TITLES: G

GALLHAMMER The Dawn Of Gallhammer CD + DVD $17.98 Peaceville

C'mon, three young Japanese girls named Mika Penetrator, Vivian Slaughter, and Risa Reaper, in black metal raccoon makeup playing primitive, crushing Hellhammer-worshipping doomcrust? Gimmick or not, shit like that is right up my alley. Actually, I first heard about Gallhammer a couple of years ago when they first formed, but at the time I was only able to locate one of their mp3's online and their debut full length Gloomy Lights proved to be an elusive disc for me to locate. Somewhere along the line though Gallhammer was picked up by Peaceville, who have just released this CD and DVD set of rare studio/demo tracks and live performance footage as a precursor to the band's upcoming full length for the label. This set is a terrific overview of the band's brutal, death-tripping slomo battery. Based out of Tokyo, Gallhammer draw from a combined influence of proto-black/doom pioneers Hellhammer and old school UK crust bands Amebix and Axegrinder, with just a trace of new wave/post punk (see the melodic chorus for "Beyond The Hate Red" if ya don't believe me), and create an otherworldly graveyard atmosphere, total dread. The audio disc portion of this release has 12 tracks, including demo versions of two exclusive new songs, and rare tracks that go all the back to before the Gloomy Lights album. Awesome, blackened dirge crust with thunderous plodding drum pounding and grim distorted riffs, and spooky feedback laden ambience drifting between each lumbering song. And the vocals are awesome, a comination of ghastly choking rasps and occasional clean chanting, like undead wraiths emerging from the crypts in some old B&W Japanese horror movie.
And the companion DVD that's included here is even cooler, featuring 24 songs from six shows filmed at various venues in Japan throughout 2005 and 2006. The central footage on the disc is from a pro-shot six-song set in Okayama from 2005, and it's an amazing show: singer/bassist Vivian Slaughter, clad in a Celtic Frost shirt and staring dead into space and grunting into her mic, pounding away at her bass, drummer Risa Reaper looking like a white, hollow-eyed Japanese ghost behind her kit and emitting occcasional backup shrieks, and guitarist Mika Penetrator grinding out sludgy riffs and peals of feedback, the band belting out a hypnotic set that includes "Endless Nauseous Days", "Blind My Eyes", "May Our Father Die", "Song Of Fall", "Hallucination", and "Crucifixion". Awesome. The other footage has more low-fi/videocamera production, but it's all terrific, and there's even a photo gallery of stills to further fuel my fanboy fire. Terrific package for this too, the CD and DVD encased in a six-panel digipack with awesome photos of the band and Manga-style portaits, and includes a 12 page booklet.

GALLOPING CORONERS (VAGTAZO HALOTTKEMEK) Dancing With The Sun CD $14.98 Neurot

Dancing With The Sun is an ecstatic live album capturing the legendary Hungarian band Vagtazo Halottkemek (which loosely translates into Galloping Coroners) in an explosion of mystical, psychedelic hardcore power, with a twelve song set captured during a concert appearance in Budapest in 1999 with Neurosis, Voivod, and Today Is The Day. A legendary group of dissident musicians in their own country, Vagtazo Halottkemek were banned for years in the '80s from playing music in Hungary, and have become fairly reknowned for their mystical social messages and "shamanic" style of psych-punk power. Musically, the band engages in awesome, heavy tribal/hardcore/space rock freakouts, sort of like early Amon Düül 2 fused with Hawkwind and noisy, epic hardcore, or swirling around in pools of beautiful fuzz with improvised melodies singing the edges of the band's ambient drones. Haunting Hungarian folk melodies and kraut rock rhythms winding their way through tribal drumming, improvised space-rock explorations, and spacey prog-rock that builds and builds, culminating in huge maelstroms of distorted guitars. Their lead vocalist Grandpierre Atilla shrieks, howls and narrates tales in both Magyar and English, and his primal chants radiate a hypnotic vibe across the music. All kinds of instruments are used to create their otherworldly jams: droning didgeridoo, kettledrums, flutes, violin, xylophone all swirl together into a whirling feverdream that drifts through the Carpathian mountains and etches primitive petroglyphs around the sun, as depicted on the album's eyecatching psychedelic cover art. This is one of the lesser known releases on Neurot (it's actually the first non-Neurosis release to appear on the label), but it's highly recommended if yer in the mood for some seriously expansive, and occasionally really fucking heavy psychedelia.

GALVIN WILHELM MILLER QUARTET S/T CD $11.98 Impatience Or Indifference

Mind-boggling schizoid avant grind from this bizarre trio, errrr, "quartet", from Buffalo, NY, featuring members of Avulsion and Parade of the Lifeless. Blazing complex grindcore jams stretched to upwards of 9 minutes at a time mixing the most bulldozing blasts of double bass, piccolo snare and tornado guitar runs with church choirs, middle eastern motifs, squealing sax, tribal percussion, swirling ambience, jazz structure, sampled vocals, keyboards, and more. Their brand of complex, epic exploratory grindcore is really unlike anything previously released, effectively turning the genre over on itself with bizarre stream-of-consciousness, attention-deficit disordered amalgamations concocted in the Quartet’s music library/laboratory.

GANG WIZARD Byzantine Headache CD $12.98 Load

I'll be straight, the cacophonous noise-punk jamming that the Los Angeles-based collective Gang Wizard sink their teeth into on Byzantine Headache isn't for everybody. The first song, "Another Misplayed Endgame", is an entrancing, formless jam with soft percussion and splattery drums, lo-fi ambience, wordless vocals, and spare melodic instrumentation that makes for one of their more "accessible" tracks. From there, though, the California free/punk garage orchestra stumble and lurch through a trippy improvised warzone of noisy, skronky punk-skuzz, fucked-up keyboard noise, crude feedback-splattered hardcore assaults, broken noise rock, retarded death metal vocals, coked-up cartoon character shrieks, random percussive clatter, broken and malfunctioning instruments, inept Krautorkc jams, strained melodies and bodies hurtling through the air. The troupe freak out in a junkyard feast of brutal, slobbering vomit mess across the ten tracks of Byzantine Headache, channeling the silly garage slop of primo Bunnybrains, Dead C, Beefheart, the primitive '60s ramblings of the Godz, and the early 90's free-noise-rock moves of bands like Sun City Girls and Boredoms and achieving absurd levels of randomness. If your looking for linear rock sounds, move on please; this is fucked up, damaged noise rock skronk at it's loosest. This is the band's first release for Load after putting out three LPs on Ecstatic Peace (as well as seemingly hundreds of CD-rs, 7"s, and tapes throughout the fringes of the sub-underground), and has one of the funniest album covers of the year: biting the design style off of the classic Crass/Gee Vaucher covers, but with a MAD Magazine take on one of the more reknowned photos from the Vietnam War.

GANON In The Dead Of Sleep CD $11.98 Acerbic Noise Development

From the same label that brought us the bitchin' art-damaged thrashcore of Verse & Radiation last month comes this inaugural disc from indie-metal crushers Ganon. This is definitely heavy stuff, with huge tidal riffs building up and crashing down, twin guitar harmonies spiralling outward from volcanic dirgescapes, the heavy crushing passages positioned in the realm of burly post-metalcore alongside the likes of Neurosis,Isis,etc. But then there's also Ganon's melodic, almost indie rock-ish side, their brutal sludgy riffing often plated in major key hooks, and killer, spacey instrumental sections. The album opens with a blast of burly dirgey riffing and math-crush guitars and ferocious war bellows, all crushing angular post-metal like Neurosis meets Keelhaul, monstrous and apocalyptic sounding...but then the second track comes in with a slow paced melodic crunch that sounds to me like a metallized, sludgy version of pre-Green Mind Dinosaur Jr. Hell yeah. Theres alot of that on In The Dead Of Sleep, fusing really catchy hooks to crushing post-Neurosis art metal and wandering,hypnotic post-rock. The last song even closes out in an awesome wash of radio static and a fuzzy, blurred piano loop, suspended above some cavernous Lull-style cave drones. Fans of the new breed of post rock / metal hybrids (Isis, Conifer, Tides, Pelican, Mouth Of The Architect), the sludgy technicality of bands like Mastodon and Keelhaul, and the indie-sludge goodness of Floor and Torche need to get blasted by this album fast.

GANTZ La Chambre Des Morts CD $12.98 Radar Swarm

It seems like there is an unending flow of awesome, artsy, post-rock influenced heavy bands coming out of France lately. Cortez, Membrane, Time To Burn, Year Of No Light....all bands that lift the grandiose instrumental post-rock moves of Temporary Residence/Constellation/Kranky and apply them to BONE CRUSHING heaviness in a way that is similiar in spirit to the likes of Isis, Cult Of Luna, and other Neurosis-influenced post-metal outfits, but these French bands always end up heading off into an artier, more lyrical realm with their albums. Much of this new French heaviness is circling the always-excellent Radar Swarm label, who just released this new disc from Gantz. Laq Chambre Des Morts is beautifully heavy post-rock influenced indie/metal that opens with blissed-out wash of Troum-style guitar drones and spacey chords that then meanders into delicate math rock territory. It's not until the second song that crushing, ominous-sounding dirges begin to appear out of Gantz's long and stretched out instrumentals, and the rest of the album works with this contrast of heavy, melodic dirge and mathy post-rock to great effect. Imagine a mix of pleading mid-90's French emo, Isis, Botch, From Monument To Masses, Aereogramme, and Envy, and you'll have an idea of what they are doing on this album. Really majestic, frantic stuff, the sort of crushingly heavy indie rock/sludge action that we completely worship around here. Packaged in a terrific gatefold digipack with thick lyric booklet.

GANTZ La Chambre Des Morts LP $13.98 Impure Muzik

Now available on heavy, clear Euro vinyl!
It seems like there is an unending flow of awesome, artsy, post-rock influenced heavy bands coming out of France lately. Cortez, Membrane, Time To Burn, Year Of No Light....all bands that lift the grandiose instrumental post-rock moves of Temporary Residence/Constellation/Kranky and apply them to BONE CRUSHING heaviness in a way that is similiar in spirit to the likes of Isis, Cult Of Luna, and other Neurosis-influenced post-metal outfits, but these French bands always end up heading off into an artier, more lyrical realm with their albums. Much of this new French heaviness is circling the always-excellent Radar Swarm label, who just released this new disc from Gantz. Laq Chambre Des Morts is beautifully heavy post-rock influenced indie/metal that opens with blissed-out wash of Troum-style guitar drones and spacey chords that then meanders into delicate math rock territory. It's not until the second song that crushing, ominous-sounding dirges begin to appear out of Gantz's long and stretched out instrumentals, and the rest of the album works with this contrast of heavy, melodic dirge and mathy post-rock to great effect. Imagine a mix of pleading mid-90's French emo, Isis, Botch, From Monument To Masses, Aereogramme, and Envy, and you'll have an idea of what they are doing on this album. Really majestic, frantic stuff, the sort of crushingly heavy indie rock/sludge action that we completely worship around here. Packaged in a terrific gatefold digipack with thick lyric booklet.

G-ANX Flashbacks CD $12.98 Sound Pollution

Ok, when it comes to fucking ripping Scandi-thrash from that crucial era of extreme hardcore (we're talking last half of the '80s), I am unable to think of a band that that was as awe-inspiringly epic sounding and progressive and capable of lobbing out some killer "what the fuck" moments as the almighty Swedish outfit G-ANX. The band was only around for 4 years and released a mere 4 7"s, eventually breaking up in 1991, but they left behind some of the most atmospheric ultrathrash I've ever heard that still stands up to the test today. While they were firmly entrenched in the extreme hardcore/grind scene, G-ANX were also not bashful about the fact that they dug Pink Floyd and reggae just as much as they were into blazing grind, and what materialized out of the dust of their eruptions was a whirlwind of hyperspeed HC destruction laced with lush, epic instrumental passages that almost sound like they came from an 80's horror movie soundtrack, as well as a hefty dose of 80's grade metal, weird funk riffs and infectious drumbeats, and even straight reggae ("Clouds Of Cancer"). It's those aforementioned atmospheric parts that have made G-ANX one of my favorite 80's HC outfits though; check out the awesome "In Harmony" for instance, where lush keyboards and piano mix with a moody guitar melody that simply seeps atmosphere, until the heavy crunchy guitars kick in and the synths get all triumphant and majestic - freaking awesome. Nobody sounded like these guys when they were around, but you can hear their influence on an entire generation of cello-toting, dreadlocked punks nowadays. The older jams are more straightforward, rabid blasts of hyperspeed hardcore, kinda along the lines of stuff like Totalitar, Heresy, and Anti-Cimex, but as time went on, they became more metallic and more enamoured of those lengthy epic instrumentals and using spacey effects on their instruments. Amazing stuff, super fierce yet evoking almost poetic visions of apocalypse; fans of adventurous crustcore would certainly want to hear G-ANX in action. This discography disc contains all of the bands recorded work from 1988 through 1993, and Flashbacks is all you need to dose up on some G-ANX, as this 1993 disc collects everything the band ever released, including their tracks from the split 7" with Filthy Christians, the Masterpeace 7", the Far Out 7", the Out Of Reach 7", compilation tracks, and two unreleased tracks.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Appelskruttar" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Clouds Of Cancer" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "In Harmony" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Stenad" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "The Narrow Path" (excerpt)

GAPING MAW Two Improvisations CD $12.98 Archive

Two Improvisations is definitely our favorite release from the aRCHIVE camp so far...Gaping Maw's rumbling, grindcore-strength electro-acoustic improv is so brain flattening that we've had to spin this about two dozen times just to try and absorb the heavy density of these two eruptions, recorded live in Chicago in 2001 and 2002. The trio features heavy names from the free-improv orbit, including Kurt Johnson (Flying Luttenbachers) on bass and electronics, Kyle Bruckmann (EKG) on electronics/minimoog/suona, and Tatsuya Nakatani on drums/percussion. The first jam, nervous center, has the group bulldozing over you for about 20 minutes of destruction, opening up with what sounds like a free-jazz drummer being slowly and inexorably crushed to death by 100 copies of Godflesh's Streetcleaner all being played at the same time. Tatsuya Nakatani's drumming on this jam kills, rattling out some powerful blasting and snare abuse alongside more fluid percussive flourishes and krautrock grooves, as the other guys stack huge slabs of electronic quake and low-end rumble. The second tracks is titled Candlestick Maker, starts off quieter, pure menace as the droning subdued rumbling of an encroaching electronic thunderstorm gradually explodes into a fierce percussive assault. Gaping Maw delivers a killer improv disc in the vein of the heaviest crush-jazz, like an infernal "metal" take on Flying Luttenbachers and Borbetomagus at their most thunderous. Righteous, highly recommended. Comes in typically sweet packaging from aRCHIVE, the disc attached to the interior of a foldout full color sleeve with great artwork.

GARMONBOZIA s/t CD $12.98 Profane Existence

I'm all about the small explosion of folk/post-rock influenced crustcore and hardcore punk bands that have appeared recently...bands like Wake Up On Fire and Remains Of The Day combining aggressive, anarcho-conscious hardcore with cellos and tribal percussion. It seems that the politically charged post-rock of Godspeed You! Black Emperor made an impression on the underground anarchopunk scene, and now we're seeing bands combining all kinds of non-rock elements with their heavy hardcore. One of the best bands around right now doing this sort of thing are Minneapolis' Garmonbozia, whose crushing progressive crustcore is almost like a weird mix of Crass, Neurosis, and heavy metallic thrash backed by an Eastern European chamber folk ensemble. Like Wake Up On Fire and Remains Of The Day, Garmonbozia uses cello to add a haunting, folkish atmosphere to raging hardcore anthems, and they move from intricate melodies to blasts of heavy D-beat thrash, fronted by two pissed-off female vocalists. But unlike those aforementioned bands, Garmonbozia uses the cello as the lead instrument, and the melodies are eerie and aged, and the whole album has a slightly mystical feel that you don't normally hear on a Profane Existence album. In between their ferocious screaming, the vocalists also do alot of the Crass speak/sing thing over some of the quieter parts with pointed, heavy social-and-scene outrage. This is definitely one of the more interesting releases I've heard from Profane Existence. And stay tuned for the hidden untitled track at the end, it's a speedy thrashcore ripper with that cello weaving an awesome melody over total blastbeat hardcore. Powerful, heavy and atmospheric.

GARMONBOZIA s/t LP $12.98 Profane Existence

Cool vinyl edition of this anarchist folk/thrash/crust bands debut album!
I'm all about the small explosion of folk/post-rock influenced crustcore and hardcore punk bands that have appeared recently...bands like Wake Up On Fire and Remains Of The Day combining aggressive, anarcho-conscious hardcore with cellos and tribal percussion. It seems that the politically charged post-rock of Godspeed You! Black Emperor made an impression on the underground anarchopunk scene, and now we're seeing bands combining all kinds of non-rock elements with their heavy hardcore. One of the best bands around right now doing this sort of thing are Minneapolis' Garmonbozia, whose crushing progressive crustcore is almost like a weird mix of Crass, Neurosis, and heavy metallic thrash backed by an Eastern European chamber folk ensemble. Like Wake Up On Fire and Remains Of The Day, Garmonbozia uses cello to add a haunting, folkish atmosphere to raging hardcore anthems, and they move from intricate melodies to blasts of heavy D-beat thrash, fronted by two pissed-off female vocalists. But unlike those aforementioned bands, Garmonbozia uses the cello as the lead instrument, and the melodies are eerie and aged, and the whole album has a slightly mystical feel that you don't normally hear on a Profane Existence album. In between their ferocious screaming, the vocalists also do alot of the Crass speak/sing thing over some of the quieter parts with pointed, heavy social-and-scene outrage. This is definitely one of the more interesting releases I've heard from Profane Existence. And stay tuned for the hidden untitled track at the end, it's a speedy thrashcore ripper with that cello weaving an awesome melody over total blastbeat hardcore. Powerful, heavy and atmospheric.

GASP An Earwigs Guide To Traveling CD $13.98 Capibara

A long-awaited n' crucial collection of pretty much everything this cult California psych-violence/drone-grind released, aside from the Dome Triler Of Puzzle Zoo People LP on Slap A Ham (which we also stock here at Crucial Blast). These guys were WAY ahead of their time: Between 1996 and 1999, GASP emitted bizarre frenquencies of avant-powerviolence that was beyond anything else going on at the time (think mid/late 90's, at the fever pitch of the West Coast extreme hardcore movement). Hallucinogenic, brain warping, brutally heavy. Listening to these tunes again after years of obscurity and out-of-print vinyl brings it all back...swirling together fucked up caveman grind, floating psycehdelia, ambient tape loop dreaminess, and massive, cough syrup covered sludge heaviness, GASP were like a bizarre, disorientating mix of post-MAN IS THE BASTARD power violence, TROUM's cloudy dream-drones,and NAUTICAL ALMANAC style tape manipulation, with mutant,stuttering blastbeats collapsing into dense fogs of electronic droning and crushing extreme sludge dirge bulldozing through abstract longform free psych-noise jams. This CD collects their freaking impossible-to-find vinyl splits with the likes of Noothgrush, Deerhoof, Suffering Luna, Volume 11, etc., compilation jams, unreleased songs (including the infamous Lepidostomatid 7". GASP were one of the most innovative bands to come out of this scene, and this is a killer document of their non-album stuff.

GASP Dome Triler Of Puzzle Zoo People CD $11.98 Slap A Ham

It’s criminal that we haven’t had this in stock until now, as GASP’s sole full length is one of the best avant-powerviolence albums ever released, and certainly one of the most daring releases from the sorely missed SLAP A HAM imprint. GASP combined brutal,blastbeat-ridden violence and heavy sludge with serene, beautiful ambience and interesting tape/collage/noise, almost like some mutant hybrid of INFEST / CROSSED OUT, TROUM, and NEGATIVLAND, a grind / sludge / psych / avant pastiche that balances crushing fury with brain melting electronics and noise. Crucial. This long-gone LA outfit are due for rediscovery...if you haven't heard these sixteen songs yet, you're missing out. Crushing and beautiful !

GASP / SUFFERING LUNA split LP $11.98 Deep Six

One of the all-time great vinyl documents of esoteric, psychedelic powerviolence, the Gasp/Suffering Luna split LP contains some of the most insane, hallucinogenic heaviosity to ever emerge from the West Coast grind scene. The Gasp side of this split is broken up into 6 tracks, but effectively operates as a single breathing organism, beginning and ending on hypnosis inducing locked grooves that spin cosmic drones and childlike taunting into infinity. These locked grooves bookend an epic tapestry of beautiful galactic dirge metal, dreamlike deep space sound collage, and demolition strength sludge/powerviolence that reaches immense wall-of-sound levels of overload. Gasp had always reminded me of an otherworldy fusion of the early space/psych of Pink Floyd and Hawkwind being coopted by an ultra chaotic mutation of 90's extreme hardcore and extreme sludge/doom. These guys didn't sound like anyone, and this music is still years ahead of it's time. The end of the Gasp side actually has about a half-dozen locked grooves that you can utilize to liquify your grey matter, ranging from surrealist vocal cutups to atmospheric drones. Essential sounds.
If the Gasp side isn't enough to convince you that this is an essential platter, the other side is inscribed with four cuts from the little-known but earth shaking Los Angeles psych-deathcore outfit Suffering Luna, who trudge through a grueling dirge avalanche that interconnects rhythmic Godflesh dissonance with massive Neurosis tribal sludge, complex layers of sampled media soundbites and tape loops, streaks of acid damaged cosmic guitar, and ultra harsh and oppressive noise and tortured howling effects-heavy vocal incantations. Suffering Luna's hallucinogenic soundbite sampling is similiar to the manner in which Dystopia uses soundbites to create an ultra paranoid atmosphere of urban dis-ease; these guys could sort of be seen as a nastier, cryptic trance-doom companion band to Dystopia, who they actually shared another split LP with back in 1995. Their songs on this LP are hellish and spaced out, a perfect companion to the Gasp side. Crucial!! On gorgeous grey marbled wax.

GATE 9 Moon Ranger Gone Evil CD $10.98 Underdogma

Surprisingly good and diverse melodic Cosmic Doom from this Norwegian trio. The nine songs on Moon Ranger Gone Evil mostly revolve around slow, trippy riffs and Sabbathian vocals that recall Maryland stoner blues doom like Unorthodox and Internal Void, with an added helping of jacked up, acid-washed 70's psych-boogie, but things get really heavy here and there with some supremo monstrous Candlemass-meets-Sons Of Otis space doom chug that drops in at a leaden crawl, and there's also a few moments of wispy psychedelic pop and mellow jazz flourishes that add to the bonged out atmosphere. Our fave track off of this is the drum-free "Mantra Of Doom", with its cyclical droning melody that could have come off of EARTH's Phase III: Thrones And Dominions and stoned vocals drifting into the ether.

GATE TO GATE I Turn Black Keys CD $7.98 Troniks

This disc will drown you in some fucked up, slaytanic cable-buzz murk and sludgy bass squelch. Actually, GATE TO GATE is exaqctly what we would expect from a project consisting of Mike Connelly (Hair Police, Wolf Eyes, Gods of Tundra) and Greh (Hive Mind, Chondritic Sound), plundering low frequency chaos for squirming,greasy,blackened gunk jamz and wrangling ungrounded instrument cables into writhing nests of extreme carnivorous hum. This disc drops one new 38 minute fuzzfest plus the two extremely limited cassettes BANE and HOUSE WITH THE CLOCK IN ITS WALLS in remastered form. Nearly 80 minutes of satanic blackened sludge noise for fans of,well, Hair Police and Wolf Eyes !

GAY BARBARIANS Bohemian Special CD $11.98 Charnel

Who in the hell were the Gay Barbarians? We landed this amazing full length album from this amazingly obscure San Francisco trio (that also subtitle themselves "the Jaurwars" - what the fuck?) in the midst of the recent avalanche of Charnel Music titles we've found ourselves buried in, and were stunned by the bizarre, supremely melodic and catchy post-rock-space-noise-sludge-pop weirdness these guys created. From what little we've been able to glean, we guess this is sort of a Subarachnoid Space spinoff, 'cuz Chris Van Huffel from Sub Space drums for the 'Barbarians, alongside a fuggin' thick dual-amp guitar assault drowning in fuzz and distortion but belting out catchy, really heavy indie rock riffs that remind us of the slackest 90's shit (think Dinosaur Jr., Pavement, even My Bloody Valentine at some points etc.) but way more destroyed and baked in fried amp noise, bulldozing thru layers of analog synths dropping all kinds of whooshing cosmic tronix, droning sheets of gauzy, shoegazey noise, and LOTS of fucked-up, mutant noises into the Gay Barbarian's bent psych crunch. Some of the tunes give up on the rock entirely, and just engage in splattered electronics and stoned synth abuse. Apparently the dude from E-Zee Tiger is in this too? Bohemian Special is all-instrumental (save for some ambiguous vocal splurt that's near unidentifiable), and is definitely in the vicinity of The Fucking Champs and Trans Am in terms of sheer heavy/anthemic post-rock delight, but these tunes are a much more fucked, baked take on distorto "post-rock".

GEISHA Hymns For The Living Dead CD $9.98 Blood Red Sounds
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

WOW, what a surprise this was! We got a handful of this CD from our pal Kunal at Super Fi Records in the UK. Based on his description, we were expecting "noise rock"...you know, Am Rep, grizzled basslines, guns, Midwestern attitude, angular riffage beating you in the face...our kind of rock. We are always down for "noise rock". Well, this CD has to rank as THE NOISIEST "noise rock" record of all time. Indeed, the opening song "Year Of The One Armed Drummer" starts off with an awesome, gnarly, and catchy as fuck angular riff, total Am Rep...but when everything kicks in full force about a minute into the song, the distortion is pushed through the ROOF...the vocals are distorted into a noisy, powerfully emotive smear, the bass is fuzzed out to oblivian, the guitar is a razor sharp killing machine, even the DRUMS sound distorted - yet beneath the constant wall of noise, there are some honest-to-god pop hooks, buried under a thick veil of corrosive distortion. that just pulverize, super melodic riffs that are barely recognizeable, but unmistakeable. As this 4 song CD continues, it reaches the point where you think you're hearing melodies and other stuff that's not even there. The culmination of this is the 3rd track, "How Far Is Nowhere (Version)", which becomes a beautiful, anthemic, life-affirming blast of brutal high-frequency white noise with a rock beat crashing against the waves. Fucking awesome. This is in MY BLOODY VALENTINE Loveless territory in terms of subverting the rock idiom. Where MY BLOODY VALENTINE at their most blown-apart took psychedelia and jangly 60's pop forms and mutated them into a wall of overdriven sugary noise, GEISHA does the same with post-hardcore/post-rock/Am Rep thuggery/math rock,etc. Imagine My Bloody Valentine on Dope,Guns, And Fucking In The Streets..., or Merzbow fronting a mid-90's emo hardcore band on steroids. Minimally packaged in a hand-assembled glossy DIY sleeve thats stuffed inside a small zip-loc bag. A bitchin' blast of anthemic white-out / overload rock.

GEISHA Mondo Dell'Orrore CD $9.98 Crucial Blast

Devouring/rebirthing the concept of "noise rock" into something frighteningly beautiful and brutally heavy, GEISHA deliver crushing blasts of impossibly hyperdistorted rock baked in massive frequency overload and massive hooks and melodies and sinister crushing riffs, all of it slathered in filthy throbbing feedback and white noise horror holocaust, like the early 90's alt rock of Isn't Anything-era MY BLOODY VALENTINE and DINOSAUR JR. mashed together with the most brutal sort of Unsane/Am Rep style racket and distortion-drenched psych/noise into a sludgy metallic mass, jamming with a small army of pedal-smashing harsh electronics troglodytes playing awesomely catchy/crushing pop songs buried beneath a hellish storm of skree and amp-blowing fuzz. Terrifying. Beautiful. Licensed for North America by Crucial Blast.

GEISHA / TRACTOR split 10" $11.98 Superfi

SuperFi matches two blistering Bristol outfits on this 10" slab of black wax, showcasing some of the more ferocious avant noise-rock coming outta the UK at the moment. You may recall GEISHA being jocked quite highly in our last webstore update, where their Hymns For The Living Dead was a featured release...that CDEP's brutal but melodic wash of lacerating white-noise rock was truly exhilerating, and we were stoked to also get our hands on a small amount of this split 10" that features the song "Blood Around The Mechanism" from GEISHA. "Mechanism" starts off with a laid back,jangly riff that reminds us of CODEINE (if they were drunk), but doesnt stick around for long as the band takes off into a howling, bass heavy MELVINS-y noise-rock freakout that gets noisier and noisier as the song progresses, layering more and more white noise on everything until the whole song becomes an atonal,formless smear of cymbal crashes, screams, and looping noise, disentegrating into a bleary eyed, string scraping DEAD C-like free-rock jam that finally closes out in a squelchy locked-groove of Merzbow-style whirr.
TRACTOR are new to us, but with a name like that, we expect heavy. "gHost" brings it, with noisy,droning feedback-rock, plodding and heavy and NOISY. Starts off sorta like UNSANE if they mellowed out and tried their hands at some UNWOUND style post-rock, but then a gargantuan dirge/noise riff and very pissed-off sounding vocals kick in,sending TRACTOR off into some sort of unholy GRAVITAR/MELVINS/early SWANS muck, a shitstorm of buzzing instrument cables, minimal shouting, amp speakers ready to explode, and ferocious bass. Hell yeah.

GELSOMINA Cronenberg/Dead Music Live CD $11.98 Freak Animal

We recently listed a brutally loud and heavy album from Finnish noise artist Gelsomina called Disease With A Purpose, a cranium-splitting blast of epic, psychedelic power-feedback that felt like an old school Total assault on steroids. Intense, massive wall-of-noise assaults that sounded like hordes of malfunctioning guitar amplifiers set on fire, cranked to full blast, and screaming to the heavens, with beautifully grim melodies and destroyed vocals buried deep inside the churning feedback racket, squalls of organic harsh noise that fell somewhere between classic UK Power Electronics and Total's free-guitar obliteration. Great stuff. LOUD stuff. Subsequently, I tracked down a couple of copies of this super limited CD Cronenberg/Dead Music Live, which collects the tracks from the out-of-print Cronenberg 3" CD-R from 2004, with a punishing live Gelsomina assault from a show with Deutsch Nepal that veers into violent PE territory. The Cronenberg tracks unleash Gelsomina's monstrous, detailed heavy feedback and mangled guitar/electronics constructs, cut with abstracted tape loops and samples from Cronenberg's venereal horror classic Shivers and other references to the legendary director's early flesh/horror films, and it's distortion/power skree of the highest order, totally essential for distortion explorers and fans of the harshest strains of amp-abuse/power electronics/brutal drone; think Total, Merzbow, Skullflower's most abrasive meltdowns, Prurient, Burmese, etc. Sensitive ears should steer clear however. Limited to 200 handnumbered copies.

GELSOMINA Disease With A Purpose CD $10.98 Freak Animal

Massively heavy, LOUD power feedback from this Finnish artist who approximates the sound of 100 howling guitar amplifiers melting down violently in an incandescent silver haze, delivered at the volume of a jumbo jet taking off. The burlier parts of this disc reminds me of old Broken Flag steez, as it mixes up menacing power electronics style assaults of high-end metallic distortion and squealing circuitry burn with a destroyed-guitar vibe, but then Gelsomina also move into these ultra dense, extremely detailed passages of power drone that to my ears sound absolutely beautiful, with traces of doomy melodic figures buried deep within the swirling ocean of squealing feedback. I'm not sure what the original sound sources were for this materal as the packaging doesn't say, but alot of this music sounds guitar-feedback generated; regardless, the more "ambient" stuff is huge and heavy and richly psychedelic in the way that old TOTAL and SKULLFLOWER can wipe your mind out, but infused with a razor sharp harsh noise bite. Kinda reminds me of BASTARD NOISE's dronier stuff, or THE RITA if they were an apocalyptic droneological free-guitar unit. Song titles like "Throat Cut With Diamonds" and "Shot To Death With Pearls" just add to the overall coolness of this disc. Excellent crushing feedback heaviness from the legendary Freak Animal imprint...limited to 300 copies, packaged in a simple sepia folder sleeve with xerox insert.

GENGHIS TRON Cloak Of Love CD $7.98 Crucial Blast

Formed in early 2004, this trio has forged a brutally absurd amalgamation of shredding grindcore, slamming beats, and soaring synthpop. Think Brutal Truth in a backalley brawl with Depeche Mode and An Albatross, or Naked City and Afrikka Bambaata hijacking New Order’s electro melodies. The debut CD release from Poughkeepsie, NY trio GENGHIS TRON emits a thoroughly contagious fusion of electropop and grindcore as soaring melodies collide and intertwine around a cacophony of blastbeats, insane vocals, and monstrous riffs. Produced by Colin Marston (BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS and DYSRYTHMIA), and featuring original artwork from Jon Beasley. Grinding techpop? Electrobliss blast? Melodic synth spazz destruction?

GENGHIS TRON Dead Mountain Mouth CD $11.98 Crucial Blast

Dead Mountain Mouth is the debut album and follow-up to Genghis Tron's imaginative debut EP, Cloak Of Love. Recorded at Godcity Studios with Kurt Ballou (Converge), Dead Mountain Mouth moves beyond the rapid-fire electro/grind genre-splicing of Cloak Of Love, and forms something more fluid and cohesive, an arcane union of digital dreams and brutal heaviness, where speedcore eruptions blossom from clouds of maximum beat-driven electronic bliss, and futuristic metal riffage seethes from your speakers. These ten gloriously-dense and triumphantly catchy jams soar through valleys of immense crush and alien vistas of 8-bit wizardry unlike anything you've heard before...

GENGHIS TRON Dead Mountain Mouth LP CLEAR VINYL $14.98 Lovepump United

We have a very small quantity of Dead Mountain Mouth on CLEAR VINYL, so order fast! This vinyl edition was released on Lovepump United, and is a visually stunning gatefold presentation of the album.
Dead Mountain Mouth is the wickedly anticipated full length album from GENGHIS TRON, and the follow-up to their imaginative debut EP, Cloak Of Love. Recorded at Godcity Studios with Kurt Ballou (Converge), Dead Mountain Mouth moves beyond the rapid-fire electro/grind genre-splicing of Cloak Of Love, and forms something more fluid and cohesive, an arcane union of digital dreams and brutal heaviness, where speedcore eruptions blossom from clouds of maximum beat-driven electronic bliss, and futuristic metal riffage seethes from your speakers. These ten gloriously-dense and triumphantly catchy jams soar through valleys of immense crush and alien vistas of 8-bit wizardry unlike anything you've heard before...

GENGHIS TRON Triple Black Diamond CD-R $9.98 Crucial Bliss
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Like last year's Cape Of Hate disc that we released from Genghis Tron through the Crucial Bliss shortrun imprint, Triple Black Diamond is a new compilation of assorted new jams and remixes from GT that was created as a special limited item for their July tour with Ed Gein that just wrapped up a few weeks ago. This disc was issued in a one-time only edition of 444 copies, most of which the band took with them on tour. We've got the rest here at C-Blast though and it's finally available to anyone that wasn't able to catch any of Tron's tour dates, but be warned, we've only got 148 copies on hand and once they are gone, they are gone for good. Triple Black Diamond features blistering live versions of "Ride The Steambolt" off of Cloak Of Love and "Chapels" and "The Folding Road" from Dead Mountain Mouth, a Rick Allen mix by Vytear, "The Folding Road (Carwash Climax Remix)", "Greek Beds (1993 Industrial Dance Version)", the ten-minute plus dronebliss of "Dead Mountain Mouth (Epeirogenesis)" which turns Trons original track into a Growing-style cascade of shimmering ambient riffage, and to top it all off, the disc closes with an untitled demo track of a never before heard song that gives us a taste of what to expect from Tron's upcoming album on Relapse Records next year. The disc comes in a full color sleeve designed by Dylan Reece. Again, this is super limited!

GEORGE KOREIN Memoirs Of A Trilobite CD $9.98

OK, when we get in the self-produced, solo album from George Korein (one half of INFIDEL?/CASTRO!, whose awesomely weird Bioentropic Damage Fractal double CD was just recently released on Crucial Blast), we were naturally expecting something along the lines of I/C, something epic, conceptual, mutant and vaguely metallic. Even Colin Marston from Infidel?/Castro! shows up to help out with total shred-tastic guitar on a handful of tracks. Plus there's various people from Dysrythmia, Kayo Dot, and Stinking Lizaveta. So we're expecting some proggy, complex, heavy indie metal stuff, right? Memoirs starts off heavy enough with some nutty instrumental angular prog-funk over that monolithic techno-drum machine sound that shows up in a lot of Infidel?/Castro! stuff, as over-the-top guitar shred tech-shrapnel flys all over the place. And then suddenly, stuttering beats, pulsing keys, and tweaked rhymes coalesce, and Memoirs Of A Trilobite suddenly becomes a strange hip hop/pop concept album. Hiphop ?! I definitely wasn't expecting this. Yessir, weird, sort-of abstract, avant-collage indie hiphop and mangled synth blurts, a combination of Anticon and Atom And His Package and Infidel?/Castro!, with George rhyming and dropping sometimes surreal, often nonsensical, and sometimes pretty funny stuff about trilobites (prehistoric sea bugs, for those of you that don't know), spam email, amongst other subjects. There's also lots of noise, bent pop hooks, robotic funk-metal, 8-bit melodies, angular fits of free jazz, strident indie-prog-metal instrumentals, blastbeats, elfin thug beats, Nintendo beats.... weird,very weird, but very catchy, and I'm finding bits and pieces of this stuck in my head after listening to this a couple of times. Fans of weirder indie hiphop stuff will find much to like, but so will those into the current crop of avant/indie prog metal nuttiness like Infidel?/Castro!, Behold...The Arctopus, Time Of Orchids, and GENGHIS TRON.

GERRITT Space Level Blaze CD $9.98 Misanthropic Agenda

Superior harsh electronic seizures from Gerrit Wittmer, the dude behind the Misanthropic Agenda label. His mini-album Space Level Blaze captures six untitled highly tactile eruptions of heavy digital distortion crunch and looped/processed feedback that were recorded in 2003 by Gerrit, and then edited and arranged by John Wiese into ferociously psychedelic slabs of electronic terror. Their work here incorporates harsh, strobing blasts of distorted feedback, extensive amounts of delay and echo, mutated blobs of sampled song melody, low-fi recordings of human screaming, powerful streams of glitchy static, and hyper abstracted swarms of laptop-cutup frequencies. He manages to tap into both mind expanding seas of hypnotic, droning wall-noise and extremely brutal, precision-cut slices of nihilistic digital violence, making this an effective entry into the field of psychotropic flesh-metal visions. Limited edition CD, comes in an understated digipack case.

GERSCH,THE s/t CD $13.98 Tortuga

These are the collected recordings from the little known Boston art-sludge band that included Clifford Meyer among it's ranks, whom you may know from his current bands Red Sparowes and Isis. While there are clearly some shadows of the majestic post-metal and post-rock of his current bands that can be heard in The Gersch's weird sludginess, these recordings from the mid to late 1990's are primarily a raw assault of vaguely sinister, psychedelic garage doom. Heavy, post-Sabbath dirge with a singer howling from the far end of a wind tunnel collides with bombastic mutant classic rock riffs, weird instrumental passages of crossover thrash, feedbacking drone rock, punishing "Holy Terror" metalcore, angular math/noise rock, and trippy tape drones. Kudos to Tortuga Records for documenting The Gersch's output, as this totally pre-dates the whole artsy post-metal thing that's beein getting so much attention lately and delivers 10 tracks of genuinely crushing tuneage. The final track is a noisy, sludgy live cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young's "Ohio". Recommended! Comes packaged in a cool minimalist white digipack illustrated in old engravings reminiscent of Albrecht Dürer.

GEZOLEEN Black Spaces Between Stars CD $11.98 Acerbic Noise Development

Yet another pleasant surprise from our pals over at Acerbic Noise Development, following the asskicking HEMATOVORE album we just got in from them. GEZOLEEN is Alabama improviser/multi-instrumentalist Jeff McLeod's challenging, malevolent take on post-Am Rep/Skin Graft noise rock spun off into particularly ear-destroying directions. Noise rock basslines and drumming are gnarled and obscured by abrasive noise,McLeod's vocal dementia fluctuates between harsh singing and insane babbling,and synths,textured electronics and static add a layer of filth to everything. While not as blown and melted as Geisha's brutal whiteout, Gezoleen occupies a similiar mudfield of smeared blackened tuneage and deformed arrangements. Everything's covered in caustic feedback that whips out of control, and songs sound like they could implode or burnout at any second. Hellish, angular, barbed-wire distorto rock spitting gunks of black noise all over your grill. A long-lost imaginary soundtrack to Hellraiser II: Hellbound as scored by Today is The Day, Thrones, and Mount Shasta blasted out of a tinny transistor radio hotwired to your spinal column. Menacing shit that closes out with a sort-of hidden Dazzling Killmen song at the very end. Artwork is from Paul Nitsche (Oneiroid Psychosis, Dazzling Killmen and Skin Graft comics).

GIANT SQUID Metridium Fields CD $13.98 The End

Here's the brand new, re-recorded debut of GIANT SQUID's Metridium Fields album on The End. This new version features all of the songs from the original album re-recorded, again with Billy Anderson (WEEDEATER, MELVINS, FANTOMAS) producing, and packaged in a sleek digipack.
Highly peculiar and haunting proggy indie-metal from these folks. Very synth heavy, which we like lots. Heavy riffs are layered with dreamy synths, moving from uptempo metallic dreampop with angelic male and female vocal harmonies, to slow doomy dirges, to heavy post-metal majesty, to deranged black metal weirdness. Very cool! It all ties together well, and the delicate synth breaks are awesome, sounding like BLACK HEART PROCESSION or PLEASURE FOREVER emerging from a one of ISIS' crushing dirges. GIANT SQUID reminds us of MARE a little bit,too, with their dense vocal harmonies and ultra stylized shifts in sound, but this is also quite a bit like a punkier NEUROSIS on a serious shoegaze/dreampop/prog-rock binge. The final track, "Metridium Field", is a 17 minute epic in the vein of PELICAN, ISIS, and MONO, with GIANT SQUID's own weird nauttical vibes. Excellent, grandiose metallic-post rock designs for fans of TIDES, NEUROSIS, MOUTH OF THE ARCHITECT, ROSETTA, etc. Recommended.

GLITTERPALS Unleash The Compassion CD $8.98 Lovepump United

Spooky-ooky chants kick into the 1st track with that special kind of high-tension rubber band crunch that only a massively distorted bass guitar can deliver, overtop a spazztoid caffeine-driven drum attack...yup, we've got another bass and drums duo with Glitterpals, but this has Mookie and Jake, GENGHIS TRON affiliates both, which = zero jackassery when it comes to laying down the frenzy. Mondo post-Am Rep riff muggings at double speed interrupted by blasting whiteouts of heavy duty thrash are the order of the day on Unleash The Compassion, and though this is a brief affair at only 4 songs/9 blissful minutes, it's ALL POWER. I think these two are picking up the trail abandoned by GODHEADSILO ...yeah! Big Big BIG production from Martin Bisi , master knob turner for the likes of SWANS , BOREDOMS , and SONIC YOUTH. Yeah!

GLOW Dive Into The Sun CD $12.98 Alone

Glow's last album Gone, but Never Forgotten... was a solid slab of bluesy, soulful doom metal steeped in the heavy swaggering riffage of classic Maryland doomsters like Internal Void and The Obsessed, but their latest full length Dive Into The Sun is even better, showing a big improvement across the board with burlier production values, some really fantastic riffs, and a killer performance from singer Ralph. Released on the same label that put out recent heavyweights from Orthodox and Warchetype, Glow are still drawing from the classic doom sounds of Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus, and Pentagram, with plenty of great psychedelic touches like the Hammond organ that shows up all over Dive, and the spacey, subdued breaks and blazing, soaring spaceout guitar solos that appear between the bouts of megalithic blues-based riffage. And check out the killer latin-tinged psych-funk break at the tail end of "Doomdriver". When they really slow it down, as they do pretty often here, Glow take on a sour sludge tone that sounds massive; coupled with Ralph's soulful vocals, Glow occasionally sound sorta like Goatsnake with a rougher-sounding Chris Cornell (circa Louder Than Love) singing. Trad doom heads and heavy stoner freaks are gonna love this album's distinctive conglom of psychedelic heavy 70's rock and total post-Hellhound blues doom vibes. Recommended if yer at all into the sounds of Vitus, Internal Void, Hidden Hand, Obsessed, Goatsnake, Spritu, etc. Awesome layout on this, too, a huge step up from the previous album's sorta generic photo imagery...Dive is accompanied by some terrific high contrast psychdoom imagery with lotsa skulls, wings, actual winged skulls, n' lysergic suns glowing over a stark landscape right out of a Bakshi still.

GLOW Gone, But Never Forgotten CD $12.98 Alone

Seriously awesome/heavy debut from madrid psychedelic doomster's GLOW beams straight out of 1975 and channels absolute asskicking post-Hellhound Records vibes with this eight song album. You know what we wish we heard alot more of from doom metal bands? COWBELL. At the risk of echoing the now-classic SNL skit, you just can't have enough cowbell, and GLOW offer it up in spades. The album starts off strong with heavy duty doom rock in the vein of The Obsessed and Saint Vitus, totally born-too-late shit, with obvious nods to Black Sabbath, but Glow really hit the mark with the third song, "Rush", a crushing slab of metallic flower power that simultaneously recalls Louder Than Love era Soundgarden and primo Maryland Doom a la Unorthodox and Internal Void, but with massive downtuned guitars and huuuge chugging riffage, and a killer cowbell break lifted straight offa Nazareth that'll have you lifting 10 sets of horns. The rest of the album continues in this vein, with killer hooks, reverb'd soul vocals, crazed wah-wah freakouts, and even some doped up Hammond organ infused funeral dirge jam on "Seasons". An excellent dose of saurian doom and soaring, bonged-to-oblivian hippie sludge. Tacks on a cover of VITUS' "Living Backwards" + some live video footage as a bonus.

GOATSBLOOD Drull CD $11.98 Cacophonous

Import version of Drull, released on legendary UK black metal /extreme metal label Cacophonous. It's identical to the original Willowtip version. The music? Total slow motion, painfully heavy, lava-like doom/sludge, like Eyehategod meets Khanate, but with brief bursts of chaotic blastbeats and grind, squealing feedback outbursts, howling shrieking vocals, evil, melancholy melodies, and filthy ambience, powered by a scum-soaked guitar tone that cuts right through your miserable life. Awesome.

GOAT TUNNEL s/t CD-R $8.98 Epicene Sound Replica

Freaking awesome ear-dissolving rock/improv/blast/immolation invoked by Matthew Reis (Epicene label head/Yes, Collapse/Teeth Collection) on drums, vocals, and tapes, Josh Fink (Yes, Collapse/Plasmic Formations) on synth, electronics, and vocals, aided by someone named J.G on bass and Kevin Charles on additional electronics and tapes. Goat Tunnel explodes in black tar vomit all over this 23 minute orgy of grinding feedback loops, high pitched electronic noise violence, freeform blastbeat drumming, monstrously detuned/deformed bass guitar, some sickening bass bleats lifted from Riz Ortolani's Cannibal Holocaust score, and miasmic, hellish, indiscernable vocals. Think of Aufgehoben meets Borbetomagus meets ultra lo-fi black metal imagery mashed up with Merzbow's most over-the-top white noise implosions, all tumbling in and out of slaytanic Wolf Eyes-esque un-grooves...and you'll get a little closer to where these cats are at. Totally fkkng crushing psychedelic free-grind-noise-rock played at soul destroying volume. Packaged in a simple but righteous looking black and white wallet folder spattered in red paint and housed in a plastic sleeve. Hand numbered in an edition of 75 copies, yeesh!

GOATVARGR Goatvargr CD $13.98 Cold Spring

Fkkn awesome black vomit tronix from Goatvargr, a collaborative hook up between Swedish blackened drone designer Nordvargr and US scum noise sculptor Andy O' Sullivan (aka Goat). I love this CD, it's one of the nastiest releases I've ever heard from Cold Spring's catalog, a writhing ball of demonic malfunctioning instrument cables and black industrial heaviness. Each of the artists work with each others source material to construct a thick, suffocating nightmare soundworld of monstrous strangled low-end electronics and sickening lopsided beats, mega distorted doomdrone guitars cutting through the murk, all of it cloaked in spiked black metal imagery and slaytanic tracks titled "Realms Of The Goatvargr" and "Filthdaemon". There are parts of this that sound like Wolf Eyes and Black Boned Angel colliding together as choking synthesizer gargle is spewed over ultra downtuned, corroded amplifier riffage, and elsewhere blasted, heavy distorted breakbeats emerge, almost hip-hop-like (on the AWESOME "Fix" in particular), like Justin Broadrick / Techno Animal laying down crushing beats over waves of crunchy, crushing circuit shriek, pitch-black static, and howling feedback/vocal smear. Hateful machine pistons pulse over crackling grim ambient, ending with the demonic epic techno/noise/filth electro-throb obliteration of "Drunk On The Blood Of The Goat". Total Black Goat Industrial Punishment! Limited edition of 1,000, presented in a rad glossy digipack. Highly fucking recommended.

GODHEADSCOPE A City Out Of Sight CD $11.98 God Is Myth

A fantastic new album of heavy, droning compositions from Godheadscope, the new project from Matt Rosin, a longtime collaborator with the Polish avant-black metal/cryptic folk ensemble Dead Raven Choir. Here, Rosin goes solo under the name M.Kolophonium as he creates a breathtaking series of gorgeous, haunting, drone-based music across four tracks that average about 10 minutes in length, and these lengthy pieces range from monumental minimalist drone to somber, yet achingly beautiful modern classical fused to buzzing clouds of distortion. There's a devotional quality to A City Out Of Sight that makes these songs really stand out, and at the same time Rosin knows his way around a wistful pop hook like nobody's business...for instance, the amazing hymn-like pop ambience of "Joy/Grime" presents a simple piano melody and a gorgeously gloomy pop hook that are layered with tolling bells, blown-out, heartfelt vocals, and blasts of hazy distortion that makes me think of a vastly more subdued and delicate Angelic Process. Rosin cites a bunch of different influences on the writing of A City Out Of Sight, including the Estonian composer Arvo Part, minimalist Robert Rich, cult doomsters Corrupted, and Swans, and we can hear bits and pieces of those influences at work here, with references to Part's "sacred minimalism", those elegiac doomy piano parts on Llenandose de Gusanos, and evocative ambient electronics all rearing their head. But Godheadscope has created an album that can't easily be catagorized; even though most of the music here features a simple, spare musical arrangement that ever so slowly unfolds and grows over the course of the composition, this isn't merely "drone music" or minimalism, it's more like an abstract, ambient mutation of avant-garde post-punk mixed with deeply personal chamber music, which blossoms into sheets of sparkling metallic mist and distorted guitars. Equal parts Projekt Records gloominess and fuzzed out blissmetal and enigmatic avant garde compostion...the more I listen to this amazing album, the more it also reminds me of Caina's latest album Mourner, which was also our last featured new release here at C-Blast, a dreamy, mysterious sort of gloom-pop that's informed by black metal, but here that gloomy pop is mixed in with the kind of abstract music you'd expect to hear from Kayo Dot. An amazing first release from this new project that has landed firmly on our top albums list for the year, and highly recommended.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Room Of Light" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Dusk On Glass" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "The Weight Of Paper" (excerpt)

GODLESS Church Arsonist CD $11.98 Rusty Axe

Another killer album that came in with the batch of Rusty Axe titles this week, Church Arsonist is the second full length from Godless, the first ever black metal band from Puerto Rico. I shouldn't even be surprised when I find out about black metal bands from countries that don't normally fall on the BM map, but it's Godless's subject matter that kinda weirded me out. The music is raw, murky black metal straight out of the early 90's, eight tracks of primitive, low fi blackness, heavily influenced by the OG Norwegian scene like Immortal, Mayhem, Emperor, explicitly anti-Christian as the album title mighta clued you to, with harsh shrieking vocals. Epic riffs buzz over loping midtempo rhythms and sloppy blastbeats, majestic melodic hooks soar over crawling doom. Acoustic guitars suddenly appear in the middle of a fast thrashy part and play hauntingly pretty flamenco style melodies over top of the buzzsaw guitars and thrashing drums, which sounds pretty cool and strange....and there are lots of eerie ambient passages, samples of chanting monks, and LOTS of World War II imagery that all appear throughout the disc. The war imagery is just as prominent as the anti-Christian themes, as sounds of machine gun fire, WWII newsreel clips, and battle sounds are intercut with Godless' buzzing, blasting black murk, definitely setting this apart from other Burzumic black metal outfits. The booklet features photos of the band members in full chainmail armor and cloaks, weilding gauntlets and swords - you gotta see it to believe it.

GODS AMERICA s/t CD-R $8.98 Stickfigure

Awesomely peculiar post-rock/art punk/math-sludge-splurt from Atlanta, whose ranks include members of Blame Game. The trio concoct weird smeared math rock textures and very angular post-punk twitch over which extremely reverb dunked sorta-spoken vocals meander and mutter sleepily, and then shift into dreamlike plodding sludge, like a shoegaze pop band slowing down into a heavy narco caveman-Sabbath dirge cut up with splattery jazz/punk drumming and an octave generator jacked into the guitar. Very nice, very weird. Angular postpunk indie-dreamsludge with an even more stoned sounding than usual Kim Gordon on vocals? The disc is spraypainted and comes inside of a handmade color calendar cutout assembled into a wallet sleeve with duct tape.

GODS AMONG MEN s/t CD $9.98

A re-stock of the newest full length from this Seattle heavy avant prog-rock / crustcore outfit. The CD starts off in the vein of stuff like Dystopia and Wormwood, with hoarse screaming vocals and dark, apocalyptic sounding metallic riffs pounding away angularly, but then brings in gorgeous folksy cello and dramatic, soulful female vocals, sort of like Jarboe or Diamanda Galas, with a dark and avant-operatic delivery. The vocals really set this apart...very well done without being overly melodramatic and overbearing. And the music is pretty inventive, structure-wise...like a grindcore version of UNWOUND playing European folk songs, maybe? Atonal No Wave-y skronk grind, keening cello, free improv clatter, and dark melodies and heavy double-bass driven crustcore/math rock with really dramatic female vocals and vicious male vocals...good stuff! Fans of the Life Is Abuse label and their psychedelic crustcore sound will especially dig this.

GODS AMONG MEN Got Bricks? CD $9.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Gods Among Men's self-released full length Got Bricks? features the earlier throes of their bizarre operatic, avant-crust, like a Skin Graft band assimilating the apocalyptic anarchist hardcore of Dystopia or some similiar dirgy outfit. Lots of dramatic, Diamanda Galas-esque singing from lead vocalist Ruth, along with eerie cello and guitar interplay driven by a tribal rhythm. Creepy stuff, broken up by chaotic,dissoanant,grindy blasts. Imagine a mashup of Neurosis and Dystopia and Godspeed! You Black Emporer with Diamanda Galas-like vocals and lots of Mount Shasta / Ruins-y skronk. Pretty weird and way more challening/heady than most music coming out of the underground crusty-punk scene. The CD face has the title and band name hand-written on it, and comes in a hand-assembled chipboard digi-sleeve with multi-page booklet and artwork glued to the panels.

GODS TEMPLE OF FAMILY DELIVERANCE s/t CD $11.98 Not Common

This is the first offering from Houston, TX's God's Temple Of Family Deliverance, a supremely menacing sludge outfit on the ever-eclectic Not Common label. I've been a fan of everything else I've heard on Not Common, including the gnarly grunge noise of Bats & Mice and Conifer's awesome post/prog/doom, and God's Temple delivers an equally cool take on sludgey heaviness. The first thing that grabs your eye is the gruesome cover illustration of warrior corpses impaled on stakes on some mist-enshrouded battlefield, which might fool you into thinking this is old school death metal circa 1985. But when you crack this album open, what oozes out are huge, winding trance states of serpentine math/doom riffage and potent floor-tom/feedback workouts, divided into a four song cycle with each jam stretched out into a 10-17 minute epic. At their core, God's Temple traffic in the same sort of sticky, feedback-infested 16 rpm hardcore sludge as Noothgrush, Grief, and old Melvins, but they infiltrate the tarpit riffs and gluey tempo with some intricate math-rock moves and unexpected melodic flourishes that are hidden beneath the detuned doom. Extended bouts of amplifier feedback howl and proggy, angular guitar lines appear throughout as well, like some barbaric fusion of The Melvins, Eyehategod, and Don Caballero dunked in tar. Killer crushing hypno-math-magma-metal.

GODSTOMPER Hell's Grim Tyrant CD $8.98 Enterruption

This by far our fave release ever from Godstomper, the notorious bass n' drums powerviolence duo that seemed totally ubiquitous in the 1990s, releasing mountains of split 7"s, tapes, etc., shredding skulls all over the place with their ridiculously ferocious lo-fi grind/improv/chaos. And they were brothers! Yep, Godstomper were Paul and Danny Barfo, two brothers bonded in extreme grind destruction! Hell's Grim Tyrant may be the most "produced" release these guys did, for the most part leaving behind the pure boombox-recording quality of alot of the stuff they put out...but this is still an ULTRA NOISY, ULTRA RAW seige of blistering extreme hardcore, 22 songs of brootal tuneage with a bass guitar tone so gnarly it'll strip enamel from your teeth, with songs sometimes sounding like primo Slap A Ham violence a la Infest and Crossed Out being crammed through a malfunctioning vacuum cleanerand showered in feedback and electronic noise...sometimes bulldozing your fucking cranium with a repetitive sludge riff before spazzing out into a mess of guitar noise and freeform drumming...but most often flying by at 3000 miles per hour with lethal hardcore riffs played at blinding speed on the bass, a sloppy thrashcore catastrophe with Paul's bass strings bouncing around like telephone cables being bullwhipped by Godzilla, while Danny has a fucking seizure behind the drums, splattering cymbals and blasting pure meth tempos, like Ruins and early Napalm Death bonded in bass/drums disaster-zone bliss, hitting mach 10 and falling apart into total improvised noise carnage. Fucking explosive stuff, with a sense of humour apparent in their whole "anti-emo" lyrical crusade. The disc is closed out with some awesome, over the top, blown n' hyperspeed live recordings from 924 Gilman Street from 2000 that had us doing divebombs off the upper CD shelves here at Crucial Blast. Comes packaged in a swank custom digi-sleeve type thing, with vinyl stickers and insert.

GODSTOMPER/IRRITATE Extreme Mosher/Need To Destroy split CD $7.98 Riotous Assembly

We got a stack of this split CD back in 2001 when it came out, thought we sold out of all of 'em, but in cleaning up Crucial Blast HQ recently we turned up a few copies of this now out-of-print dose of fucked up, noisy grindcore weirdness. The Extreme Mosher/Need To Destroy split disc features 10 tracks from California powerviolence/noise duo Godstomper, and 12 tracks of murky, monochromatic sludge/grind/deathcrust from Finland's Irritate; this CD was released on the old Portland label Riotous Assembly, who released a bunch of awesome vinyl and CD's from CSSO, Dystopia, Bongzilla, Corrupted, Grief, 13, etc., before dropping off the face of the earth in the early 00's. So if you're a fan of either of these bands, this'll probably be the last chance you'll have of picking this up outside of Ebay. The oversized 7" sleeve features each band displaying their artwork on a seperate side of the sleeve, and each also have an individual panel on the inside of the jacket with all of their lyrics and liner notes. Godstomper opens up the discussion with their ten blasts of insanoid damaged grind, and C-Blast regulars already know how much I love this shit. Their lineup consists of just Paul Barfo on bass and Danny Barfo on drums, and they kick up a ridiculously noisy, loose assault of buzzsaw hardcore riffs, blastbeat freakouts that turn into total noise, and shredding sub-Ruins bass/drums freakouts. Paul's bass guitar has one of the nastiest tones ever, sounding like he's running it through a bunch of cheap, tiny practive amps turned to full blast, and his vocals aren't any prettier, an onslaught of total murderous throat carnage. Uncontrolled static and amp noise bleeds heavily through all of the songs, and the end result is like listening to a groovy, PCP-fueled spawn of Fear Of God, Man Is The Bastard, and Masonna.
Slowing things down dramatically, the Irritate "side" is all doomy anarchist deathcore, pretty damn raw and sludgy, with a heavy Hellhammer/Celtic Frost influence and fucked up distorted vocals that are sometimes run through a bunch of effects. The riffs are utterly tuneless, downtuned dirge marches, sometimes shifting into more upbeat, midtempo thrash parts, but generally plodding along in a blackened haze. Imagine a primtive, garage version of Winter and you're close. A hideous tag-team match of noise-infected underground crush! The sleeve rocks some great Seaocide artwork, too.

GOLIATH BIRD EATER Blood Venus CD $9.98 Not Not Fun

I thought that the tape that these guys did with Robedoor a couple months back on Not Not Fun was really pretty asskicking. Their side of the cassette dripped thick, ultra distorted instrumental metal sludge monochord riffing and huge stoned 1-note buzzsaw blasts clawing their way out of a stack of amplifiers spewing smoke and flame out of the back, like a mutant punk take on Sleep's dope sludge and Boris at their most cro-magnon. Rad stuff that I thought flew by way too quickly. Well, looks like the Not Not Fun folks felt the same, 'cuz here we are with an entire full length CD of gooey cellar metal from Goliath Bird Eater! The in-the-red levels of distortion that made that split tape squash our heads flat aren't as prevalent on Blood Venus (at least not till about halfway through the disc), but this is still pretty damaged. GBE's core sound revolves around their stripped down drums and guitar setup ripping through fast paced raveups that pound away at primitive Blue Cheer/Sabbath riffage, frequently slowing down to a droning narcoleptic doom crawl or a super blown out, distorted wall of stoner riff that sounds like a much noisier, chaotic High On Fire, and then splatter the jams with feedback, synthesizer drones, organ, sampler, loads of amp hiss, and gong. The CD closes out on a 25+ minute minimalist feedback drone cloud that rises from humming amplifier speakers, and forms something similiar to the shifting organ drones of the recent releases from Beequeen-sideproject Wander fusing with Earth 2's rumbling powerdrone, evoking bong fueled, beer soaked psychedelic basement rituals before a mighty drone rock groove raises it's head and lumbers forward through the feedback haze. Pretty rad stuff!

GOLIATH BIRD EATER / ROBEDOOR Inside Men split cassette $5.98 Not Not Fun
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Yet another new cassette capsule from those dayglo sprayed freaks at Not Not Fun, this one is a little longer in reach than the too-brief Abe Vigoda/Hot Girls Cool Guys split cassingle that we also reviewed in this weeks update. Just a little, 'tho...this still only captures about 6-10 minutes of sound from each band, but it's maximum blast regardless. Goliath Bird Eater come from out of nowhere to run a blown-out noise rock bulldozer over our skulls repeatedly, pounding away at a low-fi monochord dirge like a belligerent Boris high on glue, with their amps on fire and speakers melting, the distortion cranked to 30 and it sounds like their equipment is about to blow at any goddamn second, and then right before the ur-metal crunch threatens to bottom out completely, they ram a zoned Sleep riff through your encephalon. Total brutal filth, and it's over way too soon. Flip the tape over, and Robedoor proceeds to smother you in some extremely loud, perfectly boneecrushing powerdrone. Their double tape on NNF is cool shit and gets much play here at C-Blast, but this track ("Draining Day") is the best yet from these guys, swaying from softly drifting incense intonations to time-erasing amplifier throb. Fucking ACE.
Not Not Fun are the fucking beast when it comes to the handmade packages, totally one-of-a-kind pieces of art that are total antithesis to mass-produced media and technology, and boy do we need it. This particular tape comes in a plastic case with Denzel's mug pasted to the front, blasted in paint and sheathed in bubble wrap. Sweet.

GORE BEYOND NECROPSY Wild & Frantic 7" EP $9.98 HG Fact

Holy shit! I'm always freaking out about the music and records that we get here at Crucial Blast, since we put alot of time into tracking down and hand selecting only the heaviest, weirdest, most killer stuff coming out of the metal/punk/hardcore/noise/avant underground. But sometimes I get a record in my hands that just blows me away so much and makes me freak out so bad that the entire day is spent listening to it nonstop, and it's utterly impossible to get other stuff listed for the store! And when that record is a mere 7", that's a lot of freakin' replay, for real. But this 7" EP from Japan's Gore Beyond Necropsy is that heavy, that fucked up, that awesome. I loved the stuff that these guys did back in the 90's, brutal and weird goregrindnoise like AC or Sore Throat but with this bizarre, psychedelic quality. They even did an awesome collaboration album with Merzbow, but it had been years since I had heard anything new from them. So, I flipped out when I found out that HG Fact had released this 5-song EP, and here it is, packaged inside of a gloriously psychedelic jacket covered in bizarre cartoon art, a five song rampage that has Gore Beyond Necropsy covering 60's garage, 70's acid rock songs from Jimi Hendrix, The Spaceshits, The Sonics, The Dirtys, and a bonecrushing cover of "Leaving Here" by Eddie Holland, via the Motorhead version! GBN rewire those classic garage/psych/rock songs with their buzzsaw death metal guitars and tweaked out demon beast vocals, awesome fast paced drumming, and some fucking ragin' psychedelic guitar leads, almost sounding like a death metal version of Boris' heavy rock rave ups,or fellow Japanese grindcore-acid-rockers C.S.S.O., or Napalm Death covering Motorhead while setting two dozen wah-wah pedals to stun. So awesome, but it's over with so quickly, blazing by in just under 10 minutes. These guys need to do an entire album of songs just like this, this rocks so hard! Yeah, it's kinda pricey for a 7", but our cost on these is pretty high. It's worth it though, an awesome asskicking platter of lysergic garage grind!!

GORGUTS Live In Rotterdam CD $12.98 Prodisk

Recorded in 1993 in Rotterdam, Netherlands while on tour in support of their second album Erosion Of Sanity, this high-quality live recording is the first and only official live document from the influential, experimental death metallers Gorguts. This recording has actually been floating around in the tape-swapping community for years, but the remaining members of Gorguts opted to polish it up with a new mastering job and issue it on CD to all of us rabid fans. There's a ton of Erosion tracks on here mixed in with some earlier stuff; also of interest is the fact that the lineup on this tour is the same that would go on to create the avant-death metal masterpeice Obscura several years later. The songs off of Erosion display a marked evolution from their debut, displaying their incredible chops and increasingly technical and experimental song structures, often with two guitar leads playing insanely technical riffs going in completely opposite directions on every song, and filled with super complex drumming and blastbeats. If yer a Gorguts fanatic, this live album is pretty great, mapping out the bands trajectory between the technical, Morbid Angel/Death-inspired death metal of their early years and the mindblowing dissonant constructs of their late 90's work.

GOROD Leading Vision CD $11.98 Willowtip

Generally when I think "technical death metal", the concept of catchy hooks and memorable songs aren't the first things that leap to mind. Knuckle-powdering fretboard sweeps and stop-on-a-dime time changes, yes, but rarely has the tech-death scene given us catchy songs. With GOROD, however, we've always been enamoured of their ability to embellish their brand of technical, complex, zoned death metal with freakin' great hooks and songwriting that roll around in our heads well after the disc has finished spinning. Leading Vision is the second album for Willowtip Records from this French band, and the follow up to 2005's awesome Neurotripsicks. Like the previous album, GOROD execute amazingly catchy, serpentine songs with melodic riffs matched with flashy fretboard sweeps and arpeggios and lightspeed tapping, backed up by machine-precision drumming and some wild bass playing that manages to keep pace with the insane shit that's going down with the guitars. Definitely along the lines of fellow death calculators NECROPHAGIST, DECAPITATED, ATHIEST, NEURAXIS, PSYOPUS, etc, but way catchier, way more memorable, way more rocking. And on songs like "Edaenia 2312" and "State Of Secret", there are glimpses of mutant European prog rock, FUCKING CHAMPS / NWOBHM style harmonies, jazz fusion, and stoner rock peeking through the veil of dizzying death constructs that really elevate this stuff to another level. There are also these weird, almost industrial blocks of sound that tie the songs together like a continous suite. Incredible. And weirdly "upbeat" at times too, which adds to the awesome weirdness. We loved the last album from these guys, but this one is even better, and it's an absolute must-have for fans of the outer limits of complex, conceptual death metal. The booklet for this is nice n' thick, with a long written peice setting up the VOIVOD-ian apocalyptic sci-fi concept behind Leading Vision, complete lyrics, and some nicely demonic artwork in a Giger/Clive Barker vein from GOROD guitarist Mathieu. Recommended!

GOROD Neurotripsicks CD $11.98 Willowtip

A righteous slab of French death metal with slithery, arthritis-inducing, mega-melodic riffs and spirally, harmony-rich arpeggios that truly rape the Rubix cube. Neurotripsicks is the new album from Gorod (formerly known as Gorgasm)...Willowtip Records has released this for North America with two brand new songs. You get extremely intricate, technical death metal minus any overtly "mathy" stuff, rather Gorod blasts you with tons of melodic, catchy sweeps and arpeggios, insane fretboard tapping, and super syncopated stop-start chugging n' ridiculous stop-on-a-dime drumming. Add in all sorts of weird tape dropouts and bizarre production techniques and spacey background effects, and you get one of the most inventive and catchy melodic Euro tech-death releases of 2005. Fans of Decapitated, Neuraxis, Anata, In-Quest, Skinless, Psyopus, Ion Dissonance, etc., are going to love this.

GOSLINGS, THE Between The Dead CD $12.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Yes! Here's the new full length that the GOSLINGS just self-released, an eight song slog through sugar-encrusted tarpits and monolithic basement dirge. We've been in love with THE GOSLINGS gooey,low-fi sludge/pop/drone gorgeousness ever since getting turned onto their Spaceheater and Perfect Interior CDR EP's on Asarus earlier this year (both of which we finally got around to stocking in the webstore!), and this full length delivers more of the dream-fug bliss that we love so much, but now with the addition of drums, making this far more heavier and sludgier than their CD-R releases. The CD opens with a swollen mass of blown-out,burnt blackened guitar drone and pounding,elephantine drumming that's all cymbal hiss and lumbering plod, falling somewhere between early EARTH, SKULLFLOWER, and old FLOOR, but with singer Leslie belting out creepy emissions like a possessed blues diva. The following song,"Brindle", begins with ramshackle drums and hissing amplifier grit, then explodes halfway thru into a heavenly noisedronepop chorus, another awesome MEDICINE-meets-SUNN O))), dreamy powerdrone moment that knocks our cups off the walls and sets our hair on end. One of the most beautiful,noisy,brilliant moments yet from the GOSLINGS. Between The Dead continues with mystical, THRONES-esque bass dirge, field recordings of birdsong and windchimes and the wind itself,blown and shredded storms of cymbals n' feedback,sounds of passing traffic and airplanes passing overhead, wobbling organ drones, ominous low-fi doom chugging and cavernous harmonies buried beneath an avalanche of guitar noise, stumbling fuzzy garage-rock funeral marches right into the mouth of a black hole...so awesome, muddy and nebulous and low-fi and amazingly pretty, yet super heavy and always rooted in an ultranoisy, floor-rumbling DIRGE. Imagine SUNN O))) if they were a psychedelic indie pop/shoegazer outfit. Or a heavier SKULLFLOWER with gleaming melodic hooks and melodic female singing poking out from behind their veil of feedback. Comes hand assembled, with the jewel case packaged inside of a hand-stamped paper bag. Very highly recommended !!!

GOSLINGS Grandeur Of Hair CD $14.98 aRCHIVE CD
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Over the course of the past year, the always-terrific aRCHIVE label has been releasing some seriously crucial stuff ranging from limited-edition live discs from such big names in the drone/psych/dirge/meta metal scene as Earth, Sunn O))), Growing, Khanate, and Boris, to awesome, esoteric improvisation recordings from Gaping Maw, Khanate's James Plotkin and Jim Wyskida, and John Dikeman, an epic double disc set from Keiji Haino, to florid documentations of the Japanese psychedelic artist LSD March. Most of these releases have been super limited, often selling out as soon as they become available for sale online, and collector geeks have been scrambling to get their hands on these beautifully packaged discs. Scott Slimm, the dude behind aRCHIVE, has created a uniform label aesthetic that really sets his releases apart, packaging the CDs in slightly oversized gatefold wallet sleeves with stunning artwork and graphic design that have a molded disc hub attached to the sleeve that holds the disc in place. Every single aRCHIVE release that I've managed to grab so far for myself (the awesome, crushing Gaping Maw improv disc and that killer Plotkin/Wyskida session) look and feel beautiful, and I've become really stoked on this label. So here we have the newest edition from aRCHIVE, and it's from our favorite husband and wife, psychedelic basement drone-pop-sludgecore band The Goslings! So stoked! I've been SERIOUSLY eager to get this ever since aRCHIVE announced it earlier this year on their site. Grandeur Of Hair is the band's follow up to their Between The Dead album from last year, which received lots of acclaim in the noise/heavy underground for it's ultra burned up, charred-amplifier haze of sludgy druggy murky noise pop heaviness. Now, I first fell in love with The Goslings when Crucial Blast buddy and Does guitarist Neddal Ayad turned me onto them awhile back, recommending their Spaceheater and Perfect Interior to me as he knew that I am a huge geek for anything really heavy and really poppy. Both of those little CD-R releases contained some of the most impossibly gorgeous, destroyed noise/psych pop that I had ever heard, a magical skuzz rising up off of a smoldering pyre of malfunctioning instrument cables, melted Cocteau Twins LPs, field recordings of bodies of water in the middle of the night, and snatches of Melvins/Earth style sludginess. Totally weird and mysterious and dreamlike. I loved these CD-Rs so much that I managed to hook up with the band and work with them on releasing the music as an actual CD that collected both of the EP's together, which we released recently as the Spaceheater/Perfect Interior CD on Crucial Blast. However, since releasing those EPs, Max and Leslie Soren, a.k.a The Goslings, have become way heavier, even more blown out and overloaded, channeling fucked up Royal Trux blues rock noise and Melvins style mega dirge through a wall of amplifiers with the volume knobs on 11, the speakers disentegrating under the sheer overload of Max's noise-doom riffage and uber-distortion, everything swirling together into a crumbling mass of fuzzy ultra-distorted fuzz and heavy drumming, with Leslie Soren's awesome echoey singing floating gorgeously across the sludge sea. Between The Dead was really blown out, but this, man, this album is gone, the music so massively heavy that there are occasional tape dropouts, moments of woozy warbling, as distortion is pushed to the limits, but with every song possessing a KILLER pop hook, insanely catchy and melodic and captivating. Like on the song "Overnight", when an otherwise apocalyptic dirge-doom riff is shot through with rays of sunlight via gleaming guitar feedback melodies, and the song becomes something akin to Jesu being fed into through malfunctioning overloaded speakers, which equals total magic to us. This album is so freaking awesome, so beautiful and SO HEAVY, our favorite release yet from one of our favorite bands ever! Max and Leslie also enlisted the help of their friends Adel Souto (who we remember from cult Floridian holy terror hardcore bruisers Timescape Zero back in the mid 90's, as well as being the brains behind the excellent Feast Of Hate And Fear zine), Paul Leroy, and Brendan Grubb on drums, and our pal Neddal Ayad playing guitar on two of the songs. As always, aRCHIVE packaged this music in an awesome looking cardboard gatefold sleeve, with cool abstract pink illustrations and lyrics on the inside panels, with a plastic disc hub affixed to the center of the inside panel. Highly recommended !!!!

GOSLINGS, THE Spaceheater / Perfect Interior CD $11.98 Crucial Blast

Spaceheater/Perfect Interior collects the first two EP's from husband-and-wife duo the GOSLINGS, originally released as short-run CD-Rs on low-fi/indie noise imprint Asaurus Records in 2003-2004. Working with a signature palette of melted,low-fi indie pop and muggy/smeared psych-drone ambience ground through overdriven amplifiers and shot out into pools of swirling basement shudder, The GOSLINGS adorn their gorgeous powermurk with eerie field recordings, ghostly subterranean vocals, and crackling cable buzz.If SUNN O))) had, in actuality, been a late-80's dreampop outfit on 4AD Records, or if cult shoegazers MEDICINE had ever collaborated with drone-axe sorcerers EARTH, the resulting fug may have been similiar to this black-sugar avalanche. Simultaneously ethereal and blown-out,angelic strains of four-track mud-majesty shaking the walls of the ancient well it's buried beneath.

GOVERNMENT ALPHA Venomous Cumulus Cloud CD $7.98 Troniks

The latest from long-running Japanese noise legend Government Alpha, who has firmly established himself as one of the heaviest, most aggressive dealers of extreme electronic annihilation, with a style that is reminiscent of both Merzbow's rumbling, cycling white noise blasts, and K.K. Null's propensity for piercing high-frequency feedback skree ripped out of tortured electric guitars. Continuing the psychotropic violence, Venomous Cumulus Cloud is a cerebrum-splattering codex of brutal psychedelic feedback collage, a barrage of deafening oscillating white noise and harsh grinding machine textures, broken distorted beats, and howling vocals strafing through the atmosphere. Total cataclysm, with virtually nothing in the way of quiet respite offered over the course of the album's 40 minutes. There are a couple of detours though; the malfunctioning computer spasms of "Perfumed Womb" sound like a noisy mutation of something from Null's Datacide disc and bathes your ears in a sea of hyperactive bleeps and glitch, and "Spiderwort And Dragonfly", despite starting off with a stuttering blast of digital noise, eventually morphs into one of the sickest noise jams ever, like a death metal band overmodulated and distorted to the point where the sound becomes a screeching abstract roar racing through a hundred flanger pedals, and coming out the other side as an all-devouring aural smear of metal wreckage. That one is ungodly heavy. For fans of punishing extreme noise, you cannot go wrong with anything from Government Alpha, and this ranks as one of his most brutal albums. Venomous Cumulus Cloud is released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, in the trademark Troniks wallet jacket that has some sweet psychedelic album cover artwork that reminds me of Mati Klarwein.

GRAF ORLOCK Destination Time Tomorrow CD $10.98 Level Plane

Being a huge action/sci-fi film geek, Graf Orlock's debut album Destination Time Yesterday was exactly the sort of high-concept grindcore that speaks to me; formed by a bunch of California film-school dropouts, the band links up a powerful, frantic grind assault that borrows moves from both thrash metal and 90's screamo with movie samples captured from assorted action flicks mostly from the late 1980's and early 90's. Every Graf Orlock song uses a different movie as it's thematic material, as a matter of fact; and then there are the lyrics, warped narrative fragments created exclusively from actual dialogue from the film itself, which they somwehow manage to turn into a kind of symbolic social commentary? They're obviously working on several levels here, but it's easy enough just to get swept up in the brootal, Converge meets Creation Is Crucifixion meets Pig Destroyer blast mayhem. Destination Time Tomorrow is the follow up to their debut, a new 16 minute EP that delivers another series of "cinemagrind" blasts straight to your cortex, and not only is the tuneage great, but the disc also comes in one of the craziest, coolest packaging setups I've ever seen...the disc, which has a photo image of the back of a guy's head on the cd face, comes attached to a plastic hub that's attached to the, uh, "orifice" of a large, full color glossy-card paper sculpture of one of the facehugger aliens from Aliens, which folds out with jointed legs and a fully extended tail. My jaw dropped when I opened up my copy of ...Tomorrow, this thing looks so fucking cool, and I can't imagine how they managed to put this together. The facehugger foldout is packed inside of a static shield bag along with an insert with lyrics and liner notes, and you'll have to carefully cut across the top of the static bag to keep from messing it up too much.
And of course the music on the disc is just as rad, this time taking on such targets as Aliens and Alien Resurrection, as you'd probably expect, as well as Lethal Weapon, True Lies, Demolition Man, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park. The EP reaches an all-time high wih the last song, "The Dream Left Behind", which uses the Jurassic Park samples and races through some breakneck chaotic thrash, but then at the end actually syncs up the majestic orchestral theme song from the movie with Graf Orlock themselves, playing along with the score with huge crushing melodic sludge chords! AWESOME!

GRAF ORLOCK Destination Time Tomorrow 10" $13.98 Level Plane

Being a huge action/sci-fi film geek, Graf Orlock's debut album Destination Time Yesterday was exactly the sort of high-concept grindcore that speaks to me; formed by a bunch of California film-school dropouts, the band links up a powerful, frantic grind assault that borrows moves from both thrash metal and 90's screamo with movie samples captured from assorted action flicks mostly from the late 1980's and early 90's. Every Graf Orlock song uses a different movie as it's thematic material, as a matter of fact; and then there are the lyrics, warped narrative fragments created exclusively from actual dialogue from the film itself, which they somwehow manage to turn into a kind of symbolic social commentary? They're obviously working on several levels here, but it's easy enough just to get swept up in the brootal, Converge meets Creation Is Crucifixion meets Pig Destroyer blast mayhem. Destination Time Tomorrow is the follow up to their debut, a new 16 minute EP that delivers another series of "cinemagrind" blasts straight to your cortex. If you've seen the CD version of this EP, you know it's fucking amazing looking, a cut-out, almost full size paper scultpure of one of the Alien "Facehuggers" that wraps around the Graf Orlock CD. It's one of the coolest CD packages I have ever seen! Well, the labels involved and the band didn't slack for the vinyl version either: this 10" version of Destination Time Tomorrow comes in a die-cut glued jacket, the front cover depicting what we guess is one of the band members holding the bottom of his tshirt....and then when you flip the cover flap up, it turns into a three-dimensional pop-up of an Alien bursting out of the guys chest! With the lyrics and liners printed on the underside of his gore-splattered t-shirt! WOW.
And of course the music here is just as rad, this time taking on such targets as Aliens and Alien Resurrection, as you'd probably expect, as well as Lethal Weapon, True Lies, Demolition Man, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park. The EP reaches an all-time high wih the last song, "The Dream Left Behind", which uses the Jurassic Park samples and races through some breakneck chaotic thrash, but then at the end actually syncs up the majestic orchestral theme song from the movie with Graf Orlock themselves, playing along with the score with huge crushing melodic sludge chords! AWESOME!

GRAVE IN THE SKY Cutlery Hits China: English For The Hearing Impaired CD $12.98 Heart & Crossbones

Fans of extreme electronic music might already be aware of the Israeli artist Maor Appelbaum. He's been heavily involved in the Isreali underground for ages now, working as a sound and lighting engineer, recording extremely confrontational electronics-based music with bands like Poochlatz, Vultures, and IWR, collaborating with legendary Industrialist Maurizio Bianchi as well as releasing tons of solo material both under his own name and under the names Screening, Vectorscope, Lunisolar and Plated Steel. As if that wasn't enough on his plate, Appelbaum has also worked as a DJ and a writer for Metal Hammer Israel and the web based Alternative-Zine.com. Talk about prolific! I was pretty intrigued when our buddy David Opp at the Israeli label Heart & Crossbones told me about a new album he was releasing from a new "doom" band called Grave In The Sky, which featured Appelbaum on bass guitar, "noises", and effects, along with drummer Matan Shmueli and vocalist/sampler conjurer Rani Zager. Man, is this album heavy. Yeah, you could call this Doom, it's definitely very slow and very grim sounding, but it's also so blown out and damaged and NOISY that it borders on a kind of psychedelic noise-dirge...seriously, the five tracks on the oddly named Cutlery Hits China: English For The Hearing Impaired are so fucked up sounding that it makes me think of what it would sound like if you teamed up the members of Wolf Eyes with the original Electric Wizard lineup, I'm thinking of Dopethrone in particular here. Massive black-hole sludge jams of plodding, pounding, sloppy slow-motion drumming rumbling over sheets of terrifying processed vocal noise and gargling screams, all kinds of messed-up modulated electronic wreckage floating around in a black filth haze, and ribcage rattling bass guitar vomiting up totally damaged Iommi riffing into a technicolor low fi spew pool. The songs don't even have real titles, each one is named after a movie ("Donnie Darko", "The Descent", "Straw Dogs", The Devils Rejects"), and all of the "lyrics" are apparently lifted straight from DVD subtitles of various horror and crime flicks; it's not like I can verify that, as I haven't eaten nearly enough barbituates to decode Grave In The Sky's tripped out sludge. The one exception is the last track "Scum", a blackened blast of fried feedback drone mayhem, tribal percussion, and mindmelting chanted vocals blasting out of other dimensions. Obviously, I think that Cutlery fucking ROCKS, it's sort of like a sludgier Gravitar but totally blown out and charred, metallized and completely drowning in 'Tussin, or Khanate fused with Hawkwind and Burmese. I can imagine the free-noise rawk heads into the sounds of Double Leopards, Gravitar, Mouthus, and White Mice eating this up just as much as the extreme sludge crush junkies into bands like Bunkur, Khanate, Halo, Unearthly Trance, and Boris' slowest, heaviest jams. Fucked up, trippy as hell drugdroom noise insanity.

GRAVES AT SEA Documents Of Grief CD $14.98 20 Buck Spin

This full length CD is an official re-issue of Graves At Sea's self-released Documents Of Grief cd-r from 2003, which went out of print fairly quickly. Super gnarly doomcrust with swingin' stoner riffs covered in molasses and filth, monstrously crushing, like a zombiefied Maryland doom outfit lumbering along rotten and diseased and unleashing gigantic bluesy sludge riffs as slow and gooey as liquid concrete, with snarling, raspy vocals. Ultra heaviness for fans of Eyehategod, Khanate, Grief, Sour Vein, Unearthly Trance, and other am-blowing scum sludge. Also features new and improved artwork.

GRAVES AT SEA / ASUNDER split CD $12.98 Life Is Abuse

Two of the West Coast underground Doom scene's heaviest team up for this cult split album, which came out a couple of years ago but we're just now getting this sucker in stock. And if you're a fan of pulverizing glacial doomcrust, well, this disc comes with the highest possible recommendation. Both Graves At Sea and Asunder have become more well known to adherents to the slow n' low in the past year and a half, due to amazing new albums from both, but even in 2005 when this stuff was recorded these bands were killing it with some of the heaviest doom/sludge/tarpit hatred imaginable.
Arizona's Graves At Sea opens this up with two tracks, 'Pariah' and 'Reclamation', both over ten minutes long. Crushing, surprisingly catchy slo-mo crust riffs, droning feedback, and a gnarly charnal house guitar tone are combined with some of the nastiest, most sickening doom vocals ever, for real. Graves' dreadlocked singer is awesome, alternating between these ultra low chunk-blowing death growls and a high pitched witch shriek that sort of reminds me of a cross between Blaine from The Accused and Edgy from Burning Witch, but even more shredded and warped. Brutal, fucked up murk doom in the spirit of Grief, Sour Vein, and Burning Witch.
From the diseased desert doom of Graves, we move to Asunder's side of the split, which follows their stunning album A Clarion Call with a single 20 minute track titled 'Whited Sepulcher'. Featuring members of Dystopia, Weakling, Amber Asylum, and