Gnaw Their Tongues — All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity

It’s like, how much more black could this latest release from Netherlands’ Maurice De Jong (or Mories) be? and the answer is none. None more black. For Gnaw Their Tongues, Mories has set himself the task of taking what is commonly understood to represent the most romantically sublime, terrifying and apocalyptic in music and sound – doom metal’s grinding drum and bass sludge, the panicked screaming of vulnerable souls in flight, cinematic serialist strings of Bernard Hermann or Leonard Rosenman, and choral requiems of the 19th century – and blending it all in a cacophonous mass that goes one louder, or rather one darker, than anything that has gone before.

The overall effect of the album is like a ride on a ghost train and, as with most fairground attractions, the first ride is the most affecting – pressing play is the equivalent of your carriage slamming through the double doors, plunging you into darkness, heavy with expectation. The hellish fun doesn’t ever take long to reach a critical mass as (s)low end bass lines accompanying ritualistic percussion are immersed in screeching violins, feedback and brass fanfares, while fearful screams reverberate, building scenes of malevolent, unstoppable destructive forces slowly, yet methodically, wreaking carnage in their wake. For the most part, these elements are brought together at similar levels so no single sound dominates, creating an obscured, unsettling mix, whose heavy riffs and cinematic flourishes remain buried somewhat in an almost pantomimic cavalcade of decadent devilry.

Mories’ choice of one of Flaubert’s prose poems as ‘found lyrics’, downloaded from librivox.org, corroborates a strong disposition to romanticism. A conversation, between Death, weary of his work and immortality, a consoling Satan and a dethroned Nero at the end of his life, neatly represents Gnaw Their Tongues’ aesthetic of “the abyss of oblivion” and “paroxysms of rage, rivers of blood, or maddened frenzy” while wallowing in the flowery language adopted by the most epic of historical dramas. In fact, epic is a fitting description of Mories’ achievement, best demonstrated on the title track that layers pummelling drums with a huge, moody bass riff, portentous horns and a vast, heavenly choir to create a majestic, rising terror whose climactic scenes are full to the brim with spectacle and grandeur. Pity then that the puerile sleeve designed by Mories falls back on hackneyed images of women in bondage when the music is more befitting of a triptych of Hieronymous Bosch or a Cecil B DeMille finale.