Steel Hook Prostheses     

The Empirics Guild

Malignant Records 2013

Ambient industrial death straight from the heart of Texas.  That is essentially what you are smothered by when you listen to the new album from Steel Hook Prostheses.  Rendering Human Tallow slowing grinds and churns with minimalist ambient noise and heavily distorted vocals.  The track drops into more piercing and distant sounds while still scraping your eardrums with the warped, metallic voice.  Leprosaria Dross takes another subdued but unnerving approach with industrial sounds that bring to mind a sinister swarm of mechanical locusts.  The vocals become even more inhuman than they were on the previous track.  Up next are the dark and terrifying soundscapes of Sadomedica.  Like a nocturnal sojourn through an abandoned factory, on this track you see shards of iron and hear distant metallic echoes.  The mournful female vocals add a ghostly touch to the track.  Gula uses an intimidating beat and rising wall of distortion and unnerving noise to drive you towards death.  You can practically picture ashen visions of an apocalyptic future.  Digitized vocals announce the obliterating presence of Decrepit Hands Emerge.  The song hums and buzzes with a demonic intensity before giving way to shifting cuts and scrapes of metallic corruption.  The final portion of the track fades into an astral hum that warbles like the inescapable void.  Scald however has a bit more mature sound, wavering between undercurrents of harmonic solitude and overcurrents of disembodied vocal obliteration and fuzzy currents of sonic noise.  The Empirics Guild is an album that is suffocating in its horrific atmosphere.  You cannot escape the nightmarish visions these sonic compositions unleash upon you.