Upcoming Crucial Blast Releases
T.O.M.B. UAG DIGIPACK CD / DIGITAL ALBUM / SHIRT
CBR94
For nearly a decade now, the shadowy collective known as T.O.M.B. (or Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) have been creating a particular brand of industrial death worship with some of creepiest recordings that I've heard out of this realm. I discovered the band through their 2007 album Macabre Noize Royale on Todestrieb, whose grating industrial rhythms, blasts of blackened noise and malformed black metal left my skull a charred husk, and I've been following their clandestine electro-acoustic experiments and rituals of corpse-abuse ever since. Now, T.O.M.B. have brought us their latest album (and first for Crucial Blast) UAG (or Undercovered Ancient Gateways, and it follows the group of crypt-crawlers through eleven tracks of suffocating black ambience and lifeless industrial pummel that strips away most of the black metal elements of previous releases, crafting a more abstract, ambient sound this time around.
The band has largely distinguished their approach to black industrial because of the sound sources they use; making their way into abandoned sanitariums, morgues, decaying crypts, and other sites of psychological and spiritual distress (such as the Pennhurst State Hospital in Pennsylvania, and Kentucky's infamous Waverly Hills), the members of T.O.M.B. capture the natural ambience of these locations with field recorded sounds, and engage in pounding percussive workouts by banging and hammering on the very walls and structures of these sites. These rumbling industrial rituals result is a mix of Neubauten-esque bashing and rhythmic forms combined with crushing harsh industrial noise and lightless black ambient voids, sculpted into a uniquely haunted industrial ambience on UAG. As far as references go, I hear traces of death industrial (a la Atrax Morgue / Subklinik / Mauthausen Orchestra / Brighter Death Now) here, as well as the black industrial weirdness of bands like Abruptum, MZ412, and Stalagggh, but there's also echoes of Lustmord's early work here as well in the cavernous black spaces that T.O.M.B. explores.
There is no narrative here, nothing resembling "mood music"; each track flows directly into the next, the album crawling and breathing as a single malevolent organism. The title track opens the album with massive metallic reverberations rumble through vast cavernous realms of darkness and roaring subterranean maelstrom, corrosive distorted noise washing over the pounding sheet-metal percussion and almost tribal-like rhythms, like the howling of the dead emanating from the bowels of the earth. Then "Torment" creeps in, layering agonized distorted howls and monstrous moaning vocalizations over sweeping noise and a pulsating distorted synth, the whole sound drifting through an echo-chamber of hallucinatory horror, then slipping into the swelling subterranean rumblings, juddering machine rhythms and pounding cemetery gate rhythms of "Mausoleum Witchcraft". The subsequent depths of the Underground Ancient Gateways are further infested with these rattling infernal engines and massive rumbling dronescapes, violent metal percussion, ghostly effects and mysterious sounds drifting across the abyssal emptiness, various nightmarish vocalizations, the pounding drums and other hammered objects a constant presence.
Some of the album's more disturbing moments appear on the psychedelic noise eruption "Blood Vortex" that resembles one of CCCC's extreme synth-noise meltdowns, a mass of swarming electronic glitch whirling over smeared drones and distant machine noise that apparently used actual blood as a sound source; the snarling, teeth-gnashing blood ritual chaos of the "Tribe Of The Corpse" gives way to the dank Lustmordian depths of "Graveyard Requiem"; and the twelve-minute "EMPLEH", where the cavernous ambience transforms into twisted atonal guitar noise, distant cries, and eerie howls cloaked in thick black fog, later revealing warped, quasi-black-metal shapes as it drifts deeper and deeper into the pit. The closest that the album ever approaches anything resembling black metal, though, is on the psychotic blastscape "Leech", where those faint, programmed blastbeats drift up out of a hazy dungeon ambience amid snarling demonic vocals and reverb-soaked synthesizers. The one piece on UAG that really gets under my skin though is "Cadaver Transmissions", a recording of contact mic scrapings across the rotting flesh of an actual corpse, backed by echoing black drift, creating the blackest of ambient soundscapes on what is already a supremely unsettling listening experience.
Highly recommended to fans of blackened industrial and black ambience. Comes in a full-color digipack.
SUTCLIFFE JUGEND Blue Rabbit DIGIPACK CD / DIGITAL ALBUM
CBR95
Appearing in the early 80's as an offshoot of the legendary UK power electronics band Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend soon went to to become an equally confrontational and extreme purveyor of the early PE/industrial sound, producing some of the most abrasive and violent electronics albums ever with their early Come Organisation releases We Spit On Their Graves and Campaign . Since then, Sutcliffe Jugend has continued to pursue a unique sonic vision that combines transgressive subject matter and dark, cerebral musings on violence and sexual perversion with explorations into the use of brutal feedback and synthesizer damage. In the past decade, however, the band has delved into darker, more restrained (at least on a sonic level) sounds alongside their harsher work, and Blue Rabbit is the latest such offering, unfolding like a night-terror across the album's eight tracks. You won't find any of SJ's trademark power electronics sound here, nor the dark throbbing industrial of their recent album With Extreme Prejudice for Cold Spring Records; this is a darker, more unsettling experience, heavy with an atmosphere of doom and smoldering violence, as if Sutcliffe Jugend sought to channel the creaking dread of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste through a series if blood-freezing psychosexual nightmares.
The first song "Solace" begins with washes of black tidal drift and eerie creaking sounds, wheezing string-like drones, the scrape of bones against the rusted strings of a cello, brief flashes of piano, and strange low-frequency muttering, snatches of melody drift in and out of clarity, while a male voice murmurs just below the surface of this seasick soundscape. The vocals never break into the kind of high, manic screaming that you'd hear on previous SJ albums, instead appearing as a malevolent presence, a depraved narrator lurking in the dark corners of Blue Rabbit. The album creeps through ever more disturbing scenes, from the sparse electro-acoustic collage of percussive noises, asthmatic scraping strings and reedy feedback tones that make up "Seed", a collage of warbly electronic tones, the thump of an oil tank, evil whispers guiding the listener through these aural hallucinations, the track eventually resembling some nightmare free-improv session.
Then there is "The Bad Mannered Prophet", an almost orchestral dark ambient epic unlike anything that I have ever heard from Sutcliffe Jugend, magisterial and haunting, a stirring dark melody and sounds of distant chanting looping repeatedly beneath a creaking, crashing oceanic soundscape. And the rest of the album drifts further through these realms of bad-dream ambience, strange somnambulant improv and the sounds of organ, murmuring voices, mewling cries, jazzy bass frozen into a glacial drip, minimalist drones that waver and fade against the darkness, the slow scrape of the bow across strings processed into buzzing, wasp-like tones, clouds of billowing melodious keyboard, the songs at times resembling the din of a house of clocks gone haywire, finally culminating in the frenzied depravity of "The Death Of Pornography".
For fans of the band that are primarily familiar with their harsher output on Come Org and Cold Spring, this is a revelation; a seething quasi-ambient nightmare that lingers with the listener, enhanced in it's creep factor by the unsettling paintings from Sutcliffe Jugend's Kevin Tomkins that make up the album art. Comes in a full-color digipack.
STALAGGH :Projekt Stalaggh: CD BOXSET
CBR96
Coming in 2012. A complete, comprehensive documentation of the recorded output of one of the most fearsome black noise ensembles of the past decade, Stalaggh...
GULAGGH Vorkuta DIGIPACK CD
CBR97
Coming in 2012. A reissue of the now out-of-print first album from Gulaggh, the demonic improv/chamber horror project that has risen from the ashes of Stalaggh...
CREMATION GROUNDS Abortion Sacrament 3" CDR / CHAPBOOK
BLAZE05
A punishing exercise in blackened harsh noise, death cult worship, and intensely focused misanthropy.
GLASS COFFIN Remnants Of A Cold Dead World CDR+ARTZINE
BLAZE12
New album of wrecked, blooze-damaged American black metal filth and necrotic weirdness from Glass Coffin, featuring Josh Lay (Temple Of Rot, Cadaver In Drag, Swamp Horse).
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