Reeking Pained and Shuddering

You really need to listen to this album a few times to come terms with it. The first time I heard it, "Reeking, Pained and Shuddering" was an overwhelming and confounding experience. Noise, ambient, industrial, spoken word samples and black metal are rolled up by one-man act Gnaw Their Tongues into an explosion of sound terrorism. Repeated hearings however eventually reveal an actual narrative and underlying musical structures beneath the layers of fuzz distortion, noise, shock tactics, aggression and hatred.

Opening track "Blood spills out of everything I touch" spells out the extremity of the music and its subject matter: you're thrown straight into the business end of a vortex of howling noise, juddering drone, bombastic drum rhythms and deranged black metal screaming that collapse into a chilling spoken voice monologue which in turns epxands into a whirring drone storm and more crashing juggernaut percussion. If you peruse the song titles in the order on the album sleeve while all this is going on, you discover the narrative anchoring this music: a serial killer filled with hatred for humanity and life, for whom destruction is the highest manifestation of creation, setting about his business. (Apart from Aileen Wuornos, I don't know of any other female serial killers who acted on their own or who weren't accomplices to male serial killers - the vast majority of self-employed serial killers happen to be men.) Succeeding tracks like "Utter futility of creation" and "Nihilism, tied up and burning" pile on the fear and terror by adding high-pitched sound samples of opera singers and tightly-strung violins amid more layers of distorted noise and crazed rhythms; "Nihilism ..." in particular adds insane programmed BM rhythms and jackhammer-speed fuzz guitars and this song is about as BM industrial as the album gets.

If you think the noisy tracks are horrific, you might have to think again: the quiet piece "the evening wolves" has none of the previous three songs' thunder and sonic violence but in its place is a chilling ambience that is hard to bear. When "Destroying is creating" brings back the noise, the screaming and the banging back, some tension is released (so it's kind of a relief from the previous track!) and there is also a strange kind of exhaustion as though the killer is actually sated but is compelled by some strange inner religious force to continue his butchery.

You've probably guessed that there won't be an end any time soon to the slaughter: "transition" continues with doom-laden rhythms, more distorted BM screaming vocals and grinding drones. This is actually a more controlled track than the rest of the album with moments where the music floats or becomes static, allowing space to enter it. Spoken voice samples describe the nature of the transition involved: no, it's not about souls going to Heaven or Hell, it's more material and shocking than that. Need I say any more about the mention of the word "lampshades" in one sample out of a number used in the track?

It's a monstrous and pitiless experience and the field recordings, especially those used in "transition", will be far too much to bear for many listeners. The barrage of noise can get tiresome after the first three tracks but the later half of the album does have quieter and more restrained music and listeners will be able to better appreciate the way in which songs like "Destroying is creating" have been constructed. The GTT guy does not give anything away about whether he admires serial killers or not or approves of the things they do and I guess this neutrally charged aspect of "Reeking ..." combined with the extreme nature of the music will be a turn-off to listeners. The album also presents a pessimistic view of humanity and in a way this is a saving grace as this attitude underpins the ferocity and hatred in the music and prevents it from being a sensationalist and voyeuristic survey of a serial killer's activities.

Though the music is well-composed and balanced in its own way, and can be quite compelling, I'm not sure that this music can retain lasting value as quite often music that is very extreme in nature and which deals with extreme abnormal human behaviours can lose its edge with the passage of time and start looking cartoony and kitsch. On the other hand the concept of the music which forces you to enter the serial killer's mind may well give this album an edge over other cultural works that follow serial killers' activities by ensuring that it doesn't become too popular even within the underground music scene.