Another installment in Handmade Birds' "Blue Series", this one part of the "Critical Fabric" line, lettered "L". Collectors, take note!

One of the most baffling of the "Blue Series - Critical Fabric" line from Handmade Birds, Defiling The Putrefied Corpse Of Loli Odessa's Blightwater Lullabies album is firmly and completely fucked up, some of the weirdest and most challenging (on multiple levels) goregrind / gorenoise I've ever listened to. Where did this come from? Who moved the rock that this abomination crawled out from underneath? What in the hell? So, to the best of my research faculties, this tape is the only physical release from this Hamburg, Germany trio, and it is legitimately insane. The band actually describes their stuff as "ambient grind", and I can get behind that. This is not the hyper-blown-out Carcass worship you might expect from a band coming out of the goregrind underground; I mean, that's definitely a part of the churning core o0f ultra-brutal slop-blast that Odessa befouls this tape with, but this goes off in a number of much weirder and unexpected directions from there. Frankly, it's stuff like this that has been fueling my growing obsession with the whole "gorenoise" aesthetic - if you thought that extreme music couldn't get any more "extreme" and bizarre, this scene would like you to hold their beer.

There's the hentai obsession that fuels their imagery and subject matter, which for the most part goes right over my head. Musically though? Defiling The Putrefied Corpse Of Loli Odessa makes me feel like my internal organs are mutating while I'm listening to this tape. The trio (who only list themselves by their initials) smash together bass guitar, multiple synthesizers, drums, guitar, and vocals into a rancid soup of off-the-wall vomitblast. But what in other hands might be just pure emetic splatter, the Odessa trio sculpt this absurd bouquet of anime (and specifically the raunchier hentai sub-genre) references and samples, hypersonic blastbeat ping snare, weird brief interludes of musical ambience, spine-destroying detours into a kind of sputtering tech-death madness, repugnant bestial grunts and growls and squeals, and this strange gleam of assorted electronic textures that float freely beneath the vicious grindcore. It's hugely fucked up and insanely catchy, combining what feels like genetic material from the supersonic gorenoise-damaged goregrind of bands like Sulfuric Cautery, wafts of beautiful and moody drifting soundtrack ambience, crazed electronics, and song structures that touch on the craziest tech-death forms I get from the likes of Psycroptic or Malignancy.

But there's really nothing else like what Defiling The Putrefied Corpse Of Loli Odessa is doing here. Because on top of all of the blasting, shredding, meatgrinder madness that makes up this musical massacre, it's genuinely captivating, using the contrast between hyper-speed noisegrind gore splat and romantic instrumental sound to do a real number on your cranium. The three-part "Pine Tale" section is a prime example of this, juxtaposing melancholy beauty againts the most spastic, hideous anti-musical violence imaginable.

Honestly, I think this stuff is genius. I can't stop listening to it. When those lilting, almost childlike vocals appear on "Leper Crest" towards the end, the effect is totally unique. Same for the haunting, almost funerary melodies gleaming beneath the stuttering blast of "Little Lady Lifeless". And then you get the relatively epic closing title track, which weaves elements of melodic death metal into the gurgling, pinging chaos, ascending into something majestic, monumental, crushingly heavy but wrought with melodramatic intensity and grandeur, while the music warps into mesmeric complexity and saccharine electronics. It's amazing. The only other artists that are even remotely on the same planet as these guys might be Serotonin Leakage, or maybe 16-武装翼の女神 [16-Armed Winged Goddess], another anime-obsessed avant-grind squad. But these comparisons are tenous at best.

Comes in the O-card packaging that defines the series, with a sticker, a fragment of blue cloth, and a wooden bird.