Fragments From The Aethyr is the latest blast of caustic cinematic black ambience from this Vancouver based audio alchemist, although it's the first FC record to get reviewed on the aQ list, which is strange, since this is the sort of dense black mesmer that many of you can't get enough of. With a sound that lurks somewhere betwixt Gnaw Their Tongues, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Tenhornedbeast, MZ412 and Wolf Eyes, this band weave gristly sprawls of feedback drenched buzz, and keening high end squalls of swirling black psychedelia, the sound driven by what sounds like a violin, but a violin possessed, wreathed in effects and sent spiraling into the ether, a weird sort of droned out black folk drift, that manages to be lilting and lovely, even while being face meltingly brutal. The sound slips into a long stretch of haunting hushed shimmer, laced with chiming minor key harmonics, and lush rumbling drones, and oozes through clouds of blackened sonic murk, growing quite minimal, and almost modern classical sounding, the violin to the fore, soaring above the abyss, a harrowing bit of minimal modernism that broods ominously, and blossoms blackly into a gorgeous blackdrone cinematic epic, that ends up being far too short, even at nearly twenty minutes, before finishing off with a dense sprawl of echo drenched ritualism, processed vox and heavily layered tones, dubbed out and smeared into hazy blurs and almost liturgical sounding chants, seriously sinister and gorgeously grim.
Fans of abject minimal blackness and any of the above mentioned purveyors of sick sonic miserablism, heed the call.
We've gotten to the point with every review of a new Gnaw Their Tongues record, where we're essentially at a loss for words, if you have a look on the aQ site at past reviews, you'll see these sprawling ultra wordy descriptions that read like some sort of sinister poetry, because really, that's the only way to describe the twisted sound world of cinematic black doom outfit Gnaw Their Tongues, the work of a single man called Mories, who as we've established in the past, must be one twisted fellow. Cuz no one that wasn't utterly demented and deranged could create sounds like this. We have the genre in iTunes for this as 'Industrial Symphonic Cinematic Black Doom', which is as succinct a descriptor as we could come up with. And is fairly accurate. Odds are if you're a fan, you can't get enough, and you're gonna want this one too, after all these sorts of sick sonics engender obsessiveness, trust us, we're totally under Mories' thrall as well, and greet every new slab of twisted genius filth, like some bowl of rotting porridge slipped between the bars of our cell. We beg for the darkness, we imbibe of the blackness, we devour the sounds we are given.
But for those new to this bleak world of chaotic sonic mystery and abject cinematic noise, have a gander at the song titles, "Human Skin For The Messenger's Robe", "Urine-Soaked Neophytes", "Fallen Deities Bathing In Gall", "Bonedust On Dead Genitals", "The Storming Heavens As A Father To All Broken Bodies", which should give you at least a rough idea of the spirit of GTT, now imagine those sentiments rendered in sound, and you have Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus, which in English translates as "with blood and whip, we worship the dark", which again, should leave no doubt as to what lies beyond the blackened gates, a world of churning black metal offal, of demonic symphonies, the sound of Gnaw Their Tongues is precisely what we would imagine Satan's symphony must sound like, epic and majestic, but utterly bleak and blackened, the sound swirling and blurred, erupting into thick gouts of black buzz, but just as often collapsing into something more akin to the score for a bloodletting. The sound does occasionally let up, but it's usually only to build tension, offer dynamics, or unveil the sound of some poor wretch retching, or the cries of people as their skins are flayed, Gnaw Their Tongues is a torture chamber in sound, but so exquisitely rendered, we often find ourselves wondering why Mories isn't scoring every twisted horror film in Hollywood, probably because these sounds are too evocative, and paint too much of a distinct picture, that the need for actual images is practically null.
The thing with GTT records, is that often, there's too much going on, and the can become a head spinning wall of sound, a swirling roiling cauldron of black noise, but more often the balance is just right, and Mories' creation is perfectly balanced, equal parts buzzing blackness, abject doom, and haunting symphonic mesmer, a melding of horror score, outsider abstract doom metal and epic classical music, and Per Flagellum Sanguemque, Tenebras Veneramus seems to be maybe the most perfect specimen yet, spending less time grinding and howling and blasting and buzzing, and more time conjuring up some seriously soul stirring ambience, and some blackly symphonic sonic horror.
As always, utterly intense, ridiculously epic, and has us wondering what kind of demented mind can conjure up such glorious filth, and then actually creates it. Grim genius!
Record number two from the strangely named Human Quena Orchestra, whose first record, Means Without Ends, was one of the most devastating slabs of blackened post industrial ultra doom ever, an abject crawl through layer upon layer of impossibly thick downtuned buzz, massive walls of crumbling distortion, pounding percussion, we mentioned groups like Godflesh and Pitchshifter and Swans, as well as Moss and Bunkur, but even on that record, HQO were going somewhere darker, and deeper, heavier and way more extreme. Take those same bands and mix in some Whitehouse, some Khanate, diSEMBOWELMENT, Thergothon, Lustmord, HQO is the soundtrack to a descent into hell, or at least sounds exactly how we imagine that must sound. Pants shittingly terrifying.
For the follow up, HQO mainman (and only man) Ryan Unks, was joined by his former Creation Is Crucifixion bandmate Nathan Berlinguette, and the two spent months and months meticulously crafting this slab of bleak aural terror. Sampling drums, recording guitars and basses, creating loops and samples, layering and assembling and arranging, recording and rerecording and mixing and remixing, two sonic alchemists poised above their slumbering golem, waiting for the perfect moment to bring it to life.
The Politics Of The Irredeemable is absolutely epic, monstrous, stunning in its scope, if the first record was the soundtrack to an earth stripped bare, of death and destruction and pestilence, then this record is the sound of the end of all life in the universe, of planets hurtling into suns, of stars collapsing into black holes, but the thing is, the music here is much more personal and emotional, it carries the weight of a universal apocalypse, but is more the sound of sadness, personal hell, not a literal trip down the rabbit hole, gnashing teeth and eternal hellfire, this is much more tactile and REAL, it's easy to describe music like this abstractly, but this is some seriously intense and brutal, and stunningly introspective heaviness.
Unlike most of the sludge and doom, where the bands play as low as they can, tune down until the stings are hanging loose on the fretboard, playing as loud as they possibly can, and as slow and they are able, the elements that make up Human Quena Orchestra's sound world are deliberate, are crafted to evoke specific emotions, to conjure up images, to help your mind relate to the message within the music. Four long long tracks, two split into distinct parts, the opener "Progress" plays out like most bands' entire records. A heaving crush of downtuned crunch, the vocals wild and hysterical, wrapped in reverb and often left to wail in the wide open, only occasionally joined by the pound of a drum, or the slow motion avalanche of the next chord. All the while the sky is streaked with feedback and long buzzing tones, all woven into undulating smears, lit from below by buried melodies and a patina of cymbal sizzle. For 13 minutes, the darkness becomes sound, and that sound swallows the listener whole, preparing him for the harrowing musical journey to come.
The rest of the record is split pretty evenly between sprawling expanses of windswept ambience, distant moaning whir and barely audible subterranean drones, deep bell like tones drifting along slow swirls of muted melodies, and lurching crushing slow motion sludge, but sludge seems too dismissive in the case of HQO, this is not filthy or crusty or lo-fi, it's definitely dark and harsh, but hauntingly beautiful, the crush and crunch are strangely lush and rich, layered and textured, the sound becoming almost orchestral at points, often receding into the background, an ominous backdrop to the slow slither of sounds up front, at its harshest, the sounds gather up into a squall of white noise, but even then the edges are dull and rounded, the noise is muted so instead of being brutal or painful, it manages to throb and pulse like the beating of a dying heart, that beating echoed by the reverbed crash of a lone drum, pounding out a simple rhythm, nearly obfuscated by the haze of rumble and buzz, the record finally coalescing into something resembling hopefulness, the last minute or so, a warm glowing ember of drone, drifting, drifting and then slowly fading out. It seems impossible that something this heavy and harsh and brutal and blackened could be so beautiful...
Years and years ago, a handful of cd-r's showed up in the mail, obviously black metal, it took us a while to figure out what or who it was, the group's logo, fantastically illegible, the artwork abstract and black and white, shapes and skulls, altars and shadows, and the music, woah, dark and ritualistic, buzzy and blackened and pretty goddamn weird, we eventually discovered it was in fact a 'band' called Homunculus, but were never able to get copies for the shop. We've been fans of Texas industrial noisescapers and black drone technicians Husere Grav for a while now, and only just discovered, that the man behind Homunculus is in fact also Husere Grav. But don't be expecting black metal here, HG traffic in a bleak, blackened, post industrial ambience, huge heaving swaths of Lustmordian rumbles, sprawling bleak soundworlds that are equal parts Wolf Eyes at their most minimal, and the grim, kvlt ritualism of Abruptum, all blurred and smeared into hazy expanses of black sonic murmur, and abstract metallic shimmer, abject soundworlds of blunted blacknoize and crumbling squalls of static, most of the tracks here surprisingly tranquil, heady, meditative soft noise minimalism, which sounds at times quite a bit like The Caretaker, albeit a bit noisier and low fidelity, or Caretaker offshoot The Stranger, sculpted static, and buried murky melodies. While folks into black metal, and black ambience, and ritualistic dronemusic will of course dig, the sound here is shot through with a buried beauty, that casts You Are Transparent, as something almost more aligned with Philip Jeck, Tim Hecker or Leyland Kirby, which is most definitely a very good thing.
Super deluxe packaging, the disc, housed in a dvd case, with a sixteen page black and white art zine, wrapped in a Japanese style obi, with a sticker and a button. LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered.
All scrap metal, all the time. Hal Hutchinson's sound demolition begins and ends with a piece of metal being dragged, bent, hammered, twisted, thrown, crushed, and generally abused within a relatively enclosed space. Industrial culture has long been enamored with abandoned warehouses rich with concrete reverberation and the transgressive thrill of breaking and entering into such a space to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting air-conditioning duct. Einsturzende Neubauten, Test Dept., Z'ev, The New Blockaders, Organum, Merzbow, and many others have collected the detritus from the urban wasteland and turned those tools into a rich vocabulary of muscularity, guttural exuberance, and violent expressionism. The British noise sculptor Hutchinson takes this obsession to the extremes in building his entire musical language on the aggregation of acoustic noise from scrap metal. In the lengthy essay mapping out the aesthetic progression of his work, Hutchinson describes a goal of occupying the space between heavily structured forms of industrial music (e.g. Test Dept., Vivenza, etc.) and the more freeform approach to noise, seeking "a kind of 'ordered chaotic' state." Hutchinson is not one for the metal-bashed rhythms, and more inclined to repeat cyclical textures into a dense miasma that is equal parts controlled symphony and demolition site collapse. Strangely meditatively in delving into this throng of metal machine music for close to 60 minutes of tumbling car-crash frenzy.
Body Horror is the second record from Iron Forest, whose sound is a dizzying mix of crushing industrial rhythms, blacknoise terror, power electronics, mutated dub and churning downtuned doom dirgery. Longtime aQ list readers might have crossed paths with the man behind Iron Forest, maybe without even knowing it, with him most recently contributing a B side remix to the newest 7" from USBM weirdos Venowl, but going way further back, operating under the name Crown Of Amaranth, a harsh, harrowing drone project that was an early release on the Crucial Blast label imprint Crucial Blaze. Iron Forest definitely displays much of the same sonic malevolence as CoA, but has honed it into something more focused and rhythmic, taking thick swaths of gnarled and gristled sound, and anchoring it to blown out, almost Digital Hardcore sounding beats. The opening track is strangely lovely, a black sprawl of reverbed melodies over distant rumbles, and grinding glitched out buzz, wrapped around a skeletal stretch of dubbed out pulses, and peppered with machine gun bursts of spastic drum splatter, somehow managing to be both grim and fierce, but haunting and sort of space-y and atmospheric. And that carries over to many of the tracks here, although some like "Rust And Decay" sound a bit like the robotic machine music heaviness of Author & Punisher, lurching and lumbering Godflesh like through fields of static and churning doom-crush riffage. The sticker on the front had us prepared for more of an all out noise assault, but in reality, this could have been some weird Wordsound record, or some Alec Empire related jam from back in the day, not hard to imagine this as being some weird Kevin Martin project too (Ice, God, etc.). tracks like "The Divide" lay down warm, woozy swaths of majestic slow build thrum, and inject weird bits of fragmented rhythm, and shards of more caustic noise, but all of that is sort of smeared into the whole, making for a seriously heady and hypnotic listen. In fact barring a few moments of doom-ed heaviness, the whole second half of the record is all sinister doom-death-dub sprawl, beats for doomheadz, haunting, textured, cinematic, noisy, psychedelic, grim and totally tranced out and hypnotic. So good!
Packaged in an oversized dvd-style case, LIMITED TO 400 COPIES, each one hand numbered, inside a printed insert, as well as a handful of full color art cards, wrapped in a black on black printed cardstock cover, and held shut by a similarly black on black printed Japanese style obi!
Holy shit, does this sound like a made-in-hell aQ dreamdate or what? The first filthy sonic offspring of a mutated meeting of the minds, between Mories the mastermind behind longtime aQ faves Gnaw Their Tongues and Aderlating, and the mystery man behind one man Aussie black metal/blacknoize juggernaut Nekrasov, known simply as Bob. Both men specialize in a sick breed of sonic depravity, the soaring orchestral cinematic black doom noise of GTT, the grim harsh buzz of Aderlating, and the noise infused blackness of Nekrasov, but none of that prepared us for the opening track, a haunting near symphonic sprawl of swoonsome strings, laid over a bed of spare percussion, and softly swirling black ambience, a darkly demonic chamber music, that sounds a bit like a satanic Rachel's, or a way more sinister noise drenched Necks, a hushed blackened shuffle, that is gradually subsumed by thick, caustic swaths of crumbling distortion, heaving low end moans and rumbles, the whole thing splintering into a glorious billowing cloud of hellish harsh noise and grim psychedelic blackness.
Which is our baptism by black sonic fire, into the warped and harrowing soundworld that is Mors Sonat, nothing so lovely as that opening track, and if anything, the record is like a musical black pit, yawning before you, and with every track, you get farther and farther from the edge, where eventually, fingers bloody and torn, all hopes of clawing your way out have been abandoned, leaving the only hope to continue down, further into the blackness.
Thick swirls of hellish voices, buried beneath cascades of black industrial crumble, dense low end rumbles and howls, and splinters into a grinding swirls of blackened shards, long sprawling stretches of slowly decaying power electronics give way to sheets of blacknoise, which in turn give way to dense noisy drones, and soundscapes of abject grey thrum, and terrifying cinematic mystery.
There are moments of lightness, subjectively speaking, when compared to most of the records deep black, but those moments are suffused with their own terror, dense and intense, laced with ghostly voices, buried melodies, a strange uneasy oasis surrounded on all sounds by black walls of unstable sound, that can collapse at any moment, and usually do, transforming these small moments of tranquility, into full bore black holes of sonic chaos. Near the end of the record, there's a gorgeous bit of funereal creep, all pounded piano, and grinding blurred staticky ambience, spread out into a haunting expanse of sonic malevolence, lovely but blackly lovely, a final respite, the long slow trudge toward the inexorable end, in the case of Mors Sonat, the final track, an all engulfing blast of hateful, harrowing, feedback drenched white noise terror.
And they're back, once again, to test even the loyalty of their most faithful fans. Like clockwork, another list, another Nadja. It's difficult enough doing a list every two weeks. The thought of writing, recording and releasing an album every two weeks boggles the mind.
Okay, so we're exaggerating a little, but only a little. And in fact, this here Nadja, has been out for quite a while, but it went out of print before we could get enough copies to list, so we had to wait until it was finally repressed.
We may gripe about the ridiculous frequency of Nadja and Aidan Baker releases, but a lot of that has to do with having to review them. If we were a fan, and all we had to do was just kick back with some headphones and drift off, well, hell. Bring it on!
But as we've mentioned before, Nadja actually do manage to mix it up, each record exploring different facets of their sound, offering up new takes on their dirgey droney shoegaze-y doom. Desire In Uneasiness brings in a real drummer, and it's noticeable, the songs have a bit more swing, are a little less mechanical sounding, and actually do sound more organic. This record actually is strange in that even though it's split up into 5 songs, the guitar sound is super distinct, and they all seem to be in a similar key, and thus, the record plays out like a single extended song, which with some bands might be a huge complaint, but in the case of Nadja, it actually is pretty excellent.
The first track (movement?) might just be one of our favorite Nadja tracks yet. The new guitar sound is killer, super processed and almost alien sounding, but still thick and distorted. The drum sound is BIG, the main riff is a dizzying fuzzy swirling harmony, almost like some metal lead, slowed down and drenched in FX and distortion, mesmerizing and looped and hypnotic, the drum pounding away beneath that circular riff. The second track blisses �out a bit more, gets super shoegazey, a gorgeous washed out drift, that near the end slips into a strange almost funky shuffle.
Track three is super spare, the drums pounding along in an expanse of distant drones and swirling effects, sort of jazzy, a little bit dubby, stripped down and abstract, which gives way to part 4, a 15 minute long crush, channeling Godflesh and Loop, a churning spaced out groove, with the drums holding things down until things begin to drift apart, the looped guitar spiraling into the ether, while the drums gradually go from simple and tribal to sporadic and space-y. The final track is nearly 20 minutes, and finds Nadja doing their very best space rock, the blown out buzz and relentless pummel builds to a tripped out space-y, many minutes long blow out, that reminds us a bit of Terminal Cheesecake crossed with Hawkwind!
Another Nadja. Another good one. As long as you have room on your shelf, no reason to stop now...
About three years ago, Matthew Bower resurrected his sleeping freenoise behemoth Skullflower, after having spent the last few years focusing on the more dreamy drone based Sunroof! That disc was a serious surprise, the new Skullflower was somehow some sort of stoned, freaked out druggy, psychedelic kraut/space/groove/stoner rock outfit. Killer psychrock riffs, looped into oblivion and buried in dense washes of outer space FX and thick sheets of tripped out ambience. We were stunned, and totally blown away. Exquisite Fucking Boredom was just about the heaviest noisiest space rock record EVER! The follow up to EFB, Orange Canyon Mind was still heavy on the riffs, but the noise quotient was cranked WAY up, as if the band had made this huge leap into some outer space drug rock alternate universe, but was sliding steadily back into the old Skullflower's swirling pit of white noise and grinding guitar feedback. So here we have record number three from Skullflower mach II, and it seems those riffs had an incredibly short half-life and have now been totally obliterated, the shards of all those dying riffs have been chopped into pieces and hurled into the spinning vortex that is Tribulation. Easily the noisiest record since the good ol' Total days (Bower's band before Skullflower), with huge sheets of white hot, blown out guitar skree, crunchy amp buzz, sparkling clouds of glitched out electronic interference, and layer after layer after layer after layer of thick squirming, slithering, shrieking guitar ROOOOOAAAR. Tribulation most definitely sounds like an army of guitars, set to kill, and leaned up against an even bigger army of feeding back amplifiers. Every track is a dense ear shredding tangle of melodic fragments and wild peals of upper register psychguitar abuse. Imagine classic Total mixed with Bower's new blacksludge outfit Mirag and you'll get a rough idea of what sort of aural punishment you're in for. Harsh and heavy, noisy and brutal, but as with most Bower projects, not without some hidden beauty, although Tribulation's hidden beauty is tucked safely away, beneath a million pounds of black hole noise rock pummel.
"Some things have to be endured, and that makes the pleasures so much sweeter!" So spoke the villainous Frank Cotton in Clive Barker's first Hellraiser movie. It is interesting to think back, and realize that Coil had their proposed soundtrack to that same movie rejected with some citing that Coil's themes were 'too frightening' or (more likely) 'not commercial enough' for a major studio motion picture. Anyone with ears who has listened to Coil's unreleased themes to Hellraiser will not find anything frightening or scary at all. In fact, Coil was quite reverential to somebody like David Shire, especially with his minimalist and maudlin score for The Conversation, with Coil composing everything on the Fairlight synthesizer, which itself had a distinct sound but one that didn't fall in line with the Goblin / Carpenter axis. Had Coil turned in to the film studio something like what they produced on their grand statement to the apocalypse in Horse Rotovator, it might have sounded close to where Theologian ended up on this death-synth industrial opus.
Here, Theologian - the project of a cold-hearted character simply given the name Leech - has employed the talents of a host of female vocalists from the darkwave and noise underground. The conceit has a similar feel to Lustmord's recent album The Word As Power; and thankfully, both albums transcend any notion of female tokenism. Furthermore, both albums do not suck. Far from it for Theologian; as this album triumphantly extends the M83-produces-Swans analogy that we posited regarding the 2012 epic The Chasms Of My Heart album. After a garbled, witchy cackle that introduces the album's first track "Black Cavern Myopia," Leech uncorks a dark-minded, power techno rhythm, crunched through distortion, echo and sinister atmospheres featuring the deep-in-the-catacomb vocalizations of Hecate's Rachael Kozak. A more familiar militantly bashed rhythm keeps with a Swans-styled corporal beatdown on "The Conjoined Deviant Procession" with the monotone chanting delivered by Kristen from Sewer Election. The vocals never really come to the foreground throughout the album, instead they swirl and commingle amidst the metalgaze hiss, powerdrone murk, and audio sickness from Leech's decomposing productions. Even when he employs the talents of opera singer Melissa Kelly (the only vocalist not hailing from noise culture), her voice is cacooned in billowing reverb as it flutters throughout the ghastly synth melodies and blackened industrially crushed doom plod on "Ectothermism." Aside from Sewer Election and Hecate, we've not encountered any of the other vocalists, but their legion is Rachel Maloney (Tonikom), Nikki Telladictorian (Prometheus Burning), Patricia Benitez (Fetish Drone), Gillian Leigh Bowling (Teloahqaal), Christiana Key (Delphic Oracle), Joan Hacker (Factoria), and Shari Vari (Void Vision). Leech has crafted monstrous, ghastly album of lurching rhythms and totally downer melodies - think the Cure's Pornography remixed by Vatican Shadow. So good!
The second of two releases this year from black ambient alchemist Theologian, the other, Finding Comfort In Overwhelming Negativity, released on Handmade Birds and reviewed here recently, and now this one, The Chasms Of My Heart, released on Crucial Blast. Like Finding Comfort (and The Further I Get before that), Chasms is another stunning collection of grim, industrial wastescapes, all bleak drones and industrial percussive crunch, although Chasms does start out on a remarkably 'musical' note, opener "Abandon All Hope" weds actual singing to tense layered keening tones, and churning machinelike rhythms, the vocals mantra like, wreathed in static and crackle, drift atop a dense droned out thrum, driven by that relentless rhythm, eventually the vocals and drums drop out, leaving some seriously serene sonic shimmer and softly sweeping cinematic ambience.
The second track makes up for the melody in the first, unleashing a heaving onslaught of power electronics and blacknoise skree, which eventually blurs, and is melted down into a thick morass of crumbling low end that gradually becomes a hushed blackened drift.
But it does seem that melody will be a recurring theme on Chasms, as "My Body Is Made Of Ash, I Live As Ash" begins as a series of thick thick distorted synth swells, which rapidly blossom into something much more melodic, soaring and cinematic, like M83 via the Swans, but even slower and meaner, and then the beats come in, and you can add Muslimgauze to the mix. Weird combo, but it works, hypnotic and tranced out, until the hammer falls, and the song explodes into full on face melting noise, but if you listen close, within that caustic cloud of noise, the rhythm continues to churn, vocals wail, and melodies drift and shimmer, it's the sort of hard noise, that softens a bit the more you listen, and seems to transform before your ears into something weirdly, and impossibly catchy. The rest of the record reveals more of Theologian's bleeding black sonic heart, the stuttering, almost 'danceable' "We Can't All Be Victims", the processed vocal driven blackened power electronics skitter of "I Don't Exist", the blown out noisebliss of "Bed Of Maggots, the almost house music-y pulsating noisescape title track, and finally, the sprawling 13 minute, haunting, grinding cinematic ambient noisescape closer.
Comes packaged in a super striking, full color, oversized dvd style, six panel digipak.
Our friend Adam at Crucial Blast does it again (after his release of Finnish thrashers Katastrofialue from last week's list) with this new slab of blues-scum-metal from North Carolina's Weedeater. Featuring Dave from the mighty Buzzoven, Weedeater basically
We dug the first ep from SF transplants Wildlife, who just so happened to feature our very own Matt in mailorder on guitar and vocals. A blown out tripped out heavy as fuck space rock psychedelic freakout of the highest order. Since then, not only have the band changed their name, to the much weirder and somehow more appropriate Wildildlife but also honed their sound into something somehow more blown out, more tripped out, heavier, weirder, but more importantly, WAY catchier. Hooks and melodies that most bands would kill for, but Wildildlife play it like it's no big thing, burying that stuff under avalanches of processed guitars, throbbing howling bass pedals, metallic Iron Maiden like riffing, insane chaotic drumming, and a fierce white hot wall of sound.
We were pretty much sold from the first track. Beginning with some simple Adam Ant drumming, tribal and pounding, before the glistening reverbed Big Country guitars come in, all swathed in delay and drifting over the tangled rhythmic chaos below. The guitars build into a serious chordal frenzy, and then a strange haunting, and very eighties sounding hook, and that's when the vocals come in. Distorted but melodic, a dangerously catchy hook, that somehow reminds us of Gaye Bykers On Acid. Druggy and tripped out, with a cool guitar/vocal "la� lalalalalaaaaaaa" refrain that sticks in your head FOREVER. Wildildlife are usually described as Butthole Surfers meets Black Sabbath, which while flattering, and maybe to a certain extent accurate, hardly do justice to Wildildlife's cracked pop flecked noise rock heaviness.
Yeah, they're heavy, but there's no massive doom riffing or downtuned metallic pummel, and they are definitely trippy, but not in the same way as the Buttholes.
Take the second track, beginning with a wicked tangle of distorted guitar, when the drums kick in, and the band locks into an angular almost new wave melody, and those vocals return, sort of raspy and crooned, echoed by either a high wavery guitar or a falsetto vocal, and they repeat, mantra like, mesmerizing and hypnotic, relentless and seriously tripped out. The drums a constant rhythmic lock beneath the strange poppiness of the vocals and the guitar, before the whole thing splinters into a Hawkwind free rock noise jam, all super effected vocals, total drum mayhem, and thick washes of crumbling guitars and throbbing buzzing bass, eventually petering out into a gorgeous metallic slowcore dirge, everything still wrapped in thick layers of reverb and delay, a gorgeous mournful doomic sonic deathmarch. While some may hear the Buttholes, we're hearing stuff like the God Bullies, the Cows, Lubricated Goat for sure and still plenty of Gaye Bykers, although all even more souped up and super charged.
The two halves of the record are separated by the longest track, the 18+ minute "Magic Jordan", which begins as a washed out post rock dirge, all shimmery strummed guitars, echoey Jim Morrison vocals, and a simple stripped down rhythm, Eventually, the band erupts into a massive roiling bout of slow heaviness, that sounds like a way more psychedelic Harvey Milk, with killer angular riffs surfacing amidst the endless black sonic swirl, eventually giving way to 10 minutes of tripped out free folkiness, all warped backwards guitars, abstract percussion, fluttering melodies, haunting disembodied vocals, all sorts of random creaks and chimes and whir and hiss. Which is quickly followed by what is easily the catchiest track on the record. The relatively brief seven minute long "Feed", with its abstract delayed guitar harmonic feedback intro, giving way to probably the most Buttholes sounding bit on the record, a tense and intense bit of furious drumming, and throbbing bass beneath little flurries of metallic guitar leads, doused in FX and sent swirling over the abyss, while the vocals croon from WAY down in the mix, finishing off with a cool thick chunk of melancholy riffage, massive low end throbs playing out a gorgeous melody beneath the squiggly guitar chaos above.
The disc finishes off with a massive sonic one two punch, two fourteen minute tracks, the first, a super abstract slow motion noise doom lurch, with anguished vocals, sung from the bottom of a well, the guitars and drums offering up jagged little stabs, before locking into a relentless Swans like crush, nearly suffocating the vocals, until the band again lock into an impossible blissed out drone, where the guitar and bass mesh into a nearly M83 sounding wash of fuzzed out psychdrone, before reverting to full on glacial plod until the end.
While the final track, begins with a thick bit of bassy buzz, weaving a hard to define slow motion melody, the buzzing rich and thick and rife with overtones, metallic, electric and lush all at once, eventually joined by a downtuned guitar mirroring that same slow motion melody, eventually joined by dramatic almost gothic vocals, the drums dropping in like brass knuckled fists to the sternum, the band again almost slipping into some intense Swans like doom, before the riffing slips away leaving nearly six minutes of soaring guitar noise, and cymbal sizzle, eventually building to a super dramatic major key coda, all soaring chords and falsetto crooning, like some sort of alien metallic "Star Spangled Banner" (again reminding us a bit of Harvey Milk), before drifting off into a meandering morning after guitar bass post rock fade out.
Way recommended. Noisy and heavy and poppy and psychedelic and fucked up and catchy in a way few bands can pull of. And the one time we caught them live, we were hanging in a hammock, above the stage, IN A BUS, getting rammed repeatedly by the headstock of the guitar as the two axemen dueled wildly in the outrageous confines of the space below. Barring that sort of intimate and surprisingly painful interaction with Wildildlife, this record will definitely serve as an ideal introduction to their damaged and druggy fucked up metallic noise rock space pop, at least until you too can be battered and bruised by these guys in the flesh!
Recorded by Aaron from Mammatus, released on the always awesome Crucial Blast, and in some seriously amazing packaging, a super fancy mini gatefold sleeve, thick and full color, with an intense bejeweled turquoise skull on the cover, a fucked up masked dirt faced hatchet flag duel photo inside, as well as a full color booklet with liner notes and a bunch more freaky blurry creepy masked wild(ild)life photos...
Originally released as a super limited cassette in 2004, Badb is one of the first releases from Canadian black metal weirdos WOLD, and if you thought the other records were noisy and demented before, this one will blow your mind (and probably your speakers too). After a quick opening intro of whipping winter wind, that ends abruptly as if someone just leaned over and pushed stop on the tape player, the record launches into the title track, the first song in what is apparently a songsuite based on a the myth of a mysterious war goddess, and is an crumbling onslaught of superdistorted buzz and while there may be drums, if there are, they're buried WAY down in the mix, the vocals however are right up front, a wild demonic shriek over the churning roiling blackness below. And so goes the rest of the record, a twisted maelstrom of sound, a sonic blizzard of black buzz and harsh vokills, the guitars less riffy and buzzy as they are practically a Merzbowian wall of blown out white noise, that white noise seeming to be in constant flux, occasionally coalescing into an almost riffy churn, before splintering again into a blast of face melting buzz. The recording is super lo-fi too, which gives even the harshest passages a strange washed out and muted vibe, the coolest parts when the sounds seem to blur into one another and become a strange sort of pulsing alien rhythm.
"Final Offering" might be our favorite, a murky monster of a track, with the most discernible riffing, and a cool murky swirl that envelops everything in its path, and when the vocals back off, the music becomes a weird audial illusion, like those paintings that reveal hidden shapes if you stare at them long enough, the wild tangle of buzz seems to unravel before your ears, the various melodic fragments and interwoven textures shifting and transforming, eventually seemingly melting into a blurry viscous pool of buzz and drone, that eventually fades to black, finishing the record the way it started, with another stretch of frosty winter winds. Awesome. And EXTREMELY noisy, fans of Wold know what to expect, and folks into other noise metal outfits like Nekrosov, Gnaw Their Tongues, Alkerdeel, Hallow and the like will definitely dig, but be warned this is less about THE RIFF and more about blown out blackness...
We made Wolvserpent's Blood Seed lp our Record Of The Week on list #358 back in November of last year, Wolvserpent being the group previously known as Pussygutt, a male/female duo from Idaho capable of crafting grimly powerful blackened folk flecked dronescapes that defy easy categorization. And as we mentioned then, the name Pussygutt probably put off plenty of people, thus the shift to Wolvserpent, and while that name definitely better captures the group's ominous tone and black metal leanings, it still leaves much about the music, and its makers, quite mysterious.
Yet for as much as we dug Pussygutt, and love their new Wolvserpent incarnation, we somehow managed to miss completely, the Wolvserpent lp that preceded Blood Seed, a record called Gathering Strengths. Thankfully, the mighty Crucial Blast have stepped in, and combined both Blood Seed AND Gathering Strengths into a handsome double disc compendium, the first disc of which, is the first time on cd for the aforementioned Blood Seed, two epic sprawls, the first a haunting bit of dirgey folk, laid over lush shimmery drones, a gorgeous funeral lament, that only hints at the abject brutality these two are capable of, instead, simply invoking a darkly melancholic mood, eventually guitars drift in, plucking out simple sad melodies, while the strings continue to swirl and soar, gorgeously tense and intense, cinematic and soundtracky. It's not until nearly the nine minute mark that the drums come in, as do the electric guitars, laying down a sort of skeletal doom framework, a different kind of downtuned slowbuild creep, pounding drums, muted riffage, the strings and Sunroof!-like drones growing in intensity, a super intense bit of droney tribal drift, but with an odd start stop arrangement, peppering the lush droning plod with little bits of more traditionally metallic riffage. Eventually some shrieked vocals swoop in, and the song stretches out into a strangley psychedelic epic, a bastardized mix of Godspeed like post rock, avant ur-drone drift, funeral doom, and glacial black metal buzz, all muted and blurred as if mixed by Tim Hecker.
The second 'movement' takes up right where the first left off, long layered high end tones, a lush undulating upper register dronescape, haunting and hypnotically shimmery, before finally lurching into some seriously metallic crunch, a lumbering doomy dirge, buzzing riffs, caveman drums, all wrapped in swirling swaths of reverbed vocals and superdistorted streaks of ambient melody, erupting into occasional blasts of uptempo chuggery, but always slipping back into that stuttery creep, and constantly wreathed in a lush otherworldly sonic haze.
Which brings us to Gathering Strengths, originally released on lp by Olde English Spelling Bee back in 2009, like Blood Seed, a single track split into two epic parts, the first, subtitled "Silence Within", begin with the chirping of crickets, which is soon joined by some haunting distant low end thrum, a dreamlike swell, which is soon joined by a more intense layer of buzzing tones, overlapping woodwinds, rife with mysterious overtones, a creepy harmony, the buzz and shimmer drifting in and out, the minimal drift gradually coalescing into an intense bit of dronemusic, like a blackened Phil Niblock, while off in the distance, barely there percussion surfaces, fragmented slo-mo rhythms, while more and more layers are piled on top, super intense and trancelike, until the woodwinds drift off, leaving a feedback laced stretch of blackdronedrift, softly clattery and corrosive, A wolf Eyes-ian industrial sprawl, that transforms into some hauntingly lovely gypsy like folk, driven by a mournful fiddle melody, the sound swells and smolders, all lilting melodies, and cinematic atmosphere, the vibe like a doom folk Astor Piazolla, that is until a MASSIVE avalanche of washed out downtuned doomcrush rolls in, that gorgeous fiddle now all tangled up in a heaving SUNNO)))-like churn, which manages to be both brutal and blackened, dreamy and so totally lovely. Impossibly pretty heaviness, this whole double disc worth it for that 5 or 6 minute stretch alone.
But there's still the second part, that one subtitled "Spirit Walker", this one starts off in seriously gorgeous drone-folk mode, the band laying down a lush, mesmerizing, hauntingly tense layered drone backdrop, over which the violin keens and cries, accompanied by simple shamanistic drumming, the result a darkly mesmerizing glimpse into some lost forest glade, where some shadowy priest like visages are gathered around dancing black flames, conjuring up spirits from another realm, but like the first track, this one too gradually grows heavier, with the addition of a slow thick dirge-y doomy riff, not super distorted or grumbly, but more softly buzzy, the chords ringing out and fading until they seem to bleed into the sounds around them, only to have the next chord take over, what we said about the last few minutes of the first track, well, we could say it about this whole track, worth the price of admission all on its own, a hazy tranced out chunk of heavy, heady, forest folk drone drift bliss.
Both records are incredible, and work amazingly well together, and like Pussygutt before, Wolvserpent continue to hone their unclassifiable sound, a melding together of dark hushed folk, minimal drone music, and blackened dooooooom. Their name change probably won't really make 'em much more commercially appealing, but who needs that, when you're ruling the darkened otherworld of psychedelic avant heaviness???
