High Strange is low death! Plague metal! The buried-alive-in-brown-dirt raw death, chased with elements of sludge and decaying atmosphere, reeks of indiscriminate decay across Woe Upon Man‘s 28-minute span, and the purposefulness of its abiding drear is obvious. This is the sound of the times, channeled into pummeling drive and bitter stench. My beloved Garden State’s own Chrome Peeler Records (Butler, no less; my mother taught art there for 35-plus years) will handle the Aug. 24 release of the five-song debut outing, and Woe Upon Man spits dark poetry in “Black Hands” and “Evil is Life” at least partially lifted from the 1901 A Dream Play surrealist drama from Swedish playwright August Strindberg, lines like “It is a misery to be man!” and “Unclean is the earth” arrive in a spoken gutturalism over drones and distortion like Celtic Frost minus the majesty, and in alternating fashion with opener “Descend and You May See,” centerpiece “Foulstrand” (premiering below) and 10-minute finale “The Final Complaint/The Parting Hour,” ragers and bludgeoners all, no matter what speed they’re actually playing.

To wit, “Descend and You May See” plods until it sprints, taking a mere three minutes to introduce the disaffection and drear wrought by High Strange — the New York-based four-piece of Jonathan Canady, Jay Newman, Conor Hickey and Joseph Branciforte, whose significant pedigree you can see below — and the mystery of how Woe Upon Man earned a cassette release is quickly solved. It’s entirely possible, of course, that these songs were composed and recorded in isolation, passing files back and forth in a pandemic-era project — certainly the style bears the hallmark of disease — but they sure don’t sound like it. High Strange have harnessed a lo-fi sound that is at once scathing and experimental, the drones behind the echoing speech of “Black Hands,” derived from monologues in the play by The Portress and The Lawyer (the full text of the play is readily available) branching outward even as guitar noise howls and screeches like surrounding fire. This leads to the single snare hit that launches the classic death of “Foulstrand,” a speed-chugging central riff holding firm as the gritty, charred-epic sensibilities are shoved further along, the album’s shortest-to-longest progression of tracks making the noted descent all the more palpable as it goes.

“Evil is Life” is, accordingly, lower, longer and less frenetic than “Black Hands” before it, just as “Foulstrand” feels more assured of what it’s doing than “Descend and You May See” — which if you told me it was the first song written for the project, I’d believe you — and “The Final Complaint/The Parting Hour” draws the two sides together, devoting its first half to creating and only partially releasing tension in verses and a spoken chorus, while the second transitions into an ambient peculiarity of doom and drone noise, the rigor finally giving over to speech not unlike “Evil is Life” in such a way as to confirm that, as willfully unrefined as Woe Upon Man is across its relatively short stretch, High Strange are in control of what they’re doing and not acting without purpose behind their expression. The back-and-forth between assault and atmosphere — neither without aspects of the other, mind you — is pulled together in a way that is conscious and that it seems laughable to call graceful but is that just the same. If you can’t raise a claw to this, why even have claws?

Again, Aug. 24 is the release date (or at least the shipping date), and the preorder link and more info follows below from the PR wire. Before you get there, hit play on “Foulstrand” and be duly immersed in mortality’s endgame.

Enjoy:

HIGH STRANGE “Woe Upon Man” LP/cassette (SHIPPING AUGUST 24TH)

Lyrically based on August Strindberg’s “A Dream Play” HIGH STRANGE infuses their dark heaviness with a surrealistic edge. “Woe Upon Man” is a depraved cacophony of metal and noise primitivism, injecting blasts of fetid doom with mangled thrash. Massive slabs of rotted noise and low-end rumble into a seething mass of claustrophobic horror, creating a diverse and mind-blowing avant-heaviness.

Limited to 200 copies on black vinyl and 50 cassettes.

PRE-ORDER @ https://chromepeelerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/woe-upon-man

Tracklisting:
1. Descend and You May See
2. Black Hands
3. Foulstrand
4. Evil is Life
5. The Final Complaint/The Parting Hour

Members:
Jonathan Canady (Deathpile, Dead World): vocals, electronics
Jay Newman (Unearthly Trance, Serpentine Path, Abandoner): bass, moog, apprehension engine
Conor Hickey (Brain Slug, Born Sinner): guitar
Joe Branciforte (Carnivore A.D., All Out War): drums

High Strange, Woe Upon Man (2021)

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