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BLACK DUST
Katorga On A Distant Planet

Self-released (2024)
Rating: 7.5/10

There are two men behind this cosmically aligned death metal creation from Tbilisi in Georgia, Giorgi Talikadze (vocals, guitar and bass) and Giorgi Kartvelishvili (drums). Together they have produced a somewhat eerie and definitely otherworldly soundscape that requires the listener to don thermal underwear to face the chills.

As death metal albums go I probably expected something slower in design, but it’s still an atmospheric and cavernous recording particularly in the vocal slurping . The track ‘Caverns (From Future)’ is what I really wanted from Black Dust; a serrated chug built upon a jagged bass and then unwinding with a frosted blackened chord. ‘Landscapes Of Desolation’ also offers more of the chunky and grim chugging, but such congealed meandering is all too often blasted away by the frantic and more formulaic flurries.

The album is certainly pitch black in its guise, and the gaseous rings that circle it are ice cold in content. The title track is an absolute beast; ten minutes of ghoulish, galactic horror boasting permafrost leads that drift into the cosmos as melancholic vapours. The vocals are dissonant slurs that erupt like freezing geysers amidst a grating bass that reverberates like some alien signal spearing the ozone. The second half of the track acts as an otherworldly soundtrack to accompany the fact you are lost and floating in the depths of space, waiting for death.

Like sombre and soulless denizens, Black Dust have created a distant, dissonant death metal vacuum that swallows you as if it were a cosmic dust cloud.

Neil Arnold

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