Another rare Live Bait release, 2006's Lifes Blood Deaths Embrace CD arrived about a decade after Murderous Vision's formation, and continued to employ some of the gothic and erotic imagery that wafted around the band's earlier releases. Initially a duo, Murderous Vision has been at it for close to thirty years now, and has explored a range of soundscapery and low-key orchestration as one of the more interesting and experimental entities in the US post-industrial underground. Sonically, the whole presence on this disc is more focused and more malevolent, however, and it definitely feels like it's on the same kind of morbid wavelength as the isolated black ambient / death industrial that was contemporaneous to what was happening on Cold Spring and Cold Meat at the turn of the century. At this point in Murderous Vision's existence, founder Stephen Petrus had taken over as the sole member, with a small group of pals collaborating with him on certain songs, adding some additional instrumentation and percussive elements for the album to flesh out his benighted 'scapes; later on, Petrus would get pretty experimental with this project, tinkering and flirting with different musical genres and moods that would sometimes work terrifically, sometimes not so much, but with Lifes Blood, he's delving headfirst into the gravedirt. A menacing mixture of occult symbolism, carnal strangeness and ritual stance, this stuff drops heavily into a weird world of (mostly) abstract sound that's eternally wrapped in an aura of immersive creepiness and mystery.

Some of these tracks are fucking heavy, too. Right outta the gates, Petrus blasts you with a short but massive storm of rumbling distorted tectonics, clanging dread and earthmoving power as "Commiserate The Curse" introduces the album in a thundering gust of Plutonian drone. From that point it drifts and weaves through a negatory dreamscape, into the cold steely synthetic strings, whirring metallic drone and distant volleys of tympani-style percussion that takes over "Grinding Your Souls Into Hell", oppressively dark ambient sound with suggestions of "ritual" sounds and foggy voices circling in the background, hammers striking iron rhythmically deep underneath, these sounds forming together into a styxian blur. There's a consecutive pair of songs that feature controversial power electronics artist Brethren, "Dethrone And Disseminate" and "The Serpent Approaches"; with his contributions of additional percussion, synthesizers, electronics and vocals, the duo stand out as the grimmest work here, melding dire, almost cinematic neo-classical elements with violent tribal drumming, woeful violins floating over swells of a kind of symphonic intensity, while an intense spoken-word screed appears, a voice decrying Christian ideals and proclaiming Might Is Right ideas before it slams into a powerful, danceable drum squad, part martial workout, part blasphemous cloud of ominous classical instrumentation. The heaving infernal drone-blast and far-off megaphone ravings of "Serpent" is basically part two, distorted declarations of Darwinian / violently anti-Christian rancor flitting among an even more desolate-sounding churn of subterranean industrial rumbles and lightless thrum.

That conjured nether-realm makes up the rest of the album for the most part, continually descending into new layers of Hell, grotesque loops of dissonant piano noise infested with tape-warped Latin mumbling, repetitious and chilling, loops of sinister string sections, musty horns bellowing across chasms of total blackness, androgynous liturgical chanting shifting in and out of phase, fragments of anxious dialogue, bizarre (and I mean bizarre) and nightmarish glitchery, sprawls of Lustmordian reverberation, blasts of hideous Satanic garble and marching tempos, satyr flutes and sickening electronic emanations, each song and passage opening into another diabolic soundscape, with the final minutes of the album unexpectedly arising as "The Soot Of Decay" becomes this awesome ceremonial procession of growling Korg-like synth and rattling chains and bells, carried on black winds, infectious and cinematic and oddly earwormy. Petrus's horrific ambience is strange and thick and threatening; again, this thread of ritual "action" appearing through most of Lifes Blood, and feels like some intersecting point situated between Kerovnian and Sigillum S, Megaptera, Raison D'etre and Brighter Death Now while possessing its own weird Ohioan vibe, like you're present at a Black Mass in the rear parking lot of Kroger's in the dead of night in late autumn.

One of his best.