ELYSIÜM & MONARCH! - 'Elysiüm & Monarch!' CD (Solitude Records / Throne Records / Shifty Records / Amertume Corruption / Parade Records / 213 Records / Wee Wee / Fidelio / Amanita / Murder Records)
Talk about your polar opposites, it’s like night and day on this one! This French pairing brings together the skull exploding grind antics of Elysiüm and the super slow motion doom of Monarch. Elysiüm splatters gray matter with four cuts in 10 minutes of noxious, hyper speed grind frenzy. Meanwhile Monarch eclipses the sun with a 58 minute dirge featuring some of the sickest female vocals ever committed to CD! Apocalyptic droning, dredging doom riffs and a fetid air of misery impact with all the subtlety of a rusted knife to the groin. If Burning is too fast for you, then Monarch! should fit just right! Second edition of 500 copies.
UK 10.50£
Europe 11.50£
World 12.50£
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MONARCH! - 'Mer Morte' CD (Crucial Blast)
First appearing as a limited edition LP on the Spanish label Throne Records in 2008, "Mer Morte" is now made available on CD as an unbroken thirty-four minute sludge-and-feedback feast that sprawls out further into the dismal black void that these French doom junkies have been lurking in for the past six years. As with previous releases, Monarch move through massive blackened tarpits of low-end riffage and sheets of gluey feedback that are stretched out into monolithic slabs of sound, a grim, glacial ultra-doom that crawls at a saurian sub-tempo. Vocalist Emilie sounds as gaunt and ghostly as ever, her vocalizations materializing across the spatial doomscape as distant ululating wails, breathy whispers, and putrid death shrieks. Digisleeve.
R-A-R 27 features Melvins. There's also interviews with Aaron Turner (Isis, Lotus Eaters, Old Man Gloom), The High Confessions (a new 'Supergroup' featuring Chris Connelly of Ministry / Revolting Cocks, Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth, Sanford Parker of Minsk / Twilight and Jeremy Lemos of White / Light), Yakuza, Black Sun & Eugene Robinson (Oxbow), Stian Westerhus (Puma), Monarch!, Edible Woman, Omega Massif and Horseback. This month's Label Focus is on Temporary Residence Limited. 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 7.50£
World 10.00£
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STALNOY PAKT / ANTHESTERIA / MIKHAIL VAVICH - 'Dedicated To The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905' CD (Der Angriff)
A commemoration of one of the most tragic pages of Russian history in the 20th century - the Russo-Japanese War. This lost war became a deep scar in the national consciousness of that period and turned out to be among the most painful and powerful incentives for the following first Russian revolution (1905) and the further eventual decline of the Russian monarchy. This CD is an attempt to revive the deep anxiety and the premonition of the upcoming relentless social shock which had overwhelmed the Russian nation in those times. Stalnoy Pakt presents maybe its most melodic tracks to date here, the distinctive band's multi-layered dark ambient fused with old military Japanese song samples and old Russian lyrical narrations, sometimes adorned with piano chords or martial drums. Anthesteria's cold gloomy tunes are combined with choir chants and gramophone record samples that aggravate the atmosphere of the dull waiting for the imminent disaster. The album is concluded with an authentic historical recording of the classic track of the period called "Na Sopkakh Manchzhurii" performed by a very famous singer of that time, Mikhail Vavich. This funeral waltz dedicated to the victims of this war drives the overall feel of despair and grief up to the highest limit. The album could be compared to the best examples of historically inspired works but with its own very special and purely Russian depressive mood. An absolute must! A5 sleeve with inserts.
UK 12£
Europe 13£
World 14£
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SURVIVAL UNIT - 'Tied Down For Survival' CD (Autarkeia)
Originally released as a limited edition in 2003 (self-released). At the times of global crisis, the zombies of cultural terrorism strike again with the fire of new toxic power. Tied Down For Survival is a old/new blow from the Scandinavian cult project Survival Unit to the rotten cancer of Western civilisation and the second collection of rarities in the golden collection of cultural terrorism series. This is an exceptionally suggestive, psychedelic power electronics with deeply terrorising implications. Here you will listen to unreleased live records, passages from limited edition utan fana and the controversial conspiracy theory of Rolf-Peter Andersson, where Swedish monarch family, Indira Gandhi and Mikhail Gorbachev practice cannibalism. Digipak.
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.
"Those who worship at the altar of all that is slow and low and heavy and sludgey and doomy and droney, you must now bow before a new lord, the duo from New York known simply as Wicked King Wicker. After three records, each heavier than the last, comes Borne Black, a sprawling black sun explosion of creepy crawly riffage, lumbering lugubrious tempos, tarpit sludge, and spaced out abstract buzz and shimmer, if you fancy Moss, Bunkur, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, SUNNO))), Wolf Eyes, Khanate, Skullflower, Human Quena Orchestra, Monarch, Corrupted, Otesanek, Habsyll, and all the various other denizens of the inky black dronedirgedoom underworld, and have yet to hear WKW, you are in for a treat. (Aquarius). Ltd x 999 copies.
UK 11£
Europe 12£
World 13£
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YEAR OF NO LIGHT - 'Ausserwelt' 2 x LP (Music Fear Satan)
Year Of No Light have recruited two new thirsty mercenaries to their line-up: Shiran, of Uber-doom combo Monarch! and Mathieu, of deviant-electronics act Aeroflot. Out of their cave, they crept into an old theatre to record these 4 tracks, catching every possible vibration of the trembling frame of this enlivened new mansion. All the energy collected there forms "Ausserwelt", the sophomore album of Year Of No Light. Mystical emanations flow out of these riffs colliding into each other to an in ear-splitting shriek. Cranked amps and molested drums hurl their mourning chant as a choir intoning its final psalms at the dawn of the Last Judgment. Year Of No Light follows the path opened by "Nord" towards more sombre psychedelics, creating its own blend of black metal, sludge, drone or any other influence marked with the seal of darkness. An ambiguous electrical network of acting singularities, now ready to afford the collective metaphysical crash to come. Ltd x 500 copies over two slabs of black vinyl in a superb gatefold sleeve.
