Labels: Crucial Blast
Review by: Kunal Nandi
Mere simple, dry descriptions do screw all to convey the overall effect of Skullflower (a.k.a. Matthew Bower plus a little help from his friends), but it’s my job to give it a good British try, so you’ll be wanting to know about the repeated hammering riffs barely breaking through some genuinely fucked tape hiss and electronic tomfoolery whilst someone’s guitar wails over the top. And that’s about it. For an hour. It’s gratuitously painful, but not without its hypnotic charm, like an evil Vibracathedral Orchestra, or a Krautrocking Merzbow. I can’t really comment on how this compares to the rest of the Skullflower back-catalogue, what with it extending over a near two-decade period with much of it out of print, but the band’s previous album’s title “Exquisite Fucking Boredom” neatly reviewed itself and this album too. Unstoppable, bizarre, mind-expanding and mind-numbing lunacy.