Gnaw, from New York, are a five-piece band. But the noise metallurgists churn around one clear and inarguable point of darkness—vocal torturer Alan Dubin. Horrible Chamber, the band’s much-improved second album, starts without him. An out-of-tune piano plinks a diatonic melody ahead of and then in sync with a concussive electronic thud. It’s a chilly sound, sure, but it’s like waiting in line for a haunted house, where the anticipation of what’s about to come offers the true scare. When Dubin’s pitchy scream, stuck somewhere between a lupine howl and a serpentine hiss, cuts in after the 40-second prelude, you’re finally pushed through the front door. “Humming, humming, outside, outside, humming,” Dubin speak-screams slowly, splitting every word of his harangue with rests flooded by static and a sidecar of anxiety. “You left your window open, nice lady.” The next five minutes are purely repetitious, Dubin redelivering his lines in broken fragments and slipping briefly into talk of knife play. The band behind him controls the shock that surrounds the sound, like night watchmen looking out for the perpetrator and not the victim. It’s a point-of-view horror movie.
Dubin has done this before, of course. In the 90s, he was the singer of O.L.D., a collaboration with James Plotkin that specialized in weirdo, post-Patton industrial metal. And during the last decade, he infamously offered the curdled tone at the center of Khanate, the leaner and more terrorizing doom sideshow to member Stephen O’Malley’s drones in Sunn O))). But Gnaw released its 2009 debut, the nine-song fisticuffs This Face, a month after Khanate released its posthumous finale. The implication was clear: Gnaw was custom-built to harbor Dubin’s demented invective, to make his screams the bloody, bloodying star. By mixing jagged digital shards, relentless power electronics, piercing guitar amplifiers, and mid-tempo metal drums, Gnaw created a violent, volatile place for Dubin to work.
But This Face tried to do a bit too much at once, as though the band were overenthusiastic about its savage charge. The meld of heavy metal electrics and harsh noise electronics were sometimes nebulous, mostly causing the songs to feel more slight than scary. Horrible Chamber is more focused and deliberate, and the net effect is much more threatening. Dubin limns scenes of murder and decay (in both cases, his own and that of others), and the band not only paints the text with music to match but stands back far enough to let him work. During that gambit about the open window, the manipulated piano eventually starts to sound like wind chimes plinking together calmly and creepily while madness happens inside. Across its 10 minutes, “Widowkeeper” morphs slowly from a catacomb drone, where Dubin death-whispers about cold hands and rotting bodies above combative electronics, into a full-on doom torment, where the singer drags his beleaguered voice over broken guitar waveforms like a bag of bones. It’s a brilliant move that allows suspicion to become a visceral, terrifying reality. “Of Embers” is a tale of chest-beating, mad-eyed domination. “I bring the mist,” Dubin bellows at one point. “We’ll take this city, burn their beds,” he promises. The band pairs the ultimatums with what’s ultimately its most punishing metal—a grueling crawl across peak-and-valley drums and through hyper-distorted guitars. In the past, Gnaw might’ve crowded the action with tape hiss or effected malfeasance. But here, the squelchy din simply supports the roar rather than hamstring it. It’s more than a move of economy; Gnaw have gotten better at serving as Dubin’s vehicle of choice, at conveying the danger he means to share.
Horrible Chamber arrived in mid-October, just as plastic ghouls began to populate small-town storefronts and black-cat cutouts arrived in little front yards. Those fake boogeymen remind us annually of the horror of haunting and the tingle of danger. Gnaw get beyond all that, pushing their tirades and tales to the point where actual destruction seems just beyond the door. So much of that rests with Dubin, just as it has with every band he’s called his own. But this time, much of it rests with the band itself, too, which approaches Dubin’s rampages with newfound reserve and purpose. Gnaw might still lack the dramatic thrall and endless volume of Khanate, but they’ve begun to build themselves stepwise around a masterful instrument and centerpiece that no one else has.
