This album has one seriously gruesome cover. One panel is a close-up of the artist's face - so close-up as to be a little blurry - slaumed in blood. The other panel is a photograph of a mattress and pillow, also covered in blood. The inlay is simply a side of meat with a knife beside it, although of course, it's questionable exactly what we're looking at here. What is Vainio saying with the artwork for 'Life (...It Eats You Up)'? I get the impression that he's suggesting that we're all just meat and blood. Eat or be eaten. That's life. And death. And to expect brutality. In other words, pretty much what you might expect from a man who used to be one half of Pan Sonic, who collaborated with Merzbow, Alan Vega and Sunn O))) to name but three.
The first half of the thirteen minute opener, 'In Silence A Scream Takes a Heart', takes the form of gentle, yet sinister ambience. Drones and scrapes: the sharpening of knives... and then the guitars carve through the air. Slow, deliberate, heavy, and rent with screeches of skull-splitting feedback, it's reminiscent of 'Earth 2'. It's punishment, it's torture and it's heart-stoppingly devastating.
And then things get really nasty: 'Throat' is a cut and paste mess of fragments of found sounds, samples, feedback and distortion - and clattering pans, before the industrial rhythm of 'Mining' brings order to the chaos as guitars like chainsaws continue to grate and shred the atmosphere.
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Slap in the middle comes the most peculiar track of all: an eerily sparse, minimalist cover of The Stooges' 'Open Up and Bleed'. It's an appropriate choice, of course, but slowed to a crawl, the bulldozing guitars are backed off and the reverb on the drums is pushed up, to chilling, glacial, effect. This is accentuated by the snarling vocals so low in the mix as to be barely there. It's hardly recognisable, but echoing in the darkness, it's immensely powerful in an oddly restrained, detached sort of a way.
There are moments of unexpected grace in the lengthy ambient sections that follow, countered by deep, sonorous drones rumble off in the distance, occasionally split by more squalls of feedback and guitars mangled distorted beyond all recognition.
'Life' is without doubt a challenging album. Above all, however, it's a remarkable work, rich in texture, depth and range, and gloriously brutal in places.
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