THROAT "Pee" 7"
Some of the best sludge rock has been coming out of Finland lately, and at the very top of that heap is Throat. Their grueling low-slung dirge rock offers nods to the early 90's heyday of this kind of ugly, angular racket without ever sounding like an exercise in nostalgia, thanks in large part to the total ferocity with which these bass-thugs attack their music. This limited edition 7" (issued by Kaos Kontrol, only three hundred and thirty copies pressed) gives us another two new songs, "Prison Shower" and "Pet Peeves", short but skull-cracking blocks of crushing, twitchy sludginess that will give fans of bands like Tad, Unsane, The Jesus Lizard, Black Elk, Pissed Jeans and Oxbow a nice buzz. The first song is one of the meanest sounding songs from the band so far, a bludgeoning battery of skronky, lopsided riffing, and howled vocals slightly doused with distortion, a pounding percussive drive and more than a hint of pending violence. The flipside is noisier, the rhythm section locking into a vicious staggering groove while the guitar slashes and stabs with dissonant chords and noxious stop/start key changes, then slipping into a more driving, rocking passage about halfway through before finally turning into this massive dragging dirge at the end that fucking pulverizes even as it piles a ton of ominous atmosphere onto the proceedings. Love the Sub Pop visual references of the record sleeve, too. Recommended as always to fans of hateful, brute-force sludge-rock.
THROAT "Licked Inch Fur" 12"
After a run of supremely thuggish 7" Eps that I've raved about here at C-blast, the Finnish noise-rock band finally produced a longer piece of work last year with this four song 12" called Licked Inch Fur. The record came out as a joint effort between At War With False Noise, Kaos Kontrol and a couple of other labels, and the grinding angular assault on display here is just as brutal as the stuff on their 7"s. There's a dank reek that comes off this record, like someone brought this album back tucked under their arm after a long tour through musty back rooms with cheap wall paneling, filthy yellowed bed sheets, unidentifiable fluid stains on the carpet, dark basements, messy drug dens. This wasted vibe seeps into every second of the dissonant ugly sludge-rock on Licked Inch Fur, and it's fantastic. Songs like "Stampede", "Wake Down" and "Piggie" glom together more of Throat's bludgeoning bottom-heavy riffing that's wound tight around the rhythm section's lurching power, often offering their slower crushing dirges at brain-smashing levels of aggression, but also throwing in a lot of faster, more urgent parts that keep the music from stagnating in pools of grimy sludge for too long. There's lots of powerful tribal drumming and noisy guitar work that hints at the apocalyptic force of older Neurosis, and their jagged riffing and noisy high-end guitar scrape has a lot of extra weight from Throat's massive metallic crunch. They've always had a heavy 90's noise rock influence with echoes of Melvins, Fudge Tunnel, Unsane and Hammerhead rippling through the bulldozing feedback-soaked heaviness, but Throat put a harsher, more aggressive edge on their songs, cranking up the sludge quotient, the singer belting out his anti-social rants in a bloodied howl, without losing the ability to turn out a catchy hook such as that found on "Piggie". The heaviest song on Licked Inch Fur is the last one, though; "Poolpisser" crawls through a tar-haze dirge that finds the band at their slowest, dishing a nearly doom-laden slab of slow motion crush that's got some dirty, twangy guitar going on within the eerie melody lurking just beneath the surface of this song. Throat gets better every time I grab a new record from them, and anyone into heavy, dark noise-rock really needs to start listening to these guys now.
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