Gnaw Their Tongues
All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity

<< The fifth angel poured out his bowl on the throne of the beast, and its kingdom was plunged into darkness. Men ''bit their tongues'' in agony and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and sores, instead of repenting of their deeds >>
_{(Revelation of St. John, 16: 10-11).}

Gnaw Their Tongues is Mories, a crazy Dutch multi-instrumentalist, a workhorse by nature (I wholeheartedly recommend looking up ''De Magia Veterum''). His music and creations germinate and develop within a shapeless and colorless shell. Mories is alone, makes overlapping registers and languages his distinctive feature, assembles everything with the computer, and presents us with some flashes of incredibly real delirium, of relentless catastrophe, a true orchestra of Satan.

Listening today, almost two years after its release, to an album like ''All The Dread Magnificence of Perversity'' is somewhat akin to melting into a stream of boiling lava walking towards a hell that even Dante would never have dared imagine. Mories managed to build a “suicide trip” shack, mixing in a single pot all the filth of humanity, clashing Black Metal with Noise, Ambient with reminiscences of Industrial, Doom with Drone, and pulling from his hat one of the sickest records of the last few years, something extreme and original at the same time.

Sometimes it feels like you're on the edge of pure disorder and incomprehensibility, but all this, in the end, does nothing but increase the mix of anguish and discomfort that the album relentlessly exudes. There's a coldness, a musical precision that recalls the early works of the legendary Swans. The vocal snippets present are nothing but deep, piercing screams (the so-called ''torture screams'' in Black jargon) that fit well with the tortuous and oppressive fresco of the platter, while the spoken parts, which deal with themes such as violence, death, ritual sacrifice, and so forth, are rarer.

A meticulous collage work, therefore, that extended over many months, through hours and hours of recording, mixing, to craft a product as condensed as possible. Maybe even too much. The risk that it runs, in fact, is to be so unpredictable and destructive that it cannot be fully deciphered; sometimes the structural complexity of an album can certainly be a weapon in its favor, but, in this case, that of Gnaw Their Tongues seems more a sensitive inability to synthesize (82 minutes in length!) which creates obstacles that are, in some circumstances, insurmountable even for the most ''noisy'' and ungraceful listeners (the dirty and disheveled followers of bands like Abruptum and Stalaggh, consider yourselves warned).   

This is not music for everyone. Indeed, it's music for few, perhaps very few; it's affectionately advised to have at least a minimum of predisposition to understand the nature and message of this proposition, at the risk of getting bogged down among orchestral samples, electronics, samples of 20th-century avant-garde composers, and horror movie kits. A unique project to say the least. Among all the rabble and noise of Black metal we're presented with today, it's objectively difficult to escape mediocrity or worse, the smoking shit; ''All The Dread Magnificence of Perversity'' instead represents a rich and sovereign work, full of new ideas and formidable insights, precisely for this reason absolutely not separable into single fragments.

A valid motive for the most heinous of murders: our own.