Labels: Outsider Art
Review by: Kunal Nandi
Swallowing are somewhere between Swallowed and Swallowing Shit in my mp3 folder, but they’re also really close to Swans. Aside from an alphabetical proximity, there is an atmospheric closeness to them what with the densely suffocating vibe Swallowing are already giving off on their excellent debut demo. For your downloading efforts (for the tape is sold out already) you get two tracks spanning half an hour, so we’re in drawn out, painful territory here, with some ethereally plangent plucking eventually giving way to devastating crush and all the way back and forth, all awash with beautifully integrated noise elements and sampling, for which you can put Khanate’s “Things Viral” as another valid reference point. Crescendoes that turn into loud bits are all well and good but Swallowing goes about things in a non-obvious, inventive manner, able to pound out a riff into bludgeoning repetition without it getting boring in the slightest and it genuinely sounds hellish thanks to a tip top production job. Already great.
Swallowing