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Active for four years, Tokyo's Grave New World is the unfamiliar work of familiar faces. The group's lone album, 1992's experimental crust epic The Last Sanctuary, is uncommonly challenging and immune to easy comparisons. The band took the post-apocalyptic crust blueprints of Amebix, cut them into jagged pieces, tie-dyed them in a Jonestown punchbowl, and made a papier-mâché bust of Maurizio Bianchi. It's the shockingly unexpected output from a supergroup that rose from the '80s hardcore ashes of Asbestos, Crow, Last Bomb, and Crisis Kill. The band set out with the explicit goal of defying expectations, and has suffered a legacy of relative obscurity as the result.
Grave New World was formed in November of 1989 by drummer Kenji (Asbestos), visual kei guitarist Hitoshi (Crisis Kill), and an ex-Asbestos bassist who was soon replaced by Bondage (Last Bomb). Considering the direction their sound ultimately took, the group surprisingly began as a relatively straightforward Discore band, though this quickly changed with the addition of industrial noise addict Crow, who relocated to Tokyo in 1990 to join the band following the dissolution of his namesake, Osakan band the year prior.
The band's sole release The Last Sanctuary was recorded in September of '91 at Shinjuku Antiknock and released by Never Again Records (run by Yoshikawa of DON DON, Nouzui Records) on vinyl and CD a year later. Following in the unfortunate footsteps of Asbestos' The Final Solution.... and Crow's Last Chaos (both ~200 copies), The Last Sanctuary LP received a tragically identical low press run and has since become a collector's nightmare. In the words of Crow, audiences at the time were mostly "indifferent" and the small press run reflected the low demand.
Although only representing a momentary chapter in the lives of its members, Grave New World remains an ambitious project worthy of its talent. As such, The Last Sanctuary has grown in stature and now stands as one of the greatest audial examples of outsider music within the world of hardcore punk. Bitter Lake Recordings is supremely honored to reintroduce to the world one of our favorite records in a pressing of 100 copies on black/white smokey vinyl for mailorder only and 600 copies on black vinyl with black and silver artwork as originally intended.
Our take: Bitter Lake Recordings once again digs into the Japanese punk archives, reissuing this punk/crust obscurity released in a tiny 200-copy edition in 1992. I had never heard The Last Sanctuary before Bitter Lake announced this reissue. If I was aware of its existence, I must have written it off since the band named themselves after the worst Discharge record (I’m usually an apologist for bands’ under-appreciated later records, but Grave New World just sucks). However, I don’t think I would have loved The Last Sanctuary if I’d heard it in my 20s when I was rabidly acquiring every Japanese punk record I could. I’m happy that this record has arrived in my life when I’m more open to hearing something that surprises me. And boy does The Last Sanctuary surprise! Crow—singer for the band Crow—sings in Grave New World, and if you paid close attention to the records Crow released in the 2000s or Crow’s other project Death Comes Along, Grave New World might not be a total shock, but I’m a big fan of all of those records and I still find The Last Sanctuary pretty out there. Combining metallic crust and psychedelic rock is original on its own, but Grave New World’s implementation of that recipe is even more idiosyncratic and innovative that you might imagine, sliding between and cross-pollinating those genres (and others too!) in ways that sound like nothing I’ve ever heard before. The first track, “Never Ending Winter,” starts off with a harsh noise intro that would make Hanatarash proud, furious drums kicking in but never coalescing into a proper hardcore song. Next is the track “Grave New World,” which sounds like you’re in a practice space with a band working out a cool Amebix-meets-Sacrilege riff, but the room to your left has a really fucking loud band who’s obsessed with Piper at the Gates of Dawn and King Diamond is doing his vocal warm-ups in the room to your right. I could come up with a wacky analogy for every track, but I think you get the point… The Last Sanctuary is all left turns. Yet, for all of its weirdness, it doesn’t skimp on the heaviness or grittiness one bit. While it may be too left of center for some people, this record is one of my most treasured musical discoveries of the past several years, and I’m stoked to wear the grooves out on this reissue.