TITLES: C

CABLE Never Trust A Gemini CD $14.98 This Dark Reign

Heavy duty 2003 album from these long running Connecticut noise goons, effortlessly stitching riff-heavy noise rock, bluesy sludgecore, snarling stoner rock, and flashes of plaintive post-rock together across these eight tracks, every one a smasher, with some of their best riffs ever, possessed by impassioned,razor-gargling vocals. Theres a surprising amount of melody here too, with beautiful epic guitar harmonies and occasional clean vocals, and cool vocal loops and electronic noises and sweet feedback wrangling, but largely this boils down to a menacing mutant classic rock-addled sludge masterpiece that'll crash your cloud, an unexpected fusion of Unsane, Isis, and Eyehategod, swampy but epic, melodic but scuzzed and ugly, psychedelic and noisy and brutally heavy with more fang-baring attitide than you can handle. We miss these cats. Produced by Steve Austin from Today Is The Day.

CABLE Pigs Never Fly CD $13.98 Translation Loss Records

Connecticut’s Cable continue to mature and perfect their particular brand of wiry sludge rock with Pigs Never Fly, their newest (2004) full length. These guys have been slugging it out for over ten years, and have consistently managed to dial in catchy, brutal riffage with previous albums on Hydrahead and This Dark Reign...but this new full length album brings in so much melody and spacey, wah-drenched workouts and monstrous feedback and totally unexpected, awesome elements, it makes this a hugely more epic sounding and soul-crushing affair than previous releases, which were solidly entrenched in post-Am Rep violence. There are still the gigantic swampy grooves and nihilistic vocals/lyrics, though, so fans of the previous albums will be served well, but this is definitely a killer step for the band-the lengthy squalls of haunting feedback, the jittery, BORIS- esque fried-cable drones that close out the epic "I Love It When You Crawl", the AWESOME Lynyrd Skynyrd-meets-Pelican chug of "It’s My Right..." (the ending of this song is incredible, with gorgeous, soraing female vocals and a lone acoustic guitar emerging from the riffage to close out the song) , loads of Eyehategod-on-crack swamp blasts broken up with super-powerful, anthemic, catchy choruses that you’d expect from an Isis or Pelican album..soooo good! It’s like modern space-rock/post-rock / melodic slow-core atmospherics mixed with Southern-fried Am Rep sludge rock/metal. It’s definitely my favorite release so far from Cable, and I can’t wait to see what they come up with after this. Highly recommended.

CABLE Skyhorse Jams CD $12.98 This Dark Reign Records

The missing link between CABLE's early years as noise-rock / hardcore terrorists and their more recent incarnation as whiskey soaked sludgecore crushers. An infectious mix of complete Am Rep-esque, hardcore influenced noise rock with deep heavy doom/southern sludge undertones. The grooving hooks in I've Been Down, the crazed noise of Ride the Jackass Backwards, the aggressive vocals, the really loud low end sound, all of this makes for a killer album.Southern soaked, liquor drenched melodic yet heavy music.

CADAVER EYES The Acquisition Of Power Over Fire / No Time To Haste CD $11.98 Heart & Crossbone (Isreali import)

This is another project from Isreali avant-hesher David Opp, who also plays drums for the brootal blackened bass+drums duo Barbara (whose amazing CD we also carry in the Crucial Blast webstore). Cadaver Eyes is his solo project, and it's a bit different from the black metal-meets-prog-punk vomit of Barbara. Instead, David has rigged his drums with triggers that set off samples of all sorts of ill shit, with David blasting and rolling and summoning up a locust swarm of electronic bzzt and old death metal album samples and bowel-blowing bass blurt. It's a hideous, glitchy, crusty avant-grind splatter holocaust, sort of a bastard fusion of oldschool Earache Records grind and improv sample splat, with lyrics howled in Hebrew and scattered with found sound bits, haunted vacuum drones, traditional Isreali folk music,shortwave static and buzzing noise, hissing cymbal noise,freeform drum retardation, toy music box melodies, and apocalyptic media soundbites. Totally fucked. We're dingging this MIGHTILY, the same way we dig similiar sado-grind noise thugs Burmese, although this is a little less carnivorous, and more straight up stoned. Or imagine powerviolence pioneers Siege and death-screechers Macabre meeting James Plotkin's Phantomsmasher for some hot free jazz action. Cranium cleansing shit, I say. Collects the 2001 No Time To Haste CD-R recorded by Steve Austin of Today Is The Day, and the Acquisition Of Power Over Fire EP from 2004 for a total of 24 tracks.

CAINA Mourner CD $13.98 Profound Lore

Caina is another loner project that has been aligned with the artier, stranger fringes of black metal, and is overseen by atalented British multi-instrumentalist named Andrew Curtis-Brignell. The last Caina album on God Is Myth, Some People Fall, really surprised us when we first heard it last year, a debut that seemed to come out of nowhere yet blew us away with it's mixture of somber, buzzy black metal and abstract, 4AD records style dreampop. So now it's a year later and Curtis-Brignell has returned with Caina's Mourner, his first disc on the increasingly fantastic Profound Lore label, and it's somehow both sublimely beautiful and distinctly more abstract and avant garde than the earlier Caina material. Gorgeously creepy hand drawn artwork and gauzy grey textures cover the discs 4-panel gatefold sleeve, adorned with strange ghost-like faces and bird's skulls entwined with flowering vines. The songs flow together as one extended dream-hallucination, sometimes disjointed and horrific as blasts of heavily distorted low-fi black metal a la Xasthur bleeds across flanger effects spinning wildly out of control, or blossoming into majestic shimmering noise pop or passages of shadowy folk strum and the twang of mouth harp. One of Caina's great strengths is that Curtis-Brignell actually has a great voice, and he's able to paint several shades of gloom and dark, downcast visions by singing in a deep, bassy croon or rending his vocal cords with a demented blackened shriek that sets skin to crawling. Mourner also has some great lyrics, which point to the "unseen creaking world" that Bone Awl explores with their songs, and which feel even creepier and mysterious when their delivered through Caina's beautiful grey shoegaze. Completely amazing music, like Xasthur, Dead Raven Choir, Current 93, Swans, Sigur Ros, Lovecraft's prose, Xiu Xiu, and British avant-folk all swirled together into a surreal otherworldly dream. Highly recommended.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Morgawr" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Hideous Gnosis" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Part 1 - Overture" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Requiem For Shattered Timbers" (excerpt)

CAINA Some People Fall CD God Is Myth
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Over the past few years, there have been some really incredible mutations sprouting out of the cracked floorboards of the deep underground black metal scene that have flirted with, and in some cases fully assimilated into it's own DNA, the gorgeous wall-of-sound bliss of early 90's shoegazer rock and dreamy post-rock. That awesome LURKER OF CHALICE album springs immediately to mind, with it's heavy MBV style melodic wash and creepy post-punk-isms, and AGALLOCH has also formed some truly amazing sounds that bridge the frosty, blackened rasp of black metal with beautiful, hazy shoegaze. LEVIATHAN, WIGRID, and WOLD have all also infused their isolationist black metal with similiarly woozy, smeared melodic textures. I definitely can't enough of this sort of stuff. Enter CAINA from the UK, whose debut album Some People Fall not only looks like an early 90's 4AD Records release with it's high contrast moth artwork, a gothy photo of sole member A., and lots of gloomy downer lyrics, but also weaves some seriously beautiful and epic shoegazey post-rock a la ELUVIUM and MONO into ragged and chaotic eruptions of low-fi outsider black metal. CAINA is a one-dude unit in the vein of USBM outfits DRAUGAR, LEVIATHAN, and XASTHUR, and the black metal passages are extremely frenzied, blurry blasts that remind me a bit of LEVIATHAN and XASTHUR, but with deeper, more death metallish vocals, and some fucked up, wobbly drumming that makes this even more hallucinogenic and dreamlike.
The album opens with the gorgeous instrumental "Some People Fall", which wraps a lone tremelo picked guitar melody in sheets of sad feedback, evoking everything from M83 to ELUVIUM's dreamscapes and the sort of understated buildups that MONO traffic in, dipping in and out of valleys of near-silence as stumbling marching drums ascend from below. Very, very beautiful, the sort of shoegazey post rock that you would expect to hear from Temporary Residence draped in gauzy diistortion. This leads into "The Validity Of Hate Within An Emotional Vacuum", which takes a dark turn into ultra lo-fi black metal territory with layers of trebly, ultradistorted guitar fuzz thrashing out bleary minor key melodies, all very reminiscent of both XASTHUR and STRIBORG, with demented, pissed-off vocals pushed WAY up front over blasting, chaotic drumming. "Black End Tyme Collapse" follows with several minutes of chilly isolationist guitar drones that fade into the sounds of children screaming and singing and distant gunshots, which comes off pretty creepy, before CAINA collapses into the nine minute epic "Satanikulturpessimis", which marries another destroyed outsider black metal assault with really weird offtime blastbeats and stumbling confusional grooves and more awesome fuzzy shoegazer melodies floating over the blackthrash carnage. After several minutes of chaotic, fuzzbombed blasting and demented ranting, the song fades into another passage of MONO-esque post-rock beauty as lonely slide guitars glide through veils of e-bow shaped feedback. The fifth track, "Abraxas Gate", is another foray into slow building post rock, a creeping atmospherinc melody drifting slowly into clouds of distorted guitar noise and far-off metallic tones. "The Mother" appears with a surprising turn into depressing dark pop, reminding me a little of Andrew Eldritch or Martin Gore with his dramatic clean singing, but then explodes again into a wash of noisy, droning BM blur with an extremely catchy downer-pop melody layered over it. "Inside The Outside" features more of A's clean, gothy singing over layers of single note e-bowed guitars, as rolling drums appear alongside another glistening MONO-like build. The closing track, "Goetic Shadow Cabaret", is another dark field of ambient drone, casting it's black shadow briefly before coming to a sudden end. CAINA's alchemical, artsy black metal is out there enough that it will probably turn off fans expecting a more grim, straightforward assault, but fans of post-BM abstraction, damaged black metal weirdness, and heavier, more disruptive shapes of modern post rock should check this out.

CANDY MUSCLE Harvesting The Jesus Trilogy 7" EP $6.98 Wolfman Records

This out of print EP from Humboldt county / northern California drums and guitar duo CANDY MUSCLE delivers a dayglo colored mudslide of pretty, jangly and nicely low-fi / rough around the edges pop-noise and MEGA SLURRED , glacial drip paced MELVINS / early FLOOR style sludge , with cough-syrup inflected dual vocals. Hell yeah! BRUTALLY catchy and heavy and noisy and blasted. Where are these guys now? Someone let us know (seriously!) . This gooey slab is on BLACK WAX and comes in a silkscreen spattered glossy sleeve. Vinyl is MINT, UNPLAYED !! We had this sitting in the darkest corners of the vinyl compund for years!

CAN'T Final Performance CD-R $8.98 RRRecords

Wow, where did she come from? We've been snoozing on Massachusetts artist Jessica Rylan, 'cuz this RRRecords CD-R entitled Last Performance is an awesome blast of noisy human craziness that rocks our broccoli. I guess Can't is over with? We'll have to keep an out out for her other bands, Vampire Can't (Rylan with Vampire Belt's Chris COrsano and Bill Nace) and Dirty Dynamite Gang (with Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core and John Olson from Wolf Eyes). Anyways, what we get from this little CD-R is a brief but skull-blowing set, five tracks for a total running time of fourteen minutes, with Can't rocking out some "home made" analog syntheszier based distorto belch with Jessica's shy/freaked/funny vocals and brontosaur industrial beats going gonzo, performed/recorded at Jessica's parent house. Nice! One of the better homemade electronic spaz documents we've landed on lately.

CAN'T New Secret LP PICTURE DISC $14.98 RRRecords

We won't lie. We've been crushing on CAN'T ever since we were first bewitched by the chirping closet confessionals on the Final Performance CD-R that we listed a month or so ago. Then, we saw Jessica Rylan (a.k.a. CAN'T) open for WHITEHOUSE, WOLF EYES, and PIG DESTROYER, as part of SECRET DIARY, her duo with Donna Parker that spewed arcs of serious amplifier scream and shy utterances that just totally amazed us. So, we've been working on getting our hands on all of the CAN'T stuff that's been released for Crucial Blast, and we ultra stoked to find this brand new, beautiful looking picture disc 12" released on RRRecords. Like some weird melting together of K Records-style, delicate DIY bedroom pop and gnarly analogue synth sputter, New Secret has several tracks that focus on Jessica Rylan's lullaby voice chopped up with modulated feedback oscillations and scrawling sine waves from her small, self-built synths. The result is a beautiful collection of cracked electronics and crumbling circuits haunted by eerie little girl vocals. It also sort of reminds me of hearing one of those eerie, beautiful tunes from The Wicker Man, like "Willow's Song", through a long row of box fans, chopping up the softy sung strains of girlish longing into bits and pieces of wispy folk noise and blowing the fragments out into twilight air. Absoluetly GORGEOUS, highly recommended, probably our favorite recorded work from CAN'T ever. Limited edition of 500. One side of the pic disc is covered in snapshots lifted straight out of Jessica Rylan's scrapbook, cut and paste style...the other side has a nice scrawled watercolor piece.

CAN'T Prepares to Fail Again CD $9.98 IRFP/RRRecords

More warped in-the-moment electronic squelch from Jessica Rylan, a.k.a. CAN"T ! On Prepares To Fail Again, Jessica's homemade analogue synthesizers bubble up from the basement and from out of dusty closets, blurting repetitive minimalist squiggles of distortion and subdued, spartan blasts of contemplative noise that evolve and take new form over the course of the track. Some tracks, like "Reneging on the Promise of a Higher Education", are more brutal events, showcasing a deep bass hum that is slowly distorted and mangled until it becomes a chirping code. Other songs are grounded in more explicit rhythmic noise. This disc is a bit crunchier than the K Recs-meets-gnarl noise of the New Secret pic disc or the modulated mutant pop reworkings of Vs. The World. Great stuff. Packaged in a minimal full color wallet sleeve.

CAN'T Vs The World CD $9.98 RRRecords/IRFP

Another new (well, not really new, originally released in 2002) full disc of lush mangled sweetness from artist/synth torturer Jessica Rylan, which precedes the harrowing bedroom vibes of the Final Performace CD-R we listed a while back. We totally dug that disc, and this one is even radder, a distillation of middle school angst and broken hearts through brutally remixed versions of nostalgiac roller-rink pop trash like "Too Shy", "Songbird", Kenny G jazz slop, and Christopher Cross, all blasted to smithereens by overmodulated distortion, the original hook napalmed by tons of skkrrch and beaten to death by rumbling, earth shuddering bass grooves. The way that these chunks of adolescent chaos have been reformatted as volcanic spew are exactly why we love Jessica Rylan's sounds so much...there's something extremely (sometimes painfullly) personal and thoughtful in her songs and music that connects with us, instead of simply immolating us in noise destruction. That said, these remixes ARE heavy duty, and speakers will be slain at top volume. Packaged in a plastic slipsleeve with color insert/cover and a folded up note of pubescent longing that really drove this one home.

CAPITAL HEMORRHAGE Attempted Abduction CD-R $6.98 Outfall Channel

The opening shot from the Dayton-based Capital Hemorrhage, a guitar/drums duo made up of Ryan Faris & Jonathan Prunty, who are also the driving force behind free/sludge/industrialists ULTRA//VIRES. This project sort of works in a different vibe, but it's just as heavy and destroyed. The band vomits incomprehensible rivers of abrasive free-noise-rock language all over the course of the disc's 24 minute improv assault, obviously entitled "Attempted Abduction". It's a dynamic jam as they move from clattery free-jazz forms and slack string squelch to blasts of spontaneous thrash to massively distorted garage/drone/narco rock raveups and back to burning, amplifier melting drones. Heavy aggro improv along the lines of a sludgier, looser, brattier Flying Luttenbachers or Borbetomagus stripped of brass, gnawing on about 15 years worth of Earache Records vinyl and scrawled manifestos of European Improv. Comes in a cool, minimalist screenprinted white wallet sleeve with insert card.

CAPRICORNS Ruder Forms Survive CD $13.98 Rise Above / Candlelight

The striking cover art of a suicide victim, drawn in stark black ink and subtle shading, drew us in immediately. With a grim, highly detailed look that reminds us of old Rudimentary Peni artwork, the cover depicts the deceased's destroyed head blossoming into a psychedelic vomit spew of toy horses and vines, eyeballs and alien fauna, forming one of the more warped tableaux we've witnessed on an album cover. It's an awesome visual counterpart to the driving metallic instrumentals that make up almost all of Ruder Forms Survive, the debut album from this UK group made up of former members of Dukes Of Nothing, Bridge & Tunnel, Iron Monkey and Orange Goblin. This album serves up a sound that actually stands out from the legions of voiceless metallers that have seemingly crawled out of every corner over the past few years - in Capricorn's churning heavy riffage and prog-inflected power dirges, we're hearing bits and pieces of grimy UK crustmetal, doomy sludge, Pink Floyd's oft-evocative space rock, and even some of Amebix's brooding gloominess, though Capricorns ultimate sound is wholly their own. Sometimes slow and brooding and creepy, or crushingly rocking and propulsive with huge radiant major key chords exploding in the sky, the songs certainly stand out, 'cuz as proggy and intricate as they are capable of getting, the guys in Capricorns consistently focus on the RIFF, and there are so many truly catchy, memorable riffs and songs on here that we've actually listened to this album nonstop since we got 'em in. One of the album's standouts though is "The First Broken Promise". The only song not to feature a cryptic reference to a year in it's title (as with "1977: Blood For Papa", or "1440: Exit Wargasmotron"), "The First Broken Promise" features a guest collaboration with Oxbow's Eugene Robinson for the sole vocal performance on the disc. That track is badass, as Robinson's unmistakeable psychotic wailings fit perfectly with Capricorns tumultuous riffage. Kinda wished we coulda heard more of that teamup! But Capricorns mighty instrumental stoner metal is fine just the way it is, loaded with killer repetitious grooves and intricate, spacey sludge sagas stretching out forever. One of Crucial Blast's top 20 albums to take on a long drive, for real!

MP3 SAMPLE: "The First Broken Promise" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "1946: The Last Renaissance Man" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "1440: Exit Wargasmatron" (excerpt)

CAROLINER Recycled Music Series CASSETTE $4.98 RRRecords

This just came in with the latest batch of Recycled Music Series cassettes from RRRecords - a Recycled tape from the legendary San Francisco avant-industrial-bluegrass collective Caroliner! But what the fuck is this? The first side of the tape gets rolling with a murky, damaged pop song that sounds mutated by tape hiss and delay, but then proceeds into a series of renditions of the old 1940's cowboy song "Cool Water", which'll be immediately recognizeable to anyone that's ever heard this old-school country/western staple before. I recognized the Marty Robbins and Tom Jones versions, and there's countless other musicians on here, one after the other, each contributing to an endless stream of renditions of "Cool Water", over and over and over. There's some vocal/tape delay weirdness that pops up at the end of side two, along with some spoken word stuff that we couldn't place, but it's an afterthought to the eternity of "Cool Water" that precedes it. We gotta think that this is either some kind of conceptual prank, or a Caroliner-sanctioned mix tape of what might be one of their favorite cowboy songs. Or some demented combination of the two. In any event, be warned! I've gotta admit, the song starts to take on a macabre hue after you've listened to it, like, 20 twenty times in a row, but anyone that picks this up looking for original Caroliner music is likely going to be disappointed. Pretty essential to hardcore fans of Caroliner's unique brand of outsider weirdness though!

CARRION The Crime Of Idle Hands CD $9.98 Epicene Sound System

DC area punkprogcore stoners CARRION delivered their swan song here with this awesome 10 song full length that effortlessly melds post-hardcore crunch to Am Rep violent insanity and stonerized riffing. Like BLACK FLAG’s My War genetically fused to DAZZLING KILLMEN and TODAY IS THE DAY, while veering between emotional outbursts akin to Fugazi and atonal doom trudge. Produced by Bruce Falkinburg (THE HIDDEN HAND).

CARRION s/t 7" EP $4.98 Lysergic Soul Drain Records

More Am Rep style noise rock meets stoner sludge punk from these NoVA cats....really heavy, catchy rock that still reminds me of early Today Is The Day with a prominent DC/MD stoner doom vibe and chaotic prog elements. Comparable to a cross between BLACK FLAG and KING CRIMSON - a marriage of frenzied punk damage and headspinning prog-ery.

CARRION Beggar 7" EP $4.98 McCarthyism Records

More catchy, brutal noise/stoner rock from DC, these guys set fires with chaotic, pummeling riffs cribbed from Am Rep's back catalog and dousing the whole mess in acidic rock. Comparable to a cross between BLACK FLAG and KING CRIMSON - a marriage of frenzied punk damage and headspinning prog crunch.

CATALYST, THE Freak Out The Squares CASSETTE $5.98 Robotic Empire

Man, I thought the first CD these guys released, A Hospital Visit, was the shit,a rippin' assault of catchy, rocking, and mildly art-damaged hardcore, with crazy Greg Ginn style guitar parts and terrific ripped vocals. The whole disc felt like it connected SST hardcore and early 90's Sub Pop sludginess, like Black Flag and Karp and Bleach era Nirvana fused together into an unstoppable DIY hardcore wrecking ball. Really rad stuff that I could not get enough of. Amazingly, in the couple of years since they released that CD, The Catalyst have gotten even fiercer and weirder, and recently put out this cassette tape on Robotic Empire that just fuckin' KILLS. All of the gnarly, noisey hardcore heaviosity of their previous stuff is here, even heavier than ever as a matter of fact, but now The Catalyst have seen fit to splatter their songs with TONS of fucked up delay FX and extended psychedelic jams and tweaked riffage, and their tunes are even catchier than before, every song has a fucking crucial hook that'll stick in my head for days after listening to this tape. This tape is highly recommended, a righteous dose of psychedelic hardcore, at times reminding me of Screaming Trees, Jimi Hendrix, Karp, Nirvana, and Black Flag, but never sounding derivitive. Seriously awesome. Just wish they had listed song titles on this! The tape has eight songs, consisting of old songs that have been re-recorded, new demo songs, and one song completely exclusive to this cassette. Limited edition of 200 pro-made tapes, hand numbered.

CATHETER Dimension 303 CD $11.98 Selfmadegod (Poland)

Catheter's 2005 album Dimension 303 is an oddly overlooked entry into the grind field, but is actually one of the better hypergrind albums of the decade. The Denver trio had been kicking it for awhile before they released their debut Preamble For Oblivion, but it's Dimension 303 that saw the band in top form, mixing pulverizing Napalm Death inspired grind, raw crustcore, punishing sludge/doom metal riffage, and strange rhythmic samples. The production here is top notch, and the drumming is fucking astounding, with tons of hyperspeed fills and laser guided blastbeats. Catherter's lyrics tackle alot of the standard grindcore issues, i.e. socio-political issues, apocalyoptic imagery, and getting rowdy at shows, but it's all delivered with lots of high-energy spirit and savagery. Songs like "Waste Time" and the closer "Outro" dish out some supreme Cathedral worshipping doom metal, and some rad sampled breakbeats and industrial rhythms pop up out of left field at a couple points throughout the album. Like Disassociate's Symbols, Signals, And Noise, Catheter's Dimension 303 keeps their grind brutal, catchy and interesting without getting "experimental", and with just a hint of the weirdness of their buds in the West Bay Doomryderz (Deadbodieseverywhere, Utter Bastard, Kalmex). The album features killer acid-trip artwork from John Santos.

CATHODE A Machine That Never Falters LP $6.98 Terrotten Records

VINYL LP VERSION. Awesome 8 song full length of dark, crushing hardcore from Holland that is caught somewhere between the Portland "epic crustcore" sound of Tragedy & From Ashes Rise (but MUCH faster and more pi**ed off) and discordant,apocalyptic bands like Catharsis and Gehennna.There's also a little of that insane german metalcore thing going on here too, a la Acme Systral Morser. From the first blast of nightmarish riffing that rips out of the speakers,to the last shredded scream of defiance, this is dark, ultra-crushing stuff with a fierce anti-authoritarian/anti-consumerist bone to pick.This killer LP comes packaged in a starkly printed minimalist sleeve with insert sheet.

CAUSE FOR EFFECT Professional 300 CD $9.98 Bucho Discos Records (Brazilian import)

Here's the newest injection of ridiculous grindprog from Finland's CAUSE FOR EFFECT, who essentially marry octopoidal drumming and bass prog/jazz/core heaviness and complexity to old school NAPALM DEATH / CARCASS style grindcore! That's right, you get insane , non-distorted bass guitar runs and ultra technical,mathy skronk, blasting intricate drumming, like Ruins and Orthrelm, but with entire pages torn out of the early Napalm Death songbook, including 30 second songs and absurd full-on deathgrunt vocals. Imagine Hella or Lightning Bolt doing a tribute set to grindcore legends REPULSION's Horrified album. Or bass n' drums powerviolence band Godstomper, if they were heavily influenced by Magma and Ruins. It's just as over the top and ridiculous as it sounds, but we've loved this crazy shit ever since we first heard their PQ-2 CD a few years ago. The playing is stop-on-a-dime, super tight, mostly blastbeats and retarded speedy bass runs, but Cause For Effect occasionally drop into a wicked southern rock groove or slow,doomy dirge, or poppy, melodic riff, before taking off at high speed back into their weird, undistorted, austere version of grindcore. Clocks in at around 15 minutes, which is more than enough of this type of stuff. Ruins fans would dig it; Those of you into Behold...The Arctopus and Dysrythmia would appreciate this for the shred factor, although the grunting grindcore vocals might put you off.

CAVE IN Perfect Pitch Black CD $13.98 Hydra Head

A welcome return to heaviness from CAVE IN, which again finds them on the Hydra Head label. This album was recorded while the band was still signed to RCA, before being unceremoniously dropped due to poor album sales. Perfect Pitch Black showcases the band at their best, merging the space-rock inflected post-hardcore and cosmic psych-pop that had colored their last two albums, with the heavier, metallic crunch of the seminal Beyond Hypothermia and Until Your Heart Stops, complete with the return of Caleb Scofield’s guttural roar that had been absent from their last few releases. This might be our favorite album yet from CAVE IN, actually. It’s one of those slow burners whose hooks etches themselves deeper in our mind each time we listen to it. The songwriting on Perfect Pitch Black is so good that it totally erases the simplistic “RADIOHEAD-meets-SLAYER” tag that burdened the band earlier in their career. Songs like “Paranormal” offer soaring melodies that climb for miles, while “Trepanning” kicks in with lethally heavy stoner rock riffing that marks an interesting new direction from the band. The more we listen to this, the more we love it. Highly recommended.

CEASE UPON THE CAPITAL s/t CD $11.98 Impure Muzik (French import)

I'm not the biggest fan of what is generally referred to as "screamo". Most of the stuff that I've heard from this scene seems to lack any real power, and the mainstream aims of alot of the bands that carry that tag is sort of a turnoff for me too. So much of the whole fall-on-the-floor, overwrought, messy, post-Hardcore thing seems like a dissipated shadow of what was cutting edge in San Diego about 15 years ago (i.e., Gravity Records, Heroin, Antioch Arrow, Universal Order of Armageddon, Swing Kids, Mohinder, etc). Every once in a while though, I'll stumble across a band from that scene that really grabs my attention; bands like Gantz and Envy, for instance, whose roots are in the "screamo" sound but integrate the power and atmosphere of instrumental post-rock and epic crustcore, and become something entirely different and inventive in the process. Take Cease Upon The Capital, for instance; these guys unleash a torrent of fast thrashy hardcore and intense, soul-scorching breakdowns with powerful, throat-rending screamed vocals, and clad them in some of the most epic, unstoppably catchy melodies I've ever heard, further flesh out their songs with quieter, intricate interludes informed by the early 90's sounds of bands like Slint and Rodan, layer on all kinds of spacey electronic effects and delayed guitars, blazing riffs and drumming that switches effortlessly between frantic pummel and complex rhythms, and build each of these songs into a massive crescendo of grindy, chaotic, metallic emo-prog-pop. The band calls it "shoegaze-violence n' roll" on their Myspace page, and I'm not going to argue. This is by far one of the catchiest albums I've heard this year, like a perfect combination of art-damaged, psychedelic hardcore, Envy, Neurosis, chaotic metalcore, haunting post-rock, and the catchiest indie/emo pop band ever. I know that sounds like a lot of hype, but this album is so catchy, so fierce, and so freaking amazing, and the guitar playing, those riffs, those hooks....it's just amazing. Definitely in my top 10 for 2006. Where in the fuck did these guys come from?
The package for this album is awesome too; a six-panel digipack with killer abtstract new wavey artwork, and a full color 24-page book enclosed in an interior pocket.

CELEPHAIS I Am Kuranes CD $13.98 Hoss Records

This is the first release from the Atlanta based trio Celephais, who I had never heard before but who piqued my interest when I read a blurb about them somewhere that referenced Metallica, H.P. Lovecraft, and 90's indie rock in the same breath. That comment had me searching for more info on Celephais, and once I checked out some of their stuff online, I totally flipped out over 'em. I Am Kuranes is the band's first release, and it's an impressive debut, and indeed does combine the aforementioned elements into a really rad math-metal assault that I've been listening to nonstop since this came in to C-Blast. First off, fans of H.P. Lovecraft's classic weird horror lit may well recognize the band's name and the album title as a reference to a Lovecraft short story that describes an otherworldly city only accessible through dream-travel, populated by strange entities and architectural visions that are barely comprehensible to the human mind. That story is filled with the richly descriptive prose that makes Lovecraft one of my favorite authors, and it seems that this band were grooving on the story even more, as the arty, crushing math metal of I Am Kuranes feels like Celephais has constructed a sprawling prog-metal soundtrack to a journey through the titular city, the tracks filled with jagged riffs that move at hard angles and pummeling, off-kilter drumming, the songs shifting into subdued dronescapes and collages of skittery electronica and cut-up voices, and bursting into some awesome, guitar-heavy metallic indie rock like "Fingers In Your Mouth" and "Trevor Towers". There are huge riffs layered with acoustic guitar strum and lush cosmic keyboards, equally ominous and anthemic, and it when the full-on rock kicks in, it sounds like Celephais took the heavy, noisy rock and hazy vocals of 90's bands like Chavez and Swervedriver and strapped it to crushing, angular thrash metal riffage and experimental soundscapes. This is a killer disc, proggy and psychedelic and pretty damn heavy but with that awesome '90s indie-guitar hookage that I love so much. Highly recommended. Comes in a striking digipack case.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Dulled, Prosaic" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Tanarian Steep" (excerpt)

CELESTIIAL Desolate North CD $12.98 Bindrune

The one-man primordial deathdoom band CELESTIIAL slooowly drifts through an ethereal woodland terrain that's alive with the sounds of rain and chirping birdsong, forming an ominous atmosphere that is very similiar to SKEPTICISM in it's stately lumbering, but CELESTIIAL is more organic and mystical, more like a cross between those Finnish funeral masters and the fragile druidic doom-folk of Chet Scott's projects (ELEMENTAL CHRYSALIS, RUHR HUNTER, SVART UGLE, etc). Actually, as the album progresses, it loosens it's tethers to the doom form, mainly through the distant hiss of slowly pulsating cymbals and barely discernable drums and the buried drone of the almost non-existant guitar. The dreamy death growls blanketed in reverb are similiarly distant and blurred, while the woodland sounds are at the forefront, the grey haze of rainfall and wildlife sometimes obscuring the beautiful Windham Hill-style New Age string and flute arrangements and heavier passages. That's not to say that CELESTIIAL isn't crushingly heavy, which it is...the heaviness here is a suffocating ambient dread, a witnessing of the impermanent self surrounded by nature. Desolate North contains 8 tracks that work together as a single 45 minute suite, and the album is definitely best absorbed in it's entirety. Highly recommended to followers of the funeral ambient of NORTT, the otherworldly ooze of ESOTERIC and DISEMBOWELMENT, and the Glass Throat family of sylvan drones.

CELTIC FROST Monotheist CD $13.98 Century Media

Few "comeback" albums have been as loaded with expectation as Celtic Frost's Monotheist, which is the first new album from Frost since 1989's Vanity/Nemesis. How were these guys going to follow up their oft-maligned late 80's period, where their flirtations with Goth and pop metal alienated pretty much their entire audience? Well, it's a surprising return to the sort of avant-garde Metal progression that Celtic Frost pioneered with Into The Pandemonium; while obviously not as groundbreaking as that album, Monotheist is still an adventurous, haunting follow-up to Pandemonium, a descent into grim, doomy experimental Metal that incorporates 80's Goth Rock, Industrial, doom-drone, classical, and New Wave elements into their crushingly heavy Death/Black/Thrash assault, with repetitive, dirgey rhythms that make up much of the music hints at a Godflesh influence. But along with all of the awesome experimental flourishes on this album, Frost's trademark crusty, detuned guitars and Tom Fischer's death grunts are totally intact.
The album kicks off with "Progeny"'s avalanche of double-bass thrash destruction, beyond heavy and demonic, brutal guitar tones turning the air to rust, as the song slows to a mournful doom metal crawl, cold electronics surface in the background adding an ashen atmosphere that persists throughout the rest of the disc. This is followed by the inexorable pound of "Ground", a tranced out death sludge mantra with cool vocal layering effects and an undeniable sing-along chorus. The atmospheric "A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh" features a gloomy, hushed spoken-sung lament over textured guitar melodies that erupts into an ominous eruption of molten Doom. "Drown in Ashes" matches beautiful female singing with Fischer's clean vocals that remind me a lot of Peter Murphy of Bauhaus, over what could only be described as a hybrid of gothy post-punk and psychedelic doom metal. "Os Abysmi Vel Daath" starts off with a clanging Metal ambience that could be mistaken for the lead-in to a Jesu song, until a crushing doom metal riff emerges with FIscher's dramatic Bauhaus croon layered with distant operatic female wailing, then disappears into a black void of ambient electronics and crackling guitar distortion before reemerging as a spaced out blast of cavernous thrash. "Obscured" opens with tracers of feedback drone over heavy drumming, then turns into a massively heavy combo of Frostian doom, prog rock-informed guitar passages, and Sisters Of Mercy style apocalyptic gloom rock with a melodic chorus that kills. "Domain of Decay" is another megaheavy Sabbathian sludge feast, with slightly more complex riffing and menacing, strained vocals, with an awesomely deranged guitar solo surfacing towards the end. "Ain Elohim" is a much faster number, with speedy double-bass blasts and awesome thrashy riffs, spliced with bursts of crackling, crumbling amplifier drone and ending in a mangled heap of freeform guitar noise. Monotheist closes out with the three-part "Triptych": "Triptych: Totengott" unleashes distant percussive blasts buried in a fog of droning, blackened synthesizer ambience and sickeningly evil Black Metal screams bathed in distortion, forming a rich psychedelic soundfield of bleak drone; "Triptych: Synagoga Satanae" delivers one of the heaviest freaking riffs on the entire album, a crushing doom-dirge that ends on heavy feedback with creeped out, Teutonic mutterings, before closing out with the frozen, classical strains of "Triptych: Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale)".
I think this is one of the best things Celtic Frost has ever recorded, gloriously weird, progressive, catchy, and U L T R A heavy, totally in the spirit of Frost's experimental Metal spirit of the 1980's but adventurous and totally contemporary, an apocalyptic mix of doom, thrash, goth rock/post punk, drone, classical music, and prog, all filtered through Frost's monstrous heaviness. Highly highly recommended !!!!!

CELTIC FROST Into The Pandemonium CD $14.98 Noise

An indisputable avant-thrash classic, Celtic Frost's 1987 album Into The Pandemonium followed up To Mega Therion with a surreal, unpredictable album that blew minds when it came out. Who would have guessed that these guys would have followed the classic death metal of their debut with an album that would combine unlikely covers, industrial-laced breakbeats, gothy thrash jams with backing female R&B vocals, and orchestral strings and sultry female French singing? The band had the sheer audacity to open the album with a cover, Wall Of Voodoo's new wave hit "Mexican Radio", but somehow it works, as do all of the other weird elements that Celtic Frost brandishes on Into The Pandemonium. Tom G. Warrior also unveils his newly-found singing style, a gothy, weepy croon which he alternates with his more aggressive death grunts. "Mesmerized" uses his singing to great effect as it weaves a sorrowful love song; "Rex Irae (Requiem)" brings together brutal thrash metal riffage, operatic backing vocals, eerie orchestral strings, and french horns. And then there is "One In Their Pride", the one track on Into The Pandemonium that seems to get a lot of metalheads in a huff - probably doesn't help that it appears on this reissue in two different versions. A heavy, drum-machine bangin' dub/industrial breakbeat mix, "One In Their Pride" seems so strange appearing halfway through the album, but when you look at the whole picture and see how it fits in Frost's surrealistic vision of 80's apocalypse, it makes total sense. "I Won't Dance" is one of my favorite Celtic Frost jams ever, a mid-paced thrasher with those aforementioned backing R&B vocals that ends up sounding like a crushing metallic version of Sisters of Mercy. In between all of the weirdness, there are some straightforward rippers; "Inner Sanctum" and "Babylon Fell" both bring the To Mega Therion style deathcrush in top form.
This crucial re-issue is remastered and comes with all of the original artwork, lyrics, never-before-published photos, track notes, and most impressively, four unreleased tracks: "In The Chapel, In The Moonlight", "The Inevitable Factor", and "The Inevitable Factor (Alternate Vox)".

MP3 SAMPLE: "Mexican Radio" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Inner Sanctum" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "I Won't Dance (The Elder's Orient)" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Tristesses De La Lune" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "One In Their Pride (Porthole Remix)" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Rex Irae (Requiem)" (excerpt)

CELTIC FROST Parched With Thirst Am I And Dying CD $14.98 Noise

When Celtic Frost finally disbanded for the (then) final time in 1992, they encapsulated their troubled history with a bold collection of B-sides, rarities, remixed album tracks, demos, and other odds and ends that spanned across the band's classic early albums and through to their infamous Cold Lake and the follow-up Vanity/Nemesis. Parched With Thirst Am I And Dying is a crucial compilation for diehard CeltiC Frost fans for a number of reasons: first off, it's got an assload of jams you are not going to find anywhere else; second, this collection is a superb cross-section of the band's catalog and song reworkings that perfectly demonstrates the unbridled weirdness, experimental spirit, and sheer heaviness of Celtic Frost. Ultimately for me, it's the presence of several songs off of Frost's reviled Cold Lake that make this disc fucking indispensible to me: a heavier re-recording of "Juice Like Wine" and "Downtown Hanoi", and the radio edit for "Cherry Orchards". Now, I'm going to share an unpopular view here and say that I actually like Cold Lake. Like, really, really like Cold Lake. The songs are fucking catchy, and the album has this terminally weird glam-thrash vibe that I think rules. I'm pretty certain that my stating that is going to earn me a lethal kick in the bag at some point down the road, but I had to get that off my chest. I'm convinced that years from now, metal historians are going to look back on Cold Lake and finally give that album the credit it's due.
Anyways, Parched with Thirst Am I and Dying....this comp is crucial, with mostly-informative liner notes giving the source for most of the tracks, and this is a wealth of deep cuts from the Frost, with some stunning moments of deaththrash weirdness that blow my mind. Alot of the stuff is from the sessions for To Mega Therion and Into the Pandemonium, but then you have the cover of Dean Martin's "In The Chapel In The Moonlight", the infectious, brilliant thrash metal/death pop of the Sisters Of Mercy-ish "I Won't Dance", the haunting orchestral dream of "Tristesses De La Lune", and their cover of "Mexican Radio". Highly recommended.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Tristesses De La Lune" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Juices Like Wine" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Wings Of Solitude" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Cherry Orchards" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "A Descent To Babylon (Babylon Asleep)" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Under Apollyon's Sun" (excerpt)

CELTIC FROST To Mega Therion CD $14.98 Noise

This re-issue of the classic 1985 album from Celtic Frost has been out for awhile, but I figured we'd make this available here at C-Blast for any newcomers to the band's genre-defying, frequenty experimental heavy metal that still holds up as some of the heaviest tuneage ever. As far as I'm concerned, it is. To Mega Therion was the Swiss band's second album, and it marked an important turn in their career that found the Frost implementing a wider range of sounds and influences into their primal blackened thrash attack. Housed within some spectacular original artwork from H.R. Giger, To Mega... starts off with the sinister Wagner-esque bombast of "Innocence and Wrath", a brief orchestral doom-dirge of pounding kettle drums and french horns and grinding distorted guitars, and then the band kicks in with "The Ursurper", total classic Frost, catchy as fuck riffage that moves adeptly from skull cracking sludginess to up tempo death thrash, complete with singer/guitarist TOm G. Warrior's classic "ugh" death grunts! Classic songs like "Dawn of Meggido" and "Necromantical Screams" designed the template for the black metal movement that would rise up a few years after this album was released, and the brutal halftime chug of "Jewel Throne" plants the seeds of pretty much the entire NYC deathcore movement of the early 90's. Obviously, this is essential, classic stuff, highly influential when it came out, and the experimental spirit behind Celtic Frost makes this album and Into The Pandemonium utterly prescient and as powerful and crushing and weird today as they were twenty years ago. Nobody in death/thrash metal was doing the fucked up things that Celtic Frost were doing during this era of metal - just check out the wacked out female vocal accompaniment on "The Ursurper", the orchestral horns on "Necromantic Screams", the black industrial-ambience of "Tears In A Prophets Dream"...this shit was crucial when it came out, and did much to bend the minds of hordes of hypercreative young metal freaks like myself. It was with their followup Into The Pandemonium that Celtic Frost really blasted out into the outer fringes of metal, but this album is just as crucial a marker in their long and strange career, if for no other reason than it rocks a nonstop feast of apocalyptic megaheavy riffage unequalled in the annals of 80's metal. This re-issue from Noise Records contains a bonus track entitled "Return to the Eve (1985 Studio Jam)" that appears here for the first time, and comes in a cool package that includes a 16-page booklet with the original artwork, photos from the era, lyrics, and track notes. Essential.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Circle Of The Tyrants" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Dawn Of Meggido" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Necromantical Screams" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "The Usurper" (excerpt)

CENTRIFUGE Desolate CD $11.98 Paradise Noise (France)

Issued by the French label Paradise Noise, Desolate is a new album from a little-known power trio from Ohio called Centrifuge that have been creating a dark and hypnotic brand of trippy space-doom for a couple of years now, actually they've been around since 1995, quietly releasing demos and playing around their home town, keeping a low profile in the underground metal scene. I hadn't heard of 'em till I read an interview on Hellride that piqued my interest, and further investigation into 'em revealed a new album that just came out earlier in summer '07. This disc has five songs, and they get pretty long as the band has a tendency to jam out on extended minimalist riffs and stretched out psychedelic solos. Centrifuge are pretty crushing though, stripping their songs down to a spartan selection of heavy, pummeling riffs and machinelike drumming that gives the music an almost Godflesh industrial-metal vibe at times, although the music is more a combination of Sabbath/Vitus/Obsessed style doom metal with cool Ozzy-esque vocals reduced to an icy chant, lots of percussive riff hammering reminiscent of both Helmet and Fudge Tunnel, and even a little whiff of Paradise Lost/My Dying Bride's deathdoom. The tunes get really epic when the guitarist starts to wail on those meandering, ethereal space rock solos that just kind of wander off into the darkness, all the while the rhythm section is just fuckin' hammering it out. I've been really digging this disc, it has an early/mid 90's feel where there was some great, underrated rock coming out from the nether region between indie, doom rock, and metal.

CEPHALIC CARNAGE Conforming To Abnormality CD
Subordinate Records (Italian import)
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Originally released in 1998 on Italian grindcore label Headfucker Records (!) and out of print for several years, this is the dizzying debut full length from Colorado hydro-grinders CEPHALIC CARNAGE, remastered and re-issued courtesy of the fie folks at Subordinate. Even on their first album, CEPHALIC CARNAGE were aeons ahead of the grindcore scene, combining ultra-lethal blastbeat action and chainsaw riffage with bizarre jazz breakdowns and electronic noise that comes from out of nowhere. The guitar playing and song structures brandish skull-melting technicality, yet the band manages to invest killer hooks and catchy riffs in all of these songs. The drumming is positively octopoid, it takes multiple listens to Conforming To Abnormality to follow everything the drummer is doing. Lenzig’s multi-faceted vocals range from inhuman death metal bellows to insane monkey shrieks. And sub-bass drops! And fucked-up electronic breakbeats! Conforming To Abnormality was (rightfully) quite critically acclaimed upon it’s release, and it’s good to have this seminal blast of 1990’s experimental grind available again. In addition, this new version also includes the CEPHALIC CARNAGE songs from their out-of-print split 7” with IMPALED. Absolutely essential for fans of hyperblasting, dopesmoking, fucked-up hydro math grind !!

CHAPSTIK Barnburner CD $11.98 Unfortunate Miracle

I checked these guys out online on a whim, and really dug the tunes I heard - ended up picking up this full-length for C-Blast, and dug it even more. This five-piece from Detroit bust out 10 songs of amped-up, stonerized boogie metal and goofy wordplay on Barnburner, which lays on the noise, distortion, and crud nice n' thick. I hear a little Melvins in there, as well as the metallic riff-rawk of bands like Speedealer and Zeke, equal parts fast paced destructo rock and sludgy dirtbag metal. Then halfway through, they start tripping out on an 8-minute slow burner called "Slow OJ" that starts out as a shimmering cloud of dusty instrumental desert rock and then morphs into a monstrous, slooow sludge attack. Which is fucking killer. The last track "Black Opium Fermata" is another skullcrusher, a spacey psychedelic devolution into extended blackended doomsludge that stretches out forever. "Retrocution" erupts into a minute and a half of blazing speedmetal/boogie-blues churn. Other songs toss in Hammond organs, loungey jazz parts, and 80's ass-rock hooks of the highest order. The whole thing smacks of a deepfried Mudhoney/Melvins mashup, goofy, weird and rocking as fuck.

CHERRY POINT, THE Black Witchery CD $8.98 Troniks

Another fkkn awesome re-issue disc from The Cherry Point, this one revives and remasters three sick jams dedicated to the Black Arts that has originally appeared as a trilogy of limited edition 3" CD-Rs back in 2004. "Virgin Witch" (originally released as a 3" cdr on Chondritic Sound), "Devil's Witch" (originally released as a 3" cdr on Audiobot), and "Season of the Witch" (originally released as a 3" cdr on Fargone) are all recaptured here, and we're talkin' full on satanic power feedback blastage informed by another round of crucial occult cinema...Phil lays down the influences: "...a black mass ritual for fans of Evilspeak, The Gate, Satan's Black Wedding, Ghoulies 2 (the one set at a carnival), The Tempter, Paura Nella Città dei Morti Viventi, The Legend of Hell House, and John Cassavetes in Incubus (1982) + Rosemary's Baby (1968)." Hell yes. The disc opens with "Virgin Witch" and sucks you into it's howling maw with heavy, HEAVY rumbling distortion and insectile feedback crashing in waves over what could be a massively, monstrously distorted riff blown out beyond all recognition. It's an awesome assault of swarming menace, with distorted incomprehensible vocals screaming over waves of skuzz and glimmers of melody. "Devil's Witch" is a little more subdued, whipping up horrific feedback drones and deformed psychedelic presence. "Season..." closes this out with a show-stopping ocean of hallucinogenic vocal float, roaring pyres of crumbling distortion, and endless waves of frightening goat drones. Awesome. All of the tracks hover at around 20 minutes in length, making for some marathon skull abuse action.

CHERRY POINT, THE Night Of The Bloody Tapes CD $9.98 Troniks

Hyper-dense deformed distortion storms, wrapped up in classic splatter flick worship? Count me in. According to Phil Blankenship, the man behind esteemed imprint Troniks/PACrec and The Cherry Point, this disc features material "Compiled from three years of cassette releases, Night of the Bloody Tapes provides a shattering drive-in experience of unrelenting horror and harsh noise nightmares. Equally fueled by Fangoria magazine, import laserdiscs, third generation vhs bootlegs, damaged contact mics & DOD death metal distortion, The Cherry Point has set the ultimate bait in the trap of terror." Us being enormous fans of this particular cinematic and cultural canon, and seeing how Night Of The Bloody Tapes houses a nonstop barrage of some of the juiciest ultranoise we've been crushed by since the last album from The Rita, we can't get enough of this stuff. This lengthy disc has four tracks over 40 minutes, compiled from the long deleted split cassettes with Ahlzagailzehguh, Black Sand Desert, Luasa Raelon, Nkondi, Andy Ortmann, Pedestrian Deposit, The Rita, and more. Heavy walls of swirling distortion pedal cutup overload that almost drown out far off melodies and shrieking buried feedback and ominous foghorns. Leave this on for more than five minutes, and the massed roar of The Cherry Point will blank your mind. Killer static powerdrone and terminal feedback loops blast you at top volume, similiar in spirit to The Rita and Whitehouse, all served up as potent splatter/exploitation worship. Phil recommends the classics: "ESSENTIAL VIEWING: Shriek of the Mutilated, Raw Meat, Night of the Demon, Girls Nite Out, House on Sorority Row, Just Before Dawn, The Burning, Shock Waves, Mardi Gras Massacre, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Criminally Insane, Creature From Black Lake, The Deadly Spawn, Shredder and films by William Lustig and Larry Cohen." Mixed & mastered by John Wiese (Bastard Noise / Sissy Spacek). Crucial.

CIBO Ignorante CD $11.98 Zas Records (Italy)

Somehow, I've completely forgotten how I initially got turned on to this Italian band, but we just received their latest full length album Ignorante here at C-Blast, and man is it a ripper. One of the reasons that I'm stumped as to how I ordered these for the Crucial Blast store is that there is virtually zero information on this band anywhere online, and this album was also released by something like 19 different labels (much like the older Monarch! releases), making the job of tracking down details on this band a nearly impossible task. I can tell you that Cibo are from Torino, Italy and Ignorante is the band's second album, it's filled with bizarre imagery and even stranger lyrics that make absolutely no sense to me, and that these goofballs tear through some of the nuttiest genre-fucking hardcore this side of Le Scrawl. While the 12 songs on this disc are mostly constructed from a combination of raging, hyperfast Italian hardcore and brutal grindcore, Cibo work in all kinds of weirdness like surf guitar breaks, dance music, and lounge jazz interludes over speedy thrash, melodic punk verses mutating into ridiculous death metal blasts and jangly indie rock parts, and lots of detours into heavy rhythmic riff rock. Incredible stop-on-a-dime tempo changes and stylistic shifts are executed every coupla seconds, yet despite all of the zany time changes and genre pilfering, all of the songs on Ignorante are really catchy. That goes double for the final 10-minute song "Tonni Sgombri E Sirene", which starts off as some kind of math rock/crustcore hybrid, turns into a strange industrial field recording, and then ends up as a weird casio-n-drum machine pop song with harmonized modulated voices singing "We hope you like Cibo" over and over for several minutes. These weirdos have managed to straddle freaky style splicing, psychedelic shredmanship, and punishing thrashcore in a manner that makes me think of a fucked up fusion of Cripple Bastards, Le Scrawl, ZZ Top, and Queens Of The Stone Age, but this is way catchier than most album's that take a similiar Le Scrawl/Naked City approach. Very rad.

CHILD ABUSE / MIRACLE OF BIRTH split CD $10.98 Lovepump United

A killer new split disc from our buds at Lovepump United, showcasing two brave new forces in the field of mindmelting electro heaviosity and robotic prog. Miracle Birth, a.k.a Jade Larsen of Spaceboy and Nausea Quartet, opens this disc with two rollicking sci-fi prog freakout jams, "Thirst For Hunger" and "Damn You All I Told You So". Quirky, futuristic prog delivered in a spaced-out jumble of buzzing synthesizers, sequencers, and electronic instruments, and the result is something akin to to a mutant hybrid of Zombi, Chromolodeon's 8-bit game soundtrack worship, and Ruins prog wipeout, with super weird detours like the psychedelic marimbas that suddenly appear towards the end of the first song. Both of these jams are really freaking great, highlighted by Miracle Of Birth's unique use of overmodulated vintage synth sounds, and I can't wait to hear more from this project. Child Abuse follows, with four songs of weird synth/deathmetal/prog with stuttering beats and demonic vocals that are leagues beyond the demo stuff I first heard from these guys about a year ago. This stuff is fkkn gone, a bombastic n' heavy but 100% fun noise-metal/grind assault filtered down through a stack of casio keyboards and tinny robot melodies, a confounding fusion of The Locust and The Flying Luttenbachers and old school John Carpenter synths and an esoteric 70's prog rock outfit on a sugar high.

CHRISTPUNCHER Haunted Hymns, Buried Treasures CD $5.98 Conformist Records

9 song debut from Christpuncher, a sludgy old school thrash/death metal outfit from Maryland that is as obsessed with classic splatter and horror filmography as fellow classic death metallers DECEASED, while incorporating more hardcore and CELTIC FROST /HELLHAMMER influences. Fast, crushing and and chock full of bulldozing mosh riffs, CHRISTPUNCHER are dead serious about the metal, while handling their horror movie infatuation fairly tongue-in-cheek. Pummeling stuff.

CHROMELODEON Heart Of Sawdust CD $12.98 Bloodlink

Oh man...we love instrumental rock. And we love Nintendo-style video game music. When bands combine the two, we're like giddy schoolgirls. Which is a good description for how we felt when we first threw this full length CD from CHROMELODEON on for the first time. Wow. Six kids playing incredibly epic and sky-sweeping indie/post rock fused to Japanese video game theme songs, played to perfection, technical and massive and so epic. Metallic guitars, two keyboardists, bass and drums, and layers and layers and layers of 8-bit synth sounds and melodies circling over and over again, just like they do when you've been sitting in front of the tube for hours playing Nintendo, beaming soaring complex anthems into ypur cortex, all triumphant loop melodies and huge stadium hooks delivered via old school 8-bit circuitry. It's like Zombi doing Sega Genesis game themes. Or a Konami game scored by The Fucking Champs mixed with some spaced-out instrumental post-rock band meets some weird proggy hypno-rock, like Circle and Goblin fused together! So freaking killer. If you're into Nintendo game-music rock stuff like Temp Sound Solutions, The Advantage, Minibosses, etc., this is a MUST GET. But we also think that fans of heavy cosmic soundtrack prog like Zombi annd Goblin, as well as more bombastic strains of post-rock will FLIP over this. Why arent these guys huge??? Packaged in a nice gatefold sleeve. Seriously recommended.

CHURCH OF MISERY / DEER CREEK split LP $11.98 Game Two

It seems that Game Two only comes out with a new release about once a year or so, but when they do, it's always a crushing dose of sludgy doom metal goodness. This vinyl-only release joins those serial killer obsessed psychedelic doomlords Church Of Misery with the warped sludgecore of Denver's Deer Creek for an excellent split. Church Of Misery belt out one of their greatest songs ever, a side-long, 17 minute jam called "The Golden Dawn" that begins with the band dialing in a recording of a Aleister Crowley speech and then jamming a killer bluesy Sabbathian riff over it for the entire duration of the song, accompanied by extended acid guitar freakout, layers of droning feedback and trippy electronic echo effects, and burly effects-warped vocals. A macabre psych-sludgecore epic, and one the most sinister, spaced-out jams ever from these guys. Imagine an Acid Mothers Temple/Warhorse collab and you'll have an idea. Is this the first song of theirs that's not explicitly about a serial killer?
Denver's Deer Creek has the other side, and features Game Two label boss and Iron Kind member Conan Hultgren on guitar and vocals. Where COM's side is unbridled lysergic heaviness, Deer Creek unleash three tracks of bleak, dirty-sounding sludgecore with more of a bleak Hardcore vibe; the guitar has a weird, gnarly tone, Conan's vocals are strange combination of crusty, torn-throat growls and Pentagram-esque singing, and the songs often burst into fast paced, crusty pummel that makes me think of Buzzoven, or a more hardcore Eyehategod, mixed with elements of old school doom metal. “The Gateway Was Broken” and “Lightening Rod” are two original tracks that have some surprisingly catchy moments, and the ultraskuzzy "Something So Heavy" is weird, catchy combination of Nirvana's "Something In The Way" and The Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)", mutated into a bruising 5mph ooze of glacial sludgecrust. Awesome!
In a limited edition of 1,000 copies on thick vinyl, with cool original artwork by Paul Vismara.

CIRCLE Andexelt CD $13.98 Tumult

Finally back in stock after being out of print for several years, the Tumult edition of Circle's 1999 masterpiece Andexelt captures one of the band's most intoxicating albums with the addition of a bonus track that makes this a crucial addition to any Circle fans collection. By now Circle has racked up an impressive following here in the US, both though cloaking their band in a healthy amount of mystery and mysticism, and by delivering album after album of ever-evolving hypno rock mastery that constantly takes on new shapes and guises while remaining true to their core sound, that of the repetitious riff twisted into circular shapes and played to infinity. But for me at least, it was Andexelt that first introduced me to the band's sound, and I remember being completely captivated by their music the first time I heard it. Heavy and hypnotic, totally mesmerizing and unquestionably rockin', Andexelt's nine tracks took simple, catchy riffs, ghostly flutes and thick vintage synthesizers and wrapped 'em around an array of clockwork staccato drum patterns. Bits of gorgeous underwater dub, deep-space lounge jazz, heavy metal chuggery, and post-rock mesh together, as Circle's modernized krautrock fuses with vaguely Zeuhl/Magma-esque prog. Imagine a heavier, weirder Neu! or Can with huge drumming, or maybe a more stripped-down Loop with bursts of angular metallic riffing, and cosmic ambience. Simply amazing. This is the album that turned me into a ravenous Circle fan, and I can't think of a better place for someone to start if they haven't heard Circle yet. The bonus track "Friitalan Nahka" is no mere add-on either; not appearing on the original Finnish release, this is a sprawling 18 minute drone freakout, the first half filled with growling electronics and soaring space synths streaking across the night sky, the second half blasting into a throbbing kosmiche kraut-metal trance straight from the heavens. Highly recommended.

CIRCLE Earthworm CD $9.98 No Quarter

Ever heard of Jesters Of Destiny? They were a quirky, psychedelic-tinged metal/pop/punk band from Los Angeles back in the mid-1980's that released a couple of obscure records on Restless. Well, Jussi from Circle is a big fan; not only did he re-issue their Fun At The Funeral on his Ektro label, Jussi and Circle also enlisted Jesters Of Destiny singer Bruce Duff to perform with them on this EP! Released earlier this year to coincide with the band's March 2006 US tour, this 20 minute EP features four new tracks (one an instrumental) from our favorite Finnish hypno-rockers; taking the place of the weird hymnal chants sung in the made-up Meronian language that we are normally used to hearing from Circle, are Duff's unique, glammy vocals and lyrics written in English. And the tunes are a mix of Circle in both their heavier, hypno-metal and cosmic prog rock modes, further integrating their love of late 70's/early 80's metal with the "circular" kraut-influenced psych that has become their trademark. "Earthworm" is a fast-paced blast of heavy, trance inducing NWOBHM riffage over a propulsive kraut-crash rhythm and killer psychedelic keyboards; and “Connection” is more upbeat as well, but more dreamy and psychedelic with spaced-out singing, straight up pop hooks, and strange vocal effects. The third song, "Taking It Back", has Duff whispering his lines over a mellower krautrock jam reminiscent of Can, a killer combo of minimalistic riffing, rich Rhodes textures, and spacey vocal choirs. And the instrumental "Coda" closes the EP with more wicked Rhodes action. Another fantastic dose from the Circle guys, alternating between trippy headbanging, minimalism and evocative krautrock. Features original artwork by Paul Romano.

CIRCLE Forest CD $13.98 No Quarter

Forest is Circle at their mellowest, and while I tend to favor the Finnish hypno-rockers more metallic and rocking albums, this weird trip into psychedelic forest jams and alien hippie percussion jams is actually pretty rad. It's Circle shifting gears from their "New Wave of Finnish Heavy Metal" to a weird sort of proggy trance-folk. Four tracks, 45 minutes, opening with the throbbing tribal trance jam of "Havuporti", rainsticks and animal bones shaking hypnotically in a percussive jam that is gradually joined by soaring analogue synths and weird chanting vocals, like Rick Wakeman suddenly finding himself jamming alongside satanic forest shaman. Then comes "Luikertelevat", a sinister hypno blues number with a wicked guitar lick repeated ad nauseam, eerie Goblin style synths, cookie monster growls, culminating in a brain erasing synth meltdown that makes me think of the Escape From New York soundtrack. "Ydinaukio" returns even more to the blues, and it's here that it finally dawns on me that Circle singer Mika Ratto is actually singing in English, rather than Finnish or the made-up language that he's used on so many previous Circle albums. We finally come to "Jaljet", Forest's 18 minute closer that begins with four minutes of near silence before the drum circle, synths, and acoustic guitars kick in, and we're immersed in a longform repeato ritual that becomes something akin to Sunburned Hand Of The Man colliding with that twisted version of 70's prog rock on bad drugs that surfaces all throughout the album. Yeah, this album is great, mixing together Goblin and Amon Duul and creepy woodland drones and sinister blues licks into a total glaze.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Havuportti" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Luikertelevat lahoavat" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Ydinaukio" (excerpt)

CIRCLE Katapult CD $14.98 No Quarter

It's a new Circle album, with the letters NWOFHM, the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" banner right there underneath the disc tray, so I was excitedly anticipating another foray into the band's heavier metallic mode with Katapult. And this new disc definitely delivers, although as we've come to expect from Circle's 16-year career, the band is constantly evolving and mutating with each new album, so while their is definitely a "metal" element to Katapult, it's a bit unlike their previous heavy releases like Sunrise, Andexelt, or Tulikoira, where Circle interpreted the classic heavy metal riffage that they are big fans of through their unique, circular neo-krautrock. The huge rhythmic loop-grooves and driving riffs are there, as well as their wonky space rock effects and keyboards, and some of the metallic riffs are heavier than anything I've heard from 'em before...the label's press release mentions Venom and Celtic Frost as a reference point for where Circle's heads were at when they created this album, and some of the dark thrash riffing on songs like the opening "Saturnus Reality" and the chugging "Understanding New Age" have a raw crunch that definitely reminds me a little of Celtic Frost, but then the riffs are buried in a flurry of throbbing krautrock rhythms and awesome, soaring Tangerine Dream keyboards that timewarp right out of the 80's. And I'm not sure if it's Mika Ratto or Jussi Lethisalo, but one of these guys has adopted a deep, sinister croon for Katapult that sounds like freakin' Andrew Eldritch from Sisters Of Mercy! "Torpedo Star Throne" weaves more spidery thrash metal riffing around a dense tangle of jazzy ricocheting snare drums and synthesizer loops. When "Black Black Never Never Land" starts, you'd almost expect Circle to kick in with a lush 80's metal pop anthem, but instead it turns into an eerie techno-shamanic dopetrance like something offa their Forest album performed on antique electronic instruments. The last song "Snow Olympics" delivers one of their most triumphant riffs ever over trippy cosmic ambience. Utterly awesome psychedelic hypno metal/rock, reaching even further out into the void than ever before but somehow coming back with some of their catchiest, most breathtaking jams to date. And hearing this in advance of their upcoming September '07 East Coast tour has me in a state of fevered fuckin' anticipation. Highly recommended, and hands down the featured release for this week. Vinylphiles should also take note that we've got Katapult on vinyl too, a limited edition LP pressing that looks and sounds amazing. Oh yeah, and the album features some rad artwork from Paul Romano, too.

CIRCLE Katapult LP $16.98 No Quarter

It's a new Circle album, with the letters NWOFHM, the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" banner right there underneath the disc tray, so I was excitedly anticipating another foray into the band's heavier metallic mode with Katapult. And this new disc definitely delivers, although as we've come to expect from Circle's 16-year career, the band is constantly evolving and mutating with each new album, so while their is definitely a "metal" element to Katapult, it's a bit unlike their previous heavy releases like Sunrise, Andexelt, or Tulikoira, where Circle interpreted the classic heavy metal riffage that they are big fans of through their unique, circular neo-krautrock. The huge rhythmic loop-grooves and driving riffs are there, as well as their wonky space rock effects and keyboards, and some of the metallic riffs are heavier than anything I've heard from 'em before...the label's press release mentions Venom and Celtic Frost as a reference point for where Circle's heads were at when they created this album, and some of the dark thrash riffing on songs like the opening "Saturnus Reality" and the chugging "Understanding New Age" have a raw crunch that definitely reminds me a little of Celtic Frost, but then the riffs are buried in a flurry of throbbing krautrock rhythms and awesome, soaring Tangerine Dream keyboards that timewarp right out of the 80's. And I'm not sure if it's Mika Ratto or Jussi Lethisalo, but one of these guys has adopted a deep, sinister croon for Katapult that sounds like freakin' Andrew Eldritch from Sisters Of Mercy! "Torpedo Star Throne" weaves more spidery thrash metal riffing around a dense tangle of jazzy ricocheting snare drums and synthesizer loops. When "Black Black Never Never Land" starts, you'd almost expect Circle to kick in with a lush 80's metal pop anthem, but instead it turns into an eerie techno-shamanic dopetrance like something offa their Forest album performed on antique electronic instruments. The last song "Snow Olympics" delivers one of their most triumphant riffs ever over trippy cosmic ambience. Utterly awesome psychedelic hypno metal/rock, reaching even further out into the void than ever before but somehow coming back with some of their catchiest, most breathtaking jams to date. And hearing this in advance of their upcoming September '07 East Coast tour has me in a state of fevered fuckin' anticipation. Highly recommended, and hands down the featured release for this week. Vinylphiles should also take note that we've got Katapult on vinyl too, a limited edition LP pressing that looks and sounds amazing. Oh yeah, and the album features some rad artwork from Paul Romano, too.

CIRCLE Tulikoira CD $14.98 Ektro Records (Finland)

You never know what to expect from these Finnish avant-rockers, as each new album moves from kraut rock inspired hypnosis to strange jazz to deformed forest folk...but Circle's Tulikoira features the band in rippin' "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" mode, the NWOFHM logo splashed across the inside of the booklet just in case there is any confusion. Everything that Circle puts out is amazing, but I gotta say that my favorite stuff from them is their mutant, kraut-rock influenced take on classic heavy metal action. The four tracks on Tulikoira take that kraut rock approach and applies it to fast paced heavy metal that's obviously inspired by Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Saxon, and other early Brit metal legends, similiar to their awesome 2002 album Sunrise; killer riffs are locked into repeato mode, equal parts Can and Maiden, Neu! and Priest. The album opens with the seven-minute "Rautakaarme", which begins with dark glistening ambience, metallic chimes and stray piano notes, as distant chanting vocals and surges of feedback appear and suddenly give way to a raging, speedy heavy metal assault that is accompanied by awesome, haunting sympho-synthesizers and those weird monk chants, breaking apart into passages of creepy drones before kicking back in with the metal. Super mesmerizing and ferocious! "Tulilintu" is the second song, and it starts immediately in metal mode, an awesome combo of Judas Priest style rockin' and Finnish singing, a headbanging rager filled with awesome Halford style screams, weird electronic effects and killer guitar solos. The third track "Berserk" is more atmospheric, with weird spoken lines appearing over a repetitive bass and drums groove, part 70's funk soundtrack and dark droning ambience. Finally, the album's closing track kicks in, a 25 minute epic called "Puutiikeri" that starts off with a chunky metal riff but then wanders through a weird, spacey mix of lush, soaring synthesizers, chanted vocals, fractured techno rhythms, pulsing motorik drumming and exploratory acid-rock leads, splattery improv clatter, cosmic electronic whoosh, and hushed whispers. That track is easily the album's centerpiece, serving up everything we love about these FInnish rockers in a dreamlike stew of hypno-psych weirdness, the connecting thread between their Sunrise album and the creepout forest trance of Circle's Forest.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Rautakaarme" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Berserk" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Tulilintu" (excerpt)

CIRCLE OF DEAD CHILDREN Exotic Sense Decay CD $9.98 Willowtip

Finally got this in stock, the surreal, atmospheric deathgrind feverdream Exotic Sense Decay from Pittsburgh's Circle Of Dead Children. This 7-song EP also came out as a picture disc 7" on Robodog, but that's long out of print. In possession of one of the greatest band names ever, Circle Of Dead Children followed up their debut album Starving The Vultures with this feverish blast of arty deathgrind that incoporates bits and pieces of black metal, crustcore, powerviolence, electronics, and confusional math-metal. Superfast, super technical downtuned grind, ridiculously deep gutteral vocals and gnarly rasping screeches, packing in a ton of wild concepts into it's 12 minute running time. The highlight of the disc is probably the combined 15 second blast of psychedelic noisecore that bleeds straight into the contorted cosmic angles of "Grabbing N.", and then into "Skull Of A Hermit/Brain Of A Faery"'s blinding mach-10 skronk. These guys are right in step with the artful, futuristic grind maximalism of Discordance Axis, Cephalic Carnage, and Luddite Clone. Awesome cover art, too.

CIRCLE OF DEAD CHILDREN Zero Comfort Margin CD $11.98 Willowtip

A brain scrambling 15 song mini-album from the arty Pittsburgh-based deathgrind outfit Circle Of Dead Children, filled with furious, chaotic and insanely complex grindcore marked by super downtuned guitars, dueling gutteral belches and ripped-larynx screams, and a thousand riffs and changes packed into short and concise slices of pummeling blast that mostly run under a minute and a half in length. If CODC's dizzying, ultra technical, ultra noisy grind wasn't crazed enough, there's huge chunks of noise rock riffage, interludes built from sinister Industrial drones, weird ambient breakdowns made up of bass/drums/feedback, power violence, and dissonant black metal all thrown into the mix, a feverish blast vision marked by deeply misanthropic and apocalyptic lyrics and awesome album artwork that reeks of a Carcass/Southern Nihilism Front stylistic fusion. Zero Comfort Margin has a sloppy, jagged, falling-apart-at-the-seems power that not many bands are able to pull off like this, think Creation Is Crucifixion, Discordance Axis, Cephalic Carnage at their most deformed.

CIRCLE TAKES THE SQUARE As The Roots Undo CD $11.98 Robotic Empire Records

As The Roots Undo is a surprising mix of frantic, chaotic modern hardcore (think ORCHID and PAGE 99 ), crusty hardcore blitz (there were more than a few times when this reminded me of the awesome old bay area band FILTH ), metalcore crunch, sprawling and dynamic post-rock, wonderfully weird and complex prog rock, jangly indie pop, and weird, ambient electronic stuff. You would think that this would sound schizophrenic and cluttered, but it's actually really cohesive and unique how the band blends all of this together. Intense and dramatic and emotional, there are mighty Neurosis/Isis style dirges that turn into weird clean guitar breaks, an even mix of intense, brutal vocals and distinctive high-quality melodic singing, spoken word parts with spacey electronic blurt, cyclone powerviolence / grindcore blasts that fragments into melodic, awkward but freaking awesome prog-pop, and epic City Of Caterpillar / Godspeed You Black Emporer -style sprawl. We're kicking ourselves for not checking this out sooner. It's awesome! And it's packaged in one of the coolest digipacks we have ever seen, a six panel digi with killer wraparound artwork printed in bold metallics and earth tones, with a multipage booklet bound into the inside of the digipack, and closed with a foldover tab - freaking beautiful. We were expecting another standard modern hardcore album, and what we got is a genre-defying underground masterpiece...we hate to gush, but this has us totally stoked, and is one of our favorite new albums!

CLOACAL KISS Easter CD $9.98 Arclight Communications

I had a chance to see these guys over the summer when their tour took them through southern Pennsylvania, and was knocked flat by their spastic drum machine tech-shred robo assault. I had heard of them previously through the Genghis Tron guys, who had played with Cloacal Kiss several times on tour, but I had no idea quite how fucked up and manic these guys were. Was even more surprised to find out that the bassist for Cloacal Kiss used to play in a Boston band called Virulence, who released one of the best jazz/death metal hybrids ever with 2001's amazing A Conflict Scenario. Cloacal Kiss's intensely calculated death/grind is just as heavy and technical, with lightning fast pinball-machine fretboard sweeps, baffling, stop-on-a-dime death-jazz arrangements, and huge discordant math-metal grooves. It all reminds me of a 500 mph mashup of Necrophagist and Meshuggah and Behold...The Arctopus, with twisted vocals that switch between an incredibly harsh, larynx-destroying screech and sub-sonic death grunts. And then there's the drum programming, cold, clinical, and clearly computerized, reaching convoluted, hyperspeed blastbeat structures that the band deftly shred their way around. The computerized beats make Cloacal Kiss sound even more inhuman and calculated, a seemingly cyborg tyech/death/jazz killing squad clad in Tetsuo-esque flesh/metal imagery which is leavened a bit by the bands bizarre, tongue-in-cheek song titles such as "Carpathian Kitten" and "Necrobot". My fave track on this 26-minute mini-album? The closer "Easter", which starts off in hyper complex, confusing death mode, and then somewhere halfway thru the song suddenly evolves into a beautiful hypno-metal mantra, like Meshuggah hijacking Genghis Tron's synths off of Dead Mountain Mouth and riding a single heavenly riff off into the distance. Righteous tech grind insanity for fans of everything from Necrophagist to Behold The Arctopus to Agoraphobic Nosebleed.

CLOAMA / GELSOMINA The Duelists CD $11.98 Musically Incorrect (FINNISH IMPORT)

The past year (we're talking 2006-2007 here) has produced a phenomenal brood of albums that have harnessed the most brutal strains of feedback and sculpted them into slabs of crushing, monolithic un-rock corrosion...Skullflower's Tribulation, a large portion of the stuff coming out on the At War With False Noise cd-r imprint, and all of the awesome wall-noise discs that Troniks has been cranking out immediately spring to mind. Obviously this approach is rooted in the head-splitting frequencies of classic Power Electronics and Matt Bower's TOTAL, but there's also a sense that there are riffs buried somewhere deep in the churning storms of distortion and feedback, which adds a whole 'nother level of heaviness to these newer "noise" releases. The Finnish artists Gelsomina and Cloama themselves both work with this kind of crushing amplifier damage, and for The Duelists they've teamed up to sculpt a four-part monument of shrieking feedback manipulation, thunderous lower-frequency amplifier drone, and buried, subliminal melodies...Gelsomina's material is in the left channel, and Cloama's in the right. Cloama I'm not familiar with, this collab is the first time I've heard anything from that project...Gelsomina, on the other hand, is a noise fave over here, his assorted CDs and CD-Rs on the Freak Animal imprint have all been excellent feedback battles. These lengthy tracks don't stray too far from Gelsomina's normal m.o., which is basically high volume blasts of feedback in a turbulent maelstrom underpinned by occasional grinding, low-end amp-sludge drones, but there are also alot of fragmented melodic figures and malformed quasi-riffs that appear, especially in the final, epic 17 minute track that creates cloudbreaks of haunting ambience in the middle of the wall-of-noise chaos. Powerful, psychedelic amplifier terror from the cold dark north. This disc was issued in a limited, hand-numbered edition of 300, and is presented in an oversized, full-color A5 sleeve housed in a plastic sheath.

CLOCKCLEANER The Hassler CD $11.98 Manic Ride

Much like the recent releases from fellow Philly area scuzz-punks Violent Students and Pissed Jeans, Clockcleaner summons the heavy duty, damaged noise rock of the early 90's and runs it through a contempo Hardcore/nerve scrape intensity, packaged in effectively weird artwork of a ghoulish-looking woman emitting a swarm of hornets from her mouth, and with zero in the way of info/text in the booklet. These guys are sort of an offshoot of blasted psych-sludge-Hardcore cretins Violent Students (whose amazing full length is reviewed elsewhere in this week's list), but Clockcleaner have more of a classic Am Rep sound, with killer, catchy riffs and a thunderous rhythm section locking in heavy while the guitars scrape and splatter in-the-red feedback and meaty riffs over the singer's howling, desperate, wasted vocals that remind me of David Yow and J. Robbins in the same breath. Seven songs in 17 minutes of heavy noise punk aggression; think Big Black, Scratch Acid, Flipper, Jesus Lizard, Black Flag, Melvins, Jawbox, etc., injected with catchier hooks than what you'd nomrally expect from this sort of pummeling, thunderous scum rock. Just check that fuckin riff on "Shingles" and try to pry that outta your skull. Recommended.

CLUB MORAL Lonely Weekends 7" EP $5.98 Dead Mind (Holland)

The latest batch of Dutch neo-industrial weirdness that we just received produced this odd little EP from a Belgian outfit called Club Moral. Formed back in 1981 by Danny Devos and Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, Club Moral were both a pioneering early industrial/noise outfit and an art collective working within the realm of "extreme art"; the group's musical activities included releasing material on Iphar, the extreme electronics tape label operated by Whitehouse's Philip Best in the early 80's, as well as releases on the Extreme, Cthulhu, and Staalplaat labels. Centered around rhythmic noise and demented vocals completely mutated by effects processors, Club Moral were one of the weirder bands to come out of the seminal industrial movement. This recently released 7" is the group's final document, with two tracks that date from 1981 and 2003, respectively. "Lonely Weekends" was recorded in '81 and combines a staccato machine rhythm with undecipherable vocals, almost like a spartan new wave dance number played back on a relentlessly skipping CD. "Gun", the track from 2003, is right up my alley though, adding turntables and guitar and delivering a menacing mutant industrial dirge with the vocals rendered totally demonic through a wall of effects. Limited edition of 500 copies in a full color jacket.

COBALT Eater Of Birds CD $14.98 Profound Lore

This disc has been getting alot of hype lately, and it's no wonder - Cobalt's first album for Profound Lore is an unbelieveably ferocious assault of inventive black metal with a couple of aces up the collective sleeve of members Erik Wunder and Phil McSorley. Cobalt's riffing immediately strikes me as pretty different from typical black metal tremelo shredding; while the guitars do whip up a vicious storm of buzzsaw chords, there are also some slippery discordant riffs and warped axework that almost sound more like something off of Gorgut's Obscura or that new Negativa disc. Then there are the rolling tribal drums and monolithic drones of "Ulcerism" where it sounds like Neurosis just crashed the party, jangly post-rock bits, and a highly skilled ability to craft dark ambient dronescapes and lilting acoustic requiems that offset the metal. There are three different tracks titled "Ritual Use Of Fire", each one a seperate track of ominous folk/drone. But these are no mere interludes, each track runs 4-5 minutes in length, and just as essential to Eater Of Birds flow as the metal. "Androids, Automatons and Nihilists" is another softer peice, but that one is a weird, otherworldly track with guitars both acoustic and distorted accompanied by theremin tones.
But another thing that is certainly of interest with this new album is the presence of Jarboe from Swans on a couple of tracks, which is pretty impressive. Being a huge fan of both Swans and Jarboe's solo works, I'd love to see her engage with more bands and artists from the heavier end of the spectrum, and her contribution of vocal textures to Eater Of Birds adds a substantial layer of emotion to the music. Cobalt came out with a great album with this, progressive and often psychedelic and otherworldly-sounding - fans of the more mind-bending collectives in modern black metal (Deathspell Omega, Portal, Nachtmystium) are urged to check 'em out. The a 6-panel digipack packaging is beautiful too, complete with a 12-page full color booklet. Recommended.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Invincible Sun" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Blood Eagle Sacrifice" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Ritual Use Of Fire" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "When Serpents Return" (excerpt)

COCK E.S.P. CockWorld CD $10.98 Little Mafia

Full length album released a couple of years back from Minneapolis's masters of extreme volume improv-violence steez, finally in stock. And we're talking brutal avant-splat gangbang action here...the Cock crew are joined by pals Lasse Marhaug, Kazumoto Endo, Smell & Quim, Richard Ramirez, Nakahara, Origami Replika, Death Squad, Lost In Translation, Tom Smith (To Live And Shave In LA), Eric Hofferber, Rexor, Late, Joel Francis St. Germain, Kris Abplanalp, Randy Hoffman, Mike McGuire, Joe Evans, Limozine Feet, and Phillip Von Zweck. Whew! It's still Cock E.S.P.'s party though, and the noise pranksters get down with 20 blasts of free-improv / noisecore / comedy / power electronic mulch, moving from extremely harsh noise freakouts to awkward tape-recorded roommate battles to heavy-ass scrap-metal hump anthems to the sounds of a Nintendo game being molested, all to tracks titled "Posh Cock", "Too Much Too Cock","Cock Up Your Life", etc. Righteous. Could Cock E.S.P. be the missing thread between Borbetomagus/early Boredoms powersnarl and Neil Hamburger? Also contains some weird flash slideshow stuff on the CD-ROM portion of the disc.

COCK E.S.P. Greatest Dicks:Best Of COCK E.S.P. 1993-1996 CD $7.98 Pure/RRRecords

A mind frying tribute to one of the greatest American noise bands EVER. Crucial punk-avant-noise explosions hammered into yr skull via their demented, free spirited cacophonous free for all. Absurd, subversive, essential.

COCK E.S.P. Greatest Dicks II: The Best And Worst Of Cock E.S.P. 1997-2000 CD $10.98 Little Mafia

Here's #2 in the Greatest Dicks series from the Minneapolis noise shockers, collecting compilation tracks, remixes, live tracks, and more spanning the years 1997 through 2000, delivering 40 tracks of confrontational pandemonium from the Matt Bacon/E.W. Hagstrom lineup of Cock E.S.P., with help on some tracks from Weasel Walter (Flying Luttenbachers/XBXRX), Val D'Orito, Neil Campbell, and others. It's a brutal showing of improvised noise delivered at maximum volume and with the sort of punk 'tude most "free" acts tend to lack, blasting their jams with fucked up electronic wreckage and harsh, Japanese-style jackhammer noise, gasps of early Industrial, random ambient visions, and recordings of hostile show-goers that are definitely not down with the live Cock E.S.P. experience. Released in a limited edition of 500 copies.

COCK E.S.P. Greatest Dicks III 3" CD $6.98 Breathmint/Ignovaminous Records

Cock E.S.P.'s third collection of recorded works is a 3" CD in a limited edition of 500. Covering the years 2001-2003, you get 40 tracks of sublime, cranium crushing noise hijinks and surrealist action from the Midwestern free/noise/core/comedy legends. Includes collaborative work with Crank Sturgeon, Prairiepusher, Eugenics Council, Rotten Piece, Newton and Panicsville, but the highlights of this disc are an incredible krautrock-esque remix by Burning Star Core that channels Faust and This Heat with shrill noise bursts drilling through the periphery of the motorik beat, and a radio interview with the group, conducted by a "Fink Winklebean", which includes hard to follow chitchat about tension, punching each other in the face, Sylvester Stallone in "Rocky VII", spider monkeys, the most unpleasant characteristics of playing in Cock E.S.P., having W.A.S.P. or Sabbath play at their funeral, and prescriptions and influences. Crucial for fellow Cock fans, and those of you that are into harsh noise, brutal improv, mutant jazz, and noisecore, and haven't yet begun to explore Cock E.S.P.'s demented world, this 'lil disc is a perfect introduction to their smash-up spazz noise!

COCK E.S.P.