��Mancuerda Confessions is the impressive debut from the new death industrial duo Shock Frontier, released by the consistently terrific Malignant label. Opening with the controlled corrosive static and rhythmic throb of "Paroxysm", the album wastes no time in unleashing its blackened aural malevolence, sprawling out into sinister soundscapes filled with sampled voices, whirring metallic drones and deep bass reverberations, the music shifting from passages of pounding electro-throb into more minimal sprawls of bleak black ambience where ghostly murmurs and echoing metal clank drift through the endless darkness. On "Angels Upon Iron Horses", the duo employ an interesting mixture of fractured electronics and more abrasive clanking metal sounds, while spectral voices moan and howl in the distance behind a veil of grim soundtracky string-like textures. The track slowly builds into something intensely heavy and malevolent, forming into a rhythmic death-pulse, a din of shambling hulking metal shifting beneath grim Tangerine Dream-esque synth sounds and slurred voices caught in some kind of ghastly loop. Confessions continues to dip into pools of unsettling, hallucinatory ambience on tracks like "The Confessional" and "Controlled Atmosphere Killing", and the latter features a collaboration with death industrialist Staalkracht, combining sinister industrial rumblings and plumes of suffocating blackened noise and thrumming electricity.
�� From there, the violent black radiation hellstorm of "Decrepitude Approaching" rides on massive, thunderous war-drums, and both "Mancuerda" and "Understand The Extent Of Our Disintegration" create dense soundscapes of urban chaos, evoking the sounds of crumbling structures and terminal entropy as this turns into a kind of hellish soundtrack to a slow-motion collapse of civilization. The centerpiece of Confessions is the nearly twenty minute "Blood Eagle Zealot", a rumbling black expanse of half-whispered female voices and vast distorted synths that gradually begins to bloom with sinister horn-like sounds, resounding above spumes of crackling blackened static and harsh pneumatic rhythms, everything swirling and scurrying beneath the slow swell of mournful orchestral melody that begins to seep across the track, a fog of soulcrushing kosmische sorrow that slowly unfolds over those caustic frequencies and half-glimpsed voices, swirling around the steady kick-drum pulse that fades in and out of the track. Terrifying stuff, with moments of seriously crushing heaviness via some skillfully constructed blasts of mechanical rhythm and bone-rattling distorted bass that sharply punctuate the project's utterly bleak, dystopian ambience. Comes in a six panel digisleeve.