If you’ve been digging on Puce Mary at all (and really who hasn’t jumped on that bandwagon?) Himukalt’s Conditions of Acrimony should be your next stop on the post-noise/post-industrial sludge circuit. What I admire most about this one is the way Ester Kärkkäinen, ‘Kalt’s principal member, turns his blobs of gelatinous goo into bona fide songs, or at least injects the proceedings with the drama of such. This isn’t a series of recordings as much as a view into a troubled mind that scrapes the soul as much as it salves its wounds. There’s a wide variety of sounds at work here too; the Puce Mary reference is valid for maybe the first few minutes of Side A; from there you’re on your own. Conditions of Acrimony gets truly ugly when 11-minutes-plus face-smasher “Without Laughter” rears its humorless head, a guttural uneasiness, queasiness even, pervading what on the surface could be read as a chill-out track to close out the first side of action. Not at all. I hear death in between the lines of these flapping wings and raging winds, a turbine propeller twisting as helpless birds unknowingly aim their flight paths straight into its jaws. What happens next is so hellish and unexpected I’m going to have to let you experience it for yourself. Side B is… damn, just-plain bad-ass, “Tuberculosis” toting machine-gun turrets that point a rhythmic path toward absolute experimental bliss. From there you’re golden either way, so I’ll leave you to it. Conditions of Acrimony is sold out (at the source at least), but you can access its grim realities on Bandcamp. See that you do that.
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