Clawing / Offerbeest – split
6.13.18 by Ryan Masteller

From Nailbat Tapes, your favorite purveyors of spiked weaponry and sonic terrorism, or the sonic terrorism equivalent of spiked weaponry (it’s not clear what’s happening right now at the shadowy corner stall of this rural flea market), comes a release that’s essentially righteous indignation in sound form. And we all know what forms righteous indignation takes when it’s wielded by the blackhearted and downtrodden. It can get really dark around these psychoses if the root causes are left to fester.

But hey, we noise lovers can’t complain, so as long as we get great splits by Clawing and Offerbeest, the government can pump whatever chemicals or poisons into the water it wants to. Clawing’s side is a rippling diffraction of distant drones, flickering sickly in the subterranean shadows where the victims cower. Jeff McLeod and Austin Gaines conjure the mood, while spoken word artist/poet Matt Finney intones horrible truths in an Alabama drawl deadened by PTSD, truths that we all fear for our kids and about our country. Example: “A whole generation of drunken car crashes [gives] way to another generation of meth addicts.” I’d chuckle at the gross southern hyperbole if he wasn’t so dead on.

Offerbeest seethes through to this plane of existence in the form of Gnaw Their Tongues’s Maurice de Jong, a Dutch troublemaker who here uses analog synthesizers to further foist his black metal nightmares upon us. Listening to Offerbeest is like listening to Ash Williams recite passages from the Necronomicon, but way less funny, and way more actually dangerous. (You thought the Deadites were dangerous, didn’t you. You fool – Offerbeest is dangerous.) Curdling any sort of positivity or goodness into noxious fumes within a vast void-y cauldron of static and disease, de Jong’s wretched meditations serve as the dank endpoint this whole tape is hurtling toward like an old Chevy with its brakes cut. When the cops peel your face from the rock wall you smashed into, the blood spatters beneath will spell “Offerbeest.”

For some reason.

Nailbat released 100 of these; thwack your head against one to see if it sticks in there.