(Advance Copy) Basement Torture Killings – The Gallery of Monsters Part 1 (EP)
- Dark Juan
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Self-Released
Release Date: 13.06.25
Running Time: 13:17
Review by Dark Juan
Score: 9/10
I am still in the grip of verbal diarrhoea. I cannot stop writing. I am consumed with a desire to scribe. This is the fourth review I have written today, and I cannot stop myself. I am compelled to vomit nonsense and then somehow tie in into the music I am listening to. This is what happens when Mrs Dark Juan leaves me alone. I mean I could be doing anything else, but I just can’t make myself do something else. The single mindedness is terrifying, and I feel a curious sense of detachment, as if I am watching myself, even as my fingers fly over the keys of my computer.
I’m not even drunk and I haven’t partaken in any party treats for many years. Once upon a time, however, you might have found Dark Juan half-insensible in a dank, dark alley somewhere, only to find that he would tear off your arms and beat you to death with the wet ends if you tried relieving him of his wallet, because there are times that Dark Juan requires solitary solace in the dark where no one can see him as the mental troubles he has reflect and make their way across his face in weird and disturbing expressions that would inspire pity, if they weren’t so ugly, and therefore only invite disgust.
Disgust leads us to the four-track EP I have strapped to the Platter of Splatter ™, which is a most apt name for the band I am currently listening to. Yes, after a very long time, Basement Torture Killings have finally given Dark Juan a new recording to listen to. I was previously most impressed with BTK and their education of budding serial killers.
These educators have gone a stage further this time, however, and their depravity has only increased. This pleases Dark Juan, who is only truly happy when he is slathered in gore up to the elbows and gnawing on something that does not belong on the outside of a human body. Not content with merely offering tuition, this time Basement Torture Killings have founded a museum of murder and have curate their collection in this EP (“The Gallery of Monsters Part 1”) representing the first of four parts to be released over the next 18-24 months, each lecture dealing with a particular type of savagery. Let us expand our educational horizons with this most seminal of British Goregrind bands…
Track one is ‘The Strangler’ which opens with a voiceover, screaming, demented giggling and then the madness begins. Vocalist Beryl appears to have been gargling with acid and broken glass again, and the whole song less than three minutes of tightly controlled fury, played at velocities not dissimilar to the revolutions of the flywheel of a steamroller. Unsurprisingly, this song is about an individual who enjoys offing his victims by strangulation. There is something deeply satisfying about watching the light of life leave their eyes up close when you are cutting off their air and you can feel every kick and twitch as they get weaker… What? Oh. The legal department of Decibel Warfare has instructed me to explicitly state that any views expressed herein are absolutely FUCK ALL TO DO WITH THEM and if Dark Juan is a filthy murdering pervert then he’s dealing with the consequences himself, and that they won’t be assigning any more Basement Torture Killings records to him after what happened the last time. I don’t even remember what happened the last time apart from being covered in blood and waking up in someone else’s house…
The next song (I use the term advisedly) is called ‘The Piquerist’ and this is where things get interesting, fact fans, as a piquerist is a person with a sexual interest in penetrating the skin of their consenting partner/ absolute fucking victim with needles and knives, and it is a paraphilia as well as sadism. The most frequently targeted areas of the body by the piquerist are the buttocks, breasts and genitals. This is deeply unsurprising. Again, there is a magic to the sliding of a blade or a slender needle into the skin, watching it part and enjoying the scarlet of blood edging the purity of the blade or needle before it runs in a beautiful claret stream over the alabaster white skin of your already partially exsanguinated victim. I mean consenting pervert. No, I mean partner. They like being tied down, officer, I PROMISE…
‘The Psychic’ is up next and BTK slow down the tempo a little (a very fucking little) for a song about a psychic killer. Of course, merely typing the words “psychic killer” has set off Talking Heads in my head and I will suffice to say that ‘The Psychic’ does not even sound vaguely like the Alt-Popsters and their frontman with a ridiculous suit. It is yet another slab of uncompromising brutality, played at velocities that only daemon primarchs can attain, and requiring the band to have more limbs than they were issued with at birth to actually be able to play. Which is a rather more worrying idea than it might normally be where Basement Torture Killings are concerned because you just KNOW there’s a fucking VAT of them knocking around somewhere…
The final exhibit on this exhibition of atrocity is ‘The Scaphist’. Yet again we devote ourselves to a particularly exciting method of murder. This one requires brainpower, peeps, so stick with me, yeah? The erstwhile and worthy scaphist requires two floating vessels, either tree trunks, or boats, to which they have tied their willing participant/ poor doomed motherfucker, and they are then force fed with, and covered in, a concoction of milk and honey and then towed out to the middle of a body of stagnant water and left. The inevitable defecation of the right dodgy bastard/ victim and smell of the milk and honey as it begins to putrefy attracts insects and carrion eaters who then consume the filthy fucking pervert/ poor damned victim alive. Apparently this has a fascination also for the piquerist as flies burrow beneath the skin and lay eggs and the skin is breached by teeth and mandibles.
Of course, Dark Juan has never heard of ANY of these things and is really QUITE nauseated at the thought of them.
However, BTK (it is most pleasing that the band’s initials are the same as the signature of all-round pillar of society Dennis Rader) revel in the glory of tearing out guts and chowing down on chunks of raw human. Dark Juan would expect nothing less of them. The music is fucking brilliant, Beryl is a consummate Death Metal vocalist and merchant of mayhem, the band’s performance on this EP is top notch from starting soliloquy to parting scream, and it is shot through with the kind of humour you only get in mental asylums or an evening at Dark Juan’s house. The EP has a pin sharp production, and the bass offers more bottom end than a legion of T-80 tanks captained by chunky 1950s German hausfraus called Gerta. The music is faster than an emergency trip to an Indian restaurant’s lavatories and sicker than the day after an evening on the absinthe. Everything about the EP is perfectly judged as far as songwriting, execution and production goes. Every sinstrument (not a misprint) of torture is clearly and distinctly heard and there is not really a downside at all which Dark Juan can think of. Apart from the EP being far too short and leaving Dark Juan gasping at the point of release…
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splatter Rating System is conflicted because it wants to give a stratospherically high score to this EP, but its only four tracks and part of a series, meaning that the body of work is not yet completed… An interim score of 9/10 will be applied for the quality of this EP but will be reviewed when the full horrid exhibition of esoteric murder is completed and displayed in its entirety.
TRACKLISTING:
The Strangler (boring murder method and been done to death, uninspired and insipid modus operandi that does not inspire. It’s saving grace is that you get to see the life leave the eyes of the victim)
The Piquerist (rather more exciting and one for the artists among us, I feel. A work of sublime genius in murder, and one with real quality)
The Psychic (not sure how this works, but now Talking Heads will be stuck in my head for the rest of the day, dammit)
The Scaphist (now, THIS is one for the connoisseur. Food, torture and slow death at the hands of nature. I like it as long as I get to watch)
LINE-UP:
Tarquin – Razor wire and shrieks
Beryl – Perverse sermons
Kliff – Bowel eviscerations
The Faceless Killer – Beater of souls
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