TITLES: P

PAIN JERK Trashware CD $9.98 RRRecords

Classic 1995 PAIN JERK action from RRR's crucial PURE Series. Pain Jerk, a.k.a. Kohei Gomi, has been one of Japan's most lethal figures in the harsh noise underground throughout the 1990's, and this 4-track, hour-long exercise in extreme electronic blast cut-up and constantly shifting, dynamic textures is one of his all-time finest works. A hyperspeed collage of spastic feedback, detailed distortion, and seizure inducing rhythms that feels like you've stuck your head inside of a cement mixer filled with scrap metal and malfunctioning stereo receivers. Absolutely essential for all acolytes of the Japanese noise movement and fans of fellow psychedelic junk-destruction units Incapacitants, Monde Bruits, and Merzbow. Packaged in a minimal RRR/PURE style wallet sleeve with xerox-damaged artwork.

PAIN JERK Recycled Music Series CASSETTE $4.98 RRRecords

More killer Recycled Music Series action from RRR, this time from old-school Japanese kill-troniks master Pain Jerk! We can't get enough of the Recycled Music Series, as you might have noticed...give us time, and we'll have all of these grungy, skull-splitting cassettes available through the Crucial Blast store! The long-running noise unit operated by Kohei Gomi, Pain Jerk is a familiar name to Japanese noise enthusiasts, with a prolific body of work going back to 1993 that rivals the crushing, violent 90's output of Merzbow and Kazumoto Endo. Pain Jerk's entry into the Recycled series delivers two 22+ minute sides of nonstop wall-noise destruction loaded with fierce squalls of manipulated feedback shot through thick slabs of rumbling, swirling low-end distortion pouring out of your speakers at top volume. Every once in a while, Kohei backs off the pedal and sends distorted spoken-word recordings, streaks of chirping FX-blat and crashing spaceship transmissions screaming across the eye of the storm, but mostly this is an unrelenting wall of ultra-dynamic, devestating psychedelic electronic noise weaved into rhythmic loops that jackhammer away at your lobe while it constantly changes and evolves into new, heavier forms. Like all entries in the Recycled series, the recording has been dubbed onto an old commercial cassette, covered in a strip of duct tape, and the tape cover likewise covered in duct tape and scrawled with the artist's name and the "Recycled" motto across the front.

PAIN TEENS Pain Teens CD $11.98 Charnel Music

Charnel Music re-issue of the excellent eponymous 1988 debut from Pain Teens, originally released only on vinyl on the band's own Anomie Records imprint. This is where it began, the first non-cassette missive from the Austin, TX-based duo of Scott Ayers and singer Bliss Blood, whose mutant hybrid of metallic punk, mutant Texas psychedelia, gorgeous droneology, industrial noise, tape loops, and found sound/weird instrumentation formed one of the creepiest takes on urban paranoia and Chthonian avant-rock that we've ever heard. Listening to this album is like sitting in on a post-apocalyptic tribal jam, surrounded by densely layered loops of murky electronic noise and dialogue samples raining like black ash over clamorous and heavy industrial junkyard polyrythms and Scott Ayer's utterly sinister guitar mutations that veer between swampy acid-psych freakouts, brooding midnight punk riffs, and full on avant guitar noise, his guitar playing absolutely KILLS...and then there's Bliss Blood's icy, morbid singing and spoken-word elicitations, utterly bleak and apocalyptic, with lyrics that posess definite Lovecraftian overtones. Pain Teens is disturbing, heavy shit, occasionally immensely rocking, that traces razor cuts from the classic industrial of Throbbing Gristle and Einsterzende Neubaten to 80's punk/metal skuzz and the fucked up, early psychedelic hardcore spew of fellow Texans Butthole Surfers. At times, this reminds us of a brooding, avant-garde take on Ministry's A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste with frozen female new wave vox, or sometimes a post-nuke, LSD-devouring Swans backed by a mutant drum corps...but Pain Teens were really onto something totally their own. This stuff terrified us in the early 90's when we were first turned onto them. Fantastic. The Charnel House edition also features insanely rare tracks culled from pre-1988 Pain Teens cassette releases. A goddamn subterannean classic.

PALE DIVINE Thunder Perfect Mind CD $11.98 Psychedoomelic

Out of print for the past few years, this crushing album from Pennsylvania power doom trio Pale Divine is finally resurrected courtesy of Austrian label Psychedoomelic. Ten tracks of heavy, rocking psychedelic 70's influenced Doom Metal that's sure to stoke fans of the Maryland/VA Doom sound (Internal Void, Pentagram, Hidden Hand / Spirit Caravan and all things Wino). Singer/guitarist Greg Deiner belts out some great clean-but-rugged vocals, the riffs are excellent, and the band draws from their Pentagram, Leafhound, and Manilla Road inspirations to lay down some serious old school Doom Rock. In addition to the original 10 songs from the album, this re-issue also features two awesome-sounding live tracks recorded in Maryland in 1999.Pale Divine also cover Pentagram's "20 Buck Spin" here as well, and Pentagram singer Bobby Liebling lends his distinctive vocals to the song "Dark Knight". Needless to say, this is something that Pentagram fans are going to want to get their hands on, but we've gotta recommend this highly to all Doom freaks and stoner fans, as this is one of the best true traditional Doom albums to come out of the US in the past few years!

PANOPTICON EYELIDS Mobile Asylum Band-Aid/Guru Gurette CD-R $9.98 Ohnono

More subterranean noise weirdness from the Ohnono camp, this latest CD-R is the first ever release from the Montreal psych punk collective Panopticon Eyelids, featuring two members of Fly Pan Am and other denizens of the Montreal underground, blowing out a half hour splodge of freeform noise rock and spastic exploratory skronk. The band trudges through technicolor improvised sludge freakouts, gnarled monster vocals, motorik raveups and creeping waves of free-feedback, deconstructed no wave disintegrating into globular noise ecstacy, culminating with the colossal three-part epic 'Paratroople People' and the disc closer 'À Chaque Fois Que J'Pisse Y'A Une Plante Qui Pousse'. Turns out that these cats have something new coming up on Our Mouth, the label run by the Mouthus dudes, which makes sense; both of these bands share a similiar propensity for heavy rock forms devolved to primal, formless splatter. This CD-R seems to be a combination of studio and live recordings, although it's hard to decipher the liner notes on this thing. Totally brain warping amp slop in any event, though. Hand numbered edition of 100 copies in a hand-sewn three-color screenprinted sleeve with spraypainted CD-R and an insert sheet held together with medical tape.

PANTHEIST Amartia CD $13.98 Firedoom
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Here's the follow-up to O Solitude from UK/Belgian doom merchants Panthiest, which was one of our favorite funeral-doom releases of the past few years. This brand new album takes their slow,funureal doom to full on melodic peaks, the massive droning,crushing guitars, organs, and torpor-riddled drums creating soaring hooks while choirs of chanting monks drift into the ether, broken up by some amazing, brief flares of epic black metal chaos. Amazingly heavy and beautiful and forbidding. The album actually sounds like it was recorded in a cathedral, totally befitting the monastic feel of these songs. I gotta say that this is a vast improvement over O Solitude, which is saying alot, considering how much we loved that album's trudging, cavernous doom. Awesome stuff. The band thanks Ennio Morricone in their liner notes, so that gives us an ideas as to the inspiration for their epic, cinematic melodies. Apparently Panthiest also included members of UK extreme doom legends Esoteric on this album!

PANTHEIST O Solitude CD $13.98 Firedoom
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

This Finnish band has created some of the most beautiful and epic Doom I have ever heard with "O Solitude", as well as some of the most varied and interesting throughout these 5 songs, the band delivers dark, immensely heavy Funeral Doom (a la their tourmates in SKEPTICISM), baroque medieval folk-sounding passages, HUGE, epic, heartwrenching melodies played super slow, like Tangerine Dream scoring the shifting of continents with one of their insanely catchy 80’s synth soundtracks,brief blasts of apocalyptic blackened thrash.the droning of baglama and oud instruments....prog-rock riffs and keyboards played at molasses pace...soaring Pink Floyd-ian cosmic electronics...tormented clean vocals mixed with demonic death growls,song structures that shift wildly between these different elements, but always sounding perfectly constructed,.gigantic-sounding reconstructions of Beethoven and Chopin compositions...With the added bonus of an incredibly lush, massive production, this ranks as one of the greatest epic Doom albums ever, in my opinion. But this is so much more than another "Doom album". It’s hard to believe that something this heavy and this ridiculously slow (not all slow, as it does inject some blastbeats and mid-tempo/ fast parts briefly in just the right spots here and there.) could be so catchy and melodic and beautiful. Like sad requiems for ancient sea beasts.

PAPERCUT HOMICIDE From Filth Comes Grace CD $11.98 Retribute

Featuring members of the acclaimed RED SKY, and current members of NEMO, Papercut Homicide create a devastating avant tech-grind attack, in league with Cephalic Carnage, Dillinger Escape Plan, and Pig Destroyer. Papercut Homicide have taken the vitriol and sheer naked aggression inherent in grindcore and death metal, combined it with elements of hardcore and extreme jazz,and add soulful rock vocals over some occasional asskicking rock parts. Machine gun drumming, 100mph riffing, screamed vocals, disorientating time changes and jazzy interludes.

PARACOCCIDIOIDOMICOSISPROCTITISSARCOMUCOSIS Satyriasis CD $11.98 American Line
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

The long awaited debut album of this Mexican bizarre grindcore duo, highlighted by some completely off the wall abstract guitar squiggle shred and super low cannibal vocals. One of the most chaotic grind releases I've ever heard, squiggle riffs and blastbeats and squealing slop leads fly all over the place, honestly sounds like most of this has been completely improvised, making this sort of a goregrind cousin to ORTHRELM or LIGHTNING BOLT, sorta. Obviously fans of gruesome grind will love this, but those of you into improvised grind, noisecore, and avant-shred fests will dig this weirdness as well.

PARADISE CAMP 23 Bar-BQ Dungeon CD-R $8.98 Mandragora

Available again at a lower price than before!
The debut private-press disc from New England's PARADISE CAMP 23 delves into a cabin-creep atmosphere similiar to the recent ROBEDOOR and HAUNTED CASTLE stuff we've been blasting, but channeled through frequently formless noise rock moves like old SKULLFLOWER and RAMLEH. Erik Amlee (CRACKHOUSE,BULL ANUS) takes assorted tape noise, diseased guitar riffage, evil feedback sheets, buzzing voices, and melts the concoction down into a dreamlike fug, an eerie ambient post-industrial drone-psych that would be ill fit for crashing-out sounds, this being an unsettling and often skin-crawling mass of buried roar. Think early primitive PINK FLOYD and THROBBING GRISTLE getting down with a bad-dream stream of grey, washed out amp-drone haze. Packaged in a cardstock wallet sleeve. As with all Mandragora goodies, this is recommended to fans of SKULLFLOWER, TOTAL, greasy UK psych noise, etc.

PARADISE CAMP 23 oTo CD-R $8.98 Mandragora

Mandragora drops another heavy blat of psychedelic midnight freakout on us with this CD-R re-issue of the first ever recording from Paradise Camp 23. One of the many projects that has sprouted from the skull of Mandragora label head and psych/sitar/sludge sorceror Erik Amlee, Paradise Camp 23 is also one of his heaviest (along with the painful feedback demolition of Amlee's Bull Anus group and the Skullflower/Hendrix acid skum of Crackhouse), merging formless haunted noise like a more dusted version of the heavy drone shit that has been coming out on the Not Not FUn imprint, with heavy duty guitar abuse that traces back to the whole UK Industrial/Ramleh/Skullflower scene. This private-press disc is a re-issue of the very first recording from PC 23, originally released on cassette through the UK-based Ordnance Tape Only label in 2001, and features a single half hour track entitled "Theory Megatron" that appears out of a syrupy fog of late night, UHF television frequencies melted over slowed-down tapes and delayed guitar noise beamed through a monstrous echo chamber. The track slowly evolves into some sort of hallucinogenic free-rock/drug sludge freakout, drowning in total delay-pedal feedback abuse, metallic loops spinning off into the distance, and elongated wah-wah soaked acid rock guitar dunked in glue and left to bake in a cathode glow of half-heard old time horror movie soundtracks and crackling film dialogue. The whole disc puts me in the same sort of vibe I'd get if I crashed out, drunk on 'tussin, in front of some 1950's creature feature at 2 a.m. in the morning while a sun baked Hendrix bootleg tape rolls on the stereo. Excellent, totally stoned hardcore psych-noise, pretty crucial for fans of Amlee's other projects. Packaged in a simple but effective black and white cardstock wallet in a plastic sleeve.

PARADISE CAMP 23 Solitaire CD-R $8.98 Mandragora

Available again at a lower price than before!
Another private-press disc from the Mandragora imprint, this time serving up a single epic 46 minute track entitled "Like A Duck In A Noose", the sound of stars falling from the sky and huge insects cruising through space. This is heavily drugged murk, an ultraheavy drone feast that channels SKULLFLOWER and EARTH via Japanese heavy psych rage. Oscillator violence and Cthulhian sinewaves invade your skull like barbed wire, while a wall of amplifiers thunder incessantly. Utterly stones acid sludge drone. Highly recommended to fans of all things powerdrone, SUNN O))), EARTH, SKULLFLOWER, TOTAL, ROBOT VS. RABBIT, etc. Comes packaged in a full color glossy sleeve with full disc face art.

PARADISE CAMP 23 Mu CD-R $8.98 Mandragora

This new one from Erik Amlee's Paradise Cam 23 collective sorta threw me for a loop at first. All of the other discs I own from the Camp (Bar-BQ Dungeon, oTo, Solitaire) are for the most part thick n' gooey clouds of psychedelic drone-sludge, with lots of heavy reverberating amplifier tone a la old Skullflower and Earth, but with more of a hookah-sucking glaze to their longform jam sessions. And this newer disc on Amlee's own Mandragora imprint certainly starts off like I'd expect, with "Kether"'s free-floating metallic feedback drone, equal parts Growing glimmer and Earth-en sludge, a huge crushing distorted chord hanging in space with heavenly feedback clusters flying around. Massive, heavy, beautiful. But then comes the shambling raga wisps of "Oaxaca", quite pretty and hazy, but not at all what I was expecting! Mu was apparently recorded throughout 2003 in a variety of forms, some tracks consisting of Erik playing by himself, others finding him playing with musicians Joel Boultinghouse, Aleda Jonquil, Nate Longcope, and Mark Dwinell. All of the material is completely improvised, and it's clearly a sunnier, more blissed out Paradise Camp 23, as if the psychedelic sitar music of Amlee's solo cd-rs has leaked over into his darker, heavier drug drone side, all of his styles and influences converging here into a collection of dreamy damaged folk strum, Erik's buzzing sitar floating alongside overcast electronic drones, primitive pop jams, and downtuned guitar dirge, like Sunburned Hand Of The Man and Bardo Pond mixed with Earth, the band alternating between those transcendent dronecrush mantras and the indie raga dreams. The disc is packaged in a simple cardstock wallet folder with mystical liner notes and credit/track information.

PARIA Misanthropos CD $10.98 Imagine It

Modern metalcore generally doesn't do a whole lot for me, as it seems like most of the bands playing that kind of stuff are basically rehashing their favorite bands. There is however a cadre of bands out there that are ostensibly metalcore, but bring a broader range of influences to the table, as well as top-notch chops that help to push the sound further ahead. Bands like Psyopus, Between the Buried And Me, and Into The Moat, fer instance, who bring the over the top tech chops to the sound, blending ridiculously complex tech-death, metalcore, and jazz/prog influences together to create some awesomely dizzying jams. The Nebraskan outfit Paria are part of this neuveau-tech scene, and this older album from the band has been rocking the fuck out of us lately, injecting loads of jazz-informed breaks, demolishing metalcore breakdowns, insane fretboard gymnastics, and triumphant melodies that are straight out of the Gothenburg guidebook. Sure, this is metalcore, but a weird, tweaked version of metalcore that balances precision calculus metal and massive chugging riffs with bizarre sound effects and samples and an ADD-afflicted habit of jumping between stylistic forms every couple of seconds or so. "The Absurdity Of Solace" is one of my fave tracks, with it's combination of killer fucked-up guitar noise, crushing stop/start death metal, and an acoustic guitar melody that's total 80's hair. Elsewhere, Pariah tosses out weird dancey percussion breaks, droning guitar parts that seesaw back and forth, psychedelically sludgy boogie blasts, and manipulated feedback. The guitar playing is freaking killer, though - the guitarists slip and race and slide up and down their fretboards like someone has dumped a vat of vaseline on them, and the freaked out fretwork on display here borders on avant-guitar abstraction more than a few times. Misanthropos came out a couple of years ago but we were just now turne onto the band, and if yer a fan of retardedly complex, 500-riffs-per-minute experimental tech-metalcore, this disc is one you should check out.

MP3 SAMPLE: "The Absurdity Of Solace" (excerpt)

PART CHIMP Cup CD $14.98 Monitor

Cup is a stateside-only collection of odds-n-ends from Part Chimp, the UK outfit on Mogwai's Rock Action label that are in many ways the Brit's answer to Torche's magnificent thunderpop. Sharing Torche's affinity for huge melodic hooks delivered on 10-ton megadistorted riffs, and a droning sludgy bottom-end that rattles your ribcage while encasing some sublimely sweet pop core centers, Part Chimp ups the noise ante even further by piling on additional levels of crumbling crushing metallic distortion that seems to be blasting out of a dozen busted speakers, and jacking the volume up to skull-bursting levels. Awesome shit, exactly the type of overdrive sludge pop that I live for, super catchy and droning and drowning in crushing distorted riffage, a la Floor and Torche, Geisha and Harvey Milk, the Melvins at their "poppiest", you get my drift. Everything these guys have put out is essential, which makes this assembly of B-sides, out-of-print singles, alternative versions of older jams, and compilation tracks a welcome addition to my shelf. My heart really skipped a beat over the devestatingly catchy dronemetal-guitar pop monstrosity "30,00000000000000 People" which sounds like Floor covering fucking Gumball, the blown out sludgerock charger "New Cross", and the spectacular dooomed out sludgefeast adaptation of the Beatle's "Wild Honey Pie". The 10-minute "Amd Hell Is Behind Me" was the flip on the New Cross single, and is a buzzing, blown black hole of rumbling amplifier drone and oscillating feedback, pure hesher psych in the key of Z. A highly recommended collection, and not the worst place to start if you're new to the Part Chimp experience. The disc comes in a slick full color digipack, and also includes two music videos for the songs "New Cross" and "War Machine".

PARTYMAN/DJ RENALDO split CD-R $5.98 CNP Records

This split private-press disc from CNP Recs teams Ryan Parrish (who plays in DARKEST HOUR and SUPPRESSION) and Alex Tomlin (from BATTLEMASTER) for an orgy of digitized gabber/blast tronix weirdness. Sort of sounds like a prog keyboard spazz-out battling Nintendo themes over a backdrop of blasting machine beats and cracked out Drum n' Bass/Casio techno breaks. Some of this reminds us of ELECTROCUTIONERDZ brand of Atari grind, particularly the more speedy double-bass sounding eruptions, although this is mostly an instrumental jam. Sort of falls somewhere between digigrind retardation and Advantage/Minibosses 8-bit love. Packaged in between two full-color slats of pixel-horror gloss.

PATHOS Perdition Splits The Skies CD $9.98 Intolerant Messiah

From the frozen wastes of the northwest, Pathos delivers a tundra grind onslaught that pierces skulls with ice picks and ruptures organs with reckless abandon. This crusty lot draws from Nordic black metal and injects the technical prowess of modern death metal and grind to create a lethal brew of sonic mayhem that'll slash your senses into oblivion. A devastatingly unique mixture that draws influence from the likes of Skitsystem, At The Gates, Immortal and Cryptopsy! An epic assault of frostbitten, grinding warcrust.

PEDESTRIAN DEPOSIT Volatile CD $11.98 Hospital Productions

After a string of limited cassettes and CD-R releases, Pedestrian Deposit graces extreme noise fans with his first real CD release. Exquisitly constructed and textured noise cut ups executed with blistering precision from John Borges, a.ka. Pedestrian Deposit, who has previously collaborated with Nihilist Spasm Band and Solmania. This new full length presents four amazing pieces and a live recording, ranging from ruthless, exquisitely assembled feedback squalls to tranquil, dreamlike drones. This is at the top of the "harsh noise" game, folks...the early tracks on Volatile are surprisingly detailed and layered, where one really would need to use headphones to dissect and explore the sound field. But brutal, seriously brutal, with carnivorous feedback rumble and howling high frequencies. This is all wonderfully contrasted with "Naomi (In And Out Of Consciousness), a beautiful 15-minute field recording / melodic organ drone piece that is a perfect counterpoint to the album's earlier carnage. Superb.

PELICAN Australasia CD $13.98 Hydra Head

The mighty debut full length from Chicago’s instrumental heavies PELICAN perfectly blends metallic weight and beautiful, precise post-rock. The band rises from sludgy tar riffs and canyon-wide grooves to drift into gorgeous melodic interludes, even breaking away into crushing bouts of faster-paced metal chug. The grasp of dynamics these guys possess is intense, and despite the legions of bands that have begun to emulate this sound , PELICAN are still the masters. Shaping great spacey slabs of hypnotic riffing and rhythmic intricacy from influences as diverse as celestial Pink Floyd moves, Chicago’s native post-rock, MELVINS-weight sludgery, MOGWAI’s dramatic arcs, black metal and minimalism into massive throbbing indie metal greatness.

PELICAN City Of Echoes CD $13.98 Hydra Head

We had the same reaction to Pelican's newest City Of Echoes as we did to the new Oxbow album that Hydra Head released pretty much at the same time: it's our favorite album of theirs yet! Pelican's Fire In Our Throats was terrifically immense, further perfecting their massive prog-hued instrumentals and cross-cutting melodic axework, but on City Of Echoes, Pelican has finally turned into the massively crushing melodic indie rock outfit we've been hoping they would evolve into. The hooks on City are just so memorable and catchy...Pelican has always been upfront about their love for stuff like Sunny Day Real Estate and Hum, and you can really hear it here, with songs like "Lost In The Headlights" and the title track revealing themselves as metallic, ironclad indie pop monsters, delivering the kinds of uber-infectious hooks we love from early 90's indie rock on the back of titanic metallic riffage. Yeah, Pelican are still heavy as hell, but even when they are plowing out their most devestating sludgy riffage, it's still uplifting and exuberant. City's songs are way shorter this time around too, with the title track being the longest at 7 minutes...they've managed to make their winding symphonic riff workouts more compact, while still delivering engaging, intricate tunes. This is already in the running for one of our favorite albums of the year. Anyone into melodic, weighty indie metal like Torche, Jesu, Floor (and yes, Isis too...) needs this album immediately! The artwork is amazing as well, and the 6-panel digipack that the disc comes in looks spectacular, with lots of abstract layers, spot varnish printing, and black-on-black ink...stunning! Highly recommended.

MP3 SAMPLE: "City Of Echoes" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Lost In The Headlights" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Spaceship Broken - Parts Needed" (excerpt)

PELICAN s/t CD $11.98 Hydra Head

The Hydra Head re-release of PELICAN’s thirty-minute, four song demo EP that the band originally had self-released. These early tracks are more loosely based in the tectonic, guitar-heavy drones of EARTH and MOGWAI, but the immense panoramas that the band would explore with Australasia and Fire In Our Throats are definitely forshadowed here. Doomy, droney, metallic heaviness heaves alongside melodic post-rock moves and cool rhythmic interplay. Epic, heavy, LOUD…slinging out trance inducing cyclic riffs and melancholy melodies. Highly recommended to sludge dogs into the sounds of TARANTULA HAWK, 5IVE, HARVEY MILK, and ISIS.

PELICAN March Into The Sea CD $9.98 Hydra Head

A two-song "single"/Ep in preparation for the new full length coming this summer from Pelican! Pretty mighty at just over 30 minutes, this disc features the full,unedited version of "March Into The Sea", a 20 minute epic with beautiful and massive instrumental indie metal that starts out with a churning maelstrom of thunderous guitars and rolling drums, giving way to Mogwai -esque post-rockisms building to an explosion of distortion. The second half of the song features sad, heavily strummed acoustic guitars and piano and flute, dissolving into a wash of placid drones. This is followed by Justin Broadrick's remix of "Angel Tears" from Pelican's Australasia, where he turns the already quite beautiful song into an even more sky-reaching epic, with angelic guitar tones stretched and processed into pure shoegaze bliss, the main riff repeating ad infinitum, as massive layers of chiming distortion, melodic drones and cosmic feedback swirl around, ending in rhythmic beat-driven synth-bliss. Wow. WOW. Really fucking beautiful. Like The Cure's Disintegration as played by a crushingly heavy sludge-metal band. This EP is essential just for the remix track, let alone the new song. It's a must-get for fans of the heavy melodic indie-metal crunch.

PELICAN The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw CD $13.98 Hydrahead

Here's the mucho anticipated new full length from Chicago instrumental post-rock chuggers PELICAN! Fire is more expansive and more melodic than Australasia, actually poppy in many spots, but with new levels of complexity and labyrinthine songwriting that have PELICAN further developing their post-rock/powerdronemetal plateaus. The band has really nailed their heavy layering of melody and riffing and dynamics on this album. Opener "Last Day Of Winter" is slow burning and moody, the building of a coming storm. The untitled fourth song is all pastoral acoustic strum and arpeggios, swimming in pools of crackling glitch static. The edited "March Into The Sea" (the full version of this song is available on the CDEP of the same name elsewhere here in the webstore) gets heavy with some fast, furious, almost thrashy metallic power, with surging peaks of majestic riffage. Totally mesmerizing. And like we said, there are some straight up poppy hooks all throughout Fire, super sweet indie rock melodies and Codeine-esque glacial strum that are immensely catchy. A juggernaut of earth shaking melodic riffage. Great stuff. The packaging for Fire is just as great, with a translucent vellum cover on the booklet and traycard that create a smokey, cloudy visual effect, with neat interior artwork from Aaron Turner (Isis/Hydrahead). Definitely recommended to fans of cerebral heavy music like Floor,Isis,Red Sparowes,and Jesu, as well as anyone into the majestic instrumental rock of Kinski.

PELICAN The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw 2xLP BLACK VINYL $23.98 Hydra Head
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Old-school style heavyweight gatefold jacket printed on reflective metallic stock. Double vinyl LP on BLACK VINYL, on 180 gram vinyl with full color labels. Each record is in a heavyweight 4 color inner-sleeve. This is an exquisite vinyl edition of Pelican's latest full length.
Here's the mucho anticipated new full length from Chicago instrumental post-rock chuggers PELICAN! Fire is more expansive and more melodic than Australasia, actually poppy in many spots, but with new levels of complexity and labyrinthine songwriting that have PELICAN further developing their post-rock/powerdronemetal plateaus. The band has really nailed their heavy layering of melody and riffing and dynamics on this album. Opener "Last Day Of Winter" is slow burning and moody, the building of a coming storm. The untitled fourth song is all pastoral acoustic strum and arpeggios, swimming in pools of crackling glitch static. The edited "March Into The Sea" (the full version of this song is available on the CDEP of the same name elsewhere here in the webstore) gets heavy with some fast, furious, almost thrashy metallic power, with surging peaks of majestic riffage. Totally mesmerizing. And like we said, there are some straight up poppy hooks all throughout Fire, super sweet indie rock melodies and Codeine-esque glacial strum that are immensely catchy. A juggernaut of earth shaking melodic riffage. Great stuff. The packaging for Fire is just as great, with a translucent vellum cover on the booklet and traycard that create a smokey, cloudy visual effect, with neat interior artwork from Aaron Turner (Isis/Hydrahead). Definitely recommended to fans of cerebral heavy music like Floor,Isis,Red Sparowes,and Jesu, as well as anyone into the majestic instrumental rock of Kinski. Pricey, but also bear in mind that the listed price includes Priority/Airmail shipping, and this is a pretty weighty package.

PELT Heraldic Beasts 2xLP $23.98 Eclipse

Pelt has become reknowned over the past few years for their largely acoustic, neo-Appalachian/American Primitive drone-psych sounds, and the presence of contempo Fahey-channeler Jack Rose has further endeared them to drone/folk/psych circles. Before their jump to acoustic material, though, these guys forged some seriously h e a v y glacial ragas and eternal amp-drone epics. The massive Heraldic Beasts deluxe double album set is of particular interest to us at Crucial Blast HQ, as it compiles a series of live movements captured between the years 1998 and 2002; portions of these recordings had been previously released on limited edition cd-r via the Klang imprint, or have appeared on past compilations. This is the era of Pelt when the group erected some of the heaviest slabs of free-floating power drone this side of Skullflower, Total, Sunn O))), Earth, and other conjurers of super-heavy unanchored amplifier mantra.
The first record in the set is the heaviest, and features earlier tracks of monolithic drones and deep, subterranean gravity invoked by the band's wall of guitar, hurdy gurdy, "drone fiddle", and organ. Huge, scraping dronescapes swell like the amplified rumbling of some deep-earth orchestra tuning up in the blackness, coalescing into dark, corroded melodic figures that gradually morp into a sort of demolished, crushing Dead C/Skullflower free-drone amplifier dirge that smolders across the A-side. The flip continues with the rivers of blackened amp hum flowing forth, all heavy free-floating feedback and the scraped, scrabbling of rusted guitar strings, surging into a mighty speaker-melting buzzsaw raga that revolves in a storm of abused guitars and mangled fiddle; just as heavy and meditative as early Earth jams. Awesome.
The second record scales back a little on the amplifier roar, and showcases more recent material that was recorded in Houston, TX and Blacksburg, VA, with a lineup of esraj, tanpura, chord organ and oscillator conjuring huge swirling drones that blend together Eastern ragas, Western folk laments, and the immolating purr of unchained feedback. The last side however once again blossoms into a massive dronefield of transcendental feedback-drift erupting into harsh blasts of corroded noise and speaker grit, molten guitar noise crafted into monstrous blissed out hymns. 100% zoned-out drone heaviness.
The packaging for this 2xLP edition is absolutely stunning, as well, with the two super thick vinyl slabs housed in a heavy, sturdy full-color gatefold jacket with gorgeous artwork and absolutely zero text. Recommended.

PENANCE The Road Revisited CD $11.98 Psychedoomelic

Penance's The Road Revisited is the original version of The Road Less Travelled, released on Lee Dorian's Rise Above Records in the early 90's. I don't know why the album was re-recorded, as this version has solid production and sounds great. But this original studio recording was shelved until Hegedus Mark at Psychedoomelic Records unearthed it for this release. Penance has always been one of the better known US doom metal bands, and this album has all of the soaring,morose melodies and heavy,heavy post-Sabbath riffs that these guys played to perfection. This re-issue was assembled by drummer Mike Smail, who also played in Dream Death (the hardcore sludge/doom metal precursor to Penance, whose CD we also just added to the store) as well as currently banging skins in Internal Void and Pentagram right here in Maryland. Lovers of classic doom metal (Cathedral, Pentagram, The Obsessed, etc.) , this is right up your alley. CD booklet has 16 pages of lyrics and photos.

PENGO Alchemy & Bullshit 2xCD-R $11.98 Carbon

Excellent private press double CD-R set from Rochester, NY's PENGO that documents their transformation from HEAVY spazz-noise trio to plane-shifting free/psych/drone/rite rock quartet. The recordings range from the 2001 Phi-Tour series that has the band "covering" Blue Oyster Cult, Thin Lizzy, Negative Approach and Organization jams, 2002 live and "studio" pieces (including a show with guests Dave Cross of Coffee, Ed Wilcox of Temple Bon Matin and Charles Leport of Hinkley/Finkbeiner/etc, that devolves into killer Beefheartian craze), thru pounding live 2003/2004 sets of tribal clatter and some freaking menacing drone rites. At their most slammin', these guys whip up a storm of heavy HARRY PUSSY style guitar damage, manic sax splat, fog-blowing organ drones, and seriously disturbing electronic improv that shifts you to another plane. Awesome. Very cool packaging, 2 black-bottom cdrs with a glossy print insert, sealed in a 6"x8" silkscreened and spray painted chipboard mailer.

P.FX 68 Fiction Alternative CD $10.98 Kubernoise

We picked up a handful of copies of this out-of-print CD from French Industrial/gabba/death industrial outfit P.FX 68 alongside the latest batch of Necrocosm releases that we have listed this week (Diapsiquir's Virus S.T.N. and DARVULIA L'Alliance des Venins). While P.FX 68 doesn't remotely sound like the damaged, hateful black metal that Necrocosm usually traffics in, this disc does share a similiar grim electronic delirium as Diapsiquir, so it makes sense that Necrocosm is now handling this release after the original label, Kubernoise, went belly up. P.FX 68 is a newish project from ex-personnel of the long running French electro-punk band Punish Yourself, and their Fiction Alternative is a 70 minute orgy of disruptive heavy electronica that stylistically shifts between gabberesque hardcore, grinding dancefloor Industrial, nightmarish ambient soundscapes and mechanical field recoridngs, and even a few nods to classic death industrial. The disc is driven by an effective combination of both organic & electronic percussion, with lots of glitchiness and nonsequitorial samples that add further layers of technological disorientation to the tracks. Sort of like a brutal, nihilistic hybrid of Skinny Puppy and tech step/gabba experimentation, scraped from the underbelly of the French underground, and festooned in day-glo hardcore techno imagery.

PHARAOH OVERLORD 3 CD $15.98 Riot Season
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

The minimalist stoner-psych offshoot of legendary Finnish hypno-rockers CIRCLE, PHARAOH OVERLORD's 3 features members of CIRCLE applying their hypnotic Krautrock-inspired trance magic to a suite of smoke wreathed psychedelic hard rock riffage. The music is purely instrumental as the trio hones in on a series of locked-in rhythmic patterns that invoke the likes of CAN and NEU!, tightly wound motorik beats pulsating over endlessly looped 70's psych guitar riffs and peals of scuzzy feedback that draw from a druggy vibe reminiscent of BLACK SABBATH, KING CRIMSON, and 70's funk fused to vintage Kraut-prog. The entire album is set to "cruise", and there is little in the way of starting or ending points...this is all about riding on hazy momentum and deep grooves. The only real shift in atmosphere occurs halfway through, when the OVERLORD suddenly drop into "Autobahn", a crushing feedback meltdown that sounds like early EARTH crashing the party. Not as heavy as previous releases, this is still recommended to CIRCLE fans and enthusiasts of trance inducing, Krautrock inspired riffage.

PHARAOH OVERLORD 4 CD $15.98 Ektro
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

The fourth (obviously) album from Finnish hypno-metal masters (and Circle side-project) Pharaoh Overlord! Their previous albums were all big faves around Crucial Blast, each one channeling ultra-repetitive, minimalist Kyuss stoner rock riffs through classic krautrock propulsion, similiar in spirit to Circle, but more overtly in servitude to the power of 70's hard rock. Heavy, killer stuff, each album with it's own unique vibe but all of them loaded with a feast of mind wiping cyclical riffage. But now, on #4, the Overlord has now totally embraced the power of high energy 80's metal riffage, evolving into some kid of weird, creepy Judas Priest/early speed metal/Krautrock hybrid, with ripping 80's retro-metal riffs locked in to trance inducing, tick-tock repetition, and amazing old-school metal vocals! There are lots of weird guitar sounds and psychedelic noises mixed in as well, and some of the songs dissipate into spacey psychedelic ambience, but this is ultimately a massive feast of hypnotic riffage with songs stretching out to 6-8 minute in length while Pharaoh Overlord ride their killer riffs to to transcendental bliss. Imagine Can and Neu combined with Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. It's an amazing, ultra rocking album that definitely lives up to the "New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal" slogan emlazoned across the back of the CD case! Highly recommended !!!

PHILLIPS, DAVE A Collection Of Curses CD $13.98 Blossoming Noise

More than likely, most Crucial Blast regulars will recognize Dave Phillips as one of the co-founders of seminal Swiss noisegrinders Fear Of God. After Fear Of God broke up in 1988, though, Phillips has also gone on to work in a variety of extreme noise/sound/performance art groups leading all the way up through to the present day. In 1991, Phillips formed the group PK with ex-Fear Of God guitarist Reto "Tschösi" Kühne and Roger Drein, a project that staged ritualistic performances featuring all-improvised sounds; and around the same time, he joined the ranks of the infamous Schimpfluch-Gruppe collective, the Swiss group dedicated to continuing the extreme aesthetics of the Viennese Actionists of the 1960's. Later on would join Schimpfluch-Gruppe's Joke Lanz in his other project, the gibbering Musique Concrete monstrosity Sudden Infant. As a sort of primer to Dave Phillip's jarring sound experiments, A Collection Of Curses goes all the way back to 1995 and compiles an assortment of out-of-print and unreleased material from his long running adventures with field recordings, scrambled grind-noise, transgressive collages of bodily function sounds, and harsh electronic noise, with tracks culled from his Psychic Rally, Sudden Infant, and solo recordings. The disc, housed in a sleek digipack, is loaded down with all kinds of incredible soundfields that are clearly assembled with a meticulous attention to detail, as celebratory gurgling noises, pig squeals, and gastrointestinal eruptions are interjected with outbreaks of brutal electronic noise and vocalized death screams. The last nine or so tracks is where this really gets crushing: using recorded material sourced from Fear Of God tracks, Phillips mutates and warps the original sounds into an awesome display of pyrotechnic, disc-skipping glitch grindcore that crushed me!

PIG DESTROYER Painter Of Dead Girls CD $11.98 Robotic Empire

This disc features older non-album songs from Virginia's Pig Destroyer collected together for the first time. A blazing collection of out-of-print material from the split EPs with Gnob and Benumb, Painter Of Dead Girls also has demented covers of "Fuck You Up And get High" by The Dwarves, The Stooges' "Down On The Street", and Helmet's "In The Meantime". This is some of the heaviest, most stylish grindcore happening right now...guitarist Scott Hull's awesome brutal metal riffage overlays ridiculously intricate drumming and vocalist J.R. Hayes manic, seething screams. It's hard to believe that this is merely a three peice with no bass player. Crushing, complex, spastic grindcore, serving up 17 tracks in 20 minutes. Includes extra CD-ROM material with three live videos filmed at CBGB's in NYC in 2000, which is pretty amazing footage of the band grinding away while Hayes screams sans microphone and manages to be heard over the music. Excellent cover art from Chris Taylor of Page 99.

PINEBENDER The High Price Of Living Too Long With A Single Dream CD $13.98 Lovitt

We are huge fans of Codeine, and have been ever since we first heard their Barely Real EP. Codeine were masters of taking clean, undistorted indie-pop guitars and riffs and really minimal drumming and making their songs sound so massively heavy by playing their songs really slow, but at the same time having these sad, very catchy melodies and lyrics that we would be unable to get out of our head for weeks. If you go back and check out Barely Real, The White Birch, or Frigid Stars, we're convinced you'll see the early roots of what melodic-but-crushing bands like Isis, Floor / Torche, and especially Jesu are doing now.
Well, in Crucial Blast's ongoing quest to find the heaviest indie rock out there, we recently stumbled across this Chicago band called Pinebender , who sound A LOT like Codeine. But much, MUCH louder, and definitely crushing. Yes! They take the glacially slow indie-pop and plaintive singing of Codeine and pile on tons of distortion and crunchy guitars and soaring choruses, like if Codeine had been re-configured as a Hydra Head band. It's so perfect and so heavy. Not "Doom Metal" heavy, sure, but I can't imagine anyone that likes the newer Isis stuff, or Floor, or Pelican or Jesu for that matter, not digging this. This came out on the small DC area indie Lovitt Records, which is why it may have gone under the radar of anyone interested in crushing indie-pop/heavy shoegaze/etc, etc, as Lovitt tends to put out "lighter" emo stuff, but for anyone into the "heavy indie rock" of the aforementioned bands, this is a must get!

PINEBENDER Working Nine To Wolf CD $13.98 Lovitt

Working Nine To Wolf is Pinebender's fourth album, back with an even catchier, heavier collection of songs that make this my first fave album of 2007. I gush perpetually in these pages of my love for all things metallic indie-rock, particularly the kind that sounds freshly transplanted from the guitar-heavy crunch of the early 90's, and retrofitted with iron-clad metal distortion, morphin' into MASSIVE CRUSHING POP, and Pinebender have totally nailed that gooey, sugary greatness with this hour-long trip through 8 emotive sludge anthems. I just checked out their Myspace page, and the first four bands listed under their influences are Chavez, Dinosaur Jr, Black Sabbath, and Superchunk; those coordinates should give you an idea of what these guys are about: massive, sludgy, guitar-heavy indie rock with knockout hooks. Their last album, the absolutely terrific The High Price Of Living Too Long With A Single Dream from a few years ago (which I still think is one of the heaviest, finest indie rock albums ever) was a perfect combination of Codeine's glacial indie rock and HUGE crunchy guitars and amazing emotional melodies, pretty indie rock riffs turned into super distorted slabs of pounding metallic sludge, the band's baritone guitar taking the place of bass and making the tunes that much crunchier. With Working Nine To Wolf, though, the trio sounds even huger and heavier...the album opens with the fourteen minute 'Parade Of Horribles', a glacial trudge through slabular moody pop, like a dirge metal Low hooking up with Harvey Milk with J Mascis on guitar, perfectly connected jangly verses exploding into syrupy expressive wah-drenched guitar solos and heavy sludgy riffing arising halfway through, accompanied by strains of feedback and amp noise as the song winds it's way through to an uplifting coda. "She Destroys The Light" starts off spare and slow like an escapee from Codiene's Barely Real, and then the distortion on the guitars piles in, the pace quickens, and an upbeat sludgepop hook suddenly becomes accompanied by singsong gang harmonies, like Weezer copping some moves from Floor's self-titled album, and it's stupid catchy. The rest of the album is just as awesome and infectious, songs like 'Fifth And Last' and the GBV-esque 'Decide On The Double Cross' combining ridiculously catchy pop with chunky, sludgy riffage low-gliding over lumbering slomo drumming, and so much of the guitar playing really evokes that Mascis style of soaring melodic mightiness. Being on a label that's not really identified with heavy music at all, I think that Pinebender are overlooked by alot of people that would otherwise fall completely in love with their indie-guitar-rock gone distorto power, Weezer-meets-Harvey Milk-meets-Melvins-meets Dino Jr pop crush bliss, but I'm here to tell ya. This album has some of the best pop songs of recent memory, and sits right next to Harvey Milk's Special Wishes as a highly recommended masterwork of indie heaviosity.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Decide On The Double Cross" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "She Destroys The Night" (excerpt)

PISSED JEANS Shallow CD $13.98 Parts Unknown

These ur-core cretins somehow manage to construct some of the most mangled dirge punk beatings my canals have received since the first time I was headfucked by Brainbomb's Obey! Brutally heavy and mega fuckin damaged, Pissed Jeans bang out 8 jams of burly monochord caveman core that manifests the sweatiest, most plastered Black Flag freakouts via the aforementioned Brainbombs sludgy hate attack gone full on rockin' hardcore. It's like the second coming of fuckin' Flipper, I say. Feedback splattered fractured riffs and zonked Greg Ginn-worthy guitar spasms hook up with and menacing basslines to underscore rambling/ranting tales of self disgust, body hate, and antisocial vibes delivered with a guy that kicks it like John Brannon (Negative Approach) on acid. Totally mangy, burly psychedelic noise-punk meltdown colliding with heartstring tugging blues piano balladry and cosmic freeform drone core rituals. Now signed to Sub Pop (!!!), grab this CD while you can to get a taste of the filth. Packaged in a digipack case. Fucking AWESOME.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Closet Marine" (excerpt)

PLANES MISTAKEN FOR STARS Mercy CD $13.98 Abacus

I first experienced Planes through their last album, Up In Them Guts, right around the same time that I saw 'em open for High On Fire in Baltimore when they toured with 'em about 2 years ago. Planes were a band that I had heard about for years, had always written them off as a generic screamy HC band based on what little I had read about them, and never bothered to check them out. Granted, their older stuff is a bit different from what they are doing now, but the last two albums from Planes are simply amazing - they've turned into a heavy, metallic indie-rock outfit with a super gritty, emotional edge, one that gets them compared pretty frequently to one of my all-time favorite bands, the Afghan Whigs! Apparently Planes Mistaken For Stars are really influenced by Afghan Whigs, and you can hear it in the brutaly confessional, self-immolating lyrics, epic guitar hooks, and singer Gared O'Donnell's gnarly-as-fuck vocal rasp that sounds like what Greg Dulli mighta sounded like if the dude has completely wrecked his vocal chords on cheap whiskey, sword-swallowing, and a 6-pack-a-day cig habit. Mercy is the band's sixth album and it's a fuckin' ripper, it totally takes me back to the early 90's when indie rock bands wielded loud guitars and burly riffs, but the level of aggression and heaviness applied here also has as much to do with High On Fire's sludgy metal as it does with the golden era of Sub Pop and Matador. Crushing and catchy like plague, greasy and naked in their release of personal demons, and laced with some awesome twangy countryisms and majestic melodic parts, this is an amazing album, highly recommended, and if we weren't listing it so damn late, would be one of our contenders for album of the year!! Comes in a bautiful full clor digipack with creepy cover art from Chris Taylor of Page 99 (Pig Destroyer, Darkest Hour, etc.)

MP3 SAMPLE: "One Fucked Pony" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Widow - A Love Song " (excerpt)

PLANES MISTAKEN FOR STARS Up In Them Guts CD $13.98 No Idea

What we have with Up In Them Guts is, quite honestly, a masterpiece of vicious, gnarly indie rock with a rough metallic edge that really sets them apart from everything else out there. Catchy as hell, with inventive song structures, guitar interplay that borders on prog at times, brooding acoustic numbers, and soaring melodies, but delivered by a totally crusty attack, as if Tragedy or His Hero Is Gone were covering CELL's dark and noisy guitar pop (anybody remember Cell? Check em out...great stuff, especially their Slo Blo album on Ecstatic Peace...) , with torn-throat vocals that carry a tune despite their brutal raggedness. This album is tremendous from start to finish, with epic hooks that will stick with you long after the album is done spinning. Highly recommended.

PLASTIC CRIMEWAVE SOUND No Wonderland 2xLP $22.98 Eclipse

An epic, limited edition double slab set of supremely dystopian space-punk ugh from Chicago's Plastic Crimewave Sound, dressed up in a killer, heavy-stock, full color gatefold sleeve that's all scrawled with that great, eye-burning Galactic Zoo artwork from Plastic Crimewave himself, a.k.a. Steve Krakow. These two LPs contain a massive dose of tripped out, droney, spacey psychedelic dirge, weaving huge scorching hypno-riffs and repeato rhythms cloaked in all kinds of wah fuzz , feedback, and cosmic effects, like some star-tripping, bong-wielding hybrid of vintage Hawkwind and Loop, heavy and super hypnotic, the propulsive riffage winding it's way through fields of sitar and shrieking vocals, blissed folk and free noise meltdown, bells and harp, string sections and washboard, while doomy voices orate tales of grim apocalyptic horror and paranoid industrial fallout. It's a conceptual hypno-psych-rock crusher, one of my fave platters from the Eclipse camp ever, with guest appearances from Michael Yonkers, Devendra Banhart, Josephine Foster, Fursaxa, Spires that in the Sunset Rise, Chris Connelly, and more. Highly recommended.

PORTAL Seepia CD $13.98 Profound Lore

This album blew alot of minds when it was reissued through Profound Lore last year. If you've been paying attention to their output lately, Profound Lore has been consistently releasing some of the most exciting, surrealistic death and black metal in existence, and they've been flooring us with every single release we've gotten in from them. This beautiful reissue of Portal's Seepia is one of the first releases we heard from Profound Lore, and it's taken us awhile to finally list this in the Crucial Blast store, but if you're a fan of truly demented, mindbending death metal and you haven't pick up this disc yet, you seriously need to check this out immediately! Seepia had been out of print for awhile, but now it's presented in a beautiful, eerie looking 4-panel gatefold jacket with spot-varnish printing on the cover, and comes with a full color insert booklet. The closest reference point for Portal would probably be the avant-angularity of Gorgut's legendary Obscura album, but this is even more fucked up, if you can believe it...taking their brutal death metal riffs and blastbeat-heavy drums and bestial vocals and contorts the assault into a hyper chaotic blizzard of twisted, tangled arrangements and trance inducing riffs and stuttering rhythms, infested with amazingly fucked up sounding lead guitars that squiggle and shred all over the place. The music is ferociously frenetic and dense, every possible area of sound filled with warped guitars and impossibly complex drumming figures and horrific howling feedback. Psychotic, psychedelic death metal, performed by faceless entities in nighmarishly exaggerated black cloaks, and creating a effectively disorientating effect comparable to sitting in between multiple stereos playing an assortment of skipping Beherit, Mayhem, Incantation, and Arkon Infaustus CDs all at the same time. Despite the complete lack of structure, Portal summon up a dense, hypnotic storm of terrifying death metal abstraction that sounds like a Lovecraftian drug nightmare coalescing into flesh. Highly recommended!

MP3 SAMPLE: "Vessel Of Balon" (excerpt)

PROCER VENEFICUS Astral Birth CD-R $9.98 God Is Myth
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

More excellent blackened strangeness from the God Is Myth label, who have also graced us with the black metal/shoegaze of Caina, the newest album of Dead Raven Choir's folk/country/drone/black metal rasp, and the charred, blurry buzz of Sapthuran. All of which conjure strange, individualistic expressions of cosmic dread that travel the twilight roads of post-black metal buzz. As is the case with Procer Veneficus, whose limited edition CD-R Astral Birth is one of my favorite releases on the label so far, a three-track, 26 minute suite of abstract, hypnotic black metal/grim droneology. The disc opens with "Astral Birth", a creepy industrial dronescape of deep, cavernous thrum and chilly metallic ambience, drifting glacially through distant depths and electrically charged drones, very eerie and nocturnal sounding. Think Maeror Tri, Lustmord, Yen Pox, the ritualistic cave drones of the Aural Hypnox label, etc. Excellent atmospheric drift. And then "Starchamber Heart" fades in after an extended silence, a frozen blast of minimalist black metal riffage and distant, buried blastbeats, a single droning riff cycling over and over again into infinity over a blurred metronomic pulse, arcing cosmic blackthrash like a Nachtmystium riff stuck in a locked vinyl groove, while the harmonic ringing of the guitars pile on top of each other into dense drones a la Band Of Susans. It's an amazing piece of transformative black metal as drone rock, stretching out over 11 minutes in length, totally captivating as that epic riff flows in and out of near-silence. The last song, "One Million Rivers Pulsing With Whitefire", closes the disc with another wash of subterranean ambient drones, dark and ominous as distant industrial sounds are blurred by the mass of sheer blackness, the clanging of metal obscured by night and electrical currents. Recommended for those into the dreamlike black metal abstraction of Velvet Cacoon. Released in an edition of 200 copies in a handassembled black digipack, with professionally printed full color booklet and full color CD face. Already sold out at the source.

PROFANATICA The Enemy Of Virtue CD $11.98 Invocation Records

There have apparently been a couple of different collections of early material released from this old school USBM outfit, this being one of the latest. Issued through the Invocation Records imprint and then picked up by Battle Kommand when Blake at BK assimiliated the Invocation catalog into his label, The Enemy Of Virtue is a single disc collection of apparently all of the studio recordings from the black cult Profanatica, most of which are highly difficult, if not utterly impossible, to find. The band was formed by members of the original lineup of death metallers Incantation and future members of cult black-noise freakazoids Havohej, and although they never really broke out of the obscurity of the early 90's US black metal/satanic noise cassette underground, Profanatica were still a power to behold, crafting anti-Xtian lyrics and imagery that were about as over the top and ridiculously sacriligious as it gets...now, we're not doubting Profanatica's dedication one bit, but their imagery was so completely, hysterically over the top and blasphemous that it almost defies belief. Add to that the band's penchant for promo photo shoots that feature the members of Profanatica posing completely naked out in the woods, clad only in corpse paint, and their use of horrifically mindbending artwork, and you get a serious dose of noxious demonic basement blast straight out of the pit. Spewing an ultra-noisy, blasphemous brand of blackened death influenced by Hellhammer, Bathory, Necrovore, and Sarcofago, most of their recorded material is so lo-fi and mangy that it becomes an awesome, thrashing blot of psychedelic satanic skuzz and primitive blastbeat drumming, punctured by slow sludgy riffs, weird dark-ambient passages, gregorian chants, and the craziest fucking speedblast shredding this side of Haunting The Chapel screaming out of the filth...at some points, the music becomes so blown out and gnarly that it turns into full on blasts of septic junknoise. Awesome. And the gross, gutteral vocals are incomprehensible smears of raspy gurgling that stick to the riffs like gobs of rotten meat. Truly evil and diseased black metal atavism. This disc collects the band's 1990 Putrescence Of... demo tape, the As Tears Of Blood Stain... 7" EP, their tracks from the split with Masacre, the Broken Throne demo, and several other EPs and tapes. Comes in a digipack case with a 12-page booklet filled with the band's awesomely nasty slaytanic artwork, a history of the band, and a detailed tracklisting.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Final Hour Of Christ" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Weeping In Heaven" (excerpt)

PROFESSOR Academizer 3" CD $7.98 Tumult

3" CD reissue of the notoriously cult lost 7" from the enigmatic Euro grind band known as Professor. The original 7" came out way back in 1993 on Epistrophy but has long been out of print, and featured the only four songs that Professor ever recorded...citing their inspiration as "Repulsion, Carcass, Terrorizer. No other influences", Professor's Academizer EP is a brutal, noisy blast of fetid grindcore, seemingly obsessed with all things academia - indeed, the four tracks on this EP are "Professor", "Immatriculation", "Into The Auditorium", and "Numerus Clausus". What these scholars of bestial blast bestow upon your fragile canals is, however, a relentlessly crushing jet-engine roar of pulverizing blown-out riffage spawned from the muck of primo Earache grindcore but glazed in so much amp hiss that the guitars sound like they are coated in scum, ridiculous mach-ten blastbeats a la Fear Of God racing by at inhuman tempos, occasionally downshifting into punky circle pit parts that drill right through my skull. The vocals are righteously fucked up, a litany of blackened gorilla grunts delivered at the other end of a reverb chamber. The last two tracks deliver some of the craziest stop-start grind action I have ever heard, and I'll be damned if the EP closer "Numerus Clausus" isn't one of the goofiest, heaviest, sickest grind jams EVER, even with the blink-and-ya-miss-'em funk guitars and the quick nod to Slayer's "South Of Heaven" that they toss in there. Crucial !!! Tumult Records overlord Andee counted himself among the small but diehard following that this German band created, and he graciously brought this ripper back to the surface with this 3" CD reissue, with the original EP sleeve art reproduced on the 4-panel booklet, the whole shebang packaged inside of a miniature jewel case.
MP3 SAMPLE: "Immatriculation" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Numerus Clausus" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Professor" (excerpt)

PRURIENT The Barons Chamber CD $12.98 Nihilist

This is quite possibly the heaviest emission ever from Prurient, a single 30 minute piece that edits together recordings from 1999 through 2003 into a monstrous death wave of crushing electronic distortion, brutal riff-loops, overmodulated demonic screams, and ear-destroying feedback designs. The Barons Chamber opens with jarring blasts of speaker squeal and harsh feedback tones that recalls the violent amplifier attacks on Prurient's Black Vase and Fossil albums; but around 4 minutes into the track, a crushing pulse loop appears suddenly, grinding over and over, almost like the heaviest possible Melvins riff pushed way into the red, ultra-distorted and crumbling apart as it bulldozes over snatches of easy listening string sections and rumbling bass. Later, that loop/riff disappears and gives way to high-velocity blasts of microphone destruction and white noise only to reveal strains of "Greensleeves" beneath the murk. The remainder of The Baron's Chamber continues on this hellish ascension through black stormclouds of rumbling, threatening distortion, satanic speech rendered incomprehensible through a wall of grit and reverb, and inner-ear destroying feedback that culminates in an epic climax of Whitehouse-level overmodulated powerdrone. B R U T A L. The dreamlike lyrics are culled from Jean Feraca's Crossing The Great Divide, and Prurient's Dominick Fernow encases the recording in a series of awesome bondage/death/necro scrawl. Absolutely skull crushing, and highly recommended to devotees of extremely heavy noise.

MP3 SAMPLE: "The Baron's Chamber" (excerpt)

PRURIENT Church Of Ammunition 7" EP $5.98 Troubleman Unlimited

Church Of Ammunition came out at the end of 2005 in a limited edition of 500, but I finally just picked up a couple from Troubleman since we can't get enough of Prurient out here. Sheathed in a black and red sleeve covered in quasi-religious geometric artwork, this EP contains two exclusive tracks: "Asphalt Lilacs", a piercing confessional that capture's Prurient's Dom Fernow breathing seething existentialist/nihilist observations into a flailing mass of malfunctioning circuitry and throbbing feedback. The other side of the record is "Cement Lilies", an awesome, powerful hypermodulated distortion seizure, like two exploding amplifier stacks singing to each other before exploding into white fire. Crucial. And apparently totally out of print since we picked these up, so act fast.

PRURIENT Troubled Sleep CD $10.98 Truculent

Prurient's harrowing 2003 album Troubled Sleep is as punishing as anything from the man's repertoire. The man, of course, being Dominck Fernow, the mind behind Prurient as well as the Hospital Productions label, and here he weaves a nightmarish narrative of domestic discord and disenchantment, night terrors, and deeply personal dread, inspired by and formed from poet Jean Feraca's Crossing The Great Divide. Like other Prurient recordings from the same time period, Troubled Sleep is a series of brutally violent and strangled blasts of focused feedback that collide with obliterated fragments of classical music and harsh, sinister beds of rusted ambient distortion, which form a stalking ground for Fernow's blasted recitations of Feraca's poetry, his vocals becoming fried and distorted to the point of total abstraction by the album's end. The tension on this disc is tactile and disquieting; this isn't one for casual listening as background noise. No, you've got to sit back and let Troubled Sleep wash over you, and travel with the feedback and grime and grit into the deep open sores of the psyche that Fernow probes and explores. Way beyond typical Power Electronics and death industrial thrills, this is really intense, dark stuff, with a production style that allows each jagged blade of feedback to slice through your skull without resistance. Released in a limited edition of 1,000, we've got this back in stock (after being unavailable for a while), packaged in a jewel case with full color packaging that includes actual text/poetry from Feraca's book.

PRURIENT Recycled Music Series CASSETTE $4.98 RRRecords

Along with the Caroliner and Pain Jerk Recycled Series cassettes that we just got in this week, there's also this entry in the series from Prurient that actually ranks up there with some of our favorite recorded material of Dominick Fernow's brute-electronics project. These recordings date back to around 2003 or thereabouts, and the combination of super crushing overmodulated sinewaves and meaty bursts of metallic distortion feels like these two untitled sides mighta come from the same sessions that produced Prurient's Baron's Chamber album. Like with that disc, blasts of buzzsaw distortion churn off of this tape so heavy and massive that they might have started off as doom metal riffs pushed so far off into the red that they've become huge buzzing drones, devoid of rhythm but foating malevolently through a nightmarish necropolis, around which Fernow wraps chopped-up barbed-wire lines of his signature high-pitched feedback and his harsh, feral screams. There's sections of this tape that border on a total harsh noise/death metal vibe. Awesome, murderous electronic crush. Like all of the tapes in RRRecords' Recycled Music Series, both the tape and insert have been produced using old commercial cassettes that have been partially covered in duct tape and hand-scrawled with the artists name and the series title. Definitely check this out if you're into Prurient's violent hardcore electronics.

PRURIENT Fossil CD $11.98 Truculent

Dominick Fernow , a.k.a. PRURIENT , completely fucking torches the "noise" idiom with this 2004 full length. Again using the Persian love poems of Rumi as well as the writings of Jean Feraca, Dominick also enlists the talents of Jeff Plummer ( IMMACULATE GROTESQUE ), Ben Barnett ( DROPDEAD ), Emily Salvatierra ( FOOTBALL RABBIT ), among others, to create this full length, live-recorded album that took over a year to assemble, record, and edit. This is a devastating, inhuman recording, unleashing incredibly painful feedback frequencies amongst the recordings of room ambience, of unidentifiable debris being destroyed, and battling the monstrous ,beyond-distorted vocals of Fernow as he recites lines like "whoever's not killed for love is dead meat...". There are some incredibly beautiful moments of glistening electronic ambience that shoot through the chaos, but they are always summarily destroyed by the fucking flesh-destroying feedback that eventually comes screaming out of the speaker. Fossil is a masterpiece of aural nihilism, the next step in self-immolating sonic horror beyond SWANS' "Time Is Money (Bastard)". Even at super low volume, Fossil is absolutely incendiary.

PSYCHIC PARAMOUNT, THE Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural CD $13.98 No Quarter

I'm finally listing the CD version of Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural here at Crucial Blast since we've just gotten in the brand spankin' new limited-edition LP release of the album - and no matter what format you normally wrap yer skull around, this album is an ESSENTIAL pick-up, one of the few true noise-rock masterpeices of the new century. The NYC-based power trio Psychic Paramount rose from the ashes of the obscure (yet godlike) Laddio Bolocko, and took the advanced ultradistorted post-rock/math rock moves of their previous outfit into even noisier, heavier realms. Crushingly heavy but not "metallic", Psychic Paramount burst onto the planet with a violently psychedelic brand of hypno-fuzzbomb rock sludge emitted at speaker-destroying levels of volume and distortion, and within their chaotic, buzzsaw blasts of corroded riffage are stashed mindmelting beautiful melodies, gorgeous streaking guitar lines that sear themselves into your brain. Like some unholy mix of Japanese distortion maniacs High Rise, Pink Floyd, Skullflower, and ultracrush dirge. "Megatherion" has one of the raddest song titles in the history of written music, and kicks the album off with an avalanche of ethereal backwards guitar sludge, layers upon layers of melted bliss heaviness flowing over sputtering drum patterns, and it's undiluted beauty through fleshrending distortion, like My Bloody Valentine caught in a wormhole. "Para5" and "Echoh Air" kick in like blownout Pink Floyd jams rendered in skull slicing crunch, whiplash guitar freakouts that KILL, and propulsive, explosive drumming. Then there's "X-Bisitations", where the drums all but disappear in an extended amplifier meltdown with waves of dissolving guitar grind and lovely guitar melodies washing over roaring speaker rumble a la Skullflower. And at the end comes the title track, where the band locks in on a pulsating delay-feast undulating upwards, a simple riff trapped in digital delay and other effects extending skyward and eventually blossoming into a bonecrushing dronerock power blast that drops into almost total silence right before everything gives out.
Psychic Paramount's in-the-red riffbliss takes the noise rock idiom to a whole 'nother level with their debut album, and it's one that we've gotta wholeheartedly recommend to fans of the heavy, ultraloud blown-out rock riffage and amp-destruction that we've ruined our lives with over here. Lots of tongues have been wagging lately about the "rebirth of noise rock", mine included, and this band (and album) is at the vanguard.

PSYCHIC PARAMOUNT Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural LP $14.98 No Quarter

No Quarter has now released a super-limited vinyl edition of Psychic Paramount's noise-rock masterpiece Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural!
This album is an ESSENTIAL pick-up, one of the few true noise-rock masterpeices of the new century. The NYC-based power trio Psychic Paramount rose from the ashes of the obscure (yet godlike) Laddio Bolocko, and took the advanced ultradistorted post-rock/math rock moves of their previous outfit into even noisier, heavier realms. Crushingly heavy but not "metallic", Psychic Paramount burst onto the planet with a violently psychedelic brand of hypno-fuzzbomb rock sludge emitted at speaker-destroying levels of volume and distortion, and within their chaotic, buzzsaw blasts of corroded riffage are stashed mindmelting beautiful melodies, gorgeous streaking guitar lines that sear themselves into your brain. Like some unholy mix of Japanese distortion maniacs High Rise, Pink Floyd, Skullflower, and ultracrush dirge. "Megatherion" has one of the raddest song titles in the history of written music, and kicks the album off with an avalanche of ethereal backwards guitar sludge, layers upon layers of melted bliss heaviness flowing over sputtering drum patterns, and it's undiluted beauty through fleshrending distortion, like My Bloody Valentine caught in a wormhole. "Para5" and "Echoh Air" kick in like blownout Pink Floyd jams rendered in skull slicing crunch, whiplash guitar freakouts that KILL, and propulsive, explosive drumming. Then there's "X-Bisitations", where the drums all but disappear in an extended amplifier meltdown with waves of dissolving guitar grind and lovely guitar melodies washing over roaring speaker rumble a la Skullflower. And at the end comes the title track, where the band locks in on a pulsating delay-feast undulating upwards, a simple riff trapped in digital delay and other effects extending skyward and eventually blossoming into a bonecrushing dronerock power blast that drops into almost total silence right before everything gives out.
Psychic Paramount's in-the-red riffbliss takes the noise rock idiom to a whole 'nother level with their debut album, and it's one that we've gotta wholeheartedly recommend to fans of the heavy, ultraloud blown-out rock riffage and amp-destruction that we've ruined our lives with over here. Lots of tongues have been wagging lately about the "rebirth of noise rock", mine included, and this band (and album) is at the vanguard.

PSYCHIC PARAMOUNT, THE Origins And Primitives Vol.1+2 2xCD $14.98 No Quarter

A double disc of odds n' ends that serves as a follow up/companion peice to 2005's amazing Gamelan Into The Mink Supernatural, Origins And Primitives Vol 1 + 2 features solo recordings from Psychic Paramount founder Drew St. Ivany that are more in the vein of spaced out guitar freakouts than the controlled chaos of their full band recordings; this is still going to be of extreme interest to those of you that have been as knocked out over The Psychic Paramount's super heavy kraut/post/noise rock as I have been, as well as fans of the immense Laddio Bolocko, out of which the seed of TPP first sprouted. Disc one contains seven peices of solo guitar work and organ/drums/guitar/tape recorder conglom which Drew recorded live to stereo cassette and four-track; the second disc is solely comprised of electric-acoustic guitar run through a loop pedla and effects that were recorded in France in 2002. Some of these tracks ("Echoh Air", "Microphone II") are like a mesmerizing mix of Pink Floyd's infinitely delayed guitars and Robert Fripp's rich axe textures, as moody guitar melodies soar through the atmosphere, and scraped guitar strings sending off sparks of percussive plunk into the cosmos. But then there's "The Eye Glass / Sex Operation", a monstrously CRUSHING and caustic noise-rock dirge freakout of mega-distorted guitar sludge and pounding drums rolling like tank tread over sheets of feedback and ominous melodies, almost like a krautrock version of one of the songs off of The Gosling's Beneath The Dead album. Massive! "Enad/VOAT" is similiarly noisy, a morass of spastic drumming and fucked-up cassette-player noise like Drew is jamming his entire guitar into the guts of a tape machine; aside from those two tracks though, this is a far less "in the red" experience than Psychic Paramount's other releases, but some of the sweetest moments here are when Drew ascends into his looped space-rock blissouts and This Heat-meets-Steve Reich style meditations. Recommended!

MP3 SAMPLE: "Echoh Air" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "The Eye Glass / Sex Operation" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Microphone II" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "E5" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "The Perfect Request" (excerpt)

PSYCHIC PARAMOUNT Live 2002 The Franco-Italian TOur CD $12.98 Public Guilt

Here's the infamous live recording from Psychic Paramount's first week of existence, a big bang supernova of headshredding psychedelic noise rock recorded live to cassette via a single stereo microphone on their European tour in November and December of 2002. The band went on tour less than a week after their first meeting, and the sheer force presented here is staggering. Featuring two of the dudes from the legendary math squad Laddio Bolocko and a guy from Sabers, The Psychic Paramount initally discharge thick streams of blown out,ultra chaotic psychedelic rock, sometimes with guitars so pretty and dreamy they border on shoegaze, but run through a thousand distortion and delay pedals, bombarded with splattered backwards drumming....then move on to hypnotic space rock freakouts, snarling sludgy psychedelic hypno rock squall, beautiful and messy and catchy, the levels pushed into the red, a hyperdistorted cosmic storm that sweeps you into it's eye. Awesome. All instrumental, no vocals, a perfect meeting of improv muscle, killer songwriting, and mind blastign complexity. Reminds us of My Bloody Valentine and Geisha, total overload with major hooks, but way more fucked than either. Public Guilt packaged this puppy in a sweet/austere black digipack with silver printing. Crucial monolithic free rock.

PSYCHOFAGIST self-titled CD $13.98 Subordinate
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

This trio beams in some of the most pulverizing noise-tech-jazz-grind this side of VIRULENCE! Seriously, these Italians are trafficking in outrageously complex/frantic grindcore with blink-and-you’ll-miss it jazz/funk breaks, schizophrenic shifts in tempo, blasts of nauseating noise…..all powered by a bizarre, crushing post-hardcore/deathgrind assault. Like DILLENGER ESCAPE PLAN, if they went full-on grindcore. Or TODAY IS THE DAY meets GORGUTS. Fans of ATHIEST, CRYPTOPSY, CEPHALIC CARNAGE, and similar shred blast will definitely love this, although these twelve songs are looser and more frenzied than most current tech-metal outfits…this is noisier and more crazed, but altogether just as insane and mindblowing as anything their peers in the extreme grind movement are doing. Awesome stuff from the label that brought us the newly resurrected debut from CEPHALIC CARNAGE.

PULSE EMITTER Planetary Torture CD-R $6.98 Housepig

An excellent set of new synthesizer seizures from Portland's Daryl Groetsch, who has been using hand-built modular synths to create his carefully crafted blasts of heavy high-volume analogue sound under the Pulse Emitter banner since 2002. Planetary Torture is the latest from PE, issued by C-Blast faves Housepig as a microedition CD-R of 100 copies, and presented in a hand-printed envelope sleeve and printed insert card created by Seattle lino-block artist Nic Schmidt. Looks great, and the stark eerie images are a perfect accompaniment to the powerful electronic blasts contained within. The four tracks run from 6-9 minutes long, and range from brutal squalls of low-end squelch infested with gross Evil Dead howls and walls of crusty, crunchy oscillating white noise that evoke a Moog-heavy Throbbing Gristle, to more subdued circuitscapes of dark, bubbling drones and deep low-frequency hum, fluctuating fragments of 8-bit electronics, and rhythmic machine pulses. Parts of this, especially during the track "Propaganda Machine", remind me of the great sci-fi soundtrack sounds of the 60's and 70's, but as soon as that thought floats through my head Pulse Emitter fires off a round of apocalyptic, psychedelic bursts of heavily distorted synth burble that conjure visions of ferocious steel-jawed machines chewing their way out of the Earth's crust. Groetsch creates tense dynamics even within the passages of crushing electronic distortion by wielding carefuly placed pauses and passages of near-silence, which serve to make the dense, high volume attacks even more powerful.

PULSEFEAR Perichroresis CD $12.98 Profound Lore

Prior to forming their awesome avant-industrial-blackmetal duo Axis Of Perdition, members Michael Blenkarn and Brooke Johnson had engaged in a series of guitar-based improvisations which ultimately ended up sitting on a shelf somewhere for several years. At some point last year though, they unearthed this material and proceeded to reconfigure their original guitar sounds with heavy, low-frequency electronic textures and dark ambient sound design. The final result is this nearly hour-long album of intense, nightmarish death drones and psychotic ambient terrain titled Perichoresis, released under their new Pulsefear moniker. And it's one of the creepier black/ambient releases to ever come our way, packaged in a 4-panel gatefold digisleeve that features some really cool, rusted out photographs of urban decay from artist Melanie Rhys, which serves as an evocative visual counterpart to Pulsefear's audio exploration of crumbling buildings and rotted-out hallways leading off into inky blackness. Each of the five tracks is a densely detailed and longform soundscape filled with grinding distorted guitars, howling feedback that has been processed into elongated drones, alien vocal sounds heard through a heavy blanket of psychedelic effects; there's some really use of stereo panning and synth textures that creates a uniqely terrifying soundworld that's clearly influenced by the classic post-industrial drones of groups like Troum/Maeror Tri and Megaptera as well as Cold Meat Industry style death industrial, but Pulsefear dive into much darker and heavier depths. A total headphone album, one to be exprienced in the dark with no outside aural interruption to be fully immersed in what these guys have achieved.
MP3 SAMPLE: "DOcks" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Gauze" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Lighthouse Part 1" (excerpt)

PURGATIVE KLYSTER / VOL. 4 Guardian Of Grind/Settlers split 7" EP $4.98 AgroMosh

This weird, noisy split pairs up two bands from the far edges of the noisecore gutter: Purgative Klyster is a longrunning, deeply obscure noisecore duo featuring Ove Wiksten of Sayyadina on drums and somebody named Blom playing bass; on their side of this slab, they whip out 8 tracks of noisy, raw thrashcore, sloppy freeform blastnoise, and weird poppy punk with gruff grindcore vocals, with almost all of the songs averaging around 20 seconds or so. My eyes almost liquified when I saw that these guys were still around. I remember them being on the Son of Bllleeeeaaauuurrrrgghhh! 7" compilation on Slap A Ham from 1992! Is this stuff new? Am I in a time-warp? Is Ax/ction Records and Fudgeworthy still around?
Those questions are moot, 'cuz once I flipped this 7" over to unleash the Vol 4 track 'Settlers', my grey matter becomes mangled by the psychedelic guitar feedback, ominous sound of marching boots, that deliciously modulated and crushing distortion loop and distant, black metallish howls lost in a black pit of hiss. Sweet! I swear that this blast of rhythmic electronic crunch is concealing something akin to a rhythmic Metal riff under all of the layers of electronic overdrive, but I can't find the edges no matter how hard I try. An excellent dose of severely heavy rhythmic distortion nonetheless. This plate comes on black vinyl, in an old-school, double sided B&W sleeve.

PUSTULATED Inherited Cryptorchidism CD $9.98 Gorgiastic

This sewer grind outfit is going to blast you a new cakehole. The vocals are especially gutblowing---low massive throaty stomach churning blurrghs! Death grind extremism at its grossest. Semi-technical brutal goregrind on this 14 song debut full length.

PUSSY GALORE Live / In The Red CD $14.98 In The Red

For a band like Pussy Galore, one of the original New York lower east side "pigfuck" outfits and purveyors of some of the gnarliest noise rock garage stomp of the 1980's, the live setting is where shit really kills. Like an even more devolved and noisy Stooges, Pussy Galore made an ungodly rockin' racket in their day, equal parts brutal distortion, drug cult mythology, and serious avant-noise fury, fronted by the hilariously drunken bawling of singer Jon Spencer (later of Blues Explosion and Boss Hog), with splatter rock riffage from Kurt Wolf and Neil Hagerty (Royal Trux), and the awesome curbstomp drumming of Bob Bert (ex-Sonic Youth), who would attach all kinds of found street-junk to his kit, like gas tanks, shock absorber springs, custom-made metal snares, etc. Treble-overloaded guitars dish out criminally catchy rockabilly sludge riffs and mongoloid garage rock splattered in amp hiss and malfunctioning everything, songs like "Understand Me" and "Dick Johnson" delivering the scumbag booty shake like nuthin' else but barely holding it together, with hooks that every Nuggets-wannabe in the past decade woulda sold their souls for. Listenin to these jams now, I can't imagine a world with bands like Brainbombs and Pissed Jeans and other distortonauts if Pussy Galore hadn't existed. Now I never got to see Pussy Galore when they were around - fuck, the band broke up in '89 when I was barely in high school - but their last show ever, a fucking barnburner of sleazed out garage noise rock thuggery that went down on August 5th, 1989 at punk mecca CBGB's, was recorded to 16 track and documented here as this boss live album. And just like the title suggests, the band sets the needle in the red, with a rippin' setlist featuring 18 mid-career highlights (circa 1987-1989) in 43 minutes, which starts off with a ripping, gonzo cover of The Twilighter's "Nothing Can Bring Me Down", and ends with Hagerty destroying his guitar in a mess of wood, metal, and feedback. Such a killer live album, capturing the last gasp from one of the greatest noise rock bands ever, total trash rock savagery vomiting motor oil and white noise all over itself as it stumbles around with a needle hanging out of it's arm.

PUTREFIER Trace Element Syntax CD $9.98 RRRecords

Brutal UK noise skuzz from this Broken Flag alumnus, released via the PURE Series in 1997. PUTRIFIER, a.k.a. mark Durgan, has been serving up primo noise assaults since back in 1986, with tapes on the Broken Flag and Birthbiter imprints as well as the MSBR label and a select few other releases. This '97 full length captures 7 tracks/72 minutes of PUTREFIER's (love that name!!) electroacoustic / feedback horror, summoning up pits of writhing malfunctioning guitar cables, a more sinister take on VOICE CRACK style improv noise, early MERZBOW level skree, and a diseased scum pulse that not only reminds me a bit of RAMLEH, but also predates the sort of woozy, gross tone subversions that WOLF EYES / UNIVERSAL INDIANS engaged in. Trace Element Syntax is packaged in a minimalist PURE Series style xerox-wrecked wallet sleeve.

PUTRESCENCE Dawn Of The Necrofecalizer CD $11.98 No Escape

PUTRESCENCE's last album Mangled, Hollowed Out, And Vomit Filled was a hysterically gross platter of absurd downtuned deathgrind comedy that featured dudes from Canadian hyperblasters Head Hits Concrete. I loved that albums huge splatter grooves, weird technical arrangements, and ridiculously tongue-in-cheek gore lyrics that poked fun at the tenant of death metal while delivering over-the-top deathgrind brutality from meembers Soild Depends, Grimmgore, Dark Lord Skullbong, and Necromagnon. Now PUTRESCENCE is back with another full length of awesome punky blast death that has much-improved production quality over their debut, and with even more insano riffs and brain melting thrash than before. Their lyrical and structural approach is stull righteously tongue in cheek with fucking hilarious lyrics outlining all kinds of surreal splatter-comedy atrocities, over a backdrop of pummeling, brutal death grind and intricate riffing that flows with great hooks. These guys have powerful gutteral vocals dueling with wicked snarling screams, tight as fuck drumming, and songs like "Detrunked Wizard Part II", "Vomiting Partially Digested Brain Matter Into A Rectum", and "Scooped Out Eyeballs". Includes a cover of IMPULSE MANSLAUGHTER's "They Start The War". The album cover sports some ridiculous, awesome psychedelic comic style artwork from Wes Harrison.

PUTRESCENCE Mangled Hollowed Out And Vomit Filled CD $11.98 No Escape

Ultra ridiculous , ultra downtuned death grind from Canada, featuring dudes from Head Hits Concrete. Wickedly heavy shit thats bolstered by lots of weird riffs and fucked up, bizarre arrangements , total tech outbursts, and gigantoid grooves. Songs like "Ebola Infected Plane Crash Victims Raining On A Church Picnic" and "Gunked Up Tree Chipper" , cannibalistic subhuman grunt vocals, and a righteous sense of humor make this a killer slab of extreme deathgrind!

PYGMYLUSH Bitter River CD $11.98 Robotic Empire

With members of Pg. 99, Malady, City Of Caterpillar, Crestfallen, Hissing Choir, and Majority Rule, Pygmylush has had a fair amount of anticipation surrounding the arrival of their first album. I was never that big of a fan of Pg. 99, but they certainly had an impact on the DC area hardcore scene and on contempo HC at large, and Pygmylush sees these guys taking on an eclectic variety of sounds and styles for Bitter River that is one of the more ambitious albums so far this year. The disc opens with the 37-second blast of maniacal hardcore chaos that is "Nonsensical Tremor", and then glides effortlessly into the hushed plunky folk of "Hurt Everything". "Universal Order at omph" continues in the quiet folky vein, with processional tambourines and percussion thumping behind a gang harmony and haunting melody. Things pick up with the lurching heavy noise punk of "Slave To A Teenager" where the band sounds a little like a demonically possessed Jesus Lizard, and the whole album alternates like this, dark catchy folk songs split with crazed sludgy noise rock with just the right amount of metallic heaviness...Robotic Empire cites everything from Tom Waits and Bob Dylan to The Black Heart Procession, Nirvana, and One Eyed God Prophecy in their press release, and that's a pretty accurate map of Pygmylush's sonic trajectory, where creepy indie folk intersects with explosive heavy noise rock. Very very cool. The CD version of Bitter River also has two tracks that aren't available on the vinyl release, and drone lovers will FLIP over the 25-minute untitle track of utterly gorgeous Troum/Loveless-esque guitar haze that builds into a swirling black hole of blown out melodic distortion, like a massively distorted, crushing Troum track. Awesome. The other CD-only track is also untitled, a brief and catchy bit of backalley blues shimmy. Comes with a 16-page booket filled with lyrics.