Gnaw Their Tongues

Gnaw Their Tongues

Hymns For The Broken, Swollen And Silent

Crucial Blast

A shambling monstrosity woven from charred bones and infernal technology, stitched with gristle and exposed wiring, Hymns For The Broken, Swollen And Silent lurches like a grotesque assemblage of tortured flesh and mangled machinery, revealing the latest nightmare from Dutch fiend Gnaw Their Tongues. After more than a decade, they continue to disturb with their uniquely dark and depraved blend of black metal, industrial and noise, and this eight-song album shows them to be in prime killing mode. In the wake of a series of live performances starting in 2015, this new material from mastermind Mories (Seirom, Cloak Of Altering, Mors Sonat) finds him tapping into a heavier, more violent rhythmic element as well as a more pronounced use of synthesizers, yet another step in the evolution of GTT’s sound. Throughout the album, the harsh drum programming offers a mixture of cacophonous blast beats and grueling, glacial detonations while signature unsettling samples and blasts of orchestral power weave throughout the mix, turning each track into a seething mass of claustrophobic horror. Eruptions of ultra-frenzied blackened blast and floor-shaking depth-charge reverberations, ravenous, psychotic vocals and swells of choral despair, distorted electronics and gut-churning bass riffs, mournful horns and weirdly layered female operatic singing—this release delivers on the promise of chaotic horror that one expects from Gnaw Their Tongues, evoking foul, corrupted imagery while also streaked with striking moments of warped, morbid beauty.

Gnaw Their Tongues

Abyss Of Longing Throats

Crucial Blast

Though Gnaw Their Tongues has hardly been quiet of late, what with recent collaborations with Alkerdeel, the release of the Collected Atrocities compilation and 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 Abyss of Longing Throats, Gnaw Their Tongues returns in full ravenous glory, offering another hellish cacophony of mangled industrial black metal, lurching 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 into one of the most emotionally stirring sequences yet heard in the band’s catalog, Abyss continues the evolution of Gnaw Their Tongues’ sound.  There’s plenty of the grueling, industrialized heaviness and violent orchestral sounds for which the band is known, 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...

Gnaw Their Tongues

Collected Atrocities 2005-2008

Crucial Blast

For nearly a decade, Dutch avant-black / doom entity Gnaw Their Tongues—named after a particularly evocative passage from the Book of Revelation—has infected the underground with a uniquely disturbing brand of chaotic heaviness. Fusing malevolent, rumbling doom and rabid, noise-damaged aggression with blasts of fearsome orchestral power and industrial pandemonium, and draping these lurching, hellish dirges in an oppressive atmosphere thick with horror and despair, the intensely nightmarish music of Gnaw Their Tongues defies easy categorization. It’s the sole work of architect and madman Mories, also known for his work in Cloak of Altering, Pyriphlegethon, De Magia Veterum, Aderlating, Mors Sonat, Pompidou, Dimlit Hate Cellar and others. In 2007, before the release of the band’s Crucial Blast debut, An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood, Gnaw Their Tongues crawled into the black metal / industrial underground via a number of ultra-limited EPs which quickly went out of print, and are now sought after by fans of the band’s abject, blackened horror. Collected Atrocities 2005-2008 is a double-disc anthology that gathers together essential, out-of-print early recordings from the first three years of the project’s existence, compiling the Preferring Human Skin Over Animal Fur, Horse Drawn Hearse and For All Slaves... A Song of False Hope EPs, the material from the Static Hymnal compilation, and other rarities from the bowels of the Gnaw Their Tongues archives.

Gnaw Their Tongues

Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus

Crucial Blast

Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus—roughly translated, “with blood and whip, we worship the dark”—collects the latest atrocities from Gnaw Their Tongues, an eight-song exploration of the copper-scented frenzy of the serial killer, the obsessive acts of death worship enacted by those who live on the edge of abyss, the rites and rituals of black cults.  As always, the sound is immensely heavy—a seething maelstrom of thunderous tympani, screeching classical strings, horns, piano and some of the most vomitous vocals imaginable. However, Per Flagellum Sanguemque is marked by the most frenetic percussive attack heard from Gnaw Their Tongues yet, with volleys of chaotic drumming, fractured blasts and maniacally complex patterns that border on free-jazz.

Gnaw Their Tongues

L’arrivee De La Terne Mort Triomphante

Crucial Blast

One of the extreme metal / industrial underground's most unique bands, Gnaw Their Tongues returns with a new album of majestic, orchestral death-terror called L'Arrivee de la Terne Mort Triomphante, a series of five hymns to the death shroud, a celebration of dissolution. This Dutch one-man band is responsible for two of the most chilling albums of abstract heaviness in recent years (An Epiphanic Vomiting of Blood and All the Grand Magnificence of Perversity, both on Crucial Blast), but with this new full-length, Gnaw Their Tongues peels back additional layers of horror to reveal moments of euphonic beauty.  L'Arrivee de la Terne Mort Triomphante opens with the soaring choir of the damned--a cacophony of tortured shrieks and demonic howling underneath a crushing, sludgy bass riff and pounding elephantine drumming. The blackened doom is soon joined by peals of dissonant strings and softer droning cellos and violins. Deeper into the album, moments of severe beauty emerge: brief passages of fragile piano and mournful strings, the soft crackle of ancient vinyl grooves and French horns. Symphonic shadows drift throughout L'Arrivee de la Terne Mort Triomphante amidst the pounding industrial blackness, but they never last for long as the spiraling woodwinds and cyclical piano figures are inevitably subsumed into the blasts of malevolent orchestral might. At its heaviest, it's funeral doom bathed in modern orchestral music, a cross between Penderecki and pitch-black filth, pulverizing and intensely evil. Like the previous two Gnaw Their Tongues releases on Crucial Blast, L'Arrivee de la Terne...

Gnaw Their Tongues

All The Dread Magnificence Of Perversity

Crucial Blast

The second release to infect Crucial Blast from the Netherlands' Gnaw Their Tongues, All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity is the heaviest yet from this infernal mutation. The nine-track full-length mixes huge, black blots of grisly, distorted bass riffage and noxious undertow with the band's trademark symphony of orchestral strings bent into hellish, atonal melody. Horrific screams and guttural, operatic wails are wrenched from the pits of orgiastic ecstasy, while slow-motion percussion grinds away, enveloping the album in a thick, suffocating atmosphere of cancerous horror and dread. All the Dread Magnificence comes packaged in a heavy gatefold CD jacket with a Gnaw Their Tongues vinyl sticker.

Gnaw Their Tongues

An Epiphanic Vomiting Of Blood

Crucial Blast