ninehertz

Bookmark them on bandcamp, California's Sentient Ruin Laboratories releases guarantee exploratory, immersive and inventive evolvements of extreme metal. They enclave themselves around creative and original bands, normally on short tape, vinyl and split releases that unearth unknowns and expand horizons internationally. Unru, from Germany, are the latest to appear.

This 12" vinyl, replete with Miss Machine type cut and paste biology artwork, is a vicious beast of black metal fervour base amid wild sashays into neighbouring extremeties. A hellish mask engulfs the stratosphere from the off, blackening the sky. The masterpiece that is Das Anna-Karenina-Prinzip is fervent in its bitterness, expeditious in forcing the intensity, with only glimpses of light in almost Liturgy-esque tones, but applied to relentless black metal pulse. As it abruptly ends you take an involuntary deep intake of breath, released from the near 13 minute endurance imposed upon your soul.

Hedonee's slow build lends it a doom/death excavation mood, crawling out from it's tomb. Sonically imposing, they give the impression they've been tortured into giving up their secrets, not unlike The Body's approach to the sound of self inflicted pain, allied to bludgeoning suffocation. Totemiker comes out clobbering, descending into black metal bluster with notes of death, doom and crust surge, a blurring unholy mash.

A cross-genred, desolately overbearing release, Unru go as far a possible to drag you down into a depressive squalor, the only thing alleviating you from the mire the practically self-defeating and unpindownable thrill that bubbles beneath, defiantly smiling through the experience they so obviously want you to suffer from.