Rab'ha - "The Defiant Demos" (2011) [Small Doses]

Rab'ha's The Defiant Demos (WE ARE RAB'HA AND WE HAVE COME TO KILL YOU) are full of urban exploration photos from collapsing buildings. And it really seems like the record was born there. Rusted girders, brick, shattered sections of roof, steel preparation tables, and soiled mattresses scattered on the floor around a steel bedframe (and scattered empty bottles).

The record starts with the kind of harsh, all-high feedback that promises the blasting scream of the Hallow record before sombre drums and heavily distorted vocals frame harsh black guitar and grindingly heavy bass. And when you've grasped a sort of staringly firm wreckage of black metal, harsh noise (really harsh really noise, not some more filthy guitar) kicks in with smashing violence. When it gives in, it gives into some really heavy (but still abjectly harsh) doom that grabs the heart in just the right rusted way.

Gradually it vanishes into effects-loop-feedback-screaming harsh noise blasting away at a backdrop of distant bleak black guitar. The piles of detritus in this open-roofed building and the mildewed, scraped walls are showing through . . . then the pounding duo of bass and drums fights the frustrated destruction of more noise.
oh . . . and I've just put together a little more two and two and realized that half of this band is a noiser whose shirt I wear proudly and whose sticker is among the few I display in appropriate locations.

-V.