For a band who’ve been building up a good head of steam under the OSDM banner, releasing an experimental collaboration with Mick Harris (yep, him from Napalm Death, PainKiller and Scorn) might seem like a strange and potentially career-shitting manoeuvre. That is, of course, until you remember that the band’s singer has been running At War With False Noise for the last 20 odd years – a label that’s released everything from extreme noise to doom, drone, death metal, noise-rock and power violence over the course of its long, wonderful existence.
‘In Dub’, then, is not a straightforward death metal record. While both tracks pack in some grinding, scum-caked riffs and beleaguered gurgles, these elements have been heaved onto the rack and had their knobbly bits bent mercilessly out of shape. Twists of grey, ambient murk snake their way around the metallic elements like a shroud, while erratic electronic drum patterns pebbledash the walls and strange, hollowed-out skwooshing noises hover overhead. Lead track ‘Chromatic Dissolution’ has something robotic and Godflesh-y about it while ‘Cease To Exist’ is more smeared and abstract, the two pieces interlocking to form an intense but strangely meditative whole that’s perhaps even better suited to a four-hour deep dive than the confines of a twelve-minute EP.
It mightn’t be for folks who just crave riffs, but that’s okay – despite its modest size, the band’s back catalogue is already ripe with prime grade death slime, after all. Instead, this one’s for the heads who’ve been enjoying the further-flung antics of The Body and Full Of Hell or, better yet, those intrepid souls who always managed to make time for GOD and Techno Animal alongside Entombed and Morbid Angel.