Description
On their first album, The Towers Are Burning, Oakland’s Noisegate were a devastating powerhouse, creating four huge, ominous dronescapes sprawling across 60 minutes. Noisegate’s sound occupies a nether region somewhere between the quarter speed muscularity of Earth, the death ambient experiments of Lustmord and the ear splitting noise of Merzbow, all delivered with the glacial ferocity of grindcore 45’s played at 16rpm. A nightmarish wall of impenetrable sound; waves of uneasy ambience constructed from teutonic rumbles, washes of tranquil hum disrupted by violent squalls of hyper-distorted slow motion riffs, crushing sludge shattered into a thousand hypnotic pulses, while chest rattling rhythms dissipate into clouds of shimmering feedback and corrosive electronics slowly rot the whole thing from the inside out. “The Towers Are Burning” possesses the ultra-lumbering brutality of death metal devoid of a propulsion system, taking even the likes of Godflesh and Skullflower deeper into the pit, drowning you in static chaos. (tUMULt)
