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Heavy Matters

Wallowing - Earth Reaper

Label- Church Road Records

Release Date - 28th April 2023

Words - Tony Bliss

Now five years and two full-lengths into their career, Brighton-based sci-fi nutters Wallowing are arguably the most compelling band in the UK underground. Indeed, if the concept of five space-suited figures anonymously dishing out vicious extreme metal doesn’t sound like a good time to you, number one you should probably stop reading now, and two you should definitely re-evaluate your idea of what cool shit is. History will also attest that nothing quite encapsulates the infinite terror of space like wilfully fucked up noise, and by the time Earth Reaper is done with you, there will be little doubt that Wallowing’s pitch-black sonic vision is wholly in sync with our ancient fixation with the great beyond. Red Dwarf this ain’t.


From the get-go, the record may look oddly paced, with the first five tracks featuring no less than three thirty-second interludes before a brace of mahoosively long mini-epics round the album off. Conceptually however it makes sense, with each precursory cut acting as a foreword to the closing title track, itself a daunting twenty-two minutes in length. And so, whilst ‘Flesh And Steel’ and ‘Cries Of Estima’ bristle with the feral energy of someone like Full Of Hell, moving from insanely savage powerviolence to excoriating doom, there is always an atmospheric mastery nudging at the fringes, making every second feel like it’s been double-dipped in Xenomorph blood.


‘Cyborg Asphyxiation’ veers into even more immersive terrority, its gargantuan slo-mo assault and piercing shrieks sprawling out over ten minutes, with plenty of dissonant weirdness and even a hint of NOLA-style turbo-blues unleashed for a brief boogie towards the end. And then we come to ‘Earth Reaper’, its gluttonous expanse taking in everything from funeral doom, riff-powered rockin, ferocious black metal, spacious clean guitars and touches of the avant-garde. Like everything here, there's a nightmarish disquiet permeating from every chord and snare hit, and Wallowing’s multi-limbed attack seems purpose-built to conjure images of the scorched, smouldering landscapes of distant planets. With an album of this quality, it’s a shame no one can hear you scream in space. 8/10

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