Gnaw Their Tongues

One of the extreme metal / industrial underground's most unique bands, Gnaw Their Tongues returns with a new album of majestic, orchestral death-terror called L'Arrivee de la Terne Mort Triomphante, a series of five hymns to the death shroud, a celebration of dissolution. This Dutch one-man band is responsible for two of the most chilling albums of abstract heaviness in recent years (An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood and All the Grand Magnificence of Perversity, both on Crucial Blast), but with this new full-length, Gnaw Their Tongues peels back additional layers of horror to reveal moments of euphonic beauty. L'Arrivee de la Terne Mort Triomphante opens with the soaring choir of the damned--a cacophony of tortured shrieks and demonic howling underneath a crushing, sludgy bass riff and pounding elephantine drumming. The blackened doom is soon joined by peals of dissonant strings and softer droning cellos and violins. Deeper into the album, moments of severe beauty emerge: brief passages of fragile piano and mournful strings, the soft crackle of ancient vinyl grooves and French horns. Symphonic shadows drift throughout L'Arrivee de la Terne Mort Triomphante amidst the pounding industrial blackness, but they never last for long as the spiraling woodwinds and cyclical piano figures are inevitably subsumed into the blasts of malevolent orchestral might. At its heaviest, it's funeral doom bathed in modern orchestral music, a cross between Penderecki and pitch-black filth, pulverizing and intensely evil. Like the previous two Gnaw Their Tongues releases on Crucial Blast, L'Arrivee de la Terne Mort Triomphante comes in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket (exclusive to the North American release of this disc).