Kiloton – C4H8Cl2S [EP]

With this fourth EP in a short series of short-players released by the ever-restless and prolific T.S., a Canadian musician who has been torturing our senses with several other bands and projects including Gotthammer, Pénombre, Complot! and Shezmu, we are being presented with the band’s most challenging ride.

While the three preceding EP’s by Kiloton, named ‘War’, ‘Gears’ and ‘Hearts’, seemed to have prepared you for battle, this last one (at least for now) is the soundtrack of an post-apocalyptic battlefield. Albeit all three previous EP’s had a slightly different musical identity, they more or less dwelled within the same musical territories, the twilight zone between Black/Death Metal and pure Black Noise. That resulted in a terrifying audial backdrop for the sceneries depicted on their individual covers.

‘C4H8Cl2S’ has very little to do with the devastating brutalism of its three predecessors, just as the cover and the title of this EP suggests: this indeed sounds like the last second of humanity. Okay, admittedly, I’m not really a chemist, so Google had to tell me that ‘C4H8Cl2S’ stands for mustard gas. A very cruel and vicious substance that has brutal consequences: burns on the skin, eyes and in the lungs. This EP is almost entirely free of regular metal elements, instead the soundscape sounds cold and desolate, like a post-combat battlefield. You can imagine the charred corpses and smoking, ruined tanks after a war battle, among the billowing remnants of mustard gas fumes…