ninehertz

Ah, this is the medicine. After a week of writing reviews of weird drone noise and retro prog (I’m not knocking it), some absolute filth-ridden pure sludge from the Philippines from Aware is what was needed.

This is thick-toned, sloth-slow and swamp-encrusted sludge, smearing grim debris as it crawls and leeches along the floor. When the vocals eventually arrive on Anxietrip they are barely forming words, merely a guttural splurge. Sludge in 2025 can innovate and branch out like we originally thought not possible, but there is always a need to bring it back down to this primordial soup of stomach acid bubbling creeping wretch of a noise, and Aware get that.

Hang Noose sounds like a Sabbath record warping and decaying in front of your ears, a doom zombie clinging to life, unsteadily creeping forth on muscle memory, a shambling, rotting sludge corpse – and glorious for it. The Maintenance is primarily in the bleak destroy-the-world viewpoints of Corrupted and Grief, but with just hints of the Bongzilla end of sludge, into some Eyehategod in its middle section change up – it’s taking its cues from the big hitters and creating a basement dwelling little piece of putridity all of itself.

The demo ends there, but the cassette release on Anugal Audio Terror adds in a rehearsal recording and a live track, the former enforcing Aware’s authenticity as it drags itself across 16 raw minutes, whilst the latter is understandably more chaotic, like being a bystander at a riot.

This is sludge at its raw brilliant best, still able to provide a thrill in how horrible it all sounds.