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CRUCIAL BLAST DIGITAL RELEASES

These digital album downloads include high quality 320 kbps mp3 files, cover artwork, and a multi-page .pdf booklet that includes all liner notes and most of the artwork that is featured on the physical release. Orders are processed through the DIYSTRO checkout system, which allows you immediate access to your purchased download.

KORPERSCHWACHE Night Country Fog DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBRDIGITAL009

Going back to the mid-90's, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for "organic decay") has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground that showcased a distinctive sound sitting at the strange nexus between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan's more extremist noise artists, the massive gravitational pull of the formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. From the beginning, Korperschwache has consisted of mastermind RKF on guitar, noise and vocals, assisted by the loyal mechanical timekeeping of Doktor Omega and occasionally joined by outside contributors. Korperschwache first took form as a side project of RKF's droning industrial rock band Autodidact, but became a primary concern soon thereafter, releasing a steady stream of releases over the years on cassette, Cd-r and digital download on labels like Peasant Magik, Inam Records, Colony, Dark Winter Moon, Public Guilt, Cut Hands and our own sub-label Crucial Bliss, to name a few, usually in extremely limited editions made available to the band's small but loyal cult of followers. The majorioty of these older releases have long been out of print, especially the extremely limited cassette releases from the early days of the band; a longtime Korperschwache fan, I myself never had an opportunity to get my hands on those early tapes, which featured some of Korper's harshest noise-based material.
Now, in conjunction with the brand new Korperschwache album Evil Walks that has just come out on Crucial Blast, we've assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache releases, some of which have never been heard by anyone outside of the band's immediate circle. The early cassette releases that have been excavated here are very different from Korperschwache's newer Loop-meets-Abruptum industrial blackpsych sound, many centering around brutal, high-volume noise assaults heavily influenced by both classic UK power electronics (Whitehouse, Ramleh, etc) and Japanese harsh noise (Merzbow, Masonna, Incapacitants, Contagious Orgasm). The later releases from this period began to creep into more guitar-focused dronepower and hypnotic amplifier bludgeon, with material like that of Night Country Fog (Korperschwache's previously unreleased collaboration with Smolken of Polish avant black metal/doom folk band Dead Raven Choir) beginning to direct the sound into the often melodic, always twisted psychedelic heaviness of it's current incarnation.
The most recent of the "excavated" Korperschwache albums is the 2005 album Night Country Fog, a collaboration with Smolken from Dead Raven Choir/Wolfmangler that, for some bizarre reason, never received any kind of formal release until now. This is pretty surprising, as Night Country Fog is one of the best of Korperschwache's considerable catalog of releases, and is possibly my favorite of all of the unearthed "lost" Korperschwache albums that we're releasing. It's the one that hews closest to the strange basement black psych dirge of Korperschwache's more recent material, but at the same time is very different from Korperschwache's other releases, a kind of amp-noise soaked funeral folk dirge, like what I would imagine one of those Belgian psych covens would sound like if one of their midnight forest jams was invaded by a wave of skuzzy HeadDirt Records-style guitar filth. Smolken's cello figures prominently on this album, and gives Night Country Fog much of it's strange, creeping folk feel.
The first song (and these are all definitely songs, and not just assaults of noise) "Afternoon" begins the album with a hazy, slow-moving cloud of strummed guitar chords and gauzy feedback drifting and unfurling beneath the sounds of birds singing and forest noises and distant sirens; the guitars are pushed to the background, heavy but not oppressive, and the clanging chords and thick clusters of dirgey rumble form into a surprisingly pretty wash of almost dreampop-like melody. The sounds of wind chimes and strange scraping noises surface intermittently while the chord progressions shift into slightly darker directions, winding this ten minute song through varying degrees of light and shade. Towards the very end, a damaged stringed instrument (banjo? a heat-warped guitar? Smolken's cello?) is slowly plucked and scraped as the swirling mist slowly dissipates. With the next track "Evening", the music suddenly transforms into something much more abrasive and unfriendly, a thick amp fug surrounding strains of keening feedback and slippery detuned strings, softly plucked guitar notes and Smolken's grief-stricken cello as darkness slips inexorably over the rumbling drone jam, while the chirping birds and field recordings are slowly overwhelmed by swells of sinister fx and black static. As the album moves into "Night", the reverberant guitar is loud and booming as it slowly crawls across the now-nocturnal soundspace, playing a gorgeous melancholy chord progression while night sounds emerge all around, the buzz and chirp of crickets melting into the warm gusts of feedback and hiss that uncoil out of the amplifier, and something scrapes at the door while a train blares it's horn way off in the distance. "Around midnight" is made of similar stuff, slowly drifting electric guitars riding on waves of euphoric feedback and wavering sheets of drone, awash in that ever-present amplifier hiss, again surrounded by nocturnal sounds, the effect mesmerizing and beautiful; towards the end, though, a myriad of jarring sounds intrude, a grinding locomotive chug, crashing sounds, scraping metal, a growing din of industrial racket that leads into the last song "I heard the ghost train call my name (as the wheels went rolling by and by)", where the beautiful, cathedral-sized folk guitars are pushed down beneath the rumbling machinery and howling factory noise.

KORPERSCHWACHE Der Antikrist DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBRDIGITAL008

Going back to the mid-90's, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for "organic decay") has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground that showcased a distinctive sound sitting at the strange nexus between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan's more extremist noise artists, the massive gravitational pull of the formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. From the beginning, Korperschwache has consisted of mastermind RKF on guitar, noise and vocals, assisted by the loyal mechanical timekeeping of Doktor Omega and occasionally joined by outside contributors. Korperschwache first took form as a side project of RKF's droning industrial rock band Autodidact, but became a primary concern soon thereafter, releasing a steady stream of releases over the years on cassette, Cd-r and digital download on labels like Peasant Magik, Inam Records, Colony, Dark Winter Moon, Public Guilt, Cut Hands and our own sub-label Crucial Bliss, to name a few, usually in extremely limited editions made available to the band's small but loyal cult of followers. The majorioty of these older releases have long been out of print, especially the extremely limited cassette releases from the early days of the band; a longtime Korperschwache fan, I myself never had an opportunity to get my hands on those early tapes, which featured some of Korper's harshest noise-based material.
Now, in conjunction with the brand new Korperschwache album Evil Walks that has just come out on Crucial Blast, we've assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache releases, some of which have never been heard by anyone outside of the band's immediate circle. The early cassette releases that have been excavated here are very different from Korperschwache's newer Loop-meets-Abruptum industrial blackpsych sound, many centering around brutal, high-volume noise assaults heavily influenced by both classic UK power electronics (Whitehouse, Ramleh, etc) and Japanese harsh noise (Merzbow, Masonna, Incapacitants, Contagious Orgasm). The later releases from this period began to creep into more guitar-focused dronepower and hypnotic amplifier bludgeon, with material like that of Night Country Fog (Korperschwache's previously unreleased collaboration with Smolken of Polish avant black metal/doom folk band Dead Raven Choir) beginning to direct the sound into the often melodic, always twisted psychedelic heaviness of it's current incarnation.
Crafted over the course of three years, the unreleased 2004 album Der Antikrist is Korperschwache in earth-rending blackened drone mode, each track built from layers of crushing wall noise, massive distorted doom-laden powerdrone, and deformed sludge riffs. It's some of the band's heaviest stuff. A deep bass pulse introduces the massive twenty minute opener "Entropy eats at the cosmic firmament", which opens up into fields of thick, murky guitar drone, dissonant chordal dirges and endless swirling hiss, like a more doom-laden and dismal Skullflower jam, noisy and slow and hypnotic and drenched in amplifier buzz and distorto guitar and blackened tremolo riffs. A deep, achingly pretty oboe-like melody repeats throughout the track, surrounded by clouds of hiss and acid-damaged guitar and droning bass rumble, the music fading in and out of view, sometimes receding completely into the sea of hiss. The following track is other twenty minute long monster and is even more abrasive. Clanking machines pound and grind in the background as the air is filled with bass-heavy blackened sludge and choked with sonic grit, a lopsided free-rock dirge buried under several feet of broken concrete, sputtering blown amplifier speakers, and distortion pedals cranked into the red. On "A guided tour of ghost empires (last stop: auschwitz-birkenau)", however, the guitars are removed completely, leaving us with a crackling ocean of amp hiss and cable noise that flits from speaker to speaker, recalling some of the static walls favored by Werewolf Jerusalem but with a steady bass throb emanating from deep within the fuzzy depths, emitting an atmosphere as bleak and somber as the subjects of the title. The disc ends with the percussive mechanical hiss and throb of "Ich bin der antikrist", the sound of machines hammering away in concert beneath a veil of ashen keyboard dronedrift and more of that black static that chokes every pore, and covers every inch of this relentlessly grim album.

KORPERSCHWACHE Tumescent Love Songs For Psychotic Drifters DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBRDIGITAL007

Going back to the mid-90's, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for "organic decay") has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground that showcased a distinctive sound sitting at the strange nexus between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan's more extremist noise artists, the massive gravitational pull of the formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. From the beginning, Korperschwache has consisted of mastermind RKF on guitar, noise and vocals, assisted by the loyal mechanical timekeeping of Doktor Omega and occasionally joined by outside contributors. Korperschwache first took form as a side project of RKF's droning industrial rock band Autodidact, but became a primary concern soon thereafter, releasing a steady stream of releases over the years on cassette, Cd-r and digital download on labels like Peasant Magik, Inam Records, Colony, Dark Winter Moon, Public Guilt, Cut Hands and our own sub-label Crucial Bliss, to name a few, usually in extremely limited editions made available to the band's small but loyal cult of followers. The majorioty of these older releases have long been out of print, especially the extremely limited cassette releases from the early days of the band; a longtime Korperschwache fan, I myself never had an opportunity to get my hands on those early tapes, which featured some of Korper's harshest noise-based material.
Now, in conjunction with the brand new Korperschwache album Evil Walks that has just come out on Crucial Blast, we've assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache releases, some of which have never been heard by anyone outside of the band's immediate circle. The early cassette releases that have been excavated here are very different from Korperschwache's newer Loop-meets-Abruptum industrial blackpsych sound, many centering around brutal, high-volume noise assaults heavily influenced by both classic UK power electronics (Whitehouse, Ramleh, etc) and Japanese harsh noise (Merzbow, Masonna, Incapacitants, Contagious Orgasm). The later releases from this period began to creep into more guitar-focused dronepower and hypnotic amplifier bludgeon, with material like that of Night Country Fog (Korperschwache's previously unreleased collaboration with Smolken of Polish avant black metal/doom folk band Dead Raven Choir) beginning to direct the sound into the often melodic, always twisted psychedelic heaviness of it's current incarnation.
2001's Tumescent Love Songs For Psychotic Drifters is another previously unreleased disc that was recorded right when Korperschwache was evolving into a new level of heaviness, mixing the harsh noise aspects of the earlier material with more Skullflower-style guitar noise and ultra distorted industrial sludge, a super heavy and noisy assault that RKF would continue to shape all the way up to the latest album Evil Walks. Beginning with "The last vision of timothy mcveigh", the band drops a skull-rupturing din of roaring psych-guitar overload and amplified buzz that is super distorted and blown out, the Skulllflower-esque dirge made up of heavy wrecked riffs and clusters of high-end melodic keyboard-like notes, jittery electronics and sludgy guitar chords awash in massive amounts of distortion and feedback. A crushing wall of noise and apocalyptic keyboard drone is erected for "Cold fusion device", and is shot through with buried guitar melodies and blasts of metallic percussion, evolving into a slow, excruciating noise dirge that starts to resemble the likes of Wicked King Wicker or Hedorah or some similar industrial noise-damaged mecha-sludge heaviness. The next three tracks are all likewise crushing and blown out and speaker wrecking, but these overloaded noise-dirges are much more melodic, with shoegazey chord progressions uncoiling beneath immense layers of howling hiss and swirling static and distortion, at times resembling a Jesu song being remixed by Incapacitants, the rhythmic pounding seeming to come from sheets of scrap metal being pummeled by sledgehammers in slow motion, a syrupy Godflesh-like machine grind. Then there's the immense blastfest of "Scenes from the Navidson House", a vast furnace of harsh noise roaring over buried blasting drum machines, industrial rumblings and staticky voice transmissions. The closer "Nyarlathotep (reprise)" finsihes the album off with a short return to the earlier track with a raging storm of white noise and static swirling around a slow heavy drumbeat and droning keys.

KORPERSCHWACHE Mywomanmywomanmyslave DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBRDIGITAL006

KORPERSCHWACHE A Fistful Of Nihilism DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBRDIGITAL005

Going back to the mid-90's, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for "organic decay") has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground that showcased a distinctive sound sitting at the strange nexus between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan's more extremist noise artists, the massive gravitational pull of the formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. From the beginning, Korperschwache has consisted of mastermind RKF on guitar, noise and vocals, assisted by the loyal mechanical timekeeping of Doktor Omega and occasionally joined by outside contributors. Korperschwache first took form as a side project of RKF's droning industrial rock band Autodidact, but became a primary concern soon thereafter, releasing a steady stream of releases over the years on cassette, Cd-r and digital download on labels like Peasant Magik, Inam Records, Colony, Dark Winter Moon, Public Guilt, Cut Hands and our own sub-label Crucial Bliss, to name a few, usually in extremely limited editions made available to the band's small but loyal cult of followers. The majorioty of these older releases have long been out of print, especially the extremely limited cassette releases from the early days of the band; a longtime Korperschwache fan, I myself never had an opportunity to get my hands on those early tapes, which featured some of Korper's harshest noise-based material.
Now, in conjunction with the brand new Korperschwache album Evil Walks that has just come out on Crucial Blast, we've assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache releases, some of which have never been heard by anyone outside of the band's immediate circle. The early cassette releases that have been excavated here are very different from Korperschwache's newer Loop-meets-Abruptum industrial blackpsych sound, many centering around brutal, high-volume noise assaults heavily influenced by both classic UK power electronics (Whitehouse, Ramleh, etc) and Japanese harsh noise (Merzbow, Masonna, Incapacitants, Contagious Orgasm). The later releases from this period began to creep into more guitar-focused dronepower and hypnotic amplifier bludgeon, with material like that of Night Country Fog (Korperschwache's previously unreleased collaboration with Smolken of Polish avant black metal/doom folk band Dead Raven Choir) beginning to direct the sound into the often melodic, always twisted psychedelic heaviness of it's current incarnation.
The 1996 Monotremata cassette A Fistful Of Nihilism is the third release from Korperschwache's early devestating guitar-noise/power electronics mode, remastered for maximum skull-blasting power. RKF and the good Doktor erect more crushing monoliths of amp abuse here, starting with the churning black furnace of harsh murky noise of "Waiting for the number five", wading through low end rumble as they build a wall that stretches out for almost half an hour, forged out of swirling oceanic distortion, crackling bass frequencies, monstrous howling feedback, and titanic drones, a combination of harsh wall and industrial guitar drone with undercurrents of monstrous writhing doom. Total amp immolation that's part Total, part The Rita. It's trailed by the short harsh noise blast of "LOve Song", a screeching cacophony of demonic howls, droning feedback and crashing metal all drenched in delay, then returns to the massive flanged wall of distortion and amp noise for the third track, teeming with shrill high pitched feedback and spluttery low end crackle, emitting a vintage power electronics vibe of absolute bleakness and despair. "Discussing structure" continues with this, drowning the warbling bass tones in filthy feedback and pitchshifted vocalized horror, chunks of mangled guitar noise, juddering low end rhythmic rumble and brain-drilling feedback drone, which after a minute or so reveals an almost musical structure. "God of feedback" is another monstrous distorted wall, but beneath it can be heard bits of cinematic minor key melody on the verge of being obliterated by the inferno, almost like shades of a John Carpenter composition struggling to surface beneath an ocean of furious roar. The bonus track here is the delicately titled "Fistfucking hippies", which takes a very different approach; it's a mix of manipulated found sound and horrific vocals, a heaving, gasping industrial nightmare alive with panic-stricken voices being run backwards alongside stark metallic drones and hissing pneumatic pulses.

KORPERSCHWACHE Blood Everywhere DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBRDIGITAL004

KORPERSCHWACHE Fangs Of An Angry God DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBRDIGITAL003

Going back to the mid-90's, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for "organic decay") has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground that showcased a distinctive sound sitting at the strange nexus between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan's more extremist noise artists, the massive gravitational pull of the formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. From the beginning, Korperschwache has consisted of mastermind RKF on guitar, noise and vocals, assisted by the loyal mechanical timekeeping of Doktor Omega and occasionally joined by outside contributors. Korperschwache first took form as a side project of RKF's droning industrial rock band Autodidact, but became a primary concern soon thereafter, releasing a steady stream of releases over the years on cassette, Cd-r and digital download on labels like Peasant Magik, Inam Records, Colony, Dark Winter Moon, Public Guilt, Cut Hands and our own sub-label Crucial Bliss, to name a few, usually in extremely limited editions made available to the band's small but loyal cult of followers. The majorioty of these older releases have long been out of print, especially the extremely limited cassette releases from the early days of the band; a longtime Korperschwache fan, I myself never had an opportunity to get my hands on those early tapes, which featured some of Korper's harshest noise-based material.
Now, in conjunction with the brand new Korperschwache album Evil Walks that has just come out on Crucial Blast, we've assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache releases, some of which have never been heard by anyone outside of the band's immediate circle. The early cassette releases that have been excavated here are very different from Korperschwache's newer Loop-meets-Abruptum industrial blackpsych sound, many centering around brutal, high-volume noise assaults heavily influenced by both classic UK power electronics (Whitehouse, Ramleh, etc) and Japanese harsh noise (Merzbow, Masonna, Incapacitants, Contagious Orgasm). The later releases from this period began to creep into more guitar-focused dronepower and hypnotic amplifier bludgeon, with material like that of Night Country Fog (Korperschwache's previously unreleased collaboration with Smolken of Polish avant black metal/doom folk band Dead Raven Choir) beginning to direct the sound into the often melodic, always twisted psychedelic heaviness of it's current incarnation.
The 1995 cassette Fangs Of An Angry God was also issued on Monotremata Records, and showcased five more lengthy tracks of psychedelic harsh noise and brutal feedback ecstasy from Korperschwache; this reissue adds on a sixth bonus track that was recorded in 1996. This second tape continued to move the band's sound further into a grueling smashup of grinding amp abuse, industrial noise and psych guitar meltdown, unleashing clanging guitar chords that ring out over smoldering black lavaflows and brutal clank and screech, the axe strings slipping wildly out of tune. Tracks like "The drowning pool" and "Hands of stone" are formless masses of squirming slack guitar slime and crackling distorted filth, the sound moving slowly, like sputtering magma waves of incinerating speaker vomit, flesh-rending cable noise and sheet-metal drag. RKF constantly spews fried-out psych guitar leads through waves of stentorian drone that rise and fall, while blasts of metallic crush reverberate in the distance, later transforming into massive, almost doom metal-like riffage that appears briefly beneath the noise. The rest of Fangs has cloudscape of feedback and droning buzz and grainy distortion, delay effects speeding up and slowing down amid snarls of cable buzz, and flashes of human voice and melodic guitar drift that become swallowed up in a viscous mass of heavy guitar drone and industrial-strength amplifier noise. The final bonus track "Vinyl Fetish" (carrying on the theme from the previous reissue Ovencleaner) matches juddering machine noise and diffused glacial guitar sludge beneath an array of electrical detritus and controlled fx-pedal mayhem. This ranks as one of the nastiest and gnarliest of Korperschwache's pre-Y2K cassette releases.

KORPERSCHWACHE Ovencleaner DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBRDIGITAL002

Going back to the mid-90's, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for "organic decay") has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground that showcased a distinctive sound sitting at the strange nexus between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan's more extremist noise artists, the massive gravitational pull of the formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. From the beginning, Korperschwache has consisted of mastermind RKF on guitar, noise and vocals, assisted by the loyal mechanical timekeeping of Doktor Omega and occasionally joined by outside contributors. Korperschwache first took form as a side project of RKF's droning industrial rock band Autodidact, but became a primary concern soon thereafter, releasing a steady stream of releases over the years on cassette, Cd-r and digital download on labels like Peasant Magik, Inam Records, Colony, Dark Winter Moon, Public Guilt, Cut Hands and our own sub-label Crucial Bliss, to name a few, usually in extremely limited editions made available to the band's small but loyal cult of followers. The majorioty of these older releases have long been out of print, especially the extremely limited cassette releases from the early days of the band; a longtime Korperschwache fan, I myself never had an opportunity to get my hands on those early tapes, which featured some of Korper's harshest noise-based material.
Now, in conjunction with the brand new Korperschwache album Evil Walks that has just come out on Crucial Blast, we've assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache releases, some of which have never been heard by anyone outside of the band's immediate circle. The early cassette releases that have been excavated here are very different from Korperschwache's newer Loop-meets-Abruptum industrial blackpsych sound, many centering around brutal, high-volume noise assaults heavily influenced by both classic UK power electronics (Whitehouse, Ramleh, etc) and Japanese harsh noise (Merzbow, Masonna, Incapacitants, Contagious Orgasm). The later releases from this period began to creep into more guitar-focused dronepower and hypnotic amplifier bludgeon, with material like that of Night Country Fog (Korperschwache's previously unreleased collaboration with Smolken of Polish avant black metal/doom folk band Dead Raven Choir) beginning to direct the sound into the often melodic, always twisted psychedelic heaviness of it's current incarnation.
The earliest Korperschwache release featured here is the Ovencleaner full length, originally released as a sixty-minute cassette in 1995 through RKF's own Monotremata Records. Like all of Korperschwache's early stuff, this is an orgy of harsh, grating noise, similar to much of the underground industrial slime that was creeping out of the mid 90's, but mostly generated using guitar. The four tracks of industrial psych sludge on Ovencleaner begins with massively distorted psych guitar crawling through a juddering mass of amp rumble on the opener "Your Shattered Spine", with it's slow motion doomed riffs and skittering dubby percussion awash in swarming hiss and fuzz, the drum machine malfunctioning later in the track as it sputters out fractured percussive fills and tinny, scrabbly faster-paced beats. Insanely high end garage riffs appear at the center of this howling storm of noise, and it gets more chaotic and frenzied as it goes on, spastic thrashing drum machines dipping in and out of the cacophony of amp noise and feedback, descending into Incapacitants-style clots of violent scrapyard obliteration, then shifting into a weird noisescape of irritating electronic beeps, shuffling drums buried under layers of gritty distortion, and heavy waves of amp noise, ending up becoming something reminiscent of old Skullflower/Shock Records style dirge "rock". "Sand Swallower" follows with more monstrous harsh noise a la Incapacintas/Pain Jerk, a raging black maelstrom of distortion and feedback stretching over fourteen minutes, infested with all kinds of crackling cable noise, the might revving of infernal engines, shifting between a total wall of noise and more frantic electronic turmoil swirling over heavy slabs of guitar/amp drone. The next track continues with crushing noise and metal avalanche that feels like Tribulation/Strange Keys To Untune-era Skullflower hellstorm mixed with the more extreme junknoise side of the Japanese scene, a dense, psychedelic thirty-plus minute epic of brainscrape and glacial sludge guitar, almost like hearing Skullflower crossed with Incapacitants, later erupting into shrieking tape-noise carnage, demonic howls and massive gusts of granular noise, with pretty psych guitar chords buried beneath it all. The final track "Rubber Fetish" is a bonus track that has ends the album with a classic American industrial vibe, high pitched feedback stretched across a field of rumbling machine throb and chopped up loops, fluttering distorted signals panning from speaker to speaker, the hammering rhythmic noise suspended over massive rumbling frequencies.

THEOLOGIAN Charting The Schism DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
CBR90

Released as a companion piece to Theologian's first official full length "The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face", "Charting The Schism" is a new half-hour mini-album that further explores Theologian's blackened architecture of abject suffering and orgasmic damnation. These five tracks delve deeper into rumbling obsidian nightmares with Leech's signature combination of Swedish death industrial influences, infernal power electronics, and crepuscular electronic ambience.
The opener "I" begins the set with a grueling death-industrial loop, all seething speaker-shred, austere starless murk and carnivorous warnings from beyond the realm of the Order Of The Gash, grinding at the listener's subconscious like the rusted teeth of an ancient torture wheel, and the following track "II" flows through the subsequent fissures, emerging as the fearsome roar of Leviathan, klaxon blasts emanating from up out of the labyrinth while savage howling vocals warp and whip overhead, and black electronic tendrils explore nerve endings and fray synapses, dishing out some delirious, drugged slow-motion power electronics abuse. The third track also delivers more crushing, droning power electronics, the massively delayed and processed vocal ecstasy riding on chthonic waves of distorted synthesizer whiplash and grinding machine throb, and "IV" unleashes deep-space static waves that sweep through the infinite depths of space, crushing quasar impulses surging forth from wormholes and later joined by looped percussive rhythms and buried tribal drums that rise and fall within this massive metallic power-drone. Finally, "I Am The Engineer" appears as a cold black mechanical pulse shuddering through an abyss of monstrous sonic forms, deep bestial roars stretching across the void and echoing through endless blackness, surrounded by the roar of subterranean forges, and blossoming in its second half into a rush of icy, psychedelic power electronics and ominous sonar throb.

EHNAHRE Taming The Cannibals DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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. Featuring former members of the prog/gothic art-rock band Kayo Dot and avant-death metallers Biolich, Ehnahre are creating some of the most difficult death metal I've heard since Obscura, but also manage to balance the extreme atonality and relentlessly unpredictable nature of their arrangements with seething aggression and crushing riffage.
Taming The Cannibals is a continuation of their discordant black art, six lengthy tracks of demented and distended death metal and harrowing atonal composition, their chilling guitar textures and bizarre chordal moves merging with distant, keening muezzin-like vocals and monstrous, blood-gargling shrieks, extended percussive wig-outs that veer into pure jazz territory, and vast black fields of nightmarish ambience. Once again, the band employs horns and strings, this time from guest musicians Greg Kelley of Heathen Shame on trumpet and C Spencer Yeh (Burning Star Core) on violin, draping sheets of high end amorphous violin skree and free jazz blowing across the ethereal blastscapes and apocalyptic feedback of "Clatterbones" and the bloated black doom and spacious horror of "Foehn". Minimal electronic grit and glitch and crackle is woven through the cacophony, subtle keys float beneath the hyper complex riffs. Soft crooning vocals (courtesy of Jonah Jenkins from Only Living Witness/Milligram/Raw Radar War/Miltown) emerge, dreamlike, drifting on abyssal lullabies. And all the while, Ehnahre pull the listener ever deeper into their claustrophobic depths, crafting a terrifying, hellish vision of blackened jazz-doom that will set skin to crawling and nerves on edge, while their haunting lyrics draw from a number of unexpected influences such as Irish poet F. R. Higgins, Austrian Expressionist Georg Trakl, Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself", and American poet/environmentalist Robinson Jeffers.
An immense new disc from Ehnahre that heads even further "out" than their previous album; it's highly recommended to fans of the furthest extremes of avant garde death metal and doom, Disembowelment, Phlebotomized, Demilich, Starkweather, Gorguts, Pan.Thy.Monium, Portal, and the heavier moments of Kayo Dot's earlier recordings.

KORPERSCHWACHE Evil Walks DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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, songs like the sprawling eleven minute "The City Of Lost Girls" and "Me And You And A Can Of Gasoline" crawling all soft and solemn through clouds of deep bass buzz and those weird sing-song ghoul-snarls and trance-states of repetitive slow-motion industrial beats, while "Heaven's Gate" hurtles through a primitive scum-thrash assault of clanking drums, noise, simple punky riffing and distant howls that explodes into a washed out smear of overdriven blast beats and dreamy major key guitar. 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. A comparison that I've used before when trying to describe the thumping psychedelic graveyard din of Korperschwache, certainly, but it's never been more relevant than it is here. A warped, blasted beauty shining through rotting shadows and rapidly declining emotional states. A series of ecstatic demon zone-outs. A hallucinatory strain of necro drone-rock. It's not black metal, but Korperschwache's Evil Walks is definitely recommended to fans of the demented fringes of underground blackness inhabited by like-minded bands like Utarm, Wrnlrd, Charnel House, Diapsiquir, Brobdingnagian, Mamaleek, Wormsblood and Lonesummer. Comes in a full color digipack with illustrations by Nicole Boitos.

THEOLOGIAN The Further I Get From Your Star The Less Light I Feel On My Face DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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.
Following a series of small-run collaborations (with Wilt, Steve Moore, and The Vomit Arsonist) that were released on Leech's own label Annihilvs, Theologian delivers it's first full-length album, a seven-track descent into roaring, cosmic drone and howling black hole electronics, colossal industrial soundscapes and grim low-end heaviness. The opening track "Zero" sounds like early space music (Schulze, Tangerine Dream, etc) being blasted through massive bass-heavy sound system directly into the Void; its followed by the sprawling twenty-four minute "In Times of Need, We All Go Against Our Natures", which starts with distant twilight factory rumblings and murky motorized reverberations, then slowly reveals a bleak, shadowy realm of grimy minor-key synths slowly drifting underneath the industrial buzz and hum, both mysterious, and immensely grim. After a few minutes, eerie choral voicings begin to appear, and the sound continues to slowly develop into a vast expanse of lush isolationist ambience, a simple three-note melody repeating over and over deep beneath the peals of muted electronic tones, distant grinding, hushed whispering, and oncoming waves of black feedback, becoming darker and more menacing as it goes on. Then a male voice appears off in the background, awash in delay, forming these haunting multi-part harmonies that drift beneath the smoldering electronic noise; after a while, it almost sounds like something from Sigur Ros slowly falling into Stygian blackness, the singing becoming warped and fractured as the swirling black synths corrode and decay into a buzzing, churning field of irradiated drone, getting heavier, more distorted, until the final eight minutes finally form into a wash of blackened doom-drone heaviness surrounded with icy synth pulses, eerie choral voices, grinding industrial dread, and fearsome distorted screams, a sort of pitch-black power electronics dirge...
That epic track may be the album's heaviest moment, but the rest of Your Star is just as bleak and lightless. Another massive slab of murky, molten ambience unfolds with "Unfamiliar Skies", where sheets of glacial string-like drones swirl beneath blown-out synthesizer rumble, and a simple rhythmic throb pulses at the black rotting center, surrounded by clouds of crackling static, and gradually becoming streaked with oscillating sine waves and heavy gusts of black distortion. The title track is blighted isolationist drone shattered by the burning descent of black stars falling from the skies, underscored by a gorgeous, wavering blissed-out drone; halfway through, it shifts gears into hallucinatory, dark wave-infected power electronics with ultra-distorted demonic/robotic vocals and super dense walls of deteriorating drone and sepulchral synthesizer. The remaining tracks move through roaring melodic drift, wailing distorted vocals, and seriously acerbic distortion that combine into mantras of narcotized power electronics, throbbing black machine pulsations, chthonic ambience laced with metallic ringing, eerie sublimated melodies and deep low-end bone-rattling churn, at times sounding really soundtrack-esque, even resembling a more apocalyptic, deformed take on John Carpenter's film score work at times. The hidden final track "The Fragility Of The Male Ego..." finishes the album with a crushing industrial dirge sculpted out of droning feedback and overdriven distortion, as caustic as anything that's come before, with a very subtle dark wave quality lurking beneath the scorched electronics that makes this sound somewhat like hearing a Projekt Records track being remixed by a Japanese noise extremist.
Like Navicon, Theologian combines several different disciplines of industrial into a signature sound, a doom-laden hybrid of death industrial and power electronics and black ambience that's spliced with a constant melodic presence; the music is harsh, often hellish, but accentuated by an icy, desolate beauty that gives The Further I Get From Your Star, The Less Light I Feel On My Face it’s unique, abyssal vibe.

NEKRASOV Extinction DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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.
The eight-song disc combines hyperspeed cybernetic blastscapes and bleak black metal riffage, the tracks often revealing snarled minor key melodies that are buried deep beneath blizzard blasts of machinegun drum machines, the drums veering through nerve-fraying rhythmic shifts, and acidic croaks bathed in black hiss. Triumphant frost-bitten riffs scream out of maelstroms of violent distortion, and Choral voices soar through a cyclone of helicoptering blastbeats and sheets of blown-out, ultra distorted drone, streaked with bits of gorgeous vibraphone-like melody, somber Hammond-like organ drones and looped synth, sometimes breaking off into grinding slo-motion industrial throb or swirling kosimiche drift. The tracks on Extinction go back and forth between the noisier, more industrial like material and overt black metal, though the two sides of Nekrasov's sound are always present together. When the sound does move into pure noise, it's either vast fields of minimal ambient drift, metallic clank and distant percussive sounds, utterly bleak Lustmordian soundscapes, or crushing, almost HNW-style slabs of molten noise, scouring waves of hellish skree and crushing slow-motion tidal surges of jet-black sonic syrup flecked with dubbed-out blasts of tectonic crush and electronic glitches that ripple across the void.
Closing the album, the title track descends even further into black industrial crush, a monstrous, almost seventeen-minute long sprawl of plodding, simple drum pound echoing within a slowly swirling fog of distorted fx, churning, billowing black ambience, buried black buzz, an endless whirlpool of blown-out synthesizers and the immense black breath of leviathan lungs heaving deep below the surface.
Like everything else from Nekrasov, this album is loaded with blasting inhuman drumming and ferocious riffing that form into noise-drenched trance-scapes of bestial industrial BM, but the attention to texture and sound sculpture elevates this above most mechanized black metal projects, with immersive layers of electronic sound, creative stereo panning techniques, and other production tricks that create a harsh, alien atmosphere that is pretty unique to Nekrasov's sound. This is a scorching new chapter from one of our favorite bands out there right now fusing black metal and noise.

GNAW THEIR TONGUES L'arrivée de la Terne Mort Triomphante DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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.
This is still harrowing stuff, though. The album opens with soaring choirs of the damned and a cacophony of tortured shrieks and demonic howling underneath a crushing, sludgy bass riff and pounding elephantine drumming, total blackened doom that's soon joined by peals of dissonant strings and softer droning cellos and violins. As you get deeper into " L'arrivée de la terne mort triomphante", there are moments of severe beauty that emerge, brief passages of fragile piano and mournful strings, the soft crackle of ancient vinyl grooves and French horns. These moments repeat throughout the album, lots of symphonic shadow that drifts amidst the pounding industrial blackness, but they never last for long as the spiraling woodwinds and cyclical piano figures inevitably become subsumed into the blasts of malevolent orchestral might. The fearsome martial drums and brass fanfares at the beginning of "Les anges frémissent devant la mort" eventually evolve into stretches of abstract industrial percussive pummel over droning strings and organ, and then into a stunning cinematic finale. That's followed by the clanking doom, swarming black buzz and sheet-metal cacophony of "La mort dans toute son ineffable grandeur/splendeur", the most industrial-sounding track on the album. "Le Chant De La Mort" is a lurching, blown-out death march that shifts into an infernal dubbed-out dirge, and the closing track " Le trône blanc de la mort (de white throne of death)" rumbles through funereal classical drift, waves of horns, strings, percussion surging into a series of dark, mournful shapes at first, but are then shattered by pounding doom metal drums and wailing choir voices, becoming an utterly grim blackened dirge with distorted shrieking vocals that are wracked with agony, ending the album with a suffocating atmosphere of death. At its heaviest, it's like funeral doom bathed in modern orchestral music, a cross between Penderecki and pitch-black doom filth, pulverizing and intensely evil.
Of course, this is essential for fans of previous Gnaw Their Tongues albums, but it's equally recommended to fans of both abstract blackened weirdness of bands like Emit, Abruptum, and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and the bleak Wagnerian industrial of In Slaughter Natives and Shinjuku Thief.

FISTULA Goat DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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. This new disc delivers more of the pulverizing, slime-covered sludge and primitive death metal rot that these Buckeye barbarians have been carving out in the back of Medina garages over the past ten years, continuing to follow in the coagulated blood tracks of Frost, Autopsy and Winter, but filtered through Fistula's uniquely mangled and inebriated scum-haze and utterly negatory worldview.

TREES Freed Of This Flesh DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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, a crumbling, blighted majesty, noxious ambient blackdoom adrift on putrescent tides. The wretched vocal effluvium creeps formlessly across austere slabs of crushing heaviness arranged into ghoulish constructs of atmospheric dread, moving so slow that the music seems to lose all sense of propulsion at times, becoming lost in a fog of howling amplifiers and buzzing feedback, the guitars stretched into massive decomposing drones, the spaces between infested with controlled bursts of drums that skitter and rumble, almost "jazzy" in a vague sort of way, but still incredibly slow and ponderous. Freed Of This Flesh inhabits the same sort of black-tar depths as the likes of Burning Witch, Monarch, Khanate, and Bunkur while stripping the slo-mo heaviness into their own twisted, skeletal configuration.

MONARCH! Mer Morte DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
CBR82

If you've been following Crucial Blast for a while, you probably already know all about Monarch, the extreme slow-motion sludge/doom band from France who plays so slow, so glacially, that Decibel said in their review of Mer Morte that "even at their fastest, Monarch! sound dead". They ain't kiddin'. Monarch's previous releases pushed the envelope on just how slow and miserable and anguished one band can sound, but here their crawling black drones and tectonic doom rumble seems to actually be decaying. If you're looking for some big, fat riffs to bite into, this isn't the place to look.
Like our previous Monarch release Dead Men Tell No Tales, Mer Morte is a reissue of a vinyl release that came out on the Spanish label Throne Records, this one from back in 2008. The Lp featured the monolithic track "Mer Morte" split into two halves across the two sides of vinyl; now, most Monarch fans find it pretty hard to not lust after their vinyl releases, which are all beautifully packaged and always super-limited, but it's also cool to hear the song uninterrupted, to hear it unfurl it's rotting black wings in it's entirety without pause, which is why we wanted to make this available on disc.
And it's truly gargantuan sounding on this re-issue. “Mer Morte” is a single unbroken thirty-four minute sludge-and-feedback feast that sprawls out even 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 tar pits of low-end riff and sheets of gluey feedback that are stretched out into monolithic slabs of sound across "Mer Morte", a grim, glacial ultra-doom monolith that crawls at a saurian sub-tempo. It's the most droning, static, deathly doomdrone that Monarch have so far released, not really that propulsive, certainly very little of anything that you could call a "groove", but instead just floating, decaying and corrupted, massive rumbling crush hovering in a sea of yawning blackness.
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, at times disappearing almost completely into the black fug for minutes at a time, or lurking as a hushed lullaby whisper way off on the edges of the crushing subterranean thrum. At the same time, this disc captures the band at their most formless and distended, with long sections of droning buzz where the band collapses into waves of pure amp-rumble and minimalist percussion, smoldering black clouds of ghostly cooing vocals and howling feedback drone, and eerie tectonic melodies...definitely one of their most extreme and dismal slabs of doom yet, more ambient drone than doom really, but still completely CRUSHING.

SUBARACHNOID SPACE Eight Bells DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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.
Their last couple of records pointed towards a heavier direction for the band, and this new material continues on that trajectory, combining blazing luminous axe-howl over hypnotic heavy acid riffage and dense squalls of fx-stacked sound. The album comes in at just under 40 minutes, and is packaged in another one of Crucial Blast's high quality visual presentations with stunning new artwork from Stephen Kasner. We've been big fans of Subarachnoid Space here at Crucial Blast since back when the band was releasing albums on Release/Relapse and Charnel Music, and they have continued to be one of our favorite bands working within the heavy neo-psych spectrum.
Since their formation in 1995, Subarachnoid Space has evolved into one of the preeminent navigators within the realms of psychotropic underground rock and have firmly established themselves alongside the brightest stars in the constellation of contemporary acid rock. Playing a form of lysergic and almost entirely instrumental rock that draws its DNA from the sounds of classic Krautrock, prog, long-form improvisation and metallic heaviness, the band has attracted a fervent and dedicated following over the past decade around albums on established independant labels such as Relapse Records and Strange Attractors Audio House. Subarachnoid Space have also continued to bring their ominous, ethereal riffage, soaring fx-laden guitars and pulsating rhythmic propulsion on the road with numerous tours and festival appearances, including multiple stints across the U.S., three appearances at the legendary psych-rock festival Terrastock, and a tour of Japan, and has performed alongside such a variety of artists as Sonic Youth, Acid Mothers Temple, Khanate, Wolf Eyes, YOB, Sunn O))), Danava, Red Sparowes,Boris, Lightning Bolt, These Arms Are Snakes, Master Musicians Of Bukkake, and Ludicra.
Thoughout the band's existence, the one constant has been visionary guitarist and bandleader Melynda Jackson. A native of rural Texas, Jackson grew up an only child, and never considered that the isolated grasslands and windswept landscapes of her youth would eventually inspire her to evoke equally mysterious terrain through experimental, exploratory guitar and wordless vocalizations in Subarachnoid Space. Jackson moved to San Francisco at the age of twenty-six and within a year had become part of the fledgling version of Subarachnoid Space, which had been formed by experimental guitarist Mason Jones, already known within the post-industrial/psych underground from his long-running Trance project. After the release of the band's debut 7" Char-Broiled Wonderland in 1996, Subarachnoid Space went on to fine-tune their sprawling improvisations and began to tour frequently. This led to the band scoring a record deal with Relapse Records soon thereafter.
After three albums on Relapse Records, the band went on to release material on a number of smaller labels like Elsie And Jack, September Gurls, and Strange Attractors Audio House, and continued to perform regularly, touring both the USA and Japan with Acid Mothers Temple and performing alongside Sonic Youth at the 2002 Terrastock V festival. After the release of 2003's Also Rising, Mason Jones retired from the band, leaving Jackson to assume control of the band and reshape Subarachnoid Space into something heavier and more song-oriented. This new phase of Subarachnoid Space saw Jackson bringing a darker and more metallic edge to the band's sound while still retaining the elements of fiery improvisation and rich textural guitar that the group was known for. Both 2003's Also Rising and 2005's The Red Veil further introduced the band to a new audience of left-field metal and heavy rock fans.
Now, Jackson and Subarachnoid Space have returned with Eight Bells, the band's first new release since 2005's The Red Veil on Strange Attractors, and the newest chapter in Jackson's continually evolving vision of music as ecstatic ritual.
The recording features a new lineup of Daniel Barone, Melynda Jackson, Lauren K. Newman and Daniel Osborne, and was produced by Steven Wray Lobdell who also performs on the album. The music of Eight Bells continues in a similar heavy lysergic vein as their last couple of post-Relapse albums, fusing wicked metallic crunch with celebratory sky-streaking guitar freakouts and some of the band's most narcotized jamming yet. Their last couple of records all increasingly pointed towards a heavier direction for the band, and this new material continues on that trajectory as it combines blazing luminous axe-howl over hypnotic acid riffage and dense squalls of fx-stacked sound. Eight Bells features five songs ("Lilith", "Akathesia", "Hunter seeker", "Haruspex", "Bird Signs"), and features stunning new artwork from Stephen Kasner.

WHOURKR Concrete DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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. Following a similiar strategy as James Plotkin's post-production grind experiments on the first Phantomsmasher album, all of the guitars, drums, and vocals are arranged and recorded by Whourkr and then run through a gauntlet of hardcore editing and remixing. Each tracks then becomes a cyclone blast filled with a hundred moving parts; what might at one point been a straightforward death metal song is now defleshed, violated, and reconfigured into a brutal plasma blast of demonic time-stretched vocal acrobatics, ultra complex riffs blasted through a vortex of dizzying time signature changes, screaming glitched-out electronic effects and bizarre filtering, mangled quasi-jungle beats and programmed blastbeats that are so insanely fast that they resemble the blur of ten cds all skipping simultaneously.
Total chaos deathgrind filtered through a futuristic cuisinart of ultra-aggressive electronica, like a freaked-out epileptic mashup of Atari Teenage Riot, Dying Fetus, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Venetian Snares, Blut Aus Nord, and John Zorn. Exactly the kind of gonzo alien death metal weirdness that we can't get enough of, and a new fave for enthusiasts of apocalyptic extremo grind/death/jungle/electronica like Drumcorps, Bong-Ra, Dataclast, Noism, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Reptiljan, Mulk, and the hardest of the DHR crews.

GNAW THEIR TONGUES All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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.
And again, the song titles evoke total nightmare visions: "My Orifices Await Ravaging", "Broken Fingers Point Upwards In Vain", "The Stench Of Dead Horses On My Breath And The Vile Of Existence In My Hands", "Gazing At Me Through Tears Of Urine", "Rife With Deep Teeth Marks", and the whopping "The Gnostic Ritual Consumption Of Semen As Embodiment Of Wounds Teared In The Soul". The album opens with a sudden blast of pounding tympani-like percussion and roaring distorted bass, a massive blackened dirge wading through a swirling storm of metal smashing against metal, howls of anguish and terror, bursts of majectic brass fanfare and distortion and epic string sections struggling to emerge from the chaos, then turning into a sea of tense strings and choral voices spreading out towards the end that creates a less noisy but still totally evil atmopshere before becoming devoured at last by the bulldozing black industrial doom. Then it's on to "Verbrannt und verflucht", a mechanical black dirge filled with darkly beautiful orchestral strings and stumbling chaotic drumming, weaving back and forth between a crushing lopsided industrial groove and bombastic riffage that's shot through with brief sections of shimmering ambient drift and echoing chimes and harsh whispered vocals.
The next track opens with an immense deep bassline, like the shuddering tones of a massive bowed cello rumbling through an underground cave system, then launches into another stumbling industrial groove, like a broken Godflesh track draped in harrowing Bernard Herrmann strings, dissonant riffage and some of the albums most overt black metal style vocals, a seriously pissed-off ripped-throat shriek soaring over the sludge. Halfway through, the song turns into a a gripping cinemtatic dirge, just heavy drums and looped strings and ominous bassline spreading out over several minutes, then sinking back into a morass of charred distorted drone, cello and weeping female vocals towards the end. "Stench" juxtaposes a reading of a poem from Gustave Flaubert over monstrous slow-motion doom, and " L’Ange qui annonce la fin du temps" reveals a seething mass of murderous whispers and demonic black ambience, deep pounding kettledrums echoing through the pit, dissonant piano and Lustmordian darkness swirling with swarms of atonal strings and hovering drones.
A heavy rhythmic orchestral loops opens "Gazing" and leads this track into one of the album's most "grooving" moments, a massive winding doom riff working its way across pitch-black film-score strings and later joined by scathing blackened vocals. "Rife" starts off with a full minute of granular black noise before dropping in to a chaotic lurching off-time riff and a churning maelstrom of distorted electronics and looped orchestral stabs, but evolves into dreamy dark ambience laced with piano and hushed female vocals in it's second half, then exploding into a monstrous speaker-shredding bass-heavy drone at the end.
And then as if things couldn't get any more terrifying and nightmarish, the title track appears, opening with a distant female voice screaming for help (a sample I recognize but can't place off of the top of my head), her frantic screams repeating over and over and over as the vicious black doom riffage and industrial percussion pours forth, massive blasts of brass fanfares and dense strings piled on top, the sound absolutely suffocating. But then four minutes in, the doomy heaviness and strings drop out suddenly and we're left with minimal fluttering drones and slow dissonant chords being smashed out of a piano for a minute, a brief moment of almost-calm, and then the drums begin to pound and the orchestral sounds and distorted riffage crashes back in with an epic final hook that's one of the most majestic moments on the album, almost sounding like My Dying Bride but drowned in noise and filthy buzzing bass and psychotic strings.
Finally, "Gnostic Ritual" closes the album with a simple two-chord bass riff over pounding, heavily echoing drums, a blackened dubby doomscape filled with super distorted shrieks and harsh noisy ambience, slow and crushing and utterly depressing, and as the track continues the stripped down industrial dirge is slowly joined by waves of rumbling orchestral percussion, distant warning sirens, murky strings and suspended high pitched drones that builds in intensity until finally fading out on a smoking trail of crackling feedback and distorted bass.

THE HUMAN QUENA ORCHESTRA The Politics Of The Irredeemable DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
CBR76

Human Quena Orchestra first took shape as a solo project from Ryan Unks, who had previously played guitar in the final lineup of the Pittsburgh metal band Creation Is Crucifixion. After moving from CIC, Unks began to work on a new project that would incorporate elements of black metal, crushing drone music, extreme psychotropic noise and psychedelic/krautrock influences into a sound that would be much heavier any of his previous projects. The first album from Human Quena Orchestra was released in 2007 on Daft Alliance; Means Without Ends was a disturbing, introspective slab of blackened industrial doom that stood out in stark contrast from the rest of the slow n' low extreme doom scene, utilizing layers of harsh textured distortion and electronics to create a caustic form of monstrous doom that shared as much of industrial music's cold, machine-like aesthetic as it did the ultra-slow riffage of the most extreme variants of doom metal. At the same time that the bands debut was taking shape, Unks was joined by another former member of Creation Is Crucifixion, Nathan Berlinguette (who was also a member of the dark ambient project M.Kourie and the deathdrone duo 5/5/2000). With the addition of Berlinguette's skilled application of dark ambience and expansive soundscapes, Human Quena Orchestra began to move into even more textured territory which has culminated with the second HQO full-length, The Politics of the Irredeemable, a series of apocalyptic visions and epiphanies of endtime realization, prophetic screeds that look to a future rendered pustulent and war-stricken by the failed machinations of the human race, presented as six chapters that enter your consciousness through a delivery system of extreme industrial dread. The Politics of the Irredeemable is 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, the drums becoming like distant mortar blasts heard over the horizon as terrified screams ring out and stars fall dead from the skies. This is seriously apocalyptic deathmachine grind ambience.

BLACK ELK Always A Six, Never A Nine DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
CBR70

Black Elk’s eponymous 2006 debut on Crucial Blast was a ferocious rush of ultra-heavy, jagged noise rock with a penchant for creating moments of lethal build-and-release, some wonderfully malevolent riffage with a massive, bottom-heavy undertow, and creepy, often disturbing lyrics delivered via the wailing, yowling throat of singer Tom Glose. Glose’s singing has often invoked comparisons to that of David Yow from Jesus Lizard, and Black Elk do seem to channel the demented power of the Chicago noise rock legends alongside their other influences (sludge metal, late 90's math-damaged hardcore, even hints of black metal, etc.), taking their influences and filtering them through their super-heavy metallic filter. If you were a big fan of that whole Am Rep/Touch And Go/noise rock scene from back in the 90's, and like yer gnarly rock crushing and psychotic sounding, you'd probably fall in love with Black Elk the first time you heard 'em.
Here we are two years later after the released of that killer debut, and we're totally knocked flat by Black Elk's second album Always A Six, Never A Nine. If you liked their first album, I'll bet my lunch that this new one will blow you away. From the suggestive album title and Tom Glose's deeply weird lyrics to the ten songs of aggro wreckage and crushing, noise-rock influenced heaviosity, this goddamn album is one the raddest post-Am Rep exercises in riff-induced panic, molten rock and menacing bad-assery sitting in my stereo pile right now. That metallic Jesus Lizard/Melvins influenced sound that their first album delivered - the jagged, angular riffs and math-deformed rhythms slithering through delirious night sweats and paranoia - has been further developed into a set of songs that altogether border on the epic. And Tom's singing is even more crazed and freaked-out sounding than before. Which is saying alot. The band has also begun to incorporate some atmospheric elements like flourishes of piano, layered ambience, and, um, some rather "blackened" guitar moves that add some deep new shadows to Black Elk's fearsome set, and at the same time, the band has written their catchiest music so far for Never A Six..., with some fantastic, jangly melodic hooks surfacing in the midst of songs like "Brine" and "Winter Formal".

GNAW THEIR TONGUES An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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.

NOISM ± DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
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.

TREES Lights Bane DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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.

NADJA Desire In Uneasiness DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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.

WILDILDLIFE Six DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
CBR64

A couple months ago (we’re talking mid-Spring ‘07, here), I received an email from Robotic Empire boss Andy Low commanding me to check out a couple of songs that a band from San Francisco called Wildildlife had posted online, immediately. I knew that the dude has a solid idea of what kind of sounds I’m into, so I pulled up the link immediately and was totally blown away by the two Wildildlife tunes that I heard. Heavy, crunchy riffage rolling over celestial FX freakout and gang choral voices, part pop, part neo-psychedelic noisiness, part metalloid skullcrush. Super melodic and catchy but vaguely menacing and dark all at the same time. The band toured through here about a month later, and I was even more floored by their manic live energy; the band summoned up 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 sky-streaking eruptions of psychedelic lowcore and swirling, cosmic sludge. Going back to a review that Terrascope Magazine wrote 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 psych heaviness.These guys have become one of my favorite new bands, and I’m MEGA excited to be presenting their first full length Six through Crucial Blast.

SKULLFLOWER IIIrd Gatekeeper DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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 and a remastering job courtesy of Scott Hull at Visceral Sound.

GREY DATURAS Dead In The Woods DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
CBR62

CRUCIAL BLAST is stoked to be re-issuing the colossal, previously 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 dirge, freely improvised amplifier noise and crushing riff splatter, and massive, sky-streaking psychedelic corrosion, travelling the speaker-shredding void between The Dead C, pulverizing sludge, and Skullflower's heaviest jams. The Crucial Blast re-issue of Dead In The Woods features a full remastering by Scott Hull at Visceral Sound.

SOUVENIR'S YOUNG AMERICA An Ocean Without Water DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
CBR61

Richmond, VA's cinematic instrumentalists SOUVENIR'S YOUNG AMERICA present their second full length, "An Ocean Without Water," recorded with John Morand (Labradford, Sparklehorse, 4 Walls Falling) at Sound of Music, and accompanied by artwork from 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). The band has developed their sound even further with this new album, and we couldn't be more stoked over the epic, moody sounds that onfold over "An Ocean Without Water's" 40 minute running time.

YEAR OF NO LIGHT Nord DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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 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.

MONARCH! Dead Men Tell No Tales DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
CBR59

The North American version of the upcoming MONARCH! double CD set, Dead Men Tell No Tales, a colossal collection of not one, but two full length albums previously released on vinyl only by the French glacial sludge/feedback/lava rock behemoth known as MONARCH!.
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 album 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.

BLACK ELK self-titled DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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).

MICROWAVES Contagion Heuristic DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
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.

SKULLFLOWER Tribulation DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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 DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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...

GENGHIS TRON Dead Mountain Mouth DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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...

GEISHA Mondo Dell'Orrore

GEISHA Mondo Dell'Orrore DIGITAL ALBUM
$4.98
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.

GOSLINGS Spaceheater/Perfect Interior DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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 psych-addled 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 avalanche of mystic black sugar. Simultaneously ethereal and blown-out,angelic strains of four-track mud-majesty shaking the walls of the ancient well it's buried beneath.

SO I HAD TO SHOOT HIM Alpha Males & Popular Girls DIGITAL ALBUM
$2.98
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. 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 sass and ferocity courtesy of frontwoman Libby Schaub. Alpha Males is a boldly imaginative debut, chock full of infectious hooks and crazed heaviness that summons crazed grindcore, girl-fronted indie pop, pulverizing metalcore, dance punk, gleaming melodic shoegazer bliss, and mutant stadium-rock anthems ... all in the same breath.

skullflower orange canyon mind

SKULLFLOWER Orange Canyon Mind DIGITAL ALBUM
$5.98
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! 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.

GENGHIS TRON Cloak Of Love DIGITAL ALBUM
$3.98
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. Produced by Colin Marston (BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS and DYSRYTHMIA), and featuring original artwork from Jon Beasley.