Rotten Earth

INFO

GNAW BONE started off 2018 with Scorched Earth, a blackened 4-track EP that presented a world of destroyed monuments and fallen rulers. As the year comes to a close, GNAW BONE returns with Rotten Earth, the 2-track followup that serves as a spiritual epilogue to the tones and tomes of Scorched Earth. As pungent as its title implies, Rotten Earth presents GNAW BONE in their most primal form yet, trudging through two tracks of tar-covered black metal and sludge and featuring the shrieks, howls, and bellows of all three members once again. GNAW BONE stomps the Earth back to primordial ooze and wallows in its filth.

Rotten Earth wastes no time with introductions in "Tar Pit" and explodes from subsonic sludge to intense dissonance multiple times before finally coming to a brief respite. The rest is in vain as the rhythms (and narrator) sink intro a "bubbling, churning, smoking, rotting" cauldron of harsh noise, feedback, and deathly wails, climaxing in the same dynamic outbursts as the intro. "Five Stages" offers a semblance of melancholy for a moment, but quickly diverts course into a blazing wall of volume and murky, pummeling percussion representing Denial as "blood flows / fear grows / time slows." Anger and Bargaining are no less caustic with the riffs becoming more and more erratic before giving into Depression's tortured wails. Acceptance finally arrives as a crushing doom mantra, with a proclamation to "consume my corpse / nurture the earth / persist no more" and accept that we all end up as dust on this rotten Earth.

Lathes cut in amazing stereo fidelity by Audio Geography.

PACKAGING

• Clear 7" hi-fi stereo lathe cut
• Full color cardstock jackets
• Double-sided glossy insert
• Full color labels
• Fragment of bone-infused record

TRACKLISTING

A1 – 03:06 – Tar Pit
B1 – 03:25 – Five Stages