TOMB

TOMB

Pennhurst / Xesse

Crucial Blast

Pennhurst / Xesse is a new collection of rare material from the shadowy black industrial outfit T.O.M.B., compiling their ultra-limited Pennhurst album and the tracks from the one-sided Xesse 12-inch previously released on Prison Tatt. With all new artwork presented in a six-panel digipack, this full-length disc delivers over an hour of the band’s bizarre brand of vile electro-acoustic noisescapes, oppressive industrial drift and ghoulish vocalizations dredged from the dank, black bowels of some long-abandoned mausoleum. Originally released in 2009 as an extremely limited CDR on Esto Perpetua Records, the five tracks of abysmal necro-industrial filth on Pennhurst draw from source material that the band recorded at the notorious Pennhurst State and Norristown State Hospitals, two Philadelphia-area mental asylums that boast disturbing legacies of abuse and experimentation. As with their other releases, the work centers around nightmarish industrial soundscapes that mix blackened electronics with creepy field recordings, often erupting into suffocating, hellish noise. It’s without a doubt one of the group’s most intense blasts of sonic terror.  The next five tracks comprise Xesse, one of the band’s more ambient, drone-based works. No less fearsome than the preceding material, the EP opens with a chorus of wailing voices, the sounds of abject suffering echoing and reverberating within some nameless underground crypt. From there, Xesse moves into crushing Lustmordian walls of drone; thick, buzzing synthesizers rumble under snarling, electronically-warped vocals and other demonic utterances. Out of this growing graveyard chaos comes the sound of distorted chanting, sonic remnants of some unseen...

TOMB

Uag

Crucial Blast

For nearly a decade now, the shadowy collective known as TOMB (or Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) have practiced their brand of industrial death worship, creating some of creepiest recordings in recent memory. The grating industrial rhythms, blackened noise and malformed black metal on the band’s 2007 album Macabre Noize Royale blasted skulls into charred husks. TOMB’s latest album UAG (short for Underground Ancient Gateways) follows the crypt-crawlers through eleven tracks of suffocating, black ambient noise and lifeless industrial pummel, stripping away most of the black metal elements of previous releases and crafting a more abstract sound.  Making their way into abandoned sanitariums, morgues, decaying crypts and other sites of psychological and spiritual distress (such as the Pennhurst State Hospital in Pennsylvania, and Kentucky’s infamous Waverly Hills), TOMB captures the natural ambience of these locations and engages in pounding percussive workouts by banging and hammering on the very walls and structures. These rumbling industrial rituals yield a mix of Neubauten-esque rhythmic forms, harsh noise and black ambient voids that is sculpted into the uniquely haunted sonic landscape that is UAG. There is no narrative here, nothing resembling “mood music.” Each track flows directly into the next, the album crawling and breathing as a single, malevolent organism.