[ aquarius records new arrivals — issue 331 ]

Showing results 101 through 101 of 101.

YOGAMegafauna(Holy Mountain)cd$ 14.98

We went a little nuts for the skewed not-quite-black-metal of the oddly monickered Yoga, whose split with Ghast we reviewed a while back. Their sound not really buzzy and brutal as much as warped and twisted and blackened, more like a blurry shadow of black metal, the murky muddy underbelly of a sound more traditionally buzzy and black. Or as someone here opined, it's not black metal, but it wouldn't exist without black metal. We'd been anxiously awaiting more, having played that split to DEATH, this full length definitely one of our most anticipated records of the year, and an inevitable Record Of The Week. The band do not disappoint. Once again, exploring all manner of spaced out otherworldliness, the blackness more implied, the buzz doused in druggy FX and wrapped around twisted streaks of fragmented pop and sprawling deconstructed dronemuisc. The core of the sound a sort of blissed out, uneasy, lo-fi dronescape, infused with fragmented riffage, pounding drum detritus, and super effected howling vox. There are definitely moments on Megafauna where Yoga begin to resemble an actual and proper metal band, but even then the sound is ragged and off kilter, effects swooping and swirling, the repetitive buzz becoming mantra like, the various strands of melody unraveling before your ears, like a live, metal, Disintegration Loop, with sounds crumbling and falling to pieces, the sound of dissolution and destruction rendered in abstract sound. Imagine Tim Hecker or Philip Jeck, filtered through a grim black bedroom black metal aesthetic. Or better yet, Jeck in full corpse paint, hunkered over a row of black turntables, candles guttering in the evening breeze, lit from below like some hellish visage, the sounds emanating from his warped vinyl manipulations, being these: fuzzy, gauzy smears of indistinct shimmer and ghostly shadow, haunted music box missives, grim buzzscapes underpinned by heaving swells of crumbling blackness, abstruse sonic alchemy begetting bursts of almost orchestral crush, as well as long stretches of fun house mirror hum and whir, all gathered into a loose songsuite that oozes and drifts, interrupted only by the occasional squall of buzzing metal pound, either looped and frenzied sounding, or lurching and doom-ic, the drums a murky plod, the guitar slippery and shimmery, the riffs melty and viscous, the arrangements endless and lysergic, the sound washed out and shoegazey, a sort of hybridized black metal space rock trip out, that may lumber or blast or crunch, but always eventually slips back into a sound more abstract and metaphysical, psychedelic and darkly dreamy. Yeah!