Korperschwache / Fangs Of An Angry God

Crucial Blast

Going back to the mid-’90s, the obscure Austin, TX outfit Korperschwache (German for “organic decay”) has issued a steady stream of releases into the deep underground, landing somewhere between the early UK noise rock scene, the skull-rupturing power of Japan’s more extreme noise artists, the massive gravitational pull and formless guitar crush of bands like Earth and the Melvins at their most art-damaged, and, in more recent years, a filthy, blackened, low-fidelity underbelly that hints at the mutated black metal of bands like Abruptum, Necrofrost, and Vondur. The majority of these older releases have long been out of print, but now, in conjunction with the brand new Evil Walks album, Crucial Blast has assembled a series of reissues of early Korperschwache material, some of which has never been heard by anyone outside the band’s immediate circle. The 1995 cassette Fangs of an Angry God originally featured five lengthy tracks of psychedelic harsh noise and brutal feedback ecstasy from Korperschwache; this reissue adds on a sixth bonus track that was recorded in 1996. The tape continues to move the band’s sound further into a grueling smashup of grinding amp abuse, industrial noise and psych-guitar meltdown, unleashing clanging chords that ring out over smoldering black lava flows and brutal clank and screech. Songs like “The Drowning Pool” and “Hands of Stone” are formless masses of squirming guitar slime and crackling, distorted filth, the sound moving slowly, like sputtering magma waves of incinerating speaker vomit, flesh-rending cable noise and sheet-metal drag. Other tracks paint cloudscapes of feedback and grainy distortion, delay effects speeding up and slowing down amid snarls of cable buzz and flashes of human voice. Bonus cut “Vinyl Fetish” matches wrenching machine noise and diffused guitar sludge beneath an array of electrical detritus and controlled effects-pedal mayhem. This ranks as one of the nastiest and gnarliest of Korperschwache’s early cassette releases.

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