Omnibael – Rain Soaks The Earth Where They Lie
Cruel Nature Records
Release Date: 04/02/22
Running Time: 39:25
Review by Dark Juan
9/10
It is 15.07 on April 3rd and I am only just getting round to doing this review. It has been a fairly trying few weeks, where murder has been thought about on many occasions. It has not been committed but there are a number of people on my shitlist who would be being found in parts, in bin bags, throughout the UK right about now had they continued to stoke my ire. Therefore, I apologise and once I have this one and Sleepwulf out of the way, I can actually review current releases. I might have been being a bit grumpy and rather less than productive.
This has been a public service announcement. Please form an orderly queue to the left and I’ll see you as soon as I can.
Omnibael, then. A duo who shroud themselves in secrecy and don’t allow anyone to know their identities or appearances and especially their names. Although a bit of digging has revealed Stoke-On-Trent as a possible location. This would be for reasons of security, as they perform some of the most gut-churning, sludgy Industrial music it has ever been my pleasure to hear. So visceral it is, there is a UN Resolution against it because it is extremely challenging to listen to and has been known to cause nausea, vomiting and insanity among listeners with less self-control than Dark Juan. If they played this album to General Noriega to keep him awake, there would have been absolutely no invasion of Panama by the US, as he would have topped himself after 12 seconds flat because it is frankly an insane, bloodied, flailing wall of noise heading straight for you at terminal velocities.
Needless to say, Dark Juan is quite enjoying it.
The casual listener should approach Omnibael with caution. It is not the American style of polished, Electronic Industrial with verses and choruses and things like that. It’s two demented motherfuckers with drum machines, samplers and all kinds of equipment and the perverted desire to take sounds and fuck them up beyond all healing, then bolt the poor bastards on to other mutilated noises. Basses crackle, fizz and fuzz and get chopped up as screaming feedback meets the sound of pans and body parts being thrown at walls and single chords get looped and extended and blasted back at themselves. It barely qualifies as music in parts, such is the sheer sonic terror and the wall of noise Omnibael creates as it steamrollers everything. In short, this is fucking INDUSTRIAL.
There is zero concession to beauty here. Everything is oily, smoke belching black. Wastelands of rubble and half-starved children surround factories shitting out armaments and pollution. Rivers chock-full of industrial waste feed mycoprotein farms and steel presses and stamps clang and crash in a staccato, off-tempo rhythm as welding robots leak carcinogenic lubricant and send sparks showering over a filthy, petrochem flooded factory floor and the humans in there are merely OPERATORS, abject slaves to their machines… The orgasm has disappeared from the human condition completely without neurologists noticing, breeding is just another mechanical act and love isn’t a thing anymore. All there is, is a miserable, short, grease streaked, ill-nourished and disease filled existence where beauty and nature have died beneath a sinister grey pall of pollution and fallout and all there is left is production.
I do so enjoy it when a band conjures up pictures in my imagination. It’s such a jolly place.
Not since the days of Throbbing Gristle have I heard industrial quite like this. Inventive, painful to listen to and absolutely brutal. If you like Throbbing Gristle, Whitehouse and the like and lo-fi, zero production Black Metal, you’re gonna love this. If you want NIN mark 2, fucking avoid this, because it’ll let your brain out through your ears after turning it to milkshake. ‘Flowing Backwards’ being a prime example, as it builds from mechanical clanking to the sound of several thousand war machines warming up en masse and just keeps building and building and building until it actually fucking hurts to stay with it. Maschinenklang done fucking right. Off key, visceral and batshit mad roaring and screaming and howling abound and masquerade as vocals and give an unexpectedly plaintive human element to the sheer overwhelming power of the wall of deliberately mutated sound hitting you right in the back brain.
Jesus holy high Christ in a chariot driven sidecar. I LOVE this record.
Although I adore it, this is a record for purists and experts though. You have to know Industrial music and its history in order to fully appreciate it. You can’t have just got into Extreme music or Industrial and expect to understand this. You aren’t able to correlate Omnibael’s music with the likes of Nitzer Ebb, or NIN, or Ministry or Red Harvest. It’s unique. Melody is ground under the hobnailed jackboots of endlessly marching cybernetic infantry. It’s Skinny Puppy and Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse all mixed into one poisonous, dangerous form. It’s heavy as fuck, heavier than an armoured regiment of your mothers in neutronium panties and actually painful to listen to loud. It’s like an extended aural aortic aneurysm.
What a fucking album. Not one, by dint of the fact that it is more sonic sculpture than music, that I will be humming when hoovering Dark Juan Terrace, but one that I will play when I am on my own (that will be later when Mrs. Dark Juan abandons me to watch Norwegian forest pixie Aurora in Leeds later) and the room is dark and I am full of beer and I have my cans on.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System awards a sparkly and shiny 9/10 to Omnibael for an almost perfect Industrial record. Fucking brilliant, chaps. Fuck yes!
TRACKLISTING:
01. Mind Is A Mess
02. Last Days
03. The Repetition
04. Nothing Tastes Better Than Deceit
05. Rung Keep
06. Sound Of The WWII Story
07. Flowing Backwards
08. Lost Days
09. Shut Out The Light
LINE-UP:
Two people who don’t want you to know who they are, so I can’t tell you who they are either.
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of ‘Dark Juan’ and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
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