(written by Islander)
Bone Eater is a New Brunswick-based death/doom/sludge unit, led as a solo outing by the multi-instrumentalist Scott Miller. Formed in 2021, it takes its name from a worm that bores into the bones of rotting whale carcasses to feed off of them.
Bone Eater released its debut EP MMXXII in 2022. And now, on September 18th, Bone Eater will release its second EP, MMXXVI. This one will be compiled with the debut release and put out via Ancient Temple Recordings and Phage Tapes on vinyl and CD, and through Doomshire Tapes and Crypt Death Mortuary on tape.
The new EP is a two-song offering, but it’s a substantial one, with each song reaching beyond the 10-minute mark. The EP is also a devastating, take-no-prisoners destroyer, as you’ll begin to discover through our video premiere of its first song, “Parasites of Dead Earth“.
By way of introduction, we begin with a statement by the video’s filmmaker Eeli Helin:
“Matching Bone Eater’s massive wall of sound visually wasn’t the most straightforward task, and took a moment or two to materialise and carry the deserved and needed amount of weight. Ultimately once the idea was there, the rest followed quickly.
“What better emulates the music than a barren desert against a pitch-black starless sky, with oozing parasitic slugs being the only things remaining, exploring bones and other expired, dead matter throughout the song’s duration. There is no light nor is there hope, only inauspicious and dire scenery with a beyond-suffocating soundtrack.”
“Beyond-suffocating” is an apt description for the music, especially at the start when the reverberation of abrasively distorted notes moans, oozes, and shivers. The slowly heaving sounds are deep, dense, and diseased, like the aural manifestation of glacially paced rot.
Eventually, spine-jolting drum-blows join in at the pace of a death march, and abyssal gutturals add to the music’s choking, pitch-black horrors. But the music changes. Ethereal ambient tones and cymbals begin to shimmer and shiver as the backdrop to a dreamlike acoustic-guitar melody.
But that’s just a lulling interlude, offering just a brief peace of mind (though a haunting one) before Bone Eater begins taking pieces of your mind (and flesh) and dragging them away in another staggering march laden with sizzling and groaning distortion and ghastly gutturals. At the very end, the vocals elevate into howls and Bone Eater brutishly hammers the listener as if armed with a girder-sized sledgehammer.
As you’ll see, the video is a indeed a very fitting accompaniment for such a catastrophically abysmal piece of music.
As noted above, the new EP includes a second song, “Void of Light Forever“. It too begins with feedback, but of the kind that burns right through the aural canal and into the brain. The riffing this time is also more shrill and freakish, more dissonant and deranged, and the drums beat like the accompaniment to a hideous ritual.
The gruesomely distorted instruments also viciously jolt and swarm as if greedily feeding, but also sickeningly drag and agonizingly groan. The drums go off like gunshots and detonate like bombs. The vocals monstrously roar and fanatically bellow. It’s a primitive, heartless, and excruciating experience, but it has its own interlude of sorts, in which a guitar quivers like a Geiger counter in the presence of plutonium.
Thereafter the song miserably groans, wickedly slithers, and thuggishly stomps. At the end, the feedback scours again as drums fall like boulders. There’s nothing remotely healthy about the experience, especially because the distortion on the layers is so ruinous that you might check your walls to see if it’s causing the paint to flake off them like falling snow.
For more info, and to pick up the EP, check the locations linked below:
LABELS:
https://ancienttemplerecordings.bigcartel.com
https://phagetapes.bandcamp.com
https://bandcamp.com/holy_smoke66
https://www.fetidfrequencies.com
BONE EATER:
https://boneeaterdeath.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/boneeaterdeath