TITLES: W

WADGE The Road To Hana CD $14.98 RSR

A solo grindcore South Pacific-theme album? Speedfreak blast-crust anthems titled "Sunset On Maui" and "Tiki Timewarp"? You'd better believe it. Mega-brutal one man grindcore band WADGE returns after years of silence with this thirty-four track CD of previously unreleased and unavailable stuff recorded up until 2000 for various compilation and EP projects that never came to light. We're not too sure what to make of the island theme, but it's hard to focus on it when we're getting sledgehammered by WADGE's sickeningly fast hyperblast noise-grind with super downtuned guitars and bizarre monstrous vocals. Add to that electronic noises,drum machine breakbeats,totally blown production,atrocious atonal doomy breaks, blasts like skipping CDs,there's even a brutally heavy, fuggin awesome pop punk song ("Two Plus None") with blastbeats! And a surf tune? And ridiculous, ultra noisy hip hop? And almost all of the songs are some sort of Hawaiian reference? Yep, this CD gets pretty fucked up. Chris Colohan (CURSED/SWARM) and Migeul (PANTALONES ABAJO MARINERO) contribute guest vocals. Super freaking heavy. One of the heaviest drum-machine powered grind outfits ever next to AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED.Sick.

WAKING COLD Doorways Of A Fading Heart CD-R $9.98 Audio Savant

Full length of ambient drones, synth bliss, and bizarre distant vocals from AGALLOCH drummer Chris Greene. The second song "Independance" is a standout, so beautiful and sweetly triumphant, as layered synths play a simple,gorgeous pop melody with strange, distant Gregorian-chant vocals keening over, polluted by a constant vicious sinewave and bursts of electronic feedback rippling through the song. Like Tears For Fears, if they were a Cold Meat Industry band. Fucking awesome. The rest of the album is excellent ambient prettiness, with whirring noises, decayed radio signals, industrial rhythms and other noises buried underneath layers and layers of sad synthesizer melodies. Very nice. This is one of those perfect rainy day albums. Packaged in a DVD case with full color insert.

WALL OF SLEEP Sun Faced Apostles CD $11.98 Psychedoomelic

New Hungarian Doom greatness from the ex-MOOD dudes...these guys somehow perfectly captures the Maryland Doom sound throughout these 8 songs, and adds some CATHEDRAL style heaviness to the onslaught of riff. Of course, having Wino from The Obsessed/Hidden Hand/Spirit Caravan/Saint Vitus lending some guitar playing to one of your songs might help.Indeed, the doom legend contributes some crushing axework to "From The Bottom Of These Days"...crucial. This second album from Wall Of Sleep channels the mega heavy, bluesy classic sound of the Doom Capital, dark and crushing, with huge 70's hard rock riffs covered in molasses, but way heavier and more metallic. So freaking heavy, the dinosaur riffs on this thing totally devestate. And singer Gabor Holdampf avoids cheese with strong, clear vocals that get the job done. Fans of Cathedral,classic Obsessed, Place Of Skulls, and Internal Void need to hear this. A wicked Doom assault, our fave so far for 2005!!

WANDER s/t CD $13.98 Small Voices

Wander are Freek Kinkelaar and Frans De Waard, who together might be better known as the ambient dronepop duo Beequeen. Since Beequeen ceased to exclusively pursue the perfect drone a couple of years back, Wander came about as an outlet for their continued work in holy minimalism. Using vintage synthesizers (juno 60, korg MS20, roland SH 102 and Arp synthesizers) and a Philicordia organ, the duo craft four long streams of pastoral drones that hum gently like electric currents running beneath the ground. The Philicordia material is probably our favorite stuff on this disc, an 11+ minute meditiation on a single miasmic organ chord that rumbles like an airplane far off in the distance, and is alive with minute shifts in timbre and tone. All four tracks deliver excellent evolving drones that fall comfortably between the classic minimalism of Charlamagne Palestine and the thick dream swirl of Troum. Released in a limited edition of 600 copies, packaged in a great digisleeve wallet with spot-varnish cover.

WARCHETYPE Goat Goddess Supremacy CD $12.98 Alone Records

Denim and bullet belt clad trippers of the lysergic pits, Barcelona's Warchetype debut with Goat Goddess Supremacy, an awesome tome of slow motion doomage. This is clearly the product of students of Iommi's gluey riffage, Candlemass and Wino-era St. Vitus, but the righteously-monikered Warchetype drag their tar-covered psychedelia deep into the earth with super-slow, stretched out tempos, winding and serpentine song structures, and huge rumbling blasts of cracked and moldy amplifier feedback droning in the musty blackness. Songs like the monstrous 18-minute opener 'Itaca' fuse lyrics inspired by the Greek writer Homer with megacreeping Sabbathian sludge and unexpectedly melodic riffs, and 'Marduk Stair's To Earth' is a cosmic epic of crushing concrete blues-sludge pouring through the cosmos; none of this stuff rushes, with almost all of the songs running 10-18 minutes in length, massive labyrinthine structures moving through passages of roaring doomed death metal sludge, subdued psychedelic noodling, Spanish folk guitars singing ancient codes, and titanic major-key riffs that are so catchy that they bend your head sideways whenever they kick in. Singer Ibán Arrieta, whose throat does an amazing job of emitting both rugged, Wino Weinrich-style singing circa St. Vitus, and a ferocious low-slung death roar, delivers lyrics steeped in allegory and inspired by the works of Balzac, Kant, Kafka, Hesse, Homero and Jenofonte, and the combination of Warachetype's literate themes and their esoteric ice-drip metal makes this one of the coolest mystic crush rites since their countrymen Orthodox arrived with Gran Poder (which unsurprisingly was issued on the same label Alone, which has become the uncontested sourcepool for unrelentingly heavy Spanish doom and acidhead rawk). Somewhere between of the psychedelic heaviness of Cathedral and Electric Wizard and the monstrous slurred sludge of Warhorse, but uniquely bent into a blackened pagan battlesludge assault.

WARCOLLAPSE Crap, Scrap, And Unforgiveable Slaughter 7" EP $4.98 FirstBloodFamily

A long silence has been broken from Sweden's crust legends Warcollapse with the release of this covers EP. This is the same brutally powerful sound Warcollapse has become renowned for,a blistering D-beat/sludge attack, this time surgically applied to crushing covers of classic songs by Amebix, Antisect and Discharge.

WARHAMMER 48K Knife Cuts 3" CD $8.98 A-pop

A-Pop Records, an uber-cool store based out of St Louis that specializes in underground noise and outsider art, started up the ongoing Pasteur Series last year, each edition featuring a different underground out-noise band filling up a lil' 3" CD disc with their mind destroying sounds, which A-Pop then packaged inside of a genuine plastic petri disc filled with swirled melted wax gunk and psychedelic wax paper designs seperating the disc from the wax mold. The finished product is really neat looking and fun to hold, a cool pocket sized piece of junk scultpure abstraction that totally compliments the weird sounds housed inside.
The first installment in the Pasteur Series was this killer EP from Missouri's WARHAMMER 48K, whose Uber Om pummeled us. This EP has more of the band's asskicking cosmic battle sludge hallucinations, all huge metallic indie riffage, melodic glimmers and delayed guitar streakings tracing arcs around a dimly lit basement, confused vocals drowning in pools of effects, like a stoned fusion of KARP and UNWOUND that gradually melts down into heavy acid chuggging free-doom and dripping dubbed out psychedelic feedback. Pressed in an edition of 666 copies. Highly recommended!

WARHAMMER 48K Uber Om CD $11.98 Collective Records

Uber Om is the debut full-length of Killer psychedelic battle sludge from Missouri's Warhammer 48K, following their 3" cd installment in the Apop Records petri-dish packaging series. The music on this album continues in the same mathy indie-sludge vein as their 3" disc, with genuine pop hooks emerging from a sea of crushing repetitive stoner doom/sludge dirge with psychotic ranting vocals and echo drenched chanting, meandering, cello-driven grey-sky post rock instrumentals, and No Wave skronk rock eruptions a la (early) Sonic Youth and Unwound, all melting down into pools of greasy free electronics and strangulated guitar noise. Crushingly heavy psych-sludge with trace elements of midwestern noise rock and indie pop melodicism.

WARHORSE The Priestess LP $15.98 Ellington
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

It's been years since we last heard anything from Worcester, MA doomlords Warhorse, but when they were around, they were possibly the only American band that rivalled the sheer blackened heaviness of Electric Wizard circa-Dopethrone. Anyone that got to seem them when they toured with the 'Wiz can attest to that; with a sound that drew from Sabbathian psychedelia drowning in absinthe, LSD and fetid bongwater as well as a severely downtuned and sluggish version of Celtic Frost's doomy death, Warhorse's sole full length album As Heaven Turns To Ash is, in my opinion, one of the heaviest things that Southern Lord has ever out out. Which says alot. Before that album came out however, Warhorse issued a weighty piece of 12" vinyl through the Boston label Ellington Records in 1999 called The Priestess, which featured three titanic jams: the title track and it's crushing slow-motion riffage that sounds like concrete blocks being ground together, a track titled "Jam" that has the band going off on an awesome, meandering psych improv that could pass for Acid Mothers Temple trying to take on extreme doom, and a stretched-out, insanely heavy cover of Wargasm's "Wasteland". Super doomy and crushing, with an almost death metal level of crunch to the riffs but also deeply entrenched in druggy psychedelia, and using quiet/loud dynamics to astounding effect, this EP came in a handsome jacket and on swirly red vinyl. It's been out of print for years and has commanded some pretty ridiculous bidding on Ebay (I'm pretty sure that I've seen this 12" go for as much as $80 on Ebay), but amazingly we just obtained a warehouse stash of this extreme doom classic and have a small amount that we can sell here at C-Blast. The label folded years ago and this stuff will probably never be repressed, so move quick!

WARSORE Re-opened Wound CD $11.98 Vomit Noise

This is an OUT OF PRINT cd collection of early material by this pretty famous australian grindcore/grindnoise outfit, containing their "Open Wound" tape, rehearsal tapes and some live tapes; the sound can be pretty rough on some of the tracks but the band always gives a tight, intense performance. Warsore was into very fast, very violent, blasting grindcore with some crust/noise elements too. Very much like early Napalm Death, Agathocles, Fear of God, Unholy Grave, but blasted through destroyed speakers and coming out the other end like a noisecore/harsh noise/blastbeat infected shitstorm... and with an additional touch of brutal crust and some genuine rawness to it. All the songs are bulging with energy, aggression, speed and distortion. Scorching growls, abrasive shrieks, blistering guitars, very prominent bass and some of the most amazing, insanely fast, grinding drumming... All the songs are real short, mostly around 30 seconds and rarely over 1 minute... just pure, undiluted grindcore noise. The tracks from the "Open Wound" tape are the ones with the better sound quality, raw but heavy, the rest sounds alot cruder, but the band always remains intense and quite fascinating to listen to!

WARSORE Sweet Revenge CD $11.98 Vomit Noise Records

Another semi-discography from this notorious, cult Australian grindcore band. This full length CD collects the tracks from the WARSORE / DISGORGE split tape from 1997, the "Rampant Murder" split 7" EP with EGROGSID from 1997, and a liveset from WATTS in Tokyo, Japan, from (I believe) 1999. In addition, the CD features some gritty, blown out bonus live footage (MPEG and Quicktime compatible) from Nishiogikubo in Tokyo Japan from November 29th, 1999, and Koenji in Tokyo Japan on November 30th 1999. WARSORE gave the grindcore / crust underground some of the most vicious and antimusical noise from the past decade, and these 48 tracks are a continuing testament to their vacuum-cleaner blast attack. All of the material on this disc is on the low-fi end of things, having been recorded live, but who listens to this type of stuff for superior audio clarity anyways? It's a relentless onslaught of gutteral, savage grind that almost never slows, achieving the type of violent sonic morass that prime UNHOLY GRAVE reaches, when all beats and riffs and screams and brown noise are on 11, cranked and buzzing and scum-covered.

WARSPITE Gallery Of Macabre CD $8.98 Crimes Against Humanity Records

12 awesome blasts of German deathgrind. This is the followup to their split EP with Groinchurn...Warspite have created a masterful piece of grind power that is incredibly fast and packed with some great melodic moments and some of the best damn riffs ever in the death/grind canon. Outstanding drumming and vicious vocals round out this powerful release.

WATAIN Sworn To The Dark CD $14.98 Ajna Offensive

I hadn't heard anything from Sweden's Watain before we received this new stateside release of their new album Sworn To The Dark, their third, issued through the illustrious Ajna Offensve imprint. It's definitely kicking my ass, though. These guys have been all over the metal media lately after their latest US tour, where Watain splattered the audience and themselves with gallons of gore and shredded heads coast to coast with a savage black metal assault that takes Dissection's darkly majestic melodic black metal and infests it with a nasty fucking black-n-roll streak that blasts you in the solar plexus whenever Watain kicks in with one of their crushing mid-tempo parts. Sworn To The Dark is loaded with exactly that: riot inducing midtempo riffs, bone crushing slow riffs a la Celtic Frost, hyperspeed blastbeats, some vaguely off-kilter, woozy guitars that lend a certain hallucinogenic quality to their songs, all surrounded by intensely Satanic imagery and a dense atmosphere of dread that sticks to your skin like grease and powered by a clean recording that still manages to sound fierce.
MP3 SAMPLE: "Legions Of The Black Light" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "The Serpents Chalice" (excerpt)

WATCHMAKER Erased From The Memory Of Man CD $11.98 Willowtip

Man, when it comes to turbo-charged hardcore brutality, noone in the scene today compares to the cyclonic hatred of Boston’s WATCHMAKER. Their 3rd full length of grind/noise/thrashpunk misanthropy is even burlier and noisier and more unhinged than their last, which is saying a lot. Being one of the few bands to effectively manifest the pedal-to-the-metal ultracore of fellow Bostonoids SEIGE and Cali speedbeasts INFEST while updating the sound for 21st century ears, WATCHMAKER beats you mercilessly with bursts of bizarre disharmonic thrash riffs and deformed, avant-garde speedcore rampage that’s all the more feral thanks to the unique torn-throat vocals of singer Brian Livoti and the bands lean,efficient approach to songwriting. Hell, well over half of the music on Erased From The Memory Of Man devolves into clouds of toxic noise n’ feedback plague and squggling freeform guitar shred before reforming back into their awesome post-KREATOR crush. Totally fucking lethal, absolutely crucial.

WATCHMAKER Kill.Fucking.Everyone CD $11.98 Willowtip Records

Watchmaker are one of those bands whose music is so pissed off , it’s scary. There's only a few bands out there that sound that fucking mad. Infest, Siege, and Anaal Nathrakh immediately come to mind. So does Watchmaker. This second full length (the follow up to Kill.Crush.Destroy) is a goddamn cyclone , with buzzsaw swarm-of-hornets guitars and savage riffs and a frenzied drum attack that holds it all together, and a singer who makes every ghoulish, demented screech and utterance sound like a murderous oath, like he's about to come after you with a broken beer bottle, once that next blastbeat is over. It's the perfect meeting of old school hateful black metal blast and bone-cracking powerviolence. Like Darkthrone meets Infest. Or Crossed Out screaming thru an interpretation of Marduk songs. Brutal. And mad!

WE ARE THE MUSK BRIGADE Sand Dunes CD $4.98 MT6 Records

This disc is the latest out-rock spasm from We Are The Musk Brigade, lead by the prolific weirdo Jesse Krakow (Time Of Orchids,Fast N' Bulbous, PAK). This project is a "4-track collaboration" band made up of assorted heads (including folks from Friends Forever and Scutopus) and assembled entirely from swapping recordings back and forth through the mail. The resulting aberration is a fully mutant and chaotic lo-fi rock/noise/improv/avant-mess that lands somewhere at the intersection of Half Japanese, Bunnybrains, and Captain Beefheart. But weirder/stoopider/dreamier/more blown. Makes sense that this weirdness would surface on the increasingly warped outsider-pop label MT6 outta Baltimore. Packaged in a black and white cardstock sleeve with xeroxed insert. Listening to this makes me feel like I just sucked down a gallon of 'Tussin.

WEASEL WALTER QUARTET Revolt Music CD $15.98 ugEXPLODE

Clearly Weasel Walter isn't making enough of a racket with The Flying Luttenbachers. The need for unhindered, free flying skronk is so great that the Wease assembled this incendiary free jazz ensemble and recorded over an hour of blistering, ass-kicking blastism via studio and live tracks. This is free jazz the way I like it, powerful and FAST and explosive, in the Peter Brotzmann/Cecil Taylor/Albert Ayler vein. The quartet is made up of a rotating lineup that consists of bassists Damon Smith and Randy Hunt, alto saxophonists John Gruntfest and Aram Shelton, tenor saxophonist Josh Allen, and guitarist Henry Kaiser, in addition of course to Weasel Walter on drums. All of the tracks are plays on the album title ('Revolt', 'Revolt and Revolt Again', 'Revolting Music'), and the album is nonstop blast fury, a relentless explosion of howling, screaming reeds and bowed bass, constantly powered by Weasel's full throttle drumming which takes off into grindcore blast speeds every other minute. And check the five minute drum solo right in the middle of the disc, it's a cacophony of polyrythms and blasting rimshots. Pretty goddamn awesome. One of the most immense, skull-shredding aggro-free/jazz assaults we've gotten in recent times. Released in a limited edition of 500 copies.

WEEDEATER Sixteen Tons CD $11.98 Crucial Blast

A masterwork of southern fried sludgecore. The soundtrack to your next zombie beach party. Sixteen Tons churns out a black hole of thunderous, snarling Swamp Doom from acclaimed rebel rockers WEEDEATER (featuring Dixie Dave of confederate metal legends BUZZOVEN). With monstrous production courtesy of Billy Anderson (MELVINS, SWANS, CATHEDRAL), these ten whiskey soaked anthems are heavier than a mastodon trapped in a tarpit. Crusty, wasted, and buried.

WELKIN Angel Inside CD $9.98 The Spew

Belgian grinding deathcore masters WELKIN debut here with 8 songs of insanely heavy death metal with catastrophic mosh parts...imagine a perverted fusion of DEICIDE and ALL OUT WAR | HATEBREED -- ferocious shit. The band goes from speeding into violent blasting deathgrind,unleashing low growling proclamations...to massive pit inducing breakdowns. A crushing combination of European metalcore, blasting satanic death/grind, and slamming deathcore.

WELTER QUARTET Ring Ring CD $11.98 Amanita

Here's yet another wickedly neato new find courtesy of French avant-rock imprint Amanita: Welter Quartet, a jazzy, proggy, and definitely fucking weird French foursome. Jazzy bass and drums support warped rock structures and improvised violin noise/screech/creep-out. But what makes us positively fucking giddy about this album is singer/chanteuse Clemence...her delicate, sweet vocals are pure pop, even when the music gets completely twisted. Welter Quartet will deliver a straight faced cabaret pop song one sec, then get down with some kind of circus/prog mutation, or go off on some smokey No New York tangent. A French pop version of RUINS ? At times,maybe. And it's not often that we describe an album as "cute", but this definitely wins that title. Cute, surreal, sorta dreamlike really, right before it jars you with some angular clatter. The weird, sorta witchy rendition of "Blue Moon" in French is a total winner, too. We could see this coming out on Ipecac, actually. Avant garde and wierd enough, but still disarmingly listenable and , uh, "cute". A No Wave cabaret sugar-shock, like James Chance and early Lounge Lizards backing Brigitte Bardot. Or Max Roach and Mars teaming up with Jean Carn. Highly recommended !!

WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE The Wreck of The Minot CD $11.98 Underdogma

Megaheavy melodic rock action from this Boston band that beats you over the skull with stomping, burly as fuck lumberjack sludge riffs and monstrous guitars belting out grooving hard rock anthems with killer catchy hooks and vocal harmonies. Sludge metal meets anthemic hard rock? Hell yeah. Looking at the artwork (cool artsy, post-hardcore style imagery), you wouldn't expect it to be as heavy as it is. The riffs are freaking huge, especially when the band launches into one of their trademark slow parts. WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE combines the heaviness of sludge and doom metal with the syncopated pounding of HELMET and a singer that sounds like a cross between a rawer Ian Astbury of THE CULT and Glenn Danzig, and adds in almost pop-concise songwriting and cool acoustic tracks that supply an additional LED ZEP feel to the album. Wreck Of The Minot is sort of like the melodic doom rock of GOATSNAKE meets the gnarly backwoods sludge of SCISSORFIGHT. Or CROWBAR ransacking THE CULT. Or Louder Than Love era SOUNDGARDEN jamming with QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE. A crushing sophomore album from these guys.

WETNURSE s/t CD $11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

This is a killer debut from NYC's WETNURSE, who we've been hearing about for some time, but hadn't had a chance to hear their stuff. Well, this 8 song full length lives up to the hype, as it unleashes some of the most vicious, angular modern thrash we've heard. It's like KISS IT GOODBYE battling VOIVOD, with bluesy, stoner-sludge solos and riffs throughout the album...the singer unleashes a barrage of schizophrenic barks, growls, and shrieks that are completely menacing and match the crushing math-blast of WETNURSE perfectly. Part metalcore, part sludge, part art-thrash, part grindcore...this CD is really original and shows tons of potential for this confrontational group. Mike Oleander (of Burnt By The Sun and Endeavor) shows up on one track with guest vocals, there's a scorching jazz/funk break in "Curse Or Blessing", and "Urgently Missing Something" features some monstrous doom riffage...this definitely comes highly recommended. Engineered by the famed Martin Bisi (SWANS, SONIC YOUTH).

WHIP, THE Freelance Liason / Sheep And Goat Judgement 7" EP $5.98 Wantage USA

Just got this bulldozing 7" in stock, apparently just got repressed or something...this was the only thing aside from a demo tape that The Whip ever put out, a crushing 2-song dose of thunderous indie sludge chug that picked up where Scott Jerigen and Jared Warren's old band Karp left off. Ya dig Karp? I sure as hell do, and this pretty much sounds just like Karp, which makes this platter completely crucial. And as if that wasn't enough, The Whip featured fuckin' Joe Preston on guitar. Preston! This EP is freaking BLISS, man. Monster riffage and Jernigan's pounding, earth shaking drumming dish out whiplash alongside Warren's triumphant howl and distorted bass...these two jams smoke. This is a tragic document, too, as Jernigan was killed in a boating accident not long after this was released. Absolutely necessary for fans of Karp, Big Business, Thrones, Melvins, and crushing sludge rock power in general. On thick black vinyl.

WHITE MICE Live At AS220 CD-R $10.98 OhNoNo
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

A beautiful looking CD-R document chronicling an especially demented performance from Rhode Island weirdos White Mice, who dropped a killer album called WHITE MICE ASSPhIXXXEATATESHUN on Load last year. This recording captures their bass/drums/oscillator lineup in full swing, belting out a couple of ultra noisy, sorta droney, supernatural psych/death/sludge/thrash attacks with monstrous demon vocals soaked in so much reverb that it sounds like the band is playing at the bottom of a deep well. In between their oscillator splattered blast attacks, the Mice huddle around haunting synthesizer hymns and ridiculous slide-whistle jams, all delivered in front of an appreciative and semi-rowdy crowd. It's a weird n' surreal mashup of psych rock, grindcore, Melvins stomp, electronic noise and general silliness, and listening to this definitely has me looking forward to the next time the Mice come through Baltimore. The discs are hand numbered in an edition of 200 copies, and are packaged in a stunning, carnivalesque three color silkscreened n' handsewn cd pouch with artwork by Montreal artist Leyla Majeri.

WHITE MICE Mouse of Mendes LP $13.98 OhNoNo

One of the heaviest bands to seep outta the whole Providence art-school/Load Records noise rock scene, White Mice grind out awesome psychedelic noise/metal damage with their tweaked trio lineup of crushing death/sludge/thrash drums-and-bass action that is blasted with swooshing oscillator effects and nebulous satanic vomit vocals distorted beyond recognition. Their weird heaviness sort of makes me think of Brainbombs and west coast psych-core innovators Gasp, rolled up into a swirling, churning, hypnotic mudslide of drug damaged metal drowning in distortion and reverb. White Mice also have a neat/weird conceptual thing going on; the members are named Mouseferatu, Euronymouse, and Anonymouse, with songs like "Cheesus Saves", "They Tried To Poison Me", "Mousetrap", and "Limburger Baby" and lyrics written from the perspective of a test-lab mouse and delivered with the rabid vitriol of the most furious hardcore outfit, and notorious live performances where the White Mice play wearing fabricated mouse masks and are dressed in bloody lab technicians smocks. Heavy, spacey, drug thrash flooded with trippy effects and frequently falling into a crushing, sludgy hypno riff that sounds like the record has slipped into a lock groove. This LP is an expanded reissue of a self-released CD from White Mice that also includes some early demos and found sounds that were not featured on the original CD, and is in a limited edition pressing of 502 copies, hand numbered and packaged in a silk-screened jacket and an insert.

WHITE MICE BLasssTPhlEgMEICE CD $11.98 Load

White Mice aren't a band that you turn to for nuanced listening or dynamics. Nope, White Mice batter your skull with crushing psychedelic pigfuck grind with their arsenal of miasmic oscillator noise, bonecrunching bass guitar and Sabbathian drumming, a brutally heavy noise-rock glazed with Black Metal and grindcore elements. And they're back with BLasssTPhlEgMEICE, the second album from the trio of Mouseferatu, Euronymouse, and Anonymouse, the three members of White Mice who take on the guise of freshly escaped lab mice splattered in blood when they play live. This shit is seriously mindbending, especially if you sit down and play this album at top volume, and let the noise-drenched sludge sweep over you like a wave of coagulated toxic 'Tussin. Songs like "Violence Of The Lamb", "Mousestassh Ride", and "Foetal Castro" sounding like somebody melted a bag of Skullflower anf Flipper 7"s, old cassette copies of White Zombie's Soul Crusher album and assorted dubbed Melvins tapes and black metal demos into a thickened, grinding, bottom-heavy goo. Crunching complex riffs, bursts of punky speed, gross samples, lurching bass grooves are all mixed massively over-the-top and in the red into a wall of total stoned bleaargh shooting through an echo-chamber. If it's possible, BLasssTPhlEgMEICE might actually be even less discernable than their debut, but that's fine by me - I love diving into this kind of sledgehammer black murk.

WHITE MICE BLasssTPhlEgMEICE LP $11.98 Load

The latest White Mice album, on black vinyl and in a deranged looking full-color sleeve.
White Mice aren't a band that you turn to for nuanced listening or dynamics. Nope, White Mice batter your skull with crushing psychedelic pigfuck grind with their arsenal of miasmic oscillator noise, bonecrunching bass guitar and Sabbathian drumming, a brutally heavy noise-rock glazed with Black Metal and grindcore elements. And they're back with BLasssTPhlEgMEICE, the second album from the trio of Mouseferatu, Euronymouse, and Anonymouse, the three members of White Mice who take on the guise of freshly escaped lab mice splattered in blood when they play live. This shit is seriously mindbending, especially if you sit down and play this album at top volume, and let the noise-drenched sludge sweep over you like a wave of coagulated toxic 'Tussin. Songs like "Violence Of The Lamb", "Mousestassh Ride", and "Foetal Castro" sounding like somebody melted a bag of Skullflower anf Flipper 7"s, old cassette copies of White Zombie's Soul Crusher album and assorted dubbed Melvins tapes and black metal demos into a thickened, grinding, bottom-heavy goo. Crunching complex riffs, bursts of punky speed, gross samples, lurching bass grooves are all mixed massively over-the-top and in the red into a wall of total stoned bleaargh shooting through an echo-chamber. If it's possible, BLasssTPhlEgMEICE might actually be even less discernable than their debut, but that's fine by me - I love diving into this kind of sledgehammer black murk.

WHITE MICE ASSPhIXXXEATATESHUN CD $11.98 Load

ASSPhIXXXEATATESHUN was White Mice's first album for Load, and the release that introduced the band to a larger audience outside of the band's Providence, RI hometown scene. Obviously, the first thing that your gonna notice about this trio is the fact that the members have names like Anonymouse, Euronymouse, and Mouseferatu, and that they wear mice heads and white lab coats splattered in blood. See, they're escaped lab mice, torn and tattered refugees from the horrors of the testing facility from which they fled; now they're a power trio, armed with drums, bass, and an oscillator taking the place of guitar as lead instrument, blasting songs like 'Limburger Baby', 'Mousetrap', 'Slo Poison', and 'The Maze'. Each of the ten tracks on this album are a mind melting trainwreck of oscillator dub effects swooping over Melvins strength sludge riffs,back-masked drums, freeform noise, squealing feedback, super slow brain-damaged doom crawls, and tortured howls echoing through black space, like a mutant hybrid of Providence's costumed art-noise-punk scene, black metal dread, and psychedelic grind/sludge swimming in oceans of cough-syrup. When they do achieve something resembling a coherent riff, it's like Lighning Bolt dunked in concrete. Super fucked up and trippy and HEAVY, much heavier than alot of the stuff that comes out on Load. I think these guys are the shit, but you gotta be in the mood for some seriously zoned out sludge to handle the Mice in action. They continue to fuck with you to the very end, closing the album with the final track "Microjackass", which spans almost 50 minutes. Over its first four minutes the song builds in speed and intensity before fading to static, then turning to silence; 43 minutes later the final blast of stuttering drums and bass riff emerge amidst ringing oscillator tones and a telephone operator delivering a voice-mail message.

WIESE, JOHN Black Magic Pond CD $13.98 Blossoming Noise

Using an arsenal of recordings captured throughout the Midwest and East Coast recorded live in 2005, Sissy Spacek member and Sunn O)))/Wolf Eyes collaborator John Wiese took his blocks of raw harsh feedback and grinding distortion and recycled them into a series of fast-paced, intensely insectile and organic sounding electronic assaults. Like most of his solo recordings from the past couple of years, the 12 tracks on Black Magic Pond transmutes the shrill, scraping tones and swirling, crunchy distortion of mangled circuit noise into lightspeed sonic cut-up that has the same life-affirming manic spirit as his noisecore/harsh troniks collage outfit Sissy Spacek. However, this solo outing is far more amorphous, with sharp jump-cuts and blips of silence slicing through Wiese's junkmetal screech, the tracks taking hairpin turns and screaming divebombs into interstellar locust electronics. And while I'm pretty sure that I can hear some sickeningly wrecked guitars and ultra distorted windtunnel death vocals screaming through Wiese's interconnected series of explosions, it's ultimately futile to pinpoint the source material. It's enough just to let the brutal surgical stitchwork of these tracks sweep over you like a swarm of carnivorous nanobots. One thing that you can generally count on with Wiese's solo releases is a crystal-clear production that reveals massive detail in his complex layers of noise regardless of how violent this gets, and Black Magic Pond also features some pretty brilliant use of stereo panning that creates a dizzying whirlwind effect, especially when you play this disc at high volume. A high quality disc from one of the shining stars of the harsh electronics scene, and one of his more suspenseful, violent exercises. Comes in a nice full color digipack.
MP3 SAMPLE: "Track 5" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Track 8" (excerpt)

WIESE, JOHN Soft Punk CD $11.98 Troubleman Unlimited

John Wiese's newest blast of hyperspeed noise/grind/drone/circuit scramble is also available on pink vinyl while supplies last!
Constantly pushing out at the edges of what we call "harsh noise", John Wiese has continued to hone his unqiue style of hyperspeed cut-up collage into one of the more powerful tongues in the realm of underground electronics. While I'm not a huge devourer of noise collage recordings, I always come back to Wiese's stuff due to his skilled sense of dynamics and his penchant for using some REALLY heavy sounds in his work. His Sissy Spacek project with Cory Ronnau, for example - that stuff is amazing, all lightspeed grindcore blurr chopped up and pieced back together a la musique concrete , turning what would otherwise sound like an adequately nuclear grind attack into something way more abstract and terrifying. The solo recordings I've been picking up from Wiese have also been pretty brutal, juxtaposing his speedy blips of brutal electronic skree and feedback roar with slabs of shining drone. But it's his new full length and first for Troubleman, Soft Punk, that finally intersects the aggro blurrcore of his Sissy Spacek work with the exploding technicolor fractals of his electrical cut-up. The album's sequencing is perfect - Soft Punk opens with "Atural Magic"'s blast of fluttering cicada tronix and chopped up roar that sounds like Randy Yau being devoured by tiny robots, and then moves into skittery improvised scratching on an unknown instrument that becomes overtaken by an avalanche of heavy feedback manipulation. "Recorded Hologram" is where Wiese completely nukes my brain, starting off with whooshing loops of death metal shredding and random audience sounds being focused into a beam of metallic space drone, then erupting again into one of his own Sissy Spacek jams, but whose puzzle peices have been put back together into an impossibly complicated noisecore attack. The rest of the album continues in that vein, carefully positioning his textural drones, complex noise collages and deconstructed grind/no wave recordings (which are culled from bands like Die Monitor Bats and Grand Ulena in addition to Sissy Spacek) against each other for maximum disorientation. This is probably the most intricate work I've heard from the guy yet, and it has so many of his different guises involved that Soft Punk should appeal to anyone that has dug his work with Wolf Eyes, Sunn O))) and Bastard Noise to Sissy Spacek's mindblowing EP's.
MP3 SAMPLE: "Atural Magic" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "No Party" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Recorded Hologram" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Snowpit" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Trapped In A Spell" (excerpt)

WIESE, JOHN Soft Punk LP $11.98 Troubleman Unlimited

John Wiese's newest blast of hyperspeed noise/grind/drone/circuit scramble is also available on pink vinyl while supplies last!
Constantly pushing out at the edges of what we call "harsh noise", John Wiese has continued to hone his unqiue style of hyperspeed cut-up collage into one of the more powerful tongues in the realm of underground electronics. While I'm not a huge devourer of noise collage recordings, I always come back to Wiese's stuff due to his skilled sense of dynamics and his penchant for using some REALLY heavy sounds in his work. His Sissy Spacek project with Cory Ronnau, for example - that stuff is amazing, all lightspeed grindcore blurr chopped up and pieced back together a la musique concrete , turning what would otherwise sound like an adequately nuclear grind attack into something way more abstract and terrifying. The solo recordings I've been picking up from Wiese have also been pretty brutal, juxtaposing his speedy blips of brutal electronic skree and feedback roar with slabs of shining drone. But it's his new full length and first for Troubleman, Soft Punk, that finally intersects the aggro blurrcore of his Sissy Spacek work with the exploding technicolor fractals of his electrical cut-up. The album's sequencing is perfect - Soft Punk opens with "Atural Magic"'s blast of fluttering cicada tronix and chopped up roar that sounds like Randy Yau being devoured by tiny robots, and then moves into skittery improvised scratching on an unknown instrument that becomes overtaken by an avalanche of heavy feedback manipulation. "Recorded Hologram" is where Wiese completely nukes my brain, starting off with whooshing loops of death metal shredding and random audience sounds being focused into a beam of metallic space drone, then erupting again into one of his own Sissy Spacek jams, but whose puzzle peices have been put back together into an impossibly complicated noisecore attack. The rest of the album continues in that vein, carefully positioning his textural drones, complex noise collages and deconstructed grind/no wave recordings (which are culled from bands like Die Monitor Bats and Grand Ulena in addition to Sissy Spacek) against each other for maximum disorientation. This is probably the most intricate work I've heard from the guy yet, and it has so many of his different guises involved that Soft Punk should appeal to anyone that has dug his work with Wolf Eyes, Sunn O))) and Bastard Noise to Sissy Spacek's mindblowing EP's.
MP3 SAMPLE: "Atural Magic" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "No Party" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Recorded Hologram" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Snowpit" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Trapped In A Spell" (excerpt)

WIESE, JOHN Teenage Hallucination: 1992-1999 CD $10.98 Troniks

Teenage Hallucination: 1992-1999 documents the initial solo recordings of John Wiese, who would go onto join Bastard Noise for several years, as well as release a mountain of solo material through the cut-up grind of Sissy Spacek and Dead Machines, and collaborative work with the likes of Wolf Eyes, Sunn O))), and The Haters. Spanning primal bedroom noise blasts to his signature extreme/harsh cut-up and spastic editing style, one can trace the outlines of the formation of Wiese's aesthetic across the 52 tracks presented here. The liner notes help peel the skin back from Wiese's youth spent adrift in the vitriol of death metal and hardcore, attaching high impact, atonal electrical bursts to metal/punk dynamics. An exhausting/exhilerating assault of rapidly changing stop/start feedback death. Includes material from the Catwoman 7", the split LP with The Haters, the split 5" with Panicsville, collaborative tracks with GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters) and Corydon Ronnau (Sissy Spacek), and loads of unreleased tracks unearthed. The booklet contains liner notes by T.Mikawa (Incapacitants/ Hijokaidan) and Seymour Glass (Bananafish). Nearly 80 minutes of material. Limited to 1,000 copies.

WIJLEN WIJ s/t CD $13.98 Aesthetic Death

Aesthetic Death has only been releasing about one or two albums a year over the past few years, but every time they come out with something new, you can guarentee that it's going to consist of the most morose, mindbending extreme DOOM imaginable. Esoteric, Stumm, Wreck Of The Hesperus - all have been documented by Stu at AD, and all are essential listening for fans of ultraslow ultraDoom. The first new Aesthetic Death release since the killer Wreck Of The Hesperus CD from last year, Wijlen Wij's self-titled debut came in at Crucial Blast just a couple of days after we got the new Nadja Corrasion CD in stock...every time we played the Corrasion album (which has been alot this week, and Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff would kick in with those crushing, crumbling slabs of funeral deathdoom that took us by surprise, we were wondering what it would sound like if Nadja sounded like that all of the time. Well, Wijlen Wij kind of answer that question. Their songs are huge, lumbering blasts of slomo funeral doom, very much in the tradition of Skepticism's classic Stormcrowfleet and Thergothon's Stream From The Heavens, ultra sloooow and intensely depressing, dark and raw, the long lumbering songs buried in an austere graveyard atmosphere. But then there are the guitars, so saturated in distortion that they sound alot like Nadja's overmodulated walls of fuzzy drone, massive crumbling waves of crunch pouring forth over sparse plodding tomb-marches beaten on huge tympani drums, over which Wijlen Wij drape layers of ominous, beautiful church organ drones, minor key fugues, and haunting Gregorian chant-like choirs. Awesome! The first track even sounds like a deathdoom version of music from the Conan The Barbarian soundtrack. 6 tracks of epic, desolate doom metal perfectly crafted out of obsidian riffage, which isn't too surprising as the band is a virtual funeral doom/drone-doom supergroup, featuring members of Pantheist, Solicide, In Somnis, Until Death Overtakes Me, and Fall Of The Grey Winged One! In a limited edition of 1000 copies.

MP3 SAMPLE: "L'Anatheme " (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Offertorium" (excerpt)

WHITEHORSE Whitehorse 2xCD $14.98 20 Buck Spin

MEGA HEAVY Aussie lava doom! This shit will rattle yer ribcage around, believe me. Extreme doomsters take note: this dope-looking double CD set comes in a black on black gatefold case that's similiar to the Black Boned Angel Bliss & Void Inseperable CD that 20 Buck Spin also put out, comes with a folder insert card with track info and a detailed miniature replica of Nick Mangan's gnarly cover art, and two discs of ultra fucked up glasschewing sludge violence! Whitehorse have established themselves over the past few years in the Australian underground doom/metal scene, and little wonder - their torturously slow and grinding sludge dirge drips off of severely detuned guitars and out of amplifiers vomiting thick black torrents of feedback, while their "singer" tears his throat out with horrific inhuman shrieks and blood-flecked gargling, and gargantuan drum beats explode miles apart from one another while sickening electronic tones and surreal space rock FX flutter on Whitehorse's black winds like incinerated human ash. There's tons of howling improvised guitar noise that fans of Grey Daturas and Skullflower's IIIrd Gatekeeper will spasm over, as well as wide expanses of bleak stillness and swirling stygian atmosphere crawling with abject dread. Whitehorse collects brand new studio material, tracks from their limited edition LP that was released as part of Conspiracy Record's 10th Anniversary series, and material from out-of-print short-run releases. So nightmarishly oppressive and glacial that fans of Monarch, Khanate, Corrupted, Black Boned Angel, Moss and Eyehategod are gonna lose their fucking minds.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Fire To Light The Way" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Oceans Turn To Black" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "The Unwelcome Return" (excerpt)

WINDMILLS BY THE OCEAN s/t CD $11.98 Robotic Empire

Obviously, being big fans of the primary bands that the members of WINDMILLS BY THE OCEAN do time in (ISIS, RED SPAROWES, ANODYNE, and 27), we were all pretty excited when we heard about this new release, the fruit of some sort of studio project that was recorded in 2003 and is only now seeing the light of day. Not really sure what we were expecting, but comparisons were being made to EARTH and SUNN O))) in advance descriptions, so it certainly posed to be interesting. We were pretty surprised, however, when we finally picked this up, and discovered it to be an awesome, crushing, eclectic shoegazer/drone/hypno sludge epic! Mostly instrumental save for some washes of angelic layered vocals, WINDMILLS BY THE OCEAN serves up a diverse collection of tracks, all untitled, which vacillate between repetitious, heavy, post-rock informed drone metal that's similiar to the more melodic, rhythmic EARTH material, and effects-heavy slug trails of Creation Records-style shoegazer dreaminess. It's all heavy on the melodies, and there's also fantastic use of electronics throughout the album that suggests comparisons to SIGUR ROS. The album closes on a slab of beautiful, triumphant guitar-drone that is the catchiest thing that EARTH never recorded. For anyone that's been hoping for a band to fill the void between ISIS' titanic constructs and the dirge/pop/sludge of JESU and FLOOR, this album is for you. Accompanied by excellent mottled visuals by Sera Timms.

WINDMILLS BY THE OCEAN s/t LP $11.98 Robotic Empire

Now available on vinyl, black, in a pressing of 1400.
Obviously, being big fans of the primary bands that the members of WINDMILLS BY THE OCEAN do time in (ISIS, RED SPAROWES, ANODYNE, and 27), we were all pretty excited when we heard about this new release, the fruit of some sort of studio project that was recorded in 2003 and is only now seeing the light of day. Not really sure what we were expecting, but comparisons were being made to EARTH and SUNN O))) in advance descriptions, so it certainly posed to be interesting. We were pretty surprised, however, when we finally picked this up, and discovered it to be an awesome, crushing, eclectic shoegazer/drone/hypno sludge epic! Mostly instrumental save for some washes of angelic layered vocals, WINDMILLS BY THE OCEAN serves up a diverse collection of tracks, all untitled, which vacillate between repetitious, heavy, post-rock informed drone metal that's similiar to the more melodic, rhythmic EARTH material, and effects-heavy slug trails of Creation Records-style shoegazer dreaminess. It's all heavy on the melodies, and there's also fantastic use of electronics throughout the album that suggests comparisons to SIGUR ROS. The album closes on a slab of beautiful, triumphant guitar-drone that is the catchiest thing that EARTH never recorded. For anyone that's been hoping for a band to fill the void between ISIS' titanic constructs and the dirge/pop/sludge of JESU and FLOOR, this album is for you. Accompanied by excellent mottled visuals by Sera Timms.

WIRE ORCHESTRA s/t CD-R $6.98 MT6 Records

The debut recording from this Baltimore free/improv space psych outfit. After 2 years and over 50 shows, the current lineup entered the studio in January of 2004 and blasted out over an hour of improvised acid space rock, trumpet and violin generated scrape-and-clatter sonic esoterica, neurotic electronics, and evocative melodic drones. Fans of Acid Mothers Temple and Sunburned Hand Of The Man will dig. 14 tracks, comes packaged in a labeled white digipack.

WIZAR'D, THE Follow The Wizard CD $10.98 Rusty Axe

All of the Rusty Axe releases that we've gotten in this week have been primal, zero-bullshit slabs of underground metal, their label motto is "raw fucking metal" fer god's sake; Rusty Axe jams are like an enema for a metal scene choking on wannabe stardom and mock professionalism. And so far, everything that I've heard from the label is rooted in old school metal yet somehow damaged and bent, like a mutant bizarro-dimension version of the genres that the bands fall in. Like Godless's harsh, hallucinatory WWII-infatuated black metal, or Blood Cult's midwestern redneck blackthrash. Or The Wizar'd, extra apostrophe required, a weirdly psychedelic doom metal band from Autralia, whose Follow The Wizard bears the motto "crushing gothic slime" per the CD booklet. Fuck yeah. Totally lumbering doom metal steeped in Sabbath and the UK doom of bands like Cathedral, Warning, and Witchfinder General. But weirder. Definitely weirder. The songs move from plodding slow motion dirges and downtuned riffage (the third track "Life Eternal" is total Vitus worship) to quirky acoustic folk parts that sound like Uriah Heep or something, with distinctive vocals that have a weird chanty quality to them, awesome acid-rock guitar solos, everything blanketed in a raw, murky recording and dark ambience. Awesome!

WIZAR'D, THE Smouldering Sinners 7" EP $5.98 Rusty Axe

More weirdo Aussie doom from The Wizar'd! This 7" is a mandatory companion to their awesome Follow The Wizard mini-album that we've listed elsewhere in this weeks update, with three songs that were recorded during the same session as Follow... and dedicated to "the masters of metal: Manilla Road, Pagan Altar, and Death SS". The EP opens with a short psychedelic instrumental called "The White Ship", with lonesome dustbowl guitar melodies floating over pipe organs, and then kicks into the title track, a dose of classic old school doom metal a la Saint Vitus, Black Sabbath, Cathedral, but filtered through The Wizar'ds quirky lens with those nasally, effects drenched vocals, killer melodic soloing, and bizarre lyrics. So cool, the singer actually does sound like some wizened sorceror, while the band kicks out righteously retro 80's doom riffs. The b-side has "The Wizar'd", another heavy doom jam with massive slowmo riffing and oddly anthemic choruses, this time with weird drum machine like rhythms plodding through the song and spacey guitar leads dripping with flanger fx. Comes in a color sleeve with AWESOME cover artwork and a double sided insert. Recommended.

WOLF EYES Recycled Music Series CASSETTE $4.98 RRRecords

Wolf Eyes entry into the infamous RRRecords Recycled Music series serves up molten freeform horror electronics and ghostly feedback squeal conjured from strangulated analogue electronics and malfunctioning circuit mayhem bathed in dubby almost-beats and buzzing splattered howl. The Recycled Music Series has the featured artist'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. Pretty cool!

WOLF EYES WITH JOHN WIESE Equinox CD $11.98 Troniks
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

The latest in a long running series of collabs between buds Wolf Eyes and John Wiese transports the juddering, crunchy heave of W.E. into some weird, alien sonicscape that is surprisingly calm for at least the first half hour or so. This isn't a mutual jam session as one might expect; rather, Equinox features noise sculptor Wiese attaching himself to a body of Wolf Eyes recordings featuring the original Dilloway/Olson/Young lineup and recorded between July 2004 to December 2005, and sees him reshape their jams into a superb stygian dronescape that's at least as creepy as anything those guys have vomited up on their own. The sole 45 minute track on this disc opens with a detailed soundscape of distant industrial whirring, spectral sound events, and echoing horns, like walking through a post-apocalyptic factory town late at night, surrounded by the buzz of electric lines and bizarre, alien insect sounds. At about 25 minutes in, though, the night haze is suddenly punctured by ultra abrasive peals of feedback and demonic beast roars and high frequency chirps swarming above your head. A brutal nightmare assault that dissipates back into subdued drone. Part formless horror sound design, part isolationist narrative, this is a killer album that boasts one hell of a descent into brooding, amplified/psychotic creep. There's a second track too, which consists of the Wolf Eyes guys watching fireworks and cracking jokes. Limited edition of 1,000. Excellent black and white artwork on this one, with the booklet folding out poster style to reveal a larger version of the nightmarish cover art. Fkkn A. Already sold out at the source!

WOLFMANGLER Cooking With Wolves CD $14.98 Digitalis

A new collection of grim chamber-folk doom from Smolken, the dark figure behind the Polish "black metal" band Dead Raven Choir, whose weird, janky black/folk buzz has long been some of our favorite music. Wolfmangler is Smolken's new project, a grim, shambling folk music interpretation of doom metal, played entirely on string instruments and accompanied only by Smolken's creepy rasping whispers, primitive percussion, and dark rural atmosphere. Following the split CD with British ultradoom metallers Moss and a full length on the UK outsider metal imprint Aurora Borealis, Cooking With Wolves is Wolfmangler's latest, fourteen songs of twisted, eldritch folk melodies scraped out of bowed double bass and violin while Smolken whispers, screeches, and deeply intones weird visions of autumnal decay. There are a couple of traditional folk standards on here that took me by surprise, including a rendition of "Old Man River" that when played by Wolfmangler becomes a deeply unsettling dirge that barely resembles the original. Before that, Cole Porter's "All Of You" is twisted into a stumbling doom march, the deep groan of the contrabass and Smolken's deathlike whisper conjuring a funereal fog. An out of print CD-R EP The Gates Of Wolves is also included on the disc, which was the last Wolfmangler recordings captured before Smolken moved back to Poland from Texas. Darkly beautiful acoustic doom, different from his previous work as Dead Raven Choir, although fans of DRC will find this equally entrancing. The disc comes in a silkscreened 4-panel gatefold case.
MP3 SAMPLE: "All Of You" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "In The East" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Ol Man River" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Zegar" (excerpt)

WOJCZECH Sedimente CD $11.98 SelfMadeGod

Ferocious grindpunk action from Germany that delivers the goods: 11 songs of nihilistic worldview communicated through blastbeat strewn graveyards, Scandinavian style crustcore and gutteral/sick screaming tradeoffs, tightly played but fucking raw metallic grind thats as hooky as crust faves like Disassociate and Phobia. These cretins have been kicking it since 1995, and their steady output of 7"s and Euro touring has made them a well-oiled blast machine rooted in classic grindcore that's not afraid to throw in some apocalyptic atonal slow doom parts, awesome post-hardcore elements, hard rock riffs, old school hardcore sprints, and cool/grim melodic riffs, like all the best parts of Assuck and Nasum and His Hero Is Gone together in a vicious grind stew. Recommended to all grind bastards.

WOLD Screech Owl CD $13.98 Profound Lore

This latest offering from Wold certainly turned heads when it was released earlier this year. Like alot of the stuff that comes out on Profound Lore, Wold initially take shape as a black metal band, but their approach to crafting their sound is entirely different from anyone else in the "black metal" scene. The trio, who hail from the barren prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada and consist of members Opex ("battle strings and death marches"), Obey (credited with "scourge"), and Fortress Crookedjaw (vocalist and "devices"), create home-recorded slabs of overdriven, raw-as-fuck black metal that are then transmitted through what seems like a mile of white noise and distortion, and come out on the other end as terminally abstracted smears of ultra lo-fi skree and blackened speaker filth that somehow becomes an intensely creepy and dense wash of blown out blackness. Screech Owl is the band's second album, the follow up to the arcane amplifier conjurings of LOTMP, and at first sounds like the noisiest black metal band in the world, noisier than Akitsa or Bone Awl, reelasing shredded streams of sonic hatred through a thin sheen of murderous hiss and throbbing buried blastbeats. But then there's "December Eve", which shows up in the middle of the album as a monstrous distorted backgroud loop, a beautifully crumbling melody so bass heavy and distorted that it threatens to unravel your speaker cones, a slow-spinning slab of shoegazer drift rumbling underneath Fortress Crookedjaw's vicious taunting vocals, like some insane combination of Brainbombs, Whitehouse, Bone Awl, and My Bloody Valentine, if you can imagine that. Elsewhere, like on "Gather Under Her Shadow", Wold weave wicked nocturnal loops of overdriven distortion and trance-inducing walls of fuzz, and on "I'm The Chisel" the band lurches through a demolished haze of hypnotically repetitive rockin' blackpunk fighting to tear through droning keyboards. This album is intensely fucked up, black metal and harsh noise and haunting melodic loops like something from a Basinski album melting together into a surreal narco-blacknoise hallucination. Awesome. The disc is packagd in a 4-panel gatefold jacket, with the disc inside of a printed paper sleeve.

MP3 SAMPLE: "So That No Sword May Strike Him Down" (excerpt)

WOLF EYES Dead Hills CD $11.98 Troubleman

As we continue to dredge thorugh the Troubleman back catalog searching for more heavy weirdness, we stumble across Dead Hills, the 2002 mini-album from Michigan creep industrialists Wolf Eyes. As far as I'm concerned, this is one of their best doses, matching 80's industrial a la Throbbing Gristle with the skull thudding rage of primal HC through their own unique vision of handmade analogue electronics, old drum machines, squealing sax, and buzzsaw riff. The disc starts with "Dead Hills", an eleven minute crawl through a nightmare forest filled with chirping electronics and monstrous grunts and waves of heavy distortion. And then "Dead Hills 2" kicks in with a skeletal, minimalist beat-pulse that gets overtaken by blasts of demonic sax squawk and distorted guitar, searing manipulated sinewaves, and terrifying sing-song howls, almost like early Swans defleshed, stripped to a leering, knife-wielding skeleton, yet still brutally heavy and completely threatening. That track is one of the best Wolf Eyes jams ever, certainly one of their heaviest, a crushing relentless trudge through squealing feedback spikes and brutal 808 thump. The third track "Rotten Tropics" presents another pulsating drum machine loop, this time pulsing underneath a black sky of horrific vomit vocals streaming out of an endless chain of delay pedals, more of Olsen's piercing sax, and an ominous synth pulse that turns the track into something like a John Carpenter/Suicide collaboration. A killer dose of Wolf Eyes, with boss cover art from Aaron Dilloway.

WOMBA Evidence Of Letta CD $12.98 R.A.I.G.

It's always a challenge to try and describe pretty much anything that comes out on the Russian label R.A.I.G. The label's whole aesthetic revolves around completely genre-defying sound art and challenging, progressive heaviness, and so much of the stuff that I've picked up from them is so far-out there that it can be tough to navigate. I've yet to come across a R.A.I.G. release that I thought was less than fantastic though, and this newest disc from the eccentric Russian outfit Womba is one of the more surreal and evocative releases to come out from the label's core circle of artists. Their last album, the utterly confounding The 27th Baku Commissar from 2005 was a dreamlike collage of sound, and Evidence Of Letta develops their meticulous cut-and-paste style even further, creating a mysterious collection of found sound collage, gorgeous industrial drones, snippets of cartoon, folk, and classical music bleeding through slow, rhythmic loops of noise, mutant radio transmissions intercepted from another time, maniacal cartoon voices, and spaced-out neo-psychedelia, all of the sounds chopped up and sped up/slowed down and recombined into an epic half-waking hallucination divided into 24 chapters. This is also mant to be a kind of interactive CD, with the intent of having the listener listen to the entire album on shuffle, which creates a nearly endless number of sonic possibilities. A cool, trippy symphony of cassette-splicing/plunderpunk dreamscapes.
The packaging for this disc is something else, too...the disc is presented inside of a oversized chipboard folder sleeve with embossed/silkscreened artwork, and on the inside there is a 12 page booklet that is bound into the sleeve, with the CD pocket glued to the inner back cover. The booklet is filled with high contrast images of strange cultural detritus, and the terrific design and imagery is a perfect accompaniment for Womba's psychedelic, post-industrial plunderphonic visions. Highly recommended.

WOMBA The 27th Baku Commissar CD $12.98 R.A.I.G.

This 72 minute CD is loaded with mega acid-trip electro psych genre-mash from the Russian splice ensemble Womba. The 27th Baku Comissar (a reference to the Soviet-led assassination of Azerbaijan revolutionists in 1918) is split up into 27 tracks...but the album is really a single entity, a blast of brutal mutant electronica and weird genre splicing as it drifts from fuzzy, glitched out minimalist synthesizer drones to weird lopsided beats accomapnied by ferocious Russian ranting, to crushing digital blastbeats and somber piano lines. Womba uses alot of vocal cutup, samples, and drunk cheerleader rants to add a thick veneer of paranoia to everything, and the album gradually takes on a hypnotic, trance inducing vibe as you're relentlessly hammered with their noisy electronic collage and nightmarish voices. But then, in the last 20 minutes of the album, Womba takes another left turn with brief passages of woozy indie-pop, sloppy disembodied proto-metal riffing, ambient post-rock, and other unexpected weirdness before shifting back to their bizarre nightmare electronica. We're reminded of a much weirder, much more textured take on the loop heavy scum-psych-trance of Dead Husbands, and this definitely sounds like something that would fit well on one of the Dead Mind Electronica Obscura compilations. Political techno-noisecore-cheersquad-industrial-deathfunk-pop cutup? This is pretty difficult to describe, but it rules. Way recommended to fans of aggro mutant electronica and superweird post-rock forms. Like the other R.A.I.G. CDs we reviewed in this weeks newsletter, The 27th Baku Commissar is packaged in this really cool, very unqiue thick cardboard case with silkscreened, handassembled printing and cover art.

WON JAMES WON Tols Toy CD $12.98 R.A.I.G.

Surreal, confusional avant-rock/thrash/noise/punk/hip hop/collage from this Russian ensemble that is tied in with the ZveZdaZ art collective that's been putting out some wonderfully weird music over the past few years, which we are just now starting to discover. From what we have been able to discern, Won James Won is more of a musical collective than an actual band, and includes members of Womba and Mux (both of who have had CDs reviewed at Crucial Blast recently) among their shifting membership. Musically, Won James Won is part dystopic electro-psychedelia, and part Naked City cut-n-paste. Throughout Tols Toy, Won James Won pieces together 26 mostly-instrumental tracks of abstract computer noise, blasts of powerful stadium punk, electronic sample cut-up, Mike Patton/Eye Yamatsuka style avant vocal stylings, some genuinely intoxicating passages of electronic pop and folk, harsh noise, unbelieveably beautiful overmodulated post-rock, free jazz, martial-drone soundscapes. In the end, Tols Toy sounds like the soundtrack for some surreal, avant garde 80's coming of age movie, and it's really amazing, probably our favorite release from the increasingly curious R.A.I.G. label. Recommended! Like the other R.A.I.G. CDs we have in stock, this CD is packaged in a super cool, unique oversized thick cardboard case with silkscreened, handassembled printing and full color cover art.

WORLD BELOW Maelstrom CD $11.98 Psychedoomelic

More Swedish Doom that threatens to usurp Maryland's title of Doom Capital!! I don't know if there's any other country on the planet that is capable of producing as many high quality, classic sounding Doom bands. World Below play in the old school Doom style, tapping the same vein of bluesy slow n' low Sabbath worship as the Maryland legends (The Obsessed, Internal Void, Unorthodox) and of course, Saint Vitus, and getting epic a la the melodic sloth of Candlemass...but with the addition of brutal Swedish death metal elements that come as less of a surprise when you find out that World below is made up of members of Centinex and Carnal Forge. The combination is fucking crushing, with a range of lush doom rock with almost powermetal vocals, gritty and crushing downtuned sludge riffing, faster death metal parts, all contributing to solid catchy songs. Killer doom that sits alongside Goatsnake, Cathedral, and especially Orodruin, in terms of taking the classic Doom sound and breathing new life into it.

WORLD BURNS TO DEATH Sucking Of The Missile Cock LP $9.98 HCH Records

Scalding hardcore thrash with a ferocious anti-war message, comparable to Japanese crust meeting a potent mix of Swedish & Finnish distortion with the essential elements of Scandinavian D-beat mayhem. Guest screams from Lyz ANTISCHISM and Jenny SBITCH. WBTD members also play in bands like SEVERED HEAD OF STATE, DEATHREAT, and FROM ASHES RISE.The LP includes a cloth patch.

WORMS Pelican Songs CD $13.98 Tumult

A little known band from Finland, Worms started off in 1983 and continued to play and record throughout the 1990's despite being almost completely ignored by the Finnish underground. They only released three singles and a couple of songs on a compilation for the Bad Vugum label, but somewhere along the line they were discovered by Andee over at Tumult/Aquarius, who realized the genius behind Worms' heavy, mesmerizing drone rock. This led to his contacting the band and discovering that they actually had a full length album that was already recorded but had languished on the shelf after the original releasing label dropped the project. Pelican Songs is this lost album, released in 2002 through Andee's label Tumult, and this is one weird, crushing drone-metal/kraut-pop album, one that I had been meaning to check out literally for years but am only now hearing it for the first time thanks to a big shipment of Tumult's crucial back catalog titles that we just got in. Opening with the massive half-hour dirgefest "Medley: The Most Futile Insurance/Pelican Song", Worms rages with an incandescent drone-sludge jam that released a single titanic shimmering riff into the world and then proceeds to pound it out across a landscape of feedback-spouting amplifiers and propulsive hammering drums. Massive and beautiful and wholly trance inducing, this track is a little like one of the riffs offa Skullflower's IIIrd Gatekeeper stretched out to infinity, or Band Of Susans performing a Terry Riley score with Dale Crover grinding away at his kit like Sisyphus. Amazing. After that it's three tracks that were recorded several years after the heavier material, and these songs ("Early In The Evening", "I Dream Of You", and "There Is No Such A Thing") take on a lighter weight, each one a melodic jangle pop riff repeated over and over while frontman Veli Pesonen intones his simple lyrics in a deep, drawling voice - kinda like Circle jamming with Michael Gira in a way, darkly melodic and psychedelic as searing leads wind their way through the hypnotic riffs.
But then it's back to the HEAVY, with the closer "Border", a 17-minute long dirge with an awesome apocalyptic riff grinding through a mist of feedback and distorted singing, a truly menacing melody, like Godflesh gone krautrock, Melvins meets late-era Swans, beautiful and grim, that mighty levitational riff repeating itself over and over.
This album rules, highly recommended if you're one that digs early 90's feedback-heavy sludge rock, weird Finnish hypno-rock, and colossal riffage.
MP3 SAMPLE: "Medley: The Most Futile Insurance / Pelican Song" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "I Dream Of You" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Border" (excerpt)

WORMWOOD Starvation 2xLP $19.98 Kreation

An awesome looking, double LP gatefold edition of Wormwood's latest psychedelic sludgecrust opus, Starvation, available on boss gray-marble vinyl in a limited hand-numbered run of 250 copies!!!
Wow. I have always liked Wormwood's weird brand of keyboard-heavy sludge metal, going all the way back to their 2000 LP Requiescat. That album fused blackened doom, full on prog-rock keyboard overload, and the psychedelic crustcore of bands like Dystopia and the Baltimore doomcore contingent (Wake Up On Fire, Moonshine) into a twisted feverdream. One of the things that has set Wormwood apart, and one of the things that I thought made Wormwood sound so distinctive, is their lack of guitar...instead, the band utilizes a dual bass guitar attack, a la Seized, that makes their bludgeoning, technical dirge riffage sound ten times heavier than it ever would with regular guitars. So, after about six years and a move from their original home base of Lawrence, Kansas to Seattle, Wormwood are back with their second full length, Starvation, and I think it's by far the most developed sonic narrative that the band has yet created. The album waves through complex, tangled compositions of churning, sludgy bass riffs, layers upon layers of swirling, minor-key Cradle Of Filth-esque keyboards and samplers invoking paranoid soundscapes, unbelieveably beautiful piano interludes, dynamic shifts in rhythm and bonecrushing slow doom dirges, tribal drumming, ghostly female vocals chased by gnarly caveman howls, the songs thickened into syrup courtesy of sludgecore producer extraordinaire Billy Anderson. Imagine a weird, trippy fusion of early Neurosis, Tarantula Hawk, Skepticism, prog rock, Cradle of Filth, Eyehategod, and Seized. The entire album is fantastic, crushing and psychedelic and intensely strangem but it's the with the final three tracks of Starvation that it becomes really transcendent: track seven is a cover of The Smith's "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" from Strangeways, Here We Come, turning the dark croon of the original into an awesome progpop/doomcrust epic; "No True Altruism" is a full-on prog rock epic, comprised of multiple movements that go from lumbering sludgeprog like a Goblin track gone sludgecore backed by haunted keyboards drifting on demonic winds, soaring synthesizers painting epic vistas of dread, and then another ridiculously catchy piano melody surfaces alongside beautiful, heartbroken female singing, before the track shifts into another killer keyboard-driven dirge straight out of an Argento movie, punctuated with blasts of pummeling double-bass drumming. And then theres the track, which I'm not sure of the title, it's either untitled or it's called "Gluttony", either way it's a massive 10-minute miasma of dubby effects and rhythms, processed backwards-moving keyboards and electronics, hallucinatory backwards vocals, warped bass guitars, sort of sounding like it's a remix of the Smiths cover, but melted over bits and peices of other tracks from the album, massively heavy and dreamlike, totally mind-melting and trippy, a crushing wave of psych-sludge weirdness that serves as a perfect coda to the albums journey. So amazing. This CD version of Starvation comes in an exquisitely designed digipack that mimics the original gatefold vinyl jacket, and includes an eight page booklet. The album also sports awesome artwork from Lara Haynes that perfectly evokes the bizarre wooded dreamworld in Wormwood's music. Highly recommended !

WORMWOOD Starvation CD $13.98 20 Buck Spin

I have always liked Wormwood's weird brand of keyboard-heavy sludge metal, going all the way back to their 2000 LP Requiescat. That album fused blackened doom, full on prog-rock keyboard overload, and the psychedelic crustcore of bands like Dystopia and the Baltimore doomcore contingent (Wake Up On Fire, Moonshine) into a twisted feverdream. One of the things that has set Wormwood apart, and one of the things that I thought made Wormwood sound so distinctive, is their lack of guitar...instead, the band utilizes a dual bass guitar attack, a la Seized, that makes their bludgeoning, technical dirge riffage sound ten times heavier than it ever would with regular guitars. So, after about six years and a move from their original home base of Lawrence, Kansas to Seattle, Wormwood are back with their second full length, Starvation, and I think it's by far the most developed sonic narrative that the band has yet created. The album waves through complex, tangled compositions of churning, sludgy bass riffs, layers upon layers of swirling, minor-key Cradle Of Filth-esque keyboards and samplers invoking paranoid soundscapes, unbelieveably beautiful piano interludes, dynamic shifts in rhythm and bonecrushing slow doom dirges, tribal drumming, ghostly female vocals chased by gnarly caveman howls, the songs thickened into syrup courtesy of sludgecore producer extraordinaire Billy Anderson. Imagine a weird, trippy fusion of early Neurosis, Tarantula Hawk, Skepticism, prog rock, Cradle of Filth, Eyehategod, and Seized. The entire album is fantastic, crushing and psychedelic and intensely strangem but it's the with the final three tracks of Starvation that it becomes really transcendent: track seven is a cover of The Smith's "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" from Strangeways, Here We Come, turning the dark croon of the original into an awesome progpop/doomcrust epic; "No True Altruism" is a full-on prog rock epic, comprised of multiple movements that go from lumbering sludgeprog like a Goblin track gone sludgecore backed by haunted keyboards drifting on demonic winds, soaring synthesizers painting epic vistas of dread, and then another ridiculously catchy piano melody surfaces alongside beautiful, heartbroken female singing, before the track shifts into another killer keyboard-driven dirge straight out of an Argento movie, punctuated with blasts of pummeling double-bass drumming. And then theres the track, which I'm not sure of the title, it's either untitled or it's called "Gluttony", either way it's a massive 10-minute miasma of dubby effects and rhythms, processed backwards-moving keyboards and electronics, hallucinatory backwards vocals, warped bass guitars, sort of sounding like it's a remix of the Smiths cover, but melted over bits and peices of other tracks from the album, massively heavy and dreamlike, totally mind-melting and trippy, a crushing wave of psych-sludge weirdness that serves as a perfect coda to the albums journey. So amazing. This CD version of Starvation comes in an exquisitely designed digipack that mimics the original gatefold vinyl jacket, and includes an eight page booklet. The album also sports awesome artwork from Lara Haynes that perfectly evokes the bizarre wooded dreamworld in Wormwood's music. Highly recommended !

WORMWOOD Behemoth 2x7"EP $9.98 Kreation

It's a new release from the Seattle-based pysch/prog/sludgecrust ensemble Wormwood, but not new jams, although chances are that you've never heard this stuff...the Behemoth double 7" was originally recorded in 1998 and pressed way back in '99, but the label that was supposed to have released this just sat on the vinyl for some reason. The only ones that ever made it out were 100 copies that Wormwood took on tour with them, but thankfully Kreation Records stepped up last year and bought off the rest of the records, designed and printed a bitchin' new silkscreened gatefold jacket, and finally made this available! Behemoth contains three songs, "Out Cold", "Soundtrack", and "Nothing" (the other side of the second 7" plays but it is devoid of sound)...gnarly, slow doomcore that uses two bass guitars to create a lumbering low end heaviness that fucking crushes, along with awesome droning prog-rock keyboards, harsh roaring vocals, samplers, and thunderous tribal drumming. These guys are masters at creating dense, paranoid seizures, reminding us of a cross between Neurosis, Tarantula Hawk, drug-fueled percussion freakouts, Kylesa, and Eyehategod, a total nightmare score, psychedelic but sickeningly heavy and sludgy, super complex rhythms swirling beneath the creepout synths. Freaking great! The sleeve for this double 7" is really rad too, the 7"s packaged inside of a beautiful maroon gatefold sleeve that is screenprinted in black and metallic golk inks, with the classic image of the elephant-headed Behemoth on the cover.

WRAITHS Plaguebearer CD $12.98 Paradigms

One of the newer releases from the always-great Paradigms imprint (who have provided us with crucial tuneage in recent months from The Angelic Process, Throne Of Katarsis, Utlagr, Titan, Hjarnidaudi, Amber Asylum and a host of others) , Wraith's Plaguebearer is a heavy, forbidding nightscape that has been engineered from modified sound equipment, field recordings, and human voices, five long tracks that collectively stretch out to almost an hour, plummeting the listener into a nightmarish factory inferno and then transporting you across a hellish wasteland of dead cities and mindless machinery shrieking in it's death throes. A swirling storm of super heavy improvised industrial psych-death, with howling distorted vocals swimming through chain links of FX, screeching feedback melting into silvery rivulets of drone, deep rumbling frequencies shaking the earth's crust in a thunderous bass-heavy miasma, cracked by the sound of brutally pugilistic tribal drumming. Like the Aural Hypnox ritual-deathdrone sound run through the rabid noise-thud of Wold Eyes arranging the score for apocalyptic black death. The track titles set the mood: "Nihil Rex", "Plaguebearer", "Bone Flutes & Skull Drums", "To Corrupt The Waters Of Lethe, Ghoulsong". The consistent presence of the drumming, which seems to be trapped in between dimensions with the beats bouncing around the darkness like a dub track gone horribly wrong, really sets Wraith's apart from the "dark industrial ambient" pack - this is heavy, corrosive drift from the Styx, at once mystical and skullscraping. Limited to 500 copies, and presented in a DVD case with full color artwork and a black and white insert sheet.
MP3 SAMPLE: "Bone Flutes And Skull Drums" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Ghoulsong" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "To Corrupt The Waters Of Lethe" (excerpt)

WRATH OF THE WEAK s/t CD $10.98 Bastardised

It's good having scouts in the Metal field, ya know? Especially when we're talking about super-underground, basement-dwelling Black Metal projects, of which there seem to be hundreds of here in the U.S. along. There's just no way that I can scan through all of the Myspace pages and websites to find the really great shit. So I'm totally relying on trusted associates to discover and refer me to new bands/projects nowadays, like Hamilton from Genghis Tron - that dude breathes Black Metal and fucked-up Death Metal, and he's turned me onto all kinds of bands like Portal and Velvet Cacoon, and other sources of warped blackness like Wrath Of The Weak. Wrath Of The Weak is a one-man band outta Buffalo, New York operated by a guy named "J", and this self-titled disc is the band's first release, a seven song epic of hypnotic, ultra-repetitive Black Metal drone. Bleak walls of sound are created by layers upon layers of droning, heavily distorted guitars, and the sound is so dense and loaded with harmonics and overtones that it begins to feel like a one of Glenn Branca's guitar army pieces being performed by Weakling, a crushing minimalist cacophony of amassed powerchord blizzard and white noise harmonies. The riffs are extremely simple, but become monolithic as they are repeated eternally, with timing and riff changes happening only sporadically. J's vocals, a muted, scorched rasp that hisses tales of winter storms and warrior rabbits bleeds into the wall of droning mono-riff, and some deep listening reveals that Wrath Of The Weak has scattered awesome subliminal melodies that have been buried deep behind the buzz. The last track, the 24-minute long "Cuniculean Rampage", is a two-part suite of soaring hypno-blast mantra that devolves into a final 15 minute clot of brutal Industrial distortion loops and droning feedback death. This is total trance inducing Black Minimalism meant to be played and devoured at maximum volume, exploring the fields of drone that Weakling left behind, and also sharing a kind of kindred fuzzblast ambience as bands like Velvet Cacoon, Xasthur, Ildjarn, and Blut Aus Nord. Highly recommended!

WRECK OF THE HESPERUS The Sunken Threshold CD $12.98 Aesthetic Death

Aesthetic Death always delivers the absolute concrete when they drop another album on us. Their past releases include two different double-disc sets from the psychedelic drug doomster Esoteric and the black vomit sludgecrust of Stumm's album from last year, and this debut full length from Irish tarpit beasts Wreck Of The Hesperus carries on that fine tradition of maximum downer doom. The album contains three looong songs, "Stop The Black Coffins", "Grave Signal", and "The Osseous Tomb (Echoes Of Winter)", which clock in at a combined 42 minutes in length, so you know you're going to get immense, ultra-slow stretched-out riffs pulled apart like gobs of tar over some surprisingly busy drumming, sickening demonic vocals screeching in slo-mo while the crusty riffs are set to hypno-repeat mode, grinding and stumbling over and over for up to eight minutes at a time, while hallucinatory electronic noises and processed vocal murk lurks in the shadows. The last track "The Osseous Tomb (Echoes Of Winter)" even has a minimal, whispered second half that owes as much to the slow-core of Codeine and Low as it does the gnarly deathsludge of Noothgrush and Khanate. The artwork and package design for this disc is really cool, too...a stark, high contrast tangle of withered vines and squid tentacles that scrambles across the entire multipage booklet and case. This one is a crusher, highly recommended to fans of crusty, gnarly doom filth like Khanate, Moonshine, Grief, Noothgrush, Corrupted, Fleshpress, Eyehategod, Moss, and Graves At Sea.

WURDULAK Ceremony In Flame CD $6.98 Baphomet

Barbaric and blasphemous black metal filth from an all star extreme metal lineup!Ceremony In Flames features a harrowing gathering of some of extreme music's most feared names, resulting in sickening,unholy musical insanity. Features Killjoy (NECROPHAGIA / THE RAVENOUS),Maniac (MAYHEM),and members of IMMORTAL, GORELORD, BLOODTHORN, PERISHED, and SOUL FORSAKEN. Your suffering will be in vain! On a probably very dark night in 2000, Frediablo of GORELORD and NECROPHAGIA and Killjoy of NECROPHAGIA decided to give life to yet another band. They named it WURDULAK, and unlike the musical direction of their other bands, looked for a more Black Metal approach to music. For that they needed the best musicians available, and they found a very nice selection. WURDULAK is: Killjoy (NECROPHAGIA) and Maniac (MAYHEM) on vo-kills, Frediablo (NECROPHAGIA/ GORELORD), Ihizahg (PERISHED) and Fug (SOUL FORSAKEN/ NECROPHAGIA) on guitars, Iscariah (then still IMMORTAL) on bass and Jehmod (BLOODTHORN) on drums. With this unholy gathering they went into Skansen Studio in Norway and recorded their debut album, "Ceremony In Flames".Already the cover artwork leaves very little room for doubt about the musical style of the band, with the cover depicting a nun with a wooden stake driven through her mouth. There are also several pictures of naked staked nuns in the booklet. No material for the weak-hearted! Maybe the expected musical onslaught after this visual gore on the record cover would be raging Black Metal, but that's not exactly what we can find on "Ceremony In Flames". Instead, the music on "Ceremony In Flames" is evil as hell, old school Black Metal. This means that quite a large portion of the record is played at mid-pace, although on several tracks such as "Cauterizing The Wounds Of Christ","Containment Of Inferno" (which has lyrics written by Bard Eithun Faust, the ex-EMPEROR drummer who has been imprisoned for several years now) and "Chosen Below", the tempo is also shifted a few gears up.Musically WURDULAK doesn't do any really weird things, mostly choosing for simple but very effective chord-based riffs. What makes the band more special is the dual vocal attacks of Maniac and Killjoy, who often scream at the same time, giving the music an additional evil-dose.

WUZOR / OPAQUE split 7" EP $5.98 Wolfman Records

One track of weirdo medieval deathcore from Cali grind dervishes WUZOR, and 3 tracks of improvised dreamnoise from UK group OPAQUE, heavy melted slabs of feedback, fans of SKULLFLOWER and MBV take note.