With "Trenches" we're off to a great start here, deep, dark, far-reaching ululating drone, really cold and sharp and arctic, reverberating decay, enfolding and encompassing, shrieks and high-pitched creaks and cracks, knobs twisted past the point of comfort and never quite released, labyrinthine or just a really long dark corridor, dripping crackle like fat rain, gnashing teeth, metal trash can lids tossed at high frequency transmitter towers, crashing synth like falling down a flight of stairs, moth wings made of metal shavings, an all-seeing beaconic eye. The quality is absolutely perfect. Sweeping and slamming, a strange combustion engine. Music on the moon, on any place where gravity and magnetics don't quite work right. That sweeping again, like the heavy nose-breathing of something big and dark and abhuman. Even in the last moments of breaking down the atmosphere is intensely thick, disorienting, inescapable.

Side B's "Slowly Fraying," begins with the same booming pounding gloom, a drum machine in hell being beaten by the damned, breathy gnashing synth, if the noises of The Haunting had been wholly demonic, the kind of static eaten on exorcism tapes, waves of acid and toxic sludge piling up, bullhorns in the darkness announcing the arrival or departure of something epic, interference of the voyages to Dunwich, the warbly sphere music of alien realities.

I love the depth of bass, low and high frequencies colliding at high speed to produce thunderheads and it doesn't relent, except when it does give you an instant to process, you really can't, you can only just take it in, or really, it takes you in. The rumbling belly of the beast, churning insides like power cables.

It's not the source of the sound, it's the fact that these sounds exist at all in a rational reality. Peeling back the surface of all things monstrous and exposing the subdermal textures. Crossing the threshold violently, loudly: It Is Here. The sudden silence at the end is far more jarring than any fade out could be. 10/10 -- April Larson (2 December, 2009)