Lovingly pinched from The Sleeping Shaman: Purely by taking the time to even stumble across this webpage, you will most probably be aware that “heavy” can take on all kinds of forms when it comes to music. What South London-lurking noise-urchins Hey Colossus define as their take on this art is a brand of intense, smothering humidity: a confused storm cloud in a sky of confronting electrical pressures. It’s certainly a chaos you can describe as big, and I spent a fair few listens scratching my noggin trying to decide if it was also clever.
You’ve got to bear with me when I try to describe this, it’s not easy. RRR, presumably pronounced “ruuuuhhhhhhhhhh”, haunts you with chanting, swirling, colliding, and hypnotically intimate resurrection of long dead human souls. Its power is in its gathering rumble, which at times resembles a cult of robed, long-haired monks hunched over smouldering incense, their eyes rolled toward the backs of their skulls in an ecstasy of noise-worship. It’s feedback meditation. It’s the sodomising of the choir of holy virgins with a Marshall stack. It’s drenched in its own lactic acid, wailing out for release from its self-inflicted cage of anguish and dead memories.
Yet, through this misery, I hear familiar screams. Scratched copies of Electric Wizard’s Come My Fanatics, fragmented imprints of Neurosis and scorched ladles of Japanese behemoths Boris and Acid Mother’s Temple swim silently in the murky depths of the kind of morbid psychedelia once owned by Amon Duul. The ghost-riffing influence of Part Chimp is also apparent, with the recording setting of RRR at said band’s Dropout Studios no doubt impacting on the sessions.
Continue reading: The Sleeping Shaman – Hey Colossus ‘RRR’ CD/LP 2011.
Listen to the title-track here:
Tags: Album of the day, Hey Colossus, Krautrock, Noise, Pete Green, Riot Season, RRR, The Sleeping Shaman
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2011 at 1:57 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . 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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