��� Didn't really realize it until I sat down to note my impressions of the new Sewer Goddess album Painlust, but it's actually been a full five years since the Boston-area project gave us their last album, 2010's With Dirt You Are One . There's been a couple of smaller releases, EPs and tapes and the like that have surfaced in the interim, along with that killer Live Waste disc that Malignant put out a while back, but this new disc is the first full album of new material from the band in all this time. I loved the debut, and made it a featured new release here at C-Blast back when it came out; the way it fused its blackened power electronics to doom-metal guitars and squealing, skin-eating electronic noise managed to avoid sounding like just another Abruptum / Gnaw Their Tongues clone, and it was easily the heaviest thing that I'd ever heard come from the Malignant label up to that point. For the band's latest, though, mastermind Kristen Rose has re-shaped her band's sound into a more concentrated form: those grueling death industrial elements are still front and center, but Sewer Goddess's sophomore album strips away all of the extraneous flesh from their sound, mounting it on a ravenous industrial metal chassis that serves as a perfect delivery system for Rose's noxious, masochistic visions.

��� And where earlier efforts were primarily the work of Rose alone, Sewer Goddess has also now evolved into an actual band, which includes Carl Haas from power electronics project Sharpwaist on bass; there's also a guest appearance from guitarist John Gelso of black metal legends Profanatica and The Royal Arch Blaspheme on the song "Get The Rope". With this expanded lineup, Painlust naturally offers a heavier, fuller sound than before, and that's never more apparent than the tracks in which they lurch into their crushing, pestilent version of industrial metal. The album slow cranks its flesh-chewing gears, spreading apart the sound to get at the black rot inside of each track; when it starts off with the droning industrial clamor of "Plague Axis", it's a drawn-out introduction to Painlust's horrors, initiating contact through a long sprawl of dirgelike synthesizer chords, clanking metallic percussion and distorted screams that all seem to be taking place somewhere in the distance. But when the next song "My Grave" kicks in, it's a punch to the ribs, the band suddenly shifting into a supremely sinister-sounding industrial metal dirge with Rose now adopting an almost gothy disaffected moan, the music turning into a a strange shambling mix of putrescent electronics and slow-motion heaviness, with glimmers of something sad and beautiful beneath the grinding, squelchy sludge; it's like some blacker, more metallic take on early Swans, filtered through a heavy haze of black metal-esque atmopsherics and draped in gloomier guitars. Fucking fantastic.

��� It isn't complex music, usually centering around a single dramatic riff that churns relentless through the band's blackened din. But it's nevertheless powerful stuff, hypnotic in its grinding monotony, but also surprisingly catchy. The tracks proceed through an array of deformed soundscapes and torturous industrial heaviness, oozing through warped blackened ambience and punishing Streetcleaner-esque hypno-sludge, vocals drifting across the album in a reptilian hiss or mutating into unsettling, heavily processed demonic moans. Painlust has plenty of moments where it's as heavy as any doom metal, but the surrounding layers of vile distorted electronics and filthy synthesizer keep it rooted in a more industrial sound. The best stuff on here are tracks like "Black Meat And Bones" and closer "Melena's Mask", both evoking the squealing discordance and grinding post-punk guitars of early Godflesh and Head Of David, with some earworm riffage fused to that assault of thunderous oil-drum percussion, clanging noise loops and Rose's creepy vocals, carving out a killer blast of howling, blackened machine-rock. More than ever before, this manages to evoke qualities of both Gnaw Their Tongues/MZ.412 style black industrial, and the apocalyptic pummel of Godflesh; in some ways, this stuff is also reminiscent of labelmates Sektor 304 with the blend of grinding electronic filth and bleak metallic heaviness, and certainly elicits a similarly blackened atmosphere. Totally fitting that the grotesque album art was designed by Sektor 304's Andre Coelho.