HOLY JESUS BASTARD SHIT ON A FUCKING MOPED WHAT A FUCKING RACKET.
Khost's 'Corrosive Shroud' was an ungainly, unpleasant, coruscatingly timely and consequently FEARsome slab of nastiness from 2015. Here they aim at PEAK MAXI-BRUM CARNAGE by giving the tracks to J.K Broadrick and letting him vivisect seven shades of splatterfest shite out of them. The results are the finest noise you'll hear all year, filling you with the kind of tension (as they describe it) 'akin to being in the proximity of a large, unstable machine on the verge of meltdown.
If it was a painting it would be about a kilometer wide held up by old, thick metal supports and wires that creak in wind, in parts abstract, in parts quite hard to decipher, and the materials would be oil like and seeping, never quite drying out'.
The thing I don't dig about alot of noise is its lack of purpose. And the fact it makes that purposelessness its point. This isn't happening here. Though never explicitly political or polemical this is a record determined to chart where we're at and where the band and JKB are at in relation to the global-shitfest that is 2016. Like I say, TIMELY as fuck.
Opener 'Inversion' lashes down a monstrous industrial throb, a pounding heavy-manners bass (JKB is incapable of not making dub music) over which shards of the original are put on the rack and stretched out until their skin films to a unicellular thinness and breaks - think of the heaviest bits of Ice/God/TechnoAnimal given a terrifying reanimation and kitted out with a whole new vibe of turbid doom and panoramic warfare. 'A Shadow On The Wound' finds a similarly bone-crushing groove and puts a whole mile-high dome of psychedelic smeared guitar and groggy vocals over it - like Terminal Cheesecake got really fucking miserable, while 'Revelations Vultures Jackals Wolves' emerges as somehow, impossibly, even more of a headwreck than it did on the original, every surge turned into an assault on your senses, what sounds like an ebbing lost long-wave frequency pumping itself up with steroids and PCP and transmogrifying itself into the internal sound of hebraphrenia, a shuddering crack in the sea-floor of your consciousness from which all kinds of gigantic beasts and superbeasts emerge. What's gratifying is how scant the relationship of this rerubbed rancour to the original, but also how the visceral trajectory of the originals hasn't been sacrificed - Broadrick smart enough to know that the best noise is noise you can bang your head to, never arrhythmic until it needs to be, the track closing with whorls of sheer unmitigated din akin to Crowhurst but a fuck of a lot more concise and likeisaid purposeful. The closer 'Deathsset' is a completely new Khost track untouched by the hand of JK - grindcore vox, a bat that's pure Scorn/Unsane, a building sense of imminent armageddon and those slightly Arabic/ancient touches that take this beyond Brum (or rather more reflective of the real Brum than every other band from Brum is willing to be at the moment) and out to the burning desert, across the refugee camp, down to the junkie corner.
This is music that screams of loss, loathing, division and fear. Why isn't more music doing this in 2016? Essential.
'Needles Into The Ground' is out on Cold Spring Records NOW and you can get it HERE.