Blut have been among the fave bands here at Doommantia. Maybe because these two guys from UK, i.e. multi-instrumentalist S.M. (in charge of guitar, noise, drums, vocals) and N.B. (in charge of bass, noise, vocals), are among the most blood-curdlingly heavy, painfully slow and skin-scarring abrasive bands around. Blut entered the scene with their crushing and misanthropic debut album Ritual and Ceremony (2010) and further consolidated their style in their second album Grief and Incurable Pain (2011). Like a seasonal disaster Blut came back in 2012 with a new album, Drop Out and Kill, in line with their established scheme: few long tracks soaked with intoxicating rawness and black heaviness unrelentingly raping your brain cells for what will sound like an unbearably long time.
During mid-2012 Blut released the new album as CD via the Portuguese label Bubonic Productions. However someone, namely Mike and Kyle of the Canadian underground label Major Destroyer Records, had the idea of transfer Blut’s music onto the most appropriate solid medium, a cassette tape. So during late 2012 Blut’s Drop Out and Kill was out as tape edition (limited to 100 copies) with a bonus track, Ultimatum (Yog-Sothoth), their cover of the eponymous song by one amongst Blut’s main sources of inspiration: Nightstick. And a bit like with Nightstick, Blut are not that easy to categorize in short. You have to listen to them; no, sorry, you experience them, so you can absorb the wealth of shades in their incredibly raw and only apparently minimalistic sounds. Then you read their interviews (HERE or on the Obelisk), and you see how these two guys work hard for blending and merging the wide spectrum of influences they are subjected to.
The Drop Out and Kill tape includes the two suites Aeon-long Death /Alcoholic on Cloven Hoof and Murder Hallucination on Side A, and the suite Skulls.Coffins.Nails. plus Nightstick’s cover Ultimatum on Side B.
The sample from movies at the onset of suite Aeon-long Death /Alcoholic on Cloven Hoof in side A is the trigger to a labyrinthic, foggy, murky, hypnotic trip in a pathologic state via a ritual drone-doom-noise funereal march somehow hinting to Electric Wizard. It may be the common origin, Dorset, with its inspiring marshland atmospheres. However Blut’s ritual doom style is much more asphyxiating than Electric Wizard’s. It is true that there are a few unexpectedly groove-laden, almost hendrixian guitar solos that seem to escape or materialize like fragments of a dream, or shots from a past life. But in general the Wizard-esque plodding rhythms in Blut eat their way through a magma of pitch-black atmospheres and raw, dense, rotten and evil sounds encompassing blackened sludge and much blackened industrial noise locally morphing into some kind of infernal black space psychedelia. You can taste all this, for example, in the core and in the second part of the first suite, a true alien nightmare reminding me of Hell, Reclusa (also for the vocal parts), obvious SunnO))), the darkest, chaotic moments in Gravetemple, etc.
The Blut duo like to employ any possible noise and electronic elaboration of sounds for creating a chaotic flow which may easily be the sonic description either of the passage of a hurricane, of the slowed-down equivalent of the shock wave of an atomic bomb, or else the progressive destruction of body and mind intoxicated by drugs. Or else they simply put nightmares in music. You realize you are sort of coming out of this nightmare when the initial, ritual drone-doom leitmotiv comes back and is accompanied by some heavy breathing, which is almost relieving after that long, hallucinating noise cacophony. But also this return back from the nightmare is painfully long. The feedback is coarse and abrasive and the distorted, noisy drone-doom leading “melody” is extremely dragged and monotonous. It’s pure distressing intoxication à-la-SunnO))) but possessing subtle variations and sporadic, but perceivable sabbathian touches.
Another face of Blut’s style is shown in the second suite on Side A, Murder Hallucination. The opening vocal samples are more frenzied and the doomy rhythms linking the samples are a bit more dynamic and much more groove-laden than what heard before. As a matter of fact, an almost psych funky guitar solo and the vocal samples get hooked to the density of the pulsating drone-doom background as if they were insects on a flypaper. Then, surprise, the “normality” of the dull drone-doom feedback disappears. What is left are only the nervous vocal samples and the guitar solo indulging in a “weird”, groovy bluesy jamming gradually deformed and eventually dissipated by pedal effects and echoes. With the suite Skulls.Coffins.Nails. opening Side B you get back to the blackened sludge-drone-industrial nightmare. In spite of the very “human”, female vocal sample announcing the suite, the noise industrial components are dominant. Noises of machines, saws, etc. are mixed with sounds of probably normal things made unsettling by the electronic elaboration. The background drone, which is the nest for everything, is wavy and granular, very coarse and dark, but never too monotonous. The drone background can change tone, sometimes it may get duller or just disappear or else expand and incorporate a slow, ritualistic, pitch-black and epic-sounding lithany populated by infernal, ranting and hissing voices and recalling what heard in bands like Void Meditation Cult. When the background drone stops all of a sudden you can appreciate the doleful repetitive leading riff which occasionally diverges towards epic solos.
This lithany develops in the core of the suite. There the epic and the ritual features of the melody may gradually further grow to an almost apocalyptic intensity especially when the monolithic leading riff gets boosted by gigantic noise manipulations sounding like reverbered and deformed roars of a Godzilla-like monster. The monster and its obsessive lithany die out gradually into an absurdly monotonous black drone industrial magma made of obscure vibrations able to keep the tension high, until when silence swallows anything after a pulsation.The final track, Blut’s version of Nightstick’s Ultimatum, is gorgeous. It starts with the typical vocal sample followed by a fat Wizardian mammoth rhythm. After much industrial buzz it is cool to be able to headbang after a juicy super-heavy tune. Here Blut’s sound is extremely charged and monolithic, although with Blut, like with Nightstick, you have to expect some contrast. You get it, for example, when the guitar starts building up the cool, hyper-reverbered psych jamming over the heavily plodding mammoth dooom base. Blut’s Ultimatum is a titanic, toxic march where psych doom commands. Noise and samples only sporadically interrupt the march except for the final part where industrial noise chaos and the reverbered vibrations of the guitar take over and eventually lead to total silence.
Earlier I mention that Blut’s music on the tape is lo-fi. But don’t think that the tape is bad quality. Not at all. Listen to this monster tape with headphones, get into Blut’s caustic vibe and your senses will expand.
And for more treats to your battered ears and brain cells, you had better further explore the roster of Major Destroyer Records
Words: Marilena Moroni
Blut | Official Website
Blut Tape | Major Destroyer Records
Blut CD | Bubonic Productions
Major Destroyer | Official Website
Major Destroyer | Bandcamp