Scott Conner from Xasthur recently turned me on to this Providence, RI band, and man am I thankful - how have I never heard these guys before? Gravesideservice have been around for at least a couple of years and released their first Cd Masters In Lunacy back in 2008, but somehow they've managed to totally fly under my radar up till now. I love the psychotic din this band whips up though, an utterly fucked-up and hallucinatory strain of quasi-black metal that is devoid of guitar, instead relying on a lineup of piano, bass, drums, and vocals, with the piano basically acting as the lead instrument. Popes Pears (named after a particularly gruesome medieval torture device) is their second album, and begins with a hallucinatory introduction of distant doleful piano notes drifting up over a din of murky voices and backwards sound, streaks of electronic grit and fluttering feedback, but when the second song "Pope Says No" kicks in, things turn weird.

Its an odd, disturbed mix of that haunting piano, distant drumming and a vocalist who belts out the surreal, often humorous graveyard visions in a deep gruff voice, the music becoming a weird sort of gothic rock, the drummer doing a sort of processional-like rhythm that gives this an almost neo-folk feel where the drums are concerned, while the swirling piano and low-fi cemetery ambience fall somewhere a Requiem Mass written for piano and some mold-covered haunted house film soundtrack from the early 70s. There's a couple of instrumental tracks that feature the piano lilting its sad, mournful melodies over howling winds and the rusted creak of crypt-gates, and then there's the blasting weirdness of songs like "Church Of The Immaculate Deception", where the lead piano drifts over the pounding blastbeats, a black metal-like percussive attack rumbling and blazing beneath the brain-damaged howling and gothic piano. It sort of reminds me of the modern classical / grindcore fusion of Silentist, but Graveyardservice are much weirder, with a really heavy horror- soundtrack feel to a lot of the instrumental passages. The vocals range from a killer whacked-out croon to insane squawks, or deliver the lyrics in a kind of demented sing-song cadence, like morbid nursery rhymes being recited over the mutoid black metal blast, the lyrics conjuring all sorts of blasphemous images of diabolical Catholic bishops devouring children head- first and stuffing wicked torture devices down the throats and up the asses of those poor saps who choose to defy them.

This is pretty amazing, unique and twisted and totally fucked up, not quite "black metal" in the traditional sense but certainly channeling the same sort of sick, anti-human energies...

This is a different version of Popes Pears , a reissue perhaps? It's the 2012 version of the CD, and features an eight-song version of the album without the interstitial pieces that appeared on the original edition, and also lacks the two bonus Gravesideservice Psalter tracks. Different cover art, as well.