Praise for Mamiffer‘s Mare Decendrii from San Francisco’s aQuarius Records: The last few months have given us a flurry of Mamiffer releases, first a split with Aaron Turner’s House Of Low Culture, then another split with dark drone-noise heavies Oakeater, and now a brand new full length.
With a pedigree that includes members of Everlovely Lightningheart and These Arms Are Snakes, and a crew of guests that has included folks from Isis and Helms Alee and others, you think this band would be sonically in line with their Hydrahead brethren, but instead, Mamiffer do their own thing entirely, which is not at all metal, and certainly not heavy, at least in the traditional sense. Instead, Mamiffer traffics in sprawling expanses of piano driven ambience, epic soundscapes the drift and shimmer and smolder, sometimes hushed and abstract, other times dense and dark and ominous and yeah, a little bit heavy.
This brand new one, released on Aaron Turner’s new label Sige, finds the band perfecting their sound, creating a collection of songs that sounds like a more sinister Godspeed, the arrangements intricate and complex, the long songs drifting through multiple movements, all deftly assembled into these mini epics.
Take Mare Decendrii opener, ‘As Freedom Rings’, which begins with a hazy layered bit of shimmery drone, before haunting piano joins the fray. Then it’s like some sort of haunted chamber music, eventually some heavy guitar comes in, but instead of launching into some crushing doom, the rest of the band switches gears and play something that sounds like the Rachel’s, over which someone has laid thick swaths of crumbling distorted guitar. There are drums, and when they come in, the song gets marginally more propulsive, and a bit more proggy, in come strings as well, super cinematic and soundtracky, chantlike vocals, its like some strange Three Mile Pilot / Master Musicians Of Bukkake hybrid, brooding, and haunting, and mysterious and fantastically epic.
The rest of the record follows suit, varied for sure, but all woven into an elaborate and ever shifting tapestry, from soaring female vocal driven minimal chamber rock dirge, to shimmery hushed high end ambience, to creepy apocalyptic folk (at moments sounding like a piano-fied Woven Hand), to dark drifts of solo piano, to slow building doom flecked post rock churn, to barely there minimal low end thrum, to dreamy drifty abstract soundscapes…
Good stuff, another strange and mysterious, haunting and beautiful collection of heavy avant sonic abstraction from these audio alchemists!
At 40 years old, Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco. We try to only carry music we love, and we’re always searching for more new, cool, weird and wonderful music. All of which we then share with you, our loyal customers.
Tags: aaron turner, Album of the day, Aquarius Records, Faith Coloccia, Mamiffer, Mare Decendrii, Sige
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 7:01 am and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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