Control - The Great Divide.

Control – The Great Divide – LP/Download – Malignant Records – 2021

https://malignantrecs.bandcamp.com/album/the-great-divide

https://www.malignantrecords.com/

https://control-exsanguinate.bandcamp.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAEfZjFOyfk

        1.    For the Ashes.

        2.    In Ruin.

        3.    Greed.

        4.    Annihilation.

        5.    The Great Divide.

        6.    Grim Resolve.

After the release of the impressive live at Maschinenfest III tape earlier this year, we now have The Great Divide. This is the first new Control studio album in three years, it is also the 14^th Control album since the project started releasing in 1999. Control is Thomas Garrison; Thomas Garrison is Control.

Subtle drones are rained on by distortion as For the Ashes begins, it is less than a minute until bigger drones build the sound up. The vocals are unmistakably the Control voice as it also rains down on the track. The crunching rhythm that builds in the background combined with the repeated vocal lines gives it a battering ram effect. In Ruin has a more infected sound, the synths seem to melt and the sound bubbles and splatters nastily, this is real Death Industrial murk. There is ambient churning and an Industrial urgency in the alarm like synths that are buried by the swamp of sound - I admire how grim Control allows itself to get. Diseased sounds continue Greed, the vocal returns and takes the lead, the sound is sickened as the Death Synths go off at times. Greed sounds like decomposition.

Halfway through this review, I decided to take a break and watch some Control live performances. Garrison seems to build up layers of Noise behind his set up, let that grow and blast out alone while he comes out and assaults the audience with his inhuman vocals. This is very much how he works on albums, the sound builds and Garrison backed by it becomes a bigger force.

Back to the album and onto it’s latter half, ambient bleakness echoes as if in a tunnel, explosive distortion booms continuously. The synth hums and drones kick in as if to act as a call to arms for other noises to fire off, they do. Garrison’s vocal explodes at the listener making Annihilation a hellish storm of noise abuse. I like how Control builds up distortion and crackle to allow the Synthesizers to really resonate over the work, the vocal is less shouted and more spoken over it – it is as if both want to take the lead. The synthesizers feel like metal being scraped by metal, it adds discomfort to the track. The resonating drones continue as murky noise and vocals collide with it on Grim Resolve. The vocal here is thicker and splatters across the work, the slow rhythmic feel is given by a sample of metal being hit.

This album is a bold display of sound; it seems to thrive in the murkier work, allowing certain elements to cut through this. This is an impressive album by someone clearly at the height of their powers. The Great Divide can be purchased through Malignant Records Bandcamp or their website.

Coventry Soul, 2021.

Urschmerz - Misery Plan

Album: Misery Plan

Artist: Urschmerz

Label: Malignant Records

Catalogue no: TumorCS128

Tracklist:

     1.      Hate

     2.      People

     3.      Deny

     4.      Birth

     5.      Reject

     6.      Life

     7.      Death

Malignant Records is one of those labels who possess an instinctive grasp of what makes ‘good’ music, and I can tell you now that their latest release, on cassette only, is an absolute blinder. These seven tracks by Urschmerz (which translates to, appropriately enough in this case, Primal Pain) take me right back to the foundations of the industrial genre – massed noise, blistering attack that goes beyond even black/death metal, scorching nuclear blast that not only threatens to strip your skin off but comes close to actually doing so. This is what Hell would be like – industrialised slaughter and war, institutionalised torture and hate, illimitable pain and agony.

‘Hate’, the first track, doesn’t bother with any introductions, instead going for the sonic jugular right from the get-go. Pounding granular blasts, jet engines on full throttle, and a seething bassline lands right in your lap, then grabs your ears, and refuses to let go. The pace is relentlessly malevolent, never letting up until you’re overwhelmed. This is warfare, chaotic and completely unstoppable. Track, two, ‘People’, piles on more anger and agony, adding to and weighing us down with the sheer black misanthropy of it all. A cold blast of pale wind blows in from the depths of some deep pit, only to be followed by some kind of mechanical beast crawling up out of it. Its only intention is ruination, decimation, and annihilation. It feeds on our fear, our crushed bones and torn flesh, and sups on the blood that flows in gushing rivulets.

‘Deny’ is a grainy bass onslaught, pitched against what sounds like a lone flute that gradually evolves into full orchestral music and choirs, that insistent and overpowering graininess a solid wave destined to overwhelm and smother any last vestiges of ‘culture’. This is an army, not of soldiers, but of hellish nature throwing all its vast weight of seismic and granitic solidity at us. There is truly nothing we can do in the face of this aggression.

‘Birth’ comes next, a gargantuan pummelling of rumbling drone upon which rides bell-like minor tones, again with more than a whiff of chaotic roiling about it, a portrait perhaps of the cancerous thing we call life that we all so desperately cling to as if it means something. The thesis as I read it is that life has no meaning, that it is in fact just one endless sea of suffering and degradation: if it does have a meaning, then surely it’s that it’s all a sick joke played on us, and yet no one’s laughing.

 ‘Reject’ pummels in on a wave of old-style industrial/tribalistic drumming, a massive call to turn our backs on the lives we’ve created for ourselves in order to convince ourselves that everything we do has purpose. Slashing guitar attack weaves in and out of the pounding rhythm, adding even more fuel to a fire that’s been burning from time immemorial. Moreover, this isn’t the type of conflagration that we can subdue anytime soon. ‘Life’ follows swiftly, an atomic detonation of sound and concussion accompanied by a battalion-sized guitar assault, pulverising and grinding all into dust and atoms. This is what life is like – a behemoth intent on crushing and trampling, reducing every constituent into meaningless particulate, abrading our hopes and dreams, cursing us with pain and sorrow, and laughing at us all the while. Once everything has crumbled and turned to dust, what is left?

‘Death’ seems to be Urschmerz’s answer. If life is the question, then perhaps death is the answer, but does it solve anything? Judging by the acidic distorted chords of Urschmerz’s guitar the answer is probably that it’ll be more of the same, except on a different plane altogether. The pressure of life is seemingly increased in death, a lightless, airless ‘existence’ that subsumes the human spirit and subjects it to even more pain and agony than it endured in life. At last, of course, the punchline to the joke has been revealed – suffering is closely followed by further suffering until the substance of the soul itself dissolves into the everlasting night of No-Thing.

A bleak album then, appropriately so for a set of seven pieces delineating the reality of the bleak existence that is our lot on Earth. One cannot deny the qualities inherent in this release: the sheer power and weight of the argument, the lack of anything remotely resembling light (and by extension, hope), the utter uselessness of all that we as a species do in order to make ourselves feel and appear important. It’s a sweeping summation of homo sapiens as a species, and in seven fell swoops systematically destroys all pretentions. Having said that, this is an album that is magnificent in its transparent nihilism as well as being absolutely glorious in its complete dismissal of the feats and triumphs that mankind is wont to tout, instead laying bare the hollowness at the premise’s core. Better yet is the philosophy contained in its hidden message:

Hate People, Deny Birth, Reject Life. Death.

Available as a cassette from Malignant Records here:

https://www.malignantrecords.com/releases/6631

It can also be obtained (along with a download version) from the Malignant Bandcamp page:

https://malignantrecs.bandcamp.com/album/misery-plan

Psymon Marshall 2019. 

Monocube - Substratum

Album: Substratum

Artist: Monocube

Label: Malignant Records/Cyclic Law

Catalogue no: TumorCD120/137^th Cycle

Tracklist:

     1.      Sehnsucht

     2.      Prima Materia

     3.      Luft

     4.      Visiones V

     5.      The Opposite of Nadir (feat. Antti Litmanen)

     6.      Opaque

     7.      Actio in Distans

     8.      Limen (feat. Visions)

Yes, you read that correctly – this album is a co-release between Malignant Records and Cyclic Law, two very fine purveyors of dark and industrial ambient. Monocube broadcast their brand of darkness from the Ukraine and on this outing are assisted by contributions from Antti Litmanen of Arktau Eos and Frederic Arbour’s Visions (he also manages Cyclic Law).

Shake the bones, inhale the sulphurous vapours, blow the bone trumpets, stare into the sacred black flame dancing on the altar. The eight darkly ambient/occult tracks here have emerged from deep underground, from the shadowed spaces where celebrants enact ancient forbidden rites in the deepest and most secret of primordial caverns: places where the gods were worshipped before mankind had even come into existence. The sounds and textures here are truly subterrestrial, the exhalations of entities far beyond our abilities to comprehend. Washes of whispering winds and voices surface from even deeper regions, emanating from times and dimensions separated from us by vast temporal distances. As lazy as it may be for a reviewer to borrow a[n overused] label but the term Lovecraftian is perhaps the nearest I can get to encapsulating the aura this music stifles us with.

Even if it can be labelled thusly, perhaps it’s not the nightmare visions of the creatures themselves that are being conjured up – it’s the terror inherent in the idea that there are those humans who are willing to manifest them into material existence in the first place. These are the agitated harbingers announcing their imminent arrival. The poisonous, suffocating vapours seeping from the fissures beneath our feet are highly disturbed, their effects distorting and twisting. The weight of the imminent catastrophe to be visited on our reality crushes sanity, and heavy black atmospheres build up into gargantuan waves ready to break and submerge all. The world will drown, and the light will be extinguished.

Monocube are either issuing a warning or an invitation. Either way, it speaks of a bleak, dismal future, where the only light available is from a dim, cold, and dying sun. Even the stars will flee from the sight of a devastated earth, and a starless night will be our only companion. Warmth will abandon us, and in its place will be an imperative for survival. The prognosis, however, remains grim.

Essential listening for those times when you suffer the nihilist blues – this will set you straight back along the path of blissful doom and gloom. 

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Dødsmaskin - Ødelagt.

Album: Ødelagt

Artist: Dødsmaskin

Label: Malignant Records

Catalogue no: TumorLP125

Tracklist:

     1.      Svart Tundra

     2.      Jernguden

     3.      Det Som Ødelegger

     4.      Isolasjon

     5.      Kaldere Nå

Dødsmaskin, which translates to Death Machine, is a Norwegian duo, and this is their fourth full-length album, and here Ødelagt (Broken) is not so much about in your face industrial chaos as it is about stealthily creeping doom and death, first glimpsed from afar – and it’s about the quieter gulfs in between just as much as the noise itself.

This vinyl LP is divided into two very distinct halves, atmospherically-speaking. Side One leans more toward industrial/death ambient, starting with ‘Svart Tundra’ (Black Tundra): vast, cavernous echo chambers secreted somewhere away from the prying eyes and sensibilities of brightly-lit daylight normality, a place where the minutest of clicks, scrapes, and crackles take on an intensely black, malignant immensity and weight, soul-crushing and life extinguishing. Rats scurry, insects squirm amongst filth and decay, and the air is a miasma of disease and corruption. ‘Jernguden’ (Iron God) begins scratchily, before a dark rain pours down heavily, drenching us in decomposition and disintegration. Ending the first side we have ‘Det Som Ødelegger’ (That Which Destroys) which announces its intentions by warning us with a shrill whistle right from the start – which then evolves into a hovering death, inches away from our heads, its whirring blades looking for a taste of blood, flesh, bone, and sinew. What makes it even more terrifying is that we’re engulfed in a putrid darkness, a black-hole so dark that not even light can penetrate, and we can only detect its presence from the fetid stink these machines exude.

Side Two is a different creature altogether. The emphasis here is on a lighter atmosphere, but nevertheless the darkness hasn’t quite fled. It’s more structured, less reliant on abstraction and more on a sweeping sense of the cinematic and visual. Indeed, on the opening track ‘Isolasjon’ (Google translates it as Insulation, but perhaps Isolation would be better) we’re treated to shimmering ringing tones carrying an actual tune on its back before degrading into an endlessly-building seismic wave of granular noise that threatens to overwhelm. Just before it breaks, it abruptly disappears totally, leaving a ringing, deafening, wondering silence in its wake. As a finale, ‘Kaldere Nå’ (Cooler Now) brings us short, spooky, repetitive guitar phrases which sound as if they’re ghostly voices out of the distance – are they being sung by someone or are they merely recordings from the past, a past consigned to the past like ashes in a wind?

This wonderful album is awash with dankness, decay, filth, and degradation, even in its ‘lighter’ moments. What it says to me is that death doesn’t have to come for us in the dark – it can claim us on the brightest of days, at the happiest of times. In short, just remember to keep your eyes open.

Psymon Marshall 2019.

Wet Nurse -Thanatosis

Album: Thanatosis

Artist: Wet Nurse

Label: Malignant Records

Catalogue  no: TumorCD124

Tracklist:

      1.      Focal Point

      2.      Sacred Spring

      3.      A Promise was Made

      4.      Sexual Vertigo

      5.      Liminal Flesh

      6.      The End of a Rope

      7.      Glove Anesthesia

      8.      Divisible Organs

      9.      The Opening of the Mouth

    10.  Stitched Nerve Drapery

    11.  Tapeworm Finds its Host

    12.  The Exit Anthem

    13.  Salvation Comes in Waves of Pain

Once in a while an album comes along and grabs you by the throat. This latest from Canada’s Wet Nurse did just that for me – thirteen tracks of condensed malignancy, pain, and trauma, utterly bleak and uncompromising. The starting point is painted in black, and the endpoint is an even deeper shade of black. And what you get in between is a soul not merely laid bare, but ripped asunder.

Thanatosis, or Apparent Death, is the state that resembles death. It occurs in nature as a defence mechanism in some animals and insects, but it can also appear in humans who have suffered extreme brutality and abuse beyond the pale. If ever there was an apt title for an album of harsh, obtuse, and bitter inhuman paeans to affliction, mental collapse, and agony, then this is it.  

What happens when you don’t have much left, but you still want to scream your rage? You chain that rage to stripped back, sparse, grinding and pulsing stabs of electronics, garnished with both distorted, indecipherable lyrics, and the unalloyed, untreated spoken word. The very fact that each of these pieces is composed of very little structurally means that their power is all the more pronounced– spite and venom don’t have to be shouted to be raw and immediate. All that’s needed is the torture chamber assortment of power tool sounds that we have here to experience the filth, grime, and cesspit swamp of personal degradation and social debasement.

This is grim at its grimmest. From beginning to end there’s no let-up, and its maladjustment never rises above the dungeon floor. This isn’t a criticism, but praise – its sparseness and relentlessness, along with the frigidity and emptiness at its core, is what captivated my attention. And perhaps the most pertinent aphorism in this essay, the one possible escape route, is contained in the title of the final song, ‘Salvation Comes in Waves of Pain’ – shades of the film Martyrs and the nihilist philosophy that runs through it, perhaps. Anger has never sounded so sharp, so precisely surgical, or so relevant.

One to bludgeon myself with again and again - every man has to have a hobby.

Psymon Marshall 2019