GNAW THEIR TONGUES - L'arrivée De La Terne Mort Triomphante CD

One of the extreme metal/industrial underground's most unique bands, Gnaw Their Tongues arises again with a new album of majestic, orchestral death-terror called L'arrivée de la Terne Mort Triomphante, a series of five hymns to the death shroud, a celebration of dissolution. This Dutch one-man avant black/doom/industrial band is responsible for two of the most chilling albums of abstract heaviness to have been released in recent years (An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood and All The Grand Magnificence Of Perversity, both from Crucial Blast), but with this new full-length, Gnaw Their Tongues peels back additional layers of it's bombastic horror to reveal moments of euphonic beauty more than we've heard on the previous albums.

This is still harrowing stuff, though. The album opens with soaring choirs of the damned and a cacophony of tortured shrieks and demonic howling underneath a crushing, sludgy bass riff and pounding elephantine drumming, total blackened doom that's soon joined by peals of dissonant strings and softer droning cellos and violins. As you get deeper into " L'arrivée de la terne mort triomphante", there are moments of severe beauty that emerge, brief passages of fragile piano and mournful strings, the soft crackle of ancient vinyl grooves and French horns. These moments repeat throughout the album, lots of symphonic shadow that drifts amidst the pounding industrial blackness, but they never last for long as the spiraling woodwinds and cyclical piano figures inevitably become subsumed into the blasts of malevolent orchestral might. The fearsome martial drums and brass fanfares at the beginning of "Les anges frémissent devant la mort" eventually evolve into stretches of abstract industrial percussive pummel over droning strings and organ, and then into a stunning cinematic finale. That's followed by the clanking doom, swarming black buzz and sheet-metal cacophony of "La mort dans toute son ineffable grandeur/splendeur", the most industrial-sounding track on the album. "Le Chant De La Mort" is a lurching, blown-out death march that shifts into an infernal dubbed-out dirge, and the closing track " Le trône blanc de la mort (de white throne of death)" rumbles through funereal classical drift, waves of horns, strings, percussion surging into a series of dark, mournful shapes at first, but are then shattered by pounding doom metal drums and wailing choir voices, becoming an utterly grim blackened dirge with distorted shrieking vocals that are wracked with agony, ending the album with a suffocating atmosphere of death. At its heaviest, it's like funeral doom bathed in modern orchestral music, a cross between Penderecki and pitch-black doom filth, pulverizing and intensely evil.

Of course, this is essential for fans of previous Gnaw Their Tongues albums, but it's equally recommended to fans of both abstract blackened weirdness of bands like Emit, Abruptum, and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, and the bleak Wagnerian industrial of In Slaughter Natives and Shinjuku Thief. Like the previous two Gnaw Their Tongues releases on Crucial Blast, this comes in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket (which is exclusive to the North American release of this disc). Released for North America and all other non-European/UK territories by Crucial Blast.