November, 2009 (3 items)
- Artist: Gnaw Their Tongues
- Title: All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity
- Format: CD
- Label: Crucial Blast
- Price: $10.00
- Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR78
"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. On Dread, we're feeling 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 (which is still the closest reference point to Gnaw Their Tongue'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 atrmosphere. Hyper-abstract black metal sound-collage? Wagnerian avant-doom psychosis? That's one way of putting it, but Gnaw Their Tongues is ultimately impossible to pin down, defying simple categorization as this album plunges even deeper into a black pit of total cinematic horror, sexual perversion, and shapeless heaviosity. Once again, we've presented the cd version of this album in a deluxe heavyweight tip-on gatefold sleeve manufactured by Stoughton, exactly the same as the sort that we used for the cd release of An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood, and the package includes a six-panel full color booklet. Both the booklet and the gatefold features new artwork from Gnaw Their Tongues mastermind Mories, whose artwork continues to get more insane with each new release. Their are images of depravity, masochism, and sadistic enslavement captured here that we're betting are still haunting the poor saps who assembled these at the plant. And again, the song titles evoke total nightmare visions: "My Orifices Await Ravaging", "Broken Fingers Point Upwards In Vain", "The Stench Of Dead Horses On My Breath And The Vile Of Existence In My Hands", "Gazing At Me Through Tears Of Urine", "Rife With Deep Teeth Marks", and the whopping "The Gnostic Ritual Consumption Of Semen As Embodiment Of Wounds Teared In The Soul". The album opens with a sudden blast of pounding tympani-like percussion and roaring distorted bass, a massive blackened dirge wading through a swirling storm of metal smashing against metal, howls of anguish and terror, bursts of majectic brass fanfare and distortion and epic string sections struggling to emerge from the chaos, then turning into a sea of tense strings and choral voices spreading out towards the end that creates a less noisy but still totally evil atmopshere before becoming devoured at last by the bulldozing black industrial doom. Then it's on to "Verbrannt und verflucht", a mechanical black dirge filled with darkly beautiful orchestral strings and stumbling chaotic drumming, weaving back and forth between a crushing lopsided industrial groove and bombastic riffage that's shot through with brief sections of shimmering ambient drift and echoing chimes and harsh whispered vocals. The next track opens with an immense deep bassline, like the shuddering tones of a massive bowed cello rumbling through an underground cave system, then launches into another stumbling industrial groove, like a broken Godflesh track draped in harrowing Bernard Herrmann strings, dissonant riffage and some of the albums most overt black metal style vocals, a seriously pissed-off ripped-throat shriek soaring over the sludge. Halfway through, the song turns into a a gripping cinemtatic dirge, just heavy drums and looped strings and ominous bassline spreading out over several minutes, then sinking back into a morass of charred distorted drone, cello and weeping female vocals towards the end. "Stench" juxtaposes a reading of a poem from Gustave Flaubert over monstrous slow-motion doom, and " L’Ange qui annonce la fin du temps" reveals a seething mass of murderous whispers and demonic black ambience, deep pounding kettledrums echoing through the pit, dissonant piano and Lustmordian darkness swirling with swarms of atonal strings and hovering drones. A heavy rhythmic orchestral loops opens "Gazing" and leads this track into one of the album's most "grooving" moments, a massive winding doom riff working its way across pitch-black film-score strings and later joined by scathing blackened vocals. "Rife" starts off with a full minute of granular black noise before dropping in to a chaotic lurching off-time riff and a churning maelstrom of distorted electronics and looped orchestral stabs, but evolves into dreamy dark ambience laced with piano and hushed female vocals in it's second half, then exploding into a monstrous speaker-shredding bass-heavy drone at the end. And then as if things couldn't get any more terrifying and nightmarish, the title track appears, opening with a distant female voice screaming for help (a sample I recognize but can't place off of the top of my head), her frantic screams repeating over and over and over as the vicious black doom riffage and industrial percussion pours forth, massive blasts of brass fanfares and dense strings piled on top, the sound absolutely suffocating. But then four minutes in, the doomy heaviness and strings drop out suddenly and we're left with minimal fluttering drones and slow dissonant chords being smashed out of a piano for a minute, a brief moment of almost-calm, and then the drums begin to pound and the orchestral sounds and distorted riffage crashes back in with an epic final hook that's one of the most majestic moments on the album, almost sounding like My Dying Bride but drowned in noise and filthy buzzing bass and psychotic strings. Finally, "Gnostic Ritual" closes the album with a simple two-chord bass riff over pounding, heavily echoing drums, a blackened dubby doomscape filled with super distorted shrieks and harsh noisy ambience, slow and crushing and utterly depressing, and as the track continues the stripped down industrial dirge is slowly joined by waves of rumbling orchestral percussion, distant warning sirens, murky strings and suspended high pitched drones that builds in intensity until finally fading out on a smoking trail of crackling feedback and distorted bass."
- Artist: Subarachnoid Space
- Title: Eight Bells
- Format: CD
- Label: Crucial Blast
- Price: $10.00
- Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR81
"Eight Bells is the first new release from Subarachnoid Space in four years (following 2005's The Red Veil on Strange Attractors). Featuring the recording 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 post-Release albums, fusing wicked metallic crunch with ethereal fx-laden guitar freakouts and some of the band's most narcotized jamming yet. Their last couple of records pointed towards a heavier direction for the band, and this new material continues on that trajectory, combining blazing luminous axe-howl over hypnotic heavy acid riffage and dense squalls of fx-stacked sound. The album comes in at just under 40 minutes, and is packaged in another one of Crucial Blast's high quality visual presentations with stunning new artwork from Stephen Kasner. We've been big fans of Subarachnoid Space here at Crucial Blast since back when the band was releasing albums on Release/Relapse and Charnel Music, and they have continued to be one of our favorite bands working within the heavy neo-psych spectrum.
Since their formation in 1995, Subarachnoid Space has evolved into one of the preeminent navigators within the realms of psychotropic underground rock and have firmly established themselves alongside the brightest stars in the constellation of contemporary acid rock.
Playing a form of lysergic and almost entirely instrumental rock that draws its DNA from the sounds of classic Krautrock, prog, long-form improvisation and metallic heaviness, the band has attracted a fervent and dedicated following over the past decade around albums on established independant labels such as Relapse Records and Strange Attractors Audio House. Subarachnoid Space have also continued to bring their ominous, ethereal riffage, soaring fx-laden guitars and pulsating rhythmic propulsion on the road with numerous tours and festival appearances, including multiple stints across the U.S., three appearances at the legendary psych-rock festival Terrastock, and a tour of Japan, and has performed alongside such a variety of artists as Sonic Youth, Acid Mothers Temple, Khanate, Wolf Eyes, YOB, Sunn O))), Danava, Red Sparowes,Boris, Lightning Bolt, These Arms Are Snakes, Master Musicians Of Bukkake, and Ludicra.
Thoughout the band's existence, the one constant has been visionary guitarist and bandleader Melynda Jackson. A native of rural Texas, Jackson grew up an only child, and never considered that the isolated grasslands and windswept landscapes of her youth would eventually inspire her to evoke equally mysterious terrain through experimental, exploratory guitar and wordless vocalizations in Subarachnoid Space. Jackson moved to San Francisco at the age of twenty-six and within a year had become part of the fledgling version of Subarachnoid Space, which had been formed by experimental guitarist Mason Jones, already known within the post-industrial/psych underground from his long-running Trance project. After the release of the band's debut 7" Char-Broiled Wonderland in 1996, Subarachnoid Space went on to fine-tune their sprawling improvisations and began to tour frequently. This led to the band scoring a record deal with Relapse Records soon thereafter.
After three albums on Relapse Records, the band went on to release material on a number of smaller labels like Elsie And Jack, September Gurls, and Strange Attractors Audio House, and continued to perform regularly, touring both the USA and Japan with Acid Mothers Temple and performing alongside Sonic Youth at the 2002 Terrastock V festival. After the release of 2003's Also Rising, Mason Jones retired from the band, leaving Jackson to assume control of the band and reshape Subarachnoid Space into something heavier and more song-oriented. This new phase of Subarachnoid Space saw Jackson bringing a darker and more metallic edge to the band's sound while still retaining the elements of fiery improvisation and rich textural guitar that the group was known for. Both 2003's Also Rising and 2005's The Red Veil further introduced the band to a new audience of left-field metal and heavy rock fans.
Now, Jackson and Subarachnoid Space have returned with Eight Bells, the band's first new release since 2005's The Red Veil on Strange Attractors, and the newest chapter in Jackson's continually evolving vision of music as ecstatic ritual.
The recording features a new lineup of Daniel Barone, Melynda Jackson, Lauren K. Newman and Daniel Osborne, and was produced by Steven Wray Lobdell who also performs on the album. The music of Eight Bells continues in a similar heavy lysergic vein as their last couple of post-Relapse albums, fusing wicked metallic crunch with celebratory sky-streaking guitar freakouts and some of the band's most narcotized jamming yet. Their last couple of records all increasingly pointed towards a heavier direction for the band, and this new material continues on that trajectory as it combines blazing luminous axe-howl over hypnotic acid riffage and dense squalls of fx-stacked sound. Eight Bells features five songs ("Lilith", "Akathesia", "Hunter seeker", "Haruspex", "Bird Signs"), and features stunning new artwork from Stephen Kasner."
- Artist: Overmars
- Title: Born Again
- Format: CD
- Label: Crucial Blast
- Price: $10.00
- Catalog ID: CarbonDist_CBR77
"Call it some kind of dark providence, but back in early 2008 I had three different people all hit me up in the same week to tell me that we really needed to put out a US release of the new album from Overmars. I was already a fan of the French band's 2005 CD/DVD set Affliction, Endocrine...Vertigo, which reminded me of a mix of Neurosis-style slow-motion power and elements of Swans-inspired industrial rock, prog, classic old-school doom, goth rock, black metal, and the more adventurous end of the metalcore field a la Starkweather and Integrity (the former of which actually has a forthcoming split with Overmars on the horizon...), so I already wanted to hear their follow-up, which at the time had only been released in France on Appease Me, the label run by one of the guys from avant-black metallers Blut Aus Nord. After all of the raves I was hearing and the impassioned please to release the album in the US through C-Blast, I finally got in touch with the band and prepared myself for some major heaviness. But when I finally got my hands on a copy and listened to it for the first time, I was floored - that towering black/sludge/industrial/goth sound was there in full effect, but their sound was more oppressive and bleak and epic than ever before, and captured this in a single monolithic song that was almost forty minutes long. Born Again immediately became one of my fave releases of last year, a fucking devestating piece of music that documents the band evolving even further from the simplistic Isis/Neurosis comparisons that have dogged their previous releases. The album descends deep into themes of self-immolation, horror, and rebirth, and becomes a harrowing narrative as it moves through a series of different musical moods. Overmars had already established their atmospheric, electronically-tainted sludge-metal sound on their excellent 2005 album Affliction, Endocrine...Vertigo and all of the previous splits with Donefor, Iscariote, Fugüe and Icos, but Born Again is something new from the band; this forty-minute epic moves from pulverizing industrial dirge blanketed with heavily textured layers of processed guitar and fearsome gutteral roars intermixed with captivating female vocals, to passages of haunting dark ambience and bottom-heavy churn, and a magesterial 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 . Like I said, I really loved their last album Affliction, which I thought was an interesting variation on the Neurosis/psychedelic sludge sound with its heavy use of electronics, and if you liked that album as much as I did, I'm pretty sure that you'll be blown away by this darker new form that the band has taken. This Crucial Blast release of Born Again features a distinctly different album design than the original version on Appease Me, and is also packaged in a four-panel digipack (where the Appease Me release came in a standard jewel case)."