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While renowned for his work as bassist for Agalloch and Sculptured, Jason Walton has also frequently ventured into other, stranger and more experimental regions over the past two decades, offering a range of baffling and captivatingly weird sounds with bands like Self Spiller, Especially Likely Sloth, and Nothing. And it's in that latter territory that we find the debut EP from Snares Of Sixes, his latest creation. On the band's debut EP Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass, Snares Of Sixes makes a bold and confounding introduction, tangling the listener in confusional, highly aggressive avant-prog. The genre-shredding sound taps into a warped confluence of frenzied King Crimson-esque progressive rock, faint traces of frayed, heavily mutated black metal, haunting atmospheric touches, and abrasive electronics, and the result leaves us deliriously disoriented.
With tracks like "Urine Hive", "Lions To Leeches", "The Mother's Throat", Walton and company lurch through an escalating, ever-shifting frenzy of creepy, labyrinthine melody and pummeling percussive chaos, over-modulated riffage and schizophrenic time signatures, where android mutterings give way to hideous blackened shrieks and bouts of bizarre crooning, the sound stitched with veins of crushing metallic heaviosity, fractured electronica, and surreal atmopsherics as it reaches towards the menacing glitched-out tech-metal hallucination of "Retroperistalsis" that closes the EP.
Often difficult, frequently nightmarish, this stuff easily ranks as one of Walton's more challenging and oblique offerings. And for us, one of his most fascinating. Features Marius Sjøli and Robert Hunter (Hollow Branches), Andy Winter (Winds), Pete Lee (Lawnmower Deth), Nathanaël Larochette (Musk Ox), and Don Anderson (Agalloch, Sculptured), among others.
The EP will be released on digital and CD in a six-panel digipak.
click on the images to enlarge
GATEFOLD CD $9.98
DIGITAL $7.00
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A shambling monstrosity Woven from charred bones and infernal technology, stitched with gristle and exposed wiring. Hymns For The Broken, Swollen And Silent lurches like a grotesque assemblage of tortured flesh and mangled machinery, revealing the latest nightmare from Dutch fiend Gnaw Their Tongues. After more than a decade, the band continues to disturb with its uniquely dark and depraved blend of black metal, industrial and noise, and the eight-song Hymns shows Gnaw Their Tongues to be in prime killing mode.
Coming in the wake of a series of live performances starting in 2015, this new material from GTT mastermind Mories (Seirom, Cloak Of Altering, Mors Sonat) seems to find him tapping into a heavier, more violent rhythmic element as well as a more pronounced use of synthesizers, producing yet another step in the evolution of GTT's sound. Throughout the album, the harsh drum programming offers a mixture of cacophonous blast beats and grueling, glacial detonations; the sickening, tumescent groove that surges through "Hold High The Banners Of Truth Among The Swollen Dead" resembles something approximating a vile chopped n' screwed dubstep / blackened doom abomination, while on tracks like "Speared Promises", it slips into a hideously dissonant deathcrawl where those drums almost seem to be shorting out. Elsewhere, "Frail As The Stalking Lions" contorts into hellishly warped synth-sludge, and the hallucinatory weirdness of the title track delves into a black pit of ghastly ambience, gleaming synth and malfunctioning, off-time drum programming, which becomes possessed by bizarre operatic vocals that drift amid the anguished shrieking.
Through all of this, the band's signature use of unsettling samples and blasts of orchestral power is woven through the mix, turning each track into a seething mass of claustrophobic horror. Eruptions of ultra-frenzied blackened blast and floor-shaking depth-charge reverberations, ravenous, psychotic vocals and swells of choral despair, distorted electronics and gut-churning bass riffs, mournful horns and weirdly layered female operatic singing - yeah, Hymns delivers on the promise of chaotic horror that one expects from Gnaw Their Tongues, evoking foul, corrupted imagery while also (as usual) streaked with striking moments of warped, morbid beauty.
CD edition comes in a gatefold digisleeve.
click on the images to enlarge
DIGIPACK CD $9.98
DIGITAL $7.00
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"As much as we raved about Troller's eponymous debut five years ago, this one is even better. The band posted a video for the albums' "Storm Maker" which is a beautiful swoon of an synth ballad harking to those emotive tracks that OMD sculpted early in their career. A lovely track to say the least, but the Siouxsie / Kate Bush allusions may be the siren call to draw unwitting listeners into the dark pit at the soul of this album. Snarled electronic death rock and synthetic industrial catharsis is found throughout the rest of Graphic, highlighted by the title track's Cranes-ish pummel of heaven and hell, "Sundowner" (a track of a Diamanda Galas theatricality affixed to what the whole witch house scene aspired to but failed in delivering while busy coming up with ascii symbol nomenclature), and the diabolically death-disco anthem "Torch" with its ice queen vocal crescendos and tense drum-machined inventions for the dungeon. Luridly alluring indeed, and recommended." - Aquariusrecords.org
After a nearly four year wait, this doom-laden darkwave outfit from Austin, TX has finally returned with the follow-up to their acclaimed eponymous debut. It was there that the band introduced their lush, lugubrious sound combining heavy synths, slow-motion rhythms and haunting vocal melodies, woven into infectious, brooding blasts of darkpop perfection; the songs seemed to emanate from some cavernous subterranean chamber, drenched in reverb and surrounded by shorter pieces of bleak ambience and grinding noise. A sinister, often abrasive edge gleamed from that early material, but it also featured some of the most stunning darkwave anthems we'd heard in ages. And with their first proper full-length album, Troller have expanded on that sound even further, their sensuous, dread-filled pop encrusted with those huge, otherworldly synths and distorted, grinding bass roar, rumbling across crawling drum machines and washes of glacial Carpenterian electronics, gorgeously gloomy synthpop hooks gleaming in the dimly lit corners of Graphic, as Amber Goers' soulful, utterly bewitching vocals once again haunt Troller's tenebrous depths. Songs like "Not Here", "Torch" and "Storm Maker" shimmer with a malevolent majesty, while elsewhere the album slips into nightmarish electronic ambience and stunning expanses of black kosmische bliss. And while the band's noisier tendencies are more subdued this time around, there are still surges of corrosive sound throughout Graphic that materialize in dense feedback and jagged chords that are juxtaposed with the album's more beautiful passages. Combined with their penchant for provocative imagery and apocalyptic undercurrents, this produces something far bleaker and more unsettling than anything else we're hearing in the realm of darkwave right now.
Crucial Blast is proud to present a CD and digital release of this striking new album from Troller, available as a digipak CD with different art than the vinyl, and digital download via our website. The LP/cassette versions on Holodeck can be found in our webstore: Crucial Blast Webstore
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CRUCIAL BLAST WEBSTORE: NEW ARRIVALS LIST FOR EARLY 2022 COMING SOON
Yes, still here - it's been awhile since you've heard anything new from over here, and I'll be posting a statement ASAP explaining the personal catastrophes that I have had to deal with in recent past. If you've been waiting on anything from me, rest assured that I'm working my tail off to get back to you as soon as possible, and get you current.
In the meantime, Crucial Blast is here and bubbling, with new releases, store arrivals, announcements, ideas and other thought-forms on the fastly approaching horizon.
- Talk soon,
Adam Wright / Crucial Blast
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