But maybe it's good to have waited this long. If it means getting to see Shone muscle out tracks from _Melk En Honing_, maybe right now is the perfect time to witness that A&P wizardry. _Melk_ is a monster album. If you heard 2012's _Ursus Americanus_ or the following year's _Women & Children_, you know basically what to expect: overdriven bass rape, wheezing foundry-reverb beats, nihilistic Godflesh shouts and semi-tonal singing, accompanied by thirty tons of distortion and grating sonic catastrophes that would each constitute startling experimentation on any other band's album but which come and go on _Melk_ like they're no great feat. If you've never listened to A&P, you're in for a treat. Or your in for recurring bouts of grueling nausea, depending on your physical constitution and musical preferences.

Like Godflesh, A&P's music elevates rhythmic considerations above all else, filling the remaining sonic space with buzzing abominations that hardly qualify as chords, once in a while tossing out a chilling moan or a simple, emotive keyboard line. Songs are protracted treatises on gravelly monotony, not individual pieces so much as welded-joint segments of one vast, intimidating beast. Whether or not you can hang with A&P will depend entirely on your acceptance of such harsh, oil-slicked and rusted-out landscapes. This isn't robot conquest -- this is man enslaving man amidst the ruined factory husks that litter land and sea after we've harvested the last organic compounds from Earth's sterile stone shell. _Melk_ offers no respite, unless you can find hope in the album's final cry: "Void! Null! Alive!"