Despite being a big fan, I don't carry the Nurse With Wound catalog here at C-Blast as it falls outside of the shop's general focus, but every once in a while we'll see something new from NWW member Andrew Liles that crosses over into our realm of metallic weirdness. Liles has been an outspoken fan of metal and has collaborated with an assortment of folks from the Scandinavian black metal scene, legends of the isolationist ambient community, and even has an upcoming collaboration with black noise fiends Sutekh Hexen coming on the horizon, and whenever this guy starts fooling around with metallic sounds, the results are almost always amazing (and amazingly bizarre).

Part of what aims to be an ongoing series, the new Schmetaling Lp features Liles working alongside two legendary black metal vocalists, Maniac and Attila Csihar, both of whom have fronted the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, and fellow NWW member Matthew Waldron (also of irr. app. (ext.)) is also brought in. Before I threw this on my deck, I was sort of expecting something along the lines of Liles's previous collaboration with Maniac Det Skjedde Noe N�r Du Var I Belgia, a mutant hydra of NWW-style sound fuckery, black industrial and blown-out noise-punk slime. There is a bit of stuff here as well as that Nurse With Wound style of sound collage and surrealistic weirdness as you would expect, but the music ends up being MUCH heavier and more freaked-out than anything these guys did on Det Skjedde....

Gorgeously presented in a thick gatefold jacket and pressed on red vinyl, Schmetaling Monster Of Rock starts off with the pounding metallic noise and Maniac's vicious demon-shrieks of "Liberte", a crushing slab of black industrial that evokes the hellish sounds of Mz.412 and Skitliv. But from there, the rest of the album starts to center around a kind of wigged-out, heavy duty psychedelia that's not too far removed from the sort of metallic neo-krautrock sounds that Circle and their Ektro brethren experiment with. The version of heavy metal that Liles seems to be paying homage to is that of the 70's-era, hard rockin', axe-wailin' kind, a la Rainbow, Black Sabbath, early Priest. The musicians switch things up constantly and jarringly, suddenly segueing from a crazed take on classic early NWOBHM with insane falsetto screams and tinny, spastic guitar solos into weird dark and doomy acoustic death-folk that transforms into minimal electronic noisescapes ("Bitter Suite"), stomping, wailing metallic krautrock jams like the instrumental "Death Row Diner" and chopped up liturgical/operatic ambience ("Zygonic Model"). Lots of surrealistic weirdness appears in the form of pornographic sound effects, bizarre electronic sounds, cut-up processed voices and horror movie samples, test-tone drones, discordant piano, and even a little bit of Sabbathian doomcrawl that's strewn through the psych-metal delirium. That black-industrial vibe does re-emerge later on, on the creepy "Schwarze Nacht, Ruchlos Nacht" where Attila snarls and chants over a blackened mix of satanic jazziness and droning trance-metal. But then it's back to the closing track "Ditchdigger" where more of that heavy mutoid boogie is met with Waldron's gargled growls, sounding like a hydrocephalic Leonard Cohen.

This is a thoroughly avant-garde album that most metal fans won't be into, but if you dug Liles's other forays into

mind-melting and surrealist metal/electronic delirium and his bizarro blackened prog band Sehnsucht, you'll dig this.

Limited to five hundred copies.