ALBUM REVIEW: Ingested Burial Ground – Ploughshare

Aussie noise merchants PLOUGHSHARE return with their second album, Ingested Burial Ground. Featuring an A-side/B-side split of original tracks and remixes from friends and peers, this makes for a deeply uncomfortable and brash listen, pulling in every trick and trope of the noise genre and vomiting them back up across a 36-minute span of nightmarish audio.

Before the first tortured note even gurgles out of your speakers, the track list illustrates an absolute horror show. A Horrible And Terrifying Impression, Two Awful Creatures and An Uneasy Dread Rose are not the names of songs that will soundtrack your next family get together. Hell, they’re probably not the kind of tracks you’ll ever listen to with anybody that you’re close to. Instead these are songs that lurk in the deepest recesses of your music library, rearing their gnarled heads when you least expect them, like the grotesque monsters that terrorise the populace in cinema’s most difficult entries. 

Sure enough, the names are well suited to a collection of tracks that crash and clang, squealing and scratching as they go. Ingested Burial Ground furthers PLOUGHSHARE‘s dedication to experimentation, and “stretches that approach further through using new techniques and tools and playing with sound in new (for us) ways“. The Cold Horror Is Clear sounds like a Berlin nightclub has soundtracked an S&M dungeon, its powerful and fidgeting bass-driven instrumentation submerging harsh vocals deep under the murk. Meanwhile, Divulging Bees, Spiders, And Scorpions is the aural equivalent of being swarmed by that trio of hellacious beasties. Synths echo into eternity with the feedback and reverb dialled up to max before a deluge of drums and roars cut through the electronic façade like a rusty machete. If APHEX TWIN and CONVERGE had a lovechild, the abomination may sound a little like this.

The second half of the record is a regurgitation of the first, through the lens of electronic acts, death metal groups and black metal bands. While the changes and remixes don’t add a whole lot, it does tally up to an interesting and novel experiment. An Uneasy Dread Rose undoubtedly presents the most stark difference between versions. The original is an unhinged exercise in brutality underpinned by a haunting track of female choirs, while the remix by eccentric psych pop artist Alex Macfarlane cuts and chops the screamed vocals with drum & bass pulses and space age drum machines. But the decision to repeat all five tracks with generally small changes adds to the unease that the album breeds. Even on repeated listens, you’re not quite sure what to expect one track to the next.

Ultimately, Ingested Burial Ground is as disgusting and murky as they come, not that you expected anything different from a record with this name. A challenging and confronting listen upon which PLOUGHSHARE have pushed themselves and the noise genre to breaking point. It may take some time, but once it gets its hooks in, this will haunt your speakers for the foreseeable future.

Rating: 7/10

Ingested Burial Ground is out now via Brilliant Emperor Records.

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