Industrial-damaged dirge-metalers Gnaw promise to be "as ugly as sound can get" and they inarguably deliver on that. This Face is a visceral, bilious, crawling, throat-shredding mangled nightmare of an album. Their singular devotion to being unpleasant deserves respect and admiration.
While This Face is Gnaw's debut, they already have an impressive doom-metal lineage: the group features former Khanate vocalist Alan Dubin and Burning Witch drummer Jamie Sykes. However, it is the lesser-known members of the group that give Gnaw such a distinctive sound.
The band's "music" is provided by multi-instrumentalist Carter Thornton, who largely and conspicuously eschews conventional doom-metal riffing and adds unique touches using an array of homemade instrumentation. However, what defines Gnaw is the fact that the group contains two established film/television sound designers (one of whom is an Emmy winner). Jun Mizomachi and Brian Beatrice take the band's source material and forge it into something much more crushing and complex by adding layers of field recordings, electronics, and bizarre sound-manipulations. Also, the resultant production clarity and density yields an awesome heaviness and immediacy that far exceeds that of most of Gnaw's peers.
The album's opener ("Haven Vault") is a riffless, beatless tsunami of distortion, screaming, and electronic noise. It is not boring by any means, as Dubin's vocals are quite cathartic, and the roar is augmented by drum fills and plinking eerie piano, but I found myself desperately hoping that the whole album would not be in this vein. Nine songs of formless, agonized sociopathic sludge vomit would be too much for me. I suspect Dubin spit up blood for several days after delivering this vocal performance.
Thankfully, the album changes gears immediately with the second song ("Vacant"). Dubin delivers an uncharacteristically melodic vocal performance (he sort of sounds like Edward Ka-Spel after a lifetime of chain-smoking and whiskey-drinking) and the band locks into a rare groove. One of the many traits that make Gnaw so perversely delightful is that even though this song has an actual guitar riff, it is buried fairly low in the mix and rumbling noise and feedback are given center stage. It is endearingly contrarian to give listeners something to latch onto, then subvert that by burying it with an avalanche of electronic chaos. Also, "Vacant" features some of Dubin's most amusing lyricisms ("you can hear them laughing, everybody's fucking but you.").
The rest of the album, for the most part, continues the theme of being somewhat song-like and even maintains a surprisingly propulsive pseudo-tribal industrial groove for couple of songs ("Talking Mirrors" and "Backyard Frontier"). While all of the tracks sound quite similar (although the degree of dirge-iness varies a bit), they are often distinguished by interludes of stylistic departure that delve into power electronics or tribal ambiance.
Obviously, this much hate and dissonance is difficult to listen to in an album-sized dose, but that only indicates how impressively Gnaw have succeeded. I cannot begin to imagine where the band will go for their second album—it seems like they've pretty much said it all here. This Face is an overwhelming monolith of uncompromising and malevolent nastiness.
Samples:
• Vacant
• Talking Mirrors
• Backyard Frontier
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