Posts Tagged ‘drone’

Album of the day: Black Boned Angel – The Witch Must Be Killed (vinyl)

Posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010

Black Boned Angel - The Witch Must Be Killed

Praise for Black Boned Angel’s The Witch Must Be Killed from San Francisco’s Aquarius Records: Latest slab of sprawling outsider minimal ambient sludge doom drone from this (now) duo, fronted by none other than Campbell Kneale, he of Birchville Cat Motel and Our Love Will Destroy The World, but as most of you probably already know, BBA is a whole ‘nother beast. A snarling, slow motion, glacial, tarpit, black crawling beast. A sparse, yet still dense assemblage of massive riffing, the riffs themselves doused in crumbling distortion and left to just decay before our ears, only to have another crunching chord wash over us, not so much riffs as long arrangements of massive notes and chords.  A forward momentum of nearly nil, these guys create some serious ultra doom, that rivals groups like Moss for sheer sonic weight.

The Witch Must Be Killed is a two sided two parter. The first side begins with a long stretch of near silence, hushed ambient drift, before the band really kick in with a Neurosis-at-16rpm dirge, and calling it a dirge is being generous. It’s so slow, it’s almost like a soundscape assembled from bits of riff, and occasional crashing drum pound, but the result is intoxicating, gorgeously hazy and blown out and weirdly epic, especially with the addition of a whole other layer of sound, what could be distant waiting vox, or another high end guitar, or some sort of noisemaker, but what that extra layer does is add some serious pathos, tension, what would otherwise be a metallic creep, becomes something totally emotional and intense, like a metal Godspeed crossed with an even more minimal Corrupted, but WAY spaced out, cosmic and otherworldly, more in line with something like Jesu or Nadja, but way heavier, and WAY more metal.

Repetitive, hypnotic, mesmerizing, nearly endless, a sprawling primordial metallic ooze, that envelops and consumes, sucking the listener into a black vortex of minimal metallic sound, the song itself developing slowly, nearly imperceptibly, for it is an actual sound, not just a hodge podge of sounds.
A song that fills up nearly two sides, until about halfway through side two, when the band slip into their own sort of Filsofem, a blurred wash of buzz and rumble, of swirling hiss, of smeared effects and black ambience, laced with a haunting melody, played over and over, way off in the distance, partially obscured by the murk, while beneath it strange voices surface and swirl, the guitars smolder and burn, totally gorgeous and weirdly dreamy and otherworldy, as the record dissolves into an extended outro as bleary eared and buzzy as the best Birchville jam, just rendered via big amps and loud blackened guitars. Awesome.

LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!

Tags: album of the day, Aquarius Records, Black Boned Angel, Campbell Kneale, Conspiracy Records, drone, The Witch Must Be Killed
Posted in Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended | 3 Comments »

Aderlating: New EP Available For Download

Posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Aderlating, the drone / horror soundtrack / noise sibling of Gnaw Their Tongues has made his new EP available for download. Dying of the Light is the follow up to Aderlating’s split CD-R with Defiler and you can check that out at the link below:
Download: Dying of the Light EP ...read more

Album of the day: Necro Deathmort – This Beat Is Necrotronic

Posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010

Lovingly pinched from Cyclic Defrost: Necro Deathmort are a London duo comprised of Matthew Rozeik and AJ Cookson, and this debut album release on Distraction This Beat Is Necrotronic apparently their first ‘proper’ record easily represents one of the most intriguing and unexpected genre collisions I’ve encountered over the past ...read more

Album of the day: Expo 70 – Sonic Messenger

Posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

Lovingly stolen from SanFrancisco’s Aquarius Records: More epic and dense heart-of-the-sun blissed out heavy space drones from Expo 70. And the thing is, we’re running out of superlatives, we can only gush so much before we run out of new things to say, which is especially difficult when every record ...read more

Album of the day: Bong – Gilgamesh Lives

Posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

Lovingly stolen from San Francisco’s Aquarius Records: 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 ...read more

We Want Your Top 10 Albums Of The Decade

Posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Update:  The votes are in, the points have been awarded and the math has been done. More than 150 of you have taken the time to forward your Top 10 list for the Roadburn Album of the Decade.
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Album of the day: Opium Warlords – Live at Colonia Dignidad

Posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Lovingly pinched from Aversionline.com: Live at Colonia Dignidad is the monstrous 77-minute debut album from the unusually peculiar Finnish act Opium Warlords, whose lone member, as far as I can tell, is Sami Albert Hynninen (who’s been in a shitload of other bands, though the only one I’ve ever heard ...read more

Album of the day: Bohren & Der Club of Gore – Dolores

Posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009

Lovingly pinched from Drowned In Sound: Formed in the German city of Mülheim an der Ruhr in 1992, Bohren & Der Club of Gore (their name is partly an homage to the 80s Dutch noisecore band Gore) set out with the self-proclaimed intention of processing a love of rock’s more ...read more

Album of the day: Toner Low – II

Posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009

Lovingly pinched from The Obelisk: Sometimes I run into bands I don’t want to check out just because they’re so highly recommended they can’t possibly live up to the hype. Case in point: Toner Low from The Netherlands. Everything I’d ever heard about them rounded out to, “Oh my god ...read more

Album of the day: Boris – Boris At Last / Feedbacker (LP)

Posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Lovingly pinched from Dusted Magazine: Boris are the only living band (with the possible exception of Electric Wizard) who have mastered the art of out-Sabbathing Black Sabbath. Obviously, a ton of groups play in that crushing, occult style, and many do it quite competently, but only Boris have been able ...read more