CRUCIAL BLAST RELEASES

CULTIC Seducer (Expanded Edition) CASSETTE
CBR123CS

Dark Dungeon Metal Overdrive!
Man, I was immediately obsessed with Cultic as soon as I heard 'em; their 2019 debut album High Command stomped me into the dirt with its visions of dark epic fantasy and primal death/doom. That album demonstrated Cultic's sure hand at grinding you into dust, their sound grounded in a fetid mixture of classic 1980s heavy metal, primitive death metal, Hellhammer / Celtic Frost, and a smattering of barbaric hardcore punk. But that pummeling style was elevated by its use of electronics, weird effects and post-industrial elements, turning their already sufficiently crushing and filthy death churn into something stranger, spacier, more otherworldly, perfectly encapsulating the feel and atmosphere that emanates from the band's stunning original artwork (from drummer Rebecca Magar, a talented visual artist and the force behind the art/design house Wailing Wizard). Fiery dragons and clashing medieval armies, eldritch monoliths and sinister sorcery - Cultic's album art evoked everything that I loved about the darker fantasy novels I read in my youth, backed by atomic hammer riffs, scowling vocals, vintage synthesizers, and dark martial bombast. That album and its 2022 follow-up Of Fire and Sorcery (both released on the band's own Eleventh Key label) featured a raw assault of vaguely psychedelic mid-paced Morbid Tales-damaged deathsludge, and from the early demos through to the latest album, Cultic has followed a contorted upward trajectory into ever-heavier, more down tuned riff-laden primacy.
In 2023, the band released the two-song Seducer EP through Eleventh Key. With new bassist Andrew Harris (also of Baltimore trad doom heavyweights Alms) joining the husband-and-wife team of Brian (vocals / guitar) and Rebecca (drums) Magar, these guys sounded more embittered, lustful, and just plain violent than ever. Ancient synths and gorgeous dark ambience, ethereal female vocals, and mesmeric dungeon industrial starts off the title track, then pulls the rug out from under you as the trio lunge out of the shadows with one of their heaviest riffs ever. The awesome screams and mocking, acid-tinged roars melt into the atavistic spaced-out doom-death as "Seducer" lumbers through more of those killer Moogy electronics and weird effects. It's ridiculously heavy in spite off all the bizarre hallucinatory audio swirling around. Then "Seduced" bathes you in eve more lush, grim keyboard sounds, the most kosmische kind of dungeon synth bliss, and once again the band scatters that bleary ether when they drop into another fucking scuzzy, spine-bending hunk of slo-mo death metal . It's terrific. These two songs have better production than previous recordings, while maintaining their raw, caustic filthiness. If these two tracks are indicative of what Cultic's next album is going to be like, god help us.
This expanded version of the band's Seducer EP includes the early demo version of "Seduced" which has its own alternate electronic charms, and reveals a much more primitive, caveman vision of that song. Like hearing early Cathedral jamming in some rickety, oil-stained garage, soused out of their gourds on dextromethorphan. It's rad. On the B-side, this release features several bonus tracks: first is the two-song Prowler demo from 2017, recorded when the band was just the original duo of Brian and Rebecca. Their first-ever recording, previously released on a now out-of-print CDR, Prowler sounds fully formed, just more raw and low-fi, and without the electronic elements that would later develop into their current sound. These two songs are crushers, "Cruel Orders" and "The Prowler" delivering those signature dark fantasy lyrics, trippy grunting vocals, and knuckle-dragging doom-death. In addition, the EP is rounded out by a feral 2018 live recording of "Conqueror" that unleashes the band's full war-wrath, and circles back around with a killer live 2019 recording of "Seducer" that's stripped down to its bulldozing basics.
Nearly forty minutes of primo gargantuan Gamma World barbarian death metal. So for an "EP", this Crucial Blast reissue crams in the goods. It's also beautifully designed by the band themselves: Seducer boasts more of Rebecca's striking, Frazetta-esque artwork, which perfectly captures the carnal violence of this music. It's one of the coolest looking tapes we've put out over here yet. I can't express how stoked I am to be working with this band, as I've been a longtime fan of the couple's work, both Rebecca's fantastic art and Brian's previous musical dark arts in the ritual black ambient / doom-drone outfits The Owls Are Not What They Seem and Layr. Can't recommend this band enough.

::ORDER HERE::.

GRAVE GNOSIS Pestilence Crowned CASSETTE / BOOKLET / POSTER SET
CBR142CS

The swirling, sweat-soaked psychedelic black metal of Grave Gnosis first infected me when I discovered the band's 2021 album Lux Nigredo and 2022 EP Towards the Nameless Darkness a while back. Both of 'em are terrific and terrifying blasts of incredibly chaotic and mind-bending black metal that likewise caught the attention of many that follow the USBM underground, despite only being available as digital downloads and super-limited cassettes. Slick with swamp slime, the band's music is a smoldering torch in the darkness, mutating the raw matter of black metal into nightmarish and exuberant ritual. There's a distinctly marshy Southern stench that permeates their blend of raging black / death metal, psych, and neo-classical, wafting off the triumphant galloping riffs, harsh and blazing blackened blast, and miasmic trippiness that completely enshrouds their music. But on their latest, Pestilence Crowned , all hell fully and truly breaks loose as the band ascends to a new level of Satanic savagery and twisted, psychotronic violence. This shit is wild . Possessed with a powerful shamanic presence, the nine songs on Pestilence are thoroughly tangled with specific formulae of ceremonial magic and violent adoration, a direct continuation of the themes running through Nigredo related to the band's system of Vedantic Nihilism. Each song becomes a paved stone on the honeysuckle and kudzu-covered footpath to a particular transcendental state; no mere soundtrack to patchwork blasphemies, this album directly interacts with the nervous system and the third eye.
From the ghoulish ambience of opener "Amidst the Rotten Coils of a Great Centipede" with its ghostly cello, tribal percussion and eerie experimental electronics, and the subsequent blast of feverish churning chaos that is "Carnivorous Darkness", this stuff undulates in some seriously crazed ways. Moving through passages of solemn funereal chamber strings and traces of rustic folk music tradition in the gorgeous acoustic strum that appears on tracks like "Ragziel", this album strikes a balance between inchoate madness and progressive intricacy that doesn't really sound like anything else going on in the US black metal field. It all explodes in kaleidoscopic forms, heavily layered with rabid howls echoing into oblivion, strange almost sitar -like ragas spinning in blackness, Moog-like spaced-out synthesizers snaking around the darkly majestic melodies and fractured riffs; you've got moments here that echo the weirder symphonic bombast found in later Emperor and Aspera Hiems Symfonia-era Arcturus , others that hint at classic death metal influences, but Grave Gnosis is so much more chaotic and convoluted, beautiful and monstrous. They've delivered one of the best American occult black metal albums I've heard so far this decade. Drown in the fires of its spiritual intensity.
This cassette edition of Pestilence Crowned is complete with the band's supplemental material: while the tape comes in a traditional case, it is presented in a re-sealable sleeve that also contains an 11" by 17" foldout poster of the scorching, lysergic cover art, and the band's twenty-three page Pestilence Crowned booklet. The latter is an essential piece of the experience, not just a collection of expansive liner notes pertinent to the album, but a new grimoire written by Grave Gnosis frontman Caine Del Sol ( aka Ø ), with explanations both "mundane" and "esoteric" for each song. The liner notes go into intimate detail about the creation and recording of the album, but pairs that with dense occult text, ritual practice, and extensive sigil art that is all as feral, impenetrable, and liberating as the music of Pestilence Crowned itself.
The cassette / booklet / poster edition from Crucial Blast is limited to one hundred copies, hand-numbered.

::ORDER HERE::.

GENEVIEVE Akratic Parasitism CASSETTE
CBR138CS

I first met Baltimore-area musician Eric Rhodes years ago at an ill-fated show right here in my home town. Today Is The Day was supposed to play this absurdly small dive bar right down the street from me, there was no way I was going to pass that up. Alas, the band was stuck in traffic due to an accident on the highway, and they didn't make it. But the evening was salvaged by meeting Eric, who shared many of the same interests as I - we talked European prog, avant-garde death metal, and noise rock all evening. And he told me about his then-new band Genevieve; I assumed it was a reference to the Velvet Cacoon album, which it partially was. But as he described the band's sound, it was obviously something quite different. I followed Geneveieve's work over the subsequent past decade, watching this interesting, amorphous outfit move from early roots in Kayo Dot-esque chamber doom into something more idiosyncratic. That radical evolution tracked Genevieve moving from the gorgeous, Codeine-meets-Time Of Orchids-meets-blackened doom of 2013's Hope /Desolation demo (which is absolutely beautiful, harrowing stuff, check it out), and the early experimental digital releases that blended an increasing control of atonality and crushing black metal-influenced guitar sound with polluted sprawls of ambient guitar-noise ectoplasm, creepy-as-fuck improv industrial exercises, Abruptum-like horrorscapes, and the ever-present aura of prog and math rock, which would always manifest in the band's songwriting.

This mixture of sounds and textures really stood out on the two albums that Genevieve put out on local label Grimoire Records: 2015's Escapism and 2017's Regressionism. Here, it finally all came together into this monstrous and insanely heavy black / death chaos, barbed with bizarre dissonant leads, brutalizing tempo changes, churning concrete-mixer power that ripped everything around them to shreds. Nightmarish guttural vocals ascend into psychotic shrieks, each song unfurling into a pulverizing pandemonium of jagged edges and wrecked neurosis. But that math rock / chamber rock element is still fully present, appearing in the cracks that open amid the blackened blast, haunting interludes (sometimes using cello and acoustic guitar) and these beautiful, emotionally-wracked performances that magnify the intensity of the band's violent sound. Both of those albums are excellent and highly, highly recommended for those into the far-flung fringes of chaotic, experimental black / death.

And here we are with 2023's Akratic Parasitism. The band's third album, sharpened and concentrated, further perfecting Genevieve's unusual sound. As sweeping, majestic melodies rise through opener "Growth", the quartet expertly detonates maelstroms of ultra-violent, ravenous blackened death that swallow everything in sight, but which shatter into those amazing passages of clean, spidery guitar structures, ghostly vocals that waft through the shadows, and abrupt, off-kilter tempos that, to me at least, evokes the likes of Slint, Rodan, June Of 44 and other seminal 90s-era Louisville math rock outfits (as well as a heavy dose of early This Heat) . It seems like such an unlikely genetic code, but man, does it work. Akratic's eigh songs are slithering, undulating abominations, writhing with snarling shape-shifting vocals and grotesque roars, screaming at the heavens, the thick, suffocating chaos exuding something similar to the weird non-Euclidean death metal of bands like Ulcerate, Portal, Ehnahre, Altars, Dead Congregation, and Pyrrhon, that sort of post-Obscura Gorguts influenced death, but shot through with those abrupt shifts into shimmering angularity, chorus-drenched strings, spindly minor-key melody, choral voices, and impassioned, emotive singing that blossoms into something strange and achingly beautiful, before everything around it is brutally sucked back into their churning hell vortex. I haven't heard anything like it. The schizoid, form-splintering violence sewn through Genevieve's music continues to remind me of early Today Is The Day as well, funnily enough. One of the most interesting and ambitious extreme metal bands from the Baltimore area, Genevieve has found their way into a bizarre pocket universe of their own making.

::ORDER HERE::.

STCLVR Post Self Abandonment CASSETTE
CBR137CS

One of my latest obsessions is the burgeoning field of what I've been describing as "Death EBM", a loosely-connected cadre of artists and bands from around the wor4ld heavily influenced by the classic 1980s "Electronic Body Music" movement spearheaded by the likes of Nitzer Ebb and Front 242. Heavily relying on sequencers, distorted Korg and Roland synthesizers, pummeling drum machines, aggressive vocals, and punk-as-fuck anti-authoritarian lyrics, those pioneers developed a hybrid of industrial music; electronic dance elements and punk rage that absolutely dominated the late 80s underground. That style of industrial dance music went in and out of fashion over the subsequent decades, though, with some artists heading in a more "metal"-centric direction, others polishing their sound to a sleeker, more commercial technoid style. But in recent years, I've been following a serious resurgence in this style that seems to be coming primarily out of the harsh noise / dark industrial / synth-punk underground, with many of these new heavy hitters appearing on the Phage Tapes label. This new breed of EBM retains the violent 4/4 syncopated aggression and searing, distorted synthesizer sounds of the original scene, but bring a virulent strain of violent, grotesque electronics and vocals to the aesthetic, infecting these heavier EBM attacks with death metal-style shrieks, charred and blackened keyboard melodies, jackhammer-powered industrial abrasion, and trace elements of other extreme music forms that turn the whole EBM sound on its head, producing something uglier, heavier, harsher, darker and more ferocious than ever before, often drenched in violent, visceral eroticism. Phage has been mapping this incredible deathscape in recent years, delivering punishing neo-EBM from artists like Choke Chain, Distruster, Plack Blague, Wvalaam Klous, Harsh R, Talk Show, Fox Nova Project, Human Vault, It Spoke In Tongues and a host of other crushers. This shit is amazing, and anyone who's diggin' this heavy new brand of EBM should dive into that label's catalog, STAT.

One of the best of these dancefloor / headroom annihilators is STCLVR. Pronounced "Streetcleaver", this mutant from somewhere in Western NY blew the tail end of 2023 apart with the slammin' electronic body-horror bomb Post Self Abandonment , which came out on 12" vinyl through Phage right around Halloween. This cassette edition features the same material, and it's a beast. Merging caustic noise, power electronics influences, crumbling distortion walls, industrial metal, and monstrous vocals, this album builds upon the bulldozing EBM / synth-metal crush of the tracks from the Talk Show split cassette from 2022 (where I first encountered STCLVR's music, alongside the reissue of the Lovers album) and comes out even heavier (and more danceable) than ever. Ten tracks of brutal Death EBM that unleash a maelstrom of rabid electronic noise, horrifying death metal-esque screams and roars, gigantic rumbling industrial loops, vintage synthesizer arpeggios, and blasts of pummeling rhythmic power that invoke the hardest dance-floor eruptions of classic Belgian EBM. Equal parts harsh psychedelic noise, acid-damaged beast roars, lava-like distortion, and hardened beats that resemble Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, or Twitch -era Ministry filtered through a blackened cloud of rot and repulsion. The bass line that drives "Scumbag Finesse" immediately recalls the main theme from John Carpenter's iconic Assault On Precinct 13 score while adding chaotic, clanging rhythms, bursts of blast beat-level speed, and those ravenous shrieks; the propulsive four-on-the-floor power of "Plowed", underscored by grinding chord structures, erupts into a kind of electro-thrash savagery. The highly infectious beats that burn through the whiteout of "Cocaine Winter" join with melancholic synths, offering a discordian atmosphere that continues through the whole album; likewise, an element of Digital Hardcore seethes through songs like "Sea Hag 2023" and the menacing techno throb of closer "Tarnish", adding to the variety of rhythmic texture on the album. Forged from the black fire of mental and emotional struggle, STCLVR emerges anew, fearsome and unstoppable, and you can hear it through the entire album. Post Self Abandonment is triumphant.

The vinyl version of Post Self Abandonment is available via Phage Tapes.

::ORDER HERE::.

CREMATION GROUNDS Abortion Sacrament 3" CD / CASSETTE
CBR128

Similar to the recent online-only (thus far) release of the long-thought-lost Cremation Grounds full-length Lord Of Nerves, the 20-minute EP Abortion Sacrament is another recording that was produced in the late 2000s and had been thought lost for fifteen years due to the destruction of the hard drive that contained the original masters. As part of a recent organizing effort here at Crucial Blast, almost all of these recordings were recently rescued from that cursed external drive, and have been resurrected and remastered for your listening displeasure.

Coming from one of the preeminent entities of the Order Of The Warhead, the three-track Abortion Sacrament EP is the very first release that Cremation Grounds recorded around 2008-2009, and like other recordings of the era, dislodges a bog-damn of insanely misanthropic black noise / heavy electronics, gruesome blown-out industrial sludge, crushing harsh-noise-wall style constructions, and an overdriven recording style that may well have been itself the cause of that hard drive's suffering and collapse. Again, the gist of these tracks is pure in-the-red evil electronic obliteration, much of it crafted by the entities behind Cremation Grounds as a kind of "meditation through abomination" strategy, utilizing the recordings for deep meditative sessions typically accompanied by sacred entheogens, assorted psychedelics (both natural and otherwise), acts of self-debasement and self-abuse, extended scatalogical ritual, and the disintegration of the ego in the churning jet-black oceans of searing distortion and low-end rumbling rot that dominate the sessions.
Abortion Sacrament does not have quite as much of the molten scum-dirge that is found on the Lord Of Nerves full-length. But these three tracks make up for it in all-out sense-wrecking chaos and over-modulated electronic violence. Drums, vocals and percussion all exist within the roiling black-static detonations of the title track and "Spread Wide Upon Her Cremation Grounds (Adorned In Bone Ornaments)", but they have been destroyed completely by walls of crumbling, crackling electronic distortion, with the occasional muffled roar of guttural, monstrous vocalizations breaking through the carnage.

As with the album, this material skews hard towards the harsh noise / black noise end of the sound spectrum, but likewise takes a great deal of inspiration from the diabolic filth of ancient, dissolving Finnish black/death demos. This sonic abhorrence crawls before the cracked and damaged altars of Macronympha, the no-fi bestial hiss of the earliest Beherit demos, classic Japanese noise a la Pain Jerk and Incapacitants, and the aura of eighth-generation dubs of Archgoat rehearsal tapes, all grown together into a swollen, pulsating, cancerous mass of cacophonous horror.
The EP is available on 3" CD in DVD-size packaging, hand-numbered in an edition of 90 copies. Sacrament is also available on audio cassette in a limited run of 100 copies, with a bonus tape-only track on the B-side titled "Enfolded In The Engorged Lips Of Kali", another nineteen-minute harsh blackened heavy electronics meditation that was recorded around 2010. Both the 3" CD and Cassette versions of Abortion Sacrament include full-color inserts and a vinyl Cremation Grounds sticker.

::ORDER 3" CD HERE::.

TOMBHAMMER Sprecher des Omnibus der Ewigkeit CASSETTE
CBR127 CS

For nearly a decade, Gregorio Franco has been a steadily rising force in the field of dark, aggressive synthesizer music, producing some of the most innovative and full-on heavy "synth metal" you're gonna find in the underground music scene. One of the most prominent faces in the field of what is generally referred to as darksynth, Franco has traversed similar dystopian badlands as Carpenter Brut and Perturbator. But where he deviates is the unique addition of an impenitent death metal influence; where other contemporary synth artists are often content to peddle the same 'ol pastel-hued VHS-era aesthetics and "outrun" sounds, Franco injects bulldozing guitar tones reminiscent of Bolt Thrower and the Swedish death metal underground, alongside an ultra heavy electro-bass attack and brutalizing rhythmic power that's directly descended from industrial metal's most violent drum programming. Franco's music feels more suited to a war zone than a dance floor, and in fact has the ability to turn one into the other. And his creative flow is endless; along with a multitude of albums and EPs that stretch back to 2013, his Bandcamp account is constantly updated with unique covers of synth-pop classics and video game soundtracks alike.

Under the Tombhammer banner, Franco now expands his sound into even deeper, heavier territory. His electronic influences are obvious, at their core consistently paying homage to the classic sounds of early John Carpenter, vintage Tangerine Dream / Klaus Schulze, and the darkest of neon-drenched 80s-era film soundtracks. But with Tombhammer, Franco further incorporates a specific side of his metal background for the project. Heavily informed by the tone and feel of Nightfall-era Candlemass, the lugubrious funeral doom of Australia's Mournful Congregation, and the peculiar blackened orchestrations and apocalyptic resonance of Urfaust circa-Verräterischer, Nichtswürdiger Geist and Geist ist Teufel, Franco's guitar work and songcraft evokes the tangled black roots of graveyard trees, the blinding glare of a nuclear-red sun at twilight, the oceanic emptiness of an uncaring omniverse, and the deepest abysses of human grief. This stuff is genuinely heart-wrenching with its cold, dark beauty and oppressive emotional depth. Somber. Sonorous. Man, these songs moved me.

Pairing the song "Sprecher des Omnibus der Ewigkeit" from the online digital demo MMXXIII with a brand-new exclusive B-side track "Bereiche Magischen Leids", this EP is the official debut release from the mighty Tombhammer. Together, it almost feels like part of a score to a previously unknown Panos Cosmatos film. The first, ""Sprecher" (roughly translated from the German to "Speaker of the Omnibus of Eternity"), stretches out to the razor-thin light dying on the horizon line, immediately casting you into a sumptuous and billowing cloud of black- fluorescent synthesizer. When that riff comes in, the complimentary effect is crushing. I was in love with this as soon as it kicked in. Cinematic synth-doom? Soaring, darkly romantic doomwave? Forget all that, "Sprecher" simply pulverizes with a perfect blending of electronic texture and bone-smashing doom. Somewhere, some film director should be scrambling to find Franco's contact info because this is one of the best unmade film scores I've ever heard. The middle section where the cinderblock guitars die away and we are adrift in clouds of swirling ashen particulate? Gorgeous. The moment when that devastator of a riff comes flowing back in like a river of black magma? Punishing. This instrumental crush is as emotionally weighted and mournfully ethereal as the best late 80s / early 90s UK / European doom metal, and just as memorable. The B-side "Bereiche Magischen Leids" was recorded exclusively for this EP release, and shifts the experience more towards the electronic side of the spectrum. It is just as cyclopean in scope. Again, a curtain is dropped on an immense black void, luminous drones driving into the infinite, a menacing guitar melody uncoiling in the depths. A synth-drenched hint of Peaceville-style slow-motion dread sprawling outward, everywhere. And it builds. And builds. Attracting molten matter to the slow spinning iron core and amassing itself into a kind of ambient metal spheroid, swirling black guitar drone and eerie doom-laden melody and grinding synth all bearing down on you like the shadow of a newly birthed black sun. An amorphous elegy as counterpart to the previous trudge through majestic misery.

It rolls over you, somewhat like the darker work of Jóhann Jóhannsson, seeded with the glacial melodic style of guitarist Andrew Craighan. One hell of a debut.

::ORDER HERE::.

BOREDOM KNIFE Stalker CASSETTE
CBR124 CS

Finnish musician Marko Neuman has been busy as hell lately. I'd been following his work previously via the assorted high-grade bands he has been in (Dark Buddha Rising, Overdose Support, Sum Of R, Ural Umbo, Waste Of Space Orchestra). But until very recently, I hadn't heard his noise project Boredom Knife. It made an impact on me, though. Checking out previous releases like the split with Crepuscular Entity ?on Basement Corner Emissions or the Your Pain Is Getting Worse tape on Bent Window introduced me to a cruel, cold strain of harsh noise, a form of deep-field black static, flecked with elements of power electronics and K2-style junk-avalanche. I was already getting deep into it when Neuman sent me his latest recording, Stalker. This twenty-three-minute release pairs two corresponding pieces, "Envy" and "Snap", the first a long and winding chaos-channel into the doom-laden intensity of the second. The atmosphere around this release is felt in the cold stare, the mindless gaze, and the resulting vortex of emotional destruction that was written in the postures of celestial forms long before the final act of exterminating envy and dominance occurred. Lines cut through the star-map of lethal obsession. The predetermined hunt.

Boredom Knife's Stalker emits a cold, piercing gaze instantly, the first side "Envy" churning out a dense wall of hollowed-out drones, black static, bursts of corrosive hiss, and strange pulse-like rhythms buried deep within the core of this ghostly noisescape. While there's much to digest here for enthusiasts of the "wall", Neuman produces something much more complex and dramatic. Feedback and speaker-rumble are carefully probed and manipulated, vicious high frequency noise expressed through rivers of metallic skree that are easy to drown in. That first track gradually and deliberately evolves from the mechanical whirr, junk-style clatter, and mangled (but weirdly melodious) carnage at the beginning, morphing into a steady field of layered screech and endless hum, sharpened metal scrape and clusters of bizarre, almost subliminal gurgling that continue to resurface throughout the track. It conjures a hypnotic, possibly psychedelic state of sonic overwhelm, each layer of cruel noise obsessively carved and sculpted into a latter half of near-complete roar, before it finally circles back to a final stretch of rhythmic squelch, immutable drone, and hideous shattered distortion that resolves into a final noxious junk-loop at the end.

This brief bit of structured noise is instantly obliterated with the onset of the b-side "Snap". Everything is sucked inward, imploding in a vast mass of roaring, raging static. Some semblance of the humanity heard on the previous track is dragged to the surface and obliterated. This piece concludes Stalker with a blast of oppressive, dominating black static that remains almost constant over the entire runtime. Bits of machinelike jitter, traces of peripheral musicality, horrifying shrieks, it is all swirling inward, into itself, this titanic maelstrom of over-modulated electronics and eerie voice-like entities, teeth-grinding distortion, and covert structures of sound, all going down the drain forever. This is where Stalker really turns into something psychedelic, affecting your senses and your perception of the space around you as that chaos keeps seething and spinning, occasionally shooting out chunks of strange sonic debris and whiplash tentacles of high-end feedback. And then, for the first time, a volley of fearsome shrieks and howls come flying out of that chaos, incomprehensible screams of abject horror. Just for a moment, those nightmare distorted vocals blow your hair back, and it all suddenly collapses into itself, leaving you with a brief moment of deadened electrical thrum before it abruptly stops.

I've listened to a number of Boredom Knife releases, and while much of his material shares this tenacious sadism and auditory blast-violence, this one gives me the creeps. Stalker finds that blood-specked middle ground between the gargantuan murderous PE of Slogun, and the obliterating heaviosity of classic harsh noise.

::ORDER HERE::.

AMERICAN WEREWOLVES (2022) VHS VIDEOCASSETTE + BOOKLET
CBRV002

The second entry in the new Crucial Blast Video line is a limited-edition VHS release of the gnarly 2022 Small Town Monsters documentary AMERICAN WEREWOLVES. Blending raw witness testimonies, some contextual folklore and anthropological commentary from researchers, and an increasingly mind-bending visual style that brings the encounters with the subject into a surreal nightmare reality, WEREWOLVES documents the bizarre "Dogman" phenomena, where people are unexpectedly encountering monstrous, bipedal canids, often in rural regions and often in proximity to early Adena-Hopewell mound-builder sites. Focused on encounters in Ohio and Kentucky, this film bridges the narrow chasm between run-ins with "high strangeness" and the irreal state of true horror. Each year, dozens of encounters with what are described as “upright canids” are reported throughout North America. These beings often behave in similar ways, with many reports recounting a creature that is aggressive, ghastly, and disturbing. While many theorize that the “Dogman” is some sort of unidentified species of animal, many believe that what they were confronted with was something else.
Something more.
AMERICAN WEREWOLVES aims to explore an oft-overlooked aspect of American folklore. However, where previous STM films delved into similar subject matter by presenting the details of the phenomena through a panel of experts, authors, folklorists and investigators, WEREWOLVES leaves the storytelling to the witnesses. Comprised of around a dozen witness accounts, the film takes on this bizarre topic by leaving it up to the people who have experienced it to present it to the viewer The encounters discussed range from brief run-ins on rural country lanes to horrifying, face-to-face confrontations that seem like the stuff of nightmares.
Crucial Blast Video is proud to partner with Small Town Monsters to present this limited VHS videocassette of 2022’s AMERICAN WEREWOLVES, bringing this strange amalgam of regional cryptoid docudrama a la LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, surrealistic 80’s shot-on-video horror, and UNSOLVED MYSTERIES / SIGHTINGS-esque, made-for-tv production aesthetics to eerie analog for the first time.........

The original film trailer can be viewed HERE
::Click here for more information and online ordering::.

LYSERGIC Void Dissociation AUDIO CASSETTE
CBR122 CS

Here is another recent debut that immediately chewed my face off upon first contact. Coming from the fertile war-metal grounds of Alberta, Canada, the band Lysergic suddenly crashed into our reality at the beginning of May 2023 with this three-song blast of freakish, psychotronic black / death metal. The band remains anonymous but has tendrils digging into the Calgary metal underground. More importantly, this outfit delivers something I've been waiting for, a sound that channels the exact mental and emotional state I arrive at whenever I listen to stuff like Conqueror, Black Witchery or Revenge after shotgunning two bottles of cough syrup. For years, I've been waiting for this. And Lysergic brings it. Made up of three explosive tracks ( "Erratic Noose Departure", "Maggot Crown Usurper", "Throne Annihilation" ), the EP detonates eruptions of convulsive and hallucinatory war-blast that slips in and out of dimensional phase, merging a sulfuric whirlwind of barbaric riffs, hammering drum-machine generated tempos, electronic derangement, and foul vocal emanations with a fractured and downright psychedelic quality befitting its name. There is no lessening of the core brutality behind this specific sound; this shit is ferocious, a roiling mass of air-raid siren horror, raw and relentless blastbeat drumming, primitive chainsaw guitar, all glomming together with sickening, echoing snarls and moments of unmistakable Conqueror-worship. But this carnivorous blast-attack spins out of control pretty fast, those inhuman, reptilian vocals getting tangled and knotted in crazed amounts of delay and reverb, emitting a hallucinatory, tracer-like aural effect, joined in with what fast turns into a phantasmagoria of noxious electronic skree, over-the-top guitar noise, grinding loops of distant voices and sculpted feedback, the spaces between songs filling up with cacophonic, monstrous sound deformation. And when the tempo eventually shifts into a slower, sludgy muck, it all leads this tape into a foul final crush of collapsing sonic structures. It's fucked up.

This kind of trippy, noise-damaged war-metal mutation has been worming out of the rotten woodwork in recent years, and man, I can't get enough of it...........
::Click here for more information and online ordering::.

SEVEN HEADED SERPENT Ophidian Mysteries: Demos 2021-2023 AUDIO CASSETTE
CBR121 CS

The Ophidian Mysteries: Demos 2021-2023 cassette is a collection of all of the previously digital-only demo recordings from this outrageously cacophonic bestial noisecore outfit, along with a sixth, previously unreleased demo that appears here for the first time. Seven Headed Serpent came to me like a message from the ether; or maybe I had just Google-searched the words "bestial noisecore” and this band was the first thing to pop up. Either way, this Texan outfit spews out a very specific mélange of ultra-violent anti-musical filth that I've been looking for. The only thing in the vicinity of this is the similarly-monikered "bestial” noisecore of Acwelan, but there are clear distinctions between the two bands, save for their intention to rip the listener to pieces. Over the course of nearly three years, Seven Headed Serpent has been steadily issuing short, absurdly brutal blasts of noisecore via their Bandcamp page and disseminated through shady Youtube channels every few months. That first time that I hit "play" on their debut Awakened From Ancient Slumber demo, I was enthralled: here was the spastic bastard vision of venomous scum-blurr that I'd been searching out, an eerie and relentlessly hyper-violent maelstrom chopped up in twenty-second micro-blasts, an unholy fusion of early Oath Of Black Blood Beherit and demo-era Von style minimalism, and the old-school hyper-speed noisecore laid down by the likes of Sore Throat, Seven Minutes of Nausea, and Anal Cunt.
Those vocals from main member R. (aka Ryan Wilson of Intestinal Disgorge, The Howling Void, and Pneuma Hagion) can be seriously unsettling, veering between an echo-laden animalistic roar and disturbing whispers, garbled guttural shrieks and trippy incantations. Freakish electronics and blots of distorted nonsense blur with extreme anti-riffery and indecipherable guitar skree. Flatulent machinery collides with severely bestial grunts and bursts of insane guitar shred, while something akin to the sound of limbs being ripped from a torso keep emerging in the back of the mix. That drum machine element is strongest on the earlier demos, as from Naas on , R. was joined by drummer Polwach Beokhaimook who brought a less mechanical, more car-crash style blast attack to the Serpent's maniac slime-meditations; anyone familiar with Beokhaimook's work in key gorenoise outfits like Cystgurgle and Vomitoma will recognize the additional free-form percussive confusion and inhuman speeds that he brings to this mangled sonic abomination.

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HIGH NOON KAHUNA Killing Spree AUDIO CASSETTE
CBR120 CS

As of early 2023, the band High Noon Kahuna is firmly in my personal list of my three best-loved, absolutely favorite local bands. I could be accused of a certain amount of bias, seeing as how I've been friends with some of the members of this band for over thirty years. But it's really about how strongly this band scratches my itch for bitchin' noise rock. And these guys dig at it like it's 1994. A full-on POWER trio, the Kahuna crew include dudes who have done time in some local institutions like seminal Maryland doom metal outfit Internal Void and mangy math-rockers Admiral Browning, as well as lesser-known but no less bangin' operations like the electronic-damaged slowcore duo Black Blizzard and the cult art-punks Vox Populi from West Virginia. So there's a lot of experience being funneled into this band.
The American post-punk vibe reverberates beneath everything these guys do, but that cymatic force arranges their pieces into new and energetic shapes. When thinking about how to describe High Noon Kahuna, the best I have been able to come up with is asking you to imagine the following brew: merge the raucous, ascerbic wit and muscular stage presence of God Bullies with a heavy smattering of early Sonic Youth, back when that latter band was still in the same zip-code as the NYC noise-skuzz crowd; add to that already-pungent mix a huge dose of bulldozing Melvins-level drone-crush that enters zones of eruptive metallic crunch just when you're not expecting it, and a chronically wicked guitar attack that is touched (in the head) by the cumulative energies of Dead Kennedys's East Bay Ray, vintage O.G. surf licks a la Dick Dale and Eddie Bertrand, and just a dank whiff of second wave black metal. All at once.
Since they've started hitting the live circuit en force, the "surfy" aspect seems to be something that some people have focused on, but that's just one strand of the DNA; High Noon Kahuna are more brooding, soulful, and battering-ram heavy than you might otherwise guess, with a rhythm section ready to drive you into the dirt like a rusted nail. Take it from me, these guys rule. If it was indeed 1994, this band would have already been added to the Amphetamine Reptile roster in a heartbeat. Bit it's not, and they aren't, so we've got the goods. Come and see. Come and hear...

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GASKET Noumenal Field Recordings / Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) AUDIO CASSETTE
CBR119 CS

This self-described "garage band" from McAllen, Texas showed up on my radar earlier this year and comprehensively smashed my skull into fragments. Looking back at the Youtube upload that the band did for their debut Noumenal Field Recordings EP (released online at the very end of 2022), I had commented the following: "...holy fucking shit, is this awesome. Like someone crammed early Sore Throat, Harry Pussy, and The Stooges into a malfunctioning Cuisinart. I'm in heaven .". You know what? I'm still in heaven. Since that first demo came out, Gasket have continued to fuck with their sound, extending beyond the violent no-fi barbarity of that first EP into a very recent EP of severe negative hardcore jams called Dull The Needle which rips like a motherfucker, while also dropping some hunks of horrendous noise along the way. That Needle EP is going to have the circle-pit going ballistic when they hear it, polishing their unique frame of three-chord hardcore punk primitivism with that sludgy hideousness and noisiness (and moments of noisecore abandon) of their beginnings and jacking it up with riffs and mid-tempo breakdowns a la Gag, Wound Man, Hoax, and Geld, that I guarantee will unleash a riot. Keep an eye out for that monster.
But in the meantime, sink your teeth into this hunk of rotted meat. The Noumenal Field Recordings EP hits physical media for the first time here, paired with the previously unreleased Tierra Y Voluntad (Land And Will) EP, and both sides of this machine will fuck you right up. Just like I spewed all over that video comment section months ago, Noumenal Field Recordings rips through eleven songs of blown-out aggression that effortlessly walk the line between classic early 80s three-chord hardcore and heavy doses of Brainbombs / GG Allin - level sludge-punk barbarity that you can smell from here. Onto that feral sonic assault, the band wields feedback-screaming slabs of freeform noise rock in the Harry Pussy vein, blurts of brain-damaged Casio weirdness, obnoxiously catchy hooks, and barbs of clotted noisecore that hit and run faster than you can even try to catch the plates. This shit is no joke, even when it sounds like the band is having an absolute blast. That first EP is so ugly, so mangled, so fucked up, and yet so weirdly literate, with nods to Nick Land, Marx and Thoreau. The lyrics are fantastic, too. Which is doubly confusional since it seems that these songs were written on the spot, recorded live and apparently totally off-the-cuff and improvised in that aforementioned McAllen garage. Blows me away.........

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ATHAME / XEUKATRE Morbid Deviations AUDIO CASSETTE
INFERNAL 024

Long in the works and finally released as a split-label effort between Infernal Machines and depraved local imprint Volva just as the two bands were about to embark on their 2019 summer tour together, Morbid Deviations is the long-awaited split album featuring two of the Baltimore / Maryland area's most vicious and destructive black metal outfits. Released as a pro-manufactured tape with on-shell printing and packaged with a pair of 1" buttons each bearing the sigil of each band, and released in a limited edition of two hundred copies, this motherfucker seethes with all of the violent, inebriated energy that these two outfits have harnessed over the past decade.
The Athame side blows this up immediately with three sweat-and-blood stained blasts of morbid ugliness from the fringes of Appalachia. It's a fetid mixture of pulsating cellar emanations with brief moments of cavernous ambiance and abstract ritualistic rattling amid the crushing chaotic, sludge-n'-punk stained black metal of "Human Flood" and "I, Accuser", with an ode to classic 80's deathrock surfacing in the middle with Athame's barbaric rendition of Christian Death's "Figurative Theatre". There is a wretched, lurching, blasting hatefulness that grips the witch-blade and follows the continuum of their underheard but satisfyingly grimy discs With Cunning Fire and Adversarial Resolve and The Burning Times. To date, some of their best work that I've heard.
On the B-side, Baltimore's Xeukatre follow with their own uniquely putrid melange of Les Legions Noires-influenced filth and ghastly low-fidelity punk. Frenzied and rotten, their three offerings "Dirgelwch Ffydd", "Sigrdrifumal" and "Scalding Blizzard of Seraphim Tears" waft off of their side of this tape like fumes from a corpse-clotted gutter. One of the few releases to surface from the trio even after a decade of skulking around dimly-lit Baltimore-area venues , this is some of the best raw, unhinged black metal coming out of the area, and hopefully a portent of more new material to come at some point in the near goddamned future.
A full-length split album that features three exclusive tracks from each band, presented with professionally manufactured cassettes with black-on-silver shell print, in a limited edition of 200 copies. Each cassette comes sealed with a pair of ATHAME and XEUKATRE 1" badges.
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GNAW THEIR TONGUES Hymns For The Broken, Swollen And Silent GATEFOLD CD / DIGITAL
CBR117

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...
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TROLLER Graphic DIGIPAK CD / DIGITAL
CBR116

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....
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RAMLEH Circular Time DIGISLEEVE 2xCD / DIGITAL
CBR115

It's been nearly twenty years since we last had a full-length album from Ramleh operating in "rock" mode, but the sprawling new double album Circular Time sees these British noise rock legends returning with their most intense work since re-emerging in recent years. 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 the band went on an extended hiatus in the late 1990s. The group would return later the following decade with a number of reissues and new releases, but up until now, almost all of the new material from the re-activated Ramleh leaned more towards their power electronics and harsh noise tendencies. But 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) have returned with nearly two hours of speaker-shredding, void-gazing psychedelia, pushing the pummeling, Hawkwindian meltdowns heard on classic 90's-era albums like Be Careful What You Wish For and Shooters Hill into realms of total obliteration...
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CLOAK OF ALTERING Manifestation DIGIPAK CD / DIGITAL
CBR114

     One of many offshoots / alter-egos of the notorious Dutch industrial black metal outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, Cloak Of Altering returns to deliver the follow-up 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 of Cloak Of Altering's sound on the band's fourth album continues to thoroughly scorch the listener. The sound is still rooted in a bizarre confluence of majestic 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. Swarms of blackened tremolo riffage sweep across sputtering malfunctioning rhythms and strange electronic accoutrements. One notable difference from the previous album: the vocals, which here often take form here as a vile, guttural robotic croak, a sickeningly putrid android presence that is layered among the rest of the distant shrieks, anguished screams and chilling, garbled cries that all feel as if they are trying to escape the bowels of some nightmarish AI system...
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DIMESLAND Psychogenic Atrophy DIGIPAK CD
CBR113

Appearing at the end of 2014 as a digital-only, self-released 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 amongst their ranks, Dimesland released the promising Creepmoon EP a couple of years prior on Vendlus, but even that only hinted at just how maniacal the band's sound was to become. The eight songs featured here combine dizzying musical complexity and fearsome dissonance with a sort of 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 hurtling through the jagged arrangements of songs like "Institutional Gears" and "Xenolith" with an almost No Wave-informed abrasiveness, but also frequently sprawling out into well-crafted sequences of abstract, unearthly ambience and forbidding, hallucinatory industrial noisescapes...
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GNAW THEIR TONGUES Abyss Of Longing Throats DIGIPACK CD / DIGITAL
CBR112

Though Gnaw Their Tongues has hardly been quiet in the interim, what with recent collaborations with Alkerdeel, the release of the Collected Atrocities collection and recent 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 new album Abyss Of Longing Throats, Gnaw Their Tongues has returned in full ravenous glory, offering another hellish cacophony of mangled industrial black metal, lurching deformed 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 to one of the most emotionally stirring sequences yet heard in the band's catalog, Abyss continues to chart the evolution of Gnaw Their Tongues' sound. There's plenty of the grueling industrialized heaviness and violent orchestral sounds the band is known for, 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 of raging orchestral chaos, all writhing together into another exhilarating descent into total demonic delirium from this monstrous outfit. ...
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LEGION OF ANDROMEDA Iron Scorn GATEFOLD CD
CBR111

    When it comes to slavering, skull-crushing heaviness and flesh-destroying death metal barbarism, nothing I've heard this year has fucked me up as much as the debut album from Legion Of Andromeda. Diabolical in its minimalist approach, the new album from Tokyo-based duo Legion Of Andromeda wormed its way deep into my brain upon first hearing it (thanks to a recommendation from fellow Maryland label Unholy Anarchy), unleashing a grinding nightmare of violent, industrial doomdeath rooted in a barbaric simplicity, moving in endlessly cyclical percussive patterns. It makes perfect sense that the band enlisted none other than Steve Albini to record this album, as the monolithic percussive pummel of Big Black is an admitted influence on Legion's sound. Iron Scorn was first released on vinyl by the aforementioned Unholy Anarchy, with At War With False Noise handling the European release, and is now being followed up with a CD release by Crucial Blast to further the blast radius of this immense debut. As opener "Transuranic Ejaculation" bellows across the first moments of Scorn, the band's combination of primitive bone-crushing riffage and minimal, mechanical tempo seems overly simplistic, even monotonous. Each song centers around little more than a pair of interchanging riffs that circle endlessly over an unfluctuating 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 begins to reveal a perversely hypnotic quality, the brutal repetition and savage cyclical flow of these seven tracks turning into surprisngly infectious blasts of ravenous, concussive doomdeath.....
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GNAW THEIR TONGUES Collected Atrocities DIGIPACK 2xCD
CBR110

For nearly a decade, Dutch avant-black/doom entity, GNAW THEIR TONGUES -- named after a particularly evocative passage from the Book Of Revelation -- has been infecting the underground with a uniquely disturbing brand of chaotic heaviness. Fusing together malevolent, rumbling doom with rabid, noise-damaged aggression and 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. The sum of all GTT’s construction and execution is the work of sole architect and madman, Mories, also known for other destructive output with Cloak of Altering, Pyriphlegethon, De Magia Veterum, Aderlating, Mors Sonat, Pompidou, Dimlit Hate Cellar and others. Before the release of the band's Crucial Blast debut, An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood, in 2007, 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 new double CD anthology that gathers together essential, out-of-print early recordings from the band that span the first three years of GNAW THEIR TONGUES'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 GTT archive...
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EMIT Spectre Music Of An Antiquary DIGIPACK CD
CBR109

The latest album of murky graveyard ambience, deranged synth, phantasmic dread and ritualistic black drift from this cult UK outfit, their first in nearly ten years. Surrealistic, spectral music and nocturnal delirium transmitted from beyond the veil and steeped in the mysteries of old Britain, like some twisted, eldritch fusion of Fabio Frizzi, In Umbra Malitiae Ambulabo-era Abruptum, and 80’s darkwave. First released as an extremely limited cassette on Glorious North, Spectre Music Of An Antiquary is the first new material from Emit in over five years, a full length collection of murky ambience, deranged 80's style synth, ritualistic black drift, and stranger sounds forays into black noise. This British outfit has been creating their unique brand of experimental blackened delirium since the late 90s, branching out of a low-fi UK black metal band called Ante Cryst. With Emit, the members began to explore a creepy, synth-heavy sound that was unmistakably descended from black metal but supremely more deformed, combining harsh electronic noise, horror-movie soundtrack atmospherics, droning keyboards, wrecked and fractured black metal guitars, and bizarre vocals that would often push Emit's music into a strange realm of hallucinatory, ghastly psychedelia. On their latest tape Spectre, though, Emit's sound has morphed into something that more resembles some mutated, primitive 80's darkwave being completely taken over by malevolent spirits...
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T.O.M.B. Pennhurst / Xesse DIGIPACK CD
CBR108

Pennhurst / Xesse is a new collection of rare material from the shadowy black industrial outfit T.O.M.B., featuring their ultra-limited Pennhurst album and the tracks from the one-sided Xesse 12" previously released on Prison Tatt. Featuring all new artwork and presented in a six-panel digipack, this full-length disc delivers over an hour's worth of the band's bizarre brand of vile electro-acoustic noisescapes, oppressive industrial drift and ghoulish vocalizations seemingly dredged up from the dank black bowels of some long-abandoned mausoleum...
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EPISTASIS Light Through Dead Glass DIGIPACK CD
CBR107

One of the finest new bands we've stumbled across here at Crucial Blast, New York based outfit 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, their often difficult, jagged arrangements traced with elements of prog rock and noise rock, black metal and avant jazz, and even the influence of modern classical composers such as Béla Bartók, Arvo Pärt and György Ligeti. Even then in embryonic form, Epistasis were hinting at the sort of abrasive, atmospheric metal that we're continually obsessed with over here at C-Blast, but it is with their second release (and first for Crucial Blast) Light Through Dead Glass that the band has re-emerged with a much more focused and fleshed-out sound. Now a quartet comprised of Amy Mills on vocals and trumpet (who has also contributed trumpet parts on new albums from Castevet and Psalm Zero), Alex Cohen (drums), Kevin Wunderlich (guitar) and Doug Berns (bass), Epistasis delivers a dark new vision of atmospheric dissonance and surrealistic heaviness with this six-song mini album recorded by Martin Bisi (Sonic Youth, Swans, Unsane)...
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CLOAK OF ALTERING Plague Beasts DIGIPACK CD
CBR106

Although most would probably best know Dutch avant-metal madman Mories for his notorious blackened industrial/orchestral doom outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, he's also been involved with a number of projects that one could describe as being rooted in a much more recognizable "black metal" sound. One of 'em is Cloak Of Altering, a project that Mories started in 2011 as a continuation of his earlier black metal band Ophiuchus. The previous Cloak Of Altering albums explored Mories's fascination with 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 Dødheimsgard. Each new release has moved deeper into stranger and more mutated realms of electronically-damaged symphonic black metal, though, and with Cloak Of Altering's third album (and first for Crucial Blast) Plague Beasts, Mories 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 rhythmic violence that, at times, feels more like something you'd hear off of a Planet Mu 12"...
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ENBILULUGUGAL Noizemongers For Goatserpent 2xCD DIGISLEEVE
CBR105

Enbilulugugal's debut album Noizemongers For Goatserpent was a putrid eruption of low-fi black metal, harsh noise and experimental, anti-musical weirdness that arrived with a splat on the black/noise underground in 2004, infused with a Black Legions-style mix of weird invented mythology and garbled language. The album first appeared as a super-limited CDR released by the now-defunct Rusty Axe label, a home for some of the most demented experimental black metal of the past decade, and has been out of print in the physical realm for nearly a decade. It's been one of Crucial Blast's favorite releases from the band, a vicious, hideous mass of churning blackened hatred and brain-warping chaos that has now 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...
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THEOLOGIAN Some Things Have To Be Endured GATEFOLD LP
CBR104LP

The latest offering from NY synth-death master Theologian (aka Leech, also the mastermind behind the renowned power electronics/death industrial outfit Navicon Torture Technologies), "Some Things Have To Be Endured" features eight new tracks of punishing black industrial, apocalyptic darkwave frequencies, and nerve-rending electronic deathscapes. "Endured" is a collection of collaborations between Theologian and a lineup of female vocalists/artists from both within the industrial / noise / dark ambient / coldwave 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 industrial dread to ethereal coldwave beauty, blasts of rumbling blackened synthcrush met with washes of haunting electronic melody, while always remaining rooted in Theologian's bleak, jet-black industrial sound...
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THEOLOGIAN Some Things Have To Be Endured CD DIGIPACK
CBR104

The latest offering from NY synth-death master Theologian (aka Leech, also the mastermind behind the renowned power electronics/death industrial outfit Navicon Torture Technologies), "Some Things Have To Be Endured" features eight new tracks of punishing black industrial, apocalyptic darkwave frequencies, and nerve-rending electronic deathscapes. "Endured" is a collection of collaborations between Theologian and a lineup of female vocalists/artists from both within the industrial / noise / dark ambient / coldwave 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 industrial dread to ethereal coldwave beauty, blasts of rumbling blackened synthcrush met with washes of haunting electronic melody, while always remaining rooted in Theologian's bleak, jet-black industrial sound...
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TREES Sickness In CD DIGIPACK
CBR102

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 band again presents a two-song assault, each one roughly fifteen minutes in length, each a slowly rotting heap of droning slow-motion deathdoom riffs decomposing into clouds of black amplifier hum, high shrieking voices and tortured screams drifting against the glacial roar of smoking amp stacks and short-circuiting hardware. Where the previous album had Trees employing some interesting rhythmic chaos and longer stretches of ambient filth, this time around the band drops some of their most leaden, majestic riffs yet into their slow-mo filthstorm, massive saurian doom riffs slipping WAY out of the confines of 'groove' and deep into rumbling fields of charred ritualistic chanting and almost Abruptum-like states of psychotic noise...
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AELTER Dusk Dawn / Follow You Beloved 2xCD DIGIPACK
CBR101

One of several side-projects to emerge from the Wolvserpent camp, Aelter is the solo effort of Wolvserpent guitarist Blake Green. With Aelter, Blake explores a similar realm of dark majestic sound to Wolvserpent, with his massive downtuned guitar roar and bleak minor key melodies being the common thread between the two projects. But where Wolvserpent blends this chugging Melvins-esque heaviness and haunting slowcore arpeggios with violins, pounding drums, and a propensity for extended hypno-dirges, Aelter dispenses with the drums almost completely and goes for a more cinematic approach using layered keyboards and gorgeous harmonized voices that reminds me of something you would have heard on Beggers Banquet or 4AD being fused to a malevolent black heaviness. Both of the Aelter albums were only released on vinyl in limited editions of a few hundred copies and are close to going out of print completely, but we have now gathered both Dusk Dawn and Follow You Beloved together in a double disc set...
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FUNERARY CALL Fragments From The Aethyr CD DIGIPACK
CBR100

The grand master of black ambience returns with this new missive from beyond the chthonic depths. Featuring three 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. The music shifts between violin-led passages of pitch-black, dissonant chamber music backed by booming kettledrums and traces of modern music composition and the rotting exhalations of the dead, to blasts of crushing shapeless doom where huge metallic chords thunder in the deep, sending tremors of doom-laden dronemetal 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 murmerings of the long dead, the sound imbued with a deep ominous feel but also glowing with a mysterious dark beauty as it builds to a crescendo of black majestic power...
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EHNAHRE Old Earth CD DIGIPACK
CBR99

The third album from the avant-death/doom ensemble Ehnahre and the follow up to the critically acclaimed 2010 album 'Taming The Cannibals' on Crucial Blast, '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 modern music composition, to earth-scorching result...
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THEOLOGIAN The Chasms Of My Heart CD DIGIPACK
CBR98

On Theologian's debut album for Crucial Blast The Further I Get From Your Star..., 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 merged into even darker, more majestic sounds, crafting something that was significantly more atmospheric than his work with NTT, while also 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, and it's one of the best albums that Leech has brought us.
Chasms opens with what may be Theologian's most stirring and evocative piece of music to date, a monumental end-time dirge titled "Abandon All Hope" that starts off as a swirling ocean of blackened synthesizer roar before morphing into the sound of 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 begin to pour in, soaked in distortion and climbing skyward in a gloriously miserable multi-part harmony above an eerie minor-key hook, this heaviness is transformed into 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...
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GULAGGH Vorkuta CD DIGIPACK
CBR97

When I was first introduced to the entity known as Stalaggh a few years ago, the Dutch blacknoise maniacs crawled under my skin immediately. Couldn't really come up with a precedent for what they were doing, taking recordings of the screams and wails of mental patients and layering them against a fearsome tableau of dissonant skull-scraping noise, Merzbow levels of grinding harsh feedback and heaps of low-fi improvised black doom all but hidden by their thick curtains of demonic skree. It certainly made for some demented, evil sounding noise, and the three albums that they released made up a suffocating, bizarre body of work that seemed to challenge even the mighty Abruptum for the crown of nihilistic, abstract black horror. In 2008, the band announced that they were going to alter their sound and change their name to Gulaggh, with the new incarnation of the band now focusing on creating their terrifying soundscapes using orchestral instruments instead of the blackened ultra-harsh distortion and feedback of their previous works. And while their new sound isn't as harsh or oppressive as the Stalaggh material, Gulaggh has managed to create something that is equally disturbing and nightmarish with their debut album Vorkuta, resembling some strange fusion of abstract European improv and the howling background sounds from an exorcism ritual...
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SUTCLIFFE JUGEND Blue Rabbit CD DIGIPACK
CBR95

Appearing in the early 80's as an offshoot of the legendary UK power electronics band Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend soon went to to become an equally confrontational and extreme purveyor of the early PE/industrial sound, producing some of the most abrasive and violent electronics albums ever with their early Come Organisation releases We Spit On Their Graves and Campaign . Since then, Sutcliffe Jugend has continued to pursue a unique sonic vision that combines transgressive subject matter and dark, cerebral musings on violence and sexual perversion with explorations into the use of brutal feedback and synthesizer damage. In the past decade, however, the band has delved into 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. You won't find any of SJ's trademark power electronics sound here, nor the dark throbbing industrial of their recent album With Extreme Prejudice for Cold Spring Records; this is a darker, more unsettling experience, heavy with an atmosphere of doom and smoldering violence, as if Sutcliffe Jugend sought to channel the creaking dread of Nurse With Wound's Salt Marie Celeste through a series if blood-freezing psychosexual nightmares...
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T.O.M.B. UAG CD DIGIPACK
CBR94

For nearly a decade now, the shadowy collective known as T.O.M.B. (or Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) have been creating a particular brand of industrial death worship with some of creepiest recordings that I've heard out of this realm. I discovered the band through their 2007 album Macabre Noize Royale on Todestrieb, whose grating industrial rhythms, blasts of blackened noise and malformed black metal left my skull a charred husk, and I've been following their clandestine electro-acoustic experiments and rituals of corpse-abuse ever since. Now, T.O.M.B. have brought us their latest album (and first for Crucial Blast) UAG (or Undercovered Ancient Gateways, and it follows the group of crypt-crawlers through eleven tracks of suffocating black ambience and lifeless industrial pummel that strips away most of the black metal elements of previous releases, crafting a more abstract, ambient sound this time around...
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GNAW THEIR TONGUES Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus CD DIGIPACK
CBR93

Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus. Roughly translated, with blood and whip, we worship the dark. This is the latest collection of atrocities from Gnaw Their Tongues, an eight song investigation into the rites and rituals that emerge from the copper-scented frenzy of the serial killer, the obsessive acts of death worship enacted by those that live on the edge of abyss, the limits of experience sought by black cults. The sound is, as always, immensely heavy, with fractured drums and tunderous tympani skins reverberating within a maelstrom of seething black doom, screeching classical strings, horns, piano, and some of the most vomitous vocals imagineable. However, Per Flagellum Sanguemque is marked by the most frenetic percussive attack that we have heard from Gnaw Their Tongues, with volleys of chaotic drumming, fractured blasts, and maniacally complex patterns that sometimes seem to border on free-jazz drumming...
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MORS SONAT Comforts In Atrocity CD DIGIPACK
CBR92

Though the name may be new, those who explore the more terrifying sounds found at the intersection where black metal, industrial noise, power electronics and black ambience meet surely know the minds behind this collaboration. Featuring Mories (of Gnaw Their Tongues / Aderlating / Cloak Of Altering / De Magia Veterum infamy) and Australian black noise/metal technician Nekrasov, Mors Sonat sounds little like their other projects, crafting 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...
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WOLD Badb CD DIGIPACK
CBR91

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 featured here revolve around the mythology of the war goddess, the spectre of doom that lurks at the edge of the battlefield, and begins at the heart of a roiling black blizzard and 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 distorted witch-screams ripping through the blackness, all doused and drowned in Merzbowian levels of feedback and distortion abuse. Now presented on Cd for the first time, this early swarm of Wold's psychotropic black metal/noise terror comes with all-new artwork from Pippi Zornoza...
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WOLVSERPENT Gathering Strengths / Blood Seed 2xCD DIGIPACK
CBR90

Previously known as Pussygutt, the duo of blackened psychedelic dronemetallers from Boise, Idaho changed their name to the much more ominous sounding Wolvserpent in 2010. The name is the really the only thing that changed, as the occult hypno-doom and grim, folk-stained nightmares that populated their previous albums are all intact here. This double disc from Crucial Blast collects both the Gathering Strengths Lp (Olde English Spelling Bee) and Blood Seed Lp (20 Buck Spin), both of which were previously available only on limited edition vinyl. The material has been remastered for this format, and comes in an eight-panel digipack that features both the original album artwork as well as new imagery that further compliments Wolvserpent's avant-garde witch-sludge...
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EHNAHRE Taming The Cannibals CD DIGIPACK
CBR89

The new full length (number two) from the Boston based avant-black/death/doom band Ehnahre, Taming The Cannibals, is one of the more cerebral and challenging "death metal" albums to have come through the Crucial Blast headquarters this year. After being turned on to their excellent debut from 2008 The Man Closing Up, I've been itching to hear more from these warped death abstractionists; their debut instantly dazed me with its jarring, alien approach to bestial slow-motion death metal, drawing heavily from the twelve-tone serialism of composer Arnold Schoenberg and the outer fringes of free-jazz and free improvisation as much as they do from the foul black pit of early 90's death metal and doom. Even after years of devouring the most dissonant strains of death metal that I could get my mitts on (Gorguts, Demilich, Immolation, Portal, etc.), these guys stunned me with their extreme chaotic dissonance and pitch-black chthonic textures, a combination of atonal 20th century classical music and vicious blackened death laced with squalls of free-jazz horns, stretches of intense choral ambience, and blasts of calcifying glacial doom...
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KORPERSCHWACHE Evil Walks CD DIGIPACK
CBR88

Evil Walks is the first widely available cd release for Crucial Blast from Korperschwache after almost a decade of smaller, limited-run discs released through the label's Crucial Bliss sub-imprint. It's also the most focused work yet from this utterly demented Texas outfit that started out in the mid 90s as a pure noise project but gradually evolved into this weird, lumbering black-dirge that we hear now.
The eight songs that make up Evil Walks feature the signature Korperschwache moves: thumping minimal drum-machine pound courtesy of the relentlessly decisive Doktor Omega, droning dissonant riffs that veer from hypnotic noise to dismal quasi-black metal buzz, RKF's narcoleptic croaking and malevolent sneer bathed in reverb and amp skuzz, guitars humming and droning against cranked-up amps while creepy news sound bites, the distant sad howling of wolves and ear-piercing screams drift across the background...Strange post-punk reverberations rumble all throughout this disc, nothing new to those who are familiar with the myriad other Korperschwache discs that have come out since 2001 when RKF first began flirting with his odd mix of simple, mesmeric gloom-guitar and black mechanical slime, but it's never sounded better to my ears than it does here, when the music forms into this stoned blackened hypno-rock thing, the buzzing guitars and acid-scorched melodies looping over the skittery industrial beats and weird dubbed-out snares and concussive Godflesh-esque rhythms, turning into something that sounds remarkably like a mutant cross between late-80s British psych/drone rockers Loop and those notorious improv-black metal freakazoids Abruptum...
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THEOLOGIAN The Further I Get From Your Star The Less Light I Feel On My Face CD DIGIPACK
CBR87

The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face is the latest chapter from New York power electronics/synth-death demon Leech. This is the first full-length, widely available release from Leech's new incarnation as Theologian, which picks up where he left off with his long-running project Navicon Torture Technologies. Over the past decade, Navicon Torture Technologies blurred the edges of power electronics and dark industrial on albums like The Church Of Dead Girls (2002, Malignant), VTERVS (2008, NCC) and The Gospels Of The Gash (2009, Malignant) before ceasing operations in 2009. Now reconstituted as Theologian, Leech again explores the further realms of experience with a new form of blackened synth dread that combines many of the sounds that made up NTT's crushing electronic attack (Swedish death industrial, classic power electronics, harsh noise, powernoise) with a new level of heaviness and droneological power...
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NEKRASOV Extinction CD DIGIPACK
CBR86

...Riding atop the recent wave of black metal/noise hybrids who combine the bleak frosty riffs and blackened ferocity of underground BM with blown-out and corrosive strains of industrial noise (see also WOLD, Emit, Grief No Absolution, Enbilulugugal, Vargr), the Australian one-man band Nekrasov has so far made a substantial mark in the realm of extremist necro-racket with a series of limited edition, brutally abrasive albums (Cognition Of Splendid Oblivion, The Form Of Thought From Beast, etc) that have mostly been self-released, save for some recent offerings on labels like Siege Of Power and Chrome Leaf. Early on, Nekrasov's sound was steeped in caustic noise, a blazing industrialized black metal assault that was doused in heavy levels of irradiated distortion and Merzbowian skree. But more recently, it's mutated into less metallic regions, alternating the hyperblast black metal with forays into crushing, demonic wall-noise and blasted ambience. Now, Nekrasov is back with a new full length (the first for Crucial Blast), and it's the most advanced slab of their blacknoize terror that we've heard so far. An octagonal prism of isolationist drone, flesh-rending mechanical black metal, abstract otherworldly beauty, claustrophobic industrial dread, and the most violent, suffocating strains of harsh noise, Extinction is pure cyclonic contempt for humanity....
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GNAW THEIR TONGUES L'arrivée de la Terne Mort Triomphante CD GATEFOLD
CBR85

...One of the extreme metal/industrial underground's most unique bands, Gnaw Their Tongues arises again with a new album of majestic, orchestral death-terror called L'arrivée de la Terne Mort Triomphante, a series of five hymns to the death shroud, a celebration of dissolution. This Dutch one-man avant black/doom/industrial band is responsible for two of the most chilling albums of abstract heaviness to have been released in recent years (An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood and All The Grand Magnificence Of Perversity, both from Crucial Blast), but with this new full-length, Gnaw Their Tongues peels back additional layers of it's bombastic horror to reveal moments of euphonic beauty more than we've heard on the previous albums...
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FISTULA Goat CD
CBR84

...Ohio is rotting. Fistula once again team up with Crucial Blast to deliver another heavy dose of their septic, filthy, lumbering death-sludge in the form of Goat, a five-song Ep of low-fi and low-end nihilistic filth and rabies-laced caveman thrash with songs based on the ghoulish discovery and subsequent investigation of the eleven decomposing bodies found in the Cleveland home of Anthony Sowell in the Autumn of 2009...
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TREES Freed Of This Flesh CD
CBR83

...The mysterious Portland ensemble Trees return with their second offering on Crucial Blast, Freed Of This Flesh, with two new fetid death rituals scraped from the crypt. Each of these tracks averages around fourteen minutes, an extended death-rattle formed from black glacial riffs suspended in space, tectonic percussive rumbles, anguished shrieks of torment and abject suffering, deep guttural demon-toad throat singing, and endless sheets of glistening metallic feedback that spill and drift to the far edges of their extreme time-stretched ambient doom...
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MONARCH! Mer Morte CD
CBR82

...First appearing as a limited edition LP on the Spanish label Throne Records in 2008, Monarch's Mer Morte is now made available on cd and digital as a single unbroken thirty-four minute sludge-and-feedback feast that sprawls out further into the dismal black void that these French doom junkies have been lurking in for the past six years. As with previous releases, Monarch move through massive blackened tarpits of low-end riffage and sheets of gluey feedback that are stretched out into monolithic slabs of sound, a grim, glacial ultra-doom that crawls at a saurian sub-tempo. And vocalist Emilie sounds as gaunt and ghostly as ever, her vocalizations materializing across the spatial doomscape as distant ululating wails, breathy whispers, and putrid death shrieks ...
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YEAR OF NO LIGHT / KARYSUN Adoration / Salvation 7" EP
CBR74

... a new limited edition split 7" featuring one exclusive track each from French underground sludge/metal bands Year Of No Light and Karysun, pressed on clear wax and limited to 1000 copies....


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SUBARACHNOID SPACE Eight Bells CD
CBR81

... Eight Bells is the first new release from Subarachnoid Space in four years (following 2005's The Red Veil on Strange Attractors). Featuring the recording lineup of Daniel Barone, Melynda Jackson, Lauren K. Newman, Daniel Osborne and Steven Wray Lobdell, the music of Eight Bells continues in the heavy lysergic vein as their last couple of post-Release albums, fusing wicked metallic crunch with ethereal fx-laden guitar freakouts and some of the band's most narcotized jamming yet....
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WHOURKR Concrete CD
CBR80

... The second album from French deathtronix duo Whourkr, Concrete is a whirlwind of electronically processed and treated avant-death/grind that is as violent and brutal as it is complex and obsessively constructed, relying as much on samplers and sound-editing software as it does on bonecrushing technical riffs, vicious screaming and hyperspeed mechanized blastbeats...total chaos deathgrind filtered through a futuristic cuisinart of ultra-aggressive electronica, like a freaked-out epileptic mashup of Atari Teenage Riot, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Venetian Snares, Blut Aus Nord, and Fantomas...
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SCOTT HULL Audiofilm II 3"CD
CBR79

...best known for his amazing thrash/grind riffage in the bands Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Scott Hull has been gradually revealing another side of his musical persona over the past few years, an obsession with cinematic soundscaping and dark evocative film scores, mutant electronic textures and pitch-black isolationism that employs brilliant production trickery to immerse the listener in a vibrant, active aural environment...on this second Audiofilm 3" CD, Scott creates a much more frantic and energetic soundscape, this one alive with minimal bass-shuddering pulses and keening tone manipulations, layered swarms of insectile electronic chitter, swells of shadowy ambience, brain-melting plasma blasts, and vast tectonic drones. A brief (at 12 minutes) but amazing dose of abstract dark ambient/noise that will appeal to fans of Bastard Noise, Astro, and freaked-out 70's sci-fi synth soundtracks...
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GNAW THEIR TONGUES All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity CD
CBR78

...Picking up where 2008's An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood left off, Gnaw Their Tongues is back with nine new tracks of fearsome blackened orchestral chaos and abstract horror that still sounds like little else out there. On Dread, we're feeling an even heavier bass-assault compared to the other releases, and this is easily the heaviest Gnaw Their Tongues release yet. This monstrous, noxious bottom-end roar that skulks and slithers throughout the album suggests a foul fusion of Abruptum (which is still the closest reference point to Gnaw Their Tongue's black chaos) and Leonard Rosenman's most nightmarish film scores, piled in towering heaps of sadistic noise, warped orchestral strings, degraded samples, shrieking voices, and punishing lurching doom draped in suffocating atrmosphere. Hyper-abstract black metal sound-collage? Wagnerian avant-doom psychosis? That's one way of putting it, but Gnaw Their Tongues is ultimately impossible to pin down, defying simple categorization as this album plunges even deeper into a black pit of total cinematic horror, sexual perversion, and shapeless heaviosity....
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OVERMARS Born Again CD
CBR77

... this forty-minute epic moves from pulverizing industrial dirge blanketed with heavily textured layers of processed guitar and fearsome gutteral roars intermixed with captivating female vocals, to passages of haunting dark ambience and bottom-heavy churn, and a magesterial finale that stretches gloom-ridden moody riffage, vaporous electronics and dramatic male/female singing across the song's final fifteen minutes, a tense, slow buildup that erupts into an earth-shaking crescendo of super heavy riffage. Immensely bleak and heavy, Born Again brings together elements of Godflesh's industrial pummel, black metal, tribal dirge , the violent nihilism of Swans, doomy death metal, and even some black strains of psychedelia into a monumental metallic black hole .....
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THE HUMAN QUENA ORCHESTRA The Politics Of The Irredeemable CD
CBR76

...crushing and oppressive, a crawl through abstract fields of low-end sound that move from punishing blasts of ultra-heavy machine-doom and earth-shaking tectonic riffs, to thick fogs of black electronic ambience that shimmer with subsonic pulses and celestial drones, the presence of malevolent electricity crackling in the air around the lumbering, nightmarish electro-sludge monstrosity of the Human Quena Orchestra. And at the same time, there are passages of immense beauty on this album that lurk at the peripheries of HQO's malevolent crush; the track "Aspirations" for instance, where pummeling slow-motion industrial percussions grinds in an infinite loop beneath a swirling nightsky of kosmiche synthesizers and heavenly, blissed-out ambience...
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GENGHIS TRON Board Up The House Remixes Vol 5 LP
CBR75

...Board Up The House Remixes Vol. 5 is the final installment of the five-volume remix series that has been produced in co-operation between Genghis Tron and five labels (Relapse, Lovepump United, Anticon, Temporary Residence Ltd., and Crucial Blast), and features a myriad number of artists reshaping and reimagining various songs off of Genghis Tron's 2008 album Board Up The House (Relapse Records). Each volume is pressed in a run of 1,000 copies on colored vinyl that ties in with the sleeve art. Board Up The House cover artist, Jon Beasley, has provided each remix album with alternative artwork. The Crucial Blast entry in the Board Up The House remix series features Tim Hecker (Mille Plateaux, Alien8, Staalplaat, Fat Cat) turning the title track "Board Up The House" into a fuzz-entombed bliss-scape, Aidan Baker/Nadja's fifteen-minute glacial vision of "I Won't Come Back Alive", and another remix of "I Won't Come Back Alive" rendered as a blur of distorted electro by Dudes You Can Trust, which is the solo project of Michael Sochynsky from G-Tron taking a heavy mangle approach. This remix platter is easily the most distortion-laden entry in the series...
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WILDILDLIFE Peas Feast 12" + DROPCARD
CBR72

...The 12" vinyl for Wildildlife's Peas Feast is coming soon, too. The band released this EP as a handmade CD-R that has been sold at shows over the past year, but the songs on Peas Feast are so cool that we wanted to give this a proper vinyl documentation, and have been remastered for vinyl by Scott Hull at Visceral Sound. The record will be pressed on yellow wax with black splatter in an edition of 1,000 copies, and will also come with a digital dropcard that will allow you to download the tracks from the Peas Feast EP as well as a digital-only EP titled Drongolet Demos that has a bunch of unreleased tracks from Wildildlife....
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SCOTT HULL Audiofilm I 3"CD
CBR71

...a terrifying fug of demonic drone that utilizes delirious stereo panning and slabs of obsidian ambience, and it slowly unfolds over the length of the piece to reveal layers of malevolent black drone and unsettling voices seemingly lost between planes of shadow. Audiofilm I plays out like a wildly hallucinogenic horror film score, and anyone into Scott's previous ambient/soundscape work will find this to be one of his darkest pieces yet. The disc is limited to a single pressing of 1,000 copies, packaged in a tiny 4" x 4" glossy gatefold jacket with stunning full color artwork from artist Seldon Hunt. Recommended to enthusiasts of the isolationist terror of Painkiller’s Execution Ground ambient disc, Lustmord, and Scorn...
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BLACK ELK Always A Six, Never A Nine CD
CBR70

Always A Six, Never A Nine is the second album and the follow up to the 2006 self-titled debut from Portland, OR aggro wreckers Black Elk, whose psychotic brand of crushing, noise-rock influenced heaviosity is a return to the unhinged underground rock force of bands like Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Black Flag and Hammerhead. This new album features ten songs of seething weirdness, with the dissonant, crushing riffage, lunging rhythmic push and awesome freaked out, Yow-esque vocals of singer Tom Glose that made their debut a fave among anyone who remembered the days when Amphetamine Reptile ruled the underground rock scene, but with some interesting new elements (bleak, blackened guitar ambience, a smattering of piano, skyreaching guitar harmonies, etc.) that add new shadows to Black Elk's ferocious sound. Always A Six, Never A Nine is packaged in a heavy four-panel gatefold jacket with an eight page lyric booklet.
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GNAW THEIR TONGUES An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood CD
CBR69

Gnaw Their Tongues, an enigmatic project from the Netherlands that has wowed fans of messed-up heaviosity with the phenomenal Reeked, Pained and Shuddering CD that was released on Paradigms along with a host of super-limited CDR and cassette releases, is joining the Crucial Blast roster for the CD release of the new full length An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood, which was released as a limited edition vinyl release at the beginning of 2008 on Burning World Records. This undefinable mass of black amorphic horror is one of the most intense listens we've engaged in recently, a nihilistic pit of howling orchestral strings and blackened abstract doom, operatic female voices plunging into a fetid sewer of filth and blackness, equal parts avant black metal and splattered sludge and symphonic horror movie score. An overwhelming deathscape scrawled in jagged figures across pieces like "My body is not a vessel, nor a temple. It's a repulsive pile of sickness" or "Sawn asunder and left for the beasts", and flecked with moments of unbelievably crushing beauty that may surprise fans of Gnaw Their Tongue's previous work.
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GEISHA Die Verbrechen Der Liebe CD
CBR68

This hour-long, six track monolith follows Geisha into a psychedelic black storm, their blown-out and raw rock infused with a bone-rattling recording and covered in a thick sheen of white noise and gritty distortion. As with their previous album, the spirit of seminal noise rock / sludge rock (think Cherubs, Melvins, My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything for coordinates) is combined with violent, chaotic NOISE and tainted with blurred VHS cassette visions and vague allusions to BDSM, and then jammed through an orgone accumulator, forming a ferocious, crushing rock beast that reveals it's powerful hooks and melodies underneath the churning distorted bass rumble and sludgemetal riffage , blasts of psychedelic drone-noise and corrosive skree, percussive pummel, and deranged singing. The sound is immense, and the first five tracks on Die Verbrechen Der Liebe deliver Geisha's in-the-red heaviness and hooks in surplus. "Prelude To Amber Pays The Rent", "A Wilderness, Except By Sight", "Sportsfister" - every one is a crusher.
But then Geisha pull out the monstrous thirty-minute, thirty-five second closer "Theme From Diana", and the tone changes completely. This track is a re-working of a "metal percussion" set that Geisha originally performed live several years ago, and it begins as a slowly building fog of voices and effects and shimmering metal that blooms into an expanse of droning, fx-heavy guitar, looping samples, cosmic effects, and improvised percussion. It's a kind of rumbling industrial dronescape that stretches out forever, until suddenly in the last few minutes the drifting drones and psychedelic guitars and sampled voices suddenly explode in an immolating nuclear blast of overdriven, speaker-annhilating noise and the track immediately, terrifyingly changes shape into a monstrous lumbering noise-metal dirge that bulldozes out of your speakers, whooshing Hawkwind effects swooping overhead, the band knotted together into a white-hot blast of ultra heavy riffage, distortion, and a wall of percussive force. "Diana" is one of the most crushing pieces of music that I have ever heard from Geisha, like some majestic and brutal conglom of Swans, Skullflower, Merzbow, and Burmese forged into a destructive space-metal supernova.
Crucial Blast is releasing the CD version of Die Verbrechen Der Liebe in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, packaged in a full-color gatefold jacket.
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NOISM ± CD
CBR67

The first real release from the Japanese glitch/shred duo Noism, following their appearance on the Relapse compilation Drummachinegun and a series of demos. Formed by guitarist Yoshiro Hamazaki and programmer Tomoyuki Akiyama in 1999 in Tokyo, Noism focuses on ridiculously complex and spastic death/grind instrumentals using programmed drums that are cut up and spliced back together into impossible rhythms, a million brain-melting riffs and dissonant shredding, all of which is chopped up and processed into abstract death blasts that defy physics. This twelve-song, twenty-one minute disc features a unique, glitched-out chop shop of Planet Mu-style beats delivered at truly meth'd levels of chaos fused with sweeping technical death metal. Insane. Highly recommended for fans of extreme, way-out avant-guitar spazz and absurdly technical deathgrind.
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TREES Lights Bane CD
CBR66

The debut album from the Portland quartet Trees delivers two epic tracks of monolithic, blackened doom metal with a twisted, noise-damaged approach and a dank basement vibe. Trees craft glacial abstract riffs and rivers of ashen amplifier goo that fans of feedback-laden heaviosity will find highly satisfying, a kind of grinding, slow-motion black hole psychedelia that has a similiar hypnotic death-ritual quality as artists like Bloody Panda and Khanate, but with their own unique trance state of swirling guitar textures, horrific jet black dronescapes and ghoulish, excoriating vocals. Features members of the PDX psych-sludge outfit Tecumseh (Important Records). This CD edition of the TREE's debut comes in a Stoughton printed 4-panel gatefold case.
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NADJA Desire In Uneasiness CD
CBR65

Following a wave of recent reissues and re-recorded versions of older CD-R titles, Desire In Uneasiness is an album of all new material from the acclaimed Canadian dreamsludge weavers Nadja. Five colossal jams of eternally-fuzzy, ethereal dirge that are powered by the interlocking bass guitars of Leah Buckareff and Aidan Baker, who set loose a wave of monstrous grinding bass riffs amidst a fog of beautiful, swirling electronic effects. Desire also marks the first Nadja album to feature a live drummer in place of the drum machine programming that has driven the band's previous recordings, and the difference in the band's sound is apparent from the first crushing beats of album opener 'Disambiguation'. The organic drumming here takes Nadja's music into new realms of spacious jazzy exploration, dubby rhythms and cavernous psychedelia, while also delivering some of the band's most grooving, crushing hypno-bliss yet. Desire also stands out from the rest of the Nadja catalog for it's bizarre artwork that Aidan commisioned from his friend The Reverend Aitor. Aitor's bright, bold lines and textured magic marker artwork gives the gatefold jacket we've presented this disc in the look of a twisted children's book on acid, with weird images of chickens, trees growing through chairs, and more. The package is a sturdy 4-panel gatefold jacket printed by Stoughton, and it looks killer.
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WILDILDLIFE Six CD
CBR64

Heavy, crunchy riffage rolls over celestial FX freakout and gang choral voices: part gluey pop hallucination, part psychedelic blast furnace, part metalloid skullcrush. Super melodic and catchy but vaguely menacing and dark at the same time: this is WILDILDLIFE. Their debut full length Six follows up a fistful of CD-R and vinyl documents and summons a wicked whirlpool of dense distorto crunch and freaky singing, raging metallic percussive pummel, tribal rhythms and crushing effects-soaked guitars, subdued floatational drones and ecstatically gorgeous melodies, all let loose in a series of psychedelic slowcore eruptions and swirling cosmic sludge. Going back and referencing a review that Terrascope Magazine printed about one of the band's earlier CD-R releases, this sounds vaguely like Black Sabbath and Butthole Surfers jamming together with ancient forest mystics, an experience both brutal and beautiful, and which proves that Wildildlife have already established themselves as serious purveyors of blown-out mindmelt heaviness.
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SKULLFLOWER IIIrd Gatekeeper CD
CBR63

A reissue of Skullflower's acclaimed 1992 album IIIrd Gatekeeper, featuring the lineup of Matthew Bower (guitar), Stuart Dennison (drums and vocals), and Anthony DiFranco (bass). IIIrd Gatekeeper is an immensely heavy album that was originally released on HeadDirt, the label run by Justin Broadrick of Godflesh/Jesu/Final fame back in the early 90's, and featured Skullflower at their heaviest, grinding out slow, sludgy riffs and crushing, almost industrial rhythms amid a tempest of psychedelic guitar noise and dense sheets of feedback - easily the most crushing, rock-based music that Skullflower ever produced. IIIrd Gatekeeper served up a skulldozing dose of post-industrial dirge rock that sat comfortably next to Godflesh, Swans, and Ramleh in terms of dark, druggy, hypnotic lumbering heaviness. This is one of our favorite albums ever at Crucial Blast, and we are presenting this reissue with new liner notes, a new package design that retains all of the original artwork from the HeadDirt release, and a remastering job courtesy of Scott Hull at Visceral Sound.
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GREY DATURAS Dead In The Woods CD
CBR62

A re-issue of the out-of-print 2004 monsterpiece from the Melbourne, Australian trio Grey Daturas. Originally released through the band's own Crashing Jets imprint, Dead In The Woods is a massive exhortation of lumbering metallic sludge rock, freely improvised amplifier noise and crushing riff splatter, and massive, sky-streaking psychedelic corrosion. The Crucial Blast re-issue of Dead In The Woods features a full remastering by Scott Hull at Visceral Sound, and will also come with a brand new packaging design via a 4-panel case printed by Stumptown Printers.
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SOUVENIR'S YOUNG AMERICA An Ocean Without Water LP
CBR61

AVAILABLE ON YELLOW/CLEAR SMOKE, BLACK/CLEAR SMOKE, AND STANDARD BLACK VINYL.
Lush, shimmering guitar ambience and hypnotic, propulsive instrumental heaviness wind through the dusty highways and burnt twilight skies of "An Ocean Without Water," the sophomore album from Richmond's Souvenir's Young America. Divided into six flowing movements, "An Ocean Without Water" is filled with intensely beautiful melodies that drift on lonesome harmonica strains and sparkling, celestial electronics, shot through with mystic, western slide guitar, passages of crushing angular riffage, rolling tribal drumming, and transcendent blues. Through their intricate song arrangements and moody textures, Souvenir's Young America has created an epic, emotional narrative. The sound draws from the collected DNA of forebears like Popul Vuh, Earth, Labradford, and Neurosis, yet they form a powerfully evocative instrumental language all of their own. Features collaborations with Aughra (Magic Bullet Records) and Nick Forte (Sublight Records, ex Rorschach / Beautiful Skin).
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SOUVENIR'S YOUNG AMERICA An Ocean Without Water CD
CBR61

Richmond, VA's cinematic instrumentalists SOUVENIR'S YOUNG AMERICA present their second full length, "An Ocean Without Water," which will be released through Crucial Blast on both CD (on July 24th) and LP (shortly thereafter). The album was recorded with John Morand (Labradford, Sparklehorse, 4 Walls Falling) at Sound of Music. "An Ocean Without Water" comes in a 6-panel digipack designed by Sasha Barr.
Lush, shimmering guitar ambience and hypnotic, propulsive instrumental heaviness wind through the dusty highways and burnt twilight skies of "An Ocean Without Water," the sophomore album from Richmond's Souvenir's Young America. Divided into six flowing movements, "An Ocean Without Water" is filled with intensely beautiful melodies that drift on lonesome harmonica strains and sparkling, celestial electronics, shot through with mystic, western slide guitar, passages of crushing angular riffage, rolling tribal drumming, and transcendent blues. Through their intricate song arrangements and moody textures, Souvenir's Young America has created an epic, emotional narrative. The sound draws from the collected DNA of forebears like Popul Vuh, Earth, Labradford, and Neurosis, yet they form a powerfully evocative instrumental language all of their own. Features collaborations with Aughra (Magic Bullet Records) and Nick Forte (Sublight Records, ex Rorschach / Beautiful Skin).
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YEAR OF NO LIGHT Nord CD
CBR60

As part of our current plundering of the French art-metal underground, Crucial Blast presents the North American release of 'Nord', the colossal debut from French ensemble Year Of No Light that was originally released via the French label Radar Swarm in 2006. Year Of No Light bring an amazing set of songwriting chops to the 10 songs that make up 'Nord', a heavy, chugging metallic monster that channels both gloomy atmospherics reminiscent of The Cure, and crushing Neurosis-inspired dirgecore, heavy, raw, and lumbering, but at times extremely beautiful and epic. To us, YEAR OF NO LIGHT's Nord seems to orbit the guitar-heavy early 90's alt rock of bands like Swervedriver and Dinosaur Jr., The Cure and My Bloody Valentine, just as much as it draws from the arty, crushing metallic post-hardcore pioneered by Old Man Gloom and Neurosis. Sure, there are a ton of bands out there that touch upon similiar influences, but we can't think of anyone recently that has delivered an album in this style that is quite this catchy and well-written. Nord flows seamlessly between passages of ultra melodic post-rock and frenzied bursts of dissonant, crushing hardcore, to austere radiant guitar figures and gorgeous ambient drones, to massive doomy dirge metal, utterly gorgeous Loveless-esque melodic bliss, and some almost folksy, but unbelievably EPIC riffs, with powerful, strained vocals fighting through their wall of sound. Presented in a 4-panel gatefold case from Stumptown Printers, and featuring all new artwork.
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MONARCH! Dead Men Tell No Tales 2xCD
CBR59

Hailing from the picturesque Northern Basque Country of France, MONARCH! unleash a slow motion avalanche of impossibly glacial, blackened sludge and hypnotic feedback, each song a series of epic tarpit riffage stretched out eternally over lumbering drums and the cavernous rumble of speaker cabinets. Over these yawning expanses of black void appears the demonic, throat-shredding shrieks and ghostly singing of Emilie, whose petite appearance belies one of the harshest throats in the underground Doom spectrum. Beyond heavy. MONARCH!'s mega-crawling ambient doom/drone/sludge follows in the grand tradition of fellow tarpit adventurers Melvins, Corrupted, Noothgrush, and Black Sabbath, and accompany their music with an iconoclastic design style that decorates their material with deceptively cute imagery drawing from the collective influence of Sanrio, Japanese animation, European graffiti, weirdo hardcore, and skateboard culture.
This double CD set contains both MONARCH!'s newest album Die Tonight, and the now out-of-print Speak Of The Sea LP, both released in limited vinyl editions as European imports, with additional unreleased songs exclusive to this release. The North Amercian version of Dead Men Tell No Tales is presented in an offset-printed, 4-panel case printed by Stumptown Printers, with all new original artwork in the band's unique design style.
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TOTIMOSHI Ladron CD
CBR58

The fourth album from TOTIMOSHI. Slabs of crushing metered riffing and joyously ecstatic sludge ooze from the band's instruments over sunbaked vocal harmonies and flourishes of pure pop melodicism and bursts of old-school heavy metal energy. These songs wind through shadows of dusty blues and western music, riff-tastic instrumental rave-ups, squalls of immolating guitar noise, and smoldering post-punk dynamics clad in serious heaviness. TOTIMOSHI's distinctively elephantine rock grips the listener in the power of the big riff and saw-toothed hooks as it reconciles MELVINS/HIGH ON FIRE/KARP crush with pop and psychedelia, bolstered by powerful production courtesy of HELMET's Page Hamilton.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

BLACK ELK s/t CD
CBR57

The eponymous debut from Portland, Oregon's BLACK ELK is a raging destructo rock eruption, heavy, catchy, and flattening. This ten song album contains a creeped out conglom of carnivorous charred hardcore punk, the sludgy power of primo Pacific Northwest tarpit rawk (think KARP, MELVINS, and early SOUNDGARDEN as reference points), twitchy Midwestern noise rage somewhere between Am Rep Records (circa-1991) and a more rabid DIE KREUZEN, and a goatheaded psychedelic backwoods black mass/dance party risen to a freakin' fever pitch. Total crush. Produced by Mike Lastra at Smegma Studios (EARTH, THRONES, JACKIE O MOTHERFUCKER).
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MICROWAVES Contagion Heuristic CD
CBR56

In the anti-tradition of whitebread Bay Area thrash metal, the violent morass of New York no wave, and a familiarity with Ralph Records / THE RESIDENTS insanity, Microwaves draws from a palette that is somehow as wide as it seems limited. Spiked skronk-infested guitars spit tonality-impaired riffs like so much chaff from a surgically calibrated tree shredder, while a propulsive fretless bass assault is jammed through all manner of alien effects, often rendering it as more a bowel-rumbling presence than an actual instrument. The percussive cyborg clatter and MICROWAVE's paranoid dual vocal attack serve to further blast MICROWAVES' dystopian thrash into the outer void. Features former 1985/CREATION IS CRUCIFIXION/CONELRAD/FATE OF ICARUS personnel.
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SKULLFLOWER Tribulation CD
CBR55

Tribulation. The new emission from the UK trance-noise legends SKULLFLOWER. A black-void beaming of utterly destroyed drone rock and crushing amplifier obliteration that rains down black ash and punishing blasts of feedback skree on the listener. A dynamic, bleary-eyed meditation. An avalanche of powerdrone that threatens to take your cranium apart and transport your grey matter into filthy new dimensions infested with melodic razor cuts and submerged mantras. A triumphant eruption of apocalyptic meta-metal and radioactive raga swarms, guaranteed to loosen eardrums. This album is one of the heaviest, harshest slabs of guitar armageddon from Matt Bower since the glory days of Total, and bridges the void between the krautrock/celestial free drone influence of the last few Skullflower albums, and the blackened molten death of his Mirag material.

ACROSS TUNDRAS Dark Songs Of The Prairie CD
CBR54

Dark Songs Of The Prairie, the first full-length album from Denver's ACROSS TUNDRAS, holds eight portraits of heavy majesty carved out of massive syrup riffage and spacious melodies. It's almost like hearing some mysterious 70's country rock outfit thawed out and refitted with mighty amplification, sludgecore tempos, and shoegazey shimmer that conjures up visions of the wide open prairies and looming mountains of the band's home territory. As weighty as the melodic heaviness coming from the from the whole "post-metal" camp, but coming from a different place altogether, ACROSS TUNDRAS draw a tangential line from Neil Young to HUM to NEUROSIS, and unleash a powerful new statement of rustic, crushing Americana. Features former members of Sioux Falls, SD post-hardcore outfits SPIRIT OF VERSAILLES and EXAMINATION OF THE...
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GENGHIS TRON Dead Mountain Mouth CD
CBR53

Dead Mountain Mouth is the wickedly anticipated full length album from GENGHIS TRON, and the follow-up to their imaginative debut EP, Cloak Of Love. Recorded at Godcity Studios with Kurt Ballou (Converge), Dead Mountain Mouth moves beyond the rapid-fire electro/grind genre-splicing of Cloak Of Love, and forms something more fluid and cohesive, an arcane union of digital dreams and brutal heaviness, where speedcore eruptions blossom from clouds of maximum beat-driven electronic bliss, and futuristic metal riffage seethes from your speakers. These ten gloriously-dense and triumphantly catchy jams soar through valleys of immense crush and alien vistas of 8-bit wizardry unlike anything you've heard before...
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GEISHA Mondo Dell'Orrore CD
CBR52

Devouring/rebirthing the concept of "noise rock" into something frighteningly beautiful and brutally heavy, GEISHA deliver crushing blasts of impossibly hyperdistorted rock baked in massive frequency overload and massive hooks and melodies and sinister crushing riffs, all of it slathered in filthy throbbing feedback and white noise horror holocaust, like the early 90's alt rock of Isn't Anything-era MY BLOODY VALENTINE and DINOSAUR JR. mashed together with the most brutal sort of Unsane/Am Rep style racket and distortion-drenched psych/noise into a sludgy metallic mass, jamming with a small army of pedal-smashing harsh electronics troglodytes playing awesomely catchy/crushing pop songs buried beneath a hellish storm of skree and amp-blowing fuzz. Terrifying. Beautiful. Licensed for North America by Crucial Blast.
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THE GOSLINGS Spaceheater/Perfect Interior CD
CBR51

Spaceheater/Perfect Interior collects the first two EP's from husband-and-wife duo the GOSLINGS, originally released as short-run CD-Rs on low-fi/indie noise imprint Asaurus Records in 2003-2004. Working with a signature palette of melted,low-fi indie pop and muggy/smeared psych-drone ambience ground through overdriven amplifiers and shot out into pools of swirling basement shudder, The GOSLINGS adorn their gorgeous powermurk with eerie field recordings, ghostly subterranean vocals, and crackling cable buzz.If SUNN O))) had, in actuality, been a late-80's dreampop outfit on 4AD Records, or if cult shoegazers MEDICINE had ever collaborated with drone-axe sorcerers EARTH, the resulting fug may have been similiar to this black-sugar avalanche. Simultaneously ethereal and blown-out,angelic strains of four-track mud-majesty shaking the walls of the ancient well it's buried beneath.
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NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT compilation 2xCD
CBR50

This limited-edition re-issue of the 1999 double CD compilation NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT is Crucial Blast's homage to the scuzz-caked grindcore/noise/sludge/speedpunk underground of the mid/late 1990's embodied in cheap cassette compilations and xerox-sleeved split 7" EPs. One of Crucial Blast's first ever releases, we grabbed exclusive outbursts from an array of subterranean sonic abusers, including BASTARD NOISE, AGATHOCLES, DAHMER, CRIPPLE BASTARDS, MACRONYMPHA, UNHOLY GRAVE, and loads of other purveyors of damaged, anti-social grind and noisecore, free noise and power electronics, spoken word, brutal fastcore, blazing D-beat driven crustcore, and lysergic psych-sludge. This second edition is limited to 1,000 copies, never to be repressed. NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT is packaged in a DVD style plastic double-disc case that holds both CDs and a mega-thick, 64 page fanzine-style newsprint booklet loaded with band info, art, stories and rants. ARTIST LISTING: Mark Bruback, Cruel Face, Strong Intention, Bastard Noise, RPOD, SoIHadToShootHim, Katastrofialue, Unfound, Dark Skies Fallen, Retribution, Global Holocaust, Flammable Child, Depressor, John Bender, Aural Torture Mechanism, The Last Day No Human Voice, Agathocles, Daybreak, Puncture Wound, None Of Your Fucking Business, Dahmer, Samus, Mizuko, Cripple Bastards, Miseries AD, A Death Between Seasons, Macronymhpha, Unholy Grave, Falsies, Final Exit, JDog, Bloodstains & Bulletholes.
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ORTHRELM / BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS split CDEP
CBR49

This CDEP features one new, exclusive song each from New York tech/prog metal wizards BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS and shred meltdown duo ORTHRELM, overdosing the listener on spastic complexity and insane instrumental prowess that is sure to liquify your grey matter. Adorned in eye-blazing original artwork from VOIVOD's Away.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

SOIHADTOSHOOTHIM Alpha Males & Popular Girls CD
CBR48

On their debut full length Alpha Males & Popular Girls , SOIHADTOSHOOTHIM complete their metamorphosis from purveyors of mid-90's art-damaged powerviolence to modern blastpop visionaries. Sugarcoated and venomous, these ten songs marry monstrous metallic riffing and surreal, swirling pop seizures to cyclones of gasoline-soaked noise skronk and arena-sized rock blowouts that are fronted with utter sass and ferocity, courtesy of frontwoman Libby Schaub. Alpha Males is a boldly imaginative debut, chock full of infectious hooks and crazed heaviness that references BLONDIE and indie pop, blasting powerviolence and NAPALM DEATH, pulverizing tech-metalcore, neon-hued dance punk, gleaming melodic bliss, and mutant stadium-rock anthems all in the same breath. Astounding.
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THE MASS Perfect Picture Of Wisdom And Boldness CD DIGIPACK
CBR47

The 2nd album from Oakland California's THE MASS further refines the band's unique brand of malevolent indie-thrash, oozing a crawling heaviness not apparent on earlier releases. Crushing, epic, and melodic...moving beyond the hyperkinetic seizures of City Of Dis, here THE MASS whip out blazing, staccato riffs and multifaceted vocal attacks that knife through complex structures and sludgy, epic elegies, as wicked saxophone melodies interweave with angular crunch and creepy nocturnal post-rock. Like a stuttering, bat-winged Bay Area thrash metal outfit arming itself with Louisville/Chicago schooled math-thug asymmetry, pounding dirge-core, and fierce,evocative jazz flourishes while lobbing some whopping bonged-out grooves, THE MASS continues to evolve its cryptic heaviosity.
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TOTIMOSHI Mysterioso CD
CBR46

¿Mysterioso? , the second full length from Oakland, CA-based trio TOTIMOSHI, intersects earthquake-heavy rock and wicked sludge riffage with the wiry hooks and dynamics of 80's post-punk / new wave, Spanish melodies, and an adventurous, occasionally improvisational fuzz attack. It's like someone gave an old Beggars Banquet band a cocktail of steroids, huge amps, and battered copies of Melvins' Stoner Witch and Mainliner's Mellow Out. Heavy, crunchy, catchy,hypnotic - ¿Mysterioso? winds, grinds, and explodes every step of the way. This re-issued, re-tooled version features enhanced CD-ROM extras, including video , photos, and more.
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SKULLFLOWER Orange Canyon Mind CD
CBR45

The new full length from the legendary UK free/drone/psych outfit Skullflower, featuring some of the most searing, synapse scorching droneworks that Matthew Bower (the man behind Skullflower, as well as Sunroof!, Total, and The Hototogisu) has unleashed to date, in our humble opinion. Orange Canyon Mind is the follow up to 2002's awesome Exquisite Fucking Boredom (Tumult Records), and continues that albums utter mutation of stoned out riffs pulled taffy-like into eternity/oblivion and star-rupturing blasts of sonic white light. Over the 8 tracks/60 minute running time, Bower and cohorts build massive horizontal drones and melodic supernovas. Superb, beautiful, brain melting stuff.
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GENGHIS TRON Cloak Of Love CD
CBR44

The infectious, adventurous debut EP from GENGHIS TRON unleashes an outrageous and virulent synthpop/grindcore mutation that smashes machinegun blastbeats, acrobatic shred, and screaming freakouts up against soaring electropop bliss. Cloak Of Love splatters the listener with lethal blasts and breakdowns one minute, and enfolds you in majestic tech-pop, gorgeous hooks, and utterly mutant dancefloor mayhem the next.
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JUMBOS KILLCRANE The Slow Decay CD
CBR42

The 4th album from Kansan doom-prog / dirge juggernauts JUMBO'S KILLCRANE. Leaner, darker, and far more crushing than their previous releases, The Slow Decay finds the Killcrane in an altogether apocalyptic frame of mind, unleashing subsonic frequencies that resonate with the decay of ages. Their monstrous riffs are more angular than ever, but this new manifesto also delivers soaring, stygian melodies that earlier releases only hinted at. Haunting and heartbreakingly heavy, the trio wind together barbed-wire hooks that snarl themselves around snail's pace rhythms and tarpit riffs.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

INFIDEL?/CASTRO! Bioentropic Damage Fractal 2xCD
CBR41

Undefineable, uncatagorizeable, INFIDEL?/CASTRO! return with Bioentropic Damage Fractal,a 14-part, 2-disc epic of electro-acoustic ambient metal destruction that travels the extremes of density and sparsity, speed and sluggishness, length and brevity, beauty and ugliness. Hyper-complex and hyper-epic, the band weaves an engrossing tapestry of spastic electronic carnage, sweeping melodic bliss, futuristic heaviness, and swirling, hypnotic walls of sound. Concepts of degradation and the inherent instability of the organic are thoroughly explored in this cohesive and focused double CD. Intense. For fans of Fantomas, Sigur Ros, My Bloody Valentine, Discordance Axis, and Scanner.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

THE MASS City Of Dis CD Digipack
CBR40

The US release of City Of Dis, the debut full length from Oakland, CA indie thrashers THE MASS delivers unto us a scalding blast of sax-assisted King Crimson-meets-Slayer art|thrash|core worship, all light-speed riffing, shrieking vox and burly singing, malevolent soft jazz,insidious tempo shifts, and bloodthirsty dynamics. Disparate elements of No Wave, damaged pop, grindcore, post-punk, thrash metal and math-rock are crafted into a blast of hyperkinetic fury, and is catchy as fuck. Pure audio dissent. THE MASS feature current and former members of FROM MONUMENTS TO MASSES and TOTIMOSHI. Recorded at Louder Studios in San Francisco with producer Tim Green (THE FUCKING CHAMPS, MELVINS, UNWOUND ). The Crucial Blast release of City Of Dis features enhanced CD-Rom video footage not available on the original European release, as well as slightly different artwork and design.
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SUZUKITON Service Repair Handbook CD
CBR39

Service Repair Handbook is the introductory unveiling of fine-tuned, tightly-wound instrumental heaviness from Richmond, VA riff-technicians SUZUKITON. Executing an elaborate schematic of progressive, technical musicianship and earth-shaking rock propulsion, Service Repair Handbook delivers an onslaught of anthemic, pulverizing tuneage that intersects math metal, heavy prog, and stoner rock. Features both former and current members of Relapse Records artist ALABAMA THUNDERPUSSY.
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BURMESE / FISTULA split CD
CBR38

Hyper destructive low-end violence from two of the American underground's most ferocious hate-sludge outfits. A dual assault from feedback-warriors BURMESE and battle-sludge titans FISTULA. BURMESE annhilate everything before them with a lethal blast of low frequency skree tantrums, cough-syrup drenched blastbeats, WHITEHOUSE-worshipping noise, and demonic free improvised violence. Think KHANATE, DROPDEAD, EARTH, and MERZBOW in an earth shattering, widow-making basement deathmatch. Ohio 's FISTULA batter up with megaheavy sludge, blistering blackened thrash, diseased rock, and some incredibly infectious riffs . Hear these tarpit battle anthems, hail the low frequency berserker. BURMESE burn you down...FISTULA pisses all over the ashes.
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DOOM CAPITAL Maryland/DC Heavy Rock Underground CD
CBR35

A 14 song compendium of crushing Doom, heavy backwoods psychedelia, and stoned blues sludgery from the infamous Maryland/DC Doom Capital scene, featuring all exclusive,rare and new tracks from CLUTCH, THE HIDDEN HAND (featuring Wino of Spirit Caravan / The Obsessed / Saint Vitus / Place Of Skulls), EARTHRIDE, UNORTHODOX, INTERNAL VOID, BLACK MANTA, LIFE BEYOND, WAR INJUN, CARRION, KING VALLEY, COUNTERSHAFT, NITROSEED, LEVIATHAN A.D., and LOS TRES PESADOS. Since the early 1970's, the Maryland/DC region has been home to one of the most vital and influential underground music movements in the world, helping to define the crushing aesthetic of Doom Metal and Stoner Rock. This compilation features both legends and newcomers of the Doom Capital, and delivers over 65 minutes of thunderous doom rock and blackened riffage from the dark shadow of the nations capital.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

RECORD OF SHADOWS INFINITE compilation CD
CBR33

A diverse collection of drones, post-rock drift, and modern neo-minimalism, Record Of Shadows Infinite brings together eerie twilight hum, harrowing field recordings, intoxicating soundscapes, and hazy psychedelic ambience from across the globe. From pastoral to apocalyptic, a wealth of evocative aural vistas are contained within. Features new recordings from TROUM, FRANCISCO LOPEZ, HOUSE OF LOW CULTURE, THUJA, UNEARTHLY TRANCE, CHAOS AS SHELTER, AMON, BENEATH THE LAKE, SCOT JENERIK, and RUHR HUNTER.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

JUMBOS KILLCRANE Carnaval De Carne CD
CBR32

Six tracks of angular barbarism from these Lawrence, KS cavemen with calculators. Awesome post-AM REP sludge rock, sorta like early NIRVANA on a pill bender jamming with US MAPLE. Think drunken prog rock cruising on gargantuan slabs of hammering distorto riffage and possessed wailing/crooning. This trio of grizzled Midwestern thugrockers deliver a squall of threatening runble and stutter. Cerebral and violent, subtle and thunderous,Carnaval De Carne sledgehammers the math-rock aesthetic into a twisted, towering monument of huge greasy riffs and defiant melodies. The latest evolution of pigfuck.
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SPICKLE Right To Remain Silent CD
CBR27

This superb slab of epic instrumental metallic indie crunch is a masterful collection of complex, insanely melodic/anthemic heaviness. These New Orleans natives have created an incredible mixture of sludgy Southern swagger, soaring post-rock, and technical math-isms that have to be heard to be believed, all in succinct 2-4 minute bursts of musical perfection. Right To Remain Silent is the Southern-fried missing link between Don Cabellero, The Fucking Champs, and the Isis/Pelican/Keelhaul school of complex post-metal.
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BELOW THE SOUND More Like A Gunshot Than A Car Wreck CD
CBR26

Desert thunder never sounded so good. BELOW THE SOUND emerge from the dust of New Mexico with a 7 track attack of stripped-down precision thud punk. High powered hooks, angular fuzz, and venomous lyrics all further entrench this trio in the guts of the current scud rock movement. Biting, catchy, and lethal, this recalls the minimalist power of the MINUTEMEN merged with NAKED RAYGUN's anthemic 'core and Am Rep noise.
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WEEDEATER Sixteen Tons CD
CBR23

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.
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ALL IS SUFFERING The Past:Vidictive Sadisms Of Petty Bureaucrats CD
CBR15

Fueled by war and corruption, The Past:Vindictive Sadisms Of Petty Beauracrats collects both new studio recordings, plus demo and EP tracks from this visionary Maryland grind/crust/avant band. ALL IS SUFFERING combine rabidly violent grindcore and epic black/death metal with monastic chants, blackened drones, incredibly catchy melodies, and a cosmic endtime ambience. Some have compared them to HIS HERO IS GONE meets MARDUK interspersed with jet-black pools of Koner-esque drone. 14 blasts of adventurous, grim, and vicious disgust for diseased humanity.
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SAMUS Desengano CD
CBR12

Desengano is a surreal landscape of mutated freaked-rock comprised of lumbering sludge riffs that contort into tape/turntable manipulations amidst melodious keyboards and sustained guitar tones/drones. Ranging from the crushing droning doom-laden EARTH-esque guitar thud of "The Happy Sultan", and the bountiful melodies that playfully flow under the sugary electronica and plunderphonic jazz of "Super Orthopedic Caravan", to the expansive Ennio Morricone-influenced slide guitar ambience found in "Who's Pumping Estrada" and the wall reverbating drones and tape oscillating backwash that drifts into the no-wave dissonance of "Bone Ape Tit", SAMUS create a cohesive, multi dimensional soundtrack comprised of heavy duty psychedelia, avant-rock experimentalism, and opium-den cartoon soundtracks.
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DATACLAST / EARWIGS split CD
CBR11

Synapse-shredding splatter electronics!! Hyperspeed eGrind glitch violence vs. crushing cosmic electronic chaos! New Jersey duo DATACLAST forge an explosive amalgamation of hyperkinetic breaks and blastbeats organically fused to spastic glitch electronica and bestial vocals with their 29 tracks, bringing post-human grind screaming into the 21st Century. DISCORDANCE AXIS hand picked these guys to open their final show, if that tells you anything. For a point of reference, imagine the surgical grindcore of prime CARCASS brutally molested by KID 606, MERZBOW, and AUTECHRE.
And shadowy Northwest decibel merchants EARWIGS follow up a decade long career of twisted electronic noise abstraction with 6 tracks of new material that tanges from evocative shards of crystalline debris to Mecha-inspired blastquakes of apocalyptic throb.
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HAISHA / MIZUKO split CD
CBR10

A meeting of two demented forces from the filthiest gutters of Los Angeles.HAISHA opens with a seriously grotesque noisecore/grind/trash hybrid, powered by jackhammer drum machines and miles of bad fucking attitude. Think early EARACHE grindcore, japanese trashpunk a la CONFUSE, and hardcore gabba smashed up in a crystal meth milkshake. Things only get worse when MIZUKO follow up with event-driven found sound ,grisly power electronics,and queasy death industrial that is misanthropic to its very core. Black transmissions from a rotting planet, unleashed on an unsuspecting ghost world. Presented in a sleek glossy gatefold package.
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KATASTROFIALUE Tuskatakuu 1994-1998 CD
CBR08

A 36 song semi-discography CD featuring unreleased and out-of-print material from this cult Finnish crustcore band. A must for fans of violent crust,raw-punk, and noisy blown-out thrash! Formed in 1992, the devastating Finnish ensemble KATASTROFIALUE (roughly translated as "Disaster Area") delivered some of the most pulverizing scum-encrusted thrash of the past decade. The band combined an unrelenting early DISCHARGE and SORE THROAT influence with minimalistic (yet BRUTAL) metal stylings, headcrushing speed,and excruciating inhuman vocals. The band excelled at incendiary songwriting and memorable,gritty (yet sometimes beautiful?) atonal riffs laced with acidic vocals that employed their native tongue....expressing nihilistic,transcendentially intelligent and morbid ruminations on life through the lyrics.Awesome,brutal crustcore.This full length semi-discography CD features an unreleased studio album, their tracks from the NOT WITHOUT A FIGHT double CD compilation on CRUCIAL BLAST, more unreleased studio tracks, and their material from the 1994 split 7" with FREAK SHOW."Tuskatakuu '94-'98" comes packaged in a DVD style shrinkwrapped plastic case and features a Glossy booklet with lyrics, Finnish-to-English translations, liner notes, and more.
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BODYBAG ROMANCE Gin/Crusher:Hymns CD
CBR05

Fractured and fucked up, freaked-out black/grind/ sludge/mung metal driven by disharmonic riffage and sub-basement toilet bowl vocals. Heavy, bad-azzed metal with blastbeats and the occasional psych influence. The band deliberately combines traditional extreme-metal with seventies rock, Appalachian music, and influences from the new wave of 80's metal, plus a hearty love of Scandanavian death metal and punk, as well as Swan Song-era CARCASS. Swan Song fucking ruled, so eat it. The result is heavy as a dump truck, full of wildly unpredictable shifts in tempo, tone, and texture, a schizophrenic blunt musical trauma. This disc has six studio songs (including a deranged cover of MOUNTAIN's Mississippi Queen), followed by a couple of blown out live tracks and some chaotic demo tracks. Abrupt, churning guitars and intensely overdriven blastbeat drumming along with the aforementioned cover of the MOUNTAIN tune all absurdly downtuned and speeded up into a big atomic blur. The demo tracks are similar to the studio ones, with rougher production values (but still clear and every bit as intense). Early tracks like Workshed Assassination offer a thrashing mix of honking hell-wave guitar, churning beats, and pure attitude problem. Like the CONVERGE template being appropriated by neanderthals.Broken metal....scum doom....trashcan blast metalcore mashup. Comes packaged in a handassembled 5"x8" sleeve with handmade origami-esque inserts that are so intricate they're stupid. Defunct and swept under the rug.
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