Praise for Dragged Into Sunlight’s Hatred For Mankind from San Francisco?s aQuarius Records: We had never heard of these UK metalheads, but the gruesome Justin Bartlett art of course caught our eye, and if anything, the sounds inside live up to the grim warning of the strange ritual depicted on the cover, hooded figures surround a woman, whose baby is dragged from her by a strange goat creature, her mouth open, emitting instead of a scream a strange column of either feathers or crystals.

The soundtrack to this demonic ceremony is some sort of super intense, ultra aggro, sludgey blackened downtuned death metal dirge doom pummel. The sound shifting from frenzied blasting Swedish style melodic death metal to lurching, lumbering noise drenched doom, the recording so hot and in-the-red, that the drums buzz and sizzle, the guitars so distorted they crumble from the speakers. The vocals a harsh hateful shriek, plenty of Eyehategod style feedback, long stretches of layered skree, tense and intense. The sound so impossibly heavy, not sure we’ve ever heard guitar SO buzz drenched and blown out.

The sound brutal and intense and harrowing, but probably the coolest  / weirdest aspect of this band’s sound are the samples, all over the place, snippets of conversations, bits from films, sometimes draped over minimal bits of droney ambience, other times set amidst roiling churning heaviness and thus barely audible. But it definitely gives the record a strange vibe, reminding us of nineties industrial rock, but only in that one aspect, in every other way, this is some of the fiercest, most fucked up and intensely heavy death / sludge we’ve ever heard.

The vocals sometimes slipping into an inhuman ear shredding shriek, the buzzing so intense and furious that it sometimes almost blurs into total blackdronenoise, usually slipping right back into something more riffy or dirgey, but always suffocatingly black hole heavy, annd then there are those samples, which change everything. And stick around for the final track a supremely creepy outro of crumbling distorted buzz, keening feedback, layered industrial noise, and one final creepy sample. Awesome stuff.

Definitely one of the most brutal records we’ve heard, and while too many samples definitely plague many an otherwise awesome record, somehow, this wouldn’t be the same without ‘em.

At 40 years old, Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco. We try to only carry music we love, and we’re always searching for more new, cool, weird and wonderful music. All of which we then share with you, our loyal customers.