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 a 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 emerges, joined with 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 opening beneath your feet as 13th Apostle increases the violence of the churn. Everything dropping out as horrifying screams explode from nowhere, opening the door to a 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 release. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.