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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

      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.

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!

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.

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).

��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.

Similar to the recent online-only (thus far) release of the long-thought-lost Cremation Grounds full-length Lord Of Nerves, the 20-minute EP Abortion Sacrament is another recording that was produced in the late 2000s and had been thought lost for fifteen years due to the destruction of the hard drive that contained the original masters. As part of a recent organizing effort here at Crucial Blast, almost all of these recordings were recently rescued from that cursed external drive, and have been resurrected and remastered for your listening displeasure.

Coming from one of the preeminent entities of the Order Of The Warhead, the three-track Abortion Sacrament EP is the very first release that Cremation Grounds recorded around 2008-2009, and like other recordings of the era, dislodges a bog-damn of insanely misanthropic black noise / heavy electronics, gruesome blown-out industrial sludge, crushing harsh-noise-wall style constructions, and an overdriven recording style that may well have been itself the cause of that hard drive's suffering and collapse. Again, the gist of these tracks is pure in-the-red evil electronic obliteration, much of it crafted by the entities behind Cremation Grounds as a kind of "meditation through abomination" strategy, utilizing the recordings for deep meditative sessions typically accompanied by sacred entheogens, assorted psychedelics (both natural and otherwise), acts of self-debasement and self-abuse, extended scatalogical ritual, and the disintegration of the ego in the churning jet-black oceans of searing distortion and low-end rumbling rot that dominate the sessions.

Abortion Sacrament does not have quite as much of the molten scum-dirge that is found on the Lord Of Nerves full-length. But these three tracks make up for it in all-out sense-wrecking chaos and over-modulated electronic violence. Drums, vocals and percussion all exist within the roiling black-static detonations of the title track and "Spread Wide Upon Her Cremation Grounds (Adorned In Bone Ornaments)", but they have been destroyed completely by walls of crumbling, crackling electronic distortion, with the occasional muffled roar of guttural, monstrous vocalizations breaking through the carnage.

As with the album, this material skews hard towards the harsh noise / black noise end of the sound spectrum, but likewise takes a great deal of inspiration from the diabolic filth of ancient, dissolving Finnish black/death demos. This sonic abhorrence crawls before the cracked and damaged altars of Macronympha, the no-fi bestial hiss of the earliest Beherit demos, classic Japanese noise a la Pain Jerk and Incapacitants, and the aura of eighth-generation dubs of Archgoat rehearsal tapes, all grown together into a swollen, pulsating, cancerous mass of cacophonous horror.

The EP is available on 3" CD in DVD-size packaging, hand-numbered in an edition of 90 copies. Sacrament is also available on audio cassette in a limited run of 100 copies, with a bonus tape-only track on the B-side titled "Enfolded In The Engorged Lips Of Kali", another nineteen-minute harsh blackened heavy electronics meditation that was recorded around 2010. Both the 3" CD and Cassette versions of Abortion Sacrament include full-color inserts and a vinyl Cremation Grounds sticker.

Similar to the recent online-only (thus far) release of the long-thought-lost Cremation Grounds full-length Lord Of Nerves, the 20-minute EP Abortion Sacrament is another recording that was produced in the late 2000s and had been thought lost for fifteen years due to the destruction of the hard drive that contained the original masters. As part of a recent organizing effort here at Crucial Blast, almost all of these recordings were recently rescued from that cursed external drive, and have been resurrected and remastered for your listening displeasure.

Coming from one of the preeminent entities of the Order Of The Warhead, the three-track Abortion Sacrament EP is the very first release that Cremation Grounds recorded around 2008-2009, and like other recordings of the era, dislodges a bog-damn of insanely misanthropic black noise / heavy electronics, gruesome blown-out industrial sludge, crushing harsh-noise-wall style constructions, and an overdriven recording style that may well have been itself the cause of that hard drive's suffering and collapse. Again, the gist of these tracks is pure in-the-red evil electronic obliteration, much of it crafted by the entities behind Cremation Grounds as a kind of "meditation through abomination" strategy, utilizing the recordings for deep meditative sessions typically accompanied by sacred entheogens, assorted psychedelics (both natural and otherwise), acts of self-debasement and self-abuse, extended scatalogical ritual, and the disintegration of the ego in the churning jet-black oceans of searing distortion and low-end rumbling rot that dominate the sessions.

Abortion Sacrament does not have quite as much of the molten scum-dirge that is found on the Lord Of Nerves full-length. But these three tracks make up for it in all-out sense-wrecking chaos and over-modulated electronic violence. Drums, vocals and percussion all exist within the roiling black-static detonations of the title track and "Spread Wide Upon Her Cremation Grounds (Adorned In Bone Ornaments)", but they have been destroyed completely by walls of crumbling, crackling electronic distortion, with the occasional muffled roar of guttural, monstrous vocalizations breaking through the carnage.

As with the album, this material skews hard towards the harsh noise / black noise end of the sound spectrum, but likewise takes a great deal of inspiration from the diabolic filth of ancient, dissolving Finnish black/death demos. This sonic abhorrence crawls before the cracked and damaged altars of Macronympha, the no-fi bestial hiss of the earliest Beherit demos, classic Japanese noise a la Pain Jerk and Incapacitants, and the aura of eighth-generation dubs of Archgoat rehearsal tapes, all grown together into a swollen, pulsating, cancerous mass of cacophonous horror.

The EP is available on 3" CD in DVD-size packaging, hand-numbered in an edition of 90 copies. Sacrament is also available on audio cassette in a limited run of 100 copies, with a bonus tape-only track on the B-side titled "Enfolded In The Engorged Lips Of Kali", another nineteen-minute harsh blackened heavy electronics meditation that was recorded around 2010. Both the 3" CD and Cassette versions of Abortion Sacrament include full-color inserts and a vinyl Cremation Grounds sticker.

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of CRUCIAL BLAST, we are stoked to present the first in a series of Crucial Blast shirts featuring brand-new commissioned art from our favorite visual artists. This design features the gnarly collage art of Cody Drasser, guitarist for the acclaimed New York prog-death outfit AFTERBIRTH; we've been longtime fans of Drasser and his music/art, with several releases from him in the C-Blast catalog..

The "Psychotronic Catastrophism" design is an accurate glimpse into the neurologic strategies behind the art, music, film, and literature that we release here at Crucial Blast. Issued in a limited printing, on black Gildan 100% cotton short sleeve t-shirt, two-color print, with the Crucial Blast sigil on the back of the shirt.

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of CRUCIAL BLAST, we are stoked to present the first in a series of Crucial Blast shirts featuring brand-new commissioned art from our favorite visual artists. This design features the gnarly collage art of Cody Drasser, guitarist for the acclaimed New York prog-death outfit AFTERBIRTH; we've been longtime fans of Drasser and his music/art, with several releases from him in the C-Blast catalog..

The "Psychotronic Catastrophism" design is an accurate glimpse into the neurologic strategies behind the art, music, film, and literature that we release here at Crucial Blast. Issued in a limited printing, on black Gildan 100% cotton short sleeve t-shirt, two-color print, with the Crucial Blast sigil on the back of the shirt.

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of CRUCIAL BLAST, we are stoked to present the first in a series of Crucial Blast shirts featuring brand-new commissioned art from our favorite visual artists. This design features the gnarly collage art of Cody Drasser, guitarist for the acclaimed New York prog-death outfit AFTERBIRTH; we've been longtime fans of Drasser and his music/art, with several releases from him in the C-Blast catalog..

The "Psychotronic Catastrophism" design is an accurate glimpse into the neurologic strategies behind the art, music, film, and literature that we release here at Crucial Blast. Issued in a limited printing, on black Gildan 100% cotton short sleeve t-shirt, two-color print, with the Crucial Blast sigil on the back of the shirt.

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of CRUCIAL BLAST, we are stoked to present the first in a series of Crucial Blast shirts featuring brand-new commissioned art from our favorite visual artists. This design features the gnarly collage art of Cody Drasser, guitarist for the acclaimed New York prog-death outfit AFTERBIRTH; we've been longtime fans of Drasser and his music/art, with several releases from him in the C-Blast catalog..

The "Psychotronic Catastrophism" design is an accurate glimpse into the neurologic strategies behind the art, music, film, and literature that we release here at Crucial Blast. Issued in a limited printing, on black Gildan 100% cotton short sleeve t-shirt, two-color print, with the Crucial Blast sigil on the back of the shirt.

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of CRUCIAL BLAST, we are stoked to present the first in a series of Crucial Blast shirts featuring brand-new commissioned art from our favorite visual artists. This design features the gnarly collage art of Cody Drasser, guitarist for the acclaimed New York prog-death outfit AFTERBIRTH; we've been longtime fans of Drasser and his music/art, with several releases from him in the C-Blast catalog..

The "Psychotronic Catastrophism" design is an accurate glimpse into the neurologic strategies behind the art, music, film, and literature that we release here at Crucial Blast. Issued in a limited printing, on black Gildan 100% cotton short sleeve t-shirt, two-color print, with the Crucial Blast sigil on the back of the shirt.

Deliriums And Death is another entry in the new 3" CD-R series that Public Guilt has started; we've also listed the awesome new Korperschwache disc in the series in this week's update. This one features two new tracks of super-heavy metallic drone from Brian Daniloski, the former Meatjack member and current Baltimore soundguy at spots like the Ottobar, who has been recording some great ultra-crush guitar meltdowns as Darsombra for a few years now using just guitar, effects pedals, and electronics. The Darsombra album Ecdysis on At A Loss was a killer collection of processed amplifier sludge and dark, droning ambience, sorta in the vein of Thrones and Sunn O))) and the older, more blown-out Growing recordings, but with an alien weirdness that was wholly his own. This EP continues in that vein, opening with the massive inexorable sludge drone and looped powerchord rumble of 'Periphery' which opens into a blazing fiery horizon of cosmic synth sounds, like an ambient metal Kosmiche soundscape. It actually reminds me ALOT of the more ambient parts off of Meatjacks Days Of Fire. The track builds in heaviness and volume before fading out in a smoky haze of electronic drone; this segues straight into 'Eyes In Eyes', a chilling collage formed out of endlessly overdubbed layers of warped manipulated vocal loops and droning feedback pulses, heavy detuned amp rumble and keening unidentifiable cries. A total psychedelic nightmare soundscape. Pretty great! Comes in a three-panel miniature gatefold sleeve screenprinted with cool blotchy artwork designed by Germ? at PowerThroughMetal,and limited to 110 copies.

One of my all-time favorite Maryland bands, Darsombra blasted out of the ionosphere in 2023 with their amazing, sprawling double-album Dumesday Book. I've loved everything that Darsombra has done, going all the way back to founder Brian Daniloski's early doom-drone version of the band. That first appeared in the mid-2000s with crushing, trance-inducing albums like Ecdysis and Eternal Jewel, issued by the fantastic local labels At A Loss and Public Guilt, respectively. Those early Darsombra works were awesome, megalithic monuments of crushing ambient doom (seemingly inspired by the sound and feel of Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions-era Earth), swirling experimental electronics, and kosmsiche-influenced riff-scape repetition - that stuff still holds up as some of the heaviest metallic psychedelia of that period. But at some point, starting with the 2012 album Climax Community, Brian began taking the band's sound into even further depths of lysergic energy and shroomed-out axe-drone, blending in newfound folk and noise elements into his sound, as well as stunning multi-tracked choral voices that made the band sound like angelic choirs howling over gargantuan tectonic plate-shift. Amazing stuff. And with each new album, Darsombra continued to evolve into something even more unique, more immense, and most of all, more beautiful. And over the past decade, the band moved further afield into a style and space totally its own, impossible to categorize, carving out massive slabs of exploratory space-rock guitar alongside those blasts of distorted guitar crunch, stacking the vocals and electronics higher and higher with insane effects-pedal circuits. Things really took a turn towards the ultra-majestic when Brian teamed up with Ann Everton, who had already provided Darsombra with its strikingly cosmic-looking artwork; the first recording of the duo, 2016's Polyvision, blew my gourd off with its eerie, explosive dronescapes and synth-drenched roars of interstellar ambient sludge. This expanded vision did away with anything resembling the "doom"-iness of the early work, there was no feeling of doom here, just a kind of ghostly, soaring beauty that would build forever before going supernova with massive crescendos of voice, synth, and guitar.

From there, the duo became more and more ecstatic in their almost ritualistic walls of sound. I remember seeing them together live for the first time, Ann on the floor in front of her various gear, Brian standing next to her with his guitar, the two of them blending and blurring their voices together through an impossible amount of effects processing, unleashing an unending wave of blissed-out roar with an utterly flattening climax. I'm pretty sure I was lying on the floor towards the end of it, eyes closed, just soaking up the vastness of their music. It was incredible. And every time I've seen them perform since then, it's somehow more energetic, more ecstatic, more joyous than before, the pair reveling in their sounds, Brian crafting enormous riff-grooves that circle endlessly over Ann's exhilarating electro-invocations and her sweeping, seraphic singing that’s stretched out into wordless cloudscapes of chorus-drenched sound. That Earth vibe I mentioned? It's still there, Brian's cyclical riffing still evoking that offbeat drone-rock bliss we got from Phase 3 and (especially) Pentastar: In the Style of Demons. But whereas initially that hypno-riffing and layered shredding and winding sky-high leads was the centerpiece of Darsombra's music, now it was subsumed into the larger whole, with the result producing something akin to being caught up in the currents of a cosmic storm, pulled along by this sometimes creepy, more often glorious, always perfect pandemonium of krautrock-esque pulse, lush synthesizer and electronic effects, soaring seemingly wordless choral vocals, and biting, metallic psych-guitar. Bewitching, for sure. And that's not even remarking on the band's visual assault, with a constant stream of kaleidoscopic craziness projected onto the screen behind the band, their bizarre, hallucinatory and often hilarious video-collages perfectly synced with the rising, swelling waves of sound. Darsombra sound huge and crushing and beautiful on disc, but their live experience is something not to be missed.

And on their 2023 album Dumesday Book reaches new heights of euphoric, heart-rending power and triumph. It's easily the band's best work to date. It builds on that unusual mix of Teutonic throb, drone-metal crunch, quirky humor and electronic sense overload, but these ten tacks ripple with an even higher frequency. It's one of my fave albums of 2023, no question. From the meandering guitar and bright, searing synth melody that opens the album with "Shelter In Place", Dumesday blasts off into outer / inner space, led by emotive leads and oceanic buzz and crashing gongs before they lock into the eternal with "Call The Doctor (Pandemonium Mix)". The song is incredibly, absurdly catchy, with lovely vocoder vocals transmitting from above chugging hard-rock guitar chords and blooping, bleeping synth melody. Like some gigantic 70's arena rock hook soaked with Tangerine Dream / Klaus Schulze-esque keys and gorgeous processed singing. The music weaves in and around these moments of majestic catchy space-rock nirvana, sometimes dipping into a kind of primal percussive groove, splashes of solarized atonal synth-bloop, long stretches of droning metallic power chord rumble, malfunctioning electronics, weird city noises and barking dogs and random clatter popping in and out. There are long shadows that sometimes creep across the face of this music, occasionally unleashing some harsh dissonance or sinister minor-key riff, like on " Everything Is Canceled". But then there's that glittery “glammy" quality to the band, both visually and sonically. It bleeds out through their wild pop hooks, the and synchronized outfits, staining everything around it. The moments of darkness are always ultimately swallowed up by the duo's elemental euphoria that they create. Even when Brian is laying down the heaviest possible stoner-metal riff ("Nightgarden (Profundo Mix)"), it's almost always surrounded by this intoxicating aura, a kind of Kirlian glow of jubilation, glinting and flashing off the beatific vocal melodies, weirdo noises, and lovely keyboard lines like shafts of light hitting that hunk of bismuth on the album cover. Then there's "Azimuth", nearly twenty minutes of haunting synth and bone-rattling distorted low-end rumble, blown-out electronics and mellifluous guitar wandering around, the duo bringing a defined percussive beat this time, slow and mesmeric, a tick-tock pulse anchoring the music as it ascends to celestial heights - the song slowly unfolds into this moody swirl of guitar and synth melodies woven together, building into a kind of orchestral hypno-rock, heavy and trippy and utterly trance-inducing. A massive metallic psych-glam ceremony stretching skyward forever. Flowing right into the looping mesmer of "A New Dell", itself stretching out to the horizon and out into space. Into the windswept barren of "Gibbet Lore", with its killer metallic leads and Morricone-esque twang. The culmination of everything as " Mellow Knees" closes the trip with its final blast of crushing synth and gently plucked melody and whooshing keys.

It is an amazing, transformative piece of music that absolutely must be heard to in its entirety. Each song is just a piece of the monument, staggering in its splendor. Again, Darsombra and Dumesday Book exist outside of "genre". I recommend this album to anyone into anything from Ya Ho Wha 13 and Hawkwind to the aforementioned Pentastar-era Earth, from Ash Ra Tempel to Animal Collective and Lysol-era Melvins (especially their "Hung Bunny"), Deerhunter to Roxy Music to Sunn O))), Growing to 70's Bowie to the weirdest moments of Boris and Emerson Lake And Palmer. And beyond. So far beyond...

I love this band.

Darsombra is another incarnation of Baltimore's Brian Daniloski, a member of the long-running theatrical noise metal outfit Meatjack, as well as a recent addition to Dadaist math metallers Trephine. Much like Joe Preston's Thrones, Darsombra is just Brian, armed with drum machine, guitar, synths and electronics, and vocals, crafting massive trudge metal anthems and sinister droning currents. The album starts off with a Troum-gone-space-rock vibe, just looped electronics and distant guitar figures cycling in the darkness, but then moves into heavy drum-machine patterns interlocked with crushing guitar riffage and a strangely pseudo-Middle Eastern feel, like an exotic Thrones/Swans fusion with clean anthemic vocals.Ecdysis keeps up this dynamic throughout it's six tracks, shifting between heavy robo indie-metal sludge, spacey guitar-crush space drones, deranged vocal loops, and lots of eerie amp ambience and meandering effects heavy guitar exploration. Very cool stuff, fans of axe-heavy droneologists Sunn O))), Earth, Troum, etc., and Thrones / Black Mayonnaise robotic sludge should check out.

One of my all-time favorite Maryland bands, Darsombra blasted out of the ionosphere in 2023 with their amazing, sprawling double-album Dumesday Book. I've loved everything that Darsombra has done, going all the way back to founder Brian Daniloski's early doom-drone version of the band. That first appeared in the mid-2000s with crushing, trance-inducing albums like Ecdysis and Eternal Jewel, issued by the fantastic local labels At A Loss and Public Guilt, respectively. Those early Darsombra works were awesome, megalithic monuments of crushing ambient doom (seemingly inspired by the sound and feel of Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions-era Earth), swirling experimental electronics, and kosmsiche-influenced riff-scape repetition - that stuff still holds up as some of the heaviest metallic psychedelia of that period. But at some point, starting with the 2012 album Climax Community, Brian began taking the band's sound into even further depths of lysergic energy and shroomed-out axe-drone, blending in newfound folk and noise elements into his sound, as well as stunning multi-tracked choral voices that made the band sound like angelic choirs howling over gargantuan tectonic plate-shift. Amazing stuff. And with each new album, Darsombra continued to evolve into something even more unique, more immense, and most of all, more beautiful. And over the past decade, the band moved further afield into a style and space totally its own, impossible to categorize, carving out massive slabs of exploratory space-rock guitar alongside those blasts of distorted guitar crunch, stacking the vocals and electronics higher and higher with insane effects-pedal circuits. Things really took a turn towards the ultra-majestic when Brian teamed up with Ann Everton, who had already provided Darsombra with its strikingly cosmic-looking artwork; the first recording of the duo, 2016's Polyvision, blew my gourd off with its eerie, explosive dronescapes and synth-drenched roars of interstellar ambient sludge. This expanded vision did away with anything resembling the "doom"-iness of the early work, there was no feeling of doom here, just a kind of ghostly, soaring beauty that would build forever before going supernova with massive crescendos of voice, synth, and guitar.

From there, the duo became more and more ecstatic in their almost ritualistic walls of sound. I remember seeing them together live for the first time, Ann on the floor in front of her various gear, Brian standing next to her with his guitar, the two of them blending and blurring their voices together through an impossible amount of effects processing, unleashing an unending wave of blissed-out roar with an utterly flattening climax. I'm pretty sure I was lying on the floor towards the end of it, eyes closed, just soaking up the vastness of their music. It was incredible. And every time I've seen them perform since then, it's somehow more energetic, more ecstatic, more joyous than before, the pair reveling in their sounds, Brian crafting enormous riff-grooves that circle endlessly over Ann's exhilarating electro-invocations and her sweeping, seraphic singing that’s stretched out into wordless cloudscapes of chorus-drenched sound. That Earth vibe I mentioned? It's still there, Brian's cyclical riffing still evoking that offbeat drone-rock bliss we got from Phase 3 and (especially) Pentastar: In the Style of Demons. But whereas initially that hypno-riffing and layered shredding and winding sky-high leads was the centerpiece of Darsombra's music, now it was subsumed into the larger whole, with the result producing something akin to being caught up in the currents of a cosmic storm, pulled along by this sometimes creepy, more often glorious, always perfect pandemonium of krautrock-esque pulse, lush synthesizer and electronic effects, soaring seemingly wordless choral vocals, and biting, metallic psych-guitar. Bewitching, for sure. And that's not even remarking on the band's visual assault, with a constant stream of kaleidoscopic craziness projected onto the screen behind the band, their bizarre, hallucinatory and often hilarious video-collages perfectly synched with the rising, swelling waves of sound. Darsombra sound huge and crushing and beautiful on disc, but their live experience is something not to be missed.

And on their 2023 album Dumesday Book reaches new heights of euphoric, heart-rending power and triumph. It's easily the band's best work to date. It builds on that unusual mix of Teutonic throb, drone-metal crunch, quirky humor and electronic sense overload, but these ten tacks ripple with an even higher frequency. It's one of my fave albums of 2023, no question. From the meandering guitar and bright, searing synth melody that opens the album with "Shelter In Place", Dumesday blasts off into outer / inner space, led by emotive leads and oceanic buzz and crashing gongs before they lock into the eternal with "Call The Doctor (Pandemonium Mix)". The song is incredibly, absurdly catchy, with lovely vocoder vocals transmitting from above chugging hard-rock guitar chords and blooping, bleeping synth melody. Like some gigantic 70's arena rock hook soaked with Tangerine Dream / Klaus Schulze-esque keys and gorgeous processed singing. The music weaves in and around these moments of majestic catchy space-rock nirvana, sometimes dipping into a kind of primal percussive groove, splashes of solarized atonal synth-bloop, long stretches of droning metallic power chord rumble, malfunctioning electronics, weird city noises and barking dogs and random clatter popping in and out. There are long shadows that sometimes creep across the face of this music, occasionally unleashing some harsh dissonance or sinsiter minor-key riff, like on " Everything Is Canceled". But then there's that glittery “glammy" quality to the band, both visually and sonically. It bleeds out through their wild pop hooks, the and synchronized outfits, staining everything around it. The moments of darkness are always ultimately swallowed up by the duo's elemental euphoria that they create. Even when Brian is laying down the heaviest possible stoner-metal riff ("Nightgarden (Profundo Mix)"), it's almost always surrounded by this intoxicating aura, a kind of Kirlian glow of jubilation, glinting and flashing off the beatific vocal melodies, weirdo noises, and lovely keyboard lines like shafts of light hitting that hunk of bismuth on the album cover. Then there's "Azimuth", nearly twenty minutes of haunting synth and bone-rattling distorted low-end rumble, blown-out electronics and mellifluous guitar wandering around, the duo bringing a defined percussive beat this time, slow and mesmeric, a tick-tock pulse anchoring the music as it ascends to celestial heights - the song slowly unfolds into this moody swirl of guitar and synth melodies woven together, building into a kind of orchestral hypno-rock, heavy and trippy and utterly trance-inducing. A massive metallic psych-glam ceremony stretching skyward forever. Flowing right into the looping mesmer of "A New Dell", itself stretching out to the horizon and out into space. Into the windswept barren of "Gibbet Lore", with its killer metallic leads and Morricone-esque twang. The culmination of everything as " Mellow Knees" closes the trip with its final blast of crushing synth and gently plucked melody and whooshing keys.

It is an amazing, transformative piece of music that absolutely must be heard to in its entirety. Each song is just a piece of the monument, staggering in its splendor. Again, Darsombra and Dumesday Book exist outside of "genre". I recommened this album to anyone into anything from Ya Ho Wha 13 and Hawkwind to the aforementioned Pentastar-era Earth, from Ash Ra Tempel to Animal Collective and Lysol-era Melvins (especially their "Hung Bunny"), Deerhunter to Roxy Music to Sunn O))), Growing to 70's Bowie to the weirdest moments of Boris and Emerson Lake And Palmer. And beyond. So far beyond...

I love this band.

Crucial Blast is ECSTATIC to partner with Darsombra for a special double-cassette boxset of "Dumesday Book". The entire album is spread across four sides of glorious analog audio cassette, their spaced-out heaviness and joyous drone rock fusing perfectly with magnetic tape. The "Dumesday Book" 2xCASSETTE BOX presents the two cassettes in a black clamshell case with revised full-color outer sleeve, each tape housed in an individual full-color slipsleeve / o-card that combine together to make a single image, accompanied by a modified reproduction of the booklet from the LP/CD editions, with various extras including a pair of Darsombra 1" badges, Darsombra sticker, and more. Released in a limited edition of 150 copies through Crucial Blast.

One of my all-time favorite Maryland bands, Darsombra blasted out of the ionosphere in 2023 with their amazing, sprawling double-album Dumesday Book. I've loved everything that Darsombra has done, going all the way back to founder Brian Daniloski's early doom-drone version of the band. That first appeared in the mid-2000s with crushing, trance-inducing albums like Ecdysis and Eternal Jewel, issued by the fantastic local labels At A Loss and Public Guilt, respectively. Those early Darsombra works were awesome, megalithic monuments of crushing ambient doom (seemingly inspired by the sound and feel of Phase 3: Thrones and Dominions-era Earth), swirling experimental electronics, and kosmsiche-influenced riff-scape repetition - that stuff still holds up as some of the heaviest metallic psychedelia of that period. But at some point, starting with the 2012 album Climax Community, Brian began taking the band's sound into even further depths of lysergic energy and shroomed-out axe-drone, blending in newfound folk and noise elements into his sound, as well as stunning multi-tracked choral voices that made the band sound like angelic choirs howling over gargantuan tectonic plate-shift. Amazing stuff. And with each new album, Darsombra continued to evolve into something even more unique, more immense, and most of all, more beautiful. And over the past decade, the band moved further afield into a style and space totally its own, impossible to categorize, carving out massive slabs of exploratory space-rock guitar alongside those blasts of distorted guitar crunch, stacking the vocals and electronics higher and higher with insane effects-pedal circuits. Things really took a turn towards the ultra-majestic when Brian teamed up with Ann Everton, who had already provided Darsombra with its strikingly cosmic-looking artwork; the first recording of the duo, 2016's Polyvision, blew my gourd off with its eerie, explosive dronescapes and synth-drenched roars of interstellar ambient sludge. This expanded vision did away with anything resembling the "doom"-iness of the early work, there was no feeling of doom here, just a kind of ghostly, soaring beauty that would build forever before going supernova with massive crescendos of voice, synth, and guitar.

From there, the duo became more and more ecstatic in their almost ritualistic walls of sound. I remember seeing them together live for the first time, Ann on the floor in front of her various gear, Brian standing next to her with his guitar, the two of them blending and blurring their voices together through an impossible amount of effects processing, unleashing an unending wave of blissed-out roar with an utterly flattening climax. I'm pretty sure I was lying on the floor towards the end of it, eyes closed, just soaking up the vastness of their music. It was incredible. And every time I've seen them perform since then, it's somehow more energetic, more ecstatic, more joyous than before, the pair reveling in their sounds, Brian crafting enormous riff-grooves that circle endlessly over Ann's exhilarating electro-invocations and her sweeping, seraphic singing that’s stretched out into wordless cloudscapes of chorus-drenched sound. That Earth vibe I mentioned? It's still there, Brian's cyclical riffing still evoking that offbeat drone-rock bliss we got from Phase 3 and (especially) Pentastar: In the Style of Demons. But whereas initially that hypno-riffing and layered shredding and winding sky-high leads was the centerpiece of Darsombra's music, now it was subsumed into the larger whole, with the result producing something akin to being caught up in the currents of a cosmic storm, pulled along by this sometimes creepy, more often glorious, always perfect pandemonium of krautrock-esque pulse, lush synthesizer and electronic effects, soaring seemingly wordless choral vocals, and biting, metallic psych-guitar. Bewitching, for sure. And that's not even remarking on the band's visual assault, with a constant stream of kaleidoscopic craziness projected onto the screen behind the band, their bizarre, hallucinatory and often hilarious video-collages perfectly synced with the rising, swelling waves of sound. Darsombra sound huge and crushing and beautiful on disc, but their live experience is something not to be missed.

And on their 2023 album Dumesday Book reaches new heights of euphoric, heart-rending power and triumph. It's easily the band's best work to date. It builds on that unusual mix of Teutonic throb, drone-metal crunch, quirky humor and electronic sense overload, but these ten tacks ripple with an even higher frequency. It's one of my fave albums of 2023, no question. From the meandering guitar and bright, searing synth melody that opens the album with "Shelter In Place", Dumesday blasts off into outer / inner space, led by emotive leads and oceanic buzz and crashing gongs before they lock into the eternal with "Call The Doctor (Pandemonium Mix)". The song is incredibly, absurdly catchy, with lovely vocoder vocals transmitting from above chugging hard-rock guitar chords and blooping, bleeping synth melody. Like some gigantic 70's arena rock hook soaked with Tangerine Dream / Klaus Schulze-esque keys and gorgeous processed singing. The music weaves in and around these moments of majestic catchy space-rock nirvana, sometimes dipping into a kind of primal percussive groove, splashes of solarized atonal synth-bloop, long stretches of droning metallic power chord rumble, malfunctioning electronics, weird city noises and barking dogs and random clatter popping in and out. There are long shadows that sometimes creep across the face of this music, occasionally unleashing some harsh dissonance or sinister minor-key riff, like on " Everything Is Canceled". But then there's that glittery “glammy" quality to the band, both visually and sonically. It bleeds out through their wild pop hooks, the and synchronized outfits, staining everything around it. The moments of darkness are always ultimately swallowed up by the duo's elemental euphoria that they create. Even when Brian is laying down the heaviest possible stoner-metal riff ("Nightgarden (Profundo Mix)"), it's almost always surrounded by this intoxicating aura, a kind of Kirlian glow of jubilation, glinting and flashing off the beatific vocal melodies, weirdo noises, and lovely keyboard lines like shafts of light hitting that hunk of bismuth on the album cover. Then there's "Azimuth", nearly twenty minutes of haunting synth and bone-rattling distorted low-end rumble, blown-out electronics and mellifluous guitar wandering around, the duo bringing a defined percussive beat this time, slow and mesmeric, a tick-tock pulse anchoring the music as it ascends to celestial heights - the song slowly unfolds into this moody swirl of guitar and synth melodies woven together, building into a kind of orchestral hypno-rock, heavy and trippy and utterly trance-inducing. A massive metallic psych-glam ceremony stretching skyward forever. Flowing right into the looping mesmer of "A New Dell", itself stretching out to the horizon and out into space. Into the windswept barren of "Gibbet Lore", with its killer metallic leads and Morricone-esque twang. The culmination of everything as " Mellow Knees" closes the trip with its final blast of crushing synth and gently plucked melody and whooshing keys.

It is an amazing, transformative piece of music that absolutely must be heard to in its entirety. Each song is just a piece of the monument, staggering in its splendor. Again, Darsombra and Dumesday Book exist outside of "genre". I recommend this album to anyone into anything from Ya Ho Wha 13 and Hawkwind to the aforementioned Pentastar-era Earth, from Ash Ra Tempel to Animal Collective and Lysol-era Melvins (especially their "Hung Bunny"), Deerhunter to Roxy Music to Sunn O))), Growing to 70's Bowie to the weirdest moments of Boris and Emerson Lake And Palmer. And beyond. So far beyond...

I love this band.

Ridiculoid robot-pop from a bunch of Baltimorian Kraftwerk-worshipping synth punk mutants. Didn't think Atom & His Package were nearly weird or geeked out enough? Here's an album for you. These guys take totally legit over-the-top 80's electro/synth pop hooks and crunchy, awesomely wanky hard rock guitars and bizarre noises and electronics and deliver ten catchy,completely dorky anthems to robots, girls, and girls with robots, all with a singer that usually sounds like a cross between the guy from Devo and The Count from Sesame Street. So poppy and sugary and weird, you'll develop diabetes ten minutes into Theres No Sex Like No Sex. Another blast of cool/fucked Baltimore pop freakery from the MT6 camp, packaged minimally in a clear plastic DVD case.

We can always rest assured that any band that features Richard Johnson in its ranks is gonna slay. This guy is a legend in the Washington DC area extreme music community; throughout the 1990's, his band Enemy Soil was one of the most devestating politically-tinged grindcore outfits on the East Coast, and over the past few years Richard has also worked with grind units Agoraphobic Nosebleed and The Index, as well as continuing to publish his long-running underground music zine Disposable Underground. Drugs Of Faith is his newish band, a kickass power trio that has been kicking around for a couple of years now but just recently released this debut EP through Polish death/grind imprint Selfmadegod (which is also home to futuristic grinders Antigama and the Godflesh-inspired blast/dirge monstrosity of Third Degree). Drugs Of Faith are totally rooted in brutal, downtuned ultra-heavy grindcore, but Richard's guitar playing adds alot in the way of weird, dissonant chords and off-kilter,textured guitar playing that sort of makes this sound like a spastic, grindy version of Die Kreuzen, or maybe Black Flag mixed up with the weird dissonant riffs from mid-period Voivod maybe, a jagged hardcore-inflected grind assault that breaks off into crushing, almost noise-rock style riffage, all fronted by Richard's ferocious barking vocals and his trademark brand of super pissed-off political/personal lyrics. Ferocious, progressive grindcore from one of the masters! Eight songs in just over 15 minutes.

Hell yeah! OK, EARTHRIDE are local guys (hailing from Frederick, Maryland, which is just a few minutes down the road from Crucial Blast HQ), we've seen 'em numerous times, we had them on our Doom Capital compilation we did back in 2004....needless to say, we're big EARTHRIDE fans, and Vampire Circus just delivers more of the crushing biker doom these guys are such fucking masters of. This album does sound a lot heavier than past stuff though, probably in large part due to the presence of Mike Dean from CORROSION OF CONFORMITY as producer. Featuring members of SPIRIT CARAVAN and INTERNAL VOID, EARTHRIDE is Maryland Doom at its most grungy, dropping dank Black Sabbath meets Lynyrd Skynyrd riffs and fronted by our buddy Dave Sherman, whose gnarly blown-throat growl still resembles Lemmy from MOTORHEAD after smoking a carton of cigs in 20 minutes. Total battering-ram rock. Hell yeah. And dig that killer Hammond organ on "Dirtnap" and "Swamp Witch", courtesy of Mick Schauer from CLUTCH, blasting those tunes with some rich Deep Purple/Edgar Winter vibes. The whole thing reeks of primo 70's dirtbag metal caked in sludge.

A sold-out tour-only CD-R release from Baltimore's Ecstatic Sunshine that we managed to get a very small quantity of for Crucial Blast. I've been in love with this band since I saw them open for Earth about a year ago in Baltimore; just two dudes, Matt Papich and Dustin Wong, playing two guitars through two amps, and soaring through joyous, spazzy, fastpaced guitar instrumentals that remind me of a super catchy indie/hardcore band, like old school Dinosaur Jr. at their poppiest, ripped free from the constraints of a rhythmic backline and jettisoned into the ether, their clean, undistorted guitars interlocking into complex melodic minatures and then untangling again to race off in different directions.

This tour CD-R features a bunch of re-recorded songs off of their "Spiral" CD-R, with titles like "Wavechop", "Crystal In The Sky", "Ramontana", and "Perrier", clockwork jams of beatless melodic 'core and Allman Brothers merging with free-floating SST Records dreams. Packaged in a flashy screenprinted oversize wallet, and hand-numbered out of 50 copies !!!

��� Based in the same seedy Prison City that Crucial Blast calls home, this local outfit finally crawled out of the muck with their first full-length Unto The Nothing, and it might well be the heaviest thing on this week's new arrivals list. A misshapen monstrosity stumbling out of the most abject depths of doom metal, this trio belts out one seriously ugly and gnarled racket on their debut, that's also not without the rare moment of haunting prettiness that serves to make their ugliness sound even uglier. More than anything though, these creeps lean towards long, lumbering passages of crushing droning riffage that threaten to stretch into infinity, building a wall of hypnotic black sludge out of horrendously detuned instruments and rotten amp-noise that occasionally births some twisted, writhing burst of stoned groove, or will pull apart into a damp, crumbling passage of desolate slowcore. The look of this album alone makes quite the impression upon the listener: Unto The Nothing features amazing original album art from Aeron Alfrey, who did the dust jackets for Subterranean Press's reprints of Thomas Ligotti's Grimscribe, Noctuary and Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, and his visions of a nightmare forest filled with flayed corpses, severely deformed mutations, grotesque demonic oaks, and chattering insectoid horrors is done up in a mix of collage and illustration that looks like a JK Potter piece gone completely apeshit. It makes for a striking visual accompaniment to Fortress's grueling, ghastly negative sludge.

��� The likes of Winter, Celtic Frost, Worship and Autopsy have all been invoked to describe the band's torturous slow-motion heaviness, which are all fairly apt. The album takes awhile to get there, though, with a long, smoldering build through plaintive guitar chords hovering over a vast field of dead-eyed amplifier drone and mesmeric feedback hum. For a brief moment, that almost suggests a horribly withered, sun-blasted take on White Birch-era Codeine, but once everything finally and violently crashes in though, it's like suddenly being buried underneath a large mound of peat, all crushing down-tuned torpor and Sabbath-on-ketamine glacial blues. When "Fight The Son" kicks in, the mood changes to something even more violent, a chugging, gnarled mass of diseased Frostian riffage, the sledgehammer swing of their riffs mounted to the drummer's monstrous pachyderm groove, while the phlegm-clotted guitar leads rise out of the sludge in a sour miasma to be drawn out over the gluey heaviness. There are a few more moments where the distorted dirge falls away and unexpectedly pretty melodies briefly surface through the murk, and there's also some pretty catchy riffage that shows up when songs like "Lies & Fears" and "Stolen Graves" suddenly surge into their rocking, fuzz-drenched groove. Nothing's most haunting passage comes with the elegiac feel that creeps into the titanic dirge of "The Nothing", as an ethereal female voice drifts out of the gloom, a fragile siren-song lilting over the singer's half-whispered croak and the funerary crush of the band. These guys manage to bring an interesting spaced-out vibe to their grueling slow-mo grind with the multi-tracked vocals and strange somnambulant vibe, the songs frequently disappearing into a black hole of billowing feedback drone and cavernous low-end drift, and in the end the album manages to bridge the agonized crawl of early funereal death-doom bands like Thergothon and Winter, and the crustier, drug-fucked misanthropy of Grief and Noothgrush, wrapping it all in a strangely dazed fog of glacial amp-buzz. Take it from me when I tell you that there is no heavier band to be found creeping through this vile, stinking town.

��� Available on digipack CD and gatefold LP in casewrapped jacket with download, limited to three hundred copies.

Based in the same seedy Prison City that Crucial Blast calls home, this local outfit finally crawled out of the muck with their first full-length Unto The Nothing, and it might well be the heaviest thing on this week's new arrivals list. A misshapen monstrosity stumbling out of the most abject depths of doom metal, this trio belts out one seriously ugly and gnarled racket on their debut, that's also not without the rare moment of haunting prettiness that serves to make their ugliness sound even uglier. More than anything though, these creeps lean towards long, lumbering passages of crushing droning riffage that threaten to stretch into infinity, building a wall of hypnotic black sludge out of horrendously detuned instruments and rotten amp-noise that occasionally births some twisted, writhing burst of stoned groove, or will pull apart into a damp, crumbling passage of desolate slowcore. The look of this album alone makes quite the impression upon the listener: Unto The Nothing features amazing original album art from Aeron Alfrey, who did the dust jackets for Subterranean Press's reprints of Thomas Ligotti's Grimscribe, Noctuary and Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, and his visions of a nightmare forest filled with flayed corpses, severely deformed mutations, grotesque demonic oaks, and chattering insectoid horrors is done up in a mix of collage and illustration that looks like a JK Potter piece gone completely apeshit. It makes for a striking visual accompaniment to Fortress's grueling, ghastly negative sludge.

The likes of Winter, Celtic Frost, Worship and Autopsy have all been invoked to describe the band's torturous slow-motion heaviness, which are all fairly apt. The album takes awhile to get there, though, with a long, smoldering build through plaintive guitar chords hovering over a vast field of dead-eyed amplifier drone and mesmeric feedback hum. For a brief moment, that almost suggests a horribly withered, sun-blasted take on White Birch-era Codeine, but once everything finally and violently crashes in though, it's like suddenly being buried underneath a large mound of peat, all crushing down-tuned torpor and Sabbath-on-ketamine glacial blues. When "Fight The Son" kicks in, the mood changes to something even more violent, a chugging, gnarled mass of diseased Frostian riffage, the sledgehammer swing of their riffs mounted to the drummer's monstrous pachyderm groove, while the phlegm-clotted guitar leads rise out of the sludge in a sour miasma to be drawn out over the gluey heaviness. There are a few more moments where the distorted dirge falls away and unexpectedly pretty melodies briefly surface through the murk, and there's also some pretty catchy riffage that shows up when songs like "Lies & Fears" and "Stolen Graves" suddenly surge into their rocking, fuzz-drenched groove. Nothing's most haunting passage comes with the elegiac feel that creeps into the titanic dirge of "The Nothing", as an ethereal female voice drifts out of the gloom, a fragile siren-song lilting over the singer's half-whispered croak and the funerary crush of the band. These guys manage to bring an interesting spaced-out vibe to their grueling slow-mo grind with the multi-tracked vocals and strange somnambulant vibe, the songs frequently disappearing into a black hole of billowing feedback drone and cavernous low-end drift, and in the end the album manages to bridge the agonized crawl of early funereal death-doom bands like Thergothon and Winter, and the crustier, drug-fucked misanthropy of Grief and Noothgrush, wrapping it all in a strangely dazed fog of glacial amp-buzz. Take it from me when I tell you that there is no heavier band to be found creeping through this vile, stinking town.

Available on digipack CD and gatefold LP in casewrapped jacket with download, limited to three hundred copies.

The first recorded offering from twilight-psyche dronerock duo FULCI. Deep, rumbling, and eternal speaker-buzz worship, wrapped around lumbering riffs drunk on cough syrup and shimmering distortion overload. Howling feedback mantras repeated ad infinitum. Major key rustic lullabies are reduced to primal string scraping drones that climb over mountains of echoing hum. Intensely melodic and repetitious, like SKULLFLOWER covering EARTH's 2 in an old, empty farmhouse. FULCI is Eric Crowe (formerly of Social Infestation, currently of Marax) and Adam Wright. Former members of Leviathan A.D. and The Bodybag Romance assisted on bass and drums, respectively.

Back in stock. Even though the band is from right down the road from C-Blast HQ, it wasn't until quite recently that I started to listen to these guys in earnest, starting with a rather blistering set I saw them perform in DC with Column Of Heaven around a year ago. The 7"s I'd picked up from the band were pretty cool, but after seeing them live I realized they didn't do justice to the strength of their sonic attack; in the live setting, their mix of brutal hardcore and cyclonic grind flayed the flesh right off of my bones. When the band's collaboration with Japanese noise pioneer Merzbow was announced shortly thereafter, this vicious album turned into one of my more anticipated new releases of '14. Released as a double disc set on Profound Lore (with a vinyl edition forthcoming in the next few weeks, which we'll be getting in stock as well), this is one of the best noise/metal collabs I've heard since Masami Akita himself teamed up with those maniacs in Gore Beyond Necropsy, with a ferocious sound that comes much closer to capturing the live savagery of the band.

The main album that makes up the first disc is a short one, at just twenty-three minutes long, but it hurtles at top speed through eleven tracks of blasting ferocity. Songs race by in a blur of ultra-violent blastbeats and discordant hardcore riffs, the multiple vocalists swapping back and forth between the frantic, bestial screeching and deeper, gruffer bellowing and a weird disaffected moan, the music blending equal parts spazztoid staccato powerviolence with blurts of massive dissonant sludge and full-on grindcore. Occasionally this will slow down into turbulent assaults of jagged noise-rock or pulverizing dirge, and Merzbow's presence is felt throughout, not only in the swells of jittery electronics and squealing high-pitched feedback that bubble up in the spaces between songs, transforming entire tracks like "Raise Thee, Great Wall, Bloody And Terrible" into outbursts of virtual power electronics, but also as an omnipresent texture in the midst of the band's raging grind. A layer of electronic filth and corrosion that smolders beneath the instruments, creating an edgy aural abrasion lurking in every corner of the album. Towards the end, things slow down to a seriously epic crawl, starting with "High Fells" as it drags itself through vast furrows of droning heaviness somewhere in between the industrial plod of early Swans and the barbaric trance of Neurosis, crushing riffs churning over noisy percussion as the vocals rise in wraithlike chant and vein-popping screams, while volleys of jazzy horns streak overhead. And on ""Ljudet Av Gud", most of that instrumentation is swept away, leaving just a creaking noisescape of distant electro-acoustic sounds slowly overcome by the rhythmic boom of hammers on empty oil tanks, building into a desolate industrial dirge that takes over the entire track. Building to the cathartic release of closer "Fawn Heads And Unjoy", the final blast of dissonant, delirious grind violence is splattered in free jazz squonk.

The Sister Fawn disc offers a more avant-garde sound, and while it seems to be presented as more of a companion piece, I gotta admit I thought this material is even cooler than the album proper. Much of Full Of Hell's screeching grindmetal is absorbed into a more cacophonous wall of industrial violence here, delivering longer tracks of pummeling industrial junk-metal rhythms and howling feedback manipulation, blasts of crushing power electronics and more of that abject Swans-esque dirge, and squalls of apocalyptic jazz-infected noise like "Crumbling Ore" that approach Borbetomagus levels of intensity. This stuff still get very grindy at times, though, like the noise-damaged blast-assault of "Merzdrone" that welds a seemingly endless blastbeat to Merzbow's scorching electronics and shrill skulldrill distortion, ferociously psychedelic.

Comes in digipack packaging.

����� One hell of an impressive first album from these fellow Maryland mutants. I'd heard and dug some of their earlier stuff, but on Escapism these guys have nailed down a creepy and crushing avant-metal assault of their own, exploring a fascination with psychedelic guitar meanderings, improvisation and experimental noise. Their name might infer something a little more "delicate", but the music is pretty harsh, a frenzied combination of blackened math metal and twisted noise rock that ends up sounding pretty unusual.

����� Their creepy dissonance descends over the ambient opener "Parasite I", where metallic, almost sitar-like drones bleed into a gorgeous, orchestral driftscape. But "Charnel Flow" detonates that placid, dreamlike ambience with a furious combination of off-kilter black metal-style melody, hideous discordant riffs and a maniacal level of aggression. That blackened influence is constantly felt throughout Genevieve's sound, but there's also this frantic, frayed-nerve feel to all of this stuff that just as often reminds me of Today Is The Day's vicious metallic noise rock. The songs proceed to erupt with pummeling death metal-esque double bass, eerie atonal melodies, and lots of skronky, jagged riffage, careening through a demented landscape of howling feedback and blasting blackened dissonance. As it slips into gruesome slow-motion dirge and churning math-metal chaos, the deranged, vocals and monstrous guttural roars blend together for a maximum psychotic effect, and that blackened noise rock vibe is always there beneath the surface, jutting out of even the fastest and most frigid blastscapes.

����� There are a few deviations from that heavier stuff, like the psych-guitar instrumental that makes up the title track, and some of the songs feature weird underwater guitar effects and odd crooning vocals that can swerve the album into vaguely Lynchian territory. There's a moment on the song "Fell" where it suddenly shifts into hauntingly pretty gloom-rock for a second, laced with mournful slide guitar-like textures, and elsewhere Genevieve use both baritone guitar and fretless guitar to add unique tonal qualities to their sound. At the end, Escapism closes with a reprise of that strange sitar-like drone from the beginning, but it's stretched across an eight-minute outro that turns increasingly dread-inducing, layered in weird chittering electronics, distant horn-like blasts, and flurries of swirling black drift. Those weird ambient stretches definitely give this an odd, dreamlike feel at times, but for the most part, this album is set to pulverize, spewing a lurching, necrotic nightmare that's easily one of the coolest things coming out of the Baltimore area right now.

����� One hell of an impressive first album from these fellow Maryland mutants. I'd heard and dug some of their earlier stuff, but on Escapism these guys have nailed down a creepy and crushing avant-metal assault of their own, exploring a fascination with psychedelic guitar meanderings, improvisation and experimental noise. Their name might infer something a little more "delicate", but the music is pretty harsh, a frenzied combination of blackened math metal and twisted noise rock that ends up sounding pretty unusual.

����� Their creepy dissonance descends over the ambient opener "Parasite I", where metallic, almost sitar-like drones bleed into a gorgeous, orchestral driftscape. But "Charnel Flow" detonates that placid, dreamlike ambience with a furious combination of off-kilter black metal-style melody, hideous discordant riffs and a maniacal level of aggression. That blackened influence is constantly felt throughout Genevieve's sound, but there's also this frantic, frayed-nerve feel to all of this stuff that just as often reminds me of Today Is The Day's vicious metallic noise rock. The songs proceed to erupt with pummeling death metal-esque double bass, eerie atonal melodies, and lots of skronky, jagged riffage, careening through a demented landscape of howling feedback and blasting blackened dissonance. As it slips into gruesome slow-motion dirge and churning math-metal chaos, the deranged, vocals and monstrous guttural roars blend together for a maximum psychotic effect, and that blackened noise rock vibe is always there beneath the surface, jutting out of even the fastest and most frigid blastscapes.

����� There are a few deviations from that heavier stuff, like the psych-guitar instrumental that makes up the title track, and some of the songs feature weird underwater guitar effects and odd crooning vocals that can swerve the album into vaguely Lynchian territory. There's a moment on the song "Fell" where it suddenly shifts into hauntingly pretty gloom-rock for a second, laced with mournful slide guitar-like textures, and elsewhere Genevieve use both baritone guitar and fretless guitar to add unique tonal qualities to their sound. At the end, Escapism closes with a reprise of that strange sitar-like drone from the beginning, but it's stretched across an eight-minute outro that turns increasingly dread-inducing, layered in weird chittering electronics, distant horn-like blasts, and flurries of swirling black drift. Those weird ambient stretches definitely give this an odd, dreamlike feel at times, but for the most part, this album is set to pulverize, spewing a lurching, necrotic nightmare that's easily one of the coolest things coming out of the Baltimore area right now.

I first met Baltimore-area musician Eric Rhodes years ago at an ill-fated show right here in my home town. Today Is The Day was supposed to play this absurdly small dive bar right down the street from me, there was no way I was going to pass that up. Alas, the band was stuck in traffic due to an accident on the highway, and they didn't make it. But the evening was salvaged by meeting Eric, who shared many of the same interests as I - we talked European prog, avant-garde death metal, and noise rock all evening. And he told me about his then-new band Genevieve; I assumed it was a reference to the Velvet Cacoon album, which it partially was. But as he described the band's sound, it was obviously something quite different. I followed Geneveieve's work over the subsequent past decade, watching this interesting, amorphous outfit move from early roots in Kayo Dot-esque chamber doom into something more idiosyncratic. That radical evolution tracked Genevieve moving from the gorgeous, Codeine-meets-Time Of Orchids-meets-blackened doom of 2013's Hope /Desolation demo (which is absolutely beautiful, harrowing stuff, check it out), and the early experimental digital releases that blended an increasing control of atonality and crushing black metal-influenced guitar sound with polluted sprawls of ambient guitar-noise ectoplasm, creepy-as-fuck improv industrial exercises, Abruptum-like horrorscapes, and the ever-present aura of prog and math rock, which would always manifest in the band's songwriting.

This mixture of sounds and textures really stood out on the two albums that Genevieve put out on local label Grimoire Records: 2015's Escapism and 2017's Regressionism. Here, it finally all came together into this monstrous and insanely heavy black / death chaos, barbed with bizarre dissonant leads, brutalizing tempo changes, churning concrete-mixer power that ripped everything around them to shreds. Nightmarish guttural vocals ascend into psychotic shrieks, each song unfurling into a pulverizing pandemonium of jagged edges and wrecked neurosis. But that math rock / chamber rock element is still fully present, appearing in the cracks that open amid the blackened blast, haunting interludes (sometimes using cello and acoustic guitar) and these beautiful, emotionally-wracked performances that magnify the intensity of the band's violent sound. Both of those albums are excellent and highly, highly recommended for those into the far-flung fringes of chaotic, experimental black / death.

And here we are with 2023's Akratic Parasitism. The band's third album, sharpened and concentrated, further perfecting Genevieve's unusual sound. As sweeping, majestic melodies rise through opener "Growth", the quartet expertly detonates maelstroms of ultra-violent, ravenous blackened death that swallow everything in sight, but which shatter into those amazing passages of clean, spidery guitar structures, ghostly vocals that waft through the shadows, and abrupt, off-kilter tempos that, to me at least, evokes the likes of Slint, Rodan, June Of 44 and other seminal 90s-era Louisville math rock outfits (as well as a heavy dose of early This Heat) . It seems like such an unlikely genetic code, but man, does it work. Akratic's eigh songs are slithering, undulating abominations, writhing with snarling shape-shifting vocals and grotesque roars, screaming at the heavens, the thick, suffocating chaos exuding something similar to the weird non-Euclidean death metal of bands like Ulcerate, Portal, Ehnahre, Altars, Dead Congregation, and Pyrrhon, that sort of post-Obscura Gorguts influenced death, but shot through with those abrupt shifts into shimmering angularity, chorus-drenched strings, spindly minor-key melody, choral voices, and impassioned, emotive singing that blossoms into something strange and achingly beautiful, before everything around it is brutally sucked back into their churning hell vortex. I haven't heard anything like it. The schizoid, form-splintering violence sewn through Genevieve's music continues to remind me of early Today Is The Day as well, funnily enough. One of the most interesting and ambitious extreme metal bands from the Baltimore area, Genevieve has found their way into a bizarre pocket universe of their own making.