A while back we reviewed an amazing record by a band called Tides. What was equally amazing was the circuitous route it took to get to Aquarius. In a nutshell, it was sent to a certain publication who deemed it too punk to review, a friend at said publication grabbed it from the reject box thinking we'd like it. We did. And well you can read that review on the AQ site. And that record ended up being a huge hit around here. The thing is, that record wasn't alone on its perilous journey. No, another record was right there along side the Tides cd making its way to AQ. That record, was this record. The Body. But The Body had a bit farther to go, before making it to the list you have right here in your hands. First, many emails with the label, then much waiting. Then finally a box of cds arrived, but somehow they had all become unglued and ruined in the mail. More emails followed, and still more waiting. FInally we had pretty much just given up. Then just a few days ago, a couple of big bearded guys with tattoos were sort of lurking around the store. You guessed it, they were The Body. Phew. So was it worth it? Hell yeah it was. That is if you like massive, pummeling, downtuned slow motion sludge metal with little bits of ultra doom and lots of post rock in there. And you know we do.
So yeah, The Body. This will definitely hit the spot for all you folks into Conifer, Pelican, Isis, The Ocean, Mouth Of The Architect, Tides and all that metallic post rock doom stuff. The first track is a crusher, a plodding doom riff spread out over eight minutes, with freaky garbled vocal samples and the whole thing building in intensity and slowly becoming more and more blown out until it's a fuzzy slab of white noise doom drone. Woah. The rest of the record trudges alternately between slow motion chugging and poundiing, moody mathy rhythmic workouts, and some truly dense tangles of chaotic riff rhythm mashup. All strung together with some seriously harrowing shrieked black metal style vocals buried WAY down in the mix. The final track is a fifteen minute long, relentless midtempo pipe to the skull, with a main riff that is repeated over and over, almost looped sounding, completely mesmerizing, before it all breaks down into a spacious plodding doom coda. So awesome.
Packaged in hand glued cardstock digipaks. This came out a while ago and was limited to 1000 copies so we can't be entirely sure how long we'll have these.
Rhode Island avant doom duo The Body just swung through town, with their pals in Braveyoung in tow, the two groups touring as a single unit, the increased firepower of this newly formed two headed beast harnessing some serious black energy. And for those who were unable to witness said energy in the flesh, comes this, an audial document of the collaboration, and while we'd never heard Braveyoung before, the resulting sonic onslaught speaks to the two groups' compatibility, the result a sprawling blackened soft cacophony, a series of surprisingly melodic and impossibly lush blackened doomscapes replete with a choir (the very same choir from The Body's epic All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood), and an unlikely cover of a song by sixties voodoo groovers Exuma!!
The opening track explodes with black gouts of crumbling low end, murky blurred riffage, and churning black hole crush, but as the song unfolds, all manner of melodic subtleties blossom, what sounds like soaring strings, muted tangled melodies, moaning low end rumbles, the buzz and crunch peeling way right at the end revealing the swirl of melodies that lurked underneath all along.
The factually titled "Song Two" seems to be the centerpiece, a massive epic clocking in at 15+ minutes, a brooding slow build, long droning tones over a bed of hiss and crackle, the sound quickly growing more melodic, laced with deep throaty cello, tinkling chimes, and lush female vocal harmonies, the sound downright liturgical, hints of Godspeed and other brooding post rockers, eventually the drums kick in, the guitars begin to buzz, and the song is transformed into a fantastic dirge, peppered with long stretches of crumbling low end, keening guitar tones, more ethereal voices, finally building to a massive coda, the drums cranked WAY up in the mix, the guitars too, the sound so in-the-red, you can almost hear all the meters peaking, everything wreathed in clouds of feedback, until finally disappearing in a haze of crumbling buzz.
The title track is the prettiest of the bunch, the two groups laying down a thick fog of blackdrone and hiss drenched rumble, muted streaks of feedback, all blurred into one heaving undulating stretch of corrosive low end, while over the top, Christmas carol like melodies drift and shimmer, the crystalline tones hovering weightless above the black sonic chasm below.
And then finally, the band finish off with their Exuma cover, trading the over-the-top swamp shaman vocals of the original with some gorgeous folky female vox, transforming the sound into a weird sort of dirgey atmospheric doom folk, the sound woozy and warm, washed out and dreamy, the main vox backed up by the lush harmonies of the choir, while The Body and Brave Young, wrap everything in a thick coruscating black haze, a blackened background that more than anything, adds a bit of dreamily sinister texture to the proceedings.
Fantastic stuff, and well worth experiencing live too if you get the chance...
Following hot on the heels of The Body's somehow surprisingly/supposedly "poppy" full length No One Deserves Happiness on Thrill Jockey comes this release on Neurot, which sees The Body, a band noted for their affinity for collaborations, teamed up with former tour-buds, Maryland's Full Of Hell, whom we know best from a previous collaborative effort of theirs, with Merzbow. This one stacks up well with that, and with that recent album from The Body, as well. With The Body on board, of course this disc is heavy and strangely catchy, intense and idiosyncratic, a destructive, dynamic onslaught of blackened industrial cathartic clank & blast, laced with feedback, samples, ambience, and a disquieting variety of vocals. Meanwhile, Full Of Hell, themselves always a raging attack of experimentally inclined hardcore noisethrash, definitely keep up their end, adding to the intensity and heaviness no doubt. But this does however really sound more like a record by The Body than one by Full Of Hell, due to the dynamics - and those vocals, both The Body's trademark ear-hole abusing, pained vocal shrieks and the conversely quite lovely female vocals they provide as well. Damn, some harrowing & extreme shit here, pretty compelling, might actually dig this more than No One Deserves Happiness!
Not a split, but a proper collaboration between these two doom/sludge combos, and strangely enough, the band math sounds exactly how you think it would - dense flurries of double drumming, underpin, thick, viscous, downtuned riffage, there's probably bass in there too, but it's more like a thick undulating slab of low end droned, plenty of squealing feedback, and warped melodies, not to mention dueling vocals, the harsh demonic rasp of Thou, with the inhuman hysterical shriek of The Body, all wound up into churning sprawls of lurching, lumbering noise drenched heaviness, the first three tracks blurred into a sort-of songsuite, epic, and crushing, downtuned heaviness, total head shearing, gut rumbling chug and churn, the best part maybe the clouds of guitarnoise and twisted FX, that seem to swirl in squalls around the song proper, not to mention some bad ass processed drumming, that gives the sound a twisted sort of black doom dub vibe, the whole thing culminating in a cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Coward". Both bands are masters of the cover song, each having transformed some classic jams into their own warped mutations, and this one is no different, starting off all lovely, except for the distant vocal shrieks, and when the hammer falls, instead of exploding into full on metal mode, the two groups unfurl a bed of rumbling, gristly distortion, and drape a blown out disorto-melody over the top, before devolving into a gloriously dirgey and doomy creep, with huge booming drums, thick walls of crumbling distortion, and more harsh vokills, that somehow manages to preserve the melody and vibe of the original, while essentially burying it in gristled murk and thick black buzz!
Gorgeously packaged, fancy heavy weight jackets, letter-pressed inserts, and pressed on 180 gram vinyl. NO download.
Maybe cause they're just a lonely duo, avant doomsters The Body sure like to collaborate with other folks. Not only with the Assembly Of Light choir who have appeared on The Body's albums, but also on records they've done with Braveyoung, Haxan Cloak, and Thou. They must really dig Thou (sludge bros stick together!), though, 'cause this the second team-up of the two bands, following the Released From Love lp on Vinyl Rites last year. As per that release, you can expect another onslaught of blackened noisy downtuned droning crushing heaviness and so forth. Yep!
Sheer peace-destroying sonic ugliness with an undercurrent of majestic desolation is what's on offer here, with the expected elements of wretched vokills, abject blackened atmospheres, shrieks of anguish, occasional ambient interludes, seasick riffage buried under blown out dirge-drone, and industrial-strength tribal rhythmic pummel (particularly on the cover they do of "Terrible Lies" by NIN). Thou and The Body definitely seem like sick soulmates, a match made in heaven, or rather, some bowel of hell.
Note: the compact disc version of this includes the tracks from that previous collaboration of theirs, Released From Love, for this first time available in non-analog format.
We discovered experimental doomlords The Body via their 2004 self titled debut, a crushing slab of slo-mo dirgery, that at the time we compared to other sonically like minded bands like Conifer, The Ocean, Pelican, and Isis. It was all pounding moody mathiness and churning downtuned doom chaos. But it was really on 2010's All The Waters Of The Earth Turn To Blood, where the Body transformed into something way more than doom-dirge knuckle draggers, expanding their sound to include multiple drummers, electronics and samples, and a full female choir. That record definitely set a benchmark for avant-doom, and with each release since, the band seem dead set on continuing that drift into the outer realms, although odds are you won't find a more twisted and sonically abstract corner of the doomworld than I Shall Die Here, which finds the Body submitting to a serious sonic makeover from Haxan Cloak, who transforms the sound into something bleak and abstract, the resulting sound something that seems like it might be more at home on Tri Angle or Blackest Ever Black, so no surprise we're flipping out big time.
The opener sets the template, with fragments of the original sound recast in a whole new context the big crashing drums, super distorted and blown out, laying down a mesmeric tarpit groove, the guitars muted and muddied, and blurred into a soft swirling, distorto churn, at this point, it could still be a proper doom record, the weird shrieked vokills swoop in, howl abjectly in the background, buried in the mix, and then suddenly, a cloud of digital glitchery erupts, the guitar churn peels back, those shrieked vocals become a disembodied loop, in come deep bass pulsations, and the song settles into a super minimal electronic creep, skittery, and glitchy, and staticky, and so heady and hypnotic. It ends way too soon, would have loved to see that final part stretch out for another 10-15 minutes of moody electro-murk, but instead, the process begins again, distorto drums, this time dubbed out a but, more buzzing riff-blur, wailed high pitch screeches, and then right back into another sprawl of electro-doom minimalism, this time eventually erupting into a wild, gristly squall of blown out tribal drumming, and layered drones, sounding a bit like a million copies of Tusk being played at 16 rpm.
And so it goes, some tracks are dirgey stretches of oozing black riffage, spread out into slowly churning landscapes of crumbling distortion, others fuse warped psychedelic techno with grim, gristly buzz, and still others actually sound a bit like the recent Coil / Nine Inch Nails 'collab', heaving industrial weirdness and fractured electronic experimentation, here of course fused to gargantuan black doom crush. The final track spends most of its time drifting moodily, a spare stretch of dreamily divine ambience, peppered with hushed pulsations, before it too eventually explodes into one final burst of pounding, howling, blown out electro-doom pummel. Awesome.
Surprised this one didn't happen sooner. Hell, if it hadn't, we probably would have suggested it. Providence, Rhode Island's two piece doom sludge wrecking crew The Body, and Aussie slow and low heavies Whitehorse. A seemingly perfect match, but the weird thing is, they both offer up something out of the ordinary here.
The Body start things off with what could be their most metal jam yet, sounding like some grim black metal slowed way down, there are even some almost-blasts, the vocals shrieked and maniacal, the song collapsing part way through into a super thick doomed out sprawl, laced with bursts of blown out buzz, the vocals hovering over a thick undulating almost ambient layer of downtuned guitar buzz and dense tribal drum pound, that every once in a while sounds like Lightning Bolt slowed to a crawl.
Whitehorse counter with a booming, echoe-y chunk of churning doom-ed noise rock, about as groovy as these guys get, and we're talking Eyehategod style groove, which is to say, barely a groove at all, occasional blasts of thick low end creep up from below, shrieking feedback and squalls of glitched out noise pepper some surprisingly black metal riffing, the vocals here veering fro, shrieked to cookie monster grunted, a massive, lumbering, lurching sonic slab of doom sludge crush.
SUPER LIMITED. In fact, already mostly out of print. We got some of the last copies direct from Whitehorse before they headed back to Australia. Packaged in super swank screen printed jackets.
You might not expect a band featuring former members of Whitehouse and Sutcliffe Jugend to sound a bit like some twisted noiserock hybrid of old Today is The Day, the crushing bombast of the Swans, and the ominous brooding doom and gloom of Joy Division, but that's precisely what Bodychoke conjure up on this, their long out of print final album, circa 1998, now reissued by Relapse.
We always assumed we didn't like Bodychoke all that much, the other records we heard we really not that good, and their version of "Painted Black" was even left off the tUMULt comp featuring multiple version of that iconic song, but holy shit has this record knocked our fucking blocks off. There's plenty of noise for sure, jagged and processed and crumbling and crunchy and blown out, but noise is just one element here, the band in full on noise rock / post rock. Unfurling low slung bass lines, jagged riffing, some cool complex drumming, the arrangements super dynamic, the vocals slipping from ominous deep Michael Gira like croon, to strangled punkish wail.
Opener "Control" pretty much has it all, beginning with a weird cacophony of fractured fragmented noise, the band soon slip into a minimal bass groove, before the guitars kick in and lock in with the snares, the song transformed into a brooding almost Angels Of Light sounding jam, until the chorus, which EXPLODES, and the noise from the beginning returns, wrapping the churning loping crush in a swirling field of feedback and crumbling grit and grime. It's just so intense and heavy and weirdly catchy, and so much better than we ever remember Bodychoke being.
And so it goes, the rest of the record continues to display a sound that's almost more slow building post rock than noise, but most of the tracks are laced with heaping doses of caustic crunch. There's also a cello player in the band, who offers up some gorgeously moaning ambience, and subtle strings here and there. Many of the tracks spread way out, sprawling lugubriously, expansive minimal post punk soundcapes, skitter and whisper, burning slowly until the song is engulfed in tangled riffage and wild tribal pounding, and even the noise, it's so deftly crafted and well placed, it's hard to imagine anyone into heavy music being put off at all, it's just like another layer of heaviness, another level of dynamicism, it's weird, we all had the exact same response when this record came on. "Oh I don't like Bodychoke", but gradually, it seemed everyone was listening to this, ALL the time, even now, as this is being written, not only is it playing on the stereo in the back room, but also in the store, this record just slays. So dark and heavy and brutal and melodic and epic and AMAZING. Based on nothing but how often this gets played in the store and how often we've listened to this since it came in, we're beginning to think maybe we should have made this Record Of The Week, so consider this an EXTREME highlight, and thus overwhelmingly recommended!
Bogus Blimp were nothing like we expected. I mean, they're from Norway. They release records on Garm's (from black metallers Ulver) label Jester. Who could have guessed that they would sound like circus music, or gipsy music, or sort of like Tom Waits. No
We were told this was supposed to sound like circus music, and it sorta does--like really, really demented circus music. Another quite strange release on the quite strange Jester label (see also Esperanza and When, below). Jester is run by Garm of Norwegian black metal avantgardists Ulver and Arcturus, and it could be said that this band is a bit reminiscent of the more cabaret-styled material on Arcturus' last uberweird opus. Bogus Blimp seem to be an ensemble of evil clowns who have combined carnivalesque themes with the theatrical fury of Cradle of Filth, all within an hallucinatory electronic realm close to that of The Young Gods. Fans of Nina Rota, Mr. Bungle, Arcturus, etc. should check this out.
From what weird Norwegian experimental electronica label do we always expect the unexpected? Well there's the excellent Rune Grammofon...and Smalltown Supersound...but it's Kristoffer "Garm of Ulver" Rygg's label Jester that really knows how to throw us for a loop, time and again. And having heard from Bogus Blimp before, the anticipation here is high... On their two previous Jester releases, Bogus Blimp were what we had to call "circus music"... quirky not-quite-metal, partly electronic bombastic carnivalesque stuff that lived up to their puzzling but oddly pleasing name. Now on Rdtr we get something just a little different. Here Bogus Blimp operate in a realm of glitchy soundtrack noir (actually Rdtr IS a soundtrack, maybe, or at least pretends to be) meant to evoke a futuristic dystopia with a sinister sci-fi feel. So not so circusy as before, more serious...it's electronic post-rock that reminds us a bit of Goblin soundtracks, always a good thing.
We were blown away by this, the most recent issue of this totally DIY travel / music / metal magazine. It's their 8th issue, and it's overflowing with amazing stories and killer interviews and reviews, with plenty of aQ faves. Metalheads will probably want to check this out for the interview with Erik from Watain, or John Gossard from Dispirit / Weakling / The Gault / Asunder, and there's also a bunch of killer in depth reviews of records by Necrite, Dispirit, Barn Owl, Walknut, Horna and others. Which on it's own would probably be enough. But the bulk of the magazine is about travel, specifically of the DIY type, even more specifically, with a focus on train hopping. From Traveling on freight trains in Mexico, to various expeditions throughout China, Mongolia, Finland, Norway and Nepal, there's a history of railroads and railroad operations in Maine, where the author is from, and there's tons of crazy stories, encounters with other travellers, loads of photos, it's pretty incredible, and besides getting a vicarious thrill from reading about all of these amazing places, and the amazing journeys to and through and back, it definitely gives us the bug, to tour, travel, explore, get lost, the sort of thing that the best travel writing does. We've been reading this like crazy, but it's HUGE, so are only partway through, but you'll find yourself riveted, and probably will have trouble putting it down. Also has us hankering to check out past issues as well! Total photocopied, cut and paste old school zine radness, and obviously WAY WAY recommended
Debut record from these Greek avant black metal warriors, oddly named after a redwoods retreat near here that should be familiar to the conspiracy-minded, whose sound is equal parts midtempo Burzumic buzz, furious blackened blast and gnarled experimental blackness, which means, awesome!
Five long tracks that slip from pounding primitive crush to insectoid frenzy and back again, with a sound that definitely harkens back to the Norwegian elite, the riffs epic and majestic, the vocals a gravelly demonic howl, the drumming crushing and intricate, the band deftly balancing their two sides. Pounding away relentlessly, before launching into a blazing blast at the drop of a dime, only to screech to a halt, and lurch right back into the pound, often shifting gears even more, slipping into some seriously doomy plod, or sprawling out into some weirdly melodic post-BM meander, but always finding their way back to the trancelike buzz.
The record finishes with the Deathspell-ish
"Drowning In The Roar Of A Sinking World", a 12+ minute, post rock, black metal hybrid, loping and lurching, the riffs angular and atonal, the song a woozy waltz, the band spitting out intense little squalls of rapid fire double kick and grinding buzz, the track slows down even further eventually, becoming downright doomy, the vocals getting full on Popeye / Immortal, a hellish croak, the guitars getting more and more seasick and psychedelic, until they launch into an epic, blasting, midtempo, melodic outro.
Super swank packaging, 6 panel black on gold digipak, featuring super creepy evil artwork from Justin Bartlett, who among other things, designed an aQ t-shirt not too long ago. LIMITED TO 1000 copies.
Named for the mysterious Northern California glade where old white male dignitaries gather to perform strange and bizarre rituals, hold costumed orgies and who knows what else. Members include a who's who of world leaders, businessmen and various other wielders of power. These Greek black metallers wield their own brand of power, manifested in these blasts of frenzied avant black metal madness, furious gnarled riffage, colliding with incredibly dense and complex drumming, gorgeous epic and twisted melodies and gruff demonic vokills, the awesomely titled opener "Star Wimpled Dome" combines all of those elements into some seriously classic black metal, only to switch gears with "The Tree Ravens", more of a Buzumic lope, with some surprising vocals, deep bellows, super operatic croons, but those bits are nestled between bursts of furious blast, and pounding doomic trudge. Two more chunks of twisted epic black metal lead to the 11+ minute finale, a sprawling epic titled "When The North Winds Blow Fair", that like much of the record channels a bit of Deathspell through classic Norwegian style blackness, guitars here soar and howl, the track flitting from grinding black gnarl to frenzied insectoid buzz to lumbering midtempo crush, some incredibly catchy Khold-like riffing, some killer classic metal leads, more surprising almost operatic vocals, all wound around an awesomely intricate and convoluted arrangement.
Packaged in a super striking black and gold digipak, with some seriously bad ass bare-breasted goatgod / pagan ritual / mysterious monk cover art, not to mention a nicely printed booklet/lyric sheet.
Our favorite Teutonic twilight doomjazz combo, the awesome Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, is back with a new, 35+ minute ep, once again released via mega fan Mike Patton's Ipecac label (as have been their past few domestic outings). It's classic Bohren we know and love, more of their usual slow, sad, sparse jazz, that's "heavy" and noirish and minimalistic. But this ep also introduces a WTF? factor we weren't expecting. Of the three (long) songs here, one's a cover. And it goes a long way to establishing their metal cred, more than the Immortal and Emperor t-shirts they sometime wear (with suits) on stage. No, rather than cover a black metal song, as you might expect, they instead proved that they're real old school metal fans by doing "Catch My Heart" by '80s German heavy metal band Warlock, you know, the outfit fronted by blonde metal siren Doro Pesch before she went solo.
It's a nice, melodic song, and Bohren successfully adapt it to their own style, extending it to over 13 slowly trickling minutes, and making it all the more emotive and moody. And... they got Mike Patton to sing it. Which is where your mileage may start to vary, depending on how much of a Mike Patton fan you are. Patton doesn't get too over the top or anything, he sticks to a deep voiced, torch-song croon that's only a little bit weird, reminding us a bit of the singer for Urfaust in fact. But, we kinda think they should have done it as an instrumental (which is of course Bohren's usual mode), and also that way the weirdness of doing a Warlock cover woulda been a bit more subtle. Or, if they had to have somebody sing it, maybe they should have just gotten Doro herself!!
Aside from the presence of Patton's vocals, though, "Catch My Heart" sounds very much like a typical Bohren piece. As do the other two songs here, quietly droning, glacially paced, utterly gorgeous, no vocals. "Zombies Never Die (Blues)" is all drifting near-ambient synth, adorned with some smokey sax which tends to give this the vibe of the soundtrack to an '80s Jonathan Demme film, wistfully perfect for a late night street corner scene between two young lovers. The final, title track, is the longest, over 14 minutes, wonderfully atmospheric, shimmering textures from the trap kit, limpid notes arising from the keys, no sax. Nice.
But, the Warlock song isn't the only thing that's really weird about this ep. Another truly WTF? element to this release is the cover art, as discerning music fans will recognize it as some sort of tribute to the album Fun At The Funeral by the band Jesters Of Destiny (you know, the late '80s LA alt-metal act beloved by our Finnish friends Circle, they reissued that album on their Ektro label!). Same logo/typeface, almost identical (but different) artwork. No explanation. We're really curious what the deal is with that, 'cause it's such an obscure thing to reference and has nothing to do with anything else about this release, if they'd have done a Jesters cover on the ep rather than a Warlock one, it would make more sense. Instead, it's a total non-sequitur that almost nobody will even "get".
And thus, Bohren are somehow even cooler now than we already thought they were!!!
"Black Earth" is the dark as night new album from an old AQ fave. Is it the heaviest album on this list? It is if you understand Bohren's concept of "quiet heaviness", using their self-described "horror jazz" instrumentation of subtly-brushed drums, down-tuned double bass, sparse piano, Fender Rhodes, mellotron, and melancholic saxophone to create an atmosphere of heaviness "which is otherwise only achieved using distorted guitars and lots of noise."
Our appetite was whetted for his release by an email from Bjoern Eichstaedt (of Caacrinolas), our German friend who originally introduced us to Bohren. He described a recent Bohren concert in which the band played in a cubic room, the walls painted completely black, on a black stage, without light -- all wearing black suits. Live, they used two basses for maximum bottom end. He spoke to them afterwards and learned that black metal is their main influence, noticing also that they were all wearing t-shirts from such bands as Immortal. Yet Bohren's music is far from loud and fast. Metallic or not, it's certainly DOOM. Creeping, plodding, yet gorgeously, sleepily melodic. Each note played on the piano, each hit of the snare, carries great weight, and beauty. Their music falls like thick drops of liquid into a still, dark, black pool, rippling the surface with unknown echoes. Foreboding, and entrancing. Certainly more than deserving of this disc's black on black, skull embossed packaging.
The sultry, smoky saxophone introduced on their previous album "Sunset Mission" is still in evidence, though not so much as before. When it's present, it only adds to the noir-ish vibe, great for wandering the rainy streets of night-time San Francisco with this playing in your Walkman, let me tell you. And compared to "Sunset Mission", this new album definitely extends Bohren's methods to further extremes: slower, moodier, dronier, lovelier: "heavier". Quite quietly heavy, indeed.
Imagine a blackened, funereal dooooooom band like Skepticism or Nortt morphed into the jazz idiom (after having kissed a frog, or some fairytale scenario like that), playing their slow, sad music in a smoky Berlin jazz club. The sound is jazz (electric piano, organ, vibes, sax, double bass, trap kit...) but the feeling is doom. That's our usual shorthand for describing the unique music made by longtime AQ fave, Germany's Bohren & Der Club Of Gore. Here at last is their eagerly anticipated 5th album, Dolores (not named after the San Francisco street near us, presumably). If you're fans like we are, you know what to expect, it's just as ponderously "heavy" as a "jazz" band can be. No, not loud, not harsh, not noisy. The opposite of all that. Rather, whisper-quiet, glacially slow, and spacious, with sparse snare hits keeping time like a wound-down clock ticking off the eternity between 2 minutes to midnight and the witching hour itself. Doomsday so slowly arrives on a velvety bed of somnolent deep bass notes, and the cool slinky tones of vintage Fender Rhodes. Cymbals shiver in a dark haze of ambient drones near to silence. Several of the songs are infused with the warmth of tenor or baritone sax breathes gorgeous expiring breaths. It's all so sad and woeful and achingly beautiful, Bohren nodding off, their fragile melodies trickling like tears, and by the end you may find you have shed a few too.
This newest Bohren differs mainly from their previous Ipecac outing Geisterfaust by being composed of somewhat shorter, sweeter tracks, ten in all, in about an hour. But it is, again, an-ever-more-perfected example of why Bohren is one of our all time favorite bands, especially at twilight and late at night...
Not metal -- not remotely. So why did they get written up in Terrorizer magazine? Well this German four-piece isn't exactly a jazz band either, even though they utilize such instruments as Fender Rhodes electric piano, vibraphone, double bass, and saxophone. No, they're actually really really heavy though it's always hard to explain how something this quiet and this pretty can be "heavy". But you'll feel it when you hear it. Their special brand of Teutonic, minimalist, noir-jazz influenced "heaviness" is not to be denied. And so it makes sense that they like grim black metal and that people who like grim black metal like them. A very special band, certainly unknowable to some, but very well liked 'round here. So we were pretty excited to hear that the release of this new album Geisterfaust ("Ghostfist") was impending. And it does not disappoint. Five tracks for the five fingers of the Ghostfist (skeletally represented in the cd digipak). Almost one full hour.
Thusly, a Bohren album cannot be properly absorbed in little snippets. The time frame within which their compositions work is not conducive to quick scans or distracting environments -- even the shortest of the five tracks here isn't much less than eight minutes in length, and the opening track "Zeigefinger" is a 20+ minute experience. So, when I got my copy of this (oooh) I took it home and drew the curtains, lit the candles (well, ok I didn't really light any candles, but could have), and assumed a relaxed pose in order to let the music of Geisterfaust infiltrate my conciousness. Which it did. At Bohren's usual glacial pace, which utterly starts to alter one's perception of time. The long songs are endless...then over. Eternity telescoped. So spare and melodious. Like magnified drops of rainwater, falling on the petals of a shivering flower. The vast space of Bohren's music makes the listener concentrate, and gives each and every note (a vibraphone chime, perhaps, surrounded by a nimbus of a gentle cymbal-strike's shimmer) extra weight and meaning. The Bohren aesthetic certainly holds that less is more. Even though there's guests -- a tuba player and a choir, even -- augmenting the basic Bohren quartet on several of these tracks, you're never overwhelmed with sound, but with silence. And the sheer *subsonics* that a band with two bassists can generate. Geisterfaust flows exquisitely, the listener's pulse rate slowing. Calm. Cool. Bliss. Stupor. So gorgeous, soo heavy. There we go again. This IS heavy. You'll see.
Basically it's like some utterly slow crushing doom band (the Melvins at their most monolithic -- Khanate -- Caspar Brotzmann Massaker -- Corrupted -- Gore) with their instrumentation transposed into the "jazz" realm. The snare only brushed. The distorted electric guitar replaced with the tinkle of a Rhodes piano. Notes not riffs. Played like a dirge, with hints of drone, sombre and sad, but beautiful. There's only a smidgen of saxophone (dreaded by some) that is brought in only at the very end of the last very track, one that is almost speedy by Bohren standards, to act as the light at end of the tunnel, the sun's rays just over the horizon...
Our friend Bjoern in Germany (of Caacrinolas), who first turned Allan and thus AQ on to Bohren five or six years ago, emailed excitedly about the release this new album (that's often when we hear from Bjoern, actually!). Here's a quote from his email: "...fucking amazing!!! Better probably than anything they have done before! You need this for AQ!!! It will sell zillions of copies!" Well of course. As a follow up to the Ipecac-released Black Earth, this is an even greater triumph. Brilliant.
Here's an old favorite -- a former AQ Record Of The Week in fact -- that we've been unable to get for a long time now, until just this week that is. So we thought we'd better relist it, especially since when we relisted the Ipecac reissue of Bohren's most recent album Black Earth we sold a whole bunch of copies to folks who'd missed it the first time, and this one is perhaps even more essential not to miss! So here's a portion of our review from the first time we had this:
At last, we've managed to import some copies of this fantastic 1995 album by this mysterious German instrumental band! I (Allan) discovered them via a friend in Germany (an AQ-customer who, like many others, has been so kind as to turn *us* on to stuff: it's a two-way street). I was visiting for the 1999 total solar eclipse (well, among other things; I was also in the land of schnitzel for a metal festival...) and heard a tape of this sprawling double cd set in the context of a late night, post-eclipse, wine-drinking get-together. But when I finally got a hold of the actual album some weeks later (we couldn't even find one in the local record stores, my friend had to special order it and send a copy to me in the States), I was happy to discover that it wasn't merely my memories of the wondrous eclipse that had imbued Midnight Radio with such a gorgeous sense of darkness and dread, but that it really was an amazing album!
After Midnight Radio, Bohren released Sunset Mission (later followed by Black Earth). If the now out of print Sunset Mission album was the ultimate noir-jazz soundtrack to a hypothetical first person shooter video game set in afterdark Berlin, then this aptly-titled previous double cd set, (sans saxophone, an addition to the Sunset lineup) is the perfect accompaniment to a late night autobahn death ride, cruise control on, cigarettes burning. There's even a moment, two hours or so into it, when sun starts to come up over the horizon (you'll hear what we mean when you get to the end of the second disc).
Now, we're always talking about "hypnotic" music here at AQ, but this is music for when you're *already* hypnotized, slumped near bed at home or cruising down that infinite highway at 3am, aware of only your own thoughts and the darkness all around made even more black by your headlights. (Maybe this is what some of those unexplicable people who I saw driving around during the eclipse were listening to...for two very long minutes anyway.) Heavy, heavy bass notes, glacially deployed, crushingly beautiful slow-motion guitar and dark, liquid pools of piano, with a narcotized drummer who must be passing in and out of consciousness to occasionally brush his snare and hi-hat. Midnight Radio enters into the tiny pantheon of somehow similarly intended doomy double cd sets beloved of AQ (Esoteric's Pernicious Enigma and Epistomological Despondency, Corrupted's Llenandose de Gusanos). Of course, Bohren is not at all metallic like those two outfits, but is knowing of the same gloombliss. Slow and low, and highly recommended!
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Like Circle, Earth, Boris, and The Necks, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore is one of those long time fave bands that you can always count on us getting all excited about here at aQuarius, even when it's essentially 'more of the same' - we WANT more of the same, since theirs is a unique, wonderful sound. So, yay, the German "death jazz" greats are now back with their 8th full-length album. Piano Nights features piano, yes, lovely placid piano, and also all the other usual Bohren ingredients: restrained minimal timekeeping on the traps, lots of low end from the double bass and baritone guitars, additional atmosphere and melody from mellotron, organ, and vibraphone, and some smokey noirish saxophone too.
There's nine more gorgeous, soft focus, slow moving tracks here in the Bohren tradition of all-instrumental slowcore jazz noir, gently doom laden twilight moodiness that's practically hauntological, to use a term often used to describe stuff like Demdike Stare and The Caretaker - especially the portions of these tracks wherein an underlying ghostly ambient hum is made evident. Although this is not so much scary-haunting, as it is wistful-haunting. Also almost romantic, as if maybe Rodelius had joined Bohren, especially with the piano playing.
Bohren's previous outing on Ipecac, Beileid, had a bit of a weirdness factor (mainly due to an unexpected cover of an '80s German metal song, with guest vocals from Mike Patton) that Piano Nights perhaps wisely retreats from, instead simply providing the sort of aching, intimate yet cinematic sounds we have enjoyed from them since back when we first discovered the music of Bohren on a trip to Germany so many years ago.
This just came out this week, so it's just sinking in, but what a feeling, this music is all about sinking in. We'll be spinning it a lot, it's the perfect late night relaxing in an armchair with a glass of whiskey sort of record, lights low, eyes half closed... The libation, furniture, time of day, etc. can be purely imagined, but this music sure conjures that vibe. Another classic Borhen opus in other words.
We just got a few copies of this kinda-hard-to-find cd reissue of a much harder to find (only 200 copies pressed!) 1972 lp by a hard rock band from Florida who are kinda legendary for their song "Dead Meat", a over-15-minute opus of proto-doom metal, which appears here as the album closer. Combining sub-Cooper schlock horror stage theatrics and sub-Sabbath riffage, "Dead Meat" was
Since we first discovered local primitive black metal outfit Bone Awl, on a tip from Leviathan's Wrest, we've been pretty much totally obsessed. As have most AQ customers considering how fast we fly through their limited cassette only releases.
So finally, two of those long out of print demos (so long out of print in fact that we never actually had ANY) reissued on super deluxe 180 gram vinyl. Two demos, one on each side. Bog Bodies on side A, originally released as a cassette in 2003, limited to 300 copies, now LONG out of print, and on side B, Magnetism Of War, originally released as a cassette in 2002, limited to 150 copies and also long out of print.
So this vinyl reissue, is also of course limited. Only 400 copies. Each sleeve is cut and paste style, to sort of keep with the aesthetic of the Bone Awl cassettes and as you can well imagine, this stuff is SICK SICK SICK. Bone Awl play super lo-fi black thrash, simple throbbing, furious and fucked up. Murky and primitive, just guitar and drums, manned by the brilliantly named duo of He Who Gnashes Teeth and He Who Crushes Teeth! Simple riffs pounded into your skull, a crushing static black buzz, that is totally trancelike in its simplicity. Tape hiss wraps it's blackened tendrils around downtuned guitars, the drums a simple pounding framework, the vocals a guttural demonic howl. Actually, Bone Awl sound strangely like some sort of black metal Brainbombs, and we shouldn't have to tell you how goddamn good that sounds. As far as we know this is already out of print at the label. We have 30 copies, and once they are gone, they are GONE FOR GOOD.
LIMITED TO 400 COPIES!!
Wrest from Leviathan had been bugging us forever to carry records by local black metal horde Bone Awl for ages. And we usually trust him when it comes to all things black, However there were a few problems, the first being that we always thought he was saying Bonall, or some other one word variation. The other problem was as far as we could tell they didn't really have any proper releases. Well, we finally managed to track down the guys in Bone Awl and discovered that they did indeed have a bunch or releases, they just happened to consist of several out of print 7"s and a couple cassettes. So we figured what the hell, cd-r's may be the cool cult format, but if that's the case, then it's time to head back to cassettes, the true underground format. So we managed to get a handful of Bone Awl's last two cassettes, and we're happy to report that they're both packed with minimal blackened thrash, 'goat metal' Wrest would probably call it, murky and primitive, simple riffing smeared into dense droney slabs of galloping black metal crush, from just a two piece band of guitar and drums (played by He Who Gnashes Teeth and He Who Crushes Teeth!). But while the lineup is minimal the sound is still thick and snarlingly fierce. Imagine a stripped down Darkthrone (if you can): a single riff pounded mercilessly into submission, gruff gargly vocals buried in the mix, sloppy and raw recorded super hot and totally blown out. This is true underground black metal for sure. By Ropes Through Dirt is the older title and was limited to 500 copies. We have about ten copies and that's it, it's already out of print. Up To Something is the most recent, released last year, and is also limited to 500 copies, we have a bunch but they're going fast and will most likely be gone for good pretty soon.
For the latest installment in their ongoing, all-analog blackened onslaught,�local raw, primitive, black-thrash duo Bone Awl unleash another full length lp, the third by our count, not including a clutch of limited run cassette tapes and 7"s. And as always, it's another fantastically furious and filthy slab of relentlessly pounding buzz, hateful howl and sheer black force.�
For the uninitiated, Bone Awl are the duo of�He Who Gnashes Teeth and He Who Crushes Teeth, just guitar and drums, but the two are a whirling dervish of harsh negative energy, not so much blasting and buzzing black metal style, as pounding and pulsing, a blown out D-beat style garage thrash pummel. Every track takes a single black riff, and pounds it into the ground, the guitar a swirling cloud of dark energy, the drums some sort of harnessed chaos, hewing closer to the abject blown out pound of the Brainbombs than perhaps any of their more metal forebears. No real blast beats to be found, instead the sound is a blackened punk rock, crusty and crumbling, on the verge of total collapse, barreling hellward with unstoppable momentum.�
Pressed on super thick�180 gram vinyl, housed in a thick cardstock inner sleeve, printed with lyrics, and housed in a gorgeous black and white poster sleeve, that opens to be pretty massive. The whole thing tucked in a plastic jacket with a sticker affixed to the front. And as always, probably crazy limited...
Finally more blasting primitive blackness from this local black metal duo. After a handful of ultra limited tape and vinyl releases and at least one box of lps lost in the mail (folks who are waiting, we are getting more we swear, thanks for being so patient), we've all been left with a Bone Awl shaped hole in our black souls. Originally released on Nuclear War Now, Not For Our Feet (and the accompanying Undying Glare 7", also reissued and reviewed elsewhere on this list) disappeared before we could get our hands on a single copy, so were were psyched to discover that the band had formed their own label and will start to release their own records, beginning with this 9 song blast of pummeling black thrash.
Not For Our Feet is dripping with atmosphere, it's crusty and dark, it's simple, and straight forward, but chaotic and messy, it's wild and unrestrained, but relentless and impossible concise, most songs are stripped down and blown out, one riff, maybe two, sometimes three, never more, the drums are relentless, usually not blasting, but pounding furiously, and the vocals howling above the din, but the sound is so intense and emotional and so very black. There's definitely a D-beat influence, a lot of the time Bone Awl don't even really sound like black metal, more a white hot pounding noise rock outfit, with buzzing insectoid riffing and some seriously blackened tendencies. Which is part of what makes them so appealing. They go from galloping black thrash, to buzzing blast, to simple cavemen pound often in the same song. And the sound itself is as intense as the music, super hot, in the red, needle pegged, speaker shredding, high end buzz and blast that threatens to blow your speakers even at the lowest of volumes.
As with most Bone Awl stuff, not sure how long this will be around, hopefully longer than usual, but don't risk it, this is some of the most intense and visceral, raw and hateful, brutal and punishing music we've heard in ages, black metal or otherwise. You definitely won't want to be left behind.
All new artwork, cool distressed black and brown sleeve with collaged olde English text cover image, includes a printed insert with all the lyrics.
While we struggle desperately to get the guys in Bone Awl to bring us more of their cassettes, and while we wait impatiently for the boxes of Bone Awl lps to finally show up after being lost in the postal system for going on three months now, at least we have these here 14 inches of brand new analog Bone Awl to tide us over.
Keeping true to their old school ethos (as in NO CDS!!) the band give us a brand new double 7", released on Hospital Productions (run by the man behind Prurient) and it's just what you might expect. And just what we can never seem to get enough of. Super raw, stripped down two piece black metal buzz. Harsh and hateful, buzzing and brutal, thrashing and totally trancelike. The duo of He Who Gnashes Teeth and He Who Crushes Teeth whip up a frenzy of lo-fi blackened ultra violence, relentless and so sick. We described Bone Awl as sounding a bit like a black metal Brainbombs and that still holds true. Each track, a single riff, guitar and drums, pounded into your skull, over and over and over and over. Fucking awesome!
Probably limited but we got a bunch...
Originally released with the Not For Our Feet lp in a super limited cloth bag deluxe version that disappeared almost before we even heard about it, Undying Glare might possibly be primitive black metal combo Bone Awl's harshest, heaviest, noisiest, and thus finest moment yet, which is saying something, especially with a band whose limited release history is pretty much nothing but finest moments.
Undying Glare is three tracks, but they all sort of blur together into one glorious white hot burst of blown out black buzz. And when we say blown out, we mean, completely and utterly in the red to the point where these songs are a breath away from collapsing into straight white noise.
Squeals of feedback give way to a blinding deafening blast of hissing, hateful high end buzz, the guitars have become some sort of impossible noise, merely in the shape of riffs, but when the song kicks in those riff shaped chunks of sound are swallowed up by a wave of pure black noise, the drums and cymbals are all sizzling sibilance, just another layer of hiss and buzz, as are the vocals, all three tracks smeared violently into one sprawling black beast.
Pressed on grey vinyl, one sided, super striking cover art, and again, like all Bone Awl stuff, we have no idea how long these will be around or if we'll ever be able to get more...
Wrest from Leviathan had been bugging us forever to carry records by local black metal horde Bone Awl for ages. And we usually trust him when it comes to all things black, However there were a few problems, the first being that we always thought he was saying Bonall, or some other one word variation. The other problem was as far as we could tell they didn't really have any proper releases. Well, we finally managed to track down the guys in Bone Awl and discovered that they did indeed have a bunch or releases, they just happened to consist of several out of print 7"s and a couple cassettes. So we figured what the hell, cd-r's may be the cool cult format, but if that's the case, then it's time to head back to cassettes, the true underground format. So we managed to get a handful of Bone Awl's last two cassettes, and we're happy to report that they're both packed with minimal blackened thrash, 'goat metal' Wrest would probably call it, murky and primitive, simple riffing smeared into dense droney slabs of galloping black metal crush, from just a two piece band of guitar and drums (played by He Who Gnashes Teeth and He Who Crushes Teeth!). But while the lineup is minimal the sound is still thick and snarlingly fierce. Imagine a stripped down Darkthrone (if you can): a single riff pounded mercilessly into submission, gruff gargly vocals buried in the mix, sloppy and raw recorded super hot and totally blown out. This is true underground black metal for sure. By Ropes Through Dirt is the older title and was limited to 500 copies. We have about ten copies and that's it, it's already out of print. Up To Something is the most recent, released last year, and is also limited to 500 copies, we have a bunch but they're going fast and will most likely be gone for good pretty soon.
The return of the Bay Area's very own lo-fi black thrash terrorists Bone Awl, and holy fuck is this stuff fierce. Brutal and chaotic and lo-fi as always, but for this cassette, they've teamed up with Canadian harsh noise outfit The Rita and the two bands sound perfect together. When we first put this on we assumed it would follow a traditional split release format, one band plays their songs, then the other band plays theirs, or at least each band gets their own side of the tape. But no, here, the bands switch back and forth, and The Rita's noisy dronescapes sound almost like they could be Bone Awl's ambient interludes. In fact, we assumed the first track WAS the intro to a Bone Awl song until we figured out what was going on. Bone Awl are a two piece killing machine, who spew a downtuned and murky, pounding midtempo thrash drenched in tape hiss and fuzzed out noise, turning their thrash into some weirdly dirge-y black Brainbombs thing. The Rita take the same sort of sonic grime and murk, but instead of harnassing it into some sort of metallic framework, they let it soar skyward, unchained and uncontrollable, all the meters pushed into the red, smearing the buzz and fuzz into crumbling Merzboic masses of snarling, slithering scuzz drenched power electronics. Together these two hordes whip up a gloriously noisy, punishingly harsh, druggy and buzzed out expanse of free noise thrash dirge brutality, and we LOVE IT!
Super limited as always. We've got about 30 so act fast.
Bone Awl!!! You know you want it. We can't seem to keep their shit in stock. It flies out of here everytime we get a new title. We're still waiting on two huge boxes of Bone Awl lps to finally arrive. Sorry for the folks who are still waiting. We're as frustrated as you are. AND we're still waiting for the sort of flakey band members to come by and bring us more copies of their old cassettes.
But thankfully, we just got a new tape in to tide you over! Yep, you heard us tape. These guys are old skool. No cds, just tapes and vinyl. All super lo-fi and primitive, visually and sonically.
Vinland / Finland was previously available as a super limited lp on Grievantee (now WAY out of print, so don't ask) and now as a super limited tape on Northern Sky. Four different bands, all brutal, primitive, and ultra grim black metal, Bone Awl (USA), Hammer (Finland), Volkurah (Canada) and Vordr (Finland). We obviously love Bone Awl as do you all it seems, and we are super into Vordr (although we've never been able to get enough copies of their discs to list), we had never heard of either Hammer or Volkurah, but both fit comfortably along side the other two.
So if you're in the mood for some stripped down, ugly, crusty black brutality, then this is exactly what you've been hankering for. And as much as we hate to say it, this is of course super limited. And while we did get a whole bunch, they still probably won't last long.
Alone In The Grave is the 7 song, 18 minute debut lp from this old school punked out death metal crew who hail from Olympia Washington, and whose sound is totally beholden to the old days, classic death metal punked up into something crusty and noisy and filthy, short sharp songs, most of which begin with feedback drenched creepy lurching doomy intros, which inevitably explode into churning downtuned riffage, belched and bellowed demonic vokills, furious caveman drum pound, the whole thing laced with wild leads and tons of oozy blackened atmosphere. A little grind, a little doom, a little classic metal, but a lot of grunting, head banging death metal heaviness. Not to much to say, these guys aren't reinventing the death metal wheel or anything, instead they're paying homage to all who came before, and injecting the sound with a little of their own punkish Northwestern energy. Fans of recent releases by outfits like Howling, Antediluvian, Knelt Rote, Abyssal and others will dig big time.
Primitive black and white cover art by one of the sickos behind the Chips & Beer magazine!
A new double disc of crushing slow motion space doom from UK doomlords BONG, and be warned, this thing is limited to maybe 100 copies, we tried to order half of those and ended up with more like a dozen. So normally we would highlight this, make a huge deal about it, and sell a ton, cuz this is exactly the format required to fully enjoy the epic glacial cosmic drift of Bong, 2 discs, 3 songs, an epic multi part blackened expanse of slowly unfurling low end doomdronesludge, spaced out and druggy, single riffs spread out to forever, meditative, mesmerizing, a sound somewhere between Electric Wizard, Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg and Bohren. Two originals on disc one, and the whole of disc two is filled up with an epic, ultra minimal cover of Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun", a surprisingly restrained, deep, dark, smoldering space rock slow jam, total late night chill out come down dream doom for sure.
So we won't make a big deal out of it, but grab one of these while you can, they're probably already out of print which means we most likely won't be able to get more...
The return of Bong! We may have had the amazing Live At Roadburn disc to tide us over, but what we were really hankering for was a brand new full length from these UK psychedelic space doom heavies, and we're not and here it is. Beyond Ancient Space is three loooooong tracks, titled "Onward To Perdondaris", "Across The Timestream" and "In The Shadow Of The Towers" respectively, and described on the cd sleeve as 'unsere kosmischen musik', and after a creepy deeply intoned, reverbed spoken word intro, delivered over a glimmery spacescape of twinkle and shimmer, we are suddenly sucked into the strange world of Bong, as massive guitars come cascading down, a plodding ultra heavy doomic lumber, the drums spare and loose, the churning rumble and thrum laced with some sitar like buzz, which is no doubt the Shahi Baaja, an electrified Indian zither / drone harp with typewriter keys, that figures prominently in Bong's sound.
"Onward To Perdondaris" is a sinister creeping crawl, a nearly 25 minute, tranced out buzzing space doom mediation, the guitars not so much riffing as unfurling sheets of rumbling low end, a sprawling layered expanse of thick blackened thrum, a spaced out dirge, the buzzing Shahi Baaja transforming the sound into something exotic and alien, the vocals too, a monk like chant, long low tones, all very mesmerizing and meditative but still heavy and buzzy and droney, like Hawkwind covering SUNNO))), or Ravi Shankar jamming with Earth, or maybe some blurred confusional mix of the two.
"Across The Timestream" is another 25 minute epic, beginning with a crumbling, rumbling bit of corroded guitar buzz, it's not until nearly 3 minutes in that the drums surface, and even then, they're barely there, a skeletal rhythm underpinning the group's smoldering blackdrone, finally, the Shahi Baaja begins to buzz, and the track locks into a mesmerizing, motorik space psych dirge that will carry us through the whole 25 minutes, this is not headbanging music, this is blissed out drug drone music, a zoner cough syrup space rock soundtrack to some serious innerspace exploration, the track does build gradually, growing more intense, but subtly and slowly, they're called Bong for a reason, it's 25 minutes, but it could be 2500, or 2.5, time does not exist, once you're lost in these sounds, time becomes liquid, it's the perfect sonic tranceout, drifting off, alternate plane, next level, ur-drone ur-dirge bliss out.
Finally, there's the nearly 30 minute final movement, "In The Shadow Of The Towers", which begins with a SUNNO))) like riff, all foghorn moan and blurred slo-mo melody, the drums way more up front here, a slow, meandery lope, pounding away, the rumbling guitar a lush backdrop, the cymbal sizzle spilling over, a slow burning space rock dirge, blurred and bleary, hypnotic and lysergic, druggily monochromatic, it's not until about 20 minutes in that things get seriously intense, the drums wild and chaotic, the sound blown out and in the red, a sonic squall climax, that quickly gives way to a smoldering blackened slow fade outro.
Like all the Bongs that have come before, a heady chunk of krautrocky psychedelic dirge-y doom recommended for fans of SUNNO))), Gnod, The Heads, White Hills, Grails, Sylvester Anfang, Electric Wizard, Trollmann Av Ildtoppberg, Monster Magnet, Black Sabbath, Bohren & Der Club Of Gore and their slow and low doom dirge alchemist brethren
And it's not just us, our customer Glenn was so blown away by the new Bong he felt compelled to send HIS review which is way more succinct than ours:
"Album of the year so far. Absolutely fucking amazing. Imagine if Hawkwind had taken downers rather than acid and you played their albums at 16rpm. A total kosmische trip into another dimension."
Fuck yeah! Bong on!
The last missive from these drugged out UK doomlords, the criminally way-too-limited double cd-r Bethmoora, disappeared before most folks could grab one. Rumors of a repress have been going around, and we'll of course grab as many as we can get when and if that happens, but for now, this new chunk of slow and low space doooooom (on an actual cd) should tide you over if you missed Bethmoora.
Two tracks, recorded live (although you might not know it), one 32 minutes, one 18 minutes, both massive sprawling slow motion doomscapes, minimal spidery guitars, and sitar strum, all laid over a thick miasma of rumbling buzz, a thick low end raga, a black sonic fog threatening to envelop the delicate melodies above. The drums come in slowly, when they do, they're spare and sparse, spread way way out, letting the music continue to drift, it's not until nearly 20 minutes into the first track that things begin to ramp up, still slow, and minimal, but the drums are harder, the guitars more distorted, the melodies congealing into woozy riffage, synths beginning to swirl, adding another layer of buzz and rumble, some space-y swoosh, the guitars get all wah wah'd, the band build and build and build, to the edge of a full on psychedelic space rock blowout, but before anything can happen, they reign it back in, and get all meditative once again before fading out. The second track fades right back up, as if it was the same song, the way they used to split long songs on an lp, part one, flip it over and voila, part two, but THIS part two starts off already revved up, the drums pounding the guitars growling and buzzy, backing up a mournful chiming minor key melody, this part too builds and builds, but the band aren't about loud / soft, aren't about the payoff, or the destination, it's all about the journey, and for 51 minutes, Bong do just that, once again taking us on a blissed out drug fueled space psych kraut doom journey to end all journeys!
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Latest sprawling psychedelic space doom epic from this UK crew, a 40+ minute track split over two sides of an lp. Longtime fans no doubt know what to expect, and won't be disappointed, and there are a few surprises lurking amidst the swirling clouds of sonic bongsmoke. Newbies to the delightfully druggy world of Bong will find this as good a place to start as any. In fact, this time around, the guys in Bong lure you in gently, opening with a hazy, heady bit of psychedelic drift, all Eastern melodies, and droned out softly buzzing raga. Soon, a thick low end swell surfaces, adding some serious sonic heft, pulsing and throbbing beneath the field of hazy psych-drift mesmer, we'd have been perfectly happy if this dreamy creep was all there was, a gorgeously laid back dreamdirge that spread out over two sides of vinyl, would be fantastically soporific, but about 5 minutes in, you'll notice something out of the ordinary: vocals. And not just any vocals - haunting, witchy, female vocals, delivering in a wordless croon, a sort of zoned out incantation, the whole thing hauntingly ritualistic, and remember what we said a few sentences back? Well, by the end of side one we were almost convinced that Idle Days was gonna be just this gorgeously slow smolder. But fear not, the B side fades in mid-jam, as if minutes, or perhaps even hours, of free form freakouts took place in the mere moments it took to flip the record over. The B side much more recognizable as spaced out psychedelia, simple dirge-y drumming, beneath a cloud of swirling tangled melodies and drifting textures, drones and textures, the raga vibe still in full effect, but here woven into a lumbering motorik dirge, laced with what sounds distinctly like piano (!), the sound abstract and constantly shifting, the drums anchoring the rest of the music, but even then, the sound flits from doom-ic crawl, to loping post rock, to almost jazzy shuffles, often dropping out completely, letting the rest of the instruments drift freely, only to swing back into action, and lock right back into another head nodding, droned out zoner-psych groove, the whole thing eventually petering out, the drums sputtering to a halt, the guitars fading into the ether, leaving just reverbed ripples of sound, which also eventually disappear into a final woozy, washed out coda.
LIMITED TO 350 COPIES, on 180 gram black vinyl. Includes a download code.
It wasn't so long ago, that UK heavies Bong were just an amusingly-named band that counted one of our customers as a member. It took a while, but eventually we got 'em to send us some records (you can imagine, a band named Bong isn't the most businesslike and efficient bunch, nice folks though they are). And their brand of stoned, psychedelic, Eastern-tinged doomdrone improv proved to be right up our alley, and appropriate to their moniker.
Now, a couple years later, we've sold many, many Bong lps, cds, and cd-rs - and one of us here even got to see 'em live, last year. That'd be Allan, when he went to the amazing Roadburn festival in Holland (sadly, he missed out on going again this year, darn it). Of course, being a fan, he was excited about seeing Bong in person. And even though they're not the sort of band to move around much on stage, they weren't boring. In fact, they were TERRIFIC. Allan was also told afterwards that their performance was recorded, and would be released on Roadburn's Burning World label. Beyond that, strangely enough, Allan doesn't remember much else specific about the show (there may have been a contact high involved from their music that affected his memory faculties) but now at long last here's Bong's Live At Roadburn 2010 release to remind him! And for the rest of us to enjoy as well, and not have to be so jealous that we didn't go to Roadburn too.
After some enthused hails from the crowd, the first of two loooooong tracks ("Onwards To Perdonaris", 33:24) starts up, or seeps in, eerie and airy and understated, quite lovely really, not at all heavy, but nicely hypnotic...until a few minutes in when one may be rudely startled (depending on how high you have your volume set) by some deep voiced declamations, dunno what the fellow is on about, but that's ok, 'cause it serves to alert you that right about NOW the band is really gonna get LOUD, everything stepping up a big notch, to accommodate a constant drone backing, yeah now it's heavy, but still keeping the hypnotic lovely thing going too, slow rhythmic pulsations punctuated by an exotic zing of the strings (that's the "Shahi Baaja", an electrified Indian zither / drone harp with typewriter keys that one of the Bong-sters plays), once in a while joined again by more near-throat singing... It's rolling, rumbling, atmospheric, Eastern, with something of the quality of a cult ceremony or religious rite, in part due to the those occasional low monkish vocals. At times, "Onwards..." drifts back down into lulling stretches of spacey warbling electronic FX, and hippy-kraut hand drumming, coming across like a sinister Siloah or doomy Amon Duul. Or imagine the Master Musicians Of Bukkake making an ambient album for Miasmah, maybe.
The equally epic second track, "Wizards Of Krull" (previously recorded for the first side of their self-titled lp debut in 2009), continues in this vein, with more powerful percussion, though. It's 24 minutes of ritualistically pounding drums and crashing cymbals, low drone from bass and voice both, gobs of distortion and spooky psychedelic effects, those Shahi Baaja note clusters chiming in with regularity. "Wizards..." gets (slowly) more and more intense as it goes, really ramping up towards the end with rhythmic urgency. Damn this is good!
Bong bring it, all right, quite recommended, definitely for fans of Om, SUNNO))), Grails, Sylvester Anfang... and of course Bong. And bongs! Most if not all Bong releases thus far have been live, and this one is much less of a lo-fi recording than some of those, making for an essential document of Bong's unique trance-inducing potency.
We only got about ten of these, and that's all we'll ever be able to get. Criminally limited to just 250 copies and already out of print, this review is essentially just a sort of sonic starting pistol for all the aQ shopping Bong obsessives to ready-set-go and push add to cart before these are gone for good. Two lengthy live tracks, recorded, as the title helpfully explains, live at an old church AND burial ground, the perfect setting for Bong's sprawling, undulating wash of droned out doom-ed psychedelia. And live is definitely where these guys shine, building up thick clouds of swirling mesmer, all blurred chords and woozy buzz, the sound of voices and the buzz of the unplayed snare drum, adding a strange sort of rattling buzz to the proceedings. The vox here are much more dramatic, and way higher in the mix, delivered like some demonic preacher in a crumbling old cathedral, the guitars build and build, roaring instead of growling, and then finally, the drums kick in, and the band lurches to life, some massive lumbering behemoth, filling the church to the eaves with a noxious sonic black fog, which seems to pour out of the shattered stained glass windows, and drifts along the muddied ground, cloaking the old weather worn tombstones in a grey haze, warped and washed out spectral doom, spaced out and darkly druggy, the sound super lo-fi, but in a way that definitely suits the sound, lots of echo and reverb, and random noise, woven into the bands buzzed out psych doom trance.
Again, EXTREMELY LIMITED, just 250 copies, which are essentially sold out already minus this batch. Like all MIE releases (Gate, Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides, Pelt, Chord, etc.), gorgeously packaged, pressed in heavy vinyl, and this one includes a 12"x12" poster of the cover art as well.
NB. we also have another new Bong vinyl release as well this list, the lp version of Mana-Yood-Sushai.
By now, we're pretty sure most regular AQ customers are familiar with Bong. The name rings a bell, right? (Hahaha.) While there's plenty of stoner/sludge type bands with "bong" in their name, and a lot of 'em are pretty good (Bongzilla, Bongripper, and the recent Belzebong, for instance), this Bong, the one true Bong, have deservedly earned the appellation of Bong by itself without any cute suffixes or prefixes. This UK band's sweet sonic smoke does indeed send the listener into an altered state. On this, their latest, recorded by Esoteric's Greg Chandler, they've come from beyond ancient space (the title of their previous album, also released on the aptly named Ritual Productions) to bring us another two looooonnng tracks of their trademark slomo, spaced out, dronedirge dooooom. Dunno though if we should even be calling Bong doom, or dooooom, actually, though we do. What's heralded here is perhaps something more transcendentally wondrous, psychedelically blissful. Tune in, turn on... the first, 27+ minute track is "Dreams Of Mana-Yood-Shushai", its title referencing the poetic, pre-Lovecraft mythology of early 20th century fantasist Lord Dunsany. Mana-Yood-Shushai is the sleeping god, creator of all, the god of "having done", to whom none may pray, for when he wakes the world will end... Bong do a good job of conjuring the gentle, yet ominous mood of such a god's dreams here, as near as we mere mortals can tell. Heaving waves of down-tuned guitar riffage and rolling, rumbling softly thunderous percussion accompany droning monkish vox doing some sort of seemingly ceremonial chant. The deep, Earth-like bass frequencies emanating mountainously from Bong's amps provide a solid foundation also for the exotic East Indian zing of Bong's secret weapon, the Shahi Baaja (an electrified zither / drone harp with typewriter keys) to play its part in the unfolding phantasmagoria of the endless innerspace odyssey that is Bong's gift to you... Massive, meditative. Sinister, somewhat, and sensuous, the Shahi Baaja contributing to the sense of snake-charmer sway.
Next, track two, "Trees Grass And Stones", we must assume is a nod to legendary Swedish psychsters Trad Gras Och Stenar! Certainly not just the name, but the somewhat more pastoral feel of the mesmeric music, supports such an interpretation. If not, then it's a case of great minds... some sort of psychic psychedelic communion between two of our faves. In any event, it's a thick, 19 minute slab of sturdy, stately krautdrone hypnorock, that stirs up a mite more rhythmic umph than what came before.
Once again, highly recommended by all of us here at aQ, especially of course to fans of Bong (or the use of bongs), Megaton Leviathan, OM, Earth, SUNNO))), Hawkwind, and all other bands that could have used the name Bong but didn't, leaving it to this groop to take up the challenge, and succeed. All bow down and pray to Mana-Yood-Shushai! (Whoops!)
It always seems to happen this way, we spend ages and ages trying to track down recordings from an elusive band, hearing rumors about 7"s and cd-r's and tapes, and then suddenly, BOOM. Or in the case of these guys, Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom... the recordings come bursting forth, and again, in this case, the sounds spew from speakers and headphones like some viscous black torrent. Which can only mean one thing, the return of drugged out sludge drone mavens Bong. If ever a band was more appropriately named, Bong are ready to take them on. In fact, the only way a band could prevail monicker-wise, they'd have to be called Bong Blood Hell Froth, or Bladed Bong Skullorb, or something, and even with a name all ready for battle, it's doubtful their pathetic sounds would be any match for Bong's thick, sprawling doomscapes of sitar like buzz, churning bottom heavy crunch, and at least on one of the tracks here some serious drum pummel.
Three discs, five tracks, three hours, recorded in pubs, under bridges and in restaurants, one can only imagine the smoldering ruins these guys left in their lumbering drug-doom wake. Their live sound much more rocking then their doomed out minimal records might lead you to believe.
The opener on its own is worth the price of admission, a relentless buzzy, space-y sludgey groove, with some killer drumming, chaotic, mathy, but locked in pretty tight, the cymbals offering up a layer of warm swirling sizzle, the vocals a haunted demonic chant, the rest of the sonic space taken up by woozy washed out buzzing sitar like strings, a sort of Sleep meets Circle meets SUNNO))), a downtuned krautrock crunch, smeared into an endless drug drenched space rock groove. The second half of disc two offers up more of the same, with the drums even more frantic, the band rocking propulsively, not so sludgey as heavy and fierce, the song slipping into a tranced out sonic tarpit partway through, before exploding into a tangled doom-math outro.
The two tracks on the second disc see the drums pulling back a little, letting the guitars and vocals interlock, the result some sort of ritualistic groove, albeit wrapped around some serious percussive heft, the second of the two tracks blissing out pretty nicely, the band slipping comfortably into something a bit more meditative and slowcore sounding, but still the guitars smoke and smolder, the drums, while restrained, still sound urgent, the track seething with dark intensity, and minimal doomic menace.
The final disc, a nearly 40 minute single song set, is the heaviest and densest of the bunch, somehow fusing the blown out ur-drone of groups like Sunroof! with a fuzzed out garage doom space stomp. Think White Hills, the Heads, Monster Magnet, this is the sort of doom that's bursting with barely restrained psychedelia, like watching some black star explode, swirling red and yellow gouts of sonic fire spilling forth from a heaving black hole of sound. The sound lo-fi, lots of noise and reverb and distortion and ambient noise, the sound crumbles and breaks apart here and there, the band slipping easily from ponderous trudge to blissed out shimmer, often merging the two into some soul shearing psychedelic doom.
A few of these tracks were already released, but as a cd-r in a limited run of 50 or something crazy like that, so odds are, like us, you never even saw 'em. These are proper, real cds (NOT cd-r's), packaged in a dvd style case, with printed inserts. And is also limited, this time to 300 copies!
You know you're a stoner when your band is named Bong. Heck, everybody knows you are, especially if your new album is called, simply, Stoner Rock. Which is, funnily enough, indeed the name of this new disc from UK psych-doom-drone-drug faves Bong. It's a bit like calling your album Heavy Metal. Or Grunge. Or J-Pop. But definitely the sort of thing stoners like Bong would do. Funny too, 'cause while they are of course super stoney, the one thing we don't usually associate Bong with is "rocking". We've said they lumber, we've said they rumble, we've said they "unfurl", but we don't think we've said they rock. Well, ok, we just checked, a few times they've rocked, yes, but that's not the first thing that springs to mind. But apparently they do often get tagged as "stoner rock" (due to their name, natch) and so this is their response, in the words of Bong themselves: "It is a tongue-in-cheek dig at our usual classification as stoner rock and what the term has come to represent. The idea is to create our own definition of 'stoner rock' by creating an album so utterly stoned and repetitive to be a million miles away from the usual definition." Should be no problem at all for 'em, right?!
This new full-length, consisting of two looooong tracks (about 36 minutes apiece) is the utterly hypnotic result. First up, "Polaris", is almost Stoner Ambient more than Stoner Rock, heavy (of course) on the drones, creating a spaced out atmosphere of DOOOOOM that, in usual Bong fashion, is huge and compelling. Closest comparison: a more cosmic sounding version of something off of Earth's seminal 2 album, made even more mesmeric by what sounds like monks moaning along.
Some bands would stop there and leave it at that, utterly spent, but Bong's statement of 'stoner rock' supremacy is not yet complete, so then they unfurl the album's second track, "Out Of The Aeons", still slo-mo and quasi-ambient but a little less soporific, with the massive throb of a doom-dirge riff carrying the song along. There's also some (spoken) lyrics at one point, about some sort of alien contact, trippy stoner stuff of course, in keeping with the drone-zone destination at the outer reaches of space that the song sends you spiraling into. Also excellent is how Bong insinuate plenty of melodic filigree amidst the heads-down slo-mo cosmic grind they're doling out. So good!
Not sure we need to say much more, we know a LOT of you are already big Bong fans and just need to know this is out. Waaaay out.
Compact disc available now, with a vinyl version (doubtless expensive, as it'll be an import) coming in a few months.
By the way, the two biggest stoner rock fans at aQ have never, or almost never, ever smoked pot. But man do we love Bong. Maybe 'cause their unique extreme brand of, uh, 'stoner rock' actually succeeds in making us feel stoned, without inhaling (or so we're guessing).
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Oh Bong. How we have longed for thee. Ever since we first go wind of a stonery slow motion doom sludge outfit called BONG, we knew we had to have it, even the non-bong inclined around these parts became disturbingly obsessed with tracking down the BONG. Finally it's here, so prepare to partake.
Before we get to the music, they're called Bong, two sidelong tracks, one called "Wizards Of Krull", the other called "The Starlit Grotto". The cover is gorgeous a washed out painting in all blacks and browns of some creepy alien landscape, and some strange looking flora or fauna (hard to say with). No info anywhere, except the names of the songs, the last names of the players (one of whom happens to be an aQ mailorder customer!) and the word BONG.
Deep buzzy layered drones, peppered with little bits of banjo-y (?) buzz, creepy and minimal and abstract, cymbals sizzle over the undulating black backdrop, the bass a simple single deep thrum, and then the vocals, deep and ominous and (almost overly) dramatic, which when we first heard them reminded us the Mighty Boosh. The guitars thicken, the drums begin to pound, and suddenly the shapeless miasma begins to take the shape of some seriously drugged out stoner doom sludge. Distorted and downtuned and Sabbathy and sloooooooooooow, that voice begins to chant, the banjo returns only now it's a sitar, and we're neck deep in some primal doomdrone stonersludge ritual and sinking fast!
The second side / track is more of the same, beginning with a smattering of drums before the guitar slither in and the track becomes another plodding chunk of druggy doom, the drums are brief blasts, the riffs so slow they're barely riffs at all, that reverby croon returns, but this track explodes in the second half, the guitars going wild, unfurling swirling clouds of warped and wild wah wah drenched leads, tangled and frenetic, drifting over the churning sludge below, all woven into a dense and drug addled chunk of blown out lysergic and psychedelic dooooooom.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A split waiting to happen if there ever was one, both by name, and by sound, blissed out ambient soundscapers Gnod, best know for their split with White Hills, and beloved drugged out space rockers form the UK Bong.
The real bummer is that we tried to get a ton of these and only managed to wrangle TEN. Otherwise this would have been up with the highlights and the review would be about 10 times as long. But since odds are we'll probably get more orders for this than copies we actually have, we'll keep it brief.
Gnod offer up a warbly looped pianoscape, peppered with distant percussive rattles, draped over slow deep ambient swells, all building to a dense blackened rumble. Nice. Bong counter with more of that thing they do, rad tripped out FX drenched space rock, replete with sitar like buzz, kosmiche krautrock drumming, incendiary guitar buzz and deep chanted vocals, the sort of song that could, and probably should go on forever, but here fills up the side with gloriously dense hypnotic psychedelic heaviness.
The 7" comes with a cd-r, with over 50 minutes of extra stuff, one massive 30+ minute Bong jam, and three shorter Gnod tracks. Again we have less than ten, we really did try, all but the very quickest on the trigger, prepare to be disappointed.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We've been dying for more Bong. Ever since we got our ears around their long awaited debut lp a little while back, two side long tracks of crushing Sabbathy slow motion dooooooooom, we've been jonesing for another fix. Which has finally arrived, in the form of this split 12". Bong on one side, and fellow (new to us) doomlords Quttinirpaaq on the other.
Bong sound even heavier and more sluggishly propulsive than on their debut. Like space rock slowed waaaaaay down, Bong unleash a dark, dense roiling dirge drone doom, that slowly and gradually, and yes, druggily develops into something super rocking and ultra heavy. Crushing low end, lugubrious stoner doom riffs, pounding drums, and this time around some buzzing sitar (or at least it sounds like a sitar), adding a woozy Eastern vibe to the otherwise sludge-y proceedings. This is a total druggy lumbering stoned slow motion doom groove drug jam, channeling Monster Magnet, Black Sabbath, SUNNO))) and especially some Electric Wizard. The second half gets pretty rocking, seriously upping the churning downtuned chug, and upping the tempo from plod to rocking plod! It's heavy for sure, but still lo-fi and murky and muddy and mysterious - and that sitar, playing the same melody over and over and over the whole track gives it a super hypnotic and trancelike vibe. So good.
The flipside belongs to the impossible to pronounce Quttinirpaaq who counter with their own chunk of ultra low doom exploration. Beginning all blissed out and space-y and krauty and new age-y, with swirling effects and soft synths all shimmering and glistening over deep sweels of muted feedback, the band easily slip into some serious dronedoomdirge, kicking out a thick wall of downtuned buzz that will have SUNNO))) fans frothing for sure, and then the drums kick in, and the band lock into an impossible slow, ultra doom jam, the drums not so much a rhythm as occasional accents to the crushing crunch of guitars, beneath the surface, headphones reveal all sorts of weirdness going on, strange sonic events, mysterious voices, all churning and roiling underneath the layers of buzz and that impossible slow drum plod, think Khanate, Habsyll, Bunkur, Moss, that sort of thing, but more spaced out and abstract. Killer stuff for sure, and a perfect match for the mighty Bong!
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!! Plain black sleeves with paste on red and black front cover.
We've long been fans of these Midwestern instrumental psychedelic drug obsessed doom dirge heavies, their Satan Worshipping Doom record was a huge seller around here, the first time around a couple years back, but we could barely keep the recent reissue of that record in stock either. The doom fans around here went to great lengths to track down every single one of their (mostly self released) cd-r's, and ever since we've done what we could to get enough to review/list, so the rest of you could revel in Bongripper's gloriously tranced out heavily psychedelic drugdoom epics.
Thankfully, it seems as if there's a Bongripper reissue campaign afoot, the aforementioned Satan Worshipping Doom a few weeks back (we're hoping Hate Ashbury and Hippie Killer will be reissued soon too!), and now the even more awesomely titled The Great Barrier Reefer, a sprawling, epic nearly eighty minute psych-doom tripout that most definitely gives Sleep's Jerusalem / Dopesmoker a run for its single-track-stoner-metal money. But unlike the more Sabbath beholden heaviness of Sleep, Bongripper ditch the vox, and spend a lot of time locked into tranced out repetition, just check out the first EIGHT minutes, which is spent drifting along, a muted, cyclical strum, mesmerizing and stripped down, beneath a subtly garbled, effected sample of a preacher, the result is seriously creepy, and it's easy to forget this is in fact a doom record, but eventually, the band kicks in, exploding into a droned out dirge, crumbling downtuned riffage, and blown out drum pound, the band lacing their metallic churn with spidery melodies, loads of texture, streaks of feedback, the guitars deviating from the main riff BIG time, splintering into weird angular fragments, or woozy looped strums, drifting over smears of distorted buzz and slithery basslines, the sound shifting from head caving pummel, to dark droney muted metal mesmer, to intricate tangled mathiness, and we're still only 25 minutes in!
The sound is in constant flux, at times it sounds nearly improvised, the band spiraling into weird stretches of near kosmische drift (albeit, still swaddled in crumbling buzz), or hazy almost classic rock sounding clean guitar dirgery, rife with slippery slide guitar melodies, channeling the Allman Brothers or maybe recent aQ faves Blackwolfgoat, weaving a sort of FX flecked droney riffscape, a little bit twangy, a little bit psychedelic, backwards guitars swooping in the background, beneath a cloud of echo drenched harmonics, fading out to near silence, before bursting into a massively heavy chug-fest, that over the course of the remaining 25 minutes lurches from grinding heaviness, to weirdly melodic poppiness, to tarpit sludge, before finishing off with a stretch of washed out feedback, and detuned slo-mo bass buzz.
Fuck yeah. Super psychedelic eye popping cover art too, much like the crazy cover of Satan Worshipping Doom, although this time featuring some sort of underwater sci-fi tentacled monsterscape!
That's right a double disc live recording from these Satan worshipping, weed obsessed instrumental ultra-doom sludgelords, a live document of their two night stint at 2012's Roadburn Festival. The first night, they performed a sort of greatest hits, including a few even hardcore fans might have missed out. Sure the faves are all here, "Hate Ashbury", "The Great Barrier Reefer", "Reefer Sutherland", etc. But also two songs from a 7" we have yet to track down: "Sex Tape" and "Fisting". Then, the second disc finds the band doing their whole Satan Worshipping Doom record in its entirety! Both nights sound killer, the recordings loud and raw, the band on fire, massive riffs, gut pummeling drum pound, the songs slipping easily from downtuned churn to blasting almost punked out thrash, and lots of long tripped out psychedelia in between, like the segue between "Fisting" and "Hate Ashbury" on the first disc, that weird swirling psych shimmer drifting quite a ways into the next song proper. And the band never let up, no between song banter, no nothing, just pure, relentless, non-stop, sludgey doooooomy dirgey bliss. In fact you might not even know these recordings were live, until the very end of the first disc, when we finally hear the thoroughly pummeled crowd show their appreciation. And the same goes for the second disc. Satan Worshipping Doom is presented essentially as a sprawling single 53 minute 4 part mega-epic songsuite, and like the studio record, it's a seriously epic slab of psychedelic-urdoom that should have metalheads, doomlords and drone obsessives equally entranced. Normally, a live record might be the last place for someone to start, but if you've yet to dip your toes into the lysergic waters of the mighty Bongripper, this is as good a place to start as any.
Comes packaged in a super swank six panel digipak, with lots of live shots of the band tearing it up live at Roadburn.
