Crucial Blast on BloodLust!

It is always nice when a store or mail-order source takes the time to listen to a release and write their own blurb about it, rather than just copy and paste from a label's one-sheet. I always appreciate Aaron Dilloway's personalized descriptions in the Hanson catalog, and Aquarius Records always goes above and beyond the call of duty. Crucial Blast is another great outlet that takes the time and makes an effort... Here are a few examples: CULVER Sugar Tip CD Guitarist and dronemaker Lee Stokoe has been a member of the new Skullflower lineup for awhile now, appearing on some of the newer studio and live recordings and performing live with Matt Bower, and his addition to the band has probably been a big factor in the 'Flower's evolution into the furious blackened dronerock behemoth. Also a member of the UK sludge band Marzuraan, this guy keeps pretty busy, and on top of all of this he's still able to crank out new material from his longrunning solo project Culver, which I'm always stoked to hear. Sugar Tip is one of Culver's latest slabs of crushing metallic amp-trance, released on the Chicago industrial label Bloodlust! and packged with Stokoe's signature style of brightly colored and surreal collage art. The first track "Suicide Crypt" is roaring pit of blacknoise rumble, endless walls of buzzing, grinding, raging distorted drone like a massed Chatham-like army of doom metal guitarists all playing the same single chord behind a cascade of roiling low-end rumble and threads of humming high-end drone that almost sound like orchestral strings distended from massive gravitations pull. For more than twenty-one minutes this piece stretches out, a massive wall of roaring distorted dronebuzz, a purely ambient noisewall that undergoes only the most subtle chordal shifts. At just two minutes, the middle track "I Know You're Alone" is just an interlude between the two other larger tracks, a swirl of muted low-end thrum and murky cosmic winds obscuring a vague melodic pulse, droning and dark kosmiche drift that leads straight into the final distorto-drone epic... "Suicide Witch", like the first track, is both minimal and massive, a single feedback drone writhing serpentine through cosmic clouds of warbling high-end shimmer and thick metallic buzz, a mighty blackened raga buzzing through the void, Sunroof-style. As this goes on, the soft smears of ambient hum and metallic resonance that float around this roaring static raga-drone undergo slight shifts, forming into eerie fragments of melody that evolve ever so slightly over the track's twenty-three minutes, winding down at the end as the drones are stripped down layer by layer until all that remains is a throbbing electrical hum at the end. Fans of Sunroof, Vulture Club, Ajilsvga, Birchville Cat Motel, RST, To Blacken The Pages, and other guitar-centric heavy psychedelic drone outfits, here's another crushing psychdrone archtitect for you to zone out to! ENVENOMIST Hidden CD A re-issue of an extremely limited cassette released in 2006, Hidden is another excellent slab of ultra-heavy, pitch black drone from Envenomist. The differences between Envenomist and dronesculptor David Reed's other project Luasa Raelon are subtle, as both projects produce intense pieces of desolate, bottom-heavy black ambience that is heavily influenced by the early Lustmord albums. Where Luasa Raelon uses a variety of instruments and sound sources to create it's monstrous industrial doomscapes, Envenomist uses only synthesizers to build these minimal sheets of black industrial drone. The seven tracks on Hidden suggest a much heavier Maurizio Bianchi, the sound is definitely similiar to Bianchi's icy, inhuman electronics, and the ongoing influence of German kosmiche music from the 70's is also felt on the deep reverberant washes of analogue drift and black hole drone. Vast waves of black shimmering whirr and deep doomy low end float through an endless void, the sound cold and threatening and bleak, a metallic black drone that changes shape with each track but never loses it's massive buzzing malevolence. Equal parts Klaus Schulze and Lustmord and Bianchi, with song titles and cover art that evoke a suffocating sense of urban dread. KRIMINAALISET METSANHALTIJAT Anarkkia, Kaaos, Maailmanloppu! CD I love Finnish hardcore and black metal, but I've hardly heard any Finnish industrial music. Most of what I have been exposed to has come out on the Kaos Kontrol label, which specializes in grating, psychedelic old-school industrial, and if you told me that this album from the Finnish band Kriminaaliset Metsänhaltijat was in fact a Kaos Kontrol release, I wouldn't doubt it. It's actually on the American power electronics/industrial label Bloodlust!, however, and is a reissue of a super-limited cassette that came out on Triangle Records in 2008. The band has been around since the 90's but is only now beginning to get some exposure over here in the States, a good thing, too, as this disc points towards a very cool and heavy form of apocalyptic machine music. The six tracks on Anarkkia, Kaaos, Maailmanloppu! have an obvious old-school Throbbing Gristle/S.P.K. influence with lots of clanging metal rhythms, buzzing distorted bass-tones, looped feedback, dense clusters of dubby percussion, blasts of pure white noise, warning sirens, radar pings, but also incorporating some really menacing and doomy synth-bass lines and creepy melted samples that make this a heavier, more evil sounding version of classic industrial. One of the things that really set these guys apart are their vocals, which are snarled and distorted and are all over these songs. The band not only cites early Japanese noise and classic Industrial as primary influences on their thick, cacophonous industrial dirge sound, but also the ferocity of Finnish hardcore, a strange sounding mix at first, but when you actually hear Kriminaaliset Metsänhaltijat it makes sense, a fierce and furious sheet-metal attack with intensely psychedelic noise, howling hardcore vocals and dub effects swirling around the dark, nihilistic atmoshere, all set to an extremely raw and hissy recording that makes this sound like it was recorded in the hallways of an old abandoned mental hospital. Kind of like a heavier, angrier, more PE-influenced Wolf Eyes.