TOMB

Third Wave Holocaust

Malignant Records 2013

Another album of suffocating ambient darkness straight from the bowels of hell envelopes us as we partake in the latest release from Pennsylvania's TOMB. Antagonizing The Unknown is a sinister ceremonial incantation of female vocals, chimes and enveloping noise.  It creates a truly dark and claustrophobic atmosphere, especially when the sharp shards of squealing metal and distorted electronics overwhelm the rest of the track.  Unlike the slow buildup of the previous track, Electric Exorcism immediately washes over you with a tsunami of ambient, industrial noise and never relents.  The Great Venerat Insult changes course once again for a low static hum that drives you mad with its warbling paranoia.  Then the ominous percussion announces itself and imbues the track with thunderous foreboding.  Na La Gore Na is dominated early with desolate monastic chants.  This Satanic spiritualism is soon washed out by waves of static and white noise.  However you get a track like Vulgarity which is a throbbing and smothering blanket of layered noise and really fails to instill anything within me other than the desire to move on.  Luckily the next track, Disrupting Admin is more sparse and repeatedly pulses with industrial disease and then fades into obscurity.  The title-track clashes with raucous dissonance and hissing noise which morphs into dark, pumping textures.  While being a oppressive tome of sonic nihilism, Third Wave Holocaust seems slightly flat when compared to the rest of the Malignant Records catalogue I have digested in the last few months.  That said, this is still a disturbing and abyssic album that instills a certain level of dread within the listener, it just doesn't reach the heights of some of their other labelmates.