Droning, crashing, building tower after tower of riffs and choking the oxygen out of the very atmosphere you breathe while you listen to it – these would seem to be the objectives behind French post-metallers Year of No Light’s second full-length, Ausserwelt (Conspiracy). The Bordeaux six-piece featuring three guitars, two drummers, one bassist and a host of keyboard and electronics that can come from just about any of them present  four extended tracks to make up the album’s 48-minute runtime, the shortest being just over nine and a half minutes long, and the longest, “Hiérophante,” clocking in at 13:13.

With six people in the band and the most recognizable figure being guitarist Shiran Kaidine (also credited with vocals, though there aren’t any words on the album) of Monarch!, who came aboard after Year of No Light’s 2006 debut, Nord, it’s the wall of sound that’s the star on Ausserwelt. It would almost have to be. Throughout “Perséphone I,” “Perséphone II,” “Hiérophante” and closer “Abbesse,” it’s the full-on tonal weight the band crafts that makes the record memorable, if not necessarily the songs themselves, which are instrumental, given toward stretches of ambience and, frankly, going for something entirely different than catchy hooks or lead lines. In a way, Year of No Light have so many spontaneous elements in their music – the effects, the electronic noises – that they can’t really come out of Ausserwelt sounding like anyone but themselves, but that said, what they’re doing isn’t really all that original.

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For anyone in or around Manhattan tonight, Tersdee, May 6, Tones of Death is putting on a free show at Fontana’s — it’s like the pancake breakfast; they do it every month — which features NYC horror metallers Gnaw, the ever-doomed Sin of Angels and Bubonic Bear, whom I’ve never heard of but rule solely based on the name. Gnaw are also working on a new album to follow up their first outing, This Face, which still gives me periodic nightmares. The PR wire says dig it:

This month’s installment of Fontana‘s free Tones of Death metal night takes place this Thursday, May 6th, headlined by audio nihilists Gnaw. Free PBR will be served until it runs out.

Gnaw Live Terror:

5/06/2010 Fontana‘s – New York, NY w/ Sin of Angels, Bubonic Bear

Gnaw is the sawblade-wrapped-in-razorwire brainchild of Alan Dubin (Khanate, OLD), Carter Thornton (Enos Slaughter), Jun Mizumachi (Ike Yard), and Jamie Sykes (Thorr’s Hammer, Burning Witch). Their 2009 debut for Conspiracy Records This Face was further infected and finally delivered by engineer Brian Beatrice before being wrought for stage deployment with additional drummer Eric Neuser. Their attack has been described as a “genre destroying journey” and utilizes pounding percussion, factory noise, chordal slabs of guitar and bass and homemade electro-acoustic contraptions. Dubin’s unique and legendary shriek delivers vivid portrayals of all things bad.

The NYC-based unit have been working in the shadows, constructing their diabolical follow-up to This Face. More info on this ongoing auditory terror campaign will be available soon, as well as dates for a Gnaw European assault in the works for October.

When I learned that former O.L.D. and Khanate vocalist Alan Dubin lives in Hoboken, New Jersey, after reviewing This Face, the debut from his new band, Gnaw (pictured above), I knew immediately that as someone whose hate-filled screams drove doom to newer, darker depths than it had ever seen before, he’d probably have an interesting take on the town.

Hoboken is situated just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and is connected to it via a rail system called the PATH (Port Authority Trans Hudson). PATH trains also run from Newark and Jersey City, but in Hoboken particularly, a commuter culture based largely on wealth and class privilege has submerged other resident demographics to become the face of the town. And that face is one of unmitigated douchebaggery.

Once comprised of a healthy immigrant community (mostly Italian; both Frank Sinatra and baseball are said to have been born there), real estate and rental costs overpriced even in this collapsed economy have made it impossible for a working class to thrive, and so what’s left are the kids from further out in the suburbs who don’t want to pay city prices even though they probably could instead move to Hoboken and take the PATH. Though this (as Dubin explains below) results in a wealth of places to find good sushi, it also means that anyone visiting the town is bound to be exposed to these soulless accountants-by-day-date-rapists-by-night and their self-obsessed, shallow companions. Even better, now they’ve started having kids and main drag Washington St. is thusly booming with mom and pop baby boutiques. As a lifelong resident of Jersey, I know it is the worst of everything bad about the Garden State.

His voice is the sound of all things disgusted, and even though Gnaw — a five-piece also including Jun Mizumachi, Jamie Sykes, Carter Thornton and Brian Beatrice on various noises and instruments — operates in a more blackened industrial vein than did Khanate, the same contempt that fueled Dubin then is evident in This Face, all the more prominently for the aural horrors surrounding it. Below, the vocalist discusses his place of residence, the dynamics of his new band and writing process, and finally clears the air concerning the status of Khanate.

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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.

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