Gnaw Their Tongues
All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity
Crucial Blast
Usually a new album by a favored band, especially one as individualistic and antagonistic as Gnaw Their Tongues, would fill me with gleeful anticipation. Unfortunately, as with most things relating to them, Gnaw Their Tongues is a thornier proposition. Put bluntly, where can you go after 2008’s An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood? I’m not saying it was the “end of music” or anything that foolish, but it did certainly demonstrate that there is an endpoint to extremity. And that’s a shame because Netherlands-based mad scientist Mories is one of the stranger outsider voices in the scene today. Imagine a cross between Coil, Abruptum, Deathspell Omega, Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, NON, Einsturzende Neubauten, and simultaneous screenings of every Dario Argento movie alongside Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. Fell sounds, man. And the music of All the Dread… isn’t just rolling around in glass and pushing all of the volume knobs to 11, this music is carefully and painstakingly constructed, like a particularly disturbing Bosch-influenced collage, all careful near-cinematic cuts and jarring juxtapositions. Overloaded effects pedals, fingernails-on-blackboards strings, brass and horn sections, tubular bells, cavernous and stuttering bass-and-drums grind, film samples, occult screams and retching, and worst of all, dread silence. In sum, All the Dread… is not so much a leap forward or a holding pattern as it is a further exploration of a rich vein of oddly-poised nonlinear horror sound. And why not? No one else is taking it this far right now.
Recommended for the black metal fan who wants to stop fucking around.
Crucial Blast: http://www.crucialblast.net
