Black Tongue have only been around for a short while, but their reputation is already phenomenal. Their debut EP ‘Falsifier‘ immediately announced them as deathcore’s next figure head when it was released back in May 2013. Their follow up EP ‘Born Hanged‘ further cemented their inevitable future as the poster boys of a sub-genre, while their live shows confirmed that yes – the world should be watching.
Ahead of their debut album, reported to arrive in the early stages of 2015, the heavy-handed Hullensians are rebuilding the hype with a doube EP redux package. But instead of just gluing the two releases together, they’ve merged the two, giving the illusion of a whole new, complete album and one that will blow everything else out of the toxic, boiling water.
‘Eclipse‘ gets things rolling in punishing fashion and it’s easy to see why it instantly became a live show staple and firm fan favourite. It seems only fitting then, that the track recently received a live video release (which you can see here). But the track itself is a juggernaut in it’s own right, and one that will destroy everything you hold dear, grinning while it does it.
Before you can recover from the initial assault, ‘Fauxhammer‘ stomps its way onto the scene and the destruction continues without missing a beat. It does also raise the question of solid genre classification. To quote ‘Born Hanged/Falsifier‘s accompanying press release, this is “too clinically brutal to be a Doom band, too sludgy to be defined as Death Metal, too Dark to be labelled as a Hardore band”. For any lesser entity, this could be seen as a potential issue of identity confusion, but what Black Tongue manage to do so well is meld the best elements of each into their own concoction of brooding, crushing aural annihilation to stunning effect.
Something else that this release has accomplished is just letting the songs run. The editing and production of this album is a thing of beauty within itself, as the tracks just keep coming without ever slowing down proceedings. You could almost go as far as to say that the record plays out as one long, 53 minute track, just with the right amount of variation to make each track it’s own bruising beast.
The crowning glory here still comes in the form of the track ‘Falsifier‘ which remains to this day, the most brutal 3:43 in the music world, with it’s final third enough to reduce even the most hardened fans to rubble. Meanwhile, ‘Coma‘ (featuring Matt Jones of Martyr Defiled), with it’s call of “Send me to hell, ‘cos I don’t give a fuck” is still cataclysmic and ‘Ire Upon the Earth‘ still sounds like the aural rendition of the end of days.
The purists may not sing the praises of the final track on the album, a dubstep-tinged remix of ‘Waste‘ (here titled as ‘Wasted‘), but even that has taken the most violent aspects of each genre to create something truly monstrous.
Overall, this is one of those rare records that makes you feel as if you can take on the world and win handily. In fact, this isn’t so much a record as it is a solid steel wrecking ball the size of Jupiter. Every single second plays out with the energy and force of a dying star and as a product truly instates Black Tongue as the new kings of Deathcore, Doom Metal and Hardcore, no matter how you choose to look at it.
