siLLy puPPy The Calgary based MIND MOLD is the darkened bleak creation of Robert LaChance (guitarist of Canadian dark grind devastators WAKE), Will Bjorndahl, and Ryan Kennedy (of Calgary-based avantgarde grind anomaly Seminary) who together released this sole EP in 2017 and then returned to the spawning fertile hellish ground from whence they came.

Although a mere 21 minutes in length with only five caustic tracks to sample, MIND MOLD’s self-titled concoction courtesy of the Sentient Ruin Laboratories follows the modern trend of heavy downtuned dissonance guitar chords accompanied by anguished screams of pain and sludgy post-metal drifting processions that conjure up the most menacing of atmospheres and blackened doom metal fortified with thick noise walls of reverb and sustained feedback.

A trudging journey through the bleakest musical expressions possible, MIND MOLD’s self-affirming companions to be a blender’s worth of various extreme noise / hardcore / metal bands such as Neurosis, Red Harvest, Blut Aus Nord, Today Is The Day, Rorschach, Jesu/Godflesh, and Swans existing in a torturous harmony is actually the most accurate description anyone could possible come up with although i’d add the spidery guitar chords are more out of the Deathspell Omega camp.

In the end MIND MOLD sinks to a depressive new level of skronky pasty-metal style sludge that is really hard to categorize by normal standards. The corrosive creepy crawl of the bantering din is akin to a shoegaze act fornicating with a vitriolic disso-death band like Ad Nauseam, Ulcerate or Pyrrhon only slowed down to a snail’s pace of funeral doom metal with bands like Esoteric and Evoken coming to mind. Overall a grotesque mutilating journey of the soul into the darkest recesses of the musical gutter but delivered in a way that makes it all feel so good.