Labels: Feast of Tentacles – Halo Of Flies
Review by: Alex Deller
Typically good split here, featuring two bands you should know well enough by now. Cloud Rat continue their vengeful assault on humanity with seven tracks that gurn, grind and gouge, combining familiar elements in a way that’s pretty much all their own at this stage. You can hear everything from 90s Bremen metalcore and 00s screamo to WITTR-style black metal going on, but it’s blended so seamlessly that trying to find where the joins are is a sucker’s game. Closing track ‘Amber Flush’ represents an even more interesting marker, with the chaos dropping away and making way for some skittering electronic drum patterns, chilly keyboard tones and beatific vocals that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Muscle & Marrow release … a departure for sure, but nevertheless a welcome addition to the band’s sonic armoury. Moloch, after all that, slow things right down with some sewer-crawling sludge that sounds impossibly burdened. Grief-meets-Cavity is perhaps the most appropriate comparison I can think of right now, which should serve as a pretty good indicator as to whether it’s the kind of dense, sticky muck you want to be tamping into your pipe.