Labels: Southern Lord
Review by: Alex Deller
This album has sat around in my download folder for a long, long time waiting for me to review it. It’s not for want of will, appreciation or even listening hours, just that it’s such an undertaking in terms of absorption and attempting to convey the strangeness at play. Their previous fuller-than-full-length (‘The Unkindness Of Crows’) was wonderfully heavy and deliciously oddball, and this latest outing manages to be perhaps even weirder and even weightier. Taking thematic cues from Ted Hughes and the Bible, ‘The Feather Tipped The Serpent’s Scale’ forms a protean aural gloop that’s part prog, part doom and part something else entirely; a melting pot of influence and experience that means parallels can be drawn with everything from Om, Orthodox and High On Fire to Lungfish or Man Is The Bastard. Riffs surge and splurge, pouring forth like molten stone from the fissures of hell while a cavernously stentorian voice booms out strange otherworldly tales involving feathers, beaks, scales and fangs. It’s far from a ‘straight’ release and an awful lot to wrap your head around, but if you like your sounds sludgy, proggy and more than a little leftfield then you’ll have a fine old time busying your crooked beak within the guts of this one.