Review: Bile Caster ‘Writhing Between Birth And Death’
Leicester’s Bile Caster have been slugging their way through the British underground for about five years now and following a malignant demo in 2020 and a split with fellow underground violence merchants Mazakari, their new release Writhing Between Birth And Death is their next, eldritch step towards the sickly light of day. It is out now in a variety of formats from Road To Masochist, Cursed Monk Records and Eggy Tapes.
If you weren’t tipped off by the album artwork, band name or album name, Bile Caster peddle a particularly vile brand of sludgy doom. You know the kind, rife with squalling feedback and knuckle dragging riffs, suffocating atmospheres and cavernous roars.
Opener Abscess trades lumbering doom with torturous, drawn-out sludge riffs spiralling into an endless abyss of ugly hopelessness. It is the genesis, the first expulsion of the futility of life. Trapped is the inevitable next step from the pained birth of Abscess, a mixture of chaotic bludgeoning and dirging sludge, an aural metaphor for the clanking of our chains to this mortal world, while narration from The Faces of Depression adds yet more hopelessness to the cause.
the almost thirty minutes of brutally heavy, earth-shaking riffs and nihilistic roars is potent enough to reduce anyone to a quivering, traumatised mess…
Closer Harrowing has an almost Godfleshian trudge to it, a relentless chugging doom riff that feels just as uncaring but less industrialised and more organic. A lot of this record has a real organic feel actually, but it is the organic entropy of life into a yawning chasm of endless death. There’s nothing more appropriate than this track dissolving into shrieking feedback to close as well to complete the journey.
It may only have three tracks, but the almost thirty minutes of brutally heavy, earth-shaking riffs and nihilistic roars is potent enough to reduce anyone to a quivering, traumatised mess. Bile Caster‘s work is thick, mesmerising and oppressive, bringing a veil of real tangible darkness over your day as you are smothered again and again by the riff.
Sludge doom can be a term that is kind of lazily applied to doom with a little bit of an edge to it, but Writhing Between Birth And Death is truly deserving of it as a cloying miasma of inevitable decay and demise. Thoroughly recommended.
Label: Road To Masochist | Cursed Monk Records | Eggy Tapes
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Sandy Williamson
