Prepare for a descent into devastating death-dub delirium! Pardon the alliteration, but just seeing that this debut CD from the Japanese band Begottened featured the duo of Chew (vocalist for legendary sludge metallers Corrupted) and Kohei Nakagawa (the guy behind the long running extreme noise outfit Guilty Connector) was enough to make me giddy. Yeah, I had to pick up this self-titled debut pronto, and this depth-charge ended up being even better than I expected. Chew brings mucho darkness to this project, with heavy whiffs of the kind of glacial despair that he trafficked in via Corrupted, but the overall sound is certainly something much, much different. True, the six songs on this eponymous full-length are formed out of an immensely bleak brand of slow-motion, industrial-tinged heaviness, focused around spare, echoing drums that creep and shuffle through a vast, dark expanse, that almost dubby percussion moving beneath encroaching waves of crushing detuned drone and streaked with bits of trippy electronic noise.

That's where the duo diverges into a different direction of abyssic crush. Nakagawa's unique electronic noise is heavily layered and immersed into Chew's tectonic percussion and thick black drift. And the industrial dub / industrial breakbeat influence is really prominent throughout some of the song structures. It's great. The opener "Brainwashing" almost resembles an especially doom-laden Scorn track, or perhaps something from Necro Deathmort, all slow-motion snare hits and echoing kick drum, draped in thick curtains of filthy murk and cavernous reverb, the sound of a doom metal drummer playing solo in some isolated cave chamber. As the album moves through each subsequent track, however (the whole album seems to be essentially a single piece of music, as it all flows directly together), the sound grows more frenzied and noisy, those drums becoming lost in gales of shrieking electronics and crushing low-end distortion, and halfway in to all of this, all you can make out are the violently crashing cymbals swept up in a hurricane of noise.

The second half of the album re-emerges into a much more psychedelic space, though, as swarms of frenzied tape delay effects and garbled glitchy electronics take over, joined by even slower and even more distended, stretched-out drumming, surrounded with shrieking feedback and controlled blasts of distortion, contrasting space and stillness with those bursts of abrasive sound and echoing percussive skitter to lead the rest of the album into a spaced-out, utterly desolate sprawl of ashen doom-dub, desaturated isolationist ambience and ghostly electro-acoustic creepiness, a whirring, clanking, echoing nightmare that at times resembles some doom outfit channeling Lee Perry in the shadows of the world of Eraserhead.

It's ultimately what you'd probably expect from collaboration between these two artists, and delivers on all fronts. Skews at times towards what some of Corrupted's dark ambient work has sounded like, but Nakagawa continuously punctures the deathscape with vicious electronics, searing the pitch-black depths with plumes of black fire.

Highly recommended, particularly to those of you into the like-minded heaviness and dub-damaged dread of Grave In The Sky, Lietterschpich, and even the roiling Teutonic synth-doom of My Heart, An Inverted Flame.