Album number two from the ultra heavy death industrial outfit Gnawed, Feign And Cloak is the much-anticipated followup to the fantastic 2012 full-length Terminal Epoch, a featured release here at C-Blast when it originally came out, and one of the heaviest industrial albums that came out that year. Even before Epoch, Minneapolis artist Grant Richardson had been constructing some of the most fearsome industrial music we'd been hearing, but with this newest album the project's fusion of crushing scrapyard rhythms and brutal noise is heavier than ever.

Featuring an array of guest artists from such groups as Cock ESP, Ice Volt, Violator X, Scaphe, and Agitate, Feign employs a variety of sounds to forge it's doom-laden noise dirges; using scrap metal, bowed cymbals, and singing bowls, the album delves into the various aspects of Gnawed's sounds, with some truly skull-crushing moments arriving pretty early on. As the album opens with the staticky, monochromatic ambiance of "Time Undone", Richardson drifts in with a fog of grainy distorted drone and rumbling, doom-laden heaviness, sprawling out beneath delay-drenched voices flitting through the blackness like ghostly forms on the periphery of your hearing, while huge constructs of rusted metal shift and settle in the depths, a clanking arrhythmic din cloaked in grim, hazy ambiance.

But when "Burning The Hive" follows, you're hit with a sickeningly blown-out mechanical dirge that seems to drag the album into a kind of twisted, mutated industrial metal territory. Putrescent, massively distorted screams undulate over the crumbling, earth-grinding machinery that seethes and smokes beneath the layers of tremulous electronic hum, the sound blasted with noxious frequencies and bone-rattling bass, almost like some warped version of UK industrial sludge outfit Pitch Shifter slowed down to an abject crawl and left to rot in a pit of bile-drenched bio-mech refuse. The album moves deeper into this nightmarish corrupted mecha-hell, tracks like "The Scales" and the title track unfolding into smoldering fields of electrical hum and juddering death-engine reverberations, laced with surges of Carpenterian synth-dread and those horrific processed shrieks; others spread out into vast cinematic black ambiance, immersed in crushing malevolent synthesizers and ghastly pneumatic loops. And closer "Torch To Cedar" may be the most harrowing piece on the album, a swarming mass of blackened death-drone festooned with cacophonous metallic noise and prayer-bowl resonances that were recorded in the sewers beneath Minneapolis, the sounds slowly coalescing into a monstrous industrial dirge.

Building upon that classic Cold Meat death industrial sound, Richardson adds even blacker textures and an almost metallic immensity to these tracks, making this another soul-consuming assault that further establishes Gnawed as one of the US's finest death industrial outfits alongside the likes of Steel Hook Prostheses, Theologian, Vomit Arsonist and Nyodene D. Comes in a six panel digipak with album art from Dutch artist Brian Vander Pol.