Now that I've been blasting so much newer weirdo hardcore and fucked-up punk, I've been getting a gnawing urge to pull out all of Black Flag's old records that had such a strong hand in influencing not only all of the bent adolescent skuzz that I'm addicted to, but also much of the noisy, brutal rock and sludgy crush that makes up so much of the music that I carry here at C-Blast. And what better place to start than with those early 7"s that introduced Black Flag's ferocious punk to the world...

Here it is, the first record from Black Flag, five minutes of visceral suburban mutant rage circa 1978 blasted with all of the immolating heat of a nuclear explosion, packaged with the Raymond Pettibone's disturbing, iconic artwork. This of course is from the original lineup that had Keith Morris (later of the Circle Jerks) on vocals, and if you're some poor soul who loved that box set from Morris's new hardcore band Off! and hasn't heard his work from 'Flag, oh boy... The a-side "Nervous Breakdown" is a classic Black Flag jam, a snarling ode to psychological destruction painted in raging buzz saw guitars and howling distress as Morris slobbers his cynical lyrics all over himself. Compared to where hardcore would head a couple of years later, it's not that fast or extreme, but it's definitely loaded with power, and in 1978 this was as violent as music could get. The flipside then jams three more songs down yer throat in a row, "Fix Me", "I've Had It", "Wasted", each one a perfect blast of primitive hardcore. Of course, Black Flag would get wonkier and weirder with later albums and lineups, but this early stuff is unfuckwithable, the apex of brutal L.A. punk.

The fact that three of the early Boredoms albums came out on Warner/Reprise in the 90's is still one of the oddest moves in major label history. How anything this crazy and weird and far-out got that kind of mainstream exposure is still pretty unbelievable, even by today's standards, the music of the Boredoms is anything but accessible. Early on, the band was influenced heavily by the wacko acid-punk of the Butthole Surfers, but they took it into far more extreme and cacophonous directions; any one of their songs could smash together random noises, raging hardcore punk, super noisy guitars, weird studio effects, crazy cartoon voices and random babbling, whipped into a frenzy of jarring, totally unpredictable arrangements. All three (Onanie Bomb Meets The Sex Pistols, Pop Tari, and Chocolate Synthesizer) eventually went out of print, but were later reissued on Very Friendly and are finally in stock here at C-Blast - the early, hardcore-laced Boredoms albums are my favorite releases in their canon (along with the classic Soul Discharge), and are prime for discovery for anyone new to their insane, psychedelic, speed-charged Bore-mania...one listen to any of these albums, and you'll hear where an entire generation of noisecore/noise rockers got their inspiration from...

Album number three from the Boredoms Pop Tari opens with the electro-shock of "Noise Ramones", which is nothing but extreme high-pitched tones layered on top of each other, then heads off into a warped realm of musical nonsense that occasionally comes close to actual song-like forms. There's loungey guitar on "Nice B-O-R-E Guy Boyoyo Touch" joined by softly mewling vocals and weird casio pop that could almost be described as catchy, but it's not long before the band dives back into total chaos, random drumming that starts and stops abruptly, songs erupt into crazed thrashy punk, or sludgy mangled rock, or damaged junkyard hip hop, while frontman Eye Yamatska and company spew all kinds of weird psychotic vocalizations, random vocal noises, and over the top soulful rock singing over it all. It's full-on Bore-insanity, assembled according to some kind of whacked out noise logic that fuses together

blasting ray gun synths, electronics and tape noise with chaotic noisecore jams, mutant dub-reggae, opera singing, improvised funk rock, passages of nothing but screaming women, sitars, tribal percussion freakiness, death metal roars over choppy hardcore punk, bits of sloppy exotica and weird radio intercepted voices, random screams and moans and chanting and free-jazz horns...yikes! This album fits right next to Mr. Bungle's first LP and Naked City's Torture Garden, a maniac pastiche of extreme genre-mashing punk-fuckery .

���Despite their name, the debut EP from Norwegian duo Brutal Blues in fact delivers absolutely zero blues, but rather a whole lot of confounding, nerve-scorching avant-grind. Well, maybe not a whole lot - this disc is only fifteen minutes long - but the six songs featured here are seriously blistering, assaulting the listener non-stop with a maniacal blast of mathy time signatures, crushing hyperspeed grindcore, and some of the most abrasive riffing you're going to find on this week's new arrivals list. Both members of Brutal Blues are involved in a number of other bands and projects that I've been a fan of over the years, drummer/vocalist Anders Hana with Jaga Jazzist, Noxagt and Ultralyd, and guitarist/vocalist Steinar Kittilsen with the psychotic grind outfits Parlamentarisk Sodomi and Psudoku; together, these guys whip up some crazed angular grindcore, somewhere in between the ragged brutality of latter-day Brutal Truth and the cutting edge extremism of Gridlink, the songs filled with hideously spastic blastbeat drumming and jarring stop/start arrangements, and a discordant, weirdly jangly guitar sound. But over this brutal blast-assault the duo splatter all sorts of trippy electronic noise and spacey synth slop, turning this into something strangely psychedelic; the vocals are pretty insane as well, infuriated screams that are run through an echoplex machine cranked all the way to ten, the bellowing aggression swooping and echoing endlessly through the band's progged-out blast-metal; they slash and scrape at the guitars, strafing the songs with abrasive guitar noise that sometimes sounds like they're dragging rusted hunks of metal down the fret board, and the songs lunge wildly through this noise-addled hysteria, surging out of those spastic, stuttering grind assaults into clouds of grainy digital noise and electronic drone. Intensely abrasive and intricate stuff, with a discordant No Wave-esque edginess applied to their precision hyper-violence. A phenomenal fuckin' debut.

The latest release from Caul is admittedly pretty expensive, but it's more than just a cd, too. Caul assembled this gorgeous photo book/disc set and issued it through their own label Aglaia in what is presumably an extremely limited printing, and it's visually very striking. The 7" x 7" booklet features seventeen full color photographs of haunting abstract images, printed on high quality paper and bound with a full color glossy cover, with the disc enclosed in a plastic sleeve that's attached to the inside back cover. Sound wise, this is really different from the other recordings that I've heard from Caul. The eight tracks on Kairos maintain the deep, drifting dark ambience of the other releases, but now dark industrial dub has been introduced, taking this into pure Scorn territory. Hypnotic minimal breakbeats skitter beneath vast expanses of eerie ambient drone, the rhythms pulsating within slowly swirling fogbanks of guitar feedback and shimmering low-end thrum. I can hear some echoes of Troum in here, too; the parts of this disc where the slow, druggy beats disappear and the sound extends into long stretches of keening feedback and deep distorted drone, there's a clear resemblance to the sort of gothic post-industrial ambient that the German duo helped to pioneer. Deep immersive ambient dub with massive basslines, deep distorted horns and cello-like sounds, the sound sometimes getting vaguely jazzy with the bass, and especially with the parts where the saxophone enters and the rhythms begin to get a little more skittery. As the album goes on, vast washes of celestial synthesizer ambience spread overhead, and massive low-slung beats merge with haunting vibraphone melodies, screaming free-jazz trumpets begin howling, horns become smeared in shadow, and the atmosphere begins to get somewhat apocalyptic, definitely VERY dark, by the end of the album sounding like a dystopian jazzy dub, a mutant hybrid of Bohren And Der Club Of Gore and Scorn. It's a stunning album, somewhat similar in feel to that recent [Other] Dub disc from Lustmord, and Mick Harris fans definitely need to hear this.

Back in stock, this time with a gloss-finish jacket.

On the last Crucial Blast new arrivals list, I talked up the new album from a band called Celeste from France that had blown me away upon first hearing it, a crushing mixture of ultra-heavy metallic dirge and discordant black metal with a distinct French flavor to it. I compared Misanthrope(s) to both older Neurosis (specifically, the oppressive apocalyptic vibe of Through Silver In Blood-era Neurosis) and the evil experimental black metal of bands like Glorior Belli and Deathspell Omega, without the overblown philosophical lyrics and intellectual nihilism. That doesn't mean that Celeste isn't surrounded by it's own enigmatic aura - the completely indecipherable lyrics and surreal artwork that makes up the packaging for the band's first album Nihiliste(s) is creepy and mysterious enough - but Celeste are much more concerned with caving your skull in through a relentless, almost unbearable application of ultra-heavy riffage and ponderous tempos. 2008's Nihiliste(s) is slower and heavier compared to the second album, with fewer blasts of black metal ferocity and speed; instead, the blackness is almost totally soaked into the slow, doomy riffing and tangles of chaotic mathy guitar, putting this album closer to the hellish sludge of Omega Massif, Amen Ra and Overmars. The riffs are discordant and gnarly, and shift between passages of atmospheric glacial groove and skullcrushing pummel, the vocals are harsh and torn, at times reminding me of a blackened and snarling version of Jacob Bannon (Converge), and the drumming is huge, complex, way more complex than most sludge bands, with tons of tightly-wound fills and an almost industrial percussive pound. The sixth track "Tu Regardes Trop Fort, Tu penses Trop Fort, Tu Parles Trop Fort" kinda sums the whole album up, starting off with a huge angular riff and sinister leads, then exploding into fragmented blastbeats and hectic black metal for a moment before shifting into some martial militant snares that build into another explosive crescendo of blackened metallic sludge.

Now in stock - the limited edition colored vinyl version of Cynic's incredible new album Traced In Air, in a full color gatefold package with a full color printed inner sleeve with expanded artwork.

There aren't many bands that could drop just one debut album in the early 90's, have it turn into an instant masterpiece, then break up almost immediately after and achieve almost mythic status in the metal underground. Even fewer that could reform fifteen years later and record a follow-up to their now classic debut and have the entire metal scene anticipating it like it's the Second Coming. That goes to show just how immense and influential Cynic's Focus was when it came out in 1993. The Florida band's first album was unlike anything else coming out of the Floridian death metal scene back then. The closest antecedents were Death's Human and it's weird, disharmonic guitars and the jazz-influenced death metal of Athiest. Both of which, it should be noted, included members of Cynic. Cynic's music was an utterly unique fusion of progressive rock, jazz fusion and death metal with bizarre robotic vocals and played by total virtuosos. Their experimental, avant-garde progressive death metal was groundbreaking and enormously influential on the development of all of the proggy extreme metal that followed this album - we certainly wouldn't have bands like Behold...The Arctopus, Meshuggah, Candiria or Between The Buried And Me without it.

It's been around fifteen years since we last heard from Cynic, and it's amazing how much buzz and anticipation has surrounded the release of their follow-up album Traced In Air. The reunited band features almost all of the original members, but what would this sound like? A return to the groundbreaking death/prog/fusion of Focus? Alot of us would have been content with that, but in the decade and a half since that last album, the members of Cynic have progressed drastically as musicians, and with the obsessive, ultra-detailed approach that they have always taken to their music, it wouldn't make much sense to simply revisit the same sound that they essentially invented in 1993. Instead, Traced In Air amazingly manages to be just as groundbreaking and fucking mindblowing as their debut, a kind of majestic death/tech/prog/pop, still rooted in elements of technical death metal with insanely intricate guitar playing and pummeling double-bass driven drumming, and still imbued with those astounding prog/jazz fusion qualities, but now there's this gorgeous ethereal pop sound sharing space with the dizzying arrangements and lush instrumentation, and those weird computerized vocals (which were a sticking point with a lot of listeners on the first album) are integrated so much more seamlessly here, while still injecting the occasional death growl. The songs on Traced In Air are so ridiculously catchy, which is hard to wrap your head around at first since this stuff is so complex when songs flow from airy acoustic guitar breaks and awesomely cheesy, virtuosic fusion playing to impossibly dense polyrhythms and futuristic guitar synths and ambient pop.

This album is so amazing, so mindblowingly pop yet so unbelievably complex and heavy, it's absolutely essential for anyone who loves technical, weird prog and avant-garde death metal.

Public Guilt Commissioned this compilation of remixes for the Darsombra track "Nymphaea", which appeared on the debut album Ecdysis in 2006. It's one of the best tracks from the Baltimore one-man psych/dirge project, a throbbing kraut-y bass groove riding on waves of melodic distorted guitar and droning distorted ambience, and lends itself nicely to a variety of interpretations and mutations. The original studio recording of "Nymphaea" opens the disc, and it's then followed by twelve different artists all doing their own unique reconfig of the song, and the lineup includes a bunch of my favorite drone/ambient/noise groups, including Max Bondi, Ala Muerte (both of who shared their own collaborative limited edition CDR on Public Guilt not long ago, a really fantastic little dose of blown-out, blissed out ambient crunch), Pulsoc, Japanese speedjunknoise god Guilty Connector, Magicicada, Swiss turntable droneologist Strotter Inst., Destructo Swarmbots, Blood Fountains (the new dark ambient project from artist Stephen Kasner), Decimation Blvd. with Darla Hood, The Heirs Of Rockefeller, Le Knell, and last but not least, the new C-Blast house band Perfekt Teeth. These interpretations run the gamut from strange drone-pop numbers littered with the sounds of children's toys, to pulsating dronescapes with an amazing soulful female voice singing in Latin, massive slabs of blown-out ambient sludge, guitar-heavy riffscapes, and minimalist deconstructions of the original track's skeletal form, each track extrapolating on "Nymphaea"'s throbbing bass and vaguely Middle Eastern sounding guitar lines. Pretty damn great, and I bet that even drone fans who have never heard the original Darsombra album would dig this disc heavily. Released in a limited edition of 250 copies and packaged in a very cool silkscreened sleeve with a translucent vellum insert, all designed by artist Chase Middaugh, who has put together the artwork for releases from Suishou No Fune, Aidan Baker, and Heavy Winged, among others.

Here's another one of those albums that's been around for ages (in this case it came out over twenty years ago) that I just stumbled across and am in disbelief that I never heard it before know. I'd seen the Devil Doll name thrown around over the years, but they're another example of a band that I made these weird assumptions about what they sounded like simply based on their name, thinking that they were some sort of glam band. Once I finally sat down and listened to Devil Doll, though, I was fucking floored by what I heard. It was this 1989 album from the Italian/Slovenian band that won me over, totally hooked me on their astounding horror-prog-metal, which is so unique and creepy and weird that I can't really compare them to any other band out there. It's hard for me not to gush - this disc is awesome, a single album-length epic that's arranged like a rock opera of sorts, moving through a series of different movements that are all tied together by some grandiose prog sensibilities. Devil Doll's music will go from these incredibly eerie piano parts with Mr. Doctor's unique raspy high-pitched vocals, to ripping heavy metal gallop to sweeping synth-heavy prog that sounds a lot like Goblin, but piles on all these other orchestral sounds and bizarre vocals that really make this sound like nothing else I've ever heard before. There's a HUGE metal element to this album, but it's perfectly balanced with the progressive rock and theatrical elements in their music, these different elements flowing from one to the other for maximum dramatic effect, slipping from classic thrashing heaviness into gorgeous sections of angelic female vocals, ghastly organ melodies and intricate guitar parts. Angular violin-led prog metal freakouts suddenly veer into utterly mournful funeral strings, and these killer fist-pumping metal raveups drift into chilling abstract horrorscapes laced with chamber strings, heavy drums and blackened orchestral bombast, and end up among some wild evil circus music. The closest comparison I can come up with to Devil Doll's music on The Girl Who Was Death is if you can imagine King Diamond being backed by a band made up of members of Goblin and Univers Zero, engaging in an over the top album-length prog metal opera. Fucking brilliant, a cult classic for sure. Be sure to stick around for the KILLER "hidden" song tucked all the way at the end of the disc...

Along with the super-limited, now out-of-print split 7" from the Hungarian black metallers Vorkuta and Marblebog that we have in stock this week from Autopsy Kitche, we also have this short four-song EP from a new band called DOG that features both Blizzard from Vorkuta and Gabor from Marblebog, pressed on a tiny 3" CD and packaged in a miniature jewel case. These guys have teamed up to play an incredibly fucked-up brand of atavistic blackened thrash, totally killer old-school primitive slop with trebly guitars overloaded with fuzz, awesome punkriffs buzzsawing over simple drumming that veers from tinny thrash beats to blazingly sloppy blastbeat speed, the sound is all noxious and heavy with a black fug of decay and corruption that was, according to the liner notes, "recorded in miasmatic moors under a puss moon", whatever the hell that means, but it's the vocals that really make this stand out. They're completely wrecked, and fucked up, vomiting grunts and mumbling gruff death metal growling and crazed wordless howls that are so slurred and unintelligible that it's impossible to make out the insane lyrics that deal with hordes of zombie troops and ghouls stalking cemeteries and leper-priests. These are some of the most fucked black metal vocals I've heard lately. Weird, sloppy, over the top damaged , like hearing old Celtic Frost and Abruptum fused together into a blast of stumbling, messy necrothrash. Weird and brilliant and right up there with the brain-damaged black mania of Funereal Moon, Vondur and Abruptum, I can't wait to hear more from DOG and their whacked out "Ancient Crypt Metal". KILLER.

As with their previous full length, the latest album of Equimanthorn's mesmeric Sumerian-influenced soundscapes also comes to us from the Dutch label From Beyond, which normally specializes in cult death metal and grind releases. There's nothing metallic in the slightest with the music of Equimanthorn, though, even though the band is made up of members of the (similiarly Sumerian-obsessed) black metal bands Absu and Melechesh. Equimanthorn also includes musicians who play in the occultic neo-folk projects Hexentanz and The Soil Bleeds Black, which is a little closer to the sound of Equimanthorn, though not by much. This is definitely dark and intoxicating stuff though, completely immersed in esoteric ritual magic and intensely researched Mesopotamian mythology, and the members of Equimanthorn use a combination of lush Middle Eastern folk music and dark ambience and dark proggy synth music as soundtracks for their strange recitations. Like they say in the booklet for Exalted, "These recorded efforts should only be listened to under the influence of candlelight". That's entirely your call, but this is definitely music best experienced with a minimum of light and outside interference, an immersive soundscape for sure.

There are some differences between the last album and this. Where Second Sephira Cella equally mixed the Goblin/John Carpenter-esque synths and Middle Eastern folk and industrial elements together into a strange sonic whole, these elements are explored in individual detail on Exalted. The first five tracks are almost entirely made up of the Middle eastern folk music, each track dramatic and mysterious, assorted percussion instruments and

the high-pitched hand drum called the darabukke (or "goblet drum") interweaved with the stringed bouzouki, chimes, flutes, recorders and other exotic instruments, the sound wreathed in shadow and hash smoke, with deep black ambience swimming below the music.

We don't hear those buzzing vintage synth sounds until all the way at the end with the last two tracks, but both are fantastic and totally worth the wait. Both "Irkalla: To Enter the Great Above and the Depths Below" and "The Submissive Myth Genesis of Mirror Waters Rising" are synth-heavy, dread filled progscapes...sinister low-end synthriffs repeated over swirling black ambience and swells of spacey keyboards as pounding martial drumbeat enter alongside a dramatic spoken word passage. The heavy synths are straight out of the 80's, and the first of the two sounds like an old British post-industrial band with John Carpenter on the Moogs. "Submissive" is more ambient, with almost no rhythmic elements until the very end when slow, minimal gongs and cymbals arrive to ceremoniously lead the creepy synth hook straight into the void. Together, these two tracks make up favorite part of the album, but the entire experience of Exalted is great. Not as deliciously strange as Second Sephira Cella , maybe, but still thoroughly narcotizing and hypnotic...

There's only a couple of bands whose live albums I personally feel are all essential, and Flipper is one of them. I love all of the early Flipper albums and I've been spinning their recent reissues like mad, but the reissue of their Public Flipper Limited live album might be getting the most play of all - these guys were fucking madmen on stage back in the 80's, and they are one of those rare bands that sound just as brutal and powerful live on tape as they do in the studio. And their stage banter between (and sometimes during) songs is brilliant and awkward and often really hilarious. I'm stoked that the new incarnation of the band has released this new live disc as a sort of companion piece to their new album Love, as it's got all of that primo Flipper-live action that I dig so much. Snarled performances, slobbering stage banter, but this time their live sets have a monster recording to give them all of the massive heaviness and oomph that their earlier live recordings might have lacked. Fight is comprised of material taken from two sets that were recorded in Seattle and Portland throughout 2007, both recorded and mixed by the legendary Jack Endino, and the sound is really huge. Half of the album is older classic material, songs like "Way Of The World" and "Shine" which open the album with a huge undertown of drugged heaviosity, and the other half features new songs from their album Love. New bass player Krist Novoselic (of Nirvana fame, natch) plays on all of the songs, and while I gotta admit that I was apprehensive about what the new Flipper songs were going to sound like, I'm pleased to report that the new stuff sounds pretty much just like the old stuff, that being loud, dissonant, sludgy art-punk monstrosities. Actually, some of these new songs are really growing on me quickly, like the dark, Sabbathoid "Why Can't You See" and the inebriated pogo bounce of the anti-authority anthem "Be Good, Child!". The classic cut "Sacrifice" sounds as heavy and sinister as ever. Bruce Loose's vocals are wrecked and powerful and slurred all at the same time, and the band is both loose and punishing, slamming through nine songs of their heavy, damaged art-punk. Essential for hardcore Flipper fans.

Virtually impossible to find when originally released, Gehenna's Land Of Sodom Ep has been resurrected by A389 in a handsome new edition that combines an improved, re-recorded version of the 7" with a Cd containing the Ep tracks as well as the Under The Gravehill album, which up until now had only been available on vinyl. The disc and 7" are packaged in a customized gatefold jacket that reproduces the cover art from both releases and includes a poster insert.

The Land Of Sodom Ep is some of Gehenna's most vicious music, and that says a lot if you're at all familiar with the savagery that these maniacs unleash on their records. The record opens with the borderline-sloppy, bestial blackthrash of "I Am Your Tormentor" with it's Teutonic riffing, pounding almost blastbeat-speed drums and Mike Apocalypse's awesome throatripped snarl, the song sounding like some diseased mutation of early Sodom. Then "Possessed" crashes in, following suit but sounding even more crazed and chaotic, the bestial thrash exuding total savagery, total power. "Caveman" (which was also recorded by the Gehenna black metal side-project Sangraal) is rendered here with all of the frothing-at-the-mouth insanity that Gehenna is capable of summoning, a blazing blast beat ridden killgasm that ranks as one of their most vicious hate anthems. The b-side has the title track, and it's a completely different beast, a slow, lumbering blackened dirge, almost Sabbathian heaviness as the band grinds away on a series of simple, flattening riffs while strange manipulated voices and garbled speeches seethe below the surface; here, you can definitely sense the seed of what guitarist DC Grave would later develop into his similar noxious drugdoom project Witch-Lord.

Released in 2003, Under The Gravehill is more of the Gehenna's perfect fusion of West Coast power violence and crude bestial black metal. Gehenna are one of the most infamous and mythologized bands to ever come out of the American hardcore underground, with stories of stabbings, hardcore drug abuse, random violence, and other anti-social activities surrounding the band. Their music was a delirious fever-dream of visions of mass death, plague, global apocalypse and societal collapse set to some of the most misanthropic thrash ever. Upon The Gravehill was the bands last "full length", a fifteen minute long rampage of super short songs that typically clock in at around a minute and a half. Sloppy blast beats and thrashy slipshod drumming combine with primitive Hellhammer-esque riffs and metallic hardcore of the ugliest sort, fronted by the awesome strangled snarl of frontman/provocateur Mike Cheese. It all comes together into one of the most violent, ferocious sounds ever, laced with bits of gnarled feedback-soaked doom, the maniacal influence of Japanese metalpunks GISM, and weird ambient parts. The song "No One Will Ever Miss You" is one of the heaviest songs the band ever slugged out, a chugging slow motion gallop building to a devastating war anthem, and there's loads of filthy early black metal DNA that creeps into songs like "To Lay Waste", "Sadist", and "Trample This Earth". The band never sounded more metal than they do here, but their brand of thrash is still rooted in the most vicious, depraved strains of hardcore and punk.

Absolutely crucial for disciples of apocalyptic thrash and the "Holy Terror" circle of bands from the 90s.

Heres the second 12" in the ambitious five-part series of remix records for Genghis Tron's Board Up The House; the first record that came out on Temporary Residence (which appears to already be sold out) featured remixes from Jesu, Steve Moore (Zombi), ROb Crowe (Pinback), and Eluvium, and ran the gamut from blissed out quasi-dubstep mutations to freaked out slice-n-dice blast collage to sinister Goblin-style prog rock atmospheres. Temporary Residence's first installment was pretty eclectic, but on the Lovepump entry in the series, the remixes turn Genghis Tron's original music into a fog of weird 80's electro-pop and mutant krautrock.

The first track comes from Tobacco, the guy behind the band Black Moth Super Rainbow. He takes Tron's "Relief" and wraps Mookie's haunting vocal line around some sweet 80's style breakbeats and old school synths, throws extra layers of synth and buzz and electronic whirr over it, and suddenly the track becomes this weird Madchester pop, super funky and danceable but still maintaining the grim moodiness of the original song. Very cool, and I'm intrigued enough by what he did with this remix to check out the new album Fucked Up Friends that Anticon just put out.

Next is Circle, who take Tron's "Recursion" and...well, I don't want to say "remix" the song, because this doesn't really sound like a remix at all. And next to the Justin Broadrick remix on the first record, this track is my favorite in the series so far. What it sounds like the Finnish hypno-rockers have done is taken just one element from the original track, the central synth melody for "Recursion", and constructed an entirely new piece of music around it, a dark sprawl of darm ambience and strange abstract clatter, an ambient soundspace laced with percussive noises swimming in delay, all dubbed out and menacing, but the most unexpected thing about Circle's "remix" are the vocals. Mookie's original vocals don't appear here at all, at least not in any way that I can recognise them; instead, we get these weird, gutteral almost death-metal like grunts, presumably from Circle frontman Mika, that appear over the abstract dronescape. Very strange, but very cool, and so far this is the most out-there interpretation of Genghis Tron that I've heard in the series!

On side two, we start off with a remix of the same song, "Recursion", from the French Canadian electro-pop artist CFCF, who has been getting alot of buzz lately with his remixes for Crystal Castles, Apache Beat, Sally Shapiro and Health. Like the Tobacco remix, this has a mutant retro 80's dance pop feel, but CFCF puts "Recursion" through a strange otherwordly soundfilter that morphs the music into a kind of brooding disco, colored by atmospheric Tangerine Dream keyboards and awesome droning synth textures that evoke Claudio Simmonetti, flecked with crunchy SEGA 8-bit tones and poured over huge dubbed-out beats and a thick grooving bassline, no vocals, purely instrumental. So great! And the last track from DNTEL, wow...who would have thought that the guy from The Postal Service would be the one to give us the heaviest, most aggressive remix on the record? Jimmy Tamborello's electro-pop project takes "The Feast/Ergot" and melts the riffs and keyboards down into a crushing cosmic miasma, super distorted and modulated, the music folded over onto itself and formed into a crushing slab of lown-end drone that grinds and drifts until in it's last minutes it begins to reconstitute into a hesitant, looping rhythm, surging forward in fits and starts, and finally collapsing into a cloud of granular fuzz that dissipates into the ether.

On yellow/purple splatter vinyl, limited to 1,000 copies.

Board Up The House Remixes Vol. 5 is the final installment of the five-volume remix series that has been produced in co-operation between Genghis Tron and five labels (Relapse, Lovepump United, Anticon, Temporary Residence Ltd., and Crucial Blast), and features a myriad number of artists reshaping and reimagining various songs off of Genghis Tron's 2008 album Board Up The House (Relapse Records). Each volume is pressed in a run of 1,000 copies on colored vinyl that ties in with the sleeve art. Board Up The House cover artist, Jon Beasley, has provided each remix album with alternative artwork.

The Crucial Blast entry in the Board Up The House remix series features Tim Hecker (Mille Plateaux, Alien8, Staalplaat, Fat Cat) turning the title track "Board Up The House" into a fuzz-entombed bliss-scape, Aidan Baker/Nadja's fifteen-minute glacial vision of "I Won't Come Back Alive", and another remix of "I Won't Come Back Alive" rendered as a blur of distorted electro by Dudes You Can Trust, which is the solo project of Michael Sochynsky from G-Tron taking a heavy mangle approach. This remix platter is easily the most distortion-laden entry in the series!

Finally managed to get the third entry in the Genghis Tron Board Up The House remix series that Relapse put out back in December. We've picked up a bunch of the red and blue splatter version of this record, which was released in a run of 1000 copies, and it features one of the wildest lineups of the entire series with remixes from Scott Hull (Pig Destroyer/Agoraphobic Nosebleed), Danny Lohner (of Nine Inch Nails fame), Phillip Cope (Kylesa/Damad), Ulver, and Drumcorps. Jesus! And it's as varied an assortment of approaches to the source material as you might imagine as each of these remixers takes the seething synth-heavy Goblinoid grindmetal of the original tracks and turns 'em into everything from dancey industrial rock to crushing cyber-metal to glitchy abstract breakcore.

The first of the tracks is Danny Lohner's remix of "Board Up The House", and it stands out for having only trace amounts of the original track appearing in it's newly configured form. Here, Lohner has deconstructed the original into a plodding rhythmic industrial jam that sounds alot like, well, Nine Inch Nails, which isn't that surprising, and it makes for what is probably the most accessible of all of the BUTH remixes. That's followed by Scott Hull's mutated version of "The Feast", to which he has attached massive plates of cybernetic armor and pneumatic drills, turning the track into a seriously fucking crushing slab of slayerized robo-metal. Once the super-processed guitars and lumbering drum programming kicks in about a minute in, shit gets ridiculously heavy, like some futurist mixture of Meshuggah and Zombi, the soaring 80's synth melodies bubbling over a sputtering mechanical thrash riff. Easily one of my favorite remixes out of the whole series.

Then we move on to Phillip Cope from Kylesa, and his remix/fusion of the songs "City On A Hill" and "The Whips Blow Back". The songs are ripped apart and melted back together into a chaotic blur of dubbed-out blastbeats and fragments of the original song's main hook, vocals now drifting disembodied over fractured synth melodies and riffs, everything smeared into a dreamy surrealistic wash of glitched out samples and drifting rhythms, the vocals eventually becoming chopped and screwed towards the end as an ominous church-organ like synth line repeats over and over like some weird gabber/IDM/sound collage nightmare.

Ulver takes "I Won't Come Back Alive" and delivers one of the more haunting remixes. The original song was already one of the albums strongest tracks, with Mookie laying down some of his eeriest vocals and centering around a killer metallic riff...but here, Ulver strips it apart and modifies a new arrangement with creepy stringed instruments, the sort of lush trip-hop manuevers that Ulver has displayed on their past few albums, some symphonic drum n bass towards the end and some amazing harmonies drawn out from the source material.

The most surprising remix though is the last track from Drumcorps. The other Drumcorps releases that I have tend to focus on Aaron Spectre's ability to combine brutal metallic riffing with crazed jungle programming, but here he goes for a much more restrained approach, taking what was originally a four minute song and reassembling it into a seven minute epic electro-dirge, mixing in oh-so-brief blasts of junglist carnage with more atmospheric passages made up of booming rototom sounds and looped riffs creating a dense, psychedelic atmosphere.

Obviously, if you've been picking up the rest of these remix albums, this one is just as essential. Comes on red vinyl with blue splatter, in a full color jacket with artwork from Jon Beasley.

Barely got this one in stock, due to the first pressing of the Temporary Residence installment selling out within a week or so! This is the first of the Board Up The House Remixes 12" series that is being put together by five different labels, Temporary Residence, Anticon, Lovepump United, Relapse, and yers truly here at Crucial Blast. Each one of these 12"s features various remixes of songs from Genghis Tron's latest album, the prog-colored masterwork that is Board Up The House, and are pressed on colored vinyl and packaged in full color sleeves that have been "re-mixed" by original cover artist Jon Beasley. The Temporary Residence record kicks the series off with a knockout lineup of remixers that includes Justin Broadrick from Jesu/Godflesh, Rob Crowe from Pinback/Goblin Cock/Heavy Vegetable, Steve Moore from Zombi, and Eluvium.

The first track is from Steve Moore, and he turns the album's title track into a gloriously creepy Italo-horror throb, taking the twilight progginess of the original song and morphing it into a totally 80's style synth piece a la Goblin or John Carpenter, just like we were hoping for. You could easily mistake this for an actual Zombi track with the buried swells of orchestral synth-strings and pulsating drum machine beat and hypnotic bassline, and the awesome synth hook that kicks in towards the end. I can close my eyes an immediately see images from Fulci's City Of The Living Dead or Argento's Phenomena crusing past my orbs. Awesome.

For Broadrick's remix of "Colony Collapse", I was expecting the kind of blurry, blow-out distorto blissout that he gave to remixes for Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Isis. Instead, he takes a chunk of rhythm from the song and reshapes it into a bouncing, crunchy percussive loop that almost sounds like a distorted dancehall beat, like something you'd hear from Broadrick's longtime collaborator Kevin Martin and his Razor X Productions stuff. Over this grinding loop, he drapes the track in all kinds of fuzzed out Jesu-like distortion, splatters the vocals into abstract smears of fx-damaged screaming, and brings in some pretty orchestral strings, shimmering streaks of feedback and noise. The result is a weird, dreamy slab of blissed-out, metallic trip-hop, heavy and eerie but really, really beautiful, too.

Rob Crowe's remix is the weirdest when he takes the song "Things Don't Look Good" and chops it all up, stitching the parts back together into a manic mess of chamber strings, weird tribal drumming, acoustic guitars and atonal piano, dousing the track in effects and spacey electronic noises, eventually becoming a wall of heavy tandem drumming that builds and builds, then abruptly shifts into a metallicized version of the original song.

Eluvium closes the record out by taking the song "Ergot" and stretching the guitars and keys out to infinity, removing the drums and transforming the track into a blissed out expanse of fuzzy ambient drone. The original chords and melodies are all smeared and obliterated, leaving just a slow swirling melodic haze and swells of deep shimmer, streaks of high end skree drifting across the horizon of Eluviums' solar hymn, reminiscent of Sunroof or Tim Hecker. Immensely beautiful.

The record comes on rad gold/grey swirled vinyl in full color packaging, and it's already sold out from the label. Don't drag yer heels!

Jazkammer's Lasse Marhaug appears to be keeping a constant high profile in the avant-noise scene with a constant stream of limited edition solo releases and collaborations with Sunn and Merzbow, but we don't hear as much about his partner in the legendary Norwegian noise duo, John Hegre. That's not because Hegre has been slouching, I just think his other projects lean towards a less noisy form of experimental music that's not as visceral as much of Marhaug's work. When not touring and recording with Jazkammer, Hegre has kept busy working on collaborations of his own with Maja Ratkje and putting together his first solo album Colors Don't Clash which came out on Dekorder in 2007. This just came in to Crucial Blast, and chances are that most of you probably havent heard this yet since it hasn't received a whole lot of distribution outside of Europe. It's an excellent collection of abstract sound collages with a few moments of serious heaviness that Jazkammer fans need to check out.

Colors Don't Clash is divided into five interconnected pieces that move one right into the next, and the array of diverse sounds and how these tracks fit together reminds me of the interesting direction that Jazkammer took on last year's Balls The Size Of Texas album. There;s a similiar sonic palette being used here that incorporates the harshly abrasive computer-noise that Jazzkamer is known for, as well as detours into hypnotic, bluesy rock riffing and gorgeous abstract drones. The album starts off with the delicate "Don't", where a softly manipulated and looped electric guitar blossoms into clusters of notes and crystalline pulses. Things become much more abrasive with the second track as it starts off with a brutal blast of harsh high end feedback skree, followed by a swarming cloud of clicking particles and airy, metallic drones, like hearing masses of tiny buzzing robotic insects swirling back and forth around your head while heavy guitar drones rise up from below. The last half of the track fuses a fractured jazz guitar chord progression with muted percussive loops and strange blips and glitches. That's followed by the most brutal piece on here, the 9+ minute "They", a brutal storm of grinding wall-noise and churning low-end drones. "Never" is about 7 minutes of crushing blackened free-rock that has corroded sludge riffs and mangled, discordant chords oozing out of heavily distorted amps and flecked with glitchy electronics. That one almost approaches KTL/Fushitsusha territory. Lastly, the last track takes us out with some hazy, softly played psychedelic blues that goes on for a few minutes, becomes more and more abstract, and is then replaced by a few minutes of scraping, droning sounds, childrens voices and other found-sound weirdness. The album vacillates from dreamy surreal soundscapes to abstract noisy heaviness, weird and confounding and quite beautiful, really. Comes in a full color gatefold with brain damaging sleeve design by yasutoshi yoshida of Government Alpha.

A brand new two-song 7" EP from Seattle sludge-pop rockers Helm's Alee, whose debut album Night Terror on Hydra Head is also listed in this week's new arrivals list. Like I mentioned in that review, Night Terror was one of my favorite albums of 2008 and one of the best things that Hydra Head put out in a year that was already full of awesome releases. Super catchy, epic heaviness with a gorgeous pop sensibility hidden under all of the massive Melvinsy riffage and the bellowing vocals of frontman Ben (formerly of Harkonen), heightened by the dual female vocal harmonies provided by the guitarist and drummer who push the album in this awesome Karp-meets-Pixies sort of ultra-heavy powercrush.

This 7" features two exclusive new songs on a super thick piece of wax - the first, "Lionize", shows the darker, heavier side of Helms Alee, a series of crushing sludge riffs and slow, pummeling dirge, dark and doomy, with spidery math-rock guitar parts dropped in the midst of the downtuned heaviness, the vocals harsh and howled. Definitely one of the heavier, sludgier Helms Alee songs.

On the b-side we get "Truly", and this is more like the poppier stuff from the album, starting off with a jangly indie rock riff over a pounding drumbeat, very early 90's sounding, kind of reminds me of Archers Of Loaf or Superchunk at first with soft emotive singing over a simple, moving melody, but then the crushing guitars and Ben's bellowing vocals drop in and it turns into a punishing sludge-metal riff. The song continues into delicate math rock with majestic piano accompaniment, gorgeous female vocal harmonies, and the slow-burning metallic sludge, totally captivating and catchy, like Melvins and Karp being filtered through chiming old school indie rock. I love this stuff.

The 7" is on the sort side, but is limited to 1000 copies, available on a mix of colors and pressed on incredibly thick vinyl and packaged in a cool foldout jacket with spot varnish printing, making this a neat collectors item for anyone that was as hooked by Helms Alee's debut as I was.

Remember Pitch Shifter? If yer a fan of old school industrial metal, I bet you do. That British band was one of the heaviest mecha-metal outfits that Britain had to offer back in the early 90's, a pioneering group of Godflesh-influenced sludge-thugs who took the repetitive machinegrind of Streetcleaner and applied it to a grooving concoction of sluggish but near-danceable beats, ultraheavy downtuned guitars and catchy riffs that bordered on some kind of ultra-heavy metallic rock, and heavy use of textured electronic noise and samples. Later on towards the end of the 90's, Pitch Shifter would begin to incorporate elements of drum n' bass and jungle into their sound, but those early Earache albums were pure molten robo crush that would eventually influence bands like Neurosis, Dead World and Fear Factory. I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to the later Pitchshifter stuff (the band dropped the space in their name when their style began to change) as those latter albums are nowhere near as heavy and abrasive as their first few, but I was stoked when I found out that Pitch Shifter guitarist Stuart Toolin had a new band called Hordes Of Satan that was apparently a return to the industrial sludge metal of the early PS days. This debut LP is the only release so far from the HOS duo, and it's already sold out from the label - the copies we have in stock are the last ones available anywhere, to my knowlewdge. Four long, bludgeoning tracks of sludgy slow motion doom powered by plodding drum machine beats and insanely heavy downtuned guitars and bass, each track made up of only one or two riffs that build into a suffocating wall of gloomy, dismal atmosphere and hypnotic repetition, comparable to an apocalyptic cross between Godflesh and Corrupted. This mother is ultra-heavy, equal parts industrial metal and glacial death doom, like early Pitch Shifter but even heavier, slower, more desolate, more along the lines of Toolin's little-known project Skin Limit Show, with deep gutteral death metal roars. There's even a cover of Pitch Shifter's "Landfill" on here that absolutely crushes. Seriously massive mechanical doom heaviosity, and one of the heaviest LPs sitting on my record player right now. The record comes in a grey-toned sleeve with morbid artwork with a fold out insert.

The second album from this one-man doom band from Texas, who combines empyrean synthwork and crushing funereal doom for a heightened cinematic experience on this release from the Russian doom metal imprint Solitude Productions. Like many of the Russian doom bands that we hear from Solitude, The Howling Void heavily incorporates keys and electronics into their sound and creates a sort of ethereal kosmiche doom with that same stellar vastness that we hear in bands like Ea, Abstract Spirit, Frailty, and Opaque Lucidity, so this fits in perfectly with the rest of the label's output. The thing that sets this apart is the addition of swirling, lush orchestral strings, choral voices and some really well-executed piano melodies that turn Shadows Over The Cosmos into something more akin to a cross between gloomy, filmic neo-classical music, Vangelis, and, of course, the most glacial extremes of the early 90s Peaceville doom bands. While this album is undeniably heavy, much of Shadows is pure ambience, soaring off into washes of deep-space synthesizer that extend into looooong stretches of Ashra-style ambient drift, softly swelling waves of droning keyboards and repetitious piano and guitar entwining into darkly ornate melodies. When the music drops back into the slow-motion doom metal after these long passages of cosmic ambience and orchestral sound, the transition can be devastating, the sound of the world crashing back in with the weight of aeons, the despair amplified by sparse blackened tremolo riffing and the impossibly deep guttural vocals rumbling up in the depths. The song "The Hidden Sun" that shows up at the end of the album is one the most dramatic tracks on here, and it's totally devoid of doom metal; this track is purely made up of neo-classical strings and piano woven with haunting choral voices into a somber coda. For fans of Ea, Evoken, Mindrot and similar doom metal bands with a flair for sweeping majesty.

This EP is kinda pricey, but for hardcore Integrity fans, it's still a pretty wicked collectors item. This disc features the two original tracks from the 7" version of Walpurgisnacht that came out on A389 Records with another two tracks that are actually Ingrity covering the mighty Septic Death! Indeed, the whole vibe around this EP is pretty similiar to the cool collectors editions that Pushead used to do with his Bacteria Sour imprint, as this disc comes packaged inside of a hand-silkscreened sleeve and also includes a hand-screened Integrity skull logo patch and an insert sheet with lyrics and more artwork from Florian Bertmer. There might only be four tracks on this disc, but man, they rip.

Here's the original review for the 7" vinyl version:

It has been five long years since the last time I heard from the mighty Integrity, but at long last we've got this new two-song EP, the first new Integrity jams since 2004's To Die For came from out of nowhere and kicked my ass wholly and completely with an awesome return to form from one of the most influential and groundbreaking bands in the American metal/hardcore underground. I'm not exaggerating when I say that these guys are one of my all-time favorite bands; In the beginning of the 1990's, Cleveland's Integrity were an unstoppable force, something darker and heavier than any other band in the American hardcore scene, and their fusion of Slayerized speed metal, youth crew hardcore, and sinister ambience all rendered through an apocalyptic worldview and Boschian vision of hell on Earth is as potent and ferocious today as they were nearly twenty years ago. This is ground zero for what would later become known as "metalcore". As Integrity progressed through the 90's, the band shed members and experimented with it's sound, but Integrity always orbited around the charismatic constant of singer Dwid Hellion. Now five years after the band's last album, we have this short but lethal EP, and man does it deliver. It's essentially a taste of what's coming in '09 with the next Integrity album The Blackest Curse which I can't fucking wait to get my hands on, and the EP primes the adrenaline with two new songs of primo Clevo violence: "Walpurgisnacht" sounds like it could have come screaming off of Integrity's Systems Overload, a vicious blast of speed-thrash aggression with Dwid's trademark bellow that explodes at the end, leaving behind a pair of sorrowful acoustic guitars. "Mirror In Reverse" reminds me of the later Integrity stuff; starting off with an ominous, doomy riff and over the top shredding, the song kicks into high gear as raging thrash metal guitars ride a thunderblast of doublebass drumming, then breaks into a crushing mid-paced chorus that is also really weird sounding, the monstrous thrash riff layered with strange effects and samples, which become more prominent as the song moves forward as acoustic guitars, strange dissonant ambience, heavily processed vocals and other sonic chaos appear. Reminds me of the more experimental stuff that Integrity was doing on Seasons In The Size Of Days, but heavier and thrashier. Awesome. Can't recommend this one enough, especially if you are a fan of Integrity. The great artwork is courtesy of Florian (Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Napalm Death).

Dwid from Integrity has long professed his love for Septic Death, and one of the wildest releases that Integ ever put out was a 7" that came with an issue of Dwid's fanzine BloodBook back in 1995 that featured covers of Septic Death's "Thaw (Cold World)" and "Change". This eventually would come to be known as the"Septic Death Karaoke EP" as these tracks were actually just Dwid singing over the original versions of the Septic Death songs. Any other band that did this would probably be laughed out of the room, but fuck, any opportunity to hear Dwid lay down hellfire with those pipes of his is good by me. Well, not too long ago Integrity released a split 7" with the Japanese band AVM and once again, they break out a couple more Septic Death covers (this time "Poison Mask" and "Dream Silent") and it appears to be another karaoke performance just like the old Bloodbook 7". These two tracks have been tacked on to the Walpurgisnacht EP, and they sound just as crazed as you'd expect.

I love Finnish hardcore and black metal, but I've hardly heard any Finnish industrial music. Most of what I have been exposed to has come out on the Kaos Kontrol label, which specializes in grating, psychedelic old-school industrial, and if you told me that this album from the Finnish band Kriminaaliset Mets�nhaltijat was in fact a Kaos Kontrol release, I wouldn't doubt it. It's actually on the American power electronics/industrial label Bloodlust!, however, and is a reissue of a super-limited cassette that came out on Triangle Records in 2008. The band has been around since the 90's but is only now beginning to get some exposure over here in the States, a good thing, too, as this disc points towards a very cool and heavy form of apocalyptic machine music.

The six tracks on Anarkkia, Kaaos, Maailmanloppu! have an obvious old-school Throbbing Gristle/S.P.K. influence with lots of clanging metal rhythms, buzzing distorted bass-tones, looped feedback, dense clusters of dubby percussion, blasts of pure white noise, warning sirens, radar pings, but also incorporating some really menacing and doomy synth-bass lines and creepy melted samples that make this a heavier, more evil sounding version of classic industrial. One of the things that really set these guys apart are their vocals, which are snarled and distorted and are all over these songs. The band not only cites early Japanese noise and classic Industrial as primary influences on their thick, cacophonous industrial dirge sound, but also the ferocity of Finnish hardcore, a strange sounding mix at first, but when you actually hear Kriminaaliset Mets�nhaltijat it makes sense, a fierce and furious sheet-metal attack with intensely psychedelic noise, howling hardcore vocals and dub effects swirling around the dark, nihilistic atmoshere, all set to an extremely raw and hissy recording that makes this sound like it was recorded in the hallways of an old abandoned mental hospital. Kind of like a heavier, angrier, more PE-influenced Wolf Eyes.

Last time we heard from the duo of legendary Swedish industrial artist Peter Nystrom (Megaptera, Negru Voda) and Kristoffer Oustad from the industrial avant-black metal band V:28 was on the brakeHEAD album back in 2006. For their latest, the Kristoffer Nystroms Orkester returns with a darker, creepier sound and an obsession with the floor plan of the fictional hotel from Stephen King's The Shining. Compared to the grinding industrial of the previous disc, Overlook Hotel works on more of a psychological level, evoking dread and emptiness over and over again as the listener passes through each track.

Beginning with an eerie looped female vocal, the record takes shape slowly as deep pulsating electronics and abstract rhythmic sounds fade in and form into a hypnotic electrical field of black energy, the sound evolving into a swarming static-flecked drone before suddenly breaking into a heavy mechanical rhythm on "The Colorado Lounge", an almost breakbeat-like rhythm pounding beneath the trails of ominous minor key creep and abrasive noisy textures. From the start, this is the most cinematic sounding music that I've heard from KNO, the blend of hazy dark ambience and machine-like rhythm sounding like it could work exceedingly well as a film score. When conjuring images of this notorious site (best known of course as the evil sentient ski resort from Stephen King's The Shining, though you won't find any direct references to that book here), though, this inhabits a strange surreal dreamworld, consistently threatening and filled with a sense of lurking dread, but the washes of cloudy metallic drone and richly layered synthesizer drift and metallic percussion often take the album into a kind of surreal nocturnal terrain that's closer to Hoor-Paar-Kraat than the relentlessly horrific death industrial of Nystrom's work with Megaptera. Some of the tracks on the album move into a kind of minimal haunted techno pulse that reminds me of the black electronic Kompakt-like moves of some of Nordvargr's material, but then break down into the sound of distant chains being dragged and rustled amid deep ambient drones. Other songs deliver jackhammer blasts of industrial drumming that wouldn't sound out of place on a Ministry album, volleys of crushing wall-shaking percussion pounding away incessantly beneath fields of evil voice samples and electronics. There's moments of pure horror to be found here as well though, in the blasts of smoldering MZ.412-esque industrial and creaking factory death-marches that come into view in the last third of the record, and the closing symphonic swells of unearthly horns and wavering drones on "The Dormer". If you're a fan of Nystrom's other projects, this is very highly recommended. Released as both a digipack Cd and a limited-edition Lp in an edition of 217 copies.

Though it may be one of the more obscure titles on the ever-crushing Malignant label, the oddly titled brakeHEAD is also one of the imprint's heaviest releases, a brutal fusion of Scandinavian industrial and skull-crushing doom-noise that blew me away when I picked up a copy of this disc last year. It's not new, a 2007 release as a matter of fact, but when I started digging around the Malignant catalog recently to see what older titles that I've overlooked here at C-Blast, this one popped up immediately as a must-get.

Just the lineup should have a good many of you mechafreaks drooling...Kristoffer Nystroms Orkester is the duo of legendary death-industrialist Peter Nystr�m (of Megaptera fame) and Kristoffer Oustad of the experimental post-black metal band V:28, which should give you a vague idea of what direction this collaboration heads in. The Orkester delivers four tracks of lumbering, ultra-heavy black industrial with the nearly twenty minute long "ExtenDEAD Konnektion " as the centerpiece of the album. The rest of the tracks are shorter, five to eight minutes, with the opener "Biter" draping huge black curtains of ultra-distorted black drone and dark orchestral ambience over a foundation of throbbing industrial rhythms and pounding tribal oil-drum percussion, and " High_Level_Input - Slow_Speed_Output (Well Done)" blasting skull fragments apart with it's thunderous roar of white noise, screaming, heavy machine throb and massive tribal drumming exploding in a Merzbowian rush of distorted heaviness that gradually burns off into a trail of slimy, dank factory ambience. But it's with "ExtenDEAD" that the Orkester guys really drag the listener down into hell, starting the track off with muffled voices and smears of lush dark ambience and subterranean rumble, then slowly introducing the clatter and clang of various metal objects being smashed together and forming crude scrapyard rhythms as a syrupy wave of ultra-heavy metallic doomdrone slowly pours in from a rift torn across a midnight sky, unleashing massive black drones and crushing Sunn-esque amp-roar across a cacophony of broken machinery and swooping space FX. The first six minutes or so showcases some seriously heavy ambient doom, and then starts to being in pounding percussion and added layers of oscillating electronic noise and dubbed-out rhythmic elements before fading into a stretch of granular noise and strange voice samples. Eventually, the grinding ultra-heavy guitars and looping distorted noise seeps back in for a few more minutes, but then the final third of the track wanders into more abstract areas, the heavier metallic sounds dropping away and leaving just a bleak, barren wasteland of fragmented radio newscast recordings and ominous melodies buried beneath a blanket of ashen noise and eerie ambience. Then the album closes with "Asphalt Flowers", another relatively shorter piece that's completely crushing, opening with chiming metallic percussion and dread-inducing news reports as huge distorted drones slowly gather overhead, and then suddenly it all caves into a fucking MAJESTIC riff, the greatest epic doom metal riff you've never heard roaring over clanging pipes and swirling rusted-out space synths and more of those panic-stricken media broadcasts. An awesome final statement of total despair on this crushing album...it goes without saying that fans of Swedish death industrial will be all over this, but the Orkester are more than just another CMI style outfit. This is like a kind of blackened post-industrial doomdirge, part Archon Satani, part Megaptera, part Black Boned Angel, totally crushing and brimming with a bleak satanic menace. This is fucking great! Limited edition, digipack packaging.

Holy Mountain released the LP version of Blood Moon Riders last year, but Adam Kriney's Colour Sounds imprint has just issued a limited edition cd

version of the album. These New York psych rockers just keep cranking out the goods, and Blood Moon is another in their recent spate of heavy duty

riff-feasts that combines sinister krautrock and Hawkwind style vibes with a (sometimes) subtle amount of proto-metal crunch. It's spacey, heavy, and highly

exploratory; the band opens the album with a fifteen minute monster called "Inner Mind Journey" that takes up the entire first side of the LP, a massive

winding jam that's loaded with soaring fx-soaked guitar, endless pummeling drum workouts, bursts of crunchy metallic riffage, meandering jazzy basslines, and

endless clouds of effects all congealing in an epic sprawl of burly freeform prog heaviness. It's along the lines of Acid Mothers Temple and Hawkwind, but

with more of a metallic hard rockin' edge. Halfway through that first track, La Otracina break into a killer Sabbath-like jam with wild organ-like synths and

swirling fx, then veer off into some extended space-prog jamming with killer vintage synth buzz and endlessly delayed acid solos trailing off into the

cosmos, and finally breaks down at the end into a krautrocky groove.

For the other four tracks, La Otracina pulls back on the throttle a bit while still keeping things very zonked. "Ballad Of The Hot Ghost Mama Part 1" is a nebulous cloud of druggy phased wah-soaked guitar, swells of minimal cymbal shimmer, drifting Hawkwind space-synths, a total nod-out tumbling through the cosmos. "Zunblazer" opens with swirls of cascading guitar before moving onto a heavy, head-nodding krautrock jam, slow and melodic with bits of early 90's math rock creeping into their massive propulsive throb. The second half of "Ballad of the Hot Ghost Mama" follows, a darker and more ominous continuation of the first, opiated blues guitar snaking around washes of abstract cymbal patterns and surges of dubby percussion floating through the kosmiche fog. And then on to the final song, "A Drifted Memory"; the first few minutes are a slowly churning ocean of muted guitar ambience and glorious MBV-like textures, a gorgeously blurry and crushing wall of reverberant amplifier goo, then suddenly halfway through the song switches into this killer mathy surf rock jam, a super catchy melody repeated ad infinitum over a frenetic propulsive drumbeat.

It's great to hear a band deliver this sort of soaring spacey psychedelia with some real muscle, and La Otracina are one of the contempo psych scene's most rockin' trios; crucial stuff for fans of Mammatus, Titan, Earthless, Hawkwind, Cuzo, Gnod, and all things proggy, cosmic and crunchy.

Comes in a full color wallet sleeve, limited to just one hundred copies!

This disc documents an almost twenty-minute live piece that was performed in September of 2008 by an improvisational group made up of Chicago artists Bruce Lamont, Mark Solotroff, and Right-Eye Rita, which took place at the Chicago art space AV Aerie. Lamont, of course, is well known 'round here as the frontman and sax-blower for avant-metallists Yakuza, whose albums have long been faves of ours. Mark Solotroff is also a known quantity from his work in the Chi-town power electronic/industrial groups Bloodyminded, The Fortieth Day, Intrinsic Action, and for running the excellent Bloodlust! label which released this slab of strangeness. On the other hand, I had only heard the name Right-Eye Rita in passing before and wasn't familiar with any of her music. It's kind of a moot point though, as the sum result of this particular live set is so dense and layered that I can only occasionally pick out individual pieces that I can attribute to one of these folks. The performance consisted of the three musicians taking their voices and building a powerful wall of sound using both treated and natural vocal sounds, and they manage to construct a chilling soundscape that frequently sounds totally alien and unlike anything from the human throat. The piece starts off with a vocal sound loop turned into a clanking quasi-rhythm and Rita's eerie, speaking-in-tongues gibberish floating through a sea of reverb, and this is gradually joined by Lamont's deep chanting tones that are reminiscent of throat-singing and which I've heard him use before in Yakuza. As the performance continues, additional layers of vocals are piled on, some sounds manipulated into inhuman electronic textures and drones, while some of the voices are layered into haunting harmonies. The first half is pretty calm going, but by the halfway point, they begin to warp the sounds into strains of aggressive feedback and waves of blackened hiss, turning the sound from dreamy and surreal into something much more dark and nightmarish. The cavernous space of AV Aerie is used to create a huge billowing ocean of reverb that the vocalists ride on, looping their wailing, chanting vocals over an increasingly threatening atmosphere, until the last few minutes when the sound slowly begins to die down, leaving stray bits of reverb-soaked squeal and anguished wailing and infinite streaks of silvery feedback to rot away into silence. This performance is pretty cool, I don't get very many experimental vocal recordings around here since that sort of stuff generally doesn't fit in with the scope of Crucial Blast, but when the label cites Abruptum, Coil and Diamanda Galas as reference points for the strange nightmare chant-ritual that these folks have summoned here, I'm all over it. And those references do give you a fair idea of what's going on here - the sound, at it's most intense, does channel the washed-out, corroded vibe of early Industrial, while tracing creepy signatures with the wailing, increasingly deranged vocals that towards the end does indeed remind me of some of Abruptum's most abstract and atmospheric freakouts.

Heavy, drugged-out and utterly hypnotic, Loop invoked a dark, trippy sound that was unlike most other UK underground rock bands in the late 1980's. Blending together the trance-inducing psych riffage of Hawkwind, the stoned Detroit garage stomp of the MC5 and Stooges, and the mesmeric motorik throb of Can, Loop were a band whose sound was a mirror image of their name: cyclic, circular riffs pounded out over heavy duty propulsive drumming, plowing through thick clouds of feedback and lysergic lead guitar, with dreamy, disinterested vocals drifting in through a field of reverb. Along with the Spacemen 3, these bands breathed new life into the idea behind space/drug rock, but where Spacemen 3 were super wasted and spaced out, Loop had a much heavier, crunchier sound, with guitars that could be heavy and distorted enough to sound almost metallic. Hell, Loop were heavy enough to have ties with Godflesh, for fuck's sake, as the legendary Godflesh/Loop split 7" will attest. All of Loop's output has been out of print for years and tough to find, but we're finally seeing their albums being reissued through Reactor, in gorgeous new packages with loads of extras, starting with the band's first two albums.

As awesome as Loop were, they've mostly enjoyed a cult underground following and aren't well known outside of psych/noise/avant rock circles. I think they were ahead of their time in so many ways, and if you dropped Loop in front of an audience at a current heavy psych show, people who had never heard of them would probably go nuts over them. Huge, buzzing metallic guitars, head-nodding riffs looped over and over, big booming motorik drums, simple three chord riffs grinding over and over, super catchy and blown and soaked in effects and feedback, the singer's narcotized crooning just barely cutting through the thick haze of drugged out rock. So goddamn great. They were like this massive supercharged krautrock band, but overloaded with trippy effects. After Loop disbanded in the early 1990's following the release of A Gilded Eternity, members would go on to form other projects like Hair And Skin Trading Company and Main, but none of those projects were as heavy and spaced-out and druggy as Loop.

When Loop came out with their second album Fade Out in 1988, you could hear them evolving beyond the raw, noisy Stooges/Can drugjams of their debut with a cleaner, more polished production and a streamlined approach to their sound that sounds even more unique here. The eight songs on Fade Out are way heavier and crunchier than before, the bass more audible, drums more complex and driving, and more than anything the guitars are more pronounced, with a huge crunchy distorted tone that casts off most of the stoned, feedback-coated haze of their debut. A thick cloud of guitar whir opens the disc, shuttling us into the heady propulsive throb of "Black Sun", distorted garage riffage and echoing chord clusters exploding over a pulsating bassline and busy motorik drums, hinting at the psychedelic feedback of the debut but pointing towards a more focused, acid-scorched hypno-rock sound. "This Is Where You End" is another classic, again jamming layers of buzzing guitar drone-riff and wailing wah guitar over a heavy krautrock beat. The song "Fever Knife" is one of the slowest tracks on Fade Out, a sludgy bloozy guitar riff plodding alongside multiple lead guitars breaking out into druggy wah-wah overload, the track moving in and out of phase at times and even being devoured entirely by massive flanger effects. This one is super druggy and psychedelic and stomping and it's the closest we get to Loop's earlier sound. But that's followed by the heaviest Loop song yet, "Torched"; here the guitars get super distorted and chunky, a huge wrecking-ball riff crashing through the endless wah, almost overwheling the distorted bass and frenetic drumming, getting noisier and more blown out and caustic at the end - definitely one of my all time favorite Loop songs! Then it's back to another slow syrupy drug crawl with the title track; the central riff is a massive plodding dirge, grinding slowly over a steady propulsive pulse and the weary, effects-heavy vocals, the whole thing dark and heavy and oppressive. "Pulse" is another catchy midtempo rocker, lots of wavering tremelo guitar and trippy wah-buzz and heavy distorted riffage, followed by the equally crunchy jams "Vision Stain" and "Got To Get It Over", the latter of which closes the album out in a dark fog of rumbling low-end feedback and haunting ambience.

As with Reactor's reissue of Heaven's End, Fade Out is given the deluxe treatment, packaged as a double disc set in a metallic silver Stought style gatefold sleeve with printed inner sleeves. The first disc features the remastered album, and the second disc has even more awesome extras this time around, including alternate mixes of three songs from Fade Out that are drenched in feedback, a demo version of "This Is Where You End", a three song Peel Session from 1988, and a bunch of textural guitar loops played by Robert Hampson for the Fade Out sessions; these five loops range from wailing feedback blur to rumbling slabs of heavy drone, and these abstract guitar pieces forshadow the more experimental guitar-based music that Hampson would explore with this project Main after the demise of Loop.

It was a pleasant surprise to have this new Lull album pop up at the end of last year - like the label states, this is the first brand new album from Mick Harris's dark ambient project in fourteen years, long enough that I really didn't expect him to revisit the ice-cold stygian dronefields that he helped to trailblaze in the early 90s alongside Lustmord and Yen Pox. Lull has always been one of my all-time favorite dark ambient outfits, Harris just seems to have this spectacular touch for weaving impossibly deep webs of subterranean murmur and barren volcanic drift that stands out from anyone else in the field. Definitely muich more than just "that electronic side-project from the former Napalm Death drummer" to me.

Covid-era sessions

Impressionistic driftscapes that evoke oceanic vastness, an immense and empty terrain cast with an ominous, crepescular glow, somewhere on the razor's edge between twilight and nightfall. Fields of immensely ancient ice sprawling all the way to the horizon, the dim, fading solar glow rising over that distant flatline horizon, vaporous clouds of freezing air and condensation swirling upwards into the troposphere. A single, blinding beam of light shoots straight down into the ice-fields, stretching skyward from the surface like a lunar ray that ascends to the point of invisibility. Borealis-like smears of lightform shifting imperceptibly beyond the vanishing point. The pieces, titled "Range", "Expanse", "Unplumbed", "Way" feel like a fractured phrase, each one stretching from eleven to seventeen minutes and flowing together like a black haze of sound. Pieces of something approaching sonority slip beneath the surface of these glacial sheets of sound, bleeding into each other, blurring and melting together.

Make sure you've got a good system for low-frequency playback. For an hour, Harris draws the listener through a boundless sonic environment, the drones and rumblings and reverberations and echoes moving constantly in all directions, washing over you again and anagin with huge swells of deep bass tones and lush chordal forms, spires of majestic tonality piercing through the gloom and shadow and casting a luminous glow across the billowing, gamboling cloudscapes, awe-inspiring choral textures rising out of unseeable depths. This is unmistakeably Lull, scultping vast and ominous sound into dramatic movements that completely surround you, quite different from the other early "dark ambient" and "isolationist" artists; Harris utilizes his layering of low-frequency / low-end soundscapes to create something almost symphonic, opener "Range" being a perfect specimen of this approach as the track unfurls into something akin to a cosmic event, with peaks and valleys of intensely cinematic magnitude arrayed into deeply moving formations. Aside from having an extremely subtle rhythmic substratum in his dronescapes, Harris and Lull usually brings a meditative element to this music that distinguishes it in the field, with series of forms and patterned movements that reveal themselves to the attentive listener, especially on the first two tracks of That Space Somewhere, "Range" and "Expanse". As the album moves into its second half, though, it feels more meteorological, those giant tectonic tones and reverberations giving way to a slightly more etheric sprawl of endless shimmer and metallic whirlpools. "Unplumbed" and "Way" develop into slightly more harrowing topographies, less physically visercal tjhan the begining of the album but no less immersive and evocative. Like waves of tone emitting from planetary-sized prayer bowls, rippling through the cosmos.

Gary over at Shifty Records is all about turning us on to new sludge and doom bands. He's released a couple of the better sludge compilations you'll ever hear with the two-part Crushers Killers Destroyers series, and I'm always discovering new purveyors of slow n' low heaviosity with the split 7"s and split albums that he puts out through his label. This brand new full length disc from Shifty features three bands, a tryptich of swampmetal from Maegashira, Sowbelly, and Ossm, all of whom pay homage to the junkie doom and New Orleans sludgecore sound pioneered by Eyehategod. Any one of these bands would have done a fine job of covering EHG on that tribute album that Emetic put out, I'm sure. While none of them make any drastic changes with the sludge metal template, each band puts their own twist on the sound, and fans of this kind of Deep South sickness should find all of 'em satisfyingly crushing.

Maegashira are the only band on here that I had heard of before. We received a demo from them a while back that was pretty rad, and the three songs that open this disc are pretty much in the same vein. Massive bloozy Eyehategod style sludge mixed with creeping old school doom a la Saint Vitus and some interesting blues/country influences, and brutal vocals that are a lot more varied than the norm. The singer is able to drop a monstrous death metal roar or a drunken southern rock bellow at the drop of a hat, but mostly he whips out these abrasive, freaked out screeches that are pretty fearsome. I really dig it when these guys break out the slide guitars on "Thanks, I'm Fine".

Oops. Sowbelly actually were on that Eyehategod tribute album. My bad. The three songs that this Michigan band contribute are filthy and droning, very much in the vein of Weedeater, Buzzoven, Eyehategod, that sort of drug-blasted, antisocial crustiness, with sleazy samples and huge Sabbathoid riffs that leak bad attitude and alienation all over the place. And when these guys put together a riff that they think is especially crushing, these mutants will ride the fucking thing endlessly, turning their snarling sludgecore into a hypnotic riff-mantra that goes on and on, beating your grey matter into mush while the singer vomits all over their amps. Good stuff.

What's an Ossm? According to the band, it means "Kentucky Fried Hydro Sludge". It seems odd that we don't hear more sludge bands from Kentucky, but they are a rare thing indeed. Ossm's song titles are kind of retarded - the first one is called "The Beer Halloween", which is followed by "Where's The Groove" - but I like the fact that these guys don't give a fuck about fidelity and opted to go for an utterly noxious low-fi recording that is perfect for their grease-stained brand of mongoloid sludgecore. I'm also a fan of how the singer sounds like Dixie Dave from Weedeater choking on a piece of chicken gristle. Utterly fucked up low-fi skumdoom that's equal portions Buzzoven, Cavity, Burning Witch, and old Sloth.

Killer artwork rounds out this taster of some new blood from the American metal underbelly. Hardcore sludge and doom fanatics, and worshippers of Toadliquor, Sleep, Grief, Weedeater, Eyehategod, Warhorse, Electric Wizard and Bongzilla should all investigate.

Merzbow's Zophorus came out a while back on Blossoming Noise, but I never got a chance to check it out until just recently. I was missing out, too, as this 2007 album is one of the more psychedelic of Masami Akita's recent albums. Well, all of his stuff is pretty psychedelic, but Zophorus is even more so, with seriously dense noisescapes that have some fantastic melodic motifs squirming beneath the roaring chaos that he constantly returns to over the course of the tracks. The opener is a perfect example of this; for more than thirteen minutes, that first track soars through an immensely thick and textural cloud of whiplash oscillations, Hawkwind-strength synth freakout, waves of fuzz and distorted sub-bass, shards of electronic glitch and whir, but underneath this massive bleeping, roaring, grinding slab of mind melting electronic chaos, a simple two-note melody loops over and over endlessly, and it continues to repeat itself throughout the entire track, wavering back and forth, an eerie melodic undercurrent that gives this a strange kosmiche quality that you don't often hear in Merzbow's pure noise constructs. The other tracks on Zophorus are more formless and brutal, each featuring tons of frenzied oscillator abuse and throbbing low-end distortion, and much of the album actually reminds me of Bastard Noise, but even when the Merz-blast is at full tilt here, these fragments of melody continue to surface, like the eerie flute-like figures that surface on the third track, and the weird orchestrated tunes that manifest on the fourth track, pieces of prerecorded music sped up to light speed blur, pounding mechanized percussion, the wall of sound becoming almost like a fucked-up, hyper-abstract kind of digital grindcore at times, which also makes it one of the album's most vicious pieces. The final track just about rivals it, though, with a massive wall of sputtering percussive noise and brutal locust-swarm noise. Zophorus is as crushing and heavy as anything that Merzbow has released, and sounds like much of the noise may have been guitar generated. If you want pure sonic catharsis, this disc most definitely delivers. Packaged in a full-color digipack with artwork from Masami Akita himself.

After forming in the early 90s, Australia's Mournful Congregation released a couple of demos that were instrumental in

defining the burgeoning 'funeral doom' sound, and would place this band in the pantheon of funereal pioneers alongside the

likes of Thergothon, Funeral, Evoken and Skepticism. Made up of members of several other noteworthy Aussie metal bands

(Portal, Chalice, Stargazer, Cauldron Black Ram), Mournful Congregation mastered the art of matching an atmosphere of utter

despair to an array of incredible melodies and dreamlike crush With their combination of achingly mournful melodies, glacial

tempos, dark burial-rite ambience and monstrous slow-motion riffs, making their music absolutely essential to anyone

interested in this particular realm of extreme doom. For years though the Mournful Congregation albums were hard to come by

here in the Us having been released exclusively on small overseas labels, but now we've got both a number of the Japanese

import releases of their older discs in stock as well as the recent spate of excellent Cd reissues that 20 Buck Spin just put

out at the end of 2012; I've been listening to these albums constantly since we got them in, and I really can't recommend

this stuff enough to fans of massive, miserablist metal.

Album number three from the masters of atmospheric funeral doom, The June Frost has gone in and out of print since its release, briefly appearing on Cd via the ill-fated Enucleation label along with a Japanese release on Weird Truth; we've got both that Japanese edition as well as the newest American version on 20 Buck Spin, though the two versions are essentially identical in terms of music and album art.

One of the main things that sets this band apart from the droves of funeral doom bands slogging across the earth is the fantastic guitarwork that makes Mournful Congregation's music so stirring, with solos and melodic leads that soar like the best arena rock, but which remain tethered to their supremely heavy riffs and slow-mo tempos. The June Frost is filled with this stuff as well as a heavy helping of the bands trademark funereal ambience, opening with the tolling bells, strings and pipe organ of "Solemn Strikes The Funeral Chime", a gorgeously grim funereal hymn that establishes the somber mood immediately. Those mournful lead guitar harmonies drift in after a few minutes, setting up the sorrowful feel for the epic second song, the seventeen minute "White Cold Wrath Burnt Frozen Blood"; this glacial deathmarch of soaring sorrow- wracked guitar harmonies, deep, guttural death metal vocals and deep baritone muttering, and crushing slow drums is one of the heaviest songs on the disc, but it also breaks into brief interludes of gorgeous acoustic strum and choral drift as it moves through a series of different passages, long ascending riffs and gleaming slide guitar slowly climbs skyward into swathes of black gothic beauty that almost sound like a doom metal Fields Of The Nephilim, and punishing doomdeath crush that rises up at just the right moments, making this one of the highlights of the album.

Nearly twenty years on, Mournful Congregation remain one of the best songwriting outfits in the field of funereal doom, each and every song rife with deeply affecting melodies and skillfully arranged music that concentrates on atmosphere without sacrificing any of their bone-crushing heaviness. You hear it in the slow-motion deathcrawl of "Descent Of The Flames" brings in piano and lush acoustic strings amid the crushing doom, and in the title track that appears in the middle of the album as a beautiful proggy interlude with more of that soaring virtuosic lead guitar winding around more delicate, doleful acoustic strum. Elsewhere, they add other instrumental interludes of creepy psychedelic ambience, clouds of guitar noise and graveyard mist, electronic drones snaking through a black fog of reverb, amp drone and dungeon-drift.

It's hard to pick a favorite out of all of Mournful Congregation's albums as they're all pretty consistent in quality, but June Frost definitely stands out as one of the discs that I've found myself returning to over and over since its release. One of the best funeral doom albums that we've carried here, and highly recommended to fans of the form.