Rudimentary Peni - Great War

First new Rudimentary Peni in over a decade (first album in even longer), and what a surprise, it's just about the best thing you'll hear this year. New is a somewhat relative term, since it appears this was recorded sometime ago just before the band did one of their customary disappearing acts. Whatever's going on in the RP world - and let's face it, at this stage, it could be just about anything - their utterly singular anxiety-laced monochrome crust flex is as hard, heavy and apocalyptic as ever. Blinko's black tar vocal (not to mention artwork) cuts its familiar sinister line, but there's tunes here for days amidst the desperate fog and Lovecraftian squall. Opener, Anthem for Doomed Youth (the  album name is a conceptual reference to the Wilfred Owen poems from which the lyrics mostly seem to be drawn), is precisely that: a debased one-note, foot-down Shadowplay. From that moment on they slow-mo grind and blast their way through the outer orbits of proto-thrash anarcho nihilism. Same as it ever was, sure, better than anyone else ever was, too. Also worth noting that Great War preludes a much larger reissue campaign from Sealed of the RP catalogue. All hail the end of the world.