Labels: Eolian Empire
Review by: Alex Deller
Here’s one of those weird ones. A record I like but don’t love and yet appreciate for what it’s doing. Whether it’s trying and succeeding to achieve a weird, warped vision or is the result of a glorious failure to do something else entirely I don’t know, but the end result is admittedly kinda interesting. Ostensibly cut from doom metal cloth, Prizehog owe something (Money? Beers? Plastic envelopes full of powder?) to Name Bands like High On Fire, Yob and Buzzov”¢en. The music, though, is kinda ungainly. It squelches at the edges, walks with a painful limp and occasionally makes large, unhealthy rending sounds. In the background there are some vague psychedelic mitherings that rarely come to the fore but are, nonetheless, there, throwing you off balance and buzzing persistently around on the periphery. The production is also decidedly off, having a weird processed sound like Godflesh being subjected to a nuclear blast. It’s the vocals, though, that make it a true oddity. Weird, echoing, near-monastic incantations that sound like a vast trapdoor opening onto a passage down into the bowels of the Earth. It’s the kind of listen that elicits a puzzled and perhaps wistful smirk. I mean, yes, it’s loathsomely enjoyable, but its prime success is perhaps making me wonder what the world would’ve been like if the two sides of the Dystopia / Suffering Luna split had cross-pollinated and shat forth a deadly new species.