Shone, a mechanical engineer turned musical mad scientist that designs and constructs his own “custom fabricated drone and dub machines from raw materials and open source electronic circuitry” with which he achieves a sonic quality suggestive of a bloodthirsty computer virus dragging itself across corroded motherboards.  Shone appeared on the scene in 2005 with his debut LP The Painted Army, released independently through A&P Recordings, and has been carefully crafting his signature sound ever since.  2015 and 2017 saw two releases with Phil Anselmo’s Housecore Records, an LP entitled Melk en Honing and an EP entitled Pressure Mine, respectively.  While Melk en Honing is laden with Author & Punisher’s usual droning, unforgiving atmosphere, Pressure Mine is an outlier in his catalog, oriented closer to Nine Inch Nails than Godflesh.  The EP introduced a more melodically driven sound into Shone’s repertoire, standing in stark contrast to the boiling metallic swamp of his older material.  Now, having arrived at the release of his 6th album and Relapse Records debut, critics and fans alike are glued to the edge of their seats in anticipation of what Shone will deliver on Beastland.

 

From the record’s very first moments, there is no doubt that Beastland is a return to the anguished, dystopian feel of Author & Punisher’s previous albums.  “Pharmacide”, the record’s opener, immediately flattens our ears with a distorted, oscillating square wave that fizzles and writhes before exploding into a pulverizing wall of static noise.  In addition to Shone’s typical barbed-wire-and-gravel textures, the listener is assaulted by shapeshifting synthesized frequencies reminiscent of hard bass or even trap music, exploring previously uncharted territory within Author & Punisher’s sound.  The second track, “Nihil Strength”, begins with a garbled, otherworldly spoken word passage before Shone launches into his trademark snarl, with his familiarly punishing, hard-driving crash pulsing beneath.  Yet instead of simply pounding along and shifting through layers of dark synthesizers while periodically blasting the listener with harsh dissonance, "Nihil Strength" builds progressively in massive waves of despair that swell and regress like a digital tide, infusing the grim, dirge-like quality of the music with a sort of hopeful determination as triumphant chords rise above the chaos below. 

Beastland effortlessly combines the more harmonically driven elements from Pressure Mine with the pulverizing, droning throb of Author & Punisher’s earlier material, incorporating the best elements of each into a masterful summation of Shone’s capability as a songwriter.  This broadening of aesthetic is partly in thanks to his collaboration with Kurt Ballou of Converge, whose celebrated mixing abilities present Beastland’s compositions through a precisely devastating and emotionally unique filter.  Each of Beastland’s tracks is infused with a visceral bleakness that evokes the feeling of struggling immensely with each and every breath, yet refusing to yield.  Like the figure on the album’s cover, we are thrust into this frozen alien wasteland, steadily and unceasingly marching onward while drawing pressurized vapor into our lungs through hissing, gasping valves.

 

Beastland features some of Shone’s most hideously organic auditory experiments to date, rivaling the grotesque fluidity of producers like Aphex Twin or Dave Tipper.  This flexible quality allows him to incorporate an incredible range of variety within the album’s relatively limited thirty-seven-minute run time.  In “Nazarene”, a re-imagined version of a track off Pressure Mine bearing the same name, we see the full extent of Beastland’s melodic elements fed through Shone’s morose interpretation of a synthwave composition.  However, melodically straightforward moments such as this do not represent a softening of Author & Punisher’s sound – they serve to unsettle or disturb rather than relieve the listener.  “The Speaker is Systematically Blown”, arguably Beastland’s most accessible song, introduces Author and Punisher’s digital rendition of more straightforward, crunchy analog riffs, complete with a chorus that features an almost stoner/alt-metal chord progression supporting a raspy, anthemic melody.  Tracks such as Apparition and “Night Terror” achieve an almost meditative quality; repetitive rhythmic patterns evoking industrial machinery gone haywire are overlain by expansive synthesizer chords that decay and never quite reach harmonic resolution, hypnotizing the listener into a state of transcendent immersion.  In these moments we hear Author & Punisher not as a collection of machines performing as an ensemble, but rather as a symbiosis screaming out with a unified voice, as vocals, percussion, and synthesizers all meld together to create a single organism.

 

As the album reaches its conclusion, all of these varying motifs and atmospheres coalesce into Beastland’s monolithic title track, one of the sludgiest, most doom-oriented songs of Author & Punisher’s discography.  Although each of the first seven songs adheres to the same methodical, slow to mid-tempo 3/4 pulse, “Beastland” moves at a freer and more natural pace, utilizing shifting sequences of odd time signatures in a final demonstration of the savage human element underlying the record’s mechanical structure.  Soaring vocal harmonies drone above a mournful dirge as a crackling, cycling tone slowly envelops “Beastland” in a wash of discordant, granulated dissonance before the song is slowly deconstructed, fading away entirely.  This closing track strays farthest from Author & Punisher’s traditionally implemented structure, yet still remains true to the musical trajectory created through Melk en Honing, Pressure Mine, and his earlier albums, all while bolstering Beastland’s claim as one of the heaviest and most eclectically conceived industrial undertakings to date.  Thus, Shone has proven yet again that Author & Punisher’s music exists in a realm all its own, further solidifying his identity as a landmark act not just within industrial or experimental metal, but modern music as a whole.

 

Ultimately, Beastland eschews any dramatic change in Author & Punisher’s sound for a more focused and direct evolution of his demented cyborg entity, reinforcing the aesthetic that Shone has been cultivating for the last thirteen years while simultaneously decorating it with new and disturbing ornaments.  Despite considerable dynamic expansions, Beastland features an Author & Punisher that offers a concise sonic atmosphere more streamlined and accessible than his previous records without sacrificing any of the incomparable David Lynch-esque aesthetic of nihilism and desolation that fans of the project have come to know and love.  Shone demonstrates progression in Author & Punisher’s overall sound using the same strategy he implements within a single track, by gradually developing and expanding upon a singular idea until it has swollen into a fully immersive hellscape of grating distortion and sinister majesty.  With his sixth album he has thus fully realized the duality that Author & Punisher represents, that which juxtaposes the primal instinct of human aggression with music generated entirely by digitally programmed machines  Beastland is yet another fantastic installation in Author & Punisher’s gallery of bizarre and dystopian soundscapes, an album that pushes his music outwards into lush realms of discordant melody yet retains its well-established devastating brutality, undoubtedly satisfying long-time fans while gaining the attention of those previously unaware of his unmatched talent and creativity.

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FINAL SCORE:  8.5/10

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Beastland will be released via Relapse Records on October 5th.  The album can be purchased or streamed in full on Bandcamp

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You can catch Author & Punisher on his upcoming European tour, and stay up to date by following him on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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