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The first new release from Marax since 2005...this is electronic/harsh noise by Eric Crowe, who in the past served as throat for the cult Southern grindcore band Social Infestation, who also featured future members of Mastodon and Withered. This full length has been in the works for several years and is only now crawling out into the light, but the wait has sure been worth it. This'll incite some serious zoneouts from anyone who dipped their skulls in the molten deathdrone of Marax's ultra-limited Love Of Death series...Black Veil has four lengthy tracks of heavy liquid nightmare distilled from the catacombs. The disc opens with the fuzzy muted swirl and distant percussive clang of "Returning To Rust", which moves through soft gauzy layers of crackling distortion until exploding in a churning wall of concrete-mixer crunch with heavily modulated, howling demonic vocals. "Inside The Inner Voice" is a seven minute exercise in pitch black ambience and malignant incantations, and "Bleeding Black" stretches out across a vast abyss of distant reverberations and ambient fuzz, filled with far-off sonic flutterings, metallic scraping and screaming voices that just barely heard, an intensely creepy ambient dronescape. And the final track "Nod" is a twenty-two minute headphone epic...this is one of my favorite Marax tracks, a threatening ambient film score piece that stretches way out and moves from huge slabs of growling black ambient drift and buzzing black metal guitar through epic celestial synthesizer riffs. Simple synth melodies are repeated over swathes of droning amp rumble, the low-end sometimes swelling up in huge waves that threaten to overwhelm the entire piece, and a beautiful little melody begins to take shape later in the track that sounds like it's being played on a heavily processed piano, repeating over and over. Later, the buzzing, fuzz-drenched sheets of blackened guitar and droning distortion come back in and the sound becomes a massive muted fuzzdrone that reaches out forever, finally fading off into the ether as the track comes to a close. I'd normally never describe any of Marax's material as beautiful since most of his works either suggest feelings of isolation and dread or simply shear your fuckin' dome off with extreme electronic skree violence, but with "Nod" Marax gives us one of the most mesmeric pieces of music I've ever heard from him, a sprawling, subtly beautiful narco-scape that's like hearing the mystical krautrock orchestrations of Florian Fricke and Popol Vuh faded and filtered through the deformed, dank dungeon atmosphere of Abruptum.
Black Veil Of The Sanguinarian is packaged in the signature Bliss sleeve with full color artwork from Crucial Blast, and the disc is attached to the interior of the sleeve on a plastic hub. Issued in a limited edition of 300 copies.
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