Savage Cross - Abyss of the Flesh Ouroboros [Altar Of Waste - 2012]Richmond, Virginia based Savage Cross brew up a stumbling, brooding & fucked-up mixture of noised-up blacked metal, blacked noise, and HNW. Behind the project is Evan Craig of creative HNW project Ritual Stance, and this is the projects first physical full length release after a few digital only releases. The CDR offers up a single just over hour track, for the first eighteen or so minutes the track locks into a careening 'n' damaged mixture of: drum lined mid-paced blacked metal, slowed ‘n’ swirled blacked guitar texturing, more clamouring up beat blacked metal attacks, huge sounding guttural vocals ‘n’ moans / creepy modified guttural cackling, & blacked sustained noise trails. Everything seems so messed-up/ blurred together into a truly fucked-up blacked noise soup, with little or no real song structure….it just seems stager, suddenly speed-up, or slow down as it wants, which causes a great grim disorientating feel. At the 17.30 point the track strips right down to a distant drone sustained, spread out guttural moans & grunts- feeling almost like some huge blood chilling beast is slowing drifting into a slumber. By the 19th minute these tones are bouncing off each other in an alien tongue like manner, under neath this is a slowly fading in rushing water like noise tone. By the 22nd minute the guttural elements have died down, and we're left with a mixture of billowing, juddering & jittering blacked walled noise, which ever so often has grim mid-toned whizzing fireworks going off over it. By the 25th minute a more rumbling-crusty-static locked-avalanche like feeling has taken hold, and one feels like there on brutal blacked descent down & down. As the track progresses more hammering masses of huge crusty pelting tone are added to the ‘wall’- these sound like masses of rocks/earth pouring ‘n’ piling into some blacked cave network, and utterly encasing you in dank, dusty, endless darkness. The ‘wall’ stays fairly fixed through-out the remainder of the track, through it does feel like the tones are slowly speeding up; rapidly encasing you deeper into you grim dark stone prison…through of course this could just be a sonic illusion of the ‘wall’. All told “Abyss Of The Flesh” is an wonderfully unholy & painfully grim brew of noise raped black metal, blacked noise craft, and bleakly encasing walled noise. A must for fans of noise ripped black metal or dark butal noise. Roger Batty
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