Gnaw Their Tongues - "Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus" (2011) [Crucial Blast Records]

A combination of unemployment and a month and a half long school break means one thing: slasher films. Though I'm not a violent person by any means, I've always been drawn to them. Maybe it's my own way of confronting silly irrational fears, maybe I enjoy the schadenfreude of knowingly watching a D-list movie, rifled with ketchup and "flesh-colored" putty galore, but, either way, from the first time I knowingly viewed "Friday the 13th" at the tender age of 11, I was hooked. My one consistent annoyance with these films are the abundance of less than satisfactory. I know, I know, B-list movies warrant a terrible soundtrack, but when watching something as demented as the original Last House On The Left, I was sort of expecting something a little more faux-chilling than goofy, lighthearted Casio etudes. The closest to "oh wow, that's kind of eerie" horror has ever gotten is definitely Harry Manfredini's "ki ki ki ma ma ma" from the Friday the 13th series, but that was even done to death. Horror needs something...fresh, something truly horrifying to fit the nightmarish intent of these movies. Has anything brought enough intensity to a film since Kubrick's brilliant adaptation of Bartok as a soundtrack for A-lister The Shining? No. Never. However, maybe filmmakers should start turning to Dutch madman Maurice "Mories" de Jong for a new, much more fucked sound direction.

Even with twenty-eight releases under his belt (for this project alone), Gnaw Their Tongues still hasn't lost it's horrific edge. A noise-inflicted, sadistic nightmare of blood-soaked sexual freedom and hedonism, snuff film and gore-obsessed Mories drags his listeners further into his tormented mind. Heralded by demonic orchestras, thick, eardrum-stabbing bass, free-jazz inspired percussion, and the most harrowing of torture samples, the religiously inclined (Gnaw Their Tongues is taken from a rather masochistic bible verse) Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus is a meditation in unspeakable, de Sade-esque horrors, whether it be "Urine-Soaked Neophytes," "Bonedust on Dead Genitals." The tormenting, droning doom metal found on this album, by far Mories's crowning achievement thus far with the Gnaw Their Tongues moniker, are rife with haphazard atonality, carefully crafted textures, and an expansive, Lustmordian gait that previously had yet to be achieved with such a minimally-inclined genre. This is true horror.

A testament to the ever crumbling psyche of a sexual sadist, Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus is one of the most chilling, mind altering albums I have ever heard. Though Mories has yet to release any lyrics at all, there is no doubt that this phantasm of an album is rife with rape obsessions, immense gore, and the stream-of-consciousness ravings of a madman. Fuck your movies, if you want to experience true fear, true madness, take Gnaw Their Tongues for a spin. Soon enough you'll be making snuff films of your own.

-Jon