Crucial Blast on BLOODYMINDED "Within The Walls"

Crucial Blast has always spent time writing thoughtful reviews of BloodLust! releases and here is a look at the BLOODYMINDED "Within The Walls" album that we had not previously seen:

Still one of the key shapers of American power electronics, Chicago PE mainstays Bloodyminded return with their first new album in seven years, and it's one of the most harrowing industrial/noise albums of their career. Within The Walls is some of the grimmest material I've ever heard from the band, steeped in clinical electronic drones and waves of deeply unsettling dark ambience that move through uneasy psychological spaces. The album wastes no time in its effort to creep you out as the opener "All The Cities Are Occupied" layers those eerie dissonant drones and cold wheezing electronics over sounds of creaking, scraping metal, like the sound of a pick-axe being dragged down the length of some long, dank culvert, surrounded by bleak synthesizer sounds that have been summoned by David Reed of Luasa Raelon / Envenomist. But then they'll follow that up that with something like the Whitehouse-worthy blast of squealing feedback abuse and pandemonic derangement of the title track, a disorienting din of crazed voices shrieking and raving over an assault of pestilent fluttering distortion and severe speaker-shredding noise. The album often surges into that level of extreme, assaultive sound, traveling swiftly out of the passages of cold dark ambience into these vicious onslaughts of deformed synth noise and sputtering oscillators, becoming a churning backdrop of diseased drone and insectile chaos that takes that classic Whitehouse-influenced style of power electronics and twists it into something even more monstrous.

    But the focal point of Bloodyminded's bleakly violent vision on Within The Walls is not the harsh, ear-rending electronics, but actually the myriad of voices that appear together throughout the album, a legion of voices that evokes the interior pandemonium of a schizophrenic, the screeching garbled horror of tracks like "Night Strikes" teeming with a barely controlled violence, the nihilist lyrics spilling out in streams of surrealist horror as the voices shift between English and Spanish, gouts of guttural bellowing and sneering hatefulness, a multitude of psychotic howling and gnashing teeth that ceaselessly pan back and forth over the screaming malignant squeal and chirping electronics. It's only at the very end, when the band slips into a reworking of the Locrian song "Inverted Ruins" that the album transforms, as the coldly ambivalent synth melody that Sanford Parker weaves around the skull-scraping feedback slowly blossoms into a kind of mesmeric, malignant darkwave; in that final moment, Bloodyminded's high-end violence somehow morphs into some akin to a more atmospheric Skinny Puppy, a striking and wholly unexpected climax to the otherwise blistering aural abuse that makes up Walls.   © CRUCIAL BLAST