A View From Nihil — Dedicated To The Living Dead Vol 2
The release’s packaging is simple, yet effective - it's a sheet of white paper with minimal black text detailing the albums title and project name. And on the front cover is a single picture of the comic yet disturbing first zombie that appears in Dan o’Bannon’s tongue in cheek pastiche on the zombie movie 1984’s “The Return Of the Living Dead”.
The first untitled track starts out with a few minutes of quite chugging and active bass like blacked clouds of intensifying noise tone which peak then jump head first into an ultra nasty, darkly muffled and boiling maelstrom of seared tar black sustain ‘n’ drone. This 'wall' nicely pressers down on you in a grim oppressive manner for the it's just under ten minute runtime.
The second untitled track is the longer of the two and comes in just over the nineteen minute mark. This tracks starts out with ten seconds or so of gruesome cinematic tone raise, then it kicks in hard with a crusty & rolling avalanche ‘wall’ of thick, seared and un-impenetrable tone bombardment. Think of been traped underneath a bridge that being endless battered with an seemingly unstoppable avalanche of rocks, earth and debris- then you’ll be close what to expect here. The thick main ‘wall’ keeps very locked-in and unmoving through most of the tracks length, though there’s often a nice sliding up, down or acceleration of tone gain over the top of the violent cascading ‘wall’ of seared tone. Things strip down somewhat to a lower and battering roar at about the thirteen minute mark, then by the seventeen minute mark we’re once more back to a ‘wall’ of the thicker variety, before it thins out one more time for a reducing roar & judder stop. It’s a great track for most of it’s run time, I just felt the thinning out at around the thirteen minute mark didn’t really work- it seemed a little pointless and really took away from a lot of the tracks power and atmosphere.
So in summing-up this is a very worthwhile slice of HNW from one of the more know names in the Irish/ British ‘wall’ scene. It’s just a pity the ending of the second track rather lets the disc down- meaning this is a three kudos album instead of the four or possibly five kudos album it could have been.