මහසෝනා – ‘(මහසෝනා​)​* – යන්ත්‍ර​.​මන්ත්‍ර​.​ගුරුකම්!’

‘මහසෝනා’ (Mahasonā) from this anonymous project from Sri Lanka. Nearly 15 minutes on cassette, Noise Metal dismal ritual hate and occult death to invoke the summoning of Sinhalese folkloric demon. Deathly yakseya evokation of soul-killing Noise and Black Drone of no-riff Doom, minimalist martial drums shimmer in unnatural heat haze, bass frequencies shudder and throb through lo-fi obscured audio, darkly psychedelic and ritualist, pulsing nahash vocal of the insane. Werewolf beast visage looms through the vibrating sonics, you can hear the candles flickering and smell the shitty amplifiers burning like some vile censer. Conjures a similarly mental atmosphere to Abruptum, Nirriti and Black Mass of Absu, being extremely forbidden and haram, harmful and dangerous in it’s esoteric intents and operating outside any specific scene paradigm. The work is an offering to Maha Sona, who will crush your shoulders with four hands, four eyes blazing through your cursed soul, filling your body with choleric pestilence. Be warned!

විරූපි Propaganda

CULT GRAVES – ‘STRANGE CUSTOMS’

Blaspheming blasting Death Metal from the States. ‘Strange Customs’ has drawn comparisons to Proclamation and early Deicide, influences amongst others with which Cult Graves harness a savage rite of Death Metal all their own. Riff-centric yet utterly primal, dismal, vile necromantic Death Metal; rabid strangulating riffs and solos with transgressive sort-of grooves,  plummeting bombastic drums of death with tempo variations and nuances, full of the erect powerful primality that elevates this sort of ghoulish, slobbering riff feast, and decimating, ear crushing production with squashed ambience and audial clarity. This has a similarly grinding feel and sound to Gravesend or Caustic Wound at times, too, and there’s a blackened edge to some of the more chaotic guitar parts, sometimes coming off like Lucifer’s Hammer in their more demented, heretical throes. Crucial brutal.

Godz Ov War Productions

Transylvanian Recordings

Bandcamp

GOD IS WAR – ‘PREDATION PERFECTED’

God Is War’s modular Industrial complex continues to crush all in it’s path to electronics ascendant supremacy with ‘Predation Perfected’. M.Chami has elevated this particular corner of Noise-adjacent Electronic music to such aggressive, dizzying heights as to render much competition invisible. Militarist psychedelic Electronics, cryptic beat patterns emerge from entropic modular waters shimmering with warping audial toxin and variably mutate, dropping bass kicks like massive spent shell casings, claps reverberate at unpredictable intervals through beds of abraded granulated Bass and appropriated drugged sample, modular synthesis layer application and development like military virus in secret compound blacksite. Combat stimulant ambience to build tension and nervousness, chill paranoiac, smoked out and poised to wreak havoc. Refined and more accurate than previous releases, ‘Predation Perfected’ stalks from the shadows in beaded-sweat death squad calm and readiness, bristling with illegal psychotropic weaponry. God Is War is an AC-130J Ghostrider, far out of sight and well within lethal range. Murderous.

Closed Casket Activities

GIANT SWAN – ‘FANTASY FOOD’

The notoriety of Bristolian technopunks Giant Swan stems largely from their apocalyptic live shows, but their studio work scarcely marks them out as shrinking violets. Atypically, the duo’s latest EP targets the dancefloor rather than the padded cell, though it would be a mistake to assume the dearth of redlining discord equates to a Swan with clipped wings. ‘Fantasy Food’ may be leaner, cleaner fare than the dungeon-dragging likes of ‘Do Not Be Afraid Of Tenderness’, but it still packs a ferocious punch. Audio-terror notwithstanding, attention to detail has long been a Giant Swan hallmark and their finely whorled fingerprints cover every burnished surface of this blistering record. Take ‘Sugar And Air’ in which an onslaught of woody kicks and serrated hi-hats vie for attention with a hyperventilating female vocal sample that backflips through the clangour like a gymnast in a breaker’s yard. In unsteadier hands, such anarchic sound design could easily descend into slapstick, but every haymaker thrown here lands with pinpoint precision. Likewise, ‘RRR+1’ is a laser-guided buzzbomb that cycles through multiple overlapping phases, its concrete-cracking 4/4 beat the only constant amid a sandstorm of whipping digital detritus. Even the beatless title track, which on first pass sounds like a skipload of euphoniums being fed through a woodchipper, is a mini-masterpiece of tightly controlled chaos. Closer to the rambunctious mischief-making of Pariah and Gesloten Cirkel than the grit ‘n’ girders pile-driving of JK Flesh and Regis, ‘Fantasy Food’ is full-tilt techno with a lascivious twinkle in its eye. Dance, motherfuckers.

KECK

FENTANYL TAPWATER DISCOGRAPHY

Dismal bulldozing Bass & Drum Sludgecore from the fertile ground of Rochester NY, featuring Matt from of Water Torture, Deceiver, blessed relief for mother and more, and Tim from Hallucination Realized, Holy Money and other projects. Exploded amp bass chord Sludge with miserable, morose melody and droning dissonance, brute heavy hardcore drums drift from death march dirge to loping mid paced stomp, D Beats and Fastcore forays without straight-up blasts, hurtling ahead with fearsome idiot power and crushed crashing cymbals, harsh blown up spite vocal, knuckle dragging groove, obtuse, shambling and ignorant Sludge for punks. Being a collection of split recordings, the audio is variable, at best the loud and punishing production ramps up the noxious Bass fuzz thud and presents the drums as a clattering, weighty affront. At their most rumbling, trudging and concussed they resemble Ride For Revenge via Flipper and Grief, a toxic and hellacious Sludge/Hardcore construct of sound to pollute and poison. Fucken gnarly.

Bizzaro Warrior

BLOATED SUBHUMANS – ‘EXECUTIONS 4-6’

Three live sets collected on three cassettes from the shambling dripping monster of destroyed sub-musical Noise Rock, Bloated Subhumans. Pestilent screeds of utterly annihilated thanatocentrist  ‘rock music’, blown-out and scorched to living shit. Doom laden spoken word/feckless yelling vocals, long passages of feedback evoking early Power Electronics like Ramleh or Sutcliffe Jugend, hissing delays and forlorn echo effects build to forebodingly simple and punishing Bass and Drum Noise Rock instrumentation, often revolving around a single riff and beat which then ploughs mercilessly and listlessly through your sense of worth. Re-infect and repeat until your eyes hurt from wrenching seasick nausea. Bass frequencies forming hairline fractures in your skull, tinny live recorded percussion keeping some semblance of the melted sub Stooges R’n’R discernable, the voice of an unknown ‘human’ calls like a broken half-dead mutant lying on an irradiated, abandoned beach waiting to melt. Confrontational and draining, a true dirge of morbid, mordant anti-music. This thing seriously sounds totally nuked.

Bandcamp

SIDETRACKED – ‘AMMUNITION’

Blistering, brief and brutal EP from overachiever extraordinaire Sidetracked, surely one of the most consistent and interesting Hardcore bands of the last 20 years. Usually operating as a two piece, covering ground ranging from Youth Crew to Power Violence, they follow a consistency of visual and audial aesthetic that means their massive discography carries a rarified consistency. ‘Ammunition’ provides 20 super short bursts of Nihilist Commando style Noisecore polemic and audial alienation from peers and colleagues, cryptic personal lyrics contained within a fugue state maelstrom of minimalist dissociative Noisecore with a Hardcore Punk flavour, instrumentation cuts in and out song by song, caustic booming strings appearing three songs in and bursting the fucking dam with shockwave amplified axe wielding, brutal Hardcore vocal perfection, superfast concise blasting with killer harsh drum sound. Short, sharp, shocking body music. It’ll leave you gasping and choking for more.

Bandcamp

STCLVR – ‘PREDATOR’

STCLVR’s 2017 cassette release ‘Predator’, 20 odd minutes of filthy Industrial Dance Noise and blistering Harsh Pop. Crushed and crumpled Industrial sizzle beats and squonk electronic pulse Bass fried to death, unmaligned claps snap through the audial grease, howling echo vocal Power Electronics style, but abstracted to fit a perverse dancefloor no one should dance upon. The ghoulish spectre of industrial, lurking electronic instrumentation menace, synths overloaded to shitting hell, dance music trussed up into a garish, prurient noise amalgam, dark electro nightmares in a damaged brain. If you dig on Plack Blague, Mutwawa or Backxwash, seek no further, strap on the leather and fuck shit up. Throbbing and gristly.

Chthonic Streams

Bandcamp

OATH OF CRUELTY – ‘HELLISH DECIMATION’

Oath of Cruelty with their 2012 EP ‘Hellish Decimation’, two tracks of the other OTHER War Metal, summoning the murderous intensity and hammering barbarian Teuton Thrash of ‘Tapping The Vein’ era Sodom and dialing everything beyond taste and decency via berzerker blast beats and Death Metal aural dimensions. Replete with temple crushing grooving Thrash riffs and stacked up infernal rhythms, disastrously lethal leads frothing with bloodlust and razor throated vocal from Hades. Deathleaping from blitzing fast Death Thrash mayhem to full-on pit frenzy mid-paced near-crossover thrashing murder, massive tom strikes prelude the devastation as posers are wasted in no mans land amidst the chugging, fist banging riff affront. Guitars are provided by Dave Callier, he of the mighty Texan Grindcore institution P.L.F., and there are many similarities between the two band’s mean-as-fukk riffing styles to be found here. Boundless, blasting Death Thrash perfection borne of cruel, maniac zeal and fleet-footed fervor. Concrete production provides a deadly weight and martial power to these tracks. ‘Hellish Decimation’, indeed.

Warfare Noise Productions

BLACKWATER SNIPER – ‘EXTRAVIOLENCE’

BLACKWATER SNIPER is a Chicago based, ghillie suited, 2 piece Hardcore band with an interesting and obliterating songwriting conceit, imbuing Extratone gigasnareblasts into the body of a brutal Hardcore/Power Violence sound to extremity melting result. Songs thrash in stop start blasting deathrolls, building more usual percussive instrumentation patterns to extant, carbonising extrablast parts and switch swerving into slow fatass breakdowns, brusque shrieking/borting vocal, crisp and bouncy drum programming sound with monstrous string sounds ringing with feedback noise – alarmingly memorable songs, too, with touches of extreme Emoviolence and little reliance on the Extratone element to obfuscate lack of imagination in the songwriting, which often comes off like Sea of Shit or Water Torture. Gnarly obscure, gritted with violent purpose and about as extra as one can get.

Bandcamp

 

STORMCROW – ‘ENSLAVED IN DARKNESS’

Stormcrow’s only full length album, released back in 2005 on No Options Records. A classic of US Stenchcore and a total monolith to miserable DETH! Salvos of muscular, primordial, massive Guitars and foreboding Bass form stoic, forlorn melodies of warring death, strafing chugging Crust Thrash riffs mount a rhythm section of devastating simplicity, Metal and Punk boiled down to their most furtive and mercurial and combined in the cast, powerful dynamic rhythms with an organic looseness and a barreling heft akin to the heights of Bolt Thrower, simultaneously soaring and crestfallen leads charge headlong into withering fire, bellowed low crust vocal command – moments of metallic acoustic to draw breath from the fog of war, tempos grinding to a chugging mid paced cruise after fire is exchanged across the martial, punk as fukk Drum work. Stormcrow also manages to pull off that absolutely hopeless, rain swept atmosphere of misery that makes Axegrinder’s ‘Rise of the Serpent Men’ so potent and terrible. This particular sword will keep sharp a fucking long time yet.

Brainsand

Bandcamp

GUTLESS / MORTAL WOUND SPLIT

Totally neckwrecking old school Death Metal split from US combatants Mortal Wound and Australian unit Gutless, released back in 2020 on Me Saco Un Ojo Records and Maggot Stomp Records, and sealed in super extra bogan airbrushed art from the side of some interdimensional Death Metal fuck truck. Mortal Wound casts three odes to warfare trauma, sweltering jungle combat groove riffs and terrorizing, sonorous leads surge across blasting drums in interesting patterns shifting from static stiff arm blasts to punk skanks, rumbling cable Bass presence and super low Barnes worship vocal, dotted with samples from war films and documentaries. Savage, terse and steaming with mean lead work. Callous. Gutless kicks out two tracks of furious Death Metal, heavier than it’s constituent parts by dint of manic rabid playing and dynamic tempo switch ups. Hat heavy drums with cannon handed snare strikes and pit frenzied thrashing aura, with plenty of tight as fukk groove, Guitars lashing out pitliess, barbed death thrash riffs and limber-dicked Bass lines matching Guitars phrase and rhythm, low wind tunnel howl vocal full of rage, with warped insane Guitar solos from hell (australia) florid in mercurial downcast melody. Gutless has this amazing knack of channeling old Cannibal Corpse mana in sound and spirit – moments in ‘Manufactured God’ come off like ‘Edible Autopsy’ pt II; necksnapping thrashing drum parts with hi hat blasts, isolated bass badassery, violent atmosphere of ripping death. Fucking glorious.

Gutless Bandcamp

Mortal Wound Bandcamp

Me Saco Un Ojo Records