Tomb / Uag

Crucial Blast

For nearly a decade now, the shadowy collective known as TOMB (or Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) have practiced their brand of industrial death worship, creating some of creepiest recordings in recent memory. The grating industrial rhythms, blackened noise and malformed black metal on the band’s 2007 album Macabre Noize Royale blasted skulls into charred husks. TOMB’s latest album UAG (short for Underground Ancient Gateways) follows the crypt-crawlers through eleven tracks of suffocating, black ambient noise and lifeless industrial pummel, stripping away most of the black metal elements of previous releases and crafting a more abstract sound.  Making their way into abandoned sanitariums, morgues, decaying crypts and other sites of psychological and spiritual distress (such as the Pennhurst State Hospital in Pennsylvania, and Kentucky’s infamous Waverly Hills), TOMB captures the natural ambience of these locations and engages in pounding percussive workouts by banging and hammering on the very walls and structures. These rumbling industrial rituals yield a mix of Neubauten-esque rhythmic forms, harsh noise and black ambient voids that is sculpted into the uniquely haunted sonic landscape that is UAG. There is no narrative here, nothing resembling “mood music.” Each track flows directly into the next, the album crawling and breathing as a single, malevolent organism.

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