ninehertz

Sound the alarms and raise the gates – Abiuro are back, ready to terrorise your neighbourhood once more. Abetted by the Doom Fujiyama label, every release to date has been a cesspit of horror through the medium of depraved sludge, and 落, which translates into English as ‘Fall’, is no exception.

This might even be pushing them further into the extreme voids. The vocals are so much back of the throat guttural splurge they become practically animalistic, all within a pressure-raising density of sludge of the nastiest order. It often turns to screams, not as a vocal style but pure monstrous outpourings. It feels depressive, and (naturally) painfully slow.

This is sludge as fucked up as you’ll hear anywhere in the world. Tracks act like lumbering ogres of overladen doom, dragging its club behind it, before lashing out, clobbering anything in its radius. The vocals become more out there the further it goes, somehow, latter on so gargled and poisonous they delve disturbingly close to goregrind mania.

The instrumentation follows, travelling ever closer to a death-doom realm of Fossilization or Hooded Menace levels of murk. They almost take it too far, to a point where it feels as if we’re witness to a band wallowing in its madness, collapsing under its own chaos into incoherency. And just as it reaches that point a sledgehammer riff erupts and flattens all before it.

Rather surprisingly, there is cause for light – relatively speaking – on its penultimate track, spritelier than anything before, still rabid animal vocals of course but with a forward leaning tempo. It dies to nothing less than two minutes later, probably a rush of blood to the head requiring a sit down, then returning noisy and weird, more to type.

This is the sludge abyss. Even considering the pure filth spewed out by the likes of Hell, Matraque and Stomach this year, this exceeds them all in terms of sludge of the most blackhearted intentions.