Time to get crushed by the wheels of industrial and there are not many that run you over quite so nastily. In fact Concrete Lung are likely to get in reverse and go back and forth over your corpse, doing skid marks on your intestines. This is up there with Khost in the harrowing stakes. I have been following this lot since debut release ‘Waste Of Flesh’ in 2010 and they just seem to be getting more and more mired in filth as they continue. I would have thought that moving from Manchester to Australia might have cheered them up a bit but obviously the change of environment has not done anything to make them happier in life. Oh well Fumes, let’s go and choke on em!
To say first track ‘The Harbinger’ brings the doom would be a cliché but one that can’t be ignored as it slowly cranks into life and hits a rugged robotic groove. It feels like the machines have risen and are preparing to terminate and when Ed Oxime’s hateful, snarly vocals join in the laborious and unrelenting march, there’s little in the way of humanity about them. There’s plenty of Bile and spite to this as it crushes and rumbles away, still in control rather than out of it but completely unstoppable. ‘Spinning In The Grave’ carries on the cold crushing antagonism, there’s no mercy as one track blends into another, vocals becoming more forceful and angry and a feel of cold alien misanthropy rising. It’s what can only be described as a totally ugly sound but that’s what we like and it is certainly hitting the mark, right between the eyes. Some lurching Godfleshian squalls hit the riffing machine and things become even bleaker as an end of the world vibe of desolation enters with the depressive tones of ‘When The Blind Man Sees You.’ Speed is certainly not the weapon here it’s long and bitter genocide being wrought out and all the more lethal for it. It sounds like the words “down, down, down” are being wretched out here and that’s where we are going, all the way down!
Dissonance, ambience and noise and distorted spoken voices form around ‘Dissension 1’. In my mind it’s a radio transmission coming from desperate human survivors, the screams that rise from it don’t give much in the way of hope and this wrecked land as the next number suggests is going to be well and truly barren for the next period of ‘A Thousand Years.’ This one chugs even harder and heavier, a battle to the bitter end; the march becoming more frenzied and the vocals demented and dictatorial. Toxicity and gas mask terror is wrought in the title track or perhaps it’s a message of environmental disgust with the words “I no longer breathe your fumes” being spat out at the multi-national polluters of the planet. With ‘Dissension II’ finishing things off, whatever way you look at things, there’s little in the way of hope for the human race. To say this leaves a nasty taste in the mouth would be an understatement and it has done so from the very start all the way through to conclusion. This is Concrete Lung at their most harrowing and extreme; saying I enjoyed it would not be quite the right way of putting things but I have been more than glad to endure it. Find out if you are at the links below.
(7.5/10 Pete Woods)
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