Writing an album about a landscape in northern England doesn’t sound like a very interesting nor topical subject but when you listen and discover that this album written by a founding member of Zoviet France in Robin Storey is based around Britain’s wastelands that house their Cold War intercontinental ballistic missile sites, efforts for launching a Briton into space, and other top secret research facilities your ears percolate with the mysterious and doom. Rapoon’s “Dark Rivers” is riddled with murky cold watery synthetic dankness, gloomy superstitious and ominous tones that are as wild, uncontrollable, and remote as the region itself. Thumbs up big time.
Toronto’s own Nadja blitzkriegs the metal community with their brand of punishing fuzzy experimental metal opuses. Loud and crunchy bass lines up next to starlet guitar fuzz distorted into a dank underbelly of stench and rot yet still retaining that blissful state that only My Bloody Valentine could retain with such heavy distortion. Dreamy sludge metal drips from the vacant eyesockets of a skull lit by internal candles and a dizzying array of psychedelics. Imagine what would happen if your favorite sludge metal mavens got together, took a lot of bong hits laced with crystal meth and played metal until the electric company cut the power. All of this with the power of a drum machine that brings back memories of past Godflesh accomplishments. Dazzyling.
