Just as Young Gods Records has become a magnet for acts who have carried spores of founder Michael Gira's vision into new areas, so Appease Me - the label run by members of Blut Aus Nord - appears to be a launch pad for bands with an affinity for their bosses' vast, unblinking claustrophobia. In the case of Paris-based P.H.O.B.O.S. that aesthetic is to be found in a fusion of filth-ridden doom, pitiless industrialism and, as the title suggests, paganistic, earthshaking convulsions. You'll also find a rather large debt to Godflesh, albeit minus the futile, battling and battered human will, Khanate's long-festering pulp of disgust and tail-end, trailing winds of feedback à la Skullflower's 'IIIrd Gatekeeper'. If this is all starting to sound too much like an obvious checklist for noise addicts, it's an understandable initial misgiving. But having been whittled down since their inception in 2000 from a four-piece to sole member Frédéric Sacri, there's a single-minded density to P.H.O.B.O.S. that's ultimately overwhelming, the relentless trawls herein driven by constantly shifting, mind-altering layered grooves, and with tracks up to ten minutes long a strange, okay-okay-you've-broken-me euphoria starts to kick in, clinging on to Sacri's fetid rasp amidst suffocatingly overripe textures as he piledrives you ever further into his molten heart of darkness.

- Jonathan Selzer (7.5/10)

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