Gnaw Their Tongues ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ CD/LP (Consouling Sounds)

If Maurice De Jong’s recent releases as Hagetisse, Golden Ashes and in duo Dodenbezweerder speak to different paths of black metal historicism, Gnaw Their Tongues is intent on abandoning that association. Only the final tattered remnants of Maurice’s genre trappings are still stapled to the project’s sickly flesh, little left of the beginnings of the project which seems to have occupied the nastiest and bleakest corners of Maurice’s attentions for well over a decade.

‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ strips away black metal’s layers of traditional musicality to reveal an impassive industrial inside, dominated by blocks of cold sound which have been deprived of melody to instead comprise a set of negatively charged drones owing more to the fringes of European postmortem industrial than its church burning miscreants, then sets in largely short-form compositions which share a dismal production robbed of frequency definition and often constrained from the strangled recordings into which Maurice places his textural aberrations.

Despite Gnaw Their Tongues’ rejection of musicality, percussion is an usual driver of ‘I Speak The truth, Yet With every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’; devoid of melodic form, its drone layers clutch at the trajectory given by the pieces’ rhythmic constructs. The burrowing insect slop which opens the title track, leading into a brief martial industrial refrain and more larval electronics layers, begins to writhe as sparse programmed percussion punches through its murky electronics – reducing its bass guitar to a mucousy substance which bulges as the percussive stabs jab it. Likewise “Purity Coffins” alternates its hellish windstorms with punctuations of tense electronics twitching at the provocation of its electronic drum flashes, the piece almost dramatic in its soundtrack-like percussive hits and orchestra-like swells of permeating sound, and “Abortion Hymn” rides free-form percussion into a storm of reverberated industrial spatter, bass guitar murmur and swampy vocal cries: only a few tentacles of mid-range slither emerge from the depressive mass of sound separately, to warily grasp around and retreat unsatisfied.

Other rhythmic constructs follow the turgid pull of the LP’s familiarly hateful textures, beginning with “White Void Black Wounds” commandeering a blast beat to then requisition it as a tool of war, as a frantic spray of artillery merges with seething distortion textures. The harrowing screams of “Here Is No Corruption” are only unleashed when its quaver drum pattern pauses to allow strains of vocals scrapings to emerge from the moist drone which blankets the track, its subtle pattern changes swamped by the clamouring spawn of the piece’s synth lines. Gnaw Their Tongues has never lurched closer to power electronics than in these moments of insistence, textures caught in the churn and seething in frustration as harrowing vocals whirlpool through the pieces.

While not afraid to borrow from the black industrial setups of MZ.412 and the drone-heavy suffocations of Urfaust, Gnaw Their Tongues brings a newly abstracted darkness to what remains, again somehow shaped by its percussive elements. “To Rival Death In Beauty” begins with grotesque vocals and a marauding synth line but is taken away by intermittent fragmentation of electronica rhythmic constructs, the piece managing to move its heaving carcass in time with the pulse set in motion by those early drum machine patterns. Even more absurd, a noirish wash permeates “A Sombre Gesture In The Faint Light Of Dusk” as faltering error messages and an unsettling bass refrain flare into more swollen pustules of greying drone mush, squirming electronics and dripping vocal screams – its urgencies dictated by the return of its percussive elements, as with closer “Shall Be No More” which ebbs and flows as tied to its rhythmic fortunes.

After half an hour of unpleasantness which plumbs the depths of Maurice’s late night self-torment, reflected in a constantly dismal production which has been stripped of any high end presence, “Shall Be No More” finally settles into ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’’s brief moment of normalcy. Weak rays of sun reach the later half of the track  to reveal an almost uplifting (at least comparable to the remainder of ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’) melody which brings the nightmarishness of the album to a close – as if acknowledging that the LP’s terrors must lurk in both literal and mentally figurative shadows, to be forgotten in the light of day but crawling back into consciousness when the evening arrives.

My initial listens to ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ thought that perhaps the project had spat out a release too reliant on the emotionless distortion textures which shadow much of the LP, but the shaping of ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ is a more complex ordeal than that initial impression, its grotesqueness worsened when you realise that even within that putrid production its parts are connected, and that mess is alive and responsive. Gnaw Their Tongues has picked at the rotted flesh of industrial culture for years, but ‘I Speak The Truth, Yet With Every Word Uttered, Thousands Die’ seems enraptured by the genre’s dark recesses, even as Maurice’s other projects pull threads of more familiar black metal out for focus. Earlier pleasure derived from the chaos and paraphilic pulls of power electronics has failed, leaving only the genre’s bleakest focuses with which to construct this album.

https://gnawtheirtongues.bandcamp.com/album/i-speak-the-truth-yet-with-every-word-uttered-thousands-die