Undergrind Metal

Crawl – Necrotic Fear April 2019 – Anomalous Mind Records Crawl is a one-man project I stumbled upon in 2018, after the release of their split with Leviathan, opening with the irate At the Forge of Hate, which might have been the heaviest side on any Leviathan split ever. Necrotic Fear continues the tradition of whipping the listener in the face with bass strings, but for pacing's sake the album is broken up by sinister lulls like the alcoves on the cover, providing refuge from the wind tunnel that the other songs seem to imitate. Everything from the art to the drums is distorted, almost feeling like a more noise based project than a metal one, and we're in the territory of the non-riff, where feedback and drone are how hatred are expressed. Let's go with blackened sludge. The opener and closer are similar in that they both showcase a more subtly menacing approach, akin to dark ambient, but in different ways. Paralyzed, I Awaken... is a melancholic dirge, th...

Obscuring Veil – Fleshvoid To Naught March 2019 – I, Voidhanger Records Mories, famous for having recorded half of the avant-garde/experimental black metal released since 1996, participates in his second release this year, Fleshvoid To Naught. Released by the folks who distributed Tchornobog and the Spectral Lore/Jute Gyte split, the album has a legacy to honour – while less abrasive than other similar acts, Obscuring Veil is more than the sum of its multinational parts. After a quick intro, Fleshvoid To Naught picks up and delivers some of the most dissonant black metal in recent memory. The drumming has the kind of micro-intensity you'd usually find in jazz, with fast but subtle cymbal sections and an overall tactful approach, mostly leaving blasts behind for a more technical and original style. There's something approachable and conventional about it, maybe the mix of relatively simple time signatures and recurring power chord strumming, which make for a ...

Triumvir Foul – Urine of Abomination February 2019 – Vrasubatlat/Invictus Productions Two years after the stellar Spiritual Bloodshed, Triumvir Foul are back with the Urine of Abomination EP, a noisy, chaotic, primitive record that's satisfyingly predictable and predictably satisfying. Sharing a member with Dagger Lust, for whom the best descriptor I could come up with would be noisened death metal, it comes as no surprise that every entry this EP writes in the book of death metal is surrounded by slabs of warm, almost comforting harsh noise sections. Reminiscent of Azarath, the vocals have a raw, primitive rasp, fitting the caveman aspect curated by similar cavernous death metal bands. Raw and primitive also describe every other aspect of the record – some leads are literal three-note tapping sections, and the rhythm section is filled with hammer blasts and other similar beats that I'd assume were first played during mammoth hunts. The songwriting is where ...

Hexenoise – II March 2019 – Unsigned After the excellent catastrophic sludge monolith that was Heavy Drugs Smashed Amps, Hexendrone began showing signs of veering straight off the cliff and free-fall into the jagged forest of noise, having recorded a split with B ol', a mysterious experimental act whose only proof of existence is their presence in said split. A sharp-eyed reader might notice Hexendrone not having the same name on this record. Indeed, the Russians may have wanted to clearly separate both sounds without creating an entirely new project, hence the Hexenoise and Hexendrone entities. Their approach to sludge always noisy and approximative, yet II displays remarkable forethought and composition given the genre. Acoustic drums accompany the slow, intangible Go Home!, giving it structure and giving me something to hold on to while my lungs and head are crushed. A vice made of guitar distortion and bass rumble, feeding into an ever-growing drone, constrict...

Mama came out in 2015, and while the objective here is to cover the most recent output, this album holds a special place in my heart and I couldn’t resist adding it to the list. I haven’t listened to many albums that resemble this one – I’m not sure there’s anyone out there who does a better job at mixing harsh noise, grindcore and black metal. Endon describe themselves as “catastrophic noise metal”, and it suits them well. Everything happening in Mama is either ominous, cataclysmic, or downright frightening. It’s the first album that made me actually grind my teeth from the intensity in years, and it’s a quality the record keeps for a while. The album starts off with some interesting black metal-tinged guitar work, but that soon grinds into noise, with parasite sounds appearing, more intense riffs and drumming, and the craziest vocals since Silencer. It’s great to hear how Endon can push the limits of a section until it turns around and eats itself, becoming some ungodly crea...

Canadian noise/dark electronics project Wet Nurse just released V A S E S, and it’s making me uneasy in the best kind of way. I hadn’t felt this unnerved since the Noisefest last year, and it’s all thanks to the masterful mix of sound manipulations and creepy vocals present here. Disturbed lyrics speaking of drugs, sex, depression and depravity are common in the noise genres, but they’re not so “in your face” as say Whitehouse or other power electronics groups would present them. Instead they feel composed, deliberate, and they mesh well with the disturbances underneath. Alabama poet Matt Finney is responsible for these words, and he knows how to get me going when it comes to grime and filthy ambiance. The album seems to get more intense as it goes in, with V A S E S being so calm it almost doesn’t fit in with the others. There’s almost a duality going on with the soft-spoken vocals during the first track and the distorted anger in the second half of the last song. The music i...

UG You’ve gone over the “Jouissance” title in the past. Would you mind going over Coma Wall? It’s got quite grave and final undertones. First, Coma Wall has no totalised meaning for me, but death of the author could suggest otherwise. But there are themes. The Coma Wall, also known as the CfA2 Great Wall, is a galactic filament - thread-like structures composed millions of galaxies - of and one of the largest structures in the observable universe. It’s 750 million ly high x 200 million ly in width x 16 million ly in thickness. There are few structures bigger than it before you get to the “End of Greatness”, where the universe no longer is seen in discernible structures (filaments and voids, which combined look awfully organic, almost like clusters of interconnected neurones) and you get undifferentiated noise, like static on a TV or white noise. Basically, in cosmology, there seems to be an upper limit to how big things get before the universe seems to become pure undifferentia...

When I put on Martial Industrial Metal for the first time, I immediately guessed the band was German – and I’m not talking about the accent. There’s something about the martial industrial aesthetic that’s inherently Nazi, no insult meant. Black Tribe is a band which is interesting in its total lack of visual presentation or promotion. The only trace I could find of them is their Bandcamp, whose color-code is white. Just white. There’s nothing but dates to differentiate the releases, which can be an annoyance given the speed at which they come out. Seriously, there have been eleven of them in the past seven months, I can’t keep up with that (Note: They put out 2 records by the time I got around to writing this). While a lot of them are one-off songs, Black Tribe does have a couple of longer records, including Martial Industrial Metal. Once you get past the two-song intro, Black Tribe shows you who they really are. It’s not the most abrasive album I’ve ever gotten into, and there’...