grave in the sky

CUTLERY HITS CHINA - ENGLISH FOR THE HEARING IMPAIRED, THE DEBUT ALBUM FROM GRAVE IN THE SKY, IS OUT NOW!

GET IT FROM www.hcbrecords.com or from Aquarius Records at www.aquariusrecords.org Crucial Blast at www.crucialblast.net from NAT, if you live in Japan www.natrecords.com Cold Spring in the U.K. www.coldspring.co.uk and RAIG in Russia! www.raig.ru

Grave in The Sky is a new incarnation of Poochlatz members Rani Zager (also the vocalist of Lietterschpich) & Maor Appelbaum(Screening/Vectorscope/Thy Mesmerized) with metal drummer Matan Shmuely (Armilos/Distorted). On their debut album titled "Cutlery HItsChina: English for the Hearing Impaired" they use DVD subtitles of horror/thriller/crime/drama films as lyrics, molesting and dragging them downa boiling hot lava of a stoner-rock dirge, in order to create new aesthetics of doomed, heavy and hectic music. And it's beautiful one hour earlier.

Yeah, all the shit above and a new and funny one from Wonderful Wooden Reasons:

Roaring like a snowbound steamtrain, this is industrial music from the heaviest of industries. Grave in the Sky take the metronomic riffing of Godflesh and add a healthy dose of Khanate and Boris style sludge before drenching everything in slop-buckets full of processed vocals and harsh digital noise. Straw Dogs shows a slight tendency to slip towards goth-pomp but essentially this is punishing and churning metal. If this album was chewing-gum it would be tarmac flavour. If it was a razor it would be rusty. If it was the denouement of a who-dunnit it would be the butler, in the library, with a lead pipe, beating you over the head...again...and again...and again...and again.

from Stylus Magazine:

Israel's Grave in the Sky take Hyatari's Godflesh-gone-digital vibe, and smear it with harsh distortion and tortured electronics. But unlike Godflesh, the vocal delays keep going and going, smashing through bar lines and plunging into dirty depths even Broadrick and co. avoided. The production avoids the laptop glitch to which such experiments often stoop. No choked or chopped sounds here; white noise bruises, digital rugburn, and between-radio-stations static scar the soundscape like an electromagnetic storm. Near the end, filthy sub-bass lashes out wantonly; imagine Khanate with a blood-crusted computer vomiting old school techstep. Forget analog amp worship; Akira's Tetsuo has inflated Black Sabbath into a leviathan-like cyborg. [Cosmo Lee]

And a great one from Aquarius Records:

GRAVE IN THE SKY Cutlery Hits China: English For The Hearing Impaired (Heart & Crossbone)

First it was the metallic noise rock crunch of Barbara, then it was the freaked out psych-noise of Lietterschpich, and now there's Grave In The Sky, who are proving difficult to describe. But holy shit, has Israel underground rock has been seriously kicking our asses!!! Hard to believe how bad ass and fucked up and utterly amazing this stuff is. Grave In The Sky are on the same label as Barbara and Lietterschpich and sort of fall sonically right between the two. They are a bass/drums/vocals trio, the various members also occasionally responsible for stuff like Indian vocals, noises, effects, and Indian vocals again, hmmm.... The sound is dirgey industrial pound, doomic dirge and blown out noise rock stomp, all tangled up in as seriously chaotic and mangled musical car wreck. Let's start at the beginning though. The record is called Cutlery Hits China: English For The Hearing Impaired. Okay. The songs are all named after movies: "Donnie Darko", "The Descent", "Straw Dogs", "The Devil's Rejects" and "Scum". All chiseled into a faux tomb stone on the back of the cd with the legend "Here Lie..." Weird already. Then the first track kicks in and we're in super distorted ultra violent crust sludge heaven where we will happily stay until the end of the record, at which point we will push play again and let this bloody brutality rain down on us all over again. Each track is a lurching sludgey doom trudge, like the Brainbombs at 16rpm, the vocals dripping with FX, hellish and harsh, distorted and twisted into bizarre shapes, sometimes so affected they turn into long drawn out helldub sonic echoes, the riffs are roiling black grooves, the drums, in the red caveman pounding and pummeling. This is some sort of primitive serial killer garage rock stomp but filtered through all sorts of Whitehouse NOISENOISENOISE, with every knob and every effect turned up to 11. The songs may begin as crusty doom dirges, but once the effects kick in every single note, every shouted lyric, every drum pound is echoed into jagged fragments and sent spinning in every direction resulting in the songs turning into ultra damaged noise dub experimental chaos. And it sounds so amazing. Layer after layer of undulating sound, corrosive and harsh, speaker shredding buzz, vocals swirling and turned inside out, the drums distorted into blinding bursts, but buried within all of this blurry smeared musical mayhem, are strange creepy melodies, plodding industrial rhythms, huge low end swells and tons of textural grit and grime. Another one of those rare records where utterly abject, ear shredding noise, and an avalanche of effects and some of the harshest and hateful sounds we have ever heard, are all somehow transformed into a record we actually want to listen to. And not just once. Over and over and over and again and again. We were pretty sure it would be tough to beat Barbara and Lietterschpich, in terms of bizarre brutality, but then it never occurred to us to just mash them both together. Fucking awesome.

And another great review from decibel.com:

Holy mother of fuck! Man, do I ever love this stuff. The first thing I noticed about the new album by Israel’s Grave in the Sky—a drum & bass & vocal & samples & electronics trio comprised of Maor Appelbaum, Matan Shmuelli and Rani Zager—is how friggin’ LOUD it is. Seriously, I can’t turn my stereo up even close to the halfway point without fear of doing major damage to my humble earthly speakers when Cutlery Hits China is playing. It almost makes me want to go buy a stereo system that COULD handle this album, just to hear what that would sound like. I do pity my cat, though.I listen to a ton of sludge and doom and crust and blood and gore, and I’ll be honest with you: After years of the stuff, most of it ends up sounding sorta pleasant and comforting. I’m not blasé about it, but I’m used to noise attacks of every shape and size. It’s hard to jar me at this late date, is what I’m trying to say. Well, these dudes did it! This is just nasty and glorious stuff. What I love about it is not just how heavy and loud their lo-fi sludge is, but how purely psychedelic and mind-bending their sound is. I’m not sure I even want to know what would happen if you took acid and listened to this album, but I’m betting that it would be a memorable experience. The unhinged industrial-tinged vocals, that bottomless bass sound, drums that pound like a headache—this is unsettling, hellish and dark. And just so… cool! You’ll wonder why anyone ever bothers with a guitar that has six strings when you hear this. All the lyrics come from movie dialogue, which creates the unique situation of me LOVING a song entitled “Donnie Darko.” This album desperately needs to be heard by the scuzzbuckets who think they’ve heard it all. Jaws will drop. —Scott Seward