Album of the day: Gnaw Their Tongues – All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity

Lovingly stolen from our dear friends at Aquarius Records / San Francisco:  We’re running out of superlatives, not to mention overly poetic descriptions of filth and blackness and depravity, to describe this one man cinematic black doom noise outfit.

But with every record, Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues), the man behind the beast, offers still more glimpses into what lurks below, or within, the sound an ever evolving cloud of black energy, rendered audible in shades of pummeling drum plod, of downtuned melting riffs, of howled and shrieked vocalizations, of Bernard Hermann like strings, all stretched and blurred and smeared and tangled into a veritable symphony of black bleak heaviness.

It’s difficult to classify, as every song tends to slip seamlessly from Wolf Eyes like industrial soundscapery, to Godflesh like metal machine crunch, to lurching Abruptum like black ritual, to almost classic sounding black metal buzz, to haunting cinematic dark ambience. Each of those elements fully realized, but then hurled into a black sonic vortex, where along with all the various other sounds and shapes and colors it gets mangled and tangles and spewed out on the other side as some almost living thing.
A music that is at once threatening and caustic, harrowing and hateful, but also weirdly melodic and almost classical sounding, a definite case of black(ened) beauty.

For those new to the filth encrusted soundworld that is Gnaw Their Tongues, a brief survey of song titles: ‘My Orifices Await Ravaging’, ‘The Stench Of Dead Horses On My Breath And The Vile Of Existence In My Hands’, ‘The Gnostic Ritual Consumption Of Semen As Embodiment Of Wounds Teared In The Soul’. The album title: All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity, the crown of thorns / blood splattered / bondage cover art, should all give hints as to what sort of sinister sound lurks inside, but again, all of that could point to something much more puerile and simplistic.

The sound of Gnaw Their Tongues is something altogether more refined, if a word like that could be applied to something this hellish, but it does sound refined, and composed, epic and majestic, for every bit of sluggish heaviness, there’s another part that is hauntingly beautiful, or strangely serene. It boggles the mind how someone creates music like this, it must come from some deep, dark, black part of the soul, and while we ourselves might fear such a place in ourselves, we can’t help but be enthralled and obsessed with the sort of sonic darkness that lurks in others.

Tags: album of the day, All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity, ambient, Aquarius Records, Burningworld Records, Crucial Blast, Dark Metal, drone

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2009 at 6:20 am and is filed under Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.