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BEGOTTENED   self-titled   CD   (Nostalgia Blackrain)    15.99



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.