GNAW THEIR TONGUES – “Abyss Of Longing Throats”

There’s something in Julian Cope‘s line in “My Wall” that just fits right in when it comes to Gnaw Their Tongues‘s output over the years. “Abyss Of Longing Throats” retains that same quality, although it ends up not sounding like pretty much anything else in the band’s discography, mainly for the better production and crisper feel to its more subtle elements.

With the last full-length “Eschatological Scatology” having been a collection of faster songs composed and unreleased throughout the years, this can be seen as a sort of return to normality, if such a word can ever be employed when it comes to music authored by Mories. In “Abyss Of Longing Throats” there then is the traditional conglomerate of all things ugly; the industrial and the mournful, the violent and uncomfortable, wholly bleak but with a sense of aesthetics, of beauty within very little light.

From beginning to end, Mories‘ screams take all sort of hellish shapes, being occasionally intertwined with a cleanly sung bit, with the ending of “From The Black Mouth” being an example of such moments. The pace fluctuates between the dirge cadence of “The Holy Body” or the going all out in epic fashion of the fantastic album closer “Up Into The Heavens Down Into The Circles Of Hell”. With the classic samples making their presence felt in the title track, deliciously placed amidst a drum crescendo leading right onto a black metal onslaught, the record has everything a Gnaw Their Tongues fan can expect and yet sounds completely new, as the subtle details that were always there are much more stripped down from the evolving wall of noise.

It’s weird to think that it has been four years between two new full-length records by GTT, as the stream of “smaller” releases by the band and all the other projects of its author has been incredibly high in the meantime. Within the bigger picture, “Abyss Of Longing Throats” is a damn fine addition to an otherwise excellent catalogue, as deserving of being there as anything else but perhaps an easier starting point for the atrocities laden pit we’ve come to know and love. If that means a bigger audience for Gnaw Their Tongues that would be more than overdue and with the band starting to play live, it might very well be about to happen.