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Hymns For The Broken, Swollen And Silent by Gnaw Their Tongues

Gnaw Their Tongues

Hymns For The Broken, Swollen And Silent
Crucial Blast

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, they continue to disturb with their uniquely dark and depraved blend of black metal, industrial and noise, and this eight-song album shows them to be in prime killing mode. In the wake of a series of live performances starting in 2015, this new material from mastermind Mories (Seirom, Cloak Of Altering, Mors Sonat) finds him tapping into a heavier, more violent rhythmic element as well as a more pronounced use of synthesizers, 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 while signature unsettling samples and blasts of orchestral power weave throughout 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—this release delivers on the promise of chaotic horror that one expects from Gnaw Their Tongues, evoking foul, corrupted imagery while also streaked with striking moments of warped, morbid beauty.

CD $12.00

05/19/2017 655035031729 

CBR 117 


MP3 $7.92

05/19/2017 655035031729 

CBR 117 


FLAC $8.99

05/19/2017 655035031729 

CBR 117 


Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass by Snares Of Sixes

Snares Of Sixes

Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass
Crucial Blast

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 yet captivatingly weird sounds with bands like Self Spiller, Especially Likely Sloth, and Nothing. In this latter territory lies the debut EP from Snares Of Sixes, his latest creation. On the band’s debut Yeast Mother: An Electroacoustic Mass, Walton 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, leaving one deliriously disoriented. Often difficult, frequently nightmarish, this EP easily ranks as one of Walton’s more challenging and oblique offerings, but 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.

CD $9.50

05/05/2017 655035031828 

CBR 118 


MP3 $4.99

05/05/2017 655035031828 

CBR 118 


FLAC $5.99

05/05/2017 655035031828 

CBR 118 


On their acclaimed eponymous debut release, doom-laden Austin, Texas, darkwave outfit Troller introduced a lush, lugubrious sound combining heavy synths, slow-motion rhythms and haunting vocal melodies, woven into infectious, brooding blasts of dark-pop 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 heard in ages.  Troller takes that sound further on Graphic, their first proper full-length album. The group’s sensuous, dread-filled pop is encrusted with huge, otherworldly synths and distorted, grinding bass roar, rumbling across crawling drum machines and washes of glacial Carpenterian electronics. Gorgeously gloomy hooks shine in the dimly lit corners, as Amber Goers’s soulful, utterly bewitching vocals 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 that materialize in dense feedback and jagged chords juxtaposed with the album’s more beautiful passages. Combined with Troller’s provocative imagery and apocalyptic undercurrents, this produces something far bleaker and more unsettling than anything else in the realm of dark synth-pop today.

CD $12.00

06/03/2016 655035031620 

CBR 116 


One of many alter-egos of the notorious Dutch industrial black metal outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, Cloak of Altering returns to deliver the followup to the maniacal 2014 album Plague Beasts, unleashing yet another brain-scrambling blast of mutated symphonic black metal, nightmarish breakcore madness and hellish electronics fused together into a sweat-soaked, chrome-plated nightmare. Compared to previous works, the seven-song Manifestation is a slightly less chaotic monstrosity, giving these blackened maelstroms added room to breathe, but the cumulative assault continues to thoroughly scorch the listener. The sound is still rooted in a bizarre confluence of synth-drenched black metal, skewed industrial heaviness and fractured Planet Mu-esque electronic music, seemingly as informed by the hallucinatory throes of early Coil and the violent breakcore of Bong-Ra and Venetian Snares as it is by classic Nordic black metal. Strange contrapuntal riffs weave drunkenly amid crackling electronic glitch and eerie drones. Mournful synthscapes unfold across glacial rhythms and distorted doom-laden dirges. Blasts of foul, industrialized death metal pummel erupt alongside ominous piano figures and swells of sickening orchestral dissonance. One notable difference from previous works are the vocals, which take form as a vile, guttural robotic croak—a sickeningly putrid android presence layered among the rest of the distant shrieks, anguished screams and chilling, garbled cries.  As always, Cloak of Altering balances this electronically deformed madness with strikingly beautiful and majestically bleak melodic passages. Blasts of bombastic, heavily atmospheric synthesizer roar across songs like “Parasitic Altering Sickness” and “Hidden Celestial Deity.” An arresting, alien album, Manifestation...

CD $12.00

12/04/2015 655035031422 

 


MP3 $6.93

12/04/2015 655035031422 

CBR 114 


FLAC $7.99

12/04/2015 655035031422 

 


Psychogenic Atrophy by Dimesland

Dimesland

Psychogenic Atrophy
Crucial Blast

Appearing at the end of 2014 as a self-released digital-only title, Dimesland’s Psychogenic Atrophy was met with little fanfare, yet made an immediate and powerful impression upon those who heard it. Described by Invisible Oranges as a “sonic nightmare of thrash... that blends instrumental ability with the progressive stabs of Dimension Hatross-era Voivod....” and landing on numerous end-of-year best-of lists, Psychogenic Atrophy flattened just about everyone who encountered it.  With members of art rock legends The Residents’ touring band and blackened prog-doom ensemble Wild Hunt among their ranks, Dimesland released the promising Creepmoon EP a couple of years prior on Vendlus, but even that only hinted at how maniacal the band’s sound was to become. The eight songs here combine dizzying musical complexity and fearsome dissonance with off-kilter thrash. The confounding and complicated arrangements and demented riffing recall the likes of Watchtower, Coroner and Atheist, but this is darker, weightier, more sinister stuff. The band hurtles through the jagged arrangements of songs like “Institutional Gears” and “Xenolith” with an almost No Wave-informed abrasiveness, elsewhere sprawling out into well-crafted sequences of abstract, unearthly ambience and forbidding, hallucinatory industrial noisescapes. Violent, discordant riffs are folded around psychotic time signature changes, then suddenly expand into passages of moody, doom-laden darkness. And these guys have some serious chops. But Psychogenic Atrophy is heavily layered, each listen revealing added details and degrees of delirium.  Crucial Blast was so blown away by this album that the label wanted to make it available as a...

CD $12.00

11/20/2015 655035031323 

CBR 113 


Circular Time by Ramleh

Ramleh

Circular Time
Crucial Blast

It’s been nearly 20 years since the last full-length album from Ramleh operating in “rock” mode, but the sprawling new double album Circular Time sees these British noise rock legends deliver their most intense work since re-emerging from extended haitus.  One of the key bands to emerge from the British post-industrial underground of the early 1980s alongside their Broken Flag label-mates Skullflower, Ramleh continually shifted between the extreme, confrontational power electronics of their early material and their later forays into searing, lysergic noise rock, right up until they went inactive in the late 1990s. The group re-emerged later the following decade with a number of reissues and new releases, but up until now, nearly all of the new material indulged their harsh noise tendencies. With this massive new album, these distortion masters (now comprised of founding member Gary Mundy, longtime member Anthony Di Franco and new drummer Martyn Watts) return with nearly two hours of speaker-shredding, void-gazing psychedelia, pushing the pummeling, Hawkwindian meltdowns heard on classic ’90s-era albums like Be Careful What You Wish For and Shooters Hill into realms of total obliteration. Forged from a simple but savage combination of pummeling drumming, monstrously overloaded synthesizers and elliptical, sludge-encrusted bass riffs that anchor the squalls of brutal, electrified guitar noise, Ramleh’s sound is hypnotically crushing. Heavy, zoned-out drone-rock grooves are unleashed amid gales of sky-scorching guitar noise, with epic psych-shred workouts stretched out across storms of nebular effects. Distant vocals howl beneath sheets of shimmering guitar, and streaks of...

2XCD $13.00

12/04/2015 655035031521 

 


MP3 $9.90

11/06/2015 655035031521 

CBR 115 


FLAC $11.99

11/06/2015 655035031521 

 


Diabolical in its minimalist approach, the new album from Tokyo-based duo Legion of Andromeda wormed its way deep into the brains behind Crucial Blast, unleashing a grinding nightmare of violent, industrial doomdeath. First released on vinyl by Unholy Anarchy (North America) and At War With False Noise (Europe), Iron Scorn is now reissued on CD to further the blast radius of this immense debut album.  Iron Scorn has a strange effect upon certain listeners; as “Transuranic Ejaculation” bellows across the first moments of the album, the band’s primitive, bone-crushing riffage and minimal, mechanical tempo seem overly simplistic, even monotonous. Each song centers around little more than a pair of interchanging riffs circling endlessly over a mid-paced drumbeat that rarely deviates from a simple combination of metronomic crash cymbal and rumbling double bass. Keep listening, though, and Legion of Andromeda’s seemingly atavistic heaviness reveals a perversely hypnotic quality, the brutal repetition and savage, cyclical flow of these seven tracks turning into surprisingly infectious blasts of ravenous, concussive doomdeath. And it’s topped off with repulsively bestial vocals that frequently devolve into psychotic gibberish or rabid, snarling vocalizations, all of which lend an unhinged vibe to this rigid, skull-flattened dronedeath assault.  Legion of Andromeda have hacked out a uniquely vicious sound, and share as much disgusting DNA with the grinding industrial metal of bands like Dead World, Skin Chamber and Streetcleaner-era Godflesh as they do with the putrescent doomdeath of Autopsy, Cianide and Asphyx, brilliantly fusing the devastating downtuned chug of...

CD $12.00

09/11/2015 655035031125 

CBR 111 


Abyss Of Longing Throats by Gnaw Their Tongues

Gnaw Their Tongues

Abyss Of Longing Throats
Crucial Blast

Though Gnaw Their Tongues has hardly been quiet of late, what with recent collaborations with Alkerdeel, the release of the Collected Atrocities compilation and high-profile performances in the US at Maryland Deathfest XIII and Apex VI, it’s been a good three years since the last full-length album from this Dutch nightmare machine. But with Abyss of Longing Throats, Gnaw Their Tongues returns in full ravenous glory, offering another hellish cacophony of mangled industrial black metal, lurching heaviness, twisted electronic carnage and bombastic orchestral power that sounds like no one else.  From the frenzied, black swarms that sweep across the doom-laden death industrial of opener “Lick the Poison From the Cave Walls” that eventually resolves into a glacial haze of bleary, blasted bliss, to the hallucinatory black metal of “Through Flesh” that fuses staccato violins, terrifying choral singing and grueling mechanical doom into one of the most emotionally stirring sequences yet heard in the band’s catalog, Abyss continues the evolution of Gnaw Their Tongues’ sound.  There’s plenty of the grueling, industrialized heaviness and violent orchestral sounds for which the band is known, but this new material also expands upon the filthy, blackened doom at the heart of Gnaw Their Tongues’ music with those moments of striking melodic power—moments where all the horror surging through these songs suddenly transforms into something hauntingly elegiac. Brief passages of tragic beauty, scattered throughout an abyss roiling with relentless programmed blastbeats, somber chamber strings hovering mournfully amid tortured shrieks, harsh clanking percussion and blasts...

CD $12.00

08/07/2015 655035031224 

 


MP3 $6.93

08/07/2015 655035031224 

CBR 112 


FLAC $7.99

08/07/2015 655035031224 

 


Collected Atrocities 2005-2008 by Gnaw Their Tongues

Gnaw Their Tongues

Collected Atrocities 2005-2008
Crucial Blast

For nearly a decade, Dutch avant-black / doom entity Gnaw Their Tongues—named after a particularly evocative passage from the Book of Revelation—has infected the underground with a uniquely disturbing brand of chaotic heaviness. Fusing malevolent, rumbling doom and rabid, noise-damaged aggression with blasts of fearsome orchestral power and industrial pandemonium, and draping these lurching, hellish dirges in an oppressive atmosphere thick with horror and despair, the intensely nightmarish music of Gnaw Their Tongues defies easy categorization. It’s the sole work of architect and madman Mories, also known for his work in Cloak of Altering, Pyriphlegethon, De Magia Veterum, Aderlating, Mors Sonat, Pompidou, Dimlit Hate Cellar and others. In 2007, before the release of the band’s Crucial Blast debut, An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood, Gnaw Their Tongues crawled into the black metal / industrial underground via a number of ultra-limited EPs which quickly went out of print, and are now sought after by fans of the band’s abject, blackened horror. Collected Atrocities 2005-2008 is a double-disc anthology that gathers together essential, out-of-print early recordings from the first three years of the project’s existence, compiling the Preferring Human Skin Over Animal Fur, Horse Drawn Hearse and For All Slaves... A Song of False Hope EPs, the material from the Static Hymnal compilation, and other rarities from the bowels of the Gnaw Their Tongues archives.

2XCD $13.00

02/03/2015 655035011028 

CBR 110 


MP3 $9.90

02/03/2015 655035011028 

 


FLAC $11.99

02/03/2015 655035011028 

 


Some Things Have To Be Endured (Vinyl Version) by Theologian

Theologian

Some Things Have To Be Endured (Vinyl Version)
Crucial Blast

The latest offering from NY synth-death master Theologian, Some Things Have to Be Endured features eight tracks of punishing black industrial, apocalyptic darkwave frequencies and nerve-rending electronic deathscapes. The album is made up of collaborations between Theologian (a.k.a. Leech, also the mastermind behind the renowned power electronics outfit Navicon Torture Technologies) and a lineup of female vocalists from the industrial / noise realm and beyond, with contributions from Rachael Kozak (Hecate), Kristen MacArthur (Sewer Goddess), Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), Shari Vari (Void Vision) and professional opera singer Melissa C. Kelly. The tracks shift from grinding sonic dread to ethereal coldwave beauty—blasts of rumbling, blackened synthcrush met with washes of haunting electronic melody—while remaining rooted in Theologian’s bleak, jet-black industrial sound.  The LP edition of Some Things Have to Be Endured is limited to 500 copies on blood-red vinyl, comes in gatefold packaging with new artwork featuring the evocative and disturbing images of New York photographer Gretchen Heinel, and includes a digital download of the album.  “Leech has crafted a monstrous, ghastly album of lurching rhythms and totally downer melodies—think The Cure’s Pornography remixed by Vatican Shadow.” —Aquarius Records

LP $17.50

12/09/2014 655035110417 

CBR 104 LP 


Spectre Music Of An Antiquary by Emit

Emit

Spectre Music Of An Antiquary
Crucial Blast

Emit has honed their unique brand of experimental, blackened delirium since the late ’90s, branching off from the lo-fi black metal band Ante Cryst. Their creepy, synth-heavy sound is unmistakably descended from black metal yet more deformed, combining harsh electronic noise, horror-movie soundtrack atmospherics, droning keyboards, wrecked and fractured guitars, and bizarre vocals. First released as an extremely limited cassette on Glorious North, Spectre Music of an Antiquary is the first new material from the British outfit in over five years, a full-length collection of murky ambience, deranged synth, ritualistic black drift and stranger forays into black noise. Here, Emit resembles some mutated, primitive ’80s dark wave ensemble possessed by malevolent spirits; the eerie electronic drones and distant, moaning vocals mark a new approach, though the results are no less weird or phantasmagoric. Like past Emit offerings, Spectre Music is more concerned with occult lore and the hidden history of the British Isles than Satanism or goat worship or any other overused black metal tropes, serving to enhance the wraithlike vibe of these songs. A must-hear for those into the murky, surrealistic blackness of Reverorum ib Malacht (a band that has shared members with Emit in the past), Yoga, Occultation, Uno Actu, Utarm and Dapnom, Spectre Music of an Antiquary is available from Crucial Blast on CD in digipack packaging featuring evocative, all-new artwork.

CD $12.00

10/28/2014 655035010922 

CBR 109 


MP3 $9.90

10/28/2014 655035010922 

 


FLAC $11.99

10/28/2014 655035010922 

 


Wreckage Installations & Metalworks by Hutchinson, Hal

Hutchinson, Hal

Wreckage Installations & Metalworks
Crucial Blast

Few contemporary noise artists have explored the sonic qualities of scrap metal to the extent that Hal Hutchinson has with his “Factory of Metal Sound” aesthetic. The dense, brutally forceful metalscapes this UK noisemaker crafts follow a tradition of metal manipulation previously examined by Japanese noisician K2 and Canadian artist Alan Bloor (a.k.a. Knurl), but Hutchinson employs a unique approach to assembling and layering his recordings of chains, pipes, sheet metal, metal barrels, and other metallic objects being smashed and dragged and beaten. A cacophony of skull-scraping clatter is transformed into something far more complex, as his “Factory” method blends these sounds together into a strangely structured colossus of entropic industrial pandemonium. With the new full-length collection Wreckage Installations & Metalworks, Hutchinson delivers seven immense noisescapes and blasts of orchestrated machine-shop annihilation. It’s intensely abrasive, comparable to Molekular Terrorism-era K2, but stripped down to the sound of pure metal; attentive listening yields a haunting, undefinable element found beneath the more abrasive layers of crashing junk scrap. These repetitive scraping tones take on an eerie, accidentally melodic quality, as the mountains of scrap metal and heavy chains slowly shift and crumble, forming subliminal patterns. Along with the CD, Wreckage Installations includes a booklet with liner notes that examine the creative process behind these recordings, and a set of six double-sided black-and-white photo prints depicting Hutchinson’s stark, high-contrast images of corroded, hulking factory equipment. Released as part of the Crucial Blaze series.

CD $12.00

10/14/2014 655035072326 

BLAZE 023 


MP3 $9.90

10/14/2014 655035072326 

 


FLAC $11.99

10/14/2014 655035072326 

 


Although most known for his notorious blackened industrial / orchestral doom outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, Dutch avant-metal madman Mories is also involved in a number of projects rooted in a more recognizably “black metal” sound. One of ’em is Cloak of Altering, started in 2011 as a continuation the band Ophiuchus. Their previous albums explored the early symphonic black metal of In the Nightside Eclipse-era Emperor and Arcturus’s early efforts, as well as the more fiendish and fractured forms of industrial black metal as practiced by the likes of Dödheimsgard. Moving deeper into strange and more mutated realms, Cloak of Altering’s third full-length delivers a ferocious affront to black metal form and structure, combining his otherworldly strain of sweeping, symphonic black metal with bursts of intense electronic chaos, waves of nebulous synthesizer, and spastic, violent rhythms. Twisted melodies seethe and swarm throughout the album, resembling a nightmare version of prog rock keyboard freak-outs, or vintage 16-bit game soundtracks fused to the gristle and graveyard stink of second-wave black metal. As with Mories’s other projects (Aderlating, De Magia Veterum, Seirom, etc.), Plague Beasts deforms traditional elements into something even more surreal, but where Gnaw Their Tongues features heavy use of orchestral sounds, Cloak of Altering submerges these elements beneath fuzz-enshrouded riffs and swirling elliptical synths, melting those symphonic influences into a psychotic cyborg stew of washed-out trip-hop rhythms, discordant tremolo riffs, bizarre gurgling vocals, and swells of stunning, almost shoegazey majesty that wash over the music, imbuing it for a moment...

CD $12.00

04/29/2014 655035046624 

CBR 106 


MP3 $6.93

04/29/2014 655035046624 

 


FLAC $7.99

04/29/2014 655035046624 

 


Pennhurst / Xesse by 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...

CD $12.00

04/15/2014 655035046822 

CBR 108 


MP3 $9.90

04/15/2014 655035046822 

 


FLAC $11.99

04/15/2014 655035046822 

 


Light Through Dead Glass by Epistasis

Epistasis

Light Through Dead Glass
Crucial Blast

New York-based Epistasis first appeared in 2012 with a self-titled album on The Path Less Traveled Records. Those early recordings revealed an interesting confluence of sounds—jagged arrangements traced with elements of prog, noise rock, black metal, avant jazz, even the influence of modern classical composers such as Béla Bartók, Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti. On Light Through Dead Glass, a six-song mini-album recorded by Martin Bisi (Sonic Youth, Swans, Unsane), the band reemerges with a much more focused, fleshed-out sound. Now a quartet comprised of Amy Mills (who has worked with Castevet and Psalm Zero) on vocals and trumpet, Alex Cohen (also a member of avant death metallers Pyrrhon and NY death metal titans Malignancy) on drums, Kevin Wunderlich on guitar and Doug Berns on bass, Epistasis delivers a dark new vision of atmospheric dissonance and surreal heaviness. Shifting from moody, understated passages of atonal melody into blasts of frostbitten, discordant blackness and lurching, angular riffage, Light Through Dead Glass leaks strains of spectral jazziness through the depths beneath the band’s complex, metallic assault. Mills’s ghastly screams drift vaporously behind twisted, lurching grooves and blackened blasts, offsetting the ghostly sound of her trumpet bleating in the darkness. These subtle, jazz-informed touches are met with Cohen’s furious drumming, giving the songs a churning rhythmic intricacy that seethes beneath even the band’s most atmospheric moments. Much like label-mates Ehnahre, Epistasis crafts a complex and unconventional sound that suggests as much kinship with the darker and more malevolent realms of prog rock (Univers...

CD $9.50

04/01/2014 655035046723 

CBR 107 


MP3 $5.94

04/01/2014 655035046723 

 


FLAC $6.99

04/01/2014 655035046723 

 


Noizemongers For Goatserpent by Enbilulugugal

Enbilulugugal

Noizemongers For Goatserpent
Crucial Blast

Enbilulugugal’s debut album Noizemongers for Goatserpent was a putrid eruption of lo-fi black metal, harsh noise and experimental, anti-musical weirdness, infused with a Black Legions-style mix of invented mythology and garbled language, that arrived with a splat on the black / noise underground in 2004. Originally released as an extremely limited-edition CDR by the now-defunct Rusty Axe label, a home for some of the most demented experimental black metal of the past decade, it has been out of print for nearly a decade. This vicious, hideous mass of churning, blackened hatred and brain-warping chaos has been resurrected as a deluxe double-disc set that features more than an hour and a half of bonus filth, all re-mastered for maximum ear-hate by Enemata Productions, and presented in a new digipack design with artwork from acclaimed underground illustrator Jeff Zornow. The first disc features the original album, a twenty-nine “song” assault of hyper-distorted blasphemy blasted out in minute-long eruptions of noise and violence. Barbaric black metal riffs and monotonous, primitive blast-beats are bathed in corrosive static, while bursts of stomping, catchy punk rock, insane cut-up experiments and harsh electronic noise all surface in Enbilulugugal’s bubbling bouillabaisse of blackened filth. The album still sounds as extreme as it did back when it first came out, and while there’s a perverse, utterly profane sense of humor in the song titles and cranked-up, psychotic visuals, Enbilulugugal was dead serious in its drive toward depravity and extreme violence through black noise.  The other half of the...

2XCD $13.00

10/29/2013 655035046525 

CBR 105 


MP3 $9.90

10/29/2013 655035046525 

 


Some Things Have To Be Endured by Theologian

Theologian

Some Things Have To Be Endured
Crucial Blast

The latest offering from NY synth-death master Theologian, Some Things Have to Be Endured features eight new tracks of punishing black industrial, apocalyptic darkwave frequencies and nerve-rending electronic deathscapes.  The album is made up of collaborations between Theologian (a.k.a. Leech, also the mastermind behind the renowned power electronics outfit Navicon Torture Technologies) and a lineup of female vocalists from the industrial / noise realm and beyond, with contributions from Rachael Kozak (Hecate), Kristen MacArthur (Sewer Goddess), Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), Shari Vari (Void Vision) and professional opera singer Melissa C. Kelly. The tracks shift from grinding sonic dread to ethereal coldwave beauty—blasts of rumbling, blackened synthcrush met with washes of haunting electronic melody—while remaining rooted in Theologian’s bleak, jet-black industrial sound.  Co-produced with Derek Rush (Dream Into Dust) and mastered by James Plotkin, Some Things Have to Be Endured contains some of the most moving and dramatic music to emerge from Theologian’s black sonic abyss, and comes adorned with striking photography by Ione Rucquoi that makes this one of the more visually arresting releases in the artist’s growing catalog.

CD $12.00

10/15/2013 655035046426 

CBR 104 


MP3 $7.92

10/15/2013 655035046426 

 


You Are Transparent by Husere Grav

Husere Grav

You Are Transparent
Crucial Blast

The mysterious Husere Grav arose from the ashes of black metal duo Homunculus in 2006, and over the past eight years has released some spectacular pieces of dread-filled industrial blackness. Following the 2012 CD Ten Graves, as well as splits with Meditations, TRTRKMMR and Robedoor, their latest full-length offering comes via the Crucial Blaze imprint. The macabre ambience and ghostly black drift of You Are Transparent recalls the charnel perfume of early-’90s black metal, the desolate early industrial sounds of the Broken Flag label and the subterranean reverberations that Lustmord pioneered on albums like Heresy and The Monstrous Soul.  These seven crushing, crepuscular dronescapes are littered with bursts of creepy metallic whirr, pipe organ and ghastly reverb that rise above a sea of churning, distorted low-end rumble. Ritualistic percussion and blasts of distorted synth drift in slow motion through the sulfurous opener “Red Room,” adding to the album’s already hallucinatory atmosphere. This surreal, creepy vibe runs through the whole disc, as “Terrors” erupts into a raging delirium of angelic screams and black winds, the swirling, dreamlike din drenched in endless reverb. “Lines” drops a minimal, menacing rhythmic throb into the middle of whirling drones and jet-roar distortion.  As the listener drifts further out across the abyss, the sound mutates, transforming into a vast, ethereal roar, hypnotic and speaker-rattling, before erupting into walls of incandescent, distorted synth. These immense, ominous dronescapes and waves of hypnotic rumble are bathed in a carcinogenic glow that stretches all the way into the...

CD $12.00

10/01/2013 655035045825 

BLAZE 008 


MP3 $6.93

10/01/2013 655035045825 

 


Reality Is, The Dream Is Dead by Actuary

Actuary

Reality Is, The Dream Is Dead
Crucial Blast

Since forming in the latter half of the past decade, California-based extreme noise outfit Actuary has steadily cranked out a stream of split releases that saw them sharing wax (or other petroleum-based substances) with everyone from Merzbow, Bastard Noise and Gnaw Their Tongues side-project Aderlating to cult underground noise spewers like Winters in Osaka, Bacteria Cult, Juhyo and Fetus Eaters. Keeping up with their prolific output has been a daunting task, but also a rewarding one, as Actuary’s epic-length blasts of abstract electronic chaos, extreme psychedelic circuit-fuckery and monstrous synth abuse consistently deliver serious sonic skull-melt. On their first proper full-length CD The Reality Is, The Dream Is Dead, Actuary returns with four new tracks of intense noise that cover all the different aspects of their sound. Opener “Spiritual Armageddon” sends spasms of squelchy electronic carnage through a massive, rumbling dronescape, evoking visions of high-end robotics in the bowels of some subterranean forge. “Heat of Eternal Punishment” blends scraping, metallic tones and sputtering distortion before shifting into fields of layered and processed samples that ratchet up the panic level to nearly unbearable heights. Corrosive buzzsaw drones flutter and fluctuate across the “Pool of Perpetual Torment,” building into crushing waves of percussive industrial pummel. On final track “Baptized in Flames,” the band works up a smoldering, apocalyptic noisescape infested with clanking metal chains, pulsating synths and the howling of mutant cetaceans—becoming by the end something resembling an entire megalopolis consumed in the hell of nuclear fire.  The malevolent, psychedelic electronics...

CD $12.00

06/11/2013 655035036922 

BLAZE 022 


MP3 $7.99

06/11/2013 655035036922 

 


In 2008, Dutch blacknoise maniacs Stalaggh announced that they altering their sound and changing their name to Gulaggh, with the new incarnation of the band creating their terrifying soundscapes using orchestral instruments instead of the blackened, ultra-harsh distortion and feedback of their previous works. And while their updated sound isn’t as harsh or oppressive as the Stalaggh material, Gulaggh delivers something equally disturbing and nightmarish with their debut album Vorkuta. The first chapter in a planned trilogy, Vorukta was initially released in 2009 by New Era Productions. The album soon went out of print, but has been resurrected by Crucial Blast in a revised package for newcomers to Gulaggh’s dissonant, otherworldly dread. Comprised of a single 45-minute track, Vorukta is an epic sound-collage of surrealistic dread employing violins, saxophones, trumpets, electronics and voices.  Growing slowly and inexorably from ominous, murky ambience into a bizarre aural nightmare, Vorkuta is like a cross between some demonic chamber ensemble tuning up and a free-jazz group achieving maximum dissonance. Intensely harrowing and deeply creepy, the album is one of the more uncomfortable listens in recent memory—equal parts hellish free-improv, dissonant chamber horror and intensely disturbing sound collage. This new Crucial Blast edition comes in a black digipack with metallic silver printing.

CD $12.00

06/11/2013 655035019727 

CBR 97 


MP3 $7.99

06/11/2013 655035019727 

 


I Vivi E I Mort by Rotorvator

Rotorvator

I Vivi E I Mort
Crucial Blast

I Vivi E I Mort is the debut album from Italian void-gazers Rotorvator, a seven-song blast of blackened electronics, pounding industrial rhythms, deformed black metal and punishing abstract noise issued through Crucial Blast’s Crucial Blaze series. The band’s unique strain of extreme music was first issued via a series of limited cassettes and CDRs on obscure, noise-friendly Italian labels like Dokuro; although Rotorvator’s early works emerged out of the noise / drone underground, their music is unmistakably rooted in black metal. Blistering vocals, blasting tempos and eerily dissonant riffing are woven into their strange, mechanical music, a unique sound that shifts between moments of mutant majesty and vicious chaos. Beginning with the pneumatic industrial rhythms, icy black metal guitars and gothic synthesizers diffused into wavering clouds of nebulous electronics on opener “Ad Sanctos,” Rotorvator begins its descent into angular, blasting violence; the mechanical percussive backbone gives this a rigid, relentless attack that suggests the influence of early mecha-BM pioneers Mysticum and Dødheimsgard, even as the song slips into murky, tectonic breakbeats in its final moments. On tracks like “Domenica,” the black metal elements are consumed into a strange, mutated industrial sound—shuffling breakbeats and eerie electronic ambience wrap themselves around ragged, utterly psychotic vocals and creeping minor key guitars. Elsewhere, the bleak, droning crush of “In Limine” fuses brooding, slow-motion bass thud and sheets of corrosive noise with fractured drum loops, swells of dramatic synthesizer drift and a swirling fog of distant screams. Released as part of the Crucial Blaze series,...

CD $12.00

06/11/2013 655035036823 

BLAZE 019 


MP3 $6.93

06/11/2013 655035036823 

 


This installment in the Infernal Machines series of limited-edition tapes features two of Crucial Blast’s favorite bands in the black noise / experimental / industrial underground teaming up for a full-length album of corroded aural horror. The release includes artwork created by Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues, Aderlating) and comes in an edition of 200 copies on professionally manufactured cassettes. First up, Crown of Bone assaults the listener with relentless, largely unmoving walls of crushing, distorted black static on the tracks “Nazareth Impaled” and “Cathedrals of Rot,” both very much situated in the vein of artists like Vomir and The Cherry Point but with a hateful, blackened vibe. On side B, Norwegian necro-weirdo Utarm delivers two songs of low-fi, heavily layered black murk. The filthy, droning effluvium of “Reversed Revelation in the Third Dead Eye” sets the stage for the black, psychedelic din of “Restructuring the World,” which closes the split with an evil, blasted dirge.

MC $6.75

05/28/2013  

INFERNAL 004 


Body Horror is the second full-length release from Iron Forest, the new project of Midwestern industrial / experimental artist Brandon Elkins, and follows his extremely limited 2012 album Pantechnicon. Some might know Elkins from A Crown of Amaranth (who released an excellent album of dark, futuristic heaviness and black-hole ambience on Crucial Blast’s Crucial Bliss series in 2005) as well as his short-lived group A Crown of Light. The eight songs on Body Horror are forged from gleaming metallic drones, glitchy electronica and vast clouds of interstellar synthesizer that wind around fractured, doom-laden riffs. The album is rife with the sort of apocalyptic atmosphere that Godflesh exuded on their more experimental albums, and while Justin Broadrick’s pioneering industrial metal is an obvious influence on Iron Forest’s sound, here the crushing guitars and solemn ambience are cracked and broken into strange splatters of percussive noise and dissonant dronescapes that evoke an altogether more warped vision. Elkins abuses dubstep tropes—the speaker-rattling bass tones, the vicious synthesizers, the fragmented rhythms—but there’s nothing here that a sane person would consider “danceable.” It’s a chaotic, noise-damaged, dub-infested version of Skin Chamber’s industrial metal, if that band had been obsessed with Autechre’s experimental glitchery. Combine that with an obsession with Cronenbergian themes (mutation, deformity, etc.) to get an idea of the type of pitch-black, mechanized dread found on Body Horror. Released in a limited edition of 400 hand-numbered copies, the album comes in the signature Crucial Blaze clear DVD-style case with an insert card and a...

CD $12.00

05/28/2013 655035012025 

BLAZE 020 


MP3 $7.92

05/28/2013 655035012025 

 


Comforts In Atrocity by Mors Sonat

Mors Sonat

Comforts In Atrocity
Crucial Blast

Though the name may be new, Mors Sonat is comprised of personnel well known to those who explore the more terrifying sounds found at the intersection of black metal, industrial noise, power electronics and black ambience. Featuring Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues, Aderlating, Cloak of Altering, De Magia Veterum) and Australian black noise / metal technician Nekrasov, this collaboration sounds little like their other projects. Here, the the pair crafts a cold, hallucinatory strain of aural dread that draws from a strange mixture of twilight chamber music, ghastly death industrial sounds, harsh electronic noise and gleaming dark ambient, while tapping into the sort of psychic unease and violent chaos that will be familiar to fans of their previous efforts. Across six long tracks, Comforts in Atrocity blends darkly gorgeous chamber music sounds (aided by guest cellist Aaron Martin), blasts of excoriating black noise, pools of cloudy dark ambience, clanking industrial horror and vicious bouts of power electronics abuse. Incorporating the creaking crypt ambience of opener “Holy Holy Holy Nil” with gorgeous cello drones, shimmering orchestral strings and smeared horns, the duo lays down a highly evocative mix of layered electronic noise and atmospheric sound that builds into walls of howling chaos.  Fans of the shambling, chthonic evil of Mories’ other projects and Nekrasov’s black-hole visions will find some of their classic power electronics and death industrial elements in Mors Sonat’s sound, but it’s tempered by haunting chamber strings and ritualistic ambience, diffused into a kind of grim, otherworldly soundscape all...

CD $12.00

05/14/2013 655035009223 

CBR 92 


MP3 $7.99

05/14/2013 655035009223 

 


Chasms Of My Heart by Theologian

Theologian

Chasms Of My Heart
Crucial Blast

On his debut album for Crucial Blast The Further I Get From Your Star..., Theologian mastermind Leech established a new trajectory for his unique brand of pitch-black, rhythm-heavy industrial music that he’d previously explored with Navicon Torture Technologies. Under this new name, the power electronics and death industrial influences were twisted into even darker, more majestic sounds, crafting something significantly more atmospheric, reaching into new extremes of experience. On Theologian’s latest, The Chasms of My Heart, this sound is perfected, incorporating more melody and percussion into the long, oppressive dead-world ambience and pummeling electronic doomscapes. Chasms opens with Theologian’s most stirring and evocative piece of music to date. Monumental end-time dirge “Abandon All Hope” starts off as a swirling ocean of blackened synthesizer roar before introducing pounding metallic percussion and skull-rattling bass frequencies. At first, it’s the sort of pitch-black, apocalyptic death-synth heaviness that Theologian has long claimed as its own, but when the layered vocals pour in, soaked in distortion and climbing skyward in a gloriously miserable multi-part harmony above an eerie, minor-key hook, it becomes something new. Like some kind of hellish fusion of industrialized shoegaze and thunderous power electronics, “Abandon All Hope” reveals a new side to Theologian’s black-hole sound that is explored further throughout these eight tracks.  There’s no shortage of Theologian’s trademark black ambience here, though. The frantic, clanking rhythms on “We Can’t All Be Victims” becomes a backdrop to a maelstrom of monochrome drone and howling demonic noise, obscuring the nightmarish cacophony of...

CD $12.00

11/27/2012 655035020129 

CBR 101 CD 


MP3 $9.90

11/27/2012 655035020129 

 


Demonologists have consistently produced high-quality and supremely vicious assaults of demonic electronic noise over the past few years, with their full-length Miscarriage of the Soul being one of the highlights of the Crucial Blaze series. Here, Demonologists return to Crucial Blast with more hellish noise, accompanied by comrades in sonic extremism HHL. On the A-side, Demonologists offer four tracks of extreme blackened savagery. Their signature harsh noise assault commences with the violent wall of distortion and layered feedback of “Consumed by Grief and Despair,” continuing through the Merzbow-ian roar of “Blood Noir” and “Bloodsucker Malpractice” to the brief closing chaos of “Child Sized Coffins.” But like most of this group’s material, these brutal sex / death hallucinations are infested with additional layers of atmospheric drone that elevate them above a simple brute-force noise attack. In among the churning maelstroms of mid-range static roar and amplifier overload, Demonologists penetrate the ocean of noise with swaths of haunting celestial ambiance, monstrous screams, brief glimpses of corrupted church choirs, smoldering black electronics, and what sound like insanely deformed black metal guitar riffs seething and swarming in the frenzy of distortion. Side B features a pair of long tracks from Portland, Oregon, noise artist HHL, a newcomer to the harsh noise scene whose recordings thus far have fallen in somewhere between the hypnotic, suffocating black walls of The Rita and the heaviest junk-noise avalanches of K2. Titled “Shame Gauge” and “Reflecting Disgust,” these two ten-minute pieces bombard the listener with a constant storm of...

MC $6.00

10/02/2012  

INFERNAL 010 


The third album from Boston ensemble Ehnahre, Old Earth again finds the trio of Ricardo Donoso, John Carchia and Ryan McGuire (the latter two former members of avant-prog rockers Kayo Dot) exploring their unique fusion of hellish death-doom, blackened prog, avant-jazz and experimental composition with earth-scorching results.  Old Earth opens with a distant rustling creeping out of a dank underground space, as the dusty, warbling strains of a 78 RPM record drift past, introducing the first track with an eerie haze of corroded, hallucinatory sound. As a terrifying chorus of operatic female howls suddenly waft out of cracks in the floor, the guitars appear, all alone and slowly weaving an ominous, dissonant melody as the listener is propelled further into Ehnahre’s twisted soundscape. It’s not long before the band tumbles into their trademark atonal death-doom—if anything, even more abstract here than previous releases. Resembling a cross between Disembowelment and Obscura-era Gorguts, the warped, noisy death metal folds in on itself, mutating into crushing, droning riffage. On the intensely creepy second track, double-bass, keyboards and delicate percussion take over, joined by the gorgeous and ghostly trumpets of guest musicians Greg Kelley (Heathen Shame) and Forbes Graham (Kayo Dot). It’s one of Ehnahre’s most spellbinding moments as the band ventures into an twilight world of avant-jazz fusion and shadowy atmospherics. The third movement winds back into bone-crushing death-doom, another monstrous wave of lurching heaviness and dissonant skronk spilling over into the final passage while bludgeoning, jagged death metal riffs underpin a...

CD $12.00

09/18/2012 655035018928 

CBR 99 


MP3 $9.90

09/18/2012 655035018928 

 


Sickness In is the third album from Portland’s most wretched, Trees. Following their similarly abject slabs of feedback-doused horror and quasi-formless dirge Lights Bane and Freed of This Flesh on Crucial Blast, the two-song full-length is a slowly rotting heap of droning, slow-motion death-doom riffs decomposing into clouds of black amplifier hum, shrieking voices and tortured screams drifting against the glacial roar of smoking amp stacks and short-circuiting hardware. This time around, the band drops some of their most leaden, majestic riffs yet into a slow-motion filth-storm. Massive, saurian doom rhythms slip way out of the confines of anything resembling a “groove,” deep into rumbling fields of charred, ritualistic chanting and Abruptum-like states of psychotic noise. Opener “Cover Your Mouth” crashes in on an avalanche of thrumming electricity and metallic noise; the crushing, abstract heaviness collapses in on itself while the rhythm section accentuates the rumbling black mess with thunderous blasts of anti-propulsion. Trees have always had a somewhat improvisational bent to their extreme doom-laden horror, but just when the track lies on the verge of a field of pure drone, the band unleashes titanic, earth-scorching riffage. On “Perish,” the resonant sound of throat singing introduces a new wave of howling, ambient feedback and speaker-hiss, soon transformed into another twisted, agonized pain-dirge as those tortured vocals scrape raw, pain-wracked screams that rise and fall behind the amorphous black sludge and diseased drones.

CD $12.00

02/05/2013 655035024226 

CBR 102 


MP3 $9.90

09/18/2012 655035024226 

 


Void Chaos And Cum by Fecalove

Fecalove

Void Chaos And Cum
Crucial Blast

While it’s only one of the many tentacles emerging from the vile meat-mass of Nicola Vinciguerra, Fecalove ranks as the most dangerous. The Italian filth-monger has been tormenting our eyes over the past several years with repulsive, provocative artwork under the Tisbor name, running the Italian division of the excellent Turgid Animal label, and puking up a steady stream of Fecalove cassette tapes and CDRs loaded with vicious sonic portraits of deviant sexual behavior and violence. Void, Chaos and Cum is the first Fecalove release for Crucial Blast, and it’s his heaviest, most violent material yet. Combining classic power electronics influences (particularly the primitive slime of early Mauthausen Orchestra) with brutal junk-noise assaults, searing electronic drones and sputtering hypnotic rhythms, Vinciguerra cranks up the bestial violence tenfold with a vocal attack more akin to the blood-gargling horror of death metal than the typical distorted rant ’n’ rave. That ultra-vicious energy transmits all kinds of blasphemies and hate-filled screeds, each track materializing as a blunt, blood-boiling excoriation of humanity at large or a euphoric celebration of gruesome perversion. Either way, it’s a blast. The latest release in the Crucial Blaze series of disc / zine sets, Void, Chaos and Cum is packaged in a clear DVD-style library case that includes a 20-page art zine, a set of three black and white mini-posters and a one-inch pinback badge. The album is limited to a hand-numbered edition of 400 copies.

MAG+CD $12.00

10/02/2012 655035012520 

BLAZE 005 


MP3 $7.92

09/18/2012 655035012520 

 


Fragments From The Aethyr by Funerary Call

Funerary Call

Fragments From The Aethyr
Crucial Blast

The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths—extended descents into jet-black drift, funereal chamber music, monstrous metallic noise, booming ritualistic percussion, slit-throat recitations of formless horror and further abyssal abominations.  Fragments From the Aethyr presents a triptych of long, sprawling pieces that descend through dark layers of cinematic sonic horror. Violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music are backed by booming kettledrums, traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead; blasts of crushing, shapeless doom thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden drone-metal rumbling through the strata of Funerary Call’s demonic industrial nightmares. The sound of Fragments sometimes resembles a Bela Bartok piece drifting through a fog of black-mass ambience and the murmurings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep, ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious and dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power, as on the nearly twenty-minute centerpiece “Fragments.”

CD $12.00

07/17/2012 655035010625 

CBR 100 


MP3 $9.90

07/17/2012 655035010625 

 


The most recent of the "excavated" Korperschwache albums is the 2005 album Night Country Fog, a collaboration with Smolken from Dead Raven Choir/Wolfmangler that, for some bizarre reason, never received any kind of formal release until now. This is pretty surprising, as Night Country Fog is one of the best of Korperschwache's considerable catalog of releases, and is possibly my favorite of all of the unearthed "lost" Korperschwache albums that we're releasing. It's the one that hews closest to the strange basement black psych dirge of Korperschwache's more recent material, but at the same time is very different from Korperschwache's other releases, a kind of amp-noise soaked funeral folk dirge, like what I would imagine one of those Belgian psych covens would sound like if one of their midnight forest jams was invaded by a wave of skuzzy HeadDirt Records-style guitar filth. Smolken's cello figures prominently on this album, and gives Night Country Fog much of it's strange, creeping folk feel.  The first song (and these are all definitely songs, and not just assaults of noise) "Afternoon" begins the album with a hazy, slow-moving cloud of strummed guitar chords and gauzy feedback drifting and unfurling beneath the sounds of birds singing and forest noises and distant sirens; the guitars are pushed to the background, heavy but not oppressive, and the clanging chords and thick clusters of dirgey rumble form into a surprisingly pretty wash of almost dreampop-like melody. The sounds of wind chimes and strange scraping noises surface intermittently...

MP3 $4.95

03/20/2012 655035000503 

CBR DIGI09 


Appearing in the early ’80s as an offshoot of the legendary UK band Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend was soon recognized as an equally confrontational and extreme purveyor of the early power electronics / industrial sound, producing on their early Come Organisation releases We Spit on Their Graves and Campaign some of the most abrasive and violent music ever. Since then, the group has pursued a unique sonic vision that combines transgressive subject matter—dark, cerebral musings on violence and sexual perversion—with brutal feedback and synthesizer damage. Recently, however, Sutcliffe Jugend has explored darker, more restrained (at least on a sonic level) sounds alongside their harsher work, and Blue Rabbit is the latest such offering, unfolding like a night-terror across the album’s eight tracks.  For fans who are primarily familiar with the group’s harsher output on Come Org and Cold Spring, Blue Rabbit is a revelation; a seething, quasi-ambient nightmare that lingers with the listener, its creep factor enhanced by the unsettling paintings from band member Kevin Tomkins that make up the album art. One won’t find their trademark power electronics here, nor the dark throbbing industrial of 2011’s With Extreme Prejudice; this is a darker, more unsettling experience, saturated with an atmosphere of doom and smoldering violence, as if Sutcliffe Jugend were channeling the creaking dread of Nurse With Wound’s Salt Marie Celeste through a series of blood-freezing psychosexual nightmares.

CD $12.00

03/06/2012 655035018621 

CBR 95 


MP3 $9.90

03/06/2012 655035018621 

 


Crafted over the course of three years, the unreleased 2004 album Der Antikrist is Korperschwache in earth-rending blackened drone mode, each track built from layers of crushing wall noise, massive distorted doom-laden powerdrone, and deformed sludge riffs. It's some of the band's heaviest stuff. A deep bass pulse introduces the massive twenty minute opener "Entropy eats at the cosmic firmament", which opens up into fields of thick, murky guitar drone, dissonant chordal dirges and endless swirling hiss, like a more doom-laden and dismal Skullflower jam, noisy and slow and hypnotic and drenched in amplifier buzz and distorto guitar and blackened tremolo riffs. A deep, achingly pretty oboe-like melody repeats throughout the track, surrounded by clouds of hiss and acid-damaged guitar and droning bass rumble, the music fading in and out of view, sometimes receding completely into the sea of hiss. The following track is other twenty minute long monster and is even more abrasive. Clanking machines pound and grind in the background as the air is filled with bass-heavy blackened sludge and choked with sonic grit, a lopsided free-rock dirge buried under several feet of broken concrete, sputtering blown amplifier speakers, and distortion pedals cranked into the red. On "A guided tour of ghost empires (last stop: auschwitz-birkenau)", however, the guitars are removed completely, leaving us with a crackling ocean of amp hiss and cable noise that flits from speaker to speaker, recalling some of the static walls favored by Werewolf Jerusalem but with a steady bass throb emanating from...

MP3 $4.95

03/06/2012 655035000800 

CBR DIGI08 


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.

CD $12.00

02/21/2012 655035018423 

CBR 94 


MP3 $9.90

01/31/2012 655035018423 

 


Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus by Gnaw Their Tongues

Gnaw Their Tongues

Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus
Crucial Blast

Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus—roughly translated, “with blood and whip, we worship the dark”—collects the latest atrocities from Gnaw Their Tongues, an eight-song exploration of the copper-scented frenzy of the serial killer, the obsessive acts of death worship enacted by those who live on the edge of abyss, the rites and rituals of black cults.  As always, the sound is immensely heavy—a seething maelstrom of thunderous tympani, screeching classical strings, horns, piano and some of the most vomitous vocals imaginable. However, Per Flagellum Sanguemque is marked by the most frenetic percussive attack heard from Gnaw Their Tongues yet, with volleys of chaotic drumming, fractured blasts and maniacally complex patterns that border on free-jazz.

CD $12.00

11/22/2011 655035018324 

CBR 93 


MP3 $7.92

11/22/2011 655035018324 

 


Originally released on cassette in 2004 in a limited edition of 100 copies, Badb is one of the earliest releases from the Saskatchewan-based black metal / noise duo Wold. The nine tracks around the mythology of the war goddess—the specter of doom that lurks at the edge of the battlefield.  Beginning at the heart of a roiling black blizzard, Badb proceeds through a charred nightmare soundscape of icy, corroded black metal riffs, fractured blasting, melancholic melodies blurred and smeared into malevolent new shapes, and scathing witch-screams ripping through the blackness, all drowned in Merzbow-ian levels of feedback and distortion abuse. Available on CD for the first time ever, this early example of Wold’s psychotropic black metal / noise terror comes with all-new artwork from Pippi Zornoza.

CD $12.00

11/22/2011 655035018126 

CBR 91 


MP3 $8.91

11/22/2011 655035018126 

 


Mywomanmywomanmyslave by Korperschwache

Korperschwache

Mywomanmywomanmyslave
Crucial Blast

Going back to the mid-90’s, 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 1997 cassette Mywomanmywomanmyslave delivers loop-heavy industrial doom-guitar and walls of abrasive noise of the highest order, ranking it as one of the band’s darkest and heaviest. From howling maelstroms of harsh noise, roaring walls of distortion, psychedelic electronics and locomotive guitar-grind loops to brief passages of pounding drum-machine rhythms and sped-up chipmunk pop music warped, stretched and run backwards, Mywoman blasts off into vicious storms of apocalyptic noise. This digital version adds bonus track “Sinister Maggot,” closing the album with the constant death-pulse of an iron lung heaving within a blizzard of static.

MP3 $4.99

11/22/2011 655035000602 

CBR DIGI06 


Dusk-dawn / Follow You Beloved by Aelter

Aelter

Dusk-dawn / Follow You Beloved
Crucial Blast

One of several side-projects to emerge from the Wolvserpent camp, Aelter is the solo effort from guitarist Blake Green. Both bands explore a similar dark, majestic realm with massive, down-tuned guitar roar and bleak, minor-key melodies, but where Wolvserpent blends Green’s chugging, Melvins-esque heaviness and haunting slow-core arpeggios with violins, pounding drums and a propensity for extended hypno-dirges, Aelter almost completely dispenses with drums, filling the spaces with layered keyboards and gorgeous harmonized voices reminiscent of Beggars Banquet or 4AD releases.  With Aelter’s first two albums, Dawn-Dusk and Follow You Beloved, released only on vinyl in limited quantities (the former already out of print), Crucial Blast has gathered both together for release as a double-disc set.

2XCD $13.00

11/08/2011 655035009827 

CBR 98 


Tumescent Love Songs For Psychotic Drifters by Korperschwache

Korperschwache

Tumescent Love Songs For Psychotic Drifters
Crucial Blast

Going back to the mid-90’s, 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. 2001’s Tumescent Love Songs for Psychotic Drifters was recorded during the band’s descent to a new level of heaviness. Mixing the harsh noise aspects of the earlier material with more Skullflower-style guitar and ultra-distorted industrial sludge, it marks the beginnings of the crushing assault that RKF has maintained all the way up to the latest album Evil Walks. Opening with a skull-rupturing din of roaring psych-guitar overload and blown-out amplifier buzz, these seven dirges are made up of heavily wrecked riffs, jittery electronics and sludgy chords awash in massive amounts of distortion and feedback.

MP3 $4.99

11/08/2011 655035000701 

CBR DIGI07 


A Fistful Of Nihilism by Korperschwache

Korperschwache

A Fistful Of Nihilism
Crucial Blast

Going back to the mid-90’s, 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 1996 Monotremata cassette A Fistful of Nihilism is the third release from Korperschwache’s early devastating guitar-noise / power electronics mode, remastered for maximum skull-blasting power. The band erects more crushing monoliths of amp abuse here, starting with the churning black furnace of “Waiting for the Number Five,” forged of swirling oceanic distortion, crackling bass frequencies, howling feedback and titanic drones—part Total, part The Rita. The bleak onslaught continue as Korperschwache wades through four more tracks of high-pitched feedback, monstrous waves of distortion and brain-drilling drones. Included with this reissue is the delicately titled bonus track “Fistfuking Hippies.”

MP3 $4.99

05/31/2011 655035010519 

CBR-DIGI05