TITLES: U

UBIQUE DAEMON VS. ZYRTAX split/collaboration 7"EP $5.98 Dead Mind (Dutch import)

This tasty petrol slab of Dutch electro-howl is home to two collaborations between ZYRTAX and UBIQUE DEMON. Side A has "Prisoner Come Out (Give Me The Keys)", an exercise in bad-dream circuit squiggle grounded by downtuned sludge guitar and dirgy riff drip which disappears about halfway through allowing all sorts of weird electronic loops and eerie chopped up samples to crawl out of dark corners. Don't have this one on the headphones when you hit the sack. The B side has "I Don't Want To Be There Anymore", which fills my head with minimalist, martial industrial rhythms and surreal noise loops and ultra squeaky beats, like classic 80's Wax Trax dance music for cartoon robot mice. Nice. This 7" is slipped inside of a translucent blue n' black sleeve with a vinyl sticker and insert card.

U CAN UNLEARN GUITAR No Strings CD $7.98 Little Mafia

Hard to believe that this is the product of one of the members of legendary psychotic acid-punk combo Bunny Brains, as this 21 song album from Andrew Alper is almost total acoustic songwriter stuff, albeit cut with plunderphonics experiments and free noise. This is some sort of compilation of out of print vinyl releases, we think, covering around 8 years of recorded output. Freak folk and outsider indie fans would dig the combination of destroyed guitar laments and drug-trip serenades presented here; it's pretty eclectic, moving from the more straightforward singer-songwriter songs with great lyrics and loads of angst, to spacey psychedelia, to bombastic avant-garde pieces...and there are some really great songs on here ("Tell Me Sumthin' is particularly rad with it's Floydian electronics), plus the booklet sports bozz pics of Alper's realtime reconstruction of disassembled guitars. Liner notes by Dartmouth music professor and noted composer Larry Polansky. Easily comparable to Fuck or Timothy Prudhomme's solo work.

ULTRA DOLPHINS Mar CD $11.98 Robotic Empire

When we were introduced to Ultra Dolphins earlier this year via their Why Are You Laugh? collection of EP's, I was totally taken with the band's rocking, quirky hardcore/math rock attack, a pummeling and complex assault of spastic tempo shifts and noisy angular riffs, falling somewhere between Drive Like Jehu, Shellac, and an unbridled ball of hardcore energy. Now the band has released their first real full length, also through Robotic Empire, and it takes their proggy noise punk into whole new territory. On Mar, the band has kept their spazzy stop-start freakouts with intense vocal yelps intact, while embellishing their songs with majorly epic hooks, loads of piano accompaniment, squalls of formless guitar noise, and amazing vocal melodies; these 12 jams show the band evolving way beyond their garagey freakouts into a sort of esoteric prog rock/post-hardcore, frantic and dissonant and off-kilter but amazingly well constructed and intricate. Seriously, this album is awesome, way beyond what I was expecting from their debut. Every song kills on here; highlights include the crazed neo-classical piano/drum/bass thrash freakout of "Winged Babblar", the harmonium intro of album opener "Mar", the fuzzed out pop-stomp of "One, Two, Three, Four", and the heavy seesaw crush of "Sickman Outside". An amazing conglom of 90's math rock, speedball punk, Am Rep noise, Jesus Lizard and US Maple, Drive Like Jehu and Bastro, all wrapped up in an explosion of bombastic, hypercreative, and thoroughly weird prog punk ferocity cloaked in Ultra Dolphin's surreal lyrics and imagery. And the packaging for Mar is freaking awesome: the CD is presented in a 6-panel chipboard jacket with a 12 page booklet packed with awesome line drawings, lyrics, and more.
Highly recommended !!!

ULTRA DOLPHINS Mar LP $11.98 Robotic Empire

Here's the vinyl version of Ultra Dolphin's amazing debut album; we've got these on cloudy orange/red vinyl, in a chipboard LP sleeve with a huge booklet!
When we were introduced to Ultra Dolphins earlier this year via their Why Are You Laugh? collection of EP's, I was totally taken with the band's rocking, quirky hardcore/math rock attack, a pummeling and complex assault of spastic tempo shifts and noisy angular riffs, falling somewhere between Drive Like Jehu, Shellac, and an unbridled ball of hardcore energy. Now the band has released their first real full length, also through Robotic Empire, and it takes their proggy noise punk into whole new territory. On Mar, the band has kept their spazzy stop-start freakouts with intense vocal yelps intact, while embellishing their songs with majorly epic hooks, loads of piano accompaniment, squalls of formless guitar noise, and amazing vocal melodies; these 12 jams show the band evolving way beyond their garagey freakouts into a sort of esoteric prog rock/post-hardcore, frantic and dissonant and off-kilter but amazingly well constructed and intricate. Seriously, this album is awesome, way beyond what I was expecting from their debut. Every song kills on here; highlights include the crazed neo-classical piano/drum/bass thrash freakout of "Winged Babblar", the harmonium intro of album opener "Mar", the fuzzed out pop-stomp of "One, Two, Three, Four", and the heavy seesaw crush of "Sickman Outside". An amazing conglom of 90's math rock, speedball punk, Am Rep noise, Jesus Lizard and US Maple, Drive Like Jehu and Bastro, all wrapped up in an explosion of bombastic, hypercreative, and thoroughly weird prog punk ferocity cloaked in Ultra Dolphin's surreal lyrics and imagery. And the packaging for Mar is freaking awesome: the LP is presented in a gorgeous chipboard jacket with a HUGE 12 page booklet packed with awesome line drawings, lyrics, and more.
Highly recommended !!!

ULTRA DOLPHINS Why Are You Laugh CD $10.98 Robotic Empire

This collection of older EP tunes is the first of several Ultra Dolphins releases being released on Robotic Empire in 2006, with the full re-master treatment. This Philly/Richmond based power trio race through a quirky brand of rocking,playful, mathy hardcore punk with loads of spazzy shifts in riff/tempo/propulsion, noisy and complicated and pummeling, vaguely art-damaged but heavy in the same way that Jesus Lizard and Shellac are heavy, spastic and angular riffs twisting and turning around undeniably catchy hooks,totally catchy and fuggin' rocking. Imagine Shellac, Drive Like Jehu, and Born Against rolled into one combustible, disorientating post-hardcore rock unit. Raging melodic guitars, playground victory chants, and frenzied noise conspire to drill their potent post-SST lurch into your cellular structure. Fans of Racebannon, Hella, Snack Truck, and angular noise-punk would probably dig. Can't wait to hear a full length! Full on destructo fun.

ULTRALORD We Hate You And Hope You Die CD $13.98 This Dark Reign

With Fistula members Corey Bing and Bahb Branca at the wheel of this ridiculously negatory, gutter trawling sludgecore outfit, it's not too much of a surprise that Ultralord brandishes a similiar sound as the speedier, more crossover-thrash style songs by Fistula. We Hate You And Hope You Die, the band's only album so far, is one hell of a gnarly thrashcore assault that has a nasty habit of dropping massive slow motion sludge metal riffs in the middle of most of the songs, and just like with Fistula, these guys are masters at creating some of the heaviest riffs you've ever heard. It's like they tap into everything great about Age Of Quarrel and the way that Eyehategod can vomit endless feedback out of their amplifiers for eons. Ultralord also includes Scott Stearns on guitar, and if you've been following the Ohio/Shifty Records sludge scene at all, you'll probably recognize him as the artist behind alot of the album covers on Shifty; his hyperdetailed sketch style of iillustration has singlehandedly elevated the teenage hesher ritual of scrawling demons and thrash metal logos on notebooks into a higher art form. We've been digging his stuff for awhile, and it's cool to hear him in action here as one of the band's two guitarists; the wicked solos are ripped out like Greg Ginn gone speedmetal and they get downright psychedelic at times, especially when they start shredding over one of Ultralord's grinding sludge dirges. Gnarly. This is bone-powdering deathsludge from the black pits of eastern Ohio, choking on dope smoke and shrieking tales of wizard pimps and black maggots, and even as seemingly tongue-in-cheek as this gets at times, Ultralord deliver a sheer warped heaviness that's totally pulverizing.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Black Maggot" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Dirty Living" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Wizard Pimp" (excerpt)

ULTRA MILKMAIDS and AIDAN BAKER At Home With... CD $11.98 Infraction Records

A superb collaboration with the French drone duo Ultra Milkmaids and Canadian post-rock guitarist Aidan Baker, which primarily finds Baker's gorgeous pastoral guitar work blasted into a glitchy, heavenly drone via the Milkmaids, and the result is like a buzzing swarm of microscopic cyborg insects flitting around streetlamps at twilight, while the sound of mellotron choirs drift over the horizon. It's immensely pretty stuff, highly recommended to fans of glacial drone bliss like Troum / Maeror Tri. This CD is limited to only 538 copies.

ULTRA//VIRES Black Snow CD-R $6.98 Outfall Channel

Here's another private press CD-R release from the Ultra//Vires team that has been pulping our consciousness for the past few weeks. Black Snow is yet another short affair from the duo of Ryan and Jonathan, with two 8 minute tracks that capture Ultra//Vires's nasty free-sludge-noise drone in all of it's gruesome glory. And again, there's a bleak, ecological theme here, the harsh speaker-blowing vibrations evoking horrific images of houses stained in ash and industrial filth, and whole populations decimated by pollution. The first track, "Black Snow", is a chilling stream of corroded powerdrone, like a more industrialized Black Boned Angel with it's mix of roaring distortion, shimmering ambience, and buried harsh rhythms. The second, "Birth Defect", is a abrasive blowout of flinty feedback loops and rumbling vortex of distortion almost like a marching beat constructed from blocks of caustic Japanese style noise, breaking down at the end into a wheezing landscape of painful Scutopus/Prurient level sinewaves and machinelike scrapings. A brutal mind wipeout packaged in a cool silkscreened case blasted with metallic silver paint.

ULTRA//VIRES Land Cancer CD-R $6.98 Outfall Channel

This is the first disc we heard from the Ohio duo Ultra//Vires, which includes Ryan Faris formerly of the excellent Epicene Sound System label. Land Cancer, as the title might suggest, evokes all sorts of visions of urban decay and sprawl over the course of it's 20 minute duration, and starts off with an eerie noise/psych jam that loops some creepy elastic noise across a cobweb strewn meadow,like a sleepy Wolf Eyes stuck in a locked groove at 6am while birdsong begins to floats across the fields. Very cool. The second track begins similiarly, a subdued and improvised low-fi atmosphere punctured by clattering metal junk and corroded, barely recognizeable guitar/amp noise that slowly builds in volume and rumble until the drums appear, a crawling malignant trudge that oozes forward beneath a crumbling blanket of sludgy amplifier drone and toxic electronic vomit. We're reminded of a gnarly fusion between Midwestern noise damage and extreme sludge metal transmitted via free-improv means, highly recommended! The disc is packaged in one of the cooler handmade CD-R containers of recent memory, a painted canvas pouch that has been attached to a circuit board with the CD-R inside plus some textured silkscreened inserts.

ULTRA//VIRES You Want Some? CD-R $6.98 Realacide

A DIY low=fi archive of live actions from the combative Ohio duo Ultra//Vires recorded over the course of 2004 and 2005. We've been digging these Ultra//Vires jams...these guys do super combative electro-acoustic improv with a raw punk attitude n' early Industrial spasms, and inject lots of megaheavy freeform sludge that pushes their music into another realm of heavy. At times they achieve a sort of raw, Khanate-meets-Wolf Eyes gravitational pull. This disc starts off more in the free-feedback/drone jam/improv clatter vein, lots of piercing tones and metal being hurled into the sky, but by track 5, Ultra//Vires are blowing up amps by hurling gobs of ultradistorted guitar noise and sucking all of the oxygen oput of the room. Invigorating shit that Burmese fans would get flush over. The disc comes in a simple xeroxed wallet sleeve with liner notes and weird basketball imagery. Not sure what that's all about.

UMIGLIAZONE Fist Sucking 7" EP $4.98 The Spew (Belgian import)

8 tracks of foul Italian grindcore similar to the noisy onslaught of early Cripple Bastards. The 7"ep comes with an extensive glossy 12 page booklet. Fans of the rawer side of grindcore audio molestation will dig this.Full color sleeve, sick artwork/design.

UNABOMBER Potemkin CD $11.98 Parade (Spanish import)

Killer schizo extreme hardcore from Barcelona, Spain...this album freaking RIPS, channeling everything from ultrafast, ULTRABRUTAL powerviolence that sounds like INFEST on PCP, to screechy, lumbering art-damaged hardcore, to almost NAKED CITY style cuts into bizarre jazz territory. The songs on Potemkin generally smash you over the head with a ridiculously fast blast of hyperspeed Slap A Ham style hardcore before suddenly morphing into anything from a cool BLACK SABBATH style riff-heavy stoner jam, or those aforementioned passages of mutant jazz, or noise rock-meets BLACK FLAG freakouts, or a mashup of snotty garage rock and speedy melodic punk. Their eclectic grindcore weirdness reminds us alot more of Japanese freaks like C.S.S.O. or Melt Banana or Bathtub Shitter, that's for sure. Heavy,grindy, brutal stuff!

UNCONDITIONAL LOATHING Cornholecopia CD $11.98 Ignivomous Records

For several years spanning the late 90's and early 00's, Unconditional Loathing were the kings of the Minneapolis "noise" scene. With line-ups of up to a dozen members, and a million incestuous side-projects, they alternately showcased high-concept performance art and the lowest in scummy absurdity. Beginning in 2001, the core members one by one relocated to various cities on the west coast, leaving many of us to believe the UL magic was lost forever - but this CD proves they're back on top, where they belong. So whats on tap? Nasty improvised static drones and psychic noise and experimental surrealist electronics are interspaced with damaged freak-rock, nuked breakbeats, field recordings,diseased outsider ballads,blasts of fried disembodied AM Radio pop, all glued together by a twisted and thoroughly hardcore psychedelic attack. This stuff RULES. There are also live recordings of the band getting unplugged by local noise promoters. Fun stuff!

UNDER THREAT Bomb Scars LP $5.98 Low Life Records (Brazilian import)

Out of print. The record sleeve is laid out in classic DISCHARGE style, stark anti-war photos and minimalist design- but don't be fooled...this 1996 LP blazes through 13 tracks of fierce, face shredding Brazilian grindcore with blast set to stun and buzzsaw guitars drilling into your grey matter. Lethal Brazilian grind.

UNEXPECT In A Flesh Aquarium CD $13.98 The End

It seems like The End has really been exploring the influence of Mr. Bungle on heavy music lately. For starters, we had the wild new one from Bungle acolytes Estradasphere that blew me away with their (now) instrumental prog/gypsy/polka/deathmetal/genre blender, and now we have a gloriously vertigo-inducing debut full length from the French Canadian avant-metal mini-orchestra Unexpect. This album is freaking mindblowing, a troupe of dizzying, post-Bungle genre dicers that fluidly conjoin technical death metal, classical pomp, cabaret, baroque carnivalesque music, black metal, prog, and a lot more into a crazed, theatrical circus-like atmosphere that really does sound and feel like a disorientating tumble through the Cirque Du Soleil gone black metal / technical death metal. It's that surreal and awe-inspiring, each song a narrative-like tapestry of weird cabaret, Gorguts style dissonance, insane math metal shredding that could stand toe to toe with the likes of Into The Moat and Dillenger Escape Plan, jazz noir, amazing piano playing and dramatic violins and horn sections, a breathtaking female lead vocalist, amazing multi-part vocal harmonies, and a million jarring changes and labyrinthine song structures that demand repeat listens to parse what the fuck this band is doing. Astounding shit. Heads into the Mr. Bungle/Fantomas/Estradasphere realm of madness will lose their gourds over this. Brilliant genre-defying stuff, I bet this is completely insane live.

UNEXPECT We, Invaders CD $12.98 Galy (CANADIAN IMPORT)

If there has ever been a Metal counterpart to Tim Burton's modern-Gothic dreamworlds and the surreal circus atmosphere of the Cirque Du Soleil, it's gotta be the eccentric French Canadian septet Unexpect. I loved their amazing In A Flesh Aquarium album, which came out in late 2006 amidst a flurry of similiar-minded avant-cabaret-gypsy-prog-metal albums from fellow The End artists Estradasphere, Sleepytime Gorilla Museaum, and Stolen Babies; their dizzying pastiche of post-black metal weirdness, hyper technical death metal, and dark carnival music blew me away and had me coming back over and over again to try to absorb the complexity and labyrinthine song arrangements. So we tracked down the band's 2003 mini-album We, Invaders, and it's just as over-the-top and theatrical as their new material. The disc features four tracks of super progressive death metal fused with jazzy cabaret flourishes, shredding black metal riffage, violins, synthesizers and cellos, strokes of epic power metal and classical, bits and pieces of opera and gypsy folk and medieval music, and of course lots of spiralling circus melodies streaking across their baroque dreamworld. The vocal performances add to Unexpect's surrealism, contrasting the harsh, black metal rasp of the male vocalists against the bewitching female vocals of Leilindel, with a spoken voice sometimes popping up to add dramatic narration to the song. Imagine a symphonic fusion of Arcturus, Mr. Bungle, Cirque Du Soleil soundtracks, Gorguts, and Cradle Of Filth, and you'll have a rough idea of what's going on here. Absolutely essential if you were into their album on The End, and not a bad place to start for anyone curious about Unexpect's intoxicating avant-metal. Awesome artwork on this as well. Highly recommended.

UNHOLY GRAVE Aussie Disorder 2x7" EP $9.98 Agromosh

Nah, still can never get enough of Unholy Grave's weird super noisy mix of classic 80's grind/crust and fucked up, Boredoms-esque vocal weirdness. We've been bestowed with a sweet stack of assorted Grave annihilation by the California label Agromosh this week, so eat up if you've got a hunger for extremely noisy grindcore scuzz!
Back in 2004, Unholy Grave flew from Japan to Australia and toured there for around eight days, levelling Melbourne with their freaked out, ultra-noisy grindpunk. On the last day of their tour, the Grave played at the legendary Melbourne record store Missing Link in front of about 100 enthusiastic grindheads, and the entire set was captured to minidisc and has been issued in this double 7" EP set. It's as blown-out, low-fi and noisy as you would expect, bordering on total noisecore/free-noise wipeout much of the time, but the Grave also busts out the awesome grooving breakdowns and raging Discharge hardcore that keep their tunes from turning into total blurr. Takaho's vocals are wonderfully fucked up and goofy, and the whole set cruises by in a white flash of feedback-encrusted skuzz grind. The two 7"s come in a 12 page 7" sized booklet, handfolded and assembled and printed in blue ink, and loaded with lyrics, photos and flyers from the tour, and a tour diary written by Takaho that is actually a pretty funny read. Limited to 1000 copies!

UNHOLY GRAVE UK Discharge LP $11.98 Agromosh

Recorded in 2003 in Nottingham while Unholy Grave was touring the UK, UK Discharge is not only the best live document of the band in action, but it's one of the most vicious records period from the Japanese grind mob! If you're familiar with Unholy Grave's super raw and noisy style of grindcore, then you know how blown out, noisy, and ridiculously low-fi their regular studio recordings are, which are generally 4 or 8 track recordings that UG singer Takaho masters at ear-bleeding levels of distortion and noise. So production-wise, there really isn't a whole lot that seperates Unholy Grave's "studio" releases from the live stuff that they've put out - that's why their double live 7" Aussie Disorder is one of my favorite recent releases from 'em. So anyways, what you've got here is a full set from Unholy Grave in front of a very stoked crowd, blazing through 18 songs of insanely noisy, ferocious, feedback-plastered grindcrust with Takaho's singular wacked out vocals; the blastbeats are off the hook, too! UG's drummer Kaz must have arms the size of garbage cans. An awesome whirlwind of metallic grinding noise weirdness...if you havent heard Unholy Grave, imagine a fusion of Napalm Death, Discharge, and Burmese with Eye Yamantaka on vocals. Glorious! This scorching platter comes in a full color gatefold jacket with a large poster insert that includes flyer art, lyrics, and a tour diary from Takaho, issued in a limited edition of 1000 copies, and apparently almost sold out from the label.

UNHOLY GRAVE / DISGUST Grind Freaks split 7" EP $5.98 Agromosh

Nope, I just can never get enough of Unholy Grave's weird grindcore 'round here, their super noisy mix of classic 80's grind/crust and fucked up, Boredoms-esque vocal weirdness always gives me whiplash. We've been bestowed with a sweet stack of assorted Grave annihilation by the California label Agromosh this week, so eat up if you've got a hunger for extremely noisy grindcore scuzz!
This Grind Freaks split 7" teams up Unholy Grave with another Japanese grindcore band, Disgust. The Grave side finds the band ripping through three covers (Heresy's "Never Healed", Nausea L.A.'s "Does God Need Help?", and Varuker's "Bomb Blast") in total UG style: blow-out, noisy grindcrust choking on distortion and riddled with singer Takaho Komatsu's unique freaked-out, babbling vocals. Crushing as always. Disgust's two songs are both originals, brutal blasts of early Napalm Death-style grindcore, including a really weird song that comdemns tax evaders? Probably one of the strangest themes I've ever seen attacked on a grind record. This 7" comes in a black and white glued pocket sleeve with a double-sided insert. The jackets have a small crease on one of the upper corners, which is how we received all of these.

UNHOLY GRAVE / UNBIASED Raw Hammer Damnation/Liberator '95 split 7" EP $5.98 Agromosh

Unholy Grave's side of this plate documents a lost recording session from 1998, the last from the band's five-piece lineup; six songs of insane, beyond-blown out grinding blurr, crusty Discharge riffs and thrashy drumming blossoming into total whitenoise whiteouts, impossibly catchy riffs ripping out of tinny guitars and busted practice amps, and Takaho's totally fucked up vocals, whooping like a cowboy one minute, roaring like a starving lion the next. A super noisy mix of classic 80's grind/crust and fucked up, Boredoms-esque vocal weirdness. Damaged and weird and ridiculously noisy, with incomprehensible haiku-like lyrics. Yer either into the Grave's lowfi noisegrind or yer not. If you are, this shit RIPs. Includes the songs 'Disgusting Mines!', 'Buried Terror', 'Inhuman Sexual Slavery', 'Blurred Out Answer', 'To Hell With Racists', and 'Kim After Kim". I had never heard of Japan's Unbiased before picking this split 7" up, but their side starts out killer with 'Flight To Light', a brutal mid-tempo grindcore jam splattered with weird wah and flanger effects, becoming so FX-tweaked at points that it sounds like the whole song is getting jammed up in a tape player, which ends up sounding pretty fucking cool and disoreintating. I was hoping the rest of their side of the split was going to sound like that first jam, but the remaining three songs are more straightforward, gutteral grindcore a la early Napalm Death and S.O.B., albeit with some of the best lyrics this side of Bathtub Shitter and a singer who sounds like he's in a wind tunnel. Pretty crushin'. This 7" comes in a B&W glued jacket with two printed inserts, and the record is on black vinyl. The upper right corner of the jacket is slightly creased on all of these, which is how they arrived here.

UNICORN Playing With Light CD $8.98 Housepig Records

A field report from an outpost at the border where droning ambience, minimalist melody and pure noise share an uneasy truce. Unicorn is the brainchild of W.T. Nelson, a longtime member of Bastard Noise and Sleestak . Here, he serves up seven tracks of grey clouds and soft light, where melodic lines skate across a surface of disturbing drones and scathing noise. Brilliantly beautiful, falling somewhere between the Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do material from Sigur Rós, the ghostly guitar based drone music of Troum, and the more musical moments of Nelson's work in Bastard Noise. Dreamy, ethereal piano, deep bass drones and minimal synth burn, buried noise carnage barely audible beneath a blanket of sunlit tones. Playing With Light also features enhanced CD-Rom content that includes three short films by Stephanie Miller, with soundtracks by Unicorn.Presented in a gorgeous letterpressed sleeve by Thumbprint press. Ver highly recommended, particularly to fans of droning post-rock drift and melodic, edgy ambient.

UNICORNS Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? CD $7.98 Alien8

Quirky,ramshackle avant-pop from the current hotspot of eccentric indie rock, Montreal. Low-fi,woozy,surreal outsider pop excellence,like Flaming Lips, Olivia Tremor Control, and whimsical kiddie pop jammed together into one huge sugar rush of mutant disco punk,analog synthesizers,candied soul,and totally catchy songs.Another one from Alien8, so the gatefold packaging is sweet as usual.

UNITED SUPREME COUNCIL Oastem! Vibe Orchestra LP $14.98 Eclipse

Amazing document from the shortlived drone rock project featuring members of Pelt and Rake that briefly existed from 1996-1997, teaming up here on a 2-part drone ritual captured from 1997 in Richmond, Virginia. Top notch free-improv hum n' drift extracted from a two hour meltdown, a rougher take on Pelt's rustic drones, quite beautiful and brain shifting. It's a big band deal, with scraping strings and abrasive skree oozing into a droning hand-drum jam that degenerates into amplified noise bliss. The second side drops another hippie drum circle on it's head amidst a brutal saxophone war and ends up flatlining into a sweet amplifier worship droneout. The lineup features Mike Gangloff (guitar, shenai, electronics), Jack Rose (lap steel), Patrick Best (guitar, bass resonator, conga), ~SKB (bass and percussion), V2G2 (nylon string guitar, percussion, shenai and voice), Planet C (moog, sax, percussion), Mick (dumbek and dijembe), and Beth Jones (dijembe). Limited edition of 330 copies.

UNIVERSAL INDIANS Recycled Music Series CASSETTE $4.98 RRRecords

Universal Indians' entry into the Recycled Music series dumps a mudpit over your head over the course of it's 30+ minute duration. These purveyors of murky noise/guitar/circuit improv splurge dish out a crucial psych jam of blown speaker roar, ghostly delay tones, cough syrup chuggin' faux-throat singing slop, whirring feedback fog, chirping loops, helicopter rumble,and subterranean micro laser blasts. Fucking straight drugged heavy demon attack. Grab it if you're down for Wolf Eyes/Gravitar/Hair Police style power drudge, 'cuz this is from one of the best, and sports pre-Wolf Eyes personnel getting down. This being part of the infamous Recycled Music Series, it has Universal Indian's recordings dubbed over old commercial junk/thrift tapes (which could be anything from Annie Lennox solo albums to bluegrass instructional cassettes) that have been traded into the RRRecords used CD shop, and the packaging cobbled together with old cassette covers, duct tape, and magic marker. Due to the nature of audio cassette tape, often the original audio is still partly audible, merging and melting into the new sounds that have been dubbed onto its magnetic strip. thus making each cassette a hand-made and one-of-a-kind item on some level.

UNPERSONS III CD $13.98 At A Loss Recordings

Devestating, freaked out psychedelic crust from Savannah, GA, which for some reason has one of the coolest scenes in the country. Cool enough to give us other hardcore innovators like BARONESS, KYLESA, and DAMAD, all of which have been long time favorites around here, especially BARONESS and their awesome, epic stoner-prog-crustcore that has to be seen live to belive it. Awesome stuff, from a punk scene that clearly seems to hold originality in high regard, which brings us to fellow Savannites UNPERSONS. Like BARONESS, UNPERSONS take elements of classic rock and prog rock and absorb them into their collective DNA, but that's only part of the picture...these guys are a way more hectic, totally scatterbrained but powerful as fuck, jumping from brutally heavy passages of neurotic noise-rock that sound like a way crustier JESUS LIZARD to awesome driving blasts of pure hardcore fury, to complex, almost jazzy instrumental interludes with odd, complex time signatures, to sludgy RORSCHACH-meets-BUZZOVEN meltdowns, to effects heavy weirdness that recalls an even more psychedelic, tripped-out DYSTOPIA...but somehow these guys tie all of these different vibes together into a compelling whole. Definitely something that fans of adventurous, progressive hardcore would really be into, sort of how RACEBANNON heavily fucks with hardcore forms, but rougher, thrashier, HEAVIER. Rad stuff. 11 songs, 30 minutes.

UNSANE CRISIS / HASHASSIN split CD $8.98 Throne Records (Spanish import)

One of the best grindcore records to ever come out of Spain. Dual-vocal technical grind from Unsane Crisis that blows away their debut split with Ekkaia. Modern hyperblast brutal twitch grind. Unsane Crisis features two members from the cult brutal deathmetal band Wormed. On their half, Hashassin unleash crazy and neanderthal-ish grind in the early Brutal Truth vein. Crushing shit! Exclusive artwork from Nor (Machetazo, Fermento, etc.)

UNSEEN TERROR Human Error CD $8.98 Earache Records
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Crucial 80’s speedcore !!!! Earache re-issued this seminal blast of brutal, shredding thrash back in 2001, and it's been a personal favorite here at Crucial Blast for years (the Unseen Terror Peel Sessions recording used to get blasted here nonstop), so we had to get some of these in. Unseen Terror was formed in 1987 by Shane Embury (he of Napalm Death, Lock Up, Malformed Earthborn, etc.) and Mitch Dickinson (Heresy). This disc features the bands highly influential Human Error LP, re-mastered, and with the band's first studio recordings and final rehearsal recording added on as a bonus, 26 songs in all. This is totally classic, face-melting speed/thrash/grind, a rabid precursor to the powerviolence / thrashcore movement of the 90's, and despite the primitive production values, remains an absolutely pulverizing blast of ultrafast annihilation. The guitar tone is gloriously abrasive, all high-end like it was recorded direct out of a cheap practice amp, the drumming is a stuttering cyclone of ultrafast blastbeats and fast thrash, the vocals are gruff shouts with lyrics similar to earlier Napalm Death, all nihilistic social commentary. And to top it off, the band has a couple of bizarre songs involving the cartoon character Garfield?! The booklet that comes with this re-issue includes liner notes on the history of Unseen Terror written by Mitch Dickinson, as well as all of the lyrics off the of album. Unseen Terror were the missing link between the raw grind of Repulsion and Siege, the melodic UK thrashpunk of the Stupids, and the speedmetal of Slayer and Insanity. Awesome stuff, fans of the band and anyone into the fast stuff has gotta check this out!

UNTIL DEATH OVERTAKES ME Prelude To Monolith CD $11.98 Firebox Records (Finnish import)
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Finland’s Firebox label continues to astound me with yet another album of terrific, depressing, and totally beautiful music. UNTIL DEATH OVERTAKES ME is a one-man band helmed by Stijn Van Cauter, who (like labelmates PANTHIEST) has completely mutated the "Funeral Doom" genre with this brilliant debut album. Starting off with sky-reaching synth and pipe organ melodies that drift beautifully, as massively distorted guitars emerge droning from the depths, with the sole percussion provided by timpani (yes!), and droning guitar strings lilt like Labradford, epic and sad and ultra slow. Ambient funeral doom, if it was composed by Richard Wagner, maybe. But delicate and mesmerizing, and unbelievably heavy and hellish and apocalyptic all at the same time, like The Cure’s Disintegration played by demons. Firebox owns the patent on mindblowing ambient Doom, and anyone into stuff like Skepticism and Thergothen and Panthiest, as well as the heavier end of the drone/ambient spectrum should check this out!

UNTIL DEATH OVERTAKES ME Symphony III - Monolith CD $11.98 Flood The Earth
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The follow up to Prelude To Monolith, which was highly dug here at C-Blast, charting new planes of sub-symphonic ambient/astral doom. UNTIL DEATH OVERTAKES ME is a one-man project from Belgium that takes the leaden fuzzy gloom of bands like SKEPTICISM and THERGOTHON and removes any sense of rhythm or forward movement, instead creating a fog of heavy ass orchestral synth drones and really slow-moving minor key melodies embedded in crushing distorted funeral doom riffs drifting disembodied in the ether. Some of the guitar distortion that is layered over these glacial ambient dirges is weirdly brittle, a buzzing static like a guitar amplifier on the verge of frying out completely, making everything sound even woozier and more creeped, and there's ultra gutteral death gargles that are deeply buried in the mix, and stretched out to the point where they are barely recognizable as vocals and more like some bubbling abyssal urk mixed in with the floating doom drone. Weird, ominous bad-dream classical doomdrone, possibly comparable to a mixture of Sunn O))) and Skepticism and Growing with synthesized chamber music strings? Accompanying lyrics are suitably suicidal and hopeless, and the whole thing feels like a neverending funeral dream. Beautifully sad and heavy.

UPSILON ACRUX Volucris Avis Dirae-Arum CD $14.98 Planaria Records

Insanely complex tech prog from San Diego's Upsilon Acrux. This is the 5-piece's 4th full length, which sees the addition of a second drummer, as well as even more abstraction and variety. Ultra mathematic,complex, over the top prog! Otherwordly melodies combine with sharp stop on the dime memorizations pushed through a cannon of brutality. Like a thousand points of plight aimed directly at your sternum, each time change'll knock the fucking wind right out of you. Playing chess in reverse never seemed so complicated, so they took a chainsaw directly to the board and made queens from guitar strings and kings out of the shards of mangled drumsticks. Perhaps the most traditionally prog amongst the whole new "brutal prog" family, Upsilon Acrux have existed since the late 90's with a handful of albums under their collective belt. This stuff is so intricately complex, venturing into metallic bludgeoning, cathartic noise, to ethereal kraut-scapes, but always grounded in their unabashed love for 70's progressive rock. Features a GOBLIN cover, fer chrissakes. Crisply produced and packaged exquisitely in austere o-card/white case box. Get this shit now before you're paying This Heat prices for it on ebay. Beyond recommended for fans of Lightning Bolt, Hella, Orthrelm, Ruins, Flying Luttenbachers, and all things brutal polyrhythmic prog!

URSHURARK Pandemonium Theory CD $11.98 Baphomet / Red Stream

We can always count on Necrophagia's Killjoy and his label Baphomet Records to unearth some cool, quirky death metal and black metal. Take this 2004 album from Italy's Urshurark that I just stumbled upon, for instance; housed in a slick, full-color digipack burning with a vibrant cover illustration of some kind of angelic being being peirced by huge thorns and other exaggerated hellish images, Pandemonium Theory is the second album from Urshurark and combines a crushing melodic black/death/thrash metal assault with lots and LOTS of keyboards. Keyboards all over the place. Now, obviously adding keyboards to black/death metal isn't anything new, but Urshurark's keyboardist Claudio Loreto brings a different sort of soundtrack vibe to their metal via the heavy influence of Goblin's Claudio Simonetti, who has apparently mentored Loreto in some capacity (according to the thanks-list in the booklet). So instead of the lush, bombastic keyboards that you'd hear from bands like Cradle Of Filth and Dimmu Borgir, Urshurark combines their epic blackened death metal with sheets of creepy, crystalline keys that feel like they came right out of an early 80's Dario Argento movie like Phenomena or Tenebrae. And those keyboards have an authentic tinny 80's tone to them, something which could otherwise date a band, but here the mix of Euro Horror/80's Euro synth atmospherics and Dark Funeral/Emperor-esque blackness turns out to be pretty damn cool. Pandemonium Theory is catchy as hell too, with a surplus of hooks that've wormed their way right into my grey matter, and there's also some great vocal processing happening here that's used on singer Luca Loreto for a bunch of the songs, mutating his range of gutteral roars and blackened rasps into unearthly textured electronic howls, coated in a sheen of distortion. Imagine a blackened death metal version of Simoetti's post-Goblin band Daemonia, surrounded by weird, almost cartoonish demonic imagery; the CD also includes a music video for "The 7th Seal" that's playable on your computer.

USAISAMONSTER, THE Sunset At The End Of The Industrial Age CD $12.98 Load

Another album of completely dizzying, socially conscious technicolor-progpunk anthems from The Usaisamonster, that ecologicially minded duo currently based out of Brooklyn that have been roving the planet over the past several years spreading their melted freakout of spazzy, no-wave flavored thrashcore, noise rock and mindbending prog rock mixed with folksy, hippie protest vibes. Live, drummer Thom Holman plays his drumkit, sings through a headset mic, plays a Moog Taurus foot pedal with his left foot, and plays keyboards with his right hand, all at the same time. And guitarist Colin Matthews rips out an array of low-end sludgeriffs and soaring, cosmic leads through an arsenal of effects pedals and massive stacks of amplifiers. On their latest, Sunset At The End Of The Industrial Age, the music and message is presented as a loosely structured sci-fi song cycle recounting the total collapse of the Western world and the re-emergence of the Native Americans' way of life. Most of the jams are short, glorious blasts of guitar/drum/keyboard skronk and melodious riffs, save for the monolithic thirteen minute title track and the cosmic dirge stomp of eight-minute freakout closer, 'The Spirit of Revenge'. Sort of like a weird, operatic cross between Magma and Rush, Melvins and Lightning Bolt and bombastic 70's stadium/prog rock, working all kinds of thumb pianos, soaring vocal harmonies, exultant back-to-nature lyrics, folky interludes, and gobs of droning, celestial casio buzz. So fucking AWESOME. Heavy and psychedelic and imaginative, a headtrip into a joyous near future where the grid has gone down for good.

UTLAGR Traditions Normandes CD $12.98 Paradigms (UK import)

More ripping black metal from the Paradigms series, following up that recent killer Throne Of Katarsis CD. Utlagr deliver epic, majestic Scandanavian style black metal in the vein of Mayhem, Immortal, and early Satyricon, only Utlagr aren't Scandinavian, they're French Canadian, and their music is a pagan tribute to Rolfr Utlagr, the founder of Normandy ! It's a scorched earth blast of killer triumphant riffs and pestilent NWOBHM hooks, apocalyptic acoustic guitars swept away into a sea of buzzing blastbeats and grim, frosty black metal. Killer stuff that fans of the recent slate of scorched black n' roll albums from Craft and Negator would probably dig. Limited edition of 750, with the disc and insert contained in a Paradigms series full-color card sleeve wallet that is sealed inside of a hand-stamped presentation envelope. Recommended!

UTON Sacred Hiss / Ghost Oracle CD-R
Ikuisuus (Finnish import)
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

This new private-press disc was recorded in spring of 2005 in Tampere, Finland, and contains 10 beautiful drone shadows from Uton, formed from earth tones, percussion, smeared chant, acoustic instruments, and rust. Imagine Earth's early guitar drones softened to a grey subterranean blurr and sent floating through the woodlands of Finland, and you'll get an idea of the sort of sacred iron mantra that is present on Sacred Hiss / Ghost Oracle. Very pleasant, drifting gravitational amp/psych drones. Comes in a hand assembled full color wallet sleeve.

UVALL October Turns...Ruined CD $11.98 Blackmetal.com

Before forming his new black/folk/avant-rock project Dormant, God Is Myth label owner Todd Paulson released a couple of albums of excellent, dreamy black metal haze as Uvall, under the name Lord Of Storms. October Turns...Ruined was the second and final Uvall disc, which just came out in late 2006...a nearly hour-long dream of autumnal, frost-bitten ambience and raw blazing black metal, this album is soaked in an overcast, sometimes harsh return-to-the-earth atmosphere. Here Uvall is essentially a duo, with Paulson handling most of the guitar, bass, and synthesizer duties, and accompanied by Chris Donolan on drums. The songs move between slow dirges built from out-of-phase minor key arpeggios and walls of droning heavily distorted riffs, to blasts of primitive, blackened blackthrash and ominous acoustic/synthesizer ambience, as Paulson leaves trails of sinister croaks lost in reverb and deeply buried chanting. Psychedelic black metal dirges somewhere in between the ambient blackened folk/drone of Procer Veneficus and Xasthur's gauzy tomb-blasts. The last track on the disc, titled "End", is a bold 15 minute epic that begins with washed-out electronic drones and bubbling subterranean synths as a minimalist distorted riff appears and builds along with a simple funereal drum beat, and becomes an expansive meandering journey through icy electronic dronescapes, seemingly improvised instrumental doom, the crunching of footsteps through snow, and classical strings, turning into something like an orchestral film score to some desolate wintery scene.