Seattle’s incredibly prolific doom metal outfit Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, consisting primarily of members Stan Reed and wm.Rage, have released a slew of 7-inches, splits, CD-Rs, and cassettes, collaborating and conspiring with peers in their community to generate one of the more viciously enviable catalogues of sound-vomit, death, and hatred to ever be thrown against the monolithic brick wall of noise. Their sound is metal inverted. Like other bands within the doom milieu, BSBC do not make songs, but rather create soundscapes, borderline narrative-based explosions and showcases in control and sound and moment. They are a commentary on what it means to be metal, on that kid with the pet scorpion who had “Led Zepplin” [sic] smacked across his English 2 binder, on John Wayne Gacy, on Yngwie Malmsteen, on shitty horror movies and exploitation films, and on the overly pompous yet glorious and wonderful absurdity of it all.
Crows Eat The Eyes From The Leviathan's Carcass consists of a live performance, a collaboration with Anakrid, a few songs released previously on cassettes, compilations, and 7-inches, and two previously unreleased tracks. Yet in spite of this fact, the record has an uncanny cohesion, a pummeling template of unmatched horror. Their songs are atonal, without melody or song structure, and completely devoid of anything aurally attractive in the conventional sense. BSBC, like so many before them, are creating environments -- absolute grave and punishing, disgusting environments -- with their collages. The untitled second portion of the sixth track is a tundra, patchy and cold, lifeless, with a distanced clamoring and clanging of sadness, and an anger of the growls, something sexless and furious, confusedly looking for nourishment upon the cold and open plain. “Genocide” is a black box recording, a wordless glimpse at the fear within a man’s bloody pupils. The shrieks are inhuman, the actions taking place within a hollow warehouse.
Jesus, those screams, yelps, growls -- tortured and pained hisses. You can practically hear the hair on the chest. Throughout the album, the vocals range from squeals and cackles to roaring and bloody belches. “Maggot” contains vocals menacing and hungry, Beelzebub’s anus teething on entrails in a pool of fuzz. The squeals of a warthog, of a 10-foot high warthog, cavorting in the foreground of consciousness. Likewise, in the opening track, the searing jet-engine howls and plodding death march is torn in half by a tape-hissed, bowel-loosening slurred roar of hate and chaos. The genuine feeling and thought and emotions put into the hateful bellows of this album are stunning, and this limb, the vocals, will particularly stand out within the first listen.
Aside from the voices, though, you can’t place the origin of a single goddamn sound on this record, even things you know have to be guitars. This is a very refreshing feeling, allowing one to fully understand individual perception of sound-- something that one could only hope to be expected of all music. “Borre Fen,” the lone collaboration, is pure expanse, just open sound and controlled blasts. Everything begins at a distance, everything seems important, with the atonal mammoth shift of one piece of matter against another, as shitting and fucking yelps and gasps are just barely heard in the background. Bows rub against steel, children cry and scream in fear, and one wonders what this is building up to. But chances are it isn’t building up to something, but that it simply is something. "It" is what it is building up to. It is. The entire album is, and anyone’s hard-on for peaks and valleys will be stoically flaccid and tucked in between their legs upon hearing the horrid monolith that is Blue Sabbath Black Cheer.
1. Untitled
2. Untitled
3. Genocide
4. Maggot
5. Untitled
6. Borre Fen/Untitled
7. Untitled
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