Gehenna - The War Of The Sons Of Light And The Suns Of Darkness. Andthe split with Blind To Faith.

When is buying records more enjoyable than usual? When you're not paying for them...

These two were bought by way of a Deathwish voucher, given to me from my brother for my birthday a few weeks ago. Deathwish themselves had nothing that tickled my fancy so I tapped up their brilliant distro for two Gehenna releases on A389 Records.

The infamous Gehenna. Dark & chaotic Holy Terror style. Their War Of The Sons Of Light and The Suns Of Darkness LP is a collection of early cassette, split 7" and unreleased tracks all from around 94-95. All out of print since forever and kindly reissued by A389 on grey/red haze vinyl. More of a red with grey explosion, but still looks good. Limited to 200. 

I'm into the Medieval satanic end-times artwork. Suits it all perfectly. Gehenna in the early days had a reputation for intense and violent live shows, rumours of stabbings and all sorts. A lot of it is probably well constructed mystique but there aint no doubting that they're the real deal. And vocalist Mike Apocalypse (or Mike Cheese or a bunch of other names) certainly gives zero fucks in interviews.

Definatley a party i wouldn't want to go to. All the demons is one thing, but being force fed frogs? I'm out. No matter how well it may enlighten the path to wherever. This LP is raw and nasty and totally brilliant. And so with the rest of my Deathwish Dollars, i snapped up the Gehenna /  Blind To Faith split.

This came out last year. Now im no scaredy little girl, but the Gehenna tracks are terrifying. Raw production, oddly placed psychedelic lead guitar drenched in reverb and Mike's creature-from-hell vocals. Its pretty amazing.

Great artwork too by Szymon Siech. Blind To Faith on the B-side feature members of Rise & Fall and play a stripped back, pretty dark metal punk hybrid. They've got a full length out on Holy Terror Records which i've got iPod style and it's brilliant. Something else for the shopping list. This split pressed on a grey marble. I have no clue about pressing amounts but i'd imagine its somewhere in the hundreds.

Touch Amore - Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me - Deluxe Edition

Briefly jumping forwards through my backlog to post about this one for a couple of reasons.

Reason one is the fact that this has taken forever to arrive. Pre-orders for this went up on Deathwish's Estore without much warning at the start of May and such was the rush of people to buy it, Deathwish broke. The site went down for around 2 days in total before fully coming back on line. During this time judging from forums and DW's tumblr and twitter feeds there were a lot of people flipping out desperate to know if their order had gone through and wether they had sold out or not. Confusion and chaos in this tiny corner of the interweb in full effect. Anyway, store went live eventually, and I snagged the Deluxe Edition (naturally) of Touche Amore's Deathwish debut - Parting The Sea Between Brightness And Me. 1000 of these made, never to be available again. Encased in a 28 page 12" LP sized hardcover book and on 180 gram black. And then I waited.

And waited.

And wai.. yeah you get the point. Many a delay stopped this from shipping out and from Jake and Tre's regular updates it had something to do with the huge ass book the record comes in. Months went by, to the point where I wasn't even sure if I was bothered about it anymore. I was seeing pictures online of other people's standard editions in a variation of pretty colours and began to wonder if the extra cash for the Deluxe, the chaos of the order process and the long wait was going to be worth it?

In short, yes.  So reason two that this jumps the queue  - it's fucking gorgeous.

Deathwish & Touche Amore have really outdone themselves with this one.

The 180 gram record comes inside a sleeve inside that hand written lyric sheet. While we're on the subject of how nice this is, you should head over to this great post by my man Gav Weir. He drops all kinds of science about paper weight and stuff.

And it's got a really fucking cool label.

I'd be into it if all Deathwish releases had this label, a bit like how A389's are all the same. So, in the words of the Partridge Family, how long is too long? Well when it comes to the finished product being this brilliant, it's pretty irrelevant.