Labels: Feast of Tentacles – miscreant
Review by: Joe Callaghan
Ghastly, treacherous sounds. Gut-wrenching and torturous. Gigantic, earth shattering blasts of sludge are interspersed, by eerie, haunting soundscapes, reminiscent of those days when you’d sit in the dark, playing Silent Hill, taking the walk-through from Games Master magazine as gospel, resulting in your pants being caked in your own shit from the jolt of being devoured by a DOG WITH NO SKIN! Removing the skin from anything makes it that little bit more formidable though, don’t you think? Especially if it still manages to live, and attack you. I’d be a little narked if I had no skin too, so you can relate.
Once the ghostly, evocative crescendo has swollen the ambience, a truck full to the brim of the waste collected from flushed toilets worldwide tips its entire contents through the window of your living room, as your lungs eventually burst full of what can only be described as “black congealed hangover spray”. This is where it gets skull-smashingly deafening, to obscene, anti social proportions.
Gruel are absolutely foul, beyond belief. The grinding of the sludgy, preposterous guitars is enough to rumble your insides until you puke out your own lungs. If they made a film where John McClane and Indiana Jones had a big, fuck off, massive fight for about an hour, this record would be the soundtrack in its entirety. The atmosphere would be incepted by the daunting howls, as John and Indy square up, in a cage constructed out of testosterone and iron girders they bent and shaped themselves, bare handed, only for McClane to pummel Indy’s head right through the bars anyway, as the bloodcurdling brawl ascends to sewers, to the top of a building, to the wing of an aeroplane, until one of them is nothing but a ripped up torso “” In a horrifying, gruesome, emotionally scarring sort of way. Not in a “I’ll bite your balls off!” Monty Python way.
Remember that cartoon, Swamp Thing? It adopted the song “Wild Thing’ as its theme tune, but with obvious word replacement. As soon as the instrumentation comes crashing down like an aeroplane delivering a shipment of grand pianos and buckets full of loose change crashing into a high rise, you get an hour long repetitious punch in the face from the aforementioned Swamp Thing, sporting a Henry Rollins physique, until your body caves in and turns inside out. Then he’ll kick it around a bit, until you’re in a few pieces, scattered around a mile or so radius.
This record fucking hates you. It wants to cut you. It wants to confiscate a limb of yours, and twat you about with it, for giggles. This record wants you dead, and it wants to be the one that snuffs you good, you fucking pansy. Pack a spare set of pants to soil and a bucket to barf in.