Labels: Deadwood
Review by: Kunal Nandi
West Midlands represent! The once defunct and endearingly named Goddam Ox crawl out from Coventry’s underbelly and play doom, to put it in very simple terms. Their track takes a good quarter of an hour to run its course, but in that time, they manage to build up to a mighty crescendo in remarkably pained, tense style. When it does come to the clinch, it totally crushes. What makes the Ox stand out from the other newjacks is that there are definite subtleties in the murkiness, with Khanate styled noise swirls in the feedback. Good stuff. Haddonfield Illinois are an offshoot from defunct Brummie circus grinders Esquilax, an already bloody noisy outfit. HI take their name from the town “Halloween” is set in, and the John Carpenter influence certainly doesn’t end there. Synthy plinky-plonks abound, and it all sounds quite 70’s and spooky. You get virtually nil presentation-wise here, but this LP is inexpensive and I doubt you’ll get such a quality pair-up of homegrown acts from such disparate musical strands on the same record like this for a long time.