meets WOLF EYES, or early SONIC YOUTH fused with the BOREDOMS, TOTAL SHUTDOWN, and LIGHTNING BOLT. Spiky guitars and spazzy ramshackle drumbeats tumble over each other, and more often than not lock into a wild hypnotic skronk jam that will eject you from your seat, if you have an ear for this kind of head shred. The disc closes out with the 12 minute free-drone-noise haunted house jam "Some Sexual Drawings", and it's a knockout. Definitely one for fans of Load Records, Afrirampo, artsy noise punk, Melt Banana, and Skin Graft jams. For those that don't know, members of AIDS WOLF also double as the design group Seripop, whose eye popping artwork is all over this thing. We just got these in from our buddy Mookie, who besides singing and banging keys for our very own GENGHIS TRON, also operates the Lovepump United imprint that unleashed this album.
Killer picture disc 7" of lung-burning migraine RAWK from this Pennsylvania outfit. "Catneck" is the A-side jam, and enters with a buzz of cable/amp presence before it bursts into molten rock riffage jammed into a tarpit of distortion. The B-side follows with "Frustrating Ice Princess" and napalms a noise rock jam with even more sickening feedback and ends in a caustic trainwreck of brick-on-guitar action transmitted through a malfunctioning truck engine. Crucial. Fans of Wolf Eyes, Burmese, Geisha, Rusted Shut, etc., need to get on these guys post-haste.
This is one of those albums that I pull out when I feel the need for real NOISE rock, and I am absolutely not in the mood for any weak-ass shit. These Allentown brusiers debuted with this three-song disc on Level Plane that came out a few years ago, and it's a required dose for anyone looking for total immolation. The lineup is classic power trio - guitar, drums, bass, someone singing lyrics - but what these guys do with that lineup is more akin to a serious industrial accident: pounding percussive bomb blasts, shrieking overdriven feedback, quasi-riffs and melodies buried in an avalanche of skull splitting fuzz and skree, seriously fucking heavy but oddly tuneful, if your a similiar breed of mutant as I and are able to glean the hooks from Air Conditionings brutal noise pummel. Three songs: "Accusation, Denial, Denali" a mere minute of spastic inter-dimensional punk spew; the 23 minute epic "Baby With a Graphite Soft Spot/Smooth Branches" which drags you across a wasteland of pounding factory-machine grind, gooey guitar tones that sound like the most malevolent seconds of Loveless infected with an especially virulent case of rabies, multiple voices shouting snottily in a cough syrup soaked fug, and ultraheavy blown dirgecore. The last jam, "Welcome to Seaworld/Championship Rings", is another long one, 15 minutes in fact, and it sounds like a meth'd up Brainbombs set being blasted out of a cosmic megaphone. This is not for sissies, no sir. Weakness is super catchy, but it's catchiness and hooks are reserved for only those steel-gutted scum pilots that think that the idea of listening to monolithic distorto-grudge punk dirge pushed to Merzbow levels of brutal crunch is a solid way to spend a Saturday afternoon. And are down to PLAY IT LOUD. Position this motherfucker next to your Vegas Martyrs, Goslings, Burmese, New Flesh, Heavy Winged, and Brainbombs collection, and pull out for immediate catharsis whenever the urge to bury a hatchet in someone's headbone strikes ya.
There's been plenty of heavy noise-punk action comin out of Allentown, Pennsylvania lately, Pissed Jeans probably being the most well known of the bands to come out of that burgs cool little underground community, but nobody from Allentown trumps the sheer heaviness of Air Conditioning. These cats dropped this block of headcrushing psychedelic noise rock back in 2006, but if yer a fan of ultra-heavy, ultra-dense distorted noise rock and haven't heard Dead Rails yet, you gotta pick this up now. Air Conditioning's second album (and first for their new label Load) is another essential one for those of us that like our rock brutal, elephantine, and distorted to the point where all of the instruments and vocals are blurred into a churning mass of blistering CRUNCH. The Weakness album that Air Conditioning released on Level Plane was an awesome fistful of blownout sludge that was just as great as likeminded albums from Vegas Martyrs, Heavy Winged, Goslings, and The New Flesh that I'm always spinning around here, and on Dead Rails, the AC guys crank the crunch and distortion and white noise even further into oblivion. These four lengthy tracks have massive skullcrushing riffs bulldozing through an ocean of extreme distortion and sublime amplifier grit, at times sounding like a noise rock version of Nadja, or Skullflower strapped down onto pummeling industrial percussion, hooky melodies popping up out of the murk and distortion but always, always washed over with brutal blown out noise. The guitars rumble and grind in a fog of strange tunings, spewing warped acid-rock solos and crawling over pounding scrapyard percussion and thunderous drums, their vocals are an indecipherable howl drowned out by gooey FX and wailing feedback, and the surging currents of distortion roiling underneath it all at all times. Definitely rocking, but with more noise and crud slathered over everything than any other noise rock band I can think of, and MUCHO HEAVIER too. Towards the end, the band hunkers down and weaves some more laid-back, droning textures and hypnotic buzz on "I Run Low", but then the final sixteen-minute-plus epic "Accept Your Paralysis" unfurls the heaviest, most blown trudge of em all, drowning their guitars in feedback and squeal while the drummer snakes through a hypnotic beat, slowly blossoming into a super-rhythmic grinding jam that takes on a sludgy forward propulsion that sounds like Hijokaidan getting down with a particularly stomping Black Sabbath loop. The heaviest jams yet from this punishing trio.
Also available on vinyl!
There's been plenty of heavy noise-punk action comin out of Allentown, Pennsylvania lately, Pissed Jeans probably being the most well known of the bands to come out of that burgs cool little underground community, but nobody from Allentown trumps the sheer heaviness of Air Conditioning. These cats dropped this block of headcrushing psychedelic noise rock back in 2006, but if yer a fan of ultra-heavy, ultra-dense distorted noise rock and haven't heard Dead Rails yet, you gotta pick this up now. Air Conditioning's second album (and first for their new label Load) is another essential one for those of us that like our rock brutal, elephantine, and distorted to the point where all of the instruments and vocals are blurred into a churning mass of blistering CRUNCH. The Weakness album that Air Conditioning released on Level Plane was an awesome fistful of blownout sludge that was just as great as likeminded albums from Vegas Martyrs, Heavy Winged, Goslings, and The New Flesh that I'm always spinning around here, and on Dead Rails, the AC guys crank the crunch and distortion and white noise even further into oblivion. These four lengthy tracks have massive skullcrushing riffs bulldozing through an ocean of extreme distortion and sublime amplifier grit, at times sounding like a noise rock version of Nadja, or Skullflower strapped down onto pummeling industrial percussion, hooky melodies popping up out of the murk and distortion but always, always washed over with brutal blown out noise. The guitars rumble and grind in a fog of strange tunings, spewing warped acid-rock solos and crawling over pounding scrapyard percussion and thunderous drums, their vocals are an indecipherable howl drowned out by gooey FX and wailing feedback, and the surging currents of distortion roiling underneath it all at all times. Definitely rocking, but with more noise and crud slathered over everything than any other noise rock band I can think of, and MUCHO HEAVIER too. Towards the end, the band hunkers down and weaves some more laid-back, droning textures and hypnotic buzz on "I Run Low", but then the final sixteen-minute-plus epic "Accept Your Paralysis" unfurls the heaviest, most blown trudge of em all, drowning their guitars in feedback and squeal while the drummer snakes through a hypnotic beat, slowly blossoming into a super-rhythmic grinding jam that takes on a sludgy forward propulsion that sounds like Hijokaidan getting down with a particularly stomping Black Sabbath loop. The heaviest jams yet from this punishing trio.
�� Beginning in 2012, Irish label Hell Comes Home began to unleash a subscription club series of 7"s that featured pairings of some of the best bands in the noise-rock/sludge/doom underground (and beyond); featuring the likes of Thou, Fistula, Burning Love, Dead Elephants, and Coffinworm, this series delivered all-new material from the artists involved, each 7" featuring one song from each band along with a digital download code for the music. In addition, each 7" is presented in a cream-colored jacket with striking original artwork from Polish designer Kuba Sok�lski, who illustrated each of these singles with a different mutant insect-like monstrosity, rendered in the sort of detail that you would expect from an entomological text. The look and feel of these records got my collector's vein pulsating in a big way, and we've managed to snag a selection of these 7"s for the C-Blast shop; numbers are limited, of course, and several of the entries in the Hell Comes Home series are already out of print...
��This installment in the series pairs up proggy Aussie crushers Akaname with Seattle psych ensemble Fungal Abyss, an offshoot of heavy prog-sludge outfit Lesbian. Akaname delivers some killer sprawling sludge with their "Rain Will Be The New Gold", the drummer's intricate, off-time rhythms and complex arrangements underscoring the band's interesting mix of black metal-influenced riffing, trippy synthesizer drift and spastic metallic chug. At times resembling a more blackened version of Mastodon or Keelhaul, this is menacing and mathy stuff that slips into some seriously devastating metallic crush later in the track. I loved the prog-tinged fury of Akaname's track, one of the coolest discoveries I've made through this series of 7"s.
�� The other side feature's Lesbian's psychedelic improv alter-ego Fungal Abyss emitting a cloud of dark, instrumental heaviness called "Humongous Fungus", purportedly recorded under the influence of hallucinatory mushrooms; it's a lot better than you'd expect from the goofy title, a slow building jam that forms from layers of meandering guitar over the heavy, droning groove of the rhythm section, evolving from a dreamy haze of almost shoegazy rock into something akin to Isis at their prettiest, building into an almost space rock finale that winds down into an effects-smeared haze at the end.
����� Since getting hooked on the works of Scottish expat Paul Kirk, who currently resides in Hiroshima, Japan, I've been picking up most of the stuff that he's released under the Akatombo banner over the past decade, all of it steeped in an atmosphere of urban isolation and paranoia. Following the project's 2003 debut on UK label Swim, Akatombo proceeded to release a series of increasingly experimental albums on his own label Hand-Held, tracing his early forays into grim, jazz-tinged industrial breakbeat to the more complex and aggressive sound of his most recent work. All of the Akatombo albums are consistently good, though, displaying a sound that can often resemble a vaguely jazzy, more layered take on the dystopian industrial dub practiced by the likes of Scorn and Techno Animal in the 90s, but fleshed out with Kirk's cinematic use of samples, drones and electronics, creating these imaginatively rendered soundscapes beamed back from the fringes of a entropic technological wasteland.
����� Akatombo's second album Unconfirmed Reports is one of the darkest of his albums, and one of my favorites. From the brooding, sinister boom-bap of opener "Friend For Hire" and the skittering paranoia of "Pragmatism", to the swirling, 'gazey noise-trance of "Tondo" and the sprawling drones of "Cypher", the project produces a dense array of largely instrumental electronic music, burying ominous samples beneath a layer of sonic murk, shifting the shuffling breakbeats into more distorted, penetrative rhythms, cloaking these sounds in sleek black electronics and metallic burnish. Clanking, dub-stained beats are at the rhythmic core of the album, but these are also shot through with striking moments of vaporous dark ambience and squalls of distorted noise. Equally effective are the hallucinatory noir-esque darkjazz elements that begin to show up halfway through Reports.
����� Echoes of late-90s Scorn ripple through these tracks, especially when Akatombo drapes those sheets of malevolent electronic ambience over hard-edged breakbeats, the percussive snap of the drum loops echoing through the shadows, sending off tracers of dubby deliria. But it's much more immersive, heavily expanding on that sound with contemporary techniques and imaginative soundscaping, weaving chilling minor key melodies and looping musical fragments around the hypnotic, gritty beats and surges of nocturnal electronics, incorporating additional sounds of guitar and violin, bringing a shadowy melodic quality to the music. It's all quite evocative of rain-slick city streets in the middle of the night, black asphalt glistening beneath the cold hard glow of halogen lamps, surrounded by towers of glass and concrete thrusting into a black starless sky. It's a fine addition to your illbient/isolationist dub shelf for sure, highly recommended (as are all of the Akatombo albums) to anyone hooked on the bleak narcotized beatscapes of Scorn and Techno Animal and even Muslimgauze.
����� Comes in a large, oversized printed envelope that contains a set of full-color insert cards, newspaper clippings, and a home burned DVDR that features haunting, experimental music videos for two of the tracks from the album and a "Hikiko Mori" from the False Positives album, each copy hand-numbered in an edition of five hundred copies.
����� Album number three of dreamy, dystopian electronica and cinematic industrial dub from Hiroshima-based Scottish ex-pat Paul Thomsen Kirk and his Akatombo project, False Positives offers a little more variation in tone compared to the mostly sinister stylings of his previous album, but fret not - this still has plenty of the surrealistic Scorn-like beatscapes and crumbling urban ambience that hooked me on this band from the beginning.
����� While Akatombo is primarily a one-man operation, on this album Kirk enlisted a number of guest musicians, who add violin, bass, and guitar to these urbanized soundscapes. At first, I was a little thrown off by the hypnotic, house-like throb that runs through opener "Kleptokrat", but after that unexpectedly uplifting opening, things take a more ominous and paranoid turn. You get the deep bass and sun-scorched, almost Morricone-esque melodies that wind around the speaker-rattling rhythms of "Melt Again", and the bassbin-rattling midnight pulse of "Shi-Shi Mai"; those tracks remind me of the sort of bleak, brooding "darkhop" that Economy Records and Pathological used to traffic in back in the 90s, a sound that I'm still a huge fan of but which you don't hear too often anymore. It's definitely one aspect of Akatombo's music; while this album isn't as desolate as the likes of Scorn or Ocosi, Kirk crafts some sublimely sinister vibes throughout it all, bringing together rattling dub-style effects and echoing snares with deep, hypnotic bass lines and washes of surreal street sounds like something half-dreamed at 2 a.m., the distorted beats slipping in and out of focus, and distorted guitars searing the shadowy gloom that stretches beneath many of these tracks. "The Right Mistake" gleams coldly in this dreamlike soundworld, its skittering technoid beats looping endlessly beneath washes of sleek nocturnal ambience and spacey electronics, while "Dominion" takes something resembling a mutant rockabilly lick, all shimmering tremolo and twang, and welds it to an even more infectious bone-rattling breakbeat. The monstrous boom-bap of "Masked" is the most overtly dub out of all these tracks, huge, spacious rhythms swept up in a surreal rush of reverb, flowing into the desolate industrial clank of the title track. And it's all immersed in an array of gorgeous droneworks, moody orchestral strings and swaths of filmic ambience. Through his unique alchemical touch, Kirk transforms these seemingly disparate sounds into a captivating listening experience.
����� This limited-edition version of False Positives comes in a beautifully hand-assembled package, and also comes with a DVDR that features videos for some of the hardest, darkest tracks off both this album and Unconfirmed Reports. Each one is an assemblage of flickering images of urban desolation, processed video entropy, and abstract Brakhage-esque imagery all laced with a disquieting vibe.
����� Along with those killer older Akatombo releases that we recently picked up, we also got the latest album from Scottish expat Paul Thomsen Kirk�s heavily atmospheric post-industrial outfit, Sometime, Never. And just from the first track, it establishes itself as the darkest and heaviest album from the project yet. This Hiroshima-based artist initially caught my ear after the band tuned us in to their back catalog; I dug that stuff immediately, the dark, often dystopic vibe emanating from much of that material was reminiscent of Scorn, but that sort of dub-infected electronic music was just one aspect of Kirk's outfit.
����� On Akatombo's fourth album, though, he gives us what's probably the most malevolent Akatombo album of them all, these ten tracks spilling across the album in a rush of nocturnal ambience and punishing rhythms, locked into that throbbing, jet-black industrial breakbeat that always seems to be lurking just beneath the surface. When opener "Snark Und Troll" kicks in, it layers murky sampled voices and swells of sinister looped music over a pulsating, slightly distorted drum loop and deep bassline, about as creepy as Akatombo gets, mesmeric and dark and droning, the low frequency bass wobbling and reverberating over that crunchy, crackling breakbeat. And "Mission Creep" delivers even more beat-heavy electronic blackness, with distorted rhythms skittering beneath crushing low-frequency rumblings, shrouded in ghostly androgynous wailing and hit with blasts of deformed bass whom. Let me tell ya, if you've been mourning the departure of Scorn from this rotten globe, this Akatombo stuff is quite effective at filling that particular little hole in your heart.
����� The rest of Sometime is pretty uniformly bleak, each unfolding into grim drones and harsh looped sounds strung over the hypnotic rhythmic heaviness. The bass and beats tend to be distorted, abrasive, adding to the incessant, threatening vibe. But it's also rhythmically varied, moving from faster quasi-tribal drum loops to that glacial death-dub to brutal shuffling breaks. Parts of this even slip into an almost metallic heaviness, the bass transforming into a buzzing, bludgeoning thud that gets pretty intense on tracks like "Matching Muzzles", "Vincere Vel Mori" and "Convict A45522". Elsewhere, Kirk will shift into something a little jazzier, or dispense with those beats entirely and unfurl a strange soundscape with what sounds like fragments from a horror film score becoming intertwined with bits of synth-bass, sinister digging sounds, and distant, disembodied voices. And it all hits an apex of heaviness toward the end with "Cold Call", which heads into overt industrial metal territory, almost like Godflesh draped in what sounds like gorgeous Arabic female voices and ominous orchestral swells.
����� All of Akatombo's albums are worth checking out, but this one is particularly recommended if you're into the industrial dub of Techno Animal and Scorn, Wordsound-style darkhop/illbient, and the winding sensuous beatscapes of Muslimgauze. Comes in gatefold packaging with a pair of printed inserts.
A fantastic collection of ghastly ritualistic ambience, Celebratum features pretty much everything that this obscure 90s-era black ambient project released during its brief existence, compiling remixed and remastered recordings from the three ultra-limited cassette releases that Akhkharu released between 1995 and 1996 on the Dark Age Productions and Ishnigarrab Recordings imprints. The two members of Akhkharu were Fakir NXW and Blood Moon Ausar, musicians whose resumes also included stints with black metallers Crimson Moon and Absu, the Absu-related black ritual prog project Equimanthorn, and even experimental rock weirdoes Vas Deferens Organization; here, they were channeling vast apocalyptic visions and sonic blood rituals by way of a strangely militant black ambient sound that combined booming martial percussion, electronically-processed vocals that were generally delivered in an incantatory spoken style, looped orchestral sounds and blasts of stentorian brass, and gusts of hellish black drift. If you've been digging the recent Funerary Call releases that came out over the past year on Crucial Blast, Malignant and Fall Of Nature, you'll love this stuff. Aside from their super-rare tape releases, the band also appeared on the Y2K compilation CD The Fossil Dungeon alongside Equitant, Profane Grace, Absu's Proscriptor, The Soil Bleeds Black and Cernunnos Woods, which also gives you an idea of what sort of nightmarish post-industrial music these guys created.
Scattered among the shorter ambient pieces on this disc are tracks like "Nos Dominari Noctus: The Dominions Of The Night", where the band sprawls out into an eighteen minute black mass soundtrack filled with demonic chanting and looped horns, murky orchestral drones and pounding kettledrums, eerie wind chimes and burbling black cyborg electronics and washes of Lustmordian dread all fusing together into total delirium. Other tracks explore occult incantations played in reverse and enshrouded in trippy effects, monstrously deformed dronescapes, blasts of guttural war-horns and passages of murky Moevot-esque ambient creep, ominous keyboard symphonies drifting out of some dank sulfurous pit, and bizarre sound collages like "Ave Calix Sanguinis (Praise Be The Blood)", where the duo weave solemn ritual verse, female vocals and streaks of evil chamber strings around a hypnotic backdrop of pulsating black drift; the whole thing starts to sound like a satanic Dead Can Dance towards the end.
Akhkharu's black ritual drift can easily be situated next to the likes of early Funerary Call, Endura, Melek-Tha, the pure
ambient projects of the LLN and even In Slaughter Natives, bridging that lightless chasm between the most desolate corner of post-industrial music and the feral witchery of black metal's most abstract fringes. Really stoked to see this come out, and Silcharde did a nice job with the presentation for this disc, packaging it with a twelve-page booklet fitted with translucent vellum covers and metallic silver print that adds to the album's "grimoire"-like look. Recommended.
Akhlys's Supplication has been out of print for awhile, but I just unearthed a couple of copies of this rare disc back in the store room. This is the one and only release from this obscure side-project from Naas Alcameth of Nightbringer and Temple of Not; with Akhlys, Naas Alcameth explored a form of abyssal black ambience that feels like an even more blackened take on the nightmarish sounds of Archon Satani and Kerovnian. This disc features a single thirty-seven minute track of blackened occult-tinged ambience, entering with the sound of tectonic blasts reverberating beneath soft whorls of looping industrial sound, the sound minimal and desolate as it continues for several minutes before the vast emptiness is intruded upon by massive distorted blasts and short bursts of blown-out melody that immediately crumble and dissolve into the bottomless depths before reappearing a few minutes later. Later, strange whispered phrases appear alongside fragments of snarled, hushed speech and demonic chanting, the voices breaking apart and scattered over the pulsating black ambience, while fluttering metallic pulses and loops emerge and recede into the gloom. Distant, murky keyboard melodies drift in and out of earshot as scraps of eerie, Vangelis-like electronic ambience materialize for several minutes, joined by strange, spectral EVP-like voice transmissions and a distant percussive rumbling that thrums just beneath the surface.
Later on, more processed drum sounds swell up, accompanied by gorgeous, almost Dead Can Dance-esque female vocals that drift up out of the blackness, while Alcameth hisses and snarls through a veil of delay and reverb, his reptilian invocations drifting like wisps of black smoke into the night sky. The track continues to evolve, growing more menacing as those percussive sounds come to the foreground, at times surging into kettledrum-like volleys of orchestral pummel while charred horns intone low, infinite drones, and broken shards of discordant piano and bells flitter at the edges. It all eventually moves into a long passages of echoing demonic voices and distant incantations, ritualistic chant set to stygian, surrealistic black drift, shuffling mechanical noises echoing out of the void before finally returning to a reprise of the jet-black void from the beginning of the disc, those booming, crumbling blasts of low-end crush once again echoing through the blackness, surrounded by the faintest whorls of electronic pulse. This is definitely one of those albums that is best experienced in a pitch-black room, the transmissions of ritualistic black ambience untouched by light.
Comes in a slim DVD-style plastic case with a full color cover, released in a limited edition of one hundred copies.
Akimbo's first album for Alternative Tentacles delivers 12 jams of their quirky, crushing metallic rock flavored with the heshhead sense of humor those guys have, injecting their massive metallic rawk battery with stylized artwork and song titles like "Rockness Monster" and "Spooning With Disaster". They merge the off-kilter lurch of Jesus Lizard with a kind of complex progressive metalcore that points towards fellow Seattleites Botch, with lots of angular, sorta-mathy riffs and sludgy, burly boogie-metal parts a la Eyehategod, Jon Weisnewski's intense ripped snarls, and Nat Damm's seriously heavy, pummeling drumming. Occasionally Akimbo pull back to reveal brief flashes of tense math/indie rock that remind us of Unwound or maybe Drive Like Jehu, and the indie rock vibe is heavy in their sound, which I guess kinda makes them heirs to the Karp throne of huge, crushing indie metal destruction. Band creeds like "Sharpen Swords, Polish The Armour, It's Feeding Time" and their longrunning motto to "Live To Crush", a psychedelic-poster style band logo, eerie metal imagery, heavy stoner-boogie riffage and frenetic hardcore punk, Karp meets Unwound meets Melvins for a fun, crazed riff heavy blast of twisting, skull splitting crunch. Awesome!
Akimbo rules. I've been a devout fan of these guys ever since I first witnessed them live when they toured with Genghis Tron; a tightly wound power trio, Akimbo have this undefineable power that feels like it draws from the noise rock of Amphetimine Reptile and Touch And Go, early Neurosis, hard edged math rock riffs, and classic hardcore. Incredibly potent and ferocious sounding, easily one of the heaviest bands to have ever been on Alternative Tentacles, but really catchy too. Remember how Karp had that streak of indie rock catchiness underneath their crushing riffs? Akimbo has that too. Complex, crushing, rocking, unstoppably catchy and anthemic. A killer live band, too, and you can tell that these guys are lifers, dedicated flesh and spirit to the power of crushing riffage. Harshing Your Mellow was the band's first album, originally coming out in 2001 on Amalgamate Records, but it subsequently sold out and went out of print, and has been a tough one to find in the years since. Alternative Tentacles has re-issued the album with all ten tracks remastered, and has tacked on an additional unreleased cover of 'Vertigo' from LA punk legends The Screamers that was recorded during the original album session. These early songs aren't as balls-out crushing as the more metallic Forging Steel And Laying Stone, but this is still heavy HEAVY stuff, a blistering, thunderous onslaught of angular hardcore pummel and ominous riffs, quirky time signatures appearing out of speedy HC blasts and awesome infuriated vocals. This re-issued is served up with brand new artwork in a digipack case. Definitely recommended!
Akimbo are back with a new album, their fifth, and mere months after the reissue of their crucial Harshing Your Mellow debut. And
boy is this a ripper! Ten new jams of burly, crushing rock from one of the best live bands around, encased in a slick package with lots
metallic inks, an album cover depicting a tour van with a Viking sail mounted to the roof and bull horns welded to the hood, chopping through a
violent sea on it's way to deliver earth crushing rock. Throw this puppy on and yer blasted with the bands heaviest shit yet, channeling grungy
noise rock of the Am Rep sort, fierce hardcore moves, Neurosis style dirge riffs. And a HEAVY 70's rock influence. For real. There are riffs on
Navigating The Bronze that could have come off an AC/DC album, like on the bluesy HC charge of "Wizard Van Wizard", at least right
before the band lunges into a monstrous sludge groove. On "Dungeon Bastard", the band breaks through the stormclouds of brutal angular riffing
with a passage of beautiful epic melody. "Roman Coins" is a nearly 3-minute drum solo that sounds like the drummer is playing 2 kits at once,
and it leads straight into the lead-heavy dirge rock of "Lungless". The first time I heard the epic melody of "Megatherium" 's soaring prog
sludge, it took my breath away. It's brutal, ass-shakin' rock from start to end, huge riffs and awesome Angus Young style shredding, gruff
howling vocals, bits of beautiful post-rocky bliss, massive dirgey slow parts and Southern grooves, ripping blasts of speedy hardcore, loads of
catchy hooks, and Nat Damm's awesome drumming. These guys lay the hammer down. Zero bullshit heaviness from one of the best bands in the scene.
Highly recommended.
Akimbo are back with a new album, their fifth, and mere months after the reissue of their crucial Harshing Your Mellow debut. And
boy is this a ripper! Ten new jams of burly, crushing rock from one of the best live bands around, encased in a slick package with lots
metallic inks, an album cover depicting a tour van with a Viking sail mounted to the roof and bull horns welded to the hood, chopping through a
violent sea on it's way to deliver earth crushing rock. Throw this puppy on and yer blasted with the bands heaviest shit yet, channeling grungy
noise rock of the Am Rep sort, fierce hardcore moves, Neurosis style dirge riffs. And a HEAVY 70's rock influence. For real. There are riffs on
Navigating The Bronze that could have come off an AC/DC album, like on the bluesy HC charge of "Wizard Van Wizard", at least right
before the band lunges into a monstrous sludge groove. On "Dungeon Bastard", the band breaks through the stormclouds of brutal angular riffing
with a passage of beautiful epic melody. "Roman Coins" is a nearly 3-minute drum solo that sounds like the drummer is playing 2 kits at once,
and it leads straight into the lead-heavy dirge rock of "Lungless". The first time I heard the epic melody of "Megatherium" 's soaring prog
sludge, it took my breath away. It's brutal, ass-shakin' rock from start to end, huge riffs and awesome Angus Young style shredding, gruff
howling vocals, bits of beautiful post-rocky bliss, massive dirgey slow parts and Southern grooves, ripping blasts of speedy hardcore, loads of
catchy hooks, and Nat Damm's awesome drumming. These guys lay the hammer down. Zero bullshit heaviness from one of the best bands in the scene.
Highly recommended.
Framed by episodic vignettes, Jersey Shores is the latest album from Akimbo, a concept album, in fact, that revolves around a series of infamous shark attacks that occured in 1916 off of the coast of New Jersey, a subject that has captured the imagination of the Northwestern sludge rockers for their sixth album (and first for Neurot). The five songs on Jersey Shores weave a chronological, if slightly surreal narrative that describes each of the key events that happened during the horrific shark attacks, which included four deaths and one serious injury. These shark attacks were the inspiration for Benchley's Jaws, and Akimbo spins the story into an equally epic sludge-metal saga with the band's heaviest music to date. Previous albums delivered their manic metallic assaults in short hardcore-style blasts, but now Akimbo lets their songs stretch out into longer, epic jams that sometimes spill out over ten minutes or more, as if the Neurosis influence that's always lurked in the shadows of their thunderous metallic rock has completely come out into the light. "Bruder Vansant" melds together burly stoner rock riffage and aggressively fast tempos with old school metal at first, but then evolves into moody, jazzy post-rock. The eleven minute "Lester Stillwell" is the album's centerpiece, its spacey Karp-like crushrock alternating with bluesy Sabbathy doom before wandering into a twilight field of twangy, Big Sky psychedelia and shuffling blues. The whole album is filled with these long, epic wanderings from punishing heaviness into dark musical calm, blending smoky blues and post-rock with Neurosis-esque dirge, super-heavy Kyuss groove and angular noise rock, and Akimbo are now moving further from the Melvins/Karp comparisons that have saddled these dudes since day one. They still sound very "Pacific Northwest", if you know what I mean, but Jersey Shores has them exploring a whole new side to their sound. Might disappoint fans of their older stuff that are looking for more of their faster, hardcore-injected sound, but Akimbo's newer, improvisational approach to brooding heaviness is pretty damn cool. Comes in slipcase packaging.
Akimbo's peculiar concept album about the New Jersey shark attacks of 1916 finally makes its way onto vinyl thanks to the folks at Alternative Tentacles, who have put together a deluxe package for this slab of murderous noise/sludge metal that includes a gatefold jackter, thick 180 gram vinyl, and a download code for an MP3 copy of the album.
Framed by episodic vignettes, Jersey Shores is the latest album from Akimbo, a concept album, in fact, that revolves around a series of infamous shark attacks that occured in 1916 off of the coast of New Jersey, a subject that has captured the imagination of the Northwestern sludge rockers for their sixth album (and first for Neurot). The five songs on Jersey Shores weave a chronological, if slightly surreal narrative that describes each of the key events that happened during the horrific shark attacks, which included four deaths and one serious injury. These shark attacks were the inspiration for Benchley's Jaws, and Akimbo spins the story into an equally epic sludge-metal saga with the band's heaviest music to date. Previous albums delivered their manic metallic assaults in short hardcore-style blasts, but now Akimbo lets their songs stretch out into longer, epic jams that sometimes spill out over ten minutes or more, as if the Neurosis influence that's always lurked in the shadows of their thunderous metallic rock has completely come out into the light. "Bruder Vansant" melds together burly stoner rock riffage and aggressively fast tempos with old school metal at first, but then evolves into moody, jazzy post-rock. The eleven minute "Lester Stillwell" is the album's centerpiece, its spacey Karp-like crushrock alternating with bluesy Sabbathy doom before wandering into a twilight field of twangy, Big Sky psychedelia and shuffling blues. The whole album is filled with these long, epic wanderings from punishing heaviness into dark musical calm, blending smoky blues and post-rock with Neurosis-esque dirge, super-heavy Kyuss groove and angular noise rock, and Akimbo are now moving further from the Melvins/Karp comparisons that have saddled these dudes since day one. They still sound very "Pacific Northwest", if you know what I mean, but Jersey Shores has them exploring a whole new side to their sound. Might disappoint fans of their older stuff that are looking for more of their faster, hardcore-injected sound, but Akimbo's newer, improvisational approach to brooding heaviness is pretty damn cool.
����� Now available as a gorgeously packaged LP (on black vinyl, limited to four hundred copies) and back in stock on both digipak CD and cassette, all with super-striking metallic silver foil stamped lettering, beautiful snow-capped landscapes and natural ice sculptures, the lyrics and liner notes all printed only in French...
����� An expression of jet-black will, caught in the blinding whiteness of a Quebec blizzard. Long awaited new album of French Canadian black metal from the mighty Akitsa, the first new release from the band since the split with Ash Pool and first actual full-length since 2010's Au Cr�puscule De L'Esp�rance. I've been eagerly looking forward to this one; when it comes to frigid, uncompromising black metal, nobody beats Akitsa. And on Grands Tyrans, this Montreal band lacerates the listener with a nine-song blast of treble-shredded, violently impassioned music and poetic imagery that continues to traverse the twisted intersection of atavistic black metal, harsh noise, and punk primitivism. Since early on, this mysterious outfit has flirted with aspects of industrial music, unsurprising considering that the main player behind Akitsa has also been producing harsh experimental noise under the name �mes Sanglantes since the late 90s. At the same time, Akitsa's music is resolutely black metal, capturing the feral energy of the rawest second wave filth.
����� Fearsome opener "D�voil�" feints with languidly strummed guitar chords, but then erupts into one of the band's trademark droning riffs, a simple, three-chord figure repeated like a mantra over a monotonous blastbeat, transforming into a trancelike blur of high-end tremolo buzz and repetitious blast that stretches out beneath the hysterical, high-pitched screams for several minutes. But when it does finally change, it's subtly dramatic, shifting into a slightly different but vastly prettier version of that central riff, transforming the song into something strangely emotional and moving. That sort of nuanced blackened aggression alternates with barbaric punk anthems like "Le feu de l'ab�me", stomping scum-encrusted hardcore, attitudinal French-language vocals drawled over the brittle, violent chug of the guitars, draped in eerie blackened leads and layers of filthy fuzz. Other songs fall somewhere in between these two approaches, blending icy, frantic mid-paced black metal with droning, punk-informed riffs, the drumming a mix of slower, loping tempos and that furious hypnotic blast, and more of those eerie, simple guitar leads abound. They throw in some left turns, like the primitive synth of "Les flots de l'enfer" where a murky, melancholy keyboard melody emerges amid swells of throbbing electronics and gritty static, spoken word lyrics recited in the background, resembling a cross between some ancient darkwave outfit and the vintage 90's dungeon synth sound of Mortiis. The title track, though, steals the show. When this morbid dirge kicks in alongside a great gothy keyboard line, the vocals suddenly shift into a weird croon and the whole thing suddenly turns into this savage, saturated take on early 80s death rock, strafed with blistering blackened guitars and shrouded in an atmosphere of frostbitten misanthropy. When all is said and done, Grand Tyrans emerges as Akitsa's most musically and emotionally complex album thus far.
����� Now available as a gorgeously packaged LP (on black vinyl, limited to four hundred copies) and back in stock on both digipak CD and cassette, all with super-striking metallic silver foil stamped lettering, beautiful snow-capped landscapes and natural ice sculptures, the lyrics and liner notes all printed only in French...
����� An expression of jet-black will, caught in the blinding whiteness of a Quebec blizzard. Long awaited new album of French Canadian black metal from the mighty Akitsa, the first new release from the band since the split with Ash Pool and first actual full-length since 2010's Au Cr�puscule De L'Esp�rance. I've been eagerly looking forward to this one; when it comes to frigid, uncompromising black metal, nobody beats Akitsa. And on Grands Tyrans, this Montreal band lacerates the listener with a nine-song blast of treble-shredded, violently impassioned music and poetic imagery that continues to traverse the twisted intersection of atavistic black metal, harsh noise, and punk primitivism. Since early on, this mysterious outfit has flirted with aspects of industrial music, unsurprising considering that the main player behind Akitsa has also been producing harsh experimental noise under the name �mes Sanglantes since the late 90s. At the same time, Akitsa's music is resolutely black metal, capturing the feral energy of the rawest second wave filth.
����� Fearsome opener "D�voil�" feints with languidly strummed guitar chords, but then erupts into one of the band's trademark droning riffs, a simple, three-chord figure repeated like a mantra over a monotonous blastbeat, transforming into a trancelike blur of high-end tremolo buzz and repetitious blast that stretches out beneath the hysterical, high-pitched screams for several minutes. But when it does finally change, it's subtly dramatic, shifting into a slightly different but vastly prettier version of that central riff, transforming the song into something strangely emotional and moving. That sort of nuanced blackened aggression alternates with barbaric punk anthems like "Le feu de l'ab�me", stomping scum-encrusted hardcore, attitudinal French-language vocals drawled over the brittle, violent chug of the guitars, draped in eerie blackened leads and layers of filthy fuzz. Other songs fall somewhere in between these two approaches, blending icy, frantic mid-paced black metal with droning, punk-informed riffs, the drumming a mix of slower, loping tempos and that furious hypnotic blast, and more of those eerie, simple guitar leads abound. They throw in some left turns, like the primitive synth of "Les flots de l'enfer" where a murky, melancholy keyboard melody emerges amid swells of throbbing electronics and gritty static, spoken word lyrics recited in the background, resembling a cross between some ancient darkwave outfit and the vintage 90's dungeon synth sound of Mortiis. The title track, though, steals the show. When this morbid dirge kicks in alongside a great gothy keyboard line, the vocals suddenly shift into a weird croon and the whole thing suddenly turns into this savage, saturated take on early 80s death rock, strafed with blistering blackened guitars and shrouded in an atmosphere of frostbitten misanthropy. When all is said and done, Grand Tyrans emerges as Akitsa's most musically and emotionally complex album thus far.
����� Now available as a gorgeously packaged LP (on black vinyl, limited to four hundred copies) and back in stock on both digipak CD and cassette, all with super-striking metallic silver foil stamped lettering, beautiful snow-capped landscapes and natural ice sculptures, the lyrics and liner notes all printed only in French...
����� An expression of jet-black will, caught in the blinding whiteness of a Quebec blizzard. Long awaited new album of French Canadian black metal from the mighty Akitsa, the first new release from the band since the split with Ash Pool and first actual full-length since 2010's Au Cr�puscule De L'Esp�rance. I've been eagerly looking forward to this one; when it comes to frigid, uncompromising black metal, nobody beats Akitsa. And on Grands Tyrans, this Montreal band lacerates the listener with a nine-song blast of treble-shredded, violently impassioned music and poetic imagery that continues to traverse the twisted intersection of atavistic black metal, harsh noise, and punk primitivism. Since early on, this mysterious outfit has flirted with aspects of industrial music, unsurprising considering that the main player behind Akitsa has also been producing harsh experimental noise under the name �mes Sanglantes since the late 90s. At the same time, Akitsa's music is resolutely black metal, capturing the feral energy of the rawest second wave filth.
����� Fearsome opener "D�voil�" feints with languidly strummed guitar chords, but then erupts into one of the band's trademark droning riffs, a simple, three-chord figure repeated like a mantra over a monotonous blastbeat, transforming into a trancelike blur of high-end tremolo buzz and repetitious blast that stretches out beneath the hysterical, high-pitched screams for several minutes. But when it does finally change, it's subtly dramatic, shifting into a slightly different but vastly prettier version of that central riff, transforming the song into something strangely emotional and moving. That sort of nuanced blackened aggression alternates with barbaric punk anthems like "Le feu de l'ab�me", stomping scum-encrusted hardcore, attitudinal French-language vocals drawled over the brittle, violent chug of the guitars, draped in eerie blackened leads and layers of filthy fuzz. Other songs fall somewhere in between these two approaches, blending icy, frantic mid-paced black metal with droning, punk-informed riffs, the drumming a mix of slower, loping tempos and that furious hypnotic blast, and more of those eerie, simple guitar leads abound. They throw in some left turns, like the primitive synth of "Les flots de l'enfer" where a murky, melancholy keyboard melody emerges amid swells of throbbing electronics and gritty static, spoken word lyrics recited in the background, resembling a cross between some ancient darkwave outfit and the vintage 90's dungeon synth sound of Mortiis. The title track, though, steals the show. When this morbid dirge kicks in alongside a great gothy keyboard line, the vocals suddenly shift into a weird croon and the whole thing suddenly turns into this savage, saturated take on early 80s death rock, strafed with blistering blackened guitars and shrouded in an atmosphere of frostbitten misanthropy. When all is said and done, Grand Tyrans emerges as Akitsa's most musically and emotionally complex album thus far.
�� For as long as Canadian black metal/punk primitives Akitsa have been working with Dom Fernow's Hospital Productions, you'd have to figure it was just a matter of time before this split was going to materialize. At long last, Akitsa have teamed up for this vinyl-only album with Fernow's Ash Pool project, whose ferocious left-field black metal might come as a surprise to those who primarily know the guy for his power electronics and industrial/techno work with Prurient and Vatican Shadow and neo-synthpop outfit Cold Cave. It's a perfect combination, though, with both bands delivering some fantastic material, Akitsa unleashing a black swarm of noisy, folk-flecked malevolence, Ash Pool weaving a strange, experimental black metal assault that is shot through with a couple of moments of blinding pop majesty.
�� A lot has been made of the low-fi quality of Akitsa's recordings as well as the seemingly primitive nature of their songwriting, but that stuff is secondary to the fact that the band writes some damn good songs. Akitsa's "L'Heure De V�rit�" blasts open their side with their trademark feedback-soaked stomp, a primitive blackened riff circling around the pounding drums, the band locking into an almost motorik throb for awhile, albeit one that is absolutely drenched in filthy static and an atmosphere of pervasive violence, and laced with those tinny, slightly out of tune guitar solos. But then there's the instrumental "Tour De Garde", a song that shares its name with the excellent underground black metal label run by the members of Akitsa; it's a bit different in feel, still really blown out and murky, but the guitars spin a strangely folky melody beneath the buzzing distortion, and the drums seem to shuffle through an almost funereal march, sounding more like some moody blackened martial folk, like something from Menace Ruine, perhaps. That's followed by the catchy-as-fuck blackened garage punk of "Ne Perdez Jamais Espoir", which could almost pass for an early 80's California hardcore punk jam, and another haunting instrumental called "Arrach� A La Mort, Forc� A Vivre Et Mourir Encore" that also has that folky quality. Their side finishes with one last blast of anthemic black metal, "Volupt�s Pestilentielles", delivering another killer catchy riff that the band bangs out ad infinitum, the blackened hook burrowing deep into your brain-meat.
�� It's been awhile since I've heard anything new from Ash Pool, three years since their last album For Which He Plies the Lash came out. The band gets right to it, blazing into "Death Has No Mother" as the band shifts between a super-catchy rocking mid-tempo hook into chaotic blastbeat violence, the riffs murderous and razor-sharp, veering between sinister three-chord punk forms and intense, frantic black metal blast, the vocals a harsh croak, the hiss-soaked guitars blossoming into amazingly moving melodies. "The Ash Pool" is another blast of catchy, majestic black metal, those violently shifting tempos at work here as well, and when it downshifts into a plodding mid-tempo groove, it suddenly transforms into something akin to super-distorted gloom rock. The vocals remain vicious and harsh, a static soaked shrieking, but the music is weirdly poppy, even more so as the band heads into "Gemini The Winter Night"; here, gloomy synths emerge, and the music once again swings wildly between murderous, howling black metal and that strange gothy gloom rock sound, the contrast jarring and intense, bringing us to the epic last song "De-Stoning The Ephesus House", another gothy, gorgeously gloomy hook. That weird post-punk vibe courses through the blackness, a plodding Joy Divisionish bass-line following the song into slower, more doom-laden heaviness, and suddenly the vocals abruptly change into a completely unexpected croon, deep sung vocals that rise over the chugging blackened metal, the effect intensely striking, and VERY unique, injecting a perverse poppiness into the otherwise dark and malevolent sound. From there it gets even more proggy, the guitars and bass weaving into another majestic riff, the vocals shifting back into the gruesome howl as the album screams to a close.
�� Limited to five hundred copies and already sold out from the source, so move quick if you want to grab one of these.
Only have a handful of these and it's now out of print. Aksumite is one of the killer black metal-influenced punk bands on the Colloquial Sound tape label, and this was (I believe) their first cassette for the label. It's a grimy, somewhat hysterical, and very low-fi sound that jams a primitive black metal influenced attack through a blunt hardcore assault, a style that I can't get enough of right now when it's played with this level of sonic mayhem and ugliness. The tape kicks off with an ominous doom-laden intro of creeping guitar melody and lumbering stop-start drums awash in shimmering feedback and amp buzz, then it blasts off into the raw blackened thrashpunk of "No Soil Overturned In The Master's Field", the swarming two-chord riffs drenched in reverb, the band alternating between full-tilt hardcore velocity and bashing out a noisy, anthemic breakdown, the whole recording slathered in excessive reverb that gives this a huge cavernous feel. The singer has a real wild vocal delivery, his killer possessed vocals served up in a psychotic mess of slobbering, vomiting screams and howling delay-drenched insanity. The band rip into the thrashing blackened hardcore of "Endlessly, Remorselessly", with it's bizarre vocal effects and noisy recording, and the intense catchy HC of "Laid Bare Upon The Stone", the song laced with ferocious blast beats and chugging, warped thrash parts, the guitars dissonant and filled with jangling, clanging chords. "Blood Cult" tangles up a mess of Celtic Frost worship, sloppy blackthrash, and D-beat speedfreakery, and "Particles Of Faith" drops more of their blazing black metal riffing into big whacks of sludge-riddled heaviness, leading up to the closing outro where they end the tape with a reprise of eerie clean guitars and slow, pounding drums from the first track. I really dug Aksumite's howling blackened hardcore on this tape, it's right in there with bands like Willing Feet, Ives, even the newer Darkthrone stuff, but with more of an awkward rhythmic twitchiness. If the other tapes on Colloquial Sound have moved you, this will too, and fans of Primal Vomit's black metal/punk aesthetic should check Aksumite out as well. Manufactured on blood-red cassettes and released in a hand-numbered edition of one hundred copies...
Creepazoid noise from Al Qaeda meets a vicious harsh noise wall erected by Dried Up Corpse, a side project from one of the guys in Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. Now, Al Qaeda was a new one to me; I had seen their name around before, but for some reason thought that they were some kind of lighter psych/noise outfit. I apparently had 'em figured all wrong, at least as far as their side on this tape is concerned. The thirteen minute nightmare of "Fucked" that fills the a-side uncoils it's atmospheric evil with distorted, heavily processed vocals, subdued feedback and crackling mechanical noise, ringing metallic tones that hover over fields of ultra low dark ambient drift...this is creepy shit that I wasn't expecting at all and which duly impresses, a pitch black fogbank of horrific industrial noise and infernal fug laced with sparse percussion and swirling psychotic dissonance, sounding like the wretched contents of hell being vomited up from the bowels of the underworld. A fantastically bleak and nightmarish mix of brutal Merzbowian skree and smoldering black ritual ambience. I'm on the lookout for more of Al Qaeda's stuff now, for sure.
On the other side, Dried Up Corpse counter with their own thirteen minute "Fucked", a brutal high-end wall of dense blast and swarming mid-range frequencies that whip through a black static storm. This is vicious chaos, formed through the powerful layering of high end hiss and snarling, howling electronics that are set deeper in the mix, and underscored by a crushing bottom-end rumble and a constant screeching tumult that hurtles through the piece like chunks of jagged busted machine wreckage scraping and grinding against the swirling blizzard of distortion, or an ancient torture device at work within the center of a raging inferno. Fans of intense HNW will not be disappointed.
Only one hundred copies of this tape were issued, each in full color packaging and on chrome cassette.
Back in stock! A new cassette injection of scathing black atrocity from Demonologists, pairing up with Al Qaeda whose work continues to become more savage every time I hear something new from 'em. This split tape matches five super short tracks from AQ and one sidelong noise attack from Demonologists, released in a limited run of seventy copies.
The Al Qaeda side is a series of demonic noisecore miniatures, starting up with the echoing thud of dubbed-out drum machines, then explode into a frenzy of ultra-distorted black noise. Over-modulated riffs and spastic, rabid vocals pound away in a wash of white noise, resembling a section of a Wold song clipped and looped over and over. That's followed by a slow lurching industrial dirge of chugging out-of-tune guitar, mangled hyper distorted drums and static, then a brief flash of an electric guitar melody repeated over smoldering low end noise. Putrid shrieking vocals introduce another industrial black metal hypno trance, this time sounding something like a super low-fi version of Nekrasov stuck in a locked groove and bathed in vinyl crackle and hiss. And last, a gleaming ambient dronescape of glistening keyboard tones that drift and waver beneath strange wet crackling sounds.
Demonologists follow with "The Bastard Curse", a blast of black hiss and fluttering electronic chaos that shifts between grinding, crackling slabs of heavy low end filth laced with high metallic tones, and even heavier stretches of ultra distorted noise wall and light-devouring black drone. Like all of Demonologist�s work, it's harsh, heavy, and ferocious, a night-black noise wall seething with animus.
Recorded at home in her apartment in Queens, Santa Elena is the debut full length from Bianca Bibiloni, who records her dark dreamy ether-pop under the name of Ala Muerte. Some of you might remember that 3" CD-R that Ala Muerte released with Max Bondi on Public Guilt a while back, a beautiful little slab of blissed-out, crumbling metallic dreampop that knocked me out of my seat when it came out. Been looking forward to hearing some more music from Ala Muerte ever since, and J.R. over at Public Guilt has followed up that 3" CD-R with her first full length, a ten song disc of hazy, surreal melodies that drift like a heavy morning fog through vocal-heavy arrangements and meditative music formed by spare bass and guitar riffs, viola, collages of field recordings, recorder, a ten-string Puerto Rican guitar called a Cuatro, hints of almost imperceptible percussion (at least until the very last track), and dark sheets of airy synthesizer, ambient drone and heavy distorted guitar. Ala Muerte's vocals are layered and ghostly, and the lyrics are often blurred and indiscernable beneath the near formless singing that gives the music an ethereal, haunting sound somewhat similiar to Cocteau Twins, a kind of dreamy slow-core infused with currents of dark folk and delicate dark ambience. Many of the songs on Santa Elena also remind me of what Swans were doing on their later albums, mixing together ominous sounding recordings of urban life and background noise with spare acoustic guitar strum and Bianca's moving vocals. Then the last song "Fireweed" appears, starting out with Bianca singing a fragile little melody over minimal guitar, her vocals and the guitars building in layers and growing in power and volume, then drums come in a few minutes in, a huge, blown-out beat bashing away in the background and joined by crushing distorted guitars, and the song turns into sweeping, crushing noise-pop that totally blows me away, like hearing some old K Records band gone heavy and majestic. Wow! The disc comes in nice full color gatefold packaging with a full color lyric booklet. Recommended.
Immensely beautiful post-rock crushscapes make up this awesome 3" disc that Public Guilt just put out. For the record, this unassuming
looking little disc is one of the best damn things that the Guilt has released to date, and I'll be shocked if this doesn't incur at least a
minimal buzz from fans of ultra-blissful, metallic shoegazery. It's a collaboration between Destructo Swarmbots guitarist/vocalist Bianca Ala
Muerte and London-based vocal conjuror Max Bondi, and they blend together ethereal vocals with delicate guitar melodies and softly shimmering
drones into something that resembles the mellower moments of the Swarmbots fused with slabs of metallic dreampop. The guitar sounds are heavily
processed, stretched out into drifting smears of melody and glitchy feedback that sound like it's being shaped by an e-bow. The vocals sound
almost wordless, breathy male and female voices lilting over sometimes folky guitar strum, a fragile swirl of beautiful circular arpeggios and
angelic throats swimming in ephemeral electronic FX, and when they build into the crashing walls of massive distorted riffage and overdriven
noise on tracks like "Still" and "Hiding In A Tiny Space", it's some of the heaviest, most exquisitely beautiful music I've ever heard, like a
glitchy Windy And Carl crossed with the crushing dronemetal of The Angelic Process. Highly, highly recommended, and you're going to have to
move fast, as this has been released in a super limited edition of only 100 copies in a silkscreened 3-color, 3 panel trifold sleeve with
rubber stamped images pressed onto the paper by Bianca herself!
Recorded in 2000, this split contains two weighty slabs each from these low-toned aural bruisers. ALABAMA THUNDERPUSSY
delivers "Heavyweight" and "Rabdos (The Strangler" from Richmond sludge rockers ALABAMA THUNDERPUSSY and "Darktown Strutter" and "Thee Song" from Jerseys Southern sludge lords HALFWAY TO GONE (ex-SOLARIZED).
Out of all of the instrumental sludge/doom/metal bands that have popped up over the past decade, the UK band Capricorns found their way into the upper echelons of the form, their heavy, dramatic math-crush more than just another plodding sludgefeast, incorporating some fantastic math rock maneuvers and sweeping, sometimes almost cinematic atmospheres into their super heavy metallic riffage and delivering an elaborate sound that succeeded at keeping interest without the presence of a singer. Their last album River, Bear Your Bones was really great, a proggy, atmospheric record that balanced epic sky-streaking majesty with violent bursts of angular aggression, and saw the band playing with a wider variety of psychedelic colors than ever before. Unfortunately, their best album was also to be their last, and the band broke up not too long after River came out.
Since then, I hadn't heard anything about what the members were up to until a few months ago, when I found out that the British label Iron Pig had just released the debut from a band called Alabaster Suns that turned out to have three quarters of the Capricorns lineup. This new band has some clear connections to the sound of Capricorns, a sludgy, bottom-end heaviness in particular, some of the same math rock influences, but Alabaster Suns goes in a much less metallic direction, evoking a heavy rocking sound that's closer to early 90's post-hardcore than the doom/sludge that was at the root of their previous outfit. And they've got a singer, too, whose hoarse, emotive bellow appears sporadically throughout the album, punctuating some of the band's more dramatic moments. There's enough here that Capricorns fans will want to get on board, the post-hardcore influences matched with proggy arrangements, chiming melodic guitars scrabbling over crushing riffs, the songs generally pretty rocking and mid-tempo, with lots of complex time signatures and skronky guitar, and even some really cool Voivod-esque riffing mixed in. It reminds me a lot of both Jawbox and Quicksand, a sound that'll be instantly recognizable to any of you guys who were around in the early 90's when this sort of stuff was everywhere, but Alabaster Suns add a drop-tuned metallic crunch and dissonance to it that makes this way heavier than anything from that era. Recommended!
As more and more bands are revealing an affinity for the sound of dark 80's post-punk and death rock for inspiration, I'm hearing a lot of amazing new gloomy heaviness coming out that draws from what is some of my favorite music of all time, the sinister black-clad rock of Bauhaus and Sisters Of Mercy, the occult power of Fields Of The Nephilim and Killing Joke. This sound has emerged over the past decade with more accessible bands like Interpol and the like, but what I've always wanted to hear is this influence coming through in heavier, more aggressive music, and with fantastic new albums from Anatomy Of Habit, Deathcharge, Hateful Abandon and Alaric that all have their own unique take on this particular set of influences, I'm finally getting my wish.
Made up of members of several well-known bands from the Bay Area metal/punk scene (Noothgrush, Cross Stitched Eyes, Dead & Gone, among others), Alaric brings the gloomy, shadowcast atmosphere and delivery of 80's darkwave and goth to a pummeling, vaguely metallic sound that also has some subtle traces of Neurosis that I can hear in some of the band's heavier moments. It's probably more that Alaric mines some of the same influences that helped to define Neurosis's sound, the application of metallic crunch to the apocalyptic tribal power of early Killing Joke and Amebix. This is incorporated into a set of heavy, driving songs on Alaric's debut that range from the wash of chorus-heavy acoustic and electric guitars that lead to the apocalyptic dirge of "Eyes" to the churning tribal rhythms and swirling reverberant bass-driven power of "Ugly Crowds", with the grim lyrical matter delivered via singer Shane Baker's Brit-accented moan. There are several songs on here that crank up the heaviness such as the lumbering "Your God" with it's militaristic pummel and moments of almost Swans-esque crush, but the bulk of the album is spent driving the gloomy minor key melodies, anthemic choruses and propulsive, bass heavy n' doom-laden crunch forward through ever darkening clouds of urban dread.
This album is pretty killer, one of the best of the new fusions of dark heaviness and post-punk gloom to come out this year, definitely recommended.
As more and more bands are revealing an affinity for the sound of dark 80's post-punk and death rock for inspiration, I'm hearing a lot of amazing new gloomy heaviness coming out that draws from what is some of my favorite music of all time, the sinister black-clad rock of Bauhaus and Sisters Of Mercy, the occult power of Fields Of The Nephilim and Killing Joke. This sound has emerged over the past decade with more accessible bands like Interpol and the like, but what I've always wanted to hear is this influence coming through in heavier, more aggressive music, and with fantastic new albums from Anatomy Of Habit, Deathcharge, Hateful Abandon and Alaric that all have their own unique take on this particular set of influences, I'm finally getting my wish.
Made up of members of several well-known bands from the Bay Area metal/punk scene (Noothgrush, Cross Stitched Eyes, Dead & Gone, among others), Alaric brings the gloomy, shadowcast atmosphere and delivery of 80's darkwave and goth to a pummeling, vaguely metallic sound that also has some subtle traces of Neurosis that I can hear in some of the band's heavier moments. It's probably more that Alaric mines some of the same influences that helped to define Neurosis's sound, the application of metallic crunch to the apocalyptic tribal power of early Killing Joke and Amebix. This is incorporated into a set of heavy, driving songs on Alaric's debut that range from the wash of chorus-heavy acoustic and electric guitars that lead to the apocalyptic dirge of "Eyes" to the churning tribal rhythms and swirling reverberant bass-driven power of "Ugly Crowds", with the grim lyrical matter delivered via singer Shane Baker's Brit-accented moan. There are several songs on here that crank up the heaviness such as the lumbering "Your God" with it's militaristic pummel and moments of almost Swans-esque crush, but the bulk of the album is spent driving the gloomy minor key melodies, anthemic choruses and propulsive, bass heavy n' doom-laden crunch forward through ever darkening clouds of urban dread.
This album is pretty killer, one of the best of the new fusions of dark heaviness and post-punk gloom to come out this year, definitely recommended.
Back in the early 90's, you know, the glory days of death metal, we were soaking our ears in the sounds of Cynic, Atheist, and Pestilence, all bands that were blazing some brave new paths in death metal by connecting brutal DM with fusion jazz, forming a new branch of progressive death metal that set the standard for the genre. Since the early 90's, there aren't that many bands that have come close to matching the technicality and jazz chops of those seminal bands, but Alarum are one of the few that have totally knocked our socks off with some of the most brain-frying death/fusion we've ever heard. Yikes! Eventuality is as good as progressive jazz-infused death metal can get, and it quickly became a classic release within the realm of tech/death.
Alarum's penchant for Cynic worship is still heavily in place, with plenty of energetic riffing and tightly knit alternate picking patterns with lots of intricately woven layers of guitar parts and basslines that could've easily been at home on Focus, not to mention some of the more ethereal textures and clean passages, but their songwriting has definitely become more diverse and creative over the years. They are obviously influenced heavily by the forerunners of technical/progressive death metal like Cynic and Atheist, but I'm hearing just a heavy influence of jazz fusion musicians like Allan Holdsworth and Chick Corea...the solos on Eventuality are off the chart, super fluid,jazzy,melodic playing that blows us away every time we hear it. Essential for tech heads, especially anyone into Athiest and Cynic !!
I've liked all of the records that I've heard from Bardo Pond, it's all great, smoke-wreathed psych rock jamming delivered from deep in the dopezone, but while listening to 'em, I always inevitable finding myself hoping that the Bardo guys are going to kick in with a truly crushing riff to shatter the languid torpor of their sprawling jams, and really go into the red, ya know? Thanks to this somewhat recent new disc from Slim and his consistently amazing Archive label, we've got a full length disc from the Bardo Pond side project Alasehire, and it totally meets my aforementioned needs. Alasehire features three of the members of Bardo Pond, and on Stone Sentinels, they create three sprawling tracks of riff-heavy sludgy psychedelia that sounds like Bardo Pond on 'roids, indeed; the Gibbons brothers are on dual guitars, dropping Sabbath strength slomo riffs alongside the meandering drumming from Bardo drummer Jason Kourkonis. The 1st track "Nazca" unfurls massive Western-tinged psychedelic improvisation, almost Earth-like guitar meditations and narcotic slide guitar twang laced with blasts of powerful feedback and noise, before moving into the free-floating Sabbathian psych of "Lost City". This starts off as a cloud of hazy and dreamy ambience that drifts from mellow acoustic guitars and woodsy psych-folk but evolves into a massive tangle of crushing sludge metal riffing, sweeping oscillators, and strafing wah-wah freakout, like Hawkwind, Acid Mothers, and Sunburned Hand Of The Man filtered through heavily drugged sludgecore. And "Shroud" follows a similiar route, a far-drifting dopehaze of exploratory stoner jamming, tweaked electronic noises, Kourkonis' powerful, busy drumming constantly divebombed by spacey, superphased electronic FX and swirling feedback. Towards the end of the track, guitars and drums disappear altogether as the band bottoms out into a field of sparse electronic textures and chirping Bastard Noise-esque noise. I loved this disc, it's an immenselt spaced out slab of free psychedelia with moments of chaotic heaviness that really blast off. The disc comes in a six panel glossy full color gatefold jacket much in the same style as Archive's other recent releases, with the disc attached to the jacket on a plastic hub. It's limited to 600 copies, too.
��Albatwitch's Only Dead Birds Sing Over the Graves of Fallen Kings is the first album from this new project from Stone Breath / Mourning Cloak / Time Moth Eye founder Timothy Renner, and continues to travel down the darker, noisier rural pathways that Renner has been increasingly drawn to in recent years. Taking its name from a peculiar, mythical Sasquatch-like being found in southern Pennsylvanian folklore, Albatwitch blends the sort of fractured graveyard folk and twisted Appalachian song craft that his other older bands are known for, with harsher sounds that include elements of blown-out, low-fi black metal and nasty electronic noise. Self-described as "blackened swamp crust noise drone folk", the music on Dead Birds invokes visions of a sinister shadow-world hidden beyond the rural byways and back roads of Pennsylvania, one inhabited by those titular mystical ape-men as well as undead crows and gaunt specters lurking in the shadows of Three Mile Island, the lyrics shot through with a scathing underlying environmentalist message.
�� The duo (which also includes multi-instrumentalist Brian Magar) uses a variety of instruments, from acoustic and electric guitars, banjo, stick dulcimer, harmonium, Celtic harp, banjola, electronic oscillators to more obscure ethnic instruments like dumbek and bodhran to craft their blackened, mutant folk-dirges. Tracks like opener "Die Gedanken Sind Frei" (an adaptation of an early 19th century German protest song), "Liar's Noose" and "Nomads" sound positively ancient, ghostly arrangements of withered bluegrass banjo and shadow-streaked Appalachian folk that skulk and slip between shifting twilight shadows. These moments are then followed by the occasional blast of utterly brutal blackened noise, like the ultra-distorted violence of "Break Apart" that sputters out of the speakers like a din of massively distorted blastbeats and Masonna-esque screech. There are many moments of mutant metallic heaviness to be found here as well, like the loping blackened sludge metal of "Beneath the Flood", a low-fi blast of Frostian heaviness and screeching ghastly vocals shrouded in murky, noisy guitar and rumbling feedback, Renner's deep monotone chant appearing later in the song to lend it a demented ritualistic vibe. There's some wretched blackened doom alongside the scorched black instrumental psychedelia of "Floodwaters", which blends the dry, weather-beaten plunk of the banjo with droning, almost raga-like strains of distorted electric guitar, a mixture of searing buzzing psychedelia and rural creep that sounds like the sort of stuff that Revelator did on his Time Moth Eye album, before drifting languidly into more of that gorgeous wraith-folk on the title track. It's stuff like that which gives much of Dead Birds a similar vibe as some early 90s Scandinavian black metal demos.
�� All throughout the album, the folkier tracks are layered with some seriously blown-out guitar noise and wrecked acid-shred buried way down in the mix, giving even these quieter, more solemn songs an utterly fried, corroded texture, hints of a possible Japanese psych influence creeping in. On "The Gods And The Apes", a female voice reads from the poetry of early American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre's as a savagely over-modulated synth chortles deep in the mix, playing a warped baroque melody bathed in bone-rattling speakerbuzz; that later transforms into a kind of skeletal doom, simple clanking percussion banging in slow motion beneath swooping terrifying shrieks and ghostly cries, like some junkyard funeral march. Prayer-bowl drones whirl around the lumbering psychdoom of "The Hanged Man", a murky, lethargic mantra of blackened buzz and meandering bass guitar, smears of feedback and shimmering guitar dissonance washing across the hypnotic slow motion pulse. "Rise!" is one of the few tracks where all of this stuff clings together, the banjo playing right over the lurching discordant sludge riffs, the songs suddenly eruoting into a blast of bizarre folk-flecked blackened violence, Timothy's droning chant like voice suddenly being replaced by harsh, frenzied screaming. "Frack-ture" is an environmentalist screed aimed towards the practice of oil fracking in Pennsylvania, a nightmarish miasma of recorded testimony regarding the disturbing effects of the drilling process on local communities and the environment, materializing as a nightmare of hissing blackened shrieks, tribal rhythms and rumbling dark ambience that leads straight into the final track "Black Waters Rise". All of these tracks are short, sometimes more like sketches of abstract sound than a fully fleshed out song, but each flows right into the next, casting a web of wispy reverb and crackling noise all across the album, transforming this into some bizarre, otherworldly combination of Skepticism-esque funeral crawl, Appalachian necro-folk, cemetery ambience and crushing blasts of Wold-like black static metal.
�� Comes in a screen-printed brown jacket with an eight page full color booklet with fantastic artwork, and a vinyl sticker.
���"Heavy electronics", indeed. Originally released as a massive eight-cassette box set limited to a mere fifty copies (which naturally went out of print almost immediately), Alberich's 2010 debut full-length NATO-Uniformen was an electrifying collection of industrial experiments, thankfully finally reissued by Hospital as a deluxe double LP set. Obviously, some of the material from that initial four-hour collection had to be left out of this scaled down version, the album condensed down to its most potent components to produce a more streamlined version.
���The work of one Kris Lapke, a member of black metallers Ash Pool alongside Hospital boss (and Prurient mastermind) Dominick Fernow, Alberich took form as a monstrous amalgam of noise, techno and power electronics stylings, and the blighted black pulsations that palpitate across NATO-Uniformen comprise a key release in the relatively recent resurgence in industrial techno. The tracks nineteen tracks collected here traverse blasted sonic terrain, moving from jet-black electronics and surges of dread-filled dystopian ambience into passages of heavily distorted electro-shock rhythms and pummeling machine rumble, surrounded with a detached, desolate atmosphere. Vague militaristic motifs are fetishized within Alberich's corroded soundworld, from the stark album art to the eruptions of warfare sonics scattered through the tracks. As harsh as the atmosphere and mood is though, this stuff can get pretty infectious, from the murky darkwave synthesizers that wash across opener "Atlantic Munitions Development" to the barbaric technoid thud of tracks like "Infrared Kommando" and "Skysweeper". Lapke fuses his forays into grim industrial techno with a screeching ferocity lifted right out of classic power electronics aesthetics; elsewhere, his grimy, juddering concrete-mixer rhythms are diffused into gleaming metallic dronescapes that threaten to stretch into infinity. Most of the album centers around Lapke's use of crushing, massively distorted rhythmic loops which he welds into immense hypnotic forms, at times resembling the sound of a marching drum squad that has been slowed down and distorted into a grimy machinelike rumble, the muffled rhythms stretched across fields of cinematic synth-drone and rivers of volcanic low-end rumble.
���Other tracks unleash vicious assaults of earscraping power electronics, distorted screams rattled by the trancelike throb of malfunctioning tank-engines and waves of squealing, tortured electronic noise, overlaid with ancient Cold War media transmissions and waves of charred static; the ghostly residue of fractured electronic melodies clings like black soot to skittering, minimal techno, and rumbling mechanical dirges are slowly buried beneath warbling synth chords and swells of monstrous bass. Some of the tracks that really stood out for me included the insidious, dub-infected dancefloor funk of "Limit Mitigate Counteract Transmute" that almost resembles Sutcliffe Jugend being remixed by Cut Hands, and "Man Is Ready" is interlaced with vintage Tangerine Dream-style synths, like fragments of a score to some unseen Michael Mann war film. And the on the magnificent closer "Immortality", Lapke crafts an atmospheric kosmische epic that further dives into that classic synth sound, swirling through a gleaming fog of arpeggiated electronics like something off the scores to Thief or Sorcerer, but suffused with an almost suffocating nihilistic air. Essential stuff for fans of Alberich's distinct brand of heavy, pessimistic industrial music.
��� Comes in gatefold packaging, limited to seven hundred copies.
Back in stock once again!
The US vinyl version of Souvenirs seemed to go out of print almost as soon as it was announced, and I was only able to get a couple copies of it. Released by Hyperrealist in a limited edition of 1000 copies, this domestic pressing has the same artwork as the European LP release on Northern Silence (which is itself different from the CD release), and the copies we have are on black vinyl.
When Souvenirs d'un autre monde (which translates to "Memories Of Another World") came out in late 2007, it seemed really weird that the most beautiful rock album of the year (in my mind) came to us by way of the French black metal underground. Looking back, I've heard alot of other equally beautiful, very un-black metal albums come out of the black metal scene, but Alcest's latest full length is still one of the best, and one of the few albums to really take me back to the height of the whole UK dreampop/shoegaze scene that I grew up with. Souvenirs... is a perfect pop record, totally immersed in delicate jangly melodies and gorgeous blasts of shoegazey distortion and utterly removed from the blissed-out black metal shred of Ameseours, which is the other band that Neige from Alcest plays in. No, there are only the barest traces of metal found on this disc, heard in the super-distorted speedpicked guitars roaring down underneath the beautiful dreamy pop hooks and heartrending melodies, and in the occasional blasts of furious double-bass drumming that erupts here and there. For the most part, this is pure heavy shoegazer rock refashioned in a more distorted and epic form, much like how Justin Broadrick has taken early 90's shoegaze and molded that sound into the blissful grinding dreamsludge of Jesu, only here the sound is all dense layers of lush guitars and fragile fingerpicked acoustics, like My Bloody Valentine powered by a black metal drummer, or a heavier Chapterhouse or Catherine Wheel. All six songs here follow this route, awash in majestic swells of guitar and keyboards and dreamy vocal harmonies that evoke images of innocence and springtime. While Alcest's sound is drawn directly from early 90's shoegaze, those of you that are fans of the more atmospheric sounds of bands like Drudkh and Agalloch will likely love this album just as much as fans of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. Highly recommended! Comes in a full color digipack with booklet.
When Souvenirs d'un autre monde (which translates to "Memories Of Another World") came out in late 2007, it seemed really weird that the most beautiful rock album of the year (in my mind) came to us by way of the French black metal underground. Looking back, I've heard alot of other equally beautiful, very un-black metal albums come out of the black metal scene, but Alcest's latest full length is still one of the best, and one of the few albums to really take me back to the height of the whole UK dreampop/shoegaze scene that I grew up with. Souvenirs... is a perfect pop record, totally immersed in delicate jangly melodies and gorgeous blasts of shoegazey distortion and utterly removed from the blissed-out black metal shred of Ameseours, which is the other band that Neige from Alcest plays in. No, there are only the barest traces of metal found on this disc, heard in the super-distorted speedpicked guitars roaring down underneath the beautiful dreamy pop hooks and heartrending melodies, and in the occasional blasts of furious double-bass drumming that erupts here and there. For the most part, this is pure heavy shoegazer rock refashioned in a more distorted and epic form, much like how Justin Broadrick has taken early 90's shoegaze and molded that sound into the blissful grinding dreamsludge of Jesu, only here the sound is all dense layers of lush guitars and fragile fingerpicked acoustics, like My Bloody Valentine powered by a black metal drummer, or a heavier Chapterhouse or Catherine Wheel. All six songs here follow this route, awash in majestic swells of guitar and keyboards and dreamy vocal harmonies that evoke images of innocence and springtime. While Alcest's sound is drawn directly from early 90's shoegaze, those of you that are fans of the more atmospheric sounds of bands like Drudkh and Agalloch will likely love this album just as much as fans of Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. Highly recommended! Comes in a full color digipack with booklet.
The Australian Neurosis! Yeah, Alchemist have been compared to Neurosis ever since Relapse first released Organasm here in the US, but these guys totally take the epic post-metal thing to a new place. The music on this CD is epic, certainly, but it's more spaced out, more psychedelic , and DEFINITELY Australian sounding, with digideroo and what can only be described as the "Australian Rock" sound...if you heard it, you'd understand what I mean. The kind of Aussie rock that you might here over a travelogue video promoting vacations down under, or something. Anyways, this album crushes, with huge riffs and metallic atmospherics that definitely remind me of later Neurosis stuff, but with Pink Floyd -style psychedelic leads, that Aussie rock sound, the digideroos, awesome occasional shrieking vocals that sound like Dani from Cradle Of Filth, total VOIVOD -isms, more uptempo parts, chant-like vocals, Ennio Morricone style film music.
���� And down we go. We just picked up the cassette version (limited to three hundred copies) of this great album from Portland, OR depth-crawlers Aldebaran, as well as restocked the original CD release on Profound Lore; if you're into the more chthonic realms of funereal deathdoom, Embracing is well worth picking up. It's the most recent full-length from the band, which includes former and current members of bands like Ritual Necromancy, Howling Wind, Nightfell, Wolves In The Throne Room, as well as the guy from noise outfit Okha, and continues to surround itself in allusions to classic Weird literature, Lovecraftion cosmic horror and otherworldly imagery that's a perfect fit for the monstrous sadness of their music.
���� Aldebaran's sound is obviously seriously heavy, but one of the things that makes this stuff stand out in the sea of funeral doom dreck is their skill at weaving longform melodies through the titanic, glacial riffs, letting the songs fall into long stretches of solemn, contemplative quietude. Those moments on Embracing often sound more like some gloomy early 90s slowcore outfit, up until the mountain of metallic crush finally crashes down on everything. You can really hear it in the stark, understated grace of opener "Occultation Of Hali's Gates", which early on reminds me of the glacial beauty of bands like Codeine and Low, a somber, slow-burning instrumental introduction that takes awhile to develop into swells of distorted guitar and peals of howling feedback. Flowing into the massive sprawl of "Forever In The Dream Of Death" and "Sentinel Of A Sunless Abyss", the music then turns epic as these two half-hour long songs unfold, each a multi-part saga slowly developing from that glacially-paced instrumental passages into their surges of metallic heaviness. But it always comes, the guitars crashing in with their majestic, almost hymn-like riffs, the drums slow and deliberate, a series of earthbeating tectonic reverberations, all building to that moment when the guttural roar of the singer suddenly punctuates the gloom. Really powerful stuff that's never sounded better than it does on Embracing, cold and sorrowful and desolate, death metal turned elegiac. It's downright beautiful, draped in lush Hammond-like organ and wound in those drawn-out, gorgeous melodic riffs and flecked with traces of mournful twang. A sound that fans of Thergothon, Evoken, Skepticism and Asunder are well familiar with, but Aldebaran are at the top of the heap when it comes to this sort of stuff, with killer songwriting that always teeters on the edge between the hushed, wintry beauty of their quieter moments, and the charred, colossal crush of their deathly funereal doom.
This record has been out for awhile, but we never stocked it until now. Available on black vinyl, this is one to pick up if you dug that new album that came out on Profound Lore earlier last year...
From Forgotten Tombs is a vinyl-only collection of re-mastered odds and ends culled from the ten year presence of this Portland, OR based sludge metal band. The band includes past and present members of esteemed Pacific Northwest black metal outfits like The Howling Wind, L'Acephale and Wolves In The Throne Room, but Aldebaran are pure doom. The Lp features the tracks off the Pleasures Of War 7", their side of the split CD with Ohio's Rue, and a previously unreleased cover of Pentagram's The Ghoul", all recorded between 2004-2006, showcasing this monstrous outfit's awesome blackened boogie and glacial deathcrawl.
The two tracks off the Pleasures Of War 7" are primo Sabbathian sludge jolted with a sickening, blackened vibe, a more diseased and rotting take on the swampy evil boogie of Weedeater and Eyehategod, huge bloozy riffs splattered in feedback and sinister discordance, the drummer weaving through the tarpit crush with jagged, complex rhythms that get pretty twisted. Like a lot of Aldebaran's stuff, there's a Lovecraftian influence that runs through the songs with sampled voices and nods to gibbering cosmic horror that appear in the art and lyrics.
Same goes for the four songs from the Rue split; here's my old write-up for the disc from back in 2004: Following Rue, the lumbering black sludge behemoth Aldebaran makes it's appearance, their first track is the awesomely titled "They Bend The Trees And Crush The Cities" rises up with an H.P. Lovecraft derived sample that I can't place, and crush forth with a slow motion tar-spattered boogie that moves in thick gooey strides. The other three tracks blend together the apocalyptic imagery with songs titled "Tower Of Famine", "Aldebaran Red", and "The Obscene", and mix in some spacey chorus-soaked guitar effects into the creeping sludge, which, coupled with Mike's distinctive screeching witch-howl (how in the fuck did I never make this connection before?) makes this sound a lot like YOB stripped down to it's barbaric blackened core and playing a more primitive droning variant on their psychedelic doom sound. Definitely a band that fans of YOB and Buried At Sea and Bongzilla need to hear.
And then there's the Pentagram cover, a solid choice in tuneage to pay homage to; Aldebaran drag "The Ghoul" down into a sunless subterranean hole way beyond the sub-basement, that massive Sabbathoid riffage drenched in gluey heaviness, the song dropped down into some rib-rattling tuning and transformed into a leaden graveyard crawl that could just as easily have been one of Aldebaran's own songs.
Back in stock. I've been gradually making my way through the entire discography of Portland, OR band Aldebaran, who have been producing some of the finest contemporary doom/death around ever since forming around a decade ago. I'm a big fan of drummer Tim Call and his various other bands, which ranges from the black metal of Howling Wind and Ardour Loom to the blackened doom-crust of Nightfell to his stints as the live drummer for C-Blast faves like Saturnalia Temple and Mournful Congregation, but Aldebaran is one of his longest running outfits, with a number of fantastic albums of crushing, cosmic doomdeath albums under their belt.
The 2011 EP Buried Beneath Aeons features just one song from the band, but it's an epic, a half-hour long crawl through hellish depths of molten downtuned doom and ascending on wings of soaring, solemn majesty. As with the rest of Aldebaran's work, "Buried Beneath Aeons" combines otherworldly Lovecraftian imagery and themes of cosmic horror with their creeping tectonic crush, evoking antediluvian intelligences and awakening gods with their mix of monstrously lumbering death metal and sorrowful guitar parts. They're tapping into an old and well-worn sound with this stuff, of course, but Aldebaran combine all of these elements into something much more effective and unearthly than most, skillfully weaving those eldritch vibes through these waves of glacial death metal, crafting stunning, sepulchral melodies that course and creep through the various passages of winding riffery that emerge over the course of the record. Tribal drumming and crushing funereal tempos intertwine as the riffs shift, moving from one impressive depth-charge eruption of slow-mo heaviness to another, the guitars sometimes shedding their molten black weight in favor of plaintive chords that shimmer with heavy doses of reverb, like the passage of almost Earth-esque gloom that rings out over the very beginning of "Buried". Naturally, you'll hear echoes of the classic doom/death of early My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost in this stuff, but the ghostly guitar parts and the almost Neurosis-esque drumming that reappears throughout the record give Aldebaran's music its unique touch. The killer album art from acclaimed illustrator Dan Seageave perfectly matches the towering, titanic feel of their music, and it's reproduced on the big fold-out poster that comes with the album. Pressed on one hundred eighty gram vinyl, and issued in a limited run of five hundred copies.
���� And down we go. We just picked up the cassette version (limited to three hundred copies) of this great album from Portland, OR depth-crawlers Aldebaran, as well as restocked the original CD release on Profound Lore; if you're into the more chthonic realms of funereal deathdoom, Embracing is well worth picking up. It's the most recent full-length from the band, which includes former and current members of bands like Ritual Necromancy, Howling Wind, Nightfell, Wolves In The Throne Room, as well as the guy from noise outfit Okha, and continues to surround itself in allusions to classic Weird literature, Lovecraftion cosmic horror and otherworldly imagery that's a perfect fit for the monstrous sadness of their music.
���� Aldebaran's sound is obviously seriously heavy, but one of the things that makes this stuff stand out in the sea of funeral doom dreck is their skill at weaving longform melodies through the titanic, glacial riffs, letting the songs fall into long stretches of solemn, contemplative quietude. Those moments on Embracing often sound more like some gloomy early 90s slowcore outfit, up until the mountain of metallic crush finally crashes down on everything. You can really hear it in the stark, understated grace of opener "Occultation Of Hali's Gates", which early on reminds me of the glacial beauty of bands like Codeine and Low, a somber, slow-burning instrumental introduction that takes awhile to develop into swells of distorted guitar and peals of howling feedback. Flowing into the massive sprawl of "Forever In The Dream Of Death" and "Sentinel Of A Sunless Abyss", the music then turns epic as these two half-hour long songs unfold, each a multi-part saga slowly developing from that glacially-paced instrumental passages into their surges of metallic heaviness. But it always comes, the guitars crashing in with their majestic, almost hymn-like riffs, the drums slow and deliberate, a series of earthbeating tectonic reverberations, all building to that moment when the guttural roar of the singer suddenly punctuates the gloom. Really powerful stuff that's never sounded better than it does on Embracing, cold and sorrowful and desolate, death metal turned elegiac. It's downright beautiful, draped in lush Hammond-like organ and wound in those drawn-out, gorgeous melodic riffs and flecked with traces of mournful twang. A sound that fans of Thergothon, Evoken, Skepticism and Asunder are well familiar with, but Aldebaran are at the top of the heap when it comes to this sort of stuff, with killer songwriting that always teeters on the edge between the hushed, wintry beauty of their quieter moments, and the charred, colossal crush of their deathly funereal doom.
Infernal Kommando brings us another great cassette of mysterious blackened ambience, but this time it's from a project out of Honduras of all places, not a place well known for it's black ritual ambient output. Aleph Naught turns out to fit right in with the sort of abstract graveyard drift that I look for from this label, fitting in perfectly with bands like Malvoisie, Stigma Diabolicum, and the like, with a side full of evocative kosmische blackness and dark drugged dreamscapes that winds through menacing wormholes and Lovecraftian cave systems. The five tracks on Rituals had all previously appeared on a self-released disc, but this kind of ominous black cathedral ambience always seems to sound even better when heard on cassette. Described in some quarters as "Occult Ritual Dark Ambient", Aleph Naught channels some classic Popul Vuh/Tangerine Dream style synthesizer drift and space drone into darker forms, each track a dreamy, low-fi synthscape of haunting minor key creepiness and murky sonic shadow that are kept fairly short at around five minutes or so each, lacing the synth drones and rumbling on pieces like "Death Ritual', "Insects And Rats", and "The Womb Of Opposites" with what sounds like detuned piano and eerie circular keyboards that circle overhead, swells of dissonant noise and copious amounts of echo, and slabs of damaged Mellotron, dolorous choral voices and dark symphonic strings. Try imagining Zeit/Rubycon-era Tangerine Dream, but filtered through the low-fi catacomb rituals of drug-zonked occultists, and you'll have a general idea of what's up. Fans of Vinterikett's take on grim, minimal synthscapes in particular should look into this. Released in an edition of two hundred copies, the Rituals tape comes with a cover printed on metallic gold paper.
� � La Conjuration Sacree is the most recent offering of dark kosmische ambience from Aleph Naught, the Honduras-based outfit that brought us that excellent Rituals tape on the French black metal label Infernal Kommando a couple of years ago. This newer recording delivers a similar set of gorgeous phantasmagoric drift-music, a kind of mournful ghost music that draws equally from classic 70's space electronics and the grim pulse of early industrial.
� � The tape begins with an eerie piano melody that drifts in on "Let The Corpse Of Mind Lie Unburied At The Edge Of The Great Sea", the keys rising up in clusters of dissonant sound and fragments of broken, formless beauty, then dropping away as the sound transforms into something even more minimal and creepy. High, sustained tones rise and burn away in the crepuscular glow of the music, more of that ghostly piano becoming lost in the murk of Aleph Naught's atmospheric tape hiss and deep subterranean rumblings echoing through the earth. Later, the music shifts into more of a subdued kosmische-influenced sound, layers of soft warbling keyboards drifting over a haze of low-fi murk, minimal shimmering tones tumbling through a fog of spectral drones, strains of orchestral drift and strange bouts of murky industrial chaos that pop up briefly throughout the tape.
� � Side two drifts out into even darker regions with "L'acephale", as clouds of black synth-fog and eerie choral voices float through more of that low-fi fog, orchestral sounds slowly twisting and warping in space, gauzy keyboards whirring beneath Aleph Naught's spectral shadowscapes. On this track, the keyboard parts sort of remind me of Gene Moore's eerie organ music for Carnival of Souls, all off-kilter and dreamlike but surrounded by swells of metallic dissonance, but then it later transforms into a nightmarish distortion of classical 70's era space music.
� � Limited to eighty-four copies, packaged in a full-color cover printed on metallic vellum stock.
A duo made up of J. Joshua Philips and someone named Exile, Alethes is the blackest shot of woodland ambience to come out of the Glass Throat camp so far. This six-song album is their debut, issued in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, and it's manifested as a visually stunning 6" by 6" gatefold jacket that folds out to six panels. The jacket is made from some sort of thick, leathery pitch-black card material that has an almost silky finish, on which the eerie artwork and calligrapy-style lettering of the lyrics and sleeve notes are printed in black foil-stamped relief ink. This really looks freaking amazing. On Alethia, the duo are joined by Armin Zomorodi on cello, Nora Danielson on violin, and Markus Wolff (Crash Worship, Blood Axis, Waldteufel) on percussion, and create a grim, minimalist doom-folk from the darkside, a reverse negative image of delicate sylvan psych-folk forming out of slow, atonal acoustic guitar melodies and minor key arpeggios, raw, with the gravelly, raspy voice of some unseen thing reciting ominous, spiritually-contemplative lyrics. A slow moving glide through shadowy nocturnal glades and clouds of shimmering strings, doomed and mystical. Almost like some combination of Neurosis, Comus and Swans performing acoustically as background sounds for ancient pagan rites under cover of total darkness. Another heavily evocative doom-folk document from the GT orbit, grim and doomy enough to appeal to fans of the more acoustic-tinged edges of doom and black metal. Highly recommended.
Alfarmania the self-described "post-mortem power electronic" project from workaholic Kristian Olsson, who also records with projects like Survival Unit and Blood Ov Thee Christ, and Tony Hall�n; like those outfits, Alfarmania is dark, heavy industrial, but this is a much more blackened and sinister sound than anything else that I've heard from Olsson. The sound is dark, creepy industrial with a seriously blackened streak running through it; I hear hints of Abruptum, the early Broken Flag output, and SPK in the grinding slow-motion clang and murk of Nojjan, all of which signifies that this is exactly the kind of industrial sound that I'm addicted to, and this tape (the first ever American release from Alfarmania, and released by the excellent Cathartic Process label) is definitely on the heavier side of the noise/industrial spectrum. Each side of the sixty minute tape has two long tracks, lengthy sprawling fields of blown out murky drones, demonic howling, harsh distorted shrieks, electronic FX, pounding percussion buried underneath the layers of noise, streaks of high pitched feedback, indiscernible samples from old low budget horror films, scraped metal and surges of blown-out scrap metal chaos, and heavy doom-laden riffs that seem to be coming from distorted guitars (or at least seriously distorted synths, it's hard to tell exactly). The atmosphere on these tracks is positively apocalyptic and steeped in dread and despair, the sounds densely layered, shifting between corrosive noise and a blackened power electronics assault. Overdriven synths roar, blasting heavy metallic drones and deep rumbling electronics, deep distorted vocals echoing through the clang and buzz, at certain parts the sound is invaded by the whining skree of what sound like dentist drills; at other points, squealing gears and clanking metal rise to a deafening din. When it really launches into it's heaviest, the sounds on Nojjan sound almost like classic power electronics infused with doomdrone-strength heaviness. This is excellent apocalyptic abysmal industrial. The cassette is packaged inside of an oversized zip bag that also contains a full color folder with disturbing, hellish-looking collage art.
One of several recent tape offerings from the Virginia based experimental black/noise metal project Algea, one of the many musical endeavors of Evan Craig (Void Seance, Savage Cross, Ritual Stance).
The first few minutes of "Stagnation II" is little more than the sound of wind blowing across some vast void, an endless expanse of emptiness that stretches out in all directions. Gradually, faint distant drones begin to materialize over the horizon, and then suddenly the sound erupts into a primitive blast of low-fi black metal, super-murky and vague, the guitar blurred into an indistinct thrum in the background, the drummer pounding out an incessant unchanging blastbeat. This suddenly shifts into a slower noisier dirge when the drummer suddenly cuts out and its just a discordant guitar riff being banged out over and over, while piercing feedback drills through the fog of black distortion. This goes on for ages, plodding doom-laden fuzz joined by simple, lurching drums buried waaaaaaay down in the mix, everything shrouded in a thick crackling patina of blown-out noise. Some crazed, brain-damaged soloing appears, and later it shifts back into that droning, monotonous black blast from the beginning, while some weird, booming horn-like sounds reverberate out of the distance, almost sounding like something off of Frost's To Mega Therion.
That Frost quality gets really strong as soon as side two kicks off; "Stagnation III" begins with a killer doom-laden riff uncoiling beneath a squall of harsh, Merzbowian squelch, then explodes into super-murky blackened doom, wound around the same repeating riff but driven by lurching double bass thunder and spazztoid blasting and, again, swallowed up in a cloud of tape-hiss and low-fi filth. But instead of building into some epic blackened crescendo, it just melts down into a tangle of squealing electronic noise before dissolving into the same sort of desolate black ambience that started the tape.
Rotten, corroded black metal slime smeared with tumorous eruptions of electronic carnage, almost comparable to a no-fi version of Aussie BM experimentalist Nekrasov. Comes in a black and white, hand-assembled cover.
This super limited 12" pairs up two gooey sides of sweet n' clunky noise/free/howl punk from Gang Wizard and Algebrassiere. Gang Wizard destroy forms with
their feedback spiked mysticism and muddy improv crumble that's sort of like a yowling combination of Truman's Water and Dead C oozing across the grooves of
black wax, while Baltimore's Algebrassiere creep around their side with a crude, weird formlessness that recalls early Smegma and creeps us out. Released in
an edition of 264 copies, in handassembled black jackets with xerox art damage pasted on.
Nice, some new French filth from the consistently-killer black metal label Flamme Noir. The discs that I have thus far grabbed from this label have all blown me away, from the cold, satanic mecha-black metalof C.Y.T., to the furious hate-filled distortion whiteouts and murderous buzzsaw ambience of Drastus. The kind of stuff that seems to drop the temperature in the room a couple of degrees whenever you put it in the deck. Now we've got a new Flamme Noir outrage to run by you, and bud, this thing is pretty fucked. On the surface, Alien Deviant Circus appears to be black metal, of that peculiarly French variety with icy, dissonant guitars that form into strange riffs and unexpected song structures. But it's not long before this album reveals it's twisted agenda as looped film samples, volleys of pounding tribal drums, looped machine noises, skittery breakbeats, savage gabba beats lifted from a Bloody Fist 12", swells of orchestral majesty and slabs of malevolent black ambience are all layered together into evil industrial dirges, which make jarring, almost frightening transitions into feirce buzzing black metal riffs and hyperspeed blastbeat programming. Style-wise, Alien Deviant Circus are closer to the industrial/electro-black metal of bands like Manes, D�dheimsgard, Mysticum, Black Hole Generator and Aborym than the current crop of French avant-gardists, but there is still that perverse French sensibility still burning at the core of these hallucinogenic tracks. Could be because ADC actually has a member of Mutiilation in it's lineup, one of the original members of the notorious Les L�gions Noires. This doesn't sound at all like Mutiilation though, with the mangled drum programming and bleeping digital effects that swarm through these tracks; at times, this sounds more like Deathspell Omega buried by explosive gabba beats and sheets of electronic fuckery, or a more hypnotic version of D�dheimsgard with heavy tribal beats. Fans of the aforementioned bands should check this out, or if yer into the weird industrial/black metal deathscapes of C.Y.T. and Spektr. Blazing, warped sci-fi industrial black metal, with an overtly Satanic credo that reads like this:
Art, philosophy and drugz are the way ov this awakening towards Satan. We shall awake in order to match our vibration to his source and to arrange the manifste according to our will�
Let�s draw our strengh from decay, let us sawmp with this source ov creativity, expression and death!!!
Order shall never rise from disorder again!!!
Dethroned mankind shall end his cycle in pain and dishonor!!!
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust�
Vae victis, and they�ll be numerous!!!
Oderint dum metuant!!!
The CD is limited to 500 copies, and has some great devilish sci-fi artwork included in the packaging, all created by the singer from what I can tell. Recommended!
Once again stirring an unholy mix of Satanic delirium, apocalyptic Vedic mysticism, technoid rhythms and necrotic hatefulness, French industrial black metal weirdos Alien Deviant Circus are back with Ananta - Abh�va, the band's first new album since 2010's En To Pan Omegas. And their stuff is still firmly rooted in the maniacal mechanized terror peddled by the likes of Blacklodge, Mysticum and Aborym, but Alien Deviant Circus up the techno ante a bit more than most, at times coming close to the sort of black metal speedcore of D-Trash artists like Schizoid.
These maniacs kick it off with a twenty-two minute opening track, the mesmeric, murky electronica that creeps across the beginning of "Ap (N�da)" blending fragments of blackened doom-folk and eerie overtone chants, squelchy bass throb and a slow-motion technoid pulse, the first few minutes swirling with a strange, demented ritualistic vibe. Once those black metal guitars kick in, their bass-driven pulse turns into a relentless thump beneath those icy riffs and washes of black cosmic electronics. Definitely reminiscent of industrial black metal pioneers Mysticum, but enfolding that sound within their own uniquely sensual derangement, as female voices emerge in the distance with ghostly operatic wailing, glitchy noises and rhythmic bleeps creeping around that malignant slow-motion techno pulse. As things progress, the Circus continues to weave a weirdly narcotic atmosphere, erupting into glitch-riddled blasts of frigid blackness, and slipping into twisted, psilocybin-dosed, Tesla-quoting excursions into mechanized heaviness. The singer switches off between those morose chants and a hoarse, gargling croak, and some songs seem to unfold into a bizarre liturgy, layering magickal verses over minimal burbling synthscapes, wafts of malformed kosmische ambience spreading like inky clouds across recitations from Crowley's Liber Samekh. Clanking industrial rhythms and swarming guitars mutate into wicked necro-techno attacks, emitting blasts of pneumatic hiss amid the trance-inducing rhythmic pummel, while bits of Carpenterian synth dread circle in the depths alongside Wax Trax-sized chunks of dancefloor obliteration. These guys aren't doing anything to reinvent industrial black metal, but I could care less when it sounds this insane. Ananta-Abh�va is definitely on par with their previous works, injecting some of that uniquely French depravity into their howling electrocuted black metal, and it delivers what is now my favorite song of theirs, the heavily atmospheric closer "Maha Pralaya (Pradhvamsa-Abh�va)" that welds a particularly tough doom-laden riff to a sweeping tremolo riff, before speedcore-style drum programming ends up turning it into something vaguely Ministry-like, easily the most vicious song on the album.
Limited to five hundred copies.
Brutal machine grind from the Czech Republic! EXTREMELY brutal and freaked out spazztoid grindcore delivered at insanely high speeds. This Cd features the entire Kopferkingel demo, full on crusty Cryptopsy-worshipping grind with some odd quirks. The second track on this is the awesome 'TV Digger' which got an excellent gabba remix treatment on their split with Inhumate and rules even more in its original form. Blasting drumming with technical fills that recall the legendary Flo Mounier, the guitars are able to switch from slower, crushing riffs to the high end chaos and into topspeed mayhem seamlessly, and the gutteral vocals are sick vomitous shrieks.This also features the tracks from the split with Cerebral Turbulency, which also kick total ass.
Choeur Delys is a new album from the French quartet Alkalys that just came out recently on Basement Apes. Don't know much about this band due to my lack of French, most of the band's website/myspace is in French and there isn't much information on them out on the web, I'm not even sure if this is their first album or not (though I'm pretty sure that it is). COming from Basement Apes, it's no surprise that their music is pretty mathy, but they combine a bunch of other interesting elements along with math rock for their sound. The seven songs on Choeur Delys mix together bits of sunny folk melody and lush guitar ambience, treated guitar strings that are scraped and bowed to create layers of textured sound, strange found-sound samples and hypnotic drones are built upon a heavy foundation of bass riffs and thunderous, complex drumming. Very proggy, very epic, I hear bits of Sonic Youth and King Crimson and Explosions In The Sky and early 90's math rock all tied up in the Alkalys sound, and those weird samples (what are those? street sounds? wildlife noises? it's impossible to tell) that float over the instrumental music throw this slightly off-kilter, giving their heavy, wall-of-guitar epics an offbeat, surreal vibe. Sometimes the guitars are woven into such thick curtains of sound that Alkalys even evoke the guitar-symphonies of Branca or Chatham. The drumming stands out, too, as it moves from busy jazz-informed flourishes and intricate patterns to bludgeoning slow-mo power. Then there's the dual bass attack - yeah, two bass guitars, but it's not as heavy as having two bassists might suggest; instead, they weave their instruments around each other in complex melodic riffs that serve as the foundation for the guitars to ascend from. Like a way proggier Explosions In The Sky with a tendency to erupt into the occasional burst of metallic heaviness, and splattered with weird random field recorded noises and samples. Comes in a four-panel digipack with cool artwork.
Alkerdeel's the heaviest thing that I've ever heard come outta the Funeral Folk label and the tight-knit Belgian basement-funeral-psych/folk scene that those cats associate with. Luizig first came out as a demo tape that Funeral Folk released in a tiny run of 66 copies, which had fans of gnarly outsider Doom clambering to get their claws upon it after it sold out quickly from the label. In steps Al over at At War With False Noise to re-release this as a limited edition CD in a run of 500 copies, and it fits right in with the other low-fi outsider black/sludge metal releases that At War has been dishing out lately like Sloth, Black Sun, Seppuku, etc.
The sleeve for this looks great, a three panel foldout sleeve with silvery ink printed onto the thick black stock, screenprinted by the French printer/label Tetedemort, and fantastic Art Nouveau artwork lifted from Aubrey Beardsley. The music? A single track of feircely noisy, low-fi basement metal weirdness. A twenty one minute track that starts off ultra chaotic and noisy black metal, blown out thrashing guitars whipped up into a thick murky sonic storm, sloppy blastbeats bashed out on trashcans, tortured screams stretched out horrifically. The song then moves through sections of nothing but room ambience and male and female voices speaking in French, haunting violins, strange clattering objects and other sounds, before kicking back in to the heaviness, only now the band breaks into some crawling, neanderthal sludge, a lumbering dirgey Melvins style riff, demonic howls, pounding trashcan drums, everything wrapped up in sludgy distorted noise. The rest of the song goes back and forth between the sludgier slower stuff and the noisy black metal, smashing the two together by the end into a mindmelting mass of fucked up, speaker shredding blacknoise doom. Crazed, filthy, deranged skuzz metal damage that puts a pounding on yer skull. Fans of blownout, noisy BM like Ildjarn, Akitsa, Bone Awl, Beherit and Malveillance will worship this, as will all of you creeps that dig the ultra low-fi sludge stuff like early Sloth and Fistula. Gruesome!
The output of Henrik Nordvargr Bjorkk (Toroidh, MZ412, Korperwelten, Folkstorm, etc.) has become so insanely prolific that I've given up trying to keep track of all of the different projects he's involved in. Whenever something new comes down the pike from his noize-injected black metal alter ego Vargr or the black industrial ambience that he creates under the Nordvargr name, I'm usually on top of it, but I didn't find out about this particular project until a good five months after the damn thing had been released. This guy is an unending fountain of black atmospheric music.
The music that's featured on the debut cd from All Hail The Transcending Ghost has been in the works for a while. The liners mention that this was recorded between 2004 and 2007, a collaboration between Nordvargr and guitarist Tim Bertilsson that engaged in on-again, off-again recording sessions that eventually birthed these seven tracks. Bertilsson is probably better known to some as the drummer for the Swedish instrumental metal band Switchblade, who released a couple of excellent albums on Deathwish and Cyclops Media a few years ago, though he has also appeared recently as a drummer for the guitar drone project Fear Falls Burning on their Frenzy Of The Absolute album from last year. As All Hail The Transcending Ghost, the two musicians create a series of restrained industrial dronescapes that might surprise some with how subdued and ambient this is compared to other recent Nordvargr related releases... the first few tracks especially are haunting driftscapes that never peak into full on aggression, but instead carefully layer soft post-rock guitar strum and minor key melodies across black oceans of machine whir and ambient drone, endless metallic shimmer and far-off factory rumblings, bits of backwards melody and traces of chanting vocals swirling in the murky dark dronescapes. The first three tracks all remind me of a much more muted and droneological version of the dark kosmiche/post-rock/blackdrone of Locrian, but the fourth track heralds a more caustic shift with deep electronic belches, Nordvargr's gutteral mumbling vocals, and glitchy noise that fully takes shape with the crushing industrial clamor of the following track. Here, dissonant guitar clang echoes across bursts of electronic blackfire that pan from speaker to speaker, erupting into a blown-out noisedirge rife with shrieking tortured vocals, like a Neurosis guitar riff ripped away from the rest of the band and left to drift over an abyss of corrosive blackdrone. The last two tracks return to the more droning, ambient end of the band's sound, but still feature swells of ominous ambient riffage and abrasive guitar noise that lurks just below the surface of their distorted dronescapes. It's a strange but effective mix of black ambience, cold droning industrial, and metallic guitar sludge, sort of like a blackened industrial version of Fear Falls Burning at times. Another winner from Nordvargr, for sure.
Along with the small number of copies of the out of print early Crucial Blast titles from Rune and Katastrofialue that recently surfaced as part of a return that just arrived here from one of our old distributors, I also found a couple of copies of the Cd from blackened death/crust beasts All Is Suffering. A collection of studio and Ep material, The Past: Vindictive Sadisms Of Petty Bureaucrats has been out of print since at least 2005, and is one of the label's earliest efforts. It's also one of the only releases from a a little known but amazing band from southern Maryland who blew me away during their short span of existence with an apocalyptic mixture of old school death metal, imperial black metal, ultra-bleak ambience, majestic doom, and a definite Scandinavian crust influence. Not many people heard 'em when they were around as the band rarely played live and never toured outside of the area, and only released one other 7" Ep after this disc came out, but every single person that I've talked to about the band fucking loved them. Here's my original description of the disc from when it first came out, with all hyperbole intact:
"Fueled by war and corruption, The Past:Vindictive Sadisms Of Petty Bureauracrats collects both new studio recordings and demo and EP tracks from this visionary Maryland grind/crust band. All Is Suffering combine rabidly violent grindcore and epic black/death metal with monastic chants, blackened drones, incredibly catchy melodies, and a cosmic endtime ambiance. Some have compared them to His Hero Is Gone meets Marduk. Fourteen blasts of adventurous, grim, and vicious disgust for diseased humanity."
So there you go. Less than four in stock!
A real what-the-fuck release Relapse dropped on us in 2016 that made me do a double take. Joel Grind is the crossover king, his band Toxic Holocaust turning into one of the biggest thrash outfits of the past decade. The guy is a riff-machine, making his albums pretty consistent in terms of ripping, circle-pit power. But this EP pairs Grind with an artist who couldn’t be further from the crossover thrash spectrum: the A-side of this thing features the legendary Davie Allan of all people. One of the original pioneers of surf rock, Allan and his backing band The Arrows were a constant presence in 1960s-era exploitation films about juvenile delinquents and troublesome biker gangs, many of them produced by Roger Corman's legendary American International Pictures. From 1966's The Wild Angels and 67's The Born Losers to the "mondo-teeno" documentary Teenage Rebellion, Allan and the Arrows were all over the place, and their version of the song "Apache '65" is one of the all-time surf / rockabilly classics. His cranked-up fuzzed-out distortion sound has been cited as a proto-punk element, and if you do a dive into his work over the years, it's pretty apparent that Allan has been an extremely influential figure in the evolution of rock and roll here in the U.S. So what's he doing on this platter with thrash-master Joel Grind?
Laying down some sweet, sweet instrumental aggro surf rock, is what. As does Grind. A showcase of two accomplished guitarists going to town on the classic psych / surf sound, with two original songs from each. It's fuzzbox city, man. Davie Allan rips out "Recycled Too" and "Buzz Saw Effect", ancient motorcycles revving up as he delivers some seriously distorted licks slathered in vintage distortion over a heavy rock backbeat. That crunchy tone of his cuts right through the speakers, and both of these songs are built on massive grooves; Allan's playing and songwriting actually sounds totally contemporary, which speaks to how influential he's been on the entire history of hard rock. "Buzz Saw" couldn't have been titles better; the bouncy, bluesy backing riff snarls at you while he's picking out that infectious lead. It's awesome. I only wish that there was more. The Joel Grind side then counters with “Peacekeeper" and “The Invisible Landscape", his own metallic crunch fueling the driving instrumental of the first song as he blends in some mutant acid-garage licks with a rhythm section straight out of early 80's heavy metal. But "Landscape" is weirder, welding that old-school heavy metal crunch to some straight-up surfy licks, with washes of wild wah-pedal whirling around everything. It's amazing, like hearing British Steel-era Priest playing a Ventures tune? I don't know. I just know that this kills.
A brief but blazing blast of heavy biker-psych rock bliss! This shit makes me want to jump on a 1969 Easy Rider Chopper and turn into a werewolf. Comes with a digital download.
The devilish noise project Allegory Chapel Ltd. is one of the older members of the American noise scene, with releases that date all of the way back to the mid 1980's. Elden M. is the guy behind ACL, and later in the 90's he would go on to become a central figure in the excellent black metal label and mailorder Blackmetal.com, but during the heyday of Allegory Chapel Ltd, he was producing some of the most evil sounding noisescapes that were drifting around the American post-Industrial underground. After releasing a number of limited edition cassettes and contributing tracks to compilations, ACL released it's first full length in the early 1990's with When Angels Fall, released by Mason Jones of Subarachnoid Space/Trance on his Charnel Music label. This was one creepy album, from the silver-on-black album artwork and artwork depicting a lone Seraphim tumbling into some kind of maelstrom and through to the grim fusion of orchestral Classical music, dark ambient, strange samples, and grinding, pulverizing distorted noise textures. The album moves from the somber faux-strings and creepy ambience of the opening track "Introduction (Allegory of the Frozen Heart)" to the shredding blacknoise cut-up of the monstrous "Trajectory Calculations", which is rife with sudden bursts of white noise, a constant deep rumbling presence, horrific screams run through a malfunctioning tape machine, and barely perceptible rhythms seething underneath the surface. That track is barely six minutes long, but it's one of the most crushing and unsettling on the album. The rest of the album continues to descend into dynamic white-noise mantras with terrifying vocal loops of a woman screaming in abject terror ("Predatory Instincts"), almost tactile washes of drone-noise interlaced with minimalist piano and muffled voice samples("Self Destructive Jealousy..."), swooping test-tones launching into columns of brutal, demonic distortion ("Escalate the Violence!"), evil sound collage ("P x Q"), and deformed piano dirges ("Recital 587"). The album's most powerful piece has got to be the closing track " Requiem for Thee Possessed" , a nearly ten-minute dark drone piece that layers together a chopped-up and looped female voice that sings bits and pieces of the old English folk song "I Wish, I Wish" with corrosive crunching distortion and haunting female chorales...very dark and haunting and beautiful.
Allegory Chapel Ltd.'s dark noise falls somewhere in between the death industrial of Brighter Death Now and Atrax Morgue, neo-classical sound collage and the evil dungeon ambience of MZ.412 - in other words, highly recommended if yer into the darker side of noise/industrial. This is the original Charnel Music pressing of the CD which has been a tough one to find for years, but we just scraped up some of the last copies anywhere.
���� You know, nothing quite says "world peace" like detonating a speaker cone in your ear. Which is pretty much what you experience with the latest EP from the Floridian band Allergy. These guys rip through eight furious blasts of quirky noise-punk cut from highly Confusional cloth on this double-sided flexidisc, but they add some interesting oddball touches that keep this from turning into another rote Confuse clone. This shit is definitely noisy, though. Peace Fuckers is a whirlwind of hysterically over-modulated punk, combining a near-constant assault of distorted skree and feedback-overload with catchy, almost surf-rock bass lines, rampaging drumming that trips up all over itself, and griff n' frenzied screams that are fused to a gout of anti-authoritarian / anti-war / anti-cop lyrical outrage. Like most stuff in this vein, the influence of Confuse can clearly be felt, but Allergy's use of catchy, pogo-powered bass riffs and weirdly needling high-end guitar melodies cut through the hiss and static, and make this a surprisingly much more musical foray into the noisepunk realm. Still pretty headsplitting though, especially on songs like "Shadows", where it sounds like their amplifiers are blowing up mid-song, the extreme feedback squealing violently amid the onslaught of snotty streetpunk.
Now also available in a limited-edition 2022 "shit mix” colored vinyl edition for all of you distinguished aesthetes out there.
In 2016 year of our lord, it's almost unfathomable that this rare beast could have once stalked the face of the earth. But when I need a real social palette cleanser, I turn to the late 80s GG Allin stuff. And this motherfucker is top of the pile, one of the filth-king's rattiest and nastiest albums. The fifth album from Allin and originally released on Gerard Cosloy's Homestead Records, Freaks captures the beast during my favorite period of his career: with this particular expression of his monstrous Id, Allin enlisted the talents of Bulge, who otherwise belched out a couple of rippin' thrashcore releases on Ax/ction and Fudgeworthy in the early 90s, and who featured members of Gonkulator, Jesus Chrust, and Psycho. Bulge's drummer Charlie Infection had already previously worked with Allin by including the song "I Wanna Suck Your Cunt" on the Welcome To Ax/ction Island compilation. Bulge was a relatively tighter, more "stable" band compared to Allin's previous backing group, so the team-up made sense.
That said, this album is a warzone: a pitch-shifted GG lays down the law with the spoken word intro "My Revenge", then throws us headfirst into a nineteen-song orgy of drug-damaged blues riffs and monstrously fucked-up hardcore punk. His vocals sound totally scorched here, like the man has been swilling gasoline in between vocal takes. "Be My Fuckin Whore"' offers a litany of degradation and misogynistic abuse set to primitive hardcore, with some almost Greg Ginn-level guitar warp going on when it rips into a solo, followed by the thirty-second noisecore-esque blast-chaos of "Suck My Ass It Smells". "Dog Shit" delivers what is possibly my favorite line from the guy, "...Get the fuck outta my bread line...", and that general mean-spirited, ragged hardcore attack makes up the bulk of Freaks.
Other scorchers include sickoid mid-tempo rippers like "Anti Social Masterbator" (sic)and "Last In Line For The Gang Bang" that collectively climb right into your head and won't leave. You've got a nod to David Allan Coe via "Outlaw Scumfuc". And with the messed-up and overtly brain-damaged moments like the lumbering, tuneless skull-beating on "Wild Riding" and "Crash & Burn" , Allin and crew puke up a kind of Flipper / Kilslug / Black Flag-style scum-dirge that's swarming with gruesome guitar skronk, grating atonal synthesizer, go-nowhere sludgepunk riffing, and some of the more unsettling and orgasmic vocals we've heard from Allin. Goddamn awesome stuff. The closer "My Bloody Mutilation" is a drawn-out, industrial nightmare, a fog of clanking, metallic atonality and tortured invective screams, raving madness set to a oily black shimmer of deformed ambience, almost Abruptum-like in it's sheer abject hideousness. But if I had to give you just one reason to pick up this atrocity, it's the song "Die When You Die" (actually itself a sort-of cover of Destroy All Monsters's proto-punk classic "You're Gonna Die" ), a perfectly formed piece of anti-social, anti-human punk rock that has gone on to be covered by countless punk and black metal bands in the decades since. It's one of the greatest Allin songs of all time.
Bottom line is this- fans of fucked-up and demented 80s' hardcore who haven't heard this stuff are missing out. This is hanging out on the most terrible fringes of hardcore. The height of anti-social art-psychosis and chaos-invocation in the latter half of the 1980s. The Freaks album could sit nicely alongside other albums that I would term "outsider hardcore", in spite of some probable pushback from members of the punk scene. But GG and the Bulge beasts were not interested in working within the parameters of the then-current hardcore scene. This is so much more transgressive, more bizarre, more genuinely deranged and incontrovertibly misanthropic, more dissident and self-destroying in every possible way. Allin himself considered this album to be one of the best of his career. A sodomatic , Dionysian immolation rite, pursuing ultimate physical transcendence in a manner not unlike the Aghori sect. And man, nobody ever came close to hustling the way that GG did. It's a sight and sound to behold. Everyone else was performing theater. This was the real deal.
Now also available in a limited-edition 2022 "shit mix” colored vinyl edition for all of you distinguished aesthetes out there.
In 2016 year of our lord, it's almost unfathomable that this rare beast could have once stalked the face of the earth. But when I need a real social palette cleanser, I turn to the late 80s GG Allin stuff. And this motherfucker is top of the pile, one of the filth-king's rattiest and nastiest albums. The fifth album from Allin and originally released on Gerard Cosloy's Homestead Records, Freaks captures the beast during my favorite period of his career: with this particular expression of his monstrous Id, Allin enlisted the talents of Bulge, who otherwise belched out a couple of rippin' thrashcore releases on Ax/ction and Fudgeworthy in the early 90s, and who featured members of Gonkulator, Jesus Chrust, and Psycho. Bulge's drummer Charlie Infection had already previously worked with Allin by including the song "I Wanna Suck Your Cunt" on the Welcome To Ax/ction Island compilation. Bulge was a relatively tighter, more "stable" band compared to Allin's previous backing group, so the team-up made sense.
That said, this album is a warzone: a pitch-shifted GG lays down the law with the spoken word intro "My Revenge", then throws us headfirst into a nineteen-song orgy of drug-damaged blues riffs and monstrously fucked-up hardcore punk. His vocals sound totally scorched here, like the man has been swilling gasoline in between vocal takes. "Be My Fuckin Whore"' offers a litany of degradation and misogynistic abuse set to primitive hardcore, with some almost Greg Ginn-level guitar warp going on when it rips into a solo, followed by the thirty-second noisecore-esque blast-chaos of "Suck My Ass It Smells". "Dog Shit" delivers what is possibly my favorite line from the guy, "...Get the fuck outta my bread line...", and that general mean-spirited, ragged hardcore attack makes up the bulk of Freaks.
Other scorchers include sickoid mid-tempo rippers like "Anti Social Masterbator" (sic)and "Last In Line For The Gang Bang" that collectively climb right into your head and won't leave. You've got a nod to David Allan Coe via "Outlaw Scumfuc". And with the messed-up and overtly brain-damaged moments like the lumbering, tuneless skull-beating on "Wild Riding" and "Crash & Burn" , Allin and crew puke up a kind of Flipper / Kilslug / Black Flag-style scum-dirge that's swarming with gruesome guitar skronk, grating atonal synthesizer, go-nowhere sludgepunk riffing, and some of the more unsettling and orgasmic vocals we've heard from Allin. Goddamn awesome stuff. The closer "My Bloody Mutilation" is a drawn-out, industrial nightmare, a fog of clanking, metallic atonality and tortured invective screams, raving madness set to a oily black shimmer of deformed ambience, almost Abruptum-like in it's sheer abject hideousness. But if I had to give you just one reason to pick up this atrocity, it's the song "Die When You Die" (actually itself a sort-of cover of Destroy All Monsters's proto-punk classic "You're Gonna Die" ), a perfectly formed piece of anti-social, anti-human punk rock that has gone on to be covered by countless punk and black metal bands in the decades since. It's one of the greatest Allin songs of all time.
Bottom line is this- fans of fucked-up and demented 80s' hardcore who haven't heard this stuff are missing out. This is hanging out on the most terrible fringes of hardcore. The height of anti-social art-psychosis and chaos-invocation in the latter half of the 1980s. The Freaks album could sit nicely alongside other albums that I would term "outsider hardcore", in spite of some probable pushback from members of the punk scene. But GG and the Bulge beasts were not interested in working within the parameters of the then-current hardcore scene. This is so much more transgressive, more bizarre, more genuinely deranged and incontrovertibly misanthropic, more dissident and self-destroying in every possible way. Allin himself considered this album to be one of the best of his career. A sodomatic , Dionysian immolation rite, pursuing ultimate physical transcendence in a manner not unlike the Aghori sect. And man, nobody ever came close to hustling the way that GG did. It's a sight and sound to behold. Everyone else was performing theater. This was the real deal.
Now also available in a limited-edition 2022 "shit mix” colored vinyl edition for all of you distinguished aesthetes out there.
In 2016 year of our lord, it's almost unfathomable that this rare beast could have once stalked the face of the earth. But when I need a real social palette cleanser, I turn to the late 80s GG Allin stuff. And this motherfucker is top of the pile, one of the filth-king's rattiest and nastiest albums. The fifth album from Allin and originally released on Gerard Cosloy's Homestead Records, Freaks captures the beast during my favorite period of his career: with this particular expression of his monstrous Id, Allin enlisted the talents of Bulge, who otherwise belched out a couple of rippin' thrashcore releases on Ax/ction and Fudgeworthy in the early 90s, and who featured members of Gonkulator, Jesus Chrust, and Psycho. Bulge's drummer Charlie Infection had already previously worked with Allin by including the song "I Wanna Suck Your Cunt" on the Welcome To Ax/ction Island compilation. Bulge was a relatively tighter, more "stable" band compared to Allin's previous backing group, so the team-up made sense.
That said, this album is a warzone: a pitch-shifted GG lays down the law with the spoken word intro "My Revenge", then throws us headfirst into a nineteen-song orgy of drug-damaged blues riffs and monstrously fucked-up hardcore punk. His vocals sound totally scorched here, like the man has been swilling gasoline in between vocal takes. "Be My Fuckin Whore"' offers a litany of degradation and misogynistic abuse set to primitive hardcore, with some almost Greg Ginn-level guitar warp going on when it rips into a solo, followed by the thirty-second noisecore-esque blast-chaos of "Suck My Ass It Smells". "Dog Shit" delivers what is possibly my favorite line from the guy, "...Get the fuck outta my bread line...", and that general mean-spirited, ragged hardcore attack makes up the bulk of Freaks.
Other scorchers include sickoid mid-tempo rippers like "Anti Social Masterbator" (sic)and "Last In Line For The Gang Bang" that collectively climb right into your head and won't leave. You've got a nod to David Allan Coe via "Outlaw Scumfuc". And with the messed-up and overtly brain-damaged moments like the lumbering, tuneless skull-beating on "Wild Riding" and "Crash & Burn" , Allin and crew puke up a kind of Flipper / Kilslug / Black Flag-style scum-dirge that's swarming with gruesome guitar skronk, grating atonal synthesizer, go-nowhere sludgepunk riffing, and some of the more unsettling and orgasmic vocals we've heard from Allin. Goddamn awesome stuff. The closer "My Bloody Mutilation" is a drawn-out, industrial nightmare, a fog of clanking, metallic atonality and tortured invective screams, raving madness set to a oily black shimmer of deformed ambience, almost Abruptum-like in it's sheer abject hideousness. But if I had to give you just one reason to pick up this atrocity, it's the song "Die When You Die" (actually itself a sort-of cover of Destroy All Monsters's proto-punk classic "You're Gonna Die" ), a perfectly formed piece of anti-social, anti-human punk rock that has gone on to be covered by countless punk and black metal bands in the decades since. It's one of the greatest Allin songs of all time.
Bottom line is this- fans of fucked-up and demented 80s' hardcore who haven't heard this stuff are missing out. This is hanging out on the most terrible fringes of hardcore. The height of anti-social art-psychosis and chaos-invocation in the latter half of the 1980s. The Freaks album could sit nicely alongside other albums that I would term "outsider hardcore", in spite of some probable pushback from members of the punk scene. But GG and the Bulge beasts were not interested in working within the parameters of the then-current hardcore scene. This is so much more transgressive, more bizarre, more genuinely deranged and incontrovertibly misanthropic, more dissident and self-destroying in every possible way. Allin himself considered this album to be one of the best of his career. A sodomatic , Dionysian immolation rite, pursuing ultimate physical transcendence in a manner not unlike the Aghori sect. And man, nobody ever came close to hustling the way that GG did. It's a sight and sound to behold. Everyone else was performing theater. This was the real deal.
So if you're a rabid GG vinyl collector, there's a good chance that you already have at least most of the EP material gathered together on this cassette, although as I’ll mention momentarily, there's is some rare shit here that even I hadn't come across before. This TPOS tape is a total anomaly. Purported to be a collection of "singles" from Allin's various incarnations throughout the 1980s (although the actual release dates of these EPs frequently date beyond 1990), I haven't been able to find any concrete information on this specific tape anywhere. That said, this is a bulldozer of Allin's signature scatological punk, with some stunningly brain-blasting versions plucked out of the rotting compost heap that is his studio discography.
The EP material is smeared across both sides: live recordings of "Dirge" and "Dog Shit" that I think came off of the extremely rare Sickest of The Sick 10", recorded live at Kisha's in Berkeley, CA, on March 17, 1989. That track here titled "Dirge" (which might also be known as "Jesus & Mothers Cunt", but I'm not 100% on that) is one of my fave GG freak-outs, a murky mess of stumbling doped-out freeform punk-sludge / noise-dirge a la Kilslug or Flipper with some demented Greg Ginn-esque guitar skronk whipping everything into a bloody heap, while GG rants and drools and grunts his murderously anti-social and blasphemous stream-of-conscious madness, an almost improvisational meltdown from the whole band; it's a beast, definitely one of the more fucked -up and outre GG Allin jams from the era. The other tune follows some in-the-moment discussion from GG, before we get nuked in the face by a shambling, pissed-off "Dog Shit" that sounds like GG has something crammed down his trachea. Gnarly. Another berserk live recording features "Diarrhea Blues", "Drink Fight And Fuck", "Cock On The Loose" and "Out For Blood" which all appear to be taken from the 1990 Live...Carolina In My Ass 7" that came out on Repo Records. The band sounds a little more demented than usual, rocking out a grueling head-on collision of stomping caveman skuzz and brain-damaged blues-punk boogie, head-bobbon' buzzsaw anthemic HC, some almost Oi!-esque "Cock"-action that is subversively catchy. Blown out and low-fi but completely psychotic, this definitely sounds like a show that I would've killed to be at. Bonus points for the entire additional venue chatter where people are dealing with the aftermath.
One of my favorite GG Allin EPs is the one he did with Bulge, "Legalize Murder", "Suck My Ass (It Smells)", "Interior Depths" all coming off the Fudgeworthy Legalize Murder 7" from 1990. Again, sound quality is brittle and harsh, which makes the bat-shit guitar shredding and wood chipper riffs all the better; ferocious speed violence smashing against the noisecore-style nonsense of "Ass" and a radio cue and the barbaric sample -laden and spoken-word-draped industrial dirge-crush of "Depths" that rivals anything from Brainbombs or Nearly Dead or Rectal Hygeniacs, awesome free flowing hate filled misanthropic prose-poetry smeared against the most abrasive kind of avant-hardcore shit-feast. Oh boy. That's tailed by the more straightfo0rward skull-caving punk rock of the 1991 versions of "Violence Now" and "Cock On The Loose" that make up the GG Allin / Antiseen collab 7" on Jettison; better productions and thicker mix doesn't detract from the blinding ugliness of this one bit. And the final track "Fartmaster" is (I think) off the Penis Rising 10" released in '91, which had Allin collaborating to various extents with the Bulge dudes again; it's a pounding sing-a-long that really makes you feel alive again.
I did an obscene amount of research on this tape with make heads and tails of what this material is sourced from, so hopefully this breaks down exactly what 7" releases are gathered here. Such is the case with a lot of these old GG tape compilations. That said, this definitely fucked me up in more ways than one. Uncut, unexpurgated transgression.
One of the more sonically extreme discs in the Allin catalog, this 2001 compilation is a fuckin' low-fi abomination. A reissue of one of the best sessions of abject noise punk from GG Allin, which has been out for awhile, but I'm just now getting it on the shelves. Like much of the later GG Allin output, it's atavistic hardcore punk filth, but this session boasts one of the harshest, most distorted recordings I think I've ever heard on an Allin album - oh hell yeah, Violent Beatings is one of my all time favorite discs from the Sewer Messiah. This recording is so fucked-up and noise-damaged that it strikes the same frayed nerve as stuff like Stickmen With Rayguns, Brainbombs, Flipper, Drunkdriver, No Balls, and Rectal Hygeneics. And that title? Couldn't be more fucking appropriate. It's one two three four and the blown-out homicide anthem "Watch Me Kill The Boston Girl" skids into you like an out of control Honda, a mere minute long blast of primitive hardcore with incredibly gnarly vocals pushed through a snarl of distortion and dented microphone. That hardcore punk element is all over the classic Watch Me Kill 7" tracks (released on Fuckin' A / Stomach Ache Records in 1991) that consist of the first half of this disc, apparently remixed and remastered from the original four-track tape recordings, slamming one after another into the mutilation fantasia "Castration Crucifixion" a mid-tempo punk stomper, into the bizarre tribal exorcism "Snakemans Dance" that weaves reptilian noises and crude tribal rhythms and GG sneering psychotically over a simple but sinister sludgy guitar riff, producing some wickedly noxious psychedelic noise rock fuckery. And then it explodes into a shrapnel storm of infectious pogo violence via "Slaughterhouse Deathcamp" and the closing song "Master Daddy", that wash of omnipresent tape-hiss consistently smeared over top of everything, simultaneously catchy as hell, and garbled and grotesque; a bizarre Communion ritual is rasped over the blasphemous sludge-punk of "Feces And Blood Bacteria Of The Soul" that dredges up some more of the band's latent shithole psychedelia, twisted and gnarled blues guitar licks and discordant amp skree swirled into the slow-motion depravity, almost suggesting a viciously violent Butthole Surfers jam as the group and Allin stumble and stomp their way to the absolute blurr-chaos of the summit. Yeah man, this EP is a beast,; again, one of my favorites of the late 80s Allin canon.
The alternate recordings from the August 1988 "Suicide Sessions" is similarly hideous and wrecked as the band rams another five tracks of grime down your throat, from the Oi!-esque catchiness of "Dagger In My Heart", the vile mid-tempo metalpunk crusher "Spread Your Legs Part Your Lips", the "classick", almost surf rock-tinged "Shit On My Prick" with its brain-damaged atonal guitar soloing and simple, barbaric riff; "Cornhole Lust"'s borderline pigfuck atrocity that stands out on the set with its slower, shambling tempo, horrific vocal sounds, and gritty noise and distortion. The band's hardcore punk undercurrent rises to the surface on "Kiss Me In The Gutter”, again demonstrating some completely berserk ear-fucking guitar skronk and solo. Oner of the real standouts on Beatings is the abject sludge of "Drug Whore", a dark and deliriant crusher that could almost pass for some unheard Hellhammer song, its grisly minor-key riffs grinding over you like a bulldozer, the noisy fretboard histrionics adding to the song's aura of depravity and chaotic frenzy, with Allin's ranting, seemingly freeform muttering and whispering and shouting drawling across the slo-mo scumbath. "I Live To Be Hated" is a perfect closer, another one of those rippin' nihilistic pogo-punk jammers that Allin and crew were able to just pluck out of the fetid air. What a glorious, abominable bloodbath.
Released on the insanely influential (well, at least to me) blurr / grind / noise / black metal label Fudgeworthy Records outta Woburn, MA and distributed by the equally impactful Ax/Ction Records, this here is a classic EP from the Allin / Bulge spree. Amidst all of the ancient n' new GG Allin-related stuff that I've been dragging in here to sate my growing obsession (hunger?) for the filth-legend's corpus, this remastered reissue of one of the more obscure Allin platters has risen to the higher ranks of the ugliest, most extreme end of the shitbag spectrum. This, this "Bulge" era with some notable names in the N ew England grind / punk scene serving as the man/s backing band, this stuff is brutal. Ugh. First emerging in 1990, this four-track EP drops you in the middle of Allin backed by bludgeoning noise-rock, a filthier and frothier mess of clanging guitar chords and power-slug drumming compared to the alternating Hardcore Punk and Scumbag New Wave of his output throughout the 1980s. Me, I love this stuff.
Backed by early 90s Massachusetts scum-core punks Bulge (which was basically a slightly different version of the somewhat seminal thrashcore band Psycho), this 7" is pure grime. It's a different version of the title track that lands here, this take of "Legalize Murder" kicking off with samples of criminal mayhem (1967's Bonnie And Clyde) before the band launches into a buzzsaw hardcore blast, GG gargling anti-human bile backed by big gang vocals; it's a grimier, filthier version of the tune that would later reappear on Brutality And Bloodshed For All, and man it sounds vicious. The infamous scat-anthem "Suck My Ass (It Smells)" gets warped here into a super-short clanging hardcore eruption of stop/start skuzz, borderline noisecore, really, and then rounds out the A-side from a clip from an appearance on the Revolution radio show.
The whole B-side though is one of my favorite Allin-fronted nightmares from this era, delivering his wretched spoken word prose over the sound of Bulge bangin' out a gruesome slow-motion sludgepunk assault that falls well within Kilslug / Groinoids / Upsidedown Cross territory, a shifting heap of atonal guitar skree and swampy downtuned dirge, wailing whammy-bar abuse drooling over everything, trippy and crushing and bass-heavy; apparently a lot of GG Allin fans aren't a fan of this one, but holy crap does it scratch my itch, full-on raw-as-fuck noise rock sewage spooling out across the entire side. Man, I really wish we had gotten more of this sort of thing from Allin and crew while he was around, because it's some terrific abject anti-musical grotesquerie. Definitely falls within the realm of outsider 80s/90s hardcore. Eeugh. Features sleeve art from the renowned underground artist Jeff Gaither.
The latest edition of the original 1997 release, featuring the Jabbers-backed version of Allin's outfit. I'm pretty sure that the Jabbers were his first backing band (to be followed by the Scumfucs) and in any event, this gets you some relatively early recordings from the human time-bomb.
The first side has two cuts from a May '83 session at David Peel's Death House, with boombox-level sound quality that makes me feel like Allin is about to reach right through the speakers and cold-cock me. That shreddin' title anthem "Out For Blood" is a classic blast of atavistic hardcore punk that uses a hammering riff suspiciously similar to Venom's "Countess Bathory" (may the chicken n' egg speculations ensue...), fast four chord mayhem blazing at sicko tempos and rotten to the pulpy core; it's a key slice of early 80's Allin / Jabbers work that strips the mascara off your face as brutally as anything this particular incarnation of the band belted out. That's followed by four other songs of lo-fi violence that emit dangerous levels of radiation hatred and contempt; the Jabbers were a vicious crew, balancing right there on the edge between that older late 70s American punk melodicism and the clenched-fist barbarity of first wave Hardcore. "Sixty Nine" is more power-pop abandon, a big clanky Kinks-esque hook busted out of sloppy electric guitars and grubby grin stretching across that mangled mug.
The other side is all from 1982, starting with the one-two Hardcore punch of the apocalyptic fast-as-fuck "Nuclear Attack" and the primitive juiced-up caveman New Wave of "You’re Wrong, I'm Right", both from a Club Merrimack set in New Hamshire. The closer is the utterly silly "Fags In The Living Room", a puerile behind-the-scene dig at the legendary Rhode Island venue of the same name; it's a no-fi pop-goof recorded in GG's bedroom, basically his absurd dragged-out lyrics over a staccato guitar strum. Pretty dumb, but par for the course. It's soaked in the degradation and mindless violence I'm lookin' for with these releases, not to mention its historical significance.
Alms is a solo project from guitarist Nathan Young, who I had previously been aware of due to his work in the psych-doom-ambient duo Ajilvsga. With Alms, Young sculpts minimal, slow-moving ampdrift that moves from hushed clouds of hypnotic buzz to heavier fields of low-fi metallic drone, and it's an intoxicating performance that's featured on this half hour long cassette. Taken from a live performance that was aired on an Albuquerque radio show in early 2011 (and split across the two sides of the tape), "Annihilation Of The Self" was apparently created primarily from Young's manipulation of a bowed amplified guitar soaked in thick, oily Metalzone style distortion. It's not at all like the Earth-style sludge-trance you might expect, though. The piece is more abstract and ambient, and after the first few minutes of minimal thrum begins to morph into a single monstrous hum that hovers and drifts slowly through a blizzard of hiss, the sustained buzzing tone stretched into infinity. That droning chord drops out for periods of time, leaving behind just a roaring wall of muted, washed-out static, and will then slowly fade back in from behind, slightly shifting into a very simple chord change that is barely perceptible at first, it's so buried beneath the maelstrom-like wall of fuzz. From there, Young slowly introduces other drones and textures, lower static humming and massive ominous chordal drift, washes of metallic flanged effects and deep speaker-rattling frequencies, even a few brief moments of Sunn O)))-like crush, but the sound continuously returns to the central, originating drone throughout the entire track, even as things begin to dissolve and crumble across the last half into smoldering fields of washed-out chordal buzz, and a ponderous bass pulse emanates from the depths in random bursts. It's pretty cool stuff if you're into this sort of crushing improvisational guitar drone/noise, and is recommended to fans of Vulture Club, Fulci, RST and the like. Those looking for form within their droning heaviness will not find it here, but for fans of pitch-black amp-stasis and crushing tectonic rumble, I recommend cranking this loud. The tape includes information regarding accessing a digital download of the recording, and is limited to fifty copies.
Small Doses doesn't send a lot of HNW our way, but when they do, we always find it satisfying. Alo Girl's Catharsis is a nearly fifteen minute block of swirling HNW from this Italian artist, the harsh wall pseudonym for Cristiano Renzoni who also runs the Urashima label and is one half of the harsh noise unit An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter. Over the course of this heavily textured wall, Renzoni strafes the surface of "Catharsis" with a constant monsoon blast of crackling high-end distortion and sharp-edged static swirling around in a dense, thickly layered vortex of movement and mass; underneath, deep sublimated bass fluctuations and thick low-end revolve in constant submerged activity, and thunderous deep-earth drones rumble way down in the lower depths. At times, the crackling, crumbling monolith feels as if it's fraying apart and is about to completely break apart, but as it seems to peak out into total static, the sonic inferno once again coalesces into a monstrous roar of mid-range buzz and searing black static. Either high volume or a sturdy set of headphones is recommended to really unlock the sputtering sonic crush that Alo Girl summons on this disc. Renzoni names some classic Japanese harsh noise artists like C.C.C.C. and Incapacitants as key influences on his brand of detailed distorto-chaos, and brings some of the same overwhelming claustrophobia to this work.
The disc comes in a small sleeve printed with high contrast artwork, and is limited to fifty-two copies.
This Lp pairs up new material from two killer dark hardcore bands, dystopian German crust-thugs Alpinist and Cleveland's apocalyptic ragers Masakari, both of whom have released new albums on Southern Lord over the past year.
On Alpinist's side, the band delivers six songs of dark, dystopian metallic hardcore, starting with the dissonant Neurosis-esque apocalyptic power of the first song, but then the band floors the pedal and launches into a speedy metallic D-beat hardcore assault that continues throughout their side. The band whips out dark melodic leads and crushing crusty riffs, sudden downshifting into raging rocking mid-tempo fury, lurching jagged dirge, blast beat driven violence, and swirling breakdowns with powerful super-tight drumming. The vocals are a mix of pissed-off shrieks and death metallish howls. There are shades of Tragedy and that dissonant brutal Bremen/Per Koro hardcore sound along with some forays into doom. The side ends with the moody "Quelle Valeur Reste?", a slower brooding epic with sampled voices, stirring magisterial guitars and dark rumbling drift, stretching into dark doom-laden slow core that grows heavier and more intense, finally picking up speed into a driving majestic crescendo.
Masakari bring eight of their own raging end-time visions, played out through a series of ripping D-beat driven hardcore anthems and crushing metallic dirges laced with stirring dark melodic breakdowns and swathes of dark ambience. As on their previous records, I hear that malevolent Clevo hardcore sound creeping through, shades of Integrity lurking just below the surface of their ferocious crustmetal. These guys are one of the best bands doing this sort of dark apocalyptic hardcore right now.
The Process of Self-Immolation is the debut full-length from Nashville black metallers Alraune, a newer band made up of current and former members of Yautja and Mourner; it's the follow-up to their well-received tape that came out on Graceless Recordings not too long ago. Combining a rhythmically complex brand of blackened metal with Slinty math rock influences and intense, emotional delivery, these guys have whipped up one of the more impressive debuts to appear this year, with a confident approach towards fusing elegant icy melodies with a vicious Scandinavian-inspired attack.
The brief intro track opens the album with the sounds of mournful, low-fi folk, the distorted buzz of the strings ringing out through a murky haze, before the band launches violently into the blazing black metal of "Exmordium". Alraune's sound immediately reveals the sort of soaring melodic sensibilities found in fellow American BM outfits like Krallice, Fell Voices and Ash Borer, that classic Nordic-influenced sound underscored by eerily pretty minor key melodies and cascades of spidery arpgeggiated notes that seem to draw from early 90's math rock just as much as they do from the frostbitten chordal forms of black metal. And as the album progresses, more of that mathiness emerges through the violent blastbeat-driven wintervisions, vicious buzzsaw riffs and rampaging d-beat tempos suddenly hurtling out of the chaos before slipping into some off-kilter, angular breakdown or wash of creepy dissonant instrumental guitar. There's a raw, low-fi edge to Process that really works in its favor, contrasting with the ambitious complexity of the songs and the Slinty digressions and eruptions into soaring, keening droning guitar leads that streak over the thunderous blasting epics like "Simulacra". The vocals have a strange distorted sheen than clings to them, at times sounding as if those desperate screams and shrieks are being transmitted out of a crackling transistor radio as the elegant, mournful tremolo riffs swarm madly around, slipping into some terrific little moments of phantasmic beauty, like how the end of "Kissed By The Red" goes from the aggressive, majestic metallic blast into the sound of Scottish folk singer Isla Cameron singing "O Willow Waly", taken from Jack Clayton's 1961 supernatural classic The Innocents. And at the end, Alraune drag their ragged frenzy down to an almost doom-laden pace on the closing title track, the song lumbering through an epic sprawl of slow pummeling tempos, blazing blastbeats and wretched screaming that leads towards the powerful combination of frantic blackened tremolo riffs and pounding tribal rhythms that take over the second half of the song.
A promising start from this new entry in the USBM field, Process skillfully combines haunting melodic dissonance, raw savagery and a distinct progressive edge into a powerful and mournful sound of their own. Killer stuff. Comes in digipack packaging.
����Now available on limited-edition vinyl.
���� The Process of Self-Immolation is the debut full-length from Nashville black metallers Alraune, a newer band made up of current and former members of Yautja and Mourner; it's the follow-up to their well-received tape that came out on Graceless Recordings not too long ago. Combining a rhythmically complex brand of blackened metal with Slinty math rock influences and intense, emotional delivery, these guys have whipped up one of the more impressive debuts to appear this year, with a confident approach towards fusing elegant icy melodies with a vicious Scandinavian-inspired attack.
���� The brief intro track opens the album with the sounds of mournful, low-fi folk, the distorted buzz of the strings ringing out through a murky haze, before the band launches violently into the blazing black metal of "Exmordium". Alraune's sound immediately reveals the sort of soaring melodic sensibilities found in fellow American BM outfits like Krallice, Fell Voices and Ash Borer, that classic Nordic-influenced sound underscored by eerily pretty minor key melodies and cascades of spidery arpgeggiated notes that seem to draw from early 90's math rock just as much as they do from the frostbitten chordal forms of black metal. And as the album progresses, more of that mathiness emerges through the violent blastbeat-driven wintervisions, vicious buzzsaw riffs and rampaging d-beat tempos suddenly hurtling out of the chaos before slipping into some off-kilter, angular breakdown or wash of creepy dissonant instrumental guitar. There's a raw, low-fi edge to Process that really works in its favor, contrasting with the ambitious complexity of the songs and the Slinty digressions and eruptions into soaring, keening droning guitar leads that streak over the thunderous blasting epics like "Simulacra". The vocals have a strange distorted sheen than clings to them, at times sounding as if those desperate screams and shrieks are being transmitted out of a crackling transistor radio as the elegant, mournful tremolo riffs swarm madly around, slipping into some terrific little moments of phantasmic beauty, like how the end of "Kissed By The Red" goes from the aggressive, majestic metallic blast into the sound of Scottish folk singer Isla Cameron singing "O Willow Waly", taken from Jack Clayton's 1961 supernatural classic The Innocents. And at the end, Alraune drag their ragged frenzy down to an almost doom-laden pace on the closing title track, the song lumbering through an epic sprawl of slow pummeling tempos, blazing blastbeats and wretched screaming that leads towards the powerful combination of frantic blackened tremolo riffs and pounding tribal rhythms that take over the second half of the song.
���� A promising start from this new entry in the USBM field, Process skillfully combines haunting melodic dissonance, raw savagery and a distinct progressive edge into a powerful and mournful sound of their own. Killer stuff. Comes in digipack packaging.
When he's not laying down his majestic, sky-reaching riffage and beautiful melodic gloom in his main band Year Of No Light, guitarist Johan Sebenne keeps busy with a couple of other projects that explore more droneological territory. Johan sent us the limited-edition full length discs for Altair Temple and Nexus Sun that came out earlier this year, two duos that Johan plays in, and both bands explore similiar realms of guitar-based drone music with slightly different approaches. Altair Temple is the duo that Johan shares with a guy named Fred, who plays guitar and manipulates effects pedals while Johan works with synthesizers, laptop and other effects, crafting gorgeous industrial drones that share alot of common ground with both Troum and Tim Hecker. The disc features ten tracks that range from soft Eno-esque ambience to muted roars of buzzing amplifier drone, fields of glimmering guitar notes sparkling above sheets of grinding bottom end, malevolent dark ambience and waves of crushing metallic drone. These are shadowy, bleak drones that sometimes move into brighter, more melodic shapes, but mostly remain cloaked in darkness, their amplifiers casting eerie shadows over the miasmic waves of delay and drone. Excellent amorphous ambience that goes from cosmic to crushing; these dark guitar-driven dronescapes are positioned somewhere in between the sounds of Byla, Fear Falls Burning, Aidan Baker, Troum and Main. Only 120 copies of this disc were made, and each one comes in a thick paperboard gatefold with silkscreened artwork.
Old school electronic skzzch gets blackened again by Swedish noisemaker Mattias Gustafsson and his Altar Of Flies project. This five track CDR was
released by Digitalis last year in a limited edition of 100 copies, and it's packaged in a color sleeve with artwork that depicts a demons skull exploding in
a psychedelic flurry of bats, skulls, ghosts, ghetto blasters, and serpents. This is only the second release from Altar Of Flies that I've picked up (the
first being the super limited cassette tape that came out on Epicene Sound over a year ago), but the project is so far pretty consistent in delivering an
evil, ghoulish form of industrial that sounds kind of like a satanic Wolf Eyes. Each one of the tracks on Trapped Under Water has this ominous, evil
feel, but the approach is varied, too...minimal buzzing tones and nauseous drum beats meet snarling vocal mantras one moment, and then flow into curtains of
black hiss and metallic drone. Bells are struck over washes of shimmering cymbal noise and grinding low-end doomdrone guitar buzz. Watery melodies can be
heard, blurred and indistinct, deep beneath layers of distortion and rumbling feedback. Chirping oscillator tones get bent and mangled, then obliterated by
spikes of razor sharp high-end skree. Modulated metallic powerchords are strummed and stretched apart over broken drumbeats, and there are hints of both
Throbbing Gristle and old Broken Flag power electronics in Altar Of Flies blackened pulses. A solid set of creepy, damaged electronic sludge!
Ridiculously limited, full length cassette album of blackened industrial sludgenoise from Sweden's awesomely monikered Altar Of Flies, the alter ego of artist Mattias Gustafsson. Only 50 of these were made and chances are this is already sold out from Epicene, but it's a highly recommended dose of ultra heavy feedback sludge and subsonic buzzsaw tone, pitch black and heavy like the most diseased abstract black metal act filtered through a factory filled with infernal machines and industrial pulses. The tracks are untitled, but it all basically flows together as one 30+ minute piece, filled with chaotic ultradistorted drones that ooze out of what sounds like a wall of overloaded guitar amps, all connected to a heap of mangled and destroyed guitars covered in gore and slime, left to shriek and rumble on the concrete floor of the aforementioned death factory. Bursts of shrill feeback scream out of the blackness alongside harsh black metal-style shrieks, and throbbing low end bass frequencies shudder deep below. Heavy, grimy black noise and demonic sludgy drones, a mix of Wolf Eyes and Corrupted, Abruptum and Hive Mind, utterly doomed nightmare filth. Each one of these cassettes comes in a standard case with a full color sleeve that is handnumbered out of 50.
Back in stock! Here are more fantastic factory nightmares and grinding industrial death visions from this Swedish artist, whose work has consistently impressed me over the past couple of years. This latest offering of murderous industrial filth comes from the A Dear Girl Called Wendy imprint, a combination 7" and CDR set that features more of Mattias Gustafsson's grimy looped drones, ghostly field recordings and harsh noise in an extremely limited edition of one hundred hand-numbered copies.
The first half of "Sacred Trails" begins with a steady mechanical throb and deep pulsating black buzz, then erupts into a crushing cacophony of feedback, junk metal avalanche, garbled electronic skuzz, and massive, earthquake like low-end rumbling. It breaks away at various points on the a-side into more restrained industrial ambience and subdued scraping rhythms and grating lock grooves; then, disturbing chuckling and looped giggling appears, sounding like the clipped and edited sounds of a madman played over a slow fade-out of black drift. The b-side picks up the second half with another set of minimal lock groove like clicks and rumbles, which are slowly overtaken by a heavy heartbeat like throb and high piercing feedback and smears of black buzzing synth, transforming the sound into a monstrous rhythmic scrapescape of abused metal and skull-drilling sinewaves, heaving squelch and strange metallic ringing, clicking spokes in a torture machine slipping into place while heavy rumbling electronic frequencies rise and fall. When the vocals show up this time, it's in the form of sickly moans and distressed cries in the background, while the rhythmic elements fall away and the side ends with the constant surging swell of rumbling feedback before the record comes to a stop.
The disc features another three longer tracks: the first, "Axis III", starts with rising bursts of heavy distorted synth which are joined by a series of crunching sounds, like those of someone treading through deep snow, or charred ash, while more layers of sinister electronic drone and distorted synth pile on, inhuman screams suddenly rip through the air, and the whole goddamn thing starts to take on the feel of one seriously horrible nightmare. Deep bass frequencies drone and flutter beneath swarming buzz and those crunchy, crackling sounds. The rusted creak of an ancient water pump introduces the second track "Helveteseld", then moves into dark, gleaming shafts of droning synthesizer and soft drifting feedback; it's actually quite pretty here at first, but then the soft ambient drone-music is suddenly sucked into a monstrous maelstrom of bass rumble and industrial noise, another violent scrap metal avalanche strafed with feedback spikes and corroded creaking metal. The final fourteen minute track "Nervklen" is more minimal at first, a series of high frequency drones laid over a percussive rumble and menacing electronic drone, then moves into a very weird stretch of looped ogres growling and barking dogs and some deformed metal pounding, getting more surreal and nightmarish as it goes on, blasts of harsh feedback and lurching metallic noise coming up against the manipulated demonic voices and loops, evolving into a mutated form of power electronics with rhythmic structure and looped voice elements, but woven into a fucked up industrial loopscape.
Another grim, heavy offering from Gustafsson. The record and the disc are packaged together in a thick 7" sleeve, and again, it's extremely limited, and doubtful that we'll be able to get more of these once we sell out.
�� Underneath the creepy high-contrast Xerox imagery that adorns the sleeve for the limited-edition LP Female (released by the upstart UK industrial label Peripheral), you'll find more of the fantastic sonic rot-scapes and skin-crawling industrial gurgle that Swedish artist Mattias Gustafsson has been perfecting over the past decade, having brought us some of the creepiest industrial music that I've been stocking here at C-Blast with his Altar Of Flies project. Primarily working from heaps of hot-wired effects processors, primitive sound generators and tape machines that are haphazardly scattered and piled across tables that Gustafsson hunches over like some mad alchemist, he summons up sinister, crackling noise-scapes that feel as if they are formed from some sort of nightmarish ectoplasm, strange shambling industrial dirges and disturbing drones that creep out of black charnel pits.
�� Opener "Boiling Blood" is a mix of hissing tape noise and slow, squelchy rhythms that gradually uncoil beneath ascendant bursts of brutal feedback and noise, blanketed by massive rumbling distorted drones, crafting a intensely bleak field of grinding death industrial murk. Massive rusted metal creaks and groans on warped hinges, while irradiated black winds sweep in from below, rushing through the eerie abstract noisescape that Gustafsson occasionally blasts with blasts of immense distorted heaviness. "When We Wake Up There Will Be Nothing Left" is another one of AOF's more minimal nightmarish visions, an expanse of minimal hum and pulse that slowly begins to vomit up weird moaning voices and inhuman cries, bursts of high-end squiggle and chirping electronics, various metallic sounds and noises teeming beneath the near-constant thrum of amp-feedback. Bits of malformed rhythm take shape within the weird ghastly blackness, and the title track is even more sinister, a black minor-key synth-groan stretched out across heaving, cadaverous exhalations and squealing hornet-drone, an increasingly noisy and nightmarish mass of mechanical horror that builds into something truly apocalyptic at the end, a screaming air-raid dirge that oozes dread across the final moments of the side.
�� On the other side, minimal looping drones swirl around the sounds of dragging chains and mechanical gears falling apart, the slow rhythmic burble of air bubbling to the surface of some corroded tank of viscous black liquid, a heavy morbid atmosphere hanging over the sounds. It evolves into another doom-laden soundscape of tearing, ripping, rending noises, anguished distorted voices appearing, more of those wordless cries, muffled and unintelligible, moaning desperately in the depths of the recording, gradually swallowed up by the monstrous wall of noise that comes crashing in over the end of "Nervous Loops". The final track "100511" closes the album with blasts of that swarming black electronics and crushing synth-drone amid some fairly disturbing vocal recordings that, by the end of the record, tie back in to the album's title in a strange, unsettling manner.
�� At times, Gustafsson's burbling, abstract electronics begin to resemble the morbid industrial throb of Atrax Morgue, but his work here is much more complex in its construction, evocative of a microscopic world of ghoulish mechanisms crafted from decomposing bits of animal carcass and salvaged metal, or the audio track of a snuff film overlaid with murky synthesizer drones and waves of blackened static. Limited to two hundred fifty copies.
An awesome, evocative black metal outfit from Lithuania, Altar Shadows (or Altoriu Seseliai, in their own language) debuts here with an incredible first album - this is some of catchiest, most epic sounding Eastern Euro black metal that I've heard so far. I think that this is another one-man outfit, beacuse the booklet has a photo of a single corpsepainted indiviual, but I'm not 100% sure. As you might expect, there's a heavy pagan element to Altar Shadows, but I'm not picking up on any of the questionable racial/nationalistic ideologies that tend to come part-and-parcel with black metal bands from this part of Europe. And it's more than just a black metal album. Recordings of chirping crickets and the sound of leaves rustling in the wind give way to somber, beautiful slow-core dirges that remind me of Drudkh. Harsh growling vocals pan from speaker to speaker over spiky tremelo picking and swirling shoegazy riffs. Lilting acoustic folk strum is plucked out softly over sounds of birdsong and the burbling of a creek running through an ancient Lithuanian forest. Buzzing, Burzumic midtempo black metal is accompanied by acoustic guitars, giving Altar Shadow's ominous buzz a folky feel, and often busting out with awesome psychedelic blues-based soloing over the riffs and churning double bass drumming. The sounds of flutes drift through deep shadowy woods, with thunder rumbling off in the distance, and answered by the crowing of a rooster. "The Yellow Moon III" is a midpaced rocker that combines chugging heavy metal riffing with powerful melodic leads, unleashing frenetic double bass drumming alongside a super catchy riff and killer spacey soloing. The flute shows up again on "I'm Waiting", a beautiful medievel sounding folk tune that evolves into an epic black metal waltz. A deep female voice appears on "In The Falling Snow", which is again played on acoustic guitars but this time it feels like they are playing actual black metal riffs on them.
I love this album. Alot of the leads have a spacey psychedelic feel to them that reminds me of Pink Floyd quite a bit, and fans of Nachtmystium's more recent psych-black metal will probably LOVE Altar Shadows. But it's the Lithuanian folk music that really takes center stage on this album. Most of the songs blend together those acoustic folk music elements with the Burzum-esque black metal, using a combination of original lyrics and classical Lithuanian poetry, and further mix in those evocative ambient field recordings to invoke visions of untouched forests, rain-choked skies looming overhead, and remote Lithuanian farmsteads. Amazing stuff. Comes with an 8-page booklet that includes all of the lyrics, cool grainy artwork that perfectly matches the rainy, gloomy feel of Speckledy Falcons, and some personal writings from Altar Shadows.
Worshippers of filthy, punk-infected blackness should get a load of this: a new split 7" that has malefic collaborators in Lamb-baiting no-fi perversion teaming together for a bowel-scented platter of skuzz that I've been spinning nonstop lately. Altars and Halla both specialize in cacophonic blackpunk that compliment one another nicely, despite being situated at opposite ends of the globe.
Featuring members of Hex Noir, Iron Curtain and Teeth Collection, Altars deliver ultra violent no-fi black metal on "Serment de Sang", a seven minute jam that absolutely fucking kills, and sounds like one step above a boom box recording while managing to imbue the murky, blown out production with a strange, grimy density. Rampaging drums speed through a storm of reverb-drenched screams, distorted hiss, electronic feedback, and trebly guitars, but underneath all of the filth and noise are some great melodic riffs that are catchy, anthemic even, but delivered through a twisted, hideous blackened noisepunk assault. It ends in a mangled skronky breakdown that crumbles into pure sonic chaos and grinding industrial noise at the end, dragging the thrash down into a mire of corruption.
Hailing from Iran, Halla (should take you roughly two seconds to figure that name out) delivers "666 Sanctus", an equally noisy and impressive puke-blast of blackened misanthropic punk. It's quite an introduction: the music is completely blanketed in white noise, the primitive black thrash enshrouded in this thick coating of hiss and distortion that's comparable to the trebly overload of bands like Vacuus, Malveillance, or Ancestors. A more accurate reference point might be what you'd get if someone was blasting the early Hellhammer demos out of a gargantuan transistor radio directly into your face. Primo!
Recommended to necro scum junkies, obviously; this filth is ideal for followers of early Ash Pool, Ancestors, Bone Awl, Malveillance, Ildjarn, Akitsa, and similarly damaged creeps. Released on black vinyl in a limited edition of 263 copies.
This vinyl edition of Aluk Todolo's debut masterpiece of blackened hypno rock comes to us from UK label Riot Season, on black wax and in the expected limited edition.
First heard Aluk Todolo on that debut 7" that the band released on Implied Sound last year, which I thought was a real blast of fetid hypno rock inscribed with cryptic occult imagery and one hell of a pounding groove, major groove, a kind of satanic trance rock meltdown that felt like it was crawling right off of the edge of the vinyl. Great stuff that caught the attention of a lot of people that follow this sort of thing, and this past November saw the release of Aluk Todolo's first full length on Public Guilt, which has been building a heavy buzz ever since it came out. On Descension, Aluk Todolo have carved out a pitch-black krautrock masterpiece that ends up sounding akin to Circle performing the background music for a black mass while being mixed by Masami Akita armed with short-circuiting amplifiers in each hand, punctuating their nocturnal dronerock rituals with blasts of white-hot electronic skzzzz.
Aluk Todolo features members of the black metal cult Diametragon, but the main thread that ties the two bands together is the musician's use of brutal white noise as a kind of lead instrument; in Diametragon, the band splatters their razorwire black metal asaults with ear shredding skree, but here the noise is draped in layers over skeletal rock instrumentation, a basic drums/guitar/bass lineup that forms minimalistic propulsive jams that swim in black feedback and atmospheric speaker buzz. Like This Heat and Einsutrzende Neubaten filtered through an endless blackdronenoise ritual, sinister melodic sigils forming out of the fuzz and forming a claustraphobic, creepy low fi psych epic, their rhythms relentless in movement. The opening "Obedience" starts off as swirling black ambience with a shuffling sheet metal rhythm banging away in the background, and then suddenly a wavering female chorale appears and the whole song suddenly explodes into a clamorous, propulsive krautrock jam, simplistic driving drumming slicing through a storm of overloaded demon howls and white noise. It's really low fi and garagey sounding, but powerful and totally in-the-red. On "Burial Ground", the band sets up a tense, claustrophobic vibe with a simple guitar arpeggio played over weird FX, rusted metal percussion, tinny evil drones and a plodding drumbeat. "Woodchurch" is another slow, plodding jam that almost seems to invert the guitar part from the previous track and crank the distortion way up while layers of machine noise and FX shift and warp above it; the last track, "Disease", has another shambling hypnotic drumbeat playing in an odd time signature accompanied by trippy distorted effects and blasts of overmodulated acid guitar clipping throughout the jam.
Imagine an evil, hypnotic fusion of the super blown-out blackness of Wold and Akitsa, Harry Pussy's shambolic noise, and This Heat. Slow marches into unnerving noise frequencies and atmospheric clatter are served up as black magic meditations, and alternate with invocations of demonic krautrock. Highly recommended !
First heard Aluk Todolo on that debut 7" that the band released on Implied Sound last year, which I thought was a real blast of fetid hypno rock inscribed with cryptic occult imagery and one hell of a pounding groove,
Aluk Todolo features members of the black metal cult Diametragon, but the main thread that ties the two bands together is the musician's use of brutal white noise as a kind of lead instrument; in Diametragon, the band splatters their razorwire black metal asaults with ear shredding skree, but here the noise is draped in layers over skeletal rock instrumentation, a basic drums/guitar/bass lineup that forms minimalistic propulsive jams that swim in black feedback and atmospheric speaker buzz. Like This Heat and Einsutrzende Neubaten filtered through an endless blackdronenoise ritual, sinister melodic sigils forming out of the fuzz and forming a claustraphobic, creepy low fi psych epic, their rhythms relentless in movement. The opening "Obedience" starts off as swirling black ambience with a shuffling sheet metal rhythm banging away in the background, and then suddenly a wavering female chorale appears and the whole song suddenly explodes into a clamorous, propulsive krautrock
jam, simplistic driving drumming slicing through a storm of overloaded demon howls and white noise. It's really low fi and garagey sounding, but powerful and totally in-the-red. On "Burial Ground", the band sets up a tense, claustrophobic vibe with a simple guitar arpeggio played over weird FX, rusted metal percussion, tinny evil drones and a plodding drumbeat. "Woodchurch" is another slow, plodding jam that almost seems to invert the guitar part from the previous track and crank the distortion way up while layers of machine noise and FX shift and warp above it; the last track, "Disease", has another shambling hypnotic drumbeat playing in an odd time signature accompanied by trippy distorted effects and blasts of overmodulated acid guitar clipping throughout the jam.
Imagine an evil, hypnotic fusion of the super blown-out blackness of Wold and Akitsa, Harry Pussy's shambolic noise, and This Heat. Slow marches into unnerving noise frequencies and atmospheric clatter are served up as black magic meditations, and alternate with invocations of demonic krautrock. Highly recommended !
Finsternis comes to us more than two years since the release of Aluk Todolo's debut Descension,
where we were fully introduced to their harsh, blackened trance-rock. In the time since that disc came out, Aluk Todolo has
garnered a bit of critical acclaim for their recordings, while the members spent time working with other related projects, like the acid-fried garage psych ensemble Gunslingers and French black metallers Diamatregon, whose latest album Crossroad came out last year and itself seemed to be infected with a bit of Aluk Todolo's scorched avant-rock DNA. I've been lusting for new Aluk Todolo, though, and they finally returned earlier this year with this, their latest slab of evil psychedelia and blackened, malevolent krautrock.
Divided into four sections with a shorter interlude track in the middle of the album, Finsternis (German fir "Darkness") feels as if it is tied together with a larger concept, though nothing is spelled out through the song titles. The album begins with the simple pounding trance of "Premier Contact", a steady, minimalist drum beat steadily banging away while the guitars squeal and howl, emitting controlled bursts of feedback and strange noises, the guitarists scraping and stabbing at their instruments. This physical guitar assault often sounds like it could've been something off of an experimental prepared guitar piece, if it weren't for the incessant deathmarch drumming and general atmosphere of dread that hangs over the music. After awhile, creepier riffs start to emerge, and Aluk Todolo reveal their blackened heritage' these spidery minor-key figures take over, circling around and around through gales of feedback and amp noise. And it leads right into "Deuxi�me Contact", which stumbles for a quick moment as the band erupts into a frenzied rhythmic tangle, but then settles back down into a similar metronomic pulse, the death-clock tick-tock hammering in slow motion, that sinister slithering guitar melody gradually joined by ghostly sustained notes and weird electronic sounds in the distance, leading the album into ever creepier regions. As the album deepens, the guitars transform. They slowly build, first blooming from those droning buzzing chords and strangled string noises into that creeping graveyard melody, and then from there into sudden bursts of reverb-drenched psychedelic shred, and morose, blackened riffing.
The simple, ritualistic floor-tom throb that comprises the center track "Totalit�" wipes the board, returning the band to the most basic, stripped-down percussive pulse. For several minutes, there is just the one drum, pounding in the blackness, but as the piece progresses, reaching tendrils of black amp fog and seething distorted electronics seep up from below, slowly overtaking the track with swarming, bacterial noise.
Then comes "Troisi�me Contact", and again the sound has intensified, the black metal aspect of Aluk Todolo's sound further defined as the guitars blast out in a black jet of crushing distorted tremolo-drone, swarming blackened riffing spreading out over the now thunderous drums. The guitars are a skygush of Skullflowery feedback-drone and murderous buzzsaw shred, and you can hear other dark, complex melodies unfolding beneath the roar of exploding amplifiers and rumbling detuned guitars. By the time you've reached the closer "Quatri�me Contact", the album has drifted into a nightmarish form of psychedelic rock, the guitars slipping into wailing high-end chords and eerie wavering notes. In its final half, the song breaks apart into something more spacious and minimal, that blackened hypno-riff burning off into sheets of warm, shimmering guitar glazed in echo and delay. Still pretty ominous though, the band locking into a strange, desolate atmosphere in the end as an almost Morricone-like feel taking over, transforming this into something quite different than from where we started.
Finsternis comes to us more than two years since the release of Aluk Todolo's debut Descension,
where we were fully introduced to their harsh, blackened trance-rock. In the time since that disc came out, Aluk Todolo has
garnered a bit of critical acclaim for their recordings, while the members spent time working with other related projects, like the acid-fried garage psych ensemble Gunslingers and French black metallers Diamatregon, whose latest album Crossroad came out last year and itself seemed to be infected with a bit of Aluk Todolo's scorched avant-rock DNA. I've been lusting for new Aluk Todolo, though, and they finally returned earlier this year with this, their latest slab of evil psychedelia and blackened, malevolent krautrock.
Divided into four sections with a shorter interlude track in the middle of the album, Finsternis (German fir "Darkness") feels as if it is tied together with a larger concept, though nothing is spelled out through the song titles. The album begins with the simple pounding trance of "Premier Contact", a steady, minimalist drum beat steadily banging away while the guitars squeal and howl, emitting controlled bursts of feedback and strange noises, the guitarists scraping and stabbing at their instruments. This physical guitar assault often sounds like it could've been something off of an experimental prepared guitar piece, if it weren't for the incessant deathmarch drumming and general atmosphere of dread that hangs over the music. After awhile, creepier riffs start to emerge, and Aluk Todolo reveal their blackened heritage' these spidery minor-key figures take over, circling around and around through gales of feedback and amp noise. And it leads right into "Deuxi�me Contact", which stumbles for a quick moment as the band erupts into a frenzied rhythmic tangle, but then settles back down into a similar metronomic pulse, the death-clock tick-tock hammering in slow motion, that sinister slithering guitar melody gradually joined by ghostly sustained notes and weird electronic sounds in the distance, leading the album into ever creepier regions. As the album deepens, the guitars transform. They slowly build, first blooming from those droning buzzing chords and strangled string noises into that creeping graveyard melody, and then from there into sudden bursts of reverb-drenched psychedelic shred, and morose, blackened riffing.
The simple, ritualistic floor-tom throb that comprises the center track "Totalit�" wipes the board, returning the band to the most basic, stripped-down percussive pulse. For several minutes, there is just the one drum, pounding in the blackness, but as the piece progresses, reaching tendrils of black amp fog and seething distorted electronics seep up from below, slowly overtaking the track with swarming, bacterial noise.
Then comes "Troisi�me Contact", and again the sound has intensified, the black metal aspect of Aluk Todolo's sound further defined as the guitars blast out in a black jet of crushing distorted tremolo-drone, swarming blackened riffing spreading out over the now thunderous drums. The guitars are a skygush of Skullflowery feedback-drone and murderous buzzsaw shred, and you can hear other dark, complex melodies unfolding beneath the roar of exploding amplifiers and rumbling detuned guitars. By the time you've reached the closer "Quatri�me Contact", the album has drifted into a nightmarish form of psychedelic rock, the guitars slipping into wailing high-end chords and eerie wavering notes. In its final half, the song breaks apart into something more spacious and minimal, that blackened hypno-riff burning off into sheets of warm, shimmering guitar glazed in echo and delay. Still pretty ominous though, the band locking into a strange, desolate atmosphere in the end as an almost Morricone-like feel taking over, transforming this into something quite different than from where we started.
Aluk Todolo's 7" is available again, repressed in a limited run of two hundred copies for their recent East Coast tour (which slayed; I caught the band in Baltimore at Golden West Cafe a few weeks ago with Darsombra and Lussuria, and they had me completely zoned by the end of their set), with hand-stamped labels and no obi-strip this time.
Featuring members of such esteemed French black metal iconoclasts as Vediog Svaor and Diamatregon, Aluk Todolo's debut EP is an amazing, occult-tinged eruption of heavy drone/Kraut/trance rock that uses the bands driving motorik formations to explore transcendental consciousness and trance-like states. Each song on this 7" is identified with only an arcane set of runes, and the compositions are based on music conjured during Aluk Todolo's live improvised sessions. The A side sports a rhythmic drone rock jam that builds into sheets of guitar sound similiar to Rhys Chatham overlaid with recordings of legendary occultist Aleister Crowley. On the B side, the band generates a powerful krautrock influenced number that pulsates like a darker Circle/AMT jam. The riff is totally trance inducing before it fades into a cavernous grey drone, then exploding suddenly back into full-on heavy hypno rock. This EP is a killer debut, and I'm dying to hear more from this band. Aluk Todolo's take on kraut/drone influenced heavy psych rock imbues the music with the sort of bleak blackness that you'd expect from their black metal projects. There's parts of their jams that make me think of the obvious modern heavy hitters in the field of heavy trance-psyche, like the aforementioned Acid Mothers Temple and Cirlce, as well as Circle side project Pharoah Overlord, as Aluk Todolo can get pretty heavy...but I also hear that Rhys Chatham/Robert Poss/Band Of Susans brand of overloaded guitar drone in parts of these songs that push the intensity level even further. Awesome stuff, highly recommended. Our buddy J.R. at Public Guilt did a killer job of presenting this EP as well, packaging the 7" in a simple but effective glossy gatefold sleeve printed in silver and grey inks, with cabalistic symbols and photography.
The latest slab of charred, blackened psych from France's mysterious Aluk Todolo comes via the fine Ajna Offensive imprint, and it's a superb new dose of their intense occult-fueled hypno rock. Well, not quite new...this long track, here split into to halves across the two sides of the record, was actually recorded several years ago, back around the same time that they were recording their excellent debut album Descension, but was never made available until now. If you're a fan of that album, this delivers the same corrosive black pulse, with deceptively simple drumming locking into a heavy trance-state as the band pushes through hideous tar-pit bass throb and caustic guitar noise that undergoes a series of transformations over the course of the record.
The record begins with the band fading in gradually, the scrape and huzz of the guitars drifting in over a rickety quasi-break beat. The guitars and feedback swirl with other, less identifiable noises, bits of industrial scrape and broken-down crackle, and there seem to be strings or keyboards or something along those lines droning and drifting over it all. The sound is abrasive and creepy but also quite hypnotic, the shambling rhythm resembling something from Scorn as it lopes through the shifting clouds of sonic detritus and metallic creak. As this goes on, the different noisy elements move around, allowing bits of head-nodding throb to peer through all of the murkiness, and there are some vocals that take form at different points, a deep growl that intones strange mangled incantations within the caustic, chaotic noise. This all burns off about halfway through the side, and changes into a slightly more controlled dirge. The drums are still shuffling and clanking along, but the noisy elements are replaced by a searing distorted noise that is looped over and over, until the band once again shifts gears at the end and lurches into an aggressive mid-tempo krautrock groove. Heavy throbbing bass and sheets of guitar skree and pounding motorik drums guide the song into it's final minutes.
The second side is much more threatening and assaultive; as soon as it begins, the band is locked into a grinding, off-time almost tribal workout, the over-modulated bass rumbling and buzzing around the feedback howl and scrape of the guitar, taking shape as an industrialized trance-rock workout. The sound here at first seems to feel much less hypnotic, and instead unleashes an ever-changing, always shifting cloud of metallic buzz and grinding noise and far-off clang over and around the hammer-clang rhythm of the band. It's as malevolent sounding as anything that these guys have put on record in the past, and as it goes on, it does begin to reveal a murderous trance-like quality, still very rooted in a classic psychedelic krautrock influence but taking that sound and blowing it out into a blackened, heavily distorted, thoroughly evil sound of it's own. At the end of the b-side, Aluk Todolo once more transforms the song, this last time into a slow, warbling dronescape filled with echoing guitar chords buzzing and drifting through billowing feedback and washes of murky guitar noise while a single bass drum pounds away slowly in the background.
Like all of their other releases, this comes bound in strange occult-influenced artwork, and is pressed on thick black vinyl.
Originally released on CD and LP by Utech and Public Guilt respectively, the second album from French necro / hypno-rockers Aluk Todolo is now back in print via The Ajna Offensive/Norma Evangelium Diaboli, on both formats with revised artwork. The CD version is now presented in a six-panel digipack, while the Lp comes on 180 gram vinyl. Here's the original review for the Utech version from when we had that in stock:
Finsternis comes to us more than two years since the release of Aluk Todolo's debut Descension,
where we were fully introduced to their harsh, blackened trance-rock. In the time since that disc came out, Aluk Todolo has
garnered a bit of critical acclaim for their recordings, while the members spent time working with other related projects, like the acid-fried garage psych ensemble Gunslingers and French black metallers Diamatregon, whose latest album Crossroad came out last year and itself seemed to be infected with a bit of Aluk Todolo's scorched avant-rock DNA. I've been lusting for new Aluk Todolo, though, and they finally returned earlier this year with this, their latest slab of evil psychedelia and blackened, malevolent krautrock.
Divided into four sections with a shorter interlude track in the middle of the album, Finsternis (German fir "Darkness") feels as if it is tied together with a larger concept, though nothing is spelled out through the song titles. The album begins with the simple pounding trance of "Premier Contact", a steady, minimalist drum beat steadily banging away while the guitars squeal and howl, emitting controlled bursts of feedback and strange noises, the guitarists scraping and stabbing at their instruments. This physical guitar assault often sounds like it could've been something off of an experimental prepared guitar piece, if it weren't for the incessant deathmarch drumming and general atmosphere of dread that hangs over the music. After awhile, creepier riffs start to emerge, and Aluk Todolo reveal their blackened heritage' these spidery minor-key figures take over, circling around and around through gales of feedback and amp noise. And it leads right into "Deuxi�me Contact", which stumbles for a quick moment as the band erupts into a frenzied rhythmic tangle, but then settles back down into a similar metronomic pulse, the death-clock tick-tock hammering in slow motion, that sinister slithering guitar melody gradually joined by ghostly sustained notes and weird electronic sounds in the distance, leading the album into ever creepier regions. As the album deepens, the guitars transform. They slowly build, first blooming from those droning buzzing chords and strangled string noises into that creeping graveyard melody, and then from there into sudden bursts of reverb-drenched psychedelic shred, and morose, blackened riffing.
The simple, ritualistic floor-tom throb that comprises the center track "Totalit�" wipes the board, returning the band to the most basic, stripped-down percussive pulse. For several minutes, there is just the one drum, pounding in the blackness, but as the piece progresses, reaching tendrils of black amp fog and seething distorted electronics seep up from below, slowly overtaking the track with swarming, bacterial noise.
Then comes "Troisi�me Contact", and again the sound has intensified, the black metal aspect of Aluk Todolo's sound further defined as the guitars blast out in a black jet of crushing distorted tremolo-drone, swarming blackened riffing spreading out over the now thunderous drums. The guitars are a skygush of Skullflowery feedback-drone and murderous buzzsaw shred, and you can hear other dark, complex melodies unfolding beneath the roar of exploding amplifiers and rumbling detuned guitars. By the time you've reached the closer "Quatri�me Contact", the album has drifted into a nightmarish form of psychedelic rock, the guitars slipping into wailing high-end chords and eerie wavering notes. In its final half, the song breaks apart into something more spacious and minimal, that blackened hypno-riff burning off into sheets of warm, shimmering guitar glazed in echo and delay. Still pretty ominous though, the band locking into a strange, desolate atmosphere in the end as an almost Morricone-like feel taking over, transforming this into something quite different than from where we started.
Originally released on CD and LP by Utech and Public Guilt respectively, the second album from French necro / hypno-rockers Aluk Todolo is now back in print via The Ajna Offensive/Norma Evangelium Diaboli, on both formats with revised artwork. The CD version is now presented in a six-panel digipack, while the Lp comes on 180 gram vinyl. Here's the original review for the Utech version from when we had that in stock:
Finsternis comes to us more than two years since the release of Aluk Todolo's debut Descension,
where we were fully introduced to their harsh, blackened trance-rock. In the time since that disc came out, Aluk Todolo has
garnered a bit of critical acclaim for their recordings, while the members spent time working with other related projects, like the acid-fried garage psych ensemble Gunslingers and French black metallers Diamatregon, whose latest album Crossroad came out last year and itself seemed to be infected with a bit of Aluk Todolo's scorched avant-rock DNA. I've been lusting for new Aluk Todolo, though, and they finally returned earlier this year with this, their latest slab of evil psychedelia and blackened, malevolent krautrock.
Divided into four sections with a shorter interlude track in the middle of the album, Finsternis (German fir "Darkness") feels as if it is tied together with a larger concept, though nothing is spelled out through the song titles. The album begins with the simple pounding trance of "Premier Contact", a steady, minimalist drum beat steadily banging away while the guitars squeal and howl, emitting controlled bursts of feedback and strange noises, the guitarists scraping and stabbing at their instruments. This physical guitar assault often sounds like it could've been something off of an experimental prepared guitar piece, if it weren't for the incessant deathmarch drumming and general atmosphere of dread that hangs over the music. After awhile, creepier riffs start to emerge, and Aluk Todolo reveal their blackened heritage' these spidery minor-key figures take over, circling around and around through gales of feedback and amp noise. And it leads right into "Deuxi�me Contact", which stumbles for a quick moment as the band erupts into a frenzied rhythmic tangle, but then settles back down into a similar metronomic pulse, the death-clock tick-tock hammering in slow motion, that sinister slithering guitar melody gradually joined by ghostly sustained notes and weird electronic sounds in the distance, leading the album into ever creepier regions. As the album deepens, the guitars transform. They slowly build, first blooming from those droning buzzing chords and strangled string noises into that creeping graveyard melody, and then from there into sudden bursts of reverb-drenched psychedelic shred, and morose, blackened riffing.
The simple, ritualistic floor-tom throb that comprises the center track "Totalit�" wipes the board, returning the band to the most basic, stripped-down percussive pulse. For several minutes, there is just the one drum, pounding in the blackness, but as the piece progresses, reaching tendrils of black amp fog and seething distorted electronics seep up from below, slowly overtaking the track with swarming, bacterial noise.
Then comes "Troisi�me Contact", and again the sound has intensified, the black metal aspect of Aluk Todolo's sound further defined as the guitars blast out in a black jet of crushing distorted tremolo-drone, swarming blackened riffing spreading out over the now thunderous drums. The guitars are a skygush of Skullflowery feedback-drone and murderous buzzsaw shred, and you can hear other dark, complex melodies unfolding beneath the roar of exploding amplifiers and rumbling detuned guitars. By the time you've reached the closer "Quatri�me Contact", the album has drifted into a nightmarish form of psychedelic rock, the guitars slipping into wailing high-end chords and eerie wavering notes. In its final half, the song breaks apart into something more spacious and minimal, that blackened hypno-riff burning off into sheets of warm, shimmering guitar glazed in echo and delay. Still pretty ominous though, the band locking into a strange, desolate atmosphere in the end as an almost Morricone-like feel taking over, transforming this into something quite different than from where we started.
ALUMINUM NOISE is Jason Crumer, also of Southern crust-grinders FACEDOWNINSHIT and cult label Sacred Noise, here embarking on an isolationist drone/noise/dark ambient wave that moves between superb, Aural Hypnox-style ritual drones, and BROOTAL tempests of distortion swarm, haunted with angelic choir voices or roof-caving power noise loops. This is apparently the last recorded work from ALUMINUM NOISE, created between 2001-2002, but is by far the best stuff we've ever heard from Crumer. Layers of menacing whirr and distant industrial clatter blend together, creating extremely evocative and unsettling (actually, downright frightening) sound fields that violently erupt into crushing rhythmic harsh noise jams. Excellent. This is a nearly 70-minute long private-press disc packaged in full color jewel case setup with artwork by James Keeler of WILT, and limited to a single edition of 100 copies, of which we only nabbed a few.
The European psych-noise group Alvars Orkester delivered their installment in the Recycled Music Series from RRR in 2005, and this was one of the first new releases from the legendary outfit to show up in quite awhile. The Swedish duo started out in 1987 with members Joachim Nordwall and Jan Svensson exploring the more psychedelic, drug-damaged side of experimental, analog post-industrial music, and they created an impressive body of work that stretched from highly creepy dronescapes to worlds of sweeping deep-space electronic weirdness. The music of Alvars Orkester has always had a dark, paranoid tint to it, and the tracks on this Recycled Series tape could easily pass for a lost expiermental horror movie score. It's a murky sonic realm squirming with warbling tape sludge, droning high pitched feedback, organic sounds that resemble alien creatures swarming inside a maze of human guts, deep buzzing tones that go through subtle shifts in pitch and speed, delicate little test-tone melodies, and murky, muddy waves of evil distortion sweeping out in oscillating concentric patterns. Really creepy, though sometimes quite pretty in a weird, kosmiche sort of way, a mixture of Throbbing Gristle, dismebodied Hawkwind fx, and Japanese psych blasters CCCC. This is one of the more transportational entries in the Recycled Music Series, for sure. And as with all entries in this infamous series, the tape and jacket are recycled random pop cassettes that RRR has covered in duct tape and scrawled on in black magic marker.
Beautiful gatefold vinyl release of Amano's legendary electronic score to one of the kinkiest, horniest, most transgressive and downright vile anime of all time. I remember when this film hit videocassette in the early 90s; my friends and I were instantly obsessed by it, and we would hold regular viewing parties in the punk house I rented because we just could not believe that something like this existed. The American anime audience was just beginning to take shape, and many of us became fans of the form after the high-profile release of iconic films like cyberpunk classic Akira and the massively influential Robotech series. But nothing could have prepared us for the debauchery, eroticized violence, and ultra-surrealistic horror that came gushing out of our old cathode floor-model TV and ripping any remnant traces of innocence from our young selves.
If you've never seen it, it's difficult to describe: the muddled narrative, made even more convoluted in the English language dub, is a jumble of teen-sex hijinks and high-school melodrama that somehow collides with an ancient apocalyptic prophecy in which a human being emerges as the “Choujin”, capable of transforming into a skyscraper-tall demonic monster with gargantuan, wildly flailing genitalia; somehow this leads into weird inter-dimensional espionage, bizarre romantic interludes, completely bonkers splatter and body-horror at the Cronenbergian level, sickening displays of extreme sexual violence, human bodies being pulled apart like taffy…it's an orgy of nonsensical ero-guro chaos and tentacle-porn that just keeps building in frenzied strangeness, graphic violence, and mind-blowing obscenity. It actually makes even less sense when you watch it.
This shit was crazy. After that, our nascent otaku-hood was spurred on by the discovery of ever more violent and depraved animated films coming out of Japan, but looking back over the past thirty-odd years, it's hard to come up with anything that matched the sheer offensive power of Urotsukidoji on first watch. Also, as an interesting pop-culture note, White Zombie famously opened their landmark 1992 album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Vol. 1 with a sample of one of the electronic sequences from a key scene in the film. Just so you know.
How Masamichi Amano fell into this job, God knows. A perfectly respectable composer for Japanese film and television, for whatever reason he was tapped to set the musical accompaniment to this trashy animated filth. But man, he gets on it with gusto. Amano's offbeat score for the original film is as recognizable and iconic as the film itself, full of blasting synthesizers and orchestral electronics that draw from progressive synth music of the 70s and 80s , the hammering overwrought majesty of Gustav Holst's The Planets suite, and the action-driven electronic sound of contemporary video games. There was and is nothing like it. From what I can tell, this is the complete score, with eighteen tracks spanning the entire film; amazingly, this has apparently never been made available on any physical format before now. Tonally, the music is all over the place, keeping in line with the madcap pace of the film. The sounds range from the soft, billowing New Age romanticism of "A New World", "Niki's Final Moments" and "Nagumo And Akemi" that blends digital chimes, synthetic strings, and lovely mock-woodwind tones to make something so saccharine and mawkish that it sounds like it could have been on a romantic film score cassette from 1983. The orchestral synth sounds feels huge, with lots of auditorium-reverb and booming tympani. Such a weird contrast with the visions of demonic rape and ultra-graphic gore that lurk around every corner. The action-themed pieces like "Battle Among The Skyscrapers" come out of nowhere, with rapid-fire electronic drums, orchestral stabs, driving pop hooks, and swirling celestial synth arpeggios and the appearance of some weird musical scales; this is the stuff that often evokes the feel of the more berserk video game soundtracks of that era, or maybe am especially nutso TV cop drama. The utterly goofy , funky 80s "sex comedy" keyboard music of "Campus Theme" feels totally ridiculous by itself, but the fact that this piece leads into one of the film's most notorious and outrageous sequences of demonic molestation make it that much weirder. As with most anime of the time, there’s a lot of Japanese "city pop" / easy listening music in here, as well, which again just adds to the insane surrealism of the whole thing.
There are all kinds of madness in here. It's psychotic: jazzy fretless bass guitar sounds, prog rock-level Moog freakouts, blazing electric guitar shredding, wacky intricate faux-symphonics, Jerry Goldsmith-esque orchestral arrangements, titanic war-drums, all of these come together in varying degrees. Then you have stuff like "Birth Of The Overfiend" that shifts into avant-garde composition, using atonal improvised piano, suspenseful drones, militaristic percussion (with unmistakable shades of Holst's "Mars, The Bringer of War"), eerie choral voices, and even bird sounds to create a strange, grim, otherworldly ambience. Likewise, "Charmer And The Half Beast: Amano Jyaku" further uses dissonance and strange scales alongside quasi-industrial noises and creepy synth, forming a throbbing, threatening electro-dirge mixed with pop melodies to totally throw you off kilter before it explodes into another blast of 16-bit action music. Then there’s the growling ghastly dronescapes of "Suikakuju's Rebirth", while the expansive, cinematic dark ambience of the main theme "Legend Of The Overfiend" is skillfully-crafted texture. One of my favorite tracks is "Oceanic Overlord", which crosses between cyberpunk synth and something resembling an Akira Ifukube kaiju score. Wild, wild shit.
The loony, lurid supernatural sleaze saga continues! Could this series get any more provocative and taboo-busting after the outrageous beastporn / tentacle assault / occult ultraviolence of the first film? Oh, you bet!
Like the first film's score on Tiger Lab, this is presented in a slick gatefold jacket featuring still artwork from the series, a mega-hentai odyssey that helped to kick start the boundless perversion of 1990s-era anime. Masamichi's hands are all over the sci-fi / mecha / action terrain of the past few decades, with 1986's SF Roman Animation Nayuta Ongakushuu, 2000's Battle Royale, 2001's Giant Robo I, and the 2003 television series Stratos 4 all under his belt. Nothing comes close to the insanity and depravity of his work on the Overfiend series, though. The film is absurdly outrageous. Using one of the most diabolical sex-magick machines ever portrayed in cinema of any kind, the utterly mad Nazi scientist Dr Munhi Hausen and his son proceeds to summon a demon called Kohoki, in an effort to take total control over the worlds of human, man-beast and demon. A cast of characters old and new find themselves entangled in this new parade of abominations and atrocities, with the Munhi Hausen clan's ultimate goal being the destruction of the Choujin, the titular "Overfiend".
Legend Of The Demon Womb is bigger, crazier, sleazier than its predecessor, and that goes for the soundtrack as well. Thirty-one tracks of proto-synthwave across two LPs, and it's fuckin' bonkers from start to finish. Thematically, it's like the filmmakers looked at the first film / OAVs and spitballed whatever they could come up with that would out-shock the audience: more brutal sexual violence, more tentacle penetration, but also massive amounts of Nazi occultism (via references to the Vril Society) , and gargantuan grotesque sex-machines driven by some kind of nightmarish orgone energy. Yeah, this is pinnacle transgressive Japanese animation. Ultra-horror. Ultra-repulsion. Definitely not for the faint-hearted.
Amano's score puts you through the wringer, too: of course you get Amano's perverse use of Japanese "city pop", 80s lounge sounds, and outrageously schmaltzy orchestral arrangements to drench everything in sugary romantic sweetness on pieces like "A Strike From Fate", "Flying Date", "Campus Theme II". That aspect of the score is wild, with glistening electronic strings and heart-wrenchingly bittersweet piano , New Agey flutes, funky lighthearted pop melodies and jazzy piano/synth duets, dangling these perfectly normal, human feelings of young love, unrequited crushes, sweet nostalgia, youthful wonder, and joyous innocence in your face before it drops you into the sweat-soaked, cum-blasted ultra-violent erotic hellscape of Urotsukidoji.
The action pieces like "Battle Atop The Roofs Of Shinjuku", "Experiment in 1944 - Vril Society HQ", "Megumi's Scream" and "Battle In The Yokohama Sky" are bigger, badder, and bolder here, moving beyond the video-game soundtrack vibe of the first score with denser, more layered orchestral voices, huge choral pads, a wealth of instrumental brass timbres and a constant use of pulse-quickening percussion sequencing; those militaristic snares are back, as are the booming battle-drums and sinister horns that highlight the film's intense combat scenes, lending them an operatic majesty. But fans of the 16-bit electronics also get a decent amount of that here too, with several of those "battle" sequences blasting off into wild video-game-style action. Amano's predilection for avant-garde classical sounds and weird proggy synthesizer arrangements is back as well, with "Black Magic In 1948" and "Completion Of The Ritual" unfurling strange and dissonant soundscapes that occasionally sound like a Penderecki piece that has been repurposed for a Sega Genesis game, eerie chorales floating over offbeat rhythmic forms and jagged strings. And there are some brief moments of unexpectedly wonky xylophone that have a demented, frightening Carl Stalling-like vibe.
The oddball ethno-ambient of "Peeping Room" blends Japanese and Middle Eastern musical motifs together into a super-sleazy delirium; there's lots of pulsating Tangerine Dreamy stuff; fans of 80s-era progressive synth music will have a ball with this, with all of Amano's dizzying keyboard shredding and lunatic jazz-rock fusion synths, along with the few instances of primo horror-synth like "Mysteries of the Future" and "Skyscraper Ceremony". Indeed, the sleek, lilting sonic drift of many of these tunes actually recall the vintage Japanese New Age music of artists like Kitaro and Inoyama Land at times. In spite of the over-the-top transgressive splooge-fest on screen, the music is more sophisticated this time around, which just makes it even weirder when you hear all of this in tandem with viewing the film. A crazy, cult score to one of the most extreme, notorious, and downright nasty anime films ever.
Another Desolation House title that I pulled out of the depths of the past, this was the one and only album from the duo of David Sullivan (Last Of The Juanitas, Magwheels) and Jason Crumer, both of whom also played in the cult Southern sludge band Facedowninshit that had an album on Relapse back in the 2000s. Under the Amazing Grace banner, Crumer and Sullivan used Christian iconography and themes of Christian revivalism to explore immense, cavernous dark ambient soundfields using guitar and electronics. It's pure mood, the lovely six-panel digipak covered in old, sepia-colored images of wood churches, tent revivals, and rusted surfaces, and the sounds on Revival Times feel like they could be traveling through these structures and events, a solemn soundtrack to still-extant undercurrents of religious belief in the first half of the twentieth century.
From the start, the duo craft billowing clouds of massive, murky drone and muffled feedback, slowly churning fogscapes of bass-heavy thrum that remain constant as dramatic , almost orchestral guitar noise and electronics sweep up from below. This conjures an ecstatic awesomeness that is on par with the work of the Troum / Maeror Tri guys, but they put thir own stamp on this roiling, iridescent ambience with interesting applications of controlled feedback and effects pedals, choral-like sounds alighting like angelic beings above this ocean of whirr and roar, eerie currents of slightly distorted sound coursing through the air.. It's all very beautiful and awe-inspiring, like the opening symphonic blast of "Os, Itighaho". But "Sunday" presents something a bit more psychologically unsettling, the track unfolding into a coarse blur of old voices, crumbling mechanical noise, swells of liquid low-end guitar, with abrasive drones and distant dissonant wailing notes floating against the background. It's still pretty gorgeous, teeming with those layers of lush ambient guitar sound, but the strange machinelike scrapes and mutterings make it more unsettling than the other, more elegiac songs on the album. Sullivan's formless guitar work is one of the main foundations of the music, weaving long, winding single-note drones, washes of crystalline shimmer, deep floating tremors that echo endlessly, and every so often, sculpting a poignant melody that floats, fragile and delicate, over the slowly swirling mass of sound.
"Blind Man's Ears" is another one of the creepier tracks on here, pulsating with a weird muted throb while the guitar drift turns atonal. It abruptly cuts off, with the following track "Blind" suddenly plunging this forbidding driftscape down into blacker, more stygian depths. Rumbling amplifiers throb endlessly, small glimmers of cautious plucked strings fusing to an ominous two-note figure hovering in darkness, only occasional shafts of electroni8c light piercing through the vast sea of sound. Weird percussive thumps and minimal pieces of melody appear and disappear, and this tension between that solemn, reverential diaphanous drone and the slightly harsher, rhythmic moments make this more intense compared to other guitar-centric dark ambient discs. Crumer of course infests these rumbling, shimmering, gliding drone-fields with all kinds of electronic particulate and buzzing circuit-abuse, likewise weaving his sounds throi8gh and around the benthic depths of the music. He's pretty restrained here compared to the much more violent electronic noise that he creates either with American Band, Aluminum Noise, or under his own name, weaving a deft touch over his instruments and devices, carefully shaping each burst of metallic skree and tangle of distorted noise. Towards the end, it all gets even more unsettling as "Faith Healing (Symbols)" dives into a cavernous arena filled with indistinguishable shouting voices, rattling percussive sounds, whirling low-end hum, and strange skeletal clatter that builds to a frightening din of disembodied chanting and marching. Easily the creepiest piece on the disc.
An excellent album of dark, often serene guitar-based glacial ambient drift, and one of my favorite Desolation House releases.
���Fans of dark, heavy avant-guitar ambience in particular will perk up at this fantastic collaboration, featuring Stephen O'Malley (Sunn / Khanate / KTL / Burning Witch), Oren Ambarchi (notable for his many solo works of experimental guitar/electronics as well as performing with Sunn offshoot projects Burial Chamber Trio, Pentemple and Gravetemple) and famed avant-rock producer Randall Dunn (Master Musicians Of Bukkake). The trio came together to create a score for the short science fiction art film Kairos from Belgian filmmaker Alexis Destoop, which I have yet to see myself' from the sounds created for the score alone, it's definitely spurred my interest in the work. The music captured here on this deluxe double LP (out recently from Drag City) is such a sumptuous slab of dark hypno-rock delirium that it can sit perfectly well on it's own, though, and it's one of the best things I've heard from O'Malley and Ambarchi in quite awhile.
��� The trio utilize an array of electric and acoustic guitars, vibraphone, bass, drums, Mellotron and synthesizers as well as some more exotic instrumentations such as a shruti box and crotales (a kind of miniature tuned cymbal played with mallets), but as soon as the flurry of ghostly glitchery and warbling electronic tones begin to materialize across the opening minutes of Shade Themes, the group introduces the wash of sound that becomes the core of the album, rendering most of the instruments unidentifiable within their rich layered sonic fog. As "That Space Between" slowly begins to coalesce around the sounds of softly strummed minor key chords and a shuffling, slightly jazzy drumbeat, the music gradually shifts into a surreal sort of post-rock, luminous guitar notes rising and hovering and decaying over a slow, ominous melody, bits of distorted detritus and droning feedback flitting through the mix. It's a crepuscular, Bohren-esque instrumental sprawl with lush layers of instrumental texture, the drumming in particular revealing a strange complexity in its seemingly haphazard rhythmic interplay, eventually turning the first side into something akin to the twangy dolorousness of Earth laid over a bed of narcotized tribal percussion, chest-rattling bass tones rising and falling across the track, a strange Lynchian atmosphere emerging from the soft vibraphone-like notes that drift hazily over the insistent rattling rhythm, later peeling back and revealing gleaming, vaguely Middle Eastern-esque melodies that float from out of some ancient Rhodes piano, breaking apart further into a kind of mysterious, gorgeous nocturnal psychedelia.
��� From there, the trio continue to creep further out into Shade Themes's twilight realm, moving from more of that sprawling, shadowy hypnotic post-rock and dreamy twanginess into the heavier, hazy "Temporal, Eponymous", that insistent, elliptical drumbeat pounding beneath distorted powerchords and waves of black amplifier drift and gleaming electronics, taking on a clanking, almost industrial-tinged quality, eventually unfolding into monstrous, fuzz-drenched psychedelic blues awash in waves of searing raga-like drone, slowly enfolded in plumes of kosmische synthesizer. Over on the third side, you get a couple of guest appearances; the first from comes from Tor Deitrichson of the cult 70s psych outfit Diga Rhythm Band, who plays tabla on the abstract creepscape "Circumstances Of Faith", an expanse of minimal bass throb and distant ghostly wailing, mysterious electronic sounds and swells of mesmeric metallic drone, enshrouded in a dark and ominous atmosphere that eventually explodes into a furious psychedelic squall of screaming effects-damaged acid guitar and pounding death-rite drumming. And the track that follows features Japanese psychedelic singer Ai Aso adrift on vast cetaceous drones and sheets of spectral hum, her etheric whisper lilting high over deep, tectonic booms and smears of gorgeous, bleary grey-sky ambience and swirls of hushed synthdrift, a combination that makes for one of the most stunning sequences on the album. And by the album's end, the trio ascend to a final symphony of crushing metallic drone, huge power chords shifting and thundering across the dusky expanse, eerie wailing falling across the horizon, a vast ocean of feedback and rumbling amplifier hum sprawling endlessly, gorgeous and grim, a crushing Sunn-style sea of doom-laden drones spreading out beneath Kairos's majestic, apocalyptic vistas.
��� A real winner on all fronts, this vinyl-only release also sports more of Denis Kostromitin's amazing artwork for the heavyweight case-wrapped gatefold jacket, as well as photography from Faith Coloccia (Mamiffer).
A complete live performance from Australian guitar explorer Oren Ambarchi that took place in Holland in 2001, Triste was originally released as a vinyl-only title from Touch Records in 2003 and has long been out of print. Triste, offered in two parts, is a superbly realized piece of understated guitar-based minimalism, epic in length but delicate, fragile notes plucked and suspended in midair and left to decay, overtones floating dreamlike across Ambarchi's open spaces. Sparse and slow burning melodies appear, sad and forlorn, as the minutes drift by. By thirty minutes into the piece, subsonic bass frequencies and sublime feedback shimmer emerges and contorts into glitchy out buzzings and crackling currents and the angelic hum of a shorted instrument cable, woven together into rich shimmering drones and high end skree. Absolutely gorgeous. The original LP version on TOuch came with a 7" of extended remixes of Triste by Tom Rechion of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, and these tracks are also included on this CD...these are dense interpretations of the source material, yet just as lovely as Rechion adds Hammond organ, tape loops, synthesizer and cds to the mix, taking the originals and building thick melodic dronescapes, stacked with layers of warbling electronics and woozy melodies. Southern Lord has done a killer job of repackaging the original idea-label 220gsm/stoughton heavy-stock aqueous gloss sleeve edition into a stoughton cd-gatefold (retaining the original tina frank/inwirements design). Highly recommended.
Up-and-coming imprint Paradigms started off with this CD re-issue of the limited edition 10" from SF chamber-doom ensemble AMBER ASYLUM, who now boast members of trance-BM legends WEAKLING. Garden Of Love is the first new recording from Amber Asylum in years, a welcome return of their gloomy, moody string/horn/heavy arrangements moving languidly over a bed of voice, trumpet, viola, cellos, piano, percussion, etc. This disc has the original 4 tracks from the 10" vinyl, plus a previously unreleased song called "Serenade". Following their previous recordings on Relapse and Neurot, these songs are heavy, brooding works, working an almost funeral-doom weight into neo-classical forms. The heaviest points are found on the first two tracks, the first channeling those SKEPTICISM/UNTIL DEATH OVERTAKES ME vibes through somber string arrangements and ghostly operatic vocals, and the second song delving into an ominous cello/stabbed strings construct that wouldn't be out of place on an early 80's Argento soundtrack. The following tunes ("Stillpoint part 1 and 2" and "Serenade") are more delicate, beautiful, even fragile, string heavy textures with Kris Force's ethereal singing, like Godspeed You! Black Emperor mixed with Cocteau Twins floating on sheets of cello drones and clouds of reverb.
Excellent Paradigms presentaion in a color wallet sleeve slid inside of a sealed brown envelope with hand-stamped artwork, in a strict edition of 750 copies.
Oh yes, we've been waiting for years for new music from Amber Asylum, whose mesmerizing, gloomy chamber music has always captivated us here at C-Blast. Still Point is the first new full-length release from the ladies of Amber Asylum since 2000, as a matter of fact. That baffles us, as Kris Force and company have always created amazingly beautiful music that combines the lush introspective gloom of later Swans material with a unique combination of neo-classical, gothic, and post-rock elements. Why there aren't legions of adoring fans clamoring for more Amber Asylum, we'll never understand. Headed by founding member and classically trained multi-instrumentalist Kris Force (who Neurosis fans will know from her contributing pretty much all of the string arrangements to Times Of Grace), Amber Asylum's Still Point offers nine moody tracks of austere, elegant chamber doom, with ghostly operatic female vocals gliding on lush droning violins and cellos, doomy folk-dirges like "Garden Of Love" and "Outer Dark" groaning icily, everything draped in somber, melancholy atmosphere. "Diminishing Returns" is a 7-minute flurry of eerie, droning strings, and "North" unveils an ominous horror movie score heavy with pulsating piano notes and minor key creep stalked by scraping electronic tones. On the album closer "12 Months", Amber Asylum unveil more of their gorgeous austere vocal harmonies that gradually become lost in the wash of cymbals crahing like tide over Jackie Perez-Gratz's cello. When the deep, resonant bass guitar and drumming eventually appears, the music takes on a heavy weight almost like hearing Neurosis' quieter moments being interpreted by a classical orchestra. It's all so heartbreakingly beautiful and downcast. Features a cover of Richard Thompson�s folk classic "The Great Valerio", with acoustic guitars by John Cobbett from Bay Area metallers Hammers Of Misfortune, and Tim Greeb from The Fucking Champs also shows up to contribute guitar to Still Point. Presented in a 4-panel gatefold case with metallic printing and nicely abstract imagery of cloudy greys and silvers.
Back with their second album for current label home Profound Lore, Amber Asylum delivers more of their atmospheric dark chamber music that I've been
infatuated with since first hearing The Natural Philosophy of Love. Band leader and multi-instrumentalist Kris Force has led her group through
several label changes and lineup fluctuations over the past decade, but that's never diminished the beautiful power of Amber Asylum's music, which is still
some of the most haunting and moving chamber-ensemble music being made right now. Combining gothic atmosphere and neo-classical arrangements, the group is
able to weave sounds that are as dark and grim as anything from Neurosis (a band that AA's Kris Force has collaborated with in the past), while possessing
all of the fragile introspective beauty as the later Swans material. Bitter River features another ten tracks of moody chamber-rock formed with layers of piano, guitar, violins, synthesizers, cello, viola, flute and percussion, with Kris Force lending her haunting voice to a couple of songs. Their gothic chamber sound is infused with dark melodies that feel like they were culled from ancient folk songs, and elsewhere the band weaves a hazy veil of electronics and strings that creates a heavy psychedelic effect as Amber ASylum's music seems to waver like a heat mirage in the air. The album also features some cool guest appareances: Eric Wood from Bastard Noise/Man Is The Bastard contributes bass and oscillator to several songs on Bitter River, Chiyo from Noothgrush performs percussion on "Twilight" and "Auger Of Thrall", Sigridd Sheie (Hammers Of Misfortune) plays flute, and legendary Swans chantreuse Jarboe contributes some spoken word narration on the eerie fifteen-minute epic "Nocturne". As with every new album that Amber Asylum puts out, this is absolutely gorgeous, moody and cinematic and highly recommended. The beautiful six-panel digipack features artwork from David D'andrea and includes a foldout instert.
����� Wasn't much fanfare around it, but Amber Asylum's first new album in nearly six years just arrived via German label Prophecy. I wasn't even sure that these gloomy Bay Area chamber-rock artists were still around, but Sin Eater proves otherwise with a full album wrapped in beautiful, somber sheets of sound. A continuation of the mix of mournful strings, classically-tinged darkness and doom-laden atmosphere that band leader Kris Force has been championing since the mid 1990s, this nonetheless delivers a few surprises, including an interesting choice of a cover song midway through.
����� Once again, the group's meditative, melancholy strings are at the center of the music, a mix of cello and violin that drifts above slow, deliberate percussion. Opening with the droning instrumental "Prelude", the album then shifts into the spellbinding gothic beauty of "Perfect Calm", as Force's soulful voice floats in over the spare instrumentation, her vocals sharing some of the solemn grace of Jarboe's work with Swans in the 1990s (herself a previous collaborator with Force). The funereal feel of "Beast Star" follows, steeped even more in sorrow and regret, a slow, sad lament that with just a handful of acoustic instruments and the ghostly glow of Force's voice manages to exude more emotionally wrought drama than an entire funeral doom album. Those flowing, folky violins and the funereal strains of cello are at the forefront of Sin Eater's sound, lush and layered and atmospheric., but some sparse drumming does appear, sometimes shifting into a somber processional. And there's some heavy, mildly distorted bass guitar that also kicks in at a couple points, emerging as a deep rumbling presence that brings added weight to the music, accompanied at times by sheets of reflective feedback and screaming distorted violin, moments that take on a vaguely metallic edge; on songs like "Executioner", all of that can rumble with a portentous power similar to the likes of Neurosis.
����� One of the most striking passages on the album though occurs when the band suddenly lumbers into a mighty miserablist epic about halfway through, and lo and behold we're hearing them performing a cover of "Tot" by doom metal legends Candlemass. And they effortlessly remake the song in their own image, maintaining the dread power of the original, especially when it kicks into that immense mid-tempo riff later in the song. Another highlight is the title track, where they introduce searing, distorted synthesizer into the stark, cold instrumental, a combination that ends up making this vaguely resemble more atonal and abrasive European prog rock. It's all rather grave and elegant, though, even when it's all stripped back to just the sound of strings and piano, full of dark, magisterial power.
����� Another elegant collection from Force and company, sure to thrill fans who've been aching for a new full length since 2009's Bitter River. It's available on both six-panel digipack CD, and a limited edition double LP pressed on 180 gram vinyl with an etching on the last side, in gatefold packaging with poster, limited to five hundred copies.
����� Wasn't much fanfare around it, but Amber Asylum's first new album in nearly six years just arrived via German label Prophecy. I wasn't even sure that these gloomy Bay Area chamber-rock artists were still around, but Sin Eater proves otherwise with a full album wrapped in beautiful, somber sheets of sound. A continuation of the mix of mournful strings, classically-tinged darkness and doom-laden atmosphere that band leader Kris Force has been championing since the mid 1990s, this nonetheless delivers a few surprises, including an interesting choice of a cover song midway through.
����� Once again, the group's meditative, melancholy strings are at the center of the music, a mix of cello and violin that drifts above slow, deliberate percussion. Opening with the droning instrumental "Prelude", the album then shifts into the spellbinding gothic beauty of "Perfect Calm", as Force's soulful voice floats in over the spare instrumentation, her vocals sharing some of the solemn grace of Jarboe's work with Swans in the 1990s (herself a previous collaborator with Force). The funereal feel of "Beast Star" follows, steeped even more in sorrow and regret, a slow, sad lament that with just a handful of acoustic instruments and the ghostly glow of Force's voice manages to exude more emotionally wrought drama than an entire funeral doom album. Those flowing, folky violins and the funereal strains of cello are at the forefront of Sin Eater's sound, lush and layered and atmospheric., but some sparse drumming does appear, sometimes shifting into a somber processional. And there's some heavy, mildly distorted bass guitar that also kicks in at a couple points, emerging as a deep rumbling presence that brings added weight to the music, accompanied at times by sheets of reflective feedback and screaming distorted violin, moments that take on a vaguely metallic edge; on songs like "Executioner", all of that can rumble with a portentous power similar to the likes of Neurosis.
����� One of the most striking passages on the album though occurs when the band suddenly lumbers into a mighty miserablist epic about halfway through, and lo and behold we're hearing them performing a cover of "Tot" by doom metal legends Candlemass. And they effortlessly remake the song in their own image, maintaining the dread power of the original, especially when it kicks into that immense mid-tempo riff later in the song. Another highlight is the title track, where they introduce searing, distorted synthesizer into the stark, cold instrumental, a combination that ends up making this vaguely resemble more atonal and abrasive European prog rock. It's all rather grave and elegant, though, even when it's all stripped back to just the sound of strings and piano, full of dark, magisterial power.
����� Another elegant collection from Force and company, sure to thrill fans who've been aching for a new full length since 2009's Bitter River. It's available on both six-panel digipack CD, and a limited edition double LP pressed on 180 gram vinyl with an etching on the last side, in gatefold packaging with poster, limited to five hundred copies.
Hot on the tailwinds of news that the mighty Amebix are reuniting comes a bunch of reissues, including several on Alternative Tentacles that we'll have
listed in the next store update. The POwer Remains, however, was released by the German peace punk label Skuld, first in 1993 and then popping back
up every few years or so in a new vinyl repress.
Amebix are a band that it's hard not to gush over, if you are a fan of their massively influential apocalyptic punk-metal. The UK outfit was crucial in the
formation of what we call "crustcore", and their influence is felt in everyone from Neurosis, Sepultura, Napalm Death, Tragedy, Dystopia, Gallhammer and
about a million other crusty, black-denim wearing, patch-covered, anarchist punk rockers across the globe. Amebix's music is still incredibly moving and
dramatic, and the visions of apocalypse and skies filled with black clouds of war still have a haunting power. The Bristol band stood in contrast to the
stark primal power of Discharge, weilding a sound that was far more atmospheric and weird while simultaneously being some of the heaviest music in the world
at the time by combining the influence of Venom, Hawkwind, early Killing Joke, Motorhead and Black Sabbath into something totally unique. A prescient meeting
of proto-speed metal, post punk, psychedelia, synthesizers and gloomy dirge, played by a bunch of guys who truly lived the life that they were singing about
in their tales of crumbling Western society and oppressive government control, eating out of dumpsters, living in squatted buildings, and likewise existing
on the outer fringes of the grid.
The Power Remains isn't an actual Amebix album but rather a collection of studio and live tracks that were captured at the height of what I
consider the band's creative prowess, right around the release of Arise and Monolith. The four studio tracks are fucking amazing to hear
now, massive metallic gloom-punk anthems that sound like the dark gothy post-punk of Killing Joke and Joy Division fused to the thunderous metal of Celtic
Frost/Hellhammer, filled with crazed guitar solos, buzzing drone synths, beautiful, chiming melodic guitar hooks that border on pop ("Last Will And
Testament"), the Baron's awesome Lemmy-style croak, and some of the best lyrics ever written from the stance of young people living under the shadow of
nuclear holocaust in the 1980's: "I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream, They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird, Giving their blood to the
Doomsday Machine I screamed into the wind my goodbye to the world...". Heavy stuff. The live side of this LP is just as crucial - I'm usually not a big fan
of live punk albums from this era, but fuck, the Amebix set from 1987 that is documented on the b-side is incendiary, four awesome psyched-out
thrashers ("Nobody's Driving", "Fallen From Grace", "Arise", and "Drink And Be Merry") with great recording quality and amazing clean passages that were
way, WAY ahead of their time. A essential document of unique, doom-laden endtime punk whose power has yet to diminish.
On black vinyl in a full color jacket with a xeroxed insert.
One of the most important and influential bands to energe from the UK anarcho-punk scene in the wake of Crass, Amebix were also the heaviest, and it's no secret that Amebix were a huge influence on the burgeoning thrash/speed metal sound that developed in the 1980's. Bands like Sepultura, Nausea and Neurosis were all heavily influenced by the weird, apocalyptic punk that Amebix forged over the course of their existence. The members of Amebix were squatters, actually living the squalid, strung-out existence that they sang about in their songs, and their lifestyle and desperation gave their music a grave, apocalyptic power that hardly any other band has been able to replicate. And Amebix's sound was pretty unique, a combination of heavy metal, punk and biker rock influenced by Venom and early Killing Joke, Black Sabbath and Motorhead and the grime of late 70's punk. Their darkly anthemicsongs tended towards chugging, sludgy dirges with tribal drumming, cold droning synthesizers, and growling vocals; utterly bleak and doom-ridden punk that didn't reach the high velocity of hardcore, but was immensely heavier than any hardcore band.
No Sanctuary
features early Amebix recordings that have been locked up for the past twenty five years, previously only heard as grungy, nth-generation bootlegs. Available officially for the first time, this reissue on Alternative Tentacles is an essential piece of punk/metal history, as powerful today as ever, maybe even moreso as Amebix's apocalyptic visions synch up eerily with the current state of the world. Recorded between 1982 and 1984, the No Sanctuary, Who's The Enemy and Winter EPs are all collected here, remastered and packaged in a digipack case with a 12-page booklet filled with lots of fantastic Amebix artwork, those stark, eerie black and white images almost as important to the Amebix experience as the music itself. One of my favorite Amebix songs ever is included here, "Sunshine Ward", five minutes of misery and gloom that starts off with deep, melodic singing that reminds me of Jaz from Killing Joke over a bleak guitar melody, then mutates into warped proto-thrash. Crucial.
Also available on LP, thick black vinyl with a bonus 7" that has the tracks "Winter" and "Beginning Of The End", and comes with an insert sheet that features the liner notes and artwork from the CD booklet.
One of the most important and influential bands to energe from the UK anarcho-punk scene in the wake of Crass, Amebix were also the heaviest, and it's no secret that Amebix were a huge influence on the burgeoning thrash/speed metal sound that developed in the 1980's. Bands like Sepultura, Nausea and Neurosis were all heavily influenced by the weird, apocalyptic punk that Amebix forged over the course of their existence. The members of Amebix were squatters, actually living the squalid, strung-out existence that they sang about in their songs, and their lifestyle and desperation gave their music a grave, apocalyptic power that hardly any other band has been able to replicate. And Amebix's sound was pretty unique, a combination of heavy metal, punk and biker rock influenced by Venom and early Killing Joke, Black Sabbath and Motorhead and the grime of late 70's punk. Their darkly anthemicsongs tended towards chugging, sludgy dirges with tribal drumming, cold droning synthesizers, and growling vocals; utterly bleak and doom-ridden punk that didn't reach the high velocity of hardcore, but was immensely heavier than any hardcore band.
No Sanctuary
features early Amebix recordings that have been locked up for the past twenty five years, previously only heard as grungy, nth-generation bootlegs. Available officially for the first time, this reissue on Alternative Tentacles is an essential piece of punk/metal history, as powerful today as ever, maybe even moreso as Amebix's apocalyptic visions synch up eerily with the current state of the world. Recorded between 1982 and 1984, the No Sanctuary, Who's The Enemy and Winter EPs are all collected here, remastered and packaged in a digipack case with a 12-page booklet filled with lots of fantastic Amebix artwork, those stark, eerie black and white images almost as important to the Amebix experience as the music itself. One of my favorite Amebix songs ever is included here, "Sunshine Ward", five minutes of misery and gloom that starts off with deep, melodic singing that reminds me of Jaz from Killing Joke over a bleak guitar melody, then mutates into warped proto-thrash. Crucial.
Monolith was the final studio album from Amebix, and it has been a tough one to find in recent years. Released in 1987 on the British label Heavy Metal Records, the album has intermittently found itself out of print, but it now seems to be available once again in the wake of recent rumblings from the mighty Amebix. An immense influence on just about every single punk and metal band with apocalyptic leanings that has formed since the mid-1980's, Amebix had a huge impact on the sound of everyone from Godflesh and Winter to Neurosis and Sepultura. And out of all of their albums, Monolith is by far the heaviest and most metallic; coming towards the end of the decade like it did, the album feels like it absorbed some of the thrash and speed metal sounds of the time, the same sound that Amebix paradoxically helped influence themselves.
Truth be told, Monolith is also the one Amebix record that many fans in the punk scene derided as being Amebix's "metal" album, a blight that dogged almost every punk and hardcore band in the latter half of the '80s. But even the early Amebix records had a metallic edge to them compared to other UK punk bands at the time, and the band was influenced just as much by Venom and Motorhead as they were by the UK peace punk scene and the apocalyptic post-punk of Killing Joke, so hearing the more complicated and heavier gloom/thrash/crust of Monolith seemed like a perfectly natural evolution to me. It's urgent and ferocious, taking that combined Motorhead/Killing Joke influence that defined their signature sound, and making it heavier and thrashier, adding in lots of speedy shredding guitar solos and thunderous double-bass drumming, and the lyrics are some of the finest endtime visions that Amebix ever spewed: "I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream, They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird, Giving their blood to the Doomsday Machine..." and "Meatwagon come, borne on the rays of the morning sun...". These are still powerful images to me. The songs themselves are more intricate as well, with huge droning riffs opening up into atmospheric instrumental passages, and the synthesizers and keyboards are more prominent than on the previous albums, and together with the spacey Hawkwindy effects that appear in songs like "I.C.B.M." and the title track, makes for strange, psychedelic post-apocalyptic punk-metal that was completely unique when this album was first released.
Plus, the album artwork on this reissue of Monolith is my favorite in the Amebix catalog, with its demonic mutant beast rising up out of the surface of a cracked and scorched wasteland, sporting numerous fanged mouths like a Giger painting on PCP.
Essential fans of Amebix's doomed post-nuke visions and haunting crustmetal!
While we're waiting for the mucho-anticipated new album from the reformed Amebix, the highly influential UK crust-metal trio has released this Ep of older tracks that have been re-recorded by the band's new lineup that includes new drummer Roy Mayorga, who in the past has sat behind the kit for bands ranging from NYC crust punkers Nausea, nu-metallers Soulfly, the Slipknot spin-off Stone Sour, and Hare Krisha rockers Shelter. More unlikely as an Amebix reunion might have seemed when this was first announced a while back, the band sounds absolutely intense revisiting these classic jams, with a heavier and more metallic attack and a much thicker recording than they had on their original albums from the 1980's. Their original sound, which was essentially a combination of Killing Joke's apocalyptic post-punk and the gnarled thrash of Motorhead, went on to be one of the most influential sounds to come out of the UK underground, and that end-of-the-world vibe and crushing power hasn't faded a bit to my ears after hearing this.
A distant war-horn heralds the arrival of opener "Arise", one of Amebix's most classic songs, here reconfigured as a crushing, thrash metal take on the original with that massive galloping riff sounding heavier than ever, those deep scorched Lemmy-like vocals still chilling to hear, an icy synthesizer droning in the background through the entire song, a punishing end-time crustmetal anthem that ends amidst the sound of otherworldly industrial chaos. Another Amebix classic, "Winter", begins with air-raid siren keyboards before kicking into that awesome panic-filled bass line joined by rolling tribal drums and The Baron's scorched howl, and it's followed by the chugging stentorian riffage and surging waves of drum battery of "Chain Reaction" (originally off of their Monolith album, and the most obviously re-tooled track here), this new version featuring some awesome, weirdly processed (almost power electronics style) vocals and backing orchestral synths and choral voices that sound fucking massive!
The comeback Ep from Amebix is also available on vinyl, packaged with a big embroidered patch and a download card that accesses an MP3 copy of the recording as well as a bonus live version of the song "Progress?" that's only available here.
While we're waiting for the mucho-anticipated new album from the reformed Amebix, the highly influential UK crust-metal trio has released this Ep of older tracks that have been re-recorded by the band's new lineup that includes new drummer Roy Mayorga, who in the past has sat behind the kit for bands ranging from NYC crust punkers Nausea, nu-metallers Soulfly, the Slipknot spin-off Stone Sour, and Hare Krisha rockers Shelter. More unlikely as an Amebix reunion might have seemed when this was first announced a while back, the band sounds absolutely intense revisiting these classic jams, with a heavier and more metallic attack and a much thicker recording than they had on their original albums from the 1980's. Their original sound, which was essentially a combination of Killing Joke's apocalyptic post-punk and the gnarled thrash of Motorhead, went on to be one of the most influential sounds to come out of the UK underground, and that end-of-the-world vibe and crushing power hasn't faded a bit to my ears after hearing this.
A distant war-horn heralds the arrival of opener "Arise", one of Amebix's most classic songs, here reconfigured as a crushing, thrash metal take on the original with that massive galloping riff sounding heavier than ever, those deep scorched Lemmy-like vocals still chilling to hear, an icy synthesizer droning in the background through the entire song, a punishing end-time crustmetal anthem that ends amidst the sound of otherworldly industrial chaos. Another Amebix classic, "Winter", begins with air-raid siren keyboards before kicking into that awesome panic-filled bass line joined by rolling tribal drums and The Baron's scorched howl, and it's followed by the chugging stentorian riffage and surging waves of drum battery of "Chain Reaction" (originally off of their Monolith album, and the most obviously re-tooled track here), this new version featuring some awesome, weirdly processed (almost power electronics style) vocals and backing orchestral synths and choral voices that sound fucking massive!
Back in stock!
Hot on the tailwinds of news that the mighty Amebix are reuniting comes a bunch of reissues, including several on Alternative Tentacles that we'll have
listed in the next store update. The Power Remains, however, was released by the German peace punk label Skuld, first in 1993 and then popping back
up every few years or so in a new vinyl repress.
Amebix are a band that it's hard not to gush over, if you are a fan of their massively influential apocalyptic punk-metal. The UK outfit was crucial in the
formation of what we call "crustcore", and their influence is felt in everyone from Neurosis, Sepultura, Napalm Death, Tragedy, Dystopia, Gallhammer and
about a million other crusty, black-denim wearing, patch-covered, anarchist punk rockers across the globe. Amebix's music is still incredibly moving and
dramatic, and the visions of apocalypse and skies filled with black clouds of war still have a haunting power. The Bristol band stood in contrast to the
stark primal power of Discharge, weilding a sound that was far more atmospheric and weird while simultaneously being some of the heaviest music in the world
at the time by combining the influence of Venom, Hawkwind, early Killing Joke, Motorhead and Black Sabbath into something totally unique. A prescient meeting
of proto-speed metal, post punk, psychedelia, synthesizers and gloomy dirge, played by a bunch of guys who truly lived the life that they were singing about
in their tales of crumbling Western society and oppressive government control, eating out of dumpsters, living in squatted buildings, and likewise existing
on the outer fringes of the grid.
The Power Remains isn't an actual Amebix album but rather a collection of studio and live tracks that were captured at the height of what I
consider the band's creative prowess, right around the release of Arise and Monolith. The four studio tracks are fucking amazing to hear
now, massive metallic gloom-punk anthems that sound like the dark gothy post-punk of Killing Joke and Joy Division fused to the thunderous metal of Celtic
Frost/Hellhammer, filled with crazed guitar solos, buzzing drone synths, beautiful, chiming melodic guitar hooks that border on pop ("Last Will And Testament"), the Baron's awesome Lemmy-style croak, and some of the best lyrics ever written from the stance of young people living under the shadow of
nuclear holocaust in the 1980's: "I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream, They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird, Giving their blood to the
Doomsday Machine I screamed into the wind my goodbye to the world...". Heavy stuff. The live side of this LP is just as crucial - I'm usually not a big fan of live punk albums from this era, but fuck, the Amebix set from 1987 that is documented on the b-side is incendiary, four awesome psyched-out
thrashers ("Nobody's Driving", "Fallen From Grace", "Arise", and "Drink And Be Merry") with great recording quality and amazing clean passages that were
way, WAY ahead of their time. A essential document of unique, doom-laden endtime punk whose power has yet to diminish.
On black vinyl in a full color jacket with a xeroxed insert.
At long last, Amebix's classic second album of apocalyptic, spaced-out crust metal has been reissued on vinyl, in a gorgeous limited edition package that includes 180 gram vinyl, a gatefold jacket, and a limited run of 1,000 copies.
Monolith was the final studio album from Amebix, and it has been a tough one to find in recent years. Released in 1987 on the British label Heavy Metal Records, the album has intermittently found itself out of print, but it now seems to be available once again in the wake of recent rumblings from the mighty Amebix. An immense influence on just about every single punk and metal band with apocalyptic leanings that has formed since the mid-1980's, Amebix had a huge impact on the sound of everyone from Godflesh and Winter to Neurosis and Sepultura. And out of all of their albums, Monolith is by far the heaviest and most metallic; coming towards the end of the decade like it did, the album feels like it absorbed some of the thrash and speed metal sounds of the time, the same sound that Amebix paradoxically helped influence themselves.
Truth be told, Monolith is also the one Amebix record that many fans in the punk scene derided as being Amebix's "metal" album, a blight that dogged almost every punk and hardcore band in the latter half of the '80s. But even the early Amebix records had a metallic edge to them compared to other UK punk bands at the time, and the band was influenced just as much by Venom and Motorhead as they were by the UK peace punk scene and the apocalyptic post-punk of Killing Joke, so hearing the more complicated and heavier gloom/thrash/crust of Monolith seemed like a perfectly natural evolution to me. It's urgent and ferocious, taking that combined Motorhead/Killing Joke influence that defined their signature sound, and making it heavier and thrashier, adding in lots of speedy shredding guitar solos and thunderous double-bass drumming, and the lyrics are some of the finest endtime visions that Amebix ever spewed: "I awoke in a sweat from the American Dream, They were loading the bomb bay of the iron bird, Giving their blood to the Doomsday Machine..." and "Meatwagon come, borne on the rays of the morning sun...". These are still powerful images to me. The songs themselves are more intricate as well, with huge droning riffs opening up into atmospheric instrumental passages, and the synthesizers and keyboards are more prominent than on the previous albums, and together with the spacey Hawkwindy effects that appear in songs like "I.C.B.M." and the title track, makes for strange, psychedelic post-apocalyptic punk-metal that was completely unique when this album was first released.
Plus, the album artwork on this reissue of Monolith is my favorite in the Amebix catalog, with its demonic mutant beast rising up out of the surface of a cracked and scorched wasteland, sporting numerous fanged mouths like a Giger painting on PCP. So cool.
Essential fans of Amebix's doomed post-nuke visions and haunting crustmetal!
While we wait for the new album coming later this year from legendary Uk crust punks Amebix, the band has offered this tease of a 12" that came out on Profane Existence earlier this summer. More of an art object for collectors than anything, this record features just one new song, "Knights Of The Black Sun", the first new Amebix song to be released in over twenty five years. Pretty amazing that this band is once again active with a new album on the way, and naturally fans have been wondering what their new stuff would sound like. If this song is any indication of what to expect, then that upcoming Lp is going to be majestic. "Knights of The Black Sun" begins with a softly strummed guitar that picks up into a catchy, melodic riff, and then the vocals kick in, clear and bright, and actually sounding surprisingly like those of Richard Butler from the Psychedelic Furs, a deep melodic burr that adds to the strangely epic post-punk feel of the song. But then the band cranks up the power, the drums coming in with a steady beat but then rising up into a thunderous tribal rhythm, the guitars becoming more furious, and then it all comes together, the epic keyboards dropping in, the vocals shifting into that instantly recognizable charred growl. By this point, there's no mistaking the Amebix sound, although it does sound sleeker and tighter than they ever have on record, unsurprising considering the span of time since their last record and the obvious advances in recording that Amebix now have available to them. But the thunderous metallic post-punk majesty that emanates off of this song is total Amebix. The song moves through crushing doom-laden heaviness, soaring keys that have an almost Cure-like ethereal quality to them, a KILLER, moving anthemic chorus taking shape towards the end, until the song finally ends in a haze of distant feedback and sorrowful piano. Pretty fucking terrific, and makes me even more anxious to hear the comeback album that's on the way. The song takes up the a-side of this record, and on the b-side, there is a laser etching of the iconic Amebix face. This also comes with a download code that includes both a digital version of the record and a Hi Def music video for the song. Limited to two thousand copies.
The Amebix fever continues here at C-Blast with the acquisition of two high-quality pins that were issued by the punks over at Profane Existence. Both of them are cool heavy-duty nickel and enamel pins, this one bearing that iconic "Splat Head" image that has adorned Amebix's records since the early 80s, one of the more recognizable images from this seminal era of apocalyptic post-punk. The pin measures roughly 3/4" across, and comes in a tiny black velvet pouch, apparently produced in a run of three hundred.
The Amebix fever continues here at C-Blast with the acquisition of two high-quality pins that were issued by the punks over at Profane Existence. Both of them are cool heavy-duty nickel and enamel pins, this one bearing the iconic Amebix logo that has adorned their records since the early 80; it's still one of the more recognizable band logos from this seminal era of apocalyptic post-punk. The pin measures roughly 1" across, and comes in a tiny black velvet pouch, apparently produced in a run of three hundred.
Finally back in print...
Like Cult Of Luna, there isn't a whole lot of mystery as to where Amenra are copping their sound from; as soon as one of their monolithic riffs kick in, there's no mistaking the Neurosis/Isis influence on their sound, and these Belgians essentially mine the heaviest elements of both - the chunky, percussive mono-chord riffing of early Isis and the slow-burning, sky-blackening riff-towers that Neurosis perfected on Through Silver In Blood. There's a reason why Amenra have gathered a fanatical cult following over in Europe, however. These guys aren't just another Neurosis ripoff band...they've taken that pounding, epic sludge and turned it into something far bleaker and more sinister than either of their influences, and I can't think of another band that has put such a crazed spin on this sound.
Back in the 1990's, several members of Amenra played in a band called Spineless that was tied in with the notorious H-8000 scene in Belgium. The H-8000 bands took the concept of combining hardcore and metal to a whole new level, and lots of the stuff that was coming out from that scene was essentially brutal thrash metal infused with a hardline straightedge and vegan philosophy. Most of the bands that were involved with that scene disappeared, but around the turn of the decade, Spineless was recreated as Amenra, taking their ferocious metalcore and jacking that into a heavy Neurosis influence. The band began to align themselves with a sort of spiritual consciousness that was later documented in a self-published, 166 page book (!), and their music evolved into a much heavier version of mid-90's Neurosis, tuning lower and adding colossal amounts of heaviness to their riffs...and their riffs were phenomenal. Definitely one of things that makes this band so great. Sure, they sound a lot like Neurosis and Isis, but they come up with riffs that are so crushing and powerful that it doesn't phase me at all. It's like hearing an evil, blackened, ultra-downtuned version of Through Silver In Blood, with freaked-out, hysterical vocals a la Jacob Bannon from Converge and an extremely economical approach to the riffs. A single song (which rarely comes in under ten minutes) usually centers around a single, punishing riff that the band coils tighter and tighter as the song progresses, and their music takes on a hypnotic intensity through their use of repetition, even when they launch into a fucking bludgeoning riff that sounds like Godflesh busting out some Kyuss at 12 rpms, blotting out the sun with the sheer mass of their sound. And they add some cool unique touches, like ethereal female vocals and deep, dramatic male singing that sounds a little like Maynard Keenan from Tool, passages of dark jangly indie rock that build into heavier sections, and on their latest album IIII, some slightly more complex and progressive song arrangements. They never sacrifice the heaviness, though. Ever.
Previous Amenra releases were released on European labels like Hypertension and have been pretty tough to get over here in the U.S., especially without having to pay an arm and a leg for them, but Init has put together an immense double disc set that collects both 2005's III and 2008's IIII as well as their two song EP from 2003 and an additional track that had previously only been available on vinyl. This set is a killer collection of Amenra's best recordings to date - both of these albums rank as some of the heaviest sludge/doom metal I've ever heard, and all of this stuff is essential listening for anyone who's already hooked on their punishing black hypno-tribal-dirge.
Killer packaging that has the two discs secured inside of a customized z-fold digipack that includes most of the artwork from both albums, and the digipack itself fits inside of a slipcase. Very cool.
A new re-issue of the first album from Belgian sludge metallers Amenra, featuring two songs off of their Mass II Ep as a bonus (all of which also appeared together on the first disc of the double CD collection that came out on Init a few years ago).
Like Cult Of Luna, there isn't a whole lot of mystery as to where Amenra are copping their sound from; as soon as one of their monolithic riffs kick in, there's no mistaking the Neurosis/Isis influence on their sound, and these Belgians essentially mine the heaviest elements of both - the chunky, percussive mono-chord riffing of early Isis and the slow-burning, sky-blackening riff-towers that Neurosis perfected on Through Silver In Blood. There's a reason why Amenra have gathered a fanatical cult following over in Europe, however. These guys aren't just another Neurosis rip-off band...they've taken that pounding, epic sludge and turned it into something far bleaker and more sinister than either of their influences, and I can't think of another band that has put such a crazed spin on this sound.
Back in the 1990's, several members of Amenra played in a band called Spineless that was tied in with the notorious H-8000 scene in Belgium. The H-8000 bands took the concept of combining hardcore and metal to a whole new level, and lots of the stuff that was coming out from that scene was essentially brutal thrash metal infused with a hardliner straightedge and vegan philosophy. Most of the bands that were involved with that scene disappeared, but around the turn of the decade, Spineless was recreated as Amenra, taking their ferocious metalcore and jacking that into a heavy Neurosis influence. The band began to align themselves with a sort of spiritual consciousness that was later documented in a self-published, 166 page book (!), and their music evolved into a much heavier version of mid-90's Neurosis, tuning lower and adding colossal amounts of heaviness to their riffs...and their riffs were phenomenal. Definitely one of things that make this band so great. Sure, they sound a lot like Neurosis and Isis, but they come up with riffs that are so crushing and powerful that it doesn't faze me at all. It's like hearing an evil, blackened, ultra-down tuned version of Through Silver In Blood, with freaked-out, hysterical vocals a la Jacob Bannon from Converge and an extremely economical approach to the riffs. A single song (which rarely comes in under ten minutes) usually centers around a single, punishing riff that the band coils tighter and tighter as the song progresses, and their music takes on a hypnotic intensity through their use of repetition, even when they launch into a fucking bludgeoning riff that sounds like Godflesh busting out some Kyuss at 12 rpms, blotting out the sun with the sheer mass of their sound. And they add some cool unique touches, like ethereal female vocals and deep, dramatic male singing that sounds a little like Maynard Keenan from Tool, passages of dark jangly indie rock that build into heavier sections, and on their latest album IIII, some slightly more complex and progressive song arrangements. They never sacrifice the heaviness, though. Ever.
These early tracks rank as some of the heaviest sludge/doom metal I've ever heard, and all of this stuff is essential listening for anyone who's already hooked on their punishing black hypno-tribal-dirge. The two Lps are housed in a nice matte-finish gatefold sleeve, and the release is limited to a pressing of 1,000 copies.
Two of Belgium's heaviest exports come together on this killer-looking new 10" from Init Recdords, pressed up on clear vinyl and packaged inside of a screen printed translucent mylar sleeve with artwork from Kristoffer Mondy. Both of the bands play extremely heavy, slow-paced sludge metal, but each takes it in a different direction, with Amenra's apocalyptic black dirge contrasting with the instrumental atmospheric crush of Hive Destruction.
Amenra's side has two songs, "Dodenakker" and "Nemelendelle" (both of which appeared on their studio album collection Mass III-II + Mass IIII) recorded live in Belgium in 2010. The cloudy black oppressiveness of Amenra's sound is only amplified in the live setting; sustained drones drift into view and hover like distant warning sirens just as the full band crashes in with their punishing slow motion doomchug, a grinding apocalyptic dirge fronted by the singer's strained, desperate screams, fueled by a bottom-heavy rhythm section that pounds and chugs like the gears of some great earthmoving machine, erupting into volleys of dissonant droning riffage and thunderous blasts of down-tuned roar. These two tracks perfectly demonstrate the ease in which Amenra has taken the eschatological dirge-metal of Neurosis and reshaped it into their own image, one that is significantly more paranoid and hopeless and relentless. Hear this, and witness one of the heaviest bands in action right now.
I have a new Cd from the band Hive Destruction that I have not listened to yet, but it is next in line on my play list once this record leaves my turntable. This French band features a lineup comprised of one of Amenra's founding members alongside personnel from the notorious Belgian Holy Terror hardcore outfit Liar, members of the fearsome "H8000 Crew". As Hive Destruction, these low-end technicians lay down some serious damage in the form of heavy mega-chug on the song "We're all instruments of purpose - the second coming", a rumbling instrumental workout that combines anthemic rocking riffage to atmospheric guitars, some electronic grit and monstrous hooks to create something that sounds to my ears like a song from The Cult being performed by Pelican, although it ends up in a strange heap of opera samples, brutal electronics, police interrogations, eerie acoustic strum, and bestial vocal-noise loops at the very end.
More than likely, if you've heard of Jason Crumer, it's through his crusty sludgecore outfit Facedowninshit that he plays guitar and sings in. Those guys have been spreading a trail of grime for close to a decade now, and their last album came out on the underground metal powerhouse Relapse. But Crumer is also known for his extensive work with heavy, harsh electronic noise, working under his own name as well as with Amazing Grace and American Band. American Bands First Album lays it all out - Crumer is joined by Matt Franco from Air Conditioning on guitar, vocals, and electronics, and Lee Counts on "metal", for this particular group's debut. This is HEAVY STUFF. You know how alot of noise outfits will have a really long, epic piece as their last track on an album? Well, American Band start out with one, the 22 minute "Bone Skirt", a titanic noise wall of churning static, blistering distortion coming in waves, and what we think are monstrous, death metal style roars submerged deep in the metallic hurricane. Could be anything tho I guess...that track is so fucking overloaded that, like all good harsh walls of noise, it starts to mess with your ability to make out details, and the whole experience turns into a whirlpool of melted rust and exploding steel slabs. Great use of feedback on here, too, really textured and menacing sounding, especially when American Band ease up on the vicious noise and settle into one of their super eerie dronescapes, huge open spaces of minimal midnight whirr where you can just make out the terrifying whine of a distant air raid siren. They use similiar dynamics throughout the rest of the album, making this a solidly engaging work of brutal noise sculpture, comparable to what it might sound like if the blastfurnace feedback storms of outfits like Cherry Point and The Rita were offset by drifting Troum style drones. Packaged in a full-color, 4-panel digipack.
Though they've been dogged by incessant comparisons to Mastodon (who they shared a split 7" with back in 2003), it's more a case of American Heritage having an extremely similiar set of genes as their Atlanta brethren. That set of genes, of course, being a shared love of dizzying prog/math rock complexity welded to gymnastic thrash metal and pinball shredding topped off with a big ol' heaping of Sabbathy heaviness. That said, there is no denying that Mastodon fanatics in particular are going to love American Heritage and their brand of technical, jagged progthrash. The seven songs on their fifth album Millenarian make up a freakin' feast of intricate arpeggiated riffing, wicked time signature changes, haunting melodic guitar parts that creep out from under the angular riffs, and more straightforward thrash metal shredding, formed into complex arrangements that frequently tend to lose the gruff, powerful shouting vocals and veer off into purely instrumental territory. Their early stuff like 1999's Why Everyone Gets Cancer was entirely instrumental, but I dig the occasional blast of vocals that the band use now, it adds a serious punch whenever they show up over the convoluted, chunky, twisting riffage. Sure, the Heritage know when to pull back and ride some monstrous grooving riff or slow it down to a crunchy, jackhammer breakdown at opportune moments, and there are some fucking skullflattening parts on here that remind me of Coalesce, which make this more than just some techy math-metal workout. The riffs are massive though, and they come at you relentlessly, changing shape every few seconds as the drummer lays down an amorphous rhythmic assault. Definitely one of the most underrated and overlooked bands in the metal underground, this disc needs to be heard by fans of everyone from Knut to Kylesa to Dazzling Killmen and yes, Mastodon.
The second entry in the new Crucial Blast Video line is a limited-edition VHS release of the gnarly 2022 Small Town Monsters documentary AMERICAN WEREWOLVES. Blending raw witness testimonies, some contextual folklore and anthropological commentary from researchers, and an increasingly mind-bending visual style that brings the encounters with the subject into a surreal nightmare reality, WEREWOLVES documents the bizarre "Dogman" phenomena, where people are unexpectedly encountering monstrous, bipedal canids, often in rural regions and often in proximity to early Adena-Hopewell mound-builder sites. Focused on encounters in Ohio and Kentucky, this film bridges the narrow chasm between run-ins with "high strangeness" and the irreal state of true horror.
Each year, dozens of encounters with what are described as “upright canids” are reported throughout North America. These beings often behave in similar ways, with many reports recounting a creature that is aggressive, ghastly, and disturbing. While many theorize that the “Dogman” is some sort of unidentified species of animal, many believe that what they were confronted with was something else.
Something more.
AMERICAN WEREWOLVES aims to explore an oft-overlooked aspect of American folklore. However, where previous STM films delved into similar subject matter by presenting the details of the phenomena through a panel of experts, authors, folklorists and investigators, WEREWOLVES leaves the storytelling to the witnesses. Comprised of around a dozen witness accounts, the film takes on this bizarre topic by leaving it up to the people who have experienced it to present it to the viewer The encounters discussed range from brief run-ins on rural country lanes to horrifying, face-to-face confrontations that seem like the stuff of nightmares.
Crucial Blast Video is proud to partner with Small Town Monsters to present this limited VHS videocassette of 2022’s AMERICAN WEREWOLVES, bringing this strange amalgam of regional cryptoid docudrama a la LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, surrealistic 80’s shot-on-video horror, and UNSOLVED MYSTERIES / SIGHTINGS-esque, made-for-tv production aesthetics to eerie analogue for the first time.
Limited to an limited run of 300 copies, this edition also comes with a twenty-eight page full-color booklet that includes a brand new essay on the film "Witness To The Hyper-Feral", psychedelic stills from the film, behind-the-scenes production photos, and "Stalking The Bestial", an interview with American Werewolves director Seth Breedlove.
So many years into collecting and immersing myself in the vast RRRecords catalog, and I am still coming across noise releases that I missed for one reason or another but which shred my brain beautifully. Like the 2016 RRRecycled Music Series tape from Ames Sanglante, the harsh noise alter-ego of Quebecois artist Pierre-Marc Tremblay, that gutter-savant notorious for his legion of different, unique projects, bands, and endeavors that include Akitsa, Vilains Bonshommes, Departure Chandelier, Venusberg Cardinal, Contrepoison, Outre-Tombe, and running the Tour De Garde label. Ames Sanglantes is one of his oldest projects; with releases stretching all the way back to 1998. The project name roughly translates to "Bloody Souls", in keeping with the general macabre theme that catalyzes his musical expressions, and the sound of Ames Sanglantes has evolved a bit over the course of the project's nearly twenty-five year existence. On this Recycled tape (released in 2016, I believe), Tremblay's untitled noise excursions travel over a varied but rough topography that stretches out for a bit over half an hour, starting off with restraint but leading you into a crushing harsh noisescape by the end.
Specks of sharp, pointillist feedback emerge from a lo-fidelity haze of tape hiss, settling into a steady sinewave whine right before a sub-surface whirl of distant skree, mysterious subterranean flutter and quick bursts of bitcrushed noise starts to take over on the A-side. It is abrasive but pulled-back, allowing for the subtle interplay of Tremblay's feedback machinations with that muted and distant oceanic rumble to spread out multi-directionally. More blips of crushed glitch appear briefly, while that chthonic reverberation slides into a kind of pulsating rhythm. This hovers in a similar void-field as the monotonous, pungent industrial minimalism of Zone Nord and Davide Tozzoli's work under the N. banner. There's a strange semi-organic presence within the muffled, caustic dronescape that really becomes apparent when that tranquil static starts heaving and throbbing beneath the shrill tone-streams and it all starts to feel like you are holding a closed container of writhing grubs up to your ear. In part, meditative, but also a little bit ghastly as it all slowly takes the form of a seething chitinous mass of insectile chaos. Chattering, clattering movements bursts from the slow shifting murk, those 8-bit electronic noises bursting onto the scene like some malevolent Morse code transmission. But when it switches over to the b-side, take cover: those sounds are suddenly and monstrously amplified, erupting into a cacophonic throb with the distortion pushed into the deep red, frying out the signals and bathing everything in a massive level of crunch. All of the mid-range is scooped out, leaving a bass-heavy mass of over-modulated rumble and hiss. All quite cathartic, of course, and heavy on detail as is the norm with Âmes Sanglantes recordings. Tremblay was obviously taking inspiration from some of the U.S. titans of extreme psychedelic primitivist noise a la Macronympha and Richard Ramirez circa-Nature's Afterbirth / Bleeding Headwound.
As with all of RRRecords' Recycled Music Series, this material is recorded over a pop/rock cassette, with hand-scrawled titles on the duct-taped cassette and cover.
Record/flexi-disc abuser A.M.K. returns with a new full length disc with 29 tracks designed for random play on your CD player, in the same manner as that recent Bizarre Uproar disc on Housepig that we just listed a few weeks ago. A.M.K. has always stood out in the American noise scene for his focus on using vinyl records and primarily flexi-discs to create confusing montages of sound, chopping up the records and flexis into sections and then recombining them into strange new forms and played back on regular turntables. RRR released a 10" titled Montage that is probably one of AMK's best known releases, but it's been awhile since I've heard something new from the longrunning project, who started out cutting apart flexi-discs way back in 1986.
Troniks has released AMK's latest album Super Panoramic Stereo Sound 5000 in a limited edition of 500, in a black and white sleeve that uses classic phonographic design imagery. When these 29 tracks are played back in random order, they create a tense collage of chopped up pop music, big band music, brutal low frequency feedback rumble and distorted noise, bits of vinyl hiss and crackle, looped voices, looped bits of unrecognizeable rock music that is morphed into blurts of hypnotic drone rock, vicious dronescapes built from white noise and tribal percussion loops, and more. Half of the tracks are untitled; the other half are named after famous slasher movie locations ('Haddonfield', 'Crystal Lake') or more random subjects. Obviously, this is meant to be listened to as a single piece of sound art, and it's a really cool patchwork of Dadaist-plunderphonic sonic fuckery that goes from surreal to sinister and back again.
3 song dose of primo RVA acid punk and death disco throb from some SUPPRESSION members. Think neo No Wave, jamming energetic disco rhythms, angular staccato trebly guitar, sped-up monster movie basslines played on keyboards, yelpy vocals, a mutant dance punk riot sometimes dipping into a sort of BUTTHOLE SURFERS stupor. Rad! On black wax in a tight neon sleeve.
A hefty slab of crushing improv-noise and bestial industrial horror from post-Man Is The Bastard outfit Amps For Christ and Midwestern collective Winters In Osaka; this full length split really smokes, with some of the heaviest stuff that I've heard from WIO so far.
I haven't stocked anything from Amps For Christ in the past, but their contribution to this split is pretty heavy stuff, definitely of interest to those of you with a taste for mangled, monstrous industrial music. Their side features three tracks from the Barnes/Snarb duo configuration of the band: "Spring Theory" starts things off with a murky dronescape of scraped strings and distant percussive thump, swirling ambient muck washing over the stretched out drones (created via something that the band refers to as "wheelbarrow/strings") and those cracked caveman electronics that are at the heart of AFC's sound. A nice enough blurt of damaged folk-drone that leads into the sputtering, sinister drift of "Ninetynine Time", a mass of seething low-end noise and fluttering electronics, monstrous distorted voices and ghostly metallic reverberations lurking way off on the background as abrasive oscillator tones and fractured metal slowly consume the room, transforming into a nightmarish din of lurching, broken-down percussion and squealing malfunctioning effects pedals. The last track, "Atar-core", veers off into something resembling Indian classical music being played on massively distorted guitars, the haunting melody wafting up like black smoke over the band's grimy buzz. But then it shifts into this killer sludgy riff, and all of a sudden it sounds vaguely like some 70's progressive rock guitarist wandering around in a fog of amplifier filth and broken speaker buzz. As wrecked and creepy as anything off that latest Hair Police album, for sure.
But it's the Winters In Osaka side that I picked this up for, and man does it deliver. For nearly twenty minutes, "Vorkuta" builds from a mass of whirling metallic drones and subterranean reverberations into a strange and hallucinatory industrial deathscape. One filled with creepy looped music, deep tectonic rumbling, strange psychedelic guitar melodies adrift in clouds of gaseous black fumes and the din of distant crashing metal, all underscored by the utterly monstrous cackling and bellowing of guest vocalist Eric Wood (of Man Is The Bastard / Bastard Noise infamy) and an undercurrent of shapeless rumbling heaviness that builds into a full-blown roar of oceanic power by the end of the side. There's always been a heavy Bastard Noise influence on Winters In Osaka's grim industrial dronecrush, and that really shines through here, for obvious reasons; with Wood's bestial utterances echoing across this vision of dystopian assembly-line horror and those weird spacey guitars, this has the feel of a Bastard Noise jam lost in a haze of damaged acid rock meanderings and disturbing, oppressive ambience. Very cool.
Limited to two hundred copies.
Both of the new discs that just came in from The Institute Of Organic Conversations (the micro-label operated by James Keeler of Wilt/Hedorah) exist in the same sphere of punishing industrial skum-sludge; Hedorah's latest, the three-track Flower cdr that's reviewed on this week's list, is a continuation of Keeler's monolithic noise-doom, roaring glacial mecha-sludge doused in holocaustal levels of harsh noise. On the other hand, Amputation Theory's Scum is a complete clusterfuck of distorto-sludge violence and spastic noisecore that's way more antisocial and damaged, though it totally fits in with the kind of putrid heaviness that Keeler and company have been working with as of late.
Dunno where this band is from or who's behind it, all I've found online is that it's apparently one guy by the name of Jimmy Rexroad who creates all of this noise. Scum is one of the few things that the project has put out so far, apparently released in a microscopic edition of 25 copies, but anyone into seriously demented and noise-damaged heaviness will flip out over this disc. Eleven tracks, all soaked in nihilist dread and seriously negatory vibes, a mix of vicious harsh noise, retarded Brainbombs-like sludge rock, massive Swans-style industrial peercussive pound, hyperfast drum-machine noisecore...tracks like "Arsonist" and "Down With The Rich" bury massive blackened doom metal riffs underneath impossibly heavy mountains of Incapacitants-style noise, but then "Girls In Love" is a surreal sound collage of murky shortwave dance-pop, film samples, melted jazz horns, clouds of spacious room ambience, weird chuckling voices, blasts of fleshrending black noise, and other random sounds. Then there's tracks like "Crystals" and "Mandance" that remind me of the blown-out garage sludge of Drunkdriver and Brainbombs, only with RIDICULOUS amounts of harsh noise and distortion and feedblack dumped all over the songs, almost obliterating the sloppy riffs and neanderthal drumming with a hellstorm of ear-scraping skree. This shit is VERY intense.
Comes in a handmade black and white wallet sleeve.
Super brief but high quality "album" from Philly spazztoid blasters An Albatross is now available from Crucial Blast. Uh, better late than never, and if you're into the new wave of art-damaged grindcore that's been ripping shit as of late (Genghis Tron, Daughters, Triumph Of Gnomes, The Locust, etc), well, these guys are tops. Just over 11 minutes in length, An Albatross shred through 10 blasts of catchy as fuck, super spastic and caustic noise-punk mashed with apocalyptic hardcore/grind colliding over the band's signature carnival/Italian prog rock style keyboards. Due to the heavy presence of those freaked out keys, we remmeber AA being tagged as a Locust knock off when this originally came out, but we think they're onto their own thing. Add to that all sorts of weird melodies, dogs barking and growling, and other fucked up sound loops and tape crud and you get a fucking KILLER disc of sci-fi dance thrash that demands repeat spins. Eat Lightning Shit Thunder also has some enhanced CD-ROM live videos too, which is sweet. These guys RIP IT live, as anyone who has witnessed them will tell you. The Crucial Blast gang caught 'em on tour with Melt Banana in 2005 and we thought our heads were going to come clean off.
Back in stock!
Tons of bands have tried to combine classic prog and the more furious thrashing aggression of hardcore and grindcore, a few faring better than the rest, and An Albatross definitely fall in the camp of the former. While their early releases were skronky, spazzy, low-fi blasts of carnival synths and tuneless hardcore, 2006's Blessphemy (Of The Peace Beast Feastgiver And The Bear Warp Kumite) had the band blasting off into a much more intense realm of prog-thrash psychosis. This album still blows me away whenever I listen to it; it's the sound of 70's prog rock after snorting meth for twelve hours straight, crazed carnivalesque organ melodies and spastic pop hooks zooming alongside hyperspeed blastbeats and explosions of psychedelic noise, bizarre angular arrangements and epic hardcore riffs, like Magma if the French progsters metamorphosised into a speed metal band and were fronted by a kid who sounds more like a pissed off Macaque than anything. In other words, this sounds completely badass. It's spastic and ridiculously hyper like alot of the stuff that's been coming out on Load and Lovepump and Skin Graft, but like Ruins and Koenjihyakkei, these guys really have their prog chops down, spitting out awesome synth freakouts and insane alien melodies and insanely complex arrangements, but unlike those bands, An Albatross deliver this spastic Zeuhl-huffing circus prog sound via brutally fast and aggressive grind and thrash. This shit is amazing, barely a half hour long, but every second is packed with crazed calliope melodies, jarring stop/start arrangements, blasts of joyous brass fanfares, bizarro disco rhythms, wonky lightspeed keyboards, pummeling but super complex drumming, ripping thrash riffs that bloom into angular skronk, sometimes catchy and strangely poppy, the next second a roaring blast of convoluted grindcore. Furious and technical and totally unique, Blessphemy still holds up as one of their best albums ever. Highly recommended!
This limited vinyl release of Blessphemy comes in a heavy full-color gatefold and on colored vinyl.
Back in stock.
Tons of bands have tried to combine classic prog and the more furious thrashing aggression of hardcore and grindcore, a few faring better than the rest, and An Albatross definitely fall in the camp of the former. While their early releases were skronky, spazzy, low-fi blasts of carnival synths and tuneless hardcore, 2006's Blessphemy (Of The Peace Beast Feastgiver And The Bear Warp Kumite) had the band blasting off into a much more intense realm of prog-thrash psychosis. This album still blows me away whenever I listen to it; it's the sound of 70's prog rock after snorting meth for twelve hours straight, crazed carnivalesque organ melodies and spastic pop hooks zooming alongside hyperspeed blastbeats and explosions of psychedelic noise, bizarre angular arrangements and epic hardcore riffs, like Magma if the French progsters transformed into a speed metal band and were fronted by a kid who sounds more like a pissed off Macaque than anything. In other words, this sounds completely badass. Spastic and ridiculously hyper like the stuff that's been coming out on Load and Lovepump and Skin Graft, but like Ruins and Koenjihyakkei, these guys really have their prog chops down, spitting out awesome synth freakouts and insane alien melodies and insanely complex arrangements, but unlike those bands, An Albatross deliver this spastic Zeuhl-huffing circus prog sound via brutally fast and aggressive grind and thrash.
This shit is amazing, barely a half hour long, but every second is packed with crazed calliope melodies, jarring stop/start arrangements, blasts of joyous brass fanfares, bizarro disco rhythms, wonky lightspeed keyboards, pummeling but super complex drumming, ripping thrash riffs that bloom into angular skronk, sometimes catchy and strangely poppy, the next second a roaring blast of convoluted grindcore. Furious and technical and totally unique, Blessphemy still holds up as one of their best albums ever. Definitely their craziest.
Here's another punishing cassette for you insatiable HNW junkies, brought over from one of my new favorite power electronics/industrial noise labels Nil By Mouth. Fans of extreme harsh noise should be familiar with this long-running project, a duo featuring Texan noise artist Richard Ramirez (also of Werewolf Jerusalem/Black Leather Jesus) and Italian artist Cristiano Renzoni (from the HNW project Alo Girl) that has been producing hardcore noise walls on and off for almost two decades. Their love of obscure Euro-horror is the primary inspiration behind the project, and here they pay homage to the cult film Eyes Without A Face; not to be confused with George Franju's haunting 1960 French horror film of the same name, this is a 1994 giallo from legendary Italian sleazemaster Bruno Mattei that was also released as Madness. The film's stylized fedora-sporting murdered, scenes of graphic ocular disfigurement, and suspenseful stalking sequences fuel Gliocchi Dentro's sprawling, obsessive expanses of brutal static crush, filled with lots of textural detail across the tape's thirty-minute length. Each side features half of "Eyes Without A Face", the first primarily made up of a constant churning maelstrom of static, throbbing bass and metallic reverberations, with a patina of shortwave static clinging to the surface. After a while, though, the duo begins to introduce fragments of horrific distorted screaming and shrieking high-end feedback which add a fearful element to their raging noisewall. A few sparse samples from the film appear later as well, primarily as an intro to the b-side, but this track remains consistent in it's crushing, hypnotic HNW approach as well. As the second side approaches the end, the duo steadily increase the deep, low-end rumbling until it grows and builds into a vast oceanic roar, giving the final moments of the piece a dire atmosphere of inexorable doom. Fans of Ramirez's other harsh noise releases (and HNW work in particular) will love it, obviously, as will anyone into the more brutal end of the harsh wall spectrum.
Released in a limited edition of 120 copies, in a bright yellow package design that compliments the aesthetics of the giallo genre that these guys are so obsessed with.
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Crushing eschatological violence. 2009's In The Constellation Of The Black Widow from British industrial death/black crushers Anaal Nathrakh is as extreme as anything the band has produced so far, a ten song blast of hellish, apocalyptic violence that signaled a return to the full-on feral fury of earlier albums like The Codex Necro and When Fire Rains Down From The Sky, Mankind Will Reap As It Has Sown. It was on those early releases that the band quickly established themselves as one of the most intense newer black/death bands to have surfaced at the dawn of the 2000s. Certainly one of the most pissed off sounding bands, that's for sure. After getting blasted with the withering misanthropy of those early works, it's tough coming up with another band that exudes as much anti-human vitriol within the death metal spectrum as these guys.
Their nihilistic tone was tempered somewhat by Anaal Nathrakh's growing inclusion of power metal-style vocal heroics and soaring melody as their career continued, though. I'd always been a fan of those more melodic qualities that the band incorporated into the ultra-violent, twisted deathblast on later albums, but in many ways Constellation was a return to form, with the demonic vocal outbursts that switch on a dime between insanely harsh shrieks and guttural growls taking center stage versus David Hunt's majestic baritone, the convoluted, savage riff-arrangements, the slashing, dissonance of the guitars, the corrosive electronic noise, and those furious programmed drum machines ripping through these ten tracks like artillery fire. And corrosive electronic noise that made their debut one of my favorite black/death album ever. That barbaric industrialized death metal riffage and blackened hyperblast is colored by additional textures like ghostly voices and samples that lurk beneath the metallic onslaught, and there are frequent outbursts of psychotic guitar solos, vicious electronic glitchery and weird industrial samples that explode out of nowhere, constantly keeping these songs in a state of panicked tension. One of their more ferocious records, this sees Anaal Nathrakh chronicling our slow-motion apocalypse better than most, delivering another amazingly brutal slab of supremely epic death/black metal.
Back in stock.
Crushing eschatological violence. 2009's In The Constellation Of The Black Widow from British industrial death/black crushers Anaal Nathrakh is as extreme as anything the band has produced so far, a ten song blast of hellish, apocalyptic violence that signaled a return to the full-on feral fury of earlier albums like The Codex Necro and When Fire Rains Down From The Sky, Mankind Will Reap As It Has Sown. It was on those early releases that the band quickly established themselves as one of the most intense newer black/death bands to have surfaced at the dawn of the 2000s. Certainly one of the most pissed off sounding bands, that's for sure. After getting blasted with the withering misanthropy of those early works, it's tough coming up with another band that exudes as much anti-human vitriol within the death metal spectrum as these guys.
Their nihilistic tone was tempered somewhat by Anaal Nathrakh's growing inclusion of power metal-style vocal heroics and soaring melody as their career continued, though. I'd always been a fan of those more melodic qualities that the band incorporated into the ultra-violent, twisted deathblast on later albums, but in many ways Constellation was a return to form, with the demonic vocal outbursts that switch on a dime between insanely harsh shrieks and guttural growls taking center stage versus David Hunt's majestic baritone, the convoluted, savage riff-arrangements, the slashing, dissonance of the guitars, the corrosive electronic noise, and those furious programmed drum machines ripping through these ten tracks like artillery fire. And corrosive electronic noise that made their debut one of my favorite black/death album ever. That barbaric industrialized death metal riffage and blackened hyperblast is colored by additional textures like ghostly voices and samples that lurk beneath the metallic onslaught, and there are frequent outbursts of psychotic guitar solos, vicious electronic glitchery and weird industrial samples that explode out of nowhere, constantly keeping these songs in a state of panicked tension. One of their more ferocious records, this sees Anaal Nathrakh chronicling our slow-motion apocalypse better than most, delivering another amazingly brutal slab of supremely epic death/black metal.
Earache has given a pair of early Anaal Nathrakh releases the reissue-bundle treatment that they've bestowed upon more and more of their back catalog, giving extreme metal fans an opportunity to beef up their collection with nicely boxed dual Cd sets of material that, in most cases, had gone out of print for a while. Taking their 2001 debut album The Codex Necro and it's follow-up/companion Ep When Fire Rains Down From The Sky... from 2002, the label here presents a reissue set of this UK black metal band's earliest releases that will fully school any newcomer to the vicious, advanced 21st century industrial-necro violence of members V.I.T.R.I.O.L. and Irrumator, complete with the bonus tracks that were included with the original Earache reissues. The entire Anaal Nathrakh catalog is incredible, and even this early in their existence, the band was creating some of the most nihilistic, bestial black metal I've ever heard.
When The Codex Necro originally came out in 2001, the album received rabid accolades from the European metal press and appeared on numerous year end best-of lists. And rightfully so; here was a band that combined the blazing, frostbitten ferocity of classic second wave black metal with a futuristic industrial sheen, but instead of delving into the sort of warped dancefloor tactics that other electronically-enhanced BM outfits were experimenting with around the turn of the decade, Anaal Nathrakh forged this sound into something so hateful and apocalyptic that the album threatens to blowtorch the flesh right off of your face. Crushing black blast fused with a bizarre electronic edge, with some truly insane production techniques that were unlike anything I'd heard at the time. The seminal BM of bands like Mayhem and Darkthrone is obviously at the root of their sound, but it's mutated and spliced into something even faster and meaner. A heavy death metal influence finds it's way into Anaal Nathrakh's sound, making this so much heavier than most black metal, but the band also weaves in bizarre melodic touches, insane mechanized drum patterns, irradiated electronic ambience, perverted Gregorian chants, weird wah-stained riffs, even veering unexpectedly into some frantic drum 'n' bass breaks on "Paradigm Shift - Annihilation". Then there are the vocals, extreme and processed screams, maniacal high-pitched falsetto shrieks that sound like a cybernetic Rob Halford, and insane, bestial grunts, the vocals constantly changing shape, giving the music a constant psychotic energy, an incomprehensible gnashing of teeth. An amazing debut that left a permanent boot mark on the face of British black metal. The album originally came out in the UK on the Mordgrimm label, but in 2005 Earache released it in the US with four bonus tracks that were taken from Anaal Nathrakh's Peel Session from 2003, which included members of Napalm Death and Cradle Of Filth as auxilliary members...
Released as a follow up to Codex, the 2003 Ep When Fire Rains Down From The Sky, Mankind Will Reap As It Has Sown delivers a half hour assault of maniacal necro violence from British black metaller Anaal Nathrakh. A vicious six-song exercise in apocalyptic blast hate from the duo of Irrumator and V.I.T.R.I.O.L., with much of the bizarre production fuckery and electronic enhancement that made their debut so wickedly alien sounding now stripped away for a more straightforward, grind black/death attack. You won't find any of the sudden junglist outbreaks, electronically processed vocals, bizarre ambience or industrial clatter, but they still keep their sound in total end time overdrive, blasting out hyper fast, violent black metal scorched in nuclear fire and etched in misanthropic hatred. The sound is still pretty fractured and insane, the blastbeats hurtling into the stratosphere, the arrangements full of jagged stops and frenzied riffage, and of course, those psychotic vocals, a hellish tapestry of tortured screaming, bestial grunting, and wailing cries that feel as though they are emanating from the bowels of an asylum, with some additional throat damage contributed by Attila Csihar (Sunn O))) / Mayhem / Aborym). Like the debut, this was released in the UK on Mordgrimm, but was later reissued for the US by Earache with three bonus tracks taken from Anaal Nathrakh's 2005 BBC Rock Show appearance.
Both discs are packaged together in a full color box.
Back in stock.
Along with Coroner, Voivod, Watchtower and Mekong Delta, St. Louis shredders Anacrusis were one of the more imaginative bands to emerge from the thrash metal underground of the late 1980s, blending together a unique combination of classic power metal moves, gloomy post-punk melody (a pervasive influence that would later lead them to cover the likes of New Model Army on their third album Manic Impressions), moments of Sabbathian crush, eerie complex shredding and an arsenal of ultra ripping thrash riffs, all topped off with one of the quirkiest, coolest vocal performances that you'll ever hear out of a thrash metal band, courtesy of guitarist/singer Kenn Nardi; his intense, expressive voice would suddenly morph from a killer high-pitched howl into an almost ethereal croon in the blink of an eye, and no-one in metal has ever sounded anything quite like this guy. Although Anacrusis didn't achieve the level of notoriety of many of their peers, their strange, unearthly metal would become an influence on everything from the latest wave of progressive thrash metal bands to the crushing avant-garde heaviness of Starkweather.
Like a lot of the prog-thrash albums from this era that I've been obsessing over, Anacrusis's releases have been increasingly difficult to track down, especially their first two albums, Suffering Hour and Reason, both of which have been out of print for decades. After reuniting a few years ago for a show in Europe, the original Anacrusis lineup decided to re-record both of these albums in full, and they've been combined into the hefty double disc set Hindsight: Suffering Hour & Reason Revisited that was released on cult metal reissue label Divebomb. I'm generally not a big fan of band's re-recording their older albums, but this set has a couple of things going for it: the band members smartly decided not to mess with the original music, and aside from a few small changes to some of the guitar solos and other elements, these new recordings are pretty faithful to the original songs; and with twenty some years of maturity and experience under their belt, the material benefits from the band's gains in skill and musicianship. Add to that a cleaner, heavier production that's thankfully free of modern bells and whistles, and you get a killer new envisioning of some of the coolest, heaviest prog-thrash from this era, enhanced by the appearance of two demo-era songs ("Apocalypse" and "Injustice") that didn't appear on the original albums.
The first disc in the set features the re-recorded songs from Suffering Hour, the band's raucous 1988 debut. The original album was plagued by murky production and some haphazard songwriting, but Suffering Hour still had plenty of ferocious kicks to offer via the band's often reckless technical thrash, a sound that was only beginning to take form here as they started to carve out their signature brand of tricky riffage and dark atmospherics through their frantic, crossover-esque attack. You could hear some of those progressive/psychedelic rock influences creeping through on songs like "Twisted Cross" and "A World To Gain" as well as moments of crushing doom that crash through the weird arrangements, but for the most part the band was locked into an aggressive, down-tuned thrash assault with a plethora of AWESOME riffs, with the song "Twisted Cross" numbering among my own favorite thrash songs of all time.
It was with 1990's Reason that Anacrusis's experimental tendencies would really start to take flight, though. Pushing their prog tendencies further than before, the album featured eleven songs of complex, crushing avant-thrash with a stronger production than their debut while still having that raw, energetic feel, and the musicianship had grown in spades. Songs like "Terrified" combined ferocious thrash metal with creepy discordant leads, eerie doom-laden passages and odd riff arrangements, hinting at the kind of Byzantine math-thrash that bands like Watchtower and Deathrow were doing around the same time, but then the album would suddenly shift into the trippy prog of "Stop Me" or the sweeping dark post-punk-esque melodies found nestled within the violent speed and angularity of songs like "Not Forgotten", "Child Inside" and "Misshapen Intent", these awesome, unexpected Killing Joke-like moments seamlessly integrated with their ripping convoluted thrash. By this point, singer Nardi had developed a truly unique delivery, his vocals a mix of ghostly, ethereal crooning and terrifying screams, resulting in an awesome, almost darkwave-tinged tech-thrash vision.
As you would expect, the re-recorded versions of Suffering Hour and Reason are much more polished and lack all of that reverb that drenched the first album, but these new recordings still sound like they could have been recorded from the same period of time. Of course, a lot of that fraying-at-the-seams energy and looseness is what I dug so much about those original albums and was a big part of what made them sound so unique; while the songs still sound as imaginative and powerful as they did then, it's a different kind of performance, and I wish that they could have included reissues of the original albums alongside these new recordings. As it is though, Hindsight is the sound of Anacrusis performing at the top of their game, and these songs sound as amazing and as haunting now as they did back in the late 1980s.
Hindsight comes in a thick eight-panel digipack package that includes a thirty-two page full color booklet filled with liner notes (from both members of the band and former Metal Forces editor Bernard Doe), lyrics and photos.
New half-hour cassette from the mysterious psych-drone project known as Anakrid, which is actually Chris Bickel who used to play in the hardcore/punk bands In/humanity and Guyana Punch Line. Anakrid has previously shared wax with their like-minded brethren in blackened industrial droneology, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and the project continues on it's stygian trajectory with Ceaselessly Out Of A Cloudless Sky, serving up two contrasting sides to their sound. On the a side, they craft a bleak sprawling soundscape of echoin metallic clang, vast Lustmord-like black ambience, deep cavernous drones, flecked with vague percussive sounds and an abstract rhythmic quality that makes this extended jam sound like glacial krautrock, super slow and syrupy and stretched out over a dark propulsive backdrop of metallic throb and chug that almost sounds like the looped bellow of a train, surrounded by strange rattling sounds, ghostly chimes, and other black sonic effluvia wafting out of Anakrid's infernal incense burners. Not all that unlike the releases from Jazzfinger and Uton that I've written up this week, although Anakrid is far heavier and more rhythmically based than either, almost like a motorik Wolf Eyes doused in the black ritual ambience of the Aural Hypnox camp. On the other side, though, is totally different. This fifteen minute piece is an improvised scrapyard avalance, stringing deep veins of tectonic low end heaviness through a chaotic mass of metal clatter, crunching noise, pieces of metal and other materials being dragged across concrete, percussive and loud and frenetic, and sounding like what would go down if Moe! Staiano had a squadron of cavemen performing one of his industrial found-object symphonies. Limited to one hundred copies, and packaged in a neat looking layered cover with marbled paper and clear transparency fixed together with grommets.
It's hard to believe that these maniacs are even still alive, let alone still performing as Anal Cunt after all of these years of substance abuse, overdoses, comas, brawls, and rampant assholism. But the nefarious AxCx has been pretty busy this past year, with a full US tour and performances at some of the bigger metal festivals here in the U.S....I actually caught them at a show right outside of Hagerstown last spring when they were on tour, and the fact that Anal Cunt were performing in our little 'burg was surreal enough, but there they were, ripping through a half hour set that had them berating the crowd of rioting kids over an ear shredding assault of ultraheavy punked-out grind noise. In betwixt all of this activity, AxCx dropped this disc called Defenders Of The Hate on Menace To Sobriety Records last summer ('07), which was touted as a new release from the band. It's not though, so AxCx collectors need to take note; Defenders Of The Hate is actually a twenty-minute mini-album that collects the remastered eleven tracks from the Defenders of the Hate EP from 2001, and ten bonus tracks from their split wih Flachenbrand, the 13 Bands Who Think You're Gay compilation LP, and the Thrash Of The Titans compilation LP. And the "music" is exactly what you'd expect, short minute-long blasts of impossibly fast, downtuned grindcore pushed to the limit, usually turning into a blurr of violent Merzbowian noise, although bits of fucked-up punk, deformed rock, and grooving sludge riffs show up here and there. Super pissed off and offensive, with song titles like "Obviously Adopted", "You Quit Doing Heroin, You Pussy", and more that I can't even print here. These cretins are still completely out of control.
A classick early EP from the Boston noisecore legends, Morbid Florist came out as a 7" back in 1993 on Relapse Records, and was then reissued on disc a couple of years later with a previously unreleased untitled bonus track. Like most of AxCx's early 90's stuff, the fifteen tracks on here are mostly pure raw hyperblast blurr, each track a super short nuclear blast of improvised guitar bleeargh and whirlwind noise that borders on Merzbow-like levels of sonic overload, insanely fast cyclonic blast beats, and Seth Putnam's guttural nonsensical screaming about Morrisey, the Grateful Dead, Canadian big band conductor Guy Lombardo, among other more hate-filled subjects.
But there's also some sickeningly grinding doom metal crawl that surfaces on the tracks "Song #5" and "Slow Song From Split 7-Inch", and a couple surprise bursts of goofball thrash metal that keep you on your toes, and the song "Radio Hit" rocks some awesome mosh-meltdown death metal sewage that's still a staple of their live set. The Ep is probably best known though for AxCx's infamous brain-damaged cover of "Unbelievable" from early 90's Madchester pin-ups EMF, easily one of the most insane "cover songs" ever. Along with a bunch of lightning-fast eruptions of total grindnoise, another cover (of Eddy Grant's "I Don't Wanna Dance") and a weird medley of riffs from Boston proto-grind legends Siege called, unsurprisingly, "Siege", this is a blistering chunk of noxious, ridiculously brutal early grind/noise blasts that's pretty essential for hardcore AxCx fans, even if it doesn't have the genius song titles of their later albums. Bleeeargh!
For more than twenty years, Anal Cunt has prided itself on being the self-described "worst band in the world" and offending anyone and everyone that they possibly can. Like some kind of PC-baiting, ultra-confrontational musical/comedy act, these goofs have made an art form out of combining ridiculously short and noisy assaults of blurr and hardcore punk with offensive (and often hilarious) song titles, and enough transgressive subject matter to make your eyes water. It's like having the essence of all four issues of Answer Me! boiled down into twenty second blasts of tuneless improvised grindcore. You either love 'em or hate them, that's for sure, and you've got to give credit to a band that has managed to go down in history as one of the most notorious and controversial extreme music bands ever, right? Pretty crucial listening for fans of early Naked City and Boredoms, too, since AxCx was one of the few other bands of that era to blast through the conventions of extreme music to the same degree that those bands did. Anyways, we've stocked four of their Earache albums for the first time here at Crucial Blast, so now's a perfect opportunity for grind/noise/improv freaks to add these to their collection.
The 1996 album 40 More Reasons To Hate Us from Anal Cunt doesn't deviate from their patented style of tuneless, hyper-brutal grind and metal/hardcore parodies, at least compared to the more song-based direction that they started to take with Top 40 Hits, but there are a couple of things that make this album stand out from the rest of the AxCx catalog. First, 40 More Reasons... is noteworthy for being the only Anal Cunt album to feature Scott Hull of Pig Destroyer/Agoraphobic Nosebleed fame on guitar, and his chunky thrash-style riffs break through on a bunch of these songs (when the band isn't exploding into a blast of full-on Merzbow-strength noise, that is), resulting in some of Anal Cunt's heaviest jams thus far. Secondly, while I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't want to recommended this to your usual Pantera / Down / Superjoint Ritual fan, it is interesting to hear Phil Anselmo all over this album, playing guitar on "Van Full Of Retards", contributing backing vocals to almost half the songs, and playing guitar and singing on the absurd (and awesome, in a frontal-lobe damaged sort of way) cover of Manowar's "Gloves Of Metal". Aside from those two points, this collection of forty-two tracks is another hateful, ear-ripping grind/noise assault that shifts between their signature blurr-core assaults, the stoopid Sockeye-style falsetto vocals and sloppy punk, and CRUSHING grindcore, with a brain melting rendition of "Theme from Three's Company" lobbed like a frag grenade into the middle of it all. As always, half of the appeal of any Anal Cunt album is the song titles, which range from "You Looked Divorced" and "Al Stankus Is Always on the Phone With His Bookie" to "Johnny Violent Getting His Ass Kicked by Morrissey", "Van Full of Retards", and "Everyone in the Underground Music Scene Is Stupid". Pretty hilarious, as usual.
For more than twenty years, Anal Cunt has prided itself on being the self-described "worst band in the world" and offending anyone and everyone that they possibly can. Like some kind of PC-baiting, ultra-confrontational musical/comedy act, these goofs have made an art form out of combining ridiculously short and noisy assaults of blurr and hardcore punk with offensive (and often hilarious) song titles, and enough transgressive subject matter to make your eyes water. It's like having the essence of all four issues of Answer Me! boiled down into twenty second blasts of tuneless improvised grindcore. You either love 'em or hate them, that's for sure, and you've got to give credit to a band that has managed to go down in history as one of the most notorious and controversial extreme music bands ever, right? Pretty crucial listening for fans of early Naked City and Boredoms, too, since AxCx was one of the few other bands of that era to blast through the conventions of extreme music to the same degree that those bands did. Anyways, we've stocked four of their Earache albums for the first time here at Crucial Blast, so now's a perfect opportunity for grind/noise/improv freaks to add these to their collection.
The first full length slab of ultra-offensive song titles, hateful lyrics and brutal blasting grindnoise from Boston's infamous scumlords, 1994's Everyone Should Be Killed introduced a whole new audience to Anal Cunt's over-the-top comedic hate-filled blurrcore by way of new label Earache Records. The album is really raw and grungy sounding compared to later releases, and their sound was still pretty much the same chaotic, formless grindnoise of their early EPs (albeit quite a bit heavier), but this cruddy recording works in their favor; the micro-bursts of frenzied screaming, random vocal noises, tuneless blasts of distortion and improvised grindcore blast out of the speakers in a nuclear wave of filth, even though all of this sounds like it could have been recorded inside of a large oil drum. There's the notorious cover of EMF's "Unbelievable", and the ridiculous "Eddy Grant" (Eddy Grant cover)", some kind of homage to Boston SXE warriors Slapshot ("Choke Edge"), and what could be Anal Cunt's slowest and longest song ever, the crawling five and a half minutes of doom metal misery of "Song #5". And, of course, there are plenty of riotous song titles: "I'm Not Allowed to Like A.C. Any More Since They Signed to Earache", "I'm Wicked Underground", "Abomination of Unnecessarily Augmented Composition Monickers", "When I Think of True Punk Rock Bands, I Think of Nirvana and the Melvins", "Song Titles Are Fucking Stupid", "Brutally Morbid Axe of Satan". A noisecore classic!
For more than twenty years, Anal Cunt has prided itself on being the self-described "worst band in the world" and offending anyone and everyone that they possibly can. Like some kind of PC-baiting, ultra-confrontational musical/comedy act, these goofs have made an art form out of combining ridiculously short and noisy assaults of blurr and hardcore punk with offensive (and often hilarious) song titles, and enough transgressive subject matter to make your eyes water. It's like having the essence of all four issues of Answer Me! bo
For more than twenty years, Anal Cunt has prided itself on being the self-described "worst band in the world" and offending anyone and everyone that they possibly can. Like some kind of PC-baiting, ultra-confrontational musical/comedy act, these goofs have made an art form out of combining ridiculously short and noisy assaults of blurr and hardcore punk with offensive (and often hilarious) song titles, and enough transgressive subject matter to make your eyes water. It's like having the essence of all four issues of Answer Me! boiled down into twenty second blasts of tuneless improvised grindcore. You either love 'em or hate them, that's for sure, and you've got to give credit to a band that has managed to go down in history as one of the most notorious and controversial extreme music bands ever, right? Pretty crucial listening for fans of early Naked City and Boredoms, too, since AxCx was one of the few other bands of that era to blast through the conventions of extreme music to the same degree that those bands did. Anyways, we've stocked four of their Earache albums for the first time here at Crucial Blast, so now's a perfect opportunity for grind/noise/improv freaks to add these to their collection.
Anal Cunt's second album came out in 1995 and featured forty tracks that are divided up between blasting improvised grindnoise, brain-damaged punk, and fast, ripping hardcore, with a handful of ridiculous "covers" thrown in. When the band launches into their ultra-noisy blasts, they achieve that same Merbow / Incapacitants-level of sonic rumble as their earlier album, but at least half of Top 40 Hits is more song based, for whatever that's worth. The fucked-up punk rock stuff reminds me a lot of Ohio "tard-core" legends Sockeye, and indeed A.C. front man Seth Putnam can be seen in the booklet sporting a Sockeye shirt, so there's obviously some of that band's influence floating around here, as well as lots of brutal death metal riffing and other weirdness, but this album will probably always be best known for the completely bonkers covers that the band included. There's Rupert Holmes's "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)", Elton John's "I'm Still Standing", The Guess Who's "American Woman", the theme song from The A-Team, and the totally ridiculous "Stayin' Alive (Oi! Version)", all delivered via Anal Cunt's skull-wrecking psychosis. Other "hits": "Living Colour Is My Favorite Black Metal Band", "Benchpressing Effects on Kevin Sharp's Vocals", "Stealing Seth's Ideas: the New Book by Jon Chang", "Morbid Dead Guy", "Don't Call Japanese Hardcore Jap Core".
I seriously doubt that Seth Putnam would have wanted to be eulogized, but I gotta say that I'm glad that the final record from Anal Cunt is as over-the-top offensive and hateful as anything the band ever did, a big stinking thumb in the eye of extreme music all the way to the end. This one-sided Lp came out earlier this year, just after front man and founding member Putnam died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-three, leaving behind a legacy that included some of the most vilified music to ever come out of the grind/death underground. Released on the boutique label Limited Appeal, this hand-assembled Lp comes in a white jacket with full color artwork pasted to the front (courtesy of artist Sean Linehan, who also did the hilarious cover art for AxCx's I Like It When You Die) and the liner notes and track listing affixed to the back, with a minimal insert and hand-stamped labels. Each copy is hand-numbered in an edition of three hundred and ninety-four copies, and like the other Anal Cunt records that Limited Appeal has put out, this is going to be out of print pretty soon.
If you were never a fan of Anal Cunt before, listening to Wearing Out Our Welcome sure wouldn't convert you. The needle scrapes through the eleven songs of standard AxCx blurr that blast your skull with a mix of gnarly midpaced metalpunk and filthy hardcore blasting off into whirlwind distorted noise, labeled with some of the band's most outrageously PC-baiting song titles and lyrics ever, such as "Get On Your Knees, Cunt" and "One Man Ghetto"; there's also some humorous self-awareness when you see other songs on this record like "Nothings Offensive Anymore" and "Wasting Time Writing Anal Cunt Songs". While their earlier albums would be packed to overflowing with super-short blasts of noisecore, their more recent stuff have featured longer songs, with more hardcore thrown into the mix, and less fifteen-second blurrcore eruptions. It's still hard to call these "songs", though, even with the catchy punk riffs and sing-along choruses...this is extremely noisy, chaotic shit, shapeless guitar noise and anti-riffs whipping out mangy hardcore thrash, all fronted by Seth's screeching panther vocals. The song "Caring About Anything Is Gay" that appears second to last could just be their ultimate nihilistic anthem, and is as perfect a final statement from AxCx as you could expect.
I reviewed a compilation cd here last year called Doomed To Death Damned In Hell that featured exclusive material from three Japanese doom-death bands. That compilation (which we still have in stock) was an awesome collection of fucked-up, ultra-heavy deathsludge that not only delivered some exclusive jams from one of my favorite current death metal bands, Coffins, but also introduced me to two bands that I immediately fell in love with, the sickening graveyard sludge of Grudge, and the wasted Frost-worship of Anatomia, who featured members of the cult Japanese death metal band Transgressor.
I've been keeping my eyes peeled for more stuff from both of those bands ever since, and while I haven't been able to find much else from Grudge, I finally located this 10" vinyl release from Tokyo's Anatomia. This limited edition EP came out on Nuclear War Now! and is actually a reissue of Anatomia's 2003 demo, with four tracks of warped, spaced-out deathsludge and a bonus cover of Repulsion's "Splattered Cadavers" that was previously unreleased. Like most of the other Japanese death/doom bands that I listen to, there's something vaguely weird about Anatomia's music. It's obviously rooted in early Celtic Frost and primitive American death metal, but there's that special x-factor that makes this more than just another blurt of slow-mo death metal. The riffs are stripped down, simple and plodding and heavy as fuck, but the guitarist is prone to veer into weird angular riffs while the bassist accompanies him with these odd dissonant basslines. The drumming, on the other hand, is totally barbaric, just lumbering sludgy dirges and splattery slo-mo double-kick thunder, and the vocals spew ragged vomitous roars across Anatomia's fetid sludge. Clouds of dank reverb drift through the recording, and smears of grimy dark ambience appear in between songs. The lyrics are indecipherable gore-soaked hallucintations, songs like "Morgue Of Cannibalism", "Funeral Feast" and "Drowned In Sewage" all speak for themselves, and the record artwork is awesome, with horrific Chris Moyen-esque visions of victims being consumed by amorphous corpse-blobs. Crushing, filthy, totally awesome death-dirge insanity along the lines of Coffins, early Incantation at their slowest, Autopsy, Grudge, etc.
I've been a big fan of everything that I've heard from the Japanese doom-death band Anatomia, who have been offering a twisted take on their slow-motion death metal since forming in 2002, but their latest Decaying In Obscurity takes their crawling heaviness into a new level of putrescent delirium. Like the band states on the back cover of the album jacket, Anatomia specializes in "dismal slow death metal...", but their foul, discordant doomdeath has expanded into stranger regions with this new record, their music now laced with some subtle electronic and experimental touches that gives their newer material more of a unique edge. They've always had a weird feel to their crushing Autopsy/Frost influenced music, previous records often featuring some off-kilter angular riffing and spacey graveyard ambience, but they've really carved out a strange sound all their own on Decaying In Obscurity.
When the album starts, the band immediately sinks into the sort of ghoulish glacial heaviness they're known for, opening with the nightmarish melting groans and glowing keyboard slime that begins "Cadaveric Dissection", and the band quickly lurches into a super-heavy, cavernous death/doom assault that shifts easily between fast-paced thrashiness and slothful, cadaverous dirges. Barbaric death/doom with bludgeoning Frostian riffage, strange discordant guitar textures, and gaseous vomit vocals is at the core of Anatomia's sound, with a fucking monstrous low-end presence that makes you feel as if the band is moving through molten lead, but they also mix in some killer, eerie guitar melodies with the downtuned crush to create a strange otherworldly feel. It's not long before you start to hear the keyboards that Anatomia is now adding to their sound, and I love the way they're incorporating them into the mix; the keyboards are used sparingly and sparsely, laying down weird atonal melodies alongside the crushing riffs as well as some nightmarish electronic noises and putrid synth-vomit,
subtle droning textures that are situated beneath the grinding glacial crush, adding an experimental, somewhat industrial feel to their Autopsy-esque heaviness that extends into monstrous industrial loops and eerie horror-movie soundtrack ambience that appear on the track 'Obscurity'. This subtle electronic shading never overshadows the death metal, though, as the band bludgeons you with the cavernous D-beat driven death metal of "Garbage", the many passages of glacial bass guitar that slowly wind into immense crawling dirges, the chunky, catchy grooves of "Sinking Into The Unknown" and the blasting frenzy of "The Unseen". The album closes this slab of utterly morbid rot-worship with another chunk of macabre weirdness with the song "Eternally Forgotten", where the heavier riffage drop out completely, and the band lurches through a ghastly funereal crawl layered with eerie keyboards, lumbering bass guitar and smears of clear, atonal guitar.
Anatomia have found a perfect mix of atmospheric weirdness and crushing death/doom on this record, and its definitely a new favorite here. The packaging is fantastic, too. Nuclear War Now always puts out quality looking stuff, but the design for this record really stands out, with a heavy gatefold package that has the interiors of the pockets lined with full-color images of glistening viscera that create a striking contrast with Eiichi Ito's dark, surreal artwork on the outside of the jacket. Available on black vinyl, and includes a foldout poster and a printed insert.
�� We now have the "Die Hard" edition of Anatomia's latest in stock, which comes on heavy colored vinyl and includes a large Anatomia backpatch and large black and white sticker.
��I've been a big fan of everything that I've heard from the Japanese doom-death band Anatomia, who have been offering a twisted take on their slow-motion death metal since forming in 2002, but their latest Decaying In Obscurity takes their crawling heaviness into a new level of putrescent delirium. Like the band states on the back cover of the album jacket, Anatomia specializes in "dismal slow death metal...", but their foul, discordant doomdeath has expanded into stranger regions with this new record, their music now laced with some subtle electronic and experimental touches that gives their newer material more of a unique edge. They've always had a weird feel to their crushing Autopsy/Frost influenced music, previous records often featuring some off-kilter angular riffing and spacey graveyard ambience, but they've really carved out a strange sound all their own on Decaying In Obscurity.
�� When the album starts, the band immediately sinks into the sort of ghoulish glacial heaviness they're known for, opening with the nightmarish melting groans and glowing keyboard slime that begins "Cadaveric Dissection", and the band quickly lurches into a super-heavy, cavernous death/doom assault that shifts easily between fast-paced thrashiness and slothful, cadaverous dirges. Barbaric death/doom with bludgeoning Frostian riffage, strange discordant guitar textures, and gaseous vomit vocals is at the core of Anatomia's sound, with a fucking monstrous low-end presence that makes you feel as if the band is moving through molten lead, but they also mix in some killer, eerie guitar melodies with the downtuned crush to create a strange otherworldly feel. It's not long before you start to hear the keyboards that Anatomia is now adding to their sound, and I love the way they're incorporating them into the mix; the keyboards are used sparingly and sparsely, laying down weird atonal melodies alongside the crushing riffs as well as some nightmarish electronic noises and putrid synth-vomit, subtle droning textures that are situated beneath the grinding glacial crush, adding an experimental, somewhat industrial feel to their Autopsy-esque heaviness that extends into monstrous industrial loops and eerie horror-movie soundtrack ambience that appear on the track 'Obscurity'. This subtle electronic shading never overshadows the death metal, though, as the band bludgeons you with the cavernous D-beat driven death metal of "Garbage", the many passages of glacial bass guitar that slowly wind into immense crawling dirges, the chunky, catchy grooves of "Sinking Into The Unknown" and the blasting frenzy of "The Unseen". The album closes this slab of utterly morbid rot-worship with another chunk of macabre weirdness with the song "Eternally Forgotten", where the heavier riffage drop out completely, and the band lurches through a ghastly funereal crawl layered with eerie keyboards, lumbering bass guitar and smears of clear, atonal guitar.
�� Anatomia have found a perfect mix of atmospheric weirdness and crushing death/doom on this record, and its definitely a new favorite here. The packaging is fantastic, too. Nuclear War Now always puts out quality looking stuff, but the design for this record really stands out, with a heavy gatefold package that has the interiors of the pockets lined with full-color images of glistening viscera that create a striking contrast with Eiichi Ito's dark, surreal artwork on the outside of the jacket, and includes a foldout poster and a printed insert.
�� Now available on CD.
��I've been a big fan of everything that I've heard from the Japanese doom-death band Anatomia, who have been offering a twisted take on their slow-motion death metal since forming in 2002, but their latest Decaying In Obscurity takes their crawling heaviness into a new level of putrescent delirium. Like the band states on the back cover of the album jacket, Anatomia specializes in "dismal slow death metal...", but their foul, discordant doomdeath has expanded into stranger regions with this new record, their music now laced with some subtle electronic and experimental touches that gives their newer material more of a unique edge. They've always had a weird feel to their crushing Autopsy/Frost influenced music, previous records often featuring some off-kilter angular riffing and spacey graveyard ambience, but they've really carved out a strange sound all their own on Decaying In Obscurity.
�� When the album starts, the band immediately sinks into the sort of ghoulish glacial heaviness they're known for, opening with the nightmarish melting groans and glowing keyboard slime that begins "Cadaveric Dissection", and the band quickly lurches into a super-heavy, cavernous death/doom assault that shifts easily between fast-paced thrashiness and slothful, cadaverous dirges. Barbaric death/doom with bludgeoning Frostian riffage, strange discordant guitar textures, and gaseous vomit vocals is at the core of Anatomia's sound, with a fucking monstrous low-end presence that makes you feel as if the band is moving through molten lead, but they also mix in some killer, eerie guitar melodies with the downtuned crush to create a strange otherworldly feel. It's not long before you start to hear the keyboards that Anatomia is now adding to their sound, and I love the way they're incorporating them into the mix; the keyboards are used sparingly and sparsely, laying down weird atonal melodies alongside the crushing riffs as well as some nightmarish electronic noises and putrid synth-vomit, subtle droning textures that are situated beneath the grinding glacial crush, adding an experimental, somewhat industrial feel to their Autopsy-esque heaviness that extends into monstrous industrial loops and eerie horror-movie soundtrack ambience that appear on the track 'Obscurity'. This subtle electronic shading never overshadows the death metal, though, as the band bludgeons you with the cavernous D-beat driven death metal of "Garbage", the many passages of glacial bass guitar that slowly wind into immense crawling dirges, the chunky, catchy grooves of "Sinking Into The Unknown" and the blasting frenzy of "The Unseen". The album closes this slab of utterly morbid rot-worship with another chunk of macabre weirdness with the song "Eternally Forgotten", where the heavier riffage drop out completely, and the band lurches through a ghastly funereal crawl layered with eerie keyboards, lumbering bass guitar and smears of clear, atonal guitar.
�� Anatomia have found a perfect mix of atmospheric weirdness and crushing death/doom on this record, and its definitely a new favorite here. The packaging is fantastic, too, and features Eiichi Ito's dark, surreal artwork.
Although Chicago noise artist Mark Solotroff has been destroying eardrums for nearly thirty years, first with his early American power electronics outfit Intrinsic Action that combined rabid Whitehouse worship with an evil undercurrent of S&M sleaze, later with the extreme electronic abuse of Bloodyminded and the apocalyptic industrial sludge-scapes of The Fortieth Day, it hasn't been until recently that Solotroff has started to explore more rock-based delivery systems for his visions of dystopian violence and collapse. Starting with a self-titled 12" released in 2011 and followed by another, similarly untitled 12" the following year, Solotroff's new band Anatomy Of Habit (which also features Blake Edwards of Vertonen on metal percussion, drummer Dylan Posa, formerly of Flying Luttenbachers and Cheer Accident, bassist Kenny Rasmussen, and Greg Ratajczak of Plague Bringer and Winters In Osaka) has been building a sound that is equal parts crushing noise rock, 80's-style goth n' gloom, metallic sludge and hypnotic post-punk, with long songs that stretch out across an entire side of a record, marked by marked by slow buildups into pummeling sludgy heaviness and long circular grooves. Swans and Joy Division are obvious influences on the band's music, but there's also a bit of Om-like psychedelic repetition here as well, giving this a heavy, trance-inducing feel at times.
The band has assembled their first Cd release with this re-mastered collection of all of their vinyl tracks to date, compiling both of the self-titled 12"s here on this full-length disc. Packaged in a six-panel digipack, this is an excellent entry point into Anatomy Of Habit's dour, industrial-tinged gloom-rock.
The first Lp features the tracks "Overcome" and "Torch": "Overcome" sprawls out into a dark, brooding mass of slow-moving gloom rock, the minimal guitars and droning bass line giving this a real Joy Division-ish feel, the deep distant vocals cloaked in shadows, the song seeming to be building eternally as the chiming delay-streaked guitar notes and incantatory singing rises ever skyward. It gradually takes on a ritualistic vibe as the drums come in and the song locks into a kind of circular trance, the melody slowly spinning around, over and over, a gloomy shambling hypnorock loop; it builds like this for minutes at a time, the sound slowly growing in intensity, until it all suddenly lurches into the pounding, sludgy heaviness that takes over the last half of the song, a lumbering, droning low-end crush fused to a catchy melodic hook, somewhere in between Killing Joke and Neurosis's calmer moments of apocalyptic dirge. The seventeen minute "Torch" is another powerful gloom epic, coming in on waves of shimmering cymbals and distant whirring synths, then shifts into dark piano sounds and those far-off vocals before slipping into another monstrous slo-mo groove. This one has some of the band's heaviest stuff, blooming into crushing metallic war-sludge and massive chugging riffage, then later devolving into discordant, plodding heaviness at the end.
The second 12" from Anatomy Of Habit features two more long tracks of their crushing, hypnotic post-punk, "After The Water" and "The Decade Plan", and sees the band introducing piano and synthesizer into their sound. After a haunting introduction of simple laid-back percussion and jangling guitar melody, "After The Water" opens up into a kind of slow, brooding gloom-rock, somewhere in between Swans and some slow-moving math rock outfit, the heartfelt vocals droning over this slowly developing hook; somewhere around the middle of the song, it changes into an almost militaristic rhythm with clanging bass and the vocals becoming harder, more stentorian, right before surging into a blast of crushing, pummeling sludge. "The Decade Plan" follows with slowly cascading clean guitars and speak-sing vocals that make the beginning of the song sound like some early 90s slowcore, then blasts into a crushing doom-laden riff, a strange stilted heaviness with clanking metallic percussion rattling in the background, slowly but inexorably building into a majestic finale.
Although Chicago noise artist Mark Solotroff has been destroying eardrums for nearly thirty years, first with his early American power electronics outfit Intrinsic Action that combined rabid Whitehouse worship with an evil undercurrent of S&M sleaze, later with the extreme electronic abuse of Bloodyminded and the apocalyptic industrial sludge-scapes of The Fortieth Day, it hasn't been until recently that Solotroff has started to explore more rock-based delivery systems for his visions of dystopian violence and collapse. Starting with a self-titled 12" released in 2011 and followed by another, similarly untitled 12" the following year, Solotroff's new band Anatomy Of Habit (which also features Blake Edwards of Vertonen on metal percussion, drummer Dylan Posa, formerly of Flying Luttenbachers and Cheer Accident, bassist Kenny Rasmussen, and Greg Ratajczak of Plague Bringer and Winters In Osaka) has been building a sound that is equal parts crushing noise rock, 80's-style goth n' gloom, metallic sludge and hypnotic post-punk, with long songs that stretch out across an entire side of a record, marked by marked by slow buildups into pummeling sludgy heaviness and long circular grooves. Swans and Joy Division are obvious influences on the band's music, but there's also a bit of Om-like psychedelic repetition here as well, giving this a heavy, trance-inducing feel at times.
The debut Lp from Anatomy Of Habit features the tracks "Overcome" and "Torch", sprawling out over two sides of black vinyl housed in a striking Lp package with a black and white die-cut sleeve designed by Jonathan Canady (Deathpile/Malsonus) that holds a printed inner sleeve. First up is "Overcome", which sprawls out into a dark, brooding mass of slow-moving gloom rock, the minimal guitars and droning bass line giving this a real Joy Division-ish feel, the deep distant vocals cloaked in shadows, the song seeming to be building eternally as the chiming delay-streaked guitar notes and incantatory singing rises ever skyward. It gradually takes on a ritualistic vibe as the drums come in and the song locks into a kind of circular trance, the melody slowly spinning around, over and over, a gloomy shambling hypnorock loop; it builds like this for minutes at a time, the sound slowly growing in intensity, until it all suddenly lurches into the pounding, sludgy heaviness that takes over the last half of the song, a lumbering, droning low-end crush fused to a catchy melodic hook, somewhere in between Killing Joke and Neurosis's calmer moments of apocalyptic dirge. The seventeen minute "Torch" is another powerful gloom epic, coming in on waves of shimmering cymbals and distant whirring synths, then shifts into dark piano sounds and those far-off vocals before slipping into another monstrous slo-mo groove. This one has some of the band's heaviest stuff, blooming into crushing metallic war-sludge and massive chugging riffage, then later devolving into discordant, plodding heaviness at the end.
Although Chicago noise artist Mark Solotroff has been destroying eardrums for nearly thirty years, first with his early American power electronics outfit Intrinsic Action that combined rabid Whitehouse worship with an evil undercurrent of S&M sleaze, later with the extreme electronic abuse of Bloodyminded and the apocalyptic industrial sludge-scapes of The Fortieth Day, it hasn't been until recently that Solotroff has started to explore more rock-based delivery systems for his visions of dystopian violence and collapse. Starting with a self-titled 12" released in 2011 and followed by another, similarly untitled 12" the following year, Solotroff's new band Anatomy Of Habit (which also features Blake Edwards of Vertonen on metal percussion, drummer Dylan Posa, formerly of Flying Luttenbachers and Cheer Accident, bassist Kenny Rasmussen, and Greg Ratajczak of Plague Bringer and Winters In Osaka) has been building a sound that is equal parts crushing noise rock, 80's-style goth n' gloom, metallic sludge and hypnotic post-punk, with long songs that stretch out across an entire side of a record, marked by marked by slow buildups into pummeling sludgy heaviness and long circular grooves. Swans and Joy Division are obvious influences on the band's music, but there's also a bit of Om-like psychedelic repetition here as well, giving this a heavy, trance-inducing feel at times.
Released earlier in 2012, the second 12" from Anatomy Of Habit comes in a white glossy jacket with a new variation on the band's "five nails" image that has appeared on the cover of each of their releases so far. This self-titled record features two more long tracks of their crushing, hypnotic post-punk, "After The Water" and "The Decade Plan", and sees the band introducing piano and synthesizer into their sound. After a haunting introduction of simple laid-back percussion and jangling guitar melody, "After The Water" opens up into a kind of slow, brooding gloom-rock, somewhere in between Swans and some slow-moving math rock outfit, the heartfelt vocals droning over this slowly developing hook; somewhere around the middle of the song, it changes into an almost militaristic rhythm with clanging bass and the vocals becoming harder, more stentorian, right before surging into a blast of crushing, pummeling sludge. "The Decade Plan" follows with slowly cascading clean guitars and speak-sing vocals that make the beginning of the song sound like some early 90s slowcore, then blasts into a crushing doom-laden riff, a strange stilted heaviness with clanking metallic percussion rattling in the background, slowly but inexorably building into a majestic finale.
Comes on white vinyl, and includes a digital download code for the album.
This Californian band has surrounded itself in mystery from the start, cloaking their records in almost unreadable text and strange photos that, while not showing anything overtly threatening, still manage to suggest bad things...it was only recently that I even found out that Mark McCoy from Charles Bronson and Das Oath plays in this band, although I shouldn't be surprised, since his label Youth Attack out both the Ancestors LP and this here 7", and when i listen to this latest slab of blownout blackened scumpunk, I can hear a definite hardcore vibe seething underneath the rheumy distortion and fried amplifiers. That first Lp that these whackos released last year was possibly the most distorted and over the top blackpunk record that I'd heard all year, even showing up similiarly fucked-up offerings from Malveillance and Bone Awl, but boy, they apparently weren't close to reaching their limit. Somehow, on II, Ancestors have become even more noisy and distorted and furious, igniting two untitled sides of blistering thrashing filth in yer face with this criminally limited 7". It's fast and short, the two sides/songs(?) jammed into a brief but effective runtime, both of 'em fierce as fuck and raging and weirdly catchy, once again mashing together old school hardcore punk and primitive black metal into a compacted blot of maxed-out ultra-distorted violence.
Fast thrashy riffs and jackhammer blastbeats and spiteful vocals are jammed through an obscene amount of distortion, pushing the music way into the red and drowing everything in fuzz and white-hot filth, the guitars sizzling and warping, the riffs disintegrating into total buzz, the drummer pounding away at the simple midpaced blastbeats while all around him the sound turns into a swirling, acidic mass of blackened noise. When the vocals kick in, the effect is jarring; a disgusting, hyperdistorted snarl run through a gazillion effects, super fucked up and demonic sounding. the songs are mostly blasting blackened thrash, but there are parts where the band suddenly veers into pure old school hardcore, like Void or something, or contort into an unexpected math rock breakdown, or spit out a catchy anthemic melody, but even these parts are slathered in grimy distortion. Awesome shit that fans of this whole current wave of fierce punky black metal bands like Akitsa, Bone Awl, Malveillance, Zarach'Baal'Tharagh, and Raw Hatred will love.
The record comes in an amazing package, the 7" pressed on thick white vinyl and packaged inside of a full color jacket with multiple insert sheers, and limited to 333 copies.
So weird seeing a black metal album on Youth Attack. This is the same label that released the awesome arty thrashcore of Das Oath and some really killer hardcore from Japan and Chicago, including the notorious fastcore band Charles Bronson, but their latest release is pure fucking blackness, a super limited vinyl release of an out of print cassette from the enigmatic Ancestors. Don't confuse this band with the Hawkwind-worshipping psych-doom band on Tee Pee - this Ancestors is an entirely different beast, an ultra blown-out blackpunk holocaust that showers you in insane levels of caustic distortion. Jesus christ, is this noisy. The mysterious album artwork shows photos of a basement staircase and a dressing room mirror obscured by fog that seems to reflect the image of someone, faceless and formless, their image completely blurred and unrecognizeable, strange images that don't give you any indication of the carnage within...but as soon as this record begins to spin, a rush of ultra distorted, crushing, venomous black metal filth spills out, intensely raw and low-fi and damaged. This band is right up there with Bone Awl, Akitsa and Ildjarn, a violently fucked up blast of blackened punk with stomping, midpaced riffs crumbling off of immensely distorted, speaker-blowing guitars, bestial blackened shrieks, drums mixed so far in the red that they become pounding grenade blasts, and everything is smeared in a thick layers of white noise and grit. More punk than metal, the songs veering through the overdriven murk on hypnotic sledgehammer beats that come close to the fucked up techno-like pummel that Ildjarn was known for, but way more noisy and drowned in malfunctioning amplifier vomit. This record is CRUCIAL if yer a fan of ultrablown, distorted punky black metal a la Bone Awl and Malveillance! Released in a limited edition of 333 copies on heavy white vinyl, this record is already sold out through the label!
���Already sold out from the label, so move fast if you want to pick up the latest release from shadowy black metal/punk outfit Ancestors (not to be confused with the neo-psych band on Tee Pee), headed up by Youth Attack label boss and former Das Oath/Charles Bronson member Mark McCoy. New stuff from this band only appears every once in a while, but it's always intensely abrasive and murderous-sounding filth, and In Death delivers four new songs of that caustic, cacophonic low-fi blackened metal, inside one of the coolest 7" packages I've seen in ages - more on that in a moment.
��� Musically, this EP is hideous. Ancestors' stuff has always flayed a similar set of nerve-endings as Black Cilice's majestic no-fi din, with previous releases tipping over into some seriously speaker-destroying noisiness tempered with barbaric hardcore-informed riffs. This 7" isn't as insanely blown-out as some of their previous stuff, but it's still exceedingly raw. Songs like "That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do " and "Reliquary Ashes" combining raging fast-paced tempos and simple, violent riffage lifted from classic early hardcore, but it's strained through a black murk of hiss and distortion with a putrid gargling vocal attack that renders the lyrics utterly unintelligible, a bizarre droning croak that stretches into a preverbal shriek over the crushing blackened heaviness. Guitars are whipped into squalls of queasy, evil guitar solos and sickly, dissonant melodies amid the frenzied thrash and pummeling tempo changes, sometimes shifting down into a crushing Frostian heaviness. As usual, though, there are stirring melodic touches that briefly emerge out of the band's feral tumult as well.
��� But maybe the coolest thing about this 7" is the "hidden track", accessible by pushing down on the cover of the gatefold jacket, where a device inside the cover begins playing an intense blast of evil blackened murk that borders on total necrotic noise, the violent snarling chaos emanating from the sleeve in a tinny blast of transistor evil, similar to those old VHS box covers for movies like The Dead Pit and Metamorphosis that would light up and howl when you pushed them.
Just unearthed some of the last copies of this zany late-era Slap A Ham release, and it's super cheap too! Check this out if you are looking to bomb your brain with some of the craziest out-thrash to emerge from the heyday of the West Coast extreme hardcore movement!
Man, that was a dark day when Slap A Ham Records shut down around the turn of the century; throughout the 90's, Slap A Ham was putting out pretty much the most seminal, mindblowing music in the underground extreme hardcore scene, with now-classic releases from bands like Man Is The Bastard, Spazz, Infest, Discordance Axis, Burning Witch, Noothgrush, Melt Banana, Gasp, and a ton of other extreme, unique, insanely heavy bands. Slap A Ham kept getting cooler and weirder as time went on, too, and it's safe for me to say that the label was a huge influence on the formation of Crucial Blast. Luckily for us, right before the label folded, they put out some of their weirdest releases ever, including this amazing one-shot album from Ancient Chinese Secret, the avant-new wave-powerviolence trio of ex-Spazz dude and Slap A Ham owner Chris Dodge himself on bass, vocals, ring modulator, and keyboards, his wife Lydia on vocals and organ, and former Capitalist Casualties drummer Matt Martin on drums, keyboards, and vocals. This is one of those albums that was criminally overlooked when it came out, and was years ahead of it's time. At least I think so. This post-Spazz project was originally monikered Doctor Bombay before the band changed it's name to Ancient Chinese Secret, and blended the high-speed, bass-heavy grindy Hardcore freakouts of Spazz with Lydia's deadpan shouts and a weird mix of cartoon sound effects, trippy tape loops, and spooky electronic noises. When the band goes full tilt, it's like a playful, minimalist speed metal assault. Imagine a psychedelic mix of Melt Banana, Man Is The Bastard, Wall Of Voodoo's percussive New Wave, and NoMeansNo's complex artpunk instrumentation. Thoroughly weird and fast and amazing, with a similiarly bent mindset as Dodge's subsequent work with Dave Witte on the East West Blast Test project. The CD version of this album is now completely out of print, but I managed to obtain a stash of this killer album on vinyl for anyone interested in blowing their minds with some of the craziest out-thrash to emerge from the heyday of the West Coast extreme hardcore movement!
Back in stock, and cheaper now than before too!
Man, that was a dark day when Slap A Ham Records shut down around the turn of the century; throughout the 90's, Slap A Ham was putting out pretty much the most seminal, mindblowing music in the underground extreme hardcore scene, with now-classic releases from bands like Man Is The Bastard, Spazz, Infest, Discordance Axis, Burning Witch, Noothgrush, Melt Banana, Gasp, and a ton of other extreme, unique, insanely heavy bands. Slap A Ham kept getting cooler and weirder as time went on, too, and it's safe for me to say that the label was a huge influence on the formation of Crucial Blast. Luckily for us, right before the label folded, they put out some of their weirdest releases ever, including this amazing one-shot album from Ancient Chinese Secret, the avant-new wave-powerviolence trio of ex-Spazz dude and Slap A Ham owner Chris Dodge himself on bass, vocals, ring modulator, and keyboards, his wife Lydia on vocals and organ, and former Capitalist Casualties drummer Matt Martin on drums, keyboards, and vocals. This is one of those albums that was criminally overlooked when it came out, and was years ahead of it's time. At least I think so. This post-Spazz project was originally monikered Doctor Bombay before the band changed it's name to Ancient Chinese Secret, and blended the high-speed, bass-heavy grindy Hardcore freakouts of Spazz with Lydia's deadpan shouts and a weird mix of cartoon sound effects, trippy tape loops, and spooky electronic noises. When the band goes full tilt, it's like a playful, minimalist speed metal assault. Imagine a psychedelic mix of Melt Banana, Man Is The Bastard, Wall Of Voodoo's percussive New Wave, and NoMeansNo's complex artpunk instrumentation. Thoroughly weird and fast and amazing, with a similiarly bent mindset as Dodge's subsequent work with Dave Witte on the East West Blast Test project. The CD version of this album is now completely out of print, but I managed to obtain a stash of this killer album on vinyl for anyone interested in blowing their minds with some of the craziest out-thrash to emerge from the heyday of the West Coast extreme hardcore movement!
��� These guys seemed to catch some of the blowback from Ghost and their surge in mainstream popularity, falling under a similar shadow of suspicion by those who saw this sort of occult posturing as an empty bid for street cred and black metal-esque mystique. While there's certainly been a vomitous number of bands that have climbed aboard the black magic wagon in recent years, Austin, TX band Ancient VVisdom seemed a little more legit than most. Maybe the fact that they didn't sound like the umpteenth Coven clone was enough for me to dig what I heard on albums like A Godlike Inferno, and the set of theirs I caught a few years back when they were on tour with Enslaved hammered me pretty nicely. Formed by former members of Integrity and Iron Age, Ancient VVisdom are one of the more original bands to come out of that "occult rock" resurgence of recent years, their early albums centering around an acoustic-based sound that offered an interesting mix of heavy metal chug, gothy acoustic folk, big-riff rock and a bit of those weird Holy Terror references.
��� On the band's latest album Sacrificial, their stuff sounds more anthemic and accessible than ever. This batch of songs is about as catchy as anything on Ghost's latest, but much of the folkiness of past VVisdom releases now replaced with more overt doom-laden heaviness. They've always had elements of doom metal in their music, but on Sacrificial, the acoustic guitars are almost totally swapped out for crunchier, morose riffage that takes this in the direction of more straightforward metallic rock. I miss that folky quality from previous albums, but as far as songs go, this is still pretty great. The sinister strum of the acoustic guitar at the beginning of introductory instrumental "Rise of an Ancient Evil" quickly gives way to slow, plodding riffage and layered guitars, with eerie choral voices swelling up and giving this piece a strange atmospheric power that sort of feels like something that could have been on a mid-80s Italian horror movie soundtrack. That metallic heaviness sticks around as the album moves into the old-school doom of "Chaos Will Reign", those clear, keening vocals rising over the gloomy chug and sluggish, solemn weight of the music, but like most of the songs on the album, it eventually moves into a wickedly catchy chorus that elevates this into serious earworm territory. They've always had this accessible quality to their songs, but songs like this one are borderline radio-friendly. Passages of moody acoustic strum and harmonized singing turn into a kind of shadow-drenched pop, coiled with the band's overtly satanic and death-drenched imagery. The rest of this stuff is equally infectious, "The Devil's Work" dropping power-pop hooks into the brooding black-magic doom, and a lot of this reminds me a bit of the similarly pop-damaged UK doom-rock band Winters, but even catchier and more rooted in a classic psych-tinged hard rock sound. Of course, this album does little to shake the Ghost comparisons that have followed these guys from the beginning, but there's also a distinctly American feel with this as well; there are several moments on Sacrificial where I'm reminded of certain strains of 90s era post-hardcore, as if one of those old Deep Elm Records outfits had been enfolded within the black wings of Saint Vitus and Pentagram. Like most of the bands that Ancient VVisdom get lumped in with, this stuff will probably grate on heavy metal purists, but I'm digging their infernal, ear-friendly hard rock.
��� These guys seemed to catch some of the blowback from Ghost and their surge in mainstream popularity, falling under a similar shadow of suspicion by those who saw this sort of occult posturing as an empty bid for street cred and black metal-esque mystique. While there's certainly been a vomitous number of bands that have climbed aboard the black magic wagon in recent years, Austin, TX band Ancient VVisdom seemed a little more legit than most. Maybe the fact that they didn't sound like the umpteenth Coven clone was enough for me to dig what I heard on albums like A Godlike Inferno, and the set of theirs I caught a few years back when they were on tour with Enslaved hammered me pretty nicely. Formed by former members of Integrity and Iron Age, Ancient VVisdom are one of the more original bands to come out of that "occult rock" resurgence of recent years, their early albums centering around an acoustic-based sound that offered an interesting mix of heavy metal chug, gothy acoustic folk, big-riff rock and a bit of those weird Holy Terror references.
��� On the band's latest album Sacrificial, their stuff sounds more anthemic and accessible than ever. This batch of songs is about as catchy as anything on Ghost's latest, but much of the folkiness of past VVisdom releases now replaced with more overt doom-laden heaviness. They've always had elements of doom metal in their music, but on Sacrificial, the acoustic guitars are almost totally swapped out for crunchier, morose riffage that takes this in the direction of more straightforward metallic rock. I miss that folky quality from previous albums, but as far as songs go, this is still pretty great. The sinister strum of the acoustic guitar at the beginning of introductory instrumental "Rise of an Ancient Evil" quickly gives way to slow, plodding riffage and layered guitars, with eerie choral voices swelling up and giving this piece a strange atmospheric power that sort of feels like something that could have been on a mid-80s Italian horror movie soundtrack. That metallic heaviness sticks around as the album moves into the old-school doom of "Chaos Will Reign", those clear, keening vocals rising over the gloomy chug and sluggish, solemn weight of the music, but like most of the songs on the album, it eventually moves into a wickedly catchy chorus that elevates this into serious earworm territory. They've always had this accessible quality to their songs, but songs like this one are borderline radio-friendly. Passages of moody acoustic strum and harmonized singing turn into a kind of shadow-drenched pop, coiled with the band's overtly satanic and death-drenched imagery. The rest of this stuff is equally infectious, "The Devil's Work" dropping power-pop hooks into the brooding black-magic doom, and a lot of this reminds me a bit of the similarly pop-damaged UK doom-rock band Winters, but even catchier and more rooted in a classic psych-tinged hard rock sound. Of course, this album does little to shake the Ghost comparisons that have followed these guys from the beginning, but there's also a distinctly American feel with this as well; there are several moments on Sacrificial where I'm reminded of certain strains of 90s era post-hardcore, as if one of those old Deep Elm Records outfits had been enfolded within the black wings of Saint Vitus and Pentagram. Like most of the bands that Ancient VVisdom get lumped in with, this stuff will probably grate on heavy metal purists, but I'm digging their infernal, ear-friendly hard rock.
A couple of years ago Cyril Blandino, former bassist of French post-metalcore destructos Superstatic Revolution, landed in Cleveland after Superstatic toured the US. Repositioning himself musically, Blandino joined a newly formed band called And Say We Did, which evolved into yet another quartet working sans vocals in a heavy, instrumental mode. The band's debut album Final Demonstration was recorded a couple of years ago and finally released in 2005 on French label Basement Apes Industries, but we're just now getting it onto the shelves at Crucial Blast. Glad we did, 'cuz And Say We Did's concise jams are loaded with killer two-guitar noiserock/mathrock riffage and melodic indie jangle that's interspersed with crushing post-hardcore eruptions and precision angles, sorta similiar to our buddies Suzukiton, but with a melodic post-rock vibe that sets in when the band drifts into dreamy guitars and pretty layered melodies. Rad stuff that fans of Don Cabellero, Pelican, Keelhaul, Dysrythmia, and Suzukiton will want to wrap their heads around.
Some more fantastic dark ambience from Anduin, the solo project from Jonathan Lee who's also a member of Souvenir's Young America. This second Anduin album follows up a couple of great collaborative releases, the Bending Of Light disc with Jasper Tx and the live 7" Black River with Svarte Greiner (which is actually included here as a single unbroken track as a bonus track not on the Lp version), and travels into darker, deeper regions of eerie ambience than before.
There's an element of dark electronica that's apparent on Abandoned In Sleep that wasn't on the previous releases, at least not to this extent. The tracks are still heavy on the swirling, dreamy drift and melodious shadowdrone, but Lee introduces massive low-end bass and collages of rhythmic clicks and scraping sounds that add a rhythmic throb to much of the sound here. The sound is ever-changing, too, thanks to the presence of several guest contributors that include Xela, Stephen Vitiello, Jasper TX, and Gareth Davis who offer either source material or actual studio collabs, and Lee takes these recordings and samples and materials and crafts them into fields of dark lugubrious, gorgeous and lushly layered but wrapped in a dreamy kosmich heaviness. Earth-shaking bass throb reverberates through mysterious abstract clatter and sheets of obsidian synth, swells of distorted horns and metal scrape, the sound of harmonica, such an integral part of Souvenir's Young America's sound, appearing here on certain tracks, haunting and ghostly as it floats across rumbling depth-charge bass, eerie keening vocals, the sound so heavy and creepy, flecked with little fragments of sound like breaking glass, saxophones, electronic glitch and whir, clanging metal and pops and clicks. Found sounds and field recordings also figure heavily into Abandoned's dreamlike shadow-world, overlaying incidental sounds of creaking doors and footsteps and hard-drive hum on clouds of warm melted drone and shuffling industrial rhythms and distant grinding gears, often sounding like Scorn scoring an avant-garde Western. In fact, it feels like some dubstep influence has found it's way into Anduin's dark kosmiche music, as in the doom-laden liquid bass tremors on tracks like �Content of a Black Box�, and the sputtering low-end rhythm of �Octagonal Forms�, bringing a killer new edge to Anduin's sound.
The cd version also includes three bonus tracks: an untitled piece, the track "Filed Away" which was created for an installation piece, and the complete live collab with Svarte Greiner "Black River" - The first half of "Black River" is a churning fog of murky low-end rumble and nocturnal whirr with muted swells of murky orchestral strings and heavy feedback, deep subterranean throb, and metallic high-end feedback leaving streaks of melodic glare across a vast black cloudbank, immense and ominous. The second side picks up from there and descends deeper into the black pulsating mist, that deep, heavy electrical pulse still humming away in the background and oscillating back and forth, while strands of feedback and flecks of haunting melody waft through the darkness.
Stripping almost all of the "rock" elements (drums, heavy guitars, linear songs) and leaving just the vast, sprawling Western ambience found in the music of Souvenirs Young America, Anduin is the new solo project from SYA's Jonathan Lee that sees him engaging in an altogether darker and more textured sound than the proggy instrumental rock of his main band. I've been hooked on this album for months ever since Jonathan hooked me up with an advance copy of it, and fans of SYA are definitely going to dig these spacey soundscapes...that same dustbowl ambience is here, except Anduin creates it out of rumbling basslines and surges of growling synthesizers, swarms of noisy minutiae swirling and roiling in the depths of the drifting ambience, and fractured hypnotic rhythms formed from percussive loops and skittering electronica instead of the chugging riffage and lonely, desolate melodies of his main band. One of the things that ties together the two musical projects is the harmonica, whose Western wheeze resonates all over Forever Waiting...just like in SYA, the harmonica gives this a unique, heartsick beauty that sounds really amazing. The disc opens up with "For Francis Bacon Part 1", a tribute to the master painter by way of huge swathes of churning keyboard drone mottled with ghostly strains of feedback, sweeping cosmic fx and that lonesome harmonica played in the background...a deep, heavy spaced-out slab of dark ambience that sounds like staring at the night sky from the middle of the Mojave and drinking in an ocean of stars. On "Makepiece In Pieces", the sound becomes more abstracted and tense as an eerie looped melody plays over slices of field recordings and strange electronic burbling...later joined by huge swells of distorted synth and low-end drone. Dubby breakbeats and skittering electronica serve as the backbone for the layered dark ambience of "The Black Line (Forever Waiting), where the harmonica appears again over ringing guitar notes and somber drones, the beat transforming from tribal beats into more abstract rhythms and clomping loops that sound like the sound of horse hooves on stones being reshaped into a percussive loop. One of the albums' heaviest moments arrives with "Rain Cloud, Storm Cloud", which begins with a massive growling drone that sounds like a distorted riff rumbling in perpetual amp-roar while thunderous gongs ring out, then in the second half turns into a cosmic blast of languid tribal drums and roaring synths.
The end of the disc features appearances from Jaspar TX and Xela on reworkings of two of the previous tracks...on ""Reason In Exile Part 2" Jaspar TX takes some of the basic drones of the first part and creates a gorgeous slowcore epic that wraps a slide guitar melody in cloaks of murky sound and deep ambience, and it sounds like the glacial country music of newer Earth being played back underwater. The Xela mix takes particles of "For Francis Bacon" and crafts a heavily distorted hymn, whorls of radio static swirling through an utterly beautiful chorus of piano and angelic voices cascading in syrupy overtones over blissed out organ drones, building to a crescendo of noise that resembles Sigur Ros being flooded by Merzbowian skree.
So beautiful and ethereal, but with some moments of massive heaviness in the subsonic dark drones and grinding guitar textures, Anduin's music is not quite dark ambient or space rock, not exactly instrumental post rock or experimental electronica, but an atmospheric, cinematic combination of all of that, with some of the most gorgeous melodic drone music of recent memory to be found in it's grooves. Highly recommended, and another addition for one of my favorite albums of 2008.
Anduin's excellent debut is now available as a combination LP and CD package in a limited edition of 300 copies, on colored vinyl, and packaged in a silkscreened sleeve with different artwork from the CD version.
Stripping almost all of the "rock" elements (drums, heavy guitars, linear songs) and leaving just the vast, sprawling Western ambience found in the music of Souvenirs Young America, Anduin is the new solo project from SYA's Jonathan Lee that sees him engaging in an altogether darker and more textured sound than the proggy instrumental rock of his main band. I've been hooked on this album for months ever since Jonathan hooked me up with an advance copy of it, and fans of SYA are definitely going to dig these spacey soundscapes...that same dustbowl ambience is here, except Anduin creates it out of rumbling basslines and surges of growling synthesizers, swarms of noisy minutiae swirling and roiling in the depths of the drifting ambience, and fractured hypnotic rhythms formed from percussive loops and skittering electronica instead of the chugging riffage and lonely, desolate melodies of his main band. One of the things that ties together the two musical projects is the harmonica, whose Western wheeze resonates all over Forever Waiting...just like in SYA, the harmonica gives this a unique, heartsick beauty that sounds really amazing. The disc opens up with "For Francis Bacon Part 1", a tribute to the master painter by way of huge swathes of churning keyboard drone mottled with ghostly strains of feedback, sweeping cosmic fx and that lonesome harmonica played in the background...a deep, heavy spaced-out slab of dark ambience that sounds like staring at the night sky from the middle of the Mojave and drinking in an ocean of stars. On "Makepiece In Pieces", the sound becomes more abstracted and tense as an eerie looped melody plays over slices of field recordings and strange electronic burbling...later joined by huge swells of distorted synth and low-end drone. Dubby breakbeats and skittering electronica serve as the backbone for the layered dark ambience of "The Black Line (Forever Waiting), where the harmonica appears again over ringing guitar notes and somber drones, the beat transforming from tribal beats into more abstract rhythms and clomping loops that sound like the sound of horse hooves on stones being reshaped into a percussive loop. One of the albums' heaviest moments arrives with "Rain Cloud, Storm Cloud", which begins with a massive growling drone that sounds like a distorted riff rumbling in perpetual amp-roar while thunderous gongs ring out, then in the second half turns into a cosmic blast of languid tribal drums and roaring synths.
The end of the disc features appearances from Jaspar TX and Xela on reworkings of two of the previous tracks...on ""Reason In Exile Part 2" Jaspar TX takes some of the basic drones of the first part and creates a gorgeous slowcore epic that wraps a slide guitar melody in cloaks of murky sound and deep ambience, and it sounds like the glacial country music of newer Earth being played back underwater. The Xela mix takes particles of "For Francis Bacon" and crafts a heavily distorted hymn, whorls of radio static swirling through an utterly beautiful chorus of piano and angelic voices cascading in syrupy overtones over blissed out organ drones, building to a crescendo of noise that resembles Sigur Ros being flooded by Merzbowian skree.
So beautiful and ethereal, but with some moments of massive heaviness in the subsonic dark drones and grinding guitar textures, Anduin's music is not quite dark ambient or space rock, not exactly instrumental post rock or experimental electronica, but an atmospheric, cinematic combination of all of that, with some of the most gorgeous melodic drone music of recent memory to be found in it's grooves. Highly recommended, and another addition for one of my favorite albums of 2008.
Also available as a limited-edition vinyl release housed in a thick matte chipboard jacket, and includes the cd version (with the additional non-lp tracks) in a simple plastic sleeve.
Some more fantastic dark ambience from Anduin, the solo project from Jonathan Lee who's also a member of Souvenir's Young America. This second Anduin album follows up a couple of great collaborative releases, the Bending Of Light disc with Jasper Tx and the live 7" Black River with Svarte Greiner (which is actually included here as a single unbroken track as a bonus track not on the Lp version), and travels into darker, deeper regions of eerie ambience than before.
There's an element of dark electronica that's apparent on Abandoned In Sleep that wasn't on the previous releases, at least not to this extent. The tracks are still heavy on the swirling, dreamy drift and melodious shadowdrone, but Lee introduces massive low-end bass and collages of rhythmic clicks and scraping sounds that add a rhythmic throb to much of the sound here. The sound is ever-changing, too, thanks to the presence of several guest contributors that include Xela, Stephen Vitiello, Jasper TX, and Gareth Davis who offer either source material or actual studio collabs, and Lee takes these recordings and samples and materials and crafts them into fields of dark lugubrious, gorgeous and lushly layered but wrapped in a dreamy kosmich heaviness. Earth-shaking bass throb reverberates through mysterious abstract clatter and sheets of obsidian synth, swells of distorted horns and metal scrape, the sound of harmonica, such an integral part of Souvenir's Young America's sound, appearing here on certain tracks, haunting and ghostly as it floats across rumbling depth-charge bass, eerie keening vocals, the sound so heavy and creepy, flecked with little fragments of sound like breaking glass, saxophones, electronic glitch and whir, clanging metal and pops and clicks. Found sounds and field recordings also figure heavily into Abandoned's dreamlike shadow-world, overlaying incidental sounds of creaking doors and footsteps and hard-drive hum on clouds of warm melted drone and shuffling industrial rhythms and distant grinding gears, often sounding like Scorn scoring an avant-garde Western. In fact, it feels like some dubstep influence has found it's way into Anduin's dark kosmiche music, as in the doom-laden liquid bass tremors on tracks like �Content of a Black Box�, and the sputtering low-end rhythm of �Octagonal Forms�, bringing a killer new edge to Anduin's sound.
The cd version also includes three bonus tracks: an untitled piece, the track "Filed Away" which was created for an installation piece, and the complete live collab with Svarte Greiner "Black River" - The first half of "Black River" is a churning fog of murky low-end rumble and nocturnal whirr with muted swells of murky orchestral strings and heavy feedback, deep subterranean throb, and metallic high-end feedback leaving streaks of melodic glare across a vast black cloudbank, immense and ominous. The second side picks up from there and descends deeper into the black pulsating mist, that deep, heavy electrical pulse still humming away in the background and oscillating back and forth, while strands of feedback and flecks of haunting melody waft through the darkness.
This collaborative album is the newest release from the always-amazing SMTG Limited label run by Jonathan from Souvenirs Young America, which has been shaping up over the past year to become one of the finest sources for dark droney ambience here in the states, with a particular taste for lovingly packaged small-run vinyl editions that have to be seen and held to be truly appreciated. Jonathan's own solo project Anduin came out with a debut album last year on SMTG that I fell in love with immediately, a collection of shadowy kosmiche drift and rumbling subterranean ambience, and here we are a year later with a new full length featuring Anduin, now teaming up with Jasper TX (aka Dag Rosenqvist), another artist whose sound is closely aligned with the murky, gauzy dronebliss aesthetic of the SMTG catalog. And, no surprise, Anduin and Jasper TX have created an amazing album, the signature sounds of each artist complimenting the other perfectly as they craft six long tracks of enveloping aural drift.
Each track is titled after a quote from Carl Sagan concerning the creation of black holes, and the music on The Bending Of Light is all blurred and hazy, drawn out slabs of heavy shimmering drone and rumbling guitar tones, slowly soaring kosmiche synths buzzing and sparkling, the roar of textured drift shot through with shards of light and exquisitely crafted melodies, or submerged Rhodes-like electric piano tones (like on the gorgeous fourth track "Where A Star Once Was"). "Producing Great jets of Radiation" begins in a flutter of chimes and soft whorls of tense Lustmordian drone, but then slowly blooms into great waves of distorted drone and swirling distressed organ melodies reminiscent of the fuzzed-out bliss of Tim Hecker. And "Like The Foot Prints.." is immersed in thick layers of metallic hum and elegant drones, while a heartbeat-like pulse emerges ticking away slowly, joined by a lovely melody appearing as a muted acoustic strum, a warm, dreamy field of deeply layered and detailed ambient electronica. The whole album is filled with equally mesmerizing sounds that wash over the listener, surrounding you with soft underwater creaks and washed out textures, fuzzy chordal drones and emotive melody,
dark and mysterious and beautiful. An incredibly album that everyone and anyone that is into droney, dreamy, heavily textured driftscape needs to hear (especially on headphones) - gorgeous and essential.
The cd version of The Bending Of Light features different artwork from the vinyl.
Also available on vinyl accompanied by a CD version, and packaged in a thick, heavy chipboard-like jacket with black artwork, and limited to 300 copies.
This collaborative album is the newest release from the always-amazing SMTG Limited label run by Jonathan from Souvenirs Young America, which has been shaping up over the past year to become one of the finest sources for dark droney ambience here in the states, with a particular taste for lovingly packaged small-run vinyl editions that have to be seen and held to be truly appreciated. Jonathan's own solo project Anduin came out with a debut album last year on SMTG that I fell in love with immediately, a collection of shadowy kosmiche drift and rumbling subterranean ambience, and here we are a year later with a new full length featuring Anduin, now teaming up with Jasper TX (aka Dag Rosenqvist), another artist whose sound is closely aligned with the murky, gauzy dronebliss aesthetic of the SMTG catalog. And, no surprise, Anduin and Jasper TX have created an amazing album, the signature sounds of each artist complimenting the other perfectly as they craft six long tracks of enveloping aural drift.
Each track is titled after a quote from Carl Sagan concerning the creation of black holes, and the music on The Bending Of Light is all blurred and hazy, drawn out slabs of heavy shimmering drone and rumbling guitar tones, slowly soaring kosmiche synths buzzing and sparkling, the roar of textured drift shot through with shards of light and exquisitely crafted melodies, or submerged Rhodes-like electric piano tones (like on the gorgeous fourth track "Where A Star Once Was"). "Producing Great jets of Radiation" begins in a flutter of chimes and soft whorls of tense Lustmordian drone, but then slowly blooms into great waves of distorted drone and swirling distressed organ melodies reminiscent of the fuzzed-out bliss of Tim Hecker. And "Like The Foot Prints.." is immersed in thick layers of metallic hum and elegant drones, while a heartbeat-like pulse emerges ticking away slowly, joined by a lovely melody appearing as a muted acoustic strum, a warm, dreamy field of deeply layered and detailed ambient electronica. The whole album is filled with equally mesmerizing sounds that wash over the listener, surrounding you with soft underwater creaks and washed out textures, fuzzy chordal drones and emotive melody,
dark and mysterious and beautiful. An incredibly album that everyone and anyone that is into droney, dreamy, heavily textured driftscape needs to hear (especially on headphones) - gorgeous and essential.
The vinyl version of The Bending Of Light is pressed on thick wax, and presented in a sturdy silkscreened jacket with excellent artwork from Dan Owen, which also contains a cd with all of the music from the album.
German ambient-industrial project Anemone Tube was formed in 1996 by Stefan Hanser, and has explored a variety of heavy noisescapes and rhythmic blocks of sound; the Tube's modus operandi has always seemed to focus on putting the listener into a state of delirium caused by constantly shifting sounds and tones sourced from assorted organic and synthetic sounds, and this approach has resulted in a stylistically diverse body of work over the years. On the debut full length Existence, a nearly hour-long disc released in a hand-numbered limited edition of 500 copies, Anemone Tube is at it's heaviest, constructing seven bulky tracks that move from gorgeous ambient dronescapes to crushing, loop-heavy walls of distortion and menacing melodic tracers undulating over grinding rhythmic throb, sort of like what I'd expect a collaboration between Wolf Eyes and Maurizio Bianchi to sound like, although you can also draw lines to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, and violent early UK power electronics when tracks like 'Choke Down' and 'The Encounter III" get into full swing and start obliterating speakers with ferocious torrents of factory distortion. I really dig the way that Existence manages to balance the haunting, atmospheric drones and buried deconstructed rhythms with the louder, brutal passages of rumbling machine filth, making this much easier to digest than many of Anemone Tube's peers. Packaged in an elegant jewel case with a large 10-panel booklet glowing in fiery, fractaled reds and oranges, imprinted with mysterious pictograms.
��This Dismal World crushes. A split between two of the more intense artists within the industrial sub-terrain, the long running German dark ambient/industrial noise duo Anemone Tube and Japanese noise/dirge master Dissecting Table, here teaming up for an intensely dark concept album that seems to have been at least partly inspired by Buddhist teachings.
�� Continuing to explore some of the same sounds and atmospheres as their fantastic last album Death Over China, the Anemone Tube side (titled Threnody For The Dejected) features two long tracks of grim industrial rumble and drift. It begins with "In The Mausoleum", a rather ghastly sounding soundscape that utilizes field recordings taken from ancient Buddhist burial chambers at the Sun-Yat-sen-Mausoleum in Nanjing, China; the track takes shape as a violent churning storm of bellowing black winds rushing through vast underground chambers, recordings of eldritch rattling that crumble like handfuls of rot in slow-motion, a rumbling swirling cloud of black dust amplified to thunderous levels. That segues right into "From Anthropocentrism To Demonocentrism", a crushing malevolent mechanical loop that lurches beneath more of the Tube's harsh bursts of distorted noise and squealing feedback, super ominous, a lurching mechanical death-mantra looping into infinity, eventually fading out into a sea of choral drone.
�� Dissecting Table's side is labeled Guanyin, and has just one monolithic twenty minute piece, "1000 Tones"; the side starts off with the sound of Japanese Buddhist chants overlaid with rhythmic clanking metal and a pounding drumbeat, the clank and screech of metal sounding off constantly in ther background behind this strangely mesmeric, sinister dirge. The first half of the side is almost all heavy, clanking dread, splattered with bits of squelchy synthesizer, the sound intensely distorted, with almost death-metal like shrieks ringing out in the background. The latter half of the side detaches from that massive clanking rhythmic crush, and drifts out into a more abstract sprawl of distorted looped chanting, mangled electronics and howling metallic feedback that seems to take on the sound of warped flutes. The drums and rattling metal and blackened screams come back in at the end though, and transform the final minutes into a bizarre bit of demonic industrial delirium. That track is fucking amazing, and for me was worth the purchase of this Lp alone; whenever Dissecting Table finds its way into that sort of crushing, monstrous almost metallic industrial heaviness, the sound really isn't that far removed from the blackened industrial chaos of bands like Gnaw Their Tongues and Aphelion.
�� Released in a limited edition of two hundred copies, and includes a printed insert with a translation of the Buddhist text The Lotus Sutra Chapter Twenty Five: The Universal Gate of Bodhisattiva Kanzeon.
��Previously released as a limited-edition LP on the UK label Peripheral, this split album from Anemone Tube and Dissecting Table is now available as an equally limited cassette tape (one hundred copies) from Black Horizons, presented in the label's signature silk-screened packaging, and featuring an extended version of one of the Anemone Tube tracks.
�� This Dismal World crushes. A split between two of the more intense artists within the industrial sub-terrain, the long running German dark ambient/industrial noise duo Anemone Tube and Japanese noise/dirge master Dissecting Table, here teaming up for an intensely dark concept album that seems to have been at least partly inspired by Buddhist teachings.
�� Continuing to explore some of the same sounds and atmospheres as their fantastic last album Death Over China, the Anemone Tube side (titled Threnody For The Dejected) features two long tracks of grim industrial rumble and drift. It begins with "In The Mausoleum", a rather ghastly sounding soundscape that utilizes field recordings taken from ancient Buddhist burial chambers at the Sun-Yat-sen-Mausoleum in Nanjing, China; the track takes shape as a violent churning storm of bellowing black winds rushing through vast underground chambers, recordings of eldritch rattling that crumble like handfuls of rot in slow-motion, a rumbling swirling cloud of black dust amplified to thunderous levels. That segues right into "From Anthropocentrism To Demonocentrism", a crushing malevolent mechanical loop that lurches beneath more of the Tube's harsh bursts of distorted noise and squealing feedback, super ominous, a lurching mechanical death-mantra looping into infinity, eventually fading out into a sea of choral drone.
�� Dissecting Table's side is labeled Guanyin, and has just one monolithic twenty minute piece, "1000 Tones"; the side starts off with the sound of Japanese Buddhist chants overlaid with rhythmic clanking metal and a pounding drumbeat, the clank and screech of metal sounding off constantly in the background behind this strangely mesmeric, sinister dirge. The first half of the side is almost all heavy, clanking dread, splattered with bits of squelchy synthesizer, the sound intensely distorted, with almost death-metal like shrieks ringing out in the background. The latter half of the side detaches from that massive clanking rhythmic crush, and drifts out into a more abstract sprawl of distorted looped chanting, mangled electronics and howling metallic feedback that seems to take on the sound of warped flutes. The drums and rattling metal and blackened screams come back in at the end though, and transform the final minutes into a bizarre bit of demonic industrial delirium. That track is fucking amazing, and for me was worth the purchase of this Lp alone; whenever Dissecting Table finds its way into that sort of crushing, monstrous almost metallic industrial heaviness, the sound really isn't that far removed from the blackened industrial chaos of bands like Gnaw Their Tongues and Aphelion.
Here's a harsher take on that epic, metallic post-rock sound, this time from the Chicago-area band Angel Eyes. This disc delivers two long songs in just under half an hour, each one mapping out an elaborate journey through valleys of slow-burning instrumental heaviness and blasts of apocalyptic fury. It takes alot for a band that is messing with this kind of stuff to really stand out nowadays, since the metallic post-rock sound has been done to death over the past few years, but Angel Eyes step up to the challenge with a sound that seems to come from a bunch of guys that have their roots in hardcore but also are capable of delving into lush Western soundscapes and shoegazey washes of sound as powerful as what Souvenir's Young America did on their An Ocean Without Water. The first track begins softly with waves of shimmering guitars and floating feedback swirling around a central minor key melody, slowly building into a sad slowcore dirge filled with shimmering Ennio Morricone style strains and reverb-drenched guitars, layers of guitars gliding over each other, becoming louder and louder until the band erupts into crushing sludge metal with sickening slashed throat screams and a heartrending epic guitar melody soaring overhead. The second track is heavy from the word go, starting off with deep, rumbling guitars and busy drumming patterns that flow into a heavy hypnotic shoegazer sludge jam, little melodies popping up out of the heavy riffing, the whole band backing off every few minutes into a quiet stillness where the drums are heard way off in the distance and a lone guitar chimes away before everything crashes back into majestic heaviness. Those harsh vocals show up again in the middle of the song, dueling shrieks and howling screams wrapping around one another, and everything becomes even heavier, the melodic riff and burly drumming lumbering to a close while delay-soaked guitars build en masse, fading out into burnt feedback and mysterious sounding voices. Beautiful, crushing metallic rock that is top freaking notch, it's got that tumbleweed blowing, Western sky burn that I love, like Souvenir's and Across Tundras, but the heaviness is gnarlier, sludgier, with more of a crusty hardcore feel. Recommended. Comes ina silkscreened Arigato Pak style case.
In spite of all of the unimaginative Neurosis knockoffs that have crowding the metal underground lately, I'm still always trying to keep at least one ear to the ground for bands that are putting their own creative stamp on the epic sludge/instrumental metal sound, working to twist it into something different and interesting. It's happening less and less now that this sound has reached a kind of critical mass not seen since the death metal bubble of the early 1990's, but every once in a while I luck out and discover a band like Angel Eyes.
Angel Eyes came out with this excellent disc a while back that works within the framework of epic, melodic rock and crushing metallic slow-mo heaviness, but Something To Do With Death stands out with the eerie slide guitars and wintery haze of white noise that seem to drift down on all four songs on this disc. I'm kicking myself for not getting this disc in stock sooner, since it's been out for over a year now - this is an moody CRUSHER of an album, and we've been playing it nonstop all week here. Each of these monumental songs (around fifteen minutes long on average) builds from a brooding slow-burn of jangly minor key guitar strum and drums locked into simple marching rhythms, and slowly builds in power as sheets of distorted noise, intriguing dialogue samples, shafts of shimmering ambience and thick swirling clouds of industrial grit descend upon the majestic riffing. By the time that the second track "By The Time He Was My Age Orson Wells Had Made Citizen Kane" kicks into the crushing crescendo halfway through, it sounds yer hearing Mogwai and Neurosis fused together with a noise artist behind the mixing console, raining down corrosive distortion onto the grinding, downtuned metallic sludge, big riffs blossoming out of moody waltizing strum and vicious screams. The vocals are another thing that makes Angel Eyes stand out from the epic sludge metal/instrumental rock hordes...the singer only appears at a couple of points on the album and it's essentially all instrumental, but when he does start belting out his harsh, bestial screams, he reminds me of the singer from Envy but with the aggression levels through the roof. The rest of the music on Something To Do With Death follows the same path, moving from dreamy emotive jangle and layered ambience to monstrous metallic crush and caustic noise and passages of pounding tribal percussion saturated with dark shadows and eerie samples of a preacher rambling about the endtimes. This album kills, and those of you into the epic sludge/gazer heaviness of Mouth Of The Architect, Rosetta, Minsk, Isis, Mogwai, Tides and the emotive metallic 'core of bands like Page 99, Envy and Buried Inside gotta hear this.
The Bloodlust! label is another one that I've been slowly making my way through, having missed out on most of the label's offerings of grimy, grim industrial noise when they first came out in the latter half of the last decade. One of these is this disc from Angel Of Decay, which has become one of my new faves since getting it in stock. It's a collection of two half-hour long tracks of crumbling black factory ambience from this short lived project from Jonathan Canady. You've no doubt come across Canady's work in one form or another over the years, as this guy has been involved with the vicious power electronic and death industrial groups Deathpile and Blunt Force Trauma, industrial metallers Dead World, the newer noise group Nightmares alongside David Reed (Luasa Raelon/Envenomist) and Mark Solotroff (Bloodyminded), and was the in-house art guy for Relapse Records for several years. Originally released on cassette back in 2007, AOD's Bleeding On The Flowers explores new stygian depths and nightmare terrain from Canady through the use of various vintage analog synthesizers.
The title track is a churning mass of machine noise and the monotonous chug of massive engines, rumbling rotors and other mechanical drones all bathed in delay and reverb. Grinding black synths crawl across this blasted industrial backdrop as howling distorted vokills descend upon it, resembling the fury of demons raging over a symphony of steel presses and buzzsaws. This fusion of industrial dronescape terror and oppressive, stentorian power electronics is covered in sonic filth, but it's also juiced up with a seriously heavy recording that combine together for a powerful, hellish listening experience.
The second track "Sick, Insane And Half Dead" is more minimal, smoldering distant distortion and peals of high end feedback swelling up alongside blackened gasping vokills and murkier washes of machine noise. From there, this travels through various stretches of grinding synth damage, harrowing passages of screeching drone, waves of crackling machine noise and the earth-shaking rumble of gargantuan turbines, all of these evoking further visions of demonically possessed ironworks that are filled with howling ghostly vocalizations, relentless pounding rhythms and swooping shrieking entities. Man, this is terrifying stuff all the way to the end; fans of the harshest Cold Meat Industries output will want to hear this for sure.
Released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies.
Angel'in Heavy Syrup are four women from the land o' the rising sun who play like a bizarre cross between the Cocteau Twin s and the Butthole Surfers in the bathroom of a jazz lounge in Osaka. Sorta. Angel'in Heavy Syrup -- one of Japan's finest psychedelic rock bands ( and possibly one of the best bands of any kind in the world) -- return with a full-length album of all new material. The current lineup consists of vocalist/bassist Mineko Itakura and guitarist Mine Nakao, both of whom have appeared on all of the band's albums, and guitarist Fusao Toda, who joined the band in time for the second album. Naoko Otani provided drums on the album. This all-girl trio lays down some heavy duty, riffalicious, totally mesmerizing underground psychedelic rock bliss with GORGEOUS ethereal female vocals and a distinct Japanese delivery. Hands down, one of our ALL TIME favorite albums ever!!!! So, you wonder, what do they sound like? Well, that's a good question... describing them is easier said than done. Take the aforementioned psych bands of the flower-power era, mix in a large dose of folk juju, sprinkle on a smidge of free jazz, then season liberally with influences like the Butthole Surfers, John Coltrane, and various noise artists. Garnish with unexpected time changes, odd meters, impeccable technical skill (Fusao and Mine could play rings around nearly all the "hot" guitarists in American and European circles, and Mineko is not only an amazing bassist but one of finest singers in Japan) and lots of exotic-looking flowers.
Angel'in Heavy Syrup were formed in Osaka, Japan in 1990, and they are possibly the greatest band in the world. On their psychedelic side they are nfluenced by the likes of Gong, 50 Foot Hose, and Amon Duul, but they are definitely influenced by more recent, noisy contemporaries such as Hijokaidan and Masonna as well. Morita Doji, a Japanese pop-folk singer of the 70s and 80s, has also had a big impact upon them. Now defunct out-music label Monotremata Records (one of the great underrated labels of the last few years) graciously made this album domestically available in conjunction with the album's simultaneous release in Japan by legendary avant-garde label Alchemy Records. From the first blast of reverb-heavy psychedelic noise at the beginning of "First Love" to the fading burst of Echoplex that closes "Fate," the six lengthy songs on this album rank among the band's best work. All three of the musicians are in fine form here, with strong songs and stellar playing making this one of their best releases to date. To top it off, the deluxe packaging of the CD (with a sixteen-page booklet and artwork by Masahiko Ohno, guitarist of Solmania and Alchemy's lead designer) make this a highly attractive release - and for the first time, the band's lyrics are printed in English.
Despite crafting some of the best "doomgaze" I've heard, Morgan Bellini's projects have been woefully under recognized, at least in my mind. His older work as Vanessa Van Basten was incredible, rivaling the sky-burning grandeur of Nadja with its massive melodic slowcore, blending the industrial-tinged pneumatic power of Swans and Godflesh while weaving various influences from classic darkwave, Teutonic psych / prog, Scadinavian black metal elements, and the "post-metal" (ugh, forgive me) crush of later Neurosis. Perhaps it was the band name (naming your band after a person, real or no, is usually a stumbling block for potential listeners), or the fact that Vanessa Van Basten were entirely instrumental. For whatever reason, even though one orf their later albums came out on the high-profile label Robotic Empire, the duo remained a cult entity. And that seems to be the case as well for Angela Martyr, again with the name, but this time a little more in synch with the feel and look of this slightly different band that's essentially a Bellini solo project. It's safe to say that if you are one of the few people who were as bewitched by Vanessa Van Basten as I've been, you may well connect with this semi-continuation of that kind of slow-motion, earth-moving, skull-crushing majesty. But it's pursuing that sound down a very different avenue. It's definitely something of a misfit on Avantgarde, a label best known for its, er, more avant-garde black metal offerings. If anything, this album shares some of that gauzy, glazed-over beauty you get from the stuff that comes out on the Avantgarde side-label Flowing Downward. In any case, 2016's The November Harvest is great stuff.
To date, it's the only album from the band. The label mentions the likes of Godflesh, Slowdive, and Dance Of December Souls / Brave Murder Day-era Katatonia as touch points for the music; as much of a hodgepodge as that might seem, it's actually pretty accurate once you get sucked into the monstrous undertow of Martyr's sound. Dissonant guitars ripple over the beginning of "Deviant" as it morphs into a dark, metallic gloom-pop melody, Bellini delivering his vocals in a droning, honeyed croon that meshes nicely with the driving heaviness and swirling sludginess; his multi-tracked vocals and sonorous tone slightly reminds me of a young Layne Staley crossed with a bit of Chino Moreno. That aforementioned black metal influence is so faint as to be almost imperceptible, heard in the swarming tremolo-picked guitar riffs that move in currents beneath the album's stately pace. Detuned guitars grind and lurch through the frequent time changes and sometimes angular songwriting. It's an arresting sound, dark and brooding, the drumming possessed of a somewhat industrial feel, and the overall sound is immense. The more I listen, the more I feel the spirit of the more imaginative and abrasive heavy alternative rock that was coming out in the early 1990s. Definitely a weird kind of lost nostalgia hovers over the album. But there's this pending apocalyptic atmosphere as well that clings to every crushng chord and soul-stirring lyric.
Some of the songs feature guest performances: on "Deviant" and "Serpent", Bellini incorporates Valentina Soligo on strings (probably viola and violin, from the sound of it), to striking effect; for the songs "Deathwish" and "Negative Youth", he's joined by backing vocalist Igor Rojas, who assists with soaring, soulful harmonies with Bellini. Huge doom-laden grooves plow through "Georgina" and "Deathwish", the latter rumbling with killer guitar tone and strange, bluesy undercurrent even as it falls into an almost Jesu-like enormity. Darkening thunderclouds amass over each song. "Serpent" slips into even slower and more pulverizing downtuned heaviness, with the looming presence of funeral doom-like crush creeping through the gales of billowing guitar noise, which often expands into huge cloudscapes of dreamy distortion and looping noise. Time signatures become more complex on "Negative Youth" and "On The Edge Of Next Time" turns into a kind of industrial doom-pop with machinelike percussion and more of that funeral-doom guitar tone. At the end, the almost fourteen minute title track finale brings all of these sounds together into a massive industrial-tinged shoegaze / noise pop epic, with a midway detour into sprawling, lovely electronica, and it's awesome.
Actually, you know what? Do you miss the feeling you'd get from the expressive, textured rock of stuff like Hum, Failure, and Swervedriver? This brings it. Slower and much, much heavier, with the weight of a collapsing star, but man, it brings it. Comes in a DVD-style digipak with a twelve-page lyric/art booklet bound into the packaging; quite nice, with some really striking typography.
It's good to see this one available again for anyone that missed it the first time around. Which is probably pretty much everyone who has just gotten into The Angelic Process in the past couple of years, as the original release of And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey was issued right here on Crucial Blast back in 2001, on a tiny micro-edition cassette that was part of batch of tapes we busted out at the time (other tapes that came out alongside the Angelic Process tape included stuff from noise/ambient projects Never Presence Forever and Belltone Suicide, now long sold out.) And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey was the band's first full length, darker and moodier than their later, more melodic walls of distortion that the project would erect with Coma Waering and Weighing Souls With Sand, but the dense layers of distortion and feedback, anguished screams totally obfuscated by noise, dark apocalyptic dirge metal riffs, simple yet pounding tribal drumming, emotionally devestated melodic hooks, and an almost Merzbowian level of feedback skree pour forth from this disc, proving that it really was a forerunner to the current wave of distortion-surfing sludge/pop/dream outfits like Goslings and Nadja. Ultra blown out and massive, like Neurosis and Jesu and My Bloody Valentine's Loveless melted together and shot back out through a jet engine, a swirling roar that we called "an avalanche of black sugar" back in the day, and that still holds up now. Now remastered, this new version features two bonus tracks ("Hang Him Higher" and "Cages Of Blood And Bone"), comes in a slimline case with new artwork. Recommended.
There's been a flurry of activity lately around the duo The Angelic Process, with last year's acclaimed Coma Waering CD on the UK label Paradigms turning alot of people on to the dense, crushing metalbliss that Kris Angylus has been creating since the early part of the decade. Then there's the new album Weighing Souls With Sand which just came out on Profound Lore not too long ago and which earned them a spot as our featured new release when it came out...that disc has been garnering all kinds of great reviews, deserved it too, as it saw Angylus and MDragynfly delivering their most focused and powerful music yet, a massive wall of gorgeous synthesizers, howling melodic vocals, saturated distortion, and utterly heavenly feedback scorched through by pummeling tribal rhythms and brutal, percussive metallic riffing a la Godflesh and Neurosis. Absolutely amazing stuff at the crest of the current wave of evocative, melodic dream-metal, right up there with their peers in Nadja, Goslings, and Jesu. With all of the increased interest in The Angelic Process, Kris has saw fit to issue short-run, CD-R releases of assorted older TAP recordings through the band's own Decaying Sun imprint; alot of this material dates back several years, as the project has been recording and releasing material since 2001. The previously unreleased 2004 EP Sigh is one such CD-R, a 4-track, 23-minute disc in a slimline case with a full color insert sheet, featuring four exclusive tracks: "Sigh", "Trance To The Sun", "Mouvement � With Mouthfulls Of Blood", and "The Black Ark", all a continuation of the band's wall-of-fuzz dronemetal with the addition of sampled cello and drum programming further fleshing out their sound. Recommended.
We All Die Laughing is the third in a series of CD-Rs released through Decaying Sun, the tiny imprint operated by the members of the ambient metal duo The Angelic Process. Documenting their recorded material leading up to the Coma Waering CD on Paradigms and the new full length album Weighing Souls With Sand on Profound Lord, the Decaying Sun CD-Rs feature Angelic Process material recorded since the beginning of the decade when the band first formed. We All Die Laughing was released towards the end of 2006, and actually contains songs that would go on to be re-recorded for their Profound Lore album; the versions here are similiar but a bit more stripped down and restrained, though no less powerful. The other songs on this disc are in the same vein, and fans of Weighing Souls With Sand are sure to love this material just as much. The songs exclusive to this disc include "Bleedbeliever", "Mouvement - Soleil Et Noir", "How To Build A Time Machine", and "Mouvement - Every City Is A Prison" - all are monolithic blasts of beautiful distortion and feedback, massive tribal drumbeats and psychedelic Gothic atmosphere, and ultra crushing melodic metal riffage with those signature howling vocals buried way back in the sea of fuzz and swirling noise, like Neurosis and Godflesh mashed together into a towering wall of dreampop mightiness. There's actually a handful of parts on We All Die Laughing where TAP back off of the wall of noise and reveal some surprisingly quiet passages of minimal droning ambience which make for some of The Angelic Processes' most fragile moments, almost sounding like Troum at times. Like the other two discs in the Decaying Sun series, this comes in a slimline case with full color artwork.
It had been a couple of years since we had heard anything from The Angelic Process, the ambient drone-metal project of Kris Angelyus whose ...And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey was released on cassette through Crucial Blast back in 2001. Obviously, we were big fans of Angelic's blissed out maelstrom of layered My Bloody Valentine guitars blasted at hurricane levels of volume and density...so we were HUGELY stoked when we found out that UK imprint Paradigms were going to re-release Coma Waering, the second full length album from The Angelic Process! This album was originally self-released in 2003
in an extremely small edition and didn't circulate much, which was a shame as The Angelic Process's astral 'gaze was definitely ahead of the pack. But here it is again, released in a limited edition of 750 copies, a solar blast of awe inspiring shoegazer bliss clad in massive swirling distortion as epic swells and majestic melodies soar through the squall, like a crushingly heavy version of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless meeting Akira Yamaoka's Silent Hill game scores in a glacial wash of Merbowian fuzz. Awesome! Fans of Jesu, Loveless, Sunn O))) and similiar dense heaviness will love this. Again, this is a limited edition of 750 copies, and is packaged in Paradigm's signature card sleeve that comes sealed in a hand-stamped presentation envelope and wallet. Highly recommended!
The long awaited new album from one of my favorite ambient bliss-metal outfits ever! Weighing Souls is the first new full-length album from The Angelic Process in something like four years; their Coma Waering CD that came out on Paradigms in 2006 was actually a re-issue of a CD-R that The Angelic Process founder K. Angylus recorded back in 2002; prior to that, the project had released the super-limited 2001 cassette ...And Your Blood Is Full Of Honey right here on Crucial Blast. Needless to say, we've all been waiting for awhile now for new music from the band, which grew into a duo a coupla years back when K. (who handles the guitars, vocals, drums, and electronic blastwalls) was joined by a lady named M. Dragynfly, who plays bass as well as contributing additional vocals and electronic textures, further filling out the band's blissed-out, widescreen dronemetal sound. Weighing Souls With Sand seems to frame a narrative about death, loss, despair, and self-realization, and I gotta say that this album sees the band perfecting everything that I've ever loved about this band. Each of the ten songs here are achingly beautiful monoliths of heartrending melody, radiating out of dense walls of fuzzed out, simple but crushing metallic riffs. Those guitars are so processed and ultra blown out and distorted that they reach the point of becoming a massive ball of white light, suffocating and celestial, through which the strained melodic singing and keening wails, all equally distorted and obfuscated by white noise, appear soaring through the wall of lush fuzz. The drums somehow sound gigantic and primordial, like tribal war beats thundering across vast canyons. They also cut through the wall-of-sound with occasional passages of restrained, almost mechanical drumming and quieter ambient drones, before exploding back into the oceans of heavenly buzz. It's like the ritualistic dirge of Neurosis filtered through My Bloody Valentines' Loveless and Merzbowian levels of white noise. Along with likeminded bliss blasters The Goslings, Nadja, and Jesu, The Angelic Process are creating some of my favorite music being made currently, carving intense beauty out of corrosive noise and distortion. Weighing comes in a gorgeous digipack case illustrated with beautiful burning imagery designed by the band. Highly highly recommended.
���Just restocked this 2011 release from the ephemeral duo of Kenneth Anger and Brian Butler (a session player who has performed in the past with Christian Death frontman Rozz Williams and Mark Stewart of The Pop Band) called Technicolor Skull, a short-lived collaboration who released just this one single-sided LP on blood red 180 gram vinyl in a limited edition of six hundred and sixty-six copies via esteemed occult-centric label Ajna Offensive. Anger's name should be familiar to all enthusiasts of dark counter-culture cinema and the more occult-fixated corners of the underground art scene, foremost for his now iconic body of experimental films from the mid-20th century that included Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Scorpio Rising, Lucifer Rising, and Invocation of My Demon Brother.
���His latest project Technicolor Skull hardly sounds like the work of a man in his eighties. Released in conjunction with a one-time only live performance at the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011, this record features a blast of improvised psychedelia from Anger and Butler that's just as grim as the morbid cover art of a red-hued skull suggests, sprawling out into a vast swirling psychedelic noisescape, the eerie wail and shriek of Anger's theremin rising and swooping across fields of crackling electronic noise and whirring cosmic effects like the cries of alien birdlife and blasts of incandescent laser. As the performance continues to unfold, waves of distorted guitar wash across the side likes tides of black lava, cascades of fractalized acid guitar shred tumble through space, and fuzz-drenched power chords strobe in the blackness. Walls of sputtering black static collapse in slow motion, while bursts of what sound like fluttering woodwinds are swept up in a chortling free-jazz style rush of notes. A massively distorted guitar sputters out a stream of malformed glitchery like the effluvium of a malfunctioning mainframe computer, right before an onslaught of crazed, violent drumming explodes into a storm of percussive power, rising and falling as the performance grows more sinister and more atmospheric, leading into the sound of distant funereal violin and droning electronics, fragments of creepy piano and plumes of howling, mesmeric feedback belching from overdriven amplifiers like incense over the sounds of sampled orchestral scores from ancient horror movies that thunder in the background. A real skull-fuck blast of ghostly black-hole psychedelia that's chaotic and creepy and pretty goddamn mind-melting; I can only imagine what this was like live, with Anger's otherworldly images towering on a screen behind the duo. Immense.
��Seems like these Portuguese black metal borgs have been bashing out their brand of industrialized evil since the nineties, but it's taken 'em till now to finally put out an album. Released on the almost always interesting Code666, Angrenost's debut delivers a ferocious assault of modern industrial black metal, combining glistening electronic textures and terrifying orchestral rumblings with a dramatic, melodic black attack that fits right in among the progressive aesthetics of the Code666 roster. It's not just another Mysticum clone, either. Angrenost find a sweet spot between the rigid, robotic fury of industrial black metal, and a more ornate, synth-drenched sound that draws heavily from more symphonic sources.
�� Planet Muscaria opens with some dread-filled black ambience and clanking industrial noise on the brief intro track "INferN(O)" before they blast off into the surreal interstellar visions of demonically-possessed wormholes, cellular chaos, heroin-fueled projections of the astral self, malevolent sub-atomic entities, and the necromantic knowledge hidden within ancient radio waves that make up the album. It's all rooted in blazing fast black metal powered by rapid-fire drum programming that frequently breaks down into crushing Mysticum-esque industrial rhythms. The vocals have some variety to 'em, shifting between a strange wailing chant like delivery, a bizarre processed cyborg howl, and the singer's scorched blackened rasp that asserts itself on the majority of the tracks. This stuff is loaded with sweeping cosmic synthesizer textures, sudden bursts of clanking violent sheet-metal percussion, detours into deformed drum n' bass chaos-ritual, layers of abrasive electronic noise and eerie choral voices wailing in the distance, even working some creepy atonal piano into the mix. Some of the highlights on Planet include the frenzied black majesty of "acIdShIVa", and the crushing junglist tendencies of "ajNagraMMaTON" and "INTraVeNUS" that get spliced into the driving mid-tempo metallic crush. Those ferocious breakbeats become glazed with slightly dissonant symphonic synthesizers, often before suddenly dropping into another one of their off-kilter mechanical rhythms, where churning double bass seizes up as fractured robotic beats suddenly take over. There's the gleaming kosmische electronics of "SaTaNlOgOS" that sweep across the song's brutal mechanized blasts and imperious riffage, leading the music into a shambling, super heavy industrial dirge; the clanking, wretched, almost Skinny Puppy-esque industrial crawl of "ScOrpIOSaUrUS"; and the clanking scrap-metal percussive rhythms that underscore "SchIzOphObOS" before that song kicks into a killer, almost new wavey hook. The vicious "abSUMardUk" is another churning mass of blazing blackened riffs and pounding blasts that eventually makes a long descent into an expanse of ghastly soundtracky ambience, which ends up turning into one of the album's most fearsome tracks. There's a lot to like here if you're into the more industrial-tinged end of black metal, and it's certainly worth checking out if you've been digging some of the other recent mechanized black metal albums that Code666 has been championing lately from Control Human Delete and Axis Of Perdition.
Animal Steel is a side project from one of the guys from Twodeadsluts Onegoodfuck, the notorious Boston area power electronics group who have become almost legendary in the industrial/noise subterranea with their destructive, confrontational performances that often end with the members stripping naked and assaulting the audience while blasting chaotic feedback. This project is much more reserved. The Sleep Forever Blue Face Babe cassette is limited to 100 copies and comes in a full color case , and contains six tracks of icy electronic synth-death that alternates between controlled bursts of brutal Whitehouse style Power Electronics, icy kosmiche drones drifting in soft waves across an endless black void, super distorted ambient blasts that sound like a crushing, ultra-heavy Popul Vuh, and slabs of rumbling, mesmerizing black ambience. The tape isn't that long, clocking in at twenty minutes, but all of the sounds on here are top notch dark industrial. Recommended.
This album had already been highly recommended to me by fellow fans of the more blown-out, distorted and abstracted strains of black metal, but I was still pretty amazed when I finally sat down and listened to Poems For The Aching, Swords For The Infuriated, the stunning debut full length from the Israeli one-man black metal band Animus. This project is shrouded in mystery, no track titles, the songs instead identified by numbers, the sole member choosing anonymity, and no lyrics...the booket itself contains only some arcane writing and minimal woodcut art. This sense of mystery extends even moreso across the music - with six tracks running just a total of 50 minutes, Animus crafts a majestic brand of epic yet introspective black metal dronebliss; while the raw materials are what I was expecting from a denizen of the loner black metal realm, the dark and ominous minor key melodies, brittle guitars pushed through extreme levels of distortion, and bleak, minimalist song structures, etc., Animus nevertheless creates a unique and entrancing cloud of dreamlike black buzz that is almost painfully beautiful. Like "Part 3", which drowns a heartbreakingly gorgeous melody in a pool of trebly distortion and Animus' sandpaper death-croak, a sorrowful dreampop lullaby buried in white noise and amp hiss. Or "Part 4" and it's repetitive, soaring melodic hook gliding over a black surface of Burzumic fuzz and cavernous reverb and pulsing drum machine blasts swallowed up in the swirling fog. Animus mostly crawls along at a slow, dirgey pace though, a murky midtempo trudge, sometimes sounding like a fuzz drenched, more melodic version of Skepticism. This album has some of the catchiest, most melodic black metal dirge ever, it's as bleak and depressing and trance inducing as Xasthur, but those melodic hooks have more in common with the more recent Drudkh releases, Velvet Cacoon's dreamy hiss, and some wraithlike version of shoegaze summoned up from black corners. Highly recommended.
Israeli one-man bedroom black metal band Animus is back with another mouthful of an album title and another solid disc of mournful, Burzum-influenced black metal, their second for underground American BM label Ars Magna. Why isn't this band more known in the avant-black metal scene following the band's first album Poems For The Aching from two years ago? Poems was a dreamy blast of treble-overload and fuzzwreathed melodic blackness that resembled the murky post-punk influenced music of Velvet Cacoon and Lurker Of Chalice heard through a blizzard of white noise and tape hiss, and the music was painfully beautiful, achingly beautiful with it's downcast melodies obfuscated by sheets of blurred noise. So great. Things are a little different with this second album: half of the album's six songs (all of which are untitled) are in that Burzumic black metal vein, with no audible bass, the guitars so distorted and mixed so harshly in the red that they all melt into sheets of caustic fuzz, and stumbling drums that are way up front in the mix, the plodding doomic beats and marching rhythms and ramshackle blastbeats right in your face, surrounded by the blizzard winds of trebly amp hiss and anguished moans. But the other half of the album isn't really black metal at all. Instead, Animus offsets the wintry BM buzzdrone half with stuff like the darkly shadowed acoustic guitars, orchestral strings, piano and cellos of the second track that sounds like a particularly dreary (but heartbreakingly beautiful) piece from Godspeed You Black Emperor. The third track is primarily acoustic guitar joined by gutteral black metal vocals, a blackened folk song with some amazing flamenco style playing that shows up in the second half. And the fifth track is an eight minute slab of isolationist drone with just the barest smattering of distant blackened rasps floating over the grim, low-key ambient fuzz and electronic tones, which reminds me of M. Bianchi's bleak industrial drones. Obviously this is a much more varied and textured album than the debut, a mix of the noise-drenched Burzumic black metal and some excellent detours into blackened folky post-rock and dark industrial, and these experimental elements add some very cool new shadows to Animus' beautifully depressing blackness.
Loads of newer bands have been juicing up their hardcore thrash with some straight up rock lately, but few do it as well as the mighty Annihilation Time, whose latest album III on Tee Pee completely kicked my ass earlier this year. These Cali rippers combine old-school hardcore and classic 70's hard rock/proto-metal heroics better than anyone, and sound like some mutant cross between the burly hardcore punk of Black Flag and B'last! and the infectious bloozy riffage of Rainbow and Deep Purple; sounds like a weird combo, and it is, but do these guys tear it up! I'm still playing III on a regular basis here at C-Blast HQ, and I've been slowly tracking down their earlier releases that came out on the thrashcore labels Dead Alive and Six Weeks. Some of this stuff is out of print or otherwise hard to locate, but I did just find the vinyl version of their second album, appropriately titled II, from 2005. It's just as raging and rocking and furious as the newer stuff; the hybrid of Black Flag/Deep Purple is in full form here, short manic songs that mash together skronky Greg Ginn style riffs and fast pounding thrash with yelping, reverb-soaked vocals, fuzzed out leads and fist-pumping rawk, with titles like "Too High To Die", "Fastforward To The Gore", "Yuppie Killer", and "Imaginary Mirror", and there's a killer cover of "Teenage Rebel" from British proto-punks Pink Fairies that closes out the first side. Nice! The guitar sound and production on this record has a killer vintage sound, as if II really was recorded and released back in the 70's, a lost hardcore anachronism that was only recently unearthed and discovered by modern hardcore fans. It's not, of course, but this record fucking smokes like few other hardcore platters of this era, that's for sure. And the album art is terrific: the front cover of the LP is a garish, hand-painted psychedelic collage that has the zomboid heads of the band members rising in a geyser from a gushing toilet while demonic skater punks hold the Annihilation Time logo aloft, tossing multi-colored pills over a grotesque scene that includes an undead Lemmy Kilmister and Phil Lynott, a skeletonized creep wearing a Blue Oyster Cult t-shirt with guitar cables pounded into his ear cavities, mushrooms, beer cans, dope-smoking sewer rats, and demonically possessed water bongs. That freakish vision just kind of sums it all up.
After one album on the defunct Manic Ride label and another that was self-released, Oakland rippers Annihilation Time are back with their latest blast of manic, whiskey-fueled thrash, the band's first for their new label Tee Pee, an imprint that I was kinda surprised to see a hardcore band putting out a record on at first, since so much of what I've been listening to on Tee Pee has been monster heavy psych metal (Sleep, Witch, Earthless, etc.). Back when a buddy first turned me on to Annihilation Time's first album, I thought that their rocking hardcore was pretty badass, hopped up on an obvious SST/Black FLag influence but putting their own hard rocking spin on the sound. Now with Tales Of The Ancient Age, those hard rock vibes are more prominent than ever with a twin-guitar attack that has caused some to compare A-Time to Thin Lizzy...I'm hearing that just a wee bit but only in the tasty harmonized solos that pop up a couple times in the album. I'm hearing just as much of a diet of Ted Nugent and Deep Purple circa Machine Head but jacked up on hard liquor and speedballs and raging at top-speed hardcore tempos, filtered through the bare knuckled aggro of Black Flag but way more ROCK and much less SKRONK than the Flag comparison might lead you towards...though check out the 1:29 powerbomb "Jonestown" for some gnarly fretboard beating and one of the fastest, hardest jams on the disc. Then there's "About To Snap", an awesome warning shot with infectious riffage that spins off into some amazing Iron Maidan worthy dual axe harmonizing at the end. Nice. The whole deal is raw and no-frills, just sweet ripping riffs and hooks to match, blasting at HC tempos and shredding bloozy guitar moves and sweet shredding all over your face. Hardcore thrashing rock and roll speedboogie wreckage, one of the funnest fuckin' punk albums I've picked up since I can't remember. Added points for the great album art too; the cover art is an actual illustrated painting (it's good to see this approach becoming more and more popular) of a post-society collapse street with fascist stormtrooper cops, babies packing heat, hookers, puking punks, amputee wasteoids and some poor bastard being devoured by a giant alligator that just lunged out of a manhole - really cool. The disc comes in this full color digipack, we've got it on vinyl too.
Also available on vinyl (black), which comes with a plastic dropcard with download information to receive a free MP3 version of Tales Of The Ancient Age. Plus, Shaun Filley's awesome cover art looks just right at this size!
After one album on the defunct Manic Ride label and another that was self-released, Oakland rippers Annihilation Time are back with their latest blast of manic, whiskey-fueled thrash, the band's first for their new label Tee Pee, an imprint that I was kinda surprised to see a hardcore band putting out a record on at first, since so much of what I've been listening to on Tee Pee has been monster heavy psych metal (Sleep, Witch, Earthless, etc.). Back when a buddy first turned me on to Annihilation Time's first album, I thought that their rocking hardcore was pretty badass, hopped up on an obvious SST/Black FLag influence but putting their own hard rocking spin on the sound. Now with Tales Of The Ancient Age, those hard rock vibes are more prominent than ever with a twin-guitar attack that has caused some to compare A-Time to Thin Lizzy...I'm hearing that just a wee bit but only in the tasty harmonized solos that pop up a couple times in the album. I'm hearing just as much of a diet of Ted Nugent and Deep Purple circa Machine Head but jacked up on hard liquor and speedballs and raging at top-speed hardcore tempos, filtered through the bare knuckled aggro of Black Flag but way more ROCK and much less SKRONK than the Flag comparison might lead you towards...though check out the 1:29 powerbomb "Jonestown" for some gnarly fretboard beating and one of the fastest, hardest jams on the disc. Then there's "About To Snap", an awesome warning shot with infectious riffage that spins off into some amazing Iron Maidan worthy dual axe harmonizing at the end. Nice. The whole deal is raw and no-frills, just sweet ripping riffs and hooks to match, blasting at HC tempos and shredding bloozy guitar moves and sweet shredding all over your face. Hardcore thrashing rock and roll speedboogie wreckage, one of the funnest fuckin' punk albums I've picked up since I can't remember. Added points for the great album art too; the cover art is an actual illustrated painting (it's good to see this approach becoming more and more popular) of a post-society collapse street with fascist stormtrooper cops, babies packing heat, hookers, puking punks, amputee wasteoids and some poor bastard being devoured by a giant alligator that just lunged out of a manhole - really cool. The disc comes in this full color digipack, we've got it on vinyl too.
Here's the latest repress of this rippin' 2006 Ep from Cali stoner punks Annihilation Time, featuring three songs of their Flag-esque mix of 70s rock/metal riffage and ferocious hardcore punk. Released prior to their final album III - Tales Of The Ancient Age, this Ep has some of my favorite tuneage from this band, and I don't think I'm alone as this has been repressed over and over again to satiate the band's still growing legion of fans.
The a-side track "Reality?" is one Annihilation Time's most majestic thrashers, opening with some sweet metallic power that has a whiff of Judas Priest around it, then hurtling into the awesome, jagged hardcore at the meat of the song. Their adoration of B'last and Black Flag is still devout, the guitarist peeling off loads of wicked Greg Ginn-esque skronk-leads as the band twists itself around some off-kilter time changes. Then it all drops into a big Sabbath riff in the middle, which crawls over the song for awhile before finally tearing back into the speed assault. Pure power.
The b-side tracks are shorter blasts of thrash, "Feel It" raging at top speed with anthemic riffs galore and screaming lead guitar solos whipping the band into ever greater frenzies, like some 70s stadium metal band racing at top speed for their life. "Annihilate" follows, another Flag-style hammer to the face delivered with top metallic precision.
Highly recommended to fans of their albums, obviously, as well as anyone into the newer band Lecherous Gaze that some of these guys went on to form after Annihilation Time broke up, this is one of those few modern records to really capture the sort of frenzied, rockin' hardcore violence found with the likes of Eye For An Eye-era Corrosion Of Conformity, late-era Flag, and B'last!'s crushing metallic output.
Back in stock! This is the more recent Tank Crimes reissue of Annihilation Time's second album, this version packaged in a gatefold jacket with an additional 7" of the band's ripping Cosmic Unconciousness EP. Here's my original writeup on the Six Weeks edition:
Loads of newer bands have been juicing up their hardcore thrash with some straight up rock lately, but few do it as well as the mighty Annihilation Time, whose latest album III on Tee Pee completely kicked my ass earlier this year. These Cali rippers combine old-school hardcore and classic 70's hard rock/proto-metal heroics better than anyone, and sound like some mutant cross between the burly hardcore punk of Black Flag and B'last! and the infectious bloozy riffage of Rainbow and Deep Purple; sounds like a weird combo, and it is, but do these guys tear it up! I'm still playing III on a regular basis here at C-Blast HQ, and I've been slowly tracking down their earlier releases that came out on the thrashcore labels Dead Alive and Six Weeks. Some of this stuff is out of print or otherwise hard to locate, but I did just find the vinyl version of their second album, appropriately titled II, from 2005. It's just as raging and rocking and furious as the newer stuff; the hybrid of Black Flag/Deep Purple is in full form here, short manic songs that mash together skronky Greg Ginn style riffs and fast pounding thrash with yelping, reverb-soaked vocals, fuzzed out leads and fist-pumping rawk, with titles like "Too High To Die", "Fastforward To The Gore", "Yuppie Killer", and "Imaginary Mirror", and there's a killer cover of "Teenage Rebel" from British proto-punks Pink Fairies that closes out the first side. Nice! The guitar sound and production on this record has a killer vintage sound, as if II really was recorded and released back in the 70's, a lost hardcore anachronism that was only recently unearthed and discovered by modern hardcore fans. It's not, of course, but this record fucking smokes like few other hardcore platters of this era, that's for sure. And the album art is terrific: the front cover of the LP is a garish, hand-painted psychedelic collage that has the zomboid heads of the band members rising in a geyser from a gushing toilet while demonic skater punks hold the Annihilation Time logo aloft, tossing multi-colored pills over a grotesque scene that includes an undead Lemmy Kilmister and Phil Lynott, a skeletonized creep wearing a Blue Oyster Cult t-shirt with guitar cables pounded into his ear cavities, mushrooms, beer cans, dope-smoking sewer rats, and demonically possessed water bongs. That freakish vision just kind of sums it all up.
And here's my writeup of the Cosmic Unconciousness EP: Here's the latest repress of this rippin' 2006 Ep from Cali stoner punks Annihilation Time, featuring three songs of their Flag-esque mix of 70s rock/metal riffage and ferocious hardcore punk. Released prior to their final album III - Tales Of The Ancient Age, this Ep has some of my favorite tuneage from this band, and I don't think I'm alone as this has been repressed over and over again to satiate the band's still growing legion of fans. The a-side track "Reality?" is one Annihilation Time's most majestic thrashers, opening with some sweet metallic power that has a whiff of Judas Priest around it, then hurtling into the awesome, jagged hardcore at the meat of the song. Their adoration of B'last and Black Flag is still devout, the guitarist peeling off loads of wicked Greg Ginn-esque skronk-leads as the band twists itself around some off-kilter time changes. Then it all drops into a big Sabbath riff in the middle, which crawls over the song for awhile before finally tearing back into the speed assault. Pure power.
The b-side tracks are shorter blasts of thrash, "Feel It" raging at top speed with anthemic riffs galore and screaming lead guitar solos whipping the band into ever greater frenzies, like some 70s stadium metal band racing at top speed for their life. "Annihilate" follows, another Flag-style hammer to the face delivered with top metallic precision.
Highly recommended to fans of their albums, obviously, as well as anyone into the newer band Lecherous Gaze that some of these guys went on to form after Annihilation Time broke up, this is one of those few modern records to really capture the sort of frenzied, rockin' hardcore violence found with the likes of Eye For An Eye-era Corrosion Of Conformity, late-era Flag, and B'last!'s crushing metallic output.
Just in! The original vinyl version of this metallic noise-rock/avant-dirge crusher from Brooklyn's heaviest, Anodyne. Pressed on clear vinyl, in a three color sleeve with glossy insert. This 10" version features the four songs "Black.Sun.Rise", "Consumer", "Valley Of The Worm", and "Mask Behind The Face".
One of the most lethal of the post-hardcore bands that fully embraced the caustic nihilism of 90's noise rock, Anodyne for some reason never caught on with the metal/hardcore crowd in a big way, despite releasing some of the most abrasive and ferocious NYC noise since Unsane. Actually, I don't understand how Anodyne failed to become the favorite band of every hardcore kid that ever worshipped Deadguy and Kiss It Goodbye. I only had the opportunity to see Anodyne play live once, in the basement of the cafe attached to CBGB's in the early part of this decade, and their set was chilling; pure, hateful force conveyed through brutal, jagged riffs and Mike Hill's gnarly howls. Vicious neo-noise rock rendered metallic and pulverizing through ample levels of distortion and dirge. Beyond recommended for fans of metallic Am Rep worship, dissonant and experimental metalcore, and gunmetal endtime visions. Recommended.
One of the most lethal of the post-hardcore bands that fully embraced the caustic nihilism of 90's noise rock, Anodyne for some reason never caught on with the metal/hardcore crowd in a big way, despite releasing some of the most abrasive and ferocious NYC noise since Unsane. Actually, I don't understand how Anodyne failed to become the favorite band of every hardcore kid that ever worshipped Deadguy and Kiss It Goodbye. I only had the opportunity to see Anodyne play live once, in the basement of the cafe attached to CBGB's in the early part of this decade, and their set was chilling; pure, hateful force conveyed through brutal, jagged riffs and Mike Hill's gnarly howls. Vicious neo-noise rock rendered metallic and pulverizing through ample levels of distortion and dirge. The Salo EP was first released as a 10" on the German label Insolito and was then released on CD by Init, and it's seven tracks are beyond recommended for fans of metallic Am Rep worship, dissonant
and experimental metalcore, and gunmetal endtime visions. The four tracks from the 10" have a different mix on this disc, although I myself don't have the vinyl and so can't draw any comparisons; the other three tracks are exclusive to the CD, the ambient/electronic soundscapes of "Teratology Survey" and the eight minute industrial drone/dirge meditation "Playing Enemy" (which is frankly worth picking up this disc for alone), and a sickening cover of Husker Du's "Beyond The Threshold". Recommended.
Before Tombs showed up on the scene and blew everyone away with their heavy-duty blackened noise-rock assault, before Versoma, Mike Hill developed a lethal brand of grinding, misanthropic noise-rock in Anodyne, a NY-based band that broke up a few years ago and which never got much recognition outside of their hometown. But these guys were one of the most vicious bands I ever had the pleasure of seeing live, their brutal combo of modern metallic heaviness and Am Rep skuzz and grindcore speed coming off like a carbomb, an explosive and violent performance that had one feeling that the band could come rushing off the stage any minute and clobber you over the head with their instruments. The violence of their live set didn't translate completely to their recorded output, but Anodyne's releases were still sufficiently ferocious and heavy. This 7" from 2001 came out on the now (presumably) defunct Alone Records, a four song blast of unrelenting anger formed from ugly dissonant riffs, blazing blastbeats, choked desperate screams and short chaotic songs that race by so fast the EP is over in a matter of minutes. This is one of the rawest recordings that Anodyne released during their career, and some of their ugliest tracks. Features the songs "RRP", "Crop Circle", "Dreaming Mind Of The Masses", "Hecate". Highly recommended to fans of Fight Amp, Playing Enemy, Engineer, KEN Mode, Breather Resist and Coalesce.
Even though I did get to see Anodyne play live a couple of times, including one absolutely pulverizing set in the basement at CBGBs back in 2001, I didn't really get into these guys and start picking up their albums and EPs until well after the band decided to throw in the towel. All of their releases reveal a punishing riffbeast who delivered some of the most creative and textural music to come out of the metal/hardcore scene, a massive dirgey heaviosity that was as schooled in brutal post-Am Rep/noise rock as it was in the cacophonous sheet-metal aggression of NYC pigfuck and Swans and the apocalyptic tribal sludge of Neurosis. Anodyne consumed all of those influences and distilled them into brutal, often experimental and improvisational slabs of endtime metalcore that ranks as some of the most pissed off, apocalyptic sounding metal I've ever heard.
Over the past year I've been picking up the rest of their older releases that I hadn't heard yet, and the latest addition to the Anodyne library is this collection of early works that was released through Black Box, the label run by Anodyne guitarist (and founding member of Tombs) Mike Hill. The disc contains their earliest demo and 7" recordings, all of which are long out of print in their original formats, so I'm stoked that this allows me to get all of that stuff without fucking around with hunting 'em down on Ebay. And as soon as the first track opens up, yer flattened by the fiery industrial improv of "Metal Years Part 3", which could actually pass for a super-heavy Ramleh track, a tangled mass of feedback and strangled guitar noise, clattering free-jazz drums and electronic squeal...a vicious five minute chunk of sludgy metallic free-noise destruction. Sweet. Then it's off to the original 1997 demo, which was later released as the bands self titled debut 7"...six tracks of burly, chugging brute metal that totally nails down their Neurosis-meets-Deadguy sound, chaotic but mathy and jagged sounding, angular riffs bending away from the crushing rhythm section, the sound almost excruciatingly bottom-heavy and filled with creative use of feedback and amplifier noise. The song "Lead By Example" from the 7" appears here for the first time in it's full un-truncated form, a sprawling experimental doomdirge with layers of menacing spoken word recordings and a feedback-blasted mass of dissonant sludge riffs and improvised guitar noise.
Later tracks include the bruising "Start With Subtraction" off of the Metal Is A Tough Business, the fearsome fx-laced powerdirge "Shape Of Things To Come" from the Self-Deconstruction compilation and "Polecat" from the So It Goes comp on Reproductive Records; another unreleased track called "Walking Small" which again combines brutal noise-damaged metallic noise rock with an extended bout of cranium scraping free-noise; the grindier Red Was Her favorite Color 7" from Happy Couple Never Last and the BLAZINGLY FAST Berkowitz 7" where it sounds like Anodyne was subsisting on a steady diet of Human Remains and Discordance Axis before they unleashed these jams in the studio...and as it happens, these tracks were actually recorded with none other than Dave Witte of DA/HR himself at the drumkit! And finally, the last track - an intensely creepy, far-too-short piece of grungy dread called "Persuasion" that melds together evil industrial drones with zombified croaks and crackling, filth-encrusted distorto-sludge ambience.
Awesomely heavy, apocalyptic stuff, and essential for anyone into Am Rep-influenced metal, experimental sludge, and general bad vibes transmitted through the most crushing math-metal imagineable. Great, grim artwork too, and liner notes that break down the source of the tracks roud out this crucial release. Now where's volume 2?
Even though I did get to see Anodyne play live a couple of times, including one absolutely pulverizing set in the basement at CBGBs back in 2001, I didn't
really get into these guys and start picking up their albums and EPs until well after the band decided to throw in the towel. All of their releases reveal a
punishing riffbeast who delivered some of the most creative and textural music to come out of the metal/hardcore scene, a massive dirgey heaviosity that was
as schooled in brutal post-Am Rep/noise rock and Black Flag's discography as it was in the cacophonous sheet-metal aggression of NYC pigfuck and Swans and the apocalyptic tribal sludge of Neurosis. Anodyne consumed all of those influences and distilled them into brutal, often experimental and improvisational slabs of endtime metalcore that ranks as some of the most pissed off, apocalyptic sounding metal I've ever heard. I'm working on getting everything that they released (that's still in print) in stock here at Crucial Blast since there's some interest in Anodyne thanks to the big buzz that Mike Hill's new band Tombs has been generating...
1999's The Outer Dark is little more than an elongated EP, with seven songs coming in at just over twenty-one minutes, but this disc is still a
punishing entry in Anodyne's catalog that would probably have lost some of it's impact if the band had made it any longer. It was the band's first album, paired with those creepy Gustav Dore engravings, and it featured guitarist Ayal Naor from post-rockers 27 in the lineup. While Quiet Wars doesn't have any real industrial elements like those that would appear on later releases, this is still a devestating dose of complex, metallic noise-rock that sounds like the final scream of rage at the dying of the world. The disc opens with "Sometimes No Means Right", aggressive tribal drums and sheets of dissonant guitar and eerie atonal leads met with jagged Deadguy-esque metallic hardcore, and then on to the feral assault of "Coriolis Acceleration", which combines Neurosis dirge and angular metallic noise rock into that signature Andoyne sound. "The Great Assimilator" starts off with a sludgy thrash metal riff that turns into dissonant shredding over crushing quasi-industrial drumming, then veers into a surprisingly languid bit of psychedelic slowcore that again hints at that Neurosis sound, then veers off again, this time into another crushing angular noise rock jam. "Cities Of The Plain" features more repetitive, chunky noise rock riffing and atonal melodies, but the last three minutes turn into sparse glacial drums over pure molten ambient guitar noise and spacey effects, a grim stretch of dark abstract ambience that hints at some of the more aggressively droneological experiments that Anodyne would engage in later.
"Untermyer Park" achives near grindcore speeds at first, and then drops into a massive chugging dirge that effectively channels the atavistic pound of early
Swans through minimal doomy guitars and pounding slow-motion drums, and then "The Extremist" ends the album with a ferociously thrashing number mixed up with crushing dissonant noise rock complete with drum solo (!) and drifting out in a factory fog of spaced-out guitar noise.
Even though Anodyne never achieved the popularity of their peers in Botch, Isis, and Coalesce, these guys were just as crucial in the development of what a lot of folks like to call "post-metal" (please, shoot me in the face with a nailgun if you ever catch me using that term...), playing a brand of crushing, complex and sometimes difficult sound that was all their own, and all of their albums are essential listens within the spectrum of forward-thinking metallic heaviness.
Even though I did get to see Anodyne play live a couple of times, including one absolutely pulverizing set in the basement at CBGBs back in 2001, I didn't
really get into these guys and start picking up their albums and EPs until well after the band decided to throw in the towel. All of their releases reveal a
punishing riffbeast who delivered some of the most creative and textural music to come out of the metal/hardcore scene, a massive dirgey heaviosity that was
as schooled in brutal post-Am Rep/noise rock and Black Flag's discography as it was in the cacophonous sheet-metal aggression of NYC pigfuck and Swans and the apocalyptic tribal sludge of Neurosis. Anodyne consumed all of those influences and distilled them into brutal, often experimental and improvisational slabs of endtime metalcore that ranks as some of the most pissed off, apocalyptic sounding metal I've ever heard. I'm working on getting everything that they released (that's still in print) in stock here at Crucial Blast since there's some interest in Anodyne thanks to the big buzz that Mike Hill's new band Tombs has been generating...
By the time of 2001's The Outer Dark, Anodyne had been pared down to a three-piece, but this seems to have simply allowed their music to become that much more compact and concise in it's punishing, singleminded drive to batter the listener with their intense and misanthropic metallic noise rock (or noise-rock infected metal, or whatever...). The band was also continuing to experiment more with abstract noise and other sounds, and The Outer Dark resulted in the band's most claustrophobic and dystopian release to date. The album (which once again refuses to breach the twenty-five minute mark) opens with the vicious Black Flag-meets-black metal fury of "Lucky Sky Diamond", with the band's trademark eerie dissonance winding around blasts of raging speed. A twitchier, more angular malevolence manifests in "FOrm Is Emptiness", which slows down at the end as it's boiled down to an insanely heavy dirge. That Neurosis-meets-Unsane sound that Anodyne perfected is featured in "The Tenderness Of Wolves", but at the end changes into another one of their chilling dronescapes. Angular thrash metal makes up most of "Knives" up to the point where the band erupts into a massive wall of guitar noise, but then "Black Pearl" crashes in with a short but pummeling bit of improvised sludge that reminds me of John Zorn's Painkiller. The beginning of "Our Lady Of Assassins" starts off almost indie rock, like one of the heavier Sonic Youth songs, but keeps cranking the heaviness up bit by bit, and "Finest Craftsmen" is a super short blast of proggy noise rock, Greg Ginn-esque guitar skronk, vicious grindcore and doom metal all rolled into a barely two-minute song. And "Like Water In Water" finishes out The Outer Dark with another brooding, angular dirge with some melodic guitar lodged among the dissonant riffs.
Even though Anodyne never achieved the popularity of their peers in Botch, Isis, and Coalesce, these guys were just as crucial in the development of what a lot of folks like to call "post-metal" (please, shoot me in the face with a nailgun if you ever catch me using that term...), playing a brand of crushing, complex and sometimes difficult sound that was all their own, and all of their albums are essential listens within the spectrum of forward-thinking metallic heaviness.
Also available on colored vinyl.
Even though I did get to see Anodyne play live a couple of times, including one absolutely pulverizing set in the basement at CBGBs back in 2001, I didn't
really get into these guys and start picking up their albums and EPs until well after the band decided to throw in the towel. All of their releases reveal a
punishing riffbeast who delivered some of the most creative and textural music to come out of the metal/hardcore scene, a massive dirgey heaviosity that was
as schooled in brutal post-Am Rep/noise rock and Black Flag's discography as it was in the cacophonous sheet-metal aggression of NYC pigfuck and Swans and the apocalyptic tribal sludge of Neurosis. Anodyne consumed all of those influences and distilled them into brutal, often experimental and improvisational slabs of endtime metalcore that ranks as some of the most pissed off, apocalyptic sounding metal I've ever heard. I'm working on getting everything that they released (that's still in print) in stock here at Crucial Blast since there's some interest in Anodyne thanks to the big buzz that Mike Hill's new band Tombs has been generating...
By the time of 2001's The Outer Dark, Anodyne had been pared down to a three-piece, but this seems to have simply allowed their music to become that much more compact and concise in it's punishing, singleminded drive to batter the listener with their intense and misanthropic metallic noise rock (or noise-rock infected metal, or whatever...). The band was also continuing to experiment more with abstract noise and other sounds, and The Outer Dark resulted in the band's most claustrophobic and dystopian release to date. The album (which once again refuses to breach the twenty-five minute mark) opens with the vicious Black Flag-meets-black metal fury of "Lucky Sky Diamond", with the band's trademark eerie dissonance winding around blasts of raging speed. A twitchier, more angular malevolence manifests in "FOrm Is Emptiness", which slows down at the end as it's boiled down to an insanely heavy dirge. That Neurosis-meets-Unsane sound that Anodyne perfected is featured in "The Tenderness Of Wolves", but at the end changes into another one of their chilling dronescapes. Angular thrash metal makes up most of "Knives" up to the point where the band erupts into a massive wall of guitar noise, but then "Black Pearl" crashes in with a short but pummeling bit of improvised sludge that reminds me of John Zorn's Painkiller. The beginning of "Our Lady Of Assassins" starts off almost indie rock, like one of the heavier Sonic Youth songs, but keeps cranking the heaviness up bit by bit, and "Finest Craftsmen" is a super short blast of proggy noise rock, Greg Ginn-esque guitar skronk, vicious grindcore and doom metal all rolled into a barely two-minute song. And "Like Water In Water" finishes out The Outer Dark with another brooding, angular dirge with some melodic guitar lodged among the dissonant riffs.
Even though Anodyne never achieved the popularity of their peers in Botch, Isis, and Coalesce, these guys were just as crucial in the development of what a lot of folks like to call "post-metal" (please, shoot me in the face with a nailgun if you ever catch me using that term...), playing a brand of crushing, complex and sometimes difficult sound that was all their own, and all of their albums are essential listens within the spectrum of forward-thinking metallic heaviness.
Hailing from Spain, ANOTHER KIND OF DEATH dishes out awesome crushing technical metalcore/grind that taps into a weird evilness through the singers monstrous gutteral rasp and the band's frequent descents into apocalyptic/cosmic noise-dirges, while throwing in some killer melodic post-hardcore hooks (imagine a brutally heavy BOTCH/CONVERGE hybrid suddenly taking a left turn into TEXAS IS THE REASON-esque rock), somber piano melodies, post-rock dynamics, and other cool weirdness. Fans of stuff like CONVERGE, MAJORITY RULE, and AS THE SUN SETS would dig this, as the riffs are mega heavy and infected with that kind of keening high-end guitar assault...but ANOTHER KIND OF DEATH definitely has their own unique, bent take on the chaotic metalcore sound. Crackling electronic drones rise to the surface, stop-on-a-dime drumming nails each song to the floor, spastic splattery noise freakouts achive liftoff, and some AWESOME unexpected production tricks (tape dropouts, found sounds spliced into the songs, swampy sound washouts,etc) all do much to elevate this above the tedium of modern metalcore. These guys sort of remind us of a crusty death-metal incarnation of CAVE IN, or a more experimental BOTCH. This album could easily have fit on the stellar Radar Swarm label, with their smart, artsy European metalcore vibes, and Red Cobalt is clearly getting off to a great start.
We've listed a couple of other releases from Another Kind Of Death before, most recently with the compilation CD Waterloo that they shared with other Spanish metalcore bands Moksha, Moho and Adrift. I've always like Another Kind Of Death's frenzied, vaguely mathy metalcore, with their obvious nods to Botch and Cave In and the occasional spacey electronic textures that they would employ in some of their songs. Their latest album Sleepless Every Night shows the band further fleshing out their aggressive metallic hardcore sound, still indebted to the mathy, angular riffs of Botch and Converge, but now flexing some raging rock muscle that reminds me of the swingin' gutter sass that Every Time I Die has perfected. Huge rocking grooves appear alongside the more discordant guitar riffs on songs like "Electric Manifest", and the vocalist even busts out some gruff singing on some of the songs. Something that I really like about Sleepless Every Night - and I'm not if it's intentional or not - but I'm also hearing nods to classic 90's Am Rep noise rock like Unsane and early Helmet and even the windswept guitar chords of Novelty-era Jawbox in here too, which if you know me at all, is nothing but a good thing. Another Kind Of Death aren't doing anything radically different with their version of hard rock/noise rock-tinged modern metalcore, but the songs are crushing, there are hooks galore, and there's a great instrumental intermezzo that blends some sad slide guitar playing with a heavy dirge riff that reminds me of a less weighty Neurosis jam compacted down into a sweet three-minute lament.
While becoming one of the premier underground metal labels, Profound Lore has avoided becoming aligned with any one specific genre or sound, covering the realms of everything from metallic prog (Hammers Of Misfortune, The Atlas Moth) to adventurous black metal (The Howling Wind, Leviathan) to doom (Yob, Loss) to more experimental heaviness (Krallice, Subrosa, Grayceon) with their catalog of releases, but one sound in particular is obviously a favorite of the labels, that of murky, off-kilter subtearranean death metal. Some of the best albums/bands of this kind have appeared on Profound Lore in recent years like Disma, Portal, Mitochondrion, Vasaeleth and Impetuous Ritual. The latest addition to this corner of the Profound Lore roster is another Canadian band called Antediluvian, a three piece from Edmonton, Canada, but prior to releasing their new album Through The Cervix Of Hawaah, they put out this three song 12" on the Bird Of Ill Omen label earlier this year. The twisted, mutant death metal on the songs "Demon Spore", "At The Swirling Spouts Of Uncreation", and "Rapture Amongst The Phosphenes" is rank, cavernous, a strain of slippery, monstrous blackened death metal that shifts from highly angular, dissonant death metal to passages of warped deathdoom and flurries of bizarre riffage that consists of lots of sliding notes and convoluted alien chords. While not as avant-garde or outright bizarre as bands like Portal and Ehnahre, this is still some very messed-up stuff, blending together the doomed dissonance of Incantation with a highly chaotic and idiosyncratic blackened death attack. They've got a great visual style too, with the album art consisting of abstract, black and white drawings of grotesque Lovecraftian beings and vile mutant sexual organs, a look that fits nicely with Antediluvian's repulsive alien death metal.
Recently re-issued by Nuclear War Now, Antediluvian's suffocating surrealist death metal nightmare Through The Cervix Of Hawwah is presented in a gorgeous hard-back tipped-in gatefold package that is book-bound and includes the entire booklet bound into the cover - it's one of NWN's coolest vinyl presentations, and pretty essential if you're as big a fan of the band's unique, amoebic artwork as I am. The album is spread across four sides of black wax, with the fourth side featuring etched artwork.
I was definitely one of the converted after I heard Antediluvian's Revelations In Excrement. That platter of swirling, mutated death metal and discordant blackness offered one of the more outr� interpretations of early death metal barbarism, finding it scuttling around in the same dank, mold-slick pit as the likes of Portal, Impetuous Ritual, Teitanblood, Mitochondrion, Rites Of Thy Degringolade, and Encoffination. Of course this also means that some have described this Canadian band as a mere Incantation clone, but as far as I'm concerned, the more avant-garde moments in Incantation's musical history are always prime for pillaging if the music is as fucked sounding and unsettling as it is on their first full-length album Cervix. One of the best descriptions I've seen for this album came from the excellent blog Grimmer Than Thou when they compared it to "vintage Incantation jamming on the rim of a worm hole.", and if that sounds even mildly appealing, you need to pick this up. The nine songs on Through The Cervix Of Hawwah are complex webs of hyper speed blast beats and controlled rhythmic chaos, swirling blackened tremolo riffs awash in diseased, nerve-scorching discordance, ultra-guttural occult exhortations, and passages of pitch-black ritualistic ambience that form together into a mind-bending labyrinth of experimental blackened death metal. The brutality level on rampaging blastscapes like the title track and "Intuitus Mortuus" mostly stays in the red, save for when the band detours into hellish black ambience like the last half of the latter song where they roll out ecstatic moaning, chamber strings, demonic grunts and a fogbank of Funerary Call-esque dread.
Antediluvian's doom-laden, sludgy death metal isn't as chaotic and abstract as that of Portal, nor is it as bone-crushing as the graveyard ooze of Encoffination; the band instead blasts through a squirming vortex of wormy riffs and brief eruptions of slow-motion doom, the weird deformed riffing sometimes blossoming into the kind of triumphant hooks found on "From Seraphic Embrace " and "Scions Of Ha Nachash", sometimes mutating into vicious, angular deathsludge, born of the same hellish micro-organisms pictured in the album's superb surrealistic black and white artwork. And closer "Erect Reflection (Abyss Of Organic Matter)" is a wall of dissonant sound that wouldn't sound out of place on a Sonic Youth album, at least up the point where that roaring guitar-squall finally explodes into a swarming mass of jagged blackened death metal at the end.
Highly recommended!
Back in stock on Cd...
I was definitely one of the converted after I heard Antediluvian's Revelations In Excrement. That platter of swirling, mutated death metal and discordant blackness offered one of the more outr� interpretations of early death metal barbarism, finding it scuttling around in the same dank, mold-slick pit as the likes of Portal, Impetuous Ritual, Teitanblood, Mitochondrion, Rites Of Thy Degringolade, and Encoffination. Of course this also means that some have described this Canadian band as a mere Incantation clone, but as far as I'm concerned, the more avant-garde moments in Incantation's musical history are always prime for pillaging if the music is as fucked sounding and unsettling as it is on their first full-length album Cervix. One of the best descriptions I've seen for this album came from the excellent blog Grimmer Than Thou when they compared it to "vintage Incantation jamming on the rim of a worm hole.", and if that sounds even mildly appealing, you need to pick this up. The nine songs on Through The Cervix Of Hawwah are complex webs of hyper speed blast beats and controlled rhythmic chaos, swirling blackened tremolo riffs awash in diseased, nerve-scorching discordance, ultra-guttural occult exhortations, and passages of pitch-black ritualistic ambience that form together into a mind-bending labyrinth of experimental blackened death metal. The brutality level on rampaging blastscapes like the title track and "Intuitus Mortuus" mostly stays in the red, save for when the band detours into hellish black ambience like the last half of the latter song where they roll out ecstatic moaning, chamber strings, demonic grunts and a fogbank of Funerary Call-esque dread.
Antediluvian's doom-laden, sludgy death metal isn't as chaotic and abstract as that of Portal, nor is it as bone-crushing as the graveyard ooze of Encoffination; the band instead blasts through a squirming vortex of wormy riffs and brief eruptions of slow-motion doom, the weird deformed riffing sometimes blossoming into the kind of triumphant hooks found on "From Seraphic Embrace " and "Scions Of Ha Nachash", sometimes mutating into vicious, angular deathsludge, born of the same hellish micro-organisms pictured in the album's superb surrealistic black and white artwork. And closer "Erect Reflection (Abyss Of Organic Matter)" is a wall of dissonant sound that wouldn't sound out of place on a Sonic Youth album, at least up the point where that roaring guitar-squall finally explodes into a swarming mass of jagged blackened death metal at the end.
Highly recommended!
Back in stock. The latest album from Canadian outfit Antediluvian, Logos (the English translation of the actual title, an ancient Greek term for "the word of God") brings us nine new tracks of their bizarre blackened death metal that had previously pummeled me on the Through The Cervix Of Hawaah album and with their split with Adversarial. With a lineup that has connections to other ferocious black/death outfits from the Great White North like Gloria Diaboli and Revenge, one expects Antediluvian to share in the savagery that seems to constantly radiate from the Edmonton black/death scene; while their music is most certainly violent, the chaotic, tentacled blackness that swarms off of Logos is far more surrealistic, a bizarre mutation of that oft-copied Incantation-influenced death metal sound that has here been twisted and warped into something much more contorted and nebulous. Antediluvian's embrace of gibbering chaos often places their music at the intersection of bestial black/death, the angular insanity of bands like Mitochondrion and Portal, and even the splintered discordance of Obscura-era Gorguts, but there's an additional seething, amorphous quality to this stuff, mirrored in the band's strange abstract album art, that gives this a uniquely horrific and repulsive atmosphere.
The opening track on Logos exemplifies this formless horror, spreading open with a gaping black chasm of murky industrial ambience before erupting into droning, churning death murk; "Homunculus Daimon-eon (Awakening)" spreads quickly outwards like an oily black stain, a cacophony of incoherent bottom-heavy riffage and tumultuous blastbeats, the sound shifting between the blazing fast chaos and sudden descents into crushing, unformed deathdoom. The vocals are a primal gurgle, a litany of incomprehensible guttural growls smeared into bestial rumblings, while screams of soul-rending terror streak across the shimmering petroleum blackness; within these abject howls lie lyrics that read like a kind of jet-black surrealist poetry. The rest of the album spills out in similar fashion, each song a shambling mass of discordant blackened death metal, the guitars spewing eerie atonal melodies amid the chaotic riffing, the sound teetering on the edge of total incoherence, balanced between crushing, sludge-encrusted riffage and hellishly infectious barbed hooks, and a gnashing maelstrom of mindless chaos that comes threateningly close to the dissonant, otherworldly delirium of Portal. Brief passages of nightmarish ambient drift, distant hazy choral gleam, and putrid minimal synth continue to ooze out of the cracks that appear between tracks, and the band will frequently loom out of the frenzied, murky blast into a sickeningly discordant doom riff, an almost Gorguts-like passage of immense fractured riffage and atonal ugliness that is soon enough swallowed back up in the gibbering amoebic maelstrom.
Comes in gatefold packaging with a twelve page art-zine style booklet that features the band's signature strain of high contrast, hyper-abstract bacterial illustrations, accompanied by a large foldout poster.
I'd only previously heard one or two things from Illinois-based noise musician Bryan Tholl and his previous project Is, a drone/harsh noise endeavor that released a solid split 7" with The Cherry Point a couple years ago that we've carried here at C-Blast. After that project ceased activity, Tholl went on to begin recording under the name Anti, a pure harsh noise outfit that debuts here on Small Doses with this 3" disc. It features a single nineteen-minute piece that starts off with the sound of scraping metal en masse, a swelling din of extreme metallic noise, chain-driven cacophony and guttural electronic buzz that has hints of the sort of chaotic junked noise sculptures and percussive destruction that Japanese artist Kimihide Kusafuka (K2) and Brit noise-fiend Hal Hutchinson are known for. But then it quickly starts to pile on so much additional black static and sputtering amplifier filth that the racket is buried under a mountain of harsh smoldering distortion. Its a far cry from the static, unmoving walls that you get from artists like Vomir; this is brutal, tumultuous noise, an avalanche of acrid black lava that swallows everything whole, a rumbling, sputtering raging din of collapsing buildings and overdriven distortion generators, a sprawl of absolute sonic destruction that starts to resemble something akin to a K2 track off of Metal Dysplasia being remixed by The Cherry Point. Total obliteration / negation / immolation. Comes in a small black and white sleeve, released in an edition of fifty-one copies.
This Polish grindcore band has been getting a lot of attention lately, after releasing the excellent Zeroland album last year and the recent announcement of their signing with Relapse Records for their next full length. As far as I'm concerned, all of the hype surrounding ANTIGAMA is justified, 'cuz Zeroland was one of the most ferocious, forward-thinking grind blasts of 2005, a heavy as hell mutation of precision grindpunk and mechanized metal fused to a thoroughly creepy mixture of futuristic sound collage and dark ambience. While we're anxiously waiting for their follow-up to Zeroland, Selfmadegod Records has stepped in with this new re-issue of the debut album from ANTIGAMA, Intellect Made Us Blind, originally released back in 2001. This album is, as one would expect, a slightly rawer incarnation of the band's mechanoid grind sound, but these songs are just as fucked up and bizarre as anything the band is doing now, making this pretty essential for anyone who fell under the spell of Zeroland. The band unleashes an avalanche of relentless blastbeats and burly grindpunk riffage that tap into the same rabid bloodstream as late-era BRUTAL TRUTH, majorly heavy shit, but Intellect Made Us Blind really messes with your neurons when the band makes their sudden left turns into punishing GODFLESH-esque dirge, freeform tribal-industrial trance, and transmissions of steel sheets of electronic ambience. With their more recent, goth-mecha-avant-grind material being my introduction to ANTIGAMA, I really wasn't expecting their early material to be this terminally badass and weird, but it is. Sometimes the massive percussive riffage and industrial metal rhythms remind me of a crustier version of what FEAR FACTORY was doing on their first album, but this is way more fucked, a schizoid dystopian urban grind nightmare illustrated with bizarre, seemingly stream-of-consciousness lyrics. An awesome debut, highly recommended, especially if you were as big a fan of ANTIGAMA's Zeroland album as we are!
Antigama's second album Zeroland from 2005 remains my favorite from this Polish outfit, a masterwork of discordant, progressive grindcore that combined a Voivoidian dissonance and spirit of experimentation with a precision grindcore attack that is still unmatched. The album has been out of print for awhile, but Selfmadegod finally repressed it this year; if you're a fan of challenging, crushing grind, you seriously need to hear this album if you've yet already done so. Here's my old writeup for the album from back when it was originally released:
Looking at the packaging on this CD, it would be easy to assume that this might contain some sort of psychedelic techno if it weren't for the Selfmadegod Records logo on the back of the case. What this is, is one of the best grindcore releases of 2005, a superb new blast of futurist grind violence from Poland that sounds to my ears like a modern day Voivod gone grind, or maybe Diatribes-era Napalm Death crossed with Nasum's rabid lockstep blastmetal and the nightmarish industrial atmosphere of classic Skinny Puppy. The album spews streams of speed-of-light blastbeats, disharmonic ultra-poly-rhythmic deathcore colliding with psychedelic electronic noise and chilling industrial loops.. These guys are at the top of their game here, delivering skullcracking, machine-tight grind combined with cleverly assembled avant/cyber/electronic sections and their signature dissonant guitar sound.
Zeroland, despite its experimental leanings and odd time signatures flirting with the boundries of free jazz and extreme noise, is also surprisingly catchy. The vocals here are an effective mixture of clean, heavily processed and spacey clean vocals and brutal gorilla tantrum deathgrunt, the singer's morbid moan getting into some weird territory that definitely doesn't sound like your usual death/grind delivery. And when the band isn't blasting through their insane cybergrind , they're melting your brainpaste with stuff like "Starshit" (a harrowing piece of extreme psychedelic vocal noise) and the massive closer "Zeroland", with it's 9 minutes of sinister fuzzed-out sample collage spoolling off into an ambient blackness while subtle clicks and cuts dance around far-off feedback screams. HIGHLY recommended to fans of primo avant-garde grindcore.
The mindmelting 2004 album from Polish avant-grinders Antigama that first caught the underground metal scene's attention with their intelligent, forward-thinking grindcore, mastery of electronics, and demented riffing. When this came out, I got that same feeling as when I first heard Brutal Truth or Discordance Axis, hearing the grindcore paradigm being reshaped into something new and exciting yet without losing any of the brutality or heaviness that true grindcore requires. Discomfort is filled with weird time changes, dissonant guitar chords formed into utterly alien sounding riffs, deep gutteral vocals that don't sound contrived, cleverly designed electronic textures, and bursts of rocking midtempo destruction that appear just when the band seem to be disappearing into another dimension. Some of the shit that they pull off on here is nuts...like the stuttering CD-skipping glitch blast of the intro to "This Structure Is Tight", or the insanely precise stop-start riffs of "President Say Yes", or the deep throat-chanting that opens "Flies". Every few seconds these guys throw something out that has you hitting rewind to figure out what the fuck it was that you just heard. Imagine Meshuggah meets Diatribes era Napalm Death meets Voivod meets Brutal Truth circa Sounds of The Animal Kingdom meets Megativa. Discomfort was originally released on the U.S. death metal label Extremist, but after that label went belly up, Selfmadegod reissued it with two bonus tracks: "Discomfort", a short electronic drone piece, and Fala (seed remix), which is almost complete silence for seven minutes before erupting into a brutal rhythmic noise piece that chops up parts of Antigama's brutal grind into an abstract gabber/breakcore beating. Intense, and highly recommended...this is one of the most amazing grind albums of the decade.
The disc also contains a DIVX file for an awesome music video for their song "Flies"!.
Back in stock.
This six-song EP from Polish avant-garde grinders Antigama came out around the same time as their blistering split with jazz-blasters Psychofagist last year, a quick blast of ferocious angular grindcore that was the band's first new offering after a nearly three year hiatus that followed their last album (2009's Warning) and their subsequent departure from Relapse Records. Throughout the past decade, Antigama have carved out their own ugly, industrialized take on modern grindcore, blending together a set of influences that ranged from Voivod's spaced-out prog thrash and the pummeling discordance of prime-era Godflesh with a kind of cold, atonal sound unique to the Polish extreme metal underground, and this fifteen minute EP showcases their latest excursion into jagged, discordant grindcore and subtle experimentation. Tracks like "E Conspectu" and "The Law" rip through complex atonal riffs and arrangements that twist and careen through their ever-shifting time signatures and almost industrial-like blasts, at times echoing some of the more industrial influenced moments found on Napalm Death's more recent albums. Antigama bring a colder, more machine-like feel to this sort of grindcore assault though, a definite Voivod-like vibe running through their sound, the lurching riffs and discordant chords interlocking into mechanical forms while swells of robotic choral voices, electronic textures and eerie droning vocals well up out of the background. The title track is one of the standouts, a longer, more complex ripper where the band's 'Vod influence really shines through, and the mecha-lurch of "Find The Function" equally kills with it's bursts of crushing crusty hardcore. On "Intricate Trap", the drumming showcases some intense polyrhythmic weirdness that offsets the song's monstrous grooves, but when they reach the instrumental closer "The End", the music makes an sudden and abrupt tonal shift into a kind of lush soundtrack-style electronic music, a killer piece of Tangerine Dream-influenced mood-music that resembles something off of one of their more rock tinged scores from the late 80s (think Near Dark or Miracle Mile) being fused to sheets of droning distorted guitar feedback and distant metallic rumble. I could easily have listened to a whole album of that.
Released just ahead of the Polish avant-grinders new album Meteor (which we'll have in stock soon), this companion piece to the 2012 Ep Stop The Chaos is a collection of remixes produced by a variety of experimental electronic / noise artists and producers that for the most part transform the original Ep tracks into totally unrecognizable new forms.
The first track is a remix of "The End" from Lukasz Myszkowski, the former lyricist and vocalist for Antigama; he takes the original's Tangerine Dream/John Carpenter-esque synth score and tweaks it into something more abstract, a dramatic piece of dystopian electronic soundtrack music laced with bits of textural glitch and static and layered with additional voices and effects to create the feel of an almost Blade Runner-like sense of dread. Polish experimental duo LXMP take the song "E Conspectu" into their own weird realm of chopped-up Naked City-influenced hardcore/math/noise weirdness, transmuting it into one of the most severe re-workings on this collection. Japanese tech house producer Prism overhauls "The Law" into a strange sort of goth-tinged industrial metal, like Godflesh infested with wheezing electronics, weird crooning vocals and smatterings of darkwave synth. Tomasz Madry's remix of "The Law" is another imaginative contribution, deconstructing the angular, discordant grind of the original into a shimmering cosmic sound collage, a seemingly Nurse With Wound-influenced synthscape flecked with sudden bursts of abstracted crush, bits of shapeless piano, and other surrealistic touches. Progressive house producer 21 Grams doesn't do a whole lot other than bathe "Find The Function" in a haze of static and work in a handful of new samples (a woman's sobbing, a muezzin's prayer), but Bogdan Kondracki from Polish prog rockers Kobong turns "Intricate Trap" into a super-short track of bizarre robotic funk-metal that sort of resembles a Praxis jam.
There are two remixes of Stop The Chaos's title track: the first is from Krzysztof Lenard and Tomasz Madry, who reconstruct it into a spastic lurching math-metal monstrosity infested with electronic beats, more glitchy electronic textures and some odd vocal processing; and experimental electronic artist Anna Zaradny takes more of a musique-concrete approach to her re-envisioning of the song, with what might be the most unrecognizable offering here, flensing away all of the original elements and leaving behind a buzzing, chirping dronescape. All in all, there's some really imaginative material on here that will be of interest to anyone fascinated with the more experimental realms of metal/electronic alchemy, and not just Antigama fans.
Released in a limited edition digipack, limited to five hundred copies.
The long-awaited return of Antigama! Actually, these Polish avant-garde grinders have kept busy over the past year or so, bringing us a killer, all-too-brief EP that came out in early 2012, and followed that with a collection of experimental electronic remixes of that same EP that came out earlier this year, but Antigama's sixth album Meteor is the full-fledged grind opus I've been looking forward to since 2009's Warning. If anything, these guys have become even more savage in the intervening years, honing their performance into a stunningly precise attack that hints at the crushing lockstep power of post-Y2K Napalm Death, and then injecting a crazed discordance and angular complexity that has more in common with the cold, dissonant sound of Voivod and Obscura-era Gorguts. Antigama take that ripping metallic grindcore sound deeper into industrial-tinged dissonance than anybody else I can think of within the realm of grind, taking that Diatribes-era mechanized math-grind and injecting it with a potent mixture of ferocious musicianship, noisiness, and imaginative sci-fi concepts. They keep the requisite short song lengths on Meteor, but even within the space of a minute and a half, Antigama pack in an incredible amount of riffage, quickly moving between passages of grinding, almost Godfleshian discordance and hyper-speed blastmetal forged out of complex, angular riffing and stop-on-a-dime tempo changes. Man, this stuff is FEROCIOUS, and the cumulative power of these eleven songs makes this possibly my favorite Antigama album yet. Can't really remember any of their previous albums sounding quite this vicious. There's some awesome, almost noise rock-like breakdowns that show up on songs like "Prophecy", skronky, dissonant chords smashing into sludgy rhythms and disappearing into weird wormholes of droning, dark feedback/electronics, and "Fed By The Feeling" whips out some vicious mid-tempo rocking chuggery that later turns into this weird stuttering, off-kilter passage where the singer slips into some off-the-wall jazzy scat-singing that comes from out of left field; it's easily the most insane moment on the album. The black kosmische voids of "Turbulence" give birth to both dark drum-n'-bass abstractions and a burst of awesome 70's style Moog-drenched space/prog-metal heaviness that might be my favorite song on here, and "Stargate" transforms into complex time-signature changes, constantly shifting riffage and alien electronic ambience fractured into a surrealistic stop-start blastscape. Billowing black ambience unfolds across the first few minutes of closer "Untruth", before lurching into another crushing discordant dirge, this one with a real heavy Killing Joke vibe, emblazoned with massive math-metal breakdowns and more of that crazed proggy Moog organ all over the place. Fantastic, and highly recommended to fans of high-quality, forward-thinking grind.
�� Now available on splatter blue vinyl in a limited edition of three hundred copies with an insert and download code.
�� The long-awaited return of Antigama! Actually, these Polish avant-garde grinders have kept busy over the past year or so, bringing us a killer, all-too-brief EP that came out in early 2012, and followed that with a collection of experimental electronic remixes of that same EP that came out earlier this year, but Antigama's sixth album Meteor is the full-fledged grind opus I've been looking forward to since 2009's Warning. If anything, these guys have become even more savage in the intervening years, honing their performance into a stunningly precise attack that hints at the crushing lockstep power of post-Y2K Napalm Death, and then injecting a crazed discordance and angular complexity that has more in common with the cold, dissonant sound of Voivod and Obscura-era Gorguts. Antigama take that ripping metallic grindcore sound deeper into industrial-tinged dissonance than anybody else I can think of within the realm of grind, taking that Diatribes-era mechanized math-grind and injecting it with a potent mixture of ferocious musicianship, noisiness, and imaginative sci-fi concepts.
�� They keep the requisite short song lengths on Meteor, but even within the space of a minute and a half, Antigama pack in an incredible amount of riffage, quickly moving between passages of grinding, almost Godfleshian discordance and hyper-speed blastmetal forged out of complex, angular riffing and stop-on-a-dime tempo changes. Man, this stuff is FEROCIOUS, and the cumulative power of these eleven songs makes this possibly my favorite Antigama album yet. Can't really remember any of their previous albums sounding quite this vicious. There's some awesome, almost noise rock-like breakdowns that show up on songs like "Prophecy", skronky, dissonant chords smashing into sludgy rhythms and disappearing into weird wormholes of droning, dark feedback/electronics, and "Fed By The Feeling" whips out some vicious mid-tempo rocking chuggery that later turns into this weird stuttering, off-kilter passage where the singer slips into some off-the-wall jazzy scat-singing that comes from out of left field; it's easily the most insane moment on the album. The black kosmische voids of "Turbulence" give birth to both dark drum-n'-bass abstractions and a burst of awesome 70's style Moog-drenched space/prog-metal heaviness that might be my favorite song on here, and "Stargate" transforms into complex time-signature changes, constantly shifting riffage and alien electronic ambience fractured into a surrealistic stop-start blastscape. Billowing black ambience unfolds across the first few minutes of closer "Untruth", before lurching into another crushing discordant dirge, this one with a real heavy Killing Joke vibe, emblazoned with massive math-metal breakdowns and more of that crazed proggy Moog organ all over the place. Fantastic, and highly recommended to fans of high-quality, forward-thinking grind.
����� Antigama have turned into a real beast with these last two albums. I've been a fan of their stuff all the way back to their pre-Relapse output, but starting with Meteor and continuing with The Insolent, these Polish blasters have really tightened the screws on their particular brand of dissonant, experimental grindcore. Much of indulgence of earlier albums has been cut away, the riffs cutting closer to the bone, while at the same time exploring some strong psychedelic tendencies that can make their dystopic visions feel even darker and disorienting. As before, the sound of Napalm Death's industrial-tinged 90s output appears to be a key influence on what Antigama are doing, but the riffs this time around are more savage than ever, tracks like "Foul Play" and "Data Overload" as discordantly violent and complex as anything we've heard from 'em, married to some really chilling atmospheric soundscapery and inventive passages of droning guitar textures that elevates the overall intensity of their nightmarish near-future vibe.
����� And it's all played with a razor-sharp level of precision. These guys have become remarkably tight over the past few albums, and while that precise, almost inhuman delivery can give this a cold, almost robotic feel at times, that's what makes The Insolent such a strong effort. Their violent, chromite-sheathed grindcore is heavily textured, the jagged edges of the jazz chords that rip through the title track get snagged on unusual time signatures, sheets of sleek electronic ambience sweeping out beneath the stuttered, vicious blast-attacks as the album unfolds. But they'll also erupt into a super-catchy, punk-fueled midtempo hook on songs like "Sentenced To The Void", and then flex their deft grasp of classic 70's-era prog rock aesthetics when they kick into the instrumental "Out Beyond", suddenly swerving out of that cyborg grind into a killer stretch of sweeping Moog freakouts, screaming acid-etched psych-guitar, and a propulsive, distinctly krautrock-informed propulsive drive that becomes fused to Antigama's highly polished black engine, even breaking out some robotic vocoder vocals towards the end, almost sounding like a heavier, metallic version of Majeure or Zombi. Like the previous album, these guys create an unlikely combination of interests in the retro-futurism of 70's art music with ferocious grind-metal that at this point has become pretty unique. And it's all delivered at mostly supersonic speeds; it's only towards the very end of the album that they drop the tempo in any considerable way, as closer "The Land Of Monotony" finishes this off with a crushing, almost industrialized dirge called "The Land Of Monotony" that leaves a yawning blast crater in its wake.
I've been a fan of these two European grindcore bands for ages, both of 'em offering an edgier version of contemporary grind that each has carved into it's own unique image, from the churning jazz/noise infested grind of Psychofagist, to the cold, inhuman mechanical heaviness of Antigama. Their respective sounds are considerably different, but a split album that teams them up together makes perfect sense to me, so here you go...
Antigama's half of the split has four new songs of their industrialized deathgrind: the mechanical blast and lurch of the opening song "Missing The Past" taps into that mid-90's era Napalm Death sound like so much of Antigama's stuff, attacking the listener with controlled blasts of chunky staccato riffing, machine-like percussion and distorted megaphone vocal-hate. They unfurl long stretches of threatening dark ambience on "Paranoia Prima", where the brief eruptions of industrial grind are juxtaposed with distant metallic percussion, staticky radio voices, and Lustmordian drones. "For Just One Breath" is weirdly groovy grindmetal with jazzy walking bass lines and more of their trademark clattering drum patterns, and that's followed by the ethereal closing piece "Finito", a hazy wash of soft synths that resembles the newer Jesu stuff. A really interesting batch of new tunes from these guys.
But Psychofagist shatter that tranquility pronto with their own skronky avant-garde grindcore, beginning with the ear-wrecking angularity and dissonance of "Apophtegma Nonsense" that combines an almost no-wave style atonality with their shockblasts of jagged grind. "Carne Tremula Marcia" blends twangy guitar with a series of extreme noisy freak outs and bleating chords, digging in further to the bizarre jazz/no wave damaged metal, the frenzied percussive assault and bass mayhem resembling the Flying Luttenbachers more than anything, albeit mucho heavier. The band attacks all of their songs on this split with that sort of ferocious, jagged abandon, even when they lock into something that resembles more straightforward grindcore and the singer finally comes in bellowing in his crazed guttural roar, there's still all kinds of weird jazzy stuff going on around the periphery, jazz-style guitar licks, diminished chords, complex drum patterns, etc. The song "Initiation" features some intensely heavy slower parts, massive sludgy dissonant anti-grooves slithering through the wreckage of their blasting death-skronk, lurching Godflesh-esque dirges that pummel relentlessly at your skull as they fade into the distance, and "Aritmia" breaks out the slap-bass and confounding time signatures for one of their shorter jazzgrind assaults. Antigama finish with a cover of the Tom Waits song "Misery Is The River Of The World" that they transform into a harsh, blasting sonic assault that more closely resembles the likes of Gorguts, breaking into some smoky saxophone playing at the very end. 100% blazing anti-music indeed...
Two of grindcore's most forward-moving units come together on this blazing split 3" CD, packaged in a full-size jewel case decorated with awesome
apocalyptic imagery of blood-spattered, twilight sunsets and comic book style zomboid legions - fuck, this looks killer! Antigama from Poland deliver three
new songs that herald their upcoming Resonance album on Relapse, and they are all some of the raddest tunes these guys have put forth yet: "Herd" is
a churning blast of vicious grindcore with stuttering, atonal breakdowns and monstrous roaring vocals, kinda like Napalm Death's mid-90's stuff but enhanced
by electronic textures. "Gift" opens with some sickening polyrhythmic drumming and spastic guitar chug that reminds me of some of Candiria's whacked out
tribal freakouts, but then shifts into a warped deathgrind dirge with processed vocals and fucked up electronic trickery. And "Zombi" is a cover of the
classic Goblin theme from the original Dawn of The Dead...holy shit, does this rule, Antigama do a virtually picture-perfect rendition of Goblin's
original funk/prog peice, the creepy choir vocals, spacey keyboards and jagged disco synths and rolling bass drumming is all there, but the guitars are
beefed up and metallized. One of the best covers of a Goblin tune I've ever heard. If you're as big of a fan of Antigama's futuristic, digitally-mutated
grindcore as we are, then you've gotta hear this.
And then comes Drugs Of Faith, the bonecrushing power trio fronted by Rich Johnson of DC grind legends Enemy Soil...their last CD on Selfmadegod was an
awesome debut from the band, a politically-charged blast of vitriol fueled by a blenderized assault of atonal noise rock, hardcore punk, and straight-up
grindcore. The three jams on this disc continue in that vein: "Churchianity" delivers one of the nastiest anti-organized religion rants ever over a ferocious
attack of chest rattling buzzsaw bass guitar, catchy thrash riffage, and chaotic drumming. "Memoranda" is another brutalizing statement with veiled
references to Tony Blair's involvement in US foreign policy, conveyed through a furious dissonant dirge that lumbers at a punishing mid-tempo pace before
exploding into serrated guitar noise and blastbeats. And "Phantom" closes the disc with an apocalyptic blizzard of sludgy Am Rep noise rock sludge, visions
of blackened skies, and frantic grinding blasts. It's like Drugs Of Faith somehow channeled Napalm Death and Unsane into a tightly focused eruption of
dissonant crush. So awesome !!!
Instead of splitting each band's songs into two halves, this split CD alternates between the band's songs, which makes this an even more disorientating
assault. An awesome matchup from two of my favorite grind bands around, and highly recommended !!!
Where in the hell did this split come from? I didn't even know that it was in the works until Selfmadegod told us about it at the beginning of November, and
there doesn't appear to be anything on the labels website about it's release. It seems that this hush-hush release was put together for the current
Nyia/Antigama tour. A pleasant surprise to be sure, as I've already been gushing over Antigama and their progressive, futuristic-sounding grindcore for
awhile now, and I can't get enough of their music. For this 9 song, 16 minute EP, Antigama are joined by their Polish tourmates Nyia, a band that I hadn't
heard previous to this, but one that has totally kicked my ass with a mere three tracks on show here. Yeah, Nyia is awesome, a complex, convoluted
kind of industrialized grindcore, with clean harmonized vocals alternating with fierce death metal screams; their riffs are impossibly spastic and angular,
contorting into everchanging forms over rigidly calculated rhythmic pummel and explosive jazzy beats. As crazy as it sounds, they approximate some weird
fusion of Gorguts' Obscura and Godflesh, and the result is a fucking mindblower than any fans of extreme experimental grindcore are going to blow a
fuse over. It's hard to believe that this band is made up of members of Vader, Yattering, and Prophecy, as this is completely and wholly unlike anything that
those bands ever did, but here we have it, an amazingly technical and brutal avant-grind assault, replete with guitars firing off alien dissonance, split
second tempo changes, blazing blastbeats, clean jazz breaks, and Meshuggah-ish mathy pummel. This is a band that I guarentee we'll be keeping an eye on, and
will be working hard to get everything else that they've released in stock here at C-Blast as soon as possible.
And having Antigama follow Nyia with six new tracks of their finely tuned avant-grind dissonance just makes this split an essential. The Polish killsquad
has been blowing my mind since their Discomfort album, blending sharp, angular riffing and cold industrial textures with ferocious grindcore and
detours into strange electronic soundscapes, and armed with the best grindcore drummer since David Witte. For real, Antigama's Krzysztof Bentkowski blows my
mind on a constant basis with his endless flurries of hyperspeed rimshots, bizarre backwards blastbeating and general percussive weirdness that sets Antigama
apart from every other grind outfit out there. Antigama open their half of this split with a sample from A Clockwork Orange and hurtle heafirst into
the churning grind of "Beyond Me", the lightspeed atonality of "Nature", and "Only"'s sheer accusational savagery. But then they drift off into a terrifying
electronic void in "Torture", a whirling nightmare of melted drones, klaxon blasts and tape-manipulated blastbats before coming back to the grind with the
deceptively catchy "ADV". They finally end with "The Trio Infernal", awash in bleeping computer tones and sputtering video game noises over a walking jazz
bassline and free jazz drumming floating in an echo chamber. If any band has channeled the experimental, adventurous spirit that Voivod demonstrated with
their classic Nothingface album, it's Antigama.
Beyond recommended, one of the finest avant-grind releases of the year. And it comes in an equally awesome package, the album art and booklet featuring
weird desert photos overlaid with metallic gold printing.
An older but crucial split disc featuring Australian grinders Openwound and C-Blast futurist grinders Antigama, both of which deliver the quirky grindcore goods. Openwound open the split with 17 tracks of their awesome hyper-meth'd grind, most of which were recorded in 1999 but appear here for the first time. Heard of The Kill? They were a shortlived Aussie grind band that the entire grind scene blew a collective load over about six years ago after releasing an EP that attained total blastbeat nirvana and had some of the most ferocious riffs in, well, forever. Well, members of Openwound went on to form The Kill, so that should give you an idea of how good these guys are. Awesome, fierce as fuck grindcore somewhere in between early Napalm Death, Terrorizer and Swedish bands like Sayyadina, but with weird little passages of clean jangly guitars, over the top mock-operatic vocals, funky almost-breakbeat breaks, awesome thrash metal parts, chaotic blasts of mathy shredding, and other distinctive little flourishes that set these guys apart from everyone else. Most of all though, are the hooks...Open Wound busted out some of the catchiest grind ever, seriously hooky and catchy riffs that will stick in your head. Open Wound were awesome, one of the best post-Earache grind bands I've ever heard, and essential listening for any grind fan.
The Antigama side features a bunch of early recordings from the Polish prog-grind band, which were recorded at practice spaces and studios and live shows from 2001-2003. The sound is a little more raw and unpolished than their later albums obviously (though totally listenable), but even at this early stage Antigama had already defined their unique, intellectual style of 21st century grindcore that combines 90's era Napalm Death influences (think Diatribes era Napalm) with industrial music, gravity-defying percussion overloads, sinister sci-fi samples, electronic noise, and massive Meshuggah-esque grooves. There's no doubt that Antigama are one of the key bands at the moment that are pushing the grindcore aesthetic into new territory. Awesome stuff. They also include a live cover of Repulsion's 'Radiation Sickness' as a nod to the original trailblazers of grind.
Definitely a killer split album for anyone into quirky, forward-thinking grindcore!
The second album of high quality Italian dark ambient from Antikatechon, with that undercurrent of liturgical mystery that seems to inhabit a lot of the Italo deathdrift I've been listening to lately. On Chrisma Crucifixorum, sole member Davide Del Col crafts six lengthy subterranean driftscapes that combine meditative drones and darker, more malevolent recesses of electronic blackness, beginning with opener "Altaria Expiationis". This track sets the stage with a swirling midnight mass soundtrack comprised of simple, haunting melodic figures that loop eternally in a dank fog of cavernous reverb and murky rumblings of tectonic power. The music drifts slowly, shifting in and out of clarity, that eerie moaning melody eventually being swallowed up by great gusts of abyssal wind and distant squalls of grinding deep-earth activity. Bits of delicate acoustic guitar glint through the fog, then slowly shift into a gorgeously shadowcast bit of orchestral, almost Tangerine Dream-esque synthdrift. On darker, heavier tracks like "Delubra Vexatorum", Antikatechon drifts off further into a richly layered underworld where smears of amorphous minor key melody and streaks of burning dawnlight penetrate the gloom, revealing a teeming mass of subterranean sonic activity, clanking chains and reverberating stone whipped into a vast fog of sound, howling hymn-like chants almost totally obscured by the sheer power of the rumbling lower frequencies, then billow skyward into swirling clouds of shimmery organ loops. The rest of the disc shifts between these two aspects, moving from stirring cinematic wonder into ominous subterranean drift, where monstrous clanking rhythms echo out of the depths of "Violatio Sigillorum" and lead into something akin to a cross between latter-day Tangerine Dream and the Cold Meat sound, and "Convivium Vulturum"'s ghastly dungeon drones evolve into the sound of rhythmic metallic clanking and distant percussion, keening horns smeared across the horizon, the sound evoking images of massive infernal machinery coming to life in the bowels of some medieval cathedral. Good stuff; fans of such Cold Meat-aligned dark ambient acts as Coph Nia, Desiderii Marginis and Raison d'�tre should check it out. Comes in digipack packaging.
These becloaked weirdos from Madison, Wisconsin have belched forth a nasty little album of spacey acid-death that'll probably end up falling under the radar of most of the underground metal scene, but fans of gnarly Frostian black magic and the recent spate of retro-psych doom (Devils Blood, Blood Ceremony, etc) would do well to check these guys out. Make no mistake, The Antiprism sure love Celtic Frost (and Hellhammer, Sabbath and Motorhead), and the influence of those Swiss metallers is all over this self-titled debut, but the band puts their own greasy fingerprints all over the old-school metal attack by also throwing in a ton of rollicking classic riffs that feel like they've been imported directly from the NWOBHM scene circa 1983, along with smatterings of spacey psychedelia and pounding garage rock (and apparently a shared appreciation of garage-psych legend Roky Erickson), and best of all, a smokin' co-ed vocal attack that has singer Alex trading off his punky, sneering reverb-soaked vox with the ratty snarls of drummer Kristine. Whenever Kristine enters the picture, I'm constantly reminded of Jennifer Herrema from Royal Trux/RTX, and her snotty snarl definitely gives The Antiprism a unique edge. As do the trippy, off-kilter sounds that the band pulls out unexpectedly on a couple of the songs; "Moonlight Overdrive", for instance, starts off with a catchy Sabbathian groove and introduces some epic guitar lead work, but then towards the end, they introduce a freaking xylophone towards the end, and it sounds great! There's lots of tambourine thrown in here too, and the guitarists freely whip out one soaring dual guitar harmony after another, and they really capture a classic British metal feel with alot of the riffs and leads. Yep, blackened and bent and sludgy, and steeped in basement occultism and cheapo mystical artwork (my god, the album artwork is a Photoshop nightmare!), The Antiprism have come out with a cool, quirky album of killer psych-metal that came as a surprise, especially when I found out that the band features former members of Madison noise-rockers Pachinko!
This is a posthumous discography from short-lived Southern California art-sludge outfit Anubis Rising (whose members can now be found in Intronaut). These guys surprised the hell out of us with this bizarre and enigmatic tuneage that merges spacey electric basement indie psych rock (w/ a totally black-neon 80's vibe) to crushing death ooze that pilfers from the combined sludgecore/black metal/dronecore/math-death playbook. Comparisons can be drawn to the melodic heaviness of bands like Isis, Pelican, Neurosis, and Buried Inside, but there's alot more going on here like weirdly effects-overload stoner doom and mindmelt space rockiness, spasms of lopsided death metal chaos, SoCal prog rock, and other weirdness. The meat of their matter is in the breathtaking, tragic sounding melodies of the lighter psychedelic pop parts, clean guitars bathed in reverb and watery effects and sometimes strummed on acoustic guitars with lightly sung vocal harmonies, and structured around proggy forms and bold durations which eventually erupt into huge metallic crescendos. My grey matter keeps projecting visions of Dinosaur Jr.'s eponymous debut being covered by Opeth meets Mastodon-gone-funeral-doom meets Eyehategod meets a dark Goblin/Pink Floyd hybrid, with neurotic post-hardcore seizures mangled by vicious V.O.D.-esque (circa Still) metalcore and ripping thrash metal hallucinations come screaming out of feedback/tape-splice mudbaths and ambient dronescapes and sweet jangly rock. Battle ready dual-axe harmonies dominate old-school Metallica / Fucking Champs style all throughout this mother, too. The vocals are just as textured, switching between blackened screams and clean crooning and brutal crusty bellowing. Track two, "Firmamentum", is worth the price alone with its memorable somber psychedelic pop verses melting down into a majestic melodic mega-tar-metal dirge, like Eyehategod and Swallow The Sun and Skepticism mashed together in an echo chamber with some poor lysergic bastards on the run from the Paisley 80's. Awesome. I wish these guys could have maintained, as this is truly original stuff, a weird epic cinematic melodic prog metal drone tech dream that fries us every time this disc gets tossed into the C-Blast Central ghetto blaster. Funerary Preamble contains almost 80 minutes of material, consisting of their obscure Funerary Preamble EP, the Scales Of Truth EP, and their split with UPHILL BATTLE. Recommended.
Salt Lake City is no noise mecca, but there is a small and dedicated scene active over there orbiting the Red Light Records media center and label, artists like Night Terror, Gudgeguh, I Hate Girls With Bruises and AODL all raising a hellish din. AODL is one of the harshest of the bunch, a solo noise project from Jeff Shell that has just released its debut full length LP on Red Light after a series of limited cassette and CD-R offerings on labels like Hospital Productions, Audiobot, Trash Ritual, and RRRecords. Hard Cobble Abdomen is vicious, straightforward harsh noise, not quite HNW territory, but brutal and spastic all the same; the two sides rumble with dense noisescapes that Shell constructs out of amplified sheet metal scrape and violent scrap yard destruction, the screaming distortion of overloaded synthesizers, loads of crushing low-end rumble, harsh metal-on-metal nuke-scrape, skull-scouring waves of high-end feedback, huge swells of roaring, raging distortion. Sometimes vague rhythmic elements appear within the churning noise, but it's peripheral at best; AODL generally remains aggressively chaotic and formless, an old school harsh noise pileup that would fit in nicely in in the RRRecords catalog alongside artists like Knurl, Pain Jerk, Sickness, Killer Bug and Lockweld. Very nice. Limited to 200 copies and packaged in a silk-screened jacket.
First released on CD back in 2006 by the long defunct British label Retribute Records, this is still the only full-length album to come from the fearsome Clevo powerviolence band Apartment 213, who took their name from
the infamous abode of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Made up of current and former members of Nekrofilth, Scarver's Calling, Schnauzer and Soulless, and fronted by the power-tool weilding madman Steve Makita from the industrial noise
outfit Lockweld, Apartment 213 were one of the bands on this side of the country throughout the 1990s capable of handing out the same level of abuse as the West Coast powerviolence contingent. Mostly known for their skull-crushing 7"s
and splits released on labels like Dark Empire and Bovine, the band took nearly a decade to finally unleash this sixteen song album, and it's still one of my favorite albums of violent blastcore from the oughts. This slab of speedbeast
brutality has finally been reissued on vinyl, courtesy of Macedonian label Fuck Yoga. Here's the old review I did of the CD version:
Apartment 213 are fucking back on the map with this new 16 song album. Back in the '90's, the Midwest couldn't really compete with California or the East Coast when it came to extreme hardcore. I mean, c'mon...Cali had
the whole Slap A Ham contingent, bands like Infest and Crossed Out and Man Is The Bastard that are still unchallenged in terms of sheer annihilating brutality. And out east, we had NYC bands like Disassociate and Black Army Jacket and
Disrupt that totally killed. Don't get us wrong, there were LOADS of hardcore bands between coasts that shredded, but most of 'em were more punk, less obliterating extremity. Enter Apartment 213, whose hyperspeed, ultra downtuned
toolshed grind came together in the early 1990's out of the dark industrial wastes of Cleveland, and channeled brutal Infest-style powerviolence through a bunch of blue collar Ohio dudes armed with power tools and some serious
misanthropy. On this new album, Apartment 213 hasn't changed their sound a bit, still dealing out super sludgy metal riffs, blast beats, and over-the-top aggro barked vocals, but with MUCH better production than their previous stuff. And
they are still rooted in the DIY punk aesthetic and a love of experimental and industrial noise. You think extreme blasting speedcore sounds tough? Try adding some fucking power tools and crazed feedback noise to the assault. Their use
of noise and post-industrial sonics makes alot of sense seeing as how vocalist Steve Makita is also one-half of legendary industrial noise duo Lockweld. Plus, the last track "Freak War" is a nightmarish noise collaboration between
Apartment 213 and Eric Wood of Man Is The Bastard/Bastard Noise. Seriously crushing stuff. Cleveland Power Violence! Fight with tools!
Cleveland's infamous/legendary APARTMENT 213 is finally fully documented with this collection of ULTRA-brutal ultracore from the heydey of extreme American hardcore/powerviolence. Probably the only Midwestern band to ever actualize the same type of oatmeal-mouthed brutality that Infest and Crossed Out trafficked in, via insanely fast hardcore speeds and bonecrushing breakdowns. Apartment 213 went even further by injecting their caveman grindcore antics with loads of unsavory serial killer and horror/splatter references, power tool noise (forshadowing the industrial noise of LOCKWELD, which featured APARTMENT 213's Steve Makita), and a generally sociopathic/rust-belt take on lo-fi white-noise hyperspeed thrash. This disc spans the years '93-'97, and collects all of their vinyl output (the Vacancy and Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things 7"s), splits (w/Gehenna, Thug, Benumb, Dahmer, and Forced Expression), comp tracks, and the The Power of Tools demo. 40 tracks of raw sonic violence. Essential.
Back in stock!
Hell YEAH. Apartment 213 are fucking back on the map with this new 16 song album. Back in the '90's, the Midwest couldn't really compete with California or the East Coast when it came to extreme hardcore. I mean, c'mon...Cali had the whole Slap A Ham contingent, bands like Infest and Crossed Out and Man Is The Bastard that are still unchallenged in terms of sheer annihilating brutality. And out east, we had NYC bands like Disassociate and Black Army Jacket and Disrupt that totally killed. Don't get us wrong, there were LOADS of hardcore bands between coasts that shredded, but most of 'em were more punk, less obliterating extremity. Enter Apartment 213, whose hyperspeed, ultra downtuned toolshed grind came together in the early 1990's out of the dark industrial wastes of Cleveland, and channeled brutal Infest-style powerviolence through a bunch of blue collar Ohio dudes armed with power tools and some serious misanthropy. On this new album, Apartment 213 hasn't changed their sound a bit, still dealing out super sludgy metal riffs, blast beats, and over-the-top aggro barked vocals, but with MUCH better production than their previous stuff. And they are still rooted in the DIY punk aesthetic and a love of experimental and industrial noise. You think extreme blasting speedcore sounds tough? Try adding some fucking power tools and crazed feedback noise to the assault. Their use of noise and post-industrial sonics makes alot of sense seeing as how vocalist Steve Makita is also one-half of legendary industrial noise duo Lockweld. Plus, the last track "Freak War" is a nightmarish noise collaboration between Apartment 213 and Eric Wood of Man Is The Bastard/Bastard Noise ! Seriously crushing stuff. Cleveland Power Violence! Fight with tools!
Two sides of brutalizing blast, the first featuring some brand new violence from Cleveland's mighty Apartment 213. The band has been relatively quiet since the release of their split with Agoraphobic Nosebleed from a few years ago, but they've shown up here with four new tracks of their trademark crush assault to remind everyone that, no, they haven't gone anywhere, and no, they still aren't interested in making friends. From the opener "Creepy" and it's crushing dirgey riff that spurts out chunks of electronic squelch and drill noise, to the classic ultracore of "Apply Your Make-up" and it's attendant whirlwind blastbeats, slow chugging thug-riffage and Steve Makita's barking, pissed-off vocals, these guys remain masters of their brand of Midwestern neo-power violence, a perfect fusion of metallic Infest worship and weirdo industrial noise.
The Pennsylvania trio Nothing Is Over makes for good sparring partners on this 7". Their side follows up Apt 213's violence with their own raw take on shock-assault blastcore, ripping through seven short tracks of thrashy, Spazz-esque hardcore that shifts every few seconds into another crushing maniacal riff, weird sudden stops and jarring arrangements that come at lightning speed, some oddball bass guitar parts, song titles that make no effort to conceal their bad attitude ("Get Pissed", "Everyday Hate", "You're Cut Off", "Stare Back") and best of all, a handful of killer breakdowns that make me think that I'm all of a sudden hearing some 80's youth crew band jacked up on PCP. These guys will ingratiate themselves with not onl y Apt 213 fans but anyone into contempo PV like Endless Blockade and SU19B with ease. Note: the 7" has one of those large center holes, so you'll need a 45 rpm hole adapter to play this.
Six blasting rave-ups of scorching, bass-heavy futuro-blues psych punk thuggery, with bitchin' organ/moog that exhume Deep Purple flurries-on-crack courtesy of organist Amanda Kleinman, totally nixing the need for guitars. This stuff kicks serious ass. On Street Warz, this Washington DC quartet get down Fun House meets a sugar rushing Black Sabbath / Iron Butterfly mutation with hard riffing, but likewise jacked up on over caffienated Gold Standard Laboratories style skronk and mushroom-laced lyrical fantasies. The Apes drown you in psychedelic / post-apocalyptic garage prog murk.
Here's a kickass limited edition picture disc of Street Warz, pressed in a strict edition of 500 copies, and featuring eye-boiling artwork from bassist Erick Jackson.
Six blasting rave-ups of scorching, bass-heavy futuro-blues psych punk thuggery, with bitchin' organ/moog that exhume Deep Purple flurries-on-crack courtesy of organist Amanda Kleinman, totally nixing the need for guitars. This stuff kicks serious ass. On Street Warz, this Washington DC quartet get down Fun House meets a sugar rushing Black Sabbath / Iron Butterfly mutation with hard riffing, but likewise jacked up on over caffienated Gold Standard Laboratories style skronk and mushroom-laced lyrical fantasies. The Apes drown you in psychedelic / post-apocalyptic garage prog murk.
Aphelion's first album came out on the same label that did that Aderlating album, and that might give you a general idea of where this band is coming from as well. Aphelion's music comes from the industrial tradition, building it's monstrous electronic dirges and menacing atmospheres out of thick slabs of distortion, field recordings, samples, feedback and programmed rhythms, but there's a HUGE industrial metal and Digital Hardcore influence at work here too, heard in the heavy distorted basslines, distorted screams and tinny programmed thrash beats that weave their way through almost every track on the album. At the same time, there's a lot of variety to Lay, and it's a thoroughly mutant vision of hardcore industrial that D-Trash fanatics will lose their fucking minds over...
The first track is a mass of raging Ministry beats, grating distorted noise and roaring buzzsaw bass, like what the theme music for Pole Position might have sounded like if Al Jourgensen had been hired to score it. "Hell" is another crushing slab of blackened Wax Trax industro-insanity, with crushing fast-paced drum programming galloping over a hellish surface of screaming, tortured voices, blistering white noise and sickening power electronics...samples and bits of epic melody sprout up at the end, but it's mostly a relentless blast of spastic mecha-thrash, like a DHR speed metal remix. "Circumlocution" blends wailing bomb-raid sirens and hammering distorted gabba throb into a terrifying blast of apocalyptic speedcore, and "Frozen Birds" is a slower chaotic dirge of looped sounds, pounding percussion, super blown-out vocals, lush spacey synths, all smashed up into a violent noise-doom eruption.
"Be Still" is another creeping industrial dirge, clanging Swans-like percussive pound beneath nauseous piano melodies, uncontrollable weeping, agonized screams, and it almost sounds like a DHR remix of Gnaw Their Tongues...then an old school hip-hop sample starts off "Chest Cavity", before the track explodes into a short minute-long blast of hyperfast electronic speedcore ripping through a thick curtain of black noise and samples. A brutal distorted breakbeat powers the orchestral drones and acidic sample-laden noisescapes of "5%", and "Car Bus Plane Or Coffin" starts off like some psychedelic black metal version of Psalm 69 era Ministry before drifting off into lush jazzy ambience towards the end. And the last listed track, "Purge", closes the album with a short, ominous dronescape littered with more corrosive noise and random samples.
If your're looking for an ultra-chaotic skullfuck that mashes together old school Wax Trax electr-thrash, Dissecting Table's ultra-distorted industrial sludge, Navicon Torture technologies nihilistic power electronics, the hellish abstract soundscapes of Gnaw Their Tongues and the most fucked-up, distorted, violent ends of the DHR/D-Trash digital hardcore spectrum, then this is the album for you. When I decided to pick up some copies of this disc for C-Blast it was on the basis of hearing just two of the slower tracks on the album, which led me to believe that the whole thing was going to be a sort of industrial doom, but it turned out to be way crazier and more intense than I ever expected. Awesome.
Packaged in a four panel digipack.
Second full length album from Apostle Of Solitude, a Midwestern doom outfit that features guitarist/singer Chuck Brown who had previously played drums for Gates Of Slumber, still carrying the torch for classic old-school doom metal with this project, although with a slightly tweaked take on the sound. We're talking about some serious Hellhound Records/Maryland doom-style metal, with massive slow-crawling bluesy riffs carved out of huge blocks of Sabbath, creeping doleful dirges powered by huge pounding saurian rhythms and streaked with lots of killer melodic lead guitar; the nine songs on Last Sunrise are directly descended from the classic sound of bands like Saint Vitus, Unorthodox, Internal Void, The Obsessed, Wretched, and Iron Man, and fans of that sort of traditional doom sound should definitely give Apostle Of Solitude a listen. Brown and crew also add some somber spacious passages of melodic guitar and fantastic twin guitar harmonies, interesting flourishes of twangy dark Americana on "Letting Go of the Wheel" and jazz-piano flecked balladry on "December Drives Me to Tears", and even crank up the energy level on a couple of songs by ripping into the occasional NWOBHM style gallop, like on "Hunter Sick Rapture" and "Coldest Love", or the straight up thrash that "Frontiers of Pain" rips into after a lengthy intro of creeping dirge, but the majority of the album is spent wallowing in super heavy lumbering DOOM, equally crushing and majestic and very, very melodic, the melodic aspect enhanced even more by Brown's extremely soulful and dramatic vocals. His soaring, soulful singing really stand out, and may put off doom fans who aren't so crazy about vocals that are this "croony"; his voice reminds me of a cross between Jonah Jenkins (Only Living Witness/Milligram/Raw Radar War) and Eddie Vedder, and it definitely adds an interesting "rock" sheen to the otherwise crushing doom.
Then there are the cover songs. After the nine tracks that make up the album proper, Apostle Of Solitude has also included three covers from The Obsessed, The Misfits, ad Born Against, all of which are pretty fucking killer, and which spin the original songs into AOS's own melodic doom style. The cover of The Obsessed�s �Streetside� is heavier and way more metal than the original, the Misfits classic �Astro Zombies� is given a similar super-heavy treatment, and the cover of �Mary and Child� from 90's hardcore legends Born Against is an unexpected slab of thrashing, anthemic aggression. Usually covers are throwaway additions to an album, but Apostle Of Solitude have turned this into a defining part of their style, even going so far as to include an entirely different set of covers on the European release of this disc!
Recommended for disciples of trad doom and Gates Of Slumber fans, who both should dig this interesting take on classic doom.
Two tracks of monolithic sludge metal that fill up almost an hour here, so you know that there's gonna be some commitment required here, possibly assisted by some hard psychotropic drugs. Seems like this disc has had a bit of anticipation behind it, since it's the first official appearance of the duo Aquilonian which features two of the members of Bongzilla playing spacey long form drug-doom, but the other half from their buds in Sollubi is just as punishing, the Ohio/PA outfit serving up another big black slab of nihilistic space-sludge/hypno-doom (featuring members of Fistula and power electronics maniacs Rape-X)...
Aquilonian's "Symphonica De Levita" is first up, the drums/guitar duo initially laying down some hushed spacey psychdrone with a skeletal drumbeat beneath soft flanged guitar, a druggy Electric Wizard/Sleep style intro that finally bursts into a fuzz-soaked garage doom crawl, going from plodding narcotized dirge to more upbeat Sabbath groove, the riffs locking in on extended circular workouts, their raw doom getting pretty tranced out as they pound away at the subtly shifting riffage. After awhile, they head back into that spacious minimal drift that they started the song with, spreading out the effects-heavy guitar and soft minimal drumming for more than six minutes before lurching back into yet another stoned riff workout. The vocals don't even show up until fifteen minutes in, and when they do, it's soaring clean harmonies, almost like Torche, and disappears almost as suddenly as they appear. It's drawn-out and totally wasted trance-dirge that kind of lulls you into a stupor after a while, and I'm betting that's the whole point.
The vibe turns palpably darker with the next track, Sollubi's "The Struggle". These guys immediately set into a mega-crushing down tuned doom metal riff, but then it heads off into a surprisingly melodic stretch, an almost gothic dirge with spectral guitar melody drifting over the tectonic crush, the vocals spiteful and snarled, this grim doom metal plod stretching out for eons. The second half of their track is where Sollubi's trademark toxic synths come in, unleashing buzzing filth and rumbling spaced-out drones over the plodding ultra-dirge, twangy guitar sliding around in the background, crazed Hawkwind-like effects zipping around, the dirge getting wilder and more frenzied even as the riffs get slower and slower, until everything finally begins to disintegrate, the riff getting stretched out, guitars collapsing into massive rumbling drones, drums becoming a wash of cymbal hiss until there's nothing but roaring low-end synth and looped down tuned guitar throb, the sound dissolving until its just a barren stretch of bleeps, amplifier noise, and buzz.
We were gushing over these guys a couple of months back, a brutal Norwegian take on Am Rep style noise rock, like Tad, or Melvins, or Unsane, but heavier and crazier and with a singer that sometimes sounds like freaking Bobcat Goldthwait. Serious. So needless to say we are PSYCHED over this new 2-song platter from Norway Rat that boasts two tracks of total mangle, "Moneyshot" and "Reperbahne", the latter being a total destructo one-chord dirge freakout, and the former laying down some of the excellent/hateful noisey sludge rock these guys do so well. Here's what we said about their righteous Proposing A Pact With Jesus CD..."Freaking ripping primal noise rock from Norway, with badass hooks and a brootal Melvins meets Unsane meets Tad meets Six Finger Satellite assault that blew our doors off! Dirgy downtempo filth, high energy sludge tantrums, nasty barbed wire guitar crush and thuggish bass and pounding drum blitzkrieg, with distorted vocal spew that sounds a little like Bobcat Goldthwait fronting the best fucking psycho-hardcore Am Rep outfit you've never heard. Almost-NWOBHM riffs get rung thru brutal noise blowout. Catchy, scuzzed out, with massed punishing whiteout drone riffing and some golden hooks that'll bury themselves in your gristle...." Totally necessary for scum heads into Brainbombs, Unsane, Melvins, Scratch Acid, Jesus Lizard,and all gross discordant noise rock (with the emphasis on ROCK), this is great shit! PLUS, the 7" comes in a totally aggro color sleeve armed with a strip of some sort of sandpaper type material glued to the inside, so that the vinyl naturally rests against it, grinding at the grooves and fucking up the record (slightly) so that it's even noisier and more crazed and wrecked when you throw it on the turntable ! As far as skips, our copy does a little, but putting a quarter or something similiar on the needle corrects the situation. The concept is AWESOME, an amazing piece of self destructive art, like Amphetimine Reptile thuggery transmitted via Christian Marclay/Record Without A Cover style vinyl damage! Produced by low-end wiz Billy Anderson (Weedeater,Swans,Cathedral,etc.), and released in an edition of 300 copies!
Freaking ripping primal noise rock from Norway, with badass hooks and a brootal Melvins meets Unsane meets Six Finger Satellite assault that blew our doors off! Dirgy downtempo filth, high energy sludge tantrums, nasty barbed wire guitar crush and thuggish bass and pounding drum blitzkrieg, with distorted vocal spew that sounds a little like Bobcat Goldthwait fronting the best fucking psycho-hardcore Am Rep outfit you've never heard. Almost-NWOBHM riffs get rung thru brutal noise blowout. Catchy, scuzzed out, with massed punishing whiteout drone riffing and some golden hooks that'll bury themselves in your gristle. I think this disc is awesome, and am surprised we've never heard of these creitns before. Sludge wiz Billy Anderson manned the knobs for this album, and the bottom end shows. Def recommended for scum heads into Brainbombs, Unsane, Melvins, Scratch Acid, Jesus Lizard,and all gross discordant noise rock (with the emphasis on ROCK), this is great shit!
It's been a LONG time since we last heard anything from Norwegian noise rockers Arabrot, but we certainly hadn't forgotten about them; their releases on Norway Rat from earlier in the decade were some of the sickest outbreaks of noise rock that we'd heard, and their notorious Moneyshot 7" was easily one of the most outrageous records that we've ever carried here at C-Blast. Packaged in a full color sleeve with sheets of actual sandpaper on the inside of the cover, that Ep was deliberately constructed to damage the record, so that when you played it on your turntable, there was a constant layer of surface noise and pops that the band wanted to have added to their (already quite hideous) sludgy noise rock. As much as we loved that record and their subsequent album Proposing A Pact With Jesus , we've been hoping to see something new from the band, and now we've finally gotten a hold of new Arabrot, released by the band's new label Fysisk Format.
As soon as we started listening to I Rove, it was clear that things had changed for the band. The throbbing, bass-heavy sludge rock was still present, but now it's weighed down with an even heavier guitar sound and a much bleaker, more doom-laden sound. The Cd features three new songs, and the twenty-minute title track that opens it takes up the bulk of the disc; it opens with a surge of industrial pummel, a lurching bass line crawling over industrial percussion and swells of choral chanting, the sound surprisingly Swans-like at first, dark and very dramatic. Then, it all kicks in full-power at the four minute mark, the drums finally crashing in as the music draws back, coiling into seething tension, and then explode into a crushing riff that rivals anything from the Melvins. When the band kicks into the strange mantra-like chorus (with the singer repeating the line "And I rove, and I rove, and I rove and I rove and I rove...." over and over), it gets seriously evil sounding, the discordant guitars scraping and writhing over the bottom end massiveness, the vocals taking on a black metal like raspiness, and weird buzzing electronic fx swarming around. As they grind through this twenty minute saga, the song takes on a Neurosis-like ebb and surge, but the recording becomes super hot and distorted, the levels peaking out and everything sounding extremely fried out, seeming to even skip at times, turning into this overdriven, over-modulated dirge, with a haunting melodic hook lurking just underneath the churning distortion and crushing low end. It becomes more blown and distorted until the music turns into a roiling black maelstrom of distortion and clipped drumming and in-the-red chaos with that eerie guitar melody and smatterings of piano continuing underneath it, until it's a Merzbowian blur of noise at the end.
Not at all what we were expecting before we threw this on, this song is fucking amazing, and shows that the band has really evolved since the last time we heard them.
The other two songs are shorter, more direct blasts of noisy heaviness: "The Serpent" serves up some evil, catchy noise rock with massive metallic crunch, a grinding angular groove, freaked-out screaming vokills, shifting into a catchy stop start riff with some weird sing-song poppiness emerging out of the muck. Then the band busts out a cover of "The Money Will Roll Right In" by Fang, and they take the burly punk of the original and turn it into an awesome Jesus Lizard-like rocker, fast paced and lurching and crushing, and easily put their own unique stamp on the tune.
We love hearing that classic Am Rep/Touch And Go noise rock sound being appropriated by newer, heavier bands, and Arabrot continue to hammer that sound into their own ugly, caustic image, and with I Rove have easily come up with their darkest and most ominous music so far. Highly recommended. The disc comes in a gorgeous arigato-pak case with embossed metallic silver artwork and an insert, issued in a limited numbered edition of 1000 copies.
��Norway's Arabrot kept things simple for the title for their latest album, but nothing else has been scaled back with the band, least of all their ultra-heavy, blown out sound. The band's stomping, skull-shredding aggression is in full effect with this new batch of songs; more than ever, Arabrot sound like some evil, noise-damaged version of the Melvins, and the songs featured on their sixth album Arabrot are as heavy as anything I've heard from these guys, doused in allusions to religious and literary symbolism and references to the surrealism movement. I've been a huge fan of this Norwegian noise rock band's brand of menacing, bludgeoning sludge ever since I picked up their ear-scraping Moneyshot EP back in 2006, and despite the fact that the band has gained all sorts of accolades in their home country (even winning the Norwegian equivalent of a Grammy award a few years ago), their music is some of the most abrasive, discordant noise rock you're going to find, loaded with massive riffage buried under the paint-peeling distortion and bone-scraping bass that rivals the sort of triumphant battle-riffs you'd get from High On Fire. Arabrot's ugly, anthemic noise is also distinguished by frontman Kjetil Nernes's awesome rabid vocals, which shift between a murderous seething whisper to a ferocious earth-shaking bellow, and they also continue to infect their music with a heavy layer of experimental noise and electronic malevolence, courtesy of guest member Lasse Marhaug (Jazkamer) who contributes blasts of garbled electronic chaos and tortured glitch and sheets of abrasive drone that are threaded throughout the album.
�� Some of my favorite moments on here include the grinding angular chug of "Ha-Satan D�ofol", and the crushing lurch and demented singsong vocals on "Throwing Rocks At The Devil" ; these songs wind through massive serpentine riffs aglow in eerie psychedelic textures from organ and synthesizer. "Arrabal's Dream" is one of the album's catchier songs, a churning violent space-sludge anthem that features guest vocals from Kylesa's Laura Pleasants, her voice rising like an incantation over the tribal drumming and driving, mid-tempo metallic crush and cosmic synthesizer whoosh, and the monstrous "Blood On The Poet" is riddled with wrecked slide guitar and more of that crazed schizoid singing. "Drawing Down The Moon" has squalls of haunting, ethereal jazzy trumpet from Jan Sjonneby howling across the background of this bass-heavy angular sludge anthem , occasionally blasted with concrete mixer noise. The quirky, infectious hook of "The Horns Of The Devil Grow" explodes into one of the album's noisiest, most in-the-red blasts of crumbling distorted heaviness, followed by the apocalyptic lust anthem "M�nads" that closes the album, a delirious dirge shrouded in the sounds of piano and harmonium. It's some of the heaviest noise rock I've heard in ages, monstrous and metallic with blasts of brutal double bass and crushing metallic riffage, the heaviness flecked with traces of harmonium, pump organ, piano, and slide guitar, and these songs often hide a huge pop hook under all of the grueling ugliness and violence. Definitely one of the heaviest album's I've heard in the past year, and the best noise rock album I listened to all of last year, without a doubt. We've got this in stock on both CD and LP, with the LP version also including a copy of the CD inside of the package.
��Norway's Arabrot kept things simple for the title for their latest album, but nothing else has been scaled back with the band, least of all their ultra-heavy, blown out sound. The band's stomping, skull-shredding aggression is in full effect with this new batch of songs; more than ever, Arabrot sound like some evil, noise-damaged version of the Melvins, and the songs featured on their sixth album Arabrot are as heavy as anything I've heard from these guys, doused in allusions to religious and literary symbolism and references to the surrealism movement. I've been a huge fan of this Norwegian noise rock band's brand of menacing, bludgeoning sludge ever since I picked up their ear-scraping Moneyshot EP back in 2006, and despite the fact that the band has gained all sorts of accolades in their home country (even winning the Norwegian equivalent of a Grammy award a few years ago), their music is some of the most abrasive, discordant noise rock you're going to find, loaded with massive riffage buried under the paint-peeling distortion and bone-scraping bass that rivals the sort of triumphant battle-riffs you'd get from High On Fire. Arabrot's ugly, anthemic noise is also distinguished by frontman Kjetil Nernes's awesome rabid vocals, which shift between a murderous seething whisper to a ferocious earth-shaking bellow, and they also continue to infect their music with a heavy layer of experimental noise and electronic malevolence, courtesy of guest member Lasse Marhaug (Jazkamer) who contributes blasts of garbled electronic chaos and tortured glitch and sheets of abrasive drone that are threaded throughout the album.
�� Some of my favorite moments on here include the grinding angular chug of "Ha-Satan D�ofol", and the crushing lurch and demented singsong vocals on "Throwing Rocks At The Devil" ; these songs wind through massive serpentine riffs aglow in eerie psychedelic textures from organ and synthesizer. "Arrabal's Dream" is one of the album's catchier songs, a churning violent space-sludge anthem that features guest vocals from Kylesa's Laura Pleasants, her voice rising like an incantation over the tribal drumming and driving, mid-tempo metallic crush and cosmic synthesizer whoosh, and the monstrous "Blood On The Poet" is riddled with wrecked slide guitar and more of that crazed schizoid singing. "Drawing Down The Moon" has squalls of haunting, ethereal jazzy trumpet from Jan Sjonneby howling across the background of this bass-heavy angular sludge anthem , occasionally blasted with concrete mixer noise. The quirky, infectious hook of "The Horns Of The Devil Grow" explodes into one of the album's noisiest, most in-the-red blasts of crumbling distorted heaviness, followed by the apocalyptic lust anthem "M�nads" that closes the album, a delirious dirge shrouded in the sounds of piano and harmonium. It's some of the heaviest noise rock I've heard in ages, monstrous and metallic with blasts of brutal double bass and crushing metallic riffage, the heaviness flecked with traces of harmonium, pump organ, piano, and slide guitar, and these songs often hide a huge pop hook under all of the grueling ugliness and violence. Definitely one of the heaviest album's I've heard in the past year, and the best noise rock album I listened to all of last year, without a doubt. We've got this in stock on both CD and LP, with the LP version also including a copy of the CD inside of the package.
Epidemie bring us another warped individualistic metal album that reminds me why this is fast becoming one of my favorite labels. The Demon From The Ancient World is the fourth album from Arallu, an Israeli black metal band that calls themselves "barbaric Mesopotamian black metal", but this isn't a mere clone of the more well known Middle Eastern black metal band Melechesh like you might expect. While both bands draw from Middle Eastern mythology and traditional Arabic sounds that they incorporate into their music, Arallu are actually substantially more fucked up sounding than Melechesh have ever been. Whether that's due to Arallu suffering from genuine ineptitude or a refusal to play by the book when it comes to things like "rhythm" or "tightness" is still up in the air; it doesn't even matter, because this album fucking SHREDS. It's a mutant blackthrash attack that sounds like a mix of classic thrash like Slayer, Kreator and Sodom mixed with hyperspeed black metal and bona fide Arabic instruments and musical scales, but played so off-the-cuff and raggedly and with bizarre changes in speed, song structure and key that this comes close to the mutant BM realm inhabited by the likes of Furze and Benighted Leams. Arallu is fronted by vocalist and bassist Butchered, who for a very short while actually played in Melechesh, and his choked, froglike vocals spin all kinds of visions of desert-roaming demons, genii, gateways to hell opening right in downtown Jerusalem, and more earthbound matters like the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The music, as I mentioned, totally shreds; thrash metal riffs and buzzsaw blackened tremelo blurr alternate over an awesome stumbling drummer that barely stays in time with the riffs, but the way that the members of Arallu pull it off, the sloppiness and chaotic playing elevates their Arabic blackthrash onto a new level of weirdness. And then every couple of measures or so, the metal instrumentation will be suddenly joined by a host of Arabic desert instruments like darbuka and shofar, sometimes taking over completely as a song turns into a Middle Eastern tribal jam. Yeah, this album is heavy on the what-the-fuck factor, but it also rocks, and heavily at that. Songs like 'The Seven Chosen Genii' veer into ripping black n' roll, singer Butchered busts out a couple of hair-raising Tom Araya style screams, and album closer 'Tzvaot ARALLU' sounds, bizarrely enough, like a Stiff Little Fingers song as played by a diseased black metal outfit. And it rules. Hands down the best freakoid blackthrash album on Epidemie, totally recommended.
I love this band! Middle Eastern black thrashers Arallu are back again with a brand new album of their "barbaric Mesopotamian black metal", their first since 2005's The Demon From the Ancient World that I raved about last year when we first got it in stock here at C-Blast. These Israeli thrashers have been competing with Melechesh for the title of true "Mesopotamian black metal" for years, and they tend to get short shrift with a lot of Melechesh fans and writers, but I still think that Arallu's Middle Eastern-influenced metal is an entirely different sort of beast than the more technical and polished music of Melechesh. Sure, both of these bands utlize traditional Arabic instruments and scales in their music and have the same all-consuming obsession with Mesopotamian mythology, but Arallu excel at stripped-down, primitive blackthrash that takes all of it's moves from early Sodom, Slayer and Kreator, with loads of ripping monochromatic thrash riffs and speedy, sloppy drumming, and fronted by band leader Butchered's blistered rasp. It's an atavistic, messy approach compared to Melechesh 's more progressive sound, and though a lot of Arallu's music tends to blur together, I still can't get enough of this shit.
Obviously, one of the main reasons why the two bands are constantly compared is the use of traditional Arabic percussion and horns that show up throughout all of Arallu's songs, and there is a LOT of that going on with Desert Battles, even moreso than Arallu's last album. The constant flux between the ripping Sodom-on-crank blackthrash and the blasts of hyperkinetic Darbuka drum circles and the queasy roar of Arabic horns makes for a seriously psychotic mix. There's still a lot of references to Mesopotamian folklore and imagery in these tracks (especially with songs like "The Demon's Curse" and "The Keeper Of Jerusalem"), but much of these images that Arallu conjure up are more like metaphors for the ongoing social unrest in the Middle East than fantasies of Djinns and desert kingdoms and stuff like that. Bottom line, though, Desert Battles fucking shreds, a blazing assault of crude, barely-hanging-in-there thrash laced with awesome Araya-style screams and filthy atonal solos galore, and loaded with their trademark detours into manic Middle Eastern instrumental freakouts that sometimes blend right in with the razorwire black metal. Killer!
The disc also has some CD-ROM content that connects you with a video for the song "Battleground".
Ararat is the new solo project from Sergio Chotsourian, the Argentinian musician who is better known as the front man and guitarist for the hypno/stoner metal band Los Natas, who has released albums on Ektro, Meteorcity, Small Stone and Mans Ruin over the past decade. As Ararat, Chotsourian explores a form of freeform psych that's really similar to the more laid back and lugubrious psychedelia found on the Los Natas double album Toba Trance that came out on the label run by the guys from Circle, and fans of that album are pretty much guaranteed to dig Musica de la Resistencia. There is some heavier music that emerges on this disc, but Ararat generally sticks with a hazy, druggy vibe that foregoes the metallic riffage of his main band. These seven tracks have a flowing, cinematic feel, with treated acoustic guitar drifting across throbbing Om-like hypno-grooves, passages of haunting flamenco guitar set against hazy psychedelic ambience, minimalist piano patterns circling across electro-acoustic soundscapes, and bits of Argentinian folk music. Fans of the less heavy Circle stuff like Forest will probably dig this, as well. The disc opens with "Gitanoss", which begins with echoey samples, heavy tribal drums and a mesmeric slithering bass line, sounding alot like Om, but with meandering guitar lines and moaning vocals that drift off into an ambient ether filled with droning organs and repetitive percussion. That's followed by the song �Dos Horses� , which is actually a Los Natas song that appeared on their last album Nuevo Orden de la Libertad, a dreamy instrumental with piano and acoustic guitar and effects woven into a gorgeous melody. Then the heavy psych-drone of "El Carrusel� appears, with Tangerine Dream-like keys and whorls of minimal piano emitting a dark circus atmosphere, which then gives way to huge distorted Earth-en riffing that flows into shimmering pools of buzzing pipe organ. The rest of the album shifts back and forth between heavier psychedelia and softer, eerier ambience, with extended jazzy solos running through some of the songs, female backing vocals, harmonicas, the buzzing drone of Indian ragas, mystical Argentinian folk, the fluttering tones of flutes and other woodwinds, and the influence of old kraut/prog bands like Agitation Free and Amon D��l II can definitely be heard in Ararat's long, winding space rock jams laced with a distinctly Latin-flavored brand of psychedelia. The closest that Ararat ever gets to the propulsive, hypnotic heaviness of Los Natas comes at the very end of the album with the song "Castro", which brings out a massive bass riff that locks into a heavy rocking groove while Chotsourian streams his bizarre ululating cartoon voices over top, really similar to Los Natas and Circle both, a heavy metallic trance-rock workout with wailing ecstatic vocals and droning spaced-out keyboards buried in the background. Los Natas fans probably don't even need to be told, but Ararat is definitely recommended to anyone into Chotsourian's main band as well as fans of the circular heavy psych found on the Ektro label. Comes in a full color gatefold jacket.
We're big fans of Canadian guitarist Aidan Baker here at the Blast. We've been digging his glacial guitar-generated drift designs for years, and have been lucky enough to release some of his work (the recent Periodic CD-R on our Crucial Bliss imprint as well as an appearance from Aidan's drone/doom/shoegaze band Nadja on the Shadows Infinitum compilation, also on Crucial Bliss). Much like Troum, Aidan is a master at summoning immense beautiful melodies out of feedback and processed guitar, and with the Arc project he has teamed up with percussionists Richard Baker and Christopher Kukiel to create some of the thickest, prettiest drone rock we've ever heard on this debut album. Aidan also utilizes flutes and tapeloops here, and according to the liner notes, the 4 tracks on The Circle Is Not Round are actually studio pieces constructed from live recordings that have been reworked and layered together into a vaporous wash of drone, a mixture of Popul Vuh acoustic compositions, Pink Floyd's Ummagumma era, the ethno-ambient of Voice of Eye, and the heavy galactic drone rock of Subarachnoid Space. Melodic loops and textured guitar flow through each other, sometimes taking on My Bloody Valentine levels of density while being grounded by tribal-esque rhythms provided by various percussive instruments. Absolutely essential to fans of drone rock, Kranky Records, Growing, drone-core, etc. The disc is packaged in a special cardboard digisleeve with varnished images. Limited edition of 800 copies.
Anyone that is into the sounds of drifting drones of the guitar-based sort and/or the more blissed out, textural strains of doom metal is going to at least be aware of Canadian avant-guitarist Aidan Baker, either from his excellent solo recordings or from his prolific and increasingly popular dronemetal band Nadja. There's another band that Aidan is a member of, however, that isn't nearly as well known, but which is just as great as any of his other projects. That band is Arc, a Toronto based trio that crafts what I'd call a sort of improvised ambient rock. If you're familiar with Aidan Baker's solo work and the kind of drifting, layered drones that he creates using guitar and effects, that's a large part of Arc's sound, and he's joined by Christopher Kukiel on percussion and electronics and Richard Baker on drums and other percussion. Aidan also contributes drums and other percussion to Arc's music, and what we get is heavily rhythmic dronerock, with cascading tribal rhythms amd dreamy guitar drones swirling together into a wash of hypnotic ambience.This newest album, the band's fourth, is a bit surprising as it has been released by the Czech avant-metal label Epidemie Records, whose catalog includes albums from avant-death metallers Azure Emote, experimental electro-doom duo Dusk, and funeral doomsters Mistress Of The Dead. Which leads me to believe that this Arc album might be heading in a heavier direction than previous recordings. That's partially the case, through most of Arkhangelsk stays in a subdued state of hazy drones and swirling percussion. The disc features four lengthy tracks, all of them created initially with improvisational performances on drums and guitar and then layered with additional percussion, electronics and woodwinds, with each of these two sessions recorded in a single sitting, using only minimal post-production on the recordings. The disc begins with the glistening sheets of guitar and dense polyrhythms of'Relicary', then moves through the spacious dronescapes of 'Angel Sightings' and "ossuary', but it's on the second track "The Valley Of Dry Bones" that Aidan lashes out with crushing distorted riffs and improvised blues licks, and even comes within range of Nadja-levels of metallic overdrive towards the end of that track. Even at it's heaviest, though, Arc's music is constantly underscored by the surging and receding waves of krautrocky percussion, an eternally moving mass of rhythm riding out on Aidan's ethereal guitars. These tracks flow together like an epic fusion of Troum, Can, Nadja, and the trippy drum-trance music of the Boredoms. Limited to a mere 600 copies, the disc comes in a sleek 6-panel digisleeve illustrated with abstract, Shroud Of Turin-esque artwork. Highly recommended!
Stunning psychedelic blackness from this Italian band that sprang as a side project from the sides of Italo avant-black metallers Urna and Locus Mortis.
It's actually another one-man BM outfit, but you'd be hard pressed to guess that from the expansive, doomy atmospheres and symphonic heaviness crafted on
this album, and synth music freaks will particularly dig the amazing space music textures that cover Ubi Secreta Colunt. The guy behind Arcana
Coelestia is MZ, who is responsible for most of the instrumentation for the aforementioned bands, and here he weaves a pitch-black tapestry of cosmic funeral
doom and sleek analogue ambience with blasts of black metal tremelo picking, blastbeats and doomy arpeggios savagely bursting out of these four creeping
symphonies. Each of these lengthy tracks spin melodic, swirling synthesizers around dark doom metal marches, double-bass drumming blasting out every once in
a while to bring the music to a boil, gutteral death growls alternating with spacey clean chanting, groans, and hushed whispers, and those sweet keyboards
taking center stage with an old-school analogue sound that turns this into a blend of powerful melodic doom metal, atmospheric dirge, and heavenly, swirling
kosmiche electronics in the mode of Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Vangelis. As if the music wasn't heady enough, this is a concept album based on the
work of Swedish author and alchemist August Strindberg, who is quoted in the booklet, and the whole package is filled with images of eerie religious
iconography and church statues. Man, this album is amazing, and it's become yet another new favorite over here. Imagine Skepticism, Shape Of
Despair, Esoteric or Panthiest combined with Virgin-era Tangering Dream, black metal, and lush shoegazey metal like Cult Of Luna, with songs like "Arcane
Knowledge Revealed (Part I)" reaching suffocating levels of celestial beauty. Seriously recommended!
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, sound artist David Myers released a sizeable body of work under the name Arcane Device, using a variety of unique hand-made feedback generators that he built himself to craft exquisitely lush fields of black isolationist sound and otherwordly aural terrain that blooms with textural noise and heavy analogue throb. Arcane Device created some extremely unique and immersive electronic dronescapes that have, unfortunately, been overlooked by many fans of dark industrial droneology, which is partially due to the fact that many of his older releases have been out of print and tough to come by. This new reissue from the Russian industrial label Monochrome Vision is a welcome reinstatement of a large chunk of Arcane Device's out of print material, and the two discs included here are packed with rare Arcane Device tracks collected from compilations on Subterranean Records, Tragic Figures, SFCR Tapes, and Generations Unlimited, as well as some unreleased material that was unearthed and remastered in 2007 for this release. The second disc is titled Feedback Symphony, and is a series of four movements created from source material taken from various recordings made throughout Arcane Device's existence. The sounds gathered here are cold and otherworldy, ranging from deep resonant drones and weird cosmic ambience to orchestrations of fearsome feedback sweeps and manipulated sinewaves, sometimes brutal and harsh, mostly softer and subdued and droning, a series of utterly alien tone poems and hard metallic dronescapes that exist in a similiar realm as the no-input electronic sculptures of Mika Vainio and Ryoji Ikeda. Limited edition of 500 copies in jewelcase with liner notes by Myers.
Previously released on cassette, this is the Lp version of the first full length from Arch Toll, which is basically Sump operating under a different name. With both George Proctor (also of White Medal and Mutant Ape) and Gareth Howells (Axnaar) behind this album, you'd no doubt expect this to be another blast of filthy, no-fi blackened punk violence, but instead you get thrashy black metal forged under the rotten gaze of the worm Ouroboros that moves along at a pretty good clip. The minimal set-up (drums / guitar / vocals) and production qualities (dirty and low-fi) are reminiscent of Sump, but the music is more like a mildly brain-damaged take on early second wave black metal and certain strains of primitive cavernous death metal, full of simple, hypnotic tremolo riffs and sloppy, blasting drums and an undercurrent of barbaric violence. The four long songs ("Alchemy", "From This Eye", "Serpent Tail", "Landwella") weave through a crude labyrinth of riffs and reverb, the ghostly guitars becoming a softened blur of fast jangled minor-key chords like some atavistic version of Darkthrone shot up with lots of noisy weirdness, off-beat feedback and effects fuckery slipped into the blasting blackened thrash. The circular and minimalist nature of Arch Toll's music riffs is used to create a hypnotic, ritualistic atmosphere that fans of Bone Awl and Ildjarn will groove on, too, but this is definitely most closely aligned with the uniquely warped aesthetic of the Legion Blotan camp.
Released in a limited edition of one hundred copies in a screen printed sleeve.
An oldie but goodie from the vaults of Profound Lore that I just now found out about, Forcing The Astral is the first album from the enigmatic
blackthrash cult Arctic Circle who hail from the frozen tundras of Manitoba. This shit is right up my alley - handpasted cover with a cutout logo taped over
a murky photo of a dark twilight sky, the booklet interior depicting the band playing live, the words "dedicated to piggy and voivod" printed across the top.
The music, a twisted hybrid of black metal and early Voivod, but somehow damaged and "off". The guitars are slippery blackened lashings of dissonant riffage,
the drums a chaotic clot of sloppy blastbeats and frantic fills that borders on the inept, but it is this stumbling chaoticness that makes this sound even
more ferocious and demented. The vocals are blackened raspy shrieks, gargling blood and bile rising up in his throat. I can hear the Voivod influence in the
contorted thrash beats and jagged riffs and the feeling like their songs are constantly slipping out of equilibrium, as if the members of Arctic Circle have
been subsisting exclusively on a diet of Killing Technology, blotter acid, Alberta Premium, and early Norwegian black metal demos for the past few
years. Which they very might well have been. They also incorporate some very cool, very textural feedback ambience in a couple of spots on the album that
actually smacks of the swirling feedback textures of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, and also brief, haunting bits of classical guitar strum, all of
which contributes to the strange, alien aura that encirles the album. Sadly, this is the only album that the band would release, as it looks like they just
recently disbanded, but it's a terrific dose of blackened outsider thrash that should be checked out by seekers of the warped. The label told us that it's
also almost out of print, so heads up - we've got some of the last copies available.
A beefed-up re-issue of the early Arcturus recordings delivered as a double-disc set, Aspera Hiems Symfonia / Constellation / My Angel is exactly that, a collection of the band's first full length album Aspera Hiems Symfonia from 1995, the Constellation CD promo from 1994, and the My Angel 7" from 1991. This two-disc remastered reissue documents Arcturus before they truly entered the realm of electronica-flavored, Faith No More-inspired post-black metal, but even with these early releases you can hear a band breaking through the walls of traditional black metal forms. Featuring Garm from Ulver and Hellhammer from Mayhem, Arcturus' early releases were blazing, epic Norwegian black metal bolstered by tons of majestic synthesizers, ripping double bass drumming, and a combo of alternating blackened shrieks and awesome soaring vocals that sound alot like Depeche Mode. When their not racing through wintry wastes on fierce BM thrash, Arcturus break down into spacey orchestral waltzes and melodic breaks that border on full-on "pop" at times. Really catchy yet brutal, with a heavy, theatrical prog-rock vibe that hints at where the band would go with their late 90's work. The Aspera hiems Symfonia disc includes two previously unreleased tracks that were recorded during the same recording session.
1997's La Masquerade Infernale is still one of the greatest codices of avant-garde, genre-blurring black metal that emerged from the wide ranging experimentation that swept through Norwegian black metal in the late '90's. It's still certainly thought of as Arcturus' masterwork by pretty much everybody in the metal community. Featuring Garm from Ulver and Hellhammer from Mayhem, Arcturus took a huge step away from the slow melodic doominess of Arcturus' Aspera Hiems Symfonia, and from the opening seconds of "Master Of Disguise", immediately plunges you into a nocturnal, dreamlike carnival atmosphere filled with with crazy prog-rock synthesizer runs and dense electronic samples that are unified with Arcturus' melodic, somewhat baroque-sounding black metal. The grotesque dream-visions of the album artwork and the surreal Faustian lyrics reveal eerie Satanic visions colored by theatre, literature and French poetry, and the music is like black metal's answer to both Mr. Bungle and Faith No More, containing Weill-esque cabaret music, symphonic strings, pop melodies, industrial clang, drum n' bass/jungle beats, trip hop, and mind-tripping flights into the deep cosmic ether, the arrangements constantly shifting in and out of these stylistic boundries without warning. The raw screams that normally characterised black metal are replaced with dramatic, semi-operatic vocals, gruff low crooning that reminds me of Mike Patton, and the bizarre high-pitched singing of guest singer Simen Hestn�s, who would later replace Garm as the band's frontman. Still sounds as strange and alien as it did when it came out over 10 years ago. This is the re-mastered re-issued version of La Masquerade Infernale on Candlelight, and does not include the hidden trip-hop track that appeared on the original Misanthropy Records release.
Never stocked this cd before, but I've been on a bit of an Arcturus kick lately and decided to pick it up at long last since I'm constantly getting orders for all of the other back catalog titles from this Norwegian avant-black metal super group. Featuring members of Ulver, Mayhem, Covenant, Borknagar, and Ved Buens Ende, Arcturus were a band unto themselves, starting off as a slightly proggy, symphonic black metal outfit but over the course of several albums evolved into something like a blackened version of Faith No More, with their majestic metal augmented by strange genre-hopping that might include bits of drum n' bass and electronica, theatrical arrangements, bizarre left-field forays into hardcore rap, trip-hop, and industrial music.
2005's Sideshow Symphonies would actually be the band's last studio album, and found the band shifting their bombastic and theatrical sound into a more focused (but no less dramatic) direction. One of the changes that stands out on this album is the arrival of new singer Simen "ICS Vortex" Hestnaes (ex-Borknagar, Dimmu Borgir) who replaces former front man Garm (Ulver); Hestnaes's soaring, phantasmal voice was an interesting addition to Arcturus's sound, definitely way more over the top and melodramatic compared to Garm's singing, but it fit perfectly with their majestic futuristic prog-metal. Musically, you can barely hear any of their black metal origins, the nine tracks instead sounding like a spacey, symphonic, strangely New Wave-tinged power metal, sorta, and there are parts of the album that sound to my ears almost like Kansas, fer petes's sake. Not that they went soft for Sideshow; the lush analogue synths, symphonic strings, and operatic singing are still backed by chugging heavy guitars, blazing double-bass drumming and triumphant metallic crunch. The music isn't as schizo as their past releases, where Arcturus would veer from drum n' bass to black metal to orchestral pomp and Portishead-style trip-hop, but there is still some of that Mr. Bungle weirdness going on, albeit very subtly, with some touches of dark jazzy ambience (like on "Nocturnal Vision Revisited"), electronica, and classical elements appearing on various tracks. Definitely a high point in the field of progressive post-black metal heaviness.
Finally got this double vinyl reissue of Arcturus's 1997 album in stock on vinyl, released as a hefty gatefold package by UK reissue label Back On Black. Still as weird as it was when we first picked it up, here's our old review of this Nordic avant-metal mindfuck from when we originally got the CD reissue version in stock:
1997's La Masquerade Infernale is still one of the greatest codices of avant-garde, genre-blurring black metal that emerged from the wide ranging experimentation that swept through Norwegian black metal in the late '90's. It's still certainly thought of as Arcturus' masterwork by pretty much everybody in the metal community. Featuring Garm from Ulver and Hellhammer from Mayhem, Arcturus took a huge step away from the slow melodic doominess of Arcturus' Aspera Hiems Symfonia, and from the opening seconds of "Master Of Disguise", immediately plunges you into a nocturnal, dreamlike carnival atmosphere filled with crazy prog-rock synthesizer runs and dense electronic samples that are unified with Arcturus' melodic, somewhat baroque-sounding black metal. The grotesque dream-visions of the album artwork and the surreal Faustian lyrics reveal eerie Satanic visions colored by theatre, literature and French poetry, and the music is like black metal's answer to both Mr. Bungle and Faith No More, containing Kurt Weill-esque cabaret music, symphonic strings, pop melodies, industrial clang, drum n' bass/jungle beats, trip hop, and mind-tripping flights into the deep cosmic ether, the arrangements constantly shifting in and out of these stylistic boundaries without warning. The raw screams that normally characterized black metal are replaced with dramatic, semi-operatic vocals, gruff low crooning that reminds me of Mike Patton, and the bizarre high-pitched singing of guest singer Simen Hestn�s, who would later replace Garm as the band's frontman.
Yep, this still sounds every bit as strange and alien as it did when it came out over 10 years ago. This is the re-mastered re-issued version of La Masquerade Infernale on Candlelight, and does not include the hidden trip-hop track that appeared on the original Misanthropy Records release.
Along with that killer new album, we also just restocked this double Lp release of Arcturus's 2005 album Sideshow Symphonies, now available at a lower price. Packaged in a deluxe gatefold jacket and pressed on white vinyl, this is a gorgeous limited edition release of what had been up to that point the final album from these legendary avant-garde black metal alchemists. Here's my original writeup on the CD version:
Never stocked this cd before, but I've been on a bit of an Arcturus kick lately and decided to pick it up at long last since I'm constantly getting orders for all of the other back catalog titles from this Norwegian avant-black metal super group. Featuring members of Ulver, Mayhem, Covenant, Borknagar, and Ved Buens Ende, Arcturus were a band unto themselves, starting off as a slightly proggy, symphonic black metal outfit but over the course of several albums evolved into something like a blackened version of Faith No More, with their majestic metal augmented by strange genre-hopping that might include bits of drum n' bass and electronica, theatrical arrangements, bizarre left-field forays into hardcore rap, trip-hop, and industrial music.
2005's Sideshow Symphonies would actually be the band's last studio album, and found the band shifting their bombastic and theatrical sound into a more focused (but no less dramatic) direction. One of the changes that stands out on this album is the arrival of new singer Simen "ICS Vortex" Hestnaes (ex-Borknagar, Dimmu Borgir) who replaces former front man Garm (Ulver); Hestnaes's soaring, phantasmal voice was an interesting addition to Arcturus's sound, definitely way more over the top and melodramatic compared to Garm's singing, but it fit perfectly with their majestic futuristic prog-metal.
Musically, you can barely hear any of their black metal origins, the nine tracks instead sounding like a spacey, symphonic, strangely New Wave-tinged power metal, sorta, and there are parts of the album that sound to my ears almost like Kansas, fer petes's sake. Not that they went soft for Sideshow; the lush analogue synths, symphonic strings, and operatic singing are still backed by chugging heavy guitars, blazing double-bass drumming and triumphant metallic crunch. The music isn't as schizo as their past releases, where Arcturus would veer from drum n' bass to black metal to orchestral pomp and Portishead-style trip-hop, but there is still some of that Mr. Bungle weirdness going on, albeit very subtly, with some touches of dark jazzy ambience (like on "Nocturnal Vision Revisited"), electronica, and classical elements appearing on various tracks. Definitely a high point in the field of progressive post-black metal heaviness.
Back in stock, available on both digipak CD and gatefold LP. A freaky funhouse avant space-metal opera that often feels more like the kind of contempo prog you'd hear on Web Of Mimicry than anything connected to the Norwegian black metal underground, but that's where this quasi-supergroup has ended up with their fifth full-length, the first new Arcturus studio album in a decade. Made up of members from Borknagar, Ulver, Mayhem, Dimmu Borgir and Ved Buens Ende, these space-faring steampunk weirdos broke up for awhile following their previous album Sideshow Symphonies, but the time away has seemingly recharged their blackened batteries, as much of Arcturian features an undercurrent of black metal that we haven't heard out of these guys in years.
Despite the newfound sense of heightened aggression present in these new songs, though, this is still extremely proggy stuff. The album opens with skittering, sinister electronica, a pounding breakbeat beneath eerie synthdrift and spacey glitchery, but the band quickly digs into their blackened prog-metal on "The Arcturian Sign" as the song winds through a multi-faceted attack of symphonic blackened metal bombast, Vortex's rock-style singing delivering some petulant vocal hooks before shifting into a guttural death-roar as the music erupts into blasting, celestial violence. The sound is lushly layered with choral backing vocals, tuba, and a wall of analogue synth, but those symphonic elements and the soulful rock flourishes don't diminish the darkness and dread that ends up spilling out across the second half.
As the rest of this unfolds, Arcturus fill out their songs even further with sweeping synth strings and huge, bombastic hooks, the crushing guitars fused to Hellhammer's furious, intricately arranged drumming, which maintains a constant (and virtually exhausting) feeling of nuclear propulsion, his complex blasting adding to the fearsome aura that surrounds Arcturian. All of the songs are elaborately designed epics, filled with bizarre sci-fi tinged lyrics and dramatic hooks that can swerve into shockingly catchy melodic riffs, the berserk symphonic delirium threaded with the sounds of Eastern European folk violin, gongs, luminous Moog-like keys and horns; and there's lots of the weird sonic detours they're known for, the over-the-top operatic bombast, the excursions into spacey drum n' bass that are woven in directly with the band's heavier material. "Game Over" is one of Arcturus's finest odes to 70's era progressive rock, and features some really terrific guitar and synth work as the band balances dreamy, dark prog with pummeling metallic heaviness; songs like that and "Archer" have a distinctly Floydian feel to them that's much more integrated than similar psych-rock influenced material on their previous albums. But again, this is also the heaviest that Arcturus have sounded in ages, songs like "Angst" rivaling the most fearsome stuff in the early catalog. Wild stuff!
����� Back in stock, available on both digipak CD and gatefold LP. A freaky funhouse avant space-metal opera that often feels more like the kind of contempo prog you'd hear on Web Of Mimicry than anything connected to the Norwegian black metal underground, but that's where this quasi-supergroup has ended up with their fifth full-length, the first new Arcturus studio album in a decade. Made up of members from Borknagar, Ulver, Mayhem, Dimmu Borgir and Ved Buens Ende, these space-faring steampunk weirdos broke up for awhile following their previous album Sideshow Symphonies, but the time away has seemingly recharged their blackened batteries, as much of Arcturian features an undercurrent of black metal that we haven't heard out of these guys in years.
����� Despite the newfound sense of heightened aggression present in these new songs, though, this is still extremely proggy stuff. The album opens with skittering, sinister electronica, a pounding breakbeat beneath eerie synthdrift and spacey glitchery, but the band quickly digs into their blackened prog-metal on "The Arcturian Sign" as the song winds through a multi-faceted attack of symphonic blackened metal bombast, Vortex's rock-style singing delivering some petulant vocal hooks before shifting into a guttural death-roar as the music erupts into blasting, celestial violence. The sound is lushly layered with choral backing vocals, tuba, and a wall of analogue synth, but those symphonic elements and the soulful rock flourishes don't diminish the darkness and dread that ends up spilling out across the second half.
����� As the rest of this unfolds, Arcturus fill out their songs even further with sweeping synth strings and huge, bombastic hooks, the crushing guitars fused to Hellhammer's furious, intricately arranged drumming, which maintains a constant (and virtually exhausting) feeling of nuclear propulsion, his complex blasting adding to the fearsome aura that surrounds Arcturian. All of the songs are elaborately designed epics, filled with bizarre sci-fi tinged lyrics and dramatic hooks that can swerve into shockingly catchy melodic riffs, the berserk symphonic delirium threaded with the sounds of Eastern European folk violin, gongs, luminous Moog-like keys and horns; and there's lots of the weird sonic detours they're known for, the over-the-top operatic bombast, the excursions into spacey drum n' bass that are woven in directly with the band's heavier material. "Game Over" is one of Arcturus's finest odes to 70's era progressive rock, and features some really terrific guitar and synth work as the band balances dreamy, dark prog with pummeling metallic heaviness; songs like that and "Archer" have a distinctly Floydian feel to them that's much more integrated than similar psych-rock influenced material on their previous albums. But again, this is also the heaviest that Arcturus have sounded in ages, songs like "Angst" rivaling the most fearsome stuff in the early catalog. Wild stuff!
Along with the Back On Black reissue of Arcturus's late 90's avant metal masterwork La Masquerade Infernale, we also finally picked up the latest repress of the double LP reissue of the band's early collection Aspera Hiems Symfonia / Constellation / My Angel, which had been previously reissued on Candlelight as an expanded double CD set. This vinyl edition features all of the same material as that CD version, and houses the records in a hefty gatefold jacket, with the records coming on colored vinyl. Here's our original review from back in 2002 when we first got that CD reissue in:
Here we get a beefed-up re-issue of the early Arcturus recordings delivered as a double-disc set, Aspera Hiems Symfonia / Constellation / My Angel is exactly that, a collection of the band's first full length album Aspera Hiems Symfonia from 1995, the Constellation CD promo from 1994, and the My Angel 7" from 1991. This two-disc remastered reissue documents Arcturus before they truly entered the realm of electronica-flavored, Faith No More-inspired post-black metal, but even with these early releases you can hear a band breaking through the walls of traditional black metal forms. Featuring Garm from Ulver and Hellhammer from Mayhem, Arcturus' early releases were blazing, epic Norwegian black metal bolstered by tons of majestic synthesizers, ripping double bass drumming, and a combo of alternating blackened shrieks and awesome soaring vocals that sound a lot like Depeche Mode. When their not racing through wintry wastes on fierce BM thrash, Arcturus break down into spacey orchestral waltzes and melodic breaks that border on full-on "pop" at times. Catchy as hell, but also quite vicious in spots, these recordings begin to reveal that heavy, theatrical prog-rock vibe that hints at where the band would go with their late 90's work. The Aspera hiems Symfonia disc includes two previously unreleased tracks that were recorded during the same recording session.
Super heavy blackened sludge from Knoxville, Tennessee with some wild noise fuckery that elevates this above the rest of the extreme doom rabble. This 26+ minute disc has just one long untitled song from this young band, and Argentinum Astrum display an enthusiasm for messing around with expectations of what doom metal is supposed to sound like, which ultimately turns this debut into something more than just doom metal. The track starts off with a cloud of black, buzzing feedback, then lurches into a slow, Khanate-like riff, but instead of moving forward with the riff, the music gets all warped and chewed up and dropping out completely, like you're listening to the band on a cassette and the tape is being eaten by the tape deck, the slurred sludgey guitars become a mangled blurt of analogue squelch, starting and stopping, winding down into silence and then revving back up again, until the riff finally disappears completely and is replaced by a single strummed guitar and spacious, laid back drum beat surrounded by tendrils of feedback and amp buzz. It gets heavy again soon enough, building back into a crushing minimalist riff chugging in slow motion, weird pterodactyl shrieks soaring over the desolate doomscape, and those vocals sound totally fucked, wrecked and wretched. They remind of how messed up and shrill the singer from Fleurety sounded on their demos.
The track moves onward, shifting between lumbering, monotonous sludge and slightly faster riffs that have a vague southern feel, then into brief blasts of epic, damaged black metal where the drums seem to float in and out of focus, or simply disappear together for a second. From there it's back to the slow sludge, a different riff this time, then the drums exit the scene again and we're left with nothing but guitars, black and roiling as ultra slow motion riffs unfurl over a caustic ocean of low-end grind, super abstract and droning, with those weird fucked-up reptile screams rising up out of the background. This monolithic metallic dronescape is spread out for more than ten minutes, then drums gradually re-enter the picture and once again the band shifts gears, lurching this time into a drunken bluesy sludge jam a la Weedeater or Eyehategod that closes the track out. These guys have an eclectic style that sounds like a couple of different bands stuck together with the unifying factor being the insane echo-chamber shrieking, a blackened sludgemutant built from scraps of Black Boned Angel, Fleurety, and Eyehategod, bashing out their primitive, noise-damaged sludge on busted amplifiers and broken guitars, electronic noise detritus dripping from their instruments, swampy low-frequency buzz infesting their blasted boogie.
The second album from Knoxville, TN black/doom metallers Argentinum Astrum, their first new batch of songs following a self-titled 2008 debut and subsequent one-song EP. Just as on previous releases, Malleus Maleficarum continues the band's propensity towards an almost ascetic presentation for their art, dispensing with lyrics, band info, even track titles; despite the dearth of lyrical info, the record's title and the use of magical symbology all lean towards the presence of occult influences. Musically, though, this is the band's most accomplished material yet.
The album takes its time getting started, slowly fading into view with a long stretch of mysterious ambient noises and distant midnight whirr. It's suggestive of field recordings of the forest featured on the cover, a swirling sonic murk of distant cries and eerie metallic noise, creaking percussive rhythms and echoing nightlife, the sound slowly threaded with distant organ-like drones and fragments of eerie minor key melody. A lone guitar enters, weaving a lonesome melody in that twilight gloom, and then the band finally crashes in with their tortured, blackened sludge, the tone of the record suddenly shifting into a roiling mass of sonic suffering. From the start, Malleus is more atmospheric than what these guys have done before, the sound more stripped down, with less of the chaotic noisiness that marked their earlier discs. Instead, Argentinum Astrum punish with a ghastly reverb-drenched atmosphere through which their hateful deathsludge lurches and lumbers, slipping gears from slow to slower, a swampy necrotic crawl splattered in squealing, astringent feedback that situates itself somewhere in between the deformed sludge of Eyehategod and the gnarled screeching evil of classic second wave black metal, with some supremely stomping riffage beneath the grim, minor key gloom, slipping from one crushing tarpit riff to the next.
It's the other two tracks that demonstrate the band's strongest stylistic shift, as they blast off into droning, sinister black metal, each coiled around a series of savage, swarming riffs arranged in an off-kilter manner that gives this stuff a slightly mathy feel at times. This stuff has some great majestic melodies that slowly unfurl from the band's raw black blast and frantic buzzsaw strum, the last song even erupting into a gale of hyperfast melodic tremolo riffs, forming a soaring hook that almost sounds like a rawer, more cavernous Krallice. Strongest material so far from these guys, recorded with a strangely tinny production that makes this sound like it was recorded in some dank culvert on the outskirts of Knoxville. A noticeable evolution from the almost Abruptum-esque abjection of their earlier releases into a distinctly American black metal sound, blended with strong currents of brackish sludge that will no doubt appeal to fans of bands like Lord Mantis and Dragged Into Sunlight.
Limited to five hundred copies.
���Perfect timing! Just as we're about to list the new Malleus Maleficarum 12" from Argentinum Astrum that came out recently on Forcefield (the band's first new release in years), a handful of copies of the 2009 EP from this Knoxville, Tennessee necro-sludge outfit surfaced in our stockroom. This long out of print disc was the second release from the band, and has a similar sound as the first track on that new 12", spewing a kind of tortured, blackened doom across one long untitled song that stretches out for nearly twenty minutes long, seething with the band's ugly, filth-encrusted fusion of abject, Khanate-esque sludge and raw black metal violence.
���This nameless exercise in grueling blackened agony opens with a hateful lava-flow of molten downtuned riffage and screeching high-pitched screams, the sound quickly degenerating into a horrific tangle of doom-laden riffs that fracture into gouts of polluted feedback and mangled string noise. It almost begins to venture into the sort of abstract, splintered blackness that Khanate explored, tinges of a kind of demonic psychedelia squirming through the cracked blackened sludge. At least, that's up until the point that the band suddenly swings into a slimy, whiskey-stained groove deeper into the track, unleashing some deranged, bluesy doom that wanders through a haze of warbling synthesizer noise and rumbling bass. From there, Argentinum Astrum's sound continues to mutate, this sprawling noise-addled dirge drifting out into vast fields of demonic drone-doom, where huge waves of Sunn-esque heaviness wash across the backdrop of atmospheric misery that stretches in every direction. Those echoing screams blossom into a chorus of howls and shrieks that are increasingly layered on top of each other, blurred into a choir of the damned, the sound shifting deeper into a rumbling blackened dronescape, smeared in terrible cries of suffering, slipping from surges of that sludgy slow-motion heaviness into violent eruptions of raw, chaotic black metal, as the final moments become swept up in an ice-storm of minor key tremolo shred and droning buzzsaw riffs spilling out over the blastbeat frenzy.
���Just as their latest 12" shifts further into blasting black metal fury, this disc likewise moved further into the realm of black metal than their debut, exchanging some of the deformed Abruptumisms of their previous disc for a slightly more structured sound; it's still pretty chaotic, though, with a sickening , mentally unstable vibe that they use to good effect to bend the listener's brain, as their frantic, fucked-up black doom spreads across this disc like a swarm of sonic pestilence.
Fitting right at home with the classic old-school doom metal and trad metal that Shadow Kingdom has made their forte, Argus are another high quality offering of underground doom that the Pittsburgh label has wisely added on to their ever expanding roster. Before Shadow Kingdom came onto the scene a few years ago, there had been a longstanding void for this sort of cult old school metal that they specialize in, but these guys have become one of the best labels around dealing in this stuff, with a stellar lineup of both newer bands that carry the torch of true doom and heavy metal, and some much needed reissues that include a host of crucial Maryland doom albums from the late 80's/early 90's glory days of the scene.
Argus are right at home among all of this doomed goodness. Hailing from the same Pittsburgh area environs that's home to Shadow Kingdom, the band mines a vintage doom metal sound that they've already mastered with their self-titled debut. It comes naturally, seeing as how the band features a couple of doom metal alumni in front man Butch Balich (formerly of doom legends Penance) and Kevin Latchaw (Abdullah). Combining soaring, epic dual guitar harmonies with massive doom riffs and lumbering Sabbathain swing, Argus carve out wicked, chugging metal that's enhanced by Balich's powerful mid-range vocals. Those killer guitar harmonies and some of the arrangements give Argus a somewhat proggy feel, at times reminding me of While Heaven Wept, or Hammers Of Misfortune and Lord Weird Slogh Feg, but more rooted in epic doom. Some other cool touches that appear on the eight song album include the creepy pipe organs and choir voices that introduce "The Damnation of John Faustus", and frequent fist-pumping anthemic hooks...trad doom fans are going to love these guys. They pull off a classic sound without sounding "retro", with some solid songwriting on top of it all. Highly recommended if you're into Candlemass, Trouble, Solitude Aeturnus, Pale Divine, and Penance.
��This psychedelic death industrial project formed from the ruins of Pestdemon, a similarly styled project that released a number of excellent cassettes on labels like Unrest Productions and Sprachlos Verlag between 2008 and 2011; that sinister Swedish one-man outfit managed to stay pretty well hidden even among fans of murky, malevolent industrial music during its short run, but the stuff I managed to get my hands on (like the Hidden Temple tape) sounded terrific, filled with grimy blurts of occult-influenced machine-drone and rumbling menace that wormed their way right into my grey matter. With Arkhe, the guy behind Pestdemon looks like he's continuing to explore the same sort of dank, black sound; as a matter of fact, these recordings were originally intended for a Pestdemon release before that project dissolved. Anyone who happened to dig Pestdemon will surely want to explore this stuff as well.
�� For Everything That Lives Is Holy is one of the latest releases from Arkhe, a super-limited cassette packaged in an o-card style sleeve that folds out into a longer printed sheet, and which also includes a set of five full color insert cards that feature strange 18th century illustrations of creepy, tarot-like artwork. The tape features two long tracks of noisy low-fi soundscapery compiled from blasts of black hiss, mysterious subterranean clattering, and eerie distant drones that come together into a kind of murky and evocative ambience. These noisy recordings seem to be decomposing as you're listening to them, the broken rhythms buried underneath an ocean of tape hiss and reverb, obscured and muffled by layers of audio rot and decay. The a-side is a muffled, murky slab of sepulchral drift with strange clinking sounds echoing through the depths, like the percussive sounds of wind chimes made from broken bone fragments being blown by foul subterranean winds, joined by smears of hazy synthesizer melody, dissonant drone, sampled voices and looping feedback-like shrieking appearing from beneath the waves of mechanical rumble and hiss. Snatches of broken radio transmissions bleed through the murk, growing more nightmarish as the piece continues to unfold.
��The other side is more intense, more violent, a pandemonium of machinery screeching in the depths and massive percussive echoes thundering through the gloom, the sound dense and suffocating, pitch black, a rumbling screeching blast pf infernal machinery grinding and groaning within a thick fog of sonic corruption. The effect is intense and hypnotic, burying the listener beneath what almost feels like the roar of tank treads grinding over mountains of human bone, the screaming feedback destruction and thick rumbling drones all melting together into a macabre atmosphere of entropic filth. Love the song titles, too; "Raptor's Talon Tear The Infants Flesh" and "Flowers Roam The Carrion Of Silent City-centre Massgraves" evoke all sorts of wonderfully surreal and macabre imagery that is mirrored in the artwork, all contributing to a pervasive atmosphere of decay and derangement that I'm betting will appeal to anyone infatuated with the similarly blackened occult industrial of bands like Trepaneringsritualen and Alfarmania.
Finally back in print from Red Stream!
The furious fourth full-length from French satanic black metal outfit Arkhon Infaustus circa 2005, which was originally released on Osmose Productions before going out of print the first time around. Luckily for fans of fucked up, psychotic French blackness, Red Stream re-issued Perdition Insanabilis with this digipack edition, inscribed in alien code and classic Satanic icons. Arkhon Infaustus developed a bit of a rep over the years since forming in the mid-90's; their releases have been censored in several countries due to ultraviolent album art and lyrics that outlined acts of Satanic perversion and rough S&M-related imagery, and the band is pretty outspoken regarding their fierce anti-christian/satanic ideology. Musically, they play a demented fusion of death metal and black metal, kind of in the vein of Zyklon and also reminiscent of the total sonic evil of Anaal Nathrakh, with some additional doom elements stitched into the mix. The songs blaze by with relentless double bass blasting, awesome chaotic drumming, and chunky, downtuned death riffing and complex layers of dismal minor key melodies. And the sound is heavy, really heavy, with a massive bottom end that will rattle your ribcage. The vocals are disorientating, often with multiple deep death growls and blackened rasps all singing different lyrics at the same time, adding to the awesome "out of phase" vibe that seeps through the entire album. And there's plenty more of that fucked up French weirdness at work here too: creatively placed samples and electronic drones, manipulated feedback that crafts their trans-dimensional ambience, executing vertigo-inducing time changes (seriously, the drummer on this disc is fucking awesome), crazed dissonant shredding, harmonized chanting, and electronically-fucked vocals. Tracks like
"Whirlwind Journey" even hint at some distinctly old-school Voivod and Celtic Frost influences, while "Saturn Motion Theology" reveals a lumbering slab of ultraheavy blackened doom that reaches psychedelic heights as sheets of wailing feedback are draped over the sour, slightly out-of-tune guitar harmonies and the pulverizing central dronedirge riff. Crushing. Definitely another essential blast of bizarre French malevolence! And the packaging for Perdition Insanabilis is great, too; the booklet includes text that has to be decoded to be read, using a system of alternating lines, and the photos of the band are pretty rad, with their eyes covered in gauze as if they have been torn out after witnessing some hellish horror.
The supremely blackened 2007 album from France's Arkhon Infaustus, Orthodoxyn is their fourth, released in Europe on Osmose but now available here in the States on the esteemed Red Stream label. Opening with the lurching dissonance of "Trigarammaton", Arkhon Infaustus again plunges us into a fetid tangle of brutal, atonal death metal and complex black metal with songs that combine crushing, chunky riffing and slow, doomy passages with complex layers of guitar composed into droning, fucked-up melodies and alien harmonies. Much of the music on Orthodoxyn is slow, huge doomic riffs slithering through fields of evil dissonance with gutteral layered vocals that create a weird disorienting effect, the lyrics surrounded by overt satanic imagery and fascinating lyrics that infuse their goat-worshipping concepts with feverish visions that are drawn from biblical scriptures, scenes of sexual perversion, and quantum physics. I can hear a similiarity to fellow French black metallers Deathspell Omega, especially in the fucked up, avant-garde riffing and bizarre song structures that Arkhon Infaustus employs, but these guys are much, much heavier, their atonal dirges and downtuned riffage often broaching Incantation territory. These parameters of Arkhon Infaustus's sound make this another crucial slab of French black metal, filled with experimental guitar textures and abstract melodic leads matched by pulverizing heaviness, with an undercurrent of disturbing dissonance that constantly underscores their music. Another album of brutal, blackened French death from these masters, a must-get if you were into their last album Perdition Insanabilis (which is another favorite around here), and lust for both the innovative French blackness of Antaeus, Deathspell Omega, S.V.E.S.T., Blut Aus Nord, and the discordant crush of bands like Incantation and even Portal. Includes a thick booklet with lyrics and artwork.
Arktau Eos' Scorpion Milk is a companion piece to the Mirrorion CD which we will have listed in next week's new additions list, and was originally presented in a super-limited deluxe boxset that contained both discs. That box set disappeared pretty quickly, but both the Mirrorion CD and this Scorpion Milk CD-R are offered individually, a good thing for fans of Aural Hypnox's brand of heavy, ritualistic drone music.
Scorpion Milk is a single, 48-minute track of glacial, meditative drone created from a live performance of obscure 70's electronic music being manipulated and reshaped from reel-to-reel tapes. It's difficult to imagine what the original recordings must have sounded like, because the result is like standing over an immense void and bearing witness to some Stygian ritual taking place far below you in the depths. Over the course of Scorpion Milk's running time, Arktau Eos conjures a cavernous dronescape through which drifts strands of amplified guitar drone, ghostly vocal chants and intensely creepy, monstrous whispers soar through the darkness, alongside minimalist chimes, prayer bells, and distant, frozen synths. It's very beautiful but also quite unnerving, made even moreso by the jarring appearance of what sound like huge, reverberating cello chords scraped from some cyclopean stringed instrument that surge up from the deep, hanging in midair as the monstrous vibrations resonate and disappear back into the pitch-black void. Like many of the other excellent releases on Aural Hypnox, this is the darkest ritual drone imaginable, eerie and monstrous, mystical and heavy, a soundtrack to a deep-earth Lovecraftian nightmare, but also evocative and organic sounding, and strangely beautiful. Sort of reminds me of The Monstrous Soul-era Lustmord in it's obsidian massiveness.
And like everything else released on the Aural Hypnox label, this disc is beautifully presented, in a one-of-a-kind slim plastic case with a textured, hand-painted cover and an insert card, in a mubered edition of 222 copies. Highly recommended to heavy/deep drone disciples.
A debut full length at long last from the UK blastcore band Army OF Flying Robots, which follows a slew of EPs and compilation appearances. Alot of people have tagged Army Of Flying Robots as a kind of UK version of Converge, and while I'm not doubting that Converge have been an influence on AOFR's frantic metallic hardcore (I mean, c'mon, what metallic hardcore band formed after 1998 hasn't been influenced by Converge?), there is definitely more to their sound than that. Life Is Cheap spins 11 songs of chaotic but controlled vitriol, and the core of their sound revolves around fast, thrashy hardcore and powerful, dynamic time changes, murderous screamed vocals, harsh dissonant riffs and fucking huge apocalyptic riffs, definitely tapping into what Converge were doing on Jane Doe, but also throwing in big meaty helpings of powerviolence, math rock, and majestic post-rock, with mathy chugging slow parts and hyperspeed grinding opening up into panoramic instrumental rock passages that remind me of Mogwai or Envy. Dark ambient interludes build tension in between the metallic attacks, and the twin guitars scrape and claw at their instruments, creating some interesting textures that further set Army apart from the rest of the blasting metalcore flock. And the riffs...a band's gotta have killer riffs, and Army delivers, with every song on this disc serving up awesome, frenetic riffs that rage like clarion calls for the apocalypse. Awesomely intense and supercharged grind metal meets epic atmosphere. Recommended. Fucking killer artwork across the board for the album too, all skulls, suits, and dollar bills serving up a scathing dismissal of profit-driven culture.
Another brain-flaying collection of cult Finnish noisecore from Mikko Aspa's Lolita Slavinder imprint, Arse's Discography collects the complete recorded output of this little-known noisecore outfit who vomited up a cathartic bile-blast of collapsing low-fi hardcore filth and hyperspeed noise for a couple of years in the early 90s. Featuring members of Finnish hardcore punk bands Hybrid Children and Sairaat Mielet, Arse only released three tapes before they broke up, each tape packed to the rafters with raucous ten second blasts of maniacal punk/grind slime that was directly influenced by Anal Cunt's brand of crazed noisecore. And like their heroes in AxCx, Arse were prone to throwing up big chunky messes of mutated speed metal or primitive doom amid their whacked-out piss-take covers of well known bands like Black Sabbath and The Beatles, fragments of recognizable riffs from songs like "Paranoid" and "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" suddenly appearing amid the whirling cyclonic shitstorm of blown-out bass and clattering drums and out-of-tune guitar skree. Ugh. And the vocals are completely fucked. Arse's "singer" Toni leaves his larynx shredded and destroyed, belting out intense high pitched screams that strafe across the blastcore assaults like the sound of an anally-electrocuted Rhesus monkey being hurled down a fire escape right on the heels of a toxically tanked grindcore trio. Some of this shit is super heavy, though, like the later live material where the band introduces their feedback-drenched blurr and bizarre reverb fuckery into slow grueling doom riffs that plow through your grey matter like a corroded bulldozer.
Like most noisecore discography releases from bands who recorded hundreds of ultra-brief "songs", this has each release and live performance indexed as an individual track; at nearly fifty minutes, though, there is a shitload of stuff on here. The disc features their 1992 demo (loaded with songs like "Triumph Of Cats", "Coma Of Ghouls", "Speed Metal Makes Me Puke", "Stench Of Burning Penis", "Glen Benton Is Loser", and the classic "Butthole Is The Place To Be"), some brief but explosive shows from 1992-93, the absolutely savage Right Hand Path session from '92, filthy rehearsal recordings, and everything off of their No Sleep 'Til Kasisali World Tour 1992 tape. This stuff is brutal and one of the better examples of 90's noisecore, enhanced by the band's hardcore-informed level of savagery that unfortunately tends to go missing from these kinds of noise/blurr bands. Definitely recommended if you're into the ear-terrorism of Anal Cunt (obviously), Seven Minutes Of Nausea, Sore Throat, and Arsedestroyer...
Released on the Japanese label Devour in 2000, XXXTeenassrevoltXXX has gone down in the annals of extreme grind/noise/punk as one of the wildest, harshest grind records ever...quite a claim when you consider all of the insane shit that has come out since the mid-1980's, but one listen to this sophomore LP from Sweden's Arsedestroyer will show you the light. Not only is Arsedestroyer's ultra chaotic, ultra-low-fi whiteout blast insanity about as blown-out and violent as you can imagine, but the band encased this slab of annihilating wipeout in a gatefold jacket covered in graphic, hardcore homoerotic S&M illustrations that apparently caused several printers to refuse the job. The LP is divided into 19 tracks, but exists as a single relentless wall of Scandinavian thrash riffs that have been pushed into overdrive, the maelstrom of hyperspeed Discore riffs launching into an ear shredding blurr of white noise , with insane lightspeed solos drenched in FX ripping out of the slop alongside skull-exploding screams, sludgy pneumatic bass riffs, a ridiculous level of brutal treble overload, and layers upon layers upon layers of chaotic guitar noise. A godly blast of freeform psychedelic scum-noise, like Merzbow, Anal Cunt, Burmese, Fear Of God and Discharge all playing together at the same time, the resultant supernova of distortion, sloppy blastbeats, and amp-frying skree killing everything in a 100' radius. Awesome. You've gotta include a note stating that you're above 18 years of age if you're going to order this one, too, due to the explicit album art. Presented in a gatefold sleeve.
The boxload of CDRs that just arrived from R.O.N.F. provided us with a mixed bag of familiar noisecore bands and uneard-of outfits. This one man
grindnoise project from Youngstown, Ohio was one of the new ones, but there were a couple of things that made me want to pick this disc up: the name, for one
thing, complete with umlauts and sounding like a long forgotten relic from the early 80's Scandinavian HC scene; the fact that the label descibed this as
"Completely disgusting raping violence raw and sober drum-machine-powered Total Noise/Noisecore"; and what I'm seeing as a satirical track listing with track
titles like "780 Trax Of Noise", "80 Songs Part 1", "80 Songs Part 2", "Ear Raping Noise Terrorism (Part 1 of 4)", and "815 Tracks Of Noisecore Anarchy", all
of 'em seeming to poke fun at old Anal Cunt 7"s. Once I finally popped this garish looking CDR in to my player, though, the smile on my face was wiped right
the fuck off by a series of increasingly lengthy tracks that go from freaked out vocal/blastbeat/power electronic spasms that sound like Whitehouse speaking
in tongues while Agoraphobic Nosebleed's drum machine is set to eternal stun way off in the distance; glitchy harsh noise (harsh being an understatement);
silly movie samples; blood vomiting death roars swooping over blistering hard-drive digital noise chaos that sounds like a hundred lasers going off while
massive gears grind human skeletons to dust; and waves of crumbling distortion and demonic monk grunts that open up every fifteen seconds to reveal a
blastbeating drummer. Seriously extreme sonic annihilation. It's all the product of one Justin Barger, who uses a BC Rich Warlock axe, an amplifier pushed to
total atomization, and computer looping software to create these hellish, lightspeed scum mantras. There's almost 80 minutes of this stuff on here, and what
must be something like 2,000 "tracks" or something equally ridiculous, of ultra brutal vicious speedcore glitchnoise death that sounds like the harshest
Japanese noise gods Masonna, Merzbow, Pain Jerk and Incapacitants mashed together with Sore Throat, Seven Minutes Of Nausea and Swedish grind lords Fear Of
God and then puked back up by a satanic supercomputer. Limited to only 60 copies.
Opening with an ominous swell of violin strings that sets an apocalyptic mood, Art Of Burning Water quickly set into a ferocious set of artsy, occult tinged "holy terror" style metalcore that chucks out slabs of disgustingly heavy thrash metal breakdowns that wind through immense passages of dissonant instrumental math metal and huge sludgy dirges with washes of violin. This album is really pretty amazing, not just because of the sheer destructive power of the riffage presented on here that manages to be both weirdly complex and chaotic as well as bonecrushingly heavy, but also because the vocals are some of the most fucked up, insane sneered shrieks I've ever heard, sounding totally unhinged and EVIL and distinctly British, a perfect match for the sinister thrash/sludge/math/instrumental assault and the creepy, abstractly Satanic pen and ink artwork on the package and song titles like "Murder The Skies Of England". The disc has 10 songs in just under a half-hour, a tightly constructed blast of outsider thrash/metalcore that lays down loads of creep and closes out in an extended cacophony of twisted-metal feedback drone, haunting violin skree, and smoking amplifier carnage that would make both Boris and Skullflower proud. Another seriously recommended one from Superfi, the same label that brought you the similiarly-excellent Hunting Lodge album reviewed elsewhere in this weeks list as well as the UK release of Geisha's Mondo Dell'Orrore. Killer!
Does anyone outside of the United Kingdom know about these guys? I fuckin' flipped over their last album The Voyage of the Pessimistic Philosoph, which came out six years ago on the same label; the quirky mixture of blackened, brutal hardcore and thuggish noise rock that The Art Of Burning Water created on that record crushed in a big, big way, but despite my raving, it seems like they've gone on to fly further beneath the radar than ever. Didn't even know they were still around when Super-Fi dropped this new Lp in my lap, all decked out in black, minimal layout, an almost ascetic look to the thing. I couldn't slap it onto my deck fast enough though, and was once again quite flattened by what The Art has to offer. Apparently this stuff was recorded in 2007 but sat around on someone�s back burner, so the pummeling metallic chaos and grudge-fuck riffs sound like a direct continuation of their previous effort. Beginning with a gorgeous blurred out, distorted piano intro, Head Of The Tempest launches into a series of nine violent outrages of potent blackened hardcore, burly noise rock, and angular sludge, with standout drumming from skinpounder Jason who whips his kit into convulsive surges of complex, churning rhythm and force beneath the spiky angular metallic riffs, the sound frequently evoking a much more evil, blackened version of Mastodon. More than anything, it's always been front man Grief and his hysterical strangled vocals that have given Art Of Burning Water their unique psychotic edge, his throat veering dervish-like from gritty, low howling to agonized screaming to off-balance yowling with a very distinct British accent, the vocal parts used sparingly as the band grinds through long stretches of instrumental bludgeon. The riffs are MASSIVE, derived from a strain of ugly, Am Rep style noise rock that's outfitted with crushing metallic weight, and stretches of thunderous hypnotic drumming and trippy samples/effects lead off into weird almost industrial percussive freak-outs. The awesome closing track "Toymaker" is The Art at their most ferocious and fearsome, the singer's strangulated screams looped endlessly over a grueling slo-motion dirge-chug that's fucking monstrous. Recommended in a big way if you're into real heavy, real pissed metallic noise-rock mayhem with an evil, off-kilter quality. I can't wait to hear what they'll be doing next, as I've heard that The Art now have Dave Cochrane of Head Of David / Greymachine / Transitional / Ice fame playing bass for 'em. Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies on black vinyl.
Still one of the UK's best kept secrets, Art Of Burning Water has been terrorizing my sound system since 2006's The Voyage Of The Pessimistic Philosoph; back then, I compared the band to a blackened, Holy Terror-influenced math metal, and that's still pretty much what these guys sound like, an evil mix of droning ultra-heavy sludge, massive Unsane/Today Is The Day-esque noise rock, and an evil streak a mile long that makes Art Of Burning Water sound incredibly psychotic. They've been more active on the recording front as of late, dropping the excellent Head Of The Tempest Lp a year or two ago, and they've quickly followed that up with album number three, the vinyl-only This Disgrace, their first for the esteemed avant-rock imprint Riot Season. It's their best stuff yet, a collection of vicious aural beatings that are capped off on each side with extreme, sample-infested electronic blast-scapes. The singer's unique psychotic vocal style (an intense, gasping shriek that is a big part of this band's sickening, evil sound) sounds more crazed than ever before, and the production is perfect, giving these guys just the right amount of clarity to give their twisted, discordant heaviness the teeth it needs. Droning, skronky riffs inject a feeling of constant terminal unease as the band kicks things off with "You Won't Know Till You've Cried", building the tension until they explode into the crushing, angular heaviness with full force, an eruption of discordant sludgy crush like some massively distorted, pitch-black version of Am Rep noise rock. From there, they lurch through more crushing jagged metal and angular, often Slayer-esque riffs, often employing interesting post-production tricks to create a panic-driven nightmare of skewed electronic noise and warping effects (like on "Way Of Bastard"). And as with their previous albums, the songs have a proggy quality to some of this stuff that really evokes latter day Today Is The Day, but with a much more sinister, blackened feel. One of the best metallic noise rock bands around in my opinion, totally unique within the realm of contempo Am Rep-influenced brutality.
Still one of Britain's most overlooked bands, Art Of Burning Water are back with their latest slab of downtuned berserker evil, the vinyl-only Living Is For Giving, and it's just one more blood-splattered chapter in the band's ongoing cataloguing of humanity's eternal wretchedness. Their stuff also continues to fall oustide of any clearly delineated genre as well. Grindcore, demented thrash metal, downtuned doom, vomit-spattered punk, howling noise rock - all of that stuff is fed into the band's gnashing chaos, and comes out fused to a rabid, terrifying sonic assault that tears violently through these ten invectives. The label states that the band would be appreciated by fans of "Keelhaul, Rorschach, Voivod, Amebix, Godflesh and Motorhead", but that's not a comparison to the band's sound, but rather a suggestion of the sheer energy, abrasiveness and aggression that emanates from the music on this LP.
Despite the somewhat tongue-in-cheek song titles and their pitch-black sense of humor, this is incredibly vicious stuff, filthy, fractured metallic hardcore with viciously inverted riffs and an intense, bloodlusting vocal attack, which on songs like "Happiness Always Ends In Tears" kind of comes across as Converge's blackened, rabid little brother, with a similar ability to mix noise rock, metal and the most feral punk into a relentlessly aggressive whole, while the song "At The Hands Of Them" kicked this into higher gear and tore my goddamn face off with its brain-damaged, PCP-soaked take on Voivodian thrash. All of these songs on Living are fucking savage stuff, and much more powerful than any of these reference points can convey. Art Of Burning Water are use carefully selected and edited samples that they interlace with ghostly loops of industrial noise, brief noisescapes that are threaded around each belligerent blast of discordant, feral thrash to help build the misanthropic atmopshere that hangs over all of this stuff. Eruptions of slower, even heavier riffage juts violently out of that rampaging hardcore, the songs veering into a thresher of intricate churning breakdowns and murderous corkscrew grooves that turn an already violent sound into something even more brash and unbalanced; you definitely get the feeling that the guys behind this ultra-heavy ugliness have some genuinely anti-social tendencies. This album is just as ferocious as anything they've given us before, and is one of the nastiest sounding albums of its kind to come in here lately; it's criminal that these guys are better known in metal/hardcore circles - if they were on Deathwish instead of an avant-rock label like Riot Season, people would be losing their goddamn minds over this stuff. Well worth picking up if you're into the more insolent and off-beat violence found with the likes of Starkweather, Hard To Swallow and Kickback...
Here is yet another new outfit that has been mentored by the tectonic crush of Neurosis' Through Silver In Blood. This time, it's courtesy of Switzerland's epic post-hardcore Art Of Falling, whose mid-paced, seething punishment and hoarse brutal vocals are definitely in the heavy,brooding art-sludge mode of Neurosis as well as contemporaries Isis and Cult Of Luna, while also throwing in some slight Unsane-esque noise rock elements and direct nods to Mogwai/Sigur Ros in their clean post-rock passages. Extending Behind This Shape is all about mighty melodic riffs and dynamic quieter moments that erupt into heavier-than-thou payoffs by songs end. And it's good stuff. Art Of Falling keep their songs relatively short and to-the-point compared to most other metallic post-rock-influenced outfits, so you get alot of crunch packed into this discs half an hour running time. Definitely one for fans of Vancouver,Rebreather,Breach,Isis,The Other Side Of The Sky, Switchblade, etc.
Two sides of extreme jazz/prog blastage come together on this split Lp, featuring the extreme improv-jazz/thrash fury of French newcomers Artemisia Absinthium and some older unreleased material from Flying Luttenbachers leader and ugEXPLODE boss Weasel Walter,, released on limited edition colored vinyl by the Israeli label Heart & Crossbone in concert with a host of other small labels (Wee Wee, Saucisse + Lentilles R.E.C.O.R.D.S., Electric Junk, Amertume and Bande Noire Records).
The a-side introduces eight tracks from the French quartet Artemisia Absinthium, a gang of free-jazz thrashers who mix together squealing Ayler/Brotzmann style sax bleat over slack distorted bass that slips and groans like the roar of a revving engine, and frantic, fast-paced drumming that races between manic fills and blast beats, with a muddled chaos of electronic toy noises hovering in the background. Their aggressive blastjazz assaults are obviously influenced by bands like Last Exit, Painkiller and Flying Luttenbachers, but the shrieking high-pitched vocals sound like something from a more modern grind outfit.
AA whip up a bad-ass din that just gets heavier and grindier as they tear through their side, the screeching free-jazz-punk-grind freak outs occasionally slipping into brief sections of slower, grinding heaviness, slithering percussive rattle, and bizarre tandem vocal/sax grunts. Moments of relative calm are rare, such as on the last track where the band skulks through a creepy improv piece of horror noise ambience, backwards sound, and skittery looped percussion. It�s killer stuff, like something that could have come out on Amanita a decade ago; the high pitched yowls and chaotic drumming also reminds me of Total Fucking Destruction quite a bit, albeit mixed up in Painkiller-style jazzgrind.
Most folks know Weasel Walter for his louder, more aggressive group recordings with Flying Luttenbachers, 7000 Dying Rats, XBXRX and Hatewave, but he�s also an accomplished solo artist with a bunch of great recordings under his belt that tend to gravitate more towards the prog end of the spectrum. Here, he dusts off some previously unheard recordings that are definitely less brutal than what Artemisia Absinthium had to offer, but it�s also much creepier sounding stuff, the four tracks all recorded between 1999 and 2009 and appearing here for the first time, a mix of psychedelic improv and evil prog workouts. The first track "Decay Of The Species" is a creepy free-jazz/prog jam with propulsive drumming, mangled guitar blurt, and droning ascending synth; I'm hearing a RIO influence here at first, hints of Magma and UZ and Present, but then it turns into a heavy duty free-improv percussion wig-out with rioting analogue synths spewing space gas overhead. "Composition For Woodwinds And Solo Percussion" is my favorite piece here, a highly dark and sinister sounding chamber prog piece with dissonant woodwinds and low growling tones that's somewhere in between the demonic prog of Shub Niggurath/early Univers Zero and the film score work of composer Leonard Rosenman. This track is one of the best things that I've heard from Weasel, and would love to hear him explore this sort of creepy avant chamber music more in the future. The next track "Descension" is another heavy, evil-sounding prog piece, this one sounding even more like Shub Niggurath with atonal guitar lines scuttling over distorted rumbling bass and lurching rhythms. Closer "I'm Never Coming Back" combines eerie tape-speed manipulated strings, busy drumwork, hallucinatory clusters of percussion, extended bleating horns and howling orchestral elements, with Weasel's drumming becoming more chaotic and speedy until the piece turns into a blur of sound at the end.
Nicely packaged in a full color sleeve with a printed inner sleeve, pressed on clear green vinyl and limited to 500 copies.
��Ever since discovering Voivod's Dimension Hatr�ss as a kid, I've been more than a little obsessed with the union of heavy metal and science fiction imagery. What could possibly go better together? That fascination later led me to bands like Timeghoul, Nocturnus and Wormed, who all similarly ignited my imagination when I came upon their visions of time-traveling cyborg Christ assassins and nameless quantum horrors set against a backdrop of brutal, progressive death metal. With their debut album Labyrinth Constellation, the New York band Artificial Brain joins the ranks of the cosmically crushing, bringing their sweeping, proggy death metal to far-flung interstellar reaches, combining a complex, prog-infected heaviness with epic melodic flourishes and twisted, horrific imagery. Featuring some killer zomboid galactic warrior artwork from the now ubiquitous Paolo Girardi, Labyrinth blasts some seriously dizzying cosmic death metal from this new group, which features guitarist Dan Gargiulo (from technical death metallers Revocation) and Will Smith, who some of you might recognize from another weird death metal outfit called Biolich that was around for a short period in the mid-aughties.
�� Offering a strange combination of nebulous prog-death and putrid sewer-trawling vocals, Artificial Brain definitely don't skimp on sonic brutality. Starting with the rumbling, ultra-heavy downtuned drones that start off opener "Brain Transplant", the band lurches into the contorted death metal assault that dominates the album, an onslaught of complex angular death metal spiked with bursts of unexpected major-key melody, and possessed by an ultra-guttural vocal assault that reaches some pretty outrageous depths of unintelligible throat-destruction, often bursting into insane pig-squeals or frantic, larynx-shredding screams. Those spiraling major key guitar parts are one of the unique aspects of the Brain's brutal bombast, and there's more than once that those chiming, bright guitar parts start to sound like something off of some early 90s math rock record, spidery Slintlike melodies crawling all over the downtuned angular churn. Just as the music seems to spin out into a total blur of jagged discordant riffage and whirlwind blastbeats, though, the Brain will suddenly bring it back into sharp focus by shifting abruptly into one of their stunning melodic riffs, stratospheric, stirring hooks that come ripping out of the warped death assault. Keith Abrami's drumming is another highlight on Labyrinth, delivering a ferocious performance that flows fluidly from rapid-fire thrash tempos to eruptions of roiling double bass to wildly angular and off-kilter time signatures. You can hear a few hints of Obscura-era Gorguts in here, but that discordant skronk is sublimated within the band's churning sludgy heaviness, and they even make some cool use of eerie pipe organ-like textures on a couple songs that help to give this stuff its weird, gothic sci-fi feel, additionally peppered with stretches of otherworldly low-frequency electronic drone and ghostly glitch.
��Technically, this is right up there with some of the more high-profile prog-death albums that have come out recently from Gorguts and Pestilence, one of my favorite albums among the various eccentric death metal offerings I've gotten in at Crucial Blast so far this year, for sure. Highly recommended if you're into the progressive, otherworldly death metal of bands like Demilich, Portal, Gigan, Ulcerate, Mitochondrion, and latter-day Gorguts. Comes in a full color four panel digpack with a ten-page booklet.
�� Thus far my favorite death metal debut of 2014, Artificial Brain's monstrous sci-fi progdeath nightmare is now available on vinyl from Canadian reissue imprint War On Music, in gatefold packaging with a printed inner sleeve.
�� Ever since discovering Voivod's Dimension Hatr�ss as a kid, I've been more than a little obsessed with the union of heavy metal and science fiction imagery. What could possibly go better together? That fascination later led me to bands like Timeghoul, Nocturnus and Wormed, who all similarly ignited my imagination when I came upon their visions of time-traveling cyborg Christ assassins and nameless quantum horrors set against a backdrop of brutal, progressive death metal. With their debut album Labyrinth Constellation, the New York band Artificial Brain joins the ranks of the cosmically crushing, bringing their sweeping, proggy death metal to far-flung interstellar reaches, combining a complex, prog-infected heaviness with epic melodic flourishes and twisted, horrific imagery. Featuring some killer zomboid galactic warrior artwork from the now ubiquitous Paolo Girardi, Labyrinth blasts some seriously dizzying cosmic death metal from this new group, which features guitarist Dan Gargiulo (from technical death metallers Revocation) and Will Smith, who some of you might recognize from another weird death metal outfit called Biolich that was around for a short period in the mid-aughties.
�� Offering a strange combination of nebulous prog-death and putrid sewer-trawling vocals, Artificial Brain definitely don't skimp on sonic brutality. Starting with the rumbling, ultra-heavy downtuned drones that start off opener "Brain Transplant", the band lurches into the contorted death metal assault that dominates the album, an onslaught of complex angular death metal spiked with bursts of unexpected major-key melody, and possessed by an ultra-guttural vocal assault that reaches some pretty outrageous depths of unintelligible throat-destruction, often bursting into insane pig-squeals or frantic, larynx-shredding screams. Those spiraling major key guitar parts are one of the unique aspects of the Brain's brutal bombast, and there's more than once that those chiming, bright guitar parts start to sound like something off of some early 90s math rock record, spidery Slintlike melodies crawling all over the downtuned angular churn. Just as the music seems to spin out into a total blur of jagged discordant riffage and whirlwind blastbeats, though, the Brain will suddenly bring it back into sharp focus by shifting abruptly into one of their stunning melodic riffs, stratospheric, stirring hooks that come ripping out of the warped death assault. Keith Abrami's drumming is another highlight on Labyrinth, delivering a ferocious performance that flows fluidly from rapid-fire thrash tempos to eruptions of roiling double bass to wildly angular and off-kilter time signatures. You can hear a few hints of Obscura-era Gorguts in here, but that discordant skronk is sublimated within the band's churning sludgy heaviness, and they even make some cool use of eerie pipe organ-like textures on a couple songs that help to give this stuff its weird, gothic sci-fi feel, additionally peppered with stretches of otherworldly low-frequency electronic drone and ghostly glitch.
�� Technically, this is right up there with some of the more high-profile prog-death albums that have come out recently from Gorguts and Pestilence, one of my favorite albums among the various eccentric death metal offerings I've gotten in at Crucial Blast so far this year, for sure. Highly recommended if you're into the progressive, otherworldly death metal of bands like Demilich, Portal, Gigan, Ulcerate, Mitochondrion, and latter-day Gorguts.
One of our favorite death metal albums from 2014, Artificial Brain's monstrous sci-fi progdeath nightmare is now available on colored vinyl from Profound Lore with printed inner sleeve.
Ever since discovering Voivod's Dimension Hatr�ss as a kid, I've been more than a little obsessed with the union of heavy metal and science fiction imagery. What could possibly go better together? That fascination later led me to bands like Timeghoul, Nocturnus and Wormed, who all similarly ignited my imagination when I came upon their visions of time-traveling cyborg Christ assassins and nameless quantum horrors set against a backdrop of brutal, progressive death metal. With their debut album Labyrinth Constellation, the New York band Artificial Brain joins the ranks of the cosmically crushing, bringing their sweeping, proggy death metal to far-flung interstellar reaches, combining a complex, prog-infected heaviness with epic melodic flourishes and twisted, horrific imagery. Featuring some killer zomboid galactic warrior artwork from the now ubiquitous Paolo Girardi, Labyrinth blasts some seriously dizzying cosmic death metal from this new group, which features guitarist Dan Gargiulo (from technical death metallers Revocation) and Will Smith, who some of you might recognize from another weird death metal outfit called Biolich that was around for a short period in the mid-aughts.
Offering a strange combination of nebulous prog-death and putrid sewer-trawling vocals, Artificial Brain definitely don't skimp on sonic brutality. Starting with the rumbling, ultra-heavy downtuned drones that start off opener "Brain Transplant", the band lurches into the contorted death metal assault that dominates the album, an onslaught of complex angular death metal spiked with bursts of unexpected major-key melody, and possessed by an ultra-guttural vocal assault that reaches some pretty outrageous depths of unintelligible throat-destruction, often bursting into insane pig-squeals or frantic, larynx-shredding screams. Those spiraling major key guitar parts are one of the unique aspects of the Brain's brutal bombast, and there's more than once that those chiming, bright guitar parts start to sound like something off of some early 90s math rock record, spidery Slintlike melodies crawling all over the downtuned angular churn. Just as the music seems to spin out into a total blur of jagged discordant riffage and whirlwind blastbeats, though, the Brain will suddenly bring it back into sharp focus by shifting abruptly into one of their stunning melodic riffs, stratospheric, stirring hooks that come ripping out of the warped death assault. Keith Abrami's drumming is another highlight on Labyrinth, delivering a ferocious performance that flows fluidly from rapid-fire thrash tempos to eruptions of roiling double bass to wildly angular and off-kilter time signatures. You can hear a few hints of Obscura-era Gorguts in here, but that discordant skronk is sublimated within the band's churning sludgy heaviness, and they even make some cool use of eerie pipe organ-like textures on a couple songs that help to give this stuff its weird, gothic sci-fi feel, additionally peppered with stretches of otherworldly low-frequency electronic drone and ghostly glitch.
Technically, this is right up there with some of the more high-profile prog-death albums that have come out recently from Gorguts and Pestilence, one of my favorite albums among the various eccentric death metal offerings I've gotten in at Crucial Blast so far this year, for sure. Highly recommended if you're into the progressive, otherworldly death metal of bands like Demilich, Portal, Gigan, Ulcerate, Mitochondrion, and latter-day Gorguts.
A 2024 vinyl repress on "black blood orb" vinyl, a cool-looking blob of black and green wax that indeed looks like some biologic matter recovered from a distant interstellar warzone. Pretty rad.
This 2014 brain-blower was the first album from Artificial Brain, who came out with photon blasters cranked to the max with a complex, dissonant, deranged death metal attack that sort of picks up from the Timeghoul / Nocturnus / Wormed school of spaced-out science-fiction fueled experimental brutality. Which I'm always down for. These guys have had a hell of a pedigree over the course of their career, with assorted members connected to Luminous Vault, Aeviterne, Dreamless Veil, Afterbirth, Reeking Aura, Biolich, and Buckshot Facelift, mentioned below in my original album review. I loved having another opportunity to listen to this album again, which further cemented my appreciation of Constellation as one of the more imaginative and crazed "tech" death metal albums of the past decade - if you're a fanatic for "weird" death metal, I still can't recommend this album enough. Here's my original write-up:
One of our favorite death metal albums from 2014, Artificial Brain's monstrous sci-fi progdeath nightmare is now available on colored vinyl from Profound Lore with printed inner sleeve.
Ever since discovering Voivod's Dimension Hatross as a kid, I've been more than a little obsessed with the union of heavy metal and science fiction imagery. What could possibly go better together? That fascination later led me to bands like Timeghoul, Nocturnus and Wormed, who all similarly ignited my imagination when I came upon their visions of time-traveling cyborg Christ assassins and nameless quantum horrors set against a backdrop of brutal, progressive death metal. With their debut album Labyrinth Constellation, the New York band Artificial Brain joins the ranks of the cosmically crushing, bringing their sweeping, proggy death metal to far-flung interstellar reaches, combining a complex, prog-infected heaviness with epic melodic flourishes and twisted, horrific imagery. Featuring some killer zomboid galactic warrior artwork from the now ubiquitous Paolo Girardi, Labyrinth blasts some seriously dizzying cosmic death metal from this new group, which features guitarist Dan Gargiulo (from technical death metallers Revocation) and Will Smith, who some of you might recognize from another weird death metal outfit called Biolich that was around for a short period in the mid-aughts. It's also worth noting that this was produced by weird-death / prog-metal icon Colin Marston, which often points towards a more unconventional and offbeat approach to death metal.
Offering a strange combination of nebulous prog-death and putrid sewer-trawling vocals, Artificial Brain definitely don't skimp on sonic brutality. Starting with the rumbling, ultra-heavy downtuned drones that start off opener "Brain Transplant", the band lurches into the contorted death metal assault that dominates the album, an onslaught of complex angular death metal spiked with bursts of unexpected major-key melody, and possessed by an ultra-guttural vocal assault that reaches some pretty outrageous depths of unintelligible throat-destruction, often bursting into insane pig-squeals or frantic, larynx-shredding screams. Those spiraling major key guitar parts are one of the unique aspects of the Brain's brutal bombast, and there's more than once that those chiming, bright guitar parts start to sound like something off of some early 90s math rock record, spidery Slint-like melodies crawling all over the low-end angular churn. Just as the music seems to spin out into a total blur of jagged discordant riffage and whirlwind blastbeats, though, the Brain will suddenly bring it back into sharp focus by shifting abruptly into one of their stunning melodic riffs, stratospheric, stirring hooks that come ripping out of the warped death assault. Keith Abrami's drumming is another highlight on Labyrinth, delivering a ferocious performance that flows fluidly from rapid-fire thrash tempos to eruptions of roiling double bass to wildly angular and off-kilter time signatures. In addition, a couple of songs feature additional vocals from Paulo Henri Paguntalan from Encenathrakh, adding to the chaotic mania of the whole thing. Unsurprisingly, you can hear a few hints of Obscura-era Gorguts in here, but that discordant skronk is sublimated within the band's churning sludgy heaviness, and they even make some cool use of eerie pipe organ-like textures on a couple songs that help to give this stuff its weird, gothic sci-fi feel, additionally peppered with stretches of otherworldly low-frequency electronic drone and ghostly glitch.
Technically, this is right up there with some of the more high-profile prog-death albums that have come out recently from Gorguts and Pestilence, one of my favorite albums among the various eccentric death metal offerings I've gotten in at Crucial Blast so far this year, for sure. Highly recommended if you're into the progressive, otherworldly death metal of bands like Demilich, Portal, Gigan, Ulcerate, Pyrrhon, Mitochondrion, Abyssal and latter-day Gorguts.
In the works for over a year, the first issue of As Loud As Possible lives up to the expectations that had been building up with noise and industrial fans. Sub-titled "the Noise Culture magazine", As Loud As Possible was created to offer a well-written and professionally edited publication that would focus exclusively on the world of experimental noise, power electronics, post-industrial music, and related forms, and with this hefty 156 page commencement, things are looking really good. Sure, we have Special Interests which focuses on similar editorial content, but ALAP has a different feel from the grittier, more personal vibe of Mikko Aspa's zine; in fact, Aspa himself is one of the contributing writers for this issue.
There's a ton of stuff to stuff your eyes with: the extensive cover story on Rudolf Eb.er and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock, for starters, and a MASSIVE retrospective of Broken Flag Records that is essential reading for fans of the influential UK post-industrial label; there's an autobiography of the Haters written by GX Jupitter-Larsen; columns from GX Jupitter-Larsen (Haters), Steve Underwood, John Olson, Andy Ortmann (Panicsville), Mikko Aspa and several other writers; short interview pieces with Vomir and Helicoptre Sanglante; an essay titled The Politics Of HNW: The Roots Of Wall Riding by Sam McKinlay (aka The Rita), which is the best overview of the HNW philosophy that I've read so far; extensive and insightful interviews with Putrefier, Zone Nord, Sewer Election, Alien Brains, Climax Denial, Cheapmachines, Nicole Chambers (Ides Recordings), Apraxia Records, John Smith (the editor of the seminal early Industrial fanzine Interchange), Carlos Giffoni (No Fun); overviews of classic older Industrial albums; and tons of in-depth record reviews that I'm still in the process of reading. Perfect-bound and nicely designed with a clean, organized layout that incorporates all sorts of fantastic visual content (both rare/vintage and contemporary), this excellent magazine deserves a place on every noise/industrial/power electronics fan's coffee table. I can't wait for the next issue.
The new Black Drone imprint has been turning out a great series of dark ambient albums with more variety than you might expect; this disc from Asbaar is one of the label's latest, a slab of excellent minimal black ambient from Spanish artist Marc Merinee, who is also known for his involvement in the Cold Meat martial industrial group Eldar as well as the dark ritual prog band Equimanthorn (which also features members of Absu and Hexentanz, and is a huge favorite of mine...). Those fans of Eldar who check out Asbaar will hear a few similarities between the two projects in Merinee's solo work, but with Asbaar he pursues a more stripped-down and abstract form of dark industrial, this one made up of longer, more expansive tracks broken up with shorter interlude-like pieces. Once you start listening to Corona Veil Aurei, you're quickly embraced by vast metallic reverberations echoing within endless, lightless underground chambers, where mysterious unidentifiable sounds occur at the edges of hearing and abstract machinelike clank and echoing noises dissolve into the blackness without end. At its core, Asbaar crafts a massive abstract blackness that's pretty similar to Lustmord, the vast cavernous drift filled with the same sort of Lovecraftian dread and mystery. But there's an added mystic element to this that also suggests a kinship with the blackened Finnish drone rites of bands like Halo Manash, Zo�t-Aon, Aeoga and Arktau Eos. These elements appear as inhuman mutterings and chanting that drifts up from deep beneath the earth, those monstrous voices cloaked in swarms of creepy insectile buzz and flutter, disappearing behind the omnipresent drone of distant engines. Massive distorted cosmic synths start to show up with the third track "Agnosia" amid percussive noises and abstract glitchy sounds, but it's on "Lumur" where the sound really changes into a more fearsome soundscape, with eerie distant sirens sliding up and down in pitch, strange synthetic wailing and the far-off buzz of swarming locusts all filling the depths. From there, the faint sounds of bells and chimes emerge followed by sinister reptilian throat singing and nightmarish chanting, swells of formless black drift and metallic whirr bellowing out of the depths, joined by dissonant synthetic strings and pitch-black kosimiche synth-drone. The whole album moves equally between the more minimal Lustmordian crypt-drift and the heavier, caustic Cold Meat style sound, while maintaining a nightmarish feel throughout all ten tracks. Chilling stuff, highly recommended to any fans of serious ambient dread.
The disc comes in a six-panel digipack with a full color twelve page booklet with photos by Manel O. Company and writing from Merinee, and is limited to 480 copies.
A long overdue collection of everything that this seminal late 80's doomcrust group ever recorded - not only did Asbestosdeath crank out some mighty brutal sludgy heaviness, but the band also planted the seeds that would later grow into Sleep, High On Fire, and Om ! Asbestosdeath featured Al Cisneros, Chris Hakius and Matt Pike who would later evolve into the cult doom juggernaut Sleep, along with singer/guitarist Tom Choi (who would himself go on to join Noothgrush, It Is I, and Operator Generator). So obviously this is some seriously historical stuff for fans of sludge and doom metal, a compendium of both of the tracks from Asbestosdeath's self-released Unclean 7", and the two tracks off of the Dejection 7" that came out on the anarchopunk institution Profane Existence. Both of these records have been out of print for eons - I (Adam) already owned the Dejection EP, but never got a chance to hear the Unclean stuff, so we were freaking stoked to get this in! All four tracks have been mastered from the original source material, and sound crushing! Asbestosdeath were rooted in the sounds of crusty Bay Area hardcore like early Neurosis and Christ On Parade, but their love of Sabbath and Melvins turned their skuzzy hardcore into a slower, more turgid beast, with vaguely jazzy drumming and haunting intricate arpeggios picked out between their crushing riffs, and ending with a terrifying sample loop. Gritty, grungy atmospheric sludge core, alot like the music on Sleep's Vol. 4 if you need a frame of reference, presented with a package design by Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley.
Now available on thick, black vinyl!
A long overdue collection of everything that this seminal late 80's doomcrust group ever recorded - not only did Asbestosdeath crank out some mighty brutal sludgy heaviness, but the band also planted the seeds that would later grow into Sleep, High On Fire, and Om ! Asbestosdeath featured Al Cisneros, Chris Hakius and Matt Pike who would later evolve into the cult doom juggernaut Sleep, along with singer/guitarist Tom Choi (who would himself go on to join Noothgrush, It Is I, and Operator Generator). So obviously this is some seriously historical stuff for fans of sludge and doom metal, a compendium of both of the tracks from Asbestosdeath's self-released Unclean 7", and the two tracks off of the Dejection 7" that came out on the anarchopunk institution Profane Existence. Both of these records have been out of print for eons - I already owned the Dejection EP, but never got a chance to hear the Unclean stuff, so we were freaking stoked to get this in! All four tracks have been mastered from the original source material, and sound crushing! Asbestosdeath were rooted in the sounds of crusty Bay Area hardcore like early Neurosis and Christ On Parade, but their love of Sabbath and Melvins turned their skuzzy hardcore into a slower, more turgid beast, with vaguely jazzy drumming and haunting intricate arpeggios picked out between their crushing riffs, and ending with a terrifying sample loop. Gritty, grungy atmospheric sludge core, alot like the music on Sleep's Vol. 4 if you need a frame of reference, presented with a package design by Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley.
A massive new collaborative project between Greg Anderson (Sunn O)))/Goatsnake/Engine Kid) and Gentry Densley (Iceburn/Eagle Twin), Ascend combines their shared love of extreme sub-sonic tones and the dark fusion jazz of the late 1960's and early 1970's. It seems an unlikely mix, but Ascend have created an amazing debut that travels through regions of abstract doom metal riffage, glacial blues, and behemoth drones that are laced with elements of fusion like horns, reeds, and Wurlitzer electric piano. I've been getting more and more obsessed with 70's fusion like The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Weather Report, especially with the darker, more ominous strains of fusion from that period, and hearing these guys blend those elements with some of the most elephantine drone-doom riffage since early Sunn O))) made this album an immediate favorite. It's also great to see and hear Gentry Densley playing in a band that is this heavy again; his work in Iceburn in the 90's has always been criminally overlooked, and hopefully Ascend will introduce the guy to a new generation of heavy music seekers.
The six tracks on Ample Fire Within are lengthy epics that were borne out of improvisational sessions between the core duo of Anderson and Densley and the host of guest musicians that appear on the album like Steve Moore (Earth), Attila Csihar (Mayhem), Randall Dunn (Master Musicians Of Bukkake), Bubba Dupree (fuckin' VOID, man!), Bill Herzog (Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter), and Kim Thayil (Soundgarden). Massive, lumbering Melvins-style riffs plunder spacious planes of sub-bass drone and extreme low frequency rumbling (low enough to shake the walls when this gets cranked, especially when the extended feedback sculpting kicks in towards the end of "V.O.G.") when the group is at it's heaviest, but the sludge is tempered by passages of transcendent ambience and muted, jazzy textures, and the presence of the Wurlitzer electric piano is constantly felt, as soft flurries of Rhodes-style jazz piano notes drift across the background of both dirge and dronewall alike. Some of the best parts are when Steve Moore's trombones appear over the stentorian doom of "The Obelisk Of Kolob" and sound like battle horns blasting their fanfare over the marching of steel-booted troops to war, or the spacey organ and Moog drones and Native American field recordings that are layered all over the pulvering slo-mo sludge of "Her Horse Is Thunder", eventually sliced and strafed by a gnarly, congested guitar solo from Densley. Another absolutely ripping solo shows up in "V.O.G." and it's one of the album's most striking moments, when a screeching, utterly fucked-sounding atonal solo screams out of the lumbering Sabbathian riff courtesy of Bubba Dupree. Nice. Attila contributes his wordless demonic throat-chanting to the title track, but it's Densley's vocals that dominate the album, moving from the deep growling performance on "Divine" that suggests a subtle Tom Waits influence, to the processed death chants that drift slowly over the buzzing, sitar-infested dronescape of "Dark Matter".
I've been listening to this album constantly lately, and it almost won out over the new Made Out Of Babies for the featured release for this week. A fusion of jazzy organ and resonant Wurlitzer tones that sound like Chick Corea moving through glue and gargantuan abstract doom. Recommended!
The disc is nicely packaged in a six-panel gatefold case with full color artwork and an eight page booklet printed in sepia tones that features all of the lyrics.
Just picked up some of the last copies of the deluxe 2xLP version of Ascend's debut, pressed on 180 gram black vinyl, packaged in a heavyweight textured gatefold sleeve with printed inner jackets, and featuring two bonus tracks ("Desert Cry" and "Fenrir Ondi Ahman") that do not appear on the cd version.
A massive new collaborative project between Greg Anderson (Sunn O)))/Goatsnake/Engine Kid) and Gentry Densley (Iceburn/Eagle Twin), Ascend combines their shared love of extreme sub-sonic tones and the dark fusion jazz of the late 1960's and early 1970's. It seems an unlikely mix, but Ascend have created an amazing debut that travels through regions of abstract doom metal riffage, glacial blues, and behemoth drones that are laced with elements of fusion like horns, reeds, and Wurlitzer electric piano. I've been getting more and more obsessed with 70's fusion like The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, Miles Davis' Bitches Brew and Weather Report, especially with the darker, more ominous strains of fusion from that period, and hearing these guys blend those elements with some of the most elephantine drone-doom riffage since early Sunn O))) made this album an immediate favorite. It's also great to see and hear Gentry Densley playing in a band that is this heavy again; his work in Iceburn in the 90's has always been criminally overlooked, and hopefully Ascend will introduce the guy to a new generation of heavy music seekers.
The six tracks on Ample Fire Within are lengthy epics that were borne out of improvisational sessions between the core duo of Anderson and Densley and the host of guest musicians that appear on the album like Steve Moore (Earth), Attila Csihar (Mayhem), Randall Dunn (Master Musicians Of Bukkake), Bubba Dupree (fuckin' VOID, man!), Bill Herzog (Jesse Sykes & The Sweet Hereafter), and Kim Thayil (Soundgarden). Massive, lumbering Melvins-style riffs plunder spacious planes of sub-bass drone and extreme low frequency rumbling (low enough to shake the walls when this gets cranked, especially when the extended feedback sculpting kicks in towards the end of "V.O.G.") when the group is at it's heaviest, but the sludge is tempered by passages of transcendent ambience and muted, jazzy textures, and the presence of the Wurlitzer electric piano is constantly felt, as soft flurries of Rhodes-style jazz piano notes drift across the background of both dirge and dronewall alike. Some of the best parts are when Steve Moore's trombones appear over the stentorian doom of "The Obelisk Of Kolob" and sound like battle horns blasting their fanfare over the marching of steel-booted troops to war, or the spacey organ and Moog drones and Native American field recordings that are layered all over the pulvering slo-mo sludge of "Her Horse Is Thunder", eventually sliced and strafed by a gnarly, congested guitar solo from Densley. Another absolutely ripping solo shows up in "V.O.G." and it's one of the album's most striking moments, when a screeching, utterly fucked-sounding atonal solo screams out of the lumbering Sabbathian riff courtesy of Bubba Dupree. Nice. Attila contributes his wordless demonic throat-chanting to the title track, but it's Densley's vocals that dominate the album, moving from the deep growling performance on "Divine" that suggests a subtle Tom Waits influence, to the processed death chants that drift slowly over the buzzing, sitar-infested dronescape of "Dark Matter".
I've been listening to this album constantly lately, and it almost won out over the new Made Out Of Babies for the featured release for this week. A fusion of jazzy organ and resonant Wurlitzer tones that sound like Chick Corea moving through glue and gargantuan abstract doom. Recommended!
� � Started up by Crown Of Bone mastermind / ex-Demonologist member Dustin Redington in 2012, Occult Supremacy is a CDR label focused on "Blackened Noise, White Noise, Death Industrial, HNW, Dark Ambient, Black Metal, Horror Drone"; in other words, exactly the sort of stuff that I can't stop listening to here at C-Blast. The label's crude aesthetic is pure 90's harsh noise, with each disc issued in a limited run of fifty copies and packaged in either a slimline jewel case or a plastic sleeve with minimal Xeroxed artwork, the discs themselves either scrawled on with black magic marker or blasted with abstract spray-paint patterns. But the sound that Occult Supremacy traffics in is total horror, heavily leaning towards the bleakest strains of harsh noise wall and experimental, noise-damaged black metal, and over the past year it has maintained a crazed release schedule that has already produced nearly forty discs, from a variety of artists that includes slightly more recognizable names from the harsh electronics underground (Vomir, Burial Ground, Luasa Raelon). While we haven't been able to get all of the Occult Supremacy titles in stock, we have managed to stock a pretty large selection of their titles, all of which are recommended listening to anyone into the filthiest depths of black noise, experimental black metal, and brutal electronic noise.
� � One of my favorite Occult Supremacy discs, Ascetic Hedonism debuted here with this five song album of pitch-black ambience and ghastly crypt-drift, and it's one of the creepiest things that the label has vomited up so far. Opening with the sound of ritualistic wailing and waves of lightless hypnotic drone that make up "Descent", this obscure outfit slowly unfurls a sprawling subterranean soundscape filled with death-chant whispers and blasts of distorted funerary horn, sheets of gleaming dark electronics and lush low-end synth, distant cries that echo endlessly throughout the winding passageways and cobwebbed chambers of Dark Rift. Throughout the album, horns are pulled apart into ghoulish moans, and distant wailing voices are transformed into smears of glacial agony. The track "Devoid Of Light" features arrhythmic pulses beneath gusts of ghastly moan and orchestral drift, a kind of abstract electronica draped in deformed French horn blasts and dank oubliette atmosphere, and on "As The Bladed Ball Spins" the creepy ghoulish ambience is disturbed by the echoing pound of drums and ringing metallic reverberations. "Rattling Of The Cold" is a grim symphonic murmur, washes of muted glacial strings suspended above dank dripping dungeon ambience, dripping water and rattling chain links, gusts of slow cymbal shimmer and black kosmische fog, and the closing track ventures even deeper into those vast cosmic electronics, becoming a billowing cumulus of hellish brass and woodwinds, tumbling in slow motion through the yawning black void of the "Dark Rift" like a dark jazz album that has been chopped and screwed into monstrous ritualistic ambience. These drones have a vast, cavernous sound heavily influenced by the bleakest Lustmord albums, but those ghostly, vaporous incantations and the glacial orchestral tones transform this into something that's a whole lot closer in feel to the occult black drift of Zero Kama, Emme Ya, Funerary Call, Aghast and Aymrev Erkroz Prevre. Really impressive.
� � Limited to fifty copies.
This invocation of rot and minimalist charnel ambience from Italy's Aseptic Void first surfaced as a digital release a while back, but has finally been reissued in physical form for collectors, presented in digipack packaging with cool, almost Beardsley-esque cover art, in an edition of five hundred copies. A nice accompaniment for Aseptic Void's morbid post-industrial music, which unfurls across these nine tracks as eerie echoing tones and half-formed minor key melodies drifting glacially through vast expanses of lightless emptiness. Creepy stuff.
Cardiac pulses reverberate through the depths of sprawling black ambience, a muted murky throb that drifts in and out beneath slowly-shifting layers of sonic mire. Soft bursts of writhing, malevolent electronics materialize in the midst of tense, unsettling drones that are suspended across immense near-silent voids. The first several tracks are all steeped in this sparse, desolate atmosphere, but when it gets to "Beyond The Suffocation", the sound turns more threatening, leading into even darker and more sinister regions as swells of almost orchestral murmur are stretched and smeared through the blackness, with waves of heavy distorted synthdrone washing through the field of sound, a doomed, oppressive atmosphere taking hold as the rest of the album continues this downward descent into pure abyssal ambience. Strange rattling noises and subterranean sounds lurk on tracks like "Circumspection", suggestive of traversing immense unlit underground passageways while the sounds of a mass transit system rumble overhead; elsewhere, crackling blackened static is layered over those glacially drifting drones to create an unnerving, entropic effect.
And it takes an unexpected turn into ghostly trip-hop with "Black Toy Box", weaving chilling, cinematic music with horrific screams, sounds of sudden violence, and dubby echo around a languid breakbeat; it comes out of nowhere, but makes for an interesting diversion from the immersive and mesmerizing stygian driftscapes that comprise most of Carnal. Another standout is "Suspended In The Void" with its soundtracky feel, lone footsteps moving through some dank subterranean chamber while Carpenterian synthesizers growl in the shadows. And the last track "Violate", which is exclusive to this reissue, sounds like field recordings of poltergeists discovered beneath the ambient sounds of a particularly busy morgue. Definitely one to check out if you're hooked on bleak, Slaughter Productions-style death industrial aesthetics.
Featuring Dominick Fernow of Prurient/Cold Cave/Vegas Martyrs/Hospital Productions and Kris Kapke of Northern Cross/Alberich, NY black metal duo Ash Pool has returned with their newest album of raw furious negativity, with more than a few surprises in store for fans who have been following the band since their early Genital Tomb/Black Bondage in the North works. With Fernow involved, you might expect the music of Ash Pool to be on the noisier, more abstract end of USBM, but this stuff turns out to be actually far more melodic and catchy than you'd think, playing a brand of hooky, blown-out punky black metal on previous releases that situated them alongside the likes of Bone Awl, Akitsa, Ancestors, Malveillance and Aanal Beehemoth, and now with For Which He Plies The Lash moving into more progressive territory , with a thicker, more glossy recording, some superbly warped riffing and arrangements and some amazing melodic turns that dropped my jaw a couple of times when I first gave this disc a spin.
All of the older Ash Pool material was punishing enough, but any preconceptions that I had for this album were wiped out as soon as opener "Holocaust Temple" kicks in, starting off with a fucking EPIC jagged intro, then hurtling into a whirlwind of frenzied swarming black riffage and scorched screeching vocals, totally blackened and violent, but with the vocals spinning off into soaring, seemingly harmonized singing, a little like later Enslaved but weirdly "poppy", not at all what I was expecting, but it sounds killer. Suddenly, the song shifts into this long passage of mid-tempo melodic metal, a super poppy rush of raging riffage, then shifting abruptly once again into bizarre loping polka-like melody, almost like some demented blackened Irish traditional tune gone metal before blasting right back into the ferocious holocaustic blackthrash. Fucking AWESOME.
The breakneck blasting BM keeps burning: next is "A Sacrifice Consumed By Fire", putrid death shrieks and guttural howls over grinding back dirge, dissonant guitars buzzing in the background, super heavy and strangely groovy up until it blasts into more super fast violent blackthrash, then switches back into another pounding mid-tempo black n' roll groove. "Big Bang Black Metal" is another ripper that kicks off with a crushing death n' roll riff and deep demonic grunts, shifting between an eerie angular melodic break with sinister trippy lead guitar and jagged rhythmic pummel, and the thrashing blackened gallop and awesome harmonies of the second half. There's the awesome hardcore-tinged black blast of "Porcelain Cancer Spear" that veers from fucked blackthrash to majestic rocking mid-tempo with haunting harmonized vocals in the blink of eye, and the clean soaring singing and spastic black buzz of "White Dwarf Death Mask". The whole album is full of these weird and jarring rhythm and tempo changes, exemplified by the final two tracks: woozy waltzing doom shifts back and forth into a pounding ultra heavy dirge on "Moon Rose", and the crushing black dirge "On The Rings Of Saturn Adam And Eve Conceive Cain" starts with grimy droning riffage that suddenly breaks off into some surprisingly spacey thrash, with swirling Hammond-like buzz and cosmic synth whirr morphing into a droning blurr of minor key thrash riffing and pounding static blast beats, then hurtling back into epic melodic black metal with more soaring majestic melody and buzzing mosquito riffs over relentless blast beats and some really manic, complex tremolo shredding.
Man, their earlier stuff ripped, but this is a whole new level for the band, a faster more melodic dimension to Ash Pool's fearsome brand of black metal.
We now have the black vinyl edition of For Which He Plies The Lash in stock!
Featuring Dominick Fernow of Prurient/Cold Cave/Vegas Martyrs/Hospital Productions and Kris Kapke of Northern Cross/Alberich, NY black metal duo Ash Pool has returned with their newest album of raw furious negativity, with more than a few surprises in store for fans who have been following the band since their early Genital Tomb/Black Bondage in the North works. With Fernow involved, you might expect the music of Ash Pool to be on the noisier, more abstract end of USBM, but this stuff turns out to be actually far more melodic and catchy than you'd think, playing a brand of hooky, blown-out punky black metal on previous releases that situated them alongside the likes of Bone Awl, Akitsa, Ancestors, Malveillance and Aanal Beehemoth, and now with For Which He Plies The Lash moving into more progressive territory , with a thicker, more glossy recording, some superbly warped riffing and arrangements and some amazing melodic turns that dropped my jaw a couple of times when I first gave this disc a spin.
All of the older Ash Pool material was punishing enough, but any preconceptions that I had for this album were wiped out as soon as opener "Holocaust Temple" kicks in, starting off with a fucking EPIC jagged intro, then hurtling into a whirlwind of frenzied swarming black riffage and scorched screeching vocals, totally blackened and violent, but with the vocals spinning off into soaring, seemingly harmonized singing, a little like later Enslaved but weirdly "poppy", not at all what I was expecting, but it sounds killer. Suddenly, the song shifts into this long passage of mid-tempo melodic metal, a super poppy rush of raging riffage, then shifting abruptly once again into bizarre loping polka-like melody, almost like some demented blackened Irish traditional tune gone metal before blasting right back into the ferocious holocaustic blackthrash. Fucking AWESOME.
The breakneck blasting BM keeps burning: next is "A Sacrifice Consumed By Fire", putrid death shrieks and guttural howls over grinding back dirge, dissonant guitars buzzing in the background, super heavy and strangely groovy up until it blasts into more super fast violent blackthrash, then switches back into another pounding mid-tempo black n' roll groove. "Big Bang Black Metal" is another ripper that kicks off with a crushing death n' roll riff and deep demonic grunts, shifting between an eerie angular melodic break with sinister trippy lead guitar and jagged rhythmic pummel, and the thrashing blackened gallop and awesome harmonies of the second half. There's the awesome hardcore-tinged black blast of "Porcelain Cancer Spear" that veers from fucked blackthrash to majestic rocking mid-tempo with haunting harmonized vocals in the blink of eye, and the clean soaring singing and spastic black buzz of "White Dwarf Death Mask". The whole album is full of these weird and jarring rhythm and tempo changes, exemplified by the final two tracks: woozy waltzing doom shifts back and forth into a pounding ultra heavy dirge on "Moon Rose", and the crushing black dirge "On The Rings Of Saturn Adam And Eve Conceive Cain" starts with grimy droning riffage that suddenly breaks off into some surprisingly spacey thrash, with swirling Hammond-like buzz and cosmic synth whirr morphing into a droning blurr of minor key thrash riffing and pounding static blast beats, then hurtling back into epic melodic black metal with more soaring majestic melody and buzzing mosquito riffs over relentless blast beats and some really manic, complex tremolo shredding.
Man, their earlier stuff ripped, but this is a whole new level for the band, a faster more melodic dimension to Ash Pool's fearsome brand of black metal.
Quite a ferocious black metal album from this Russian outfit. They've got a raw, pissed off attitude and a treble-heavy edge that makes me think of some
of then Ukrainian black metallers like Hate Forest and Astrofaes, but then they bust out these awesome punky midtemp thrash parts that are total Darkthrone.
The riffs and hooks on this album are top notch, too, catchy and epic, and their keyboardist Katerina drapes eerie orchestral synths over the band's
shredding blackened thrash, floating sheets of spacey strings singing in the background. She also harnesses this weird melty, swirly synth sound on a couple
of spots on the album that sound closer to the manipulated pink feedback of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless than yer typical BM synth pomp. But
there's no mistaking this for any shoegazey black metal. Ashen Light's blackness is fierce, atmospheric and harsh, hypnotic riffs loping across wintery
wastelands, epic midtempo melodies blasted over roiling double bass drumming, everything with a thin, distorted buzzing tone that packs just enough of a
punch while sounding like the whole band is covered in frost. Their frontman is Lord Demogorgon, and his gurgling, hateful shrieks alternate with deep death
metal growls. Ashen Light are one of the only Russian black metal bands that I've heard, but they've got a potent, frostbitten savagery that rivals that of
their eastern European neighbors.
Supernal is always a great source for awesome outsider black metal, and this 2005 release from the UK band Ashes is right up there alongside labelmates Benighted Leams, Dead Raven Choir, Drudkh, and Contra Ignem Fatuum in terms of twisted, highly personal BM strangeness. Another loner Black Metal outfit, Ashes is the work of one Davidian (a.k.a. David Lumsden), and Hymn To A Grey Sky was Ashes' debut full length following a pair of demos. The album is composed of eight "chapters" with titles like "Leaf Lord" and "I, The Forest" that are tracked together as a single 47 minute piece. Working with a hybrid of woodland ambience, field recordings, and stumbling black metal, the music could be comparable to a fuzzier, dronier Benighted Leams, the sort of shambling, fucked up midpaced mutant black metal that Supernal specializes in so well; the 47 minutes of Hymn... wind through open fields of fast, buzzing black metal and spastic mid-tempo lurch with fucked up offtime drum machine programming and stumbling blastbeats, haunting, wobbly synth ambience and distant carnival keyboards buried deep in the mix, strange and melancholy acoustic guitars, dreamy drone interludes, and intensely creepy, cackling vocals that sounds more like the gurgling of a slit throat than any sort of intelligible speech, all of this cloaked in a grim, grey wash of gauzy ambience. Then, in the middle of the album, there's this huge stretch of natural ambience that opens up, the sound of the forest with running water, birdsong, leaves rustling in the wind, a really evocative field recording of woodland life that lasts for something like 15 minutes before it erupts into another melancholy, fuzz-blasted midtempo dirge that drifts into a weird gloomy outro with classical guitars, tambourines, heavy tympani drumming, and swells of synth melody. It feels like Ashes explores similiar sylvan glades as the seemingly likeminded projects Celestiial and Svart Ugle, and this album turns out to contain a surprising balance between grave distortion inferno and woodland tranquility.
English artist Phil Todd has been an underground presence for well over a decade, engaging in countless groups and collaborations, signing on as an occasional member of Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sunroof!, and releasing numerous documents through his Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers and Memoirs of an Aesthete labels. Todd�s major achievement, though, is his ongoing solo project Ashtray Navigations. Releasing a baffling amount of cassettes, LPs, CDs and CD-Rs, Todd has refined a singular take on modern drone construction that references the dynamics of rock, the emotional evisceration of blues, and the white-light intensity of noise. This new follow-up to Ashtray Naviagtion's crucial Four Raga Moods is another heavy dose of transportational drone rock/feedback bliss from guitarist Phil Todd and company, who on this disc include Alex Neilson, Ben Reynolds, Mel Delaney, Chris Hladowski, Matt Cairns, Andy Jarvis and Pete Nolan of Magik Markers. On Four More Raga Moods, glacial amp trances slowly unfold around epic guitar drip, gauzy folk figures, and rotating casio drones.This is a baked haze of bleached guitar drones and woozy consumer electronics, as cassette tape detritus accumulates around epiphanic guitar leads, occasionally evoking Keiji Haino in miniature. An exquisite broadcast from an interstellar shortwave radio station, with his blasted guitar submerged under frazzled layers of distortion. Excellent, dreamy trash drone, definitely advisible to fans of Sunroof! and Vibracathedral Orchestra (both of which are bands that Phil Todd has worked with in one form or another), as well as the mid-90's psychedelic Skullflower output and the New Zealand drone sound. Packaged in a killer fold-out, full-colour four-panel digipak.
Michael Frenkel's latest album of black kosmische drift under the Aspectee name is actually the first release from the German artist that I've heard, even though he's been recording and releasing dark ambient records for years with earlier projects like Evoke Scurvee. The stamp of the Black Drone imprint on Aspectee's second album Jour Cinq was reason enough for me to pick this disc up, and fans of the label will find this to be another satisfying dose of subterranean ambience, comprised largely of icy, muted synthesizer figures circling around vast cavernous spaces filled with lush reverb and endless abyssal darkness. There's a myriad of mysterious sounds flitting through the void of Jour Cinq, ranging from ominous voices trailing off into the depths, strange creaking sounds and scraping noises and various field recordings, swells of terrifying orchestral strings and distant war-horns sounding off in the deep, smears of washed-out piano, ghostly EVP-like transmissions flickering in the gloom, fragments of backwards sound and clanking metal, gusts of arctic wind, hazy choral voices, the sound constantly seeming to pulse with menace as Frenkel flows through the dim gloom of vast underworld passageways. On some parts of the album ("Poudure", "Roter Wald") Frenkel ventures into an eerie cinematic territory that's really similar to Tangerine Dream at their most sinister, sometimes bringing minimal electronic rhythms into the mix, but more often he simply constructs layer upon layer of chthonic drift that slowly blooms out of the depths, with later tracks venturing into blacker regions of sonic terror nearer to the likes of Lustmord and Atrium Carceri. Aspectee doesn't veer too far from the classic stygian ambient sound, but fans of the more dread-filled, less hospitable depths of dark drone/kosmische music a la Northaunt, Vinterriket, Phaenon, early Encomiast, and False Mirror will probably find this as satisfying as I did.
Zero-bullshit mach-10 grindcore from a short-lived NYC band that for a moment were one of the best fucking grind bands on the planet! The Way Of All Flesh was the first album from ASRA and came out earlier this year on Black Box, the label run by Mike Hill from Tombs, and grind fans have been giving this disc all kinds of praise over the past few months, only to have the band break up this past October. I'll be kicking myself for awhile for missing out on the show that Asra played in Baltimore with Hayaino Daisuki and Gridlink the month before they broke up.
ASRA, or Alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse (possibly the best name ever?), serve up eleven tracks of scathing hyperspeed violence that takes the best stuff from classic Earache grindcore like Napalm Death and early Brutal Truth, the gnarly West Coast hardcore/powerviolence of bands like Crossed Out, Man Is The Bastard, and Spazz, and the razor-sharp assembly of Discordance Axis and puts it all together into short, punishing blasts of intricate death/grind. Like Pig Destroyer and Discordance Axis, these guys forego a bass player, but you'd never know it from listening to this disc - the bottom end is HUGE, with massive sludgy riffs sharing sonic space with whirlwind thrash parts and downtuned death metal riffing, seared by staccato blastbeats and jarring stop-start drumming. The vocals? Sufficiently brutal, and that's one of the places where you can hear that West Coast hardcore influence creep in - the deeper, gutteral grunts are pure death metal, but whenever the high pitched, maniacal shrieks break in, the vocals remind me of Siege. Nothing wrong with that! The whole thing is so tight and so expertly executed that The Way Of All Flesh clocks in at barely 20 minutes and you still feel like you were just sucked into a jet engine head-first. This definitely ranks as one of the best grind releases of the past few years, and if you have been fiending for a fix of the kind of contorted, prescision grindcore that Discordance Axis delivered, you could a whole lot worse than hear ASRA.
Zero-bullshit mach-10 grindcore from a short-lived NYC band that for a moment were one of the best fucking grind bands on the planet! The Way Of All Flesh was the first album from ASRA and came out earlier this year on Black Box, the label run by Mike Hill from Tombs, and grind fans have been giving this disc all kinds of praise over the past few months, only to have the band break up this past October. I'll be kicking myself for awhile for missing out on the show that Asra played in Baltimore with Hayaino Daisuki and Gridlink the month before they broke up.
ASRA, or Alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse (possibly the best name ever?), serve up eleven tracks of scathing hyperspeed violence that takes the best stuff from classic Earache grindcore like Napalm Death and early Brutal Truth, the gnarly West Coast hardcore/powerviolence of bands like Crossed Out, Man Is The Bastard, and Spazz, and the razor-sharp assembly of Discordance Axis and puts it all together into short, punishing blasts of intricate death/grind. Like Pig Destroyer and Discordance Axis, these guys forego a bass player, but you'd never know it from listening to this disc - the bottom end is HUGE, with massive sludgy riffs sharing sonic space with whirlwind thrash parts and downtuned death metal riffing, seared by staccato blastbeats and jarring stop-start drumming. The vocals? Sufficiently brutal, and that's one of the places where you can hear that West Coast hardcore influence creep in - the deeper, gutteral grunts are pure death metal, but whenever the high pitched, maniacal shrieks break in, the vocals remind me of Siege. Nothing wrong with that! The whole thing is so tight and so expertly executed that The Way Of All Flesh clocks in at barely 20 minutes and you still feel like you were just sucked into a jet engine head-first. This definitely ranks as one of the best grind releases of the past few years, and if you have been fiending for a fix of the kind of contorted, prescision grindcore that Discordance Axis delivered, you could a whole lot worse than hear ASRA. The CD version comes in a full color digipack with complete lyrics (printed in type so small you'll need a magnifying glass to go over it). Crucial.
Featuring striking artwork from Daniel Danger on both sides of a heavy picture disc, this EP sports four songs from The Assailant, whose heavy, manic metalcore recalls the likes of Deadguy and Kiss It Goodbye, that crazed and chaotic noise-rock inflected style that sounds like the band is on the verge of falling apart at any moment. The riffs in these songs are pretty nuts, a combo of mathy angularity and seething metallic dirge; the drummer pushes the songs through abrupt time sig changes and rolling tom-driven breakdowns; and the singer bellows and screams so violently that you're just counting the seconds before he blows out every lymph node in his body. Crushing, discordant heaviness that doesn't add much in the way of new ideas to this mode of metalcore but sure doesn't slack in the intensity department, either. And Danger's artwork is truly haunting, a kind of Derek Hess-gone-cartoon-art style that sets his faceless Nurse character against the backdrop of a starlit sk
y while protoplasmic hands reach up towards her, begging for healing. It's a limited edition of 666 copies, with a black obi-style strip that is embossed with metallic silver that wraps around the record, with lyrics and notes printed on the inside.
��One of the few Mexican black metal albums that's come into C-Blast lately, Astarot's As Leaves Fall offers a solitary sound that brings together gorgeous, mysterious ambient synthesizer music, searing raw black metal, and some elements of ethereal darkwave into a somber, slightly off-kilter sound. It's some pretty isolationist stuff, music for people who spend a lot of time hanging out by themselves in the woods, and it definitely feels like it was created by someone with the same kind of habits. I was actually first turned on to Astarot's raw ambient blackness after hearing 'em on WFMU's My Castle Of Quiet, where they were spinning a few tracks off of this then-unreleased album earlier in 2013; the gloomy, shadowy sounds that drifted off of that show ended up only hinting at the odd, bewitching quality that flickers throughout these nine tracks.
�� Working here as a duo with vocalist Tortured, Astarot shifts between those ambient environmental soundscapes and passages of raw, tortured black metal, thick with the ambience of the ancient forests that surround Irapuato, Mexico. The album opens up into a verdant soundscape of woodland noises and birdsong, droning mournful keyboards breaking through this sylvan ambience like rays of light breaking through the forest canopy, warbling sheets of synth-strings drifting through the woodland shadows. Beautiful stuff, even when Astarot finally creeps in with his demonic screeching vocals, a hateful reptilian shriek that echoes off in the background. When the second song "Chapter II - Nacer, Perecer y Renacer" drifts in, the sound becomes more peculiar, the sound of heavy, driving double bass rumbling in the background, switching off with slower, sparser slowcore-like tempos, but the guitars are absent at first, replaced with those droning keyboards; it's not until a little later on the album that the blackened tremolo riffs begin to appear, dissolving into the background over those distant reverb-drenched drums. There's a strange distant quality to the recording, as if we're hearing the band performing this from somewhere off in the woods, and Tortured's anguished, abject shrieks sound lost amid the album's strange, spacious sound, forlorn cries drifting off into the background. The black metal passages at times remind me of the raw, synth-drenched wilderness visions of Marblebog, but these are often just brief bursts of aggression scattered among the album's many sprawling atmospheric dirges led by those dreamy keyboards. As the album continues, washes of gorgeous bleary Tangerine Dream-esque synth unfold over the slow, spacious drumming, while other tracks are little more than a lone electric guitar weaving a slow, doleful melody around those forest sounds, sending out waves of tremulous arpeggios into the gloom. If it weren't for those anguished shrieking black metal vocals, the music on tracks like "Walking in the Forest of Time, the Eternal Forest" and "Despair" would actually sound a lot more like something from gloom rockers Lycia or early Love Spirals Downward, but with those undercurrents of double bass surging into view beneath the floating keys and dark dreamy atmosphere, it becomes something else entirely. And other songs like "Revelation of the Storm" are almost akin to the murky ambience of Vinterriket transplanted to ancient Mexican forests, funereal synth-strings hovering mournfully over the pounding distant drums and washes of grim, grainy sonic drift.
���� This reissue of an alleged mid-70's occult rock band's sole 7" just got repressed; I'm pretty sure by this point that the whole thing is a hoax, but it's an enjoyable one. Here's the old review from the original release:
���� Much like their awesome reissue of the lone album from hard rockin' apocalypse cult The Law, this delicious 7" is a blast of infernal obscurity from the brilliant minds behind Unseen Forces. Somehow, these guys managed to arrange a reissue of what appears to be a hyper-unknown two-song single from the early 70s Detroit band Astaroth, whose name has apparently only been previously known to serious seekers of vintage occult-tinged garage rock. If the 'net is to be believed, this 7" (their only release aside from an appearance on the cult comp Michigan Meltdown on Coney Dog), seems to have been a grail of sorts to hardcore fans of infernal psychedelia, as a quick glance around the 'net reveals that original pressings purportedly have gone for over $250. Yikes. Hence this re-issue via Unseen Forces, bringing us a re-mastered edition of the single for a vastly saner price. The a-side is the main attraction: a short, insanely infectious rocker that's somewhere between the grit of classic Motor City proto-punk and the 13th Floor Elevators, with lyrics typical of that era's swingin' Luciferian infatuation. The b-side "Lady Of The Moon" is a slower but similarly occult-themed number that to me sounds almost like a more raw take on the psychedelia of early Amboy Dukes; still a pretty cool tune though, and definitely redolent of that particular time period.
���� Gotta admit though that I'm skeptical as to the veracity of this record. Did a little research on this band having never heard of them before, and I haven't been able to come up with a single reference to the band that dates prior to 2011. An elaborate prank on the "occult rock" obsessed underground? Perhaps. Even if it is a hoax, it still rocks mightily, highly recommended to anyone with an ear for ancient, devilish hard rock...
���� Limited to three hundred copies.
Another older Metal Mind reissue that I'm just now discovering, Astharoth's 1990 debut Gloomy Experiments is a lesser-known prog-thrash obscurity from this Polish outfit that I just recently discovered after reading about them on some "weird thrash" list someone had posted online. Being someone who can never get enough oddball thrash, I went looking for this album after seeing them described as an unusual Voivod-influenced outfit, and Experiments turned out to be a great discovery. This stuff is a highly confusional brand of progressive thrash metal, pretty wonky stuff actually.
These guys were obviously drawing heavily upon both the otherworldly, spaced out dissonance of Voivod and the pummeling Teutonic thrash of bands like Kreator and Destruction with rampaging tempos and ferocious buzzsaw riffage, but that was then filtered through a quirky, somewhat spaced-out vision that rendered this into something much more unique. The guitars have a lush, textural feel, the vocals are a youthful snarl that matches the energy of the music, with introspective lyrics, and the songs shift between that furious thrash metal, strange almost jazzy guitar explosions, groovier rocking moments, icy dissonant chords, all wound together into a set of nine sprawling, elaborately laid out songs that are delivered with an energetic, not too polished delivery. Intricate and brainy metal with lots of surrealistic atmosphere. Can't say I've heard anything quite like this album. The experimental, ambitious aspects make this something that fans of classic prog-thrash a la Coroner, Watchtower, Voivod, Mekong Delta and the like would want to check out, but Astharoth are much more prone to slipping out of their thorny thrash into sequences of chorus-drenched progginess that leads their album into unexpected directions.
While Astharoth's Gloomy Experiments aren't essential if you're into progressive / weirdo thrash metal, their stuff is certainly interesting if you're into the weirder fringes of late 80s/early 90s thrash metal. This reissue pairs the album up with an additional seven bonus tracks that were recorded after the band relocated to the US in the early 90s, much of which gets into even more Voivodian territory. Re-mastered and Comes in digipack packaging with booklet and liner notes, limited to machine numbered 2000 copies.
I still have copies of the Polish import Metal Mind reissue that just features the album itself along with eight bonus tracks taken from the demos, and is beautifully packaged in a glossy digipak. The more recent Dark Symphonies reissue expands upon that with jewel case packaging and a 20 page booklet loaded with new liner notes, album and recording info, pics, and complete lyrics, but even more importantly, a second disc that is packed with demo, studio, and live material, much of which has never been previously released. Very nicely done. I myself had to upgrade to this one just because of the whopping 65 minutes of additional recorded material on a second disc.
Here's my older review of the music from the Metal Mind reissue :
Another older Metal Mind reissue that I'm just now discovering, Astharoth's 1990 debut Gloomy Experiments is a lesser-known prog-thrash obscurity from this Polish outfit that I just recently discovered after reading about them on some "weird thrash" list someone had posted online. Being someone who can never get enough oddball thrash, I went looking for this album after seeing them described as an unusual Voivod-influenced outfit, and Experiments turned out to be a great discovery. This stuff is a highly confusional brand of progressive thrash metal, pretty wonky stuff actually, and additionally stands out for being one of the few European thrash outfits of the time to have a female lead guitarist (Dorota Homme), who also contributes vocally for a really unique and eclectic style.
These guys were obviously drawing heavily upon both the otherworldly, spaced out dissonance of Voivod and the pummeling Teutonic thrash of bands like Kreator and Destruction with rampaging tempos and ferocious buzzsaw riffage, but that was then filtered through a quirky, somewhat spaced-out vision that rendered this into something much more unique. The guitars have a lush, textural feel, the vocals are a youthful snarl that matches the energy of the music, with introspective lyrics, and the songs shift between that furious thrash metal, strange almost jazzy guitar explosions, wild shredding, groovier rocking moments, some obvious post-punk influences, icy dissonant chords, all wound together into a set of nine sprawling, elaborately laid out songs that are delivered with an energetic, not too polished delivery. Intricate and brainy metal with lots of surrealistic atmosphere. Can't say I've heard anything quite like this album. The experimental, ambitious aspects make this something that fans of classic prog-thrash a la Coroner, Watchtower, Voivod, Mekong Delta and the like would want to check out, but Astharoth are much more prone to slipping out of their thorny thrash into sequences of chorus-drenched progginess that leads their album into unexpected directions. While Astharoth's Gloomy Experiments aren't essential if you're into progressive / weirdo thrash metal, their stuff is certainly interesting if you're into the weirder fringes of late 80s/early 90s thrash metal. This reissue pairs the album up with an additional seven bonus tracks that were recorded after the band relocated to the US in the early 90s, much of which gets into even more Voivodian territory.
OK, so on to the second disc that comes with the Dark Symphonies reissue. This one is awesome, with loads of unique, non-album material. You get a total of fourteen tracks, remastered versions of every demo the band ever did. This stuff varies in quality both in terms of songwriting, performance, and recording quality, but it's all crucial listening if you are a fan. I love the chronological track order, tracing their music from the early, chaotic roots through to the more sophisticated prog-thrash of their album-era material. The songs that feature the combination of female and male lead vocals are really great, too: "Wisdom Of The Blind" sounds as much influenced by the punchy post-punk of Killing Joke and Ghost Dance as it is by Voivod, Watchtower and Testament. Actually, in some ways this band feels like it shares more genetic material with Anacrusis than anyone else I can think of. The non-album songs prove to be pretty intriguing, with some of this demo material going even deeper into prog-rock territory than they did on Experiments. You get the 1991 Wisdom Of The Blind demo tape ("Wisdom Of The Blind", "Misplaced Senses", "Nameless"), the 1992 Limits demo tape ("Limits", "Egos Of Myself", "Accused"), the 1994 Cycles Of The Sphere demo tape ("Cycles Of The Sphere", "Denial"), and the 1990 Self-Hatred demo tape ("Toll Of Hypocrisy", "Self-Hatred", "Gloomy Experiments", "Circles Of Confusion"). There is also a previously unreleased song, "House Of Frustration", and a live track ("Drunk Hate ") that appeared on the Metalmania '89 compilation that came out on the obscure Polish cassette label Atomica.
�� Just discovered this band after checking out the American black metal imprint Singularity Publishing for the first time. Astral Rebirth are a Mexican black metal outfit who do their own take on synth-draped atmospheric buzz; hardly a new sound, of course, but I definitely dug just how far these guys lean towards the electronic/industrial end of this style, an approach that takes this tape into some sinister lower planes of blackened industrial ambience. This is the precursor to the bands debut full-length on Winterglow; The Axis Of The Utter Black Ocean features four tracks of blazing modern black metal laced with some seriously gorgeous passages of black kosmische drift. When the tape starts off, it's with a cloudy electronic dronescape called "Black Visual Void" where the band sprawls out through several minutes of minimal rumbling sonic fog. From there, they launch into the furious twelve-minute "Distortion Mental Process", and the sound transforms into a sweeping, murky brand of black metal, the riffs imbued with a sorrowful, melancholy feel that at times recalls the likes of Drudkh. That sound is fleshed out with layers of jangly chorus-drenched guitar and discordant riffs, the feral snarling vocals drowned in distortion, a hiss-soaked snarl that's buried way down in the mix.
�� And then there's those synthesizer textures, adding a cinematic quality to Astral Rebirth's music. This stuff slips into some really cool atmospheric passages, like when the majestic blackened drone of the guitars slowly fades into the distance and we're left with just the sound of delicate acoustic strings being plucked over a field of minimal electronic drift. The production is the right kind of murky, and heavily layered, the sheets of symphonic strings muffled by a haze of hiss that could just be a side effect of the cassette format, but which works well with the generally hazy feel of the music. The tape ends with one final ambient soundscape called "Seabreath", another grim mass of looping orchestral sound and grinding industrial drones, a symphonic blackened dronescape that almost has a classic Cold Meat feel going on. Sure, there's a ton of bands out there doing this sort of stuff, but Astral Rebirth's stirring melodies, ultra Tangerine Dream-ish keyboard arrangements and the noise-flecked production make this one of the better releases of its kind.
Usually, when I think of Finnish doom metal, it's funeral-doom and deathdoom bands like Skepticism, Shape Of Despair, Thergothon, Minotauri, Dolorian, stuff like that. Immense, crushing slabs of depressing ultradoom drenched in nihilism and sadness. Noone does that shit better than the Finns, methinks. Then, out on the periphery of Finnish doom metal, you have Unholy, a band that existed from the late 1980's through the beginning of this decade and who turned that sloooow miserable Finnish doom sound into something hallucinogenic and unpredictable. Nobody quite sounded like Unholy, but Finland has continued to bring us some other oddball doom outfits that are obviously following in Unholy's footsteps, like Umbra Nihil and the ultra-bizarre Aarni. Another band that we can aqdd to this tradition of pushing the weirdness envelope is Astral Sleep, whose debut album Unawakening came out recently on the Russian doom metal label Solitude Productions. The crux of Astral Sleep's music is deathdoom, slow creeping deathdoom that echoes the classic downer trudge of Skepticism and Thergothon, and there's enough depressing heaviosity on this album to satisfy any deathdoom junkie. But Astral Sleep infuse their deathdoom with other sounds that turn this into something much more unique and challenging, incorporating baroque, almost Medieval-sounding melodies, choruses of demonic grunting and hellish distorted screams, weird electronic effects, creepy horror-movie soundtrack music, stoned psych-guitar leads and Pink Floyd-esque soloing, parts where the band breaks off into an throbbing 80's rock instrumental before dropping back in with crushing doom riffage, lots of cool interplay between clean guitar and distorted doom, recordings of seagulls and waves crashing on a beach, delicate acoustic folk and sweeping Tangerine Dream keyboards, all arranged into multiple "movements" across epic 12+ minute songs. The band also makes weird detours into 70's style proto-doom worship a la Pentagram and Sabbath, or break out a harmonica all Neil Young-like over a creeping doom riff, and the singer keeps things interesting too, going from deep, raspy deathgrowls to super-dramatic opera crooning, and every once in a while will even bust out an awesome, insane Halford-esque falsetto scream. Whoa! These guys aren't as over the top and off-the-wall as Aarni, but the album weaves and winds through so many different parts and directions that anyone into mutant outsider doom will dig this bigtime.
A super limited picture disc, limited to 400 copies, featuring one side each from the Finnish avant-jazz collective Astro Can Caravan and psychedelic beat sculptor Bradford Reed. For their side, fragments of an Astro Can Caravan rehearsal tape is redesigned by DJ Ohra into "Lost Robot", who turns their deep space psychedelic jazz into an aggressive breakcore track. The band's epic big band arrangements which normally sound like an epic fusion of Fela Kuti afrobeat and Sun Ra's cosmic jazz are cut up and mutated into stuttering, fastpaced breakbeats and layers of vocal samples, squelchy Moog synths and blasts of heavy drone guitar mixing with swells of UFO sounds and what vaguely sound like metal riffs somewhere underneath DJ Ohra's chaotic beatscape. I wasn't expecting this at all from Astro Can Caravan, hearing their far out skronk recontextualized as a ripping dose of aggressive, heavy breakcore. Sounds like something Planet Mu would put out, actually.
Weird instrument inventor Bradford Reed offers �Bright Moons & Bird Dances� on the flipside, and it's a much mellower piece by comparison. Reed has worked with King Missile III and Michael Gira before, and here he crafts an alien gamelan mantra put together with drums, bells, and a strange instrument called the "Pencilina", some kind of ten-stringed board that is played by striking pencils or chopsticks against the strings, kind of a cross between a mutant gamelan, a chapman stick, and a piece of junkyard scrap. He's joined by Matthew Pierce who contributes some eerie, austere violin strains that bring a mystic Chinese air to the track's percussive ethno-drone.
That tonguetwisting moniker is gonna be instantly recognizeable to followers of the international noise scene, a three headed flamethrowing feedback beast, a collaboration between Japan's master of space-blast Astro (aka Hiroshi Hasegawa), Norway's Jazkamer (the duo of John Hegre and Lasse Marhaug), and Hair Stylistics (another Japanese noise artist, Masaya Nakahara of Violent Onsen geisha). A single 45 minute track recorded live at Earthdom in Tokyo, Japan in March of 2007, Motorcycle Fuck With The Ghost Rider is a crushing hellish psych-noise epic, brutally dense sheets of galactic EMS synthesizers drfting through infernal clouds of vocal noise, feedback laden doom guitar, and noxious electronic squirm and skree. Spin this disc at full volume and it'll liquify yer innards by the ten minute mark. Ultra distorted cosmic synth annihilation and high power harsh noise, shot through with fleeting bits of grinding doom metal guitar and overdriven amplifiers vomiting out black feedback tentacles. Think CCCC meets Merzbow meets Jazkamer's Metal Machine Music. A thousand electronic devices screaming in terror, dense layers of noise and distortion and trippy synth tones and screeching feedback all melting together.
It's an Archive release, and the disc comes in another one of Archive's rad gatefold sleeve packages, this one designed by Lasse Marhaug himself, it has a diecut circle on one side that reveals the flaming skull artwork on the disc face, and the sleeve is covered in illustrations of the Ghost Rider and pics of Mr. T surrounded by wingding style icons of narcotic paraphernalia and various symbols. The disc itself is attached to the inside of the gatefold sleeve by a plastic hub. And limited to only 600 copies!!
The French black metal scene gets alot of coverage around here due to my ongoing obsession with the weird, often avant-garde music that has been coming out of that country over the past two decades, but theres another European black metal scene that's just as tweaked and amazing and possessed with it's own unique sound that I haven't had as much of an opportunity to explore, that being the BM underground emerging from the Ukraine. There have been a handful of Ukrainian bands that we've carried here at C-Blast in the past, Drudkh being one of the most popular that we've stocked, and as I've continued to dig deeper into the story behind Drudkh and it's members, I've come across some related bands that have turned out to be pretty fucking incredible as well. Astrofaes hails from the city of Kharkiv in the Ukraine, and features members of Drudkh, Blood Of Kingu, Hate Forest, and Khors, but where those bands often incorporate quite a bit of folkish melody into their sound, Astrofaes goes for a much more ferocious sound, mighty hyperspeed black metal brutality with a touch of death metal, especially in the gutteral vocals of singer/guitarist Thurios. There is plenty of melodic guitarwork in AStrofaes's music though, but instead of the almost wistful, mournful melodies of Drudkh, the riffs and occasional keyboards here are triumphant, evil, and thoroughly coated in frost and hatred.
2007's Idea Form Essence is the sixth album from Astrofaes, and one of their heaviest. The death metal elements really come to the fore this time around, with lots of crushing midpaced chug and the vocals even more bestial and gutteral than ever. Fast as fuck too, with awesome hyperspeed blastbeats littered everywhere, situated pefectly alongside raging midtempo parts. Definitely picking up on the ferocious Hate Forest sound in a big way, but more polished, and much heavier, a feirce blast of brutal black metal majesty with incredible riffs, blazing, crushing drumming and those insanely brutal vocals. Throws a bit of a curveball with the last track, a strangely proggy song called "In The Fog" that starts off soft and folky and psychedelic, with chorus-heavy clean guitars and droning synths, then moves into thunderous midpaced metallic churn before taking off at full blast into epic highspeed blasting that goes back and forth between fast and unfuckinggodly mach 20 blastbeats that threaten to shake the teeth right out of my jaw - and then the song suddenly changes direction back into the mellower jangly section, before moving onto an epic loping Drudkh style riff.
Comes with a thick sixteen page full color booklet that includes lyrics in both English and Cyrillic.
The French black metal scene gets alot of coverage around here due to my ongoing obsession with the weird, often avant-garde music that has been coming out of that country over the past two decades, but theres another European black metal scene that's just as tweaked and amazing and possessed with it's own unique sound that I haven't had as much of an opportunity to explore, that being the BM underground emerging from the Ukraine. There have been a handful of Ukrainian bands that we've carried here at C-Blast in the past, Drudkh being one of the most popular that we've stocked, and as I've continued to dig deeper into the story behind Drudkh and it's members, I've come across some related bands that have turned out to be pretty fucking incredible as well. Astrofaes hails from the city of Kharkiv in the Ukraine, and features members of Drudkh, Blood Of Kingu, Hate Forest, and Khors, but where those bands often incorporate quite a bit of folkish melody into their sound, Astrofaes goes for a much more ferocious sound, mighty hyperspeed black metal brutality with a touch of death metal, especially in the gutteral vocals of singer/guitarist Thurios. There is plenty of melodic guitarwork in AStrofaes's music though, but instead of the almost wistful, mournful melodies of Drudkh, the riffs and occasional keyboards here are triumphant, evil, and thoroughly coated in frost and hatred.
Compared to the brutal hyperspeed black metal of Astrofaes 2997 album Idea Form Essence, this 2005 album is much closer in sound to the member's work in Drudkh, with more of a folk influence on the melodies and mournful atmosphere that appears on some of these songs. Make no mistake though, Those Whose Past Is Immortal is a ferocious album, filled with furious blastbeats and whiplash inducing tempo changes, beautiful melodies entwined around fierce minor key riffs, and it sounds alot like the early Drudkh stuff, but with an almost nonstop relentless blastbeat attack. Like most of the Ukrainian black metal that I've heard so far, this is ferocious and majestic, and highly recommended to fans of both Drudkh and Hate Forest.
A double compact disc boxset of heavy analog synthesizer powerdrones and space noise. This collaborative project between Damion Romero of 90's "power-acoustic" outfit Speculum Fight and P-Tapes, and Hiroshi Hasegawa of Astro/C.C.C.C./Mortal Vision recorded between 1995 and 2005, and their entire output is all gathered together in this swank box set. Romero and Hasegawa collaborated live, in studio, and through the mail during this time, creating extended explorations into the psychedelic power of vintage analogue synthesizers. taking cues from the psychedelic black hole electronics of C.C.C.C., who were considered the Hawkwind of Japanese noise. But Astromero is definitely a force unto itself, as these guys create skullbending assaults of UFO liftoff and circuit hum, colored green and black in the purring shadow of a gigantic, monolithic refridgerator erected on earth by some eldritch race. Pulsing drones and crackling black-lightning rhythms throb in a manner reminiscent of Kluster, Faust, and Conrad Schnitzler. The first disc features studio/mail collaborative material,including guest spots from L.A. Free Music Society member/Keiji Haino collaborator Rick Potts and C.C.C.C. member and Mason Jones collaborator Miyuko Hino...and the second disc is compiled from two live synchronised performances in 2002 in Tokyo that ends in the gnashing jaws of an apocalyptic bass loop. Ten years of powerdrone/electro psych blast conceptualism capsuled in a molded metal tin with glossy color insert folder, and sealed with a printed label. It comes together as a killer, fully satisfying compendium of imaginative Japanese drone/noise and electronic psychedelia. Limited to only 500 copies.
Wow...this is a massive triple CD boxset that collects recordings of all four of Astromero's live performances from their 2006 U.S. tour, fully documenting their earth-shaking sets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and Brooklyn. The duo of Hiroshi Hasegawa (also of legendary Japanese psych-noise band C.C.C.C. and South Saturn Delta) and Damion Romero (formerly of Speculum Fight and head of the P-Tapes label) have been far from prolific, with the self-titled double CD set on Troniks from 2005 collecting their only studio recordings, so this hefty set is a must for any fans of Astromero's crushing space-noise. The duo originally existed between 1995 and 2005 as an offshoot of Hasegawa's post-C.C.C.C. project Astro, where he further explored the transcendental power of distorted analog synthesizers. When Hasegawa teamed up with Romero in the early 90's, the two of them collaborated both through sending recordings back and forth through the mail and eventually meeting up in person. The result is some of the heaviest synthesizer-based freeform drone noise ever, a combination of the ultra-low-end synth throb heaviness that Romero had experimented with in his own work, and the sweeping cosmic electronics of Hasegawa's music that came out sounding like someone took only the crazy electronic sounds from Hawkwind's Space Ritual, made them one hundred times denser and heavier, and played back the psychedelic synth sounds at skull-shattering levels of volume and distortion.
It wasn't until 2006 that folks over here in the U.S. would finally get a chance to witness the power of Astromero. The four-date tour was centered around a performance at the No Fun Fest in Brooklyn, NY in March of 2006, and a trio of West Coast dates were included in the itinerary. This set captures every one of these performances, with the first disc featuring the Los Angeles and San Francisco sets, the second disc featuring two seperate shows that took place in Oakland, California, and the third disc capturing the monolithic performance at No Fun. Each performance typically runs from 20-40 minutes, and erupts with huge showers of heavily distorted synth buzz and crunching, crushing low-end frequencies that sometimes reach Earth 2 levels of ambient heaviness, over top of which the two musicians unleash all manner of squiggly analogue signals and swooping oscillator noise, deep-space blips and bleeps, sounds that could be swarms of intergalactic battle angels singing in choir, and fluctuating sinewaves that make my heart shudder. Every one of these performances is epic and unbelievably loud, and totally improvised, and in spite of that fact this never sounds like the kind of chaotic earblow skree that people usually associate with Japanese noise. Astromero are on a totally different level, forging crushing, almost overwhelming but totally engaging slabs of trippy, psychedelic formlessness. Highly recommended to anyone into Astro and/or C.C.C.C. and psychedelic, brain-melting cosmic drone noise.
Troniks packaged this three-CD set in a huge jewel box with a cool, minimal design on the outside that focuses on the set's track listing and Astromero's logo, and on the inside it has photos of interstellar oceans of stars burning through the night sky, and an eight-page booklet with track notes, show details, and photos from each of the performances.
This tape just came in with the pile of Wilt-related releases that showed up this week, a 90 minute cassette from a project called Astronomy that I can only guess is a side project of James Keeler of Wilt, who runs the Institute For Organic Conversations label that this was released on. The full color artwork for the tape depicts a cosmic expanse dotted with asteroids floating through the void, and the look of it had me thinking that the music contained inside was going to be some sort of cosmic drone or similiar ambience. Astronomy's sound is cosmic alright, but this is anything but drone - each side of the tape unleashes a massive wall of brutally dense and churning psychedelic noise filled with half-glimpsed riffs, waves of crushing distortion, amorphous rhythmic pulses and massive buried beats. It sounds like it could have been formed by layering hundred and hundreds of black metal samples on top of each other, which wouldn't be too surprising given Keeler's appropriati
on of metal forms for his crushing noise/drone scultpures in Wilt. But again, who knows who is actually behind this project and what the sound materials used to create it are...there's no information on Astronomy to be found anywhere online, and the tape itself is devoid of information or text of any kind aside from the Institute label info and logo. All we're left with is a massive blast of ultra heavy psych-wall that sounds like CCCC mixed with The Rita that roars off of the cassette tape at spine-destroying volume.
Once again, back in print after being unavailable for more than a year...
Monstrous, heavy-as-lead death/doom debut full length from members of Weakling, Dystopia, and Skaven! A Clarion Call is ridiculously epic, with 3 songs that range from 12 to 15 minutes each. This stuff is really atmospheric, but even with the cello and droning chant-like singing that mingles with demonic growls, this is some of the heaviest doom you could want. Asunder also has a great melodic element with vast,catchy dirge-riffs and leads, but never falls into "cheesy" territory like so many epic doom bands do...it's all class, albeit brutally slow and crushing. The whole album sounds appropriately gigantic thanks to the production of the always-reliable Billy Anderson (Weedeater, Swans). A Clarion Call is a terrific debut, and perfectly combines early UK melodic death/doom, Thergothen / Skepticism style funeral dirge, Disembowelment -esque blackness, and the classic doom of Pentagram and Saint Vitus. Dismal, mournful, menacing, and catchy as hell!
Now availble on vinyl, and the only version available since the CD went out of print.
Second full length album from Oakland's doomcrust veterans (featuring members of Weakling, Dystopia, Skaven, and Amber ASylum) contains only two tracks: the first, 'A Famine', trudges on a funeral march for 22 minutes; the second, 'Rite Of Finality', weighs in at an oppressive 50 minutes in length. You just can't rush the sort of glacial, scorched-earth lamentations that these guys throw down. Total trance inducing doom, combining the gloomiest Finnish funeral doom metal (a la Skepticism, Swallow The Sun, Thergothon) with a similiar brand of tectonic deathcrust peddled by Asunder's Japanese tour buddies Corrupted, and an ability to construct amazingly expressive heartrending melodies. 'A Famine' balances the crushingly slow riffage, gutteral deathmetal vocals and Gregorian like chanting with majestic, sorrowful twin guitar harmonies, elegant cello strains performed by Jackie Perez-Gratz (whom you might also know from Amber ASylum) and heavy armageddon poetry ("calming storms still incessant void looms on/vibrant stream without origin without end"); 'Rite' begins as a beautifully gloomy instrumental played on acoustic guitars, cello, almost jazzy in a way, until the heavy cathedral tones of the guitars appear in the distance and the song slows to a saurian crawl, winding through rusted corridors of funereal deathdoom, bottoming out into a low, sublime drone that reaches nearly inaudible levels of ambience for over half an hour as the song creeps to a shadowy, ghoulish close. Awesome atmospheric doom! In a full color jacket with rad artwork from David D'Andrea.
Finally back in print, this new edition of Asunder's latest doom opus is repackaged in a six panel digipack.
Second full length album from Oakland's doomcrust veterans (featuring members of Weakling, Dystopia, Skaven, and Amber Asylum) contains only two tracks: the first, 'A Famine', trudges on a funeral march for 22 minutes; the second, 'Rite Of Finality', weighs in at an oppressive 50 minutes in length. You just can't rush the sort of glacial, scorched-earth lamentations that these guys throw down.
Total trance inducing doom, combining the gloomiest Finnish funeral doom metal (a la Skepticism, Swallow The Sun, Thergothon) with a similar brand of tectonic deathcrust peddled by Asunder's Japanese tour buddies Corrupted, and an ability to construct amazingly expressive heartrending melodies. 'A Famine' balances the crushingly slow riffage, guttural death metal vocals and Gregorian like chanting with majestic, sorrowful twin guitar harmonies, elegant cello strains performed by Jackie Perez-Gratz (whom you might also know from Amber Asylum) and heavy Armageddon poetry ("calming storms still incessant void looms on/vibrant stream without origin without end"); 'Rite' begins as a beautifully gloomy instrumental played on acoustic guitars, cello, almost jazzy in a way, until the heavy cathedral tones of the guitars appear in the distance and the song slows to a saurian crawl, winding through rusted corridors of funereal deathdoom, bottoming out into a low, sublime drone that reaches nearly inaudible levels of ambience for over half an hour as the song creeps to a shadowy, ghoulish close.
Awesome atmospheric doom. In a full color jacket with more rad artwork from David D'Andrea.
Another crushing one from the Life Is Abuse vaults, this time pairing up Texan punk/black/death crusties LIKE FLIES ON FLESH with ultra heavy SF
death-doomsters ASUNDER, whose A Clarion Call album from last year fuggin' flattened us, serving up thick chunks of epic thunderous
sludgery from DYSTOPIA personnel channeling thee heaviest strains of early Peaceville style doom filtered through pure Bay Area stench. ASUNDER is
up first on this CD version of the original split LP, with two lengthy tracks of gargantuan Godzilla sized riffs crawling through sluggish death metal-on-12
rpm monstrosity, heavy and leaden like old MY DYING BRIDE and CATHEDRAL but light on the gothic trappings. LIKE FLIES ON FLESH follow, featuring a member of
epic metal weirdos HAMMERS OF MISFORTUNE, and rip thru 5 ferocious jams of fast paced, hardcore-infected black metal blasted with crazed Swedish death, think
AT THE GATES with crooning female vocals appearing in the less-nuclear passages, raw and feral shit, jammed with chainsaw guitars suddenly breaking off into
twin axe harmonies worthy of MAIDEN's Killers, fronted with total mental vocals. Total crush.
Another crushing one from the Life Is Abuse vaults, this time pairing up Texan punk/black/death crusties LIKE FLIES ON FLESH with ultra heavy SF
death-doomsters ASUNDER, whose A Clarion Call album from last year fuggin' flattened us, serving up thick chunks of epic thunderous
sludgery from DYSTOPIA personnel channeling thee heaviest strains of early Peaceville style doom filtered through pure Bay Area stench. ASUNDER is
up first on this CD version of the original split LP, with two lengthy tracks of gargantuan Godzilla sized riffs crawling through sluggish death metal-on-12
rpm monstrosity, heavy and leaden like old MY DYING BRIDE and CATHEDRAL but light on the gothic trappings. LIKE FLIES ON FLESH follow, featuring a member of
epic metal weirdos HAMMERS OF MISFORTUNE, and rip thru 5 ferocious jams of fast paced, hardcore-infected black metal blasted with crazed Swedish death, think
AT THE GATES with crooning female vocals appearing in the less-nuclear passages, raw and feral shit, jammed with chainsaw guitars suddenly breaking off into
twin axe harmonies worthy of MAIDEN's Killers, fronted with total mental vocals. Total crush.
The second album from the avant-doom ensemble Asva (which features members of Goatsnake, Sunn, Burning Witch, Faith No More, and Mr. Bungle) is a moving piece of work on a couple of different levels. This follow-up to their stunning debut Futurist's Against the Ocean is even more abstract and arty, as much an experimental drone album as it is a monument to gravity-expanding doom metal, but more notably, What You Don't Know Is Frontier follows in the wake of the tragc 2005 death of Michael Dahlquist, a member of the Chicago band Silkworm and brother of Asva leader Stuart Dahlquist. That actuality imbues Asva's music with a new level of power and depth, as it states on the inside of the jacket for Frontier, this is "because of Michael". The four tracks presented here explore the band's brooding, droning art-doom with extended time-stretched riffscapes that, at their shortest, clock in at more than thirteen minutes, and each of these pieces feels like a meditation, the sound forming into densely blanketed expanses of rumbling, droning heaviness and epic buzzscapes. The band employs a variety of synths, wind instruments, percussion, vocals, and electronics alongside the immense downtuned riffage, but where you'd expect groove, or propulsion, there is instead a weird sort of stasis as each riff and carefully scored section feels pregnant with tension, moving through a intensely detailed terrain of percussive texture and finely sculpted low-end. While the music here is most defintiely crushing, this feels more cinematic than visceral, an epic doomscape formed from dramatic riffage, minimal droning organs, swirling clouds of metallic cymbal shimmer, flashes of Earth-like twang, densely layered feedback, haunting female vocals, chimes, more like an apocalyptic modern music piece than "metal", abstract, grandiose, and almost devoid of light. Heavy stuff in more ways than one.
The vinyl version of Asva's latest album is now in stock, presented in a gorgeous heavyweight package that unfolds into a six-panel gatefold, the jacket printed on heavy matte stock with spot varnish printing, and pressed on thick colored vinyl.
The second album from the avant-doom ensemble Asva (which features members of Goatsnake, Sunn, Burning Witch, Faith No More, and Mr. Bungle) is a moving piece of work on a couple of different levels. This follow-up to their stunning debut Futurist's Against the Ocean is even more abstract and arty, as much an experimental drone album as it is a monument to gravity-expanding doom metal, but more notably, What You Don't Know Is Frontier follows in the wake of the tragc 2005 death of Michael Dahlquist, a member of the Chicago band Silkworm and brother of Asva leader Stuart Dahlquist. That actuality imbues Asva's music with a new level of power and depth, as it states on the inside of the jacket for Frontier, this is "because of Michael". The four tracks presented here explore the band's brooding, droning art-doom with extended time-stretched riffscapes that, at their shortest, clock in at more than thirteen minutes, and each of these pieces feels like a meditation, the sound forming into densely blanketed expanses of rumbling, droning heaviness and epic buzzscapes. The band employs a variety of synths, wind instruments, percussion, vocals, and electronics alongside the immense downtuned riffage, but where you'd expect groove, or propulsion, there is instead a weird sort of stasis as each riff and carefully scored section feels pregnant with tension, moving through a intensely detailed terrain of percussive texture and finely sculpted low-end. While the music here is most defintiely crushing, this feels more cinematic than visceral, an epic doomscape formed from dramatic riffage, minimal droning organs, swirling clouds of metallic cymbal shimmer, flashes of Earth-like twang, densely layered feedback, haunting female vocals, chimes, more like an apocalyptic modern music piece than "metal", abstract, grandiose, and almost devoid of light. Heavy stuff in more ways than one.
We've carried some of the other bands that Portland's James Woodhead has been involved with, like the ritualistic forest-doom of Blood Of The Black Owl, and the psychedelic dronefolk duo The Elemental Chrysalis, both projects that he shares with Chet Scott from Ruhr Hunter. It's all great stuff, generally drawing from the same well of spacey, sylvan darkness and mystical heaviness even though each of these bands sounds distinctly different. It's like how you know you're listening to something on Glass Throat as soon as you hear it. And Woodhead's solo project At The Head Of The Woods fits right in to this dark, gorgeous sound with it's strange deep-woods psychedelia. Secrets Beyond Time & Space is the first album from this project and came out on Glass Throat a short while ago, packaged in another one of those fantastic-looking oversize gatefolds that all of the GT releases are packaged in now. This music evokes shadowy forests and mountain ranges burnished in a red sunset glow through soft, dark acoustic strum and distant wah-soaked electric guitar, the guitars drifting over simple, repetitious drums, field recordings and swirling kosmiche ambience. It's an amazing, tripped-out sound, dark and droney but not really dronemusic, more like a lugubrious LSD-glazed krautrock jam shrouded in shadows, each song stretching out for seventeen minutes or longer, the music mostly formed with guitar, vintage analogue synths and percussion but sometimes joined by cellos, violin, Farfisa organ, samples, gongs and other instruments, used more for texture and ambience than anything, creating slowly shifting raga-like acid-drones, eerie harmonized vocal arrangements, fragments of stoned twang, shimmering twilight synths, buried percussion, creepy piano melodies, woodwinds. Much of ATHOTW's music reminds me of the slow, hazy Americana of Earth's Hex, but filtered through deep shadows and dying light, and mixed with the cosmic drift and buzz of early 70's prog bands like Ash Ra Tempel or Tangerine Dream.
Nabbed some of the last copies of the now out-of-print CD edition of the one and only album of 1974 spook-tronics from album from Mort Garson's Ataraxia. Canadian composer Garson, best known for his weird early sci-fi tinged "proto-New Age" electronic releases (specifically his Mother Earth's Phantasia, an album designed to be played for plants), also previously explored the darker realms of early analog synth with his Lucifer project, which received similar reissue treatment from Rubellian and Sacred Bones. The man is a pioneer in the field of analog synth composition and progressive and experimental electronics, a true Moog-master among other things, and the gorgeous shadowy atmospheres that he briefly created with these two projects are intensely evocative sound-invocations. The Ataraxia material is absolutely crucial dark synthesizer music from the golden age of analog electronic experimentation; of course, it was the sheer darkness and strangeness of both its music and its visual presentation that drew me in, but it's also one of the most idiosyncratic albums from that era.
This gets bonkers right off the bat, "Tarot" exploding into a micro-nova of crystalline tones, luscious Moog drone, swirling spaced-out sinewave formations, booming low-end synth melodies that evoke all kinds of majesty and wonder, gradually building to a batshit crescendo of clanking keys and weird, almost ritualistic drum patterns, eerie noises panning from one end of the room to the other, this one slightly menacing riff coming to the forefront but also surrounded by a rush of jazz-rock flute sounds, pounding metallic percussion, and an ending that makes you feel as if you've just been transported to the center of Stonehenge. This is a blast. And there's quite a bit of variety here, considering the time period that this was produced in. Murky textured drift billows around "Sorcerer", evoking chant-like tones and slow, processional reverberations, like the accompaniment to a black light-hued march of cowled characters slowly moving through a wonky electronic shroom-hole; this soundtracky stuff sounds huge, too, you can easily imagine this music actually being used in some 1970s-era "Satanic panic"-style chiller .Some of the music on Unexplained offers more complex keyboard structures and instrumental voices; it even moves into something resembling early Giorgio Moroder on the creepy / groovy disco territory on the songs "The Unexplained" and "Deja Vu" (dig that buzzsaw Moog riff on the former, that thing is a monster, while the solarized funk of "Astral Projection" even seems to possess what sound like steel drums....my favorite stuff is the music that sounds like background sounds to a ghost story adaptation from a late night public broadcasting station- this stuff evokes all kinds of nostalgia and feel for the darker fringes of a certain cultural moment.
That otherworldly vibe continues through "I Ching", emanating a druggy, woozy feel as the melodies writhe around harsh metallic peals, odd low-register chordal noise, Theremin-like fluctuations and other weirdness. There's abstract atonality on "Cabala" that produces one of the albums creepiest pieces, all off-kilter effects and detuned notes flitting like spectral shadows over rhythmic booms and an eruption of awesome church organ-esque drones. This falls back to Earth with the haunting closer "Wind Dance" that mutates into rather shocking proto-techno arrangements; this track has parts that actually sound like something Autechre would come up with, again displaying the experimental abstraction and new approaches to soundcraft that's way ahead of its time. There are few reference points while listening to this; some of the album reminds me of the berserk synthesizer psychedelia of The Visitor soundtrack - I bet at least a handful of zonked-out Italians heard this and lost their collective minds, because there's quite a bit of Ataraxia's style and sound that feels like a potential influence on the soundtrack work that would start to appear with great frequency in Italian horror / fantasy films of the mid-70s onward. Of course, everyone around the world was bewitched by then wild new sounds of synthesizers and other electronic sound generators, but I haven't heard that much that sounds as gleefully ominous as the nine songs presented here. A couple moments evoke the feel of the iconic backing music for Leonard Nimoy's original In Search Of... series, as well.
This Rubellian Cd edition includes descriptive liner notes by Jacques Wilson, which I believe were included in the sleeve to the original release. A benchmark in the field of occult proto-electronica and innovative supernatural mood music.
A recent reissue of this long out-of-print 1974 spook-tronic classic, the sole album from Mort Garson's Ataraxia. Canadian composer Garson, best known for his weird early sci-fi tinged "proto-New Age" electronic releases (specifically his Mother Earth's Phantasia, an album designed to be played for plants), also previously explored the darker realms of early analog synth with his Lucifer project, which received similar vinyl reissue treatment from Sacred Bones. The man is a pioneer in the field of analog synth composition and progressive and experimental electronics, a true Moog-master among other things, and the gorgeous shadowy atmospheres that he briefly created with these two projects are intensely evocative aural invocations. The Ataraxia material is absolutely crucial dark synthesizer music from the golden age of analog electronic experimentation; of course, it was the sheer darkness and strangeness of both its music and its visual presentation that drew me in, but it's also one of the most idiosyncratic albums from that era.
This gets bonkers right off the bat, "Tarot" exploding into a micro-nova of crystalline tones, luscious Moog drone, swirling spaced-out sinewave formations, booming low-end synth melodies that evoke all kinds of majesty and wonder, gradually building to a batshit crescendo of clanking keys and weird, almost ritualistic drum patterns, eerie noises panning from one end of the room to the other, this one slightly menacing riff coming to the forefront but also surrounded by a rush of jazz-rock flute sounds, pounding metallic percussion, and an ending that makes you feel as if you've just been transported to the center of Stonehenge. This is a blast. And there's quite a bit of variety here, considering the time period that this was produced in. Murky textured drift billows around "Sorcerer", evoking chant-like tones and slow, processional reverberations, like the accompaniment to a black light-hued march of cowled characters slowly moving through a wonky electronic shroom-hole; this soundtracky stuff sounds huge, too, you can easily imagine this music actually being used in some 1970s-era "Satanic panic"-style chiller .Some of the music on Unexplained offers more complex keyboard structures and instrumental voices; it even moves into something resembling early Giorgio Moroder on the creepy / groovy disco territory on the songs "The Unexplained" and "Deja Vu" (dig that buzzsaw Moog riff on the former, that thing is a beast, while the solarized funk of "Astral Projection" even seems to possess what sound like steel drums....my favorite stuff is the music that sounds like background sounds to a ghost story adaptation from a late night public broadcasting station- this stuff evokes all kinds of nostalgia and feel for the darker fringes of a certain cultural moment.
That otherworldly vibe continues through "I Ching", emanating a druggy, woozy feel as the melodies writhe around harsh metallic peals, odd low-register chordal noise, Theremin-like fluctuations and other weirdness. There's abstract atonality on "Cabala" that produces one of the albums creepiest pieces, all off-kilter effects and detuned notes flitting like spectral shadows over rhythmic booms and an eruption of awesome church-organ-esque drones. This falls back to Earth with the haunting closer "Wind Dance" that mutates into rather shocking proto-techno arrangements; this track has parts that actually sound like something Autechre would come up with, again displaying the experimental abstraction and new approaches to soundcraft that's way ahead of its time. There are few reference points while listening to this; some of the album reminds me of the berserk synthesizer psychedelia of The Visitor soundtrack - I bet at least a handful of zonked-out Italians heard this and lost their collective minds, because there's quite a bit of Ataraxia's style and sound that feels like a potential influence on the soundtrack work that would start to appear with great frequency in Italian horror / fantasy films of the mid-70s onward. Of course, everyone around the world was bewitched by then wild new sounds of synthesizers and other electronic sound generators, but I haven't heard that much that sounds as gleefully ominous as the nine songs presented here. A couple moments evoke the feel of the iconic backing music for Leonard Nimoy's original In Search Of... series, as well.
Includes the original descriptive liner notes by Jacques Wilson, which I believe were included in the sleeve to the original release. A benchmark in the field of occult proto-electronica and innovative supernatural mood music.
Here's a crushing debut album from the French glacial-death ensemble Ataraxie, by way of the Japanese-based label Weird Truth. I've been a on a big death/doom kick lately, and Ataraxie are just the pill I've been looking for...monstrous slow motion death-metal riffs with wide expanses of space between them, marked only by trails of silvery feedback, huge booming drums beating out freakishly heavy marching rhythms that move in geological time, deep gutteral death roars echoing over vast voids of endless blackness. Heavy, HEAVY stuff. Not a ray of light to be found in Ataraxie's mist-covered world. One of the guitarists is also credited with "e-bow", and it sounds like it's definitely being used as an additional instrument, conjuring lush feedback textures over their grinding glacial dirge. It's not all slow though, which makes this album stand out; every once in a while, they'll suddenly erupt into vicious old-school death metal riffs and double bass drumming, a surge of savagery that sometimes rages for a couple of minutes before coagulating once again into total doom. There are some awesome melodies here too, like the mournful layers of melodic soloing on "L'ataraxie", and the somber acoustic passages on the title track. Everything about Slow Transcending Agony is cloaked in sorrow, the thick mournful atmosphere clinging to every riff like a grey mist. Imagine a more death metal inclined Thergothon with gorgeous acoustic guitars and whispered vocals floating in the background. Fans of classic doom-death like My Dying Bride, Mourning Beloveth, Morgion, and Evoken definitely want to check these guys out, as well as anyone into the newer, melodic funeral crawl of Swallow The Sun and Shape Of Despair. And dig that awesome ending on "Another Day Of Despondancy", where Ataraxie suddenly go from creeping sorrowful doom into a weird, black metal tinged atmospheric blastbeat assault, but with the guitars still emitting those huge slow funereal riffs, creating a really cool, unusual outro for the album. Comes with a nicely designed 16-page booklet filled with lyrics, stylized band photos, and eerie photographs of fog-covered hillsides. Highly recommended.
Absolutely DEVESTATING new album from French deathdoom lords Ataraxie! Their last album on Weird Truth, Slow Transcending Agony, flew out of here in a flash when we listed it earlier this year and we sold out of it almost immediately. From what I've noticed, it looks like Ataraxie are becoming pretty popular in the death/doom field. It's not surprising, 'cuz Ataraxie are one of the heaviest, catchiest deathdoom bands that I've been listening to lately. Their music is clearly descended from the classic deathdoom pioneers like Disembowelment, Thergothon, Evoken, Winter, and early My Dying Bride, with long, epic songs of crushing downtuned death metal guitars sluggishly grinding over thundering drums, soaring lead guitars that etch these amazing emotional melodies into Ataraxie's overcast skies, and best of all, darkly majestic riffs that are catchier than you might expect. And there are sudden unpredictable bursts of speed where the band lurches into blastbeating death metal that appear throughout the album that remind me a lot of seminal deathdoomers Disembowelent. The singer's demonic vocalizations fit the soul-wrenching doom perfectly, a combination of creepy whispering, desperate hysterical screams, and unbelievably deep death grunts delivered dramatically over the music. There is a heavy veil of darkness and hopelessness that falls over all of Anhedonie, in the softer passages where the band stretches out huge droning chords that hang endlessly in midair,racked with despair, through the weird ambient parts of just blastbeats, sickening evil screams and howling feedback and the omnipresent doom riffs...crushing. A fantastic slab of creative, epic deathdoom, highly recommended!
��Been awhile since I've listened to these guys, but the latest album from French doom-death beasts Ataraxie quickly reminded me just how soul-crushing this band's music can be. Indeed, their third album L'Etre Et La Nausee is one of the finest new doomdeath albums in recent memory, and finds the band further refining their monstrously heavy sound. Spread out across two discs, Nausee unleashes the sort of sickeningly heavy glacial death metal that Ataraxie have long been known for, but their flirtations with heartbreaking melodies and a skillful use of quieter passages turn this into more than just another grueling slog through the sub-Disembowelment depths.
�� As the first track "Procession Of The Insane Ones" slowly unfolds, the band employs a sparse arrangement of clear clanging chords that slowly drift through the gloom, but that quickly crashes into their signature slow-motion crawl as the band's signature glacial death metal sinks in. The singer's ravenous, reverb-drenched howls blow through here in gusts of monstrous agony, billowing throughout the band's bludgeoning doom. This epic opener stretches out for more than twenty minutes, erupting into faster-paced rumbling death metal and descending into effective passages of funereal slowcore, where the heaviness drops away to reveal just the sound of sorrowful reverb-heavy guitars weeping over distant, spacious drums and the singer's half-spoken lamentations. In moments like these, Ataraxie manages to achieve an atmosphere of elegant abject despair that almost compare to Japan's Corrupted, contrasting the violently oppressive weight of their molten metallic crush with moments of maudlin, delicate beauty. And when those emotional, brightly jangling guitars are dropping in over the churning deathmetal, I'm also reminded of some of those early 90s French emo bands like Anomie and Ivich, traces of that sound seemingly seeping into Ataraxie's crushing misery. It's a cool and rather unique touch.
�� Later on, Ataraxie accelerate into even more furious blastbeat-riddled power on tracks like "Face The Loss Of Your Sanity", without losing any of that pervasive miserableness, later shifting into an incredibly eerie stretch of apocalyptic jangle, with mathy, almost Slintlike guitars creeping over the drummer's sudden descent into booming, tribal rhythms. Droning dissonant chords slowly build into a majestic climax as the guitars climb to nearly Floydian heights of grandeur over the rumbling amplifier drones and elephantine advance of the rhythm section, followed by a brief sojourn into the instrumental Codeine-esque gloom of "Etats D'�me".
�� The second disc features just two tracks: the relatively shorter "Dread The Villains" unleashes more of their blasting dismal deathcrush, sinister dissonant tremolo riffs suddenly downshifting into pulverizing sludge, then later evolving into sweeping fields of almost kosmische ambience from layered and processed guitar feedback that sound surprisingly synthlike, stretching out in cold black veins of cosmic hum over massive rumbling bass drones. And the nearly half-hour "Naus�e" doesn't really achieve any sort of forward momentum until nearly halfway through the song, the behemoth riffage undulating in slow-motion over the punishing glacial pace until it finally heaves forward into a crushing wave of double bass drumming and spidery minor-key guitar, building to an intense climax.
�� One of the best current doom-death bands out there, Ataraxie's latest blends a distinctly French feel with their primal, Disembowelment influenced ultra-crush, smothering the listener beneath a dense, cold blanket of bleak downtuned crush, sporadic blast-violence and eruptions of frantic, expressive melancholy melody. Recommended.
���� Out of print for several years, the pulverizing 2005 album Slow Transcending Agony from French glacial-death ensemble Ataraxie has just been reissued by Japanese-based label Weird Truth. This new edition comes in digipack packaging and also adds a new bonus track at the end, a violent, boiling cover of Disembowelment's "The Tree Of Life And Death" that's transformed into something more soul-destroying and poignant in the hands of these misery merchants. Here's the old review of the original album from way back when:
���� I've been a on a big death/doom kick lately, and Ataraxie are just the pill I've been looking for...monstrous slow motion death-metal riffs with wide expanses of space between them, marked only by trails of silvery feedback, huge booming drums beating out freakishly heavy marching rhythms that move in geological time, deep guttural death roars echoing over vast voids of endless blackness. Heavy, HEAVY stuff. Not a ray of light to be found in Ataraxie's mist-covered world. One of the guitarists is also credited with "e-bow", and it sounds like it's definitely being used as an additional instrument, conjuring lush feedback textures over their grinding glacial dirge. It's not all slow though, which makes this album stand out; every once in a while, they'll suddenly erupt into vicious old-school death metal riffs and double bass drumming, a surge of savagery that sometimes rages for a couple of minutes before coagulating once again into total doom. Some amazing melodies too, like the mournful layers of melodic soloing on "L'ataraxie", and the somber acoustic passages on the title track. Everything about Slow Transcending Agony is cloaked in sorrow, the thick mournful atmosphere clinging to every riff like a grey mist.
���� Imagine a more death metal inclined Thergothon with gorgeous acoustic guitars and whispered vocals floating in the background. Fans of classic doom-death like My Dying Bride, Mourning Beloveth, Morgion, and Evoken definitely want to check these guys out, as well as anyone into the newer, melodic funeral crawl of Swallow The Sun and Shape Of Despair. And dig that awesome ending on "Another Day Of Despondency", where Ataraxie suddenly go from creeping sorrowful doom into a weird, black metal tinged atmospheric blastbeat assault, but with the guitars still emitting those huge slow funereal riffs, creating a really cool, unusual outro for the album. Comes with a nicely designed 16-page booklet filled with lyrics, stylized band photos, and eerie photographs of fog-covered hillsides. Another crushing album from these titanic gloom-pushers.
Don't confuse this Spanish band with the French doom/death band Ataraxie on Weird Truth; this is Ataraxy, a gang of crypt-lurkers who invoke the gods of ancient sludgy death metal on their six-song debut Curse Of The Requiem Mass. Their Ep is one of the first releases for the new label Memento Mori, who along with the reissue of Centinex's Subconscious Lobotomy are well on their way towards staking their claim in the realm of atavistic and barbaric death metal. Hell, while listening to this half-hour disc I keep thinking that I've inadvertently grabbed one of my old Peaceville discs off of the shelf, 'cuz this sounds like it's easily twenty years old. Ataraxy's music reeks of that classic doomed death metal sound from the dawn of the 90's, the throwback riffs and cavernous heaviness drawing influence from Bolt Thrower, Asphyx, Autopsy and early Immolation. There's a noticeable Swedish death metal influence in here too. Gaseous gasping vokills and fearsome down tuned riffage, eerie evil guitar leads drifting over the massive crush of songs like "The Last Stare" and "Curse Of The Requiem Mass"; the songwriting is pretty good for a band fresh out of the gate, and Ataraxy pull off an excellent evocation of ancient death metal that puts the emphasis on slow-to-mid-paced death metal that's judiciously laced with well-timed bursts of galloping thrash or blast beats. The band is at their best though when unleashing the skull crushing doom on songs like "Bleed To Death" and the monolithic eight minute closer "Hear The Ghouls". Honestly, though, I was pretty well sold as soon as I saw the surreal Seagrave-influenced album art for Curse...; everything about this is a time warp back to the glory days of slo-mo caveman death metal, but with a heightened level of craftsmanship that you don't usually hear in throwback bands like this. For those of you who lust for contempo death metal primitivism like that peddled by Spun In Darkness, Coffins and Fistula and any of those aforementioned classic outfits, Curse Of The Requiem Mass comes recommended.
A gorgeous brand-new vinyl reissue of Atavist's knockout 2007 album, released by Aurora Borealis on heavyweight 180 gram black vinyl in a matte-finish gatefold sleeve. Massive!
Atavist make their negatory nature clear with the inscription "no life worth living" that is printed in simple white lettering across the black panels of
the inside of II: Ruined's massive digipack case, and yet they somehow find moments of intense beauty in their extended, single-minded quest for the
all-devouring riff and total sonic catharsis. Atavist's second album has been issued by Profound Lore for North America, in an 8-panel digipack that features
evocative photography of rotting buildings and urban decay, which perfectly capture the dank, depressing atmosphere that soaks into these seven tracks.
They've foregone song titles and replaced them with roman numerals that signify each new chapter, although the final track is actually a cover of Grief's "I
Hate The Human Race". The hallmarks of extreme sludge are in place on all of these tracks, massively detuned guitars, hideous riffage sustained into
eternity, horrific mangled screams, an almost inpenetrable nihilistic worldview, but I think that Atavist's take on tectonic sludge is delivered with a sort
of precision that sets them apart some....you can hear the influence of bands like Grief, Khanate, and Eyehategod in their riffs and gluey tempos, but the
band plays each riff and delivers each drum strike with a methodical, controlled power, and tie some of the longer, 15+ minute pieces together with
minimalist guitar drones and dusty acoustic strum, a pretty post-rock outro that finishes the fifth track, and some tranquil piano playing on the fourth
track is contributed by Justin Greaves (of Crippled Black Pheonix, Electric Wizard, and Iron Monkey). Incredibly crushing and hateful sludge doom on par with
fellow Brits Moss and Marzuraan, served up as a single suite of slow motion hatred like a black hole version of Corrupted's El Mundo Frio.
Atavist make their negatory nature clear with the inscription "no life worth living" that is printed in simple white lettering across the black panels of
the inside of II: Ruined's massive digipack case, and yet they somehow find moments of intense beauty in their extended, single-minded quest for the
all-devouring riff and total sonic catharsis. Atavist's second album has been issued by Profound Lore for North America, in an 8-panel digipack that features
evocative photography of rotting buildings and urban decay, which perfectly capture the dank, depressing atmosphere that soaks into these seven tracks.
They've foregone song titles and replaced them with roman numerals that signify each new chapter, although the final track is actually a cover of Grief's "I
Hate The Human Race". The hallmarks of extreme sludge are in place on all of these tracks, massively detuned guitars, hideous riffage sustained into
eternity, horrific mangled screams, an almost inpenetrable nihilistic worldview, but I think that Atavist's take on tectonic sludge is delivered with a sort
of precision that sets them apart some....you can hear the influence of bands like Grief, Khanate, and Eyehategod in their riffs and gluey tempos, but the
band plays each riff and delivers each drum strike with a methodical, controlled power, and tie some of the longer, 15+ minute pieces together with
minimalist guitar drones and dusty acoustic strum, a pretty post-rock outro that finishes the fifth track, and some tranquil piano playing on the fourth
track is contributed by Justin Greaves (of Crippled Black Pheonix, Electric Wizard, and Iron Monkey). Incredibly crushing and hateful sludge doom on par with
fellow Brits Moss and Marzuraan, served up as a single suite of slow motion hatred like a black hole version of Corrupted's El Mundo Frio.
Document number two in the ongoing collaboration and joint low-frequency brain massage between the uber-prolific ambient sludge duo Nadja and minimalist UK doom architects Atavist, released by the consistently amazing underground metal label Profound Lore. This disc features two twenty-two minute pieces, titled "Projective Plane" and "Closed Curve" respectively, and if you didn't get a chance to hear the first collaborative album that these cats put together last year, well, this isn't exactly the bonecrushing slugfuck you might expect. Both of the tracks are sprawling and spacious, and the first opens with a plaintive guitar melody hovering above a field of whistling drones and deep tectonic rumblings, the muffled guitar and downcast minor key melody resonating across the softly roiling dronescape and eventually joined by a chorus of male vocals chanting in harmony. Once these vocals emerge, the sound becomes a bit darker and more ominous and the guitar melodies begin to unravel and break apart and float across the darkening plane of subsonic rumblings and swelling low end drone, beautiful and mysterious sounding but becoming more and more abstracted until it fades into an elongated feedback drone that disappears into nothingness. And the the second track suddenly appears amidst a swell of metallic shimmer and feedback, exploding into the big riff, a huge crumbling minor key dirge that definitely sounds like what we were expecting from these two bands combining their sounds together, a massive grinding riff, simple but pulverizing, and encrusted with overdriven feedback and distortion, repeating over and over atop huge pounding drums, and joined by a constant panic siren of feedback. The metallic crush only lasts for about seven minutes though, a brief avalanche of bottom heavy sludge that slides to a halt and becomes a sprawl of nebulous atmospheric feedback and humming amplifiers. Clean guitars come back in, along with waves of feedback and freeform, almost jazzy drumming, swells of cymbal shimmer and cello-like strains as the song becomes an eerie dronescape that stretches out for more than twelve minutes. This last half of the song is super abstract and mysterious sounding, filled with deformed sludge riffs and surges of Sunn O)))-esque amp drone, that quasi-jazzy percussion that reminds me of those recent discs from Pentemple and Burial Chamber Trio, reverberating notes suspended in blackness, and horrific blackened shrieks that scuttle over the blasted landscape of drone and guitar noise.
The album is more abstract and intangible than what I'm used to hearing from either band, but together they make some amazing far-out ambience that on this album manages to channel some serious heaviness. Cool packaging, a six panel digipack with strange mystical artwork that adds to the esoteric dimesion-tripping vibe. Recommended.
Even after spinning the last Atavist/Nadja collaboration II - Points At Infinity over and over, I'm still totally blown away by how different this first collab sounds from what you might expect. Just having the UK sludge/doom band Atavist involved with it makes me think that this is going to be unstoppably heavy, some sort of earth-crushing glacial doom exercise, and you'd think that Nadja would bring a heavy helping of their trademark guitar/synth sludge blowout to this project. But what the two bands put together is hardly "doom", and more like a crushing, dreamy dronescape that fans of krautrocky drift and ultraheavy amp-rumble will adore. The album features two tracks, each one almost half and hour long, and each is a vast expanse of dark gorgerous subharmonic drift. The first piece "Twentyfour:sixteen" begins with a soft sprawl of ambient slowcore filled with fragile guitar melodies floating through a slowly shifting surface of blackened rumble and grinding drones. This surface slowly grows more malevolent as the track continues, becoming entangled with shimmery washes of metallic drones and keys and streaked by heavily delayed guitar lines that build layer upon layer, until thick waves of distorted guitar rumble surge up and wash over the sheets of melody, turning the sound into a thick churning ocean of subsonic blackened doom riffage and kosmiche noodlings.
The second side has "Twentynine:Thirtyseven(edit)", and it's another vast field of dark, cosmic drift, starting off much quieter than the previous one, filled with soft hovering feedback drones, hushed minor key guitars crawling over flurries of violin-like strings and clouds of muted ambience and swirling low-end murk. Towards the middle, some heavier guitar riffs begin to enter in, huge sludgy waves of distorted heaviness crashing against the towering drones, and it starts to sound like a trippy, krautrock version of Earth 2, huge whorls of Klaus Schulze style kosmiche drift swirling with massive doomy bottom end throb and crushing slabs of corroded metallic riffage. It's a mesmerizing, narcotized dose of crushing ambient sludge that fans of either band will want to hear - highly recommended!
Some serious brain-scalding psychcrust is found on Atentado's Dias De Rabia, the debut mini-album from this Spanish hardcore outfit outta Barcelona, on vinyl only. I fuckin' fell in love with this beast as soon as I planted my eyes on the album art; the sleeve is adorned with a maelstrom of obsessive scribbled nightmares from artist Guillem El Muro that have a feel comparable to seeing some of Nick Blinko's work after he's gone way off his meds, visions of horned demons and shrieking graveyard ghasts and pictorial representations of anti-authoritarian horror all gobbled up in the dense sketched chaos that extends all the way into the large twelve-page booklet that comes with the record. And the music fits those visuals perfectly, a ripping, rather zonked-out crustcore assault that has one of the more maniacal approaches I've heard lately. The band's rampaging D-beat drumming and buzzsaw three-chord riffs all nod to the obvious Discharge influence, but Atentado take it in a weird other direction with a frenzied blown-out sound that smears huge gobs of distortion and trippy effects and noise across the brutal hardcore. The songs surge into chaotic noise-drenched assaults and odd off-kilter riff-wreckage, shifting from swirling angular noise-punk into some killer mid-tempo thrash breakdowns, with extreme levels of reverb and echo being employed for a strange disassociative effect, and the high-end of the mix pushed right through the roof. Singer Elsa has a crazed near-monotone ripped-throat shriek that comes howling from somewhere in the background, just as drenched in reverb as everything else, a bestial wind-tunnel howl that barely registers as human, let alone something that's coming out of the lungs of a young girl; these some of the harshest fuckin' vocals I've heard in ages. While built on a heap of crushing, Discharge-influenced aggression, Atentado's berserker sound doesn't carry the type of noise-overload that you'd associate with the 'crasher crust'/Japanese noise punk crowd, but it definitely has a warped lysergic edge that is all its own. Great shit, definitely check this out if you were into the stuff that No Statik has been putting out. Sadly, these guys seem to have disbanded in the wake of this monstrous platter, but what an artifact they left behind. On heavyweight black vinyl, limited to five hundred copies.
Long in the works and finally released as a split-label effort between Infernal Machines and depraved local imprint Volva just as the two bands were about to embark on their 2019 summer tour together, Morbid Deviations is the long-awaited split album featuring two of the Baltimore / Maryland area's most vicious and destructive black metal outfits. Released as a pro-manufactured tape with on-shell printing and packaged with a pair of 1" buttons each bearing the sigil of each band, and released in a limited edition of two hundred copies, this motherfucker seethes with all of the violent, inebriated energy that these two outfits have harnessed over the past decade.
The Athame side blows this up immediately with three sweat-and-blood stained blasts of morbid ugliness from the fringes of Appalachia. It's a fetid mixture of pulsating cellar emanations with brief moments of cavernous ambiance and abstract ritualistic rattling amid the crushing chaotic, sludge-n'-punk stained black metal of "Human Flood" and "I, Accuser", with an ode to classic 80's deathrock surfacing in the middle with Athame's barbaric rendition of Christian Death's "Figurative Theatre". There is a wretched, lurching, blasting hatefulness that grips the witch-blade and follows the continuum of their underheard but satisfyingly grimy discs With Cunning Fire and Adversarial Resolve and The Burning Times. To date, some of their best work that I've heard.
On the B-side, Baltimore's Xeukatre follow with their own uniquely putrid melange of Les Legions Noires-influenced filth and ghastly low-fidelity punk. Frenzied and rotten, their three offerings "Dirgelwch Ffydd", "Sigrdrifumal" and "Scalding Blizzard of Seraphim Tears" waft off of their side of this tape like fumes from a corpse-clotted gutter. One of the few releases to surface from the trio even after a decade of skulking around dimly-lit Baltimore-area venues , this is some of the best raw, unhinged black metal coming out of the area, and hopefully a portent of more new material to come at some point in the near goddamned future.
A full-length split album that features three exclusive tracks from each band, presented with professionally manufactured cassettes with black-on-silver shell print, in a limited edition of 200 copies. Each cassette comes sealed with a pair of ATHAME and XEUKATRE 1" badges.
These Chilean black/death vets get vaguely psychedelic with their new band Athanatos, debuting with a killer demo cassette that surfaced in 2014 and which has now been reissued on 7" by Nuclear War Now. Tantalizingly described on Athanatos's Bandcamp page by one fan as sounding akin to "Dark Angel on LSD", you can definitely hear something more twisted and warped than just another black-thrash attack with this stuff, which delivers some really cool off-kilter riffage winding through these four tracks. Featuring member Hateaxes Command (aka Pablo Clares) of cult death metallers Totten Korps and Atomic Aggressor, Athanatos draws from the classic South American death-thrash sound, but filters that influence through a thick, tenebrous atmosphere of subterranean filth charged with frantic energy, a violent blast of pummeling blackened death-thrash formed from the band's mix of convoluted riffery and blasphemous, brazenly Satanic imagery delivered in fractured English that "consecrates the anal chalice". Athanatos fucking rip on this demo, belting out a crazed blast-assault of blackened chaos across the beginning of "Unholy Union", with crazed shouted vocals drenched in echo instead of the typical guttural puke-approach, giving this stuff a gruff, maniacal feel; there's a moment where the blasting heaviness suddenly stops and those bellowed, reverberant shouts come echoing out of the depths, and all of a sudden it almost sounds like Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman howling over the echoing blackness, right before it leads into an even more twisted riff-maze, the song mutating into an awesomely savage assault of warped, vaguely proggy thrash. A killer debut from these guys, and I can't wait to hear more from them. Limited to five hundred copies.
����� Now available on black (ie., superior sounding) vinyl!
����� Out of all of the death metal bands that were flirting with prog and avant-garde tendencies in the early 90's (a crowd that included the likes of Pestilence, Cynic, Death and Nocturnus), Atheist was the one that seemed to venture the furthest into full-blown jazz territory, releasing a trio of albums that would continue to mutate more and more into a strange sort of experimental fusion-death that liberally applied elements of tripped-out psychedelia, sweat-soaked samba (!) and similar Latin influences into their complex, crushing metal. Atheist's three albums (1989's Piece of Time, 1991's Unquestionable Presence and 1993's mind-bending Elements) went on to become landmarks in the field of progressive death metal; though the band reunited in recent years and produced the solid comeback album Jupiter for Season Of Mist, it's those earlier albums that I always go back to, as these guys sounded so unique, so outr�, their music has aged remarkably well in the decades since their release. Founded by guitarist Kelly Shaefer (who also handled the vocals in Atheist, with a ferocious yowl that was totally unlike the guttural growling most other bands were doing back then) and his crew of pot-smoking visionaries in the early 80's as a standard issue thrash metal band, by the end of the decade they had evolved into one of the most unique metal bands to ever come out of the Sunshine State, morphing into something much more complex and left-field than almost anyone else in the Floridian death metal scene, combining dizzying baroque arrangements and highly complex time signatures with vicious, discordant riffs and heavy doses of fusiony jazz, Latin music and prog influences. Unsurprisingly, these albums went over the heads of most metalheads when they originally came out, the complexity and insane tonal shifts throwing most 'bangers for a loop. They never received the sort of widespread acclaim that many of their peers enjoyed throughout the 90's, and Atheist ended up breaking up not long after the release of their third album Elements. Released on the long-defunct Active Records, all three of the early Atheist LPs were later re-mastered and reissued with bonus materials on CD via Relapse Records in 2005, followed by these new limited-edition vinyl reissues on new label Season Of Mist that pretty much duplicate the original Active releases all the way down to the center labels.
����� On album number three, listeners followed Atheist all the way down their weird rabbit-hole of surreal songwriting and jazz/samba influenced prog meshed with crushing staccato death metal heaviness. Despite the fact that Elements was in essence a rush-job that the band belted out quickly to finish off their contract, the album was an intense, accomplished work that featured some of Atheist's most imaginative songwriting ever. Most of the songs are titled after various elemental forces, continuing in the band's strange New Age-style themes of spirituality, and their Byzantine songwriting was further fleshed out with polyrhythmic drumming, complex time signatures and unpredictable shifts in style and tone that often completely abandoned the death metal form. Cynic bassist Tony Choy returned as well, contributing his virtuosic deep-pocket playing that the band wisely put way up front in the mix. Choy's playing is a big part of what makes this album sound so unique, his grooves more informed by jazz, funk and Latin influences than the plodding chug of classical heavy metal. The song "Mineral" breaks into one of the sickest and most unusual death metal breakdowns I have ever heard, while elsewhere the band blends soaring guitar solos, fusiony shredding and haunting e-bow textures into gorgeous abstract guitar instrumentals like "Fractal Point" and "See You Again". And all throughout Elements, the band swerves from that wicked metallic heaviness into frenetic samba session or searing Latin jazz style guitar solos, with some full-on samba appearing on the piano-laced interlude "Samba Briza". I know that this stuff blew my mind the first time I listened to this album, I can only imagine how other death metal fans might have reacted when they first heard this wild, jazz-infected progdeath back in 1993. Atheist's rhythmic complexity and stylistic indulgences were like no other band; in fact, in the twenty years since Elements first came out, the only band that has even come close to capturing the sort of bizarre, mind-bending jazzmetal virtuosity heard here would be Brooklyn's Candiria. A lot of Atheist fans consider their second album to be their finest, but for me, Elements remains the band's career high point, a masterpiece of memorable, utterly unique, highly adventurous metal. Highly recommended.
Out of all of the death metal bands that were flirting with prog and avant-garde tendencies in the early 90's (a crowd that included the likes of Pestilence, Cynic, Death and Nocturnus), Atheist was the one that seemed to venture the furthest into full-blown jazz territory, releasing a trio of albums that would continue to mutate more and more into a strange sort of experimental fusion-death that liberally applied elements of tripped-out psychedelia, sweat-soaked samba (!) and similar Latin influences into their complex, crushing metal. Atheist's three albums (1989's Piece of Time, 1991's Unquestionable Presence and 1993's mind-bending Elements) went on to become landmarks in the field of progressive death metal; though the band reunited in recent years and produced the solid comeback album Jupiter for Season Of Mist, it's those earlier albums that I always go back to, as these guys sounded so unique, so outre, their music has aged remarkably well in the decades since their release. Founded by guitarist Kelly Shaefer (who also handled the vocals in Atheist, with a ferocious yowl that was totally unlike the guttural growling most other bands were doing back then) and his crew of pot-smoking visionaries in the early 80's as a standard issue thrash metal band, by the end of the decade they had evolved into one of the most unique metal bands to ever come out of the Sunshine State, morphing into something much more complex and left-field than almost anyone else in the Floridian death metal scene, combining dizzying baroque arrangements and highly complex time signatures with vicious, discordant riffs and heavy doses of fusiony jazz, Latin music and prog influences. Unsurprisingly, these albums went over the heads of most metalheads when they originally came out, the complexity and insane tonal shifts throwing most 'bangers for a loop. They never received the sort of widespread acclaim that many of their peers enjoyed throughout the 90's, and Atheist ended up breaking up not long after the release of their third album Elements. Released on the long-defunct Active Records, all three of the early Atheist LPs were later re-mastered and reissued with bonus materials on CD via Relapse Records in 2005, followed by these new limited-edition vinyl reissues on new label Season Of Mist that pretty much duplicate the original Active releases all the way down to the center labels.
Recorded in the wake of the tragic highway accident that took the life of founding bassist Roger Patterson while on tour, it's amazing that the band was even able to continue on, let alone release their second album Unquestionable Presence, which is considered by many to be the band's finest hour and one of the all-time classic albums of 90's era prog-death. Atheist were at the absolute top of their game here, though. As work had already been started on the album prior to Patterson's death, the band carried on, drafting Cynic bassist Tony Choy to complete the album, and the result is a whiplash assault of some of the finest avant-garde death metal that you will ever hear. A savage set of unorthodox death metal songs that showcased the band's ever growing musical prowess and songwriting chops, Presence delivered eight songs of complicated, proggy metal that was at the time unmatched in terms of sheer creativity. Opening with the frantic tech-death workout of their classic "Mother Man", the band sets into one of their most lethal grooves, but they follow that with a dizzying array of punishing chromatic riffage, galloping thrash and soaring sinister leads, unexpected slap bass playing that actually fits right in with the band's jazzy sound, the songs shifting through myriad time signature changes, the complicated song structures constantly changing shape, the band moving through brutal death thrash into reckless prog workouts and into strange, atmospheric jazziness. As the album unfolds through songs like "Retribution", "An Incarnation's Dream" and the title track, there's plenty of those killer proggy solos, ambient samples and fusiony breaks strewn throughout, and never once would you mistake this for just another rote death metal record. While the band had yet to immerse themselves in the sort of samba/jazz elements that would appear on their third album, there is still a heavy undercurrent of jazz and fusion technique with the guitar playing, and some of those Latin rhythms do start to peer through on a couple of songs. The whole feel of the album stood out even further with Shaefer's strange wordplay, his wicked sneering scream belting out lyrics that almost read like arcane motivational tracts, and his unique vocal phrasing is just as important to Atheist's singular sound as any of the other elements that the band is known for. A landmark album in the field of technical/progressive death metal. Highly recommended.
Here's the Relapse CD reissue of Atheist's prog-death classic Elements, back in stock.
Out of all of the death metal bands that were flirting with prog and avant-garde tendencies in the early 90's (a crowd that included the likes of Pestilence, Cynic, Death and Nocturnus), Atheist was the one that seemed to venture the furthest into full-blown jazz territory, releasing a trio of albums that would continue to mutate more and more into a strange sort of experimental fusion-death that liberally applied elements of tripped-out psychedelia, sweat-soaked samba (!) and similar Latin influences into their complex, crushing metal. Atheist's three albums (1989's Piece of Time, 1991's Unquestionable Presence and 1993's mind-bending Elements) went on to become landmarks in the field of progressive death metal; though the band reunited in recent years and produced the solid comeback album Jupiter for Season Of Mist, it's those earlier albums that I always go back to, as these guys sounded so unique, so outr�, their music has aged remarkably well in the decades since their release. Founded by guitarist Kelly Shaefer (who also handled the vocals in Atheist, with a ferocious yowl that was totally unlike the guttural growling most other bands were doing back then) and his crew of pot-smoking visionaries in the early 80's as a standard issue thrash metal band, by the end of the decade they had evolved into one of the most unique metal bands to ever come out of the Sunshine State, morphing into something much more complex and left-field than almost anyone else in the Floridian death metal scene, combining dizzying baroque arrangements and highly complex time signatures with vicious, discordant riffs and heavy doses of fusiony jazz, Latin music and prog influences. Unsurprisingly, these albums went over the heads of most metalheads when they originally came out, the complexity and insane tonal shifts throwing most 'bangers for a loop. They never received the sort of widespread acclaim that many of their peers enjoyed throughout the 90's, and Atheist ended up breaking up not long after the release of their third album Elements. Released on the long-defunct Active Records, all three of the early Atheist LPs were later re-mastered and reissued with bonus materials on CD via Relapse Records in 2005, followed by these new limited-edition vinyl reissues on new label Season Of Mist that pretty much duplicate the original Active releases all the way down to the center labels.
On album number three, listeners followed Atheist all the way down their weird rabbit-hole of surreal songwriting and jazz/samba influenced prog meshed with crushing staccato death metal heaviness. Despite the fact that Elements was in essence a rush-job that the band belted out quickly to finish off their contract, the album was an intense, accomplished work that featured some of Atheist's most imaginative songwriting ever. Most of the songs are titled after various elemental forces, continuing in the band's strange New Age-style themes of spirituality, and their Byzantine songwriting was further fleshed out with polyrhythmic drumming, complex time signatures and unpredictable shifts in style and tone that often completely abandoned the death metal form. Cynic bassist Tony Choy returned as well, contributing his virtuosic deep-pocket playing that the band wisely put way up front in the mix. Choy's playing is a big part of what makes this album sound so unique, his grooves more informed by jazz, funk and Latin influences than the plodding chug of classical heavy metal. The song "Mineral" breaks into one of the sickest and most unusual death metal breakdowns I have ever heard, while elsewhere the band blends soaring guitar solos, fusiony shredding and haunting e-bow textures into gorgeous abstract guitar instrumentals like "Fractal Point" and "See You Again". And all throughout Elements, the band swerves from that wicked metallic heaviness into frenetic samba session or searing Latin jazz style guitar solos, with some full-on samba appearing on the piano-laced interlude "Samba Briza". I know that this stuff blew my mind the first time I listened to this album, I can only imagine how other death metal fans might have reacted when they first heard this wild, jazz-infected progdeath back in 1993. Atheist's rhythmic complexity and stylistic indulgences were like no other band; in fact, in the twenty years since Elements first came out, the only band that has even come close to capturing the sort of bizarre, mind-bending jazzmetal virtuosity heard here would be Brooklyn's Candiria. A lot of Atheist fans consider their second album to be their finest, but for me, Elements remains the band's career high point, a masterpiece of memorable, utterly unique, highly adventurous metal. Highly recommended.
Out of all of the death metal bands that were flirting with prog and avant-garde tendencies in the early 90's (a crowd that included the likes of Pestilence, Cynic, Death and Nocturnus), Atheist was the one that seemed to venture the furthest into full-blown jazz territory, releasing a trio of albums that would continue to mutate more and more into a strange sort of experimental fusion-death that liberally applied elements of tripped-out psychedelia, sweat-soaked samba (!) and similar Latin influences into their complex, crushing metal. Atheist's three albums (1989's Piece of Time, 1991's Unquestionable Presence and 1993's mind-bending Elements) went on to become landmarks in the field of progressive death metal; though the band reunited in recent years and produced the solid comeback album Jupiter for Season Of Mist, it's those earlier albums that I always go back to, as these guys sounded so unique, so outr�, their music has aged remarkably well in the decades since their release. Founded by guitarist Kelly Shaefer (who also handled the vocals in Atheist, with a ferocious yowl that was totally unlike the guttural growling most other bands were doing back then) and his crew of pot-smoking visionaries in the early 80's as a standard issue thrash metal band, by the end of the decade they had evolved into one of the most unique metal bands to ever come out of the Sunshine State, morphing into something much more complex and left-field than almost anyone else in the Floridian death metal scene, combining dizzying baroque arrangements and highly complex time signatures with vicious, discordant riffs and heavy doses of fusiony jazz, Latin music and prog influences. Unsurprisingly, these albums went over the heads of most metalheads when they originally came out, the complexity and insane tonal shifts throwing most 'bangers for a loop. They never received the sort of widespread acclaim that many of their peers enjoyed throughout the 90's, and Atheist ended up breaking up not long after the release of their third album Elements. Released on the long-defunct Active Records, all three of the early Atheist LPs were later re-mastered and reissued with bonus materials on CD via Relapse Records in 2005, followed by these new limited-edition vinyl reissues on new label Season Of Mist that pretty much duplicate the original Active releases all the way down to the center labels.
On album number three, listeners followed Atheist all the way down their weird rabbit-hole of surreal songwriting and jazz/samba influenced prog meshed with crushing staccato death metal heaviness. Despite the fact that Elements was in essence a rush-job that the band belted out quickly to finish off their contract, the album was an intense, accomplished work that featured some of Atheist's most imaginative songwriting ever. Most of the songs are titled after various elemental forces, continuing in the band's strange New Age-style themes of spirituality, and their Byzantine songwriting was further fleshed out with polyrhythmic drumming, complex time signatures and unpredictable shifts in style and tone that often completely abandoned the death metal form. Cynic bassist Tony Choy returned as well, contributing his virtuosic deep-pocket playing that the band wisely put way up front in the mix. Choy's playing is a big part of what makes this album sound so unique, his grooves more informed by jazz, funk and Latin influences than the plodding chug of classical heavy metal. The song "Mineral" breaks into one of the sickest and most unusual death metal breakdowns I have ever heard, while elsewhere the band blends soaring guitar solos, fusiony shredding and haunting e-bow textures into gorgeous abstract guitar instrumentals like "Fractal Point" and "See You Again". And all throughout Elements, the band swerves from that wicked metallic heaviness into frenetic samba session or searing Latin jazz style guitar solos, with some full-on samba appearing on the piano-laced interlude "Samba Briza". I know that this stuff blew my mind the first time I listened to this album, I can only imagine how other death metal fans might have reacted when they first heard this wild, jazz-infected progdeath back in 1993. Atheist's rhythmic complexity and stylistic indulgences were like no other band; in fact, in the twenty years since Elements first came out, the only band that has even come close to capturing the sort of bizarre, mind-bending jazzmetal virtuosity heard here would be Brooklyn's Candiria. A lot of Atheist fans consider their second album to be their finest, but for me, Elements remains the band's career high point, a masterpiece of memorable, utterly unique, highly adventurous metal. Highly recommended.
Finally back in print on CD, Atheist's mind-melting third album Elements is reissued as a deluxe CD and DVD set via Season Of Mist; the CD version features the album and a live radio broadcast from 1992, while the DVD is loaded with a wealth of rare live footage, including live sets in Holland, Montreal, and Chicago captured between 1992 and 1993, and capped off with an interview with the band from January 1992. It's by far the most exhaustive CD release this album has received to date, killer stuff.
Out of all of the death metal bands that were flirting with prog and avant-garde tendencies in the early 90's (a crowd that included the likes of Pestilence, Cynic, Death and Nocturnus), Atheist was the one that seemed to venture the furthest into full-blown jazz territory, releasing a trio of albums that would continue to mutate more and more into a strange sort of experimental fusion-death that liberally applied elements of tripped-out psychedelia, sweat-soaked samba (!) and similar Latin influences into their complex, crushing metal. Atheist's three albums (1989's Piece of Time, 1991's Unquestionable Presence and 1993's mind-bending Elements) went on to become landmarks in the field of progressive death metal; though the band reunited in recent years and produced the solid comeback album Jupiter for Season Of Mist, it's those earlier albums that I always go back to, as these guys sounded so unique, so outr�, their music has aged remarkably well in the decades since their release. Founded by guitarist Kelly Shaefer (who also handled the vocals in Atheist, with a ferocious yowl that was totally unlike the guttural growling most other bands were doing back then) and his crew of pot-smoking visionaries in the early 80's as a standard issue thrash metal band, by the end of the decade they had evolved into one of the most unique metal bands to ever come out of the Sunshine State, morphing into something much more complex and left-field than almost anyone else in the Floridian death metal scene, combining dizzying baroque arrangements and highly complex time signatures with vicious, discordant riffs and heavy doses of fusiony jazz, Latin music and prog influences. Unsurprisingly, these albums went over the heads of most metalheads when they originally came out, the complexity and insane tonal shifts throwing most 'bangers for a loop. They never received the sort of widespread acclaim that many of their peers enjoyed throughout the 90's, and Atheist ended up breaking up not long after the release of their third album Elements.
On album number three, listeners followed Atheist all the way down their weird rabbit-hole of surreal songwriting and jazz/samba influenced prog meshed with crushing staccato death metal heaviness. Despite the fact that Elements was in essence a rush-job that the band belted out quickly to finish off their contract, the album was an intense, accomplished work that featured some of Atheist's most imaginative songwriting ever. Most of the songs are titled after various elemental forces, continuing in the band's strange New Age-style themes of spirituality, and their Byzantine songwriting was further fleshed out with polyrhythmic drumming, complex time signatures and unpredictable shifts in style and tone that often completely abandoned the death metal form. Cynic bassist Tony Choy returned as well, contributing his virtuosic deep-pocket playing that the band wisely put way up front in the mix. Choy's playing is a big part of what makes this album sound so unique, his grooves more informed by jazz, funk and Latin influences than the plodding chug of classical heavy metal. The song "Mineral" breaks into one of the sickest and most unusual death metal breakdowns I have ever heard, while elsewhere the band blends soaring guitar solos, fusiony shredding and haunting e-bow textures into gorgeous abstract guitar instrumentals like "Fractal Point" and "See You Again". And all throughout Elements, the band swerves from that wicked metallic heaviness into frenetic samba session or searing Latin jazz style guitar solos, with some full-on samba appearing on the piano-laced interlude "Samba Briza". I know that this stuff blew my mind the first time I listened to this album, I can only imagine how other death metal fans might have reacted when they first heard this wild, jazz-infected progdeath back in 1993. Atheist's rhythmic complexity and stylistic indulgences were like no other band; in fact, in the twenty years since Elements first came out, the only band that has even come close to capturing the sort of bizarre, mind-bending jazzmetal virtuosity heard here would be Brooklyn's Candiria. A lot of Atheist fans consider their second album to be their finest, but for me, Elements remains the band's career high point, a masterpiece of memorable, utterly unique, highly adventurous metal. Highly recommended.
The latest CD reissue of Atheist's prog-death classic Unquestionable Presence is now available from Season of Mist. This double disc set features the album accompanied by a host of extras that includes assroted demo material and instrumental tracks; and it comes with a DVD packed with fascinating material, including the February 1991 set that was the last-ever live performance of the classic original Atheist lineup, footage of Tony Choy's first rehearsal, drum-camera footage of Steve Flynn taken from a live radio performance broadcast from Morrisound in the summer of '91, fan-filmed footage of Tony Choy's first show with Atheist in July 1991, and a 1993 video interview between the band and Goetz Kuehnemund (Rock Hard Magazine) taken during their European tour with Benediction. There's hours worth of stuff to dig into here...
Out of all of the death metal bands that were flirting with prog and avant-garde tendencies in the early 90's (a crowd that included the likes of Pestilence, Cynic, Death and Nocturnus), Atheist was the one that seemed to venture the furthest into full-blown jazz territory, releasing a trio of albums that would continue to mutate more and more into a strange sort of experimental fusion-death that liberally applied elements of tripped-out psychedelia, sweat-soaked samba (!) and similar Latin influences into their complex, crushing metal. Atheist's three albums (1989's Piece of Time, 1991's Unquestionable Presence and 1993's mind-bending Elements) went on to become landmarks in the field of progressive death metal; though the band reunited in recent years and produced the solid comeback album Jupiter for Season Of Mist, it's those earlier albums that I always go back to, as these guys sounded so unique, so outre, their music has aged remarkably well in the decades since their release. Founded by guitarist Kelly Shaefer (who also handled the vocals in Atheist, with a ferocious yowl that was totally unlike the guttural growling most other bands were doing back then) and his crew of pot-smoking visionaries in the early 80's as a standard issue thrash metal band, by the end of the decade they had evolved into one of the most unique metal bands to ever come out of the Sunshine State, morphing into something much more complex and left-field than almost anyone else in the Floridian death metal scene, combining dizzying baroque arrangements and highly complex time signatures with vicious, discordant riffs and heavy doses of fusiony jazz, Latin music and prog influences. Unsurprisingly, these albums went over the heads of most metalheads when they originally came out, the complexity and insane tonal shifts throwing most 'bangers for a loop. They never received the sort of widespread acclaim that many of their peers enjoyed throughout the 90's, and Atheist ended up breaking up not long after the release of their third album Elements.
Recorded in the wake of the tragic highway accident that took the life of founding bassist Roger Patterson while on tour, it's amazing that the band was even able to continue on, let alone release their second album Unquestionable Presence, which is considered by many to be the band's finest hour and one of the all-time classic albums of 90's era prog-death. Atheist were at the absolute top of their game here, though. As work had already been started on the album prior to Patterson's death, the band carried on, drafting Cynic bassist Tony Choy to complete the album, and the result is a whiplash assault of some of the finest avant-garde death metal that you will ever hear. A savage set of unorthodox death metal songs that showcased the band's ever growing musical prowess and songwriting chops, Presence delivered eight songs of complicated, proggy metal that was at the time unmatched in terms of sheer creativity. Opening with the frantic tech-death workout of their classic "Mother Man", the band sets into one of their most lethal grooves, but they follow that with a dizzying array of punishing chromatic riffage, galloping thrash and soaring sinister leads, unexpected slap bass playing that actually fits right in with the band's jazzy sound, the songs shifting through myriad time signature changes, the complicated song structures constantly changing shape, the band moving through brutal death thrash into reckless prog workouts and into strange, atmospheric jazziness. As the album unfolds through songs like "Retribution", "An Incarnation's Dream" and the title track, there's plenty of those killer proggy solos, ambient samples and fusiony breaks strewn throughout, and never once would you mistake this for just another rote death metal record. While the band had yet to immerse themselves in the sort of samba/jazz elements that would appear on their third album, there is still a heavy undercurrent of jazz and fusion technique with the guitar playing, and some of those Latin rhythms do start to peer through on a couple of songs. The whole feel of the album stood out even further with Shaefer's strange wordplay, his wicked sneering scream belting out lyrics that almost read like arcane motivational tracts, and his unique vocal phrasing is just as important to Atheist's singular sound as any of the other elements that the band is known for. A landmark album in the field of technical/progressive death metal. Highly recommended.
Out of all of the death metal bands that were flirting with prog and avant-garde tendencies in the early 90's (a crowd that included the likes of Pestilence, Cynic, Death and Nocturnus), Atheist was the one that seemed to venture the furthest into full-blown jazz territory, releasing a trio of albums that would continue to mutate more and more into a strange sort of experimental fusion-death that liberally applied elements of tripped-out psychedelia, sweat-soaked samba (!) and similar Latin influences into their complex, crushing metal. Atheist's three albums (1989's Piece of Time, 1991's Unquestionable Presence and 1993's mind-bending Elements) went on to become landmarks in the field of progressive death metal; though the band reunited in recent years and produced the solid comeback album Jupiter for Season Of Mist, it's those earlier albums that I always go back to, as these guys sounded so unique, so outre, their music has aged remarkably well in the decades since their release. Founded by guitarist Kelly Shaefer (who also handled the vocals in Atheist, with a ferocious yowl that was totally unlike the guttural growling most other bands were doing back then) and his crew of pot-smoking visionaries in the early 80's as a standard issue thrash metal band, by the end of the decade they had evolved into one of the most unique metal bands to ever come out of the Sunshine State, morphing into something much more complex and left-field than almost anyone else in the Floridian death metal scene, combining dizzying baroque arrangements and highly complex time signatures with vicious, discordant riffs and heavy doses of fusiony jazz, Latin music and prog influences. Unsurprisingly, these albums went over the heads of most metalheads when they originally came out, the complexity and insane tonal shifts throwing most 'bangers for a loop. They never received the sort of widespread acclaim that many of their peers enjoyed throughout the 90's, and Atheist ended up breaking up not long after the release of their third album Elements. Released on the long-defunct Active Records, all three of the early Atheist LPs were later re-mastered and reissued with bonus materials on CD via Relapse Records in 2005, followed by these new limited-edition vinyl reissues on new label Season Of Mist that pretty much duplicate the original Active releases all the way down to the center labels.
Recorded in the wake of the tragic highway accident that took the life of founding bassist Roger Patterson while on tour, it's amazing that the band was even able to continue on, let alone release their second album Unquestionable Presence, which is considered by many to be the band's finest hour and one of the all-time classic albums of 90's era prog-death. Atheist were at the absolute top of their game here, though. As work had already been started on the album prior to Patterson's death, the band carried on, drafting Cynic bassist Tony Choy to complete the album, and the result is a whiplash assault of some of the finest avant-garde death metal that you will ever hear. A savage set of unorthodox death metal songs that showcased the band's ever growing musical prowess and songwriting chops, Presence delivered eight songs of complicated, proggy metal that was at the time unmatched in terms of sheer creativity. Opening with the frantic tech-death workout of their classic "Mother Man", the band sets into one of their most lethal grooves, but they follow that with a dizzying array of punishing chromatic riffage, galloping thrash and soaring sinister leads, unexpected slap bass playing that actually fits right in with the band's jazzy sound, the songs shifting through myriad time signature changes, the complicated song structures constantly changing shape, the band moving through brutal death thrash into reckless prog workouts and into strange, atmospheric jazziness. As the album unfolds through songs like "Retribution", "An Incarnation's Dream" and the title track, there's plenty of those killer proggy solos, ambient samples and fusiony breaks strewn throughout, and never once would you mistake this for just another rote death metal record. While the band had yet to immerse themselves in the sort of samba/jazz elements that would appear on their third album, there is still a heavy undercurrent of jazz and fusion technique with the guitar playing, and some of those Latin rhythms do start to peer through on a couple of songs. The whole feel of the album stood out even further with Shaefer's strange wordplay, his wicked sneering scream belting out lyrics that almost read like arcane motivational tracts, and his unique vocal phrasing is just as important to Atheist's singular sound as any of the other elements that the band is known for. A landmark album in the field of technical/progressive death metal. Highly recommended.
Originally released on New Addition (the same label that issued the Microwaves Attack Decay Sustain Release album and the final Conelrad disc), this
split mini-album of potent, no-wave influenced heaviosity features two outfits that both sport former members of Arab On Radar. That by itself should give
you an indication of what to expect...Athletic Automaton (which features Stephen Mattos from Arab On Radar) take the sort of wiry skronk peddled by their
previous outfit and turns it into repetitive exercises in electro shock/brian drill hypnosis. They open the split with "Death On An Escalator", with it's
droning noisy seasick riff and loud lopsided drumming that's topped by yowling effects-blasted vocals courtesy of J. Ryan from Six Finger Satellite, followed
by the eight minute "Sweatpants No Underwear". Made In Mexico (with AOR's Jeff Schneider) contributes "Infrared Eye", "Wounded Knees" & "International
Zombie"; their version of collapsing, deconstructed, lo-fi punk noise is heavier and creepier than their split-mates, like a freaked out old SST band playing
their songs backwards while the instruments are disintegrating in their hands, guitar strings becoming uncoiled in the middle of a riff, the rhythm section
suddenly locking in with jazz-like focus throughout the breakdown, the female singer belting out wasted, desperate shrieks. Killer stuff.
Attention hardcore no wave freakazoids: here's the sweet new 12" vinyl edition of the AA/MIM split! This fresh pressing has a killer screenprinted cover
design by Matt Brinkman.
Originally released on New Addition (the same label that issued the Microwaves Attack Decay Sustain Release album and the final Conelrad disc), this
split mini-album of potent, no-wave influenced heaviosity features two outfits that both sport former members of Arab On Radar. That by itself should give
you an indication of what to expect...Athletic Automaton (which features Stephen Mattos from Arab On Radar) take the sort of wiry skronk peddled by their
previous outfit and turns it into repetitive exercises in electro shock/brian drill hypnosis. They open the split with "Death On An Escalator", with it's
droning noisy seasick riff and loud lopsided drumming that's topped by yowling effects-blasted vocals courtesy of J. Ryan from Six Finger Satellite, followed
by the eight minute "Sweatpants No Underwear". Made In Mexico (with AOR's Jeff Schneider) contributes "Infrared Eye", "Wounded Knees" & "International
Zombie"; their version of collapsing, deconstructed, lo-fi punk noise is heavier and creepier than their split-mates, like a freaked out old SST band playing
their songs backwards while the instruments are disintegrating in their hands, guitar strings becoming uncoiled in the middle of a riff, the rhythm section
suddenly locking in with jazz-like focus throughout the breakdown, the female singer belting out wasted, desperate shrieks. Killer stuff.
These German grinders kick total ass on this short-but-annihilating 3" CD. Opening with a intense spoken word piece, these six songs of monstrous chaotic grindcore kick in quickly with huge metallic riffs, super chaotic (but also INSANELY tight!) song structures, hyperspeed machinegun blastbeats and mathy, offbeat breakdowns, and a vocalist who seems to be channeling both Kevin Sharp and Jon Chang at the exact same time. This shit is nuts! No keyboards, no ambience, no electronics, just straight punishing grind played with virtuosic skill for the first few songs, but then - whoa - the last song comes in and all bets are off, it's a supremely catchy and melodic grindmetal anthem, with a KILLER midpaced thrash riff that turns into this weird almost garage-rock pop hook in the blink of an eye, super catchy, but with those bestial vocals still going, and then at the end it builds into an epic crescendo of melodic, almost shoegazey Swervedriver like guitar and soaring feedback, then done. What the fuck?! Before I got this in, someone had described Atka to me as a cross between Discordance Axis, Botch and Cephalic Carnage...seemed unlikely at the time, but hell, that seems a lot more accurate after finally hearing this thing... The whole thing is over in six minutes, but it's six minutes of anthemic technical grindcore AWESOMENESS, with that final song that I'm hoping, dreaming signals more to come from this band.
I've been working on getting their other releases in stock, it's slow going as Atka have no distribution here in the U.S> and most of their stuff is only available on vinyl, but keep an eye out for more to come...
On the last new arrivals list, I was raving about the German grind band ATKA and their self-released 3" CD that they had just sent in to Crucial Blast; it's not that easy for me to get excited over a grindcore band nowadays, the majority of new bands that I hear are content to simply ape the classic Earache template, "oldschool revivalism" has been permeating the grind scene for years now, but every once in a while a band will slip through that just completely knocks me on my ass. ATKA is the latest band to do so, and that little 3" disc made me an instant fan with just six minutes of music, blazing epic grindcore that mixed together insane abrupt riff changes and hysterical hyperspeed tempos, huge dissonant noise-rock riffs and brutal gutteral vocals, total punishing grindcore, but what made those six songs so amazing were the strength of the riffs, and the hooks, which were so catchy, especially the last track on the disc which seemed to filter some kind of early 90's indie melodicism through a nuclear strength grind attack without ONCE sounding wimpy. Thats what makes ATKA so great, they're able to employ melody without ever falling into dreaded "emo" territory and come out with grindcore that's insanely catchy and experimental and complex and always crushing.
This split album is the newest release from ATKA, which they share with fellow German grinders Shimetsu. ATKA deliver seven tracks on their side, most of 'em averaging around two minutes each. This stuff is just as amazing as their 3" CD, each song packed with super complex arrangements of hyperspeed blastbeats, angular but catchy riffs, powerful gutteral vocals with TONS of emotion, weird squiggly leads, massive sludgecore riffs like on the beginning of the second track where it sounds like Down for a moment before the band suddenly shifts into a super catchy thrash metal part, then into EPIC grindcore - all in forty-nine seconds! There's over-the-top prog freakouts, Champ-like harmonies, awesome spacey textures, weird electronic glitchery, and one thrash attack after the next, and one song starts off with a metal lick that sounds like the band is going to go into some old school sleaze metal, but then the blastbeats kick in and take the song to a very different place. Another thing about ATKA is that they incorporate some very rocking elements into their sound without sounding at all generic, it's more like hearing Discordance Axis or Brutal Truth unexpectedly mutating into an old school heavy metal hook. Their blastbeats have that weird choppy feel where it sounds like the music is skipping, which also gives this a violently disorienting feel. Seriously, ATKA is one of the best newer grind bands I've heard, and it's probably just a matter of time before these guys are picked up by one of the bigger metal labels. Fans of adventurous grind need to this NOW.
Shimetsu have a lot to live up to after following ATKA, but they do so admirably with a warped deathgrind assault across ten tracks that'll have Gorguts fans drooling. The avant-garde skronk of Gorguts's Obscura is obviously a big influence on Shimetsu's impossibly ultra complex and dissonant avant-death, but there's also some insanely technical Behold...The Arctopus / Necrophagist style progshred in here as well, with the short songs packing in a dizzying amount of atonal dirge, lightspeed fretboard runs, bestial pigbelches trading off with higher pitched squeals, brutal blastbeats and stop/start drumming that gives me a serious case of head-tilt by the fifth track. This is some of the craziest stop/start deathgrind song arrangements to come through here since Decaying Form's Chronicles Of Decimation. I'll definitely be on the lookout for more stuff from Shimetsu after hearing this!
The ATKA/Shimetsu split also has a seriously cool-looking packages for a grindcore LP. Both sides of the jacket feature images of icebergs and clear spot varnish printing, with ATKA's side featuring one of Camille Seaman's awesome images from her Last Iceberg series, and the record comes in a printed inner sleeve. Limited to five hundred copies.
��The sort of classic, epic heavy metal that Atlantean Kodex deliver on their latest album The White Goddess isn't something that I typically expect from a label like 20 Buck Spin, whose tastes have in the past tended to extend into more extreme territory with releases from such C-Blast favorites as Coffins, Whitehorse, Black Boned Angel, Wolvserpent and Vargr. This is great stuff though, the follow up to their debut album on Cruz Del Sur hat came out in 2010, a nearly hour-long listening experience filled with some high-quality, vaguely progressive heavy metal and a lush production job that services their sweeping , majestic metal well. Atlantean Kodex's music comes from a decidedly old-school place, their ornate, sprawling epics (a couple of these songs breach the ten minute mark) laced with elements of traditional doom metal, huge slow moving riffs that carry echoes of the late 80s output of Swiss doom gods Candlemass (like on the song "Heresiarch"). The album opens with one of Christopher Lee's lines from Robin Hardy's 1973 pagan horror classic The Wicker Man, setting up the album's poetic feel and occult references as Atlantean Kodex begins their seven song saga; the music moves from folk-flecked instrumental passages to complex, slow-moving metallic crush, shifting with ease between crushing doomed riffage and faster, galloping power anthems, all the while creating an expansive sound that incorporates backing vocal choirs, acoustic guitars, Hammond organ and piano into their songs. There's a couple of points on the album that started to remind me of both Virginia prog-doom legends While Heaven Wept and Open The Gates-era Manilla Road, which should give you a fairly decent idea as to the sort of stuff Kodex is dealing in. Songs like "Trumpets Of Doggerland (There Were Giants In The Earth In Those Days)" and "Twelve Stars And An Azure Gown (An Anthem For Europa)" are full of dramatic power, that traditional heavy metal backbone underpinning the whole record even as the band scatters some atmospheric soundscapery throughout the album via a couple of short ambient interludes of acoustic folky strum and the crackle of bonfires, distant war-drums and cold arctic winds. Very cool use of piano, too; the piano solo that closes "White Goddess Unveiled (Crown Of The Sephiroth)" is wonderfully haunting. Kodex front man Markus Becker gives an impressive performance, his clear, impassioned vocals rising high above the band's dark and grandiose heaviness. Songs open with bombastic trumpet blasts that give off a strong whiff of Hammerheart-era Bathory, and samples of solemn Winston Churchill appear throughout the album alongside female voices reading spoken word passages, all adding to White Goddess's mythic imagery, which the band goes into further detail with in the lyrics and artwork, drawing from both occult and literary symbols and references, the central theme of the album dealing with the decline of Europe told in apocalyptic metaphor. Quality stuff that fans of prog-tinged 80's era heavy metal, bands like Hammers Of Misfortune, Twisted Tower Dire and Slough Feg, and classic European-style doom metal should look into...
�� The CD version from 20 Buck Spin comes in jewel case packaging, and includes a thick twenty four page booklet filled with evocative artwork and the lyrics printed in old English script.
��Chicago psych metallers The Atlas Moth are back at last after a nearly three year wait, and album number three The Old Believer sees 'em focusing their sound into something even more powerful and emotional, while continuing to build upon the spacey, textured heaviness that made their 2011 album An Ache For The Distance so impressive. To flesh out the more ambitious sound of their latest, the band brought in a number of guest musicians ranging from Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier and saxophonist Bruce Lamont of Yakuza, to violinists Kim Pack and Sarah Pendleton (Subrosa) and even former Stabbing Westward guitarist Marcus Eliopulos.
��Opening with the bellowing weather-beaten majesty of "Jet Black Passenger", The Old Believer slowly weaves it's weary magic, blending huge doom-laden riffage and elephantine tempos with layered, complex melodies, a multi-pronged vocal attack that mixes together a killer emotive croon and hair-raising feral screams to excellent effect. The Moth's melodic sludginess has often gotten them compared to bands like Jesu and Nadja, but there's really something different going on here, their sound drawing more from certain gloomy strains of post-hardcore, filtered through a searing psychedelic haze that the band forms from striking guitar work, majestic leads, and some fantastic use of effects. There are moments on this album that oddly remind me more of old favorites like Jawbox and Engine Kid than anything that folks might describe as "metalgaze", though fans of the current wave of doom-laden melodic heaviness are certainly going to find a lot to like about Atlas Moth's latest. And the singer's dramatic croon gives this a really distinctive touch as well, his dour singing bringing an almost gothic feel to the band's monstrous crush. Things take a proggier turn on the lush vibraphone-laced "Halcyon Blvd", one of the album's more subdued tracks, while tracks like "Sacred Vine" slip into a bluesy sort of goth-metal that feels like Fields Of The Nephilim getting shot up with some serious stoner-metal riffage. There's some really cool, understated use of electronics throughout the album, looping synth-like arpeggios and washes of gleaming cosmic drift that appear briefly. This stuff soars.
�� And the packaging for the CD edition of Old Believer is stunning all on its own. Using a unique printing process, the removable cover for the album is designed so that the artwork (created by Ryan Clark of Invisible Creature) changes when you run water across the material, the image of a regal snow queen on her throne morphing into something much more sinister - it's one of the coolest things I've seen using this kind of thermal printing for an album package, and you can check out a short video of this neat effect here .
Man, instrumental doom metal bands have been crawling out of the woodwork lately; just here at Crucial Blast, we've been picking up some killer albums from bands like Mills Of God, Serpentcult, Caldera, Endname, that new one from thunder-sludge duo Sardonis, and now we've got this debut album from the Aussie power trio Atolah, who toss their sizeable bong into the ring with their own stripped-down, monochrome form of cloven-hoofed downer metal, released on the always-heavy Psychedoomelic Records.
These drug-doom sculptors approach their heavy, narcotized jams as if they are soundtrack pieces, the lengthy tracks carved out of monstrous bass-heavy grooves and sludgy riffs that are cloned straight from Sleep/Electric Wizard's collective genetic soup, tracks like "Dead Leg", "Down It or Leave It", and "El Duce" all inhabiting that dank, pot-smoke filled space in between Dopethrone and Holy Mountain. A couple of the tracks have some weird non sequitur film samples that are laid over the beginning of the songs, but that's it as far as any sort of vocals go; it's otherwise pure plod, the guitarist whipping thick streaks of feedback around in what almost approaches a solo, slashing across the fuzzed out hypnotic crunch with thick tendrils of amplifier howl while the rhythm section lays down its pummeling bottom-heavy dirge. You probably already knew if this was your bag or not when I said "instrumental doom", but if you do dig this kind of heavy riff soundtrack (and it IS all about the riff), these guys supply the goods. And fans of all of that newer Sleep-worship stuff on Meteorcity (Whitebuzz/Flood/Black Pyramid/Elder) might find Atolah worthy of investigation as well. The limited edition disc comes with a vinyl sticker.
Pretty primo two-song Ep from this self-described "Primitive Doom Metal" duo, made up of drummer/bassist/organist Andy Lippoldt (Persistence In Mourning, RL:ZZ, Winters In Osaka) and singer/guitarist Sa�l Do Caix�o. This appears to be their first release following a demo that came out in 2012, a taste of the somber, slightly screwed doom that these guys are starting to amass, and it's got this perfect balance between classical Sabbathian blooze-lurch and a weird, brain-damaged quality that really won me over once the a-side wound down. That first song "False Prophecies" is exactly the sort of thing you'd describe as "trad doom", all lumbering down-tuned power chords, stripped-down, pounding caveman drumming and moaning lamentation that echoes the most dire and dread-filled Saint Vitus sides, but these guys have bent that sound into their own mutant image via those weirdly layered, drugged vocals from Do Caix�o and the filthy, MASSIVE droning bass sound, smears of lysergic Hammond organ oozing in short spurts beneath the despairing lyrics and the band's pervasive atmosphere of abject failure...it's an absolute downer of the highest caliber. The b-side has "The Atheist", another slab of dissonant dread and rumbling slo-mo crush with those reverberating vocals echoing off the walls of their cavernous, barbaric dirge. But then right towards the end, the band shifts out of the crushing funeral march into some fantastic swirling organ drift that loops around and around like some stray keyboard part off a Goblin album, and it's all over with way too soon. Can't wait to hear more from Atomic Cries...
Grim, Wagnerian bombast from this side-project from Christoph Ziegler, the guy behind the dark ambient/black metal project Vinterriket. As Atomtrakt, Ziegler forges a combination of bleak neo-classical ambience, symphonic elements, pounding industrial rhythms, and samples from WWII propaganda films, a sound that I'm well familiar with, following as it does in the footsteps of various Cold Meat Industries outfits, early In Slaughter Natives, Puissance, Toroidh, Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio, early Von Thronstahl, H.E.R.R. and Der Blutharsch. Where Atomtrakt slightly differs is in the distorted vokills, which come out as harsh and blackened rasps, very black metal-esque, and which give the tracks that they appear on an ugly, feral feel. It's an evil brand of martial industrial, the soundtrack for approaching nuclear blast waves, global plagues and incinerated cities. Nuklearchetyp is the second album from Atomtrakt, and only half of the tracks feature those blackened blown-out shrieks; the other half of the album is entirely ambient, long tracks of soundtrack-style strings and brass, dark orchestral synths, woodwinds, distorted spoken-word samples, droning organs, and groaning cellos over a battalion of pounding, martial tympani drums. Majestic blackened Teutonic industrial that follows a recurring minor-key motif that reappears throughout the album, and drifting on a black tide of swirling, drifting keys that are unsurprisingly very similar to the bleak wintry synth-ambience of Vinterriket. You can practically feel the ash drifting off of this music. Nuklearchetyp is limited to 1000 copies and includes an enhanced portion of the disc that has a video for the track "Eisenkerker".
Back in stock!
Waitasec, a new Atrax Morgue record? What the hell. Never thought I'd see something new from this legendary Italian death industrial project, since Atrax Morgue mastermind Marco Corbelli hung himself in 2007. Seems as though Bloodlust had some unreleased material on the shelf that had been recorded for the Her Guts 7" but ultimately wasn't used, and resurrects it here along with a remix of an older track that appeared on one of Atrax Morgue's cassette releases on Bloodlust. The a-side is a piece of a hallucinatory horror titled "Omicidio" that features Corbelli's moans and murderous mutterings filtered through extreme flange and delay effects, creating a sonic bad-trip of ghostly murmurs, gargling utterances and vibrating electronics that skip and buzz through a vast dead space. The end result is pretty fucking ghastly. The b-side features a new remix of the track "Autoerotic Death" that originally appeared on the Bloodlust! cassette of the same name, created by Mark Solotroff of Bloodyminded/Intrinsic Action who reshapes the source material into a hellish slab of undulating, pitch-black death drone. Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies pressed on dark, marbled bruise-purple vinyl.
Now that Atrax Morgue/Slaughter Productions leader Marco Corbelli is gone, I'm betting that it's going to be increasingly difficult to get one's hands on his body of work outside of shitty MP3 rips, so I've been working on getting as much of the Atrax Morgue back catalog in stock as possible, both to augment my own collection and to make these works of morbid electronics available to newcomers. Over the course of his fifteen year run with Atrax Morgue, Corbelli produced some of the best extreme electronic music to emanate from the Italian underground, and even now you'd be hard pressed to find an artist who evokes a bleaker worldview than Atrax Morgue. His strange, minimal electronic music took Bianchi's pulsating blackened synth-tones and melded them with a kind of slasher-movie atmosphere, and surrounded this sound with a strange delirium of Italian fashion culture, Mod graphic design, psychosexual nightmares and jet-black electronic dread.
The 2000 album Paranoia is a prime example of Corbelli's disturbed vision, from the strange album art that includes a photo of Corbelli in drag, to the noxious low-fi drones and crackling UHF ambience, pulsating black synth and blown-out, snarling vocals that skulk through the shadows of these fourteen tracks. The music on this disc is pretty minimal, often focusing on a simple, seemingly innocent spoken phrase that gets looped over and over obsessively, transforming it into a strangely evil mantra while metal objects scrape across the floor, juxtaposed with bursts of piercing feedback and his ravenous verbal murder-fantasies set to a sparse electronic pulse. There's an intimacy in Atrax Morgue's music that you usually don't hear in power electronics, with stretches of quiet pause where you only hear the amplified sound of Corbelli's labored breathing or his lips smacking or the rustling of the mic. His squealing, mewling vocals sometimes seem to transform into high pitched rat-like shrieks, and when Corbellio suddenly syncs those squealing vocals with the high-pitched synthesizer drones, it can sound seriously evil. There's a genuinely disturbed feel to this album, the lyrics drenched in sweat and cum and blood, the violent images like something that could have been lifted from a Brainbombs song, but here they sound ten times more sinister. The spartan electronic sounds are beyond primitive, but Corbelli somehow manages to imbue these simple tones and hums and drones with a palpable sense of dread; no blasting noise, just simple murderous meditations. In fact, a lot of the electronics on Paranoia resemble an Atari 2600 that has been taken over by some vast demoniac intelligence, throbbing 8-bit glitches turning feral on tracks like "Is It Enough?", where Corbelli's hellish feline shriek is processed into an electronic howl that whipcracks across the murderous rhythmic synth-throb.
Disturbing stuff, and pretty essential if you're a fan of Atrax Morgue's death-obsessed visions.
A recently re-discovered minor classic of avant-garde Teutonic death metal that I haven't been able to stop listening too lately. Atrocity's Todessehnsucht originally came out under the title Longing For Death when it was released in 1992 by Roadrunner Records, and like a lot of foreign death metal albums that came out around this time (after the heyday of underground DM), Atrocity's sophomore album slipped somewhat into obscurity. This recent reissue from Metal Mind dusts off this stunning slab of dissonant, progressive brutality for fans of challenging old-school heaviness, and it still sounds as strange and crushing as it did back upon it's release. Just listen to the lead-off title track; those nauseating atonal leads, the sludgy, slurred riffing, the odd time signatures - it all contributes to the overall strangeness of Atrocity's sound, a convoluted form of death metal flecked with orchestral elements that in some ways echoes the bizarre, uncomfortable sound that Gorguts would develop on Obscura. Other songs like "Unspoken Names" and "Godless Years" meld crushing down tuned heaviness with some truly jarring rhythms and noisy guitars, making the off-time atonal melodies and jagged riffs sound even stranger when contrasted with the faster, more straightforward thrashing, blastbeat-driven violence, and abrupt downshifts into skull-caving doom. It's not as difficult or as abstracted as later Gorguts, though, and Atrocity still anchor their songs in huge, menacing melodic riffs and ghastly atmosphere that maintains a classic DM feel, while Alex Krull's cavernous troll-vocals manage to balance a supremely guttural delivery while still being somewhat intelligible. The rhythm section doles out some crazed time signature fuckery, entering into warped math-metal and jazz-informed playing on "A Prison Called Earth" where moaning choirs are twisted around hyper-angular riffs and stop-on-a-dime rhythmic patterns, and later tracks (like "Sky Turned Red") incorporate a mix of Wagnerian and liturgical music influences (strings, tympani, choral voices) into the surging, spasming death metal.
As usual, Metal Mind gives this re-mastered reissue a quality presentation, adding a cover of Death's "Archangel" at the end, and including a twelve page booklet with liner notes, lyrics and photos, and digipack packaging. Limited to two thousand machine-numbered copies.
��Another recent entry in the extreme noise-punk canon from the aptly named Distort Reality label, the No Nukes EP from Japanese static-blasters Attack SS might not be quite as insane and blown-out as that label's offerings from dual-bass noisefiends Zyanose (who remain one of my all-time favorites within the current noise-punk scene), but these mutants still deliver some savagely static-soaked hardcore punk on this record, a punishing assault of screeching high-gain hardcore in the deformed vein of bands like Disclose and Confuse. Attack SS zip right along at breakneck speed across these four tracks; I was amused to see one of their guitar players being attributed to "fuzz" and the other to "noize" within the liner notes, and that twin-axe skree attack that the guitar players produce thoroughly coats the rampaging hardcore punk in a nice layer of ear-scraping distorted noise, which they'll occasionally dial down a bit in order to batter you with one of their anthemic sing-along choruses. While Attack SS's distorto-thrash isn't quite the Merzbow-meets-Discharge level of sonic violence that a lot of the other bands of this ilk have been offering up, these songs are still plenty catchy and ugly and most definitely noisy, with lots of totally fucked-up melodic guitar leads, and a back-to-back blast on the b-side ("Ideal Future By Our Hands" and "P.O.L.I.B.A.S") that really delivers on the crashing hardcore insanity; my head was smashing into the wall in no time. Nope, I still just can't get enough of this stuff. Highly recommended if yer a fan of Confuse-influenced noise-punk outfits like Zyanose, D-Clone, Death Dust Extractor, Framtid and Merciless Game...
��Musik For Tomma Rum (or ("Music For Empty Rooms") is the third album from the somewhat mysterious Swedish band Attestupa, who take their name from the steep, craggy mountains in Nordic folklore from which the elderly and the infirm would hurl themselves to their death, in an effort to spare the rest of their community the trouble of having to care for them in their old age. Knowing that piece of folklore is an almost essential aspect of appreciating this bands music, as they perform some of the bleakest, most miserable (and yet often strangely beautiful) music on their records, crafting slow-moving, fuzz-drenched folk dirges that seem to imbue a kind of industrial-tinged slowcore with traces of black metal buzz and an atmosphere of rural isolation and wintry desolation. Made up of members of the dark Swedish noise outfits Sewer Election and Blodvite, this band is definitely not another noise project, but an utterly haunting mix of blackened funereal folk and creepy, crude autumnal noisescapes laid out across long, lumbering low-fi dirges that move in monotonous slow-motion. I first fell under the spell of this group after picking up their 1867 12" a while back (which we finally picked up for the C-Blast shop, check out the review for that elsewhere on this weeks list), but this newest album is even better, utterly dark and doleful music that falls somewhere in between the gurgling electronics of Throbbing Gristle, the obscure 70's necro-psych of German Oak, and the mournful melodies found on Ulver's Bergtatt...
�� The first song "Skingras Och Ers�ttas" lays down a steady monotonous drumbeat beneath a sorrowful rumbling dronescape of distorted keyboards and clanking guitar, a kind of funereal slowcore lament, the keyboards way out in front playing a sad, distorted melody while the faint, plaintive singing drifts across the background. At first this sort of resembles a more low-fi, blown-out Codeine song bathed in Burzumic buzz and threaded with faint frostbitten melancholy, the twangy gutter-blues guitar layered with subtle crackling noise and primitive gurgling electronics. From there, though, the band drifts out into passages of random noise and murky malfunctioning electronics that eventually turn into the fields of minimal ambient drift and mysterious field recordings that make up tracks like "L�sryckta Minnen". The rest of Musik wanders through similar frosty fields of mournful dirge and cracked electronics, the ghostly melody of "Stillast�ende Luft" spilling out over more of those strange field recordings, the sound joined with distant doleful chanting voices and those prominent organ-like keyboard, playing another gorgeously grim melody over the layers of noise and low-fi grit. Elsewhere, those haunted-house organs emerge over murky minor key guitars on songs like "S� G�r Dagen", the sound aglow in grey winter light, leading downward into fields of crackling black noise that, by the end of the side, turn into something that resembles one of The Rita's crumbling noisescapes. On "Tystnad", the band crafts a pure noisescape of crackling, rumbling sound that feels like icy winds rushing across banks of contact mics, until it eventually shifts into one last blown out organ dirge that closes the album. While utilizing elements of electronic noise and extreme distortion, Attestupa's music is really about crafting a beautifully blighted atmosphere out of repetition and texture, a folk-flecked dirge-rock that, while not remotely "metal", has echoes of early Ulver and Burzum in the achingly beautiful doom-laden melodies. Amazing, utterly forlorn music, and a new favorite, for sure.
�� Limited to five hundred copies.
Along with that terrific new Attestupa album Musik F�r Tomma Rum, I also picked up one of the bands older records 1867 for the shop, which also features more of the Swedish band's mysterious mix of clanking ramshackle noise rock dirge, wintry blackened fuzz, and dread-filled atmosphere that feels as if it might have drained into the grooves of this record from some obscure 70's horror movie soundtrack. Featuring members of experimental noise outfits Sewer Election and Blodvite and taking its name from a mythical mountaintop in Nordic folklore from which the old and infirm would throw themselves to their deaths in an act of ritualized suicide, Attestupa's music manages to combine murky industrial creepiness and traces of black metal influence with their desolate, evil-tinged slowcore sound, which I described in my review of Musik as a cross between the gnarled necro-prog of German Oak, the low-fi melodies found on early Ulver records, and the cracked, gargling electronics of Throbbing Gristle. And let me tell ya, I've really been getting into this band's stuff as the season has been winding down into Autumn; everything surrounding Attestupa's music seems to evoke the approach of long, pitiless winters, the sounds filled with a sense of abject hopelessness, evoking visions of failed crops and the famine that follows. The title of this 12" EP is another reference to a period of frost-covered hopelessness, 1867 being the year that a punishing winter swept across Northern Europe and brought with it mass starvation that killed hundreds of thousands, and which hit Sweden in especially brutal fashion.
1867 opens with the song "Missv�xt", a clanking clusterfuck of screeching guitar noise and discordant power-chords being banged out in semi-slow-motion over a lurching backbeat, while a mountain of scrap metal and feedback and malfunctioning amplifiers crash down around the band. As with their other recordings, this has a weird, shambolic feel that in some ways reminds me of the demented sludge-rock of fellow Swedes Brainbombs, but all washed out and muted, the aggression almost totally diffused, the sound utterly and totally dejected. This particular record also shares some of the similar blackened misery found with some of those noise rock outfits on the Legion Blotan label like Lost Flood, blending together a similar fractured vision of low-fi scum-rock and raw, muffled black metal recording aesthetics. At the end of the a-side, the band wanders off into one of their creepy soundscapes of warbling tape-loops and nauseating locked grooves and squealing feedback, groaning voices circling in eternity, everything drenched in sweat and amp-filth. That leads into "Halshuggarnatten", another eerie industrial soundscape where ancient horror-movie organs creep beneath sheets of murky static, and ominous bass notes drift up out of the depths. After awhile, this too transforms into another murky, mangled dirge, the drums slowly emerging from behind that wall of static and hiss, a simple percussive pounding buried beneath waves of creepy blown-out melody that carry faint echoes of early Ulver in their utterly mournful murkiness.
The b-side is made up of the thirteen-minute "Storsvag�ret", a delirium of seasick synth and ghastly drones that waver over the sound of distant creaking, clanking metal, another amazing, ghoulish industrial soundscape that sprawls out for several minutes before erupting into one final blasted dirge, the whole band dropping in with another ramshackle noise rock anti-groove, the muffled fuzz-drenched guitar carving out doom-laden riffs beneath those moaning, incomprehensible vocals and haunted-house organs, like some bizarre cross between a Brainbombs jam and a fifth-generation cassette dub of an Hammer horror movie score that finally collapses into a heap of smoking, screeching mechanical loops and monstrous noise at the end.
As with everything else this band has recorded, this comes highly recommended. Limited to three hundred thirty copies, 1867 comes in a plain black DJ style jacket and includes a simple xeroxed insert.
One of my favorite recent discoveries from the Polish dark ambient/industrial label Beast Of Prey is the Polish outfit Atum, who have two full length releases out on the label. Atum's dark drift exudes a mixture of black ritual ambience and ghostly Amber Asylum-esque atmospherics, and this limited edition release titled HITWA is made up of five movements connected to mystical/geometric concepts that tie in to the album art. The sound on this disc is formed from industrial ambience and stringed instruments, creating crashing waves of digital distortion amid soft swells of low end thrum and eerie droning processed strings on the opening track, and later introducing distant choral voices that drift across an eerie expanse of orchestral dark drift. All of the tracks take their time to unfold and billow outward, often sprawling out for ten minutes or more, and the earlier pieces center around a more desolate form of ambience that sounds like it's probably influenced by the bleak horror of early Cold Meat artists like Megaptera, Raison D'�tre and Atrium Carceri. The second track suggests a Chthonian massiveness as subterranean monstrous breathing heaves amid the sounds of chiming bells singing in the distance and the soft thrum of metallic drones, the swirling clouds of blackness and stretched out string drones joined by clanking metal rhythms. Later on, we hear more of that liturgical chanting, twisting around fragments of orchestral sound and crashing cymbals and gongs. It's the last two tracks where the strings become more prominent in the sound, starting with "IV"'s acoustic guitars and what should like cellos taking form within the fog, the sound transforming into a kind of cinematic dark chamber folk. This carries over into the final song which ends the disc with massive orchestral black ambience, slow shifting clouds of time stretched strings and horns accompanied by spectral wailing choral voices floating through the abyss and vast grinding prayer bowl tones stretches into infinity, a sound that's part Ligeti, part Lustmord, deep and heavy and portentous.
The disc is packaged inside of an odd-size three-panel folder sleeve with the disc attached to the inside panel on a foam hub, each copy hand numbered in an edition of 444 copies.
Another quality release from the Polish dark ambient project Atum, whose mix of blackened Cold Meat death ambience, field recordings and dark dreamlike dronefolk evokes images of pagan rites held in the shadows of a modern European city in the dead of night. It's probably my favorite project from the Beast Of Prey catalog, and both this and the HITWA discs from the label are primo listening for fans of eerie, crepuscular soundscapery.
Roughly translated from the Polish for "Urban Legend", Legendy Miejskie focuses heavily on field recordings that were captured in the town of Jaworzno where Atum is based. From what I can tell, the intention was to peel back the skin of urbanization from this town and reveal a hidden world of wildness and shadow, and it does so effectively, creating a tapestry of occult sounds where ritual music drifts through minimal nocturnal ambience, giving the sounds of night over Jaworzno an almost tactile quality.
Opener "Legendy Miejskie I" begins softly with the sound of crickets and other night life and wind rustling through trees, and later we hear footsteps crunching through undergrowth as eerie low drones settle in, a wave of minimal Lustmordian creepiness drifting over the mix of layered field recordings and distant metallic thrum. An eerie harpsichord-like melody floats across the horizon, the sound rising and falling, bits of eerie melody emerging for a few moments and then crawling back into the shadows. All of these sounds gradually re-enter and pile on until it becomes a wall of sound in the final minutes of the song, a towering malevolent dronescape swirling with soft whorls of distortion, distant metal clanking, and legions of chanting voices. This gets more dissonant, more nightmarish as it builds towards the end, then fades back into the sounds of night life.
The following four tracks are similar, beginning with more random rustling noises, echoing metallic sounds and the swarming chirp of crickets, then takes a turn into a darker, more malevolent direction as dissonant metal creaks and groans materialize over a swell of subterranean black drift, the twilight quiet disturbed by the scrape of graveyard gates swinging slowly on rusted hinges, ghostly moaning keening fading into the night, and the sound of water trickling across rock. The mysterious soundscapes expand into distant barking howling dogs, rainfall, and pounding tribal percussion, and "IV" has some of the stringed instrument elements that stood out on Atum's HITWA disc. Processed electronic hiss swirls like the steady soft murmur of rain; out of this emerges an acoustic guitar playing a sad, mournful chord progression, backed by minimal synth, dark and doleful sorrowful folk melody, ends suddenly with the clanking and slamming of metal reverberating through vast corridors, immense chains being dragged through gears, and distant rumbling machinery. Very creepy. At the end, the music moves into a vast bleak soundscape of constant tectonic rumblings and grinding low end with scrapes and crackling sounds occuring in the foreground, then transforms into the sound of water crashing and churning around wheezing instruments, flutes, whistles, harmonica, a haunting cloud of freeform dronefolk.
Comes in digipack packaging.
The Japanese sound designer Aube (Akifumi Nakajima) has become legendary for this extensive body of work that centers around extremely detailed noise tapestries that are created by manipulating and mutating a single sound element; past releases have seen him using everything from recordings of water to a single voice to the sound of pages being torn from the Bible, and each work is a dense, detailed collage of sound that might range from sublime drone to brutally harsh slabs of noise. This two song EP was released by AufAbwegen for Aube's Spring 2007 tour of Europe, and both of the six-minute pieces presented here are created from an old Roland SH-12 percussive synthesizer. The first track "Blau" is a sizzling aquatic dronescape, filled with bubbling electronic noises and metallic drones. The other side, "Rot", is more aggressive though, opening with harsh squelchy blats of distortion and an increasingly chaotic stream of squiggly, glitchy electronics. On clear vinyl in a full color sleeve, and limited to 500 copies.
Japanese sound artist Akifumi Nakajima has become well known in the avant-noise scene for his manipulated soundscapes created under the name Aube. Since the early 90's, Aube has focused it's aesthetic on taking a specific sound source, often recordings of water or electric lights and similiar mundane sources, and reshaping the sounds into an unrecognizeable ambient soundscape. Aube's more recent output has tended to lean towards calmer, more meditative realms of sculpted sound, but if you dig back into his earliest work, you'll find recordings of impossibly dense, chaotic noise that is just as brain-melting as what his peers in Masonna, Merzbow, C.C.C.C., Pain Jerk and Incapacitants were doing. The Purification To Numbness full length was recorded in 1994 and was released as part of the Pure series on RRRecords, and breaks away from the processed recordings of water that Aube was beginning to experiment with around this time. Instead, the three massive tracks that comprise the album ("Elementary Particle", "Purification To Numbness", "Ele-Mentally-Particle") are monolithic, twenty-plus minute meltdowns of psychedelic industrial noise. Some of this is comparable to the psych/space blastnoise of C.C.C.C. as Aube erects a similiarly massive wall of roaring distortion that is splattered with an endless onslaught of trippy electronic fx and weird almost musical loops spiralling into the mouth of the storm, but then there are the swarms of honking brass-like tones that descend like armies of free jazz players, frothing at the mouth and doing battle with an enemy armada of spaceships from Galaga. It's quite a trip. Admittedly, there are a bunch of Aube recordings that I haven't laid my ears on yet so my working knowledge of his output is somewhat limited, but geezus if this isn't the most brutal, coked-up galactic
noise assault that I've ever heard from Aube, and that third track especially is some kind of immolating jazz/electronic black hole. Fans of hard-edged Japanese noise gotta hear this. Packaged in a plastic sleeve with xerox-damaged paper covers in the messy RRRecords stylee.
Here is another older Blossoming Noise title that I just picked up for the first time, a 2005 disc from Japanese sound sculptor Akifumi Nakajima's Aube, titled Chain[Re]Action. As with any of Aube's recordings, he is capable of summoning an entire world of sound out of a single sound source, and on this album, it�s a metal chain that is used as the source of these haunting, sometimes terrifying textural dronescapes, which Nakajima invokes purely out of the recorded sounds of the metal links of the chain.
The tracks shift from minimal fields of high-pitched, ringing bell-tike tone drone that steadily increases in volume and intensity until it becomes a blinding white blast of sonic light, to passages of even more minimal clinking noises, barely-there scrapings, all-enveloping aural swarms of metallic screech, distant cicada-like buzzing and electrical hum, portentous sonar-like emanations, and the delay-soaked thrum of alien engines. Nakajima is a master of sound manipulation and design, of achieving contrast between abrasiveness and fragility, and the haunting, richly textured ambience he creates here is nothing short of dark magic.
The two middle tracks in particular ("Re[sound]" and "Recondite") are effectively eerie descents into chthonic machine drift.
The signature track however is the closing "Spasmodic Repetition", a massive, seething thirteen-minute dronescape formed from the looped sounds of chains being dragged and rattled, traced into writhing, scraping rhythms and sinister serpentine activity.
The disc comes in a full color wallet slip-case, and is limited to 1,000 copies.
��� Released in 2002 by Manifold Records, Aube's Howling Obsession is one of the more menacing recordings to come from Akifumi Nakajima's long-running experimental noise project. Like most Aube releases, this focuses on a single sound source that Nakajima proceeds to manipulate and expand into a wider array of sounds, here crafting a black soundworld using only a small speaker to generate his noises, the black cone of his speaker transformed into a gateway into a dark chromium universe. The four main studio tracks that make up Howling Obsession were originally intended for a cassette release on an ill-fated US label that never materialized, and were revised and re-mastered for this proper release through Manifold, supplemented by a sprawling live track.
��� Nakajima produces some stunning droneworks on Howling Obsession using just that single speaker; the title track is an intense piece of deadzone soundscapery, an eighteen minute sprawl that starts out with just the muted buzz of an electrical current, a deep, almost subliminal pulse felt more than heard as it slowly fades into view. It slowly expands into a mesmeric static tone-prayer, gradually joined by layers of piercing high-frequency feedback that swell in volume, somewhat comparable to the minimalist nihilistic noise experiments of Italian artist N., but more meditative, focusing on the soft fluttering movement of the speakerbuzz as he gently manipulates his sound across the length of the track. It's disrupted by Nakajima's volleys of scrapes and rattling noises, created by running the speaker noise through a variety of effects processing, drawing back to the sound of distant thunder before surging back into a storm of chittering distortion, an insectile swarm of crackling noise that proceeds to spread out into a textural field of black static somewhat akin to some of The Rita's more subdued recordings. The other three studio tracks that follow range from brief feedback mantras that stretch rhythmic noises across a black void ("Replicate") and surreal soundscapes populated with malformed mechanical loops, spurts of acrid distortion and searingly abrasive locustblast electronics that reach Bastard Noise-style levels of sonic violence ("M.O.L."), to the ghostly, over-modulated chrome-wet drones and asthmatic industrial throb that dominates "Ex-Terminal". All in all, it's some of the bleakest material I've heard from Aube, and rather captivating.
��� You can hear some elements of the previous tracks in his live performance of "Howling Obsession" from 1997 that closes the disc. At first this twenty-four minute performance goes much darker and creepier, a hushed dronescape of delicate feedback streaks burning out against the black aural backdrop, deep speaker rumblings rising and falling across the length of the track, punctuated by some seriously tinnitus-inducing high end feedback. But later on, the set develops into a more pugilistic din of harsh noise, erupting into blasts of garbled 8-bit chipviolence. An intense enough experience just listening to this track on the album, I can only imagine what it was like to be there in the flesh as Nakajima coaxed these monstrous sounds from his equipment.
���� A rare 2005 release from one of Japan's most respected experimental sound artists, Aube's Metalive showcases a pair of complete live sets along with a shorter excerpt from a third performance, packing this disc out with over sixty-five minutes of evocative, expressionistic noise. Using the amplified and mutated sounds of banal, everyday objects, Aube creates massive, often terrifying noisescapes that become incredibly dense and overpowering. Visceral and textural, his stuff is some of the best stuff to come out of the Japanese noise underground.
���� The first full live set on this disc is from a 1997 performance in Germany that finds Aube slowly building a vast dronescape, starting off with the barest of peripheral hum, but then stretching and layering this minimalist pulse with streaks of flinty feedback and soft electronic tones. He gradually incorporates clusters of clattering metallic noise and high-pitched sinewaves into the soundfield, allowing mesmeric, almost subliminal rhythms to form from the feedback process, rumbling rattling loops materializing from within roiling waves of black static, building to a tense, almost threatening atmosphere that charges the air across the second half of the track as ghostly thumps and sinister distorted throb continues to slip in and out of focus. Impressive and ominous work.
���� The other full set comes from a 1998 performance at Yamamura Salon in Ashiya, Japan; much like the previous track, Nakajima starts this off with a soft, minimal hum that becomes the springboard for a larger and more layered noisescape. Rhythmic fluttering and soft pulses of muted feedback slowly spread out across the set, rising and falling in intensity as it gives way to a series of bathyspheric sonar-like pings and luminous drones. More minimal and mesmerizing, the set is flecked with lots of interesting tonal artifacts and hushed rhythmic movement, even slipping into sections of spare, almost technoid throb and miniature symphonies of clanging metal.
���� That looping, rhythmic feel carries over to the final eight minute track, recorded in Germany in 1998; fragile, vaguely sinister sounding loops whirr in the darkness beneath gently wavering feedback drones on this one, finishing off the disc with it's eeriest piece of music, a somewhat spooky dronescape that's further layered with more forceful metallic rattlings and a prayer-bowl like resonance that in the end graces the performance with a strange, vaguely ritualistic atmosphere.
���� Issued in a limited edition of one thousand copies, Metalive comes in a clamshell case with full color artwork.
���My teeth are still rattling from this. Form Destroyer is the debut full-length from Auditor, the latest project from Brandon Elkins, who had previously rattled our skulls with the glitched-out industrial dubscapes and doom-laden electronics of Iron Forest (who released that killer Body Horror disc on Crucial Blaze a while back), and before that with the haunting experimental blackness of his old project A Crown Of Amaranth who also appeared on one of the Crucial Blast sub-labels around a decade ago. Elkins's music has kept getting heavier with each new project, incorporating heavier elements of dub, rhythmic industrial sounds and doom-laden metal, making his more recent projects particularly punishing. And in many ways Auditor picks right up where Iron Forest left off with Body Horror, constructing a series of monstrous malformed blasts of lurching industrial heaviness smeared in echoing dub-style percussion and gut-rumbling bass. More metallic than ever, in fact.
��� But with Auditor, that dub-damaged sound also gets twisted into something even harsher, with those crushing low-slung rhythms plated in massive low-end and chiseled into breakbeat-like rhythms, over which Elkins layers some pretty oppressive orchestral ambiance and bleak industrial drones. Vast swathes of dystopian ambiance are draped over the grotesque Godfleshian boom-bap and veins of clanking mutant dub that pulse malignantly throughout the album. And it gets pretty nightmarish pretty quick, moving from the noisy, cacophonous chaos of opener "Protocol 1" that spreads out into a wall of staticky drone streaked in sinister melody, into the demonic industrial dirge of "And Vomit As You Devour Them" that sounds like some vile mutation of an old Wax Trax 12". From there it gets relentlessly bleaker, piling ominous sampled voices over those skittering, pneumatic rhythms and bursts of bone-splintering bass, washes of oceanic black ambiance sweeping across the echoing beats and droning distorted bass guitar, snarls of putrid over-modulated feedback twining around squalls of distant guitar noise.
��� The tone of the album gets significantly heavier across the second half though, as "Betrayer Of Sleep" suddenly drops the tempo down even more and the sound transforms into an utterly evil crawl of industrial doom, a glacial riff skulking through a haze of sparse, hammered drums, the vocals dispensed in a murderous reptilian whisper, everything adorned in decaying strands of howling feedback. I'm momentarily reminded of some weird synthesized version of bands like Thergothon or Evoken, but powered by a fucked-up mechanical backbeat, the drumming sounding "live" but also hopelessly fractured into something more abstract, with barely any forward momentum at all, which just adds to the oppressive atmosphere of the whole thing. And then the closer, a nearly fifteen minute holocaust of distorted chaos and terrifying choral screams (courtesy of Joan Hacker of Factoria) that gradually disperse into an epic blown-out finale, ghastly howls streaking high above a field of smoldering blackened electronics and dirge-like bass rumble, an evil mesmeric symphony of black noise spreading edgelessly through the cosmos, riding on waves of monstrous distorted doom riffs cloaked in carnivorous static, eventually burning off into a rather strange hallucinatory stretch of dreamy jazziness lit up with tracers of lingering vocals, floating through a deep black carcinogenic haze. Between that immense deathdrone voidscape and the crushing cracked industrial heaviness of the previous tracks, this sort of comes off like a blacknoise-infected Scorn, a malevolent dubstep monstrosity slowed down to a torturous crawl.
��� Comes in digipack packaging.
A strange DVD, this. It captures a live performance from Aughra, which is the solo ambient project of Magic Bullet Records label boss Brent Eyestone, who
has also played in Corn On Macabre, Forensics, and Waifle. The show takes place in a joint called KC's Music Alley in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where the
promoter provided attendees with free beer and Brent set up his gear inside of an 8� x 10� tent, which he played inside of throughout the entire performance
while blasting the audience with a fog machine. Our entire view of him during this performance consists of a static shot of the tent that he's in lit from
the back, so we only see his shadow projected against the wall of the tent. The music is pretty cool, moving from blissed lout guitar ambience not entirely
unlike something you'd hear from Stars Of The Lid, to heavy trip-hop beats layered with drones and somber piano melodies, and swirling post-rock mantras that
remind me of Sigur Ros. However, while the musical performance is going on, it seems that a bunch of the kids in attendance ingested a respectable amount of
hallucinogens at the show. What at first looked like it was going to be a simple document of a live Aughra performance instead turns into a freaked out
montage of Jackass style idiocy, with scenes of drunken goons dogpiling onto each other, public vomiting and urination, nudity, rambling nonsense,
shirtless Bluto dudes hurling furniture across the club, and other mindless debauchery, all set to Aughra's drifting, dreamy post-rock soundtrack. Strange.
Brent Eyestone, the main man at Magic Bullet Records and member of forward-thinking neo hardcore outfits FORENSICS/CORN ON MACABRE/WAIFLE, debuts his AUGHRA project here with 3 tracks of minimalist loops and crunchy droneology that sorta reminds us of some of the trancier Dead Mind Records output, like Dead Husbands. The A side is entitled "Gordob", and is like a LOUD 80's action flick score performed by an army of marbles. The B side has "Cholub" and "Fostep", two brief but sadly beautiful piano lamentations, repetitive and hypnotic, with tremelo guitar looping in the background, and a heavy sludgy breakbeat that enters about halfway through "Fostep" that turns the song into a weird mix of GODFLESH/TECHNO ANIMAL style beat-crush and post-rock instrumental melody. Very nice. On clear vinyl, in an edition of 400 copies.
The now-defunct label Underradar put out this cool little cassette a couple of years ago, and we grabbed a handful of them before the label's catalog was sold off...it's a ten-minute cassette EP that features one lengthy track apiece from Aughra and Poison Arrows, and both offer up interesting ambient/noise soundscapes that are primarily created by intense sound processing using audio editing software as their primary instrument. Aughra is the solo project from Brent Eyestone of sludge/math/ambient metallers Forensics and goofball grinders Corn On Macabre, and his side of the tape presents another one of Aughra's gorgeous dark ambient dronescapes. It's equal parts krauty, kosmiche drift, buzzing ambient dronenoise, and massive enveloping low-end drone, very pretty and delicate, even when the distorted vocal-like noises and heavy guitar feedback begins to appear towards the end. It sounds a little bit like a low-fi Tangerine Dream, actually. Very nice.
On the other side is Poison Arrows. I don't anything about 'em, but their side of the tape serves up some intoxicating drone-noise that starts off like a sampled loop of amorphous rock music that is suddenly swept up in a tidal wave of sped-up tape speed and distortion, rising up into a crescendo of thunderous rumble before flattening back out into a strange phantasmagoric soundscape filled with percussive clicking and rhythmic thumps, the loud hum of dulled guitar feedback, weird blips and noises.
The tape comes in a beautiful hand-painted cover that was created by Brent Eyestone, and is limited to 130 pieces.
Accretion is the first release from Australian artist Jason Beale, who practices a kind of industrial-tinged improv guitar delirium under the name Aumgn. This disc struck my ears as a mix of Nurse With Wound-like sonic strangeness and heavier experimental guitar-thud a la KK Null, with some slight hints of gritty Broken Flag-influenced noise seething somewhere below the surface. The disc is an interesting introduction to Aumgn's warped soundscapery, starting with a long thirteen-plus minute sound collage of strange jungle noises and looped guitar clang and processed feedback that sometimes drifts over into NUll territory with a heavy focus on rhythmic loops of percussive guitar noise and blocks of textured fuzz. Later on, the track ventures into rumbling orchestral guitar ambience that takes form from distorted chords drifting through clouds of bleeping electronic glitch and deep monstrous breathing tremors, tabla-like rhythms, deep machine murk and otherworldly spaceship engine noises, towards the end emitting aggressive distorted blasts of noise that almost sound like a power electronics track. The next piece is a field of buzzing, crackling drones that open up into masses of heavily distorted guitar, becoming an infinite rhythmic buzz populated with strange moans, metallic grinding, and deeper rumblings. Subsequent tracks go from mangled industrial grime into melodic instrumental guitar pieces, short fuzzed-out psych blurts looping over and over like a Crazy Horse jam being played sans drums, deep-space synth-like black hole buzz leading into fractured free-form riffing. The album closes with an eleven minute piece that joins a throbbing drone with more of that meandering lysergic guitar, the fuzz and grit and distortion becomes gradually louder, evolving into this cacophonic guitar skronk that ends up somewhere between Skullflower and Sharrock, then diffusing into a massive smoldering low end buzz that ends the disc.
It's an interesting debut from this experimental guitar/noise newcomer, recommended to enthusiasts of avant axe crunch a la Null, Plotkin, Hotguitars, etc. Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies.
Canadian electronic artist Martin Dumais has been active in the Montreal underground music scene throughout the past two decades, beginning with the industrial project Odds in 1990 and later moving on to techno with Les Jardiniers and Juicebox. AUN is his latest project, steeped in dark drones and loops that are primarily sourced from guitar. I found out about AUN after Martin sent me a copy of his Blackhorse album that he released on the Oral label earlier in 2007, and was really impressed by his evocative, mesmerizing dronescapes and hypnotic melodies. The sound of Blackhorse moves from deconstructed guitar melodies that are heavily processed and reshaped into abstract forms, to deep reverberating powerdrones and distorted feedback. Beautiful, eternally rumbling strings and crushing, smoothed out frequencies somewhere in between the blissful dream-drones of Troum, the classic industrial ambience of projects like Cranioclast and Lull, and, at his heavies
t on tracks like "Inkblot", the subterranean ritual throb of Sunn O))). Seldon Hunt's abstract album art and the appearance of those aforementioned heavy guitar drones might at first lead you to belive that this is indeed something along the lines of the current wave of dronemetal projects in the vein of Sunn O))), Black Boned Angel and the like, but AUN's dronescapes are more synthetic sounding, and much more detailed, with slowly drifting waves of oscillating tones sweeping over crystalline loops that seem to shimmer with dark luminescence. On "Unta Eyeless", something like an orchestral Troum is achieved, and "Cyan Card Rejector" turns into one of the more rhythmic pieces on the disc, as black buzzing distortion soars over robotic whale calls and dubby percussive hits. Blackhorse is a constantly changing and evolving album, an excellent collection of shadowed, heavy, and frequently crushing droneworks that reveals glimpses of great abstract beauty as each piece u
nfolds. Highly recommended.
Montreal native Martin Dumais has been an active participant in the Quebecois underground electronic music scene since the early 1990's, beginning with the Industrial project Odds and continuing through to the French house/electro/disco hybrid Les Jardiniers and the techno project Juicebox. Over the past few years, Dumais has been engaged in a very different sort of project, the largely solo endeavor AUN. Using heavily processed guitar and electronics as his primary intrumentation, AUN generates massive post-industrial dronescapes and grinding machine-doom that is reminiscent of the white-light supernovas of Skullflower's most explosive recordings, the classic dark industrial ambient of Lull and Cranioclast, Troum's blissed out dream drones, and the blackened, formless amplifier sludge of Black Boned Angel and Sunn O)))'s 00 Void. I was introduced to AUN's music after Martin, a longtime customer at Crucial Blast, sent me copies of his excellent AUN CDs that were released on the ORAL label out of Montreal. As heavy and distortion/feedback-damaged as any of the more abstracted noise/metal magma that has been oozing out of Battlecruiser, Southern Lord and 20 Buck Spin, but coming from what is clearly a background rooted in Industrial and electronic music, AUN's mesmerizing, crushing and often quite beautiful music became an immediate new favorite.
After picking up AUN's Blackhorse CD on Oral to carry at Crucial Blast, we started working on releasing a full length that Martin had recorded called Multigone, which he thought would fit well with the Crucial Bliss aesthetic. This seven track disc is undeniably the heaviest music that AUN has created so far, a grinding, distorted soundscape that begins with the keening electronic drones and muffled, disembodied metallic riffing that becomes endlessly tanged in a nest of squirming low-end noise in the opening title track, and steadily ratchets up the heaviness with each track, until we come to the punishing "Palejoy", a bludgeoning Industrial metal dirge that has massive, Godflesh-like percussion fused to processed, almost synthetic sounding doom riffage, a black cloud of buzzing, ultra downtuned black dirge drifting over a muffled, slow motion breakbeat. In between, AUN erects vast walls of crumbling distortion and rhythmic guitar loops forged into apocalyptic ambient drift streaked with heavenly synth choirs and sweeping cosmic fx, crushing fifteen-minute blasts of immolating amplifier ragas formed from a nebula of melting woodwind sounds, distant elephantine tympani drums, hellish symphonies of rusted, scraping strings and celestial electronic whiteout that ends up sounding like something from Skullflower's Orange Canyon Mind but one hundred times heavier, and strange deep-space blues jam instrumentals with impossibly detuned guitar soaring through black holes of reverb and tape fluctuation.
This is seriously crushing stuff that stands out in sharp contrast to the hordes of amp-leaning feedback riders, and is highly recommended to anyone into KTL, Final, Black Boned Angel, To Blacken The Pages, K.K. Null, Aethnor, Fall Of The Grey Winged One, Fear Falls Burning, Hlidolf, Messiah Complex, and other heavy, textural industrial/ambient/sludge groups.
Multigone is packaged in the signature Bliss sleeve with full color artwork, and the disc is attached to the interior of the sleeve on a plastic hub. Issued in a limited edition of 300 copies.
Martin Dumais followed up the Multigone cdr from his dark industrial drone project AUN (released by Crucial Bliss) with this full length for Alien8, and it continues his quest for lush nocturnal ambience while scaling down on some of the heavier elements from his earlier work. The music of Motorsleep is actually a big change in direction from the often crushing machine-drones and eruptions of apocalyptic doom riffage of Multigone,at least at first, and instead sounds more like a dark industrial take on classic 70's space music. Which is fine by me - I can't get enough of that dark kosmiche sound, and AUN enters it fully with the opening title track, a dark swirling dronescape of deeps-space synth textures and minimal streaks of buzzing guitar and muted metallic noise. The rest of the album continues in a similiar vein, the sounds of Cluster and Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze beefed up with heavy orchestral drones and swirling feedback, the sound only occasionally becoming abrasive in the first few tracks with slight swells of distorted guitar. Motorsleep's seven tracks are all part of a larger whole and each flows unbroken into the next, and as the album moves deeper, the sound does slowly change, becoming more intense and evolving into a dense symphonic dronescape on "Erzot" that sounds like Growing crossed with Tangerine Dream, with gorgeous murky electronic melodies swirling just beneath the surface of the metallic ambience that stretches out in every direction. Things get heavier on "With Bows Bent" as thicker distorted synthesizer choirs rise in gorgeous melodic waves over black tides of distortion and digital debris, and leads into the most terrifying piece on the album, "Unworlds". It's here that we are faced again with the fearsome industrial ambience of his prior work as this track builds into a massive cloud of synthetic strings, roaring black drones, creepy metallic dissonance and lush angelic choirs stretched into endless infernal washes of sound. From there, the album drifts back out on clouds of dark kosmiche bliss, dark and creepy but sometimes revealing glimpses of gorgoeous incandescent melody, especially on "Neiges", a slab of super-distorted ambient heaviness that sounds like a Jesu song stripped of all vocals and percussion, drifting through deep space as it's pushed by thick gusts of sludgey riffage. While I loved the menacing sound of AUN's earlier releases, this newfound metallic spacedrift is pretty hard to beat with it's mix of soaring kosmiche ambience, distortion-washed drones a la Machinefabriek and Aunduin, and drifting sheets of dronemetal guitar. Beautiful! Comes in a full color four panel digipack.
Another surprising move from Montreal's Aun that'll baffle those who pegged this project as just another entrant in the doomdrone horde, Utica combines Martin Dumais's thick blanketing of heavy guitar drone with what sound to me like 80's European horror soundtrack synths and blurps of ancient chopped n' screwed techno.
First is "Utica", which for nearly seven minutes drifts through clouds of gorgeous shimmering synthesizer-like drone, gleaming electronic melodies chiming deep below in the swirling murkiness, a dark and beautiful cosmic driftscape on par with the work of Troum. Overmodulated feedback slowly creeps into the song, the warbling, buzzing howl casting darker shadows against the densely layered drones, and heavier guitar elements emerge, low end chords buzzing and rumbling within the softly rising waves of feedback and sustained synth hum. At higher volume, this piece is breathtaking.
The other track is "Lelehudah", another long dark bliss-out of cosmic drone and billowing feedback drift. Smears of synthetic chorale voices fade in and out as searing distorted guitar floats slowly into view, with more and more layers of sound materializing as the song goes on, forming into a melodic blur that's both ominous and agonizingly beautiful, like My Bloody Valentine performing a Vangelis score with their skull-crushing amplification in place, a massive bass presence rumbling beneath but not overwhelming the sound at all.
Another fine slab of amorphous dark amp-drift, limited to three hundred hand-numbered copies on white vinyl.
A killer pairing of two of the more adventurous outfits currently working within the realm of the slow and low, each delivering their own unique version of mind-blotting doom/drone. The first side has Montreal's Aun contributing two new tracks of swirling, beat-driven black psychedelia, and the second caves in on itself with a stunning black pit of body-destroying improv-ultradoom from France's Habsyl...
Aun starts their side with the dark, languorous shoegazer drone guitars and sheets of swirling electronic tones of "Druids", with some heavy duty boom-bap trance shambling in and turning it into a sort of MBV-influenced space rock drift crossed with some dark, doomy trip-hop, much like the sound of Aun's latest album on Important. Washes of blackened feedback become expanses of deep cosmic drift, the slow break beat drumming emerging into a field of strange psychedelic guitar noodlings, droning feedback and distorted, metallic riffage, getting darker and more ominous as it goes on, propulsive and strangely melodic as well, those swells of guitar crashing over the swirling industrial ambience in the background, heavy and rumbling rhythmic crush, like some charred, doom-laden Massive Attack-esque atmosphere. The other track, "Fall Out", drops another propulsive groove into a blackened, industrial dronescape.
The motorik beat propels the sound forward across a droning guitar riff and dark kosimiche synths and effects, becoming another sinister mechanical throb, the sound eerie and desolate, deep wheezing and clanking metal appearing over the smoldering industrial backdrop, bits of shifting ambient sound and glitchery moving at the edges...
In response, Habsyll unleash the twenty-three minute "IV", a massive side-long expanse of black improv doom that starts off with a few minutes of minimal metallic clatter that eventually shifts into a creepy, rumbling soundscape. A deep bass pulse appears, hovering in a cloud of distant gong-like booms, strange wheezy organ melodies and streaks of feedback, cavernous reverberations and mutated Middle Eastern melodies, until suddenly the drums begin to scuttle in after a couple of minutes, heralding the massive slab of metallic crush that rumbles in, the sound coalescing into a huge wall of motionless black doom. This glacial, barely moving heaviness fills the space, grinding in place, the guitars breaking down into disintegrating washes of distortion, the drummer summoning swarms of cymbal hiss, then suddenly surging forward with huge halting blasts of distorted metallic sludge, the chords left to hover and echo and dissipate over the super spare drums. It takes a few minutes for the vocals to finally appear; when they do, it's a pair of terrifying throat tearing themselves open, one voice letting loose with low, vomitous snarls, the other lost in a frenzy of high-pitched, maniacal shrieks. The drums finally begin to move again after a while, slowly getting more active, breaking into abstract, jazzy fills for a while before locking into a pummeling dirge, then suddenly erupting with the rest of the band into a furious, fast-paced freakout, a thrashing, angular burst of speed and energy that quickly falls apart back into a black static crawl, slowly dissolving once again into pitch black formlessness as the drums decay and disappear, breaking off one last time at the end into a pounding crush of heaviness before decomposing into washes of feedback and drift and electronic warble and total darkness. Much like their debut album that I reviewed/listed a while back, this is total void music, taking the abstracted doom of Khanate down into the blackest depths of free-improvisation.
Beautifully presented by Public Guilt in a high quality jacket with artwork by Stephen Kasner, in a limited edition of 500 copies on 180 gram vinyl. Includes a digital download code.
Already sold out from the label and out of print, this 7" is the first appearance from these Finnish noisecore legends in almost two decades, their last being that split 7" with Man Is The Bastard that came out in the early 90's. Old school noisecore and PV fans know what's up, though. While their output was minimal to say the least, Aunt Mary produced some seriously savage free-grind back in the day, and this Ep feels like hardly a day has passed since the last time that these maniacs battered my skull with their formless, barbaric din. The vile, pornographic cover artwork and confrontational, offensive imagery that's plastered across Almost Dead's full-color sleeve might look familiar (and deeply disturbing) to some folks, as it shares a similar assault collage aesthetic as the artwork found on Bizarre Uproar releases; that's because Pasi Markkula, the guy behind the Finnish harsh noise/power electronics of BU and Xenophobic Ejaculation is also one of the members of this outfit. No electronics here, though; if there are, they are unidentifiable underneath the brutal, low-fi junk noise / noisecore cacophony that Aunt Mary pukes up in a vicious torrent of blasting noise and fucked-up grind. The "songs", or whatever you want to call them, are delivered in super-short shock blasts of formless guitar vomit and guitar squonk, ridiculously messy and BRUTAL drum battery that sounds like the drummer is hammering away on an old oil drum with a rusted aluminum pipe, demonic howls with the effects on the vocals completely out of control, all blasted in five second eruptions of pure skullfuck. Sort of like old Anal Cunt, which isn't surprising, but more primitive (if you can even imagine that) and at the same time more psychedelic, with those wild, loopy shrieks and brief detours into monstrous doom slop, and some supremely mutant guitar playing that inadvertently gets into Sharrock-like territory with all of the strangled dissonance and honking, furious chords. It's still noisecore though, a blast of seriously abusive, yet classic blurr blast; fans of the old Aunt Mary 7"s should be pleased, and anyone into the likes of Seven Minutes Of Nausea, Anal Cunt, and Sore Throat owe it to themselves to pick up anything from these frenzied Finns. The 7" was released by AWWFN in a limited edition of 300 copies.
��� Mitochondrion's 2011 album Parasignosis was one of my favorite death metal albums that came out that year, a warped and blistering assault of avant-garde blackened death that rivaled the likes of Antediluvian, Impetuous Ritual and Adversarial in terms of sheer chaotic brutality. Haven't heard anything from 'em since then, but when the new album from Auroch Taman Shud recently appeared from Profound Lore, I was eager to hear it simply based on the band's connection to Mitochondrion, as they share several members. Though Auroch's sound on Taman is drawn from the same swarming blackened death metal chaos as the members' other band, this album ventures in a different, more technical direction as it sheared my head off.
��� This is the second album from the Vancouver, BC crushers, a nine-song mini-album further showcasing their own violent, complex take on technical death metal, which first appeared on the 2011 debut From Forgotten Worlds. It's an impressive display of discordant death-worship, combining traces of the rampaging blackened bestial chaos of the Ross Bay crowd with warped riffage and some moments of excellent eerie melody that add a strange, somewhat mystical atmosphere to parts of Taman Shud. An interesting variation on the complex, monstrous blackened death that has been coming out of the frozen north since the late 80's.
��� While blasting this here in the C-Blast office, I'm occasionally reminded of bestial crushers Revenge; there's a similar psychotic feel to the band's frenzied aggro-blast and twisted, skull-scraping riffage, but Auroch interject weird atmospheric touches into their material that take this in a different direction, like the discordant acoustic guitars and subtle didgeridoo drones that surface on the title track. The songs are also infected with bursts of black static and abrasive electronic noise, suddenly diverging into bizarre passages of over-modulated bass guitar slithering through the blackness, or brief interludes of crackling alien ambience. The rabid, two-pronged vocal attack alternates a ferocious, inchoate roar with frantic yelling that appears over some of the record's slower, churning passages, adding to the frenzied feel of Auroch's sonic assault, and the crazed complexity of the riffs and the maniacal shredding solos all snake chaotically throughout these vicious blastscapes, dissonant angular riffs sprouting from the band's convoluted sonic architecture. At times like Gorgutsian tech-death filtered through the bestial violence of Revenge, and bathed in lyrical satanic surrealism and arcane imagery; this album is tough stuff, right up to the closing track "The Balkan Affair" that ends the disc with a brief but intense acoustic guitar piece steeped in an atmosphere of mystery and paranoia.
��� Finally have this crushing slab of avant-garde blackened bestial death metal in stock.
��� Mitochondrion's 2011 album Parasignosis was one of my favorite death metal albums that came out that year, a warped and blistering assault of avant-garde blackened death that rivaled the likes of Antediluvian, Impetuous Ritual and Adversarial in terms of sheer chaotic brutality. Haven't heard anything from 'em since then, but when the new album from Auroch Taman Shud recently appeared from Profound Lore, I was eager to hear it simply based on the band's connection to Mitochondrion, as they share several members. Though Auroch's sound on Taman is drawn from the same swarming blackened death metal chaos as the members' other band, this album ventures in a different, more technical direction as it sheared my head off.
��� This is the second album from the Vancouver, BC crushers, a nine-song mini-album further showcasing their own violent, complex take on technical death metal, which first appeared on the 2011 debut From Forgotten Worlds. It's an impressive display of discordant death-worship, combining traces of the rampaging blackened bestial chaos of the Ross Bay crowd with warped riffage and some moments of excellent eerie melody that add a strange, somewhat mystical atmosphere to parts of Taman Shud. An interesting variation on the complex, monstrous blackened death that has been coming out of the frozen north since the late 80's.
��� While blasting this here in the C-Blast office, I'm occasionally reminded of bestial crushers Revenge; there's a similar psychotic feel to the band's frenzied aggro-blast and twisted, skull-scraping riffage, but Auroch interject weird atmospheric touches into their material that take this in a different direction, like the discordant acoustic guitars and subtle didgeridoo drones that surface on the title track. The songs are also infected with bursts of black static and abrasive electronic noise, suddenly diverging into bizarre passages of over-modulated bass guitar slithering through the blackness, or brief interludes of crackling alien ambience. The rabid, two-pronged vocal attack alternates a ferocious, inchoate roar with frantic yelling that appears over some of the record's slower, churning passages, adding to the frenzied feel of Auroch's sonic assault, and the crazed complexity of the riffs and the maniacal shredding solos all snake chaotically throughout these vicious blastscapes, dissonant angular riffs sprouting from the band's convoluted sonic architecture. At times like Gorgutsian tech-death filtered through the bestial violence of Revenge, and bathed in lyrical satanic surrealism and arcane imagery; this album is tough stuff, right up to the closing track "The Balkan Affair" that ends the disc with a brief but intense acoustic guitar piece steeped in an atmosphere of mystery and paranoia.
Some of you guys might remember Julien Louvet from his old band Shallnotkill, a French band that combined epic rock, sludge metal, and apocalyptic hardcore into a unclassifiable heaviness that I dug so much that we made a point to carry everything from the band that we could get our hands on. Shallnotkill disbanded a few years ago, and I hadn't heard much of anything from any of the members until earlier this year, when Julien contacted me to let me know about his new project, The Austrasian Goat. The band is a new one-man venture that Julien kicked off with this self-titled LP, which has actually been out of print for awhile, but we did manage to get a small quantity for C-Blast. I knew we'd be getting something dark and heavy from his new band, but this is actually more abstract and much doomier than what I had expected, over forty minutes of a weird sort of murky, demonic doom ritual that plunges into vastly blacker regions of netherdrift than anything else Julien has been involved in, a haunting, cavernous combo of apocalyptic graveyard sludge and screeching, frostbitten black metal wound together into huge, sprawling fields of hypnotic darkness. The band takes it's name from an obscure geographic reference from the Dark Ages that was used for a mysterious region located somewhere in between Germany and France which had remained a pagan region up until the eighteenth century, and these and other esoteric scrawlings creep through the murky black doom on this record, a lament for the death of a pre-Christian culture that takes shape with the intensely nihilistic lyrics . Austrasian Goat's music is a creeping funeral dirge; plodding ultraheavy drums, swathes of grim minor key ambient keyboards, corroded slo-mo riffing creeping at a tectonic pace, and almost medieval sounding orchestral parts combine with Louvet's rasping, echo-chamber shriek into a bleak, atmospheric funeral fog interspersed with brief passages of dark ambience or weeping orchestral strings, a sort of crushing, abstract necro-misery somewhere in between Nortt, Skitliv and Burning Witch...and Grief, too, whose misanthropic influence is not so much heard as it is felt, and which is backed up by the cover of Grief's 'I Hate The Human Race' that is also included here that closes the end of side A. Misery and anguish seep into every corner and crevice of Austrasian Goat's sound, and if you like your doom and black metal miserable and hateful, I dunno if it can get much lower than this. The record comes in a chipboard jacket printed with black artwork, and again, is out of print!
While Austrasian Goat and Never Presence Forever might be seperated by an ocean, their music flows together nicely on this split 10", the orchestral necro-thrash of the Goat acting as a supreme build and release that dissipates in the cold Stygian void of Never Presence Forever. The tiny Virginia-based label Small Sacrifice released this record in a limited edition of 300 copies, presented in a heavy vellum sleeve with ghoulish abstract artwork and clear spot varnish printing, and it is a powerful first offering from the label.
The first side is inhabited by The Austrasian Goat, the new solo project from Julien Louvet of French sludge-metallers Shallnotkill; we just listed the out-of-print debut LP from Austrasian Goat in our last C-Blast store update, which I described as "a creeping funeral dirge; plodding ultraheavy drums, swathes of grim minor key ambient keyboards, corroded slo-mo riffing creeping at a tectonic pace, and almost medieval sounding orchestral parts combine with Louvet's rasping, echo-chamber shriek into a bleak, atmospheric funeral fog interspersed with brief passages of dark ambience or weeping orchestral strings, a sort of crushing, abstract necro-misery somewhere in between Nortt, Skitliv and Burning Witch." The three songs that are featured here continue in that vein, beginning with the brief intro "Ab Irato", a mesmeric wash of abstract piano and blackened ambience with roaring distorted guitars surging up towards the surface from inky depths, and then moving into the swirling symphonic hellstorm of "AFBM". Still dense and asbtract, this is one of my favorite Austrasian Goat songs, a murky blast of funereal melody and blackened shrieks that drift on a sea of reverb, then suddenly the orchestral strings and glacial doom riffs and droning synths suddenly part and the music is overtaken by an AWESOME blackened thrash riff, all chunky and buzzing, shredding through the graveyard mist like an iron scythe, and it is one of the coolest songs that I've heard so far from Austrasian Goat. The third track "Ad Nauseam" is a majestic dirge, similiar to Agalloch somewhat, but cloaked in reverb and synthesizers and billlowing clouds of ambient drift.
From there, the record slips into a black chasm with Never Presence Forever. NPF's side features a single long track called "The Condition Of Not Existing", which had been recorded some time ago but was never released prior to this split. This piece is a perfect example of why Never Presence Forever is one of the most sorely overlooked artists in the dark ambient/industrial field; the track begins in a flutter of electrical hum and reverberations that sound like they are being emitted from an unseen engine, an endless buzzing and humming that eventually fades off, replaced by heavy, slow-motion drift and feedback, a mournful minor-key melody slowly unfolding around washes of heavy amplifier drone and cavernous rumblings. This piece is great, one of the better releases that I have heard from Never Presence Forever, like hearing Vinterriket performing with Troum and armed with heavier tones and louder amplifiers than usual.
These two experimental black metal outfits go together nicely on this split 10" Ep from Musicfearsatan, bringing together the twisted, ritual-folk flecked black metal of The Austrasian Goat with the filthy, abstract blackened doom/thrash of the newer band Neige Morte (who also happen to feature former members of Overmars and French chaos-blasters The Flying Worker). Each band coughs up one song, but they're pretty epic, each one running around twelve minutes long.
Up first is The Austrasian Goat's "The Gracious Fall Of The Morning Light", which starts off with the sound of lush acoustic guitar stings strummed slowly over chanting voices and glacial drums, a kind of narcotized doom-folk streaked with gorgeous slide guitar and nocturnal ambience. It's blackly beautiful, with that dark twangy majesty that the newer Earth material has, but even more ominous and threatening as the acoustic guitar burns off and out of the void comes a killer black metal assault, the blasting drums surging up over the wasp-swarm guitars and scathing shrieking vocals. This assault is formed around one central riff that repeats over and over for several minutes, whipping the song into a ferocious black hymn before dropping off once again back into the malevolent folk music, more apocalyptic here than before, lashed by vaguely Middle Eastern melodies and a chorus of voices singing as one as the song slowly fades away...
Neige Morte's "We Who Are The Worm" begins with the slippery down tuned growl of slackened guitar strings bending and scraping against the body of the instrument, forming an off-kilter dirge that seems to struggle to rise up out of the slime, but when it finally does (right when the drums start to creep in), the sound lurches forward into a putrid, messed-up shamble of black doom. These first few minutes are totally deformed, a much more damaged sounding sort of noise-infested blackened sludge than I expected (more like something you'd hear from a band like Alkerdeel), but it's not long before Neige Morte starts to pull together into a blasting black metal assault, suddenly taking off on a blazing rush of noisy tremolo riffing and shrieked vocals and awesome hyperfast drumming that sounds more "power violence" than black metal, ending the side in a cyclone of swarming black blast.
Drone Machines had originally come out earlier in the year as a self-released CDr, but was quickly picked up by Heart & Crossbone for a wider Cd release; the label is a perfect fit, their recent explorations into bleak, dub-influenced industrial doom aligning neatly with the machine-driven ultra-sludge that this one man band creates. That Author & Punisher is indeed a one man band is only part of why this project is so amazing; the sole mastermind behind this is Tristan Shone, who not only operates the arsenal of sound machines and equipment that he uses to create this massive mechanized sludge-metal all on his own, but also designed and manufactured all of it as well. Like the title says, the machines are the basis for Author & Punisher's sound, though this is much less about drone and much more about pulverizing rhythmic heaviness. It's almost impossibly heavy, a perfectly executed assault of grinding, heaving, ultra bass-heavy industrial pummel that immediately made this one of my favorite new albums...
The sound is dense and crushing, at first focused on monstrous exhalations and rapturous chanting that join over huge swaths of low end drone, and then the mechanized drums begin lunging and lurching, a surging rhythmic machine grind taking form on opener "sand Wind And Carcass", a massive abstracted industrial metal dirge, over modulated distortion rumbling over massive percussive pummel, fields of desolate ambience suddenly opening up for a minute and then becoming swallowed up by the machines, distorted bass slowing to a crawl, the riffs becoming warped, various electronic manipulations going on as the music chugs forward, obviously the result of Shone wrangling his machines and sculpting the sound. Hearing all of this lock in together, the machines working in concert to create this monolithic robotic assault, is pretty mind-blowing. Continuing on, "Burrow Below" features some pulverizing dubstep-level bass squelch, and lurches into a devastating Godflesh-like mecha groove, ultra-downtuned lockstep riff and pneumatic drum machine grinding together in a crushing dub-doom groove, with Shone's sneering, malevolent vocals. Godflesh is the easiest comparison to what Author & Punisher is doing, obviously a big influence on Shone, but that classic Streetcleaner sound is warped and mutated into something more mechanical and inhuman, with more processed electronics, eerie melodic fragments appearing in the singing and the dense layers of drone and industrial texture, horrific screams time-stretched to the breaking point, the guitars and bass themselves processed and turned into synth-like blocks of distorted noise, or mangled into looped drones, phased bass and oscillating buzz.
Drone Machines is an ultra-intense blast of industrial metal performed by enslaved heavy machinery, and at it's most intense, sounds like a symphony of hellish steel presses and tank-tread drum machine rhythms, blasting warped low-end bass and shifting frequencies across a chaotic grindscape of malfunctioning electronics and drones, the doomed grind seizing up, the riffs fracturing, the whole thing becoming a monstrous alien construct splattered with junk metal carnage. A fucking amazing debut, anyone into grinding industrial doom, Godflesh, Halo, Human Quena Orchestra, Grave In The Sky, Dead World, any of that malicious, mechanical metallic crush has got to hear this...
���Previously available on CD from Israeli avant-metal label Heart & Crossbone, the debut release from mechanical metal titan Author & Punisher is now finally available on vinyl courtesy of Seventh Rule, in gatefold packaging with a digital download; still one of my favorite industrial metal releases of the past decade, here's the original writeup I did of Drone Machines 2010 back when we first got the disc in stock:
���Drone Machines had originally come out earlier in the year as a self-released CDr, but was quickly picked up by Heart & Crossbone for a wider Cd release; the label is a perfect fit, their recent explorations into bleak, dub-influenced industrial doom aligning neatly with the machine-driven ultra-sludge that this one man band creates. That Author & Punisher is indeed a one man band is only part of why this project is so amazing; the sole mastermind behind this is Tristan Shone, who not only operates the arsenal of sound machines and equipment that he uses to create this massive mechanized sludge-metal all on his own, but also designed and manufactured all of it as well. Like the title says, the machines are the basis for Author & Punisher's sound, though this is much less about drone and much more about pulverizing rhythmic heaviness. It's almost impossibly heavy, a perfectly executed assault of grinding, heaving, ultra bass-heavy industrial pummel that immediately made this one of my favorite new albums...
��� The sound is dense and crushing, at first focused on monstrous exhalations and rapturous chanting that join over huge swaths of low end drone, and then the mechanized drums begin lunging and lurching, a surging rhythmic machine grind taking form on opener "sand Wind And Carcass", a massive abstracted industrial metal dirge, over modulated distortion rumbling over massive percussive pummel, fields of desolate ambience suddenly opening up for a minute and then becoming swallowed up by the machines, distorted bass slowing to a crawl, the riffs becoming warped, various electronic manipulations going on as the music chugs forward, obviously the result of Shone wrangling his machines and sculpting the sound. Hearing all of this lock in together, the machines working in concert to create this monolithic robotic assault, is pretty mind-blowing. Continuing on, "Burrow Below" features some pulverizing dubstep-level bass squelch, and lurches into a devastating Godflesh-like mecha groove, ultra-downtuned lockstep riff and pneumatic drum machine grinding together in a crushing dub-doom groove, with Shone's sneering, malevolent vocals. Godflesh is the easiest comparison to what Author & Punisher is doing, obviously a big influence on Shone, but that classic Streetcleaner sound is warped and mutated into something more mechanical and inhuman, with more processed electronics, eerie melodic fragments appearing in the singing and the dense layers of drone and industrial texture, horrific screams time-stretched to the breaking point, the guitars and bass themselves processed and turned into synth-like blocks of distorted noise, or mangled into looped drones, phased bass and oscillating buzz.
��� Drone Machines is an ultra-intense blast of industrial metal performed by enslaved heavy machinery, and at it's most intense, sounds like a symphony of hellish steel presses and tank-tread drum machine rhythms, blasting warped low-end bass and shifting frequencies across a chaotic grindscape of malfunctioning electronics and drones, the doomed grind seizing up, the riffs fracturing, the whole thing becoming a monstrous alien construct splattered with junk metal carnage. A fucking amazing debut, anyone into grinding industrial doom, Godflesh, Halo, Human Quena Orchestra, Grave In The Sky, Dead World, any of that malicious, mechanical metallic crush has got to hear this...
���� Commissioned by Gotebl�d for the special release of the Wuvable Oaf hardcore anthology that came out a little while back from Fantagraphics, this split 7" features two apparent fans of Ed Luce's acclaimed comic book doing their own cover of the song "Fearce", as written/performed by the "black metal/queercore/ progressive disco grindcore band" Ejaculoid that figures prominently in the comic.
���� On his rendition, Author & Punisher mutates "Fearce" into a pummeling cyborg assault that's virtually indistinguishable from any of the band's original material. In other words, a bone-crushing industrial metal assault welded together from sputtering, super-heavy drum machines, monstrously distorted synthesizer riffs that erupt into a massive, epic hook, and Shone's furious screams stretched and fuzz-drenched as the song transforms into a soaring, mecha-metal monstrosity. Intensely crushing and captivating, like Godflesh glazed in synthwave melodies. And on the other half, LA necro-punk weirdos Harassor go for the jugular with their own cover of "Fearce", exploding into a ferocious blast of hideous bizarro punkmetal, their primitive blackened thrash steeped in low-fi filth and laced with strange electronic buzzing and deformed synthnoise, shifting between violent speed and crawling, sludgy heaviness. Vicious!
���� A killer split that'll leave you wanting to check out Luce's comic book if you haven't already, with the heavyweight colored vinyl housed inside of a full color sleeve that features some particularly grim Luce artwork, and includes a link to a digital download for the EP.
The final disc from Autodidact, and probably the finest set of tunes that this Korperschwache alter-ego has ever produced. Yep, Autodidact is/was another one of the solo projects to sprout from the skull of Roy K. Felps, the Texan mastermind behind Korperschwache, writer for avant-noise/metal ezine Dead Angel and Skullflower archivist. Even though Autodidact moved at super slow speeds, the music stands in stark contrast to the blackened, charred electro dirge of the mighty Korper. Instead of dark and malevolent, Autodidact was always a weirder, more "airy" beast, still massive and ponderous and crushing with hammering drum machine beats and and distorted atonal guitars, but with weird melodies and raspy half-spoken, half-sung vocals that turn the music into a glacial slowcore. Hypnotic indie dirge formed from a simple palette of guitar, those detached raspy vocals, the metronomic drum machine beats and electronic noise, like Codeine and Earth's Hex turned angular and mathy, played over super slow, hypnotic but odd-metered rhythms, like Godlesh's drum machine pounding away on dying batteries. Ass Of Fire is the last release from Autodidact, five really really long tracks, and mostly instrumental. It has the weird song titles and surreal BDSM imagery that runs through so much of RKF's music, and the song title for the nine-part fifth track might be the longest, most ridiculous song title ever: 'rhys chatham, defender of eroica, armed with the metaphysical hammer made of gold and rendered unto the trinity of the ghost union, joins in battle across the northern skies against the pitiless might of sun ra, the atomic black jesus, armed with the cosmo-myth supersonic groove pusher (new! improved!), as the evil penguin of eternal crippling doom watches with morbid fascination while drawing bad pictures of leni riefenstahl on a leaking etch-a-sketch (aka the evil penguin song)... a) declaration of war: no man shall utter blasphemy against the evil penguin and live... b) first skirmish: irradiated guitars bake in the hot tejas sun... c) first counterattack: invasion of the fifty-foot women in sinister fetishwear (lucifer's cheerleaders)... d) retreat: the ghosts of nanking watch in silence as night falls and the evil penguin brings forth his terrible vengeance against those who have betrayed him... e) second skirmish: at dawn, the defender of eroica carries out an assault against the unprotected flank of the astro-infinity defenders of the space monorail
... f) third skirmish: fucking hell, my ass is on fire!... g) second counterattack: the black cosmo-myth tone scientists, wielding the funk hammer of saturn, baffle the soldiers of eroica with unyielding streams of pure inexplicable bullshit, as commanded by the (new! improved!) voice of ra... h) the final war: the evil penguin draws down the power of the great serpent and claims dominion over all souls living and dead before wasting everybody... i) doom out.'
Seriously. The disc comes in a slimline case with a full color insert.
Autogen's Mutagen might not be as black and blistering as 4iB's releases from UK power electronics duo Sutcliffe Jugend, or as ear-destroying as their harsh noise releases from K2 and Hiroshi Hasegawa, but I still dug this one a lot. I've never been shy about my love of certain dark strains of cold n' sinister electro and that classic Wax Trax industrial sound, even as unfashionable as it may be among "metal" circles; recent releases from the likes of Prostate and Chiildren suggest I'm not the only one interested in revisiting some of the more abrasive corners of this sound, either. The Latvian artist Autogen isn't particularly abrasive, but he does produce a severe strain of nocturnal electronica on his debut for Singapore power-electronics / noise / industrial label 4ib, one of the more interesting surprises that I encountered when picking up the label's current catalog of releases. The eight tracks that make up Mutagen move through a near lightless urban landscape, the sound comprised of shuffling breakbeats and fragile electronic pulses rolling out beneath the glow of dark neon and incandescent street lights; there's a definite performance art aspect to Autogen's activity, seen in the live footage of the group that has circulated online, where throbbing dark electro is performed in sparsely filled underground fetish clubs in Eastern Europe, the members of Autogen covering their faces in creepy sackcloth masks, their music playing out as the pulsating backdrop to surrealistic sex rituals and weird installations where hunks of meat swing lazily on thick metal chains, and bizarre simulated acts of cannibalism and autophagia on stage. That strange gore-stained performance art atmosphere is backed by the menacing electronic music of Mutagen, ranging from dancefloor-primed electronic throb to more abstract and nightmarish ambience, the jet-black electrocreep of "Therapist", the garbled clicks and glitches that infest the sinister synthpop of "Obsolete" and "Pungent". At the very end of the album, the final three tracks head into a much more atmospheric direction, the ominous 80's horror synth ambience of "Thou Shalt Not", "Freeze" and "In The Evening" all echoing with the minimal dark synthcreep of classic John Carpenter, Tangerine Dream and Giorgio Moroder film scores. Worth checking out for fans of Skinny Puppy, Twitch-era Ministry, and some of the more subdued sounds featured on the Ohm Resistance label. Beautifully packaged in a full color digipack enclosed in an embossed slipcase with black-on-black printing, each copy numbered in an edition of five hundred copies.
Another dose of twisted, vile splattergrind weirdness from Last House On The Right! Mutilate Your Enemy is a fast, short blast, 14 tracks in 8 minutes from this longrunning one-man band from Greece, and it's about as ridiculous and over-the-top as this kind of punky grind/gore/noise gets. Primitive grind riffs and splattery blastbeats collide with retarded pitch-shifted, electronically processed vocals that sound like someone just flushed a seriously clogged toilet. Sometimes the "vocals" switch to a savage neanderthal bellow that only marginally sounds more human, but it's primarily gut-blowing gutteral spew through and through. There's a heavy punk influence here, and a bunch of the tracks devolve into freeform blasting noise, including a couple of Sore Throat covers that are over in 44 seconds. Brutal blurr blast with songs like "Sodomized Scum", "Psophymi Melynsis with Panucla", and "Rancid Phlegm on Esophago" if you were unsure as to what was going on here. I like to strap on half a dozen Natty Boh's, set this fucker on repeat for about half an hour and reminisce about the halcyon days of Ax/tion and Fudgeworthy Records sub-underground vomit.
Excellent cinematic heaviness from the midwestern trio The Autumn Project, whose meditative post rock glides blissfully through huge slabs of crushing, heavenly distortion. Yeah, there are a LOT of bands out there doing the metallic post-rock thing, and I'm generally a sucker for anything along these lines, but The Autumn Project do manage to stand out from the masses of Godspeed / Mogwai disciples by adding incredibly lush atmosphere to their music with multiple layers of sparkling keyboards and rich electronic textures. The songs also don't quite follow the quiet-build-to-crushing-crescendo structure employed by most of the post-Mogwai/Isis bands, and instead move horizontally over lengthy passages of pure static feedback drone, complex math-rock drumming, and triumphant melodies that dissipate into pure free-drone bliss and growling formless guitar noise. Very beautiful and edgeless music, particularly the epic "Between The Smoke And Mirrors" which has a breathtaking heavy hook that appears halfway through the song, and the heavy parts have a weird, processed tone to them that sounds more ethereal than metallic, while still being pretty freaking heavy, as delay and effects drenched guitars send silver arcs tracing across the horizon. This disc sort of reminds me of a mix of (a less distorted) The Angelic Process and Labradford, The Cure's Disintegration and Kranky Records drone, Sigur Ros and Godspeed You! Black Emperor all wrapped up into a majestic series of instrumental sound designs, and is one of the best and most memorable new "post rock" albums I've heard this year. Fans of Souvenirs Young America's quirky instrumentals should definitely check this band out, but this is going to be a hit with anybody that is into the instrumental post-metal zeitgeist. The booklet and packaging also has a lot of neat looking illustrations and brief text that give this the feel of a children's book. Recommended.
It takes alot to stand out nowadays if yer a band striving to create beautiful, epic instrumental rock - the indie scene is deluged with bands that are following in the well worn footsteps of Mogwai, Isis, Explosions In The Sky and Godspeed You Black Emperor. It's a sound that we love, all moody brooding guitar arpeggios exploding into massive crescendos and melodies sprawling out across the horizon. The Autumn Project are one of a handful of bands that I think are just as adept at creating huge, majestic instrumentals as the bands that helped to define instrumental rock at the turn of the century, not only are these guys amazing at writing utterly gorgeous melodies that float and linger over their propulsive drumming, but they also know exactly when to crank the distortion and erupt into grainy walls of crushing distorted riffage and turn their pretty instrumentals into 'dozing blissmetal blasts. We've listed the other two albums from The Autumn Project,
2005's reissue of their first album Fable and 2006's A Burning Light, and this is their second, released on the band's own Zu Records label and featuring six numerically titled tracks. Gorgeous and intense, moving between darkly ominous shadows and sun-blazed peaks, the band interweaving guitar and baritone guitar with heavy delay effects with lush layers of electronic textures, mysterious vocal samples and spacey keyboards. The drumming delves into some powerful heavy rhythms at times that are similiar to A Minor Forest or Mogwai. Just like their other albums, parts of this continue to remind me of The Cure's Disintegration if The Cure were actually a dustbowl outfit sculpting metallic-tinged dreamrock. Fans of likeminded cinematic instrumentalists Souvenir's Young America should check TAP out, not that the bands sound so much alike, but their use of contrasting pretty/heavy parts and windswept atmosphere kinda have the same vibe. Although where when SYA get heavy, those guys flatten ya with some primordial sludge riffage, The Autumn Project instead build up into heavily distorted crescendos that sounds more like Nadja or The Angelic Process. These guys are one of my favorite instrumental, "post-rock", epic outfits, as powerful and emotive as anything from Mono, Pelican, or Explosions In The Sky, we just kep coming back to their albums over and over again, they're that great!
We loved The Autumn Project last album A Burning Light from last year. It was one of those albums that we recommended to everyone we knew, everybody around the C-Blast HQ were into it, and we still play that disc pretty frequently over here. Not that it was groundbreaking or mindblowing or anything, it's just that The Autumn Project are really, really good at writing and playing super dreamy instrumental rock that we find very easy to lose ourselves in. Their songs are panoramic and meditative, and to us alot of The Autumn Project's music sounds like a droney, lush version of The Cure's Disintegration filtered through the metallic slowburn of Isis and the lonesome Western cinematics of Souvenir's Young America. Their melodies are so emotional and beautiful, but really well written; they also utilize effects heavily to build those heavy layers of delayed guitar and unearthly loops...the album is filled with awesome delay pedal symphonies that'll take yer breath away. Hypnotically slow and atmospheric epic instrumental rock, just as great as anything that Red Sparowes have been doing, but The Autumn Project is ripping anyone off, which is why we dig 'em so much. We've been working on getting their older releases stocked here at C-Blast as we sold a bunch of A Burning Light and we've actually had a number of customers ask us about carrying The Autumn Project's other stuff...finally managed to track their previous two albums down, one of which is 2003's Fable, a 10 song hour long disc that's just as beautiful and brooding and lush as their new one, all slow and unearthly layers of dreamy melodies and glimmering electronic clouds that will every once and a while erupt into huge crunchy dronemetal blasts. On the other hand, "Right/Left Thinktank" has the band exercising some wicked keyboard-metal harmonies over a complex mathrock jam, and "The History of Easterly Migration Westward" paints a bleary landscape of psychedelic drones and misty sheets of slide guitar. Highly recommended!
Finally have this back in stock...
It takes alot to stand out nowadays if yer a band striving to create beautiful, epic instrumental rock - the indie scene is deluged with bands that are following in the well worn footsteps of Mogwai, Isis, Explosions In The Sky and Godspeed You Black Emperor. It's a sound that we love, all moody brooding guitar arpeggios exploding into massive crescendos and melodies sprawling out across the horizon. The Autumn Project are one of a handful of bands that I think are just as adept at creating huge, majestic instrumentals as the bands that helped to define instrumental rock at the turn of the century, not only are these guys amazing at writing utterly gorgeous melodies that float and linger over their propulsive drumming, but they also know exactly when to crank the distortion and erupt into grainy walls of crushing distorted riffage and turn their pretty instrumentals into 'dozing blissmetal blasts. We've listed the other two albums from The Autumn Project,
2005's reissue of their first album Fable and 2006's A Burning Light, and this is their second, released on the band's own Zu Records label and featuring six numerically titled tracks. Gorgeous and intense, moving between darkly ominous shadows and sun-blazed peaks, the band interweaving guitar and baritone guitar with heavy delay effects with lush layers of electronic textures, mysterious vocal samples and spacey keyboards. The drumming delves into some powerful heavy rhythms at times that are similiar to A Minor Forest or Mogwai. Just like their other albums, parts of this continue to remind me of The Cure's Disintegration if The Cure were actually a dustbowl outfit sculpting metallic-tinged dreamrock. Fans of likeminded cinematic instrumentalists Souvenir's Young America should check TAP out, not that the bands sound so much alike, but their use of contrasting pretty/heavy parts and windswept atmosphere kinda have the same vibe. Although where when SYA get heavy, those guys flatten ya with some primordial sludge riffage, The Autumn Project instead build up into heavily distorted crescendos that sounds more like Nadja or The Angelic Process. These guys are one of my favorite instrumental, "post-rock", epic outfits, as powerful and emotive as anything from Mono, Pelican, or Explosions In The Sky, we just kep coming back to their albums over and over again, they're that great!
Here's a real crazed album from a few years ago that I just got tuned in to, the second full length from a South Carolina band unfortunately named Avenging Disco Godfathers Of Soul. I'd seen this record around but never checked it out due to that ridiculous name and the assumption that this was going to be more godawful screamo, but that's not the case at all. The vocals are for the most part screamed, a harsh bloody howl, but the music turned out to be pretty cool and way more interesting than some run of the mill metallic modern hardcore. These guys play a weird breed of sinister mathy metallic core, chaotic grindcore, electronic synth parts that sound kind of like old 8-bit/chiptune melodies, abstract jazz, and some instrumental stuff that sounds like a spastic take on Carl Stalling's cartoon themes, with xylophones, electronic rototoms and other synthetic percussion, and John Carpenter-esque synths turning up in these manic blasts. Naked City is one obvious reference point here; Avenging Disco Godfathers sound like they might have been chugging down long sessions of listening to Grand Guignol and Torture Garden alongside Daughter's Canada Songs, old Goblin soundtracks and Riz Ortolani's score for Cannibal Holocaust, Converge's Petitioning The Empty Sky and the robotic punk of The VSS'Nervous Circuits. The grind stuff disappears almost completely towards the end of the record, as they band descends into total electronic horror music with warbling tape and synths swirling together into a mass of electronic noise and hysterical screams, weird burbling sounds and tinkling chimes, like some Delia Derbyshire acid trip from hell. After this came in and I started spinning it a bunch, we dug around online and found out that this band actually has former members of Index For A Potential Suicide, whose killer LP was reviewed not too long ago here at C-Blast. I can see the connection between the warped nerve-damaged avant grind of IFAPS and this weird jazz/mathmetal/punk/horror experimentation that Avenging Disco deals on this ten song LP.
Some great, epic, weirdly bluesy depressive blackness is what this obscure Spanish outfit delivers. Like a lot of the bands released by Japanese label Maa, Aversion To Mankind have remained little-known outside of the most fervid and fanatical circles of progressive black metal. This, in spite of the fact that the music that this project has been steadily creating over the past few years is surprisingly accessible, while also retaining heavy doses of mournful, somber atmosphere that'll no doubt appeal to anyone into the more miserable, "depressive" realm of black metal. 2014’s Between Scylla and Charybdis is the second full-length from this one-man band, and presents a rather stunning combination of doom-laden atmosphere, soaring Floydian guitar, and anguished black metal; the sound is huge, moving from cavernous, slow-moving funereal tempos and blackened heaviness into hauntingly pretty and delicate passages of jangling minor key chords and layers of acoustic guitar strum. Those passages are the highlights of the album, contrasting that crushing metallic heaviness with evocative and enigmatic field recordings, splashes of melancholic piano, unexpected smears of rain-drenched jazziness, and mysterious, unseen voices that bring a great deal of drama and emotion to these instrumental vignettes, which materialize all throughout the three sprawling tracks that comprise Charybdis.
That cavernous quality extends into the production itself, the whole sound drenched in reverb, with this distant quality to everything, especially whenever the music kicks into the actual black metal parts. It’s an interesting feel, the drums appearing as this far-off rumble, the blast beats blurred into a deep reverberant pulse beneath the swarming minor key guitars and funerary melodies that appear and ascend over the long, stretched out passages of mournful crush. And then there's that noticeable Spanish folk influence that shows up in the guitar leads every once in awhile, something that I noticed on the previous album. That’s another cool contrast, the soaring, droning guitar lines will sometimes seem to be directly influenced by older folk melodies and even flamenco, which definitely gives this stuff a fairly unique feel. But it gets pretty vicious, too. There are killer bursts of furious rocking black thrash that wash across songs like "In a Fleshy Tomb, I'm Buried Above Ground", and the ferocious riff that tears through the end of the song is a ripper. Aversion To Mankind maintain an epic grandiosity to all of this, the mix of blackened blast and slow-moving immensity melding well with the powerful, cinematic scope of so much of this stuff; the album's most striking moments arrive whenever the guitar emerges with one of those spacey, bluesy Pink Floyd-esque melodies, shifting into sorrowful and twangy leads that drift dreamily over the wintry ambience and rumbling blackened fury, super atmospheric, but also scarred by moments of abrasive ugliness via the occasional squall of crazed atonal noise.
Ever since being turned on to this band, both Charybdis and the previous album (2013’s Suicidology) have slipped right into my list of favorite downer-metal alongside the likes of ColdWorld, Trist, early Hypomanie and Hypothermia.
2007's The Divine Tragedy was the debut full length from this solo project from Chicago-based black metaller Andrew Markuszewski (aka Aamonael), also a member of progressive black metallers Nachtmystium for a period of time as well as necro-sludge outfit Lord Mantis. On Divine Tragedy, Markuszewski took the sound of classic second wave black metal and contorted it into his own vision, blending elements of dissonance and progginess with crushing fast-paced BM and an aptitude for majestic, atmospheric leads and melodies in a way that was distinctly different from his work in Nachtmystium. The album showcased an offbeat sound that combined malevolent riffs and twisted, discordant shapes with brief passages of ritualistic ambience and, most strikingly, jangly angularity that at times can be reminiscent of the sort of math-rock influenced weirdness found in the more recent recordings of French black metal avant-gardists Deathspell Omega. Nowhere near as chaotic as that band, though; Avichi brings a more focused attack, the music rife with neck-snapping tempo changes and a tightly wound percussive assault that produces some intense, hypnotic blastscapes, which make the sudden shifts into brooding math-rock melody and those soaring leads so powerful.
The album begins and ends with a minimal ambient piece called "Entrance To God", built around the shimmering textures of gongs, producing metallic drones emanating from tempered metal, creating an almost meditational wash of sound that could pass for something off of an Eddie Pr�vost recording. And then the record hurls itself into the blasting, blazing majesty of "Purification Within The Eigth Sphere", where droning tremolo riffs and the chain-gun drumming become a backdrop upon which Aamonael hangs his arcane, philosophical lyrics and void-worship. The whole album focuses on those droning sinister riffs and washes of discordant terror, but some of Tragedy's more inspired moments come via the instrumental tracks like "Prayer For Release" and "Aeonic Disintegration", where the music slows down drastically and transforms into that bleak, mournful math-rock sound, stretches of brooding, almost Slint-like power, still thoroughly steeped in Avichi's particular strain of occult darkness but more expansive and spacious with lurching angular rhythms and crazed staccato riffs, an interesting and effective contrast with the album's more ferocious black metal meditations. Then there's "Taedium Vitae", where the band slows down to a pounding, tribal groove, almost doom-laden in it's pacing, while the guitars spiral out into one of the disc's more trance inducing buzz-mantras.
Avichi would go on to deliver a follow-up on Profound Lore that brought the project new accolades from fans of challenging, ornate black metal, but Tragedy is still a standout slab of scorched intensity from this project, highly recommended to anyone looking for imaginative, progressively minded blackness. Originally released by Numen Malevolum Barathri on Cd and subsequently out of print, The Divine Tragedy has been reissued as a high quality vinyl edition that comes in a matte-finish gatefold jacket adorned with Ba'al's stunning symbolist illustrations of taloned hands clutching flower petals and white doves hung by hooks driven through the lips of disembodied labia.
The third album from American black metallers Avichi, Catharsis Absolute continues to explore the ambitious, often progressive black metal that main member Aamonael (aka Andrew Markuszewski, a former member of Nachtmystium and current member of black sludge beasts Lord Mantis) has been developing since 2007's Divine Tragedy. His serpent-tongue visions are obsessively detailed, and further distinguished by the fact that Markuszewski recorded all of the music entirely on his own. For a true one-man band, this sounds amazingly cohesive, delivering as powerful and as sophisticated a blackened assault as any of his peers.
Opening with the sounds of requiem-like piano, "Repercussion" introduces the album with a brief bit of dark, atmospheric melody before shifting into the furious dissonance of "Flames In My Eyes". As Avichi's droning black metal glides on repetitive circular riffs over the monotonous blastbeat that gives an almost Von-esque trancelike feel to this first track, the vocals a layered mixture of scowling shrieks and monotone chanting, this simple sinister hypno-blast continues to circle endlessly, blasting through the gloom. Surges of looped orchestral sound swell up out of the depths, before finally shifting into something more melodic halfway through, Markuszewski's vocals transforming into a striking post-punk style croon over the malevolent blackened blast. Killer stuff. Then there's "Lightweaver", contrasting that blazing majestic black metal with a seriously rocking mid-tempo hook joined by some unexpectedly new wavey synthesizer accompaniment, almost Cure-style keyboards drifting up as the music downshifts into a ferocious black n' roll groove. "Voice Of Intuition " is even more haunting, those crooning vocals washing over more menacing chiming minor key melodies and serpentine bluesy leads, blastbeats racing furiously, slipping once more into another one of his signature sickoid rock parts. Markuszewski's complex arrangements mark most of these songs, but never at the expense of atmosphere and regal black ambience, and there's some seriously catchy stuff laced all throughout Catharsis. The nearly thirteen minute "All Gods Fall" starts off in a haze of ceremonial ambience, ritual bells ringing and rattling over a simple percussive pulse, then transforms into a mesmeric instrumental crush, an almost Neurosis-esque dirge laced with more of that eerie singing and furious howling vocals, imperious and apocalyptic and steeped in a heady philosophical darkness. And when the album comes to a close, its not with a blackened roar, but with a final descent into that minimalist piano that opened the album, a sprawling instrumental of elliptical minor key piano that expands the sound of the intro into a somber piece of shadowy chamber music gloom, those eerie ivory keys circling and tumbling through a haze of woodsmoke, an almost religious quality emanating from this meditative sound.
It's all still as evil and progressively minded as previous Avichi works, but with that deeper exploration of post-punk influenced melody that makes this his most infectious work. His most focused and affecting album so far, Catharsis Absolute comes beautifully presented in an eight panel digipack.
Finally picked this vinyl version of the latest Avichi album up for the shop; originally released on CD in 2014 by Profound Lore, this remains one of the better American black metal albums to come out last year.
The third album from American black metallers Avichi, Catharsis Absolute continues to explore the ambitious, often progressive black metal that main member Aamonael (aka Andrew Markuszewski, a former member of Nachtmystium and current member of black sludge beasts Lord Mantis) has been developing since 2007's Divine Tragedy. His serpent-tongue visions are obsessively detailed, and further distinguished by the fact that Markuszewski recorded all of the music entirely on his own. For a true one-man band, this sounds amazingly cohesive, delivering as powerful and as sophisticated a blackened assault as any of his peers.
Opening with the sounds of requiem-like piano, "Repercussion" introduces the album with a brief bit of dark, atmospheric melody before shifting into the furious dissonance of "Flames In My Eyes". As Avichi's droning black metal glides on repetitive circular riffs over the monotonous blastbeat that gives an almost Von-esque trancelike feel to this first track, the vocals a layered mixture of scowling shrieks and monotone chanting, this simple sinister hypno-blast continues to circle endlessly, blasting through the gloom. Surges of looped orchestral sound swell up out of the depths, before finally shifting into something more melodic halfway through, Markuszewski's vocals transforming into a striking post-punk style croon over the malevolent blackened blast. Killer stuff. Then there's "Lightweaver", contrasting that blazing majestic black metal with a seriously rocking mid-tempo hook joined by some unexpectedly new wavey synthesizer accompaniment, almost Cure-style keyboards drifting up as the music downshifts into a ferocious black n' roll groove. "Voice Of Intuition " is even more haunting, those crooning vocals washing over more menacing chiming minor key melodies and serpentine bluesy leads, blastbeats racing furiously, slipping once more into another one of his signature sickoid rock parts. Markuszewski's complex arrangements mark most of these songs, but never at the expense of atmosphere and regal black ambience, and there's some seriously catchy stuff laced all throughout Catharsis. The nearly thirteen minute "All Gods Fall" starts off in a haze of ceremonial ambience, ritual bells ringing and rattling over a simple percussive pulse, then transforms into a mesmeric instrumental crush, an almost Neurosis-esque dirge laced with more of that eerie singing and furious howling vocals, imperious and apocalyptic and steeped in a heady philosophical darkness. And when the album comes to a close, its not with a blackened roar, but with a final descent into that minimalist piano that opened the album, a sprawling instrumental of elliptical minor key piano that expands the sound of the intro into a somber piece of shadowy chamber music gloom, those eerie ivory keys circling and tumbling through a haze of woodsmoke, an almost religious quality emanating from this meditative sound.
It's all still as evil and progressively minded as previous Avichi works, but with that deeper exploration of post-punk influenced melody that makes this his most infectious work. His most focused and affecting album so far, the vinyl edition of Catharsis Absolute comes in a heavyweight gatefold presentation.
Originally released through the now-defunct Repulse imprint, Avulsed's polarizing 1998 experiment Cybergore has recently been reissued through the Russian goregrind label Coyote Records...a quick scan of reviews and feedback that generated from the underground metal scene when this album first came out show that it was pretty much universally scorned within the death/grind scene, but I think it's pretty fucking rad. Avulsed are a long running Spanish death metal outfit that have been delivering gutteral, downtuned death splattered in gore and viscera since 1992, similiar to early 90's death metallers Suffocation and Immolation. Their first full-length Eminence in Putrescence found a cult following with hardcore death metal freaks, but then in the late 90's Avulsed came up with the idea to put together an album of techno/drum n' bass remixes of stuff mostly from their first album. Yep, techno remixes, real remixes, and the result is a brutal, hypnotic deathmetal/techno/d'n'b hybrid, with detuned razor-edged riffs looped together and gutteral toilet bowl vocals belching over relentlessly pulsating glow-stick beats and frenzied breaks. Zach here at C-Blast says that Avulsed reminds him of Dieselboy gone full-blown deathgrind, which sounds pretty accurate to me. Like I mentioned before, this album was hated by most death metal fans when it came out, apparently even diehard Avulsed fans weren't really feeling their foray into raver death, but fans of more futuristic-sounding, adventurous, weird and beat-driven death/black metal sounds like Dodheimshard, Void, Aborym and the like would probably be pretty stoked on this...we've been listening to this disc nonstop since we got 'em in. Raver death is the shit for jamming while we're handling all of the sundry tasks of daily Crucial Blast life. This re-issue also contains some enhanced CD-ROM stuff including a professionally filmed music video for the Avulsed song "Powdered Flesh" as well as bio, discography, and live concert information spanning their career.
This is the last full length album from Buffalo�s AVULSION, chock full of crucial brutal grindcore! Since 1992, these guys have been at the top of the heap of American underground grind, taking their CARCASS and BRUTAL TRUTH influences and unleashing a cyclone of savage snarling vocals, monstrous roars, immensely catchy riffing, tight as fuck song structures, and intense blastbeat action. AVULSION are up there with ASSUCK and BRUTAL TRUTH in terms of sheer uncompromising power. This follows a truckload of splits and 7" EP�s from the past decade, as well as a blazing full length album on 625 Records. Ten tracks of vicious grind. Also features the Green Scare EP, for a total of 18 tracks.
Anyone into the UK post-industrial scene should know Anthony Di Franco. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Di Franco produced some of the heaviest sounds to creep out of the British post-industrial underground during his time in such legendary bands as Skullflower, Ramleh, Novatron and Ethnic Acid; in addition, for a couple of years in the mid-90s Di Franco released some monstrously heavy deathdrone recordings under the Ax name on the Freek Records label, all of which were super limited and disappeared fairly quickly. I myself have been trying to get my hands on this stuff for years without forking out for some major collector's prices, but now we've got this killer collection on Cold Spring that delivers a big chunk of Ax's recorded output.
Almost all of this material has been re-mastered and reissued on Metal Forest, a collection of the Nova Feedback Lp, the Ax II 12", and one song from the 1997 Astronomy Cd. It's crushing stuff, each lengthy track centering around thick layers of ominous, heavily distorted Korg synths and clouds of abrasive feedback and electronic noise. These crushing distorted drones come pouring out of the speakers like black lava, slow oozing streams of super-heavy amp-hum and grinding monochord heaviness, often sounding like a more industrialized Sunn O))) jam, but with some noisier traits that clearly come from Di Franco's background in harsh noise and power electronics.
The first couple of tracks focus in on simple but MASSIVE dronescapes, beginning with the sauropod throb of "Kortex" as it detonates in slow motion within a cloud of black static, sounding like some super-heavy dronemetal outfit covering an old Maurizio Bianchi piece, growing ever more crushing as Di Franco pours in more and more distorted synth over his bleak industrial pummel. On "Nova Feedback 1", loops of grinding synth and buzzing electronics are woven into a mesmerizing oceanic mass of pulverizing drone, followed by the titanic thrum of "Heavy Fluid" as it shimmers in a relentless coruscating glow of white-hot light, a single-chord drone wavering in space, dipping and rising like a chunk of infernal aerial technology riding on the plumes of some sulfurous ether. Then you get "Theme One", where the creeping synthgrind is joined with bursts of random percussion, some very Skullflower-esque bass sounds and string-scraping guitar abuse, and shocks of wild electricity, overall tapping into a sound that is very reminiscent of what Matt Bower was doing around the same time with the 'Flower.
But then Di Franco could also whip up some seriously ear-destroying noise with Ax as well. Take the title track, a massive wall of distortion, a vast churning mass of black static and impenetrable hiss that is pure HNW, and it's as heavy and brain-blotting as anything you'd hear nowadays from Vomir or The Rita; the second half of the track shifts abruptly into a kind of desolate industrial ambience made up of distant rumblings and eerie metallic drones, occasionally obscured by blasts of reverb-drenched sound, glimpses of massive half-formed riffs moving in the gloom.
The two-part "AX II" is also much noisier in comparison, a nearly twenty minute epic that assaults it's layered amplifier drones with a nearly constant barrage of spacey synth noises and trippy electronic fx, at times resembling a heavier version of CCCC's cosmic noise destruction, while transforming into an undulating mass of blackened, buzzing synth-drones and Lustmord-esque doomdrift for the second half of the track. More massive feedback symphonies and rumbling mechanical drift forms across "Nova Feedback 2", at times sounding like predatory alien aircraft lifting into the stratosphere, the sound of Metal Machine Music reconfigured as horror movie score, and closer "Cluster" transports Di Franco's waves of majestic tremolo buzz into the outer nebula, a Skullflower-esque distorted riff taking on a kind of kosmische density as it loops around and around, a wall of ominous psychedelic crunch.
This really isn't that far from the magma-metal dronecrush of Black Boned Angel and 00 Void-era Sunn O))), and the blackened metallic drift of Circle Of Eyes, but the synth-heavy industrial aspect of Ax's music is obviously coming from a different place. Its incredibly heavy stuff though, a piece of 90's underground heaviness that fans of Di Franco's other bands will definitely want to hear...
����� Got this ripping mini-LP back in stock, which came out a while back, a reissue of an equally limited tape release that came out back in 2010 and which, as of this writing, is still the only album that's surfaced from mysterious LA-area metalpunk heathens Axeman. And boy, this record is a goddamn riffbeast. Still one of the most ferocious things that I've heard come from out of the Black Twilight Circle, that shadowy group from Southern California who have taken at least a little of their steez from the infamous French collective Les L�gions Noires, made up of such offbeat and ferocious bands as Blue Hummingbird on the Left, The Haunting Presence, Arizmenda and Volahn, all of whom sound quite different from one another. That latter band is something of a spearhead for the Circle, and it's Volahn himself who's behind Axeman, shifting from the ferocious, folk-flecked black metal of his main project towards an insane, strangely psychedelic assault of freakazoid crossover that dominates Axeman's sound. This outfit is just as distinctive as the other Black Twilight outfits, a primitive, punk-fueled blast of hateful, acid-damaged ferocity that leaves me with a serious case of whiplash every time I spin this LP.
����� It's a simple enough recipe, drawing equally from the sound of savage 80's era death-thrash and classic UK crust, steeped in the sort of occult Aztec mythology that drives much of the Black Twilight Circle. With those twangy guitar chords and shimmering synths that start off "Metnal", the band creates an ominous atmosphere somewhere in between Amebix's apocalyptic crust and the sweeping darkness inherent in 80's thrash metal intros. But that moody intro soon gets ground up in the eruption of ferocious thrash that follows, as blazing motorcharged riffing and pummeling punk-fueled tempos take over, raging beneath a weirdly constant assault of screaming guitar solos. That ten minute opener goes through various shifts, blasting out one vicious metallic punk riff after another, with scathing, reptilian vocals snarling down in the fuzz-drenched mix. There's a brittle quality to the album, everything writhing violently beneath a sheen of weirdly processed distortion. An Venom-ous thrash orgasm beset by nearly non-stop guitar noodling, streaking over the galloping riffage like burning black comets, the vocals occasionally ripping into a wicked King Diamond-esque falsetto shriek. The other two tracks are slightly shorter, but display a similar lust for screaming thrash chaos. From the stampeding speed of "Kosmic Death" to the ultra-blown out frenzy of "Attestor Of Doom & Rebirth", Axeman keeps this pretty crazed, imbuing this with a psychotic energy. I could kill for an actual full-length from this band, this stuff is so addictive. Crazed and psychedelic low-fi blackthrash that feels like something dislodged from the underground metal continuum.
����� PLEASE NOTE: all of the copies that we received from the distributor arrived here with minor corner dings or slight corner creasing. It's not too bad, but if you are extremely particular about corner condition on your LPs, please take this into consideration before ordering.
The little community of artists that orbit the Legion Blotan label and the band Sump might be small in number, but man can these guys crank out a ton of amazing fucked-up black metal and noise. I've just started to follow all of the different projects that have sprouted from this camp over the past year, and I'm still discovering filthy, previously unheard music that keeps knocking my skull off. A lot of the bands that have formed around Legion Blotan involve label head George Proctor, but Axnaar comes from the other guy who plays in Sump, Gareth Howells. This debut tape from Axnaar pounds out eight songs of extremely low-fi, skuzzy black metal primitivism that leans towards the punk-influenced end of the spectrum, though not as much as Sump. It's simple, raw thrash, drawing from the early second wave black metal outfits, but turning the noise and hiss factor way up, bathing the atavistic BM and two-chord hardcore riffs in a thick volcanic coating of tape-murk, the guitars sometimes disappearing into a turbulent fog of buzz saw noise and snarling chaos. There's a couple of spots where it almost turns into a Wold-esque wall of black static. From what I've read this is apparently a band that Howells did before Sump, but fans of that band will find lots of similar evil barbarism wedged into this short tape, as will fanatics of all of that noisy blackened scum-metal that I've been raving about (Luciation, Malveillance, etc).
Released in a limited edition of 300 copies.
Another ripping tape of necromantic noise-punk from underground artist and one-half of C-Blast faves Sump, Gareth Howells. The last tape we got from his Axnaar project was played non-stop over here, and was one of the more savage spurts of blackened punk/noise that Legion Blotan has sent my way; with the second tape Crucifixion Mass, Howells continues to ejaculate more of his filthy no-fi thrash via these five new songs, each one averaging around two minutes of pounding clumsy drumming, hoarse unintelligible screams, plodding bass drone and an absolute shitstorm of guitar noise, all seemingly recorded through a vomit-encrusted ghetto blaster. The first track "Loss Of Feeling" alone had me reeling, sounding like an old Skullflower rehearsal after the band suddenly became obsessed with early black metal. The following songs are in more of a recognizable (albeit totally brain damaged) hardcore mold, simplistic droning, minor key riffs and pounding, barbaric drumming hurtling as fast as they can go through a fog of hiss and murk. There's also a percussive "clankiness" to Axnaar's drumming that continues to give this an odd, sort-of industrial vibe, and it's definitely more fucked and deformed than what this guy does in Sump. The b-side features a twelve minute live set from 2011 that captures the band unleashing a hellstorm of violent noise in some basement, with a recording so blown out and distorted that it becomes a total blur of hateful black noise along the lines of Wold or Sutekh Hexen. Its another primo tape of loner black metal-ish chaos stomp, released in a limited run of two hundred copies.
We've picked up a bunch of different cassettes from the French black metal label Infernal Kommand for Crucial Blast, all of 'em filled with weird and freaked out occult black metal mutations and queasy psychedelic ambience scraped from the underbelly of the French BM underground. Some of the tapes that we've been able to get are from familiar freakazoids (like the brilliantly fucked one man black metal of Zarach'Baal'Tharagh), while others are new discoveries, from the pitch-black void-ambience of Aymrev Erkroz Prevre and the ritual industrial murk of Stigma Diabolicum, to the sadistic satanic power electronic/crypt-drone rites of Silcharde, Malvoisie's bizarre didgeridoo-fueled black metal hallucinations and the perverted blackgrind overload of Kratornas. All of this stuff is brilliant and fucked, the sort of damaged outsider black metal weirdness that we lust for constantly, and fellow fans of all things blackened and noisy and abstract should definitely check all of these titles out.
There's probably only a few of you who will recognize the name Meldhkwis, but in the annals of satanic French ambient/industrial music, he's become infamous for creating soul-crushing black dronescapes under the name Dapnom. With his roots in the French black metal scene, Dapnom's recordings are intensely evil and bleak, taking the otherworldy dread and misery that the Les Legiones Noires evoked and channeling it through the minimal orchestral aesthetic of dark ambient pioneers like Lustmord and Raison D'Etre. The result is some of the most hellish dark ambience of the early 21st century, and any fans of black ambience that haven't heard Dapnom yet should go directly to the collaborative double CD that Dapnom released with Melek-Tha pronto.
Aside from Dapnom, however, Meldhkwis keeps busy with a handful of other projects that even more obscure and underground, like the mysterious
Aymrev Erkroz Prevre. With Aymrev Erkroz Prevre, Meldhkwis strays from the severe isolationist evil of his main project and ventures into a murkier and more psychedelic territory. On this 2006 cassette, we're immersed in two half-hour long tracks, both untitled and each one taking up an entire side of the cassette. The sound is murky, everything indistinct and obscured by a thick, almost inpenetrable cloak of subterranean drone, but all around the vast Lustmordian drift there are ghostly strains of what might be distant orchestral strings, smears of backwards percussion and booming tympani echoing from far away, harrowing Goblin-esque strings, eerie synth tones and brief glimpses of demonic vocal utterances. Swells of heavy distorted riffage seep up from the earth, Sunn O)))-like blasts of detuned thunder that hover for a short time and then dissolve into the blackness. The whole experience is soaked with an oppressive nightmarish atmosphere, a soundtrack for black magic rites and midnight acid trips, those insistent drums bestowing a ritualistic energy to these fearsome murkscapes. Fantastic demonic ambience, highly recommended to fans of Kaniba, Black Seas Of Infinity, Melek-Tha, Sorc'henn, and Uno Actu.
Two obscure black/ritual ambient outfits meet up for this split full length, released in a limited edition of 250 copies by the French black/noise label Infernal Kommando. The mysterious French entity known as Aymrev Erkroz Prevre (an alter ego of the slightly more well-known black ambient project Dapnom) starts this off with one half hour long track of abstract lightless dread called "Tiomnye Ogni" that's similar to the cassette releases that I've heard in the past from the band. It opens with a series of metallic rumblings and vibrations, as if you're hearing huge oil containers being slowly scraped and rubbed, emitting vast resonant clouds of metallic thrum while deep subterranean drones and dense gong-like crashes reverberate through the depths, the deep murky black ambience flowing and unfurling over the course of almost thirty minutes, the minimalist soundscape possessed with bits of random percussive banging, like leaking plumbing echoing in a dank dungeon, and slowly building into a host of unearthly sounds, disembodied moaning, creaks and groans, distant wind, icy electronic noise and shards of obfuscated melody, streaks of processed feedback and radio waves, becoming ever more suffocating and dreadful, the sounds of mechanical rumbling becoming more prominent, evoking the sensation of being trapped within a cattle car on a fast descent into the bowels of hell. The sound gets louder and heavier, more layers of metallic scraping and ominous minor key loops beneath massive rumbling drones and clouds of black amp rumble, evil dissonant strings rising up out of the depths, howling subterranean winds and fearsome high-pitched electronic wails, distant funeral organs and, towards the very end, some faint traces of orchestral majesty. It reminds me of Yen Pox, but much more murky and chaotic.
The three tracks from MH LMTH that follow have a comparable black industrial ambient sound, though this occult Russian project achieves this through slightly different means. The three part saga "Ethengixodefar: Jehabda Daqaz Achangka" wanders through strange tomb-cities and graveyard passages, crafting a kind of mystical, filthy death industrial along the lines of bands like Abruptum, Brighter Death Now and Atrax Morgue that shifts between frenzied masses of lunatic voices and demonic roars that swoop through expansive black clouds of reverb and delay, distorted blown-out drones that surge up out of the slime, wafts of crackling electronic noise and snarling heavily processed vokills, roaring synth muck and rumbling tectonic bass, with some massively blown out and in-the-red synthesizers droning on and emulating the swarming buzz of black metal riffs (not surprising, since MH LMTH features members of the Russian black metal bands Ithdabquth Qliphoth, Hammer ov Qliphoth, and Deathmoon, as well as the strange ambient project Cadaver Yelleth at Amber Tower).
This album just came out of nowhere, a debut from a Philadelphia based avant-garde death metal band that ended up being released by the Czech
label Epidemie, and it's a real brain-scrambler. I'm having a hard time coming up with another death metal album that's as batshit nuts as
Chronicles is, which saying alot considering the types of stuff that we get in here. Azure Emote is the brainchild of Mike Hrubovcak, a member of
the established death metal bands Monstrosity, Vile, and Divine Rapture. With this project though, Hrubovcak blasts off far from anything remotely
recognizeable as standard death metal; the insanely complex songs that make up this album are constructed using obsessive digital editing, and any single
track is woven from stuttering death metal riffage, advanced IDM rhythms, lush electronic ambience, a myriad of samples, all put together into crazily
intricate compositions. A range of vocal styles are used, from gutteral death grunts to a deep David Bowie croon, and the ethereal singing of Laurie Ann
Hause (Autumn Tears, Rain Fell Within) shows up throughout the album. And as complex and confusing as Azure Emote's digital death tapestry becomes, the hooks
are MASSIVE, total melodic death metal currents flowing through Chronicles...' glitchy landscape. "Procreation Abnegation" is one of sickest songs
on here, hyperactively fusing an awesome epic death metal riff to abstract electronica rhythms, layers of freaked out vocals, synth/beats ripped right out of
a John Carpenter film score, slow doomy heaviness, heavenly female singing....the whole album rules though, the sampling and programming is as advanced as
what Genghis Tron are doing, and the heavier electronic rhythms and textures are in league with bands like Limbonic Art, The Kovenant, Dodheimsgard and Red
Harvest. It's death metal rendered through the lens of Autechre and Squarepusher in a mindblowingly surreal masterwork.
2007's Chronicles Of An Aging Mammal remains one of the craziest (and unfortunately, most overlooked) entries in the avant-garde death metal field from the past decade, a hyper-creative opening statement from this strange side-project from Vile / Abraxas / Monstrosity / Divine Rapture front-man Mike Hrubovcak. That album's mix of punishing death metal, futuristic prog rock, weird IDM / electronica elements and complex stitchworks of off-kilter samples and sounds was ambitious to say the least, and had a lot more in common with the otherworldly electronic/black metal experimentation of bands like Dodheimsgard and Thorns and the ornate experimentation of Arcturus than anything that I've ever heard from any of Hrubovcak's other bands. It's been six years since that album came out, but Hrubovcak has finally returned with a new Azure Emote record, The Gravity Of Impermanence, and it's just as sprawling and imaginative and deliriously strange as the band's debut, with fourteen songs that stretch out across multiple genres and sounds, winding it's labyrinthine death-prog experiments through an unpredictable landscape filled with gorgeous violin sections, freaked-out prog rock raveups, skittery electronica and a myriad of other elements woven into Azure Emote's bizarre tapestry of alien conspiracy theories, quotes taken from assisted-suicide guru Jack Kevorkian and arcane metaphysical visions. Those looking for a crushing riff won't be disappointed, as Gravity is loaded with 'em, but just as the band locks into one of their monstrous down-tuned chugs or angular grooves, the music will suddenly veer into haunting chamber strings and folk melodies draped over furious double-bass drumming, lush soundtrack synthscapes, operatic female vocals soaring over strange abstract glitchscapes and Autechre-esque rhythms, or bursts into some killer proggy keyboard wankery, always backed up with the metallic guitars and ferocious blasting rhythm section. This produces some incredible moments, like the folk-n'-opera flecked death metal majesty of "Puppet Deities" and "Veils Of Looming Despair", the jazz-fusion laced math-death epic "Dissent", and the crushing saxophone-fueled heaviness of "Obsessive Time Directive" and "The Living Spiral", both of which feature a guest saxophone performance from Yakuza's Bruce Lamont. Hrubovcak's unique vision is fleshed out with the help of a number of other notable musicians from the extreme metal/avant rock underground, with guest appearances from members of Malignancy, Monstrosity, Total Fucking Destruction, Tristania and Hate Eternal rounding out the lineup. If ever there was a death metal band that would have fit on the Tzadik label, it's this one, a Technicolor assault of brainy, confusional avant-death that sits right alongside the likes of Sigh and Thy Catafalque. Highly recommended!
Taking its name from the Norwegian word for "concrete", B-Tong is a current project from sound artist Chris Sigdell, who I had been previously familiar with from his work in the group NID. Back in 2007, NID put out an album called Plate Tectonics on the German experimental music label Auf Abwegen that was as heavy and light-devouring as any doom-drone outfit, unleashing waves of crushing, processed post-industrial power drone that spread out in vast obsidian fields of low-frequency sound. It's still my all-time favorite release from Auf Abwegen, so I was certainly interested in seeing if Sigdell's current project would be in a similarly heavy vein.
On his first release for Italian dark ambient label Greytone, Sigdell crafts a series of vast, grayscale dronescapes that do have a lot of the same weightiness and grim power as his work with NID. Drawing from an assortment of field recordings, environmental sounds and vintage synthesizers, he sculpts these six tracks on Hostile Environments into an intensely bleak brand of apocalyptic industrial drone, with sheets of howling subterranean drift flowing beneath peals of squealing metallic noise and distant sinister echoes, and crashing against swells of intensely dramatic, decomposing orchestral sound. Tracks like "Stasis Field" evoke images of abandoned cities standing beneath slate-grey skies and the cold black emptiness of eternal winter, the swirling monochrome ambience laced with some well-placed fragments of melancholy piano. And as the album progresses, waves of minimal metallic shimmer ripple across the vastness, while tectonic rumblings reverberate from below, snatches of half-glimpsed electronic melody quickly slip out of earshot, sounds appear and looping through the gloom before dissolving into the irradiated ether. This aural desolation quickly taking on a hypnotic feel, some of the looping percussive noises bringing a sort of Aube-like feel to certain tracks, while other passages on the album turn into something much more visceral and disturbing when Sigdell begins to employ a mixture of samples and field recordings and disgusting emetic noises that sound like something from Randy Yau, bizarre alien gurglings that lurk amid the surges of droning industrial wreckage and frost-encrusted whirr. "Thepsis" is one of the more surreal noisescapes in that vein, sounds of strained breathing and sampled pitch-shifted voices merging with arrhythmic throbbing bass-thuds, echoing metal clank, swells of backwards glitch and mysterious disembodied voices, further evoking those visions of thrumming power lines suspended beneath slate-grey skies and a world enshrouded in radiation poisoning. Dark, heavy stuff, moving deeper into ever more nightmarish territory as the album goes on, the ambient soundscapes perpetually hovering at the edge of the abyss, the sound akin to the darkest strains of environmental ambient dread found with Yen Pox, Inade and Lustmord, but fused to deformed, often surrealistic noisescapes. Comes in digipack packaging.
Another pick that recently surfaced when I started to dig through the Old Cemetery catalog for their filthiest, weirdest and most fucked sounding discs, Bomber's Satan's Shitfuckers pretty much takes the cake for the former prerequisite. With ten songs crammed into twenty five minutes, this contains both the First & Last Demo, FUCK OFF demo and their tracks off of the split tape with Ecuadorian black thrashers Lapida, consisting of pretty much everything this perverted Chilean duo put out up to this point. These speedfreaks play the kind of raw, ragged blackened thrash/punk infested with that old-school Motorhead/Venom-style metalpunk sound that I'm terminally addicted to, with a similar vibe as C-Blast faves like Abigail, Midnight, and Syphilitic Vaginas. But Bomber come off way scummier than any of those bands, with a noxious guttural vocal attack clouded by ridiculous amounts of reverb (to the point where it barely sounds like a human voice, more like some bestial gaseous puke-chant), and underscored by some grimy BDSM and gutter-junkie vibes that give their fucked-up low-fi thrash a wild GG Allin-meets-Venom type feel. Of course, alot of that comes from the appearance of an actual GG Allin cover song that shows up in the middle of the disc, a stenchy, rousing rendition of "Bite It, You Scum" sandwiched in among their other short, foul blasts of gargling necro punk. As filthy and sloppy as this is, these guys do write some seriously catchy songs as well, anti-social anthems like "Beerdrinker" , "Total Holocaust Madness" and "Night Club Junkies" firmly implanting their satanic scum-blooze into your brainpan. A rocking disc of cum-drenched black filth, with vile artwork made up of crude drawings of a transgender Jesus and self-abusing bishop splayed wide across the back cover; like it says in the Cd booklet, "dedicated for all whorehouse, red light street and sex clubs over the world. Stay Pervert!".
Limited to 1000 copies.
This German multi-media outfit has been around for over 12 years, but Misery Is The Rhythm Of The World is our introduction to the band. The disc is
comprised of 4 epic tracks, each song averaging 10 minutes in length, and the music is an atmospheric style of post-rock influenced hardcore that feels like
it references Amebix's gloomy punk as much as it does early Neurosis, the songs shifting from haunting instrumental passages of sad minor chord melodies with
film samples or voice recordings similiar to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, with unexpected Faust / kruatrock interludes that that build and explode into
crusty metallic dirge. There's alot of melody throughout this album, and the band also incorporates alot of driving, mid-90's style indie/emo elements that I
wasn't expecting when I first threw this on. It's a pretty rad combination of Mogwai/GSYBE post rock, Texas Is The Reason/Fingerprint emo, and crushing
Neurosis heaviness. Fans of epic post-metal/metallic post-hardcore like Isis, Envy, Neurosis, and Pelican would definitely be into B. Abuse, particularly if
you're into the more melodic aspect of those bands. The artwork and lyrics are pretty surreal, all pointing towards some dystopic vision that fits with the
dark music.
Our pals at Vendetta clued us in to these German sludgecreeps earlier this year, and thank the goat for that...as soon as I heard 'em, I was having my ass kicked in all manner of subsonic ways by the magma-metal plod that these cats weld. They had an LP that came out previously that I wasn't able to get my hands on, but this disc from Vendetta solves that problem by including all of the tracks from the selfm titled LP plus the vinyl onlysplit that Black Shape Of Nexus did with Crowskin awhile back.
You could call the music of Black Shape Of Nexus doom, or sludge, or slo-mo earthcrust razing deathdirge or whatever, it's super slow and insanely heavy, with huge sickening riffs lurching along in slow motion grooves, and it's those grooves that set this apart from alot of the other extreme slo-mo heaviness that I've been listening to lately like Trees, Khlyst, Corrupted, etc. Black Shape are as heavy as any of those bands, sure, but instead of merely droning on feedback-drenched chords for eons, these guys play some real massive riffs that lumber and swing, even though they've got all of their guitars tuned to a bowel-loosening B flat and their typical rate of passage is somewhere around 10bpm. These mighty riffs are timestretched into crusty, massive, vaguely Sabbathian grooves, powered by buzzing chestrattling basslines, pummeling stroked-out jackhammer drums, singer Malte Seidel and his hideously scarred crazed-ape roars that sound like they are being played back on a vinyl record that somebody is dragging their finger on, and awesome clean guitar chords that are layered across the lumbering doomcore and which add a windswept rock ambience to the songs. Sometimes Black Sun pull it all back and groove on passages of laid back strum and subdued percussion, intricate post-rock jangle and droning amp-roar ambience, but these parts are only brief lulls in the grinding blackened sludge destruction that bulldozes across the five untitled tracks. Again, MASSIVE, like Corrupted if they had some mathy "swing" to their ultradoom, a crushing, grinding propulsive sludge metal assault that's peppered with bits of arty ambience and some really cool nuanced guitar textures. Mastered by James Plotkin (Khanate/OLD/Khylst). Recommended for sure. And the packaging for this disc is top notch: the CD comes in a golden metal box that opens to reveal the disc attached to the case on a metal hub and a thick cardstock four-panel insert with strange sepia-toned abstract artwork and band photos.
Full on, super powerful Mexican deathmetal...ripping solos, catchy as hell songcraft, harsh vocals- supreme melodic Deathmetal on par with anything from Gothenburg. Think crunching death a la CENOTAPH with IRON MAIDEN-esque melodic sensibilities anchored by killer riffs.
BAAL's thunderously loud reworks of loveable noise wizard Emil Beaulieau start this disc off with super brutal blocks of infernal white noise and throbbing distortion overload, sounding like the Earth's shuddering death spasm as it's caught in the traction of an interplanetary death ray, as panicky, broken voice transmissions come in from deep space warning us of impending annihilation. The first track delivers these heavy bursts of freeform electronic violence intercut with tape recordings of somebody's extremely pissed off neighbor screaming threats, and this style of brutal and aggressive cut-up continues through the first half of the disc. The final two tracks, however, are 11+ minute collages of BAAL's screeching electronic power spliced with lopsided rhythmic robot-toy marches that being to mind Dutch loop punks DEAD HUSBANDS on a heavy power electronics bender. The whole album is pretty engaging and dynamic, the tracks constantly change form and swoop through an industrial, Tetsuo style dreamscape. The CD-R comes packaged in the signature RRR style xerox-mutated sealed wallet sleeve, the silver disc completely blank save for a single small abstract label affixed to the top.
���More blackened pagan weirdness from Vanguard Productions. The first of two tapes I picked up from Bacchanal, the side-project from S.L. Jarson of black metallers Equinox, Purity Through Darkness is the work of easily the oddest sounding band on the label, delivering pure electronic music that draws heavily from classic 80's house music and kosmische ambience, primitive EBM, and tinged with shades of other early industrial music, all woven together this weird, somewhat crude Satanic dance music that's guaranteed to disgust staunch black metal purists. Despite the project being released by Vanguard, there's nothing connecting this to black metal, but the grim, pulsating electronic soundscapes definitely have a sinister feel that you'd probably dig if you were ever into stuff like Jon N�dtveidt's De Infernali or the more experimental electronic stuff from Ildjarn.
��� There's a vintage feel to this stuff, you could have told me that this tape was more than twenty five years old. From the pulsating low-fi techno of opener "Blood Of Titans" to the swirling murky synthscape of "Cernunnos" and its cosmic fog of crackling electronic drones, squelchy bass, and searing distortion, the tape then slips out into a warped Tangerine Dream-esque wash of mutant galactic analogue drift, hypnotic breakbeats thudding beneath vast frequency sweeps and demented synth arpeggios, the tracks scattered with unsettling spoken word samples, swells of wobbly dubstep-esque bass and classic EBM rhythms, primitive gurgling synths and wailing sampled female backing vocals, and laced with the occasional creepy keyboard melody that sounds like something from an 80s horror flick. There's a dark, threatening feel to some of that soundtracky stuff that shows up later in the tape, especially when slow pounding percussion starts to rumble at the center of a black nebulae of malformed electronics and sinister choral synths, the track "The Strife I Wove With Vein Of Pride" even resembling something from one of John Carpenter's late-80s soundtracks. There's little in the way of vocals, save for a couple of tracks that feature dozy female voices reciting what sound like biblical verse over the skittering beats and ominous dark ambience, elsewhere reciting lines from Crowley's "Hymn To Pan" and other writings over muted technoid throb and swirling synth chords.
Before forming into more of spacey, sludgy, mostly instrumental outfit playing sprawling songs somewhere between Cave In and Neurosis, Omaha's Back When
began as a ferocious and arty metalcore band, and their debut was this seven song EP that came out in 2003. We picked up some of these for C-Blast when we
recently raided Imagine It's back catalog for more The Autumn Project stuff, and I was surprised at how cool and varied this release is. The CD's package has
an interesting mix of eerie figure illustrations and dark, ominous background images that look like they came out of a nightmarish children's book; the disc
itself reveals lots of crushing, mathy riffage, spastic rhythms, monstrous deathgrowls trading off with manic shrieking, and dissonant guitars that all point
to modern ADD inflicted metalcore, as do the song titles like 'I Could See Terminator 2 Really Happening' and 'Mandatory Exodus To Hell'. But there's also
alot of deftly handled stylistic shifts that make this more interesting than much of the spazzy metalcore that was coming out around the same time. On songs
like 'Stabhead - The Prey Of A Fantasy', Back When create a bleak, dark atmosphere with slow, dissonant doom riffage and huge epic hooks and spacey FX and
psychedelic guitar noise that gives way to calm, malevolent instrumental passages and crushing, His Hero Is Gone-esque crust. The wonky spiraling fretboard
freakouts and herky-jerky offtime beats on "I Could See 'Terminator 2' Really Happening" signal a mashup of sludgy chaotic metalcore, grinding death metal,
and no wave-y hardcore. Opener 'Aphorism on the Existence of Fire' is one of the discs catchiest tunes, a crushing melodic riff and spazzy drumming suddenly
parted by a weird, quiet jazzy instrumental part. The whole disc is filled with these clean jazzy interludes which keeps things interesting. All in all, a
surprisingly eclectic dose of chaotic metalcore pummel, with weird complex parts a la early Dillenger Escape Plan and Daughter's Canada Songs, and
massive atmospheric sludginess a la Old Man Gloom and early Isis.
A collection of EPs, demo, and remix tracks that help to chart the creative arc of this progressive metalcore band, who started out as a fairly standard spazzcore outfit but then went on to incorporate an eclectic range of sounds into their style, coming out on the other side as an atmospheric and experimental collective that transcends the 'metalcore' tag altogether. All I had ever heard from Back When prior to getting this CD in from Init was an EP that they released on Imagine It; that disc was frantic, fucking super chaotic, along the lines of early Daughters and grindy screamo outfits but not breaking any new ground. So when I popped In The Presence in, I was pretty surprised with how immense these songs were, and the range of influences and styles that Back When began to incorporate with their newer material. The disc opens with "Exodus, Phobos" from their Swords Against The Father EP, and it reminds me of a more chaotic Buried Inside, mass
ive walls of distorted atmosphere and processed feedback, death metal roars intertwining with frantic screams, blastbeats and epic riffage. The next three songs are from the same EP, and further mix it up: "Examining The Lives Of The After" initally takes form as a brutal deathcore dirge before freaking out completely into spastic fret wankery and then slipping into a punishing bluesy swamp metal riff straight out of Eyehategod;"A Hero's Welcome" is psychedelic tech-core that drops a massive grooving riff right in the middle; and "Sons Against The Father" again combines psychedelic space rock guitars with crushing chaotic blasts.
"Fraud Of Scibes" is take from Back When's split 7" with The Setup, and once again we see them shapeshift, this time into a spacey dirge metal beast, like a heavier, grittier Mouth Of The Architect, delayed guitars rising up to the heavens while the band remains anchored to the earth with a crushing sludge riff that finally ends in a surge of electronic ambience. After that is a demo version of their song "We Giveth And We Taketh", another spacey psych-doom behemoth. Track seven is a previously unreleased cover of a Jerome's Dream song, and the final track is a gorgeous remix of "Essays In The Moonlight III" that merges their celestial guitar melodies with crackling electronic pulses.
Back When started out as a fairly standard spazzcore outfit but then went on to incorporate an eclectic range of sounds into their style, coming out on the other side as an atmospheric and experimental collective that transcends the 'metalcore' tag altogether. All I had ever heard from Back When prior to getting their releases on Init was an earlier EP that they released on Imagine It; that disc was frantic, fucking super chaotic, along the lines of early Daughters and grindy screamo outfits but not breaking any new ground. So when I finally spun their later recordings, I was pretty surprised with how immense these songs were, and the range of influences and styles that Back When began to incorporate with their newer material. The Swords Against The Father EP opens with "Exodus, Phobos", and it reminds me of a more chaotic Buried Inside, massive walls of distorted atmosphere and processed feedback, death metal roars intertwining with frantic screams, blastb
eats and epic riffage. The next three songs are from the same EP, and further mix it up: "Examining The Lives Of The After" initally takes form as a brutal deathcore dirge before freaking out completely into spastic fret wankery and then slipping into a punishing bluesy swamp metal riff straight out of Eyehategod;"A Hero's Welcome" is psychedelic tech-core that drops a massive grooving riff right in the middle; and "Sons Against The Father" again combines psychedelic space rock guitars with crushing chaotic blasts.
Crucial Bliss is issuing Soulless Solace, a new full-length disc from this up-and-coming southern California quartet that features Chris Dodge (Spazz / Hellnation / Despise You / Ancient Chinese Secret / East West Blast Test / Jesus Philbin), Jay Howard (Circuit Wound / Wire Werewolves), Kevin Fetus (Fetus Eaters / Watch Me Burn), and someone named E. Nervo all collaborating on mammoth jet-expulsions of seriously deranged ambient muck. The nine tracks on Soulless Solace tend towards the epic, with more than half of them running past the ten minute mark as the group summons dense, murky clouds of psychedelic effects, swirling opiate ambience, inebriated fx-box fuckery, random flashes of found music and radio transmissions, skullcrushing free-noise mayhem, and flailing demonic heaviness. Some out there have been lazily slapping the "noise" label on this bunch of maniacs, but don't be fooled...this is something much more gorked than just another exercise in mindless power-skree. Nah, Bacteria Cult create something much more druggy and creepy they travel through an upside-down dadaist darkland filled with looped voices, smears of ominous orchestral samples, bubbling mad scientist lab fx, and waves of crushing formless sludge and monstrous distorted vocals. Like some mescaline-doused tumble through a black pit where different turntables are spinning beat-up, shit-encrusted copies of The Conet Project, Nurse With Wound's Homotopy to Marie, Coil's Scatalogy, Contagious Orgasm's The Flow of Sound Without Parameter, and a chorus of unknown, super-obscure Scandinavian black ambient 7"s all spinning on their wobbly axis at the same time. A fantastic and cohesive series of schizophrenic yet mesmerizing bad-dream soundscapes. Released in a limited print run of 300 copies, and packaged in a full-color foldout sleeve.
Now re-issued on cassette, which is the original format that this classic Rasta speedpunk album came out on back in '82...
With what is essentially ground zero for American hardcore, the Bad Brains� self titled debut from 1982 (originally released by ROIR on cassette) remains one of the most influential and ferocious records to ever come out of the underground. The impact that this Lp had on extreme music as we know it is hard to overstate - just about every corner of metal and punk in the 80s was in some way touched by the music that these four young black musicians from Washington DC created here. Blending together reggae, dub, and a hyperspeed hardcore assault into an unclassifiable sound that is still as unique sounding as it was thirty years ago, this first Lp is an essential slab of genre-crushing music that's absolutely essential for fans of hardcore punk and adventurous thrash. It's got that iconic album cover image of the DC Capitol building being destroyed by a bolt of lightning from the heavens, and the songs are amazing, every one of the hardcore punk songs is a ripper and unforgettable, and even the reggae tracks fit perfectly on this record (and much more seamlessly than they would on later albums). At the time of it's release, this was the fastest shit EVER, instantly creating the template for hardcore and yet instantly defying the constricts of hardcore with it's touches of jazziness, the skilled musicianship, the wailing metal solos, HR's possessed vocal performance, the stop-on-a-dime time changes...it's a work of collective genius. This is one of my favorite records of all time, the euphoric punk thrash anthems "Don't Need It", "Sailin' On", an "Attitude", the ferocious rocker "The Regulator", the supersonic thrash of "Banned In DC", the dub reggae resistance anthem of "Leaving Babylon" complete with steel drum sounds and dub echo/reverb effects, all of this is crucial listening, now reissued by ROIR on cassette on the original classic tape format.
Super-limited "fanclub" release of what are apparently four unreleased tracks from the Rastafarian hardcore gods. The recording is surprisingly good for "lost" material such as this, really great actually, and according to the insert that comes with this, the three studio tracks featured here were recorded by the Bad Brains between 1981 and 1982 for a compilation of East Coast hardcore bands that never came together. Later versions of the songs ("Black Dots", "Send You No Flowers", "Redbone In The City") have appeared on the Black Dots collection that came out in the 90's, but the performance here is pretty damn ferocious, and the b-side, a previously never-before-released mutant reggae jam called "Recognize", is from a line performance in San Diego in 1985. The terrific sound quality makes this platter highly recommended for fans, but move quick - it's limited to five hundred copies.
Bad Brains are one of the few bands whose live albums I regularly pull out to listen to; they embodied the "crucial energy" of hardcore in the live setting more than any other band in the early 80's, and I've listened to all of their old live albums (Spirit Electricity, The Youth Are Getting Restless, and especially Live from 1988) countless times over the past twenty years. Their live documentation on record was terrific, but until a few years ago, there was hardly any high quality live concert footage of their classic 80's era available; that is, until that Live At CBGB's DVD came out on MVD, inarguably the best live video document ever released of the legendary Rastafarian hardcore gods. That DVD featured an exhaustive setlist that was culled from three consecutive shows at CBGB's that were spread over the Christmas holiday in 1982, and includes just about every song from that period that you could possibly want to see them perform live. At the time, the energy and ferocity of Bad Brains was unrivaled in hardcore, and their incendiary performances captured on that DVD proved the point. With amazingly high-quality film and audio, the footage captures the band in the throes of ecstatic fury, surrounded by punks hurtling across the stage and the dancefloor as the band tore through a set list that drew heavily from their early ultra-fast thrashers with a handful of Rastafarian dub/reggae jams.
So now MVD has taken a chunk of these performances and has assembled a new vinyl-only full length album of live material in a limited edition black-and-red splatter colored vinyl pressing, and it fucking smokes. There was a Cd release of the '82 CBGB's performances too, but this has a completely different set of material than that disc, fourteen tracks in all. This Lp features a lot of their reggae/dub material, but the heavy mix and mastering gives the dubbed-out reggae jams a much more bass-heavy, apocalyptic vibe than on previous Bad Brains live discs, and the sequencing of the tracks is perfect, with the speedy, ferocious blasts of Rastafarian thrash sandwiched between the massive reggae workouts of "The Meek" and "Unity Dub". Most of the songs found here are off of their Rock For Light album, but what makes this crucial for hardcore Bad Brains fans is the inclusion of the aforementioned "unity Dub", which to the best of my knowledge has never appeared on any other Bad Brains record, and the only live recording of "Rally Round Jah's Throne". Then there are the blistering hyper speed versions of classic songs like "Banned In DC", "FVK", "How Low Can a Punk Get" and "Right Brigade". Might be the "heaviest" sounding of all of the live Bad Brains albums, but regardless, it's a crucial set of the band at the height of their quasi-mystical, Rastafarian thrash powers, and absolutely recommended to fans. Issued in a limited pressing of just 500 copies.
Depending on who you ask, Bad Brains might be the greatest hardcore punk band that ever lived. I myself certainly subscribe to that line of thinking. While their career and recorded output has been anything but consistent, when these legendary Rastafarian punks were "on", they were an unstoppable force. Starting off as a bunch of jazz-fusion musicians outside of Washington DC who became attracted to the fire of punk rock, the Bad Brains added speed and complexity, metallic fury and Rastafarian spirituality to an amped up and groundbreaking version of punk that gave birth to hardcore as we know it, while at the same time creating their own unique sound that has never been replicated. If you're a hardcore fan, this is all old news, but nothing can take away from the epiphanic power of hearing this band for the first time. The closest I can get to revisiting that experience is by pulling out the bands very first 7", the Pay To Cum single from 1980, which for years was a holy grail of hardcore vinyl collectors and fetched hundreds of dollars for a copy. Now, the band has reissued this 7" in a limited edition, featuring one of the best hardcore songs ever on the a-side, "Pay To Cum", a ferocious speeding blast of light with an instantly hummable chorus hook, total joyous aggression distilled into one minute and thirty three seconds. And probably the fastest song ever recorded up to that point. On the flipside, the band does "Stay Close To Me", a prescient piece of punk reggae that is just as soulful and catchy as the previous track. Absolutely crucial.
With what is essentially ground zero for American hardcore, the Bad Brains� self titled debut from 1982 (originally released by ROIR on cassette) remains one of the most influential and ferocious records to ever come out of the underground. The impact that this Lp had on extreme music as we know it is hard to overstate - just about every corner of metal and punk in the 80s was in some way touched by the music that these four young black musicians from Washington DC created here. Blending together reggae, dub, and a hyperspeed hardcore assault into an unclassifiable sound that is still as unique sounding as it was thirty years ago, this first Lp is an essential slab of genre-crushing music that's absolutely essential for fans of hardcore punk and adventurous thrash. It's got that iconic album cover image of the DC Capitol building being destroyed by a bolt of lightning from the heavens, and the songs are amazing, every one of the hardcore punk songs is a ripper and unforgettable, and even the reggae tracks fit perfectly on this record (and much more seamlessly than they would on later albums). At the time of it's release, this was the fastest shit EVER, instantly creating the template for hardcore and yet instantly defying the constricts of hardcore with it's touches of jazziness, the skilled musicianship, the wailing metal solos, HR's possessed vocal performance, the stop-on-a-dime time changes...it's a work of collective genius. This is one of my favorite records of all time, the euphoric punk thrash anthems "Don't Need It", "Sailin' On", an "Attitude", the ferocious rocker "The Regulator", the supersonic thrash of "Banned In DC", the dub reggae resistance anthem of "Leaving Babylon" complete with steel drum sounds and dub echo/reverb effects, all of this is crucial listening, now reissued by ROIR with a digital download code, with my highest possible recommendation.
Now available as a limited edition full-color picture disc.
With what is essentially ground zero for American hardcore, the Bad Brains� self titled debut from 1982 (originally released by ROIR on cassette) remains one of the most influential and ferocious records to ever come out of the underground. The impact that this Lp had on extreme music as we know it is hard to overstate - just about every corner of metal and punk in the 80s was in some way touched by the music that these four young black musicians from Washington DC created here. Blending together reggae, dub, and a hyperspeed hardcore assault into an unclassifiable sound that is still as unique sounding as it was thirty years ago, this first Lp is an essential slab of genre-crushing music that's absolutely essential for fans of hardcore punk and adventurous thrash. It's got that iconic album cover image of the DC Capitol building being destroyed by a bolt of lightning from the heavens, and the songs are amazing, every one of the hardcore punk songs is a ripper and unforgettable, and even the reggae tracks fit perfectly on this record (and much more seamlessly than they would on later albums). At the time of it's release, this was the fastest shit EVER, instantly creating the template for hardcore and yet instantly defying the constricts of hardcore with it's touches of jazziness, the skilled musicianship, the wailing metal solos, HR's possessed vocal performance, the stop-on-a-dime time changes...it's a work of collective genius. This is one of my favorite records of all time, the euphoric punk thrash anthems "Don't Need It", "Sailin' On", an "Attitude", the ferocious rocker "The Regulator", the supersonic thrash of "Banned In DC", the dub reggae resistance anthem of "Leaving Babylon" complete with steel drum sounds and dub echo/reverb effects, all of this is crucial listening, now reissued by ROIR with a digital download code, with my highest possible recommendation.
I usually don't go nuts for live albums, but when it comes to the Bad Brains, I'm a huge fan of every single live record that they released during their 80's heyday. All of their live discs on SST were on constant rotation for me throughout my youth, and I'm working on getting all of them in stock here for anyone who has yet to experience these fiery performances from the Rastafarian thrash masters. The one that I've been revisiting a lot lately is 1991's Spirit Electricity, a six-song Ep on SST that consists of recordings from a couple of different US performances in 1988, during the period between I Against I and Quickness, which was when the band was developing into a much more metallic, heavy sound. The disc begins with the crunchy, soaring strut of "Return To Heaven", then tears into the infectious thrash of "Let Me Help" and follows that opening salvo with the reggae medley "Day Tripper/She's A Rainbow", starting the Beatles cover with a deep reggae groove before breaking down into the spaced out dub of the second half. Then it's on to the explosive thrash classics "Banned In DC" and "Attitude" before settling back into the supreme dub on their anti-authoritarian battle cry "Youth Are Getting Restless", the languid spacey groove flecked wth electronic effects. Like their other live albums The Youth Are Getting Restless and Live, this is a ferocious live document.
I usually don't go nuts for live albums, but when it comes to the Bad Brains, I'm a huge fan of every single live record that they released during their 80's heyday. All of their live discs on SST were on constant rotation for me throughout my youth, and I'm working on getting all of them in stock here for anyone who has yet to experience these fiery performances from the Rastafarian thrash masters. The one that I've been revisiting a lot lately is 1991's Spirit Electricity, a six-song Ep on SST that consists of recordings from a couple of different US performances in 1988, during the period between I Against I and Quickness, which was when the band was developing into a much more metallic, heavy sound. The disc begins with the crunchy, soaring strut of "Return To Heaven", then tears into the infectious thrash of "Let Me Help" and follows that opening salvo with the reggae medley "Day Tripper/She's A Rainbow", starting the Beatles cover with a deep reggae groove before breaking down into the spaced out dub of the second half. Then it's on to the explosive thrash classics "Banned In DC" and "Attitude" before settling back into the supreme dub on their anti-authoritarian battle cry "Youth Are Getting Restless", the languid spacey groove flecked wth electronic effects. Like their other live albums The Youth Are Getting Restless and Live, this is a ferocious live document.
If you are going to own one live album from the Rastafarian thrash warriors Bad Brains, it's gotta be 1988's Live, released on SST Records. Recorded during the period between their classic I Against I and the more metallic Quickness, the thirteen song set on this Lp is culled from assorted performances while the band was touring the planet in support of I Against I throughout 1987, and a better live document of the Bad Brains in the live setting does not exist in my opinion. The set is a perfect mix of songs from the band's career up to this point, their combo of blistering Rasta-fueled thrash metal, crazed hardcore punk, and soulful dub reggae displayed with unstoppable ferocity on tracks like "I", "At The Movies", "The Regulator", "Right Brigade", and "I Against I". The first several songs on the Lp blaze by at mach speed, delivering a ripping thrash assault for the bulk of the a-side before they finally slow down for the stoned reggae revolution-anthem "I & I Survive". The b-side is even crunchier, with some of their heaviest songs from that period showing up ("Re-Ignition", "Sacred Love") alongside crucial jams like "F.V.K.", "She's Calling You", "Secret 77" and "Coptic Times". With Naomi Petersen's iconic photos, the crushing production courtesy of master knob-twister Phil Burnett (which is of such consistent, powerful quality that for the longest time I thought the album was taken from just one concert), and the fire-breathing performances from the Brains' at the peak of their power, this has remained one of my all time favorite records, not just from the Bad Brains catalog, but from this entire era of hardcore/crossover. Very highly recommended, and absolutely essential to Bad Brains fans both new and old.
The Cd edition of this classic 1982 Rasta speedpunk album, in stock at last...
With what is essentially ground zero for American hardcore, the Bad Brains� self titled debut from 1982 (originally released by ROIR on cassette) remains one of the most influential and ferocious records to ever come out of the underground. The impact that this Lp had on extreme music as we know it is hard to overstate - just about every corner of metal and punk in the 80s was in some way touched by the music that these four young black musicians from Washington DC created here. Blending together reggae, dub, and a hyperspeed hardcore assault into an unclassifiable sound that is still as unique sounding as it was thirty years ago, this first Lp is an essential slab of genre-crushing music that's absolutely essential for fans of hardcore punk and adventurous thrash. It's got that iconic album cover image of the DC Capitol building being destroyed by a bolt of lightning from the heavens, and the songs are amazing, every one of the hardcore punk songs is a ripper and unforgettable, and even the reggae tracks fit perfectly on this record (and much more seamlessly than they would on later albums). At the time of it's release, this was the fastest shit EVER, instantly creating the template for hardcore and yet instantly defying the constricts of hardcore with it's touches of jazziness, the skilled musicianship, the wailing metal solos, HR's possessed vocal performance, the stop-on-a-dime time changes...it's a work of collective genius. This is one of my favorite records of all time, the euphoric punk thrash anthems "Don't Need It", "Sailin' On", an "Attitude", the ferocious rocker "The Regulator", the supersonic thrash of "Banned In DC", the dub reggae resistance anthem of "Leaving Babylon" complete with steel drum sounds and dub echo/reverb effects, all of this is crucial listening, now reissued by ROIR on Cd.
It's taking me fucking forever, but I'm still working on getting the entire early (1980s) Bad Brains catalog on the shelves here at Crucial Blast; the band's pre-1989 output is absolutely crucial mutant thrash, and every single one of the albums that these legendary Rastafarian thrashers released before their collective dysfunction really started to get the better of them are essential, as far as I'm concerned. My favorite Bad Brains record is probably their 1986 album I Against I, a record that is arguably their career masterpiece, and is definitely one of the best records to ever come out of that post-hardcore era. The songs on I Against I have all of the key elements of the Brains sound: singer HR delivering his Jah-worship in a honeyed croon that could whoop into a terrifying shriek in an instant, the crunchy metal guitars of Dr. Know soaring into stunning anthemic heights, the seething ferocity at the heart of even their catchiest material. But this Lp saw the band slowing down a bit into a more rock-centric sound that, while still prone to some ripping bursts of speed and aggression, was more concerned with laying down a powerful groove throughout these ten songs.
Beginning with the stomping, metallic heaviness and apocalyptic radio signals of the instrumental "Intro", the Brains hurtle through feverish end-time visions drawn in dark, funk-riddled rock, crunchy and hard as fuck thrash metal riffs, and a stunning array of instantly memorable and hook-laden choruses, with none of the excursions into languid dub reggae that marked their previous releases. The title track is a classic blast of metallic punk laced with Dr. Know's wailing Van Halen-esque solos, and the ominous call-to-arms "House Of The Suffering" follows with its off-kilter rhythms and tricky riffing amid one of the Bad Brains most infectious sing-along hooks ever. The story behind the recording of "Sacred Love" (which, in a genius move by the band, had HR delivering his vocals over the phone from jail after he was busted for dealing pot) has become the stuff of hardcore legend. The rest of the album is equally impressive: "Re-Ignition"'s slower, chunkier groove hints at the direction the band would go in with their next album Quickness, and the lush, haunting funk-punk of "Secret 77" and the stunning soulful drive and gorgeous guitar hooks of "She's Calling You" offered some of the band's most accessible music to date. The complex rhythmic interplay and jazz fusion bass that winds through "Hired Gun" allow the band's fusion roots to bleed through, something that can be heard throughout several of the songs on I Against I, and the album closes out with one of the best closing songs on a metal/punk record ever, the anthemic and utterly classic "Return To Heaven".
It's impossible for me not to gush over this record - the band never recaptured the near perfection of I Against I after this, and it remains to many the high point of the band's career and one of the most influential albums of it's time. Essential.
It's taking me fucking forever, but I'm still working on getting the entire early (1980s) Bad Brains catalog on the shelves here at Crucial Blast; the band's pre-1989 output is absolutely crucial mutant thrash, and every single one of the albums that these legendary Rastafarian thrashers released before their collective dysfunction really started to get the better of them are essential, as far as I'm concerned. My favorite Bad Brains record is probably their 1986 album I Against I, a record that is arguably their career masterpiece, and is definitely one of the best records to ever come out of that post-hardcore era. The songs on I Against I have all of the key elements of the Brains sound: singer HR delivering his Jah-worship in a honeyed croon that could whoop into a terrifying shriek in an instant, the crunchy metal guitars of Dr. Know soaring into stunning anthemic heights, the seething ferocity at the heart of even their catchiest material. But this Lp saw the band slowing down a bit into a more rock-centric sound that, while still prone to some ripping bursts of speed and aggression, was more concerned with laying down a powerful groove throughout these ten songs.
Beginning with the stomping, metallic heaviness and apocalyptic radio signals of the instrumental "Intro", the Brains hurtle through feverish end-time visions drawn in dark, funk-riddled rock, crunchy and hard as fuck thrash metal riffs, and a stunning array of instantly memorable and hook-laden choruses, with none of the excursions into languid dub reggae that marked their previous releases. The title track is a classic blast of metallic punk laced with Dr. Know's wailing Van Halen-esque solos, and the ominous call-to-arms "House Of The Suffering" follows with its off-kilter rhythms and tricky riffing amid one of the Bad Brains most infectious sing-along hooks ever. The story behind the recording of "Sacred Love" (which, in a genius move by the band, had HR delivering his vocals over the phone from jail after he was busted for dealing pot) has become the stuff of hardcore legend. The rest of the album is equally impressive: "Re-Ignition"'s slower, chunkier groove hints at the direction the band would go in with their next album Quickness, and the lush, haunting funk-punk of "Secret 77" and the stunning soulful drive and gorgeous guitar hooks of "She's Calling You" offered some of the band's most accessible music to date. The complex rhythmic interplay and jazz fusion bass that winds through "Hired Gun" allow the band's fusion roots to bleed through, something that can be heard throughout several of the songs on I Against I, and the album closes out with one of the best closing songs on a metal/punk record ever, the anthemic and utterly classic "Return To Heaven".
It's impossible for me not to gush over this record - the band never recaptured the near perfection of I Against I after this, and it remains to many the high point of the band's career and one of the most influential albums of it's time. Essential.
An unequivocal classic of pioneering hardcore punk, Bad Brains' 1983 firestorm Rock For Light just got reissued on vinyl, apparently from the same label that originally put it out. The follow-up to the Brains' seminal self-titled ROIR cassette, their second album propelled these iconoclastic punks even further into the stratosphere upon its release, yet another quantum leap from what had initially started out as four black kids from Washington, DC playing jazz fusion. By this point, the Bad Brains were titans in the American underground, blowing minds with their electrifying fusion of superfast hardcore thrash, screaming metal licks, and soulful reggae, permeated with the band's growing immersion into Rastafarianism. That uniqueness caught the attention of none other than Ric Ocasek, gangly mastermind behind 80s New Wave gods The Cars. Sure seemed like an odd pairing when I first picked this album up, but Ocasek kept the band's sound raw and raucous; while Rock features re-recordings of a number of songs that had already appeared on the ROIR tape (starting a long tradition the Bad Brains had throughout the 80s of continually re-recording various songs for new releases), it might be my favorite version of that stuff.
And in 1983, these guys still sounded completely unique with their ferocious blend of Rastafarian spirituality and dope-fueled positivism, welded to a mix of blitzkrieg hardcore and laid-back reggae jams. You get turbo-charged renditions of stuff like "Big Takeover", "Right Brigade", "Banned In DC" and "Attitude", while new songs like "Joshua's Song", "Destroy Babylon", the uber-catchy title track and the utterly ferocious "Coptic Times" and "At The Movies" are all blasts of triumphant, turbo-charged speed and power, with riffs that begin to hint at the metallic direction the band would head in with subsequent releases. When the Brains unleash the speed, it's about as fast as anything in hardcore at the time, and H.R.'s strangled shriek and velvety croon engage in wild vocal acrobatics through the whole album, delivering one of the most powerful vocal performances ever heard in hardcore punk. But when that ferocity suddenly slams into the mellow, dubbed-out reggae grooves of "I And I Survive" and "The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth", the sudden juxtaposition is gloriously disorienting. An eternal favorite around the C-Blast compound, and a crucial slab of pioneering mutant hardcore.
Please note that all of the copies that we received from the distributor arrived with some slight corner dings; nothing too bad, but if you are very particular about sleeve condition, please be aware of this before ordering.
Now in stock on CD.
An unequivocal classic of pioneering hardcore punk, Bad Brains' 1983 firestorm Rock For Light just got reissued on vinyl, apparently from the same label that originally put it out. The follow-up to the Brains' seminal self-titled ROIR cassette, their second album propelled these iconoclastic punks even further into the stratosphere upon its release, yet another quantum leap from what had initially started out as four black kids from Washington, DC playing jazz fusion. By this point, the Bad Brains were titans in the American underground, blowing minds with their electrifying fusion of superfast hardcore thrash, screaming metal licks, and soulful reggae, permeated with the band's growing immersion into Rastafarianism. That uniqueness caught the attention of none other than Ric Ocasek, gangly mastermind behind 80s New Wave gods The Cars. Sure seemed like an odd pairing when I first picked this album up, but Ocasek kept the band's sound raw and raucous; while Rock features re-recordings of a number of songs that had already appeared on the ROIR tape (starting a long tradition the Bad Brains had throughout the 80s of continually re-recording various songs for new releases), it might be my favorite version of that stuff.
And in 1983, these guys still sounded completely unique with their ferocious blend of Rastafarian spirituality and dope-fueled positivism, welded to a mix of blitzkrieg hardcore and laid-back reggae jams. You get turbo-charged renditions of stuff like "Big Takeover", "Right Brigade", "Banned In DC" and "Attitude", while new songs like "Joshua's Song", "Destroy Babylon", the uber-catchy title track and the utterly ferocious "Coptic Times" and "At The Movies" are all blasts of triumphant, turbo-charged speed and power, with riffs that begin to hint at the metallic direction the band would head in with subsequent releases. When the Brains unleash the speed, it's about as fast as anything in hardcore at the time, and H.R.'s strangled shriek and velvety croon engage in wild vocal acrobatics through the whole album, delivering one of the most powerful vocal performances ever heard in hardcore punk. But when that ferocity suddenly slams into the mellow, dubbed-out reggae grooves of "I And I Survive" and "The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth", the sudden juxtaposition is gloriously disorienting. An eternal favorite around the C-Blast compound, and a crucial slab of pioneering mutant hardcore.
From where I'm sitting, this 2006 DVD release is the best official visual document of a Bad Brains performance ever released. Those classic SST live albums still hold a cherished spot on my shelves, but as far as actually seeing these pioneering Rasta-thrashers on stage, Live At CBGB 1982. The band's energy and aggression on this hour-long set is something to behold. We've stocked the LP release of the live set from CBGBs for years, but haven't had this DVD in stock for ages. If you're into the Brains and haven't picked this up yet, do yourself a favor. Here's our old review of the live LP from this performance:
Bad Brains are one of the few bands whose live albums I regularly pull out to listen to; they embodied the "crucial energy" of hardcore in the live setting more than any other band in the early 80's, and I've listened to all of their old live albums (Spirit Electricity, The Youth Are Getting Restless, and especially Live from 1988) countless times over the past twenty years. Their live documentation on record was terrific, but until a few years ago, there was hardly any high quality live concert footage of their classic 80's era available; that is, until that Live At CBGBs DVD came out on MVD, inarguably the best live video document ever released of the legendary Rastafarian hardcore gods. That DVD featured an exhaustive set list that was culled from three consecutive shows at CBGBs that were spread over the Christmas holiday in 1982, and includes just about every song from that period that you could possibly want to see them perform live. At the time, the energy and ferocity of Bad Brains was unrivaled in hardcore, and their incendiary performances captured on that DVD proved the point. With amazingly high-quality film and audio, the footage captures the band in the throes of ecstatic fury, surrounded by punks hurtling across the stage and the dance floor as the band tore through a set list that drew heavily from their early ultra-fast thrashers with a handful of Rastafarian dub/reggae jams.
Now MVD has assembled a full-hour long recording of their performances, comprised of the best footage from the weekend and meticulously assembled into a full nineteen-song set; this features way more material than is found on the LP. And it fucking smokes. The performance features a couple of their reggae/dub cuts, but the bulk of this set is given over to their ferocious Rastafarian speedpunk. Most of the set is made up of material off of Rock For Light, while this is also the only recorded appearance of some of those dub tracks. It's all about watching the band rip through blistering hyperspeed versions of classic songs like "Banned In DC", "FVK", "How Low Can a Punk Get" and "Right Brigade" for us, though. A crucial live document from the Bad Brains, arguably at the height of their quasi-mystical, Rastafarian thrash powers, absolutely recommended to fans of the band.
Audio quality? Considering the age and the soundboard-sourcing of the recording, it's terrific. The camera footage? Fuckin' fantastic. Multi-camera shots and dynamic editing makes us feel like we're there in the pit. And that crowd is bananas. The circle pit is endless, as is the stamina of both band and audience. We're breathless every time we re-watch this thing. As far as extra material, you get a couple of minutes of on-site interviews with audience members, which is a brief but interesting snapshot of early 80's hardcore punk culture; and an audio track of "I and I Survive", which appears to be an alternate live version from the weekend's worth of recordings. It's rounded out with liner notes from the great Jack Rabid of Big Takeover Magazine, reminiscing on his experience at these shows. Killer stuff, one of the top ten hardcore/punk DVDs in our collection, and highly recommended.
Weird, cavernous, bloozy garage skum from this duo out of Louisville, kind of a surprise offering from Robotic Empire. It's been descibed as "shoegazey" by some, probably because of the copious amounts of reverb that soak into every nook and cranny of these seven songs, but Bad Secrets sound to my ears more like the kind of drug-n'-booze addled noise rock outfits that were slithering out of downtown New York City back in the mid to late 80's, the sort of thing that might have appeared on Rough Trade or Homestead. The guys behind this are drummer Dan Davis (also of Kodan Armada) and guitarist Evan Patterson, the latter known for his involvement in some fine contempo pigfuck/noise rock outfits like Breather Resist, Young Widows and Black Cross. In this configuration, though, Patterson goes for a more drugged and dissonant sort of clamor, the two musicians shambling through these creepy swamp-stained dirges, a vague industrial quality sticking to everything as the twangy, skronking guitar wigs out over a pounding, percussive oil-drum throb, the songs partially formed, and apparently partially improvised as well. The recording is suitably dank and dingy, the aforementioned reverb-heavy sound has it's murkiness amplified by the low fi four-track production. Haunted, stoned gothic noise rock riddled with slurred, drawling vocals and ghostly wails, subterranean metallic scrape and trippy stereo panning, clanking riffs and chaotic drum freak outs, and weird production fuckery that ranges from sped-up tape noise and sudden drop-outs to grainy needle pops and room noise. Imagine Pussy Galore on Quaaludes, or Nick Cave stalking some ancient crypt, and you're in the general vicinity. The guitars utilize some neat shimmery Morricone-esque twang on some of the tracks, too, and the band occasionally even goes off into something resembling a nocturnal version of surf rock at times. Things get pretty "out" and psychedelic throughout this little record, but the duo are still able to produce some seriously catchy noise rock jams like "Gimmee Sound" and "Go And Leave". It's a cool offering of subterranean garage skuzz, presented on an unusual 9" size vinyl record in a silk-screened sleeve, and includes a cd version of the record. We've got this on both the "metallic red"(custom pinkish red) and "evil eye" (red/white/black) editions, each one limited to a couple hundred copies.
Weird, cavernous, bloozy garage skum from this duo out of Louisville, kind of a surprise offering from Robotic Empire. It's been descibed as "shoegazey" by some, probably because of the copious amounts of reverb that soak into every nook and cranny of these seven songs, but Bad Secrets sound to my ears more like the kind of drug-n'-booze addled noise rock outfits that were slithering out of downtown New York City back in the mid to late 80's, the sort of thing that might have appeared on Rough Trade or Homestead. The guys behind this are drummer Dan Davis (also of Kodan Armada) and guitarist Evan Patterson, the latter known for his involvement in some fine contempo pigfuck/noise rock outfits like Breather Resist, Young Widows and Black Cross. In this configuration, though, Patterson goes for a more drugged and dissonant sort of clamor, the two musicians shambling through these creepy swamp-stained dirges, a vague industrial quality sticking to everything as the twangy, skronking guitar wigs out over a pounding, percussive oil-drum throb, the songs partially formed, and apparently partially improvised as well. The recording is suitably dank and dingy, the aforementioned reverb-heavy sound has it's murkiness amplified by the low fi four-track production. Haunted, stoned gothic noise rock riddled with slurred, drawling vocals and ghostly wails, subterranean metallic scrape and trippy stereo panning, clanking riffs and chaotic drum freak outs, and weird production fuckery that ranges from sped-up tape noise and sudden drop-outs to grainy needle pops and room noise. Imagine Pussy Galore on Quaaludes, or Nick Cave stalking some ancient crypt, and you're in the general vicinity. The guitars utilize some neat shimmery Morricone-esque twang on some of the tracks, too, and the band occasionally even goes off into something resembling a nocturnal version of surf rock at times. Things get pretty "out" and psychedelic throughout this little record, but the duo are still able to produce some seriously catchy noise rock jams like "Gimmee Sound" and "Go And Leave". It's a cool offering of subterranean garage skuzz, presented on an unusual 9" size vinyl record in a silk-screened sleeve, and includes a cd version of the record. We've got this on both the "metallic red"(custom pinkish red) and "evil eye" (red/white/black) editions, each one limited to a couple hundred copies.
After hearing his contributions to the now out-of-print Philosophy of a Knife compilation on Peripheral, I immediately fell in love with his brand of ultra-skeezy, ultra-heavy skum electronics, a brutal low-fi blast of hatred that turned the classic UK power electronics sound into something a bit more bestial. You've got the elements in place - distorted raving vocals, harsh electronic noise and feedback, hardcore misanthropy - but somehow it sounds like something new in the hands of Bagman, offering a fresh strain of violence somewhat similar in feel to the blackened bestial industrial of Project: Void while clearly under the influence of the sexual perversions of prime era Sutcliffe Jugend.
Men Who Solicit Sex is the latest load of venom that Bagman has dropped in 2012. Over the course of this study in sexual slavery and illegal solicitation, Bagman sandwiches samples from documentary footage concerning the sex trade in the UK in between his pulsating cancerous electronics, throbbing tumors of rhythmic synth arpeggios swarmed by nauseating feedback, a vile black sheen covering everything. His vocals are utterly psychedelic, run through an extreme amount of distortion to the point where they are little more than a cloud of reptilian verbal hatred. The production is raw, even by power electronics/noise standards, but it's fucking perfect. That is definitely one of the things that I love about this project's recordings. Its so distorted and blown and abrasive, the sound possessing a real weight to it, which is not something that is always present in PE. This is dark stuff that constantly seethes under a constant threat of imminent violence.
Highly recommended to power violence extremists. The disc is presented in jewel case packaging with a booklet of disturbing graphics and text, and wrapped in clingy black cellophane with a set of Bagman stickers. Limited to one hundred copies.
One of the most vicious of the newer British power electronics outfits, Bagman has been a favorite of mine since discovering the For Kenneth McKenna Ep this past year, and I've been hunting down whatever I can find from the project. The Public Catharsis #1 Cd-r (released on 412Recordings) is a recent live doc of this leather-armored scum warrior in action, and is way better than you'd expect for a live power electronics recording. Recorded in London in July of 2011 at ILL FM, this is actually the first ever live performance from Bagman, a twenty-two minute piece of predatory electronics perfumed in copper-scented ambience, where Steve Bagman stalks the stage, his head bound in a thick black leather mask, armed with Korg synths and looping effects chains that are piled into murderous assaults of filthy electro-throb while film footage and photo stills of sinister creepshots, rotting corpses, energetic bondage sessions, and the Great Constrictor, Kenneth McKenna flow across the wall behind the stage. Man, do I wish I could have been there.
The performance opens with a recording of children singing the lullaby "Hush, Little Baby", their voices becoming gradually more distorted and pushed into the red before Bagman violently crashes in with an onslaught of droning ambient feedback, howling cavernous squeals and foul distorted vocals, raving incoherently over a filthy backdrop of blackened dronedrift that becomes increasingly more ominous and threatening as the set continues. For the next twenty-odd minutes, the music shifts from massive rumbling amp-drones and ghastly machine hum to looping sampled voices and washes of sinister reverb-soaked noise. As with his other recordings, the influence of legendary UK power electronics duo Sutcliffe Jugend is heard throughout Bagman's psycho-sexual ravings and visions of merciless sadism and abuse, but he also gives this his own distinct edge via the incorporation of blasted melody into his fogbanks of black static and factory ambience, appearing here via fragments of ultra-blown-out film music are woven through the clouds of toxic black hum, and the eerie notes that drift across the background of "It Girl".
The disc comes in a twelve-page glossy booklet, and is hand-numbered in an edition of one hundred copies.
��I don't remember exactly where it was that I first discovered Bagman's blackened fusion of misanthropic electronics and oppressive harsh noise (probably the Men Who Solicit Sex disc that came out on Murderabilia), but I know that it had instantly seeped into my brain, infecting me with an utterly malignant atmosphere. This one-man UK outfit has been producing this pitch-black noise since at least 2008, and has already amassed a pretty impressive list of releases since then, each one a sonic representation of abject horror, the residue remaining after one gazes unblinkingly into the bottomless abyss that is humanity's capacity for evil and cruelty. When I throw on one of the few Bagman releases I've been able to track down, it feels like every mote of light in the room is being slowly crushed, leaving behind a caput mortuum of dread and disgust. Bagman's recordings ooze with the unfiltered horror of the human mind, translated into a series of violent audio frequencies. This stuff ain't no fun, that's for sure. Carrying on the tradition of transgression found in the early UK power electronics scene but combining it with a much more brutal and suffocating sonic assault, Bagman's early recordings are rumbling, bestial noisescapes littered with the voices of hate-mongers and murderers, criminals and degenerates and scenes of sexual deviance all suffused into the crushing walls of black static filth, junk metal devastation and monstrous electronics. Previously out of print, three of Bagman's malevolent early CDR releases have now been reissued on limited-edition cassette through the Infernal Machines imprint with all new artwork, recommended only to enthusiasts of the most nihilistic strains of extreme electronic noise and rabid industrial horror.
��Bagman's 2008 EP For Kenneth McKenna is another portrait of boundless human cruelty, inspired by parts of Max Call's lurid 1985 serial killer tome Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story and the bizarre online mythology surrounding Florida inmate Kenneth McKenna that began to appear subsequent to that book. A purported member of the "Hand of Death Cult", McKenna was a denizen of the Florida prison system who claimed to have been involved with all kinds of bizarre crimes, including the production of snuff films that featured the feeding of humans to alligators and anacondas. The five tracks featured here continue to explore the charred sonic wastes between harsh noise wall and power electronics, summoning visions of those bizarre satanic prison cults and reptilian snuff videos in the volcanic fog of Bagman's chaos. Some of this material is actually a little more atmospheric than his typical sonic onslaught, the tracks alternating between brutal walls of crumbling blackened static, punishing high-frequency feedback abuse, horrific power electronics assaults formed out of crushing bass frequencies splattered with those signature monstrous vocals, to more haunting, solemn noisescapes like "Hand Of Death" that layer muffled metallic noises and eerie half-formed synthesizer melodies over fields of smoldering low-end rumble. Clocking in at just over sixteen minutes, McKenna is one of my favorite of all of Bagman's releases, permeated with a sickening atmosphere of rot and decay that seeps from every second of this raw electronic filth.
�� Limited to two hundred copies on pro-manufactured cassette.
��I don't remember exactly where it was that I first discovered Bagman's blackened fusion of misanthropic electronics and oppressive harsh noise (probably the Men Who Solicit Sex disc that came out on Murderabilia), but I know that it had instantly seeped into my brain, infecting me with an utterly malignant atmosphere. This one-man UK outfit has been producing this pitch-black noise since at least 2008, and has already amassed a pretty impressive list of releases since then, each one a sonic representation of abject horror, the residue remaining after one gazes unblinkingly into the bottomless abyss that is humanity's capacity for evil and cruelty. When I throw on one of the few Bagman releases I've been able to track down, it feels like every mote of light in the room is being slowly crushed, leaving behind a caput mortuum of dread and disgust. Bagman's recordings ooze with the unfiltered horror of the human mind, translated into a series of violent audio frequencies. This stuff ain't no fun, that's for sure. Carrying on the tradition of transgression found in the early UK power electronics scene but combining it with a much more brutal and suffocating sonic assault, Bagman's early recordings are rumbling, bestial noisescapes littered with the voices of hate-mongers and murderers, criminals and degenerates and scenes of sexual deviance all suffused into the crushing walls of black static filth, junk metal devastation and monstrous electronics. Previously out of print, three of Bagman's malevolent early CDR releases have now been reissued on limited-edition cassette through the Infernal Machines imprint with all new artwork, recommended only to enthusiasts of the most nihilistic strains of extreme electronic noise and rabid industrial horror.
��A gaze into the abyss. Originally released in 2009 as a limited edition CDR on the Greek label Subliminal Recordings, Bagman's In Their Blood And From The Gutter is one of his earliest recordings, a foul, hateful blast of brutal harsh noise and screeching feedback littered with disturbing incoherent samples, recordings of far-right American political extremists, and blasts of garbled verbal hatred. These four tracks stretch out for nearly half an hour, each one an expansive blast of crushing distorted rumble and caustic black static, blasts of howling feedback carved into strange rhythmic forms, the cacophony of collapsing structures often breaking away to reveal a seething core of bestial vocalizations and sputtering low-fi drone. Massive low-end synthesizers growl through the suffocating blizzard of crackling static and roaring distressed vocals, bringing a doom-laden feel to tracks like "Breath Constriction" and "Hunting Ground". Ultra-heavy, hellish electronic noise that often steps into power electronics territory without losing it's chaotic, skin-shredding abrasiveness. It is some of the heaviest material that this project has produced, fueled by a monstrous throbbing black rhythmic power, those distorted rumbling synthesizers pulsating like the core of a dying black star. Bagman strips away the civilized face of humanity, and finds a festering, demonic evil leering back at us.
�� Limited to two hundred copies on pro-manufactured cassette.
��I don't remember exactly where it was that I first discovered Bagman's blackened fusion of misanthropic electronics and oppressive harsh noise (probably the Men Who Solicit Sex disc that came out on Murderabilia), but I know that it had instantly seeped into my brain, infecting me with an utterly malignant atmosphere. This one-man UK outfit has been producing this pitch-black noise since at least 2008, and has already amassed a pretty impressive list of releases since then, each one a sonic representation of abject horror, the residue remaining after one gazes unblinkingly into the bottomless abyss that is humanity's capacity for evil and cruelty. When I throw on one of the few Bagman releases I've been able to track down, it feels like every mote of light in the room is being slowly crushed, leaving behind a caput mortuum of dread and disgust. Bagman's recordings ooze with the unfiltered horror of the human mind, translated into a series of violent audio frequencies. This stuff ain't no fun, that's for sure. Carrying on the tradition of transgression found in the early UK power electronics scene but combining it with a much more brutal and suffocating sonic assault, Bagman's early recordings are rumbling, bestial noisescapes littered with the voices of hate-mongers and murderers, criminals and degenerates and scenes of sexual deviance all suffused into the crushing walls of black static filth, junk metal devastation and monstrous electronics. Previously out of print, three of Bagman's malevolent early CDR releases have now been reissued on limited-edition cassette through the Infernal Machines imprint with all new artwork, recommended only to enthusiasts of the most nihilistic strains of extreme electronic noise and rabid industrial horror.
��Originally self-released in 2008, Bagman's Welcome To My Fucking Misery was the first release from the project, delivering four lengthy tracks of vile, blackened noise and rumbling bass horror that stretches out for nearly half an hour. Tracks like "In Bonds" and "Power Thrust" explore the themes of deviant violent sexuality and bestial violence that course through the flesh of Bagman's electronic soundscapes like cancerous cells, the murderous whispered vocals blasted through so much putrid distortion that the images of depravity, sadism and savage lust become unintelligible murmurs, their hateful energy transmuted into a pestilential blur of sound. This is seriously heavy stuff, huge droning slabs of charred distorted rumble infected with those demonic vocals, often sinking into an almost HNW-style wall of distortion. There are strains of a more subdued, dread-filled atmosphere that lurk beneath all of the corroded blown-out drones, sputtering feedback, insectoid buzzing, punishing sheet-metal percussive rhythms and scrap-metal rituals, but moments appear briefly, quickly consumed within the pulsating black horror of Misery's foul, raw extreme electronic chaos and visions of abject suffering.
�� Limited to two hundred copies on pro-manufactured cassette.
Bait features bassist Snapa and guitarist/vocalist Rob "Mid" Middleton who both previously played together in the influential early crustmetal band Deviated Instinct; this is apparently the band that they formed after the demise of D-Instinct, but instead of the punishing stenchcore of that band, Bait goes for more of a jagged, noise-rock influenced sound (somewhat closer in feel to Mid's other industrial-crust band Spine Wrench) on this kinda-rare 7" that came out earlier this past decade. On this debut Ep, Bait belt out four songs of vicious mid-tempo metallic crush fused to slower, more angular sludgy breakdowns, and Mid delivers his vocals in an intensely harsh and scathing howl that made my blood run cold. The music on Every Lie I've Ever Lived sort of comes off like latter day Today Is The Day, Unsane and Meatjack but even more metallic, mashing massive muscular rock riffs with blasting feral thrash and angular crunch along with those distorted megaphone vocals. It's a very cool mix of Am Rep grime and lurch, and sludgy, bone-crushing heaviness, a sound that I am always in the mood to hear, and the abstract sketches of desperation that make up the lyrics add to the panicked, desperate tone on this record that really gets your nerves twitching. It's put together into a nice package, the 7" housed in a heavy glossy booklet with the lyrics printed in red ink on sheets of translucent vellum with Mid's artwork spread throughout (always in the mood to see that, too - Mid is responsible for scads of great art that you've already seen on classic covers from Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror). Extremely limited - I was only able to pick up a couple of these records for the shop.
Awesome minimal melodic guitar drone from Canadian ambient rocker Aidan Baker that's cast adrift in similiar ether as Oren Ambarchi, Growing, Troum, and Fennesz. Created entirely with electric and acoustic guitar and bass guitar, these five racks feature lighter-than-air, immensely beautiful melodies floating amongst low tones and fuzzy smears of amplifier hum and feedback. The repetitive melodies spin off into eternity, propelled by barely-there rhythms formed from loops of scraped guitar strings and the vibrations of thumps off the guitar's body that could easily be mistaken for submerged glitchy electronic beats if the liner notes didn't betray thye source. The first track is even based on some Autechre material, but we couldn't place it. It's all very Troum-like, and fans of those German droners would totally love this, an angelic postrock blur that sounds like it's buried deep beneath the earth. Truly gorgeous, and one of the best recorded works we have heard yet from Aidan Baker. Packaged in an austerely printed cardstock wallet encased in guazy stocking material. If you at all enjoyed the Periodic CD-R we released through Crucial Bliss recently, or are into the evocative droneology of Troum and Growing, we can't recommend this enough.
Following up his amazing Periodic disc that was issued through Crucial Bliss two years ago, acclaimed Toronto drone-guitarist Aidan Baker is back
with Exoskeleton Heart, his newest entry into our ongoing Crucial Bliss series. And this 2-track, hour long excursion into deep feedback bliss is
stunningly beautiful. Split into two halves, "Interior" and "Anterior", Baker once again taps into his visions of the bodycage using only his electric
guitar, performed and recorded live; the result is an evocative feedback-heavy dronescape drifting with the gritty hum of the amplifier, layers of
shimmering, chiming feedback, crushing distorted ambient dirge that borders on Sunn O)))-levels of sonic weight, and shafts of elegiac melody breaking
through the stormclouds of Baker's cavernous rumbling like rays of sunlight. Aidan Baker is without question the North American counterpart to the Tuetonic
guitar drones of Troum, and Exoskeleton Heart delivers some of his most massive, meditative, crushing, and beautiful subterranean drift yet. Hell,
the final 10 minutes of "Anterior" is without questions one of the most beautiful things we have ever presented through this label, an angelic glacial melody
that builds inexorably into a wall of blissed out fuzz a la something you'd expect from Aidan's dronesludge band Nadja. Essential. The disc comes in a full-
color signature Crucial Bliss foldover sleeve with the disc affixed to a plastic hub on the interior of the sleeve, and has been pressed in a limited edition
of 300 copies.
The 2006 album The Sea Swells A Bit from Nadja guitarist Adian Baker is one of my favorite AB solo discs. The disc came out on the Italian post-rock label A Silent Place and is packaged in a nice gatefold jacket that is constructed out of a thick, lacquered cardstock. The album features three epic tracks that run from 15-20 minutes each, and Aidan plays with extended guitar leads, drum machine and tape loops over the course of each of these sprawling instrumentals. The guitar playing is dense and dreamy, incandescent feedback floating over plodding programmed beats that lumber through his cloudy ambience, bluesy leads buried in the murky cosmic drones. I hear hints of the gauzy ambient post-rock of bands like Stars Of The Lid and Labradford as well as the percussive-driven drone rock of Aidan's ARC project in here, and these tracks are more propulsive and rhythmic than most of his other solo recordings.
The title track opens the disc with an ominous sounding guitar melody that slowly and gradually begins to build into a wash of murky dreampop, the main guitar glowing with gloomy reverb that hangs heavily over the melody, additional guitars coming in and strumming moody chord progressions, a washed out breakbeat becoming visible in the distance way off behind the guitars, the whole sound thick and moody and ominious.
Grooving percussion emerges on the second song "When Sailors Die" as the sound becomes more fully formed, the hushed whispers and soporific space drones of the first track now coming together into a hazy melodic blur and layered with more warbling feedback and endlessly looping fragments of melody, joined by a muffled, murky breakbeat throbbing away deep down in the miasma of tonal drift.
But the album's most rhythm powered track is the final song "Davey Jones Locker", which scatters fuzzy clouds of whirling synths and washes of blissy cosmic drone over an undercurrent of pulsating percussion. Slow and drugged out and dreamy, the sound of Loop looped into a fifteen minute slow motion dirge over a shuffling narcoleptic breakbeat.
What makes Aidan Baker's massive catalog of releases so consistently great is his ability to explore new corners of his guitar-based drone style in a variety of ways, from the popular fuzzsoaked dreamsludge of Nadja to the tribal dronerock workouts of Arc, but even in his prolific solo output, his sound is constantly evolving, each new release investigating new aspects of minimal ambience and dark guitar drones, abstract glacial sludge and even industrialized rhythmic realms like those captured on Oneiromancer.
Released a while ago on Die Stadt but only now getting stocked here at C-Blast, Oneiromancer is one of Aidan's heavier solo works, wrangling a palette of bass, piano, electric guitar, tape loops, drum machine, and vocals into a series of subterranean industrial dirges, still primarily woven from his trademark brand of dreamy ambient guitar drift, but here the soft swirls of guitar and feedback are wrapped around clanking, grinding percussive elements, making this quite different from many of his other solo albums. The sound of Oneiromancer is filled with whooshes of shadowy ambience and creaking stumbling rhythms, like on the fourteen minute opener "Wake Up", a mysterious environ of noisy industrial clank, smears of gorgeous melodic drift, pounding distant drum machine rhythms that have a buried, decayed trip-hop quality to them, surrounded by all kinds of strange noises and sonic events. On "Death Too Wrapped In Dream", the shades of trip-hop heard in the opening track are explored even more as a skittery reverb-soaked drumloop clatters in the background behind clouds of mottled feedback whir and a female voice speaking behind a veil of grit and echo. The rest of the album travels through a similiar terrain of strange insectile sounds, aural shadows, fractured mechanical rhythms, industrial clatter, chittering locust drones, infinitely stretched screams, the album becoming darker and creepier as it progresses, like descending deeper into a nightmarish dreamscape, but always enveloped by those dreamy, soft washes of bleary guitar drone and feedback. Intoxicating and unnerving, this ranks as one of Aidan's darker, more dramatic albums.
Packaged in a full color gatefold jacket, limited to 300 copies.
One of the first releases to come out on the Basses Frequences label was this reissue of Aidan Baker's 2002 CD-R I Fall Into You. Originally released on Public Eyesore, the album has been remixed and re-mastered, and it's another essential album for the rest of you folks who, like myself, can't get enough of Baker's dreamy abstract guitar-drone. As with many of the other releases from this period in time, Baker's music on I Fall Into You is pretty dark, the five tracks often developing an ominous pall over their billowy drones, and there's but the songs also present a propulsive energy as well, due to the use of a drum machine. If it weren't for the programmed drum machine beats, Fall would be easily comparable to the other albums that came out around this period (Concretion, Eye Of Day, etc.), lengthy expanses of dark and dreamy feedback melted into warm waves of sound, washing across endless plains of subtle amp rumble and keening high end skree, looped melodies spinning out into the ether, deep bass pulses and eerie fragmented melodies plucked out on an acoustic guitar and left to float through shadows.
But that drum machine surfaces on almost every track, and it sometimes takes this close to Nadja territory; the opener "Lapse" begins in a slow flood of lush Tangerine Dream-esque guitar bliss, and then the drum machine materializes, way off in the distance, thumping out a skittering quasi-breakbeat, the dubby mechanical snare hits echoing through a pink haze of soft, shimmering drone, like a Nadja jam stripped down to its skeletal frame, with just a delicate layer of dreamy drift and almost sax-like strains of distorted guitar drifting like a sort of jazzy minimalist dreamdirge. On the following track "Lysis", Baker is joined by vocalist Naomi Okabe, who recites poetry over a glitchy abstract dronescape as weird backwards feedback and streaks of squelchy electronic noise blend together with thick smears of warm warbly guitar, later joined by a shuffling, jazz-style drum machine loop. "Symbiosis" is almost purely made up of swirling guitar ambience, and if the drum machine is present here, it's buried so deep it's barely perceptible; the brief (at just over a minute) interlude "Phage" is a spoken word piece from Okabe, who recites a passage from Milton's "Paradise Lost" while surrounded by whispered vocal noises from Baker. The final track "Lethe" returns to the shuffling, woozy dreaminess of the first track, the drums flattened into a delicate distant trip-hop like groove beneath clouds of crackling electronics, wordless male and female voices whispering, a gorgeous looped melody cycling over and over, everything glazed with a dreamy, dubby haze, a thick heavenly fog of drone and hum that seems to stretch out forever. This is another stunning collection from Baker, and is highly recommended to both longtime fans and newbies to his solo work. Limited to five hundred copies.
A twenty minute live performance from the 2008 Lab30 Festival in Germany between Berlin transplant and C-Blast drone-guitar fave Aidan Baker and Canadian free-improv percussionist Brandon Valdivia has been documented here for posterity on a 3" disc, released in a limited run of 323 hand-numbered copies. Packaged in a miniature Dvd-style case with full color artwork that was provided by Mories from Gnaw Their Tongues, this release showcases the improvised trance-rock side of Aidan Baker that I usually only hear whenever I throw on something from his old Toronto outfit Arc. Baker and Valdivia start off their set with a soft warm blur of guitar feedback that slowly lilts through space, forming a shifting chordal blur of melody that after a minute or so is joined by restrained, shuffling free-jazz drumming and meandering, spidery guitar figures and washes of keyboard drift, building this eerie, krautrock-like vibe. Aidan gradually adds more guitar, layering fragments of delayed melody and echoing feedback, and drops in bits of fast picking and flurries of harmonic notes that he smears into clouds of ethereal sound, and it sort of sounds like Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze mixed with free improvised drumming. Deeper in, they really begin to open things up as the drumming becomes more energetic, taking off on a continuous volley of fills and rolls that sets off waves of turbulent energy while the guitar and electronics are shot skyward, emitting huge incandescent clouds of shimmering cosmic drift and nebulous synth-guitar melodies. The latter half gets a little more dissonant and intense with some distorted blues guitar shapes appearing and darkening the sound, dropping into stretches of quiet percussive murmur and skeletal space-blooze and oceanic drone, then kicking back into some locomotive chug towards the end, where the musicians lock briefly into a throbbing motorik groove for a moment before unfolding altogether into a final sprawling mass of gorgeous free-floating kosmiche formlessness.
I seem to remember The Bakerton Group playing shows all incognito around the Frederick and Baltimore area when they started out, but all you needed to hear was a few seconds of their swinging, psychedelic hard funk and you knew that it was the guys from Clutch, ditching the vocals and digging deeper into some really trippy, exploratory 70's style hard rock. The band started out with everyone from Clutch except for singer Neil Fallon, but even he has joined the band now, and will be appearing on their upcoming album El Rojo, officially making the Bakerton Group an alter ego of Clutch. But back when they recorded this self titled debut, it was Tim Sult, Dan Maines, and Jean-Paul Gaster jamming hard on eight lengthy improvisational workouts that combined heavy Southern riffing, loads of trippy Hammond organ, heavy Zeppelin-esque guitar parts, meandering jazziness, and lots of the 70's funk influence that has creeped into Clutch's music since the mid-90's. Really, the Bakerton Group sound like just like Clutch if you took out Neil's roaring vocals and the more metallic parts and just let the guys jam forever. Fans of heavy 70's rock and hard guitar-heavy psych will dig this, and even folks into instrumental heavy rock bands like Mystic Krewe Of Clearlight and Stinking Lizaveta should check Bakerton Group out - especially Mystic Krewe, who tread a similiar era of Hammond-soaked rock as these guys, though Bakerton Group are far less heavy than those guys. Comes packaged in a full color glossy digipack with cool abstract artwork.
I've only now become a fan of Bal-Sagoth after digging into the new re-issues of their last three albums came out on Metal Mind. I never paid much attention to these UK metallers in the past as I've never been a big fan of what you'd call "symphonic metal", but when Metal Mind dropped these gorgeous-looking re-issues, I went ahead and checked them out and ended up falling under the bombastic thrall of Bal Sagoth almost immediately. Presented in newly designed glossy digipacks in a machine-numbered edition of two thousand copies each, these albums look amazing, their bright full-color album art looking like something off some bizarre Japanese video game...
The fifth album of experimental sci-fi soundtrack black metal from Bal-Sagoth, Atlantis Ascendent is structured like an insane Lovecraftian rock opera, the narrative and dialogue that's included in the twenty-page booklet follows the story of a 19th British archeologist seeking to uncover the truth behind humankind's origins, which leads him to lost undersea civilizations, monstrous sleeping gods, and hidden technologies. The arcane Cthulhu-referencing song titles like "Star-Maps of the Ancient Cosmographers", "The Dreamer in the Catacombs of Ur" and the breathless �Cry Havoc for Glory, and the Annihilation of the Titans of Chaos (The Splendour of a Thousand Swords Gleaming Beneath the Blazon of the Hyperborean Empire: Part III)" probably give you a decent idea of what we're dealing with here. As with previous albums, this stuff is ridiculously over the top and theatrical, but I love it. Nobody combines the influence of classic pulp horror/adventure authors like Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs with this sort of blackened power metal the way that Bal-Sagoth does. And again, it's impossible not to notice how much big chunks of Atlantis Ascendant sound like some obscure 80's science fiction movie score. You get a big hit of that as soon as the long intro track "Epsilon Exordium" starts up, it's stirring cinematic strings, orchestral woodwinds, brass and booming kettledrums introducing the album with a majestic soundtrack feel akin to the works of Basil Pompadourous and James Horner.
But then the title track comes in and we're treated to the ferocious soundtracky black metal that takes over most of the rest of the album, the songs racing through tons of symphonic pomp, ferocious black metal riffs, high pitched snarling vocals, but with those wild synth-horns, pianos and strings backing all of it through the entire record. The vocals still shift between a deep voice narrating brief spoken word passages to vicious shrieks, and the songs veer from regal black blasting to crazy blackened power metal that sounds like metallic sea shantys, and lots of fast paced baroque metal that sort of resembles a prog-obsessed Cradle Of Filth. Bal-Sagoth also weaves a bit of electronic texture here and there, such as the soaring ambience of "The Ghosts Of Angkor Wat" that veers into total Tangerine Dream territory. Not for everyone, but fans of offbeat blackened metallers like Finntroll, Sigh, and The Meads Of ASphodel should definitely give this album a listen.
I've only now become a fan of Bal-Sagoth after digging into the new re-issues of their last three albums came out on Metal Mind. I never paid much attention to these UK metallers in the past as I've never been a big fan of what you'd call "symphonic metal", but when Metal Mind dropped these gorgeous-looking re-issues, I went ahead and checked them out and ended up falling under the bombastic thrall of Bal Sagoth almost immediately. Presented in newly designed glossy digipacks in a machine-numbered edition of two thousand copies each, these albums look amazing, their bright full-color album art looking like something off some bizarre Japanese video game...
For Bal-Sagoth's sixth (and most recent) album, 2006's The Chthonic Chronicles, the infamous blackened soundtrack metallers returned to the surface from the depths of Atlantis to document another Lovecraftian saga, this time involving evil oceanic leviathans and ancient star-gods, lost books of arcane knowledge and scenes of epic warfare. It's all outlined and narrated in the booklet that comes with the disc, thankfully, as the Bal-Sagoth just blasts your senses with the crushing black power metal of Chronicles. The story reads like a large scale updating of the Cthulhu mythos, and the music is majestic, complex, bringing together walls of proggy synthesizer and spacey electronic textures with the vicious scorched vocals and crushing riffs. This could be Bal-Sagoth's most "prog" album yet, the music and arrangements are more sprawling and elaborate than on the previous record Atlantis Ascendant, with forays into cosmic electronica and dark cinematic ambience ("The Fallen Kingdoms of the Abyssal Plain"), stirring symphonic pieces ("To Storm the Cyclopean Gates of Byzantium"), horns, chanting, whole string sections and plenty of crazed, hyper-complex shreddery appearing all over the album.
I've only now become a fan of Bal-Sagoth after digging into the new re-issues of their last three albums came out on Metal Mind. I never paid much attention to these UK metallers in the past as I've never been a big fan of what you'd call "symphonic metal", but when Metal Mind dropped these gorgeous-looking re-issues, I went ahead and checked them out and ended up falling under the bombastic thrall of Bal Sagoth almost immediately. Presented in newly designed glossy digipacks in a machine-numbered edition of two thousand copies each, these albums look amazing, their bright full-color album art looking like something off some bizarre Japanese video game...
Here's where my addiction to Bal-Sagoth recently took root, the reissue of the fourth album from the British blackened battle metallers (and first for Nuclear Blast), The Power Cosmic. Released in 1999, the eight song saga of The Power Cosmic heads off into the outer cosmos while still keeping it's bombastic sound based in a wild combination of keyboard/tympani-heavy soundtrack power (a la Basil Poledouris's score for 1982's Conan The Barbarian) and blazing symphonic black metal that has some stylistic similarities to fellow Brits Cradle Of Filth. Bal-Sagoth's music and presentation are as weird as ever, based this time around another sprawling science fantasy narrative written by founding member Byron Roberts that deals with rogue cosmos-tripping demigods and ancient extra-terrestrial civilizations, continuing to explore the vast mythos of his "Multiverse". It's all laid out in the expansive twenty page booklet/libretto that comes with the disc, which also features more amazing album art from Games Workshop illutstaor Martin Hanford). The band's complex, prog-influenced assault of speedy and ornate black metal is wed to a battalion of synthesizers that take front and center position, with Roberts continuing to deliver his vocals in an idiosyncratic mix of vicious blackened shrieks, dramatic spoken word narration, and hushed menacing whispers, an offbeat delivery that has always been a big part of Bal-Sagoth's sound. Also key are those swirling cosmic keyboards, which dominate almost the entire record, joining the sounds of lush strings and blaring horns while the guitarists slash through the songs with razor-sharp riffing soaring guitar leads. Some of the highlights include the absurdly catchy "Callisto Rising" and the ripping sci-fi majesty of "The Thirteen Cryptical Prophecies Of Mu", but the whole album is a blast, evoking the bombastic soundtracks of the most over-the-top 80's sci-fi action films through majestic metallic power and a classic pulp adventure vibe. I've sure never heard anybody quite like these guys. Like the other new Bal-Sagoth reissues on Metal Mind, this comes in an eye-popping new full color digipack design and was released in a limited machine numbered edition of 2000 copies.
Que Amiga is the fifth album from UK cinematic dark ambient master Band of Pain, aka Steve Pittis. Much of this is dark, stately drones and
magestic, almost Wagnerian orchestral synthesizers drifting slowly across wide expanses, beautiful and truly epic...but there are also emerging cavernous
hums and ghoulish, obscured whispers lurking around hypnotic minimal rhythms formed from taped voices, smeared pop culture detritus, field recordings, and
more. An oftentimes gorgeous, sometimes threatening intersection of Andrew Chalk's austere isolationism and Lustmord's nightmare ambience. This would make
for a superb soundtrack to a horror film of the eeriest sort, and is essential for fans of, say, Shinjuku Thief. Comes packaged in a nice, ghoulishly
designed digipack. Limited edition of 1,000.
Been awhile since I've picked up a Band Of Pain album; the last actual full length that we got here at C-Blast was 2003's Qu� Amiga?. I'm still waiting to hear something new from this venerable dark ambient outfit, but in the meantime Cold Spring has reissued this sinister soundtrack that BOP's Steve Pittia (also a founding member of cult UK noise rockers Splintered) did for Nigel Wingrove's controversial nun/blasphemy/art-sleaze flick Sacred Flesh in 2000. Sacred Flesh is probably the finest original score to a nunsploitation flick I've heard, as Pittia crafts a series of twelve pitch-black soundscapes that evokes all manner of fleshen debasements, religious/sexual imagery and descents into the bestial nature of the self.
Opening theme "Sacred Flesh" blends ominous orchestral elements with mysterious percussive sounds and sparse rhythmic noises before leading into the lush synth-horror of "Elizabeth, Bride Of Christ", where vast rumbling, buzzing synth drones undulate in the abyss, emitting clouds of Lustmordian dread and cavernous reverberations, where the lusty whispers of "Christ's wives" are buried beneath more demonic-sounding utterances and the thick, slow-drifting sound of symphonic strings being processed into evil drones. The tracks that follow vary in feel and texture while remaining consistently ominous and threatening throughout: "Strength To Resist" features muted, abstract orchestral ambience and blackened electronic drones, while "Submission" conjures bizarre images as the sounds of running water course through orgasmic moans, stretched out organ drones and grim synth/string arrangements. Pounding industrial percussion hammers away relentlessly under "In Media Vita"'s bleak expanse of forlorn-sounding strings, colorless keys and the sound of a crackling bonfire, and the nightmarish ecstasies of "Beat Out Desire" introduce a grinding machine-like rhythm and an infectious grungy bass line that slithers alongside liturgical sounds, the howling of nuns lost in the throes of orgasmic bliss. Most of this soundtrack is made up of massive orchestral nightscapes, though, carrying with them a pervasive atmosphere of spiritual desolation and dread. There's even shades of John Carpenter that appear here, specifically in the black synths of "Sister Ann".
I'm pretty sure this is the most evil-sounding piece of music that Band Of Pain has produced, and fans of Atrium Carceri, later Lustmord and Endvra will dig this for sure.
��� Finally have this cult classic score in stock, recently repressed by the folks at Waxwork after initially going out of print. The label's vinyl reissue of Richard Band's Re-animator score was one of the very first releases for the label, and naturally got them quite a bit of attention from horror circles; you'd have a tough time trying to find a film more emblematic of the excesses of 1980s horror, and Re-animator remains one of the most beloved movies from the era. Directed by the brilliant Stuart Gordon, this 1985 film was the first in a series of gory, gloopy adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft stories from the director, updating the weird tale of the original serial with massive doses of 80's gore and mayhem. Not to mention a big helping of pitch-black humor, too; alongside Evil Dead II and Return Of The Living Dead, this is a stone cold horror-comedy classic, capable of eliciting belly laughs one moment, and sheer revulsion in the next, such as the oh-so-infamous sequence of cadaverous cunnilingus in the film's climax that still packs one hell of a revolting punch.
��� And Richard Band's score for Re-animator is pretty iconic on its own. Instead of going for a synth-driven sound like many of his contemporaries, Band used the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra to perform his quirky score for the film, a score that directly referenced Bernard Herrmann's classic Psycho theme and extrapolated upon it for Re-animator's own theme. He actually caught a bit of heat over his "borrowing" of certain aspects of Herrmann's score, something that is discussed in the liner notes to Waxwork's reissue; listening to the two pieces of music back to back does point out some definite differences, with Band working the strings around wonky dissonant violins and a pounding disco-like backbeat. But from there Band crafts his own distinct mix of eerie orchestral sounds, strings that slowly weave an atmosphere of morbid whimsicality and building dread, somnambulant electronic drones and blasts of growling synthesizer that weaving in and out of the mix, drifting amid the low groan of cellos and the often thunderous percussion, while that main title theme recurs throughout Band's score, with the occasional shot of almost Carl Stalling/Danny Elfman-esque absurdism briefly appearing amid the darker, more disturbing sequences, perfectly evoking the film's balance of humor and horror.
��� He'd go on to produce a large body of music after this, but Re-animator still stands as one of Band's best scores, something that was more in the spirit of his beloved Herrmann and composers like James Horner and Jerry Goldsmith than the electronic scores that 80's horror is usually associated with. And this vinyl reissue is the best presentation this music has ever had, re-mastered from the original tapes and pressed on gorgeous green and white 180 gram vinyl, packaged in a killer-looking jacket designed by Gary Pullin, with a printed inner sleeve that features liner notes from Band and director Gordon that shed light on the Herrmann comparisons and the creation of the score, as well as some neat, rarely-seen photos of the recording session.
���Just unearthed a handful of copies of this now out-of-print 2007 mini-album from the obscure German duo Bann, a band who only managed to released this and one subsequent full-length album (2009's �schatologia) before going dormant. Released by the now defunct British label Grief Foundation who put out a number of killer releases in the late oughts from the likes of White Medal, Krieg, Caina, Swine and Axis Of Advance, Antiochia establishes it's dour, drear mood from the classic Gustave Dor� cover art before sinking into the three long sprawling tracks of blackened, doom-laden misery that make up the disc. It's a pretty straightforward sound that these guys were going for, mixing intensely sorrowful black metal with suffocating slow-motion tempos and morose atmosphere that heavily draws from the classic UK deathdoom of My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost, but Bann turned that into something a bit more interesting than your standard-fare gloomdealers by incorporating doleful neo-classical elements, heavily atmospheric kosmische synthesizers, and even the occasional tint of baroque progginess, a combination that put this disc into some heavy rotation here in the C-Blast office back when it first came out.
��� Each of Antiochia's epic tracks wallow in the band's mix of Teutonic misery and dour philosophical musings, their often agonizingly slow, exquisitely bleak sound occasionally reminiscent of fellow German gloomsters Bethlehem, injecting their miserable lumbering heaviness with bursts of faster-paced black metal, while distant shrieks of abject despair mingle with the more prominent serpentine rasp of frontman Hoffarth. Definitely a sound that I'm a big fan of. But then the duo will color their sorrowful, nihilistic symphonics and doom-laden blackness with haunting melodies that swirl through these tracks, and those ghostly woodwind-like arrangements and whirling piano parts give parts of this an unexpectedly Goblin-esque vibe; there's a couple moments on here where those vaguely proggy elements actually remind me of the Italian spook-prog masters' classic score for Phenomena. Elsewhere, grim chamber-string arrangements lurch across sudden descents into crushing doom, or segue into sections where the music will suddenly drop away, leaving only the sounds of a raging oceanic surf and echoing German voices, or drift into the sound of forlorn acoustic guitars weaving shadowy madrigals amidst the remnants of rumbling blackness. But in the end, it's those spooky, cinematic blasts of atmospheric creep weaving through Antiochia's buzzing, Burzumic doom which shine as the disc's most enthralling moments.
�� Who would've thought that the score to Fede Alvarez's 2013 re-imagining of the demonic splatter classic Evil Dead would turn out to be such an amazing piece of pitch-black orchestral dread? Unseen Forces and Ajna Offensive obviously agree, as they've released this terrifying film score on deluxe limited-edition vinyl, two slabs of heavy colored wax gorgeously packaged in a gatefold jacket with full color printed inner sleeves, both featuring horrific stills from the film, issued in a limited edition of five hundred copies.
�� It's one of the most ferocious film scores to emerge in the past decade - even listening to this in the middle of the afternoon with the music fully separated from the visuals has the capacity to give me an anxiety attack. Alvarez's film itself was an interesting reinterpretation of Sam Raimi's original turbo-charged demonic vision from 1981, filled with scenes of stomach-churning violence and a much more grim and graphic approach than the original; while the original Evil Dead will always remain a classic blast of hardcore 80's horror, Fede Alvarez�s remake proved to be worth a look if only for his ability to construct some truly demonic set-pieces and an effective atmosphere of hopelessness and suffering. On it's own, the score from Spanish composer Banos is an absolutely terrifying piece of dread orchestral music, one that eschews the use of electronic elements for a more organic approach that recalls the dark orchestral sounds of those classic older Jerry Goldsmith and Christopher Young scores. Blending together fearsome operatic chorales, bleak instrumental pieces for piano and strings possessed with an immeasurable sadness, washes of ominous percussion, clusters of spidery atonal piano, gorgeously sinister violins, swells of dissonant nightmarish strings, thunderous volleys of rumbling percussion, and crazed chortling woodwinds, Banos crafts a fearsome ambience that at times can easily rival the most horrific strains of black industrial. He also incorporates some interesting elements into the score to enhance the panic-stricken energy and scenes of suffocating dread, using a fearsome air-raid siren as a recurring motif, a frightening bullroarer-like sound that almost seems to take on the ferocious flesh-chewing tone of a chainsaw as it reappears throughout the score. There are passages of desolate murky ambience and deep pulsating synthesizer drones, howling choral voices and horrifying operatic screams, queasy electronic noises buried deep in the mix.
��The use of string arrangements is masterful, the first side of the soundtrack alone rife with blasts of shrieking Penderecki-esque orchestral power that will send you flying off of your seat, while further into the score, Banos utilizes swells of hive-like insectoid dissonance that comes swarming out of the blackness. One of the standout sequences is the pitch-black liturgical horror of "Abominations Rising", where those choral voices erupt into a horrifying infernal hymn from the blasts of violent brass and percussion, shrieking female voices issuing a cacophony of Latin blasphemies over the jagged, dissonant orchestrations. Even in it's more subdued moments, the music is imbued with an overwhelming sense of dread and loss, even in the dark lullaby of "Come Back To Me", an achingly beautiful piece that also recurs throughout the film. One of the best modern horror scores I've picked up, Banos's Evil Dead works particularly well on vinyl, and even employs a well-executed lock groove on one side that spins out into a hypnotic, disturbing vocal loop. Fantastic stuff that's recommended to anyone into the blackest corners of modern orchestral music.
Who would've thought that the score to Fede Alvarez's 2013 re-imagining of the demonic splatter classic Evil Dead would turn out to be such an amazing piece of pitch-black orchestral dread? We've stocked the Unseen Forces/Ajna Offensive vinyl release before, but now we've got the La-La Land CD in stock as well.
It's one of the most ferocious film scores to emerge in the past decade - even listening to this in the middle of the afternoon with the music fully separated from the visuals has the capacity to give me an anxiety attack. Alvarez's film itself was an interesting reinterpretation of Sam Raimi's original turbo-charged demonic vision from 1981, filled with scenes of stomach-churning violence and a much more grim and graphic approach than the original; while the original Evil Dead will always remain a classic blast of hardcore 80's horror, Fede Alvarez's remake proved to be worth a look if only for his ability to construct some truly demonic set-pieces and an effective atmosphere of hopelessness and suffering. On it's own, the score from Spanish composer Banos is an absolutely terrifying piece of dread orchestral music, one that eschews the use of electronic elements for a more organic approach that recalls the dark orchestral sounds of those classic older Jerry Goldsmith and Christopher Young scores. Blending together fearsome operatic chorales, bleak instrumental pieces for piano and strings possessed with an immeasurable sadness, washes of ominous percussion, clusters of spidery atonal piano, gorgeously sinister violins, swells of dissonant nightmarish strings, thunderous volleys of rumbling percussion, and crazed chortling woodwinds, Banos crafts a fearsome ambience that at times can easily rival the most horrific strains of black industrial. He also incorporates some interesting elements into the score to enhance the panic-stricken energy and scenes of suffocating dread, using a fearsome air-raid siren as a recurring motif, a frightening bullroarer-like sound that almost seems to take on the ferocious flesh-chewing tone of a chainsaw as it reappears throughout the score. There are passages of desolate murky ambience and deep pulsating synthesizer drones, howling choral voices and horrifying operatic screams, queasy electronic noises buried deep in the mix.
The use of string arrangements is masterful, the first side of the soundtrack alone rife with blasts of shrieking Penderecki-esque orchestral power that will send you flying off of your seat, while further into the score, Banos utilizes swells of hive-like insectoid dissonance that comes swarming out of the blackness. One of the standout sequences is the pitch-black liturgical horror of "Abominations Rising", where those choral voices erupt into a horrifying infernal hymn from the blasts of violent brass and percussion, shrieking female voices issuing a cacophony of Latin blasphemies over the jagged, dissonant orchestrations. Even in it's more subdued moments, the music is imbued with an overwhelming sense of dread and loss, even in the dark lullaby of "Come Back To Me", an achingly beautiful piece that also recurs throughout the film. One of the best modern horror scores I've picked up, Banos's Evil Dead works particularly well on vinyl, and even employs a well-executed lock groove on one side that spins out into a hypnotic, disturbing vocal loop. Fantastic stuff that's recommended to anyone into the blackest corners of modern orchestral music.
Heart & Crossbone's fearless leader David Opp is a longtime C-Blast pal, and I've been trying to turn as many people onto the completely fucked up and
amazing sounds that he's been releasing, most of which are bands that David actually plays in. Let me tell ya, this dude is out to crush...so far, we've been
treated to the twisted drum-chaos and sampler-splatter violence of his Cadaver Eyes project, which consists of David sitting behind a drumkit and whipping up
a hurricane of blastbeats, fragmented samples of old death metal albums that have been turned into abstract blasts of downtuned brutality, and glitchy noise;
then we were flattened by the convoluted drum-machine dirge experiments of Mildew, which approximates the sound of a malfunctioning Godflesh concert being
received by the transmitter on board a deep space freighter. And then there's his actual "band", Barbara, a drums n' bass guitar duo that's just as crushing
and contorted as his other projects. Blown out, raw doomy dirge and slowed down, minor key black metal riffs with hysterical screamed vocals and massively
distorted instruments. Deformed math rock riffs melting like hot tar over pounding drum solos and rumbling bass feedback, creeping into stretched out
spacious atonal doom a la Khanate. Really catchy, melodic riffs pop up outta the sludge here and there. Long, extended slabs of droning feedback erupt into
chaotic powerviolence. Tightly played but sprawling noisy sludge metal, like a noise rock Darkthrone meets Man Is The Bastard. Or Lightning Bolt and
Godheadsilo trapped in an evil murk filled oubliette. Grinding, crushing, feedback-blasting splattery blackdirge mayhem.
This bass and drums duo recorded this live set in Tel Aviv in 1999, and released it as this full length CD on their own Heart And Crossbones imprint...the
recording quality is top notch, in an overblown, loud as fuck blowout, as BARBARA tears through 9 songs of harsh black metal / prog punk brutality, with a
crushing bass guitar attack, crusty witch vocals, and fastpaced drumming. Lots of weird math-y breaks amongst jazzy tornado thrash and slow, sludgy dirges.
There are a (very) few awesome melodic moments dropped in here and there...hypnotic melodies that drone for a minute before the tweaked angular thrash kicks
back in full force. Imagine if RUINS donned corpse paint and started belting out buzzsaw black metal jams a la DARKTHRONE. Heavy, highly syncopated, raw but
with excellent musicianship and spastic mindwarping intensity. Awesome.
The strange, otherworldly music of The Perpetuum Mobile Space Vehicle is tough to wrap a descriptor around. Avant-garde sci-fi jazzdrone? Futuristic musique concrete/darkjazz? Bad dream electronica strewn with the trappings of noir jazz? Hallucinatory death-dub? Hmmm. It's strange stuff that seems to encompass all of those descriptions, and yet this collaboration between the Russian dark ambient/industrial surrealists Bardoseneticcube and St. Petersburg-based saxophonist Igor V. Petrov goes even further "out", mixing in strange dreamlike sound collages and twilight soundscapes with the more tangible electronic and jazz elements to create something that the label has compared to "a cross between Bohren & Der Club of Gore and Contagious Orgasm", which hints at the utterly alien music that these artists have crafted.
Perpetuum came out back in 2006 on the excellent Mechanoise Labs label, which has brought us other unique industrial-tinged releases from Necromondo, Stelladrine, and Seda E Marg, but nothing on the label sounds anything like this. I dunno how in the hell I skipped out on checking this album out until now. The six tracks on Perpetuum combine Petrov's hazy, delay-riddled and electronically manipulated sax lines bleat and drift dreamily across an ever-changing landscape of skittering mutated electronica, minimal dark ambience, circular piano patterns, slow heavy dubbed-out percussion, creepy robotic voices, samples of Russian language media, fields of sputtering bottom-heavy techno, ominous synthesizer melodies, swells of massive dubstep-like bass, ghostly singing voices, often set against strange tapestries of found sound that make up the background, everything from splashing water to urban ambience to children playing to birds to snippets of opera. There are more violent excursions into realms of almost pure noise, such as the scraping metallic cacophony and layers of frenzied free blowing that build into a hellish din on "Songong", and things get pretty heavy in a couple of spots, like the creeping dub-dirge of "Brownend" that begins to sound almost like a Nadja track with all of the distorted guitar cut out and replaced with dubstep-style low-end judder and a swirling, spaced-out psychedelic jazzscape. The mix of all of these sounds makes for both an odd noir-ish atmosphere and a distinctly futuristic and unearthly vibe, at times laced with harsh and discomfiting dissonance, at others warm and dreamlike. I love this album! Highly recommended if you're into the sounds of jazzy electronica but are looking for something darker, stranger, and more fringe, like hearing Bohren & Der Club of Gore and Autechre teaming up to score a paranoid dystopian sci-fi film. Released in a limited edition of 500 copies, and packaged in a full color digipack with amazing artwork from French designer STPo.
The debut from Minneapolis-based instrumental improv trio Barlow/Petersen/Wivinus. "The Transparent World" is effectively the group's first proper release
(aside from a live-to-cassette, self-titled CDR limited to 100 copies and released last year on Stick It To The Man/Asymmetry to good responses on both sides
of the Atlantic), and contains ten tracks encompassing a wide range of mood, texture and instrumentation. Whereas their earlier disc explored the ether via
electric guitars, feedback and the multitude of sounds that can be derived from a variety of effects pedals, "The Transparent World" finds the group working
exclusively with acoustic instrumentation to achieve a sonic landscape that is at turns lush and austere, meditative and menacing. All tracks on the disc are
improvised at their core and utilize a wide variety of instruments and techniques, creating many sounds not normally associated with "acoustic" recordings.
Of course there are guitars (both six- and twelve-string), but often unusually tuned and occasionally bowed. Piano, dulcimer, mandolin (occasionally
augmented by e-bow and slide) bowed cymbals, the Freeman Monostring (played with a ballpeen hammer) the "rattletrap," bagpipe chanter and various other
peripheral devices are all used to create a very singular and evocative whole.
Musically, the disc ranges across a wide variety of styles and influences, but still retains a unified vision and a cohesive sound. Any number of genres can
be seen in fleeting glimpses throughout the recordings: menacing blues from the deepest edges of a swamp swimming with spirits and psychosis (as seen in the
opening cut, "Buried Under Crows"), avant soundscapes conjuring images of a creaking old house with a will all its own and possible ill intent (the
chillingly abrasive "That Night"), long and languid soundtracks toward the horizon at the end of a lengthy and perhaps lucid dream (as exemplified by the
echoing piano-laden closing track, "Retribution"). This release rests somewhere between the experimental avant-garde, the darkest psychedelic folk music and
the epic 360 degree horizons of pure drone/dream music. Fans of Third Ear Band, Makoto Kawabata's "Inui" project, Six Organs of Admittance and select movie
soundtracks will surely find something to appreciate here.
Very cool debut from a Bay Area band that I found out about from the Aquarius/Tumult guys, as one of the guys in the band also works behind the counter at that esteemed San Francisco record joint. Originally released as a limited edition LP on Not Not Fun, this CD version has since come out through Digitalis; From Our Mouths A Perpetual Light is a strange trip across a nocturnal world populated with dark, dreamy wisps of droning Americana, ghostly blues guitars floating through patches of black mist, and rumbling, soporific heaviness. Using lots of spacey guitar effects, minimal percussion, and spectral strains of harmonium, the band plays sludgy psych and spiritual drone music fusing together into a sort of rustic soundtrack spun out across ten tracks, which includes the original eight from the LP release of From Our Mouths and two new ones. Eerie near-wordless vocals appear infrequently, and Barn Owl's stoned, mournful dirges are mostly instrumental, evoking a dark meditative atmosphere creeping through smoke-trails of Rhodes organ and swells of deep rumbling feedback. "Voice Of The Other" opens the disc with a vast expanse of hypnotic, heavily distorted krautrock bliss with undercurrents of crushing low-end swirling beneath; droning harmonium and ominous bass/slidge guitar forms a dark Morricone nightmare on "Lotus Cloud". Like a metallic, doomy version of something off of Earth's Hex, the desolate Western feel, 'verb-ed out twang and ultra-heavy dirge of "The White Mountain Filled With Light" marches through the desert night into oblivion, while "Road To Bardo" blends 60's minimalism with blackened cosmic drift. The way the Rhodes piano melts over the glacial desert blues of "The Last Parade", the soft jazzy notes hovering over slow motion twang and endless accordian drone, makes it one of the album's most mesmerizing pieces, only to be followed soon after by the nearly Sunn-like ambient sludge and acoustic trance of "Teonanacatl". Heaviness and hypnosis is handed out in even amounts, and quite well; these guys need to be checked out by anyone that loves droning, spacey psych and dark Morricone-inspired Western ambience. Imagine the newer Earth sound, that shadowy slo-motion countrified slow core, stripped down to something rougher and more primitive, with louder amps and a penchant for crushing distortion, and then mix in long druggy psych jams and classic minimalism, Tony Conrad and Bardo Pond, bits of psychedelic folk and buzzing drone, sometimes sounding alot like a much more drone-obsessed Souvenirs Young America, and even when Barn Owl get really spaced out, there are still amazing melodies tying everything together. Nicely packaged in a heavy chipboard gatefold sleeve.
Monstrously epic sounding, thunderous sludge riffs and skillful dual-guitar harmonies come together with ripping d-beat hardcore aggression. Sort of like
His Hero Is Gone busting out Fucking Champs-style harmonies? Although these songs all sound pretty apocalyptic, there is a great sense of melody throughout
this CD - this stuff is really quite pretty and catchy at times."Tower Falls" has got some awesome anthemic breakdowns and harmonies."Coeur" is the shortest
track at just over three minutes, yet still packs in killer memorable riffs and harmonies and odd (but awesome) riffs and chord phrasings. The final
track,"Rise", is a monster, starting off with atmospheric finger tapping that stretches for several minutes before turning into a bulldozing sludge dirge .
Awesome. Produced by Phillip Cope of KYLESA.
Now available on vinyl, with John Baizley's amazing artwork looking sweet in full-on LP sleeve mode!
Monstrously epic thundersludge riffs and skillful dual-guitar harmonies come together with ripping d-beat hardcore aggression. Sort of like His Hero Is Gone
busting out Fucking Champs-style harmonies? Although these songs all sound pretty apocalyptic, there is a great sense of melody throughout this 12" - this
stuff is really quite pretty and catchy at times."Tower Falls" has got some awesome anthemic breakdowns and harmonies."Coeur" is the shortest track at just
over three minutes, yet still packs in killer memorable riffs and harmonies and odd (but awesome) riffs and chord phrasings. The final track,"Rise", is a
monster, starting off with atmospheric finger tapping that stretches for several minutes before turning into a bulldozing sludge dirge . Awesome. Produced by
Phillip Cope of KYLESA.
The second EP from BARONESS delivers more of their righteous and majestic post-crust-metal that we loved so much from their First CD, with technical
instrumentals, lengthy psychedelia, and moody RODAN / JUNE OF 44 post-rock interjected with awesome IRON MAIDEN / F**KING CHAMPS level guitar harmonies and
crushing tech/sludge/crustcore. Super powerful, and Second also does a good job of capturing the band�s live energy. Killer stuff, BARONESS just keeps
getting better and better with each release. And as with their first release, this disc has three songs, clocking in at around 21 minutes. Highly recommended
to fans of Isis and Pelican, Disrupt and Neurosis, psychedelic crustcore, punishingly heavy metallic post-rock, stretched-out tarpit sludge, odd meters and
complex arrangements and triumphant metal hooks!!
Vinyl version of this killer epic post-metal-crustcore-rock crusher! Killer presentation - limited edition one sided black vinyl 12" with a stunning
skull-illustration etching on the non-playing side from artist John Baizley. Beautiful !!!
The Second EP from BARONESS delivers more of their righteous and majestic post-crust-metal that we loved so much from their First album,
with technical instrumentals, lengthy psychedelia, and moody RODAN / JUNE OF 44 post-rock interjected with awesome IRON MAIDEN / F**KING CHAMPS level guitar
harmonies and crushing tech/sludge/crustcore. Super powerful, and Second also does a good job of capturing the band�s live energy. Killer stuff, BARONESS
just keeps getting better and better with each release. And as with their first release, this disc has three songs, clocking in at around 21 minutes. Highly
recommended to fans of Isis and Pelican, Disrupt and Neurosis, psychedelic crustcore, punishingly heavy metallic post-rock, stretched-out tarpit sludge, odd
meters and complex arrangements and triumphant metal hooks!!
Baroness' first two CD releases have been out of print for awhile, but now that the band has been touring all over the planet in support of their Red Album on Relapse, Hyperrealist has reissued both of those early EPs as a single deluxe disc. Each EP has been remixed and remastered, and this new disc combines all of John Baizley's awesome artwork into a single package, a full color digipack with additional artwork, foil stamped lettering on the cover, and packaged inside of an illustrated o-card. It looks great.
Here's my original blurb for First: Monstrously epic sounding, thunderous sludge riffs and skillful dual-guitar harmonies come together with ripping d-beat hardcore aggression. Sort of like His Hero Is Gone busting out Fucking Champs-style harmonies? Although these songs all sound pretty apocalyptic, there is a great sense of melody throughout this CD - this stuff is really quite pretty and catchy at times."Tower Falls" has got some awesome anthemic breakdowns and harmonies."Coeur" is the shortest track at just over three minutes, yet still packs in killer memorable riffs and harmonies and odd (but awesome) riffs and chord phrasings. The final track,"Rise", is a monster, starting off with atmospheric finger tapping that stretches for several minutes before turning into a bulldozing sludge dirge . Awesome.
On on Second: The second EP from BARONESS delivers more of their righteous and majestic post-crust-metal that we loved so much from their First CD, with technical instrumentals, lengthy psychedelia, and moody RODAN / JUNE OF 44 post-rock interjected with awesome IRON MAIDEN / F**KING CHAMPS level guitar harmonies and crushing tech/sludge/crustcore. Super powerful, and Second also does a good job of capturing the band�s live energy. Killer stuff, BARONESS just keeps getting better and better with each release. And as with their first release, this disc has three songs, clocking in at around 21 minutes. Highly recommended to fans of Isis and Pelican, Disrupt and Neurosis, psychedelic crustcore, punishingly heavy metallic post-rock, stretched-out tarpit sludge, odd meters and complex arrangements and triumphant metal hooks!!
Highly recommended.
Yeah, everyone goes nuts whenever something new from Baroness comes through the door here, but this new 7" is really only recommended to collectors, as it only has one new song on here that you can't find anywhere else. The a-side track is "A Horse Called Golgotha" (which originally appeared on their Blue Album that came out last year), an anthemic, extremely catchy thunder rocker, a dose of proggy pounding pop metal, crushing and dramatic, with those killer harmonized guitars and huge gang vocals that are a big part of the Savannah, Georgia band's signature sound, with some lush acoustic guitars layered in towards the end. A killer song for sure, but it's not like this hasn't already appeared on vinyl, as the album was issued on double LP as well. What Baroness fans will really be looking for here is the b-side track, a surprisingly straightforward cover of the Descendents song "Bikeage" off of Milo Goes To College that only appears on this record. This 7" was released in a one-time run of seven hundred copies on purple vinyl, which is the version that we have in stock. The new artwork from Baroness frontman John Baizley that adorns the record sleeve is mighty fine as well.
Once again back in stock, on black vinyl - here's the old review from previous editions:
The early EP releases from Baroness have gone in and out of print over the years on different formats, and are once again available on vinyl through the folks at Hyperrealist, this time as a single limited-edition full length Lp that collects both the band's First and Second Eps remixed and remastered and presented in a gatefold package with all of John Baizley's awesome artwork, foil stamped lettering on the cover, and a printed inner sleeve.
Monstrously epic sounding, thunderous sludge riffs and skillful dual-guitar harmonies come together with ripping d-beat hardcore aggression. Sort of like His Hero Is Gone busting out Fucking Champs-style harmonies? Although these songs all sound pretty apocalyptic, there is a great sense of melody throughout this CD - this stuff is really quite pretty and catchy at times."Tower Falls" has got some awesome anthemic breakdowns and harmonies."Coeur" is the shortest track at just over three minutes, yet still packs in killer memorable riffs and harmonies and odd (but awesome) riffs and chord phrasings. The final track,"Rise", is a monster, starting off with atmospheric finger tapping that stretches for several minutes before turning into a bulldozing sludge dirge . Awesome.
On on Second: The second EP from Baroness delivers more of their righteous and majestic post-crust-metal that we loved so much from their First CD, with technical instrumentals, lengthy psychedelia, and moody RODAN / JUNE OF 44 post-rock interjected with awesome Maidenesque / Fucking Champs-level guitar harmonies and crushing tech / sludge / crustcore. Super powerful, and Second also does a good job of capturing the band�s live energy. Killer stuff, BARONESS just keeps getting better and better with each release. And as with their first release, this disc has three songs, clocking in at around 21 minutes. Highly recommended to fans of Isis and Pelican, Disrupt and Neurosis, psychedelic crust, punishingly heavy metallic post-rock, stretched-out tarpit sludge, odd meters and complex arrangements and triumphant metal hooks.
Now available on vinyl, presented in a gorgeous gatefold package with a printed inner sleeve that really does justice to John Baizley's great artwork. The LP also includes a plastic dropcard that gives you an account password to access a free digital download of the album.
I've been waiting on this one ever since it was first announced at the end of last year - a split album featuring two bands from Savannah, Georgia, each one in possession of their own unique progressive, crusty metal: Baroness with their epic, melodic crustcore-prog and Unpersons's manic, gloriously weird combination of the Jesus Lizard and metallic pummel. Featuring more amazing artwork from Baroness' John Dyer Baizley, A Grey Sigh In A Flower Husk brings these two together for just over a half-hour of raging power, which begins with two new Baroness tracks that serve as an appetite-whetter for their upcoming album for Relapse. Yeah, there's only two songs from 'em here, but it's almost 18 minutes of music on their half of the split and frankly, both of these songs CRUSH IT. "Teiresias" is the shorter of the two, a mighty riff feast that twists and turns through winding metallic crush and spidery twin-guitar harmonies, which explodes brilliantly and suddenly in the middle of the song with a passage of downtuned sludgy majesty that sounds like The FUcking Champs meets Torche, at least to my overcaffienated brain. Their second track is called "Cavite", and this is Baroness at their sprawling, proggy best, a labyrinth of chugging guitars and Maiden-eqsue harmonies, hypnotic riffchug heard through a cheap microphone which suddenly erupts into panoramic prog-metal, a dreamy middle passage through spacey post-rock, and a freaked-out drum solo. Awesome! These guys take the best elements of The Champs and epic crustlords Tragedy, Neurosis and Mastodon and turn out a mighty metallic assault that continues to kick my ass each time I spin these jams.
So how do Baroness' buddies and fellow Savannah-ites measure up on this shared split? Pretty solid, actually. Unpersons have been generally overlooked despite having a couple of releases on Life Is Abuse and At A Loss, but their fusion of Jesus Lizard's manic noise rock and crusty metal is completely crushing, as is displayed with their 4 songs here. The riffs go from hammering sludge to more jagged and jangly chords, and Kylesa drummer Carl McGinley bashes the crap out of his kit, anchoring the band with furious fills and offbeat rhythms. It's the vocals that really set Unpersons apart though, a psychotic mewling meltdown that's very reminsicent of David Yow. Unperson's highlight here is the final track "A Small Gesture, A Thousand Small Happy Gestures (Shone In The Dust)", a lengthy freakout that drops some flattening bomb-string action in amongst their psychotic post-punk flavored heaviness. It's massive neo-noise rock, as unhinged as recent releases from Black Elk and Akimbo, and an excellent companion to Baroness on this split. Highly recommended!!
Now available on vinyl, presented in a gorgeous gatefold package with a printed inner sleeve that really does justice to John Baizley's great artwork. The LP also includes a plastic dropcard that gives you an account password to access a free digital download of the album.
I've been looking forward to this split ever since it was first announced at the end of last year - a split album featuring two bands from Savannah, Georgia, each one in possession of their own unique progressive, crusty metal: Baroness with their epic, melodic crustcore-prog and Unpersons's manic, gloriously weird combination of the Jesus Lizard and metallic pummel. Featuring more amazing artwork from Baroness' John Dyer Baizley, A Grey Sigh In A Flower Husk brings these two together for just over a half-hour of raging power, which begins with two new Baroness tracks that serve as an appetite-whetter for their upcoming album for Relapse. Yeah, there's only two songs from 'em here, but it's almost 18 minutes of music on their half of the split and frankly, both of these songs CRUSH IT. "Teiresias" is the shorter of the two, a mighty riff feast that twists and turns through winding metallic crush and spidery twin-guitar harmonies, which explodes brilliantly and suddenly in the middle of the song with a passage of downtuned sludgy majesty that sounds like The FUcking Champs meets Torche, at least to my overcaffienated brain. Their second track is called "Cavite", and this is Baroness at their sprawling, proggy best, a labyrinth of chugging guitars and Maiden-eqsue harmonies, hypnotic riffchug heard through a cheap microphone which suddenly erupts into panoramic prog-metal, a dreamy middle passage through spacey post-rock, and a freaked-out drum solo. Awesome! These guys take the best elements of The Champs and epic crustlords Tragedy, Neurosis and Mastodon and turn out a mighty metallic assault that continues to kick my ass each time I spin these jams.
So how do Baroness' buddies and fellow Savannah-ites measure up on this shared split? Pretty solid, actually. Unpersons have been generally overlooked despite having a couple of releases on Life Is Abuse and At A Loss, but their fusion of Jesus Lizard's manic noise rock and crusty metal is completely crushing, as is displayed with their 4 songs here. The riffs go from hammering sludge to more jagged and jangly chords, and Kylesa drummer Carl McGinley bashes the crap out of his kit, anchoring the band with furious fills and offbeat rhythms. It's the vocals that really set Unpersons apart though, a psychotic mewling meltdown that's very reminsicent of David Yow. Unperson's highlight here is the final track "A Small Gesture, A Thousand Small Happy Gestures (Shone In The Dust)", a lengthy freakout that drops some flattening bomb-string action in amongst their psychotic post-punk flavored heaviness. It's massive neo-noise rock, as unhinged as recent releases from Black Elk and Akimbo, and an excellent companion to Baroness on this split. Highly recommended!!
I've been waiting on this one ever since it was first announced at the end of last year - a split album featuring two bands from Savannah, Georgia, each
one in possession of their own unique progressive, crusty metal: Baroness with their epic, melodic crustcore-prog and Unpersons's manic, gloriously weird
combination of the Jesus Lizard and metallic pummel. Featuring more amazing artwork from Baroness' John Dyer Baizley, A Grey Sigh In A Flower Husk
brings these two together for just over a half-hour of raging power, which begins with two new Baroness tracks that serve as an appetite-whetter for their
upcoming album for Relapse. Yeah, there's only two songs from 'em here, but it's almost 18 minutes of music on their half of the split and frankly, both of
these songs CRUSH IT. "Teiresias" is the shorter of the two, a mighty riff feast that twists and turns through winding metallic crush and spidery twin-guitar
harmonies, which explodes brilliantly and suddenly in the middle of the song with a passage of downtuned sludgy majesty that sounds like The FUcking Champs
meets Torche, at least to my overcaffienated brain. Their second track is called "Cavite", and this is Baroness at their sprawling, proggy best, a labyrinth
of chugging guitars and Maiden-eqsue harmonies, hypnotic riffchug heard through a cheap microphone which suddenly erupts into panoramic prog-metal, a dreamy
middle passage through spacey post-rock, and a freaked-out drum solo. Awesome! These guys take the best elements of The Champs and epic crustlords
Tragedy, Neurosis and Mastodon and turn out a mighty metallic assault that continues to kick my ass each time I spin these jams.
So how do Baroness' buddies and fellow Savannah-ites measure up on this shared split? Pretty fuckin' solid, actually. Unpersons have been generally
overlooked despite having a couple of releases on Life Is Abuse and At A Loss, but their fusion of Jesus Lizard's manic noise rock and crusty metal is
completely crushing, as is displayed with their 4 songs here. The riffs go from hammering sludge to more jagged and jangly chords, and Kylesa drummer Carl
McGinley bashes the crap out of his kit, anchoring the band with furious fills and offbeat rhythms. It's the vocals that really set Unpersons apart though, a
psychotic mewling meltdown that's very reminsicent of David Yow. Unperson's highlight here is the final track "A Small Gesture, A Thousand Small Happy
Gestures (Shone In The Dust)", a lengthy freakout that drops some flattening bomb-string action in amongst their psychotic post-punk flavored heaviness. It's
massive neo-noise rock, as unhinged as recent releases from Black Elk and Akimbo, and an excellent companion to Baroness on this split. Highly recommended!!
Now available on red colored vinyl in a new 2013 edition, presented in a gorgeous gatefold package with a printed inner sleeve that really does justice to John Baizley's great artwork. The LP also includes a plastic dropcard that gives you an account password to access a free digital download of the album.
I've been looking forward to this split ever since it was first announced at the end of last year - a split album featuring two bands from Savannah, Georgia, each one in possession of their own unique progressive, crusty metal: Baroness with their epic, melodic crustcore-prog and Unpersons's manic, gloriously weird combination of the Jesus Lizard and metallic pummel. Featuring more amazing artwork from Baroness' John Dyer Baizley, A Grey Sigh In A Flower Husk brings these two together for just over a half-hour of raging power, which begins with two new Baroness tracks that serve as an appetite-whetter for their upcoming album for Relapse. Yeah, there's only two songs from 'em here, but it's almost 18 minutes of music on their half of the split and frankly, both of these songs CRUSH IT. "Teiresias" is the shorter of the two, a mighty riff feast that twists and turns through winding metallic crush and spidery twin-guitar harmonies, which explodes brilliantly and suddenly in the middle of the song with a passage of downtuned sludgy majesty that sounds like The FUcking Champs meets Torche, at least to my overcaffienated brain. Their second track is called "Cavite", and this is Baroness at their sprawling, proggy best, a labyrinth of chugging guitars and Maiden-eqsue harmonies, hypnotic riffchug heard through a cheap microphone which suddenly erupts into panoramic prog-metal, a dreamy middle passage through spacey post-rock, and a freaked-out drum solo. Awesome. These guys take the best elements of The Champs and epic crustlords Tragedy, Neurosis and Mastodon and turn out a mighty metallic assault that continues to kick my ass each time I spin these jams.
So how do Baroness' buddies and fellow Savannah-ites measure up on this shared split? Pretty solid, actually. Unpersons have been generally overlooked despite having a couple of releases on Life Is Abuse and At A Loss, but their fusion of Jesus Lizard's manic noise rock and crusty metal is completely crushing, as is displayed with their 4 songs here. The riffs go from hammering sludge to more jagged and jangly chords, and Kylesa drummer Carl McGinley bashes the crap out of his kit, anchoring the band with furious fills and offbeat rhythms. It's the vocals that really set Unpersons apart though, a psychotic mewling meltdown that's very reminsicent of David Yow. Unperson's highlight here is the final track "A Small Gesture, A Thousand Small Happy Gestures (Shone In The Dust)", a lengthy freakout that drops some flattening bomb-string action in amongst their psychotic post-punk flavored heaviness. It's massive neo-noise rock, as unhinged as recent releases from Black Elk and Akimbo, and an excellent companion to Baroness on this split. Highly recommended.
����� A primo thrashjazz anxiety attack from a couple years ago that we just stumbled upon, this collaboration brings the intensity in a big way. As I learned the hard way, this one is not recommended listening while in the midst of a hangover. But if you've got the fortitude, this absolutely scorching session of extreme improv is a real goddamn blast. As one of the most aggressive things that came out on Weasel Walter's ugEXPLODE imprint, this 2012 disc from the NYC power-trio was definitely one of my favorites.
����� It's made up of two side-long pieces, "Porxen/Proxen" and "Gedra", both filled with ferocious, high-energy improvisational playing from these guys. If you've been following the New York avant-noise-rock/hardcore jazz scene of recent years, you're no doubt familiar with at least a couple of 'em: there's guitarist Mick Barr (of Krallice, Orthrelm, Crom-Tech, Flying Luttenbachers and a dozen other bands you can find in my collection) shredding his fists off almost non-stop, sending volleys of superfast noodling and atonal melody spiraling out over the rambunctious din whipped up by drummer Kevin Shea (Coptic Light, Storm And Stress, Talibam!) and bassist Tim Dahl (from noise rockers Child Abuse). The general vibe isn't too far removed from some of the other improv-heavy projects that Barr has been involved with in the past, but it buries the needle in the red more than most. The trio is firing on all cylinders on this disc; while the overall strategy is along the same lines as the high-velocity jazz-rock of Last Exit and the like, Barr Shea Dahl ultimately appeals to the same deranged impulses firing off in my skull as classic noisecore, or early Painkiller, or Hijokaidan, emitting a relentless squall of violent, exploratory chaos. Clattery percussive pandemonium and rumbling low-end splatter collides with chirping, whirring noise and that hyperactive metallic guitar-shred, racing up and down the fretboard in a constant blur that sometimes shifts into Sonny Sharrock-style sheets of guitar noise. For huge chunks of this performance, the energy and attack resembles Last Exit distilled into something even more primal and violent. There are few respites, the trio only rarely slipping into something like the looping, repetitious racket of "Porxen/Proxen" that enters into an almost krautrock-esque pulse. Otherwise, it's total creation through destruction.
It's one thing to listen to any album that Mick Barr plays on and have yer brain strafed by the man's insanely intricate and obsessive shredding; it's entirely another to actually watch this guy play in the flesh and have his endless streams of dissonant 32nd note runs streak through the air in front of you, to hear the incessant, relentless percussive patter of Mick's guitar pick scraping across the Gibson SG strings and forming a weird rhythmic background to his playing, an alien ticker-tape whirr helicoptering beneath those strange, hypnotic avant-speed fretboard runs. I've been able to see him play once before, in DC at the Warehouse when he did a short run down the East Coast as Octis, and that 40 minute set left me glazed over and drooling from the sheer overload of speedshred fractals that bombarded the twenty of us that were there. That was an experience I've been jonesing to repeat, and while various Octis, Ocrilim and Orthrelm albums make their way across the C-Blast stereo on a regular basis, this double DVD set that Archive just dropped on us is some real trance-manna that contains what are probably the most epically obsessive recordings of Mick Barr etched to plastic so far. This beautifully assembled double DVD captures several complete sets recorded between 2006 and 2007 from Mick performing solo in New York City at The Stone and the Whitney Museum, an Orthrelm set from San Francisco at The Bottom Of The Hill Club, an insane improvised set between Mick and Zach Hill (Hella) in San Fran that blew my fucking head off, and two shorter "excerpts" from Ocrilim that has Mick playing across from bassist Tony Gedrich from Stay Fucked/Archaeopteryx, both of which are in the heavy mode of Ocrilim's Hydra Head album ANNWN. The solo Octis sets and the Orthrelm are nice and long, each at least forty minutes long, so there is a ton of Mick's shredding to sink your teeth into here. This is one meaty dose of avant guitar shred visuals. Two discs, presented in a gorgeous eight-panel foldout sleeve with custom printed vellum disc sleeves, all of which are illustrated with Mick's manic alien code doodles, and held together with a vellum obi band. Limited edition of 500 copies.
Orthrelm/Ocrilim/Krallice guitarist Mick Barr and sonic weirdo Nondor Nevai have been collaborating on a series of full-lengths for awhile now, and Labyrintha is actually the third album that these guys have recorded and released together; it's the first to actually get an "official" release through ugEXPLODE however, as the previous two discs were released as super-limited CD-rs. It's pretty much what you'd expect from a team-up between guitarist Barr and drummer/vocalist Nevai: endless streams of tremolo shredding that pour forth over a chaotic, thrashing drum assault, all completely improvised, the two musicians raging through fields of densely clustered avant-speed-metal shredding and fucked-up vocal noise/feedback assaults and demented quasi-throat-singing exercises. Mick Barr's endless racing notes swarm over these tracks like hyper-dense flurries of electronic insect chirps, and fans of his work in Orthrelm/Octis/Ocrilim will love this; on the other hand, Nondor's berserk black-vomit vocalizations and stumbling, freeform blast beats and drumming chaos pulls this into a much more freaked-out and frayed-at-the-edges form of improv shredblast. Imagine the soundtrack for the old video game Galaga being performed by Sonny Sharrock while the drummer from Beherit goes into an extended shitfit. Or maybe some manic, PCP-fueled fusion of Torture Garden-era Naked City, Abruptum, and that Bonus Levels disc that featured nothing but Trey Azagthoth shredding that came with the limited edition version of Morbid Angel's Heretic. Totally fucked and maniacal avant/no-wave/thrash weirdness - Flying Luttenbachers fans, this is definitely for you. Comes in full color digipack packaging.
Eleven untitled tracks of turbulent, psychedelic vomit noise from Oregon-based noise outfit Barracks Of Afghanistan. Nothing out of the ordinary here, just 37 minutes of aggressive, mind melting cut-up noise assembled from damaging frequency fuckery, blasts of radio static, whirring drones, heavy bass rumbling, and metallic junk clatter, fronted by harsh freaking vocal shred and delivered in mostly shorter bursts, the tracks running anywhere from 90 seconds to 7 minutes in length. Think Audiobot releases, Prurient, Locust Sympathizer, Ichorous, Macronympha...pretty much along those lines. I dig. Packaged in RRR's trademark recycled paper/collage art wallet sleeve.
Subtle Cruelties is the alluring debut from gothic folk duo Barren Harvest, featuring music that is pretty far removed from the sort of harrowing, blackened heaviness I'm accustomed to hearing from member Lenny Smith. With his often terrifying, emotionally abject vocal work for the extreme doom outfit Trees and the blackened, death-rock influenced sludge of Atriarch, Smith's voice serves as a conduit to violent, soul-charring forces, navigating the extremes of human experience. With Barren Harvest, though, Smith joins with Worm Ouroboros member Jessica Way to craft a much more fragile and introspective sound, drawing from dark neo-folk traditions and classic ambient music to evoke a beautifully gloomy atmosphere that moves like slow-drifting storm clouds across the whole of Cruelties.
Over a somber backdrop of droning synthesizers and gently plucked acoustic strings, the duo trade off their plaintive voices, Way's light, delicate singing winding around Smith's deep drawling baritone, and this vocal interplay is more than a little reminiscent of some of the bleaker late-era Swans material; in those moments when the two singers come together (such as the eerie, heartbreaking "Heavens Age"), this album can be positively bewitching. But while the slow, brooding strum of acoustic guitars are ingrained throughout the album, giving this that vaguely neo-folky feel, it's their use of gleaming synthesizers that's really at the heart of Barren Harvest's gorgeously grim sound. Those folkier elements are mostly infused into the background, obscured by sweeping blacklit synths, bits of acoustic guitar here, some delicate minor key piano there, streaking some songs with the echoing lilt of an autoharp and an Indian stringed instrument called the bulbul tarang, whose metallic buzz drones through some of the album's more solemn moments. Everything is wrapped in a soft crepuscular haze of reverb that definitely contributes to the album's "gothy" vibe, and the songs sometimes drift into a kind of shadowed chamber-pop beauty that can definitely evoke Way's work with Worm Ouroboros, as well as the spectral strains of Amber Asylum. All good reference points for Barren Harvest's orphic ambience, and it's also somewhat like a somnambulant and stoned channeling of White Light From the Mouth of Infinity-era Swans, but draped in sheets of velvety, slowly shifting kosmische keyboards. A beautifully bleak song-suite, richly evocative of an autumnal atmosphere limned in the burnt amber glow of dying sunlight, each note weighted with a deep weariness.
Available on both limited edition CD and limited vinyl from Handmade Birds, though vinyl enthusiasts should note that the Lp version is a shorter version of the album, missing five tracks featured on the CD.
Subtle Cruelties is the alluring debut from gothic folk duo Barren Harvest, featuring music that is pretty far removed from the sort of harrowing, blackened heaviness I'm accustomed to hearing from member Lenny Smith. With his often terrifying, emotionally abject vocal work for the extreme doom outfit Trees and the blackened, death-rock influenced sludge of Atriarch, Smith's voice serves as a conduit to violent, soul-charring forces, navigating the extremes of human experience. With Barren Harvest, though, Smith joins with Worm Ouroboros member Jessica Way to craft a much more fragile and introspective sound, drawing from dark neo-folk traditions and classic ambient music to evoke a beautifully gloomy atmosphere that moves like slow-drifting storm clouds across the whole of Cruelties.
Over a somber backdrop of droning synthesizers and gently plucked acoustic strings, the duo trade off their plaintive voices, Way's light, delicate singing winding around Smith's deep drawling baritone, and this vocal interplay is more than a little reminiscent of some of the bleaker late-era Swans material; in those moments when the two singers come together (such as the eerie, heartbreaking "Heavens Age"), this album can be positively bewitching. But while the slow, brooding strum of acoustic guitars are ingrained throughout the album, giving this that vaguely neo-folky feel, it's their use of gleaming synthesizers that's really at the heart of Barren Harvest's gorgeously grim sound. Those folkier elements are mostly infused into the background, obscured by sweeping blacklit synths, bits of acoustic guitar here, some delicate minor key piano there, streaking some songs with the echoing lilt of an autoharp and an Indian stringed instrument called the bulbul tarang, whose metallic buzz drones through some of the album's more solemn moments. Everything is wrapped in a soft crepuscular haze of reverb that definitely contributes to the album's "gothy" vibe, and the songs sometimes drift into a kind of shadowed chamber-pop beauty that can definitely evoke Way's work with Worm Ouroboros, as well as the spectral strains of Amber Asylum. All good reference points for Barren Harvest's orphic ambience, and it's also somewhat like a somnambulant and stoned channeling of White Light From the Mouth of Infinity-era Swans, but draped in sheets of velvety, slowly shifting kosmische keyboards. A beautifully bleak song-suite, richly evocative of an autumnal atmosphere limned in the burnt amber glow of dying sunlight, each note weighted with a deep weariness.
Available on both limited edition CD and limited vinyl from Handmade Birds, though vinyl enthusiasts should note that the Lp version is a shorter version of the album, missing five tracks featured on the CD.
Back in stock. This amazing ghostfolk duo is back with more of their hauntingly beautiful music, bringing us their earliest recordings via this gorgeously assembled collection. Beautiful Flowers is the earliest material from the duo of Jessica Way (Worm Ouroboros) and Lenny Smith (Trees, Atriarch), featured here in all of its stark beauty spread across the six sides of a triple 7" set. If you dug the band's debut album Subtle Cruelties that came out late last year (and which I raved about upon its release), this stuff is just as terrific. Fans might recognize a few of these tracks ("The Bleeding", "Claw And Feather"), as they would appear in reworked form on that album. But this set is worth picking up if you're as enthralled with Barren Harvest as I am, as these early versions can differ a bit from what appeared on Cruelties.
It's gorgeous, ghostly music, the songs stripped down to spare arrangements of just vocals alongside the lush strum of the acoustic guitar and their slowly swirling synthesizer. Way and Smith weave their voices together through each song, his gravelly baritone billowing beneath her icy, lilting melodies. It's steeped in an occult folk tradition, with echoes of classic witch-folk outfits like Comus and contemporaries like Stone Breath, but there's also a grave majesty to these songs that reminds me a bit of Dead Can Dance, further distinguishing Barren Harvest's music from other current neo-folk outfits. Even their cover of the ancient English folk song "Gently Johnny" (best remembered by most from the score to The Wicker Man) is here transformed into something almost unrecognizable from previous versions, imbued with so much sorrow that the meaning behind the lyrics transforms into something much more dire. All of these songs drift beneath the cold red glow of an autumn moon, delicate strands of dried flower and ivy woven through the lush chords and dramatic singing, offering another shadow-wreathed example of how this sort of grave, gorgeous, gothic folk-flecked darkness can be as grim and powerful as any doom metal outfit. And it's beautifully packaged, the three records housed in a printed slipcase, each record in a plastic sleeve with its own printed lyric sheet, all printed in silver ink on black woven stock, issued in a limited edition of three hundred thirty-three copies.
��More killer industrial filth from Nil By Mouth; the sort of primitive din that Barrikad belts out on this tape is the sort of classic, old-school industrial that I really haven't been hearing much of lately, but which always sounds great blasting out of the C-Blast sound system at top volume. Sweden's Barrikad has produced some excellent examples of this sort of pulsating, entropic din since its formation, though, and the band's latest release Through The Voice One Becomes Animal is a primo example of exactly this sort of grungy noise.
�� This extremely limited cassette release features two long tracks, each consuming an entire side; both are lengthy blurts of corroded electronics and squealing oscillators sending out dim black deathwave pulses from the void, eerie film samples and field recordings layered over clanking junk-noise abuse, and delirious sampled voices that relay visions of evil and inhumanity from the turbulent early years of the twentieth century and beyond. The first side, "Freedom Is Only Possible In The Struggle For Liberation", starts off with hypnotic electronic tones pulsating beneath the phlegmatic roar of crumbling, collapsing machinery, but then slowly begins to evolve into something much creepier as deep throbbing bass and percussive loops emerge amid layered voices and rattling metal noises, transforming into something that resembles a series of radio transmission being beamed directly out of the cancerous blackened organ at the heart of Western society's fractured collective psyche. The other side is no trip to the beach, either. "Utanf�r Det Samh�lle Jag Tvingas Vara En Del Av" opens up with a minimal synthesizer pulse and more of those abrasive clanking metal noises, and actually sort of resembles a brain-damaged version of a John Carpenter score stumbling randomly around field recordings of slavering mutants rummaging through the city dump. This one is even creepier, though part of that might be due to the Swedish speakers that begin to emerge from behind the curtain of random clank, the male voice limned with an edge of menace. Then it all suddenly shifts into a crushing din of heavy mechanical rhythms and screaming voices, a massive pneumatic groove suddenly taking over, the steady slow motion clank of war machinery stomping across the bodies of the dead, while sinister droning electronics sweep overhead like swarms of sky borne death machines. Intense.
�� Like everything else I've picked up from Barrikad, both tracks deliver some satisfying blasts of creaking, crumbling death-trance. Comes with a large twenty four page booklet that features a plethora of notable quotes, various demonic and monstrous woodcut images, liner notes written in both Swedish and English that detail Barrikad's roots in hardcore punk and anarcho culture, and extensive excerpts from the fiery 2007 French anarchist manifesto L�insurrection Qui Vient (The Coming Insurrection), all packaged in a sealed black bubble mailer with printed labels affixed to the outside of the envelope.
Zionist power electronics? BARZEL is a self-stated "militant Jewish industrial" outfit, which is an interesting deviation from the sketchy politics of many
artists in the power electronics/noise industrial scene. The music on this disc is mostly minimal , rumbling low-frequency noise with equally minimal samples
looped over each track.Pretty old school stuff, fans of Survival Unit, Folkstorm, and MZ.412 would like this (if they can get past the politics of Barzel).
These 10 tracks rumble along, gritty bulldozing distortion and crude blasts of extreme noise. Shield Of Defense is pure, unadulterated malice.
Limited pressing of 500 copies.
���Despite the fact that the band has been around since 1997, chances are you've never heard of Japanese death-thrashers Basilisk. Formed by former members of the cult Japanese death metal outfit Monarchie Infernale, Basilisk, for some reason, took their sweet time to deliver their first album, with End Of Catastrophe finally materializing well over a decade since they first came together. The end result is pretty killer, though, a blast of eccentric death/thrash that blends together some subtle blackened elements as well as a dose of proggy complexity that reminds me of some of my fave classic prog-thrash outfits. Sort of an anomaly coming from the usually uber-doom obsessed Weird Truth imprint, but this album is well worth checking out if you're into solid but quirky thrash and the sort of offbeat sensibilities that often course through so much Japanese metal. In fact, when you start to leaf through the booklet for Catastrophe, you're confronted by band photos of these spiked and heavily leathered maniacs that look like something out of some bizarro Japanese cyberpunk epic, like amped-up extras from Sōgo Ishii's Burst City, black metal leather and chains and wild-looking spiked headgear cranked up to an absurd level of fashion terror. These guys definitely have a look.
��� The music is equally as crazed, opening with the dark soundtrack-esque industrial symphonic rumblings of "Sign Of Baptism" before blasting into a nine song assault of blazing blastbeat-riddled blackthrash, the weirdly drawled vocals sung in Japanese, the songs complex progged-out thrash attacks belted out at supersonic speed. The guitar parts can get pretty crazed, often slipping into wild, almost carnivalesque melodies that most definitely recall some of the earlier Sigh stuff, and the songs surge into weird off-time breakdowns and proggy shredfests, shifting constantly from one dissonant thrash riff or odd off-kilter rhythmic breakdown to the next. Synthesizers add a cold electronic sheen to many of the songs, and bassist Takuya injects some great, nimble-fingered runs and offbeat bass parts in these songs that add another layer of technicality to Basilisk's oblique death-thrash; it's not like he's channeling Steve DiGiorgio or anything, but his performance definitely brings some interesting shading to this stuff. There are a few other tracks of vast cinematic ambience like "Fathomless Depth Crimson Dawn" that are scattered throughout the album, washes of ominous orchestral drift and distant bells breaking through the blast-fury, and there's moments of offbeat riffery, complicated drumming patterns and oddball melody like the middle of "Nosferatu" that's as unexpected and as bonkers as anything from Coroner or Sadus. I definitely had the feeling while listening to this that these guys were a lot more informed by those kinds of 80's prog-thrash greats than contemporary death or black metal, and that vibe makes Basilisk's debut stand out from much of the extreme metal I've been hearing out of Japan lately. They've got a distinct style of their own here, but fans of similarly eccentric Japanese black thrash bands like Abigail and Sigh may find this stuff well worth investigating.
A while back, I stumbled across a subterranean art phenomenon called EroGuro online that blew my doors off. Sort of a loosely-defined movement of macabre
manga infected with deviant sexual overtones, the "Guro" material that I checked out through a couple of fansites was some of the most extreme, boundary-
pushing art I have ever seen. Definitely nothing that timid mainstream anime fans would want to witness, that's for sure. The loose translation of the term
"EroGuro" is "erotic grotesque nonsense", but that doesn't even begin to describe the atrocities that are documented in these stories and illustrations:
extreme surrealistic sexualized body-destruction, disfiguration, beyond-extreme levels of splatter and gore. Rough, rough stuff, but perversely fascinating,
if you have the iron stomach required to explore far out material like this. Enter Japanese duo BASKET OF DEATH, whose new Origami Jigoku disc is a
demonic, avant-grind descent into the filthy, gore-caked underworld of "EroGuro" depravity. Musically, the 14 tracks on show here blend together ridiculously
fast and damaged drum machine grind with psychedelic Japanese electronic noise, jackhammer industrial rhythms and scum-encrusted gabba beats,
disgusting, horrifying samples, crunching sounds of something being eaten, and foul sludgy grooves surfacing in the muck. Imagine the audio
equivalent to the Guinea Pig series of underground gore-surrealism film, a gross hybrid of DISGORGE/CATASEXUAL URGE MOTIVATION gore grind, way-
fucked drugged deathmetal riffing, DISSECTING TABLE style noise industrial, MASONNA/CCCC/ASTROMERO psych troniks, extreme Japanese splatter pornography,
almost BLACK MAYONNAISE-esque fungoid doom crawls, and berserk blasts of gabber/speedcore, all mushed together into a gross, burbling, gorey stew of chopped
up limbs and bondage rope and technicolor fluids. Intensely disturbing, absurd, sense blasting psychedelic filth, and definitely NOT for casual
grindcore fans. Most of these tracks were actually originally released on an out-of-print CD-R by a tiny gore/noisecore label, and are exhumed here along
with 2 additonal tracks. Then there's the booklet, which not only has several seriously disturbing illsutrations and way WAY over-the-top gore
lyrics, but also includes a surprisingly extensive glossary list of Japanese terms to aid you in decoding the lyrics. We seriously have to warn you: this is
about as extreme, evil, offensive, appaling, and disturbing as it gets, albeit in total cartoony, gore metal manner. Over 18 only!
A concise assault of spartan oscillator shock from Japan's Bastarbation, Bastarnation shreds through 52 ultra short tracks in 28 minutes, each track
running exactly 32 seconds in length. THis is brutal shit....imagine an ADD-afflicted noisecore outfit hijacking blasts of wormy sinewave blurts ripped out
of a malfunctioning Atari 2600 mashed with oscillating digital noise, and subsequently spewing them out in short, multi-second bursts. The digital
convulsions on this disc are stripped down to a skeletal twitch, like the defleshed bastard offspring of Oscillating Innards and Groyxo style cut-up
colliding with a rabies infected copy of the classic robo shoot-em-up Berserker. Harsh! The unmarked disc is packaged in a jewel case with a color
cover.
I'm going to go right ahead and put this on the list for "Heaviest Noise Multi-Disc Set" of the year. I had heard that this project was in the works a while back, but I didn't realize how extensive and ambitious this set was going to be until I picked up my own copy of it to check out. Packaged in a custom-made die-cut package that opens up into ten panels, with the discs held in individual pockets on each of the panels (and the fifth disc held inside of a pocket in the center of the box), this amazing package unfolds to reveal the trademark Skull grinning at you from the core of the case, and each of the panels features lyrics and other information for each disc. The case is printed with a combination of spot-gloss and matte inks to create a mix of black-on-black artwork and dark grey print - it looks incredible, and obviously a lot of work and care went into the construction of this. Limited to 720 copies, Our Earth's Blood IV is the most massive Bastard Noise release yet, a five-disc mega-album that is almost entirely made up of collaborations with other noise groups, which gives you a diverse mix of sounds and styles that includes some really surprising stuff that you probably wouldn't expect to heard on a Bastard Noise album.
Check out the lineup of guest artists that are involved with this: Merzbow, Government Alpha, Kelly Churko, Cristian Bass, Clew Of Theseus, Oblong Box, P.W.E., Jay Randall (Agoraphobic Nosebleed), Leila Rauf (also of Amber Asylum), doom metallers Volition, Sickness, Emesis, Surrounded, Andorkappen, Azoikum, Nyarlathotep, Peacemaker (the experimental noise project from Rich Hoak of Brutal Truth/Total Fucking Destruction), Defektro, Golem Gross, TN666 (which features members of Seven Minutes Of Nausea), and Rotten Piece. Jesus! And if you noticed, there's some names in there that aren't "noise" groups, which is where things get really interesting. A big chunk of the tracks on Our Earth's Blood IV feature Bastard Noise venturing into the realms of extreme doom metal, ambient metallic drone, and abstract avant-rock for some of the heaviest BN jams that you've ever heard, but noise freaks shouldn't fret; there's plenty of classic caveman electronics and harsh noise mayhem on here too, and altogether you get almost five hours of Bastard Noise in all of it's various guises, and it's one hell of a crushing noise assault!
The first disc opens with a large-scale collaboration between Bastard Noise, Japanese noisician Government Alpha, Kelly Churko and P.W.E. called
"Earthmaster", a fearsome dronescape made up of rumbling bass tones, high-pitched sinewaves that fluctuate slightly in pitch, the muted rumbling of motors, and a varied vocal attack that switches back and forth between Wood's deep excoriating roar and the freaked out upper-register shrieks. Towards the end, the track gets quite noisy and chaotic, but mostly this is one of the more ambient tracks on the disc. That can't be said for "A Treatise Of Extinction", the nearly ten minute jam that follows, which has BN teamed up with death metal drummer Christian Bass (Night In Gales / Deadsoil) and harsh noise artist Clew Of Theseus for some super intense industrial improv; this is one of the wildest tracks in the collection, a sprawling freeform workout that pits brutal oscillator spew and flesh-piercing feedback tones against metallic sheets of electronic drone and bombastic electronic stabs while Bass hammers his drums into extremely angular percussive shapes. The first half sounds like a less blackened, more glitched out Khylst, with hideous snarls and shrieks infesting the spaces between the drum strikes; after a brief passage of glimmering ambient drones, the drums re-emerge with a heavy, motorized 4/4 beat that ticks it's
way through a mist of minute laser beams and fractal noise until the vocals and drums are ultimately smothered by thick slabs of industrial hum at the end. Oblong Box and BN wander through long stretches of emptiness and minimal industrial whir and buzz floating beneath the starless sky of "Christ Would Cry", and the BN/P.W.E.jam "T.O.T.F.K.A.C." shoots razorblades of test-tone fuckery, the agonized screams of a witch impaled on spikes, swells of deep feedback, and violent fx-pedal freakout through your skull. But the last track is the most surprising: "Venom Bath" has BN, P.W.E. and Jay Randall (the frontman from Agoraphobic Nosebleed, natch) unfurling endless metallic drones, soft smears of electronic fuzz, and lush cosmic drift for almost half an hour, lacing their eerie industrial dronescape with echoing sonar pings, blurts of squelchy noise, brief blasts of garbled feedback, and fronted by a multi-vocal attack; things get a little heavy later on, as the vocals suddenly turn death metal deep and a massive glacial throb appears far beneath all of the layers of sound, but the track never gets completely out of control until the very end, when the effects and noise are suddenly cranked and they soar away in a mangled mass of screaming, raging phaser blasts and brutal analogue squelch.
Disc two opens with "An Argument", one of the few tracks to not feature an outside collaborator working with Bastard Noise; it's one of their tradermark space-troniks freakouts, with wild oscillator chaos streaking through black space and cold ambience stretching out into infinity. But the next track is one of the mosy unique on this collection, and easily the heaviest: "Pathogen" is collaboration between Bastard Noise and Brit doomsters Volition (whose album on Total Rust from last year got big raves around here), starting out with a few minutes of abstract electronics and squealing effects before lurching into crushing doom metal. Massive grinding riffage and pummeling slow-mo drums are wed to Wood's monstrous vocals and tons of freaked-out electronic noise, Hawkwind-esque effects and howling feedback, stretching out for almost ten minutes, a devestating industrial space-doom epic. "We Are The Vermin" combines harsh noise, abrasive metalscrape and crashing cymbals from Sickness that are fused to BN's brutal powersquelch, and "Sunless Hell" is a BN/Emesis collab of pure harsh noise frequency abuse and rumbling bass levels swarming with galactic locust buzz and hellish power electronics. The Skull is again at it alone for "Rushing Into Deceit", a purely electronic doomscape of synthetic horns, distant klaxons and black interstellar drift; and the last track is a team-up between BN, Andorkappen and Surrounded for the throbbing motorized dronescapes, disembodied death metal roars and sinister industrial ambience of "From The Beasts Of Fraud".
Disc number three opens with another epic track, the fourteen minute "Global Shop Of Horrors" that has Bastard Noise collaborating with Nyarlathotep and Azoikum for a massive blowout of deep-space noise, with theremin-like sounds from old sci-fi movie music mixing with crystalline electronic tones, crushing overmodulated bass and rib-rattling bottom-end throb, distorted screams and Wood's guttural bellowing vocals, and huge waves of black cosmic whoosh. "Warnumb" has BN teaming with Government Alpha and Oblong Box for a more subdued cosmic dronescape formed from pulses of thick static, ominous droning
synthesizers, scraping metal, and swells of blissed out ambience; for the first six minutes or so, it's all gorgeously drifty dark ambience, until the insanely guttural, almost death metal-like spoken word vocals appear. Peacemaker (the noise project of Rich Hoak from Brutal Truth/Total Fucking Destruction) joins the Skull for the fifteen-minute plus "Distant Burial Grounds", which moves into even heavier regions; vast molten slabs of detuned ultra-heavy ambient sludge drift through distant nebula, surrounded by celestial skree and massive fluttering bass, shrieking vocals, bursts of violent oscillator noise, buried kosmiche synthesizer drones, orchestral strings, and the distant thunder of kettledrums that rattle the earth and turn this into something that sounds a whole lot more like some sort of super abstract and blackened psychedelic doom/kraut/metal than "noise". "Satellite War" has Clew Of Theseus contributing extreme harsh noise and treble-soaked feedback to a slowly churning miasma of caveman space troniks as freaked out high pitched screams swoop through clouds of reverb, and the last track "Inner Hostage" is a frozen and frightening sprawl of endless dark ambience, deep metallic whir, vomitous blackened witch-snarls, dreamy female vocals electronically processed into lush layered sheets of sound, and keening high end tones, one of the most terrifying tracks that I've ever heard from Bastard Noise.
On disc four, we're first treated to the epic blast-a-thon of "War Loving God", a thick, frenzied maelstrom of chirping feedback, harsh distortion, ultra-violent low-end, stretches of mechanical clockwork ticking and psychotic chipmunk screams, crashing metal junk, incredibly loud and heavy chunks of distorted amp noise, malfunctioning spaceship sounds, huge slabs of abrasive industrial grind, and smoldering electronic buzz that will put your teeth on edge. "Skeletal Human Bacon Hangers" is only slightly less caustic, another large group collab that has Kelly Churko, Government Alpha, Oblong Box, Golem Gross, Culpis, TN666 (the noise project from Matthias Weigand of Seven Minutes Of Nausea), and Rotten Piece all jamming with BN on a furious blast of scorching electronics, a cappela death metal, nightmarish sampler mayhem, and thick clouds of mechanical buzz and hiss and whir. "Blue Green Sorrow" features Clew Of Theseus, P.W.E. and BN firing off endless streams of chirping electronics, pounding sheet-metal reverberations run through psychedelic effects, and steel-plated drones, and "Killing Friends" is an awesome slab of apocalyptic darkness from Merzbow and BN that combines putrid vomiting vocals, tortured screams, vast orchestral drones, huge waves of lush industrial ambience, harsh corrosive noise, grinding buzzsaw distortion, chopped-up analogue tones and blurts of crushing low-end.
The fifth and final disc keeps it coming: BN and Sickness team up for the dark ambience, minimal percussive rhythms, shrill feedback paintings and hard-drive revolt of "Denial Delusions", and "A Mother's Tears (Backwards Species)" unleashes ten minutes of punishing low-end squelch, distorted pedal
flutter, bestial roars, shuffling underwater rhythms and crushing cyborg dub from BN and Guilty Connector. There's yet another BN / Clew Of Theseus jam called "Anomic Machination" which blends together deep isolationist drone, death metal roars tumbling through an infinite wormhole, filigreed streaks of metallic feedback, and some massive muted jet-engine rumble, and the last track "G.R.N." wraps the boxset up with another vicious locust noise assault, as Bizarre Uproar and Rick Gribenas sling feedback and slowly circling clots of high-end noise against the bassy analogue rumble of BN's equipment.
Man, this has to be one of the most extensive and content-loaded noise releases of the year. I mean, c'mon...five discs of Bastard Noise? It's going to take you a while to fully absorb all of this, and the amazing variety of artists that have teamed up with BN for this release keeps the collection from ever getting redundant. Of course, you've gotta be a pretty big fan of Bastard Noise's brand of analague electronic brutality to get into this - this is hardly the place for a BN neophyte to start - but for serious fans of the Skull, this is an essential addition to your collection.
This is Bastard Noise's installment in the infamous Recycled Music Series cassette series, circa 2000 from harsh noise label RRRecords. Pretty
essential for Bastard Noise/Man Is The Bastard Fans, with Wood and company unleashing a brutal wave of interstellar locust attack and electronic caveman
violence that clocks in at over half an hour. Definitely one of the harder recordings BN has beaten us over the skull with as coarse blasts of distortion
swirl together with heavy feedback and distorted monstrous vocals. This being a part of RRR's infamous Recycled Music series, Bastard Noise's jam is
dubbed over assorted commercial pre-recorded music cassettes that had been traded into the RRRecords shop in Lowell, MA. Each is one of a kind, as the nature
of dubbed cassettes allow for glimmers of the original audio content to often bleed into the crushing noise assault that has been dubbed onto the tape. Comes
in a handassembled case/sleeve with duct tape scrawled in black marker across the front.
An ocean of high pitched, eardrum tickling frequencies and cataclysmic ambient horns trumpeting the glacial crawl. Brutal glass winds howl through swarms
of chirping circuits. Sound Engine is one of the best discs yet from BASTARD NOISE, cutting through both brutal insectile noise and delicate cosmic
constructs with homemade electronics, hand made instruments, and field recordings. Tracks like "Destiny Carved By Internal Failure" take on mechanical kraut
-ish celestial manuevers. There are some other faces on this album too, like Chris Dodge's (SPAZZ, EAST WEST BLAST TEST) Jesus Philben contributing to the
harsh feedback shriek of "A Pedestal To Support The Invaders", and "Human Denial" sports frightening caveman death vocals from Guilty Connector. The final
blast, "Seeding Interstellar Space", wa recorded live on KSPC in 2001, and buzzes the heavens like the beating of monstrous intergalactic cyborg moth wings
and surges like rivers of molten distortion. Def one of our fave BASTARD NOISE jams so far. Comes in PACrec brand wallet sleeve. Nice.
When I first opened up the package of new treats from Housepig, this little package was at the top of the box, and my first thought was: Bastard Noise Fun
Pack! Looking like a little novelty-item blister pack, this is a pro-pressed 3" CD enclosed inside of a red & black painted paper sleeve that holds the disc
and a couple of insert sheets, which is then sealed in a plastic sleeve with a little magnifying glass. The 3" CD is a reissue of Bastard Noise's rare 1998
Three Dollar Date 7" on A.I.P.R. Records, and Bastard Noise's side of an obscure split 7" with Hermit. The Three Dollar Date tracks are
lobe-liquifying blasts of heavy analog oscillation designs and grim psychedelic glitchdrones. The split EP tracks are crushing, ultra heavy electronic
spacescapes and squealing megadistortion mangle, with Wood's monstrous gutteral vocal proclamations. Classic punishing Bastard Noise electronics! The Skull
lives! The amazing package replicates the original sleeve art, and the magnifying glass is included so you can read the ridiculously miniature original liner
notes. Awesome!! Limited edition of 500. Housepig rules!
Since 1991, the sci-fi electronics arm of the mighty power violence institution Man Is The Bastard has produced more than a hundred releases, an overwhelming output to say the least. For fans of Bastard Noise's brutal distorted squelch, it's a challenge since all of BN's releases have been consistently powerful and challenging, each one journeying through the group's unearthly electronic soundscapes that they create using unique, hand-made sound generators and oscillators. These hand made instruments give Bastard Noise a sound of their own that is more aesthetically aligned with avant-garde electronic soundtracks than the blast-furnace overdrive of Japanese harsh noise artists, and the band has also distinguished their sound by actually composing much of their material, as abstract and noisy as it might sound. There are structures and patterns in their crushing feedback manipulations that aren't immediately obvious, especially when it sounds like there is a swarm of alien locusts encasing your skull for an hour or so, but if you listen deeply enough, you'll begin to hear structure and repetition in their music. This serious approach to composing heavy electronics is combined with the same fierce anti-authoritarianism and misanthropic ideologies that surrounded the pummeling bass-driven power violence of Man Is The Bastard, which is why the "Skull" has been long one of my favorite electronics groups. If you got into electronic noise like I did in the 90's, then you know all about Bastard Noise and probably have at least a couple of their CDs and 7"s in your collections.
Even after following Bastard Noise for more than a decade, I'm still shocked by what they've done with their newest album, Rogue Astronaut. The disc just came out on the legendary San Diego post-hardcore label Gravity Records, and it's a major evolutionary step for Bastard Noise that I'm betting is going to blow away longtime fans of the band. It's a concept album in the same way that their Descent To Mimas disc is, revolving around a narrative that deals with deep space exploration, humanity ruining this planet and others, GAIA worship, and the annihilation of mankind. The foundation of their sound is still in the crushing feedback manipulations, but on this album Bastard Noise have turned into something devestating and apocalyptic, their electronic noises and feedback fully harnessed and crafted into actual songs, structured arrangements assembled from their distinctive language of oscillator sounds and brutal rhythmic squee. The songs are tense, seething electronic compositions and the closest thing that I can think of to compare them to are the eerie early science fiction soundtracks of Delia Derbyshire and Louis and Bebe Barron, but amplified to bonecrushing levels of bottom-end heaviness. Fragmenting computer code breaking down into cascades of fractal noise over malevolent bass drones. Electronic pulses throb like emergency beacons while monolithic mechanized distortion loops endlessly grind into the earth. The members of Bastard Noise actually cite stuff like the Barron's film score for the classic 1950's science fiction film Forbidden Planet as an influence on their otherworldy electronic soundscapes, but the music on Rogue Astronaut is so crushing and controlled, it's like listening to a pounding industrial version of the Forbidden Planet soundtrack on steroids, the alien chirps and metallic locust swarms and squelchy throbs concentrated into punishing hypnotic dirges. Shit, if this was all that was going on with this album, it would already be one of my favorite new industrial albums. If that classic Bastard Noise sound was powerful before, just wait till you hear it focused into the pulverising killing beam that grinds through the six songs on Rogue Astronaut.
But the real holy shit moment for me is whenever the vocals kick in. Bastard Noise have always used vocals in their music, specifically Eric Wood's deep, monstrous bellow that you recognize immediately from Man Is The Bastard. His brutal roar is what has made alot of Bastard Noise's music way heavier than your usual "noise" album, and has always been a big part of their unique "caveman electronics" sound. But on this album, we hear much more than just Eric's trademark bellow over the electronic arrangements. There are ethereal female vocals that appear (sung by the newest member of Bastard Noise, Leila Abdul Rauf from Saros/Amber Asylum), drifting through spiky feedback and sonic debris, gorgeous and deeply moving. There are stranger, warbling falsetto vocals that float hazily over the scorched wreckage of "Tyranny Beyond Earth". There's plenty of Wood's burly roars of course, and some seriously creepy hissing vocals too. But best of all, there are these impossibly deep death metal grunts that Eric Wood emits, usually in the dead space between the chunks of sound, and it's like hearing Chris Barnes from his days in Cannibal Corpse grunting over these crushing plasma blast dirges and manufactured glitchscapes. It's a whole new facet to Bastard Noise's sound that has turned them into this monstrously heavy abstract industrial thing, you can't call it noise, the label "noise" seems even more generic and useless here than usual, but it's not exactly industrial either, something strange and in-between. It's fucking awesome, that's the bottom line, and in my opinion, this is the best album that Bastard Noise has put out so far, a milestone in their long, challenging existence. If you haven't picked up on it yet, this is ESSENTIAL for Bastard Noise fans, and really anyone into heavy electronics needs to hear this.
And the packaging is pretty nuts. The disc comes in a regular jewel case, but inside you get a tick foldout poster insert that has that iconic skull all over the place, embossed in metallic gold ink and some very strange looking artwork, complete lyrics (with little asides that chart out the album's weird narrative), and along with the booklet you get a rad looking Bastard Noise sticker and four full-color cardstock inserts with weird, creepy computer graphics that illustrate the album's sci-fi concept. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!
Back before the Rogue Astronaut album and the split with Endless Blockade came out, I was always stoked when a new Bastard Noise album came in. You knew that at the very least, Eric Wood and company would deliver another mental blast of sci-fi electronic chaos that would bludgeon you with some of the most extreme oscillator/pedal freakouts imaginable. But when the band started to radically evolve their sound starting with the Rogue Astronaut album, I began to get pretty obsessed with what they were doing, adding a new level of heaviness to the Bastard Noise template, incorporating brutal guttural vocals, and seemingly beginning to return, however slightly, back towards the crushing proggy hardcore sound of Man Is The Bastard, from which BN originally sprang. And when their split with Endless Blockade came out earlier this year, it confirmed exactly what I had been hoping; Wood back on bass, the lineup configuring into an actual band, bringing in an actual drummer, and combining their vicious space-locust noisescapes with pummeling progged-out powerviolence that virtually picks up where Man Is the Bastard left off.
Which brings us to the new Bastard Noise album A Culture Of Monsters. It picks up right where the Endless Blockade split left off, with the new vision of BN fully taking form, taking the sound Of Man Is The Bastard and adding the signature Bastard Noise electronics, and incorporating a MUCH heavier prog influence. The result is some of the most crushing music from this group since Mancruel. The opening title track is a spoken word piece from Nathan Martin (formerly of Creation Is Crucifixion) that sets the apocalyptic mood of the album, which launches right into "Pincer's Movement", a pummeling prog-sludge workout, a sort-of anthemic chorus wrapped around a bass-heavy sludgecore attack, blanketed in alien electronics and chirping oscillator abuse, ultra deep guttural death metal style growls, all spacey and psychedelic but SUPER heavy and groovy, with some amazing bass playing and drumming, like MITB crossed with King Crimson or something. "Me and Hitler" is demonic prog-funk weirdness, gruff shouts trading off with snarling high pitched vokills, complex bass riffing and rhythmic shifts locking into jarring time signature changes, then unleashing a crushing sludgy riff and squealing electronics five minutes in. For a moment, everything falls away and it's just a simple bass melody playing slowly while soft crooning harmonized vocals float across the ether, a dreamy driftscape stretching out for another five minutes, then drops back in with another triumphant riff assault. The album's most surprising moment comes with "If Another World...", a short but beautiful piece of ambient jazz drift, with falsetto vocals smeared over gentle Rhodes piano, totally unexpected and utterly gorgeous. Then "Through Modern Existence (The March of the Trolls)" stomps in, almost like a death metal Ruins jam, spastic guttural powerviolent prog with complex angular bass workouts and thrashy drums, deep grunting vokills trading off with gruff MITB/Infest style shouting, tons of chirping buzzing fx, the whole assault super complex and dizzying and crammed into a mere two minutes. The punishing heaviness and bouncy bass riffs of "Lumberton" turns into a killer stop/start groove, but then suddenly shifts gears into total FUSION JAZZ, Rhodes keys drifting over straight jazz bass lines and layered rhythms, the switch is immediate and seamless, and from there the band continues to weave back and forth between the brutal prog crush and jazz...it's another stunning moment on the album that comes out of nowhere, they pull it off perfectly, and finally kick back into the majestic riff that opened the song at the end. Then the album ends with the ten minute epic "Interior War", crushing slo-mo riffage and bestial vokills combined with electronic fx that pans from speaker to speaker, the song almost taking on a stoner rock swing at times, then flowing into a long stretch of pure minimal ambience, then back into another spastic, jazzy death-prog assault with busy drumming, until it finally finishes in a cloud of cosmic ambience and creepy electronic flux.
It defies expectations of what a Bastard Noise album could sound like. It's the band's most adventurous and BRUTAL album yet. If you dug what they were doing on the split with Endless Blockade, A Culture Of Monsters will cave your skull in. Highly recommended!
Available on both cd and vinyl, with both presented in a full color gatefold package with a full color insert/booklet.
Also available in a limited edition gatefold vinyl.
Back before the Rogue Astronaut album and the split with Endless Blockade came out, I was always stoked when a new Bastard Noise album came in. You knew that at the very least, Eric Wood and company would deliver another mental blast of sci-fi electronic chaos that would bludgeon you with some of the most extreme oscillator/pedal freakouts imaginable. But when the band started to radically evolve their sound starting with the Rogue Astronaut album, I began to get pretty obsessed with what they were doing, adding a new level of heaviness to the Bastard Noise template, incorporating brutal guttural vocals, and seemingly beginning to return, however slightly, back towards the crushing proggy hardcore sound of Man Is The Bastard, from which BN originally sprang. And when their split with Endless Blockade came out earlier this year, it confirmed exactly what I had been hoping; Wood back on bass, the lineup configuring into an actual band, bringing in an actual drummer, and combining their vicious space-locust noisescapes with pummeling progged-out powerviolence that virtually picks up where Man Is the Bastard left off.
Which brings us to the new Bastard Noise album A Culture Of Monsters. It picks up right where the Endless Blockade split left off, with the new vision of BN fully taking form, taking the sound Of Man Is The Bastard and adding the signature Bastard Noise electronics, and incorporating a MUCH heavier prog influence. The result is some of the most crushing music from this group since Mancruel. The opening title track is a spoken word piece from Nathan Martin (formerly of Creation Is Crucifixion) that sets the apocalyptic mood of the album, which launches right into "Pincer's Movement", a pummeling prog-sludge workout, a sort-of anthemic chorus wrapped around a bass-heavy sludgecore attack, blanketed in alien electronics and chirping oscillator abuse, ultra deep guttural death metal style growls, all spacey and psychedelic but SUPER heavy and groovy, with some amazing bass playing and drumming, like MITB crossed with King Crimson or something. "Me and Hitler" is demonic prog-funk weirdness, gruff shouts trading off with snarling high pitched vokills, complex bass riffing and rhythmic shifts locking into jarring time signature changes, then unleashing a crushing sludgy riff and squealing electronics five minutes in. For a moment, everything falls away and it's just a simple bass melody playing slowly while soft crooning harmonized vocals float across the ether, a dreamy driftscape stretching out for another five minutes, then drops back in with another triumphant riff assault. The album's most surprising moment comes with "If Another World...", a short but beautiful piece of ambient jazz drift, with falsetto vocals smeared over gentle Rhodes piano, totally unexpected and utterly gorgeous. Then "Through Modern Existence (The March of the Trolls)" stomps in, almost like a death metal Ruins jam, spastic guttural powerviolent prog with complex angular bass workouts and thrashy drums, deep grunting vokills trading off with gruff MITB/Infest style shouting, tons of chirping buzzing fx, the whole assault super complex and dizzying and crammed into a mere two minutes. The punishing heaviness and bouncy bass riffs of "Lumberton" turns into a killer stop/start groove, but then suddenly shifts gears into total FUSION JAZZ, Rhodes keys drifting over straight jazz bass lines and layered rhythms, the switch is immediate and seamless, and from there the band continues to weave back and forth between the brutal prog crush and jazz...it's another stunning moment on the album that comes out of nowhere, they pull it off perfectly, and finally kick back into the majestic riff that opened the song at the end. Then the album ends with the ten minute epic "Interior War", crushing slo-mo riffage and bestial vokills combined with electronic fx that pans from speaker to speaker, the song almost taking on a stoner rock swing at times, then flowing into a long stretch of pure minimal ambience, then back into another spastic, jazzy death-prog assault with busy drumming, until it finally finishes in a cloud of cosmic ambience and creepy electronic flux.
It defies expectations of what a Bastard Noise album could sound like. It's the band's most adventurous and BRUTAL album yet. If you dug what they were doing on the split with Endless Blockade, A Culture Of Monsters will cave your skull in. Highly recommended!
Available on both cd and vinyl, with both presented in a full color gatefold package with a full color insert/booklet.
Until recently, you would usually have a pretty good idea as to what to expect from a new Bastard Noise album whenever one would come out. Brutal distorted analogue noise ripped out of hand-made customized effects units would usually be the foundation for BN's unique brand of experimental noise, often evoking scenes of swarms of carnivorous interstellar insects devouring whole galaxies, or cataclysmic computerized warfare. But ever since the band released their incredible Rogue Astronaut album a few years ago, they've been mutating into something much more than just a "noise" group, bringing in new members, adding actual drums and vocals and bass guitar, forming into an actual band. And best of all to those of us who fucking love the band that BN sprouted from, Man Is The Bastard, we saw Eric Wood picking the bass guitar up again and delivering his utterly warped and crushing style of low-end battery that made the music of MITB so unique and punishing to listen to. Last year's A Culture Of Monsters blew my head apart with the way it channeled that classic Man Is The Bastard brutality into a new kind of proggy sludgecore while keeping and incorporating all of the flesh-rending electronic noise, and they head into even more metallic and crushing territory on their latest, the appropriately titled Skulldozer.
What a fuckin' monster this is. And the Skull continues to throw some surprises my way, like how the album opens up with a wash of gleaming, celestial synthesizer chords that sweep in like Tangerine Dream over the first couple of minutes, leading up to where the band caves in with a grinding, bass-heavy sludge riff. New singer Aimee Artz matches Wood's inhuman death metal-esque roars with her own assault of skin-crawling shrieks, and when they start trading off against each other, it sounds pretty goddamn vicious. While the band slogs through an angular, complicated sludge workout, the rhythm section twisting and turning through tricky fills and Wood's almost math-rock like bass lines, those space rock keys continue to drift overhead alongside other bleeping, spacey effects. This all stretches out for a while, and then trails off into a field of pure electronic hum as they drift out into a long passage of eerie deep-space ambience that begins to swarm with low buzzing tones and weird analogue oscillator noises. Warning signals pulse off in the blackness, heralding the return of the full band, but when they suddenly kick back in, it's with this quick, lurching noise rock assault that is insanely vicious sounding, with pounding double bass drumming and grinding bass riffing, surging in and out of crawling doom riffs and spastic progged-out un-grooves.
After that, the album jumps from shorter faster blasts of fucked up power violence to longer electronics-heavy wig-outs. Those shorter hardcore songs are the most ferocious tunes that Bastard Noise has ever produced, songs like "B.T.P" and "Seeing The Same Fate" blazing through rapid-fire thrash and slower sludgy breakdowns that are infested with all kinds of weird effects and stop-and-go arrangements. But they're interspersed with the terrifying, isolationist ambience of the instrumental noisescape "Fifty Million Light Years", a sprawling piece of blackened kosmiche drift with howling vocals and psychedelic noises swirling through the track, leading into more washes of corroded space rock synths and creepy creaking sounds, and the savage, jagged prog of "Earth On A Stretcher" and the labyrinthine, krautrock-infected hypnosludge of "The Final Days (Of Our Species)".
Then there is "Rachel", a shorter track of dark, gorgeous ambience, one of the most cinematic sounding pieces of music I�ve ever heard from Bastard Noise, and easily the most unexpected thing on this album. Soft fluttering drones drift out across a twilight horizon flecked with beautiful and eerie falsetto singing, the melody having this vague jazzy feel, but there's also some delicate slide guitar going on as well. It's just breathtaking. And it closes with another long ambient noise track, this one with those trademark oscillator sounds and chirping electronics slowly taking over a vast black expanse of nightmarish drift, creating a feeling of unease that's exacerbated by the air-raid like siren tones and distant wailing noises that slice through the darkness.
It's not that Skulldozer is all that different from the last album, all of the basic ingredients are the same. But the music is sleeker, the electronics and hardcore elements working together in closer harmony, never lapsing in sheer heaviness but laying out some of the most extensive electronic soundscapery I've heard from BN in a while. It's barbaric, progressive, and with the awesome misanthropic lyrics and attitude that seeps out of this record, Skulldozer has landed on my top ten list for this year. Anyone into the classic West Coast PV sound of bands like Infest, Crossed Out, Neanderthal, and especially Man Is The Bastard need to hear this, but Bastard Noise keeps mutating that sound into totally new forms. Highly recommended!
Until recently, you would usually have a pretty good idea as to what to expect from a new Bastard Noise album whenever one would come out. Brutal distorted analogue noise ripped out of hand-made customized effects units would usually be the foundation for BN's unique brand of experimental noise, often evoking scenes of swarms of carnivorous interstellar insects devouring whole galaxies, or cataclysmic computerized warfare. But ever since the band released their incredible Rogue Astronaut album a few years ago, they've been mutating into something much more than just a "noise" group, bringing in new members, adding actual drums and vocals and bass guitar, forming into an actual band. And best of all to those of us who fucking love the band that BN sprouted from, Man Is The Bastard, we saw Eric Wood picking the bass guitar up again and delivering his utterly warped and crushing style of low-end battery that made the music of MITB so unique and punishing to listen to. Last year's A Culture Of Monsters blew my head apart with the way it channeled that classic Man Is The Bastard brutality into a new kind of proggy sludgecore while keeping and incorporating all of the flesh-rending electronic noise, and they head into even more metallic and crushing territory on their latest, the appropriately titled Skulldozer.
What a fuckin' monster this is. And the Skull continues to throw some surprises my way, like how the album opens up with a wash of gleaming, celestial synthesizer chords that sweep in like Tangerine Dream over the first couple of minutes, leading up to where the band caves in with a grinding, bass-heavy sludge riff. New singer Aimee Artz matches Wood's inhuman death metal-esque roars with her own assault of skin-crawling shrieks, and when they start trading off against each other, it sounds pretty goddamn vicious. While the band slogs through an angular, complicated sludge workout, the rhythm section twisting and turning through tricky fills and Wood's almost math-rock like bass lines, those space rock keys continue to drift overhead alongside other bleeping, spacey effects. This all stretches out for a while, and then trails off into a field of pure electronic hum as they drift out into a long passage of eerie deep-space ambience that begins to swarm with low buzzing tones and weird analogue oscillator noises. Warning signals pulse off in the blackness, heralding the return of the full band, but when they suddenly kick back in, it's with this quick, lurching noise rock assault that is insanely vicious sounding, with pounding double bass drumming and grinding bass riffing, surging in and out of crawling doom riffs and spastic progged-out un-grooves.
After that, the album jumps from shorter faster blasts of fucked up power violence to longer electronics-heavy wig-outs. Those shorter hardcore songs are the most ferocious tunes that Bastard Noise has ever produced, songs like "B.T.P" and �Seeing The Same Fate" blazing through rapid-fire thrash and slower sludgy breakdowns that are infested with all kinds of weird effects and stop-and-go arrangements. But they're interspersed with the terrifying, isolationist ambience of the instrumental noisescape "Fifty Million Light Years", a sprawling piece of blackened kosmiche drift with howling vocals and psychedelic noises swirling through the track, leading into more washes of corroded space rock synths and creepy creaking sounds, and the savage, jagged prog of "Earth On A Stretcher" and the labyrinthine, krautrock-infected hypnosludge of "The Final Days (Of Our Species)".
Then there is "Rachel", a shorter track of dark, gorgeous ambience, one of the most cinematic sounding pieces of music I�ve ever heard from Bastard Noise, and easily the most unexpected thing on this album. Soft fluttering drones drift out across a twilight horizon flecked with beautiful and eerie falsetto singing, the melody having this vague jazzy feel, but there's also some delicate slide guitar going on as well. It's just breathtaking. And it closes with another long ambient noise track, this one with those trademark oscillator sounds and chirping electronics slowly taking over a vast black expanse of nightmarish drift, creating a feeling of unease that's exacerbated by the air-raid like siren tones and distant wailing noises that slice through the darkness.
It's not that Skulldozer is all that different from the last album, all of the basic ingredients are the same. But the music is sleeker, the electronics and hardcore elements working together in closer harmony, never lapsing in sheer heaviness but laying out some of the most extensive electronic soundscapery I've heard from BN in a while. It's barbaric, progressive, and with the awesome misanthropic lyrics and attitude that seeps out of this record, Skulldozer has landed on my top ten list for this year. Anyone into the classic West Coast PV sound of bands like Infest, Crossed Out, Neanderthal, and especially Man Is The Bastard need to hear this, but Bastard Noise keeps mutating that sound into totally new forms. Highly recommended!
The Skull's back with this two-song Ep that goes even further into the progged-out hardcore/power violence sound that bandleader Eric Wood pioneered in Man Is The Bastard. Since Bastard Noise turned into a full band a few years ago and evolved from brutal cosmic electronics into its current incarnation as a blasting, angular avant-hardcore outfit, the band has produced some of the most savage extreme music to emerge over the past few years. Needless to say, anyone that's been pining away for Man Is The Bastard's unique bass-heavy brand of blastprog needs to pick up all of the new B. Noise records pronto.
The Progression Ep is loaded with more of this stuff, and marks the arrival of new B-Noise drummer Jesse Appelhans from cult prog maniacs Upsilon Acrux. Beginning with the jagged, angular thrash of "The Contrarian", the band hurls itself into a super-violent eruption of hyper-speed hardcore riffs and warped noise rock anti-grooves, shrieking electrocuted-monkey vocals and bowel-rupturing guttural bellowing. The first half of the song is one of Bastard Noise's most vicious assaults, period, but then the latter half suddenly drops out into one of Wood's signature fields of psychedelic oscillator fuckery and buzzing, celestial ambience.
The other side features "Kicking The Hornets Nest", a sludgy battering-ram dirge that staggers and lurches with each distorted blast of bass guitar and spasmodic drumming, later turning into a weirdly catchy punk hook with Wood letting rip with some of his awesome bass-shred. The song dips into some almost Sabbathian doom at one point, swarming with more of those crazed fluttering electronic noises and brain-warping Theremins. Fuckin' brutal!
Ever since they released the Rogue Astronaut album, Bastard Noise has been evolving from its longtime "caveman electronics" sound into a much heavier and more riff-based beast that brought back a lot of the proggy powerviolence of Man Is The Bastard, the legendary hardcore band that more or less transformed into this more experimental and electronic-based project headed up by member Eric Wood in the early 90s. As amazing (and skull-crushing) as all of the more recent Bastard Noise material has been, I've actually been hungering for some of the projects extreme black-hole industrial noise lately, and this super-limited Lp on Haunted Hotel fills that demand nicely.
This Lp features two side-long tracks, the first being "Mechanized Apparatus Revolt", an abstract electronic soundscape filled with BN mastermind Eric Wood's signature oscillator abuse. bestial roars and chirping space-locust electronics, a deep rumbling resonance lurking beneath the entire piece as the band splatters a variety of trippy, abrasive noise, gong-like percussion, doomed war-drums and corrosive effects overhead. Definitely more minimal and restrained compared to the level of blow-out that a lot of Bastard Noise stuff can get, but there's still quite a bit of kosmische menace smoldering at the heart of "Revolt"'s squealing apocalyptic deathdrift.
On the other side, "Cyborg Quarantine Compromise" unfolds into a vast expanse of dark cosmic ambience, distant droning whirr and humming black synthesizers diffused into the stygian depths while alien chirps and mewling electronics drift up out of the chasm. It's also one of the prettiest sounding Bastard Noise tracks I've heard in awhile, with some gorgeous passages of gleaming otherworldly ambience surfacing among the more abrasive and menacing sounds.
Limited to three hundred copies.
��Even though the esteemed experimental/punk label Vermiform Records has been defunct for over a decade, your intrepid bin-crawlers here at Crucial Blast managed to track down some of the last available copies of the label's crushing 1998 double CD from Man Is The Bastard offshoot Bastard Noise, If It Be Not True. This collection of brutal electronics from the notorious experimental noise outfit has been out of print for years, and this is the first time we've ever been able to stock it here. I'd been hunting after this album for ages, a collection of some of Bastard Noise's earliest recordings mostly recorded between 1992 and 1994 back when both Man Is The Bastard and Bastard Noise were actively co-existing. It's classic electronic destruction, a mixture of the sort of abstract oscillator-driven soundscapes and violent "caveman electronics" that defined their early 90s output, spread across two discs and totaling nearly an hour and a half of brutal psychedelic noise.
�� Early on in their career, Bastard Noise were essentially creating a mutant version of power-electronics filtered through the barbarism of the early West Coast powerviolence scene, and when they cranked their home-made electronic noise machines to full blast, the sounds that they produced could be fucking terrifying. Expect nothing less than caustic sonic skullfuck: chirping Morse-code like signals are rattled off over the sounds of malfunctioning heart monitors and heavy distorted pulses; heavy distorted synthesizer drones throb and rumble; blasts of abrasive glitchery and juddering static-drenched noise scorch sprawling sound-collages of jumbled bible scripture and evangelical Christian sermonizing layered across disturbing electro-acoustic sound sculptures in ever more disorienting patterns; eruptions of ultra-distorted squelch and swarming insectile electronic buzz fill the air in suffocating black clouds of noise. These abrasive, abstract noisescapes are often accompanied by band leader Eric Wood's brutal, almost death-metal style vocals, a guttural, tortured bellow that brings a whole new level of murderous menace to these electronic sound sculptures. Some of the highlights on Be Not True include the sputtering robotic horror of "New Mexican Radiation" and the nauseating death-drones of "Leeches", the sheet-metal savagery of "Ready, Willing, And Able" and "Untitled 2" with their terrifying witch-screams and bellowing bestial vocals drifting high above the distant metallic reverberations and oil-tanker percussive rumblings, which grow more garbled and nightmarish as they track unfolds. Equally crushing are the bass-heavy locust-electronics of "Attempts At Revival" and the disturbing cardiac trance of "Animatronic Blood Harvest", but the album features some moments of almost meditative minimalism as well, like the super-minimal drone of "Control Holiday ". The heaviest, most crushing moments of sonic violence appear via the soul-flattening pneumatic doom that arises on tracks like "Deceleration Range" and "Equilibrium Tremor", so monstrous that they begin to resemble the charred-black industrial sludgescapes of The Human Quena Orchestra, intensely heavy and utterly oppressive fields of carnivorous black drone-death. Like most of the other releases that came out from Bastard Noise in the mid 90's, this drips with the band's misanthropic worldview and excoriation of technological society; few "noise" groups have managed to channel the sound of Western civilization collapsing in slow motion as effectively as these guys. The two discs are housed in a jewel case that comes in a screen-printed manila envelope that also contains a twelve-page booklet of lyrics and artwork, released in a limited edition of 940 copies.
��� As much as I love the full-band, weirdo prog-core stuff that Eric Wood has been doing with Bastard Noise in recent years, there's definitely nothing quite like the cosmic terror that the guy is able to whip up with his full-on "caveman electronics" style noisescapes. And that's the territory that we find the band in with this new disc. The seemingly ever-shifting lineup of Bastard Noise evolves once again for this live album, which features Wood teaming up with noise artist Anthony Saunders, who some of you might remember from his crazed digital grindcore band Dataclast that appeared on one of Crucial Blast's earliest releases. Babycastles consists of a single forty-minute piece titled "Alien Mother Nest / Space Graves" that the duo recorded live in New York City in 2014. You probably wouldn't even know that this is a live album from listening to it, though, as the sound quality is great and the group's electronic assault gets pretty massive after the long, slow build across the first third of the disc.
��� With "Nest", these guys are in no rush to assault the listener. The first several minutes of the set is all slow-burn celestial drift, slowly undulating waves of distorted drone shifting across a spacious black expanse as eerie electronic cries sound from far off in the distance, and glimmering sine-waves and high-end tones dot the rumbling, sprawling driftscape. As the performance progresses, though, other more abrasive sounds slowly begin to descend upon their thrumming electric field, high distressing feedback tones hovering endlessly over the approach of jittering machine-like noises and more of those weird distant electronic shrieks. The layered sounds become more intricate as they sculpt their noise into an symphony of tortured engines and squealing test-tones, everything clouded by heavy doses of reverb, building into a squirming, howling mass of menacing vermiform electronics punctuated with increasingly violent blasts of monstrous metallic roar, unseen power tool rituals, and avalanches of corroded sheet metal. Abrasive chirping glitchery swarms like gusts of ravenous bio-mech insects sweeping down and around the lifeless factory pulse and collapsing metal forms that loom over the final ten minutes of the set. It's an exquisitely crafted blast of malevolent alien drone, one of the more "ambient" Bastard Noise recordings of late, but underscored with plenty of that roaring mutant heaviness and cyborg / caveman psychedelia that we know and love. Comes in gatefold packaging.
���� Here's another older, out-of-print Bastard Noise release that we got ahold of recently via a warehouse find from one of our distributors. Released on the long-gone Rhetoric Records label, 1996's Our Earth's Blood Part III was another furious installment in Man Is The Bastard's sweeping anti-human saga, featuring the quartet version of the band fronted by Eric Wood's barbaric vocals. It dishes out four tracks of brutal "caveman electronics" that once again combined their hardcore-derived ferocity with a mixture of psychedelic harsh noise and extreme power electronics influences. And as usual, the result is monstrous. "Our Earth's Blood" a nightmarish mass of feral, snarling vocals, howling feedback manipulations, and ultra-distorted low-end synth-slime, a seething, sadistic assault of bestial electronics that gradually grows more powerful and violent. "HR 2202" is a slightly more subdued electronic noisescape, but still pretty abrasive, while "Lost And Found" is a direct threat against the notorious German label/bootleg operation of the same name, spelled out in no uncertain terms as Wood spews his deadly, death metal-esque roar across a pestilent clot of noxious noise and abrasive glitchery. And closer "Campfire Hymn" finishes this up with a seriously creepy dronescape, once again haunted by those bellowing, gut-churning screams. Brutal.
���� Released for Bastard Noise's 2015 Japanese tour, Our Earth's Blood Part V is the latest chapter in the band's ongoing series of ecologically minded electronic outbursts, which goes back all the way to the early 90s. This 7" features nine tracks in all, each a "statement" of anti-human / eco-conscious fury and a collaboration between Bastard Noise and one of their harshnoise compatriots, with all of them apparently hailing from Japan. And there are some pretty well-known names in here, from Guilty Connector and K2 to Toshiji Mikawa ( Hijokaidan, Incapacitants) and Hiroshi Hasegawa ( C.C.C.C., Astro), Facialmess and Government Alpha, as well as a few lesser-known artists like Katsura Mouri and Shayne Bowden offering their own skills in the creation of these terrifying noisefields.
���� It's all monstrous stuff, moving from squealing electronic hellscapes possessed by hideous, death-metal like roars, to squalls of extreme oscillator violence and rumbling low-frequency chaos, sprawls of skittering, insectile glitchery and malevolent black drone, grotesque digital vomitblasts and shrieking, garbled heaviness, with only brief glimpses of calm caught between the onslaughts of electronic savagery. The whole EP is boiling with sickening psychedelic electronics, but the highlight for me has to be the very last track, which sees Makiko Suda from grindcore band Flagitious Idiosyncrasy In The Dilapidation teaming up with Bastard Noise to assault us with a dual-vocal freak-out that feels like something scraped from the bottom of my blackest nightmares, the sound of demons slowly surfacing from the depths of a glistening kosmische driftscape.
���� Limited to three hundred copies.
���� More rare, out-of-print Bastard Noise action that we obtained as part of a recent warehouse find, this 2002 7" features the Eric Wood/John Wiese lineup of the band delivering two tracks of brutal insectile electronics for the Dutch imprint No Fucking Labels. As with other BN releases from the Wiese era of the band, this stuff is particularly harsh.
���� First track "Unleash The Cataclysm" hovers on the edge between eerie dronescapery and full-bore mutant electronics. The entire side features some extremely violent electronic noise roaring and sputtering and seething over a field of gleaming, almost kosmische synthdrift that's actually quite pretty. Beneath that squall of brutal distortion and chirping chaos and apocalyptic klaxon blasts, though, one detects shimmering steely drones that glow incandescent in the depths, and it begins to resemble an early Tangerine Dream piece infested with swarms of extraterrestrial insect life. In those moments where the noisier elements fall away, leaving just echoes of their violence dissipating over those darkened celestial drones, this becomes quite captivating.
���� It's not until the second track when those trademark beast-screams finally show up. "Punishment Legion" erupts into a barbaric chaos of guttural bellowing screams and insane, high-pitched shrieks that rage over a roiling fog of industrial noise, a miasma of distorted jackhammer blasts and frenzied glitchery, ultra-distorted low-end rupturing clouds of mechanical drone, demented electronic bleeping patterns rising and falling over that skull-scraping churn. It doesn't deviate from the sound that Bastard Noise had nailed down by this time, but it's powerful, crushing stuff, psychedelic electrified misanthropy delivered at bone-rattling levels of aggression and volume.
���� Another long out-of-print 7" from Bastard Noise that we stumbled across as part of a recent warehouse find at one of our distributors, the R.A. Sessions 7" was released on the defunct grindcore label Riotous Assembly back in 2000, and got a lot of play around here when it originally came out. The music featured on this EP is pretty typical of what Bastard Noise were doing around this time, blending Eric Wood's brutal, bestial vocals with constantly shifting electronic noisescapes that moved from moments of calm to the violently caustic; I'm still a big fan of that sound despite their moving in a heavier, "proggier" direction later in the decade.
���� These tracks show some variety, from the squealing industrial dronescape of "The Approval Of Constant Rape" (whose lyrics constitute an over-the-top call for the destruction of the people behind German punk distributor Lost & Found - yikes!) that fills out the a-side, all infested with shrill high-frequency machine-squeal and jittery mechanical noise, to the more concentrated blasts of alien power electronics and bleak isolationist ambience that make up "Pink Flag Truth" and "Space Burial (Preserved For Eternity)" on the flipside. Pretty harsh stuff, and still as powerful today as it was back when it first came out.
This rare 7" on the Balefire label is back in stock here at C-Blast for the first time in nearly ten years; featuring the two-part "Moralist Factor", this Ep is based around a collaboration between Bastard Noise and noise artists Moz and Hermit that was completed via swapping tracks back and forth in the mail. The result is something in between the insectile electronic swarms of BN and a darker strain of experimental glitchscape.
"The Moralist Factor (Part 1)" begins with the sound of something resembling a trip-hop loop whirling beneath a steadily encroaching wall of nightmarish electronics, massive drones and howling synthesizers rising in a jet-engine blast of sound, huge and intensely ominous, a wall of apocalyptic deathdrone that is gradually invaded by Eric Wood's chirping oscillators and sputtering effects boxes. This rumbling factory nightmare drifts out from there into a vast expanse of chittering electronic noise and whirring high-end drones that becomes a gradual ascent into the stratosphere.
When the second half picks up on the other side, that insidious melody from the beginning of the previous track reappears, this time leading you into a hiveswarm of insectile oscillations, eerie half-formed melodies, trippy Theremin-like tones that echo over the mechanical rumblings that emanate up from below; it ends up somewhere surprisingly beautiful as those eerie looping notes come to the forefront and turn this somewhat dreamy dronecloud into something like the sounds of an alien wilderness at the end.
Released on green vinyl in a limited edition of three hundred copies.
Now available on both CD and LP. Apparently in the works for years, this vicious split has longtime friends Lack Of Interest and Bastard Noise finally teaming up for this monstrous two-way beating, with the Skull's crushing prog-violence getting all fusiony on their side before coming up against the ultra-violent blastcore of LOI's assault.
With guest drummer Rich Hoak (Brutal Truth / Total Fucking Destruction) sitting behind the kit for their four tracks, Bastard Noise once again deliver a new twist on their electronically-mutated power-prog-violence, bringing some strangely haunting melody to the songs that adds to their twisted apocalyptic power. The first song "Denial Mastered" has a spaced-out, jazzy feel with mysterious trumpet-like synth drones that drift in the background; it's still pretty goddamn brutal, the trio spazzing out in grand fashion as they wrap their sludgy bass riffs and complex rhythms around the song's seven minute surge, the male and female vocals trading off on that terrifying mix of Aimee Artz's high-pitched shriek and the monstrous guttural bellowing. Wood delivers plenty of his freaked-out angular bass guitar shred all over this song, but the most powerful moments are when they suddenly shift into that majestic, jazzy doom that resurfaces later on, making it one of the more eerie sounding Bastard Noise jams in recent memory. "Rogue Blue Blood Spill" follows, assaulting the listener with squalls of brutal oscillator chaos and spiky angular hardcore, furious and ferociously proggy, while "Putrid Hog Men" douses it's pummeling heaviness with ample amounts of kosmische synthesizer, sending their mathy sludge into the stratosphere amid soaring space rock FX and waves of dense SETI signal static. The last song "The Time Shifter" features additional vocals from guest growler Mitchell Luna from the grindcore band Maruta, and serves up another, shorter assault of spazzoid brutality loaded with crazed bass runs and jagged off-kilter riffage, and utterly demented drumming from Hoak.
Lack Of Interest follow with a killer twelve-song blast of their stop-n'-go powerviolence, a perfect combination of violent Infest-influence thug-blast and crazed old-school crossover thrash. Believe me, I've heard a bazillion Infest clones in my time, but Lack of Interest are one of the only outfits to be heavily influenced by that seminal powerviolence band that managed to come up with something original. The speed is almost always blazing fast and they've got some of the most sickeningly precise drumming out of any contempo powerviolence band I've heard, but they also work in some vicious circle-pit breakdowns on songs like "Grown To Sicken", "All That's Lost In Your Life, I'll Help You Find" and "Hands Up" while dousing their hardcore riffs in ugly dissonance, and you can really hear some heavy early L.A. hardcore elements glaring out from behind their light-speed beatings and punishing gutter crawls. Between the two of these bands, this record is a terrific blast of bludgeoning power.
Now available on both CD and LP. Apparently in the works for years, this vicious split has longtime friends Lack Of Interest and Bastard Noise finally teaming up for this monstrous two-way beating, with the Skull's crushing prog-violence getting all fusiony on their side before coming up against the ultra-violent blastcore of LOI's assault.
With guest drummer Rich Hoak (Brutal Truth / Total Fucking Destruction) sitting behind the kit for their four tracks, Bastard Noise once again deliver a new twist on their electronically-mutated power-prog-violence, bringing some strangely haunting melody to the songs that adds to their twisted apocalyptic power. The first song "Denial Mastered" has a spaced-out, jazzy feel with mysterious trumpet-like synth drones that drift in the background; it's still pretty goddamn brutal, the trio spazzing out in grand fashion as they wrap their sludgy bass riffs and complex rhythms around the song's seven minute surge, the male and female vocals trading off on that terrifying mix of Aimee Artz's high-pitched shriek and the monstrous guttural bellowing. Wood delivers plenty of his freaked-out angular bass guitar shred all over this song, but the most powerful moments are when they suddenly shift into that majestic, jazzy doom that resurfaces later on, making it one of the more eerie sounding Bastard Noise jams in recent memory. "Rogue Blue Blood Spill" follows, assaulting the listener with squalls of brutal oscillator chaos and spiky angular hardcore, furious and ferociously proggy, while "Putrid Hog Men" douses it's pummeling heaviness with ample amounts of kosmische synthesizer, sending their mathy sludge into the stratosphere amid soaring space rock FX and waves of dense SETI signal static. The last song "The Time Shifter" features additional vocals from guest growler Mitchell Luna from the grindcore band Maruta, and serves up another, shorter assault of spazzoid brutality loaded with crazed bass runs and jagged off-kilter riffage, and utterly demented drumming from Hoak.
Lack Of Interest follow with a killer twelve-song blast of their stop-n'-go powerviolence, a perfect combination of violent Infest-influence thug-blast and crazed old-school crossover thrash. Believe me, I've heard a bazillion Infest clones in my time, but Lack of Interest are one of the only outfits to be heavily influenced by that seminal powerviolence band that managed to come up with something original. The speed is almost always blazing fast and they've got some of the most sickeningly precise drumming out of any contempo powerviolence band I've heard, but they also work in some vicious circle-pit breakdowns on songs like "Grown To Sicken", "All That's Lost In Your Life, I'll Help You Find" and "Hands Up" while dousing their hardcore riffs in ugly dissonance, and you can really hear some heavy early L.A. hardcore elements glaring out from behind their light-speed beatings and punishing gutter crawls. Between the two of these bands, this record is a terrific blast of bludgeoning power.
���Another new collaborative recording between Eric Wood's amorphous Bastard Noise project and likeminded pals, this 7" features the Skull teaming up with another SoCal outfit called Witches Of Malibu, which turns out to be a new project from Richard Skott of 80's era industrialists Hunting Lodge and space rockers Farflung. Together, these guys blurt out a fantastic blast of monstrous power electronics across the two tracks, which ends up sounding like a bit of a throwback to BN's Rogue Astronaut-era material.
��� That sound is exactly what you get with a-side "Abomination", a vicious assault of deformed caveman electronics, Wood's slurred death metal-style growl stretched into an almost somnambulant murmur as he lays out his anti-technology / anti-human screed over the whirring analogue effects and squealing synth noise. That smoldering black noisescape is laced with massive mortar-like blasts and nightmarish goblin-shrieks, the sound continuing to evolve into an ever more evil and disturbing war zone of industrial rumble and foul smoking synthesizer chaos, utter apocalyptic chaos channeled into a five minute blast of electronic hate, Wood's sound generators belching agonies of pained feedback and hellish ghostlike screams. Real bad-dream material here, and one of the band's more terrifying recent efforts. In contrast, the b-side "Infinity Sprung From Glided Machines" is virtually dark ambient, gleaming black obsidian dronescapes stretching out beneath a blasted black sun, washes of grim synthdrift gradually infected with those blasting oscillators and chirping insect electronics, but never straying all that far from that vast black Lustmordian ambience that calmly churns in the depths, the sound slowly evolving into a sinister, psychedelic glitchscape where demented demonic screams echo far in the distance, a primordial galactic deathvision.
��� Limited to four hundred copies.
���� Another long out-of-print Bastard Noise title that recently resurfaced as a warehouse find, BN + A was a collaboration between the mighty Skull-squad (here made up of the duo of Eric Wood and John Wiese) and a short-lived "minimal noise" project called Antennacle that featured some of the guys from art-damaged grindcore outfit Creation Is Crucifixion. The EP features two tracks ("Moving Across" and "He No Longer Lives Entirely Among Us") that offer an interesting approach to ominous, lowercase noise, weaving short fragments of sampled voices and controlled bursts of high-frequency feedback with sheets of restrained drone and subdued juddering sounds, like the distant reverberations of failing machinery. There's little of the physicality that Bastard Noise's work is usually known for, but this material still captures that same bleak, dystopian, black-earth vibe that typically exudes from their work. By the time the artists make their way to the second side, this transforms into a harrowing electro-acoustic hallucination flecked with chitinous chirping electronics and deep, almost imperceptible bass pulses, the noisescape becoming even more unsettling and insectlike as it scuttles towards its conclusion.
���� Originally released in a limited run of three hundred copies, the record comes in cool handmade packaging, held inside of a pocket affixed to the interior of the printed sleeve, and the whole thing sealed with a piece of twine. And as with the other old out-of-print Bastard Noise releases we just unearthed, quantities are extremely limited.
Decimation Cycle is another older Bastard Noise 7" that recently resurfaced through one of our suppliers, apparently unearthed from somewhere in the depths of Eric Wood's closet. I never had the chance to pick this up when it first came out way back in 2002 on Japanese label Utsu Tapes (run by Guilty Connector's Kohei Nakagawa), and it's been out of print from the label for years, so BN-freaks who've been hunting for this record should probably move quick if they want to get their hands on this. The two-song EP was part of an ongoing line of collaborations between Man Is The Bastard offshoot Bastard Noise and Japanese noise outfit Guilty Connector, a partnership born of a similar sonic aesthetic and attitude that has resulted in a number of recordings; this is definitely one of the more aggressive collabs that the team produced, both sides radiating some pretty vicious electronic hatred.
Each track is a roughly five minute long maelstrom of frenzied oscillator abuse and extreme electronic noise, roaring distorted static and caustic high-end skree all bleeding together into a mind-melting blast of abstract sonic violence. This definitely finds itself firmly footed in Bastard Noise's signature brand of psychedelic locust-blast electronics and lysergic effects-chaos on the first track "In The Face Of So Vast A Threat", which relentlessly scratches at your cranium with its torrent of sputtering, shrieking noise. But on the second side, the title track shifts into a much more evil sound, with Wood shrieking his horrific visions of apocalyptic extinction over a low, chirping noisescape, this creepy atmosphere punctuated with sudden blasts of extreme glitch, crazed synth squelch and waves of rumbling low-end frequencies that transform this track into a kind of toxic, monstrous power electronics.
Need some more Beefheartian stoner metal lunacy in your life? You're going to get it with the first new release from Kalmex and crew in a decade; Ultra Sonic Holocaust is a long-in-the-works album that features this bizarro crew from Redwood City, CA teaming up with Eric Wood's Bastard Noise for a nine-track decent into lysergic hell. Made up of assorted members of some of the more demented Bay Area hardcore / grind / powerviolence gangs like Agents Of Satan, Plutocracy, Immortal Fate and No Less, Kalmex And The Riffmerchants were a short-lived but thoroughly wonky outfit that delivered an experimental derangement of Shaggs-esque shamble, Kyussian sludge, brain-damaged space rock and cracked-out power electronics during their brief run. Before splitting up, the band recorded a collaboration with the Man Is The Bastard electronic noise offshoot Bastard Noise, but a variety of obstacles prevented this album from ever seeing the light of day until now. After being shelved for nearly a decade, this day-glo psych mutation has finally surfaced on Hear More, and it's as intensely fucked up as I'd expected.
The LP kicks off with a weird intro noisescape made up of answering machine messages, piercing electronics and trippy flutes, all congealing into a druggy sonic haze, then lurches into the Riffmerchants' brand of fucked-up atonal "stoner rock", a brain-wrecking mess of psychedelic wah-splooge and shambling spaced-out grooves, blotted with outbursts of ugly hardcore punk and noxious Eyehategod-esque sludge all smeared in gorked psych-guitar noodling. It's a virtual free-for-all, as they throw in assaults of hideous slow-motion powerviolence and brain-damaged Slayerized riffing, insane vocoder-fucked singing, airy folk-pop tunes with bestial vocals and more of that tuneless flute accompaniment, suddenly bursting into weird thrash metal parts, or spew out Casio keyboard melodies over meaty stoner-rock chug-fests. There's Mike Patton-esque crooning, and lots of random fucking around in the studio that suddenly shows up in the middle of a song, even abrupt blasts of low-fi technical death metal that come out of nowhere. The Merchants layer all kinds of stream-of-consciousness weirdness into their songs, out-of-place noises and trippy guitar tracks, lots of improvisational experimentation no doubt spurred on by copious drug ingestion, and there are large expanses of music that actually sound like you're hearing three different bands all playing at the same time. And all throughout this, they've incorporated Bastard Noise's squealing, swarming electronic noise into their songs, sometimes subtly, sometimes allowing it to totally take over the track as they spin out into a madness of improvised clatter and swirling locust-noise. In a word, fucked.
Along with this completely insane album of berserker psych rock, you also get a killer twenty-page booklet filled with extensive liner notes on the saga behind this album, as well as lots of full-color artwork from Aaron Guadamuz, who also did the sleeve art; his fevered hallucinatory illustrations are filled with bizarre mutants, twisted biological horrors, and insane technologies that come across like some batshit cross between the psychedelic sci-fi scribblings of Voivod's Michel "Away" Langevin and the repulsive cartoons of underground artist Mike Diana. Limited to five hundred copies.
This Bastard Noise disc from a few years ago is back in stock, at long last. 2006's Tukano Khalkha album is one of the strangest entries in Bastard Noise's extensive discography, the resultant document from a one-time collaboration between the Skull (here the extended lineup of Eric Wood, Bill Nelson and John Wiese) and the industrial group Sikhara, recorded back in 2003. Sikhara's percussive-heavy industrial surrealism has tended to focus on the vocal traditions of ancient non-Western cultures, and together with Bastard Noise, the two groups focus specifically on the ancient cultures of the Amazon basin and Mongolia, creating two long-form electronic trance meltdowns that feel like futuristic remixes of old ethnocological LPs. The two tracks on Tukano Khalkha consist of surreal vocal loops and chanting that drifts across massive storms of intergalactic gamelan and thunderous ritualistic tribal percussion from the Sikhara rhythm section; the booming tribal-industrial pummel and wailing vocal ecstasy is joined by Bastard Noise's relentless stream of squealing oscillator tones, chest-rattling low-end bass frequencies, crushing distorted drones, laptop manipulations, and those signature swarms of carnivorous cosmic locusts. It's different from the rest of Bastard Noise's stuff, for sure; the two bands come together to create a trance-inducing psychedelic freakout, collages of infinite chant collaged with brutal electronic noise and a dark industrial undertow. At times, this sounds like fragmented transmission from a Crash Worship performance breaking through a bleating, skull-crushing Bastard Noise set, but the musicians just as often create subdued dronescapes and long stretches of otherworldly psychedelic ambience, making this disc one of trippiest releases from Bastard Noise.
Brutal galactic shortwave violence and lovely star-fried drones are the fruit of this collaborative full length from Eric Wood of BASTARD NOISE and Kevin
Novak of T.E.F. The harsh noise is as brutal as anything prior from BASTARD NOISE, with squalls of piercing feedback and thick, crusty blurts of high volume
jet-engine distortion. The onslaught breaks here and there to reveal nearly musical sounds and delicate drift,though...as with all of BASTARD NOISE's stuff,
there's alot of dynamic range and skilled sound construction at work here. Astronomical Sound Images lives up to its title with three lengthy tracks
of massive deep space roar that shifts and shimmers into crystalline electronics.
��� One of several split releases that Bastard Noise did in the 90s with Finnish power electronics fiend Bizarre Uproar, this record is pretty rare, coming out back in 1994 on BN/MITB member Eric Wood's own DP imprint; long out of print and fairly hard to find, we recently unearthed a handful of this 7" from a distributor, most likely the last copies of this crushing EP ever. Packaged in a letter-pressed cardstock cover printed by Thumbprint Press, it's one of the more sought after early Bastard Noise releases.
��� Featuring the early lineup of Man Is The Bastard members Eric Wood, Henry Barnes, and W.T. Nelson, the Bastard Noise side offers up three tracks of experimental electronics and low-fidelity rhythmic industrial from the group, starting with the ambient room noise and corroded electro-pulse of "Gunrange" through the sputtering, demonic power electronics of "Ham (Kansas City Mindwash)", where Wood hisses malevolently over a field of chirping tones and juddering low-end noise. That's followed by the unsettling high-frequency glitchery and oscillator fuckery of "Bats", which is harsh as hell. Some of this reminds me of Schimpfluch-Gruppe's abstract noisescapes more than the full-blast insect electronics of the Bastard Noise releases that would come later in the decade, but you still get some of that skull-shredding oscillator mayhem here, which obviously echoes the abrasive noise experiments found on the Man Is The Bastard albums.
��� Bizarre Uproar counters with a single track, "Sound Of Gigantic War Machines Malfunctioning". His own brand of grim, threatening power electronics and industrial noise combines what sounds like the rumble of small engines layered together into a rattling bed of metallic noise, chopped apart into passages of murky machine rumble and keening feedback. This is actually somewhat easy on the ears compared to most Bizarre Uproar stuff, a muted dronescape of mechanical murk that drifts and rumbles along quite nicely, with just the right amount of abrasiveness to keep this from slipping into a purely ambient wash of sound.
It's probably safe to say that if you are a fan of Canada's The Endless Blockade, you're also probably a big fan of Man Is The Bastard, who had a big hand in the evolution of the extreme brand of hardcore that would come to be known as "power violence". That makes this split album pretty essential for followers of this sort of hyper-violent hardcore, for not only does this feature an experimental grind/hardcore epic and some surprising tracks from Endless Blockade, The Red List has the first tracks from a new version of Bastard Noise that now sees the long running caveman electronics project becoming a full-on band, complete with bandleader Eric Wood picking up the bass guitar for the first time since the disbanding of Man Is The Bastard!
I was in now way ready for the new shape of Bastard Noise that I'm hearing here. With a new lineup that has BN's Eric Wood and W.T. Nelson joined by drummer Danny Walker (Phobia/Intronaut), the band opens the disc with five tracks of brutal proggy bass-heavy hardcore and extreme electronic FX that sounds almost exactly like Man Is The Bastard, but with an extra dose of the unique oscillator mayhem that has defined Bastard Noise's sound. The first track "Fallen Species" is total MITB, crushing angular bass and drums and electronics, but way more prog than MITB ever was, the bass winding through complex riffing and weird melodies, the pummeling drums way more jazzy, the deep guttural grunts and high pitched vokills, laser-gun blasts and squealing synth noise sculpted into a massive doomed dirge. This is fucking awesome, and anyone who was a MITB fanatic will flip out when they hear this.
The other four tracks are a mix of the proggy power violence and locust electronics; the instrumental "Movement Two" is shorter and more to the point, but still has that bludgeoning MITB assault, mixing fast thrashing hardcore with cosmic electronic chaos and brain-shredding oscillator/fx violence, then turns into a jagged jazzy noise rock workout later on; "USA Today" is more like the Bastard Noise of yore, with screamed vocals floating across a malevolent soundscape of rumbling drones and electronic flutter; the two-part "Mutant World Of Shame / Underworld" returns to the bizarre Magmoid-MITB heaviness with massive bone-rattling bass riffs winding and uncoiling, lurching into surprisingly melodic shapes, then dropping sledgehammer low-end heaviness while always surrounded by swarms of squealing and chirping synths; and the last BN track "Manphibian" starts off as dark clanking subterranean drones and sewer ambience, then erupts into more pummeling bass-heavy sludge.
The Endless Blockade are one of the only bands that could possibly follow that up, but they do so with extreme power, kicking their triptych of tracks off with the sprawling fourteen minute "Deuteronomy", a blastcore epic that winds through bursts of 500 mph thrash, crushing slow motion dirge, barbed-wire gargling screams, and punishing mutant doom strafed with industrial clatter and mechanical noise, bits of Neubaten/SPK-like clang grinding through slabs of black sludge, lots of BN-esque space FX, the guitars and bass dropping out completely at times, leaving just the industrial noise and drums to carry on as a plodding psychedelic dirge for several minutes, lurching into more up-tempo crushing riffage and slipping into long stretches of howling harsh noise a la Knurl, then blasting back into the hyper fast powerviolence at the very end. Fucking scathing. The other two tracks are actually remixes/reworked material. "Advanced Directive" is a chopped-up collage of music from their Primitive album reconfigured by NY electro-acoustic artist Noah Creshevsky; the result is a chaotic, rabid assault of skipping glitched thrash that sounds a bit like Shitmat remixing Infest. The last track "Model 49 Rebreather" is a reworking of Primitive material by Canadian harsh noise wall artist The Rita, who erects a punishing fifteen minute static lava flow of molten distortion, totally hypnotic and 100% unrecognizable.
From what I've read, this was originally supposed to be collaboration between the two bands, but it turned into a traditional split album after Bastard Noise morphed into the version of the band that appears here. As amazing as I'm betting that would have sounded, this is still a decimating team-up, with both bands delivering a CRUSHING set of extreme brutality. Highest recommendation.
It's probably safe to say that if you are a fan of Canada's The Endless Blockade, you're also probably a big fan of Man Is The Bastard, who had a big hand in the evolution of the extreme brand of hardcore that would come to be known as "power violence". That makes this split album pretty essential for followers of this sort of hyper-violent hardcore, for not only does this feature an experimental grind/hardcore epic and some surprising tracks from Endless Blockade, The Red List has the first tracks from a new version of Bastard Noise that now sees the long running caveman electronics project becoming a full-on band, complete with bandleader Eric Wood picking up the bass guitar for the first time since the disbanding of Man Is The Bastard!
I was in now way ready for the new shape of Bastard Noise that I'm hearing here. With a new lineup that has BN's Eric Wood and W.T. Nelson joined by drummer Danny Walker (Phobia/Intronaut), the band opens the disc with five tracks of brutal proggy bass-heavy hardcore and extreme electronic FX that sounds almost exactly like Man Is The Bastard, but with an extra dose of the unique oscillator mayhem that has defined Bastard Noise's sound. The first track "Fallen Species" is total MITB, crushing angular bass and drums and electronics, but way more prog than MITB ever was, the bass winding through complex riffing and weird melodies, the pummeling drums way more jazzy, the deep guttural grunts and high pitched vokills, laser-gun blasts and squealing synth noise sculpted into a massive doomed dirge. This is fucking awesome, and anyone who was a MITB fanatic will flip out when they hear this.
The other four tracks are a mix of the proggy power violence and locust electronics; the instrumental "Movement Two" is shorter and more to the point, but still has that bludgeoning MITB assault, mixing fast thrashing hardcore with cosmic electronic chaos and brain-shredding oscillator/fx violence, then turns into a jagged jazzy noise rock workout later on; "USA Today" is more like the Bastard Noise of yore, with screamed vocals floating across a malevolent soundscape of rumbling drones and electronic flutter; the two-part "Mutant World Of Shame / Underworld" returns to the bizarre Magmoid-MITB heaviness with massive bone-rattling bass riffs winding and uncoiling, lurching into surprisingly melodic shapes, then dropping sledgehammer low-end heaviness while always surrounded by swarms of squealing and chirping synths; and the last BN track "Manphibian" starts off as dark clanking subterranean drones and sewer ambience, then erupts into more pummeling bass-heavy sludge.
The Endless Blockade are one of the only bands that could possibly follow that up, but they do so with extreme power, kicking their triptych of tracks off with the sprawling fourteen minute "Deuteronomy", a blastcore epic that winds through bursts of 500 mph thrash, crushing slow motion dirge, barbed-wire gargling screams, and punishing mutant doom strafed with industrial clatter and mechanical noise, bits of Neubaten/SPK-like clang grinding through slabs of black sludge, lots of BN-esque space FX, the guitars and bass dropping out completely at times, leaving just the industrial noise and drums to carry on as a plodding psychedelic dirge for several minutes, lurching into more up-tempo crushing riffage and slipping into long stretches of howling harsh noise a la Knurl, then blasting back into the hyper fast powerviolence at the very end. Fucking scathing. The other two tracks are actually remixes/reworked material. "Advanced Directive" is a chopped-up collage of music from their Primitive album reconfigured by NY electro-acoustic artist Noah Creshevsky; the result is a chaotic, rabid assault of skipping glitched thrash that sounds a bit like Shitmat remixing Infest. The last track "Model 49 Rebreather" is a reworking of Primitive material by Canadian harsh noise wall artist The Rita, who erects a punishing fifteen minute static lava flow of molten distortion, totally hypnotic and 100% unrecognizable.
From what I've read, this was originally supposed to be collaboration between the two bands, but it turned into a traditional split album after Bastard Noise morphed into the version of the band that appears here. As amazing as I'm betting that would have sounded, this is still a decimating team-up, with both bands delivering a CRUSHING set of extreme brutality. Highest recommendation.
���� Dug up this long out-of-print 7" on Misanthropic Agenda from 2002 with that unearthed stash of rare Bastard Noise stuff we recently found, teaming up Bastard Noise with Misanthropic Agenda label boss and solo noise artist Gerritt Wittmer.
���� Man Is The Bastard: Bastard Noise's "Protozoa Syringe" is pretty brutal, coming from the Eric Wood / John Wiese duo-era of the band. Their signature use of extreme oscillator effects, shrieking high-pitched feedback and swarming insectile electronics is all accounted for, but as with much of the stuff that Bastard Noise did when Wiese was in the group, there's an added focus on concentrated high-frequency sound that turns this into a particularly abusive piece of noise-art. Still pretty psychedelic, of course, though it's missing those bestial hate-grunts of Wood's that I dig so much.
���� The three tracks from Gerritt Wittmer (Deathroes) provides on the second side are in a similar vein as his Sails The Seas Of Displacement material from around the same time. And it's an excellent pairing with Bastard Noise's monstrous electronics. Starting with "Focus", Wittmer spins off whirring abrasive electronics, hideously warped vocals caught in nightmarish loops, violent mic-rupturing screams, and controlled blasts of extreme noise that reach Whitehouse-like levels of low-fi sonic monstrosity. More along the lines of raw power electronics than most of the other stuff I've picked up from Wittmer, there's also a bit of that creepy, noise-collage approach that has marked his longer works, which ultimately self-immolates in a speaker-scraping locked groove.
���� Comes on marble colored vinyl in a clear Mylar sleeve with a multi-color transparent label affixed to the front. Minimalist, but cool.
Though it looks like it might be awhile before we get another album of the sort of crushing, alien prog that Bastard Noise has been doing lately in full band mode, we can still count on BN mastermind Eric Wood to keep feeding us his more straightforward electronic assaults, which almost always blast my skull away. Even better is when we get some new Bastard Noise stuff where he's teamed up with legends of Japanese noise; this recent 7" threatens deafness with not only an a-side that has Wood teamed up with Hiroshi Hasegawa of cosmic noise gods C.C.C.C., but also a punishing blast of galactic horror from his collaboration with the mighty Government Alpha, delivering two sides of pro-Earth, anti-human technological devastation.
BN's track with Hiroshi Hasegawa sweeps across the first side with a skull-melting blast of electronic noise, the squealing, violent frequencies cut-up amid snippets of absolutely desolate ambient drift and garbled circuitry. Crank this side up to maximum volume, and it's fucking terrifying, those stray motes of deep-space drift and half-glimpsed melody that surface throughout the track only serving to exacerbate the nightmarish vibe. When Wood eventually unleashes his inhuman screams later in the track, it's a choir of agonized shrieks and monstrous guttural rumblings that rise over waves of distorted feedback and whirring, insectile electronics. It's one of the most nightmarish sounding things I've heard from Bastard Noise lately, like some fragmented S.O.S. transmission beamed back to us from the bowels of Hell.
The Government Alpha collaboration "A Diabolical Journey" offers a slightly more subdued dose of cosmic death. Wood continues to bellow and belch his misanthropic fumes, but those glottal, death metal-esque detonations are smeared over a more ambient expanse of sound, swells of minimal drift rising and falling between bits of almost orchestral drone and peals of distant metallic agony. It's like some strange cinematic version of a power electronics assault, the harsher sounds melted down and poured across distant gleaming vistas, the track only beginning to squirm out into more tortured forms towards the end as the artists finally unleash the full fury of their oscillators and effects units, bathing the final moments of the record in a horrific, irradiated glow.
Comes in some really nice (if slightly labor-intensive) packaging, the olive-green vinyl packaged inside of a sealed, printed vellum envelope.
A brand new Bastard Noise release that comes right on the heels of the awesome new BN album Rogue Astronaut that we had as our featured release last week, The Immortals features two new track from the mighty Skull that were recorded roughly around the same time as their album, and two tracks from a band called Malachi from Wisconsin. Might seem like an odd pairing at first, as Malachi plays a brand of burly, epic crustcore a la Tragedy/Skitsystem and that sort of D-beat driven thrash, but as the two bands alternate their tracks, this album does turn into something more like a collaboration than just yer run of the mill split CD.
The first and third songs are from Malachi, who has former members of What Happens Next, Artimus Pyle, and High On Crime, and their sound is a mix of the thunderous crusty thrash of Artimus Pyle, stretches of somber cello, and lumbering doom riffs, alternating between high speed D-beat driven power and grim doomy plod and spare chamber music ambience. The sound is grim and apocalyptic, opening with the morose, cello-laced doomcrust of "Pain Trials" and later switching into "Five", an instrumental piece that starts with just a dark guitar riff/arpeggio playing a sort of gloomy dustbowl melody over and over, reminding me a little of, um, 5ive...or maybe Old Man Gloom, until the full band crashes in and the song turns thunderous and heavy, a huge majestic riff rising up over tumbling tribal drums, those sorrowful cellos weeping in the background, the song eventually collapsing into a wash of crushing amp rumble and droning feedback that extends out for several minutes.
The Bastard Noise tracks are second and fourth and tie the album together, starting with the chittering metal-insect swarms and humid drones that appear at the beginning of "Post Conflict Dream" that move into deep isolationist drones and menacing Lustmord territory, vast swathes of subterranean rumble and electrical hum streaked by high-end whine and softly shifting clouds of orchestral string and scattered percussion, eventually joined by ethereal male singing and haunting female vocals from Leila Rauf (who also plays in Amber Asylum and Saros) that form into strange harmonies, the same sort that made Rogue Astronaut sound so eerie and otherworldly and unlike the Bastard Noise of old. The last track "Elemental Decay" is also in this droneological mode, with it's metallic dronescapes stretching across vast cosmic distance, laced with subharmonic pulses, tidal surges of hissing white noise, ethereal male and female vocals intertwining in ghostly descending melodies, orchestral strings rising and falling, squealing almost sax-like tones, deep pounding percussive blasts echoing in the distance, and lush metallic shimmer swirling in between the singing voices and electronics. Might be what Kayo Dot would sound like if they went totally electronic, their eerie dark prog rendered into spacious industrial dronedrift and cavernous machine rumblings. This material is much more restrained and atmospheric than the more brutal sections of Rogue Astronaut, but fans of Bastard Noise's new sound will still find this an essential listen.
Nicely packaged in a six panel gatefold sleeve printed by Thumbprint Press and illustrated with small images of insectile robots. Limited edition of 1000 copies.
���� Recently nabbed a bunch of old, rare, out-of-print Bastard Noise / Man Is The Bastard-related stuff, all of it new, but apparently hidden away in one of the darker corners of one of our distributor's warehouse. One of 'em is this long-gone 7" that came out on legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles back in 1999; featuring one track each from Man is The Bastard's electronic noise offshoot Bastard Noise, and Japanese harsh electronics terrorizer Pain Jerk, as well as a collaboration between the two on the b-side, this is probably one of the most abrasive things that ever came out on ol' Alt Tentacles. It's pretty ferocious, Pain Jerk kicking things off with a brutal blast of psychedelic electronic noise on "Face Down In A Pool Of Piss" that unleashes some serious distortion-pedal abuse, and then followed by the stretches of subdued insectile chitter and mesmeric celestial pulses that make up Bastard Noise's "I.M.F. Secrets" that rounds out the rest of the side.
���� The main draw, though, is the collaboration track "Imminent Economic Collapse". Here, the two noise artists deliver a longer, more mind-melting dose of trippy analogue synth noise and violent frequency sweeps, all set against grinding electronic drones and churning clouds of grainy shortwave static. Anyone familiar with both artists will be able to pick out their various signature moves in this chaos, but they mesh together really well, which would be just one of several collaborative experiments that the two projects would engage in over the years. And it's pretty goddamn heavy, too, once BN's Eric Wood finally starts bellowing his barbaric caveman grunts over the track's onslaught of apeshit oscillators and rapid mechanical judder. Brutal. As with all of these other rare Bastard Noise records we picked up, quantities are extremely limited.
Oozing with bilious British aggression and a thick streak of Am Rep-informed ugliness, Tarnation is the first album that we've gotten in from this UK tarpit outfit, their third overall; these guys won me over fast once I started spinning this ten song disc, spooling out an evil-sounding, somewhat angular brand of sludge-metal that does a pretty good job at combining the droning, discordant crush of Neurosis with a monstrous strain of metallic noise rock, all with a powerful vocalist who delivers an interesting mixture of hoarse screaming and a gruff, near-whispered croon that shows up in a couple of songs throughout the disc. This is super heavy stuff, crushing magma riffage that lurches and stomps along at a mostly driving mid-tempo lurch, and they keep the songs centered around those massive riffs that are heaped onto the heavy, pummeling tribal rhythms and the jagged, spiky song arrangements. Bastard Of The Skies only occasionally dips into the slower, more doom-laden tempos, though when they do slow things down it turns into some massively ugly saurian sludge. The singer's monstrous vocals are at times reminiscent of Rennie from Starkweather, which add a bit of a psychotic feel to their music, and within the long serpentine sludge workouts, the band also incorporates some subtle bits of minimal dark ambience and droning industrial noise in between the songs. There's also some more experimental improvisation that appears on the title track, where things get a little more abstract; this long, sprawling piece turns into a free-form drone workout that gets swept up in black waves of formless feedback and amp-drift that crash over the drummer's heavy, improvised caveman pummel. The whole thing is draped in a kind of apocalyptic darkness, all the way until the end, when the band veers into the bright, major key riffage of the last song that cracks through the gloom with some big melodic hooks that sort of sound like a mathier version of Torche or the Melvins, joined in with howling guest vocals from members of Scottish sludge demons Black Sun. Its another solid entry in the recent spate of crazed, super-heavy sludge metal that's been coming in from the UK lately, worth checking out if you've been digging the likes of Art Of Burning Water and Black Sun. Comes in digipack packaging.
The first U.S issue of a full-length solo album by Martyn Bates, the stunning vocalist and founding member of Eyeless in Gaza - originally released mid 1997 to accompany the similarly titled book of lyrics , and has been unavailable commercially until this HAND / EYE release. Comprising new interpretations of songs extant 1982-1995 hitherto unheard, Imagination Feels Like Poison is primarily a collection of songs (occasionally threaded through with fleeting "illustrative atmospheric" sketches); a music brightly bittersweet, conjuring up ghostly and vivid invocations of folk / psych. Voice and, perhaps surprisingly, Banjo (an unusual choice for Martyn Bates), are the principal instruments that carry this music, a skeletal, simplistic music, deftly coloured and fleshed out by inventive use of Autoharp, Percussion, Whistles and Pump Organ.
Luxuriously melodic, easily side-stepping lazy characterisations of genre, the album extends and elaborates upon Martyn Bates� previously explored musical endeavours: quiet fire; filigree and mercurial, silvery images.
Originally released in 1995, Mystery Seas (Letters Written #2) sees MARTYN BATES exploring further the seeds of ideas contained within his first solo work of some thirteen years earlier, the legendary 'Letters Written' collection. Comprising songs composed during that period (circa 1982) together with brand new songs in the idiom, this collection of highly personal �letters� -organ based songs and performances - is entitled 'MYSTERY SEAS (LETTERS WRITTEN #2)�. Haunted, richly melodic, and lyrical these new recordings are most emphatically SONGS, and as such they veer away from the more avant-garde areas in which Martyn has been known for working. Recorded at AMBIVALENT SCALE in 1995 (by EYELESS IN GAZA's Peter Becker), this music is drenched in the myriad resonances of Folk , whilst simultaneouslv circumnavigating any rigid and limiting definition (folk = the 'folk soul', the �collective unconscious�). With voice/ lyrics lo the fore, and with a (for the most part) skeletal, simplistic instrumentation, MYSTERY SEAS evokes a music of creaking ships, echoes, of distant sea-shanty, light thru' broken stained glass windows, blighted misfortune, morning light, searching glances, of each story running thru them, of salt water, clear rhyme and reason, of each mask, of a night sky - tall wall of no more, of floods of thought / unsettling fetters, of tears or words seeming to rip the surface alerting and dumbfounding at one and the same time, songs of a beautiful secret to own... MYSTERY SEAS (LETTERS WRITTEN #2) is released on Hand/Eye via A-Scale.
Sordid Salt Lake power electronics bowing at the altar of Caligula. From a brief look at the band's Discogs page, it would appear that Bathouse is the only thing that this SLC based duo has released so far, a short cassette Ep with two untitled tracks of sweat-drenched delirium that spew out a low-fi, heavily distorted strain of power electronics that sounds like it was captured on an ancient blood-soaked Tascam machine. I'm not familiar with the other bands that members Tia Martinez and Jon Tabish are involved with, but with Bathouse they summon up some spectacularly filthy electronic chaos that I could definitely hear more of. Everything about this recording is distorted, the entire sound is blown out to hell, the vocals an incomprehensible lustful howl that's buried way down in the oceanic fuzz, the sound shifting from squealing, crushing over-modulated noise fused to punishing delay/feedback abuse, to churning asphalt-mixer distortion, the synth sound massively blown-out, droning and swarming, shattered into controlled bursts of crushing low-end hum, everything lost in the intense murky haze of tape hiss. Even through this bleary haze of low-fi filth, though, the sound of Bathouse is frantic, even scornful, with a similar violent unhinged feel as some of the recent releases from Grunt and Bagman. And through this murky storm of gutter electronics and rabid frothing-at-the-mouth incantations, the duo extol the glories of Roman hedonism, of flesh subjugated in the steam-heat of the public baths and violent lust exercised in the caldarium. Nice n' filthy, and recommended only to fans of the aforementioned perpetrators of nebulous PE and their ilk. Limited to just thirty-five copies.
Another killer re-issue of out of print BATHTUB SHITTER vinyl material, this disc collects the Angels Save Us EP and Mark A Muck EP,
along with a compilation track from the World Wide Violence 7� EP. Fifteen songs total of brutal and ridiculously catchy (and terminally weird)
scat-obsessed grindcore. This stuff is way catchier than it has any right to be. Ripping guitar riffs and lots of charged midtempo thrash riots. Massive
classic rock hooks and full-bore blastbeat whirlwinds. Hypnotic drum circle workouts and monster chants. PINK FLOYD-ish psych guitar leads. And those
ridiculous cookie monster / electrocuted cheerleader vocal trade-offs that jettison BATHTUB SHITTER into the far realms of grindcore absurdity. The song
�Stand By Shit� even has some clean, reverbed BAUHAUS-esque clean vocals! And the Mark A Muck EP starts off with retarded choral voices. These guys
rule. It�s like an over-the-top mix of old NAPALM DEATH, BOREDOMS, ANAL CUNT style noisecore, Utterly demented grindcore. Packaged in a 7� style full color
jacket, hand-numbered out of 1,000 copies.
In the entire pantheon of mutant J-grind, there is noone quite like the mighty Bathtub Shitter. Since the last 90's, Bathtub Shitter have developed their
shit-obsessed philosophy into something more akin to Zen thought than the adolescent execretory fantasies that you usually find scrawled across the lyric
sheets of the gore/splatter grind underground. Or at least my corroded brain has reached the point where their scatological lyrics and mangled English have
taken on a more profound meaning since I've been listening to the CD re-issue of their Wall Of World Is Words mini-album from 2000 on repeat all
day. C'mon, you can't tell me that there isn't some heavy stuff in lyrics like "...need a gap in the pants / say hello from it / Speak with wind or shit /
One word on the world / No need the wall here...". Whether or not you want to attempt to glean hidden meaning in the Shitter's cryptic scat poetry, this 12
song eruption, which originally came into this world as a 10" and subsequently went out of print, features some incredible grindcore destruction with a fresh
remastering job and additional bonus tracks, making this pretty crucial for Bathtub Shitter disciples. Wall delivers just over 20 minutes of bizarro
blast violence, unleashing blazing cyclones of grindnoise, gloriously heavy mid-tempo thrash parts, and a couple of slooow, dissonant sludgecore dirges, and
frequently toss in killer WTF parts like straight-up funk breaks, melodic poppy riffs, fingerpicked classical guitar interludes, etc. Another one of bathtub
Shitter's highlights are the amazing, amazingly ridiculous vocals of lead growler Masato Morimoto, who effortlessly switches between deep monstrous
growls to hysterical, ultra high pitched squawks, oftentimes in the same verse. Includes covers of Extreme Noise Terror, Scum, and Holy Moses.
More Japanese scat-obsessed grind weirdness from Bathtub Shitter! Yep, Dancehall Grind is another installment in the ongoing series of limited-
edition CD releases of Bathtub Shitter material that's been released through the band's own (S)hit Jam Records imprint. There's a freaking cult that's formed
around these guys, as they are one of the weirdest, heaviest Japanese grind bands in action, and I freaked when we got this disc in. Dancehall Grind
is the latest full length from the Shitter, recorded throughout 2004-2005, and rocks 13 songs of brand new material from these pot-hoovering, shit-
philosophizing, grinding groove gods as well as a cover of D.R.I.'s "Time Out". The disc opens with a short, goofy, Nintendo-type 8 bit melody, but
immediately launches into the Shitter's unique hybrid of crushing, rocking thrash metal and crusty grindcore, like a mutant mishmash of old school Japanese
grinders S.O.B. and Boredoms, Brutal Truth and Mr. Bungle, stoner rock and pulverizing Celtic Frost sludge and awesome Exodus thrash. You'd better belive
that this thrashes...blazing thrash metal mega-riffs smash into weird yet massive grooves that could almost be described as "funky",
jackhammer grind blasts get entangled in bursts of super catchy metallic pop-punk, garage rock licks and slap-funk bass appear over slow sludge metal
breakdowns and insane blastbeats. There's the airy fingerpickin' acoustic interlude titled "Shit Drop", and the fucked up closer "Stihs Latem" that has them
playing backwards. The 7 minute-plus "Rest In Piss" is a total deathgrind/prog mindmelt, it's convoluted riffs and tempo shifts stretching out far beyond the
duration of a typical grind jam, becoming trancelike as the slow, offtime funk-sludge riff alternates with supersonic blastbeats. It's all over the fucking
place. And Bathtub Shitter's vocalist Masato Henmarer Morimoto vomits up some of the most insane, ridiculous throat performances possible over the band's
chaotic musical arrangements, effortlessly changing up between super-gutteral, lung-busting gorebeast growling, snotty hardcore hollerin', and a freaked-out,
impossibly high-pitched shriek that sounds like a hysterical, coked-up anime cheerleader. And it all works so perfectly, the vocals and schizoid
grind shifts make this an awesome, comical, ridiculous, rumbling shitstorm of gnarly grind weirdness. The disc comes in an oversized 7" style sleeve with
weird, creepy cover art and full lyrics printed on the inside, plus a Bathrub Shitter sticker!
Totally fucking ridonkulous Japanese grindcore. These guys were one of the funnest, weirdest grind bands to come out of Japan since Unholy Grave, and
where the Grave never really managed to eke out any releases of decent recording quality (granted, their low-fi bzzz was a big part of their charm), Bathtub
Shitter not only released some solid sounding stuff, but enshrouded their brutal grindcore with total fecal mystique. Yep, we're talking serious scat
obsessed grindcore. They make it work, though. Seriously. Musically, this collection will melt your bone structure with a vicious assault of crusty punk
beats, tornado grind blasts, bizarre monster/shriek vocal tradeoffs that you gotta hear to believe, and downright catchy tunes from the post-BRUTAL TRUTH /
MELT BANANA realm of damaged hyperspeed destruction. Early Yeah(s) is an early discography of the bands recorded output from late 1997 through early 2000,
and includes the split 7" tracks with DUDMAN, the Fertilizer 7" EP, the 97+3 Shit Points 7" EP, One Fun 7" EP, their tracks from the Murderous Grind Attack
compilation , and 3 unreleased versions of older songs. This beast is limited to 1000 hand numbered copies, and comes packaged in a full color 7" jacket
sleeve.
A U.S. repress of the out-of-print grind/noise/bizarro classic. New cover art and extra never before released vinyl tracks. This Japanese band has been
building a cult following around their warped, fecal-obsessed aesthetic and fast, wicked crust-filled grindcore.
A whirlwind of scatological grindcrust weirdness. Japanese scat-blasters BATHTUB SHITTER's CD debut full length further develops their debauched
obsessions explored on their many 7" releases, with a bizarre and unique style of rocking grind and an awesome, hysterical dual vocal attack that matches
monstrous death belches and high-pitched, highly cadenced insane screeching vocals that trade off in a pretty weird, unique way, all backed by some of the
greatest, catchiest grind riffs ever, with gigantic grooves and spastic noodling leads and barfing bass rumble and splattered buzzsaw blastbeats and awesome
mid-tempo thrash breaks. They even do a WITCHFINDER GENERAL cover. This CD also sports great solid production, something usually missing from bands in this
genre. For fans of Melt Banana , Unholy Grave and CSSO and all heavy Japanese speed weirdness!!
We just landed a couple of copies of this out-of-print 7"EP released on the German label Power It Up back in 1999. Only two copies! If you're a regular
reader, you'll know that we LOVE Bathtub Shitter and their manic, monstrous shit-obsessed grindcore vision. Totally fucking insane stuff, but with the
ability to knock your head off with an unbelieveably catchy, rocked-out riff or bizarre drum-circle freakout with singalong beast-vocals. These songs are
actually from the band's 1997 demo, so this is the SHITTER at their inception, with the addition of the three songs that originally appeared on their split
7" with DUDMAN. Utterly weird, crucial Japanese grind!!
Total warehouse find, we dug up a couple copies of this now out-of-print 5" from our favorite scat-obsessed powergrinders, Bathtub Shitter! released in a
limited edition of 500 copies in a thick full-color jacket with creepy cover artwork, this tiny slab of serious grind even comes with a sheet of toilet paper
that has the lyrics and liner notes printed in brown ink! This 5" features three tracks: "Skate Of Bulgaria (Single Version)", "A B Shit", and :Re-Shit
(Single Version)". If yer a Bathtub Shitter fanatic like us, well, then this is obviously essential; and if yer a fan of blazing, rocking grindcore
weirdness, well then you need to check out Bathtub Shitter post haste! We'd recommend starting with the Angels Save Us CD or maybe Dancehall
Grind...these guys serve up awesomely catchy and rocking grindcore with loads of midtempo thrash parts, insane riffs, and weird elements thrown in,
ridiculous cookie monster / electrocuted cheerleader vocal tradeoffs, and of course, their eternal devotion to shit!
You can bet yer ass that this little 3" disc is going to become part of our holiday tradition here at Crucial Blast. Bathtub Shitter are already one of my
favorite Japanese grindcore bands, and for them to release a 3" CD that combines their shit-obsessed lyrics and pummeling, rocking grind with...Christmas ?
Come on. There's only three songs here, but the weirdness is fucking overflowing: "Brown Santa (A Cappella Version)" is a bizarre yuletide nursery rhyme
"sung" by BT's psychotic vocalist Masato, and you can hear the tumors blossoming on his throat as the dude alternates between his ridiculously deep death
growls and those insane high pitched shrieks that make Bathtub Shitter sound like absolutely nobody else. Then comes "Holy Shit", which opens with sleigh
bells and more a cappella pig grunts before the band breaks into a beastly pop punk/grind jam, then shifts gears into a goofy casio keyboard bridge before
getting fuckin' annihilated again by brutal metallic grindcore. The Shitter wrap things up with a festive rendition of the holiday standard "Little Drummer
Boy" that turns the cherished song into a punishing deathdoom dirge. What can I say? As a proud member of the Bathtub Shitter cult, this disc is a must-have
for me, and it's a recommended disc for fellow BT freaks. Really, anyone into weirdo Japanese blastery like C.S.S.O., Melt Banana, Unholy Grave, and Gore
Beyond Necropsy needs to check these guys out if you havent already, and this 3" is as good a place to start as any!
Available once again, this is another version of Bathtub Shitter's Fertilizer 7" EP from 1999 - the last time we had this in stock, it had been reissued by the US punk label FirstBloodFamily. Now we've got the version that was released by the German label T.V.G., and unless I'm mistaken, this might be the original release that has been impossible to find. It's on thick pink/yellow marble vinyl and comes in the same black and white sleeve that the original pressing was in, so we may have stumbled across a long-lost stash of the first pressing of this blistering grind EP. In any case, this has always been one of my favorite Bathtub Shitter 7"s (although it's pretty hard to pick between em !).
Just hearing the name Bathtub Shitter and seeing that these guys are a Japanese grindcore band will be enough for some of you to know that this is going to be awesome, but the band go even further by singing about nothing but shit. There's no way a band like that could come from anywhere but Japan. I didn't need much convincing once I heard these guys years ago, but I'm still surprised that Bathtub Shitter and their fecal-obsessed grind managed to get this really rabid cult following around them over the past decade. Seriously, we've seen just about every single Bathrub Shitter title that we have carried sell out and go out of print, so it's cool to see this 7" become available again, even if it is just for a short time. This five song EP was the first thing that I had ever heard from Bathtub Shitter, a short but crushing blast of brutal detuned riffing, crunchy guitars roaring over blastbeats and weird groovy rock parts, massive sludgy breakdowns dropped in the middle of ferocious hyperblast speed assaults. The drumming is totally out of control, the guitarist spews all kinds of nutzoid shred and solos over their burly grind, but the vocalists are what make these guys sound really insane. There are two singers, one of whom does that ultra-deep, gutteral death metal cookie monster belch, muttering ridiculous lyrics about shit, but the other vocalist is the exact opposite, screaming in an impossibly high pitched squeal, utterly freaked out and hysterical. It's one of the most nut-decimating shrieks I've ever heard a grind band use, and the way that Bathtub Shitter have the two singers trade off vocals with each other is fuckin brilliant. There are some other weird parts that the band throws in, especially on the title track with it's drugged mix of crushing grind and tape-delay vocal weirdness. Think Napalm Death, Pig Destroyer, SOB, that sort of brutal, meaty grindcore blasted with shit-obsessed Japanese insanity - awesome!
This masterwork of offbeat scatological grindcore from Japan's Bathtub Shitter is back in print, re-mastered and re-issued in a nice six-panel digipack edition by Rip Roaring Shit Storm Records out of the UK, with two bonus tracks (including one from their split with Misery Index), limited to five hundred copies.
More Japanese scat-obsessed grind weirdness from Bathtub Shitter! Yep, Dancehall Grind is another installment in the ongoing series of limited-edition CD releases of Bathtub Shitter material that's been released through the band's own (S)hit Jam Records imprint. There's a freaking cult that's formed around these guys, as they are one of the weirdest, heaviest Japanese grind bands in action, and I freaked when we got this disc in. Dancehall Grind is the latest full length from the Shitter, recorded throughout 2004-2005, and rocks 13 songs of brand new material from these pot-hoovering, shit-philosophizing, grinding groove gods as well as a cover of D.R.I.'s "Time Out". The disc opens with a short, goofy, Nintendo-type 8 bit melody, but immediately launches into the Shitter's unique hybrid of crushing, rocking thrash metal and crusty grindcore, like a mutant mishmash of old school Japanese grinders S.O.B. and Boredoms, Brutal Truth and Mr. Bungle, stoner rock and pulverizing Celtic Frost sludge and awesome Exodus thrash. You'd better believe that this thrashes...blazing thrash metal mega-riffs smash into weird yet massive grooves that could almost be described as "funky", jackhammer grind blasts get entangled in bursts of super catchy metallic pop-punk, garage rock licks and slap-funk bass appear over slow sludge metal breakdowns and insane blast beats. There's the airy fingerpickin' acoustic interlude titled "Shit Drop", and the fucked up closer "Stihs Latem" that has them playing backwards. The 7 minute-plus "Rest In Piss" is a total deathgrind/prog mindmelt, it's convoluted riffs and tempo shifts stretching out far beyond the duration of a typical grind jam, becoming trancelike as the slow, off time funk-sludge riff alternates with supersonic blast beats. It's all over the fucking place. And Bathtub Shitter's vocalist Masato Henmarer Morimoto vomits up some of the most insane, ridiculous throat performances possible over the band's chaotic musical arrangements, effortlessly changing up between super-guttural, lung-busting gorebeast growling, snotty hardcore hollerin', and a freaked-out, impossibly high-pitched shriek that sounds like a hysterical, coked-up anime cheerleader. And it all works so perfectly, the vocals and schizoid grind shifts make this an awesome, comical, ridiculous, rumbling shitstorm of gnarly grind weirdness.
The European vinyl edition of Batillus's latest album, Concrete Sustain.
New York sludge metallers Batillus have always displayed a heavy industrial influence in their slow-motion down-tuned crush, but with their latest album Concrete Sustain, the band pursues this aspect of their sound into new areas that finds them developing into something much more unique and distinctive. Their debut was ridiculously heavy, but here they've evolved into something more spacious, more percussive, with heavy doses of early industrial metal coursing through the black veins of these songs, guided by the pressurized pneumatic power of the rhythm section.
Right from the start, Batillus bludgeon the listener with the staccato sludge metal riffage and strangely funky drumming of "Concrete", the rhythm almost like a fractured breakbeat, while the riffage is crushing, down-tuned and droning, chunks of rumbling syrupy crush chugging over the evolving industro-groove of the rhythm section, the synthesizers swelling up into swarms of trippy, interstellar electronics. It's goddamn killer, and definitely different from the previous Batillus stuff that I've listened to, a definite Godflesh influence looming over the band's terminally bleak grooves. When "Cast" picks up after that, it drops another monstrous mechanical groove, the music deceptively simple, another droning riff welded to a strangely twitchy backbeat, super heavy and utterly grim, the music synching up perfectly with the abject lyrics and their vision of psychological collapse beneath the weight of the end-times. But then "Beset" crashes in, all slow-motion lava-flow of molten black sludge and glacial tempos, and anyone aching for that ultra-crawling heaviness heard on their debut Furnace will feel right at home. Mournful, melodic riffs poured over the rumbling buzzsaw bass and spacious pounding of the drums, a delicate delay-soaked guitar lead rising up over the doom-laden heaviness and monstrous gaseous growls, the song dropping into stretches of synth-glazed slowcore. Gorgeously bleak stuff. The band picks up the pace on "Mirrors", whose driving repetitive riff coils tightly around the guts of the song, layered with controlled bursts of electronic noise and eerie guitar before each new eruption into the pummeling chorus, where a crushing two-note riff is backed by the distant clank of metal and swirling black drift. "Rust" returns to that Godfleshy groove for a bit, dropping more ultra-heavy lurching sludge over a brutal stop/start rhythm, and by this point it's starting to feel like Batillus are tapping into a certain strain of industrialized sludge that I haven't heard in ages, some real heavy whiffs of primo NYC skum-crunch a la Helmet or Unsane starting to emanate off of this record. And then they head into the miserable closer "Thorns", and it's pure dour doom, sorrowful leads slithering over glacial tar-pit dirge, deep chanting vocals drifting over top, a moving, dramatic finale to Concrete Sustain's slo-mo dystopian requiem.
Limited to five hundred copies.
Batillus's latest album, Concrete Sustain, now in stock on CD.
New York sludge metallers Batillus have always displayed a heavy industrial influence in their slow-motion down-tuned crush, but with their latest album Concrete Sustain, the band pursues this aspect of their sound into new areas that finds them developing into something much more unique and distinctive. Their debut was ridiculously heavy, but here they've evolved into something more spacious, more percussive, with heavy doses of early industrial metal coursing through the black veins of these songs, guided by the pressurized pneumatic power of the rhythm section.
Right from the start, Batillus bludgeon the listener with the staccato sludge metal riffage and strangely funky drumming of "Concrete", the rhythm almost like a fractured breakbeat, while the riffage is crushing, down-tuned and droning, chunks of rumbling syrupy crush chugging over the evolving industro-groove of the rhythm section, the synthesizers swelling up into swarms of trippy, interstellar electronics. It's goddamn killer, and definitely different from the previous Batillus stuff that I've listened to, a definite Godflesh influence looming over the band's terminally bleak grooves. When "Cast" picks up after that, it drops another monstrous mechanical groove, the music deceptively simple, another droning riff welded to a strangely twitchy backbeat, super heavy and utterly grim, the music synching up perfectly with the abject lyrics and their vision of psychological collapse beneath the weight of the end-times. But then "Beset" crashes in, all slow-motion lava-flow of molten black sludge and glacial tempos, and anyone aching for that ultra-crawling heaviness heard on their debut Furnace will feel right at home. Mournful, melodic riffs poured over the rumbling buzzsaw bass and spacious pounding of the drums, a delicate delay-soaked guitar lead rising up over the doom-laden heaviness and monstrous gaseous growls, the song dropping into stretches of synth-glazed slowcore. Gorgeously bleak stuff. The band picks up the pace on "Mirrors", whose driving repetitive riff coils tightly around the guts of the song, layered with controlled bursts of electronic noise and eerie guitar before each new eruption into the pummeling chorus, where a crushing two-note riff is backed by the distant clank of metal and swirling black drift. "Rust" returns to that Godfleshy groove for a bit, dropping more ultra-heavy lurching sludge over a brutal stop/start rhythm, and by this point it's starting to feel like Batillus are tapping into a certain strain of industrialized sludge that I haven't heard in ages, some real heavy whiffs of primo NYC skum-crunch a la Helmet or Unsane starting to emanate off of this record. And then they head into the miserable closer "Thorns", and it's pure dour doom, sorrowful leads slithering over glacial tar-pit dirge, deep chanting vocals drifting over top, a moving, dramatic finale to Concrete Sustain's slo-mo dystopian requiem.
Comes in digipack packaging.
Impressive skull-flattening heaviness from two newer doom merchants, Whitehorse and Batillus. They both bring new, exclusive material to this split Lp, and the slow-motion power that the bands bring to this slab is pulverizing.
The crushing experimental sludge of New York's Batillus's begins with "Silver Mortar", a nearly ten minute death-dirge that begins with sheets of delicate black drift and eerie guitars creeping over a steady slowcore rhythm. This brooding intro gradually builds the tension, the bass adding a slight jazzy feel to the band's shuffling gloom, but its not long before they crash in suddenly with the doom. A monstrous down tuned riff in slow motion, putrid death metal-style bellowing itself seemingly stuck in sap, a gluey, vaguely psychedelic doomdeath crush draped in whirring synthesizers and gleaming black drones. It abruptly launches into a weird, angular passage of progged-out sludge that reminds me of Man Is The Bastard, something that recurs a couple of times throughout the song, alternating with some more deformed doom riffage splattered with processed guitar noise. The other song "Feral" gets even more abject and anguished, stumbling and crawling through vicious snarling vokills and tar-drenched riffs, those Hawkwindian synths buzzing and blooping off in the distance, sounding like some space-rock obsessed version of Trees or Khanate.
Australia's Whitehorse have just one song on their side, but its a fuckin' epic. "Dark Age" drops a simple, crushing riff in the middle of a cloud of dark industrial ambience, clanking metal and billowing black drift swirling around some vast subterranean chamber, and as the rest of the band slowly enters with the slow buildup of pounding drums, the song lurches forward into an ultra-heavy deathdoom assault. Ghastly guttural vocals are unintelligible smears of putrescence against the thick reverb that cloaks the band, while the chugging lockstep groove of the guitars and rhythm section flatten everything in sight. If you've heard these guys before, you know Whitehorse is one of the heaviest doom metal bands around, taking the classic graveyard sludge of Autopsy, Asphyx, Disembowelment and Cianide and dragging it even deeper into the mire and injecting an unhealthy level of filthy electronic skuzz and trippy effects into the sludge. The song shifts into spaced-out, dub-drenched delirium later on, but when it comes out on the other side the band changes up into an all new battery of savage riffery laced with moments of chaotic blackened blasting and frenzied animalistic shrieks.
Recommended to fans of either band, and to anyone into extreme, electronically-infected ultra-doom. Comes with a printed inner sleeve, and pressed on black vinyl.
A Day Of Nights has been out for a little while, but it's taken me awhile to list this in the store 'cuz, well, I've been having a hard time
figuring out how to describe this album. Which usually means that we're onto something really cool. Brooklyn-based Battle Of Mice came together just
over a year and a half ago, a project formed by Josh Graham from Red Sparowes and Neurosis, Julie Christmas from Made Out Of Babies, and Joe Hamilton from
Book Of Knots. They debuted on that terrific Triad three way split (which we have listed as well in this weeks store update), and followed that
pretty quickly with A Day Of Nights, an awesome art-metal narrative that appears to chronicle the breakdown of the romantic relationship between
members Graham and Christmas in painful, harrowing detail. I haven't heard something this personal and emotionally raw since Swans leader Michael Gira
released his solo album Drainland. The music is appropriately grim and emotional, a crushing, sweeping miasma of metallic noir-rock rife with
dynamic riffing, dark gloomy melodies, and crushing bouts of doomy sludge, an intense and atmospheric combination of Neurosis urban tribal dirge, Tool's arty
alt-metal, the panoramic metalgaze majesty of Red Sparowes, vitriolic breakup letters, screamed accusations, and hallucinatory poetry. So awesome and
heartrending and epic, it's unbelievable that this virtually new band could achieve this with thier first album. But it's Julie Christmas' singing that
totally elevates A Day Of Nights to pop perfection, her range of vocals here far more diverse than her work with the metallic noiserock of Made Out
Of Babies, moving between psychotic paranoid breakdowns, hysterical, violent screaming assaults, almost spoken-word confessions, and soaring singing that
sends my heart into my throat every time I listen to this album. Which is alot. Beyond recommended.
The second album from Battlefields at first seems to pick up where their first full length (2006's Stained With The Blood Of An Empire) left off, plying the same sort of slow, pummeling psychedelic metal laced with textural electronics, spacey samples and sumptuous faux-analogue tones of a microKorg. These Midwestern metal sculptors have long been lumped in with the whole Neurosis/Isis influenced school of sludgey metal, and they certainly had enough massive tectonic riffing, slow simmering menace and apocalyptic atmosphere to appeal to all those fans of Tides, Mouth Of The Architect, Conifer, Pelican, Angel Eyes, etc. In my mind, Battlefields leaned more towards the space rock side of that sound, similiar to bands like Rosetta and Minsk who have a heavier emphasis on electronics and synthesizer textures, and that side of their sound is brought out even more on their latest album, Thresholds Of Imbalance. The longer sludgy metal epics are bookended by several shorter ambient tracks, which range from the slow psychedelic throb and soulful guitar of "Stasis" and the glitchy spoken-word soundscaping of "Approaching", to the slow ungainly drumming and angular riffing of the instrumental "Nibiru". Of course, the main course is the massive ten-minute-plus tracks like "Disacknowledge" and "Blueprint" that make up the bulk of the album; the songs are crushing, heaving masses of droning metallic riffage and repetitious downtuned dirge, sometimes channeling the hypnotic crush of early Isis, at others treading into pure doom metal with mighty Sabbathian grooves and eerie guitar leads. Battlefields add some interesting flavors to their spacey, earthshaking dirges: the shuffling doom-jazz and swirling abstract drift that opens the first track, and the percussive hypno-metal meets Katatonia vibe that appears later on; the jazzy psychedelia that's interspersed with the grinding slo-mo sludge of "Blueprint", and those muffled industrial loops that flow beneath the spacious drone rock at the beginning of "The Thresholds". When the songs are at their heaviest, Battlefields keep their riffs rooted in raw metallic sludge, but the album just as often slips into Floydian psychedelia. It's a familiar sound, sure, but the raw, crusty aggression that seeps into Battlefields's spacey sludgemetal makes it an enjoyable slab of heaviness for fans of this sort of stuff, heavy enough to rattle the rafters. Comes in a full-color six-panel digipack package with cool artwork from Paul Romano.
These tundra warriors return with their followup to the excellent 2006 album Stained With The Blood Of An Empire, their burly debut that merged a seething tribal doomcore fury influenced by Neurosis with that screamathon deathcore sound that is native to the Dakotas and surrounding regions. That album was crushing, evocative, and stood out from the pack of bands that simply ape Neurosis and Isis. So now it's a year later, and from the sounds on this CD single, it sounds like Battlefields are taking the same route that their forward-thinking peers in Rosetta, Mouth Of The Architect and Year Of No Light are opting for - continued experimentation and mutation of the apocalyptic dirge sound that ultimately moves them further and further from the realm of mere clonedom. This disc features a single 13 minute track that is leagues ahead of their previous work, an expansive psych-metal jam that begins as a field of tinny electronic noise and lonely piano notes that are gra
dually joined by slow scraping violin-like notes and dark rumbling ambience. Eventually the entire band kicks in with crushing, crusty sludge metal, massive riffing and death metal vocals and wah-soaked guitar leads rolling out oppressively. The band plunges into passages of quieter, ambient rock that remind me somewhat of Red Sparowes, though Battlefields have their own mystical quality to the softer instrumental twists and turns. Pretty great, certainly recommended for those into the aforementioned bands like Rosetta and MOTA as well as Tides, Across Tundras, Pelican, and Time To Burn. Limited edition of 500 copies, and is pressed on a clear fan disc with cool artwork.
This disc has been out of stock at C-Blast for ages, but we've finally got this back in stock...
Minnesota's Battlefields contribute another entry to the swelling ranks of the post-Neurosis throng with this 4-song, 30+ minute debut, but they suceed in putting their own thumbprint on the sound with a potent mixture of extended instrumental gloom and weighty, feral metalcore that the band have cloaked in themes and imagery related to their interest in ancient civilisations, occultic Archeology, and "hidden histories". 'Tides Upon The Crescent City' opens with a panorama of chiming delayed guitars, shuffling, almost jazzy percussion, and looped feedback, evocative stuff that conveys the apocalyptic biblical sunset of the album artwork (which is pretty striking, I gotta say). Right off the bat I'm digging the way these guys have incorporated samplers into their setup, adding tastefully applied textures to their atmospheric post-rock buildup, and makes me think of a tenser Red Sparowes. At least it did up until the 5 minute mark, when the band suddenly erupts into a volley of majestic deathcore, layering torn shrieks and gutteral death bellows over martial snare and crushing riffage. 'Intimations Of Antiquity' and 'A Lifeless Polar Desert' equally serve up an endtime cocktail of richly textured ambient rock passages colliding with intense, angular metalcore ...a combination that puts them somewhere between Red Sparowes, the more recent Neurosis albums, and the dissonant ferocity of older Converge attacks. Sounds like a strange mixture on paper, but I'm really into the way these guys have pulled it off. The last track 'The Blood And Time At The End Of The World' is the albums doomiest number, arising with a killer Sabbathian godzilla riff that evolves into a churning dirgecore mantra laced with amazing tripped out cosmic guitar melodies. If Battlefields can continue to strike this balance between the stratospheric rock passages and their dramatic, crushing metalcore assaults, I think they'll have really nailed something. It's a strong debut that fans of arty contempo metalcore will find pretty compelling.
A limited edition (300 copies) one-sided LP of Battlefields's crushing Entourage Of The Archaic EP, which had previously been released as a limited cd through Init. This sweet-looking record is pressed on one-sided colored marble vinyl and is packaged in a heavy clear mylar sleeve that has artwork from Minneapolis tattoo artist Heath Rave screenprinted on the one side, and includes a handnumbered insert card and a download card for a digital copy of the record.
These tundra warriors return with their followup to the excellent 2006 album Stained With The Blood Of An Empire, their burly debut that merged a seething tribal doomcore fury influenced by Neurosis with that screamathon deathcore sound that is native to the Dakotas and surrounding regions. That album was crushing, evocative, and stood out from the pack of bands that simply ape Neurosis and Isis. So now it's a year later, and from the sounds on this CD single, it sounds like Battlefields are taking the same route that their forward-thinking peers in Rosetta, Mouth Of The Architect and Year Of No Light are opting for - continued experimentation and mutation of the apocalyptic dirge sound that ultimately moves them further and further from the realm of mere clonedom. This disc features a single 13 minute track that is leagues ahead of their previous work, an expansive psych-metal jam that begins as a field of tinny electronic noise and lonely piano notes that are gra
dually joined by slow scraping violin-like notes and dark rumbling ambience. Eventually the entire band kicks in with crushing, crusty sludge metal, massive riffing and death metal vocals and wah-soaked guitar leads rolling out oppressively. The band plunges into passages of quieter, ambient rock that remind me somewhat of Red Sparowes, though Battlefields have their own mystical quality to the softer instrumental twists and turns. Pretty great, certainly recommended for those into the aforementioned bands like Rosetta and MOTA as well as Tides, Across Tundras, Pelican, and Time To Burn.
The debut album from the Richmond blackened death metal band Battlemaster is finally back in stock! The RVA metal scene has become pretty well known thanks to bands like Lamb Of God and Municipal Waste, and a few years ago, another band emerged from the River City, one that hardly even sounded like they were from the U.S. let alone from below the Mason-Dixon line, who blatently channeled the blackened fury of Scandinavian metal with tongues firmly in cheek. Warthirsting And Winterbound totally kicked my ass when we first heard got this album in stock, with ten tracks of epic blackened metal that moves back and forth from wintery Immortal-style gallop and triumphant Amon Amarth viking thrash, awesome riffs, pounding propulsive drumming and precision blastbeats, icy frostbitten atmosphere and a weird vocal attack that mixes regular deep death metal growls with a high-pitched munchkin screech that's pretty fucking awesome! It's like having a snarling androgynous hobgoblin howling over the majestic black metal attack and sounds totally nuts, and this fits in well with Battlemaster's Dungeons & Dragons/fantasy role-playing obsessed themes and references that surround their music (see songs like "The Mindflayer's Addiction", "Dungeoncrawl", "Power Word: Kill", "This Mead Is Making Me Warlike"). So yeah, there's defintiely some silliness behind Battlemaster's Scandi-thrash assault, but you'd never think that from the music, which is played totally straight and is a ferocious as anything that's come out of the European death/black scene in recent years. Except maybe for the extended acoustic coda that closes the album out, which almost sounds like a black metal interlude stretched out into a haunting piece of Appalachian folk. Like how their buddies in Cannabis Corpse and Municipal Waste pay homage to brutal Floridian death metal and old school crossover thrash with a sense of humor, so do Battlemaster with their vicious Scandinavian blackthrash cocktail, turning the cliches and goofy imagery that you'd normally find in the lyrics of "Viking" metal bands from the icy north into brilliantly over-the-top satire that nevertheless rips like hell!
I will never deny the thrash. My early teenage years were almost exclusively spent blowing my canals out with the cream of the Bay Area crop, and East Coast
beasts like Overkill and Nuclear Assault. I don't think that I owned a single piece of clothing that didn't have the DRI logo scrawled somewhere on
it in black magic marker. And when crossover hit in the late '80's, it was the first real musical epiphany that I had ever experienced up until that point;
the oft-maligned blenderization of thrash metal and hardcore punk was, at the time, the most primal and aggro noise I had come into contact with. Then came
the late 90's thrashcore revivial in the underground hardcore punk scene, with the likes of Crucial Unit, What Happens Next,and Municipal Waste unleashing
circle pit carnage throughout the DIY punk scene, and I was in total bliss. Throughout all of this, my infatuation with thrash, speed metal, and crossover
has never abated, but the past couple of years has been pretty barren for ripping new bands. So when a disc as unapologetically, un-irionically THRASH as
Battletorn's debut crossed my path, with it's primitive penciled cover art depicting some kind of cloaked demon ripped right out of a teenage hesher's
trapper keeper, I could barely contain myself. Battletorn's blown-out, fierce as fuck thrash attack surprisingly comes from a minimalist, stripped-down
lineup of just guitarist, drummer, and singer. Guitarist Omid formerly played bass in legendary DC grind godz Enemy Soil, and he napalms each one of these
jams with a whirlwind assault of blurred power chord frenzy. Fellow DC area ex-pat William batters his drum kit into dust, and it's a total trashcan blast.
But Battletorn's trump card on Evil Chains is the presence of singer Beverly,whose rapid fire, high pitched yelling is beamed straight out of 1985,
hardcore style, and falls somewhere between a feminine version of Jello Biafra, the chirpy, staccato declarations of Melt Banana's Yasuko, and Poly Styrene.
And her socially aware but strangely poetic lyrics are way more interesting than what you'd normally expect from this sort of hit-and-run thrashcore. These
cats straddle the line between ragged retro Combat Records throwback and modernized hyperspeed urban noise power, and while this is a too-brief disc clocking
in at merely 15 minutes in length, the 18 jams captured here are unbeatably ferocious emissions of distorted, gnarly energy.
Just turned up some copies of this quirky thrashcore album on vinyl, probably the last we'll ever get since it seems that the label has closed up shop for good. Here's the old review of the Cd edition:
I will never deny the thrash. My early teenage years were almost exclusively spent blowing my canals out with the cream of the Bay Area crop, and East Coast beasts like Overkill and Nuclear Assault. I don't think that I owned a single piece of clothing that didn't have the DRI logo scrawled somewhere on it in black magic marker. And when crossover hit in the late '80's, it was the first real musical epiphany that I had ever experienced up until that point; the oft-maligned blenderization of thrash metal and hardcore punk was, at the time, the most primal and aggro noise I had come into contact with. Then came the late 90's thrashcore revival in the underground hardcore punk scene, with the likes of Crucial Unit, What Happens Next, and Municipal Waste unleashing circle pit carnage throughout the DIY punk scene, and I was in total bliss. Throughout all of this, my infatuation with thrash, speed metal, and crossover has never abated, but the past couple of years has been pretty barren for ripping new bands. So when a disc as unapologetically, un-ironically THRASH as Battletorn's debut crossed my path, with it's primitive penciled cover art depicting some kind of cloaked demon ripped right out of a teenage hesher's trapper keeper, I could barely contain myself. Their blown-out, fierce as fuck thrash attack surprisingly comes from a minimalist, stripped-down lineup of just guitarist, drummer, and singer. Guitarist Omid formerly played bass in legendary DC grind gods Enemy Soil, and he napalms each one of these jams with a whirlwind assault of blurred power chord frenzy. Fellow DC area ex-pat William batters his drum kit into dust, and it's a total trashcan blast. But Battletorn's trump card on Evil Chains is the presence of singer Beverly, whose rapid fire, high pitched yelling is beamed straight out of 1985, hardcore style, and falls somewhere between a feminine version of Jello Biafra, the chirpy, staccato declarations of Melt Banana's Yasuko, and Poly Styrene. And her socially aware but strangely poetic lyrics are way more interesting than what you'd normally expect from this sort of hit-and-run thrashcore. These cats straddle the line between ragged retro Combat Records throwback and modernized hyperspeed urban noise power, and while this is a too-brief disc clocking in at merely 15 minutes in length, the 18 jams captured here are unbeatably ferocious emissions of distorted, gnarly energy.
The first five seconds of The Cosmic Gash makes us think we're in for some Loveless meets Japanese noise action, but then our brainplate
gets clawed off by Bbblood's massive skree trepanation, and we're left whipped and defeated. This is noxious ear-bleeding death/feedback/violence screaming
out of the same bloody maw as those other recent Audiobot jams from Ichorous and Villa Valley that abused us earlier this year, a merciless blizzard of
destroyed microphones, metal clang, verbal spunk, cheap stomp box apocalypse and electronic drills, while also sprouting little blossoms of almost-melody and
glitched drones out of the jet engine headfuck. Bbblood manages to eke out some of the most cranium splintering, cobra conjuring feedback we've encountered
burnt to aluminum on this sucker...gotta recommended this to anyone who feels Borbetomagus is too soft. Comes in a sexy slipcase spattered in pixel spew by
Italian beach-dweller Tisbo, in an edition of only 65 copies.
This disc is fuckin' titanic...one of a couple of discs and records I just scored off of the Canadian label Divorce Records, Vision Correction is
the first full length album from Be Bad, a gang of scum-core/free jazz addled miscreants from Halifax, Nova Scotia, bellowing forth with eight tracks of
bruising riffage, cathartic howling and a tendency towards free noise that puts these guys in a class of their own. I'm definitely hearing some of that post
-millenial Am Rep noise rock skronk in these jams, a little Black Flag soaked in toxic waste and left to sprout into a psychedelic freakout beast, with lotsa
tough as nails hooks smothered in distortion and frantic guitar noise, pummeling rhythms that seem to be coming from multiple drumkits at once, and dark,
grasy vibes, but with some real nasty FX abuse painting everything in sicko acid hues. Then "Battledick" kicks in and you're suddenly swept up in a wave of
crushing improvised hypno-sludge riffage and sheets of black guitar drone stretching out across the night sky, incomprehensible maniacal vocals and what
might be a theremin spewing cosmic dread across an 8-minute motorik jam of monstrous proportions. Tough stuff. And as if that wasn't enough to rank this one
a top-shelf dose of psychedelic hardcore, they close it out with the quick n' catchy as fuck indie sludge-freakout anthem "(I've Got No) Positive
Vibrations"...that song is awesome. Fans of that drug-trip skuzzcore vibe that bands like Snake Apartment and Violent Students are pushing lately should be
checking Be Bad out post-haste, although these dudes are definitely doing their own take. Comes with killer lysergic artwork dished out in a metallic silver
-on-black package.
Ripping psychedelic hardcore, dressed up on a scorhing little platter wrapped in great acid-skull art and bad attitudes. Both of these bands are from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and each deliver their own unique brand of thrashy noise-damaged punk violence that has the same kind of scum vibe I get from bands like older Clockcleaner and Violent Students. Be Bad's debut album was reviewed a few weeks back in one of our store updates, and their two songs here ("The Slaves Who Buried The Pharoah" and "Ruin Your Life") continue down that same path of twitchy hardcore fused with 90's noise rock, pummeling stop start drumming launching into driving thrash, the singer shouting ambiguous threats, wall-of-noise riffs bashed out on the guitar and revving up into tornado blasts of droning monochord, and weird oscillator effects breaking down in the mix. I'm getting into these guys more and more with each new dose of music I'm getting from them, and anyone into the current hardcore/noise rock fusion needs to check Be Bad out. Attack Mode are really cool too, with a sound that crosses burly hardcore like Negative Approach and Black Flag with creepy No New York art skronk, their songs "Piece Of Shit", "Society's A Prison", and "Straightfaced" loaded with damaged riffing, wiry breakdowns, and frenzied screams. Their songs have a spooky, reverb overload atmosphere that hangs over their side of the split, there's an almost vintage sound to their music that makes me think of the obscure art-damaged, hardcore-connected post-punk stuff that Homestead was putting out in the late 80's. This EP is a rager!
This private-press Japanese CD-R delivers ridiculously stoopid budget noise violence from the land of the rising sun. BEARTRAP is a drums/guitar/vocals setup
that engage in old school blurrr in the AxCx/7 MINUTES OF NAUSEA/early CRIPPLE BASTARDS vein, with tense lo-fi microbursts of improvised grindcore and
retarded noise meandering. CUNTS follow with 17 quick eruptions of their bizarre drums and vocals take on improv noisecore. Lo-fidelity as FUCK, and similiar
to a BOREDOMS/ANAL CUNT onslaught on a coke binge. Quite satisfying as aural draino. Obviously fans of old school noisecore, Ax/Tion Records blurr, and
avant-garde slop noise should take note. The disc is packaged in an appropriate xeroxed foldover sleeve with (surprisingly) plenty o' info and track listings
for each band.
I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the iconic Symbol Of Chaos set against a silver garland and black background. The patch measures 8 x 6 centimeters, and is embroidered in black, silver and grey thread. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.
I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the "Leviathan Cross", the alchemical symbol for Sulphur (or Brimstone); adopted by Lavey in the 1960's as one of his Satanic emblems (and prominently featured in his Satanic Bible, this image combines an adversarial symbol with the infinity of the Ouroboros, set against a silver garland and black background. The patch measures 8 x 6 centimeters, and is embroidered in black, silver and grey thread. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.
I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the image of the Iron Cross, a symbol of strength set against a silver garland and black background. The patch measures 8 x 6 centimeters, and is embroidered in black, silver and grey thread. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.
I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the classic inverted Pentagram, one of the oldest occult images in human history, heralded by the influential French occultist Eliphas Levi as "...a symbol of evil...it overturns the proper order of things and demonstrates the triumph of matter over spirit. It is the goat of lust attacking the heavens with its horns." With this design, the inverted Pentagram appears against a silver garland and black background. The patch measures 8 x 6 centimeters, and is embroidered in black, silver and grey thread. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.
I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This design features the symbol of the Black Sun, an image that represents power, knowledge, universal consciousness that's found in various sectors of neo-paganism, Indo-European esotericism, fascist iconography, and modern occultism, as well as appearing in the works of such artists as Coil, Death In June, Von Thronstahl, Dead Can Dance and Scottish sludge band Black Sun (obviously). This design features the Black Sun embroidered in white thread against a black background, and measures 8 cm across. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.
�� One of the best new bands to emerge in the past few years out of this current 80's-era post punk revival is Beastmilk, a Finnish band who appeared in 2010 with their White Stains On Black Tape demo that was later championed by Darkthrone's Fenriz on his Band of the Week blog. It was easy to hear why - these seasoned musicians (which include front-man Kvohst of Code / Hexvessel / D�dheimsgard, and Juho Goatspeed from the amazing avant-garde black metal band Spiderpact) appeared fully formed, performing a sort of driving, anthemic gloom-rock with a subtle metallic undercurrent and gobs of apocalyptic atmosphere, but with monumental hooks that seemed primed and ready for something arena-sized. Their first full length Climax (now back in stock here at C-Blast) polished that sound even more, delivering ten tracks of infectious, disaffected post-punk that is ridiculously catchy stuff, and which should be heard STAT by anyone into the similarly gloomy, infectious sounds of like-minded bands Vaura, Soror Dolorosa and Hateful Abandon, who all share some sort of distant black metal background. Compared to some of those bands, though, Beastmilk's roots in the Nordic metal underground are barely noticeable here, if at all.
��As the propulsive drive of "Death Reflects Us" kicks off Climax with a perfectly crafted blast of soaring gloom-rock, the bass guitar and chiming riffs soar over pounding motorik drumming, the vocals clear and soaring as they ascend to the anthemic hook of the chorus. That anthemic quality is all over this album, the bass guitar WAY out front as it lays down the driving Joy Division-esque lines, fusing their huge hooks to grim visions of a world in rapid collapse and other, more personal ruminations, and Kvohst's Danzig-esque croon is at once both icy and tremulous, layered into striking harmonies at all the right moments. "The Wind Blows Through Their Skulls" paints a bleak portrait of a radioactive nightmare future, as do the likes of "Genocidal Crush" and "Nuclear Winter", nightmarish imagery set to swirling clean guitars and crunchy metallic riffs, handclaps and huge guitar hooks shifting things into a dark majestic pop that often creates an effective contrast with the eruptions of distorted guitar squall and the relentlessly rocking tempo of most of the songs. There are echoes of The Cult and Samhain and Sisters Of Mercy all through this, and there's a bunch of moments on Climax when the band seems to suddenly transform into a vaguely blackened version of Echo And The Bunneymen - with those types of names being dropped, you should have a pretty good idea iof what sort of stuff these guys are doing, though this never sounds like pastiche to me. Songs like "You Are Now Under Our Control", "Surf The Apocalypse" and "Fear Your Mind" will rattle around in your head for days after hearing it, alternating with the slower, brooding atmosphere of songs like "Ghosts Out Of Focus" and "Strange Attractors", the latter featuring guest vocals from Viveca Butler of New York gloom rockers Occultation that closes the album with it's most haunting melody. Beastmilk are unabashed in their fierce devotion to the darkest regions of classic post punk, but they re-envisioned that sound as something much more muscular and malevolent and modern. Despite the deafening amount of hype that has been hovering around this band, it really is pretty fucking great.
��Back in stock on limited edition colored vinyl.
One of the best new bands to emerge in the past few years out of this current 80's-era post punk revival is Beastmilk, a Finnish band who appeared in 2010 with their White Stains On Black Tape demo that was later championed by Darkthrone's Fenriz on his Band of the Week blog. It was easy to hear why - these seasoned musicians (which include front-man Kvohst of Code / Hexvessel / D�dheimsgard, and Juho Goatspeed from the amazing avant-garde black metal band Spiderpact) appeared fully formed, performing a sort of driving, anthemic gloom-rock with a subtle metallic undercurrent and gobs of apocalyptic atmosphere, but with monumental hooks that seemed primed and ready for something arena-sized. Their first full length Climax (now back in stock here at C-Blast) polished that sound even more, delivering ten tracks of infectious, disaffected post-punk that is ridiculously catchy stuff, and which should be heard STAT by anyone into the similarly gloomy, infectious sounds of like-minded bands Vaura, Soror Dolorosa and Hateful Abandon, who all share some sort of distant black metal background. Compared to some of those bands, though, Beastmilk's roots in the Nordic metal underground are barely noticeable here, if at all.
As the propulsive drive of "Death Reflects Us" kicks off Climax with a perfectly crafted blast of soaring gloom-rock, the bass guitar and chiming riffs soar over pounding motorik drumming, the vocals clear and soaring as they ascend to the anthemic hook of the chorus. That anthemic quality is all over this album, the bass guitar WAY out front as it lays down the driving Joy Division-esque lines, fusing their huge hooks to grim visions of a world in rapid collapse and other, more personal ruminations, and Kvohst's Danzig-esque croon is at once both icy and tremulous, layered into striking harmonies at all the right moments. "The Wind Blows Through Their Skulls" paints a bleak portrait of a radioactive nightmare future, as do the likes of "Genocidal Crush" and "Nuclear Winter", nightmarish imagery set to swirling clean guitars and crunchy metallic riffs, handclaps and huge guitar hooks shifting things into a dark majestic pop that often creates an effective contrast with the eruptions of distorted guitar squall and the relentlessly rocking tempo of most of the songs. There are echoes of The Cult and Samhain and Sisters Of Mercy all through this, and there's a bunch of moments on Climax when the band seems to suddenly transform into a vaguely blackened version of Echo And The Bunneymen - with those types of names being dropped, you should have a pretty good idea iof what sort of stuff these guys are doing, though this never sounds like pastiche to me. Songs like "You Are Now Under Our Control", "Surf The Apocalypse" and "Fear Your Mind" will rattle around in your head for days after hearing it, alternating with the slower, brooding atmosphere of songs like "Ghosts Out Of Focus" and "Strange Attractors", the latter featuring guest vocals from Viveca Butler of New York gloom rockers Occultation that closes the album with it's most haunting melody. Beastmilk are unabashed in their fierce devotion to the darkest regions of classic post punk, but they re-envisioned that sound as something much more muscular and malevolent and modern. Despite the deafening amount of hype that has been hovering around this band, it really is pretty fucking great.
���Last year's Climax might be my favorite contempo gloom-punk album that's come out in the past few years, delivering some of the catchiest music I've heard come out of the recent resurgence in 80's style deathrock and post-punk. Released prior to their debut album, Beastmilk's early EPs were just as darkly infectious and anthemic, essential stuff if you were hooked on Climax, but that stuff had been out of print for awhile. Beastmilk's US label Magic Bullet has just reissued these earlier releases though, and both are highly recommended; while it only has two actual songs and the whole thing is repeated on the b-side, I've been hitting repeat on the Finnish band's White Stains 7" all month. White Stains On Black Wax (the title a nod to Crowley's infamous book of erotic poetry) was Beastmilk's first release, a self-released cassette that came out back in 2010 that started all of the buzz around the band after Darkthrone member Fenriz hailed it as one of the best new releases of the year on his Band Of The Week blog. Little wonder, as this brief blast of apocalyptic post-punk burrows fast into your brain, opening with the maudlin, Misfits-meets-Killing Joke rocker "The Wind Blows Through Their Skulls", then slipping into the equally catchy "Blood (Under The Mill)", the song's driving, heavy sound tinged with an almost rockabilly-esque twang. The other track is little more than a short sound collage touting the glories of "Beastmilk", but this 7" still thoroughly wipes the floor with most bands of this kind, their songs fueled on dark energy and loaded with huge, gloomy hooks that'll stick with you for days, and fronted by the shadowed croon of singer Mat McNerney (Code / Hexvessel / D�dheimsgard). Fantastic stuff.
���Here's the second new Beastmilk reissue that just came out from the band's US label Magic Bullet, a new version of the Finnish post-punk outfit's first actual 7" release that came out on Svart back in 2012. Use Your Deluge was the second release from these apocalyptic Helsinki gloom-punks, following up their acclaimed self-released cassette with four more songs of incredibly catchy, sinister music that references everything from Joy Division to Sisters Of Mercy to Danzig, while ultimately crafting a dark driving sound of their own. These tracks are still among my favorites from the band, and did more than merely foreshadow the brilliant songwriting and elegant, icy aggression of their debut album Climax; the caliber of songwriting here is just as high, tracks like "Void Mother", "Forever Animal", "Red majesty" and especially the thoroughly rousing "Children Of The Atom Bomb" all showcasing Beastmilk's perfect hybrid of Danzig-esque darkness and propulsive, rocking post-punk edged with a slight metallic bite. Every one of these songs is wound around a maddeningly catchy hook, drums slipping seamlessly between pounding tribal drumming and that soaring sinister momentum, lush ice-encrusted guitar melodies winding around the coolly detached delivery of Mat McNerney (of Code / Hexvessel / D�dheimsgard fame)'s crooning lead vocals, a perfect accompaniment to Beastmilk's heavy endtime anthems. Highly recommended.
���Now available on limited gold vinyl...
��� Here's the second new Beastmilk reissue that just came out from the band's US label Magic Bullet, a new version of the Finnish post-punk outfit's first actual 7" release that came out on Svart back in 2012. Use Your Deluge was the second release from these apocalyptic Helsinki gloom-punks, following up their acclaimed self-released cassette with four more songs of incredibly catchy, sinister music that references everything from Joy Division to Sisters Of Mercy to Danzig, while ultimately crafting a dark driving sound of their own. These tracks are still among my favorites from the band, and did more than merely foreshadow the brilliant songwriting and elegant, icy aggression of their debut album Climax; the caliber of songwriting here is just as high, tracks like "Void Mother", "Forever Animal", "Red majesty" and especially the thoroughly rousing "Children Of The Atom Bomb" all showcasing Beastmilk's perfect hybrid of Danzig-esque darkness and propulsive, rocking post-punk edged with a slight metallic bite. Every one of these songs is wound around a maddeningly catchy hook, drums slipping seamlessly between pounding tribal drumming and that soaring sinister momentum, lush ice-encrusted guitar melodies winding around the coolly detached delivery of Mat McNerney (of Code / Hexvessel / D�dheimsgard fame)'s crooning lead vocals, a perfect accompaniment to Beastmilk's heavy endtime anthems. Highly recommended.
��� Picked up some of the limited-edition tapes that Svart did of this fantastic post-punk album.
��� One of the best new bands to emerge in the past few years out of this current 80's-era post punk revival is Beastmilk, a Finnish band who appeared in 2010 with their White Stains On Black Tape demo that was later championed by Darkthrone's Fenriz on his Band of the Week blog. It was easy to hear why - these seasoned musicians (which include front-man Kvohst of Code / Hexvessel / D�dheimsgard, and Juho Goatspeed from the amazing avant-garde black metal band Spiderpact) appeared fully formed, performing a sort of driving, anthemic gloom-rock with a subtle metallic undercurrent and gobs of apocalyptic atmosphere, but with monumental hooks that seemed primed and ready for something arena-sized. Their first full length Climax (now back in stock here at C-Blast) polished that sound even more, delivering ten tracks of infectious, disaffected post-punk that is ridiculously catchy stuff, and which should be heard STAT by anyone into the similarly gloomy, infectious sounds of like-minded bands Vaura, Soror Dolorosa and Hateful Abandon, who all share some sort of distant black metal background. Compared to some of those bands, though, Beastmilk's roots in the Nordic metal underground are barely noticeable here, if at all.
��� As the propulsive drive of "Death Reflects Us" kicks off Climax with a perfectly crafted blast of soaring gloom-rock, the bass guitar and chiming riffs soar over pounding motorik drumming, the vocals clear and soaring as they ascend to the anthemic hook of the chorus. That anthemic quality is all over this album, the bass guitar WAY out front as it lays down the driving Joy Division-esque lines, fusing their huge hooks to grim visions of a world in rapid collapse and other, more personal ruminations, and Kvohst's Danzig-esque croon is at once both icy and tremulous, layered into striking harmonies at all the right moments. "The Wind Blows Through Their Skulls" paints a bleak portrait of a radioactive nightmare future, as do the likes of "Genocidal Crush" and "Nuclear Winter", nightmarish imagery set to swirling clean guitars and crunchy metallic riffs, handclaps and huge guitar hooks shifting things into a dark majestic pop that often creates an effective contrast with the eruptions of distorted guitar squall and the relentlessly rocking tempo of most of the songs. There are echoes of The Cult and Samhain and Sisters Of Mercy all through this, and there's a bunch of moments on Climax when the band seems to suddenly transform into a vaguely blackened version of Echo And The Bunneymen - with those types of names being dropped, you should have a pretty good idea iof what sort of stuff these guys are doing, though this never sounds like pastiche to me. Songs like "You Are Now Under Our Control", "Surf The Apocalypse" and "Fear Your Mind" will rattle around in your head for days after hearing it, alternating with the slower, brooding atmosphere of songs like "Ghosts Out Of Focus" and "Strange Attractors", the latter featuring guest vocals from Viveca Butler of New York gloom rockers Occultation that closes the album with it's most haunting melody. Beastmilk are unabashed in their fierce devotion to the darkest regions of classic post punk, but they re-envisioned that sound as something much more muscular and malevolent and modern. Despite the deafening amount of hype that has been hovering around this band, it really is pretty fucking great.
Crushin' southern fried doomcore meets ripping powerviolence textures and psychedelic Southern biker rock, bringing the swamp crunch like fellow warty
sludgesters Cavity and Eyehategod and Weedeater and injecting it with killer classic metal riffs and MC5 strenght hooks and miles of grime and grease. This
is more adventurous than their previous biker-sludge albums on UK label Retribute, which were freaking awesome in their own right, brutal and ultra heavy
with lots of speedy stoner thrash to accentuate their slow-as-fuck doomsludge crawls...but The Burning South gets down with all sorts of new spins,
via dark sung vocals and eerie psychedelic clean-guitar instrumentals, acoustic guitar strum and samples and feedback clouds, progressive bits and punishing
dissonant riffing and RIGHTEOUS dual-guitar harmonies. Awesome! We def think that fans of Alabama Thunderpussy and Weedeater and Suplecs and Eyehategod will
eat this up.
The debut full length from VA Beach�s BEATEN BACK TO PURE. 6 hateful tracks of demonic stoner crust boogie. Gritty, grisly, and totally southern fried (fans
of WEEDATER and EYEHATEGOD, take note!!). More up-tempo than most of their peers, BEATEN BACK TO PURE really are the new face of Southern Rock, all greasy
riffs, monstrous vocals, and crushing rock perfect for a motorcycle ride straight into Hell. Produced by Steve Austin (TODAY IS THE DAY). Freakin� abrasive
southern metal.
Another one of Emil Beaulieau's "remix" albums, where the greatest living American noise artist takes his formidible four-armed turntable the Minutoli and wreaks havoc on assorted records. All of his remix discs are crazy, hyperactive blasts of noise/rock cut-up, brutal and noisy. This time, Beaulieu takes on the early catalog of Stomach Ache Records, the cult 90's noise label run by Charlie Ward who was a both a buddie of and frequent collaborator with RRRecords. The early Stomach Ache catalog included 7"s from Gerogerigegege, Stargazers, weirdo death metallers Faxed Head and 7000 Dying Rats, Japan's AUbe, black electronics project Omit, G.G. Allin, Pork Queen, Bananafish compilations, and Evil Moisture, and all of those records are assaulted by Beaulieau on this disc, the Minutoli arms slammed into vinyl grooves and raising brutal blasts of skree and mangled noise rock, walls of chopped up death metal riffery and fucked up sound collages. Brutally noisy turntable damage that turns downright hypnotic as you're blasted with chunk after chunk of mutilated riffing and skree that sometimes gives me the impression of hearing Violent Onsen Geisha ripping apart a stack of hardcore and metal records. Comes in a jewel cases with abstract xerox-art inserts.
Crucial DIY videocassette document from RRR featuring over an hour of live and studio footage of Emil Beaulieau, the nom de plume of RRR founder Ron Lessard. If you don't know, Ron is one of the most imporatn figures in the American noise underground, whose RRRecords has been an ongoing source for the most potent underground sonics since starting in 1980. Anyways, this tape was a must-get for us, as we were witness to one of Emil's joyous sets several years ago at a noise festival in Providence, RI, one of the most purely entertaining "noise" performances I'd ever seen. Beaulieau's weapon of choice is the Minutoli,a mutant customized 4-armed turntable that he uses to project extra-harsh blasts of chaotic screech and trashed-vinyl roar and building-collapsing locked grooves ripped from records that he presses specifically for his live performances, treated slabs of vinyl that have been sanded,melted,drilled,painted,abused...and when he really gets going with the Minutoli , it's like having your head trapped inside of a cement mixer while a dance party is being crammed right up your ass. Totally fucked, spastic turntable apocalypse that's matched with Beaulieau's trademark stand-up comedy/performance art delivery, genuinely funny and weird as he banters with the crowd, attacks his gear from different angles, bobbing and weaving and violently slapping multiple tone arms onto vinyl and generally freaking out. High-adrenaline doofus obliteration, total genius and genuinely "America's greatest living noise artist"! This tape has excerpts from several performances, ranging from multi-camera pro shot footage to camcorder shots of Emil in action. Comes packaged in a hardshell plastic case with full sleeve art. Awesome !! NTSC / North American video systems only, no PAL !
Just found a couple of copies of this now out-of-print CDr...
"The sound of worms as they bore into your head, yeearrgghhh!" That's how loveable noise wizard/turntable butcher Emil Beaulieau introduces this album of death metal/grindcore/harsh noise remixes, and it's pretty incredible shit. I've been digging the recent rash of "remix" albums from Hydra Head that feature an assortment of avant-electronics artists reshaping original music from bands like KNUT, ISIS, and AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED, with the general focus being less on any sort of traditional version of the "remix", and more on the electronics-based artists shaping the raw materials of these metal bands, the riffs and distortion and heaviness, into something totally new and alien. Well, this hour long disc is the grandaddy of that avant-noise/extreme metal remix album aesthetic. Emil Beaulieau Has A Relapse was recorded back in 1997 and commissioned by Relapse Records to feature Emil Beaulieau attacking and reshaping an assortment of nine different bands on the Relapse roster. I'm not sure exactly what the story is behind this, but for whatever reason, Relapse rejected the finished album. Luckily, it's been kept in print through RRRecords though, and it's a good thing for anyone into the realm of extreme metallic heaviness fused to ear shredding noise...this album freaking kills. The general idea is pretty simple: Beaulieau shreds apart original songs from Anal Cunt, Mortician, Brutal Truth, Merzbow, Masonna, Bastard Noise, Exit-13, Deceased, and Neurosis, mutilating each band's song with his instrument of choice, the legendary Minutilo, the four-armed record player that Emil uses to create on-the-spot locked grooves that sound like concrete blocks rubbing up against your eardrums, while he chops up and reassembles segments of song and individual riffs and beats and vocals into unrecognizable blasts of glitched out mutant metal collage. None of the tracks are titled, each one is identified only by the original artist, and I dare you to figure out what songs were used. Emil turns ANAL CUNT's noisecore blast into chirpy chipmunk punk and drowns them in a sea of shrill feedback. Bands like EXIT-13 and MORTICIAN are chopped up and slathered in oceans of white noise, their chugging death/grind stretched out like razor wire. The BRUTAL TRUTH remix starts off with an almost funky industrial breakbeat before it collapses into high speed glitchy grindcore cut-up that reminds me of JESUS OF NAZARETH, or maybe a rawer, more barbaric PHANTOMSMASHER. The NEUROSIS remix is an impressively caustic, glitched-to-oblivion apocalyptic dirge that opens up in the middle to reveal a crackling funeral fugue before being swept up again in an electrified hellstorm, the result sounding almost like blurred isolationist black metal or THE ANGELIC PROCESS' dark, beautiful smears of hiss. Emil's reworking of the MERZBOW, BASTARD NOISE and MASONNA pieces pile on even more distortion and locked-groove abuse, making those tracks even more spastic and heavy than their original configuration. But the DECEASED remix on here is by far my favorite, a 10 minute epic that loops a recurring clean, melodic guitar arpeggio over manically spliced-together overmodulated death metal that somehow turns into a WHITEHOUSE-meets-Krautrock style ultra noisy, hypnotic rhythmic jam. Awesome! This is an excellent collection of industrialized metallic rethink that was way ahead of it's time, and still posesses the power to deflesh on the spot. Definitely one of my favorite Emil Beaulieau releases ever!!! Comes packaged in the RRR style xerox-mutated sealed wallet sleeve, the silver disc blank except for a small colored label affixed to the top. Highly recommended !!!!
Finally back in stock...
��Bobby Beausoleil's legendary Lucifer Rising suite has appeared in various forms over the years, first as a limited edition LP release on Lethal Records in 1980, later on self-released CDR through Beausoleil's own White Dog Music imprint that he ran in partnership with his wife. This piece of experimental film/music history never received the sort of deluxe, in-depth treatment that it really deserved, however, until the mighty Ajna imprint assembled this monstrous four-record box set that came out back in 2009. A masterpiece of infernal, occult psychedelia, dark cosmic blues, and shadowy synthesizer music, this boxset featured not only Beausoleil's now infamous score that he recorded in prison for Kenneth Anger's long-in-the-works Aliester Crowley-inspired experimental film Lucifer Rising, but also a ton of additional material that includes some of the earliest Beausoleil recordings in existence. The original boxset sold out not too long after its release, but Ajna has recently issued a new pressing of this massive set, this time on colored vinyl under the guidance of Beausoleil. As before, this is one of the most immersive sets that I've picked up for the store, charting Beausoleil's strange story from his beginnings in the West Coast psychedelia/experimental music underground through his later, more developed prison recordings. And its all essential listening for fans of occult prog and psychedelia.
�� The third edition of The Lucifer Rising Suite includes the new colored vinyl pressing along with a huge four-page LP-size booklet that features extensive photos and liner notes from illustrator/subterranean historian Dennis Dread (Entarte Kunts), writer Michael Moynihan (Lords Of Chaos) and Beausoleil himself, two huge 23" by 36" full-color poster reproductions of Beausoleil and Dennis Dread's artwork, and printed full-color inner sleeves for each record, the whole set housed in a stunning tip-on box illustrated by Dread and Finnish artist Timo Ketola (Watain, Opeth, Teitanblood, Deathspell Omega). It's absolutely gorgeous.
�� The whole saga behind Beausoleil and the soundtrack to Anger's Lucifer Rising is both tragic and fascinating. Often erroneously considered to have been a part of the actual Manson Family, Beausoleil was a young musician in the late 60's Los Angeles psychedelic underground who had already performed with Arthur Lee of Love and associated with the likes of the Beach Boys and Frank Zappa before being approached by acclaimed experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger to star in his then current project, Lucifer Rising. Agreeing to take on the role with the understanding that he would also be allowed to create the score for the film, Beausoleil began to work on the music for Anger's film just before finding himself caught up on the fringes of the crowd that was hanging around Charles Manson and his followers, and was soon involved in the brutal murder of fellow musician and drug dealer Gary Hinman in 1969, an act that ended up sending him to prison and became the spark that would ignite the series of events resulting in the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders.
�� But to fans of dark underground psychedelia, Beausoleil is more than just a footnote in the bloody saga of the Manson Family. Prior to his murder of Hinman, Beausoleil had staged several live performances that tied in with his work-in-progress for the Lucifer Rising score, sprawling experimental improv sets that blended crude rock dirges and cosmic free-jazz blurt, one of which is documented here. But in the years following his conviction, he spent his time behind bars writing and recording some seriously gorgeous music, using fellow prisoners to flesh out his "Freedom Orchestra", even creating a primitive studio inside of his jail cell. Using ancient Moog synthesizers, trumpets, Fender Rhodes electric piano and a standard rock lineup of bass/drums/guitar, Beausoleil and his backing band created some stunning psychedelic soundscapes that combined primitive electronics and effects-drenched electric guitar with propulsive, hypnotic drumming and lush layered synths, sounding at times remarkably like a more sinister Tangerine Dream flecked with bits of sun-scorched Mojave twang. It's all amazing stuff, and it definitely leads me to believe that if Beausoleil had not been caught up in the insanity of the Manson crowd, he could very well have become a legendary figure of 70's rock.
�� So what you get with Ajna's luxuriant Lucifer Rising set is basically everything that Beausoleil recorded up through the end of 70's, up to the long-delayed release of Anger's film in 1980. The recordings span more than a decade, starting with the original 1967 live recordings up through his studio work at Tracey Prison, with much of the material featured here never before released. The music is a lush opiate fog of droning psychedelia and dark kosmische drift, the first side featuring the nearly twenty-five minute live recording of "Lucifer Rising I" from 1967, a sprawling psych-rock workout woven out of saxophones and other horns, flutes and rumbling percussion, the sound a delirious haze of improvised jazziness and haunting, dreamlike melody, meandering blues guitar winding through the squalls of jazzy freeform chaos, with moments of striking dark beauty constantly surfacing throughout the recording. On tracks like "Dark Passage", Beausoleil and company craft an eerie confluence of primitive electronics and subterranean drones into something resembling a psychedelic horror film score, before lurching into the searing spaced-out blues of "Hellion Rebellion", its slide guitar slipping like black tears over the massive reverb-drenched drums. There are blown-out cosmic garage-rock raveups ("Dance Of The Fire Demons") and monstrous choogle ("Tear It Down"), and the gorgeous, almost Morricone-esque moodiness of "Penumbra"; elsewhere, it's all eerie New Age-y synthdrift, abstract and Teutonic, and at it's darkest ("Sleeping Dragon") isn't very far at all from the grim electronic soundcscapes of early Tangerine Dream. "Fallen Angel Blues" employs the talk-box to mesmerizing effect. And through it all, Beausoleil's amazing guitar playing is front and center, warm and expressive and evocative, his blues licks filled with an amazing amount of emotional resonance for someone who was so young at the time of the recording. One of the best tracks included here is the gorgeous sprawling cosmic psychedelia on the twenty one minute long jam "Beacon", one of Beausoleil's most beautiful recordings in the set, a delay-drenched, synth-smeared starburst of sound that is reminiscent of classic Piper-era Pink Floyd.
�� But it's the film score for Lucifer Rising that will truly blow you away. The fourth and final disc features the complete six-part Lucifer Rising Suite, and it's undeniably Beausoleil's masterpiece, with that vague Morricone-esque vibe hanging over the ominous melodies and brass-laced moodiness, a dark, malevolent piece of cinematic psychedelia made up of stunning electronic textures and shadowy atmosphere, breathtaking passages of trumpet cutting through the dark twilight soundscape, while distorted, crunchy hard-rock guitar riffs sweep through the abyss. The suite later erupts[ts into gales of wah-drenched psych-guitar frenzy and flurries of otherworldly electronics, and in its final moments transforms into something like a more sinister Tangerine Dream or Ash Ra, and certainly on par with the work that those bands were producing around the same time.
��� Now available as a four-CD boxset that essentially reproduces everything from the original vinyl set that Ajna put out, right down to the pair of miniature posters and the 24-page booklet loaded with liner notes, with each disc housed in it's own full-color sleeve, and all bound together in a casewrapped box. A gorgeous, exhaustive document of some of the best apocalyptic psychedelia of the 20th century.
��� Bobby Beausoleil's legendary Lucifer Rising suite has appeared in various forms over the years, first as a limited edition LP release on Lethal Records in 1980, later on self-released CDR through Beausoleil's own White Dog Music imprint that he ran in partnership with his wife. This piece of experimental film/music history never received the sort of deluxe, in-depth treatment that it really deserved, however, until the mighty Ajna imprint assembled this monstrous four-record box set that came out back in 2009. A masterpiece of infernal, occult psychedelia, dark cosmic blues, and shadowy synthesizer music, this boxset featured not only Beausoleil's now infamous score that he recorded in prison for Kenneth Anger's long-in-the-works Aliester Crowley-inspired experimental film Lucifer Rising, but also a ton of additional material that includes some of the earliest Beausoleil recordings in existence. The original boxset sold out not too long after its release, but Ajna has recently issued a new pressing of this massive set, this time on colored vinyl under the guidance of Beausoleil. As before, this is one of the most immersive sets that I've picked up for the store, charting Beausoleil's strange story from his beginnings in the West Coast psychedelia/experimental music underground through his later, more developed prison recordings. And its all essential listening for fans of occult prog and psychedelia.
��� This CD boxset edition of The Lucifer Rising Suite includes the four discs along with a thick booklet that features extensive photos and liner notes from illustrator/subterranean historian Dennis Dread (Entarte Kunts), writer Michael Moynihan (Lords Of Chaos) and Beausoleil himself, two full-color poster reproductions of Beausoleil and Dennis Dread's artwork, and printed full-color inner sleeves for each disc, the whole set housed in a stunning tip-on box illustrated by Dread and Finnish artist Timo Ketola (Watain, Opeth, Teitanblood, Deathspell Omega). It's absolutely gorgeous.
��� The whole saga behind Beausoleil and the soundtrack to Anger's Lucifer Rising is both tragic and fascinating. Often erroneously considered to have been a part of the actual Manson Family, Beausoleil was a young musician in the late 60's Los Angeles psychedelic underground who had already performed with Arthur Lee of Love and associated with the likes of the Beach Boys and Frank Zappa before being approached by acclaimed experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger to star in his then current project, Lucifer Rising. Agreeing to take on the role with the understanding that he would also be allowed to create the score for the film, Beausoleil began to work on the music for Anger's film just before finding himself caught up on the fringes of the crowd that was hanging around Charles Manson and his followers, and was soon involved in the brutal murder of fellow musician and drug dealer Gary Hinman in 1969, an act that ended up sending him to prison and became the spark that would ignite the series of events resulting in the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders.
��� But to fans of dark underground psychedelia, Beausoleil is more than just a footnote in the bloody saga of the Manson Family. Prior to his murder of Hinman, Beausoleil had staged several live performances that tied in with his work-in-progress for the Lucifer Rising score, sprawling experimental improv sets that blended crude rock dirges and cosmic free-jazz blurt, one of which is documented here. But in the years following his conviction, he spent his time behind bars writing and recording some seriously gorgeous music, using fellow prisoners to flesh out his "Freedom Orchestra", even creating a primitive studio inside of his jail cell. Using ancient Moog synthesizers, trumpets, Fender Rhodes electric piano and a standard rock lineup of bass/drums/guitar, Beausoleil and his backing band created some stunning psychedelic soundscapes that combined primitive electronics and effects-drenched electric guitar with propulsive, hypnotic drumming and lush layered synths, sounding at times remarkably like a more sinister Tangerine Dream flecked with bits of sun-scorched Mojave twang. It's all amazing stuff, and it definitely leads me to believe that if Beausoleil had not been caught up in the insanity of the Manson crowd, he could very well have become a legendary figure of 70's rock.
��� So what you get with Ajna's luxuriant Lucifer Rising set is basically everything that Beausoleil recorded up through the end of 70's, up to the long-delayed release of Anger's film in 1980. The recordings span more than a decade, starting with the original 1967 live recordings up through his studio work at Tracey Prison, with much of the material featured here never before released. The music is a lush opiate fog of droning psychedelia and dark kosmische drift, the first side featuring the nearly twenty-five minute live recording of "Lucifer Rising I" from 1967, a sprawling psych-rock workout woven out of saxophones and other horns, flutes and rumbling percussion, the sound a delirious haze of improvised jazziness and haunting, dreamlike melody, meandering blues guitar winding through the squalls of jazzy freeform chaos, with moments of striking dark beauty constantly surfacing throughout the recording. On tracks like "Dark Passage", Beausoleil and company craft an eerie confluence of primitive electronics and subterranean drones into something resembling a psychedelic horror film score, before lurching into the searing spaced-out blues of "Hellion Rebellion", its slide guitar slipping like black tears over the massive reverb-drenched drums. There are blown-out cosmic garage-rock raveups ("Dance Of The Fire Demons") and monstrous choogle ("Tear It Down"), and the gorgeous, almost Morricone-esque moodiness of "Penumbra"; elsewhere, it's all eerie New Age-y synthdrift, abstract and Teutonic, and at it's darkest ("Sleeping Dragon") isn't very far at all from the grim electronic soundcscapes of early Tangerine Dream. "Fallen Angel Blues" employs the talk-box to mesmerizing effect. And through it all, Beausoleil's amazing guitar playing is front and center, warm and expressive and evocative, his blues licks filled with an amazing amount of emotional resonance for someone who was so young at the time of the recording. One of the best tracks included here is the gorgeous sprawling cosmic psychedelia on the twenty one minute long jam "Beacon", one of Beausoleil's most beautiful recordings in the set, a delay-drenched, synth-smeared starburst of sound that is reminiscent of classic Piper-era Pink Floyd.
��� But it's the film score for Lucifer Rising that will truly blow you away. The fourth and final disc features the complete six-part Lucifer Rising Suite, and it's undeniably Beausoleil's masterpiece, with that vague Morricone-esque vibe hanging over the ominous melodies and brass-laced moodiness, a dark, malevolent piece of cinematic psychedelia made up of stunning electronic textures and shadowy atmosphere, breathtaking passages of trumpet cutting through the dark twilight soundscape, while distorted, crunchy hard-rock guitar riffs sweep through the abyss. The suite later erupts[ts into gales of wah-drenched psych-guitar frenzy and flurries of otherworldly electronics, and in its final moments transforms into something like a more sinister Tangerine Dream or Ash Ra, and certainly on par with the work that those bands were producing around the same time.
Prepare for a descent into death-dub delirium! Just seeing that this new Japanese band featured the duo of Chew (vocalist for legendary sludge metallers Corrupted) and Kohei Nakagawa (the guy behind the longrunning extreme noise outfit Guilty Connector) was enough to make me want to pick up this self-titled debut, but this ended up being even better than expected. These six songs are formed out of an immensely bleak brand of slow-motion, industrial-tinged heaviness, focused around spare, echoing drums that creep and shuffle through a vast, dark expanse, that almost dubby percussion moving beneath encroaching waves of crushing detuned drone and streaked with bits of trippy electrnic noise. The opener "Brainwashing" alost resembles an especially doom-laden Scorn track, or perhaps something from Necro Deathmort, all slow-mo snare hits and erchoing kick drum, draped in murk and reverb, the sound of a doom metal drummer playing solo in some isolated cave chamber. AS the album moves through each subsequent track, however (the whole album seems to be essentially a single piece of music), the sound grows more frenzied and noisy, those drums becoming lost in gales of shrieking electronics and crushing low-end diostortion, and halfway in all you can make out are the violently crashing cymbals swept up in a hurricane of noise. The second half re-emerges into a much more psychedelic space, though, as swarms of frenzied tape delay effects and garbled glitchy electronics take over, joined by even slower and mor stretched out drumming, shrieking feedback and controlled blasts of distortion, contrasting space and stillness with those bursts of abrasive sound and echoing percusive skitter to lead the rest of the album into a spaced-out, utterly desolate sprawl of ashen doom-dub, desaturated isolationist ambience and ghostly electro-acoustic creepiness, a whirring, clanking, echoing nightmare that at times resembles some doom outfit channeling Lee Perry in the shadows of the world of Eraserhead.
This scathing 7" from the Washington State hardcore thrash band Behead The Prophet No Lord Shall Live came out in 1998, and their ripping, violin-infested attacks haven't mellowed a bit in the past ten years. Taking their name from a Deicide song, Behead The Prophet N.L.S.L. (as their name is usually abbreviated) formed in the mid-90's after the dissolution of the influential Olympia band Mukilteo Fairies, and featured a lineup of musicians that was highlym irregular for a band playing this kind of ratty, gnarly thrash punk; along with the usual drums, bass, and guitar, Behead The Prophet also included saxophone played by guitarist Dave Harvey, but what really set them apart was the presence of violinist Michael Griffen. Griffen was also a member of the long running and highly respected improvised noise duo Noggin, and in Behead The Prophet he contributed a onslaught of truly evil-sounding violin skree over top of the chaotic grinding punk and screeching vocals that took the spazzy Gravity sound (think Heroin, Antioch Arrow) and sped it up several times over. The seven songs on this 7" are as ferocious as ever, blasting each song out in fast minute-long bursts, and married the raging music to a fierce queer-positive/anti-war/anti-materialism message. Members would later go on to play in Lords Of Lightspeed, Tight Bros. From Way Back When, The Reeks and the Wrecks, and sadly Michael Griffen died earlier this year (2008), but this 7" and the band's sole album I Am The Great And Fiery Force remain as powerful documents of this band's crushing, incendiary music. The record comes in a huge fold out poster, with the lyrics and liner notes printed on the other side.
Crushing death metal collides with spacey prog/fusion on this new album from Beheaded Zombie, whose goofy gore-flick name almost fools you into thinking that this is just another splattergrind abortion. Out on Bad Mood Man,a Russian label that we usually follow for all of the weird Slavic doom metal and dark ambience that they typically put out, so this stuck out like a sore thumb when I checked out the label's latest batch of releases. Beheaded Zombie aren't as "tech" as a lot of the stuff in this scene, and is in fact pretty old school with the crushing, cold chromatic riffing and bilious bestial throatshred, and the production is on the raw side, giving this the required heft and thickness without too much polish. But the jazz fusion guitar lines and spacey, chorus-heavy guitar textures that they blend into their death metal puts this in the same category as Spheres-era Pestilence, Atheist, early Candiria, Alarum and early Cynic, but with their own unique, melodic touch. Crushing riffs are contaminated with weird Mahavishnu fusion/prog, the harsh vokills are delivered in guttural gargles, the occasional deep chanting in Russian will sometimes appear and weird things out even more, and dark melodic leads snake through the tricky time signatures and sudden, jarring rhythmic shifts; the bassist really stands out on the album, too, playing some highly convoluted bass lines that are out in front and evenly match the guitars, and he's not bashful about ripping into an extended bass solo, either. There's this odd psychedelic quality to their mutant death metal that's a little hard to describe; it's all as demented and prog as the early 90's experimental death metal bands that these guys are obviously influenced by, but they inject these oddball melodies (which are actually sort of pretty) that definitely contribute towards their own signature sound. The artwork for Happiness For All is pretty strange for a death metal album as well, with twisted neon cartoon illustrations, and the text all printed in Cyrillic. Pretty wicked stuff, highly recommended for fans of wonky, prog-damaged death metal!
Now here's some really filthy black metal. A volatile force in early 90's black metal, Beherit hailed from Finland and made quite an impression on black metal fans with their first CD release Oath Of Black Blood, released in 1992. Their brand of black metal was seriously raw and noisy, recorded so low-fi that there's a constant noxious tape hiss that seeps between the cracks of their music, and the playing is so chaotic to the point where Beherit's guitar riffs and uber-sloppy blastbeat drumming and psychotic vocals constantly falls in and out of synch with one another, creating an intensely feral sound heavily influenced by early grindcore and death metal as well as early Sarcofago. Later albums would explore more ambient, experimental territory, but Beherit's earliest tracks are toxic flashpoints of vileness that rank as some of the most crazed, fucked-up black metal from that era. These guys channeled pure evil through their chaotic, eccentric chainsaw guitar riffing, relentless neanderthal blastbeat drumming, but it's frontman Holocausto and his whacked out vocals that especially burn my nerve endings; throughout these short, barbaric eruptions of black metal, Holocausto spews a stream of bizarre croaking, demonic whispers, blasphemous hissing, sickening vomit sounds, and trippy processed moaning that sound totally fucking inhuman. It's so "out" and freakish that the music almost borders on Abruptum territory with all of the eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, noises, effects and brief ambient outros that appear all over these songs, though Beherit indeed played "songs" with real riffs and a semblence of structure, in spite of how noisy and extreme this stuff gets. And there are times when Beherit does devolve into a black miasma of turbulent distortion and percussion, mainly towards the ends of songs like "Beast Of Damnation" and "Demonomancy", the simplistic riffing and blasting drums melting together into a viscous blob of hellish violence. If you can't get enough of the more violent, fucked-up and noisy fringes of black metal, bands like Vargr, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Nekrasov, Abruptum, Von, Blasphemy, etc., then you really need to go back to Beherit, who were one of the first bands to deliver black metal at it's most primal, it's most insane and chaotic state. The early Beherit releases have gone in and out of print over the years, and have been once again collected together onto a new release, this one issued recently through the mysterious German label Metal Fighter. Werewolf, Semen And Blood features a remastered version of the original The Oath Of Black Blood disc from 1992 and the Black Master Prayer picture disc from 1991, and captures these legendary early, pre-ambient Beherit recordings in all of their rotten deathvomit splendor.
The earlier Beherit recordings were insanely chaotic and primitive blurts of blackened death metal that had a similiar bestial vibe as the fucked-up Brazilian scumthrash of bands like Sarcafago, Vulcano and Sextrash, but when 1993 rolled around and these Finns dropped their first full-blown full length Drawing Down The Moon, it was serious what the fuck time. The band's sound had gotten MUCH weirder for this album, though at first you wouldn't notice anything different from their early recordings...the disc opens with a short synth into with a deep distorted voice proclaiming fealty to Satan while angelic voices sing in the background, then rips right into "Salomom's Gate", all brutal simplistic thrashing riffage and Nuclear Holocausto's psychotic gurgling vocals that sounds an awful lot like what the scummy deaththrash they were playing on The Oath of Black Blood. But as the song continues, the arrangement gets all weird, riffs kind of wander off or stop abruptly, droning keyboards pop up randomly, and the band ends things on a slow, sludgy doom riff that just fades off. The next track "Nocturnal Evil" is another blazing thrasher, primitive four chord riffs sounding more like hardcore punk scoured by extreme distortion and blown speakers than anything, and those vocals...whoa...Nuclear Holocausto's gargling rasp goes all over the place, one minute raging in the background, and a second later his vocals are all of a sudden WAY UP IN THE MIX and in your face. In contrast, "Sadomatic Rites" starts off total doom, a massive death metal riff played at halfspeed while spacey synths swell in the background that eventually picks up speed and turns into a chugging midpaced monster halfway through, then becomes sloppier and sloppier, the drums and guitars falling over themselves as the song fades out towards the end.
The first minute of "Black Arts" has a sample of what sounds like the crackling and hissing of a burning pyre and some kind of inhuman grunting, then switches to mid-tempo death metal with even more whacked out vocals run through some kind of effects. Then there is "Nuclear Girl", a short two minute track of dubbed out drums, sinister minor-key synth, droning guitar and bleeping electronics, a psychedelic instrumental interlude that sets up the mangled punky death metal of "Unholy Pagan Fire", and it's from here on that Beherit pile on the weirdness. Atavistic death metal riffs merge with wall-of-noise blackened buzzsaw guitars, weird Tangerine Dream keyboards keep popping up all over the place as well as other electronic noises, the vocals switch back and forth from hideous gargles to hushed whispers and ridiculous computer-processed spoken word parts where Nuclear Holocausto recites all sorts of Satanic blasphemies over a backdrop of muddy guitar noise. The vocals on Drawing Down The Moon are some of most bizarre in the black metal canon, and it's not hard to see how this set the stage for later BM weirdos like Furze and Striborg to do their thing.
One of the more notorious tracks on Drawing is "Summerlands", which is basically a really dark New Age track with spoken word vocals and Zamfir style flutes piping over a plodding drumbeat and sounds of a forest at night, and it's a total left turn in the middle of what is already a pretty strange black/death metal album. After that there's a new version of the older track "Werewolf Semen And Blood" and "Thou Angel Of The Gods", both blasts of filthy black metal with more of that insane vocal mixing and echoed layering, and the album closes with "Lord Of Shadows And Goldenwood", a mix of droning deathdoom and cosmic ambience that ends in a wave of massive blackened synthesizer roar.
The band was clearly out of their fucking minds when they recorded this album. The combination of filthy atavistic black metal and their bizarre version of New Age-y ambience is both inspired and totally inept, and there is a general consensus that Drawing Down The Moon is one of the weirdest albums to come out of the second wave of black metal. I've seen just as many people online write this album off as utter dogshit as I've seen proclaim it as the work of avant-garde genius, so depending on just how damaged you like yer old school black metal, your mileage will vary. This is absolutely crucial listening for anyone into eccentric and outsider black/death metal though, and is one of the few albums from this era that achieves the same sort of otherworldly strangeness as Abruptum's early recordings. Recommended to disciples of the Satanic and the absurd.
Attention, goat metallers: US label Emetic has just coughed up this amazing-looking picture disc LP release for Beherit's first album The Oath Of Black Blood, with killer slaytanic artwork on both sides from Chris Moyen and packaged with a full-color 11" x 17" Beherit poster! This slab of classic, terminally damaged satanic black metal chaos is limited to 500 copies, and I'm pretty sure that these are going to blow out of here pretty soon.
Here's the review that I wrote for the cd version of the album:
Now, here's some really filthy black metal. A volatile force in early 90's black metal, Beherit hailed from Finland and made quite an impression on black metal fans with their first CD release Oath Of Black Blood, released in 1992. Their brand of black metal was seriously raw and noisy, recorded so low-fi that there's a constant noxious tape hiss that seeps between the cracks of their music, and the playing is so chaotic to the point where Beherit's guitar riffs and uber-sloppy blastbeat drumming and psychotic vocals constantly falls in and out of synch with one another, creating an intensely feral sound heavily influenced by early grindcore and death metal as well as early Sarcofago. Later albums would explore more ambient, experimental territory, but Beherit's earliest tracks are toxic flashpoints of vileness that rank as some of the most crazed, fucked-up black metal from that era. These guys channeled pure evil through their chaotic, eccentric chainsaw guitar riffing, relentless neanderthal blastbeat drumming, but it's frontman Holocausto and his whacked out vocals that especially burn my nerve endings; throughout these short, barbaric eruptions of black metal, Holocausto spews a stream of bizarre croaking, demonic whispers, blasphemous hissing, sickening vomit sounds, and trippy processed moaning that sound totally fucking inhuman. It's so "out" and freakish that the music almost borders on Abruptum territory with all of the eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, noises, effects and brief ambient outros that appear all over these songs, though Beherit indeed played "songs" with real riffs and a semblence of structure, in spite of how noisy and extreme this stuff gets. And there are times when Beherit does devolve into a black miasma of turbulent distortion and percussion, mainly towards the ends of songs like "Beast Of Damnation" and "Demonomancy", the simplistic riffing and blasting drums melting together into a viscous blob of hellish violence. If you can't get enough of the more violent, fucked-up and noisy fringes of black metal, bands like Vargr, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Nekrasov, Abruptum, Von, Blasphemy, etc., then you really need to go back to Beherit, who were one of the first bands to deliver black metal at it's most primal, it's most insane and chaotic state.
The official re-release of Beherit's The Oath Of Black Blood from Season Of Mist, presented in a digipack with gnarly album art from Chris Moyen.
Now, here's some really filthy black metal. A volatile force in early 90's black metal, Beherit hailed from Finland and made quite an impression on black metal fans with their first CD release Oath Of Black Blood, released in 1992. Their brand of black metal was seriously raw and noisy, recorded so low-fi that there's a constant noxious tape hiss that seeps between the cracks of their music, and the playing is so chaotic to the point where Beherit's guitar riffs and uber-sloppy blastbeat drumming and psychotic vocals constantly falls in and out of synch with one another, creating an intensely feral sound heavily influenced by early grindcore and death metal as well as early Sarcofago. Later albums would explore more ambient, experimental territory, but Beherit's earliest tracks are toxic flashpoints of vileness that rank as some of the most crazed, fucked-up black metal from that era. These guys channeled pure evil through their chaotic, eccentric chainsaw guitar riffing, relentless neanderthal blastbeat drumming, but it's frontman Holocausto and his whacked out vocals that especially burn my nerve endings; throughout these short, barbaric eruptions of black metal, Holocausto spews a stream of bizarre croaking, demonic whispers, blasphemous hissing, sickening vomit sounds, and trippy processed moaning that sound totally fucking inhuman. It's so "out" and freakish that the music almost borders on Abruptum territory with all of the eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, noises, effects and brief ambient outros that appear all over these songs, though Beherit indeed played "songs" with real riffs and a semblence of structure, in spite of how noisy and extreme this stuff gets. And there are times when Beherit does devolve into a black miasma of turbulent distortion and percussion, mainly towards the ends of songs like "Beast Of Damnation" and "Demonomancy", the simplistic riffing and blasting drums melting together into a viscous blob of hellish violence. If you can't get enough of the more violent, fucked-up and noisy fringes of black metal, bands like Vargr, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Nekrasov, Abruptum, Von, Blasphemy, etc., then you really need to go back to Beherit, who were one of the first bands to deliver black metal at it's most primal, it's most insane and chaotic state.
Here's the official LP re-release of Beherit's The Oath Of Black Blood from Emetic, presented in a full color jacket with gnarly album art from Chris Moyen, and a full color 11" x 17' poster of the guys in Beherit (who look like they were barely out of high school when the photo was taken!).
Now, here's some really filthy black metal. A volatile force in early 90's black metal, Beherit hailed from Finland and made quite an impression on black metal fans with their first CD release Oath Of Black Blood, released in 1992. Their brand of black metal was seriously raw and noisy, recorded so low-fi that there's a constant noxious tape hiss that seeps between the cracks of their music, and the playing is so chaotic to the point where Beherit's guitar riffs and uber-sloppy blastbeat drumming and psychotic vocals constantly falls in and out of synch with one another, creating an intensely feral sound heavily influenced by early grindcore and death metal as well as early Sarcofago. Later albums would explore more ambient, experimental territory, but Beherit's earliest tracks are toxic flashpoints of vileness that rank as some of the most crazed, fucked-up black metal from that era. These guys channeled pure evil through their chaotic, eccentric chainsaw guitar riffing, relentless neanderthal blastbeat drumming, but it's frontman Holocausto and his whacked out vocals that especially burn my nerve endings; throughout these short, barbaric eruptions of black metal, Holocausto spews a stream of bizarre croaking, demonic whispers, blasphemous hissing, sickening vomit sounds, and trippy processed moaning that sound totally fucking inhuman. It's so "out" and freakish that the music almost borders on Abruptum territory with all of the eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, noises, effects and brief ambient outros that appear all over these songs, though Beherit indeed played "songs" with real riffs and a semblence of structure, in spite of how noisy and extreme this stuff gets. And there are times when Beherit does devolve into a black miasma of turbulent distortion and percussion, mainly towards the ends of songs like "Beast Of Damnation" and "Demonomancy", the simplistic riffing and blasting drums melting together into a viscous blob of hellish violence. If you can't get enough of the more violent, fucked-up and noisy fringes of black metal, bands like Vargr, Ash Pool, Bone Awl, Ildjarn, Nekrasov, Abruptum, Von, Blasphemy, etc., then you really need to go back to Beherit, who were one of the first bands to deliver black metal at it's most primal, it's most insane and chaotic state.
Since there aren�t many live recordings of Finnish black metal demons Beherit back in their early days, fanatics like myself have to be pretty forgiving when it comes to the live documents of the band that we do manage to find, especially when it�s as old as this. After years of subjecting myself to some truly atrocious sounding bootlegs, someone has finally put together a live Beherit album that�s at least as listenable as a decent soundboard tape, and since Beherit are one of my all-time favorite black metal bands, I found this an enjoyable enough blast of their early material in a live setting, which from the sounds of this set seems like it might have been pretty boisterous.
This recent release from the obscure Metal Fighter label is touted as the "first official live album" from Beherit, but the sound quality on this disc is bootleg-grade at best, sounding like it was probably recorded from the audience on a halfway operational cassette deck. All things considered, though, it's a listenable, burly blast of filthy, Christ-molesting black metal mayhem from Beherit that was captured in Finland in 1991, the band ripping through eleven tracks that are mainly drawn from their Dawn Of Satan's Millenium 7" and the Drawing Down The Moon album (including classic filth like "Through Angels of the Gods", "Sadomatic Rites", "Nocturnal Evil", "Black Arts", "Gates of Nanna", "Werewolf Semen and Blood", "Beast of Damnation", "Demoniac", and "Witchcraft") ; I've never heard a live recording of Beherit performing anything from Drawing Down The Moon prior to this, so that alone made me want to pick this disc up. Nuclear Holocausto's vocals are gaseous and ghastly, and the performance is drenched in a heavy layer of filth and alcohol and vomit, with plenty of drunken audience noise bleeding into the breaks between the songs captured in this ultra-murky, cavernous live recording, but it's actually fairly heavy sounding for a boot-quality recording. Of interest primarily to hardcore Beherit fans, completists, and terminal necro junkies.
Just when I think I've got a handle on what makes up the Beherit discography, something like At The Devil's Studio 1990 comes along and completely fuckin' confuses me again. Really, at this point, their early output is such a jumbled, disorganized mess that I'm developing the opinion that 1995's Drawing Down The Moon really was the first actual album from these experimental Finnish black metal demons. Before this, Beherit's pre-Drawing recordings are a mishmash of ultra-raw demos and rehearsal tapes that have been released on the Werewolf Semen And Blood and /The Oath of Black Blood discs that have both been touted by various mouths as the band's "first album", but this recording from 1990 apparently predates that stuff. Of course, I had to get my claws on this - this is awesome early filth that is spectacular in it's noisiness, and does appear to be the earliest studio session put to tape. A ferocious, fucked-up black/death metal recording, for sure, At The Devil's Studio was apparently recently found by one of the band members who had previously thought the master to be lost, and hearing it now shows how Beherit early on helped to create the whole bestial black/death aesthetic. At it's core, this is frenzied blackened death metal with brutal noisy riffing, cacophonic drumming, and some of the fucking weirdest black/death vocals ever, the belching, mewling vocals warped even further by using bizarre effects and insane pitch-shifted gargling noise. Yikes. I'd have to say that this recording sounds even more insane than the Oath Of Black Blood session, the music very often disintegrating into total swirling low-fi chaos, the guitar frequently mutating into nearly incoherent, blood-soaked anti-riffs, the band exploding into an ultra-primitive blackgrind barbarism. This disc contains a bunch of early versions of songs that would also appear on the Oath Of Black Blood release and later splits and Eps ("Grave Desecration", "Demonomancy", "The Oath Of Black Blood", "Witchcraft"), but it also has some never-before-released tracks like "Whores Of Belial" and "At The Devil's Churns" that make it essential for Beherit fanatics. Not only highly recommended to Beherit disciples and hardcore black/death junkies, but also to any of you guys who are fans of seriously demented blackened punk/noise and noisecore who might not already be familiar with the garbled Satanic genius of Beherit. Awesome.
Just when I think I've got a handle on what makes up the Beherit discography, something like At The Devil's Studio 1990 comes along and completely fuckin' confuses me again. Really, at this point, their early output is such a jumbled, disorganized mess that I'm developing the opinion that 1995's Drawing Down The Moon really was the first actual album from these experimental Finnish black metal demons. Before this, Beherit's pre-Drawing recordings are a mishmash of ultra-raw demos and rehearsal tapes that have been released on the Werewolf Semen And Blood and /The Oath of Black Blood discs that have both been touted by various mouths as the band's "first album", but this recording from 1990 apparently predates that stuff. Of course, I had to get my claws on this - this is awesome early filth that is spectacular in it's noisiness, and does appear to be the earliest studio session put to tape. A ferocious, fucked-up black/death metal recording, for sure, At The Devil's Studio was apparently recently found by one of the band members who had previously thought the master to be lost, and hearing it now shows how Beherit early on helped to create the whole bestial black/death aesthetic. At it's core, this is frenzied blackened death metal with brutal noisy riffing, cacophonic drumming, and some of the fucking weirdest black/death vocals ever, the belching, mewling vocals warped even further by using bizarre effects and insane pitch-shifted gargling noise. Yikes. I'd have to say that this recording sounds even more insane than the Oath Of Black Blood session, the music very often disintegrating into total swirling low-fi chaos, the guitar frequently mutating into nearly incoherent, blood-soaked anti-riffs, the band exploding into an ultra-primitive blackgrind barbarism. This disc contains a bunch of early versions of songs that would also appear on the Oath Of Black Blood release and later splits and Eps ("Grave Desecration", "Demonomancy", "The Oath Of Black Blood", "Witchcraft"), but it also has some never-before-released tracks like "Whores Of Belial" and "At The Devil's Churns" that make it essential for Beherit fanatics. Not only highly recommended to Beherit disciples and hardcore black/death junkies, but also to any of you guys who are fans of seriously demented blackened punk/noise and noisecore who might not already be familiar with the garbled Satanic genius of Beherit. Awesome.
Just when I think I've got a handle on what makes up the Beherit discography, something like At The Devil's Studio 1990 comes along and completely fuckin' confuses me again. Really, at this point, their early output is such a jumbled, disorganized mess that I'm developing the opinion that 1995's Drawing Down The Moon really was the first actual album from these experimental Finnish black metal demons. Before this, Beherit's pre-Drawing recordings are a mishmash of ultra-raw demos and rehearsal tapes that have been released on the Werewolf Semen And Blood and /The Oath of Black Blood discs that have both been touted by various mouths as the band's "first album", but this recording from 1990 apparently predates that stuff. Of course, I had to get my claws on this - this is awesome early filth that is spectacular in it's noisiness, and does appear to be the earliest studio session put to tape. A ferocious, fucked-up black/death metal recording, for sure, At The Devil's Studio was apparently recently found by one of the band members who had previously thought the master to be lost, and hearing it now shows how Beherit early on helped to create the whole bestial black/death aesthetic. At it's core, this is frenzied blackened death metal with brutal noisy riffing, cacophonic drumming, and some of the fucking weirdest black/death vocals ever, the belching, mewling vocals warped even further by using bizarre effects and insane pitch-shifted gargling noise. Yikes. I'd have to say that this recording sounds even more insane than the Oath Of Black Blood session, the music very often disintegrating into total swirling low-fi chaos, the guitar frequently mutating into nearly incoherent, blood-soaked anti-riffs, the band exploding into an ultra-primitive blackgrind barbarism. This disc contains a bunch of early versions of songs that would also appear on the Oath Of Black Blood release and later splits and Eps ("Grave Desecration", "Demonomancy", "The Oath Of Black Blood", "Witchcraft"), but it also has some never-before-released tracks like "Whores Of Belial" and "At The Devil's Churns" that make it essential for Beherit fanatics. Not only highly recommended to Beherit disciples and hardcore black/death junkies, but also to any of you guys who are fans of seriously demented blackened punk/noise and noisecore who might not already be familiar with the garbled Satanic genius of Beherit. Awesome.
This recent Nuclear War Now "30th Anniversary Edition" reissue features the original album on CD, cassette and deluxe 180-gram LP. The reissue features improved cover art clarity (sourcing the original NASA photo used for the initial release), along with extensive new liner notes and album history written by J. Campbell and rare photos (for the CD and LP edition (these are not included in the cassette format). The LP is presented in a (very) heavyweight case-wrapped jacket with leather-like texturing, and a 12"-size forty-four page booklet. It's massive, an an essential piece of early avant-garde Finnish black metal at its most fearless and adventurous.
My original review of the previous edition on Candlelight, revised and updated:
The earlier Beherit recordings were insanely chaotic and primitive blurts of blackened death metal that bore a somewhat similar bestial vibe as the fucked-up Brazilian scumthrash of bands like Sarcafago, Vulcano and Sextrash, but when 1993 rolled around and these Finns dropped their first full-blown full length Drawing Down The Moon, it was serious what the fuck time. The band's sound had gotten MUCH weirder for this album, though at first you wouldn't notice anything different from their early recordings...
The disc opens with a short synth into with a deep distorted voice proclaiming fealty to Satan while angelic voices sing in the background, then rips right into "Salomom's Gate", all brutal simplistic thrashing riffage and Nuclear Holocausto's psychotic gurgling vocals that sounds an awful lot like the scummy deaththrash they were playing on The Oath of Black Blood. But as the song continues, the arrangement gets all weird, riffs kind of wander off or stop abruptly, droning keyboards pop up randomly, and the band ends things on a slow, sludgy doom riff that just fades off. The next track "Nocturnal Evil" is another blazing thrasher, primitive four chord riffs sounding more like hardcore punk scoured by extreme distortion and blown speakers than anything, and those vocals...Nuclear Holocausto's gargling rasp goes all over the place, one minute raging in the background, and a second later his vocals suddenly shoot WAY UP IN THE MIX and in your face. In contrast, "Sadomatic Rites" starts off total doom, a massive death metal riff played at half speed while spacey synths swell in the background, eventually picking up speed and turning into a chugging mid-paced monster halfway through, becoming sloppier and sloppier, the drums and guitars falling all over themselves as the song, again, fades out into deep space.
The first minute of "Black Arts" has a sample of what sounds like the crackling and hissing of a burning pyre alongside some kind of inhuman grunting, then switches to mid-tempo death metal with even more whacked out vocals running through some kind of effects. Then there is "Nuclear Girl", a short two minute track of dubbed out drums, sinister minor-key synth, droning guitar and bleeping electronics, a psychedelic instrumental interlude that sets up the mangled punky death metal of "Unholy Pagan Fire", and it's from here on that Beherit seriously pile on the strangeness. Atavistic death metal riffs merge with wall-of-noise blackened buzzsaw guitars, weird Tangerine Dream synth sounds keep popping up all over the place along with other electronic noises, the vocals switch back and forth from hideous gargles to hushed whispers and ridiculous computer-processed spoken word parts where Nuclear Holocausto recites all sorts of Satanic blasphemies over a backdrop of muddy guitar noise. Seriously, the vocals on Drawing Down The Moon are some of most bizarre in the black metal canon, and it's not hard to see how this set the stage for later BM weirdos like Furze and Striborg.
One of the more notorious tracks on Drawing is "Summerlands", which is basically a really dark New Age track with spoken word vocals and Zamfir-esque flutes piping over a plodding drumbeat and the sounds of a forest at night, another jarring left turn in the middle of what is already a very strange black/death metal record. That's followed by new versions of the songs "Werewolf Semen And Blood" and "Thou Angel Of The Gods" from the first record, both blasts of filthy black metal with more of that insane vocal mixing and echoed layering, and then closes with "Lord Of Shadows And Goldenwood", a mix of droning death-doom and cosmic ambience that ends in a wave of massive blackened synthesizer roar.
The band was clearly out of their fucking minds when they recorded this album. The combination of filthy atavistic black metal and their bizarre version of "cosmic" 70s-era style electronic ambience and experimentation is both inspired and totally nuts, and to this day, there seems to be a general consensus that Drawing Down The Moon is one of the weirdest albums that ever emerged from black metal's "Second Wave". I've seen just as many people online write this album off as utter dogshit as I've seen proclaim it as the work of avant-garde genius, so depending on just how damaged you like your old school black metal, your mileage will vary. Me? I fucking worship this album. It's absolutely crucial listening for anyone into eccentric and outré black/death metal, one of the very few albums from this era that achieves the same sort of otherworldly strangeness as Abruptum's early recordings. Highest recommendation to disciples of both the Satanic and the absurd.
This recent Nuclear War Now "30th Anniversary Edition" reissue features the original album on CD, cassette and deluxe 180-gram LP. The reissue features improved cover art clarity (sourcing the original NASA photo used for the initial release), along with extensive new liner notes and album history written by J. Campbell and rare photos (for the CD and LP edition (these are not included in the cassette format). The LP is presented in a (very) heavyweight case-wrapped jacket with leather-like texturing, and a 12"-size forty-four page booklet. It's massive, an an essential piece of early avant-garde Finnish black metal at its most fearless and adventurous.
My original review of the previous edition on Candlelight, revised and updated:
The earlier Beherit recordings were insanely chaotic and primitive blurts of blackened death metal that bore a somewhat similar bestial vibe as the fucked-up Brazilian scumthrash of bands like Sarcafago, Vulcano and Sextrash, but when 1993 rolled around and these Finns dropped their first full-blown full length Drawing Down The Moon, it was serious what the fuck time. The band's sound had gotten MUCH weirder for this album, though at first you wouldn't notice anything different from their early recordings...
The disc opens with a short synth into with a deep distorted voice proclaiming fealty to Satan while angelic voices sing in the background, then rips right into "Salomom's Gate", all brutal simplistic thrashing riffage and Nuclear Holocausto's psychotic gurgling vocals that sounds an awful lot like the scummy deaththrash they were playing on The Oath of Black Blood. But as the song continues, the arrangement gets all weird, riffs kind of wander off or stop abruptly, droning keyboards pop up randomly, and the band ends things on a slow, sludgy doom riff that just fades off. The next track "Nocturnal Evil" is another blazing thrasher, primitive four chord riffs sounding more like hardcore punk scoured by extreme distortion and blown speakers than anything, and those vocals...Nuclear Holocausto's gargling rasp goes all over the place, one minute raging in the background, and a second later his vocals suddenly shoot WAY UP IN THE MIX and in your face. In contrast, "Sadomatic Rites" starts off total doom, a massive death metal riff played at half speed while spacey synths swell in the background, eventually picking up speed and turning into a chugging mid-paced monster halfway through, becoming sloppier and sloppier, the drums and guitars falling all over themselves as the song, again, fades out into deep space.
The first minute of "Black Arts" has a sample of what sounds like the crackling and hissing of a burning pyre alongside some kind of inhuman grunting, then switches to mid-tempo death metal with even more whacked out vocals running through some kind of effects. Then there is "Nuclear Girl", a short two minute track of dubbed out drums, sinister minor-key synth, droning guitar and bleeping electronics, a psychedelic instrumental interlude that sets up the mangled punky death metal of "Unholy Pagan Fire", and it's from here on that Beherit seriously pile on the strangeness. Atavistic death metal riffs merge with wall-of-noise blackened buzzsaw guitars, weird Tangerine Dream synth sounds keep popping up all over the place along with other electronic noises, the vocals switch back and forth from hideous gargles to hushed whispers and ridiculous computer-processed spoken word parts where Nuclear Holocausto recites all sorts of Satanic blasphemies over a backdrop of muddy guitar noise. Seriously, the vocals on Drawing Down The Moon are some of most bizarre in the black metal canon, and it's not hard to see how this set the stage for later BM weirdos like Furze and Striborg.
One of the more notorious tracks on Drawing is "Summerlands", which is basically a really dark New Age track with spoken word vocals and Zamfir-esque flutes piping over a plodding drumbeat and the sounds of a forest at night, another jarring left turn in the middle of what is already a very strange black/death metal record. That's followed by new versions of the songs "Werewolf Semen And Blood" and "Thou Angel Of The Gods" from the first record, both blasts of filthy black metal with more of that insane vocal mixing and echoed layering, and then closes with "Lord Of Shadows And Goldenwood", a mix of droning death-doom and cosmic ambience that ends in a wave of massive blackened synthesizer roar.
The band was clearly out of their fucking minds when they recorded this album. The combination of filthy atavistic black metal and their bizarre version of "cosmic" 70s-era style electronic ambience and experimentation is both inspired and totally nuts, and to this day, there seems to be a general consensus that Drawing Down The Moon is one of the weirdest albums that ever emerged from black metal's "Second Wave". I've seen just as many people online write this album off as utter dogshit as I've seen proclaim it as the work of avant-garde genius, so depending on just how damaged you like your old school black metal, your mileage will vary. Me? I fucking worship this album. It's absolutely crucial listening for anyone into eccentric and outré black/death metal, one of the very few albums from this era that achieves the same sort of otherworldly strangeness as Abruptum's early recordings. Highest recommendation to disciples of both the Satanic and the absurd.
This recent Nuclear War Now "30th Anniversary Edition" reissue features the original album on CD, cassette and deluxe 180-gram LP. The reissue features improved cover art clarity (sourcing the original NASA photo used for the initial release), along with extensive new liner notes and album history written by J. Campbell and rare photos (for the CD and LP edition (these are not included in the cassette format). The LP is presented in a (very) heavyweight case-wrapped jacket with leather-like texturing, and a 12"-size forty-four page booklet. It's massive, an an essential piece of early avant-garde Finnish black metal at its most fearless and adventurous.
My original review of the previous edition on Candlelight, revised and updated:
The earlier Beherit recordings were insanely chaotic and primitive blurts of blackened death metal that bore a somewhat similar bestial vibe as the fucked-up Brazilian scumthrash of bands like Sarcafago, Vulcano and Sextrash, but when 1993 rolled around and these Finns dropped their first full-blown full length Drawing Down The Moon, it was serious what the fuck time. The band's sound had gotten MUCH weirder for this album, though at first you wouldn't notice anything different from their early recordings...
The disc opens with a short synth into with a deep distorted voice proclaiming fealty to Satan while angelic voices sing in the background, then rips right into "Salomom's Gate", all brutal simplistic thrashing riffage and Nuclear Holocausto's psychotic gurgling vocals that sounds an awful lot like the scummy deaththrash they were playing on The Oath of Black Blood. But as the song continues, the arrangement gets all weird, riffs kind of wander off or stop abruptly, droning keyboards pop up randomly, and the band ends things on a slow, sludgy doom riff that just fades off. The next track "Nocturnal Evil" is another blazing thrasher, primitive four chord riffs sounding more like hardcore punk scoured by extreme distortion and blown speakers than anything, and those vocals...Nuclear Holocausto's gargling rasp goes all over the place, one minute raging in the background, and a second later his vocals suddenly shoot WAY UP IN THE MIX and in your face. In contrast, "Sadomatic Rites" starts off total doom, a massive death metal riff played at half speed while spacey synths swell in the background, eventually picking up speed and turning into a chugging mid-paced monster halfway through, becoming sloppier and sloppier, the drums and guitars falling all over themselves as the song, again, fades out into deep space.
The first minute of "Black Arts" has a sample of what sounds like the crackling and hissing of a burning pyre alongside some kind of inhuman grunting, then switches to mid-tempo death metal with even more whacked out vocals running through some kind of effects. Then there is "Nuclear Girl", a short two minute track of dubbed out drums, sinister minor-key synth, droning guitar and bleeping electronics, a psychedelic instrumental interlude that sets up the mangled punky death metal of "Unholy Pagan Fire", and it's from here on that Beherit seriously pile on the strangeness. Atavistic death metal riffs merge with wall-of-noise blackened buzzsaw guitars, weird Tangerine Dream synth sounds keep popping up all over the place along with other electronic noises, the vocals switch back and forth from hideous gargles to hushed whispers and ridiculous computer-processed spoken word parts where Nuclear Holocausto recites all sorts of Satanic blasphemies over a backdrop of muddy guitar noise. Seriously, the vocals on Drawing Down The Moon are some of most bizarre in the black metal canon, and it's not hard to see how this set the stage for later BM weirdos like Furze and Striborg.
One of the more notorious tracks on Drawing is "Summerlands", which is basically a really dark New Age track with spoken word vocals and Zamfir-esque flutes piping over a plodding drumbeat and the sounds of a forest at night, another jarring left turn in the middle of what is already a very strange black/death metal record. That's followed by new versions of the songs "Werewolf Semen And Blood" and "Thou Angel Of The Gods" from the first record, both blasts of filthy black metal with more of that insane vocal mixing and echoed layering, and then closes with "Lord Of Shadows And Goldenwood", a mix of droning death-doom and cosmic ambience that ends in a wave of massive blackened synthesizer roar.
The band was clearly out of their fucking minds when they recorded this album. The combination of filthy atavistic black metal and their bizarre version of "cosmic" 70s-era style electronic ambience and experimentation is both inspired and totally nuts, and to this day, there seems to be a general consensus that Drawing Down The Moon is one of the weirdest albums that ever emerged from black metal's "Second Wave". I've seen just as many people online write this album off as utter dogshit as I've seen proclaim it as the work of avant-garde genius, so depending on just how damaged you like your old school black metal, your mileage will vary. Me? I fucking worship this album. It's absolutely crucial listening for anyone into eccentric and outré black/death metal, one of the very few albums from this era that achieves the same sort of otherworldly strangeness as Abruptum's early recordings. Highest recommendation to disciples of both the Satanic and the absurd.
The latest album of hyper intricate avant-shred metal from the mindblowing trio Behold...The Arctopus from Brooklyn is now available as a combination
LP+CD, courtesy of Black Market Acitivities. It's a bit odd when I think about how long these guys have been at it, but Skullgrid is actually the
bands first real album, as all of their previous releases have consisted of Eps (like the split EP with Orthrelm that was released by Eyes Of Sound and yours
truly at Crucial Blast, and their Arctopocalypse Now... Warmageddon Later 3" CD on Epicene Sound), an elongated reissue of their debut Nano-
Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning EP with additional live tracks added on, and two early demos. So now we've got an actual full length album of new material
from them, and as I expected (and hoped), Behold...The Arctopus have taken their progressive blast metal even deeper into confounding complexity. These cats
are one of the craziest tech outfits ever, combining insane progressive death metal with over the top prog rock and John Zorn style experimentation into an
instrumental attack that reveals passages of immense beauty hidden in their relentless complex compositions.
Opening with the convoluted fretboard gymnastics of the title track, Skullgrid serves up seven tracks of hypertechnical guitar shred played at
lightning fast speeds, over an amazing polyrhythmic percussive attack from drummer Charlie Zeleny that will give you multiple cases of whiplash. Colin
Marston's shreds on his 12-string Warr guitar, weaving dissonant finger tapped harmonies and counterpoint riffs into jarring arrangements, and each song is
filled with spiralling chains of fretboard runs. The band breaks into a couple of awesome passages where it sounds like they are playing some kind of mutant
free jazz (even though all of this stuff is composed down to the smallest detail), or massive alien sounding melodic doom metal dirges, or heavenly ambient
post-rock. These guys blow my mind. You've got to really have an ear for ultracomplex, technical prog to dig Behold...The Arctopus, but if you do,
this stuff is unbelieveable, like Rush, Cynic, Orthrelm, Dillenger Escape Plan, Gorguts, 20th century classical, and Tony Macalpine combined into a brain
warping hyperprog avant death jazz overload. Also of note are the two guest musicians that contribute their own substantial chops to songs on
Skullgrid, Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess and Orthrelm/Ocrilim/Octis guitarist Mick Barr.
Essential for fans of extreme tech metal, obviously. The vinyl comes on awesome looking red-and-black splattered wax, with an insert sheet and the CD in a
plastic sleeve.
Boss vinyl manifestation of the labyrinthine EP these cats dropped on Troubleman Unlimited about a year ago, issued by our buddies at Epicene Sound System
on white wax. BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS conjure three dizzying explosions of tech-metal shredtasticness that are highlighted by Colin Marston (also of Crucial
Blast dadaist ambient-metal-clatter duo INFIDEL?/CASTRO! as well as DYSRYTHMIA and BYLA) and his virtuoso Warr tap-guitar skills, which is shit must to be
heard/seen to be believed...hyper-speed prog runs and lightspeed guitar tapping are shot out faster than your ears can follow, with jazz-informed composition
and complexity getting down with straight thrash metal insanity, further bolstered by a display of insane octopoidal drumming that tumbles out of
jams entitled Exospacial Psionic Aura, Estrogen/Pathogen Exchange Program, Sensory Amusia, and an ambient jazzy bliss out that
surfaces in the middle of the EP that'll flip your wig. Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning is all instrumental and all epic, swarming over your
eardrums like the nexus of progressive ATHEIST/MESHUGGAH/CYNIC tech and the kind of underground, hyperactive avant-shred that you get from ADD-addled nuts
like ORTHRELM (who just did a split CD single on Crucial Blast with BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS), NAKED CITY, and MELT BANANA. Housed on a one-sided vinyl 12" in a
limited edition of 500 copies, on white vinyl with the other side sporting a silkscreened image.
Reissued by Black Market Activities, this CD version of the labyrinthine EP that these cats originally dropped on Troubleman Unlimited conjures three
dizzying explosions of tech-metal shredtasticness highlighted by the presence of shredmaster Colin Marston, who is also a member of the Dadaist ambient-
metal-clatter duo Infidel?/Castro! as well as Dysrhythmia and Byla. Colin's virtuoso Warr tap-guitar skills is shit that must to be heard/seen to be
believed...hyper-speed prog runs and lightspeed guitar tapping are shot out faster than your ears can follow, with jazz-informed composition and complexity
getting down with straight thrash metal insanity, further bolstered by a display of insane octopoidal drumming that tumbles out of jams like
"Estrogen/Pathogen Exchange Program", "Sensory Amusia", and an ambient jazzy bliss out that surfaces in the middle of "Exospacial Psionic Aura" that'll flip
your wig. All instrumental and all epic, swarming over your eardrums like the nexus of progressive Atheist/Meshuggah/Cynic tech and the kind of underground,
hyperactive avant-shred that you get from ADD-addled nuts like Orthrelm (who shared that split CD single with Behold...The Arctopus on Crucial Blast), Naked
City, and Melt Banana. Along with the tracks from the original Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning EP, they've also included the jams from the
Arctopocalypse Now... Warmageddon Later 3" CD that came out on Epicene years ago, and some live tracks, totalling close to an hour of music.
Just turned up some of the original, cheaper Troubleman Unlimited version of the debut EP from Behold...The Arctopus. This one is essentially out of print, and when these are gone, they're gone.
The follow up to the NYC shredmasters debut 3" on Epicene, their Nano-Nucleonic EP on Troubleman serves up three dizzying explosions of tech-metal shredtasticness highlighted by the presence of shredmaster Colin Marston, who is also a member of the Dadaist ambient-metal-clatter duo Infidel?/Castro! as well as Dysrhythmia and Byla. Colin's virtuoso Warr tap-guitar skills is shit that must to be heard/seen to be believed...hyper-speed prog runs and lightspeed guitar tapping are shot out faster than your ears can follow, with jazz-informed composition and complexity getting down with straight thrash metal insanity, further bolstered by a display of insane octopoidal drumming that tumbles out of jams like "Estrogen/Pathogen Exchange Program", "Sensory Amusia", and an ambient jazzy bliss out that surfaces in the middle of "Exospacial Psionic Aura" that'll flip your wig. All instrumental and all epic, swarming over your eardrums like the nexus of progressive Atheist/Meshuggah/Cynic tech and the kind of underground, hyperactive avant-shred that you get from ADD-addled nuts like Orthrelm (who shared that split CD single with Behold...The Arctopus on Crucial Blast), Naked City, and Melt Banana.
More occult Dutch madness from New Era! This is the strange, near unclassifiable debut from Dutch one-man band The Being, released back in 2010 but finally in stock here at C-Blast for the first time. From what I've been able to learn, this project initially started up years ago as a black metal influenced ambient effort, but at some point along the way, The Being morphed into something much more grotesque and fantastical. Surrounded by a bizarre dark carnival atmosphere, The Being starts off by crafting a bizarre sort of freak show folk music on Through Madness To Mercury, with creaking, clanking songs that sound like ghostly folk melodies played on broken instruments by withered, skeletal hands, weird wheezing kazoo melodies buzzing over the sinister bass lines and guttural, half-moaned singing. The Being employs a junkyard orchestra of chains and pots and pans, clanking pipes and strange-looking instruments partially constructed from bones like the "tabouswine", "bone-bass", "swineskull-guiro" and "bone-rattle" that help to create the sound of the album's eerie graveyard cabaret, but then shifts from that morbid jug band sound into passages of creepy, Cold Meat-style ritualistic ambience with slow pounding death-cult drums, whispered lyrics and gothic chanting, and a kind of jagged death rock that shows up on songs like "The Mixing Separation". At times, this album has a feel similar to that of hearing latter-day Tom Waits performing for a witch's Sabbat, or a Danny Elfman score infected with bits of lurching, surrealistic death punk. The album art and lyrics all point towards the heavy influence of occult and alchemical concepts on The Being's weird theatrical blend of cracked graveyard blues, demonic circus music, neo-folk and fevered dark ambience, but it all comes together in a unique manner that leaves this album sounding like little else. The disc comes in a gatefold digisleeve package, and comes with a twenty page booklet of lyrics and artwork.
Infuckingsane cult noisecore from this one-woman Finnish project! What? That's the word, at least. As much as we fucking LOVE noisecore, the crazier and
more brain damaged and out of control the better, it's impossible to stay abreast of all of the noisecore bands that have sprouted up over the years. The
very nature of the form has permitted a deluge of bands aping the seminal sounds of Anal Cunt, Fear Of God, the Gerogerigegege, and Sore Throat, some of 'em
genius, most not. So we get very stoked when we discover a comepletely fucked up noisecore band that we've never heard of before, that actually shows us
something new. The latest carton of earbleed orgasm from At War With False Noise provided just such an experience, via this teensy 3" CD-R that houses a re-
issued EP from a Finnish girl called Beip titled I Like Penis. Any thoughts of good taste should have disappeared right out the window as soon as we
started talking about noisecore to begin with, you know? This recording came out in 2003, and according to the info on the jacket consists of 56 "songs". The
whole thing is only 9 minutes and is presented as one long track, so what yer getting is a stream of stop/start eruptions of blastbeats, mongoloid improvised
drumming, vacuum cleaner guitar noise and the occasional twisted sludge riff with the most horrific high pitched female screaming ever run through a bank of
effects! Fucking out-of-control brutal blurr overload, seriously warped - there aren't any added dimensions to this, it's just brain scrambling NOISE GRIND
of the highest order. If you worship at the burnt altar of groups like Brigada Do Odio, 7 Minutes Of Nausea, PTAO, None Of Your Fucking Business, Minch,
World, Sissy Spacek, Gerogerigegege, Aunt Mary, and other purveyors of total outsider sickoid blur, yer going to trip out on this. Allegedly, this was
actually recorded and "produced" by Mikko Aspa of Finnish noise machine Grunt, post-black metallers Deathspell Omega, and deathsludge outfit Fleshpress! Only
100 copies were made, packaged in a little full-color sleeve tucked in a pink Cromatico wraparound sheet.
The Spanish psych band Fooz are mostly known over here in the US to the truly obsessive stoner/psych fans, but over in their home country of Spain, they are apparently legends in the field of heavy, spacey stoner rock. Fooz released a couple of amazing albums on Alone Records that mixed together a heavy Hawkwind influence with the trippier side of Black Sabbath, but they ended up breaking up a few years ago. I hadn't heard anything more about what the members were up to until just recently, when Alone Records announced the release of the debut album from a group called Beiruth that has a couple of the guys from Fooz in it. Part of the recent windfall of killer heavy psych albums that we just got in from Alone, Horizonte de Sucesos is an electronics-heavy album of all-instrumental space rock that is a big departure from the 70s influenced rock that Fooz played. Harnessing the sounds of vintage synthesizers and analogue electronics, Beiruth play a kind of dark proggy space music that's closer to the soundtrack prog of Zombi and the cosmic pulse of krautrock than heavy rock. Beiruth definitely have the whole Hawkwind thing going on too, but when I say that, I'm thinking of Hawkwind at their most stoned, laid back, and drugged out. There's a heavy undercurrent to their sound, mainly in the deep, dubby grooving basslines that keep Beiruth's mesmeric stoner-space rock hallucinations anchored to earth and prevent them from spiralling out into space, and on the few tracks that have actual percussion, the band alternates between slow, dirgey drumming, tribal industrial rhythms, and washes of shimmering cymbals. Then there are the weird growling vocal-like noises that appear on tracks like "Horizonte de Sucesos", which I still can't figure out what they are. Beiruth have put together a really cool debut of dark, heavy space rock with this disc, a mix of dark dub elements, Hawkwind, Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster, Zombi and even some shades of doomy heaviness that show up in the crawling cosmic sprawl of the last track. Definitely recommended for fans of space rock, dark prog and tripped out kosmiche soundtracks. Packaged in a digipack.
I've never been a fan of "Christian" metal, especially within the more extreme realms of the underground, and because of this, I never really gave early 90s thrashers Believer a chance up until recently. It wasn't until I read about them in Jeff Wagner's book Mean Deviation that I became interested in checking them out. Wagner's description of the band's music, their technical offbeat thrash, and the more cerebral approach to matters of faith and theology made me curious to investigate further, leading me to a pair of reissues that came out on the Polish label Metal Mind Productions. Formed in Pennsylvania in the mid 80s, Believer started off as a relatively straightforward thrash act, but by the time of their second album Sanity Obscure, they had evolved into a complex, adventurous fusion of thrash, prog, and neo-classical influences. The band's Christian perspective was what most people knew them for, a novelty within the burgeoning extreme metal scene at that time, but even this aspect of their music stood apart from other bands with a similar background with a more intellectual investigation of "white" religion and Christ-based theology than, say, the cheesy glam of Stryper or the terminally lame Barren Cross.
Album number two from Believer, Sanity Obscure was a sudden leap forward from the pure thrash of their debut. The ripping thrash metal, powerful strained singing of front man/guitarist Kurt Bachman and stellar melodic leads are focused into an ambitious and imaginative album whose prog influences come through loud and clear. The opener "Sanity Obscure" begins with a strange atonal electronic melody, but when the band the band finally kicks in, we're blasted with a breathless rush of complex progressive thrash, contorted angular riffing and twisted complex arrangements wrapped around a furious thrashing percussive assault, sudden breaks into acoustic melody and crushing off-time breakdowns. That opener certainly delivers on the heaviness, but as the album continues, the playing becomes more complicated, the arrangements more intricately plotted out, the riffing bent into wild angular shapes, and the rhythm section slips into wonky time signatures, such as the weird off-time grooves on "Wisdom's Call". On "Nonpoint", moody acoustic guitars herald the arrival of the dizzying stop-start complexity where they blend an almost Slayer-esque set of riffs with mathy, angular guitar work. Even the anti-drug anthem "Stop The Madness" is a stomping mid-tempo mosher. The most left-field moment of the album however is "Dies Rae (Day Of Wrath)", a haunting soundscape of neo-classical strings, the operatic soprano vocals of Julianne Laird and dark rumbling ambience that erupts into a stirring folk-thrash epic, the crunchy riffage becoming a backdrop for staccato violins, an awesome fusion of classical strings and crushing thrash metal that returns to the solemn operatic ambience at the end. That's followed by the pummeling "Dust To Dust", and closes with a cover of U2's "Like A Song", changing the original into a charged up, metallic punk version. While not as weird and experimental as their next album Dimensions, this is still a highly skilled and seriously crushing album of advanced prog-thrash, recommended to fans of Confessor, Watchtower, Anacrusis, later Sadus, and Obliveon.
Released in a full color machine-numbered digipack with booklet and new liner notes, limited to 2,000 copies.
I've never been a fan of "Christian" metal, especially within the more extreme realms of the underground, and because of this, I never really gave early 90s thrashers Believer a chance up until recently. It wasn't until I read about them in Jeff Wagner's book Mean Deviation that I became interested in checking them out. Wagner's description of the band's music, their technical offbeat thrash, and the more cerebral approach to matters of faith and theology made me curious to investigate further, leading me to a pair of reissues that came out on the Polish label Metal Mind Productions. Formed in Pennsylvania in the mid 80s, Believer started off as a relatively straightforward thrash act, but by the time of their second album Sanity Obscure, they had evolved into a complex, adventurous fusion of thrash, prog, and neo-classical influences. The band's Christian perspective was what most people knew them for, a novely within the burgeoning extreme metal scene at that time, but even this aspect of their music stood apart from other bands with a similar background with a more intellectual investigation of "white" religion and Christ-based theology than, say, the cheesy glam of Stryper or the terminally lame Barren Cross.
By the time that 1993's Dimensions came out, Believer were one of underground metal's most advanced thrash acts. Still tagged as "that Christian band", that perspective (which was more subtle than you mighrt expect) overshadowed their precision playing and complex, offbeat songwriting, and their third album was their most ambitious yet, with virtuoso drumming, singer Kurt Bachman's vocals sounding more putrid than ever, the increased use of electronic effects, and a conceptual approach that has the lyrics and subject matter drawing from Ludwig Feuerbach's religious critique The Essence of Christianity, quotations from Biblical scripture, the writings of Freud, Sartre's Being And Nothingness, and radical theologist Thomas J. J. Altizer on the nature of religion and God. Presented here by Metal Mind in a new re-mastered edition with new liner notes in a machine-numbered digipack, Dimensions heads even further into prog , and incorporates some subtle industrial elements in their abstract intros. The crushing opener "Gone" lays down some massive chunky riffage and tricky time changes, and weird bleeping computer noises, orchestral hits and voice loops introduce "Future Mind"; when the thrash kicks in, it's angular, mathy, complex , seriously heavy and cerebral at the same time, fast paced galloping thrash warping into difficult off-time riffing and killer convoluted drum patterns, and ends with a pulsating Moroder-like synth throb, soundtracky ambience, which reappears later as a recurrent motif throughout the album. "Dimentia" features eerie atonal melodies on acoustic guitars and some spoken word vocals before it kicks into slower jagged heaviness,
but then when the cello and soaring guitar leads come in, it becomes this gorgeous, haunting classical-tinged metal. More strange electronic noise and effects begin "What Is But Cannot Be" before unleashing another contortionist thrash fraught with sudden detours into fusion riffing.
Then begins the "Trilogy Of Knowledge", the album's ambitious twenty-minute, four part prog metal suite concerned with the ascent of man and his subsequent fall from grace described in the book of Genesis. It starts with a short intro track of sound effects and spoken word narration, scraping industrial noise, looped strings and massive earthshaking sheet-metal pummel, and then "Movement I: The Lie" kicks in with sinister violins and other strings, backed by the choppy, angular thrash metal, a kind of orchestral thrash that's heavy and atmospheric, with some wailing electric violin leads through the song. It takes a few minutes before the vocals come in, and when they do, it's a mix of operatic female singing trading off with the snarling male screams, the music shifting from aggressive complex thrash to a soaring melodic passage to instrumental complexity. The strings and bass take over as it moves into "Movement II: The Truth"; at first it's total chamber rock with beautiful melancholy strings , but then kicks into the chugging lockstep symphonic thrash again, getting weirder as the band goes through a constant series of tempo and time signature changes, crunchy syncopated riffing playing in counterpoint to the strings and female vocals. By the time you get to the dissonant strings and female singing that begins the final "Movement III: The Key", it's starting to resemble the eerie chamber prog of bands like Univers Zero and Present, before launching into one final assault of intricate thrash.
Along with Watchtower, these guys were responsible for some of the most confounding, brain-scrambling thrash metal I've heard.
���� The early throes of one of the best doom metal bands around right now. Right on the hells of their terrific new album Four Phantoms comes this vinyl reissue of the Seattle band's 2011 demo, on black vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, featuring a slightly revised layout and a more durable jacket than the previous version that came out from the German label Psychic Assault. Featuring four tracks that sprawl out for more than a half-hour of atmospheric, achingly beautiful heaviness, the band's demo has some material that would end up getting reworked for their first album Longing ("Beneath The Mask" and "I Wait"). But then there's also the two tracks that only appeared here, "Mayknow" and ""The Moment", which makes this pretty desirable for those of us infatuated with the duo's brand of crushing, melancholic doom.
���� Even as far back as this demo, these guys were utilizing their spare palette of drums, bass guitar and vocals to utterly massive effect; on the instrumental "Mask", the mournful, low-end notes slowly drift around the samples from Corman's Masque Of The Red Death, opening the demo with its dreary, almost Codeine-like slowcore that leads straight into the thunderous "I Wait". These early versions are just a little more stripped down than the album versions, slightly grittier and more molten in their wall-rattling delivery, but just as suffocating heavy. The exclusive b-side songs, on the other hand, are particularly torturous. "Mayknow" is a crawling, abject dirge with some of the most terrifying vocals I've heard from Bell Witch, but will also spit out some wonderfully moody, almost bluesy guitar leads over that skull-flattening doom, and the vocals rising in a sorrowful threnody, almost choral-like as they echo across the elegiac melody that takes over the last half of the song; when they slip from that into the short instrumental closer "The Moment", it's like a clearing of thunderheads, the delicate, almost folky bass melody drifting over the ruined and blasted terrain.
���� Issued in a limited run of six hundred copies.
Back in stock.
Seattle funeral doom duo Bell Witch aren't the first band of this ilk to carry with them shades and echoes of the elegiac slowcore of classic bands like Codeine, but by god their one of the best. A two-piece made up of just drums and six-string bass guitar from members of Samothrace and Sod Hauler, Bell Witch nevertheless succeed in crafting a massive sound on their second album Four Phantoms, which has been getting lots of love from devotees of metallic misery, and for good reason - these four songs (all naturally sprawling out for anywhere from ten to twenty three minutes in length, every one an epic) sprawl out into panoramic sadness, the band expertly welding their blasts of crushing glacial heaviness and crawling, time-stopping tempos to passages of achingly beautiful melody, far prettier and more fragile than what you usually hear out of bands playing stuff this agonizingly slow.
But man, those weary, stentorian riffs that tower over the album are as spiritually pulverizing as you could hope for, slow-motion blooms of rumbling, crashing dirge surrounded by guitar leads that have a similar almost synthlike vibe as Finnish gloomdoom gods Skepticism. The songs often disappear into thick fogbanks of liturgical darkness as the drums melt away and the vocals shift from that monstrous lamentation into plaintive, chantlike tones, and on "Suffocation, A Drowning", the band is joined once again by Erik Moggridge of neofolk outfit Aerial Ruin on vocals, lending his pensive voice to one of the album's more solemn, subdued moments that slowly builds into a titanic key change that gives birth to an awesome gloompop hook buried beneath the speaker-rattling low end and soporific pace. The sound is so harmonically full, I had completely forgotten that there were no fuckin' guitars on this album until well after the album was over. Immense and beautiful in its bleak, ashen majesty, and with more complex songcraft than their previous work, Phantoms is easily one of the best doom albums that's come out so far this year, those melodious, sometimes harmonized vocals giving this a warmth and humanity not often seen in funeral doom, without sacrificing that oppressive, deathly atmosphere and utterly forlorn feeling of existential despair that marks the best funeral doom, a quality that puts this album in league with other masters of the form like Pallbearer and Asunder. Comes in digipack packaging featuring superb impressionistic artwork from Paolo Girardi.
The latest slab of heartwrenching doom metal from Bell Witch is now available on 180 gram vinyl in gatefold packaging with digital download...
Seattle funeral doom duo Bell Witch aren't the first band of this ilk to carry with them shades and echoes of the elegiac slowcore of classic bands like Codeine, but by god their one of the best. A two-piece made up of just drums and six-string bass guitar from members of Samothrace and Sod Hauler, Bell Witch nevertheless succeed in crafting a massive sound on their second album Four Phantoms, which has been getting lots of love from devotees of metallic misery, and for good reason - these four songs (all naturally sprawling out for anywhere from ten to twenty three minutes in length, every one an epic) sprawl out into panoramic sadness, the band expertly welding their blasts of crushing glacial heaviness and crawling, time-stopping tempos to passages of achingly beautiful melody, far prettier and more fragile than what you usually hear out of bands playing stuff this agonizingly slow.
But man, those weary, stentorian riffs that tower over the album are as spiritually pulverizing as you could hope for, slow-motion blooms of rumbling, crashing dirge surrounded by guitar leads that have a similar almost synthlike vibe as Finnish gloomdoom gods Skepticism. The songs often disappear into thick fogbanks of liturgical darkness as the drums melt away and the vocals shift from that monstrous lamentation into plaintive, chantlike tones, and on "Suffocation, A Drowning", the band is joined once again by Erik Moggridge of neofolk outfit Aerial Ruin on vocals, lending his pensive voice to one of the album's more solemn, subdued moments that slowly builds into a titanic key change that gives birth to an awesome gloompop hook buried beneath the speaker-rattling low end and soporific pace. The sound is so harmonically full, I had completely forgotten that there were no fuckin' guitars on this album until well after the album was over. Immense and beautiful in its bleak, ashen majesty, and with more complex songcraft than their previous work, Phantoms is easily one of the best doom albums that's come out so far this year, those melodious, sometimes harmonized vocals giving this a warmth and humanity not often seen in funeral doom, without sacrificing that oppressive, deathly atmosphere and utterly forlorn feeling of existential despair that marks the best funeral doom, a quality that puts this album in league with other masters of the form like Pallbearer and Asunder. Comes in digipack packaging featuring superb impressionistic artwork from Paolo Girardi.
The early throes of one of the best doom metal bands around right now. Right on the hells of their terrific new album Four Phantoms comes this vinyl reissue of the Seattle band's 2011 demo, on black vinyl with a printed inner sleeve, featuring a slightly revised layout and a more durable jacket than the previous version that came out from the German label Psychic Assault. Featuring four tracks that sprawl out for more than a half-hour of atmospheric, achingly beautiful heaviness, the band's demo has some material that would end up getting reworked for their first album Longing ("Beneath The Mask" and "I Wait"). But then there's also the two tracks that only appeared here, "Mayknow" and ""The Moment", which makes this pretty desirable for those of us infatuated with the duo's brand of crushing, melancholic doom.
Even as far back as this demo, these guys were utilizing their spare palette of drums, bass guitar and vocals to utterly massive effect; on the instrumental "Mask", the mournful, low-end notes slowly drift around the samples from Corman's Masque Of The Red Death, opening the demo with its dreary, almost Codeine-like slowcore that leads straight into the thunderous "I Wait". These early versions are just a little more stripped down than the album versions, slightly grittier and more molten in their wall-rattling delivery, but just as suffocating heavy. The exclusive b-side songs, on the other hand, are particularly torturous. "Mayknow" is a crawling, abject dirge with some of the most terrifying vocals I've heard from Bell Witch, but will also spit out some wonderfully moody, almost bluesy guitar leads over that skull-flattening doom, and the vocals rising in a sorrowful threnody, almost choral-like as they echo across the elegiac melody that takes over the last half of the song; when they slip from that into the short instrumental closer "The Moment", it's like a clearing of thunderheads, the delicate, almost folky bass melody drifting over the ruined and blasted terrain.
Issued in a limited run of six hundred copies.
Desert thunder never sounded so good. BELOW THE SOUND emerge from the dust of New Mexico with a 7 track attack of stripped-down precision thud punk. High
powered hooks, angular fuzz, and venomous lyrics all further entrench this trio in the guts of the current scud rock movement. Biting, catchy, and lethal,
this recalls the minimalist power of the MINUTEMEN merged with NAKED RAYGUN's anthemic 'core and Am Rep noise.
The crusty behemoth sludge of Beneath Oblivion gets a gorgeous vinyl treatment with this limited edition 10" from Mylene Sheath, which features two epic sludgefeasts on creamy red/white swirled vinyl in a limited edition of 400 copies, packaged in a thick jacket with a two sided full color insert.
The first side features the song "One Year Of Deprivation", a tar-coated lament that opens in a haze of feeedback and martial drums as a massive droning riff enters alongside warped screeching vocals from both the guitarist and the bassist, overlapping with one another in a hideous vomit frenzy as they recite a drawn out hate letter in tandem. Later, though, the band shifts into a long middle passage of twangy, discordant strum that sounds a really wasted Across Tundras jam, the heavy countrified guitar joined by some cool meandering bass playing while the drummer holds it down with a laid back shuffle - then it's back into the filth again for the last third as the band whips up a violent churning Buzzoven-like dirge.
"No Man Or Deity" drags the B side down into a dank hole with the gooey rivulets of downtuned guitar rumble that open the track, black clots of feedback and amplifier grime oozing across a hypnotic tribal beat, the band slowly building a hypnotic circular jam while the guitar builds in strength and volume, until they finally burst forth into a massive tribal-doom crush, waves of rolling toms pounding beneath the gruesome sludge riffage and snarling vocals. The sound is thick and toxic, again channeling that classic Buzzoven sound into a hateful drone ritual and shifting between slow, doomy riffing and faster pummeling rhythms up to the end when the song dissolves into a wash of blackened murky noise. If you like your sludgecore really negative and fucked up, Beneath Oblivion deliver. Both of these songs are crushing, crusty blats of hate-filled sludge that fits right next to Buried At Sea, Grief, Rwake, Buzzoven, Warhorse, and Eyehategod.
Here's another crusher from the Total Rust vaults, a full length split CD between the blackened melodic doom of Sweden's Beneath The Frozen Soil and
old-school sludge thugs Negative Reaction. It's rare that I get in any cool split albums anymore, as the ones that do pop up tend to be fairly haphazardly
constructed affairs, but this one really works. Both bands compliment each other's style, and you really get a "state of the scene" report from the crusty
underbelley of the sludge/doom underground on this disc. Beneath The Frozen Soil start things off with five songs of grim, raw deathdoom with a heavy My
Dying Bride influence - ultra heavy, desolate dirges with harsh vocals and a filthy, raw recording quality. Sometimes the songs break off into morose
passages of gloomy chamber-rock with cello, keyboards, and piano, or they pick up the pace with some slightly trickier riffing, but BTFS always come back to
the doom in the end. Heavy duty epic crustiness that takes me back to the glory days of Peaceville while putting their own spin on the sound with some pretty
cool song arrangements, loads of downer atmosphere, and a bass tone that sounds like there is some kind of machinery buzzing in the background through all of
the songs.
And then it's time for Negative Reaction to show up and deliver a serious helping of bonecrushing slo-mo hatred. Why don't these guys get more love?
Seriously, people. Negative Reaction has been kicking around for close to 20 years now, and they are still little more than a footnote in the oral
history of the American sludgecore underground. I dunno, I've been down for their brand of monotonous (and I mean that lovingly, guys) Celtic Frost-inspired
riff battery for ages - this shit is just so heavy - just check out the timeless riff on "Shroud" . Ugh. I feel like I'm being slowly buried in
molasses when I listen to their four songs on this split. And all of 'em crush, too, with a brutal bass-heavy production that rattles yer ribs, and singer
Ken E. Bones wickedly gnarly shrieks. Great stuff, super heavy and very hypnotic.
We've actually had this in stock for awhile, but for some reason never added it to the webstore. Inside Passage is the debut full length from drone
outfit Beneath The Lake, a duo comprised of Nicolas Lampert (of death-drone-metal squad Noisegate ) and Dave Canterbury, and on this album explore deep,
subterranean drone ambient bliss heavily inspired by bleak, natural landscapes and wildlife. Heavily layered and quite dense, Beneath The Lake use guitar,
cello, field recordings of whales and wind and owls, sound processors and more to form huge rumbling, shimmering drones and organic hum as their sounds drift
in and out of the drift, sweeping lush walls of sound and bleak, sparse sonic sketches. Hauntingly beautiful. I loved this album so much after first hearing
it that Beneath The Lake were one of the first artists we contacted to contribute to the Record Of Shadows Infinite compilation released on Crucial
Blast in 2004.
A truly stunning follow up to their debut 2002 "Inside Passage" offering! "Silent Uprising" features five flowing & meditative compositions clocking in at
70+ minutes. A demanding engagement from drifting drone composers Nicolas Lampert & Dave Canterbury. An alchemical mixture of lulling musical melodies &
dense cinematic environments. BENEATH THE LAKE embrace a forlorn melancholia of haunting, whispering memories & organic soundscapes. A beautiful album with a
distant hope, forged through nature's sadness... THIS IS EPIC DRONE BLISS!!! Comes packaged in a gorgeous oversized gatefold CD sleeve, professionally
printed and covered in somber, earthy browns/greys and woodland/urban decay imagery.
��I've only recently started to make a serious effort to try to track down the various albums that have come out from the intensely prolific one-man black metal band Benighted In Sodom (whose Matron Thorn has also briefly done time with German black metallers Bethlehem), and it was the Dismal Ethereality CD that helped spur me on to get more of this guy's stuff. That album's combination of plodding, slow moving drum machine rhythms, blurred and caliginous keyboards, swirling distorted guitar billowing out in mournful, murky clouds of melodic blight, and hushed screams (which seem to emanate from somewhere deeper than the standard Satanic/self-loathing rage that usually permeates this sort of loner bedroom black metal) all really hooked me. As I mentioned in the write-up for that aforementioned CD, Benighted In Sodom's bleary blackness reminded me more than anything of a heavier, black metal tinged version of cult darkwave act Lycia, as heard through a haze of Xasthur-like delirium, filtered down through a bleary crepuscular zone stained in blood from acts of self-mutilation.
�� Released as an accompaniment to the full-length CD of the same name, the Dismal Ethereality: Stellar Celestial Void cassette features a single monolithic track recorded as part of the same session as the disc, but which was presumably left off due to space restrictions. It's the same blend of bleary blackened darkwave and minimal kosmiche dread, though, and fans of the album will definitely want to pick this up. That thirty-five minute track "Paradigm Inumbrate / Sanguine Stars" starts off as a murky, low-fi kosmische driftscape, bleak and beautiful electronic strings bathed in clouds of tape hiss, sounding like some super-murky darkwave demo. The sound eventually erupts into something fuller and heavier, that swirling droning guitar sound riding on waves of blighted shoegazer distortion and layered drum machines. The sound on this tape is a little more frenzied than the album, with that blackened dreampop often lurching into blazing fast speeds, the drum machines blasting beneath those looping minor key guitars. As with Benighted In Sodom's other recent stuff, this has that killer Lycia-in-hell vibe, a darkwave drenched black metal that unfurls into long instrumental passages of swirling, hypnotic gloom, the vaguely dissonant dreamblur occasionally punctuated with the singer's demonic frog-croak. There are brief bits of simple, plaintive piano, or plumes of soft, romantic string sections that sound like symphonic film soundtracks that have been left out in the sun for too long, their warbling hazy melodies melting into the harsh mechanical pounding of the drum machine. The more black metallish parts of this epic song often fall away, leaving us with just the sound of those grimly gorgeous melting synths, shimmering murky keyboards melting over the slow, pounding pace of the drums, and there are a couple of moments where this starts to resemble some strange gloom-pop mutation of Skepticism's legendary fuzz-drenched funeral doom sound. But for the last half of the tape, that gloomy, gorgeous washed-out metal transforms completely into a much more abstract and minimal noisescape, where swells of lush black static crash across fields of gleaming nocturnal synth-drone and clusters of atonal electronics. It's very kosmiche, like something Klaus Schulze might put together in the throes of suicidal depression, but with those waves of blackened distortion and undercurrents of sinister minor key keyboards lurking under the surface, giving this a deeply troubled, miserable atmosphere.
One of several full-length albums that came out in 2010 from the obscure, yet insanely prolific (with somewhere in the vicinity of sixteen albums in the can since 2007) one-man black metal outfit Benighted In Sodom, Dismal Ethereality: Stellar Celestial Void delivers more of this band's strange strain of suffocating dense, doom-laden black metal with six epic tracks that reach upwards of a half hour or longer in length. I'd been peripherally aware of Benighted In Sodom for awhile, and had been a fan of the Beauty. Darkness. Chaos. three-way split that he appeared on alongside Frostmoon Eclipse and Chaos Moon, but I never got around to checking more of his stuff until I came across this album, released on the tiny black metal label Singularity Publishing. Along with Benighted In Sodom, sole member Matron Thorn has also been briefly involved with cult German black metallers Bethlehem (even performing on their St�nkfitzchen EP roughly around the same time that he was recording Dismal Ethereality) and is also a member of the avant-garde death metal outfit �vangelist. But it's his massive output and signature style of bleary, gloomy black metal that he's best known for in underground metal circles. It was with this album that something finally clicked with me in regards to Benighted In Sodom's music, the album's plodding, deliberately monotonous drum machines and wavering, smeared keyboards and distant swarming black metal riffs suddenly peeling back and revealing a sound that echoed with some of my favorite things: I could hear traces of classic 80's darkwave, Pornography-era Cure, and classic UK shoegaze in Dismal Ethereality's music, and more than anything else, the bleak, achingly beautiful sound of Ionia-era Lycia. But that's all sublimated into a murky din of buzzing minor key metallic guitar and agonized screams, an atmosphere of abject misery that owes just as much to the likes of Shining, Burzum and those suicide-obsessed black metallers Bethlehem.
On this album, Thorn has turned the music of Benighted In Sodom into an ode to decay and entropy, the music formed around a simple formula of repetitive riffs and gloom-drenched, warbly guitar melodies layered on top of one another, an abject 'gazey blackness drowning in an ocean of fuzz and hiss, carried away by the almost mechanical ticktock pulse and slow shuffle of the drum machine, sometimes shifting into these weirdly mixed floor-tom rhythms that rumble out of the waves of dense, suffocating guitar-gloom. The six tracks that sprawl across Dismal Ethereality are mostly instrumental, the harsh, wretched screams appearing sparingly, and when they do show up, are buried deep in the swirling blown-out roar of guitars and keyboards. The songs seem to loop around themselves, the miserable melodies repeating over and over, droning endlessly around Benighted's blackened pulse, and it's that aspect of this album that brings this sound that much closer to the heavy shoegaze fog of bands like Slowdive and the glacial goth of early Lycia. That heavy gloompop sound remains constant through the album, only breaking when the bleak, monochrome synths and industrial ambience of "The Algophile" appears later on, an interlude of desolate drone teeming with visions of suffering and suicide and extreme mental illness. Fantastic stuff.
Limited to three hundred copies.
Wow, this is some fucked up black metal weirdness. It's hard to pinpoint exactly why Benighted Leams sounds so totally alien the first time you
listen to it. Maybe it's the seemingly broken structures, as if the reverb-heavy music was pulled apart and then put back together with bad glue. Or possibly
it's the bizarre beats, which really don't seem to follow any obvious rhythm. Ferly Centesms is definitely surreal, though, and quite freaking
awesome, like a seriously damaged combo of old Voivod, the weirdest, most necro lo-fi black metal imaginable, and some stumbling, drum-machine driven math
rock band. On HEAVY drugs. Benighted Leams will blaze through some sideways blasting, then settle into creepy ambience with random sounding muttering far off
in the background. Elsewhere, the music chugs along in a funeral dirge reminscent of Bethlehem or Skepticism, and will just come to a sudden halt. Killer
outsider-black metal weirdness!
A couple of the older "private series" 7" Eps from Bloodlust! turned up recently, allowing us to get both the hard-to-find Whorebutcher 7" and this 2006 Ep from the misanthropic New England power electronics duo Bereft in stock for the first time. As with the rest of Bereft's stuff, this is ultra-heavy shit that combines a hardcore-influenced vocal attack with excoriating lyrics and ferocious electronic noise. The a-side track "Tough Man" immediately launches into a sonic assault of extreme high-end feedback and distorted rabid vocals, a ferocious seething power electronics delivery that repeats the threatening lyrics over and over for maximum effect, while harsh rhythmic rumblings detonate beneath the acidic high-end skree, growing into the monstrous mechanical vibrations that take over the final few minutes. Real fuckin' intense. The other track "Religious Leaders" is at first a departure from the aggression on the first track, unleashing massive waves of cosmic synthdrift and metallic drone across deep, reverberating blasts of percussive power, creating a really heavy death industrial feel. The demonic vocals are situated deeper in the mix, adding to the malevolent atmosphere, but then it evolves into something harsher, erupting into roars of collapsing metal and nuclear blast distortion, transforming into a slow-moving and monstrous maelstrom of broken metal and irradiated synth noise that dominates the last few minutes of the side.
Comes in a plain white sleeve with a xeroxed insert, limited to three hundred copies.
Killer chaotic black metal meets Carpenterian synth-dread and ghastly Lustmordian drone on this fantastic cassette release from Colorado's Bestia Arcana. The band is another one of the myriad side projects that have branched off from the metaphysically-concerned third-eye black metal group Nightbringer, who have continued to display a fervent experimental streak throughout their various releases. The debut To Anabainon Ek Tes Abyssu starts off with the swirling cavernous chaos of "Cup Of Babylon" as Bestia Arcana unleashes a torrent of murky layered guitars and swarming tremolo riffing, evil dissonance and thick impermeable clouds of dank subterranean reverb. The vocals are totally unintelligible howls and serpentine hissing that curls around and melts into the sulfurous fog, but then the music drops off into a killer bit of blackened doom where the guitars become diffused into a shapeless black mist, while strange declaratory voices are heard high above the slow, deliberate drumbeat and blizzard-blast of swirling miasmic sound. This noisy, chaotic approach to Satanic murk reminds me a lot of the strange ritualistic music of Reverorum ib Malacht, and the whole recording is swathed in this constant wall of hiss. The songs often transform into bizarre cacophonies of bird-like shrieks and guitar-buzz layered over cyclical looping currents of reverb-drenched drone, and on other tracks like "The Pit Of Sheh-ohl", Bestia Arcana goes for dark, murderous synthesizers and deep buzzing death-drones infested with heavily delayed demonic whispers, similar to John Carpenter's more minimal 80's soundtrack work crossed with the amorphous black soundscapes of Emit; some of the vocals that show up during the album's more synth-heavy doses of ambient drift have an evil, processed sound that actually sounds more like something off of a power electronics tape. These ambient, synth-heavy passages don't overshadow the acute dread that seeps through the bands blazing black metal, though, only serving to enhance this epic, sometimes psychedelic drone-infested blackness. Definitely something that fans of the ritualistic weirdness of Emit and Reverorum ib Malacht would want to check out. This cassette version of To Anabainon comes in a clear plastic box bundled with a large black-and-white poster insert, all contained in a black velvet pouch.
Within the realm of "bestial" black/death metal, you can either get a lifeless, tuneless carbon copy of Blasphemy or Beherit with nothing approaching the uniquely vile personalities of those iconic bands, or you can be fortunate enough to come across a band that seizes upon the inherent insanity and chaos of that sound, but pursues their own violent vision. Bestial Raids can be counted among the latter.
This blast of noxious savagery finally gets a repress on both CD and vinyl with an improved layout, the latest album from these Polish blackened death metallers, who at various points have shared members with the likes of Doombringer and Cultes Des Ghoules. On older releases like their Order Of Doom 7", Bestial Raids played their blackened death metal so chaotically that it became an awesome mess of evil noisecore. But Prime Evil Damnation finds them tightening their sound a bit, although this is still a full-on assault of chaotic barbarism, with some supremely fucked-up soundscapes and violent weirdness threaded through the album. Those echoes of the Canuck war metal sound pioneered by Conqueror reverberate through Bestial Raids sound, of course, but they put their own depraved, psychedelic spin on that extreme aesthetic, their songs lurching from frenzied blastbeat-riddled blast-assaults into slamming off-kilter dirges and churning breakdowns, and occasionally slipping into bizarre droning deathscapes laced with what sounds like a monstrous, malformed pipe organ; that delirious, demented vibe is also created by the singer's vomitous echo-laden shrieks (which are backed by additional guest vocals from members of Black Witchery), and the way that they layer their music at times with a low-frequency industrialized rumble that fills out the noisy, cacophonic din, like on the suffocating closer "Triumphant Primordial Darkness".
Yeah, this is not your typical Baphometic war metal outfit. Many of the traits are there, but Bestial Raids blanket this stuff in a stranger sort of Satanic filth. For those who can't get enough of the blasphemous blast of bands like Revenge, Teitanblood, Antediluvian, Diocletian, Nuclearhammer, and Black Witchery, these guys deliver the goods with their levels of hateful energy cranked into the red, and fueled by a perverted creativity that elevates this far above the rest of the goathordes. This reissue is further enhanced by the evil, surrealistic artwork of Croatian artist Marko Marov, who adorns the album in monstrous pen and ink illustrations.
Within the realm of "bestial" black/death metal, you can either get a lifeless, tuneless carbon copy of Blasphemy or Beherit with nothing approaching the uniquely vile personalities of those iconic bands, or you can be fortunate enough to come across a band that seizes upon the inherent insanity and chaos of that sound, but pursues their own violent vision. Bestial Raids can be counted among the latter.
This blast of noxious savagery finally gets a repress on both CD and vinyl with an improved layout, the latest album from these Polish blackened death metallers, who at various points have shared members with the likes of Doombringer and Cultes Des Ghoules. On older releases like their Order Of Doom 7", Bestial Raids played their blackened death metal so chaotically that it became an awesome mess of evil noisecore. But Prime Evil Damnation finds them tightening their sound a bit, although this is still a full-on assault of chaotic barbarism, with some supremely fucked-up soundscapes and violent weirdness threaded through the album. Those echoes of the Canuck war metal sound pioneered by Conqueror reverberate through Bestial Raids sound, of course, but they put their own depraved, psychedelic spin on that extreme aesthetic, their songs lurching from frenzied blastbeat-riddled blast-assaults into slamming off-kilter dirges and churning breakdowns, and occasionally slipping into bizarre droning deathscapes laced with what sounds like a monstrous, malformed pipe organ; that delirious, demented vibe is also created by the singer's vomitous echo-laden shrieks (which are backed by additional guest vocals from members of Black Witchery), and the way that they layer their music at times with a low-frequency industrialized rumble that fills out the noisy, cacophonic din, like on the suffocating closer "Triumphant Primordial Darkness".
Yeah, this is not your typical Baphometic war metal outfit. Many of the traits are there, but Bestial Raids blanket this stuff in a stranger sort of Satanic filth. For those who can't get enough of the blasphemous blast of bands like Revenge, Teitanblood, Antediluvian, Diocletian, Nuclearhammer, and Black Witchery, these guys deliver the goods with their levels of hateful energy cranked into the red, and fueled by a perverted creativity that elevates this far above the rest of the goathordes. This reissue is further enhanced by the evil, surrealistic artwork of Croatian artist Marko Marov, who adorns the album in monstrous pen and ink illustrations.
If you're a regular customer of Crucial Blast, or have been soaking up much of the extreme black/death metal that has surfaced in recent years, you've seen the visual work of Industrie Chimere Noire. This Qu�b�cois designer (aka Joce) has been behind the distinctive and imaginative album design and artwork for a host of hideous, hellish death metal, black metal, and extreme industrial bands, including the likes of Abyssal, Portal, Fistula, Hooded Menace, Morne, Nekrasov, Unearthly Trance, and Utlagr, among others. Beyond his visual art and design, though, Joce has also been creating sinister, spectral music of his own with his solo project B�te Lumineuse, which has to date released a handful of split tapes with bands like Actuary, Lortie and Neige Et Noirceur. Practicing a kind of nightmarish kosmische sorcery, B�te Lumineuse's sound is surreal and suffocating, centered around brackish dronescapes and drifting fogbanks of mesmeric murk that often resemble the sound of some particularly baleful 70's-era space music cassette (think Tangerine Dream circa Zeit) that has just been dug up after being buried deep beneath a forest floor for the past ten years.
After that series of splits, B�te Lumineuse has resurfaced with his first full-length cassette, Murmure du Charnier. A half-hour excursion into phantasmagoric black holes and charnel-house ambience, featuring ten tracks formed from the warped howl of mutated synthesizers that have been tortured into monstrous ectoplasmic deformations, and layers of black industrial rot. The tape opens with the crushing cosmic synthesizer roar that briefly blasts across the beginning of "Entree", the voices of ancient magicians echoing beneath the grinding electronic drones. From there, the album drifts into vast murky dronescapes filled with low subterranean rumbling and ghostly voices that waft across the background, smears of choral sound stretched into infinite, terrible howling across the nuclear-red horizon, the sound shifting from shorter passages of minimal distorted synthdrone to more atmospheric dark ambience like the ghastly murk that spreads throughout "Voix Dans Les Murs". As the album's minimal rumbling synths and meditative electronics unfold, you can hear where B�te Lumineuse is drawing some of its influence from the darkest recesses of early 1970's experimental space music. It's persistently creepy, though, with huge washes of unearthly EVP-like sound that comes barreling out of the blackness, horrific screams and eerie angelic chorales muffled and muted and melted down into a thick, swirling murk, like a more blackened, morbid take on Yen Pox's early dark ambient soundscapes.
Fragments of romantic symphonic music will occasionally bleed through the rumbling black drift, pieces of nostalgic melody that briefly materialize before being swallowed back up by the cavernous darkness, while pieces like "Possession Hypnotique" descend into more surrealistic realms, throbbing rhythms undulating beneath weird mewling tones, bizarre spacey effects and those densely layered drones. "Cosmos I: Pulsar Mourant" pushes that classic Zeit-era sound all the way into the abyss, and immense bass drones pulsate through the cacophonous roar of "Vision Trouble", thundering above strange processed voices lost in necromantic reverie as the track slowly evolves into an almost power electronics-style assault. Towards the end, "Combustion Spontanee" blossoms into a nightmare of anguished cries, scorching feedback and delirious noise , an infernal noisescape that shares some of the hallucinatory mausoleum ambience of T.O.M.B., testimonials of clandestine psy-ops activities descending into squirming synthesizer noise. "412 Yeux Qui Hurlent" is a short collaboration with Montreal power electronics artist Lortie that unleashes a throbbing industrial blast of rhythmic noise and looping drones and corrosive distorted buzz, and eventually dissolves into the final stretch of dark, dreamlike ritualistic ambience that closes the tape with "Sortie".
Released in a limited edition of two hundred copies as part of our Infernal Machines series, Murmure du Charnier comes on pro-manufactured cassette and includes a digital download code for the album.
A fucking amazing 20-"song" private-press CD of totally fucked free-death/grind noise/noise pop from this seriously obscure Ohio project, issued on
the always-confounding Epicene Sound Replica imprint. Each track is an explosion of lo-fi, multi-tracked guitar noise and retarded/jumbled hyperspeed shred
metal buried in a shitstorm of crumbling distortion, with weirdly pretty pop hooks crawling out from under the relentless wall of urk and fucked up grindcore
vocal vomit. Imagine Masonna and Hanatarashi and Faxed Head and Galaxy 500 all playing at the same time, with the session recorded on a disintegrating 4-
track, a white-hot gob of insane, gibbering grind blur and psychedelic death metal noise. Totally fucking excellent. Comes in a simple red/black xerox wallet
sleeve.
A classic album within the canon of "suicidal black metal", Dictius Te Necare (roughly translated to You Must Kill Yourself) has gone in and out of print over the past fifteen years in a couple of different editions, and is now once again available through Red Stream as a single disc reissue with a couple of bonus demo tracks added on. The German "dark metal" band Bethlehem started out back in 1991 as a mixture of black metal, doom and death metal and have undergone a number of changes both in style and in personnel over the years, with newer albums leaning more towards goth/industrial sounds. Their 1996 album, however, is in my opinion their harshest and bleakest work, and is notable for probably being the seed for the entire depressive/suicidal black metal sound that developed in the wake of this record's initial release. The band had been possessed with a morbid fascination with death and suicide since the beginning, but this preoccupation with suicide reached an apex with Dictius Te Necare, combining an intensely raw and abject emotional breakdown with fierce, atmospheric black metal and some of the most agonized, high-pitched shrieks that you'll ever hear. The frantic, insane sounding shrieks on Dictius foreshadow the similar heart-ripping vocal deliveries of bands like Marblebog, Hyadningnar, Deinonychus and especially Silencer. These screams are tempered with schizophrenic whispering and the rare Tom Warrior-style deathgrunt, and the delivery (and the fact that all of the lyrics are screamed in German) gives this a totally mental vibe that few black metal bands have been able to match since. Admittedly, the singer does sound perilously close to a teutonic Grover from Sesame Street at times, but there's no denying the abject misery and hopelessness conveyed through this music. Musically, this is raw, filthy black metal laced with crushing doom; standouts include "Die Anarchische�", a fearsome mid-tempo blackened assault layered with recordings of surf, minor key clean guitar and those panicked black shrieks drifting through black fog over the second half of the track, and "Aphel - Die schwarze Schlange", diseased rocking BM with one of the album's most vicious riffs, very Celtic Frost-esque, then veers out into some bizarre goblin-gargle atmospherics and spacious black drift with piano swirling among the blasting drums and swarming guitars. This also includes the song "Verschleierte Irreligi�sit�t" that famously appeared on the Gummo soundtrack back when this album came out. A masterwork of seriously weird, unstable black metal, essential for those into disturbed, negatory, depressive blackness. Comes in a digipack package with an eight-page booklet.
Now available in the original jewel case form.
The German "dark metal" band Bethlehem started out back in 1991 as a mixture of black metal, doom and death metal and have undergone a number of changes both in style and in personnel over the years, with newer albums leaning more towards goth/industrial sounds. Their 1996 album, however, is in my opinion their harshest and bleakest work, and is notable for probably being the seed for the entire depressive/suicidal black metal sound that developed in the wake of this record's initial release. The band had been possessed with a morbid fascination with death and suicide since the beginning, but this preoccupation with suicide reached an apex with Dictius Te Necare, combining an intensely raw and abject emotional breakdown with fierce, atmospheric black metal and some of the most agonized, high-pitched shrieks that you'll ever hear. The frantic, insane sounding shrieks on Dictius foreshadow the similar heart-ripping vocal deliveries of bands like Marblebog, Hyadningnar, Deinonychus and especially Silencer. These screams are tempered with schizophrenic whispering and the rare Tom Warrior-style deathgrunt, and the delivery (and the fact that all of the lyrics are screamed in German) gives this a totally mental vibe that few black metal bands have been able to match since. Admittedly, the singer does sound perilously close to a teutonic Grover from Sesame Street at times, but there's no denying the abject misery and hopelessness conveyed through this music. Musically, this is raw, filthy black metal laced with crushing doom; standouts include "Die Anarchische�", a fearsome mid-tempo blackened assault layered with recordings of surf, minor key clean guitar and those panicked black shrieks drifting through black fog over the second half of the track, and "Aphel - Die schwarze Schlange", diseased rocking BM with one of the album's most vicious riffs, very Celtic Frost-esque, then veers out into some bizarre goblin-gargle atmospherics and spacious black drift with piano swirling among the blasting drums and swarming guitars. A masterwork of seriously weird, unstable black metal, essential for those into disturbed, negatory, depressive blackness.
���Long before black metallers everywhere began to embrace and invoke the sounds of 80's era darkwave and post-punk in the manner we've been seeing in recent years, Germany's Bethlehem exuded a uniquely wretched and distressing concoction of crushing doom, unhinged black metal, and utterly morbid gothic filth on early albums like Dictius Te Necare and Sardonischer Untergang Im Zeichen Irreligi�ser. Those early records sounded like little else at the time, and still stick out like a black, throbbing growth amongst the 90's black metal hordes. With their bizarre vocal delivery that often seemed to break down into weeping despair, the strange atmospheric touches and avant-garde arrangements, driving Joy Division-esque bass lines coexisting with spectacularly grim mid-paced black metal riffs, and an overwhelmingly oppressive obsession with suicide and death, Bethlehem almost single-handedly formed the template for much of what people now refer to as "depressive" black metal. Bethlehem would eventually move into more industrial-tinged territory in later years, but there's always been a morbid weirdness that's followed their music, even into the strange blend of gothic metal and Rammstein-esque bombast that comprised their 2004 album Mein Weg, which was actually the last proper full length from the band up till now, their ill-received re-working of Sardonischer from 2009 notwithstanding.
��� With its glossolalia-like title (which means a fear of the number 666), Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is the long-awaited return from these Teutonic gloom-mongers, and while this twelve-song album is no return to the razor-wielding suicide-obsessed black metal of those iconic early Lps, this is still some uniquely demented stuff that I found highly enjoyable. Hex kicks off with the band in total Teutonic Sisters Of Mercy mode via the driving, high-gloss goth rock of "Ein Kettenwolf Greint 13:11-18", a track of super-slick, hard rocking stadium-goth that serves up equal helpings of brooding darkness and anthemic fist-shaking choruses, which they follow with the more propulsive, lush gloom-pop of "Egon Erwin's Mongo-Mumu ". Like the latter-day Katatonia stuff, these songs still retain a hefty amount of metallic bite and plenty of grim atmosphere, and the songs that follow delve more than once into Bethlehem's signature dismal slow-moving doom. For the most part, though, the first few songs on Hex are slick, modern post-punk through and through, heavy and ominous and very, very catchy, with lots of driving Peter Hook-style bass lines and lushly cascading guitars, the singer's crooning baritone dominating the mix. At least till "Verbracht In Plastiknacht", where things suddenly turn much more twisted and grotesque, the band finally slipping into jagged, goth-infested blackened heaviness, blasts of mid-paced doom-laden metal laced with peculiar electronic flourishes and industrial rhythms that drift in and out of the evil, lurching crush. It's a pretty varied album, actually: you get the bluesy, heavy instrumental "H�chst Alberner Wichs" with its almost Cult-esque vibe, and gorgeous slide-guitar twang appears on a couple of tracks, as do forays into Rammstein-esque industrial crunch. Other songs are haunting synth-heavy gloomscapes, laced with hints of dark shadowdraped pop and stirring vocal harmonies. An odd mix of sounds for sure, Germanic industrial metal fusing with gorgeous modern darkwave, Lifelover-esque hooks tangling with snarling black doom, with the occasional blast of frenzied black metal a la "Spontaner Freitod". The harshly guttural quality of the German language lyrics mix nicely with the emotional singing style, delivering an unusual combination of gnarled gloompop and sickly blackened dissonance, and while far more experimental than the band's earlier works, it still retains all of the stinking morbidity and suffocating despair that has always been Bethlehem's rot-soaked calling card. Purists should avoid, but for myself, I haven't been able to stop listening to this album.
��� Comes in digipack packaging.
These cats have the auspicious honor of being the first non-Silentist release on Mark Burden's Celestial Gang label. They certainly fit though, with a
demented, psychedelic grindcore quality akin to the neo-classical avant-blast of Burden's Silentist project. Portland's The Better To See You With are a much
noisier deal though, blazing through twelve tracks in twelve minutes, a furious freaked out blast of devolved grindcore being tossed down the stairs and
filtered through contempo No Wave/Skin Graft sensibilities and a bunch of malfunctioning instruments. Condensed thrash assaults suddenly fall apart into
freeform amp noise/cable buzz improv jams, and barely any riff lacks a feedback tracer, the tinny guitars slicing air like razor wire while the singer wails
and howls, sometimes birthing a series of stoned chants. And yet there are hooks and raging riffs in the midst of all of this. Did I just hear a sax? Imagine
a napalm-blasted AIDS Wolf suddenly going grindcore, and you're close. Even the artwork on the gatefold CD jacket is completely acid damaged. Awesome damaged
hardcore/free/grind weirdness.
It's starting to become difficult to keep track of all of the different incarnations of Stijn van Cauter, the Belgian doomlord that has been exploring the
heaviest frequencies of funereal metal-drone with a constantly changing lineup of projects over the past decade. I first caught wind of this guy with his
one-man band Until Death Overtakes Me, which had released a series of CDs that mapped out the bleakest realms of ultra slow motion doom riffing and ambient
synthscapes, utterly massive and austere heaviness somewhere between Skepticism's funeral doom and the abstracted ambient sludge of bands like Black Boned
Angel and Sunn O))). But there have been a endless array of other loner bands that Stijn has recorded under, like Fall Of The Grey Winged One, I Dream No
More, Dreams Of Dying Stars, The Ethereal, Organium, Tear Your Soul Apart being just a few, each one existing as a unique musical entity focused on a
specific facet of crushing metallic minimalism that Stijn explores in obsessive detail. One of these projects that I just found out about is Beyond Black
Void, which released only one album, Desolate, on a small Russian label called Marche Funebre. Fans of Until Death Overtakes Me will immediately
recognize Stijn's trademark guitar sound, a processed, mournful and almost synth-like drone that floats and echoes ominously over heavily distorted sludge
riffs with occasional timpani drums emerging in the distance. But the music on this album is even more minimalist and austere than Until Death..., the three
tracks of nearly-instrumental ambient dirge spanning 14-31 minutes in length, a tryptich of floating glacial funeral doom drone that stretches out into
infinity over a sea of low-frequency bass rumble, a score for travels across the wastes of some far off planet, navigated by Stijn's monstrous vocals that
are buried deep in the sludge and rendered another layer of subsonic drift. The whole album flows along in an unchanging crawl, and flows over you like
cooling magma...impossibly hypnotic and austere ambient doom, highly recommended to fans of Stijn's other projects, Nadja's fuzzslab sludge, funeral doom,
and crushingly heavy ambient guitar drone. This limited edition disc comes in a full color jewel case with illustrations of strange futuristic craft drifting
on otherworldly seas, packaged inside of a printed slipcase.
���The debut album of eschatological dread from Polish band Beyond Life, who combine grim electronic soundscapes with sludgy industrial heaviness and smatterings of severely downbeat black metal, producing a sickly, unsettling vibe over the course of these six tracks. Ugly, discordant stuff that oozes a nightmarish energy, Beyond Life's music is a lot more experimental than most of the industrial black metal stuff I've heard lately, though you can make out some shades of Mysticum's more atmospheric moments here and there. The opening title track kicks this off with a nearly twenty minute epic, moving from a nightmarish noisescape filled with warped murky guitar and dissonant, deformed blackened melodies that creep up from beneath swells of violent crashing percussion and metallic shimmer. Bursts of distorted drone and creepy half-formed melody rise over the sounds of distant wailing voices drifting disembodied through the abyss, amid gusts of filthy saturated amp-fuzz and keening inhuman howling echoing even further in the depths. A sprawling blackened nightmare that ever so slowly begins to coalesce into a rumbling necrotic mass of sound, like some bizarre free-improv workout oozing from out of an oubliette; at times it's almost comparable to T.O.M.B.'s mausoleum rumblings or the dungeon psychedelia of Abruptum and Emit, a meandering abstract evil presence that gradually shapes itself into a glacial, discordant riff meandering through this fuzzy, black industrial deathscape, rattled by sudden bursts of chaotic drumming and violent blastbeats, even lurching into a twisted, pummeling groove at the end of the song that lurches into a hypnotic, almost Aluk Todolo-esque churn.
��� The rest of the album, however, turns into a kind of mournful, gnarled post-rock, "Sickness Of Humanity" unleashing waves of black kosmische ambience and oceanic synthdrift like some tortured, crpyt-crawling version of Tangerine Dream, disturbing vocals and samples dissolving into surging waves of orchestral blackness and vast tectonics, while the melody from Lennon's "Imagine" loops endlessly over a ghostly backdrop of whirring industrial thrum and churning blackness on "Post-Apocalypse Now", slowly evolving into a malevolent industrial dirge. Other songs offer more languid meditations on emptiness and infinity, evocative instrumental guitar and moody jangle melding with cinematic 80's style synths over the sounds of ocean waves lapping against a shore, flowing into passages of deep electronic whirr and fuzz-drenched blackened psychedelia, lush tremolo-drenched guitar wavering and washing through rainstorms and distant demonic vocals and Draculoid mutterings. Weird shit, for sure. Limited to five hundred copies.
Things get really miserable on album number two from Dutch experimental black metaller Beyond Light, another one-man band delivering the sort of intoxicatingly mournful gloom-bliss that Japanese label Maa has been cornering the market on. Sole member Belfalas offers his own odd take on the "depressive" black metal sound, mostly made up of writhing minimalist riffs and droning blackness woven around some great, uber-gloomy melodies and the occasional ripping black n' roll hook. Belfalas whips out lots of soaring hard rock solos over his rumbling old-school black metal attack, but also leads the songs into sometimes unexpected territory, scattering passages of sorrowful classical piano amid the heavier metallic songs, or slipping from the furious, slightly off-kilter black metal of "Painted Memories" into a strange freeform soundscape of wheezing harmonica and distant rumbling sounds of warfare. The songwriting is actually pretty weird, with lots of awkward, angular riffs and odd tempo changes that throw this stuff off kilter by a few degrees, but it's also quite beautiful at times, too, especially when those piano instrumentals come in, gorgeously maudlin passages of heartbroken melody and weeping string sections, or the lush, dreamy darkwave that emerges across the beginning of "Her Broken Face", resembling some classic 80's era gothic rock draped in acoustic guitars and that ghostly piano, distant wailing vocals drifting over washes of chorus-drenched guitar, leading into the sudden shift into regal black metal that kicks in about half way in, which itself makes way eventually for a monstrous blackened groove towards the end that would make Khold proud.
The album also features some terrific flights of Floydian spaciness that ascend from the remnants of Beyond Light's buzzsaw black n' roll, blurts of blighted Sabbathian doom-groove, passages of lovely dusty folkiness overlaid with harmonica that recalls Neil Young's early stuff, and smatterings of an almost Ved Buens Ende-esque dissonance that all contribute to a creative take on the "DSBM" aesthetic. And the vocals are mostly delivered as a hushed, menacing whisper buried beneath layers of distortion and grit...as with a lot of the bands in this vein that I dig, there's a bit of a Katatonia vibe going on with the more subdued gloom-rock parts; there's one song in particular on this album, "Her Cold Hands", which is one of the catchiest black metal songs I've heard in ages, and it pairs up the band's apparent love of vintage goth rock tones and ragged black metal riffery better than anything else on this disc, producing a particularly riveting anthem to personal desolation. It takes a few songs for Paintings In The Hall to really get it's footing, but once it does, it delivers a distinctive sound that's equal parts contempo black metal, weather-beaten folk and arty gothic gloom.
��Faint is the latest album of darkened driftscapes from B.S.E., the current project from Jonas Aneheim aka Drakh of cult Swedish black industrialists Mz.412. And it's great stuff, not quite as sinister as some of his previous works, but still dark and evocative. Working with fellow B.S.E. member K. Meizter, Aneheim has released a number of albums under the Beyond Sensory Experience banner on labels such as Cold Meat Industry and Old Europa Cafe, but the crepuscular, apocalyptic soundtracks found here are a rather far cry from the cold death industrial sounds those labels are primarily known for.
�� Fans of the more abstract and sinister fringes of ambient soundscapery should certainly check this out. There's a filmic quality to B.S.E.'s music, and it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine these tracks being used as the soundtrack to some particularly dark Herzog film. Many of these pieces on Faint radiate with a strange orphic glow, like audio transmissions from within a dream. When the album opens, it's with the murky, almost trip-hop like shuffle of "Bystanders", where guitar strings are gently plucked and looped into resonant drones and elliptical melodies over the broken rhythms. Grainy recordings of angelic choirs begin to surface, and become further obscured by billowing clouds of formless electronic drift. A modulated female voice appears over those broken beats, then shifts into whorls of eerie backwards melody and haunting piano that echoes through the darkness. The duo continue to lace that ghostly piano throughout later tracks like "Respect" and "Blank", often revealed as fragments of distant spectral jazziness. Elsewhere, dark liquid bass lines creep slowly beneath those layered broken melodies and washes of sonic gloom, as clusters of gong-like tones echo in the background. Swirling guitar tones emerge on "Sleepwaking" drenched in delay, shimmering beneath more spoken word passages and distant birdsong, evolving into an almost Troum-like wash of bleak droneological beauty.
�� But things can get fairly creepy on Faint as well. On the aforementioned "Blank", that doleful piano slowly transforms into something darker and more dissonant as rumbling atonal reverberations sweep through the depths, and the murky pulsating synthesizers and nebulous black kosmische electronics that roll across "Stumble" create an atmosphere of dark empyreal wonder. The dark chamber ambience of "Legacy" blends eerie flute-like melody with swells of nightmarish sepulchral drift, bursts of abrasive noise mixed with the ominous drone of cello-like strings and far-off wailing choral voices, while the processional feel of "Exhausted" rings out like some ectoplasmic pageant before transforming into an ocean of gorgeous orchestral currents. And on "Stale", those clouds of clustered piano turn even more sinister, resembling some of Wendy Carlos's most malevolent-sounding work. It is those moments that Faint is at it's most effective, combining that penchant for eerie, unsettling sound design with a kind of abstract, spectral post-rock.
�� The disc comes in a four-panel digisleeve with a twelve page booklet, and is limited to five hundred copies.
An impressive second album from Australian grinders Beyond Terror Beyond Grace, who I wasn't familiar with before picking this up. The band serves up a savage brand of industrial/sampler-laced grindcore that balances a sharply focused grindcrust assault with lots of infectious riffing and unpredictable shifts in sound that lead the album into passages of bleak, icy ambience.
I'm a sucker for grind albums that utilize industrial elements like this, but Beyond Terror Beyond Grace are more than just blasters with a sampler; they use a red-hot recording style for Our Ashes... that glazes the music with distortion, and their vicious grindcore is laced with a lot of full-on death metal and crust elements, bits of Godflesh-like pummel, and even hints of atmospheric black metal. The music is somewhat similar to Nasum, Rotten Sound and the more recent stuff from Napalm Death, essentially brutal modern grindcore with killer riffs and an ear for dark melody, and the multiple vocalists blend their hysterical shrieks and roars together into a fierce cacophony. The guitarists employ some really cool guitar textures and processed guitar sounds that give this even more of a cold industrial feel, but what really makes these guys stand out is the way that they augment their blistering grind with the eerie industrial passages. Not just intro pieces, these ambient drones and hellish factory soundscapes emerge at various points, veering the grindmetal into unexpected icy mechanical drones, or clanking rhythms that merge with the grind to create an apocalyptic din that sometimes moves into creepy fields of Wolf Eyes-like squeal and scrape. Some of the other parts include distant wailing strings and evil whispered vocalizations, stretches of shadowy lightless ambience, and abstracted glitch; on a couple of songs, they actually weave some harsh industrial rhythms directly into the grind.
One of the standout songs here is the second-to-last track "Murakami"; the song opens with the far-off tolling of lighthouse bells and chimes, and then a soft melancholy guitar appears amid swells of shimmering cymbals and an almost martial drum beat, for a moment almost resembling something from Mogwai, a dark, somber propulsive rock that grows heavier and heavier, the guitars becoming more distorted, the song ascending into a massive dramatic climb, and finally erupting into a kind of majestic grinding sludge, above smoldering, churning sheets of industrial noise and distorted radio transmissions.
A surprising new fave from Deepsend.
The disturbingly titled Gas Chamber Music features the complete discography of the bizarre Dutch black metal band Bhaobahn Sidhe, a duo who featured members of Bestial Summoning that was active in the earlier part of the 1990s, even releasing their last Ep on infamous American death/black metal label Wild Rags. Like just about everything else that I've heard come out of the 90's Dutch black metal underground, this is some weird, weird shit, with the band's output split into two distinct "phases"; earlier on, members Conscicide Dominus Arcula (who would later commit suicide) and Lord Aliboron created short, noxious blasts of primitive black metal filth set to a pounding low-fi drum machine assault, but later they evolved into an even stranger electronic sound that seems like it was more influenced by the vintage synthesizer scores of John Carpenter and Fabio Frizzi than anything connected to black metal.
The earliest material on this Cd comes from the band's 1993 seven-inch EP The New Order, a four song selection of barbaric black vomit centered around basic, three-chord punk riffs delivered at buzzsaw velocity over the monotonous thud of the drum machine which is buried way down in the mix and set to non-stop blast, only occasionally slowing down to a halting breakdown. Adding to the 7"s overall grimy weirdness are the vocals, a series of near-wordless reptilian gasps and hissing that are mostly swallowed up in the band's low-fi murkiness. The excellent blog Grimmerthanthou described this stuff as sounding like "Ildjarn on Quaaludes", and I can think of neither a better comparison nor finer recommendation than that.
But then you come to Bhaobahn Sidhe's 1996 Corpse Crater Cd on Wild Rags and it's an all new ballpark. Surrounded by grim concentration camp imagery, these tracks delve into a kind of primitive industrial/electronic music driven by clanking drum machine rhythms and waves of ominous soundtracky synthesizer, with a spare compositional approach that gives this stuff the feel of some of the more poverty-stricken horror movie soundtracks of the late 1980s. Not that that's a bad thing in my book; I dig the weird mix of brain-damaged synth-creep and mechanical rhythms, especially when they add heavier elements to the sound, suddenly slowing into a lumbering doom metal-style tempo. There's some other stuff on here that sounds like someone dropped a death metal drummer into the middle of a demented Danny Elfman score, which will suddenly morph into a minimal Wax Trax-like industrial dance track or something resembling a late 80s industrial outfit trying to cover Goblin. That latter stuff is pretty goddamn sweet, as a matter of fact, and has a couple of moments of jawdropping weirdness when they make one of those stylistic shifts into action-move ready electro-rock.
The Jinx cassette from 1996 was one of their last releases, and mostly followed with the same bizarre, drum-machine-driven horror movie soundtrack sound, with weirder subject matter this time around ("Global Death-Knell / Orgasm At The Crack Of Doom", "Cockroach Combat", "Wolf Vs. Worm") and the addition of those disgusting gargling shrieks that just made this stuff sound even sicker and more psychotic. It's the final word from one of the weirdest Dutch black metal bands I've heard, who brought a cruel misanthropic vibe to their idiosyncratic soundscapes and blasts of filth. Anybody who digs that weird period of black metal/electronic experimentation that produced such albums as Beherit's H418ov21.C should check 'em out.
Essential early industrial evil from the Italian master, Maurizio Bianchi. I remember when I first learned of Bianchi's music, it was after reading a short article on him that appeared in an issue of Bloodbook, the confrontational zine published by Dwid from Integrity. That article made his music sound like it was going to be the most evil shit ever. When I finally heard an album from Bianchi, it was excellent, but not exactly matching the sound that I was hearing in my head. I've picked up a bunch of newer Bianchi releases, many of which are stocked here at Crucial Blast, but none of them came close to that original expectation that I had. That is, until I heard Neuro Habitat. This new version of Neuro Habitat is a re-release of a disc that came out on EEs'T Records in 1998, which was itself a reissue of three early recordings from Bianchi from 1982. Yeah, this is what I was waiting to hear, a slithering synthetic creepout, heavy synth tones and hypnotic looped distortion that sounds like the crackle of a phonograph needle stuck in a run out groove amplified to monstrous size, and horrific alien tones creeping over waves of psychedelic feedback. Heavy, dreadful minimalist drones that sound more like an acid-trip horror movie score than anything, recorded prior to Bianchi's departure from music and his joining a monastary in the early 80's.
Exquisite drone-haunt from the legendary Maurizio Bianchi. This new album is a shift away from the early experimental bionic-industrial masterpieces The Plain Truth, Armaghedon, Endometrio, and Carcinosi, instead delving into an austere drone realm that may appeal to fans of meditative drift heaviness and more kosmiche strains of dream/drone music. A M.B. Iehn Tale presents eight tracks of clustered piano melodies that are decomposed and layered into gauzy sheets of elegiac drone...th earlier tracks travel along hammered tones akin to Terry Riley, and the last two tracks engage in celestial Ur-drone of the highest order. There's a hazy, buried, twilight beauty to this album that situates it next to Tim Hecker's Mirages and Final's 3, hence getting highest recommendations from us! Slow, meditative and very very beautiful, these pieces are the sound of grey light on overcast days and of silent empty churches. Superb!
One of the heaviest and most sinister releases in Maurizio Bianchi's sizeable discography, the 2006 disc Blut Und Nebel (released on the Italian death-industrial label Slaughter Productions) is made up of remixed/reworked material that Italian industrial pioneer Bianchi took from his first ten Lps released in the early part of the 1980's and transformed into completely new pieces of industrial sound. These new tracks follow the trajectory that Bianchi has pursued following the release of his landmark album The Plain Truth in 1983, as he explores intensely focused claustrophobic drones and multi-layered ambience, and is a far colder and bleaker listening experience than the more recent experiments in synthesized ambience and intricate loop-based electronic soundscapes.
The beginning of the album is populated with corrosive noise blasted into thick clouds of reverb-pit murk and warped synthesizer rumble, oppressive drones and fluttering echoplex waves that streak across the hellish black skies of "Genocide - Symphonic Holocaust", echo and reverb effects being pushed into extreme levels of feedback. The following track "Womenses - Instrumental Secretion" is a throbbing factory dream, a swarming nest of clicking, grinding, infinitely echoing machine noise and warning sirens screaming into a six-minute sprawl of symphonic factory terror that eventually organizes itself into precisely arranged blocks of rumbling echo. Grinding low-end distortion and stuttering echo effects crawl out of the opening minutes of "Neuro Moerder - Concrete Anamnesis", then peel back to extend an eerie minor key synth line before it crumbles into a massive wash of dark corrupted ambience.
The next two tracks drift through oppressive metallic drones and shrieking black industrial ambience, but when we reach "Testamento - Electrophonic Ultimatum", the sound descends rapidly into slow motion industrial dirge, massive crushing percussive heaviness lurking in the background, Bianchi now invoking a kind of stretched out, washed out industrial doom with what cound like oil drums being hammered in slow motion, and the heavily distorted synths being pulled apart into huge growling smears of heaviness. To say this is one of Bianchi's heaviest moments is an understatement; it�s a crushing, malevolent industrial deathdrone dirge, roaring straight out of the abyss...
From there, the remainder of the album sinks back into black industrial ambience. The heavy cavernous drone of "Endometrium - Haematic Cacophony" slowly uncovers minimal clicks and scraping noises; "Har-Maghedon - Apocalyptic Dissonance" melts into shadow with minimal midnight thrum, resembling the black drift of Lull. And " Carcynosi - Minimal Metastasis " unfurls black clouds of sinister cathedral ambience and murky pipe organ tones, creepy smears of backwards sound, rattling metal, and melted minor key eeriness sounding like the blurred and slippery murkiness of an old horror movie soundtrack Lp slowly melting...
A welcome reissue of another of Bianchi's early 80's albums, Industrial Murder is one of the earliest recorded full lengths from this influential Italian industrial artist. Prior to this, the album had only been available as a long out-of-print Lp that was issued in the early 90s by Banned Productions. Like all of his early work, this album festers with a kind of diseased black electronics that is still as psychologically disturbing today as it was thirty years ago.
Recorded around the same period of time (1981-1982) that Bianchi was producing his nauseating industrial classics Endometrio and Symphony For A Genocide, Industrial Murder / Menstrual Bleeding is early Bianchi at his cancerous best, utilizing a minimal set of tools (such as drum machine, battered synth and distortion boxes) to create these sprawling noisescapes filled with wobbly buzzing rhythms, noxious throbbing bass, extreme over-modulated judders and weird air-raid siren like peals of high-end howl. This stuff sounds like the apocalypse.
Part One: Industrial Murder is one the most rhythm-driven recordings that I've heard from this era of Bianchi's output. It starts off with a brutal blast of over-modulated feedback noise, but then a clanking machinelike loop appears, becoming a constant pounding pulse that continues on as more fluttering, rumbling electronic noise swarms in. Now, this is hardly danceable, but it does hammer out an ever changing barrage of metal-on-metal clank and monotonous drum machine rhythms that produce a highly hypnotic effect, even when this nearly half-hour piece is overwhelmed with loud feedback hum, putrid stretched-out synth noise, damaged melodies, electronic sirens and massive juddering bass throb. The second half Menstrual Bleeding is pretty much of the same bent, although at first the track is a bit more monotonous and plodding. It soon starts to squirm and squeal, though, shifting into an undulating mass of distorted synth blurt and processed rhythmic glitchnoise.
Comes in a silk-screened arigato pack, and is limited to 300 copies (and already sold out from the label!).
The title of Bianchi's 2012 disc almost feels like he's playing a riff on Lou Reed's notorious guitar-feedback opus, but this is actually some of the most subdued work that I've heard lately from the renowned Italian industrial artist. Mental Machination Musing is definitely one of Bianchi's better recent albums, offering a full-length work of fantastic death-ambient that has been dedicated to his friend and fellow Italian industrial pioneer Pierpaolo Zoppo Ronzero, aka Mathuasen Orchestra. The colorful jacket artwork depicts a series of incandescent rainbow-like color bands rippling through the void, and might lead you to think that the sounds on MMM are going to be closer to the New Agey sounds of some of his post-Y2K work, but this is in fact some seriously jet-black sonic drift. The first track alone invokes a vast abyssal ocean churning deep below the earth's surface, a rumbling, deafening tumult strafed with swells of heavy metallic drone, later joined by the steady mechanical clank of massive tank treads crushing bone and concrete, a terrifying washed-out dronescape laced with distant death-choirs and horn-like drones drifting across the black and charred horizon. The second track features more soundtrack-like synthesizer ambience, eerie and threatening, muted and washed-out and drowning in black Rita-like distorted textures that suddenly warp into strange noisy dissonance and ghostly minor key creepiness. Track three feels like a sweeping, beautifully ominous cinematic score buried under layers of smoldering black distortion and malfunctioning synth, while the closer is the darkest track on the disc, a gleaming orchestral score with sinister strings and horns writhing in clouds of fluttering electronic debris and glazed in a murderous black sheen. Bianchi hasn't released anything this evil sounding in ages, crafting an apocalyptic soundscape where rumbling industrial tremors evoke time-lapsed sound recordings of buildings disintegrating over eons, waves of kosmische terror, eerie bathysphere drones and lush crepuscular ambience that all forms into a crushing subterranean deathdrone that fans of Lustmord would certainly dig.
Released in a limited edition of two hundred copies in a full-color wallet sleeve.
In the right hands, a mere tape delay machine can transform into an abyssal gate, unleashing immense oceans of dark sonic fog from a minimum of source sounds. That's all Italian noise artist Maurizio Bianchi needed back in the early 80s when he decided to craft the spectral dronescapes of s.f.a.g. 81, a re-working of recordings off of his seminal album Symphony For A Genocide, which he remixed using an Akai echo machine, warping and smearing the original sounds into an all new world of stygian sonic shadow. The result sounded virtually nothing like the source material, two epic-length tracks of ghostly black murk and fungal ambience that stretched across two full sides of the original cassette release that came out on Broken Flag back in 1983. Out of print for decades, this terrific slab of creepy post-industrial darkness is finally reissued on vinyl, ready to infest the subconscious of a new generation of industrial pit-crawlers.
The first side features "Surgical Flagellation", a phantasmagoria of weird chirping electronics and wobbly pulses, juddering mechanical noises and eerie Theremin-like tones all streaking across the subterranean soundspace of Bianchi's recording. These elements from Symphony are drowned in so much echo and reverb that they become ghostlike tracers of sound, flitting moth-like through the blackness, a whirling fog of incredibly murky and muffled electronics that begin to take on the semblance of voices from beyond the grave. Like the cries of factory ghosts captured on a century-old wax cylinder, this creepy dronescape takes on an increasingly mesmeric feel as it goes on, slipping into strange unearthly knockings and spectral loops, encountering luminous gothic pipe organ-like melodies that appear out of the murk, transforming the latter half of the track into something resembling an obscure European horror movie soundtrack that has been decomposing on reel-to-reel tape underneath the rotting floorboards of an abandoned house for the past three decades. The other track "Allopathic Glimmer" is more harrowing at first, an increasingly uneasy expanse of distant sirens and dim minor key drift lost in that expanding fog of echo and low-fi murkiness, but it eventually leads into gloomy fields of wavering melodious tones and languidly warping keyboard sounds that transform into an otherworldly ambience that seems to melt right out of the speakers.
Like most of Bianchi's earliest recordings, this album teems with an intense mix of beautifully corroded electronics and ominous ambient murk, and ranks as one of my own personal favorite records from this pioneer of eerie post-industrial creep. Newly re-mastered for this new reissue, the record comes in a heavyweight tip-on style jacket with color artwork from Siegmar Fricke, and is limited to five hundred twenty-seven copies.
���I wouldn't have doubted it for a moment if you threw this on sight unseen and told me that this was some long-lost early 80s recording from Bianchi. As he states in his typically incomprehensible sleeve notes that come with the recent 7" release of Amentest, the music on this EP was created by the use of "solemnoises and electrophobic waves", whatever he hell those might be. The two fairly lengthy tracks of morbid reverb-chamber creep that Maurizio Bianchi produces here are cut from a similar cloth as the type of primitive industrial noise works he was producing in the early 80s, as part of the early industrial underground alongside the likes of Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle. Both "Amentest" and b-side "Testamen" are a bit of a throwback to that classic, desolate Bianchi sound, composed around rattling percussive noises that are run through heavy layers of delay and echo, generating fields of ghostly tremors and ecto-rattlings that ripple across the blackness in waves of over-modulated sound.
��� There are moments here that call back to the minimal, sinister industrial music of his iconic Symphony For A Genocide album, which still ranks as some of my all-time favorite material of his. Not as suffocating or oppressive as that album was, this 7" is still my preferred mode of Maurizio, each track rattling and clanking through a thin fog of murky reverb, primitive percussive loops clanking coldly beneath the echoing metallic drift, like the distant pounding of cadaverous fists against the far side of some spectral wall; the second track in particular exudes a nicely spooky quality, as strains of horn-like melody struggle to break through the waves of rattling metallic noise. Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies, includes a download.
One of Maurizio Bianchi's more recent collaborative works, Arkaeo Planum is the combined vision of Bianchi and the somewhat obscure Italian dark-
electronics outfit TH26. Packaged in an eyecatching jacket that features great abstract imagery from the p3 Studio, this album captures the legendary Italian
industrial soundscaper in a much more rhythmic mode than what I had been expecting; Bianchi, whose 80's recordings had him positioned right alongside the
likes of Ramleh and Whitehouse as one of the early Industrial scene's most intense visionaries, here continues to construct the deep, black drone fields and
almost liturgical organ pieces that he has been working with since becoming active again earlier this decade. But working with TH26, the group weaves an
evocative tapestry of bleak, urban wastelands and ghostly electrical frequencies, filled with gooey, fractured slow-motion breakbeats that crawl and stutter
through Maurizio's chilling synthesizer drones and his frequently beautiful organ meditations. Arkaeo Planum is also intensely detailed and
textural, with some brilliant layering of piano, beats, and crackling static pulses appearing throughout the album. It's a strangely grim and entrancing
piece of music that feels fully like a Bianchi work, cold and forbidding, but TH26's contribution of mutant IDM skitter and heavy breakbeats really makes the
material stand out from the rest of Bianchi's collaborations.
This is the second collaborative album from Maurizio Bianchi and Siegmar Fricke following their Muitnelis disc, which I have yet to actually hear. Stroma-Konkret is a pretty heavy slab of minimal industrial though. The disc comes from the Russian industrial/ambient label Monochrome Vision, and like other releases from the label, the disc is packaged with black and white artwork and includes liner notes on the artists and the music contained inside. According to the liner notes, this album is dedicated to the French inventor of musique-concrete, Pierre Schaeffer, but you'd be hard pressed to pinpoint any of the sounds on this album specifically to the obsessive processes of musique-concrete. And like alot of the other collaborative discs that Bianchi has been releasing lately, there's little of the intensely bleak, suffocating drone that marked his 80's output as some of the most malevolent isolationist music ever made. Strome-Konkret seems to be driven more by the heavy, mangled rhythmic industrial noise of German artist Siegmar Fricke, the three lengthy tracks piling heavy percussive loops on top of dreamy dark ambience and grinding low-end synth drones, metal objects being hammered into infinity, the rhythms generally appearing as plodding mechanical pulses or echoing metallic blasts. The first track is the busiest of the three, a half-hour trip through chittering, swarming glitches and blurry passenger-train drone, crushing low-frequency buzz, deafening robotic heartbeats and weird electronic squelches, blasts of incendiary noise sweeping over the constant throb of Fricke's loops. The heavy industrial rhythms are mostly absent on the second track, which has all sorts of chirping electronics and fluttering tones swooping and soaring across a jet-black surface of cosmic drone. Then the third returns with more clanking, grinding machine loops, but this time the throbbing metal pulse is set against another backdrop of swirling blackened ambience; as this piece continues through it's 23+ minutes, the industrial bashing becomes quite heavy at times, and it starts to sound like someone bashing out an incessant beat on a massive oil drum while dreamy Ash Ra keys hover above. Minute buy minute, the ethereal space-drone loops and looped metallic pounding becomes slower, the rhythm fading in and out, the whole track slowing down to a slurred, syrupy machine dirge. Kind of psychedelic space-industrial piece, and though it's very different from the black isolationist industrial of my favorite Bianchi work, this is pretty cool, a cold rhythmic industrial drone album that Z'ev fans might want to check out.
This Hollywood-via-Cleveland outfit debuts here with majestic instrumental math/stoner/rock. Drummer Mike Peffer, who played on Filter's megahit "Hey Man,
Nice Shot", pins down the impeccable rhythm section alongside bassist Ray Piller, and guitarists Ron Kretsch and Scott Silverman weave in and out of complex
rock forms like Rush's Alex Lifeson jamming with KEELHAUL. Many tracks feature heavy, stoned metallic riffing and whispering, fusion-jazz breaks, again
recalling Keelhaul (circa their II album) with no vocals, as well as the angularity of Slint and Don Cabellero, but with an intense melodic and progressive
voice all of their own. Recommended for fans of Karma To Burn, Slint, Melvins, Queens Of The Stone Age, and angular melodic post/stoner/math rock.
The first of two CD EP's that were released by Wantage USA for Big Business to sell on tour, this four track disc is from 2004 and features three songs
("O.G.", "Eis Hexe", and "Off Off Broadway") from their Head For The Shallow debut on Hydra Head in noisier demo form, as well as an exclusive track
called "Evil Medievil". Total bruiser rock from these Karp/Whip/Tight Bros/Murder City Devils alumni and current Melvins rhythm section, which at this
juncture was picking up the slack from Karp's departure and busting out some megaheavy low-freq power sludge with a meaty 70's stadium rock backbone (just
listen to that fuckin' chorus on "Off Off Broadway"). The recording is much more raw and unpolished than their album, obviously, giving the songs that I was
already familiar with a gnarly, noisy blown out edge, and "Evil Medievel" is a freaked out Melvins-y dirge with weird chipmunk vocals, Jared Warren's Paul-
Stanley-on-steroids howl, loads of feedback and trippy raygun fx, and a central bass riff that cracks you over the skull repeatedly . Fans of of the Biz need
this limited edition tour disc for that jam alone.
The disc is packaged in a cardboard wallet that is about as minimal as it gets, with just a red/black screenprint on the front and the label logo on the
back, no credits or tracklisting, nuthin. It's a bonebreaker, though.
Hard rocking, bass-thug thrash from this duo of Jared from KARP / THE WHIP and TIGHT BROS, and Coady from the MURDER CITY DEVILS. You can definitely hear the
KARP lineage here, but KARP if they were doing HIGH ON FIRE covers with sort-of 80's metal type vocals. That idea might sound weird, but on CD it rocks
harder than fuck. This album is seriously badass. Head For The Shallow kicks you in the face with a stomping mix of massive growling bass guitar and
hyperkinetic drumming with those vocals, powerful and clean but slightly gruff, sort of like a higher-pitch Lemmy, but with a couple of AWESOME harmonies and
effects that come from out of nowhere. And the sound is big, full, which you don�t normally hear with bass/drums duos like this. It's a wall of riff and rock
and catchy hooks, really energetic and jacked up and over the top! For everyone that wept over the loss of THE WHIP and KARP, you must get this immediately!
Plus, we�ve heard that Hydra Head is supposed to be releasing a CD of unreleased THE WHIP studio stuff in the near future!
Finally got the limited vinyl version of Big Business' crushing debut in stock, on black vinyl.
Hard rocking, bass-thug thrash from this duo of Jared from KARP / THE WHIP and TIGHT BROS, and Coady from the MURDER CITY DEVILS. You can definitely hear the KARP lineage here, but KARP if they were doing HIGH ON FIRE covers with sort-of 80's metal type vocals. That idea might sound weird, but on CD it rocks harder than fuck. This album is seriously badass. Head For The Shallow kicks you in the face with a stomping mix of massive growling bass guitar and hyperkinetic drumming with those vocals, powerful and clean but slightly gruff, sort of like a higher-pitch Lemmy, but with a couple of AWESOME harmonies and effects that come from out of nowhere. And the sound is big, full, which you don�t normally hear with bass/drums duos like this. It's a wall of riff and rock and catchy hooks, really energetic and jacked up and over the top! For everyone that wept over the loss of THE WHIP and KARP, you must get this immediately! Plus, we�ve heard that Hydra Head is supposed to be releasing a CD of unreleased THE WHIP studio stuff in the near future!
Here Come The Waterworks the newest album from Big Business, comes after a period of heavy change for the band: relocation to Los Angeles from Seattle, assimilation into the Melvins lineup, massive touring as the in-house support band for said sludge rockers as well as a stint opening for Tool late last year. None of this has softened the punishing riff assault that bassist Jared Warren and drummer Coady Willis first perfected on their debut - if anything, it sounds like these guys have an even bigger axe to grind with this new set of jams. The spirit of Karp still posesses their sound, which is part of the reason why I love these guys so fucking much. Jared Warren's strident bellow and jackhammer bass riffage still packs that concrete punch that the dude first slung in Karp, and Willis' drumming is so heavy and pounding that it's no wonder that the Melvins signed him on to play alongside Dale Crover in tandem. This new album isn't a rehash of Head For The Shallow though...I keep hearing a 70's progressive rock influence here everytime I spin this disc, and I don't remember picking up on that with Shallow. After seeing 'em live a few weeks ago for the first time since Waterworks came out, I'm doubly convinced that Big Business has been listening to a lot of Rush, Blue Oyster Cult and Pink Floyd in the van, but that could just be me. They also added a guitarist to the mix, Melvins/Fant�mas collaborator David Scott Stone, who also contributes Mini-moog to the album, which I wasn't too sure if I'd be into at first - the whole bass/drums dynamic was part of what I thought made these guys so badass - but it sounds amazing, and is clearly a big factor in how proggy this album sounds. A crushing combo of the superheavy sludginess of Karp and Melvins, occasional pop tendencies, thunderous riff-powered battlemetal a la High On Fire and Torche, and their unique hypercharged boogie....one of the best rock outfits in action right now. Highly recommended.
This enigmatic limited-edition 12" came out last year, and I'm still not entirely sure what the deal is with this record, or what exactly the "Biz Bot" is. Whatever this advanced piece of technology is, it took two songs from the last Big Business full-length Mind The Drift, "The Drift" and "Cats, Mice.", and both songs have been taken apart, re-mixed, re-organized, and put back together with stuttering chopped-up rhythms, sludgy angular riffs, piano, weird electronic noise, and some malfunctioning drum machine splatter, turning both of the tracks into weird industrial-sludge-cabaret versions of the originals. These "remixes" end up sounding a lot like Thrones and seem to me to be a lot heavier and arranged completely differently than the originals ever sounded, and fans of both Thrones and Big Business will definitely want to pick this up, since it ends up sounding like a whacked out cyborg Thrones/Karp hybrid. Very cool! The record comes in a white printed die cut DJ style jacket, and is limited as usual.
Sample- based plunderphonic noise comedy and other strange soundworks from the legendary BCO. This San Francisco native delivers dense swirling tones, stolen
cultural detritus, jarring blippage and screech, harsh ambience, and surrealist electronic musique concrete. Outstanding damaged collage noise.
This disc documents some of the sonic events that led up to a brain melting live collaboration between the Nashville dwelling free-rock unit Big Nurse and Cinci gabba/speedcore agitators Realicide. On paper, it seems like an odd fit, but after listening to Big Nurse and their deafening blasts of crumbling chaos rock, the shared bond between these two bands starts to make itself more clear to me, labeled as it is on the inside of the sleeve as "defective punk rock falling apart". The disc opens with two tracks from Big Nurse, "Big Wall" and "Ny-Quil Thrill Kill", two colossal free rock jams, the first sounding six drummers all playing different songs simultaneously while the guitarists and bassists ram their instruments (and any other object they can lay their bloodied hands on) right down the collective maw of their amplifiers. Brutal, utterly destroyed improv that sounds like the Dead C on meth, or an even more blown out and violent than usual Grey Daturas jam with a full backline. The second track is a swirling sea of black sludge, all distorted blown out sludge riffs and brown-notes and spacey psychedelic guitars swamped and drowning and buried in the mix, a thick syrupy black haze of low-fi Sunn O))) sludge drone and demolished stoner riffing. It's all crushing and loud and way in the red, and if I didn't know any better I woulda sworn that these two jams were being beamed straight into my cranium from the wilds of New Zealand.
Then it's Realicide's turn, and they spew an untitled live track recorded in Big Nurses's hometown in 2005....this is something different from the normally-gabba powered group, a murky stew of tribal drums and clattering percussion and piercing feedback that sounds like it escaped off of Prurient's Black Vase, and eventually overrun by blasting amp rumble and droning feedback hum. What the fuck? It basically sounds like a continuation of the crushing free-rock destructo slop that Big Nurse was slinging just minute prior...finally I'm checking the notes in the sleeve, and yep, this is Realicide as joined by several members of Big Nurse.
But it's the fourth track that's actually presented as a full blown collaboration, a massive noise rock orgy recorded at Sudsy's in Cincinatti in March of '05, the full lineups of both bands joined on stage and captured here in a low-fi minidisc haze of industrial/tribal percussion, roaring guitar noise, and grating screams, a massive twenty minute free noise jam that moves from tweaked pedal-humping psychedelia to melted metallic dirge and No Neck-esque clatter.
Finally, we get another Big Nurse track, but even this is filled with the collaborative spirit...recorded in St Louis in '05, this turns into a mighty hypnotic psych jam with members of the audience climbing on board and contributing to the wall of percussion that bulldozes it's way like a pile of drumkits staggering through a fug of psychedelic fx and one skulldrilling garage-rock ur-riff that is pounded out to fucking infinity.
Falling apart punk indeed, this is great stuff provided that you don't mind the murky production of these mostly live recordings. The disc is another screenprinted jobbie from Realicide Youth packaged in a foldout xeroxed poster sleeve, and limited to 100 copies.
Here's another killer new release from Aussie grind label No Escape, who have become one of our favorite labels in the grind/vomit/death/splatter scene. No
Escape has been steadily releasing a stream of creatively designed, ridiculously brutal albums and EPs that range from the crushing grind n' roll of THE DAY
EVERYTHING BECAME NOTHING and the drum-machine fueled hyperdeath of FUCK...I'M DEAD, to the ripping old school razorblast of NEUROPATHIA. Their CDs have
excellent visual design, which is pretty rare in death/grind circles, and everything we've gotten our hands on from No Escape to date has knocked our
freaking socks off!
Camp Blood, from Dutch goregrind neanderthals BILE, is a ridiculously downtuned,totally over-the-top grind rock / splatter sludge concept
album based on the Jason Voorhees / Camp Crystal Lake mythos from the legendary Friday The 13th series, taken to fucking absurd extremes. These guys
pay homage to the saga with thirteen blasts of
bonecrushing, simplistic rock riffs, barbaric blastbeats, n' guitars and bass tuned to dropped G. Seriously. The guitars are so heavy on Camp
Blood, it's retarded...like CROWBAR, FLOOR, and MORTICIAN, it sounds like BILE's instruments are tuned so monstrously low, that the guitar strings are
just going to flop off of the fretboard. The end result makes BILE's primitive punk rock riffs sound like a building falling on your head. Imagine a zomboid
combination of MORTICIAN and sludge beasts FISTULA, and you'll have an approximate idea of what these guys are doing. Thirteen odes to the Voorhees legacy,
with appropriately unsubtle lyrics. Massively pitch-shifted vocals that alternately sound like a warthog puking and a sports announcer having his face ripped
off.
A pretty strange album from Macedonia of all places (which was previously a part of Yugoslavia, if yer geography is rusty), sent to us by Fuck Yoga
Records. The bizarre name is a reference to Silence Of The Lambs, and these guys aren't the only band to use it: some quick google scanning turned
up a Texan harsh noise outfit from the early '90s that had members of Black Leather Jesus and a funk-punk band from Oregon who both used the same name. The
Macedonian Bill Skins Fifth is neither harsh power electronics nor Faith No More-influenced rap gunk, however. Rather, these weirdos cobble together a
chaotic, fucked-up mess of neurotic metalcore, jazz, mathy indie rock, and melodic post-hardcore that's pretty damn experimental and disjointed but actually
manages to keep me interested in spite of it schizo patchwork of dissonant metallic hardcore somewhere in between older Converge and Botch colliding head-on
with jangly angular guitars, pop hooks, Primus-y basslines, and full on blasts of free jazz. I think there's some kind of concept at work here, with the
series of illustrations in the booklet and the abstract personal lyrics seeming to tie into an ongoing story the band is telling with this album, but I'm not
too sure. In any case, this is some cool, damaged metalcore weirdness, that's for sure.
Another new full length from New Zealand's Birchville Cat Motel, released simultaneously with that killer Bird Sister Blasphemy disc, the first
ever BCM entry into mastermind Campbell Kneale's avant-noise-metal sublabel Battlecruiser. These two releases compliment each other, but where the sister
disc Bird Sister Blasphemy takes Birchville Cat Motel's transcendant drone rock and runs 20,000 volts of black electricity into the tracks, turning
his hypnotic, repetitious riff constructs into redlining blasts of metallic feedback violence, this album came out on Kneale's primary label Celebrate Psi
Phenomena and showcases the cosmic, krauty, but no less heavy, side of Birchville Cat Motel. The disc opens with a monolithic slab of cosmic drone rock with
the nearly half-hour title track, starting off with sheets of quietly shimmering and swelling keyboards, changing ever so slowly as little electronic organ
sounds begin to appear and vibrate aloingside deep, growling guitar drones...after a couple of minutes, a drum beat begins to appear, way off in the distance
at first but consistently becoming louder and closer, a shuffling, offtime motorik beat pulsing in the swirling cloud of drone. The keyboard melody sounds
like the keys from The Who's "Baba O'Reilley" run through a bank of effects, chopped up and spinning through the cosmos while BCM's squalls of free-flying
electronics and pounding ur-riffage explodes into a heavily distorted blast of celestial crunch; all the while, that unchanging drumbeat pounds away in the
back incessantly throughout the track, turning this into a monstrous cosmic noise-rock drone jam, equal parts Skullflower and Circle and Hawkwind before it
disintegrates into the blissed out storm of psychedelic high-end skree, chirping bird songs, lush low-end amplifier feedback, and swirls of buzzing,
whooshing FX. If you liked BCM's Screamformelongbeach, this has that same kind of brutal, propulsive power. Massive.
The second track is "Kissing Dragon", and is a comparitively brief piece of shimmery reverential feedback and raga-esque drones that becomes entertwined
with a beautiful, vaguely Occidental melody. A beautiful drone interlude offsetting the hugeness of the other two tracks.
And then the third track appears, "Her Anger Is Limitless", which is another nearly half hour jam and which had originally appeared as a super limited tour
CD-R. This one is as huge and enveloping as the first, but the waves of sound are completely amorphous here, a constantly shifting pool of processed vocal
sounds and heavy flickering beams of feedback, what sound like heavy droning guitars being played back on malfunctioning tape heads, their buzzing growl
slurred and melting, and then all of a sudden the song EXPLODES four minutes in and reveals itself as a mighty metallic shoegazer dirge, like
Loveless but way heavier, Skullflower meets My Bloody Valentine, woozy guitars and grinding bassline and pounding subterranean rhythm heard as a low
rumble beneath the bludgeoning blissful white-hot noise. WOW. Simply amazing. You shouldn't even have to think twice about picking this album up if you're a
Birchville fan. The guy never disappoints us. Limited edition as usual, and it comes in an awesome huge 8-panel gatefold digipack, with those cool
wallpaper swirls that have branded the Celebrate Psi Phenomena releases for years spread out across the outside of the case, but the inside features some
really pretty photographs along with minimal liner notes, the disc itself attached to the case by a foam hub in the center of one of the panels.
Another new release from Battlecruiser, Campbell Kneale's awesome out-metal sublabel offshoot of his Celebrate Psi Phenomena. It's been awhile since we
last got any new Battlecruiser jams in, which in the past have included releases from Black Boned Angel and Mirag, but the rusted gears of the Battlecruiser
have once again lurched forward to grind out this new nearly half-hour disc from Birchville Cat Motel. Birchville? What is Kneale's normally transcendant
dronerock project doing here on Battlecruiser? Well, check out the other new Birchville CD that just came out and which is also listed in this weeks
update, and you'll see that Birchville Cat Motel has been working the metallic mojo overtime to produce these two latest works. Bird Sister
Blasphemy is the nightshade companion piece to the full length Birds Call Home Their Dead, with four tracks of relentlessly hypnotic blackness
that shred you vertically from the beginning of the disc opener "Powder Slave". The first couple of seconds of "Powder Slave" taunt you with some grim
drifting drone right before the band surges into a redlining locked groove of frenetic bass guitar and propulsive rock drumming, plowing through thick clouds
of Skullflowery feedback and screeching guitar solos, whooshing phaser FX and chaotic keyboards, a ripping space-metal hypno jam that threatens to go on for
eternity. It doesn't though, instead it suddenly segues into the incredibly harsh and violent wall of black metal buzzsaw drone of "Tonal Fire Antichrist",
buried beneath an ocean of white noise and fluttering electronics. Sounds like Skullflower's Tribulation meets one of those black metal Jazkammer
jams, ultra hot and blown out and bordering on pure blazing skree. Track three, "Piss Perfume Overkill", is a creepy, pulsating black-space-drone buzzscape,
drowning in layers of fried out powerchords and searing synthetic horns, thick blots of skuzzy feedback, wavering haunted house keyboards and rumbling
amplifier cones, grim and threatening and hypnotic, and underscored by a ruthless propulsive drum loop. Finally, the title track shows up and closes the disc
out with a super-blown-out wash of black hole guitar and weird rolling tribal drums, everything swirling in a whirlpool around and round, totally shredding
and violent until it dissipates into a cloud of drifting feedback fragments, wind chimes, and ghostly monk chanting. Another great release both from
Birchville and Battlecruiser, with a similiar vibe as the recent Skullflower and Mirag stuff, charred storms of corruscating guitar drone concealing hidden
bits of melody. Awesome. Comes in the trademark Battlecruiser black sleeve printed in silver ink.
Opening with the hideous heavy skree and stumbling, black metallish blastbeats of "Heavens Flaming Horse", Our Love Will Destroy The World is yet
another killer, heavier blast from New Zealand's Campbell Kneale, materializing here under the Birchville Cat Motel moniker. This full length CD features the
2 epic tracks from BCM's Screamformelongbeach 3" CD that had been released by back in 2003, accompanied by 3 new tracks of siesmic drone rock/metal
moves that aren't nearly as brutally heavy as his recent Black Boned ANgel work, but will regardless be highly satisfying for metallic drone junkies as
tracks like "Lay Thy Hatred Down" and "Our Love Will Destroy The World" releases powerful lava streams of melodic feedback, very reminiscent at times of the
early 90's drone rock of Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, but filtered through the freeformosity of the Dead C and strapped to the back of some
supremely heavy, monolithic n' propulsive dirges. The whole disc bathes you in a tidal wave of ecstatic guitar sound and heavy pulse metal. Awesome. Packaged
in a full color gatefold wallet sleeve.
Just started picking up some of the stuff on the Haute Magie label, beginning with this beautifully presented cassette collection for the Finnish occult doompsych/noise/folk band Bird From The Abyss. We had a limited-edition Cdr from this project here at C-Blast a couple of years ago but it sold out so quickly that it never even made it onto the website. This release however collects everything that the project released, a complete document of this projects exotic and narcotized acid-folk steeped in Lovecraftian dreams and strange doom-laden psychedelia, beautifully presented in a chipboard sleeve with a printed insert sheet and track-listing card. Cloaked in shadows and streaked with veins of droning heaviness, Bird From the Abyss draws from Native American and other aboriginal music, early psychedelia and krautrock, the creepier fringes of British folk (Comus, Forest), and the faintest traces of Sabbath's fuzz-soaked gloom.
The first cassette contains all of the material from the self-released Cd-r I and the Starlight Temple Society Cd-r II. It starts up with a mangled din of opium-den flutes and howling guitar noise, a thick narcotized fog of noise that quickly transforms into the sound of deep distorted guitar drone and acoustic strum, a lush folk-flecked psych colored in black shadows and crepuscular glow. The music is mostly based around acoustic guitar, but as you go deeper into the collection it grows creepier and more hallucinatory, breaking into strange slow-motion acid rock dirges where fried-out Texas blues licks suddenly combine with a Middle Eastern processional, and sinister doom-laden bass lines creep beneath the intoxicating hand drum rhythms and sitar-like scales. Clanking metallic percussion rings out beneath mesmerizing strings, sometimes sounding like a midnight funeral march through some sweltering jungle burial ground. Dreamy flute and the resonant sound of a kettledrum echo across a nocturnal wilderness, the sounds of wildlife appearing all around. Sabbathian bass grooves slither around swells of atmospheric Goblin-esque ambience. Washes of grim, colorless doom-drift and clusters of ritual bells. The crackle of towering bonfires licking at the endless blackness. This is richly evocative music.
The six tracks featured on the second cassette include the ultra-rare III disc and some previously unreleased material. Right off the bat, there's a murkier, more nightmarish tone to the music as the fuzz-thick witch-folk of "Neck Deep In Swampy Mud" drifts along, the delicate strummed strings becoming lost among waves of warped analogue synthesizer. The ominous minor key creep of "Powers Hidden" resembles an acoustic horror movie score backed by subtle grinding industrial noises, but then morphs into a killer twangy graveyard blues jam. The other side has one of the best tracks on the collection, "Interlude From Abandoned Well ", a stunning Western-tinged psych-folk piece that opens up into widescreen, sun-baked prairie vistas; that's followed by the heaviest, "Electric Forest ", a strange electronic dirge with huge blown out bass throbbing beneath chaotic bleeps and squeals, shuddering low-end 8-bit doom lurching through a mass of lysergic effects and rudimentary drum machine rhythms. The song "Horrors Of..." brings out a Black Sabbath-like guitar riff that lays down a doomy disembodied groove through the funeral atmospherics, and closer "Seven Gateways Of Clark Ashton Smith" (a loving homage to the legendary Weird Tales author) honors its namesake with another shambling blues number that focuses on a hypnotic guitar line surrounded by the sounds of bodies being whipped by chains, eldritch horrors lurking in the shadows, and the simple clinking of ritual percussion instruments.
Amazing stuff. Highly recommended to fans of the deathcult psychedelia of Master Musicians Of Bukkake, the melted graveyard hallucinations of Yoga, and the black magic narco-folk rituals of Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat, Time Moth Eye, Hellvete, and Silvester Anfang. Limited to one hundred twenty-five copies.
Finally found some more copies of this killer album of gonzo grindcore from Sweden's Birdflesh, released back in 2006 in a limited edition of nine hundred copies. Here's my old write-up from the last time we had this bizarro blast of bonkers grind in stock:
From their nonsensical band name to the equally ridiculous song titles and lyrics and cover art (is that Sean Connery?), Birdflesh don't go out of their way to hide the fact that they are, indeed, a bunch of clowns. I mean, they have a song called "Wigdestroyer", and the lyrics go like this: "Here I come bored of everything / I go downtown to look for you / You are the ones who lost your hair / And try to replace it with an ugly wig / I rip it off and throw it to the ground/ Wig Destroyer..." And they do dress up as clowns when they play live. Some of them, at least. And yet the trio of Smattro Ansjovis (drums), Barbro Havohej (bass), and Achmed Abdulex (guitar) totally kill. It's insanely fast and punky grindcore that goes from hyperspeed blasting to thrashier, more mid-paced punk rock, and into that mix Birdflesh toss in their goofy song titles ("Crocophile", "After-ski Obliteration", "Mr. Big Head", "Handicapitation", "Dancefloor Dismemberment", "Moonwalk Massacre", "Victim Of The Cat"...you get the idea), and even weirder lyrics as with the aforementioned "Wigdestroyer", or other songs about being carjacked by a deer, having a head that suddenly grows to enormous size, or death by Jacuzzi. If you haven't picked up on by now, Birdflesh tap into the goofball genre-bending thrash of Spazztic Blurr, but deliver their silliness through crusty grind in the vein of bands like Nasum, Napalm Death or Sayyadina, minute long songs of ferocious blasting, trickey percussive fills and technical riffing that gets mixed up with weird bits of pop punk, goony nursery-rhyme type chanting or squeaky chipmunk vocals, silly samples, drum solos, operatic vocals, dogs barking, and other absurdity.
From their absurd band name to the equally absurd song titles and lyrics and cover art (is that Sean Connery?), Birdflesh don't go out
of their way to hide the fact that they are, indeed, a bunch of clowns. I mean, they have a song called "Wigdestroyer", and the lyrics go like this: "Here I
come bored of everything / I go downtown to look for you / You are the ones who lost your hair / And try to replace it with an ugly wig / I rip it off and
throw it to the ground/ Wig Destroyer..." And they do dress up as clowns when they play live. Some of them, at least. And yet the trio of Smattro Ansjovis
(drums), Barbro Havohej (bass), and Achmed Abdulex (guitar) totally kill. It's insanely fast punky grindcore that goes from hyperspeed blasting to
thrashier, midpaced punk rock, and into that mix Birdflesh toss in their goofy song titles ("Crocophile", "After-ski Obliteration", "Mr. Big Head",
"Handicapitation", "Dancefloor Dismemberment", "Moonwalk Massacre", "Victim Of The Cat"...you get the idea), and even weirder lyrics as with the
aforementioned "Wigdestroyer", or other songs about being carjacked by a deer, having a head that suddenly grows to enormous size, or death by Jacuzzi. If
you haven't picked up on by now, Birdflesh tap into the goofball genre-bending thrash of Spazztic Blurr, but deliver their silliness through crusty grind in
the vein of bands like Nasum, Napalm Death or Sayyadina, minute long songs of ferocious blasting, trickey percussive fills and technical riffing that gets
mixed up with weird bits of pop punk, goony nursery-rhyme type chanting or squeaky chipmunk vocals, silly samples, drum solos, operatic vocals, dogs barking,
and other whackness.
Can never get enough of Birdflesh! This Swedish grind troop has been at it for over a decade now, playing their ferocious punky grindcore at hair raising speeds that channels the napalm fueled power of the early Earache grind movement and especially the genre-hopping Spazztic Blurr. Musically at least, the grind is dead serious, kinda technical and brutally heavy and fast, along the lines of Napalm Death, but the lyrics are absurd and the band drops in goofy bits of jazz, reggae, pogo punk and other unexpected sounds into their raging grind.
This live cassette has an entire performance recorded in 1999 while the band was touring Japan...dunno when or where exactly this was recorded from, but we get fifteen tracks of primo Birdflesh grind that includes songs like "Sky Rat", "Jazzim Qassim Electrodeath", "Teenage Mutilator", "The Hedgehog Sickness", "Kick on the Cross", "Motorbed", "Dead in the Paper", "Arabian Dreams", "Destination Shangai", and a cover of "Vicious Dreams" by Japanese grind legends S.O.B. The tape comes from a decent soundboard recording, it's not too muddy and is certainly listenable, but as with most live recordings, this one is for diehard fans only. Limited to 300 copies.
Goddamit, I had been sitting on the band name "Birth Control" for over a year before I heard that these guys had formed. I had this whole plan to get a punk rock band started and play some off-the-wall noisy Cherubs-meets-Pissed Jeans style shit under that name, but you know what they say about those that snooze. It's ironic that Pissed Jeans were the big influence on my embryonic band idea, because this Allentown band is actually made up of members of Pissed Jeans and plays a very simiar brand of fucked up brain-damaged hardcore. What the hell happened here? Some kind of synchronicity, I'm thinking. That band name was just too good to go unused. So here we've got the debut 7" from Birth Control, with four songs of heavy, noisy hardcore dirge with plodding riffs, drug-addled howling with tons of effects on them, and titles like "Be Glad I'm Not Your Dad" and "Going To Target". Are you into Pissed Jeans? Then you'll be into Birth Control. Birth COntrol are a little faster when they bust out jams like "Pump It", all Negative-Approach loaded on cough syrup, but it's the same kind of fucked up, narcotized hardcore dirge that the 'Jeans peddle. Fans of Snake Apartment, Violent Students and that Philly skuzz punk scene should dig this too. On black vinyl.
Pulvering sludge metal from Japan combined with traditional Japanese instruments and music? That sounded like a combo that needed to be checked out, and
I'm glad I did - this CD from 2002 is one of the more interesting psych-metal imports that I've gotten in at the Blast recently, a two song, twenty minute
mini-album released by the amazing Japanese label S.M.D. (who I worked with last year in regards to their Japanese release of the Grey Daturas Dead In
The Woods album), who have also hooked us up with the crushing Shinsho album from Ryokuchi. Birushanah originally started in Osaka in 2002 with
bassist Sougyo and members of the Aussie sludgecore band Dad They Broke Me who were staying in Japan at the time; the members of DTBM would leave the band
shortly after, but not before recording this two song debut that also featured Corrupted's Shibata on fretless bass.
The two songs on Touta ("Shoketsu" and "Ikei") are certainly something different. The opener "Shoketsu" starts off with a lone bass guitar playing
a heavy dark Japanese-sounding melody using that sort of traditional, atonal scale, and it becomes joined by deep wordless chanting, minimal percussion and
the deep buzz of a didgeridoo. But then five minutes in, that hymnlike processional suddenly explodes into crushing, sludgy dirge metal, a huge hypnotic
riff, angular and convoluted grinding over and over above two percussionists, one playing a regular drumkit and pounding out a steady stream of pummeling,
complex beats, the other playing some kind of found-junk-metal percussive set and smashing out these clanking steel-pipe rhythms a la Trephine in tandem with
the drummer! Monstrously heavy and chaotic, it's like hearing a mathier Neurosis if the members were actually Japanese warrior-monks. Then comes "Ikei", and
once again it begins with a more traditional style of music, an awesome droning Japanese psych jam, the digeridoo again buzzing away but now it's joined by
all kinds of Japanese percussion and Japanese folk instruments, super catchy and trippy but HUGE sounding, coming to an ecstatic close as every instrument in
the room gets cranked to eleven in a mass of sound, and then the band suddenly lurches forward into a grisly stuttering stop and go riff, manic drumming
kicking up a storm as the detuned guitars and fretless bass lock horns in twisted sludgy riffage, weaving back and forth over an increasinly weirder song
strucure. Then they start breaking off into these frenzied math metal breakdowns that remind me of Dazzling Killmen, and alternate those chaotic fretboard
freakouts with brutal angular sludge with more of that awesome junk metal percussion and grinding drumming pushing everything forward in vicious starts.
Birushanah's brand of psychedelic math sludge is pretty damn amazing, and definitely VERY crushing, and with their being a new album coming soon from the
band on Level Plane and apparently some US touring in the works, I'm betting that these guys are going to get huge. Pretty essential for anyone that is an
equal fan of Zeni Geva and Neurosis!
If the Birushanah album Touta hadn't been an older title that we just happened to pick up for the first time from the Japanese label run by one
of the band's members, it would have been a shoe-in for our Featured Release this week. As soon as I heard that album, this Japanese band immediately became
one of my new favorite bands, seemingly custom-made for my lust for demented metal with their bizarre, exotic fusion of traditional Japanese music and
planet-crushing industrial avant doom. When it rains it pours, and I just found out that Level Plane just released a brand new album from Birushanah this
month titled Akai Yama, and it's even more freaked out and brutally percussive and bizarre as their previous album, a devestating slab of insanely
complex polyrhythmic math doom with awesome psychotic vocals and THREE DRUMMERS and contorted angular riffage that will fold your frontal lobe over onto
itself. An unchallenged album of the week and one of thee best heavy albums of the year, no doubt!
Hailing from Osaka, Japan, Birushanah started in 2002 and featured members of the Aussie deathsludge band Dad They Broke Me, and would also later have
former Corrupted/Tetsuo bassist Shibata in their ranks. When you listen to Birushanah, you can hear the raw matter of their doom/sludge roots, but as the
band evolved and brought in metal percussion and Japanese percussion alongside the regular drums and incorporated traditional Japanese scales in their music,
the band's sound has become more and more alien sounding. And yeah, I said that Birushanah have three drummers, or percussionists to be more
precise; they have one guy playing a regular drumkit, hammering away at pummeling slow motion beats and the occasional blastbeat, while two other guys bash
on makeshift metal and traditional Japanese drums in unison with the drummer. This creates an extremely dense and chaotic percussive force on Akai
Yama as all three percussionsist bash away at the same time, playing super complex polyrhythms and seriously bizarre time signatures that have an
industrial feel due to the metal textures. There are two bassists, both of which play traditional Japanese scales on their instruments, and the atonal scales
combined with the dual battery of having two bass guitars thickens up the sound MASSIVELY. This album features three tracks, but the first is a short two
minute introduction piece of Gagaku-like Japanese classical ambience. After that, the band lurches into two massive 17-20 minute tracks, totalling over 40
minutes of music. Each track is made up of different passages, moving through long intricate compositions of pounding tribal psychedelic sludge, with
yowling vocals and demented male singing, melodic basslines slipping in and out of strange rhythmic grooves, more subdued passages of foly Japanese acoustic
music, glimpses of koto (the traditional Japanese stringed instrument) in the crushing mathy sludge metal. Devestatingly heavy and nauseatingly angular
heaviosity that honestly sounds like Corrupted fused to Zeni Geva, early Swans, and Japanese classical, as weird and unlikely as that combination sounds. The
album artwork is perfect too, capturing the astral strangeness of Birushanah's sound with psychedelic space paintings layered with geodisic structures and
swrling abstract shapes. This one is on my list for one of the best metal albums of the year. Highly recommended.
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The latest foray into horrific soundscapes from composer Joseph Bishara, this new score follows his third time constructing the frightening sonic backdrop to the popular Insidious series, which has updated the "family under assault by demonic forces" storyline first seen in Poltergeist to a modern, more unsettling setting. A former member of the early 90s industrial metal outfit Drown, Joseph Bishara has made a name for himself in recent years as the go-to guy for some of the better horror films currently coming out of Hollywood, drawing from the atonal modern classical music of composers like Ligeti, Crumb and Penderecki and combining that influence with contemporary electronic and experimental textures to create some of the creepiest film music being made right now. I was already a fan of Bishara's previous scores for the Insidious films, The Conjuring and Dark Skies, but the direction he would take for this new project was particularly enticing. For his score to the third installment in the Insidious series of films, Bishara teamed up with legendary metal drummer Dave Lombardo (Slayer, Fantomas) and pianist/composer Saar Hendelman to create these jet-black soundscapes, which is featured on this album as twenty-two tracks that plunge into a nightmarish sonic realm of low, rumbling percussive sound and distant ostinato strings giving way to violent, shocking blasts of orchestral dissonance, quieter sections where those muted strings drift hazily over minimal piano, or dissipate into abyssal dronescapes; violins are manipulated and molested, producing sickening glissando notes that slither and writhe through cloudy masses of low-end electronics and reverberating metallic noise; ghostly atonal melodies slip in and out of view, drifting out of the void to reveal themselves in brief glimpses before being swallowed up again in the blackness; murky electronic rhythms bubble in the depths of the mix, looping patterns that seethe on the periphery; and there are sequences of stygian ambience here that rival anything you'll find on labels like Malignant or Cyclic Law.
Like most of my favorite scores, the sudden blasts of volume and intensity make for a terrifying listen even when separated from the film's demonic imagery, which reaches a feverish intensity whenever Lombardo's abstract drumming enters the fray, often appearing in controlled bursts of rumbling percussive sound that punctuate the louder, shocking eruptions of those fearsome strings, or producing slow, sinister swells of cymbal washing over quick, improvisational flurries of drumming; it's an exercise in skillful tension building, even the more emotionally poignant moments of Bishara's score seem to have a lingering sense of dread, like the haunting, lyrical "Questions Left Behind" and the gorgeously moody "Friendly Face"; utilizes sleek modern composition and experimental techniques, there's a definite post-industrial tinge to this music. One of the better modern horror scores, in the same terrifying league as Roque Banos's fantastic Evil Dead score. Comes in gatefold packaging.
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Now available on limited-edition vinyl, includes a download code.
The latest foray into horrific soundscapes from composer Joseph Bishara, this new score follows his third time constructing the frightening sonic backdrop to the popular Insidious series, which has updated the "family under assault by demonic forces" storyline first seen in Poltergeist to a modern, more unsettling setting. A former member of the early 90s industrial metal outfit Drown, Joseph Bishara has made a name for himself in recent years as the go-to guy for some of the better horror films currently coming out of Hollywood, drawing from the atonal modern classical music of composers like Ligeti, Crumb and Penderecki and combining that influence with contemporary electronic and experimental textures to create some of the creepiest film music being made right now. I was already a fan of Bishara's previous scores for the Insidious films, The Conjuring and Dark Skies, but the direction he would take for this new project was particularly enticing. For his score to the third installment in the Insidious series of films, Bishara teamed up with legendary metal drummer Dave Lombardo (Slayer, Fant�mas) and pianist/composer Saar Hendelman to create these jet-black soundscapes, which is featured on this album as twenty-two tracks that plunge into a nightmarish sonic realm of low, rumbling percussive sound and distant ostinato strings giving way to violent, shocking blasts of orchestral dissonance, quieter sections where those muted strings drift hazily over minimal piano, or dissipate into abyssal dronescapes; violins are manipulated and molested, producing sickening glissando notes that slither and writhe through cloudy masses of low-end electronics and reverberating metallic noise; ghostly atonal melodies slip in and out of view, drifting out of the void to reveal themselves in brief glimpses before being swallowed up again in the blackness; murky electronic rhythms bubble in the depths of the mix, looping patterns that seethe on the periphery; and there are sequences of stygian ambience here that rival anything you'll find on labels like Malignant or Cyclic Law.
Like most of my favorite scores, the sudden blasts of volume and intensity make for a terrifying listen even when separated from the film's demonic imagery, which reaches a feverish intensity whenever Lombardo's abstract drumming enters the fray, often appearing in controlled bursts of rumbling percussive sound that punctuate the louder, shocking eruptions of those fearsome strings, or producing slow, sinister swells of cymbal washing over quick, improvisational flurries of drumming; it's an exercise in skillful tension building, even the more emotionally poignant moments of Bishara's score seem to have a lingering sense of dread, like the haunting, lyrical "Questions Left Behind" and the gorgeously moody "Friendly Face"; utilizes sleek modern composition and experimental techniques, there's a definite post-industrial tinge to this music. One of the better modern horror scores, in the same terrifying league as Roque Ba�os's fantastic Evil Dead score.
Ridiculous, ear scrambling computer-generated noisecore meets ultra-cheesy Nintendo/J-pop style melodies...this will either drive you completely out of your
mind, or you'll groove on this duo's hyperactive synthesizer pop attack that sounds like Dance Dance Revolution overdosing on meth and careening out of
control. The poppy parts are actually pretty damn infectious despite the ultra lo-fi recording, alot of this sounds like the saccharine J-pop stuff you'd
hear in an anime soundtrack, but it never lasts for too long as each song blasts off into mindless digital blastbeats and noise. This shit is out of it's
mind, and sounds like overcaffienated Commodore 64 mutants Lotus teaming up with computer grinders Dataclast to score a Robotech episode. Eight songs in
eight minutes, on a 3" CD-R packaged in crude megaman art and handwritten liners.
If your band is ever struggling for a name, and the music that you play is even remotely heavy, I recommend looking to large land mammals for inspiration.
There's no shortage of large game out there to tap into, and band names like Black Elk and Mastodon have got to be some of the coolest monikers in recent
history. The American Bison is the largest land mammal in North America, it's a pretty formidible looking animal, and the name just kinda rolls off yer
tongue - so it kinda surprised me that noone had claimed the name before now. It certainly fits this buncha Canuck crushers though. Bison is a new band out
of Vancouver, Canada that was formed by James "Gnarwell" Fallwell, who had previously been a member of S.T.R.E.E.T.S. (which stood for Skateboarding Totally
Rules Everything Else Totally Sucks), a Vancouver thrash punk band that channeled Suicidal Tendencies style skatethrash and Thin Lizzy inspired guitar
heroics, professed their love of 70's krautrock and Hawkwind, and put their records in beautifully crude psychedelic album covers. S.T.R.E.E.T.S. broke up
not too long ago after generating a small buzz in the underground, but Fallwell couldn't keep quiet for long. Bison came together and this half-hour debut
shows a band that is already quickly reaching mastery of the riff, dropping huge, galloping Sabbath-on-crack riffage on a pounding rhythm section and
sounding like a punkier High On Fire with sweet twin guitar harmonies a la Thin Lizzy. Mystical beer-soaked lyrics evoke white wizards, aliens, revolution in
the streets and the "Stokasaurus", and songs like "The Curse" sound like what Queens Of The Stone Age might sound like if Matt Pike was at the helm. Total
thunder. The disc comes in a bright yellow digipack with rad lysergic artwork.
Finnish noisemaster Pasi Markkula and his Bizarre Uproar project is well known as one of the most notoriously vicious harsh noise merchants in the global electronics underground. From his seminal early releases on Freak Animal and the splits and collaborations with Bastard Noise, Grunt, and Sore Throat throught the '90's, Markkula's approach to brutal noise has created some of the hardest stuff in the canon. This new CDR on Housepig, limited to a mere 150 copies and packaged in a really nicely designed plastic snapcase with stark black and white imagery of the sinister looking bunker location that served as the conceptual locus for this recording, is an interactive piece that offers up 99 seperate tracks that are meant to be played back using the random play feature on your CD player. This offers an almost endless array of shuffle-remixing permutations that the album can take. Each track is exactly 17 seconds long, and they're constructed from blasts of raw feedback, bruta
l metal percussion, machine-gun rhythms that approach digi-grind levels of blast speed, and equally brutal vocal exhortations. Many of the tracks are heavily reverbed and delayed, and that stuff almost sounds like Whitehouse recordings being chopped up and dunked in effects by a dub engineer. Fierce, jarring harsh noise violence delivered at fucking nauseating levels of volume. Highly recommended to disciples of the harshest noise and junkyard violence, Incapacitants, Hanatarash, Masonna, etc.
Back in stock! This disc is a collection of live material from Finland's prince of filthy power electronics and hateful harsh noise, Bizarre Uproar. I never get tired of having my brain matter jack hammered by BU's brand of violent scatological PE, and this disc captures the demon in front of small, enthusiastic audiences from Helsinki (and one at a record shop in Rio De Janeiro) unleashing his savage electronics at full force.
The disc begins with a 2009 set that opens with the sound of a muezzin's call for prayer slurred and stretched into a brain-damaged howl additional shouting voices and screams and streaks of minimal feedback appear, heavily delayed, skipping across the hallucinatory soundscape slowly builds as grinding noise and more vocals drift in, the sound thickening, growing ever more abrasive and malevolent, huge circular rumbling drones emerging from the depths. As the warped chanting disappears, the real vocals come in, a fearsome blackened shriek slightly obscured by the din of scraping, screeching machine noise. The next piece is introduced by a sample of Finnish military music that leads into a bludgeoning feedback assault, maniacal screams interspersed with bursts of high end feedback, then growing into a cacophony of concrete grinding against metal in steady, skull-splintering rhythmic churn.
Another 2008 set at the Bunker in Helsinki delivers an orgy of brutally abrasive noise and malfunctioning machinery, shifting into a spacious stretch of contact mic rattling and banging around, processed recordings of children's songs, high pitched squeals and violent screaming, then crashes back into a brutal wall of churning noise at the end. The Rio performance is an ultra low-fi recording full of amplified hiss and buzzing feedback, the filthiest sounding set featured here, with samples of armies marching across asphalt, the stomp of boots against the ground pounding endlessly amid bursts of vicious screaming and high speed blasting distortion. The disc ends with a 2006 set that's more subdued, an eerie echoing noisescape of dragging chains, scraping metal, all run through huge amounts of delay as a massive bass throb is buried underneath the swirling storm of feedback and oscillating electronics.
Comes with a twelve page full color booklet filled with live photos, and features some incredibly vile album art. Limited to three hundred copies.
��One of the more recent albums from this long running Finnish power electronics project, Rape Africa is an utterly nihilistic dose of blackened hatred from Bizarre Uproar that brings a new dimension to the murky, crushing noise of Finnish power electronics provocateur Pasi Markkula, and it's easily one of the heaviest slabs of sonic filth I've ever heard form this guy. Cut Hands, this ain't. As the sprawling noxious grime begins to ooze across the beginning of opener "Tornion Kev�t", the track begins to slowly shamble forward on misshapen legs, taking the form of an ultra-heavy bass dirge, a monstrously distorted doom-metal like riff that is caught in an endless repetitive loop, that grinding low-end crush enshrouded in massive levels of speakerbuzz and putrid amplifier rumble. This ten-minute long opener actually sounds a lot like some early Earth dronemetal jam, but it's also surrounded by a din of horrific screams and smears of charred black electronics that slowly seep in like some cancerous mass into the churning metallic dirge. One of the heaviest blasts of abject noise-hate I've ever heard from Bizarre Uproar, this eventually decomposes into a formless rumbling mass of diseased distorted noise. From there, Markkula drifts out into short untitled interludes of muffled mechanical noise and children's voices, reappearing on the other side with another long bout of ultra-mangled distorted noise ("Joukkohauta Pt.2 / Hate Your Face") that combines his snarling, almost bestial vocal assault with massive pounding metallic reverberations and screeching acrid feedback. That pounding percussive pandemonium thunders beneath a mountain of monstrous bass rumble and corrosive electronics, the saurian drumbeat that emerges in the background suddenly bringing an immense gravitation pull. The album drops into short passages of clanking tribal drumming and found-junk percussion that explode into more filthy, putrid crushing scrap-yard cacophony ("Silvottu Musta Vittu"), and closes with the foul juddering grind of "Raiskaa Afrikka", another long, drawn-out descent into total bass-heavy chaos, rumbling violent noise spreading out like black magma over Markkula's bestial screams, his terrifying vocals so vicious and unintelligible that they sound like they would be right at home on a death metal record. Absolutely crushing industrial evil, as violent and hateful and hellish as anything you'll hear from the likes of Demonologists or Crown of Bone. Comes in a plastic clamshell case with a full color sleeve.
More heavy, psychedelic amplifer drone from the increasingly prolific duo of Jan-M Iversen and Sindre Bjerga. The two of them have been performing and recording together since 2003, their sound revolving around freeform electronic noise and sound collage mixed with heavy amplifier/feedback drones, guitar noise, and abstract, formless riffs, swirling together into epic, otherworldy dronescapes. This single 28-minute track is titled """"Burning Liquid Rubber Metal"""", with the duo at their most ambient. They create heavy, rumbling guitar feedback that floats beneath waves of alien birdcalls and droning electronic hum, dreamy looped guitar riffs spinning slowly through crumbling sheets of radio noise. Like the handful of other cd-r releases I've heard from Iversen and Bjerga so far, this material straddles the amplifier ambience of Maeror Tri, Troum, and even """"softer"""" Earth material and abstract European free-improv at it's most stoned. Limited edition of 120 copies in a hand-assembled slimline case with full color cover insert card featuring abstract macrophotography.
Another single track, head-flattening jam from At War With False Noise's drone/noise/sludge onslaught of January 2007. This one's a live recording of a trio made up of prolific improvisors Jan-M Iversen on electronics, Sindra Bjerga on tapes and """"amplified objects"""", and Lars Myrvoll on guitar, recorded in Oslo, Norway in June of 2006. Emerging amongst a pile of percussive clatter and pensive streaks of feedback, the group quickly flip the switch as Myrvoll's guitar emerges at top volume, emitting a sickeningly sludgy dronetone that seesaws over Iversen and Bjerga's swooping electronic howls and heavy rumbling static. Those first five minutes are a harrowing crawl through crushing freeform ooze, and the rest of the 36 minute performance moves through similiar ravines of subtle circuit squiggle, guitar strings being mangled into spidery screeching noise, and restrained feedback, surging up every couple of minutes into a squall of brutal feedback and formless sludgenoise. Pretty killer, a meeting of the minds between abstract European free-improv and tarpit-Metal amplifier ambience. And of course it comes in another piece of total handmade eye candy from the At War crew, the disc contained in a handmade paper wallet with a hand-numbered insert on watercolour paper with a sketch from artist Alec Cheer. Limited edition of 100.
The prolific Norwegian ampdrone-improv duo of Sindre Bjerga and Jan Iversen have been cranking out super limited CD-Rs hand over fist lately; amazingly
enough considering their output, everything I've listened to so far from them has been pretty great. Working from the raw materials of rumbling, amplified
guitar noise and manipulated electronics, their releases have mostly consisted of live, in-the-moment recordings that capture them summoning up huge room-
filling clouds of heavy free-drone that frequently form into Earth 2-esque slabs of crushing subsonic amp drone. Cosmic Surgery is part of
the latest batch of CD-Rs from Housepig, and comes in a creepy, skull-covered envelope printed by Seattle lino-block artist Nic Schmidt that also includes a
silkscreened foldout insert. For close to half an hour, the disc unfolds three tracks that reveal stygian, paranoid crypt-drones, sheets of sizzling
electronic tracers, and those deep, rumbling waves of distorted guitar feedback that we love so much. Bjerga /Iversen create a psychedelic, abstract
soundworld that shares properties with everything from charred electronic ambience, chorales of damned eyeless monastics and the clang of a deformed
grandfather clock ("Transmitting Into The Void") to glitchy circuit crackles sparking over dense slabs of organic freeform dronedoom ("A Condensed History Of
Failure") to damaged tendrils of grinding loops of pneumatic Industrial death skuzz heard through the veil of a heavily medicated state of consciousness
("Beauty Spot"). Limited edition of 100 copies.
The Norwegian duo of Sindre Bjerga and Jan-M. Iversen has been wowing me for a few years with their dark improv-noise, mostly through their prolific release schedule that sends clutches of super limited cd-rs out into the world through labels like Carbon, Ruralfaune, At War With False Noise, and Utech. It 's hard to believe that these guys are able to explore as wide ranging a realm of sounds as they do with all of their myriad releases, and I hardly ever hear them stay in one spot for long on any given release. Massive Earth-en guitar drone will find itself next to a track of battered toy noises, or the duo will emit crushing blasts of feedback and electronic squonk, then slide effortlessly into glistening ambience that blooms from a field of effects pedals that the artists manipulate in expert fashion. For any newcomers to Bjerga/Iversen's dark noisescapes, I would recommend this disc in a heartbeat. (Go With The Flow) Like a Twig on the Shoulders of a Mighty Stream has been put together as a collection of some of Bjerga/Iversen's best material, culled from an assortment of rare and out of print releases. Sixteen minute epics of flattened high-end feedback tones, mutated radio signals, psychedelic guitar noise and throbbing low-end are matched with shorter tracks like the grinding Teutonic sludgedrone of "Drawn To The Light, Like Moths To A Flame" and the eerie space horror and industrial skulk of "Invisible Empire". The untitled eighth track is the one unreleased recording on here, and it's a killer blat of dark ambience that makes my skin crawl, a deep Lustmordian drone flecked with glitchy computer noises and unnerving dissonance. The whole disc tends to lean more towards the darker, more ambient side of Bjerga/Iversen's improv recordings, but that is where these guys really shine anyways, so who's complaining. The whole disc flows together so nicely that it hardly even sounds like the compilation that it is, and anyone who hungers for the heavier and more corroded end of the deathdrone/dark ambient spectrum needs to hear it. Think Maurizio Bianchi's cold industrial drones combined with the fractured, blackened industrial throb of newer Wolf Eyes, Lustmord's cavernous ambience, early krautrock and the grinding guitar buzz of Earth's 2. Sounds pretty great, right? This is definitely the place to start, and after sinking your ears into this heavy collection of psychedelic industrial drone, you might just want to start hunting down all of the other fifty-plus releases that Bjerga/Iversen have released over the past few years... Nice red and black packaging, and the booklet has some well written liner notes on the duo written by Tobias Fischer.
��Finally have this crusher in stock, both on CD and on limited edition gatefold vinyl. One of C-Blast's favorite hardcore albums of 2013...
�� Is it sacrilegious for me to admit that I was at least as big a fan of Bl'ast! as I was of Black Flag? Back in the 1980s, the Santa Cruz based Bl'ast! always traveled in the shadow of the mighty Black Flag and were frequently compared to their SST labelmates / benefactors; yeah, they definitely sounded alot like My War-era Black Flag, with a similar mix of atonal guitar skronk and weird jazzy shredding, sludgy off-kilter riffs and furious vocals, but these guys had a much more menacing and metallic take on what Black Flag were doing. These guys just sounded meaner to my ears, and as soon as I first heard their semi-classic 1987 album It's in My Blood, they were hitting all the same nerve endings as bands like Flag and Corrosion Of Conformity, taking that off-kilter metallic hardcore sound into even more gnarled and demented directions. All three of Bl'ast!'s albums were blazing blasts of mutant hardcore, but by 1990 the band had already begun to disintegrate, suffering from ongoing chronic instability with their lineup, and by 1991 they were pretty much done. One of Bl'ast!'s most ardent admirers has been Southern Lord Records, who released the final album from Bl'ast! frontman Clifford Dinsmore's later psych-metal outfit Spaceboy; their devotion to the band's maniacal hardcore resulted in the label getting their hands on a recently rediscovered studio recording from the mid 80's that the guys in Bl'ast! had thought to be long lost, dusted off and remixed (by another longtime fan, Dave Grohl) and presented here for the first time ever. It's not actually a "new" lost album from the band, as most of these songs had previously appeared on It's In My Blood in an earlier form, but this does bear the distinction of being the only studio recording to feature one-time member and second guitarist William Duvall, a former member of cult crossover thrashers Neon Christ and current frontman for Seattle grunge gods Alice In Chains. And if you're a Bl'ast! fan, you'll want to hear these songs in this form; this recording is crushing, probably the heaviest and most powerful that Bl'ast! has ever sounded on record. As always, their songs are furious affairs, filled with the band's trademark off-kilter time signatures, angular, slightly proggy riffs and squonky guitar solos that often rival anything that Greg Ginn was doing at that late date in Flag's career. Singer Dinsmore belts out his paranoid, introspective lyrics in a hoarse blown-out howl that sounds like he'd been scouring his pipes with steel wool for the past week, and in other places whispers his lyrics in a murderous hiss that sends an icy chill through the band's chaotic assault. Tracks like "Only Time Will Tell", "Sshh!" and the title track are dark and furious anthems that sound reborn here, while the likes of "Tomorrow" seethes with a malevolent power that oozes thick gluey Sabbathian heaviness within the squealing, spiky thrash. With long, often complex song structures and featuring some of the most discordant guitar-work you'll find from this era of hardcore, Bl'ast! boiled with a lethal energy that put them in a league of their own, and these resurrected recordings show the band at the height of their powers.
��Finally have this crusher in stock, both on CD and on limited edition gatefold vinyl. One of C-Blast's favorite hardcore albums of 2013...
�� Is it sacrilegious for me to admit that I was at least as big a fan of Bl'ast! as I was of Black Flag? Back in the 1980s, the Santa Cruz based Bl'ast! always traveled in the shadow of the mighty Black Flag and were frequently compared to their SST labelmates / benefactors; yeah, they definitely sounded alot like My War-era Black Flag, with a similar mix of atonal guitar skronk and weird jazzy shredding, sludgy off-kilter riffs and furious vocals, but these guys had a much more menacing and metallic take on what Black Flag were doing. These guys just sounded meaner to my ears, and as soon as I first heard their semi-classic 1987 album It's in My Blood, they were hitting all the same nerve endings as bands like Flag and Corrosion Of Conformity, taking that off-kilter metallic hardcore sound into even more gnarled and demented directions. All three of Bl'ast!'s albums were blazing blasts of mutant hardcore, but by 1990 the band had already begun to disintegrate, suffering from ongoing chronic instability with their lineup, and by 1991 they were pretty much done. One of Bl'ast!'s most ardent admirers has been Southern Lord Records, who released the final album from Bl'ast! frontman Clifford Dinsmore's later psych-metal outfit Spaceboy; their devotion to the band's maniacal hardcore resulted in the label getting their hands on a recently rediscovered studio recording from the mid 80's that the guys in Bl'ast! had thought to be long lost, dusted off and remixed (by another longtime fan, Dave Grohl) and presented here for the first time ever. It's not actually a "new" lost album from the band, as most of these songs had previously appeared on It's In My Blood in an earlier form, but this does bear the distinction of being the only studio recording to feature one-time member and second guitarist William Duvall, a former member of cult crossover thrashers Neon Christ and current frontman for Seattle grunge gods Alice In Chains. And if you're a Bl'ast! fan, you'll want to hear these songs in this form; this recording is crushing, probably the heaviest and most powerful that Bl'ast! has ever sounded on record. As always, their songs are furious affairs, filled with the band's trademark off-kilter time signatures, angular, slightly proggy riffs and squonky guitar solos that often rival anything that Greg Ginn was doing at that late date in Flag's career. Singer Dinsmore belts out his paranoid, introspective lyrics in a hoarse blown-out howl that sounds like he'd been scouring his pipes with steel wool for the past week, and in other places whispers his lyrics in a murderous hiss that sends an icy chill through the band's chaotic assault. Tracks like "Only Time Will Tell", "Sshh!" and the title track are dark and furious anthems that sound reborn here, while the likes of "Tomorrow" seethes with a malevolent power that oozes thick gluey Sabbathian heaviness within the squealing, spiky thrash. With long, often complex song structures and featuring some of the most discordant guitar-work you'll find from this era of hardcore, Bl'ast! boiled with a lethal energy that put them in a league of their own, and these resurrected recordings show the band at the height of their powers.
��Looks like we're getting an actual reissue campaign for Bl'ast, as this massive collection is the second release of older material from the Santa Cruz hardcore band to surface on Southern Lord in the last year. Good to see, as the Bl'ast back catalog has been overdue for re-evaluation for some time. Frequently written off as Black Flag's younger, brattier brother, Bl'ast most definitely shared a of similarities to the LA hardcore legends, namely the quirky, progressive riffing style, a fearsome, belligerent frontman and an unusually complex approach to songwriting; these guys were hardly riding Flag's coattails, though, and often played shows with them throughout the mid-80s. In fact, for some people (such as yours truly), Bl'ast's sound could be much more effective, taking that discordant guitar style and offbeat hardcore and making it even darker and more aggressive, and for fans like me, their 1986 debut The Power Of Expression remains a goddamn classic of mutant mid-80s SoCal hardcore. Originally released on Wishingwell and then later by Black Flag's own SST Records, Expression could be a tough album to track down in recent years, but now Southern Lord has worked with the band to release what would appear to be their definitive version, a collection that features an alternate, apparently preferred recording of the album along with other studio sessions of the same material, making this an exhaustive look at the band's earliest full-length effort.
�� The main session featured on the CD version (and on the first LP in the massive triple vinyl set) is as ferocious as this album has ever sounded, with no grit or sweat removed from the mix by the new mastering job; it's a grimy, almost unhinged assault of the band's off-kilter metallic hardcore, and any differences between this and the SST / Wishingwell original are negligible, as far as the songs themselves. The sound on this version of Expression does feel a bit rawer, more feral, more biting, but that's hardly a criticism. The album opens with a squall of radio static and random feedback, garbled voices and aimless guitar chug that quickly coalesces into the ferocious thrash of "Time To Think", and from there it's pedal to the metal as the band hurls themselves through these thirteen tracks. Songs like "Surf And Destroy", "Nightmare", "The Future", and "Fuckin' With My Head" all rage with brute force, guitarist Mike Neider contorting his riffs into topsy-turvy angular thrashpunk and bursts of searing discordant soloing, bringing a mucho metallic edge to his Ginn-esque shred while also introducing his own unique style of string-scraping axe abuse. The songs lurch through sudden tempo changes and oddball time signature shifts, flying at locomotive speeds through their dark, pissed-off visions of societal/personal collapse, then suddenly lurching into some burly sludge-encrusted breakdown or bone-crushing mid-tempo pummel that comes out of left field, like the grim discordant dirge that crawls across Time Waits (For No One)". Might've been cut from the same stained cloth as Black Flag, but Bl'ast managed to turn that sound into something distinctly theirs - it's still one of my favorite albums of dark, nihilistic hardcore from this era, and an essential acquisition for Bl'ast fans.
�� The CD version of Expression Of Power features the definitive "Fane Session" as well as a ferocious alternate studio session that features slightly longer, variant versions of the album tracks with a rougher mix, and comes in digipack packaging with a thick twenty eight page booklet loaded with vintage photos of the band in action from the mid-80's. The massive triple LP set is even more extensive, featuring both of these sessions as well as what appears to be the original album version that came out on Wishingwell, making this the exhaustive final word on this freakoid HC classic.
��Looks like we're getting an actual reissue campaign for Bl'ast, as this massive collection is the second release of older material from the Santa Cruz hardcore band to surface on Southern Lord in the last year. Good to see, as the Bl'ast back catalog has been overdue for re-evaluation for some time. Frequently written off as Black Flag's younger, brattier brother, Bl'ast most definitely shared a of similarities to the LA hardcore legends, namely the quirky, progressive riffing style, a fearsome, belligerent frontman and an unusually complex approach to songwriting; these guys were hardly riding Flag's coattails, though, and often played shows with them throughout the mid-80s. In fact, for some people (such as yours truly), Bl'ast's sound could be much more effective, taking that discordant guitar style and offbeat hardcore and making it even darker and more aggressive, and for fans like me, their 1986 debut The Power Of Expression remains a goddamn classic of mutant mid-80s SoCal hardcore. Originally released on Wishingwell and then later by Black Flag's own SST Records, Expression could be a tough album to track down in recent years, but now Southern Lord has worked with the band to release what would appear to be their definitive version, a collection that features an alternate, apparently preferred recording of the album along with other studio sessions of the same material, making this an exhaustive look at the band's earliest full-length effort.
�� The main session featured on the CD version (and on the first LP in the massive triple vinyl set) is as ferocious as this album has ever sounded, with no grit or sweat removed from the mix by the new mastering job; it's a grimy, almost unhinged assault of the band's off-kilter metallic hardcore, and any differences between this and the SST / Wishingwell original are negligible, as far as the songs themselves. The sound on this version of Expression does feel a bit rawer, more feral, more biting, but that's hardly a criticism. The album opens with a squall of radio static and random feedback, garbled voices and aimless guitar chug that quickly coalesces into the ferocious thrash of "Time To Think", and from there it's pedal to the metal as the band hurls themselves through these thirteen tracks. Songs like "Surf And Destroy", "Nightmare", "The Future", and "Fuckin' With My Head" all rage with brute force, guitarist Mike Neider contorting his riffs into topsy-turvy angular thrashpunk and bursts of searing discordant soloing, bringing a mucho metallic edge to his Ginn-esque shred while also introducing his own unique style of string-scraping axe abuse. The songs lurch through sudden tempo changes and oddball time signature shifts, flying at locomotive speeds through their dark, pissed-off visions of societal/personal collapse, then suddenly lurching into some burly sludge-encrusted breakdown or bone-crushing mid-tempo pummel that comes out of left field, like the grim discordant dirge that crawls across Time Waits (For No One)". Might've been cut from the same stained cloth as Black Flag, but Bl'ast managed to turn that sound into something distinctly theirs - it's still one of my favorite albums of dark, nihilistic hardcore from this era, and an essential acquisition for Bl'ast fans.
�� The CD version of Expression Of Power features the definitive "Fane Session" as well as a ferocious alternate studio session that features slightly longer, variant versions of the album tracks with a rougher mix, and comes in digipack packaging with a thick twenty eight page booklet loaded with vintage photos of the band in action from the mid-80's. The massive triple LP set is even more extensive, featuring both of these sessions as well as what appears to be the original album version that came out on Wishingwell, making this the exhaustive final word on this freakoid HC classic.
That name is a mouthful, as are their frequently wordy and punny/weird song titles like "Pearl Harbor Necklace" and "Damn Girlfriend This Napalm Exfoliates As It Burns", but this new band from Indianapolis deliver a brutal neuvo-grind assault that experiments with electronic samples and textures while keeping their songs rooted in blasting, vicious bottom-heavy death/grind. Black Arrows have connections with a bunch of better known bands from the Indiana area like Racebannon, Demiricous and The Dream Is Dead, but what they do on 1984 (Eternal) far surpasses any of those bands in terms of aggression and heaviness: "Nuclear Facelift" starts off with a volley of stuttering blastbeats and seizure-inducing stop/start rhythm changes before slamming into a pulverizing slowed down sludge riff that turns into a cloud of droning feedback/circuit buzz at the end; "If Shit Were Gold The Poor Wouldn't Have Assholes" blends together twitchy hyperspeed grind, strange fragments of melodic riffing, and an awesome swaggering angular groove that reminds me of Unsane; the oddly named "Death Creeps The Come Up" opens with eerie sampled ambience, then launches into more of their trademark blastbeat/riffslur complexity, mashing together dissonant Am Rep attitude with seriously fucked-up, paint-peeling grindcore that feels like it draws equal DNA from Brutal Truth's late 90's output and the chaotic hardcore that has been coming out of the Midwestern DIY basement scene. The vocals are wicked, too; exaggerated beastgrunts and oatmeal-choked deathgrowls trade off dramatically with higher pitched screeching and some really crazed-sounding rasps. It's not easy for me to get into alot of the newer grind bands that have been coming out as they all seem to be copping from the same sound, but these guys stand out with their expert ability to layer grim, disturbing electronic noise and drones with their ultra-intense, pigfuck-tainted grind. This reaches a high point on the seventeen minute "Survivors Envy The Dead", an epic slog through drawn out passages of industrial noise, terrifying blocks of abstract, stretched out doom a la Khanate/Moss,
weirdo ambient grind parts where spacey effects and warbling feedback are layered over spastic blastbeat arrangements and dense waves of pink noise. This album is pretty far out as far as modern grind goes, actually. Fans of later Brutal Truth, Pig Destoyer, Graf Orlock, Today Is The Day, and Antigama all should check these guys out. The disc comes in a killer six-panel gatefold case, and this CD version also features an exclusive industrial noise track that didn't appear on the original 12" vinyl that came out on Rifleman Records.
��The latest release from Black Autumn, another one of those little-known one-man bedroom black metal outfits that have been around for awhile (this one in particular having formed at some point around 2003), but whom I'd never heard of until I started to check out the stuff on Bylec-Tum Productions. Pretty cool stuff, though; Black Autumn's The Advent October delivers that blend of atmospheric black metal and arctic slowcore that I've been listening to a lot this winter, a sound all wreathed in rain and fog and ice that makes a perfect soundtrack for these perpetually overcast days slowly drifting by on slate-grey skies outside the window of C-Blast HQ. Black Autumn is the nom de plume of German gloom-sculptor Michael Krall, here presenting a twenty-two minute disc of high quality malaise that (from what I can tell) is a bit different from the band's earlier releases, which were apparently in more of a straightforward symphonic black metal vein, heavily influenced by the likes of Emperor. Since then, Black Autumn's sound has evolved dramatically, moving into a much moodier, more melodic style of black metal-influenced music that combines some buzzing blackened metallic elements with slower, vaguely doom-tinged heaviness and a smattering of interesting electronic textures that all add to the project's misty, miserable aura. The opening title track kicks in and almost immediately I'm picking up on a bit of a latter-day Katatonia vibe, especially whenever the jangly, somber guitar melodies and cold acoustic guitars start to emerge; later on, you get cold, melancholy synth strings that start to swell across tracks like "Dortke M�r", further filling out the band's overcast atmosphere of fog-enshrouded gloom and terminal loneliness, drifting out in soft waves from Advent October's music. Like most of the stuff on this disc, much of that song is purely instrumental, shifting from the heavier, thicker metallic guitars and thunderous double bass drumming into these beautiful passages of plaintive piano and layered, sampled voices, passages of gorgeously gloomy slowcore crawl that suddenly erupt into soaring, heavily emotional bursts of spacey, bluesy guitar soloing. I love the dusty-sounding pipe organ that shows up on "Dead As Martyrs March", too; the whole intro to that song sounds like some creepy gothic psychedelia, right before the song erupts into another one of his mournful, vaguely blackened melodies. And when the vocals come in, Krall delivers them in a vicious distorted rasp that creates an effective contrast with the dreamy, autumnal quality of his music. Lovely stuff, fans of all things "DSBM" and the relatively recent spate of black metal influenced gloom-rock outfits like Lantl�s, Amesoeurs, Hypomanie , Cold Body Radiation and Les Discrets will dig this, I'm sure. I definitely did. Limited to a single edition of one thousand copies.
There are few bands heavier than the hellspawn dronemetal of Campbell Kneale's Black Boned Angel, and the project emerges again with a new disc called Verdun that reminds us of just how punishing it can be. I've been listening to that Black Boned Angel collaboration with Nadja that came out recently quite a bit, but even as heavy as that is, I've been looking forward to some brand new industrial doomdrone crush of BBA undiluted, all controls set for the heart of Wormwood, unleashing gargantuan waves of black guitar oppression. This, Verdun delivers.
The desolate atmosphere of the charred battlefield hangs over this album; the title is a reference to the infamous WWI battle outside of the French city of Verdun-sur-Meuse, where the corpses of over half a million soldiers rotted in the trenches, and nearly hour-long track is divided into three sections, "Prayer Sodden Holes", "Tears Strike The Mile High Gong", and "Creeping Barrage", which seem to reference different states of war. Like the last album The Endless Coming to Life, there is as much spacious emptiness and suspension here as sheer skull-crushing heaviness, the first few minutes drifting through vaporous clouds of black mist and distant rumble, taking several minutes to congeal into a deep groaning rumble while a massive plodding drumbeat stalks through fields of echo. It takes awhile for the riff to drop in, but once it does, it's absolutely devastating; one moment, we're guided through the bleak ashen wasteland by that loud, stripped down, vaguely dubby drumbeat, the snare cracking through the air, the bass drum echoing through space, and then the monstrous descending riff caves in, utterly massive and crushing, a strange processed trebly tone giving the riff an almost industrial edge, buzzing and almost synthetic, but RIDICULOUSLY heavy. That doom riff slowly grinds its way through fields of black reverb and faint electronic hum, not so much accompanying the spartan drumming as totally overwhelming it, the titanic minor key riff slowly wrapping it's black wings around everything, sending off tendrils of textural feedback that seem to form into lush harmonic overtones. After ten minutes or so, the riff starts to come apart, slowing down and spreading out as peals of howling feedback appear, slow shifting blurs of ominous high-end shimmer and siren-like feedback, almost sounding like an air raid siren on dying batteries, as if this could sound any more threatening and apocalyptic. And then, everything drops out completely save for some sheets of murky feedback, hovering in space above a vast empty chasm, layers of high end hum slowly twisting and warping in midair, stretching out into a dismal, depressing dronescape for several minutes. The sound goes through some more changes, entering even more spacious passages of orchestral guitar chords and celestial drones, everything sounding equally processed and synthesized, for a moment sounding like heavily distorted synths looping in slow motion over minimal kosmiche keys, becoming doleful and darkly beautiful...until the guitars shift once again, turning into another incredibly crushing doom riff, only this time it's even more depressing and mournful, a massive funeral doom riff drifting through space, the drums returning even slower than before. It's oddly melodic, glorious even, like hearing an epic doom riff from Solitude Aeturnus or some other similar band slowed down to a time-stretching crawl. This riff continues to roll on, oozing over the virtually formless glacial drums, and eventually begins to disintegrate, the riff crumbling into a slow-mo avalanche of black distortion as majestic choir vocals appear, immersed in waves of delay and sonic detritus. And then, bit by bit, we begin to hear the encroaching sounds of battle, the explosions of mortars, artillery fire, machine guns erupting beneath the roiling black drone, but rising slowly to the surface, until the last few minutes where the sound completely erupts into a cacophony of warfare and screams.
This is quite possibly the heaviest Black Boned Angel yet. We've heard drumming on BBA albums before, but it's never been as prominent nor as heavy as it is here, and the riffage and bleak black ambience is immense. It was kind of easy to compare the earlier Black Boned Angel stuff to the ambient riffs and abstract dronedoom of the early Sunn albums, but with each new release the project moves further out into it's own realm of extreme industrial-strength avant doom, the focus on the texture and weight of the riff, carefully constructed and forged into absolute black-hole density.
Way beyond heavy, Campbell Kneale of Birchville Cat Motel resurfaces with his Black Boned Angel project, returning with this single track
disc, a megalithic river of ambient death stretching across the abyss at over an hour in length. "Bliss And Void, Inseperable" opens with distant
reverberations that at first sound like they could the thunderclaps of an encroaching storm crawling sluggishly across a dead grey sky, but then
transmogrifies into the plodding crash of a mountain-sized gong being rung by the hand of god as streams of austere feedback pour from out of the blackened
earth. For an incredibly grim eighteen minutes, the feedback drones hum and shimmer, until finally a massive doom riff surfaces, crawling along glacially, a
meeting of Skullflower and Corrupted and one hundred satanic monks chanting in unison. Towards the end, BBA's ultradoom dirge dissipates into an eerie
feedback-and-piano figure that closes out the track in a mist of transcendental amplifier choir. Utterly monolithic and amazing, by far the heaviest slab of
ambient doom from BBA. The packaging is a killer black-on-black gatefold sleeve, beautiful! Extremely recommended!
A brand new, 20 minute disc from Campbell Kneale's mega drone sludge beast, Black Boned Angel! Staring off with about a minute of churning, molten bass
distortion and high register, piercing feedback tones, Kneale then swoops in with a monolithic reptilian riff that lumbers across a starlit waste like some
ancient Cthulian form. The guitar tone on Eternal Hunger is a terrifying carnivorous, speaker shredding buzz, so thick and deep and downtuned that
it rattles your ribcage, backed with spacious, sparse earthshaking drum thunder, a bestial subharmonic mantra that is the closest that Black Boned Angel has
yet come to dredging up the gnarly void between Corrupted's Paso Inferior, Keiji Haino, and Sunn O)))'s OO Void. Then, abiut 10 minutes in,
a repetive piano melody surfaces, reminiscent of some minimal John Carpenter horror movie theme, repeating over and over for a couple of moments, before the
guitars and drums crash back in, but this time with a gloriously melodic, beautiful riff, over a bed of heavenly droning pipe organs, streaming down like
faint arcs of sunlight at the bottom of a deep impenetrable cave, like an even more epic Jesu, but cloaked in darkness and despair. Then, just after a few
minutes, the riff shuts down, and an extended series of tolling bells, conjured straight off of the beginning of Black Sabbath, enveloping you in
pure dread. This is the second actual CD release (following the equally bone crushing Black Temple Carved In Smoke CD from Mirag) on Campbell
Kneale's re-tooled Battlecruiser imprint, packahed in a killer black wallet sleeve imprinted in silver ink. Highly recommended.
The debut release from new avant-heavy imprint 20 Buck Spin (Pentagram , anyone?) unloads a 3 part earthquake in the form of BLACK BONED ANGEL, the sub-
harmonic drone alter ego of New Zealand drone favorite Campbell Kneale, a.k.a. BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL and head of Celebrate Psi Phenomenon. Now, comparisons to
SUNN O))) would be inevitable, if only due to the limited number of artists working in this spectrum, but Supereclipse could really only be compared to that
band's Flight Of The Behemoth, all sawtooth drone and bestial speaker hum. BLACK BONED ANGEL actually leans more towards the Tony Conrad / John Cale /
Theatre Of Eternal Music end of the "drone" sphere, and the transcendental feedback wash of Skullflower. That's not to say that SUNN O))) fans and doom/drone
heads won't lose their minds over this-they most definitely will; there is just a lot more to Supereclipse than free-feedback and detuned metal guitar. It's
more like SKULLFLOWER moving at a glacially slow pace, nightmarish and black as midnight, but with a monstrous undercurrent of melody.
Black Boned Angel traffics in pulverizing low-end dirge-drone, absolutely pitch black stuff, but remains anchored to Campbell Kneale's shimmering skree-
drone, free-noise aesthetic, with thunderous, high-end chord progressions seeping over the horizon like an apocalypse, as the earth shakes from monumental
tremors. There is CORRUPTED -esque ultraslow drumming and ghostly shades of rhythm and vocal incantations glimpsed from behind the suffocating thrum, which
add an incredibly epic feel to these 3 pieces. By now, you should know if this is up yopur alley or not; extreme doom freaks and drone heads are going to
LOSE THEIR MINDS over this. Supereclipse comes in a nice black digipack with white print and clear tray, with the mandate "Transcendence Can Only Be reached
At Maximum Volume" clearly stated on the interior.
Newish double header of flattening ritual-doom ambience from Black Boned Angel, the ambient sludge-metal alter ego of Birchville Cat Motel and Campbell Kneale. Each side of this record was previously available as a limited edition CD from Kneale's excellent Battlecruiser label, a small press imprint that specializes in all manner of blackened outsider metal weirdness, like the black noise of Skullflower alter-ego Mirag, and Devoid Of All Mercy's rustic backlot murder hymns. We carried the Eternal Hunger disc here but only for a second...it sold out within a week or so of us listing in the Crucial Blast catalog. Eternal Love, I never got a chance to pick up. Lucky for me (and for you), Riot Season stepped up a few months ago to release this LP that features each of the previously out-of-print tracks on it's own side. There are only 500 copies of this pressed, on black vinyl in a black jacket printed in metallic silver ink, and I doubt we'll have this avai
lable for long.
Here's my previous lip service to Eternal Hunger: A brand new, 20 minute disc from Campbell Kneale's mega drone sludge beast, Black Boned Angel! Staring off with about a minute of churning, molten bass distortion and high register, piercing feedback tones, Kneale then swoops in with a monolithic reptilian riff that lumbers across a starlit waste like some ancient Cthulian form. The guitar tone on Eternal Hunger is a terrifying carnivorous, speaker shredding buzz, so thick and deep and downtuned that it rattles your ribcage, backed with spacious, sparse earthshaking drum thunder, a bestial subharmonic mantra that is the closest that Black Boned Angel has yet come to dredging up the gnarly void between Corrupted's Paso Inferior, Keiji Haino, and Sunn O)))'s OO Void. Then, abiut 10 minutes in, a repetive piano melody surfaces, reminiscent of some minimal John Carpenter horror movie theme, repeating over and over for a couple of moments, before the guitars and drums cra
sh back in, but this time with a gloriously melodic, beautiful riff, over a bed of heavenly droning pipe organs, streaming down like faint arcs of sunlight at the bottom of a deep impenetrable cave, like an even more epic Jesu, but cloaked in darkness and despair. Then, just after a few minutes, the riff shuts down, and an extended series of tolling bells, conjured straight off of the beginning of Black Sabbath, enveloping you in pure dread.
The Eternal Love side is just as outrageously crushing. A twenty minute track of shadowy free drone that starts off rather tranquil, a grim bassline plucked out over a super minimal drumbeat, huge stretches of silence between notes and beats, clanking metal and scraping iron gates grating on rusted hinges, a dark shadowy void of subtle ghostly drift with dank basement vibe that lurks for over half the track until it finally collapses into a massive black hole of ultra-distorted riffage. The last half of the track is an incredibly blown out, jet-black whirlpool of downtuned bass drone, plodding machine pulses pounding way off in the distance, and an impossibly slow motion doom riff grinding into the void. It all fades away into several minutes of what sounds like heavy rainfall that closes the side.
A crucial slab from one of the heaviest bands on the planet, whose mega pulverizing ambient dirge is as punishing and transcendent as anything from early Melvins albums, Sunn O))), Earth's 2, Skullflower, Boris, and other dealers in abstracted crush.
Campbell Kneale's (Birchville Cat Motel) isolationist dronemetal monstrosity is back, heavier than ever on this new full length disc; this time, he's joined by fellow New Zealand artist (and a C-Blast customer from way back) James Kirk, who some of you might know from his NZ free-noise group Sandoz Lab Technicians. Acting in newfound duo mode, we get something a little different on this BBA monolith...
It's just one massive continuous hour long track, a sinister expanse of dark ambience that opens with flurries of tinkling chimes, deep echoing resonances, eerie far-off rumblings, and distant streaks of high-pitched sound existing in cavernous black space. In time, a single electric guitar appears, but instead of crushing downtuned chords or rumbling amplifier waves, it's a simple, plaintive series of strummed chords that hang in midair and decay into the blackness, dark and dolorous, a Codeine riff strummed in slow motion and floating through a vast underground chasm. This slowly drifting, minor key melody is beautifully dreamy, even as strange grunting sounds begin to drift up from the abyss, low, snarling pig-like sounds hovering back at the edge of your hearing. This continues for awhile, the slow chords and dark drift stretching out over half an hour and creating a narcotized haze until suddenly THAT RIFF finally crashes in, thirty minutes in, a monolithic jet-engine grinding that erupts out of the void. It's deafening and ultra distorted, a blackened digitally processed drone roaring over monstrous, minimal drums and shimmering electronic debris and dense layers of tonal fluctuations, the riff shuddering and shifting in space, sending out cascades of feedback and speaker buzz. It's like some modulated, processed version of Corrupted, a massive black hole of grinding, industrial dirge. The final fifteen minutes or so of the track settles into a feedback soaked dronescape, the distorted guitars dissipating and leaving only smears of howling, high-end feedback in their place, until the sound finally breaks down into a fragile whir of prayer-bowl tones and looping metallic clinks that fades away into silence. Another top-notch slab of meditative, earth-swallowing drone from Campbell and co, packaged beautifully in a black digipack with black gloss printing.
Also available on vinyl.
There are few bands heavier than the hellspawn dronemetal of Campbell Kneale's Black Boned Angel, and the project emerges again with a new disc called Verdun that reminds us of just how punishing it can be. I've been listening to that Black Boned Angel collaboration with Nadja that came out recently quite a bit, but even as heavy as that is, I've been looking forward to some brand new industrial doomdrone crush of BBA undiluted, all controls set for the heart of Wormwood, unleashing gargantuan waves of black guitar oppression. This, Verdun delivers.
The desolate atmosphere of the charred battlefield hangs over this album; the title is a reference to the infamous WWI battle outside of the French city of Verdun-sur-Meuse, where the corpses of over half a million soldiers rotted in the trenches, and nearly hour-long track is divided into three sections, "Prayer Sodden Holes", "Tears Strike The Mile High Gong", and "Creeping Barrage", which seem to reference different states of war. Like the last album The Endless Coming to Life, there is as much spacious emptiness and suspension here as sheer skull-crushing heaviness, the first few minutes drifting through vaporous clouds of black mist and distant rumble, taking several minutes to congeal into a deep groaning rumble while a massive plodding drumbeat stalks through fields of echo. It takes awhile for the riff to drop in, but once it does, it's absolutely devastating; one moment, we're guided through the bleak ashen wasteland by that loud, stripped down, vaguely dubby drumbeat, the snare cracking through the air, the bass drum echoing through space, and then the monstrous descending riff caves in, utterly massive and crushing, a strange processed trebly tone giving the riff an almost industrial edge, buzzing and almost synthetic, but RIDICULOUSLY heavy. That doom riff slowly grinds its way through fields of black reverb and faint electronic hum, not so much accompanying the spartan drumming as totally overwhelming it, the titanic minor key riff slowly wrapping it's black wings around everything, sending off tendrils of textural feedback that seem to form into lush harmonic overtones. After ten minutes or so, the riff starts to come apart, slowing down and spreading out as peals of howling feedback appear, slow shifting blurs of ominous high-end shimmer and siren-like feedback, almost sounding like an air raid siren on dying batteries, as if this could sound any more threatening and apocalyptic. And then, everything drops out completely save for some sheets of murky feedback, hovering in space above a vast empty chasm, layers of high end hum slowly twisting and warping in midair, stretching out into a dismal, depressing dronescape for several minutes. The sound goes through some more changes, entering even more spacious passages of orchestral guitar chords and celestial drones, everything sounding equally processed and synthesized, for a moment sounding like heavily distorted synths looping in slow motion over minimal kosmiche keys, becoming doleful and darkly beautiful...until the guitars shift once again, turning into another incredibly crushing doom riff, only this time it's even more depressing and mournful, a massive funeral doom riff drifting through space, the drums returning even slower than before. It's oddly melodic, glorious even, like hearing an epic doom riff from Solitude Aeturnus or some other similar band slowed down to a time-stretching crawl. This riff continues to roll on, oozing over the virtually formless glacial drums, and eventually begins to disintegrate, the riff crumbling into a slow-mo avalanche of black distortion as majestic choir vocals appear, immersed in waves of delay and sonic detritus. And then, bit by bit, we begin to hear the encroaching sounds of battle, the explosions of mortars, artillery fire, machine guns erupting beneath the roiling black drone, but rising slowly to the surface, until the last few minutes where the sound completely erupts into a cacophony of warfare and screams.
This is quite possibly the heaviest Black Boned Angel yet. We've heard drumming on BBA albums before, but it's never been as prominent nor as heavy as it is here, and the riffage and bleak black ambience is immense. It was kind of easy to compare the earlier Black Boned Angel stuff to the ambient riffs and abstract dronedoom of the early Sunn albums, but with each new release the project moves further out into it's own realm of extreme industrial-strength avant doom, the focus on the texture and weight of the riff, careful
��Another blast of low-fi, noisy black metal filth from Dungeon Tapes, A Corpse, A Temple is a new CD reissue of the first full-length album from Portugese carrion creeper Black Cilice. This reclusive one-man band has been putting out a bunch of terrifically skuzzy recordings over the past few years, short blasts of blown-out graveyard delirium drenched in intensely raw and noisy blackness, usually issued in tiny editions on 7" or cassette on labels like Discipline and Cocainacopia. On A Corpse, the band's raw, cave-dwelling vibe continues unabated, screaming out of the shadows with all of the urgency of a raw four-track hardcore punk demo recorded on some beat up four-track in 1982. Take the opener "The Gate Of Sulphur", a tumbling mess of hyperfast drums thrashing so furiously that they become a blur of cymbal hiss, the singer's lunatic howl echoing madly in the shadows, as everything becomes swept up in a furious blizzard of tiny low-fi black metal. When the song downshifts into a passage of rocking mid-tempo propulsion, that black echo-laden buzz shifts into a primitive off-kilter chug, transforming into a vaguely punk-rock style stomp that surges out of the swirling clouds of EVP-like static. As the album goes on, that seemingly wordless, inchoate howling is smeared over the bleary melodies of the guitar, and the cavernous low-fi recording casts the whole thing in a strange dim haze that feels like this was recorded in some crumbling, abandoned chapel. Those rapidly picked tremolo melodies are one of Black Cilice's distinguishing marks, the tinny speedfreak melodies taking on an almost Mick Barr-like quality as they race around the primitive blackness, frantically fluttering within the murk. The songs often drop into pounding, primal rhythms, the drums like bones banging on coffin lids while regal frostbitten melodies curl into the air like incense smoke, all while werewolves sing in the encroaching twilight gloom. There are moments on A Corpse where things become a kind of discordant, stumbling dirge, wrecked and wretched and almost Jandekian, like the warped shamble of "Blood To Murder" before that song takes flight into blackened buzzing noise. And there's a couple of moments of regal beauty, such as the aching, dreamlike melody that surfaces on "Resurrection Of Dead Curses". Like all of the other recent Black Cilice releases, this is some fantastically harsh, noisy low-fi blackness that can sometimes be reminiscent of some of those old Les L�gions Noires outfits, the music teeming with unearthly shrieks lost behind the curtain of night, wailing voices weeping at their newfound comprehension of the immanence of the void and the inevitability of rot.
�� Comes in digipack packaging.
Summoning The Night is the latest album from my current favorite Portuguese black metal band, Black Cilice, featuring more stunning, blown-out ramshackle majesty from this one-man outfit. Six songs of low-fi blackness that have that same unpolished, "Black Chamber" rehearsal-space recording style as all of the band's other recordings, which for me is a great part of the appeal behind Black Cilice's murky, mysterious black metal. That grimy, subterranean aesthetic, along with the atmospheric, emotional quality of the songwriting, makes Black Cilice's music a strange beast; noisy and drenched in reverb, yet buried not very deep beneath all of that rawness and roughness is some intensely moving songcraft, powerful melodies washing across the din of clanking drums and repetitive tremolo riffs, the instruments dissolving into one another as they transform into a wall of sound. The layered guitar noise builds into some shockingly gorgeous guitar-skree blowouts throughout Summoning The Night that are at times seemingly only a few steps removed from the sound of some super-raw live recording of a classic shoegaze outfit, blown out beyond all recognition.
This ain't no "blackgaze" though, despite how catchy and pretty some of these layered melodic riffs can become; songs like "Judgment" and "Chaos And Evil" are furious, ice-encrusted blasts of blackness, those bizarre wailing vocals a smear of abject misery glowing in the distance, seemingly wordless howls that almost seem to be electronically processed. The songs suddenly shift into barbaric, stomping, almost punk-like riffs at times, causing seismic eruptions of violent power whenever the songs suddenly swing into one of these vicious temp changes. And there's that hallucinatory feel to Black Cilice's stuff that continues to remind me of some of the noisier projects that came out of the French Black Legions (particularly Vampires of Black Imperial Blood-era Mutiilation), with a slight out-of-phase quality to everything, probably due to the sheer distorted overload of the recording, a quality that further transforms these songs into something deformed yet dreamlike, the blasting echo-drenched churn of the guitars reaching blissed-out levels of harmonic overload. With Summoning, Black Cilice continues to produce some of the catchiest noise-damaged black metal that I've been listening to lately - can't recommend this or his other albums enough for fans of regal, no-fi black metal.
Black Cobra's ass crushing debut drops ten tons of mighty sludge on your skull using just a drums and guitar setup. Not many duos could pull off something
this heavy with that kind of palette, but Black Cobra features ex-dudes from low-frequency violators Cavity and 16 (Jason and Rafael, respectively), so we're
talking masters of controlled crunch here, and thanks to some seriously downtuned guitar and monolithic drumming, there is no lack of serious low end and
bone crushing HEAVY. Apparently this originally took shape as a tape-swapping exercise via mail, with infrequent jam sessions during family visits in Miami
over the course of four years, resulting in this eleven song album of ultra-distorto sludgecore that lumbers along a mutant hybrid of old Floor and Karp
thrashing out on some sticky, droning, Matt Pike/Sleep/HOF -style riffage. SWEET. Massive hooks, crazed dinosaur-stomp drumming, squealing feedback, hypnotic
song structures, all communicated via a nuclear strength doomcore rawk assault. Recommended!!
Black Cobra's ass crushing debut drops ten tons of mighty sludge on your skull using just a drums and guitar setup. Not many duos could pull off something
this heavy with that kind of palette, but Black Cobra features ex-dudes from low-frequency violators Cavity and 16 (Jason and Rafael, respectively), so we're
talking masters of controlled crunch here, and thanks to some seriously downtuned guitar and monolithic drumming, there is no lack of serious low end and
bone crushing HEAVY. Apparently this originally took shape as a tape-swapping exercise via mail, with infrequent jam sessions during family visits in Miami
over the course of four years, resulting in this eleven song album of ultra-distorto sludgecore that lumbers along a mutant hybrid of old Floor and Karp
thrashing out on some sticky, droning, Matt Pike/Sleep/HOF -style riffage. SWEET. Massive hooks, crazed dinosaur-stomp drumming, squealing feedback, hypnotic
song structures, all communicated via a nuclear strength doomcore rawk assault. Recommended!!
Brutal, BRUTAL new one from Black Cobra, the San Fran guitar/drums duo who have been kicking all kinds of hesher ass across the globe since the release of
their Bestial debut. This eight song disc doesn't change things up at all from their debut, serving up more of their trademark beatings of downtuned
sludge metal heaviness that marries the awesome, megadistorted bomb string crunch of early Floor with the rolling battle metal of High On Fire, and at this
point Black Cobra has not only become the heaviest two-piece band on the planet, but these guys have truly become masters of the battle-riff. Seriously,
every time "Red Tide" and it's onslaught of brootal bass-heavy Iommi riffing and manic tribal beats kick in, the entire Crucial Blast office is suddenly
overcome with the urge to stage a Viking raid on the local bodega. Luckily for downtown Hagerstown shop owners, Black Cobra also ddeliver a mellow
psychedelic instrumenal with the spaced out, delay n' flange soaked acid jam "Thanos" that shows up in the middle of the album that settles a deep lava-lamp
hue on the album. But the real standout on the album is "Ascension", which begins with subdued solo guitar picking, erupts into a massive hypnotic trance
dirge, and then slips into an awesome krautrock coda a la Ash Ra Tempel! This CD is actually a rerelease of the tracks that appeared on Black Cobra's split
with Eternal Elysium, which was only available in Japan. Packaged up in a digipack case and joined by an unreleased bonus track, this also contains awesome
live video of the band's set at the Roadburn Festival from earlier this year.
A sweet-looking new LP edition of Black Cobra's latest battery Feather And Stone, issued in a gatefold jacket and pressed on heavy black vinyl, and accompanied by a plastic dropcard that allows you to download the release digitally.
Brutal, BRUTAL new one from Black Cobra, the San Fran guitar/drums duo who have been kicking all kinds of hesher ass across the globe since the release of
their Bestial debut. This eight song disc doesn't change things up at all from their debut, serving up more of their trademark beatings of downtuned
sludge metal heaviness that marries the awesome, megadistorted bomb string crunch of early Floor with the rolling battle metal of High On Fire, and at this
point Black Cobra has not only become the heaviest two-piece band on the planet, but these guys have truly become masters of the battle-riff. Seriously,
every time "Red Tide" and it's onslaught of brootal bass-heavy Iommi riffing and manic tribal beats kick in, the entire Crucial Blast office is suddenly
overcome with the urge to stage a Viking raid on the local bodega. Luckily for downtown Hagerstown shop owners, Black Cobra also ddeliver a mellow
psychedelic instrumenal with the spaced out, delay n' flange soaked acid jam "Thanos" that shows up in the middle of the album that settles a deep lava-lamp
hue on the album. But the real standout on the album is "Ascension", which begins with subdued solo guitar picking, erupts into a massive hypnotic trance
dirge, and then slips into an awesome krautrock coda a la Ash Ra Tempel! These tracks are actually a rerelease of the tracks that appeared on Black Cobra's split with Eternal Elysi
This is the EP that introduced the sludgy drums and guitar duo Black Cobra to the world, a three song 7" that came out on a German label called Black Flash Records in 2005. The songs are short and quick and clobber you with distorted Karp-like riffage, huge buzzing low-end crunch, pounding midpaced drums, super heavy and chunky, "Interceptor" on the a-side, "Fall And Fall Again" and "Silverblack" on the other. These songs pummel and flatten and it's all over in around six minutes, but after it's finished I feel like someone just threw a wet mattress on top of me. The original Black Flash 7" has been out of print for awhile, so At A Loss stepped in and reissued it with new artwork on the glued pocket sleeves. Into Floor, Torche, Saviours, High On Fire, 16, and Cavity?
This'll be right up your alley. Too damn short though - I would've liked to have heard these beefy riffs pounded out for a bit longer!
Nobody brings the monstrous riffcrush better than Black Cobra, who follow up their first pair of albums on At A Loss with Chronomega, their third album and first for their new label home at Southern Lord. This ultra-amped drums/guitar duo, whose members have previously cracked skulls in 16, Cavity and Acid King, continues to serve up their sludgy, ferocious thrash in huge bottom-heavy chunks of juggernaut heaviness, and the riffs are so big, so crunchy on these eight new songs that you never wonder where the bass guitar went to. Man, this album is riff-fucking-city, and every song is weighted down with at least one absolute crusher. The guitars are tuned seriously low, down to teeth-rattling frequencies, the snarling vocals are tough as nails, and the drumming is fluid and furious, a pounding battle-drum assault the roils and churns beneath the grinding riffage on songs like "Negative Reversal", "Zero Point field" and the title track. Black Cobra still remind me of a super-metallized version of Karp crossed with the sludgy thrash metal of High On Fire, and their sound hasn't changed on Chronomega, there's still some of that spacey atmosphere that creeps into some of the songs just like with the earlier albums, some swirling vocals here, trippy melodic leads there, weaving around the often trancey riffs and pummeling low-end heaviness, and closer "Nefarian Triangle" has some spacey Middle Eastern-tinged psych guitar that reminds me of something from Warhorse's As Heaven Turns To Ash. Supremely brutal metal, and clearly a must-get for fans of stuff like High On Fire, Melvins, Karp, Baroness, Torche and Zoroaster.
Now available on limited-edition vinyl, and includes an oversized LP-size full color booklet.
Nobody brings the monstrous riffcrush better than Black Cobra, who follow up their first pair of albums on At A Loss with Chronomega, their third album and first for their new label home at Southern Lord. This ultra-amped drums/guitar duo, whose members have previously cracked skulls in 16, Cavity and Acid King, continues to serve up their sludgy, ferocious thrash in huge bottom-heavy chunks of juggernaut heaviness, and the riffs are so big, so crunchy on these eight new songs that you never wonder where the bass guitar went to. Man, this album is riff-fucking-city, and every song is weighted down with at least one absolute crusher. The guitars are tuned seriously low, down to teeth-rattling frequencies, the snarling vocals are tough as nails, and the drumming is fluid and furious, a pounding battle-drum assault the roils and churns beneath the grinding riffage on songs like "Negative Reversal", "Zero Point field" and the title track. Black Cobra still remind me of a super-metallized version of Karp crossed with the sludgy thrash metal of High On Fire, and their sound hasn't changed on Chronomega, there's still some of that spacey atmosphere that creeps into some of the songs just like with the earlier albums, some swirling vocals here, trippy melodic leads there, weaving around the often trancey riffs and pummeling low-end heaviness, and closer "Nefarian Triangle" has some spacey Middle Eastern-tinged psych guitar that reminds me of something from Warhorse's As Heaven Turns To Ash. Supremely brutal metal, and clearly a must-get for fans of stuff like High On Fire, Melvins, Karp, Baroness, Torche and Zoroaster.
Whoa. This British black/doom band appeared out of nowhere with debut album To Pay The Debt Of Nature, and it's one of the most fucked/tortured albums of its kind to come through the doors here. Bearing a thoroughly ugly and misshapen sound, Black Crow King mashes together chunks of drunken, shambling doom metal, extreme electronic noise, crusty blood-gargling vocals and some of the most whacked guitar noodling this side of a Sloth album, producing something that sounds undeniably "off". I was hooked by the second song, where monolithic slabs of slow-mo guitar drift over what seems to be a totally improvised drum performance, and church organs are blurred into gorgeous majestic melodies rising in deformed clouds of whirr and buzz over clanking pianos and surges of ultra-abrasive doom-slop. This mutant blackened sludge-psych is the product of sole member Corvus Rex, who some of you may know from the blackened power electronics outfit Project: Void, whose awesome Anthropogenic Process cassette was released by Crucial Blast earlier this year. It was that connection that initially led me to check out BCK, but I was knocked out by how fucked and hideous this sounds, an irradiated cacophony comprised of random piano and horror-movie synths, blasts of Goslings-esque sludge beauty, string sections, jarring riffs that contort unpredictably through the filthy lumbering heaviness and Abruptumish chaos, all polluted with a crapload of brain-damaged electronics and random drum machine splatter that continuously pushes this over the edge into total mania. The production is white-hot, the guitars and vocals pushed all the way into the red until they erupt into chunks of pure distortion, and there's a meandering, stream-of-consciousness quality to these songs that makes this sound pretty schizo, and keeps evoking the twisted improvisational spirit of Abruptum the more I listen to it, some alternate-world version of Abruptum that somehow managed to get its hands on Joe Preston's drum machine for Thrones and set the controls to "freak-out". So yeah, Black Crow King's brand of lunacy is going to be far too weird for most, especially if you are looking for a more straight-forward approach to doom metal, but for those into the far fringes of bizarro doom inhabited by Korperscwache, Black Mayonnaise, The Whorehouse Massacre, Reclusa, Hallowed Butchery, Rigor Sardonicous and old Sloth, this is definitely worth checking out...
���� Was kind of surprised that Coronation didn't seem to get more attention from the outr� metal crowd when it originally came out. The third album from these long-running Finnish black metallers is a compelling combination of their blackened heaviness and sinister avant-prog, which I thought was one of the more effective albums of its kind. It definitely taps into a bunch of my favorite sounds - Nephilim-esque goth rock, Frostian crush, violent black metal, vintage 70's-era progressive rock - and bring it all together into this rousing album that has a strong current of surrealistic strangeness.
���� This is a newer Australian reissue of Coronation, which originally came out on Spinefarm/Svart back in 2013. Although Black Crucifixion has been around for about as long as their pals in Beherit, and delivered a similarly oddball (though totally different) brand of black metal in their early days, these guys have remained less well known, at least over here in the US. They've put out some killer stuff over the years though, from the bestial blackness of their earliest demos to the low-fi Frostian weirdness of the Promeathean Gift EP and the crushing gothic metal of 2006's Faustian Dream. Through all of this stuff, they've pursued an experimental agenda that made 'em more interesting than most bands from that era, and a lot of their stuff was tinged with a subtle death rock influence - you can really tell that these guys were big fans of old Christian Death.
���� On Coronation Of King Darkness, Black Crucifixion's black metal origins still blare through these eight songs loud and clear, as does their long held Celtic Frost influences, but when the guitars start to unfold into soaring, spacey leads and complex, almost Floydian melodies, this stuff can get pretty proggy. It sort of has a similar vibe as recent works from Ihsahn and Enslaved, combining strong metallic riffing and pummeling double-bass rhythms with bursts of furious speed and blackened tremolo picking, but then that morose goth rock element rears its head once you get into the second song "What The Night Birds Sang", dark and brooding and catchy. The songwriting is fairly straightforward, with moments of moody grandeur that wouldn't sound out of pace on a particularly heavy late 80's goth album; when the twangy guitars start weeping all over songs like "Gallows", it's vaguely reminiscent of Fields Of The Nephilim. But then elsewhere those echoes of prog get intertwined with strange electronic melodies and more aggressive blasts of rampaging black metal, or gloomy acoustic guitars drifting around massive sludgy riffs, haunting passages where the metallic crush is fused to the drone of woodwinds, and the guttural, consonant-heavy quality of the Finnish-language lyrics add a harshness to the music that makes this all the more distinctive. Really great stuff, definitely worth checking out if you're into more adventurous stuff with undercurrents of classic gothic metal. Has some terrific album art from Erkki Nampajarvi too, which adorns the album in a weird Boschian tableau.
It's been years since I've heard new stuff from Clint Listig; his Dragonflight label put out some interesting dark ambient and neo-folk albums in the early half of the last decade, and this output included some interesting records from his own projects which included the neo-folk outfit As All Die, the symphonic doom metal band Long Winters Stare, and the dark ambience of When Joy Becomes Sadness. It appears that Listig is back with a new outfit called Black Depths Grey Waves, a duo with a character named Saint Ov Gravediggers, who I've heard before from the obscure, underappreciated black industrial doom band Ordo Tyrannis; their Vasa Iniquitatis album (Flood The Earth, 2006) received a lot of play around here back when it came out. Here, the two musicians have teamed up for this black industrial outfit whose debut for Aesthetic Death combines a harsh noise aesthetic with the blackest sort of ambient drone and a heavy dose of occult subject matter. This is really cool stuff. The three tracks on Nightmare... submerge heavily processed incantations, warped minor key synthesizer melodies and backwards black metal riffs, and pitch-black bass-heavy drones in clouds of swarming black static; on the opener "The Hunt For Greater Truth", the sound suggests a meeting between the satanic industrial rituals of MZ412 and the crackling static walls of Werewolf Jerusalem. It's an unexpected mix of sounds, but it works well here. The middle track "3rd Candle For The Fallen" is more hallucinatory and layered, a swirling fog of metallic drones and roaring subterranean wind and crackling shortwave static; through this murky wall of sound you can detect all kinds of strange whirrs and whispers and melted backwards-running melodies, eventually joined once again by that withered gasping voice reciting strange Crowleyian verses. The last track is the highlight here, though; "Final Key To Pure Thought" is a Robitussin-soaked dirge with a gluey doom metal riff that is played backwards and looped over and over while corrosive static washes over it, and a processed goblin-voice snarls over top alongside pitch shifted bestial howling. With this, the duo conjures something akin to hearing Blue Sabbath Black Cheer performing the background music for a black mass. Grim stuff that makes for a supremely brain-blackening listening experience.
Comes in digipack packaging.
If you've never heard the early Black Dice recordings and only know the band from their albums Beaches And Canyons or their more recent offerings on Paw Tracks, boy are you ever in for a surprise. Before these Rhode Island art school grads started flexing their inner Eno and began experimenting with electronic textures and krautrock-inspired soundforms, they carved out big bloody chunks of berserk avant-hardcore thrash that sounded a whole hell of a lot like Void immersed in ear-wrecking bursts of harsh noise, a raucous and violent assault of sludgy hardcore, blown out to oblivion, ultra noisy and chaotic, and completely fucked and insane sounding. Black Dice never sounded more psychotic than on their very first self-titled 7" on Gravity Records from 1998, a six song beating of filthy chaos and feedback-soiled thrash that includes the noxious hardcore dirge of "Lambs Like Fruit", "Synapse Synapse" gnarled mid-paced thrash and the angular noise freak-out of "To The Lions". On the b-side, we get the bestial noise-punk of "Narcissus & Echo", the disintegrating, collapsing thrash of "New Design", and the tribal drumming and volleys of acidic guitar noise and gargling vox and messed up riffs of "Rereading". The songs are barely two minutes long, riffs falling apart, drumming so chaotic that it seems as if the entire drum kit is about to fly apart, the band barely keeping in time with one another. Packaged in a full color jacket with a glossy insert, this EP is one of the most scathing fucked-up hardcore records of the late 90's in my opinion - highly recommended.
I stumbled across these guys online totally by accident, and immediately fell under their weird spell after hearing these songs on their website. Black Elk's
heavy, manic sludgy rock assault smashed into my skull like some sort of conglom of carnivorous DIY hardcore, noise rock, and metal. This eponymous album is
equal parts primo Pacific Northwest sludginess a la Karp, Melvins, and early Soundgarden (back when they were one of the heaviest sludge bands to
emerge from the post-punk 80's), weird angular noise rock like something that Am Rep might have puked up back in '91, but meaner and heavier, and the
distinctive snarl of Die Kruezen, all distilled into a goatheaded psychedelic backwoods dance party that has risen to a freakin' fever pitch and which
threatens to leave you in a bag by the river when it's all said and done. Total fucking crush. Produced by Mike Lastra at Smegma Studios (EARTH, THRONES,
JACKIE O MOTHERFUCKER).
This new shirt features a high-quality two-color print of original artwork from Mark McCormick at Mad Pakyderms in Portland, Oregon. The artwork first appeared on a silkscreened show poster that Mark created for the Spring 2007 tour with Black Elk, Ludicra and Giant Squid, and when I saw the poster design, I decided immediately that we had to print up a shirt using this artwork.
Yer looking at the red and white silkscreened print, printed on a black hanes heavyweight 100% cotton preshrunk garment.
This new shirt features a high-quality two-color print of original artwork from Mark McCormick at Mad Pakyderms in Portland, Oregon. The artwork first appeared on a silkscreened show poster that Mark created for the Spring 2007 tour with Black Elk, Ludicra and Giant Squid, and when I saw the poster design, I decided immediately that we had to print up a shirt using this artwork.
Yer looking at the red and white silkscreened print, printed on a black hanes heavyweight 100% cotton preshrunk garment.
This new shirt features a high-quality two-color print of original artwork from Mark McCormick at Mad Pakyderms in Portland, Oregon. The artwork first appeared on a silkscreened show poster that Mark created for the Spring 2007 tour with Black Elk, Ludicra and Giant Squid, and when I saw the poster design, I decided immediately that we had to print up a shirt using this artwork.
Yer looking at the red and white silkscreened print, printed on a black hanes heavyweight 100% cotton preshrunk garment.
This new shirt features a high-quality two-color print of original artwork from Mark McCormick at Mad Pakyderms in Portland, Oregon. The artwork first appeared on a silkscreened show poster that Mark created for the Spring 2007 tour with Black Elk, Ludicra and Giant Squid, and when I saw the poster design, I decided immediately that we had to print up a shirt using this artwork.
Yer looking at the red and white silkscreened print, printed on a black hanes heavyweight 100% cotton preshrunk garment.
This new shirt features a high-quality two-color print of original artwork from Mark McCormick at Mad Pakyderms in Portland, Oregon. The artwork first appeared on a silkscreened show poster that Mark created for the Spring 2007 tour with Black Elk, Ludicra and Giant Squid, and when I saw the poster design, I decided immediately that we had to print up a shirt using this artwork.
Yer looking at the red and white silkscreened print, printed on a black hanes heavyweight 100% cotton preshrunk garment.
Black Elk�s eponymous 2006 debut on Crucial Blast was a ferocious rush of ultra-heavy, jagged noise rock with a penchant for creating moments of lethal build-and-release, some wonderfully malevolent riffage with a massive, bottom-heavy undertow, and creepy, often disturbing lyrics delivered via the wailing, yowling throat of singer Tom Glose. Glose�s singing has often invoked comparisons to that of David Yow from Jesus Lizard, and Black Elk do seem to channel the demented power of the Chicago noise rock legends alongside their other influences (sludge metal, late 90's math-damaged hardcore, even hints of black metal, etc.), taking their influences and filtering them through their super-heavy metallic filter. If you were a big fan of that whole Am Rep/Touch And Go/noise rock scene from back in the 90's, and like yer gnarly rock crushing and psychotic sounding, you'd probably fall in love with Black Elk the first time you heard 'em.
Here we are two years later after the released of that killer debut, and we're totally knocked flat by Black Elk's second album Always A Six, Never A Nine. If you liked their first album, I'll bet my lunch that this new one will blow you away. From the suggestive album title and Tom Glose's deeply weird lyrics to the ten songs of aggro wreckage and crushing, noise-rock influenced heaviosity, this goddamn album is one the raddest post-Am Rep exercises in riff-induced panic, molten rock and menacing bad-assery sitting in my stereo pile right now. That metallic Jesus Lizard/Melvins influenced sound that their first album delivered - the jagged, angular riffs and math-deformed rhythms slithering through delirious night sweats and paranoia - has been further developed into a set of songs that altogether border on the epic. And Tom's singing is even more crazed and freaked-out sounding than before. Which is saying alot. The band has also begun to incorporate some atmospheric elements like flourishes of piano, layered ambience, and, um, some rather "blackened" guitar moves that add some deep new shadows to Black Elk's fearsome set, and at the same time, the band has written their catchiest music so far for Never A Six..., with some fantastic, jangly melodic hooks surfacing in the midst of songs like "Brine" and "Winter Formal".
This CD is packaged in a deluxe Stoughton gatefold jacket that includes an eight-panel insert with lyrics and artwork.
Finally have this back in stock!
The debut from Black Engine Ku Klux Klowns was released over a year ago, but the labels that put it out have little distribution here in the U.S. and I've had a hell of a time trying to get enough copies of this to list. Finally just picked it up for C-Blast, though...the reason that I've been hunting this down for so long? I've got three words for you: ZU + IMPROV GRINDCORE. That's right, Black Engine features our favorite Italian hardcore jazz/prog band Zu teaming up with the established Italian sound artist and longtime Bill Laswell collaborator Eraldo Bernocchi for a monstrous set of ultra-heavy improv free jazz/death metal instrumental destruction that sounds like an even burlier version of Painkiller. I've really been getting into that early 90's Pathological/Avant sound that bands like Painkiller and Last Exit pioneered, bringing together high energy, ferocious free jazz playing with extreme metal guitars and distortion and speedfreak drumming...Execution Ground, Guts Of A Virgin and Koln have all been dominating my disc player lately, and when I finally got around to spinning Black Engine's album, it was a dream come true - finally, a band picking up where Painkiller left off, fusing crushing heaviness with fierce jazz improvisation and infiltrating the brutal scud attacks with a malevolent ambience. Don't let the punny title and track titles like "Fishtank Midget Surfer" fool you into thinking that there is anything jokey about Black Engine. The album begins with hammering "I Hate Clowns", brutal downtuned metal riffs colliding with spaced out free jazz, squealing sax blowouts drenched in echo and other effects and flying in circles around cyclic drum/bass machine rhythms, the bass guitar tuned down so low and so heavily distorted that it has an almost death metal level of low-end heaviness. The shapeless death/grind riffs slither through deconstructed blastbeats and free-drumming, black cosmic electronics and trippy dub effects. The rest of the tracks on the album are just as free and crushing, sometimes launching into high-speed blastbeat ridden grind, sometimes falling back into subdued passages of sinister urban jazz with dark Middle Eastern-tinged melodies, but mostly the band gets wound into super-tight rhythmic distorto jams with amazing alto and baritone sax blowing and subsonic freeform riffing. Absolutely recommended to fans of Painkiller, Ruins, God, and Last Exit. Comes packaged in a digipack with creepy artwork of a body fully wrapped in plastic.
One brutal platter of sludgecore brutality, served on transparent red vinyl courtesy of the UK imprint Calculon! Black Eye Riot were a band that we'd
heard about previously through Terrorizer and a couple of other prominent metal magazines, but hadn't actually gotten the chance to hear 'em up until now.
Man, are these guys ferocious! Featuring members of Acrimony, Iron Monkey, Helvis, and Dukes Of Nothing, BER are like a sludgemetal soundtrack to a stabbing,
ripping through two ultra negative tracks ("Bitch Slap" and "Battered By Elephants"), a super harsh and aggro hybrid of crusty hardcore punk and dissonant
wah-freakout sludge, like a mashup of Eyehategod, garage rock guitars, and Discharge with fucking murderous dual vocalists trading off between gruff hardcore
shouts and feral screams. Fucking awesome! Charger appears on the B-side with "The Amputee", opening with a syrupy blob of sampled music and noise before
raging through the song proper, another monstrous jam meshing violent hardcore with saurian sludge riffs, a totally damaged number that reminds us of an even
more fucked up Fistula before the band devolves into a skull stomping dirge that gradually melts down into diseased feedback. Pressed on transparent red
vinyl in a limited edition of 500 copies.
Big-time anticipation for this when the formation of the band was announced a year or so ago, just based on the names involved; Chuck Dukowski, founding member of Black Flag and one of the main brains behind SST Records, joining up with Eugene Robinson from Oxbow/Whipping Boy (the former a previous SST act themselves) to play a bunch of tunes that Dukowski originally wrote back during his tenure in Black Flag? It sounded very promising, although even as a fan of both men's assorted endeavors over the years, I'd been having a tough time envisioning exactly what Black Face would end up sounding like. Well, the first offering from the group was finally bestowed upon us in the form of this teasing two-song 7" that Hydra Head recently released, and although it took a couple of spins for me to really sink my teeth into it, I'm very much stoked on it. The band is rounded out on this record by original Oxbow drummer Tom Dobrov and guitarist Milo Gonzalez from The Chuck Dukowski Sextet, and they end up cranking out an aggressive, atonal punk assault that sounds undeniably like that of the more abstract, experimental Black Flag material, all the way down to Gonzalez's surprisingly Greg Ginn-esque leads and skronk-riffing. The a-side "I Want Kill You" is a mangled ripper, the rhythm section barreling through the song in spurts of angular, jagged movement as the guitar howls out wiry, dissonant runs and Robinson's murderous seething rage soaks completely through. The b-side is further out there, grooving mutant blues and spacey guitar sounds shooting through the bludgeoning intensity of "Monster", the band venturing into a kind of muscular, lurching psychedelia. An impressive debut, I'm looking forward to the next 7" that is supposed to be coming out later this spring...
����� Seemingly cultured from a rancid sample of Beherit's black blood, Larenuf Jubileum collects all of the demo material that Finland's Black Feast put out before later changing their name to Witchcraft. During their brief run under the B-Feast banner, these guys spewed some supremely fucked-up, necrotic noise metal that delivers the bestial goods. It's all obviously indebted to the sound of early Beherit, a filthy black chaos of messy, primitive black metal, but these guys were able to transcend being merely another Beherit tribute act by virtue of their violently unhinged energy and the barbaric force of their music; some of the stuff that was captured here reaches a level of noisiness and de-evolution that approaches noisecore-like levels of gibbering chaos, but laced with bits of diseased black-cosmic ambience and spooky synthdrift that swirls through the gutters of these songs.
����� What makes this stuff work is how incredibly fucked up it all sounds. Collecting the Worship Of Darkness demo and a pair of promo tapes from 2010, their tracks from the Abominations Of Darkness compilation, and a track from their 2011 tape, this makes up the bulk of their recorded work. And it's all slobbering, shambling blasts of nearly incomprehensible riffing and spazzoid tremolo picking, those guitars forming a garbled buzz that sometimes coalesces into a putrid punk-like riff or weirdly Sabbathoid dirge (like on "Necrosabbath"). Vocals are completely over the top, a vomitous, utterly unintelligible mess of disgusting gasps, snarls and gorilla grunts, virtually non-verbal throat-horror echoing through their foul fog. Sometimes that frenzied, discordant blasting and mangled, slobbering chaos is laced with brief bits of sonic weirdness that come out of nowhere, dropping off into an eerie, simple keyboard melody accompanied by a primitive caveman drumbeat, or erupting into blasts of bizarre atonal synth, or a brief passage of choral drone. But those are glimmers within the overall orgy of sonic violence, the recordings growing messier and murkier the further they go along. It's safe to say that this sort of inchoate, primitive sonic sewage probably won't appeal to those already averse to the bestial anti-musical aesthetic of that sort of Beherit/Blasphemy-influenced goatgrind, but if you've dug some of the other blackened noise metal obscurities that we've been digging lately, this collection is certainly worth checking out.
����� Comes with a large foldout poster and printed insert.
Now that I've been blasting so much newer weirdo hardcore and fucked-up punk, I've been getting a gnawing urge to pull out all of Black Flag's old records that had such a strong hand in influencing not only all of the bent adolescent skuzz that I'm addicted to, but also much of the noisy, brutal rock and sludgy crush that makes up so much of the music that I carry here at C-Blast. And what better place to start than with those early 7"s that introduced Black Flag's ferocious punk to the world...
Here it is, the first record from Black Flag, five minutes of visceral suburban mutant rage circa 1978 blasted with all of the immolating heat of a nuclear explosion, packaged with the Raymond Pettibone's disturbing, iconic artwork. This of course is from the original lineup that had Keith Morris (later of the Circle Jerks) on vocals, and if you're some poor soul who loved that box set from Morris's new hardcore band Off! and hasn't heard his work from 'Flag, oh boy... The a-side "Nervous Breakdown" is a classic Black Flag jam, a snarling ode to psychological destruction painted in raging buzz saw guitars and howling distress as Morris slobbers his cynical lyrics all over himself. Compared to where hardcore would head a couple of years later, it's not that fast or extreme, but it's definitely loaded with power, and in 1978 this was as violent as music could get. The flipside then jams three more songs down yer throat in a row, "Fix Me", "I've Had It", "Wasted", each one a perfect blast of primitive hardcore. Of course, Black Flag would get wonkier and weirder with later albums and lineups, but this early stuff is unfuckwithable, the apex of brutal L.A. punk.
Now that I've been blasting so much newer weirdo hardcore and fucked-up punk, I've been getting a gnawing urge to pull out all of Black Flag's old records that had such a strong hand in influencing not only all of the bent adolescent skuzz that I'm addicted to, but also much of the noisy, brutal rock and sludgy crush that makes up so much of the music that I carry here at C-Blast. And what better place to start than with those early 7"s that introduced Black Flag's ferocious punk to the world...
Here's another crucial early Flag Ep, this time from the Dez-fronted era of the band circa 1982. The Pettibone art oozes with discontent, and is some of the hardcore sleeve art ever; The a-side "Six Pack" is another of their classic disaffected anthems, a furious rager with guitarist Greg Ginn now starting to peel off those demented skronky leads and contorted riffs that would become his trademark, while the b-side has "I've Heard It Before" slamming a killer blast of discordant punk, followed by "American Waste"'s excoriating mid paced pummel. Brutal.
Back in stock!
Black Funeral have been kicking around the US black metal scene since 1993, and from what I've read, their music has become progressively more and more fucked up with each subsequent release. Ordog is my first exposure to Black Funeral though, so I have no idea how this compares to their older albums; I can say, however, that this is some very twisted lo-fi BM action, a kind of psychedelic bedroom electronic black metal onslaught with layers of tinny, programmed drum machines and discordant guitars that are so distorted and blown out that the riffs are rendered an indictinct blur of white noise. Over this blur of ultra noisy hiss and blast are draped baroque creepout haunted house keyboards, these bizarre major-key poppy melodies that pop up all over the album, and a mixture of screeching, rasped vocals and ghoulish female voices. Plus all kinds of production fuckery that has sudden blasts of reverbed noise and mysterious electronic fug splattered over each song. It's pretty fucked up and awesome sounding, although I'm sure traditional BM fans will find this completely offensive. After a couple of spins, Ordog starts to sound like someone created an old-school 8-bit Nintendo game soundtrack usinged a black metal band as it's source material, and then re-transmitted the recordings back through a destroyed transistor radio. The lyrics are a combination of Satanic imagery and Persian mysticism and other occultic strangeness, and the album artwork features some terrific B&W creep drawings. The mastermind behind Black Funeral is one Michael Ford, and he's joined here by the extremely foxy Lux Ferro and Dana Dark. Ford is also a member of the equally far-out blackened cabaret industrial group Ordo Tyrannis, and fans of that band should definitely check this out. Awesome, mind bending black-hole blackmetal buzz filth, as sonically mutant as projects like Wold, Benighted Leams, Ensepulchered, and Spektr. Highly recommended.
Primitive, thrashy and vicious, Black Goat were a crucial piece of the San Francisco black metal puzzle; not only was this '90s outfit one of the earliest proponents of black metal in the Bay Area metal scene, but Black Goat also gave birth to two of the most infamous underground metal bands to come out of San Fran: Weakling and Lord Weird Slough Feg. While they were active for years in the Bay Area, Black Goat only recorded one CDR that was recorded live at the radio station KVDS, later reissued through Nuclear war Now! on CD and through Lyderhorn as this here LP.
The music on this LP is everything that the short-lived Black Goat ever recorded, their entire existence captured and documented across the two sides of the record, eight songs of crude blackened thrash that sounds like the band was simultaneously invoking the primitive sounds of Venom and the raw sound of early Bay Area thrash metal. The mix is rough but powerful, recorded live in the studio at the Davis, CA radio station KDVS in 1997, and prior to this reissue had only been available as a CD-R that was primarily available direct from the band and from Blackmetal.com . Some of the members would go on to form the aforementioned Weakling and Slough Feg after the demise of Black Goat, but this sounds little to nothing like either of those bands; songs like "Human Sacrifice" and "Mortis Extremis" strafe my ears like early Exodus and Metallica being filtered through the nocturnal Norwegian blaze of Darkthrone and Venom's primitivism, complete with delicious mid-tempo circle pit thrash and ferocious speed-picking, jackhammer speed and crushing distorted basslines. The vocals are pretty wrecked, though, usually belted out in a weird groaning croak that is totally indecipherable, and at their most wasted actually remind me a little of Attila Csihar. Black Goat were so much more energetic and riff-oriented than yer typical traditional black metal band, and fans of raw, primitive BM who are tired of hearing the same old rehash should check Black Goat out if you haven't heard them yet. Mostly mid-paced and thrashy, the band also slips into passages of droning, pummeling hypnosis and dissonant riffing as well as the occasional bluesy soloing that sounds more like something from a NWOBHM album than the filthy, bestial blackthrash yer hearing. Great stuff! The Lyderhorn LP is limited edition, and features top-notch artwork from Ben West (one of the main guys behind Oaken Throne magazine); this is one grisly slab of obscure blackened violence.
��� Some more killer stuff from out the Chilean black metal underground. Black Grail's debut album Misticismo Regresivo unleashes a terrifying blast of cavernous mayhem that falls somewhere in between the frenzied savagery of the classic South American death-thrash sound and the occult weirdness of All The Witches Dance-era Mortuary Drape. With quotes from Emil Cioran and Alejandro Jodorowsky interspersed among the band's arcane Spanish-language lyrics and surrealistic drawings (all of which can be found in the thick twenty-four page booklet that comes with Regresivo), Black Grail offers an unusually heady mix of raw, morbid metal and eccentric songwriting, one that exudes a dank, delirious atmosphere across these songs.
��� Starting with the reverb-heavy production, this thing just echoes with a vintage eeriness; it almost sounds like something from a quarter of a century ago. Kicking into the ragged black thrash of opener "Di�logo entre Arcanos" amid a chaotic blur of distant swarming tremolo riffs and screaming guitar leads, the band follows the booming tom-heavy drum work and screeching vocals down into the obscure, dungeon-like atmosphere. That first, mostly instrumental track charges this with a chaotic, maniacal current that leads into the rest of the album; when they ravenously tear through "La CIudadela de Shiva", it's a release of pure devilswarm ferocity, the music shifting recklessly between blistering blackened thrash riffs and slower, moodier doom-laden darkness, while the singer's rabid screams and strange chant-like moans collide and intertwine in the shadows. That chaotic quality gives this a unique intensity, with much of the album erupting into bizarre discordant blastscapes and weirdly arrhythmic passages of insane atonal guitar shred and stuttering, blasting drums, twisting that classic South American black/death sound into something stranger. It's vicious stuff, with lots of cool atmospheric touches, like the instrumental track "Elevaci�n Frustrada" that appears mid-album, a spooky, organ-drenched piece of gothic kosmische darkness, or the passage of ophidian psychedelia that introduces "Plegaria Cat�rtica", the first few minutes sounding like something that could have come off of an old 70's era French prog rock record, up until it savagely erupts into another one of their hysterical black metal blasts. Killer stuff, and cool packaging, presented in a full-color slipcase with metallic foil stamped artwork.
A killer debut from the Norwegian duo Black Hole Generator, comprised of vocalist/bassist/programmer Bj�rnar Nilsen of Vulture Industries and
and guitarusr Dreggen, also of Deathcon, Aeturnus, and Cult Of Catharsis. Black Karma is a nightmarish flight of supersonic heaviness, an
industrialized, futuristic black metal vision transmitted from some Rene Laloux-style post-apocalyptic otherworld, with six tracks of frozen, ferocious
technical riffing, bizarre atmospheric breaks filled with tinkling piano notes, beautiful classical guitar, strains of cello strings, subtle keyboard
flourishes, crawling sludge marches, bound together by insane elaborate song arrangements and punctuated with unexpected stops and tempo shifts. The death-
infected terrain of a far off world that's illustrated through the booklet's awesome pen-and-ink drawings comes to life in tracks like "The Age Of Anxiety",
where programmed electronic drums release ferocious machinegun blastbeats strafing the grim atmosphere, and majestically monstrous black riffs descend from
smog-choked skies. Nilsen's vocal delivery adds much to the insane, technoid vibe of Black Karma, emitting searing apocalyptic hallucinations
through a litany of sickening choked screams and weird clean chanting vocals. Awesome stuff, almost like Ministry gone black metal, and which takes the
electronically-enhanced post-BM blast violence of bands like Thorns, D�dheimsgard, Aborym, and Anaal Nathrakh, and bends it into a warped new form of
blackened frenzy. Recommended!
Another Legion Blotan tape of twisted, noisy and raw raw RAW black metal...sort of. On one side of the tape you have the Spanish band Ostots whose gnarled doom n' gloom has also been heard on recent Ep offerings from Seedstock, and on the other is a band called Black Howling that plays a kind of blackened downer rock that's more wrecked jangle than BM aggression.
Black Howling's "Cursed By The Ancient Forest" is a seventeen-minute long song that falls within the parameters of what some people call "depressive black metal", a descriptor that's getting more and more vague. Like so much of that sort of stuff, it's more gloomy, wretched rock than metal, and the strange, noisy post-punk guitars, stumbling guitar melodies and driving rhythms hit my brain matter like a withered mutation of early Cure. The jangly guitars push through a heavy fog of low-fi hiss and tape noise while the singer screeches insanely way off in the background, coming together as a weird mix of no-fi indie rock and black metal vocals. It's really ugly and messed-up for sure, with lots of snarled tape noise and a murky-as-hell recording, but this is all part of the appeal for me, the melodies making Black Howling's music weirdly pretty in its wretchedness. Like a strange version of "depressive" black metal interpreted through the noisy jangle of some old Homestead records band, this long song goes through a number of different parts, shifting into other gloomy melodies and driving rock, always maintaining the moody, noisy central melody, later breaking off into long stretches where the band drops out and one guitarist is left strumming the somber acoustic melody while flute-like keyboards lilt behind him. Worth checking out if yer a fan of stuff like Hypothermia, Amesoeurs and Trist...
On the other side, Ostots's "Lurraren Erraietan" is a fine match for Black Howling's anguished blackened jangle. It's another epic, too; a meandering eighteen minute long song that has some of the same elements (jangling melodic guitars, tons of gloomy atmosphere, the shreiking black metal style vocals, the murky low-fi rehearsal recording), but does something different with 'em by blending their driving, steady rock with stretches of abject doom and overall a much more metallic, heavy sound. When Ostots really slow it down, they get into noisy rumbling territory with anguished spoken vocals and a big bottom-heavy metallic crunch, almost like an old goth/post-punk band slowing down to a rumbling doom metal crawl; some of the more driving riffs that show up on "Lurraren" even remind me of early Sisters Of Mercy, and the very end of the song drifts out into a short coda of gloomy, Goblin-esque keyboards. Very cool. I really dug this too, and am already looking for more stuff from this Spanish trio.
Limited to one hundred copies.
���� Punk-fueled black metal, or black metal-influenced hardcore - however you want to describe it, this Floridian band fucking shreds on this limited-edition tape that came out on the mighty Primal Vomit a while back. It's a later pressing/reissue of the band's eponymous debut, and features an additional bonus track of thrashing blackened savagery; it's also apparently the only thing that these guys put out before disbanding. Black Lands included a couple of members of a similarly filthy Floridian outfit Tyrants Of Hell, but this stuff is much more "punk" than that band, these four songs of blown-out hardcore-tinged black metal delivered in a seriously frantic and noisy blast of aggression.
���� I can definitely hear a bit of Ildjarn's influence on this stuff, as well as whiffs of latter-day Darkthrone and the barbarous stomp of Bone Awl, but these guys mold that messy, maniacal sound into their own image, with droning, repetitious riffs, the drummer losing his mind as the songs shift violently from chaotic blastbeats to tornados of blackened thrash to sudden shifts into vicious mid-tempo punk riffage; every time these guys drop into one of their D-beat driven moments, you can't help but imagine that somewhere a savage street-riot is breaking out. The singer's shredded, reverb-blasted vocals are pretty disgusting too, a raspy, high-pitched snarl that helps give this stuff it's murderous tone; if the bone-snapping, low-fi punk/black metal aesthetic of this label has appealed to you before with their releases from bands like Ives, Vomikaust, OV, and Floridian Winter, you'll be pleased to find that this tape offers more of the same.
One of the latest discs from this long running project from Texas noisician Richard Ramirez and crew, Skuff is a brutal mix of apocalyptic distorto-walls and industrial dirgecreep that comes to us via the excellent UK label Turgid Animal, home to some fantastic recent black/noise titles from Voltigeurs, Utarm, and Skullflower. Black Leather Jesus isn't as monotonous as many of the noise artists working within these noise-wall parameters; the tracks on Skuff alternate between spastic, droning walls of crackling, roaring distortion that focus into brutal beams of blackened trance roar, to the eerier, more atmospheric scorched drones of "Primer" and "Hidden Plague", allowing the group to explore themes of revenge, enslavement and extreme violence through shifting blocks of distorted, often monolithic sound. The last track "Smear Campaign (Vices Denied)" is a standout that combines super-distorted percussion and immense levels of rushing reverb with creepy blackened quasi-melodies that are lodged deep in the vicious maelstrom of high-end skree and punishing metallic clang, which almost sounds like a mega-distorted form of industrial sludge. This stuff is definitely more varied and aggressive than the static black dronewalls of his Werewolf Jerusalem output, and this disc comes highly recommended to fans of utterly bleak and extreme distorted wall noise (The Rita, Sewer Election, Cherry Point, etc). Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies.
Expect no peace here. At first, Richard Ramirez and crew fuck with the listener by starting off their installment in RRR's Recycled Music Series with some exuberant Mariachi music that has you thinking that someone fucked up the dubbing, but then it starts to get completely blown out and finally melts down into a vicious wall of high end skree, rumbling bass, and churning feedback, forming into the sort of brutal harsh wall assault that Black Leather Jesus is known for. Both sides of the cassette deliver crushing skull-warping distortion that's shot through with tons of paint-scraping high end frequencies, but as it gets deeper into each side, all kinds of bizarre sounds begin to emerge like distorted specters through the wall of noise. You begin to hear the Mariachi recordings bleeding through the filth, obscured by the raging blizzard of grit and buzz, and strange vocal samples, intercepted radio transmissions from Motown radio stations, demonic moaning, snarled cassette loops and distorted found-music samples all materialize and are subsequently blown apart into clouds of ash by the relentlesss assault of grinding amp-roar. It�s another brutal and psychedelic set of walls from this Texan outfit. As with all of the Recycled Music tapes, this comes in a duct-tape covered j-card and cassette.
An East/West meeting of harsh noise heavyweights that Dada Drumming assembled in a brilliant move, showcasing two distinct styles of sonic inferno from Japan's Incapacitants and Texas's Black Leather Jesus. Most of the Dada Drumming stuff that we've picked up has been short, vicious little 7"s of extreme noise and this is one of the few full length Cds on the label, presented with dark black and white imagery, photos of a cemetery on the front and back, and simple black and white band pics inside the booklet, assembled into a cool understated package. Sound wise, each artist offers a colossal slab of harsh electronic noise that takes up approximately half the disc.
Black Leather Jesus is up first with the eighteen minute "Shelter". At first, it's an acerbic storm of mid-range frequencies and crackling garbled distortion, fluttering low end and harsh scraping feedback, all murky and muffled sounding. But then it suddenly explodes into high fidelity, knocking you back in your chair as Ramirez and co. unleash a roaring bass-heavy blast furnace of extreme electronic chaos. From that point onward, the group shifts through constantly morphing masses of squirming stuttering feedback, blasts of high end trebly skree, surging waves of bone-shaking bass rumble, the distortion continuously changing in speed and texture, shifting into droning organ-like walls of melodic buzz, sputtering jets of black magma, swirling oceanic expanses of murky blackened drift, at times vast and bleak and blasted, but constantly progressing and always crushing. It's a fearsome black storm of psychedelic harsh noise abuse.
One of the few bands that could follow such an avalanche, Incapacitants follow with their own massive thirty minute piece "Yellow Silk Buddha", an epic saga of scrap metal pandemonium. It's a monolith of shrieking feedback bent into massive walls of orchestral sound, deep rumbling drones shaking the earth beneath the buzzing amplifiers and metal-on-metal carnage transmitted through contact mics. Huge thunderous drones thrum through the chaos, amid slow moving symphonic blasts of harsh psychedelic noise, hellish howling vocals, and infinite avalanches of iron pipes. A wall of nuclear distortion, structured into a complex, layered maelstrom of machine obliteration that climbs upwards through new levels of evolution and destruction.
An essential harsh noise album for fans of either group.
S'more sweet extreme skull-damage from Phage, pairing up a harsh noise elder with one of the new punks, and serving it up in a really nice silk-screened sleeve, the artwork comprised of a steaming mix of explicit leather daddy porn, scenes of violent murder, and industrial corruption.
Black Leather Jesus plants it's steel-toed boot firmly across the back of your neck with "Sissy Training", a five-minute harsh noise workout that smears huge globs of blooping synth, junk-noise chaos and shrieking feedback over the thick, raging wall of low-end distortion. Too busy and frantic and laced with assorted synthesizer detritus to ever form into pure wall-trance, this brutal distorted ejaculate is spewed violently over the length of the side and peaks into pure catharsis at just the right moment. BLJ fans will not be disappointed.
Pollutive Static's side ("Mechanical Synesthesia (Man And Machine)") is a nice long bout of electric shock assault built on a foundation of grinding harsh noise, but layered with some interesting quasi-melodic figures and a churning rhythmic undercurrent. This is actually the first recording from Hal Hutchinson's HN project that I've listened to, and while it's notably different from his other, more PE-influenced works, it's brutality is just as intemperate as the rest of his catalog. I'm reminded of some of the more psychedelic moments found on K2, Incapacitants and Pain Jerk albums with all of the howling synthesizer tones and effects that surface throughout the track, but it's more violent than anything else, slamming into an abrupt cut-off at the end just as my skull thought it was going to bulge from the avalanche of electronic chaos.
Limited to three hundred copies.
Black Manta, Maryland's own H.P. Lovecraft-obsessed, old school doom metal meets biker-rock on PCP riff-thugs! The Manta rise with this brief (at just over
20 minutes long) but pulverizing CD on Hungarian doom imprint Psychedoomelic and unleash seven burly,blown-out doomrock anthems, complete with legendary
drummer Joe Hasselvander (PENTAGRAM), drugged out Jim Morrison and the gnarliest bass tone on earth. While there is some crushing slow parts here
and there throughout the CD, Fuck Them All But Six puts the emphasis on the "bomb rock" (their term), maintaining a brutal mid-tempo bulldozer pace,
which fans of fellow Maryland doomsters Earthride, Life Beyond, Wretched, and War Injun will love. Earth shaking, monstrous rock!
Got this 2015 Record Store Day release back in stock, a killer pairing of two great heavy darkwave outfits, Black Mare and Lycia. Lycia is, of course, the influential and singular outfit whose ominous, doom-laden darkwave has had a lingering influence on all manner of gothic rock, doom metal and black metal outfits since they first emerged in the late 80s, going back to such groundbreaking albums as Ionia and A Day In The Stark Corner. Their "Silver Leaf" is the first new song we've heard from them in years, and it's another spellbinding piece of funereal, plodding beauty woven from the layered, ethereal coo of Tara Vanflower and the solemn baritone croon of Mike Vanportfleet, with lush twelve-string guitar washing over the song in a haze of reverb, the distant, thunderous plod of the drum machine moving this gorgeous, haunting song at a Skepticism-like tempo. Fucking fantastic stuff.
Couldn't have picked a better outfit to share a 7" with Lycia than Black Mare, too. This solo project of Sera Timms from Ides Of Gemini offers the similarly haunting "Low Crimes", where she is joined by Ides bandmate J. Bennett on bass as well as featuring additional guest vocals from Lycia's Vanflower. This song shares a similar somber vibe as Ides Of Gemini, and fans of that band's ghostly gothic doom-rock should hastily pick up this and anything else that Timms appears on - it is as bewitching as anything else I've heard from her, a subtly sinister, twang-flecked piece of darkwave-inspired gloomrock majesty that eventually erupts into a surprisingly heavy second half, dark and doom-laden and sorrowful, Timms' icily ethereal voice rising over the band's folk-flecked dirge, the sound somewhat reminiscent of SLC avant doom outfit Subrosa. Can't wait to hear more from Black Mare after hearing this.
Limited edition, comes with a download code.
���� Ok, so maybe the band's name isn't the most original thing out there (Metal Archives.com alone lists at least seven bands with the same name), but this Finnish band's debut ended up being a real blast. If you were to go by the witchy scratchings on the record sleeve and the unfortunately mundane band name, you might think that Black Candles / Lucifer, Rise! is going to be yet another in the overcrowded field of 70's-worshipping occult rock throwbacks in thrall to the sounds of Coven, Salem Mass and Black Widow. In actuality, this 7" turned out to be quite ripping, delivering two songs of satanic garage punk with big doses of raw aggression and vintage analogue synth. It's the first recording from this solo project from Samu Salovaara, who some might know as the guitarist for Finnish death metallers Swallowed, belting out these dark tunes with a definite 70's-era proto-punk vibe going on. Kicking off with a rush of sinister Moog, "Black Candles" rips into some rocking reverb-heavy garage punk, tough and malevolent, with a faint whiff of early 80's American deathpunk. That a-side rocks, fast paced and flecked with some cool bass-work and screaming guitar solos, but "Lucifer, Rise!" is even more punk, with some killer primitive synth lines splashed over another rudely boisterous riff. There are moments where this devilish psych-punk sort of manages to remind me of both classic Motor City rock and roll and the tougher, more boisterous stuff that Christian Death did early on, but with rawer, meaner vocals. Pretty cool. Limited to five hundred copies.
Black Mayonnaise is one of the first really weird, underground "bands" that we really got into back in the early 90's when we first began our love affair
with fucked-up heaviness. I remember ordering some sort of compilation tape of damaged punk and weird, sub-underground metal bands from an ad in Maximum Rock
And Roll years ago, a total DIY job on a dollar store TDK cassette wrapped up lovingly in a black and white xeroxed sheet of paper, filled with all sorts of
low-fi black metal hiss, 4-track noise experiments, and seriously grody grindcore blasts. But there was one band on this tape that totally jumped out at me -
Black Mayonnaise. The name conjured all sorts of grody images, and the "song" was this super heavy, industrialized blat of stuttering drum machine beats and
elastic bass riffs combined with vocals that sounded like the rumbling of an upset stomach. This was easily one of the most fucked up, extreme things I had
heard at that point in my life, a hallcinogenic combination of Godflesh grind and the sound of your body being slowly consumed by alien fungus. Turns out
that Black Mayonnaise was (and is) actually just one guy named Mike Duncan from Akron, Ohio, a one man bedroom sludge nightmare using SSLLOOWW programmed
drum machines and ultra downtuned bass guitar to record and release a crapload of cassettes and CD-rs over the past decade under the Black Mayonnaise banner.
Ttssattsr is the first proper full length release from Black Mayonnaise, and features nine tracks of gurgling, speaker-rattling, low-fi ambient
muck, or "warped lunar sludge core" as it states on the back of the CD case. The bass strings are so downtuned they flop off the instrument, banging on a
single buzzing note, as rumbling distortion swirls around it and those sort-of dubby drum machines pound away, like a DJ Screw remix of some extreme doom
band. Monstrously heavy shit, essential for slo-mo headbangers and tarpit psych freaks. Includes a cover of the Butthole Surfer's "Graveyard".
The return of "Warped Lunar Sludge Core" from Ohio's long-running one man weirdo-sludge band Black Mayonnaise, who once again oozes it's septic snailtrail across the Earth four years after the release of TTSSATTSR on Emperor Jones. And Black Mayo is still on my list of the heaviest bands of all time. It's been seventeen years since Black Mayonnaise first appeared, which is pretty hard to believe, though we only have a handful of releases from this weird freaked-out sludge outfit to show for it. The last album TTSSATTSR was a seriously messed up slab o' outsider sludge, the sound of Godflesh slowed down to a sub-tectonic crawl and then covered in a slowly spreading alien fungus. That gurgling, glacial alien doom continues with this album, but it amazingly managed to become even weirder and more fractured, the signature Black Mayo drum machine plod sometimes disappearing completely as if it's been totally subsumed by layers of black slime. The album starts off with a stretched out dubby dronescape of echoing toad-croaks and distant percussion, a thick murky rumbling drone grinding at the center of a gooey mass of corrosive buzz and coarse tape-hiss, the vocals stretched into insanely pitchshifted gurgles that go waaaay beyond anything you've heard a goregrind band pull off, and underneath it all there's that minimal drum machine pulse clattering away and cloaked in delay, distant dubby beats decaying in the black swampy dronemass. It's muted and oddly psychedelic, like an entire goregrind track pulled apart and pitshifted a couple of octaves and turned into a murky black ambience. The heaviness kicks on the second track when the drum machine officially appears, laying down a massive glacial throb, those gastrointestinal gurgles fluttering and floating, guitar smeared into a muted doomed chug, like a funeral doom band slowed way down and smeared in slow motion cosmic fx and low-fi noise. The rest of the tracks get pretty heavy as well, like "Flight"'s tripped out GOdflesh style pummel and waves of industrial filth and fx, and the pulverizing slow-mo industrial dub-sludge of "Descent/Impact" which sounds like one of the Godflesh dub remixes time-stretched and drenched in blown-out bass, with some additional guitar-crush courtesy of Corey Bing from Fistula.
Shit gets even weirder when you get to the unlikely cover of the Flaming Lips song "Pilot", which is totally unrecognizeable after being turned into a ferocious blast of noise-damaged, ultra distorted psychdrone and incessant clattery blastbeats draped in monstrous echoplexed roars and wild white-hot streaks of noise, kind of like brutal parts on that new Black Vomit album! Flipper also gets the cover treatment with their classic "Love Canal" likewise mutated into a seriously abstracted slab of sludge, the riff stretched out and drowned in trippy demonic grunts, black slime and loads of gooey space-rock fx. And finally, the last track "Guernsey County" veers off from the warped fungal sludge entirely as it spreads out for al;most thirteen minutes as a glitchy, fractured electronic soundscape streaked with malfunctioning computer noise, buzzing high-pitched drones, Nulltronix-style bleeps, staticky interference and other weird digital wreckage.
The disc is packaged in a cool silkscreened cardstock jacket with black and silver inks printed onto the black stock, and a small insert card on the inside.
When this came out on Fedora Corpse last year, it was the first new offering from Akron, Ohio's mighty Black Mayo since their (his?) previous album on Resipiscent all the way back in 2008. On Dissipative Structure, Black Mayonnaise's glacial "lunar sludge" is as psychedelic and brain-melting as ever, sprawling across just three monolithic tracks of abstract creeping drone and extreme fungal doom. Side one is a single side-long epic titled "Radiation", with glacial pounding drums drenched in delay and echoing through the churning tarpit fungal slime like a dub remix of Godflesh, a chugging doom metal riff uncoiling underneath, blanketed in amp fuzz and low end rumble, while the "vocals", as usual, emerge as wordless gastrointestinal rumbles and bestial flutterings that have been processed through extreme pitch-shifting manipulation. It's like hearing a Saint Vitus song slowed down to 4 bpm and cut up and remixed by King Tubby. This just goes on and on, glazing your frontal lobe with an endless syrup chug, but halfway through the side the song shifts into swarming electronic noise, garbled voices, and other warped sonic crud that stretches out for several minutes and sounds like a hard drive being consumed by a mass of squirming space-maggots, or maybe a chopped n' screwed KK Null track. After awhile, that Vitus-on-Robitussin riff and the dubbed-out mechanical drums slide back in like a moist fungal mass into this squirming, chirping clot of electronic noise, becoming even more lysergic and nightmarish as it crawls inexorably towards the end of the side.
The second side features two tracks; the first, "The Drunken Stupor Of The Waking World" is an abstract electronic doomscape that starts off with flanged electronic sounds and then drifts off through a cosmic abyss of sparse, mortar-like drums rumbling in the depths, chirping oscillators, and bell-like tones that slip in and out of focus. The second, "Our Senses Are Mysteries To Us, And We Are Mysteries To Ourselves" returns to the bubbling, primordial sludge-slime of the first side, the drums on this one even more spread out and glacial, the riffage sparser, a single thunderous downtuned chord rumbling overhead, the sound infested with those burbling, buzzing insectile electronics and waves of oscillating space-hiss...but then in a bizarre turn, the muck fades away and we're suddenly joined by a cavernous banjo tune, the instrument sliding and twanging in some huge echoing space. Weird.
Pressed on green vinyl in a limited edition of three hundred copies, and includes a Black Mayo sticker.
One of the more obscure bands within the already incredibly obscure "gorenoise" scene, Black Mold Phallanx barely even registers on the 'net, with virtually no information to be found anywhere on who's behind this. Even the label Sweet & Sour Sewage is a ghost, some sub-label of the Splatterfuck Tapes label/distro. I was turned onto this band by the folks behind Reclusa, and loved this blast of sewer noise as soon as I heard it. Looking at the impossibly incomprehensible logo and cheap cut-and-paste artwork, you'd expect this to be another gorenoise tape along the lines of Anal Birth and Vomitoma, but BMP is more of a highly toxic mix of industrialized goregrind, harsh noise, bizarre processed vocalizations, and hyperspeed drum machine programming that verges on splittercore levels of tonal abuse. The twenty nine tracks on Unsanitary Breeding Ground are pretty vile, similar to Vomitoma in some ways, this way over the top with the spastic, nonsensical blastbeats strung out to absurd lengths, then chopped up into smaller blurts of percussive slop and shamble and splattered across the almost constant rumble of a massively distorted bass guitar and low end electronic noise. Sometimes the rhythms suddenly mutate into warped breakcore rhythms, weird shambling tribal breakdowns, or blasts of skullshredding speedcore , and simple, grinding riffs often emerging out of the gooey yuck. Elsewhere, the band pitches over into almost total harsh noise, a rumbling sputtering pile of static, uncontrolled drum machine rattle, and disgusting gastrointestinal gurgling. Even compared to what you heard in the goregrind and gorenoise scenes, the vocals are fucking ridiculous, a shapeless mass of gurgles, hissing, belches, grunts and vomiting run through intense effects and processing. With those harsh, blunt 1000 bpm blasts, this keeps reminding me of what Vomitoma or Urine Festival would sound like being remixed by Komprex or Pressterror at the bottom of a sewer. The first side of the tape is made up of more recent material from 2009-2010 and is in more of a cybergrind mode, while the older material on the second side can't even be qualified as metal, it's extreme putrescent noise with forays into ultra-distorted, formless blast.
Limited to one hundred hand-numbered copies.
Another crushing C-30 attack from Epicene Sound Replica! This tape is both a collaborative effort and a split release showing off each of these Midwestern outfits chops. The A side rocks a mighty 15 minute jam that was formed thru mail collab between Black Moss and Josh Lay. This one is total unease, the artists snaking their way through terrain populated with gobs of buzzing, rhythmic pulse and ultra-distrorted doomdrone guitars, backfiring circuit shrieks, the howling of amplified sheets of metal being scraped down a wall,and blasts of beyond-lo-fi black metal that rise and sink in the ocean of feedback and gritty distortion-pedal manipulation. A grim, threatening soundscape. Side two features a solo track from each: Black Moss unleashes "Skog", a horrific morass of high end feedback and demonic, distorted vocals a la Prurient, augmented with deeply buried detuned black metal guitars; this is pretty damn intense/awesome, I love this sort of fried out combination of basement noise and super-abstracted, blacknoise/black metal. After that, Josh Lay appears with "Inauguration Of The Beast", a ghoulish ritual of fucked up beast chanting, oil-drum percussion, factory ambience, and rumbling doom distortion, quite surreal, with an almost Eraserhead kind of vibe. Black glossy cover, hand numbered limited edition of 50 copies.
The first thing that popped into my head while listening to Black Moth's debut album The Killing Jar was how much the first song "The Articulate Dead" sounded like a near perfect cross between L7's belligerent metalpunk and the spacious, stoned-out groove of Kyuss. That infusion of sludgy crunch helped make this a lot more interesting than much of the retro-occult rock stuff that's been going around. On a large chunk of the debut from UK doom rockers Black Moth, that metallic punk vibe continues to infect a bunch of their songs, and is a big part of why I dug this quite a bit more than most of the recent albums of 70's-obsessed, girl-fronted "occult" tinged hard rock that have come in to C-Blast lately. I was pleased to see that I wasn't necessarily imagining that L7 vibe, either, after reading an interview with Black Moth front woman Harriet Hyde where she openly proclaims her appreciation for the infamous all-girl grunge group. So here you've got ten songs from Black Moth that combine that metallic grunge sound with a more opiated doom influence and a big dose of garage-level punk aggression, the recording wrapped in a haze of atmospheric reverb and bits of grimy psychedelia.
Killing Jar kicks off with the rocking fuzz-drenched fury of "The Articulate Dead", shifting between syrupy droning propulsion and faster paced tempos, followed by the saurian Sabbathain boogie of "Blackbirds Fall", which has a cool soaring chorus, a couple of pounding breakdowns that produce a rather rousing chorus, and plenty of that doomy, saurian swing. Black Moth also avoid the long, meandering jamming that plagues a lot of records in this style, keeping their songs pretty short and concise. Yeah, these cats definitely mine a familiar sound, all vintage Sabbath / Pentagram style dourness encased in Melvins-esque crunch, but the way that they streak these songs with the occasional soaring twin-guitar solo and bruise their music black and blue with a sort of grimy gutter psychedelia and hints of ragged prog makes this an album well worth repeated listens. Of course, a big part of the appeal here is Harriet Hyde's vaguely sinister croon; the girl has some decent pipes that had the guys at Beardrock.com describe as "Karen O fronting The Sword", which I'm sure will be enough to interest at least a few of you. And the better tracks on the album happen to be the ones that skew the furthest from the traditional doom sound, like the ghostly narcotized plod of "Banished But Blameless", the ominous garage punk and grating guitars of "Spit Out Your Teeth", the graveyard stomp of "The Plague Of Our Age", the bleary, raga-like drones the pulse throughout "Blind Faith ", and the crazed Hawkwindian effects that flutter across the thunderous gallop of "Plastic Blaze". Fans of some of the grungier doom rock bands like Goatsnake are going to particularly groove on this stuff. Comes in a four-panel gatefold digisleeve with booklet, all featuring the striking artwork of Vania Zouravliov.
Meteorcity isn't stopping with Elder when it comes to mining the post-Sleep quadrant of the American doom underground, as this new release from Black Pyramid will attest. This trio is also from the New England area that Elder hails from, rising from the residue of bands like Palace In Thunderland and Artimus Pyledriver, and they bring out the big Sabbathoid riffs and stoned, chantlike singing on their debut full length, complete with dark psychedelic album art, mystical overtones and lyrics about Witchlords and "hordes of death" and the Black Cauldron, which suggests that Black Pyramid take alot of their lyrical inspiration from the old fantasy series Chronicles of Prydain. There's no mistaking the influence that the legendary Sleep has had on Black Pyramid's crushing doom, with massive downtuned droning riffs and thick syrupy guitars, but these guys also inject a large amount of classic heavy metal and psychedelia into their sound. Also like Elder, these guys are gifted when it comes to creating awesome riffs, which is pretty crucial if you are going to try to drop an album of this brand of doom on us in 2009, and the nine songs on this disc are alot catchier than your typical Vitus/Sleep clone. Fans of old school American doom are especially going to be drawn to what these guys are doing; alongside the ultraheavy downtuned dirges and creeping Sab riffage, they break out lots of meaty galloping riffs and bluesy grooves and much of the album is pretty rocking, kind of like High On Fire if they were less hooked on thrash and more obsessed with early 80's heavy metal. Singer/guitarist Andy Beresky liberally spreads his drawn out psychedelic solos on songs like "Visions Of Gehenna", and there's some killer proggy noodling that shows up throughout the album as well. It sounds like there's a big Maryland doom influence on Black Pyramid too, like on "Mirror Messiah" where they channel the swinging, bloozy crunch of bands like The Obsessed and Internal Void but with vastly heavier riffage. Nothing happens here that expands the parameters of doom metal, but this album has a solid combination of catchy songs, superheavy riffs, and sprawling spaced-out trippiness that makes it a fucking winner in my book.
The disc comes in a full color digisleeve like the other new Meteorcity releases.
Following their wildly popular self-titled debut from 2009, New England psychedelic doom metallers Black Pyramid are back with this new Ep that has two brand new songs, one a crushing metal war-anthem, the other a more brooding, trippy dose of slow motion acid sludge. Fans of denim-clad old school doom rock have been freaking out over this band ever since that first album came out on Meteor City (we've sold a ton of them here at C-Blast alone), and this Ep proves yet again that the Pyramid are one of the best old-school doom throwbacks out there. Like a thunderous concoction of Saint Vitus's epic power, the brooding darkness of Pentagram, the muscular mid-paced metal of The Obsessed and the rampaging heaviness of High On Fire, these guys being their traditional doom and occult metal influences together into something that sounds both classic and crushingly heavy.
Lead-off song "Stormbringer" is a total crusher, a punishing and ridiculously catchy Sabbath-esque pummeler that leads into galloping battle metal that continues to evoke the rolling power of High On Fire in a more stripped down, classic metal attack. There's a killer chorus hook in here, massive downtuned riffing, thunderous double bass drumming, and Andy Beresky's commanding howl heads the charge, all making for a sound that reminds me of a missing link between The Obsessed and High On Fire. The bluesy psychedelia of the brief interludes throughout the song really echoes classic Obsessed. The b-side "Cloud Of Unknown" is a slower, brooding slab of doom, switching between sorrowful riffing and a regret-filled moan that rises over a prog-tinged heaviness, and more menacing, malevolent doom, with some moving guitar harmonies appearing later in the song.
Pressed on 8" yellow vinyl and packaged in a cool-looking die-cut record sleeve, limited to three hundred copies.
Following their wildly popular self-titled debut from 2009, New England psychedelic doom metallers Black Pyramid are back with this new Ep that has two brand new songs, one a crushing metal war-anthem, the other a more brooding, trippy dose of slow motion acid sludge. Fans of denim-clad old school doom rock have been freaking out over this band ever since that first album came out on Meteor City (we've sold a ton of them here at C-Blast alone), and this Ep proves yet again that the Pyramid are one of the best old-school doom throwbacks out there. Like a thunderous concoction of Saint Vitus's epic power, the brooding darkness of Pentagram, the muscular mid-paced metal of The Obsessed and the rampaging heaviness of High On Fire, these guys being their traditional doom and occult metal influences together into something that sounds both classic and crushingly heavy.
Lead-off song "Stormbringer" is a total crusher, a punishing and ridiculously catchy Sabbath-esque pummeler that leads into galloping battle metal that continues to evoke the rolling power of High On Fire in a more stripped down, classic metal attack. There's a killer chorus hook in here, massive downtuned riffing, thunderous double bass drumming, and Andy Beresky's commanding howl heads the charge, all making for a sound that reminds me of a missing link between The Obsessed and High On Fire. The bluesy psychedelia of the brief interludes throughout the song really echoes classic Obsessed. The b-side "Cloud Of Unknown" is a slower, brooding slab of doom, switching between sorrowful riffing and a regret-filled moan that rises over a prog-tinged heaviness, and more menacing, malevolent doom, with some moving guitar harmonies appearing later in the song.
The Cd version of Stormbringer adds on a bunch of additional tracks that are collected from a number of rare Eps that had only been previously available on vinyl for a total of fifty minutes of music, including the two songs from their split with Old One. These older songs are pretty fucking great, too. "Illumination" has this odd singsong quality to the gruff vocals while the music itself is heavy lumbering metal with some particularly catchy hooks embedded deep in the downtuned crush, and later on drifts into some fucking fantastic bloozy psychedelia. "Warswine" and "Macedonia" are both total devastators, as well. "Warswine", especially; it perfectly captures that High On Fire-on-a-NWOBHM-bender vibe that is Black Pyramid's trademark with those rolling, pounding tribal drums, the singer's stentorian cry for battle, and the droning, galloping, ultra heavy guitars.
Mucho-anticipated second album from these New England battle-metallers/Sabbath worshippers (made up of former Milligram / Blackwolfgoat / Roadsaw / Artimus Pyledriver members), returning with another nine songs of crushing traditional doom heaviness, molten psychedelia and galloping power. Their debut (also on Meteor City) gained 'em a bunch of fans, and that disc was one of the most popular releases from the label that we've ever had in stock here at C-Blast. I dug their mix of mystical High On Fire-isms and rolling Sleepified doom on their debut, but on II the band's songwriting has really gone up a notch, with more emphasis on chugging, fist-raising tempos and, most of all, dropping some MASSIVE hooks into the songs, making this one of the catchiest doom albums I've heard lately. There's a crapload of memorable, infectious sing-along choruses and huge riffs on here. The twelve minute "Dreams Of The Dead" could be a lead-off single, if doom metal bands did singles, and you'll be humming along with the chorus immediately. There's also the opening one-two punch of "Endless Agony" and "Mercy's Bane" alternately stomps and soars while kicking out more anthemic hooks. Things never get too slow, as Black Pyramid are heavy enough when they just lurch into one of their lead-plated Sabbath-esque parts, and these doom-laden dirges just accentuate the main driving hooks. The guitars mix things up on II, with Andy Beresky's narcotized, wah-drenched psych guitar on "Night Queen" and the sunny acoustic strum of "Tanelorn" offering variety among the crushing riffs. There's a couple of long winding instrumental passages, something that the band also played with on their last album, and the prog-heavy doom rock of "Sons Of Chaos" is one of the more complex songs I've heard from these guys. Closer "Into The Dawn" really sums this up though, carving its molten anthemic sludge out of equal parts Torche and Master Of Reality-era Black Sabbath. They've definitely shaken off most of the High On Fire-isms of their debut for this album, and have evolved into something much more distinctive and memorable. Definitely for fans of Witchfinder General, Saint Vitus, The Obsessed, and newer Sabbathoid crushers like Elder and Windhand. Comes in a digipack.
When Ben Fleury-Steiner from Light Of Shipwreck told me a few months ago that he had a new "metal" project, I wasn't sure what the hell to expect. A much heavier version of Light Of Shipwreck's percussive dronescapes, maybe? Whatever notion had entered my mind, it sure wasn't the hideous industrial-scum hell that he unleashed on my brain with this bitching new disc from his band Black Roller Crop Rotation. Ben ( bass, guitar, drum machines, samples, and vocals) teams up with Jeffrey Bumiller (guitar, vocals) for this five track saga that evokes images of behemoth all-consuming duststorms, yellowed fields scorched by vicious drought, and towns swallowed up by monstrous clouds of swirling, obliterating blackness, a Depression-era apocalyptic nightmare scored by this heaving slow-motion industrial blackdoom monstrosity. There are parts of this disc that reminded me of a drug-blasted jam session between Abruptum and Popul Vuh, blackened wordless howls and gutteral profanity slurred across shapeless detuned riffage, mechanical, almost pneumatic percussion, and thick ropey jets of obsidian synthesizer that roar across the barren wastelands and suffocating ambience of Prayers From The Rotten Soil. Yeah, this is some intensely heavy, hopeless music, a mixture of improvised quasi-black metal slime and hints of early industrial, washes of psychedelic drift infused with melancholy guitar melodies buried under sheets of clanking machine rhythms and grinding doomy amp-drone, shrieking voices lost in a fog of endless delay way off in the distance, blasts of fragmented orchestral music scattered throughout. It's as someone unearthed a lost alternate score to There Will Be Blood composed by Abruptum. This is an impressive debut from this new project, fans of abstract noisy blackened heaviness along the lines of Gnaw Their Tongues, Emit, Khlyst, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Ghast, Pussygutt, Wicked King Wicker and KTL will definitely want to check this out. Released in a print run of 300 copies, and packaged inside of a full color foldout sleeve with the disc attached to the interior on a plastic hub.
Black Sabbath's eponymous debut needs no introduction; it's ground zero for heavy metal, the starting point for all metallic heaviness, and an eternal classic of early doom metal. Back at the dawn of the 70's, there were plenty of other bands who were developing the template for heavy metal (Led Zep, Deep Purple, Blue Cheer), but none of those guys were as dark and dread-filled and ponderous as Sabbath. The fundamentals of the sound were the same - huge blues-rock riffing married to psychedelia - but the combination of Tony Iommi's slow, downtuned riffs, the saurian rhythm section of Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, and Ozzy's tormented wail with Sabbath's infatuation with dark occult imagery and a wholly malevolent vibe turned their debut into something wholly new and groundbreaking. With that creepy cover art of a woman shrouded in black standing in the foreground of a macabre autumnal scene surrounded by withered trees and weeds, her features blurred and indistinct, the album just looks evil; then the first side starts spinning, opening with that iconic intro of soft rainfall, thunder and a bell tolling in the distance that gives way to the dismal slow-motion doom of the title track, still utterly heavy and morbid sounding as it goes into the mind-blowingly heavy central riff with Ozzy's eerie howl drifting over it, then moving into powerful psychedelic blues rock for the second half...classic. The rest of the a-side is crucial Sabbath, too; the bleating harmonica-led boogie lumber of "The Wizard", "Behind The Wall Of Sleep"'s extended psychedlic swing, the instantly recognizeable doom riff from "N.I.B." (one of the great metal dirges of all time), and the stomping Cream-esque boog of "Wicked World". All essential listening for fans of doom, and hell, heavy metal in general.
Side two isn't as powerful as the first half, with more focus on Cream-influenced blues/psych rock jamming on songs like "Sleeping Village" and the covers of "Evil Woman, Don't Play Your Games With Me" (originally by Minneapolis blues-rock quintet Crow) and "Warning" (from Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation), but still heavy and swingin' enough, and any proto-metal fan knows these tracks up and down.
Sabbath's legacy has unfortunately been tainted over the subsequent decades by some straight-up bullshit and ridiculous Hollywood glitz, but their early 70's works remain unfuckwithable slabs of molten heaviness in my eyes. This NAMS release of Black Sabbath is a limited edition vinyl run on 180 gram
black vinyl presented in a heavy jacket, a crucial entry in any doom/metal fan's collection.
One of the noisier incarnations of Hive Mind / Chondritic Sound overlord Greh, Black Sand Desert is pure extended harsh noise avalanche that buries you under
a sandstorm of heavy corroded distortion and electronic hiss. This disc offers two psychedelic, intensely detailed fifteen minute blasts of rolling blackened
static, in-the-red lower frequencies, partially/possibly glimpsed melodic figures, and buried drones that fans of likeminded speed demons Knurl and The Rita
will groove on. Excellent skull-cleansing crunch, packaged in a signature monotone Troniks wallet sleeve.
This is not, as I first assumed, a vinyl reissue of the split cassette that these two noise outfits released a while back on Hate Mail. It's all new material from both, released on the killer Husk label, and features one new side-long track from each band.
I've really been digging the newer material from The Black Scorpio Underground. The earlier stuff that I heard from the band was interesting enough take on sinister industrial muck, but man, they've been honing that sound into something that gets more and more malevolent with each new record or tape that's been coming my way. Their side of this split is titled "Alone In The Orchard Of Souls" and it's a heavy nightmarish driftscape made up of low-end subterranean rumble, distant metal-on-metal reverberations, mysterious voice transmissions and unsettling scraping/crunching noises that slowly move to the foreground of the recording as you slip deeper into their murky abyssal ambience. After awhile, the band introduces strange wailing voices and distant screams, heavy metallic clank, and layers of heavier, more abrasive drone and over modulated noise drenched in cavernous reverb into the track, shifting from the more ambient feel into a fearsome blackened industrial din that begins to resemble a ritual sacrifice taking place in the depths of some vast underground foundry. Another killer horror-scape from this outfit that comes pretty close to TOMB / Terrorgoat / Sistrenatus levels of industrial dread.
Werewolf Jerusalem's "Further Suspects In Rail Killings" is a bit different from much the stuff that I've been hearing lately from Richard Ramirez's HNW project. The washed-out droning static that is almost always the center of his bleak, minimal noise-meditations is here, but it's buried beneath churning layers of metallic scrape and clang for almost the entire first half of the track, forming a desolate factory-ambience that goes on for awhile. Around the midway point, though, Ramirez kicks in with his signature walls of ultra-distorted rumbling static that totally takes over, occasionally changing in intensity and density until it eventually returns to the abrasive metallic scrapescape that began the track. Dense, immersive noise.
More evil industrial noise from The Black Scorpio Underground, once again teaming up with another like-minded filth-merchant in the form of US death industrialist The Vomit Arsonist, with both artists bringing us more of their rotting black sonics.
I wasn't expecting the sort of black ambient horror that The Black Scorpio Underground gives us with "Rage Traitor"; previous offerings from this band have been considerably more abrasive and ear-damaging. Here though, the Underground descends into a lightless abyss of vast subterranean tremors and distant howling voices, gusts of icy metallic whir and cavernous reverberations that eventually erupt into a nightmarish din of black noise, with damned voices shrieking in anguish while blasts of rumbling noise and percussive sheet-metal tremors rise up out of the sulfurous depths. A really nice take on Heresy-era Lustmord sonics, filtered through the Black Scorpio Underground's distinctly hellish brand of industrial vomit.
The flipside has "All Is Lost" from The Vomit Arsonist, an American death industrial project that I've just recently been starting to really get into. This is another quality slab of rumbling industrial dread from this outfit, a minimal dronescape of deep tectonic reverberations and distant whirring drones that become a backdrop to the increasingly manic scrapings and squealing of god-knows-what that fill the foreground. This slowly builds as those background rumblings increase in volume and intensity, and the Arsonist's distorted demonic vocals drift in with more exhalations of abject misanthropy while the synths shift into a wavering, seething mass of low-end electro-swarm. Its another example of why this is becoming one of the best Stateside proponents of that BDN-inspired industrial deathcrush.
On colored vinyl.
Here's another slab of evil, diseased electronic noise from The Black Scorpio Underground, here teaming up with the excellent German power electronics outfit RxAxPxEx, one of the heaviest and most hateful newer PE artists that I've been turned on to lately.
I'm really digging the newer death-industrial style material that The Black Scorpio Underground has been bringing us on their recent 7" offerings (another being the split with The Vomit Arsonist, also included in this week's new arrivals list). The track "On The Relic" is a noisier piece of industrial chaos compared to some of the more Lustmordian works I've been hearing from them, but this is just as dark and oppressive as any of that stuff. It's a nightmare cacophony of loud, chain-driven torture machinery and blasts of excoriating distortion, evil orchestral sounds drifting across the background alongside screams of terror and more monstrous, inhuman vocalizations, and even some vaguely black metallish elements that are buried deep in the churning graveyard murk. Definitely one of the blackest BSU tracks we've heard - be sure to crank this with the lights out.
Although the German power electronics project RxAxPxE has been around since 2005, this is the first time I've heard anything from 'em. "His Return" turns out to be supremely heavy, and almost ventures into straight-up black industrial territory with it's combination of crushing metallic percussion, squealing high-end dentist drill drones, filthy atmospherics and monstrous vocalizations. The percussive elements are ridiculously heavy, with a pneumatic pounding layered with a jackhammer like rhythm that gives this sort of an industrial metal feel, and reminds me of some of the more bone-crushing material that I've heard from the industrial band Gnawed. And it's all offered up in homage to the Goat...
This album introduced me to Black Seas Of Inifinity, although the band has been around since the early 1990's. Apparently
the Salt Lake City project began as a more straightforward black metal outfit, but over the past decade has slowly evolved into a whole 'nother
beast, creating hallucinatory voids of pitch black electronic murk. Still influenced by the bleakness and coldness of the most feral black
metal, but now stripped of blastbeats, guitars, and traditional vocals, a kind of grim floating drone ritual. Amrita - The
Quintessence is Black Sea's first full length CD after releasing splits with Aymrev Erkroz Prevre, Kaniba, and Ugegi Aoiveae A Aer, and
this disc serves an hour-long plunge into mesmerizing black weirdness, each track sprawling out with a constantly-morphing field of minimalist
minor-key riffs, primitive spartan drumbeats, howling wind, blasts of manipulated noise bent into bizarre melodic figures, sputtering
breakbeats and heavy industrial dancefloor rhythms buried under a thick blanket of malfunctioning machine whirr, newscast warnings of zombie
apocalypse and weird glitchy rhythmic loops, the sound of metal being scraped across concrete factory floors, and heavy, subterranean ambient
drone. The last piece, "Anti Vital Interior Of The Womb Exploded Moon" features a spoken word peice from Japanese cyberpunk Kenji Siratori that
is overlaid with a veil of tribal beats, abstract electronica and sinister shimmering feedback drones. Bizarre sexual/occultic imagery is
burned into the shadows of Black Seas Of Infinity's desolate drug visions; this fits in nicely with the Autumn Wind style of stygian ambience,
informed by black metal but going way beyond, sharing the mysterious and charred vibes of artists like Hlidolf, Lustmord, Nordvargr, Ruhr
Hunter, and Neuntoter Der Plage, as well as the industrial gristle of Wolf Eyes. There are even a couple of spots on Amrita where I'm
reminded of Skinny Puppy, but this is altogether weirder and bleaker than that reference might lead you to believe. The disc comes in a
beautifully designed white digipack.
The latest album from Black Seas Of Infinity moves even further away from anything that might resemble the black metal protoplasm that the band originally sprang from, and further develops it's chilling, mindwarping language of demonic ambience and blackened improvisational murk. This is the second album that Black Seas has released through Autumn Wind, which I feel has become the North American answer to Finland's Aural Hypnox; both labels have developed a singular approach to documenting the sound of blackened ritual ambience, though Autumn Wind does have more variety in it's catalog than Aural Hypnox, branching off with releases that touch on black metal, industrial music and fantastical symphonies. On the blackest edges of the label's soundworld sits Hieros-Gamos, a four track album of creeped-out cosmic drift and psych-industrial that revolves around concepts of ritualistic sex and the marriage of pagan Gods, inscribed in expansive slabs of ambient dark matter. The first track is nearly thirty minutes, dense with drifting clouds of Lustmordian blackness and cavernous reverb, washes of gong and metallic percussion, the clang and chime of metal struck and scraped, atonal melodies, grinding low-end distortion and the tolling of bells ringing in the depths. Male and female voices appear at a couple of points throughout the track, intoning weird, erotically-charged invocations. These spoken word parts continue to show up over the course of Hieros-Gamos, reciting their tantric like lines over constant-shifting swathes of buzzing drone or glacial orchestral strings, and sometimes devolve into wordless chants or lose themselves, eyes rolled back, in a moaning trance as insectile chitter and black ambience washes over them. The first three tracks all flow together, like one single massive piece, an ecstatic slow motion vortex of time-stretched strings and cave drift, fluttering woodwinds and ritualistic percussion, voices drowned in lust and barbiturates. The sound changes when the fourth and final track shows up, starting immediately with a weird distorted raga drone that sounds like it is being played on some alien instrumental thats part didgeridoo, part sitar, emitting a thick intoxicating buzz that burrows through the tidal wash of dark cosmic drift, joined by an eerie melody scraped out a dessicated fiddle and the female vocalist, her voice deep and resonant, chanting over the heavy raga buzz . Very Swans-like, that last track.
Even if you don't put much stock into the occult/ritual themes that Black Seas explore in their music, this is still an impressive collection of weird black ambience that sounds like a fusion of the Aural Hypnox brand of percussion-heavy cave-drift, Lustmord-inspired dread, and Great Annihilator era Swans, which sounds pretty damn fantasic to me. Autumn Wind never lets me down with their packaging, and this disc is beautifully presented in a back digipack that comes with a thick 16 page booklet filled with evocative, mind-bending full color paintings from Stafford Stone, Asenath Mason, Markus Wolff and others.
�� Beginning in 2012, Irish label Hell Comes Home began to unleash a subscription club series of 7"s that featured pairings of some of the best bands in the noise-rock/sludge/doom underground (and beyond); featuring the likes of Thou, Fistula, Burning Love, Dead Elephants, and Coffinworm, this series delivered all-new material from the artists involved, each 7" featuring one song from each band along with a digital download code for the music. In addition, each 7" is presented in a cream-colored jacket with striking original artwork from Polish designer Kuba Sok�lski, who illustrated each of these singles with a different mutant insect-like monstrosity, rendered in the sort of detail that you would expect from an entomological text. The look and feel of these records got my collector's vein pulsating in a big way, and we've managed to snag a selection of these 7"s for the C-Blast shop; numbers are limited, of course, and several of the entries in the Hell Comes Home series are already out of print...
//It's a goddamn shame that Black Sun had to hang it up not long after their installment in this series came out; the Scottish band's brand of Swans-influenced sludge had been a big fave around here, especially with their 2010 album Twilight Of The Gods. Aside from a collaboration with Theologian that had come out the same year as a limited edition cassette, this is the final word from these masters of bleak, tortured heaviness. The crushing evil sludge of their "Crawling Like A Leech" continues to mix their scenes of sexual degradation and abject nihilism with a churning industrial-tinged undercurrent seething beneath the surface, echoes of Filth-era Swans in the churning bottom-heavy riffage and haunting melodies, those layered guitars forming into something grimly beautiful as the song tromps endlessly into the void, a militaristic lust-driven death march into oblivion. On the other side, we get those Finnish noise rock thugs Throat sluggin' us with another blast of their Am Rep-on-steroids clank and crush, via the howling discordant violence of "Anal Paranoid", welding their trademark noisy hysteria to a massive earthshaking sludge riff amid all kinds of clanging harmonics. Total crushing ugliness.
Another one of the limited-edition 7"s that At War With False Noise cranked out over the past year, the Black Sun / They Are Cowards split showcases one meaty track each from two of the UK's heaviest underground sludge/noise metal crews. The Ep is limited to a mere 300 copies, and comes in a double sided fold-over sleeve.
Already established on AWWFN as a heavy proposition via their Paralyser Lp on the label from a while back, Black Sun return here with a new jam called "Code Black" that's equally as crushing as what they were doing on their album. It opens up with gouts of violent feedback, as the band lurches forward into a pounding mid-tempo crush, mean and sludgy, with a mix of harsh, freaked out screaming and beefier bellowing roars over top. This driving metallic noise rock jam grinds away for a couple of minutes with lots of noisy riffing and a palpable malevolence, and then slips into a slower, stomping dirge at the end, dragging you down into the muck. It crushed quite nicely, and reminds me of a more straightforward and grinding version of Anodyne.
Then, on the flipside, the band They Are Cowards emerge with a pulverizing slab of heaviness called "First and Only". Featuring some members of the renowned UK doom metal outfit Atavist, They Are Cowards are also seekers of oblivion through the riff, but achieve it with a much more savage strategy. When the song kicks off, it's awesome, oppressive doom, grinding and glacial, but it quickly tears into a skull-hammering blend of Celtic Frost-style crush and angular Am Rep violence. Might sound like an odd combo, but these guys definitely destroy, moving from one crushing, concrete-heavy riff to another, and switching off between faster hardcore style blasts of speed and power with sickening vokills, to slower, Frostian sludge and jagged off-time beatings. I'd love to hear more from this band.
Couldn't ask for better timing really; right when I finally got around to discovering the gloriously weird UK scene that is "True Sheffield Black Psychedelia" and obtaining the majority of their awesome cd-r releases for the C-Blast shop (as well as my own collection), along comes the brand new full length from one of my favorite bands from the TSBP mob, the demented, far-put psychedelic necrokrautrock beast known as BLACK VOMIT, released on an actual cd with full color packaging, the works, and not only that, but issued through one of my favorite black metal labels, Rusty Axe. And after filling my skull with the music from Black Vomit's splits with Dukkha and Rape Rack that I've been listening to nonstop lately, I knew that I was going to love this, knew that it was going to totally fry my brain, but even then, I had no clue as to just how monumentally FUCKED this album was going to end up being!
The previous Black Vomit releases have had their moments of brutal heaviness, no doubt about it, but none of that stuff comes close to the utter blasting freakout that occurs here. When Black Vomit kick into the "metal" parts on Jungle Death, it's anything from impossibly distorted minimal black metal to severely corrupted digital grindcore, or a sort of epic drone-blasted doom, regardless of what form it takes, it's always drowned in some sort of bizarre fx and corrosive distortion, buzzing and roaring, sometimes totally obscured by sheets of rotten sonic filth and slime, or caught up in frenzied seizures of digital skipping and splintered frequencies.
It's not all blown-out hyperfucked black metal blurr though, and the album starts off all dark and rumbling, the first track "A Premonition Of Inevitable Doom" unfolding murky melodic drones and looped basslines in a black haze of industrial clinks and metallic chanting voices, a mysterious and entrancing field of dark kosmiche ambience. As soon as that ends though, it's right into the thrashing fucked-up horror of "Deluge From Hell", a messed-up, unbelieveably distorted black metal blast that seems to loop over and over, shedding bits of digitally corrupted noise and glitch, drum fills suddenly spiking high in the mix before being subsumed back into the raging black mass. It finally becomes so chaotic that the whole thing just seems to collapse in on itself. "Conderlint5" follows, a gorgeous looping sprawl of warbling ambience and glassy strings wrapped in a delicate shround of fuzz and whispered voices; then comes the awesome cosmic doom and fuzzstorm of "Vigilante Night", a gorgeous black riff grinding over roiling doublekick drums and bathed in a sea of smoldering distortion, like a blackened funeral doom dirge remixed by Tim Hecker and laced with fragments of malfunctioning hard-drive noise. The heaviness disappears almost completely on "Last Cris Of the Lost", a creepy tangle of keening feedback, electrical hum, trippy monaing fx and pounding tribal drums. The whole album teeters between passages of utterly amazing dark dronemusic and the fractured, digitally-corroded metallic heaviness.
With each track, Jungle Death seems to fall deeper and deeper into this bizarre blackened soundworld, through ultra-distorted ranting vocals and swarms of malevolent electronics, hypnotic tribal drums pounding into infinity, black winds of metallic hum and wintery hiss, monstrous growls run through severe processing, chopped up vocal samples and ominous snatches of radio interference, then morphing into weirdly damaged metallic groove and crushing industrial murk. Glitchy vocals and drowned melodies are washed over with waves of electronic crunch and tiny bursts of static that pan back and forth while
sonar pings rise up from the depths. Speaker-blown riffs struggle to coalesce over a surface of minimal industrial whir, then pull back to reveal creaking noises and insect like chirps before a weird phased jangly guitar riff appears for a few moments, only to become obliterated by a blast of super distorted metallic indie rock crush spread out over a frenetic drumbeat that speeds up to a jungle-like tempo.
And then suddenly we're transported into a gorgeous majestic dirge, with operatic female vocals and epic orchestral strings and heavily affected drums swirling together like a heavy Goblin piece, before veering off once again into the massive thirteen minute epic "Dark Beloved Cloud", a whacked out feverish blur of blown droning black metal riffs and stuttering, stumbling blastbeats and wild noodly solos flung everywhere, sometimes breaking down for a few seconds into weird effects, or tangles of gnarly blacknoise, or stretches of epic midpaced blackthrash, evolving into manic Digital Hardcore like percussive breaks, fucked-up nintendo soundtrack music, weird breakbeats, Lustmordian ambience, murky black psychedelia and haunting female vocals, becoming weirder and weirder with each moment, truly hallucinatory, a term I use alot around here, but if it was ever applicable it's with this, this sprawling feverdream of blackened weirdness. When we finally reach the end, the last track "Evolution Of Joy" takes us out on a nearly nine minute swirl of krauty ambience, beautiful melted melodies and warm, kosmiche keys soaring through clouds of murky shifting low end and tons of spacey electronic effects, flattening out into a expanse of near total silence that closes the album.
Amazing, and indecipherable, Jungle Death is one of the weirdest "metal" albums I've ever heard, a high point for sure from these purveyors of "True Sheffield Black Psychedelia", and another contender for C-Blast's psychedelic black metal album of the year award, for sure.
More of that bizarre freaked-out blackness known as "True Sheffield Black Psychedelia"! If you're a junkie for the weirdest, most "out" black metal out there, it's hard not to get pretty obsessed with the Frequency Thirteen catalog and all of the bands on the label that's based in Sheffield, England. All of this stuff is so weird and heavy and blackened and infectious that I've been listening to it constantly over the past few weeks, getting totally immersed in the mutant miasma of krautrock and klosmiche psych and noise-drenched black metal and damaged grindcore that all of these bands spew out, especially the blow-out brainfuck necrokrautrock of Skultroll and the utter mutant mania of Black Vomit. The brand new Black Vomit album Jungle Death was a shoe-in for our featured release this week, but we also have two cd-rs from Frequency Thirteen that pair up Black Vomit with other likeminded bands like the mighty Dukkha and the lysergic buzzblast of Rape Rack!
The Black Vomit / Rape Rack split is a blazing dose of vile whatthefuck heaviness. The disc starts off with Black Vomit, who label their "side" Scumfuck and begin with the eerie windswept ambience of "Dripping Red" that evolves into heavy, fuzzed-out black drone, and then all of a sudden kicks into this bizarre synth/drums metallic hypno-groove, kinda 8-bit and digitized, then goes into trippy, distortion-soaked psychedelic grind with heavily fx-splattered vocals. "Crush Your Day" is a freaked out mess of distorted programmed blastbeats and glitchy, Digital Hardcore like pound, brief stretches of glitchy, angular crawl, and "Witchtrial" moves through weird computerized black ambience, vocoded snarls, spacey drones , and breaks into an awesome, hypnotic krautrock workout surrounded by layers of processed blown-out riffage and trance-inducing robotic blastbeats and fx, the jam sliding back and forth between the motorik robo-pulse and the more ferocious black blast, eventually dropping off into a vast void of meditative blackness punctured by blasts of ultra-distorted low end and murderous screams, finally exploding at the end into brutal metallic blacknoise. Fucking killer!
Going for a more ambient approach, Rape Rack deliver three tracks of their own version of blackened kosmich psych, their music soaring through dense debris-filled realms of drumless drift. Thick swathes of cosmic synth and trippy spaced out electronics, gorgeous murky melodies, caustic corrosive distortion, their nocturnal blastscapes littered with all sorts of decayed and corroded sound, sometimes floating into epic dreamy ambience, sometimes erupting into violent torrents of murky, decomposing black metal that's almost devoid of propulsion. The last Rape Rack track is a sixteen minute epic that drops almost all of the more abrasive sounds from before, a massive shimmering black mass of obsidian blackdrone flecked by digital shards and streaked by swirls of ghostly murmur.
And after all of that, we get a seventh unlisted track that is a collaboration between both Rape Rack and Black Vomit, it's really short, barely three minutes long, but it's a ferocious, super-fucked up blast of overmodulated, mega-processed black metal, the riffs blurred into indistinct shred, bathed in over the top fx, the bestial vocals stretched and blown out into clouds of demonic reverb, a deafening abstract mass of psyched-out heaviness. This rules!
����� Back in stock. Scrawled with more great Moyen artwork, this recent split EP between bestial black metallers Revenge and Black Witchery sure won't win over any new fans amongst those who detest this sort of stuff for being tuneless, formless noise; you'll frequently see Black Witchery compared to the sound of a malfunctioning garbage disposal, for instance. But then, I do like listening to malfunctioning garbage disposals. Make of that what you will. Of course, neither Revenge or Black Witchery are at that level of racket, but this savage blackgrind blast sure hit the spot for me.
����� The first new stuff to feature new guitarist Alal'Xhaasztur (Nyogthaeblisz, Hellvetron), Black Witchery's half erupts into a blitzkrieg of barbaric heaviness, opening with a noxious blackened ambient intro, a din of monstrous growls and gasps awash in subterranean rumblings and distant metallic reverberations; once "Black Death Conjuration" kicks in though, it's a ferocious, blasting mayhem of primitive riffage, incessant blastbeats and those ghastly, murderous screams. The rest follows suit, a violent blast of blackened grindcore-style extremism, so violent that it has a similar chaotic kick as early Earache stuff, but drenched in utter satanic misanthropy, surging into one last surge of filthy blackened industrial ambience that washes over the final moments of "Profanation Triumph".
����� A medley of sorts, Revenge's "Humanity Noosed / Equimanthorn" starts off as an original blast of hateful noise metal before morphing into a cover of the classic Bathory song. Sprawling out for nearly ten minutes, Revenge unleash their signature horror-show of atonal string scrapes and utterly chaotic soloing, layered bestial screams and guttural nauseating grunts, all fused to simple, violent punk-style riffs and J. Read's psychotic drumming. And in their mitts, that Bathory cover turns into a ravenous monstrosity, the central riffs now swallowed by a snarling, snapping chaos of barbed-wire blackgrind and batshit guitar shred. Awesome.
����� Back in stock. Scrawled with more great Moyen artwork, this recent split EP between bestial black metallers Revenge and Black Witchery sure won't win over any new fans amongst those who detest this sort of stuff for being tuneless, formless noise; you'll frequently see Black Witchery compared to the sound of a malfunctioning garbage disposal, for instance. But then, I do like listening to malfunctioning garbage disposals. Make of that what you will. Of course, neither Revenge or Black Witchery are at that level of racket, but this savage blackgrind blast sure hit the spot for me.
����� The first new stuff to feature new guitarist Alal'Xhaasztur (Nyogthaeblisz, Hellvetron), Black Witchery's half erupts into a blitzkrieg of barbaric heaviness, opening with a noxious blackened ambient intro, a din of monstrous growls and gasps awash in subterranean rumblings and distant metallic reverberations; once "Black Death Conjuration" kicks in though, it's a ferocious, blasting mayhem of primitive riffage, incessant blastbeats and those ghastly, murderous screams. The rest follows suit, a violent blast of blackened grindcore-style extremism, so violent that it has a similar chaotic kick as early Earache stuff, but drenched in utter satanic misanthropy, surging into one last surge of filthy blackened industrial ambience that washes over the final moments of "Profanation Triumph".
����� A medley of sorts, Revenge's "Humanity Noosed / Equimanthorn" starts off as an original blast of hateful noise metal before morphing into a cover of the classic Bathory song. Sprawling out for nearly ten minutes, Revenge unleash their signature horror-show of atonal string scrapes and utterly chaotic soloing, layered bestial screams and guttural nauseating grunts, all fused to simple, violent punk-style riffs and J. Read's psychotic drumming. And in their mitts, that Bathory cover turns into a ravenous monstrosity, the central riffs now swallowed by a snarling, snapping chaos of barbed-wire blackgrind and batshit guitar shred. Awesome.
The follow-up to their 2006 album Solarkult, the cryptically titled T/ME [3rd Level Initiation = Chamber of Downfall] is a new 32 minute mini- album from French technoid black metallers Blacklodge. It's a standalone version of their half of the split Lp with Abigor that came out last year, a weird concept album that involved Einstein, the nature of time, and a Satanic agenda. Blacklodge's material is presented here on Cd in a deluxe black digibox release that includes a twelve page booklet. Their fusion of electronic music and black metal is a little more abstruse this time around, the songs a bit more fractured and twisted than on Solarkult, but all aspects of Blacklodge's techno-satanic vision and their hard-line oro-narcotic, pro-Satan stance are intact here, with a combination of techno and dystopian electronica with black metal that puts this firmly in the same realm as bands like Aborym, Abigor, Red Harvest, and Dodheimsgard. What separates Blacklodge from their peers is the extent to which vocalist, guitarist, and overall mastermind Saint Vincent (also of Vorkreist and Merrimack) takes the techno and drum n' bass elements on T/ME....
The first song Lambda [Or The Last of The Gods; Being The Secret of SataN] begins the disc with mysterious black ambience, eerie feedback strains slicing through fragments of orchestral melody, drafts of factory noise and distant chanting, the sound slowly evolving into a chugging spacey black metal riff that erupts into a throbbing blackened disco pulse, pounding industrial rhythms surging beneath grinding guitar and manic layered vokills, for a moment sounding like a cross between Skinny Puppy and majestic black metal and an extremely bleak strain of trip-hop. As it winds down, the beat-driven BM delirium begins to break off into machine noise and dark dolorous drift at the end, with a stern male voice speaking above choirs of synthetic silicone angels.
Then "Vector G [Gravity XVI]" kicks in, all Wax Trax style stomp and black buzz, a massive electronic pummel that dominates the swarming riffing and hateful vibe, breaking into alternating blasts of violent gabber and spastic drum n bass, whipping itself into a frenzied black metal techno chaos. The music is layered with effects and glitchy noise, a maniacal frenzied black electro blast of warped dissonant riffing and chaotic arrangements, veering into soundtrack-style ambience for a moment, then dropping off into densely layered hellish dance floor industrial and grinding programmed crush.
At the onset of "Sulphuric Acedia", Blacklodge releases a shuffling mess of stuttering machine rhythms, buzzing dubbed-out bass and swirling minor key creep, then surges upwards into jackhammer techno that's splattered with glitchy drum programming and imperial black metal riffs. And closer "Stupefying" introduces a massive booming slow motion break beat into a moody black dirge, lurching through a halting stop-start riff, a sort of metallic industrialized trip-hop with dramatic riffs and thunderous boom-bap, an anguished vokill performance taking the song to evil heights, mutating into lush electronic textures and smears of processed sound and looping electronic keys that sounds something like Massive Attack remixing Mayhem.
This is a short album, but man, is it ferocious, a complex and cerebral electronic black metal beast that's highly recommended to fans of Aborym and Dodheimsgard.
��Machination is the most recent album from French industrial black metallers Blacklodge, having come out back in 2012 on Season of Mist; I initially sold out of the album so quickly that I didn't bother taking the time to put together a review for the site, but now that we finally have it restocked (available both in digipack CD format and double LP, limited to five hundred hand-numbered copies) I finally have an excuse to ruminate a little on just how badass this disc is.
�� I've long been a fan of Blacklodge's drug-fueled vision of blackened Satanic raver violence; there are few bands that have bridged the void between classical black metal and furious electronic music as adeptly as these maniacs, and with each new album their music has evolved into more complex designs of mechanical evil and digital pandemonium. True, Blacklodge have never enjoyed the level of recognition as some of the more well-known industrial black metal bands like Dodheimsgard, Aborym or Mysticum (at least here in the U.S.), but these guys have produced some of my all-time favorite albums of electronically-enhanced blackened violence, especially in recent years, often fusing a heavy drum n' bass influence into their fractured and abstract mecha-metal hallucinations. Machination maintains that manic, warped vibe that has coursed violently through their recordings, the production filled with all sorts of weird little production tricks and odd effects that make this sound a lot more fucked-up and otherworldly and alien than many of their industrial/techno-infected black metal peers. Could be their Frenchiness, of course. There's definitely some of that baroque quality that seems to come along with most French black metal bands; Machination shimmers with some of that Deathspell-style discordance that has permeated most corners of the French black metal underground. But the way that sound intertwines with the frenetic, constantly changing electronic rhythms and violent drum programming ends up turning this into something quite unique. The songs are fast and ferocious, each one a complex blast of ripping black metal riffage and discordant tremolo swarm welded to spastic jungle rhythms, bizarre Whourkr-esque glitchery and crushing distorted breakbeats, the influence of various forms of ultra-aggressive European dance music seeping like opiate residue and black bile into Blacklodge's electro-Satanic blasts, rife with the sound of screwed-up drum n' bass and pounding 4/4 techno beats that relentlessly jackhammer at your skull. Clanking mechanical rhythms and vicious bass drops are utilized alongside jittery samples and pounding pneumatic sheet-metal percussion, and tracks like "NeutroN ShivA" and the punishing "Order of the Baphomet" even start to resemble some perverted black metal version of Ministry or Front Line Assembly, at least up to the point where strange layers of chirping nocturnal frog sounds start to appear over more fractured blasts of juddering mechanical heaviness. When the album comes to a close, its with an awesome slithering mecha-dirge titled "The Other Side", a bizarre droning nightmare of jazzy bass, wailing operatic female vocals, ultra distorted synths that bore gaping black holes straight through your brainmeat, malevolent whispers and some supremely dissonant guitar creep; it's a nightmarish dub-flecked descent into total drug-drenched delirium that starts to resemble Skinny Puppy more than anything remotely black metal, but with a pulsating evil energy that is unlike anything I've ever heard on any of my Wax Trax or Nettwerk 12" singles. It's a deeply dystopian atmosphere that Blacklodge evokes here, fueled on narcotics and flickering digital images of worldwide atrocities, visions of leering Baphometic demons, their visages lit by the dull neon tracers from twitching glow-sticks, tuning in to lycanthropic incantations hidden in the garbled scream of malfunctioning modems, heavy doses of 21st century paranoia that feel as if they could've been lifted from the pages of a William Gibson novel splattered in black goat's blood.
��Machination is the most recent album from French industrial black metallers Blacklodge, having come out back in 2012 on Season of Mist; I initially sold out of the album so quickly that I didn't bother taking the time to put together a review for the site, but now that we finally have it restocked (available both in digipack CD format and double LP, limited to five hundred hand-numbered copies) I finally have an excuse to ruminate a little on just how badass this disc is.
�� I've long been a fan of Blacklodge's drug-fueled vision of blackened Satanic raver violence; there are few bands that have bridged the void between classical black metal and furious electronic music as adeptly as these maniacs, and with each new album their music has evolved into more complex designs of mechanical evil and digital pandemonium. True, Blacklodge have never enjoyed the level of recognition as some of the more well-known industrial black metal bands like Dodheimsgard, Aborym or Mysticum (at least here in the U.S.), but these guys have produced some of my all-time favorite albums of electronically-enhanced blackened violence, especially in recent years, often fusing a heavy drum n' bass influence into their fractured and abstract mecha-metal hallucinations. Machination maintains that manic, warped vibe that has coursed violently through their recordings, the production filled with all sorts of weird little production tricks and odd effects that make this sound a lot more fucked-up and otherworldly and alien than many of their industrial/techno-infected black metal peers. Could be their Frenchiness, of course. There's definitely some of that baroque quality that seems to come along with most French black metal bands; Machination shimmers with some of that Deathspell-style discordance that has permeated most corners of the French black metal underground. But the way that sound intertwines with the frenetic, constantly changing electronic rhythms and violent drum programming ends up turning this into something quite unique. The songs are fast and ferocious, each one a complex blast of ripping black metal riffage and discordant tremolo swarm welded to spastic jungle rhythms, bizarre Whourkr-esque glitchery and crushing distorted breakbeats, the influence of various forms of ultra-aggressive European dance music seeping like opiate residue and black bile into Blacklodge's electro-Satanic blasts, rife with the sound of screwed-up drum n' bass and pounding 4/4 techno beats that relentlessly jackhammer at your skull. Clanking mechanical rhythms and vicious bass drops are utilized alongside jittery samples and pounding pneumatic sheet-metal percussion, and tracks like "NeutroN ShivA" and the punishing "Order of the Baphomet" even start to resemble some perverted black metal version of Ministry or Front Line Assembly, at least up to the point where strange layers of chirping nocturnal frog sounds start to appear over more fractured blasts of juddering mechanical heaviness. When the album comes to a close, its with an awesome slithering mecha-dirge titled "The Other Side", a bizarre droning nightmare of jazzy bass, wailing operatic female vocals, ultra distorted synths that bore gaping black holes straight through your brainmeat, malevolent whispers and some supremely dissonant guitar creep; it's a nightmarish dub-flecked descent into total drug-drenched delirium that starts to resemble Skinny Puppy more than anything remotely black metal, but with a pulsating evil energy that is unlike anything I've ever heard on any of my Wax Trax or Nettwerk 12" singles. It's a deeply dystopian atmosphere that Blacklodge evokes here, fueled on narcotics and flickering digital images of worldwide atrocities, visions of leering Baphometic demons, their visages lit by the dull neon tracers from twitching glow-sticks, tuning in to lycanthropic incantations hidden in the garbled scream of malfunctioning modems, heavy doses of 21st century paranoia that feel as if they could've been lifted from the pages of a William Gibson novel splattered in black goat's blood.
Best known for his work as the front man for the Swedish death industrial group IRM, Martin Bladh here goes solo for a thirty-five minute industrial drone piece. The disc is divided into five tracks, but these are just chapters in the overall performance, which starts off as a low, rumbling organ-like drone that slowly builds in volume and intensity over the album's half hour running time, gradually building layers and layers of sound, rumbling overtones and distant dissonant strings and machine-like throb that turns this into a massive roaring furnace of apocalyptic drone. Almost the entire first half of Study For A Theatre Of Cruelty is placid, meditative, a sprawling field of minimal buzz and hum, but the second half consistently ratchets up the power and attack, getting more and more dissonant, more sinister in tone, more abrasive, until cracks begin to appear in the roiling cloud of electronic noise through which emerge mechanical clanging and other uneasy sounds, the piece overloads into a thunderous white-hot roar, then finally fades into silence at the end. It's substantially different from Bladh's crushing dark ambience and power electronics in IRM, but there's still that nightmarish feeling, that sense of unease that seems to go hand in hand with everything that he creates. If anything, Study is closer to the recent dronescapes of Kevin Drumm, and the stark dark ambience of Jarl, or the overdriven organ drones of Wander cranked to a skull-shredding level of intensity. Limited to 300 copies, and comes in full color packaging with creepy artwork.
��� The most recent spate of Annihilvs releases has been pretty fantastic, none more so than the new collaborative album Ruby from dark Swedish visionary Martin Bladh and Portuguese industrial pummelers Sektor 304. I've been getting increasingly hooked on Sektor 304's unique combination of clanking industrial noise and apocalyptic Swans-esque power-dirge, and it was just on the last new arrivals list here at C-Blast that I raved about both their recent new live album and the latest full-length from Bladh's avant death industrial outfit IRM, so this disc landed here at the perfect time, complimenting the constant spins both of those albums have been getting here.
��� Made up of a single hour-long piece, Ruby slowly emerges out of a field of mesmeric black throb, deep bass pulses radiating out of slowly swirling electronic loops. It doesn't take long though before the group begins to unleash their full fury, leading the album through a number of distinct passages of crushing synth-drone and doom-laden death industrial, filled with sprawls of evil electronic ambience, glacial percussive movements shifting tectonically beneath the group's array of creepy field recordings and desolate drone. Bladh delivers his unsettling prose as a spoken monologue over the rumbling noisescape, his voice twisted and pitched into layers of helium-sucking squeak and deeper mutterings, the layering of voices adding to what becomes an increasingly surreal atmosphere that develops over the course of the album. Rhythmic loops are also recurring element, rattling percussive noises that resemble rain sticks and distant prayer-bells that are woven into rhythmically hypnotic forms as they tumble into a black abyss, and dread-filled synthesizers cruise that blackness with a minimal menace that verges on Carpenterian. Swells of rumbling improvised cacophony surge out of the depths, and there are moments (like when guest musician Ang�lica Salvi appears around halfway through with her ghostly harp) where Ruby veers into a kind of phantasmal, Lynchian strangeness that reminded more than once of Nurse With Wound. While this is much more focused on atmosphere than aggression, Sektor 304 fans do get some of the group's slow-motion industrial dirge in the latter half of the album, where that drifting dreamlike strangeness suddenly gives way to grueling mechanical heaviness and clanking, bass-draped crush, with some seriously heavy distorted bass guitar coiling around a particularly doomed passage. Those moments are for the most part brief punctuations of power scattered throughout the mostly formless nightmare of Ruby, however, eventually cresting with an unexpected final stretch of mesmeric noise-drenched rock that gets almost Skullflowery.
��� Comes in a four-panel digipack with artwork from Bladh and designed by Sektor 304's Andr� Coelho.
Ghost-politico avant-folk balladry and spirit-of-truth improvisation from this Baltimorian. Unapologetically political folk-soul-blues ramblings are
interjected with unnerving free noise improv. Shelly Blake has been making cult-variety recordings since 1995, his earliest published work consisting of
songs recorded directly to answering machine tapes, raw bits of ravaged songs. Later, Blake turned to the analog four-track as his chosen means of capturing
sound. He quickly recorded dozens of songs and improvisations in this fashion before disappearing in 1996 into a quasi-hermitic lifestyle; these albums were
like scrapbooks -- diaries in sound and lyric. Since resurfacing in the year 2000, Blake's music has become ever more eclectic: primarily composing and
improvising for voice, piano, organ, guitar, loops, antique record players, and found objects, his music over the last decade has spanned the gamut from lo-
fi psych folk to beat-heavy guitar-laced trance and from Guthrie-esque political balladry to site-specific free improvised performance/sound art. More
recently, he has performed free improvisation with ensembles and small groups exploring issues related to paranormal lore and American politics. His most
current work merges folk balladry, analog noise, and the sampling of English opera with whole-body free improvisation exploring stressful physical states
involving water, aluminum, and sensory deprivation. This newest full length manifesto is comprised of damaged folk ramblings and chance-inspired sonar-poetic
experiments, a documentation of the summer of 2005 from the point of view of a hermit who lives in the forest just south of Baltimore Washington
International Airport's runway. Packaged in a silkscreened/labeled white digi-sleeve.
The elegance of the time-lapse photos of a dancer featured on the cover of Rhinestone totally belies the brutal electronic chaos that David Reed (also of Luasa Raelon, Envenomist, and Nightmares) and Phil Blankenship (The Cherry Point) unleash on this full length disc. The half-hour long "Rhinestone" is a nightmarish sprawl of extreme electronic noise and random percussive noises, room ambience and screaming apocalyptic feedback from the duo. It definitely has a different feel than Blankenship's other recent releases (both solo and with the LHD project he shares with John Wiese), though. There's an improvisational feel to the bizarre haunted house rattling and moaning that takes place over the near-constant wall of brittle static, crackling electrical cable-buzz, and bass-heavy rumble. Lots of dead amplifier hum and controlled bursts of metallic junk-noise are heavily incorporated into this chaotic soundscape for good measure as well. Reed and Blankenship also make interesting use of space and depth after the initial cacophony of the first ten minutes; after that point, the blasts of noise become sporadic, interspersed with brief sections of ambient room noise, brutal percussive blasts and clanking metal, a style that follows in a similar vein as John Wiese's brutal electro-acoustic compositions. Later, Bianchi-like pulsations of black cancerous electronics begin to appear, adding to the psychedelic harsh noise horror. Hands down the harshest material that I've ever heard from Reed, a far cry from his deathly synthscapes and cold black industrial ambience. It's equally devoid of light though, and a top-notch slab of extreme electronic violence. Released in a limited edition of one hundred seventy-five copies in digipack packaging.
This bizarro bit of Boredoms-worshipping avant-grind is back in stock!
An unbridled anxiety-attack of genre-splicing noisecore, The Ring Of The Nibelungen is one of the most frenzied albums of it's type that has come
in to Crucial Blast, and considering our predeliction for the likes of Melt Banana, Seven Minutes Of Nausea, Naked City and the like, that's really saying
something. The Danish duo Blasphemia Casualis released this forty track disc in 2006 in a small self-produced run, and then re-released it with new and
improved artwork through the small Siegfried Records imprint recently. The two member go by the names Clan (vocals, programming) and Lord Corpse-Spitter
(guitars, vocals), and assemble extremely short tracks of deranged grindnoise pastiche that stitches together programmed blastbeats, blasts of pure white
noise, retarded death metal riffing and grunting vocal noise, chopped-up breakcore beats, snippets of black metal and power metal, Danish porno samples,
various movie samples, strange electronic ambient parts, and demented hip-hop into one of the most fucked-up sounding plundergrind albums ever, one that is
seperated into four sections titled "The Book Of Satan", "The Book Of Lucifer", "The Book Of Belial", and so on, and with song titles like "His Penis Now
Boasts A Power-Driven Screw", "His Mouth Is A Twisted Red-Pink Jumble Of Teeth And Meat And Jawbone Part I" and "You Could've Calibrated A Nuclear Clock By
The Ebb And Flow Of The Man's Junk Tide". The combined influence of Boredoms, Anal Cunt, and Kid606 is pretty strong here, but if you have the fortitude to
absorb the whiplash assault of sample fuckery, glitched beats, brain-damaged hip-hop stupidity, random vocal insanity and the blasts of harsh, Agoraphobic
Nosebleed-meets-Merzbow grindnoise that these two maniacs have pasted together haphazardly for this disc, this is one disorientating fucking brainscramble
that will have you trying to sort out what you are hearing every time you spin it. The tracks tend to run about thirty seconds or so, but in that short of a
time they pack in a ridiculous, nonstop array of samples, some of which have been lifted from all kinds of movies (I hear stuff from The Dark
Crystal and various 80's splatter movies right off of the top of my head), but even more of which have been actually recorded by the band themselves and
chopped up into little microblurts of sonic weirdness, and then pasted back together into these chunks of ultraviolent, kaleidoscopic sound-collage. It's all
pretty over-the-top and ridiculous and frequently pretty stupid, but this disc has a real sugar-rush to it that fans of Crotchduster, Fantomas, early
Boredoms, and other dealers in scattershot genrehopping whatthefuck will dig. I still don't know what the Wagnerian reference in the album title is supposed
to be about, though.
Now available on CD, both black and white vinyl (with corresponding covers), and LP picture disc; all vinyl editions also come with an A2 size Blasphemy poster.
It's been years since we last had this highly influential, utterly barbaric album in stock here at C-Blast, but Blasphemy's seminal Fallen Angel Of Doom is at last once again available, a crucial slab of early 90s ear-hate reissued by the folks at Nuclear War Now. Originally vomited up on the notorious Wild Rags label in 1990, Fallen Angel Of Doom is ground zero for what would eventually come to be called "bestial black metal" and "war metal"; despite its revered status amongst black and death metal extremists, this album also has just as many detractors, with many dismissing Blasphemy's sound as nothing but ear-splitting, low-fi noise. Which it definitely is, to an extent. Comprised of members with names like Black Priest Of The 7 Satanic Blood Rituals, Caller Of The Storms, Black Hearts Of Damnation And Impurity and Nocturnal Grave Desecrator And Black Winds, these guys were the core of the infamous Ross Bay Cult out of Vancouver, feral war-thugs who combined the skin-blistering speed and ferocity of grindcore, the rot-soaked filth of early death metal, and the satanic evil of black metal into one of the filthiest, most unapproachable sounds to come out of the late 80s underground, one that would have an undeniable influence on Beherit and later bands like Conqueror, Teitanblood, Revenge, Goatpenis, Black Witchery, Vassafor and Diocletian. An entire school of bestialized metal sprung up in the wake of this album. This is the original black seed.
This is genuinely violent music, a kind of blasphemic blackgrind hammered out by leather-clad, chain-draped cavemen, the vocals a bizarre, ghastly snarl often mutated by weird effects; the riffs could be described as simplistic, but are also utterly bludgeoning, delivered with a rabid aggression that can almost resemble the most insane 80s hardcore punk. The songs can also suddenly erupt into an insanely noisy blur of buzzsaw guitar noise and rumbling bass laid out over the artillery-style blastbeats and whiplash-inducing tempo shifts; those tempo changes are savage, suddenly shifting from the chaotic blasting into a pulverizing mid-tempo riff. And it's laced with sickening, hallucinatory noisescapes that are deliberately arranged throughout the album, congealing pools of droning electronic murk, backmasked snarls and weird processed choral voices all swirling through the black blast; opener "(Winds Of The Black Godz) Intro" sounds like a fragment of some obscure German kosmische outfit spinning murkily beneath a pile of rotting grave-shrouds, while the bleary, mournful keyboards that emerge at the end of "The Desolate One (Outro)" sort of resemble something off of the Nekromantik soundtrack. And "Goddess Of Perversity" unleashes a bizarre mixture of rumbling industrial-style ambience, ultra-chaotic off-time drumming, and cacophonic guitar solos that produces the most unsettling song on the album. Absolutely essential listening for anyone hooked on the noisiest and most chaotic extremes of black/death metal.
Now available on CD, both black and white vinyl (with corresponding covers), and LP picture disc; all vinyl editions also come with an A2 size Blasphemy poster.
It's been years since we last had this highly influential, utterly barbaric album in stock here at C-Blast, but Blasphemy's seminal Fallen Angel Of Doom is at last once again available, a crucial slab of early 90s ear-hate reissued by the folks at Nuclear War Now. Originally vomited up on the notorious Wild Rags label in 1990, Fallen Angel Of Doom is ground zero for what would eventually come to be called "bestial black metal" and "war metal"; despite its revered status amongst black and death metal extremists, this album also has just as many detractors, with many dismissing Blasphemy's sound as nothing but ear-splitting, low-fi noise. Which it definitely is, to an extent. Comprised of members with names like Black Priest Of The 7 Satanic Blood Rituals, Caller Of The Storms, Black Hearts Of Damnation And Impurity and Nocturnal Grave Desecrator And Black Winds, these guys were the core of the infamous Ross Bay Cult out of Vancouver, feral war-thugs who combined the skin-blistering speed and ferocity of grindcore, the rot-soaked filth of early death metal, and the satanic evil of black metal into one of the filthiest, most unapproachable sounds to come out of the late 80s underground, one that would have an undeniable influence on Beherit and later bands like Conqueror, Teitanblood, Revenge, Goatpenis, Black Witchery, Vassafor and Diocletian. An entire school of bestialized metal sprung up in the wake of this album. This is the original black seed.
This is genuinely violent music, a kind of blasphemic blackgrind hammered out by leather-clad, chain-draped cavemen, the vocals a bizarre, ghastly snarl often mutated by weird effects; the riffs could be described as simplistic, but are also utterly bludgeoning, delivered with a rabid aggression that can almost resemble the most insane 80s hardcore punk. The songs can also suddenly erupt into an insanely noisy blur of buzzsaw guitar noise and rumbling bass laid out over the artillery-style blastbeats and whiplash-inducing tempo shifts; those tempo changes are savage, suddenly shifting from the chaotic blasting into a pulverizing mid-tempo riff. And it's laced with sickening, hallucinatory noisescapes that are deliberately arranged throughout the album, congealing pools of droning electronic murk, backmasked snarls and weird processed choral voices all swirling through the black blast; opener "(Winds Of The Black Godz) Intro" sounds like a fragment of some obscure German kosmische outfit spinning murkily beneath a pile of rotting grave-shrouds, while the bleary, mournful keyboards that emerge at the end of "The Desolate One (Outro)" sort of resemble something off of the Nekromantik soundtrack. And "Goddess Of Perversity" unleashes a bizarre mixture of rumbling industrial-style ambience, ultra-chaotic off-time drumming, and cacophonic guitar solos that produces the most unsettling song on the album. Absolutely essential listening for anyone hooked on the noisiest and most chaotic extremes of black/death metal.
Now available on CD, both black and white vinyl (with corresponding covers), and LP picture disc; all vinyl editions also come with an A2 size Blasphemy poster.
It's been years since we last had this highly influential, utterly barbaric album in stock here at C-Blast, but Blasphemy's seminal Fallen Angel Of Doom is at last once again available, a crucial slab of early 90s ear-hate reissued by the folks at Nuclear War Now. Originally vomited up on the notorious Wild Rags label in 1990, Fallen Angel Of Doom is ground zero for what would eventually come to be called "bestial black metal" and "war metal"; despite its revered status amongst black and death metal extremists, this album also has just as many detractors, with many dismissing Blasphemy's sound as nothing but ear-splitting, low-fi noise. Which it definitely is, to an extent. Comprised of members with names like Black Priest Of The 7 Satanic Blood Rituals, Caller Of The Storms, Black Hearts Of Damnation And Impurity and Nocturnal Grave Desecrator And Black Winds, these guys were the core of the infamous Ross Bay Cult out of Vancouver, feral war-thugs who combined the skin-blistering speed and ferocity of grindcore, the rot-soaked filth of early death metal, and the satanic evil of black metal into one of the filthiest, most unapproachable sounds to come out of the late 80s underground, one that would have an undeniable influence on Beherit and later bands like Conqueror, Teitanblood, Revenge, Goatpenis, Black Witchery, Vassafor and Diocletian. An entire school of bestialized metal sprung up in the wake of this album. This is the original black seed.
This is genuinely violent music, a kind of blasphemic blackgrind hammered out by leather-clad, chain-draped cavemen, the vocals a bizarre, ghastly snarl often mutated by weird effects; the riffs could be described as simplistic, but are also utterly bludgeoning, delivered with a rabid aggression that can almost resemble the most insane 80s hardcore punk. The songs can also suddenly erupt into an insanely noisy blur of buzzsaw guitar noise and rumbling bass laid out over the artillery-style blastbeats and whiplash-inducing tempo shifts; those tempo changes are savage, suddenly shifting from the chaotic blasting into a pulverizing mid-tempo riff. And it's laced with sickening, hallucinatory noisescapes that are deliberately arranged throughout the album, congealing pools of droning electronic murk, backmasked snarls and weird processed choral voices all swirling through the black blast; opener "(Winds Of The Black Godz) Intro" sounds like a fragment of some obscure German kosmische outfit spinning murkily beneath a pile of rotting grave-shrouds, while the bleary, mournful keyboards that emerge at the end of "The Desolate One (Outro)" sort of resemble something off of the Nekromantik soundtrack. And "Goddess Of Perversity" unleashes a bizarre mixture of rumbling industrial-style ambience, ultra-chaotic off-time drumming, and cacophonic guitar solos that produces the most unsettling song on the album. Absolutely essential listening for anyone hooked on the noisiest and most chaotic extremes of black/death metal.
Now available on CD, both black and white vinyl (with corresponding covers), and LP picture disc; all vinyl editions also come with an A2 size Blasphemy poster.
It's been years since we last had this highly influential, utterly barbaric album in stock here at C-Blast, but Blasphemy's seminal Fallen Angel Of Doom is at last once again available, a crucial slab of early 90s ear-hate reissued by the folks at Nuclear War Now. Originally vomited up on the notorious Wild Rags label in 1990, Fallen Angel Of Doom is ground zero for what would eventually come to be called "bestial black metal" and "war metal"; despite its revered status amongst black and death metal extremists, this album also has just as many detractors, with many dismissing Blasphemy's sound as nothing but ear-splitting, low-fi noise. Which it definitely is, to an extent. Comprised of members with names like Black Priest Of The 7 Satanic Blood Rituals, Caller Of The Storms, Black Hearts Of Damnation And Impurity and Nocturnal Grave Desecrator And Black Winds, these guys were the core of the infamous Ross Bay Cult out of Vancouver, feral war-thugs who combined the skin-blistering speed and ferocity of grindcore, the rot-soaked filth of early death metal, and the satanic evil of black metal into one of the filthiest, most unapproachable sounds to come out of the late 80s underground, one that would have an undeniable influence on Beherit and later bands like Conqueror, Teitanblood, Revenge, Goatpenis, Black Witchery, Vassafor and Diocletian. An entire school of bestialized metal sprung up in the wake of this album. This is the original black seed.
This is genuinely violent music, a kind of blasphemic blackgrind hammered out by leather-clad, chain-draped cavemen, the vocals a bizarre, ghastly snarl often mutated by weird effects; the riffs could be described as simplistic, but are also utterly bludgeoning, delivered with a rabid aggression that can almost resemble the most insane 80s hardcore punk. The songs can also suddenly erupt into an insanely noisy blur of buzzsaw guitar noise and rumbling bass laid out over the artillery-style blastbeats and whiplash-inducing tempo shifts; those tempo changes are savage, suddenly shifting from the chaotic blasting into a pulverizing mid-tempo riff. And it's laced with sickening, hallucinatory noisescapes that are deliberately arranged throughout the album, congealing pools of droning electronic murk, backmasked snarls and weird processed choral voices all swirling through the black blast; opener "(Winds Of The Black Godz) Intro" sounds like a fragment of some obscure German kosmische outfit spinning murkily beneath a pile of rotting grave-shrouds, while the bleary, mournful keyboards that emerge at the end of "The Desolate One (Outro)" sort of resemble something off of the Nekromantik soundtrack. And "Goddess Of Perversity" unleashes a bizarre mixture of rumbling industrial-style ambience, ultra-chaotic off-time drumming, and cacophonic guitar solos that produces the most unsettling song on the album. Absolutely essential listening for anyone hooked on the noisiest and most chaotic extremes of black/death metal.
Now also available as a limited-edition (only 100 made) picture disc with a red background and photos of all members featured on the b-side, packaged in a standard LP sleeve with stickers, a large black Blasphemy poster and an insert, with a "scene suppotr" obi strip hand-numbered in an edition of one hundred.
It's been years since we last had this highly influential, utterly barbaric album in stock here at C-Blast, but Blasphemy's seminal Fallen Angel Of Doom is at last once again available, a crucial slab of early 90s ear-hate reissued by the folks at Nuclear War Now. Originally vomited up on the notorious Wild Rags label in 1990, Fallen Angel Of Doom is ground zero for what would eventually come to be called "bestial black metal" and "war metal"; despite its revered status amongst black and death metal extremists, this album also has just as many detractors, with many dismissing Blasphemy's sound as nothing but ear-splitting, low-fi noise. Which it definitely is, to an extent. Comprised of members with names like Black Priest Of The 7 Satanic Blood Rituals, Caller Of The Storms, Black Hearts Of Damnation And Impurity and Nocturnal Grave Desecrator And Black Winds, these guys were the core of the infamous Ross Bay Cult out of Vancouver, feral war-thugs who combined the skin-blistering speed and ferocity of grindcore, the rot-soaked filth of early death metal, and the satanic evil of black metal into one of the filthiest, most unapproachable sounds to come out of the late 80s underground, one that would have an undeniable influence on Beherit and later bands like Conqueror, Teitanblood, Revenge, Goatpenis, Black Witchery, Vassafor and Diocletian. An entire school of bestialized metal sprung up in the wake of this album. This is the original black seed.
This is genuinely violent music, a kind of blasphemic blackgrind hammered out by leather-clad, chain-draped cavemen, the vocals a bizarre, ghastly snarl often mutated by weird effects; the riffs could be described as simplistic, but are also utterly bludgeoning, delivered with a rabid aggression that can almost resemble the most insane 80s hardcore punk. The songs can also suddenly erupt into an insanely noisy blur of buzzsaw guitar noise and rumbling bass laid out over the artillery-style blastbeats and whiplash-inducing tempo shifts; those tempo changes are savage, suddenly shifting from the chaotic blasting into a pulverizing mid-tempo riff. And it's laced with sickening, hallucinatory noisescapes that are deliberately arranged throughout the album, congealing pools of droning electronic murk, backmasked snarls and weird processed choral voices all swirling through the black blast; opener "(Winds Of The Black Godz) Intro" sounds like a fragment of some obscure German kosmische outfit spinning murkily beneath a pile of rotting grave-shrouds, while the bleary, mournful keyboards that emerge at the end of "The Desolate One (Outro)" sort of resemble something off of the Nekromantik soundtrack. And "Goddess Of Perversity" unleashes a bizarre mixture of rumbling industrial-style ambience, ultra-chaotic off-time drumming, and cacophonic guitar solos that produces the most unsettling song on the album. Absolutely essential listening for anyone hooked on the noisiest and most chaotic extremes of black/death metal.
���This has got to be one of the craziest sounding Japanese death metal bands I've come across. Nagoya-based Bleedead came out of nowhere earlier this year with their debut release Mustma Dorcheme, released by the US label Gore House Productions, and their completely nutzoid tech-death sticks out like a big fat throbbing smashed thumb from the sort of brutal gore-obsessed death metal that the label is known for. Not that Bleedead isn't as infatuated with the scenes of bloody carnage and fleshtorn horror as their labelmates Stages Of Decomposition and Cerebral Engorgement, but they wrap their gore-soaked visions in one of the most insanely crushing and confusional death metal assaults I've heard in ages. This five song, eleven minute EP will seriously scramble your brain.
��� Combining complex, discordant riffage and monstrous doom-laden breakdowns with bat-shit bass solos, an almost mechanized drum performance, and a singer who's voice shifts between totally inhuman pig-squeals and an unsettling guttural gasp that gets stretched out into weird sheets of ghastly drone, Bleedead end up taking their tech-death sound into wholly alien territory. Kamada Tomohiro's rigid, precise drumming and hyperspeed blastbeats sometimes give Bleedead's sound a vaguely industrial feel, but the sudden eruptions of shredding bass guitar solos that are scattered all throughout their music sound like something that could have come off of of a modern prog/jazz recording. And when these guys suddenly drop gear into one of their grueling slower dirges, it's just ridiculously heavy. Trying to discern any traditional song structures amongst all of this ultra-violent, cyclonic riff-salad would be futile, and there's almost nothing in the way of memorable riffs or hooks in Bleedead's music, but the sheer brutality and off-kilter complexity that these kids exhibit makes this one of the weirdest, coolest albums of outr� death metal that I've picked up this year. If you're into the addicted to the more bizarro fringes of brutal death metal inhabited by the likes of Wormed, Orchdiectomy, Dripping, Devast, and Terminally Your Aborted Ghost, I'm betting that Bleedead's convoluted tech-death insanity is going to be right up your plasma-splattered alley.
Ah, the death metal rehearsal tape. It's the manifestation of old school death metal at it's purest, most bestial level. Back in the early '90s, death metal rehearsal tapes were commonly sold and traded in the extreme metal underground, and whenever I would order stuff from Ax/ction, Fudgeworthy, and Wild Rags I can remember getting packages filled with shitty black and white flyers from bands hawking their rehearsal tapes for three or four bucks , and there were a thousand little tape distros that would carry death metal demos and rehearsal tapes alongside fucked up stuff like Havohej and Pile Of Eggs tapes and Japanese noise cassettes. You don't see DM tapes like that around much anymore, which is why there is a little bit of nostlagia involved with this warty cassette from the Boston deathdoom band Blessed Offal. The tape has five tracks of ultra crushing primitive death metal with songs like "Agony of Cremation", "Pharmakanetic Subjugation", "Bottomless Grave", "Beneath The Sewer", and "Seasons in Sepulchral Depths", raging sludgy death that goes from wall-of-vomit detuned blasting to super-slow, doomy . The sound is comparable to a cross between dISEMBOWELMENT and Incantation, but because of the low-fi live recording, it's heard through a curtain of muddy low-end and gristle that smears the blasting/crawling death into a blizzard of demonic murk...pretty brutal! The tape comes with a glossy sleeve, and it was released by the weirdo occult metal label Starlight Temple Society.
Remember when Swedish bands held reign over the stoner rock underground? That super-heavy riff-rock sound that Sweden was heavily exporting at the beginning of the decade used to rule my stereo back around 2001, and even though the once-hyped stoner rock scene has long since burrowed back into the underground, I've been pulling out some of my favorite albums from that era and revisiting them lately, and in the process have been rediscovering how heavy and cool some of these discs still are. Many of these Swedish stoner rock albums came out on the esteemed MeteorCity label, and we've just picked up a handful of older Swedish stoner albums from those guys for Crucial Blast that some of you boogie-obsessed metallers and heavy psych rock freaks will want to check out if you haven't heard them yet.
One of the quirkier bands that MeteorCity released during the Swedish stoner boom was Blind Dog, a band from Halmsteed, Sweden that formed in 1996 and played a mix of 70's proto-metal, psychedelia, and the chunky downtuned blooze-crush that Entombed were doing on their late 90's albums like To Ride, Shoot Straight And Speak The Truth. It was a cool mix that kind of stood out from the rest of the Swedish scene, and from alot of the other albums that were coming out on MeteroCity at the time, for that matter. 2003's Captain Dog Rides Again is the second album from Blind Dog, full of trippy stoner rock raveups, crunchy metallic riffage, and a woozy stoned vibe brought on by Blind Dog's use of Hammond keyboards, spacey fx, and film samples. Hammonds, especially. There are Hammond organs all over the place on ...Rides Again, and those vintage organ sounds make this sound even more like a 70's timewarp than usual. Vocals might be a sticking point with fans of more extreme forms; bassist/frontman Tobias Nilsson belts out a gruff, gravelly shout that is total "rawk", but he's also able to genuinely sing as well, delivering some deep Alice In Chains-esque croon on a couple of these joints. His vocals definitely fit the music though, and if you dig that Swedish stoner sound, this is top shelf shit. Songs like "There Must Be Better Ways Of Losing Your Mind" and "Iron Cage" match fuzzbomb riffage with relentless rocking grooves, and "Would I Make You Believe" is the obligatory nod to Kyuss, as well as delivering one of the catchiest hooks on the album. The album also has the band going into more proggy territory too, on songs like "Follow The Fools" and "Back Off", channeling both Deep Purple and Captain Beyond in their keyboard-backed fuzzrock freakouts, and at other points on Captain Dog... the band even works in subtle influences from Queens Of The Stone Age, 60's psych-pop, and hints of British Invasion into their sound, nothing too overt though. Spiritual Beggars and Mushroom River Band fans would undoutedly love these guys, as would fans of Soundgarden, Monster Magnet and other brands of heavy hippie metal. Interesting stuff for sure, and way more adventurous than most of the MeteorCity stoner rock bands I listen to, making this one of my favorite releases from the label!
An obscurity from the glory days of the Bay Area thrash metal scene, Blind Illusion's The Sane Asylum was one of the weirdest records to ever come out of the Bay Area thrash underground, although it�s weirdness has been overshadowed by the fact that the album features the team of Larry LaLonde and Les Claypool, who would go on to form Primus after leaving Blind Illusion soon after it�s release. Unsurprisingly, The Sane Asylum has been mostly relegated to the footnotes in the history of Primus, but anyone into left-field thrash/speed metal from this era will want to check this out, because it doesn�t really sound like anything else that I�ve heard come out of the thrash scene. The original release has been out of print for years like most of the records that came out during this period, and although I�d known of its existence for years, I never got around to actually hearing it until it was recently reissued. Since then, this whacked-out album has become one of my favorite late 80's prog/weirdo thrash records, right up there with the likes of Sadus, Heathen, and Mordred. The Sane Asylum was the one and only album from the band, released in 1988 on Combat Records after almost a decade of activity in and around the Bay Area; when Blind Illusion first started out in the late 70�s, the band was just another heavy progressive rock outfit, but as they trudged forward into the 1980�s, they gradually morphed into a warped thrash metal outfit with an ever changing lineup of members revolving around bandleader Mark Biedermann (who would later go on to play guitar on another crucial Bay Area prog-thrash album, Heathen's Victims Of Deception, as well as playing briefly with Blue Oyster Cult). By the time that Blind Illusion came together to finally record their debut, the band had taken on former Possessed guitarist LaLonde and bass virtuoso Claypool, whose respective styles can be heard all over the album. What they ended up with was a wickedly bent slab of weirdo thrash that combined prog arrangements, echo-chamber vocals and weird psychedelic sounds with blazing, convoluted thrash metal, occasionally tossing in bits of oddball funk, bizarre fx, piano, and even Hammond organ and a children's choir on the song "Metamorphosis Is A Monster". More than anything though, it sounds like these guys were really into Rush, and you can hear that influence all throughout the sprawling prog-thrash epics like "Death Noise" and in Claypool's frequent and prominent bass work; the songs are made up of numerous sections, moving unpredictably from one time signature to the next, and often veer off into complex jams and shredfests like on "Vengeance Is Mine" and "Smash the Crystal". The mix of Rush, thrash metal, and weirdo fx turns this into one the weirdest 80's thrash metal albums ever. I really dug this, unsurprisingly, but it�s definitely of most interest to fans of more adventurous, eccentric 80�s metal; traditional thrash fans might find Blind Illusion just a little too weird. Metal Mind Productions gave this their deluxe re-mastered collector's edition treatment, presenting it in digipack packaging that features an eight page booklet with new liner notes, and released in a machine numbered edition of 2,000 copies.
���� Finally getting a bunch of the vinyl tracks from Belgian devilpunks Blind To Faith collected all in one place, their new Discography disc combines the band's Under The Heptagram 12", the tracks from the split with Gehenna, and their Seven Fat Years Are Over LP, which is still the only actual full-length album these guys managed to crank out since starting back in 2008. Featuring liner notes from Gehenna's Mike Apocalyse and an industrial-influenced collage art aestheitc reminiscent of Mike Williams's work for Eyehategod, it's an excellent primer to Blind To Faith's vicious blackened hardcore.
���� Made up of members of blackened sludge metallers Amenra, black ambient ensemble Sembler Deah and Dutch gore metallers Bile, Blind To Faith are one of the few true successors to the "Holy Terror" hardcore aesthetic that was first created by bands like Integrity and Ringworm. Their misanthropic metallic hardcore shared many of the same interests and obsessions, their lyrics and sleeve art rife with satanic visions of scorched churches, collapsing societies, ash-blotted skies, and rampant murder, a lends through which all the world is alight in apocalyptic fire.
���� Starting with the Under The Heptagram 12" tracks, the band tears through three tracks (the original vinyl featured a cool etching on the b-side) of some of their most crushing tunes. From the crushing doom-laden chug that churns across the opening of instrumental "The Gateway" and moving through the violent mid-paced thrash of the title track and "Burial Of Mankind", the band evokes the violent black energy of early Ringworm better than just about anyone I've heard. But rather than simply emulate those Holy Terror hardcore legends, these songs additionally fuse that rabid, Slayer-influenced metallic hardcore with a filthy bottom-end weight and some seriously flattening doom-tinged riffage. Punishing stuff.
���� Rawer and more chaotic, the two songs off of the split 7" with infamous bruisers Gehenna were described in my old review of that record as "...all raw and hideous occult-tinged metallic hardcore with a singer that sounds eerily like Ringworm front man Human Furnace. The first song "R.J." offering a mix of snarling violent hardcore with some massive Sabbathy riffage, and the song "Icon" delivering a more blasting, black metal influenced assault...", continuing that doomed, violent vibe of the 12" material, and just as ferocious.
���� The meat of this collection however is the band's The Seven Fat Years Are Over EP from 2009, originally released on the Holy Terror imprint run by Dwid from Integrity. Often considered their sole album but really only clocking in at just about fifteen minutes, it's ferocious stuff, hammering out short, ultra-violent blasts of blackened hardcore with infectious-as-hell riffs and burly, anthemic choruses in classic hardcore punk style, along with weird, almost black metal-influenced dirges, and loads of vicious thrash metal riffage. Like their other releases, this stuff evokes the best of the 90's Holy Terror scene, metallic hardcore stripped down to it's most muscular, murderous impulses.
���� Along with that great discography CD that we just picked up from Blind To Faith, we also found some copies of the original out-of-print 2009 mini-album from these Belgian blackened hardcore heathens, which comes with a circular embroidered patch. Released on the Holy Terror imprint run by Dwid from Integrity/Psywarfare, this comes in provocative, grim artwork depicting various 20th Century atrocities overlaid with occult symbology, printed in clear spot varnish; it's a striking piece of wax, though vinyl perfectionists should take note: all of the copies that we received from the distributor were received with some very minor corner dings; if you're particular about having your record sleeves in perfect, unblemished condition, please be aware of this before ordering.
���� Made up of members of blackened sludge metallers Amenra, black ambient ensemble Sembler Deah and Dutch gore metallers Bile, Blind To Faith are one of the few true successors to the "Holy Terror" hardcore aesthetic that was first created by bands like Integrity and Ringworm. Their misanthropic metallic hardcore shared many of the same interests and obsessions, their lyrics and sleeve art rife with satanic visions of scorched churches, collapsing societies, ash-blotted skies, and rampant murder, a lends through which all the world is alight in apocalyptic fire. But despite having been around for nearly a decade, The Seven Fat Years Are Over is generally considered to be their sole album, even though it clocks in at just about fifteen minutes. That brief playing time is boiling over with some utterly ferocious occult-tinged hardcore, though, hammering out short, ultra-violent blasts of blackened aggression that combines infectious-as-hell riffs and burly, anthemic choruses that seem ripped out of classic late-80's American hardcore, with weird, almost black metal-influenced dirges, and a heavy dose of crushing, almost Frostian thrash metal. Like their other releases, this stuff evokes the best of the 90's Holy Terror scene, metallic hardcore stripped down to its most lawless, murderous impulses, though Blind To Faith crawl even deeper than most into the putrid underbelly of the modern Western psyche.
��Wouldn't know it from Stephen Landau's gorgeous hazy photography of eerie, sunset-bathed forests that stretch across 1's minimal four-panel digipack, but this album contains some seriously ominous dronescapes that really gave my stereo speakers a workout when I blasted it while writing up this review. This Pittsburgh-based project comes from C. Ackley, who has also released a couple of crushing harsh noise 7"s under the name Hogra that I've picked up in the past for the shop; with Blinding, however, Ackley plunges into much more subdued, sinister frequencies than his other projects, crafting seven sprawling fields of subterranean echo-muck on this album that he fills up with desolate rumbling drones and a thick carcinogenic atmosphere, giving these recordings a similar bleak feel as some of the earliest, blackest works from influential Italian industrialist Maurizio Bianchi.
�� If that sounds like high praise, it is - tracks like opener "The Light Will Release Us" rumble with massive black streams of fungoid ambience and monstrous glacial drift, slowly oozing out of your speakers on waves of subsonic rumble. It wasn't until I started to read through the album notes that I realized that this music is apparently all created solely from recordings of massively distorted electric guitar, but this sounds nothing like the ultra-heavy doomdrone of bands like Earth and Sunn O))). Blinding's blighted noisescapes are most definitely ultra-heavy, but this music is so much more industrial in feel, the source instrument processed and mutated and rendered totally unrecognizable as the sounds are transformed into monstrous metallic reverberations awash in oceanic waves of echo and reverb effects, the rumbling drones and blasts of noise sculpted into a processed sound that much more closely resembles a massively distorted synthesizer. Over the remainder of the album, Ackley moves the tracks through ominous soundscapes of monstrous subterranean roar and murky mechanical whirr, rumblings of washed-out low-end drone and strange snarling distortion, with vague smears of blown-out cetacean melody suddenly surfacing through the churning black fog. Several of these tracks reveal structured movements of vast, looping amplifier-throb that on occasion will drift into brief passages of stunning kosmische beauty and dread, or drop over the edge into an abyss of Lull-esque drone, with that particular leaning towards minimal monochrome deathscapes and haunting isolationist ambience really taking over towards the latter half of the disc. It's all some supremely bleak drone-music, and fans of the more malignant edges of the industrial/ambient realm (ie., Lull, Troum / Maeror Tri, Final, Sleep Research Facility) are advised to check this out.
Another Init title that went out of print as soon as we picked up the last available copies! This Sioux Falls band featured a bunch of dudes from some fairly well known midwestern hardcore bands like Threadbare, Floodplain, and Caligari (whose album of crushing, cybernetic metalcore is listed eslewhere in this weeks list), but The Blinding Light may have been heavier than them all. Their sound is unmistakeably influenced by late 80's/early 90's Slayer, even down to Brian Lovro's vocals, which sound exactly like a snottier Tom Araya. The discordant guitars of Tim Munce and Chad Petit summon the spectre of Slayer as well, weaving crazed Hanneman style leads around their brutal detuned riffs. But if they sound a bit like Slayer, it's a Slayer that's slower, rawer, sludgier, with thick, murky riffs and splashes of vomit-green whiskey rock licks, blasting double bass drumming, jarring stop-start rhythms and blastbeats thundering behind the rest of the band who seem to lurch in hal
f-time. This EP had also come out as a CD on Deathwish, but the 7" on Init was limited to 400 copies on black vinyl, and we only picked up a couple of these from the label before they totally ran out.
A minor cult classic of outsider punk lit, the 1995 novella The Primal Screamer is Nick Blinko's first book; mostly known as the front man of legendary deathpunk gods Rudimentary Peni and an acclaimed illustrator whose surreal, obsessive drawings and paintings have been shown in galleries around the world, the man can also weave beautifully dread-filled phrases with his withered pen. And as most Peni fans already know, Blinko has also struggled with mental illness throughout his life and has been diagnosed with Schizoaffective disorder; his adventures in the world of psychiatry, suicidal desire and hallucination have always informed his art, and nowhere more so than with The Primal Screamer.
This strange little book tells the story of a psychiatrist and a deeply troubled youth named Nat Snoxell who comes under his care after a gruesome failed suicide attempt. Told as a series of dated journal entries, the story accompanies Snoxell through the burgeoning anarcho-punk scene of early 80s Britain and becomes a veiled auto-biography of Blinko's own experiences with Rudimentary Peni. But as Primal Screamer develops, it gradually shifts from psycho-analysis and an anecdotal recollection of the lives of punk youth in the anarchist squats of early 80s England into a strangely surreal sequence of events that become increasingly more disturbing, gradually revealing the presence of an unfathomable, unseen malevolence to the narrator that lurks out of sight of the narrow lens of human experience. By the end of the book, it becomes something more akin to one of Thomas Ligotti's tales of cosmic dread.
Completely unlike any other book I've ever read from a "punk"/anarchist publisher, The Primal Scream blurs the lines between hallucination and reality and offers glimpses into a monstrous dreamworld that serves as a metaphor for schizophrenia. I had originally been hunting for this book just for the artwork, which I've been a huge fan of; the book features scores of Blinko's artwork, twisted and skeletal pen-and-ink nightmares that draw from the same occult energies as Aubrey Beardsley, Odilon Redon and Austin Osman Spare. The original printing on Spare Change Books went out of print years ago and became a pricey collectors item, though, so for the longest time this book has evaded me. Thanks to PM Press, we now have a high quality trade paperback edition available once again, and its a must-get for fans of Rudimentary Peni, early anarcho-punk arcana, and vague hallucinatory horror...
Re-issued in a sleek digipack case with an eight-page booklet designed by Blake Judd from Nachtmystium, II is presented as a stateside redux of the
original 2004 album that came out on Sweden's Total Holocaust Records. The second full length from Swedish satanic fuzzmongers Blodulv (which translates to
the terminally badass moniker "Blood Wolf"), II is a ferocious blast of frozen, distorted black buzz, taking cues from Darkthrone and Burzum but
then blowing their black metal out into a mostly mid-tempo march of awesome epic riffs and triumphant blackened melodies, but all blanketed in tons of
distortion. The guitars are so distorted that it sounds like the riffs are coming out of blown speakers, all buzzing and hissy but crushing, and the ultra
distortion carries over the the vocals, which appear as a blown-out, distorted white-noise rasp that makes Blodulv's primitive, feral black metal sound even
more frozen and hateful. This album is killer, completely bathed in ripped distortion and snarling satanic singsong, and it manages to be both
amazingly catchy and darkly melodic as well as noisy and hypnotic as hell as the simple riffs and double-bass drumming churns over and over, striding on a
droning slab of buzzing black filth through a icy nocturnal wasteland.
���� Finally got this recent reissue of Alessandro Blonksteiner's cannibalistic prog-funk score to the early 80's chunkblower Cannibal Apocalypse (aka Apocalypse Domani) in stock, one of the more obscure works issued this year on horror soundtrack imprint Death Waltz. I'm glad to see it, though, as this quirky score is a real blast. If you're a fan of the soundtrack to Fulci's The House By The Cemetery, you no doubt remember the bizarro Blonksteiner contributions like "Blonk Monster" and "Blonk Fascia", right? Well, for 1980's Apocalypse Domani, famed Italian cinematic fantasist Antonio Margheriti enlisted Blonksteiner to tackle the entire score, which is from I can tell his only other foray into scoring horror movies. Because of that, Blonksteiner is comparatively unknown outside of hardcore horror-score collector circles, but it's worth investigating if you dig the funkier, jazzier stuff that bands like Goblin were doing in the late 70s/early 80s. Previously only available on vinyl as a rare Italian import from 1980, it's finally back on wax, primed to be rediscovered by fans of the craziest Italo spookprog.
���� Domani itself is a more obscure early 80s Italian horror offering, despite a killer genre cast that includes the great John Saxon in a lead role alongside long-suffering Italo-splat regular Giovanni Lombardo Radice playing the role of "Charles Bukowski". Chronicling the chaos that ensues when a group of army vets fall under the demonic effects of a cannibal virus that the poor saps contracted whilst in a POW camp together in 'Nam, shit hits the fan almost immediately as the film takes off on a deranged spree of flesh-chomping mayhem, ocular atrocity, and urban savagery in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, woven around a tragic love story and culminating with one of the most eye-popping scenes of abdominal carnage via shotgun ever put to film.
Needless to say, it's a must-see if you're addicted to that particular era of Italian horror. And in classic Italian fashion, the opening theme is a beguiling piece written for strings and jazz flute, a gentle and moody arrangement that's pretty far from you would expect as the introduction for the nutzoid carnage to come. From there though, Blonksteiner's score delivers some seriously sweat-soaked prog-funk, alternately sounding like something that could have come off a late 70s cop show, or suddenly blasting you with chilling strings; there's also lots of nostalgic soft-jazz sax, the eerie, wah-drenched Goblinesque prog of tracks like "Apocalypse And Love" and "Dreadful Night", tense tribal drumming sequences and swells of Simonetti-style synth-dread, all spiced up with a smattering of disco fever. It oozes early 80s atmosphere. So great to have this available again, and in a gorgeous presentation that includes a printed insert with lengthy new liner notes written by Radice; it's fascinating reading, humorously detailing his coke-fueled ordeal during filming.
Finally back in stock!
For the first time in seven years, Yen Pox member Michael Hensley returns with a new album from his solo dark ambient outfit Blood Box, traveling through a stygian realm that falls somewhere between the dark kosmiche drift of 70s void-explorers like Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, and the abyssal depths of Yen Pox and Lustmord. I've been looking forward to more music from Yen Pox after the fantastic reissue of Blood Music that came out on Malignant last year, but since that could be a long time coming, it's good enough to be able to sink into the more spectral, shadowy ambience of Funeral In An Empty Room . The album's magnificent dark ambience range from massive kosimiche soundscapes formed from washes of billowing twilight synth drone flecked with harp-like reverberations and synthetic strings and swells of lush chordal shimmer and hissing cymbals, to immense Vangelis-like orchestrations that are reminiscent of his Blade Runner score bathed in more layers of shadow and dread (such as on "The Celestial Abyss") with electronic horns bleeding through black clouds of abyssal hum and oceanic drift. These eight tracks are constantly moving, flowing cloudscapes of dark drift under laid with subtle layering of crackling, scorched texture, rattling percussive sounds and menacing electronic noises, ranging to more fearsome symphonies of roaring synthesizer chaos ("Battles Beneath The Earth"). It's the recognizable 70's analogue feel to these synth sounds that make this stand out, though, bathing Blood Box's claustrophobic darkness in a warm psychedelic glow.
The first album from this time-warping band from Toronto is a new fave over here alongside the debut from Devil's Blood, and just like Devil's Blood, this is some of that killer proto-doom revivalism that has been coming out of the wormwoodwork lately, a la likeminded bands like Burning Saviours, Witchcraft, Graveyards and Dead Man. Blood Ceremony are one of the heavier outfits playing this style, in my opinion, loaded with burly Iommi-influenced riffing, a total Sabbath/Pentragram vibe, but with rich, witchy female singing and a serious sheen of old school Hammond organ covering everything, that vintage organ sound up front and as much a lead instrument as the heavy guitars. I can't get enough of this album, and was fully sold once the second song "I'm Coming With You" rolls in and we're suddenly greeted by some 70's sounding prog-rock flute, which establishes itself as the real lead instrument in Blood Ceremony's arsenal, the flute trilling over the rest of the album alongside the heavy Sabbath riffs like a flowery, progged out mix of Pentagram, Jefferson Airplane and Jethro Tull, early 70's hippie-doom crossed with progressive rock and Canterbury folk. Singer Alia O'Brien is the one behind both the flute and the Hammond, and the combination of her dramatic singing with the flute playing and trippy Hammond organ tones give Blood Ceremony it's unique sound, like hearing Pentagram crossed with some 70's dark prog band; the riffs are just as crucial to the sound, though, lumbering bludgeoning slabs of fuzzed out downer riffage, heavy and doomy and soaked in Iommi's bongwater, not full-on metal but defintiely doomy as hell. Then there are the song titles and lyrics for songs like "Into The Coven", "Master Of Confusion", "A Wine Of Wizardry" and "Hop Toad", all of which conjure up images of early 70's Hammer movies and hippie-era black magic and blacklight posters...great stuff. Bewitching and heavy black magic-obsessed rock that evokes the obscure arcana of European occult rock and downer prog bands like Jacula, Black Widow, Coven, Necromandus through the retro-psychdoom of Jex Thoth . Recommended!
Now available on limited-edition vinyl!
The first album from this time-warping band from Toronto is a new fave over here alongside the debut from Devil's Blood, and just like Devil's Blood, this is some of that killer proto-doom revivalism that has been coming out of the wormwoodwork lately, a la likeminded bands like Burning Saviours, Witchcraft, Graveyards and Dead Man. Blood Ceremony are one of the heavier outfits playing this style, in my opinion, loaded with burly Iommi-influenced riffing, a total Sabbath/Pentragram vibe, but with rich, witchy female singing and a serious sheen of old school Hammond organ covering everything, that vintage organ sound up front and as much a lead instrument as the heavy guitars. I can't get enough of this album, and was fully sold once the second song "I'm Coming With You" rolls in and we're suddenly greeted by some 70's sounding prog-rock flute, which establishes itself as the real lead instrument in Blood Ceremony's arsenal, the flute trilling over the rest of the album alongside the heavy Sabbath riffs like a flowery, progged out mix of Pentagram, Jefferson Airplane and Jethro Tull, early 70's hippie-doom crossed with progressive rock and Canterbury folk. Singer Alia O'Brien is the one behind both the flute and the Hammond, and the combination of her dramatic singing with the flute playing and trippy Hammond organ tones give Blood Ceremony it's unique sound, like hearing Pentagram crossed with some 70's dark prog band; the riffs are just as crucial to the sound, though, lumbering bludgeoning slabs of fuzzed out downer riffage, heavy and doomy and soaked in Iommi's bongwater, not full-on metal but defintiely doomy as hell. Then there are the song titles and lyrics for songs like "Into The Coven", "Master Of Confusion", "A Wine Of Wizardry" and "Hop Toad", all of which conjure up images of early 70's Hammer movies and hippie-era black magic and blacklight posters...great stuff. Bewitching and heavy black magic-obsessed rock that evokes the obscure arcana of European occult rock and downer prog bands like Jacula, Black Widow, Coven, Necromandus through the retro-psychdoom of Jex Thoth . Recommended!
We just found a couple copies of this out-of-print disc from midwestern blackthrash weirdos Blood Cult stowed away in a corner of the warehouse...once these copies are gone, it's gone for good!
Here's another musical entity sprung from the demented lobe of the Reverend JR Preston, who we've already been hailing as a crazed outsider metal genius for his one-man black metal/acid rock project Tjolgtjar. Blood Cult has the Reverend playing guitar and screeching, but this time he's in a full band, backed by a bassist and drummer, playing self described "Redneck Black Metal" that comes howling across the cornfields of Illinois. Tjolgtjar fans will no doubt dig this low-fi, fuzzed out psychedelic skuzz just as much as his cosmically weird solo outfit, but Blood Cult has it's own sound - a primitive, rocking blast of raw metal, a combination of thrashy Norwegian black metal and skuzzy, whiskey-soaked hard rock and primitive New Wave Of British Heavy Metal moves, like a gnarly mix of Nashville Pussy and Beherit, scumbag bar rock and Mayhem, spinning warped visions of demonic scarecrows engaging in child sacrifice and goat worship on the backroads of the American midwest. There's some awesome freaked out, chaotic guitar shredding, and the drumming is a manically stumbling thrash assault. "The Moweaqua Coal Mine Disaster" starts off as a blazing black metal attack but then turns into a depressive piano solo towards the end, and the band's theme song "Redneck Black Metal" is a goofy, killer satanic hoedown with polka drumming and simplistic riffing. The band enlisted a guy named Zornow to provide the awesome cartoon style artwork for the album. Highly recommended to fans of weirdo black metal and that crazed Illinoisian Thunder / Dipsomaniac / Tjolgtjar axis of midwestern freakery!
Just got this back in stock. If you're a fan of the nuttier underbelly of American black metal, you are no doubt aware of the uber-prolific JR Preston, also known as The Rev. I've been following his work for years as this guy has been involved in a whole host of weird, fucked-up black metal projects that I'm a fan of, from the blazing blacknoise holocausts of Enbilulugugal to the low-fi Ted Nugent-influenced necro of Tjolgtjar, and the bizarre blackened chiptune metal of Xexyz. All of which are big faves of mine that I've been carrying here at C-Blast. My favorite of his many different bands though is probably the mighty Blood Cult, a gang of Midwestern "redneck black metal" demons who returned here with their first new album since 2005's We Who Walk Behind The Rows (and a subsequent split disc with Enbilulugugal). Now on the more well known black/death metal label Moribund, We Are The Cult Of The Plains is still a weird, rocking blast of scuzzy black metal that has evolved into something even more unique than before. At first glance, the band has all the appearance of being another raw black metal band; you've got a suitably grainy album cover, pentagrams and other black metal signifiers. But it's a very odd niche that these guys have carved out, bringing some very non-black metal sounds into their music that make this sound uniquely American compared to the bland Emperor and Darkthrone clones that continue to infest the underground. Take the opener "My Forest Home", a fast, wintry blast of low-fi black metal they are known for, some primitive Darkthrone-esque riffing, croaked vocals, a super murky production, but then it downshifts into withered, mid tempo rock n' roll bathed in a weird lunar glow, the putrid rural blackness birthing some killer 70's guitar hero action, a mix of Ted Nugent and garagey necro filth that's similar to Tjolgtjar but way harder and thrashier. The rest of the album is loaded with this 70s rock influence as well as weirder sounds; there's some awesome wonky Greg Ginn-like soloing, weird witchy screams, propulsive krautrock-like grooves, bursts of blackened punk, even some surfy twang emerging on some of the guitar parts. One of the oddest songs here is "Illinoisan Alter", a mix of hillbilly country music and blackened evil that sounds like a satanic hoedown, and later takes off into some wild psychedelia. We Are The Cult Of The Plains is fucking awesome, part acid-soaked psych, part cloven hoofed black metal, part Nuge, ending with the weirdest track of all, "Never Said Goodbye", where the band lurches into a strange rockabilly crawl that resembles a cross between The Cramps and Deathcrush-era Mayhem, that trails off into an unlisted track of lysergic noise, creepy Theremin sounds, cut-up voices and electronics, vaguely reminding me of one of those primitive proto-electronic film scores you'd hear on a low budget sasquatch splatter flick from the mid-70's.
This split has been in the works for ages and it's finally out through Rusty Axe, who couldn't be a better home for the messed-up, low-fi Midwestern black metal that the two bands deliver. It's been so long since the last time that Enbilulugugal unleashed their gnarly filthcult on us and I've been amped up on hearing this, but Blood Cult is just as nuts, following up their awesome debut on Illinoisian Thunder with some more of their blackened acid scumthrash.
Both bands have a uniquely bizarre take on black metal, Blood Cult with their crazed "redneck black metal" and Enbilulugugal summoning up hideous hellnoize, and back to back the two bands merge into a whiskey-drenched acid nightmare. This disc has some awesome artwork as well, especially the album cover which depicts a murderous demonic scarecrow engaged in battle with the goat-headed jabberwock mascot of Enbilulugugal - killer!
The five new Blood Cult songs that open the disc are the first new jams that I've heard from the Illinois band since their grim self-described "redneck black metal" first appeared on the album We Who Walk Behind The Rows from a few years ago. If you've heard that album, you'll know what to expect here: low-fi, punky blackened thrash mixed together with early Venom, primitive British heavy metal worship, and psychedelic hard rock, with plodding rock grooves, noisy production, trippy Hammond-like organs droning in the background, bursts of feral speed and sloppy blastbeats, killer catchy riffs and acid-rock solos, and tons of cornfed Satanic imagery in songs like "Goat Riders In The Sky", "The Infernal Names - Pieces Of The Cross" and "Fist Of Belial". If all of this is starting to remind you of Tjolgtjar's black metal/70's rock weirdness, yer on the right path...Blood Cult is led by J.R. Preston on vocals and guitar, aka The Rev from Tjolgtjar, and with this band he combines some of that occultic Tjolgtjar weirdness with raging spattery thrashpunk and old school NWOBHM influences; Tjolgtjar fans will love this!
After Blood Cult, we get thirteen new tracks from Enbilulugugal, whose enigmatic "black noize metal" last appeared on the Noizemongers For Goatserpent disc on Rusty Axe. The original CDR has been out of print for ages and I've never been able to get my hands on a copy of my own (though it looks like Rusty Axe is reissuing it later this year) and everything that I've heard from Enbilulugugal previously has been on compilations. Even that small amount of black noize entering my skull has gotten me completely infatuated with this band, and the chunk of sonic filth that they smear across their half of this disc is supremely fucked. Each track is a deranged blast of diseased black metal totally soaked in distortion and shrieking noise, thrashing primitive riffing and sloppy chaotic blastbeats blazing through a soup of reverb and weird samples, spidery buzzing guitars spinning contrasting minor key melodies, weird temple chants and ritual percussion looping over and over in between the bursts of noisy thrash, scorching electronic distortion washing over surprisingly catchy riffs. The vocals are totally nuts, a tortured high pitched howl way off in the background, screaming incomprehensible gibberish and blasphemies. These songs are more structured and more like "actual" black metal than the ultra-blown out blacknoise assaults that I've heard from Enbilulugugal, but it's still super fucked-up and noisy, like hearing a mashup of old Darkthrone and Tjolgtjar filtered through sheets of blistering Incapacitants style noise and brain-damaged studio effects.
Limited to 1000 copies.
Back in stock. Definitely not in a rush to get their albums out, Headless Eyes is only the second album to come from the New York doom metal outfit Blood Farmers, who have been slogging around since around 1989. The last time we heard these guys, it was their cult 1995 album that came out on the legendary Hellhound Records, the label that was home to some of the best underground doom of the late 80s/early 90s including Saint Vitus, Count Raven and a host of Maryland outfits like The Obsessed, Internal Void, Unorthodox, and Revelation. Blood Farmers stuck out amongst this esteemed company with a dirtier, darker vibe, heavily steeped in the imagery and aesthetics of classic horror and exploitation cinema, which makes since seeing how band leader Dave Szulkin is one of the guys behind Grindhouse Releasing (Cannibal Holocaust, The Beyond, Gone with the Pope). And thanks to their grittier, heavier sound, their music has aged a bit better than many of their peers, devoid of the grungy qualities that some of those early 90s doom metal bands shared. Now featuring former Toxik drummer Tad Leger on the skins, Blood Farmers unleash one hell of a crushing psychdoom onslaught here on Headless Eyes (the title taken from Kent Bateman's 1971 psycho-sexual sleazefest), obviously beholden to the seminal slow-mo metal of Black Sabbath and the later dark heaviness of bands like Saint Vitus and Trouble, but they bury their bilious boogie beneath a thick layer of murk and bone-rattling sludge and grindhouse sleaze. Guitarist Szulkin unleashes a gnarly tone with his menacing, miserable riffs, and singer/bassist Eli Brown flattens everything beneath the lumbering grooves that he carves out alongside Leger's sauropod tempos.
The songs frequently drift into a hazy psychedelia, shifting from the sludgy, sinister doom into languid acid guitar and watery, FX-addled singing that wind through the more subdued moments of songs like the title track, and the band also effectively incorporates fragments of film dialogue and other samples from 60's and 70's era horror films, layering these elements to dramatic effect during some of those trippy passages to lead up to when the band crashes back in with their massive heaviness. They also kick things into faster, more furious form with brief eruptions of garagy, wah-drenched mayhem, and unfurl some killer harmonized leads like that which soars over the spacey darkness of "The Creeper", an entirely instrumental song of eerie psychedelia. Then there's the nocturnal lysergic rush of "Night Of The Sorcerers", a ten minute epic that kicks off with some almost raga-like guitar before shifting into a sinister melody with sweeping synthesizer accompaniment, like some trippy take on 80's style horror soundtrack music filtered through a wicked space rock filter and gobs of monstrous glacial heaviness, dragging their sky-streaking instrumental jam into a punishing groovy. And it ends with a stunning cover of "The Road Leads To Nowhere" from legendary cinematic beast David Hess, which most probably recognize from the score to Wes Craven's notorious early shocker The Last House On The Left; at first it sounds as if the band is going to do a straight acoustic version of the song, but when they all crash in, transforming it into a haunting doom metal epic, it's just fuckin' KILLER. These guys had a lot in common with what was going on down in Maryland during the early 90s, which makes it perfectly natural that Hellhound would have worked with Blood Farmers on their first album. But that early stuff and this new album all deliver a grittier, grislier (not to mention flat out heavier) take on that sound that has aged much better than a lot of traditional doom from that era - listening to the sheer crushing weight of these songs, and it's easy to see why Szulkin was recently tapped to play on the new album from Japanese doomlords Church Of Misery.
First heard on the Nymphaea disc of Darsombra remixes that came out on Public Guilt last year, Blood Fountains is the new musical venture from artist Stephen Kasner, whose creepy, disturbing portraits and oceans of deep blacks and greys have graced album covers for bands as diverse as Integrity and Khlyst, Lotus Eaters and Himsa, and anyone who's been paying attention to underground metal and hardcore for the past fifteen years will be familiar with at least one of his images. I've been a huge fan of Kasner's work since the latter half of the 90's and have followed his output ever since, finally getting to the point this year of actually commissioning artwork from him for the new Subarachnoid Space album, Eight Bells. So I was intrigued when I heard that he had this new project in the works. I liked the Blood Fountains remix for Darsombra, which pointed towards a deep, murky dark ambience, but that was only a vague stirring of what his solo material would fully evolve into, a kind of gorgeous black-kosmiche psychedelia that takes form on his first full length, Floods. Released by Utech, who has also been partnering with Kasner lately for the majority of their cd package designs, Floods is a collaborative effort that sees Kasner creating sprawling, shadow-covered ambient soundscapes of Lustmordian darkness and spectral drones with help from a number of musicians, including Matt Woods (Beyond The Sixth Seal) on guitar, experimental jazz flutist Cheryl Pyle, guitarist David Beaver, and vocalist Yoshiko Ohara from Bloody Panda. According to Kasner, the music of Blood Fountains is meant to be a sonic extension of the strange otherworldly imagery found in his artwork, but this is nowhere as grim and horrific as I thought it was going to be. Floods is actually quite beautiful, as each of the six long tracks drift through fields of dark drift and jazzy ambience that sometimes feels like the extended tones of a dusty, moldy Rhodes piano being stretched across time, while thick black smears of buzzing psych guitar and crumbling distorted amp-drones snake their way through these mysterious soundscapes. Bloody Panda fans will especially love this album, as Yoshiko Ohara's vocals are all over it, though her performance here is restrained compared to the violent shrieks and ecstatic howls she uses in BP...instead, Yoshiko's voice floats disembodied across Kasner's midnight-drenched poppy fields, cooing whispers and uttering deep gutteral Tuvan-esque throat singing on thick clouds of druggy reverb that always seems to be on the verge of being swept away on a tide of nocturnal blackness. Imagine Bloody Panda at their softest, and filtered through the dark freeform psychedelia of Keiji Haino and ghoulish graveyard dream-bliss of Aghast, or a more ominous and weighty Onna-Kodomo mixed with Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze and drenched in shimmering jazzy dark ambience. I knew this was going to be good, but Floods still ended up taking me by surprise with how beautiful it is, especially the blissed out ten minute "White Wax Blood". That's my favorite song on here, with cascading crystalline guitar melodies and delicate wisps of digital glitchery drifting into a gleaming cosmic fug of flutes and wispy female voices and deep bass pulses and peals of black acid guitar, forming into something akin to a Cocteau Twins song stripped down to an ethereal cloud of dark pop bliss and pitched into the abyss. Dark and beautifully creepy, this one is definitely recommended. Comes in that signature style of Utech sleeve, with Kasner handling the artwork, of course.
I'm not shy about my love of older industrial metal bands. Over the past several years, I've been searching out some of the more obscure bands that came out of that particular era of underground metal (think late 80s through the early 90s) and have come up with killer reissues of albums from bands like Optimum Wound Profile, Pitch Shifter, and Treponem Pal, but I've also come across some older releases that just showed up in a dark corner of one of our suppliers warehouses. Like Blood From The Soul's debut album To SPite The Gland That Breeds. A lesser-known album from the early 90's Earache catalog, To Spite The Gland That Breeds is a crunchy blast of electronically-tinged industrial metal that I always wanted to give another look. An interesting collaboration between Lou Koller (front man for New York hardcore mainstays Sick Of It All) and Napalm Death bassist Shane Embury (who wrote all of the music for this project), BFTS came out of that industrial metal sound of the early 90s but in my opinion has aged a little better than a lot of similar stuff from the same era. That's due to the sound being really rooted in the churning industrialized death metal that Napalm Death themselves were consumed with at the time, taking it and blending it with massive mechanized rhythms and crushing breakbeats, and also incorporating lots of industrial ambience, factory drones and grinding noise. To Spite... has this threatening dystopian atmosphere that clings to the chugging breakbeat-driven mecha-metal and paranoid introspective lyrics, seriously heavy stuff that'll probably appeal to any fans of the atonal, icy guitar riffing and experimental feel of Napalm Death's Fear, Emptiness, Despair and Diatribes and the early 90's Godflesh albums. Embury's riffs are crushing as usual, and Koller's pissed-off yowl is a better match for this sort of machine metal than you might expect; I was always a fan of SOIA's older stuff so this wasn't a tough sell for me when it came out even if the pairing seemed weird to other metal fans. Some other interesting stuff on the album includes the dub-flecked industro-doom of "Nature's Hole", which sounds like some Vitus-strength doom treated with winding snake-charmer leads and the sort of slow , robotic reverb-heavy industrial rhythms of Scorn, and the mechanized motorik propulsion and shoegazer wall of sound guitars on "Suspension Of My Disbelief". It's the closing title track that gets really abrasive, a long sprawling industrial dirge
of slow, punishing Swans-style heaviness with plodding, cavernous drums and waves of howling feedback and guitar noise, slithering black synthesizers and sinister samples strewn across the creeping glacial crush. This disc is definitely worth checking out if you're into early 90s Napalm Death and industrial metal, and it's still one of my favorite albums in this style...
2016 repress with etched b-side.
Didn't even know that this killer new project from Justin Broadrick (Godflesh/Jesu/Final/Techno Animal, natch) and Bill Laswell (Painkiller/Praxis) even existed until right before the disc came out! You�d think that there would be more hype about this considering the lineup. And man, is this a monster of a debut. The first collaboration between Laswell and Broadrick since Painkiller's Buried Secrets, The Blood Of Heroes is a concept project based on a somewhat obscure post-apocalyptic action flick from 1989 called The Blood Of Heroes that starred Rutger Hauer. I myself haven�t seen this movie in years, but I remember liking it allot when it originally came out; the film detailed a scorched future earth where nomadic "Juggers" travel from town to town engaging in a brutal blood sport that bears some resemblance to rugby, only it�s played with bone-crunching full impact violence and dog skulls. Using themes and details from the film, Laswell and Broadrick create a narrative that explores this brutal future society through a mixture of massive speaker-wrecking dubstep, industrial metal riffage from Broadrick, drum n' bass/breakcore and ambient electronica...basically a badass conglom of Godflesh grind and malevolent dubstep/raggacore, with contributions from breakcore producers End.user and Submerged and Dr. Israel from Method Of Defiance handling the mic. For anyone who thought that there was more room for pure heaviness in dubstep and raggacore after The Bug�s London Zoo, this album is probably going to blow your doors off�
The opener "Blinded" alone is worth picking this up, a crushing apocalyptic dubstep assault with vicious toasting from Israel over punishing industrial flecked drum n bass breaks and slow grinding dubstep grooves, delivering some ultra-crushing dance floor devastation. The gorgeous industrial dub of "Chains" has Broadrick draping lush Jesu-like blissed out guitar and dreamy electronica over MASSIVE booming breakbeats, and on "Salute To The Jugger, the band welds grinding metallic guitar and swirling ominous samples to crushing dancehall dirge with more of Dr Israel's booming toasting and sinister hip hop flow.
The album continues through more Godflesh-meets-Enduser industrial-metal junglist fury laced with ululating female cries ("Breakaway"), gorgeous driftscapes of Jesu-style crushing melodic guitar over slower drum n' bass grooves swathed in spacey effects and sampled ambient noise ("Transcendent"), heavy but so catchy and mesmeric, and intricately assembled, atmospheric dubbed-out electronica and cinematic soundscapes with spoken word from Israel that further fleshes out the world of Blood Of Heroes. Even though the music on this album is very much rooted in dubstep and drum n' bass, Broadrick's trademark heaviness is all over the place. "Remain", for instance, starts off just like a Jesu song, massive crushing dreamsludge poppiness joined by lush electronics and breakbeats, but over time it morphs into more skittery, stuttering drum n� bass without losing the gorgeous melodic riff/hook at it's center. "Wounds Against Wounds" combines more massive blown-out Godflesh-style low end crush with manic jungle rhythms and a suffocating atmosphere of dystopian dread. "Descend Destroy" starts as a druggy dubscape of delayed toasting drifting through the ether, looped guitar, dark droning ambience, then turns into a sort of menacing industrial hip-hop jam, Dr Israel flowing over more grinding industrial sludge and pounding breakbeats, sounding a lot like Techno Animal streaked with dubstep bass buzz and spacey effects, later on morphing into apocalyptic drum n bass. That's followed by the eerie ethno-ambience, Middle Eastern strings, and ululating vocalizations of ""Bound" that lead into a scorched dubbed-out drum n bass assault, and the album closes with a wave of tribal drums and dubbed out jungle skitter, delirium of effects laden toasting, swirling angelic voices and murky dark ambience. Some of the heaviest stuff that Broadrick has done in years, it sounds like a natural progression from the heavy dub/breakbeat experiments that Godflesh engaged in during the mid 90�s, now fused with modern beat technology and much more complex programming. This disc fucking rules, and I hope to hell that this isn�t just a one off project�
Comes in digipack packaging.
When we picked up the debut album from The Blood Of Heroes earlier this year, I was floored by it's sinister, apocalyptic mix of breakcore, drum n' bass, and industrial metal, all assembled into something that seemed to come more from dubstep and raggacore than the heavy avant pedigree that the band boasts. But boy was that disc heavy, featuring Justin Broadrick and Bill Laswell in what I believe is their first direct musical collaboration since the two hooked up on Painkiller's mighty dub-metal Ep Buried Secrets. The industrial doom-laden dubstep / breakcore that this new ensemble (which also includes Dr. Israel, Enduser, and Submerged as regular cohorts) seemed to lend itself to an endless array of sonic permutations orbiting the band's core sound of Godflesh-style riffage fused with futuristic drum n' bass and mutant breaks, and that malleability is exercised widely on this follow-up/companion piece to the debut, the eight-song remix collection Remain.
First up, the Joel Hamilton/Submerged remix of "Descend Destroy" drapes the apocalyptic raggacore in lush new guitar draperies, the dreamy guitar melody lilting over a monstrous buzzing bass line while hyperkinetic rhythms and crushing metallic chug wobble underneath. On Enduser's reworking of the title track, the melodic electronic elements are drawn out, with prominent keyboard lines echoing across mechanized boom-bap while Broadrick lays down his lush, crushing melodic riffage, transforming the music into skittering junglist dreamsludge. More ominous sounding is D�lek's remix of "Chains", stripping it down to just a bare backbone of dubby break beats and fluttering bass. Justin Broadrick does his own remix of "Remain", giving it his droning, narcotized Jesu touch and adding skittery, paranoid break beats that scuttle beneath his moaning melodic vocals and grinding detuned riffage, later emerging into glorious heavenly ambience. Bill Laswell amplifies "Salute To the Jugger" into a pounding evil dub trance, and Kuma (aka Simon Fug�re) turns "Wounds Against Wounds" into a grim apocalyptic dub-reggae jam with amplified keening high end guitar and Dr. Israel's sinister toasting brought into starker focus. "Bound" is given another ultra-metallic remix by Submerged, and sounds almost exactly like a Jesu track, albeit a Jesu song with spaced out dancehall toasting; it's followed by a rehearsal version of "Remain", and the last track is a remix of "Transcendent" by the group Gator Bait Ten (which features Ted Parsons of Swans/Prong/Jesu, Simon Smerdon aka Mothboy, Kurt Gluck aka Submerged), an ambient reworking with dark mournful strings and woodwinds, choral drones, and distant, obfuscated rhythmic pulses all materializing in this new version.
The disc comes in a digipack that features more of Khomatech's fantastic The Blood Of Heroes inspired artwork.
��With their albums being released on the Ohm Resistance label, some have made the mistake of assuming that Blood Of Heroes was another extreme drum n' bass influenced project along the lines of flagship artist Submerged, or Imaginary Forces. While drum n' bass is obviously a part of this bands DNA, Blood Of Heroes has defied easy categorization across all of their releases, and have offered a sound that is remarkably heavy and apocalyptic in tone for something that has been largely ignored by the metal crowd. This gang of post-nuke dub/metal/jungle mutants layer their complex, heavily rhythmic songs in some vicious experimental drum n' bass movements on their latest album The Waking Nightmare, but there's just as much crushing down-tuned guitar and bellicose blackened shrieks to be found here as well. A sorta-supergroup that spans the realms of avant-metal and extreme electronic music, Blood Of Heroes features the core lineup of Justin Broadrick of Godflesh / Jesu / Greymachine / Napalm Death / Final fame, dub artist Dr. Israel on vocals (who some of you may remember from his output on the seminal Wordsound label back in the 90s), and experimental drum n' bass producers Kurt Gluck (aka Submerged) and Lynn Standafer (aka Enduser). AS with their previous releases, the band brings in a bunch of additional musicians to flesh out their frenetic futuristic visions, which on Nightmare includes Mark Gregor Filip (Gator Bait Ten), Tony Maimone and Joel Hamilton (Battle Of Mice), drummer Bal�zs P�ndi (Metallic Taste Of Blood / Obake / Wormskull), and most surprisingly, Thomas Lindberg of Swedish death metal legends At The Gates, who appears on one of the songs to deliver his awesome sky-shredding vocals. The imagery and concepts are a continuation of the bands obsession with the cult 1989 post-apocalyptic film The Blood Of Heroes, the film's rich fictional culture providing much of the thematic grist for the band's skittering, grinding soundscapes and visions of a hostile, blasted, collapsed Earth. As someone who loved that flick when I was a kid, I definitely grooved on those ideas being set to the bands ferocious industrial metal/raggacore hybrid.
�� The band has created one of the most crushing amalgams of dubstep, drum n' bass, and industrial metal I've ever heard, a sound that has expanded and evolved even further on their second full-length album The Waking Nightmare. I'm not the first person to draw this comparison when describing the strange, often hallucinatory heaviness of The Bood Of Heroes, but on Nightmare, the band sounds more than ever like the perfect fusion of the dark, apocalyptic dubstep of The Bug and the mechanical grind of classic Godflesh, and man, there are some seriously heavy moments on this album. It features an even more complex and layered sound, blending together furious dancehall vocals and violent, twitchy drum n' bass with crushing metallic guitars and dystopian ambience. The complicated rhythms and zonked-out dancehall menace of "Piration" takes the heaviest dubstep and welds it to Broadrick's punishing down-tuned guitar crunch, combining that frenetic dancehall toasting and eerie electronic soundscape with intense, crushing industrial metal. Hoovering blown out black synths and bone-rattling grindcore guitars rumble beneath the skittering, paranoid movements of "Death Wish", and on "Everything Undone" and "Bronze And Brass", the guitarists combine grinding riffage with rich, chorus-drenched chords that wouldn't have been out of place on an 80's post-punk album, again mixing it up with those infectious, brutal industrial dancehall hooks and technoid drum n' bass.
�� Elsewhere on "Hecatomb", ghostly synths merge with stuttering, robotic drum n' bass grooves, and its here that we're suddenly met with the strained, agonized howl of guest singer Thomas Lindberg from At The Gates, his instantly recognizable scream giving the brutal breakcore a unique monstrous vibe. The liquid bass and gleaming hook on "The Last Forest" help to produce the album's most haunting track, cinematic synths and piano drifting over rumbling ultra-distorted drones, more of that Godfleshian crush and mechanized breakbeats, and "War" features some lush, intoxicating kosmische synth ambience that transforms into futuristic ragga-fueled trip-hop that has Broadrick delivering his ferocious roar over the fractured beatscape. Blastbeats make a brief appearance on the mostly instrumental "Towers Arise Underground", and there's a monstrous Streetcleaner groove on "Dogtown". "Only The Desert Endures" crafts more otherwordly beatscapes from the sounds of dombura, tribal rhythms, lush cinematic electronics and sheets of guitar drone, and closer "I Love You But I Chose Darkness" is a reworking of a previously released Submerged track that delivers one of the album's finest amalgams of brutal drum n' bass, soundtracky electronica and apocalyptic industrial metal. It's a stunning blend of styles that never feels forced, and breathes life into the band's strange dark futuristic universe, further fleshed out by Khomatech's amazing, eye-popping album art that depicts heavily tattooed and painted post-apocalyptic primitives and wasteland warriors throughout the album's full-color packaging
�� Available as both a gorgeous CD digipack package with a full color booklet, and limited-edition vinyl.
��With their albums being released on the Ohm Resistance label, some have made the mistake of assuming that Blood Of Heroes was another extreme drum n' bass influenced project along the lines of flagship artist Submerged, or Imaginary Forces. While drum n' bass is obviously a part of this bands DNA, Blood Of Heroes has defied easy categorization across all of their releases, and have offered a sound that is remarkably heavy and apocalyptic in tone for something that has been largely ignored by the metal crowd. This gang of post-nuke dub/metal/jungle mutants layer their complex, heavily rhythmic songs in some vicious experimental drum n' bass movements on their latest album The Waking Nightmare, but there's just as much crushing down-tuned guitar and bellicose blackened shrieks to be found here as well. A sorta-supergroup that spans the realms of avant-metal and extreme electronic music, Blood Of Heroes features the core lineup of Justin Broadrick of Godflesh / Jesu / Greymachine / Napalm Death / Final fame, dub artist Dr. Israel on vocals (who some of you may remember from his output on the seminal Wordsound label back in the 90s), and experimental drum n' bass producers Kurt Gluck (aka Submerged) and Lynn Standafer (aka Enduser). AS with their previous releases, the band brings in a bunch of additional musicians to flesh out their frenetic futuristic visions, which on Nightmare includes Mark Gregor Filip (Gator Bait Ten), Tony Maimone and Joel Hamilton (Battle Of Mice), drummer Bal�zs P�ndi (Metallic Taste Of Blood / Obake / Wormskull), and most surprisingly, Thomas Lindberg of Swedish death metal legends At The Gates, who appears on one of the songs to deliver his awesome sky-shredding vocals. The imagery and concepts are a continuation of the bands obsession with the cult 1989 post-apocalyptic film The Blood Of Heroes, the film's rich fictional culture providing much of the thematic grist for the band's skittering, grinding soundscapes and visions of a hostile, blasted, collapsed Earth. As someone who loved that flick when I was a kid, I definitely grooved on those ideas being set to the bands ferocious industrial metal/raggacore hybrid.
�� The band has created one of the most crushing amalgams of dubstep, drum n' bass, and industrial metal I've ever heard, a sound that has expanded and evolved even further on their second full-length album The Waking Nightmare. I'm not the first person to draw this comparison when describing the strange, often hallucinatory heaviness of The Bood Of Heroes, but on Nightmare, the band sounds more than ever like the perfect fusion of the dark, apocalyptic dubstep of The Bug and the mechanical grind of classic Godflesh, and man, there are some seriously heavy moments on this album. It features an even more complex and layered sound, blending together furious dancehall vocals and violent, twitchy drum n' bass with crushing metallic guitars and dystopian ambience. The complicated rhythms and zonked-out dancehall menace of "Piration" takes the heaviest dubstep and welds it to Broadrick's punishing down-tuned guitar crunch, combining that frenetic dancehall toasting and eerie electronic soundscape with intense, crushing industrial metal. Hoovering blown out black synths and bone-rattling grindcore guitars rumble beneath the skittering, paranoid movements of "Death Wish", and on "Everything Undone" and "Bronze And Brass", the guitarists combine grinding riffage with rich, chorus-drenched chords that wouldn't have been out of place on an 80's post-punk album, again mixing it up with those infectious, brutal industrial dancehall hooks and technoid drum n' bass.
�� Elsewhere on "Hecatomb", ghostly synths merge with stuttering, robotic drum n' bass grooves, and its here that we're suddenly met with the strained, agonized howl of guest singer Thomas Lindberg from At The Gates, his instantly recognizable scream giving the brutal breakcore a unique monstrous vibe. The liquid bass and gleaming hook on "The Last Forest" help to produce the album's most haunting track, cinematic synths and piano drifting over rumbling ultra-distorted drones, more of that Godfleshian crush and mechanized breakbeats, and "War" features some lush, intoxicating kosmische synth ambience that transforms into futuristic ragga-fueled trip-hop that has Broadrick delivering his ferocious roar over the fractured beatscape. Blastbeats make a brief appearance on the mostly instrumental "Towers Arise Underground", and there's a monstrous Streetcleaner groove on "Dogtown". "Only The Desert Endures" crafts more otherwordly beatscapes from the sounds of dombura, tribal rhythms, lush cinematic electronics and sheets of guitar drone, and closer "I Love You But I Chose Darkness" is a reworking of a previously released Submerged track that delivers one of the album's finest amalgams of brutal drum n' bass, soundtracky electronica and apocalyptic industrial metal. It's a stunning blend of styles that never feels forced, and breathes life into the band's strange dark futuristic universe, further fleshed out by Khomatech's amazing, eye-popping album art that depicts heavily tattooed and painted post-apocalyptic primitives and wasteland warriors throughout the album's full-color packaging
�� Available as both a gorgeous CD digipack package with a full color booklet, and limited-edition vinyl.
Hopefully I'll be getting the CD version of BOTBO's second album in stock at some point, but for the time being, we have the limited double LP version while it lasts. The deluxe double LP for A Feral Spirit was released by Aurora Borealis, a UK import pressed on thick 180 gram black vinyl and packaged in a thick, heavy gatefold jacket with a large glossy poster tucked inside, and limited to 1,000 copies.
The second album from Chet Scott's arcane woodland sludge project picks up where the 2006 eponymous debut left off, tracking the strange mixture of primal slow-motion metal and evocative tribal ambience across nine songs of consciousness expansion and Nature-worship, and the sound has become even stranger and more discorporeal than the debut. One of the things that sets Blood Of The Black Owl apart from almost every other "metal" band is the array of primitive instruments that Chet uses, from native american flutes to wood and clay ocarinas, hand percussion, long horns, hoof shakers, antler rattles, and other shamanic tools; none of these will surprise anyone that is familiar with Chet's other project, Ruhr Hunter, whose ritualistic forest drones have long employed organic instruments alongside heavily textured electronic ambience. And metal-minded fans of Ruhr Hunter will probably find a lot to like about Blood Of The Black Owl, especially the dark, atmospheric ambient sections that are juxtaposed with the heavier metallic parts. This is Chet's "metal" band, though, so even with all of the spooky, shuffling ambience and mystical flutes floating around, the mood here is seriously heavy.
The album opens with the moody shadowdrift and spoken word of "Spell Of The Elk", which has Chet intoning a kind of prayer to animal totems in his deep, gruff growl over coarse rumblings, slow pounding tribal drums and ethereal flutes playing a lonesome Native American style melody, stretching out for nearly ten minutes before kicking in to the second track "Crippling Of Age", and here is where Blood Of The Black Owl shows it's real might, unleashing a wave of crushing distorted guitar over plodding machine-like dirge, the guitars huge and growling but slightly out of tune, like a weird mix of Skepticism's funereal plod and the chaotic black murk of Abruptum melted down and poured over passages of moody clean guitars, dreamy melody and jazzy percussion, the cleaner dark-rock interludes contrasting sharply with fuzz-soaked atonal sludge. As the album goes on, the songs become even more abstract and atmospheric, moving from tribal percussion and sinister rattles hovering over fields of dark ambience and time-stretched throat singing to blasts of massive, droning riffage and swirling distorted filth, eerie keyboard lines drifting through circles of thumping hand-drums, guided by those deep, ogrish vocals that paint visions of the wolf, of the elk, of the endtimes and of black soil swallowing generations. The nine tracks flow together as one huge cinematic piece, much more epic and thickly woven than the first album (as killer as I think that disc still is - I'll be listing that here in the store shortly as well), equally beautiful and introspective and apocalyptic and fearsome, played out as a weird ceremony with Native American sounds haunting the spaces between the grinding slow-motion dirge, like hearing bits of Godspeed You Black Emperor and Mary Youngblood appearing throughout the blackened doomy plod, a Neurosis-meets-Skepticism-meets-Abruptum wave of grim buzzing sludge. A Feral Spirit evades easy classification, and adventurous metal/doom fans should check it out.
The second album from Chet Scott's arcane woodland sludge project picks up where the 2006 eponymous debut left off, tracking the strange mixture of primal slow-motion metal and evocative tribal ambience across nine songs of consciousness expansion and Nature-worship, and the sound has become even stranger and more discorporeal than the debut. One of the things that sets Blood Of The Black Owl apart from almost every other "metal" band is the array of primitive instruments that Chet uses, from native American flutes to wood and clay ocarinas, hand percussion, long horns, hoof shakers, antler rattles, and other shamanic tools; none of these will surprise anyone that is familiar with Chet's other project, Ruhr Hunter, whose ritualistic forest drones have long employed organic instruments alongside heavily textured electronic ambience. And metal-minded fans of Ruhr Hunter will probably find a lot to like about Blood Of The Black Owl, especially the dark, atmospheric ambient sections that are juxtaposed with the heavier metallic parts. This is Chet's "metal" band, though, so even with all of the spooky, shuffling ambience and mystical flutes floating around, the mood here is seriously heavy.
The album opens with the moody shadowdrift and spoken word of "Spell Of The Elk", which has Chet intoning a kind of prayer to animal totems in his deep, gruff growl over coarse rumblings, slow pounding tribal drums and ethereal flutes playing a lonesome Native American style melody, stretching out for nearly ten minutes before kicking in to the second track "Crippling Of Age", and here is where Blood Of The Black Owl shows it's real might, unleashing a wave of crushing distorted guitar over plodding machine-like dirge, the guitars huge and growling but slightly out of tune, like a weird mix of Skepticism's funereal plod and the chaotic black murk of Abruptum melted down and poured over passages of moody clean guitars, dreamy melody and jazzy percussion, the cleaner dark-rock interludes contrasting sharply with fuzz-soaked atonal sludge. As the album goes on, the songs become even more abstract and atmospheric, moving from tribal percussion and sinister rattles hovering over fields of dark ambience and time-stretched throat singing to blasts of massive, droning riffage and swirling distorted filth, eerie keyboard lines drifting through circles of thumping hand-drums, guided by those deep, ogrish vocals that paint visions of the wolf, of the elk, of the end times and of black soil swallowing generations. The nine tracks flow together as one huge cinematic piece, much more epic and thickly woven than the first album (as killer as I think that disc still is - I'll be listing that here in the store shortly as well), equally beautiful and introspective and apocalyptic and fearsome, played out as a weird ceremony with Native American sounds haunting the spaces between the grinding slow-motion dirge, like hearing bits of Godspeed You Black Emperor and Mary Youngblood appearing throughout the blackened doomy plod, a Neurosis-meets-Skepticism-meets-Abruptum wave of grim buzzing sludge. A Feral Spirit evades easy classification, and adventurous metal/doom fans should check it out.
The word was out early in the year about this odd pairing of Revenge/Axis Of Advance members C. Ross and James Read (also of the mighty Kerasphorus and Cremation) and singer A.A. Nemtheanga from Celtic black/folk metallers Primordial, and when the advance Mp3 from their recording hit the 'net, it left a lot of baffled looks on the extreme metal message board community. It was a little hard to imagine what a band would sound like with those war metal vets fronted by Nemtheanga dramatic vocal presence, and the preliminary taste of Indoctrine suggested something quite unlike anything that we'd heard from any of their other bands. After finally getting the debut album from Blood Revolt and listening to it from start to finish, it's still a somewhat jarring and difficult listen, but I've also thoroughly come to love this disc, 'cuz it's one of the most original and powerful black metal albums that I've heard all year.
There's alot about Indoctrine that makes it stand out. The first thing that strikes the listener is the strange juxtaposition of Nemtheanga's clear, declaratory voice and lunatic delivery with the bestial, schizophrenic metal that Read and Ross unleash. And the music is fucking ferocious, clearly rooted in the supreme Canadian black/war metal violence of their other bands, with Read blasting and hammering his drum kit like a coked-up gorilla, his trademark style of somewhat sloppy, utterly vicious drumming injecting a nuclear black energy into the brutal thrash riffs and maniac black/death metal. At the same time, the band throws in some additional elements like pounding D-beat crust, the creeping, foul doom of "My Name In Blood Across The Sky", and even some surprisingly catchy pogo punk riffs, like on "Bite The Hand, Purge The Flesh". It's definitely more varied than what these guys do in, say, Revenge, with more melodic and catchy hooks infecting the violent, chaotic thrash, but there's no shortfall of ferocity. Nemtheanga's overwrought vocals clash with this sound, delivering the bleak narrative in a mixture of powerful, operatic singing and harsher shrieks, and it comes out sounding remarkably unique. His vocals wander across the album, the lyrics describing a plotline involving armed urban warfare, a lone wolf resistance fighter, and ultimately the martyrdom of the central character, all of which makes for unusual and interesting subject matter for a black/death concept album. It's an awesome, albeit quirky mix of supreme Canadian black metal ferocity and powerful, impassioned vocals with more brains than usual at work behind the bestial assault...definitely one of 2010's most idiosyncratic extreme metal albums, and an amazing debut that blew away my expectations for what this was going to sound like. This is highly recommended to fans of Revenge, Kerasphorus and other Read-related projects, and anyone into psychotic, nihilistic black/death metal who's interested in hearing a unique vocal approach outside of the standard guttural grunting and shrieking that we usually hear.
First heard Blood Rhythms on that split cassette with T.O.M.B. that came out a few years ago on Land Of Decay, their side offering up some appropriately grim and murky industrial noise. The solo project from Chicago-based experimental musician Arvo Zylo, Blood Rhythms seemed to focus on a darker strain of amorphous, ominous industrial, a notion enforced by the latest release, Assembly. Apparently the band's first official full-length, this LP features two long tracks, each taking up an entire side, and features Zylo teaming up with an ensemble of additional musicians including Bruce Lamont (Yakuza, Bloodiest, Corrections House), Andy Ortmann (Panicsville, Plastic Crimewave Sound), Brian Klein and Dave Purdie, playing a mix of brass and woodwinds inside of what was apparently an abandoned meat locker.
First up, "Coarse Land" slowly undulates in waves of dense industrial drone, a spreading stain of blackened ambience, gradually thickening into voluminous, billowing fogbanks of dense dark drone spiked with surges of abrasive metallic sound, the sound of distant mournful horns melting into layered rumblings of shifting metal and debris. Those horns diffuse into the background for most the track, but occasionally drift to the surface in clusters of atonal, scraping dissonance, leaving smears of warped, jazzy shadowdrift creeping across woozy Niblockian drones. Increasingly unsettling, this creepy, seasick ambient nightmare turns into something akin to a jazz-damaged take on Yen Pox or Lustmord's stygian dronescapes.
The noisome din that gets whipped up on the other track "Cutter Magnolias" is a completely different sort of racket. A small ensemble for vomiting brass, perhaps, brought into wailing, deformed existence via a roomful of bleating, honking horn players that slip in and out of rhythm and musical coherence across the first few minutes of the side. After a bit though, Zylo begins to cut the recording up, transforming that improvised squall into an abstract collage of chopped-up noise blurt, bits of silence separating the squall, transforming these sounds into a strange assembly of heaving repetitious loops that become increasingly layered and complex, turning into something resembling a malevolent locked groove that takes over much of the piece, backed by huge wall-rattling percussive rumbles as it crescendos into a hellish orchestral dirge.
Pretty damn intense, and even cooler than the previous stuff I'd heard from the project. The album is also available in two different versions: the first is an edition of one hundred copies assembled by RRRecords that comes in one of the label's signature duct-tape assembled custom jackets, and includes a hand-numbered and hand-stamped xeroxed insert. The other edition, released in an edition of one hundred twenty-two copies, comes in more extravagant hand-made packaging produced by Zylo himself, housed in a chunky jacket covered in duct tape and other materials (pieces of sheet metal, razor blades, bits of plexi-glass, sheets of sandpaper, etc.) and accompanied by the photocopied insert and an additional 12" "anti-record" that has been horrendously warped/tortured/abused.
����� First heard Blood Rhythms on that split cassette with T.O.M.B. that came out a few years ago on Land Of Decay, their side offering up some appropriately grim and murky industrial noise. The solo project from Chicago-based experimental musician Arvo Zylo, Blood Rhythms seemed to focus on a darker strain of amorphous, ominous industrial, a notion enforced by the latest release, Assembly. Apparently the band's first official full-length, this LP features two long tracks, each taking up an entire side, and features Zylo teaming up with an ensemble of additional musicians including Bruce Lamont (Yakuza, Bloodiest, Corrections House), Andy Ortmann (Panicsville, Plastic Crimewave Sound), Brian Klein and Dave Purdie, playing a mix of brass and woodwinds inside of what was apparently an abandoned meat locker.
����� First up, "Coarse Land" slowly undulates in waves of dense industrial drone, a spreading stain of blackened ambience, gradually thickening into voluminous, billowing fogbanks of dense dark drone spiked with surges of abrasive metallic sound, the sound of distant mournful horns melting into layered rumblings of shifting metal and debris. Those horns diffuse into the background for most the track, but occasionally drift to the surface in clusters of atonal, scraping dissonance, leaving smears of warped, jazzy shadowdrift creeping across woozy Niblockian drones. Increasingly unsettling, this creepy, seasick ambient nightmare turns into something akin to a jazz-damaged take on Yen Pox or Lustmord's stygian dronescapes.
����� The noisome din that gets whipped up on the other track "Cutter Magnolias" is a completely different sort of racket. A small ensemble for vomiting brass, perhaps, brought into wailing, deformed existence via a roomful of bleating, honking horn players that slip in and out of rhythm and musical coherence across the first few minutes of the side. After a bit though, Zylo begins to cut the recording up, transforming that improvised squall into an abstract collage of chopped-up noise blurt, bits of silence separating the squall, transforming these sounds into a strange assembly of heaving repetitious loops that become increasingly layered and complex, turning into something resembling a malevolent locked groove that takes over much of the piece, backed by huge wall-rattling percussive rumbles as it crescendos into a hellish orchestral dirge.
����� Pretty damn intense, and even cooler than the previous stuff I'd heard from the project. The album is also available in two different versions: the first is an edition of one hundred copies assembled by RRRecords that comes in one of the label's signature duct-tape assembled custom jackets, and includes a hand-numbered and hand-stamped xeroxed insert. The other edition, released in an edition of one hundred twenty-two copies, comes in more extravagant hand-made packaging produced by Zylo himself, housed in a chunky jacket covered in duct tape and other materials (pieces of sheet metal, razor blades, bits of plexi-glass, sheets of sandpaper, etc.) and accompanied by the photocopied insert and an additional 12" "anti-record" that has been horrendously warped/tortured/abused.
Part of that massive 10YR.Series boxset that Carbon released in celebration of their 10th year anniversary, Blood Stereo's Hymn For The Crippled Mulatto is a noxious blurt of zombified scum-drone, a 31 minute toxic jam crawling out of the cracked skulls of Dylan Nyoukis (formerly of legendary 90's noise band Prick Decay) and Karen Constance that was recorded back in 2004. This is the first stuff that I've heard from the duo, but it's a crushing, sickening drone stew, crank it loud and the gutteral looped distortion, creaking metal tones, and thick static murk fill the room with black fog, jammed with far off thumps and psychotic church choirs.
Pure horror-inspired gorefueled DeathGrind from this one man show. Utterly zombified. 8 tracks of grinding dismemberment. Gutteral vomit inducing vocals with
hyper throat tearing screams and guitars that melt the paint off walls. Caveman deathgrind that makes me think of a more technical MORTICIAN. Seriously
downtuned, chaotic crunch with righteous production. One of the best "dude in his basement with a drum machine and 8-track" deathgrind releases yet.
��Started up by Crown Of Bone mastermind / ex-Demonologist member Dustin Redington in 2012, Occult Supremacy is a CDR label focused on "Blackened Noise, White Noise, Death Industrial, HNW, Dark Ambient, Black Metal, Horror Drone"; in other words, exactly the sort of stuff that I can't stop listening to here at C-Blast. The label's crude aesthetic is pure 90's harsh noise, with each disc issued in a limited run of fifty copies and packaged in either a slimline jewel case or a plastic sleeve with minimal Xeroxed artwork, the discs themselves either scrawled on with black magic marker or blasted with abstract spray-paint patterns. But the sound that Occult Supremacy traffics in is total horror, heavily leaning towards the bleakest strains of harsh noise wall and experimental, noise-damaged black metal, and over the past year it has maintained a crazed release schedule that has already produced nearly forty discs, from a variety of artists that includes slightly more recognizable names from the harsh electronics underground (Vomir, Burial Ground, Luasa Raelon). While we haven't been able to get all of the Occult Supremacy titles in stock, we have managed to stock a pretty large selection of their titles, all of which are recommended listening to anyone into the filthiest depths of black noise, experimental black metal, and brutal electronic noise.
�� This entry in the Occult Supremacy catalog comes from Bloodcrown, the duo of Colombian ritual-industrial artist Edgar Kerval (aka Emme Ya) and Russian soundscaper Viktoria Isa Mengele, who previously appeared on a limited-edition CDR release from the Boston-based black metal/industrial band Cryostasium. With Bloodcrown, Kerval and Mengele create ritual music for sightless troglodytes, long, drawn out tracks of grimy, subterranean drift and nightmarish ambience that won't be totally unfamiliar to fans of the sort of dark ceremonial ambience that Kerval has been recording under the Emme Ya name; there's definitely a similar stygian ritualistic atmosphere to these three long pieces.
�� Opener "Crown Ov The Blackthorns" blends together evil goblin shrieks and gurgling subhuman vocalizations with the sound of a lone male voice slowly intoning a series of repetitive chants in the background, his voice shrouded in echo and reverb, surrounded by the sound of eerie chiming bells, mysterious mechanical creaking, swells of Lustmordian rumble, and deep dubby snare-like reverberations, layered with sheets of rumbling low-frequency noise and swarms of seething, muted black static. Minimal and creepy, this combines a hallucinatory black mass-like atmosphere with subtle electronic abrasions to craft an intently bleak strain of black industrial that bears some similar traits as Funerary Call, Kerovnian and (natch) Emme Ya at their most minimal and subdued. The middle track "Deathbringer" is even more phantasmagoric, sending more of those deep chanting vocals streaking across a vast subterranean abyss, the hypnotic smear of processed voices and non-verbal throat sounds joined by swells of creepy kosmische synthdrone and strange, wheezing flute-like fluttering. And closer "Rex Mortis" puts that menacing, half-whispered chanting, ghastly gasping and weird, ecstatic moaning front and center, closing the disc with this blood-encrusted death prayer emanating from the depths alongside hellish electronic ambience and nightmarish horn-like blasts from the deep. Pure murk.
�� Limited to fifty copies, and packaged in a simple xeroxed sleeve.
How can we not love a band called Bl��dHag, is made up of four bookworms obsessed with science fiction literature, and which plays two-minute blasts of
brutal, sludgy deathcore that they call "Edu-core", with lyrics about their favorite authors? These guys are awesome. Yeah, it's a gimmick, but it's one that
totally works for a band this smart, fun, and crushing! Hailing from Seattle, Bl��dHag has been around for awhile, touring libraries where they'd hurl books
at the audience and spread their fervent love of all things literary, and proclaim its motto: �the faster you go deaf, the more time you have to read.�
Hell Bent For Letters is their second album, and their first for Alternative Tentacles; you get sixteen songs titled after an assortment of authors,
paying tribute to Douglas Adams, Poe, Anne McCaffrey, Madeleine L�Engle, Franz Kafka and Phillip Jose Farmer, among others. The songs are brief, gutteral
eruptions, moving from sludgy, thundering deathcore a la Darkside NYC, Napalm Death, and classic Bay Area thrash moves, to the choral black metal of �Edgar
Allen Poe,� and the melodic death of �Philip Jose Farmer.� There are some weird electronic effects and ridiculous sing-along chants that appear as well, and
Jeremy Enigk (of Sunny Day Real Estate) contributes keyboards? Then there is the album artwork, which is pure genius. The cover art is an original
illustration of a rampaging librarian warrior queen who has slayed a group of men with overdue notices, holding a goblin head and posing triumphantly. A
fantastically quirky, educational, crushing dose of Edu-core!
The boogie is heavy on this debut disc from Bloodhorse, a power trio that boasts former members of 454 Big Block, Shelter, The Red Chord, Saves
The Day, American Nightmare, and Premonitions War - quite the hardcore resume. But Bloodhorse's sound is total rock, a fuzzed out, swaggering stoner rock
that filters the influence of classic 70's proto-metal like Deep Purple, Sabbath, Grand Funk, MC5 and the like through the crush of modern sludge metal and
come out sounding like a leaner, more exuberant and more rocking High On Fire. Heavy shit, for sure; I bet these guys are tight with
Doom Riders and Clouds,
two other Boston bands with hardcore guys flexing their love of muscular riff rock. The riffs on Bloodhorse's debut are fuzz-soaked and ripping, especially
on the pummeling "Il Treno a Tucumcari" and the crushing slow parts on "Son Of Man", and there's plenty of wah-wah abuse, which can never get enough of with
thism kind of stuff. Every once in a while, the band dips into some slow, doomy crunchiness that gets really heavy, but for the most part, the songs
are charged up, rambunctious riff-rock, complete with a ridiculously killer four minute drum solo in the middle of "The Goat". Stick around for the final,
untitled track, where Bloodhorse jam out on The Who's "Sparks" from Tommy. Great stuff. Comes in a four panel digipack with an insert booklet.
The sticker on the front of Horizoner touts this album as being custom made for fans of both Hawkwind and Hellhammer, a claim that's quick to get my attention, even though I really don't remember hearing much of either of those bands in the hard-charging stoner metal that made up Bloodhorse's debut from a couple of years ago. Those references end up being not all that off the mark though, as Bloodhorse's first full length does display a new love of spacey, psychedelic rock that they only hinted at on the self-titled EP, which to me sounded like a more anthemic, hardcore-tinged take on High On Fire. But check out the opening song on Horizoner to see what these guys are doing now: for more than six minutes, "A Good Son" unfurls a pounding and hypnotic tribal drum groove and spacey repetitious riffing that slowly simmers it's lysgeric vibe in flanged guitar and triumphant guitar licks before it finally explodes in a blast of crushing, loping metal in the final few minutes, and all of a sudden these guys sound way more like a galloping 80's heavy metal band, albeit with massive downtuned heaviness. There's still a bit of that High On Fire/The Sword vibe going on, but it's tempered by somewhat melodic vocals and some thrashier guitar work. The rest of them album gets deeper in this furious mix of 80's thrash metal, Sabbathian crunch, and trance-inducing psychedelia, with tracks like "A Passing Thought to the Contrary" bringing together portentous deathsludge and raw sinister guitar atmospherics before launching into a neck-snapping thrash riff, then tumbles into an epic doomy passage rife with soulful leads before re-engaging that ripping thrash riff, only now they've turned into a hypnotic driving outro that closes out the song. The rest of the songs deliver the same sort of dynamic, moving from crushing slo-mo riffage and ominous instrumentals to raging crusty thrash and hooky stoner metal with the two singers belting out their triumphant harmonies. Anyone that dug the powerful, fist-pumping metal of their debut will love this. Comes in a full color four panel digisleeve.
Almost elegant and elegiac in their deathshroud ambience, Bloody Panda have finally issued their first official full length release with Pheremone,
a four-song disc that runs nearly forty minutes. I had heard the Panda previously via some demo recordings that the band was circulating throughout the out-
metal subterrane as well as the split LP they released last year with Kayo Dot, and fucking loved the band's blend of glacial angular doom and
singer Yoshiko Ohara's ghostly vocals, the gut rumbling funeral riffs and billowing church organs, like Skepticism merged with pitch-black Japanese graveyard
psychedelia. Pheromone actually includes the song "Fever" off of the Kayo Dot split, but the other three tracks ("Untitled", "Coma", and "Ice") are
all exclusive to this disc, all lengthy midnight crypt-rites that run around 10 minutes and evoke an icy underworld populated with lost souls and horrific
demons, driven by Yoshiko's mournful, otherworldly vocals sung in both English and Japanese, which remind me of a terminally doomed Nico, so sorrowful and
narcotic, like she's singing ancient alien incantations to quiet the spirits of the roving dead. The band, cloaked in executioners masks whenever the play
live, erect monstrous angular riffs, slabs of droning feedback, and subdued bits of post-rock that scrawl out statements of eternal regret and "self
deliverance"; these swirl together with the austere pipe organ drones and deep space synths, and are augmented by the amazing drumming from noted tabla
soloist Dan Wiess who provides a molten thrust to the band's plodding dirge with rhythms that veer into full-on prog-rock at times. An achingly beautiful
Pheromone's disc comes in a full color digipack with terrific creepy photogprahy from Bloody Panda organist Blake McDowell along with additional
artwork and design from noted artist Stephen Kasner, as well lyrics and liner notes.
Now available on vinyl in a posh gatefold package, black vinyl in a limited edition of 500 copies.
Almost elegant and elegiac in their deathshroud ambience, Bloody Panda have finally issued their first official full length release with Pheremone,
a four-song disc that runs nearly forty minutes. I had heard the Panda previously via some demo recordings that the band was circulating throughout the out-
metal subterrane as well as the split LP they released last year with Kayo Dot, and fucking loved the band's blend of glacial angular doom and
singer Yoshiko Ohara's ghostly vocals, the gut rumbling funeral riffs and billowing church organs, like Skepticism merged with pitch-black Japanese graveyard
psychedelia. Pheromone actually includes the song "Fever" off of the Kayo Dot split, but the other three tracks ("Untitled", "Coma", and "Ice") are
all exclusive to this disc, all lengthy midnight crypt-rites that run around 10 minutes and evoke an icy underworld populated with lost souls and horrific
demons, driven by Yoshiko's mournful, otherworldly vocals sung in both English and Japanese, which remind me of a terminally doomed Nico, so sorrowful and
narcotic, like she's singing ancient alien incantations to quiet the spirits of the roving dead. The band, cloaked in executioners masks whenever the play
live, erect monstrous angular riffs, slabs of droning feedback, and subdued bits of post-rock that scrawl out statements of eternal regret and "self
deliverance"; these swirl together with the austere pipe organ drones and deep space synths, and are augmented by the amazing drumming from noted tabla
soloist Dan Wiess who provides a molten thrust to the band's plodding dirge with rhythms that veer into full-on prog-rock at times. An achingly beautiful
Pheromone's disc comes in a full color gatefold jacket with terrific creepy photogprahy from Bloody Panda organist Blake McDowell along with additional artwork and design from noted artist Stephen Kasner, as well lyrics and liner notes.
Even on their first album Pheromone, Brooklyn art/psych doomsters were edging away from the confines of extreme doom and exploring ritualistic
black-psych terrain that felt closer to the ghostly Japanese psychedelia of bands like Shizuka and Fushitsusha, while being possessed of a ghoulish, creepy
atmopshere accentuated by the distinctive vocals of singer Yoshiko Ohara. The lumbering angular riffs sure are heavy though, heavy enough to sate any
doom-freak while offering one of the most unique sounds in the current art-metal spectrum. Ohara's vocals have always been one of Bloody Panda's most
defining qualities, with her voice inhabiting a constant fog of reverb and coming off as a mix of Yoko Ono's expressive shrieks and the narcotic croon of
post-Velvets Nico...hardly the typical voice for a band trafficking in riffs and tempos this weighty, as her moans and cries are trailed by black smears of
pipe organ, low-slung bass, and ritualistic percussion. Now the band find themselves on a new label (the continually impressive Profound Lore) and with a new
album, Summon, with seven songs reaching on for close to an hour...the music has become more abstract than before, opening with the droning
doom-riffs and churning tribal drums of "Gold" that surge beneath one of the albums most moving vocal melodies, and swathed in buzzing organ and feedback,
which leads into the relatively straightforward death-sludge of "Pusher". A high-pitched electronic drone pierces through the entire song, giving a queasy
off-center feel to the lurching doom.
"Saccades" is presented in two parts, the first a two minute intro of shrieking and subsonic machine throb that leads into the second half's epic heaviness,
which has bursts of blasting, chaotic drumming and endless rolling tribal rhythms, and weird complex riffs that remind me of the old French prog band Shub
Niggurath, turning this song into a sort of massive doomy Zeuhl jam. Then comes the album's centerpiece "Miserere", a twenty-one minute epic of stunning
glacial heaviness and explosive power that travels through fields of emotionally wrecked sludge and gothic graveyard ambience that suddenly explodes in
flurries of black metal-like blastbeats and dissonant riffbuzz, while deep male throat singing and wafts of pitch black ambience buzz in the background.
After that, the last two tracks ("Grey" and "Hashira") bring the keyboards front and center and drift through gorgeous, haunting realms of slow-motion
psychedelia that are less aggressive than the rest of the album, but still quite intense.
Obviously, Bloody Panda fans won't be disappointed. The raw psychic terrain explored on Summon has a lot in common with recent albums from Asva and Khanate too, which themselves broke with many of the tenants of doom metal, and anybody that enjoyed those discs should check this out as well.
The cd is also accompanied by a dvd that features a short twenty-one minute film for "Miserere", which features a mixture of murky live performance footage, surreal, Takashi Miike-esque images, and warped new wave video effects that make for a creepily psychedelic visual experience that matches the epic song nicely.
Packaged in a six-panel full color digipack.
Now available as a double LP set that also includes the DVD with the 21 minute "Miserere" film, limited to 500 copies, and packaged in a heavy gatefold package
Even on their first album Pheromone, Brooklyn art/psych doomsters were edging away from the confines of extreme doom and exploring ritualistic black-psych terrain that felt closer to the ghostly Japanese psychedelia of bands like Shizuka and Fushitsusha, while being possessed of a ghoulish, creepy
atmopshere accentuated by the distinctive vocals of singer Yoshiko Ohara. The lumbering angular riffs sure are heavy though, heavy enough to sate any
doom-freak while offering one of the most unique sounds in the current art-metal spectrum. Ohara's vocals have always been one of Bloody Panda's most
defining qualities, with her voice inhabiting a constant fog of reverb and coming off as a mix of Yoko Ono's expressive shrieks and the narcotic croon of
post-Velvets Nico...hardly the typical voice for a band trafficking in riffs and tempos this weighty, as her moans and cries are trailed by black smears of
pipe organ, low-slung bass, and ritualistic percussion. Now the band find themselves on a new label (the continually impressive Profound Lore) and with a new
album, Summon, with seven songs reaching on for close to an hour...the music has become more abstract than before, opening with the droning
doom-riffs and churning tribal drums of "Gold" that surge beneath one of the albums most moving vocal melodies, and swathed in buzzing organ and feedback,
which leads into the relatively straightforward death-sludge of "Pusher". A high-pitched electronic drone pierces through the entire song, giving a queasy
off-center feel to the lurching doom.
"Saccades" is presented in two parts, the first a two minute intro of shrieking and subsonic machine throb that leads into the second half's epic heaviness,
which has bursts of blasting, chaotic drumming and endless rolling tribal rhythms, and weird complex riffs that remind me of the old French prog band Shub
Niggurath, turning this song into a sort of massive doomy Zeuhl jam. Then comes the album's centerpiece "Miserere", a twenty-one minute epic of stunning
glacial heaviness and explosive power that travels through fields of emotionally wrecked sludge and gothic graveyard ambience that suddenly explodes in
flurries of black metal-like blastbeats and dissonant riffbuzz, while deep male throat singing and wafts of pitch black ambience buzz in the background.
After that, the last two tracks ("Grey" and "Hashira") bring the keyboards front and center and drift through gorgeous, haunting realms of slow-motion
psychedelia that are less aggressive than the rest of the album, but still quite intense.
Obviously, Bloody Panda fans won't be disappointed. The raw psychic terrain explored on Summon has a lot in common with recent albums from Asva and Khanate too, which themselves broke with many of the tenants of doom metal, and anybody that enjoyed those discs should check this out as well.
The album is also accompanied by a dvd that features a short twenty-one minute film for "Miserere", which features a mixture of murky live performance footage, surreal, Takashi Miike-esque images, and warped new wave video effects that make for a creepily psychedelic visual experience that matches the epic song nicely.
An odd art-object from the Chicago power electronics outfit Bloodyminded, Phases Three is a sturdy black box that holds three extremely short 7" records which contain live recordings and processed recordings from the band that were culled from a 2006 basement performance in Saint Louis, Missouri, accompanied by a double sided insert sheet that contains liner notes, and a hand-numbered card. According to the band, this was assembled to capture the shock-assault experience of witnessing Bloodyminded live, which I can certainly buy; the live tracks are as punishing as harsh electronics get, frequently hitting extreme frequencies that drill right through my nerve centers. The audio presentatiopn borders on the spartan, though; each of the three 7"s (which are nicely housed in silk-screened inner sleeves and are pressed on white vinyl) only has about two minutes of music on each side, on average, with the whole set clocking in at just shy of twelve minutes. So, ok, I wouldn't recommend this box set to someone who might just be beginning to investigate Bloodyminded's brand of brute electronics (for you folks, I'd recommend their stunningly violent 2006 album Magnetism) but for hardcore fans, this is pretty cool. The first a-side and the final b-side of the set each feature tracks that were created using live recordings as source material; "Phases : Three (Part One)" opens it up with a savage short outpouring of brutally strangled feedback, maniacal howls, and deep bass belch and squealing feedback vomit, and "Phases : Three (Part Two)" ends with unintelligible screams and ranting in a morass of murky feedback attacks that finally erupts into a squall of malfunctioning amplifier overload and bass ejaculate. In between 'em, you get the live tracks, which includes "Girlfriend Attempts To Explain Schizophrenic Episode By Revealing Childhood Sexual Abuse", a queasy orgy of crazed screaming and roiling high-pitched feedback, total caveman electro-blunt violence; the brain-drilling feedback assaults of "Shotgun Held To Face By Severely Crosseyed Addict While Attempting To Physically Remove Girlfriend From Known Drug House" and "Visiting An Ex-Girlfriend In The Hospital - Psychiatric Ward - 24-Hour Observation - Suicide Watch"; and the pall of doom that sets in among the air raid sirens, gasping horror and vicious fluctuating feedback waves on "Visiting An Ex-Girlfriend In The Hospital - Aids Ward".
Man, nobody can title a song like Bloodyminded.
Released in an edition of three hundred copies, this collection is raw synthesizer agony and destructive power electronics of the harshest order, certainly not for timid ears.
One of the premier American power electronics outfits, Chicago's Bloodyminded continues to crank out their series of reissued albums through member Mark Solotroff's Bloodlust! label, here resurrecting the band's third album from 2005 Gift Givers in a new re-designed eight panel digipack package. Featuring guest appearances from the likes of Eyehategod frontman Mike Williams and Mauthausen Orchestra's Pierpaolo Zoppo, Gift Givers is a cruel assault of rumbling, nightmarish industrial noise and chaotic power electronics, opening with the sound of pounding processed drum sounds throbbing beneath waves of undulating synthesizer drone, while ominous voices are looped over top of the heavy malfunctioning rhythms and blasts of distorted noise.
The extreme screeching feedback abuse that has always been a focal point of Bloodyminded's assaultive sound is all over Gift Givers, but it's layered beneath the heavy, churning noise-loops that dominate much of these seventeen tracks, with lots of layered voices (speaking in a mix of French, English and Spanish) and demonic shrieking and buried percussion creating an intense state of sonic delirium; when that squealing feedback is dragged into the forefront of Bloodyminded's sonic assault, the band utilizes it to form eerie half-formed melodies, as heard on the haunting "Pro-Ana". On other tracks, the synthesizers sputter and shriek, vomiting up streams of garbled fluttering effects and buzzing black drones, waves of harsh granular whoosh and oppressive jet-engine roar.
The guest contributions stand out among the rest of the album; "Private Thoughts" features synthesizer noise and vocals from Italian industrial legend Pierpaolo Zoppo, producing an eerie, abrasive electronic soundscape, while Mike Williams brings his wretched screaming to the track "Ten Suicides", a standout track that had previously appeared in a slightly different version as the b-side on Williams's That's What The Obituary Said 7" from a few years ago.
Gift Givers also stands out from the rest of the Bloodyminded catalog with it's strange imagery. The free-associative lyrics read like a surrealist cut-up of self-help literature and a coroner's autopsy report, and are laced with a variety of creepy visuals of extreme eating disorders, obsessive self-destructive behavior and scenes of self-mutilation, while the layering of different languages in the vocals give several of the tracks a deranged, Babel-like feel of intense disorientation, especially on the monstrous "Blood Customs", which takes on the aspect of a Catholic exorcism ritual. With these explorations of extreme psychological and physical duress, Gift Givers turns out to be one of the more unsettling listening experiences that Bloodyminded has brought us so far, and fans of the recent Sutcliffe Jugend output in particular will want to check this out...
���Now available on both limited edition vinyl and digipack CD.
��� Still one of the key shapers of American power electronics, Chicago PE mainstays Bloodyminded return with their first new album in seven years, and it's one of the most harrowing industrial/noise albums of their career. Within The Walls is some of the grimmest material I've ever heard from the band, steeped in clinical electronic drones and waves of deeply unsettling dark ambience that move through uneasy psychological spaces. The album wastes no time in its effort to creep you out as the opener "All The Cities Are Occupied" layers those eerie dissonant drones and cold wheezing electronics over sounds of creaking, scraping metal, like the sound of a pick-axe being dragged down the length of some long, dank culvert, surrounded by bleak synthesizer sounds that have been summoned by David Reed of Luasa Raelon / Envenomist. But then they'll follow that up that with something like the Whitehouse-worthy blast of squealing feedback abuse and pandemonic derangement of the title track, a disorienting din of crazed voices shrieking and raving over an assault of pestilent fluttering distortion and severe speaker-shredding noise. The album often surges into that level of extreme, assaultive sound, traveling swiftly out of the passages of cold dark ambience into these vicious onslaughts of deformed synth noise and sputtering oscillators, becoming a churning backdrop of diseased drone and insectile chaos that takes that classic Whitehouse-influenced style of power electronics and twists it into something even more monstrous.
��� But the focal point of Bloodyminded's bleakly violent vision on Within The Walls is not the harsh, ear-rending electronics, but actually the myriad of voices that appear together throughout the album, a legion of voices that evokes the interior pandemonium of a schizophrenic, the screeching garbled horror of tracks like "Night Strikes" teeming with a barely controlled violence, the nihilist lyrics spilling out in streams of surrealist horror as the voices shift between English and Spanish, gouts of guttural bellowing and sneering hatefulness, a multitude of psychotic howling and gnashing teeth that ceaselessly pan back and forth over the screaming malignant squeal and chirping electronics. It's only at the very end, when the band slips into a reworking of the Locrian song "Inverted Ruins" that the album transforms, as the coldly ambivalent synth melody that Sanford Parker weaves around the skull-scraping feedback slowly blossoms into a kind of mesmeric, malignant darkwave; in that final moment, Bloodyminded's high-end violence somehow morphs into some akin to a more atmospheric Skinny Puppy, a striking and wholly unexpected climax to the otherwise blistering aural abuse that makes up Walls.
���Now available on both limited edition vinyl and digipack CD.
��� Still one of the key shapers of American power electronics, Chicago PE mainstays Bloodyminded return with their first new album in seven years, and it's one of the most harrowing industrial/noise albums of their career. Within The Walls is some of the grimmest material I've ever heard from the band, steeped in clinical electronic drones and waves of deeply unsettling dark ambience that move through uneasy psychological spaces. The album wastes no time in its effort to creep you out as the opener "All The Cities Are Occupied" layers those eerie dissonant drones and cold wheezing electronics over sounds of creaking, scraping metal, like the sound of a pick-axe being dragged down the length of some long, dank culvert, surrounded by bleak synthesizer sounds that have been summoned by David Reed of Luasa Raelon / Envenomist. But then they'll follow that up that with something like the Whitehouse-worthy blast of squealing feedback abuse and pandemonic derangement of the title track, a disorienting din of crazed voices shrieking and raving over an assault of pestilent fluttering distortion and severe speaker-shredding noise. The album often surges into that level of extreme, assaultive sound, traveling swiftly out of the passages of cold dark ambience into these vicious onslaughts of deformed synth noise and sputtering oscillators, becoming a churning backdrop of diseased drone and insectile chaos that takes that classic Whitehouse-influenced style of power electronics and twists it into something even more monstrous.
��� But the focal point of Bloodyminded's bleakly violent vision on Within The Walls is not the harsh, ear-rending electronics, but actually the myriad of voices that appear together throughout the album, a legion of voices that evokes the interior pandemonium of a schizophrenic, the screeching garbled horror of tracks like "Night Strikes" teeming with a barely controlled violence, the nihilist lyrics spilling out in streams of surrealist horror as the voices shift between English and Spanish, gouts of guttural bellowing and sneering hatefulness, a multitude of psychotic howling and gnashing teeth that ceaselessly pan back and forth over the screaming malignant squeal and chirping electronics. It's only at the very end, when the band slips into a reworking of the Locrian song "Inverted Ruins" that the album transforms, as the coldly ambivalent synth melody that Sanford Parker weaves around the skull-scraping feedback slowly blossoms into a kind of mesmeric, malignant darkwave; in that final moment, Bloodyminded's high-end violence somehow morphs into some akin to a more atmospheric Skinny Puppy, a striking and wholly unexpected climax to the otherwise blistering aural abuse that makes up Walls.
I've Filled Up These Pages was written, performed, and recorded by one Keith Vogelsong in various bedrooms and living spaces over the course of
2002...pretty impressive, given how good this album is, both tune-wise and production wise. For a bedroom -recorded pop album, this sounds FANTASTIC.
I've Filled Up These Pages is terrific weepy noise pop, with dense instrumentation, built with layers and layers of nicely off-kilter effects and
synths and guitars and vocals that usher this into the "bent pop" territory we get all spastic about. Not too out-there, though- this is still pretty
accessible stuff, but just rough enough and weird enough around the edges to register on our raucous-radar. There's some nice shoegazer-esque noise at work,
breakbeats and glitches, and weirdly discordant piano and guitar melodic interplay, like TEARS FOR FEARS if they suffered some head injury before going into
the studio. It works, too, and the whole album has this gauzy , otherworldly feel to it. Vogelsong's oft-times androgynous (and quite pretty) vocals lend
additional dreamhaze to the proceedings. Symphonic emo? Orchestral glitchy shoegaze? A mashup of MY BLOODY VALENTINE and THE POSTAL SERVICE and NOTWIST ?
Sort of. Regardless, it�s a killer,and quite catchy indie pop album that demands repeat spins.
This record was released a few months back in a super-limited edition of 327 copies, and it's already out of print from Gnarled Forest!
Holy shit, this is one the heaviest records that we have listed this week. It's one of the most recent assaults of blackened, crushing disease from the Seattle based duo of Wm. Rage (the guy behind the awesome Enterruption label) and Stan Reed. The goofy band name might mislead you into thinking that this is some sort of stonr rock action or something similiar, but you couldn't be further from the truth. Blue Sabbath Black Cheer play (play?) some of the heaviest, most pulverizing industrial sludge you'll ever hear, a nightmarish quicksand pit of insanely downtuned guitars, horrific screaming vocals and beyond-gutteral vomit roars that sound like they are bubbling up from the guys of an amoebic demon, syrupy tape loops and slow-motion oscillator whirr, clanking metakl percussion and throbbing basslines, and a flood of screeching, squealing, hellish electronic noise. Imagine a hellish fusion of Abruptum and Wolf Eyes, Streetcleaner-era Godflesh Lustmord, MZ412 and Sutcliffe Jugend cassettes being melted down into black tar. Utterly hideous, totally evil, completely fucking crushing.
This record is one of the groups heaviest. Opening up with the plodding, industrial doom of the title track, BSBC move through walls of crushing, corrosive distortion, pulverizing glacial rhythms that sounds like the drum machine from Streetcleaner pounding away on dying batteries, sheets of caustic feedback and amplifier filth, congealed into a kind of monstrous slow-mo industrial doom crush, shrouded in thick blackened noise and underpinned by formless but unbelievably heavy sludgemetal riffage, and drifting off into the shadowy, clanking ambience of "Disgusting Body". Super intense, and bolstered by the addition of Geoff Walker from improv-noise-rock gods Gravitar, Dave from Hymns Of Despondent Solitude, and Jon Kortland from Iron Lung and Pig Heart Transplant all contributing to the unholy squall.
On the B side, the riffage is gone but the sound is just as thick and crushing and dense, opening with "Prelude To Empty" and it's horrific tapestry of metallic scraping, disembodied liquid monstrous vocals and tortured wailing, a soundtrack to Bosch's Garden Of Earthly Delights chopped and screwed to a nauseating 10bpm. The last track "Empty" continues the grinding, scraping hellscape, another black hole without beginning or end filled with sub-sonic low-end distortion, the gurgling screams of the eternally damned, all drowning in a sea of scalding black tar, stretching out into infinity as a massive acidic drone.
The record comes in a great looking silkscreened sleeve with suitably distressing artwork and a glossy double-sided insert. And again, it's out of print, so this is your last chance to pick up this amazing slab of ultraheavy black noise.
Grim times give birth to grim tunes, and BSBC have vomited up another awesome slab of blackened industrial disease from their collective stygian maw that sounds like the condensed dread that starts gnawing away at my guts every time that I make the mistake of flipping on CNN. Blue Sabbath Black Cheer have turned into one of the most popular bands in the black/drone/noise/sludge pit, with each new slab of wax going out of print almost immediately, and this latest untitled LP is no different; serving up two sidelong jams of terrifying blackened aural goo, this crusher is already out of print from the label, and we won't be getting any more of this once we sell out.
Each side is a single massive track, originally released as super-limited cassettes and remastered for this LP, with new material contributed to the mix from Matt Waldron of Irr.App.(Ext.) and Chris Dodge from Spazz/East West Blast Test/Ancient Chinese Secret. The A-side is from the split cassette with Hymns Of Despondent Solitude that came out on Gnarled Forest, and it opens with slurred beast growls that sound like a monstrous being growling out of a tape player on dying batteries, oozing through a dank pit of malevolent sound filled with deep subterranean rumblings, high end squeal and metallic scraping, machine pulses and throbbing low-end tones . A constant churning mass of monstrous sound infested with all kinds of abstract noise, and it slowly builds into a delirium of roaring industrial noise, avalanches of distortion and junk metal, and swirling syrupy tarpit miasma. Corrosive and crushing, a blackened roiling sea of suffocating industrial dread made up of layers upon layers of demonic filth and crushing abstract drone.
Taken from the split tape with Vestigial Limb, the other side starts off with a thunderous crash that fades away into distant, low rumblings, like deafening, earth-shaking thunderclaps spread out every minute or so and heard from the bottom of a deep chasm, gradually joined by other sounds like the leaden scrape of chains being dragged, looping whirrs of electronic pulse, and distant low-end thrum. The atmosphere is heavier, murkier, a black ocean of broken earth crust and magma rising up in smoking chunks and waves, with a looping almost-rhythmic throb churning underneath the suffocating layers of distortion, grinding un-riffage and horrific vocals. Then suddenly it's all consumed in a blasting hellstorm of churning rhythmic white noise and metallic creaking, a massive throbbing wall of distortion and sampled noises which begins to sound like the marching of a million boots, rhythmic and pounding and roaring, becoming more and more distorted and blown out, a Merzbowian furnace of low-end noise destruction that obscures a world of inhuman howling and fragments of melody that turns into a kind of super-heavy powerdrone.
Utterly terrifying and hellish, BSBC's doomy ambient noise is a blackened, abstract industrial sludge that sits between the crushing noise of bands like The Rita and Sewer Election and the filthiest, most diseased end of blackened plague-doom like Alkerdeel, T.O.M.B., Gnaw Their Tongues, and Wilt. The record is packaged in a white jacket with a black and white image by Dominick Black affixed to the front, with black and white inserts and pressed on white vinyl with plain white labels, limited edition of 300 copies.
There are few bands skulking around today that can match the formless horror and hellish Boschian visions of Abruptum, and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer is at the top of the list, each of their releases a fresh new blast of fetid corpsebreath and oily dread rushing out of the mouth of hell, a series of hallucinatory soundscapes that drag across bloodsoaked factory floors and down into murky, dank basement crawlspaces, pitch-black and utterly malevolent in tone. Each new record that we've been getting from the demonic duo of Stan Reed and Wm Rage has flown out of here fast, and since this LP was released in the usual ridiculously limited edition and is already long sold out through their label, I expect the same will go down with The Endless Blockade. It's a three song 12" that reissues three tracks that had originally appeared on older cassette releases on the band's Gnarled Forest imprint, with two of the songs appearing on the A side; ""The Sense Of Violence" starts things off with the sort of blackened, abrasive industrial ooze that we've come to expect from BSBC,
stretching out across a blighted landscape of crashing, clanging metal percussion and scrapyard clatter echoing over a deep, rumbling factory throb and grinding machine ambience, the sound of hulking machinery slowed down into a syrupy mass of clanking evil, buzzing sludgemetal riffs pulled apart into thick smears of black murk, hideous demonic growls and monstrous roaring floating up from the stinking Stygian pit, everything melted into a muddy, murky wash of hellish black industrial crush. The sound becomes even heavier with "Funeral Rehearsal" as a monstrous bestial roar is stretched into a massive deformed drone that plows through a morass of additional death metal roars, rhythmic stabs of grinding low-end riffage, andchunky klaxon-blasts of corrosive distortion that seem to disintegrate slowly as the track mutates into nightmarish white noise.
The second side has the track "The Endless Blockade", a nod to both Japanese punk terrorists G.I.S.M. and UK industrialists The New Blockaders, and compared to the first side, this shit is almost meditative. The BSBC duo is joined by Geoff Walker of Gravitar and John Lukeman of Drowner on this piece, which starts off some what subdued with a buried roar scraped metal and rhythmic machine grinding, then progresses into terror as blasted atonal melodies surface and fall apart, horrific demon gruntings and muttering surges up out of the pounding factory din, the feedback and metallic throb builds into a thick wall of grinding hellish heaviosity laced with strafing blasts of high-end skree and treacly distortion, quickly becoming louder and heavier and more overwhelmed by the cacophony of noise, a hundred damned voices suddenly appearing and screaming at the heavens as they are swamped by wave after wave of brutal white noise and caustic ultra-drone. Skull-frying and hellish blackened doomnoise of the heaviest order. We have this record available in extremely limited quantities on both black vinyl (total 400 pressed) and purplish-red vinyl (only 100 pressed), and the record comes in a white jacket with a tip-on style cover with grim black and white woodcut artwork, and a printed insert and a postcard inside.
There are few bands skulking around today that can match the formless horror and hellish Boschian visions of Abruptum, and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer is at the top of the list, each of their releases a fresh new blast of fetid corpsebreath and oily dread rushing out of the mouth of hell, a series of hallucinatory soundscapes that drag across bloodsoaked factory floors and down into murky, dank basement crawlspaces, pitch-black and utterly malevolent in tone. Each new record that we've been getting from the demonic duo of Stan Reed and Wm Rage has flown out of here fast, and since this LP was released in the usual ridiculously limited edition and is already long sold out through their label, I expect the same will go down with The Endless Blockade. It's a three song 12" that reissues three tracks that had originally appeared on older cassette releases on the band's Gnarled Forest imprint, with two of the songs appearing on the A side; ""The Sense Of Violence" starts things off with the sort of blackened, abrasive industrial ooze that we've come to expect from BSBC,
stretching out across a blighted landscape of crashing, clanging metal percussion and scrapyard clatter echoing over a deep, rumbling factory throb and grinding machine ambience, the sound of hulking machinery slowed down into a syrupy mass of clanking evil, buzzing sludgemetal riffs pulled apart into thick smears of black murk, hideous demonic growls and monstrous roaring floating up from the stinking Stygian pit, everything melted into a muddy, murky wash of hellish black industrial crush. The sound becomes even heavier with "Funeral Rehearsal" as a monstrous bestial roar is stretched into a massive deformed drone that plows through a morass of additional death metal roars, rhythmic stabs of grinding low-end riffage, andchunky klaxon-blasts of corrosive distortion that seem to disintegrate slowly as the track mutates into nightmarish white noise.
The second side has the track "The Endless Blockade", a nod to both Japanese punk terrorists G.I.S.M. and UK industrialists The New Blockaders, and compared to the first side, this shit is almost meditative. The BSBC duo is joined by Geoff Walker of Gravitar and John Lukeman of Drowner on this piece, which starts off some what subdued with a buried roar scraped metal and rhythmic machine grinding, then progresses into terror as blasted atonal melodies surface and fall apart, horrific demon gruntings and muttering surges up out of the pounding factory din, the feedback and metallic throb builds into a thick wall of grinding hellish heaviosity laced with strafing blasts of high-end skree and treacly distortion, quickly becoming louder and heavier and more overwhelmed by the cacophony of noise, a hundred damned voices suddenly appearing and screaming at the heavens as they are swamped by wave after wave of brutal white noise and caustic ultra-drone. Skull-frying and hellish blackened doomnoise of the heaviest order. We have this record available in extremely limited quantities on both black vinyl (total 400 pressed) and purplish-red vinyl (only 100 pressed), and the record comes in a white jacket with a tip-on style cover with grim black and white woodcut artwork, and a printed insert and a postcard inside.
This latest vinyl-only release from the blackdoom industrial noise behemoth Blue Sabbath Black Cheer is actually a collection of rare out-of-print live
material taken from one of the band's early tape releases and an obscure compilation, with one new previously unreleased track included for good measure. As
per the usual with these guys, it's a limited edition release, but the packaging is one of the best that they've come up with, with some really strange
imagery and a cool print job that makes this one of their coolest looking records.
The two a-side tracks are both from the Dead cassette that came out on Scumbag Tapes, and it's Blue Sabbath Black Cheer at their heaviest. The
first one, "Borre Fen", sounds like a more spacious Gnaw Their Tongues piece; it starts off with huge waves of deep black ambience washing up over piles of
industrial clang and stabs of symphonic strings, and then pull back to reveal monstrous growling vocals and harsh grating metal sounds creeping out of the
abyss. As the track continues, murky machine noises and dense whirring ribbons of dubbed-out bass and scraping scrapmetal swirl together into a nightmare
soundscape of crushing black industrial ambience with howling anguished vocals and bestial pitch-shifted death metal roars that sound like they are wafting
up from hell itself, and eventually the band lurches into a crescendo of crumbling blacknoise and pounding oildrum percussion. It's one of the most horrific
things I've ever heard from these guys. The next track "Black Acid" is equally heavy, beginning with a guitar grinding out thick buzzing powerchords against
a churning backdrop of static air-raid sirens and crackling black electricity. Within moments, the droning sludgeguitar and harsh noise are whipped into a
frenzy, turning into a cacophonous mass of super-heavy distorted chaos, almost bordering on power electronics. Howling feedback drones pierce the filth, and
slurred, inhuman vocals roar furiously through the torrent of noise, almost drowning out the screams of total abject suffering that echo in the background.
Imagine a more droning, ambient Stalaggh with huge black pustules of mega-distorted Total-like guitar skree and drone erupting everywhere, while damned souls
are stripped of their flesh somewhere out of sight.
The first of the tracks on the flipside comes from the Feral Debris Vol II compilation from 2007, and is more along the lines of the more recent
Blue Sabbath stuff - a thick, murky slab of inpenetrable black drone infested with malfunctioning tape noises, gurgling gutteral vocals, writhing clusters of
electrical buzz, the sound spread out and omninous, not so much crushing but still immensely heavy and threatening, especially when terrified screams and
gasping agonized howls start to appear alongside those hideously distorted demon-roars, which become so massive and engulfing that it feels like the earth
itself is tearing apart and turning into a great black all-devouring chasm. The untitled track that follows is a previously unreleased piece, droning
feedback hum and crumbling distorted loops and shafts of squealing high-end skree, blackened dronenoise roar slithering out of the pit, drowning in piles of
industrial clang and stinking once-human offal and crushing distorted sludge...and then this roar of sound drops out for a couple of minutes, leaving behind
smears of bassy amp hum and hellish puking snarls and delicate feedback filigree that hover in the air, slowly building in intensity back into a wall of
blazing hellish noizeblast, equal parts Abruptum and The Rita, the screams of the torn-apart swimming in an ocean of caustic sound, finally turning into a
powerful roaring distorto-drone at the end, before fading into the blackness.
Yeah, this is definitely one of the heaviest Blue Sabbath releases. Even though the material comes from a couple of different sources, it comes together
perfectly as a single nightmare vision on the record, and since most of us never had a chance of grabbing the original tapes/cdrs when they came out, this is
pretty much new music. The record is gorgeously packaged in a black jacket with spot varnish printing and creepy cover artwork of a decaying elk head wrapped
in twine and hanging in midair, and it includes an 11" by 11" cardstock insert. Limited edition of five hundred.
After a stack of vinyl and cassette releases, the Washington-based black industrial demons in Blue Sabbath Black Cheer finally released a full-length collection of their music on Cd, most of it previously released but now hard to find material, with a handful of unreleased tracks that are exclusive to this disc. And it's brutal stuff, a variety of 7", 12" and cassette tracks that's some of their heaviest recorded material. By now, BSBC have established themselves as one of the cruelest industrial noise duos out there, infusing their grinding abstract noisescapes with a blackened metallic heaviness that makes their music much heavier and nastier than most "noise" outfits. It's vile black industrial sludge, crushing droning low end that churns beneath chaotic masses of harsh distortion, squirming electronic detritus, bestial roaring vocals, and monolithic metallic buzz, a strange hybrid of Throbbing Gristle and Sunn, UK power electronics and black ambience, all sculpted into their own bludgeoning visage that can shift from solemn sepulchral drift or throbbing industrial crawl into skull-crushing maelstroms of pure black noize holocaust.
The featured tracks explore all known aspects of their hellish factory din. The first track comes off of the Eva 7" that came out on Daisy Cutter, a grinding lumbering cacophony of crashing metal recorded live, churning low end violence and ultra distorted death metal vokills, pounding mechanical percussion deep beneath an inferno of black distortion, piercing streams of feedback and roiling harsh noise, with some gnarled horns from Geoff Walker from improv-noise-rock behemoths Gravitar. The next track is shorter and more minimal, a murky drumbeat looped over and over, surrounded by gurgling demonic voices, syrupy horns, washes of chthonic drone and pitch-shifted orchestral strings, strange mysterious gurgles and chittering hidden in the deep, inky shadows of their Lustmordian necro ambience. Peals of blackened riffage float through smoldering electronics, distant crashing/slamming metal, and demonic roars of "Genocide" (originally off of their split with Pig Heart Transplant), as extreme high pitched feedback tones and anguished screams lash against the pound and creep, like Wolf Eyes gone blacknoise. "Maggot" (from the It's Battery Acid, You Slime compilation) is a squirming, seething mass of synthesizer filth and clanking metal, guttural growls and gnashing jaws prowling through the dank junknoise dungeon, while the following untitled track is a shimmering nocturnal driftscape of stretched out chthonic drone and soft circular scraping, using source material provided by noise legends New Blockaders to craft a bleak minimal ambience a la Organum, laced with ominous minor key shadows and weighted with deep layers of subterranean rumblings and low-end, slow-motion metal abuse, becoming more malevolent and noisy and abrasive. The last track (from the excellent Lp that came out on Troniks) is the harshest of them all, an agonizing mass of high end frequencies and metallic screech, like strings pitched extraordinarily high and set against distant grinding percussive noises and dragged metal and low-end whir.
The disc's centerpiece is the massive seventeen-minute "Borre Fen / Untitled", which combines the track from the Borre Fen Lp on What We Do Is Secret with a collaboration with Anakrid that originally came out on the Mutually Assured Destruction Vol. 1 Lp. This is Blue Sabbath in full-on, pants-shitting terror mode. At first, it's another awesome slab of blighted dronemusic, oceanic waves of black drift and distant creaking noises slowly whirling through the void, slowly unfolding into a vast black stygian landscape. Pretty soon, though, the sound descends into total nightmare, as guttural inhuman shrieks and monstrous sighs begin to rise out of fields of formless rumble and a steadily growing cacophony of metallic creaks and scrapes, swells of processed vocalizations become stretched into demonic smears of pain and horror. A percussive clanking builds in strength, becoming a pounding locomotive grind, as more and more gasping death groans and screams appear, the sound becoming extremely chaotic, vicious bestial vocals processed into nightmarish slavering violence, then collapsing into minimal stretches of gong-like reverberations and mysterious metallic timbres at the end. It's an intense and terrifying soundtrack to the torments of Hell if I've ever heard one.
Crucial listening for fans of blackened industrial evil. If stuff like Stalaggh, MZ412, Nordvargr, Megaptera, Stratvm Terror, early Robedoor, Abruptum, Melek-Tha, Diagnose: Lebensgefahr, and Velehentor infects your speakers on a regular basis, you've got to get on top of this excellent collection. Presented in a Stumptown style gatefold jacket with black on black printing, and limited to 500 copies.
Autophobia is one of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer's recent cassette offerings, but be warned - this has been sold out from the band and label for a while and the handful of copies that I was able to get for the C-Blast shop are the last ones that I'll have. Fans of this prolific black industrial sludge group will want to get their talons on this tape immediately, it's one of the more punishing and abstract recordings that they've produced in the past year and fills up your skull-holes like a mass of malevolent, amoebic black horror. Autophobia is a single long piece that is split across the two sides of the cassette, a nearly twenty minute black industrial dirge that starts with a steady, massive rhythmic blasting of extremely distorted noise that sort of resemble the sound of mortar explosions occurring off in the distance, and other layers of droning sound gradually form around the crashing waves of lumbering, saurian heaviness. Slowly drifting clouds of amplifier rumble and reverb appear around the grinding noise, and as it goes on, you can hear these fragments of musical sound that drift in and out off in the background, indistinct shards of melody that threaten to coalesce into something more, but are always consumed back into the churning noise. After awhile, the vocals start to sweep in, monstrous and massively distorted roaring and screaming that rises and falls over the surging oceanic distortion and metallic noise, and it seriously heavy towards the end of the side, almost approaching a wall of noise at times but always centering itself around that crushing glacial chug.
The second half picks up from that point, stripping away much of the distortion at first and slowing the massive tectonic grinding into a more abstract dronescape of reverberating sheet-metal and smoldering, crackling static. As the latter half of the piece continues to develop, though, it ends up growing into similar levels of immense volume and power, becoming a slow-motion maelstrom of metallic roar and scrap-metal crush, those chunks and fragments of orchestral sound again seeping through into the monolithic black ocean of distortion alongside those demonic vocalizations.
Limited to one hundred copies.
Whoa...it's not as if I was expecting the latest LP from the Seattle industrial/doom/noise heathens Blue Sabbath to be easy listening, their sound has always been noisy and grim and caustic, equal parts industrial creep and blackened doom abstraction, but this is noisy on a whle new scale. Definitely the noisiest fucking platter that we've ever gotten from the band, and it appears that you can blame it all on the presence of old school noisemakers Nihilist Assault Group, who have teamed up with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer for this ear-rattling collaboration. Nihilist Assault Group has members of industrial legends The New Blockaders, but their sound is way more extreme, and together with BSBC have crafted two sidelong pieces of molten nuclear noise, each side a swirling, raging malestrom of blackened distortion, waves of screaming static and oscillating test-tone frequencies, roaring low-end heaviness and corrosive electronic glitchery. We're talking about a sheer wall of textural crunch and throbbing, swirling, all-devouring black noise, more like The Rita or Vomir than the nightmarish creeping industrial sludge that I'd normally expect to hear from the Blue Sab camp. It really is that deep into HNW territory, and extreme harsh noise fans will LOVE this record. But at the same time, there's some serious layering to this sound, too, with soaring subterranean drones, crushing mangled rhythmic grind, near blacknoise-levels of aggression all swimming deep beneath these raging oceanic waves of hellish low-end drone-noise. An absolutely brutal noise album.
Limited to five hundred copies, and packaged in a fantastic looking black and white jacket with creepy artwork from Dominic Black, and includes a heavy printed insert.
Back in stock.
An insanely heavy collaboration between industrial sludge beasts Pig Heart Transplant and black industrialists Blue Sabbath Black Cheer that turned out to be exactly as rib-crushing as I thought it would be. Right off the bat, the opening track (all of 'em are untitled) pours forth in a slow-motion wave of vomitous low-end crush and deformed doom-laden riffage, rumbling detuned heaviness laced with monstrous pitch-shifted roars and demonic growling that is stretched out into syrupy smears of inhuman hunger. As this first track continues to uncoil it's great, heaving mass across the beginning of this disc, those bestial roars are subsumed into what sound like doom metal riffs that have been slowed down to one-tenth speed and broken apart by damaged recording equipment and malfunctioning guitars, further enshrouded by waves of distant factory din and those massive tectonic reverberations. From there, the music gets slower and uglier and more desolate, moving into massive blasts of percussive power and reverberating metallic rhythms, smears of dub-like delay applied to huge sheet-metal movements, and the hellish creaking and squealing of infernal machinery bent to its task of tearing apart flesh and powdering bone.
What makes this some of the heaviest stuff I've heard from either of these bands is the pulverizing guitar/bass sound that writhes throughout these five long tracks, giving this a much heavier and more metallic weight than usual from either of these outfits. And those guttural ghastly vocals sound like something off of a death metal album, dipped in toxic slime and stretched into even more hideous exhortations. It's all really fucking hideous; there are moments on this disc where the sound suddenly lurches into a shambling forward momentum that's insanely heavy, like the tail end of the second track where the squealing mechanical noisescape suddenly gives wet, messy birth to a lumbering mecha-dirge that almost resembles something off of Streetcleaner being slowed down to quarter speed and drenched in an ocean of dubby effects and hissing noise. Or the mangled noise-doom that kicks off the fourth track with its slow, massive drumming and swirling maelstrom of crackling static noise over a bone-rattling bass riff. The other tracks move between that sort of punishing industrial mega-dirge and more atmospheric scrapescapes, entering into crushing rhythmic loops overlaid with those demonic howls, and more subdued stretches of minimal hum and whirr. The last track in particular shows the two groups working together to craft a climactic apocalyptic scene, where the sound of sprawling industrial complexes emerges, vomiting vile chemicals onto the earth and pitch-black clouds of foul smog, dissolving into sparse fields of controlled static, deep subterranean rumblings and clanking metallic rhythm, suddenly transforming the sound into a kind of nightmarish slow-motion power electronics assault. Altogether one of the most intense albums that I've heard from either Pig Heart Transplant or Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and about as heavy and horrific as this sort of blackened industrial sludge can get.
Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies.
This split originally came out as an extremely limited cassette on the label What We Do Is Secret in a run of just 50 copies; Gnarled Forest have resurrected it onto vinyl for the rest of us shlubs who missed out on the tape, pressing up 300 copies of this record on black vinyl and packaging it in a 10" sleeve with minimal silkscreened black and white artwork and a thick cardstock insert that's covered with rad-looking skulls. Can never get enough skulls, you know? This is a great teamup between one of my favorite avant-industrial-blacksludge duos, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and their buddies in Dried Up Corpse, who dredge up their own brand of blackened noise-soaked dirge...
Blue Sabbath starts this off with an untitled side-long track, and it's one of the most laid back recordings that I've heard from the band. As laid back as Blue Sabbath gets of course, and it's still an evil, feedback-laden, demonic freenoise abomination like the rest of their catalog, only here the band dials back on the grating noise and the pummeling fucked-up rhythmic elements, instead taking their blackened drones and moaning vocal horror and murky ambience and smearing it all into a more muted and ambient take on their sound, spreading it out into an expansive cavernous droneworld filled with far-off foghorn like blasts, snatches of eerie buried melody, the monstrous vocals stretched and smeared into indistinct rumblings, deep subterranean thrum vibrating up out of the depths, everything swaddled in a haze of electronic filth and droning feedback. These sounds are melted together into a hallucinatory demonic drift that never gets all of that aggressive until the very end when the deep, gutteral death metal like vocals start to creep out the cracks, and it's one of the band's most desolate, isolationist recordings yet.
On the other hand, Dried Up Corpse goes for total deathdrone approach, unleashing a nasty slab of blown out locust-swarm and churning corrosive drone. The track begins with a series of deep, rumbling pulsations that then erupt into an almost wall-noise attack of low-end white noise, fucked-up digital scrape, roaring forward like a black tide of toxic slime obliterating everything in it's path, until it dissipates into a subdued passage of chirping nocturnal insect-like noises and subterannean rumblings. Kinda like Bastard Noise being wiped out by The Rita, or something like that. Bottom line, it's a pretty cool dose of noxious deathdrone.
Only 300 copies, packaged in a thick silkscreened jacket with two-sided insert.
Compared to the last couple of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer records that have come in through our door, this one sounds almost serene, at least for the first half where BSBC delve into some of the most atmospheric blackened dronescapes that I've heard from them. Still evil sounding stuff, though, and their cohorts in Griefer follow up with a side of relentless brutal power electronics that still sets the kill-level pretty high.
Up first is the sidelong epic "We Hate You" from Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, beginning as a monstrous, earth-shaking ur-drone, a massive glacial slow-motion churn of underground rumbles and deep horn-like blasts that are stretched out into infinite roaring drones buried beneath layers of glitch and crackle. Throughout the first few minutes, huge earthquake-like rumblings continuously surface, the sound formed into a massive muted tectonic roar, like an incredibly deep, low-frequency slab of wall-noise. As it goes on, though, more sinister sounds emerge from the muck; bestial time-stretched screams and hellish moans that are extended into endless smears of vokill horror, and off in the distance, strange clanking noises and crashing sounds, a gradual rhythmic pounding that sounds like someone bashing out an irregular beat on an empty cargo container. Everything becomes buried under thick waves of static and blown-out bass throb, a hypnotic slab of blackened industrial noise, but with the second half, the slurred, demonic screams and guttural distorted vocals finally appear, howling above the grinding, rumbling black drift, becoming a sort of blackened, infernal power electronics, slowly rumbling and crawling towards the end as the sound break down into a mass of backwards riffage, black buzzing drones and arctic drift.
They share the record with Griefer from up north, who combine vicious power electronics with a sprawling apocalyptic ambience; fucking great stuff on their side. The side starts off with a massive distorted synth drone that evolves into a looped string-like high end scrape that gets pretty unnerving, then shifts into sheets of swarming fuzz and glitch that flow over super distorted and over modulated vocals. Early on, "Criminal Aggregators" sounds like this hellish alien power electronics assault, but then it becomes something more as simple hammered oil-drum rhythms materialize, joined with additional high electronic whine and buzzing, turning into a thick, oppressive soundscape. Then with "SMS Ransomware", the clanging metal percussion disappears and is replaced with an almost martial industrial rhythm and ascending sine wave drones that sound like air raid sirens, more super-distorted vocals again gnashing their way through the abstract electronic sounds. "Dancho Danchev" is another baleful power electronics assault, the vocals less distorted and more intelligible over the ominous rumbling drones and pounding metallic percussive rhythm, and the side ends with the awesome skulking evil PE of "SS8 Interceptor", layered drill-like tones screaming and whining within a vortex of pulsating black energy, with the distorted vocals locked in a fearsome cadence overhead. Reminds me of Streicher , Barzel, Fire In The Head, Slogun, that sort of crushing, malevolent power electronics, but with a horrific, futuristic ambience added that makes this as atmospheric as it is aggressive.
The record comes on nauseous-looking green and brown colored vinyl and is packaged in silk-screened jackets with two printed cardstock inserts, limited to 200 copies.
Back in stock!
And yet another recently-issued slab of vinyl from Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, who are achieving a feverish level of productivity this year. No complaints on my end, I can't get enough of their gruesome, crushing industrial blackness. The limited edition (of course) Lp Bleak Village / Mob Rules has Blue Sabbath Black Cheer hooking up with a band called Penetration Camp for the second time (the first being a cassette that both bands appeared on in 2008),
and each band delivers a whole side of nightmarish subterranean crush, each side mastered at a different speed. Starting with the Blue Sabbath side, we get two lengthy tracks, "Paranoid" (another Black Sabbath reference that I'm noticing here) and "Elektrisches Begr�bnis", together making up some of the band's least abrasive and most droneological material so far. The sound starts off as a massive black wave of deep resonant whir and looping mechanical grind buried under heavy layers of dark rumbling ambience, metallic pound and scrape blurred into a gleaming glacial wash of industrial drift, the sound of hell's machinery heard through a thick 'tussin haze. Later though, things get more sinister as the thick metallic ambience falls away and is replaced by looped tribal rhythms, rivers of thick corrosive feedback and high-end amp grit, the soundscape gradually becoming more abrasive and caustic as monstrous screams and fx-deformed vocals emerge from the muck, the track finally collapsing in a chaotic tangle of broken metal and demonic electronic vomit.
Penetration Camp's side switches over to 45 rpm for a single lengthy track called "Mob Rules"; what connection this might have to the Sab classic, I don't know, but Penetration Camp effectively compliment Blue Sabbath's infernal ambience with an equivalent blast of scorched industrial murk. It's a grim slab of messed-up voice loops and menacing blackened drones scattered across garbled radio frequencies and the distant clang of scrap metal, the black metal-esque vocals deformed by various effects and drizzled over the sputtering grind of broken machinery, loud eruptions of piano-like reverberations, and dank clouds of sewer ambience, the sound shadowy and subdued at first, but growing ever more chaotic and violent as the side continues, until this evolves into a noxious pile-up of black industrial crunch, harsh noise and snarling, agonized vocals that's somewhere in between Wolf Eyes and MZ.412.
Limited to 313 copies, black vinyl, and packaged in a black jacket with silkscreened/pasted-on artwork and two printed inserts.
��This pulverizing split between blackened industrialists Blue Sabbath Black Cheer and synth mutants Masturbatory Dysfunction is pretty weird, bringing together a full album of punishing industrial deathdrone and apocalyptic sludge-noise with a bizarre theme that involves half-naked women wearing brown bags - not too sure what that's about, but it certainly makes for a memorable experience as you take all of this rumbling, wretched industrial filth in.
�� Blue Sabbath's side features just one monolithic track titled "DEATH", an epic sprawling nightmare of detuned guitar sludge and howling feedback, waves of crushing distorted drone and rumbling amplifier noise that quickly whip themselves into a raging maelstrom of blackened sound. It's signature BSBC, an amorphous mass of doom-laden industrial dirge, like some crazed combination of Skullflower at their absolute heaviest and Sunn at their absolute noisiest, the track polluted with gusts of irradiated electronics and the ever-present shriek of tortured feedback, guitar strings tuned so low that they flop off of the instrument. The band dredges up clots of black bone-rattling noise and bulldozing bass-drone, slowly forming into a sickeningly heavy machinelike rhythm as the track continues to gruesomely unfold, coalescing into a pulverizing quasi-riff that undulates and rumbles uncontrollably over a thunderous din of random oil-drum percussion, harsh distorted screaming vocals surging to the surface in a vomitous roar of primordial hatred, the whole thing pitch-black and deformed, eventually decomposing into an expanse of abstract whirr and echo at the end.
�� Masturbatory Dysfunction follow that up with four tracks of their own cruel industrial damage, unleashing waves of mesmeric distorted synth-drone and crackling black static across the beginning of "Hole One" that loop around into a hypnotic pulse-like rhythm. From there, the side expands into fields of smoldering electronic throb and buzzing synthesizer noise, slowly shifting terrain that blooms into huge roaring drones and charred low-end sound, like some Genocide Organ-esque death industrial assault being played back at half-speed. The sound is thick with rumbling bass frequencies, and even strangely luxuriant layered synths built into walls of bleak, monochrome crush. It's just as heavy as the Blue Sabbath side, amazingly enough, and it's easily the heaviest stuff I've ever heard from this project. A monstrous strain of slow-motion death industrial power stretched out into a vast oceanic mass of slowly churning blackness and warped, fractured melody that starts to take on aspects of the heaviest forms of wall-noise, slowly transforming into a vast black hive-swarm of electronic chaos that blots out all light, without abandoning it's titanic gravitational pull, even achieving a Sunn-like level of molten heaviosity on the last track "Wet Paper Bag". Great stuff.
�� And oh yeah, the thing with the bags. Along with a set of printed inserts, the LP also comes with a large glossy zine called Brown Bag Rag that can only be described as bizarre. This "first issue" of the Rag features twenty-four black and white pages of sexually explicit writings and artwork, all of which are primarily centered around an obsession with women wearing brown paper bags on their heads. It's depraved and disturbing and fairly hilarious, with some seriously fucked-up imagery you won't soon forget. And it comes, of course, in a brown paper bag. Limited to two hundred copies.
Blue Sabbath Black Fiji? That's got to have something to do with Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, right? That's what I thought each time I spotted one of the few reviews for this UK duo, who I previously assumed was some sort of spinoff of the Seattle-based black-industrial duo. But in fact, Blue Sabbath Black Fiji is totally unrelated to their PDX namesake, their name some kind of weird inside joke nobody seems to have an inside track on. Their music, though heavy and noisy, is definitely nothing like BSBC, either, making things even more confusing. This is the first release that I've heard from them, a split with the US drone/dirge duo Ailvsgam and it's a very cool (if a bit short) cassette that in spite of the name weirdness, has me wanting to hear more from 'em pronto.
The Blue Sabbath Black Fiji side opens with the shuddering percussive jam "Everyday Is Brainday" before moving onto the next four tracks, each one a short, shapeless mass of percussive rattling, fragments of tribal drumming, hypnotic looping sound, trippy electronic noises and chunks of distorted guitar looped around each other into loud, crushing circular forms that sound like some weird blown-out dance music, like one of the old Manchester dance rock bands fed through a mangler, noisy and fractured and seriously distorted, but weirdly groovy and really, really catchy. There's also noisy Hanatarash-like freakouts, massively heavy and distorted blissed-out drones, kinda like Growing but way, way heavier, and mangled collages of guitar splooge and pop songs. It's all over the place, a kind of freaked-out, surreal noise rock, and I'm really looking forward to hearing more from these cats.
The other side features a single track from Ajilvsga, "Tales Of Ready-To-Give". This is the first release that I've picked up from this project, but I'll definitely be tracking down more, as this is great stuff. This new project is a duo that features Brad Rose from Digitalis as one of its members, but Ajilvsga is far from the sort of noisy drone and far-out freak folk that his label is known for. This is seriously heavy, plunging deep into a dark sonic realm of massive grinding feedback/amp atmosphere and rumbling guitar distortion, and very much in the same territory as newer Skullflower, Barn Owl, Half Makeshift, Vulture Club, Robedoor, Sunn, that sort of lumbering subsonic drift, a dark, dirgey undertow, with lonesome, melancholy electric guitar being played over top. The guitar melody sounds almost Western, bleak and windswept, but it's almost entirely subsumed by the heavy rumbling drone as it struggles to stay adrift throughout the entire track, the snatches of meandering, sun-baked acid guitar floating just above the surface of an immensely thick, roaring ocean of buzz and grind and crumbling distortion, while huge doomed chords and the raspy hitch of a phonograph needle stuck in an endgroove emerge from the murk.
There's only 85 copies of this tape, packaged in handstamped covers with metallic silver and black ink on a blue cover.
Another cult installment in the ever-surprising Paradigms series of limited-edition sonic obscurities. This time we are graced with a bizarre fusion of King
Crimson-ish dynamics and eccentric early 70's English prog with the stumbling avant-black metal of Fleurety and Ved Beuns Ende, courtesy of Finnish cosmic
mutants Blueprint Human Being. Actually, repeated listens remind us greatly of our very own THE MASS, as Blueprint Human Being tap into a similiar current of
vertical SLINT-like rhythms and metallic guitars fronted by some smoking horns. Very quirky, pretty heavy, and very hypnotic, especially when they close
this out with a lengthy jam of looped bits of previous songs stitched together with miasmic distortion and alien feedback blasted with skull frying
production tricks, a thick, hazy stew of psychedelic kraut/hypno rock from deep space beamed into your lobe. Excellent. As always with Paradigms, this disc
comes in a color wallet sleeve presented inside of a sealed brown envelope with hand-stamped artwork, strictly limited to 750 copies.
Picked this up on a whim from Escape Artist because I saw the words "90's" and "noise rock" and there are few better ways to grab my attention, but boy did
this disc far exceed my expectations. Now, I always considered myself a bit of a connoisseur of all things "noise rock", especially the really noisy
stuff that always tended to fall under the radar of the indie community. But up until I picked this up, I had never heard of Blunderbuss. Turns out that the
band has been around since the early 1990's, and started out playing thrashy hardcore before they evolved into a heavy, melodic rock outfit that ended up
releasing an album called Conspiracy on Homestead (which is now at the top of my to-get list...). Blunderbuss differed from many of the other bands
in the noisy indie scene with their ringing walls of guitar that was closer to Band Of Susans/Rhys Chatham and epic song lengths. The band seemed to drift
off into obscurity after the release of their debut, but lo and behold, we've got a new eponymous album in 2007 from the band on Escape Artist with the
entire lineup of Bill Baxter, James Nemeph and Ben Matthews intact, plus the addition of Jeff Ellsworth (Don Caballero/Creta Bourzia), and damn if this isn't
yet another amazing noise rock masterpiece that has me both looking back to my youth and forward to a feedback-drenched future. I can't beleive that
these guys weren't huge, their brand of chiming, hypnotic rock is so catchy and anthemic it's almost hard to take, as it moves from those awesome
Band Of Susans style blocks of drone riff to heartwrenching melody, driving, atonal rock similiar to Sonic Youth at times, and crushing distorted heaviness.
There's a perfect balance between the band's more ethereal noise pop and heavy, upbeat dirge riffage, and they work in lots of rolling tribal rhythms and
spacey electronic FX that keep this far from falling into tedium. This is so ridiculously catchy and heavy, and genuinely sounds like it came out of the peak
of the US noise/dirge rock underground, like a lost album from that time only now being discovered and dusted off, but sounding totally modern at the same
time. Highly highly recommended !!!!!!!
The second in a series of reissues of early Blut Aus Nord albums presented by Candlelight Records, Memoria Vetusta is the French black metal band's
second album from 1996, and as I sit here and listen to this, I'm thinking that it's probably my favorite out of all of the Blut Aus Nord albums. Don't get
me wrong, everything that this band has released is amazing, no two albums of theirs are the same, and all are absolutely essential listening for
fans of adventurous black metal and heavy, abstracted weirdness. But Memoria has got to have their catchiest songs ever, and I just can't stop
listening to this album. This new edition is presented with new album artwork that consists of a series of green-tinted mountainscapes, which continues the
visual theme from the reissue of the band's first album Ultima Thulee which was released simultaneously with this. Musically, this is Blut Aus Nord
before they mutated into the interdimensional black art of their 00's output; on Memoria, the band unleash epic, ghoulish black metal blasts with
heavy, emotive synthesizers that lend a classic prog rock/80's soundtrack vibe to the blackened buzzsaw assault. It's all as atmospheric and haunting as
their debut, and the melodic hooks here are stunning, they'll stick in yer head for days. Some of the spacey guitar lines here even have a shoegazey shimmer
to them, and all of the riffage is really inventive and powerful. An awesome combination of grandiose frostbitten black metal a la Emperor and woozy, surreal
celestial beauty. And yeah, you can hear the band starting to mutate, the drum machines start to stumble here and there, breaking off into Godfleshy
dirges and weird mathy rhythms that take you by surprise, and the guitars occasional take on that melted, flowing in-and-out-of-tune sheen that Blut Aus Nord
would take to extreme levels with their later albums. Lots of clean Viking singing and heavenly chorales soar across the album too. Brilliant, psychedelic
black metal, one of the best France has to offer. Highly recommended.
The latest album from French black metal abstractionists Blut Aus Nord can't even really be called "black metal" at this point - their last album, the
critically acclaimed The Work Which Transforms God, had already mutated their heavily ambient, icy blackness into a kind of seasick, doomy metal
whose guitars slipped in and out of Slint-y math figures, chaotic buzzsaw thrash, and wobbly chords that sounded like they were floating in and out of tune,
all surging over a punishing mechanized pulse that felt like the drum machine from Godflesh's Streetcleaner moving in reverse. But with
Mort, Blut Aus Nord have completely slipped into the Forbidden Zone, presenting what is basically a single 47 minute track that is divided into
eight chapters, almost entirely instrumental, and which drags you down into a murky, drug-induced state of horror populated with amorphous riffs that sound
like their being played by Luc Lemay on heavy 'shrooms, winding guitar lines layered over one another and shifting in and out of tune, warbly and surreal
sounding, while the terminally off-time Godfleshy drums pound erratically and dead monk chants and viscous growls drip across the music's pitch-black canvas
of subterranean rumbles and gooey melting circus keyboards. At time, Mort starts to sound like a free jazz band moving through glue and flickering
out of our dimension, constantly being swallowed up in the syrupy murky blackness, and clean, emotionally crushing singing emerges at times out of the muddy
chaos to . Super asbtract and twisted, moving at a slow, lurching, lopsided crawl, sort of like a fucked up combination of Xasthur and newer Wolf Eyes and
Abruptum, sad and surreal, weird and dreamlike, a masterpiece of hallucinatory post-black metal.
Dope double-CD reissue of the mindblowing fourth album from France's Blut Aus Nord, their most critically acclaimed release and the album that has garnered the band attention from far outside of the confines of the underground black metal scene. You can probably chalk that up to the fact that The Work Which Transforms God moves further outside of the parameters of black metal moreso than with any of their previous releases. The album was first released in 2003 in France, and it's sort of a concept album that deals with the band's philosophy of forward-thinking, new perceptions of reality, and constant evolution, although no lyrics are included here and it's all open to interpretation. Now we've got this new version reissued for the US through Candlelight and packaged with a second CD that contains the entire Thematic Emanation Of Archetypal Multiplicity EP. Growing weirder and more abstract with each release, Blut Aus Nord unleash some grim, searing black metal here, think early Emperor or Darkthrone, but at the same time they take that sound and warp it, melt it, mutating their filth-encrusted black metal buzz into a surreal drug trip filled with icy industrial ambience, deep gore gurgling vocals, huge stretches of drifting black dronescapes, passages of dub-like machine psych, and those queasy guitars that warble and lurch like someone is messing with the tuning pegs while they're playing the song. Those seasick guitar chords and guitar lines add alot of the unearthly ambience that makes this album so intense, permeated with an intangible, dreamlike dread. There's all kinds of rhythmic action happening here too, the drum machine sometimes grinding out a mechanized dirge a la Godflesh's Streetcleaner, or layering twisted tribal percussion that moves in and out of the background. The pinnacle of the album is the final song, "Procession Of The Dead Clowns", a lumbering ten minute dirge with spare, glacial drumming and a sorrowful, keening guitar melody, almost like a Jesu song but way more funereal and dismal and grim.
The second disc features the Thematic Emanation Of Archetypal Multiplicity EP, a more recent release from Blut Aus Nord that has five tracks of eerie, doomy dirges, fucked-up industrial clang, dank fields of black drone drifting over sparse drum machine beats, Gregorian-style chants, a weird breakbeat-heavy industrial dance track, and more of their frozen, lysergic ambience.
A crucial peice of French black metal history and an essential part of the puzzle that is Blut Aus Nord, the band's debut album from 1995 Ultima Thulee has been reissued by Candlelight, and it's a must-get for fans of metaphysical, atmospheric blackness. If you've gotten into Blut Aus Nord
relatively recently through their acclaimed albums The Work Which Transforms God or last years Mort, then their first album might surprise
you at first. Back then, Blut Aus Nord was primarily the work of founder/mastermind Vindisval, and the eight songs that make up Ultima Thulee are
murky, thunderous blasts of buzzing low-fi black metal reminiscent of both Burzum and Emperor, filthy buzzsaw guitars and droning eerie keyboards, rolling
double bass drumming and blastbeats, super heavy and ripping and atmospheric, reaching blizzard levels of churning black buzz that also call to mind the
early works of Immortal. But it quickly becomes apparent that even this early in Blut Aus Nord's existence, the band was a heavily progressive, experimental
force. Songs break apart midway to reveal ice-plated glaciers of vintage analog synthesizer-prog ambience straight out of some lost 80's horror movie. The
vocals are strange and abstract much of the time, warped and sounding more like howling winds than a human throat. "My Prayer Beyond Ginnungagap" is totally
devoid of black metal; instead, we are enshrouded in hauntingly beautiful chant-harmonies, a dark hymn drifting out of the night. Equally beautiful
electronic appear ghostlike over droning midtempo riffs. And you can't even tell that Vindisval was using a drum machine here, it sounds so organic and
natural. Fans of 90's black metal will groove on this heavily, and it's obviously an essential addition to the library of any serious follower of French
black metal. Progressive and wildly original psychedelic blackness, with some of the coolest keyboard sounds ever used on a black metal album, presented in
an almost entirely text-less package that simply features a set of photographs that evocatively capture an icy mountain range, a perfect visual accompaniment
to Blut Aus Nord's frozen terrorscapes. Highly recommended.
Now available on limited edition clear vinyl from the French label Debemur Morti, with the same album artwork as the original Cd release on Impure Creations Records.
A crucial peice of French black metal history and an essential part of the puzzle that is Blut Aus Nord, the band's debut album from 1995 Ultima Thulee has been reissued by Candlelight, and it's a must-get for fans of metaphysical, atmospheric blackness. If you've gotten into Blut Aus Nord relatively recently through their acclaimed albums The Work Which Transforms God or last years Mort, then their first album might surprise you at first. Back then, Blut Aus Nord was primarily the work of founder/mastermind Vindisval, and the eight songs that make up Ultima Thulee are
murky, thunderous blasts of buzzing low-fi black metal reminiscent of both Burzum and Emperor, filthy buzzsaw guitars and droning eerie keyboards, rolling double bass drumming and blastbeats, super heavy and ripping and atmospheric, reaching blizzard levels of churning black buzz that also call to mind the early works of Immortal. But it quickly becomes apparent that even this early in Blut Aus Nord's existence, the band was a heavily progressive, experimental force. Songs break apart midway to reveal ice-plated glaciers of vintage analog synthesizer-prog ambience straight out of some lost 80's horror movie. The vocals are strange and abstract much of the time, warped and sounding more like howling winds than a human throat. "My Prayer Beyond Ginnungagap" is totally devoid of black metal; instead, we are enshrouded in hauntingly beautiful chant-harmonies, a dark hymn drifting out of the night. Equally beautiful electronic appear ghostlike over droning midtempo riffs. And you can't even tell that Vindisval was using a drum machine here, it sounds so organic and natural. Fans of 90's black metal will groove on this heavily, and it's obviously an essential addition to the library of any serious follower of French black metal. Progressive and wildly original psychedelic blackness, with some of the coolest keyboard sounds ever used on a black metal album. Highly recommended.
A gorgeous-looking deluxe vinyl reissue of the 1996 album from this French avant-garde black metal cult, the latest edition of Fathers Of The Icy Age: Memoria Vetusta I with stunning new artwork and album design by Metastazis (Dapnom, Morbid Angel, Antaeus, Nachtmystium), foil stamping on the cover, printed inner sleeve, 180 gram vinyl...this album has never looked better. We've got this on the limited grey colored wax...
Here's my original write-up of the Candlelight Cd edition:
The second in a series of reissues of early Blut Aus Nord albums presented by Candlelight Records, Memoria Vetusta is the French black metal band's second album from 1996, and as I sit here and listen to this, I'm thinking that it's probably my favorite out of all of the Blut Aus Nord albums. Don't get me wrong, everything that this band has released is amazing, no two albums of theirs are the same, and all are absolutely essential listening for fans of adventurous black metal and heavy, abstracted weirdness. But Memoria has got to have their catchiest songs ever, and I just can't stop listening to this album. This new edition is presented with new album artwork that consists of a series of green-tinted mountainscapes, which continues the visual theme from the reissue of the band's first album Ultima Thulee which was released simultaneously with this. Musically, this is Blut Aus Nord before they mutated into the interdimensional black art of their 00's output; on Memoria, the band unleash epic, ghoulish black metal blasts with heavy, emotive synthesizers that lend a classic prog rock/80's soundtrack vibe to the blackened buzzsaw assault. It's all as atmospheric and haunting as their debut, and the melodic hooks here are stunning, they'll stick in yer head for days. Some of the spacey guitar lines here even have a shoegazey shimmer to them, and all of the riffage is really inventive and powerful. An awesome combination of grandiose frostbitten black metal a la Emperor and woozy, surreal celestial beauty. And yeah, you can hear the band starting to mutate, the drum machines start to stumble here and there, breaking off into Godfleshy dirges and weird mathy rhythms that take you by surprise, and the guitars occasional take on that melted, flowing in-and-out-of-tune sheen that Blut Aus Nord would take to extreme levels with their later albums. Lots of clean Viking singing and heavenly chorales soar across the album too. Brilliant, psychedelic black metal, one of the best France has to offer. Highly recommended.
Talk about heavy. These three Belgian fellows bust out their third album Materia, and this about the closest that anyone has gotten to
effectively reanimating the quirky crushing mindfuck sludge of early Melvins. Yep, Blutch sounds alot like early Melvins, there's no denying that,
but to me this seems like less of an appropriation of the master's style and more like a pitch-black doppelganger of the Melvins, a sludgier and more
menacing sounding rework of the Melvin's indie sludgerock. It certainly doesn;t hurt that singer Djinn Alaimo succeeds in taking King Buzzo's whispered croon
and creeps it out even further, hissing like some back alley dopefiend crawling through the gutter; it's a harrowing vocal performance that ups the evil
quotient on this disc tenfold. And the riffage is BROOTAL, lurching around with the weird offtime angularity of Ozma and Bullhead (just
check out the beginning of "The Black Caped Man"....holy shit...), but like I said, this is alot heavier, the guitar massively
downtuned to Floor-like levels of bomb-string-flop, the drummer flailing like a spastic trapped in amber, the band getting even slower and more doomed as the
album progresses. As if it couldn't get any creepier and more threatening, they pull these killer stunts like opening "Masamune" with the childlike humming
of a lullaby drifting out of a drainage pipe, and closing out the song "Moving Ground" with some genuinely diseased sounding wheezing whispers that make my
fuckin' skin crawl. Awesome, AWESOME sludge, as heavy and bonecrushing as you could possibly hope for. Blutch wrap up the whole aural mugging with the nearly
10-minute "Confutatis", a rich dronescape of echoing splattery percussion and rumbling feedback blackness, and total horror-movie vocal chorales and monk
chanting rising out of the amplifier muck. Imagine Earth 2 or Sunn O)))'s 00 Void melted over fragments of the original Omen
score. What the fuck. Materia has actually been out for awhile in Europe, having been released as an LP through Delboy Records, but it's
just now emerging here in the States through the ever-crushing At A Loss imprint, the label that also recently released the Bestial album from
Blutch's European tourmates Black Cobra. Devestating! This domestic version of Materia comes in a digipack with weird, high-contrast artwork. Highly
recommended !!
A twenty-minute cassette of brutal wall noise from Iowa-based noise artist Alex Nowacki. Operating under the name Boar, Nowacki erects these relentlessly raging, crushing black avalanches of distortion that rise endlessly into the heavens, titanic walls of impenetrable swarming noise that sucks the listener into a vortex of volcanic chaos. Each of the ten minute tracks that are featured on Teen Cribs is a roaring slab of harsh noise wall that falls on the more muted, washed out end of the spectrum, still quite brutal, but with a heavier focus on the low end frequencies, making for a more droneological listening experience. A deep oceanic rumble, crashing waves of low end and surging bass-heavy dronecrush swirling through the entirety of physical matter, a merciless unchanging roar with a thin layer of crackling hiss lying just beneath the surface. A monolithic, mesmerizing force that engulfs everything around it within a pandemonium of infinite black rain, the infinite roar at the center of a cosmic conflagration. An all-consuming blaze of atramentous fire that wraps it's arms around the Earth. This was our first time hearing this lesser-known outfit, and we're impressed. Highly recommended to devotees of the HNW discipline and the severe aesthetic of likeminded artists like Vomir, Werewolf Jerusalem, The Rita, Dead Body Love. Comes in full color packaging, in a tiny pressing of only twenty-five copies...
��Dead Existence is the first full-length CD from Alex Nowacki and his nihilistic harsh noise outfit Boar. I haven't heard a lot of stuff from this project, but I did have my skull shredded by the psychedelic harsh noise savagery that he delivered on his Teen Cribs tape that came out on Rainbow Bridge a few years ago. Little has changed since then, the project still hyper-focused on drowning the listener in an ocean of black crumbling static and ultra-distorted amplified chaos; it's not rigidly "HNW" in its execution, but those with a taste for overwhelming electronic wall-noise will find much to fill their skull with on this album.
�� Opening with a short track of pulsating rhythmic electronics, Dead Existence quickly settles into a long stretch of monstrous, deafening power, unleashing brutal harsh noise walls on tracks like "The Dried Socket", "Distant Collapse", and "72nd Death"; these early tracks relentlessly blast one right after the other, eruptions of crushing harsh noise and extreme pedal abuse that rush out of the speakers with volcanic force. The album is filled with these maelstroms of churning, bass-heavy black static, infested with nearly non-stop assaults of intense junk-noise screech and some seriously violent editing techniques, striving towards some sort of mind-erasing trance-state through pure chaos. Once the album gets to the fifth track "Angel Skin Decaying", though, Nowacki takes a hard right into a more subdued, spacious sort of electronic deathscape, layering fluttering distorted bass drones and rumbling low end frequencies with peals of hissing pneumatic distortion and eerie feedback, the sprawl of decomposing sound laced with intermittent eruptions of rhythmic noise.
�� A couple of the tracks that follow pursue a similarly subdued sound, from unsettling noisescapes made up of echoing feedback and smoldering lava-flows of bass-heavy distorted rumble like that found on the atmospheric "The Fragrance That Brought You Back" (which eventually explodes into violent, guttural destruction and skull-melting feedback), to the viscous black boiling HNW chaos and glitched-out horror of "Her Toxic", and back to more of that ultra-heavy, garbled distorto-avalanche found on "Memory Lapse/Fuck/Gone". On the final track "Walking Love Corpse", Nowacki again surprises as he unleashes a firestorm of noise that halfway through makes a sudden transformation into a stunning wash of metallic, almost orchestral drone. It adds up to an interesting combination of crushing HNW aesthetics, brutal cut-up electronics and traces of death industrial creep that constantly shift throughout the album. Recommended.
���A maddeningly terse blast of skullshredding noise, You're All Lame Fucks is one of two extremely limited lathe cut records that were recently released by the harsh noise label Breaching Static run by Boar's Alex Nowacki. Boar's Lame Fucks is a snotty, unsubtle blast of confrontational electronic noise that's much more chaotic than the other, more HNW-focused recordings I've stocked from this Midwestern artist. Cut on a clear unlabeled piece of polycarbonate, this features two extremely brief tracks, "There Is No Escape From Yourself" and "Failing, But Who Cares", each one a mere minute long blast of hateful, garbled cut-up noise, filled wildly fluctuating feedback that squeals chaotically across a bed of putrid static, interspersed with weirdly horrific bass-drops and squeaking mechanical noises, bits of juddering anti-rhythmic throb and bursts of monstrous howling skree. Bein' a five inch record and all, this little outrage is over almost before you know it, rolling around in a mess of self-loathing and abject hatred for two minutes and then poof, it's gone...
Here is a seriously deep cut from the weirdo hardcore punk field. The only other release (to my knowledge) from Bobby alongside the British Shootfight cassette, the 1995 Clear The Corner flexi-disc 7" is another feral blast of fucked-up thrashcore from this weird high-concept band. Purporting to be a UK punk band made up of two actual British policemen, Bobby (itself an old slang term for London cops) delivers ridiculously filthy and aggressive songs of extreme over-the-top police brutality from the point of view of these previously benign British cops who has been utterly corrupted by gratuitous abuse of power and deranged violence after a UK/USA "cultural exchange" to Los Angeles. It's pretty hilarious in concept, and the band lyrics and song titles goall the way with the conceit. It's purportedly the concoction of Connecticut underground lifers Malcolm Tent (TPOS label boss, current Antiseen bassist, former member of noise rockers Bunnybrains, Profanatica, and GG Allin & The Bloody Apostles) and Paul Ledney, founder of USBM pioneers Profanatica, death metal legends Incantation, and experimental necro noise beast Havohej, belting out some maniacal blastcore. Both share vocals, while Ledney handles drumming and Tent plays guitar and bass, the result being a total riot of no-fi speed violence. Berserk, noise-damaged, raw as fuck.
I remember the Bobby releases well from the old Fudgeworthy, TPOS, and Ax/ction Records ads in zines like Maximum Rock And Roll back in the early 90s. Never checked them out at the time because I misinterpreted them as purely a "joke band". But despite the darkly humorous concept behind the band, the music is ferocious. Got obsessed with these two releases when I finally dug into 'em a while back, especially after I learned who was actually behind the band. The duo race through four short hardcore blasts on this flexi; the one-sided flexi-disc has two songs that also appeared on the Shootfight tape ("Clear The Corner" and "I Will Kill You With My Club") along with two songs that I think are only found here ("Kill 'em Then Cuff 'em" and "Sh-Boom!!!!!"). All of them kill. The recording is on par with old black metal demos, and the music itself has a heavy underground black/death influence - it's a little like hearing stuff like Void, Siege or Negative Approach jammed through a delirium of primordial death thrash. Simple hardcore-style songwriting, but delivered at sickoid tempos with hoarse, harsh screaming, with weird drum breaks and the occasional spoken word bit that ties back into the band's concept. It's gnarly, atavistic, and ultra-violent. Clear the corner!
This is all that you will get from Body Cop. Even for those of us living in the general DC area, you would have had to been in the know to have been in attendance at one of the few shows that this band played during their brief existence. I remember hearing about them around the time the band had started up, hearing that the band was pure Swans-worship, and try as I might, I couldn't find anything from 'em, no web presence, no Myspace page, nothing. It wasn't until Fan Death released this self titled tape in conjunction with the band that I could finally hear what the local buzz was about. Now that I've been listening to this five-song, half-hour long tape, their one and only release, the fact that I never caught Body Cop in a live setting when they were doing the occasional basement show in the DC/VA area stings me even more. With members of DC deathcrust warriors Ilsa and the short-lived screamo/grind band Flowers In The Attic, Body Cop does indeed wear the rotting, bilious influence of early Swans right smack on it's collective sleeve, with obnoxiously slow atonal dirges, pounding saurian drums, lots of feedback and clanging guitar chords; but singer Kiki Tropea Suthard does this combination of howling excoriation and spoken-word delivery that is intense and harsh in it's own way, her howling vocals reciting some cool minimalist nihilistic poetry over the lumbering noise-punk. One of the band members is also in charge of pure electronic noise, so the music is constantly under barrage from an array of grinding distorted drones, harsh feedback manipulated into trippy waveforms, and other excessive amp-abuse that turns this into a really abrasive listening experience. It's low-fi and very mangy sounding, Kiki's shrieks and verbal scorn seeming to be drifting from down the hall somewhere, but the rhythm section plows through the murk with bulldozer force, and the guitars are choked and beaten constantly, spewing chunks of agonized axe-screech and twisted discordant crunch that never seems to coalesce into anything resembling an actual riff. It's a killer tape, loaded with some of the nastiest, gnarliest no-wave influenced hate-sludge in recent memory, and a fine final document of their brief run.
The debut album from the one-man electrogrind band Body Hammer delivers some intensely wacked out blastchaos that's pretty indefinable. There's lots of brutal programmed blasting and ultrafast riffing here, it's definitely got that drum machine/electronic grind sound going on, but these elements are combined with tons of dark ambience and weird electronic soundscaping which give Jigoku a strange industrial soundtrack feel. It's really unique, and definitely recommended to fans of extreme experimental grindcore.
The first track "Severe Durol Torture" starts off slow and creepy, an alien creepscape with an eerie minor key piano drifting into grinding detuned guitar sludge, gasping vocals and weird electronic noises, and then rips into the hypergrind chaos of "The Bystander Effect", all spastic grind riffage and mach 10 blastbeats, reminding me of both Noism and Discordance Axis quite a bit. "Blue Eyed Assassin" follows with a mere fourteen seconds of insane harmonized guitar squiggle and abstract grindnoize, then "Digital Direct Drive" returns to atmospheric horrific ambience, huge slabs of crushing metallic drone, screaming tortured vokills, and eerie synths cloaked in darkness and reverb, a terrifying industrial doom dirge crawling through Body Hammer's shadowy futuristic soundworld. More short, spastic blasts of angular processed grind follow, "MPD Psycho", "No Fucking Way", "The Principles And Practices Of Nihilism", all of them microbursts of dissonant grindcore, insanely fast programmed blastbeats, blackened industrial murk and digital FX, sometimes as short as four seconds long.
On the last third of Jigoku, though, Body Hammer's sound shifts into a slower, more ambient direction, almost like Abruptum crossed with spacey industrial noise. There's low-fi, heavily distorted industrial blackdirge with blown-out vokills and plodding riffage that melts down into slabs of caustic white noise, putrid guitar mangle and pounding metallic percussion, and then "Deeper Into The Abyss" introduces blackened tremolo riffing that writhes around monstrous blackdoom ambience, a thick fog of cavernous reverb, delicate piano and scraping noise thundering across a bleak, evil ambient metal wasteland. The title track is next, a disturbing soundtracky dronescape with more murderous raspy vokills, a simply creepy piano melody and clean shimmery guitars mixed in with blasts of rotten black dirge riffage, trippy effects, huge uncoiling ropes of black bass, sounding like an 80's horror movie theme filtered through some alien blacknoize nightmare. After that, the sound gets more spacious as insanely detuned bass chugs through an underworld of whining siren like tones and weeping feedback, and then the last track appears, total silence for a good five minutes, and then it suddenly erupts into about a minute of blistering choppy white noise and strange disembodied voices.
Some seriously crazed, surrealistic hypergrind going on here, like Infidel Castro mixed with Abruptum and Discordance Axis maybe, a strange, otherworldly chaos that's both brutal and incredibly detailed. The disc comes in a dvd case with full color packaging, and for a limited time we have a limited edition version that's also packaged in a patterned cloth wrapper with extra buttons and stickers.
��Been a fan of Curran Reynolds ever since hearing the 2004 debut from his band Wetnurse, a criminally overlooked avant metal outfit who combined crushing angular heaviness and a twitchy noise-rock influenced sensibility and who was one of the more interesting bands to come out of NYC in the past decade. He's has his hands in all kinds of projects though, from a stint in noise rock legends Today Is The Day to curating his now defunct Precious Metal concert series, and has also written on some of the more interesting music coming out of the metal and experimental music underground for websites like Pitchfork. The guy's got good taste, that's for sure. His latest musical project is some weird mutant conglom of sounds that, while bearing a slight similarity to some of his previous outfits, is really something totally new: on the debut self-titled EP from Body Stuff, Reynolds defies attempts at categorization, the songs sprouting tendrils of apocalyptic post-punk, crushing sludge-pop and industrial rock weirdness all within a single, pounding two minute song.
�� You can definitely hear some of that classic Amphetamine Reptile style noise rock sound juicing up his compact yet thunderous creep-anthems, but that sound is twisted into something much less recognizable and much more creepy. Fronting the band with powerful, warbling vocals that echo over the frenetic metallic pummeling laid down by guitarist Ryan Jones (also of Wetnurse and Today Is The Day, as well as a member of NY black metallers Mutilation Rites), Reynolds crafts a strange and choppy sound with infectious hooks that dissolve like a dream in the fading roar of the amplifiers. "Street Walker" comes prowling across the opening minutes of this Ep like some lurching, murderous confluence of the Jesus Lizard and some soaring arena-metal hallucination, the brutal stop-and-go bass chug heaving beneath the funkified percussion and vertiginous guitars until it all comes to an abrupt and jarring halt. The spacey sheets of guitar and rumbling tribal rhythms of "Wanted Man" turn that brief minute and a half sketch into a vague vision of post-punk propulsion, while both "Year-Ends" and "I Will Be He" deliver an odd fusion of almost Torche-like tectonic metal-pop and weirdly gothic undertones, the former joined by some smokin' bleary saxophone at the very end, the latter surging into an absolutely pummeling industro-metal hook. Classic pigfuck fumes waft off of the dreary chug of "New York Story", and the closer "Beyond Bodies" wraps this up with the longest song on the whole 7", a nearly three minute slice of moody instrumental melodic heaviness with more of that killer Torche-gone-arena-rock majesty.
�� It's like some Gothic take on sludge pop, equal parts Killing Joke and Torche, and one only hopes that Curran will be fleshing out these sounds even further with future releases. Limited to three hundred copies, includes a digital download.
I had been hearing good things about The Body and their self-titled album, but it took awhile to finally track this down and dig in. Based out of
Providence, Rhode Island, The Body is two guys named Chip and Lee, one drummer and one guitar player playing through a wall of amps, and they are freaking
heavy. And kind of enigmatic, too. Their website doesn't tell you anything...it's just a old-looking, sepia-toned photograph of two guys on a hill
in the distance, wearing potato sacks over their heads. That's it. And the band's Myspace page isn't that much more informative. Which is kinda cool.
Definitely lends a weird, mystical vibe to The Body's pummeling sludge. Musically, for one reason or another I was expecting this album to sound like some
sort of Melvins knockoff, but that's not what this sounds like at all. Nope, this seven song album is a weird mixture of super heavy, repetitively droning
sludgecore, ferocious jangly balls of mathy riffage, and strange vocal samples and other noises moving around in the big, murky fog these guys whip up. The
first track is an untitled nine-minute dronefeast, huge drums and monochord sludge riffing lumbering through a thick haze of rumbling feedback and growing in
volume and intensity until the entire performance begins to become more and more distorted and blown out, eventually turning into a crunchy blast of ripped-
speaker overload and buzzing drone. Then it abruptly kicks into "The City of The Magnificent Jewel", with a massive grooving riff and slightly faster,
churning drumming, playing the same droning hypnotic riff over and over, tied together by insane sounding, desperate shrieked vocals that are way off in the
back of the mix. The rest of the disc alternates between slo-mo pummeling sludge and strange detours into math rock; parts of this remind me of the metallic
mathy crush of Conifer and Tides, but those wrecked screaming vocals and the odd atmosphere that permeates the album definitely make this stand out. Dig the
last track, too: a fifteen minute long descent into hypno sludge dementia, huge pounding monoriffage bashing your skull in right before it disappears and the
sound of singing children enters the room, then rushing back in as a churning, chaotic dark riff grinding over and over and over, lulling you into a uneasy
trance until disassembling into a spacious field of upright bass tones (and I swear I hear violin in there...) and roaring droning feedback. It's a pretty
badass closeout. Comes in a hand-assembled digipack. Apparently these are sold out from the label - we've got a handful but I'm not sure if we'll be able to
restock these once they're gone.
Here's the recently reissued 2004 self-titled album from Providence art-sludge duo The Body that came out on At A Loss, keeping the same digisleeve package design as the Moganono edition, but now boasting a new mastering job. Here's my old write-up for the original release of the album...
I had been hearing good things about The Body and their self-titled album, but it took awhile to finally track this down and dig in. Based out of Providence, Rhode Island, The Body is two guys named Chip and Lee, one drummer and one guitar player playing through a wall of amps, and they are freaking heavy. And kind of enigmatic, too. Their website doesn't tell you anything...it's just a old-looking, sepia-toned photograph of two guys on a hill in the distance, wearing potato sacks over their heads. That's it. And the band's Myspace page isn't that much more informative. Which is kinda cool. Definitely lends a weird, mystical vibe to The Body's pummeling sludge. Musically, for one reason or another I was expecting this album to sound like some sort of Melvins knockoff, but that's not what this sounds like at all. Nope, this seven song album is a weird mixture of super heavy, repetitively droning sludgecore, ferocious jangly balls of mathy riffage, and strange vocal samples and other noises moving around in the big, murky fog these guys whip up. The first track is an untitled nine-minute dronefeast, huge drums and monochord sludge riffing lumbering through a thick haze of rumbling feedback and growing in volume and intensity until the entire performance begins to become more and more distorted and blown out, eventually turning into a crunchy blast of ripped-speaker overload and buzzing drone. Then it abruptly kicks into "The City of The Magnificent Jewel", with a massive grooving riff and slightly faster, churning drumming, playing the same droning hypnotic riff over and over, tied together by insane sounding, desperate shrieked vocals that are way off in the back of the mix. The rest of the disc alternates between slo-mo pummeling sludge and strange detours into math rock; parts of this remind me of the metallic mathy crush of Conifer and Tides, but those wrecked screaming vocals and the odd atmosphere that permeates the album definitely make this stand out. Dig the last track, too: a fifteen minute long descent into hypno sludge dementia, huge pounding monotono-riffage bashing your skull in right before it disappears and the sound of singing children enters the room, then rushing back in as a churning, chaotic dark riff grinding over and over and over, lulling you into a uneasy trance until disassembling into a spacious field of upright bass tones (and I swear I hear violin in there...) and roaring droning feedback.
Crucial Blast review coming soon
Crucial Blast review coming soon
Just got the recent vinyl reissue of The Body's eponymous debut from 2004 back in, released by Howling Mine, the label run by some of the guys in Thou. This latest edition has been remastered for this release, and comes on 180 gram black vinyl, limited to five hundred copies. Here's my old write-up for the original release of the album...
I'd been hearing good things about The Body and their self-titled album, but it took awhile to finally track this down and dig in. Based out of Providence, Rhode Island, The Body is two guys named Chip and Lee, one drummer and one guitar player playing through a wall of amps, and they are freaking heavy. And kind of enigmatic, too. Their website doesn't tell you anything...it's just a old-looking, sepia-toned photograph of two guys on a hill in the distance, wearing potato sacks over their heads. That's it. And the band's Myspace page isn't that much more informative. Which is kinda cool. Definitely lends a weird, mystical vibe to The Body's pummeling sludge.
Musically, for one reason or another I was expecting this album to sound like some sort of Melvins knockoff, but that's not what this sounds like at all. Nope, this seven song album is a weird mixture of super heavy, repetitively droning sludgecore, ferocious jangly balls of mathy riffage, and strange vocal samples and other noises moving around in the big, murky fog these guys whip up. The first track is an untitled nine-minute dronefeast, huge drums and monochord sludge riffing lumbering through a thick haze of rumbling feedback and growing in volume and intensity until the entire performance begins to become more and more distorted and blown out, eventually turning into a crunchy blast of ripped-speaker overload and buzzing drone. Then it abruptly kicks into "The City of The Magnificent Jewel", with a massive grooving riff and slightly faster, churning drumming, playing the same droning hypnotic riff over and over, tied together by insane sounding, desperate shrieked vocals that are way off in the back of the mix. The rest of the disc alternates between slo-mo pummeling sludge and strange detours into math rock; parts of this remind me of the metallic mathy crush of Conifer and Tides, but those wrecked screaming vocals and the odd atmosphere that permeates the album definitely make this stand out.
Dig the last track, too: a fifteen minute long descent into hypno sludge dementia, huge pounding monotono-riffage bashing your skull in right before it disappears and the sound of singing children enters the room, then rushing back in as a churning, chaotic dark riff grinding over and over and over, lulling you into a uneasy trance until disassembling into a spacious field of upright bass tones (and I swear I hear violin in there...) and roaring droning feedback.
Each new release from avant-sludge duo The Body sees the band exploring new facets of their sound, experimenting with tone and texture while continuing to root their music in the agonized slow-motion heaviness they unveiled with their self-titled 2004 debut. From collaborations (both live and in studio) with all-girl choirs, to big-band team-ups with the likes of majestic doom metallers Thou, to this recent collaboration with dark UK electronica artist Haxan Cloak, The Body have expanded the boundaries of their music more than most bands of their ilk, reshaping their jagged, molten sludge into ever darker and more adventurous forms.
Teaming up with British artist Bobby Krlic (aka Haxan Cloak) to produce six crushing tracks of mutated black electronics and skull-pulverizing sludge metal on I Shall Die Here, The Body have rarely sounded quite this terrifying. Each artist's fingerprints disappear into the mix; the opener "To Carry The Seeds Of Death Within Me" evolves from terrifying, minimal electronic shrieks that resemble the eerie whistling cue from Brad Fiedel's score for Just Before Dawn, into a droning, pulverizing sludge riff carried on saurian tempos, the sound streaked by strange processed screams and pulsating bass tones, shifting into a minimal, almost Kompakt-like technoid throb. From there, the album move further into heavily processed metallic crush, shifting into massive sludge-encrusted dubbed-out heaviness, echoing snares snapping beneath the weight of the severely down-tuned doom riffage, the music breaking apart as creepy vocal samples suddenly take over, or dissipate into stretches of minimal ambience. Chip King's high, blood-curdling shrieks are as panicked as ever, even as the music transforms into a swirling mass of distorted synthesizers and murky processed drum loops, or erupts into a wall of thunderous martial drumming and tribal rhythms. And the disembodied tectonic riffage of "The Night Knows No Dawn" is as massive and earth-rending as anything from Corrupted or Sunn 0))), but that monstrous glacial guitar-churn gets caught in a swarm of thin crackling glitchery and distant choral drift that transform into something much more otherworldly.
The music that follows gets even stranger, those shrieking electrocuted shrieks sounding out over blasts of fractured bass-heavy electronics and abstract quasi-techno rhythms that have been warped and slowed down into a monstrous doom-laden crawl, then suddenly shifting into a noise-drenched industrial doomdirge, reverberating with bass-heavy detonations and slow, violently off-kilter dubbed-out drums that churn and thud beneath guttural droning guitars. There are moments when the music lurches into an almost pneumatic sort of rhythmic power, an ultra-heavy industrialized throb that feels like some bizarre Wax Trax remix job, and elsewhere you can hear the Haxan Cloak's vintage horror-soundtrack influences seeping into the glitch-riddled, slow-motion crush. On the final song "Darkness Surrounds Us", droning dissonant violin-like sounds introduce the track, joined by eerie female voices and distant swarms of murky noise as it slowly builds to a punishing monotonous doom dirge, that destructive downtuned doom-crush bulldozing its way through a storm of screeching metallic noise and heavily processed feedback, closing the album with a final blast of fearsome electronic chaos.
Each new release from avant-sludge duo The Body sees the band exploring new facets of their sound, experimenting with tone and texture while continuing to root their music in the agonized slow-motion heaviness they unveiled with their self-titled 2004 debut. From collaborations (both live and in studio) with all-girl choirs, to big-band team-ups with the likes of majestic doom metallers Thou, to this recent collaboration with dark UK electronica artist Haxan Cloak, The Body have expanded the boundaries of their music more than most bands of their ilk, reshaping their jagged, molten sludge into ever darker and more adventurous forms.
Teaming up with British artist Bobby Krlic (aka Haxan Cloak) to produce six crushing tracks of mutated black electronics and skull-pulverizing sludge metal on I Shall Die Here, The Body have rarely sounded quite this terrifying. Each artist's fingerprints disappear into the mix; the opener "To Carry The Seeds Of Death Within Me" evolves from terrifying, minimal electronic shrieks that resemble the eerie whistling cue from Brad Fiedel's score for Just Before Dawn, into a droning, pulverizing sludge riff carried on saurian tempos, the sound streaked by strange processed screams and pulsating bass tones, shifting into a minimal, almost Kompakt-like technoid throb. From there, the album move further into heavily processed metallic crush, shifting into massive sludge-encrusted dubbed-out heaviness, echoing snares snapping beneath the weight of the severely down-tuned doom riffage, the music breaking apart as creepy vocal samples suddenly take over, or dissipate into stretches of minimal ambience. Chip King's high, blood-curdling shrieks are as panicked as ever, even as the music transforms into a swirling mass of distorted synthesizers and murky processed drum loops, or erupts into a wall of thunderous martial drumming and tribal rhythms. And the disembodied tectonic riffage of "The Night Knows No Dawn" is as massive and earth-rending as anything from Corrupted or Sunn 0))), but that monstrous glacial guitar-churn gets caught in a swarm of thin crackling glitchery and distant choral drift that transform into something much more otherworldly.
The music that follows gets even stranger, those shrieking electrocuted shrieks sounding out over blasts of fractured bass-heavy electronics and abstract quasi-techno rhythms that have been warped and slowed down into a monstrous doom-laden crawl, then suddenly shifting into a noise-drenched industrial doomdirge, reverberating with bass-heavy detonations and slow, violently off-kilter dubbed-out drums that churn and thud beneath guttural droning guitars. There are moments when the music lurches into an almost pneumatic sort of rhythmic power, an ultra-heavy industrialized throb that feels like some bizarre Wax Trax remix job, and elsewhere you can hear the Haxan Cloak's vintage horror-soundtrack influences seeping into the glitch-riddled, slow-motion crush. On the final song "Darkness Surrounds Us", droning dissonant violin-like sounds introduce the track, joined by eerie female voices and distant swarms of murky noise as it slowly builds to a punishing monotonous doom dirge, that destructive downtuned doom-crush bulldozing its way through a storm of screeching metallic noise and heavily processed feedback, closing the album with a final blast of fearsome electronic chaos.
There's been mucho anticipation for this since it came out a couple of weeks ago, the first collaborative EP between Baton Rouge sludge metallers Thou and experimental sludge duo The Body. Issued as a vinyl-only release, Released From Love features the two bands joining together into a kind of sludge supergroup as they deliver these three new tracks of slow-motion crush colored in Crowleyian imagery, and capped off with an impressive cover of the Vic Chesnutt song "Coward" off of his final album At The Cut, here re-imagined as a kind of funereal, doom-laden ambience.
As the grueling slomo crush of opener "The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills" spills forth, the presence of both bands feels more cumulative than collaborative; rather than being able to pick out recognizable traits of either, the bands have coalesced into a massive grinding force, an avalanche of immense down-tuned riffage and gut-churning bass, tribal drums slowly pounding out their hypnotic rhythms beneath all of the oppressive asphalt-coated guitar crunch. It's not until the two-pronged vocal attack comes in that you can hear the respective frontmen doing their thing, Chip King's strained, breathless howl drifting over Bryan Funck's monstrous growl echoing through the thin layer of black ether that hangs suspended above the pulverizing dirge. The second track "Manifest Alchemy" is more engaging, dropping passages of looping, caustic electronic noise in among the mournful minor key leads and the funereal atmosphere; it's no less heavy than the preceding song though, especially when it slips into the almost industrial-tinged clank and crush that slowly creeps across the final minutes of the side.
But it's the song "In Meetings Hearts Beat Closer" over on side two that really flattened me. Bringing an icy, almost black metal style tremolo riff to the rolling, percussive power that pushes this grim, noise-drenched dirge through the blackness, the bands come together to craft an effective, intensely eerie atmosphere that doesn't let up, even as the song is hurled into the pummeling, Swans-like sturm und drang that drags "In Meetings" all the way down into that final coda of crackling radio-waves and garbled guitar noise. And to finish this collaboration off, Thou and The Body present a harrowing cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Coward", starting it off with a lone guitar weaving it's sorrowful, bluesy song out over the abyss, eventually joined by King's hysterical screams sounding off in the distance. When the rest of the bands kick in, it becomes something both luminous and tortured, the gorgeous guitar harmonies rising like incense smoke curling from a censer. A blast of beautiful, soul-crushing sound.
Released on 180 gram black vinyl in a heavyweight cover with a letter-pressed insert.
Back in stock. The ongoing collaboration between Baton Rouge doom metallers Thou and avant-sludge duo The Body continues apace with You, Whom I Have Always Hated, which picks up from their previous collab with more crushing noise-damaged heaviness, creeping doom-laden atmosphere and chunks of twisted mega-crush. The LP release of You, Whom... is certainly heavy enough on its own, but the expanded CD release also includes the entire Released From Love album that came out last year, for maximum art-sludge punishment.
On the CD, that Released From Love material is first, delivering slow-motion crush colored in Crowleyian imagery and capped off with an impressive cover of the Vic Chesnutt song "Coward" off of his final album At The Cut, here re-imagined as a kind of funereal, doom-laden ambience. As the grueling slomo weight of opener "The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills" spills forth, the presence of both bands feels more cumulative than collaborative; rather than being able to pick out recognizable traits of either, the bands succeed in coalescing into a massive grinding force, an avalanche of asphalt-encrusted down-tuned riffage and gut-churning bass, tribal drums slowly pounding out their hypnotic rhythms. It's not until the two-pronged vocal attack comes in that you can hear the respective front men doing their thing, Chip King's strained, breathless howl drifting over Bryan Funck's monstrous growl, both of these tortured voices echoing through the thin layer of black ether that hangs suspended above the pulverizing dirge. Second track "Manifest Alchemy" is more engaging, dropping passages of looping, caustic electronic noise in among the mournful minor key leads and the funereal atmosphere; it's no less heavy than the preceding song though, especially when it slips into the almost industrial-tinged clank and crush that slowly creeps across the final minutes of the side.
It's "In Meetings Hearts Beat Closer" over on side two that really flattened me, though. Bringing an icy, almost black metal style tremolo riff to the rolling, percussive power that pushes this grim, noise-drenched dirge through the blackness, the bands come together to craft an effective, intensely eerie atmosphere on this one that doesn't let up, even as the song is hurled into the pummeling, Swans-like sturm und drang that drags "In Meetings" all the way down into that final coda of crackling radio-waves and garbled guitar noise. And to finish this collaboration off, Thou and The Body present a harrowing cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Coward", starting it off with a lone guitar weaving its sorrowful, bluesy song out over the abyss, eventually joined by King's hysterical screams sounding off in the distance. When the rest of the bands kick in, it becomes something both luminous and tortured, the gorgeous guitar harmonies rising like incense smoke curling from a censer. A blast of beautiful, soul-crushing sound.
The other half of the disc features the newer You, Whom I Have Always Hated LP, and flows perfectly from the previous material. Again, you get this heavy industrial-tinged vibe as soon as the opener "Her Strongholds Unvanquishable" kicks in, with its pummeling metal-shop rhythms echoing beneath squalls of feedback and rumbling noise, leading straight into the song's immense, noise-drenched power-dirge. That sets the tone for the rest of the record, the two bands again fusing together into a monstrous, noisy roar of droning doom metal, the vocals shifting back and forth between guttural roars and that extreme high-pitched screamo-esque yelp, the slow rhythmic pound of hammers slamming against sheet metal ringing out while ultra-distorted, massively down-tuned riffs uncoil in slow motion. The group occasionally lurch into a kind of sickening, deformed groove on tracks like "The Devils Of Trust", while the unexpected cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie" really delivers on that quasi-industrial metal hinted at before, heaving mechanical rhythms and eerie droning guitars surrounded by bursts of processed feedback and distortion, resulting in one of the most interesting tracks to emerge from this experiment (not to mention one of the catchiest). Those industrial elements surface over the rest of the record, with lots of noisy loops and grating textures woven into the tectonic crush, but there's also a brief track titled "He Returns..." that offers its own gorgeously grim soundscape of distant machinelike thunder and ominous ambience towards the end, while the last song sees members of Assembly Of Light Choir joining the fray, lending their haunting vocal harmonies to a hideously lumbering dirge that plows vast black furrows into the earth. Great stuff that leaves me wanting to hear even more from this great team-up.
Back in stock. The ongoing collaboration between Baton Rouge doom metallers Thou and avant-sludge duo The Body continues apace with You, Whom I Have Always Hated, which picks up from their previous collab with more crushing noise-damaged heaviness, creeping doom-laden atmosphere and chunks of twisted mega-crush. The LP release of You, Whom... is certainly heavy enough on its own, but the expanded CD release also includes the entire Released From Love album that came out last year, for maximum art-sludge punishment.
The You, Whom I Have Always Hated LP flows perfectly from the previous collaboration. Again, you get this heavy industrial-tinged vibe as soon as the opener "Her Strongholds Unvanquishable" kicks in, with its pummeling metal-shop rhythms echoing beneath squalls of feedback and rumbling noise, leading straight into the song's immense, noise-drenched power-dirge. That sets the tone for the rest of the record, the two bands again fusing together into a monstrous, noisy roar of droning doom metal, the vocals shifting back and forth between guttural roars and that extreme high-pitched screamo-esque yelp, the slow rhythmic pound of hammers slamming against sheet metal ringing out while ultra-distorted, massively down-tuned riffs uncoil in slow motion. The group occasionally lurch into a kind of sickening, deformed groove on tracks like "The Devils Of Trust", while the unexpected cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Terrible Lie" really delivers on that quasi-industrial metal hinted at before, heaving mechanical rhythms and eerie droning guitars surrounded by bursts of processed feedback and distortion, resulting in one of the most interesting tracks to emerge from this experiment (not to mention one of the catchiest). Those industrial elements surface over the rest of the record, with lots of noisy loops and grating textures woven into the tectonic crush, but there's also a brief track titled "He Returns..." that offers its own gorgeously grim soundscape of distant machinelike thunder and ominous ambience towards the end, while the last song sees members of Assembly Of Light Choir joining the fray, lending their haunting vocal harmonies to a hideously lumbering dirge that plows vast black furrows into the earth. Great stuff that leaves me wanting to hear even more from this great team-up.
Being a big fan of the whole UK post-industrial scene, the Pathological, Freek, Broken Flag and Headdirt labels, bands like Skullflower, Ramleh, Splintered, Slab!, etc., it's weird that I never got into the band Bodychoke before. Part of it is that their stuff has been out of print for years and I just never came across any of their albums, but Bodychoke also came along later in the 90's, around the time that this scene began to drift deeper underground. Thanks to Relapse for reissuing this 1998 album, though, because this stuff rules. Cold River Songs originally came out on the Purity label, and has been presented here in a remastered form with three bonus tracks (originally from the limited Completion cdr) and new artwork and album design.
The band was formed by members of power electronics legends Sutcliffe Jugend and Whitehouse, a massive noise rock unit that fused together industrial rhythms, crushing riffage, dark dramatic baritone vocals that sound a whole lot like Michael Gira from Swans, and nihilistic lyrics. By the time that Bodychoke recorded their third and final album Cold River Songs, they had evolved into a sinister combination of the pummeling mechanistic heaviness of Godflesh, the grim and dramatic crush of Swans, and the gloomy post-punk of Joy Division and Nick Cave.
The album starts off with the heavy guitar noise and tribal drumming of "Control", ominous martial snares coming in, the sound very Swans-like, and then it changes into a frenzied noise rock jam, screaming vocals and seething riffage, bits of electronic noise and cello, a pummeling industrial noise rock groove. The next track "Cold River Song" is a longer jam that starts off with atmospheric clean guitar strum and drums, the cello coming back in and giving the sound an epic, dolorous feel, and as the song stretches out for almost ten minutes, the softer post-rock sound is contrasted with violent eruptions of distorted riffs and pounding percussion, building slowly to the chaotic crescendo at the end. More cello dominates "Your Submission", whose sparse bass lines and skittering dubby percussion at first creates a dark, brooding vibe, Paul Taylor's deep crooning vocals and the electronic noises adding to the moody post-rock crawl, but then the track erupts into a super heavy spaced out tribal jam with screamed vocals, corrosive slabs of guitar noise, pounding militaristic snares, scraped cello strings, a pounding industrial post-punk heaviness that segues right into the song "Victim". This track starts off almost like a chamber rock piece, eerie cello drones and electronic ambience and tribal percussion slowly building to another frenzied noise rock eruption, squalls of guitar noise and heavy drumming pounding out a hypnotic waltzing groove, similar to later-era Swans or Killing Joke.
The Swans comparison is most obvious on "Ideal Home", though. It's a standout track that's much more somber and restrained than the rest of the album, a slow moody dirge that's led by the bass guitar and cello and surrounded by clean guitars and violins and subtle percussion, dramatic and brooding and very Swans-like, especially when the distinctly Gira-like singing comes in. And "Aftermath", which closed the original album, is another ominous post-punk jam, almost entirely instrumental save for some deep chanting choir-like vocals, the sound minimal and spacey, droning horns and moaning cello mixing with minor key guitar and sprawling dramatic ambience, finally building into squalls of psychedelic, Skullflowery noise guitar. The three bonus tracks at the end are similar, winding noise-laced rock with explosive feedback, haunting cello strings, pounding Killing Joke-style drumming, and fierce screamed vocals. This album is so heavy and haunting; I can't get enough of it, and can't believe that I've just now discovered it. A definite recommendation for anyone into heavy noise rock, Uk industrial, that sort of thing; this is one of the best albums that I've ever heard from that era of underground UK heaviness!
Superb enviromental sound collage by one of Norways pioneers of experimental ambient / drone music. This release features detailed, engrossing collages of various sounds and field recordings that Tore has collected from his new home. Reissue of this side-project of Origami Republika, composed from environmental sounds, including 5 new tracks not found on the original "Siesta" release (2000). Delicate and minimal atmospheres, that are often calm but have some more brooding moments. Tore Honor� Boe (of experimental ambient masters ORIGAMI REPUBLIKA) creates a link between Dada, Merz, and the long collage and concrete music tradition: Boe creates a personal, crystalline and sparklingly clear series of sound narratives constructed out of microphysical elements of chance and risk by occasionally using amplified everyday objects and, in other instances, field recordings and processing of all these. The singular beauty of his music stems from this premises, but also from the emotional atmosphere of the spaces where his live interventions take place. Needless to say, this is musique concrete best explored on a righteous set of headphones, in order to truly immerse yourself in the intimate microaudio of these preserved and treated aural experiences. The Suave Siesta CD comes with a 16 page booklet of artwork. Highly recommended for fans of intense minimalism and environmental sound a la Francisco Lopez.
Somewhere in between the homemade industrial gristle of Wolf Eyes, damaged basement black metal ambience and the mysterious blackened textures of Prurient's recent output, you'll find the strange midnight noise rituals of Fire Island, AK, a project from South Carolina noise artist Thomas Boetnner. I just recently discovered his stuff after he got in touch with us to see if we'd be interested in carrying his music, which is released in tiny handmade runs on his own label, sometimes in editions of less than twenty copies. Once I started checking his stuff out, I found it to be pretty fascinating; using a variety of instruments, electronics and found objects, Boettner creates extremely eerie and abstract soundscapes of blackened old-school industrial, minimal drone and some grisly ambient skronk that reminds me of a murkier, evil sounding version of the Japanese improv-jazz-noise group Dislocation. It's really cool stuff that occasionally stumbles into passages of filthy black ambient brilliance. We picked up a bunch of the Fire Island, AK releases as well as a tape that Boettner released under his own name; all of this stuff is pretty rad, fans of disquieting graveyard drift and occult basement industro-buzz should check this guy out.
I'm not exactly sure what the distinction is between this cassette released under Thomas Boettner's own name and the material released through his solo noise project Fire Island, AK, as the Guilt cassette really isn't all that far removed from Fire Island's grimy low-fi noise. For whatever reason, this is the one cassette put out through Boetnner's own B.T.N.R. imprint that�s not under his Fire Island, AK moniker. Guilt features ten tracks of murky harsh noise, long stretches of droning black static a la Werewolf Jerusalem, short bursts of violent power electronics, and occasionally distorted almost black metallish shrieks appear through the fog of tape hiss and distortion. The tracks move between twisted melodic abstraction and full-tilt noise, which Boettner creates with a combination of guitars, synths, samplers, tapes, metal, power tools and effects pedals. I think that one of the main things that distinguishes this from the Fire Island stuff is the use of samples; Boettner takes a kind of plunderphonic approach with several of these tracks, taking short samples from Black Flag, NON, Scott Walker and Nashville chanteuse Skeeter Davis and warping/disfiguring them into melodic loops and smears of distorted sound, which are sometimes identifiable, sometimes not. The last track "What Angel Is Carried Hidden In Your Cheek?" is the most overt piece of plunderphonic mashup on the tape, where fragments of music from most of those artists are layered together to form a woozy, hallucinatory sound-collage that sounds like a warped Southern waltz. An interesting mixture of plunderphonic collage, blackened power electronics and static drone-noise that I suppose is fairly different from the rest of Boettner�s catalog, now that I�ve listened to it a few times. The tape comes in a handmade package with full color artwork that borrows imagery from Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages, and is hand-numbered and limited to 100 copies.
Had been hearing a LOT about these cats lately, who seem to have many in the black metal subterane buggin out over their microeditions of cassettes and
vinyl. I happened to only get a very small number of this recent double-7" release as a matter of fact, like 5 copies, and it's already sold out
from the label, so there ya go. This double EP is a reissue of a limited tape likewise released on Hospital Productions (the label operated by Dominick
Fernow of Prurient), in a crude, crusty silk screened fold over jacket scrawled with various drawings of stabbings, murder, and mutants with a xeroxed lyric
sheet. A two-man guitar/drums duo whose members go by He Who Gnashes Teeth and He Who Crushes Teeth, Bone Awl incites a riot of horrendous, beyond-raw low-fi
basement black metal/noisepunk, all damaged spkiy buzzsaw riffs and muffled distorted howls, endlessly repeating over and over as their atonal black
thrashpunk slop and jangly guitars melt together into a trance inducing temporal dissonance, Brainbombs and Darkthrone and Discharge fused together and
stripped down into a relentless thrashing smear of pounding black trancecrust.
After infesting us with a swarm of limited-run cassettes, splits, and 7" EP's, Bone Awl has finally arrived with their first full length album,
Meaningless Leaning Mess, a shredded collection of 17 songs in the vein of the Not for Our Feet and Up To Something cassette
tapes. Part of our (and many others) infatuation with this enigmatic California duo is the way that they have stripped down black metal to a molten,
minimalist punk core, a blasting atmospheric noize assault matched with strange existential lyrics utterly unlike anything else in black metal; drummer and
guitarist He Who Gnashes Teeth and He Who Crushes Teeth rip through crude, rusted-out husks of simplistic blackened thrash, every song built from only one or
two basic crusty riffs and screeching distorted vocals, but bashed out over and over with a focused repetitive force over a primitive and furious midtempo
drumming that sets in like a trance. The instruments, hell, the entire production is swamped in white noise hiss, the recording pushed into the red,
super distorted and noisy, giving this an extremely gritty, skuzzy vibe closer to bands like Rusted Shut and Brainbombs than anything typical to black metal,
like a blasted, blazed noise rock mutation of Venom and Discharge. The statement on the inside of the record's enormous poster sleeve is great, giving a
clear idea of where this music is coming from: "BONE AWL would like to thank the world that bends and creaks, it's swaying spines, it's unlimited
precariousness, and it's little winks, letting us always know the joke is on us." Awesome. The aforementioned poster sleeve is amazing looking, a stark,
creepy looking collage of pasted-together cathedrals teetering at insane angles like something out of a Lovecraft story, alongside faceless scarecrows and
puppets, bizarre word play, and strange quotes. Kinda reminds me of Rudimentary Peni's artwork but it's far more esoteric and mysterious looking. Another
amazing, haunting blast from the Awl, pressed on heavywieght black vinyl and housed in a printed inner sleeve inside of the 6-panel foldout poster. Bone
Awl's stuff has been selling out/going out of print pretty quickly lately, so don't drag yer heels on any of their new releases!
Yeah! More primitive braindrilling blackpunk noisethrash from those Cali feedback mystics Bone Awl! This is a one-sided 7" featuring rare material that was
previously only available as a bonus EP that came with the "Die Hard" version of the Meaningless Leaning Mess LP...lucky for those of us that
totally missed out on that limited edition release, the band's own Klaxon imprint has re-issued this material as a standalone 7", still limited edition with
only 1000 copies pressed, but at least you've got a shot at picking up these three ripping blasts from the AWL! That's right, three tracks on one side,
opening with the hyperfast "Visions Of Altitude", a blackened speedblast that's way faster than anything we've heard from Bone Awl before, which eventually
blurrs into the songs "Undying Glare" and "Passing Through Shadows", with virtually no pauses between the tracks, turning the EP into essentially a single
blob of ultra-distorted blown out blackness. Barbaric punk riffs become serrated daggers of feedback and speaker filth, the guitar and drums pushed so deep
into the red that the whole record is a vicious hissing cacophony. Crucial! These guys continue to map out their beyond-fucked trajectory between Brainbombs
and Darkthrone, and we cannot get enough of their mega noisy blackness.
One of the latest vinyl reissues from the mysterious black metal duo known as Bone Awl, Not For Our Feet is a nine song album recorded in 2004 which had originally been released on cassette, then reissued on vinyl through Nuclear War Now, and now re-reissued through the band's very own Klaxon imprint. I can't get enough of Bone Awl's raw, blown out blackened punk, and this record serves up some of the most hardcore-tinged jams that we've heard from them, simplistic and thrashing, almost bordering on d-beat style crust at times but unmistakeably black metal in spirit. Songs go from super blown-out Discharge hardcore assaults with blazing primitive two-or-three chord riffs to ferocious blackened blastbeats and messy chaotic guitars, everything distorted and noisy, the harsh screeching vocals dripping strange mystical lyrics. Crude, brutal black thrashscuzz with a relentless approach to hammering their repetitive riffs into your skull like rusted nails, like Bathory and Darkthrone fused with primal UK hardcore in a barbaric cyclone of trance inducing intensity. This new version features a rad monochromatic jacket with all new artwork that looks like it was created through some heavy Xerox abuse, and comes with a photocopied insert sheet that contains all of the lyrics.
I probably dont need to say much else other than BONE AWL, fer fucks sake. There's a ton of C-Blast customers who obviously worship the blown-out black metal atavism of the Novato, Cali duo Bone Awl, as we've gotten loads of orders for the LP and previous 7" titles of theirs that we have had in stock, so I'm sure you guys dont need too much prodding to know that this is another awesome blast of ultra distorted, glorious noisy three chord black metal skuzz of the highest order. Their sound has always been as much barbaric punk rock as old school black metal, and that's never been more true than with the three songs on this 7", "You're Late", "Nights Middle" and "Make For Yourself A Last Vision" all blistering white-noise beatings and wide-eyed interrogations of reality. Members He Who Crushes Teeth and He Who Gnashes Teeth strip the blackened thrash down to a raw, almost pogo-punk like simplicity, and it's fucking amazing that music that is this distorted and gnarled can be as catchy as this, hammering out intense basic riffs and pounding neanderthal drumming over and over into oblivion through a blizzard of smoking amp hiss and overdriven distortion. Fucking awesome. On black vinyl, and packaged with a twelve page black and white booklet with strange imagery and their usual esoteric lyrics. Absolutely essential for fans of Akitsa, Ildjarn, Malveillance, Ash Pool, Von, and that whole breed of primitive noisy black filth.
After infesting us with a swarm of limited-run cassettes, splits, and 7" EP's, Bone Awl has finally arrived with their first full length album,
Meaningless Leaning Mess, a shredded collection of 17 songs in the vein of the Not for Our Feet and Up To Something cassette
tapes. Part of our (and many others) infatuation with this enigmatic California duo is the way that they have stripped down black metal to a molten,
minimalist punk core, a blasting atmospheric noize assault matched with strange existential lyrics utterly unlike anything else in black metal; drummer and
guitarist He Who Gnashes Teeth and He Who Crushes Teeth rip through crude, rusted-out husks of simplistic blackened thrash, every song built from only one or
two basic crusty riffs and screeching distorted vocals, but bashed out over and over with a focused repetitive force over a primitive and furious midtempo
drumming that sets in like a trance. The instruments, hell, the entire production is swamped in white noise hiss, the recording pushed into the red,
super distorted and noisy, giving this an extremely gritty, skuzzy vibe closer to bands like Rusted Shut and Brainbombs than anything typical to black metal,
like a blasted, blazed noise rock mutation of Venom and Discharge. The statement on the inside of the record's enormous poster sleeve is great, giving a
clear idea of where this music is coming from: "BONE AWL would like to thank the world that bends and creaks, it's swaying spines, it's unlimited
precariousness, and it's little winks, letting us always know the joke is on us." Awesome. The aforementioned poster sleeve is amazing looking, a stark,
creepy looking collage of pasted-together cathedrals teetering at insane angles like something out of a Lovecraft story, alongside faceless scarecrows and
puppets, bizarre word play, and strange quotes. Kinda reminds me of Rudimentary Peni's artwork but it's far more esoteric and mysterious looking. Another amazing, haunting blast from the Awl. This is the newer repress of the LP, pressed on heavywieght black vinyl and housed in a printed inner sleeve and chipboard jacket instead of the 6-panel foldout poster that made up the original packaging.
Released on the Italian label Iron Tyrant, this limited-edition 12" features two out-of-print cassettes from 2010 reissued on vinyl from the primitive black metal duo Bone Awl. The first side has the Bowing Heads Ep, which sees Bone Awl evolving from their ultra-distorted barbaric blackened punk sound and utilizing more melody in their compositions. The side starts with the noisy martial stomp of the instrumental intro "Howard N.", then lurches into the noisy hardcore of "Let Blood", the simple two-chord riffage clanging away over furious rocking drums, the guitar not as distorted as their older stuff, more hooky, punky, but still very murderous in intent. The following song "Bowing Heads" is slower yet, a trudging gutter punk anthem with one of the catchiest riffs that I've heard from Bone Awl, almost epic in feel; this material is the catchiest music that I've heard from them, though their trademark sound is still there, the riffs still simple, primitive and punk-like in form, using repetition to forge their trance-like battery via the pounding caveman drumming and hoarse, putrid vocal mantras. "How It's Done" is a speedier blown out blackened hardcore crusher, while "The Awful Voice" sort of sounds like ancient LA hardcore drenched in sewer slime and flogged with chains.
The flipside features the Sunless Xyggos recordings, which were originally recorded for the source material for their split with HNW artist The Rita. These five instrumentals tracks are blown out, violent black metal filth, formed from barbaric three-chord riffs, and with a massively distorted recording that exceeds even their usual level of speaker-abuse. Some of the tracks found here (like "Black Beasts") are so blown and distorted that they start to resemble noisecore, but it's extremely heavy, too; as chaotic and noisy as this is, these tracks sound MONSTROUS, and when they slow down, as they do on the doom-laden death march "You're Getting More", it's like a slow cave-in on your skull, with what might be their heaviest song ever.
Limited to seven hundred copies.
Just as likely to offer a new live recording as they are something put together in a formal studio setting, the British drugdoom band Bong is all about improvisation, and all about unleashing their sprawling, long-form sludge rituals in front of a crowd stoned/drunk/out of their minds enough to be fully and wholly sucked into the monstrous black holes of seismic psychedelia that this band is so adept at summoning. This three-disc set from Bong offers this in spades with a collection of epic live performances that finds their drugged jams occurring in a variety of settings over the course of a two year period; the recordings are of course somewhat rough in quality, but all sound sufficiently heavy and zoned-out, and do an excellent job of conveying the immediacy of Bong's sprawling mazelike improvisations.
Disc one begins billowing out great clouds of opiate chug from the word go, a stern voice introducing the piece as the room is filled with the steely buzz of some sitar-like instrument bending and uncoiling, and a black tide of distorted, metallic riffage. This churning cloud of drugsludge spreads out for a couple of minutes before the drummer finally drops in, hammering away at a busy, driving backbeat, guiding this massive doom-laden raga jam on a winding route through the nearly forty-minute long performance. It's strewn with screaming acid guitar solos streaking upwards and exploding in bursts of wah-wah ecstasy, the deep chant like vocals drifting wordlessly over the pounding drums and sticky narco-haze, that sitar coming to the fore every few minutes and emitting more rich metallic buzz, the whole band locked into this massive ur-drone groove that circles around and around, a blackswarm ouroboros doomgroove that feels like it could continue into eternity. The second track continues in the same vein, heavier and darker though, a huge droning Sabbathian riff lumbering into oblivion, bell-like reverberations echoing through the space, the drummer laying on the ride cymbal like a motherfucker, the band whipping themselves into a rumbling, effects-drenched din, a squalling acid-dirge with some seriously freaked guitar wig-out action that sounds like Earthless trudging laboriously through La Brea, then morphs into a demented caveman krautstomp the rest of the track.
The two performances on the second disc see the band getting into an even heavier mode, the first centering around a roaring, grinding mono-chord droneriff bulldozing over the saurian stomp of the drums, bits of sitar buzz sneaking through, the vocals way out in front now with wordless chants rising over the lumbering drugtrance. The other is much mellower, a lugubrious hypnodirge that starts off delicate and deeply brooding, slow solemn melodies crawling across plumes of black amp fog, the band plugged into a stoned ur-groove that's way more laid back than the previous sets, the sound still really heavy and rumbling, but wreathed in moaning voices, opium smoke and sinister intent.
The last disc features a single track, almost forty minutes long, that at first takes shape as another blurry psychedelic haze, the notes from the sitar cascading down in sheets of metallic shimmer, long black tendrils of amp-fog curling through the air, the band simply emitting a dense druggy dronehaze for the first few minutes. But then it begins to shift into something much heavier as the drums creep in, and those rumbling guitar drones coalesce into a massive oozing riff, turning into the heaviest jam on the whole set as Bong lumbers through this creepy, mesmeric doom-raga laced with high end guitar buzz and syrupy bass drift. Squalls of wild feedback soaked psychshred scream out of the swirling dopecloud, the sound sometimes threatening to collapse into total amp/drum destruction, or trailing off into stretches of near-formless narco-ambience, but always returning to that plodding, trance inducing heaviness, like a noise-soaked, low-fi fusion of Sleep and the scorched psychedelia of Burnt Hills.
For fans of the narcotized psychdoom and mantra metal of bands like Queen Elephantine, Sleep, Electric Wizard, and Om. Limited to three hundred copies, packaged in a triple-disc dvd case with printed inserts.
Idle Days On The Yann is but one of many new records to have come out in the past few months from dope-fueled UK dronemetallers Bong, a band whose live performances are so filled with exploratory improvisation and deeply wasted formless heaviness that their live recordings are just as sought after as their studio creations. Yann is the latest slab of saurian psychedelia from band, taking its title from the work of legendary Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, an ongoing influence on the band's weird dreamworld visions. I can't get enough of their intoxicating combination of droning, improv-heavy psych-doom, macabre imagery steeped in early twentieth century weird lit, and mesmeric classical Indian music; along with Queen Elephantine, these guys are crafting some of the most delirious drug-induced heaviness you're going to find.
This new LP features a single forty-plus minute song that is spread across the two sides of the record, beginning in typical Bong fashion with a soft haze of shimmering distant amp-whirr and rumbling bass, the wah-drenched psych guitars tumbling through the void, joined by the shimmer and buzz of Ben Freeth's droning sitar and the electrified thrum of his shahi baaja (a kind of amplified, modified Indian zither that has appeared throughout Bong's recordings), these sounds curling and coiling through the opium-den ambience of the first few minutes of the album. Eventually, this drugged-out haze of low-end rumble and metallic drone is joined by the wailing vocals of guest vocalist Holly Forster, her ghostly voice slowly drifting in as a series of ecstatic, prayer-like exultations that echo across through the depths of Bong's glacial psychedelia, and later, an even heavier rumbling presence begins to ever so slowly materialize across the length of the first side, a vast low-end drone that trembles through the muted, spaced-out roar amid waves of amplified Earthen raga-drone pulsating deep in the mix, becoming an almost orchestral wash of sound that, by the end of the first side, begins to really rattle your speakers.
The whole first half of the record is super abstract, eerie and atmospheric, with Forster's wordless, haunting cries a near constant presence echoing across this spaced-out raga-doom. But once the second side starts up, the music almost immediately begins to shift into something more propulsive, the vocals beginning to burn off as the entire rhythm section finally comes alive, heaving forward into an agonizingly slow processional pulse, the whole band shifting into a sinister cosmic dirge that begins to take over the album. The shahi baaja pulses within the billowing blackness like some warped electric piano, the phantasmal notes echoing over pounding slo-mo drums and creeping riffage, and it definitely feels as if you are listening to a band playing together in a live situation, the performance feeling really organic, almost similar to a free-jazz album, even as this crawls forward as a slow shambling psych rock fog that spreads out across the entire second side, emitting vast plumes of heavy droning dream-music weighed down with that rumbling amplifier drone, with no sense of resolution, the band simply descending slowly and languidly into oblivion.
While not as experimental and improvisational as Queen Elephantine, Gnod, Cosmic Dead or Naam, nor as doom-laden as bands like Whitebuzz or Sons Of Otis, Bong inhabits a strange, mystically-charged abyss of their own, though fans of all of that stuff would do well to check out this and all of the rest of the void-crawling heaviness that Bong has produced. Limited to seven hundred copies on 180 gram vinyl, and includes a digital download of the album.
Just got the latest CD reissue of the band's self titled 2009 debut back in stock; Bong are one of the best bands out there right now deconstructing Sabbath's end-time deathmarch into its most potent residual matter, and in just the past few years have become high priests of psychedelic sludge in their native UK. The band crafts a massive, earth-shaking sound that takes the blackened drugged out doom of Dopethrone, stretches it out and strips it down into an even heavier psilocybin -fueled delirium of slow-motion riffage, elephantine percussion and utterly wasted vocal excess, smeared with the sounds of classical Indian instruments like sitar and shahi baaja to evoke a raga-like feel within their churning drugdoom.
Bong's self-titled debut first came out as a limited edition LP a few years ago, featuring the two monolithic side long songs "Wizards Of Krull" and "The Starlit Grotto"; much like the mighty 'Wiz, the guys in Bong are obviously heavy into the same mixture of influences, bringing together elements of classic weird literature and dark fantasy, Indian classical music, extended droning metal jams and immense down-tuned heaviness to create their hypnotic lumbering sound. With the CD format, these original tracks are now presented in untruncated form, unhindered by the space restrictions of the original vinyl release, and are joined by a third bonus track "Asleep" which itself runs nearly twenty minutes in length. Their intoxicating blend of surreal black fantasy and rumbling saurian psychedelia swings into full gear here.
The first song "Wizards Of Krull" opens up with the band lurching into their signature slow motion sludginess, the drummer pounding away slowly but furiously behind the guitarist's billowing fog of wah-drenched soloing and spaced-out effects overload. Those guitars end up soaring waaaay out into Hawkwind-style space-psych territory, and turn this crushing behemoth riff into a kind of sinister slo-mo space rock in no time. After awhile, those riffs start to mutate into something more sinuous and serpentine, warped snake-charmer guitars winding around the simple, droning riffage. The whole sound is wreathed in heavy doses of reverb and echo, a spacious recording quality giving you the impression that you are right there in the room with the band has they summon up this amorphous black fog of heaviness, and when the vocals drop in, they materialize as a distant monotone chant that hovers in the background, a near wordless moan that drifts vaporously over the psychmetal crush, eventually disappearing into a stoned haze of improvised percussive clatter and rumbling amplifier drones.
When they pick back up with "The Starlit Grotto", it's with a minimal haze of soft amplifier hum and droning bass guitar notes, all abstract and rumbling psych-guitar drift floating through the band's black ether. The distorted drones undulate beneath the sounds of scraped guitar strings and scattered percussion, the track sprawling out into an expanse of near formless improvised amp-drone. After nearly ten minutes of that gloriously hypnotic rumble, though, the band eventually begins to coalesce into another one of their monstrous doom-riffs, the sound coming together slowly and gradually, shifting out of that vast rumbling raga-style buzz into an ominous Sabbathian crush; it's doesn't quite crash in with that heavier riff, but rather subtly transforming into an equally delirious groove that becomes slowly infused with the hypnotic twang of sitar-like strings and those deep chant-like vocals, billowing out even further into a psychedelic mass of sound at the end. A cacophony of spaced out drones and wild, fluttering flute-like melodies, crazed wah-drenched acid guitar meandering out beyond the edges of starlight, a monstrous shambling psychedelia, a subterranean ayahuasca ritual.
And then there's that last track "Asleep", pure molten heaviness pouring from yet another simple, crushing doom riff that the band plays into infinity, a lumbering, ramshackle hypno-sludge jam surrounded by more of that twangy sitar buzz and faint bursts of psychedelic guitar, a massive elliptical narco-crawl that slips into planet-devouring quasars of wah-pedal overload and crushing black synthesizer, about as terrible and tar-covered a space rock jam as you will ever hear...
Another massive slab of crucial, glacial drug-metal from these trogs, highly recommended. Comes in a four panel digipack.
��The latest album of grim, gargantuan slow-motion psychedelia from UK doomdrone demons Bong, Stoner Rock is obviously a tongue-in-cheek gesture from the band, poking fun at the unimaginative would-be music critics out there in webland and their feeble attempts at discussing and describing the band's music. You'd be hard pressed to find anything remotely "rocking" on a Bong album. The gorgeously evocative cover for Stoner Rock keeps up with the band's tradition of fantastic, Weird Tales-like album art, calling up visions of lost worlds, antediluvian religious sects, and ancient cyclopean architectures, an atmosphere of dark weird fantasy set to Bong's massive glacial psychedelia, formed around the vast rumble of severely downtuned guitars and crushing ritualistic drone. It's so much better than just another boring Sunn-clone, though, as these guys immerse their sound in immense layers of sonic delirium that draws equally from Indian classical influences, the electronic dreamworlds of German space music, even the meditative minimalism of Harold Budd and La Monte Young.
�� As with previous releases, Bong carve out two massive side-long tracks, expanding cloudscapes of rumbling ritualistic amplifier drone and downtuned guitar grind that sprawl out for well over half an hour each. The first, "Polaris", emerges amid an oceanic current of Sunn-esque amp-drift and massive bass tones that undulate in slow, casual movements deep in the mix, forming into a gorgeous wash of heavily layered low-frequency ambience. As that stoned smog formation slowly spreads out, deep chant-like vocals briefly appear, a half-spoken incantation that sounds like some malefic High Priest in the midst of ceremonial magick. A halting drumbeat starts to take form, a glacial plod that echoes in the background, bringing an agonizingly slow funeral procession feel to the music. By halfway through the track, you don't even realize that the titanic ur-chord that rumbled forth from the beginning of the song has made a subtle, elegant evolution into the haunting riff that now begins to grind across the latter half of the side, riding on waves of onyx synthdrift, vast kosmische Tangerine Dream-like drones that ripple through the lightless expanse. Surges of choral drift and deep wordless chanting loom out of the depths, later peeling back to reveal faint traces of spectral piano-like melody that tumbles endlessly through the fog.
�� The other track is only slightly more propulsive, the molten roar of a distorted power chord heralding the beginning of "Out Of The Aeons", which almost immediately shambles forward in a delirium of drone-metal riffage and syrupy sauropod drumming. No slow build to satori here, as the band erupts into a mesmeric mixture of sitar-like scales and damaged bluesy leads, all buried within the band's gargantuan psych-groove. On this song, Bong lulls the listener into a crushing, titanic trance with a rumbling heaviness that almost resembles a Sleep song that has been slowed down to half-speed, and then enshrouded in a cloud of raga-like drones and cosmic light.
�� Comes in digipack packaging.
���Finally got this monstrous slab of psychedelic dronecrush back in stock. It's one of the earlier live albums from British narco-psych heavies Bong, featuring massive live renditions of tracks off of their self-titled debut and their Beyond Ancient Space album, "Onward To Perdondaris" and "Wizards Of Krull". The recording was taken from their performance at the 2010 Roadburn Festival, where they unleashed their floor-rattling drone rituals and sprawling sludge jams on what sounds like a small but very enthusiastic gang of amplifier-drone junkies.
���If you already have those albums, you know what to expect: epic, bleary-eyed drone-jams that stretch out for a half hour or more, the music imbued with a strong Indian classical influence, the first track birthed from a murky haze of pulsating bass and soporific sitar and deranged slow-motion blues licks, a thick fog of druggy delirium and endless delay that sprawls out across the whole first half of the disc. A deep dramatic male voice enters in over all of the stoned noodling and low-end rumble, reciting a brief bit of mumbo jumbo seemingly read out of an ancient issue of Weird Tales right before the whole band drops into the massive intoxicated groove that proceeds to dominate the rest of the song. And from there, the first half of their set spreads out into an ever-expanding ocean of drugged-out psychdrone and meandering sitar shimmer, a vast mind-melting dronescape of rumbling bass and slow-motion drumming that continues to struggle to accelerate against that inescapable opiate fog. Creepy liturgical chanting drifts in out of the shadows, for a brief moment resembling some weird cross between Jocelyn Pook's "Masked Ball" and Electric Wizard's utterly wasted and pitch-black Sabbathian crawl. That flows right into "Wizards" on a wave of black cosmic sludge, stretching out the original into an even more spacious and sinister sprawl of sitar-flecked improvised doom that eventually gives way to a monstrous motorik groove, a colossal krautrock-like propulsion that is considerably more driving than the original album version, and is in fact probably the most "rocking" thing I've ever heard from Bong.
��� Like everything else that these guys do, this stuff will bore the pants off of more ADD-afflicted listeners, but if you've got a thing for the slowest, heaviest strains of zonked-out black psychedelia, Bong are undoubtedly one of the best, dragging the most droning forms of Hawkwindian cosmic sludge down into a dim, dank abyss of Sunn-like death ragas and blood-cult ceremonies. And like most of the other Roadburn live albums that I've picked up, it's dressed up in a striking digipack package that features artwork and graphic design from Mories of Gnaw Their Tongues / Cloak Of Altering / Aderlating / Mors Sonat infamy.
The latest roar of monolithic doomdrone from the mighty Bong is another two-song exercise in longform psychcrush, each track taking up an entire side of the record. That seems to be the modus operandi for most of this British outfits releases, exploring their rumbling slow-motion spaciness through massively drawn-out walls of sound, but it works terrifically. As with their other recent output, We Are... is carved out of monolithic towering, terrible slabs of molten metallic rumble and vast psychedelic drift, continuing to combine classic space rock and kosmische drift with earth-shaking metallic psych-crush better than anyone.
The trance-state begins immediately as soon as that massive, distorted guitar drone trumpets across the opening seconds of "Time Regained", a vast and fearsome roar of churning ur-riff heaviness that's also slightly muffled, a huge Sunn-esque churn hazed by streaks of spacey electronics and slowly joined by the drummer's languid backbeat. Again, Bong proceeds to do a lot with very little, letting this mammoth drone-rock jam billow out for nearly twenty minutes, never releasing that single monochord roar that throbs at the center of the music like a malignant engine, tracing the sound with those bleary psych-guitar figures and the slowly propulsive groove of the rhythm section, the singer eventually drifting in with his monotone chant. The whole thing creeps further out into the interstellar void, eventually abandoning the drums completely as they finally go floating out into oblivion, adrift on waves of black wah-drenched amplifier roar.
The spoken word piece that opens "Find Your Own Gods" evokes the feel of classic British fantasy, an influence that's popped up in other Bong works and helps give their stuff a uniquely esoteric vibe; it's almost like something from Arthur Machen being read over a field of glimmering, black stardrift slowly unfolding into another lush, rumbling doomscape. The track also takes on a more cinematic feel, with heavy layers of dramatic, ominous synth flowing over the beginning like a Tangerine Dream score, flecked with delay-drenched guitar and pulses of hypnotic bass. A menacing, minimal riff takes form alongside the patter of hand drums, and it evolves into a striking piece of dark, dolorous psychedelia, a gorgeous opiated space-metal epic slowed down to glacial crawl, enveloping and intoxicating as it teases at erupting into something even more obliterating.
Available on both digipak CD and 180 gram vinyl.
���� The latest roar of monolithic doomdrone from the mighty Bong is another two-song exercise in longform psychcrush, each track taking up an entire side of the record. That seems to be the modus operandi for most of this British outfits releases, exploring their rumbling slow-motion spaciness through massively drawn-out walls of sound, but it works terrifically. As with their other recent output, We Are... is carved out of monolithic towering, terrible slabs of molten metallic rumble and vast psychedelic drift, continuing to combine classic space rock and kosmische drift with earth-shaking metallic psych-crush better than anyone.
���� The trance-state begins immediately as soon as that massive, distorted guitar drone trumpets across the opening seconds of "Time Regained", a vast and fearsome roar of churning ur-riff heaviness that's also slightly muffled, a huge Sunn-esque churn hazed by streaks of spacey electronics and slowly joined by the drummer's languid backbeat. Again, Bong proceeds to do a lot with very little, letting this mammoth drone-rock jam billow out for nearly twenty minutes, never releasing that single monochord roar that throbs at the center of the music like a malignant engine, tracing the sound with those bleary psych-guitar figures and the slowly propulsive groove of the rhythm section, the singer eventually drifting in with his monotone chant. The whole thing creeps further out into the interstellar void, eventually abandoning the drums completely as they finally go floating out into oblivion, adrift on waves of black wah-drenched amplifier roar.
���� The spoken word piece that opens "Find Your Own Gods" evokes the feel of classic British fantasy, an influence that's popped up in other Bong works and helps give their stuff a uniquely esoteric vibe; it's almost like something from Arthur Machen being read over a field of glimmering, black stardrift slowly unfolding into another lush, rumbling doomscape. The track also takes on a more cinematic feel, with heavy layers of dramatic, ominous synth flowing over the beginning like a Tangerine Dream score, flecked with delay-drenched guitar and pulses of hypnotic bass. A menacing, minimal riff takes form alongside the patter of hand drums, and it evolves into a striking piece of dark, dolorous psychedelia, a gorgeous opiated space-metal epic slowed down to glacial crawl, enveloping and intoxicating as it teases at erupting into something even more obliterating.
���� Available on both digipak CD and 180 gram vinyl.
This album from the master of jungle / extreme metal / breakcore alchemy and raver apocalypse came out back in 2005, but we just found some of the limited vinyl edition of this killer album that combines overt metal imagery and heaviness with spastic, schizoid breakbeat holocausts. The perverse tinges of house music and old-school hip hop that worm their way into Bong-Ra's massive raggacore grooves and hyperkinetic drum n bass don't dilute the dark vibe that permeates this album one bit, and while Hellfire isn't as blindingly fast as some of his stuff, this has some of the heaviest, slowest grooves we've heard from 'em, and even includes some of the smatterings of metallic crunch that has appeared with increasing frequency in Bong-Ra's recordings.
Opener "Skool Ov Violence" blends a heavy techno-groove with old school synths and scratching, later mixing in chirpy 8-bit video game sounds that are wrapped around thick buzzing bass lines and frenetic jungle breaks. Then it slows down for "Redrum", where the sound coagulates into a leaden raggacore groove with aggressive, ominous flow from producer/MC Mike Redman. "White Horse Come Soon" is a crushing, instrumental industrial-metal/electro hybrid, followed by the skittery, seething industrial dubstep / drum n' bass assault of "Go Tiger!" that features the bratty vocals of Hanin Elias (formerly of Atari Teenage Riot) and the splattery chopped-up jungle hysteria of "Bert Is Evil", which showcases the moody, androgynous singing of Luca Venezia (aka Drop The Lime), which momentarily shifts the album into a smoky, surreal atmosphere. The last b-side track gets back into pure aggression with the brutal dystopian dancehall and massive boom-bap thump of "The Claw", where Ras Bumpa's furious rapid toasting is intercut with sampled jaguar screams over the rumbling apocalyptic groove.
The second Lp begins with a dreamlike intro of children's voices and ethereal drift that segues into the fractured ragga of "Crack In The Mirror", with guest vocals from MC Quest One. Mike Redman returns with more of his aggro flow on "Pop That Cristal"'s dark raga / hip-hop / jungle heaviness, followed with the old school drum n bass of "Kill The Sound" and the somber, jazz-flecked "Serpent Tongue For The Blues". The final track "Come Out To Play" is probably the fiercest and darkest here, centering around a grim, almost Godflesh-like guitar riff that's laid over a chilly down tempo trip-hop groove fused with bursts of pummeling breakbeats and blown-out synth-bass, eventually morphing into warped chiptune-laced gabber and sampled lines from The Warriors.
Essential for fans of malevolent, apocalyptic drum n' bass / raga / breakcore.
Another raging blast of blackened breakcore weirdness from the Zhark imprint, this time it's a 12" from Dutch breakcore beast Bong-Ra called Vitus Blister. It's been out for awhile, but since Bong-Ra's more evil sounding records aren't very well known outside of the aggro drum n' bass scene, we're trying to stock what we can for those more adventurous fans of dark, heavy electronic music.
Vitus Blister is a very different creature from the hyperkinetic breakcore and brutal ragga mania that Bong-Ra usually does. The beats on this record are as manic and frenzied and choppy as I expected them to be, but he combines them with haunting Gothic string sections, thick swathes of creepy and cinematic horror-movie ambience, deranged vocal samples, moaning choirs and demonic voices. Instead of incorporating crushing death metal guitars as he did on the Grindkrusher Lp, here it's a more abstract and nightmarish blend of evil, warped strings and agonized voices over spastic shuddering beats and mangled breaks.
There are four tracks here, beginning with the surreal "Naai De Duivel In Z'n Reet"; spastic drums are splattered and strewn chaotically across a nightmarish soundscape, broken with massive stuttering loops and constant, violently shifting rhythms a la Shitmat, torrential drum fills looped around into heart-attack snare rushes over a harrowing slasher soundtrack. The following track "La Plume De Ma Tante" mixes monstrous bass swells and hellish ambience into another infectious, crazed splatterbreak orgy. On the flipside, "Nomina Nuda Tenemus" proceeds with a nightmare of anarchic drum n' bass and swells of My Bloody Valentine-like orchestral sound and agonized screaming, followed by glitchy hyperfast skitter surrounded by vast black ambience on " Zumo De Mis Cojones Oscuro".
It doesn't make any sense to call this "dance music", unless your idea of dance music is attending a breakcore event being held in the bowels of an insane asylum while DJs mash up Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre with blood-splattered breakcore dubplates. This is seriously malevolent music, and recommended to those into the darkest, most depraved edges of occult drum n' bass.
Comes in a printed DJ style diecut jacket.
Another WAY OUT OF PRINT find, this one from the long-gone Thunder Lizard label from 1997. How do we find this stuff? Released in 1997, this features
two tracks recorded right before the band would deliver their first album for Relapse, Methods For Attaining Extreme Altitudes. "Hemp For Victory"
is one of the band's quintessential pro-dope anthems, a pummeling slo-mo dirge, deep, virtually death-metal style vocals over an endlessly repeating hypno-
riff that later gives way to a ponderous all-crushing Sabbath groove. Slow, relentless, punishing sludgecore. On the flipside, Bongzilla drop "Smoke", a more
psychedelic oozer from the Hawkwind-inspired end of the camp that coats snarling cries of 'Smoke!' in delay and gooey resin and send's em spinning over a
wasted sludge n' drone dirge swirling with film samples, feedback, hammering industrial strength drum workouts and clanging percussion, and droning doom
riffs stretched out to infinity. This, without a doubt, is the single most psychedelic and mind warping piece of music that these guys ever came up with.
The copies of Hemp For Victory that we got are on green vinyl, and have the large center hole (so if you pick this up, make sure you have an
adapter!). We picked up some of the last ever copies of this rare record from someone affiliated with the label, and once these are gone that's gonna be it.
Before you Bongzilla fans scramble for the "buy" button, take note: Nuggets is actually a redesigned and renamed reissue of their Shake: The Singles collection CD that went out of print over a year ago. However, and I know this'll aggravate any diehard Bongzilla fans out there that already own Shake, this redux of Bongzilla's collection of out of print singles contains three additional tracks that didn't appear on the original CD. Here's what this one has: fifteen tracks of lumbering, super heavy stoner sludge with spacey fx and fronted by vicious torn-larynx screams, and completely and wholly obsessed with pot and marijuana culture. Primal, resin-coated sludgecore from the Wisconsin sludgelords....the tunes featured here are bit more raw and simple compared to their later albums like Gateway, though some of these tracks ('Smoke', 'Budgun/THC') are also some of their trippiest jams, with lots of killer Monster Magnet style space fx shot through their bluesy swamp metal dirges.
This collection features Bongzilla's tracks from their Mixed Bag 78" on Rhetoric, the 5 Bong Hits demo, the Hemp For Victory 7", their splits with Cavity, Meatjack, Hellchild, and their tracks from the Painkiller II, Assassins, Nothing Records, and Twin Threat To Your Sanity and He's No Good To Me Dead compilations; the tracks from these last two compilations are the ones that didn't appear on the original Shake collection.
Crucial for fans of Bongzilla and druggy, ultraheavy sludge metal a la Corrupted, Eyehategod, Weedeater, early Boris, Church Of Misery, Buzzoven, Fistula, etc. Comes with new artwork, too.
Vinyl collecting sludge fans, prepare to bug out - we just located a small stash of this long out of print 7" featuring an exclusive song each from sludgecore dopelords Bongzilla and the Japanese deathcore band Hellchild. This EP has been out of print and unavailable for years, but we found some of these hidden away in the warehouse of one of our distributors and were able to pick them up for Crucial Blast. These are pricey for a 7" but our cost for them was pretty high, and no matter how you slice it, we're offering them at a much cheaper price than you'll likely find it going for on Ebay. And this EP is a scorcher: Bongzilla drop a screeching, bluesy sludge jam recorded by Steve Austin from Today Is The Day, and it's called "Witch Weed", which I can only imagine is an ode to one of their preferred strains of marijuana. Sickening, strained screams and slow, crushing swamp riffs recall Eyehategod, but Bongzilla always had a crustier tone that made them a fave among fans of
sludgecore, doom, and crust.
Hellchild's contribution is "Voice From Far Away", and from the opening blast of chugging, ultra detuned death metal riffage reminds the listener that these guys are one of the heaviest goddamn bands on the planet. Churning, slightly funky and devestatingly heavy death metal combines with bursts of mid tempo rock and atmospheric arpeggios and guitar textures make this jam a fucking destroyer. These guys take the brutal deathcore and grind sound of bands like All Out War and Disassociate, made it a little more progressive with inventive guitar work and rhythmic patterns.
This 7" was released by HG Fact, the same label that has brought us all of the Corrupted albums and that recent featured release from Noise A Go Go's as well as ton of other awesome Japanese bands; the record is on black vinyl and comes in a full color sleeve.
Remember Teen Cthulhu? I sure do. Aside from having one of the best band names ever, their only album, Ride The Blade, was an awesome,
mutant mixture of DIY sympho-blackness a la early Cradle Of Filth and the brutal buzzsaw powerviolence of Infest, and it was one of the best fucking albums
to come out of the "extreme hardcore" scene of the past decade. When are we going to see a discography of that stuff, guys? Seriously? Well, while I grind my
teeth hoping that the Teen Cthulhu back catalog will one day make it's way into my mitts, at least I can incur some serious whiplash with Book Of Black
Earth's The Feast. Formed out of the ashes of Teen Cthulhu in 2003, this Seattle warcrust machine follows up their split album with Fall Of The
Bastards with this debut full length. And this is seriously heavy shit, a blackened death metal assault with loads of boiling double bass drumming, Nordic
black metal moves, crusty grindcore, epic keyboards, TJ Cowgill's awesomely deep n' gutteral vocals, monstrous blackened doom, even a grinding industrial
dirge in "Let Us Worship The Dead". But really melodic too - they actually kind of remind me of the old Crucial Blast band All Is Suffering with their
seamless fusion of black metal, grindcore, and epic doom. Killer artwork too, and the disc comes in a O-card enclosed case. Highly recommended!
Heres the new limited edition (only 500 pressed) vinyl release of Book Of Black Earth's awesome blackcrust debut, on black vinyl in a glossy jacket with full color printed inner sleeve.
Remember Teen Cthulhu? I sure do. Aside from having one of the best band names ever, their only album, Ride The Blade, was an awesome, mutant mixture of DIY sympho-blackness a la early Cradle Of Filth and the brutal buzzsaw powerviolence of Infest, and it was one of the best fucking albums to come out of the "extreme hardcore" scene of the past decade. When are we going to see a discography of that stuff, guys? Seriously? Well, while I grind my teeth hoping that the Teen Cthulhu back catalog will one day make it's way into my mitts, at least I can incur some serious whiplash with Book Of Black Earth's The Feast. Formed out of the ashes of Teen Cthulhu in 2003, this Seattle warcrust machine follows up their split album with Fall Of The Bastards with this debut full length. And this is seriously heavy shit, a blackened death metal assault with loads of boiling double bass drumming, Nordic black metal moves, crusty grindcore, epic keyboards, TJ Cowgill's awesomely deep n' gutteral vocals, monstrous blackened doom, even a grinding industrial dirge in "Let Us Worship The Dead". But really melodic too - they actually kind of remind me of the old Crucial Blast band All Is Suffering with their seamless fusion of black metal, grindcore, and epic doom. Killer artwork too, highly recommended!
It took me long enough, but we've finally managed to get the entire available catalog of Borbetomagus releases on Agaric Records catalog in stock at the 'Blast. And for anyone looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms", three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus. A host of their recording have been reissued recently, many with liner notes, and we've snagged everything that we could
from the guys so there's absolutely no excuse for any of you into brutal noise and improv to not fill out your Borbeto collection.
1983's Barbed Wire Maggots might have the most wicked album title off any "jazz" slab ever. It certainly conjures up the gnarly images that Borbetomagus' brutal skronk attack invokes. Their fourth album, Maggots has the trio further exploring their abrasive improv; Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich use their saxophones to emit a terrifying litany of screeches and screams, reedy whispers and labored breathing, while guitarist Donald Miller inverts his axe and pours forth grating distorted amp sludge and skree. Two side-long tracks of crushing improvised noise and "snuff jazz", recorded in '82 at In-Roads in New York City. Not even close to an easy listen, this is some of the most abrasive, bonescraping free jazz ever recorded, and when the group really reach the heights of ecstatic blast, it feels like you're hearing the very hinges of the universe turning on rusted metal. This album was also the first one to feature Miller's excellent acid-damaged artwork that
recalls a darker, nightmarish version of Terry Gilliam's art, which I'm shocked that no black metal outfit has ever attempted to crib notes from. This reissue disc comes with liner notes from Forced Exposure/Arthur Magazine scribe Byron COley, too.
It took me long enough, but we've finally managed to get the entire available catalog of Borbetomagus releases on Agaric Records catalog in stock at the 'Blast. And for anyone looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms", three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus. A host of their recording have been reissued recently, many with liner notes, and we've snagged everything that we could
from the guys so there's absolutely no excuse for any of you into brutal noise and improv to not fill out your Borbeto collection.
The very first Borbeto album from 1980 is probably their least challenging, with an undercurrent of droning electronics and guitar that makes their dissonant improvisations a little easier on virgin ears, but even at the dawn of the group's creation, Borbeto sought to destroy. Back then, the band included Brian Doherty on electronics, and his contributions of squelchy noise and concrete sounds add a whole 'nother level to their sound. Something else that marks this album is Miller's guitar playing, which is surprisingly some of the heaviest sounding axe noise the man emitted throughout their catalog. Parts of this album actually remind me a little of Matt Bower's Total if that project has been joined by frenetic free jazz skronk informed by Coltrane and Ayler. There's five tracks, numbered "Concordat" one through five, and this CD reissue of the album also has a previously unlreleased track titled "Lost COncordat". Corrosive, sludgy guitar noise and spacey electronic bleepa
ge becomes intertwined with blackened textures befitting early Industrial moves and strafed and splattered by the prowling sax bleats. More seething and dramatic than the block-razing death jazz blowouts that the band would define themselves by later in the decade, Sauter, Dietrich, Miller, Doherty (1980) is an excellent starting off point for anyone looking to check out Borbetomagus, and is also a highly recommended slab for fans of free-jazz accompanied, distorted freeform guitar noise.
It took me long enough, but we've finally managed to get the entire available catalog of Borbetomagus releases on Agaric Records catalog in stock at the 'Blast. And for anyone looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms", three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus. A host of their recording have been reissued recently, many with liner notes, and we've snagged everything that we could
from the guys so there's absolutely no excuse for any of you into brutal noise and improv to not fill out your Borbeto collection.
A crucial CD reissue of Borbetomagus' third album, which was originally released in a limited vinyl pressing of 500 LPs. Four tracks of ferocious jazz improv, recorded from 1979 through 1981 at various locations in New York and New Jersey. Live and in the flesh, these performances see the trio diving headfirst into vast fields of extreme sound and volume, and each of the long jams explore a variety of textures and overtones and tension. Dying screams are pulled by the roots out of the saxophones, and distorted guitar grunt is melted down into black tar. Like all of Borbetomagus' albums, you've gotta spin thi at top volume to actually get your head around it. At thunderous levels, the reeds and amplifier ooze swirl together into a heavily textured miasma of skronk and skree, breath blasted into rubber hosing and tubes that are fitted onto the horns in order to extend their reach, and then fed through a bank of distortion and effects, Miller's tabletop guitar is abused by all
manner of metal bars, toys, and other objects. The third track on here is legendary, a set from Bergen Community College in 1981 where Borbetomagus proceeded to demolish a frathouse dinner party that was expecting something much more polite. Crucial.
It took me long enough, but we've finally managed to get the entire available catalog of Borbetomagus releases on Agaric Records catalog in stock at the 'Blast. And for anyone looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms", three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus. A host of their recording have been reissued recently, many with liner notes, and we've snagged everything that we could
from the guys so there's absolutely no excuse for any of you into brutal noise and improv to not fill out your Borbeto collection.
Along with nall of the currently available CD titles from Borbetomagus that we are now stocking, we also received a small quantity of this rare, out-of-print 7" that was released by the unfortunately named Butt Rag Records, a tiny imprint out of Chicago that has long since folded (as far as I can discern), but which did happen to issue this brutal l'il platter. Each side of the EP features a different renditon of the piece "Coelacanth" recorded by the core Borbetomagus trio of Don Dietrich, Jim Sauter, and Donald Miller, one from 1992 and the other from 1993. It's horrific screeching skronk, the saxophones emitting shrill bleats and rusted overtones together, way up in the high registers, and Miller's guitar noise is less apparent here, heard as a vague background rumble. This is harsh stuff, even by their standards; by the time you've flipped over to the b-side, Borbetomagus have completely channeled the sound of the universe turning on prehistoric rusty hinges, a massive
cacophony of skree that slices right through your brain. It's only at the end that the group suddenly comes back to earth, suddenly emitting a short burst of clanging guitar chords that ring out over a malformed, monstrous melodic fragment that sputters and dies as quickly as it was born.
It took me long enough, but we've finally managed to get the entire available catalog of Borbetomagus releases on Agaric Records catalog in stock at the 'Blast. And for anyone looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms", three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus. A host of their recording have been reissued recently, many with liner notes, and we've snagged everything that we could
from the guys so there's absolutely no excuse for any of you into brutal noise and improv to not fill out your Borbeto collection.
Don't let the kitschy cover fool you - Experience The Magic is the harshest album in the Borbeto catalog. This early 90's live album from the Borbeto trio was recorded over two different performances at CBGB's in New York City in 1993, and the two half-hour long tracks ("Bathed In The Blood Of The Lamb" and "Grunion Run") are total blowouts. What makes this recording so extreme is the mix...whoever captured these guys on tape decided to keep the trebleand midrange levels way in the red, so Dietrich and Sauter's blasts of sax sound even more searing and white-hot than usual. And their energy is through the roof on both of these cuts...blasting primal skronk heard through a haze of white noise, amplified and vicious. Jesus, the end of "Bathed" reaches levels of overload that actually start to resemble the harshest Japanese noise jams. These guys are without a doubt the only "jazz" group that could even garner such a comparison. Brutal!
It took me long enough, but we've finally managed to get the entire available catalog of Borbetomagus releases on Agaric Records catalog in stock at the 'Blast. And for anyone looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms", three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus. A host of their recording have been reissued recently, many with liner notes, and we've snagged everything that we could
from the guys so there's absolutely no excuse for any of you into brutal noise and improv to not fill out your Borbeto collection.
First released on cassette from Lowlife and long unavailable, this new reissue of Live In Allentown features the original 32 minute rampage that appeared on the tape and also includes an entire second set from that late October night in 1986. This live performance was captured during the group's brief quartet phase when bassist Adam Nodelman was a member, and the additional low end adds some serious crunchy heft to the two jams. Massive plumes of crimson sax screech and horrific low chords fill the room, the members of Borbetomagus wearing demonic Halloween masks, crunchy mangled guitar noise and snakey feedback lines slithering through loops of electronic noise and nonsensical shouting. Formless, on-the-spot violence. Completely brain-wasting; this set is so annihilating that it's taken a solid slot as my favorite Borbetomagus recording. This CD reissue has a punchy remastering that sets the band right in front of your face and squashes you flat, and the packaging
includes some terrific liner notes from avant-blast scribe Phil Freeman. Beyond recommended.
It took me long enough, but we've finally managed to get the entire available catalog of Borbetomagus releases on Agaric Records catalog in stock at the 'Blast. And for anyone looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms", three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus. A host of their recording have been reissued recently, many with liner notes, and we've snagged everything that we could
from the guys so there's absolutely no excuse for any of you into brutal noise and improv to not fill out your Borbeto collection.
One of the few Borbetomagus albums to feature a bass player, Seven Reasons For Tears has the trio bringing in Adam Nodelman on bass, and the result is one of the group's most crushing, murderous sessions. Recorded in 1987, Borbetomagus were at this point fully enthralled with the power of their high-volume skree assaults, and the seven untitled tracks on Tears match their winding freeform skronk orgasms with a massive stream of low frequency and distortion. It's one of my fave albums of theirs, and was reissued by Agaric after the first release on the Purge/Sound League label went out of print; the booklet itself contains a review of the album that Byron Coley wrote for his Forced Exposure magazine that positions the disc as one of their most crucial slabs of radioactive snuff jazz. Highly recommended!
It took me long enough, but we've finally managed to get the entire available catalog of Borbetomagus releases on Agaric Records catalog in stock at the 'Blast. And for anyone looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms", three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus. A host of their recording have been reissued recently, many with liner notes, and we've snagged everything that we could
from the guys so there's absolutely no excuse for any of you into brutal noise and improv to not fill out your Borbeto collection.
Songs Our Mother Taught Us saw the Borbeto destruction squad returning after a couple of years of silence; the 2000 album from the upstate New York guitar/sax/sax trio toured the UK in 1999 and documented the trip with this three track album. The first track "Aftershock" is a crushing wall of locked-horn sax noise and distorted guitar skronk that was recorded live in Glasgow, Scotland at the 13th Note, and it's a skullmasher. The following two tracks, the thrity-four minute title track and "After Aftershock" were captured at the Spitz in London. The 90's didn't soften up these maniacs one bit, as the entire set is full on, freaked out nuclear strength free jazz blasting at disintegrating levels of volume and distortion. A gorgeous, mind-wasting wave of infernal death-skree spurting from a zone of pure spontaneous energy, the FX-wrecked saxophones locking their bells together and emitting squonk and squeal that sounds virtually prehistoric, while Miller rips bruisin
g deformed riffage out of his axe. Recommended.
FUCK YES !!! Whenever some schmuck asks me what the hell I'm talking about when I start blubbering about "brutal jazz" in one of my inebriated fugs, this is the album that I'd like to mash in his face. It's just total malevolence - the album cover with the blurry photo of a man in a bloodsoaked white t-shirt holding a handgun to his chest, the pulverising skree lasered onto the surface of this motherfucker, the sinister title.
If yer looking for thee most brutal free jazz band on the planet, look no further: Borbetomagus, a Celtic word for "City Of Worms". Three men locking saxophones and guitar noise together into a blast of monstrous improvised skree that takes the feeling behind the aggressive free playing of Ayler and Brotzmann and amplifies it into total fucking napalm. The core trio of sax players Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and electric guitarist Donald Miller have been consistently bulldozing eardrums with their incendiary "snuff jazz" since the late 70's, and no one in the avant jazz/improv underground has ever come close to achieving the sheer cyclonic power of Borbetomagus.
The legendary, awesomely-titled Snuff Jazz first came out on vinyl in 1990, and featured two long untitled tracks that were recorded at ABC No Rio in New York City in 1988 and DC Space in Washington DC in 1989. Each of these roughly seventeen minute jams is a vicious improv blowout, recorded loud and in your face and in the red from start to finish. Two saxophones locked in bloody battle, spurting incendiary squonk and screeching brass deathbreath over a grinding subcurrent of damaged amplifier noise and scraped guitar abuse. It's the closest that jazz has ever gotten to the skull-imploding power of artists like Merzbow or early Napalm Death, pure destructive noise blasted at maximum levels of aggression and volume. Hoo man! Snuff Jazz has been out of print and highly sought after in collector circles for years, but Agaric has hooked it up with a brand new reissue that not only features the original vinyl tracks but also throws in a killer unreleased jam and the Untitled cassette that came with issue #3 of the Japanese magazine COS in 1990. All new digipack packaging with the legend "SNUFF JAZZ" embossed across the front cover in large raised lettering. Crucial!!!
As if it wasn't cool enough that the classic 1990 Borbetomagus album Snuff Jazz has just been reissued, we've also have a BRAND NEW Borbetomagus album called Borbetomagus: a Go Go, which features a complete live set from the legendary free-jazz trio of Jim Sauter, Don Dietrich, and Donald Miller performing at the Club Pezner in Villeurbanne, France in December 1998. Normally, I wouldn't get all excited over a new live album, but Borbetomagus have proven that they are one of the few bands out there that actually sound WAY heavier on their live recordings than they do in the studio. Live, the horns and guitar all melt together into one massive sonic stew instead of being seperated in the studio, creating a monstrous murky din like on their flesh-rending live album Live In Allentown. The 1998 performance captured on this disc is even more dense and brutal than that, and one of the main reasons is that guitarist Donald Miller is incredibly loud in the mix, his axe cranked way up and almost dominating the room. On past Borbeto albums, both live and studio, Donald's guitar tends to exist more in the background, creating a mangled surface of damaged amp noise and choked guitar skronk that the screeching saxophones of Don Dietrich and Jim Sauter surf across. Here, though, it sounds like there are dozens of guitars, every one of them cranked to maximum volume, vomiting vast torrents of grinding industrial noise and crushing distorted crunch, forming a brutal wall of symphonic feedback and amplifier roar that is simply skull-crushing when you crank this album up to the max. The first track "Chiote a l'espirt" is a 33 minute behemoth with searing sax chaos and awesome cetacean moans scrambling for purchase over a massive wall of low-end drone, and when the band really gets moving, they summon up a crushing, grating cacophony that sounds like gates of Hell being slowly pulled back as an army of howling Candarian demons rushes forth. That's followed by "Gestapo She Wolf Barbie", a shorter (at 14 minutes) but even heavier blastscape that sounds like a regular Borbeto jam being sloooooowed waaaay dooown into a syrupy miasma of hellish black machine clank and infinite brass screams. The final jam is called "We Were Done With The Judgement Of God Last Week" and crashes into a sickening freakout of scraped metal, weird processed horn sounds, and super-heavy guitar grind seperated into blocks of sound, tied together by fragments of surprisingly lyrical melody.
The prominent guitar noise on this live album sets it apart from most of Borbetomagus's catalog, and while this is most definitely the band in their full-on, bonecrushing "snuff jazz" mode with all dials set to eleven, the ultra-heavy guitar destruction on Borbetomagus A Go Go would probably appeal to fans of extreme guitar-based improv/noise too, even if they might have been turned off by the more high-end skree assaults of older Borbetomagus. While listening to this album I was reminded more than once of the heavy amp-blasting drone jams of bands like Skullflower, Total, Double Leopards, and Jazzfinger, and this Borbeto set definitely moves through some similiar territory of viscous, industrial-strength murk, caustic grind, and crushing sax-splattered drone. Might just be my new favorite Borbetomagus album, and for any of you Borbeto fans, this is obviously essential!
Unfortunately only available in size extra-large, this limited edition t-shirt is the only official shirt design that I've ever seen from these legendary brute-improv titans. Printed on a black Gildan tee (100% cotton preshrunk), the design features a classic live photo of the three members of Borbetomagus in action, with the band name and legend "Changing Lives Since 1979" emblazoned across the bottom of the image. Only have a handful of these in stock, so move quick if you're a fan of the snuff-jazz masters and want to nab this shirt.
One of the few Borbetomagus releases that I've picked up that's not on their own Agaric label, this limited live Lp from the NY blast-jazz noise beasts looks like a private press edition with it's stickered white sleeve and Xeroxed inserts. Wherever this rare disc came from, it's brutal. The two sides document a live assault that Borbetomagus perpetrated on an audience at the Destroy All Music Festival in Atlanta, GA in 2004, featuring the classic trio formation of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich, and guitarist Donald Miller. If you know Borbeto, you know not to expect anything resembling a "song"; the band unleashes two side-long powerblasts of "snuff jazz" made up of extreme blasts of saxophone shriek and lower register bellowing that is so abrasive and head-crushing that it completely leaves the realm of "free jazz". The dueling horns howl and roar and scream at levels of volume so great that you envision the walls of the performace space cracking and crumbling down in a crush of concrete and splintered wood on top of the crowd. The whole first side of the Lp captures Borbeto in full-force destructo mode, dishing out an assaultive wall of free-form cacophony that would blow back the hair on any fan of Hijokaidan, K2 and Cock ESP. Some of the deeper lowing sax tones heard here even start to resemble the deep buzzing drone of a didgeridoo in a couple of spots when the band drops into one of their less abusive passages of simmering improv noise. While the saxophones spit gasoline and blood across the stage, Miller jams his fist into his axe and pulls out great big gobfulls of squirming feedback and distorted stringscrape, the guitar seeming to choke on it's own steaming guts. Over on the second side, they move into a slightly less abusive stretch of groaning horns and screeching industrial guitar with lots of those aforementioned didgeridoo-like low-end drones emerging throughout the performance. But on the last five minutes or so, the band hurtles back into the closest that they approach "jazz" on this set, with a furious skronkfest that sounds like an Ayler performance on massive amounts of crystal meth with someone operating a malfunctioning shortwave radio transmitter and a concrete mixer off to the side. These guys have most definitely not calmed down with age. Released in a limited pressing of 500 copies.
Another new live recording from NY "snuff jazz" trio Borbetomagus, still one of the most punishing and extreme improvisational / free-jazz units on the planet. This nuclear-strength performance from the trio of saxophonists Don Dietrich and Jim Sauter and guitarist Donald Miller was captured in 2009 when the band was performing at the final show of their European tour at Instants Chavirs in Montreuil, France, presented here as a single unbroken forty-six minute track.
Trente Belles Annees starts cracking skulls right out of the gate as the trio launch into a screeching tangled mess of over-modulated sax shriek and mangled guitar skronk. By minute three of the set, the band has sprayblasted your face off with some of the most distorted, skin-shredding blowing I've ever heard from a live Borbeto recording, while Miller continues to lay down a slippery abattoir-slop backdrop of mutated slide guitar and blown-the-fuck-out rock leads. These guys have never released a softball set in all of their thirty-plus years of playing, but man, this really is one of the most corrosive performances I've ever heard from Bormetomagus. They never, ever let up during this set, going from passages of wrecked noise that sounds like ancient mainframe computers being brutally fucked, to utterly deformed riffs crawling through non-stop volleys of manic sax trills, a seemingly infinite din of screeching reeds that start to sound like a thousand tape decks all malfunctioning at once, blurts of caveman Texas blues-twang that have been beaten into frightening, brain-damaged monstrosities, and waves of hypnotic feedback-drone that stretch out into infinity. After awhile, it's easy to forget that we're even listening to two saxophones and a guitar as their swirling maelstrom of sound becomes something truly alien, but even at this level of free-form chaos you can hear them communicating via their strange, intuitive language system. And even through all of this chaos, the horns still manage to work in some haunting jazzy lines into the performance, especially at the end, where traces of mournful melody and lonesome wheeze start to surface among the wreckage.
Still on par with the most destructive, violent noise set you'd get from a band like Incapacitants or Hijokaidan, the latter of which being the only other band on the planet that even comes close to the same level of improvisational carnage as these guys. Released on the band's own Agaric label, the disc comes with a booklet featuring liner notes on the Borbeto experience written by Dan Warburton from Paris Transatlantic.
2013 is starting to turn into a banner year for Borbeto fans. First we got that killer live album Trente Belles Ann�es earlier this year, a bulldozing recording of the legendary American "snuff-jazz"/extreme improv trio in action over in Europe from 2009, and now they've followed that right up with another new disc on Agaric, this one a reissue of the 1985 double Lp Zurich. Long out of print, this live album captures Borbetomagus performing at Rote Fabrik in Zurich, Switzerland sometime in late 1984, blasting their ferocious improvised sound directly into the skulls of a small but appreciative and receptive audience that seems to be lapping up each new blast-wave of nuclear-strength skronk that the band unleashes on 'em. Opening with the colossal "Fleetwood DeKooning", the trio of Donald Miller (Guitar, Alto Saxophone), Jim Sauter (Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone) and Don Dietrich (Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Guitar) launch into an epic length battle as the horn players jab and squeal breathlessly over Miller's corrosive guitar-scrape and layers of smeared feedback, a squirming mass of skronk that sounds like some hellish Sonny Sharrock jam being run backwards and in slow-motion through a broken down tape machine. Their playing shifts from forceful, full-on blasting with screaming high-register trills slicing thorough the air, to more subdued playing where their deep circular breathing techniques and waves of crackling drone take over, allowing for tiny fragments of melodious sound to creep through the violent blurt; though even at it's calmest, this track often ventures into agonizing frequencies that are as brutal as anything to have ever come out of the harsh noise underground.
The following five tracks are shorter pieces that also range from violent bouts of high end skree and locking bells, scraped guitar slime and wailing discordant chords, animalistic howls and shrill piercing tones, swarms of flesh-rending insectile buzz. Some of the tracks that left some particularly large bruises on my frontal lobe are "Fried Tampons", which begins with a buzzing swarm of charred guitar noise that could pass for something off of an early Earth record for a second, before the rest of the band rushes in with another vicious bleat-beating; and the two long pieces that close the album, "Nein Is The Loneliest Number" and the twenty minute quasi-reprise "Elaine DeFleetwood". The former sees the group unleashing massive waves of harmonic-drenched drone from their instruments, the sheets of howling discordance creating a strange seasick sound as the sound builds and billows outwards, transforming into burbling alien soundworld. The closer is a real show of brute force, a ceaseless blast of hardcore skronk and some seriously heavy, mangled guitar noise that pours out in a torrent of sludgy low-end axe-scrape and slippery, nauseating fret-board abuse oozing out of Miller's smoking amplifier, the horns interlocking into violent frantic screaming runs, ascending into a cacophony of violent noise that completely fills the room over the last half of the piece. As brutal as anything else in the band's catalog, Zurich still sounds as incendiary and extreme now as it did back in '85, and is available here for the first time ever on Cd, reissued with the original liner notes from Rev. Dr. Paul Laliberte along with photos from the performance.
Finnish musician Marko Neuman has been busy as hell lately. I'd been following his work previously via the assorted high-grade bands he has been in (Dark Buddha Rising, Overdose Support, Sum Of R, Ural Umbo, Waste Of Space Orchestra). But until very recently, I hadn't heard his noise project Boredom Knife. It made an impact on me, though. Checking out previous releases like the split with Crepuscular Entity on Basement Corner Emissions or the Your Pain Is Getting Worse tape on Bent Window introduced me to a cruel, cold strain of harsh noise, a form of deep-field black static, flecked with elements of power electronics and K2-style junk-avalanche. I was already getting deep into it when Neuman sent me his latest recording, Stalker.
This twenty-three-minute release pairs two corresponding pieces, "Envy" and "Snap", the first a long and winding chaos-channel into the doom-laden intensity of the second. The atmosphere around this release is felt in the cold stare, the mindless gaze, and the resulting vortex of emotional destruction that was written in the postures of celestial forms long before the final act of exterminating envy and dominance occurred. Lines cut through the star-map of lethal obsession. The predetermined hunt.
Boredom Knife's Stalker emits a cold, piercing gaze instantly, the first side "Envy" churning out a dense wall of hollowed-out drones, black static, bursts of corrosive hiss, and strange pulse-like rhythms buried deep within the core of this ghostly noisescape. While there's much to digest here for enthusiasts of the "wall", Neuman produces something much more complex and dramatic. Feedback and speaker-rumble are carefully probed and manipulated, vicious high frequency noise expressed through rivers of metallic skree that are easy to drown in. That first track gradually and deliberately evolves from the mechanical whirr, junk-style clatter, and mangled (but weirdly melodious) carnage at the beginning, morphing into a steady field of layered screech and endless hum, sharpened metal scrape and clusters of bizarre, almost subliminal gurgling that continue to resurface throughout the track. It conjures a hypnotic, possibly psychedelic state of sonic overwhelm, each layer of cruel noise obsessively carved and sculpted into a latter half of near-complete roar, before it finally circles back to a final stretch of rhythmic squelch, immutable drone, and hideous shattered distortion that resolves into a final noxious junk-loop at the end.
This brief bit of structured noise is instantly obliterated with the onset of the b-side "Snap". Everything is sucked inward, imploding in a vast mass of roaring, raging static. Some semblance of the humanity heard on the previous track is dragged to the surface and obliterated. This piece concludes Stalker with a blast of oppressive, dominating black static that remains almost constant over the entire runtime. Bits of machine-like jitter, traces of peripheral musicality, horrifying shrieks, it is all swirling inward, into itself, this titanic maelstrom of over-modulated electronics and eerie voice-like entities, teeth-grinding distortion, and covert structures of sound, all going down the drain forever. This is where Stalker really turns into something psychedelic, affecting your senses and your perception of the space around you as that chaos keeps seething and spinning, occasionally shooting out chunks of strange sonic debris and whiplash tentacles of high-end feedback. And then, for the first time, a volley of fearsome shrieks and howls come flying out of that chaos, incomprehensible screams of abject horror. Just for a moment, those nightmare distorted vocals blow your hair back, and it all suddenly collapses into itself, leaving you with a brief moment of deadened electrical thrum before it abruptly stops.
I've listened to a number of Boredom Knife releases, and while much of his material shares this tenacious sadism and auditory blast-violence, this one gives me the creeps. Stalker finds that blood-specked middle ground between the gargantuan murderous PE of Slogun, and the obliterating heaviosity of classic harsh noise.
The fact that three of the early Boredoms albums came out on Warner/Reprise in the 90's is still one of the oddest moves in major label history. How anything this crazy and weird and far-out got that kind of mainstream exposure is still pretty unbelievable, even by today's standards, the music of the Boredoms is anything but accessible. Early on, the band was influenced heavily by the wacko acid-punk of the Butthole Surfers, but they took it into far more extreme and cacophonous directions; any one of their songs could smash together random noises, raging hardcore punk, super noisy guitars, weird studio effects, crazy cartoon voices and random babbling, whipped into a frenzy of jarring, totally unpredictable arrangements. All three (Onanie Bomb Meets The Sex Pistols, Pop Tari, and Chocolate Synthesizer) eventually went out of print, but were later reissued on Very Friendly and are finally in stock here at C-Blast - the early, hardcore-laced Boredoms albums are my favorite releases in their canon (along with the classic Soul Discharge), and are prime for discovery for anyone new to their insane, psychedelic, speed-charged Bore-mania...one listen to any of these albums, and you'll hear where an entire generation of noisecore/noise rockers got their inspiration from...
Album number three from the Boredoms Pop Tari opens with the electro-shock of "Noise Ramones", which is nothing but extreme high-pitched tones layered on top of each other, then heads off into a warped realm of musical nonsense that occasionally comes close to actual song-like forms. There's loungey guitar on "Nice B-O-R-E Guy Boyoyo Touch" joined by softly mewling vocals and weird casio pop that could almost be described as catchy, but it's not long before the band dives back into total chaos, random drumming that starts and stops abruptly, songs erupt into crazed thrashy punk, or sludgy mangled rock, or damaged junkyard hip hop, while frontman Eye Yamatska and company spew all kinds of weird psychotic vocalizations, random vocal noises, and over the top soulful rock singing over it all. It's full-on Bore-insanity, assembled according to some kind of whacked out noise logic that fuses together
blasting ray gun synths, electronics and tape noise with chaotic noisecore jams, mutant dub-reggae, opera singing, improvised funk rock, passages of nothing but screaming women, sitars, tribal percussion freakiness, death metal roars over choppy hardcore punk, bits of sloppy exotica and weird radio intercepted voices, random screams and moans and chanting and free-jazz horns...yikes! This album fits right next to Mr. Bungle's first LP and Naked City's Torture Garden, a maniac pastiche of extreme genre-mashing punk-fuckery .
The fact that three of the early Boredoms albums came out on Warner/Reprise in the 90's is still one of the oddest moves in major label history. How anything this crazy and weird and far-out got that kind of mainstream exposure is still pretty unbelievable, even by today's standards, the music of the Boredoms is anything but accessible. Early on, the band was influenced heavily by the wacko acid-punk of the Butthole Surfers, but they took it into far more extreme and cacophonous directions; any one of their songs could smash together random noises, raging hardcore punk, super noisy guitars, weird studio effects, crazy cartoon voices and random babbling, whipped into a frenzy of jarring, totally unpredictable arrangements. All three (Onanie Bomb Meets The Sex Pistols, Pop Tari, and Chocolate Synthesizer) eventually went out of print, but were later reissued on Very Friendly and are finally in stock here at C-Blast - the early, hardcore-laced Boredoms albums are my favorite releases in their canon (along with the classic Soul Discharge), and are prime for discovery for anyone new to their insane, psychedelic, speed-charged Bore-mania...one listen to any of these albums, and you'll hear where an entire generation of noisecore/noise rockers got their inspiration from...
On 1994's Chocolate Synthesizer, the band began to stretch out from the schizophrenic noisecore/studio experiments of their previos albums, while still maintaining that frenzied, goofy, seemingly improvised energy that had become their trademark. The album is as unpredictable and spastic as anything that came before, with plenty of Bore-chaos flying out of the speakers: lots of Eye Yamataka's grunting and shrieking a-cappella weirdness, pummeling tribal hardcore anthems, electronic synth noise, druggy psychedelic tribal hand drum jams, backwards orchestral tape sounds, trumpets, blasts of absurdist noisecore, freeform indie guitar strum, epic noise rock, speed metal shred, mutant dub, and cartoon soundtrack sounds with mewling chipmunk vocals, all mashed together into a confusing and chaotic blur of sound and energy. But we also hear a heavy percussive element here that hints at the more krautrock inspired direction that the Boredoms would take later in the decade, with lots of dense drumming and multiple percussionists going off, with elements of free jazz and early krautrock a la Amon Duul peeking through the crazy quilt of surrealist noisepunk mayhem. There's less of the Mr Bungle style craziness, it's more psychedelic and trippy, but still completely Bore-mental.
The fact that three of the early Boredoms albums came out on Warner/Reprise in the 90's is still one of the oddest moves in major label history. How anything this crazy and weird and far-out got that kind of mainstream exposure is still pretty unbelievable, even by today's standards, the music of the Boredoms is anything but accessible. Early on, the band was influenced heavily by the wacko acid-punk of the Butthole Surfers, but they took it into far more extreme and cacophonous directions; any one of their songs could smash together random noises, raging hardcore punk, super noisy guitars, weird studio effects, crazy cartoon voices and random babbling, whipped into a frenzy of jarring, totally unpredictable arrangements. All three (Onanie Bomb Meets The Sex Pistols, Pop Tari, and Chocolate Synthesizer) eventually went out of print, but were later reissued on Very Friendly and are finally in stock here at C-Blast - the early, hardcore-laced Boredoms albums are my favorite releases in their canon (along with the classic Soul Discharge), and are prime for discovery for anyone new to their insane, psychedelic, speed-charged Bore-mania...one listen to any of these albums, and you'll hear where an entire generation of noisecore/noise rockers got their inspiration from...
More than twenty years later, the earliest Boredoms material hasn't lost one iota of its insanity. Onanie Bomb collects the first two releases from Boredoms, the Osozeran No Stooges Kyo LP from 1988 and the Anal By Anal EP from '86, and together demonstrate that Boredoms were seeking to destroy from the very start. The thirteen tracks blast and howl and go apeshit in short order, constantly taking off on a myriad of musician tangents; taking their Butthole Surfers influence to the nth degree, the band goes from the percussive dirge and orgiastic cartoon chaos of "We Never Sleep" to the bent acid-punk stomp of "Young Assouls", which almost sounds like a warped DK dirge with someone dismantling a guitar off to the left; there's the demented noise-damaged rockabilly strut of "Bite My Bollocks", "Call Me God"'s low-fi brain-damaged boog, and the nuclear noise/thrash of "No Core Punk" and "Melt Down Boogie" that takes early Earache inspired blastery and tosses it into a cuisinart. The other tracks are just as maniacal: grindore-meets-Carl-Stalling cartoon blasts collide with apocalyptic psychedelia and improv smashing, speed metal solos and weird mutant dubby bass lines and spastic slobbering hardcore punk disappear into fields of pure radio static, lurching skronking punk finds itself stacked with bleating horns and wailing acid-rock guitar, tumbling into blown out surf raveups or passages of nothing but random screaming or someone burping. This stuff is puerile and terminally silly, but there's a ton of power and way-out noise punk deconstruction here that makes this essential for Boredoms fans and anyone into extreme noisecore.
Here's the crucial 1996 full length from Japanese power drone / sludge / metal trio BORIS, released domestically on doom metal powerhouse Souther Lord. This
Super Low Frequency Version (an obvious reference to the EARTH influence splattered all over this album) gives you new artwork and an additional
bonus track, "Dronevil2", for a combined 2 tracks in 73 minutes, with "Absolutego" clocking in at close to 65 minutes. Freaking monolithic feedback-soaked
slomo glacial drone-sludge. An essential part of the contemporary drone metal canon alongside SUNN O))) , Khanate, Growing, Isis, and Earth. Fan of those
bands? Then you definitely need anything BORIS related.
Brand new re-issue of yet another masterwork of heavy duty, Japanese feedback/drone/metal bliss from the mighty (and mighty popular!) BORIS. Six songs in 39
minutes of heavier-than-god riff-rumble, glacial instrumental beauty, and jacked up, blown-out rock destruction, with riffs so big they blot out the sun.
Everything everyone loves about Boris is in full force here: the EARTH worship meets riff-overdrive motorcrunch of "Ibitsu". The epic grinding sludge of the
title track. The languid psyche/"post rock" of "Naki Kyoku". Psych-punk-sludge riots on steroids and run through a mountain of Marshall amps. Crushing.
Digipack packaging.
A crucial exercise in extreme riff seismology. This 1998 full length from Japan's Boris was re-released by Southern Lord, and definitely brings the
heavy, all Earth-worship as played by some jacked up Detroit rock outfit by way of Japanese drone/doom mind-benders. Super low-end riffage butts up
against extended amplifier hum and feedback-drone, consciousness raising, eternal fuzz bliss and mega-slow sludge assault peppered with crushing Motor City
rock freakouts. Five tracks, but man, are they long...The first song, "Huge", begins with a monstrous, repetitive doom riff before descending into
an earth shaking free-drone jam. "Ganbou-Ki" continues the massive riff into a cosmic howling percussion workout and feedback orgy, sort of Boredoms -esque
but heavy as hell. "Hama" rips into a ferocious, howling rock blast, then shifts gears into a KILLER circular drone-rock / feedback / psyche-guitar blowout,
like Circle meets Comets On Fire or something. "Kuruimizu" brings in a pretty instrumental melody, like something you�d here from Godspeed You Black Emperor
or Tristeza, after an onslaught of buzz and distortion...an eye of the hurricane, all gorgeous and glistening and sad, as "Vomitself" comes in and flattens
your life with a stumbling,sub-sonic Godzilla-size riff and howling vocals. Absolutely recommended to fans of Corrupted, Earth, Khanate, Melvins, Earth, Sunn
O)))...you get the picture. A masterpiece of innovative,psychedelic detuned virtuosity.
Finally got this in, our favorite album to date from everyone's favorite Japanese drone/psych/sludge/post/rock trio, Boris! This is the
European version of Feedbacker, released by Belgium's Conspiracy Records, and in the same cool gauzy translucent packaging that the original version
on DIW Phalanx.
Feedbacker is a single 43 minute composition broken into five movements that weave through ethereal drones and noise, flowing into haunting
psychedelia, then finally exploding in a crescendo of crushing riffs and Wata's planet-smashing acid leads. Absolutely breathtaking. The albums opening of
incandescent flares of Earth-style amplifier drone rumble appearing across a nearly ten-minute expanse of silence eventually surges into
funereal paced psychedelia that stretches for ages, spare drumming and reverb overload and shimmering, gauzy, swirling guitars, totally majestic shoegazer
drift and feedback filligree with singer/bassist Takeshi's sadly keening vocals entering alongside increasingly dubbed out drums just before a titanic sludge
riff rises into the clouds and the band sinks into MONSTROUS fuzzbomb rock..and all throughout, Wata's guitar launches into ripping, amazing distorted leads
and full on feedback obliteration, channeling Hendrix via acid doom heaviness...all of this finally begins to disintegrate gradually into feedback and noise
and amp hum and sludgy distortion and stately drumming that melst together by the albums end into a gorgeous swirl of cosmic hum. Boris At Last -
Feedbacker is absolutely amazing, equal parts melancholy epic slowcore/post-rock, blazing stoner sludge, trippy indie rock, Japanese psychedelia,
Earth/Sunn O))) style drones. EXTREMELY recommended !!!!
Here's the stateside release of 2005's Pink, courtesy of Southern Lord. It's a goddamn fantastic new studio blast from the band, starting
off with a bleary haze of gorgeous crumbling shoegazer dirge that almost had us fooled into thinking that Boris was going to start copping Jesu/MBV
moves...but then they explode into that total destructo fuzzbomb rock that has been the focus of most of their recent albums. Eleven tracks of amped-up
stoner/acid rock, saturated in tons of fuzz and reminding us of Guitar Wolf a bit, but totally crushing, every riff is godlike, and the band has incorporated
melodies in a whole new way. Ultra rocking, but Boris also inject some of the other sound forms that they have worked with in the past, moving from crushing
megadrones, to blasts of ferociously noisy punk rock, to grim psych shades, and there is this ridiculously catchy, dare-we-say downright poppy
melodicism that shows up throughout Pink that easily makes this the most accessible Boris album yet, while always remaining a fuzz-drowned
acid/rock/sludge juggernaut. We've been jamming this album NON-STOP here at C-Blast, and we think that this might just be the ultimate Boris album, a
masterpeice of catchy, epic, psychedelic heavy rock.
Stunning package design with deluxe die-cut artwork by Stephen O'Malley reminds us why we will never accept the MP3 as end-game music format: this stateside
edition of Pink comes in gorgeous O'Malley designed case with foldout booklet, inside of which are contained three additinal inserts, all of which
have O'Malley's vector-carnage designs on one side, and the other sides sport assorted Bosch/woodcut/acid trip illustrations, and the insterts themselves are
perforated in the style of a sheet of acid tabs. Fucking amazing. Highly recommended !!!
This is the breathtaking soundtrack for an (imaginary?) film titled Mabuta No Ura (translated as 'Backside Of The Eyelids'), composed and performed
by Boris as a series of guitar-based post rock instrumentals and plaintive drones that are drenched in ambient reverb and feedback. This extended Brazilian
edition features exclusive music that was not available on the original Japanese version, and is presented in a stunning package that has a lasercut box
jacket holding a miniature gatefold hardback case and inclusing a set of photo/story cards, in a limited edition of 1,000. Absolutely beautiful to hold. This
release of Mabuta No Ura features 12 tracks of Boris in their restrained, post-rock mode, but even more abstracted and definitely cinematic, the
majority of the music instrumental with dreamy acoustic melodies and wistful, slowly plucked guitar figures, vocals when they do appear doing so cloaked in
beautiful shimmering reverb. The second track ('A Bao A Qu') is the only truly "heavy" song on here, but it's also one of my all time favorite Boris numbers,
a monstrously distorted slab of sludge jacked so far into the red that the tones are crumbling in on themselves, burying a perfect pop hook and dreamy rhodes
tones under it's weight. That track had previously appeared on a super-limited picture disc EP that Boris released a while back, and as I said it's one of
their most beautifully destructive jams. The rest of the album explores more contemplative terrain, simple guitar passages washed with hazy tones and Syd
Barret inspired acoustic trances, hypnotic drum circle jams, shambolic psych rock, clouds of blissful free drone, an evocative soundscape projecting a
meditative, heavy-lidded urban dream narrative across your consciousness.
Just reissued on a slightly different configuration of vinyl colors, here's Boris' awesome 2006 album Pink available again on 180 gram vinyl in a thick cardboard gatefold jacket, complete with the three "acid-tab" insert sheets from the CD version included inside of the gatefold package inside of a glassine envelope. Only 1000 pressed!
Here's the stateside release of 2005's Pink, courtesy of Southern Lord. It's a goddamn fantastic new studio blast from the band, starting off with a bleary haze of gorgeous crumbling shoegazer dirge that almost had us fooled into thinking that Boris was going to start copping Jesu/MBV moves...but then they explode into that total destructo fuzzbomb rock that has been the focus of most of their recent albums. Eleven tracks of amped-up stoner/acid rock, saturated in tons of fuzz and reminding us of Guitar Wolf a bit, but totally crushing, every riff is godlike, and the band has incorporated melodies in a whole new way. Ultra rocking, but Boris also inject some of the other sound forms that they have worked with in the past, moving from crushing megadrones, to blasts of ferociously noisy punk rock, to grim psych shades, and there is this ridiculously catchy, dare-we-say downright poppy melodicism that shows up throughout Pink that easily makes this the most accessible Boris album yet, while always remaining a fuzz-drowned acid/rock/sludge juggernaut. We've been jamming this album NON-STOP here at C-Blast, and we think that this might just be the ultimate Boris album, a masterpeice of catchy, epic, psychedelic heavy rock.
Stunning package design with deluxe die-cut artwork by Stephen O'Malley reminds us why we will never accept the MP3 as end-game music format: this stateside edition of Pink comes in gorgeous O'Malley designed case with foldout booklet, inside of which are contained three additinal inserts, all of which have O'Malley's vector-carnage designs on one side, and the other sides sport assorted Bosch/woodcut/acid trip illustrations, and the insterts themselves are perforated in the style of a sheet of acid tabs. Fucking amazing. Highly recommended !!!
Just reissued on a slightly different configuration of vinyl colors, here's Boris' awesome 2006 album Pink available again on 180 gram vinyl in a thick cardboard gatefold jacket, complete with the three "acid-tab" insert sheets from the CD version included inside of the gatefold package inside of a glassine envelope. Only 1000 pressed!
Here's the stateside release of 2005's Pink, courtesy of Southern Lord. It's a goddamn fantastic new studio blast from the band, starting off with a bleary haze of gorgeous crumbling shoegazer dirge that almost had us fooled into thinking that Boris was going to start copping Jesu/MBV moves...but then they explode into that total destructo fuzzbomb rock that has been the focus of most of their recent albums. Eleven tracks of amped-up stoner/acid rock, saturated in tons of fuzz and reminding us of Guitar Wolf a bit, but totally crushing, every riff is godlike, and the band has incorporated melodies in a whole new way. Ultra rocking, but Boris also inject some of the other sound forms that they have worked with in the past, moving from crushing megadrones, to blasts of ferociously noisy punk rock, to grim psych shades, and there is this ridiculously catchy, dare-we-say downright poppy melodicism that shows up throughout Pink that easily makes this the most accessible Boris album yet, while always remaining a fuzz-drowned acid/rock/sludge juggernaut. We've been jamming this album NON-STOP here at C-Blast, and we think that this might just be the ultimate Boris album, a masterpeice of catchy, epic, psychedelic heavy rock.
Stunning package design with deluxe die-cut artwork by Stephen O'Malley reminds us why we will never accept the MP3 as end-game music format: this stateside edition of Pink comes in gorgeous O'Malley designed case with foldout booklet, inside of which are contained three additinal inserts, all of which have O'Malley's vector-carnage designs on one side, and the other sides sport assorted Bosch/woodcut/acid trip illustrations, and the insterts themselves are perforated in the style of a sheet of acid tabs. Fucking amazing. Highly recommended !!!
Finally listing the new Boris, sheesh...I'm sure most of you Boris fans have already picked up yer copy of Smile either on CD or on the more recently released double LP version, but for those stragglers that still haven't grabbed this yet, we've got the limited-edition Southern Lord release of Boris' newest album Smile that comes with the bonus DVD of Boris music videos.
To begin with, this CD edition of Smile looks fucking amazing, with all new artwork from Stephen O'Malley that is completely different from the Japanese release; the packaging is printed in bright orange and silver metallic inks, and includes a sixteen-page booklet that is filled with lyrics, drawings and photos of the band, with a nifty foldout back cover...the case itself has a partial smiley face sticker stuck to it, and each one of these CD/DVD sets is machine numbered out of 3,000 copies and now sold out from the label and most other sources. Once these are gone, we'll just have the regular single disc version in stock. It's also important to note that the track listing on the Southern Lord CD edition of Smile is different from the Japanese release...some of the songs on this version are longer than on the Japanese one, whereas the untitled final track on this version is fifteen minutes long versus nineteen on the Japanese disc, and the song "Statement" that appears here is a longer version of the track "Message" on the Japanese disc, and with a different mix. The confusing differences between the Southern Lord disc and the Japanese disc and the CD and vinyl versions have been discussed at length elsewhere, so we'll just proceed on to the jams:
Smile once again sees Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara joined up with Boris, continuing the collaboration that started on the Rainbow album that came out last year on Drag City. When I saw Boris in D.C. over the summer, Kurihara was touring with them as well, so I'm wondering if he's now a full fledged member of the band? Anyways, I love hearing his searing psychedelic guitar in Boris' music, and he's all over a bunch of the tracks on this album. The album continues from where Pink and Rainbow left off, taking the blown-out, slow motion heavy poppiness of the former and the sunbaked psychedelia of the latter. The first song is one of album's prettiest, a cover of "Flower Sun Rain" from the cult Japanese psych band PYG that's all dreamy, reverb drenched guitars and minimal drumming, heartfelt singing and background harmonies, whirring effects and streaks of searing, solarized psych guitar, all exploding into a huge gorgeous crush of distorted riffage and wah overload at the end. "Buzz-In" follows, starting with a baby babbling in Japanese, then kicks into massive distorted garage metal with heavy, thrashing drums, that crunchy, crushing riff, swirled with gobs of fx-drenched feedback and backwards tape textures. "Laser Beam" is another devestating garage rocker, a sickoid Motorhead style riff bashed out on guitars and bass that are all ultra distorted and blown out, screaming over the thrashing fast paced beat, a weird fuzznuke soloing burning a hole through the song and loud orchestral style hits clanging in the background, collapsing in on itself at the end and becoming a soft, lovely blur of dubby percussion and hushed acoustic guitar.
The rest of the album is just as great, from the super blown garage metal stomp and extreme distortion overload of the live staple "Statement"; the gorgeous dreamy pop of "My Neighbor Satan" and it's buried, almost drum n' bass like electronic rhythms, heavy distorted guitar grinding under a bed of lovely melodies and soulful melodic vocals; the droning, sludge guitar waves and corrosive guitar leads and crumbling riffage of "Ka Re Ha Te Ta Sa Ki -- No Ones Grieve". The record closes out with a massive untitled track that stretches out to fifteen minutes, and it features Stephen O'Malley (Sunn /Khanate) lending his guitar textures to the piece. Beginning with a subdued dronescape of fragile guitar melodies and backwards moving leads over dark, airy drift, it's briefly blasted with a violent surge of super-distorted psych guitar and pounding drums before suddenly falling back into the dreamy slow motion psych dirge. Hazy, narcotized singing and gentle psych guitars wind together, until they build into a tidal wave of crushing, glacial distorto-riffage and striated with ghostly feedback and fx-soaked soloing.
The DVD that comes with this limited edition version is pretty killer, with three professionally shot music videos for the songs "Statement", "My Neighbor Satan", and "Pink".
Here's the domestic vinyl for Boris' latest album Smile, a gorgeous double LP release that features new artwork from Stephen O'Malley (which is amazing to look at) printed in blacks and metallic silver and bright oranges printed onto a reflective "mirror" stock, and presented in a thick gatefold sleeve and pressed on thick 180 gram yellow vinyl in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. From here it gets confusing though, because this domestic vinyl release of Smile is not only musically different from the Japanese vinyl release, but it's different from the domestic CD on Southern Lord as well. There are two bonus tracks that do not appear on the CD ("Vein" and "After Me"), the version of "My Neighbor Satan" on the domestic LP has a different mix from the CD version, and the versions of "Flower Sun Rain" and the untitled final song that have different mixes from the CD version and/or are longer, uncut versions of the tracks that appeared in slightly shorter, edited form on the CD. It's all pretty confusing, even for Boris completists.
Here's the review for the CD version:
To begin with, this CD edition of Smile looks fucking amazing, with all new artwork from Stephen O'Malley that is completely different from the Japanese release; the packaging is printed in bright orange and silver metallic inks, and includes a sixteen-page booklet that is filled with lyrics, drawings and photos of the band, with a nifty foldout back cover...the case itself has a partial smiley face sticker stuck to it, and each one of these CD/DVD sets is machine numbered out of 3,000 copies and now sold out from the label and most other sources. Once these are gone, we'll just have the regular single disc version in stock. It's also important to note that the track listing on the Southern Lord CD edition of Smile is different from the Japanese release...some of the songs on this version are longer than on the Japanese one, whereas the untitled final track on this version is fifteen minutes long versus nineteen on the Japanese disc, and the song "Statement" that appears here is a longer version of the track "Message" on the Japanese disc, and with a different mix. The confusing differences between the Southern Lord disc and the Japanese disc and the CD and vinyl versions have been discussed at length elsewhere, so we'll just proceed on to the jams:
Smile once again sees Ghost guitarist Michio Kurihara joined up with Boris, continuing the collaboration that started on the Rainbow album that came out last year on Drag City. When I saw Boris in D.C. over the summer, Kurihara was touring with them as well, so I'm wondering if he's now a full fledged member of the band? Anyways, I love hearing his searing psychedelic guitar in Boris' music, and he's all over a bunch of the tracks on this album. The album continues from where Pink and Rainbow left off, taking the blown-out, slow motion heavy poppiness of the former and the sunbaked psychedelia of the latter. The first song is one of album's prettiest, a cover of "Flower Sun Rain" from the cult Japanese psych band PYG that's all dreamy, reverb drenched guitars and minimal drumming, heartfelt singing and background harmonies, whirring effects and streaks of searing, solarized psych guitar, all exploding into a huge gorgeous crush of distorted riffage and wah overload at the end. "Buzz-In" follows, starting with a baby babbling in Japanese, then kicks into massive distorted garage metal with heavy, thrashing drums, that crunchy, crushing riff, swirled with gobs of fx-drenched feedback and backwards tape textures. "Laser Beam" is another devestating garage rocker, a sickoid Motorhead style riff bashed out on guitars and bass that are all ultra distorted and blown out, screaming over the thrashing fast paced beat, a weird fuzznuke soloing burning a hole through the song and loud orchestral style hits clanging in the background, collapsing in on itself at the end and becoming a soft, lovely blur of dubby percussion and hushed acoustic guitar.
The rest of the album is just as great, from the super blown garage metal stomp and extreme distortion overload of the live staple "Statement"; the gorgeous dreamy pop of "My Neighbor Satan" and it's buried, almost drum n' bass like electronic rhythms, heavy distorted guitar grinding under a bed of lovely melodies and soulful melodic vocals; the droning, sludge guitar waves and corrosive guitar leads and crumbling riffage of "Ka Re Ha Te Ta Sa Ki -- No Ones Grieve". The record closes out with a massive untitled track that stretches out to fifteen minutes, and it features Stephen O'Malley (Sunn /Khanate) lending his guitar textures to the piece. Beginning with a subdued dronescape of fragile guitar melodies and backwards moving leads over dark, airy drift, it's briefly blasted with a violent surge of super-distorted psych guitar and pounding drums before suddenly falling back into the dreamy slow motion psych dirge. Hazy, narcotized singing and gentle psych guitars wind together, until they build into a tidal wave of crushing, glacial distorto-riffage and striated with ghostly feedback and fx-soaked soloing.
�� Back in stock. Just unearthed some of the very last copies of this series of 7" EPs from Japanese sludge rockers Boris, originally released back in 2009 in between the Smile and New Album albums. The first two 7"s have been out of print for a while, so when these few copies go, that'll be the last of 'em. Each one of these 7"s featured a different member of Boris on the front cover posing in a weird glamour-style shot, and each record delivers a slightly different permutation of Boris's experimental metal/pop/sludge sound, with a presentation that ties these three records together in a manner that really reminds me of those old Melvins "solo" EPs that came out on Boner way back when.
�� The second entry in the Japanese Heavy Rocks 7" series finds the band making their way back to the sort of crushing heaviosity of their much-revered early albums, albeit warped through their newer propensity for incendiary overdriven distortion. The A-side opens up with a blat of weird electronic/synth fuckery, wailing vocals rising through cloudbanks of lush reverb and some random guitar splatter, as "Heavy Metal Addict" proceeds to kick in with an oddball bit of metal goofery, a chugging, ass-kicking riff locking into overdrive over a pounding motorik drumbeat. Certainly heavy enough, but when those weird howling metal-god vocals start echoing across the sky and the chanting/clapping accompaniment comes in, this turns into something much more lighthearted, a whacked out metallic pop hook forming out of the metallic hypno-jam, as it all shifts into more weird electronic effects and noises, exuberant whoops and yells and discordant crooning.
�� As with the other 7"s, Boris shifts gears into a much more experimental and off-kilter sound on the b-side. This might be my favorite of all of the b-sides in this 7" series; "Black Original" sees Boris whipping out some stomping 808 beats and fuzz-drenched guitar for a totally retro dance pop atmosphere, a weird take on mid-80's synth-rock as filtered through the warped prism of Boris's songwriting, the background swirling with warbling synth noises and watery, murky melody, that deformed funk guitar front and center, a mutant new wave pop hit that almost feels like some souped-up, deformed version of a Wire song, twisted by Boris's willful weirdness.
�� Like the other records, this too has one of the members of the band pictured on the cover, a strange sort of glamour shot that seems to go along with the way that Boris began reinventing themselves as psychedelic hard rock pop stars, his visage obscured by the layered vector chaos graphics that were designed by Sunn / Khanate guitarist Stephen O'Malley.
��Back in stock. Just unearthed some of the very last copies of this series of 7" EPs from Japanese sludge rockers Boris, originally released back in 2009 in between the Smile and New Album albums. The first two 7"s have been out of print for a while, so when these few copies go, that'll be the last of 'em. Each one of these 7"s featured a different member of Boris on the front cover posing in a weird glamour-style shot, and each record delivers a slightly different permutation of Boris's experimental metal/pop/sludge sound, with a presentation that ties these three records together in a manner that really reminds me of those old Melvins "solo" EPs that came out on Boner way back when.
�� The seven minute "16:47:52" is suggestive of where Boris would go on some of their later albums, as they explored a more pop-centric (but still quite experimental) direction in their songwriting. This is one of my favorite of their 7" tracks, a simply constructed song that sees Wata crooning softly over a pretty, downcast bit of guitar jangle and minimal percussion. Definitely reminds me of some early 90's dreamy alt-pop band that I can't quite put my finger on. Certainly gorgeous, moody stuff, Boris at their most fragile, like amore lof-fi, skeletal Mazzy Star number laced with some fuzzily-distorted, haunting piano. Absolutely lovely.
�� "...And Hear Nothing" then cranks up the amplifiers, and wraps this 7" up with a massive wave of crumbling, blown-out rumbling amp sludge, a gorgeous, dreamy melodic riff uncoiling in glacial slow motion, the sound super slow, the vocal harmonies rising skyward above the crushing dreamdoom heaviness, again sounding not unlike one of those classic early 90s shoegazer bands, but slowed down to quarter speed, a slowly crawling pop hook encased in earth-crushing metallic heaviness. As devastating as anything you'll hear from Jesu or Floor, so crushing you'll find yourself leaning over to the turntable to make sure that you have the record playing on the proper speed...
�� As with the other 7"s in this series, Volume 3 features a slick, glamour-style photo on the cover, this one of Wata casting her icy, aloof gaze out from the jacket cover, obscured by the chaotic vector graphics that Khanate/Sunn guitarist Stephen O'Malley created for all of the records in the series.
��Back in stock. Just unearthed some of the very last copies of this series of 7" EPs from Japanese sludge rockers Boris, originally released back in 2009 in between the Smile and New Album albums. The first two 7"s have been out of print for a while, so when these few copies go, that'll be the last of 'em. Each one of these 7"s featured a different member of Boris on the front cover posing in a weird glamour-style shot, and each record delivers a slightly different permutation of Boris's experimental metal/pop/sludge sound, with a presentation that ties these three records together in a manner that really reminds me of those old Melvins "solo" EPs that came out on Boner way back when.
�� Japanese Heavy Rocks #1 kicks off with some of the band's brutal blown-out psych storm, the first song "8" slowly building out of crashing waves of glacial guitar chords, slowly drifting through a murky, low-fi mix that has this crawling, melodic doom riff suddenly surging into sharp focus as the band kicks in to a killer, heavy pop hook. When they crank the distortion pedals on this song, it turns into something as heavy as any of the later Torche albums, a roar of sunny anthemic guitar hooks suddenly erupting into that crushing dreamy metal-pop, the chorus one of the best I've ever heard from the band. It's like one of your favorite British shoegazer bands suddenly discovering the skull-crushing power of down-tuned, in-the-red metal guitars. Fucking killer.
��As with the other entries in this 7" series, the b-side on this on features some supremely danceable fuzz-streaked pop, this one called "Hey Everyone"; it probably has more to do with my age than anything, bur some reason this song seriously reminds me of that stuff that was coming out of Manchester in the early 90s, the song carried on an almost danceable undercurrent, but fuelled with some seriously crunchy metallic elements and more of that searing, overdriven amplifier fire, the band bathing the tune in their super-distorted psychedelic guitars.
�� As with the other 7"s in this series, this comes in a thick cardstock sleeve with striking design from Stephen O'Malley. Super limited.
��� This pulverizing drone-metal classic from 1996 has been out of print for years now, but we recently stumbled across a stack of the vinyl version that Southern Lord put out in 2010, hidden away in some dark corner in the bowels of one of our suppliers warehouses. Move quick, as quantities are limited. Here's the ancient writeup on this album I did way back when the original Southern Lord CD came out:
���More than a decade after they were originally released, the first two Boris albums are finally making an appearance on vinyl courtesy of Southern Lord, who has reissued Absolutego and Amplifier Worship on 180 gram vinyl in gorgeous heavyweight tip-on gatefold jackets that feature new package design from Stephen O'Malley.
���Here's the crucial 1996 debut album from Japanese power drone / sludge / metal trio Boris, released domestically on doom metal powerhouse Souther Lord. This Super Low Frequency Version (an obvious reference to the Earth influence splattered all over this album) gives you new artwork and an additional bonus track, "Dronevil2", for a combined 2 tracks in 73 minutes, with "Absolutego" clocking in at close to 65 minutes (here split across multiple sides of the multi-album set by way of some creative editing). Freaking monolithic feedback-soaked slomo glacial drone-sludge. An essential part of the contemporary drone metal canon alongside Sunn O))) , Khanate, Growing, Isis, and Earth.
More than a decade after they were originally released, the first two Boris albums are finally making an appearance on vinyl courtesy of Southern Lord, who has reissued Absolutego and Amplifier Worship on 180 gram vinyl in gorgeous heavyweight tip-on gatefold jackets that feature new package design from Stephen O'Malley.
A crucial exercise in extreme riff seismology. This 1998 full length from Japan's Boris was re-released by Southern Lord, and definitely brings the
heavy, all Earth-worship as played by some jacked up Detroit rock outfit by way of Japanese drone/doom mind-benders. Super low-end riffage butts up
against extended amplifier hum and feedback-drone, consciousness raising, eternal fuzz bliss and mega-slow sludge assault peppered with crushing Motor City
rock freakouts. Five tracks, but man, are they long...The first song, "Huge", begins with a monstrous, repetitive doom riff before descending into
an earth shaking free-drone jam. "Ganbou-Ki" continues the massive riff into a cosmic howling percussion workout and feedback orgy, sort of Boredoms -esque
but heavy as hell. "Hama" rips into a ferocious, howling rock blast, then shifts gears into a KILLER circular drone-rock / feedback / psyche-guitar blowout,
like Circle meets Comets On Fire or something. "Kuruimizu" brings in a pretty instrumental melody, like something you�d here from Godspeed You Black Emperor
or Tristeza, after an onslaught of buzz and distortion...an eye of the hurricane, all gorgeous and glistening and sad, as "Vomitself" comes in and flattens
your life with a stumbling,sub-sonic Godzilla-size riff and howling vocals. Absolutely recommended to fans of Corrupted, Earth, Khanate, Melvins, Earth, Sunn
O)))...you get the picture. A masterpiece of innovative,psychedelic detuned virtuosity.
Finally back in stock!
This is the breathtaking soundtrack for an (imaginary) film titled Mabuta No Ura (translated as 'Backside Of The Eyelids'), composed and performed by Boris as a series of guitar-based post rock instrumentals and plaintive drones that are drenched in ambient reverb and feedback. This extended Brazilian edition features exclusive music that was not available on the original Japanese version, and is presented in a stunning package that has a laser-cut box jacket holding a miniature gatefold hardback case and including a set of photo-story cards, in a limited edition of 1,000. It�s absolutely beautiful to hold. This release of Mabuta No Ura features 12 tracks of Boris in their restrained, post-rock mode, but even more abstracted and definitely cinematic, the majority of the music instrumental with dreamy acoustic melodies and wistful, slowly plucked guitar figures, vocals when they do appear doing so cloaked in beautiful shimmering reverb. The second track 'A Bao A Qu' is the only truly heavy song on here, but it's also one of my all time favorite Boris numbers, a monstrously distorted slab of sludge jacked so far into the red that the tones are crumbling in on themselves, burying a perfect pop hook and dreamy Rhodes piano tones under it's weight. That track had previously appeared on a super-limited picture disc EP that Boris released a while back, and as I said it's one of their most beautifully destructive jams. The rest of the album explores more contemplative terrain, simple guitar passages washed with hazy tones and Syd Barret inspired acoustic trances, hypnotic drum circle jams, shambolic psych rock, clouds of blissful free drone, an evocative soundscape projecting a meditative, and heavy-lidded urban dream narrative across your consciousness.
Back in stock.
Here's another amazing late-oughts reissue that just came in, a new deluxe Ten Year Anniversary reissue of Boris's Pink, quite possibly the band's finest hour, resurrected via this crushing double-disc version and an even more monstrous triple-LP boxset, both filled to the gills with additional material. Originally released on Southern Lord here in the U.S., Pink further perfected the ultra blown-out psychedelia that had taken over Boris's sound throughout the decade, blending massive pop hooks and soaring melodies and heartfelt singing with their trademark use of downtuned guitar-crush and amplifier-torching noise. This was where people really started to lose their shit over this band, and their tour for the album here in the States was one of the most intense things I'd seen in quite some time. I probably pull Pink off the shelf more than any other album of theirs, and this reissue is a glorious re-examination of the band's work, pairing the original album with an entire extra disc of studio material titled Pink Sessions "Forbidden Songs", nine additional songs that were recorded during the same period and which compliment the album material nicely, serving up equal doses of their pulverizing slo-mo sludge, distorted psych blast and hazy, heat-warped pop. If you're a fan of heavy psychedelia and haven't heard this album yet, don't waste another second. Here's what I was ranting about back when we originally got the album in stock:
The stateside release of 2005's Pink, courtesy of Southern Lord. It's a goddamn fantastic new studio blast from the band, starting off with a bleary haze of gorgeous crumbling shoegazer dirge that almost had us fooled into thinking that Boris was going to start copping Jesu/My Bloody Valentine-esque moves...but then they explode into that total destructo fuzzbomb rock that has been the focus of most of their recent albums. Eleven tracks of amped-up stoner/acid rock, saturated in tons of fuzz and reminding us of Guitar Wolf a bit, but totally crushing, every riff is godlike, and the band has incorporated melodies in a whole new way. Ultra rocking, but Boris also inject some of the other sound forms that they have worked with in the past, moving from crushing mega-drones, to blasts of ferociously noisy punk rock, to grim psych shades, and there is this ridiculously catchy, dare-we-say downright poppy melodicism that shows up throughout Pink that easily makes this the most accessible Boris album yet, while always remaining a fuzz-drowned acid/rock/sludge juggernaut. We've been jamming this album NON-STOP here at C-Blast, and we think that this might just be the ultimate Boris album, a masterpiece of catchy, epic, psychedelic heavy rock.
As with the original Southern Lord version, the packaging for both versions of this reissue is exquisite. It's also almost completely different from the previous releases, as well. The double CD version comes in a clear jewel case that has the titles and the track list printed directly onto the plastic of the case itself, quite an interesting design effect; the booklet itself is a multi-part foldout that includes additional inserts, including perforated sheets designed in the style of old-school blotter acid. The LP boxset, on the other hand, houses the three records inside of a die-cut heavyweight folio, along with the assorted insert materials and a download card; fans should note that the vinyl edition actually features the original track lengths for the songs, some of which were edited for the CD versions, ultimately making this a distinctly different release from the CD.
Here's another amazing late-oughts reissue that just came in, a new deluxe Ten Year Anniversary reissue of Boris's Pink, quite possibly the band's finest hour, resurrected via this crushing double-disc version and an even more monstrous triple-LP boxset, both filled to the gills with additional material. Originally released on Southern Lord here in the U.S., Pink further perfected the ultra blown-out psychedelia that had taken over Boris's sound throughout the decade, blending massive pop hooks and soaring melodies and heartfelt singing with their trademark use of downtuned guitar-crush and amplifier-torching noise. This was where people really started to lose their shit over this band, and their tour for the album here in the States was one of the most intense things I'd seen in quite some time. I probably pull Pink off the shelf more than any other album of theirs, and this reissue is a glorious re-examination of the band's work, pairing the original album with an entire extra disc of studio material titled Pink Sessions "Forbidden Songs", nine additional songs that were recorded during the same period and which compliment the album material nicely, serving up equal doses of their pulverizing slo-mo sludge, distorted psych blast and hazy, heat-warped pop. If you're a fan of heavy psychedelia and haven't heard this album yet, don't waste another second. Here's what I was ranting about back when we originally got the album in stock:
The stateside release of 2005's Pink, courtesy of Southern Lord. It's a goddamn fantastic new studio blast from the band, starting off with a bleary haze of gorgeous crumbling shoegazer dirge that almost had us fooled into thinking that Boris was going to start copping Jesu/My Bloody Valentine-esque moves...but then they explode into that total destructo fuzzbomb rock that has been the focus of most of their recent albums. Eleven tracks of amped-up stoner/acid rock, saturated in tons of fuzz and reminding us of Guitar Wolf a bit, but totally crushing, every riff is godlike, and the band has incorporated melodies in a whole new way. Ultra rocking, but Boris also inject some of the other sound forms that they have worked with in the past, moving from crushing mega-drones, to blasts of ferociously noisy punk rock, to grim psych shades, and there is this ridiculously catchy, dare-we-say downright poppy melodicism that shows up throughout Pink that easily makes this the most accessible Boris album yet, while always remaining a fuzz-drowned acid/rock/sludge juggernaut. We've been jamming this album NON-STOP here at C-Blast, and we think that this might just be the ultimate Boris album, a masterpiece of catchy, epic, psychedelic heavy rock.
As with the original Southern Lord version, the packaging for both versions of this reissue is exquisite. It's also almost completely different from the previous releases, as well. The double CD version comes in a clear jewel case that has the titles and the track list printed directly onto the plastic of the case itself, quite an interesting design effect; the booklet itself is a multi-part foldout that includes additional inserts, including perforated sheets designed in the style of old-school blotter acid. The LP boxset, on the other hand, houses the three records inside of a die-cut heavyweight folio, along with the assorted insert materials and a download card; fans should note that the vinyl edition actually features the original track lengths for the songs, some of which were edited for the CD versions, ultimately making this a distinctly different release from the CD.
This latest collaboration between Japanese drone/sludge/rockers BORIS and legendary noise artist Masami Akita (MERZBOW) follows their previous matchups
Megatone and 04092001, and returns to the drone-heavy fields explored on Megatone and BORIS� Flood. Languidly strummed
acoustic guitars open the album, gauzy and delicate as single notes are plucked and hung on a wide open expanse of sound. Eventually far-off rumbles and
approaching electronic flashes begin to appear around ten minutes in. At twenty minutes into the track, the roar of massively downtuned guitar crashes in, as
Merzbow beams in crackling electronic shrapnel and glitchy noise over the amorphous swells of noisy powerdrone. The final half of the record crawls out of
the heavy swirl and drifts into black with ghostly blots of computer noise and feedback, as the album�s opening guitar movements re-appear as the coda.
Packaged in an awesome Japanese �style gatefold package, with black and white and metallic printing designed by Stephen O�Malley. Recommended.
We've got one (1) copy of this now out-of-print 2xLP in stock. Here's the original review from the CD release:
This latest collaboration between Japanese drone/sludge/rockers BORIS and legendary noise artist Masami Akita (MERZBOW) follows their previous matchups Megatone and 04092001, and returns to the drone-heavy fields explored on Megatone and BORIS� Flood. Languidly strummed acoustic guitars open the album, gauzy and delicate as single notes are plucked and hung on a wide open expanse of sound. Eventually far-off rumbles and approaching electronic flashes begin to appear around ten minutes in. At twenty minutes into the track, the roar of massively downtuned guitar crashes in, as Merzbow beams in crackling electronic shrapnel and glitchy noise over the amorphous swells of noisy powerdrone. The final half of the record crawls out of the heavy swirl and drifts into black with ghostly blots of computer noise and feedback, as the album�s opening guitar movements re-appear as the coda. Packaged in a killer casewrapped gatefold jacket virtually identical to the original CD packaging, super striking, Stephen O'Malley's hyper-abstract album artwork printed in blue, black and white metallic inks. Limited to one thousand two hundred copies.
The incredible new collaboration between Crucial Blast's favorite Japanese psychedelic sludge pop gods Boris and Michio Kurihara of Ghost is finally available as a domestic release after bring issued as a super limited import last year, thanks to Drag City. I wasn't sure what to expect from Boris after their stunning Pink album and the Altar collaboration with Sunn O))) - were we going to see a return to their blown-out garage rock raveups, more time-stretched ambient doom sculpture a la Amplifier Worship, or were they going to head off into yet another unexpected direction? - but no fear, Rainbow proves yet again that Boris are one of the most creative, emotive rock bands on the planet in our time, and when they team up with other hypercreative minds (as they have done previously with Masami Akita of Merzbow, the aforementioned Sunn O))) collab, and Keiji Haino), the results are exponential.
As it is with Rainbow, which begins much like Pink, opening with a gloriously slow and distorted sludge-pop hymn, huge resonant powerchords floating up out of crumbling amplifers falling apart beneath the weight of the riff they are emitting, clean chiming guitars ringing over the crunch, dreamy vocals rising to the heavens. So great. But then the title track comes in and things take a much quieter turn, as Michio Kurihara's psychedelic guitar and the influence of his primary outfits send Boris through smoky avenues of loungey bossa nova and delicate psych-pop.
The title track is a real standout as it features guitarist Wata singing in a silky, smoky croon over a krautrocky pop tune that is seared by Michio's in-the-red acid lead playing halfway through. Then it's bassist Takeshi who sings on "Starship Narrator", which is a more rocking number matching heavy droney riffing against some more awesome psych shred from Kurihara. That's followed by "My Rain", a brief, minute-and-a-half instrumental of fragile post-rock prettiness, and then "Shine" emerges in a haze of cymbals washing over the band in a silver mist, ghostly strains of feedback wisping out of their amps, Takeshi wailing soulfully over the dreamy haze. The seven-minute "You Laughed Like A Watermark" returns to the jangly pop, soft and laid back, sorta reminds me of one of Dinosaur Jr.'s later pop songs in a way, and again Kurihara appears with a scorching solo that cuts through the song like a shaft of light. After that, the band melts down into the krauty driftout "Fuzzy Reactor", pushed skyward by slow, pulsating drumbeats and shimmering waves of chanting and feedback, creating a narcotic bliss state that is then ripped asunder by the crushing psychedelic funk rock of "Sweet No. 1", all massive churning riffage and some of the sickest distorto shredding on the album.
All that's left in it's wake is the delicate closer "...And, I Want", drifting out on softly plucked guitar strings and silky reverb. This is such an incredible album, obviously much softer than most of the Boris stuff we have but the moments of HEAVY that appear are all the more powerful when contrasted against the hazy pop of Rainbow. And man, is the psych rock element on here awesome, I would love to hear more collaborative playing between Kurihara and Boris, one album just isn't going to be enough! Highly recommended. This Drag City edition also features some gorgeous photography from Naomi Yang of Damon & Naomi fame.
Back in stock
The incredible new collaboration between Crucial Blast's favorite Japanese psychedelic sludge pop gods Boris and Michio Kurihara of Ghost is finally
available as a domestic release after bring issued as a super limited import last year, thanks to Drag City. I wasn't sure what to expect from Boris after
their stunning Pink album and the Altar collaboration with Sunn O))) - were we going to see a return to their blown-out garage rock
raveups, more time-stretched ambient doom sculpture a la Amplifier Worship, or were they going to head off into yet another unexpected direction? -
but no fear, Rainbow proves yet again that Boris are one of the most creative, emotive rock bands on the planet in our time, and when they team up
with other hypercreative minds (as they have done previously with Masami Akita of Merzbow, the aforementioned Sunn O))) collab, and Keiji Haino), the results
are exponential. As it is with Rainbow, which begins much like Pink, opening with a gloriously slow and distorted sludge-pop hymn, huge
resonant powerchords floating up out of crumbling amplifers falling apart beneath the weight of the riff they are emitting, clean chiming guitars ringing
over the crunch, dreamy vocals rising to the heavens. So great. But then the title track comes in and things take a much quieter turn, as Michio Kurihara's
psychedelic guitar and the influence of his primary outfits send Boris through smoky avenues of loungey bossa nova and delicate psych-pop. The title track is
a real standout as it features guitarist Wata singing in a silky, smoky croon over a krautrocky pop tune that is seared by Michio's in-the-red acid lead
playing halfway through. Then it's bassist Takeshi who sings on "Starship Narrator", which is a more rocking number matching heavy droney riffing against
some more awesome psych shred from Kurihara. That's followed by "My Rain", a brief, minute-and-a-half instrumental of fragile post-rock prettiness, and then
"Shine" emerges in a haze of cymbals washing over the band in a silver mist, ghostly strains of feedback wisping out of their amps, Takeshi wailing soulfully
over the dreamy haze.
The seven-minute "You Laughed Like A Watermark" returns to the jangly pop, soft and laid back, sorta reminds me of one of Dinosaur Jr.'s later pop songs in a
way, and again Kurihara appears with a scorching solo that cuts through the song like a shaft of light. After that, the band melts down into the krauty
driftout "Fuzzy Reactor", pushed skyward by slow, pulsating drumbeats and shimmering waves of chanting and feedback, creating a narcotic bliss state that is
then ripped asunder by the crushing psychedelic funk rock of "Sweet No. 1", all massive churning riffage and some of the sickest distorto shredding on the
album. All that's left in it's wake is the delicate closer "...And, I Want", drifting out on softly plucked guitar strings and silky reverb. This is such an
incredible album, obviously much softer than most of the Boris stuff we have but the moments of HEAVY that appear are all the more powerful when contrasted
against the hazy pop of Rainbow. And man, is the psych rock element on here awesome, I would love to hear more collaborative playing
between Kurihara and Boris, one album just isn't going to be enough! Highly recommended. This Drag City edition also features some gorgeous photography from
Naomi Yang of Damon & Naomi fame.
Even with the global community coming closer and closer together through the internet, and obscure underground music reaching more people now than ever
before, it can still be a difficult proposition for bands outside of the "cultural centers" of major Western countries to reach an audience. This is
especially noticeable when a band from a country such as Russia has been around for several years with a couple of albums under their belt, and are playing
music that is at least as good as their peers from the U.S. and Europe. Bosch's With You has been honing their own brand of ambient rock since 2004's
Birds And Fishes, and it was with their 2006 album Defamiliarisation that I first discovered this band, thanks to our pals at the R.A.I.G.
label. With a sound that harnesses the dreamy ambience of bands like Stars Of The Lid, Windy & Carl, and Landing, and incorporates it into amazing,
instrumental epic heavy rock anthems, it's hard to believe that these guys aren't gigantic and being buzzed about by everyone that's into the whole
instrumental rock sound. After listening to With Dreams That Come A Thing over the past few weeks, I've decided that this is probably the perfect
album for someone to check out if they haven't listened to Bosch's With You yet. It's the first in what looks like a planned trilogy that the band will be
releasing, and there's definitely a conceptual element to this album as each song is simply titled "Episode #1", "Episode #2", and so on, and all of the six
lengthy tracks that make up the album flow right into each other as if one enormous suite. As with previous albums, Bosch's With You are entirely
instrumental, and like all of the best bands that are doing this kind of atmospheric voiceless rock, they pack their compositions with heavily layered
melodies and instrumentation and paint huge vistas of brooding sound out of chiming guitars, subtle washes of samples and electronic noise, slow, propulsive
but very minimalistic drumming that sometimes locks in with a second drummer that breaks out the occasional tribal tom tom beats, and piano. LOTS of piano,
which by itself sets this apart from much of the instrumental film -rock that I've been listening to lately. The music is slow and shoegazey, multiple
guitars swirling into cloudy fields of melody, shimmering delay-soaked melodies streaking across vast valleys of drone, but then there are also a few moments
on the album where the band picks themselves up from out of the fog and crank the distortion up, like on the soft swells of metallic guitar roar that can be
heard underneath the interlocking guitar melodies on the first track, or about ten minutes into the second song, when heavier guitars and drums emerge and
grind away at a hypnotic uber-catchy riff that sounds sort of like Swervedriver jamming off behind a veil of shimmering guitar feedback. No moment on
Dreams... is heavier than the final track, though, which differentiates itself from the other tracks with a different title ("Hoarfrost"). The first
part of "Hoarfrost" is a short, two minute bit of a lone acoustic guitar being plucked slowly, a forlorn, beautiful melody floating over electronic tones.
But the second part loses the acoustic in a steadily nearing roar of amplifier rumble that takes a good three minutes to fully arrive, a dense distorted
drone a la Sunn O))) or Earth 2, and then then acoustic shows up again, joined by creaking percussion and at least one other guitar, and suddenly
the song becomes a kind of stoned backporch blues jam riding on waves of blackened doom. Very very cool. Over the course of the song's 12 minutes, the
acoustic strumming and bluesy, folksy plucking disappears in and out of the shifting mass of crushing guitar drone, drifting out into fields of Sunroofy high
end skree, then bottoming out completely at the end and ending in a wash of piercing feedback and muted noise.
With that last half of the album, this becomes a new chapter in Bosch's evolving soundtrack rock, and all together makes for my favorite music from the band
yet. Those of you who picked up Defamiliarisation from us and dug it need this one for sure. And fans of stuff like Red Sparowes, Sigur Ros, and
Grails should definitely check 'em out as well. R.A.I.G. has been putting their releases in some really great looking packaging lately, too, and this album
continues the trend: the disc comes in a 4-panel gatefold jacket with the disc attached to the inside on a small foam hub, and the jacket is illustrated in
weird, storybook-style artwork.
One gorgeous hour of cascading, delayed powerchords and dreamy melodies make up this album from Russian ambient rock ensemble Bosch's With You. Yeah, the
name doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but we're used to that sort of disconnect when dealing with underground bands from Russia.
Defamiliarisation was released on the very cool Russian label R.A.I.G., whose releases from Womba, U.S. Christmas, I Am Above On The Left, and Seven
That Spells have all found a lot of love in my disc changer, and Bosch's With You fits in nicely with the kinda-weird avant/prog rock leanings of the label
roster; the band sends up billowing clouds of guitar drone and cosmic metallic ambience that curl around a series of beautiful moody interlocking guitar
melodies, and interjects noisier, distorted riffing and really spacey, hypnotic drone improvisations. They aren't doing anything wildly original, but their
epic instrumental rock certainly hits the right spots, sounding like a combination of the mellower parts of Isis songs, Explosions In The Sky, and My Bloody
Valentine's wall of sugary guitar roar, stretched out into floating, 10-20 minute dream sagas. Although Bosch's With You does mix things up on "HCTD Do The
D.T.W. Another Way", a ten minute jam that assembles a breathking krautrock epic out of distorted 70's action-funk guitars, waves of shimmering swirling
drones and propulsive drumming - very cool. Fans of UK ambient tone sculptors Rothko might also dig Defamiliarisation's swirly, lunar beauty.
Now available on red vinyl in a full color jacket with full color printed inner sleeve that reproduces much of the amazing artwork from the original cd release of Dreams That Come A Thing, and limited to 300 copies.
Even with the global community coming closer and closer together through the internet, and obscure underground music reaching more people now than ever
before, it can still be a difficult proposition for bands outside of the "cultural centers" of major Western countries to reach an audience. This is
especially noticeable when a band from a country such as Russia has been around for several years with a couple of albums under their belt, and are playing
music that is at least as good as their peers from the U.S. and Europe. Bosch's With You has been honing their own brand of ambient rock since 2004's
Birds And Fishes, and it was with their 2006 album Defamiliarisation that I first discovered this band, thanks to our pals at the R.A.I.G.
label. With a sound that harnesses the dreamy ambience of bands like Stars Of The Lid, Windy & Carl, and Landing, and incorporates it into amazing,
instrumental epic heavy rock anthems, it's hard to believe that these guys aren't gigantic and being buzzed about by everyone that's into the whole
instrumental rock sound. After listening to With Dreams That Come A Thing over the past few weeks, I've decided that this is probably the perfect
album for someone to check out if they haven't listened to Bosch's With You yet. It's the first in what looks like a planned trilogy that the band will be
releasing, and there's definitely a conceptual element to this album as each song is simply titled "Episode #1", "Episode #2", and so on, and all of the six
lengthy tracks that make up the album flow right into each other as if one enormous suite. As with previous albums, Bosch's With You are entirely
instrumental, and like all of the best bands that are doing this kind of atmospheric voiceless rock, they pack their compositions with heavily layered
melodies and instrumentation and paint huge vistas of brooding sound out of chiming guitars, subtle washes of samples and electronic noise, slow, propulsive
but very minimalistic drumming that sometimes locks in with a second drummer that breaks out the occasional tribal tom tom beats, and piano. LOTS of piano,
which by itself sets this apart from much of the instrumental film -rock that I've been listening to lately. The music is slow and shoegazey, multiple
guitars swirling into cloudy fields of melody, shimmering delay-soaked melodies streaking across vast valleys of drone, but then there are also a few moments
on the album where the band picks themselves up from out of the fog and crank the distortion up, like on the soft swells of metallic guitar roar that can be
heard underneath the interlocking guitar melodies on the first track, or about ten minutes into the second song, when heavier guitars and drums emerge and
grind away at a hypnotic uber-catchy riff that sounds sort of like Swervedriver jamming off behind a veil of shimmering guitar feedback. No moment on
Dreams... is heavier than the final track, though, which differentiates itself from the other tracks with a different title ("Hoarfrost"). The first
part of "Hoarfrost" is a short, two minute bit of a lone acoustic guitar being plucked slowly, a forlorn, beautiful melody floating over electronic tones.
But the second part loses the acoustic in a steadily nearing roar of amplifier rumble that takes a good three minutes to fully arrive, a dense distorted
drone a la Sunn O))) or Earth 2, and then then acoustic shows up again, joined by creaking percussion and at least one other guitar, and suddenly
the song becomes a kind of stoned backporch blues jam riding on waves of blackened doom. Very very cool. Over the course of the song's 12 minutes, the
acoustic strumming and bluesy, folksy plucking disappears in and out of the shifting mass of crushing guitar drone, drifting out into fields of Sunroofy high
end skree, then bottoming out completely at the end and ending in a wash of piercing feedback and muted noise.
With that last half of the album, this becomes a new chapter in Bosch's evolving soundtrack rock, and all together makes for my favorite music from the band
yet. Those of you who picked up Defamiliarisation from us and dug it need this one for sure. And fans of stuff like Red Sparowes, Sigur Ros, and
Grails should definitely check 'em out as well.
Visions Of The End is about as far as you can possibly get from the cult death metal, black metal and gothic doom that Ars Magna usually supplies me with, but it's not totally without precedent - if you enjoyed that Trancelike Void Ep Where The Trees Can Make It Rain that came out on the label a year or so back, Bosse's elegant and autumnal funereal-folk offers some of that same euphoria. This is the first release from New York City based artist Richard Bosse that I've listened to, though it follows a handful of previous titles that included releases on similarly black metal-aligned imprints like Those Opposed and Choir Of Delusion n' included a split record with the aforementioned T-Void. Though this is essentially one man and his acoustic guitar, it's not hard to see why Bosse's music has always been connected to certain sectors of the black metal underground; Richard Bosse crafts these gorgeous shadowy folk songs that are almost entirely instrumental, layering haunting twilight melodies that repeat over and over, laid over simple, somber acoustic strum that he accompanies with soft droning sounds, ethereal keys, piano and mandolin-like buzz that slowly emerge across the six songs on Visions. Those electronic backing sounds are understated and melt right into soft washes of electric guitar hum, all a minimal backdrop for the rich buzzing and droning texture of the guitar, the scrape of fingers across the strings a constant human presence. There are moments on this disc where the music becomes a little reminiscent of later-era Swans when that band was at their most ethereal and delicate, and I can also hear some echoes of the gloomier corners of the Glass Throat catalog and Drudkh's Songs of Grief and Solitude trailing off through this collection of somber, shadow-cast melancholia. Bosses's music would probably appeal to the neo-folk crowd, but there's also elements of widescreen grandeur that materialize with the washes of droning melodic beauty and cascading strings that even touch on the sort of "post-rock" majesty that you'd hear from bands like Explosions In The Sky and Mogwai, albeit in a much more hushed and ethereal manner. It's a really moving collection of songs that has turned in to one of my favorite recent dark-acoustic albums. Recommended.
Comes in a gatefold jacket.
���Out of all the deluxe vinyl soundtrack reissues that have come out this summer, I was most excited over this new double Lp edition of Simon Boswell's score to the cult early 90s cyberpunk art-splatter film Hardware. The first feature film from visionary director Richard Stanley (who had previously cut his teeth on acclaimed documentary work and music videos for The Fields Of The Nephilim), Hardware is still one of my all-time favorite films from the early 90s, a stylish, splattery cyberpunk nightmare about a piece of lethal military robotics that ends up in the possession of a metal sculptor, then proceeds to reactivate inside of her apartment and go on a spree of death and destruction. Hardware featured a heady mix of psychedelic visuals, some wonderfully stylized visions of a near-future hellscape, a pounding post-punk soundtrack that featured songs from Ministry and Public Image Ltd., and some seriously gnarly death sequences that included copious robotic skull-shredding and bisection by pneumatic door. Yikes!
��� If you've seen Hardware, you already know that much of the film's power is derived from Simon Boswell's unique score, a mixture of moody Spaghetti Western soundtrack influences, harsh industrial textures, and fearsome orchestral sounds that Boswell had perfected with his previous work in the horror genre with Italian directors Argento, Soave and Bava. The film's music manages to be at once sorrowful and unsettling, and remains one of the most distinctive sci-fi/horror scores from the era. Boswell's opening title theme, which played out over scenes of a nameless "zone tripping" desert crawler dressed in black (played by Fields Of The Nephilim frontman Carl McCoy) first unearthing the dreaded M.A.R.K.-13, is a perfect mood setter, introducing the film's doom-laden atmosphere and twisted sensibilities with a mixture of cold futuristic synth ambience, gorgeous slide guitar twang, and swelling, ominous string sections, the bleak ambient backdrop punctuated with bursts of terrifying digital noise. As the score progresses, the music continues to nurture Stanley's ever-present vibe of impending doom, with orchestral strings laid over bone-rattling synth bass and gleaming electronic drones, while bits of other sounds take on a malevolent cast, like the tinkle of a child's music box. Electronic riffs on Indian classical sitar music are entwined around those twangy electric guitars on tracks like "Acid Meditation", and elsewhere Boswell layers his synthesizers and minimal electric guitar into skin-crawling episodes of mounting tension , smearing the grim ambience with heavily processed blasts of squealing jazz horns or dissonant orchestral samples. Otherworldly tracks like "Droid Attack" and "Shower " employ harshly arranged synthetic orchestral samples and choral voices, while the stunning black majesty of "Feathers" has a soaring, almost Floydian feel with its streaks of bluesy guitar, and the grim New Agey beauty of "Herbal" rides on waves of lush synthdrift.
��� It's an extremely experimental score, drawing heavily from industrial and electronic music to evoke an overwhelming sense of despair and hopelessness, and is as perfect a soundtrack to a ruined earth as I've heard. Never before released on vinyl, Boswell's Hardware has been reissued by Flick in a comprehensive, deluxe double LP set that contains both a "clean" version of the score without any dialogue, and a version that includes effects and dialogue from the film, as well as the radio spots from Iggy Pop's DJ Bob and dialogue from Motorhead frontman Lemmy, and some cool spoken word pieces featuring the voice of director Stanley that ultimately didn't appear in the film. The records are beautifully packaged in a heavyweight gatefold jacket with printed innersleeves, with artwork from the great Graham Humphreys and liner notes from both Boswell and Stanley, issued in a limited edition of one thousand copies.
���There's probably a good chance you haven't seen Michele Soavi's phantasmal 1987 slasher Stage Fright, even if you're a fan of horror films from the era. Although it's been reissued several times in recent years and continues to build a cult following, this was generally overlooked by horror audiences, and was out of print here in the US for ages following the VHS release of the film (titled Deliria for that format). But it's a personal favorite of mine, ultra-violent and ultra-stylish, with one of the most unique-looking killers in the slasher canon. The ritualistic plotting of 80's slasher cinema is certainly present here, with Stage Fright following a troupe of theatre actors desperately trying to escape from an escaped madman who has locked them in their theatre, hunting them one by one. But Soavi (a protege of Dario Argento) escalates the weirdness, putting a giant owls head mask on his killer that give his scenes a bizarre, uncanny vibe, and the doomed actors are subjected to some truly brutal death sequences, part of a generally nihilistic mood that surrounds the film and ranks it as one of the more mean-spirited and vicious contributions to the slasher genre. Can't recommend it enough if you've got a taste for highly stylized Italian slasher films from the 80s, as you'll not see anything else quite like it. For the film's score, Soavi enlisted Simon Boswell to create the musical backdrop for this gore-splattered nightmare, and it's another one of my favorites from the period, though some contemporary listeners might see it as being a "cheesier" example of 80's horror film music.
��� Sure, there's a distinctly 80's feel to Boswell's drum programming and synthetic choral sounds, but that's part of the appeal for me. It's actually a quite odd blend of modern electronic music and gothic atmosphere that he employs here, along with some of the industrial elements that often crept into his scores. His "Aquarius Theme" is a lush fusiony phantasia of over-the-top synth-bass and jazzy electric piano that reminds me of some of Keith Emerson's more decadent compositions for the Italians, and sets the stage for the delirious electronic-based sounds that follow. The score moves from dreamy elliptical arpeggios that have an almost Phillip Glass-esque vibe ("Hieronymus") and washes of jet-black electronic ambience that ripple with echoes of early Carpenter ("Bloody Bird"), to pounding electro-rock anthems like "Deliria" replete with staccato hard rock guitars and screaming solos, driven by blood-pumping tempos that give some of this an almost motorik momentum for some of the more action-heavy sequences. On the mournful "Requiem For An Owl", Boswell weaves lilting synth-flute melodies around ethereal pads and sustained strings to produce a darkly romantic atmosphere with a distinctly Italian feel, sorrowful and sweet electronic orchestrations that sort of feel as if Boswell is paying homage to the likes of Morricone and Ortolani. "Backstage" emits a nerve-shredding atmosphere of tension with its swells of deep brass and strange percussive noises overlaid with eerie music-box chimes, only to be followed by the experimental boom-bap of "Drama Queen" that sounds like some twisted Tackhead-style breakbeat attack, shuffling beneath random industrial clatter, high droning strings, weird tape noises and ominous minor-key orchestral creep. There's more of that rhythmic electro approach along with some additional industrial elements towards the end of the album, elements that fans of Boswell's other scores from the era (Demons, Hardware) will definitely recognize. It's great stuff, especially if you're a longtime fan of the film, and it's one of Boswell's most interesting scores from this time period.
��� Flick has done a solid job with this reissue, apparently the first time this has appeared on vinyl since 1987; pressed on clear vinyl, the Lp comes in a jacket featuring eye-catching artwork from LG White, and includes a printed inner sleeve. A much-needed addition to my own collection, my only gripe is that they weren't able to somehow include Stefano Mainetti's awesome contributions to the score as well.
IV: Mandragora is the fourth album from the San Francisco-based band Botanist, a peculiar one-man band that has brought together a strange combination of swirling waves of melodic sound and eerie dissonance fused to the twitching skeleton of black metal, and performed with a unique lineup of just hammered dulcimer and drums, all woven into a strange world of sound that evokes hallucinatory visions of ambulatory plant-beings and botanical invocations. Each new Botanist album has featured slight variations on the dulcimer-led sound, with this one heading into much more melodic territory than before. The presence of hammered dulcimer might seem odd when you first hear about it, but as soon as this album starts up, it makes perfect sense; the ringing, metallic tones of the instrument create unique buzzing overtones that slightly echo the buzzing of tremolo riffs, and Botanist layers these notes into massive blankets of droning buzz, the opener "Arboreal Gallows (Mandragora I)" speeding off into a swarming, majestic blast that almost feels like something from old NYC drone-rockers Band Of Susans meeting up with a furious black metal back-beat. In fact, a lot of this album feels more like an ominous sort of drone-rock, the sound richly layered and hypnotic, a surprisingly huge cloud of sound coming from this one instrument, but those sickening, croaking vocals and the evil atonal melodies that appear at the beginning of songs like "Nightshade" and "Sophora Tetraptera" continue to betray the bands roots in black metal. There's a shimmery quality to some of the dulcimer's higher register that start to sound like piano notes on "To Amass An Army", appearing on the songs utterly gorgeous, almost pop-like crescendo; it's an incredibly beautiful piece of music that seems like something you'd expect to hear from a band like Mono or Explosions In The Sky, but filtered through this strange, droning, slightly blackened buzz. The rest of IV: Mandragora is all like this, shifting between that gorgeous, soaring wash of distorted metallic melody and the harsher black metal elements, those scathing, reptilian vocals simply adding to the otherworldly atmosphere that surrounds this album. A minor masterwork of blackened avant pop, fused to a anti-human/plant-centric philosophy that is unlike anything else I've seen or heard.
Packaged in an arigato-style jacket with black and white printing on the interior, and a small black and white insert booklet.
Now available on vinyl with alternate album art...
IV: Mandragora is the fourth album from the San Francisco-based band Botanist, a peculiar one-man band that has brought together a strange combination of swirling waves of melodic sound and eerie dissonance fused to the twitching skeleton of black metal, and performed with a unique lineup of just hammered dulcimer and drums, all woven into a strange world of sound that evokes hallucinatory visions of ambulatory plant-beings and botanical invocations. Each new Botanist album has featured slight variations on the dulcimer-led sound, with this one heading into much more melodic territory than before. The presence of hammered dulcimer might seem odd when you first hear about it, but as soon as this album starts up, it makes perfect sense; the ringing, metallic tones of the instrument create unique buzzing overtones that slightly echo the buzzing of tremolo riffs, and Botanist layers these notes into massive blankets of droning buzz, the opener "Arboreal Gallows (Mandragora I)" speeding off into a swarming, majestic blast that almost feels like something from old NYC drone-rockers Band Of Susans meeting up with a furious black metal back-beat. In fact, a lot of this album feels more like an ominous sort of drone-rock, the sound richly layered and hypnotic, a surprisingly huge cloud of sound coming from this one instrument, but those sickening, croaking vocals and the evil atonal melodies that appear at the beginning of songs like "Nightshade" and "Sophora Tetraptera" continue to betray the bands roots in black metal. There's a shimmery quality to some of the dulcimer's higher register that start to sound like piano notes on "To Amass An Army", appearing on the songs utterly gorgeous, almost pop-like crescendo; it's an incredibly beautiful piece of music that seems like something you'd expect to hear from a band like Mono or Explosions In The Sky, but filtered through this strange, droning, slightly blackened buzz. The rest of IV: Mandragora is all like this, shifting between that gorgeous, soaring wash of distorted metallic melody and the harsher black metal elements, those scathing, reptilian vocals simply adding to the otherworldly atmosphere that surrounds this album. A minor masterwork of blackened avant pop, fused to a anti-human/plant-centric philosophy that is unlike anything else I've seen or heard...
��� The third album from this unique San Francisco botanical metal outfit has been released on limited-edition vinyl for the first time, a double LP pressed on black vinyl and housed in gatefold packaging, limited to three hundred fifty copies. We also just restocked the original double CD release on TotalRust, which features an entire second disc of additional material from other bands featuring Botanist's Otrebor on drums.
��� There was never a moment where you could confuse Botanist with a typical black metal outfit. From the beginning, this San Francisco based one-man band crafted a wholly unique sound, taking signature elements of black metal and reshaping them using just drums and dulcimer into something new, a dissonant, ethereal sound shot through with shockingly pretty melodies that at times could remind me of old NY noise rock outfits like Band Of Susans more than anything "blackened". Main member Otrebor tied that unusual dulcimer-draped sound to an aggressive eco-consciousness, explored through a surreal fantasy world where plant life becomes the dominant life form, a concept that has expanded over the course of each new album. The combination of all of this produces one of the weirdest (and coolest) things to come out of the fringes of the US black metal underground.
��� On Botanist's third album Doom In Bloom, Otrebor again shifted his approach, moving into even more melodically-rich directions from the previous releases. The seven songs come across more like some blackened, funereal post-rock, the music much slower than before, with a mournful atmosphere descending across all of these long sprawling songs. His drumming takes on a more deliberate, stately feel, with expressive percussive touches underscoring the wistful tone of the dulcimer's steel-strung melodies; there's a strong contrast with the more frenzied, pell-mell pacing of his earlier albums. Some of the songs on Bloom stretch out for twelve minutes or more, dark mournful arrangements of emotional melody shifting into waves of rumbling double-bass and chant like singing, opening up into passages of hushed piano and aching instrumental beauty. As always, the distinctive clang of the dulcimer brings an unusual folky feel, but the riffs are more muted, the "doom" aspect suggested at in the album's title materializing through the creeping dread of tracks like "Deathcap". There's a funerary vibe as well, turning some of this stuff into intensely melancholy, folk-flecked drone rock, and elsewhere the sound swells into a strange combination of neo-folk pomp and dark post-rock grandeur. What little residue of black metal remains is mainly heard in the vocals, a weird wheezy croak buried down in the mix, sometimes exploding into monstrous screeching, or reduced to a nervous, tremulous whisper; it's all an abrasive counterpoint to the gorgeous, shadow-stained darkness of the music. Fantastic stuff.
��� The second disc with the double CD version of Bloom is an entirely separate beast. Titled Allies, it's a collection of material from other bands aligned with Botanist, each song using drum recordings that were created for the original album session. Appropriately, this stuff expands further on Botanist's flora-centric themes, but with quite a bit of variety between the various projects. The disc is book-ended with tracks from the obscure outfit Matrushka, who opens and closes the album with waves of minimal glitch and scrape, each a dark, dimly lit piece of industrial murkiness that feels akin to some of the more ambient early Bianchi recordings, but with the addition of distant growling vocals, soft whorls of backwards sound, and far-off pulses of black kosmische energy. From there, though, the bands offer up varying brands of metallic crush: the band Cult Of Linnaeus erupts into a long slow blast of gloomy deathdoom with their song "The War Of All Against All", slipping briefly from their leaden heaviness into stretches of choral mystery and washes of interstellar electronic texture; Trans-Atlantic black metallers Ophidian Forest deliver an impressive piece of mid-paced black metal majesty ("Total Entarchy") that seems to draw as much from latter-day Swans as it does from the frostbitten charge of classic black metal, draping it's slightly murky, vaguely industrialized rumble in symphonic ambience and stirring, folk-flecked melodies; On "It Lives Again", Arborist stomp out a strange, frantic form of folk dirge, heavy drums pounding behind the plaintive strum of acoustic guitars and the howl of some seriously wrecked slide guitar, bits of sorrowful piano melody rising behind the despairing vibe put forth by the singer's anguished, acrid howl - when the song suddenly erupts into a kind of powerful doom-laden blues stomp in it's second half, it turns into one of the most impressive moments on the album, almost akin to a more wretched and skuzzy version of the country-laced heaviness heard on that last Neurosis album; And Bestiary, made up of members of The Human Quena Orchestra and Grayceon teaming up with Otrebor, dredges up some killer gothic-tinged doom, with lovely female vocals drifting across the grim, grinding sludge.
��� My favorite of all of these, though, is Lotus Thief's "Nymphaea Carulea". Another project from Botanist's Otrebor, this has him teaming up with a woman by the name of Bezaelith, the duo creating some seriously stirring dreampop-laced blackened power, and "Nymphaea" is a stunning example, the song crafted around a soaring, dreamy vocal hook and waves of gorgeous ethereal sound, but shot through with aggressive drumming and an undeniable black metal influence that is perfectly balanced with the stunning melodies, like some strange combination of Cocteau Twins and classic Nordic blackness. Can't wait to hear more from this band.
��� The third album from this unique San Francisco botanical metal outfit has been released on limited-edition vinyl for the first time, a double LP pressed on black vinyl and housed in gatefold packaging, limited to three hundred fifty copies. We also just restocked the original double CD release on TotalRust, which features an entire second disc of additional material from other bands featuring Botanist's Otrebor on drums.
��� There was never a moment where you could confuse Botanist with a typical black metal outfit. From the beginning, this San Francisco based one-man band crafted a wholly unique sound, taking signature elements of black metal and reshaping them using just drums and dulcimer into something new, a dissonant, ethereal sound shot through with shockingly pretty melodies that at times could remind me of old NY noise rock outfits like Band Of Susans more than anything "blackened". Main member Otrebor tied that unusual dulcimer-draped sound to an aggressive eco-consciousness, explored through a surreal fantasy world where plant life becomes the dominant life form, a concept that has expanded over the course of each new album. The combination of all of this produces one of the weirdest (and coolest) things to come out of the fringes of the US black metal underground.
��� On Botanist's third album Doom In Bloom, Otrebor again shifted his approach, moving into even more melodically-rich directions from the previous releases. The seven songs come across more like some blackened, funereal post-rock, the music much slower than before, with a mournful atmosphere descending across all of these long sprawling songs. His drumming takes on a more deliberate, stately feel, with expressive percussive touches underscoring the wistful tone of the dulcimer's steel-strung melodies; there's a strong contrast with the more frenzied, pell-mell pacing of his earlier albums. Some of the songs on Bloom stretch out for twelve minutes or more, dark mournful arrangements of emotional melody shifting into waves of rumbling double-bass and chant like singing, opening up into passages of hushed piano and aching instrumental beauty. As always, the distinctive clang of the dulcimer brings an unusual folky feel, but the riffs are more muted, the "doom" aspect suggested at in the album's title materializing through the creeping dread of tracks like "Deathcap". There's a funerary vibe as well, turning some of this stuff into intensely melancholy, folk-flecked drone rock, and elsewhere the sound swells into a strange combination of neo-folk pomp and dark post-rock grandeur. What little residue of black metal remains is mainly heard in the vocals, a weird wheezy croak buried down in the mix, sometimes exploding into monstrous screeching, or reduced to a nervous, tremulous whisper; it's all an abrasive counterpoint to the gorgeous, shadow-stained darkness of the music. Fantastic stuff.
��San Francisco's dulcimer-driven one-man band Botanist brings us more of his brilliant plant-worshipping black metal with this new split, which sees him teaming up with another San Fran outfit, Palace of Worms. I snoozed for the longest time on Palace of Worm's previous stuff on Flenser, but their side of this split is killer stuff, and makes for a fantastic compliment to Botanist's strange verdant visions.
�� Botanist is up first, his side titled EP I: The Hanging Gardens Of Hell; once again delivering an unconventional vision of black metal using just vocals, drums and hammered dulcimer which more often resembles some ramshackle blackened drone-rock veined with black threads of withered folk than anything you'd typically describe as "metal". The first song "Tillandsia" is in that same rollicking mode as the music on the Mandragora album, the drums racing beneath the strange chiming overtones and washes of eerie droning guitar, a sound that continues to remind me of Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth strapped to the back of blazing black metal-style tempos and possessed by distant, gasping vocals. The lyrics again read like some strange chronicle of arcane botanical hallucinations, apocalyptic arboreal visions of weeds and vines and roots crawling across the earth, burying human civilization beneath a bed of green. More avant noise rock than metal, in fact, but still pretty powerful. And again, this guy is gifted with crafting sheets of melodic sound, the songs breaking away into haunting plaintive melodies woven from that hammered dulcimer, or clustering together into masses of chiming sound like on the thunderous "Senecio", shot through with dissonant glare, or the hushed, almost hymnlike beauty of "Tradescantia Pallida". Lovely stuff.
�� On Palace Of Worm's side, though, the album shifts into much darker and more menacing territory. The three-part "Ode To Joy" kicks in with buzzing minor key balck metal riffs and mostly mid-paced rocking tempos, flecked with some vintage synthesizer textures, bits of 80's style soundtracky ambience glimmering above the off-kilter rhythms and sudden shifts from ferocious tremolo riffing into more awkward, off-kilter angularity. There's some killer gothy touches that appear through these three tracks, the echo-drenched scraped strings and wiry reverb-soaked melodies putting off some classic deathrock fumes here and there, but there's always another violent eruption of rickety blastbeats and hoarse, layered screaming and epic riffage right around the corner, a hallucinatory vibe wafting off the recording thanks to sole member Balan's unusual layering of atonal keyboards and howling pipe organs with the ragged ugly black metal, and his use of almost math-rock style time signatures and spiky dissonance with soaring, delay-drenched rock solos. Love this stuff!
Man, this takes me back. I was lucky enough to see Botch two nights in a row when they toured with Jesuit and Dillenger Escape Plan in 1998,
and I remember being totally blown away by how frantic and complex and CRUSHING Botch were live. It would have been awesome to see their last
show a couple of years back, but for all of us that couldn't cough up the plane tickets to Seattle, Hydra Head has finally delivered this document of that last show from 2002. A mighty math-metalcore destruction machine, Botch beamed massively heavy yet super melodic and intricate
jams, every one of their songs a devestatingly epic assault of chugging, confounding riffage, weird effects, earth shaking bass, complex angular rhythms n' dizzying time signatures, and monstrous roaring vocals. One of the most important and influential bands of the 90's
underground heavy music scene, Botch sent hardcore spiralling off into a whole 'nother direction. This DVD/CD set captures their final
performance on June 15th, 2002 at the Showbox in Seattle, Washington. The footage is AWESOME, capturing the incredible energy of the band and an entirely appreciative crowd that fucking flip OUT, and the variety of different camera angles and a powerful, crystal clear audio recording
make this one of the best live concert DVDs I have ever seen. Most of the footage is shot from the stage, and it puts you right in the middle
of their explosive, emotional set. The set runs through pretty much all of their crucial stuff: ""St. Mathew Returns To The Womb"", ""C. Thomas Howell As The ""Soul Man"", ""John Woo ""Japam"", ""Oma"", ""Frequency Ass Bandit"", ""Thank God For The Worker Bees"", ""Framce"", ""Third Part In A Tragedy"", ""Rock Lobster"", ""Transitions From Persona To Object"", ""To Our Friends In The Great White North"", ""Hutton's Great Heat Engine"", and ""Man The Ramparts"". The DVD also features an insightful commentary track with the members of Botch, the music video for ""St. Matthew Returns
To The Womb"", and a live set from 2002 in Bellingham, Washington. In addition to the DVD, the set also includes a CD with the entire concert,
and the whole deal comes in one of the coolest DVD packages I've seen, the DVD and CD held in a gatefold sleeve with 8 page booklet of liner notes, and which folds up into a box. Obviously this is something that any Botch fans aren't going to want to miss, but this should also be mandatory viewing for anybody that wants to bear witness to one of the most progressive, influential hardcore bands ever, who pretty much changed the shape of what has become known as ""metalcore"".
Resurrected yet again from out-of-print obscurity, this CD is a collection of songs from the original Unifying Themes disc (which was essentially a
combination of their early EP's, the John Birch Conspiracy Theory 7" and the Faction 7", plus compilation tracks, unreleased songs, their
bizarre, awesome covers of "O Fortuna" (which you might recognize as the theme from Conan The Barbarian) and B-52's "Rock Lobster", their songs from
the splits with Nineironspitfire and Murder City Devils, and an unlisted live radio show from 1996. Botch's weird, complex and massively heavy
metalcore was some of the most important heavy music made in the 90's, displaying even on this early material a twisted sense of complex time signatures and
controlled chaos, and these jams outline the evolution of this legendary Seattle band that would go on to record a career defining landmark with We Are
The Romans. One of the greatest bands to ever stride the realms of mathy, angular crush. Features beefed up package design.
Latest vinyl reissue of Botch's final album We Are The Romans from 1999, a high water mark in the field of angular, progged-out metalcore that would go on to inspire legions of bands, almost none of which ever came anywhere close to capturing the bold creativity and psychotic energy of Botch at their peak. With these nine songs, Botch perfected their metallic math rock attack, taking the sort of spiraling, complex guitar structures of bands like Slint and Shellac and fusing 'em to the crushing heaviness and speed-fueled aggression of thrash and metallic hardcore. Listening to this again, it's notable that Romans has also aged far better than many of the other likeminded albums that came out during this era, due in large part to the band's attention to songwriting and their ability to craft some genuinely catchy music out of the skronky, angular aggression, and many of the songs on Romans were fleshed out with effective atmospheric passages and memorable hooks, striking a balance with their still-dizzying musical acrobatics that continue to resonate with a fevered power.
Dense math-metal carnage spills out across songs like opener "To Our Friends In The Great White North" and "Mondrian Was A Liar", shifting into monstrous lead-plated grooves and off-kilter time signatures. The hushed spoken lyrics and dark riffing of "Swimming The Channel Vs. Driving The Chunnel" is a particularly Slinty slab of metallic math rock, and one of the most haunting songs on the album. Tightening the tension with well-placed passages of angular rhythmic weirdness like the beginning of "Transitions From Persona To Object", Botch paved the way for the lethal serpentine groove that rears it's misshapen head later in the song amid a swarm of bizarre electronic effects. This is epic, apocalyptic music, filled with passages of devastating heaviness that rival the likes of Meshuggah, especially with the almost eleven minute long closer "Man The Ramparts", a slithering skronk-metal saga that lurches into some surprisingly dubby territory as it uncoils across an entire side of the record, drifting out into a cloud of choral voices, a weirdly liturgical stretch of atmospheric vocal drift laced with lovely female singing that extends for several minutes before the band finally crashes back in with one final onslaught of crushing, dire heaviness. Immense stuff that stands as some of the very best math-metal of its time, We Are The Romans also features an untitled track on the final side of this vinyl reissue that is actually Logic Probe's pummeling drum n' bass remix of the Botch song "Thank God for Worker Bees" off of their American Nervoso album, the original song's crushing angular guitars transformed into tangles of crazed metallic crunch scattered among the track's deep bass swells and sinister electronic ambience, fused to a brutal looped rhythm.
Comes on 180 gram vinyl in a gatefold jacket, re-mastered for vinyl by James Plotkin.
Gorgeous new vinyl edition of Botch's last live performance, previously released as part of the band's 061502 DVD and CD set. Re-mastered for vinyl, these two LPs come in printed inner-sleeves, housed inside of a heavyweight case-wrapped gatefold jacket, and issued in a limited edition of two thousand copies. This still stands as one of the most ferocious live performances I've seen documented on video, and that energy bleeds through every second of the recorded audio from this concert. Here's the old review of the live material from the CD release:
For all of us that couldn't cough up the plane tickets to Seattle, Hydra Head has finally delivered this document of that last show from 2002. A mighty math-metal destruction machine, Botch beamed massively heavy yet super melodic and intricate jams, every one of their songs a devastatingly epic assault of chugging, confounding riffage, weird effects, earth shaking bass, complex angular rhythms n' dizzying time signatures, and monstrous roaring vocals. One of the most important and influential bands of the 90's underground heavy music scene, Botch sent hardcore spiraling off into a whole 'nother direction. This captures their final performance on June 15th, 2002 at the Showbox in Seattle, Washington. The footage is amazing, capturing the incredible energy of the band and an entirely appreciative crowd that flip out throughout the entire length of the show...their explosive, emotional set runs through pretty much all of their crucial stuff: "St. Mathew Returns To The Womb", "C. Thomas Howell As The "Soul Man"", "John Woo", "Japam", "Oma", "Frequency Ass Bandit", "Thank God For The Worker Bees", "Framce", "Third Part In A Tragedy", the cover of "Rock Lobster", "Transitions From Persona To Object", "To Our Friends In The Great White North", "Hutton's Great Heat Engine", and "Man The Ramparts". Obviously, this is something that any Botch fans aren't going to want to miss, but this should also be mandatory viewing for anybody that wants to bear witness to one of the most progressive, influential hardcore bands ever, who pretty much changed the shape of "math-metal" as we know it.
���� This pulverizing 7" is finally back in stock; it's still (so far) the only official release to appear from this formidable math-metal outfit, a duo featuring experimental musician Brian Metz ( Amish Control Tower) and drum titan Pen Rollings, of Honor Role / Breadwinner / Loincloth infamy. Together, these guys create an experimental, extremely heavy strain of math-metal that feels like an extension of Rollings' previous work, but with a tightly edited, almost ascetic production aesthetic. Bowl Ethereal's six-song debut was the introduction to the duo's jagged metallic architecture, and it knocked me flat the first time I listened to it; as soon as this opens with "Twenty Three Exciter Dreams", I was immediately reminded of Confessor's confusional heaviness, though this stuff is totally instrumental. But there's a similar technical, convoluted feel to this stuff. Interestingly, each song is exactly one minute long, and crammed to the gills with complex instrumental structures and pummeling rhythmic dexterity, the confounding, vertigo-inducing time signatures unfolding beneath an onslaught of crushing downtuned riffs, the music stuttering and lurching violently, each song a miniature math-metal epic that could easily be pulled apart and reworked into a much longer, more expansive song. With these songs seemingly vacuum-packed into this strict, economic length, though, this has a peculiar, compact power that makes me want to listen to the EP again and again. Can't recommend it enough to fans of Rollings' other bands.
We just dug this disc up out of the RRRecords bins; there's been a few versions of this album, beginning with the original Lp release on RRRecords in 1987 and a later reissue on Aussie label Lexicon Devil. This is a barebones CDR release of Winter from RRRecords that became available not too long ago, packaged in RRR's signature style of Xeroxed, hand assembled paper sleeve. While Winter might not be a classic album, it is a dark, fascinating album of early American post-industrial that fans of Wolf Eyes, Hair Police, and other Midwestern noise bands should check out, if for no other reason than to see that this sort of creeping, sinister industrial skuzz came into being more than a decade and a half before Dread. Featuring members of the legendary thrash/post-hardcore band Die Kruezen, Boy Dirt Car was one of the oddest bands to crawl out of Milwaukee's post-hardcore underground in the late 80s. The band devoured classic UK post-industrial/PE and the music of Throbbing Gristle and the experimental guitar music of Rhys Chatham and spit these influences back out into a weird mix of grimy trailer-park power electronics, punk energy, and occult atmosphere.
This fifteen song disc opens with "Smear", a pounding dirge of metallic percussion, scraping noises and harsh feedback, gut-rumbling bass frequencies and dubby effects. It's noisy and abstract, a pounding machine-shop dirge molded into an almost hypnotic blur of noise. But with the second track "Control Broadcast", the band turns into a kind of plodding industrial dirge-rock, grinding out a lurching scrap yard sludge that's interspersed with blats of random television signals and looped noise. That's followed by the strange noisy punk of "Western Nile", which sort of sounds like Flipper wandering around in a laboratory next to a discotheque where they're blasting Throbbing Gristle Lps, the air full of primitive thud and disembodied voices. "Invisible Man" is total old-school power electronics with raging ultra-distorted vocals over an ear-splitting muck of chaotic guitar noise and amp rumble, buzzing feedback and monstrous bass throb, followed by the industrial creep of "Forms Forced Surrender", a Broken Flag-esque blat of abstract electronics. Melodic guitar rumblings and buzzing engine noise are combined on "What Never Ends, Begins Today", as bells toll against a backing rhythm of a steady hi-hat click. And the album's other foray into ear-splitting extremity comes with "10,000 Years", a brutal harsh noise exercise that is almost on par with something you'd hear from Incapacitants or Pain Jerk, later moving into a cacophony of junk metal and oscillating moans and chittering insect noise. The rest of the tracks have the band wandering through more fields of creepy power electronics, static low-end drone, random metal percussive sounds, digging noises, crushing bass-drone, and guitar racket.
The disc also has the five songs from Boy Dirt Car's split Lp with space rockers F/I added onto the end. This material is darker stuff, apocalyptic ranting over hellish swirling industrial drift, demonic vocals and warped guitar noise, and menacing machine shop dirges; it's with this music that you can hear the raw DNA for what bands like Wolf Eyes would be doing roughly a decade later.
Blown-to-fuck, weirdly rhythmic noisecore/cut-up explosions from this Florida duo of AG Davis on drum machines and synthesizers and Auston K on vocals,
setting off spastic, irregular noise jams that loop extremely damaged machine rhythms and programmed blastbeats around some super nasty synth squelch,
destroyed guitar noise and brutal screaming vocals, with song titles like "Alone In The Brassfront High Chair", "Harem Oxygen Blowsetter", and "Mongrel Bone
Display". This tape has a definite cut-and-paste feel, and the tracks bounce around between full-on harsh noisecore, loopy punk collages that sound like
Hanatarash abusing some obscure garage rock demo tapes, and weirder cassette abstraction. Pretty tweaked shit that sits somewhere in between the
aforementioned Hanatarash, Strangulated Beatoffs' weirdo noiserock, and some kind of vicious industrial grindnoise. This installment in the crusty No Horse
Shit series of tapes is now sold out from the label, and only 22 copies were made. Comes in a plastic tape case with some gnarly looking B&W xerox artwork.
We only have a couple of these in stock.
Listening to these 21 hyperblasting tracks from Boy + Girl is like consuming a gallon of coffee and jamming your head into a malfunctioning car engine. Which
to us, sounds like a lot of fun. This FLorida trio mash up electronics, guitar,bass, drums, destroyed chipmunk vocals, and synthesizers into a rapid fire
noise cut-up/dance punk/avant grind disaster that sounds like some weird collaboration between Melt Banana and Scissor Shock and a full on Japanese noise
catastrophe. Fast paced, ultra distorted and noisy dance beats, loopy distortion blasts, retarded cheer squad vocals, hyperspeed cassette carnage ripping
through your skull...pretty fucking rad, wethink. Total caffeine-overdose noisecore. Fans of Lightning Bolt, Melt Banana, and Lovepump United spazztocity
would spoo over this private-press disc, in full color jewel case packaging.
British drone sculptor Paul Bradley has teamed up with the Italian musique concrete/ambient project Cria Cuervos (aka Eugenio Maggi) for this set of evocative droneworks. Moraines II uses a previous CD-R release that the two artists collaborated on as source material for the epic title track, which stretches out for almost an hour and is obviously the centerpiece of this album, which is followed by a shorter remix of the same material by the surrealist sound alchemist Andrew Liles.
The trip through "Moraines II" is a dark one, beginning with whorls of deep resonant shimmer and bowed metal tones that drift through a great void and reveal glimmers of melody and shards of glitch and digital detritus. From there, the piece moves through a series of different states, each one existing almost as a seperate piece from the rest, but flowing along a strange aural narrative. Strange amorphous soundscapes are formed from field recordings of water and melting ice, the rush and hiss of liquid subtly changed through manipulation and signal processing into alien-sounding sonic textures. Bird songs are stretched and blurred into a dreamlike haze, and draped with gauzy layers of distortion and eerie ambience. Electronic organ-like drones create stretches of dark minimal ambience, joined by recordings of rainfall, metallic growling noises, more bizarre field recording mutations, swells of ominous Lustmord-esque drift, and towards the end, the dreamlike array of sounds and drones is overwhelmed by waves of black noise.
The second track is a sixteen-minute remix of the same material by Andrew Lille, and he creates a creepy nightmare collage of tidal drones, metallic rumblings, fractured bits of piano, and warped nature sounds that's along the lines of the Nurse With Wound influenced strangeness of the rest of his body of work.
The two artists create an interesting, phantasmagoric amalgam of natural sounds and isolationist drone on this disc that'll fit in well with any collection that contains lots of Aube, Maurizio Bianchi, Coleclough, Organum, and Hafler Trio. Packaged in a matte gatefold jacket.
Fuck, this thing is in and out in three minutes flat! I'm like a junkie shaking when the needle lifts, these two jams kill it with a blazing fast-paced hardcore punk attack that stinks of mid-80's Black Flag and some stranger, wonkier influences floating around in there - I need to hear more of this ASAP...guitars are all bent and angular, but the riffs are punishing, definite Ginn influence there but with more emphasis on jaw-cracking power...the singer has an impressive yowl that still allows me to generally get the gist of what he's going on about. Turns out these cats are from Pittsburgh, have a couple of other releases out (which I will be tracking down, pronto), and features members of a band called Warzone Womyn that were kicking it around P-burgh a couple of years ago with bands like Crucial Unit, though I never got a chance to see 'em/hear 'em. Bottom line - this is supremely wonked and ugly-ass feedback-smeared ripper thrash that rubs the same tumurous gland that recent offerings from Total Abuse and Double Negative stroked so well, but with some nods to that head-trauma ugliness of Pissed Jeans... uber recommended. This came out on the label run by the guys in Iron Lung, and comes in a simple white record sleeve with the Brain Handle logo printed in one corner. Limited to 500 copies.
Here's an awesome debut Ep from a hardcore punk band out of Minneapolis called Brain Tumors that had me raging instantly the first time I threw it on the deck. It's on Fashionable Idiots, and like most of the stuff that I've heard from the label, it's wonky hardcore with a quirky style of it's own. The six songs on this platter are fast, ferocious blasts of hardcore that come from the Negative Approach/Die Kreuzen school of brute thrash, always a winner in my book, but injects it with manic solos, jangly, sort of twangy guitars, and some angular skronk. Oh, and the singer is a goddamn maniac, spitting and frothing and howling out his lyrics, belting them out in a nearly unintelligible mess of anti-social ranting. I can't wait to hear more from these guys, you'll want to check this Ep out if you're infatuated with the new crop of mutant hardcore bands that have been coming out on Iron Lung and Fashionable Idiots and Parts Unknown. The record comes in a disgusting four-color silk-screened sleeve, and is limited to six hundred copies.
The 2003 12" EP Cheap has been unavailable for awhile, but we just scored some of this crushing blat of prime Brainbombs skeeze. I had been
trying to get this for my own collection for ages, so this was a welcome find. We at C-Blast have had a serious obsession with the Swedish band Brainbombs
ever since we first heard Obey, and ever since then I have been trying to get my hands on everything that this band released for both myself and for
the Crucial Blast catalog. Since most of their released are out of print, that hasn't been easy, but luckily a bunch of their titles have been getting
reissued on CD lately, and every once in awhile I'll stumble across warehouse stashes of older stuff of theirs (like this 12").
Five tracks of Brainbombs in all of their brutal, stumbling, transgressive mightiness. Slo-mo sub-Stooges punk slowed down to a retarded crawl, blown out
and bottom heavy, each song is just one riff, but what a riff...hammered out over and over again, Brainbomb's riffs border on sludge/doom, they are that
fucking slow and heavy, but this definitely isn't metal, even though it's as heavy and evil as anything you've ever heard. The brain damaged saxophone
that slobbers its way across the jams further coats songs like "Freak Accident", "Birthday Baby", and "Cum In Blood" with an additional layer of sleaze, but
as any Brainbombs fan knows, it's all about the singer, a misanthropic freak show of a man who recites these half spoken/half muttered lyrics over the music
that regale the listener in sordid tales of murder and sodomy, his voice buried under distortion and fuzz.
Hard to believe considering how grotesque and punishing the other Brainbombs records are, but holy shit, Cheap is one of the slowest and dirgiest
things that I've ever heard from 'em. Whenever you hear people compare Brainbombs to early Swans or Eyehategod, this is the music that they are
talking about. Utterly negative and nihilistic sludgepunk oozing through busted speakers, gooey guitar FX abuse slathered all over the riffs, a metronomic,
almost motorik descent into total depravity.
On the A side, you get the four originals, right around 20 minutes of music, and then on the B side you get a remix of the song "BUrning Hell" from Alec
Empire of DHR/Atari Teenage Riot fame. If you felt that the original version of Brainbomb's classick "Burning Hell" wasn't blown out and gross enough for
you, well, get an earful of this: the superdistorted sludge of the original run through a warzone of chopped up gabba beats and spastic breaks, harsh
Merzbowian electronic skree, grinding machine-engine drones, and the screeching clatter of dying video game consoles. I wasn't sure what to expect from this,
but Empire turned in a chaotic earbleeding collage that, while it doesn't do anything to add to the saga of Brainbombs, is a satisfying blast of noisy,
violent, rhythmic aggression.
On black vinyl, packaged in a white and black jacket.
Is this it? Is this really the last-ever release from the mighty Brainbombs? Fucking heartbreaking. But this does seem to be the word on the street surrounding this new 7"""" from the notorious Swedish scumfucks. This EP rocks two never-before-heard jams that were recorded during the band's final recording session, which also produced The Grinder and Big Brothel EPs, and it's got everything that we love about the Brainbombs: the damaged saxophone blowing, the sludgy primitive riffs played over and over again like a subterranean Stooges mantra, the noise, the filth, the scum, the skuzz, the deadpan vocals describing all manner of sexual and criminal depravity. Total genius. And """"Stinking Memory"""" is indeed pure 'Bombs, a sludgy two-chord riff pounded into the ground, surrounded by fucked up sax skronk, sociopathic lyrics, and a thick sheen of filth. """"Insects"""" is even more damaged, the guitar totally blown out, the sax and weird manic guitar soloing all over the goddamn place, the vocals muttering some serious downer vibes, everything splattered with even more grit and distortion than usual, yet somehow this is one of the catchiest songs from the Brainbombs too, the hook on """"Insects"""" is so catchy, it's a noisy blown out garage stomp sludge jazz anthem that'll rattle around in your head for awhile. Limited edition of 377 copies, and comes in a cool black sleeve with screenprinted gray and metallic silver inks.
Recently repressed by the Armageddon folks, and back in stock...
Obey was the first Brainbombs album I had ever heard, my introduction to their bad-news garage thuggery...the longstanding obsession that I've had with this band all started here. Obey was previously released through the label Releasing Eskimo but went out of print several years ago, and has now been reissued by the good folks over at Armageddon with slightly different packaging. Every one of Brainbombs albums is a brutal, murderous slab of misanthropic hatred and depravity, but Obey seems to top 'em all as the clearer production here allows you to hear all of the over the top, seriously disturbing rants that tumble out of the singers mouth. The disc opens with a few moments of snappy cheesbag game show muzak, then mashes you across the grill with "Kill Them All" as the band enters among wailing feedback and a noxious plodding sludge-punk riff as the singer drunkenly states "if you've got the power, then use it an kill them all...", lurching into their trademark brand of brain-damaged noisy garage scumrock. It's simple but lethal, sludgey out-of-tune riffs repeating over and over, that banged up trumpet blaring some warped jazz over it, pummeling neanderthal drumming, every song a staggering hypnotic crawl through hideous, psychotic depictions of rape and murder and dismemberment...the "lyrics" are delivered in a heavy Swedish accent, more spoken than sung, a crazed murderous scumfuck outlining his crimes and fantasies through songs like "Die You Fuck", "Lipstick On My Dick", "Anal Desire", "Fuckmeat", extreme fucked-up litanies of misogynistic and misanthropic violence. The sludgey riffage of the Melvins dragged through the skuzzy stomp of the Stooges Funhouse and set to repeat, the music becoming more and more horrifying and hypnotic as the band hammers the riff into the ground and the singer becomes more unhinged...intense stuff. The whole vibe here is similiar to the transgressive meltdowns of Whitehouse, though to my ears Brainbombs are far more creepy and disturbing. This new reissue has pretty much the same artwork and layout, except now the artwork is all black-on-black instead of the black and white artwork of the original.
I have been trying to get ahold of this import LP for ages, but everytime the distributor had any listed, they instantly disappeared. At last though this record has been repressed and we've managed to grab a limited number of these for Crucial Blast, a recently released (2008) vinyl only album from the legendary Brainbombs released on the Lystring label, and limited to only 735 copies. What can I say? New BRAINBOMBS! Any of you who follow the Crucial Blast catalog updates know that this is one of my favorite bands, and up until this Lp came out, I thought that they were all done. Somehow they blurted out this new set last summer, and it's as heavy as anything from this gang of garage sludge thugs. If yer a Brainbombs addict too, it shouldn't take too much prodding to tell you that this is essential stuff, but heres the details: seven new songs, all of 'em from the band at their sludgiest and funkiest, each song a lumbering hypnotic drudge of blasting out-of-tune trumpet and deformed Stooges riffing, a single massive droning riff at the center of it all grinding onward incessantly, their power in repetition as they hammer that riff out over and over while the singer spews his bizarre misanthropic rants and murderous hallucinations. Most surprising moment is thesong "Stalker", which might be the "prettiest" Brainbombs song ever, a murky melodic jam with those brain damaged vocals softly speaking over it, like Brainbombs twisting an old 70's AM radio soft-rock hook into their own warped image. Other songs include "It's a Fucking Mess", "Behind a Tree", "Stinking Cocks", "Ooh What a Feeling", "Skinned Alive", "Turn to Shit", each song describing another atrocity performed at the hands of the singer, each song surrounded by menacing atmosphere and noisy filth, warped and crushing and oddly catchy in their own noxious way. Crucial.
Back in stock! At long last, the collection of out of print Brainbombs singles and EPs that I've been jonesing for ever since I first heard their scumfuck masterpeice Obey! Actually, this is the Singles Collection II CD that was just released by the French label Polly Magoo, the followup to the first Brainbombs singles CD that is currently out of print. This is an equally essential anthology CD for any fans of these notorious Swedish noise punkers, gathering five different singles from 1998 through 2007 along with four never-before-released live jams from 1993. If you haven't already joined the cult, you gotta check them out if you're even remotely into the current skuzz-punk sounds of Clockcleaner, Violent Students, Homostupids, Burmese, and that ilk. Seriously. Aside from maybe Flipper, Brainbombs are the primo figureheads for violent, antisocial dirge. Brainbombs formed in 1987 in Hudiksvall, Sweden and spent the next two decades spreading their terminally reprobate, heavy-as-hell sludge punk, each of their songs usually consisting of just one monstrous riff that the band plays over and over, hammering it into the ground while their singer spews all manner of psychopathic, sexually transgressive ranting over the band's radioactive Stooges trudge in a deadpan sing-speak that sounds pretty funny at first, until you actually make out what he's saying and realize that this is pretty fucking deranged. And the music is so heavy, the riffs slow and sludgy and just evil sounding, with sinister trumpet blowing bleating over top, sending vile brass notes drifting over their droning, hypnotic noise rock, everything recorded raw and low fi and totally in the red, every instrument glazed in distortion, the drumming locking into a propulsive motorik beat. Utterly crushing genius, and one of the most crucial noise rock bands on the planet. This anthology focuses on the Brainbomb's later years, and includes the Macht (Gun couRt singles SEries) 7" from 1998, the Stigma Of The Ripper / Street Cleaner 7" on Tumult from 2003, The Grinder / Mommy Said 7" on Ken Rock from 2004, the I Need Speed 7" on Big Brothel from 2006, the Stinking Memory / Insects 7" on Anthem, and the live recordings of "Stacy", "Tired And Bloody", "Danny Was A Streetwhore", and "Urge To Kill" that were recorded in Oslo, Norway in 1993, all perfectly gnarly and noisy and raging. The booklet contains the cover artwork from the 7" releases along with some brief liner notes written by The Lamp's Monty Buckles. Highly recommended.
Now released as a limited edition with the same black-on-black artwork as the cd version on Armageddon Label...
Obey was the first Brainbombs album I had ever heard, my introduction to their bad-news garage thuggery...the longstanding obsession that I've had with this band all started here. Obey was previously released through the label Releasing Eskimo but went out of print several years ago, and has now been reissued by the good folks over at Armageddon with slightly different packaging. Every one of Brainbombs albums is a brutal, murderous slab of misanthropic hatred and depravity, but Obey seems to top 'em all as the clearer production here allows you to hear all of the over the top, seriously disturbing rants that tumble out of the singers mouth. The disc opens with a few moments of snappy cheesbag game show muzak, then mashes you across the grill with "Kill Them All" as the band enters among wailing feedback and a noxious plodding sludge-punk riff as the singer drunkenly states "if you've got the power, then use it an kill them all...", lurching into their trademark brand of brain-damaged noisy garage scumrock. It's simple but lethal, sludgey out-of-tune riffs repeating over and over, that banged up trumpet blaring some warped jazz over it, pummeling neanderthal drumming, every song a staggering hypnotic crawl through hideous, psychotic depictions of rape and murder and dismemberment...the "lyrics" are delivered in a heavy Swedish accent, more spoken than sung, a crazed murderous scumfuck outlining his crimes and fantasies through songs like "Die You Fuck", "Lipstick On My Dick", "Anal Desire", "Fuckmeat", extreme fucked-up litanies of misogynistic and misanthropic violence. The sludgey riffage of the Melvins dragged through the skuzzy stomp of the Stooges Funhouse and set to repeat, the music becoming more and more horrifying and hypnotic as the band hammers the riff into the ground and the singer becomes more unhinged...intense stuff. The whole vibe here is similiar to the transgressive meltdowns of Whitehouse, though to my ears Brainbombs are far more creepy and disturbing. This new reissue has pretty much the same artwork and layout, except now the artwork is all black-on-black instead of the black and white artwork of the original.
Now reissued on limited edition Lp, this crucial collection of early 7" and compilation tracks from the mighty Brainbombs is available once again. The Cd version of this comp has been out of print for years, so it's good to have this stuff back in print, even if this vinyl edition is already almost sold out from distributors. Masters of politically incorrect, death-lusting garage crush, Brainbombs have long been one of our favorite bands, and these early recordings from the Swedish scumfucks are deliciously violent slabs of their messed-up, horn-splattered sludge rock that go all the way back to their origins in the late 80s. Beginning with the "Jack The Ripper Lover / No End" 7" from 1989, the band had already nailed down their mix of depraved stream-of-consciousness lyrical matter and Stooges-inspired skuzz, starting off with "Ripper"'s mock jazz that settles into one of thair patented blooze-sludge dirges and the slide guitar and horn mayhem on the angular skronk trudge of the b-side. The Anne Frank 7" from 1990 was even heavier, with doom-laden slow mo jazz-sludge, guitar noise, and slurred drunken howls coming off with Melvins-strength crush, but it wasn't until their It's A Burning Hell / No Place 7" and the subsequent Live Action At Rock All, Oslo Ep on Big Ball Records that the 'Bombs would really define their fucked-up out of tune sludgepunk sound, repetitive riffs, and those fey monotone vocals and Peter Sotos-style lyrics that would come to trademark their recordings from this point on. The live in particular is a gloriously ugly and blown out slab of pummeling, inebriated noise rock filth. The collection also has the song "Second Coming" a heaving industrial chug fest that originally appeared on the In The Shadow Of Death compilation that came out on Cold Meat Industry in 1988, and the two bonus tracks at the end are the oldest songs on here, pulled from the Unveiled compilation tape on Mechanik Cassettes from 1986; the first, "Psychout Crash Kid" is an odd percussive dirge of howling feedback and industrial tribal punk crud, and the second, "I Detta Satan's Rum", is another industrial dirge with minimal guitars, droning bass, and distant vocals, almost Swans-like, slow but propulsive, and very different from the sound that they would evolve into a few years later.
Finally, after years of being out of print, this slab of pounding sadistic sludge punk is available again in a vinyl-only reissue from Load. This notorious gang of Swedish misanthropes have been playing their brand of maniacal, Stooges-esque garage sludge for more than twenty four years, combining a drunken, droning Neanderthal punk lurch with inebriated trumpets, out of tune guitars, the singer's perversely fey delivery and vile lyrics that seem to be lifted right out of a copy of Peter Sotos's infamous Pure fanzine. Needless to say, they're one of our favorite bands ever, and getting this scorching 1999 album from the 'Bombs on vinyl has us positively giddy. Opening with the seething Stooges-style garage skum stomper "Slayer", Urge To Kill delves into a dark, disturbing world of blunt hammer murder fantasies and deathlust, delirious narratives of rape and abuse, kidnapping and dismemberment, the English lyrics delivered in the singer's weirdly fey, detached monotone. The music is brutal, repetitive, demented jazz dirges, going from the hell bound industrialized boog of "Slutmaster" to the bleating echoing trombone that drifts over the laid-back groove, heavy chorused guitars, and almost surfy sludge of "Salome"; "Ass Fucking Murder" is a lurching blooze-backed litany of sodomy and savage violence, followed with "Maybe"'s crushing slow-mo heaviness. "Down In the Gutter" and "Stupid And Weak" are a back to back battering of lurching motorik pummel and howling free jazz horns, and the band introduces some harmonica and slide guitar on the song "Driving Through Leeds". Awesome, transgressive heaviness that comes across as a warped mix of Whitehouse and the Cows and the snotty sludge of Drunks With Guns, so fucking great...
The latest 2017 reissue of this massive scum-punk collection.
Originally released on the French label Polly Maggoo back in 2007 as a double Cd (now long sold out), this formally-untitled collection of early sonic scum-assaults from these Swedish fiends is available once again, this time via the Armageddon Label who also brought us the most current edition of the 'bombs classic Obey, presented as a double Lp set limited to five hundred copies. An essential collection for anyone into the murderous punk-sludge that this outfit has been slinging for the past two decades; here's my old write-up of the original Cd release:
At long last, the collection of out of print Brainbombs singles and EPs that I've been jonesing for ever since I first heard their scumfuck masterpeice Obey! Actually, this is the Singles Collection II CD that was just released by the French label Polly Magoo, the followup to the first Brainbombs singles CD that is currently out of print. This is an equally essential anthology CD for any fans of these notorious Swedish noise punkers, gathering five different singles from 1998 through 2007 along with four never-before-released live jams from 1993. If you haven't already joined the cult, you gotta check them out if you're even remotely into the current skuzz-punk sounds of Clockcleaner, Violent Students, Homostupids, Burmese, and that ilk. Seriously. Aside from maybe Flipper, Brainbombs are the primo figureheads for violent, antisocial dirge. Brainbombs formed in 1987 in Hudiksvall, Sweden and spent the next two decades spreading their terminally reprobate, heavy-as-hell sludge punk, each of their songs usually consisting of just one monstrous riff that the band plays over and over, hammering it into the ground while their singer spews all manner of psychopathic, sexually transgressive ranting over the band's radioactive Stooges trudge in a deadpan sing-speak that sounds pretty funny at first, until you actually make out what he's saying and realize that this is pretty fucking deranged. And the music is so heavy, the riffs slow and sludgy and just evil sounding, with sinister trumpet blowing bleating over top, sending vile brass notes drifting over their droning, hypnotic noise rock, everything recorded raw and low fi and totally in the red, every instrument glazed in distortion, the drumming locking into a propulsive motorik beat. Utterly crushing genius, and one of the most crucial noise rock bands on the planet. This anthology focuses on the Brainbomb's later years, and includes the Macht (Gun couRt singles SEries) 7" from 1998, the Stigma Of The Ripper / Street Cleaner 7" on Tumult from 2003, The Grinder / Mommy Said 7" on Ken Rock from 2004, the I Need Speed 7" on Big Brothel from 2006, the Stinking Memory / Insects 7" on Anthem, and the live recordings of "Stacy", "Tired And Bloody", "Danny Was A Streetwhore", and "Urge To Kill" that were recorded in Oslo, Norway in 1993, all perfectly gnarly and noisy and raging.
Comes on black vinyl, and includes a double sided insert that includes the brief liner notes written by The Lamp's Monty Buckles that also appeared in the Cd version. Highly recommended.
Back in print on vinyl via Armageddon Shop with a new 2017 edition, with a slightly revised sleeve design and accompanied by a digital download code. Here's my old review from way back:
Obey was the first Brainbombs album I had ever heard, my introduction to their bad-news garage thuggery...the longstanding obsession that I've had with this band all started here. Obey was previously released through the label Releasing Eskimo but went out of print several years ago, and has now been reissued by the good folks over at Armageddon with slightly different packaging. Every one of Brainbombs albums is a brutal, murderous slab of misanthropic hatred and depravity, but Obey seems to top 'em all as the clearer production here allows you to hear all of the over the top, seriously disturbing rants that tumble out of the singers mouth.
The disc opens with a few moments of snappy cheesebag game show muzak, then mashes you across the grill with "Kill Them All" as the band enters among wailing feedback and a noxious plodding sludge-punk riff as the singer drunkenly states "if you've got the power, then use it an kill them all...", lurching into their trademark brand of brain-damaged noisy garage scumrock. It's simple but lethal, sludgy out-of-tune riffs repeating over and over, that banged up trumpet blaring some warped jazz over it, pummeling neanderthal drumming, every song a staggering hypnotic crawl through hideous, psychotic depictions of rape and murder and dismemberment...the "lyrics" are delivered in a heavy Swedish accent, more spoken than sung, a crazed murderous scumfuck outlining his crimes and fantasies through songs like "Die You Fuck", "Lipstick On My Dick", "Anal Desire", "Fuckmeat", extreme fucked-up litanies of misogynistic and misanthropic violence. The sludgy riffage of the Melvins dragged through the skuzzy stomp of the Stooges Funhouse and set to repeat, the music becoming more and more horrifying and hypnotic as the band hammers the riff into the ground and the singer becomes more unhinged...intense stuff.
The whole vibe here is similar to the transgressive meltdowns of Whitehouse, though to my ears Brainbombs are far more creepy and disturbing. This new reissue has pretty much the same artwork and layout, except now the artwork is all black-on-black instead of the black and white artwork of the original.
They've been dead for a couple of years now, but Brainoil's sole album from 2003 still stands as one of the finest slabs of scab n' scum encrusted boogie
sludge of the decade, and I'm finally getting this killer self-titled disc in stock for you sludgefreaks that haven't picked this up yet. Featuring an all-
lifer lineup that included members of Watch Them Die, Grimple, Lana Dagales, Destroy!, and Nigel Pepper Cock, I remember thinking that Brainoil were like a
West Coast version of Buzzoven when they were around, they had that dreadlocked crustpunk look but served up meaty Southern rock riffs dripping with tar
resin that would suddenly erupt into blasts of fast paced hardcore aggression. Massive bluesy downtuned riffs and ripping solos, super rocking and catchy and
gnarly, like a meth'd up Eyehategod with trickier riffs than you might expect, with a lead singer who sounds even more destroyed than Mike Williams. The disc
is only 21-some minutes long, but every track is a crusher. For some reason, Brainoil were largely overlooked by the sludge/doom/crust scene when they were
around, which is weird seeing as how they consistently wrote songs that were alot catchier than most of the stuff comin' out at the time. Think Buzzoven,
High On Fire, Weedeater, and Eyehategod - these guys were just as great. The album features cover art from Oakland's Judd Hawk, and the CD version contains
extra video footage of live shows and a music video.
I just unearthed some gatefold LP copies of this sludgecore cult classic, released through Throne Records outta Spain. This one isn't going to be restocked
once their gone, since the title is out of print.
They've been dead for a couple of years now, but Brainoil's sole album from 2003 still stands as one of the finest slabs of scab n' scum encrusted boogie
sludge of the decade, and I'm finally getting this killer self-titled disc in stock for you sludgefreaks that haven't picked this up yet. Featuring an all-
lifer lineup that included members of Watch Them Die, Grimple, Lana Dagales, Destroy!, and Nigel Pepper Cock, I remember thinking that Brainoil were like a
West Coast version of Buzzoven when they were around, they had that dreadlocked crustpunk look but served up meaty Southern rock riffs dripping with tar
resin that would suddenly erupt into blasts of fast paced hardcore aggression. Massive bluesy downtuned riffs and ripping solos, super rocking and catchy and
gnarly, like a meth'd up Eyehategod with trickier riffs than you might expect, with a lead singer who sounds even more destroyed than Mike Williams. The
album is only 21-some minutes long, but every track is a crusher. For some reason, Brainoil were largely overlooked by the sludge/doom/crust scene when they
were around, which is weird seeing as how they consistently wrote songs that were alot catchier than most of the stuff comin' out at the time. Think
Buzzoven, High On Fire, Weedeater, and Eyehategod - these guys were just as great. The vinyl edition of the album comes in a beautiful gatefold jacket with
cool album art from Judd Hawk.
Man, it's been a long, long time since I've heard anything from this Bay Area band, and figured them for kaput. But no, lo and behold we've got this brand new Lp (well, not that new, this did come out several months ago, but I dragged my heels on picking it up for the shop) from Brainoil, with seven songs of furious, sludgy hardcore that shows that this trio (whose members also happen to play in Laudanum, Stormcrow and Whatch Them Die) are not only still kicking, but still hammering out some of the heaviest shit in Oakland. The opening title track drills it home: a thunderous concoction of crushing Sabbathoid grooves wrapped around mildly angular riffing, the song shifting gears multiple times as they push forward with bludgeoning down tuned thrash that slips down into that swampy, monstrous slow-motion swing and even slower passages of grinding crush. Brainoil's tar-coated heaviness has always been closely related to the blues-influenced scum-boogie of Eyehategod, Buzzoven and Weedeater, but there's more of an overt hardcore element to their music, that mucky Bay Area crust seeping into their already quite ugly racket - fans of Eyehategod side project Outlaw Order and Ohio's sludge warlords Fistula would no doubt especially dig Brainoil's sound, as all three bands share a common appetite for jarring dynamic shifts between breakneck speed and lumbering ultra-heavy dirge. When Brainoil really crank the tempo up, it's some of the best stuff on the Lp; the song "Opaque Reflections" is one of album's absolute scorchers, erupting from one of their crushing slow riffs into a tornado of ferocious D-beat drumming and blazing fast crustcore, and on "Feet Cling To The Rotting Soil", the band whips up a vicious rocking thrash assault that's got some killer riffing and a brutal metalpunk edge. Hell, the whole b-side of this thing is one ripping thrash attack after another, shot up with just the right dose of Sabbathy sludge. Raging stuff, it's good to hear something new and bruising from these guys; fans of sludgy, brutal hardcore should grab Death and try slapping it on alongside some Corrosion Of Conformity and Black Cobra for maximum vertebrae wreckage. Comes with a black and white insert and a huge 24" x 24" black and white poster designed by Feeding.
Now available as a limited-edition, pro-manufactured cassette for you tapeheads...
Man, it's been a long, long time since I've heard anything from this Bay Area band, and figured them for kaput. But no, lo and behold we've got this brand new Lp (well, not that new, this did come out several months ago, but I dragged my heels on picking it up for the shop) from Brainoil, with seven songs of furious, sludgy hardcore that shows that this trio (whose members also happen to play in Laudanum, Stormcrow and Whatch Them Die) are not only still kicking, but still hammering out some of the heaviest shit in Oakland. The opening title track drills it home: a thunderous concoction of crushing Sabbathoid grooves wrapped around mildly angular riffing, the song shifting gears multiple times as they push forward with bludgeoning down tuned thrash that slips down into that swampy, monstrous slow-motion swing and even slower passages of grinding crush. Brainoil's tar-coated heaviness has always been closely related to the blues-influenced scum-boogie of Eyehategod, Buzzoven and Weedeater, but there's more of an overt hardcore element to their music, that mucky Bay Area crust seeping into their already quite ugly racket - fans of Eyehategod side project Outlaw Order and Ohio's sludge warlords Fistula would no doubt especially dig Brainoil's sound, as all three bands share a common appetite for jarring dynamic shifts between breakneck speed and lumbering ultra-heavy dirge. When Brainoil really crank the tempo up, it's some of the best stuff on the Lp; the song "Opaque Reflections" is one of album's absolute scorchers, erupting from one of their crushing slow riffs into a tornado of ferocious D-beat drumming and blazing fast crustcore, and on "Feet Cling To The Rotting Soil", the band whips up a vicious rocking thrash assault that's got some killer riffing and a brutal metalpunk edge. Hell, the whole b-side of this thing is one ripping thrash attack after another, shot up with just the right dose of Sabbathy sludge. Raging stuff, it's good to hear something new and bruising from these guys; fans of sludgy, brutal hardcore should grab Death and try slapping it on alongside some Corrosion Of Conformity and Black Cobra for maximum vertebrae wreckage.
Now available on CD...
Man, it's been a long, long time since I've heard anything from this Bay Area band, and figured them for kaput. But no, lo and behold we've got this brand new Lp (well, not that new, this did come out several months ago, but I dragged my heels on picking it up for the shop) from Brainoil, with seven songs of furious, sludgy hardcore that shows that this trio (whose members also happen to play in Laudanum, Stormcrow and Whatch Them Die) are not only still kicking, but still hammering out some of the heaviest shit in Oakland. The opening title track drills it home: a thunderous concoction of crushing Sabbathoid grooves wrapped around mildly angular riffing, the song shifting gears multiple times as they push forward with bludgeoning down tuned thrash that slips down into that swampy, monstrous slow-motion swing and even slower passages of grinding crush. Brainoil's tar-coated heaviness has always been closely related to the blues-influenced scum-boogie of Eyehategod, Buzzoven and Weedeater, but there's more of an overt hardcore element to their music, that mucky Bay Area crust seeping into their already quite ugly racket - fans of Eyehategod side project Outlaw Order and Ohio's sludge warlords Fistula would no doubt especially dig Brainoil's sound, as all three bands share a common appetite for jarring dynamic shifts between breakneck speed and lumbering ultra-heavy dirge. When Brainoil really crank the tempo up, it's some of the best stuff on the Lp; the song "Opaque Reflections" is one of album's absolute scorchers, erupting from one of their crushing slow riffs into a tornado of ferocious D-beat drumming and blazing fast crustcore, and on "Feet Cling To The Rotting Soil", the band whips up a vicious rocking thrash assault that's got some killer riffing and a brutal metalpunk edge. Hell, the whole b-side of this thing is one ripping thrash attack after another, shot up with just the right dose of Sabbathy sludge. Raging stuff, it's good to hear something new and bruising from these guys; fans of sludgy, brutal hardcore should grab Death and try slapping it on alongside some Corrosion Of Conformity and Black Cobra for maximum vertebrae wreckage.
Originally released on Life Is Abuse but long out of print, Brainoil's crushing 2003 debut is finally available again on CD and limited edition colored-vinyl (with digital download) from Tank Crimes. Here's my old write-up for the album, back when we first got this album in stock and before the band had reformed:
They've been dead for a couple of years now, but Brainoil's sole album from 2003 still stands as one of the finest slabs of scab n' scum encrusted boogie sludge of the decade, and I'm finally getting this killer self-titled disc in stock for you sludgefreaks that haven't picked this up yet. Featuring an all-lifer lineup that included members of Watch Them Die, Grimple, Lana Dagales, Destroy!, and Nigel Pepper Cock, I remember thinking that Brainoil were like a West Coast version of Buzzoven when they were around, they had that dreadlocked crustpunk look but served up meaty Southern rock riffs dripping with tar resin that would suddenly erupt into blasts of fast paced hardcore aggression. Massive bluesy down-tuned riffs and ripping solos, super rocking and catchy and gnarly, like a meth'd up Eyehategod with trickier riffs than you might expect, with a lead singer who sounds even more destroyed than Mike Williams. The album is only 21-some minutes long, but every track is a crusher. For some reason, Brainoil were largely overlooked by the sludge/doom/crust scene when they were around, which is weird seeing as how they consistently wrote songs that were alot catchier than most of the stuff comin' out at the time. Think Buzzoven, High On Fire, Weedeater, and Eyehategod - these guys are just as punishing. Features Giger-esque artwork from Judd Hawk.
Originally released on Life Is Abuse but long out of print, Brainoil's crushing 2003 debut is finally available again on CD and limited edition colored-vinyl (with digital download) from Tank Crimes. Here's my old write-up for the album, back when we first got this album in stock and before the band had reformed:
They've been dead for a couple of years now, but Brainoil's sole album from 2003 still stands as one of the finest slabs of scab n' scum encrusted boogie sludge of the decade, and I'm finally getting this killer self-titled disc in stock for you sludgefreaks that haven't picked this up yet. Featuring an all-lifer lineup that included members of Watch Them Die, Grimple, Lana Dagales, Destroy!, and Nigel Pepper Cock, I remember thinking that Brainoil were like a West Coast version of Buzzoven when they were around, they had that dreadlocked crustpunk look but served up meaty Southern rock riffs dripping with tar resin that would suddenly erupt into blasts of fast paced hardcore aggression. Massive bluesy down-tuned riffs and ripping solos, super rocking and catchy and gnarly, like a meth'd up Eyehategod with trickier riffs than you might expect, with a lead singer who sounds even more destroyed than Mike Williams. The album is only 21-some minutes long, but every track is a crusher. For some reason, Brainoil were largely overlooked by the sludge/doom/crust scene when they were around, which is weird seeing as how they consistently wrote songs that were alot catchier than most of the stuff comin' out at the time. Think Buzzoven, High On Fire, Weedeater, and Eyehategod - these guys are just as punishing. Features Giger-esque artwork from Judd Hawk.
A brutal, yet somewhat low-key album of power electronics that comes to us from the Polish project Brandkommando. Coming from this heavily Catholic country, Brandkommando makes religion and the Catholic Church the primary target of it's ire on this disc, specifically the whole issue of sexual abuse within the Church that has become such a hot topic over the past decade; underneath the rumbling, pulsating black electronics of We Love All Your Children is an excoriating attack on religious orders and pedophilic priests that glows white-hot. The eight tracks are vicious, blackened PE layering grating junk-noise over deep simmering drones, more seething and smoldering than full-on blasting, the vibe more about suppressed violence than a chaotic assault. One of our favorite aspects of this disc are the bestial snarling vocals that are used pretty consistently; it's a pretty ferocious vocal style that is sometimes treated with heavy fx, or shifts into a deep, growling stentorian voice speaking in Polish. The noise is a mix of deep rumbling metallic thrum and keening high end drones that's blanketed with weird percussive rattling and looped feedback; it's not until the sixth track "Lux Veritatis" that the disc really kicks with full-power, the sound erupting into a crushing distorted rumble over samples of Catholic hymns, the liturgical choir nearly consumed by a torrent of crashing metal and malevolent electronic drone, followed by the rhythmic threatening pummel and martial pound and demonic muttering of "Biskup Pedofil" that becomes lost in a tempest of harsh swirling electronics laced with jarring random sound events.
Excellent dark power electronics for fans of Sutcliffe Jugend, Slogun, Propergol, and Deathpile. We Love All Your Children comes in a printed cardstock sleeve with the disc affixed to the inner panel on a hub, the sleeve then slipped inside of a printed envelope. Released in a limited edition of fifty copies.
I'm now stocking a selection of high-quality embroidered patches that have been designed and produced by the Polish industrial imprint Beast Of Prey, which range from shield-shaped designs that feature various occult/esoteric symbols, to logo patches for power electronics and black industrial artists.
This patch features the "B" logo in a black triangle from the Polush power electronics/harsh industrial band Brandkommando. This outfit has been growing in popularity over the past few years among the PE/extreme noise crowd, thanks to their confrontational imagery and sonic attack, vicious anti-political outlook, and virulent misanthropy. If you're already a fan of Brandkommando's hateful apocalyptic power electronics, you'll instantly recognize this image. This design features the Brandkommando logo embroidered in white thread against a black background, and measures 8 cm on each side. As with all of Beast Of Prey's patch designs, this is a high quality piece that's durably constructed.
Finally got around to writing up this 2007 disc from Polish death industrial outfit Brandkommando that we got in stock a short while ago; this actually pre-dates the other disc that we've carried from this project, We All Love Your Children, which I was a big fan of. On Keine Arbeit Macht Freil!, Brandkommando goes for a much more aggressive sound, focusing on heavy, harsh electronics and low-end bass frequencies and grinding industrialized rhythms that suggest a heavy Genocide Organ influence. There's much that I dig about this hour-plus PE assault: the atmosphere surrounding the six lengthy tracks is terminally grim, dealing with themes of bottomless human evil and acts of apocalyptic genocide (with a particular focus on the horrific industriousness of the German concentration camp system during the second World War), the sounds effectively evoking nightmarish visions of vast body-pits, black crematorium smoke blotting the sun from the sky, and the slow, methodical destruction of the human body and spirit. Makes for some of the most unsettling and evil-sounding electronic horror that I've heard from this project. The sound is char-black and smoldering, inhuman mutterings and distorted monotone voices (all in Polish) cast across filthy throbbing synthesizers and hypnotic loops of flesh-destroying electronic noise. The delivery is minimal, often laying down simple pulsating drones and crackling black static, but as each track evolves, it piles on more and more corrosive, caustic noise and bass-heavy synth, morphing into monstrous blackened mecha-dirges and massive, rumbling drones that suck the sound down into realms of crushing death industrial. There are brief appearances of Oil-drum percussion and piercing high end drone, demonic vocals pushed through toxic clouds of distortion and swirling black orchestral drift, but for the most part Keine Arbeit crawls like a tar-black cancer across these six rotting, irradiated deathscapes. Released in a hand-numbered edition of three hundred fifty copies, presented in a custom six-panel sleeve.
awesome quirky thrash from Japan...Breakfast blew my doors right off with this 18-song disc that gathers up their demo tracks, the Eat Rice
7", and Second EP, all of which are out of print. The label described this as "a mix of distorted thrash with Minutemen influences", and that's
pretty much right on the money, as Breakfast engages in ripping high-speed hardcore assaults that are often so blown out that it sounds like their amps are
on the verge of catching on fire, and then manage to stop on a dime and drop into skronky, funky skate rock jams that smack my eardrums like primo Minutemen
(and I hear a lil' later Descendents in there too at times) sandwiched in between the fuzzbomb blastbeat assault. I also love how Breakfast work in these
pretty acoustic guitars and pastoral fingerpicked folk melodies into their outros, right before they blast back in with the 1000 MPH thrashcore blitz and
shear yer head right off. Seriously. This is so goofy, weird and over-the-top raging, and so ridiculously catchy, it's one of the best new releases I've
heard on 625 in years. The booklet folds out into a poster and is filled with images of the original vinyl, lotsa visual cues that reference Black Flag, DC
hardcore, and of course, their lyrics extolling the virtues of eating rice. Awesome !!!
� � If you're reading the rest of this particular week's new arrivals list, you'll notice me gushing over a bunch of low-fi CDR releases that we picked up from Occult Supremacy, the black noise/HNW/experimental black metal CDR label run by Dustin Redington (Crown of Bone / Demonologists). This isn't Redington's first DIY label, though. Before this, he ran the Ministries Of Blood imprint, a similarly themed imprint that put out all kinds of power electronics, harsh noise and blackened weirdness. Most of that stuff is out of print, but I've managed to pick up some of the remaining Ministries of Blood titles for your perusal...
� � A re-release of an obscure 2006 disc of bizarre, blackened low-fi noise-doom and gargling psychedelic chaos from this Canadian outfit. Breath Of Chaos's version of funereal doom on Decaying is heavily mutated, a dubby, delay-drenched delirium of echo-soaked drums and distant murky black metal riffs, hissing rat-like shrieks and demonic utterances drifting through stretches of chaotic, slow-moving dirge. The drums sort of fade in and out of view, sometimes slipping out of the mix for a minute before slowly drifting back in, the grinding industrial heaviness in the background occasionally surging forward and obliterating everything around it. When they do coalesce into a steady rhythm, it's this clanking shambling monstrosity, sloppy oil-tanker rhythms and metallic pounding and violently crashing cymbals all going at the same time. Some of the other songs center around disembodied black metal guitars that buzz aimlessly over more of those ramshackle rhythms and clouds of gnat-swarm distortion, sometimes breaking into a weird, stumbling gallop, or delve into murky black-noise rituals with snarling, ultra-distorted tremolo riffs spread out over simple, skeletal drumbeats. The band's extreme use of delay and other effects on this crawling, abject blackness ends up transforming a lot of this music into something that almost resembles a kind of abstracted electronica at times, but those murky mangled black metal riffs are always right around the corner, a symphony of diseased sonic murk joined by weird robotic chanting and tortured moaning. There's an unstructured, almost improvisational feel to Decaying that has more in common with the diseased dungeon hallucinations of Abruptum, Enbilulugugal and Havohej than pure doom metal, further fueling Breath Of Chaos's lumbering madness.
� � Comes in a black and white paper sleeve, limited to fifty copies.
� � If you're reading the rest of this particular week's new arrivals list, you'll notice me gushing over a bunch of low-fi CDR releases that we picked up from Occult Supremacy, the black noise/HNW/experimental black metal CDR label run by Dustin Redington (Crown of Bone / Demonologists). This isn't Redington's first DIY label, though. Before this, he ran the Ministries Of Blood imprint, a similarly themed imprint that put out all kinds of power electronics, harsh noise and blackened weirdness. Most of that stuff is out of print, but I've managed to pick up some of the remaining Ministries of Blood titles for your perusal...
� � Here's another awesome full-length collection of fucked-up blackened ambience, shambling low-fi black metal and bizarre improvisational doom from the Canadian band Breath Of Chaos. Recorded in 2009, this six-song disc features more of this strange band's brand of formless Satanic horror, where outbursts of ultra-sloppy black metal suddenly smash into expanses of glacial, noise-drenched doom and howling choral synthesizers, hideous shrieking vocals drift through a thick haze of rumbling electronics and amplifier hum, the riffs suddenly break down into smears of black distorted slime, and vintage horror-movie keyboards just sort of hang there, aimless, hovering in the swirling primitive chaos. Detuned, deformed doom riffs crawl on stunted limbs through pools of agonizing discordant guitar noise and dank dungeon atmosphere and the reek of things long dead, occasionally obliterated by blasts of intense harsh noise and feedback, or swept beneath the monotonous slow motion pummel of massively-distorted drums and oceanic currents of monstrous black murk, or enshrouded by the reverberant clank of rusted metal and the spectral hum of distant pipe organs. An ugly and strangely hypnotic strain of sewer psychedelia in the vein of Abruptum, Moevot, Dark Morbid Death, Enbilulugugal and Havohej, this stuff actually reminds me more of something that could have evolved from the monstrous industrial/improv rock mutations that the Broken Flag was coughing up in the late 80s than anything resembling what most people would call "black metal".
� � Limited to fifty copies.
Even though Breather Resist have been broken up since the winter of 2005, their brutal Am Rep-meets-chaotic HC assault has remained some of the most potent
post-pigfuck violence to seep out of the Bible Belt this decade. The band featured guitarist Evan Patterson of Black Cross and National Acrobat fame, bassist
Nick Thieneman, drummer Geoff Paton, and singer Steve Sindoni, and took their cues from the seething dissonant post-hardcore of Hoover (a Hoover song was the
source of Breather Resist's name), Unsane, Kiss It Goodbye, Coalesce and the Jesus Lizard. This 2003 EP was the first thing I picked up from the band after I
saw them live right here in Hagerstown when they were touring with the Kansas metalcore band The Esoteric - my freaking jaw was on the floor after being
stomped by BT's bliztering set in a dingy little VFW hall. Picked up Only In The Morning on CD and proceeded to rattle my brains for the next couple
months to the tune of songs like "Pretty Like Cancer", "Died To Be Famous", and "The Pity Party" - these guys harnessed barely controlled chaos and rage
within a framework of dissonant noise rock riffs and enough distortion to flatten a house. Massively dark and heavy stuff, with some of the raddest negatory
lyrics this side of Unsane. The band broke up in late 2005, but their legacy of neo-noise rock destruction lives on through the new band Young Widows, who
feature 3/4ths of Breather Resist and who continue to peddle grungy, heavy noise in the vein of the 90's greats while putting their own stamp on the
Midwestern skuzz approach. If you want the really heavy shit, though, you gotta go back to the Breather Resist stuff like this decimator of an EP.
This posh picture disc edition of Only In The Morning was released by King Of The Monsters, a lesser known label that nevertheless released some
amazing shit from Creation Is Crucifixion, Gehenna, Locust, Man Is The Bastard, and Unruh back in the '90's. This record and that killer Patent Cruciform
Casket pic disc from Breather Resist were two of the labels last releases before they apparently went back into hibernation. We've got some of this
limited edition jam, only 1000 copies were made so this isn't going to stick around forever. Pretty necessary for heavy noise rock heads!
Basically more of an art object than a musical release, the Patent Cruciform Casket EP is indeed pretty amazing to look at - it's essentially a
5" record pressed into a casket-shaped picture disc, with two exclusive tracks from Louisville noise-rockers Breather Resist: "Patent Cruciform Casket" and
"Crucifucked". Awesome as expected, I fucking LOVE Breather Resist's brutal, discordant Am Rep-meets-metalcore destruction. Frenzied chaotic guitars,
pummeling, punishing drumming and demented screams, equal parts Am Rep, Unsane, Kiss It Goodbye and Jesus Lizard. A seriously menacing metallic pigfuck
attack. Man, it sucks these guys aren't around any more. Features former members of National Acrobat and Black Cross. Limited edition of 1000 copies.
���The amazing second album of malevolent, void-gazing space rock from Bremen, a Swedish duo that features Lanchy from hardcore legends Totalit�r and scum-punk gods Brainbombs. Like the title suggests, Second Launch sees the band returning to the interstellar void with this new collection of sprawling, hypnotic drone-rock trances, each one stretching out for ten minutes or more as the music spills out across throbbing two-note bass riffs and wailing, delay-streaked guitar, the sound tumbling through the starlit blackness, suspended above the drummer's slow, steady, almost motorik beat, as the band chases after some sort of ego-obliteration in the face of the unfathomable immensity of space. That opening song "Entering Phase Two" alone had me glazing over completely, the simple, ominous cosmic howl sounding like some stripped-down, intensely sinister version of Hawkwind, fading in and out of view as waves of solar whoosh and glimmering organs sweep over the hypnotic ticktock pulse.
��� The rest of Launch is just as goddamn terrific as that opener, from there drifting further out into the cosmos into washes of gorgeously glistening vibrato and warm organ pulse found on "Hollow Wave", singing with clusters of twinkling piano, and then into swells of murky orchestral drift and bursts of deep-space radio fuzz, lush guitar chords slowly ringing out over fragile music-box melodies, down through the spacious whirr of "Static Interferences" that slips into even vaster, more kosmische realms of lush synthdrone. The atmosphere on Launch dances between vast cosmic mystery and a darker, more dread filled feeling of wonder, locking into mesmeric looping ambience and moody, Western-tinged guitars, glitchy keyboard sounds scattered across the emptiness like fragments of communication signals. There's huge stretches of the album where the music drops away from any kind of percussive propulsion, so that when the minimal pulse of the drums do finally reappear, their sudden presence injects an immediate feeling of tension into the music; when the brief krautrock blast of "Sweepers" drifts in halfway through the album, it brings with it a sense of grim urgency that makes it one of the album's more memorable moments, even though the thing is only a couple minutes long. Elsewhere, Bremen's use of those soft, lush washes of tangy Western guitar almost seems to evoke Pentastar-era Earth, as do the softly chugging mono-riffs and noodly synths that hover over these swirling gyres of black-hole drift and repetitious church organs, like some kind of blues-stained Lynchian space rock. And on songs like the lovely lunar psychedelia of "Walking The Skies" or the elegant gothic glow of "Voxnan", or those gorgeous Badalamenti-like strings that shimmer across the closer "Sun Son", you'd be easily forgiven for forgetting that this came from one of the guys behind the dreaded 'Bombs. It's a far cry from the abject sludge-punk of those guys, though not without it's own simmering darkness. Comes in gatefold packaging.
Chrome Peeler has had a knack for bringing together seemingly disparate bands for some pretty cool releases, like with their You've Got Your Orders series of CD compilations that featured a diverse assortment of underground bands and artists writing original songs based on abstract song titles that the label invented and gave to each participant. This new 10" record is more of a New York scene report, featuring a side each from Brooklyn's Team Robespierre and Albany's Brevator, both bands offering their own weird versions of heaviness. Team Robespierre come out with nine songs of high energy electro-thrash, with two keyboardists, spastic drum sequencing, harsh shrieking vocals, the drumming going all over the place from herky-jerky no wave rhythms to blazing blastbeats...like the electro punk of the Screamers being played by a rabid digital grindcore band, brutal, manic, but infectiously catchy.
But where Team Robespierre are all about speed and mayhem and frantic keyboard chaos, when you flip the record over to Brevator's side, suddenly all of the oxygen is sucked out of the room and a heavy wave of slow feedback crashes over you as the Albany doom cult appears in a thick cloud of psychedelic sludgecore. They serve up a single untitled track that begins in a haze of heavy droning feedback and free saxophone blowing, cymbals starting to crash in as the drums creep into view, a crushing funeral doom riff eventually crashing down from above as the singer starts to sing in a deep, chanting voice,all while the buzz and crackle of malfunctioning instrument cables and short circuiting amplifiers fill the room. Where in the hell did these guys come from? This track is an amazing slab of psychedelic avant-doom, with a ritualistic graveyard atmosphere that reminds me of an even more fucked up Bloody Panda jamming with the Butthole Surfers.
Limited edition of 500 copies.
1996's Innerwar is the terminally evil fifth album from legendary Swedish death industrialists and Cold Meat Industries flagship band Brighter Death Now, released through the experimental/industrial arm of U.S. death metal/grindcore label Relapse. The main musical project from Cold Meat Industries founder Roger Karmanik (also of Lille Roger/Bomb The Daynursery), this long-running death industrial project has never sounded more harsh than it does here, eschewing much of the bleak, crushing dread and ghastly dark ambience of earlier albums like Necrose Evangelicum for a more violent wall of noise. And man, is this brutal. Definitely some of the heaviest "death industrial" ever, Innerwar bludgeons the listener with eight lengthy tracks of grating, crushing industrial horror, full of grisly images of viscera and corrupted corpses, and visions freed from a Peter Sotos narrative, tracks like "American Tale" and "Little Baby" and "War" feeding you into a great gnashing maw of metal teeth and chains and flesh-destroying gears, looped machine noise and abusive brain-scraping Whitehouse-style feedback forged into fearsome dirges of extreme low-end drones, ultra-distorted vocals that often cross the line into death metal roar, vast rumbling, churning slabs of factory noise and bone-rattling bass, and heavily manipulated, effects-drenched voice samples. A total fucking nightmare of abuse, distortion and sadism, as blackened and terrifying and nihilistic as any "black industrial" album, but firmly rooted in a classic industrial noise/power electronics tradition. Extreme blackened abrasion - if only Release was still putting out stuff like this! The packaging is pretty nice, with translucent vellum cover printed with the red BDN insignia that overlay the horrific abattoir imagery of the actual booklet cover. Highly recommended to fans of Grey Wolves, MZ.412, IRM, Navicon Torture Technologies, Institut, Deathpile, Steel Hook Prostheses and Sutcliffe J�gend.
I originally heard the mysterious Brobdingnagian on the latest Rusty Axe compilation disc and the tribute to outsider black metal legends Von that Rusty Axe put out, Sacrifice At The Altar Of The Satanic Blood Angel, and both of their contributions to those compilations were hideous, intoxicating blots of primitive black metal so corroded by noise and distortion that they sounded as much like some old UK industrial noise group as they were basement black metal, blown out and damaged, a wailing psychotic mass of blackened riffs and droning feedback and anguished white-noise vocals that positioned Brobdingnagian somewhere close to the abstract dungeon blackness of bands like Abruptum, Enbilulugugal and Emit.
Those compilation songs were clearly not enough noisy, mutant black metal murk for Rusty Axe, as the label recently released this four song, half-an-hour long mini-album from the band; the music on this disc is even more deranged than their previous tracks, and there are several points on Torture Stained Disaster where Brobdingnagian moves away from anything remotely resembling what we'd call black metal. This disc is fucking awesome though, and opens with "Smeared Faces In The Ruins" which begins with a chaotic blast of ramshackle black metal, sorrowful shrieking vocals and strange melodic riffs mashed with trashcan drums pounding out sloppy midpaced blastbeats, the sound is oddly catchy and actually kinda moving, but then the second half of the songs sees the black metal disappear and leave behind a menacing field of room ambience, a minute or so of quiet that is intruded upon by gasping sounds and scraping metal in the background. This sets up one of the longer tracks on the disc, "Harvester Of Disease", which spreads out for ten minutes with nary a black metal riff in sight; instead, it's a terrifying wasteland strewn with black feedback and buzzing electrical currents, the sound of torture victims screaming in horrific agony in the distance, while booming metallic percussion blasts like bombs, as if huge oil drums and sheets of metal are being pounded in slow motion, with only the occasional distorted cymbal crash to suggest that an actual drumkit is being played. That track is a rumbling, terrifying industrial dirge that sounds like Abruptum being played by Ramleh, or maybe it should be the other way around, an early industrial band dropped into the middle of Hell and forced to bash out a lumbering sheet-metal dirge while the souls of the damned are flayed and skewered all around them.
The title track brings us back to Brobdingnagian's weird black metal, an ominous buzzing guitar riff repeating over and over atop a smoking heap of sampled voices and screams and skeletal doom riffs, a lumbering bassline meandering through clouds of electrical hiss and crackle, cavernous rumblings and thick smears of black feedback, building in intensity as tribal drums start to appear and suddenly eventually explodes into a blast of primitive howling black metal hatred, various screaming voices falling over one another, the band slipping in and out of an epic, blown out dirge and the thrashier black buzz. Finally, "Poison Tongue/Bloody Throat" closes the disc with a heavy, trippy blast of fucked up black metal, the vocals run through some weird processing and coming out an insectile chirp, awesome old school black metal riffs tumbling over sputtering blastbeats and howling reverb winds. And if you let that last track play out, after a few minutes of silence you'll get to hear a blazing Havohej cover! Limited to 501 copies.
A recent cassette release from these bizarre, not-quite-black-metal but VERY heavy necro-mutants, who some of you guys might have heard on their killer TortureStainedDisaster Ep on Rusty Axe, or possibly on the Audio Apogee double disc compilation that came out on Frequency Thirteen last year. This tape features just two tracks, but both of them are pretty long and immerse the listener deep within Brobdingagian's fractured, Emit-meets-Wolf Eyes industrial black blast weirdness.
The first side has "CITRTETMYIT", a lone guitar playing a sad reverb-heavy melody, the sound twangy and melancholy as it repeats over a simple backing drumbeat and mysterious background samples and strange swirling effects; suddenly furious double-bass drumming kicks in, and the band suddenly takes off into fast paced black metal, only the guitars are still kind of twangy and post-punkish. As the band slows into a slower, somber dirge, that strange goth/post-punk vibe continues to be mixed in with the noisy, ferocious black metal, giving off echoes of Lurker Of Chalice, but filled with tons of swooping effects and a blizzard of tape hiss, the track getting noisier until it explodes into a WOLD style white noise overload, thrashing metal obscured by swirling hiss and distortion, the multi-layered howls and screams sucked into the jet engine roar. Pretty intense!
The title track "Machines Of Unrelenting Terror" on side two is a bizarre, psychedelic take on classic Nordic black metal, a black plodding dirge of simplistic drumming, howling feedback, grim minor key riffage, those insane howling vocals becoming completely freaked out as they're run through a TON of effects. Through all of this, there's still that weird gothy quality that the other track had, as well as a bit of Abruptum weirdness, strange sounds and samples going on in the background, that throbbing bass line repeating over and over, surrounded by swooping Hawkwindian space effects. The end of the track has the band exploding again into a pounding crescendo, a killer hook over the pummeling rhythm section, oddly halting and stilted but super catchy, almost poppy, but becoming increasingly frenzied until the band finally collapses in a howling storm of fucked up noise, tape mangle, chopped up beats, and static.
Both of these tracks fucking kill. I've loved everything that I've heard from this band, and highly recommend this tape (as well as their EP on Rusty Axe) to anyone into bizarre, noisy blackened weirdness. The cassette came out in a hand-numbered run of 100 copies.
More killer blackened hardcore from the black maw of the Holy Terror compound. Curated by frontman and founding member of legendary metallic hardcore band Integrity, Dwid, Holy Terror has been producing a small but impressive series of (mostly) 7"s from the likes of Gehenna, Oede, and Vermapyre, with a focus on the apocalyptic and sonically raw. The label might not have the busiest release schedule, but I've loved every one of its releases so far, with most of the bands featured delivering some wildly unique, offbeat heaviness. One of the common traits that these bands share with one another is an air of mystery, of anonymity, with some of the bands having little to no information available on them, a level of obscurity that leads me to believe that a few of these bands might just be the work of Dwid himself. Just as little is known about the one-man band Broken Cross, who continues that tradition of cloaking the band's identity in mystery; from the Septic Death-style band logo and the bits of Process Church iconography that peer out from the murky grayscale artwork on this EP, you'd probably think that this was going to be another Integrity-worshipping outfit a la Rot In Hell.
Instead, Broken Cross blast a far more fucked-up brand of metallic hardcore on their debut 7", the first side of which contains the band's New World Soldier demo. The vocals are an insane delay-drenched croak, unintelligible end time visions puked up through a fog of echo and reverb, while the music is a blistering mix of scummy low-fi production, soaring metal guitar solos and majestic harmonized leads, weird samples, primitive speed-fuelled drumming that sometimes breaks into a vicious D-beat sprint, and a razorslash guitar attack that seems to draw more from both classic Japanese dementoids G.I.S.M. and mid-80's Iron Maiden than anything stateside that I can put my finger on. All of that changes with the last track, which has the band slipping into a weird industrial noisescape that sounds like some distant Neubatenesque clank being perpetrated by a squad of goblins. This EP delivers some supremely fucked-up, weirdly psychedelic metalpunk that's way more unique sounding than I expected, but which still fits in perfectly with the whole maniacal Holy Terror aesthetic. Can't wait to hear more from this band, whoever they are...
Finally, the follow-up to that killer debut 7" that this weirdo Swedish metallic punk outfit put out last year on Holy Terror, the label run by Integrity frontman Dwid (who also handled the sleeve design for this record). This latest slab of demonic metalpunk from Broken Cross delivers another four tracks of vicious, mind-bending blackened hardcore, still steeped in that strange mixture of catchy metallic riffage and fucked-up low-fi weirdness that made the band's Anti Human Life one of my favorite 7"s to surface on the Holy Terror imprint. It's just as catchy as the previous material, mixing warped G.I.S.M.-esque metallic punk and soaring heavy metal solos with those bizarre growling, slobbering vocals that are run through a cloud of delay and echo effects, the vocals a layered mess of weirdo monotone speak-sing and froglike croaks and other, more inhuman utterances, which combined with the crazy delay abuse that the band employs gives this stuff a decidedly psychedelic feel. All of these songs are catchy, anthemic blasts, "Temple Of Violation" and "Justice Squad" all ripping mid-tempo blasts of aggression, smeared in spacey effects and the effluvium of various malfunctioning loop pedals; there's also some of that bizarre quasi-industrial sound that the first EP had, via the slurred militant stomp of "Assassin's Anthem", which blends a strange almost industrial feel with a guitar lead that sounds like if was lifted right off of the score to Phantasm, a steady pounding clanking rhythm repeating endlessly beneath that eerie melody and sheets of grinding distorted noise. And the closer "Secret Destruction" sounds like mid-90's era Integrity slathered in an extra heavy dose of trippy effects and low-fi percussive stomp, and infested with a legion of demonic voices all raving and gnashing their teeth at the same time. I seriously can't get enough of this band.
I've listened to this slab of spaced-out devilcore at least a dozen times since it came in the door. From the sounds of Armageddon and the oddly elegiac synthesizer melody that creeps across "Intromancy" like a warped Fabio Frizzi piece, to the murky and monstrously low-fi Holy Terror hardcore that the band unleashes throughout the rest of these ten tracks, Through Light To Night is a depraved vision of a world consumed in unending violence set to some seriously fucked-up and far-out metalpunk. I loved the previous 7"s I've picked up from this somewhat enigmatic Swedish band, but Broken Cross's first full-length is so much weirder than that stuff, a shot of utter ugliness and demented thrash that's even more psychedelic and terrifying.
As before, the music is directly informed by the classic evil hardcore of 90s bands like Integrity, Ringworm and Gehenna, combining rampaging punk fury with waling heavy metal guitars and crushing, blackened riffage. But this stuff gets so much weirder, and much rawer, with a production aesthetic closer to the no-fi sound of old black metal demos. You'll get a song like "World Demolition" that exudes the most Maidenesque aspects of classic GISM, a snarling, hateful blast of raw hardcore erupting with soaring, dive-bombing metal guitar heroics, or the stomping circle-pit aggression of "Total Isolation". But then they splatter these songs with all kinds of bizarre effects and oddball production tricks that can make this sound incredibly hallucinatory. There's weird droning vocals and sudden blasts of spacey electronic effects that blare across the front of the mix, or parts where a single guitar will be suddenly pushed all the way into the red, turning it into a shrieking blast of noise. Doleful acoustic guitars appear, sorrowfully strummed over rumbling masses of noise and sampled voices, and bizarre junkyard percussion appears rattling and clanking over another one of their rousing, epic NWOBHM-esque riffs.
At times, the songs can get so chaotic that it feels like you're hearing two different songs playing at the same time, everything snarled in a bleary, drug-addled haze of low-fi violence. And the nearly eight-minute "Poison Of Insanity" sprawls out into total madness, moving from grainy, etheric soundscapes laced with the distant cries of seagulls and children, to spooky Moog sounds and more of that ramshackle percussion, finally giving way to yet another majestic, dirt-streaked melody, all moody and twisted. And yet from start to finish, Night is seriously catchy, every one of these songs delivering a killer hook underneath the gnarled riffs and blood-choked bellowing toad-vocals and primitive blackthrash slime, with some fantastic songwriting lurking below all of that filth and fucked-up ferocity. A terrifically bizarre and ripping album from this one-man band, with apocalyptic lyrics and grim collage art from Integrity's Dwid Hellion that only enhance the overall dementia.
This British group is responsible for some of the heaviest, most extreme dubstep I've ever heard, and their Flood 12", a vinyl-only limited release from Ad Noiseam, brings more of that awesome apocalyptic dub-dread. Crushing, subwoofer-wrecking bass and ultra-distorted stuttering 4/4 beats are mixed with sampled strings, eerie voices, contorted synth lines and even some brooding post-rock atmospherics to create a peculiarly doom-laden form of dubstep that is just as heavy as anything you'll hear from Necro Deathmort or The Blood Of Heroes, and probably even heavier. Each side features two tracks: first up is the massive lurching doom-laden dubstep of the title track, followed by the brilliantly assembled "Aporia", which opens with cavernous black ambience before slipping into a bleak Scorn-esque dubscape with bits of soundtrack-style strings and muffled techno rhythms, sinister cinematic samples and dark choral voices.
Over on the b-side, an impressive intro of orchestral stabs and skull-imploding bass leads into the brutal wobbling synth-bass of "Mask Of Gas" (the only non-exclusive track on this record, having previously appeared on the band's 2009 album Terminal Static), with pulverizing beats that are so heavy, they could have been lifted from a deathcore album; this track achieves massive metallic heaviness. And "Bad Acid" features lush pads and bursts of distorted synth that spasm into a brutal mash of distorted beats, slithering blown-out bass, sampled vocals from some maniacal ragga toaster, all fused into a mass of sputtering spastic dubdoom.
This is as brutal and as violent as I've heard dubstep get. Highly recommended!
Total desolation. Another of the myriad noise projects that come from ultra-prolific artist Anthony Shaw (Albert Fish Is My Hero, Burial Ground, Deadbeat, Cold Comfort, Haemorrhaging Fetus, etc. etc.), Broken Spirit is by far the most placid of all of his various forms, an exercise in aural rot that shares some of the qualities of the most "ambient" releases in the Slaughter Productions catalog. With its somewhat murky and washed-out recording quality, Falling Apart is a relentlessly grim piece of deathdrift, a slab of bleak isolationist ambient sound that stretches out for half an hour, shifting from distant tectonic rumblings to sinister low-fi industrial dronescapes that evoke visions of a blasted and blighted wasteland, an endless emptiness where the sounds of distant machinery, scraping metal and crumbling architecture echo over an equally distant horizon. Later on, this smoldering waste is disturbed by peals of shrieking feedback and squealing metal, and eventually evolves into something quite noisy, the last few minutes becoming a rumbling, rattling factory din. The influence of isolationist pioneers like Sleep Research Facility and Journey Through Underworlds-era Lull can be heard all throughout this tape, but Shaw works in some subtle grinding resonance and far-off heaviness into his bleary black drones that hints at the kind of amorphous ur-crush heard in the most abstract of drone-doom outfits. I really dug this entropic blackened soundscape, and fans of the kinds of bleak industrial sound found on the Cathartic Process imprint would probably love this.
Released in a limited edition of fifty copies.
Yeah! This monster set is already in the running for my favorite aggro-jazz album of 2009, and features a smoking quartet with some of my favorite players
engaged in high-power jamming, not the least of which is the legendary reedsman Peter Brotzmann, who needs no introduction to fans of extreme European
free-jazz. Hairy Bones documents a live performance in Amsterdam froom 2008, where Brotzmann teamed up with avant-garde trumpeter and former Praxis member Toshinori Kondo (who he had previously worked with in the Ayler tribute group Die Like A Dog Quartet), Norwegian free-jazz drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, and bassist Massimo Pupillo. All of these guys smoke, but it's the presence of Massimo Pupillo, who many of you will recognize from his bass playing in the crushing metallic free-jazz outfit Black Engine and in jazzcore heroes Zu, that makes this one of the heaviest free jazz blowouts to come through here this year. The album is split into two halves, "Hairy Bones" and "Chain Dogs", both over thirty minutes each; the first track is a scathing workout with Brotzmann strafing the air with his trademark bursts of chaotic sax and furious squalls while Kondo triggers beams his processed trumpet squeals (which sound like deep-cosmic beamings when he really lets loose on the title track), and the rhythm section creates a powerful rhythmic churn that's sometimes furious and thrashy, at other times stripped and meditative. But the real heart-stopping moments appear whenever the band turns all thrusters on and Pupillo's bass takes on a massively distorted tone that veers the group into some sweetly devestating Painkiller-style hardcore improv-jazz territory, with monstrous low-end bass riffs that would sound right at home on any sludge-metal album while Nilssen-Love pummels his kit into dust. The second longer track takes the group into bluesier territory over nearly thirty-eight minutes, but there's still some raging passages of thrash-jazz the bubble up to the surface amidst the more laid back blowing and acrobatic Ayler-style skronk. A top-notch hour long set that any free-jazz junkie will love, especially if yer into the heavier side of Brotzmann's collaborative projects. Comes in a gatefold jacket.
One of the all-time classics in the realm of assault-jazz,
So far, this is the only release from this vile squad of mutants from the nuked-out side of Pittsburgh; the band might include members of Conelrad and Microwaves, but none of their other affiliations hint at the sonic scum that they create as Brown Angel. This tape features four tracks of fucked up, totally damaged industrial sludge and a cover, the original tracks a mixture of ULTRA low-fi industrial sludge scrape that's completely drenched in feedback and tape hiss, and mutant basement no-wave pummel that sort of comes off as a totally decomposed and washed-out take on the sort of hulking dirges that Swans pioneered. It's not heavy though, because the sound here is so incredibly low-fi, it all comes off intensely murky and hissy. The first track opens it up with the heavily corroded and murky blown-out melodic drone of a re-worked Indian melody, which ends up turning into a rusted rumbling throb by the end, laced with damaged sludge melodies and the aforementioned sheets of tape hiss. The following tracks ("White Flight", "Slugfucker", "Your Life In Heaven") are just as shit-fi and wrecked, if not more so, a grimy mess of growling, slobbering vocals and distant clanking caveman drums, growling bass and dissonant guitar buried under piles of garbage, swarming with howling feedback melodies and a weird omnipresent drone that sounds like it's emanating from some large piece of electrical equipment just out of view; at their most cohesive, this sounds vaguely like hearing some ancient live Swans recordings that were recorded onto an derelict micro cassette, buried in a sewer for a year or two, and then dug back up and dubbed off of a malfunctioning boombox. The tape closes with a mangled cover of Arab on Radar's "#5" that stands out for actually sounding like it was recorded on a piece of 20th century recording equipment, as well as being a punishing skronk-assault that sounds like Godflesh covering the AOR original with Kevin Tomkins delivering a PE style vocal assault over top. Be warned, this is ugly, ugly shit. Limited to 50 copies.
I listed Brown Angel's cassette tape a couple of months ago, a particularly grimy, sewage-covered dose of low-fi sludgenoise from the Pittsburgh band (featuring members of Microwaves, Creation Is Crucifixion, Conelrad and 1985) that could only appeal to the most hardened, gutter-dwelling devotees of torturous sonic ugliness. That tape was their only release after several years of kicking around the Iron City underground, but now they've raised their multi-headed mass above the muck again with their first full length, a vinyl only release that has a very different sound than the tape. Instead of the low-fi skuzz on that cassette, the band pounds out a kind of industrial trance-sludge that is equal parts Godflesh, Swans, early Earth, and discordant no wave abrasion, with a massive depth-charge bass grind lurking beneath the whole thing that really sets your nerves on edge.
The opener "Danava Bhanjana Rama" slowly takes form as a psychedelic dirge, heavy low end riffage and droning feedback winding round and round, a vaguely Middle Eastern sounding lead snaking through it, sounding a lot like early Earth circa Phase III or Pentastar, and then the vocals come in, a soaring emotive chant rising over the pounding industrial sludge-mantra, the percussion becoming more machinelike and receding into the background. But then the second song ("It's Hard To Be Parted From A Friend") kicks in, and the tone turns really ugly, keening sung vocals trading off with frenzied screams, the drums stuttering and lurching, the guitars grinding out a feedback-soaked riff, super heavy and raw, slathered in feedback and guitar noise. On "White Flight�, the no wave influence really starts to emerge as the band grinds out a single monstrous riff into infinity, gradually cranking up the noise and skull-scraping guitar skree and amp abuse until it sounds, again, like a Godflesh jam, but one that's being shredded through a small army of Branca noise guitarists and marauding wood chippers.
Over onto the second side, "Occidentosis" further blends the mechacrush with paint stripping no wave damage and growling processed bass, collapsing into lysergic Arabic guitar melodies and howling feedback at the end, followed by "Your Life Is Heaven" and its pounding tribal drums and chunky staccato guitar, veering from strange angular grooves and powerful percussive work into crunchy rolling Swans-like dirge. "Kirimibhojanam" centers around a another huge dissonant riff and spacious lumbering slowness, the vocals drawn out here into a mix of twisted throat singing and blackened shrieks, the space between the riffs and drums lurking with processed feedback and odd didgeridoo-like buzzing. And finally "Celibacy Pact", a brutal death metal riff and down tuned bludgeon alternating with howling noise rock, almost like Jesus Lizard injected with some crushing DM , ULTRA heavy and raw and vicious, and grinds into the total space noise meltdown of the finale, a storm of feedback and fx and amp noise and cymbals that closes the album.
Man, this is fucking killer. Recommended to anyone into the monolithic sounds of early 'Flesh, Halo, early Swans, etc. Comes in a two-color silkscreened jacket, each one hand-numbered in a limited edition of 150 copies, on black vinyl, and comes with a random photograph and a small acetate insert sheet.
���Despite their name, the debut EP from Norwegian duo Brutal Blues in fact delivers absolutely zero blues, but rather a whole lot of confounding, nerve-scorching avant-grind. Well, maybe not a whole lot - this disc is only fifteen minutes long - but the six songs featured here are seriously blistering, assaulting the listener non-stop with a maniacal blast of mathy time signatures, crushing hyperspeed grindcore, and some of the most abrasive riffing you're going to find on this week's new arrivals list. Both members of Brutal Blues are involved in a number of other bands and projects that I've been a fan of over the years, drummer/vocalist Anders Hana with Jaga Jazzist, Noxagt and Ultralyd, and guitarist/vocalist Steinar Kittilsen with the psychotic grind outfits Parlamentarisk Sodomi and Psudoku; together, these guys whip up some crazed angular grindcore, somewhere in between the ragged brutality of latter-day Brutal Truth and the cutting edge extremism of Gridlink, the songs filled with hideously spastic blastbeat drumming and jarring stop/start arrangements, and a discordant, weirdly jangly guitar sound. But over this brutal blast-assault the duo splatter all sorts of trippy electronic noise and spacey synth slop, turning this into something strangely psychedelic; the vocals are pretty insane as well, infuriated screams that are run through an echoplex machine cranked all the way to ten, the bellowing aggression swooping and echoing endlessly through the band's progged-out blast-metal; they slash and scrape at the guitars, strafing the songs with abrasive guitar noise that sometimes sounds like they're dragging rusted hunks of metal down the fret board, and the songs lunge wildly through this noise-addled hysteria, surging out of those spastic, stuttering grind assaults into clouds of grainy digital noise and electronic drone. Intensely abrasive and intricate stuff, with a discordant No Wave-esque edginess applied to their precision hyper-violence. A phenomenal fuckin' debut.
There's been much cause for rejoicing amongst fans of extreme grind over the past year since we were originally graced with the announcement that Brutal Truth would be reuniting to play live and record new material. Since forming in the late 1980's, Brutal Truth have consistently reshaped the topography of grindcore, bringing in influences as diverse as hardcore Sun Ra worship, industrial noise, improvisation, and more, making them one of the few bands since Napalm Death to really break new ground with the form.
The legendary Machine Parts 7" from BT was originally released in 1996 on BT drummer Rich Hoak's own Deaf American label, and after years of being an out-of-print collector's item is once again available via this repress on the French grind label Bones Brigade, who also put out that amazing Agoraphobic Nosebleed/Total Fucking Destruction split 7" last year. The original sleeve design and artwork is intact (incuding their bitchin' label artwork of a Christ figure crucified on a pot leaf, and the record is pressed on transparent clear vinyl. Machine Parts +4 is a crucial, classic platter for fans of these experimental, environmentally conscious grinders; the a-side features the one-two punch of "Spare Change"'s vicious grind blast splattered with Rich Hoak's insane, punk-informed tornado drumming style, followed by the slower, grueling mass of "Machine Parts". The flipside starts off with five different live versions of "Collateral Damage", Brutal Truth's b
arely-three second long blast of noise that actually made it into the Guiness Book Of World Records in 1994 for having the "Shortest Music Video Ever"; these five different takes blaze by in a matter of seconds, but somewhere in the noisy, hilarious extremism of the song, Brutal Truth are joined by Barney from Napalm Death and Bill from Exit-13. After that is the disjointed midtempo crush of "Fucktoy" and "Kill Trend Suicide". Fans of Brutal Truth that missed out on the original 7" release will be ecstatic that this is available once again, and it's an important document from one of the greatest forward-thinking grind bands ever.
The latest in Earache's reissue campaign is the still-stunning 1992 debut album from legendary grinders Brutal Truth, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses, considered by most to be one of the most important and influential American grind albums. Much more experimental than most of their peers back in the late 80's/early 90's, BT played with the parameters of constituted �grindcore� by incorporating more left field sounds (noise, industrial, breakbeats) into their music while playing at a level of ferocity that was unparalleled. Scathing politically charged lyrics are roared over fifteen tracks of crushing grind loaded with technical, death metal influenced riffing, brutal d-beat driven tempos and blastbeats, gnarled noise rock riffs and devastatingly crushing dirges, adding in a heavy American thrash metal element along with the death metal and Japanese thrash punk and noise influences to create a violent, ultra-heavy sound that was distinctly different from what was coming out of the UK at the time.
Brutal Truth's love of noise is apparent from the first track �P.S.P.I.", a brief intro of industrial drones and power drill drones and samples that tears right into the machine-flecked blastage of "Birth Of Ignorance", a classic BT track with bestial low/high vokills trading off with one another, a monstrously catchy chorus, and a brutally fast percussive assault. "Time� is another noise damaged track, fusing harsh industrial noise to a punishing slow motion dirge that reverses the album's blasting speed into a skull-crushing six minute grind.. But then there�s plenty of pure blast on here, too: the four second song "Collateral Damage" ranked as one of the shortest grindcore blasts ever, and "Stench Of Profit" is a furious, hyperspeed anti-capitalist screed that is one of the album�s harshest tracks. It helps that singer Kevin Sharpe is one of the best grind vocalists ever; his throat belches out some of the most fucked up and demonic vocalizations ever heard, such as on "Regression-Progression", where the distorted snarls sound like a pack of starving wolves rather than anything human. Totally crucial.
Along with Extreme Conditions, this reissue also features a bunch of killer bonus material. A couple of tracks from the Perpetual Conversion 7" from 1992 are included; the title track's punky deathgrind is followed by a gnarled, lurching death metal cover of Black Sabbath's "Lord Of This World" complete with sampled bongslurping, and the noise-trance beatscape of "Bed Sheet", a nearly ten minute industrial breakbeat jam with swirling psychedelic noise, distorted screams and chopped up beats, sounding a lot like early Techno Animal crossed with Merzbow style noise experimentation.
There's also the four tracks from Brutal Truth's ill-fated split Ep with Japanese grinders S.O.B., which are all covers of S.O.B. tracks such as "Repeat At Length", "Let�s Go Summer Beach " and " Not Me" done up BT-deathgrind style. The last couple of tracks are from 1992's Ill-Neglect 7", and includes Brutal Truth's INSANE mach 10 grindnoise cover of the BUtthole Surfers classic "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey�s Grave", another S.O.B. cover ("Hear Nothing For You"), another booming, murky industrial noize/breakbeat jam a la Techno Animal/Ice ("Pre-Natal Homeland (Funky Budda Dub)") and a forty-nine second eruption of psychedelic noisegrind ("AC/BT").
The disc also contains three Quicktime videos that are playable on your computer, including their video for the five second song "Collateral Damage" which was listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the shorted music video ever, and the booklet has new liner notes which include a new interview with vocalist Kevin Sharp.
An essential grindcore album that�s required listening for anyone into extreme, boundary-torching metal.
We currently have the limited edition UK digipack version of the expanded reissue of Need TO Control, but once this is sold out, we'll just be stocking the regular jewel case edition.
In the early 90s, the grindcore scene started to produce some really ambitious music that experimented with the capabilities of the genre while continuing to test the limits of extremity, and one of the most stylistically experimental albums from this period was the sophomore effort from NYC's Brutal Truth, Need To Control. This 1994 release has long been one of our favorite grindcore albums, following the pot-fueled anarchistic blastwave of their debut Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses with a set of songs that went far beyond the boundaries of their crusty roots into a new realm of complex, unpredictable heaviness that's still one of grind's most audacious efforts, one that cemented Brutal Truth's place in the pantheon of extreme music. The experimental tendencies that were hinted at on their first album bloom into something astounding on Need To Control, their grinding chaos now fused with stretches of immense doom-laden heaviness, extreme abstract noise, the unexpected appearance of a didgeridoo on one track, and industrial elements.
The album begins with the crushing industrial dirge "Collapse", a Godflesh-like crush of slow spastic rubbery mechanized drumming, grating factory noise and clanking metal that turns into a devastating slow motion death metal dirge surrounded with the sounds of burbling water bongs, super heavy and pummeling, kicking into this weirdly anthemic, melodic chorus with high screeching howling vocals and climbing air-raid guitar noise, a surprisingly catchy hook sinking it's teeth into the song. A massive slab of lumbering heaviosity that probably surprised fans who were probably expecting Brutal Truth to kicks this off with nuclear strength speedblast.
It doesn't take long for the band to crank up the tempo though, launching into some awesome chaotic grind on the second track "Black Door Mine", a super complex blast of speed and frantic time signature changes, screeching vokills trading off with guttural roars, some of which are contributed by guest vocalist Bill from Exit-13. "Turn Face" kicks in with a frantic bass solo, then rips into a savage take on hardcore punk sped up to mach twenty velocity, almost like an old Corrosion Of Conformity jam but way heavier and more complex and freaked out and blasting.
Then the album takes another left turn, now into the weird industrial noise rock of "Godplayer"; a crushing, off-time stop/start groove is underscored with the deep droning buzz of a didgeridoo, launching into crushing double bass and thrash riffage, becoming more abrasive and angular, then slipping into an awesome slow industrial metal dirge with more weird effects and didgeridoo.
The next couple song are blistering grind eruptions, the blazing angular thrash of �I See Red� and the wonky riffing and crushing grind of �Bite The Hand�, and then goes into the pure harsh noise of "Iron Lung" where the music drops off and we're treated to a din of guttural snarls, metallic scrape and deep burbling low end. From this point on, it keeps moving through varying degrees of experimental grind and noisy soundscaping, the grindcore on songs like "Judgment" and "Brain Trust" becoming warped and complex, the sound infected with fucked-up vocal noises and howling effects, creepy industrial textures and thick buzzing drones, the extreme speed downshifting into thunderous D-beat or pounding sludge. The song "Ordinary Madness" is one of the standouts, another slow pounding dirge, ultra heavy and ominous, laced with samples from the movie Bad Lieutenant, sheets of dissonant guitar and awesome zonked out acid-guitar soloing that turns this into some sort of freaked out Hendrix-in-a-wormhole grindpsych, and it's followed by a wicked cover of the Germs song "Media Blitz", which has Mike Williams from Eyehategod taking on the vocal duties while the band whips the punk classic into grinding ferocity, and the last song on the album proper "Crawlspace", which is a strange abstract soundscape of random computer noise, harsh feedback abuse and incantatory voices.
This reissue also features some of the bonus tracks that had appeared on the limited five-record vinyl box set that Earache released for Need To Control, including some unlikely covers; there's the infamous cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Here" which is redone as "Wish You Were Here... Wish You'd Go Away", the first half of the song played surprisingly straight with spacey guitars and sung vocals, but then halfway through it, it turns into a total noisecore jam, random percussion and wailing fucked vokills and chaotic guitar noise, a weird almost Boredoms-like grind freakout. There's a handful of turbulent grind jams like "Painted Clowns" and "Eggshells", as well as a killer cover of "Dethroned Emperor" by Celtic Frost, and it ends with the strange fractured noise/grind chaos of "Head Cheese", a garbled assault of feedback and piercing noise, deranged vocals and pulverizing sludge, another Boredoms-style experimental grind jam.
The ease with which Brutal Truth was able to flow from punishing grindcore to hardcore punk to industrial noise to crushing doom on Need To Control was brilliant, and the album remains one of the greatest experimental grind records ever, certainly one of our favorite extreme metal discs, encapsulating everything that we love about this band and about grind as an art form, making this an absolutely essential album for anyone into boundary-pushing, adventurous heavy music...
This UK version of the reissue is presented in an eight-panel digipack that includes a booklet with a great interview with BT singer Kevin Sharpe.
The latest in Earache's reissue campaign is the still-stunning 1992 debut album from legendary grinders Brutal Truth, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses, considered by most to be one of the most important and influential American grind albums. Much more experimental than most of their peers back in the late 80's/early 90's, BT played with the parameters of constituted �grindcore� by incorporating more left field sounds (noise, industrial, breakbeats) into their music while playing at a level of ferocity that was unparalleled. Scathing politically charged lyrics are roared over fifteen tracks of crushing grind loaded with technical, death metal influenced riffing, brutal d-beat driven tempos and blastbeats, gnarled noise rock riffs and devastatingly crushing dirges, adding in a heavy American thrash metal element along with the death metal and Japanese thrash punk and noise influences to create a violent, ultra-heavy sound that was distinctly different from what was coming out of the UK at the time.
Brutal Truth's love of noise is apparent from the first track �P.S.P.I.", a brief intro of industrial drones and power drill drones and samples that tears right into the machine-flecked blastage of "Birth Of Ignorance", a classic BT track with bestial low/high vokills trading off with one another, a monstrously catchy chorus, and a brutally fast percussive assault. "Time� is another noise damaged track, fusing harsh industrial noise to a punishing slow motion dirge that reverses the album's blasting speed into a skull-crushing six minute grind.. But then there�s plenty of pure blast on here, too: the four second song "Collateral Damage" ranked as one of the shortest grindcore blasts ever, and "Stench Of Profit" is a furious, hyperspeed anti-capitalist screed that is one of the album�s harshest tracks. It helps that singer Kevin Sharpe is one of the best grind vocalists ever; his throat belches out some of the most fucked up and demonic vocalizations ever heard, such as on "Regression-Progression", where the distorted snarls sound like a pack of starving wolves rather than anything human. Totally crucial.
Along with Extreme Conditions, this reissue also features a bunch of killer bonus material. A couple of tracks from the Perpetual Conversion 7" from 1992 are included; the title track's punky deathgrind is followed by a gnarled, lurching death metal cover of Black Sabbath's "Lord Of This World" complete with sampled bongslurping, and the noise-trance beatscape of "Bed Sheet", a nearly ten minute industrial breakbeat jam with swirling psychedelic noise, distorted screams and chopped up beats, sounding a lot like early Techno Animal crossed with Merzbow style noise experimentation.
There's also the four tracks from Brutal Truth's ill-fated split Ep with Japanese grinders S.O.B., which are all covers of S.O.B. tracks such as "Repeat At Length", "Let�s Go Summer Beach " and " Not Me" done up BT-deathgrind style. The last couple of tracks are from 1992's Ill-Neglect 7", and includes Brutal Truth's INSANE mach 10 grindnoise cover of the BUtthole Surfers classic "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey�s Grave", another S.O.B. cover ("Hear Nothing For You"), another booming, murky industrial noize/breakbeat jam a la Techno Animal/Ice ("Pre-Natal Homeland (Funky Budda Dub)") and a forty-nine second eruption of psychedelic noisegrind ("AC/BT").
The disc also contains three Quicktime videos that are playable on your computer, including their video for the five second song "Collateral Damage" which was listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the shorted music video ever, and the booklet has new liner notes which include a new interview with vocalist Kevin Sharp.
An essential grindcore album that�s required listening for anyone into extreme, boundary-torching metal.
We currently have the limited edition UK digipack version of the expanded reissue of Need TO Control, but once this is sold out, we'll just be stocking the regular jewel case edition.
In the early 90s, the grindcore scene started to produce some really ambitious music that experimented with the capabilities of the genre while continuing to test the limits of extremity, and one of the most stylistically experimental albums from this period was the sophomore effort from NYC's Brutal Truth, Need To Control. This 1994 release has long been one of our favorite grindcore albums, following the pot-fueled anarchistic blastwave of their debut Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses with a set of songs that went far beyond the boundaries of their crusty roots into a new realm of complex, unpredictable heaviness that's still one of grind's most audacious efforts, one that cemented Brutal Truth's place in the pantheon of extreme music. The experimental tendencies that were hinted at on their first album bloom into something astounding on Need To Control, their grinding chaos now fused with stretches of immense doom-laden heaviness, extreme abstract noise, the unexpected appearance of a didgeridoo on one track, and industrial elements.
The album begins with the crushing industrial dirge "Collapse", a Godflesh-like crush of slow spastic rubbery mechanized drumming, grating factory noise and clanking metal that turns into a devastating slow motion death metal dirge surrounded with the sounds of burbling water bongs, super heavy and pummeling, kicking into this weirdly anthemic, melodic chorus with high screeching howling vocals and climbing air-raid guitar noise, a surprisingly catchy hook sinking it's teeth into the song. A massive slab of lumbering heaviosity that probably surprised fans who were probably expecting Brutal Truth to kicks this off with nuclear strength speedblast.
It doesn't take long for the band to crank up the tempo though, launching into some awesome chaotic grind on the second track "Black Door Mine", a super complex blast of speed and frantic time signature changes, screeching vokills trading off with guttural roars, some of which are contributed by guest vocalist Bill from Exit-13. "Turn Face" kicks in with a frantic bass solo, then rips into a savage take on hardcore punk sped up to mach twenty velocity, almost like an old Corrosion Of Conformity jam but way heavier and more complex and freaked out and blasting.
Then the album takes another left turn, now into the weird industrial noise rock of "Godplayer"; a crushing, off-time stop/start groove is underscored with the deep droning buzz of a didgeridoo, launching into crushing double bass and thrash riffage, becoming more abrasive and angular, then slipping into an awesome slow industrial metal dirge with more weird effects and didgeridoo.
The next couple song are blistering grind eruptions, the blazing angular thrash of �I See Red� and the wonky riffing and crushing grind of �Bite The Hand�, and then goes into the pure harsh noise of "Iron Lung" where the music drops off and we're treated to a din of guttural snarls, metallic scrape and deep burbling low end. From this point on, it keeps moving through varying degrees of experimental grind and noisy soundscaping, the grindcore on songs like "Judgment" and "Brain Trust" becoming warped and complex, the sound infected with fucked-up vocal noises and howling effects, creepy industrial textures and thick buzzing drones, the extreme speed downshifting into thunderous D-beat or pounding sludge. The song "Ordinary Madness" is one of the standouts, another slow pounding dirge, ultra heavy and ominous, laced with samples from the movie Bad Lieutenant, sheets of dissonant guitar and awesome zonked out acid-guitar soloing that turns this into some sort of freaked out Hendrix-in-a-wormhole grindpsych, and it's followed by a wicked cover of the Germs song "Media Blitz", which has Mike Williams from Eyehategod taking on the vocal duties while the band whips the punk classic into grinding ferocity, and the last song on the album proper "Crawlspace", which is a strange abstract soundscape of random computer noise, harsh feedback abuse and incantatory voices.
This reissue also features some of the bonus tracks that had appeared on the limited five-record vinyl box set that Earache released for Need To Control, including some unlikely covers; there's the infamous cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Here" which is redone as "Wish You Were Here... Wish You'd Go Away", the first half of the song played surprisingly straight with spacey guitars and sung vocals, but then halfway through it, it turns into a total noisecore jam, random percussion and wailing fucked vokills and chaotic guitar noise, a weird almost Boredoms-like grind freakout. There's a handful of turbulent grind jams like "Painted Clowns" and "Eggshells", as well as a killer cover of "Dethroned Emperor" by Celtic Frost, and it ends with the strange fractured noise/grind chaos of "Head Cheese", a garbled assault of feedback and piercing noise, deranged vocals and pulverizing sludge, another Boredoms-style experimental grind jam.
The ease with which Brutal Truth was able to flow from punishing grindcore to hardcore punk to industrial noise to crushing doom on Need To Control was brilliant, and the album remains one of the greatest experimental grind records ever, certainly one of our favorite extreme metal discs, encapsulating everything that we love about this band and about grind as an art form, making this an absolutely essential album for anyone into boundary-pushing, adventurous heavy music...
This UK version of the reissue is presented in an eight-panel digipack that includes a booklet with a great interview with BT singer Kevin Sharpe.
Also available as a limited-edition UK import in digipack packaging.
The latest in Earache's reissue campaign is the still-stunning 1992 debut album from legendary grinders Brutal Truth, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses, considered by most to be one of the most important and influential American grind albums. Much more experimental than most of their peers back in the late 80's/early 90's, BT played with the parameters of constituted �grindcore� by incorporating more left field sounds (noise, industrial, breakbeats) into their music while playing at a level of ferocity that was unparalleled. Scathing politically charged lyrics are roared over fifteen tracks of crushing grind loaded with technical, death metal influenced riffing, brutal d-beat driven tempos and blastbeats, gnarled noise rock riffs and devastatingly crushing dirges, adding in a heavy American thrash metal element along with the death metal and Japanese thrash punk and noise influences to create a violent, ultra-heavy sound that was distinctly different from what was coming out of the UK at the time.
Brutal Truth's love of noise is apparent from the first track �P.S.P.I.", a brief intro of industrial drones and power drill drones and samples that tears right into the machine-flecked blastage of "Birth Of Ignorance", a classic BT track with bestial low/high vokills trading off with one another, a monstrously catchy chorus, and a brutally fast percussive assault. "Time� is another noise damaged track, fusing harsh industrial noise to a punishing slow motion dirge that reverses the album's blasting speed into a skull-crushing six minute grind.. But then there�s plenty of pure blast on here, too: the four second song "Collateral Damage" ranked as one of the shortest grindcore blasts ever, and "Stench Of Profit" is a furious, hyperspeed anti-capitalist screed that is one of the album�s harshest tracks. It helps that singer Kevin Sharpe is one of the best grind vocalists ever; his throat belches out some of the most fucked up and demonic vocalizations ever heard, such as on "Regression-Progression", where the distorted snarls sound like a pack of starving wolves rather than anything human. Totally crucial.
Along with Extreme Conditions, this reissue also features a bunch of killer bonus material. A couple of tracks from the Perpetual Conversion 7" from 1992 are included; the title track's punky deathgrind is followed by a gnarled, lurching death metal cover of Black Sabbath's "Lord Of This World" complete with sampled bongslurping, and the noise-trance beatscape of "Bed Sheet", a nearly ten minute industrial breakbeat jam with swirling psychedelic noise, distorted screams and chopped up beats, sounding a lot like early Techno Animal crossed with Merzbow style noise experimentation.
There's also the four tracks from Brutal Truth's ill-fated split Ep with Japanese grinders S.O.B., which are all covers of S.O.B. tracks such as "Repeat At Length", "Let�s Go Summer Beach " and " Not Me" done up BT-deathgrind style. The last couple of tracks are from 1992's Ill-Neglect 7", and includes Brutal Truth's INSANE mach 10 grindnoise cover of the BUtthole Surfers classic "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey�s Grave", another S.O.B. cover ("Hear Nothing For You"), another booming, murky industrial noize/breakbeat jam a la Techno Animal/Ice ("Pre-Natal Homeland (Funky Budda Dub)") and a forty-nine second eruption of psychedelic noisegrind ("AC/BT").
The disc also contains three Quicktime videos that are playable on your computer, including their video for the five second song "Collateral Damage" which was listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as the shorted music video ever, and the booklet has new liner notes which include a new interview with vocalist Kevin Sharp.
An essential grindcore album that�s required listening for anyone into extreme, boundary-torching metal.
Also available as a slightly cheaper jewel case edition.
In the early 90s, the grindcore scene started to produce some really ambitious music that experimented with the capabilities of the genre while continuing to test the limits of extremity, and one of the most stylistically experimental albums from this period was the sophomore effort from NYC's Brutal Truth, Need To Control. This 1994 release has long been one of our favorite grindcore albums, following the pot-fueled anarchistic blastwave of their debut Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses with a set of songs that went far beyond the boundaries of their crusty roots into a new realm of complex, unpredictable heaviness that's still one of grind's most audacious efforts, one that cemented Brutal Truth's place in the pantheon of extreme music. The experimental tendencies that were hinted at on their first album bloom into something astounding on Need To Control, their grinding chaos now fused with stretches of immense doom-laden heaviness, extreme abstract noise, the unexpected appearance of a didgeridoo on one track, and industrial elements.
The album begins with the crushing industrial dirge "Collapse", a Godflesh-like crush of slow spastic rubbery mechanized drumming, grating factory noise and clanking metal that turns into a devastating slow motion death metal dirge surrounded with the sounds of burbling water bongs, super heavy and pummeling, kicking into this weirdly anthemic, melodic chorus with high screeching howling vocals and climbing air-raid guitar noise, a surprisingly catchy hook sinking it's teeth into the song. A massive slab of lumbering heaviosity that probably surprised fans who were probably expecting Brutal Truth to kicks this off with nuclear strength speedblast.
It doesn't take long for the band to crank up the tempo though, launching into some awesome chaotic grind on the second track "Black Door Mine", a super complex blast of speed and frantic time signature changes, screeching vokills trading off with guttural roars, some of which are contributed by guest vocalist Bill from Exit-13. "Turn Face" kicks in with a frantic bass solo, then rips into a savage take on hardcore punk sped up to mach twenty velocity, almost like an old Corrosion Of Conformity jam but way heavier and more complex and freaked out and blasting.
Then the album takes another left turn, now into the weird industrial noise rock of "Godplayer"; a crushing, off-time stop/start groove is underscored with the deep droning buzz of a didgeridoo, launching into crushing double bass and thrash riffage, becoming more abrasive and angular, then slipping into an awesome slow industrial metal dirge with more weird effects and didgeridoo.
The next couple song are blistering grind eruptions, the blazing angular thrash of �I See Red� and the wonky riffing and crushing grind of �Bite The Hand�, and then goes into the pure harsh noise of "Iron Lung" where the music drops off and we're treated to a din of guttural snarls, metallic scrape and deep burbling low end. From this point on, it keeps moving through varying degrees of experimental grind and noisy soundscaping, the grindcore on songs like "Judgment" and "Brain Trust" becoming warped and complex, the sound infected with fucked-up vocal noises and howling effects, creepy industrial textures and thick buzzing drones, the extreme speed downshifting into thunderous D-beat or pounding sludge. The song "Ordinary Madness" is one of the standouts, another slow pounding dirge, ultra heavy and ominous, laced with samples from the movie Bad Lieutenant, sheets of dissonant guitar and awesome zonked out acid-guitar soloing that turns this into some sort of freaked out Hendrix-in-a-wormhole grindpsych, and it's followed by a wicked cover of the Germs song "Media Blitz", which has Mike Williams from Eyehategod taking on the vocal duties while the band whips the punk classic into grinding ferocity, and the last song on the album proper "Crawlspace", which is a strange abstract soundscape of random computer noise, harsh feedback abuse and incantatory voices.
This reissue also features some of the bonus tracks that had appeared on the limited five-record vinyl box set that Earache released for Need To Control, including some unlikely covers; there's the infamous cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Here" which is redone as "Wish You Were Here... Wish You'd Go Away", the first half of the song played surprisingly straight with spacey guitars and sung vocals, but then halfway through it, it turns into a total noisecore jam, random percussion and wailing fucked vokills and chaotic guitar noise, a weird almost Boredoms-like grind freakout. There's a handful of turbulent grind jams like "Painted Clowns" and "Eggshells", as well as a killer cover of "Dethroned Emperor" by Celtic Frost, and it ends with the strange fractured noise/grind chaos of "Head Cheese", a garbled assault of feedback and piercing noise, deranged vocals and pulverizing sludge, another Boredoms-style experimental grind jam.
The ease with which Brutal Truth was able to flow from punishing grindcore to hardcore punk to industrial noise to crushing doom on Need To Control was brilliant, and the album remains one of the greatest experimental grind records ever, certainly one of our favorite extreme metal discs, encapsulating everything that we love about this band and about grind as an art form, making this an absolutely essential album for anyone into boundary-pushing, adventurous heavy music...
Includes a booklet with a great interview with BT singer Kevin Sharpe.
Just re-issued by the US wing of Earache, the classic Brutal Truth shirt design for their debut album Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses is once again available as an official design from Earache. This album and it's cover art is an iconic piece of cutting-edge American grindcore, and like the Godflesh shirt that Earache just re-released, this design has been bootlegged countless times over the years on sloppily produced shirts. This is a high quality, professionally printed shirt straight from the label, though, printed on black Gildan brand 100% cotton fabric. We have sizes small through extra large for this design in stock. The word from Earache is that this (along with the other classic Earache shirt designs, of which we also stock the Godflesh shirt) are only going to be available for a limited time...
Just re-issued by the US wing of Earache, the classic Brutal Truth shirt design for their debut album Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses is once again available as an official design from Earache. This album and it's cover art is an iconic piece of cutting-edge American grindcore, and like the Godflesh shirt that Earache just re-released, this design has been bootlegged countless times over the years on sloppily produced shirts. This is a high quality, professionally printed shirt straight from the label, though, printed on black Gildan brand 100% cotton fabric. We have sizes small through extra large for this design in stock. The word from Earache is that this (along with the other classic Earache shirt designs, of which we also stock the Godflesh shirt) are only going to be available for a limited time...
Just re-issued by the US wing of Earache, the classic Brutal Truth shirt design for their debut album Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses is once again available as an official design from Earache. This album and it's cover art is an iconic piece of cutting-edge American grindcore, and like the Godflesh shirt that Earache just re-released, this design has been bootlegged countless times over the years on sloppily produced shirts. This is a high quality, professionally printed shirt straight from the label, though, printed on black Gildan brand 100% cotton fabric. We have sizes small through extra large for this design in stock. The word from Earache is that this (along with the other classic Earache shirt designs, of which we also stock the Godflesh shirt) are only going to be available for a limited time...
Just re-issued by the US wing of Earache, the classic Brutal Truth shirt design for their debut album Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses is once again available as an official design from Earache. This album and it's cover art is an iconic piece of cutting-edge American grindcore, and like the Godflesh shirt that Earache just re-released, this design has been bootlegged countless times over the years on sloppily produced shirts. This is a high quality, professionally printed shirt straight from the label, though, printed on black Gildan brand 100% cotton fabric. We have sizes small through extra large for this design in stock. The word from Earache is that this (along with the other classic Earache shirt designs, of which we also stock the Godflesh shirt) are only going to be available for a limited time...
Back in stock, on both Cd and limited edition colored vinyl...
These pioneering grindlords are one of extreme metal's most unapologetically experimental bands, and since getting back together after a long hiatus in 2009, they've been producing harsh, noise-laced blast violence that's every bit as confrontational and edgy as their classic 90's output. That by itself is why I've been such a fan of Brutal Truth over the years, but I've also always appreciated their fatalist worldview that doesn't bother itself too much with proposing a bunch of anarchist platitudes, instead laying out the message loud and clear: we're fucked, and we're at this very moment in the throes of that the BY guys have long referred to as our "slow motion apocalypse". Not the cheeriest thought for anyone who turns to grindcore for a lil' bit of cathartic fun, but that's hardly why I listen to this stuff. Brutal Truth's latest shows that there still isn't a dull edge to be found on these grind vets, as End Time backs up it's eschatological visions with a crushing onslaught of experimental noise, brutal grindpunk, industrial heaviness and punishing sludge.
The opening song "Malice" gets this rolling with a killer atonal dirge, the band slowly lurching over a spasm of noisy chords and twitchy no-wave splattered heaviness, alternating between an angular sludgy anti-groove and faster, more frantic thrashing, then blasts into the spastic grind of "Simple Math", which ends up slipping into an off-kilter bit of southern rock riffing over the blasting grind at the end. Rich Hoak's octopoidal drumming flies all over the place on End Time, and propels this stuff into whirlwinds of chaos; after listening to the disc a couple of times, a lot of the rhythms and riffs on End Time feel more jagged than usual, almost "mathy", making some of this stuff sound incredibly angular thanks to the extremely dissonant riff-style of new guitarist Eric Burke, whose playing gives the new BT stuff a woozy, off-balance quality. And Kevin's awesome frenzied howl is as bestial as always- NOBODY sounds like this guy, his vocals are some of the best in grind, ever. The title track is another short chunk of dissonant grind etched in strange mathematics, but as usual, the band pulls out an awesome hooky riff amid the spastic blast chaos, even slipping into an unexpected melodic rock part at the very end. The album is primarily made up of these kinds of shorter, compact assaults of complex grindcore delivered in minute-and-a-half long bursts, the angular thrash riffs colliding with the skronky, atonal guitar parts, the drumming frenzied and loose, as always informed by the extremes of free-jazz percussion that has long influenced Hoak's playing in BT. There's blazing D-beat and hardcore punk that erupts on songs like "Small Talk" and "Lottery"; whenever these guys break out the hardcore stuff it fucking rips, but they always twist it and deform it into their unique cyclonic chaos. Other tracks like ".58 Caliber" blend harsh guitar noise, wild drumming and samples into an improv-thrash workout. There's a couple of collaborations on the album, frist with Italian noise artist Robert Piotrowicz on the grueling, sludgy "Warm Embrace Of Poverty", where nauseating feedback is incoporated into the crushing sludgepunk, and the song "Gut-Check" has the Chicago industrial sludge band Winters In Osaka contributing some additional toxic electronics. The end of the Lp closes with the grinding doom-laden death metal dirge "Drink Up", super slow and heavy, and on the Cd version finishes with a fifteen-minute bonus track called "Control Room", a furious free-improv noise workout with furious double-bass drumming and jazzy blasting beneath huge swathes of amplifier rumble and power electronics-style feedback abuse, layers of murky samples, harsh guitar skree, all kinds of strange electronic pulses and glitches, the sound very dense and layered, an industrialized improv blastscape that becomes very hypnotic the further you get into it's dense rumbling chaos.
Back in stock, on both Cd and limited edition colored vinyl...
These pioneering grindlords are one of extreme metal's most unapologetically experimental bands, and since getting back together after a long hiatus in 2009, they've been producing harsh, noise-laced blast violence that's every bit as confrontational and edgy as their classic 90's output. That by itself is why I've been such a fan of Brutal Truth over the years, but I've also always appreciated their fatalist worldview that doesn't bother itself too much with proposing a bunch of anarchist platitudes, instead laying out the message loud and clear: we're fucked, and we're at this very moment in the throes of that the BY guys have long referred to as our "slow motion apocalypse". Not the cheeriest thought for anyone who turns to grindcore for a lil' bit of cathartic fun, but that's hardly why I listen to this stuff. Brutal Truth's latest shows that there still isn't a dull edge to be found on these grind vets, as End Time backs up it's eschatological visions with a crushing onslaught of experimental noise, brutal grindpunk, industrial heaviness and punishing sludge.
The opening song "Malice" gets this rolling with a killer atonal dirge, the band slowly lurching over a spasm of noisy chords and twitchy no-wave splattered heaviness, alternating between an angular sludgy anti-groove and faster, more frantic thrashing, then blasts into the spastic grind of "Simple Math", which ends up slipping into an off-kilter bit of southern rock riffing over the blasting grind at the end. Rich Hoak's octopoidal drumming flies all over the place on End Time, and propels this stuff into whirlwinds of chaos; after listening to the disc a couple of times, a lot of the rhythms and riffs on End Time feel more jagged than usual, almost "mathy", making some of this stuff sound incredibly angular thanks to the extremely dissonant riff-style of new guitarist Eric Burke, whose playing gives the new BT stuff a woozy, off-balance quality. And Kevin's awesome frenzied howl is as bestial as always- NOBODY sounds like this guy, his vocals are some of the best in grind, ever. The title track is another short chunk of dissonant grind etched in strange mathematics, but as usual, the band pulls out an awesome hooky riff amid the spastic blast chaos, even slipping into an unexpected melodic rock part at the very end. The album is primarily made up of these kinds of shorter, compact assaults of complex grindcore delivered in minute-and-a-half long bursts, the angular thrash riffs colliding with the skronky, atonal guitar parts, the drumming frenzied and loose, as always informed by the extremes of free-jazz percussion that has long influenced Hoak's playing in BT. There's blazing D-beat and hardcore punk that erupts on songs like "Small Talk" and "Lottery"; whenever these guys break out the hardcore stuff it fucking rips, but they always twist it and deform it into their unique cyclonic chaos. Other tracks like ".58 Caliber" blend harsh guitar noise, wild drumming and samples into an improv-thrash workout. There's a couple of collaborations on the album, frist with Italian noise artist Robert Piotrowicz on the grueling, sludgy "Warm Embrace Of Poverty", where nauseating feedback is incoporated into the crushing sludgepunk, and the song "Gut-Check" has the Chicago industrial sludge band Winters In Osaka contributing some additional toxic electronics. The end of the Lp closes with the grinding doom-laden death metal dirge "Drink Up", super slow and heavy, and on the Cd version finishes with a fifteen-minute bonus track called "Control Room", a furious free-improv noise workout with furious double-bass drumming and jazzy blasting beneath huge swathes of amplifier rumble and power electronics-style feedback abuse, layers of murky samples, harsh guitar skree, all kinds of strange electronic pulses and glitches, the sound very dense and layered, an industrialized improv blastscape that becomes very hypnotic the further you get into it's dense rumbling chaos.
I've seen a number of bands pay homage to the ancient 8-track cartridge over the past decade, from the Melvins and HNW outfit Burial Ground to Locrian and Drop Dead. Pioneering grindcore band Brutal Truth is the latest to offer their music in this chunky, antiquated format, with this super-limited 8-Track edition of their latest album End Time, and the geek in me finds this thing extremely cool-looking. Here's my old write-up of the original album release:
These pioneering grindlords are one of extreme metal's most unapologetically experimental bands, and since getting back together after a long hiatus in 2009, they've been producing harsh, noise-laced blast violence that's every bit as confrontational and edgy as their classic 90's output. That by itself is why I've been such a fan of Brutal Truth over the years, but I've also always appreciated their fatalist worldview that doesn't bother itself too much with proposing a bunch of anarchist platitudes, instead laying out the message loud and clear: we're fucked, and we're at this very moment in the throes of that the BY guys have long referred to as our "slow motion apocalypse". Not the cheeriest thought for anyone who turns to grindcore for a lil' bit of cathartic fun, but that's hardly why I listen to this stuff. Brutal Truth's latest shows that there still isn't a dull edge to be found on these grind vets, as End Time backs up it's eschatological visions with a crushing onslaught of experimental noise, brutal grindpunk, industrial heaviness and punishing sludge.
The opening song "Malice" gets this rolling with a killer atonal dirge, the band slowly lurching over a spasm of noisy chords and twitchy no-wave splattered heaviness, alternating between an angular sludgy anti-groove and faster, more frantic thrashing, then blasts into the spastic grind of "Simple Math", which ends up slipping into an off-kilter bit of southern rock riffing over the blasting grind at the end. Rich Hoak's octopoidal drumming flies all over the place on End Time, and propels this stuff into whirlwinds of chaos; after listening to the disc a couple of times, a lot of the rhythms and riffs on End Time feel more jagged than usual, almost "mathy", making some of this stuff sound incredibly angular thanks to the extremely dissonant riff-style of new guitarist Eric Burke, whose playing gives the new BT stuff a woozy, off-balance quality. And Kevin's awesome frenzied howl is as bestial as always- NOBODY sounds like this guy, his vocals are some of the best in grind, ever. The title track is another short chunk of dissonant grind etched in strange mathematics, but as usual, the band pulls out an awesome hooky riff amid the spastic blast chaos, even slipping into an unexpected melodic rock part at the very end. The album is primarily made up of these kinds of shorter, compact assaults of complex grindcore delivered in minute-and-a-half long bursts, the angular thrash riffs colliding with the skronky, atonal guitar parts, the drumming frenzied and loose, as always informed by the extremes of free-jazz percussion that has long influenced Hoak's playing in BT. There's blazing D-beat and hardcore punk that erupts on songs like "Small Talk" and "Lottery"; whenever these guys break out the hardcore stuff it fucking rips, but they always twist it and deform it into their unique cyclonic chaos. Other tracks like ".58 Caliber" blend harsh guitar noise, wild drumming and samples into an improv-thrash workout. There's a couple of collaborations on the album, first with Italian noise artist Robert Piotrowicz on the grueling, sludgy "Warm Embrace Of Poverty", where nauseating feedback is incorporated into the crushing sludgepunk, and the song "Gut-Check" has the Chicago industrial sludge band Winters In Osaka contributing some additional toxic electronics. The end of the Lp closes with the grinding doom-laden death metal dirge "Drink Up", super slow and heavy, and on the Cd version finishes with a fifteen-minute bonus track called "Control Room", a furious free-improv noise workout with furious double-bass drumming and jazzy blasting beneath huge swathes of amplifier rumble and power electronics-style feedback abuse, layers of murky samples, harsh guitar skree, all kinds of strange electronic pulses and glitches, the sound very dense and layered, an industrialized improv blastscape that becomes very hypnotic the further you get into it's dense rumbling chaos.
Now available as a limited-edition pro-manufactured cassette from the grind-junkies over at Haunted Hotel...
These pioneering grindlords are one of extreme metal's most unapologetically experimental bands, and since getting back together after a long hiatus in 2009, they've been producing harsh, noise-laced blast violence that's every bit as confrontational and edgy as their classic 90's output. That by itself is why I've been such a fan of Brutal Truth over the years, but I've also always appreciated their fatalist worldview that doesn't bother itself too much with proposing a bunch of anarchist platitudes, instead laying out the message loud and clear: we're fucked, and we're at this very moment in the throes of that the BY guys have long referred to as our "slow motion apocalypse". Not the cheeriest thought for anyone who turns to grindcore for a lil' bit of cathartic fun, but that's hardly why I listen to this stuff. Brutal Truth's latest shows that there still isn't a dull edge to be found on these grind vets, as End Time backs up it's eschatological visions with a crushing onslaught of experimental noise, brutal grindpunk, industrial heaviness and punishing sludge.
The opening song "Malice" gets this rolling with a killer atonal dirge, the band slowly lurching over a spasm of noisy chords and twitchy no-wave splattered heaviness, alternating between an angular sludgy anti-groove and faster, more frantic thrashing, then blasts into the spastic grind of "Simple Math", which ends up slipping into an off-kilter bit of southern rock riffing over the blasting grind at the end. Rich Hoak's octopoidal drumming flies all over the place on End Time, and propels this stuff into whirlwinds of chaos; after listening to the disc a couple of times, a lot of the rhythms and riffs on End Time feel more jagged than usual, almost "mathy", making some of this stuff sound incredibly angular thanks to the extremely dissonant riff-style of new guitarist Eric Burke, whose playing gives the new BT stuff a woozy, off-balance quality. And Kevin's awesome frenzied howl is as bestial as always- NOBODY sounds like this guy, his vocals are some of the best in grind, ever. The title track is another short chunk of dissonant grind etched in strange mathematics, but as usual, the band pulls out an awesome hooky riff amid the spastic blast chaos, even slipping into an unexpected melodic rock part at the very end. The album is primarily made up of these kinds of shorter, compact assaults of complex grindcore delivered in minute-and-a-half long bursts, the angular thrash riffs colliding with the skronky, atonal guitar parts, the drumming frenzied and loose, as always informed by the extremes of free-jazz percussion that has long influenced Hoak's playing in BT. There's blazing D-beat and hardcore punk that erupts on songs like "Small Talk" and "Lottery"; whenever these guys break out the hardcore stuff it fucking rips, but they always twist it and deform it into their unique cyclonic chaos. Other tracks like ".58 Caliber" blend harsh guitar noise, wild drumming and samples into an improv-thrash workout. There's a couple of collaborations on the album, frist with Italian noise artist Robert Piotrowicz on the grueling, sludgy "Warm Embrace Of Poverty", where nauseating feedback is incoporated into the crushing sludgepunk, and the song "Gut-Check" has the Chicago industrial sludge band Winters In Osaka contributing some additional toxic electronics. The end of the Lp closes with the grinding doom-laden death metal dirge "Drink Up", super slow and heavy, and on the Cd version finishes with a fifteen-minute bonus track called "Control Room", a furious free-improv noise workout with furious double-bass drumming and jazzy blasting beneath huge swathes of amplifier rumble and power electronics-style feedback abuse, layers of murky samples, harsh guitar skree, all kinds of strange electronic pulses and glitches, the sound very dense and layered, an industrialized improv blastscape that becomes very hypnotic the further you get into it's dense rumbling chaos.
Two hulking slabs of cancerous, seismic blacknoise that dunk your skull in charred, blackened rumble and grating, screeching feedback for nearly an hour of abuse. It's Sam McKinlay from harsh noise behemoth The Rita scaling back on the ultra-dense walls of concrete-mixer deathdrone that he erects with that project, instead going for a wicked Power Electronics onslaught that rises up out of the ashes of his black metal-esque noise project Ba.Ku. I haven't heard any of the Ba.Ku stuff so I don't know it compares, but the two tracks on Her Serpent stand on their own. Vicious lashings of high end feedback and shrieking skree gouge chunks of bloodied meat out of the churning, roaring drone, an endless grinding of thick and impenetrable distorted low frequency white noise that is sickeningly heavy in an ear-bleeding, Whitehouse/Merzbow way. You already know if this is something you'd be into. The vocals make this stand out, too. Shrieked, distorted screaming is one of the core elements of the Power Electronics sound, but the screaming vocals here are heavily treated with a bunch of other effects and are mutated into echoing, dubby howls. It sounds crazy, and gives BT. HN. a slightly more psychedelic aura than other practicioners of Whitehouse-inspired harsh noise, and fans of the blackened noise of Stalaggh and Emit would probably be into this just as much as anyone into PE, noise walls, harsh-as-hell Japanese noise, etc.
Packaged in the signature wallet sleeve of the Troniks imprint.
Brutal demonic power electronic annihilation! Sam McKinlay , the guy behind BT.HN, is better known in noise circles for his scorching harsh noise wall project The Rita that has been melting brain matter since the mid 90's with monolithic blocks of pulverizing, long-form distorted noise, but I've always loved his stuff as BT.HN at least as much as The Rita, even though this project has released just a handful of titled over the years, including an excellent disc of blackened noise that came out on Troniks two years ago. Much of the BT.HN output is out of print, but Retrospective collects several of these hard-to-find recordings in one place in a nicely packaged limited edition disc from Pointless Blank, and it's an excellent starting point for anyone who wants to explore the terrifying black realms of BT.HN.'s crushing horror-noise.
Somewhat similar (though more active and dynamic) to The Rita's brutal HNW, BT.HN. adds it�s own signature horror to the sound in the form of demonic screams and guttural growling run through fleshcurdling amounts of distortion and delay, as well as loads of manipulated horror film samples that both introduce and then weave throughout the lengthy tracks. Bits of old horror movie scores are absorbed into crushing blasts of distorted noise and massive waves of rumbling black bass, with fragments of blown out melody buried underneath the crumbling walls. With those vicious vokills roaring underneath the layers of crumbling, churning distortion, BT.HN.'s hellish din often sounds like a death metal vocalist drowning in vat of black noise. The disc features material from the Crypts Of Dark And Obscure Lineage cassette on Iatrogenesis Records, the Wolf Woman Of Black Lake cassette originally released on Audiobot, the early BA.KU. material from the Barrier Kult skate video, and more.
Comes in a silkscreened chipboard gatefold jacket, and is limited to 85 copies.
Another slab of sound that I can't believe that I'm coming to this late, IV is the final release from the incredible, mind blowing ambient-
hardcore genius of Bucket Full Of Teeth. It fucking astounds me that this band didn't become gigantic. But they weren't, and aren't...nope, Bucket
Full Of Teeth were only around for a short time, formed by members of the seminal 90's hardcore band Orchid, playing only six shows during their entire
existence and producing only three 7"EPs and this final CDEP statement. This 16-minute disc contains 12 blasts of unpredictable stylistic shifts, cramming in
everything from breathtaking electronically textured hardcore, sweeping panoramic ambience, soaring blissed-out cosmic synthesizers, ultradistorted grindcore
and brief blurts of blown-out sludgedoom, massve Southern rock boogie and crushing instrumental apocalyptic-rock, often several of these elements coming
together in the same song; what is so awesome about this EP is how the mishmash of styles and sounds is so thought out that it totally comes together as a
seamless, futuristic vision; at any given moment Bucket Full Of Teeth sound like an unearthly mixture of Popul Vuh and Infest, Pink Floyd and Orchid,
Vangelis and Eyehategod, Converge and Corrupted. Yeah, it's sort of hearing DIY hardcore kids taking a stab at Naked City style genrefuckery, but it sounds
awesome.
Another slab of sound that I can't believe that I'm coming to this late, IV is the final release from the incredible, mind blowing ambient-hardcore genius of
Bucket Full Of Teeth. It fucking astounds me that this band didn't become gigantic. But they weren't, and aren't...nope, Bucket Full Of Teeth were only
around for a short time, formed by members of the seminal 90's hardcore band Orchid, playing only six shows during their entire existence and producing only
three 7"EPs and this final CDEP statement. This 16-minute disc contains 12 blasts of unpredictable stylistic shifts, cramming in everything from breathtaking
electronically textured hardcore, sweeping panoramic ambience, soaring blissed-out cosmic synthesizers, ultradistorted grindcore and brief blurts of blown-
out sludgedoom, massve Southern rock boogie and crushing instrumental apocalyptic-rock, often several of these elements coming together in the same song;
what is so awesome about this EP is how the mishmash of styles and sounds is so thought out that it totally comes together as a seamless, futuristic vision;
at any given moment Bucket Full Of Teeth sound like an unearthly mixture of Popul Vuh and Infest, Pink Floyd and Orchid, Vangelis and Eyehategod, Converge
and Corrupted. Yeah, it's sort of hearing DIY hardcore kids taking a stab at Naked City style genrefuckery, but it sounds awesome.
With names like Serj Tankian (System Of A Down), Saul Williams, Maura Davis (Denali), GiGi Laswell (aka Ejigayehu Shibabaw), Shana Halligan (Bitter:Sweet ), Dirk Rogers and Keith Aazami (from Los Angeles grincore freakos Bad Acid Trip), Maximum Bob (Deli Creeps) and opera singer Ani Maldjian, this promised to be at the very least an interesting new disc from that legendary shredder Buckethead, the towering Bill Laswell/John Zorn protege who wears a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket and an expressionless white mask. Buckethead released a bunch of pretty amazing solo albums and played in the seminal experimental funk/jazz/metal outfits Deli Creeps and Praxis in the 1990's, and left an indelible mark on the face of avant-garde guitar shred. In recent years, he went on to become a minor guitar celebrity in the mainstream by writing and performing music for a ton of movies and playing for a brief moment in the bizarre revamped Guns N' Roses lineup that surfaced a few years ago, but it's the newer solo albums like Enter The Chicken that we're investigating.
This album was first released in 2005 but was just re-released with a new track ("shen Chi"), and it's a collection of original songs that pair Buckethead with the aforementioned array of vocalists that leans further into pop territory than the guitarist's legendary 90's solo and band recordings. It's still an interesting mishmash of Buckethead's signature virtuoso shred and unorthodox guitar playing with more conventional sounds, and the album spans hip-hop (on the Saul Williams fronted "Three Fingers"), dreamy trip-hop ("Waiting Hare"), goofy death metal ("Funbus"), and spasmodic nu-metal ("We Are One"). His style of changing in the blink of an eye between metal riffing, weird rhythmic scratching, and insane lightspeed soloing is all over these tracks, and where I'd normally wouldn't be too interested in the nu-metal and trip-pop jams that are featured here, the crazy guitar stuff makes this pretty neat stuff.
One of the standout tracks is "The Hand", which glances back to the outre avant-funk/metal of Praxis with it's choppy thrash metal riffing, crazed funk riffs, shrill operatic female vocals, and fucked up rhyming from Deli Creeps vocalist Maximum Bob, all wrapped up in a thick blanket of guitar noise that emulates vinyl scratching (one of Buckethead's signature tricks) and electronic weirdness. The instrumental "Nottingham Lace" is another amazing composition that blends funk, metal, and insane, inhuman fretboard gymnastics into one of the catchiest songs on the album. And the bonus track "Shen Chi" melds together fluid robo-soloing with fractured breakcore, thrash metal beats, carnivalesque fretboard runs, and crushing metallic math riffs.
Now I'm just waiting to get my hands on the new Praxis album Profanation (Preparation for a Coming Darkness) ...when in the hell is this coming out in the U.S. ?
Here's a fucking fantastic album of cinematic jazz-flecked cosmic power electronics/dark ambience from this Lithuanian group, whose lineup includes Leonardas Marozas, the editor of the excellent new PE/harsh noise zine TeRRoR. I was struck by the combination of dark spacey psychedelia and smoldering power electronics that Budrus reveals on Devyniems Rytams Au�tant; the only other band that sound even remotely like what these guys are doing is 88MM, who also combine elements of PE and space music. But Budrus's sound is all their own, seeping with intense orchestral power and seething dread, the sound woven with looped woodwinds and strings wound into ominous minor key figures that are repeated over and over, with more dissonant processed string and horn sounds hovering in the background. Electronic effects and churning distortion melts down into dense buzzing drones and hallucinatory soundscapes, and the album is filled with a relentlessly bleak feeling, an industrial suite for the end times. Pounding tribal drums are heavily processed and echo beneath the hostile growling vocals, which deliver all of the lyrics in guttural Lithuanian. Psych guitar leads soar across an onyx horizon, surrounded by opulant synthesizers, ghostly harmonium-like drones and groaning cellos.
The fifth song is "Draskyti Sapna. Atbulom Link Skliauto (To Tear Apart The Dream. Backwards Toward Dome)", one of my favorite pieces here; a swarming hive of trebly, almost blackened guitar buzz and eerie minor key flute-like melodies, fronted by the ravings of a madman. The following track "Pjutyje/In The Reaping" is also noteworthy for it's symphonic sound and vast droning strings; it's the processed saxophone, though, that elevates this, the bleary sound of the sax drifting over blasting electronics, becoming an ominous buzz rising into the stratosphere while muffled clanking rhythms rumble in the distance alongside electronically tweaked screams. The sax also appears on "Budraujant/White Wake", where it meets up with space rock guitars gliding across thumping shamanic drums.
Definitely not just another PE album, Budrus's debut is pretty amazing, the trace elements of power electronics that appear here adding certain ferocity to the dark psychedelic drift that they unleash across these nine tracks. The disc comes in a six panel digipack that includes a twelve page booklet, and is released in a limited edition of three hundred copies. Highly recommended.
An insane EP pairing up the obscure Minneapolis art-thrash duo Buffo and German "acoustic grindcore" band Happy Grindcore. Buffo's guitar/drum duo blast out
a single instrumental song of bizarre noisy blat that falls somewhere between The Flying Luttenbachers, U.S. Maple, and a dumpster being hurled from the top
of a parking deck. A pretty freaking deranged take on Skin Graft style bugout. We had heard of Happy Grindcore before, and were wondering what the hell a
band called Happy Grindcore was going to sound like. Well, at least on this EP, what you get is a bizarre series of power violence style eruptions played on
acoustic guitars with casio lounge beats and random audio nonsense knifing your eardrums, like a bunch of meth heads banging out Napalm Death tunes during a
flamenco class. Pretty fucked! Released in a limited edition of 300 copies, in punk fucking xerox sleeve.
Sludgy, feedback-splattered indie rock that taps the early 90's vein of dirgey, noisy stuff, coming off like a fucked up, garagey alter ego of NIRVANA's
Bleach...or the MELVINS, if their sludgerock was blasted out of tinny practice-amp speakers, lo-fi and super noisy and wreathed in gnarly feedback
and distorted narcoleptic vocals. This twelve song album also channels sloppy hardcore blasts and degenerate Midwestern scumrock attitude into a buzzing,
jangling tantrum that would have fit well on Am Rep about thirteen years ago. Of course, we at Crucial Blast are big fans of this sort of noxious, dirgey
rock, and BUGS AND RATS (which we think is a killer name, by the way) certainly hits the spot in terms of pure head-bashing, lo-fi, grizzled pop hooks bombed
to oblivion with hideous distortion and yowling vocals. While not mega-heavy like fellow contemporary neo-noise-rock purveyors JUMBOS KILLCRANE and DACTYL,
BUGS AND RATS are nevertheless a much noisier and drugged out blast. It's good stuff.
This disc captures a scorching 17 minute free-psych-noise blowout recorded in 2002 at the esteemed Western Mass indie venue Flywheel from maxx
crunch heavies BULL ANUS. Titled "Bass Ass Woods", this collective freakout emits a dense deathbeam of free guitar racket and feedback blast and manic
electronic synth chaos. BRUTAL power gnarl. Imagine a combination of old MERZBOW and TOTAL, or BORBETOMAGUS meets SKULLFLOWER in a takedown flamethrower
match. Towards the end, the jam flatlines into a brain-baking oscillator drone that kills. This CD-R comes with full disc face art, slipped inside of a full
color glossy wallet sleeve.
Available again at a lower price than before!
A name like that creates certain expectations. BULL ANUS deliver with 70 minutes of HARSH drone-
noise n' scumfuzz hell, like the most brutal early SKULLFLOWER/BORBETOMAGUS skuzz crawling through the gutter and spurting grotesque feedback swarms over
your cranium, courtesy of Erik Amlee (CRACKHOUSE) and company. There's little in the way of dynamics here...BULL ANUS lock in with a crackling avalanche of
fuzz and distortion and skree, piling it on, layers and layers of dense, cloudy crunch, with gauzy melodies obscured and blurred by the storm of noise. Pure
brooding pestilence and evil tone mulch. Guitar amplifiers bare toothy grins and spastic beats grind away at the withering transistor frequencies. Enter
The Anus could possibly be heard as a meditation on the sounds of machinery falling apart, a bleeping,grinding mantra of coarse speaker hurl. Good shit.
Like most of the other Mandragora back-catalog jams we've landed, this private press CD-R comes packaged in a cardstock wallet sleeve.
It's almost without fail that I get hooked on anything coming out of the French heavy underground lately. I almost passed on this one though, due to the
goofy album cover which depicts a gaggle of little girls dressed in, you guessed it, bumblebee costumes. But you know, I gave it a shot just 'cuz it was
French, and whaddya know but Cissetive turned out to be a fantastic album of post-rocky, Temporary Residence-influenced post-hardcore.
Sure, Envy are the masters of this style in Japan, no question about it, but this is a sound that's the French have been continuing to explore for a couple
of years now, and they're really perfected that combination of heavy, explosive hardcore and fragile, brooding instrumental rock. Gantz and Amanda Woodward
are two of the better known bands doing this stuff, but Bumblebees' are equally great, mixing together mighty Neurosis/Isis crunch, harmonica-laced spacey
folk-pop, epic riff instrumentals a la Pelican / Red Sparowes / Tides, jazzy, sax-driven ambient rock, a crooning singer delivering his lyrics in French,
Codeine-esque slow core, and lurching math-rock. Bumblebees take all of those elements and keep Cissetive a cohesive, well-written album - man, this
band would/should be huge, I can't believe it took me this long to find out about 'em. The album closes with the sprawling 19 minute epic
�Stolnjak�, which shifts between delicate post-rock strum and tangles of crushing metallic heaviness; the track is actually cut in half by about seven
minutes of silence, but when the end of the track kicks in, whoa...it suddenly becomes a moody, insanely catchy shoegaze jam, kinda like a heavier
MBV, or Ride, or Swervedriver, you get the picture, the song is that good. Can't recommend this disc enough, which sucks 'cuz we actually only have a couple
of copies in stock, and we're not sure if we're going to be able to get this back in stock or not.
Bumsnogger's gnarly sludgepunk crawls out of that whole scene of UK bands that took Black Sabbath's bluesy metal, harsh crustcore, and the most negatory
sludge imaginable and vomited up a particularly virulent strain of skumfuck stoner metal - other outfits that pushed this sort of ugly heaviosity included
Iron Monkey, Mistress, Charger, Black Eye Riot, and Lazarus Blackstar, pretty much the entire Calculon roster of homegrown bands. Nottingham's Bumsnogger
kicked the bucket recently, but their last gasp at the end of 2006 was this 6-song CD-R that boasted a ferocious assault of riff-heavy sludgecore that falls
soundwise somewhere in between Eyehategod, Motorhead, and a gang of enraged junkies. Alcohol & Swine is mostly up-tempo, digging in frequently with
slowed down, slurred sludge breakdowns and wasted wah-drenched leads. The band uses two singers for dual vomit screech/deathroar trade offs, and the songs
like "How I Became The Town Slut" actually flirt with enough diseased melody to make 'em downright catchy. Filthy, fucked up and misanthropic sludgecore punk
scuzz with loads of awesome boogie riffs that rock immensely.
BUNNY RABBITS serve 4 drum-machine powered psych-punk jams with ex-KOJAK and RAMROD dudes at the helm. Weird, art-damaged dancey post-punk with wiry,
meandering guitars and spacey, reverb-drenched vocals. Another dose of bizarro punk noise from CNP's vaults. Comes packaged in primitive deranged sleeve with
full color disc face.
This grimily gorgeous picture disc is the second vinyl-only release from Burial Chamber Trio, another Sunn O))) splinter group a la Grave Temple Trio. And just like the aforementioned Trio, this features avant-guitarist Oren Ambarchi (also credited on analog electronics) and the blackened throat of Attila Csihar (of Mayhem, Aborym, and Sear Bliss fame) teaming up with 1/2 of the core Sunn O))) duo, this time being Greg Anderson (also of Engine Kid, Thorrs Hammer, etc). I missed out on the 1st vinyl release that the Burial Chamber Trio released through Southern Lord last year as it went out of print almost immediately after being released, but we managed to get ahold of a bunch of copies of this new 10" picture disc before it disappears. And man, is this one heavy jam. Recorded live in Rotterdam, Holland in January of 2007 at Club:Wurm, each side is a total subterranean bass-murk ritual, the band swimming though black pools of vibrational subsonic amplifier rumbles and some really diseased-sounding waves of rotten feedback, all low bass frequencies and pulsating distorted amp throb swirling around Attila's creepy, inhuman growls and wordless mutterings. He sounds like he's channeling some fucked up Orc language with those slurred vocals, which adds an additional layer of bestial filth to these proceedings. Every once in a while a huge megadoom powerchord rises up out of the murk and I'm suddenly reminded of Sunn O)))'s Flight Of The Behemoth album before the band slowly sinks back into a wholly blown out and nightmarish morass of beyond-slow motion sludge noise. But really, this is a much noisier, nastier beast than Sunn O))), and is actually kinda closer in spirit to the amazing blacknoise cassettes that Epicene Sound has been putting out lately from Kvlt Of Unicron, Altar Of Flies, and Gnaw Their Tongues.
The artwork and packaging on this record is awesome as well, each side of the picture disc covered in bizarre cartoonish artwork depicting mutant demonworms, the record held in a transparent mylar sleeve that is printed with gold and black images of rotting skulls and grubworms and slime, forming a cool layering effect, all created by Seldon Hunt. Limited edition of 3,000 copies!
Sold out from most other sources, this is the latest slab of demoniac improv ooze from the Sunn O))) offshoot Burial Chamber Trio. Like the other Sunn O))) offshoot Grave Temple Trio, this project includes Oren Ambarchi on guitar and electronics and Attila Csihar (Mayhem/Aborym, etc.) contributing his freakoid vocals, but the core Sunn O))) member here is Greg Anderson, switching his trademark guitar for bass and "subsonics". This is a vinyl only release from the Trio, limited to 2000 copies, and packaged in a killer-looking black sleeve printed with black gloss artwork designed by Seldon Hunt.
The LP features two epic sidelong tracks with the Trio calling forth a nebulous black cloud of crushing doom riffs, subsonic bass, electronic noise, feedback, and demonically possessed vocals. The a-side starts off with churning waves of electronic noise and fx-soaked feedback coiling with Oren Ambarchi's punishing guitar sludge and the deranged chants and moans that are run through a wall of effects and turned into horrific otherworldy EVP. Huge and crushing and psychedelic, this stuff sounds like the blackened offspring of Sunn O))) and Abruptum, throbbing diseased doom riffs droning and rumbling, slight chordal changes occuring every few minutes, the atmosphere dank and fetid and filled with insane gibbering. When it starts to crawl to the end of the side, the grisly black ambience and mangled guitars begin to melt down into a flood of manipulated amp vibrations, increasingly freaked out vocals, and processed fx, and it ends in a chaotic orgy of damaged, cavernous noise with Attila hooting like a Pazuzu-possessed mountain gorilla at the end of an echo chamber. Totally fucked. Things are much more chill on the b-side, even though it does pick up from those weird, processed primate-grunts. When the droning guitars and electronics do ooze in, the sound is less chaotic than the previous side,and it becomes a vast obsidian powerdrone, a simple, super-crushing riff slowly drifting through the abyss, floating on waves of buzzing troniks and eternally buzzing feedback strains.
This is one of the most psychedelic, wigged-out ambient doom sets I've heard from the Sunn O))) camp. Pretty freakish. This is a vinyl only release, issued in a limited edition of 2,000 copies.
When I started listening to Anthony Shaw's harsh noise work, it was from his Cold Comfort project, which produced an excellent videocassette release last year that combined his minimal static harsh noise walls with eye-melting video/cathode tube distortions. That led me to dig into his other projects (of which there are many), my favorite being the zombie-obsessed conceptual harsh noise of Burial Ground. Specifically, Burial Ground draws it's inspiration from Romero's iconic trilogy of hardcore zombie-gore films, and has released three cassettes that deal with each of the films. By the time that I discovered these, the Day Of The Dead cassette was already sold out, but I was able to get some of the other two Burial Ground titles for the shop. This stuff is pure wall, with very little dynamic movement; pretty much for hardcore HNW aficionados only...
Night Of The Living Dead contains two twelve minute long tracks of brutal electronic overload, each one starting off with an instantly recognizable, iconic sound bite from Romero's 1968 hardcore indie-horror classic, Night Of The Living Dead explodes into a black maelstrom of extreme distortion and feedback, massive rumbling frequencies blasted with an ocean of squelchy amp-mulch that constantly rises and falls over the duration of the track. This huge roaring wall of noise seethes will all sorts of fluctuating noise and concrete-mixer crunch, the track moving constantly through varying levels of intensity into fast-moving, near junk-metal levels of sonic avalanche that come crashing down in an infinite loop of immolating, city-disintegrating power. It's enhanced by a massive low-end heaviness that situates this closer to the electronic chaos-storms of Japan's most savage noise artists and the more destructive crunch-trances of Vomir, Indch Libertine and The Cherry Point; fans of the latter artist in particular will want to check out Burial Ground's similarly horror/splatter-obsessed harsh noise sculptures. It's much more "active" and chaotic compared to the other Burial Ground tape that I picked up.
Limited to 30 copies, the tape label smeared in black ink and streaks of blood-red paint, packaged in a nicely designed black and white sleeve.
When I started listening to Anthony Shaw's harsh noise work, it was from his Cold Comfort project, which produced an excellent videocassette release last year that combined his minimal static harsh noise walls with eye-melting video/cathode tube distortions. That led me to dig into his other projects (of which there are many), my favorite being the zombie-obsessed conceptual harsh noise of Burial Ground. Specifically, Burial Ground draws it's inspiration from Romero's iconic trilogy of hardcore zombie-gore films, and has released three cassettes that deal with each of the films. By the time that I discovered these, the Day Of The Dead cassette was already sold out, but I was able to get some of the other two Burial Ground titles for the shop. This stuff is pure wall, with very little dynamic movement; pretty much for hardcore HNW aficionados only...
The second of Burial Ground's harsh noise-wall homage series to Romero's canonical trilogy of hardcore zombie splatter films, Dawn Of The Dead is a sixteen minute construction of extreme distorto-roar that begins with a classic piece of dialogue from Richard France taken from the beginning of the film, and then proceeds into the massive rumbling inferno of low-end noise and distortion that continues throughout the entire track. It's a violent, roiling mass of bass-crackle and tectonic roar that barely changes over the duration of the piece, and what changes do occur tend to be very subtle, appearing as barely perceptible shifts in volume, tone and texture and faint mechanical sounds and vibrations that reveal themselves only upon deeper listening. Of course, I'm happy enough just to crank this motherfucker to eleven and allow Burial Ground's crushing distortion-trance to roll over me like one hundred tons of debris, ash, and concrete from a collapsing building. Pure flattening distortion.
Limited to thirty copies.
If you're really hooked on HNW, you should already be familiar with Worthless Recordings. This small cassette label out of the Midwest has been producing a top-notch line of harsh noise cassettes over the past year, including titles from C-Blast faves like Crown Of Bone, Vomir, Marax, Cold Comfort and Burial Ground. Burial Ground is one of the noise acts that I first discovered through it's Worthless releases, specifically the Living Dead tape trilogy that married the projects infatuation with the landmark zombie series and a brutal static noise assault that turned my frontal lobe into a puddle of black goo. The whole M.O. of this project is the same - each Burial Ground release is inspired by a different cult horror film from the "golden era" (early 60s through the 80s) and tastefully bookends the immense wall of distorted crunch with key samples taken from the film. The editing is spot-on, and every tape I've gotten from Burial Ground has been a blast.
The latest Burial Ground offering is this colossal double tape set called Disembodied, each tape fueled by a different haunted house film. The first is The Haunting, inspired by Robert Wise's 1963 supernatural classic; the second is Burnt Offerings, based on the 1976 film of the same name. Each tape features two twenty-plus minute sides of crushing drone-noise, massive churning walls of low-to-mid range distorted rumble and hiss that reveals a world of seething activity when listened to at high volume or on a pair of headphones. Both tapes are pretty consistent in their attack, bathing you in a relentless avalanche of speaker-roar that creates a meditative, mesmerizing effect on the listener, as if you are surrounded by the deafening roar of a massive black waterfall, or are surrounded on all sides by an eternally crumbling cityscape. I'm a huge fan of this particular approach to harsh noise obliteration as well as the kind of older horror films that influence the imagery behind these tapes, making Burial Ground one of my current favorite static-sculptors alongside Vomir, Cherry Point and Vice Wears Black Hose. Each tape comes in a case with black and white artwork, and both are then housed inside of a black cardstock sleeve. Released in a limited edition of fifty copies.
� � Started up by Crown Of Bone mastermind / ex-Demonologist member Dustin Redington in 2012, Occult Supremacy is a CDR label focused on "Blackened Noise, White Noise, Death Industrial, HNW, Dark Ambient, Black Metal, Horror Drone"; in other words, exactly the sort of stuff that I can't stop listening to here at C-Blast. The label's crude aesthetic is pure 90's harsh noise, with each disc issued in a limited run of fifty copies and packaged in either a slimline jewel case or a plastic sleeve with minimal Xeroxed artwork, the discs themselves either scrawled on with black magic marker or blasted with abstract spray-paint patterns. But the sound that Occult Supremacy traffics in is total horror, heavily leaning towards the bleakest strains of harsh noise wall and experimental, noise-damaged black metal, and over the past year it has maintained a crazed release schedule that has already produced nearly forty discs, from a variety of artists that includes slightly more recognizable names from the harsh electronics underground (Vomir, Burial Ground, Luasa Raelon). While we haven't been able to get all of the Occult Supremacy titles in stock, we have managed to stock a pretty large selection of their titles, all of which are recommended listening to anyone into the filthiest depths of black noise, experimental black metal, and brutal electronic noise.
� � When I initially began to listen to Anthony Shaw's harsh noise work, it was from his Cold Comfort project, which produced an excellent videocassette release last year that combined his minimal static harsh noise walls with eye-melting video/cathode tube distortions. That led me to dig into his other projects (of which there are many), my favorite being the zombie-obsessed conceptual harsh noise of Burial Ground. Largely drawing it's inspiration from Romero's iconic trilogy of hardcore zombie-gore films, Burial Ground has released three cassettes of amplified rot trance that deal with each of the films. By the time that I discovered these, the Day Of The Dead cassette was already sold out, but I was able to get some of the other two Burial Ground titles for the shop. This stuff is pure wall, with very little dynamic movement; pretty much for hardcore HNW aficionados only...
� � Night Of The Living Dead contains two twelve minute long tracks of brutal electronic overload, each one starting off with an instantly recognizable, iconic sound bite from Romero's 1968 hardcore indie-horror classic, Night Of The Living Dead explodes into a black maelstrom of extreme distortion and feedback, massive rumbling frequencies blasted with an ocean of squelchy amp-mulch that constantly rises and falls over the duration of the track. This huge roaring wall of noise seethes will all sorts of fluctuating noise and concrete-mixer crunch, the track moving constantly through varying levels of intensity into fast-moving, near junk-metal levels of sonic avalanche that come crashing down in an infinite loop of immolating, city-disintegrating power. It's enhanced by a massive low-end heaviness that situates this closer to the electronic chaos-storms of Japan's most savage noise artists and the more destructive crunch-trances of Vomir, Indch Libertine and The Cherry Point; fans of the latter artist in particular will want to check out Burial Ground's similarly horror/splatter-obsessed harsh noise sculptures. It's much more "active" and chaotic compared to the other Burial Ground tape that I picked up.
� � The second of Burial Ground's harsh noise-wall homage series to Romero's canonical trilogy of hardcore zombie splatter films, Dawn Of The Dead is a sixteen minute construction of extreme distorto-roar that begins with a classic piece of dialogue from Richard France taken from the beginning of the film, and then proceeds into the massive rumbling inferno of low-end noise and distortion that continues throughout the entire track. It's a violent, roiling mass of bass-crackle and tectonic roar that barely changes over the duration of the piece, and what changes do occur tend to be very subtle, appearing as barely perceptible shifts in volume, tone and texture and faint mechanical sounds and vibrations that reveal themselves only upon deeper listening. Of course, I'm happy enough just to crank this motherfucker to eleven and allow Burial Ground's crushing distortion-trance to roll over me like one hundred tons of debris, ash, and concrete from a collapsing building. Pure flattening distortion.
� � The third entry in Burial Ground's series takes its inspiration from the nihilistic final chapter of Romero's trilogy, starting up with a looped segment of John Harrison's original film score before exploding in signature B-Ground fashion into another sprawling mass of mesmeric black static. The longest of all of these recordings, the harsh noise wall on Day is as dense and suffocating as the rest of Burial Ground's output, a monotonous wall of seething, roiling distortion that takes on a hypnotic quality when experienced at full volume, a sound like the roar of maggots boiling on a corpse being amplified to thunderous, earth-shaking volume levels.
� � Limited to fifty copies.
Constantly active with his amazing psych/noise/outsider metal label Skulls Of Heaven and assorted musical projects like psych-doom mutants Jex Thoth, Hintegedanken, Burial Hex, and freak folksters Davenport, Clay Ruby is a wellspring of underground weirdness. Up to now, the only band of his that I've carried here at C-Blast is Hintegedanken, the sludgy tribal free-psych/drone rock band that he plays in with Karen Eliot (Totem). The disc that they put out on Barbarian is a crushing drug-fueled slow-motion wipeout. Now we've got the newish disc from his goat-worshipping industrial project Burial Hex that came in from Aurora Borealis. "Oppressive Necro Electronics" is what he calls it, a perfect descriptor for the wasted black kosmos of Burial Hex, whose sound prowls somewhere around the edges of Throbbing Gristle, Abruptum and Klaus Schulze.
The disc is presented in a cool arigato case with multiple inserts, and they are all printed with creepy high contrast images that suggest clandestine demonic rituals, bog mummies, sex rites and other occultisms, but it's pure blissed out beauty that hits yer ears when this disc begins. The first song "Will To The Chapel" is 18+ minutes of gorgeous orchestral drift and dark moaning strings, rumbling tympani percussion in the background, like a horror movie score, dark and ominous, but really pretty too. Bit by bit, the music is joined by other strange sounds as weird growling vocals, sizzling cymbal crashes, juddering underground rumblings drift into view, the sound becoming increasingly eerie until suddenly it's swept over by a black cloud of filth that boils with tortured howls, shrieking orchestral strings, a chorus of agonized screams and bestial grunts, huge waves of blackened corrosive distortion and roaring amplifier buzz, noxious electronics and a hellish white-out of grating noise that then burns off, leaving a similiar haunting blur of strings and synthesizer drift that began the track. The remaining three tracks pursue a similiar trajectory, each one around 18 minutes long and moving from thick sheets of growling distorted murk and pulsating machine trances to subdued sheets of rusted drones and ghoulish torture-chamber ambience, warped buzzsaw drones wafting out of handmade oscillators and analogue synths, clanging metal percussion and soft tribal rhythms, evil pipe organs and ceremonial chanting, all wrapped into frightening ritualistic soundscapes that create an unnerving atmosphere not unlike that of Gnaw Their Tongues or the more ambient Abruptum stuff. Total kosmiche death worship!
Vinyl version now in stock, packaged in a silkscreened jacket with insert booklet.
Constantly active with his amazing psych/noise/outsider metal label Skulls Of Heaven and assorted musical projects like psych-doom mutants Jex Thoth, Hintegedanken, Burial Hex, and freak folksters Davenport, Clay Ruby is a wellspring of underground weirdness. Up to now, the only band of his that I've carried here at C-Blast is Hintegedanken, the sludgy tribal free-psych/drone rock band that he plays in with Karen Eliot (Totem). The disc that they put out on Barbarian is a crushing drug-fueled slow-motion wipeout. Now we've got the newish disc from his goat-worshipping industrial project Burial Hex that came in from Aurora Borealis. "Oppressive Necro Electronics" is what he calls it, a perfect descriptor for the wasted black kosmos of Burial Hex, whose sound prowls somewhere around the edges of Throbbing Gristle, Abruptum and Klaus Schulze.
The disc is presented in a cool arigato case with multiple inserts, and they are all printed with creepy high contrast images that suggest clandestine demonic rituals, bog mummies, sex rites and other occultisms, but it's pure blissed out beauty that hits yer ears when this disc begins. The first song "Will To The Chapel" is 18+ minutes of gorgeous orchestral drift and dark moaning strings, rumbling tympani percussion in the background, like a horror movie score, dark and ominous, but really pretty too. Bit by bit, the music is joined by other strange sounds as weird growling vocals, sizzling cymbal crashes, juddering underground rumblings drift into view, the sound becoming increasingly eerie until suddenly it's swept over by a black cloud of filth that boils with tortured howls, shrieking orchestral strings, a chorus of agonized screams and bestial grunts, huge waves of blackened corrosive distortion and roaring amplifier buzz, noxious electronics and a hellish white-out of grating noise that then burns off, leaving a similiar haunting blur of strings and synthesizer drift that began the track. The remaining three tracks pursue a similiar trajectory, each one around 18 minutes long and moving from thick sheets of growling distorted murk and pulsating machine trances to subdued sheets of rusted drones and ghoulish torture-chamber ambience, warped buzzsaw drones wafting out of handmade oscillators and analogue synths, clanging metal percussion and soft tribal rhythms, evil pipe organs and ceremonial chanting, all wrapped into frightening ritualistic soundscapes that create an unnerving atmosphere not unlike that of Gnaw Their Tongues or the more ambient Abruptum stuff. Total kosmiche death worship!
More gnarly "oppressive necro electronics" from Burial Hex, that blackened industrial outfit headed up by the extremely busy Clay Ruby who also gives us the doom-laden psychedelic rock of Jex Thoth, the bizarre ramshackle blackened metal of Wormsblood, Hintergedanken's lethargic drug dirge, and the oddball psych-folk of Davenport. As Burial Hex, though, Clay's psychedelic tendencies disappear straight into a black gaping maw of grimy nightmare ambience. This limited edition double-cassette set serves up four sides of horrific dronedrift and blackened industrial sound, about eighty minutes of music total, and it stands out from the rest of the Burial Hex catalog mainly for the strange almost symphonic sounds that drift through these lengthy tracks. There are seriously eerie strains of what sounds like looped, muted orchestral strings, and deep rumbling tones that resemble the sound of woodwinds and brass that have been washed out and pitch shifted, sounding like a decomposing classical piece from out of a nightmare, buried under layers of rust and filth and decay and stretched out and warped beneath thick clouds of reverb and catacomb echo. Random scrapes and crashes echo through long lightless underground passageways, and simple creepy chordal drones drifting trough the subterranean blackness.
As you continue through each side, you descend into even deeper chambers of sound. Deep resonant bowed metal tones and soft smears of keening feedback are accompanied by ghostly wails in the distance and monstrous inhuman roars. Droning, buzzing cello-like sounds and deep pulsing low-end hum form into swells of vast deep-earth thunder. Harsh icy winds blast through cramped crumbling crypts, and bits of ominous piano and clanking metal pipes trail off into stretches of almost total silence. Delicate little fragments of melody drift through shadows, the sound is constantly decaying, decomposing, floating disembodied through Burial Hex's eerie underworld, ending in smears of kosmiche keys that fade away at the very end of the last tape. Deep blackened ambience and abstract creep come together into a form of ghoulish ritual dronemusic, sometimes reminding me of a cross between early Lustmord and the otherworldly black ambience of Moevot. Fans of the Aural Hypnox label and the abstract necrotic clatter of Uno Actu would dig this set. The tapes come in a heavy duty molded vinyl case that also includes a black and white sticker.
Possibly my favorite out of all of the killer new releases on Cold Spring this week, Book Of Delusions is a collection of re-mastered rare and out-of-print material from Clay Ruby's self-described "horror electronics" project Burial Hex, including the material from the original Delusions Lp that came out on Aurora Borealis plus the B-Hex tracks from the splits with Zola Jesus and Kinit Her.
The original Book Of Delusions tracks are a delirium of blackened industrial psychedelia. The opener "Final Litany"
starts with the voice of Charlie Manson leading us into shadow as cymbals and drums shudder and rumble out of the depths, and a swirl of electronic drones and metallic thrum begins to circle round ghostly piano and distorted deformed guitars, while murderous whispers skulk at the edge of earshot. That trails right into the foul industrial urk of "Urlicht", where hideous mangled guitars coil around sputtering black synthesizer noise and insectile buzz, and massive pieces of metal rhythmically pound against concrete surfaces, hammering out a menacing ritualistic tempo. On "Crowned & Conquering Child", an assault of horrific death metal style vocal-vomit combines with throbbing synths that sound like they've been lifted from an early 80's post-apocalyptic film, brutal metallic percussion, piano and wailing tortured vocals for one of the strangest tracks on the album. It's a weird nightmarish cabaret, and reminds me a lot of Gnaw Their Tongues but far more "musical". Pretty brilliant, really. It's gets weirder with the nearly fifteen minute trance of the title track, where guest musicians from Kinit Her and Wormsblood join Clay for a propulsive krautrock-influenced psych-jam that spreads out across a pulsating almost techno-esque beat, stoned vocal exhalations and drugged out chanting drifting around the droning electronics and steady thump of the drums and sheets of reverb-heavy guitar. Very hypnotic and Circle-like.
The next two tracks both come from the Vedic Hymns collaboration with Kinit Her. On "God Of War And Battle", we're treated to more than ten minutes of abstract, minimal piano and nocturnal forest sounds, a din of chirping crickets singing in the darkness as this bleak melody slowly unfolds on the keys. Later on, it explodes into flurries of fast paced notes, transforming into this darkly beautiful modern composition piece at the same time that these hideous death metal style gurgling vocals appear. "Storm Clouds" is even more freaked out, the harsh anguished vocals have a real black metallish feel while the music is woven out of mournful violins that soar over dubby echoing drum hits and sorrowful piano, making this sound like a maniacal funeral march.
The last two tracks on the disc come from the split Lp with Zola Jesus. It's just as creepy and deranged sounding as the previous material. "Go Crystal Tears" again featuring Clay's hysterical howling vocals over another plodding, heavy industrial trance, the sound very "soundtracky", keyboards and pulsating synth and electronics mixing with doleful piano parts and bits of ugly noise, like some weird cross between black industrial and an 80's sci-film score. On "Temple Of The Flood", the band slowly tumbles into the abyss as ritual drums bang in the depths, a billowing haze of cymbal shimmer and deep synth drone swirls all around, and bizarre demonic vocalizations seep up out of the blackness over trippy fx, haunted pipe organs and narcotized Middle Eastern melodies.
This disc is a must-get for Burial Hex fans if you weren't able to pick up the original limited vinyl. Burial Hex's blackened post-industrial soundscapes and bizarre ritualistic electronics are pretty unique, possessed with a mysterious black glow that's unlike anything else out there...
This new entry in Crucial Blast's Infernal Machines limited edition cassette series again features the blistering black harsh noise of Crown Of Bone teamed up with another denizen of the black noise/death industrial / mutoid black metal underground. This time its with the renowned "horror electronics" project Burial Hex, aka Clay Ruby (also of Davenport, Totem, ex-Jex Thoth, Wormsblood, Journey To Ixtlan, Hintergedanken, and a bunch of other musical projects that I've been listening to over the past decade or more).
Burial Hex's "Resurrection" is up first, opening with gusts of demonic breath and a distant scream of terror, then falling into silence. The first few minutes of the track are harrowing, that horrific screaming rising up in the background behind a veil of monstrous utterances cloaked in delay and other effects, and the sound of droning keys slowly drift in, dark electronic ambience gradually rising to the surface. Eerie, John Carpenter-esque synths slowly curl across the blackness while those vile, guttural intonations continue to roll out, and this all starts to take shape as a kind of anguished, hellish power electronics as those nightmarish breathing sounds and bestial moans becoming more erratic, the screams more desperate. Further into the track, those warbling background drones start to transform into the sound of creepy pipe organs, but then it turns into something much noisier and more chaotic, those droning keyboards suddenly swallowed up in a gale of screeching metallic noise and howling feedback, turning into a harsh, squealing industrial nightmare. One of the most unsettling tracks I've heard from Burial Hex.
On the b-side, black noise project Crown Of Bone (featuring a former member of Demonologists and Ensepulchered) follows with "Strangulation Rites". In a similar black, pulsating vein as his previous splits, this is a massive blast of harsh, endlessly churning blackened noise, a monstrous maelstrom of violent distortion and guttural death metal-style roaring, vague rhythmic sounds and crashing metallic cacophony all consumed by the raging inferno of Crown Of Bone's assault. It has all of the chaotic intensity of Government Alpha or Richard Ramirez or Vomir, but there's a malevolent streak running through this oppressive noisescape with bits of creepy half-glimpsed melody and those inhuman distorted vocals seething within the storm. And then right towards the end, after an extended passage of rumbling, locomotive reverberations, a swarm of evil black metal tremolo riffing suddenly descends, closing the track out with a final blast of frostbitten power. Punishing.
Released in a limited edition of two hundred professionally manufactured tapes.
This 7" came out in 2002, and holds two tracks from the heaviest free-noise deathsludge band on the planet, San Francisco's Burmese, with each side
capturing a different lineup of the band. The 'Live War" side features the band's dual drummer, dual bassist incarnation whipping up a black malestrom of
insane gibbering, shrieking vocals, improvised blast grind, pummeling ultra noisy sludge, and impossibly low-end droning feedback, with alleged covers of
Black Flag's "I've Heard It Before" and Brainbomb's 'Angel's Crawling' somewhere in there, rendered black beatings of hypnotic filth and spastic bass abuse.
The "Treaties of Greed And Filth" side is from 2001 and has the Mike/Mark/Mike bass and drums formation weaving from bestial detuned sludgecore to blasts of
formless grind, covered in screeching, screaming feedback and death screams, the whole set recorded distorted and in the red. Comes on black vinyl, in a
limited edition of 400 copies!
Arguably the HEAVIEST SHIT EVER from Burmese, the noise-sludge cult that migrated to San Francisco from Iowa and struck fear into the hearts of any sissies
who bore witness to their free-improv, Whitehouse-worshipping, drum-kit-tossing deathsludge destruction. Prior albums had them in ripping whirlwind mode,
whipping out high speed bass-heavy noisecore with severe force, but with 2001's A Mere Shadow And Reminiscence Of Humanity, Burmese slowed their
shit down, way down, freezing up their formless avant-death into a blown out syrup crawl of ear blowing low-end, fucked-up qrindcore riffs, gobs of feedback
and electronic skree, and destroyed beast vocals. The lineup was stripped down to only a trio here, the two Mikes on bass and Mark on drums and cassettes,
and at times the twin-bass beating makes songs like "Stripped Clean" and "Broken Legs, Broken Face, Blood Everywhere" sound like Man Is The Bastard gone
total death metal. Murderous, overdriven sludge noise covered in pustulent tape manipulations and distorted megaphone screams. Screeching feedback and sense
-liquifying noise dripping over relentless drum pound, amps opening bloody maws, the songs inexplicably cut with 10-second silences in between them leaving
you wondering if Burmese have finished ripping your limbs off while yer staring at A Mere Shadow's beautiful Japanese style artwork and then having
your query answered with another feedback punch to yer skull. One of the heaviest.
On White, San Fran mega-rumble destructo-bastards Burmese pay tribute to UK noise legends / power electronics pioneers, Whitehouse. This
indulgence graces us with an entire album of Whitehouse songs as interpreted by the double bass guitar / double drummer Burmese arsenal, a full on fucking
nuclear blast of nerve-devouring, hateful high-end violence, parts power electronics and power violence...certain death for audio wimps. The boys build a
throbbing, rotten wash of feedback pulse and acidic skee-chirp that comes off like dirty bombs going off in the backlot, while megaphone scum vocals get
seriously anti-social about it. Goddamn awesome. Probably the best covers/tribute album we fucking own. Fans of Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Drop Dead, Black Dice,
etc, need to get their ear canals torn out by White.
The first album on Tumult, from back in 2000. This is where I first fell in love with the bone-shattering power of Burmese, at the time a mere trio of
two bass players and a drummer, recently relocated to the Bay Area from Iowa City of all fucking places. I remember hearing about them when my old band
toured through Iowa in the late '90s, but it wasn't until Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds made it's way into my mitts that I finally caught whiff of the
unbridled violence of Burmese. This album is like the heaviest noisecore record ever, opening with the tumbling free-jazz percussion avalanche and tangled
bass guitar noise of the title track, and proceeding to tear and gnash it's way through minute long assaults of heavyweight improvised violence like
"WWWIII", "Dragged Through The Streets", and "Corpses Sealed In Concrete Floors". Massive feedback drones collide with vicious grindcore, chaotic, deformed
death metal, and impossibly dense, sludgy free-noise-jazz, which had Tumult comparing 'em to a cross between Earth and Drop Dead, a descriptor that
admittedly had me drooling when I first read it. And this album definitely lived up to my expectations - it's still one of my favorite albums ever, and it
led to me eventually doing that split CD between Burmese and Fistula that we put out on Crucial Blast in 2004. It all ends with the twenty minute long "Man
Never Forgives Ape, Man Destroys Environment", a monstrous dronescape a la Earth 2 that sends out huge ripples of malevolent subsonic filth, twisted
smoking electronics, and screeching garbled vocal noise, and then drifts off into an icy glacier wind of fuzzy turntable noise and feedback. Highly
recommended!
We just listed the original Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds CD this week, after it being out of stock here at Crucial Blast for several years, and it
just so happens that Enterruption just released a vinyl version of the same album...or so we thought, at first. When these LPs arrived here last week, I was
surprised to see that this is actually a totally different, alternate recording of Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds that was recorded in the
bands practice space in 2000 on an 8 track reel-to-reel machine by Enterruption boss William Rage, about a month before the band went into the studio
recorded the Tumult album. And amazingly, this is even more brutal and savage than the second round of recordings that would make up the Tumult
version - no small fucking feat, if you're at all familiar with the original release. Seriously, I fell in love with Burmese all over again listening to this
LP, as every song sounds even more noisy and distorted and blown-the-fuck-out than ever, the two bass guitars slamming huge feedbacking sludge riffs against
the raging improv drumming, the vocals pushed way out to the front this time, making Burmese sound like a completely wrecked death metal band more than ever
before. Holy shit, is this crushing. This record also has their devestating cover of Black Flag's "I've Heard It Before" that was previously released on
their now out-of-print Treaties of Greed and Filth 7".
Here's my take on the CD version, which still applies here: These songs mark the spot where I first fell in love with the bone-shattering power of Burmese,
at the time a mere trio of two bass players and a drummer, recently relocated to the Bay Area from Iowa City of all fucking places. I remember hearing about
them when my old band toured through Iowa in the late '90s, but it wasn't until Monkeys Tear Man To Shreds made it's way into my mitts that I
finally caught whiff of the unbridled violence of Burmese. This album is like the heaviest noisecore record ever, opening with the tumbling free-jazz
percussion avalanche and tangled bass guitar noise of the title track, and proceeding to tear and gnash it's way through minute long assaults of heavyweight
improvised violence like "WWWIII", "Dragged Through The Streets", and "Corpses Sealed In Concrete Floors". Massive feedback drones collide with vicious
grindcore, chaotic, deformed death metal, and impossibly dense, sludgy free-noise-jazz, which had Tumult comparing 'em to a cross between Earth and Drop
Dead, a descriptor that admittedly had me drooling when I first read it. And this album definitely lived up to my expectations - it's still one of my
favorite albums ever, and it led to me eventually doing that split CD between Burmese and Fistula that we put out on Crucial Blast in 2004. It all ends with
the twenty minute long "Man Never Forgives Ape, Man Destroys Environment", a monstrous dronescape a la Earth 2 that sends out huge ripples of
malevolent subsonic filth, twisted smoking electronics, and screeching garbled vocal noise, and then drifts off into an icy glacier wind of fuzzy turntable
noise and feedback. Highly recommended!
Excellent packaging for this LP, a silkscreened LP sleeve that features the original artwork from the CD, the interior of the jacket is all black with a
few striking live shots of Burmese in all of their club-destroying glory, inside the sleeve is the thick vinyl pressed on burgundy colored wax and slipped
inside of a white inner sleeve printed with the track listing and record notes, along with a big stack of flyer reprints from various Burmese shows from the
same period. All limited to 500 copies!
This week we're diving deep into the vaults of Load Records...most of you are probably familiar with Providence's long running Load Records for their
releases from Lightning Bolt, Brainbombs, Usaisamonster, and Prurient, but Load has also released some righteously metallic blats of fucked-up heaviness that
aren't nearly as well known. We've gone through their catalog and have started to stock some of these older weirdo-metal titles from Load for those of you
that might not have heard about these albums the first time around.
As technicians of blunt, brutal grindsludge, Burmese tore heads off with their first few albums on Tumult and that acidic turn they took on their split
with Fistula that we put out a few years back, but in the middle part of the decade, somewhere along the line Burmese suddenly became infatuated with the
transgressive, antisocial bile of Whitehouse, and began to veer off into a new sound that was heavily influenced by the UK power electronics legends. The
Whitehouse covers album that Burmese put out on Planaria was the pinnacle of this obsession, but with Men, the band's first (and to date, only)
album on Load, they managed to combine the frenzied, violent downtuned crush of their early material with the abstract harsh sonics and distorted ranting of
their newfound Whitehouse worship, making these six jams some of the most over the top and creeped out Burmese tracks that they've recorded. Two drummers and
two bassists, locked in a chaotic death struggle for audio supremacy, vicious shrieks and animalistic death metal roars over the drummers smashing their kits
into piles of gristle and bone, and mega blown out and crushing bass riffs splattering over the pummeling rhythmic onslaught. Ridiculously anti-social song
titles like "Rapewar" and "Preyer" and worse are coupled with hateful raving screamed into a megaphone in the William Bennet school of verbal assault.
This week we're diving deep into the vaults of Load Records...most of you are probably familiar with Providence's long running Load Records for their
releases from Lightning Bolt, Brainbombs, Usaisamonster, and Prurient, but Load has also released some righteously metallic blats of fucked-up heaviness that
aren't nearly as well known. We've gone through their catalog and have started to stock some of these older weirdo-metal titles from Load for those of you
that might not have heard about these albums the first time around.
As technicians of blunt, brutal grindsludge, Burmese tore heads off with their first few albums on Tumult and that acidic turn they took on their split
with Fistula that we put out a few years back, but in the middle part of the decade, somewhere along the line Burmese suddenly became infatuated with the
transgressive, antisocial bile of Whitehouse, and began to veer off into a new sound that was heavily influenced by the UK power electronics legends. The
Whitehouse covers album that Burmese put out on Planaria was the pinnacle of this obsession, but with Men, the band's first (and to date, only)
album on Load, they managed to combine the frenzied, violent downtuned crush of their early material with the abstract harsh sonics and distorted ranting of
their newfound Whitehouse worship, making these six jams some of the most over the top and creeped out Burmese tracks that they've recorded. Two drummers and
two bassists, locked in a chaotic death struggle for audio supremacy, vicious shrieks and animalistic death metal roars over the drummers smashing their kits
into piles of gristle and bone, and mega blown out and crushing bass riffs splattering over the pummeling rhythmic onslaught. Ridiculously anti-social song
titles like "Rapewar" and "Preyer" and worse are coupled with hateful raving screamed into a megaphone in the William Bennet school of verbal assault.
We now have the rare, limited edition vinyl of this powersludge noise beast available, a limited edition, numbered run of 300 copies pressed on white vinyl and packaged in screen-printed paper sleeves!
On White, San Fran mega-rumble destructo-bastards Burmese pay tribute to UK noise legends / power electronics pioneers, Whitehouse. This indulgence graces us with an entire album of Whitehouse songs as interpreted by the double bass guitar / double drummer Burmese arsenal, a full on fucking nuclear blast of nerve-devouring, hateful high-end violence, parts power electronics and power violence...certain death for audio wimps. The boys build a throbbing, rotten wash of feedback pulse and acidic skee-chirp that comes off like dirty bombs going off in the backlot, while megaphone scum vocals get seriously anti-social about it. Goddamn awesome. Probably the best covers/tribute album we fucking own. Fans of Wolf Eyes, Merzbow, Drop Dead, Black Dice, etc, need to get their ear canals torn out by White.
FINALLY, new music from Burmese! It's been two years since the San Fran band released their Men album on Load, and I've been itching for more of their Whitehouse-inspired sludge/noise/grind violence. And on this split album, they're joined by one of the few bands that can withstand their white heat, the Israeli percussive metal/noise project Cadaver Eyes! Hell yeah.
The disc alternates tracks between Burmese and Cadaver Eyes. Burmese's stuff is a continuation of the vicious grind and power electronics sound that the band has been forging. Brutal low end grindcore built from blasting drums, deep ferocious gutteral roars, and splattery riffs is smashed into stretches of abstracted noise, which is still very influenced by Whitehouse all the way down to the confrontational song titles ('No Blood No Cum', 'War Vs Women'). Savage vocal freakouts emerge over rumbling feedbacking dronescapes. Warning alarms scream alongside fractured grindcore. Eleven tracks total from Burmese, and these are the first recordings from the new lineup of the band, which has 'em reduced to just one drummer now alongside the two bassists and multiple vocalists. Some of this almost sounds like Man Is The Bastard chopped up into 15-second chunks of meat, for chrissakes.
Every four tracks or so, Cadaver Eyes appear with a couple of longer pieces. Here they are a duo, with Cadaver Eyes drummer/vocalist David teaming up with someone named Zax on no-input mixer, and the five tracks that they contribute to the album were recorded live on Brian Turner's show on famed radio station WFMU earlier in 2007. Somehow, two guys manage to whip up a murderous frenzy of abstract grindcore that sounds like an entire squadron of feedbacking amps, blastbeating drummers, and cannibalistic vocalists all going off at once. Impossibly distorted riffs are pulled apart into rubbery rumbling black tar drones, and sampled death metal riffing is plundered and manipulated over David's splattery drumming. 'The White Supremacy' and 'Chocolate Soldier Disintegrates' fuse together as one massive glob of Khanate-esque doom that is thoroughly infested with piercing sinewaves and crazed screams. 'Execution Procedure # Three' comes off like a fusion of RRRecords-style harsh noise and tumbling noisecore loops layered over and over on top of each other creating a dense mass of improvised grind. And on their final track, Cadaver Eyes start off by painting a series of cymbal loops and subsonic bass drops with grimy feedback for 'Ba Yom Yom' that moves into percussive blasts of noise and bass, and then deliver an unrecognizeable cover of Skynryd's 'Sweet Home Alabama' that reinterprets the song as a doomed glitchscape splattered with dying shrieks and sludgy bass riffs. Crushing !
Hyper destructive low-end violence from two of the American underground's most ferocious hate-sludge outfits. A dual assault from feedback-warriors
BURMESE and battle-sludge titans FISTULA. BURMESE annhilate everything before them with a lethal blast of low frequency skree tantrums, cough-syrup drenched
blastbeats, WHITEHOUSE-worshipping noise, and demonic free improvised violence. Think KHANATE, DROPDEAD, EARTH, and MERZBOW in an earth shattering,
widow-making basement deathmatch. Ohio 's FISTULA batter up with megaheavy sludge, blistering blackened thrash, diseased rock, and some incredibly infectious
riffs . Hear these tarpit battle anthems, hail the low frequency berserker. BURMESE burn you down...FISTULA pisses all over the ashes.
��Finally got around to picking up all four of the Burning Church cassettes that came out on French black metal/industrial label Infernal Kommando. Instead of the ultra low-fi brain-damaged blackthrash that we usually get from this label, this Australian band delivers a more experimental (but certainly still very low-fi) strain of black metal weirdness. While the band would obviously progress in certain ways with each subsequent recording, all of the Burning Church Forest releases that I've picked up so far are filled with grim, noisy strangeness that points towards the influence of both classic second-wave European black metal and the drug-induced psychosis and Satanic hallucinations invoked by Sweden's Abruptum. Hateful, sonically demented stuff that borders on chaos much of the time, I've been lovin' all of these tapes. Originally released as a digital download only, these albums were later reissued on cassette in tiny runs of sixty-six copies each, in xeroxed packaging that features a different photo of a burning church on each cover.
�� The Book I tape features four tracks of swirling hypnotic black metal, the first song revving up with what seems like an endless buildup, militant snare drums rolling beneath the bizarre animalistic screeches of the singer. The guitars are woven into sweeping circular riffing, the band poised to explode into something incredibly fast, but instead lock into this seething, almost industrial-tinged elliptical black metal assault that quickly slips into a weird, fuzz-drenched space rock dirge, infested with some of the weirdest vocals I've heard lately on a black metal tape. Those high swooping shrieks and bursts of brain-damaged satanic gibberish sort of remind me of demo-era Fleurety with their unhinged, hysterical quality. Later tracks offer up more blasting black metal awash in murky distortion and tape-hiss, the blastbeats blown-out into a frenzy of cymbal noise and machine gun hammering, a single riff repeated ad infinitum, rendered into a muffled buzzsaw roar under all of that chaos that just spins out, endlessly, through the storm of black noise until it finally drifts into fields of abstract electronic soundscapery and dreamy droning synth. On "Chapter 3", the band locks into another one of those killer mid-paced blackened groove, another pulsing motorik black metal jam that cruises into infinity, looping endlessly, stretching out for more than ten minutes before eventually disintegrating into murky black noise.
�� The other side has just one song, but it's a goddamn epic. The track stretches out for nearly twenty minutes of repetitive black metal buzz and rumbling electronic drone, the drums so blown-out on this track that they become a blur of pounding kicks and white-noise hiss, almost electronic sounding. Again, the music focuses on a single evil riff that endlessly repeats, circling around and around before shifting into another one of their weird blackened space rock jams, followed by a bizarre passage that almost sounds like some super-noisy breakcore buried beneath gothic organs and those horrific piercing screams. There's more weird ambient stuff, sections made up of those monstrous vocals drenched in effects, overlaid with droning soundtracky synthesizers and caliginous black ambience. While not as noisy as the likes of Nekrasov, Wold or Ensepulchered, this is definitely within that realm of fractured, experimental blackness.
��Finally got around to picking up all four of the Burning Church cassettes that came out on French black metal/industrial label Infernal Kommando. Instead of the ultra low-fi brain-damaged blackthrash that we usually get from this label, this Australian band delivers a more experimental (but certainly still very low-fi) strain of black metal weirdness. While the band would obviously progress in certain ways with each subsequent recording, all of the Burning Church Forest releases that I've picked up so far are filled with grim, noisy strangeness that points towards the influence of both classic second-wave European black metal and the drug-induced psychosis and Satanic hallucinations invoked by Sweden's Abruptum. Hateful, sonically demented stuff that borders on chaos much of the time, I've been lovin' all of these tapes. Originally released as a digital download only, these albums were later reissued on cassette in tiny runs of sixty-six copies each, in xeroxed packaging that features a different photo of a burning church on each cover.
�� Book II continues with more of Burning Church Forest's elliptical low-fi black metal and blackened noise, the opening track "Ashes of the Crucifix" blaring through a haze of tape-hiss and murky distortion, the stripped down riff swarming beneath those insane pterodactyl shrieks that reminded me so much of Norwegian black metal weirdoes Fleurety. The band's brand of repetitive, primitive Ildjarn-esque black metal is a little more prominent on this tape compared to the last one, but there's still plenty of those sudden detours into weird guttural vocal noise and monstrous bellowing that echoes over their fields of minimal dark drift, the band elsewhere dropping into wretched, discordant doom, or opening up into long passages of nothing but the roar of a bonfire, the flames lapping at the empty gunmetal expanse of a winter sky at nightfall.
�� On the second side, the band introduces eerie discordant guitar and electronic noises, waves of black static hiss and burps of horn-like sound that lead into the rocking fuzz-drenched weirdness of "Watching the Alter Burn". The song is another one of their off-kilter krautrocky black metal workouts that breaks off into synth-heavy passages, where it's just the drums plodding along under a black fog of crackling noise and ominous keyboard drift, minimal percussive rumbling against a black field of cinematic orchestral sound, at times sounding like Wendy Carlos's score for The Shining bleeding through field recordings of burning churches collapsing into the ground.
��Finally got around to picking up all four of the Burning Church cassettes that came out on French black metal/industrial label Infernal Kommando. Instead of the ultra low-fi brain-damaged blackthrash that we usually get from this label, this Australian band delivers a more experimental (but certainly still very low-fi) strain of black metal weirdness. While the band would obviously progress in certain ways with each subsequent recording, all of the Burning Church Forest releases that I've picked up so far are filled with grim, noisy strangeness that points towards the influence of both classic second-wave European black metal and the drug-induced psychosis and Satanic hallucinations invoked by Sweden's Abruptum. Hateful, sonically demented stuff that borders on chaos much of the time, I've been lovin' all of these tapes. Originally released as a digital download only, these albums were later reissued on cassette in tiny runs of sixty-six copies each, in xeroxed packaging that features a different photo of a burning church on each cover.
��On their 2010 release Book III, Burning Church Forest continue to explore their mix of Abruptum-esque insanity, crushing black metal blast, and extended forays into dreamy synthesizer ambience, blazing through another four epic-length tracks of murky, experimental black metal. They kick it off with the wall of noisy primitive blast that opens "The Power of the Inferno"; the drums pound relentlessly below the band's swarm of droning, frostbitten guitars and unintelligible hateful croaks buried way down in the mix. Once again, the band scratches at the gravestone of the original early 90's Norwegian black metal scene for inspiration, channeling that necro aesthetic through increased and enhanced volumes of noise. The production is really rough, befitting their frenzied noisy assault, the recording bathed in hiss and rumble as the music drops off into long passages of droning dark Tangerine Dream-esque synthesizer, celestial choral voices cloaked in fog and plumes of soft swirling black static, the black metal dropping out completely at times as the band soars into black cloudscapes of ghostly kosmiche drift. That leads into even more formless sound as "Kirkebrann" creeps in, monstrous moaning vocals rolling in on waves of suffocating reverb, the sound transforming into a kind of inchoate black ambience, deep droning frequencies and subterranean rumblings filling the air, blasts of distant orchestral sound ripping through the gloom. This stuff has an almost Gnaw Their Tongues-like feel, a chaotic, surrealistic mass of sound infested with gibbering mindless horror. The tape eventually makes it's way back to more of that murky chaotic black metal though, and on "Feel the Heat from the Flames" they dig in to another one of those killer blackened motorik grooves that I dug on their previous tapes, but for the most part, this is one of the more fucked-up and formless of all of the Burning Church Forest tapes. Killer.
��Finally got around to picking up all four of the Burning Church cassettes that came out on French black metal/industrial label Infernal Kommando. Instead of the ultra low-fi brain-damaged blackthrash that we usually get from this label, this Australian band delivers a more experimental (but certainly still very low-fi) strain of black metal weirdness. While the band would obviously progress in certain ways with each subsequent recording, all of the Burning Church Forest releases that I've picked up so far are filled with grim, noisy strangeness that points towards the influence of both classic second-wave European black metal and the drug-induced psychosis and Satanic hallucinations invoked by Sweden's Abruptum. Hateful, sonically demented stuff that borders on chaos much of the time, I've been lovin' all of these tapes. Originally released as a digital download only, these albums were later reissued on cassette in tiny runs of sixty-six copies each, in xeroxed packaging that features a different photo of a burning church on each cover.
��Burning Church Forest's Book IV is a bit different from their previous offerings in that it serves up a single forty-six minute track, and for the most part it's even more experimental and abstract than their earlier works. As with the previous tapes, the music is a mix of raw, ultra-noisy black metal heavily influenced by the more feral strains of early 90's Norwegian necro. The recording is insanely distorted and blown-out, the instruments fused together in a brutal black swarm, the drums pounding away in a ferocious speed-fueled frenzy of collapsing beats and blasting snares, the vocals a echoing bestial shriek. But then the band will suddenly and un expectedly slip into one of their weird propulsive grooves layered with monstrous blackened drones and horrific vocal sounds, horn-like tones and bits of backwards sound smeared across the ghastly backdrop of the band's almost motorik pulse, a kind of necro hypno rock that takes over for long stretches before crumbling into another blast of diseased Abruptum-like chaos. There's some really hypnotic stuff going on in these passages, at times approaching an almost Aluk Todolo-like pulse of charred, blackened energy, but its infested with all kinds of warped noise and electronics. From there, the band will shift into a wall of ambient black metal guitar, soaring icy riffs sent flying over a vast expanse of black static and low-fi murk, the drums fractured into stumbling, almost free-jazz like anti-rhythms way down int eh mix, joined by bleary out-of-tune organs and blurts of warped orchestral sound that begin bleeding through. About halfway through the tape, the band shifts into yet another messed-up dirge; this time it's all lurching and angular, a vaguely industrialized slow-motion crush, like early Swans or something along those lines, slow repetitive percussive pounding beneath howling demonic vocals and that swirling storm of black noise. Elsewhere, the band experiments with even more abstract passages of metallic noise and formless percussion, with some almost AMM-like improvisations appearing amid gusts of guttural demonic growling, or shifts into a kind of weird dubbed-out black doom where everything is drenched in echo, a rattling trippy delay-drenched dirge. This is definitely the noisiest and most outre stuff that I've heard so far from Burning Church Forest, and is recommended to fans of the black metal/noise mutations as Nekrasov, Satanhartalt, Demonologists and Abruptum.
���Beginning in 2012, Irish label Hell Comes Home began to unleash a subscription club series of 7"s that featured pairings of some of the best bands in the noise-rock/sludge/doom underground (and beyond); featuring the likes of Thou, Fistula, Burning Love, Dead Elephants, and Coffinworm, this series delivered all-new material from the artists involved, each 7" featuring one song from each band along with a digital download code for the music. In addition, each 7" is presented in a cream-colored jacket with striking original artwork from Polish designer Kuba Sok�lski, who illustrated each of these singles with a different mutant insect-like monstrosity, rendered in the sort of detail that you would expect from an entomological text. The look and feel of these records got my collector's vein pulsating in a big way, and we've managed to snag a selection of these 7"s for the C-Blast shop; numbers are limited, of course, and several of the entries in the Hell Comes Home series are already out of print...
��� This sixth entry in Hell Comes Home's 7" series features alternate versions of album tracks from Canadian punk outfit Burning Love, the current band from Chris Colohan of Cursed / Left For Dead / Ruination, teamed up with one of the best neo-noise rock outfits out there, Philly's Fight Amp. Those guys are on of my favorite current bands in this field, bringing an added level of ferocity and metallic crunch to their Am Rep-influenced sound; you can tell these guys have spent an inordinate amount of time blasting out the Dope-Guns-'N-Fucking In The Streets series on whatever rundown stereo they've got sparking away in the bowels of some inner city gutter fortress, but they've filtered those influences into something much heavier.
��� But Burning Love are up first, with a really impressive performance of their own. The gorgeous weeping of a lap steel guitar starts "The Body", that dreamy opening washing over you just as the band suddenly launches into their burly blazing rock, sounding like a more aggressive, punkier Kyuss to my ears, all crushing desert rock groove and sludgy powerchord crunch fused to Colohan's gruff singing and the ringing melodic guitars; dunno why I've been snoozing on this band up until now, but this song is pretty rippin', rocking and furious but with a stoned heaviness that fans of the aforementioned Kyuss, Fu Manchu and even Goatsnake would probably find fairly irresistible.
��� It gets substantially more aggro over on the Fight Amp side, their "Shallow Grave" a downtuned noise rock crusher in the band's trademark sludgy style, channeling the massive mean-spirited churn of bands like Unsane and Melvins into a more crazed, fast-paced assault, sinister dissonant guitars and gluey riffs grinding out over the off-kilter angular grooves that the rhythm section hammers out. Ugly, ugly stuff that's not without a certain level of catchiness.
Smokin' half-hour blast of Spencer Yeh's lush, raging drones. The first track sounds like Tony Conrad's "dream music" getting up on a hundred legs and
crawling forward on a propulsive kraut rock rhythm while blasts of brass horns and viscous distortion get hurled in every direction. The second jam is a
beautiful silver cloud of shimmering earth drone suspended in midair, a la Cale/Sunroof. Excellent. Full color jewel case package.
C Spencer Yeh's mighty Burning Star Core makes its move in the RRRecords Recycled Music Series with this lengthy free-skree monolith, a droning and slowly evolving junk jam rising out of ruptured electronic drone, skittering nervous violin and scraped strings, weird random junk percussion, horns, cut-up loops, computer chirps, and buried voices. Dreamy but unsettling, growing gradually into a massive violin and electronics generated drone-storm that consumes everything. Imagine Borbetomagus and Skullflower and Wolf Eyes and D Yellow Swans all going full blast simultaneously. Definitely LOUD and HEAVY when this jam reaches maximum overload.
This being part of the infamous Recycled Music Series, it has Burning Star Core's recordings dubbed over old commercial junk/thrift tapes (which could be anything from Annie Lennox solo albums to bluegrass instructional cassettes) that have been traded into the RRRecords used CD shop, and the packaging cobbled together with old cassette covers, duct tape, and magic marker. Due to the nature of audio cassette tape, often the original audio is still partly audible, merging and melting into the new sounds that have been dubbed onto its magnetic strip. thus making each cassette a hand-made and one-of-a-kind item on some level. Pretty cool.
For years Cincinnati avant-violinst and drone sculptor C. Spencer Yeh has been releasing records, tapes, and CDs under his Burning Star Core
moniker all by his lonesome, but for this new album, Yeh has enlisted a couple of Hair Police dudes and Mike Shiflet from Noumena to swell
BSC's ranks, and the results are massive; Yeh performs with voice, violin, electronics, "junkbox", and trumpet, Trevor Tremaine is on drums,
percussion, and "objects", Mike Shiflet contriobutes computer, electronics and voice, and Robert Beatty wields "acoustic appraiser" and
electronics. I've been into Burning Star Core's heavy free-noise jams for years, and even had Yeh and BSC contribute to the Shadows
Infinitum compilation that we released a couple of years back; Operator Dead...Post Abandoned is some of BSC's heavier jams
though, and I'm hoping that we get to hear more from this pretty potent lineup. The album starts with "When The Tripods Came", a sprawling 20
minute free-drone-noise-rock jam that reaches some pretty spiritual highs of ecstacy, if you're down to let it wrap itself around your mind. On
this track, Yeh stands at the center of an amorphous swirl of heavy, hypnotic drumming that sounds like Tremaine is hitting everything within
reach simultaneously, lunging through tamboura-like drones and swirling feedback and sets off streaks of delay-laced horns and strings
streaking through the dense fug, chased after by all kinds of digital fragments and blurts of crushing sludge distortion. Sixteen minutes in,
the drums become even heavier and more frenzied, the swirling clouds of noise and space effects and distortion suddenly seems to become heavier
and more malevolent, and everything becomes a titanic wall of crushing druggy drone dirge.
The title track starts off like it's going to be an epic comedown after the thunderous fury of the preceding jam; scattered percussion
rattles away in a haze of groaning strings and thick feedback, filling the room with smoke and ear-clogging hum and sounding like a heavier
version of White House era Dead C underpinned by grinding amplifier waves. But then towards the end, the drums start to spike into a
noisy tribal freakout swept over by flurries of cymbals, and the feedback and electronic drones build into another wall of brain melting space
drone sludge. The last two tracks are shorter and more ethereal: "Me And My Arrow" stokes a furnace blast of narcotic drone shimmer, and "The
Emergency Networks Are Taking Over" wraps up the album nicely with fierce free-jazz drumming rippling through warbling electronic melodies
moving backwards through a thick aural syrup, Goblin-esque keyboard strokes melting across ghostly violin strings scraping by in slow motion,
blasts of brutal feedback and thick swirls of liquid amp drone congealing into a crushing, crumbling finale. This is the most ferocious and
heavy Burning Star Core release so far, a distorted and sludgy sea of six-armed free jazz percussion and propulsive krautrock rhythms pushing
the dense murk forward, a flattening mix of Total's guitar feedback skree, Cluster's synth damage, jazz improv, Hototogisu, midwestern noise
rock, and planet-melting drone. Highly recommended. Comes in a beautiful 6-panel digipack featuring artwork by Paul Romano (Mastodon, Cir
I've only caught a couple of select offerings from the Tapeworm cassette series, mainly the ones with a more creep-stained, witchy touch from Stephen O'Malley and Meltaot. This newer offering from the British tape label isn't the sort of ghoulish improvisational scrape and drone that those artists delivered, but it is an exceedingly abrasive bout of high-intensity improv violence that demands to be listened to at ear-bleeding volume levels. Limited to an edition of two hundred copies and packaged in the minimalist black and white artwork that is the signature look of the Tapeworm imprint, Stinger delivers five blasts of ferocious free-jazz squonk that bear titles like "Sting", "Shred", "Bite" and "Bends", which all appear to infer the potential effect that this cassette might incur on the listener's nervous system. The Norwegian duo Burning Tree consists of drummer Dag Erik Knedal Andersen and saxophonist Dag Stiberg, and with their limited palette of sax and percussion execute some seriously blazing noise-jazz abuse across the length of this thirty-five minute album, starting with circling runs of sax bleat and crashing cymbals, then cranking up the chaos until they peak out with cyclonic blasts of abrasive skronk as the drums explode with complex fills, speeding up to almost blast beat speeds, and whipping through intricate patterns that are all smashed together as Stiberg races his sax through spastic dissonant runs and aneurysm-inducing blowouts that resemble the death-shrieks of a mortally wounded beast. This tape is a fucking scorcher, and any and all disciples of brute-strength free jazz like Borbetomagus, Weasel Walter's recent ensemble work, and Tiger Hatchery should stick this on their to-do list, pronto.
Extreme doom fans have been waiting on this for ages, but it's finally here, the definitive reissue/collection of the complete studio recordings of Burning Witch, the trailblazing and trend-setting doom outfit from Los Angeles that laid down the template for how fucking slow you could go in the 1990's. I'm pretty sure that alot of heads were turned onto Burning Witch's ouvre later on after the band ceased operations via Stephen O'Malley from Sunn O))) and Khanate, who originally founded BW along with singer Edgy 59, bassist Stuart Dahlquist and drummer Jamie Sykes. They were a pretty cult proposition when they initially came out. Regardless, though, the sound of Burning Witch has had an immense influence on how slow motion metal would evolve. You can hear their DNA in the music of everyone from Monarch to Yob to ASVA, Black Boned Angel to Buried At Sea. This reissue of Cripple Lucifer documents the decimation with a two disc set that collects the Albini-produced Towers release from 1996 and Rift Canyon Dreams from 1997, both long out of print.
The Towers session is mercilessly crushing, the ground zero for what we now recognize as extreme doom metal, and it's underscored by a nasty black streak of psychedelia that noone has managed to duplicate since. The terminal downer-sludge of Grief was no doubt an influence on what the members of Burning WItch were going for, but tracks like "Sea Hag" and "Country Doctor" are slower and more oppressive than Grief ever were. And then there is Edgy59, the leather-fetish clad androgyne that fronted Burning Witch with some of the most extreme, soul-ripping vocal expressions that have ever been recorded, period. His twisted hag-screech and fucked up Geddy Lee-on-valium howl still chills my marrow to this day. O'Malley uses feedback as an instrument in a manner that predates his droneological work with Sunn O))), unspooling massive veins of amplifier rumble that fills the void between detuned powerchords, expanses of void so vast that one wonders what in the hell Jamie Syke's is doing with his time in between his glacial prolonged drum strikes. They do mix it up though, sometimes breaking out into plodding powerdirges that recall Eyehategod, and their masterful control of dynamics and tension is what made this stuff so crucial in the first place. The track "The Bleeder" is included as well on this disc as the last track, previously having been released on the split with Goatsnake.
On Rift Canyon Dreams, the creeping doom is made even heavier and weirder with a more complex riff attack and an incredible vocal performance from Edgy59. It's been years since I've heard any of these tracks, and as soon as the gluey crush of opening track "Warning Sign" kicks in and Edgy59's crooning, tripped out singing rears its head, I'm flattened all over again by the sheer power of it all. The vocals continue to vacillate between the howling "witch screech" vocals and dramatic clean singing that appeared on Towers, but the guy sounds totally unhinged this time around, and the vocals are electronically processed, making them sound more otherworldly and dementedly alien than ever. O'Malley's guitar playing is more baroque and textured here, too, and the mood is incredibly atmospheric and bleak, bleaker than anything else happening in metal at the time, heavier than God, impossibly immense and malevolent, each song reaching upwards in length of 11 minutes or longer. And check the second track "Stillborn" for one of the most harrowing moments of post-Sabbath heaviosity ever. This disc also contains the title track that had previously only been available on a split 12" with ASVA.
This is an essential historical document for anyone into sludge, doom, slow motion metal, hell, this is on my top 20 list of heaviest albums EVER, so take that as you will. Then package is amazing as well, a massive 6 panel digipack designed by Stephen O'Malley that comes with a lavish 40-page thick booklet that is loaded with photos, medieval images, liner notes from Aaron Turner (Isis) and Chris Dodge (Slap A Ham Records), and other assorted eye candy.
Quite frankly stunned that I'm actually holding this monster in my hands, after several years of this comprehensive vinyl box set sitting in a continuous holding pattern over at Southern Lord. You'd be a knucklehead to argue that the wait was anything but worth it, though, as the final product is absolutely fucking beautiful. So, yeah, it's one of the most expensive items to come in the door here in recent memory, but if you are a serious (vinyl-collecting) fan of this pioneering extreme doom metal band, it's worth every penny. The Southern Lord guys put together an extravagant package with this set, compiling the band's complete studio output across three full-length LPs and a 12" EP (all pressed on thick 180 gram vinyl and housed in heavy Stoughton tip-on jackets), a DVD that features two live shows, and a huge booklet, all bundled inside of a heavy tip-on case, also constructed by Stoughton, all documenting the brief but earth-rattling existence of the mighty Witch. In regards to the studio recordings that are collected here, here's my original write-up of the same material from the Burning Witch double Cd collection from a couple of years ago:
Extreme doom fans have been waiting on this for ages, but it's finally here, the definitive reissue/collection of the complete studio recordings of Burning Witch, the trailblazing and trend-setting doom outfit from Los Angeles that laid down the template for how fucking slow you could go in the 1990's. I'm pretty sure that alot of heads were turned onto Burning Witch's oeuvre later on after the band ceased operations via Stephen O'Malley from Sunn O))) and Khanate, who originally founded BW along with singer Edgy 59, bassist Stuart Dahlquist and drummer Jamie Sykes. They were a pretty cult proposition when they initially came out. Regardless, though, the sound of Burning Witch has had an immense influence on how slow motion metal would evolve. You can hear their DNA in the music of everyone from Monarch to Yob to ASVA, Black Boned Angel to Buried At Sea. This reissue of Cripple Lucifer documents the decimation with a two disc set that collects the Albini-produced Towers release from 1996 and Rift Canyon Dreams from 1997, both long out of print.
The Towers session is mercilessly crushing, the ground zero for what we now recognize as extreme doom metal, and it's underscored by a nasty black streak of psychedelia that no one has managed to duplicate since. The terminal downer-sludge of Grief was no doubt an influence on what the members of Burning WItch were going for, but tracks like "Sea Hag" and "Country Doctor" are slower and more oppressive than Grief ever were. And then there is Edgy59, the leather-fetish clad androgyne that fronted Burning Witch with some of the most extreme, soul-ripping vocal expressions that have ever been recorded, period. His twisted hag-screech and fucked up Geddy Lee-on-valium howl still chills my marrow to this day. O'Malley uses feedback as an instrument in a manner that predates his droneological work with Sunn O))), uncoiling massive veins of amplifier rumble that fills the void between detuned power chords, expanses of void so vast that one wonders what in the hell Jamie Syke's is doing with his time in between his glacial prolonged drum strikes. They do mix it up though, sometimes breaking out into plodding power dirges that recall Eyehategod, and their masterful control of dynamics and tension is what made this stuff so crucial in the first place. The track "The Bleeder" is included as well on this disc as the last track, previously having been released on the split with Goatsnake.
On Rift Canyon Dreams, the creeping doom is made even heavier and weirder with a more complex riff attack and an incredible vocal performance from Edgy59. It's been years since I've heard any of these tracks, and as soon as the gluey crush of opening track "Warning Sign" kicks in and Edgy59's crooning, tripped out singing rears its head, I'm flattened all over again by the sheer power of it all. The vocals continue to vacillate between the howling "witch screech" vocals and dramatic clean singing that appeared on Towers, but the guy sounds totally unhinged this time around, and the vocals are electronically processed, making them sound more otherworldly and dementedly alien than ever. O'Malley's guitar playing is more baroque and textured here, too, and the mood is incredibly atmospheric and bleak, bleaker than anything else happening in metal at the time, heavier than God, impossibly immense and malevolent, each song reaching upwards in length of 11 minutes or longer. And check the second track "Stillborn" for one of the most harrowing moments of post-Sabbath heaviosity ever. This disc also contains the title track that had previously only been available on a split 12" with ASVA.
The live Lp features four songs ("The Sea Hag", "Country Doctor", "Bleeder", "Jubilex") captured live at the China Club in Ballard, Washington in 1996 where the band opened for Napalm Death and At The Gates, documented as a rough, filthy recording that's still a sufficiently crushing and time-stretching experience, and is notable for being one of only two performances that the band did with Greg Anderson of Sunn O))) on guitar.
As with the original discography Cd, this Lp boxset is a lavish construct, and includes a gorgeous perfect-bound book that measures 12" x 12" and contains forty pages of photos, medieval images, liner notes from Aaron Turner (Isis) and Chris Dodge (Slap A Ham Records), and other assorted eye candy. The live DVD included here is a big bonus for fans as well, with the video footage of the band's first ever live show in Seattle from 1996 (previously only available as a bonus live audio release via digital download) that also includes Greg Anderson on guitar, and another performance on public access TV from 1997. This is an essential historical document for anyone into sludge, doom, slow motion metal, hell, this is on my top 20 list of heaviest albums ever.
A new disc of heavy, drugged-out freeform psychedlia from the upstate NY band Burnt Hills, a prolific gang of improv sludgethugs who crank out long sprawling blasts of downtuned spacey heaviness that they jam out in the basement of their home base, Helderberg House. Some of Burnt Hills releases will serve up their extensive jam sessions in shorter tracks that are all connected, but on Alpha Seven, the band delivers a single sixty minute epic that's utterly massive. At first, this is a loose, sprawling mass of guitar feedback and random drumming, but it pretty quickly forms into a shambling sludgy psych rock dirge, the amps churning out wailing feedback drone, drums pounding away in spastic blurts of fractured rhythm, the guitar coalescing into huge droning distorto riff-rumble. It's like a much looser, lumbering Grey Daturas and just as heavy, the low slung bloozy soloing stretching out forever over Skullflowery waves of black-tar guitar roar and stoned trance-sludge. The guitars meander through layered noodling solos that are piled on top of one another, the sound often building into some serious acid guitar overload, and as the jam spreads out, the saurian drumming remains a driving, slow-mo engine pushing the band on through the opium fug. Later on this disc, they slip into passages of heavy Sabbathian swing and some chaotic krautrocky groove filled with wild slide-guitar skronk and a heavy propulsive bass line, and this becomes a major part of the disc, a massive propulsive hypno rock jam that stretches across the whole middle of the set, with more than fifteen minutes of this feedback soaked, heavy duty krautrock workout. From that point, it stays noisy, hectic, druggy, and LOUD, often collapsing into freaked out improv dins of racket, only beginning to fade towards the end when the band starts to space out, the groove starting to climb skyward on trails of metallic chiming and gusts of wah guitar, bits of pretty melody taking form, finally falling into some dark, lugubrious Hawkwind style psychedelia at the end.
Featuring members of Century Plants (who just released a split with Locrian), improv doom ensemble Twilight of the Century and free-sludge band Transcendental Manship Highway, Burnt Hills are real heavy improv-psych junkies, and their roaring, spaced out, crushing kraut-sludge freeform freak-outs are stunning things to behold, as heavy and flattening as Grey Daturas or Skullflower, but filled with the sort of exploratory acid jams that fans of Acid Mothers Temple and Heavy Winged will love. Comes in Carbon's signature full color sleeve for their 15YR series discs.
��Having been released on 12XU, the small indie label run by Matador/Homestead honcho Gerard Cosloy that's also home to albums from bands like Spoon and Silkworm, there's a chance that Sewer Birth could end up getting overlooked by a large swathe of the extreme metal crowd. Such an even would be highly unfortunate, as this new Austin based band has blasted out one of the heaviest fucking records of 2014 with Sewer Birth, constructing a perfect combination of relentless, inhuman industrial metal a la Streetcleaner-era Godflesh, and the most vicious strains of Amphetamine Reptile style noise rock. This album is punishing.
�� The whole reason I originally picked this record up was because the duo featured Dustin Pilkington, a former member of noise-damaged hardcore punks Total Abuse. I loved his previous band and was really interested in hearing what he was doing now, but aside from a shared lust for noise, the bone-crushing racket that Burnt Skull stir up on Sewer Birth comes from a completely different direction. The first song rips your face off right from the word go, "Harm" pounding off the beginning of the album like some rabid, locomotive death machine, punishing pneumatic drums grinding away in a kind of slipshod off-beat rhythm played at a skull-flattening volume level, while the guitars become all tangled up in a mess of spiky discordant chords and swirling, nauseous no-wavey dissonance. And those vocals, jesus...an inhuman, raspy, unintelligible hiss that sounds more like the work of black metal frontman than anything. But while this is most definitely some extremely heavy and noisy damage that Burnt Skull blast out, it's remarkably infectious, those disgusting riffs smearing feral noise rock vomit all over the drummer's crushing mechanical rhythms, his drumming so powerful and heavy and demolishing it sounds as if they might be layering actual drum machines in on top of the actual drums. And the guitar tone is monstrous, detuned and distorted and crushing, fully filling up the space left by the absence of bass guitar. No clue if these guys are as agonizingly heavy on stage as they are here, but on record, this duo sounds like a band at least three times as large, a massive noise-infested mechanized sludgecrush of damaged and deformed blood-drenched riffage and demonic drum kit detonations. There's a couple of faster tracks like "God Hole" and "No Cross" that erupt into discordant fury and feedback abuse, like some industrial-damaged version of hardcore punk; some other songs end up decomposing into ambient slimescapes laced with grinding amplifier drones, mysterious voices and waves of coruscating feedback, or drift out into pounding oil-drum rhythms surrounded by a heavy black fog of subterranean rumble and crumbling electronic effects. One of the heaviest of all of these songs is the title track that starts off the b-side, another scorched Godfleshian monstrosity of lumbering machinelike deathdirge, and "Infinite Flesh" takes the abject sludgepunk of Brainbombs and transforms it into a vile, industrialized ultra-dirge glistening with wet Cronenbergian visions, before finally closing with the utterly grim black ambience of "Abysm / Rotting Plain". I love this album. Those of you into stuff like Today is The Day, Brainbombs, Rusted Shut, Lewd, and other insanely blown-out, crushing noise rock outfits should get their hands on this pronto. Includes a digital download.
��� Observant fans of Benjamin Christensen's classic 1922 quasi-documentary H�xan have probably noticed my own infatuation with this infamous silent film here at C-Blast, as certain images from the film have taken on an almost totem-like presence in some of the organization's visuals. It's easily one of my favorite films of all time, a groundbreaking piece of cinema that blew my eyeballs out of the back of my head the first time I watched it. Released in 1922, this silent horror film/mock documentary from visionary Danish director Benjamin Christensen traced the history of witchcraft and devil-worship from medieval times through to the early 20th century, but Christensen's free-wheeling blending of fact and fantasy ended up transforming the film into a sprawling surrealistic epic. With a mix of academic presentation, grotesque medieval imagery, and dramatized sequences, H�xan gets pretty bonkers; when many of these scenes unfold, it's as if you're seeing woodcuts from the Malleus Maleficarum or scenes from a Bruegel painting coming alive before your eyes. And it's still a provocative film even today, weaving together eroticism, surrealism, perversion and blasphemy to forge flickering cinematic images that continue to linger in my subconsciousness. While the original 1922 release remains the definitive version of H�xan, most contemporary audiences actually discovered the film through a 1968 re-release that replaced the title cards with a spoken-word narration track from none other than William S. Burroughs, backed by a wild experimental jazz score created exclusively for the film. The whole project was commissioned by British experimental filmmaker and cult film distributor Antony Balch, who had already worked with the likes of Burroughs and Kenneth Anger on short films, and his revised, shortened version of H�xan was retitled Witchcraft Through The Ages, eventually finding an audience among midnight movie enthusiasts in the decades that followed. Though the tone of the film mutates wildly from its original form when backed by this combination of Burroughs's spoken word and jazzy soundtrack, this version definitely conjures a strange, dreamlike vibe all its own.
��� Apparently never before released outside of the film, Sotpackan's H�xan features what appears to be the entire audio track from the abbreviated 1968 release of the film, nearly seventy-seven minutes of Burroughs reading from Christensen's original text, set over that eerie jazz backing track. And the music is great, and of particular interest to fans of European jazz: the group that Balch assembled for this project include renowned Swiss jazz drummer/composer Daniel Humair and virtuoso French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, Frank Zappa's The Mothers), who bring a mix of moody, creepy atmosphere and energetic playing to the recording. The sixteen tracks collected on this disc move chronologically, sometimes focused purely on Burroughs's reading of the text, often spiraling out into free jazz madness as the quartet weaves airy vibraphone and eerie violin over Humair's frenetic drumming and booming tribal rhythms, while smears of bleary gothic organ and ghostly Hammond shimmers in the darkness. Oboes chortle like conspiring witches, murmuring through stretches of abstract, clattery noisiness that can almost venture into AMM-esque territory, and there's one track where someone begins gibbering madly over one of these more melodious passages, and I couldn't help but be reminded of one of Magma's jazzier moments.
��� Like some infernal beat-jazz cathode-ray drenched dream seeping into your ears at 3 am in the morning, this recording is more delirious than diabolical, though the musicians do frequently slip into passages of sinister cacophony that evoke the scenes of devil worship, child sacrifice, and wanton debauchery that parade across the screen. It's capable of abruptly turning from strange and swinging into something nightmarish, and removed from the amazing imagery of the film, the audio transforms into something new, a murky midnight jazz album guided by Burroughs's gravelly, droning intonation, like something off of some ancient Caedmon LP. A fine addition to one's library of demonic soundtrack arcana.
Burzum's second "prison album" Hli�skj�lf from 1999 has recently been reissued on Cd through Vikerne's new imprint Byelobog Productions and on deluxe vinyl through Back On Black, giving me a chance to go back over this mucho-maligned album from Norwegian black metal's most hated personality. Everyone knows the story behind this and the preceding album Dau�i Baldrs (1997); both were recorded during Varg Vikerne's imprisonment for the murder of Euronymous and multiple church-burnings, using only a synthesizer and tape recorder (the only equipment that he was permitted to use in prison), and went in an entirely different musical direction from his earlier black metal works, instead crafting a kind of dark medieval electronic music. When these albums were released, most fans scorned the new direction that Vikernes took with Burzum, dismissed by most as a half-baked change in style on the level of Cold Lake. Not to mention that Vikernes' scarcely concealed white power/National Socialist leanings didn't do much to endear his prison albums to folks, either. The controversial aspects of Burzum's work aside, I actually dug Hli�skj�lf much more than I thought I would when I first heard it. Of course it has nothing to do with black metal aesthetically; the only things that connect this with Burzum's early albums is the pagan/Norse subject matter that has always been a big part of Vikernes' art. Musically, this isn't the inept Casio slop that some have unfairly described it as being; although the music is pretty minimal on Hli�skj�lf, there's a bit of variety here, from the industrial-tinged synthesizer soundtrack of the opener "The Heart Of Tuisto" (which reminds me of some of the cooler horror movie scores that Full Moon was producing in the early 90s) and the booming tympani and synthetic horns on the ominous medieval dirge "The Death Of Woutan". Some Tangerine Dream influence shows up throughout the disc (especially on "The Ride Of Ansugardaz" and "Empathy"), as does stretches of layered looping dark ambience, and some elements of World Serpent-esque neo-folk. Yeah, there's some admittedly cheesy electronic neo-classical that appears on a couple of tracks, but as a whole the album is an interesting bit of Nordic neo-classical darkness that's worth a second look. Both versions of this reissue look great: the new vinyl reissue on Back On Black features a gorgeous gatefold sleeve and 180 gram colored vinyl, while the Cd edition of Byelobog comes in cool slipcase packaging.
Burzum's second "prison album" Hli�skj�lf from 1999 has recently been reissued on Cd through Vikerne's new imprint Byelobog Productions and on deluxe vinyl through Back On Black, giving me a chance to go back over this mucho-maligned album from Norwegian black metal's most hated personality. Everyone knows the story behind this and the preceding album Dau�i Baldrs (1997); both were recorded during Varg Vikerne's imprisonment for the murder of Euronymous and multiple church-burnings, using only a synthesizer and tape recorder (the only equipment that he was permitted to use in prison), and went in an entirely different musical direction from his earlier black metal works, instead crafting a kind of dark medieval electronic music. When these albums were released, most fans scorned the new direction that Vikernes took with Burzum, dismissed by most as a half-baked change in style on the level of Cold Lake. Not to mention that Vikernes' scarcely concealed white power/National Socialist leanings didn't do much to endear his prison albums to folks, either. The controversial aspects of Burzum's work aside, I actually dug Hli�skj�lf much more than I thought I would when I first heard it. Of course it has nothing to do with black metal aesthetically; the only things that connect this with Burzum's early albums is the pagan/Norse subject matter that has always been a big part of Vikernes' art. Musically, this isn't the inept Casio slop that some have unfairly described it as being; although the music is pretty minimal on Hli�skj�lf, there's a bit of variety here, from the industrial-tinged synthesizer soundtrack of the opener "The Heart Of Tuisto" (which reminds me of some of the cooler horror movie scores that Full Moon was producing in the early 90s) and the booming tympani and synthetic horns on the ominous medieval dirge "The Death Of Woutan". Some Tangerine Dream influence shows up throughout the disc (especially on "The Ride Of Ansugardaz" and "Empathy"), as does stretches of layered looping dark ambience, and some elements of World Serpent-esque neo-folk. Yeah, there's some admittedly cheesy electronic neo-classical that appears on a couple of tracks, but as a whole the album is an interesting bit of Nordic neo-classical darkness that's worth a second look. Both versions of this reissue look great: the new vinyl reissue on Back On Black features a gorgeous gatefold sleeve and 180 gram colored vinyl, while the Cd edition of Byelobog comes in cool slipcase packaging.
One thing that I was not expecting from Varg Vikernes was another album of electronic music. Now, I'm no hater; I actually dig his oft-maligned mid-90's "prison albums" that saw the former Mayhem member and convicted murderer/church-burner composing primitive, earnest synthesizer soundscapes from inside his cell. The minimalist neo-classical weirdness and elliptical folk of Dau�i Baldrs and the strange Wagnerian ambience of Hli�skj�lf both have a kind of crude majesty about 'em, and to be honest with you, seem to mainly get trashed by people who have never actually listened to the albums in full. Either one of them would have fir right in on the Projekt label around the time of their release. Still didn't expect to see Vikernes return to this sort of synth-based sound, though, as he always seemed to play down that period of his "career" whenever I read one of his post-prison release interviews. After a couple of interesting albums in full Burzumic mode, Vikernes has brought us Sol Austan Mani Vestan (which translates to "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", drawing from the pagan spiritual themes that Vikernes works to evoke through his music), an eleven song album that does indeed sound like it's picking up where Hli�skj�lf left off, again blending together elements of dark kosmische ambience, electronic minimalism and medieval music into hypnotic, repetitive arrangements. One big difference between this new album and his mid-90s electronic works is the production, which has definitely improved, and sounds much more contemporary; the instrumentation has expanded beyond the icy whooshing synthesizers to include the sounds of industrial percussion, upright bass, and acoustic strings. The tracks range from minimal dark ambient pieces that ripple
with ringing metallic bell tones to more folk-flecked arrangements, formed around trance-inducing tribal rhythms and layered instruments that swirl around his clouds of ghostly Moog. Vikernes cited Tangerine Dream as a big influence on Sol Austan, and you can definitely hear it on tracks like "Haugaeldr", "Heljarmyrkr" and "H��", which are far more classically kosmische sounding than anything he's done in the past; fans of all of this neuvo-Teutonic ambience and Klaus Schulze / Ash Ra Tempel / Tangerine Dream worship that's been popping up lately would love those moments of Sol Austan...
Available on both CD (in jewel-case packaging) and on limited edition 180 gram colored vinyl in gatefold packaging.
One thing that I was not expecting from Varg Vikernes was another album of electronic music. Now, I'm no hater; I actually dig his oft-maligned mid-90's "prison albums" that saw the former Mayhem member and convicted murderer/church-burner composing primitive, earnest synthesizer soundscapes from inside his cell. The minimalist neo-classical weirdness and elliptical folk of Dau�i Baldrs and the strange Wagnerian ambience of Hli�skj�lf both have a kind of crude majesty about 'em, and to be honest with you, seem to mainly get trashed by people who have never actually listened to the albums in full. Either one of them would have fir right in on the Projekt label around the time of their release. Still didn't expect to see Vikernes return to this sort of synth-based sound, though, as he always seemed to play down that period of his "career" whenever I read one of his post-prison release interviews. After a couple of interesting albums in full Burzumic mode, Vikernes has brought us Sol Austan Mani Vestan (which translates to "East of the Sun, West of the Moon", drawing from the pagan spiritual themes that Vikernes works to evoke through his music), an eleven song album that does indeed sound like it's picking up where Hli�skj�lf left off, again blending together elements of dark kosmische ambience, electronic minimalism and medieval music into hypnotic, repetitive arrangements. One big difference between this new album and his mid-90s electronic works is the production, which has definitely improved, and sounds much more contemporary; the instrumentation has expanded beyond the icy whooshing synthesizers to include the sounds of industrial percussion, upright bass, and acoustic strings. The tracks range from minimal dark ambient pieces that ripple
with ringing metallic bell tones to more folk-flecked arrangements, formed around trance-inducing tribal rhythms and layered instruments that swirl around his clouds of ghostly Moog. Vikernes cited Tangerine Dream as a big influence on Sol Austan, and you can definitely hear it on tracks like "Haugaeldr", "Heljarmyrkr" and "H��", which are far more classically kosmische sounding than anything he's done in the past; fans of all of this neuvo-Teutonic ambience and Klaus Schulze / Ash Ra Tempel / Tangerine Dream worship that's been popping up lately would love those moments of Sol Austan...
Available on both CD (in jewel-case packaging) and on limited edition 180 gram colored vinyl in gatefold packaging.
����� Also back in stock on vinyl via Back On Black, in gatefold packaging. Extremely limited quantities available! Here's the original review for the CD version:
It goes without saying that the original early 90's Burzum releases remain among the most potent and influential black metal albums ever recorded. While the criminal exploits of sole member Varg Vikernes have always threatened to overshadow the music itself (just read Lords Of Chaos for the whole sordid saga), the impact that these records had on underground metal (and beyond) is still being felt. Ferocious, sometimes experimental, Burzum's early discography includes works that are undeniable masterpieces of black metal profanity steeped in Scandinavian mythology; regardless of how one feels about the notorious character behind this music, several of these albums are required listening for anyone who is truly interested in the sonic black arts. All of these albums were reissued a while back through the Candlelight sub-label Byelobog, retaining their original form with no added bonus tracks or any other extraneous material, each disc housed in jewel case packaging enclosed in a printed slipcase; we now have all of these in stock, some at lower prices than before, and all are highly recommended to those truly interested in the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the malevolent aesthetics of genuinely sociopathic art.
����� Burzum's second album continued with the primitive, ear-scraping abrasiveness that we were assaulted with on the debut, but here Vikernes begins to explore the more deliberately hypnotic riffscapes that would subsequently be perfected on Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and Filosofem. 1993's Det Som Engang Var (translated from the Norwegian as "for what once was") continues to explore a romanticized revolt against modernity through raw, intensely atmospheric black metal, and musically, it's pretty brutal. Though the beginning of Det Som is shrouded in the dark, minimal ambience of "Den Onde Kysten", that quickly dissolves into the vicious black metal of "Key To The Gate", erupting into violent thrash, swinging between haphazard blasting and dissonant guitars and slower, more doom-laden riffing. One of the interesting developments here is the addition of melodic leads that are vaguely reminiscent of medieval music, something that would be explored even more with later Burzum records, and Vikernes' frantic, strep-throat vocals feel even more deranged than before. The sound is definitely heavier, with moments of lumbering, morbid Frostian crush, and the riffs sometimes shift between that signature trancelike buzz and catchier, more traditional metallic riffing. That droning, swirling tremolo riffing and mesmeric blasting tempos drive all of this stuff though. A couple of songs ("Han Som Reiste", "Svarte Troner") are kosmische-influenced synthesizer pieces comprised of pulsating bass notes, swaths of mysterious industrial drift, and looping melodies that draw from medieval music, which of course points towards the exclusively electronic sound of his prison-era albums. All of this is enshrouded in that signature Burzumic atmosphere, harsh and haunting, strewn with moments of brutal heaviness and otherworldly avant-garde ambience.
����� It goes without saying that the original early 90's Burzum releases remain among the most potent and influential black metal albums ever recorded. While the criminal exploits of sole member Varg Vikernes have always threatened to overshadow the music itself (just read Lords Of Chaos for the whole sordid saga), the impact that these records had on underground metal (and beyond) is still being felt. Ferocious, sometimes experimental, Burzum's early discography includes works that are undeniable masterpieces of black metal profanity steeped in Scandinavian mythology; regardless of how one feels about the notorious character behind this music, several of these albums are required listening for anyone who is truly interested in the sonic black arts. All of these albums were reissued a while back through the Candlelight sub-label Byelobog, retaining their original form with no added bonus tracks or any other extraneous material, each disc housed in jewel case packaging enclosed in a printed slipcase; we now have all of these in stock, some at lower prices than before, and all are highly recommended to those truly interested in the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the malevolent aesthetics of genuinely sociopathic art.
����� It all started here. Combining Burzum's eponymous debut with the Aske 12" released later the same year, this is the epitome of the raw black metal aesthetic, and one of the most important black metal albums in the history of the form. That debut album resonates with a fearsome negative energy that rattled listeners when the record first appeared on Deathlike Silence Productions back in 1992, with almost everything performed by Vikernes, aside from some additional instrumentation provided by his ill-fated friend Euronymous. Rather than the longform hypnotic epics that would define later albums like Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and Filosofem, many of the songs on Burzum stick to more conventional lengths. But even relatively shorter tracks like "Ea, Lord Of The Depths" and the snarling violence of "War" deftly weave those droning, fuzz-encrusted riffs into swirling minimalist figures that become trance-inducing, possessing a crude but transcendent power that is further enhanced by the anguished, feral vocals. The bursts of frenzied, repetitious melody and the churning, looplike nature of Vikernes' riffs appear simple on the surface, but repeated listening reveals the interlocking layering that creates this solemn, mesmeric atmosphere. Haunting and sorrowful, this music yearns for an escape from modernity, but the seething spiteful undercurrents constantly threaten violence, manifesting with ferocious tempo shifts and moments of stumbling, discordant dementia. There's also some billowing shadow-drenched quasi-kosmische synthesizer that overtakes the dark electronic driftscape of "Channeling The Power Of Souls Into A New God", which hints at some of the later electronic music that Burzum would engage in. And the closer is pure isolationist ambient blackness, sprawling out with waves of reverberant hammered gong that could be mistaken for something from Lustmord or Jonathan Coleclough. This mixture of black metal and post-industrial ambience has been copies by a million bands since, but none of 'em come close to capturing what Burzum created here. This created a template for moody black metal, the layered droning tremolo riffs and contrasting chord changes achieving moments of dark brilliance all throughout this album, captured with a low-fi, clandestine recording quality that is intrinsic to the album's unique presence. Needless to say, Burzum is a landmark black metal album.
����� The three song Aske EP follows, tearing through some driving, brooding blackened fury that ranges from the propulsive, hypnotic mid-tempo ferocity of "Stemmen Fra T�rnet (The Voice From The Tower)" and the frostbitten grey blastscape of "A Lost Forgotten Sad Spirit", while the lumbering slow motion doom of "Dominus Sathanas" is totally devoid of percussion, a layered, majestic piece of ambient guitar music that's one of the best experimental black metal tracks from this era. Despite its brief length, this stuff is just as essential as the debut.
����� It goes without saying that the original early 90's Burzum releases remain among the most potent and influential black metal albums ever recorded. While the criminal exploits of sole member Varg
Vikernes have always threatened to overshadow the music itself (just read Lords Of Chaos for the whole sordid saga), the impact that these records had on underground metal (and beyond) is still being felt. Ferocious, sometimes
experimental, Burzum's early discography includes works that are undeniable masterpieces of black metal profanity steeped in Scandinavian mythology; regardless of how one feels about the notorious character behind this music, several of
these albums are required listening for anyone who is truly interested in the sonic black arts. All of these albums were reissued a while back through the Candlelight sub-label Byelobog, retaining their original form with no added bonus
tracks or any other extraneous material, each disc housed in jewel case packaging enclosed in a printed slipcase; we now have all of these in stock, some at lower prices than before, and all are highly recommended to those truly
interested in the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the malevolent aesthetics of genuinely sociopathic art.
����� The oft-maligned Dau�i Baldrs was the first in what are called Burzum's "prison albums", a pair of records that came out in the late 90s while Vark Vikernes was settling into his prison sentence handed down for his murder of former bandmate �ystein "Euronymous" Aarseth. Written and recorded using relatively low-tech MIDI software inside of Bergen Prison, the album naturally alienated many fans who were expecting another Filosofem. It's definitely not a black metal album, and the sound is somewhat primitive, but it's hardly an extreme deviation from what Vikernes was doing before his imprisonment. Dau�i Baldrs simply extrapolates on the sound of earlier Burzum songs like "Tomhet", and if approached with that in mind, listeners will find a unique, antiquated atmosphere with this music that, along with Mortiis's albums from around the same time, stands as the finest examples of the "dungeon synth" aesthetic. The songs are all based around minimalist repetition, the melodies often laid over various orchestral percussion sounds. That repetition weaves of strange, otherworldly vibe on the title track, the endlessly repeating synth-strings melding with weirdly honking "woodwinds" and a ghostly xylophone-like melody all creating an odd broken majesty that carries through the rest of the album. The limited instrumental voices that Vikernes used are often obviously synthetic, and there is definitely a chintzy feel to these synth sounds, but that's what makes this album so appealing to me. And there are plenty of moments of genuine beauty here, revealing the same songwriting process that produced the droning, mesmeric black metal of those earlier albums. "B�lferd Baldrs (The Fire-Journey Of Baldur)", for instance, feels like an electronic interpretation of themes from "Jesus Dod" off Filosofem. And one of the best tracks appears with "Illa Ti�andi", where everything is stripped away and we're left with a lone mournful piano figure that plays out over a softly wavering bed of choral synth. It's obviously not for everyone (especially black metal purists), but for those us with a taste for Burzum's earlier synthesizer arrangements, and the sounds of dungeon-synth and low-fi neo-classical darkness, Dau�i Baldrs is recommended listening.
It goes without saying that the original early 90's Burzum releases remain among the most potent and influential black metal albums ever recorded. While the criminal exploits of sole member Varg Vikernes have always threatened to overshadow the music itself (just read Lords Of Chaos for the whole sordid saga), the impact that these records had on underground metal (and beyond) is still being felt. Ferocious, sometimes experimental, Burzum's early discography includes works that are undeniable masterpieces of black metal profanity steeped in Scandinavian mythology; regardless of how one feels about the notorious character behind this music, several of these albums are required listening for anyone who is truly interested in the sonic black arts. All of these albums were reissued a while back through the Candlelight sub-label Byelobog, retaining their original form with no added bonus tracks or any other extraneous material, each disc housed in jewel case packaging enclosed in a printed slipcase; we now have all of these in stock, some at lower prices than before, and all are highly recommended to those truly interested in the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the malevolent aesthetics of genuinely sociopathic art.
Burzum's second album continued with the primitive, ear-scraping abrasiveness that we were assaulted with on the debut, but here Vikernes begins to explore the more deliberately hypnotic riffscapes that would subsequently be perfected on Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and Filosofem. 1993's Det Som Engang Var (translated from the Norwegian as "for what once was") continues to explore a romanticized revolt against modernity through raw, intensely atmospheric black metal, and musically, it's pretty brutal. Though the beginning of Det Som is shrouded in the dark, minimal ambience of "Den Onde Kysten", that quickly dissolves into the vicious black metal of "Key To The Gate", erupting into violent thrash, swinging between haphazard blasting and dissonant guitars and slower, more doom-laden riffing. One of the interesting developments here is the addition of melodic leads that are vaguely reminiscent of medieval music, something that would be explored even more with later Burzum records, and Vikernes' frantic, strep-throat vocals feel even more deranged than before. The sound is definitely heavier, with moments of lumbering, morbid Frostian crush, and the riffs sometimes shift between that signature trancelike buzz and catchier, more traditional metallic riffing. That droning, swirling tremolo riffing and mesmeric blasting tempos drive all of this stuff though. A couple of songs ("Han Som Reiste", "Svarte Troner") are kosmische-influenced synthesizer pieces comprised of pulsating bass notes, swaths of mysterious industrial drift, and looping melodies that draw from medieval music, which of course points towards the exclusively electronic sound of his prison-era albums. All of this is enshrouded in that signature Burzumic atmosphere, harsh and haunting, strewn with moments of brutal heaviness and otherworldly avant-garde ambience.
����� It goes without saying that the original early 90's Burzum releases remain among the most potent and influential black metal albums ever recorded. While the criminal exploits of sole member Varg Vikernes have always threatened to overshadow the music itself (just read Lords Of Chaos for the whole sordid saga), the impact that these records had on underground metal (and beyond) is still being felt. Ferocious, sometimes experimental, Burzum's early discography includes works that are undeniable masterpieces of black metal profanity steeped in Scandinavian mythology; regardless of how one feels about the notorious character behind this music, several of these albums are required listening for anyone who is truly interested in the sonic black arts. All of these albums were reissued a while back through the Candlelight sub-label Byelobog, retaining their original form with no added bonus tracks or any other extraneous material, each disc housed in jewel case packaging enclosed in a printed slipcase; we now have all of these in stock, some at lower prices than before, and all are highly recommended to those truly interested in the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the malevolent aesthetics of genuinely sociopathic art.
����� Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss is truly a masterwork of Norwegian black metal, but in my opinion, 1996's Filosofem is the band's finest hour, and possibly the best black metal album ever recorded. Recorded simultaneously with Hvis lyset tar oss, it's obviously a direct continuation of that record's epic-length mesmeric sound, again perfectly blending sprawling, droning mid-tempo black metal and minimal, haunting electronic sounds into a stunning blackened soundscape. But there's something about Filosofem that's imbued with a violent, sweeping majesty that's unique to this album.
����� Opener "Dunkelheit" sets the mood with its slow, deliberate pacing and miserablist atmosphere, the churning wall of fuzz emanating from his guitar flecked with a simple four note keyboard figure; it's a great Burzum song, but it's almost like an epic intro for the second song "Jesus' Tod". That song's invocation of windswept ferocity features one of the most infectious and infuriating black metal riffs ever racing over waves of double bass, that riff circling endlessly and furiously, creating an almost ritualisic feel that washes over the listener. It's my favorite Burzum song, his nocturnal magic sharpened and perfected. And it's all constructed out of what is essentially just two riffs.
����� Filosofem often reaches such heights. The other songs are swept up in a near constant fuzz-drenched fog, the vocals frenzied and spiteful, the simple but murderously effective riffs fused to emotionally stirring and equally simple leads, the songs blasting meditatively over the relentless pulse of the drums, shifting from that furious swarming blast to a head-nodding midtempo groove. Those drums sometimes disappearing completely (as on "Gebrechlichkeit 1"), leaving just a mournful fuzz-encrusted riff and eerie electronic melody to drift beneath the hellish, anguished shrieks and chthonic rumblings. Synths are more present than ever before, buried deep in the mix, usually a haunting, kosmische drone gleaming beneath the riffs, only occasionally blooming into one of those skeletal, dreamlike melodies.
����� The exception is the nearly half hour long "Rundgang Um Die Transzendentale Saule Der Singularitat", which sees everything being stripped away in favor of those synthesizers. Much like "Tomhet" off the previous album, this is a immersive driftscape heavily influenced by classic German space music, and indeed it feels much like some old Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze piece, a sinister, simple melody looping over an expanse of moody electronic drift. And rather than return to the furious black roar of the first half of the album, Filosofem's final song offers a second part to ""Gebrechlichkeit", a strange, sometimes abstract soundscape that revives those swarming static-drenched riffs, but not before the track unfolds into a mysterious clanking realm of minimal piano laid over industrialized rumblings and low, resonant drones, slowly swelling into a final, funereal riff that drifts languidly across the final moments of the album. Essential black metal, one of the best albums that ever came out of the Norwegian underground.
����� It goes without saying that the original early 90's Burzum releases remain among the most potent and influential black metal albums ever recorded. While the criminal exploits of sole member Varg Vikernes have always threatened to overshadow the music itself (just read Lords Of Chaos for the whole sordid saga), the impact that these records had on underground metal (and beyond) is still being felt. Ferocious, sometimes experimental, Burzum's early discography includes works that are undeniable masterpieces of black metal profanity steeped in Scandinavian mythology; regardless of how one feels about the notorious character behind this music, several of these albums are required listening for anyone who is truly interested in the sonic black arts. All of these albums were reissued a while back through the Candlelight sub-label Byelobog, retaining their original form with no added bonus tracks or any other extraneous material, each disc housed in jewel case packaging enclosed in a printed slipcase; we now have all of these in stock, some at lower prices than before, and all are highly recommended to those truly interested in the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the malevolent aesthetics of genuinely sociopathic art.
����� Considered by many to be Burzum's best album, and indeed the apex of Norwegian black metal, there's no denying the raw power and awesome otherworldly aura that surrounds Hvis Lyset Tar Oss. Initially released in 1994 on the British label Misanthropy Records and featuring eerie, folkloric artwork from Norwegian illustrator Theodor Kittelsen, Hvis Lyset Tar Oss saw Varg's unique black metal sound solidify into a perfect blend of vicious cyclical riffing, grimly romanticized atmosphere, and spectral electronic ambience. A thousand bands sprung up in the wake of this record, desperately attempting to capture the furious, emotional brilliance of this album, and most would agree that it has yet to be superseded, an absolute classic piece of black metal mastery.
����� By opening the album with the song "Det Som En Gang Var", Vikernes establishes a direct thematic connection to the preceding album of the same name, while weaving his droning, distorted guitar melodies and atmospheric keyboards together in a much more harmonious manner than previous releases. The song veers into one of Burzum's signature mid-paced mesmeric riffs soon enough, but it maintains that darkly soaring, almost cinematic vibe through the entire fifteen minutes of the song. The drumming is heavier and more precise than before as well, the rolling waves of double bass adding more of an undertow to the music, which remains structurally minimalist, the song made up of just a couple of chord changes, but each one resonates with drama and emotion. In contrast, the title track shifts into a relentless blast, a speedy race across snow-blanketed wilderness set to stirring minor key melodies that ring out in the darkness over a simple two-chord progression, with Vikernes' painful shrieks echoing through the gloom. And "Inn I Slottet Fra Dr�mmen" slips into a violent, scornful blast-churn that at first is pure minimalist repetition, only gradually shifting into hideous dissonance and fractured thrash riffing.
����� The final song of the quartet is entirely electronic, but it's no offhand outro piece of superficial synth pads. "Tomhet" is a stunning piece of kosmische-influenced synthesizer music that echoes Vikernes's appreciation for the likes of Tangerine Dream, while soaking these layered drones, percussive pulse and minimal electronic melody with the grim mood of the rest of the album, unfolding into starlit, celestial beauty; it's one of Burzum's best synthesizer-based tracks, a beautifully haunting piece of electronic darkness that even those who dismiss the later "prison-synth" albums speak highly of. A perfect close to this classic album, a blast of minimalist, majestic ferocity that is essential listening for anyone remotely interested in Norwegian black metal.
����� Just restocked the Back On Black vinyl reissue of Filosofem, originally issued in 2008 on black vinyl with the original album art.
����� It goes without saying that the original early 90's Burzum releases remain among the most potent and influential black metal albums ever recorded. While the criminal exploits of sole member Varg Vikernes have always threatened to overshadow the music itself (just read Lords Of Chaos for the whole sordid saga), the impact that these records had on underground metal (and beyond) is still being felt. Ferocious, sometimes experimental, Burzum's early discography includes works that are undeniable masterpieces of black metal profanity steeped in Scandinavian mythology; regardless of how one feels about the notorious character behind this music, several of these albums are required listening for anyone who is truly interested in the sonic black arts. All of these albums were reissued a while back through the Candlelight sub-label Byelobog on CD and on Back On Black on vinyl, retaining their original form with no added bonus tracks or any other extraneous material; we now have all of these in stock, some at lower prices than before, and all are highly recommended to those truly interested in the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the malevolent aesthetics of genuinely sociopathic art.
����� Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss is truly a masterwork of Norwegian black metal, but in my opinion, 1996's Filosofem is the band's finest hour, and possibly the best black metal album ever recorded. Recorded simultaneously with Hvis lyset tar oss, it's obviously a direct continuation of that record's epic-length mesmeric sound, again perfectly blending sprawling, droning mid-tempo black metal and minimal, haunting electronic sounds into a stunning blackened soundscape. But there's something about Filosofem that's imbued with a violent, sweeping majesty that's unique to this album.
����� Opener "Dunkelheit" sets the mood with its slow, deliberate pacing and miserablist atmosphere, the churning wall of fuzz emanating from his guitar flecked with a simple four note keyboard figure; it's a great Burzum song, but it's almost like an epic intro for the second song "Jesus' Tod". That song's invocation of windswept ferocity features one of the most infectious and infuriating black metal riffs ever racing over waves of double bass, that riff circling endlessly and furiously, creating an almost ritualisic feel that washes over the listener. It's my favorite Burzum song, his nocturnal magic sharpened and perfected. And it's all constructed out of what is essentially just two riffs.
����� Filosofem often reaches such heights. The other songs are swept up in a near constant fuzz-drenched fog, the vocals frenzied and spiteful, the simple but murderously effective riffs fused to emotionally stirring and equally simple leads, the songs blasting meditatively over the relentless pulse of the drums, shifting from that furious swarming blast to a head-nodding midtempo groove. Those drums sometimes disappearing completely (as on "Gebrechlichkeit 1"), leaving just a mournful fuzz-encrusted riff and eerie electronic melody to drift beneath the hellish, anguished shrieks and chthonic rumblings. Synths are more present than ever before, buried deep in the mix, usually a haunting, kosmische drone gleaming beneath the riffs, only occasionally blooming into one of those skeletal, dreamlike melodies.
����� The exception is the nearly half hour long "Rundgang Um Die Transzendentale Saule Der Singularitat", which sees everything being stripped away in favor of those synthesizers. Much like "Tomhet" off the previous album, this is a immersive driftscape heavily influenced by classic German space music, and indeed it feels much like some old Tangerine Dream or Klaus Schulze piece, a sinister, simple melody looping over an expanse of moody electronic drift. And rather than return to the furious black roar of the first half of the album, Filosofem's final song offers a second part to ""Gebrechlichkeit", a strange, sometimes abstract soundscape that revives those swarming static-drenched riffs, but not before the track unfolds into a mysterious clanking realm of minimal piano laid over industrialized rumblings and low, resonant drones, slowly swelling into a final, funereal riff that drifts languidly across the final moments of the album. Essential black metal, one of the best albums that ever came out of the Norwegian underground.
Back in stock on limited-edition 180 gram colored vinyl in gatefold packaging; here's the original view for the Bylobog CD version:
It goes without saying that the original early 90's Burzum releases remain among the most potent and influential black metal albums ever recorded. While the criminal exploits of sole member Varg Vikernes have always threatened to overshadow the music itself (just read Lords Of Chaos for the whole sordid saga), the impact that these records had on underground metal (and beyond) is still being felt. Ferocious, sometimes experimental, Burzum's early discography includes works that are undeniable masterpieces of black metal profanity steeped in Scandinavian mythology; regardless of how one feels about the notorious character behind this music, several of these albums are required listening for anyone who is truly interested in the sonic black arts. All of these albums were reissued a while back through the Candlelight sub-label Byelobog, retaining their original form with no added bonus tracks or any other extraneous material; all are highly recommended to those truly interested in the evolution of Norwegian black metal and the malevolent aesthetics of genuinely sociopathic art.
It all started here. Combining Burzum's eponymous debut with the Aske 12" released later the same year, this is the epitome of the raw black metal aesthetic, and one of the most important black metal albums in the history of the form. That debut album resonates with a fearsome negative energy that rattled listeners when the record first appeared on Deathlike Silence Productions back in 1992, with almost everything performed by Vikernes, aside from some additional instrumentation provided by his ill-fated friend Euronymous. Rather than the longform hypnotic epics that would define later albums like Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and Filosofem, many of the songs on Burzum stick to more conventional lengths. But even relatively shorter tracks like "Ea, Lord Of The Depths" and the snarling violence of "War" deftly weave those droning, fuzz-encrusted riffs into swirling minimalist figures that become trance-inducing, possessing a crude but transcendent power that is further enhanced by the anguished, feral vocals. The bursts of frenzied, repetitious melody and the churning, looplike nature of Vikernes' riffs appear simple on the surface, but repeated listening reveals the interlocking layering that creates this solemn, mesmeric atmosphere. Haunting and sorrowful, this music yearns for an escape from modernity, but the seething spiteful undercurrents constantly threaten violence, manifesting with ferocious tempo shifts and moments of stumbling, discordant dementia. There's also some billowing shadow-drenched quasi-kosmische synthesizer that overtakes the dark electronic driftscape of "Channeling The Power Of Souls Into A New God", which hints at some of the later electronic music that Burzum would engage in. And the closer is pure isolationist ambient blackness, sprawling out with waves of reverberant hammered gong that could be mistaken for something from Lustmord or Jonathan Coleclough. This mixture of black metal and post-industrial ambience has been copies by a million bands since, but none of 'em come close to capturing what Burzum created here. This created a template for moody black metal, the layered droning tremolo riffs and contrasting chord changes achieving moments of dark brilliance all throughout this album, captured with a low-fi, clandestine recording quality that is intrinsic to the album's unique presence. Needless to say, Burzum is a landmark black metal album.
The three song Aske EP follows, tearing through some driving, brooding blackened fury that ranges from the propulsive, hypnotic mid-tempo ferocity of "Stemmen Fra Tornet (The Voice From The Tower)" and the frostbitten grey blastscape of "A Lost Forgotten Sad Spirit", while the lumbering slow motion doom of "Dominus Sathanas" is totally devoid of percussion, a layered, majestic piece of ambient guitar music that's one of the best experimental black metal tracks from this era. Despite its brief length, this stuff is just as essential as the debut.
PARACOCCIDIOIDOMICOSISPROCTITISSARCOMUCOSI (contender for the most ridiculous metal band name award EVER) is a Mexican gore-noise duo, primarily guitar and drums fronted by absurd vomiting/gurgling "vocals" delivering a completely chaotic and over the top assault of
spastic blastbeats and morbid noisy riffs that bounce between seriously detuned sludge ooze and white noise squiggle flurries - sounds like early Disgorge teaming up with a free-noise ensemble to cover CARCASS� "Reek Of Putrefaction". Insane. BUTCHER ABC are from Japan, feature members of grind-rockers C.S.S.O., and deliver 34 tracks of splatterfied goregrind mixed with super catchy
melodic rock riffs, and fronted by ridiculous vocals that sound like a cross between a feral pig and a guy horking snot. The melodic parts really set this stuff apart, as there are some really tuneful, almost sing-songy / pop-punk melodies buried between the 20 second blasts of crusty noise and the chugging goregrind buzzsaw riffs!! Absurd, brutal stuff. The cover art is pretty cool, too! Recommended to fans of sick grind that need something different than just another Carcass ripoff.
I haven't followed much of what the Butthole Surfers have done over the past two decades; wasn't into the goofy alt-rock direction that the band went in after moving to the majors in the early 90's, and their acrimonious, high-profile split with Touch And Go was one of the uglier moments in indie rock's recent history. Their early records are pretty crucial, though, and still hold up as some of the most zonked hardcore punk to ever come out of the American underground. Their debut EP has been out of print on vinyl for some time, and (surprisingly) has just been repressed by Alternative Tentacles - for fans of early hardcore, this is a crucial piece of U.S. HC history, but this 1983 slab from the Butthole Surfers should be heard by anyone into seriously freaked-out heavy underground rock. The music on this 12" is, for the most part, much more hallucinatory than the Surfers you've seen on MTV videos, seven songs of crazed, LSD-snarfing punk like the opening track "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave", mashing caustic, hyperfast hardcore thrash with bizarre lyrical rantings, histrionic vocals, blasting drums...the stoned psychedelic trudge of "The Revenge Of Anus Presley" through wrecked acid-guitar, weird sound effects and simplistic pounding dirge..."Bar-B-Q Pope"'s squawking, twangy punk...it's a whacked out mashup of early hardcore, psychedelic rock and experimental music that was incomparable to anything else happening in the American underground at that time, and this EP still blazes with it's unpredictable music, ferocious energy and lunatic visions. Highly recommended, especially for you folks into the weirder side of hardcore punk - few HC bands have ever matched the weirdness of the early Butthole Surfers records.
Second in the Buttholes vinyl reissue campaign that Alternative Tentacles has been on this year, which started with the self-titled 12" and has come round to their blistering live 12" from 1984, Live PCPPEP. We're talking golden era Surfers here, folks, when the band was the weirdest, most freaked out and fucking genius hardcore punk band in the US. Recorded live in March of 1984 at The Meridian in San Antonio, Texas, this record captures seven songs, most of which had appeared a year before on the band's self-titled EP aside from "Cowboy Bob" which would later appear on Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, but one of these songs ("Dance Of The Cobras") has never appeared on any other release, to the best of my knowledge.
This shit still destroys. It's the first recording of the double-drummer lineup when Teresa Nervosa began sharing drum duties with King Coffey, and the band rages through these songs, playing them loose and fast, except for "Bar-B-Q Pope", whose sludgy horn-blasted Stooges crawl hints at the sound that the Brainbombs would drag into the sewer a few years later. Conversely, "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave" is served up in feirce blasts of feedback-soaked thrash with Gibby Haynes's hallucinatory lyrics turning this into one of hardcore's greatest (and most insane) jams. Essential.
Packaged in a green jacket, no insert, and pretty much the exact same presentation as the original release.
This CD collection of the earliest Butthole Surfers jams is finally available again (and in stock here at C-Blast for the first time ever), a full length digipack disc that contains the band's classic self-titled (or Brown Reason To Live as it's known by some) 12" EP and their Live PCPEP 12", both of which were released on vinyl by Alternative Tentacles. As a bonus, the disc also contains four demo and live tracks at the end that don't appear anywhere else, making this pretty crucial for fans of the Surfers' early psychedelic hardcore sound.
Heres our original review for the EP: I haven't followed much of what the Butthole Surfers have done over the past two decades; wasn't into the goofy alt-rock direction that the band went in after moving to the majors in the early 90's, and their acrimonious, high-profile split with Touch And Go was one of the uglier moments in indie rock's recent history. Their early records are pretty crucial, though, and still hold up as some of the most zonked hardcore punk to ever come out of the American underground. Their debut EP has been out of print on vinyl for some time, and (surprisingly) has just been repressed by Alternative Tentacles - for fans of early hardcore, this is a crucial piece of U.S. HC history, but this 1983 slab from the Butthole Surfers should be heard by anyone into seriously freaked-out heavy underground rock. The music on this 12" is, for the most part, much more hallucinatory than the Surfers you've seen on MTV videos, seven songs of crazed, LSD-snarfing punk like the opening track "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave", mashing caustic, hyperfast hardcore thrash with bizarre lyrical rantings, histrionic vocals, blasting drums...the stoned psychedelic trudge of "The Revenge Of Anus Presley" through wrecked acid-guitar, weird sound effects and simplistic pounding dirge..."Bar-B-Q Pope"'s squawking, twangy punk...it's a whacked out mashup of early hardcore, psychedelic rock and experimental music that was incomparable to anything else happening in the American underground at that time, and this EP still blazes with it's unpredictable music, ferocious energy and lunatic visions. Highly recommended, especially for you folks into the weirder side of hardcore punk - few HC bands have ever matched the weirdness of the early Butthole Surfers records.
And heres our review for the Live PCPEP 12": Second in the Buttholes vinyl reissue campaign that Alternative Tentacles has been on this year, which started with the self-titled 12" and has come round to their blistering live 12" from 1984, Live PCPPEP. We're talking golden era Surfers here, folks, when the band was the weirdest, most freaked out and fucking genius hardcore punk band in the US. Recorded live in March of 1984 at The Meridian in San Antonio, Texas, this record captures seven songs, most of which had appeared a year before on the band's self-titled EP aside from "Cowboy Bob" which would later appear on Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, but one of these songs ("Dance Of The Cobras") has never appeared on any other release, to the best of my knowledge. This shit still destroys. It's the first recording of the double-drummer lineup when Teresa Nervosa began sharing drum duties with King Coffey, and the band rages through these songs, playing them loose and fast, except for "Bar-B-Q Pope", whose sludgy horn-blasted Stooges crawl hints at the sound that the Brainbombs would drag into the sewer a few years later. Conversely, "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave" is served up in feirce blasts of feedback-soaked thrash with Gibby Haynes's hallucinatory lyrics turning this into one of hardcore's greatest (and most insane) jams. Essential.
The latest repress of this classic mutoid hardcore platter, issued in a new 2017 green vinyl edition limited to one thousand and nineteen copies.
I haven't followed much of what the Butthole Surfers have done over the past two decades; wasn't into the goofy alt-rock direction that the band went in after moving to the majors in the early 90's, and their acrimonious, high-profile split with Touch And Go was one of the uglier moments in indie rock's recent history. Their early records are pretty crucial, though, and still hold up as some of the most zonked hardcore punk to ever come out of the American underground. Their debut EP has been out of print on vinyl for some time, and (surprisingly) has just been repressed by Alternative Tentacles - for fans of early hardcore, this is a crucial piece of U.S. HC history, but this 1983 slab from the Butthole Surfers should be heard by anyone into seriously freaked-out heavy underground rock.
The music on this 12" is, for the most part, much more hallucinatory than the Surfers you've seen on MTV videos, seven songs of crazed, LSD-snarfing punk like the opening track "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave", mashing caustic, hyperfast hardcore thrash with bizarre lyrical rantings, histrionic vocals, blasting drums...the stoned psychedelic trudge of "The Revenge Of Anus Presley" through wrecked acid-guitar, weird sound effects and simplistic pounding dirge..."Bar-B-Q Pope"'s squawking, twangy punk...it's a whacked out mashup of early hardcore, psychedelic rock and experimental music that was incomparable to anything else happening in the American underground at that time, and this EP still blazes with it's unpredictable music, ferocious energy and lunatic visions. Highly recommended, especially for you folks into the weirder side of hardcore punk - few HC bands have ever matched the weirdness of the early Butthole Surfers records.
����Reissued once again, this time in a new 2015 clear vinyl edition limited to five hundred copies.
���� Second in the Buttholes vinyl reissue campaign that Alternative Tentacles has been on this year, which started with the self-titled 12" and has come round to their blistering live 12" from 1984, Live PCPPEP. We're talking golden era Surfers here, folks, when the band was the weirdest, most freaked out and fucking genius hardcore punk band in the US. Recorded live in March of 1984 at The Meridian in San Antonio, Texas, this record captures seven songs, most of which had appeared a year before on the band's self-titled EP aside from "Cowboy Bob" which would later appear on Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac, but one of these songs ("Dance Of The Cobras") has never appeared on any other release, to the best of my knowledge.
���� This shit still destroys. It's the first recording of the double-drummer lineup when Teresa Nervosa began sharing drum duties with King Coffey, and the band rages through these songs, playing them loose and fast, except for "Bar-B-Q Pope", whose sludgy horn-blasted Stooges crawl hints at the sound that the Brainbombs would drag into the sewer a few years later. Conversely, "The Shah Sleeps In Lee Harvey's Grave" is served up in fierce blasts of feedback-soaked thrash with Gibby Haynes's hallucinatory lyrics turning this into one of hardcore's greatest (and most insane) jams. Essential.
���� Packaged in a green jacket, no insert, and pretty much the exact same presentation as the original release.
��The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
��1987's Locust Abortion Technician was album number three from these pioneering psychedelic Texas punks, and again saw them pilfering classic rock songs and irreverently twisting their guts into bizarre new forms, smearing their music with all kinds of vocal weirdness and trippy effects and production fuckery and weird in-jokes, while offering up a bunch of new songs that are equally as crazed. Softly drifting on a bed of saccharine strings and some mighty strange spoken word weirdness, the Surfers burst into the Sabbath-parody / demented acid-punk of "Sweat Loaf", taking that iconic "Sweet Leaf" riff and looping it into infinity and twisting it into something totally fucked and brain-damaged. Once again, the band batters you with an unpredictable mess of deranged noise rock slop like the Stooges-in-a-tarpit acid-sludge meltdown of "Graveyard", and the pitch-shifted vocal slime and sludgy blues-puke of "Pittsburg To Lebanon". There's a few brief, surreal noisescapes like ""Weber", and even weirder noise rock experiments like "Hay" and "U.S.S.A", the latter featuring some supremely sludgy riffage and distorted crush that could almost pass for something from the Melvins or Stickmen With Rayguns. Locust Abortion easily featured some of their most surreal and disturbing stuff yet, but they could still belt out some pounding punk as effortlessly as ever, like on the pummeling, motorik rush of "Human Cannonball". Then there's "Kuntz", a weird remix of some obscure Thai pop song that the band transforms into something darker and more deranged. And when these guys wanted to crank up the heaviness, even when surrounded by their goofy, brain-damaged humor, the results could be punishing: there's the twisted thrash metal of "The O-Men", which gloms together rampaging metallic riffage and thunderous drumming buried in a murky haze, splattered with crazed cartoon voices and clusters of snarled tape noise and Hayes frothing at the mouth, spitting out mush-mouthed gibberish over the retardo-Motorhead slop; and the closer "22 Going On 23" is one of their heaviest tracks ever, a lumbering mass of filthy sludge rock and disturbing samples that foreshadow the lurching deformed nihilistic sludge punk of bands like Brainbombs and Upsidedown Cross. Out of all of the Butthole Surfers's 80's output, this was by far the band's heaviest and most malevolent sounding album, a demented sludge rock hallucination splattered with their trademark tape cut-ups, weirdo effects, and other experimental psychedelia. My personal fave of all of their albums.
The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
��1987's Locust Abortion Technician was album number three from these pioneering psychedelic Texas punks, and again saw them pilfering classic rock songs and irreverently twisting their guts into bizarre new forms, smearing their music with all kinds of vocal weirdness and trippy effects and production fuckery and weird in-jokes, while offering up a bunch of new songs that are equally as crazed. Softly drifting on a bed of saccharine strings and some mighty strange spoken word weirdness, the Surfers burst into the Sabbath-parody / demented acid-punk of "Sweat Loaf", taking that iconic "Sweet Leaf" riff and looping it into infinity and twisting it into something totally fucked and brain-damaged. Once again, the band batters you with an unpredictable mess of deranged noise rock slop like the Stooges-in-a-tarpit acid-sludge meltdown of "Graveyard", and the pitch-shifted vocal slime and sludgy blues-puke of "Pittsburg To Lebanon". There's a few brief, surreal noisescapes like ""Weber", and even weirder noise rock experiments like "Hay" and "U.S.S.A", the latter featuring some supremely sludgy riffage and distorted crush that could almost pass for something from the Melvins or Stickmen With Rayguns. Locust Abortion easily featured some of their most surreal and disturbing stuff yet, but they could still belt out some pounding punk as effortlessly as ever, like on the pummeling, motorik rush of "Human Cannonball". Then there's "Kuntz", a weird remix of some obscure Thai pop song that the band transforms into something darker and more deranged. And when these guys wanted to crank up the heaviness, even when surrounded by their goofy, brain-damaged humor, the results could be punishing: there's the twisted thrash metal of "The O-Men", which gloms together rampaging metallic riffage and thunderous drumming buried in a murky haze, splattered with crazed cartoon voices and clusters of snarled tape noise and Hayes frothing at the mouth, spitting out mush-mouthed gibberish over the retardo-Motorhead slop; and the closer "22 Going On 23" is one of their heaviest tracks ever, a lumbering mass of filthy sludge rock and disturbing samples that foreshadow the lurching deformed nihilistic sludge punk of bands like Brainbombs and Upsidedown Cross. Out of all of the Butthole Surfers's 80's output, this was by far the band's heaviest and most malevolent sounding album, a demented sludge rock hallucination splattered with their trademark tape cut-ups, weirdo effects, and other experimental psychedelia. My personal fave of all of their albums.
The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
Even on the fourth album from the Butthole Surfers, Hairway To Steven, you could still hear some lingering traces of their hardcore punk roots, even as the band was slipping further down their grimy rabbit hole of brain-damaged surrealistic sludge, acid-burnt psychedelic cowpunk, and bizarro tape/noise experiments. This 1988 album would be their last for Touch And Go, and petty much marked the transition from the band's more experimental, abstract material into the slightly more accessible, song-based stuff that they would start to focus on in the 1990s. Hairway opens in grand Butthole form, with the pounding Hendrix-homage sludgefeast "Jimi", one of their all time classic songs; for more than twelve minutes, Haynes growls and snarls and squeals through an array of fucked-up pitchshifter effects, while the band slogs through a heavy, lurching psychpunk pummel, guitars spewing twisted wah-pedal meltdowns and lysergic blues shred, the lumbering, halting rhythm about as heavy as anything that the guys in the Melvins were doing around the same time. That is, at least up till the last few minutes, where the band suddenly shifts into bizarre jangly psychedelia surrounded by birdsong, creepy cartoon voices, and muffled singing. The songs "John E. Smoke" and "Ricky" are more of their twangy cowpunk raveups, while the Surfers deliver an almost Husker Du-esque pop song with "I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas", one of the album's most accessible tracks with it's searing fuzz guitar, haunting vocals and backing acoustic guitars. Other cuts include the mutant rockabilly of "Julio Iglesias" and the killer dark psych of "Rocky", and the sinister stoned drone of "Backass", itself another one of my favorite Surfers jams, an effects-smeared, gothic-tinged tribal punk creepout.
The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
Even on the fourth album from the Butthole Surfers, Hairway To Steven, you could still hear some lingering traces of their hardcore punk roots, even as the band was slipping further down their grimy rabbit hole of brain-damaged surrealistic sludge, acid-burnt psychedelic cowpunk, and bizarro tape/noise experiments. This 1988 album would be their last for Touch And Go, and petty much marked the transition from the band's more experimental, abstract material into the slightly more accessible, song-based stuff that they would start to focus on in the 1990s. Hairway opens in grand Butthole form, with the pounding Hendrix-homage sludgefeast "Jimi", one of their all time classic songs; for more than twelve minutes, Haynes growls and snarls and squeals through an array of fucked-up pitchshifter effects, while the band slogs through a heavy, lurching psychpunk pummel, guitars spewing twisted wah-pedal meltdowns and lysergic blues shred, the lumbering, halting rhythm about as heavy as anything that the guys in the Melvins were doing around the same time. That is, at least up till the last few minutes, where the band suddenly shifts into bizarre jangly psychedelia surrounded by birdsong, creepy cartoon voices, and muffled singing. The songs "John E. Smoke" and "Ricky" are more of their twangy cowpunk raveups, while the Surfers deliver an almost Husker Du-esque pop song with "I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas", one of the album's most accessible tracks with it's searing fuzz guitar, haunting vocals and backing acoustic guitars. Other cuts include the mutant rockabilly of "Julio Iglesias" and the killer dark psych of "Rocky", and the sinister stoned drone of "Backass", itself another one of my favorite Surfers jams, an effects-smeared, gothic-tinged tribal punk creepout.
The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
While not part of the late 2013 vinyl reissue campaign for the early Butthole Surfers albums, we've never previously listed the band's reissue of their Pioughd + Widowermaker! recordings on their own Latino Buggerveil imprint, so onto the shelves it goes. Although not as crucial nor as brain-melting as the avant-hardcore and mutant noise rock material of their earlier, Touch & Go-era albums, Pioughd would be the last independent album from the Surfers prior to moving on to the majors. Which is where yours truly officially gets off the wagon. After Pioughd, the Surfers declined into bland alt-rock territory, and I've never had any interest in their subsequent recordings.
Originally released on Rough Trade, 1991's Piouhgd was the band's last true dose of mutant acid punk, though by this point they had pretty much totally left behind the mutated hardcore and extended retardo sludge jams of their previous albums for something a lot closer to Ween territory. The disc kicks off with the two part "Revolution", the first half pounding out some of the Surfers's trademark brand of fucked-up psychedelic punk, a mess of wailing stoner rock leads and deformed jangle, staccato drumming and crazed effects, leading into the longer second half as Haynes comes in with his hallucinatory, drawled vocals and the band starts to chant "Gary Shandling" over the mutant psychpunk stomp, accompanied by honeyed orchestral strings and the sounds of wailing police sirens. Another two-part song follows, "Lonesome Bulldog", an almost straight-faced country-western song complete with accordion and washboard percussion, followed by their now classic cover of Donovan's "The Hudry Gurdy Man", rendered as a breathless, electronically-warped acid rock jam layered with more strings, pipe organs and screaming brain-damaged guitar-shred. "Golden Showers" offers up goofy, carnivalesque choogle with lots of blubbering brass and trippy Hammond organ, and then they crank up the riffage for "Blindman", a demented stew of distorted 70s hard rock riffage, brain-melting tape noise and bizarre vocal gibberish.
The Surfers erupt into some utterly fucked improv rock vomit on another one of their weird Black Sabbath tributes, "No, I'm Iron Man", and the song "Something" is an odd spoof of the early Jesus And Mary Chain single "Never Understand", with the lyrics swapped out for those off of the Surfers own "Something" from their debut EP, and this version getting some additional electro-shock treatment via some insane noise and effects overload. There's more lumbering, infectious psychedelic punk on "P.S.Y.", yet another reprise of that damned "Lonesome Bulldog" song, and the whole thing ends with a long track of experimental tape collage and throbbing, tension-filled synthesizer music called "Barking Dogs".
The reissue also includes the entire 1989 Widowermaker! EP, the band's final release for Touch And Go. It's more abrasive stuff, overall, from the blown-out bass squelch and countrified noise rock of "Helicopter" to the thumping, almost industrial percussion, Hammond organ and swaying fuzzbox delirium of the ominous "Bong Song"; the creepy, almost Paisley Underground-ish psych-pop of "The Colored F.B.I. Guy"; and the maniacal final freak-out of "Booze, Tobacco, Dope, Pussy, Cars", an almost hardcore-like blast of frantic fast-paced drumming and stuttering drum machine rhythms, bellowing vocals and edgy punk guitar.
Comes in digipack packaging.
The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac was the first full-length album from the Surfers, originally released on the iconic indie label Touch And Go; where their previous EPs churned with the band's early lysergic hardcore thrashing, here the Butthole Surfers began to move in a much more psychedelic direction. Using off the wall tape editing experiments, bizarre electronic effects and the extreme emetic vocalizations of frontman Gibby Haynes, this was a band that was obviously working hard to expand beyond the parameters of punk rock. Opening the album with the drooling, gibbering insanity of "Concubine", Haynes starts to spit up a litany of weird ravings over the roiling, rocking punk rock dirge. "Eye Of The Chicken" is a hallucinatory blast of acid punk weirdness that combines bursts of wiry hardcore with a bizarre stop-start structure that slips from punk into fucked-up vocoder-like moaning. Then there's "Dum Dum", which starts off sounding like some darkened, murky krautrock workout, the drums pounding out a hypnotic, rolling backbeat that's lifted wholesale from Black Sabbath's "Children Of The Grave", as sheets of guitar noise and feedback wash over the band, the bass locked into a simple sinister riff, Haynes delivering his lines in a rapid patter throughout the song. And "Woly Boly" is weird, almost Cramps-style psychobilly boogie, bizarre twangy guitar carnage splattered across the band's mutant cowpunk. "Negro Observer" is one of their more melodic noise rock songs, featuring some pretty-yet-dissonant guitar jangle and gobs of wheezing, tuneless saxophone blurt, followed by the ripping hardcore anthem "Butthole Surfers", one of the most ferocious songs on Psychic..., a throwback to the sort of atonal speed-fueled delirium found on their debut EP. Of course, more weirdness abounds: the fucked-up brain-damaged scum-blues dirge "Lady Sniff", the ominous surf-rock flecked punk of "Mexican Caravan", "Gary Floyd"'s country-fried delirium. One of the longest songs on the album, "Cherub" is another one of those oddly krautrocky songs, more of that hypnotic rhythmic lurch and loop layered beneath bursts of crazy effects and Haynes's nutzoid whoops and howls, the guitar tuned in to almost theremin-like transmissions of ghostly sound. Definitely one of my favorite Surfers albums, and an all-time classic in the canon of surrealistic psych-punk.
The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac was the first full-length album from the Surfers, originally released on the iconic indie label Touch And Go; where their previous EPs churned with the band's early lysergic hardcore thrashing, here the Butthole Surfers began to move in a much more psychedelic direction. Using off the wall tape editing experiments, bizarre electronic effects and the extreme emetic vocalizations of frontman Gibby Haynes, this was a band that was obviously working hard to expand beyond the parameters of punk rock. Opening the album with the drooling, gibbering insanity of "Concubine", Haynes starts to spit up a litany of weird ravings over the roiling, rocking punk rock dirge. "Eye Of The Chicken" is a hallucinatory blast of acid punk weirdness that combines bursts of wiry hardcore with a bizarre stop-start structure that slips from punk into fucked-up vocoder-like moaning. Then there's "Dum Dum", which starts off sounding like some darkened, murky krautrock workout, the drums pounding out a hypnotic, rolling backbeat that's lifted wholesale from Black Sabbath's "Children Of The Grave", as sheets of guitar noise and feedback wash over the band, the bass locked into a simple sinister riff, Haynes delivering his lines in a rapid patter throughout the song. And "Woly Boly" is weird, almost Cramps-style psychobilly boogie, bizarre twangy guitar carnage splattered across the band's mutant cowpunk. "Negro Observer" is one of their more melodic noise rock songs, featuring some pretty-yet-dissonant guitar jangle and gobs of wheezing, tuneless saxophone blurt, followed by the ripping hardcore anthem "Butthole Surfers", one of the most ferocious songs on Psychic..., a throwback to the sort of atonal speed-fueled delirium found on their debut EP. Of course, more weirdness abounds: the fucked-up brain-damaged scum-blues dirge "Lady Sniff", the ominous surf-rock flecked punk of "Mexican Caravan", "Gary Floyd"'s country-fried delirium. One of the longest songs on the album, "Cherub" is another one of those oddly krautrocky songs, more of that hypnotic rhythmic lurch and loop layered beneath bursts of crazy effects and Haynes's nutzoid whoops and howls, the guitar tuned in to almost theremin-like transmissions of ghostly sound. Definitely one of my favorite Surfers albums, and an all-time classic in the canon of surrealistic psych-punk.
The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
By their second album, 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, the Butthole Surfers had for the most part evolved beyond the Dadaist hardcore punk of their earlier records for a kind of creepy, extremely experimental neo-psychedelic noise rock, experimenting at greater length with drum machines, tapes, violins, electronic effects, their bizarre psychpunk soundscapes powered by the tandem pummel of their dual drummer lineup. Beginning with the weird, "Heart Of Gold"-esque mutant folk of "Creep In The Cellar", Rembrandt Pussyhorse kicks in with a more focused production quality, this first short song filled with scrabbly violins, piano and shambling drums, Haynes's creepazoid lyrics howling over the shuffling beat, making for one of the most coherent Sufers songs that we'd heard from them so far. The band's quirky, bizarro songwriting is in full effect here, songs like "Sea Ferring" sounding like some brain-damaged sea shanty, appearing before the band's insane re-imagining of The Guess Who's "American Woman", transform the classic rock nugget into an almost unrecognizable cacophony of booming tribal drums, squalling guitar feedback, bizarre tape fuckery, industrial noise, and those crazed vocals blasting out of a ridiculously distorted bullhorn. Haynes's tremulous singing is as always a focal point of the Surfers sound, and adds to the already overwhelming creep factor on display here: "Waiting For Jimmy To Kick" is one of their more nightmarish tracks, all rolling drumbeats and sinister minor key piano and layered screaming, while "Strangers Die Everyday" brings in some schlocky gothic pipe organs, weird vocal noises and creephouse atmospherics for a short instrumental that sounds like something off of an old European 1970s horror film. More trippy Hammond organs show up on the shambling drugged-out noise rock of "Perry" as well, a mutated blooze-crawl through fields of nonsensical vocals, squiggly acid rock guitar shred, messed-up tape manipulations and various surreal samples. Other highlights include the stoned drone of "Whirling Hall Of Knives" and the pummeling circular groove of "Mark Says Alright" that turns into an almost krautrocky throb of pounding caveman psychedelia.
The CD reissue also features the Cream Corn From The Socket Of Davis, recorded roughly around the same time period; this stuff shares much of the same acid-drenched noise rock vibe and lysergic punk abandon as the Rembrandt album, though these songs are generally a little more aggro, a little more lurching and angular, spiking the strange stop-start arrangements with heavier doses of that fucked-up atonal cowpunk guitar. The song "Comb" is one of the Surfer's heaviest, a stomping, almost industrialized robo-dirge that lurches violently across the juddering drum machine rhythms, almost sounding like one of the more brain-damaged early Melvins songs, followed by the wiry desperation of "To Parter". And closer "Tornadoes" almost resembles the Dead Kennedys, albeit filtered though that bizarro Texan drawl and maniac cowpunk attitude. Killer!
The prime movers of Texan post-hardcore weirdness, the Butthole Surfers produced some of the most demented outsider punk to ever lurch out of the American underground during the 1980s. The band mashed together whacked-out live antics and notorious drug-fueled carnival-like performances with their lysergic stew of drug-addled noise rock, fucked-up psychedelic punk, pummeling aggression and bizarro songwriting; indeed, there was nothing like the Surfers back when these guys were destroying stages in the 80s. The first four full-length albums from the Butthole Surfers documented this insanity in full, and every one of 'em is recommended - nay, required - listening for fans of mutant punk; most bands are totally diminished by their fourth album, but not the Surfers; by the end of the decade, the band was producing their heaviest and most sinister stuff yet. From their earliest churnings as a wild, LSD-fueled hardcore punk outfit, their album's just kept getting more twisted and more experimental as the decade progressed, from the bizarre avant-punk of 1984's Psychic... Powerless... Another Man's Sac through the tape-collage heavy experiments of 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, from the crushing sludge-drenched heaviness of 1987's Locust Abortion Technician to the scatological psychedelia of 1988's Hairway to Steven. Sure, their subsequent albums would become increasingly of less interest as time went on (their 1991 album Piouhgd is the last Surfers record that I give a damn about), but man, those first four albums make up some of the craziest drug-punk that ever clambered out of the American post-hardcore underground. We now have all of them back in print on vinyl for the first time in over a decade, newly re-mastered and packaged with digital downloads of the album; granted, the reissues are pretty barebones, basically just replicating the original packaging for the original releases, but it's still good to have these classic slabs of bizarro hardcore punk and psychedelic noise rock on vinyl again. We also have all of these crucial albums back in stock on CD as well...
By their second album, 1986's Rembrandt Pussyhorse, the Butthole Surfers had for the most part evolved beyond the Dadaist hardcore punk of their earlier records for a kind of creepy, extremely experimental neo-psychedelic noise rock, experimenting at greater length with drum machines, tapes, violins, electronic effects, their bizarre psychpunk soundscapes powered by the tandem pummel of their dual drummer lineup. Beginning with the weird, "Heart Of Gold"-esque mutant folk of "Creep In The Cellar", Rembrandt Pussyhorse kicks in with a more focused production quality, this first short song filled with scrabbly violins, piano and shambling drums, Haynes's creepazoid lyrics howling over the shuffling beat, making for one of the most coherent Sufers songs that we'd heard from them so far. The band's quirky, bizarro songwriting is in full effect here, songs like "Sea Ferring" sounding like some brain-damaged sea shanty, appearing before the band's insane re-imagining of The Guess Who's "American Woman", transform the classic rock nugget into an almost unrecognizable cacophony of booming tribal drums, squalling guitar feedback, bizarre tape fuckery, industrial noise, and those crazed vocals blasting out of a ridiculously distorted bullhorn. Haynes's tremulous singing is as always a focal point of the Surfers sound, and adds to the already overwhelming creep factor on display here: "Waiting For Jimmy To Kick" is one of their more nightmarish tracks, all rolling drumbeats and sinister minor key piano and layered screaming, while "Strangers Die Everyday" brings in some schlocky gothic pipe organs, weird vocal noises and creephouse atmospherics for a short instrumental that sounds like something off of an old European 1970s horror film. More trippy Hammond organs show up on the shambling drugged-out noise rock of "Perry" as well, a mutated blooze-crawl through fields of nonsensical vocals, squiggly acid rock guitar shred, messed-up tape manipulations and various surreal samples. Other highlights include the stoned drone of "Whirling Hall Of Knives" and the pummeling circular groove of "Mark Says Alright" that turns into an almost krautrocky throb of pounding caveman psychedelia.
The CD reissue also features the Cream Corn From The Socket Of Davis, recorded roughly around the same time period; this stuff shares much of the same acid-drenched noise rock vibe and lysergic punk abandon as the Rembrandt album, though these songs are generally a little more aggro, a little more lurching and angular, spiking the strange stop-start arrangements with heavier doses of that fucked-up atonal cowpunk guitar. The song "Comb" is one of the Surfer's heaviest, a stomping, almost industrialized robo-dirge that lurches violently across the juddering drum machine rhythms, almost sounding like one of the more brain-damaged early Melvins songs, followed by the wiry desperation of "To Parter". And closer "Tornadoes" almost resembles the Dead Kennedys, albeit filtered though that bizarro Texan drawl and maniac cowpunk attitude. Killer!
OK, gonna make this fast as we only have 8 COPIES of this ultra-limited pressing of the troubled final release from the legendary Buzzoven, and I am not
expecting these to last very long. I still can't even believe that I was able to find these! Released on a label called Sounds Of The South, this is a
limited edition pressing of the last Buzzoven album ever recorded...it's just shy of half an hour long, but man does this RULE, a raw, snarling attack from
the hatesludge masters that rips offa the turntable like a pack of starving junkies.
Revelation: Sick Again was recorded sometime around 2000 by Billy Anderson, with the Kirk/DIxie Dave/Ramset lineup of Buzzoven...I'm not too sure
about the details on this as info on this is sorta hard to come by; the album was slated to be released by Hydra Head years ago, but apparently a label that
Buzzoven had worked with in the past threatened Hydra Head with legal action if they released Revelation: Sick Again, so this music has been
floating around in limbo for years, being traded between hardcore Buzzoven fanatics. This is crucial Buzzoven, eight jams of grisly, noisy sludgepunk, equal
parts Black Flag, Black Sabbath, a nasty case of laryngitis, and piles of pills, with the songs "Never, Never Again", "Fast", "Kakkila", "V So", "Live",
"Junkie", "Lose", "Porch Monkey", and "Drying Out". All splattered with soundbites and fucking nasty feedback, with that swampy swagger that their
brethren in Eyehategod have, but Buzzoven might be even more diseased and gnarly sounding. Might be due to the raw as fuck recording here, but it sounds
completely brutal, and anyone that's followed Buzzoven since their early releases know that these guys are totally for real, total nihilist drug fiends with
riffs that can kill squares on sight. The center label itself states �All words and lyrics are merely thoughts and ramblings during periods of frustration,
depression, hopelessness, drug induced misery and confusion, and like always are subject to change anytime without notice.� The record comes in a stark white
sleeve that has been hand screened with artwork from Arik Roper, who has handled the art duties for pretty much all of the Buzzoven records as well as
Dixie's post-Buzzoven outfit Weedeater. At this point it's doubtful that the official Hydra Head release of Revelation: Sick Again will ever see the
light of day, so if you're a Buzzoven fan like us and haven't picked up this gnarly final fix from the kings of bilious Southern sludge fuckdom, here's yer
chance! Only 500 were pressed according to my sources. On black vinyl.
Reissues and releases of the recordings of legendary drug-chugging sludge maniacs Buzzov-en have been few and far between, with the last collection of out-of-print material Welcome To Violence coming out back in 2005 (and itself now out-of-print!). I'll take what I can get though, especially when it's rare studio stuff that I've never heard before. The latest document from Buzzov-en is a short collection, five songs, that were recorded way back in 1994 around the same time as their amazing album Sore, their sole release for Roadrunner Records, and while the recording quality is pretty grotty and raw, it's still primo Buzzov-en sludge, super heavy and crawling and noise-spattered, smeared in vile black feedback and vomitous screams wallowing in the depths of the mix, more tweaked and freaked-out than Eyehategod but sharing a similar punk-influenced slow-mo crush. The four shorter songs on Violence are punishing, grinding brutality, from "Mainline"'s droning hypnotic sludge and the herky-jerky stop/start groove and delirious samples of "Breed", to the pounding slo-mo drums and feedback-soaked dirge "Paintake" and the short, brutal blast of thrashing hardcore skuzz of "I Never", all of 'em ferocious and pissed and violent, the band swirling in the throes of a murderous narco-fueled rage, totally negative and hateful and psychotic. Then there's the almost sixteen minute "Nod", a seriously slow narcotized dirge with random percussion, swirling slurred and mumbling vocals, an endlessly repeating Sabbathoid riff churning through it, while suspended guitar feedback and super detuned guitar rumble hovers in the murky atmosphere, super heavy but also really abstract, a killer slab of noisy psychedelic drugsludge.
Needless to say, anyone into Buzzov-en's early releases will love this unearthed collection of tracks, especially the four shorter tracks that deliver the amazingly ferocious punky sludgecore that these guys helped pioneer. Comes in digipack packaging, and includes some brief liner notes from Buzzov-en singer/guitarist Kirk Fisher that suggests that a new full length may finally be coming soon from the band!
Also available on limited edition vinyl with a digital download code.
Reissues and releases of the recordings of legendary drug-chugging sludge maniacs Buzzov-en have been few and far between, with the last collection of out-of-print material Welcome To Violence coming out back in 2005 (and itself now out-of-print!). I'll take what I can get though, especially when it's rare studio stuff that I've never heard before. The latest document from Buzzov-en is a short collection, five songs, that were recorded way back in 1994 around the same time as their amazing album Sore, their sole release for Roadrunner Records, and while the recording quality is pretty grotty and raw, it's still primo Buzzov-en sludge, super heavy and crawling and noise-spattered, smeared in vile black feedback and vomitous screams wallowing in the depths of the mix, more tweaked and freaked-out than Eyehategod but sharing a similar punk-influenced slow-mo crush. The four shorter songs on Violence are punishing, grinding brutality, from "Mainline"'s droning hypnotic sludge and the herky-jerky stop/start groove and delirious samples of "Breed", to the pounding slo-mo drums and feedback-soaked dirge "Paintake" and the short, brutal blast of thrashing hardcore skuzz of "I Never", all of 'em ferocious and pissed and violent, the band swirling in the throes of a murderous narco-fueled rage, totally negative and hateful and psychotic. Then there's the almost sixteen minute "Nod", a seriously slow narcotized dirge with random percussion, swirling slurred and mumbling vocals, an endlessly repeating Sabbathoid riff churning through it, while suspended guitar feedback and super detuned guitar rumble hovers in the murky atmosphere, super heavy but also really abstract, a killer slab of noisy psychedelic drugsludge.
Needless to say, anyone into Buzzov-en's early releases will love this unearthed collection of tracks, especially the four shorter tracks that deliver the amazingly ferocious punky sludgecore that these guys helped pioneer. Comes in digipack packaging, and includes some brief liner notes from Buzzov-en singer/guitarist Kirk Fisher that suggests that a new full length may finally be coming soon from the band!
This collection of rare older recordings from Southern sludgecore legends Buzzoven from 2005 has been out of print for a while, but is now once again available, and just in time for the upcoming reunion shows that Buzzoven is doing on the East Coast...
Long awaited collection of early recordings from one of thee gnarliest Southern hardcore bands to ever stride the planet! BUZZOVEN were the natural progression from CORROSION OF CONFORMITY's grisly crossover thrash years, perfecting that deep south brand of sickening sludge punk to an art form. Add in Melvins / "Bleach" era Nirvana -esque thug rock, and singer Kirk's unique and hellish vocals, and this stuff remains some of the most vicious underground heaviness ever. Equal parts hardcore punk, cerebral heaviness, and total amplifier worship of early 90's sludge like Eyehategod and Sleep. Their music and lyrics were drenched in hatred, self loathing, drug addiction, and violence...this stuff is for real. Their live shows have become the stuff of legends, frequently ending with Kirk a bloody mess. Aboslutely essential stuff for fans of brutal sludge. This disc features BUZZOVEN's To A Frown LP, the Unwilling To Explain EP, and the Wound EP. Brand new artwork from Arik Roper, who has also done covers for WEEDEATER, HIGH ON FIRE, and SLEEP. Crucial.
For years, I've been hoping that the Buzzoven back catalog would be reissued, as everything that these southern sludge legends ever released has gone out of print, even more recent reissued like the Welcome To Violence collection that Alternative Tentacles out a few years ago (which is also now available again and listed in this week's new arrivals list), but for a while now, it's been tough to get ahold of anything from Buzzoven without having to deal with collectors prices and used bins. Now that the band has announced a run of shows on the East Coast this fall and appears to be rising from their long slumber, we're finally beginning to see their stuff becoming available again, starting with this new reissue of At A Loss, the last album from Buzzoven from 1998, originally released on Off The Records. This thirteen-song album featured a new lineup; with founding member Kirk Fisher joined by drummer Ramzi Ateyeh (also of Sourvein) and bassist Dixie Dave (Weedeater) for a new bout of filthy, liquor-soaked sludgepunk and scumbag metal.
While At A Loss isn't as crushingly metallic and chaotic as their legendary Roadrunner debut Sore, the band still sounded utterly violent and ready to tear your jugular out with file-sharpened teeth, grinding through the quick, lurching gutterpunk of the opening title track and junkie sludge anthems like "Dirtkickers" and "Useless", lacing the songs with samples from Taxi Driver and other nihilistic films, dropping sledghammer vomitpummel and tar-gunked bass on "A Lack Of" and two minute blasts of hardcore punk savagery with "Flow" and "Whiskey Fit", slipping into the deformed Sabbathian swing of "Kakkila"'s and "Crawl Away" and grinding out one of their most abject and narco-fucked jams in "Loracei", a bleak, nauseous dose of ultra-slow crawling doom and howling feedback . Buzzoven always infected their noxious sludge with weird, trippy aural hallucinations too, which appear here in the haunting acoustic guitar, droning vocals, feedback and samples of "Heal", the grueling cover of Electric Light Orchestra's "Don't Bring Me Down" that reinvents the classic rock chestnut into something infinitely more foul and bilious, bits of strange scraping industrial loops, and ending the disc with the psychedelic sample/noise-heavy doom of closer "Left Behind", which ends up decaying into nearly half an hour of minimal electronic pulse and static.
In my opinion, Buzzoven were the only band to actually rival Eyehategod when it comes to this sort of filthy, drug-fueled southeast hardcore sludge. Their
crushing, groovy mutoid Southern rock riffing fused to detuned, distorted metallic crush and scorched snarling vocals that would at times remind you of Eyehategod, but these guys sounded even more frantic and violent, their thick, meaty recording on At A Loss covered in alcohol sheen and vomit, and they possessed a volatile front man in Kirk Fisher, whose gut-churning vocals sound totally psychotic, schizophrenic mewling, snarling, screaming the negative, nihilistic lyrics, his throat spewing multiple voices piled on top of each other. A punishing bad-mood listening experience, crucial for fans of Southern scum metal like Eyehategod, Weedeater, and Antiseen.
This new Emetic reissue comes in a full color digipack and includes all of Arik Roper's original artwork.
Also available on vinyl for the first time ever, with all new artwork exclusive to the Lp format.
For years, I've been hoping that the Buzzoven back catalog would be reissued, as everything that these southern sludge legends ever released has gone out of print, even more recent reissued like the Welcome To Violence collection that Alternative Tentacles out a few years ago (which is also now available again and listed in this week's new arrivals list), but for a while now, it's been tough to get ahold of anything from Buzzoven without having to deal with collectors prices and used bins. Now that the band has announced a run of shows on the East Coast this fall and appears to be rising from their long slumber, we're finally beginning to see their stuff becoming available again, starting with this new reissue of At A Loss, the last album from Buzzoven from 1998, originally released on Off The Records. This thirteen-song album featured a new lineup; with founding member Kirk Fisher joined by drummer Ramzi Ateyeh (also of Sourvein) and bassist Dixie Dave (Weedeater) for a new bout of filthy, liquor-soaked sludgepunk and scumbag metal.
While At A Loss isn't as crushingly metallic and chaotic as their legendary Roadrunner debut Sore, the band still sounded utterly violent and ready to tear your jugular out with file-sharpened teeth, grinding through the quick, lurching gutterpunk of the opening title track and junkie sludge anthems like "Dirtkickers" and "Useless", lacing the songs with samples from Taxi Driver and other nihilistic films, dropping sledghammer vomitpummel and tar-gunked bass on "A Lack Of" and two minute blasts of hardcore punk savagery with "Flow" and "Whiskey Fit", slipping into the deformed Sabbathian swing of "Kakkila"'s and "Crawl Away" and grinding out one of their most abject and narco-fucked jams in "Loracei", a bleak, nauseous dose of ultra-slow crawling doom and howling feedback . Buzzoven always infected their noxious sludge with weird, trippy aural hallucinations too, which appear here in the haunting acoustic guitar, droning vocals, feedback and samples of "Heal", the grueling cover of Electric Light Orchestra's "Don't Bring Me Down" that reinvents the classic rock chestnut into something infinitely more foul and bilious, bits of strange scraping industrial loops, and ending the disc with the psychedelic sample/noise-heavy doom of closer "Left Behind", which ends up decaying into nearly half an hour of minimal electronic pulse and static.
In my opinion, Buzzoven were the only band to actually rival Eyehategod when it comes to this sort of filthy, drug-fueled southeast hardcore sludge. Their
crushing, groovy mutoid Southern rock riffing fused to detuned, distorted metallic crush and scorched snarling vocals that would at times remind you of Eyehategod, but these guys sounded even more frantic and violent, their thick, meaty recording on At A Loss covered in alcohol sheen and vomit, and they possessed a volatile front man in Kirk Fisher, whose gut-churning vocals sound totally psychotic, schizophrenic mewling, snarling, screaming the negative, nihilistic lyrics, his throat spewing multiple voices piled on top of each other. A punishing bad-mood listening experience, crucial for fans of Southern scum metal like Eyehategod, Weedeater, and Antiseen.
I can't believe I'm actually holding this. Buzzoven's Revelation:Sick Again was announced to be released almost a fuckin' decade ago, but for some mysterious (apparently legal, label-related) reason, was shelved indefinitely and thought by many (including myself) to be a lost cause, an album that would never see the light of day outside of grotty Mp3 rips. There was a "bootleg" vinyl release of the album that came out a few years ago on a label called Sounds Of The South that I was actually able to get for the shop, but that was super limited and sold out immediately, and the packaging left a lot to be desired. Well, it did finally come out on Hydra Head as was long promised, and now has proper artwork, a deluxe vinyl edition along with a cd version, and if you're a fan of these legendary drug-addled sludge punks from North Carolina, you're probably already zooming in on the "add to cart" button. And man, does this rule. Just as I said when we had that bootleg release in stock, this is a raw, punishing attack from the hatesludge masters that comes snarling off the turntable like a pack of starving, rabid junkies.
Here's the original review I wrote a while back: Revelation: Sick Again was recorded sometime around 2000 by Billy Anderson, with the Kirk/DIxie Dave/Ramset lineup of Buzzoven...I'm not too sure about the details on this as info on this is sorta hard to come by; the album was slated to be released by Hydra Head years ago, but apparently a label that Buzzoven had worked with in the past threatened Hydra Head with legal action if they released Revelation: Sick Again, so this music has been floating around in limbo for years, being traded between hardcore fanatics. This is crucial Buzzoven, eight jams of grisly, noisy sludgepunk, equal parts Black Flag, Black Sabbath, a nasty case of laryngitis, and piles of pills, with the songs "Never, Never Again", "Fast", "Kakkila", "V So", "Live", "Junkie", "Lose", "Porch Monkey", and "Drying Out". All splattered with sound bites and fucking nasty feedback, with that swampy swagger that their brethren in Eyehategod have, but Buzzoven might be even more diseased and gnarly sounding. This might be due to the raw as fuck recording here, but it sounds completely brutal, and anyone that's followed Buzzoven since their early releases know that these guys are totally for real, total nihilist drug fiends with riffs that can kill squares on sight. The center label itself states �All words and lyrics are merely thoughts and ramblings during periods of frustration, depression, hopelessness, drug induced misery and confusion, and like always are subject to change anytime without notice.� If you're a fan like us, this is an essential fix from the kings of bilious Southern violence.
I can't believe I'm actually holding this. Buzzoven's Revelation:Sick Again was announced to be released almost a fuckin' decade ago, but for some mysterious (apparently legal, label-related) reason, was shelved indefinitely and thought by many (including myself) to be a lost cause, an album that would never see the light of day outside of grotty Mp3 rips. There was a "bootleg" vinyl release of the album that came out a few years ago on a label called Sounds Of The South that I was actually able to get for the shop, but that was super limited and sold out immediately, and the packaging left a lot to be desired. Well, it did finally come out on Hydra Head as was long promised, and now has proper artwork, a deluxe vinyl edition along with a cd version, and if you're a fan of these legendary drug-addled sludge punks from North Carolina, you're probably already zooming in on the "add to cart" button. And man, does this rule. Just as I said when we had that bootleg release in stock, this is a raw, punishing attack from the hatesludge masters that comes snarling off the turntable like a pack of starving, rabid junkies.
Here's the original review I wrote a while back: Revelation: Sick Again was recorded sometime around 2000 by Billy Anderson, with the Kirk/DIxie Dave/Ramset lineup of Buzzoven...I'm not too sure about the details on this as info on this is sorta hard to come by; the album was slated to be released by Hydra Head years ago, but apparently a label that Buzzoven had worked with in the past threatened Hydra Head with legal action if they released Revelation: Sick Again, so this music has been floating around in limbo for years, being traded between hardcore fanatics. This is crucial Buzzoven, eight jams of grisly, noisy sludgepunk, equal parts Black Flag, Black Sabbath, a nasty case of laryngitis, and piles of pills, with the songs "Never, Never Again", "Fast", "Kakkila", "V So", "Live", "Junkie", "Lose", "Porch Monkey", and "Drying Out". All splattered with sound bites and fucking nasty feedback, with that swampy swagger that their brethren in Eyehategod have, but Buzzoven might be even more diseased and gnarly sounding. This might be due to the raw as fuck recording here, but it sounds completely brutal, and anyone that's followed Buzzoven since their early releases know that these guys are totally for real, total nihilist drug fiends with riffs that can kill squares on sight. The center label itself states �All words and lyrics are merely thoughts and ramblings during periods of frustration, depression, hopelessness, drug induced misery and confusion, and like always are subject to change anytime without notice.� If you're a fan like us, this is an essential fix from the kings of bilious Southern violence.
Back in stock!
Everyone seemed to be taken by surprise when Southern Lord announced that they were going to be releasing a new collaboration between Japanese psych-heavies Boris and Ian Astbury, front man for The Cult, but I could see how things could have led to this. The last couple of albums from The Cult had some fleeting moments of heaviness that suggested that the venerable hard rockers were soaking up some of the heavier underground rock sounds that have emerged in the past decade, and there's always been a certain anthemic quality to Boris's music that could allow them to back an outgoing singer like Astbury. That said, I couldn't even guess as to what the hell this match up was going to end up sounding like.
I guess I thought that BXI would end up sounding a little baroque, but what we get with this four song Ep is the most accessible material that I've heard from Boris. That's not to say that Boris fans won't like this; everyone around here that digs Boris picked this up. But it's almost radio friendly, with very little of the extreme distortion, frantic garage energy or weirdness that you might expect.
The opener "Teeth And Claws" is heavy and grungey sounding, vaguely psychedelic with it's spacey guitars but with a big hooky chorus and harmonica, and Astbury's dramatic wailing over top. That's followed by the much heavier "We Are Witches", which combines choppy metallic riffing with Astbury's weird vocal phrasing. The third song is a cover of The Cult's classic song "Rain" off of their 1985 album Love, and it sounds pretty great; that main riff becomes all crunchy and swaddled in shimmering reverb, while Wata takes over the vocals, singing in a delicate whispered vocal that is almost crushed by the red-hot guitar, with Ghost's Michio Kurihara joining the band for some haunting guitar leads. The last song "Magickal Child" is pretty fantastic too, crushing majestic glacial pop that starts off with Kurihara's eerie phantasmal guitar that leads the song into euphoric Jesu-esque sludge, soaring melodic fuzz guitar over huge, booming slow motion drums and Astbury's most restrained performance on the disc. That closer is definitely the best of the original songs here.
So yeah, it's an uneven effort, but I'm really curious to see if this union continues into a full length just based on the last song on here. And that cover of "Rain" is pretty damn intoxicating, I've gotta say...
Back in stock!
Also available as a deluxe 180 gram vinyl package.
Everyone seemed to be taken by surprise when Southern Lord announced that they were going to be releasing a new collaboration between Japanese psych-heavies Boris and Ian Astbury, front man for The Cult, but I could see how things could have led to this. The last couple of albums from The Cult had some fleeting moments of heaviness that suggested that the venerable hard rockers were soaking up some of the heavier underground rock sounds that have emerged in the past decade, and there's always been a certain anthemic quality to Boris's music that could allow them to back an outgoing singer like Astbury. That said, I couldn't even guess as to what the hell this match up was going to end up sounding like.
I guess I thought that BXI would end up sounding a little baroque, but what we get with this four song Ep is the most accessible material that I've heard from Boris. That's not to say that Boris fans won't like this; everyone around here that digs Boris picked this up. But it's almost radio friendly, with very little of the extreme distortion, frantic garage energy or weirdness that you might expect.
The opener "Teeth And Claws" is heavy and grungey sounding, vaguely psychedelic with it's spacey guitars but with a big hooky chorus and harmonica, and Astbury's dramatic wailing over top. That's followed by the much heavier "We Are Witches", which combines choppy metallic riffing with Astbury's weird vocal phrasing. The third song is a cover of The Cult's classic song "Rain" off of their 1985 album Love, and it sounds pretty great; that main riff becomes all crunchy and swaddled in shimmering reverb, while Wata takes over the vocals, singing in a delicate whispered vocal that is almost crushed by the red-hot guitar, with Ghost's Michio Kurihara joining the band for some haunting guitar leads. The last song "Magickal Child" is pretty fantastic too, crushing majestic glacial pop that starts off with Kurihara's eerie phantasmal guitar that leads the song into euphoric Jesu-esque sludge, soaring melodic fuzz guitar over huge, booming slow motion drums and Astbury's most restrained performance on the disc. That closer is definitely the best of the original songs here.
So yeah, it's an uneven effort, but I'm really curious to see if this union continues into a full length just based on the last song on here. And that cover of "Rain" is pretty damn intoxicating, I've gotta say...
BYLA is the guitar-heavy duo of Colin Marston and Kevin Hufnagel, who also play together in instrumental math metal trio DYSRHYTHMIA. These dreamy, bleary-
eyed sheets of guitar-drone driven ambient post-rock are a far cry from the apeshit tech/jazz/prog moves these guys execute in their other bands (which in
the case of Colin, also includes BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS and avant-glitch/metal/wtf project INFIDEL?/CASTRO!). The disc contains 11 tracks of twilight sound,
generated almost exclusively with guitars (both electric and acoustic), with ethereal feedback drones and deep floating ur-rumble layered with gradually
building, softly played melodies played on acoustic guitar, and pretty post-rock arpeggios played sleepily over buzzing amplifier presence. Very very pretty
and soothing, a sort of disembodied shoegazer prettiness that makes for a terrific album for late night listening, evoking the sort of nighttime urban
landscapes presented on the digipack's photography. Kinda reminds us of a combination of Troum's dreamy drift, the lush avant-ambient of Mandible Chatter,
and the gentle guitar forms of Loren Mazzacane Connors. Fans of Godspeed You Black Emperor, Sigur Ros at their most delicate, and the first House Of Low
Culture CD will LOVE this. Recommended.
Byla's debut album was a collection of gorgeous, delicate post rock ambience filled with fragile acoustic guitar melodies and washes of dense chordal guitar drift, a kind of somnolent and beautiful instrumental dronerock that would have fit in right at home on the Kranky label alongside similiar artists like Labradford and Windy & Carl. It was surprising at first to hear such dreamy driftscapes coming from the duo of Colin Marston (also of Behold...The Arctopus, Infidel?/Castro!, and Dysrhythmia) and Kevin Hufnagel (Dysrhythmia), since these guys are normally blitzing us with heavy, metallic prog through their other bands. That debut was a killer slab of guitar-drone though, and I had been looking forward to their next one, doubly so when it was announced that their follow up was going to be a collaboration with Jarboe from Swans. Viscera has been out for a while through Translation Loss but it took forever for us me to get around to listing it, and it's both a stunning followup to Byla's first disc and a totally surprising change in sound for the duo that will probably shock anyone expecting more of the first album's gleaming ambience. Jarboe's presence as a shapeshifting muse in recent collaborations with avant metallers like Cobalt, Neurosis, and Justin Broadrick and Jesu has produced some ferociously emotional music, and with Byla, they create a brutally dense ambient hellstorm that for most of the album feels closer to the crushing blackened distortoblasts of Skullflower's recent releases and the more noise-centric, abstract corners of experimental black metal. The album is divided between these epic stretches of blown-out, multitracked tremelo riffing and feedback and a few tracks of gorgeous acoustic strum and shimmering folky ambience that echoes both Byla's first album as well as later Swans and Jarboe's solo material. On the longer, heavier tracks, Byla creates intensely dense drone-oceans of hyperfast blackened guitar strum and churning low-end rumble, no drums or percussion, just a massive wall of orchestral black blast and endless layers of buzz that sounds like Rhys Chatham conducting a guitar army made up exclusively of black metal guitarists. Over this, Jarboe rends her voice into an endless, wordless stream of breathing sounds, harmonized chorals, and possessed howling, timestretched into infinite streaks of sound racing across the surface of Byla's blackdrone symphony. The two acoustic tracks on the other hand are like short interludes in between the epic 20+ minute buzzdrone guitar maelstroms, beautiful minimalist melodies fingerpicked on processed acoustics that back Jarboe's ethereal singing. Also of interest is the guest appearance from Mick Barr of Krallice/Orthrelm/Octis who plays lead guitar on the final track, and the combination of his hyperspeed single note runs and the buzzing black droneriffs make it sound like an ambient, minimalist version of Krallice. Total hypnotic. The disc is packaged in a digipack with mandala-like artwork from Cedric Victor-Desouza.
"
Anti-Christian minds never rest - so there you have it - A Spanish-Swiss blasphemous sermon conducted by two of Europes' profane hypodermic forces: C-utter and Dave Phillipsaka Dead Peni: C-utter set the skeletal rules as if they were desecrating a burial ground while Dead Peni purifies what's left in a methodical manner .
It actually starts with dogs barking in fear and then church bells chiming their divine doctrine for the last time before C-utter lay down their disgust doom virulence, defiling anything in their way. Dead Peni implements the verdict right after with two tracks of sludgy-droney torture chamber treatment for priests, whilst the later of these two is inspired by Laibach's "Bogomila - Verfhrung" from the "Krst Pod Triglavom - Baptism" album. "W.I.T.C.H" by C-utter brings to mind Diamanda Gals' "Plague Mass" and quotes from "Comunicados Y Hechizos", an announcements and spells book to practice and demonstrate another victory for the dark forces. Over and out.
" - label description
OK, so I just wrote up Experience The Concreteness from C.C.C.C. side-project South Saturn Delta for last month's New Additions list, and went on and on at length how that was an even more brutal manifestation of the space-noise overdrive of C.C.C.C., Hiroshi Hasegawa's churning synthesizer furnace amplified into even more ear shredding levels of cosmic blast. Well, after listening to the latest C.C.C.C. album this past week, I'm thinking that I might need to eat my words - on Chaos Is The Cosmos, the prestigious Japanese noise cult returns with their first new album since 1996's Flash and it's as skull-shreddingly intense and crushing as any Japanese noise album I've heard in the past decade. Focal members Hiroshi Hasegawa (also of Astro, YBO2, South Saturn Delta) and wife Mayuko Hino (a former bondage-porn actress) are joined by Fumio Kosakai (Hijokaidan, Incapacitants) and Ryuichi Nagakubo (Tangerine Dream Syndicate) for a single 43-minute track that was recorded live in the mid-1990's, and the experience of being subjugated to C.C.C.C.'s brutal psychedelic overload hasn't lost an iota of it's power in the past ten years.
The group begins in the red. The sound is already fully formed as soon as you hit "play" - a gigantic maelstrom of screaming guitar noise writhing with deafening synthesizers and electronics sweeps over you, drowning you in layer upon layer of Hawkwind-like space effects, roaring subsonic drones, buzzing synthesizers, sickening synthesizer squelches that burst forth like alien saxophones squonking across the cosmos, squalls of tortured psych-guitar that scream and screech and scrape, melodic guitar solos that suddenly morph into demonic atonal nightmares, brutal klaxon blasts and cement-mixer grind. Where artists like Merzbow and Masonna and Incapacitants seek to destroy through high-end skree and abrasive white noise, C.C.C.C. forges a constantly changing vortex of loud, freaked-out improvisation that takes on mind-altering qualities. Towards the middle, the noisescape takes a terrifying turn as weird electronic blastbeat rhythms and Mayuko Hino's vocals enter the picture, and she moves from sections of distressed, panicky spoken word to jarring screams of fear and hysteria that tear through the storm of mega-effects. This only lasts for a few minutes though, and the last half of the track returns fully to the roiling cosmic noise.
This is a top notch release, one of the strongest from the old guard of Japanese noise I've heard in ages - C.C.C.C. fans have been waiting for ages for something new, and this definitely doesn't disappoint. Highly recommended to anyone into brutal psychedelic space noise.
Midwestern speedcore / breakcore label Radiograffiti brings us another short dose of beat-extremism with this 7" from CCDM. Like the Realicide Youth imprint, Radiograffti's releases tend to combine vicious low-fi breakcore with a tangible punk influence that takes us back to the gory glory days of the Bloody Fist crew, and this new EP from this obscure breakcore producer from Wisconsin fits right in, with a sound that is just as brutal as the Dispyz and Stagediver records that we've gotten from the label.
Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies, 7 Inch Of Doom features two tracks of beastly epileptic breakcore. The first, "Dirsh Birdies (Hell Cry)" mixes a deliriously evil carnival melody with spastic high-speed breaks, bludgeoning beats uncoiling and spasming beneath eerie electronic figures and clanking industrial percussion. Then this sputtering industrial breakcore suddenly morphs into VICIOUS speedcore beats at the end. Pounding BPM terror with female vocal samples and laced with insane drum rolls and snare rushes looped into hyperspeed waves of percussive smash, getting closer and closer to digigrind territory as it screams towards the finish, getting more distorted, more violent, more freaked out until it crashes into the finish. The flipside has "Dodecahedron in C# Minor", which starts off with sampled chamber music and folk instruments that gradually evolve into a speedy classical 8-bit melody racing over another hyper fast breakcore freak-out. This one is also really ominous sounding, like late 80's video game music sped up over Shitmat, with evil synth buzz and air raid sirens and synthetic violins coming in at the end for a grim final act.
Comes with a digital download code for the Ep, along with a couple of CCDM stickers.
Back in stock after being out of print and completely unobtainable for ages. This crucial, essential collection of early EP and comp tracks from our all-time favorite psychedelic Japanese acid-rock/grindcore/garage rock outfit is once again available, this time as a Japanese import issued via the bands own Obliteration Records imprint.
This CD features a crapload of songs, 45 in all, from their split EP's with Meat Shits, Vivisection, Demisor, Mastuc Scum, Dead Infection, and Bloody Vice, along with unreleased studio sessions dating back to 1994, and their stuff from the Grindwork comp CD and Shit Hits Vol. 2 compilation, all circa 1993-2000. The earlier recordings from C.S.S.O. are slightly more straightforward grindcore than their more recent releases, but are still completely fucked. Absurdly low starving-lion growling vocals and what can only described as """"evil duck"""" vocals duel over ripping grind that falls somewhere between Carcass, Anal Cunt, and The Boredoms, with weird bass drops, tape dropouts and tape-speed fuckery, psychedelic guitar leads, a truly nasty bass guitar sound, and other assorted oddness. But as the retrospective continues, you can start to hear the psych/garage rock start to take hold on CSSO's music, as the band evolves into an unholy union of Hendrix -like acid rock, blown out, in-the-red Guitar Wolf garage perversion, monstrous crusty grindcore, and spacey psychedelia that would make Acid Mothers Temple proud! There are also some shredding covers of Carcass, Napalm Death, Regurgitate, and General Surgery included here, but this band is most definitely not your run of the mill grindcore unit. Freaked out, ultra rockin' psychedelic grindcore weirdness! Packaged in a jewel case with minimalist graphic design and lots of discography information. Highly recommended!
I still can't believe that we found these...C.S.S.O. is one of my favorite Japanese grind bands, period, and this live LP from the band is a total freakout that captures them at the absolute height of their mind-expanding, acid-grind powers. C.S.S.O., or Clotted Symmetric Sexual Organ, are hands down one of the weirdest grind bands to ever come out of Japan; they started off in the early 90's as a raw but competant Earache Records influenced grind/crust outfit who took their inspiration from bands like Napalm Death and Carcass, they later underwent a bizarre transformation into a kind of psychedelic, dope-damaged mixture of old school grind, ultra-noisy garage rock, and far out, fx-overloaded psychedelia. If you want to have your senses blasted by something from another dimension, check out C.S.S.O.'s Are You Excrements? full length-it's a fucking brainwaster, one of my top ten weirdo grind albums. Imagine Napalm Death from the Scum era pod-fused with the MC5 and Jimi Hendrix after he'd been covertly infected with rabies. Brutal blasting low-fi grind mashed with insane wah-wah splattered solos, trippy theremin fuckery, mangled but deceptively catchy garage rock hooks buried under a mountain of broken fuzzboxes, blastbeats, and noise.
The band released this live LP in 2000 on the short lived label Riot City Japan, an offshoot of Riotous Assembly Records. The label folded not long after, but even by then this record had gone out of print; we had carried it back in our pre-website days in the Crucial Blast travelling record shop, but it's been at least seven years since we had a copy for sale. So I was pleasantly surprised when one of our customers contacted us recently and offered to sell us a stash of C.S.S.O.'s Live that he had left over, I guess from an old distro or something. Whatever the case, we grabbed 'em and we've got this slab of fierce, fucked up psychgrind on both black and blue colored vinyl. Nineteen tracks of the bands grindier material recorded in 1996, but loaded with crazed theremin/electronic noise, nuclear strength blasts of ultradistorted grind, raging punk and brief moments of brutal over the top improvisation that sounds like a Japanese free-rock band being fed straight into the roaring turbine of a jet engine on an Airbus A380, all recorded in Kyoto in 1998, Tokyo in 1997, and somewhere in Germany in 1996.
I still can't believe that we found these...C.S.S.O. is one of my favorite Japanese grind bands, period, and this live LP from the band is a total freakout that captures them at the absolute height of their mind-expanding, acid-grind powers. C.S.S.O., or Clotted Symmetric Sexual Organ, are hands down one of the weirdest grind bands to ever come out of Japan; they started off in the early 90's as a raw but competant Earache Records influenced grind/crust outfit who took their inspiration from bands like Napalm Death and Carcass, they later underwent a bizarre transformation into a kind of psychedelic, dope-damaged mixture of old school grind, ultra-noisy garage rock, and far out, fx-overloaded psychedelia. If you want to have your senses blasted by something from another dimension, check out C.S.S.O.'s Are You Excrements? full length-it's a fucking brainwaster, one of my top ten weirdo grind albums. Imagine Napalm Death from the Scum era pod-fused with the MC5 and Jimi Hendrix after he'd been covertly infected with rabies. Brutal blasting low-fi grind mashed with insane wah-wah splattered solos, trippy theremin fuckery, mangled but deceptively catchy garage rock hooks buried under a mountain of broken fuzzboxes, blastbeats, and noise.
The band released this live LP in 1998 on the short lived label Riot City Japan, an offshoot of Riotous Assembly Records. The label around 2001 or so but even by then this record had gone out of print; we had carried it back in our pre-website days in the Crucial Blast travelling record shop, but it's been at least seven years since we had a copy for sale. So I was pleasantly surprised when one of our customers contacted us recently and offered to sell us a stash of C.S.S.O.'s Live that he had left over, I guess from an old distro or something. Whatever the case, we grabbed 'em and we've got this slab of fierce, fucked up psychgrind on both black and blue colored vinyl. Nineteen tracks of the bands grindier material recorded in 1996, but loaded with crazed theremin/electronic noise, nuclear strength blasts of ultradistorted grind, raging punk and brief moments of brutal over the top improvisation that sounds like a Japanese free-rock band being fed straight into the roaring turbine of a jet engine on an Airbus A380, all recorded in Kyoto in 1998, Tokyo in 1997, and somewhere in Germany in 1996.
Alert to all fellow fanatics of demonic French black metal! Issued in a limited edition of 500 copies and already sold out at the source just like the Drastus Roars From The Old Serpents Paradise CD that we listed in the last update (which sold out here at CBLAST within 24 hours of the list going out!), C.Y.T's Configuration Of A Yearned Twilight is a similiarly frigid and inhuman blast of damaged, Satanic French black metal from the Flamme Noire imprint. Lately, the French black metal scene is starting to become more recognized for it's awesome weirdness and individuality, sort of comparable to the 'x-factor' that Japanese bands seems to have that makes their music inherently bizarre and cool as fuck. Featuring a member of Drastus, C.Y.T's vision is one of the more sinister I've experienced thus far, a sexually charged feverdream of gleaming Industrial ambience infested with razor blasts of hypersonic blistering BM, awesome ferocious riffs and dissonant guitar textures spit out like venom over the drummer's kinetic beats, who delivers a combination of light speed blastbeats and convoluted, super complex polyrhythms. It's an unearthly sounding blackthrash, harsh, fractured, the singer psychotically switching between a ranting hateful rasp and psychedelic chants hurled into the void, comparable to Deathspell Omega's recent music but even spacier, ""math-ier"", more atmosperic even, an impenetrable veil of fucked up sonic ultraviolence. This album is inredible and an absolute must for fans of fucked up, far out French BM, which makes it frustrating that we have a VERY small quantity of this available!
High contrast images of depravity, eschatological Rorschachs and severe mutation...just about everything that I want to see in an underground art rag. That and more is present in the inaugural issue of Cabal, a new publication from the industrial label Cathartic Process that's hopefully going to be coming out on a regular basis. The first issue is packed with forty-four perfect-bound pages full of gruesome photo collages, nihilistic visions, images of cycloptic children, sexual depravity, bondage, psychedelic violence, deformity, all delivered in a stark, high-contrast hand-assembled style that reminds me of both the early SPK record sleeves and the bizarre collage art of Mike Williams (Eyehategod). These hallucinatory works are from Ben Brucato (Clew Of Theseus), Shool K., Nnerves, and Pasi Markulla (of Finnish harsh noise project Bizarre Uproar), and there is also a short interview with Bizarre Uproar.
The zine is also packaged with a thirty-minute cassette tape from an anonymous artist, the only thing that's printed on the tape is the pyramid/eye image that appears on the zine and the stickers; whoever is behind this, they serve up a crushing black slab of hellish industrial noise, a mass of scraping squealing abrasion and amp abuse, massive low end droning heaviness like metallic rumbling doomdrone guitars, rhythmic bass throb, shrieking feedback, overdriven percussion, the shuddering grind of machinery breaking down. Definitely harsh, heavy industrial noise, similar to Ramleh, Con-Dom, etc.
And the set is assembled in a really cool package that consists of a black zip bag with the Cabal eye on the front, with the 5" x 7" zine, cassette, and Cabal stickers enclosed inside.
If anyone thought that the transition that Cable made from 90's pioneers of chaotic, angular metalcore to the Southern rock influenced noise-rock of Northern Failures was a surprising one, then wait until you hear what the band has reconfigured themselves as with The Failed Convict, Cable's first new album in more than five years. The 'oughts have seen these Connecticut ragers rousted by a series of lineup issues that had 'em throwing in the towel not long after the release of 2004's Pigs Never Fly, and I thought that was going to be it for this long-running outfit. Lo and behold, 2009 brings us a brand new disc from a newly revitalized Cable, and with a revamped lineup and newfound urgency, they've cranked out not only the most energetic and accessible album of their career, but a fucking concept album to boot, following a narrative about the cross-country travels of an escaped convict named Jim. Fans of Cable's past albums have alot to chew on here; the thirteen songs are full of the massive swampy sludge grooves and muscular noise-rock riffage that made up the bulk of their post-Hydra Head stuff, showing that Cable haven't gone soft in the least. But the sludge has been dialed down a bit, with more of an emphasis on huge hooks and even some clean vocals that show up throughout the album - surprisingly, they pull this off really well, injecting a moody, super catchy post-hardcore quality into songs like "Welcome To Dickson", and the song "Outside Abilene" sounds like early 90's alt-rock with clean croon of Christian McKenna, who some of you might recognize as the frontman from Translation Loss indie/country rockers Slacks!. Sounds weird, but the catchier, more melodic rock songs on here are really good, and the way that the band shifts back and forth between the heavier southern-tinged Unsane crunch and these alt-rock anthems makes this album sound pretty unique, colossal riffs and sludgy heaviness leading into instantly infectious rock, and everything flecked with bits of Western twang, complex mathiness, forlorn minor-key piano, stark Across Tundras-style strum, sparse blues, and pounding alt-riffage that reminds me of Barkmarket at times. Some longtime fans of the band might Cable's new sound too melodic, but me, I think this is the best album the band's ever done. Highly recommended, extremely listenable.
Heavy duty 2003 album from these long running Connecticut noise goons, effortlessly stitching riff-heavy noise rock, bluesy sludgecore, snarling stoner rock, and flashes of plaintive post-rock together across these eight tracks, every one a smasher, with some of their best riffs ever, possessed by impassioned,razor-gargling vocals. Theres a surprising amount of melody here too, with beautiful epic guitar harmonies and occasional clean vocals, and cool vocal loops and electronic noises and sweet feedback wrangling, but largely this boils down to a menacing mutant classic rock-addled sludge masterpiece that'll crash your cloud, an unexpected fusion of Unsane, Isis, and Eyehategod, swampy but epic, melodic but scuzzed and ugly, psychedelic and noisy and brutally heavy with more fang-baring attitide than you can handle. We miss these cats. Produced by Steve Austin from Today Is The Day.
Connecticut�s Cable continue to mature and perfect their particular brand of wiry sludge rock with Pigs Never Fly, their newest (2004) full length. These guys have been slugging it out for over ten years, and have consistently managed to dial in catchy, brutal riffage with previous albums on Hydrahead and This Dark Reign...but this new full length album brings in so much melody and spacey, wah-drenched workouts and monstrous feedback and totally unexpected, awesome elements, it makes this a hugely more epic sounding and soul-crushing affair than previous releases, which were solidly entrenched in post-Am Rep violence. There are still the gigantic swampy grooves and nihilistic vocals/lyrics, though, so fans of the previous albums will be served well, but this is definitely a killer step for the band-the lengthy squalls of haunting feedback, the jittery, BORIS- esque fried-cable drones that close out the epic "I Love It When You Crawl", the AWESOME Lynyrd Skynyrd-meets-Pelican chug of "It�s My Right..." (the ending of this song is incredible, with gorgeous, soraing female vocals and a lone acoustic guitar emerging from the riffage to close out the song) , loads of Eyehategod-on-crack swamp blasts broken up with super-powerful, anthemic, catchy choruses that you�d expect from an Isis or Pelican album..soooo good! It�s like modern space-rock/post-rock / melodic slow-core atmospherics mixed with Southern-fried Am Rep sludge rock/metal. It�s definitely my favorite release so far from Cable, and I can�t wait to see what they come up with after this. Highly recommended.
The missing link between CABLE's early years as noise-rock / hardcore terrorists and their more recent incarnation as whiskey soaked sludgecore crushers. An infectious mix of complete Am Rep-esque, hardcore influenced noise rock with deep heavy doom/southern sludge undertones. The grooving hooks in I've Been Down, the crazed noise of Ride the Jackass Backwards, the aggressive vocals, the really loud low end sound, all of this makes for a killer album.Southern soaked, liquor drenched melodic yet heavy music.
Even though Cable has been around for more than fifteen years, the band has always existed on the periphery of underground metal/hardcore and never really found a larger audience outside of the New England area. Alot of that has to do with all of the lineup changes and band turmoil that Cable has endured throughout their existence, and that they were never much of a touring band never helped either. I've always thought that if Cable had toured more frequently, eventually they would have become huge, that their sound was a couple of years ahead of its time and that kids eventually would have gone apeshit for these guys. Maybe. Cable have mostly been relegated to a footnote in the evolution of metallic hardcore, though, and if you go back to their earliest releases on Doghouse and Atomic Action, you'll hear the band chewing their way through a seminal brand of chaotic, metal-glazed hardcore that would have an influence on the development of the mathy, metallic sound of the late 90's and bands like Isis and Botch. My favorite era of the band comes later, though. Starting with their albums on Hydra Head, Cable begain to evolve into a much heavier, sludgier beast that drew from the New Orleans sludge metal sound of Eyehategod and Buzzoven, noise rock, and whiskey-soaked blues and country, a feedback-soaked behemoth of massive downtuned riffing and winding dramatic riffage that sounds like a down and out, backwoods mixture of Isis and southern swamp sludge.
Like the title suggests, Last Call was supposed to be the final nail in the coffin for the long running Connecticut band Cable, a collection of previously unreleased tracks, live material, early recordings (many of which have been out of print for years) as well as some post-Y2K material thrown in to give you the big picture of the road that these guys have been travelling down since the early 1990s, combined with a DVD that features both a documentary on the band as well as a show from CBGB's right before the band called it quits. The audio disc in this collection tracks Cable from their beginnings as one of the first bands to combine chaotic metal stylings with the urgency and raw energy of hardcore, to their evolution into a much heavier, sludgier sound that drew inspiration from Eyehategod and noise rock but emerged as an epic, feedback-soaked behemoth all of it's own. Songs from all of their albums are included here, as well as five professionally recorded tracks from the CBGB's show, and the tracks are presented in reverse chronology so you hear Cable moving backwards from their newer, sludgy jams to the frenzied discordance of their first album from 1996. The DVD half of this set is nicely put together, with the Last Call documentary featuring loads of interview footage with former members (including Jeff Caxide from Isis, who played in Cable for three years, plus show promoters and other folks from the New England hardcore scene), live footage, anecdotes dealing with drunken chaos pepetrated by members of the band, and loads more. This documentary is almost an hour long and is a cool retrospective of the band that goes over their entire existence. The other half of the DVD is the complete set from CBGB's, and it's a well-shot performance with multiple camera angles, loud audio, and the band swingin' heavily. It's the DVD material that longtime Cable fans will mostly be interested in, especially if you already own all of their older albums, but if you are new to Cable, Last Call is an excellent primer on this influential band. Comes with a booklet that includes detailed track info and DVD liner notes.
It's weird to think that this album originally came out on the same label that has released stuff from emo-pop heavyweights like The All-American Rejects and Get-Up Kids, but back before Doghouse Records became known as one of the biggest indie-pop labels around, they put some pretty aggressive stuff from the hardcore scene. Inarguably, one of the heaviest albums that Doghouse ever put their logo on was the 1996 debut from the Connecticut band Cable, a twitchy mass of crazed metallic hardcore that's pretty far removed from the newer, sludge-rock version of the band that we've come to know through their subsequent releases on Hydra Head, This Dark Reign and Translation Loss. When Cable released Variable Speed Drive, the band was mining a then-new sound, combining ferocious hardcore with ultra-dissonant riffs, crushing metallic distortion, heart-attack shrieks, and angular song arrangements that put them in the same company as bands like Deadguy and Turmoil, all early proponents of the chaotic metallic hardcore sound that would spread everywhere by the end of the decade. Listening to this earlier version of Cable, you can also hear how much post-hardcore, early emo and math rock were a part of the band's DNA, apparent in the driving moody melodic hooks that show up constantly across the eight songs, and the parts where Cable breaks off into quieter sections of discordant guitar and Slint-y instrumental workouts. I hear a lot of Slint's influence on this album to tell you the truth (just check out the song "The Sinking Vessel" for proof), and there are actually some really beautiful moments to be found in the jagged wreckage of Variable Speed Drive, glints of melody and lush harmonies spotted in the midst of their churning skronk-metal and crushing riffage, and while this album is unmistakeably from a certain time and place in the evolution of underground music, the songs actually hold up really well compared to the other stuff that came out around the middle of the 90's. Variable Speed Drive is important not only for fans of Cable who never heard the genre-defining music that the band created before their stint on Hydra Head, but also to anyone interested in the genesis of metallic hardcore and math-metal, as Cable was there at the beginning. Out of print for close to ten years, Variable has been re-issued and remastered with all new artwork and packaging by Translation Loss, who also included an additional three bonus tracks taken from Cable's 1994 demo which features then-bassist Jeff Caxide, who obviously later went on to play in Isis.
���� Killer dark mutant punk on this four-song Ep from Cadaver Em Transe, a Brazilian outfit who hit us with a sinister, driving sound combining harshly angular dissonance, a smattering of Killing Joke-esque heaviness, and a heavy noise streak that blasts the opener "Camale�o" with swathes of whooshing electronics and spacey, grainy distortion. That killer post-punk vibe is even stronger on "N�s, Os Bastardos", with driving bass guitar and some rather dubby percussive touches, but when the song really cuts loose, it gets pretty furious. On "V�rus Tropical 15", that sound turns into something more industrialized, pummeling slo-mo tribal rhythms thundering beneath shimmering guitar noise, hypnotic bludgeoning bass woven around the detached, almost incantatory vocals, a coldly malevolent atmosphere descending over the music as those dubby effects continue to rattle and echo in the shadows. The 7" closes with their most ferocious song yet, unleashing the psychedelic hardcore aggression of "Puls�o De Morte", a freight train of speeding mutant punk doused in trippy guitar effects, the singer erupting into a powerful, embittered howl that leads up to an unexpectedly haunting conclusion. Really great stuff, if you dug some of those likeminded records on Iron Lung from the likes of Needles, Una B�stia Incontrolable, etc., definitely give this one a listen. Limited to four hundred copies, comes with a download code.
This is another project from Isreali avant-hesher David Opp, who also plays drums for the brootal blackened bass+drums duo Barbara (whose amazing CD we also carry in the Crucial Blast webstore). Cadaver Eyes is his solo project, and it's a bit different from the black metal-meets-prog-punk vomit of Barbara. Instead, David has rigged his drums with triggers that set off samples of all sorts of ill shit, with David blasting and rolling and summoning up a locust swarm of electronic bzzt and old death metal album samples and bowel-blowing bass blurt. It's a hideous, glitchy, crusty avant-grind splatter holocaust, sort of a bastard fusion of oldschool Earache Records grind and improv sample splat, with lyrics howled in Hebrew and scattered with found sound bits, haunted vacuum drones, traditional Isreali folk music,shortwave static and buzzing noise, hissing cymbal noise,freeform drum retardation, toy music box melodies, and apocalyptic media soundbites. Totally fucked. We're dingging this MIGHTILY, the same way we dig similiar sado-grind noise thugs Burmese, although this is a little less carnivorous, and more straight up stoned. Or imagine powerviolence pioneers Siege and death-screechers Macabre meeting James Plotkin's Phantomsmasher for some hot free jazz action. Cranium cleansing shit, I say. Collects the 2001 No Time To Haste CD-R recorded by Steve Austin of Today Is The Day, and the Acquisition Of Power Over Fire EP from 2004 for a total of 24 tracks.
Their name conjures all sorts of queasy images, but after listening to this album about a bajillion times I can't think of another banner that this Kentucky based monstrosity could go by. Equal parts doomed out sludge metal, burnt psychedelia, middle America electronic vomit and speaker-shredding noise rock, Cadaver In Drag's first real album after a slew of limited edition tapes and discs comes to us from Animal Disguise, which is quickly turning into the spot for heavily zonked midwestern scumcrush. The lineup has Cadaver members Josh Lay, Jason Schuler and Ben Allen joined by Robert Beatty from Hair Police n synthesizer, and they drop upon us three tracks of repetitious, pummeling sludge that opens with the epic "Walking Through The Gates Of Hell", which takes a particularly sickening ur-riff and pounds that motherfucker into your cranium for eighteen minutes straight. A primal two note chord progression grinding away into infinity, going nowhere but straight ahead into a blasted, blackened horizon, searing acid rock soloing screaming up from the filth, a vocalist screaming hoarsely into a concrete wall, drums pounding and plodding, a stomping march of prehistoric beasts through a haze of smoking black amplifiers reaching to the sky like Babylonian temple spires. Think Graves At Sea locked into a monochromatic shroom-fueled doom trance and yer in the vicinity.
"Fuck This Place" follows with a ferocious middle finger aimed right for the eyes of Lexington, Kentucky, a chaotic noise rock attack delivered with a sudden jolt of speed and snot after the charred plod of the preceding track that feels like a smack across the grill. A convulsive noise rock jam that feels like a Halo Of Flies piece riddled with sores and malfunctioning effects pedals, again a single riff thrashed out over and over while the singer spits out whatever is left of his throat. And then the closer "Secession '91" slows the album back to a crawl as the band crafts a sprawling eight minute psychedelic dronescape of gorgeous feedback, elegaic synthesizer, and buried sludge riffing. Comparitively softer and way more spaced out, this jam is Cadaver In Drag's smoked-out comedown, the sound of Popul Vuh crossed with epic basement doom and stoners fucking around with FX pedals. An amazing thing. Yep, another highly recommended out-metal platter, one that blurs the lines between noise, sludge and psych like Mammal's crucial latest album, but in a completely different way.
Also available on vinyl.
Their name conjures all sorts of queasy images, but after listening to this album about a bajillion times I can't think of another banner that this Kentucky based monstrosity could go by. Equal parts doomed out sludge metal, burnt psychedelia, middle America electronic vomit and speaker-shredding noise rock, Cadaver In Drag's first real album after a slew of limited edition tapes and discs comes to us from Animal Disguise, which is quickly turning into the spot for heavily zonked midwestern scumcrush. The lineup has Cadaver members Josh Lay, Jason Schuler and Ben Allen joined by Robert Beatty from Hair Police n synthesizer, and they drop upon us three tracks of repetitious, pummeling sludge that opens with the epic "Walking Through The Gates Of Hell", which takes a particularly sickening ur-riff and pounds that motherfucker into your cranium for eighteen minutes straight. A primal two note chord progression grinding away into infinity, going nowhere but straight ahead into a blasted, blackened horizon, searing acid rock soloing screaming up from the filth, a vocalist screaming hoarsely into a concrete wall, drums pounding and plodding, a stomping march of prehistoric beasts through a haze of smoking black amplifiers reaching to the sky like Babylonian temple spires. Think Graves At Sea locked into a monochromatic shroom-fueled doom trance and yer in the vicinity.
"Fuck This Place" follows with a ferocious middle finger aimed right for the eyes of Lexington, Kentucky, a chaotic noise rock attack delivered with a sudden jolt of speed and snot after the charred plod of the preceding track that feels like a smack across the grill. A convulsive noise rock jam that feels like a Halo Of Flies piece riddled with sores and malfunctioning effects pedals, again a single riff thrashed out over and over while the singer spits out whatever is left of his throat. And then the closer "Secession '91" slows the album back to a crawl as the band crafts a sprawling eight minute psychedelic dronescape of gorgeous feedback, elegaic synthesizer, and buried sludge riffing. Comparitively softer and way more spaced out, this jam is Cadaver In Drag's smoked-out comedown, the sound of Popul Vuh crossed with epic basement doom and stoners fucking around with FX pedals. An amazing thing. Yep, another highly recommended out-metal platter, one that blurs the lines between noise, sludge and psych like Mammal's crucial latest album, but in a completely different way.
The last album from Kentucky's Cadaver In Drag (2007's Raw Child) showed that the band was just as apt to deliver a grinding slab of metallic hypno-sludge as they were to blast skulls with a brutal industrial/noise assault, existing somewhere betwixt the realms of the harsh noise cassette scene and the low-fi avant-metal underground. When you dig back into their catalog, though, you'll find their earlier material harsh and based in extreme power electronics, as was explored on their now out of print Abuse CD-R. This new disc on Bloodlust! collects both the out-of-print Abuse material and a track from their also long-gone Breathing Sewage cassette for an even mix of vicious power electronics / industrial noise and the sort of damaged metallic dronesludge that these guys are so great at doing, with an extra unreleased track added on for good measure.
The opening track "Abuse 1" is a juddering twenty-two minute mass of sound populated by an omnipresent static throb that sounds like the buzz of a piece of heavy electronic equipment on dying batteries emanating a deep bone-rattling drone that slowly changes pitch throughout the track, while scraping metal noises mix with high-pitched feedback warble. This slowly builds in intensity until the midway point, when the distorted screams kick in and the feedback and distorted electrical throb all become much more violent and frenzied. It's a heavy, astringent industrial attack with a Broken Flag/Ramleh vibe. The second track "Abuse II" is shorter at nine minutes, and continues the riotous electronic spew with an opening blast of metallic feedback buzz that blossoms into mortar-like explosions of crushing distortion. This buzzing, swarming hive of grimy electronic grind fluctuates violently over the duration of the track, going from underwater squelch to brutal overdriven clots of noise that almost sound like a gang of guitars are being throttled and destroyed beneath the heavy fug of amplifier buzz.
It's not until we get to the "Breathing Sewage" track from the 2005 cassette of the same name that we come to the sort of noisy, sludgy metallic heaviness that Cadaver In Drag delivered on Raw Child . For nearly ten minutes, the band bathes in monstrous distorted guitar rumble and syrupy sludge, like an early Sunn jam drenched in industrial noise and mixed with all of the levels in the red, a massive earth-shaking mass of crumbling metallic drone that sloughs off huge sheets of rotten feedback and sputtering cable buzz while the singer bellows in rage, his voice cloaked by intense distortion, a fusion of brutal power electronics and ambient doomdrone that becomes more and more chaotic as the piece progresses, turning into pure chaos at the end as messy guitar shredding and lumbering over-modulated rhythms appear.
The final track "Leak" is previously unreleased and is the most overtly PE-influenced track on the disc. Here, the band join forces with Mark Solotroff (Of Bloodyminded/Nightmares) for a shrieking, malevolent bout of old school power electronics. Painful metallic feedback scrapes the edges of eardrums and wavering flanged noises flutter in the background while Solotroff rants maniacally; the track becomes noisier towards the end, before fading out in a cloud of effects.
This tape rates a solid ten on the heaviness scale. Church Burner is the first cassette on Husk Records, the excellent black/noise label run by Josh Lay of Cadaver In Drag, and it's the heaviest shit that I have ever heard from this band. If you were into the sludgy, trance-doom workouts that consisted their full-length on Animal Disguise, wait till you hear this.
On the first side, Cadaver In Drag lay down a devastating slab of slow-motion punishment; think Melvins / Toadliquor / Burning Witch, a ridiculously slow, bass-heavy riff uncoiling around pounding abstract caveman drumming, no vocals at first, just a massive instrumental tectonic lurch that is WAY heavier than anything they've done before. Suddenly the guitar disappears, leaving just the drummer who now starts playing even slower than before, his muffled drum hits drawn out between long pauses, then the guitar drops back in without warning, spewing droning, tar-black heaviness, the whole jam recorded underneath a thick layer of murk and corroded magnetic tape. Then the vocals finally appear, a gargled retching vokill assault that appears at the very end, screaming over the simple drum pound and shrieking feedback drone, getting completely abstract at the end as it rots into an improvised chaos of formless drum pound and amp noise, which then reverses into a muddy, murky electro-acoustic blur before coming to a close.
On the b-side, the band delivers an abstract sludgescape that's a little closer to the older stuff of their that I have, huge formless riffs, whirling feedback tones and thick low-end amp-drone congealing with throbbing electronic low-end. Creepy melodies begin to slowly drift in, joined by bits of chiming metal and oscillating synth notes, belches of garbled bass, pulsating percussive sounds, getting more ominous and threatening and finally evolving into a throbbing malevolent Wolf Eyes-esque dirge.
Comes in a translucent acetate cover,and is limited to 100 copies.
The final full-length release from this ramshackle psychedelic noise rock outfit out of Kentucky, which featured Josh Lay from the primitive, low-fi black metal project Glass Coffin. Released as a super-limited pro-manufactured cassette, Breaking And Entering was recorded back in 2009 but only finally surfaced sometime in the past year, the first new batch of stuff I'd heard in ages from this cult Midwestern outfit; this stuff is still as blown-out and ugly as their older releases, but when this tape kicks off, it's with a huge motorik groove that sends this into an unexpectedly krautrocky direction, a discordant hypno-boogie that circles endlessly throughout the track. Almost like a more wretched and wrecked low-fi, no-wave-tinged version of Circle or Religious Knives, perhaps, this pulsating tick-tock psych groove is smeared with warbling keyboard drones and jangling atonal chords, slowly evolving into that shambling, heavy-lidded motorik trance as it stretches out for more than thirteen minutes. Pretty killer, but from there the music starts to more closely resemble the mutant sludge-metal that I remember from their Raw Child album.
The rest of the tape is way more deformed, from shambling brain-damaged noise-punk dirges that resemble a much more discordant and deranged Flipper wandering aimlessly through a thick fog of random psychedelic guitar splutter, bumbling free-jazz horns and gales of howling feedback; to waves of blown-out bass-heavy speakerbuzz and Skullflowery amplifier destruction that undulate over trippy, sky-streaking electronics; to blasts of skull-warping kosmische murk; throbbing, charred power electronics, and violent blasts of snarling noise rock, rabid pig-fuck assaults that unravel into squealing, squawking dirges infested with damaged horn blasts, spastic drumming, gluey riffage, and gobs of wah-drenched guitar noise that eventually lead the song out into an almost Hawkwindian psych-rock finale. Quite a curtain call from this cadre of cacophonous creeps! Limited to one hundred copies.
In our last New Additions list, we had a cassette from an enigmatic Russian project called MH LMTH that fused cryptic Occult elements with a massively crushing wave of blackened electronic death drone, a kind of black magic industrial trance ritual that flowed from our speakers in a jet-black ooze of indecipherable vocals and blasphemous incantations, grinding doomdrone guitar, and roaring feedback. That tape was fantastic, and in digging around for more information on the mysterious figure behind MH LMTH, AL-LA-ShT-ORR, I discovered that he also had several other bands and projects that he was involved in. A "kabbalistic black metal" band called Ithdabquth Qliphoth, the raw black metal projects Deathmoon and Hammer ov Qliphoth, and Cadaver Yelleth At Amber Tower, another strange drone/electronics project that infests the listener with creeped out frequencies and sound collage. Code: Algeria appears to be the only CD release from this project, and it features two tracks that (according to the liner notes) use recordings of intercepeted conversations between Russian ground control and air force pilots from Algerian airspace in 2005, layering these recordings with sheets of electronic feedback and drone. AL-LA-ShT-ORR creates a grim electronic dronescape that takes on an almost cinematic tension as we listen to these Russian voices cloaked in white noise hiss going back and forth over grating electronic beeps and noises, harrowing high-end drones, growling organ-like clusters of notes, and piercing feedback. The mix of radio transmissions and grim industrial shrieking forms a strange, alien shortwave similiar to some of Throbbing Gristle's ominous works. This disc came out on Res Adversae, the Russian black metal/power electronics label that gave us that MH LMTH tape, and is in a hand-numbered limited edition of 283 copies.
Over the past few years, there have been some really incredible mutations sprouting out of the cracked floorboards of the deep underground black metal scene that have flirted with, and in some cases fully assimilated into it's own DNA, the gorgeous wall-of-sound bliss of early 90's shoegazer rock and dreamy post-rock. That awesome LURKER OF CHALICE album springs immediately to mind, with it's heavy MBV style melodic wash and creepy post-punk-isms, and AGALLOCH has also formed some truly amazing sounds that bridge the frosty, blackened rasp of black metal with beautiful, hazy shoegaze. LEVIATHAN, WIGRID, and WOLD have all also infused their isolationist black metal with similiarly woozy, smeared melodic textures. I definitely can't enough of this sort of stuff. Enter CAINA from the UK, whose debut album Some People Fall not only looks like an early 90's 4AD Records release with it's high contrast moth artwork, a gothy photo of sole member A., and lots of gloomy downer lyrics, but also weaves some seriously beautiful and epic shoegazey post-rock a la ELUVIUM and MONO into ragged and chaotic eruptions of low-fi outsider black metal. CAINA is a one-dude unit in the vein of USBM outfits DRAUGAR, LEVIATHAN, and XASTHUR, and the black metal passages are extremely frenzied, blurry blasts that remind me a bit of LEVIATHAN and XASTHUR, but with deeper, more death metallish vocals, and some fucked up, wobbly drumming that makes this even more hallucinogenic and dreamlike.
The album opens with the gorgeous instrumental "Some People Fall", which wraps a lone tremelo picked guitar melody in sheets of sad feedback, evoking everything from M83 to ELUVIUM's dreamscapes and the sort of understated buildups that MONO traffic in, dipping in and out of valleys of near-silence as stumbling marching drums ascend from below. Very, very beautiful, the sort of shoegazey post rock that you would expect to hear from Temporary Residence draped in gauzy diistortion. This leads into "The Validity Of Hate Within An Emotional Vacuum", which takes a dark turn into ultra lo-fi black metal territory with layers of trebly, ultradistorted guitar fuzz thrashing out bleary minor key melodies, all very reminiscent of both XASTHUR and STRIBORG, with demented, pissed-off vocals pushed WAY up front over blasting, chaotic drumming. "Black End Tyme Collapse" follows with several minutes of chilly isolationist guitar drones that fade into the sounds of children screaming and singing and distant gunshots, which comes off pretty creepy, before CAINA collapses into the nine minute epic "Satanikulturpessimis", which marries another destroyed outsider black metal assault with really weird offtime blastbeats and stumbling confusional grooves and more awesome fuzzy shoegazer melodies floating over the blackthrash carnage. After several minutes of chaotic, fuzzbombed blasting and demented ranting, the song fades into another passage of MONO-esque post-rock beauty as lonely slide guitars glide through veils of e-bow shaped feedback. The fifth track, "Abraxas Gate", is another foray into slow building post rock, a creeping atmospherinc melody drifting slowly into clouds of distorted guitar noise and far-off metallic tones. "The Mother" appears with a surprising turn into depressing dark pop, reminding me a little of Andrew Eldritch or Martin Gore with his dramatic clean singing, but then explodes again into a wash of noisy, droning BM blur with an extremely catchy downer-pop melody layered over it. "Inside The Outside" features more of A's clean, gothy singing over layers of single note e-bowed guitars, as rolling drums appear alongside another glistening MONO-like build. The closing track, "Goetic Shadow Cabaret", is another dark field of ambient drone, casting it's black shadow briefly before coming to a sudden end. CAINA's alchemical, artsy black metal is out there enough that it will probably turn off fans expecting a more grim, straightforward assault, but fans of post-BM abstraction, damaged black metal weirdness, and heavier, more disruptive shapes of modern post rock should check this out.
Caina is another loner project that has been aligned with the artier, stranger fringes of black metal, and is overseen by atalented British multi-instrumentalist named Andrew Curtis-Brignell. The last Caina album on God Is Myth, Some People Fall, really surprised us when we first heard it last year, a debut that seemed to come out of nowhere yet blew us away with it's mixture of somber, buzzy black metal and abstract, 4AD records style dreampop. So now it's a year later and Curtis-Brignell has returned with Caina's Mourner, his first disc on the increasingly fantastic Profound Lore label, and it's somehow both sublimely beautiful and distinctly more abstract and avant garde than the earlier Caina material. Gorgeously creepy hand drawn artwork and gauzy grey textures cover the discs 4-panel gatefold sleeve, adorned with strange ghost-like faces and bird's skulls entwined with flowering vines. The songs flow together as one extended dream-hallucination, sometimes disjointed and horrific as blasts of heavily distorted low-fi black metal a la Xasthur bleeds across flanger effects spinning wildly out of control, or blossoming into majestic shimmering noise pop or passages of shadowy folk strum and the twang of mouth harp. One of Caina's great strengths is that Curtis-Brignell actually has a great voice, and he's able to paint several shades of gloom and dark, downcast visions by singing in a deep, bassy croon or rending his vocal cords with a demented blackened shriek that sets skin to crawling. Mourner also has some great lyrics, which point to the "unseen creaking world" that Bone Awl explores with their songs, and which feel even creepier and mysterious when their delivered through Caina's beautiful grey shoegaze. Completely amazing music, like Xasthur, Dead Raven Choir, Current 93, Swans, Sigur Ros, Lovecraft's prose, Xiu Xiu, and British avant-folk all swirled together into a surreal otherworldly dream. Highly recommended.
The last few albums from the UK black metal experimentalist Caina that have come out on Profound Lore are much loved around here with their perfect mix of the gorgeous gloomy 4AD style dreampop shot through with a vaguely blackened undercurrent, so I was really stoked to find out that a brand new Caina disc had come out on the Portugese label Universal Tongue recently. With four tracks clocking in at just under a half hour, it's more of a lengthy EP than a full album, but it's got all of the stuff that makes Caina such a strange and mysterious sounding band, bringing together dreamy blissed-out beauty and some surprisingly brutal blackness...
The disc starts off with the short track "The Approaching Chastisement", a gorgeous bit of ethereal dreampop that sounds like it could have easily appeared as an obscure 7" from 4AD twenty years ago, a warm hazy wash of lush synthesizers and sweeping shoegazey guitar chords and blissed-out choral beauty laid out over symphonic strings and a straightforward drumbeat. The song is as sweetly majestic as any of Jesu's more recent pop offerings, but the prettiness is demolished as soon as the song leads into "Drilling The Spire", a seven minute blur of woozy, rotting black metal riffage, searing distorted melodies wavering in and out of tune and hellish reverb-soaked growls that lurch through the song's fucked-up spatial structure, the dirgey off-kilter riffing alternately turning epic and doomy or halting and angular, brief passages of abstract ambience and programmed blastbeats sometimes interrupting the mutant black metal. And then, voila, at the four minute mark this all melts into another absolutely breathtaking wash of moody dreampop, mottled synths bleeding into spacey melodic strum, heavier distorted riffing slowly creeping in, turning the climax into a kind of proggy shoegaze rock.
"To Pluck The Night Up By Its Skin" is another weird mix of abstract black metal and melodic prettiness, starting off with a martial drum beat and melodic bassline before dropping in the rich clusters of dreamy black metal buzz and the oddly melodic blackened vocals, downer black metal blended evenly with morose gloompop and swells of proggy synth, but then a few minutes in it all fades out, and shifts into a bizarre ambient passage with samples of Jim Jones speaking over reverbed pings, slowly building into a lurching stop/start riff that continues to change shape from jangly blackened pop to scorched buzz.
"You Worship The Wrong Carpenter" closes the disc with killer Carpenter/Goblin-esque synth over a simple skittering drumbeat as soft dreamy guitar strum and angelic choral synths descend, a mix of vintage soundtrack progginess and hazy electronica-tinged post rock. But then halfway in a lone, slightly-effected guitar enters and leads the song into an epic stretch of blasting drums, angular buzzing riffs, and swirling celestial ambience swept up in a majestic prog-metal outro. It's all instantly identifiable as Caina, but these tracks are also some of the weirder and more abstract jams that I've heard from the band so far...
Digipack packaging, in a limited edition of 500 copies.
The newish stuff that came in from Kaosthetik has been consistently high-quality post-industrial sound of a darker bent, and this Caithness disc is so far the easiest on the ears of anything that I've checked out from the label. Crafting a kind of gothic religious ambience, Caithness effectively evokes the mournful, utterly bleak industrial darkwave of the early Raison D'etre albums on Cold Meat Industries and pulls it off much more adeptly than most. Starting off with the track "Sortie De Terre", Caithness creates an ominous, elegiac soundworld of doleful strings, gently finger picked acoustic guitar, distant clanging metal, portentous tolling bells, the atmosphere consistently dark and sorrowful, often joined by hushed voices, spoken word samples, and lush female choirs. Long stretches of the album go by without percussion, but occasionally a martial snare will appear, turning the music into a misery filled funeral march. More abrasive industrial elements appear on "Faces And Shades", taking form with abstract metallic clang, but it's soon subsumed into deep ominous drones, orchestral strings and Gregorian chants flowing into a grim liturgical dronescape. Elsewhere in the album, Lustmord-like black ambience, deep cello-like drones and distant mist-enshrouded cathedral keys emerge, and the vocals shift into sorrowful operatic singing, or the sound of a deep male voice reciting strange incantations in French through a veil of static. "The Sorrowful Child" is especially amazing with the gorgeous lilting female vocals that give the song a big Dead Can Dance vibe. It's kind of surprising that the guy behind Caithness, Hylgaryss, has also done worked with some of the French black metal scene's harshest outfits like Kristallnacht, Sacrificia Mortuorum, and Chemin de Haine (as well as being the sole intelligence behind the loner black metal project Winter Funeral), but it makes more sense when you find that he's also one of the main members of the well-known neo-classical band Dark Sanctuary, whose lush orchestral sound is definitely echoed in the ecclesiastical, cinematic ambience of Apostasy. Comes in a six-panel digisleeve with a full color booklet, and is limited to 1000 copies.
I didn't even know that Utech had released this disc until we ordered a bunch of their back catalog titles last month - as it turns out, the Calcination disc has become one of my favorite releases from the label, a time-devouring hybrid of Earth-en dronemetal and glacial free-jazz that pushes all of the same buttons that that killer Klangmutationen album did that Utech put out, while caving my skull in inna whole new way.
Who the hell is this band? I looked around online for information on them, but came up with little. The album was recorded in Berlin and I'm guessing that Calcination is German, and the minimal liner notes on the inside of the sleeve for the disc shows two members, one named Antoine Chessex, the other Ktho Zoid. The instrumentation belies how massive this album is: tenor sax, electronics, and guitar make up the palette for Calcination's sound, which on the surface appears to be another variant on the ever-popular Earth/Sunn brand of abstract droneological ambient sludge. That notion gets obliterated pretty fast once you really dig into this album, though; the three tracks ("Shadows", "Chystka", "Let 100 Flowers Bloom", which may or may not be derived from the Maoist slogan) wash over you in huge black waves of sound, dense swirling tidal waves of droning feedback and howling amplifier buzz, guitars twisted and throttled into shrieking high-end drones that sound alot like Matt Bower's amp-skree in Total, but soaked into goliath slabs of hovering doom-riff that is stretched aout into infinite roaring drones, very much like Earth 2 but even more static and unmoving, and entwined with passages of Lustmordian ambience and weird, squiggly guitar. These guys are crafting some really heavy shit as it is, but once the sax enters in and starts scraping the stratosphere with upper register squeals and heavily delayed bleats like some post-Ayler freakout shot into deep space, this takes on a whole different hue. An immense lightless abyss of crushing formless amp-blast and tortured reeds formed into monstrous drones with an overwhelming gravitational pull. Awesome. One of the best titles that Utech has brought to us, and highly recommended.
Back in stock, and now at a much lower price...
I didn't even know that Utech had released this disc until we ordered a bunch of their back catalog titles last month - as it turns out, the Calcination disc has become one of my favorite releases from the label, a time-devouring hybrid of Earth-en dronemetal and glacial free-jazz that pushes all of the same buttons that that killer Klangmutationen album did that Utech put out, while caving my skull in inna whole new way.
Who the hell is this band? I looked around online for information on them, but came up with little. The album was recorded in Berlin and I'm guessing that Calcination is German, and the minimal liner notes on the inside of the sleeve for the disc shows two members, one named Antoine Chessex, the other Ktho Zoid. The instrumentation belies how massive this album is: tenor sax, electronics, and guitar make up the palette for Calcination's sound, which on the surface appears to be another variant on the ever-popular Earth/Sunn brand of abstract droneological ambient sludge. That notion gets obliterated pretty fast once you really dig into this album, though; the three tracks ("Shadows", "Chystka", "Let 100 Flowers Bloom", which may or may not be derived from the Maoist slogan) wash over you in huge black waves of sound, dense swirling tidal waves of droning feedback and howling amplifier buzz, guitars twisted and throttled into shrieking high-end drones that sound alot like Matt Bower's amp-skree in Total, but soaked into goliath slabs of hovering doom-riff that is stretched aout into infinite roaring drones, very much like Earth 2 but even more static and unmoving, and entwined with passages of Lustmordian ambience and weird, squiggly guitar. These guys are crafting some really heavy shit as it is, but once the sax enters in and starts scraping the stratosphere with upper register squeals and heavily delayed bleats like some post-Ayler freakout shot into deep space, this takes on a whole different hue. An immense lightless abyss of crushing formless amp-blast and tortured reeds formed into monstrous drones with an overwhelming gravitational pull. Awesome. One of the best titles that Utech has brought to us, and highly recommended.
Caldera come from the same French hardcore/metal underground that has brought us bands like Year Of No Light, Tantrum, Metronome Charisma, and Gantz, and like all of those bands, Caldera have a knack for epic, majestic riffs and crushing melodic heft served up through dramatic metallized post-hardcore. The music is all instrumental though, and the band creates monumental metallic constructs that have a lot in common with bands like Capricorns, mixing together sludge, post-rock, math rock and some sunbaked guitar playing that sounds influenced by Kyuss. I've seen these cats labeled as "instrumental post doom metal", and while there are some dark vibes at work here and the music is entirely free of vocals, there isn't anything really "doomy" about their music. Caldera are a much more energetic breed of riffmonger, and Mist Through Your Consciousness delivers eight tracks of arboreally-themed jams that wind together those heavy Kyuss-esque hooks, somber indie rock jangle, some jazzy drumming that alternates with more straightforward grooves that crush whenever the drummer really kicks in, and cool, folksy acoustic guitars that weave themselves in with the heavier distorted guitars and the hufe, dubby basslines. The songs, each one named after a different species of tree, are long and winding and often employ the time-tested loud/quiet dynamic, but Caldera have a knack for writing cool songs that, together with the tight as hell, creative musicianship, have plenty of cool hooks that keep this from being another tired metallic post-rock retread; I'm hearing bits of Tool, Agalloch, and Opeth in here alongside Kyuss and Mogwai and Capricorns, a kind of heavy, moody stoner-prog, and fans of stuff like Isis, Zebulon Pike, 5ive, Fucking Champs, Pelican, and Suzukiton would probably enjoy this. Recommended!
Out of all of the old and new Init releases that we just got in stock, their 2002 album from Caligari is one of the most distinctive. The self-titled debut from this Sioux Falls based band has that manic, metallic hardcore sound in the vein of Botch and Converge, with lots of chaotic, math-damaged fretboard freakout and punishing chug riffs, but Caligari also inject some cool psychedelic effects and electronic textures into the songs that make their spacey, progressive metalcore stand out. Brutal distorted vocals are at times run through some kind of filtering effect that turns them into a fluttering cybernetic roar, and most of the songs juxtapose these cool, spacey passages of delayed guitar and windswept melody against the bouts of heavier riffage. This was the only thing that Caligari ever put out, and the band featured members of The Blinding Light, whose slurred slo-mo Slayer violence can be found on a smokin' out-of-print 7" from Init that we just got a few final
copies of this week, and I can hear some of that Great Plains Slayer worship in Caligari's music too, the evil, discordant solos, the ripping, rippling blasts of double bass drumming...it's a sound that seems to be specific to the metalcore scene of the Dakotas, for whatever reason. Yeah, this is definitely one of the coolest releases from this scene, a textured space-metalcore epic, like a heavier Slayerized version of Old Man Gloom's Seminar II, or a more rabid Cave In circa 1998 with even more FX fuckery going on. For real, these guys just seem to fuck with the electronics more and more heavily with each subsequent song on this disc, adding noisy distorted soundscapes and drenching the guitars in delay and a host of other digital effects - it's completely kicking my ass. Obviously, Caligari aren't going to convert anybody that loathed the metallic hardcore sound to begin with, but for those of us that dug the first wave of metallic hardcore and have been looking
for bands that breathe fresh air (and a really stoned quotient of electronic frippery) into the sound, this is a really rad album.
Caligula031 is another project from Marco Deplano, the guy behind the ferocious Italian power electronics project Wertham. With this project, Deplano explores the depths of human depravity and suffering with the motto "no limits, no taboos, no mercy" driving the evil sounds captured on this tape, which follows up a couple of releases on Filth & Violence. Like some of the recent offerings from UK filthmonger Bagman, Domino explores themes of human trafficking through an abstract combination of field recordings, deformed power electronics, recorded voices of individuals from the Swiss sex trade and gnarled sound-collage techniques that results in an unsettling listening experience.
Domino begins with the panicked emergency sirens and muffled, mangled voices of "Tool Of The Trade", recorded red-hot and extremely low-fi like we're hearing a field recording of clandestine activities on the street covered in sheets of filthy black static and brutal speaker hiss, an intense noisescape that degenerates into a blast of fetid static and hellish screeching. "Blonde, Drunk, Pregnant And Barefoot 2012 " follows with a throbbing, hypnotic low-end pulse lurking beneath layers of muffled shouting and screaming, furious voices and harsh buzzing feedback later giving way to recordings of young girls engaged in the language of commerce.
The flipside has the pulsating power electronics of "War Is Not Over Yet", a grungy, pounding assault that reminds me of both Bagman's style of rabid PE and Bizarre Uproar's murky, menacing approach. Thick grinding bass a la Genocide Organ throbs under looped sirens and furious, hateful lyrics, rising in intensity over the duration of the piece. Painful jagged rhythms cloaked in filth. The last one "Oceano" dials down the ear-hate a smidge via a sound collage created out of pilfered pop music, a heavily reverbed female voice, and clanking buried rhythms.
This tape of pitch-black and heavily textured filth comes in a black spray-painted cardboard box with full color artwork affixed to it that houses the cassette, a set of small inserts, and a 1" pinback badge, issued in a limited edition of one hundred and fifty copies.
Mostly known for reissues of deep-cut jazz/psych obscurities, British label Trunk Records had put out a couple of horror-related albums that I'd been wanting to get in stock for years, but which had gone out of print. One was the Dawn Of The Dead Unreleased Soundtrack Music compilation that features the obscure Music De Wolfe library pieces from Romero's apocalyptic zombie epic, and this, the sublimely sinister and psychedelic long-lost John Cameron soundtrack to cult classic British occult biker film Psychomania. In the hazy post-Hammer landscape of 1970's-era British horror cinema, Psychomania has always stuck out with its deranged tale of a hell-raising, devil-worshipping biker gang calling themselves "The Living Dead", and their ill-fated bid for immortality via toad-fueled necromancy and crazed supermarket carnage. It's a hoot, with numerous memorable scenes of nutty biker action, half-baked occultism, and some fantastic dialogue; no wonder it's been heavily referenced by fans of British black magic schlock like Electric Wizard and Satans Satyrs.
Despite the film's cult following in horror/occult cinema circles, Cameron's Psychomania score was apparently never released in its entirity, with the only official release of music from the film being the two-song Witch Hunt / Living Dead 7" that came out in 1973, featuring two key themes from the film performed by Cameron's ad hoc psych outfit Frog that was formed specifically for the score. That original 7" alone has commanded some hefty prices on the collectors market, so it was great to have the entire score finally released by Trunk around a decade ago. Now back in print, we're getting this disc on our shelves for the first time, and get to revisit this bizarre soundtrack and its terrific low-fi psychedelic sleaze.
For Psychomania, Cameron enlisted a group of British jazz musicians (going by the aforementioned "Frog" name) to perform his macabre arrangements, performing a set of tracks that craft an uncanny, hallucinatory atmosphere that kick in like good blotter, a killer mix of fuzz-encrusted psych and avant-garde gothic creep. The wah-fueled evil psych that plays over the opening "Psychomania Front Titles" combines airy flute with some seriously skuzzy funk bass and an infectious shuffling groove, producing some cool sinister instrumental rock; from there Cameron continues to exude a druggy, delirious atmosphere that goes well with the hell-raising, devil worshipping insanity on the screen, moving from spooky gothic organ and mesmeric krautrock grooves to minimal drones and echoplex-drenched piano, dropping in some raunchy garage-rock numbers like "Motorcycle Mayhem", belting out wailing female choruses and whirling gusts of witchy weirdness, and there's even some menacing keyboard-streaked tracks of hypnotic progginess that recalls the likes of Goblin. Some of the more memorable dialogue from the film is scattered among the musical tracks, and there are some lighter moments amongst all of the macabre fuzz-guitar jams, like the eerie woodwinds and gently plucked strings that form the nocturnal balladry of "Abby's Nightmare", and the unmistakably 70's-era folk rock that shows up on "Riding Free", the only track on the album that features actual singing. Some of the tracks feature brief cues that run only a few seconds in length, but there's plenty of longer tracks as well to sink your teeth into.
The whole score was re-mastered for this release, but as label boss Johnny Trunk discusses in his liner notes, it was a tough job due to the deterioration of the original studio reels; that produces a bit of murk in the sound quality, but that's fine by me. It's still a highly listenable release that fans of the film should be greatly pleased with. The disc includes a booklet with liner notes from composer Cameron, Trunk and someone named Jogoku, with Cameron describing how he utilized a variety of experimental recording techniques to create his unearthly sounds, from prepared piano noises to processed vibraphones and Hammond organs that he ran through a bank of effects units. A real blast, still one of the kookiest horror scores of the era, highly recommended for fans of vintage psych-creep and sinister experimental weirdness.
Finally back in print on vinyl, just in time for the brand-new deluxe Blu-ray/DVD reissue that's coming out through Arrow Video.
Mostly known for reissues of deep-cut jazz/psych obscurities, British label Trunk Records had put out a couple of horror-related albums that I'd been wanting to get in stock for years, but which had gone out of print. One was the Dawn Of The Dead Unreleased Soundtrack Music compilation that features the obscure Music De Wolfe library pieces from Romero's apocalyptic zombie epic, and this, the sublimely sinister and psychedelic long-lost John Cameron soundtrack to cult classic British occult biker film Psychomania. In the hazy post-Hammer landscape of 1970's-era British horror cinema, Psychomania has always stuck out with its deranged tale of a hell-raising, devil-worshipping biker gang calling themselves "The Living Dead", and their ill-fated bid for immortality via toad-fueled necromancy and crazed supermarket carnage. It's a hoot, with numerous memorable scenes of nutty biker action, half-baked occultism, and some fantastic dialogue; no wonder it's been heavily referenced by fans of British black magic schlock like Electric Wizard and Satans Satyrs.
Despite the film's cult following in horror/occult cinema circles, Cameron's Psychomania score was apparently never released in its entirity, with the only official release of music from the film being the two-song Witch Hunt / Living Dead 7" that came out in 1973, featuring two key themes from the film performed by Cameron's ad hoc psych outfit Frog that was formed specifically for the score. That original 7" alone has commanded some hefty prices on the collectors market, so it was great to have the entire score finally released by Trunk around a decade ago. Now back in print, we're getting this disc on our shelves for the first time, and get to revisit this bizarre soundtrack and its terrific low-fi psychedelic sleaze.
For Psychomania, Cameron enlisted a group of British jazz musicians (going by the aforementioned "Frog" name) to perform his macabre arrangements, performing a set of tracks that craft an uncanny, hallucinatory atmosphere that kick in like good blotter, a killer mix of fuzz-encrusted psych and avant-garde gothic creep. The wah-fueled evil psych that plays over the opening "Psychomania Front Titles" combines airy flute with some seriously skuzzy funk bass and an infectious shuffling groove, producing some cool sinister instrumental rock; from there Cameron continues to exude a druggy, delirious atmosphere that goes well with the hell-raising, devil worshipping insanity on the screen, moving from spooky gothic organ and mesmeric krautrock grooves to minimal drones and echoplex-drenched piano, dropping in some raunchy garage-rock numbers like "Motorcycle Mayhem", belting out wailing female choruses and whirling gusts of witchy weirdness, and there's even some menacing keyboard-streaked tracks of hypnotic progginess that recalls the likes of Goblin. Some of the more memorable dialogue from the film is scattered among the musical tracks, and there are some lighter moments amongst all of the macabre fuzz-guitar jams, like the eerie woodwinds and gently plucked strings that form the nocturnal balladry of "Abby's Nightmare", and the unmistakably 70's-era folk rock that shows up on "Riding Free", the only track on the album that features actual singing. Some of the tracks feature brief cues that run only a few seconds in length, but there's plenty of longer tracks as well to sink your teeth into.
The whole score was re-mastered for this release, but as label boss Johnny Trunk discusses in his liner notes, it was a tough job due to the deterioration of the original studio reels; that produces a bit of murk in the sound quality, but that's fine by me. It's still a highly listenable release that fans of the film should be greatly pleased with. The back of the sleeve features liner notes from composer Cameron, Trunk and someone named Jogoku, with Cameron describing how he utilized a variety of experimental recording techniques to create his unearthly sounds, from prepared piano noises to processed vibraphones and Hammond organs that he ran through a bank of effects units. A real blast, still one of the kookiest horror scores of the era, highly recommended for fans of vintage psych-creep and sinister experimental weirdness.
Wow, where did this lady come from? We've been snoozing on Massachusetts artist Jessica Rylan, 'cuz this RRRecords CD-R entitled Last Performance is an awesome blast of noisy human craziness that rocks our broccoli. I guess Can't is over with? We'll have to keep an out out for her other bands, Vampire Can't (Rylan with Vampire Belt's Chris COrsano and Bill Nace) and Dirty Dynamite Gang (with Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core and John Olson from Wolf Eyes). Anyways, what we get from this little CD-R is a brief but skull-blowing set, five tracks for a total running time of fourteen minutes, with Can't rocking out some "home made" analog syntheszier based distorto belch with Jessica's shy/freaked/funny vocals and brontosaur industrial beats going gonzo, performed/recorded at Jessica's parent house. Nice! One of the better homemade electronic spaz documents we've landed on lately.
We won't lie. We've been crushing on CAN'T ever since we were first bewitched by the chirping closet confessionals on the Final Performance CD-R that we listed a month or so ago. Then, we saw Jessica Rylan (a.k.a. CAN'T) open for WHITEHOUSE, WOLF EYES, and PIG DESTROYER, as part of SECRET DIARY, her duo with Donna Parker that spewed arcs of serious amplifier scream and shy utterances that just totally amazed us. So, we've been working on getting our hands on all of the CAN'T stuff that's been released for Crucial Blast, and we ultra stoked to find this brand new, beautiful looking picture disc 12" released on RRRecords. Like some weird melting together of K Records-style, delicate DIY bedroom pop and gnarly analogue synth sputter, New Secret has several tracks that focus on Jessica Rylan's lullaby voice chopped up with modulated feedback oscillations and scrawling sine waves from her small, self-built synths. The result is a beautiful collection of cracked electronics and crumbling circuits haunted by eerie little girl vocals. It also sort of reminds me of hearing one of those eerie, beautiful tunes from The Wicker Man, like "Willow's Song", through a long row of box fans, chopping up the softy sung strains of girlish longing into bits and pieces of wispy folk noise and blowing the fragments out into twilight air. Absoluetly GORGEOUS, highly recommended, probably our favorite recorded work from CAN'T ever. Limited edition of 500. One side of the pic disc is covered in snapshots lifted straight out of Jessica Rylan's scrapbook, cut and paste style...the other side has a nice scrawled watercolor piece.
More warped in-the-moment electronic squelch from Jessica Rylan, a.k.a. CAN"T ! On Prepares To Fail Again, Jessica's homemade analogue synthesizers bubble up from the basement and from out of dusty closets, blurting repetitive minimalist squiggles of distortion and subdued, spartan blasts of contemplative noise that evolve and take new form over the course of the track. Some tracks, like "Reneging on the Promise of a Higher Education", are more brutal events, showcasing a deep bass hum that is slowly distorted and mangled until it becomes a chirping code. Other songs are grounded in more explicit rhythmic noise. This disc is a bit crunchier than the K Recs-meets-gnarl noise of the New Secret pic disc or the modulated mutant pop reworkings of Vs. The World. Great stuff. Packaged in a minimal full color wallet sleeve.
Another new (well, not really new, originally released in 2002) full disc of lush mangled sweetness from artist/synth torturer Jessica Rylan, which precedes the harrowing bedroom vibes of the Final Performace CD-R we listed a while back. We totally dug that disc, and this one is even radder, a distillation of middle school angst and broken hearts through brutally remixed versions of nostalgiac roller-rink pop trash like "Too Shy", "Songbird", Kenny G jazz slop, and Christopher Cross, all blasted to smithereens by overmodulated distortion, the original hook napalmed by tons of skkrrch and beaten to death by rumbling, earth shuddering bass grooves. The way that these chunks of adolescent chaos have been reformatted as volcanic spew are exactly why we love Jessica Rylan's sounds so much...there's something extremely (sometimes painfullly) personal and thoughtful in her songs and music that connects with us, instead of simply immolating us in noise destruction. That said, these remixes ARE heavy duty, and speakers will be slain at top volume. Packaged in a plastic slipsleeve with color insert/cover and a folded up note of pubescent longing that really drove this one home.
These guys have been blowing my mind ever since I first slapped their Deep In The Mental7"""" on the table back in '95, but for some reason they've never managed to really break out in a big way. Mighta been due to the fact that Candiria has toured primarily with nu-metal bands for the past several years, and this shit probably goes right over the heads of most of the kids that turn out for those bills. In any event, Candiria's deftly connected streams of monolithic, jazz-damaged metalcore, fusion jazz, and hip hop trance has made for one of the most cerebral and whiplash inciting genrefucks to emerge in the turn of the century. 300 Percent Density, their 2001 full length and first for Century Media, followed several albums on Too Damn Hype from the late 90's including their dizzying Surrealistic Madness debut, Beyond Reasonable Doubt, and Process Of Self Development. It's one of their most focused works, the multiple chapter tracks seamlessly merging fucking chunktastic offtime ultra-technical stop/start riffing n' brutal syncopated growling vocals that carry some serious deathmetal weight with pure prog rock structures, detours into clean urban jazz and extended fusion jams a la Mahavishnu Orchestra or Return To Forever ('The Obvious Destination'), dark, trancey Wu Tang/Kool Keith-esque hip hop ('Without Water') and spastic nocturnal electronica ('Opposing Meter'), as drummer Kenneth Schalk's time warping polyrhythms tumble like kaleidoscope fragments all over the 11 songs. There's also a brief but haunting track of heavy feedback drone and urban field recordings that sounds like it could have come from Spylacopa, the somber ambient side-project of Candiria guitarist John LaMacchia, and the band uses other sounds like digeridoo and delayed trumpet to create eerie spatial shifts. Listening to this album again, I'm reminded again just how much these guys sound like the second coming of Voivod as filtered through an array of 21st century urban sounds. It's that fucked up and perplexing, and it's all delivered with such stunning musicianship that you've gotta hit rewind at least a couple of times just to parse what you just heard them play. Totally amazing that still defies catagorization. And that hidden track at the end is pure ambient jazz bliss that stretches out on a deep blue cloud for over 20 minutes, so don't touch those buttons.
Ever since we got Candiria's 300% Density back in stock a few months ago, I've been going back through their albums and doing a bit of re-discovery. Their 00's output on Century Media and MIA is pretty tight, but I still think that their first two albums, the primal blasts of creativity that were Surrealistic Madness and Beyond Reasonable Doubt, still hold up as the band's most out-there, mind bending statements. Based out of Brooklyn, NY, Candiria's sprawling urban fusion sound brought together brutal metalcore, hip-hop, fusion jazz, funk, and avant-electronica into a surreal street vision, equal parts ultra-technical Meshuggah math metal crush, supreme 70's style Return To Forever/ Mahavishnu Orchestra fusion jazz, and dark, Wu Tang/Kool Keith-esque hip-hop. Now, normally I like to keep this sort of chocolate far away from my peanut butter, as I have an extremely low tolerance for anything that remotely sounds like """"nu-metal"""", but Candiria were the one band that could combine hip-hop and metal elements into something that was far more cerebral and sonically adventurous than pretty much anything else that was coming out of both 90's metalcore and then-burgeoning nu-metal scene. Vocalist Carly Coma spit monstrous death metal grunts and fluid rhymes seamlessly. Guitarists John """"Be-Bop"""" Malonti and Eric Matthews issue ridiculous stop-on-a-dime riff arrangements worthy of a Naked City performance. The amazing rhythm section of bassist Mike MacIvor and drummer Ken Schalk shift through a dizzying array of time signature changes. So intense and jazz-damaged and BRUTALLY HEAVY when the band is full-on crush-it mode, and when they suddenly switch into the fusion parts, it's mesmerizing. Massive metalcore breakdowns are taken over by lush horn fanfares. Lopsided deathcore grinding gives way to trancey hip-hop flow. Songs are bookended by evocative fields of urban ambient sounds.
1997's Beyond Reasonable Doubt shows the band honing their formidable chops even more, this time back up by a small army of guest vocalists from NY Hardcore outfits Shutdown and Merauder, various underground hip hop artists, plus a guest drum performance from Dave Witte (Discordance Axis/Melt Banana)! The album has an even denser feel than the debut, and weaves in and out of crushing deathcore/jazz fusion hybrids like 'Faction', the handdrums-and-metalchug of the trance-inducing 'Tribes"""", and pure free-improv ('Lost In The Forest'). Eleven tracks, totally mindbending.This is the original release on the now-defunct label Too Damn Hype, sporting Coma's bizarre techno style album art and design - we found some of the last copies of this floating around at one of our distributors, so once these are gone we won't be getting any more.
Ever since we got Candiria's 300% Density back in stock a few months ago, I've been going back through their albums and doing a bit of re-discovery. Their 00's output on Century Media and MIA is pretty tight, but I still think that their first two albums, the primal blasts of creativity that were Surrealistic Madness and Beyond Reasonable Doubt, still hold up as the band's most out-there, mind bending statements. Based out of Brooklyn, NY, Candiria's sprawling urban fusion sound brought together brutal metalcore, hip-hop, fusion jazz, funk, and avant-electronica into a surreal street vision, equal parts ultra-technical Meshuggah math metal crush, supreme 70's style Return To Forever/ Mahavishnu Orchestra fusion jazz, and dark, Wu Tang/Kool Keith-esque hip-hop. Now, normally I like to keep this sort of chocolate far away from my peanut butter, as I have an extremely low tolerance for anything that remotely sounds like """"nu-metal"""", but Candiria were the one band that could combine hip-hop and metal elements into something that was far more cerebral and sonically adventurous than pretty much anything else that was coming out of both 90's metalcore and then-burgeoning nu-metal scene. So intense and jazz-damaged and BRUTALLY HEAVY when the band is full-on crush-it mode, and when they suddenly switch into the fusion parts, it's mesmerizing. Massive metalcore breakdowns are taken over by lush horn fanfares. Lopsided deathcore grinding gives way to trancey hip-hop flow. Songs are bookended by evocative fields of urban ambient sounds.
1995's Surrealistic Madness was the band's debut full length, and is amazingly just as damaged and ferociously imaginative and surreal as the band's later work, with more of a brutal death metal vibe that would dissipate over the course of subsequent albums. Carly Coma's vocals are at their most monstrous here, This album also features what is probably my most favorite Candiria jam ever, the song """"Elevate In Madness"""" (which originally appeared on the band's Deep In The Mental 7"""" EP on Devestating Soundworks). At approximately 1:25 into 'ELevate In Madness"""" the band breaks into a mindblowing Latin freestyle passage that flips my fucking wig every single time I hear it. Awesome, mind-bending avant-metalcore/urban fusion that still remains years ahead of it's time. This is the original release on the now-defunct label Too Damn Hype, sporting Coma's bizarre techno style album art and design.
The 2008 album from Brooklyn metal fusionists Candiria, Kiss The Lie finally appeared four years after their previous album What Doesn't Kill You... and followed a long period of tribulation for the band that included a catastrophic van wreck, major turmoil within the band's lineup, and their break with Century Media and subsequent issues with label Type-A. The album turned out to be their most accessible release of their career, with a soaring, pop-tinged art-metal sound that feels more like Tool or Faith No More at times than the crushing, jazz/hip-hop/death metal fusion of their earlier records. It feels like the band wanted to move beyond the pure aggression of their early work, but by becoming proggier and artier, Candiria's sound has lost a little of what made them so unique early on, with much of Kiss The Lie reminding me heavily of later Cave In and Faith No More. Most of the rough edges have been smoothed away, and the lush, soaring pop elements vastly overshadow the heavier aspects of Candiria's music, the death metal heaviness and jazz fusion now appearing infrequently; and frontman Carley Coma delivers less of his panic-stricken screaming and gruff, narcotized hip-hop delivery, instead largely going for a kind of Patton-esque croon throughout the album. The huge Meshuggah style off-time grooves are still present though, and when the band kicks in to heavy mode, they still crush. Don't get me wrong, it's actually a solid album, just a significant departure from the brilliant Zorn-ified jazz-death-core that made The Process of Self-Development and Beyond Reasonable Doubt some of the forward-thinking metal albums of the late 90's.
The album opens with "Icarus Syndrome (Alternatve, Extended Mix)", where the abrasive and the atmospheric come together in equal measure; the song blends the grim, staccato angular metal and Carly Coma's blunt flow found in earlier Candiria jams with the more atmospheric textures and spacey ambience that's continued to creep into their work over the years, locking into a furious tripped-out space funk groove at the end that reveals an all new side to Candiria's sound. The pummeling angular sludge that starts off "Sirens" gives way to more of these spacey atmospherics, the song becoming a sort of chunky prog-pop, followed by the dark, moody trip-hop of "Reflection Eleven" which delivers Coma's most soulful singing on the album, his velvet croon drifting above the slow shuffling rhythm and sheets of jazzy guitar, some metallic guitar chug eventually rising up from the smoky haze, at the end breaking into chamber strings and piano and shimmering guitar twang. Slightly harder is "The Sleeper / Thorns For The Dying (Alternative Mix) ", where chugging metallic rock and crunchy Kyuss-esque riffing merge with sky-climbing guitar atmospherics and soaring multi-layered vocals on the chorus, then shifts into a crushing math-metal groove, massive stuttering metal riffage over double-bass thunder and Coma's rapid-fire flow, breaking off yet again at the end into dreamy, fusiony space-pop. Female vocals start off "Legion", right before the monstrous doom-laden guitars and drums kick in, and the song drops into a crushing off-time doom dirge that finally brings some serious heaviness, then lurches into a totally CLASSIC whacked out math-metal groove with those freaked out hip hop vocals. The song also works in some more multi-layered clean vocals and spacey guitars, breaking off into strange ambient interludes, then back into the mutant Meshuugah-meets-alien-hip-hop math metal. "Alicia (Alternative Mix)" is pure ambience, an evocative blues/jazz fusion guitar solo blending with electric drones, chimes, and floating amplifier rumble, bits of backwards sound and hissing cymbals sweeping over the twilight glow. "A Rose Dies In Eden" at first take shape as some more Faith No More-esque art metal, but then evolves into a churning tribal math metal freakout, swirling with spacey fx and warped hip hop vocals. "Ascend (Alternative Mix)" starts off all skittery electronica laced with airy acoustic guitar and flitting fx and Rhodes keys, then erupts into a soaring melodic crush, followed by the grooving, crushing mathmetal prog of "It Starts With A Splinter, It End With A Knife (Alternative Mix)". The epic screamo of "Genuine" then leads into the last song, "Omaha Nights", another blissed-out twilight space-fusion instrumental, with jazzy drumming and Gilmour-esque blues leads streaking through the night sky, the band getting into deep improv territory.
This is a proggier, more complex Candiria, and Kiss The Lie does require repeated listens to absorb it all. It's on a similar trajectory as what Cynic and Dillenger Escape Plan has been doing lately, branching off from their avant-garde heaviness into more of an experimental pop/prog sound. Fans should dig it though, and it's definitely one of Candiria's better albums.
Limited to 500 copies. Comes in a full color gatefold package with artwork by Seldon Hunt.
With the emergence of their own label Rising Pulse, the members of Candiria have started up a series of compilations titled Toying With The Insanities that gives them the opportunity to present fans with material from the Candiria orbit, such as remixes and solo material. The second installment in this series has a selection of well-known underground artists doing remix work on some older Candiria songs, along with instrumental solo tracks that delve deeper into the member's love of jazz fusion and ambient music.
Volume II opens with Ben Weinman of Dillenger Escape Plan doing a remix of "Paradigm Shift" (from Beyond Reasonable Doubt) , which chops up and bitcrushes the original into a splattery, mangled blast of metallic hip-hop stutter, glitches and electronic detritus furiously swirling around the jagged guitars and lightning-quick vocal sputter. The remix of "Faction (Deadverse Remix)" from Alap Momin of Dalek brings out the massive boom-bap to the forefront of the track and turns it into a noise-drenched slab of trip-hop heaviness with massive layers of MBV-level pink distortion and occasional forays into syrupy drum n bass, and is one of my favorite selections on this Lp. That's followed by "The Radio Was Dead", a solo peice from Candiria drummer Kenneth Schalk that spins off into some mysterious, murky exotica, all tribal beats and psychedelic drift. The side is then closed out by "Outerlude" from Schalk and Candiria guitarist John LaMacchia, performing another moody, spacey instrumental blues/jazz/prog fusion piece that's in the same vein as the evocative instrumentals on Candiria's last album Kiss The Lie.
The b-side begins with a dubbed-out hip-hop/techno-funk redux of "Mental Politics" from L.I.M.A., followed by a remix of "Year One" from LaMacchia that turns the original into a sweeping orchestral electronica, flecked with minimal dub beats, swells of strings, hand drums, dreamy processed trombone, and deep low-frequency throb. The last track is a new track titled "James Brown" from the improv jazz dub fusion group Ghosts Of The Canal, which features several of the Candiria guys getting very deep and very out with some sprawling, Rhodes-laced propulsive jazz and massive dub-style bass.
The sounds documented in this series will probably appeal more to fans of Candiria's more experimental side, as there's less of their math-metal heaviness going on here. Interesting stuff though, especially if you like the Ghosts Of The Canal and Spylacopa stuff that these guys have released.
Comes in a full color jacket, limited to 300 copies.
Long unavailable, I just turned up a handful of this hard-to-find 7" Ep that was one of the earliest releases on extreme metal powerhouse Relapse Records, the first release from an obscure Pennsylvania duo called Candiru that featured Pat McCahan (also a member of eco-grinders Exit-13 and a one time member of Scorn, and later the founder of death/black metal imprint Red Stream) on vocals, guitar and samples, and Kipp Johnson (later of dub/industrial heavies Solarus and noise/sample terrorists Namanax) on bass, drum machines and samples. Candiru weren't just one of Relapse's earliest signings, but also one of their weirdest, with a plodding, electronic-enhanced lurch that sounded sort of like a wonky version of Godflesh or Pitchshifter crossed with the surreal demonic industrial/EBM of early G.G.F.H..
This 7� featured two songs from Candiru, the first side with "Tranced & Trampled", a heavy, primitive industrial metal dirge with noisy, downtuned metallic riffage, weird samples and clanking industrial rhythms, very Godflesh/Scorn-influenced but powered by it's own demented propulsion system. The b-side "Hammer" is weirder stuff, a nightmare trudge through processed moans, dissonant guitar noise, metallic percussion and weird dub/electronic effects that start to creep in towards the end, giving this grinding slow motion industrial-doom dirge a seriously druggy and zonked-out feel. There are only a handful of copies of this rare 7� in stock, and chances are that it�s not going to be available again once these sell out. Comes on red vinyl.
This out of print EP from Humboldt county / northern California drums and guitar duo CANDY MUSCLE delivers a dayglo colored mudslide of pretty, jangly and nicely low-fi / rough around the edges pop-noise and MEGA SLURRED , glacial drip paced MELVINS / early FLOOR style sludge , with cough-syrup inflected dual vocals. Hell yeah! BRUTALLY catchy and heavy and noisy and blasted. Where are these guys now? Someone let us know (seriously!) . This gooey slab is on BLACK WAX and comes in a silkscreen spattered glossy sleeve. Vinyl is MINT, UNPLAYED !! We had this sitting in the darkest corners of the vinyl compund for years!
Are there two things that go together better than black metal and wolves? Probaly not. Wolfen imagery has been a part of black metal since the earliest days of the Norwegian underground (Ulver, anyone?), and is almost as totemic as the inverted cross. The new black metal band Canis Dirus takes this a step further by taking on the prehistoric Dire Wolf as their mascot and namesake; this beast was always one of my favorite Ice Age megafauna when I was a kid devouring books on prehistoric animals, so Canis Dirus get instant cool points for the name and concept. Musically, these guys are pretty kick-ass as well. The band is a duo from Minnesota, one of whom is Todd Paulson, head of the excellent black metal/experimental label God Is Myth Records and the guy behind the one-man black metal/ambient/folk bands Uvall and Dormant. Their strain of black metal is heavily imbued with a somber autumnal atmosphere, evocative of Midwestern tundra and evergreen woodlands, with a sound formed from woozy, low-fi guitars, delicate acoustic strum, a pulsating murky drum sound, and hissing cymbals awash in reverb. The songs on their first album A Somber Wind From A Distant Shore will be familiar to fans of Burzum and Xasthur, especially with the subtly out-of-tune arpeggios and deformed minor-key melodies that buzz throughout the album. But there's also a streak of wicked acid blues that runs throughout this disc, which you can hear in the last few minutes of "Joyless and the Self Fulfilling Prophecy" and the haunting extended solo in "Garden of Death", soaring, soulful bluesy solos that have a bit of a David Gilmour feel. The vocals, on the other hand, are harsh, inhuman shrieks, the swooping cry of a falcon sweeping through the thick foggy atmosphere, reminiscent of the anguished unintelligible howls of Nattramn from Silencer; this strange vocal style is later accompanied by looped samples of liturgical choirs that add to overall creepiness of the album. Canis Dirus's debut is an amazing slab of mid-paced black metal that combines grim, depressive buzz with some searing psychedelic guitar, and is definitely one of my favorite new USBM discs.
Despite now having two albums out on Moribund that produced a uniquely desolate sound that I've really been digging, Canis Dirus have remained one of the more overlooked American black metal bands to emerge in recent years. I still think that their 2009 debut A Somber Wind From A Distant Shore turned out to be one of the better US black metal albums of the past five years, distinctly American in fact, with a swirling guitar sound that seemed to hint at both a heavy blues influence and echoes of the chorus-rich guitar sound that could at certain moments remind me of the classic Nephilim sound. Of course, the sheen of noisy high-end abrasion that the band drapes across their songs gives their music an uneasy feel that isn't going to be to all tastes, nor are the overwrought high-pitched shrieking vocals, which are more aligned with the hysterics of Silencer and Marblebog. With their second album Anden Om Norr, Canis Dirus crank up the intensity several times over, opening softly at first with the sounds of soft ambient whirr and nocturnal wildlife (a continued presence on the album, evoking the wildness of Minnesota's northern boreal forests) before launching into the frenzied, fuzz-drenched gloom of ""The Hunted Stag", where the band begins to shift between speedy blasting black metal and slower heavier riffing. The droning guitars are swathed in a peculiar high-end fuzz and those vocals are as intense and distraught as ever, an extreme high keening screech that's naturally reminiscent of Nattramn from Silencer, but then trades off with deeper guttural growls. The songs all have this strange dissonant quality that comes from their use of layered discordant feedback, warped minor key arpeggios and ugly atonal leads all buried beneath the buzzing riffs and gloomy melodies, creating an effect similar to that of Xasthur's albums, but blending that sound with soaring bluesy Floydian leads and layered kosmische synths that add loads of droning texture to Canis Dirus's moody, mournful sound. The band also work in some subtle piano and acoustic guitar sounds into their songs that give this some extra added depth, but the shimmering dissonant guitars and bursts of murderous mid-paced blackened riffs are always at the core of Anden Om Norr's sound, giving this music a feral, ugly edge even when Canis Dirus are in the throes of their most mournful moments. This is one of the few albums that I've heard that has been able to successfully draw from both the frenzied despair of the "suicidal" black metal sound and the moody melodic power of Drudkh, and ends up in a strange, rural black metal sound all their own. Recommended.
On regular 12" vinyl, on hot pink vinyl (that most death metal of vinyl colors), limited to 500 copies, with a foldout insert.
Hell yeah, my favorite pot-obsessed old school death metal band has returned with another blast of gutteral brutality! The mighty Cannabis Corpse is back with this four-song EP The Weeding, with members Weedgrinder, Hallhammer, Nikropolis and Landphil once again breaking out the early-90's death blitz and bestial denim-clad heaviness with their awesome, ultra-obsessive lyrics all about smokin' bud. They aren't the first metal band to sing exclusively about weed, but I can't think of anyone who has taken it to the imaginative extremes these maniacs have, combing both bizarre sci-fi marijuana narratives and direct references to Cannabal Corpse in the same breath, and incorporating this ridiculousness into a straight-faced death metal attack that sounds like it birthed somewhere right outside of Tampa in 1990. Part of this is an elaborate joke, of course, but the music is so crushing and legit that even the stoniest death metaller will be hard pressed not to love these guys. Comedic and crushing, the EP starts off with "Shit Of Pot Seeds", a raging dose of complex death metal, total Cannibal Corpse worship, but, you know, with lyrics about the toxic horrors of what happens to your gastrointestinal system after ingesting pot seeds, the song fulla sick changeups between thrashy DM and slower chugging breakdowns, loads of technical shredding, deep gutteral bellows, and some eerie dual guitar harmonies showing up towards the end. "Vaporaized" starts off more dirgey and atmospheric, but quickly enough launches into a furious speedy death metal assault with awesome evil soloing, putrid blasts of vocal slime, jackhammer blastbeats, and complex jagged riffing, followed by the punishing double-bass driven grooves of "Skull Full Of Bong Hits" and the slightly more melodic "Sickening Photosynthesis", which has more of those diseased guitar harmonies and lots of melodic bass work. And as always, no Cannabis Corpse release is complete without the fantastic full color artwork of Andrei Bouzikov, who delivers another eye-popping piece of sentient marijuana bud mayhem, with two battling bud-warriors engaged in mortal combat in some sort of Thunderdome-like scenario. Another killer fucking slab of THC-infested death metal brutality! And for those of you keeping score, the band also features members of Battlemaster and Municipal Waste.
Made up of members of Municipal Waste and Battlemaster, Cannibis Corpse are kind of like the Bongzilla of death metal. Completely obsessed with marijuana
and pot culture to the point of naming their songs "Staring Through My Eyes That Are Red", "Reefer Stashed Place", and "Force Fed Shitty Grass", and titling
their debut album Blunted At Birth, Cannibis Corpse are a bit more tongue in cheek than Bongzilla and obviously have a totally different musical
approach, but the two bands share an extreme obsession with pot smoking that borders on the pathological. But these guys are also hilarious death metal
satirists, writing goofy pot-centric lyrics about smoking dope out of bongs made from human skulls and terminally stoned zombies, in a style that is
obviously inspired by the gory lyrics of Cannibal Corpse and which totally parody death metal conventions. When it comes to the jams, though, they play it
pretty straight with straight up old school death metal, like Suffocation or Cannibal Corpse, laced with the occasional funky bass solo. Catchy, brutal
downtuned death metal, crunchy technical riffing and ridiculous gutteral vocals that give Chris Barnes a run for his money. I'm not sure how much further
they can take this whole concept, but Blunted At Birth succeeds as a goofy, crushing blat of comedic death metal that's as funny as anything that
Putrescence has done. Great old-school DM demo style artwork.
The dope-fueled death metal concept known as Cannibis Corpse has returned with their second album Tube Of The Resinated, the followup to 2006's Blunted AT Birth. Haters might call this a one-joke band that otherwise regurgitates standard old-guard death metal, but I say "fuck 'em", 'cuz Cannibis Corpse's stalwart dedication to their concept is matched only by the utter brutality of their Morrisound-worshipping DM that flays the meat from my grill every time I slap this monster on ol' Emerson. Neither Bongzilla nor Cypress Hill have a narrative like this running throughout their music - Tube gets it going from the awesome old-school painted album cover from Andrei Bouzikov that depicts a trio of wailing dopewitches worshipping a gut-filled hellbong seated on a throne of bird skulls and human femurs, then proceed to blow my mind with the enormous poster insert that folds out to show a cartoon-style post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with roving waterbong/dinosaur hybrids, armies of sentient marijuana buds waging brutal war on the last of the human survivors while their gigantic, Lovecraftian cheeba-overlords oversee the gore-drenched destruction while they rip tubes out of decapitated human heads and chow down on bags of "Taco Hole". Are you getting a feel for how awesome this is yet? Well, then check out the poetry behind the first cut "Chronolith": "Stoned, as stoned as the builders of this bud-bastion must have been / High, so high, so high, high above the summit circled calmly be green clouds / Smoke, the smoke is drawn forth from the buds of inner earth / Deep, deep beneath the core burn their coals, primordial nugs". The dopeworship continues with "Mummified In Bong Water", "Disposal Of The Baggy", "Sentenced To Burn One", and "Addicted To Hash In A Tin". So of course there is the Cannibal Corpse worship as well, and these cats deliver the old school Cannibal Corpse/Tampa death metal style in grand form , no techy shit, no crazy time signatures or off-the-wall complexity, just straight up, crushing, song-based death metal that is catchy as fuck with stomping slow parts, tons of blasting, battering blasts of double bass kicks and sicko shredding all over the place. Awesome! Oh yeah, and the band features members of Parasytic, Battlemaster and Municipal Waste, if that gets yer Reeboks in a clot.
Now available on CD in a full-color slipcase, and with all of the insane artwork from the LP included.
The dope-fueled death metal concept known as Cannibis Corpse has returned with their second album Tube Of The Resinated, the followup to 2006's Blunted AT Birth. Haters might call this a one-joke band that otherwise regurgitates standard old-guard death metal, but I say "fuck 'em", 'cuz Cannibis Corpse's stalwart dedication to their concept is matched only by the utter brutality of their Morrisound-worshipping DM that flays the meat from my grill every time I slap this monster on ol' Emerson. Neither Bongzilla nor Cypress Hill have a narrative like this running throughout their music - Tube gets it going from the awesome old-school painted album cover from Andrei Bouzikov that depicts a trio of wailing dopewitches worshipping a gut-filled hellbong seated on a throne of bird skulls and human femurs, then proceed to blow my mind with the enormous poster insert that folds out to show a cartoon-style post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with roving waterbong/dinosaur hybrids, armies of sentient marijuana buds waging brutal war on the last of the human survivors while their gigantic, Lovecraftian cheeba-overlords oversee the gore-drenched destruction while they rip tubes out of decapitated human heads and chow down on bags of "Taco Hole". Are you getting a feel for how awesome this is yet? Well, then check out the poetry behind the first cut "Chronolith": "Stoned, as stoned as the builders of this bud-bastion must have been / High, so high, so high, high above the summit circled calmly be green clouds / Smoke, the smoke is drawn forth from the buds of inner earth / Deep, deep beneath the core burn their coals, primordial nugs". The dopeworship continues with "Mummified In Bong Water", "Disposal Of The Baggy", "Sentenced To Burn One", and "Addicted To Hash In A Tin". So of course there is the Cannibal Corpse worship as well, and these cats deliver the old school Cannibal Corpse/Tampa death metal style in grand form , no techy shit, no crazy time signatures or off-the-wall complexity, just straight up, crushing, song-based death metal that is catchy as fuck with stomping slow parts, tons of blasting, battering blasts of double bass kicks and sicko shredding all over the place. Awesome! Oh yeah, and the band features members of Parasytic, Battlemaster and Municipal Waste, if that gets yer Reeboks in a clot.
Hell yeah, my favorite pot-obsessed old school death metal band has returned with another blast of gutteral brutality! The mighty Cannabis Corpse is back with this four-song EP The Weeding, with members Weedgrinder, Hallhammer, Nikropolis and Landphil once again breaking out the early-90's death blitz and bestial denim-clad heaviness with their awesome, ultra-obsessive lyrics all about smokin' bud. They aren't the first metal band to sing exclusively about weed, but I can't think of anyone who has taken it to the imaginative extremes these maniacs have, combing both bizarre sci-fi marijuana narratives and direct references to Cannabal Corpse in the same breath, and incorporating this ridiculousness into a straight-faced death metal attack that sounds like it birthed somewhere right outside of Tampa in 1990. Part of this is an elaborate joke, of course, but the music is so crushing and legit that even the stoniest death metaller will be hard pressed not to love these guys. Comedic and crushing, the EP starts off with "Shit Of Pot Seeds", a raging dose of complex death metal, total Cannibal Corpse worship, but, you know, with lyrics about the toxic horrors of what happens to your gastrointestinal system after ingesting pot seeds, the song fulla sick changeups between thrashy DM and slower chugging breakdowns, loads of technical shredding, deep gutteral bellows, and some eerie dual guitar harmonies showing up towards the end. "Vaporaized" starts off more dirgey and atmospheric, but quickly enough launches into a furious speedy death metal assault with awesome evil soloing, putrid blasts of vocal slime, jackhammer blastbeats, and complex jagged riffing, followed by the punishing double-bass driven grooves of "Skull Full Of Bong Hits" and the slightly more melodic "Sickening Photosynthesis", which has more of those diseased guitar harmonies and lots of melodic bass work. And as always, no Cannabis Corpse release is complete without the fantastic full color artwork of Andrei Bouzikov, who delivers another eye-popping piece of sentient marijuana bud mayhem, with two battling bud-warriors engaged in mortal combat in some sort of Thunderdome-like scenario. Another killer fucking slab of THC-infested death metal brutality! And for those of you keeping score, the band also features members of Battlemaster and Municipal Waste.
Tank Crimes just released the newest Cannabis Corpse EP as a deluxe collectors package, with a thick 8" square picture disc with full color artwork on both sides, a 4" x 7" vinyl Cannabis Corpse "Bong Hits" sticker, a poster/lyric foldout sheet, and an 13" x 18" full color Cannabis Corpse "Vaporized" poster, all packaged together in an onversized zip-lock bag, and issued in a limited edition of 420 copies (of course!).
Hell yeah, my favorite pot-obsessed old school death metal band has returned with another blast of gutteral brutality! The mighty Cannabis Corpse is back with this four-song EP The Weeding, with members Weedgrinder, Hallhammer, Nikropolis and Landphil once again breaking out the early-90's death blitz and bestial denim-clad heaviness with their awesome, ultra-obsessive lyrics all about smokin' bud. They aren't the first metal band to sing exclusively about weed, but I can't think of anyone who has taken it to the imaginative extremes these maniacs have, combing both bizarre sci-fi marijuana narratives and direct references to Cannabal Corpse in the same breath, and incorporating this ridiculousness into a straight-faced death metal attack that sounds like it birthed somewhere right outside of Tampa in 1990. Part of this is an elaborate joke, of course, but the music is so crushing and legit that even the stoniest death metaller will be hard pressed not to love these guys. Comedic and crushing, the EP starts off with "Shit Of Pot Seeds", a raging dose of complex death metal, total Cannibal Corpse worship, but, you know, with lyrics about the toxic horrors of what happens to your gastrointestinal system after ingesting pot seeds, the song fulla sick changeups between thrashy DM and slower chugging breakdowns, loads of technical shredding, deep gutteral bellows, and some eerie dual guitar harmonies showing up towards the end. "Vaporaized" starts off more dirgey and atmospheric, but quickly enough launches into a furious speedy death metal assault with awesome evil soloing, putrid blasts of vocal slime, jackhammer blastbeats, and complex jagged riffing, followed by the punishing double-bass driven grooves of "Skull Full Of Bong Hits" and the slightly more melodic "Sickening Photosynthesis", which has more of those diseased guitar harmonies and lots of melodic bass work. And as always, no Cannabis Corpse release is complete without the fantastic full color artwork of Andrei Bouzikov, who delivers another eye-popping piece of sentient marijuana bud mayhem, with two battling bud-warriors engaged in mortal combat in some sort of Thunderdome-like scenario. Another killer fucking slab of THC-infested death metal brutality! And for those of you keeping score, the band also features members of Battlemaster and Municipal Waste.
Now in stock on colored vinyl!
Made up of members of Municipal Waste and Battlemaster, Cannibis Corpse are kind of like the Bongzilla of death metal. Completely obsessed with marijuana and pot culture to the point of naming their songs "Staring Through My Eyes That Are Red", "Reefer Stashed Place", and "Force Fed Shitty Grass", and titling their debut album Blunted At Birth, Cannibis Corpse are a bit more tongue in cheek than Bongzilla and obviously have a totally different musical approach, but the two bands share an extreme obsession with pot smoking that borders on the pathological. But these guys are also hilarious death metal satirists, writing goofy pot-centric lyrics about smoking dope out of bongs made from human skulls and terminally stoned zombies, in a style that is obviously inspired by the gory lyrics of Cannibal Corpse and which totally parody death metal conventions. When it comes to the jams, though, they play it pretty straight with straight up old school death metal, like Suffocation or Cannibal Corpse, laced with the occasional funky bass solo. Catchy, brutal downtuned death metal, crunchy technical riffing and ridiculous gutteral vocals that give Chris Barnes a run for his money. I'm not sure how much further they can take this whole concept, but Blunted At Birth succeeds as a goofy, crushing blat of comedic death metal that's as funny as anything that Putrescence has done. Great old-school DM demo style artwork.
Now available on lime-green professionally manufactured cassette!
Made up of members of Municipal Waste and Battlemaster, Cannibis Corpse are kind of like the Bongzilla of death metal. Completely obsessed with marijuana and pot culture to the point of naming their songs "Staring Through My Eyes That Are Red", "Reefer Stashed Place", and "Force Fed Shitty Grass", and titling their debut album Blunted At Birth, Cannibis Corpse are a bit more tongue in cheek than Bongzilla and obviously have a totally different musical approach, but the two bands share an extreme obsession with pot smoking that borders on the pathological. But these guys are also hilarious death metal satirists, writing goofy pot-centric lyrics about smoking dope out of bongs made from human skulls and terminally stoned zombies, in a style that is obviously inspired by the gory lyrics of Cannibal Corpse and which totally parody death metal conventions. When it comes to the jams, though, they play it pretty straight with straight up old school death metal, like Suffocation or Cannibal Corpse, laced with the occasional funky bass solo. Catchy, brutal downtuned death metal, crunchy technical riffing and ridiculous gutteral vocals that give Chris Barnes a run for his money. I'm not sure how much further they can take this whole concept, but Blunted At Birth succeeds as a goofy, crushing blat of comedic death metal that's as funny as anything that Putrescence has done. Great old-school DM demo style artwork.
The debut Ep from these Philly vampyric punks came out on Dwid's label Holy Terror, and their tattered blackened punk fits right in with all of the other weird black metal influenced bands that the Integrity frontman has been working with. The songs on Transylvania are all centered around old Irish vampire folklore, and the sleeve even includes an essay about the ancient Irish vampire legends that inspired this 7"; musically, it's a ratty mixture of low-fi black metal and feral hardcore punk that's surrounded by a whiff of killer LLN-esque dementia.
Side Vermyn begins with the haunting piano music of "To Transylvania", a creepy classical intro that drifts through clouds of swirling dust motes and cobwebs. This only lasts for a minute or so before the band lurches into the discordant blackened hardcore punk of "Seas Of Screams", where they bring a rotten, basement black metal vibe to their ratty thrash, sickly raspy screams echoing over the blasting drums and ominous guitars. From there, Cape Of Bats head into "Night Of The Vampyre", which turns towards more of an old school (almost Christian Death-ish) death rock sound for a bit before exploding into thrashing speed, an eerie, rocking song that sort of feels like some cross between the dank midnight hallucinations of the Les Legions Noires and the savagery of old Cali hardcore.
The only song on the b-side is "Castle Afterdark" and its another blaster, a ferocious and wonderfully sloppy hardcore attack that also veers into some damaged black metallish territory, lurching into a noisy, wretched sounding dirge towards the end, finally closing in another gorgeously eerie, dust-coated piano piece.
One of my favorite Holy Terror 7"s, hopefully an album will be headed our way sometime soon. Looks great, too; the record jacket features more of Dwid's cool murky artwork, and is limited to five hundred copies.
The opening shot from the Dayton-based Capital Hemorrhage, a guitar/drums duo made up of Ryan Faris & Jonathan Prunty, who are also the driving force behind free/sludge/industrialists ULTRA//VIRES. This project sort of works in a different vibe, but it's just as heavy and destroyed. The band vomits incomprehensible rivers of abrasive free-noise-rock language all over the course of the disc's 24 minute improv assault, obviously entitled "Attempted Abduction". It's a dynamic jam as they move from clattery free-jazz forms and slack string squelch to blasts of spontaneous thrash to massively distorted garage/drone/narco rock raveups and back to burning, amplifier melting drones. Heavy aggro improv along the lines of a sludgier, looser, brattier Flying Luttenbachers or Borbetomagus stripped of brass, gnawing on about 15 years worth of Earache Records vinyl and scrawled manifestos of European Improv. Comes in a cool, minimalist screenprinted white wallet sleeve with insert card.
Never thought I'd see this back in print again...legendary powerviolence bands Capitalist Casualties and Man Is The Bastard teamed up for this absolutely RAGING split 12" back in 1994 in a run of 1200 copies, with each band filling up a side with a short but devestating blast of wonky extreme hardcore that was collectively some of
their most lethal recorded material ever. The original vinyl has been out of print for years and each band's tracks would later be included on CD, but since those CDs are now out of print (both Capitalist Casualties A Collection Of Out-Of-Print Singles, Split EP's And Compilation Tracks and Man Is The Bastard's Mancruel), this is once again the only place where you can find these tracks.
Capitalist Casualties tear through thirteen super short tracks of stripped-down hardcore aggression on their side, and it's some of my fave stuff from these misanthropic speedfreaks. Combining intensely pissed off political lyrics and a blurr-thrash style of HC that sounded like DRI sped up to doublespeed, this is some of the greatest music to come out of the powerviolence scene of the early 90's, injecting wonky Greg Ginn-esque riffs and jarring stop-start arrangements into their blastcore that leaves you dizzy. If you're a fan of new jacks like Endless Blockade and Weekend Nachos, you gotta hear these Capitalist Casulaties tracks to see where they are cribbing most of their moves from. Crucial stuff, right up their with Infest and Crossed Out.
The Man Is The Bastard side featured the first recordings from the band to feature Andy Beatiie from No Comment on vocals, and these five tracks are some of MITB's most vicious. "Foot Binding", "Feed The Octopus", "Eunuch", "Gourmet Pez", "Blinds"...this is some of their fastest stuff, mixing together the bizarre angular bass riffs and technical, proggy arrangements with blasts of grinding speed and the triple-vocal assault. Ugh, when the instrumental "Feed The Octopus" kicks in to that wicked rocking groove, it's sickening...this stuff is awesome, some of the most inventive and avant-garde hardcore ever, and still totally unmatched today.
Absolutely ESSENTIAL. They've kept the original album art and insert intact, with Jeff Whiplash's cool high contrast artwork and the iconic MITB design style all present. Black vinyl.
The striking cover art of a suicide victim, drawn in stark black ink and subtle shading, drew us in immediately. With a grim, highly detailed look that reminds us of old Rudimentary Peni artwork, the cover depicts the deceased's destroyed head blossoming into a psychedelic vomit spew of toy horses and vines, eyeballs and alien fauna, forming one of the more warped tableaux we've witnessed on an album cover. It's an awesome visual counterpart to the driving metallic instrumentals that make up almost all of Ruder Forms Survive, the debut album from this UK group made up of former members of Dukes Of Nothing, Bridge & Tunnel, Iron Monkey and Orange Goblin. This album serves up a sound that actually stands out from the legions of voiceless metallers that have seemingly crawled out of every corner over the past few years - in Capricorn's churning heavy riffage and prog-inflected power dirges, we're hearing bits and pieces of grimy UK crustmetal, doomy sludge, Pink Floyd's oft-evocative space rock, and even some of Amebix's brooding gloominess, though Capricorns ultimate sound is wholly their own. Sometimes slow and brooding and creepy, or crushingly rocking and propulsive with huge radiant major key chords exploding in the sky, the songs certainly stand out, 'cuz as proggy and intricate as they are capable of getting, the guys in Capricorns consistently focus on the RIFF, and there are so many truly catchy, memorable riffs and songs on here that we've actually listened to this album nonstop since we got 'em in. One of the album's standouts though is "The First Broken Promise". The only song not to feature a cryptic reference to a year in it's title (as with "1977: Blood For Papa", or "1440: Exit Wargasmotron"), "The First Broken Promise" features a guest collaboration with Oxbow's Eugene Robinson for the sole vocal performance on the disc. That track is badass, as Robinson's unmistakeable psychotic wailings fit perfectly with Capricorns tumultuous riffage. Kinda wished we coulda heard more of that teamup! But Capricorns mighty instrumental stoner metal is fine just the way it is, loaded with killer repetitious grooves and intricate, spacey sludge sagas stretching out forever. One of Crucial Blast's top 20 albums to take on a long drive, for real!
Along with the limited edition vinyl for Capricorns excellent debut, we also picked up some of the UK instrumentalists self-titled CD from a few years back, now in stock for the first time here at C-Blast. Early on, Capricorns featured members from several well-known British metal bands, including Iron Monkey, Orange Goblin, and Dukes of Nothing, but played a mostly vocal-free, superheavy style of atmospheric sludge; their first album Ruder Forms Survive was where I was introduced to their powerful longform instrumentals, but I never got around to checking out their very first three-song EP that Rise Above put out in 2004 until just now. These songs ("Comrades In Tears", "Queen Of Bruises", and "Transcendental Evisceration") are as complex and heavy as the music on their first album; each song moves between haunting atmospherics and dark moodiness, and massive riffage and pummeling percussive thunder. Drummer Chris Turner brings his distinctive style of rolling, tumbling rhythms that propelled the druggy biker metal of Orange Goblin, and here his drumming creates a seething undertow of rhythmic activity that contrasts with the brooding arpeggios and repetitive heavy riffs. You might draw some comparisons between Capricorns and the epic arrangements of early Pelican, though my ears hear something much darker and proggier - these long, doleful jams move through similiar terrain of peaks and valleys as Pelican, but the riffs are more aggressive, the drumming much more complex and dynamic. The band also makes good use of spacey electronic textures and interesting time signatures, and like with their other releases that I have, there is only one track here that features vocals; when those show up, it's a gruff roar that suits the heaviness just fine. A band to check out if yer into the heavy instrumental style of groups like 5ive, Suzukiton, Zebulon Pike and dark, soundtracky stuff like Zombi and Morkobot.
I love Capricorns. Over the course of an EP and two albums, this UK band has evolved their powerful atmospheric sludge into one of the best instrumental metal sounds out there. Well, mostly instrumental...on heir last album Ruder Forms Survive, Capricorns were joined by Oxbow frontman Eugene Robinson for the song "The First Broken Promise", but that was an anomaly, albeit a great one. Other than that, Capricorns operate sans vocals, and it takes a top notch rock band to keep yer interest with just the strength of their riffs. Capricorn's are masters of the riff, in my book. The last two records had great riffs, lots of sludgy, complex riffage that wrapped around itself and constructed into compact jams that tended to get in, pulverize, and get out. River Bear Your Bones gets even more complex. The hints of prog rock that I heard in their older stuff appear to be fully realized here. Check that title out - the album is a kind of concept record about the River Thames, and the relationship between river and the city of London. The eight songs are lengthy riff/rhythm workouts that average seven minutes in length, and each song is a complex clot of dissonant guitar lines and massive chugging riffs, tricky guitar interplay and spiralling mathy lines that crisscross one another and create these cool atmospheric sections that suggests a much more aggressive King Crimson. SOme other sounds enter the fray on River, synths and oscillators lending spacey whoosh and dark textures to the music, but even when the band gets really spacey, or calm and pretty, they always return to the crush at some point. I see Capricorns get compared to Pelican alot, and I think that fans of the one would probably really dig the other. But Capricorns sound so much more aggressive and feral than Pelican (or most other instrumental metal bands, for that matter), their long brooding jams cast in a darker light than most. The drumming on this album really stands out, too. Drummer Nathan Perrier brings a bunch of powerful moves to his kit, and the rhythms on River move back and forth between straightforward pummel and freer jazz playing, and even locks in to some crushing krautrock propulsion in a couple of spots, like in the ominous Hawkwind-esque space rock in the second half of "Owing To The Frogs". Probably my favorite track here is the last, the eleven minute jam "Drinking Water from the Skull of a Hanged Man". This epic dose of skuzzy freeform metal was recorded straight to cassette and it sure fucking sounds like it; bathed in a grungy low-fi haze, this has the band simplifying their sound and grinding through a stretched out monolith of scorched hypno-metal that combines muscular sludge metal with forays into trippy rhythmic trance and zoned out guitar effects that bears a resemblance to krautrock bands like Can or Neu!. Primo stuff. This has quickly turned into one of my favorite instrumental metal albums, nice and compact, with the spacey prog rock balanced perfectly with the crushing metal riffs. Highly recommended.
Back in stock!
Along with the limited edition vinyl for Capricorns excellent debut, we also picked up some of the UK instrumentalists self-titled CD from a few years back, now in stock for the first time here at C-Blast. Early on, Capricorns featured members from several well-known British metal bands, including Iron Monkey, Orange Goblin, and Dukes of Nothing, but played a mostly vocal-free, superheavy style of atmospheric sludge; their first album Ruder Forms Survive was where I was introduced to their powerful longform instrumentals, but I never got around to checking out their very first three-song EP that Rise Above put out in 2004 until just now. These songs ("Comrades In Tears", "Queen Of Bruises", and "Transcendental Evisceration") are as complex and heavy as the music on their first album; each song moves between haunting atmospherics and dark moodiness, and massive riffage and pummeling percussive thunder. Drummer Chris Turner brings his distinctive style of rolling, tumbling rhythms that propelled the druggy biker metal of Orange Goblin, and here his drumming creates a seething undertow of rhythmic activity that contrasts with the brooding arpeggios and repetitive heavy riffs. You might draw some comparisons between Capricorns and the epic arrangements of early Pelican, though my ears hear something much darker and proggier - these long, doleful jams move through similiar terrain of peaks and valleys as Pelican, but the riffs are more aggressive, the drumming much more complex and dynamic. The band also makes good use of spacey electronic textures and interesting time signatures, and like with their other releases that I have, there is only one track here that features vocals; when those show up, it's a gruff roar that suits the heaviness just fine. A band to check out if yer into the heavy instrumental style of groups like 5ive, Suzukiton, Zebulon Pike and dark, soundtracky stuff like Zombi and Morkobot.
When I first heard about Capsule online at one news site or another, I was under the impression that they were some sort of neuvo screamo outfit, but that's not the case at all. The Miami band showed up on Robotic Empire last year with their debut album, and it's a powerful introduction to Capsule's amazingly intricate brand of grindy hardcore. First off, the presentation for Blue sets this up for pretty high expectations. The album looks fucking gorgeous, packaged in a thick glossy gatefold jacket that is coated with a thick shiny varnish, with awesome artwork and the band name printed across the top of the front in a clear matte varnish, the CD version of the album included on the inside of the gatefold and attached to a set of flaps on the left side panel similiar to how Torche's In Return was designed, and the record situated in a side pocket. Man, the guys at Robotic Empire have been putting together the coolest dual LP/CD packages, and everyone that I've shown this Capsule album to has bugged out about how cool it looks.
And Capsule's music is equally impressive, and tough to slap a label on. Like I said, some of the early reports I had been reading about the Miami trio (which features a current member of Kylesa) made me think that this was going to be along the lines of late 90's screamo, which I was never a big fan of, but when I finally listened to Blue I was surprised to hear a super-intricate, mathy sort of prog-grind made up of tons of complex little parts and crazed song arrangements that demand that you listen to this album several times before yer able to wrap yer head around Capsule's detailed sound. Angular clusters of riffage collide with abrupt time changes and awesome drumming, but instead of total chaos we get these amazing off-kilter melodies that wind around the riffs and blastbeats, and the guitars are almost totally clean and undistorted, and it ends up sounding alot like the early 90s math rock that I grew up on, like hearing Bastro sped up and bent into new alien angles and turned into a frantic tech-grind freakout. The album peaks with the two middle tracks; "Determinal" starts off with a minute or so of dissonant, intricately layered riffs and manic blastbeats, but then drops into a slow, bludgeoning dirge that stretches out for nearly ten minutes, a crushing longform dronesludge trance that rolls over you endlessly, then "Blue/Green" follows that up with a dark, minimal instrumental soundscape that casts a sinister shadow across the remainder of Blue. Highly recommended!
Been getting into this Texas band's brand of frantic blackened hardcore more and more, largely through their killer cassette titles that Broken Limbs has been issuing over the past year or so. First heard 'em on that killer split with blackened noise-doom mutants Venowl, but here we're finally getting a full length from the group, a reissue of a super-limited CDR they self-released a while back. And Stagnant Perceptions is even better than the stuff I've heard up to this point, delivering eleven short, punchy tracks of blistering, despairing hardcore that seems to draw equally from the more miserable fringes of black metal, the harsher edge of 90's emo, and a big dose of filthy, stench-filled grindcrust. Don't get spooked by the "E" word, though. Where I'm hearing that is in Garry Brents's use of jangling, dissonant guitar chords and brief breaks where the band's furious blackened thrashpunk suddenly swerves into muted, almost solemn melody while singer Chris Francis shreds his larynx over top, moments that are reminiscent of harder-edged stuff like Pg.99 and Saetia. These guys whip up a killer sound here, and the recording quality is the best yet from 'em, powerful and punchy and huge, especially considering that you're hearing a duo.
There's some great, technical guitarwork in here in addition to some hauntingly tremulous melody weaved throughout the songs, alongside bursts of absolutely savage blackened grindcore (which are aided by guitar and vocal contributions from Dorian Rainwater from Noisear/Phobia), and some of the guitar parts bring an almost mathy quality to certain parts of the album. Definitely not just another Trap Them / Young And In The Way clone, Cara Neir deliver their own distinctive strain of black metal-influenced hardcore, possessed with a frantic, frayed energy and a subtle progginess (especially in the rhythm section) along with a couple of moments where the band suddenly swells into awestruck beauty and majestic melody that's reminiscent of the likes of Fall Of Efrafa and Agalloch, all of which come together to really set it apart from the hordes of other bands working within this realm. Not to mention, the songs themselves are pretty goddamn catchy. This is definitely a band that fans of stuff like Young And In The Way should be checking out. Limited to one hundred copies.
Ridiculous gonzo grindnoise from a Dutch dude name Rogier, who has been perfecting his absurdly brutal brand of industrial goreblast since 1999. I gotta
admit, I think it's hysterical that this guy has been doing this for as long as he has, 'cuz you'd have to be a real mutant to spend close to a decade
developing this sort of stuff. That doesn't make it any less amazing though, a 22 track orgy of subsonic bass guitar grooves, detuned guitar fuzz, programmed
blastbeats flying by at 3000 miles per hour, beyond-obscure splatter movie samples and electronic distortion, and pitch-shifted toilet bowel vocals processed
into blobs of gutteral noise. Terminally weird, even moreso when the drum machine starts spitting out slower rumbling rhythms and brilliantly fucked-up
chaotic beats all at the same time while the riffs start to get really poppy and catchy and everything starts to sound like we're hearing a crude pogo punk
band playing inside of a malfunctioning mainframe computer while starving bears attack them from the outside, all the while blasting a melted cassette of
Godflesh's Streetcleaner out of a massive PA system. It's about as fucked up as cybergrind can get. File this beast next to Catasexual Urge
Motivation, Negligent Collateral Collapse, Cock and Ball Torture, Decomposing Serenity, and similiar wasteoid computer-vomit units.
This just came in with the latest batch of Recycled Music Series cassettes from RRRecords - a Recycled tape from the legendary San Francisco avant-industrial-bluegrass collective Caroliner! But what the fuck is this? The first side of the tape gets rolling with a murky, damaged pop song that sounds mutated by tape hiss and delay, but then proceeds into a series of renditions of the old 1940's cowboy song "Cool Water", which'll be immediately recognizeable to anyone that's ever heard this old-school country/western staple before. I recognized the Marty Robbins and Tom Jones versions, and there's countless other musicians on here, one after the other, each contributing to an endless stream of renditions of "Cool Water", over and over and over. There's some vocal/tape delay weirdness that pops up at the end of side two, along with some spoken word stuff that we couldn't place, but it's an afterthought to the eternity of "Cool Water" that precedes it. We gotta think that this is either some kind of conceptual prank, or a Caroliner-sanctioned mix tape of what might be one of their favorite cowboy songs. Or some demented combination of the two. In any event, be warned! I've gotta admit, the song starts to take on a macabre hue after you've listened to it, like, 20 twenty times in a row, but anyone that picks this up looking for original Caroliner music is likely going to be disappointed. Pretty essential to hardcore fans of Caroliner's unique brand of outsider weirdness, though!
��Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
�� Now reissued in a new 2013 vinyl edition on 180 gram wax (and back in stock on CD, reissued a while back by Peaceville in digipack packaging), Carpathian Forest's 1998 debut album Black Shining Leather is where things really started to get sick. Originally released through Avantgarde Music, the album blended murky samples of hardcore pornography and BDSM films along with pungent bondage imagery, and boasts an unusually heavy bass guitar presence that gave this a much heavier sound than the usual blast of Nordic frost. Leather kicks off with the lusty black ambience of the title track before hurtling into the initial blast of raw, barbaric black metal, the song rife with savage thrash riffs and some wicked tempo changes; when these guys suddenly downshift from their ripping fast-paced thrash into one of their signature black n' roll sequences, it's absolutely ferocious. They also layer their raw ragged blackened violence with some off-kilter synthesizer sounds on this album that add a diseased, delirious atmosphere to this and subsequent songs. Tracks like "The Swordsmen" gallop and thrash through the black blizzard-visions, laced with passages of haunting kosmische synthesizer drift and shifting from there into equally eerie sounding stretches of symphonic-tinged blackness, while the likes of "Death Triumphant" plunge into slower, more doom-laden tempos and passages of anguished heaviness. The orchestral war-drums that introduce "Lunar Nights" heads into the sort of crawling, synth-smeared sludge that Carpathian Forest's demos were known for, before lurching into one of the album's most crushing passages of Wagnerian boogie. The loping black metal of "Sadomasochistic" drips with Sadeian imagery and seething bloodlust, and the band's taste for electronic synthcreep emerges again on "Lupus", a short piece of sleek neon-tinged synthesizer music laced with soft malevolent whispers and swirling horror movie atmospherics that start to edge into Goblin territory. More black n' roll terror and crushing bass-heavy blackened blast is found on "Pierced Genitalia" and "In Silence I Observe"; on "Third Attempt", vicious Frostian crush mixes with washes of dark electronic texture a la Klaus Schulze, and haunting classical acoustic guitars lilt behind waves of crushing riffage and the kosmische keyboards that billow out over the woozy, waltzing lurch of "The Northern Hemisphere". The very last song is one of the most interesting, though: Carpathian Forest close this album with their cover of The Cure's "A Forest", and it's a surprisingly faithful rendition of this classic post-punk song; the band stays true to the structure and feel of the original while incorporating some of their strange little touches to transform this into something unique, the distorted guitar rendered into a shimmering corroded pulse in the background, the motorik throb of the drums ticktocking deep in the mix, sometimes washing out into a bleary indistinct beat as the clean, reverb-drenched guitars grow more dissonant as it slowly fades off into the dark woodland shadows...
��Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
�� Now reissued in a new 2013 vinyl edition on 180 gram wax (and back in stock on CD, reissued a while back by Peaceville in digipack packaging), Carpathian Forest's 1998 debut album Black Shining Leather is where things really started to get sick. Originally released through Avantgarde Music, the album blended murky samples of hardcore pornography and BDSM films along with pungent bondage imagery, and boasts an unusually heavy bass guitar presence that gave this a much heavier sound than the usual blast of Nordic frost. Leather kicks off with the lusty black ambience of the title track before hurtling into the initial blast of raw, barbaric black metal, the song rife with savage thrash riffs and some wicked tempo changes; when these guys suddenly downshift from their ripping fast-paced thrash into one of their signature black n' roll sequences, it's absolutely ferocious. They also layer their raw ragged blackened violence with some off-kilter synthesizer sounds on this album that add a diseased, delirious atmosphere to this and subsequent songs. Tracks like "The Swordsmen" gallop and thrash through the black blizzard-visions, laced with passages of haunting kosmische synthesizer drift and shifting from there into equally eerie sounding stretches of symphonic-tinged blackness, while the likes of "Death Triumphant" plunge into slower, more doom-laden tempos and passages of anguished heaviness. The orchestral war-drums that introduce "Lunar Nights" heads into the sort of crawling, synth-smeared sludge that Carpathian Forest's demos were known for, before lurching into one of the album's most crushing passages of Wagnerian boogie. The loping black metal of "Sadomasochistic" drips with Sadeian imagery and seething bloodlust, and the band's taste for electronic synthcreep emerges again on "Lupus", a short piece of sleek neon-tinged synthesizer music laced with soft malevolent whispers and swirling horror movie atmospherics that start to edge into Goblin territory. More black n' roll terror and crushing bass-heavy blackened blast is found on "Pierced Genitalia" and "In Silence I Observe"; on "Third Attempt", vicious Frostian crush mixes with washes of dark electronic texture a la Klaus Schulze, and haunting classical acoustic guitars lilt behind waves of crushing riffage and the kosmische keyboards that billow out over the woozy, waltzing lurch of "The Northern Hemisphere". The very last song is one of the most interesting, though: Carpathian Forest close this album with their cover of The Cure's "A Forest", and it's a surprisingly faithful rendition of this classic post-punk song; the band stays true to the structure and feel of the original while incorporating some of their strange little touches to transform this into something unique, the distorted guitar rendered into a shimmering corroded pulse in the background, the motorik throb of the drums ticktocking deep in the mix, sometimes washing out into a bleary indistinct beat as the clean, reverb-drenched guitars grow more dissonant as it slowly fades off into the dark woodland shadows...
Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
Bloodlust And Perversion is an older collection of the first three Carpathian Forest demos that originally came out as a bootleg CD over a decade ago; this document of the Norwegian black metal crew's earliest recordings has finally been given its first official vinyl release via Nuclear War Now!, presented in a double LP edition.
The first side of the double album features the Forest's seminal 1992 demo Bloodlust And Perversion. Opening with the cinematic death-march of "Though The Black Veil Of The Burgo Pass", the band unfurls horn-like synths across mysterious field recordings and the powerful pounding war-drums, their thoroughly evil atmosphere immediately taking shape. When the title track suddenly kicks in, it's a raw, gnarled blast of mid-tempo filth that bears a striking resemblance to old American hardcore punk, the sludgy riffs crawling over simple, powerful drumming, the vocals a putrid rasp smeared across the primitive blackened stomp. I love the gluey, sludgy tone of this early Carpathian Forest stuff, it's got a dank, dungeon-spawned sludgepunk vibe that really doesn't sound like any of the other
Norwegian black metal bands from this era. The rest of these tracks all have that sludgy, deformed grooviness, "Return Of The Freezing Winds" and "The Woods Of Wallachia " almost resembling something from Upsidedown Cross with their weird wailing feedback and sub-Sabbathian splooge. But when the band closes the tape, it's with the haunting funereal folk of "Wings Over The Mountain Of Sighisoara", their delicate acoustic strum shimmering over ghostly choral synths and strange woodland noises.
Next is Carpathian Forest's 1993 demo Journey Through the Cold Moors of Svartjern; this was a more experimental release that featured three lengthy songs in a similar slow, sludgy vein as their debut demo, but infused with an even heavier synth presce4nce and more frenzied, frantic vocals. This stuff is raw and low-fi, but the added murkiness only adds to the desolate, dreamy feel of the material, keyboards drifting slowly through the background, layers of horn-like texture and filthy electronic rumble and strange dissonant kosmische melodies melting into the mix. They also blend more of those acoustic guitars and distorted riffs over the death-march drums of the title track, which gives the song a strange industrial feel, equal parts sludgy black metal dirge and horror movie soundtrack creep and Swans-esque pummel; it's still one of my favorite Carpathian Forest tracks. The rest of this promo tape includes the unusual "The Eclipse / The Raven", which features spooky whispered vocals and pipe organs over shimmering electric guitar and more of that folky strum, the melody almost like something from a Riz Ortolani score, followed by more of that eerie kosmische soundtrack-style drift on "The Last Sigh Of Nostalgia", the funereal electronics, plaintive piano keys and ominous guitars winding around the echoing snarled vocals as they slowly transform into a breathtaking graveyard lament. Listening to some of this stuff, you gotta wonder how much Popul Vuh these guys might have been listening to back when they recorded this tape.
The 1992 Studio Rehearsals are the murkiest and most low-fi of all of the recordings included in this set, but this stuff still rips with a raw hardcore-style urgency. There's a rendition of "Return Of The Freezing Winds" off of the first demo and a new version of "Carpathian Forest", as well as a cover of Bathory's "Call From The Grave", all of 'em draped in black sludge and brain-damaged guitar solos and tape hiss, a pounding mid-tempo assault of Frostian heaviness and screeching frostbitten horror. The last side only has two tracks, one untitled, the other a cover of the Venom classic "Warhead"; the former is another one of Carpathian Forest's signature sludgy dirges, more of that wicked deformed tarpit punk ugliness, while the Venom cover is a somewhat bizarre take on the thrash classic, all super washed out and low-fi and weirdly languid, the vocals a smear of reptilian hiss.
This diehard version of the NWN! reissue comes on colored vinyl in heavyweight gatefold packaging, and comes with a huge 9" by 12" embroidered backpatch and a vinyl sticker.
Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
Newly reissued on vinyl in late 2013 (and back in stock on CD), Carpathian Forest's second album Strange Old Brew saw the misanthropic Norwegian pervo-metallers continuing to drag their Celtic Frost influenced black metal deeper into realms of experimental weirdness and filthy hardcore punk abandon. Over a decade after it's release, Brew still sounds pretty fucking weird, the songs made up of a combination of pulverizing crust punk, classic Norwegian black metal, industrial elements, weird electronic soundscapes and horrific synthesizer music. The band's weirdness kicks in pretty quick with the eldritch black horror and pounding ritual industrial of the intro "Damnation Chant", which starts this off sounding like some primo old-school Cold Meat Industries stuff. From there, the band heads into a handful of rocking, filthy punk songs, unleashing weird robotic vocals that pop up in a couple of spots, the strange cabaret-tinged doom of "Thanatology", and passages of booming industrial percussion that suddenly appear on "Martyr / Sacrificulum", where heavy tympani-like drums pound relentlessly beneath the frosty blackened riffs and blasting drums. None of this is as unexpected as the bizarre, ghostly trip-hop that suddenly appears mid-album with "House Of The Whipcord", though, where the drums become a murky mechanical pulse that plods beneath a mixture of spectral female vocals and ghoulish whispering. And then out of nowhere, a soaring saxophone enters the fray, sending eerie noir-jazz melodies streaking high above the otherworldly haunted-house piano and murky trip hop creep. That's followed by the delirious, blues-stained doom of "Cloak Of Midnight" that also features more of those guest vocals from Nina Hex, which appear just as the drums give way to a clanking industrial rhythm and the song drops off into vast funereal doom. "Theme From Nekromantikk" is a strange synth-heavy neo-classical rendition of the opening theme to J�rg Buttgereit's nihilistic 1987 art/gore classic Nekromantik, followed by the even more unsettling sounds of "The Good Old Enema Treatment ", another bizarre soundscape that combines scatological ambience and dissonant synthesizers. All of that ghastly experimentation is balanced with an equal amount of heaviness, though, tracks like "Bloodcleansing" welding vicious Teutonic thrash riffs to the band's frostbitten atmosphere, while rippers like "Mask Of The Slave" and "The Suicide Song " race with iron hooves on the back of monstrous Motorhead-esque speed metal grooves and orgiastic cries, slipping into punishing mid-tempo breakdowns and sudden surges of crushing Frostbitten sludge, their blackened violence all wrapped in a bloody haze of unrepentant sleaze and savage S&M imagery.
Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
Newly reissued on vinyl in late 2013 (and back in stock on CD), Carpathian Forest's second album Strange Old Brew saw the misanthropic Norwegian pervo-metallers continuing to drag their Celtic Frost influenced black metal deeper into realms of experimental weirdness and filthy hardcore punk abandon. Over a decade after it's release, Brew still sounds pretty fucking weird, the songs made up of a combination of pulverizing crust punk, classic Norwegian black metal, industrial elements, weird electronic soundscapes and horrific synthesizer music. The band's weirdness kicks in pretty quick with the eldritch black horror and pounding ritual industrial of the intro "Damnation Chant", which starts this off sounding like some primo old-school Cold Meat Industries stuff. From there, the band heads into a handful of rocking, filthy punk songs, unleashing weird robotic vocals that pop up in a couple of spots, the strange cabaret-tinged doom of "Thanatology", and passages of booming industrial percussion that suddenly appear on "Martyr / Sacrificulum", where heavy tympani-like drums pound relentlessly beneath the frosty blackened riffs and blasting drums. None of this is as unexpected as the bizarre, ghostly trip-hop that suddenly appears mid-album with "House Of The Whipcord", though, where the drums become a murky mechanical pulse that plods beneath a mixture of spectral female vocals and ghoulish whispering. And then out of nowhere, a soaring saxophone enters the fray, sending eerie noir-jazz melodies streaking high above the otherworldly haunted-house piano and murky trip hop creep. That's followed by the delirious, blues-stained doom of "Cloak Of Midnight" that also features more of those guest vocals from Nina Hex, which appear just as the drums give way to a clanking industrial rhythm and the song drops off into vast funereal doom. "Theme From Nekromantikk" is a strange synth-heavy neo-classical rendition of the opening theme to J�rg Buttgereit's nihilistic 1987 art/gore classic Nekromantik, followed by the even more unsettling sounds of "The Good Old Enema Treatment ", another bizarre soundscape that combines scatological ambience and dissonant synthesizers. All of that ghastly experimentation is balanced with an equal amount of heaviness, though, tracks like "Bloodcleansing" welding vicious Teutonic thrash riffs to the band's frostbitten atmosphere, while rippers like "Mask Of The Slave" and "The Suicide Song " race with iron hooves on the back of monstrous Motorhead-esque speed metal grooves and orgiastic cries, slipping into punishing mid-tempo breakdowns and sudden surges of crushing Frostbitten sludge, their blackened violence all wrapped in a bloody haze of unrepentant sleaze and savage S&M imagery.
��Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
��Now reissued in a new 2013 vinyl edition (and back in stock on CD via the latest Peaceville edition in digipack packaging), Through Chasm, Caves And Titan Woods is a classic slab of Norwegian black metal ready to be rediscovered both by longtime fans of the band and newcomers to their quirky, misanthropic metal. After a handful of hard-to-find demo tapes released in the early 90s, Carpathian Forest put out this vicious nineteen minute EP on the cult label Avantgarde Music in 1995. Opening with the crushing Frostian sludge and twisted black metal of the band's classic anthem "Carpathian Forest", Carpathian Forest quickly establishes their rough, feral sound through a violent combination of droning buzzsaw riffs and frenetic thrash metal, fronted by the ghastly gargling croak of guitarist/singer Nattefrost. That classic necro attack continues into the second song "The Pale Mist Hovers Towards the Nightly Shores", but here the listener also gets their first glimpse at Carpathian Forest's prowess at vicious black n' roll riffage, a violent swingin' groove that suddenly comes from out of nowhere, sending the song into a lethal new direction as the band's violent, demonic energy is brought into sharp focus. From there, they head into the melodramatic dungeon-synth of "The Eclipse / The Raven", a melancholy bit of warped, atmospheric organ and maudlin classical guitar that serves as a backdrop to Nattefrost's wretched whispered delivery of the lyrics, which draw from the original text of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry, followed by the more brutal Celtic Frost-esque thrashpunk filth of "When Thousand Moons Have Circled". The closer is one of my favorite Carpathian Forest songs ever, a total classic (also featured in demo form on the Bloodlust and Perversion collection); "Journey Through the Cold Moors of Svarttjern" trudges like some slow symphonic war-march, the steady pounding percussion and dark choral synths turning this into something more akin to a heavy, hellish take on a martial industrial jam or some sort of strident neo-folk than the feral Frostian black metal that makes up most of the EP, with Nattefrost's desperate screams echoing far off in the distance, the guitar rendered into a droning black buzz threading its way through the track's harsh, otherworldly ambience.
Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
Now reissued in a new 2013 vinyl edition (and back in stock on CD via the latest Peaceville edition in digipack packaging), Through Chasm, Caves And Titan Woods is a classic slab of Norwegian black metal ready to be rediscovered both by longtime fans of the band and newcomers to their quirky, misanthropic metal. After a handful of hard-to-find demo tapes released in the early 90s, Carpathian Forest put out this vicious nineteen minute EP on the cult label Avantgarde Music in 1995. Opening with the crushing Frostian sludge and twisted black metal of the band's classic anthem "Carpathian Forest", Carpathian Forest quickly establishes their rough, feral sound through a violent combination of droning buzzsaw riffs and frenetic thrash metal, fronted by the ghastly gargling croak of guitarist/singer Nattefrost. That classic necro attack continues into the second song "The Pale Mist Hovers Towards the Nightly Shores", but here the listener also gets their first glimpse at Carpathian Forest's prowess at vicious black n' roll riffage, a violent swingin' groove that suddenly comes from out of nowhere, sending the song into a lethal new direction as the band's violent, demonic energy is brought into sharp focus. From there, they head into the melodramatic dungeon-synth of "The Eclipse / The Raven", a melancholy bit of warped, atmospheric organ and maudlin classical guitar that serves as a backdrop to Nattefrost's wretched whispered delivery of the lyrics, which draw from the original text of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry, followed by the more brutal Celtic Frost-esque thrashpunk filth of "When Thousand Moons Have Circled". The closer is one of my favorite Carpathian Forest songs ever, a total classic (also featured in demo form on the Bloodlust and Perversion collection); "Journey Through the Cold Moors of Svarttjern" trudges like some slow symphonic war-march, the steady pounding percussion and dark choral synths turning this into something more akin to a heavy, hellish take on a martial industrial jam or some sort of strident neo-folk than the feral Frostian black metal that makes up most of the EP, with Nattefrost's desperate screams echoing far off in the distance, the guitar rendered into a droning black buzz threading its way through the track's harsh, otherworldly ambience.
Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
While in the midst of my latest Carpathian Forest binge, I also came across what are apprently some of the last copies of the limited-edition digipack CD of the band's professionally recorded live set from Wacken Open Air in 2004. Titled We're Going To Hollywood For This - Live Perversions, this live album was released alongside a DVD concert film of the same performance, which captured the band in all of their debauched, bloodosoaked glory; you don't get the dancing girls with this CD version, unfortunately, but as far as black metal live albums go, this is one of the best I've picked up. Opening their set with the bombastic, macabre strains of their cover of the theme from Jorg Buttgereit's transgressive splatter classic Nekromantik, the band swiftly begins their assault on the Wacken masses, firing off nineteen detonations of lustful Satanic necro-metal. Their hour-long set, captured here in its entirity, draws heavily from their then-recently-released Defending The Throne Of Evil , Morbid Fascination Of Death and Strange Old Brew Album albums, blazing through violent renditions of "Bloodcleansing", "Knokkelmann ", "It's Darker Than You Think ", "Mask Of The Slave ", "He's Turning Blue", "The Well Of All Human Tears" and "Return Of The Freezing Winds". The Forest also belt out older tunes from their classic early Lps Black Shining Leather ("Sadomasochistic", ) and Through Chasm, Caves And Titan Woods as well as a couple of cuts off of their early demo tapes (like "Skjend Hans Lik"); of even more interest to hardcore Carpathian Forest fans are the songs that apparently only appear here, like "I Am Possessed " and "Nuclear Fucking Death Machine ". It's a killer concert, complete with ghostly dungeon-synth interludes, wisps of eerie neo-classical sound drifting through the space between songs, and the sound quality is about as good as it gets, everything clear in the mix, the instruments and vocals mixed tyogether perfectly, the whole thing sounding intensely powerful, and closes with a bizarre outro of Catholic hymns and orgasmic cries that plays on and on as the crowd chants frenziedly...
We now have the European "super jewel box" version of this pervo black metal classic in stock...
Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
Now reissued in a new 2013 vinyl edition on 180 gram wax (and back in stock on CD, reissued a while back by Peaceville in digipack packaging), Carpathian Forest's 1998 debut album Black Shining Leather is where things really started to get sick. Originally released through Avantgarde Music, the album blended murky samples of hardcore pornography and BDSM films along with pungent bondage imagery, and boasts an unusually heavy bass guitar presence that gave this a much heavier sound than the usual blast of Nordic frost. Leather kicks off with the lusty black ambience of the title track before hurtling into the initial blast of raw, barbaric black metal, the song rife with savage thrash riffs and some wicked tempo changes; when these guys suddenly downshift from their ripping fast-paced thrash into one of their signature black n' roll sequences, it's absolutely ferocious. They also layer their raw ragged blackened violence with some off-kilter synthesizer sounds on this album that add a diseased, delirious atmosphere to this and subsequent songs. Tracks like "The Swordsmen" gallop and thrash through the black blizzard-visions, laced with passages of haunting kosmische synthesizer drift and shifting from there into equally eerie sounding stretches of symphonic-tinged blackness, while the likes of "Death Triumphant" plunge into slower, more doom-laden tempos and passages of anguished heaviness. The orchestral war-drums that introduce "Lunar Nights" heads into the sort of crawling, synth-smeared sludge that Carpathian Forest's demos were known for, before lurching into one of the album's most crushing passages of Wagnerian boogie. The loping black metal of "Sadomasochistic" drips with Sadeian imagery and seething bloodlust, and the band's taste for electronic synthcreep emerges again on "Lupus", a short piece of sleek neon-tinged synthesizer music laced with soft malevolent whispers and swirling horror movie atmospherics that start to edge into Goblin territory. More black n' roll terror and crushing bass-heavy blackened blast is found on "Pierced Genitalia" and "In Silence I Observe"; on "Third Attempt", vicious Frostian crush mixes with washes of dark electronic texture a la Klaus Schulze, and haunting classical acoustic guitars lilt behind waves of crushing riffage and the kosmische keyboards that billow out over the woozy, waltzing lurch of "The Northern Hemisphere". The very last song is one of the most interesting, though: Carpathian Forest close this album with their cover of The Cure's "A Forest", and it's a surprisingly faithful rendition of this classic post-punk song; the band stays true to the structure and feel of the original while incorporating some of their strange little touches to transform this into something unique, the distorted guitar rendered into a shimmering corroded pulse in the background, the motorik throb of the drums ticktocking deep in the mix, sometimes washing out into a bleary indistinct beat as the clean, reverb-drenched guitars grow more dissonant as it slowly fades off into the dark woodland shadows...
Back in print, sans the backpatch that came with the previous edition.
Carpathian Forest have long been one of my favorite of all of the Norwegian black metal outfits, a gang of frost-encrusted perverts and provocateurs whose music has often straddled the most barbaric sounds of raw second wave black metal and an demented disposition towards experimentation that would litter their demos and albums with everything from icy kosmische electronic soundscapes to the appearance of crazed darkjazz saxophones to covers of classic early 80s post-punk. From their early, more primitive efforts that were heavily influenced by the sludgy blackened heaviness of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost to their more recent, offbeat black metal hallucinations, the music of Carpathian Forest has been consistently hateful, savage, and adventurous, an instant recipe for adulation here at C-Blast. Several of the band's older titles have recently been reissued on vinyl by their current label Peaceville, which led me to track down both those and a number of assorted other Carpathian Forest releases for inclusion in the C-Blast shop; this is all vicious stuff, a sludgy and hateful black metal assault laced with a unique strain of Nordic weirdness, presented to you for further investigation...
Bloodlust And Perversion is an older collection of the first three Carpathian Forest demos that originally came out as a bootleg CD over a decade ago; this document of the Norwegian black metal crew's earliest recordings has finally been given its first official vinyl release via Nuclear War Now!, presented in a double LP edition.
The first side of the double album features the Forest's seminal 1992 demo Bloodlust And Perversion. Opening with the cinematic death-march of "Though The Black Veil Of The Burgo Pass", the band unfurls horn-like synths across mysterious field recordings and the powerful pounding war-drums, their thoroughly evil atmosphere immediately taking shape. When the title track suddenly kicks in, it's a raw, gnarled blast of mid-tempo filth that bears a striking resemblance to old American hardcore punk, the sludgy riffs crawling over simple, powerful drumming, the vocals a putrid rasp smeared across the primitive blackened stomp. I love the gluey, sludgy tone of this early Carpathian Forest stuff, it's got a dank, dungeon-spawned sludgepunk vibe that really doesn't sound like any of the other
Norwegian black metal bands from this era. The rest of these tracks all have that sludgy, deformed grooviness, "Return Of The Freezing Winds" and "The Woods Of Wallachia " almost resembling something from Upsidedown Cross with their weird wailing feedback and sub-Sabbathian splooge. But when the band closes the tape, it's with the haunting funereal folk of "Wings Over The Mountain Of Sighisoara", their delicate acoustic strum shimmering over ghostly choral synths and strange woodland noises.
Next is Carpathian Forest's 1993 demo Journey Through the Cold Moors of Svartjern; this was a more experimental release that featured three lengthy songs in a similar slow, sludgy vein as their debut demo, but infused with an even heavier synth presce4nce and more frenzied, frantic vocals. This stuff is raw and grimy, but the added murkiness only adds to the desolate, dreamy feel of the material, keyboards drifting slowly through the background, layers of horn-like texture and filthy electronic rumble and strange dissonant kosmische melodies melting into the mix. They also blend more of those acoustic guitars and distorted riffs over the death-march drums of the title track, which gives the song a strange industrial feel, equal parts sludgy black metal dirge and horror movie soundtrack creep and Swans-esque pummel; it's still one of my favorite Carpathian Forest tracks. The rest of this promo tape includes the unusual "The Eclipse / The Raven", which features spooky whispered vocals and pipe organs over shimmering electric guitar and more of that folky strum, the melody almost like something from a Riz Ortolani score, followed by more of that eerie kosmische soundtrack-style drift on "The Last Sigh Of Nostalgia", the funereal electronics, plaintive piano keys and ominous guitars winding around the echoing snarled vocals as they slowly transform into a breathtaking graveyard lament. Listening to some of this stuff, you gotta wonder how much Popul Vuh these guys might have been listening to back when they recorded this tape.
The 1992 Studio Rehearsals are the murkiest and most low-fi of all of the recordings included in this set, but this stuff still rips with a raw hardcore-style urgency. There's a rendition of "Return Of The Freezing Winds" off of the first demo and a new version of "Carpathian Forest", as well as a cover of Bathory's "Call From The Grave", all of 'em draped in black sludge and brain-damaged guitar solos and tape hiss, a pounding mid-tempo assault of Frostian heaviness and screeching frostbitten horror. The last side only has two tracks, one untitled, the other a cover of the Venom classic "Warhead"; the former is another one of Carpathian Forest's signature sludgy dirges, more of that wicked deformed tarpit punk ugliness, while the Venom cover is a somewhat bizarre take on the thrash classic, all super washed out and murked and weirdly languid, the vocals a smear of reptilian hiss.
��Back in stock. What could I possibly add to the reams that have already been written about Carpenter's legendary score to his equally legendary 1979 film Halloween? It might be the penultimate modern horror score. The impact and influence that Carpenter's Halloween score had on the field of horror filmdom is still felt today, twenty five years later. It's a masterpiece of minimalist composition, with the ability to create a palpable sense of dread through the use of just a few carefully placed notes. Carpenter's use of a simple piano figure alongside the searing distorted tones of his electronic synthesizers was inspired, and the influence of this soundtrack could be seen rippling across the fields of soundtrack composition, electronic music and even industrial music in the decades that followed; you can see the influence of Halloween is still being felt just as strongly today with the appearance of bands like Gatekeeper, Umberto and Antoni Maiovvi, and in large swathes of the burgeoning synthwave scene.
�� This latest reissue of Carpenter's score is probably the most definitive version I've seen, newly re-mastered for vinyl by none other than James Plotkin (Khanate / Khlyst / OLD) and beautifully presented in a thick gatefold package designed by Phantom City Creative that features some really cool original artwork. This new vinyl edition of Halloween features the most comprehensive version of Carpenter's score ever released on vinyl, spread across two 180 gram black vinyl records, the recording cut to vinyl at 45 rpm for maximum sound quality. And man, the sound is great, even on my shoddy little turntable setup here in the C-Blast office. Opening, of course, with Carpenter's iconic main theme, the soundtrack unfolds across the extensive twenty-eight track score that appears to include every musical cue, every sting, every interlude, with key pieces of dialogue and foley work also included in the soundtrack. The music is, of course, a masterwork of minimal piano and primitive (but wholly effective) synthesizer drones, woven into endless nightmarish ambience that evolves throughout the course of the film from an atmosphere of early autumnal ambience and eerie foreboding into its later symphony of abject dread and pulse-pounding synth. Every jet-black permutation of the main theme is rendered here in all its glory, the sound rich and revealing, the atmosphere oozing with inescapable menace, joined by other mood-setting pieces like "The Shape Stalks" and "Laurie's Theme". Still an essential part of any serious horror movie soundtrack fan's collection.
���Finally back in stock (and now completely out of print, sold out from the source), and finally reviewed: the Death Waltz reissue of John Carpenter's wonderfully spooky score to his 1980 nautical ghost story The Fog, a loving homage to the classic ghost stories of MR James and Arthur Machen that is jolted with doses of shocking 80's era violence and gruesome special effects. Thirty years later, The Fog still continues to be one of Carpenter's most overlooked films, but I'm of the opinion that it's one of his best, an intensely atmospheric and often deeply creepy tale of a shipwrecked crew returning from their watery grave to wreak vengeance on the denizens of the seaside town of Antonio Bay, whose ancestors originally sent the ghastly crew to their doom.
��� Carpenter's score for The Fog was substantially different from his other, more minimalist electronic scores from the era, and is one of his most expansive and understated works. Blending together piano and synthesizer with sonic textures that evoke the isolation of the doomed coastal town, the music for The Fog is permeated with a mournful, accursed vibe; in place of the minimal pulsating drum machines and searing nocturnal synthesizers that one usually associates with Carpenter, this goes for a much moodier, more gothic feel as it works to evoke the eldritch feel of Carpenter's old-fashioned ghost story. The record starts off perfectly with the opening sequence of John Houseman's character recounting the tale of the Elizabeth Dane to a group of children, and from there moves on to the score itself, the main theme crafting an exquisitely creepy atmosphere of dread and sorrow as it interweaves pipe organ-like tones and Carpenter's signature minimal synthesizer style. Subsequent tracks skillfully employ hushed, echoing rhythms and minimal percussive patterns with his utterly gloomy piano theme and dark, droning keys, these sounds growing ever more dreadful and malevolent as the score progresses, a briny blighted ambience unfolding over distant bathysphere clanks, monstrous distorted rumblings and swirling stygian drift churning in the depths, fearsome sheet-metal reverberations and ominous, plaintive piano chords pulsing in the deep, surrounded by swirls of ghoulish electronic effects, and swells of nightmarish orchestral terror and ghostly organ peal like foghorn blasts through the dread mist, answered by the far off lonely cry of a distant buoy. Later in the score, these sounds build into pulse-pounding sequences of ghostly pursuit and murder, synth chords resembling the steady inexorable tolling of a bell, drifting into dread-filled passages of gothic pipe organ and deep, malevolent bass throb. Definitely a classic Carpenter score that showcased another side to his unique style, The Fog also works surprisingly well on its own as a musical piece, the length and expansiveness of the tracks turning this into a fantastic slab of ghostly, funereal ambient music.
��� The second version of Carpenter's score to be released by Death Waltz, this "Blake's Gold Edition" is a 180 gram double LP set pressed on gold vinyl, released in a limited edition of one thousand copies and housed in a heavyweight gatefold jacket with fantastic ghastly album art from Dinos Chapman and liner notes from Carpenter himself, the two records featuring both the original movie score as well as a host of musical cues from the film that have never been previously made available on vinyl.
��� There's been feverish anticipation building around the C-Blast office for months, waiting for Lost Themes. The first ever "solo" album from John Carpenter outside of his legendary film score output (and his one-off band The Coupe De Villes with Tommy Lee Wallace and Nick Castle), Lost Themes comes at the height of a recent resurgence of interest in 80's era synthesizer music and classic horror movie scores, and John Carpenter's synth-drenched soundtracks in particular. A number of amazing reissues have surfaced lately from the likes of Mondo and Death Waltz, high-quality vinyl reissues of Carpenter's iconic music for classic films like Escape From New York, Halloween, Prince Of Darkness and The Fog, which have allowed a whole new audience to discover anew what many of us that have been worshipping at the altar of Carpenter since the VHS boom have known all along: this guys is one of the preeminent film and music stylists of the late 20th century. He's more revered now than ever, now that his stately nightmare visuals and pioneering electronic scores have so heavily influenced various aspects of our culture since he first appeared in the 1970s.
��� So when word came out that Carpenter would be releasing his first ever collection of non-filmic music, I could hardly wait. While his more recent film work hasn't made much of an impression on me, I had a lot of faith in this project, especially after hearing some of the tracks that came out in advance of the album's release. And when it finally landed in my hands and slipped onto the turntable, I couldn't have been more stoked on how good this album turned out to be. It's not the minimal synthesizer music of his early works like some might have expected, but rather a dark and bombastic sound, well produced and heavy on the guitars. Lost Themes was created with his son Cody (who produces his own brand of progressive rock with the band Ludrium ) and godson Daniel Davies (of stoner rockers Year Long Disaster), but from the opening notes this is immediately recognizable as a John Carpenter recording. Once that moody piano figure enters at the beginning of "Vortex" and the music gives way to those familiar synth arpeggios, there's no question as to who you're listening to. It's lush stuff, with lots of distorted guitar chords and pulsating beats that are definitely reminiscent of the rock-tinged sound of his later 80s work for films like Prince Of Darkness, Big Trouble In Little China and They Live. Still dark and menacing, though, with that signature ability to create a mood of tension that slowly and inexorably builds across the piece of music. These nine songs teem with tension, and the more expansive nature of a full album allows his pulsating electronics and pounding rhythms to develop more extensively than they might on a film score. Every track is a carefully crafted exercise in mood and menace, from the eerie piano melody that cascades across the propulsive gothic prog of "Obsidian", as sinister organs twine around fuzz-burnt guitar, a track that has some surprising echoes of Italian prog rockers Goblin, to the heavy metal guitars that thunder across "Fallen", and the pulsating rhythms transform "Domain" into a killer piece of futuristic dance floor malevolence, complete with one of the most pulse-pounding motorik grooves I've heard in ages. There's actually quite a bit on Lost Themes that reminds me of Goblin, but Carpenter and crew incorporate a larger palette of sounds, from orchestral strings that spread like shadows beneath the propulsive tempos, to gleaming electronic glitchery that gives this a much sleeker, blacker sound.
��� It's hard to not to get caught up in a heavy feeling of nostalgia when you're listening to this, but I was genuinely surprised how little Lost Themes sounded like any specific classic Carpenter score; if you listen to a lot of film music, you'll begin to notice that a lot of composers tend to recycle certain themes and ideas. But Carpenter largely avoids that with this new music, and any concerns that the album was going to be made up of cast-off material from older scores disappear pretty quickly once his pounding synth-driven darkness sweeps over you. The album deftly balances vintage tones with modern technique and texture, and most importantly, all of this stuff flows together superbly. Can't imagine anyone else surpassing this as the dark synth album of the year, a stunning, wholly cohesive album from the master; anyone into the likes of Carpenterian disciples like Zombi, Umberto, Antoni Maiovvi, Majeure and the like should make their way to this album pronto. Comes in a striking gatefold sleeve bearing Carpenter's visage cloaked in darkness, and includes a printed insert with liner notes by soundtrack scholar Daniel Schweiger; the vinyl version also comes with a digital download.
There's been feverish anticipation building around the C-Blast office for months, waiting for Lost Themes. The first ever "solo" album from John Carpenter outside of his legendary film score output (and his one-off band The Coupe De Villes with Tommy Lee Wallace and Nick Castle), Lost Themes comes at the height of a recent resurgence of interest in 80's era synthesizer music and classic horror movie scores, and John Carpenter's synth-drenched soundtracks in particular. A number of amazing reissues have surfaced lately from the likes of Mondo and Death Waltz, high-quality vinyl reissues of Carpenter's iconic music for classic films like Escape From New York, Halloween, Prince Of Darkness and The Fog, which have allowed a whole new audience to discover anew what many of us that have been worshipping at the altar of Carpenter since the VHS boom have known all along: this guys is one of the preeminent film and music stylists of the late 20th century. He's more revered now than ever, now that his stately nightmare visuals and pioneering electronic scores have so heavily influenced various aspects of our culture since he first appeared in the 1970s.
So when word came out that Carpenter would be releasing his first ever collection of non-filmic music, I could hardly wait. While his more recent film work hasn't made much of an impression on me, I had a lot of faith in this project, especially after hearing some of the tracks that came out in advance of the album's release. And when it finally landed in my hands and slipped onto the turntable, I couldn't have been more stoked on how good this album turned out to be. It's not the minimal synthesizer music of his early works like some might have expected, but rather a dark and bombastic sound, well produced and heavy on the guitars. Lost Themes was created with his son Cody (who produces his own brand of progressive rock with the band Ludrium ) and godson Daniel Davies (of stoner rockers Year Long Disaster), but from the opening notes this is immediately recognizable as a John Carpenter recording. Once that moody piano figure enters at the beginning of "Vortex" and the music gives way to those familiar synth arpeggios, there's no question as to who you're listening to. It's lush stuff, with lots of distorted guitar chords and pulsating beats that are definitely reminiscent of the rock-tinged sound of his later 80s work for films like Prince Of Darkness, Big Trouble In Little China and They Live. Still dark and menacing, though, with that signature ability to create a mood of tension that slowly and inexorably builds across the piece of music. These nine songs teem with tension, and the more expansive nature of a full album allows his pulsating electronics and pounding rhythms to develop more extensively than they might on a film score. Every track is a carefully crafted exercise in mood and menace, from the eerie piano melody that cascades across the propulsive gothic prog of "Obsidian", as sinister organs twine around fuzz-burnt guitar, a track that has some surprising echoes of Italian prog rockers Goblin, to the heavy metal guitars that thunder across "Fallen", and the pulsating rhythms transform "Domain" into a killer piece of futuristic dance floor malevolence, complete with one of the most pulse-pounding motorik grooves I've heard in ages. There's actually quite a bit on Lost Themes that reminds me of Goblin, but Carpenter and crew incorporate a larger palette of sounds, from orchestral strings that spread like shadows beneath the propulsive tempos, to gleaming electronic glitchery that gives this a much sleeker, blacker sound.
It's hard to not to get caught up in a heavy feeling of nostalgia when you're listening to this, but I was genuinely surprised how little Lost Themes sounded like any specific classic Carpenter score; if you listen to a lot of film music, you'll begin to notice that a lot of composers tend to recycle certain themes and ideas. But Carpenter largely avoids that with this new music, and any concerns that the album was going to be made up of cast-off material from older scores disappear pretty quickly once his pounding synth-driven darkness sweeps over you. The album deftly balances vintage tones with modern technique and texture, and most importantly, all of this stuff flows together superbly. Can't imagine anyone else surpassing this as the dark synth album of the year, a stunning, wholly cohesive album from the master; anyone into the likes of Carpenterian disciples like Zombi, Umberto, Antoni Maiovvi, Majeure and the like should make their way to this album pronto. Comes in a striking gatefold sleeve bearing Carpenter's visage cloaked in darkness, and includes a printed insert with liner notes by soundtrack scholar Daniel Schweiger; the vinyl version also comes with a digital download.
Once again available on vinyl, this time from British label Silva Screen. John Carpenter's wonderfully spooky score to his 1980 nautical ghost story The Fog brought to life this loving homage to the classic ghost stories of MR James and Arthur Machen, jolted with doses of shocking 80's era violence and gruesome special effects. Thirty years later, The Fog still continues to be one of Carpenter's most overlooked films, though I'm of the opinion that it's one of his best, an intensely atmospheric and often deeply creepy tale of a shipwrecked crew returning from their watery grave to wreak vengeance on the denizens of the seaside town of Antonio Bay, whose ancestors originally sent the ghastly crew to their doom.
Carpenter's score for The Fog was substantially different from his other, more minimalist electronic scores from the era, and is one of his most expansive and understated works. Blending together piano and synthesizer with sonic textures that evoke the isolation of the doomed coastal town, the music for The Fog is permeated with a mournful, accursed vibe; in place of the minimal pulsating drum machines and searing nocturnal synthesizers that one usually associates with Carpenter, this goes for a much moodier, more gothic feel as it works to evoke the eldritch feel of Carpenter's old-fashioned ghost story. The record starts off perfectly with the opening sequence of John Houseman's character recounting the tale of the Elizabeth Dane to a group of children, and from there moves on to the score itself, the main theme crafting an exquisitely creepy atmosphere of dread and sorrow as it interweaves pipe organ-like tones and Carpenter's signature minimal synthesizer style. Subsequent tracks skillfully employ hushed, echoing rhythms and minimal percussive patterns with his utterly gloomy piano theme and dark, droning keys, these sounds growing ever more dreadful and malevolent as the score progresses, a briny blighted ambience unfolding over distant bathysphere clanks, monstrous distorted rumblings and swirling stygian drift churning in the depths, fearsome sheet-metal reverberations and ominous, plaintive piano chords pulsing in the deep, surrounded by swirls of ghoulish electronic effects, and swells of nightmarish orchestral terror and ghostly organ peal like foghorn blasts through the dread mist, answered by the far off lonely cry of a distant buoy. Later in the score, these sounds build into pulse-pounding sequences of ghostly pursuit and murder, synth chords resembling the steady inexorable tolling of a bell, drifting into dread-filled passages of gothic pipe organ and deep, malevolent bass throb. Definitely a classic Carpenter score that showcased another side to his unique style, The Fog also works surprisingly well on its own as a musical piece, the length and expansiveness of the tracks turning this into a fantastic slab of ghostly, funereal ambient music.
This latest edition of one of Carpenter's most popular scores features the entire extended soundtrack that appeared on Silva Screen's previous double CD version (and which is pretty much identical to the double LP that came out on Death Waltz a few years ago, though with a different track sequence), and comes on 180 gram colored vinyl in gatefold packaging, featuring new liner notes from Randall D. Larson (Musique Fantastique).
Finally have several of the recent releases from Death Waltz in stock here at C-Blast; this new boutique label from the UK has been putting stuff out for over a year now, but just about everything they have done has quickly sold out. It's one of the coolest new imprints out there, a vinyl-only operation that is curating a fantastic selection of cult horror / exploitation film soundtracks from the 1970s-1980s "golden age" of electronic film scores, with a couple of high quality newer works appearing every now and then as well. With a signature sleeve design aesthetic, a killer logo and impeccable taste in the best in cinematic electronic darkness, every single one of Death Waltz's releases are amazing collectors items for fans of classic horror sounds.
One of the more recent entries into Death Waltz's reissue campaign is this new vinyl edition of John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's OST for the follow-up to Carpenter's iconic 1978 film. For the sequel, Carpenter kept the haunting signature Halloween theme but switched it from piano to synthesizer for this score, giving the soundtrack a sharper, more menacing edge. The opening track is the "Halloween II Theme", a harder, more synth-drenched version that signature melody, fusing it with washes of almost Tangerine Dream-like choral drift. The haunting "Laurie's Theme" is likewise updated for the new score, those familiar harpsichord-like chords turned into something more dissonant and unsettling. The rest of Halloween II's score continues to combine most of those key themes from the first film with that mix of newer synthesizer sounds and production techniques; where the first film's score was actually pretty minimal and spare, here Carpenter and Howarth blend in growling distorted synth drones, lush electronic piano, with ventures into the pounding death-march electronica of "Laurie And Jimmy" and the deep rumbling drones, blood-freezing chimes and pounding kettledrums that appear in "The Shape Enters Laurie's Room". The dread-filled tympani and sequenced electronics of "The Shape Stalks Again" make for one of the score's most doom-laden sequences, but then the fim closes with the only piece of non-original music, the old Chordettes hit "Mr. Sandman" that plays out over the end credits.
Absolutely recommended to anyone into classic slasher soundtracks, the retro terror-electronics of Gatekeeper and Umberto, and the creepiest fringes of early synth-based industrial and electronic music; despite it's minimalism, the Halloween II score is still manages to incite dread even when divorced from the blood-stained imagery of the film.
Like everything else on Death Waltz, this record is beautifully presented in a jacket that features new artwork from Brandon Schaefer as well as a large foldout poster with the same image in larger form, and a printed inner sleeve with liner notes from Schaefer and Alan Howarth.
Finally have several of the recent releases from Death Waltz in stock here at C-Blast; this new boutique label from the UK has been putting stuff out for over a year now, but just about everything they have done has quickly sold out. It's one of the coolest new imprints out there, a vinyl-only operation that is curating a fantastic selection of cult horror / exploitation film soundtracks from the 1970s-1980s "golden age" of electronic film scores, with a couple of high quality newer works appearing every now and then as well. With a signature sleeve design aesthetic, a killer logo and impeccable taste in the best in cinematic electronic darkness, every single one of Death Waltz's releases are amazing collectors items for fans of classic horror sounds.
For years following its release, Carpenter's 1987 film Prince Of Darkness was widely considered to be one of his weaker efforts and was critically panned as a muddled mess of ideas and narrative. The film has always maintained a strong cult following (I've been a huge fan of this flick ever since discovering it on home video in the late 80s) and more recently Prince Of Darkness has been reappraised as one of Carpenter's most imaginative works, most recently being featured as the cover story for the November 2012 issue of Rue Morgue. Considered to be a part of his "Apocalypse Trilogy" alongside The Thing and In The Mouth Of Madness, POD offered a heady stew of cosmic demonic horror, quantum physics, canisters of liquid Satanic intelligence, Tachyon theory, time travel, and religious conspiracy that was unlike anything else in the esteemed horror director's canon. And as usual, he paired his horrific, often gore-soaked visuals for Prince Of Darkness with a pulsating electronic score that easily wormed it's way into your head as the film plays out. On its own, Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness OST plays like the creepiest, most apocalyptic-sounding 80's prog rock album you've never heard.
The central theme of the score is introduced in "Opening Titles", an eerie melody that reappears in a variety of permutations throughout the record on a number of different tracks. But like much of Carpetner's late 80s soundtrack work, the score also incorporates loud rock guitars, symphonic elements, choral voices and a massive synth-bass sound with his signature style of pulsating dark synthesizers, and this almost orchestral evocation of dread can really start to shred your nerves. There's a slinky percussive groove that materializes on "Team Assembly", the synth-bass taking on this almost industrialized-funk tone, right before the piece shifts into a super-sinister processional driven by swells of harsh cymbals, synthetic choral voices and hypnotic kick-drum throb, and the encroaching doom of "Darkness Begins" and swarming electronics of "A Message From The Future" add additional harsh textures to the apocalyptic score. The blasts of jarring percussion that appear over the course of the Prince Of Darkness OST are reaally reminiscent of some of the more sinister strains of post-industrial music, and are often interlaced with sorrowful string sections and computer noise.
Re-mastered by producer Alan Howarth and released in a limited-edition on 140 gram vinyl and packaged in a gorgeous jacket designed by noted Criterion artist Sam Smith (with a large fold-out poster that reproduces the cover art) and liner notes from Howarth, this is another essential Lp for both collectors of the Death Waltz imprint and John Carpenter's black-pulse electronic dreadscapes.
Back in stock.
Finally have several of the recent releases from Death Waltz in stock here at C-Blast; this new boutique label from the UK has been putting stuff out for over a year now, but just about everything they have done has quickly sold out. It's one of the coolest new imprints out there, a vinyl-only operation that is curating a fantastic selection of cult horror / exploitation film soundtracks from the 1970s-1980s "golden age" of electronic film scores, with a couple of high quality newer works appearing every now and then as well. With a signature sleeve design aesthetic, a killer logo and impeccable taste in the best in cinematic electronic darkness, every single one of Death Waltz's releases are amazing collectors items for fans of classic horror sounds.
It really wasn't until fairly recently that the third entry in the Halloween series began to develop the cult following that it currently has; when Season Of The Witch was originally released in 1982, it caught a lot of flack from horror audiences for not featuring series boogeyman Michael Myers and not being directly connected with the previous two films. That's exactly why it became one of my favorite films in the series, I loved John Carpenter's idea that the series should feature a different stand-alone story with each annual entry, and while the concept didn't fly after this movie, it's become much loved by hardcore Carpenter fans in the decades since. Season Of The Witch's bizarre tale of Druidic conspiracies, Silver Shamrock Halloween masks, child sacrifice and android horror is easily one of Carpenter's strangest, and while he didn't sit behind the camera for this one (Tommy Lee Wallace handled directorial duties on Season), Carpenter (along with Alan Howarth) did craft the eerie, throbbing synthesizer score for Season Of The Witch, and its one of their best.
The Season Of The Witch soundtrack was originally released by MCA back in 1982 and has been a tough score to find on vinyl up till now, with used copies collecting hefty collectors prices; this new Death Waltz edition features the exact same track listing but is newly re-mastered, and comes in the signature Death Waltz designed sleeve with printed inner sleeve and liner notes from Howarth and Jay Shaw, and a gorgeous poster reproduction of the album art. The record starts off with the track "Main title", the theme music that appears in various permutations all throughout the score, an ominous arrangement of dark droning synths, buried pulsating drones, and strange computerized melody all backed by sinister synth-bass rhythms fits the movie's weird, surrealistic tone and quickly gets under your skin. The rest of the soundtrack shifts between those subsequent variations on the Season theme, with that creepy electronic melody becoming wrapped in throbbing black synths and tension-wracked rhythms, and pieces of minimal, murky ambience formed from simple, pulsating synth chords. Of course, being a Carpenter/Howarth score, there's some terrific action pieces in here as well like "Chariots Of Pumpkins", pulse-pounding bass-driven tracks with minimal kettledrum-like pounding that backed the film's harrowing chase sequences and which do a pretty good job of creating unease in the listener even when divorced of the film's frightening visuals. Some of the other tracks have unique little touches that make them stand out, like the harpsichord / synth sounds on "Drive To Santa Mira" that carry faint echoes of Carpenter's original Halloween theme. And then there's that perversely catchy Silver Shamrock jingle, the one that every fan of the film has been unable to get out of their head for more than thirty years, right there at the end, reminding all of you children to be in front of the TV set for the Horrorthon, don't miss it, and don't forget to wear your masks...
Now available on limited edition cassette tape with minimal packaging, featuring the new artwork from Brandon Schaefer that also appeared on the LP edition.
Finally have several of the recent releases from Death Waltz in stock here at C-Blast; this new boutique label from the UK has been putting stuff out for over a year now, but just about everything they have done has quickly sold out. It's one of the coolest new imprints out there, a vinyl-only operation that is curating a fantastic selection of cult horror / exploitation film soundtracks from the 1970s-1980s "golden age" of electronic film scores, with a couple of high quality newer works appearing every now and then as well. With a signature sleeve design aesthetic, a killer logo and impeccable taste in the best in cinematic electronic darkness, every single one of Death Waltz's releases are amazing collectors items for fans of classic horror sounds.
One of the more recent entries into Death Waltz's reissue campaign is this new vinyl edition of John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's OST for the follow-up to Carpenter's iconic 1978 film. For the sequel, Carpenter kept the haunting signature Halloween theme but switched it from piano to synthesizer for this score, giving the soundtrack a sharper, more menacing edge. The opening track is the "Halloween II Theme", a harder, more synth-drenched version that signature melody, fusing it with washes of almost Tangerine Dream-like choral drift. The haunting "Laurie's Theme" is likewise updated for the new score, those familiar harpsichord-like chords turned into something more dissonant and unsettling. The rest of Halloween II's score continues to combine most of those key themes from the first film with that mix of newer synthesizer sounds and production techniques; where the first film's score was actually pretty minimal and spare, here Carpenter and Howarth blend in growling distorted synth drones, lush electronic piano, with ventures into the pounding death-march electronica of "Laurie And Jimmy" and the deep rumbling drones, blood-freezing chimes and pounding kettledrums that appear in "The Shape Enters Laurie's Room". The dread-filled tympani and sequenced electronics of "The Shape Stalks Again" make for one of the score's most doom-laden sequences, but then the fim closes with the only piece of non-original music, the old Chordettes hit "Mr. Sandman" that plays out over the end credits.
Absolutely recommended to anyone into classic slasher soundtracks, the retro terror-electronics of Gatekeeper and Umberto, and the creepiest fringes of early synth-based industrial and electronic music; despite it's minimalism, the Halloween II score is still manages to incite dread even when divorced from the blood-stained imagery of the film.
Now available on limited edition cassette tape with minimal packaging, featuring the new artwork from the LP edition.
Finally have several of the recent releases from Death Waltz in stock here at C-Blast; this new boutique label from the UK has been putting stuff out for over a year now, but just about everything they have done has quickly sold out. It's one of the coolest new imprints out there, a vinyl-only operation that is curating a fantastic selection of cult horror / exploitation film soundtracks from the 1970s-1980s "golden age" of electronic film scores, with a couple of high quality newer works appearing every now and then as well. With a signature sleeve design aesthetic, a killer logo and impeccable taste in the best in cinematic electronic darkness, every single one of Death Waltz's releases are amazing collectors items for fans of classic horror sounds.
It really wasn't until fairly recently that the third entry in the Halloween series began to develop the cult following that it currently has; when Season Of The Witch was originally released in 1982, it caught a lot of flack from horror audiences for not featuring series boogeyman Michael Myers and not being directly connected with the previous two films. That's exactly why it became one of my favorite films in the series, I loved John Carpenter's idea that the series should feature a different stand-alone story with each annual entry, and while the concept didn't fly after this movie, it's become much loved by hardcore Carpenter fans in the decades since. Season Of The Witch's bizarre tale of Druidic conspiracies, Silver Shamrock Halloween masks, child sacrifice and android horror is easily one of Carpenter's strangest, and while he didn't sit behind the camera for this one (Tommy Lee Wallace handled directorial duties on Season), Carpenter (along with Alan Howarth) did craft the eerie, throbbing synthesizer score for Season Of The Witch, and its one of their best.
The Season Of The Witch soundtrack was originally released by MCA back in 1982 and has been a tough score to find on vinyl up till now, with used copies collecting hefty collectors prices; this new Death Waltz edition features the exact same track listing but is newly re-mastered, and comes in the signature Death Waltz designed sleeve with printed inner sleeve and liner notes from Howarth and Jay Shaw, and a gorgeous poster reproduction of the album art. The record starts off with the track "Main title", the theme music that appears in various permutations all throughout the score, an ominous arrangement of dark droning synths, buried pulsating drones, and strange computerized melody all backed by sinister synth-bass rhythms fits the movie's weird, surrealistic tone and quickly gets under your skin. The rest of the soundtrack shifts between those subsequent variations on the Season theme, with that creepy electronic melody becoming wrapped in throbbing black synths and tension-wracked rhythms, and pieces of minimal, murky ambience formed from simple, pulsating synth chords. Of course, being a Carpenter/Howarth score, there's some terrific action pieces in here as well like "Chariots Of Pumpkins", pulse-pounding bass-driven tracks with minimal kettledrum-like pounding that backed the film's harrowing chase sequences and which do a pretty good job of creating unease in the listener even when divorced of the film's frightening visuals. Some of the other tracks have unique little touches that make them stand out, like the harpsichord / synth sounds on "Drive To Santa Mira" that carry faint echoes of Carpenter's original Halloween theme. And then there's that perversely catchy Silver Shamrock jingle, the one that every fan of the film has been unable to get out of their head for more than thirty years, right there at the end, reminding all of you children to be in front of the TV set for the Horrorthon, don't miss it, and don't forget to wear your masks...
Here's the new 2014 repress of this classic slasher soundtrack, issued by Death Waltz on clear vinyl and packaged with a new obi insert.
Finally have several of the recent releases from Death Waltz in stock here at C-Blast; this new boutique label from the UK has been putting stuff out for over a year now, but just about everything they have done has quickly sold out. It's one of the coolest new imprints out there, a vinyl-only operation that is curating a fantastic selection of cult horror / exploitation film soundtracks from the 1970s-1980s "golden age" of electronic film scores, with a couple of high quality newer works appearing every now and then as well. With a signature sleeve design aesthetic, a killer logo and impeccable taste in the best in cinematic electronic darkness, every single one of Death Waltz's releases are amazing collectors items for fans of classic horror sounds.
One of the more recent entries into Death Waltz's reissue campaign is this new vinyl edition of John Carpenter and Alan Howarth's OST for the follow-up to Carpenter's iconic 1978 film. For the sequel, Carpenter kept the haunting signature Halloween theme but switched it from piano to synthesizer for this score, giving the soundtrack a sharper, more menacing edge. The opening track is the "Halloween II Theme", a harder, more synth-drenched version that signature melody, fusing it with washes of almost Tangerine Dream-like choral drift. The haunting "Laurie's Theme" is likewise updated for the new score, those familiar harpsichord-like chords turned into something more dissonant and unsettling. The rest of Halloween II's score continues to combine most of those key themes from the first film with that mix of newer synthesizer sounds and production techniques; where the first film's score was actually pretty minimal and spare, here Carpenter and Howarth blend in growling distorted synth drones, lush electronic piano, with ventures into the pounding death-march electronica of "Laurie And Jimmy" and the deep rumbling drones, blood-freezing chimes and pounding kettledrums that appear in "The Shape Enters Laurie's Room". The dread-filled tympani and sequenced electronics of "The Shape Stalks Again" make for one of the score's most doom-laden sequences, but then the fim closes with the only piece of non-original music, the old Chordettes hit "Mr. Sandman" that plays out over the end credits.
Absolutely recommended to anyone into classic slasher soundtracks, the retro terror-electronics of Gatekeeper and Umberto, and the creepiest fringes of early synth-based industrial and electronic music; despite it's minimalism, the Halloween II score is still manages to incite dread even when divorced from the blood-stained imagery of the film.
Like everything else on Death Waltz, this record is beautifully presented in a jacket that features new artwork from Brandon Schaefer as well as a large foldout poster with the same image in larger form, along with liner notes from Schaefer and Alan Howarth.
��� Finally back in stock, this classic Carpenter score has been reissued yet again by Death Waltz for a newly revised 2014 edition that was re-mastered from the original analog tape and includes six previously unreleased cues that did not appear on the previous Death Waltz release. The packaging includes a new obi-strip, 12" by 12" booklet and poster.
���Finally have several of the recent releases from Death Waltz in stock here at C-Blast; this new boutique label from the UK has been putting stuff out for over a year now, but just about everything they have done has quickly sold out. It's one of the coolest new imprints out there, a vinyl-only operation that is curating a fantastic selection of cult horror / exploitation film soundtracks from the 1970s-1980s "golden age" of electronic film scores, with a couple of high quality newer works appearing every now and then as well. With a signature sleeve design aesthetic, a killer logo and impeccable taste in the best in cinematic electronic darkness, every single one of Death Waltz's releases are amazing collectors items for fans of classic horror sounds.
���It really wasn't until fairly recently that the third entry in the Halloween series began to develop the cult following that it currently has; when Season Of The Witch was originally released in 1982, it caught a lot of flack from horror audiences for not featuring series boogeyman Michael Myers and not being directly connected with the previous two films. That's exactly why it became one of my favorite films in the series, I loved John Carpenter's idea that the series should feature a different stand-alone story with each annual entry, and while the concept didn't fly after this movie, it's become much loved by hardcore Carpenter fans in the decades since. Season Of The Witch's bizarre tale of Druidic conspiracies, Silver Shamrock Halloween masks, child sacrifice and android horror is easily one of Carpenter's strangest, and while he didn't sit behind the camera for this one (Tommy Lee Wallace handled directorial duties on Season), Carpenter (along with Alan Howarth) did craft the eerie, throbbing synthesizer score for Season Of The Witch, and its one of their best.
��� The Season Of The Witch soundtrack was originally released by MCA back in 1982 and has been a tough score to find on vinyl up till now, with used copies collecting hefty collectors prices; this new Death Waltz edition features the exact same track listing but is newly re-mastered, and comes in the signature Death Waltz designed sleeve with printed inner sleeve and liner notes from Howarth and Jay Shaw, and a gorgeous poster reproduction of the album art. The record starts off with the track "Main title", the theme music that appears in various permutations all throughout the score, an ominous arrangement of dark droning synths, buried pulsating drones, and strange computerized melody all backed by sinister synth-bass rhythms fits the movie's weird, surrealistic tone and quickly gets under your skin. The rest of the soundtrack shifts between those subsequent variations on the Season theme, with that creepy electronic melody becoming wrapped in throbbing black synths and tension-wracked rhythms, and pieces of minimal, murky ambience formed from simple, pulsating synth chords. Of course, being a Carpenter/Howarth score, there's some terrific action pieces in here as well like "Chariots Of Pumpkins", pulse-pounding bass-driven tracks with minimal kettledrum-like pounding that backed the film's harrowing chase sequences and which do a pretty good job of creating unease in the listener even when divorced of the film's frightening visuals. Some of the other tracks have unique little touches that make them stand out, like the harpsichord / synth sounds on "Drive To Santa Mira" that carry faint echoes of Carpenter's original Halloween theme. And then there's that perversely catchy Silver Shamrock jingle, the one that every fan of the film has been unable to get out of their head for more than thirty years, right there at the end, reminding all of you children to be in front of the TV set for the Horrorthon, don't miss it, and don't forget to wear your masks...
���Back in stock, this time as a revised 2014 edition that includes new liner notes from Carpenter himself and a new essay from John Doran (The Quietus).
���Finally have several of the recent releases from Death Waltz in stock here at C-Blast; this new boutique label from the UK has been putting stuff out for over a year now, but just about everything they have done has quickly sold out. It's one of the coolest new imprints out there, a vinyl-only operation that is curating a fantastic selection of cult horror / exploitation film soundtracks from the 1970s-1980s "golden age" of electronic film scores, with a couple of high quality newer works appearing every now and then as well. With a signature sleeve design aesthetic, a killer logo and impeccable taste in the best in cinematic electronic darkness, every single one of Death Waltz's releases are amazing collectors items for fans of classic horror sounds.
��� For years following its release, Carpenter's 1987 film Prince Of Darkness was widely considered to be one of his weaker efforts and was critically panned as a muddled mess of ideas and narrative. The film has always maintained a strong cult following (I've been a huge fan of this flick ever since discovering it on home video in the late 80s) and more recently Prince Of Darkness has been reappraised as one of Carpenter's most imaginative works, most recently being featured as the cover story for the November 2012 issue of Rue Morgue. Considered to be a part of his "Apocalypse Trilogy" alongside The Thing and In The Mouth Of Madness, POD offered a heady stew of cosmic demonic horror, quantum physics, canisters of liquid Satanic intelligence, Tachyon theory, time travel, and religious conspiracy that was unlike anything else in the esteemed horror director's canon. And as usual, he paired his horrific, often gore-soaked visuals for Prince Of Darkness with a pulsating electronic score that easily wormed it's way into your head as the film plays out. On its own, Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness OST plays like the creepiest, most apocalyptic-sounding 80's prog rock album you've never heard.
���The central theme of the score is introduced in "Opening Titles", an eerie melody that reappears in a variety of permutations throughout the record on a number of different tracks. But like much of Carpetner's late 80s soundtrack work, the score also incorporates loud rock guitars, symphonic elements, choral voices and a massive synth-bass sound with his signature style of pulsating dark synthesizers, and this almost orchestral evocation of dread can really start to shred your nerves. There's a slinky percussive groove that materializes on "Team Assembly", the synth-bass taking on this almost industrialized-funk tone, right before the piece shifts into a super-sinister processional driven by swells of harsh cymbals, synthetic choral voices and hypnotic kick-drum throb, and the encroaching doom of "Darkness Begins" and swarming electronics of "A Message From The Future" add additional harsh textures to the apocalyptic score. The blasts of jarring percussion that appear over the course of the Prince Of Darkness OST are reaally reminiscent of some of the more sinister strains of post-industrial music, and are often interlaced with sorrowful string sections and computer noise.
���Re-mastered by producer Alan Howarth and released in a limited-edition on 140 gram vinyl and packaged in a gorgeous jacket designed by noted Criterion artist Sam Smith (with a large fold-out poster that reproduces the cover art) and liner notes from Howarth, this is another essential Lp for both collectors of the Death Waltz imprint and John Carpenter's black-pulse electronic dreadscapes.
��While the surreal cover art might look like something off of an older death metal album, Carrier Flux's latest full-length Objection offers more of the kind of progressive, offbeat black metal that I've come to expect from their label Code666, while sounding for the most part like nothing else on the label. I actually first heard Carrier Flux after accidentally stumbling across the videos that the one-man band had posted on Youtube, featuring a rather demented industrial-metal cover of Q Lazarus's "Goodbye Horses" (you know, that song from Silence Of The Lambs) and a symphonic, Swede-death reworking of Billy Joel's "Pressure", both of which displayed a rather twisted creativity. You won't find any covers of 80's pop music on the band's third album, but these twelve tracks do feature an even more skilled and atmospheric take on black metal that gets shot through with not only some lingering traces of industrial metal, but also weird folky elements that give this more unique flair.
�� Objection opens with a short, Goblin-esque instrumental, blending acoustic guitar strum and ominous melody on "Imperative Regression" before hurtling at top speed into the title track, a violent blast of hyperspeed black metal that quickly gives way to a strange gothy mid-tempo lurch, the vocals a quirky, throaty almost British sounding croak that's surprisingly enunciated for this sort of music; throughout the album, there's a constant contrast between that odd goth-tinged singing and the harsher, more murderous blackened screams. When the music blasts off back into the mechanical tremolo picking and thunderous blast beats, the sound transforms into sweeping, super dramatic black metal with massive hooks surfacing throughout the album, super catchy and blazing and sinister. There's almost a pop sensibility at work on songs like "Midas Earth", as the band digs its black talons into your brain with their skillful interplay between epic blasting and slower, almost theatrical passages, huge catchy riffs popping up and carrying the music, balanced between anthemic hooks and vicious aggression.
�� But where Objection really stands out is with the oddball folky parts that Carrier Flux scatters throughout the songs. These folky elements show up on songs like "The Path of Children Damned", where the blazing, complex blackened metal crush will suddenly give way to short passages of strange dramatic folkiness that for all the world remind me of the Decemberists, weird dark shanties immersed within the song's intricate, Dissection-esque black metal. Those folky acoustic guitars and melodies recur throughout the album, the music sometimes giving over completely to passages of moody folk and weirdly theatrical vocals, and elsewhere apocalyptic spoken word readings emerge over clanking industrial metal, or the vocals break into a powerful, almost operatic delivery over more Goblinesque creepiness. And later tracks like "A Cancer of Foundations" offer swirling, elliptical blasts of proggy black metal with more of that mechanized, vaguely industrial feel, while still conveying that off-kilter vibe. It's a cool mix of progressive black metal, ramshackle folk and soaring Scandinavian style melodies that Carrier Flux whips up on this album.
DC area punkprogcore stoners CARRION delivered their swan song here with this awesome 10 song full length that effortlessly melds post-hardcore crunch to Am Rep violent insanity and stonerized riffing. Like BLACK FLAG'ss My War genetically fused to DAZZLING KILLMEN and TODAY IS THE DAY, while veering between emotional outbursts akin to Fugazi and atonal doom trudge. Produced by Bruce Falkinburg (THE HIDDEN HAND).
More Am Rep style noise rock meets stoner sludge punk from these NoVA cats....really heavy, catchy rock that still reminds me of early Today Is The Day
with a prominent DC/MD stoner doom vibe and chaotic prog elements. Comparable to a cross between BLACK FLAG and KING CRIMSON - a marriage of frenzied punk
damage and headspinning prog-ery.
More catchy, brutal noise/stoner rock from DC, these guys set fires with chaotic, pummeling riffs cribbed from Am Rep's back catalog and dousing the whole
mess in acidic rock. Comparable to a cross between BLACK FLAG and KING CRIMSON - a marriage of frenzied punk damage and headspinning prog crunch.
First off, Carrion Wraith scores points for their badass ultra-detailed logo. As you know, a killer logo is usually a portent of good music, and Carrion Wraith's thick, bloated root-like lettering that winds downwards like some sort of demonic tuber into what looks like a possessed deer skull is cool enough to set the bar pretty high. These French Canadian black metallers come though with the goods though, delivering seven lengthy songs of icy, distortion-drenched blackened misery. Singing in both French and English, vocalist Monarque delivers his visions of forest-demons and black woodlands ruled over by an undead Deer Lord ( also called the Carrion Wraith - uh, just read the booklet...) in a proper phlegm-spewing rasp, and the music is thick and hypnotic and buzzing, the distorted guitars cloaking dreary riffs and melodies in harsh trebly fuzz. The minor key riffs often have a blurry, dissonant quality that reminds me of Xasthur, but this tends to be much faster than Malefic's depressive black metal. Switching between blastbeats and punky mid-tempo rhythms, Carrion Wraith lace their sorrowful black buzz with bits of black ambience and lengthy field recordings of water birds and forest life, but mostly this is about awesome, heart-rending epic melodies, and every one of these songs is filled with them - my favorite being the utterly moving "L'Abysse De La Folie", which has one of the saddest-sounding black metal melodies ever. Definitely recommended for folks into Xasthur, Silencer, terminally downer black metal in general, and undead deer wraiths.
Haute Magie brings us another dose of eerie, phantasmagoric electronics with this split cassette featuring newcomers David Carter (who apparently died not long after this material was recorded) and The Witch Family. Released on pro-printed cassettes with full color packaging in a limited edition of one hundred twenty-five copies, this split contrasts Carter's mysterious low-fi soundscapes and industrial ambience with The Witch Family's re-workings of the same material, transforming them into a murky midnight slasher soundtrack on the b-side...
Carter's side showcases seven tracks of dreamlike sound that range from bleak expanses of murky factory whirr and incandescent metallic drones, simple ominous noise-loops spinning into infinity, to thumping, massive bass-heavy electronica with blown-out, distorted drum machine rhythms and harsh percussive sounds that sorta take this into Scorn/Techno Animal territory. These drum machine driven beatscapes start off spare and minimal, a study in mechanical rhythm and texture, but after a while Carter begins to unleash his growling evil synths, laying down these simple but very ominous sounding hooks over the skittering, pounding beats. Some of the later tracks move into more techno/house-like sounds, but the layered horror-movie atmospherics and ghostly piano loops that are draped over the squelchy electronics and murky breakbeats connect this to some of the more dancefloor-oriented "witch house" stuff. In fact, there's one track that combines corrupted, submerged techno-like pulsations with whirling metallic drift in a way that reminds me of a cross between the pitch-black minimal electronica found on Nordvargr's Resignation discs and the creepy slasher-soundtracks of Gatekeeper.
Using Carter's tracks as the source material, The Witch Family re-shapes the sounds into something new, an ominous creeping electronic ambience seething with mechanical rhythms buried under heaps of wirr and buzz, creeping bass lines lurking in the background, turning into a strange sort of low-fi graveyard electronica infused with the obsessive black drones of Maurizio Bianchi's early works, or dropping off into a hypnotic beat-scape of jazzy, Scorn-esque dystopia smeared with gorgeous dark saxophone, a perpetual twilight realm inhabited by industrial breakbeats, soundtrack-y strings, and Tangerine Dream's lush score for Risky Business.
Something to check out if you're into the Fright imprint and affiliated artists like Antoni Maiovvi and Gatekeeper...
Now out of print, we've got just a couple of copies of this massive three song debut from the South Dakota band Castle. 18 minutes of megatherium doomcore, boiling post-hardcore sludge rolling across the great plains, striding through passages of brutal stoner rock riffing and droning, Neurosis-esque dirge. Out of the heaviness come breathtaking valleys of windswept majesty, with a Western sound not all that unlike Across Tundras, huge open chords ringing out, harsh bellowing screams, epic reverb soaked solos...yeah, Castle kind of combine the sound that Across Tundras were first forming on their Divides EP with more aggressive, hardcore-influenced power, crushing and epic, think Celestial era Isis and earlier Pelican, but faster, more adrenalized. Features a member of South Dakota post-hardcore bands Examination Of The and Spirit Of Versailles. Limited edition of 500 copies - we've got only a smal handful of these in stock, and once they're gone, that's
it.
Funereal ultradoom probably doesn't get much more bleak, dismal and crushing than Catacombs. This newly reissued CD comes to us from the Russian doom label
Solitude, and it features the first Catacombs album from 2003 that had been originally released as a super limited CD-R on Antinomian. Extreme doom fans are
now able to not only wallow in the crawling crypt ambience of the original 15 minute epics "Consigned To Flames Of War" and "Echoes Through The Catacombs",
but also alternate remastered versions of those same two tracks, making this a pretty completist study of the album. Anyone into the cult deathdoom band
Heirophant will want to add this to their collection, and vice-versa, as Catacombs was essentially a continuation of the droning tomb doom of Hierophant
mastermind Xathagorra Mlandroth, and even the packaging for this disc is similiar to that of the new Hierophant discography CD that we listed in our last
store update.
Ultra slow, creeping deathdoom riffage, haunting piano melodies wrought with despair, reverb-drenched gutteral roars drifting up from some unseen monstrous
underground presence...guitars tuned so low and vocals so deep that they sound more like the scraping of tomb lids and deep cavequakes, nauseating guitar
drones wind around gorgeously depressing piano figures, and the drums grind machinelike through thick reverb. Catacombs created some of the most harrowing
and atmospheric Lovecraftian doom metal ever with this mini-album, a miserable slow motion nightmare that fans of Esoteric, Thergothon, Skepticism, and
Disembowelment are going to find pretty essential.
Richmond's Catalyst continue to rock my tits off with their sublimely trippy hardcore, here dropping three jams, "Born With A Buzz", "Dunna Nanunna" and
"Song Without Words". Lotsa fastpaced crusty thrash this time around, all blasting drums and dueling snarled invectives, but in total Catalyst style the
raging 'core collides with psychedelic guitar noise that continues to remind me of a thrashed out, crusty mashup of Karp, Screaming Trees, and raging
hardcore punk. I can't get enough of these guys.
And Brainworms are thoroughly badass as well - I saw these guys in Philadelphia last year when I went up there to see Genghis Tron play with Kylesa at the
First Unitarian Church before those two bands kicked off their US tour together, and Brainworms were one of the openers. They flattened me with a raging,
noise rock -inflected hardcore punch that made me feel like I was smashed into some tiny New Jersey basement show from the mid 90's all over again, fast
paced charging hardcore punk with a mix of chaotic and mathy riffing, hoarse vocals bellowing amazingly verbose lyrics that read like furiously scrawled
diary entries, all set to melodies that lit my veins on fire. The two songs on this split continue the form: a combo of abrasive, fierce hardcore and jangly
indie melody and high energy. And their from Richmond, too, making this split a killer snapshot of the heavy, progressive hardcore fury that the river city
is spewing out right now. To top it all off, Rorshach records
had RVA artists Jim Callahan and Nick Kuszyk collaborate on the sleeve, a fantastic eye-popping seizure of gooey mutant typography and ecstatic LSD
graffiti.
Excellent. I've been hoping that the recent spate of EPs from The Catalyst would be collected onto a single disc so I could finally tote 'em around. The Richmond punx play an awesome mix of spacey psychedelic hardcore and pummeling Karp/Nirvana sludge rock, and if you haven't already glommed onto their vinyl releases, this disc is a perfect place to start. The thirteen track disc compiles the songs from the Marianas Trench 12" EP, their split 7" with Brainworms and the split 12" with Mass Movement of the Moth, and all of the songs were remastered for this CD.
First released as an eye-popping silkscreened 12", the Marianas Trench EP is a new slab of psychedelic hardcore thuggery from The Catalyst, the Richmond band that has been blowing me away with their awesome mix of early Sub Pop sonics and thrashy tripped-out hardcore ever since their Hospital Visit EP first slugged my ears. Marianas Trench follows up their split LP with Mass Movement Of The Moth and features four new jams on the a-side, "This Bike Is A Gravity Bong", "Kyle Vs. Robocop", "Proceed With Caution", and "Attention Defecit Distortion". Harsh screamed vocals, deep death metal roars, manic mathy hardcore riffing and sludgy detuned dirge, way-catchy pop riffs and trippy psych guitar shredding. A thunderous conglom of early Nirvana and Karp and Melvins, Screaming Trees and ferociously crusty thrash and Mudhoney, brooding post-hardcore instrumental passages and super adrenalized n' bludgeoning noise rock. Psychedelic and crushing, insanely catchy and noisy, and one of my favorite bands around.
ALso featured are the three jams from the split 7" with Brainworms, "Born With A Buzz", "Dunna Nanunna" and "Song Without Words". Lotsa fastpaced crusty thrash this time around, all blasting drums and dueling snarled invectives, but in total Catalyst style the raging 'core collides with psychedelic guitar noise that continues to remind me of a thrashed out, crusty mashup of Karp, Screaming Trees, and raging hardcore punk.
Highly recommended!
It's a one sided record and it's an eye-popping art object but most importantly it's a new slab of psychedelic hardcore thuggery from The Catalyst, the Richmond band that has been blowing me away with their awesome mix of early Sub Pop sonics and thrashy tripped-out hardcore ever since their Hospital Visit EP first slugged my ears. Marianas Trench follows up their split LP with Mass Movement Of The Moth and features four new jams on the a-side, "This Bike Is A Gravity Bong", "Kyle Vs. Robocop", "Proceed With Caution", and "Attention Defecit Distortion". Harsh screamed vocals, deep death metal roars, manic mathy hardcore riffing and sludgy detuned dirge, way-catchy pop riffs and trippy psych guitar shredding. A thunderous conglom of early Nirvana and Karp and Melvins, Screaming Trees and ferociously crusty thrash and Mudhoney, brooding post-hardcore instrumental passages and super adrenalized n' bludgeoning noise rock. Psychedelic and crushing, insa
nely catchy and noisy, and one of my favorite bands around.
Limited edition of 700 copies, and pressed on clear vinyl with awesome psychedelic art silkscreened in blue ink on the b-side, featuring images and drawings of all kinds of deep sea life, and presented in a vivdly illustrated full color jacket.
I thought the first CD these guys released, A Hospital Visit, was the shit,a rippin' assault of catchy, rocking, and mildly art-
damaged hardcore, with crazy Greg Ginn style guitar parts and terrific ripped vocals. The whole disc felt like it connected SST hardcore and early 90's Sub
Pop sludginess, like Black Flag and Karp and Bleach era Nirvana fused together into an unstoppable DIY hardcore wrecking ball. Really rad stuff that
I could not get enough of. Amazingly, in the couple of years since they released that CD, The Catalyst have gotten even fiercer and weirder, and recently put
out this cassette tape on Robotic Empire that just fuckin' KILLS. All of the gnarly, noisey hardcore heaviosity of their previous stuff is here, even heavier
than ever as a matter of fact, but now The Catalyst have seen fit to splatter their songs with TONS of fucked up delay FX and extended psychedelic jams and
tweaked riffage, and their tunes are even catchier than before, every song has a fucking crucial hook that'll stick in my head for days after
listening to this tape. This tape is highly recommended, a righteous dose of psychedelic hardcore, at times reminding me of Screaming Trees, Jimi Hendrix,
Karp, Nirvana, and Black Flag, but never sounding derivitive. Seriously awesome. Just wish they had listed song titles on this! The tape has eight songs,
consisting of old songs that have been re-recorded, new demo songs, and one song completely exclusive to this cassette. Limited edition of 200 pro-made
tapes, hand numbered.
Saw these guys play in Baltimore recently while touring for this Lp, and I was flattened by their immensity. It's been a couple of years since this Richmond-based trio released a new album, but they've returned with their best yet, a crushing, metallic assault that is mucho heavier than before. The Catalyst play a kind of sludgy, angular rock that automatically starts to evoke the sound of the Am Rep catalog, particularly the twisted psychosis of early Today Is The Day and the blunt-edged violence of Unsane. But where most bands who mine this particular sound tend to have a retro approach, The Catalyst crank it into something much more intense. The songs on Voyager swerve through bursts of fast, rocking heaviness and jagged, wiry riffing oozing with anxiety, and a bunch of the songs on the album unleash a sort of slowed-down thrash metal sound bent into awkward (but punishing) shapes that reminds me of Cali sludge heavies 16. This is way heavier than anything I ever remember hearing from these guys; while they've got that same souped-up noise-rock/grungy thrash vibe as their older records, this is ten times more brutal and forceful. Mathy guitar shred is splattered against crushing stop/start thrash grooves, and the band works all sorts of spacey, psychedelic flourishes, strange atmospheric leads, passages of ghostly ambience into this, even sinking into some morose doom-laden lumbering on "Septagon" that turns unexpectedly proggy. The megatherium swing of "Jupiter Brain" and bent hardcore spasms of "Breathers" and "Big Bend" lend variety, and the closing title track sprawls out into a seven minute anthem of lurching dissonance and arresting hooks, moody sung vocals over wrecked, waltzing noise rock for a punishing climax. Overall, The Catalyst offer up a unique fusion of Bleach-era Nirvana, Melvins, with the spacey, psych-tinged prog of Spaceboy and the weight and ferocity of thrash metal on Voyager, and it's one of 2012's best albums to stagger out of the noise/sludge rock end of the underground. Highly recommended.
Comes in a striking gatefold jacket and includes a digital download of the album.
���This San Francisco area outfit manages to set themselves apart from the heap of Neurosis-inspired sludge by cranking up the organ and pushing out into the front of their sound on debut album All Is Sorrow. While the huge, portentous riffage, atmospheric flourishes and morose tempos situate Catapult The Dead's sound within that well-traveled realm first mapped out by Neurosis and Isis, the group offer some interesting wrinkles in that sound to tantalize enthusiasts of primal metallic mysticism. The packaging is pretty cool, with great black line art from Nick Sandy that's a little reminiscent of John Baizley, and which echoes the mythic imagery present in the band's lyrics presented in an eight page parchment-style booklet that accompanies the LP; the record itself is made up on a single, nearly forty minute song spread across the two sides, a sprawling, gothic-tinged sludge epic.
���It sprawls out as a multi-part saga, first rumbling across the beginning of the album as a crushing, doom-laden dirge draped with that swirling pipe organ-like sound, swirling around the slow, monolithic riffs and lumbering drumming, but then later moving through solemn passages of piano-laced slowcore, droning riffage wrapped in symphonic synth-strings, washes of Morricone-like orchestral atmosphere sweeping over the grinding slo-mo heaviness, threads of neo-classical delicacy winding throughout the band's crawling, tortured chuggery. That mixture of swirling piano and organ accompaniment cab be heard throughout almost the entire song, often taking over as the lead instrument as it weaves these mournful melodic shapes over the sparse and ponderous drums, the roar of the guitar washing away into a haze of restrained, textural sound. Even as the band's thunderous heaviness drifts out into the more subdued, pensive sections of the album, though, the vocals remain abrasive, the singer's gruff, guttural roar trading off against a scathing high-pitched shriek that ratchets up the frenzied energy whenever it appears. These guys are definitely working with familiar materials, the Neurosis influence echoing in Sorrow's long, drawn out riffs marching into the glare of a dying sun, and in the pounding fire-dance of the tribal rhythms; but the band succeeds in reshaping these elements into their own image, especially on the second half of the album where the song evolves into soaring, folk-flecked melodies that almost hint at an uglier, more ragged Amorphis, and in those moments when the organs swell up and douse the band's churning sludge in a thick amber glow. Limited to two hundred fifty copies, and includes a digital download of the album.
As big a fan as I am of weird, messed-up industrial metal, I'd never heard of this obscure California outfit until now. Apparently best known for being a side-project from one of the guys in the notorious grindcore outfit Meatshits, Catatonic Existence popped up briefly in the mid 90s, releasing a split CD and a seperate split 7" with the aforementioned 'Shits, and the two song I'll Kill You All! 7" from 1994, before disappearing back into the boiling black sewer from which they emerged. The band was essentially a one-man effort from Guy Mulidor, with some additional contributions from Meatshits founder Robert Deathrage on vocals, sampling and keyboards, but it's quite different from the other stuff that these guys were doing. It's just as nihilistic and misanthropic, sure, but the music is a bizarre sort of primitive, industrialized electro-metal, not quite the Godflesh worhip that you might expect (although they are cwertainly an influence on this stuff). No, this is much weirder and much more fucked-up. Pounding double-bass drum machine rhythms and machinelike programmed pummel drill through songs like "Guy Told Me To" and "The Last Temptation", tinny thrash riffs buried in the mix beneath Mulidor's monstrous guttural gorilla-grunts, while the bass guitar and synths often break into these odd funk parts, even breaking out some actual slap-bass moves in some of the weirder moments. Also, this stuff us fucking loaded with samples, with long film samples from early 90s movies like Judgement Night and Needful Things as well as fragments of news reports and various other movies are strewn throughout the songs, and there are big chunks of this stuff when the metallic elements drop out and it turns into a demented kind of EBM, some fucked-up, meth-addled take on Front 242. It's not for all tastes, I can tell you that. The awkward song structures, the bizarre funk bass, the squelchy Wax Trax synths and weird bossa nova percussion breaks, the overload of samples and the willfully anti-human attitude, all turns this into a kind of outsider mecha-metal that manages to transcend being just another Godflesh clone. It's weirdly infectious, especially if you've got a taste for weirdo electro-sludge like Black Mayonnaise and stuff in that general vein.
Long before doom metal burst into popularity with both metalheads and non-metalheads alike at the end of the 90's, there was Cathedral, the British band that helped to reshape the sound of doom and push it into new areas of sonic extremism, and who became the flagship band for Rise Above Records, the label that would bring such titans of slow n' low heaviness as Church Of Misery, Moss, Electric Wizard, Unearthly Trance, Witchcraft, Orange Goblin, Sunn O))), Sleep and Goatsnake to your stereo. During the 80's, there were a handful of bands that continued to fly the flag of trad doom that Sabbath kickstarted, Saint Vitus, Candlemass, Trouble, and the whole Maryland doom crowd, for instance, but there wasn't anybody as slow or as heavy as Cathedral, who took the notion of the crawling Sabbathian riff to whole new levels of torpor. Formed after singer Lee Dorrian bailed from grindcore pioneers Napalm Death in 1989, Cathedral combined the heaviest modes of classic doom with Dorrian's unique vocal style, a love of 70's prog rock, and a guitar sound that seems as if it had been carved out of slabs of pure granite. They signed to Earache and released their debut album Forest Of Equilibrium, which has become one of the all time classics in the doom metal pantheon; later albums would pursue a groovier, more rocking sound that the band pretty much perfected on 1993's The Ethereal Mirror. Both of these crucial early albums have just been reissued by Earache in expanded packages that have the original albums bundled with previously out-of-print bonus material, and each comes with a DVD that features a documentary on the making of the album; both are fucking ESSENTIAL for doom metal fans.
Depending on who you ask, Cathedral's second album The Ethereal Mirror might be the best album they ever recorded. While it's hard for me to choose between the crawling prog-doom brilliance of their debut Forest Of Equilibrium and this album (I love 'em both equally!), Ethereal did see the band begin to make the shift into groovier, more rocking territory, experimenting with their crushing doom sound more while at the same time becoming more accessible, with the catchiest song Cathedral ever wrote included here: if Cathedral ever had a "hit", it was "Midnight Mountain", possibly one of the best stoner rock songs of all time. Starting off with that instantly recognizable riff and Dorrian's shout of "Oh Yeah!", the guitars spit out a gnarly lick as the song crashes into an undulating, insanely funky groove that'll bore into the skull of any doom/stoner rock junkie that hears it. The twin harmonies and infectious riffing builds over a chorus-heavy bridge, then kicks into the impossibly catchy, fist-pumping hook, complete with hand claps; total genius. Across the album, Ethereal Mirror moves between stomping, doom-laden heaviness carried over from the debut ("Jaded Entity", "Phantasmagoria" ) and the pummeling psychedelic doom-rock sound that would define the albums that followed. They crank the tempo on songs like "Midnight Mountain" and opener "Ride", which features an infectiously anthemic hook and loping groove that foreshadows what Goatsnake would be doing a couple of years later, welding their monstrous ultra-heavy guitar riffs to pounding mid-tempo tempos. You gotta hear this album if you want to see where everyone from Orange Goblin to Goatsnake to Electric Wizard got their inspiration from - this is one of the high-water marks of doom metal, make no mistake.
In addition, this limited-edition double CD set also has the Statik Majik EP, which had been out of print for years. The three song EP comes in a full color wallet sleeve that's bundled with the case, and it's a must-hear for Cathedral fans; originally released in 1994, this thirty-five minute disc includes the tracks "Hypnos 164", "Cosmic Funeral" and "The Voyage Of The Homeless Sapien", the latter a twenty-two minute slab of psychedelic metal that goes from syrupy gothic plod to pastoral psych-folk to skull-crushing glacial doom.
The Ethereal Reflections DVD has the forty-minute documentary on the recording of the album, as well as the music videos for both "Ride" and "Midnight Mountain", the latter consisting of an especially awesome/ridiculous satanic disco freakout; the documentary is an in-depth retrospective on everything to do with the album, from the recording process, touring (with lots of vintage footage of the band live), discussions with artist Dave Patchett on the album art, and revealing conversations with the band on the shift in style between Forest Of Equilibrium and The Ethereal Mirror. There's a ton of amazing information included here, and the dvd is worth the admission price all on its own.
And on top of all of that, both reissues are packaged with newly re-designed booklets and inserts that present Patchett's artwork in extended form. Both reissues come highly recommended, and are totally essential for any doom fans that don't already have these classic albums in their collection.
Long before doom metal burst into popularity with both metalheads and non-metalheads alike at the end of the 90's, there was Cathedral, the British band that helped to reshape the sound of doom and push it into new areas of sonic extremism, and who became the flagship band for Rise Above Records, the label that would bring such titans of slow n' low heaviness as Church Of Misery, Moss, Electric Wizard, Unearthly Trance, Witchcraft, Orange Goblin, Sunn O))), Sleep and Goatsnake to your stereo. During the 80's, there were a handful of bands that continued to fly the flag of trad doom that Sabbath kickstarted, Saint Vitus, Candlemass, Trouble, and the whole Maryland doom crowd, for instance, but there wasn�t anybody as slow or as heavy as Cathedral, who took the notion of the crawling Sabbathian riff to whole new levels of torpor. Formed after singer Lee Dorrian bailed from grindcore pioneers Napalm Death in 1989, Cathedral combined the heaviest modes of classic doom with Dorrian's unique vocal style, a love of 70's prog rock, and a guitar sound that seems as if it had been carved out of slabs of pure granite. They signed to Earache and released their debut album Forest Of Equilibrium, which has become one of the all time classics in the doom metal pantheon; later albums would pursue a groovier, more rocking sound that the band pretty much perfected on 1993's The Ethereal Mirror. Both of these crucial early albums have just been reissued by Earache in expanded packages that have the original albums bundled with previously out-of-print bonus material, and each comes with a DVD that features a documentary on the making of the album; both are fucking ESSENTIAL for doom metal fans.
When Cathedral's Forest Of Equilibrium came out in 1990, there really wasn't anything else like it; the British doomsters had produced one of the most crushing, sorrowful doom albums up to that point, heavy on the Sabbath influence of course, but IMMENSELY slower and heavier and more extreme, with Lee Dorrian's deep distinctive growl still holding over some of the grit and hellfire from his brief stint as the frontman for UK grinders Napalm Death. Not only that, but there was a heavy 70's prog rock influence going on with the trippy flutes and psychedelic flourishes that appeared sporadically throughout the album, a unique touch that would later influence legions of newer doom crews. The duo of guitarists Garry Jennings and Adam Lehan crafted monolithic, suffocating heavy slow-motion riffs that crept over the pounding glacial drumming, creating some of the heaviest metal ever heard up to that point. But the album starts off with a sense of disorientation as the flue and acoustic guitar of the intro piece "Picture Of Beauty And Innocence" suggest something much more airy and light, only to pave the way for the sickly harmonies and slurred doom of "Commiserating The Celebration". One of the only eruptions of speed on the album is the short song "Soul Sacrifice", which starts off as a pounding grooving sludge jam, but then evolves into a ripping Judas Priest-like riff. Aside from that song, though, the band moves through these epic, ultra-long songs (several come close to the ten minute mark) like a wave of molasses, coloring their ponderous Sabbath influenced doom with morose, despair-filled minor-key melodies and those meandering Comus-like flutes.
The end of the cd features the legendary Soul Sacrifice EP, which some consider to be one of Cathedral's finest releases; there's an extended version of the title track, which also appears on Forest Of Equilibrium, as well as three exclusive tracks, "Autumn Twilight", "Frozen Rapture", and ""Golden Blood (Flooding)", all of which continue in the same oppressive style of doom as Funeral.
And the Return To The Forest DVD features a forty-minute documentary that goes into great depth on the recording of Forest Of Equilibrium with in-depth interviews with the members of the band, discussions about the formation of Cathedral, footage of early shows, getting signed to Earache, and even a fairly extensive conversation with artist Dave Patchett who designed Cathedral's hallucinatory, Boschian album art. As with the documentary for Ethereal Mirror, there's a ton of amazing information included here, and the dvd is worth the admission price all on its own.
And on top of all of that, both reissues are packaged with newly re-designed booklets and inserts that present Patchett's artwork in extended form. Both reissues come highly recommended, and are totally essential for any doom fans that don't already have these classic albums in their collection.
Limited 2008 two disc (CD + NTSC/Region 0 DVD) release of the Metal band's third album including a bonus DVD (entitled Our God Has Landed) that contains a live show from 1992 plus eight promo video clips. Originally released in 1995, Carnival Bizarre proved to be arguably the defining document for the band. The album bridges the gap between the gritty Doom of the band's earliest recordings with the vibrant catchiness and quirkiness which became the band's trademark. Cathedral were formed by ex-Napalm Death vocalist Lee Dorrian and ex-Acid Reign guitarist Garry Jennings. Features a guest appearance by Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi on 'Utopian Blaster'. The package comes housed in a double CD jewel case and offers an essential slice of Metal history in one complete audiovisual set. 23 tracks.
" - label description
Now available as a posh import digipack edition!
Long before doom metal burst into popularity with both metalheads and non-metalheads alike at the end of the 90's, there was Cathedral, the British band that helped to reshape the sound of doom and push it into new areas of sonic extremism, and who became the flagship band for Rise Above Records, the label that would bring such titans of slow n' low heaviness as Church Of Misery, Moss, Electric Wizard, Unearthly Trance, Witchcraft, Orange Goblin, Sunn O))), Sleep and Goatsnake to your stereo. During the 80's, there were a handful of bands that continued to fly the flag of trad doom that Sabbath kickstarted, Saint Vitus, Candlemass, Trouble, and the whole Maryland doom crowd, for instance, but there wasn�t anybody as slow or as heavy as Cathedral, who took the notion of the crawling Sabbathian riff to whole new levels of torpor. Formed after singer Lee Dorrian bailed from grindcore pioneers Napalm Death in 1989, Cathedral combined the heaviest modes of classic doom with Dorrian's unique vocal style, a love of 70's prog rock, and a guitar sound that seems as if it had been carved out of slabs of pure granite. They signed to Earache and released their debut album Forest Of Equilibrium, which has become one of the all time classics in the doom metal pantheon; later albums would pursue a groovier, more rocking sound that the band pretty much perfected on 1993's The Ethereal Mirror. Both of these crucial early albums have just been reissued by Earache in expanded packages that have the original albums bundled with previously out-of-print bonus material, and each comes with a DVD that features a documentary on the making of the album; both are fucking ESSENTIAL for doom metal fans.
When Cathedral's Forest Of Equilibrium came out in 1990, there really wasn't anything else like it; the British doomsters had produced one of the most crushing, sorrowful doom albums up to that point, heavy on the Sabbath influence of course, but IMMENSELY slower and heavier and more extreme, with Lee Dorrian's deep distinctive growl still holding over some of the grit and hellfire from his brief stint as the frontman for UK grinders Napalm Death. Not only that, but there was a heavy 70's prog rock influence going on with the trippy flutes and psychedelic flourishes that appeared sporadically throughout the album, a unique touch that would later influence legions of newer doom crews. The duo of guitarists Garry Jennings and Adam Lehan crafted monolithic, suffocating heavy slow-motion riffs that crept over the pounding glacial drumming, creating some of the heaviest metal ever heard up to that point. But the album starts off with a sense of disorientation as the flue and acoustic guitar of the intro piece "Picture Of Beauty And Innocence" suggest something much more airy and light, only to pave the way for the sickly harmonies and slurred doom of "Commiserating The Celebration". One of the only eruptions of speed on the album is the short song "Soul Sacrifice", which starts off as a pounding grooving sludge jam, but then evolves into a ripping Judas Priest-like riff. Aside from that song, though, the band moves through these epic, ultra-long songs (several come close to the ten minute mark) like a wave of molasses, coloring their ponderous Sabbath influenced doom with morose, despair-filled minor-key melodies and those meandering Comus-like flutes.
The end of the cd features the legendary Soul Sacrifice EP, which some consider to be one of Cathedral's finest releases; there's an extended version of the title track, which also appears on Forest Of Equilibrium, as well as three exclusive tracks, "Autumn Twilight", "Frozen Rapture", and ""Golden Blood (Flooding)", all of which continue in the same oppressive style of doom as Funeral.
And the Return To The Forest DVD features a forty-minute documentary that goes into great depth on the recording of Forest Of Equilibrium with in-depth interviews with the members of the band, discussions about the formation of Cathedral, footage of early shows, getting signed to Earache, and even a fairly extensive conversation with artist Dave Patchett who designed Cathedral's hallucinatory, Boschian album art. As with the documentary for Ethereal Mirror, there's a ton of amazing information included here, and the dvd is worth the admission price all on its own.
And on top of all of that, both reissues are packaged with newly re-designed booklets and inserts that present Patchett's artwork in extended form. Both reissues come highly recommended, and are totally essential for any doom fans that don't already have these classic albums in their collection.
��� Here's the latest vinyl reissue of Cathedral's classic debut Forest Of Equilibrium, paired up with their Soul Sacrifice EP, issued by Earache/Century Media.
��� Long before doom metal burst into popularity with both metalheads and non-metalheads alike at the end of the 90's, there was Cathedral, the British band that helped to reshape the sound of doom and push it into new areas of sonic extremism, and who became the flagship band for Rise Above Records, the label that would bring such titans of slow n' low heaviness as Church Of Misery, Moss, Electric Wizard, Unearthly Trance, Witchcraft, Orange Goblin, Sunn O))), Sleep and Goatsnake to your stereo. During the 80's, there were a handful of bands that continued to fly the flag of trad doom that Sabbath kickstarted, Saint Vitus, Candlemass, Trouble, and the whole Maryland doom crowd, for instance, but there wasn�t anybody as slow or as heavy as Cathedral, who took the notion of the crawling Sabbathian riff to whole new levels of torpor. Formed after singer Lee Dorrian bailed from grindcore pioneers Napalm Death in 1989, Cathedral combined the heaviest modes of classic doom with Dorrian's unique vocal style, a love of 70's prog rock, and a guitar sound that seems as if it had been carved out of slabs of pure granite. They signed to Earache and released their debut album Forest Of Equilibrium, which has become one of the all time classics in the doom metal pantheon; later albums would pursue a groovier, more rocking sound that the band pretty much perfected on 1993's The Ethereal Mirror. Both of these crucial early albums have just been reissued by Earache in expanded packages that have the original albums bundled with previously out-of-print bonus material, and each comes with a DVD that features a documentary on the making of the album; both are fucking ESSENTIAL for doom metal fans.
��� When Cathedral's Forest Of Equilibrium came out in 1990, there really wasn't anything else like it; the British doomsters had produced one of the most crushing, sorrowful doom albums up to that point, heavy on the Sabbath influence of course, but IMMENSELY slower and heavier and more extreme, with Lee Dorrian's deep distinctive growl still holding over some of the grit and hellfire from his brief stint as the frontman for UK grinders Napalm Death. Not only that, but there was a heavy 70's prog rock influence going on with the trippy flutes and psychedelic flourishes that appeared sporadically throughout the album, a unique touch that would later influence legions of newer doom crews. The duo of guitarists Garry Jennings and Adam Lehan crafted monolithic, suffocating heavy slow-motion riffs that crept over the pounding glacial drumming, creating some of the heaviest metal ever heard up to that point. But the album starts off with a sense of disorientation as the flue and acoustic guitar of the intro piece "Picture Of Beauty And Innocence" suggest something much more airy and light, only to pave the way for the sickly harmonies and slurred doom of "Commiserating The Celebration". One of the only eruptions of speed on the album is the short song "Soul Sacrifice", which starts off as a pounding grooving sludge jam, but then evolves into a ripping Judas Priest-like riff. Aside from that song, though, the band moves through these epic, ultra-long songs (several come close to the ten minute mark) like a wave of molasses, coloring their ponderous Sabbath influenced doom with morose, despair-filled minor-key melodies and those meandering Comus-like flutes.
��� The end of the cd features the legendary Soul Sacrifice EP, which some consider to be one of Cathedral's finest releases; there's an extended version of the title track, which also appears on Forest Of Equilibrium, as well as three exclusive tracks, "Autumn Twilight", "Frozen Rapture", and ""Golden Blood (Flooding)", all of which continue in the same oppressive style of doom as Funeral.
��� And on top of all of that, both reissues are packaged with newly re-designed booklets and inserts that present Patchett's artwork in extended form. Both reissues come highly recommended, and are totally essential for any doom fans that don't already have these classic albums in their collection.
By the time 2002's The VIIth Coming rolled around, Cathedral had moved on from the stylistic experimentation of their first few titles and found themselves settled into a well-worn, well-earned sound and groove (and I mean groove) that is undoubtedly their own. Another killer cover piece done up by Dave Patchett who continues to evoke the phantasmal mysteries of Hieronymus Bosch's Garden Of Earthly Delights triptych better than any other living artist. A perfect visual accompaniment to what was developing into a more and more unique fusion of early Black Sabbath, Celtic Frost-level riffcrush, and British progressive rock (a la Uriah Heep). I'm no fair-weather fan of Cathedral, a perfectly happy man when I'm listening to these bellbottomed goons simply locking into that sweet, sweet neo-Sabbathian blues-groove and gnarly millennial psychedelia that they've mastered since Dorrian got the show rolling. It's rare if ever that you hear these guys dipping back into the excruciating, pioneering, ponderous heaviness of stuff like Forest Of Equilibrium, but I could care less. When they drop a riff, it hits like an ICBM. See opener "Phoenix Rising", which takes that peculiar mixture of 70's rock riffiness, mega-lurching doom metal, Dorrian's kind of off-key vocals, and titanic buildups that makes Cathedral what they are, and just flatten you with it. Stuff like that feels like a return to the rockslide heaviness of Forest Of Equilibrium. It's a beast of a disc, like most of their stuff approaching the hour-long mark, but I can't imagine them abbreviating any of these tunes; when a riff hits that right groove, it’s bulldozer time, and they can keep going with it for as long as they want. Again, I'm a sucker for all of their stuff in its different guises, so I'm just stoked to be able to soak into a whole ten songs of this roiling low-end acid-metal.
On their seventh album (natch) you get some more upbeat stuff like "Resisting The Ghost", "Iconoclast"'s iron-clad death n' roll chugathon (and incredible bass tone, Christ), and the rampaging "Nocturnal Fist" that pulls out some vintage NWOBHM and even a smattering of old punk energy, alongside proggier sludgewaves such as the absurdly demolishing "Skullflower" (which I can't help but wonder if it's a reference to our favorite UK guitar psych-noise obliterator), the classical-guitar and mellotron tinged "Aphrodite’s Winter", "The Empty Mirror"' and "Black Robed Avenger" both offering anguish-filled ultra-doom and evolution into masterful Sabb'ed out power-groove and magisterial finales, that completely warped glue-storm "Halo Of Fire" that ends the album in a blizzard of dried amanita muscaria, the music often launching into some more soulful signing alongside those gritty signature growls and some slightly more offbeat, almost Tom Warrior-esque groaning (and occasional oughs). These songs open up into some brief but blazing vistas of winding lead guitar and howling feedback and bleary-eyed sun-blasted trippiness. The Iommi-esque slo-mo crush on that former song in particular really grinds my spine down, and there's a number of similar passages scattered throughout VIIth Coming, primo eruptions of dark and glacial trad-doom riffage fused to the spacey structures of Cathedral''s songwriting. It's also an overall more ecstatic affair than the glum trudge of contemporaries Electric Wizard, I can hear the band having fun even as they tear down mountains. Ancient Western mythology, 20th century magick, folk horror, crustpunk aggression, Aleister Crowley / Thelema, all subjects tinkered with throughout. Adding to the dozy, lysergic vibe, the aforementioned mellotron and electronic keyboard accompaniment is right up front and scratches more than one itch, especially when the music weaves those keys around some of the quirkier riffwork and bass-driven instrumental passages; there's long been a British space-rock influence behind Cathedral's crunch, but this album feels like it fleshes that stuff out a little more than usual, with some of those electronic voices rippling a little further into the past, at least mid-80s era synthwork and choral-like pads that feel a little archaic (in the best way possible).
Ugh. It's all so HEAVY. The guitar tone, that gutchurner bass sound, Dorrian's dazed snarl, the myriad gravitational time changes, oh man. My only real criticism is that some of these songs seem too rushed, ending too early, but again this is a nearly hour long album - something's gotta give. But it's gargantuan apocalyptic boogie for days, man.
This new 2021 UK import CD reissue comes in a gatefold digi-sleeve with foldout poster insert.
Catheter's 2005 album Dimension 303 is an oddly overlooked entry into the grind field, but is actually one of the better hypergrind albums of the
decade. The Denver trio had been kicking it for awhile before they released their debut Preamble For Oblivion, but it's Dimension 303 that
saw the band in top form, mixing pulverizing Napalm Death inspired grind, raw crustcore, punishing sludge/doom metal riffage, and strange rhythmic samples.
The production here is top notch, and the drumming is fucking astounding, with tons of hyperspeed fills and laser guided blastbeats. Catherter's lyrics
tackle alot of the standard grindcore issues, i.e. socio-political issues, apocalyoptic imagery, and getting rowdy at shows, but it's all delivered with lots
of high-energy spirit and savagery. Songs like "Waste Time" and the closer "Outro" dish out some supreme Cathedral worshipping doom metal, and some rad
sampled breakbeats and industrial rhythms pop up out of left field at a couple points throughout the album. Like Disassociate's Symbols, Signals, And
Noise, Catheter's Dimension 303 keeps their grind brutal, catchy and interesting without getting "experimental", and with just a hint of the
weirdness of their buds in the West Bay Doomryderz (Deadbodieseverywhere, Utter Bastard, Kalmex). The album features killer acid-trip artwork from John
Santos.
Awesome 8 song full length of dark, crushing hardcore from Holland that is caught somewhere between the Portland "epic crustcore" sound
of Tragedy & From Ashes Rise (but MUCH faster and more pi**ed off) and discordant,apocalyptic bands like Catharsis and Gehennna.There's also a little of that
insane german metalcore thing going on here too, a la Acme Systral Morser. From the first blast of nightmarish riffing that rips out of the speakers,to the
last shredded scream of defiance, this is dark, ultra-crushing stuff with a fierce anti-authoritarian/anti-consumerist bone to pick.This killer LP comes
packaged in a starkly printed minimalist sleeve with insert sheet.
Didya dig that Halflings Lp that I reviewed a couple of weeks back? If you did, then you'll want to pay attention to another NYC band that just released a new LP on RRRecords, and which also includes members of Halflings in it's lineup. Two Halflings, as a matter of fact, and they whip up a vicious storm of brutal noise on this record that is one of the heaviest, most cranial-destroying albums the label has given us this year. The last time that I had heard Cathode Terror Secretion was on that compilation LP The Best that Ron put out on RRR last year - I remember their track being pretty fucking scathing on that comp, but I was still taken aback by how violent this album is. Spectre Of History�s Design is a vinyl reissue of an out of print cdr release on Accretion Disk, and features thirteen brief shocks of putrid blastnoise that combines brutal power electronics, elements of digital grind and bizarre ambient hellscapes into a truly harrowing listening experience. This album kills.
These guys take a lot of their influence from classic power electronics, but it's so much more than just another PE project...the music is fierce and fast-paced, with fractured industrial noise and lumbering machine-scrape becoming entangled and immersed in blasts of nuclear feedback and wreathed with sickening, almost grindcore-like vocals that are run through all kinds of weird effects and turned into bizarre, demonic wails and gurgling screams, and then the pounding abstract noise will explode into warped blasts of hyperfast programmed beats, like an Agoraphobic Nosebleed track sped up into an almost indistinguishable blur, or collapse into a bleak dronescape littered with glitch-y malfunctioning electronic detritus and dark dismal ambience. Each one of these tracks is a separate piece, but everything is so spastic and chaotic that it's impossible to make out any sort of structure; instead, Cathode Terror Secretion just carve out chunks of brutal chaos and gnashing mechanistic horror, the whole sound twisted and deformed, with weird passages of Gregorian chant-like groans rising up out of the wreckage, huge slabs of pitch-black Lull like ambience, squirming masses of buzzing feedback drones, blasted and inverted scraps of digital hardcore.
What the hell. This sounds like old noisecore being assimilated into a heaving monstrous mass of power electronics, but far heavier and blacker and more fucked up than yer usual PE assault. A completely INSANE blast of crushing maniacal industrial noisegrind chaos. Comes in a gorgeous pro-printed jacket with a full color insert (with full lyrics), and limited to five hundred copies.
For almost fifteen years, blackened Baton Rouge death metallers Catholicon have been assaulting the underground with their quirky combination of dissonant doom-laden death metal and blasphemous black metal, but 2009 saw the band putting the kibosh on the project and heading off to new pursuits. More black metal than anything, Catholicon injected their sound with a heavy amount of doomed death metal with strange contorted riffs that was obviously influenced by the angular, dissonant death of Incantation, along with some very subtle touches of Bayou sludginess, blasting grind, and lots of really cool, tastefully used dark ambience and electronics. These latter elements, the dark electronic drones and strings, only appear occasionally and never detracts from the crushing heaviness and pervasive feeling of evil that's all over Catholicon's music, but they make this a really interesting and textured slab of blackened heaviness that I've been listening to a LOT lately.
As their final adieu, the band released this double disc set that consists of their final album Of Ages Past and an extensive DVD-ROM archive of material that offers up a staggering amount of music and video to explore. The album has ten studio tracks (including a cover of Sodom's "Remember the Fallen") and an alternate mix of "Blood Ink for the Book of Life", all crushingly heavy, doomed blackened death with those weird sludgy riffs, the bass WAY up in mix and playing these fluid bass lines that sometimes sounds like they are using a fretless bass, all of this creating a massive low-end that forms into pounding mid-paced doomed death draped in dissonant minor key blackness, and faster blackened thrash. The vocals are total death metal, super deep and beastly guttural grunts mixed with higher-pitched shrieks, and this mix of styles is a big part of Catholicon's unique sound. So too are the weird rhythmic parts and fucked-up drumming that's all over this, like the manic off-time rhythms on "Lament Configuration", and the angular riffs and slow doom-laden parts are really creative and strange sounding, reminding me of how savant allot of Incantation's stuff can be (who in fact are probably the closest comparison to Catholicon's blackened death, albeit with much more of a black metal influence, natch), and there's even some weird little Ved Buens Ende-ish dissonant blackened weirdness on "Revel In The Ashes".
The DVD-ROM archive that comes with this set is the real treasure trove for Catholicon fans, though. Titled Excommunicated: Catholicon Compendium 1994-2009, this disc contains almost twenty-four hours of audio and four hours of video footage, and has pretty much everything that Catholicon recorded outside of the other three studio albums, as well as a bunch of Catholicon-related stuff. Every demo, promo recording, rehearsal tape, live video, outtake, and unreleased track from the band going back to 1994 is collected here, all re-mastered for this release. And as you go back through their archives, you'll find some seriously weird and fucked-up black/death metal; before the band evolved into the tightly-wound, dissonant, Incantation-influenced black/death, their music was much more primitive and chaotic, with Burzum-like keyboards and weird stumbling riffs.
The disc includes Catholicon's Children of the Lost Generation and Redemption demos, the Live From the Static Age + Blacklight Rehearsals recordings, lost tracks from the Lost Chronicles sessions, the original version of Lost Chronicles of the War in Heaven, live soundboard tapes from the 90's, an unmastered version of Treatise on the Abyss, their final shows from 2009, and tons more.
Then there are the Catholicon side-projects that are included, like the demos from the blackened Satanic deathgrind band Temple of Amon, Absynth's creepy dark ambient/industrial experiments, a bunch of demos of utterly bonkers blackened techno/synthpop weirdness from Blasphyre, the bizarre dark ambience, pilfered horror film scores, industrial noise and psychedelic guitar noodling of MPR, and Peckernut's goofy scatological hardcore punk.
There's also a folder with x-rated material from Catholicon pin-up/t-shirt model girl Misty Haze, TONS of liner notes, many of which are pretty funny and self-deprecating, and other writings from the band. It's an amazingly exhaustive look at the entire career of this cult US blackened death metal band, and absolutely essential for fans.
An eye-popping, super limited deluxe picture disc LP version of Cattle Decapitation's last album, Karma Bloody Karma from 2006. I've actually become more and more of a fan of these guys in recent years; I thought that their Carcass-y gore/death metal was nice and brutal enough when they first started out, but over the course of the last few albums, Cattle Decap have grown into their own sound that moves beyond the early Necroticism worship and into a more melodic, nuanced brand of death metal that still sticks to their ongoing vegetarian/animal rights concept conveyed through horrific visions of human beings being subjected to brutal factory-farm death. Much like Carcass themselves, actually, but Cattle Decapitation make the allegory much more implicit through their nightmarish lyrics and pro-cattle imagery.
On Karma Bloody Karma, Cattle Decap plunge even deeper into a grisly, blood-and-bile splattered world of humans reduced to meat products, across eleven tracks that combine crushing death metal and flourishes of Euro/Swedish melodicism with blasting grindcore and the more experimental touches that the band has been injecting into their albums with increasing frequency. The songs are packed with insanely complex riffs that conceal surprisingly catchy hooks, bizarre stop/start arrangements, bass/ambient breakdowns and crushing midpaced thrash riffing, ridiculously squiggly guitar shred that borders on Necrophagist/Buckethead levels of fretboard clusterfuck and frenetic Orthrelm-ish single-note runs, ultra-intense grindcore executed with extreme precision, pummeling breakdowns and monstrous, noise-infested sludge parts, and a dueling vocal atack that pairs up impossibly deep beast-grunts with feral screams, all coming out of the mouth of singer Travis Ryan, and his schizophrenic vocals are pretty impressive. Fans of crushing, progressive death metal will undoubtedly drool over all over the more complex and epic direction that Cattle Decap has taken with Karma, and there are some cool surprises in here too, like the stuttering, seven minute tangle of death metal complexity and doomed dirge of "Alone In The Landfill", which eventually morphs into something not all that unlike a blackened Neurosis with sustained feedback and gloomy piano figures billowing like black smoke across the final minutes of the song; there are also undercurrents of electronic noise that appear in most of the tracks, provided by John Wiese, and these electronic textures and gritty layers of distortion adds to the feeling of unease recurrent through the album.
Karma is probably my favorite album from Cattle Decapitation so far, a crushing blast of grinding, conceptual death metal with experimental touches that sets this apart from most of their peers. The album came out on CD through Metal Blade in 2006, but Accident Prone just released this super-limited picture disc in a hand-numbered edition of 500 copies, packaged in a thick full color gatefold jacket with AWESOME embossed/raised artwork on the cover that has to be seen to be appreciated.
All of Cattle Decapitation's albums for Metal Blade have shown the band to be continously progressing into more complex, epic realms of grinding death metal, always staying true to their human-as-meat-product allegory and hardcore pro-vegetarian outlook, and on their last album Karma Bloody Karma, the San Diego goregrinders ventured into their most melodic, intricate territory yet, combining ultra-squiggly guitar shred with Gothenburg-sized melodic riffage and complex grind arrangements that made for their best album to date. Sometimes when I'm listening to newer Cattle Decap, I forget just how raw and chaotic the band was when they first started out, but with this picture disc version of Cattle Decap's debut album Human Jerky, I'm provided with a refresher course on their early stages. Released by Accident Prone in a hand-numbered edition of 1500 copies and packaged in a clear mylar sleeve, this features the eighteen-song debut on a full color pic disc emblazoned with the album's ridiculously gruesome artwork that might just turn you off to burgers for a while.
It's also easy to forget that Cattle Decapitation was mostly thought of as a side project of synth-grinders The Locust in the beginning. The original LP for Human Jerky was snatched up by hardcore kids when it came out based on the crazy buzz that the Locust had in the late 90's, but the horrific racket that oozed off of that slab was far removed from the synthoid spazz-blast of the Locust. The main thing that connected the two bands, aside from members David Astor and Gabe Serbian, was a common lust for noise, and the sonic havoc that these guys splooged all over their debut made Human Jerky more convoluted and messed up than yer typical Carcass-clone. Don't get me wrong, the influence of early Carcass classics Necroticism and Symphonies is felt all over Cattle Decapitation's brutal gore-splattered grindcore, but the arrangements on this album are a both insanely complicated and sloppily handled, with that freaked out hyperspeed squiggle shredding and contorted riffing packed into super-dense minute long songs and doused in low-fi noise and clotted crud, the whole sonic assault coming in at just under seventeen minutes. Superfast, fucked up grind violence that, in hindsight, actually has alot in common with the screwey death/grind of Hatewave.
Also available on vinyl, packaged in a diecut jacket that has the album art shown through a framed cutout on the front cover, and comes with a foldout poster.
�� Taking their name from the French word for "nightmare", this fantastic French-Canadian band first began to haunt my ears with their five song EP La Vierge Noire that came out back in 2010. That slab of spectral doom-tinged metal was fronted by the ghostly vocals of front-woman Annick Giroux, who some of you might recognize as the author of the heavy metal-centric cookbook Hellbent For Cooking that came out a while back. On their debut EP, Cauchemar suggested an intoxicating mixture of classic traditional doom metal and ancient speed metal, cloaking their sound in a cold, ethereal quality that gave you the feeling that you were listening to something drifting in from some distant graveyard or disinterred crypt, with Giroux's moaning, reverb-drenched delivery and French language lyrics adding an additional layer of opaqueness and mystery to Cauchemar's sound. At the same time, these guys benefited from not sounding like all of the legions of other female-fronted "occult" metal bands that have sprung up over the past few years; this stuff comes from a different place than the 70's era progginess that you'll find in bands like Blood Ceremony or The Devils Blood, although fans of that stuff would probably love Cauchemar's music. Instead, this has more of that dank subterranean vibe found in the recordings of cult Italian bands like Death SS, and the more doom-laden sounds of the NWOBHM that were being perpetrated by Witchfinder General and Pagan Altar. That EP had an undeniable charm in spite of all of its rawness, but with their new full-length album Tenebrario, Cauchemar deliver a stronger set of songs with a more focused sound, which only enhances their quirky mixture of haunting female singing, occult imagery, atavistic speed metal and cavernous doom. The whole sound of the album has a distinctly early 80's vintage, even down to some of the choices regarding the production and all of it's reverb-drenched ambience and stripped-down mix. Tenebrario doesn't sound self-consciously retro, though. Songs like "Le Feu Du Soleil", "Tete De Mort" and the crushing "Trois Mondes" (the latter of which carries some echoes of Sabbath's "Snowblind" and mixes in some wonderfully creepy pipe organ into the mix) are weighted with crushing Sabbathian doom riffs, while the likes of "Salamandre" and "Rites Lunaires" whip out some killer chugging speed-metal riffs and propulsive tempos. The song "Le Fantome" is my favorite of the album, a dark and catchy galloping anthem that has some cool dissonant guitar work and wicked riffing woven around the song's ghostly Gallic feel, dropping off into some sinister churning doom layered with eerie choral ambience towards the end. And the closing title track combines chimes, acoustic guitar into an elliptical, evocative number that has an almost Goblin-like feel, making for a perfect close to the album. One of my favorite NWW releases this year thus far.
�� Taking their name from the French word for "nightmare", this fantastic French-Canadian band first began to haunt my ears with their five song EP La Vierge Noire that came out back in 2010. That slab of spectral doom-tinged metal was fronted by the ghostly vocals of front-woman Annick Giroux, who some of you might recognize as the author of the heavy metal-centric cookbook Hellbent For Cooking that came out a while back. On their debut EP, Cauchemar suggested an intoxicating mixture of classic traditional doom metal and ancient speed metal, cloaking their sound in a cold, ethereal quality that gave you the feeling that you were listening to something drifting in from some distant graveyard or disinterred crypt, with Giroux's moaning, reverb-drenched delivery and French language lyrics adding an additional layer of opaqueness and mystery to Cauchemar's sound. At the same time, these guys benefited from not sounding like all of the legions of other female-fronted "occult" metal bands that have sprung up over the past few years; this stuff comes from a different place than the 70's era progginess that you'll find in bands like Blood Ceremony or The Devils Blood, although fans of that stuff would probably love Cauchemar's music. Instead, this has more of that dank subterranean vibe found in the recordings of cult Italian bands like Death SS, and the more doom-laden sounds of the NWOBHM that were being perpetrated by Witchfinder General and Pagan Altar. That EP had an undeniable charm in spite of all of its rawness, but with their new full-length album Tenebrario, Cauchemar deliver a stronger set of songs with a more focused sound, which only enhances their quirky mixture of haunting female singing, occult imagery, atavistic speed metal and cavernous doom. The whole sound of the album has a distinctly early 80's vintage, even down to some of the choices regarding the production and all of it's reverb-drenched ambience and stripped-down mix. Tenebrario doesn't sound self-consciously retro, though. Songs like "Le Feu Du Soleil", "Tete De Mort" and the crushing "Trois Mondes" (the latter of which carries some echoes of Sabbath's "Snowblind" and mixes in some wonderfully creepy pipe organ into the mix) are weighted with crushing Sabbathian doom riffs, while the likes of "Salamandre" and "Rites Lunaires" whip out some killer chugging speed-metal riffs and propulsive tempos. The song "Le Fantome" is my favorite of the album, a dark and catchy galloping anthem that has some cool dissonant guitar work and wicked riffing woven around the song's ghostly Gallic feel, dropping off into some sinister churning doom layered with eerie choral ambience towards the end. And the closing title track combines chimes, acoustic guitar into an elliptical, evocative number that has an almost Goblin-like feel, making for a perfect close to the album. One of my favorite NWW releases this year thus far.
Also available as a limited-edition "Die Hard" version that houses the LP jacket in a printed black cloth bag with a patch and sticker.
�� Taking their name from the French word for "nightmare", this fantastic French-Canadian band first began to haunt my ears with their five song EP La Vierge Noire that came out back in 2010. That slab of spectral doom-tinged metal was fronted by the ghostly vocals of front-woman Annick Giroux, who some of you might recognize as the author of the heavy metal-centric cookbook Hellbent For Cooking that came out a while back. On their debut EP, Cauchemar suggested an intoxicating mixture of classic traditional doom metal and ancient speed metal, cloaking their sound in a cold, ethereal quality that gave you the feeling that you were listening to something drifting in from some distant graveyard or disinterred crypt, with Giroux's moaning, reverb-drenched delivery and French language lyrics adding an additional layer of opaqueness and mystery to Cauchemar's sound. At the same time, these guys benefited from not sounding like all of the legions of other female-fronted "occult" metal bands that have sprung up over the past few years; this stuff comes from a different place than the 70's era progginess that you'll find in bands like Blood Ceremony or The Devils Blood, although fans of that stuff would probably love Cauchemar's music. Instead, this has more of that dank subterranean vibe found in the recordings of cult Italian bands like Death SS, and the more doom-laden sounds of the NWOBHM that were being perpetrated by Witchfinder General and Pagan Altar. That EP had an undeniable charm in spite of all of its rawness, but with their new full-length album Tenebrario, Cauchemar deliver a stronger set of songs with a more focused sound, which only enhances their quirky mixture of haunting female singing, occult imagery, atavistic speed metal and cavernous doom. The whole sound of the album has a distinctly early 80's vintage, even down to some of the choices regarding the production and all of it's reverb-drenched ambience and stripped-down mix. Tenebrario doesn't sound self-consciously retro, though. Songs like "Le Feu Du Soleil", "Tete De Mort" and the crushing "Trois Mondes" (the latter of which carries some echoes of Sabbath's "Snowblind" and mixes in some wonderfully creepy pipe organ into the mix) are weighted with crushing Sabbathian doom riffs, while the likes of "Salamandre" and "Rites Lunaires" whip out some killer chugging speed-metal riffs and propulsive tempos. The song "Le Fantome" is my favorite of the album, a dark and catchy galloping anthem that has some cool dissonant guitar work and wicked riffing woven around the song's ghostly Gallic feel, dropping off into some sinister churning doom layered with eerie choral ambience towards the end. And the closing title track combines chimes, acoustic guitar into an elliptical, evocative number that has an almost Goblin-like feel, making for a perfect close to the album. One of my favorite NWW releases this year thus far.
The latest release from Caul is admittedly pretty expensive, but it's more than just a cd, too. Caul assembled this gorgeous photo book/disc set and issued it through their own label Aglaia in what is presumably an extremely limited printing, and it's visually very striking. The 7" x 7" booklet features seventeen full color photographs of haunting abstract images, printed on high quality paper and bound with a full color glossy cover, with the disc enclosed in a plastic sleeve that's attached to the inside back cover. Sound wise, this is really different from the other recordings that I've heard from Caul. The eight tracks on Kairos maintain the deep, drifting dark ambience of the other releases, but now dark industrial dub has been introduced, taking this into pure Scorn territory. Hypnotic minimal breakbeats skitter beneath vast expanses of eerie ambient drone, the rhythms pulsating within slowly swirling fogbanks of guitar feedback and shimmering low-end thrum. I can hear some echoes of Troum in here, too; the parts of this disc where the slow, druggy beats disappear and the sound extends into long stretches of keening feedback and deep distorted drone, there's a clear resemblance to the sort of gothic post-industrial ambient that the German duo helped to pioneer. Deep immersive ambient dub with massive basslines, deep distorted horns and cello-like sounds, the sound sometimes getting vaguely jazzy with the bass, and especially with the parts where the saxophone enters and the rhythms begin to get a little more skittery. As the album goes on, vast washes of celestial synthesizer ambience spread overhead, and massive low-slung beats merge with haunting vibraphone melodies, screaming free-jazz trumpets begin howling, horns become smeared in shadow, and the atmosphere begins to get somewhat apocalyptic, definitely VERY dark, by the end of the album sounding like a dystopian jazzy dub, a mutant hybrid of Bohren And Der Club Of Gore and Scorn. It's a stunning album, somewhat similar in feel to that recent [Other] Dub disc from Lustmord, and Mick Harris fans definitely need to hear this.
Another stunning piece of dark ambience from Malignant Records. What else is new? I had actually put off sitting down and writing about this 2008 album because up until now, I knew almost nothing about either of the artists that make up this collaboration. It turns out that Caul is one Brett Smith, who has previously appeared as a member of the ambient/industrial groups Blackmouth and Tertium Non Data (the former of which some of you may remember as a one-off project that included Swans chanteuse Jarboe). He records his solo dark ambient work under the name Caul, with a number of releases that came out on Eibon and Malignant back in the 90's. This is the first time that I've heard his work under the Caul banner, and here Smith teams up with the long-running dark ambient artist John Gore, who records under the name Kirchenkampf and also runs the noise/experimental label Cohort Records.
The two artists combine for an harrowing descent into dark symphonic ambience with Sleep Night Death. The seven tracks all lean towards bleak electronic dronemusic, but the sounds are interesting: Caul and Kirchenkampf create sprawling black driftscapes formed from strange Nullsonic-like electronic detritus, cthulhian whispers, huge shimmering slabs of industrial drone, heavily processed synth-based orchestral strings, the combined influence of cinematic soundtrack music and cosmic krautrock (with more than a few passages that remind me of classic Tangerine Dream, only much darker) and terrifying realms of cavernous subterranean ambience all come together on this album. Several tracks suggest Lustmord combined with dissonant Ligeti-like strings. Others remind me of Sleep Research Facility flecked with Tangerine Dream-style dreaminess, or Goldsmith's original score for Alien stretched into infinity. It's pretty great. Not as heavy and malevolent as some of the other Malignant titles that I've been getting in stock lately, but dark ambient/drone fans will be pleased. Packaged in a slimline gatefold jacket with black-on-black spot-varnish printing, and limited to 888 copies.
Haunts is the first release from Caulbearer, a new duo that features visual artist Cody Drasser and which delivers some killer dark kosmische driftnoise on this ten-track album. Haunts drifts in on a bed of vast rumbling synth-drones, flecked with coruscating electronic noises and smears of whirling black drift; you can hear traces of classic 70's cosmic music in here, but you can also detect a much more chaotic and abrasive quality that at times feels closer to the dense psychedelic blast-furnace sounds of C.C.C.C. when Caulbearer decide the crank things up. The album is made up of a series of evocatively titled multi-part epics ("The Absorbing Ghost", "Siege Machines", "Shipwrecked Cathedrals"), each one a sprawling slab of neo-kosmische darkness that drifts in out of the abyssal realms similar to those inhabited by Maeror Tri/Troum, offering a similar approach to heavy subterranean drone-loops and deep-earth thrum. But then the music moves from glimmering washes of electronic light into deeper, more malevolent dreadscapes, like the second half of "Ghost" where eerie dissonant strings seep into the vast rumbling drift, like stray elements of a Bernard Herrman score and abstract guitar shred surfacing across an ocean of black industrial drift. The duo use a lot of abstract electronic noises and sounds throughout their sprawling dronescapes, crafting ascending waves of ominous orchestral roar and distant metallic whirr, their gleaming synthesizers slowly drifting through the abyss amid fragments of percussion that echo and ripple across the muted rumble of distant deep-earth machinery, surrounded by menacing sounds of reptilian hissing and rattling, smears of vague melody emerging through the crashing waves of murky tectonic drift, gorgeous guitar strum blown through walls of over-modulated distortion that continually build into monstrous roars of noisy, dense sonic power. All throughout this disc, Caulbearer's music evokes images of ancient cityscapes disintegrating as seen in time-lapse, continents being swallowed by vast oceans, mountains crumbling into the earth; at it's darkest, Haunts offers a lush, immersive wash of apocalyptic drone music populated with the distant cries of monstrous chthonic beasts. A really strong debut from this band, one that I enjoyed enough to have made plans for a cassette edition to be released in the near future through Crucial Blast. Keep your eyes peeled.
Comes in a four-panel digipack, includes a vinyl sticker, limited to one hundred copies.
�� Originally released as an extremely limited CD from Peacock Window, the debut album from ghostdroners Caulbearer is now reissued on limited-edition cassette via our Infernal Machines imprint, released in an edition of two hundred copies in full color packaging.
�� Haunts is the first release from Caulbearer, a new duo that features visual artist Cody Drasser and which delivers some killer dark kosmische driftnoise on this ten-track album. Haunts drifts in on a bed of vast rumbling synth-drones, flecked with coruscating electronic noises and smears of whirling black drift; you can hear traces of classic 70's cosmic music in here, but you can also detect a much more chaotic and abrasive quality that at times feels closer to the dense psychedelic blast-furnace sounds of C.C.C.C. when Caulbearer decide the crank things up. The album is made up of a series of evocatively titled multi-part epics ("The Absorbing Ghost", "Siege Machines", "Shipwrecked Cathedrals"), each one a sprawling slab of neo-kosmische darkness that drifts in out of the abyssal realms similar to those inhabited by Maeror Tri/Troum, offering a similar approach to heavy subterranean drone-loops and deep-earth thrum.
�� But then the music moves from glimmering washes of electronic light into deeper, more malevolent dreadscapes, like the second half of "Ghost" where eerie dissonant strings seep into the vast rumbling drift, like stray elements of a Bernard Herrman score and abstract guitar shred surfacing across an ocean of black industrial drift. The duo use a lot of abstract electronic noises and sounds throughout their sprawling dronescapes, crafting ascending waves of ominous orchestral roar and distant metallic whirr, their gleaming synthesizers slowly drifting through the abyss amid fragments of percussion that echo and ripple across the muted rumble of distant deep-earth machinery, surrounded by menacing sounds of reptilian hissing and rattling, smears of vague melody emerging through the crashing waves of murky tectonic drift, gorgeous guitar strum blown through walls of over-modulated distortion that continually build into monstrous roars of noisy, dense sonic power. All throughout this disc, Caulbearer's music evokes images of ancient cityscapes disintegrating as seen in time-lapse, continents being swallowed by vast oceans, mountains crumbling into the earth; at it's darkest, Haunts offers a lush, immersive wash of apocalyptic drone music populated with the distant cries of monstrous chthonic beasts.
���Canticle is a new collaboration between two Crucial Blast alumni, Caulbearer and Sky Burial, teaming up to produce a killer album of doom-laden kosmische electronics, and man is it dark. Dark and impressively grim, this disc unleashes three sprawling, stygian epics of crushing drone-noise and apocalyptic atmosphere, and fans of Mike Page's more sinister work with Sky Burial are going to love the desolate driftscapes that these guys have crafted here. The album moves through swirling miasmal fogbanks of chittering electronics and roaring orchestral drone that stretch across vast yawning chasms of pure blackness, sprawls of nightmarish kosmische dread that rise and fall in waves over fields of grinding, distorted rumble; if indie horror directors had any fucking sense, this is where they would be turning for film-scores.
��� The first track "Vortices" unfolds into a kind of jet-black cosmic electronics, the sound utterly vast and oppressive like heavy black clouds of negative energy hanging over a blasted landscape, shot through with bits of eerie choral drift and rhythmic crackle and ominous symphonic swells. Huge grinding tremors reverberate through the track, like cyclopean temple doors opening in the bowels of the earth, while ghostly howls streak high over a distant blood-rimmed horizon. As the album continues to unfurl, elliptic keyboards glimmer in an endless heat haze, only to slowly build and transform into a surprisingly heavy wall of cosmic doom-drift that rises over the latter half of the track; throughout Canticle, this swirling, massive, amorphous driftscape shifts and billows in formless waves of sound, sweeping slowly through fields of endless darkness, the sound traced with jittering mechanical noises and immense orchestral drones, bursts of choral dread that wash through the abyss.
��� All of this flows together, a roiling black ambience strafed with high keening feedback that screams out of the distant depths, a vast oceanic roar of metallic shimmer and drift, cold and unwelcoming and inhospitable, formed from layers upon layers of dissonant sound and searing sustained drones and symphonic roar that the two musicians sculpt into a nightmarish wall of sound, culminating with the bleak bathysphere ambience and nocturnal droneology of the closing track "Miserere Nobis". In those last moments, strains of murky gothic organ glimmer beneath the roiling black fog of static and hiss, while EVP-like exhalations swoop through the depths amid the groan of tortured metal and faint, black pulses of low-voltage energy, the album slowly breaking apart and dissolving into the void. Fantastic stuff that's highly recommended if you're into the Malignant / Annihilvs brand of grim industrial ambience and kosmische blackness. Comes in a four-panel digipack, limited to just one hundred copies.
���Back in stock. To be honest, pirate-themed heavy metal isn't something I'm going to get too excited over. Talk about a concept that has been played out in metal circles; leave me those early Running Wild albums, and I think I'm good. But quirky Australian death metallers Cauldron Black Ram manage to take that now timeworn pirate obsession and turns it into something genuinely grim and gruesome, immersing their old-school death in visions of violent sea-faring piracy and creaking nautical horror, crafting an atmosphere on their albums that feels more like something torn from the pages of a William Hope Hodgson story. And all without a single fucking sing-along shanty in sight, thank Christ. Much like labelmates Vastum, Cauldron Black Ram (who also features members of Mournful Congregation, Martire, and Stargazer) don't try to radically reshape traditional death metal, but rather imbue that classic old-school sound with enough of their own unique personality and imagery to create something that still manages to come across as totally their own.
��� The Ram's third album Stalagmire picks right up where they left off with their previous LP, dragging the listener through nine tracks of dank, barbaric death metal, the songs rife with thunderous double-bass battery and double-time thrashing violence, descending into crawling doom-laden heaviness and strange chorus-drenched sludge, the guitarists lashing the downtuned grave-slime with chaotic leads and maniacal soloing, their massive, sometimes angular riffs driving through the dank bass-heavy murk, cutting monstrous morbid grooves throughout the whole album. Fucking killer stuff, and it's not all moldering ghastly cave-sludge, either; the Ram whip out some wicked old-school metal on songs like "Fork Through Pitch", "Cavern Fever" and "Bats", slipping from churning blast-violence and primal thrash into Maidenesque guitar harmonies, the tunes possessed with all kinds of infectious, anthemic power, with some of the catchier songs locking into some seriously rocking mid-tempo death metal. Even at it's lowest and most punishing, Stalagmire keeps going back to that strong melodic undercurrent, and some of this sort of reminds me of old-schoolers Deceased, hewing to an early interpretation of death metal more rooted in a classic thrash aesthetic. The heavy doses of off-kilter phrasing and quirky songwriting keep this stuff from ever getting too predictable though, like the shambling off-time death-lurch that puts "The Devils Trotters" all off balance, and there are neat atmospheric touches like the rhythmic cadence of clanking chains that lends a ghostly vibe to "From Whence The Old Skull Came", and the solemn chant like backing vocals that are scattered throughout the album. Like some seaweed-tangled cross between aforementioned death metallers Deceased and the sepulchral deathsludge of Autopsy, this stuff seeps with an atmosphere of sea-faring evil even as it flattens you with it's cavernous metallic crush. Killer.
Back in stock. To be honest, pirate-themed heavy metal isn't something I'm going to get too excited over. Talk about a concept that has been played out in metal circles; leave me those early Running Wild albums, and I think I'm good. But quirky Australian death metallers Cauldron Black Ram manage to take that now timeworn pirate obsession and turns it into something genuinely grim and gruesome, immersing their old-school death in visions of violent sea-faring piracy and creaking nautical horror, crafting an atmosphere on their albums that feels more like something torn from the pages of a William Hope Hodgson story. And all without a single fucking sing-along shanty in sight, thank Christ. Much like labelmates Vastum, Cauldron Black Ram (who also features members of Mournful Congregation, Martire, and Stargazer) don't try to radically reshape traditional death metal, but rather imbue that classic old-school sound with enough of their own unique personality and imagery to create something that still manages to come across as totally their own.
The Ram's third album Stalagmire picks right up where they left off with their previous LP, dragging the listener through nine tracks of dank, barbaric death metal, the songs rife with thunderous double-bass battery and double-time thrashing violence, descending into crawling doom-laden heaviness and strange chorus-drenched sludge, the guitarists lashing the downtuned grave-slime with chaotic leads and maniacal soloing, their massive, sometimes angular riffs driving through the dank bass-heavy murk, cutting monstrous morbid grooves throughout the whole album. Fucking killer stuff, and it's not all moldering ghastly cave-sludge, either; the Ram whip out some wicked old-school metal on songs like "Fork Through Pitch", "Cavern Fever" and "Bats", slipping from churning blast-violence and primal thrash into Maidenesque guitar harmonies, the tunes possessed with all kinds of infectious, anthemic power, with some of the catchier songs locking into some seriously rocking mid-tempo death metal. Even at it's lowest and most punishing, Stalagmire keeps going back to that strong melodic undercurrent, and some of this sort of reminds me of old-schoolers Deceased, hewing to an early interpretation of death metal more rooted in a classic thrash aesthetic. The heavy doses of off-kilter phrasing and quirky songwriting keep this stuff from ever getting too predictable though, like the shambling off-time death-lurch that puts "The Devils Trotters" all off balance, and there are neat atmospheric touches like the rhythmic cadence of clanking chains that lends a ghostly vibe to "From Whence The Old Skull Came", and the solemn chant like backing vocals that are scattered throughout the album. Like some seaweed-tangled cross between aforementioned death metallers Deceased and the sepulchral deathsludge of Autopsy, this stuff seeps with an atmosphere of sea-faring evil even as it flattens you with it's cavernous metallic crush. Killer.
Here's the newest injection of ridiculous grindprog from Finland's CAUSE FOR EFFECT, who essentially marry octopoidal drumming and bass prog/jazz/core
heaviness and complexity to old school NAPALM DEATH / CARCASS style grindcore! That's right, you get insane , non-distorted bass guitar runs and ultra
technical,mathy skronk, blasting intricate drumming, like Ruins and Orthrelm, but with entire pages torn out of the early Napalm Death songbook, including 30
second songs and absurd full-on deathgrunt vocals. Imagine Hella or Lightning Bolt doing a tribute set to grindcore legends REPULSION's Horrified
album. Or bass n' drums powerviolence band Godstomper, if they were heavily influenced by Magma and Ruins. It's just as over the top and ridiculous as it
sounds, but we've loved this crazy shit ever since we first heard their PQ-2 CD a few years ago. The playing is stop-on-a-dime, super tight, mostly
blastbeats and retarded speedy bass runs, but Cause For Effect occasionally drop into a wicked southern rock groove or slow,doomy dirge, or poppy, melodic
riff, before taking off at high speed back into their weird, undistorted, austere version of grindcore. Clocks in at around 15 minutes.
A welcome return to heaviness from CAVE IN, which again finds them on the Hydra Head label. This album was recorded while the band was still signed to
RCA, before being unceremoniously dropped due to poor album sales. Perfect Pitch Black showcases the band at their best, merging the space-rock
inflected post-hardcore and cosmic psych-pop that had colored their last two albums, with the heavier, metallic crunch of the seminal Beyond
Hypothermia and Until Your Heart Stops, complete with the return of Caleb Scofield�s guttural roar that had been absent from their last few
releases. This might be our favorite album yet from CAVE IN, actually. It�s one of those slow burners whose hooks etches themselves deeper in our mind each
time we listen to it. The songwriting on Perfect Pitch Black is so good that it totally erases the simplistic �RADIOHEAD-meets-SLAYER� tag that
burdened the band earlier in their career. Songs like �Paranormal� offer soaring melodies that climb for miles, while �Trepanning� kicks in with lethally
heavy stoner rock riffing that marks an interesting new direction from the band. The more we listen to this, the more we love it. Highly recommended.
An older tape described as "Dark Ambient", but it's a bit more than that. This project is an alter-ego of the Olympia-area black metal band Huldrekall, a trio who leaned into the more psychedelic and folk-tinged aspects of the "Cascadian" black metal aesthetic by adding in acoustic guitar and mandolin; I have a couple of their tapes, and they’re pretty damn good. As Cavernous Womb, though, members Dylan Bloom and Clay DeVilbiss tap into the frequencies of Teutonic prog-influenced music and the dark ambient underground to create a similarly ritual-style experience through the use of percussion, vocals, synthesizers, and electric guitar textures. Other than this full-length tape that they released back in 2013, the only other stuff that Cavernous Womb has put out are a pair of splits, one with Aurora Bridge, the other with Mercury, both of whom practice a like-minded kind of low-fi ceremonial shadowdrone.
Berlin School meets cemetery ambience meets hazed-out arboreal ceremonial practice meets gargantuan drone-metal heaviosity. Two side-long tracks of astral crush. "Eigengrau " rumbles forth into a steadily building monolith of pulsating deep-bass drones, washes of metallic cymbal shimmer, huge bursts of distorted ambient doom-chords echoing all around you, a low-fi haze of tape hiss hanging like a thick mist. This vast glacial drone-crush is backed by that almost always-present drum kit, quick flourishes of hissing cymbals and tribal beats that rise in waves within the murk. The music evolves slowly, ritualistic and tranced-out, the space completely filled with the thunderous distorted low-end power chords and that primal drumming that's buried way down in the mix. Random noises and unknown clatter pops up amid what is obviously a live jam. Strange alien electronics and whirring synthesizers swoop and plummet through the air, large sections of " Eigengrau " transforming into this super-heavy, magma-encrusted hypnocrush, allowing you to lose yourself in the volcanic smog and warped electronics that sound like captured radio waves from a collapsing star, and horn-like tones bellowing from above.
It’s not what I was expecting when I originally picked this up. The smudgy, minimal art and layout had me thinking this was going to be a much mellower ambient excursion. I was incorrect. There's an almost industrial aspect to this with the intensive use of looping sound and metallic flourishes, but more than anything this side evokes something akin to the heaviest, most sky-eating moments of early 90s Skullflower, when Bower and DiFranco and crew were summoning titanic slabs of guitar and electronic feedback and carving them out into exquisitely heavy freeform psychedelia. But these guys have their own spin ion it, adding these touches of celestial electronics and incredibly brackish ambient pools of scintillating whirr that really blast your skull into another zone for almost twenty minutes, dissolving as it moves to intersect with the next piece.
“As the Snow Melted Away“flows right out of the preceding track. Gentle, rumbling notes swell and ring out and echo into a vast emptiness. The mood turns toward a meditative space, improvised percussion softly clinking in the depths, the lonely, reverberant guitar notes flaming out before they dissipate. Again, there's that quasi-industrial loopscape going on beneath everything else, that maintains the hypnotic pull Cavernous Womb create. It's a huge space of spare shadowy drones and whirring, pulsating, eternal loops, strange crystalline forms materializing and dematerializing. There is a vaguely musical form that takes shape, a minimal melodic series of guitar emanations, becoming more ghostly as it goes along. Like the A-side, this is around twenty minutes long, really allowing you to bathe in this strange luminous gloom for awhile. It's eerily beautiful, captivating and creepy, balancing open space with those layered drones, sometimes fading into near silence, other times surging upward in volume and power. I definitely get the feeling that the duo was going for a specific headspace here, that ritual-style repetition connecting everything. As you move through the second half of the song, haunting groans like ancient trees bending downward, and incandescent blurs of shimmering strings creep outward and merge together into a blissed-out cloud of sound.
Limited to one hundred tapes, each one hand-numbered.
Man, back when Cavity were around, there were one of the most terrifying bands out there. Long before you had a million bands all copping their moves from Eyehategod's Take As Needed For Pain, you had Cavity, a bunch of goons from the Florida hardcore scene who were able to fully channel the sluggish, narcotized blooze-crawl of Eyehategod but warp it into their own sound, blending the massive slow motion sludge riffs and Rene Barge's hoarse, tortured screaming with furious hardcore and awesome dissonant guitar playing. Anyone who had an ear for diseased, bad-mood sludge like Eyehategod and Iron Monkey and Buzzoven were usually all about Cavity as well, and their Laid Insignificant, Supercollider and On The Lam albums are all crucial pieces of any serious sludge/doom metal collection. Next to Floor, these guys were one of the heaviest Florida band ever, able to swallow you up in massive, tectonic sludge and blats of nauseous feedback noise before clobbering you with a brutal Black Flag-like blast of energy.
Laid Insignificant from 1999 was the band's third album, and originally came out on Pushead's Bacteria Sour label. That original Bacteria Sour release has been out of print for years, so Hydra Head has stepped up with this re-issue CD that has a full remastering job as well as all new artwork from Aaron Turner. I still think that this is one of Cavity's best albums, opening with that creepy film sample and launching into the crushing narco-sludge of the title track, punishing and bleak like Eyehategod but with a seething, pissed-off attitude of their own, working it's way through the churning glacial buzz and funereal doom of "The Woods" and the thrashing angular violence of "Fingers On The Spider", alternating between creeping Sabbath doom and lurching, deformed hardcore, Rene puking his guts all over the fucking floor, the guitars so distorted that they sound like they are dripping black tar all over the studio, the whole sound thick and buzzing and vicious, even moreso at the end of "Fingers" when the song speeds up into burly thrash, fast paced punk infested with fithy black feedback and crazed atonal chords. Lots of speed on this album, enough to make new jack doom fans scratch their heads - "Marginal Man" barely breaks the 90 second mark, and it's insanely catchy, all crushing southern rock hookage smashed into concrete sludge and cathartic circle pit riff. So heavy, and so textured too, Cavity's use of feedback and noise was genius, and there are parts of Laid Insignificant where Cavity's guitars start to sound almost like an evil, pitch-black version of Quicksand's, all thick and dramatic. The cover of Septic Death's "Demon" is sadly not included here, but it is replaced by two short bonus tracks "Spine I" and "Spine II" that were taken from the original recording sessions and which had previously appeared on the now out of print Miscellaneous Recollections �92-�97 disc. Totally essential for fans of slow n' low heaviness from the 90's underground, and still has punishing today as it was when it was first released.
Just got this crucial reissue back in stock. On 1998's Supercollider, Cavity rose to their heights of feedback-soaked southern hatesludge with their most crushing album, a collection of Floridian nihilism so potent and punishing that these cats ascended to the same level as Eyehategod, no mean feat. Their previous albums were pretty badass, each one jammed with their feral, snarling sludgecore that took Eyehategod's bloozy slow-mo junkie dirge and pumped it full of hardcore vitriol, but man, Supercollider just blew everything else out of the water. The riffs are DEVESTATING, massive southern fried sludge hammered into hypnotic downtuned chuggery, diseased feedback splattered and smeared over the whole damn mess, and Anthony Vialon (also of Floor) spews out a tortured vocal assault. The band began to infuse the meth'd up Sabbathoid riffs with traces of industrial noise too, on tracks like "Who Doesn't Even Know Yet", and the whole thing reeks with a humid dystopian vibe. The band sometimes pulls back into quieter sections that contrast with the crushing riffs, but these moments are brief. Absolutely essential for fans of slow n' low deep-fried metal, and right up there with Eyehategod's Take As Needed For Pain and Weedeater's Sixteen Tons. This first came out on Man's Ruin back in the tail end of the 90's, but after the demise of that label, Hydra Head picked up the reins a few years back with this beefed up ressiue of Supercollider that boasts a better mix, brand new artwork and album package design, and some extra tracks. CRUCIAL.
I'm not the biggest fan of what is generally referred to as "screamo". Most of the stuff that I've heard from this scene seems to lack any real power, and
the mainstream aims of alot of the bands that carry that tag is sort of a turnoff for me too. So much of the whole fall-on-the-floor, overwrought, messy,
post-Hardcore thing seems like a dissipated shadow of what was cutting edge in San Diego about 15 years ago (i.e., Gravity Records, Heroin, Antioch Arrow,
Universal Order of Armageddon, Swing Kids, Mohinder, etc). Every once in a while though, I'll stumble across a band from that scene that really grabs my
attention; bands like Gantz and Envy, for instance, whose roots are in the "screamo" sound but integrate the power and atmosphere of instrumental post-rock
and epic crustcore, and become something entirely different and inventive in the process. Take Cease Upon The Capital, for instance; these guys unleash a
torrent of fast thrashy hardcore and intense, soul-scorching breakdowns with powerful, throat-rending screamed vocals, and clad them in some of the most
epic, unstoppably catchy melodies I've ever heard, further flesh out their songs with quieter, intricate interludes informed by the early 90's
sounds of bands like Slint and Rodan, layer on all kinds of spacey electronic effects and delayed guitars, blazing riffs and drumming that switches
effortlessly between frantic pummel and complex rhythms, and build each of these songs into a massive crescendo of grindy, chaotic, metallic emo-prog-pop.
The band calls it "shoegaze-violence n' roll" on their Myspace page, and I'm not going to argue. This is by far one of the catchiest albums I've heard this
year, like a perfect combination of art-damaged, psychedelic hardcore, Envy, Neurosis, chaotic metalcore, haunting post-rock, and the catchiest indie/emo pop
band ever. I know that sounds like a lot of hype, but this album is so catchy, so fierce, and so freaking amazing, and the guitar playing, those riffs, those
hooks....it's just amazing. Definitely in my top 10 for 2006. Where in the fuck did these guys come from?
The package for this album is awesome too; a six-panel digipack with killer abtstract new wavey artwork, and a full color 24-page book enclosed in an
interior pocket.
Gorgeous, luminous ghostdrones and nocturnal electronica emerge from this obscure Chicago group. Though it came out a while back, we're only now listing this older, professionally pressed cassette that came out on the now defunct Land Of Decay imprint run by the guys from Locrian. Delivering psychedelic post-industrial music enshrouded in darkness and mystery, this band was made up of former members of Minsk and Planes Mistaken For Stars (as well as current members of Chicago-area noise rockers The Swan King), delivering a lengthy collection of surreal dronescapes and acid-burnt ambience recorded in decommissioned missile silos and drainage tunnels.
Using numerous additional collaborators, the trio crafts haunting, minimal guitar trances overlaid with echoing female vocals and distant, booming eruptions, long drawn-out sprawls of smoldering noise and chugging, locomotive rumblings, laced with strange environmental sounds and swells of creepy kosmische drift, occasionally rumbling with the distant din of pounding sheet-metal rhythms and shambolic tribal drums. All of these densely layered soundscapes are peppered with similar rhythmic elements, mostly buried down in the mix, and choir-like voices also frequently seep to the surface, stretched and smeared across the length of several of these tracks. The result is pretty hallucinatory, conjuring a similar mood as some of the more abstract Teutonic outfits of the 70s alongside their sound collage techniques. Cedars lay the delay on pretty thick, transforming those choral voices into something resembling a Catholic Mass drowning in LSD, and at other points it can sound like some terrifying tape manipulation of a Penderecki piece. All pretty creepy, akin to Coil at their most menacing, and there's a barely recognizable cover of Bauhaus's "Nerves" that transforms the post-punk classic into a weirdly shambling death-folk ritual that sounds like it was recorded in some dank subterranean tunnel system, billowing out across nearly fifteen minutes of the tape.
Limited to one hundred twenty-five copies.
This is the first release from the Atlanta based trio Celephais, who I had never heard before but who piqued my interest when I read a blurb about them
somewhere that referenced Metallica, H.P. Lovecraft, and 90's indie rock in the same breath. That comment had me searching for more info on Celephais, and
once I checked out some of their stuff online, I totally flipped out over 'em. I Am Kuranes is the band's first release, and it's an impressive
debut, and indeed does combine the aforementioned elements into a really rad math-metal assault that I've been listening to nonstop since this came in to C-
Blast. First off, fans of H.P. Lovecraft's classic weird horror lit may well recognize the band's name and the album title as a reference to a Lovecraft
short story that describes an otherworldly city only accessible through dream-travel, populated by strange entities and architectural visions that are barely
comprehensible to the human mind. That story is filled with the richly descriptive prose that makes Lovecraft one of my favorite authors, and it seems that
this band were grooving on the story even more, as the arty, crushing math metal of I Am Kuranes feels like Celephais has constructed a sprawling
prog-metal soundtrack to a journey through the titular city, the tracks filled with jagged riffs that move at hard angles and pummeling, off-kilter drumming,
the songs shifting into subdued dronescapes and collages of skittery electronica and cut-up voices, and bursting into some awesome, guitar-heavy metallic
indie rock like "Fingers In Your Mouth" and "Trevor Towers". There are huge riffs layered with acoustic guitar strum and lush cosmic keyboards, equally
ominous and anthemic, and it when the full-on rock kicks in, it sounds like Celephais took the heavy, noisy rock and hazy vocals of 90's bands like Chavez
and Swervedriver and strapped it to crushing, angular thrash metal riffage and experimental soundscapes. This is a killer disc, proggy and psychedelic and
pretty damn heavy but with that awesome '90s indie-guitar hookage that I love so much. Highly recommended. Comes in a striking digipack case.
Back in stock, this time with a gloss-finish jacket.
On the last Crucial Blast new arrivals list, I talked up the new album from a band called Celeste from France that had blown me away upon first hearing it, a crushing mixture of ultra-heavy metallic dirge and discordant black metal with a distinct French flavor to it. I compared Misanthrope(s) to both older Neurosis (specifically, the oppressive apocalyptic vibe of Through Silver In Blood-era Neurosis) and the evil experimental black metal of bands like Glorior Belli and Deathspell Omega, without the overblown philosophical lyrics and intellectual nihilism. That doesn't mean that Celeste isn't surrounded by it's own enigmatic aura - the completely indecipherable lyrics and surreal artwork that makes up the packaging for the band's first album Nihiliste(s) is creepy and mysterious enough - but Celeste are much more concerned with caving your skull in through a relentless, almost unbearable application of ultra-heavy riffage and ponderous tempos. 2008's Nihiliste(s) is slower and heavier compared to the second album, with fewer blasts of black metal ferocity and speed; instead, the blackness is almost totally soaked into the slow, doomy riffing and tangles of chaotic mathy guitar, putting this album closer to the hellish sludge of Omega Massif, Amen Ra and Overmars. The riffs are discordant and gnarly, and shift between passages of atmospheric glacial groove and skullcrushing pummel, the vocals are harsh and torn, at times reminding me of a blackened and snarling version of Jacob Bannon (Converge), and the drumming is huge, complex, way more complex than most sludge bands, with tons of tightly-wound fills and an almost industrial percussive pound. The sixth track "Tu Regardes Trop Fort, Tu penses Trop Fort, Tu Parles Trop Fort" kinda sums the whole album up, starting off with a huge angular riff and sinister leads, then exploding into fragmented blastbeats and hectic black metal for a moment before shifting into some martial militant snares that build into another explosive crescendo of blackened metallic sludge.
Back in stock, this time in a new gloss-finish jacket.
There's something special about how the French are able to take a sound that has been beaten to death - that of the apocalyptic metallic dirge that Neurosis pioneered on their Through Silver In Blood and developed further by Isis over the course of their first few albums - and twist it into something both bleaker, darker, and at the same time elegant and stentorian. Just off of the top of my head, there's Overmars, Year Of No Light, Omega Massif and HKY, four bands who all trace their cyclopean sludge metal sound back to Neurosis's revolutionary art-metal, but who all sound radically different from one another and from the more straightforward music that most of their American peers have been creating. From HKY's cosmic industro-doom psychdirge to the sky-reaching Disintegration worship of Year Of No Light and the blackened avant sludge opera of Overmars, it's obvious that French metallers are some of the best at taking this omnipresent sound and reinventing it in a way that few others are capable of doing.
The latest French band to be added to the list is Celeste, who just released their third album Misanthrope(s) on the excellent German label Denovali, which has brought us a number of quality albums from Daturah, Kodiak, Heirs, and other artful European sludge/metal outfits. Coming from Denovali, I had a hunch that Celeste were going to along the same lines as most of their other releases, which tend to run along the lines of post-rock influenced heaviness, but this is much heavier than anything else on the label, and definitely much, much darker, too. As soon as Misanthrope(s)'s opening track "Que Des Yeux Vides Et S�ch�s" blasts forth from the speakers, you can hear the Neurosis influence on the mighty, chugging riffage and tortured screams, but as the song continues to violently wind it's way onward, the increasingly spiteful tone of the vocals and the sheets of dissonant buzzing guitars that coil around the thunderous tribal drums and hypnotic dirgey riffs, and the holocaustal black metal intro of "Toucher Ce Vide B�ant Attise Ma Fascination" seamlessly falls into punishing sludge with a truly devastating riff that rises up halfway through, it become clear that Celeste are also drawing deep from the oily black pool of French black metal. The nine songs on this album aren't exceptionally long for this style of atmospheric sludge metal, with most averaging around six minutes, but Celeste create some supremely crushing riff-trances in the time they have, combining grinding downtuned Neurosis-esque crush with the sort of dissonant guitar textures that you'd normally expect from a Glorior Belli or Deathspell Omega album. Like most other bands in this style, Celeste also work in some softer extended instrumental sections that build into explosive crescendos of heaviness (as on "Mais Quel Plaisir De Voir Cette T�te D'enfant Rougir Et Suer" and "La Gorge Ouverte Et D�charn�e" - every single song title on Misanthrope(s) is a freakin' mouthful), but even in these more subdued moments, Celeste never get soft, creating tense buildups that put you on edge rather than soothe you with melodic frippery. No, this album keeps it caustic and black as fuck from start to finish, and set the tone with an unremittingly bleak and nihilistic bent to their lyrics, like what Year Of No Light would sound like with their dreamy sludge inverted and drenched in light-devouring malevolence. Clearly, Celeste are shooting for something more than just another attempt at cloning the signature sounds of Neurosis and Isis.
Also available as a limited edition double LP from Denovali, this version of Misanthrope(s) comes in a couple of different colors (our choice), three sides of blackened metallic sludge and epic rock with the fourth side sporting eye-popping silkscreened artwork. The vinyl is packaged in a heavy gatefold cover with printed inner sleeves, a really deluxe, killer-looking presentation all around, and limited to a couple hundred copies.
There's something special about how the French are able to take a sound that has been beaten to death - that of the apocalyptic metallic dirge that Neurosis pioneered on their Through Silver In Blood and developed further by Isis over the course of their first few albums - and twist it into something both bleaker, darker, and at the same time elegant and stentorian. Just off of the top of my head, there's Overmars, Year Of No Light, Omega Massif and HKY, four bands who all trace their cyclopean sludge metal sound back to Neurosis's revolutionary art-metal, but who all sound radically different from one another and from the more straightforward music that most of their American peers have been creating. From HKY's cosmic industro-doom psychdirge to the sky-reaching Disintegration worship of Year Of No Light and the blackened avant sludge opera of Overmars, it's obvious that French metallers are some of the best at taking this omnipresent sound and reinventing it in a way that few others are capable of doing.
The latest French band to be added to the list is Celeste, who just released their third album Misanthrope(s) on the excellent German label Denovali, which has brought us a number of quality albums from Daturah, Kodiak, Heirs, and other artful European sludge/metal outfits. Coming from Denovali, I had a hunch that Celeste were going to along the same lines as most of their other releases, which tend to run along the lines of post-rock influenced heaviness, but this is much heavier than anything else on the label, and definitely much, much darker, too. As soon as Misanthrope(s)'s opening track "Que Des Yeux Vides Et S�ch�s" blasts forth from the speakers, you can hear the Neurosis influence on the mighty, chugging riffage and tortured screams, but as the song continues to violently wind it's way onward, the increasingly spiteful tone of the vocals and the sheets of dissonant buzzing guitars that coil around the thunderous tribal drums and hypnotic dirgey riffs, and the holocaustal black metal intro of "Toucher Ce Vide B�ant Attise Ma Fascination" seamlessly falls into punishing sludge with a truly devastating riff that rises up halfway through, it become clear that Celeste are also drawing deep from the oily black pool of French black metal. The nine songs on this album aren't exceptionally long for this style of atmospheric sludge metal, with most averaging around six minutes, but Celeste create some supremely crushing riff-trances in the time they have, combining grinding downtuned Neurosis-esque crush with the sort of dissonant guitar textures that you'd normally expect from a Glorior Belli or Deathspell Omega album. Like most other bands in this style, Celeste also work in some softer extended instrumental sections that build into explosive crescendos of heaviness (as on "Mais Quel Plaisir De Voir Cette T�te D'enfant Rougir Et Suer" and "La Gorge Ouverte Et D�charn�e" - every single song title on Misanthrope(s) is a freakin' mouthful), but even in these more subdued moments, Celeste never get soft, creating tense buildups that put you on edge rather than soothe you with melodic frippery. No, this album keeps it caustic and black as fuck from start to finish, and set the tone with an unremittingly bleak and nihilistic bent to their lyrics, like what Year Of No Light would sound like with their dreamy sludge inverted and drenched in light-devouring malevolence. Clearly, Celeste are shooting for something more than just another attempt at cloning the signature sounds of Neurosis and Isis.
��Since the mid 90's, the French band Celestia has been hovering at the edges of the Gallic black metal underground, producing a number of eerie, low-fi albums on Drakkar (the label run by Celestia frontman Noktu) and Full Moon Productions, all of which have delivered some powerful, ghastly black metal forged from the band's murky, mournful melodies, vomitous toadcroak vocals and monotonous blasting drums, with their demos being particularly cool examples of murky, kosmische-tinged blackness. I've never gotten around to picking up any of their releases for the C-Blast shop in the past, though, as most of their stuff has been pretty difficult to track down, but I was particularly drawn to the new reissue of the band's 2007 demo tape Delhys-catess that just came out on Aphelion. Originally released on Drakkar to build interest for their next full-length Frigidiis Apotheosia : Abstinencia Genesiis, this new CD edition of the recording is a gorgeously designed release that showcases an interesting period in the band's career.
�� These two releases from Celestia are of particular interest, as they come from the brief period where the band featured Xasthur's Scott Conner (aka Malefic) on synthesizers, and his presence brought a newfound ghastly seasick quality to Celestia's music that I think stands out as some of their best. The Delhys-catess demo was especially steeped in this killer mixture of raw, vaguely LLN-influenced French black metal and Xasthur-esque delirium, which was rounded out with drummer Astrelya (aka Andy Julia of Soror Dolorosa and Darvulia). The four song EP clocks in at just under twenty minutes, with ghostly, raw blackened metal centering around simple, unadorned riffs circling over propulsive drumming, with Malefic's murky out-of-phase keyboards droning and drifting over everything. Those creepy keyboard textures are really prominent in the mix, melting with the icy, ethereal guitar melodies. Noktu's vocal delivery on the demo is really twisted, too; his sickening frog-like croak is used sparingly throughout the recording, but whenever it appears, the skin crawls. I love the whole primitive, withered feel of these songs, the tempos ranging from that lurching mid-tempo attack to eruptions of blastbeat-driven intensity, but the atmosphere manages to always maintain that forlorn, mist-enshrouded atmosphere. There's definitely a uniquely French feel to the music in the lurching waltz of "The Seed of Negation" and its haunting guitar riffs tumbling through the darkness, while Malefic's weird melting choral keys merge with Tangerine Dream-like textures on "A Regrettable Misinterpretation of Mournfulness". "Death of the Lizard Queen" is another standout, a strange mix of jangly, gloomy poppiness and churning dreamlike black metal, those weird swarming dissonant keyboards continuing to give this a really surreal edge, as if you are hearing some distorted mirror reflection of French black metal, the sound warped and shimmering, phantasmal and discordant.
�� Comes in a stunning six-panel digipack with metallic silver embossed printing.
The label describes this as "cosmic post rock for fans of Mogwai, Mono, and Explosions In The Sky". The cosmic part fits this pretty well, but I hear something quite different than the same old Mono/GYBE/Mogwai knockoff that you might expect from that description. What I'm hearing on this limited edition disc is a cold, somewhat dissonant take on late 80's gloom rock, stuff like The Church and Cocteau Twins and Slowdive, but played vastly slower and draped in darkness and shadows. That 80's gloom sound is a personal favorite sound of mine, so this disc blew me away when I finally got around to checking it out. Celestial Sea is Todd Paulson and Andrew Curtis-Brignell; Todd runs the excellent outsider-black metal label God Is Myth and also plays in the black metal/folk projects Uvall and Dormant, while Andrew is best known for his main gig Caina, which has turned into quite a buzzed-about project with his two albums on Profound Lore. Before Caina started putting out records on Profound Lore, Andrew released his debut through Paulson's label, and this new project grew out of that relationship. It might be my favorite recording from either of these guys, to be honest with you, and I'll bet that if you loved any of Caina's albums, as cloaked in blissed out 4AD style dreampop and gloomy British drizzle as they are, well, you be spinning Celestial Sea's disc quite a bit.
The first track "Clouds" opens with a rush of black cosmic drift, waves of crushing low-end feedback crashing over one another in a surging Lustmord-like ocean of dark ambience, and then recedes as a lone acoustic guitar enters, playing a somber minor key melody over a softly shifting surface of feedback and ambient rumblings that lasts for several minutes. After this dark entrance, Celestial Sea kick in fully with "As The Birds Fly South", it's lush reverb-soaked guitars and misty ambience evoking the crystalline sound of The Church's Starfish and Slowdive, but slowed to a heavy, droning pace. A gorgeous melodic arpeggio falls like snow over the layered strum of the electric guitars, a simple plodding motorik beat pulsing in the background, droning organs buzzing through the icy haze, while Curtis-Brignell's fragile croon drifts over it all, a single beautiful riff repeated over and over. There are moments when everything seems to bend a little as a subtle dissonance creeps into the music and allows a feeling of unease to settle on it briefly, but the song always returns to it's blissed out prettiness, and eventually builds into a heavy crescendo towards the end as distorted guitars appear and surging double-bass drumming begins to rumble down in the mix, until it all explodes in a flash of blinding heat at the end, fading out on a simple pipe organ melody.
The next song "William Bentley'S Grave" begins with gently delayed guitars and hushed vocals that fade in and out, and the drums barely there at all, just
a simple hi-hat pulse in the background, everything soft and hazy, until the drums finally kick in and the main guitar melody begins to play over and over again, a simple Slowdive-esque melody drenched in delay and reverb, chiming over the slow metronomic drums and sheets of gleaming synth and kosmiche ambience. Dark and beautiful and dreamy, this song sounds like some lost British dreampop b-side, layered with metallic guitars and shimmering drones.
The fourth and last is "Deep Inside The Cold ", an all instrumental ten-minute epic. This one starts off heavier than the others, a bed of grinding distorted guitar simmering under another dreamy melody, washes of dissonant chords sweeping over the central riff, and the drumming itself is heavier and more aggressive. Some searing lead guitar appears, playing some psychedelic solo over an ominous chord progression that starts to sound like a heavier version of Pink Floyd, actually. The second half shifts gears as the drums kick in to a faster paced motorik beat and the guitars erupt into a wave of feedback and distortion, and it turns for a moment into a kind of crushing krautrock jam, before fading away on a cloud of amplifier howl and rumble...
I don't doubt that fans of the current epic rock sound would probably love this, but this is even more recommended to those of you who love gloomy indie rock and overcast dreampop and old school British shoegaze, bands like The Church and late-80's Cure, Red House Painters, Slowdive, stuff like that, but who like the idea of hearing that sound filtered through a slight heaviness, tempered with the heavier riffage of bands like Agalloch and Kataonia.
The disc is limited to 300 copies, and comes in a minimalist white jacket with a printed insert and the band name pasted onto the front. Recommended!
The one-man primordial deathdoom band CELESTIIAL slooowly drifts through an ethereal woodland terrain that's alive with the sounds of rain and chirping
birdsong, forming an ominous atmosphere that is very similiar to SKEPTICISM in it's stately lumbering, but CELESTIIAL is more organic and mystical, more like
a cross between those Finnish funeral masters and the fragile druidic doom-folk of Chet Scott's projects (ELEMENTAL CHRYSALIS, RUHR HUNTER, SVART UGLE, etc).
Actually, as the album progresses, it loosens it's tethers to the doom form, mainly through the distant hiss of slowly pulsating cymbals and barely
discernable drums and the buried drone of the almost non-existant guitar. The dreamy death growls blanketed in reverb are similiarly distant and blurred,
while the woodland sounds are at the forefront, the grey haze of rainfall and wildlife sometimes obscuring the beautiful Windham Hill-style New Age string
and flute arrangements and heavier passages. That's not to say that CELESTIIAL isn't crushingly heavy, which it is...the heaviness here is a suffocating
ambient dread, a witnessing of the impermanent self surrounded by nature. Desolate North contains 8 tracks that work together as a single 45 minute
suite, and the album is definitely best absorbed in it's entirety. Highly recommended to followers of the funeral ambient of NORTT, the otherworldly ooze of
ESOTERIC and DISEMBOWELMENT, and the Glass Throat family of sylvan drones.
One of the primary MO's of the new Handmade Birds imprint appears to be releasing limited edition reissues of cult underground metal albums in highly attractive new packaging designs, such as the recent reish of Blut Aus Nord's Mort. This new Lp version of Desolate North from forest-doom shaman Celestiial is in the same vein, presenting the music from the original Bindrune Cd release with new artwork (by Faith Coloccia of Everlovely Lightningheart/Mamiffer) in a beautiful gatefold package that features black and white woodland photography for the album art, limited to only 250 copies. The Cd edition has been out of print for several years, so at the moment this is your only chance to get a physical edition of this album. Here's the original write-up that I did for the Bindrune release back when that version came out:
The one-man primordial deathdoom band Celestiial slooowly drifts through an ethereal woodland terrain that's alive with the sounds of rain and chirping birdsong, forming an ominous atmosphere that is very similiar to Skepticism in its stately lumbering, but Celestiial is more organic and mystical, more like a cross between those Finnish funeral masters and the fragile druidic doom-folk of Chet Scott's projects (Elemental Chrysalis, Ruhr Hunter, Svart Ugle, etc). Actually, as the album progresses, it loosens it's tethers to the doom form, mainly through the distant hiss of slowly pulsating cymbals and barely discernable drums and the buried drone of the almost non-existant guitar. The dreamy death growls blanketed in reverb are similiarly distant and blurred, while the woodland sounds are at the forefront, the grey haze of rainfall and wildlife sometimes obscuring the beautiful Windham Hill-style New Age string and flute arrangements and heavier passages. That's not to say that Celestiial isn't crushingly heavy, which it is...the heaviness here is a suffocating ambient dread, a witnessing of the impermanent self surrounded by nature. Desolate North contains 8 tracks that work together as a single 45 minute suite, and the album is definitely best absorbed in it's entirety. Highly recommended to followers of the funeral doom ambience of Nortt, the otherworldly ooze of Esoteric and Disembowelment, and the Glass Throat family of dark sylvan droneology.
This re-issue of the classic 1985 album from Celtic Frost has been out for awhile, but I figured we'd make this available here at C-Blast for any newcomers
to the band's genre-defying, frequenty experimental heavy metal that still holds up as some of the heaviest tuneage ever. As far as I'm concerned,
it is. To Mega Therion was the Swiss band's second album, and it marked an important turn in their career that found the Frost implementing a wider
range of sounds and influences into their primal blackened thrash attack. Housed within some spectacular original artwork from H.R. Giger, To
Mega... starts off with the sinister Wagner-esque bombast of "Innocence and Wrath", a brief orchestral doom-dirge of pounding kettle drums and french
horns and grinding distorted guitars, and then the band kicks in with "The Ursurper", total classic Frost, catchy as fuck riffage that moves adeptly from
skull cracking sludginess to up tempo death thrash, complete with singer/guitarist TOm G. Warrior's classic "ugh" death grunts! Classic songs like "Dawn of
Meggido" and "Necromantical Screams" designed the template for the black metal movement that would rise up a few years after this album was released, and the
brutal halftime chug of "Jewel Throne" plants the seeds of pretty much the entire NYC deathcore movement of the early 90's. Obviously, this is essential,
classic stuff, highly influential when it came out, and the experimental spirit behind Celtic Frost makes this album and Into The Pandemonium
utterly prescient and as powerful and crushing and weird today as they were twenty years ago. Nobody in death/thrash metal was doing the fucked up
things that Celtic Frost were doing during this era of metal - just check out the wacked out female vocal accompaniment on "The Ursurper", the orchestral
horns on "Necromantic Screams", the black industrial-ambience of "Tears In A Prophets Dream"...this shit was crucial when it came out, and did much
to bend the minds of hordes of hypercreative young metal freaks like myself. It was with their followup Into The Pandemonium that Celtic Frost
really blasted out into the outer fringes of metal, but this album is just as crucial a marker in their long and strange career, if for no other reason than
it rocks a nonstop feast of apocalyptic megaheavy riffage unequalled in the annals of 80's metal. This re-issue from Noise Records contains a bonus track
entitled "Return to the Eve (1985 Studio Jam)" that appears here for the first time, and comes in a cool package that includes a 16-page booklet with the
original artwork, photos from the era, lyrics, and track notes. Essential.
When Celtic Frost finally disbanded for the (then) final time in 1992, they encapsulated their troubled history with a bold collection of B-sides, rarities,
remixed album tracks, demos, and other odds and ends that spanned across the band's classic early albums and through to their infamous Cold Lake and
the follow-up Vanity/Nemesis. Parched With Thirst Am I And Dying is a crucial compilation for diehard CeltiC Frost fans for a number of
reasons: first off, it's got an assload of jams you are not going to find anywhere else; second, this collection is a superb cross-section of the band's
catalog and song reworkings that perfectly demonstrates the unbridled weirdness, experimental spirit, and sheer heaviness of Celtic Frost. Ultimately for me,
it's the presence of several songs off of Frost's reviled Cold Lake that make this disc fucking indispensible to me: a heavier re-recording of
"Juice Like Wine" and "Downtown Hanoi", and the radio edit for "Cherry Orchards". Now, I'm going to share an unpopular view here and say that I actually like
Cold Lake. Like, really, really like Cold Lake. The songs are fucking catchy, and the album has this terminally weird glam-thrash
vibe that I think rules. I'm pretty certain that my stating that is going to earn me a lethal kick in the bag at some point down the road, but I had to get
that off my chest. I'm convinced that years from now, metal historians are going to look back on Cold Lake and finally give that album the credit
it's due.
Anyways, Parched with Thirst Am I and Dying....this comp is crucial, with mostly-informative liner notes giving the source for most of the tracks,
and this is a wealth of deep cuts from the Frost, with some stunning moments of deaththrash weirdness that blow my mind. Alot of the stuff is from the
sessions for To Mega Therion and Into the Pandemonium, but then you have the cover of Dean Martin's "In The Chapel In The Moonlight", the
infectious, brilliant thrash metal/death pop of the Sisters Of Mercy-ish "I Won't Dance", the haunting orchestral dream of "Tristesses De La Lune", and their
cover of "Mexican Radio". Highly recommended.
Jewel case edition. I finally got this CRUCIAL avant-metal classic back in stock!
An indisputable avant-thrash classic, Celtic Frost's 1987 album Into The Pandemonium followed up To Mega Therion with a surreal, unpredictable album that blew minds when it came out. Who would have guessed that these guys would have followed the classic death metal of their debut with
an album that would combine unlikely covers, industrial-laced breakbeats, gothy thrash jams with backing female R&B vocals, and orchestral strings and sultry female French singing? The band had the sheer audacity to open the album with a cover, Wall Of Voodoo's new wave hit "Mexican Radio", but somehow it works, as do all of the other weird elements that Celtic Frost brandishes on Into The Pandemonium. Tom G. Warrior also unveils his newly-found singing style, a gothy, weepy croon which he alternates with his more aggressive death grunts. "Mesmerized" uses his singing to great effect as it weaves a sorrowful love song; "Rex Irae (Requiem)" brings together brutal thrash metal riffage, operatic backing vocals, eerie orchestral strings, and french horns. And then there is "One In Their Pride", the one track on Into The Pandemonium that seems to get a lot of metalheads in a huff - probably doesn't help that it appears on this reissue in two different versions. A heavy, drum-machine bangin' dub/industrial breakbeat mix, "One In Their Pride" seems so strange appearing halfway through the album, but when you look at the whole picture and see how it fits in Frost's surrealistic vision of 80's apocalypse, it makes total sense. "I Won't Dance" is one of my favorite Celtic Frost jams ever, a mid-paced thrasher with those aforementioned backing R&B vocals that ends up sounding like a crushing metallic version of Sisters of Mercy. In between all of the weirdness, there are some straightforward rippers;
"Inner Sanctum" and "Babylon Fell" both bring the To Mega Therion style deathcrush in top form.
This crucial re-issue is remastered and comes with all of the original artwork, lyrics, never-before-published photos, track notes, and most impressively, four unreleased tracks: "In The Chapel, In The Moonlight", "The Inevitable Factor", and "The Inevitable Factor (Alternate Vox)".
Few "comeback" albums have been as loaded with expectation as Celtic Frost's Monotheist, which is the first new album from Frost since 1989's
Vanity/Nemesis. How were these guys going to follow up their oft-maligned late 80's period, where their flirtations with Goth and pop metal
alienated pretty much their entire audience? Well, it's a surprising return to the sort of avant-garde Metal progression that Celtic Frost pioneered with
Into The Pandemonium; while obviously not as groundbreaking as that album, Monotheist is still an adventurous, haunting follow-up to
Pandemonium, a descent into grim, doomy experimental Metal that incorporates 80's Goth Rock, Industrial, doom-drone, classical, and New Wave
elements into their crushingly heavy Death/Black/Thrash assault, with repetitive, dirgey rhythms that make up much of the music hints at a Godflesh
influence. But along with all of the awesome experimental flourishes on this album, Frost's trademark crusty, detuned guitars and Tom Fischer's death grunts
are totally intact.
The album kicks off with "Progeny"'s avalanche of double-bass thrash destruction, beyond heavy and demonic, brutal guitar tones turning the air to rust, as
the song slows to a mournful doom metal crawl, cold electronics surface in the background adding an ashen atmosphere that persists throughout the rest of the
disc. This is followed by the inexorable pound of "Ground", a tranced out death sludge mantra with cool vocal layering effects and an undeniable sing-along
chorus. The atmospheric "A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh" features a gloomy, hushed spoken-sung lament over textured guitar melodies that erupts into an
ominous eruption of molten Doom. "Drown in Ashes" matches beautiful female singing with Fischer's clean vocals that remind me a lot of Peter Murphy of
Bauhaus, over what could only be described as a hybrid of gothy post-punk and psychedelic doom metal. "Os Abysmi Vel Daath" starts off with a clanging Metal
ambience that could be mistaken for the lead-in to a Jesu song, until a crushing doom metal riff emerges with FIscher's dramatic Bauhaus croon layered with
distant operatic female wailing, then disappears into a black void of ambient electronics and crackling guitar distortion before reemerging as a spaced out
blast of cavernous thrash. "Obscured" opens with tracers of feedback drone over heavy drumming, then turns into a massively heavy combo of Frostian doom,
prog rock-informed guitar passages, and Sisters Of Mercy style apocalyptic gloom rock with a melodic chorus that kills. "Domain of Decay" is another
megaheavy Sabbathian sludge feast, with slightly more complex riffing and menacing, strained vocals, with an awesomely deranged guitar solo surfacing towards
the end. "Ain Elohim" is a much faster number, with speedy double-bass blasts and awesome thrashy riffs, spliced with bursts of crackling, crumbling
amplifier drone and ending in a mangled heap of freeform guitar noise. Monotheist closes out with the three-part "Triptych": "Triptych: Totengott"
unleashes distant percussive blasts buried in a fog of droning, blackened synthesizer ambience and sickeningly evil Black Metal screams bathed in distortion,
forming a rich psychedelic soundfield of bleak drone; "Triptych: Synagoga Satanae" delivers one of the heaviest freaking riffs on the entire album, a
crushing doom-dirge that ends on heavy feedback with creeped out, Teutonic mutterings, before closing out with the frozen, classical strains of "Triptych:
Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale)".
I think this is one of the best things Celtic Frost has ever recorded, gloriously weird, progressive, catchy, and U L T R A heavy, totally in the spirit of
Frost's experimental Metal spirit of the 1980's but adventurous and totally contemporary, an apocalyptic mix of doom, thrash, goth rock/post punk, drone,
classical music, and prog, all filtered through Frost's monstrous heaviness. Highly highly recommended !!!!!
Ultra-rare and out of print picture disc release on Earmark Records of Celtic Frost's seminal avant-thrash classic Into The Pandemonium, the album that had thousands of heshers raising their fists towards the skies and screaming "What the fuck?" in a single global chorus of confusion back in 1987. We only have a couple of these in stock, then that's it.
An indisputable avant-thrash classic, Celtic Frost's 1987 album Into The Pandemonium followed up To Mega Therion with a surreal,
unpredictable album that blew minds when it came out. Who would have guessed that these guys would have followed the classic death metal of their debut with
an album that would combine unlikely covers, industrial-laced breakbeats, gothy thrash jams with backing female R&B vocals, and orchestral strings and sultry
female French singing? The band had the sheer audacity to open the album with a cover, Wall Of Voodoo's new wave hit "Mexican Radio", but somehow it
works, as do all of the other weird elements that Celtic Frost brandishes on Into The Pandemonium. Tom G. Warrior also unveils his newly-
found singing style, a gothy, weepy croon which he alternates with his more aggressive death grunts. "Mesmerized" uses his singing to great effect as it
weaves a sorrowful love song; "Rex Irae (Requiem)" brings together brutal thrash metal riffage, operatic backing vocals, eerie orchestral strings, and french
horns. And then there is "One In Their Pride", the one track on Into The Pandemonium that seems to get a lot of metalheads in a huff - probably
doesn't help that it appears on this reissue in two different versions. A heavy, drum-machine bangin' dub/industrial breakbeat mix, "One In Their Pride"
seems so strange appearing halfway through the album, but when you look at the whole picture and see how it fits in Frost's surrealistic vision of 80's
apocalypse, it makes total sense. "I Won't Dance" is one of my favorite Celtic Frost jams ever, a mid-paced thrasher with those aforementioned backing R&B
vocals that ends up sounding like a crushing metallic version of Sisters of Mercy. In between all of the weirdness, there are some straightforward rippers;
"Inner Sanctum" and "Babylon Fell" both bring the To Mega Therion style deathcrush in top form.
Ten years later, and this album still grinds the world beneath its heel. We've restocked the deluxe digipak edition of this phenomenal comeback album from avant-metal titans Celtic Frost, issued in slipcase packaging and featuring the exclusive bonus track "Temple Of Depression", a different layout and exclusive artwork from the "regular" edition, and a killer 14" by 14" fold-out mini-poster. Here's our old review from the original version, in case you need some additional prodding:
Few "comeback" albums have been as loaded with expectation as Celtic Frost's Monotheist, which is the first new album from Frost since 1989's Vanity/Nemesis. How were these guys going to follow up their oft-maligned late 80's period, where their flirtations with Goth and pop metal alienated pretty much their entire audience? Well, it's a surprising return to the sort of avant-garde Metal progression that Celtic Frost pioneered with Into The Pandemonium; while obviously not as groundbreaking as that album, Monotheist is still an adventurous, haunting follow-up to Pandemonium, a descent into grim, doom-laden experimental Metal that incorporates 80's Goth Rock, Industrial, doom-drone, classical, and New Wave elements into their crushingly heavy Death/Black/Thrash assault, with repetitive, dirgey rhythms that make up much of the music hints at a Godflesh influence. But along with all of the awesome experimental flourishes on this album, Frost's trademark crusty, detuned guitars and Tom Fischer's death grunts are totally intact.
The album kicks off with "Progeny"'s avalanche of double-bass thrash destruction, beyond heavy and demonic, brutal guitar tones turning the air to rust, as the song slows to a mournful doom metal crawl, cold electronics surface in the background adding an ashen atmosphere that persists throughout the rest of the disc. This is followed by the inexorable pound of "Ground", a tranced-out death sludge mantra with cool vocal layering effects and an undeniable sing-along chorus. The atmospheric "A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh" features a gloomy, hushed spoken-sung lament over textured guitar melodies that erupts into an ominous eruption of molten Doom. "Drown in Ashes" matches beautiful female singing with Fischer's clean vocals that remind me a lot of Peter Murphy of Bauhaus, over what could only be described as a hybrid of gothy post-punk and psychedelic doom metal. "Os Abysmi Vel Daath" starts off with a clanging Metal ambience that could be mistaken for the lead-in to a Jesu song, until a crushing doom metal riff emerges with Fischer's dramatic Bauhaus croon layered with distant operatic female wailing, then disappears into a black void of ambient electronics and crackling guitar distortion before reemerging as a spaced out blast of cavernous thrash. "Obscured" opens with tracers of feedback drone over heavy drumming, then turns into a massively heavy combo of Frostian doom, prog rock-informed guitar passages, and Sisters Of Mercy style apocalyptic gloom rock with a melodic chorus that kills. "Domain of Decay" is another megaheavy Sabbathian sludge feast, with slightly more complex riffing and menacing, strained vocals, with an awesomely deranged guitar solo surfacing towards the end. "Ain Elohim" is a much faster number, with speedy double-bass blasts and awesome thrashing riffs, spliced with bursts of crackling, crumbling amplifier drone and ending in a mangled heap of freeform guitar noise. Monotheist closes out with the three-part "Triptych": "Triptych: Totengott" unleashes distant percussive blasts buried in a fog of droning, blackened synthesizer ambience and sickeningly evil Black Metal screams bathed in distortion, forming a rich psychedelic soundfield of bleak drone; "Triptych: Synagoga Satanae" delivers one of the heaviest freaking riffs on the entire album, a crushing doom-dirge that ends on heavy feedback with creeped out, Teutonic mutterings, before closing out with the frozen, classical strains of "Triptych: Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale)".
I think this is one of the best things Celtic Frost has ever recorded, gloriously weird, progressive, catchy, and U L T R A heavy, totally in the spirit of Frost's experimental Metal spirit of the 1980's but adventurous and totally contemporary, an apocalyptic mix of doom, thrash, goth rock/post punk, drone, classical music, and prog, all filtered through Frost's monstrous heaviness. Highest recommendations....
Ten years later, and this album still grinds the world beneath its heel. This phenomenal comeback album from avant-metal titans Celtic Frost has been resurrected once again, reissued as a posh double LP picture disc set in full heavyweight gatefold packaging, issued in a limited run of five hundred copies. Need some more prodding? Here's our old review from the original version:
Few "comeback" albums have been as loaded with expectation as Celtic Frost's Monotheist, which is the first new album from Frost since 1989's Vanity/Nemesis. How were these guys
going to follow up their oft-maligned late 80's period, where their flirtations with Goth and pop metal alienated pretty much their entire audience? Well, it's a surprising return to the sort of avant-garde Metal progression that Celtic
Frost pioneered with Into The Pandemonium; while obviously not as groundbreaking as that album, Monotheist is still an adventurous, haunting follow-up to Pandemonium, a descent into grim, doom-laden
experimental Metal that incorporates 80's Goth Rock, Industrial, doom-drone, classical, and New Wave elements into their crushingly heavy Death/Black/Thrash assault, with repetitive, dirgey rhythms that make up much of the music hints at
a Godflesh influence. But along with all of the awesome experimental flourishes on this album, Frost's trademark crusty, detuned guitars and Tom Fischer's death grunts are totally intact.
The album kicks off with "Progeny"'s avalanche of double-bass thrash destruction, beyond heavy and demonic, brutal guitar tones turning the air to rust, as the song slows to a mournful doom metal
crawl, cold electronics surface in the background adding an ashen atmosphere that persists throughout the rest of the disc. This is followed by the inexorable pound of "Ground", a tranced-out death sludge mantra with cool vocal layering
effects and an undeniable sing-along chorus. The atmospheric "A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh" features a gloomy, hushed spoken-sung lament over textured guitar melodies that erupts into an ominous eruption of molten Doom. "Drown in
Ashes" matches beautiful female singing with Fischer's clean vocals that remind me a lot of Peter Murphy of Bauhaus, over what could only be described as a hybrid of gothy post-punk and psychedelic doom metal. "Os Abysmi Vel Daath"
starts off with a clanging Metal ambience that could be mistaken for the lead-in to a Jesu song, until a crushing doom metal riff emerges with Fischer's dramatic Bauhaus croon layered with distant operatic female wailing, then disappears
into a black void of ambient electronics and crackling guitar distortion before reemerging as a spaced out blast of cavernous thrash. "Obscured" opens with tracers of feedback drone over heavy drumming, then turns into a massively heavy
combo of Frostian doom, prog rock-informed guitar passages, and Sisters Of Mercy style apocalyptic gloom rock with a melodic chorus that kills. "Domain of Decay" is another megaheavy Sabbathian sludge feast, with slightly more
complex riffing and menacing, strained vocals, with an awesomely deranged guitar solo surfacing towards the end. "Ain Elohim" is a much faster number, with speedy double-bass blasts and awesome thrashing riffs, spliced with bursts of
crackling, crumbling amplifier drone and ending in a mangled heap of freeform guitar noise. Monotheist closes out with the three-part "Triptych": "Triptych: Totengott" unleashes distant percussive blasts buried in a fog of
droning, blackened synthesizer ambience and sickeningly evil Black Metal screams bathed in distortion, forming a rich psychedelic soundfield of bleak drone; "Triptych: Synagoga Satanae" delivers one of the heaviest freaking riffs on the
entire album, a crushing doom-dirge that ends on heavy feedback with creeped out, Teutonic mutterings, before closing out with the frozen, classical strains of "Triptych: Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale)".
I think this is one of the best things Celtic Frost has ever recorded, gloriously weird, progressive, catchy, and U L T R A heavy, totally in the spirit of Frost's experimental Metal spirit of the
1980's but adventurous and totally contemporary, an apocalyptic mix of doom, thrash, goth rock/post punk, drone, classical music, and prog, all filtered through Frost's monstrous heaviness. Highest recommendations....
��� Another rotting hunk of eccentric, lesser-known old-school death metal I just picked up from Memento Mori. Man, am I digging this label's stuff. Cemetery's Enter the Gate (Discography 1991-1993) is a killer double disc collection that compiles everything this German band recorded in the early 90s, including the long-lost titular full length. Originally slated for release on the ill fated (and weirdly named) German label West Virginia Records, Enter The Gate never saw a wide release due to the label's collapse prior to its scheduled release, and it was only released on a barely circulated cassette that one of the members put out themselves. Their music is certainly deserving of this collection and reappraisal, though, as Cemetery delivered some solid progressive death metal, combining their pummeling heaviness with good songwriting and lots of cool progressive touches, with a knack for weaving eerie majestic melodies throughout their songs. These guys have been compared to mid-period Death, and there's definitely a resemblance between Cemetery's singer and the powerful, strained snarl of Chuck Schuldiner, but musically Cemetery were doing something just a little more offbeat, weaving some unusual elements into their stuff like jazzy bass melodies and sudden detours into gorgeous, almost folky ambience, along with oddball angular riffs and surges of sickening dissonance. A couple songs descend into delirious death-doom laced with ominous orchestral strings and swells of cosmic synth, and others feature weird harpsichord-like melodies and bursts of bizarre atonality. Despite that, though, there's some really catchy stuff here; in amongst all of these left turns and complex prog-death maneuvers, Cemetery will often break into a killer melodic riff or an anthemic hook that'll ties this stuff together, suggestive of a much older, more classic heavy metal sensibility lurking beneath their weirder prog-influenced aspirations.
��� Having never heard these guys before, this discography ended up being one of the biggest surprises to come from the Memento Mori label for me, and one wonders how much of an impact Cemetery might have had if their debut album hadn't met with such a bitter end. While their music isn't as technically proficient or as mind-blowing as the top tier prog-death that was coming out at the time, this is still a solid album in that vein that I bet fans of bands like Pestilence, Cynic, Atheist and especially Edge Of Sanity would have really dug if they had had a chance to hear it. Along with the album, the second disc in this set features the rest of the band's output, their Cemetery and At Dark Places demos that were released prior to Enter The Gate. They're pretty enjoyable as well, earlier recordings of material that didn't appear on the album and which offer a similar (albeit rawer and less overtly experimental) style of quirky death metal. A couple of these songs are goddamn bulldozers, too; stuff like "Dungeon Of Dreams" and "(Under The) Cemetery" rages with a similar feral power as some of the early Edge Of Sanity stuff. Definitely one of my favorite new discoveries that I've made from checking out the Memento Mori catalog.
Loved this goth-punk outfit's Wind And Shadows, which led me to their previous LP, an eponynmous collection of demo material that came out a couple of years ago. Like a lot of the stuff that has been coming off the killer Mass Media imprint that I've been picking up, this interprets that early 80's death rock sound through a modern lens, weird and dark and brooding but injecting a bit of a peace punk attitude into this stuff as well. Cemetery are one of the more powerful sounding bands that's come out of this scene, a gang of Sisters Of Mercy-worshipping punkers who combine their obsessions with spiked n' studded hardcore, dark new wave music, early Christian Death and 80's goth rock into their own punchy, gloom-drenched sound, laced with more aggression and noisiness than is the norm for this sort of stuff.
Between this and their album, these guys are fast turning into one of my favorite bands doing this sound right now. This self-titled LP combines the tracks from their 2011 demo tape with the bonus track "Sex Foil", that latter track a furious anthem that's one of their best, blending disaffected vocals and a driving, infectious goth rock hook with energetic bass guitar, sheets of eerie chorus-drenched guitar, and a storm of crashing cymbals, sort of like First And Last And Always-era Sisters amped up into an early hardcore style fury. The demo stuff is just as good, the songs all sharing that familiar dark post-punk/goth vibe, and they wear their influences proudly on their sleeves (a few tracks nod vigorouslty in the direction of Only Theatre Of Pain - the singer does one hell of a Rozz Williams impression on songs like "Grave Dance" and "State Ward"). But Cemetery deliver this stuff woth enough youthful anger and frantic energy that they give it their own ragged flavor. They also mix things up with stuff like the thumping drum-machine driven "Voices From The Floorboards" that shifts into a weird electronic direction, resembling some mutant version of classic darkwave draped in lysergic synth, the languid baritone singing melting into a delirious dreamhaze; and closer "Voices In The Walls" wraps it up with a cool instrumental keyboard piece, the gothic organ-like keys glimmering in the darkness above the sound of a raging surf.
Really great stuff that fans of contempo morbid punk revivalists like Anasazi, Lost Tribe, Arctic Flowers, Deathcharge should check out, expecially those into the tougher, harder sounding end of the spectrum.
��Been looking forward to hearing this Baltimore-based band for awhile, as I'd heard that their live shows were pretty vicious. In fact, prior to picking up their EP, I had the impression they were going to be another competent black/thrash outfit, but the three songs featured here show something much uglier and much more interesting. Cemetery Piss's debut 7" Such The Vultures Love is a vicious slab of noisy, blackened grind with putrid guttural vocals doused in delay and echoing across the band's tinny, blown-out black blast. The music is relentless and supremely savage, the drumming rigid with it's almost mechanical sounding blastbeats, and they've got an awesome deformed guitar sound that is absolutely drenched in distorted static. There's a diseased, septic feel to all of this stuff, the sound of Darkthrone becoming fused to a barbaric grindcore assault. Guitars spew killer frostbitten riffs and dissonant leads all over the likes of "Corpses And Lye", while the short "Mitternacht" is an eerie, quasi-ambient piece made up of layered guitar squall and disembodied doom-laden guitars tumbling through the abyss, transforming into a all-too-short gust of filthy kosmische sound. And on the second side, "Such The Vultures Love" unleashes a longer blast of droning, drooling black metal with that heavy punk influence, laying on even more of the band's fetid, icy winterbreath across the song's galloping charge. Fantastic. Great Baizley-esque artwork on the sleeve, too.
�� Released in a limited edition of three hundred copies on urine-yellow vinyl.
In my mind, 1992's The Gloomy Reflection Of Our Hidden Sorrows is a masterpiece of delirious, lysergic Mexican death metal, operating on a strange and hallucinatory level while bludgeoning you with remarkable gargantuan heaviness. I fucking love The Gloomy Reflection Of Our Hidden Sorrows, and it's newly reissued on vinyl via The Crypt in a couple of different colors, featuring the nine-song track list that includes the "bonus" track "Repulsive Odor Of Decomposition". This is one of those 90s-era death metal albums that I've been wanting to write about for years, a standout slab of unique and genuinely otherworldly sounding crush that exudes an unusual, off-kilter vibe that I don't think I've ever really heard anywhere else. It's also a pretty obscure entry in the field, with some mainly knowing it for the presence of Daniel Corchado (The Chasm, Incantation) on vocals and bass. But this one stands out on its own, and anyone hooked on old-school doom-death and the weirder edges of 90s death should be aiming their ears at this STAT.
The band was vocal in their collective intent to create an album that emanated a tangible, eerie darkness and sense of claustrophobia, the lyrics drawing from states of psychological suffering and "spiritual death", but through an innovative perspective - and Gloomy delivered. Like the killer sleeve art from Polish artist Ryszard Wojtynski suggests, the whole thing feels like it could have been forged in the fires of a heavy psilocybin experience. Lush orchestral keyboards sweep across the opening to "Requiem For A Soul Request" as the band unfurls a gloomy, lumbering doom-death dirge crawling with strange dissonant guitar leads and spidery, at times impossibly tangled fretwork. It shifts between that monstrous, creepy crush and bursts of tectonic double bass and sudden chaotic speed, moving into the thundering thrash of "Ashes In The Rain"; the vocals are deep, somewhat buried, and slightly shrouded in reverb, adding to the strange ambience that Cenotaph cultivates across the entire album. Tempos are constantly, violently shifting, and those guitars continue to sprawl out with alien-sounding arpeggios and cacophonic solos, further revealing a kind of demented progginess that lurks deep beneath the surface of the music, surfacing more and more as it progresses. Especially on tracks like "...A Red Sky". Brutish bass guitar breaks through moments of the grungy, subterranean atmosphere with unusual melodies and some seriously rad technical playing, often prominently placed in the mix, with the rhythm section really standing out with their abrupt, almost chaotic attack. It's ruthless in its heaviosity, but Cenotaph incorporate these moments of complexity and whacked-out song structures that build on the whole otherworldly climate of Gloomy. Amid the grinding, bludgeoning heaviness, it constantly surprises: the bizarre ambient murk that starts off "Evoked Doom", the sickly horror-film synths and berserk, totally ghastly-sounding atonal shred of "Tenebrous Apparitions", the ritual chanting and synthesizer blurts within "The Spiritless One", delicate, spooky acoustic guitar floating over the volcanic double-bass drumming of the instrumental "Infinite Meditation Of An Uncertain Existence".
Again, I worship this album. I mean, this has everything a devotee of "OSDM" generally looks for. There is thrashing old-school death galore, and more steamrolling doom-laden riffs than you can count. But it remains unique. Distinctly "proggy" at times, in their own peculiar, deformed way. Obvious comparisons can be made to the profoundly ominous, weirdly technical energy of early Morbid Angel and Incantation, but better reference points, albeit more aura than aural, is the equally hallucinatory death found in contemporary eccentrics Transgressor ( Ether for Scapegoat ) and early Atrocity (circa 1990's Hallucinations and 1992's Todessehnsucht). If those albums cast their spell on you, Cenotaph's debut is a recommended experience.
The Crypt's new vinyl reissue features classic black vinyl (in an edition of two hundred copies) alongside a super-limited edition of one hundred copies on "Ice Blue" vinyl, and includes a 12" by 12" lyric / photo insert and an 11" x 17" poster with a 2020 interview with the band on the back side.
In my mind, 1992's The Gloomy Reflection Of Our Hidden Sorrows is a masterpiece of delirious, lysergic Mexican death metal, operating on a strange and hallucinatory level while bludgeoning you with remarkable gargantuan heaviness. I fucking love The Gloomy Reflection Of Our Hidden Sorrows, and it's newly reissued on vinyl via The Crypt in a couple of different colors, featuring the nine-song track list that includes the "bonus" track "Repulsive Odor Of Decomposition". This is one of those 90s-era death metal albums that I've been wanting to write about for years, a standout slab of unique and genuinely otherworldly sounding crush that exudes an unusual, off-kilter vibe that I don't think I've ever really heard anywhere else. It's also a pretty obscure entry in the field, with some mainly knowing it for the presence of Daniel Corchado (The Chasm, Incantation) on vocals and bass. But this one stands out on its own, and anyone hooked on old-school doom-death and the weirder edges of 90s death should be aiming their ears at this STAT.
The band was vocal in their collective intent to create an album that emanated a tangible, eerie darkness and sense of claustrophobia, the lyrics drawing from states of psychological suffering and "spiritual death", but through an innovative perspective - and Gloomy delivered. Like the killer sleeve art from Polish artist Ryszard Wojtynski suggests, the whole thing feels like it could have been forged in the fires of a heavy psilocybin experience. Lush orchestral keyboards sweep across the opening to "Requiem For A Soul Request" as the band unfurls a gloomy, lumbering doom-death dirge crawling with strange dissonant guitar leads and spidery, at times impossibly tangled fretwork. It shifts between that monstrous, creepy crush and bursts of tectonic double bass and sudden chaotic speed, moving into the thundering thrash of "Ashes In The Rain"; the vocals are deep, somewhat buried, and slightly shrouded in reverb, adding to the strange ambience that Cenotaph cultivates across the entire album. Tempos are constantly, violently shifting, and those guitars continue to sprawl out with alien-sounding arpeggios and cacophonic solos, further revealing a kind of demented progginess that lurks deep beneath the surface of the music, surfacing more and more as it progresses. Especially on tracks like "...A Red Sky". Brutish bass guitar breaks through moments of the grungy, subterranean atmosphere with unusual melodies and some seriously rad technical playing, often prominently placed in the mix, with the rhythm section really standing out with their abrupt, almost chaotic attack. It's ruthless in its heaviosity, but Cenotaph incorporate these moments of complexity and whacked-out song structures that build on the whole otherworldly climate of Gloomy. Amid the grinding, bludgeoning heaviness, it constantly surprises: the bizarre ambient murk that starts off "Evoked Doom", the sickly horror-film synths and berserk, totally ghastly-sounding atonal shred of "Tenebrous Apparitions", the ritual chanting and synthesizer blurts within "The Spiritless One", delicate, spooky acoustic guitar floating over the volcanic double-bass drumming of the instrumental "Infinite Meditation Of An Uncertain Existence".
Again, I worship this album. I mean, this has everything a devotee of "OSDM" generally looks for. There is thrashing old-school death galore, and more steamrolling doom-laden riffs than you can count. But it remains unique. Distinctly "proggy" at times, in their own peculiar, deformed way. Obvious comparisons can be made to the profoundly ominous, weirdly technical energy of early Morbid Angel and Incantation, but better reference points, albeit more aura than aural, is the equally hallucinatory death found in contemporary eccentrics Transgressor ( Ether for Scapegoat ) and early Atrocity (circa 1990's Hallucinations and 1992's Todessehnsucht). If those albums cast their spell on you, Cenotaph's debut is a recommended experience.
The Crypt's new vinyl reissue features classic black vinyl (in an edition of two hundred copies) alongside a super-limited edition of one hundred copies on "Ice Blue" vinyl, and includes a 12" by 12" lyric / photo insert and an 11" x 17" poster with a 2020 interview with the band on the back side.
Issued by the French label Paradise Noise, Desolate is a new album from a little-known power trio from Ohio called Centrifuge that have been creating a dark and hypnotic brand of trippy space-doom for a couple of years now; actually, these cats have been at it since 1995, quietly releasing demos in the regional metal/skuzz underground and playing around their home town area, keeping a low profile in the underground metal scene at large but knocking out some interesting and peculiar heaviness that (like a lot of bands from this particular area) blur together a couple of different styles/sounds into something bludgeoning and intimate. Personally, I hadn't heard of Centrifuge until I stumbled across an interview the band did on the Hellride website that piqued my interest, and further investigation into 'em revealed a new album that just came out earlier in summer '07. To date, this looks like the last thing that the band has released, although it would appear that they are still active in the industrial wastes of Ohio.
So you get five songs on this disc, and they get pretty long as the band has a tendency to jam out on extended minimalist riffs and stretched out psychedelic solos. Centrifuge are pretty crushing amidst all of their meandering though, stripping their stuff down to a spartan selection of heavy, pummeling riffs and machine-like drumming that sometimes gives it an almost Godflesh / Head Of David post-punk infected industrial-metal vibe, which of course scratches one of my primary itches. At the same time though, there's a more prominent combo of Sabbath / Vitus / Obsessed-style old-school doom, with the offbeat old-school Ozzy-esque vocals diffused to an icy chant, piling on lots of percussive riff hammering reminiscent of both Helmet and Fudge Tunnel, and even a faintest hint of primal deathdoom in the Peaceville tradition. Like I said, it's a bit of a mishmash, but Centrifuge melt it all together nicely.
And again, there's that raw psychedelic quality to some of the guitar-work that additionally twists everything. Things get especially epic-sounding when the guitarist wails those wandering, ethereal space rock leads that slowly rise and dissipate into the darkness, while the rhythm section is just fuckin' grinding out these burly, skull-bashing grooves. Really been digging this disc, with its early/mid 90's vibe that echoes that moment in time when some great, underrated heaviness had been coming out from the nether regions between pigfuck, doom rock, and more abrasive strains of metal.
Albums like Lucid Interval and Exploiting Dysfunction put Cephalic Carnage in the upper echelons of death/grind, so when Willowtip put out this EP back in 2002, the unexpected downshift in speed threw everyone for a loop. Known for playing complex and hyper-labyrinthine grind, these pot-fueled Colorado grind maniacs pulled a total 180 and headed straight into doom metal territory for this nineteen-minute track. It was originally slated to be the first in a three-part series that ultimately never happened, and Halls of Amenti eventually went out of print. Relapse has just reissued the disc, packaging it in a full color digipack and dropping the killer clear-disc layered layout of the original, but it's enough just to have this slab of mutant doom back in print after all of these years.
"Halls Of Amenti" starts as a creeping Sabbathian plod, massive doom metal riffage with ultra-deep monstrous vokills, but six minutes in, everything falls away and is replaced by haunting clean vocal harmonies, acoustic strum, a minimal doom riff in the background; it's almost folky sounding for a moment, but then the whole band crashes back in with a tangled frenzy of somber folk melody, chaotic drumming, those moaning vocals layered with deeper deathgrowls, the sound shifting back and forth between the crushing doom and the eerie psych-flecked strum, bits of electronic glitch flittering at the edges. After a minute or two the music once again falls away into minimal drone, then the doom drops in once again, crashing through the stillness, rising into a vicious psychotic doomdirge, a mass of wailing vocals and monstrous growls and massive doomdeath, eventually moving into a hectic, mathy angular math-sludge workout of stuttering riffage and vaguely martial rhythms, droning electronic noise and effects becoming more and more prominent, in the end finally turning this into a freaked-out electronics-infested angular sludge freak-out fading away into nothingness...
At the time, not at all what I would have expected from these guys, an Ep that's aligned with the ultra-slow sludge of Corrupted, Esoteric, Bunkur, Thergothon and Skepticism, but since the original release of Halls Of Amenti, they've continued to explore the slower, more doom-influenced side of their music (though nothing has been as snaillike and doomed as this disc!).
Released in 1998 on Italian grindcore label Headfucker Records, the debut album from Denver's demented, pot-smoking tech-jazz-death-grind freakoids Cephalic Carnage was often unavailable to those of us here in the US for long stretches of time due to spotty distribution; eventually, the album was reissued in a remastered version by Relapse with some bonus tracks added on, and the new version sounds fantastic. I just came across a couple copies in our warehouse of the Subordinate/Headfucker release however, which might be of interest to collectors; this version, which is apparently now out of print from the label, features two tracks from their split with Impaled ("Observer to the Obliteration of Earth" and "Regurgitation Adnauseam and Fecal Decay") that don't appear on the current Relapse reissue. Here's the original review that I wrote for the album years ago when we first got the Headfucker release in stock :
This is the dizzying debut full length from Colorado hydro-grinders Cephalic Carnage, reissued by the Italian label Subordinate. Even on their first album, Cephalic were aeons ahead of the rest of the grindcore scene, combining ultra-lethal blastbeat action and chainsaw riffage with a bizarre combo of jazz breakdowns and electronic noise that comes from out of nowhere. The guitar playing and song structures brandish skull-melting technicality, yet the band manages to invest killer hooks and catchy riffs in all of their songs. The drumming is positively octopoid, and it takes multiple listens to Conforming to Abnormality to be able to follow everything going on behind the kit. Lenzig�s multi-faceted vocals range from inhuman death metal bellows to insane monkey shrieks and the band employs some unpredictable production techniques like sub-bass drops and fucked-up electronic break beats that take this way out of the parameters of traditional death/grind. Critically acclaimed upon its release, it�s good to have this seminal blast of experimental grind available again. Essential for fans of hyperblasting, dopesmoking, fucked-up hydro math grind...
Here's an older EP from Cerebral Turbulency that's been kind of hard to find - I just picked up a small quantity of these and it's doubtful I'll be able to get any more once these are gone. If you've been following the underground grind scene for the past couple of years, you might have noticed that the Czech Republic has produced some of the weirdest grindcore bands around...T.O.O.H., Pigsty, Contrastic, Alienation Mental, Lykathea Aflame, and Mincing Fury And Gutteral Clamour Of Queer Decay all ranks as some of the most fucked up, bizarre grindcore bands you'll ever wrap your eardrums around. It seems like the Czech grind scene is pretty open to experimentation and incorporating elements like sampling, electronics, jazz and funk (!), etc., into their music. So here we've got another Czech grind band, Cerebral Turbulency, and yes, they are every bit as crazed, hypercreative, and brutal as I was hoping they would be before I actually heard 'em. Germ Of Error is a 13 song EP that came out on the Czech label Khaaranus a couple of years ago, most of the songs are mach 10 blasters that run an average of a minute and a half, classic grindcore style, with tricky riffing and deep gutteral roars trading off with high pitched shrieking. But these guys graft some shit onto their grind that I was not expecting at all...weird electronic sampling, soaring stoner rock solos, DJ scratching, vocals manipulated into gross textures, flashes of breakbeats, epic vocal harmonies that sound like Gregorian chants being recited over punishing Napalm Death riffage, awesome 8-bit sounding synths accompanying the chugging guitars...and TONS of cowbell! Seriously, the drummer is nailing that cowbell seemingly every couple of seconds. And the drumming overall on here is insane, with tons of complex, chaotic fills and blastbeats. There are also some slower, grooving riffs and percussive rhythms that come together into something that sounds kinda close to later Sepultura or even Soulfly; I wouldn't actually call these occasional grooving parts "nu-metal", some of those parts sound more like System Of A Down mixed with brutal deathgrind, but obviously grind fans with a high aversion to groove should take note. To me, they just add to the general state of fucked-upedness on this disc. Closest thing I can compare Cerebral Turbulency to is a funkier, more experimental, more stoned version of Disassociate.
��Been dyin' to get this bands stuff in for the shop, but they're releases have been extremely difficult for me to track down until now. After releasing a couple of rare cassettes and 7" EPs in the early/mid 1990s under the name Chaos C.H. (such as the much sought after Serve You Right and Just Say No! EPs on Overthrow Records), the Japanese band Chaos Channel seemed to drop right off the face of the earth. Hardly forgotten, though; the band left behind a small body of work that over time garnered a cult following among fans of noise-damaged hardcore and psychedelic punk, especially those obsessed with that uniquely Japanese strain of blown-out mutant hardcore perfected by the likes of Confuse and Disclose; I think the first that I became aware of Chaos Channel was after seeing all kinds of praise on their early releases by Sean "Seanocide" Hogan in his Damaging Noise zine. Fifteen years after their last release, Chaos Channel suddenly reappeared in 2009 and began to release all new material, one of which is the weirdly titled (Magic Bullet) That Works To Feed The Pig, a new 7" EP that comes to us from American label SPHC, which is turning into the go-to imprint here in the U.S. for the best noise-punk / psychedelic hardcore / weirdo grindcore currently seeping up out of the international punk underground. This is ferocious stuff, the a-side "The Bird, Singing At Non-Reality" delivering a blast of blistering hardcore, all super-distorted catchy guitars bathed in paint-scraping distortion and those weird yowling semi-monotone vocals, the drummer rolling and rumbling and churning with his fast paced tribal beats and pounding, speed-fueled tempos. The song keep starting and stopping, shifting haphazardly from that speedy brain-damaged punk into short bursts of ambient noise and whirring feedback. On the other side, "New Stupid Piece Of Shit, That Doesn't Fuckin' Work" starts off like its going to be some sort of weird Japanese pop song, but quickly reasserts itself as pummeling hardcore as the band hurtles into another speedy rolling punk blast. And man, those lyrics are some of the wildest I've read off of a punk record sleeve, a total Dadaist word jumble, all surrealistic weirdness whose confusion is further amplified once you start to read through the band's equally bizarre liner notes. If you've been faithfully following the SPHC label and noise-punk in general, you already know to check this out.
Available on both gatefold CD, and a stunning deluxe 2xLP edition that comes in a thick case-wrapped gatefold jacket with a foldout color poster, a massive twenty-page LP sized booklet, and an obi strip.
Ever since being announced late last year, this new album from weirdo French deathdoom outfit Chaos Echoes has been eagerly awaited around the C-Blast office. These guys had already started to garner some buzz around their earlier EPs, and their first proper full length was being touted as one of the more unusual and avant-garde releases to come from Nuclear War Now this year. And they weren't foolin' - Transient emanates a mysterious, narcotic vibe that's quite unlike anything else to come from the esteemed underground metal label, an intoxicating blend of droning chthonic deathdoom, roiling blackened death metal, and ritualistic sun-blasted ambience that sweeps across the beginning of the album like the sounds of a deathcult procession making it's way through a sweltering bazaar. The sounds of chimes and ringing feedback lilts over the steadily encroaching waves of down-tuned heaviness, but when the band finally kicks into "Senses of the Nonexistent", they unleash a haltingly syncopated doom-dirge that moves in long strides over the lockstep pummel of the rhythm section and a chorus of distant chanting.
The album settles quickly into that ritualized atmosphere, unfolding like a monstrous droning doom-trance, inexorably growing in force and expanding in rhythmic power, and I'm reminded of both the occult Hawkwindian hypno-sludge of Saturnalia Temple and the krautrock-influenced black throb of Aluk Todolo while listening to this, echoing in the way that these Frenchmen grind out their fearsome, repetitious heaviness. That opening track flows right into the next, paving the way for a sprawling multi-part epic, the music drifting from out of that monstrous grinding deathdoom into dense fields of psychedelic guitar drone and rumbling black drift, long stretches of feedback-drenched ambience and Earth-en amplifier roar cutting huge swathes through the album as they lead into more of that titanic slow-moving metallic crush. The doom-laden riffs often fray apart into swells of swarming blackened buzz or howling psych-shred, then swallowed up in a churning maelstrom of dragged-out blackened riffage and mournful sub-blasted dirge. Later on, they lavish the churning rhythmic workout that dominates the nearly fifteen minute "Advent of My Genesis" with druggy Hammond organs, and blur into a strange, almost Penderecki-esque field of dissonant modern classical darkness that comes out of the cyclonic blasting chaos. Along with that killer Hammond accompaniment, the band also makes use of synthesizers and electric piano, adding additional sonic textures and swells of sinister jazziness to their hallucinatory assault, even dipping into almost Sunn-like experimental soundscapery at times. And the closer is Transient's shining moment, a long and labyrinthine descent into the depths of blackened prog called "Soul Ruiner" that sounds for all the world like a black metal-tinged Univers Zero track, complex rhythmic interplay and off-kilter time signatures meeting grinding minor key riffage and spiraling guitars, croaked demonic vocals billowing through a black fog amid blasts of terrifying feedback and amp rumble, eventually mutating into a frenzy of blastbeats and droning tremolo riffs, prayer bells and dazed chanting that stretches like a mass of black tendrils through the close of the album. A stunner.
Available on both gatefold CD, and a stunning deluxe 2xLP edition that comes in a thick case-wrapped gatefold jacket with a foldout color poster, a massive twenty-page LP sized booklet, and an obi strip.
Ever since being announced late last year, this new album from weirdo French deathdoom outfit Chaos Echoes has been eagerly awaited around the C-Blast office. These guys had already started to garner some buzz around their earlier EPs, and their first proper full length was being touted as one of the more unusual and avant-garde releases to come from Nuclear War Now this year. And they weren't foolin' - Transient emanates a mysterious, narcotic vibe that's quite unlike anything else to come from the esteemed underground metal label, an intoxicating blend of droning chthonic deathdoom, roiling blackened death metal, and ritualistic sun-blasted ambience that sweeps across the beginning of the album like the sounds of a deathcult procession making it's way through a sweltering bazaar. The sounds of chimes and ringing feedback lilts over the steadily encroaching waves of downtuned heaviness, but when the band finally kicks into "Senses of the Nonexistent", they unleash a haltingly syncopated doom-dirge that moves in long strides over the lockstep pummel of the rhythm section and a chorus of distant chanting.
The album settles quickly into that ritualized atmosphere, unfolding like a monstrous droning doom-trance, inexorably growing in force and expanding in rhythmic power, and I'm reminded of both the occult Hawkwindian hypno-sludge of Saturnalia Temple and the krautrock-influenced black throb of Aluk Todolo while listening to this, echoing in the way that these Frenchmen grind out their fearsome, repetitious heaviness. That opening track flows right into the next, paving the way for a sprawling multi-part epic, the music drifting from out of that monstrous grinding deathdoom into dense fields of psychedelic guitar drone and rumbling black drift, long stretches of feedback-drenched ambience and Earth-en amplifier roar cutting huge swathes through the album as they lead into more of that titanic slow-moving metallic crush. The doom-laden riffs often fray apart into swells of swarming blackened buzz or howling psych-shred, then swallowed up in a churning maelstrom of dragged-out blackened riffage and mournful sub-blasted dirge. Later on, they lavish the churning rhythmic workout that dominates the nearly fifteen minute "Advent of My Genesis" with druggy Hammond organs, and blur into a strange, almost Penderecki-esque field of dissonant modern classical darkness that comes out of the cyclonic blasting chaos . Along with that killer Hammond accompaniment, the band also makes use of synthesizers and electric piano, adding additional sonic textures and swells of sinister jazziness to their hallucinatory assault, even dipping into almost Sunn-like experimental soundscapery at times. And the closer is Transient's shining moment, a long and labyrinthine descent into the depths of blackened prog called "Soul Ruiner" that sounds for all the world like a black metal-tinged Univers Zero track, complex rhythmic interplay and off-kilter time signatures meeting grinding minor key riffage and spiraling guitars, croaked demonic vocals billowing through a black fog amid blasts of terrifying feedback and amp rumble, eventually mutating into a frenzy of blastbeats and droning tremolo riffs, prayer bells and dazed chanting that stretches like a mass of black tendrils through the close of the album. Awesome.
Now available as a deluxe double cassette set from Utech, presented in a clamshell plastic case with full color j-card cover, an obi strip, and a printed insert with new artwork exclusive to this version, printed on pearl metallic stock and issued in a limited run of three hundred copies.
Ever since being announced late last year, this new album from weirdo French deathdoom outfit Chaos Echoes has been eagerly awaited around the C-Blast office. These guys had already started to garner some buzz around their earlier EPs, and their first proper full length was being touted as one of the more unusual and avant-garde releases to come from Nuclear War Now this year. And they weren't foolin' - Transient emanates a mysterious, narcotic vibe that's quite unlike anything else to come from the esteemed underground metal label, an intoxicating blend of droning chthonic deathdoom, roiling blackened death metal, and ritualistic sun-blasted ambience that sweeps across the beginning of the album like the sounds of a deathcult procession making it's way through a sweltering bazaar. The sounds of chimes and ringing feedback lilts over the steadily encroaching waves of downtuned heaviness, but when the band finally kicks into "Senses of the Nonexistent", they unleash a haltingly syncopated doom-dirge that moves in long strides over the lockstep pummel of the rhythm section and a chorus of distant chanting.
The album settles quickly into that ritualized atmosphere, unfolding like a monstrous droning doom-trance, inexorably growing in force and expanding in rhythmic power, and I'm reminded of both the occult Hawkwindian hypno-sludge of Saturnalia Temple and the krautrock-influenced black throb of Aluk Todolo while listening to this, echoing in the way that these Frenchmen grind out their fearsome, repetitious heaviness. That opening track flows right into the next, paving the way for a sprawling multi-part epic, the music drifting from out of that monstrous grinding deathdoom into dense fields of psychedelic guitar drone and rumbling black drift, long stretches of feedback-drenched ambience and Earth-en amplifier roar cutting huge swathes through the album as they lead into more of that titanic slow-moving metallic crush. The doom-laden riffs often fray apart into swells of swarming blackened buzz or howling psych-shred, then swallowed up in a churning maelstrom of dragged-out blackened riffage and mournful sub-blasted dirge. Later on, they lavish the churning rhythmic workout that dominates the nearly fifteen minute "Advent of My Genesis" with druggy Hammond organs, and blur into a strange, almost Penderecki-esque field of dissonant modern classical darkness that comes out of the cyclonic blasting chaos . Along with that killer Hammond accompaniment, the band also makes use of synthesizers and electric piano, adding additional sonic textures and swells of sinister jazziness to their hallucinatory assault, even dipping into almost Sunn-like experimental soundscapery at times. And the closer is Transient's shining moment, a long and labyrinthine descent into the depths of blackened prog called "Soul Ruiner" that sounds for all the world like a black metal-tinged Univers Zero track, complex rhythmic interplay and off-kilter time signatures meeting grinding minor key riffage and spiraling guitars, croaked demonic vocals billowing through a black fog amid blasts of terrifying feedback and amp rumble, eventually mutating into a frenzy of blastbeats and droning tremolo riffs, prayer bells and dazed chanting that stretches like a mass of black tendrils through the close of the album. Awesome.
Ars Magna, along with God Is Myth and Autopsy Kitchen, has become one of my favorite labels dealing in underground black metal, and the latest batch of
releases we've gotten from them has been amazing across the board...Valhom, Trist, Procer Veneficus, Zargof, Black Hole Generator, all awesome and unique
pushers of total blackness. But Chaos Moon might be my favorite album from the label to date, and it certainly had me completely freaking the fuck out the
first time I played this in the C-Blast warehouse. When it comes to black metal, I'm automatically drawn to anything that has any kind of psychedelic quality
to it, and the first thing that struck me about Chaos Moon is how fucking awesome their logo is. What can I say, I'm from the old guard. If I haven't heard a
band before but they have a kickass album cover or a freaking rad logo, you're going to pique my attention. Anyways, yeah, Chaos Moon's logo rules,
it's in total opposition to the spiky, unintelligible logo aesthetic that most BM bands use. While their logo is just as impossible to decipher, it's a
gooey, tentacled piece of artwork that looks more like comic book title lettering or an image from a Call Of Cthulhu art poster than a black metal
band logo. Awesome. How does the music stack up? Total melodic holocaust. Chaos Moon's guitars are razor sharp shred, tempos range from loping midtempo to
hyperspeed blasting, and the vocals are freaked-out, run through ridiculous amounts of delay and echoing all over the place, giving the songs an added
trippiness, and the use of synthesizers here is way beyond the norm. Blazing blackened riffery often flows into epic dark ambient parts with slowly swirling
layers of drone that approach Troum-levels of dark blissful beauty, but man, it's the guitar melodies on Languor that just destroy. The
first half of the album is all speedfreak velocity and psychotic thrashing until the seven minute dronewave that closes out "Simulcrum Of Mirrors" halfway
through the album. But after that, the songs suddenly become so majestically melodic that they start to sound like a way more ferocious Velvet Caccoon. Like
in "The Palterer", with it's glorious poppy melody at the core of a frenzied black metal attack with the vocals suddenly screaming into meltdown mode,
sounding somewhat like Corporate Death from Macabre, and then the song suddenly turns into a heartwrenching beautiful dreampop jam, total 4AD style? Amazing.
That's followed by "Hymn To Iniquity", the nearly 10-minute apex of the album, which kicks off in a dreamy black metal frenzy and then turns into the most
heavenly synthbliss shoegaze pop, like a song from The Cure's Disintegration fused with ripping black metal guitars and demonic shrieking, utterly
hellish and beautiful and MASSIVE. And it just gets even more beautiful and majestic with the closing track "Countless Reverie In Mare", a 12 minutes epic of
synth-heavy, doomy dreamy blackness, with a central melodic riff repeated over and over while piano melodies and thick washes of synthesizer and those
gnarled goblin shrieks swarm over it, later shifting into another impossibly emotional melodic riff even more gorgeous than the last. Another contender for
my favorite album of 2007. Anyone that is into this current wave of shoegaze/dreampop influenced black metal like Alcest, Amesoeurs, Caina, Lurker Of
Chalice, Procer Veneficus, you need to hear this album NOW. Highest recommendation.
Back in 1994, the San Francisco radio station KFJC hosted a one-off performance from a noise supergroup that centered around the intoxicating Mayuko Hino, former S&M actress and member of legendary Japanese psych-noise outfit C.C.C.C. Armed with sheet metal and contact mics and her imposing voice, Chaos Of The Night teamed Mayuko together with Mason Jones (Subarachnoid Space/Trance) on guitar, Elden M. (Allegory Chapel Ltd.) on sampler, and Monte Cazazza (of Industrial Records fame) on bass for a monstrous thirty-four minute jam that seriously holds it's own with the most pulverizing C.C.C.C. recordings, documented here on this disc from K.K. Null's esteemed (and sadly long-defunct) Endorphine Factory label. From the start, the artists blast a densely layered supernova of feedback and distortion that is filled with a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of warbling melodies, crushing distorted low-end, howling psych guitar screaming in primal ecstasy, and sweeping oscillating tones. Really massive, especially towards the last third when Mayuko's wailing vocals start to appear and the distortion seems to kick it up a notch for the last ten minutes as the piece erupts into pure chaotic bliss.
After that, we are treated to two shorter tracks that feature Mayuko partnered with just Mason Jones and Elden M., respectively. "Conscious" is a similiarly brutal wash of distortion and planet-wrecking psych guitar noise, and Mason unleashes a powerful wah-apocalypse over waves of whooshing feedback and ultra high end amplifier howl. Like the epic first jam, this is pure C.C.C.C. territory, the connection made concrete by having C.C.C.C. mastermind Hiroshi Hasegawa mixing the whole thing, and it ends in a crushing maelstrom of crunching guitar noise and Mayuko, heard from a far distance, screaming gibberish into the pit. The disc closes with "Refine", which by previous standards sounds almost "reserved" at times, with single manipulated sinewaves and oscillator fluctations breaking out into a solo, but these brief moments are obliterated by walls of meaty distorted crunch that ooze and pulsate inward while Elden M. streaks sped-up cassette noise into trippy swirls and trails through the massive buzzscape.
Released through the U.S. arm of Endorphine Factory, this brain-splattering slab of heavy psychedelic noise has been a tough one to come by in the years following it's 1995 release, but we've nabbed the last copies of this monster along with a handful of other Endorphine Factory titles - fans of C.C.C.C., extreme Japanese noise, Total, and psychedelic amplifier chaos should be putting their ears on this ASAP. The booklet contains insightful liner notes about the project that were written by Seymour Glass from Bananafish Magazine. Also notable is the surreal photo-collage from Monte Cazazza and Michelle Handelman titled Inside Herself that graces the cover, depicting a woman whose entire body has morphed into a huge vagina, out of which two hands are emerging to climb forth, Gozu-style.
A four-song EP that came out in 2006, Let Clarity Succumb from Chaos Moon seems to have been overlooked by alot of black metal fans, which is probably in large part due to the fact that the label Nails Of Christ that released this ended up going down the tubes not long after it came out. But this is one disc that fans of trippy uber-Satanic black metal really need to check out. Chaos Omen is the solo project of Necromorbus, aka Tore Stj�rna, who you might recognize as a former member of Funeral Mist, Ofermod, Watain, Blackwitch, doomsters Nex, and a host of other equally blackened outfits. For Chaos Moon, Necromorbus plays all of the instruments and delivers all of the vocals, and this four song/23 minute disc serves up a solid and ripping dose of raw Swedish black metal that reminds me a bit of Watain and Funeral Mist, sans FM's propensity for the abstract sound scupltures that they dole out on their albums, and at the same time I hear some of that progressive black metal of bands like Glorior Belli and Deathspell Omega in here as well. His vocals are hideous choking rasps run through a wall of delay FX and sent hurtling into the meatgrinder blastbeats and epic, textured black riffs that make up the songs "Glare As I Reveal", "To Admit And Allow", "Let Clarity Succumb", and "Old Wounds". There are some really cool riffs that break off into weird mathy forms or waltzy black rhythms and lush dissonant arpeggios, and these alternate with the more straightforward droning riffs and blazing tempos to excellent effect. Definitely one for fans of forward thinking black metal.
This
five-piece from Detroit bust out 10 songs of amped-up, stonerized boogie metal and goofy wordplay on Barnburner, which lays on the noise,
distortion, and crud nice n' thick. I hear a little Melvins in there, as well as the metallic riff-rawk of bands like Speedealer and Zeke, equal parts fast
paced destructo rock and sludgy dirtbag metal. Then halfway through, they start tripping out on an 8-minute slow burner called "Slow OJ" that starts out as a
shimmering cloud of dusty instrumental desert rock and then morphs into a monstrous, slooow sludge attack. Which is fucking killer. The last track "Black
Opium Fermata" is another skullcrusher, a spacey psychedelic devolution into extended blackended doomsludge that stretches out forever. "Retrocution" erupts
into a minute and a half of blazing speedmetal/boogie-blues churn. Other songs toss in Hammond organs, loungey jazz parts, and 80's ass-rock hooks of the
highest order. The whole thing smacks of a deepfried Mudhoney/Melvins mashup, goofy, weird and rocking as fuck.
Charnel House is a new Midwestern black metal-ish duo with a guy named Adam handling all of the instruments, and a girl named Hellfire on vocals, and they play a strange mixture of super low-fi warped nightmare blackened slowcore and primitive, psychedelic black metal that at times sounds like a blackdoom Mazzy Star. That sounds strange, but it's the one comparison that keeps entering my head every time that I listen to this Lp, the band's first. Released on Sygil, the small label operated by the guys in the equally damaged black/doom band OS, The Leprosy Of Unreality is scrawled in such a murky, low fi production that the music sounds as if its buried beneath years of dust and mold, the guitars washed out and buzzing in the background, the drums likewise murky and flat, but instead of merely sounding like a grungy basement recording, this sounds ancient and mysterious, warped by exposure to subterranean dampness and decay, as if the band was recorded playing in a hidden sub-basement, the recording captured on a moss-covered reel to reel. Then you have Hellfire's ghostly, narcoleptic voice, drifting across the album languidly, a disembodied moan trapped between worlds, sounding eerily like Hope Sandoval trapped in some musty underground tomb.
The album starts with "Law Of Opposites", a seriously detuned guitar grinding out a mangled doom riff, the sound steeped in murk and grime, the drums creeping slowly, barely noticeable in the background, playing a simple plodding backbeat as Hellfire's undead moan appears, swaddled in sepulchral reverb. This is one of the songs that makes me think of Mazzy Star; ghoulish, blackened, utterly creepy slowcore, like a skeletal low-fi doom version of Mazzy Star, ghostly and lingering, rumbling industrial noise off in the background, hissing cymbals drifting through massive reverb and cavernous echo. I could seriously listen to an entire album of this, but Charnel House have other ideas. The dolorous slowcore drift is ripped apart with the following track "Orison", a mangled low-fi instrumental black metal chaos, going from noisy blasting fury into off-kilter dissonant riffs, clanging noise rock guitars colliding over sloppy blastbeats, total frenzy, followed by another minimalist noisy black metal blast in "Paroxysm", where a chunky, doomy riff repeats itself endlessly over a blastbeat as Hellfire's ghostly cooing vocals drift back in, the song becoming creepy, abstract BM weirdness.
The second side tumbles further into abstract black murk. "Immolation" is another chaotic wash of dissonant guitars and stumbling blastbeats, those spooky vocals drifting like EVP, the track eventually breaking down into a dreamy, blackened dronescape. "Passage (Out from Illusion)" is pure black ambient drone, abstract guitar noise and cthonic drones burrowing beneath feedback hum and scraped strings, and the last song "Grave Digging", another instrumental, ends the album with one last hellswarm of blackened tremolo riffs and muffled, distant blastbeats, so far off and indistinct that you can barely make them out, just a thunderous rumbling on the periphery, a swirling, off-kilter black blast that almost sounds like something from Portal, but far murkier and more spectral...
Comes in a simple parchment cardstock jacket with high contrast black art, limited to 250 copies.
The follow-up to their debut Lp The Leprosy Of Unreality, Contagion brings us more of this Midwestern duo's murky frenzied barbarism, and it's even wilder this time around. When I wrote up their last album here at C-Blast, I described them as sounding a bit like a blackened doom version of Mazzy Star, but that's not quite as applicable here. The lineup is still the same, with singer Hellfire handling all of the vocals while Adam creates the music, but their sound is faster and more barbarous on Contagion, this woozy, deformed psychedelia that bears a vague resemblance to primitive black metal at the same time that the band buries themselves under a mountain of low-fi filth and abstracted heaviness.
A wave of black magma surges over the opening moments of "Prologue", as Hellfire coos and moans over the dissonant sludge, her soft tuneless singing drifting like wisps of ectoplasmic lunacy manifesting in the air above the slow motion trudge. Sounds a lot like Goslings, really, a messed-up dreamy wash of fractured sludgy heaviness and blackened noise. But then the band tears into the next song "Erosive", and everything changes substantially. Blastbeating drums race beneath murky sludgy black metal riffs, everything still extremely dissonant and buried under a heavy layer of sonic filth and rotting matter, Hellfire's washed-out voice lazily floating over the barbaric blackened thrash. It's incredibly messed-up but extremely intoxicating, a gluey mess of psychedelic black drone metal that is somehow really heavy and vicious sounding even with those cooing little girl vocals and the deliberate hazy, low-fi recording.
The whole album is just as abstract and atonal, the next song "Accipiter" beginning in a blur of minimal black metal riffing and slipshod blasting, but then it suddenly drops out as just a single slow pounding drum takes over and gauzy keyboard ambience drifts in alongside a haunting vocal melody, morphing the song into a strange lunar ritual, super minimal and eerie sounding as it stretches onward, till it finally explodes back into that barbaric noisy black metal. On "Statue", the duo slip into a stumbling doom-laden dirge that crawls along glacially, Hellfire's dreamy off-key vocals contrasting with the lurching diseased sludge that comes crumbling down around them. There's some weird industrial sounds that show up too, like the percussive clanking, abrasive noises and twisted guitar abuse on "Moonburnt" that becomes fused to the murky black blast. When the disc finishes with "Immolation II", it unleashes it's nosiest, most blown out song yet, a smeared mess of ethereal singing and thunderous thrashing drums, the guitars and other instruments rising and falling in massive waves of distortion and warped tremolo riffs, everything lost in a blizzard-blast delirium of volume and dissonance.
The disc comes in a hand-stamped Kraft gatefold jacket that includes a large full-color poster with the lyric sheet printed on the reverse. Issued in a limited edition of 250 copies.
� I've been under the sway of this strange, experimental black metal-ish duo since their The Leprosy Of Unreality 12", which introduced us to the Indiana-based band's weirdly ritualistic, intensely phantasmagoric blastprog a couple of years ago. Their previous efforts revealed a strange mixture of abstract, noisy doom and minimalist, barbaric black metal that seemed to combine the trancelike qualities of Von with a more psychedelic, almost krautrock-informed approach to rhythm and repetition. On Black Blood, though, Charnel House have moved even further out from the realm of black metal into something even more outre, a reckless improvisational streak appearing in the wild outbursts of chaotic drumming, and most interestingly, an unearthly vocal performance from singer Hellfire that brings a newfound feeling of being trapped between worlds while listening to their recordings, her wraithlike moan much more prominent in the mix compared to past releases, her wail heavily layered and processed, cloaked in heavy reverb and echo but spreading out with the surreal, dreamlike lyrics like a black fog all across the recording.
� The opening song "Deathliness" comes in on a cloud of blackened amp-drone and sparse, almost martial snare drums, as Hellfire's delirious, witch-like coo drifts overhead, the sound super creepy and hypnotic. Lashes of searing distorted guitar and tangles of percussive chaos briefly appear against the midnight thrum of the band's blown-out trance-rock, suddenly lurching into barbaric blastbeat passages, the drumming loose and propulsive, sometimes settling into a strange, almost krautrock-like rhythmic loop. Elsewhere, the band weaves together murky recordings of traditional Native American song and blaring blackened noise, erupting into odd blastbeat-driven rhythmic workouts swirling with those ghostly, monotonous vocals, then breaking down into sparse abstract doom, the rumbling low-end heaviness giving way to blurts of discordant tuneless guitar. The riffs are mostly simple and atonal, jagged and ugly chunks of distorted crunch that lock into loopy circular riffs around those relentless pounding drums. The songs suddenly stop and start back up again unexpectedly, the wailing ethereal vocals continuing to drift over top even when the music abruptly lurches to a halt and we're left with nothing but some ghostly, minimal hum hovering in the blackness. The first song on the B-side "When You Become" expands the sound a little further, adding bits of eerie piano and murky samples to the rumbling, mesmeric blast, the drums slipping into another one of their extended rhythmic loops, losing himself in the repetitive locked-groove blast for a bit, before shifting into even more violent tempos. There are bits of creepy, detuned minor key guitar that show up on "Sewn Shut", and later on, ashes of chiming tones bookend passages of lurching, noisy doom-dirge, a kind of fucked-up blackened noise rock that surfaces towards the end of the record.
� There's a strange, decrepit feel to Charnel House's music; at times, this seems to tap into a similar charred blackened hypno-groove as France's Aluk Todolo, but there's a uniquely cracked, otherworldly feel that makes this really unique. Released in a limited hand-numbered edition of two hundred copies, Black Blood comes in a striking black and white silk-screened sleeve, and includes a code for a digital copy of the album.
This Swedish band brings one of the oddest albums of the week. It had been awhile since I had picked up anything new from the Swedish label Ominous Recordings, who had released some excellent releases from Conversations About The Light and Diagnose: Lebensgefahr in the past that we've carried. After getting back in touch with the label recently, I found out about this album from a band called Charons Nymfer, which apparently featured the band taking old Swedish music and reshaping it into their own sound. I still haven't been able to learn much about who this band is, or how many other releases they have out, but after I finally got my hands on Se Doden..., I'm pretty hooked. The band uses guitar and bass but instead of a drummer they employ a drum machine, which gives their music a distinct post-punk/industrial feel, but their music is tougher to catagorize than that. All of the songs are taken from the eighteenth century Swedish songwriter Carl Micahel Bellman, who seems to be loved by a wider section of the Swedish metal underground as his songs have been covered in the past by both black metallers Marduk and doom legends Candlemass. Charon Nymfer take it a step further though by paying homage to Bellman with an entire album of interpretations of his music. I'm not familiar with Bellman's music, but it's safe to say that these versions sound very little like the original songs, and instead have been reshaped into Charon Nymfer's bizarre image much like how Dead Raven Choir mutates traditional folk music on their albums. The music is a weird mixture of Bellman's beerhall melodies fused with melancholic Swedish psychedelia, psych-folk strum tethered to plodding drum machine beats, murky trip-hop, distorted acid rock guitars, fractured industrial breakbeats, awesome Yngwie-like shredding, samples of howling wolves, fuzz-soaked doom riffage, even some weird industrialized black metal that appears briefly. If it sounds like a weird mix, it most definitely is, but it all works due to the inventive arrangements and the strength of the source material. It's also really goofy, because c'mon, it sounds like melancholy traditional drinking songs morphed into a lysergic experimental psych/industrial/metal mashup, but in spite of the weird concept, all of these songs are surprisingly catchy and accessible. Trying to come up with some kind of reference point for this stuff is pretty tough, though...the clostest thing that I can even think of might be a cross between Dungen and the newer trip-hop infected futurist-metal of Manes, maybe? Weird stuff!
Here's another killer new vinyl reissue from power-violence/experimental hardcore pioneers Man Is The Bastard, a 7" Ep that collects the bands sides from their long-out-of-print and highly sought-after early split 7"s with Pink Turds In Space (where the band went under their original name Charred Remains) and the later split with U.N.D. that explored their harsh electronic noise experiments. It's all presented with a killer new design that features a number of printed inserts with the original collage art and Morbid Mark's iconic cover art for the Charred Remains 7".
Re-titled 'First Music', the tracks off of the split with Pink Turds In Space are the earliest recordings from Charred Remains/Man Is The Bastard, and man do they crush. "The Arena" bulldozes over you with crushing, cast-iron riffs and crawling tempos, displaying the band at their slowest and most monstrous, the angular sludge shooting out spikes of jagged bass guitar and weird time-signature shifts; the other three tracks "Eunich", "No Concern For The Inhuman" and "Refuse To Thrive" are blasting, super-fast chunks of mutoid hardcore, all churning obtuse riffing and bestial roaring, the songs collapsing into barbarism in thirty seconds or less. An awesome blast of early power-violence.
The other side features the Man Is The Bastard: Bastard Noise tracks from the 1993 split with Unseen Noise Death (the Finnish band that would later turn into the noisecore outfit Arse); the first recorded appearance of Bastard Noise's "caveman electronics" assault, these four noise tracks are relatively short soundscapes formed from the band's unique rig of oscillators and effects processors that they use to summon up great swarms of carnivorous electronic noise, masses of chirping, squealing feedback issued out in steady streams of sound. There's a few brief detours in bass-driven heaviness that occur and deep, guttural vocals appear on some of the tracks, but this is primarily an exercise in apocalyptic electronic carnage.
���The latest in a steady stream of vinyl reissues of early Man Is The Bastard recordings that have been pouring out of the vaults over at Deep Six; this 7" resurrects Charred Remains/Man Is The Bastard's 1992 EP Backwards Species, which had originally come out on the German label Ecocentric Records, the hallowed hardcore/noise imprint run by Matthias Weigand of Seven Minutes Of Nausea. The EP was eventually included on the CD collection D.I.Y.C.D. that Deep Six did, but it hasn't been available on vinyl in years. At last back in print in its original form, this reissue retains the same sleeve and insert design as the original release.
��� It's one of the earliest recordings from Man Is The Bastard, seven songs of brutal powerviolence featuring the band's signature mix of technical riffs played by two bass guitars, oddball, prog-damaged arrangements, guttural beast-shrieks and blasting percussion that still doesn't sound like any other band. The EP kicks off with the mathy, angular hardcore of instrumental "Ether Rag (Permanent Smile)", then proceeds to blast through another six songs of complex bass-heavy hardcore and lurching weirdness, short eruptions of convoluted bass crush and odd time signatures, the songs careening between stretches of bludgeoning slow-motion power and surges of hyperspeed blast, while vocalist/bassist Eric Wood belts out his hateful anti-human screeds in that barbaric guttural roar of his, the songs slathered in abrasive noise, the tone utterly belligerent. Tracks like "Justice Is Swift (Jack)" more resembling some maniacal version of Nomeansno's progpunk, and it closes with a horrific industrial deathscape "Poacher" that hints at their later noise experiments under the Bastard Noise name. As with the rest of the band's output, this is some of most deranged and crushing avant-hardcore ever. Classic Skull-violence.
More electro-shock sludgeblast resurrection as another one of Man Is The Bastard's earliest releases gets the vinyl reissue treatment from Deep Six. This new edition of Abundance Of Guns transplants the ten tracks off of the original 1992 7" EP onto a ten-incher for enhanced sound quality, and it sounds massive. This stuff is some of the most brutal stuff that Man Is The Bastard ever produced, in my book.
Beginning with the sound of unearthly female singing drifting above a squall of horrific death metal-style bellowing, the first side quickly lurches into a miasma of hypnotic drumming, dual bass guitar heaviness and sputtering analogue electronics that infest the opening track "Regression Of Birth". This stuff still blows my mind hearing it twenty years later, a monstrous take on electronics-damaged hardcore that is still totally unique and unmatched in power, in spite of the hoards of bands who have attempted to synthesize this band's sound. The songs that follow like "Mocha Rebirth", "Slave To The Bean " and "Semen In The Eyesocket Of Thomas Lenz" (the latter an invocation of violence to a known bootlegger who ended up on the wrong side of MITB's ire) have lost none of their vicious blasting power, compacting bone-crushing bass chords and angular riffs twisting around the spastic sludgy tempos and sudden surges of blastbeats, blurted into forty-five second eruptions of undiluted, misanthropic disgust.
The band's penchant for jazzy rhythmic weirdness makes an appearance on "Volatile Cocktail", and while the electronic noise is used more sparsely here than on some of their other records, there's still plenty of that signature chirping/howling pedal abuse and oscillator chaos that streaks through their tangles of deformed bass-heavy hardcore. The flipside of Guns features some longer material, with the monstrous winding dirges "Tumult Being" and "Suttee" both delivering an agonizing crawl through discordant angular bass-riffs and bludgeoning low-end heaviness, while the title track erupts into squirming, gibbering chaos that flares out in less than a minute. A classic slab of mutant hardcore brutality that kicks in my bloodlust almost immediately. Comes on colored vinyl.
A piece of extreme hardcore/noise history, the Charred Remains/Aunt Mary split was one of the only releases to come out from this pre-Man Is The Bastard band, originally released on the DP label run by MITB's Eric Wood and out of print for well over a decade. Now re-issued by Deep Six as a 10" with a printed insert and a big poster reproduction of the Ep's cover art, this slab of fucked-up heaviness and experimental chaos is ready to be rediscovered by a new generation of blastfreaks. Although all of the songs on this 10" eventually made their way onto each band's retrospective Cd collections once the original 1992 Ep went out of print and onto the wish-lists of collector scum across the globe, there's a special primal power that is unique to this particular assembly of songs, to the combination of Charred Remains/Man Is The Bastard's brutal angular blastcore and Aunt Mary's terminally filthy and abhorrent noisecore sitting side by side on wax.
Finnish band Aunt Mary might be better known as the band that would eventually morph into the notorious power electronics outfit Bizarre Uproar, but it was also responsible for some of the craziest blurr-violence that you'll ever hear. Aunt Mary's side has just one track, "Gnu", and it's one of the most barbaric noisecore recordings that I have ever heard cut to wax. The terminally low-fi, utterly fucked-up "song" is made up of small chunks of blasting blurr that have been cut apart and then pasted back together in apparently random fashion, and is a clear precursor to the musique concrete-influenced grind techniques that John Wiese and Sissy Spacek experimented with on their debut. The track moves chaotically across the record, sudden blasts of backwards grindcore erupt outing of warped feedback drones, the music seems to constantly change direction, moving forward then backwards and back again, instantly disorienting as you try to parse the bizarre patchwork assault of mutant noisecore and electronic fuckery. Total brain-melt, and a real good time.
The Man Is The Bastard side counters with nine songs of their brutal angular blastcore; twenty years later, it hasn't lost any of its teeth. Tracks like "Existence Decay", "Secret Surgery" and "Attempt To Damage" churn and spasm awkwardly, a weird coagulation of jagged obtuse riffs played on distorted bass guitars, relentless chirping electronics, and blasting, near-grindcore tempos. Raw and bestial, but also weirdly progressive, the band takes their extreme hardcore sound into a totally unique direction that sounds like little before or since. Totally essential for fans of both Bastard Noise and Man Is The Bastard, and a crucial piece of powerviolence extremism.
Just obtained a couple of copies of the long out-of-print 7" release of the Man Is The Bastard / Aunt Mary split, released back in 1992 on MITB member Eric Wood's own DP label. This is pretty rare, and came from Wood's own stash, so when the copies I have in stock are gone, that'll be the last of 'em.
Here's my review of the recent 10" reissue of the split: A piece of extreme hardcore/noise history, the Charred Remains/Aunt Mary split was one of the only releases to come out from this pre-Man Is The Bastard band, originally released on the DP label run by MITB's Eric Wood and out of print for well over a decade. Now re-issued by Deep Six as a 10" with a printed insert and a big poster reproduction of the Ep's cover art, this slab of fucked-up heaviness and experimental chaos is ready to be rediscovered by a new generation of blastfreaks. Although all of the songs on this 10" eventually made their way onto each band's retrospective Cd collections once the original 1992 Ep went out of print and onto the wish-lists of collector scum across the globe, there's a special primal power that is unique to this particular assembly of songs, to the combination of Charred Remains/Man Is The Bastard's brutal angular blastcore and Aunt Mary's terminally filthy and abhorrent noisecore sitting side by side on wax.
Finnish band Aunt Mary might be better known as the band that would eventually morph into the notorious power electronics outfit Bizarre Uproar, but it was also responsible for some of the craziest blurr-violence that you'll ever hear. Aunt Mary's side has just one track, "Gnu", and it's one of the most barbaric noisecore recordings that I have ever heard cut to wax. The terminally low-fi, utterly fucked-up "song" is made up of small chunks of blasting blurr that have been cut apart and then pasted back together in apparently random fashion, and is a clear precursor to the musique concrete-influenced grind techniques that John Wiese and Sissy Spacek experimented with on their debut. The track moves chaotically across the record, sudden blasts of backwards grindcore erupt outing of warped feedback drones, the music seems to constantly change direction, moving forward then backwards and back again, instantly disorienting as you try to parse the bizarre patchwork assault of mutant noisecore and electronic fuckery. Total brain-melt, and a real good time.
The Man Is The Bastard side counters with nine songs of their brutal angular blastcore; twenty years later, it hasn't lost any of its teeth. Tracks like "Existence Decay", "Secret Surgery" and "Attempt To Damage" churn and spasm awkwardly, a weird coagulation of jagged obtuse riffs played on distorted bass guitars, relentless chirping electronics, and blasting, near-grindcore tempos. Raw and bestial, but also weirdly progressive, the band takes their extreme hardcore sound into a totally unique direction that sounds like little before or since. Totally essential for fans of both Bastard Noise and Man Is The Bastard, and a crucial piece of powerviolence extremism.
Most of the weirdo hardcore that I'm infatuated with comes from the early days of American hardcore, with bands like Void, Die Kreuzen, Siege, and Deep Wound being among my all time favorites, but another crucial, experimental band that I love from that early hardcore era hailed from Italy, the Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers, taking their name from the legendary Dead Boys guitarist. With some of the most bestial hardcore vocals ever and some of the most offbeat hardcore from the early 80s, this band is a cult legend in hardcore circles and were the premier European counterpart to the most psychotic extremes of hardcore over here in the States. Unfortunately, their records are hard to find, and when they are, they usually cost a pretty penny. Cessofonya did release this collection of early seminal recordings from CCM though, which I've finally gotten for the store, and it's a must-hear for fans of extreme early HC. The disc collects the 400 Fascists and Furious Party 7"s as well as their tracks from the Permanent Scar 12" and some compilation tracks, pretty much covering their non-album output.
The first is the 400 Fascists 7" tracks that were released back in 1981. The songs are short blasts of ultra-noisy hardcore punk, fast primitive riffs and frantic bass guitar smashed through a wall of collapsing drums and white noise, radio static fuckery and feedback, an assault of damaged hardcore that closes with the weird angular punk of "Akool" that starts off almost like no wave but then transforms into speedy ultra-noisy thrash.
The Furious Party 7" from 1985 has much better production, but it's still raw, ragged trebly hardcore pain, pissed off and evil sounding hardcore punk, and it's here that you can see where the Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers were getting compared to both Black Flag and Die Kreuzen, their super fast hardcore laced with wailing guitar leads and the singer's awesome, malevolent growl, some plodding dirge and post-punk elements showing up, and the title track erupting into a ferocious ultracore blast that rivals Siege.
The Permanent Scar split with I Refuse It is also from 1985, and again combines furious superfast hardcore with violent anti-authoritarian anthems, tinny guitars and drums, crazed gargling vocals, a spoken word class-war intro, weird no wavey noisiness, and the awesome scumbag punk anthem " Envy (I'm a Mess)". That material is followed by the compilation tracks and this stuff is easily the most extreme on the whole disc. The three songs off of the Last White Christmas tape are INSANELY fast, and rivals the pure unhinged chaos of Siege, while blasting their 'core with sickening levels of distortion and white noise, the third song a nearly fourteen minute live jam that veers from herky-jerky noise dirge to spastic thrash to spoken word parts backed by tribal drumming and trippy guitar noise and ragged improvisation. More of this crazed, noise-damaged HC appears on the Senza Tregua comp tracks and the live version of "Friend Or Foe" from the We Can Do Whatever We Want compilation.
If you're into the psychotic nuclear-strength hardcore weirdness of bands like Void, United Mutation, Deep Wound, early Die Kreuzen and Siege, you have got to hear this stuff!
Hyper-dense deformed distortion storms, wrapped up in classic splatter flick worship? Count me in. According to Phil Blankenship, the man behind esteemed
imprint Troniks/PACrec and The Cherry Point, this disc features material "Compiled from three years of cassette releases, Night of the Bloody Tapes provides
a shattering drive-in experience of unrelenting horror and harsh noise nightmares. Equally fueled by Fangoria magazine, import laserdiscs, third generation
vhs bootlegs, damaged contact mics & DOD death metal distortion, The Cherry Point has set the ultimate bait in the trap of terror." Us being enormous fans of
this particular cinematic and cultural canon, and seeing how Night Of The Bloody Tapes houses a nonstop barrage of some of the juiciest ultranoise
we've been crushed by since the last album from The Rita, we can't get enough of this stuff. This lengthy disc has four tracks over 40 minutes, compiled from
the long deleted split cassettes with Ahlzagailzehguh, Black Sand Desert, Luasa Raelon,
Nkondi, Andy Ortmann, Pedestrian Deposit, The Rita, and more. Heavy walls of swirling
distortion pedal cutup overload that almost drown out far off melodies and shrieking buried feedback and ominous foghorns. Leave this on for more than five
minutes, and the massed roar of The Cherry Point will blank your mind. Killer static powerdrone and terminal feedback loops blast you at top volume, similiar
in spirit to The Rita and Whitehouse, all served up as potent splatter/exploitation worship. Phil recommends the classics: "ESSENTIAL VIEWING: Shriek of the
Mutilated, Raw Meat, Night of the Demon, Girls Nite Out, House on Sorority Row, Just Before Dawn, The Burning, Shock Waves, Mardi Gras Massacre, The Town
That Dreaded Sundown, Criminally Insane, Creature From Black Lake, The Deadly Spawn, Shredder and films by William Lustig and Larry Cohen." Mixed & mastered
by John Wiese (Bastard Noise / Sissy Spacek). Crucial.
Another fkkn awesome re-issue disc from The Cherry Point, this one revives and remasters three sick jams dedicated to the Black Arts that has originally
appeared as a trilogy of limited edition 3" CD-Rs back in 2004. "Virgin Witch" (originally released as a 3" cdr on Chondritic Sound), "Devil's Witch"
(originally released as a 3" cdr on Audiobot), and "Season of the Witch" (originally released as a 3" cdr on Fargone) are all recaptured here, and we're
talkin' full on satanic power feedback blastage informed by another round of crucial occult cinema...Phil lays down the influences: "...a black mass
ritual for fans of Evilspeak, The Gate, Satan's Black Wedding, Ghoulies 2 (the one set at a carnival), The Tempter, Paura Nella Citt� dei Morti Viventi, The
Legend of Hell House, and John Cassavetes in Incubus (1982) + Rosemary's Baby (1968)." Hell yes. The disc opens with "Virgin Witch" and sucks you into it's
howling maw with heavy, HEAVY rumbling distortion and insectile feedback crashing in waves over what could be a massively, monstrously distorted riff blown
out beyond all recognition. It's an awesome assault of swarming menace, with distorted incomprehensible vocals screaming over waves of skuzz and glimmers of
melody. "Devil's Witch" is a little more subdued, whipping up horrific feedback drones and deformed psychedelic presence. "Season..." closes this out with a
show-stopping ocean of hallucinogenic vocal float, roaring pyres of crumbling distortion, and endless waves of frightening goat drones. Awesome. All of the
tracks hover at around 20 minutes in length, making for some marathon skull abuse action.
Cherry Point's Phil Blankenship is the master of grindhouse-themed HNW; combining visuals and themes from grotty exploitation and splatter movies, he injects his harsh noise with a dark, horrific energy. It's a great combo that's made him one of my favorite harsh noise artists. I've been carrying his releases on Troniks for awhile, but hadn't picked up his Recycled Music tape till now; compared to his Cd releases, this is rougher sounding, definitely a bit more low-fi, but the two sides of extra-strength junk noise chaos and harsh wall still pack a brutal punch.
The first side is a low-fi scrapyard metal orgy with lots of brutal looped samples of metal clank and roars all raging above a seething ocean of low-end murk and garbled feedback. Fucked-up musical loops and actual percussion begins to materialize as you get deeper into the stew, with bits of looped drumming and fragmented melodic elements peeking out from the avalanche of steel pipes and sheet metal and oil drums that Blankenship rains down from on high...harsh and abrasive for sure, but with a weird sense of order in the way that the slabs of noise are clearly separated into distinct "tracks", and flow from ear-crushing walls of metal abuse into slightly more subdued passages of percussive clatter and droning feedback.
The second side feels more structured, and is heavier on the use of looped sound. At first, it launches into full-on walls of distortion, but then starts to incorporated the grating sound of cassette reels amplified into a massive wall of squeak and squeal that loops over and over into a warped groove. All of a sudden, some random xylophone-like melody appears for a couple of minutes, then leads into some more looped sounds made up of high pitched bell like tones, fragmented melodies, and screeching drones. It gets a little creepy as a high pitched whine sears itself across your brain and these weird moans emerge from behind the grinding noise wall, then goes into even more nauseating sections of high end scrape and contact mic abuse, sudden eruptions of blown out and sped-up samples of Queen's "Stone Cold Crazy" and other random musical detritus, stretches of segmented screaming and other sonic weirdness that finally evolves into a massive wall of distortion at the end. More collage-like than most of the Cherry Point stuff that I have, but still crushing.
Phil Blankenship's long running harsh noise project The Cherry Point is one of my favorite purveyors of "wall noise", though that's hardly the entirety of his work. The Black Witchery and Night Of The Bloody Tapes discs continue to hold a high position on my personal HN charts, and are continuously recommended to anyone in pursuit of an extreme harsh electronics fix. There's been a shitload of stuff that Blankenship has released with Cherry Point that I've totally missed out on, though, so it's nice to come across a reissue of something as skull-wrecking as Misery Guts, an older 2004 release that I never had a chance to hear in its original form. Released on tape by the now defunct label Since 1972, Misery Guts is primo noise punishment that comes in at just under half an hour.
The two long untitled tracks that make up Misery Guts are violent, relentless maelstroms of noise, shifting between brutal feedback whipping wildly around seething masses of high end chirping and crushing torrents of junk-noise awash in currents of thick acrid static, to massive metallic rumblings and ominous molten power-drones buried beneath an avalanche of collapsing concrete, glass and metal. The junk-noise aspect is a big part of this recording, and it's as brutal as anything that contempos like Hal Hutchinson and Linekraft have been dishing out lately. Both tracks really deliver, interspersing blocks of rhythmic static and mechanical noise with the collapsing metal carnage, moving through a number of distinct passages that keep cranking up the sonic extremity. At times this sounds like an entire factory district being torn apart by some monstrous beast, a wave of deafening destruction bathed in radioactive fire, field recordings of a metropolis burning in the wake of a 50 megaton nuclear blast.
Reissued by Troniks in jewel case packaging in an edition of five hundred copies.
Limited to only one hundred and fifty copies, this 7" features one long track each from harsh noise producers Cherry Point and Is. Cherry Point kicks this off with a savage blizzard of metallic rumble, howling amplified scrape, and deep bass-heavy vibrations, cranking up one of the dense slabs of icy sheet-metal roar that this project is known for. After the initial destruction wrought by that expanding harsh noise wall, the side shifts into a field of heavy electrical reverberations, the steady hum of a generator beneath thunderous percussive noise and ominous howls that stretches across the remainder of the a-side.
On the other side, the Midwestern harsh noise/drone project Is generates a chaotic din of writhing feedback and heavy speaker roar that ruptures black gouts of distorted screech and piercing lashes of high end feedback. It's not long before grinding tectonic bass frequencies begin to move in, turning the sound into a wall of feedback drone that eventually melts down into an awesome overdriven roar of distorted synthesizer, surrounded with grainy 8-bit static and blocks of churning low-end hiss. A constantly evolving blast of structured electronic skullscrape.
Each copy is hand-numbered, and is pressed on black vinyl.
It didn't even dawn on me that I was already somewhat familiar with the work of improv/noise artist Antoine Chessex before I picked this tape up from Blossoming Noise. I grabbed it initially based on the recommendation of BN and the accompanying sound samples, which hooked me with the suggestion of sax-laced industrial murk. That's something I perpetually have an appetite for, but some subsequent research made me realize that Chessex is no stranger to harsh experimental heaviness, having been a member of the experimental sludge metal band Monno as well as the jazz/improv/black doom duo Calcination, who put out an awesome disc on Utech several years ago, as well as having performed with the Metal Music Machine line-up of Jazkamer and the Burial Chamber Trio (Greg Anderson, Oren Ambarchi & Attila Csihar).
The ascetic look of the cover totally belies the brutal, malevolent power found on this album, a cassette re-issue of a limited Lp release; it's not the Borbeto-worshop that I initially expected, but it's still pretty damn extreme. Chessex runs his tenor saxophone through a Marshall amplifier stack alongside electronic noise to create these sprawling drone/noise pieces, and it's amazing stuff, bleak realms of scrape and buzz and subterranean hum, more of a grim industrial album than anything resembling free-improv. Each side of the tape is a single epic track of destructive skree, the first side fading in with an oceanic surge of low rumbling noise and wailing sax tones that's incredibly unsettling, and even resembles something you'd hear on one of the more abstract black noise albums that we carry...but then it suddenly drops out, and we move into a sparser sonic terrain of minimal rumbling tones and electrical buzz, moving through various sections of extended amplified drone looped and layered into blocks of sinister, shadowy thrum and tense chordal drift. After a couple minutes of this activity, the sound suddenly bursts into a louder, more clarified wall of sound, the murkiness suddenly dropping away as it rises into this monolithic power-drone exercise. The sound thick and distorted, becoming something more akin to the crushing amp-drone workouts of early Sunn, Earth, Black Boned Angel, etc, and then the screaming vocal-like sax noise comes in and it becomes even more brutal and confrontational , the sound of the horn bent into choked, snarling, howling sounds , totally tortured, resembling some kind of power electronics/blackened drone hybrid that later shifts into more subdued industrial grindscapes filled with churning metallic rhythms and avalanches of sheet-metal rumble.
The second side starts with high, almost air-raid siren like tones that stretch out for several minutes, then the sax tones begin to fray into softly undulating drones. From there, the sound heads into the coolest passage of the album, where Chessex begins to pile layer upon layer of an evil, minor key sax figure until it coalesces into something resembling a black metal riff being looped incessantly around jets of grinding noise and thunderous amp rumble. This queasy, black-jazz workout takes up a huge portion of the b-side, before ending up becoming subsumed into an even more vicious free-noise blowout and pneumatic loop-orgy that shows up to devour almost the entire second half of the side. In fact, these apocalyptic dronescapes remind me of Japanese sax/noise ensemble Disclocation whenever the horn materializes, crossed with some kind of abstracted blackened industrial. Hopefully Chessex will be back with more of this sort of stuff...
Highly recommended.
��� Initial word on the new album from Texas band Chest Pain had me imagining that their stuff was going to sound something like Gasp, that old California outfit who were quite possibly the weirdest of all of the bands to come out of the powerviolence scene of the 90s. While Chest Pain's trippy blastcore will indeed be right up your alley if you're into bands like Gasp, Iron Lung, Suffering Luna and Man Is The Bastard, their music doesn't sound quite like any of 'em. The back cover of the sleeve for Weltschmerz is emblazoned with a quote from Schopenhauer's On the Suffering of the World, pointing towards a skewed pessimistic 'tude compared to most PV outfits, philosophical undercurrents not often seen in bands belting out this sort of brutal din.
��� Opening with a blast of belligerent feedback, Weltschmerz immediately sinks its teeth into the listener with a furious, discordant brand of power-violence, the gruff, intensely pissed off barking vocals and the staccato, stop-and-go hyper-speed hardcore undeniably influenced by Infest's classic violent blastcore. But by the fourth song "Culturalized", these guys start to roll out big blats of crushing, almost Sabbathian sludge, the spastic aggression becoming tempered with the surges of doom-laden heaviness and whirring, spacey effects that start to swoop across the background. From there things begin to get gradually more off-kilter, more of those slow, effects-stained dirges emerging out of the thrashing frenzy, sudden gales of psychedelic guitar noise and fucked up, echo-drenched vocal delirium, bizarre gibbering electronics and putrid synthesizer noise, each song mutating into more deranged forms. By the time that you get to "Sex Fear", what you're hearing starts to sound like some wild mashup of classic Slap-A-Ham/Deep Six style powerviolence and Butthole Surfers-esque acid-punk. And towards the end of the record, they really start to hammer down these slow, grueling dirges that are almost Swans-like in their dissonant brutality, like the weird industrial-tinged pummel of both "Hikikomori" and "Ghola", all wrapped in ghostly electronic noise. Some seriously punishing hardcore punk shows up as well, blazing mid-tempo outbursts that are absolutely blood-boiling, and even when Chest Pain are blasting away at a thousand miles per hour, they still grind out some pretty catchy tuneage beneath the heart-attack inducing tempos and blistering noise. Killer stuff.
��� On black vinyl limited to five hundred copies, includes a printed insert and a big foldout poster.
��The debut EP from the new industrial metal duo Chiildren is disturbing stuff, from it's sleeve imagery of the two members naked and drenched in raw black petroleum, to the hypnotic, crushing throb of their music which seems to draw just as much fuel from the classic dark electronic music of Front 242 as it does from the crushing mechanized assault of Godflesh. As the squelchy cosmic synthesizers surge over the cinematic doom-laden guitars and pounding drum programming on opener "Girl In The Dirt", the echoes of Justin Broadrick's industrial metal that reverberate through the band's churning industrial blastmetal are clearly noticeable, but that first track soon begins to slip from that mechanized cosmic crush into a kind of industrial black metal, the vocals erupting in to a violent scream over the churning pneumatic drum machines, the song finally shifting into a huge driving, almost goth-rock hook. 'Flesh worship this isn't, as Chiildren draw a lot more of their sound from a mixture of 80's synthesizer soundtrack music, Wax Trax style EBM, and massive tremors of electronic dub-doom. There's an ode to the notorious Serbian Film called "Milos" that also emits a suitably grim electro vibe, dark melodies winding around clanging percussion and those dark synths, and "My Gods" combines a crushing bass riff with crawling glacial tempos and ringing, luminous leads. Stuff like that is a kind of slo-mo black industrial doom, like Godlflesh fused to Tangerine Dream-style soundtrack music, and the combo is fucking killer, dark and evocative, surging with crushing blasts of rapid-fire double bass and keening background vocals.
�� The other four tracks that make up The Other People are an assortment of remixes: "Other People (More Ephemerol Remix)" is a murderous dancefloor workout, while "My Gods (Imperative Reaction Remix)" transforms that song into something much more pulsating and Skinny Puppy-esque; "Post Misogyny (Kid Vicious Remix)" is a dubstep-infected reworking that twists the dark synthpop hooks of the original into a delirium of frenetic beats and skittering rhythms, almost like something from Kevin Martin, and "Post Misogyny (Rocky Rosga Remix)" is the best of the lot, starting off as a gorgeous wash of choral voices that ascend into an almost sacred beauty, then drops into a blistering blissed-out drum n' bass assault. Those remixes are definitely of interest if you're a big fan like myself of this sort of industrialized, electronically-enhanced heaviness, but it's those main EP tracks with their doom-laden electronic metal set to scenes of sexualized violence, religious blasphemies and occult imagery that really have me hankerin' for an actual album from the band. It's a sound that in some ways shares a similar vibe as recent works from Aborym and Control Human Delete, but is much more rooted in cold analogue synthcreep and an unshakeable atmosphere of apocalyptic doom.
It seems from the outset that Child Abuse is out to scrape nerve endings. They've got a tongue-in-cheek band name that is sure to raise some
people's hackles. And their debut release, which was released by Lovepump United, the label run by Mookie from Genghis Tron, has cover art that
causes a severe physical reaction in me every time I pick this up. The cover? A bizarre image of a jet-black skinned Chucky doll racing through
space and time. The interior of the booket has even more fucked up images that are most likely the cause of determined pill consumption. And
then there's the music itself, an equally freaked vicious psycho-death-skronk, formed from a three piece lineup of drums, keyboards, and bass
emitting twisted, convoluted prog-death metal-no wave spasms that at times sounds like French progsters Magma fused with brutal death metal and
art-damaged powerviolence, and caught under fire by an onslaught of retarded Nintendo consoles firing off laser rifles uncontrollably. I've had
the pleasure of seeing these guys play live before when they've played in the DC/Baltimore area with Genghis Tron, The Mass, and Octis, and
they killed live, unleashing lines of chaotic synthesizer vomit and pummeling double-bass drumming. On disc, though, Child Abuse's attack
sounds laser-guided, leading their warped song arrangements along a carefully plotted course marked by jazzy percussion, tasty vintage 8-bit
electronics ripped out of the guts of some forgotten 80's Nintendo game, hypnotic bass guitar riffs, and deranged, geeked-out screams. Stick
around at the end for the wandering xylophone jam that shows up after 15 minutes of digital silence. I think this disc rips. Check out the
audio samples though, as this is hard-edged blast weirdness that will probably grate on alot of people. But if yer into the damaged freak waves
of bands like Fantomas, Genghis Tron, Microwaves, newer Daughters, and Phantomsmasher, definitely check these guys out.
A killer new split disc from our buds at Lovepump United, showcasing two brave new forces in the field of mindmelting electro heaviosity and robotic prog.
Miracle Birth, a.k.a Jade Larsen of Spaceboy and Nausea Quartet, opens this disc with two rollicking sci-fi prog freakout jams, "Thirst For Hunger" and "Damn
You All I Told You So". Quirky, futuristic prog delivered in a spaced-out jumble of buzzing synthesizers, sequencers, and electronic instruments, and the
result is something akin to to a mutant hybrid of Zombi, Chromolodeon's 8-bit game soundtrack worship, and Ruins prog wipeout, with super weird detours like
the psychedelic marimbas that suddenly appear towards the end of the first song. Both of these jams are really freaking great, highlighted by Miracle Of
Birth's unique use of overmodulated vintage synth sounds, and I can't wait to hear more from this project. Child Abuse follows, with four songs of weird
synth/deathmetal/prog with stuttering beats and demonic vocals that are leagues beyond the demo stuff I first heard from these guys about a year ago. This
stuff is fkkn gone, a bombastic n' heavy but 100% fun noise-metal/grind assault filtered down through a stack of casio keyboards and tinny robot
melodies, a confounding fusion of The Locust and The Flying Luttenbachers and old school John Carpenter synths and an esoteric 70's prog rock outfit on a
sugar high.
Zum has been dropping a bunch of cool split 7"s lately, and this one featuring Child Abuse and Zs is one of the hardest. You get two songs from Child Abuse, one from Zs, and the Zs track is the most violent thing that I've heard from them in ages.
Child Abuse deliver two new songs: a cover of Eric Dolphy's "Hat & Beard" is the longer of the two, a stuttering no wave waltz that sounds like it could have come off of their debut EP on Lovepump - lurching bass guitar lines weave around crazed jazz-fusion keys and angular carnival melodies, distorted vocals bark and howl over bubbling updrafts of double bass drumming and jagged jazz rhythms, finally staggering into a crushing bit of steroid-abusing Zeuhl worship with death metal vocals at the end. The other jam is "Beard And Coversations", a pummeling nervous system assault of scuttling bass lines over skipping drum clatter, blown out synthesizer and chittering vocals thats over in a minute. If you dug the weird mix of Magma, death metal vox and circus nightmare that their Lovepump disc spewed out, these tracks won't disappoint.
Zs "In My Dream I Shot A Monk" takes up their entire side, and it's totally different from the ultra-composed chamber prog that I heard on their last album and more in the vein of their earlier brutal prog stuff. The band unloads a volley of damaged free-form prog and percussive jazzthrash, shifting between dissonant horn and guitars clanging against one another above a raging improv drum assault that goes into full tumbling-down-stairs chaos, to screeching sax blowouts and multiple vocalists all chanting something that sounds almost like a schoolyard taunt in a furious cadence. The label mentions Beefheart and Zappa, but I'd tell ya that this is more like The Flying Luttenbachers at their most abstract. On black vinyl, limited to 500 copies and sporting cover artwork from John Dwyer (OCS/Coachwhips).
��Thinking that they might have taken their band name from the Swans album, I initially expected the California band Children Of God to be a much slower, more doom-laden outfit, especially having first encountered the band on their massive split 12" with fellow SoCal crushers Seven Sisters Of Sleep a while back. Children Of God indeed demolished their side of that record, but the sound the these guys whipped up was actually something much faster and more frantic than I was expecting, the band unleashing a brutal chaotic hardcore assault that made for a jarring contrast with the sludgy heaviosity of the Sisters.
�� This limited flexidisc is in the same vein, featuring just one short unreleased song that was taken from the same recording session as the split, a blast of crushing apocalyptic hardcore infested with chunks of skull-crushing sludge and abrasive noise. I'm not really sure what the point behind this release is, as it only features the one song and the whole thing is over with in two minutes, but I'm sure fans of this California band's brand of brutal, bludgeoning hardcore will scramble for it nevertheless, being an unreleased track unavailable anywhere else and limited to two hundred pieces on white flexidisc. And the song does definitely crush, "Victimized" delivering a brutal blast of ultra-heavy hardcore via a wall of sludgy guitars, crushing D-beat drumming, and harsh howling vocals that sound like every tendon in the singer's head is about to burst. They've got this amazing, violent quality to their music that suggests a heavy powerviolence influence, and when the band drop into lower gear, they channel an ultra-hateful sludgy sound that's sort of along the same lines as UK tar-pit fiends Iron Monkey. Definitely an interesting mixture of discordant crustcore and powerviolence shot through with all-too-brief flashes of corrosive sludge-hate.
�� Limited to two hundred copies.
���Recently discovered this obscure band via Rochester, NY experimental music label Carbon Records, and while the label has brought us all kinds of heavy duty guitar-based drone and glacial psychedelia in the past, this is probably the heaviest stuff I've ever heard from 'em aside from the caveman sludge of Tuurd. On this sprawling hour-long cassette, Chillum spews out long droning streams of metallic sludge that comes across like a noisier, crustier, more atavistic Sleep, with a tendency to disappear into voids of whirring low-fi drone at various points throughout their set.
���Featuring two massive half-hour tracks, the beginning of the tape is haunted by foreign tongues speaking in prayer, their voices bathed in washes of deep murky drone as the first song "Stoned Ape" slowly pours out into a wave of elongated guitar chords stretched and bent into a gluey doom-laden dirge. That downtuned sludgy heaviness rumbles out of a thick low-fi haze, but once this gets going, the band settles into a massive droning heaviness that feels like it might be partially improvised, somewhat similar to the meditative riff-rituals of Sleep, but even more primitive, stripped down to a relentless repetitive groove. It takes more than twelve minutes for the singer to finally show up, with a harsh, fearsome scream that echoes madly just as the band suddenly surges into an even more bludgeoning dronefest. They can pick up the pace though, later taking off into more raucous stoner rock raveups and dropping into rumbling Frostian sludge, even slipping into long stretches of minimal industrial-tinged ambience at the end of that first side.
��� The other song "Further Mutate" is even more grueling, the band's droning downtuned sludge becoming stretched into an even more amoebic dirge. The guitars rarely move from a single rumbling powerchord, sinking deeper into oblivion as the side slowly plods towards its conclusion, that miserable slow-motion heaviness becoming threaded with what sound like faint Theremin-like tones and bits of murky, droning electronic noise. Over the last half of the side, though, Chillum drop back into that meditative heaviness, huge riffage woven into slow circular movements, lulling the listener into a state of somnambulance as an ocean of black mud shifting and enshrouding your skull.
��� This blast of raw hypno-sludge comes in a silkscreened Arigato-like cassette case, and includes a digital download code.
There is always room on my shelves for another high quality metal rag as long as it's got a ton of personality, and the first issue of Chips & Beer offers up plenty. Created by the guys behind the TheLeftHandPath.com website and Dave at 20 Buck Spin, this fanzine-style mag (full color cover, black and white newsprint on the inside) is a blast to read, with 96-some pages of stuff of interest. In order: there's a page of alcoholic drink recipes from Annick Giroux (Cauchemar); a lengthy conversation with underground gore/metal illusterator Putrid; an Eerie Von comic; an interview with black metallers Negative Plane; a look at the new book Glorious Times that offers a pictorial history of American death metal; more lengthy interviews with Bobby Liebling (Pentagram) and Mark Shelton (Manilla Road), followed by an in-depth Manilla Road discography; a conversation with artist Benjamin Vierling that includes several examples of his amazing, surreal imagery; talks with metallers Christian Mistress, nightmarish Swedish death metallers Vanhelgd; a piece from Stewart Voegtlin on AC/DC's Let There Be Rock; a well-written reviews section; a four-page Pink & White comic that includes cameos by King Diamond and Ghost, from newcomers R. Storey & M. Moseley Smith. It's a great read from start to end, enhanced by a simple but effective layout, lots of artwork, and just a general high level of quality across the whole issue. A look at the bands and artists covered will tell you if this is up your alley or no. It's earned a spot on shelf, for sure. Recommended.
With the second issue of Chips & Beer, this new metal mag has already developed it's own distinct voice, one that exalts a back-to-basics attitude and appreciation for classic underground metal, a distaste for pretension, and an appreciation for the visual black arts that I can definitely get behind. I'm starting to feel like this rag fills up a weird, previously unidentified space that existed between the classic Forced Exposure magazine and Metal Forces, though that could just be me. Regardless, it's a solid read with lots of opinionated writing that doesn't balk at calling shit out as they see it. This issue has interviews with Swedish death metallers Morbus Chron, Virginia DM stalwarts Deceased, Ian Christe from metal-centric publisher Bazillion Points, black thrashers Midnight, artist Halsey Swain, a Stewart Voegtlin interview with the bassist of The Mentors, a massive piece on King Diamond that also includes a bunch of album reviews and chronological info, Obsequiae, Finnish illustrator Ola Larsson (the genius behind the striking artwork for Disma's latest), Joe Preston of Thrones, power metallers Twisted Tower Dire, an examination of Black Sabbath's Mob Rules, weird doodles, and lots of (often scathing) record reviews.
Terminally rad metal zine Chips & Beer is back with issue number three, subtitled the "New Yawk Street Metal Special", of which it's got gobs of. This rag has developed a ton of attitude, and while I'm always likely to be shaking my fist at one opinion or another expressed with a great degree of vitriol in these pages, I'm also always in awe at the erudite observations on metal art/culture/insanity, the knowledgeable history of the underground, and an eclectic coverage that makes it impossible for me to devour the mag from cover to cover whenever a new ish comes in the door. In this one, you've got that aforementioned "Street Metal" focus which gives us an expansive "New York Metal Primer", a retrospective of the early New York club scene as seen through the eyes of Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French, a talk with Manowar's Ross The Boss, a fucking insane re-envisioning of the KISS mythos Adam Ganderson, Todd DePalma's excellent essay on Willaim Lustig's classic NYC sleaze-gore masterpiece Maniac, wisdom from Dan Lilker on the NYC vibe, an interview with the awesome shred-bastards in Frigid Bich (mucho thanks to C&B for turning me on to this band), and a very cool, very long interview with former owner of Long Island's Slipped Disc Records. Beyond this issue's NYC theme, there's also a couple of entertaining interviews with Finnish death metallers Krypts and Swallowed, imperial death-thrashers Ares Kingdom, pirate-obsessed death metal weirdos Cauldron Black Ram, Chicago's criminally unrecognized musical Midas Chris Black, cult metallers Cirith Ungol, a neat piece titled "Kali Yuga Moonstomp: The Metaphysics of the Cro-Mags", the sexual debauchery of black metallers Weapon, comics, reviews, and a crapload of other stuff to soak up. Essential.
Back in stock!
The fourth issue of this terrific underground metal rag continues to carve out it's own little niche in the subterranean metal press with it's unique combination of weird inside humor, off-beat writing, bad attitude and generally unfuckwithable editorial coverage. At this point I'm totally hooked on this mag; it's got scads of character in a publishing landscape that remains largely bereft of real attitude. The latest issue is loaded with several hours worth of reading and sort of revolves around the theme of the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, with a lengthy, wonderfully hallucinatory comic drawn by Beaver that's based on the events behind the notorious McMartin Preschool satanic sex scandal. Woven in and around that piece are the regular editorial and columns, psychotic drawings and other short comic pages, Todd DePalma's interview with Lawrence Reed (the guy who painted the iconic cover art for Slayer's Show No Mercy and another essay on their South Of Heaven album; interviews with Teitanblood, New York death metal barbarians Skullshitter, Aussie death metallers Vilifier, and Swedish DM crew Degial; a killer Q&A with composer Jat Chattaway (the guy behind the memorable film scores for William Lustig films like Maniac, Maniac Cop and Vigilanmte); an interview with the amazing Italian painter (and creator of hallucinatory album covers for Blasphemophager and Diocletian) Paolo Girardi; a convoluted piece on Roky Erickson; an interview with artist and Sadistik Exekution member Reverend Kriss Hades; a long and informative article on "Satanic Cinema"; a timeline of Satanism-linked crimes; another article on cult horror movie scores with a bunch of film reviews; a retrospective on Possessed's seminal death metal classic Seven Churches; and Chips & Beer's scathing record reviews section. But the best part of the new issue has got to be the lengthy and in-depth interview that Adam Ganderson did with Bob Daisley, bassist for Rainbow and Ozzy Osbourne's backing band Blizzard Of Oz; it's got a ton of dirt on the man's long career and his dealings with various aspects of the music n' metal biz. A great read, definitely recommended to fans of true underground metal in all of it's many forms.
Another new issue of Chips & Beer, another opportunity for me to gush like a giddy twelve-year-old over this mag's unique and utterly unfuckwithable m�lange of classic subterranean metal, horror/exploitation movie lust, and underground comic weirdness. Issue five brings us another one hundred thirty-six pages of black and white print chock full of scathing criticism, stream-of-consciousness delirium and overall the finest taste you're gonna find in a contempo underground hesher rag. As with previous issues, the guys have assembled this around a central theme, and this time it's all about "Italian Metal", with some wild forays off into the fringes of Spagetti Cinema and other strangeness. The main features include a killer lengthy interview with Betsy Weiss from cult LA metallers Bitch and a massive "Italian Metal Primer" loaded to the gills with album reviews and examinations of bands like occult prog rockers Jacula and Antonius Rex, Italo-metal legends Death SS, influential proto-black thrashers Bulldozer, epic metallers Dark Quarterer, experimental black metallers Mortuary Drape and occult doomster Tony Tears along with gobs of other album reviews and writing on the mysteries and mania of the Italo metal underground; an excellent article on famed cinematic sleaze-master Tinto Brass and his filmography; and "A Brief Guide To Italian Sword & Sorcery Films" that has given me a whole list of z-grade fantasy trash to track down. Other pieces include an article on original Saint Vitus frontman Scott Reagers, capsule reviews of recent indie horror movies, a brief interview with House Of The Devil director Ti West, interesting (and often hilarious) band interviews with death metallers Bone Sickness and Morbus Chron, Michigan's Borrowed Time, 80's Ohio metallers Lester Maddox, Brit doom metal masters Moss, and Sweden's Inisians, an interview/article on prank call god Longmont Potion Castle, more amazing hallucinatory writing on AC/DC, scathing album reviews, and more of those bizarre comics laced throughout the magazine. Essential.
Head-scratchingly bizarre as only the Czech can be, Chirurgia are a super-obscure thrash/death outfit that started out in the early 90's and released what appears to be their final album in 2002, Deep Silence. There's little information to be had on this band, and I only found out about them through our friends at PurpleSoil Records in the Czech Republic, who had a small quantity of this disc that they hooked us up with. On the cover, the album title is emblazoned across the naked back of a skinhead, above which is Chirurgia's weird logo that appears to have drawings of lumbering zombies replacing the "i"s. Whoever designed the package for Deep Silence was high when they were working on it, as the word "Silence" is totally mispelled on the spine of the case. Inside, the package is minimal, with just photos of the band members, a normal looking four piece lineup. Chirurgia's music, on the other hand, is completely out of it's fucking gourd. At first, I thought that this was going to be some brutal but standard old school grindcore with a heavy early Earache influence. It quickly turns into something else though, a mutant death/thrash/grind/punk hybrid with bizarre singing; the vocalist bounces between a dramatic gothy croon, a drunken punk rock yowl, deep gutteral death growls, and weird shouting that reminds me of a carnival barker, and the music is likewise all over the place, one minute it's blasting deathgrind, the next the members of Chirurgia are spitting out an angular Jesus Lizard style rock attack with boiling doublebass drumming seething underneath jagged stop/start rythms, or ripping into some convoluted progressive thrash metal a la Mekong Delta or later Voi Vod, all inverted dissonant riffing and shredding speed, or some fucked up, stumbling gothic post-punk fused to crushing detah metal guitars. While they aren't as over the top as fellow Czech bands like Contrastic or The Gutteral Clamour Of Queer Decay, Chirurgia are most definitely one weird band, mixing together everything from Arcturus, Napalm Death, Dead Kennedys, Naked City, and progressive thrash into their stoned blast stew. We were onyl able to get a dozen of these from Purplesoil, so once these are gone they'll probably be out of stock for good, seeing as how I've been unable to find any information on the label that released this, anywhere!
This half hour long cassette of suffocating, disease-ridden power electronics recently came out on Nil By Mouth (the same label that has brought us killer recent releases from Caligula031, En Nihil, Gnawed, The Vomit Arsonist, Pollutive Static and An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter), a limited edition release surrounded with blurred, high contrast scenes of brutal sexual violence and depravity and two untitled sides of gloriously filthy noise and psych-sexual horror. Definitely not for the sensitive. The first side of this tape takes form as a black squirming mass of distorted throb, a mass of distant screaming and crackling electronic noise, a kind of diffused PE assault that sounds as if the vocalist is shrieking and ranting from two rooms away, while the mess of electronic filth is whipped into a savage, extremely abrasive cloud of evil noise. It begins to evolve into a hypnotic rhythmic force as that pulverizing over-modulated throb pulsates like some cancerous synthoid tumor at the heart of this mangled noise assault.
The other side is likewise propelled by a crude, malformed rhythm, sputtering diesel engines joined in symphony, a putrid carcinogen-belching mechanical orchestra that almost totally obscures those raging screams lodged way off in the background. The scum-trance is in the red on this one, too, pounding against your cranium with priapic force.
CR's hideous, heavy power electronics falls into the same realm as the blown-out rabid Finnish crowd (Bizarre Uproar, Sick Seed, Grunt, the Filth & Violence and True Force/Pain Electronics labels), and is one of the viler PE tapes I've picked up this year...
Kind of underrated in the annals of U.S. harsh noise but one of the key purveyors n' pioneers of primal, sense-obliterating sonic overdrive, noise / multi-media artist Scott Konzelmann has been at this since 1987. His strategy has always been fascinating, often recording noisescapes onto reel-to-reel and then blasting them through ad hoc speaker systems he created himself out of scavenged electronics and metal. The resulting speaker-abuse is thus a feature, and not a bug. This saw him working in the area of larger art installations, but even his recorded releases pack serious skuzz.
A brutalizing entry in RRRecords’ Recycled tape series, Chop Shop's contribution is a minor classic of crushing 1990s-era American harsh noise. Depending on the copy you end up with (some tapes appear to feature the one track split across two sides, others seem to repeat the material on the b-side), each side presents an untitled twenty-four minute series of destructive loops, salvaged metal, humid low-fi drone fields, mechanical crunch and throb, building a rhythmic scaffolding that supports the ongoing shifts in tone and texture and aggression as the recording plays out. It's one of the more mesmeric Chop Shop recordings from this period, focusing on blocks of semi-wrecked sound, decomposing timbres, structured loops. Building, stacking and developing, with little breathing room between the shifting structures. It's a more raw and lo-fi approach as far as the fidelity goes, but that corroded rawness to Chop Shop's recordings are a huge part of the appeal to me; in some ways, you can draw parallels between this and some of the more layered "junk noise" artists like K2 and Haters, but Konzelmann pursues a different type of logic with the creation of each of these pieces.
A symphony of squeals and white-noise squalls, creaking metallic gears and pulsating static, controlled blasts of pure overdriven distorted crunch and almost subliminal rhythmic elements; like much of his longer-form work, there is an order and coherence to this noise that even slips oh-so-briefly into a mechanical quasi-technoid throb before being wholly swallowed up again in a blast furnace of in-the-red roaring distorted fuzz and crunch.
Compared to the often elaborate sculpture-items that housed his recordings in past releases (which included CD bolted within steel plates and tapes entombed in clumps of industrial tape) this entry in the Recycled Music Series is relatively conventional in physical presentation, despite the noise being dubbed onto random commercial cassettes per the RRRecords series aesthetic.
I wasn't too hot on the band's name when I first saw it - sounded kinda generic to me - but that was before I understood that a "chord" is exactly what these guys are creating with their music. Formed by one of the guys from Pelican and some Chicago-based buddies, Chord have been floating around for a little while, playing a couple of shows and releasing a series of ringtones a few months ago that were sourced from their material for this album, and now their debut album is finally out via Neurot. The whole idea behind the band is pretty heady; like their name suggests, Chord create huge walls of sound based on a single guitar chord, the album featuring four chords, Am7, Gmaj(flat 13), E9, and Am, and each member plays a seperate note of the chord given to them in order to create the whole. It sounds simple, but the band tweaks the notes, bending and shaping them and thus forming a massive, layered cloud of distorted metallic drone. It's an impressive sound, and it makes sense that the band cites composers like Glenn Branca and Tony COnrad as being influential on their rumbling dronescapes. The sound on Flora is constantly shifting and evolving, as the chords undergo changes in attack and tone and density, sometimes transforming into a soft minimal field of hum, or exploding into monumental walls of crushing caustic roar. Their are brutal raga-like waves of Skullflower style skree, and droning, repetitious mono-chord riffs clanging over clouds of buzz and whir, and at their most gentle, Chord are capable of dispersing into delicate mists of sound. It's all quite meditative and lushly layered, but the album reaches a peak of heaviness on the fourth and final track where they take on the A minor chord, turning it into a mighty towering slab of chugging, corrosive ultra-distorted drone, super heavy and caustic, ensconced within thick layers of chaotic buzz and crackling, scorched feedback, a massive doomic march into oblivion. This turned out to be a killer album that is surprisingly closer in philosophy to the guitar-army compositions of Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca than I had expected. Recommended!
For a band that's been around for more than twenty years, Choronzon has managed to remain one of the most obscure of the American experimental black metal outfits. Early on, Choronzon was a crude black/death metal outfit headed by mastermind P. Emerson Williams (who has also worked with Norwegian black metal weirdoes Manes in the past), but over the years this morphed into something really bizarre and unique and not really black metal anymore at all, but something much more electronic and abstract. An album came out on Samoth's Nocturnal Art label (1998's Magog Agog), but from that point the band's music evolved fully into a strange blackened glitch-metal. I wasn't even aware of what Choronzon was doing until I picked up the new album Ziggurat Of Dead Shibboleths, which was released by Inner-X-Musick, the long running industrial label run by John Zewizz of Sleep Chamber. It's telling that this album came out on a label that's better known for releasing music from Psychic TV, Nurse With Wound, Hunting Lodge, Controlled Bleeding, and Sleep Chamber themselves. Indeed, Choronzon is now something much more industrial than black metal, with only vague traces of BM seeping through the nightmarish electronic detritus and crackling dystopian ambience, but when it does manifest itself, this becomes a truly alien sounding form of black industrial that fans of MZ.412, Reverorum ib Malacht, Deadwood and Melek-Tha will lust over.
Parts of Ziggurat sound vaguely like a blackened Ministry, a Wax Trax-like vibe creeping on a couple of tracks, but mixed into some classic industrial skuzziness and a bizarre production style that buries all of the metallic elements under several feet of noise and samples, warped vocals and distorted goblinoid snarling. Gleaming malformed thrash riffs are heavily processed, surrounded by the slow pounding of ritual drums, chunks of backwards sound, percussive noises, strange sampled noises, dense massed black metal guitars stacked into blocks of harsh buzz. Heavy industrial pulses and tribal rhythms drown in static while strains of dark classical music and dreamlike carnival melodies echo over cavernous break beats, and shamanic chanting floats within equally spectral field recordings.
Each song on Ziggurat is this long stretch of surreal, hallucinatory ambience and misshapen metal, like "The Dead", a ten minute glitched out soundscape of hissing demonic vocals, fragmented piano melody, over modulated vocal noise, and phased drones, or "Spacedust To Spacedust" where Teutonic thrash riffs collide with strange quasi-drum n' bass rhythms and electronic effects. The metallic elements here are infrequent, but when they do appear, they shock the black industrial dirges and evil ambience with blasts of sonic violence. It's one of the more hallucinatory industrial "black metal" albums to come through the shop lately, falling somewhere between the primitive occult industrial creep of SPK/Throbbing Gristle, the black ritual horror of MZ.412, and the electro-BM of Dodheimsgard, Manes, Blacklodge, Aborym.
Vile necro-noisecore dementia! I've gotten some weird stuff from New Era before, but this is easily the most fucked-up "black metal" offering that the label has sent us. This seventy-three track Cd collects pretty much everything that was ever recorded by the ultra-obscure (and reviled) Dutch one-man band Christfighter back in the late 90's, including the band's Christfuck, Satan's Lust and Zieke Zielen demos along with the songs off his side of the split with Dutch "peat metal" weirdoes Botulism. And man, is this a mess...a howling black mess of blasting drum machines and messed-up black metal riffs, 80's action movie soundtrack music and grindhouse samples that go on forever, sloppy buzzsaw guitars and guttural distorted vocals that are pushed so far up in the mix that it sounds as if this maniac was chewing on his microphone while recording these super-short basement black metal deformities. This stuff is raw as hell, the recording super low-fi and crude, sometimes shifting into bizarre guitar "solos" with those brain-damaged vocals mewling and screaming and grunting through a haze of low-fi murk. It's sort of comparable to an utterly brain-damaged (and ridiculously low-fi) take on the minimal black trance-blast of Ildjarn, crossed with the "tard-core" mania of Sockeye, if you can imagine such a thing. This shit reeks with the essence of "bedroom black metal", but it's littered with all kinds of vomitous vocal improvisation, random mic noise, a gazillion sleazoid movie and Manson samples, blasts of weirdly arranged drum-machine grind, mid-tempo punk dirges, random belching, squealing feedback, idiotic porno samples, mutated Casio sounds and other rampant and willfully offensive weirdness. True outsider "metal" forged from inept insanity, closer in spirit to the weirdo blackened filth of bands like Gonkulator, Black Mass Of Absu, Beherit-side project Goatvulva and the sort of hideous shit-fi noisecore retardation found on the legendary Mortville label than anything else, and only recommended if you're the sort of degenerate who listens to that sort of aforementioned sonic slop (like moi). Released in a limited edition of five hundred copies, Satan's Perversion comes in a full color fold-out sleeve plastered with pornographic collage art.
Considered by most to be the very first American death rock album that would be highly influential on the goth sound that would develop through the 80s, Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain is a classic of dark, blasphemous punk that has had a significant impact on so much of the music that I listen to and that I carry here at C-Blast. It's hard to imagine black metal taking form the way it did if Christian Death had never infected the underground punk scene with their anti-Christian imagery, their fascination with death and the occult, and the perpetually dark atmosphere and confrontational attitude that exudes from Only Theatre Of Pain, and the influence of this album on bands as diverse as Sixx, Deathcharge, Nuit Noire and Soror Dolorosa is unmistakable.
Released in 1982, this death punk masterpiece has been reissued for its 20th anniversary, with new artwork and layout as well as the addition of bonus tracks, and it's essential for anyone into the darkest strains of punk and hardcore. Coming out of the Southern California hardcore scene, the band combined Adolescents axeman Rikk Agnew's offbeat guitar playing and the driving rhythm section with bizarre haunted house organ flourishes, tolling bells, and a sickly, dread-filled atmosphere that refuses to let up at any point on the album. But the band's focal point was always their flamboyant front man Rozz Williams, who brought a weird glam influence to Christian Death's morbid punk. His fey whining vocal style was totally unique and perfectly fit the disaffected, negative feel of Christian Death's music, and his bizarre, surrealist lyrics and transgressive visions read like sketches of a nightmare, rife with all kinds of perversion, necrophilia, incest and murder. These themes possess Only Theatre Of Pain from the creepy death obsession of the rocking opener "Cavity - First Communion" to the classic heavy death rock of "Figurative Theatre", "Mysterium Iniquitatis", and "Dream For Mother". There are a couple of slower songs where the band drops into a buzzsaw hardcore dirge ("Spiritual Cramp", "Resurrection - Sixth Communion"), the ghoulish black psychedelia of "Burnt Offerings" and "Prayer", and the serpentine, Middle Eastern-tinged devil vision of "Stairs - Uncertain Journey". If this album would ever have had a single, though, it probably would have been the song "Romeo's Distress", one of the catchiest songs that Christian Death ever wrote, and it feels like it could have been a huge hit for the band if only the lyrics weren't so politically incorrect.
This new reissue of Only Theatre Of Pain also features several unreleased tracks, including the heavy, almost metallic "Deathwish", the trippy synth-laden black dirge "Dogs" and the lysergic howling witch-punk of "Desperate Hell", along with rougher early versions of "Romeo's Distress", "Spiritual Cramp", and "Cavity" that appear here for the first time..
Considered by most to be the very first American death rock album that would be highly influential on the goth sound that would develop through the 80s, Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain is a classic of dark, blasphemous punk that has had a significant impact on so much of the music that I listen to and that I carry here at C-Blast. It's hard to imagine black metal taking form the way it did if Christian Death had never infected the underground punk scene with their anti-Christian imagery, their fascination with death and the occult, and the perpetually dark atmosphere and confrontational attitude that exudes from Only Theatre Of Pain, and the influence of this album on bands as diverse as Sixx, Deathcharge, Nuit Noire and Soror Dolorosa is unmistakable.
Released in 1982, this death punk masterpiece has been reissued for its 20th anniversary, with new artwork and layout as well as the addition of bonus tracks, and it's essential for anyone into the darkest strains of punk and hardcore. Coming out of the Southern California hardcore scene, the band combined Adolescents axeman Rikk Agnew's offbeat guitar playing and the driving rhythm section with bizarre haunted house organ flourishes, tolling bells, and a sickly, dread-filled atmosphere that refuses to let up at any point on the album. But the band's focal point was always their flamboyant front man Rozz Williams, who brought a weird glam influence to Christian Death's morbid punk. His fey whining vocal style was totally unique and perfectly fit the disaffected, negative feel of Christian Death's music, and his bizarre, surrealist lyrics and transgressive visions read like sketches of a nightmare, rife with all kinds of perversion, necrophilia, incest and murder. These themes possess Only Theatre Of Pain from the creepy death obsession of the rocking opener "Cavity - First Communion" to the classic heavy death rock of "Figurative Theatre", "Mysterium Iniquitatis", and "Dream For Mother". There are a couple of slower songs where the band drops into a buzzsaw hardcore dirge ("Spiritual Cramp", "Resurrection - Sixth Communion"), the ghoulish black psychedelia of "Burnt Offerings" and "Prayer", and the serpentine, Middle Eastern-tinged devil vision of "Stairs - Uncertain Journey". If this album would ever have had a single, though, it probably would have been the song "Romeo's Distress", one of the catchiest songs that Christian Death ever wrote, and it feels like it could have been a huge hit for the band if only the lyrics weren't so politically incorrect.
This new reissue of Only Theatre Of Pain also features several unreleased tracks, including the heavy, almost metallic "Deathwish", the trippy synth-laden black dirge "Dogs" and the lysergic howling witch-punk of "Desperate Hell", along with rougher early versions of "Romeo's Distress", "Spiritual Cramp", and "Cavity" that appear here for the first time..
This is the standard vinyl version of the Only Theatre Of Pain reissue, on colored vinyl.
Considered by most to be the very first American death rock album that would be highly influential on the goth sound that would develop through the 80s, Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain is a classic of dark, blasphemous punk that has had a significant impact on so much of the music that I listen to and that I carry here at C-Blast. It's hard to imagine black metal taking form the way it did if Christian Death had never infected the underground punk scene with their anti-Christian imagery, their fascination with death and the occult, and the perpetually dark atmosphere and confrontational attitude that exudes from Only Theatre Of Pain, and the influence of this album on bands as diverse as Sixx, Deathcharge, Nuit Noire and Soror Dolorosa is unmistakable.
Released in 1982, this death punk masterpiece has been reissued for its 20th anniversary, with new artwork and layout as well as the addition of bonus tracks, and it's essential for anyone into the darkest strains of punk and hardcore. Coming out of the Southern California hardcore scene, the band combined Adolescents axeman Rikk Agnew's offbeat guitar playing and the driving rhythm section with bizarre haunted house organ flourishes, tolling bells, and a sickly, dread-filled atmosphere that refuses to let up at any point on the album. But the band's focal point was always their flamboyant front man Rozz Williams, who brought a weird glam influence to Christian Death's morbid punk. His fey whining vocal style was totally unique and perfectly fit the disaffected, negative feel of Christian Death's music, and his bizarre, surrealist lyrics and transgressive visions read like sketches of a nightmare, rife with all kinds of perversion, necrophilia, incest and murder. These themes possess Only Theatre Of Pain from the creepy death obsession of the rocking opener "Cavity - First Communion" to the classic heavy death rock of "Figurative Theatre", "Mysterium Iniquitatis", and "Dream For Mother". There are a couple of slower songs where the band drops into a buzzsaw hardcore dirge ("Spiritual Cramp", "Resurrection - Sixth Communion"), the ghoulish black psychedelia of "Burnt Offerings" and "Prayer", and the serpentine, Middle Eastern-tinged devil vision of "Stairs - Uncertain Journey". If this album would ever have had a single, though, it probably would have been the song "Romeo's Distress", one of the catchiest songs that Christian Death ever wrote, and it feels like it could have been a huge hit for the band if only the lyrics weren't so politically incorrect. All in all though, a total classic in American deathrock and macabre punk, essential listening for anyone into the recent revival of that classic 80's goth/death punk sound.
Now available on limited-edition cassette!
Considered by most to be the very first American death rock album that would be highly influential on the goth sound that would develop through the 80s, Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain is a classic of dark, blasphemous punk that has had a significant impact on so much of the music that I listen to and that I carry here at C-Blast. It's hard to imagine black metal taking form the way it did if Christian Death had never infected the underground punk scene with their anti-Christian imagery, their fascination with death and the occult, and the perpetually dark atmosphere and confrontational attitude that exudes from Only Theatre Of Pain, and the influence of this album on bands as diverse as Sixx, Deathcharge, Nuit Noire and Soror Dolorosa is unmistakable.
Released in 1982, this death punk masterpiece has been reissued for its 20th anniversary, with new artwork and layout as well as the addition of bonus tracks, and it's essential for anyone into the darkest strains of punk and hardcore. Coming out of the Southern California hardcore scene, the band combined Adolescents axeman Rikk Agnew's offbeat guitar playing and the driving rhythm section with bizarre haunted house organ flourishes, tolling bells, and a sickly, dread-filled atmosphere that refuses to let up at any point on the album. But the band's focal point was always their flamboyant front man Rozz Williams, who brought a weird glam influence to Christian Death's morbid punk. His fey whining vocal style was totally unique and perfectly fit the disaffected, negative feel of Christian Death's music, and his bizarre, surrealist lyrics and transgressive visions read like sketches of a nightmare, rife with all kinds of perversion, necrophilia, incest and murder. These themes possess Only Theatre Of Pain from the creepy death obsession of the rocking opener "Cavity - First Communion" to the classic heavy death rock of "Figurative Theatre", "Mysterium Iniquitatis", and "Dream For Mother". There are a couple of slower songs where the band drops into a buzzsaw hardcore dirge ("Spiritual Cramp", "Resurrection - Sixth Communion"), the ghoulish black psychedelia of "Burnt Offerings" and "Prayer", and the serpentine, Middle Eastern-tinged devil vision of "Stairs - Uncertain Journey". If this album would ever have had a single, though, it probably would have been the song "Romeo's Distress", one of the catchiest songs that Christian Death ever wrote, and it feels like it could have been a huge hit for the band if only the lyrics weren't so politically incorrect. All in all though, a total classic in American deathrock and macabre punk, essential listening for anyone into the recent revival of that classic 80's goth/death punk sound.
Now available on limited-edition cassette!
Considered by most to be the very first American death rock album that would be highly influential on the goth sound that would develop through the 80s, Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain is a classic of dark, blasphemous punk that has had a significant impact on so much of the music that I listen to and that I carry here at C-Blast. It's hard to imagine black metal taking form the way it did if Christian Death had never infected the underground punk scene with their anti-Christian imagery, their fascination with death and the occult, and the perpetually dark atmosphere and confrontational attitude that exudes from Only Theatre Of Pain, and the influence of this album on bands as diverse as Sixx, Deathcharge, Nuit Noire and Soror Dolorosa is unmistakable.
Released in 1982, this death punk masterpiece has been reissued for its 20th anniversary, with new artwork and layout as well as the addition of bonus tracks, and it's essential for anyone into the darkest strains of punk and hardcore. Coming out of the Southern California hardcore scene, the band combined Adolescents axeman Rikk Agnew's offbeat guitar playing and the driving rhythm section with bizarre haunted house organ flourishes, tolling bells, and a sickly, dread-filled atmosphere that refuses to let up at any point on the album. But the band's focal point was always their flamboyant front man Rozz Williams, who brought a weird glam influence to Christian Death's morbid punk. His fey whining vocal style was totally unique and perfectly fit the disaffected, negative feel of Christian Death's music, and his bizarre, surrealist lyrics and transgressive visions read like sketches of a nightmare, rife with all kinds of perversion, necrophilia, incest and murder. These themes possess Only Theatre Of Pain from the creepy death obsession of the rocking opener "Cavity - First Communion" to the classic heavy death rock of "Figurative Theatre", "Mysterium Iniquitatis", and "Dream For Mother". There are a couple of slower songs where the band drops into a buzzsaw hardcore dirge ("Spiritual Cramp", "Resurrection - Sixth Communion"), the ghoulish black psychedelia of "Burnt Offerings" and "Prayer", and the serpentine, Middle Eastern-tinged devil vision of "Stairs - Uncertain Journey". If this album would ever have had a single, though, it probably would have been the song "Romeo's Distress", one of the catchiest songs that Christian Death ever wrote, and it feels like it could have been a huge hit for the band if only the lyrics weren't so politically incorrect. All in all though, a total classic in American deathrock and macabre punk, essential listening for anyone into the recent revival of that classic 80's goth/death punk sound.
Now available on limited-edition cassette!
Considered by most to be the very first American death rock album that would be highly influential on the goth sound that would develop through the 80s, Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain is a classic of dark, blasphemous punk that has had a significant impact on so much of the music that I listen to and that I carry here at C-Blast. It's hard to imagine black metal taking form the way it did if Christian Death had never infected the underground punk scene with their anti-Christian imagery, their fascination with death and the occult, and the perpetually dark atmosphere and confrontational attitude that exudes from Only Theatre Of Pain, and the influence of this album on bands as diverse as Sixx, Deathcharge, Nuit Noire and Soror Dolorosa is unmistakable.
Released in 1982, this death punk masterpiece has been reissued for its 20th anniversary, with new artwork and layout as well as the addition of bonus tracks, and it's essential for anyone into the darkest strains of punk and hardcore. Coming out of the Southern California hardcore scene, the band combined Adolescents axeman Rikk Agnew's offbeat guitar playing and the driving rhythm section with bizarre haunted house organ flourishes, tolling bells, and a sickly, dread-filled atmosphere that refuses to let up at any point on the album. But the band's focal point was always their flamboyant front man Rozz Williams, who brought a weird glam influence to Christian Death's morbid punk. His fey whining vocal style was totally unique and perfectly fit the disaffected, negative feel of Christian Death's music, and his bizarre, surrealist lyrics and transgressive visions read like sketches of a nightmare, rife with all kinds of perversion, necrophilia, incest and murder. These themes possess Only Theatre Of Pain from the creepy death obsession of the rocking opener "Cavity - First Communion" to the classic heavy death rock of "Figurative Theatre", "Mysterium Iniquitatis", and "Dream For Mother". There are a couple of slower songs where the band drops into a buzzsaw hardcore dirge ("Spiritual Cramp", "Resurrection - Sixth Communion"), the ghoulish black psychedelia of "Burnt Offerings" and "Prayer", and the serpentine, Middle Eastern-tinged devil vision of "Stairs - Uncertain Journey". If this album would ever have had a single, though, it probably would have been the song "Romeo's Distress", one of the catchiest songs that Christian Death ever wrote, and it feels like it could have been a huge hit for the band if only the lyrics weren't so politically incorrect. All in all though, a total classic in American deathrock and macabre punk, essential listening for anyone into the recent revival of that classic 80's goth/death punk sound.
Initially released as a 2014 Record Store Day exclusive, we've snagged some of the remaining copies of this cool Christian Death 7", which will be of twofold interest to fans of the influential death rockers: not only does this 7" feature vintage, never-before-seen live photos of Christian Death taken by punk photographer Edward Colver, but it also contains the same material as the bonus 7" that came with the limited edition version of the 30th anniversary LP reissue of Only Theatre Of Pain, an alternative version of "Cavity - First Communion" and the surrealistic, experimental nightmare soundscape "The Lord's Prayer".
Couple of things I learned from listening to this 7": first, the a-side sort of sounds like Celtic Frost if you accidentally play it at 33 rpm; second, Edward Colver was one of the finest photojournalists on the frontlines of the early LA hardcore scene. Never paid much attention to his name before, but after I did a little digging, I realized that this guy was responsible for the photos that would become some of the most iconic album covers in SoCal hardcore history; it was his imagery that appeared on the covers of such classics as Black Flag's Damaged, Circle Jerks's Group Sex and Wild In The Streets, T.S.O.L.'s Dance With Me, 45 Grave's Sleep In Safety, and a shitload of other punk and hardcore records from that era. His black and white images of Christian Death that are featured on this 7" are strikingly dramatic, and are prominently featured on the high-quality gatefold jacket that the record comes in. There's also a large 18" by 24" foldout poster included in the package, and the record comes on white vinyl, the whole thing limited to one pressing of 2,500 copies.
Now available on limited-edition cassette!
Considered by most to be the very first American death rock album that would be highly influential on the goth sound that would develop through the 80s, Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain is a classic of dark, blasphemous punk that has had a significant impact on so much of the music that I listen to and that I carry here at C-Blast. It's hard to imagine black metal taking form the way it did if Christian Death had never infected the underground punk scene with their anti-Christian imagery, their fascination with death and the occult, and the perpetually dark atmosphere and confrontational attitude that exudes from Only Theatre Of Pain, and the influence of this album on bands as diverse as Sixx, Deathcharge, Nuit Noire and Soror Dolorosa is unmistakable.
Released in 1982, this death punk masterpiece has been reissued for its 20th anniversary, with new artwork and layout as well as the addition of bonus tracks, and it's essential for anyone into the darkest strains of punk and hardcore. Coming out of the Southern California hardcore scene, the band combined Adolescents axeman Rikk Agnew's offbeat guitar playing and the driving rhythm section with bizarre haunted house organ flourishes, tolling bells, and a sickly, dread-filled atmosphere that refuses to let up at any point on the album. But the band's focal point was always their flamboyant front man Rozz Williams, who brought a weird glam influence to Christian Death's morbid punk. His fey whining vocal style was totally unique and perfectly fit the disaffected, negative feel of Christian Death's music, and his bizarre, surrealist lyrics and transgressive visions read like sketches of a nightmare, rife with all kinds of perversion, necrophilia, incest and murder. These themes possess Only Theatre Of Pain from the creepy death obsession of the rocking opener "Cavity - First Communion" to the classic heavy death rock of "Figurative Theatre", "Mysterium Iniquitatis", and "Dream For Mother". There are a couple of slower songs where the band drops into a buzzsaw hardcore dirge ("Spiritual Cramp", "Resurrection - Sixth Communion"), the ghoulish black psychedelia of "Burnt Offerings" and "Prayer", and the serpentine, Middle Eastern-tinged devil vision of "Stairs - Uncertain Journey". If this album would ever have had a single, though, it probably would have been the song "Romeo's Distress", one of the catchiest songs that Christian Death ever wrote, and it feels like it could have been a huge hit for the band if only the lyrics weren't so politically incorrect. All in all though, a total classic in American deathrock and macabre punk, essential listening for anyone into the recent revival of that classic 80's goth/death punk sound.
While Christian Death did put out some highly listenable material after the departure of founding member Rozz Williams (at least early on), there's really only three Christian Death albums that you really, really need in your collection: the pioneering and provocative 1982 debut Only Theatre Of Pain, and the two albums with both Williams and Valor Kand that followed, Catastrophe Ballet and Ashes. All of these are key works in the death rock canon, and their combined influence has reached well into the realms of extreme metal, industrial music and beyond; any headbanger who turns their nose up at Christian Death's early works simply based on the band's campy look should consider sitting down and listening to these albums side by side with Celtic Frost's 80s output to see just how far the band's black tendrils extended. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in the early Christian Death material, though, what with this whole death rock revival thing that's been going on for the past few years, and it looks like a whole new generation of listeners has been turning on to the weird, morbid genius of Rozz Williams. Not a moment too soon, I say. We've had the reissue of Only Theatre Of Pain available here for awhile, but up till now never stocked the following two albums, both of which were reissued by Season Of Mist in 2009; featuring booklet materials from the original first edition LP releases on L'Invitation Au Suicide and newly re-mastered, both come with the highest recommendation for anyone obsessed with true death rock and the most macabre fringes of post-punk.
Originally released in 1985 on French label L'Invitation Au Suicide, Ashes was the final album from the Rozz Williams-fronted lineup of Christian Death, and an end to an era. While I won't completely write off the post-Williams output from Christian Death (the subsequent 1986 album Atrocities is pretty goddamn good), this was the last chapter in what had been a genre-defining run of albums, now iconic entries in the American death rock canon. On their third a