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LEGION OF ANDROMEDA
Iron Scorn

At War With False Noise (2015)
Rating: 7/10

Ever had that feeling that you’ve collected too much wax into one of your ears canals, with the result being that all you can hear is some sort of muffled clanging? Well, Legion Of Andromeda could well be something akin to that audible issue. Iron Scorn is just one big, mucus-clogged, grinding, buzzing, primitive lump of wax that will clog not only your ears but your brain.

Drenched in some sort of doom-laden fuzziness and ejaculated from its masters like some foetid, billowing rusty fog, Iron Scorn leaves a trail of puke, smog and charcoal in its wake – most of this unholy mass being vomited out by a vocalist who has clearly spent too much time worshipping at the altar of British industrial titans Godflesh, because this disturbing ten-track affair is one sure to cause a few quakes.

It’s all the work of two men (Japanese guitarist –M– and Italian vocalist –R–); a pair of disturbed individuals that take great pleasure in just spewing out churning, rolling, oozing rhythms of industrial, oil-soaked metal mayhem where the vocals exist as some sort of tormented muffled roar and the riffs trudge like some ungainly behemoth that has just stolen the bells from the local church!

I spent much of the early 90s listening to so much stuff of this ilk – whether it was Godflesh, God, Scorn, Skin Chamber, Dead World et al – but it’s always nice to hear a band still able to compete with such gargantuan grey forces and bring something so putridly wholesome to the table, because this is one migraine of a record. However, rather than being one unbearable clank of insufferable noise, Iron Scorn instead lives on as some bizarrely hypnotic grindcore sludge-fest where the guitar sound sort of throbs in a dirty manner and is backed by a series of eerie, hypnotic clangs and those strange vocal chews which literally sound as if –R– is chomping on a scrap metal sandwich.

From the opening ‘Transuranic Ejaculation’ through to ‘Cosmo Hammer’ and ‘Overlord Of Thunder’ – and, in fact, the rest of the tracks on offer – we are submitted to one rather drawn-out, ever-churning, rarely-changing white noise drudgery where we get a constant mesmerizing clang and that constant indecipherable vocal chomp. And that’s about it.

Legion Of Andromeda win no points for musical variation within their turgid grind, and so even with the slightest tweak of indifference Iron Scorn still sounds like a laborious machine continuously grinding away whether under a sizzling sun or through a bleak winter. The press release for this beast mentions how it was “Sculpted in reiteration, repetition, and cyclical rotation”, and so basically if you like being constantly whacked round the head by a rusty chain, having someone bark and growl in your ear and then run you over with a bulldozer, then you’re no doubt rather strange but sure to love this impenetrable, yet rather monotonous sonic soul crusher that wouldn’t stray from its path even if it was hit by an atomic bomb, such is its repetitive and above all immovable style of punishment. The words drudgery spring to mind.

Neil Arnold

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