BLACK ELK - 'Always A Six, Never A Nine' CD (Crucial Blast)
The 2nd album from Portland, OR aggro wreckers Black Elk, whose psychotic brand of crushing, noise-rock influenced heaviosity is a return to the unhinged underground rock force of bands like Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Black Flag and Hammerhead. This album features ten songs of seething weirdness, with the dissonant, crushing riffage, lunging rhythmic push and awesome freaked out, Yow-esque vocals of singer Tom Glose that made their debut a fave among anyone who remembered the days when Amphetamine Reptile ruled the underground rock scene, but with some interesting new elements (bleak, blackened guitar ambience, a smattering of piano, skyreaching guitar harmonies) that add new shadows to Black Elk's ferocious sound. Hardback gatefold digifile.
DEAD BEAT PROJECT - 'Breaking The Shell' CD (Aesthetic Death Records)
DBP is the solo project of Olivier Goyet (Esoteric). The music expresses a certain form of beauty in sadness and melancholy. Endless space and time where one can linger with eyes closed. A moment of reflection on the inner self. "...a recommended album for all those looking for new musical dimensions of surrounding sounds, danceable beats, touching industrial and dark ambient fanatics, all this in equal parts." (Mentenebre). "There's a deep melancholy that courses through the nine tracks on "Breaking The Shell", an introspective gloominess that Goyet paints with an array of spacey, prog-rock synthesizers, old-school electronica and trip-hop beats, and other nods to mostly older electronic music." (Crucial Blast).
UK 10£
Europe 11£
World 12£
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FISTULA - 'Goat' CD (Crucial Blast)
Ohio is rotting. Fistula deliver another heavy dose of their septic, filthy, lumbering death-sludge doom in the form of Goat, a five-song EP of low-fi and low-end nihilistic filth and rabies-laced caveman thrash with songs based on the ghoulish discovery and subsequent investigation of the eleven decomposing bodies found in the Cleveland home of Anthony Sowell in the Autumn of 2009. This disc delivers more of the pulverizing, slime-covered sludge and primitive death metal rot that these Buckeye barbarians have been carving out in the back of Medina garages over the past ten years, continuing to follow in the coagulated blood tracks of Frost, Autopsy and Winter, but filtered through Fistula's uniquely mangled and inebriated scum-haze and utterly negative worldview. Digipak.
GEISHA - 'Die Verbrechen Der Liebe' CD (Crucial Blast)
This hour-long, six track monolith follows Geisha into a psychedelic black storm, covered in a thick sheen of white noise and gritty distortion. Seminal noise rock / sludge combined with violent, chaotic noise, drone-noise and corrosive skree, percussive pummel, and deranged singing. Includes the monstrous 30:35 "Theme From Diana" - a re-working of a "metal percussion" set that Geisha originally performed live. A slowly building fog of voices and effects and shimmering metal that blooms into an expanse of droning, fx-heavy guitar, looping samples, cosmic effects, and improv percussion. It's a kind of rumbling industrial dronescape that stretches out forever, until it suddenly explodes into speaker-annhilating noise-metal dirge. Ltd x 1000 copies in a gatefold jacket.
GENGHIS TRON - 'Board Up The House Remixes Vol. 5' 12" (Crucial Blast)
If Genghis Tron's frayed and sparking mix of aggressive mathcore and electronics wasn't innovative enough, they've embarked on an ambitious multi-label remix project following their first album, "Board Up The House". The three tracks on the fifth and final edition comes wrapped in layers of distortion at once atmospheric and damaging. Tim Hecker's take on the title track is a slow thaw of icy electronic texture, and the Nadja remix of "I Won't Come Back Alive" stretches it out to fifteen minutes of buried drum hits and chilly synths. The final track is a distorted electro remix of "I Won't Come Back Alive" by Dudes You Can Trust. Ltd x 1000 copies on magenta / mint green marbled vinyl.
GNAW THEIR TONGUES - 'All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity' CD (Crucial Blast)
Picking up where 2008's "An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood" left off, Gnaw Their Tongues is back with nine new tracks of fearsome blackened orchestral chaos and abstract horror that still sounds like little else out there. An even heavier bass-assault compared to the other releases, and this is easily the heaviest Gnaw Their Tongues release yet. This monstrous, noxious bottom-end roar that skulks and slithers throughout the album suggests a foul fusion of Abruptum's black chaos and Leonard Rosenman's most nightmarish film scores, piled in towering heaps of sadistic noise, warped orchestral strings, degraded samples, shrieking voices, and punishing lurching doom draped in suffocating atmosphere. This album plunges even deeper into a black pit of cinematic horror, sexual perversion and shapeless heaviosity. Hardback digifile.
GNAW THEIR TONGUES - 'An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood' CD (Crucial Blast)
Reissue of the extremely limited LP (Ltd x 250, Burning World Records) from this ultra heavy act. Harrowing, apocalyptic, bestial ritual music from the deepest, darkest cellars of the Netherlands. Avant black metal, agonising funeral doom and blackened experimental drone noise stab forth again and again until all the blood is spilt and total carnage is all that remains. Pure dread put to music. Recommended for disturbed folk into Abruptum, Khanate, Axis Of Perdition, Swans and Univers Zero. "The bleakness and sheer refusal to allow any light to permeate proceedings alongside the non-linear, sprawling nature of the tracks will alienate a lot of people, but for anyone looking for something truly extreme, you’ll have a hard time beating this" (Kerrang). Hardback digifile.
GREY DATURAS - 'Dead In The Woods' CD (Crucial Blast)
A re-issue of the out-of-print 2004 monsterpiece from the Melbourne trio Grey Daturas. Originally released through the band's own Crashing Jets imprint, "Dead In The Woods" is a massive exhortation of lumbering metallic sludge rock, freely improvised amplifier noise, crushing riff splatter, massive doom and sky-streaking psychedelic corrosion. This re-issue features a full remastering by Scott Hull at Visceral Sound, and comes in a digifile with all-new artwork.
MONARCH! - 'Dead Men Tell No Tales' 2 x CD (Crucial Blast)
A colossal collection of two full length albums, previously released on vinyl only, plus unreleased songs exclusive to this release. French act Monarch! unleash a slow motion avalanche of impossibly glacial, blackened sludge and hypnotic feedback, each song a series of epic tarpit riffage, stretched out eternally over lumbering drums and cavernous rumbles. Over these yawning expanses of black void appears the demonic, throat-shredding shrieks and ghostly singing of Emilie, whose petite appearance belies one of the harshest throats in the underground Doom spectrum. Presented in an offset-printed, gatefold digifile with all new artwork. North American edition.
MULK - 'Putrilogie' CD (Dan's Crypt Records / Suprachaotic Records)
Hyper speed and aggressive, brutal Death Metal with some breakcore electronic parts. Really original stuff from this one-man project, whose style has evolved since its conception in 2006. An incredible sound that will make your head explode. "The slithery breakcore beats and jungle rhythms and explosion of percussive glitch are fucking devestating, and the whole thing is just brutally heavy. Way heavier than any of Bong-Ra's death metal/jungle mashups, or Avulsion's drum n bass remixes... So fucking awesome! Like Suffocation fused with Shitmat, or Venetian Snares crossed with Deeds Of Flesh... highly recommended!" (Crucial Blast). Around 30 minutes of pure brutality from France.
UK 9£
Europe 10£
World 11£
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NADJA - 'Desire In Uneasiness' CD (Crucial Blast)
"Desire In Uneasiness" is an album of all new material from acclaimed Canadian dreamsludge weavers Nadja. Five colossal jams of eternally-fuzzy, ethereal dirge that are powered by the interlocking bass guitars of Leah Buckareff and Aidan Baker, who set loose a wave of monstrous grinding bass riffs amidst a fog of beautiful, swirling electronic effects. "Desire..." also marks the first Nadja album to feature a live drummer in place of the drum machine programming that has driven the band's previous recordings, and the difference in the band's sound is apparent from the first crushing beats of album opener 'Disambiguation'. Hardback digifile.
Riding atop the recent wave of black metal / noise hybrids that combine the bleak, frosty riffs and blackened ferocity of underground metal with blown-out, corrosive strains of industrial noise, the Australian one-man act Nekrasov has made a substantial mark in the realm of the extreme underground. An octagonal prism of isolationist drone, flesh-rending black metal, otherworldly beauty, claustrophobic industrial and violent, suffocating strains of harsh noise, "Extinction" is pure, cyclonic contempt for humanity. The album is loaded with blasting, inhuman drumming and ferocious riffing that form noise-drenched trance-scapes, but the subtle attention to texture elevates this above typical mechanized black metal projects. Immersing the listener in layers of electronic sound and using creative stereo panning techniques and other production tricks, Nekrasov creates a harsh, alien atmosphere. A scorching new chapter from one of the foremost bands out there fusing black metal and noise. Digipak.
Formed by guitarist Yoshiro Hamazaki and programmer Tomoyuki Akiyama in 1999 in Tokyo, Noism focuses on ridiculously complex and spastic death / grind instrumentals using programmed drums that are cut up and spliced back together into impossible rhythms, a million brain-melting riffs and dissonant shredding, all of which is chopped up and processed into abstract death blasts that defy physics. This twelve-song, twenty-one minute disc features a unique, glitched-out chop shop of Planet Mu-style beats delivered at truly meth'd levels of chaos fused with sweeping technical death metal. Insane. Highly recommended for fans of extreme, way-out avant-guitar spazz and absurdly technical deathgrind. Digifile.
This 40-minute epic moves from pulverizing industrial dirge blanketed with heavily textured layers of processed guitar and fearsome guttural roars intermixed with captivating female vocals, to passages of haunting dark ambience and bottom-heavy churn, and a magisterial finale that stretches gloom-ridden moody riffage, vaporous electronics and dramatic male / female singing across the song's final fifteen minutes, a tense, slow buildup that erupts into an earth-shaking crescendo of super heavy riffage. Immensely bleak and heavy, "Born Again" brings together elements of Godflesh's industrial pummel, black metal, tribal dirge , the violent nihilism of Swans, doomy death metal, and even some black strains of psychedelia into a monumental metallic black hole. Digipak.
Rock-A-Rolla 26 features Mike Patton (Faith No More, Fantômas). There's also interviews with Godflesh, Harvey Milk, Emeralds, Knut, Twilight, Coliseum, Starkweather, Cleric, Celeste and Oneohtrix Point Never. This month's Label Focus is on Crucial Blast. Also included is the usual vast selection of news, music, DVD and live reviews from the avant-rock, metal, noise and experimental scenes. Highly recommended!
UK 5.00£
Europe 6.50£
World 8.00£
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SKULLFLOWER - 'IIIrd Gatekeeper' CD (Crucial Blast)
Reissue of Skullflowers 1992 album 'IIIrd Gatekeeper' (originally on Justin Broadrick's Headdirt label), featuring the lineup of Matthew Bower, Stuart Dennison and Anthony DiFranco. This is Skullflower at their heaviest, grinding out slow, sludgy riffs and crushing, almost industrial rhythms amid a tempest of psychedelic guitar noise and dense sheets of feedback - easily the most crushing, rock-based music that Skullflower ever produced. A skulldozing dose of post-industrial dirge rock that sat comfortably next to Godflesh, Swans, and Ramleh. Gatefold digifile (retaining much of the original artwork), with new liner notes and a complete remastering.
SKULLFLOWER - 'Orange Canyon Mind' CD (Crucial Blast)
The 2005 full length from the legendary UK free / drone / psych outfit, featuring some of the most searing, synapse scorching droneworks that Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Total, Hototogisu) has unleashed to date. "Orange Canyon Mind" is the follow up to 2002's awesome "Exquisite Fucking Boredom" (Tumult), and continues that album's utter mutation of stoned out riffs pulled taffy-like into eternity / oblivion and star-rupturing blasts of sonic white light. Over the 8 tracks / 60 minute running time, Bower and cohorts build massive horizontal drones and melodic supernovas. Superb, beautiful, brain melting stuff.
A black-void beaming of utterly destroyed drone rock and crushing amplifier obliteration that rains down black ash and punishing blasts of feedback skree on the listener. A dynamic, bleary-eyed meditation. An avalanche of powerdrone that threatens to take your cranium apart and transport your grey matter into filthy new dimensions infested with melodic razor cuts and submerged mantras. A triumphant eruption of apocalyptic meta-metal and radioactive raga swarms, guaranteed to loosen eardrums. This album is one of the heaviest, harshest slabs of guitar armageddon from Matthew Bower since the glory days of Total, and bridges the void between the krautrock / celestial free drone influence of the last few Skullflower albums, and the blackened molten death of his Mirag material.
SUBARACHNOID SPACE - 'Eight Bells' CD (Crucial Blast)
Eight Bells is the first new release from Subarachnoid Space in four years, since 2005's "The Red Veil", and the newest chapter in Jackson's continually evolving vision of music as ecstatic ritual. Featuring the new lineup of Daniel Barone, Melynda Jackson, Lauren K. Newman, Daniel Osborne and Steven Wray Lobdell, the music of Eight Bells continues in the heavy lysergic vein as their last couple of albums, fusing wicked metallic crunch with ethereal fx-laden guitar freakouts and some of the band's most narcotized jamming yet. Digipak.
THE HUMAN QUENA ORCHESTRA - 'The Politics Of The Irredeemable' CD (Crucial Blast)
This second monstrous disc from THQO is equal parts blackened glacial industrial, nightmarishly dosed drone music, and punishing slow-motion mecha-sludge. Imagine a cross between Corrupted and Sunroof. "...exquisitely epic (and obliterating) sonic journey through landscapes of burnt out Black Metal, and onwards trudgefully past a Burke Shelley rehearsal and fallen statues of the Doom God Dubin, through a Wodenist environment wherein tortured vocalists serenade crows and tree-impaled musicians set off Nadja samples to long-rotting corpses" (Julian Cope). Comes in a hardback, gatefold digifile.
UK 10.50£
Europe 11.50£
World 12.50£
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TREES - 'Freed Of This Flesh' CD (Crucial Blast)
The mysterious Portland ensemble Trees return with their second offering - two new fetid death rituals scraped from the crypt. Black glacial riffs suspended in space, tectonic percussive rumbles, anguished shrieks of torment, deep guttural demon throat singing, and endless sheets of glistening metallic feedback that spill and drift to the far edges of their time-stretched ambient doom, a crumbling, blighted majesty, noxious ambient blackdoom adrift on putrescent tides. Austere slabs of crushing heaviness arranged into ghoulish constructs of atmospheric dread, moving so slow that the music seems to lose all sense of propulsion at times... the guitars stretched into massive decomposing drones, the spaces between infested with controlled bursts of incredibly slow and ponderous drums. "Freed Of This Flesh" inhabits the same depths as Burning Witch, Monarch, Khanate, and Bunkur. Digipak.
2010 edition in a digipak. The debut album from the Portland quartet Trees delivers two epic tracks of monolithic, blackened doom metal with a twisted, noise-damaged approach and a dank basement vibe. Trees craft glacial abstract riffs and rivers of ashen amplifier goo that fans of feedback-laden heaviosity will find highly satisfying - a kind of grinding, slow-motion black hole psychedelia that has a similar hypnotic death-ritual quality as artists like Bloody Panda and Khanate, but with their own unique trance state of swirling guitar textures, horrific jet black dronescapes and ghoulish, excoriating vocals.
VA - 'Doom Capital: Maryland / DC Heavy Rock Underground Compilation' CD (Crucial Blast)
A 14 track compendium of crushing Doom, heavy backwoods psychedelia, and stoned blues sludgery from the infamous Maryland / DC Doom Capital scene, featuring all exclusive, rare and new tracks from: Black Manta, Carrion, Clutch, Countershaft, Earthride, Internal Void, King Valley, Leviathan A.D., Life Beyond, Los Tres Pesados, Nitroseed, The Hidden Hand (featuring Wino of Spirit Caravan, The Obsessed etc), Unorthodox and War Injun. This compilation features both legends and newcomers of the Doom Capital, and delivers over 65 minutes of thunderous doom rock and blackened riffage from the dark shadow of the nations capital, along with detailed liner notes outlining the history of the Doom Capital scene, and information on each of the bands featured.
"Not Without A Fight" is Crucial Blast's homage to the scuzz-caked grindcore / noise / sludge / speed punk underground of the mid-late 1990's. 66 tracks from: A Death Between Seasons, Agathocles, Aural Torture Mechanism, Bastard Noise, Cripple Bastards, Bloodstains & Bulletholes, Cruel Face, Dahmer, Dark Skies Fallen, Daybreak, Depressor, Falsies, Final Exit, Flammable Child, Global Holocaust, JDog, John Bender, Katastrofialue, Macronympha, Mark Bruback, Miseries AD, Mizuko, None Of Your Fucking Business, Puncture Wound, Retribution, RPOD, Samus, SoIHadToShootHim, Strong Intention, The Last Day No Human Voice, Unfound and Unholy Grave. This second edition is limited to 1000 copies and is packed in a DVD style plastic double-disc case that holds both CDs and a 64-page fanzine-style newsprint booklet loaded with band info, art, stories and rants.
UK 11£
Europe 12£
World 13£
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WHOURKR - 'Concrete' CD (Crucial Blast)
The 2nd album from French deathtronix duo Whourkr is a whirlwind of electronically processed and treated avant-death/grind that is as violent and brutal as it is complex and obsessively constructed, relying as much on samplers and software as it does on bonecrushing riffs, screaming and hyperspeed blastbeats. Following a similar strategy as James Plotkin's post-production grind experiments on the first Phantomsmasher album, all of the guitars, drums, and vocals are arranged and recorded by Whourkr and then run through a gauntlet of hardcore editing and remixing. Total chaos deathgrind filtered through a futuristic cuisinart of ultra-aggressive electronica, like a freaked-out epileptic mashup of Atari Teenage Riot, Dying Fetus, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Venetian Snares, Blut Aus Nord, and John Zorn. Akin to Drumcorps, Bong-Ra, Dataclast, Noism, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Reptiljan, Mulk and DHR. Digipak.
Vinyl reissue of 2007's "Peas Feast" self-released EP. Mastered by Scott Hull (Pig Destroyer, Agoraphobic Nosebleed). Four lengthy songs of ultra-heavy sludge, crushing glacial metal, psych rock, noise rock and desperate howling vocals. Slow, sludgy and creeping but still unbelievably catchy and exuberant. Although this early material is more immediate and raw than the band's debut album Six, the music is crushing, catchy and totally spaced-out. Ltd x 1000 copies on yellow / black marbled vinyl. Comes with a dropcard that will allow you to download the tracks from the "Peas Feast" EP as well as a digital-only EP titled "Drongolet Demos" with unreleased Wildildlife tracks.
Heavy, crunchy riffage rolls over celestial FX freakout and gang choral voices: part gluey pop hallucination, part psychedelic blast furnace, part metalloid skullcrush. Super melodic and catchy but vaguely menacing and dark at the same time: this is Wildildlife. Their debut full length "Six" summons a wicked whirlpool of dense distorted crunch and freaky singing, raging metallic percussive pummel, tribal rhythms and crushing effects-soaked guitars, subdued floating drones and ecstatically gorgeous melodies, all let loose in a series of psychedelic slowcore eruptions and swirling cosmic sludge. Comes in a hardback, gatefold digifile.
