Tartarus Records/Sweatlung – 29th August 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
My appreciation of the split release is well documented among these virtual pages, and this colossus of a monstrous beast is exemplary of the perfect balance of the contrasting and the complimentary. It’s quite the face-off, pitched as a head-on crash where ‘Australia’s heaviest force of nature Whitehorse teams up with sonic chaos conjurer UBOA for a split album that crushes, scorches, and transcends. The Dissolution of Eternity is not just an album, it’s a seismic rupture’. Yes. ‘A seismic rupture’. It’s a bold statement, bit one that’s hard to argue with, and the fact that this is getting a proper physical release on vinyl, cassette, and CD is something to get hyped about, especially the vinyl and cassette. The contrasts make the act of getting up and flipping the object an integral part of the experience, like an interval between acts at the theatre, or… well, really, like turning over a record. There’s no substitute for it when it comes to the elements of engagement with a physical release.
There must be something about bands with ‘horse’; in their name that plugs into a direct line to the world of heavy. Horsebastard, and the late, great Palehorse are just two example of UK bands who hit heavy, hard. And as for Whitehorse – not to be confused with Whitehouse, purveyors of extreme electronic noise – they are indeed as heavy as fuck. I’ll take their ‘heaviest band in Australia’ claim on face value, on the basis that ‘Wringing Life’ is almost seventeen minutes of grating, crawling, growling riff assault. It’s a heavy, harrowing, low-BPM sludge trudge, with the most choked, rasping vocals, buried low in the mix, sucking the oxygen from the air in dying gasps. The drum solo in the middle is punishing – sparse, slow, the cathedral-like reverb enough to make your head swim – and then the guitar and bass return lower and slower than ever. It’s bowel-trembling, rectum-quivering stuff, the sound of a slow, zombified clawing out of the cold damp sods: it’s the darkest, doomiest sludge imaginable. By comparison, ‘The Wait’, a mere seven and a half minutes in duration is a pop song. But it’s another crawler, its dingy riff mess strewn with feedback. This shit is so heavy it weighs down on your shoulders, your back, your lungs, just sitting in a chair listening to it.
File together Godflesh and early Swans and Oil Seed Rape and Sunn O))) and your halfway to the sternum-crushing weight of this.
Uboa’s noise brings a different kind of weight, and it’s compressed into shorter songs. When I say compressed, ‘Petplay Polycule Open Fire’ is a mere minute and forty-nine seconds of brutal, raging, clanging fury. It’s tempestuous, savage, demonic, a ravaging, brutal assault, and it bleeds into the gut-gouging morass of plunging, churning, amorphous noise that is ‘Wasted Potential’. Holy hell, is this dark and harrowing. You feel your innards slowly slump under its weight.
The theatrical piano of ‘Deamwalker, Fuck I Miss You’ certainly provides contrast, bit in terms of form and mood, and there’s a gloomy sadness which hangs over it before the darkening shadows gather at pace over the gloomy, semi-ambient ‘Pareidolia Shadow’, which reaches a sustained tempestuous crescendo that marries industrial with dark ambient and post-metal. The last track, ‘The Apocalypse of True Love’ is nothing short of a monster: clocking it at over nine minutes, it begins gentle, expanding synth ripples and surges, providing an atmospheric swell of sound, and you find yourself swimming, drifting on currents and tides… and then it expands in every direction, a surging blast of ambience ad noise and culminating in the most immense sustained crescendo… The final minutes are a slow, sloping comedown from the most all-encompassing blast that hits hard.
This release is quite something. It’s certainly loud. And it’s harsh, brutal, and unforgiving too. In short, everything we like – so this comes recommended.
AA
Aural Aggravation 