Band:	Crowhurst
Album:	Isolator
Style:	Noise, Experimental black metal
Release date:	January 16, 2016
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Reclusive
02. The Soul Leaves Its Body
03. Pain And Survival
04. Dread

This is music.

To be more precise, this is an aural diatribe of oscillating static capable of eroding all thought processes in 40-something minutes. Segmented into four bombinating heaps of ear-assaulting misery, Isolator lives up to its name by slowly, painfully constructing a rigid musical asylum wherein you, the listener, may slowly lose your sanity to the inexorable wash of noise.

"Reclusive" kicks off the album with a swarm of sci-fi sound effects that seem to mirror the sounds of space itself. This track makes me wonder what Scotty's hearing in the Enterprise's engine room all day; it has the widest variety of sounds of any track on the album, and glides between massive, foreboding drones and swarming, insectoid stippling. "Reclusive" is Isolator's shortest cut, but is in competition with "Pain And Survival" for my favorite.

"The Soul Leaves Its Body" grinds and crackles with more stridulent layers; suggestions of mournful, moaning winds arise and succumb to the incessant crush of grating noise, which periodically intensifies in scale and urgency whenever the mood relaxes beyond a certain point. This track has a looming, spectral presence that sounds like the inner monologue of an Angel from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

"Pain And Survival" opens as the harshest track yet, but discernable ambient melodies quickly temper the aggressive drone over which the song builds. This is, at various times, both the most violent and the most soothing piece on Isolator, with the constant drone occasionally fading out to favor the cosmic atmosphere, and then surging back in to reclaim dominance. Pain and survival vie for control.

Where "Pain And Survival" felt relatively calm, even uplifting, "Dread" immediately draws the listener back into the noisy fray with a much deeper, more guttural array of sounds than anything we've heard on Isolator so far. "Dread" buzzsaws its way through any sense of relief left by the preceding track and draws Isolator to a close on this monstrous assembly line of flying scrap metal and exposed wiring. They sure don't call it harsh noise for nothing.

Having said all that, I looked down at the score boxes for performance, songwriting, originality, and production and realized that, in the context of a noise album, I have absolutely no idea what the hell those things mean. I'll let the overall score speak for itself, and in place of numbers, I rate those four categories as smiley face, check, yes, and thumbs-up respectively. With such a simple premise and apparent rigidity of style, Isolator explores a wide variety of moods and atmospheres, most of which fall somewhere between foreboding and terrifying; this is an album of buzzing, infernal solitude and moribund droning for the patient and demented.