Korperschwache

Going back to the mid-’90s, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for “organic decay”) has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground, landing somewhere between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan’s more extreme noise artists, the massive gravitational pull and formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. The majority of these older releases have long been out of print, but now, in conjunction with the brand new Evil Walks album, Crucial Blast has assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache material, some of which has never been heard by anyone outside the band’s immediate circle. 
The earliest release featured here is the Ovencleaner full-length, originally released as a sixty-minute cassette in 1995. Like all their early stuff, this is an orgy of harsh, grating noise, similar to much of the underground industrial slime that crept out of the mid ’90s. Heavily distorted psych guitar crawls through a mass of amp rumble on opener “Your Shattered Spine,” the slow-motion riffs and skittering percussion awash in swarming hiss and fuzz, the drum machine sputtering out fractured percussive fills and tinny, scrabbly faster-paced beats. “Sand Swallower” follows with more monstrous, harsh noise à la Incapacitants or Pain Jerk, a raging black maelstrom of distortion and feedback stretching across fourteen minutes. The avalanche continues with “Shiteater,” a dense, psychedelic 30-minute-plus epic of brainscrape and glacial sludge guitar, like Skullflower crossed with Incapacitants, later erupting into shrieking tape-noise carnage, demonic howls and massive gusts of granular noise. Closer “Rubber Fetish” is a bonus track that ends the album on a classic American industrial note: high-pitched feedback stretched across a field of rumbling machine throb and chopped up loops, fluttering distorted signals panning from speaker to speaker, the hammering rhythmic noise suspended over massive rumbling frequencies.