Do you remember the final scene in Cronenberg’s masterpiece The Fly? The part where Dr. Brundle, now almost completely transformed into a giant humanoid fly (aka “The Brundlefly”), attempts to teleport together himself and a pregnant Veronica Quaife, to fuse each other into the “ultimate family”? As you know The Brundlefly’s plan goes totally wrong, and instead of fusing himself with Quaife and their unborn child he ends up instead getting fused with the teleport pod itself, resulting in the creation of a monstrous and agonizing deformity made of human, insect and mechanical parts, that then begs Quaife to end its suffering with a twelve gauge pump action shotgun blast right in the middle of its bug eyes. Well, that’s exactly what Gnaw‘s music sounds like: like the moment in which you see the final version of the now partially mechanical and agonizing Brundlefly emerge from the teleport pod and you just wanna puke all over yourself. In fact, Gnaw’s music just sounds like a fucking hideous and monstrous deformity made of mechanical chaos, decaying flesh, madness, and uncontrolled fucking horror.
Fronted by ex-Kahante and ex-OLD frontman Alan Dubin and featuring members of Enos Slaughter and Ike Yard, Gnaw is one of those bands you simply cannot fuck with, and which in return will fuck with YOU and your brain BIG time. You will realize this when you sit down with Gnaw’s new and second opus, Horrible Chamber, which was released this past October by Seventh Rule Recordings, and which you can (and should) get here. In fact, this album is just fucking hideous, warped and twisted in so many ways. It is a caustic and corrosive nightmare of musical madness where apocalyptic Godflesh-styled industrial sludge metal, noise, abstract industrial overtones, and claustrophobic doom metal all spiral into the sky in a beastly chain reaction of pure fucking horror and complete repulsiveness.
Dubin’s vocal delivery in this band is that of pure genius. His surreal and disgusting screech permeates this work like a disease, infesting every corner of it with loads of sickness and madness. The beautiful mesh of slow and rotting Kahnate-like rhythms with the insanely unpredictable and menacing OLD-like structures of this music makes for a totally nostalgic and unearthly listening experience. At the same time, Gnaw have definitely not stopped at being simply the sum of Dubin’s past experiences, but are instead an exponential chain reaction of slimy madness made of a million other elements spun out of control in a complete and disgusting bliss. The band fuses Einstürzende Neubauten-like mechanical and industrial hammering with the slimy and corrosive slabs of doomy sonic decay you would find in Goatsnake and Burning Witch. Then shit get’s shuffled up again in pure chaotic nonsense and elements of early Swans start to slither out along with other slimy fragments of Merzbow, Tim Hecker, Throbbing Gristle and Scorn. Dubin howls and screeches like a horde of mutant demonic rats while all around him his bandmates erect a massive and crushing wall of corrosive doom that sounds like it’s made of waves and walls of piss and razor wire, blood and battery acid, nuclear waste and barbed wire, and bile and rusted machinery. Few bands have managed to pull off such a seamless and triumphant splicing of doom metal, noise and industrial as Gnaw have managed to do with this album, and in this extremely unique, surreal and particular world the band dwells in, Horrible Chamber represents hands down industrial doom’s finest hour of 2013.
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