Artist: Cattle Hammer
Title: Dark Thoughts With Lights Out
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Road To Masochist
Everyone’s got that one mate, don’t they? You know, the one that gets you into trouble as well as make you laugh your ass off. And some of them even demand that their sausages are served on a velvet cushion…*cough*. But who also always has bands on hand that are worth checking out at the very least. So this is all the fault of my mate Pete. And probably his dog Barney who is the brains….
Cattle Hammer are fucking miserable. In the best way. I mean the main guy is Duncan Wilkins who you should know with a long, long line of misery behind him via Mistress, Fukpig, Make Them Die Slowly… so at least you have been warned. Joined here by J Wyles, D Von Donovan and I Cartwright, Cattle Hammer came to pummel. This is technically their debut as the previous 70minute, two part ‘Methlehem’ is actually described as a demo on that there Bandcamp. And its scary so this is a fine easy place to start.
Four tracks. Forty Minutes. Grimness.
‘Gloom Sower’ opens with intent. A thin guiitar strum utterly demolished by an apocalypse level, doom riff from Hell. A high, slow melody begins over the top, ponderous as the riff and the twisted gargled vocals come in. Doom sludge. Blackened doom. Misery in every note seeping out of every pore. But weirdly the thick vein of doom is shocking in its intensity. Anyone remember the epic Warhorse album ‘As Heaven Turns To Ash’? Well slowly push even deeper down any of that albums semblance of groove and you’re getting there. Its completely, utterly, compelling stuff. Like watching some brain rotted giant shamble slowly towards you out of some pit of rotted wooden houses and thick tar. And yet, somehow… it has that..um… hint of groove. Just about. If you really want to get down in the muck to search.
Damn.
‘Rotting’ just kind of surges out in a rasp of brief distortion. It’s all Pain, that’s what you earned, that’s what you deserve….the grotesquely distorted voice tells us and the downtuned, ghastly mountain of sludge slowly begins the beating. The voice wanders somewhere in the background, haunting the torture room. The gargling, rasping, vomting snarls that erupt as ‘accompanyment’ are the sonic sound of a festering wound opening up, pus leaking, ichor dribbling… You get nearly a quarter of an hour of this. Unrelenting, pitiless, horror. But Cattle Hammer are viciously talented torturers. The slab dragging riff has shifts, moments that might lead to relief only to be snuffed out in front of you. Hints of a tune that becomes a false hope and you wake back in a room out of ‘Martyrs’ finale. There is no sense of rage which makes it simply worse. This is almost calm, deliberate horror upon horror.
‘Watchmen, Alone’ is weird, an opening echoing rattle and noise, a brief moan. Percussion of things falling. Some unsettling blips, distortion, background music… Strangled moans of pain. Then, almost as relief, the riff at Khanate speed more oozing than crawling. I keep waiting for the strangled voice to force out the words inside, things viral… but this isn’t that. This is different not sinister, this is corrupted beyond all redemption. It is not so much played as hawked up in one blood black ball of phlegm after another. It sounds as though every chord is played through pain and insane determination to be rid of it.
‘Body Puzzle’offers no solution. I cannot survive this pain. I can’t fix this… It is a monument to failure, a soul slashed to ribbons and crushed to useless meat with the insurmountable horror of the task before them. The noblest of intentions utterly shredded by the rusted barbed wire wrapped around reality. Riffs are wrenched out of some bloody pit, twisted into a thin noise, released back into their blackened doom form to pummel once again.
Goddamn this is an ordeal. This album is those stains in an abandoned building you don’t want to know what they are but the single glance has your imagination hurtling down into the darkest of places. Decay, pain, failure, utter failure. There are no solutions, only problems.
Blackened, twisted, primitive doom of the darkest order. Utterly bleak. Utterly defeated. Utterly essential.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 