Steel Hook Prostheses - The Empirics Guild

It's summer time outside. Everybody plans his vacations nowadays, starts to order flight tickets, packs his stuff. You know the ordinary destinations for tourists, they don't change for decades. Turkey, Egypt, South Spain, hell, there are many dozens of them. But this time I would like to offer something more exotic, something that people don't dare to step on, that's why you will be able to find untouched natural treasures, beautiful shores and truly white sand. I am talking about Gruinard Island for example; the place that was the site of a biological warfare tests by British military scientists during the WW2 and many years after. So, I am sure that in order to prepare for the trip you will have to write down a reminder list, a very special reminder list:

A pack of violence - CHECKED, in stock
Many cans of hatred - CHECKED, in stock
A bottle of poison - CHECKED, in stock
A roll of brutalism - CHECKED, in stock
A blanket of ambience - CHECKED, in stock

But instead of carrying all those goods with you on this dangerous, but yet exciting journey, you can take just one relatively small piece of plastic with the name Steel Hook Prophesies that will contain everything mentioned above and even more! Here it is, the new record from Texas based comrades which suggest you to stop jerking and join 'The Empirics Guild', a long awaited album that arrives after more than five years of silence.

Five long years past but S.H.P. is still in control of power electronics area, being strong as never before. It seems that the compositions that appear in this record are not connected with some general theme or concept. Each track has its own face and ready to burn out all the sanity that remained in your sick mind. This diversity allows a lot of flexibility in manipulation on sensual level. More violent tracks change places with atmospheric pieces; and those changes are so fluent that it makes the listening process very entertaining, without falling into monotonous sound generating.

S.H.P. is willing to explore the darkest corners of human mental illnesses, horrors that people are capable of inflicting upon each other, sickest desires of perverted individuals. Tracks like "Sadomedica", "Disease Incubator", "Antiquus Morbis" have a really delusional and creepy background full of industrial samples and offensive atmosphere. With "Leprosaria Dross", "Debrided Necrotic Tissue" or "Gula", the texas fellas explode the surface with analogue disturbances, draw sonic landscapes showing the true destruction, blood and warfare. Compositions like "Scald" or "The Blood Cough" drill a huge hole into the inner world of the listener to fill it with terror, torture and rage.

I would like to praise separately also the level of sound engineering which plays a significant role in the albums' success. Each effect or sound or vocal session has its own place. Even when manipulating with high quantity of noises and special effects, there is no feeling of them fighting with each other or crawling over each other.

S.H.P. has made a big step forward since their last cd that was out on Malignant Records as well. 'The Empirics Guild' has everything to love it for, everything that creates power electronics as a genre, the energy that carries it forward for many years. I am not sure that it is the best album that I've ever heard, but it is definitely one of my favorites for this year, the exact soundtrack on my trip to Gruinard Island. Aug 06 2013