Things just keep getting weirder and weirder. I mean it. After recently basking in the droning strangeness of the latest Ice Dragon outing last Friday (it’s the latest unless they’ve put another one out already), I find I’m even less sure of my footing when it comes to the related project Tentacle, whose Void Abyss debut hits a mainline of blasted ultra-dark psychedelics, Lovecraftian horror and sludge-laden disgust. The Void Abyss in which the five songs of the EP reside is one of their own making.

Tentacle released Void Abyss in a CD edition of 100 that promptly sold out, with a black sleeve featuring a photo of the cover art and an all-black (front and back) disc that hides in its depths an even-more-distorted secret track. Also included is a xerox-type booklet — my tendency with photocopied anything is to call it a ‘zine, but it’s really just a handmade CD booklet, proportionally and in the fact that it just basically includes the lyrics with some pictures of snails, octopi and other creatures traditionally slime-covered — that offers little information other than the words to the songs and the year of release, which is 2012. Full lineup, recording info, etc., remains a mystery.

No coincidence there, it would seem. Other than seeing three members in the photos on Tentacle‘s Thee Facebooks, there’s nothing to mark them a trio — from the murky sounds on “Talking, Bending, Dripping, Breaking,” there could be two people in the band or 20 — but Void Abyss proves all the more disturbing for the mystique, and as the songs remain completely wretched for the duration despite hinting at some stylistic variety, the tracks prove remarkably consistent for sounding like they just crawled out from between Cthulhu’s barnacled buttcheeks: Totally and unreasonably fucked.

Scale the mountains of madness with the Void Abyss stream from Tentacle‘s Bandcamp page. Or, you know, just listening is fine too:

Tags: Boston, Ice Dragon, Massachusetts, Tentacle, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2012 at 3:44 pm and is filed under On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.