The Machinist - Contempt For Life
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THE MACHINIST – CONTEMPT FOR LIFE LABEL: INVIMA RECORDS RELEASE DATE: JANUARY 24th 2025
Hailing from the grey, industrial and notoriously rainswept streets of Manchester, England, The Machinist are hell-bent on exposing the gaping, endless emptiness that lies behind the deceptive façade of human existence. Their mechanistic, blackened extreme metal is a ferocious attack on the arrogant conceit that our lives, our pale, flickering flames in the boundless universe, so fragile and ephemeral, have some kind of greater meaning. Yet they will ride their train, hurtling to the end, with a maniacal laugh and a proud freedom, screaming for more speed, spewing their disgust on the passive and the lifeless who waste their precious moments in wilful blindness and contemptible subservience. Contempt For Life is a jackhammer attack on those without the courage for truth, a defiant glare into the eye of annihilation fuelled by solos like liquid flame and riffs hewn from acerbic misanthropy.
Building upon the blackened foundations laid down by The Machinist’s excoriating debut album, I Am Void, Contempt For Life opens with the shocking impact of its title track, a bewildering, multi-faceted assault on the senses. The guitars swoop and dive like deranged raptors above the grinding overkill of programmed drums set to kill. Then, within the black cyborg heart of the song, the claustrophobic riff attack draws back to expose a majestic, malignant landscape, towering and terrifying in its alien magnificence. ‘Cathedrals Fall’ follows in the burnt and bloody wake of ‘Contempt For Life’ bringing a stunning melodic sensibility to the barrage of gargantuan weaponry. Shades of melancholy rise like the shadows of titans between the walls of steel and a nobility of spirit is glimpsed behind the rabid exhortations of venom and disgust. Our journey through this hellscape of ashes and decimation continues with the bludgeoning, bruising ‘Brace’, the disconcerting pulse of interludes ‘Gog’ and ‘Magog’, the formidable ‘Demagogue’, a frenzied swarm of spite that climbs to closing moments of transcendence and the nightmare storms of ‘Anthropic Mistake’, before we are cast up upon the broken shores of ‘Cracks’ – a place of fractured sanity and eyeless tormentors that hasten us towards the final, ultimate end of all. Creative, visionary and scarring, Contempt For Life is breathtakingly powerful yet deceptively expansive, rife with hidden passages and tunnels that lead into ever deeper darknesses. A listening experience of enthralling intensity.
Mixed and mastered for the ultimate in cold, mechanistic force by the renowned George Nerantzis (Abbath, Dark Funeral, Rotting Christ etc) and adorned in the merciless, high impact artwork of Duncan Macpherson (Extinction Of Mankind, Deus Mori), Contempt For Life will be unleashed upon the world by InViMa Records on January 24th. Join The Machinist as they tear through the veils of deception and carry the punishing, confrontational sound of Contempt For Life to the ears of the lost, the outliers and the outcasts of the world.
Genre: Industrial Black/Death Metal
For fans of: Anaal Nathrakh | The Berzerker | Akercocke| Khonsu Line-up:
Tobias Gray – Lead Guitar/Backing Vocals
John Thompson – Vocals/Keyboards/Drum Programming
George Kal – Rhythm Guitar/Backing Vocals
Bass performed by Luke Chapman
Additional vocals on ‘Contempt For Life’ and ‘Cathedrals Fall’ by Scott Walton (Reign Of Erebus)
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