Cult of Occult - Five Degrees Of Insanity

(Words by Doomfinder General)

It's a word that gets thrown around a lot these days but fuck, Cult Of Occult are heavy. From the crushing guitar to the viscous vocals and the pounding drums it's almost too much at times but it never stops being amazing albeit in a thoroughly unpleasant way.

Five Degrees Of Insanity (as can you see from the album cover) is about a man slowly losing his mind - which is a pretty good description of the music. The album starts off with a slow feedback build up for about a minute - lulling you into a false sense of security - then kicks in and you are almost instantly drowning in a river of pain, anguish and misery that pretty music doesn't let up for 70 minutes. "Misanthropic" offers a brief respite from the constant misery with an almost black metal-like intro and a slow, psych-outro, but still has a solid 10 minutes of good old horrible sludgy misery.

If you are in any into sludge or generally unpleasant music this is well worth a listen.

NUH - Remixes Hideous Miscreation

I've not heard the source material for this remix, but I'm not entirely sure if I need to, if I'm honest. The thing with remixes of this nature is that the songs are usually so mutated from their original form that they have become brand new entities in their own right. Mixing gabba techno with awkward synths and nifty, sneaky little drum'n'bass passages, NUH really makes a fucking meal out of whatever source material Hideous Miscreation left to be devoured. Shit, I dunno whether to get up and dance or fucking smash my house to pieces. What a dilemma!

Side B continues the madness, opening straight up with more gabba brutality. Jeez! I'm proper loving this shit! Gonna be checking out more stuff by NUH in the very near future. Out thanks to Legs Akimbo Records, who seem to specialise in this unique brand of gabba-orientated punishment, and limited to 110 copies on evil black wax. Get in!

Stalaggh - Projekt Misanthropia

Is there anything quite so harrowing as the story behind Stalaggh? Probably, but still, their tale is one of the sheer lengths (or is that depths) that people will go to in the name of art. Basically, the short version is that Stalaggh was formed by some of the leading names in the European black metal scene (who come together anonymously) to make the most nihilistic and horrible noise terror ever heard. As vocalists, Stalaggh controversially garnered assistance from two (also anonymous) mentally ill patients, one of which famously killed himself after the release of the first Stalaggh EP in 2003. The other apparently had attacked and killed his mother at the age of 16. How these people were allowed out into a recording studio, I am not really sure.

This 7" is a promo tool for the third Stalaggh EP/record, Projekt Misanthropia, and it contains about 5 minutes of audio from those sessions. For most people, believe me, this is more than enough. Depending on your world view and tolerance towards extremely upsetting material, playing this record could be the longest five minutes of your life. Luckily for me then, I am jaded enough to see past the potential moral-nightmare that surrounds this band. Saying that, this is some of the more unsettling noise I have ever had the displeasure of hearing. The full release of this (on CD) came with an empty box of Risperdal tablets. Grim. As. Fuck.

Here is the entire thing. Close your eyes and wake up as a different person.