GOAT

Dead Gods Feed The Land is the first new release to come along in years from the long-running American harsh noise artist Goat, and marks the return of one of my favorite U.S noise outfits. As one half of black industrial duo Goatvargr, Andy O'Sullivan has had a hand in crafting some of the most vicious black metal influenced industrial music of the past decade. As Goat, though, he traffics in pure, unfettered noise, blasting electronic chaos delivered at assaultive levels of volume and intensity. He's been creating this sort of extreme electronic noise under the Goat name since the late 90s, appearing on splits alongside artists like Folkstorm, KK Null, The Rita, Sixes, and Steel Hook Prostheses, as well as releasing some spectacularly abrasive noise tapes through his own Philosophy Shop label. With Dead Gods, O'Sullivan unleashes a firestorm of electronic noise and brutal bass-frequency abuse, the tracks splattered with rapid-fire FX-pedal violence and surreal, morbid soundscapes, and blasts of vicious junknoise carnage that threaten to leave your speakers tattered and torn. Dead Gods starts off with the pulsating electrical thrum of "Of The Process And Transformation", the first few minutes taken over by a minimal crackling throb like that of a feedback loop coming off of a malfunctioning mixing board, a slow whirring hypnotic sound that crackles and pulses before erupting into an assault of harsh overdriven distortion. From there, the tape descends into continuously ear-rupturing, mind-melting blasts of violent noise, each track unleashing a maelstrom of churning low-end rumble, sputtering spastic distortion and signal mutation, the whole affair fairly formless and focused around a brutal HNW aesthetic. These crushing noisescapes are filled with spurts of broken mechanical rhythm and grinding synth-squelch, the tracks sometimes becoming possessed by some fragmented deformed rhythmic quality before exploding back into barbaric electronic vomit. Blasts of psychedelic black-hole synthesizer noise bore through Goat's crackling, feedback-drenched pandemonium, and huge vast oceanic swells of subterranean rumble drift up slowly from the depths of tracks like " The Forest Labyrinth", or slip into massive avalanches of deafening junk-noise destruction. The last track on the a-side, "Drowning In Shadows", is the first real respite from the relentless sonic carnage of the preceding tracks, a mysterious sound-collage of random chimes and improvised percussion, a broken stringed melody like some brain-damaged bluegrass lament playing in the background, surrounded by the distant rumble of thunder and strange, menacing chittering noises. The other side is mostly comprised of long-form HNW pieces, starting with the monolithic chaos-wall of "Blackened By Time"'s roaring static-drenched squelch, continuing through the monotonous black static trance of " Written In Ice", and closing with the psychedelic concrete-mixer noise hypnosis and photon-blast obliteration of " A Heavy Silence"; the entire side centers around that heavy HNW aesthetic, with long tracks of crushing, smoldering distortion and harsh metallic skree at the center of everything, but with more activity and fluctuation going on than the lifeless, lightless dead zones of artists like Vomir. Recommended to fans of extreme distorto-crushers as The Rita, Cherry Point, and Black Leather Jesus. (label info)