Ugh. I feel queasy.
While not overly impressed with the last offering from this Netherlands madman who goes by the name of Mories, there’s something about this album that literally hooks me, reels me in an gives me a tangible sense of disgust and self loathing.
Maybe it’s the more perverse, sexually depraved nature of song titles like “My Orifices Await Ravaging” and “The Gnostic Ritual Consumption of Semen As Embodiment of Wounds Teared in the Soul” (ACK!) and the CD artwork that worms its way into my psyche, but this album isn’t so much as a mindfuck, but more of a psychological gangrape and bukkake party.
Describing Gnaw Their Tongue’s sound is hard unless you’ve actually been sonically gang raped by an Orchestra of psychopaths and sadists playing the soundtrack to a Silent Hill game or a Hostel movie while listening to Leviathan or the first The Axis Of Perdition album (The Ichneumon Method), but suffice to say, its not really music or an album but the more like the stuff of musical nightmares. The orchestration is demented and dissonant with discordant brass and string sections that hum with malevolence before careening into calamitous crescendos while industrial drums and programming clang, screech and echo like nails on the walls of piss filled, rusty cells. It’s all backed by caustic walls of feedback drenched guitars, tortured screams and haunting spoken words. It doesn’t sound appealing, but like watching a car wreck, you can’t help but fixate on the sheer shock value being presented to your senses, and often your senses simply can’t comprehend what is assailing them.
Even at their most ambient and least caustic (“Broken Fingers Point Upwards in Vain”, “L’Ange qui Annonce la Fin du Temps”, the truly hellish orchestration and choir of “All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity” and “The Gnostic Ritual Consumption of Semen As Embodiment of Wounds Teared in the Soul”) are still sickeningly hypnotic and plod and shudder with a steady orgiastic beat and pulsing malevolence that will involuntarily file your mouth with bile but still make your lions tingle with a self depraved, guilt filled ecstasy. At their most violent and utterly disturbing (“Verbrennt und Verflucht”, “The Stench of Dead Horses On My Breath and the Vile of Existence in My Hands”, “Gazing At Me Through Tears of Urine”, “Rife Deep with Teeth Marks”), Gnaw Their Tongues borders on grating noise but somehow is truly one of the most physically and mentally disturbing and draining acts I’ve ever heard. In the movies, the term “torture porn” has become popular of late with the Saw and Hostel franchises. Gnaw Their Tongues is torture porn metal or the soundtrack to snuff films.
The perfectly titled All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity is indeed dread filled, perverse and magnificent. However, it is not a safe or easy listen and is not for the faint of heart. You might want a shot of penicillin and a hearing check up after the album ends, but like that scab ridden hooker with one eye and an adams apple you met on that visit to Thailand- you came keep coming back for more…you sick fuck.
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HA HA HA!! Well done good sir. What a horrible sound.
on Oct 19th, 2009 at 13:16This album is the brown note…
on Oct 19th, 2009 at 16:29yikes, this sounds like the one for me.
on Oct 19th, 2009 at 19:24What was the Thai hooker’s name, Erik? :D
Wow, this stuff must be what Ed Gein was hearing in his head since he was a kid.
on Oct 20th, 2009 at 17:48I think she gave me a fake name- mrs wolfensberger or something
on Oct 20th, 2009 at 18:19^ Clever little fucker
on Oct 28th, 2009 at 13:35wow this album is RIGHT the fuck up my alley. Sounds like the clanging heaviness of classic Godflesh melded with the perverse noise onslaught of Navicon Torture Technologies. Maybe a touch of Swans in there for good measure.
on Nov 17th, 2009 at 18:26Hey, gang…
So, I’ve been thinking about getting this and hoping it’d be all that various reviewers have said–and the time elapsed amounts to almost a year.
Various reviews talk about “intensity,” “disturbing qualities,” and “mind-altering/mind-altered” qualities in the sound. All of this led me to wanting to hear the album. I mean, creepy is the goods, if you ask a fan of black/ambient metal.
Now, in July of 2010, I finally bought in. And I have to say, it’s disturbing, intense, and mind-altering; however, the relentless nature of the “songs” means that it’s full-on chaos for an hour… when, perhaps, some respite from the horror would make the horror that much more effective.
To be honest, I’d categorize my first three listens as, “It’s heavy… but where are the signs of musicality?” I don’t mean that there should be sweet melodies within these compositions, but I do mean that the breathing of music provides the real terror when things get heavy. So few of those breaths appear on this, and the result is not so much aural terror as aural fatigue.
It’s a letdown, especially as all those early reviews scared me… more than the music itself did–or does.
Too bad.
on Jul 24th, 2010 at 20:56lolwut.
this is awesome.
on Sep 20th, 2010 at 14:01