REVIEW: Ourobonic Plague - Post Human Possibilities

New six-track release from the darkest corner of Australia, Ourobonic Plague follows up last year's GAAP ep with a longer stretch of industrial umbral imaginings.  The irony in titling this Post Human Possibilities is that the effect of this album is to suck away all the kinds of positive potentials the word Possibility might bring to mind. It's a grey aurad environment that is cast here, a shadowy landscape of futility, chaos, dread and paranoia. None of the songs titles suggest an album that would allow a slice of light in.

The opening Her Reptile Dysfunction begins with unsettling reverberating tones and a keening sound that sneaks in under them only to grow into a wavering foreground sound that plays call and response with wordless feral utterings that crawl out from between them. Slowly the dull thump of a beat drags itself through the swampy textures to dominate the speakers, it's funereal procession harried by a rippling kick. 
By contrast, the following Lake Slasher is a far more sprightly piece, with melodic lines flickering between the branching synths like bats in the night forest, cycling round in rabidly fluttering patterns.  Return To The Lake plays on the effectiveness of adjusting the levels of disorientation around a minimal theme before the drag-crawling pitch-downed take on Nine Inch Nails that is Connection Failed preludes the huge end-piece of Washed Up On The Shore.  The album closes on this sixteen minute vista of bleakness that takes half its length to gradually evolve from a primordial state into an achingly paced tempo of dread pounding and haunted mechanics. The cover art being drawn into perspective fully with that blood red sun silhouetting a scene of deserted industry, abandoned, derelict and lifeless. The track rolls forward in waves of toxic drone, breaking on to a bed of gritty vibration like the yellowed waters of a poisoned lake, fizzing at acid charred rocks of its lifeless bank.

You can imagine a solitary figure staring hopelessly outwards, watching as a weak sun sinks below the horizon leaving them alone in an unforgiving darkness.

Order from the Twice Removed Bandcamp