Shift ‎– Abandon
Label: Cold Spring ‎– CSR236CD
Format: CD, Album
Country: UK
Released: 12 May 2017
Style:Industrial, Power Electronics

Following the unrestrained act of aggression that was 2014’s “Altamont Rising”, Swedish Industrial act SHIFT returns to more personal and ethereal domains on “Abandon”. Created over a ten year period from a huge cache of sources, boiled down to four tracks of unyielding slow moving heaviness. Abandon features several guest appearances and is SHIFT’s most complex recording to date.

“Abandon [uh-ban-duh n]

The concept of leaving completely and finally forsake utterly; desert: to abandon a child; to abandon a sinking ship. To give up; discontinue; withdraw from: to abandon hope. To give up the control of: to abandon a city to an enemy army. To yield (oneself) without restraint or moderation; give (oneself) over to natural impulses, usually without self-control: to abandon oneself. Law. to cast away, leave, or desert, as property or a child. Obsolete. To banish.”

Gnawed ‎– Pestilence Beholden

Label: Malignant Records ‎– TUMORCD97
Format: CD, Album
Country: US
Released: Sep 2016
Style: Industrial, Power Electronics

Since its inception in 2009, Grant Richardson’s Gnawed has propelled itself into the top tier of heavy electronics and death industrial with a stream of high quality releases over a variety of formats.

For his 3rd full length disc, Pestilence Beholden, the template set forth by prior works remains intact, but is dragged down into an even darker space, this time enriched by added layers of foreboding atmospherics and foggy ambience.

Make no mistake, this is Gnawed through and through, but Pestilence Beholden is even more sculpted and refined than before, finding an intersection between tensile dread and controlled aggression, as ominous synth beds and throbbing drones are augmented with the cataclysmic reverberations, resonating scrapyard acoustics, and mechanized dirge you’ve come to expect.

Recorded in industrial complexes in and around Minneapolis, the sound here is deep and immense, once again solidifying Gnawed in a category all their own.