A final celebration of Megaptera’s 15 year anniversary, Malignant presents the definitive last statement from this prominent and highly influential death industrial project. Staring Back At You concentrates on demo versions, outtakes, and rare songs from various arenas, including the compilations Zyklon B, Beating the Meat, Slaughter Age ’95, The Book ov Shadowz, Death OdorsII, as well as material from the Deep Inside LP, and more.

These tracks capture Megaptera at their grittiest, creepiest, and most horrifying…a grinding, lurching monstrosity fueled by the madness, violence, lies, wars, and disease that plague the world. Limited to 800 copies, and coming in a 6 panel digipak designed by Mårten Kellerman, this has been re-mastered by Magnus Sundstrom,with additional boosting courtesy of Thomas Garrison. Staring Back At You is the final nail in the coffin for Megaptera, and may they rest in peace, but continue to deliver nightmares, maddening thoughts, and the darkest of obsessions.

Megaptera are probably the one band that the “Death Industrial” tag fits best. Heavier than Brighter Death Now, Atrax Morgue or any of the other bands that fell under the banner of Death Industrial, this seminal Swedish project created some of the most crushing electronic music ever during it’s heyday, and this 2007 collection released by the excellent Baltimore-based label and distributor Malignant showcases some of the most flattening tracks that Megaptera ever recorded.

This disc is the last official release from the band since it decided to cease operations in 2006, and it’s a collection of rare material culled from demo versions, studio outtakes, and tracks from the Zyklon B, Beating the Meat, Slaughter Age ‘95, The Book ov Shadowz, and Death Odors II compilations. The music represented here is unifyingly nightmarish and creepy, ranging from menacing dronescapes to pulverizing machine dirges.

The more rhythmic pieces make for some of the heaviest industrial music you’ll ever hear…”Disoriented” rides a monstrous percussive loop over slabs of subterranean black ambience and grim horror synths, and “The Passage” sounds like a a doomdirge version of the Terminator original sound track. The track “Lurking Fear” is the prime skullcrusher on this disc, however; starting out as a series of looped layers of chittering, grating machine noise and pulsating foghorn tones, the piece slowly builds in density as additional machine rhythms and noise loops and bleak drones stack up, until finally a crushing drum machine beat shows up halfway through, massive and martial, a brutal doom march stomping through a nightmare world of living machinery. Imagine Godflesh’s Streetcleaner combined with some noisy, loop-based ambient noise…freaking pulverizing.

This is ultra-dark, nihilistic music, the repetitious sound of late-20th century factory machinery forged into apocalyptic dirge. Staring Back At You is limited to 800 copies and comes in a full-color, six panel digipack, remastered by Magnus Sundstrom and with additional sound “boosting” by Thomas Garrison from the power electronics project Control.

Megaptera were undisputable kings of so-called “death industrial” genre. In 10 years they released a number of albums and contributed many tracks to compilations. So why do they stand out among their contemporaries? It’s because of sense of atmosphere that they were able to create - the one where you could almost feel nasty odor coming out of your speakers. On the downside, their obsession with darkness and death can be overwhelming at times, but I think that those who buy Megaptera records will know what its about. Step inside, if you’re bold enough.

Peter Nyström

Staring back at you - Tracklist

01. More Disturbance (demo version)
02. The Passage (demo version)
03. Disoriented (Totally Different demo version)
04. Lurking Fear (Pre-damaged demo version)
05. Frozen Corpse
06. The Final Day (excerpt)
07. Morior
08. Mass Murder
09. Antropofagi
10. Deep Inside

http://www.malignantrecords.com/