Gnaw by Night
It’s 1:52 in the morning as I start this. I thought after listening to it this afternoon the best time to review Gnaw‘s This Face (Conspiracy) would be late at night, when everyone else had long since gone to bed and the light coming out of? the three windows in this room was the only light in the whole valley as far as I could see. The headphones were on, but I took them off because this album is too horrifying to listen to with your back to the door.
They’ve done a good job of letting their potential audience know about their pedigree, and with vocalist Alan Dubin a veteran of minimalist doom oracles Khanate and Jamie Sykes boasting time drumming for Burning Witch (the two bands having in common guitarist Stephen O’Malley, also of SunnO)))) they have something decent to brag about. Dubin‘s rasp takes center stage here — I like to imagine him hiding around a corner on Washington St. in Hoboken, biting fingers off yuppies as they walk by — and the ugliness behind is busy enough to catch fans of his former (maybe? Who the hell knows what’s up with Khanate.) band off guard. For the first 10 seconds, I had to make sure I didn’t slip in the new Napalm Death record by mistake.
Gnaw should have called themselves Gnash, because where I think of gnawing as a gradually painful process, as in a wolf gnawing its leg off to get out of a trap, a gnash happens quickly, and Gnaw waste no time in inflicting themselves upon the ear. They slice and rip and dig out a hole in the psyche, offering malevolent electronica sweeps and bleeps and soundscapes of dim growing dimmer light. I’m starting to fall asleep and all my dreams are red.
It is extreme, experimental and sonically unpleasant. This Face is sonic masochism on the part of its creators; an album that practically dares you to listen, twisting and wrenching half-speed Killing Joke (“Vacant”) and Godflesh (“Shard”) into a mosiac of loathsome noises. Broken glass gone audio. The feedback and bass booms that launch “Talking Mirrors” feel like they’re cutting out my eyes and there’s even a groove on this song, packed with dense layers of cruelty and a hate that seethes, making even the blackest of the black metal look corny and lightweight by comparison.
There are coyotes outside in the valley. I can hear them through the walls in this old house and they sound like screaming children. All that shit about “arooo” howling at the moon is wrong. Coyotes make a terrible noise. Somehow with This Face lurching at me from the speakers, it fits. Gnaw are a nightmare waiting to unleash itself from the Jupiter’s Eye storm of the subconscious.
Tags: Conspiracy, Drone, Gnaw, Horror Metal
