Black Blues (Violent Version)

One of two mirror-image albums Haino released in 2004, the “Violent Version” of Black Blues contains six blues covers, sung — or in this case howled and screamed — in Japanese. Here, he’s playing the highly distorted electric guitar that’s his trademark, and forcing the vocals out like he’s passing a particularly barbed stone. As with the acoustic version, there’s a lot of space in the music, but where the “Soft Version” was desperately melancholy, here the silences are ominous, as the listener waits for the next shriek of pain. The closing version of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” intimate and despairing in its acoustic version, is like a hellish ritual purgation here.