New Heaviness for SUNDAY MAY 18TH 2008

new noise from crucial blast...

Here we are, back again after another extended delay, but the new arrivals list this week is bigger than ever...as it should be, seeing as how it's been another month and a half since the last Crucial Blast store update! We've been swamped with working on the new webstore that is even closer to completion right now, and hopefully that'll be getting launched in the next month!
The featured release for this week is the second album from Japan's BIRUSHANAH, released here in the US through Level Plane, and it's a massive two-track slab of mutant ethno-sludge that I can only compare to a twisted fusion of Zeni Geva, traditional Japanese classical, and Corrupted. Uber-angular riffs that defy physics lumber over a multi-percussionist ensemble that pairs up some slamming metal drumming with the pound and clamor of oil drums and metal percussion, and the tandem Industrial pummel that this backline unleashes is INSANELY HEAVY. This album is amazing!

We also have BIRUSHANAH's Touta CD from a couple of years ago, and it's equally as crushing and freaked out sounding; while we were raiding S.M.D. Records for more Japanese mutant metal, we found out about the duo RYOKUCHI, whose Shinsho CD combines traditional Japanese instruments with a weird kind of ultraheavy Godflesh-meets-mathprog assault. If you dig Birushanah's stuff, you seriously need to investigate RYOKUCHI and anything else connected to the S.M.D. label.

Not one, but THREE Skullflower CDs in stock this week! Along with Skullflower's 2003 return Exquisite Fucking Boredom that we now have in stock (apparently the last copies too!), we have the brand new, super-limited Desire For A Holy War CD from Utech that pairs up Matt Bower's latest blast of blackened psychedelic guitar noise with the terrific artwork of Stephen Kasner, AND a live album from Skullflower called Pure Imperial Reform that features Bower teaming up with new 'Flower member Lee Stokoe (CULVER) and performing live in Belgium - this is easily one of the most caustic, skull-crushing pure noise sets that Skullflower has ever bestowed upon us!

Lots of other new stuff in: the latest album from Boston's guitar-and-drums duo 5IVE, laying another awesome batch of riff-heavy psych metal jams; the crucial double-disc hardkore jazz-punk anthology from Swiss extreme skronk legends 16-17; a collection of older EP's gathered together on one full length disc from Aussie kraut-psych-metallers AHKMED; BLASPHEMIA CASUALIS' one and only album of sample-collage grindnoise avant splatter The Ring Of The Nibelungen; some crushing new harsh noise-walls from blackened deathnoise demons BT. HN. and the firearm-toting hatescape of Taint side project MANIA; two new CDs of scorching psychedelic raga-doom-folk Appalachia from CROW TONGUE; Darsombra's awesome new album of deep-void kosmiche drone and proggy Klaus Schulze/Ash Ra/Goblinesque drift; a new concert/art film DVD from the Mr. Bungle-connected prog band Estradasphere; a recently released split CDR featuring our favorite orchestral blackdoom soundtrack project GNAW THEIR TONGUES, sharing a disc with the bizarre bedroom Industrial slowcore and horror synthesizers of SICK TO THE BACK TEETH; and 20 Buck Spin's new full length from HUMANFLY, who deliver some epic Pink Floyd-influenced dirge metal.

Some of the cool new vinyl releases and reissues that we have in: the deluxe gatefold double LP version of COFFINS' Mortuary In Darkness; a super limited LP and 7" set from drum machine grinders AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED classic Honky Reduction that comes with the bonus The Glue That Binds Us 7" released by the small German label R.S.R.; the LP/CD for INDRICOTHERE, a solo project from Colin Marston of BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS that has Colin invoking hypertechnical death metal infused with massive melodic passages that remind me of the Sigur Ros-style parts from Colin's old band INFIDEL?/CASTRO!. Awesome!

Of course, there's MUCH more mutant heavy music to be had folks, so head over to the Crucial Blast NEW ADDITIONS Page to check out all of the new stuff.

FEATURED RELEASE

BIRUSHANAH Akai Yama CD $12.98 Epidemie

If the Birushanah album Touta hadn't been an older title that we just happened to pick up for the first time from the Japanese label run by one of the band's members, it would have been a shoe-in for our Featured Release this week. As soon as I heard that album, this Japanese band immediately became one of my new favorite bands, seemingly custom-made for my lust for demented metal with their bizarre, exotic fusion of traditional Japanese music and planet-crushing industrial avant doom. When it rains it pours, and I just found out that Level Plane just released a brand new album from Birushanah this month titled Akai Yama, and it's even more freaked out and brutally percussive and bizarre as their previous album, a devestating slab of insanely complex polyrhythmic math doom with awesome psychotic vocals and THREE DRUMMERS and contorted angular riffage that will fold your frontal lobe over onto itself. An unchallenged album of the week and one of thee best heavy albums of the year, no doubt!
Hailing from Osaka, Japan, Birushanah started in 2002 and featured members of the Aussie deathsludge band Dad They Broke Me, and would also later have former Corrupted/Tetsuo bassist Shibata in their ranks. When you listen to Birushanah, you can hear the raw matter of their doom/sludge roots, but as the band evolved and brought in metal percussion and Japanese percussion alongside the regular drums and incorporated traditional Japanese scales in their music, the band's sound has become more and more alien sounding. And yeah, I said that Birushanah have three drummers, or percussionists to be more precise; they have one guy playing a regular drumkit, hammering away at pummeling slow motion beats and the occasional blastbeat, while two other guys bash on makeshift metal and traditional Japanese drums in unison with the drummer. This creates an extremely dense and chaotic percussive force on Akai Yama as all three percussionsist bash away at the same time, playing super complex polyrhythms and seriously bizarre time signatures that have an industrial feel due to the metal textures. There are two bassists, both of which play traditional Japanese scales on their instruments, and the atonal scales combined with the dual battery of having two bass guitars thickens up the sound MASSIVELY. This album features three tracks, but the first is a short two minute introduction piece of Gagaku-like Japanese classical ambience. After that, the band lurches into two massive 17-20 minute tracks, totalling over 40 minutes of music. Each track is made up of different passages, moving through long intricate compositions of pounding tribal psychedelic sludge, with yowling vocals and demented male singing, melodic basslines slipping in and out of strange rhythmic grooves, more subdued passages of foly Japanese acoustic music, glimpses of koto (the traditional Japanese stringed instrument) in the crushing mathy sludge metal. Devestatingly heavy and nauseatingly angular heaviosity that honestly sounds like Corrupted fused to Zeni Geva, early Swans, and Japanese classical, as weird and unlikely as that combination sounds. The album artwork is perfect too, capturing the astral strangeness of Birushanah's sound with psychedelic space paintings layered with geodisic structures and swrling abstract shapes. This one is on my list for one of the best metal albums of the year. Highly recommended.

MP3 SAMPLE: " Akai Yami " (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: " kairat " (excerpt)