
Black Leather Jesus - Smacked Red [Steinklang Industries - 2010]“Smacked Red” offers up five tracks and near on an hours worth of Black leather Jesus distinct ‘n’ perverse brand of thick boiling drone matter, screaming noise tonalities and overloaded industrial noise texturing. The five tracks on offer here run between just over the six minute mark and just shy of the eighteen minute mark a piece. This album as a whole really focus in on the more denser, punishing and unrelenting side of this Texas noise collectives gay sex and S&M influenced sound. Each track here is a brutal, thick and painfully lesson in overloaded industrial texturing and gruelling noise torture. We have chugging, roaring and raging noise drones which are sliced and raped by grating pitch accelerations. There are constant static downpours that are under fed by bleak ‘n’ stark industrial grainy ambience. Or grating ‘n’ teeth nerve slicing pitch blends mixed with whistling ‘n’ searing noise grinds.....There really is little or no let up through the whole length of the album, save for a few seconds of sleazy moan laden sythn texturing ‘n’ beats that appear towards the end of the album- these of course are taken from a gay porn movie soundtrack. So “Smacked Red” fairly typical brutal if not very varied album from this infamous noise collective which of course is centred around Texas noise head Richard Ramirez. Certainly not my favourite BLJ release, but it’s never the less a consistent enough album and I do quite like the way the tracks nicely mix together grating high pitched noise elements with almost harmonic and melodic like textures.      Roger Batty
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