Indian: Rhetoric Of No – new video & From All Purity – full album stream

You will suffer through the new INDIAN video ‘Rhetoric Of No’, created by Madeline Quinn, and later on you will suffer through the new INDIAN album ‘From All Purity’. While the band think of it modestly as their “darkest and most varied material to date”, their label, Relapse Records, admits it to be the “true antithesis of easy listening”, promising it will ruin your day. Decibel says ‘From All Purity’ is “the sound of four guys hammering away the pain”, Metal Insider describes it as “pummeling, atmospheric, blackened doom that lives somewhere in some alternate universe where the evilest of sounds are worshiped for their darkness, their bleakness, their lack of all hope at all”, while always entertaining MetalSucks applauds:

“It’s just so fucking ugly and unpleasant that, unless you’re in the mood to go looking for diamonds in the vomit-encrusted rough, it can sound like an endless, sickly death march. It clocks in at just under 40 minutes, but it sounds like an eternity. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: INDIAN know that doom's slowness can be used to stretch out one's concept of time to submerge whoever’s listening into something truly vicious. ‘From All Purity’ does that masterfully. If you’re brave enough to venture in, you’ll find yourself knee-deep in some gnarled brilliance. It may smell like bat guano, though.” [Sammy O'Hagar (who writes for MetalSucks and not the Washington Post nor Cat Fancy, and has been doing so since 2008 for all three) – more here]

Celebrating along with the Americans and the Norwegians their first (that I know of) 2014 Winter Olympics gold medals as I am writing this, do venture in, from the album's hateful beginning to its bitter end, below. Recorded at Electrical Audio and Soma Studios in Chicago with engineer/co-producer Sanford Parker, INDIAN's fourth longplayer is out now everywhere (since January the 21st, 2014) through Relapse Records. It awaits your brave order here (Relapse Records' store), on iTunes, Amazon and BandCamp: 

 

These blackened-doom-noise-terrorists, INDIAN, operate out of Chicago, Illinois since 2003. In fact, claims the label, INDIAN had spent much of their formative years developing the volcanic sound that now seems as natural to them as breathing. Their debut EP, 2004s ‘God Slave’, was a self-released mission statement, “welcoming the band into the world like young, kicking, screaming giants”. INDIAN's full-length debut, ‘The Unquiet Sky’, came out in 2005 via Portland, Oregon-based Seventh Rule Recordings in 2005, followed by ‘Slights And Abuse’ in 2007 and ‘The Sycophant’ a year later. Each of these releases found the band gaining momentum and attracting followers, including Relapse Records. In 2010, the band began to craft their fourth full-length, ‘Guiltless’, issued in 2011 to rave reviews (Metal Hammer called it a “pretty much an essential album”):

“The one-two punch of the eight-minute death march ‘Guiltless’ and the four-minute, double bass drum-driven ‘Guilty’ is the album's centerpiece, and it’s savagely assaultive but oddly cathartic at the same time, the soundtrack to curling up on your bedroom floor and screaming into a pillow. As with most sludge and doom metal, it all gets a little oppressive after 40 minutes, but taken one or two songs at a time, ‘Guiltless’ is a potent album by a band with a lot of power and the talent to use it wisely,” [wrote Phil Freeman, AllMusic – more here:]

INDIAN features: Dylan O'Toole – guitar and vocals, Will Lindsay – guitar and vocals, Ron DeFries – bass and Bill Bumgardner – drums