(written by Islander)
“Nasty, miserable, no-nonsense sludge played at maximum volume with a focus on what is shit in life.” That’s the elevator pitch that Cursed Monk Records throws for Writhing Between Birth And Death, the debut EP from the UK band Bile Caster, and it hits the mark.
This Leicester-based trio, who might draw comparisons to the likes of Primitive Man and Meth Drinker, specialize in ugly, angry, primitive music that slugs hard enough to rupture spleens and is bleak enough that it might leave damaged souls looking for a permanent way out.
The new EP also has the capacity to leave anyone who survives it feeling dazed. It’s too ruthless to be truly entrancing, but the shock-and-awe effect may be enough to leave people feeling incapacitated, wondering what the hell they’re going to do while waiting for their reptile brains to yield back control of the higher faculties.
Writhing Between Birth And Death encompasses three songs of increasing length, collectively lasting half an hour. Their names alone portend a bad trip: “Abscess“, “Trapped“, “Harrowing“.
That first song, “Abscess“, brutishly stomps and abrasively sizzles like a Geiger counter that’s found a uranium core. In the middle distance, crawling in some cave, a voice dismally howls behind the toxic reverberations of punishing chords and skull-cracking beats. The pacing varies between a wounded stagger and a malignant lurch as the stringed instruments irradiate your bones, but eventually the band start hammering with a more vicious will, still primitive and cold but also relishing the ruination.
“Trapped” is no more forgiving, though it’s spliced with bursts of freakish feedback while the musical monster the band have fashioned pounds and poisons. Here again, for most of the song the pacing only changes in small measures, just as the brutally distorted and down-tuned riffage subtly rises and falls, manifesting greater and lesser degrees of malice and degradation.
While the music drones and writhes, there’s also a spoken-word sample in this one, a commentary on Hell, and it’s enough of a break that when the music resumes you realize those ugly opening riffs had gotten their corrosive hooks in your head. But in “Trapped” the band also kick up the energy near the end, jumping into a bounding and charging punk escapade, a breakout that will get heads moving, though it’s still stripped-down and ugly.
Bile Caster made a good move in the way they ended “Trapped“, and they make another one in the way they start “Harrowing“. Without those variations there’d be a risk of listeners feeling choked out and pulped before getting to the end of the EP.
“Harrowing” begins with strummed acoustic notes, slow and of course miserable, but just enough softness that when they bring the radioactive hammers down again and the snare starts chopping at the neck it feels even more crushing. “Harrowing” also livens things up with sequences of head-nodding groove, like the monster has just gotten an exciting smell of fresh roadkill.
During a pause in the bludgeoning and gutting there’s a frightful spoken-word sample in “Harrowing” as well, along with a reprise of strummed notes. The sample continues going for a bit even after the band start howling and punishing again, but Bile Caster again break things up with bursts of even more unhinged vocals and the whistle of feedback that feels like icepicks digging in the eardrums.
They end it in a penultimate episode of methodical pile-driving that would probably put fans into a full-body lurch in a live setting, even as their guts liquefy, and then one last episode of bizarre electronic contortions.
And, well, that’s a long-winded way of introducing you to our premiere stream of this devastating EP in advance of its release by a trio of labels on this coming Bandcamp Friday. You’ve got your choice of a Bandcamp stream or a YouTube stream:
BILE CASTER is:
Joe Lander – Guitar/Vocals
Adam Starkey – Drums
Nick Eagle-Evans – Bass
Writhing Between Birth and Death will be released October 4th on CD and Digital by Cursed Monk Records, on vinyl LP by Road To Masochist Records, and on cassette tape by Eggy Tapes. They’re all available for pre-order via the links below.
PRE-ORDER:
CD: https://cursedmonk.bandcamp.com/album/writhing-between-birth-and-death
LP: https://bilecastersludge.bandcamp.com/album/writhing-between-birth-and-death
TAPE: https://eggytapes.co.uk/product/bile-caster-writhing-between-birth-and-death/
BILE CASTER:
https://linktr.ee/BILECASTER
https://www.facebook.com/bilecastersludge