Another white-hot slab of crumbling, sludgy psych-roar overload from Jazzfinger via Blackest Rainbow, this disc (like the Mechanical Children debut that's reviewed elsewhere in this week's new arrivals update) first came out in a tiny edition in early 2008 and sold out immediately, so to placate the demand for it, Blackest Rainbow has issued Grief To Grind The Fire in a second edition of 150 copies, presented in a simple parchment sleeve.

The two new tracks on Grief are Jazzfinger at their most melodic and heaviest, whipping up a viscous mass of distorted guitar drones, blasted melodic figures and heavy amplifier sludge into something akin to a Goslings jam, but with that unique Jazzfinger drone-ritual quality. Compared to much of the other Jazzfinger stuff that I've been listening to of late, this is positively epic, with two ultra-long drone monoliths instead of the shorter, clattery improv-drone pieces that we're used to hearing from them. They stretch these jams waaaay out, with the whole disc coming in at over sixty minutes, giving each of these pieces plenty of time to rise and fall in volume and heaviness and skull-blasting power. The first track "Legs In The River" relies on waves of thick guitar feedback and roaring synth tones to create a beautiful rush of crumbling melodic riffage, with a single sweet melodic riff at the center of it all for more than forty minutes, turning over and over again amid the roaring feedback harmonies and crushing overtones, swallowing you up in slowly swirling cloud of buzz and hiss and grinding sludge-throb despite the relatively low-fi recording quality. Jazzfinger are one of the few bands doing this sort of psychedelic guitar/electronics based dronecrush that manage to infuse their basement-grade recordings with a boneshaking density, and you can really feel it here, especially when you crank this disc to maximum volume. Think Goslings and Sunroof melted together into a crackling, layered mass of glorious ambient sludge, eventually flatlining in the last ten minutes or so into corroded high-end drones.

On the second track "Burnt Hole", they go for a shorter, heavier dronesludge attack, letting loose a flood of gut-rumbling low-end roar for twenty-five minutes that takes the fried, rusted-out textures of the first track and stretches them into a thick grinding undercurrent of crushing bass frequencies and fluttering feedback and sinister electrical hum. Over top of this surging molten mass of corrosive machine thrum, a single simple keyboard melody rises up every few minutes, a vaguely melodic descending riff contrasted against the doomy oceanic waves, and things get progressively more and more tweaked as it heads towards the end, bits of fractured glitch and static noise building, the sound becoming more chaotic and noisy towards the end.

So far, this is one of my favorite Jazzfinger releases, and definitely the heaviest that we've managed to stock so far.