Sounds of Battle and Souvenir Collecting YOUR FAVORITE TWISTED SOUND BOUTIQUE

The brand new GOG LP and collaboration with artist Colin Stinson is available now. Pictures and more info soon. Please visit and give some support you won’t be sorry.

http://deepestgate.com/index.html

And so should you! I’m speaking of Black Hell’s, How The Rest Was Lost, still available on the release page of this website. Only 10-15 copies left! Read the review:

“Everything has been invented that can be invented” –Charles H Duell, 1899

“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical (sic) and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.” –Simon Newcomb

“That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.” –Scientific American, January 2, 1909

“640KB ought to be enough for anyone” –Bill Gates, early 1980’s

“Stoner metal is completely dead and redundant these days” –Some idiot a few weeks ago.

And, er, yes, that idiot may have been me, but at the time it just made so much damn sense. There’s only so many ways you can write a slow and fuzzy pentatonic riff, and compared to the twin monoliths of Dopesmoker and Dopethrone so much of it is just painfully average; fun and goofy, perhaps, but completely unnecessary. It’s the retro thrash of the doom genre, if you will.

But nature tends to have a way of slapping you around when you get a bit too confident about things, this being a good example. Black Hell’s “How the Rest was Lost” probably doesn’t quite match the power of Dopesmoker, true, but it’s up there with Dopethrone and Holy Mountain, a massive and brilliantly done slab of proggy stoner doom, possibly the best release of any sort this year and maybe the best release of it’s sort this decade. Seems that the fuzzy five note riff isn’t dead yet.

The word that keeps coming to mind here is “epic”. The songs tend to follow a linear progression, and there is perhaps a bit of post-metal love here; the mellow parts, while few, are vaguely reminiscent of Celestial-era Isis, and there’s a general build towards moments of massive guitargasms and me swearing breathlessly. Moments would include the huge build and epic dual leads in the 13 minute epic Planet Maker, man, the solo at the 5 and a half minute mark pleases by stoner boner like few other bits of music have. Triumphant, devastating, glorious.. think of a superlative adjective and you can probably apply it here. Likewise, the huge crunching doom riff and feedback that closes out the album, the fast and furious leads and riffing in Storm over Jupiter, and Lycanthropy’s general big riffing and fierceness. Whether they’re building up to the next massive riff or bringing out the effects pedals and slowing things down the music is of a consistently high quality.

Hard to say much else really; this is a record that’s both immediately entertaining but well worth repeated listens, a “fun” record that’s still satisfyingly heavy. Well produced- when’s the last time you’ve heard a bass play such a prominent role?- and damn, even the vocals aren’t annoying when they come in! It’s sort of hard to write this review; gushing rarely comes out well. However, this is a band that is worthy of a gushing review; I can’t think of a single flaw, and I’m out of ideas in terms of ways to improve this. Mind-blowing, supremely excellent stoner doom; if you’re a fan of this genre and don’t have this, waste no time. Best stoner doom record since Sleep put out Dopesmoker however many years back, and a very likely choice for my Album of the Year.

http://www.heathenharvest.com/article.php?story=20090930075232747

Courtesy of Animal Psi

In a spring shower of vinyl releases by Ecstatic Peace! with new material from Mouthus, Mutant Ape, and the final emergence of The New Blockaders tribute by Richard Ramirez and the late Koji Tano/MSBR, we receive a reissue of the limited-run ‘Stratospheric Passenger’ by northern California’s Servile Sect. A mysterious release to be certain, the mystery comes not for lack of evidence – the LP features nine tracks of deliberate, confidently-paced vignettes of titles like “Trainwreck”, “Rendering”, “Kingdom”, and “Hyperdermic Like Bailing Wire”. Rather, the mystery is the question: Drone (read: Black) Metal or Metal Drone? It seems the games of accepting an experiment always begin with genealogies, particularly when the grandiose pretensions of Metal are breached as if it all were rubbings from some impossible runestone (yes, XXX Maniak included). In this regard, the pair minimize denotation by actively incriminating themselves otherwise: offering little more to decode with than an obscured photo of the two wielding a Death In June t-shirt and studded belt, making plain this is a rather unconventional outfit in an otherwise orthodox division, the Sect’s metal is a more optimistic, or in the least sensitive experiment in the shoegazer terms of Isis or later Cave-In (and this comparison reaches beyond the monochrome moonscape of the cover art).

But of course this genre question is pure distraction, as the practical use of listening to these caring constructions will cohere the appropriate audience of end-users inclined foremost toward minimalist experiment (including, perhaps especially, dilettantes of the so-called “Cold Wave”), Industrial and exploratory Noise, and in the last instance, Metal. With punctured-neck vocals appearing in some form on each track but the first – indicating the harmonic introduction “Numb” as the frozen peace before the war – voice becomes just another instrument in the truest sense of the phrase, blended into this unique mix of sounds without ever appearing to explain or wrangle the trajectory. Otherwise made mostly of guitar and electronics, percussion emerges only accidentally in the phantom surge of energy beginning second intro “Into The Bloom”, guitar erasing itself to set “Suicide From Verona Rupes”, and even effects peel away for meditative segments weighing the end of the record toward some sort of ablution (though in these moments voices do appear as bold dissent). Taken altogether, texture is the guiding focus, as the pair generates an astonishing range of sounds bundled in so many palatable and complimentary compositions that the brilliance of each is absorbed seamlessly into the whole, and the whole a fantastic story. This is no doubt a needful resurrection. On black vinyl in an edition of 400 copies.

You can buy them here on the order page.

GOG show August 17th @ Trunkspace in PHX AZ, with the awesome Geronimo. Stoked. Also if any one wants to buy a print of this let me know. Maybe I can make it happen. I’m saying  10 bucks plus shipping. Plus I’ll have some at the show.