Nothing like some updates from your good ol' noise depot Crucial Blast to make the week go by...

Hear you go - some news on some of the most tumultuous, torrid, turbulent bands on the face of the planet. Get out the Old Granddad and a mug and settle in for some disturbance....

 

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Black Elk  Always A Six, Never A Nine

 

Black Elk has just wrapped up their new album Always A Six, Never A Nine, the CD for which is scheduled to come out on October 21st.

Always A Six, Never A Nine is the second album and the follow up to the 2006 self-titled debut from Portland, OR aggro wreckers Black Elk, whose psychotic brand of crushing, noise-rock influenced heaviosity is a return to the unhinged underground rock force of bands like Jesus Lizard, Melvins, Black Flag and Hammerhead. This new album features ten songs of seething weirdness, with the dissonant, crushing riffage, lunging rhythmic push and awesome freaked out, Yow-esque vocals of singer Tom Glose that made their debut a fave among anyone who remembered the days when Amphetamine Reptile ruled the underground rock scene, but with some interesting new elements (bleak guitar ambience, piano, etc.) that add new shadows to Black Elk's ferocious sound. Always A Six, Never A Nine will be coming out through Crucial Blast on October 21st and will be available as both a CD in deluxe gatefold packaging and digital download, with a West Coast tour to coincide with the release.

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NOISM ± CD debut out August '08

 

Crucial Blast is releasing the first official CD release from the Japanese glitch/shred duo Noism, which follows up their appearance on the Relapse Records compilation Drummachinegun from 2006.

 

Formed by guitarist Yoshiro Hamazaki and programmer Tomoyuki Akiyama in 1999 in Tokyo, Noism focuses on ridiculously complex and spastic death/grind instrumentals using programmed drums that are cut up and spliced back together into impossible rhythms, a million brain-melting riffs and dissonant shredding, all of which is chopped up and processed into abstract death blasts that defy physics. This twelve-song, twenty-one minute disc features a unique, glitched-out chop shop of Planet Mu-esque beats delivered at truly meth'd levels of chaos and fused with sweeping technical death metal guitar insanity. This one is recommended for those fans of extreme, way-out avant-guitar spazz and absurdly technical deathgrind. ± will be available in stores 8/26/08.

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limited-edition CD from UK whitenoise rockers Geisha coming soon.

 

It's been in the works for awhile, but we're finally announcing the release of the new CD from Bristol's Geisha, which follows their awesome Mondo Dell'Orrore CD that we released in 2006. Titled Die Verbrechen Der Liebe (taken from de Sade, I presume), this hour-long, six track monolith follows Geisha into a psychedelic black storm, their blown-out and raw rock infused with a bone-rattling recording and covered in a thick sheen of white noise and gritty distortion. As with their previous album, the spirit of seminal noise rock / sludge rock (think Cherubs, Melvins, My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything for coordinates) is combined with violent, chaotic NOISE and tainted with blurred VHS cassette visions and vague allusions to BDSM, and then jammed through an orgone accumulator, forming a ferocious, crushing rock beast that reveals it's powerful hooks and melodies underneath the churning distorted bass rumble and sludgemetal riffage , blasts of psychedelic drone-noise and corrosive skree, percussive pummel, and deranged singing. The sound is immense, and the first five tracks on Die Verbrechen Der Liebe deliver Geisha's in-the-red heaviness and hooks in surplus. "Prelude To Amber Pays The Rent", "A Wilderness, Except By Sight", "Sportsfister" - every one is a crusher.

But then Geisha pull out the monstrous thirty-minute, thirty-five second closer "Theme From Diana", and the tone changes completely. This track is a re-working of a "metal percussion" set that Geisha originally performed live several years ago, and it begins as a slowly building fog of voices and effects and shimmering metal that blooms into an expanse of droning, fx-heavy guitar, looping samples, cosmic effects, and improvised percussion. It's a kind of rumbling industrial dronescape that stretches out forever, until suddenly in the last few minutes the drifting drones and psychedelic guitars and sampled voices suddenly explode in an immolating nuclear blast of overdriven, speaker-annihilating noise and the track immediately, terrifyingly changes shape into a monstrous lumbering noise-metal dirge that bulldozes out of your speakers, whooshing Hawkwind effects swooping overhead, the band knotted together into a white-hot blast of ultra heavy riffage, distortion, and a wall of percussive force. "Diana" is one of the most crushing pieces of music that I have ever heard from Geisha, like some majestic and brutal conglom of Swans, Skullflower, Merzbow, and Burmese forged into a destructive space-metal supernova.

Crucial Blast is releasing the CD version of Die Verbrechen Der Liebe in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, packaged in a full-color gatefold jacket. The CD will be available in stores on October 21st.

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Wildildlife's Peas Feast 12" Coming November 2008

 

Crucial Blast will be releasing a vinyl edition of Wildildlife's Peas Feast, slated for a late October release to coincide with the bands upcoming Fall tour.

 

The band released this EP as a handmade CD-R that has been sold at shows over the past year, but the songs on Peas Feast are so cool that we wanted to give this a proper vinyl documentation. We are also planning to include a digital dropcard in the vinyl package that will allow you to download the tracks from the Peas Feast EP as well as access some additional bonus music that will be exclusive to the digital download. The Peas Feast 12" will be coming out around late October. Wildildlife's tour dates will be announced soon.

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Portland's Trees will be taking their organic funeral doom treachery on the road for a few shows in September. More details will be available soon on the shows.

 

09/12/2008 Someday Lounge - Portland, OR w/House of Low Culture
09/20/2008 The Comet - Seattle, WA w/Rabbits
09/25/2008 *TBA - San Francisco, CA w/Thrones, Silentist
09/26/2008 Hemlock - San Francisco, CA w/Burmese
09/27/2008 *TBA - Santa Cruz/Los Angeles, CA w/Thrones, Silentist
09/28/2008 Stork Club - Oakland, CA w/Laudanum