CORRUPTED - Garten der Unbewusstheit

Cult band Corrupted took a full six years to follow up “El Mundo Frio”, further inflating the mystery that has always surrounded this quintet, who grant no interviews, release no promotional photos, and rarely venture outside Japan's borders for the occasional tour.

“Garten Der Unbewusstheit” (the final record of the original line-up, since by the end of the recording sessions singer Hevi and guitarist Talbot had decided to leave) is a perfect manifesto of their hybrid style, a blend of sludge, doom and drone whose high point remains 1999's “Llenandose de Gusanos”. This new work is, in some respects, more tilted toward the reflective side of their art, and thanks to meticulous work at the mixing desk, the shimmering quality of the sound manages to carry across almost intact the imaginative quality of a sound that, while seeming to come from nowhere, builds itself through a slow and painstaking process of layering, where it's the "empty" spaces, the most imperceptible nuances, and the elusive tension between the different sound sources that make the difference. In the extremely long “Garten”, for instance, Hevi's voice takes a full eight minutes to enter the scene with its timbre, at once desolate and austere, while drums, guitar and bass keep weaving hypnotic, stretched-out backdrops that only coalesce, around the twentieth minute, into a climax of cutting despair, before scattering their forces across a derelict panel of mournful ambient.

After the acoustic interlude of “Against The Darkest Days”, “Gekkou No Daichi” renews the ordeal with another half hour of sordid explosions, guttural groans that seem to rise from the darkest bowels of the earth, slow-motion minimalism and vibrant jabs. It's in this very long epilogue that the band manages to revive the high points of its career, keeping the band's stock at a thoroughly respectable level. Now, with a new vocalist (Taiki), the Osaka outfit is ready to tackle new and, we hope, ever more fascinating journeys-to-the-end-of-the-night…

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29/08/2011