Just as Young
Gods Records has become a magnet for acts who have carried spores
of founder Michael Gira's vision into new areas, so Appease Me - the
label run by members of Blut Aus Nord - appears to be a launch pad
for bands with an affinity for their bosses' vast, unblinking claustrophobia.
In the case of Paris-based P.H.O.B.O.S. that aesthetic is to be found
in a fusion of filth-ridden doom, pitiless industrialism and, as the
title suggests, paganistic, earthshaking convulsions. You'll also
find a rather large debt to Godflesh, albeit minus the futile, battling
and battered human will, Khanate's long-festering pulp of disgust
and tail-end, trailing winds of feedback à la Skullflower's
'IIIrd Gatekeeper'. If this is all starting to sound too much like
an obvious checklist for noise addicts, it's an understandable initial
misgiving. But having been whittled down since their inception in
2000 from a four-piece to sole member Frédéric Sacri,
there's a single-minded density to P.H.O.B.O.S. that's ultimately
overwhelming, the relentless trawls herein driven by constantly shifting,
mind-altering layered grooves, and with tracks up to ten minutes long
a strange, okay-okay-you've-broken-me euphoria starts to kick in,
clinging on to Sacri's fetid rasp amidst suffocatingly overripe textures
as he piledrives you ever further into his molten heart of darkness.
- Jonathan
Selzer (7.5/10)
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