If you don’t like your kids, play them this…
Review by Jason Guest
Crucial Blast: website, Bandcamp, Facebook
Release date: 7 August 2015
Mories, the man behind Gnaw Their Tongues, is pretty damned busy. Since 2006, this band has released no less than seven full length albums, sixteen EPs, eight splits, and a bunch of compilations and collaborations. As for his other bands – of which there are many, the now-defunct De Magia Veterum being a personal favourite – the number of releases is staggering. How Mories finds the time to create artwork as well as produce, engineer, and remaster a host of other bands is beyond me. This guy must live, breathe and shit music. 2015, three years after the last full length and Gnaw Their Tongues is set to release its eighth album, Abyss Of Longing Throats, another extraordinary and engrossing piece of work.
It’s a waste of time to try and describe the music, the noise, the sound, the whatever-you-want-to-try-and-call-this because to attempt to capture this in language would be embarrassing. So, because a haphazard sequence of clichés would fail, we’ll play it safe and say that a voice and a number of musical instruments are here though they’re far from “present and correct”. There are blasts of black metal, slabs of dragging doom, industrial-strength orchestration, crazed choral singing, barking mad belches and guttural grunts, tumultuous percussion, strangled strings, and the occasional mellifluous melody to bring the odd shard of light into the turbulent darkness.
Albums such as this are commonly referred to as “journeys” but with Abyss Of Longing Throats, Gnaw Their Tongues aren’t taking us anywhere. Instead, we’re nailed to the spot, stared down, and forced to gaze into the inner void from which we so vainly and desperately seek to escape. Chaotic and contorted, this is uneasy listening throughout. If you don’t like your kids, play them this. It’ll fuck them up for good.
8 out of 10
Track Listing:
- Lick The Poison From The Cave Walls
- Through Flesh
- Abyss Of Longing Throats
- From The Black Mouth Of Spite
- The Holy Body
- And They Will Be Cast Out Into Utter Darkness
- Up Into The Heavens Down Into The Circles Of Hell
