T.O.M.B. - Third Wave Holocaust

Step... One more... And another one... Black sac is on your head, heaviness inside your legs, heaviness shackles every single cell of your body. Your arms are bound behind your back with a kind of a rope and you feel that there is no way to escape those fetters. Somebody strong drags your sluggish body through the narrow tunnel; you can feel its pressure even through the pain of a wounded and besotted head. Pulsating hum reaches your ears, it becomes stronger with each meter of your path, immersing into a litany sown with a hundred voices until it fills every corner of your soul, wrapping you in a blanket made of a thousand thorns. Suddenly, the movement is being stopped, the sac is pulled off your head and all your darkest fears materialize around you in one single moment. Your mind is refusing to believe in what your eyes are witnessing, but the truth is even worthier while you are being surrounded by countless figures wearing long black cloaks. They are swinging, all as one, dwelling in a collective ecstatic act of an occult ritual, hypnotizing a helpless prey which is you actually. Hell had never been that close to you and you start to realize that the sound of T.O.M.B. will be the last thing that you hear during the expiring minutes of your miserable life.

The new resident of "Black Plagve" (sublabel of Malignant records) that joined the family during 2013 certainly has some experience in causing the ears of its audience to bleed with a black blood. Death and destruction is being spread by Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy aka T.O.M.B. revealing its vision of Underworld full of saints and sinners screaming in one boiling cauldron for more than ten years already. Jack Gannon, the mastermind behind this project, participated in Pennsylvanian black metal act Deteriorate somewhere during middle nineties and this influence can be felt in his current activity for sure. Honestly, the record that I hold in my hands right now is the first that I hear from this US based comrade, but judging by the cover of "Third Wave Holocaust" and the bands' origin, I can assume that it will be something filthy and harsh. And I was not mistaken in my prediction.

Starting a battle for the listener's sanity and soul with the track "Antagonizing the Unknown", Jack releases all the demons from the very beginning. Agonizing metal overloads my speakers; my brain is being torn by waves of scratchy and sharp noise. With the second composition "Electric Exorcism" I begin to understand that it was only a preface and the real damage starts from this point. A huge wall of dirty, heavily distorted sound covers me, spins me in a huge vortex full of rusty metal parts, sand and rocks. I can hear also some background machinery hum through this cacophony that makes the atmosphere even more oppressive. This destructive storm calms down a little bit with the third track "The Great Venerat Insult" raising visions of dark catacombs that became a habitat of shriveled stinky creatures worshiping their fallen gods to the beat of an empty barrel.

In "Na La Gore Na", T.O.M.B. gains its power again; hypnotizing voice speaks with the dead trying to conjure the long forgotten evil force. The flames rise higher and higher corresponding with the intensity of the noisy textures that become denser and denser with each second of this composition. "Vulgarity" becomes more formless stepping into the field of power noise, but mister Gannon doesn't forget to add a slight touch of occultism as well throwing some background voices here and there into the boiling lava.

The following "Disrupting Admin" and "Vom Voodoo" continue to erase the listener's personality with the same technique of extreme electronics and raw noisy distortion keeping its level quite high. "Third Wave Holocaust" stands out of a relatively plane "meat-grinding" process with a kind of a rhythm created by a working mechanism and an atmosphere rather closer to dark ambient then power electronics. But with "Clairvoyant Frequencies" you can definitely forget about the calmer parts of this album, formless shadows fill the room again with a dense and sharp terror that slowly transforms into the last, slow but yet hypnotic composition "Tribute to Nanhua". Combining a woman chanting with a morphing substance of electronic pulsations, rising and falling background hum, T.O.M.B. throws a bloodless sacrificial piece of meat into oblivion.

Wow, it was an hour of such an intensive lobotomy and I feel very tired, completely exhausted after it. The music has some really negative charge that is being transmitted all the way, but not always the one that you usually seek for when you insert a record of black ambient and death industrial genre into your CD player. Maybe the issue is with monotonous parts of the album when music simply storms the brain, clinging to it with its poisonous claws. Or maybe it is a frequency of the noisy wall that makes such an effect. Anyhow, it is not the exact reaction that I expected to finish with. But even despite the headache, "Third Wave Holocaust" remains to be quite interesting in its major parts revealing a symbiosis of mechanical terror with occult and ritualistic spirit. Thus, close your eyes, open your mind and partake from the trembling soft flesh of human sacrifice. Aug 05 2014