GNAW THEIR TONGUES - Abyss Of Longing Throats CD (digipak)

Though Gnaw Their Tongues has hardly been quiet in the interim, what with recent collaborations with Alkerdeel, the release of the Collected Atrocities collection and recent high-profile performances in the US at Maryland Deathfest XIII and Apex VI, it's been a good three years since the last full-length album from this Dutch nightmare machine. But with new album Abyss Of Longing Throats, Gnaw Their Tongues has returned in full ravenous glory, offering another hellish cacophony of mangled industrial black metal, lurching deformed heaviness, twisted electronic carnage and bombastic orchestral power that sounds like no one else. From the frenzied black swarms that sweep across the doom-laden death industrial of opener "Lick The Poison From The Cave Walls" that eventually resolves into a glacial haze of bleary, blasted bliss, to the hallucinatory black metal of "Through Flesh" that fuses staccato violins, terrifying choral singing and grueling mechanical doom to one of the most emotionally stirring sequences yet heard in the band's catalog, Abyss continues to chart the evolution of Gnaw Their Tongues' sound. There's plenty of the grueling industrialized heaviness and violent orchestral sounds the band is known for, but this new material also expands upon the filthy blackened doom at the heart of Gnaw Their Tongues' music with those moments of striking melodic power, moments where all the horror surging through these songs suddenly transforms into something hauntingly elegiac. Brief passages of tragic beauty, scattered throughout an abyss roiling with relentless programmed blastbeats, somber chamber strings hovering mournfully amid tortured shrieks, harsh clanking percussion and blasts of raging orchestral chaos, all writhing together into another exhilarating descent into total demonic delirium from this monstrous outfit.