Mannequin Hollowcaust

(written by our supreme homeboy ROM B aka Billy from Buck Gooter…peep them shits here: buckgooter.tumblr.com )

 When I first opened the package containing the Mannequin Hollowcaust & Brother Fyodor split cd Mountains Made From the Corpses of Cowboys, there were cracks and fissures all over the CD case. Rather than assuming this to be damage caused by shipment my immediate reaction was that the sounds contained on the disk were trying the claw and scratch their way out. This reckoning was made having known the two perpetrators responsible for the album, torchbearers for an unlikely noise scene in the middle of a semi-urbanized patch of Appalachia.  But it seems likely that the mutant throb and scree of the work of Brother Fyodor and Mannequin Hollowcaust could easily manifest itself into some kind of ectoplasmic gremlin able to exert enough force to somehow scrape and seep out of a CD case. Once it hit the air of our realm this creature would yowl and perhaps stain a desk or bubble mailer with bile before its newly formed exoskeleton dried out and turned to dust in our atmosphere. Further investigation into these matters of sound is necessary to confirm these transmutability assumptions.

 What we have here is a meeting of the minds behind Chaotic Underworld Records. The minds specifically meet on three droning, scraping tracks and then coexist separately on four tracks each. Mannequin Hollowcaust’s offerings are an excellent blend of classic MH styles and newer, mind destroying compositional vagaries. “Pressurized Pus/Pulverized Porcelain” is a (gold) standard MH claustrophobic noise outburst that gets the ball rolling right over your body, flattening you into road kill after the slow, prescient rumble of the disk’s title track (Part I). An aforementioned vagary, “Diseased Vessels”, finds MH experimenting with a saxophone and can be easily described as King Uszniewicz trying to jam like Colin Stetson with a digital delay pedal. The results of which are equal parts intriguing and heavy but if you didn’t stop reading this to buy the disk and skip to that track after that last sentence I have serious doubts about your validity as a fan of mutant sounds. “No Survivors/Necrophile Slang” is a classic MH jam that has reared its head live for years and has a purported kinship with the man’s anthem, “Swine Slaughter”, from 2007’s Last Will and Testament disk. The term “Appalachian noise” may find a definition in the sounds of “Mountain Top Head Removal”, a battery powered noise event recorded at a mountain rest stop where a grisly murder took place with cohort Kaontrol Kontraos in tow.

 BF & MH once again stick their heads in the sonic meat grinder on “Jake Leg Syndrome” and when the goo emerges, Brother Fyodor rises out of the slop with some mellow high lonesome space rock on “Trail of Tears”. This backwoods, dark hollow guitar work continues to please on “Rusted Chains” and abruptly mutates into the rhythmic industrial skronk of “Thirteen AD”. “Wildlings” sounds like an evening with your weird girlfriend in the noise shed, hammering away some LO-FI bliss that, upon replay, may or may not be better than the memories of the love made on the shed floor while the amps fed back and the Tascam clicked to a halt. We assume the co-conspirator on this track, b33p, to be said love interest. If it was Brother Fyodor’s pet or grandmother then to him I may owe an apology. All in all, BF’s work fits nicely alongside MH and the two reveal themselves as conjoined twins again on “Mountains Made From the Corpses of Cowboys (Part II)”, a low rumbling static filled dirge and sign of departure for that ball that pulverized you a few tracks ago. Remember that?

 My initial impressions of this split album’s capabilities of manifesting itself as a creature were not made waste by the music. It is a complete picture of an audio-being that could easily scrape its way out of its cage, filled with bile and the unholy sounds of the wild woods and deforested wastelands it was raised in, ready to attack and ultimately disintegrate in your midst.  Summon it.