TREES - "SICKNESS IN" DIGIPAK

'Sickness In' is the third album from Portland's most wretched, Trees. Following their similarly abject slabs of feedback-doused horror and quasi-formless dirge 'Lights Bane' and 'Freed Of This Flesh' on Crucial Blast, the band again presents a two-song assault, each one roughly fifteen minutes in length, each a slowly rotting heap of droning slow-motion deathdoom riffs decomposing into clouds of black amplifier hum, high shrieking voices and tortured screams drifting against the glacial roar of smoking amp stacks and short-circuiting hardware. Where the previous album had Trees employing some interesting rhythmic chaos and longer stretches of ambient filth, this time around the band drops some of their most leaden, majestic riffs yet into their slow-mo filthstorm, massive saurian doom riffs slipping WAY out of the confines of 'groove' and deep into rumbling fields of charred ritualistic chanting and almost Abruptum-like states of psychotic noise.

The first track 'Cover Your Mouth' crashes in on an avalanche of thrumming electricity and metallic noise, the crushing abstract heaviness collapsing in on itself, the rhythm section accentuating the rumbling black mass/mess with thunderous blasts of anti-propulsion. Trees have always seemed to have a somewhat improvisational feel to their extreme doom-laden horror, but just when you think that 'Cover' is on the verge of dissolving into a field of pure drone, the band unleashes titanic earth-scorching riffage. On 'Perish', the resonant sound of throat singing introduces a new wave of howling ambient feedback and speaker-hiss, but soon transforms into another twisted, agonized pain-dirge, those tortured vocals scraped raw, pain-wracked screams rising and falling behind the amorphous black sludge and diseased drones.