Gnaw Their Tongues – All The Dread Magnificence of Perversity (Burning World/Crucial Blast)

Gnaw Their Tongues' All The Dread Magnificence of Perversity is not so much an album you'd listen to as experience. It's a whole-of-mind/whole-of-brain type experience; listening to this you can't really do anything else. It takes up the entirety of your brain. There is so much going on, in so many layers; it's an emotional and psychological journey through utter derangement, without being the untamed, discomposed noise of something like Dysrhythmia's Psychic Maps.

This album is entirely different territory to anything like something Dysrhythmia could dream up. It is cinematic, deep, multilayered; and I suspect that a lot has gone into its construction. There are symphonic elements that interleave with unintelligible, harsh vocals; there are sound-effects, super-down-tuned guitar and bass; slow percussion; and the sort of sound I am going to label 'industrial' – but industrial in the sense of basic goings-on of a distant factory than anything like 'industrial' genre music or industrial metal.

Being the sort of person who's always had a penchant for the music created by factories, building sites, and distant air conditioners on a hot, dark night, this kind of thing hit the spot with me. But combine it with the unsettling soundscapes of horror and you have something not just interesting, but particularly special.

I honestly didn't think I'd get into this release. Many experimental albums leave me cold, but this... this is something else altogether.

The album begins with the track My orifices await ravaging. There is so much going on here, all the time. There is screaming, industrial metal, horror-film-soundtrack orchestration. Imagine, if you will, that animated Disney film, The Master's Apprentice from many moons ago; but instead of magic happening, absolute horrors lurk in the depths. That's about as clearly as I can describe it.

The horrific screaming of a misused and potentially tortured woman towards the end of the third track, Broken fingers point upwards in vain sets the track off to perfection, and provides the intensity of it with some sort of bizarre closure.

In track four, The Stench of dead horses on my breath and the vile of existence in my hands, the samples of Flaubert layered in make it nothing short of amazing.

The album goes on in all its terrifying, disturbing intensity until you get to the third-last track Rife with deep teeth marks, where you are lulled into a false sense of relief by coming into something mellow.

It is a totally false sense of relief because during the second last track, All the dread magnificence of perversity, the screaming woman is back: this time desperate and, worse, hoarse. It gives you the feeling that something fucking awful has been going on all this time and you've been too mesmerised to notice.

The final track – in some ways you hear it going 'thank fuck it's nearly over' – is The gnostic ritual of semen as embodiment of wounds teared in the soul. It's weirdly drudgy and mesmerising, and it was well placed as the final frontier.

Gnaw Their Tongues, I have discovered, are aptly named – and hearing this release you'll discover why. They go out and beyond the fucked-up-ness of doomy experimental noise and create something entirely new.

This album is grim as fuck, and if it didn't have a sense of purpose it would border on Dada. And the best thing about it is that it forces you to construct your own picture, your own imaginings, out of your own experience. That is what art is all about.

You have to hear this album. No arguments. It's absolutely an experience you must have before you die. Even now, hours later, this experience is haunting me; immediately afterwards I could barely speak. It's pretty rare that an album can do that to you.

Gnaw Their Tongues' All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity is out now on Burning World/Crucial Blast.