Gnaw Their Tongues ‘Per Flagellum Sanguemque Tenebras Veneramus’ CD 2011

Gnaw Their Tongues 'Per Flagellum Sanguemque Tenebras Veneramus' CD 2011Lock your doors. Bar your windows. Seal yourself inside your home. Call the police. It won’t save you, Gnaw Their Tongues have returned and now nowhere is safe. THIS is the sound of the apocalypse, of impending doom. The sound that Michael Myers had in his head that drove him to kill.

This is terrifying.

A screeching, clanging, burning crescendo of chaotic discord somehow wrestled into coherent form and let loose upon the world. If Gnaw Their Tongues had soundtracked Saw, there’d be a whole generation in need of serious therapy. The twisted brain-wrong of one-off man-mental Mories, Gnaw Their Tongues have been invoking dread and horror via disturbing soundscapes since 2006, with their absolute mastery over audible terror growing with every – numerous – release. Ensconced on the ever-excellent Crucial Blast from 2009’s ‘All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity’ , the last few years has seen Mories branch out into different areas with various projects – Aderlating, De Magia Veterum and Seirom – yet still managing to pour his hatred, scorn, loathing and sheer hair-raising negative energy into Gnaw Their Tongues with ever-renewed intensity.

Taking a broadly similar approach to Japanese electro-doom lunatics Dissecting Table, but incorporating a cinematic scope and scale, welded to the thudding pummel of early Swans at their most abrasive, ‘Per Flagellum Sanguemque Tenebras Veneramus’ is a towering behemoth of bile, suppressed disgust and slow-burning aggression that beggars the senses.

There is no let-up, no quarter, no mercy here, only cold, unforgiving horror. Distant ominous war-drums open ‘Hic Est Enim Calix Sanguinis Mei’ as a roaring abyss creaks open, ready for you to plunge into headfirst – and plunge you do, into a cacophonous, slurring mire of atonal bass guitar, booming, cracking metallic percussion, buried, choking inhuman vocals and dreadful orchestrations of string and brass. An overwhelming attack on the senses that leaves you reeling and staggering, as you are besieged from all sides simultaneously. The bludgeoning, tearing and terrorising continues throughout, with nothing in the way of respite, save the slightly more stripped-down approach of ‘Tod, Wo Ist Dein Licht’. Truly, an onslaught.

The culmination of this orchestration of fear is ‘Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus’ itself, a black mass of strings, brass and an unsettling choir. Shorn of the tumultuous vortex of bass and noise, the power to terrify is still here even in stripped-down and subtler form, proving itself to be ingrained in Mories DNA.

Best taken as a whole, each track here builds toward a greater mass, amping up the dread and skin-crawling strings, the martial brass and clattering drums, the sinister choirs and vein-popping shrieks until you just can’t take any more – the effect is cumulative. One track alone will creep you out, but all eight? Brrrrrrr….I’m looking over my shoulder the entire time I write this.

Six years and a truckload of releases on from their initial inception, Gnaw Their Tongues show no signs of weakening or mellowing out. Quite the reverse, in fact. By this time next year, expect to see their listeners keeling over in sheer fright, cold sweat on their brows, mouths frozen in rictus grins, rigor-mortis filled fingers eternally pointing toward the ‘stop’ button on their stereo.

Label: Crucial Blast Records
Website: www.gnawtheirtongues.com

Scribed by: Paul Robertson