Artist: Wretched Fixation
Title: Forced Projection
Type: EP
Label: Digital / Self released cassette
Unless you’ve just joined us you probably realise by now that I do enjoy fucked up music a little here and there. You know, the kind of stuff where you can kind of see what it started out as but somewhere along the line passed through a warp gate and reappeared mangled almost beyond recognition except for maybe that one eye… Also for bands who lurch out of nowhere into my space and I can’t even recall how or why any more.
Not that it matters.
The duo of Juggernaut (also in RABM band Skvm) and Subinflictor have produced frankly a bitter blackened mess. A mess in the most glorious, deliberate and superb way. Look at the cover and brace yourself…
‘Verminous Hatred Of The Omni-Headed Succugiest’ emergest in bleeps and feedback and then a deluge of blackened death noise. But what suddenly becomes shockingly clear as the flailing claws and teeth slash and tear, there is somewhere beneath this a real structure. It snaps and twists for sure but the drive, the riff buried under distortion and lo-fi fury has shape and worse still intent. A breid moment of it being held and then the mass lurches forward again and devours the corpse. It is so ugly its beautiful; the wailing voices, the lack or remorse, the brutal dismantling of anything approaching melody. The most beautiful, intentionally fucked up thing I’ve heard since that fantastic Rougarou release last year.
‘Forsaking The Human Soul (Phantasmic Domination)’ by weird and horrific contrast has a fierce, lo-fi raw black metal structure from the off. It’s headlong, howling wind stuff. A riff riven from blood soaked black cloth and death metal veins. It skips the rails here and there, onto juddering rust encrusted death metal rails as though veering down a branch line in Hell and it works so bloody well, it passes through an eerie, still, dimension before emerging slowly into this one as though tearing the caul of birth to thrash around in a bloody mess on the floor.
‘Bog Bodies (Sentient Curse)’ mutters and hums and whispers into half life. A quiet moment of buzzing, hissing and filth gradually rising in urgency and volume the closer you tread to the corpse until it is too late and the hollow curse wraps around you.
‘Hallway Of Degradation’ drills down, a monomaniacal riff garlanded with howls and gargles, dark and ghastly like early Portal not played backwards. It has such a grim, unrelenting atmosphere, a ‘you’re already damned and we are just getting started on you’ grind against the soul. This is the moment whn you realise youre life has gone so very, very wrong…
‘Following The Trail Of Blood To The heart Of The Mansion…’ beats a quickened path, skeletal in some ways, drums pattering, guitars striking until they fade, tortured notes leading the way deeper, the walls fracturing and distorting until finally the howling centre is reached, the tempestuous and undulating riff rotten at the heart of it all. Where everything devolves into insanity.
‘….Ascending The Birth Canal’ is a crawl of screeching guitars claw marks. Each motion punctuated by a single bitter drum hammer. Forward back into darkness. Noise, distortion, quiet as the centre is reached. An ominous low buzz and then the ruptured riff, the drum blows, the howling voice. The darkness coming in like thick black blood choking you. A curdling, drowning feeling until.
Nothing.
Absence.
This is a horrible, demonic howl and rage. It crashes and it claws and is thick with something which might be blood or something far far worse. It lurches from one shape to the next, unexpected and disorienting and beyond ugly. I love it.
This is your fix of true black/death horror, right here.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 