AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PEINE KAPITAL — “PEINE KAPITAL”

“It’s hard to be optimistic in such a fucked up world. Because we witness violence and ugliness on a daily basis, we can’t help but make music that is aggressive and filthy.”

With those words, the French doom-sludge trio Peine Kapital have announced their self-titled debut album, which will be released on October 27th by the respected Sludgelord Records. And those aren’t empty words. As you’ll learn for yourselves today through our complete streaming premiere of the album, Peine Kapital is a truly harsh, harrowing, and immensely heavy experience.

The album’s 45 minutes are divided among only four tracks, and thus each one of them is formidably long. Each of them also shares certain fundamental qualities: massive chords rendered with stunningly corrosive levels of distortion; bone-deep bass lines; drums that sound like gunshots and bomb bursts; and gritty, venomous vocals that fanatically scream, snarl, and roar.

They also move slowly, at the speed of rot. The music often moans and groans like the last agonies of a leviathan crawling toward the graveyard of its kind, or whines in shattering pain, or looms like a towering black monolith of horror.

And thus true to their word, Peine Kapital have made unusually ugly and destructive music. But even those of us with steel nerves who search for metal that pulls no punches in its renditions and condemnations of humanity’s most awful qualities would not necessarily want to drown in cold filth or be pounded into jelly for 45 straight minutes. Even music that makes you think the foundations of your home (and your own sanity) are about to collapse can become numbing if it offers nothing more than ceaseless physical and mental devastation.

Fortunately, Peine Kapital are adept at creating the kind of disturbing dynamism that is likely to keep listeners rooted in place rather than succumbing to monotony.

The monstrous machinery of their music has no high gear, but it does have lower ones, and thus the pacing changes, slowing even further so that their stomping and heaving movements can reach even more abyssal and abysmal places. The band also come to sudden stops, allowing ear-shredding feedback to radiate or the abrasive bass to murmur in desolation or ghastly spoken proclamations to have the stage.

Moreover, Peine Kapital introduce eerie and ethereal melodic motifs that shiver or squirm as they rise with piercing clarity through the humongous grit-caked riffs, the explosive percussion, and the shattering vocals. Drum-fills of percussive mania also erupt in startling fashion. The band build tension and create sounds of turmoil and despair, and then bring everything crashing down into mountains of rubble.

Yet it must be noted that the music is so damned pulverizing and punishing, so apocalyptically ruinous, that those qualities alone become transfixing all by themselves. In other words, Peine Kapital‘s ugly, slow-moving ruinations can become perversely entrancing.

What you won’t find are any signs of hope, no rose-colored glasses through which to view the evils of the world, only clear-eyed bitterness.

 

 

PEINE KAPITAL is:
Drums – Thibault Bru
Bass, Vocals – Benjamin Simon
Guitar, Vocals – Renaud Deschamps

Sludgelord will release Peine Kapital on CD, cassette tape, and digital formats, and all are available for pre-order now:

PRE-ORDER:
https://sludgelordrecords.bandcamp.com/album/peine-kapital

PEINE KAPITAL:
https://www.facebook.com/PEINEKAPITAL/
https://www.instagram.com/peinekapital_band/