CRUCIAL BLAST is ultra-stoked to collaborate with GRAVE GNOSIS on a limited-edition cassette release of their latest album Pestilence Crowned.
This searing psychedelic blast of Southern USBM is issued in a hand-numbered edition of 100 copies, and is packaged with an 11" x 17" poster of the Pestilence Crowned artwork and a twenty-four page supplemental booklet of liner notes, ritual system, and artwork, previously only available as a .PDF download with the album's late 2023 digital release.
This acid-soaked outrage will begin shipping on or around 01/17/24.
AVAILABLE AT:
Here's my sprawling review of the album:
The swirling, sweat-soaked psychedelic black metal of Grave Gnosis first infected me when I discovered the band's 2021 album Lux Nigredo and 2022 EP Towards the Nameless Darkness
a while back. Both of 'em are terrific and terrifying blasts of
incredibly chaotic and mind-bending black metal that likewise caught the
attention of many that follow the USBM underground, despite only being
available as digital downloads and super-limited cassettes. Slick with
swamp slime, the band's music is a smoldering torch in the darkness,
mutating the raw matter of black metal into nightmarish and exuberant
ritual. There's a distinctly marshy Southern stench that permeates their
blend of raging black / death metal, psych, and neo-classical, wafting
off the triumphant galloping riffs, harsh and blazing blackened blast,
and miasmic trippiness that completely enshrouds their music. But on
their latest, Pestilence Crowned , all hell fully and truly
breaks loose as the band ascends to a new level of Satanic savagery and
twisted, psychotronic violence. This shit is wild . Possessed with a powerful shamanic presence, the nine songs on Pestilence
are thoroughly tangled with specific formulae of ceremonial magic and
violent adoration, a direct continuation of the themes running through Nigredo
related to the band's system of Vedantic Nihilism. Each song becomes a
paved stone on the honeysuckle and kudzu-covered footpath to a
particular transcendental state; no mere soundtrack to patchwork
blasphemies, this album directly interacts with the nervous system and
the third eye.
From the ghoulish ambience of opener "Amidst the Rotten Coils of
a Great Centipede" with its ghostly cello, tribal percussion and eerie
experimental electronics, and the subsequent blast of feverish churning
chaos that is "Carnivorous Darkness", this stuff undulates in some
seriously crazed ways. Moving through passages of solemn funereal
chamber strings and traces of rustic folk music tradition in the
gorgeous acoustic strum that appears on tracks like "Ragziel", this
album strikes a balance between inchoate madness and progressive
intricacy that doesn't really sound like anything else going on in the
US black metal field. It all explodes in kaleidoscopic forms, heavily
layered with rabid howls echoing into oblivion, strange almost sitar -like
ragas spinning in blackness, Moog-like spaced-out synthesizers snaking
around the darkly majestic melodies and fractured riffs; you've got
moments here that echo the weirder symphonic bombast found in later
Emperor and Aspera Hiems Symfonia-era Arcturus , others that
hint at classic death metal influences, but Grave Gnosis is so much more
chaotic and convoluted, beautiful and monstrous. They've delivered one
of the best American occult black metal albums I've heard so far this
decade. Drown in the fires of its spiritual intensity.
This cassette edition of Pestilence Crowned is
complete with the band's supplemental material: while the tape comes in a
traditional case, it is presented in a re-sealable sleeve that also
contains an 11" by 17" foldout poster of the scorching, lysergic cover
art, and the band's twenty-three page Pestilence Crowned
booklet. The latter is an essential piece of the experience, not just a
collection of expansive liner notes pertinent to the album, but a new
grimoire written by Grave Gnosis frontman Caine Del Sol ( aka Ø ), with
explanations both "mundane" and "esoteric" for each song. The liner
notes go into intimate detail about the creation and recording of the
album, but pairs that with dense occult text, ritual practice, and
extensive sigil art that is all as feral, impenetrable, and liberating
as the music of Pestilence Crowned itself.
The cassette / booklet / poster edition from Crucial Blast is limited to one hundred copies, hand-numbered.
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