Album of the day: Blut – Grief and Incurable Pain

Lovingly pinched from The Obelisk: Apart from a sample at the beginning of the first of its two tracks that’s soon swallowed whole by a distortion tsunami and some screams peppered throughout both tracks, there is no discernible speech anywhere within the just under 70 minutes of Blut’s second full-length CD, Grief and Incurable Pain.

The initials-only British duo (hailing from Dorset and Bournemouth / Poole) of multi-instrumentalist / vocalist S.M. on drums, guitar, noise and vocals and N.B. on bass and noise have released a slew of cassettes and have more forthcoming, but I’m inclined to think of Grief and Incurable Pain (released by Portuguese imprint Bubonic Productions) as a sequel to 2010’s Ritual and Ceremony , if only for the structures of the two titles and the fact that both albums are so unabashedly misanthropic, wrapped around Blut’s well-advertised slogan, “drop out and fucking kill.”

That said, Grief and Incurable Pain also steps beyond its predecessor in both atmosphere and actual length, its two component songs, ‘Death.Mourning.Famine (2)’ and ‘Wolf Shall Dwell with Lamb (Edit)’, clocking in at a feedback-soaked 38:17 and 31:37, respectively.

Much of that time is devoted purely to noise and droning, which isn’t so much a radical departure from Blut’s prior long-player as much as a development of it. Consistent in both ambience and visual art, Grief and Incurable Pain also maintains the ultra-challenging sonics of Ritual and Ceremony, while also pushing them further into a crushing psychedelic black hole and offering maddening Sound City-amped tonal thickness, unrelenting drones, searing screams and abrasive feedback.

Blut have taken the SunnO))) format and molded it into something more their own, and in that, the drums – intermittent though they are – play a big role. 18 minutes into ‘Death.Mourning.Famine (2)’, mired in washing layers of noise, it’s the periodic crashes from S.M.’s drumming that’s providing any grasp on rhythm whatsoever, and six minutes later, when the drums are gone and it’s just sparse, morose guitar notes running over a Hadrian’s Wall of low-end rumble and tape loops, the affect is completely different – well, as different as two different times of lung-collapsing aural misery can be, anyhow.

Continue reading: The Obelisk » Blog Archive » Blut, Grief and Incurable Pain: Diagnosis Terminal.

Listen to Death.Mourning.Famine (2) edit down below.

Tags: Album of the day, Blut, Bubonic Productions, drone, Grief and Incurable Pain, JJ Koczan, The Obelisk

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011 at 1:40 pm and is filed under 2011, 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.