Gnaw Their Tongues at Myspace

“An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood” is a horrific album but in the best possible way. Mixing Doom Drone, Black Metal, Industrial, Noise and Ambient influences to make what is a very good contender for most disturbing album of the year. This Dutch one man project is often classed as Black Metal and whilst that is definitely an influence , especially with the sporadic vocals that description is definitely too limited to explain the deal with Gnaw Their Tongues.

Taking Sunn 0))) or Earth’s most depressing and primitive moments as a blueprints, Gnaw Their tongues add in harsh and aurally disfigured white noise, the aforementioned black metal vocals, an echoing malevolent string section, additional creepy keyboards, haunting slowly precise but organic drums and samples from various televised court cases, real crime TV shows and horror films to create what could be described as Jason Vorhee’s favourite chillout record.

Not that you could ever relax to this record with its claustrophobic oppressive ambience aided by the menacing strings that swirl in and out of aural focus like glimpses of something in the corner of your eye which seems to be always present but you can never quite focus on. The chilling verbal sample of a lawyer grilling a gentlemen who took it upon himself to tie up and murder a family one by one in “Teeth That Leer Like Open Graves” which what is presumably an extract from an American televised court case would creepy enough by itself but under a barrage of hypnotic low pitched guitar lines and some threatening electronic babbling its absolutely terrifying.

Along the way the album adds what appears to be a choir of witches, samples from a number station and what I think may be (it was a bit low in the mix to definitively ID) extracts from the “Wearside Jack” tape. This is the sound of human misery and depravity entwined in a sordid trawl through the dark side of popular culture. This is some fucked up shit my friends and although you won’t listen to it all the time, its worth it for the few times you do.

Bongripper at Myspace

Bongripper is a stoner/doom/post-metal outfit from Chicago. All of the members are just in it for the love of music and don’t care about money; from what I read in another review of this album, one of them even leaked it onto the internet. The brand of sludgy psychedelia on Hippie Killer is excellent; it is almost entirely instrumental (with the exception of the track “Terrible Bear Attack”) I do have to admit that I didn’t enjoy the drumless, dronier tracks as much as the doomier ones, but the latter type tend to be much longer so it’s okay. I also thought the album went on a bit too long; at just under the maximum 80 minutes for a CD, it felt like the band was just trying too hard to fill out the entire thing. Also, I felt the vocals on “Terrible Bear Attack” were really annoying, and I was glad that track was just 3 minutes long.

Those are my only real quibbles with the album, though; it’s wonderfully atmospheric with crushing riffs, and I totally would’ve gotten high to this if my social skills were good enough to obtain weed. My personal favorite track was the 16-minute “Reefer Sutherland,” although most of the album was strong. Fans of this style of metal will love Hippie Killer.

Earth at Myspace

Earth’s masterpiece “Earth 2” was the archetype of all drone doom metal records and throughout their career as a band they’ve always done something new on each album. Again they’ve broken new ground as rather than go back to square one and create a new sound for “the bees made honey in the lions skull” they’ve built upon the approach they created for their previous album “Hex or the Infernal Printing Method” and improved it immensely.

“Hex or the Infernal Printing Method” was one damn good album in itself with more replay value than that youtube video of the toddler getting somersaulted into the air by a breakdancer but “the bees made honey in the lion’s skull” is a step beyond that. It takes the bizarre frontier ambience of that album and simultaneously refines and makes sound more alive with that sense of the great unconquered wilderness that you only get with latter day Earth records.

The clean minimalist riffs fused with the hypnotic percussion and subtle piano and organ creates a style of music that isn’t really metal but then again can’t really be anything else. If you add some distortion to the guitars and produce it in a different way you’d have something undeniably metal but then that would take away the beauty and ambiguity of this record. This is a bizarre sound to describe but the nearest I can get is the primal spirit of Black Sabbath co-existing with the classical avant-garde minimalism of Phillip Glass, the haunting country instrumentals of Duane Eddy and a nod towards the post rock of Slint. You can still hear the concepts that Earth introduced to metal and that were since taken up by Boris, SunnO))) and Cult of Luna to name but a few. It’s a Metal album but not as we know it Jim!