This album lives – it lives, yet only inside your head. No matter how real the disc and the packaging may seem, once you turn out the lights and close your eyes, this record slowly builds up momentum, resurrecting itself inside the very outskirts of your mind, only to crawl closer and closer, taking bits and pieces along the way, and finally causing a total black out.

Cellblock is dark, yet beams of light can be seen if you look up through the rusted bars and shattered glass of the prison windows that you are now lost in. It’s despair made sonic: slowly but surely the end is coming near, you can keep on running, but you can feel that it’s coming to get you.

With brooding bass rhythms, sweeping soundscapes that invoke a sense of timeless deliverance, and a clever use of female whispers and male talk, Cellblock reaches a state of absoluteness. Cellblock becomes a cellblock. Throughout the album, isolation stands above all else, desperation creeps up and catatonia is the final result. Sometimes mechanical in nature, sometimes atmospheric, but always a very frightening record with a very unnerving end. Almost like a story except that once you take the time to actually start listening, you start experiencing and find yourself on Heath’s cellblock, awaiting execution from the long dead and decomposed prison guards.

With this essential debut album, Heath has set out to create something new and refreshing, yet give us something more than we bargained for. More than we could handle. There is no monotonous feeling found, no hope, no warmth... just a cell with your name on it. (9.5/10)