Gaping Hole : 2008
Format : 12” LP

A few of you might recognize Mr. Shaw as the man behind A Machine Called Orgasm, among others, and the owner of the Life Is Easy label. My previous exposure to Haemorrhaging Fetus was the “Parasite” 3” and while I remember liking it, as with a lot of releases in that format it ended up in shoebox somewhere. That’s the great thing about a steaming slab of 12” goodness, the beauty of it, the smell, the size of the artwork, the inserts (one written by Sam McKinlay of The Rita, by the way), the ritual of taking the record out, cleaning it and dropping the needle down...I get hard just thinking about it. This LP is actually a combination of two previous released and now out of print cassettes on Gaping Hole, but this is the way it was meant to be.

Side A kicks off with “Cankered Womb”. Now I love a good wall, but more often than not it’s just one dimensional, boring nonsense with no thought to construction, “just hit Record, dude!”. So when it’s done right the reward is even better. It’s a warehouse filled with a thousand TV sets all turned to nonexistent channels and cranked to 10. The louder you listen to this one the more it envelopes you. Ten plus minutes of crunchy white bliss. The textures of “Stillborn” are a bit more subtle. Imagine a contact mic taped to the shuttles solid rocket boosters, nearly five minutes of static thrust until separation.

Side B consists of one fifteen minute long track, “Tangled Desires”. This one is lighter on the low-end crunch and heavier on the high-end hiss. Grab the headphones for this one and sizzling wet tendrils will slither down you ear cavities like a teenage tongue to virgin holes. Ceaseless and unending, it neither fades nor fails.

This one is definitely worth seeking out. I’d love to see more great walls released in this format as it lends itself well. Housed in a plain white cardboard jacket with Gaping Hole artwork/logo glued to the front. Limited to 250.

Websites: haemorrhagingfetus.blogspot.com | snse.net