Locrian – Drenched Lands (CD)
I first listened to this album on one of the last snow filled days of spring on route to Chicago leaving from Milwaukee. Pulsating with dark soothing ambiance, static, screams, dark synths and rumbling noise, Drenched Lands creates noise that is spooky, cold and cavernous. Everything is at a slow haunting pace with undertones of low-fi basement black metal, especially apparent in the vocals sections, yet the sound is remains crisp and full sounding throughout the recording. Although at times a bit harsh and menacing, for the most part these dark atmospheric soundscapes I found to be calming as I watched the snow fall and the countryside pass me by. On that frostbitten spring morning Locrian provided an appropriate riding soundtrack for what was supposed to be warm and glowing but had the life sucked out of it until nothing was left except the grey and cold.
This was send to me by Andre of Locrian for a review. I must admit that I never heard of Locrian before. Locrian are from Chicago and Drenched Lands is Locrian’s first full-length studio recording of all new material, and unfolds with an almost narrative structure. It starts with a slow descent into a dark abyss, moving tortuously, gradually rediscovering the light, then leaving you where everything began – completely transformed. The above review exactly says what you can expect, a slow ambient guitar environment slipping into massive guitar and synth drones, very recommended stuff. Drenched Lands was released on cd by At War With False Noise (ATWAR053), Small Doses (DOSEFORTYTHREE) in 2009. In a limited edition of 1000 copies.
Green Records Reviews: There’s a huge piece on the band here. Here’s the bit about Drenched Lands
The last piece of the Locrian puzzle I will talk about is their newest disc, a real silver-cd titled “Drenched Lands”, released on Small Doses and At War With False Noise. Out of all of the Locrian titles i’ve ever seen, this is by far the best looking. The disc comes in a professional looking cardboard case with track titles and graphics. Inside is the CD with black-on black imagery, and a very great looking insert with strange wire maze images.
The music is also the best of any Locrian i’ve heard so far. Incredibly different than the 3 tapes i’ve heard thusfar. The first track, “Obsolete Elegy in Effluvia and Dross”,was somewhat of a shocker to me. The whole thing is almost straight, creepy guitar. Towards the end, repeated moaning occurs, and for the last 30 or so seconds, you hear a nice synth line. Where was it for the rest of the track? Oh well. Overall a nice track (short, too – just over 2:00), but definatley not representative of the album itself. The next track, an 11 minute piece titled “Ghost Repeater”, is somewhat more like the Locrian i’m used to hear. A pulsating tone accomponied bya fainting synth and light feedback and scratching delay. The song gets heavier and heavier. More synth and guitar action on track 3, “Barren Temple Obscured By Contaminated Fogs”, but there’s also some blood-curdling screams, which fit very well with the music. Up ahead is “Epicedium”, is a little softer. Flowing sounds of sparse guitar and synth tones. Things get heavier, but still remain on the calmer side. song number 5, “Obsolete Elegy in Cast Concrete”, is a 7 minute guitar blast for the most part. More screaming like on track 3, and I really like it. Different circumstances than the latter, but just a good. The last track, titled “Greyfield Shrines”, also appears on a semi-recent 12″ the group did. It also serves as a nice closing piece for this album, seemingly summing up the styles and themes of the previous tracks. It maintains a buzzing presence, moved with more delayed guitar (all around awesome delay use on this whole album). Like many of the tracks on this album, it’s a good one to zone out to, just droning and pulsing, get heavier as it goes, slow moving though for sure. Pretty heavy hitting stuff towards the last 10 of the 30 minutes.
Overall, some of the best work Locrian has done from the things that i’ve heard (although I wouldn’t doubt this is one of the best in their entire catalog). With its pulsing synthesizer, loads of delay, and manic throat shredding, Drenched Lands is a slow paced glacial, masterful tribute to dreadful urban overgrowth and decay. I guess only time will tell if this disc can be outdone.
Only a few album titles accurately and easily describe the content. Imagine if you will slowly scanning the landscape of areas flooded by water, or recently flooded by water. Anything from grass plains to forests to empty cities. It’s often a quiet and uneasy feeling. A major event happened, and something is up. That’s the feeling that’s conveyed with this ambience, which goes beyond mere echoing guitars, spacey effects and the rarely appearing high shrill scream off in the distance, similar to Khanate. The vocals are quite fitting, as “Drenched Lands” does seem to fit into the world of both Khanate and Isis without bearing much resemblance to either band.
While the album is slow, it does have moments of rising and falling, granted the rising isn’t that substantial. The album in general draws you in, but there are minor shortcomings that prevent it from attaining greatness, which for the most part are the sudden drop-offs in the first two songs. The final song which can be hypnotic, I can also see people disliking for the long amount of feedback through a major portion of its duration.
Somehow this is exactly what we’ve been hankering for. A sprawling blackened songsuite, equal parts, dark ambience, dense drones, heavy electronics, buzzy lo-fi almost new wave sounding keyboards, spidery post rock guitars and soft noise. Even writing it, that seems like a pretty unworkable, or unrealistic combination, but somehow these Midwesterners make it work. Big time.
They definitely could be considered sonic brethren of bands like SUNNO))), Pussygutt, MZ412, Troum, To Blacken The Pages, Wolf Eyes, Vulture Club and the like. However, Locrian take that sound someplace all their own, creating actual SONGS, as opposed to just soundscapes or drones. And there’s a definitely black metal component for sure, no matter how abstract. Guitars are everywhere, seemingly the foundation for Locrian’s sound, although as often as the guitars are unfurling spidery post rocky melodies, or distant reverbed riffs, they are also smeared into warm whirling clouds, left to drift and gradually change shape, or pulled apart and allowed to crumble into jagged little shards. Noise in a big component too, often the prettiest parts are treated with a patina of grinding soft focus electronics, or groaning downtuned tones.
The record opens with a gorgeous, elegiac guitar part, simple and stripped down, like it could be a black metal intro, until the organ comes in, wheezy and warbly, giving the track a weirdly lo-fi almost industrial vibe, definitely had us wishing it was in fact more than just a two minute intro.
That is until track two, “Ghost Repeater” takes over. An epic slow motion drift, strange echoey sounds floating in a warm muted sea of buzz and drone, glitched out bits of electronics, and eventually, a very epic black metal riff, that remains off in the distance, repeated and repeated until it too simply becomes another layer of sound.
“Barren Temple Obscured By Contaminated Fogs” (another great title), begins again with some creepy spindly guitar, draped over a deep pulsing low end, before transforming into some seriously abject and WAY abstract blacknoise. Shrieked distorted vokills over that same spidery guitar, Abruptum like ambience meets warped Goblinesque synth drones, the whole track twisted and warbly, eventually the vocals dropping out, leaving the buzzing guitars and wheezing keyboards to play out a super haunting horrorscape. “Epicedium” is delicate and crystalline, noodly guitar lines looped beneath a glimmering softly throbbing drone, peppered with fragmented strums, soon the track begins to grow gradually more and more distorted, the guitars more tense and frantic, the mood so haunting and weirdly beautiful and so subtly dramatic, reminding us of a super twisted soundtrack to some lost Giallo.
The record proper ends with another awesomely titled jam: “Obsolete Elegy In Cast Concrete”, tolling bells, space kraut drones, all washed out and shimmery, the bed for some seriously corrosive guitar buzz and grind, adding layer after layer of crunch and rumble, but also slipping to some seriously black chug, joined by still more harsh hellish vox, a strange combination for sure but manages to be both beautiful and brutal, until the very end, where the track shifts gears and becomes all dramatic and melodic and weirdly majestic.
The cd features a bonus track called “Greyfield Shrines”, which is nearly as long as all of the other tracks combined, a sprawling slow building blackened world of sound that slithers from hushed drift, to fractured buzz, to woozy moody ambience to blown out speaker shredding crunch, absolutely epic, super cinematic, mysterious, and even at it’s noisiest, still quite melodic and blackly beautiful. Most definitely a track that could have been (and we think maybe was) a record all on its own.
LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES. Cool fold over arigato-pack style sleeve, with a full color printed booklet. And for anyone going to the Matchitehew metal/noise festival in Chicago in a few weeks, you’ll be able to catch these guys live.
Lords of Metal: It’s in dutch, so I opted not to post it.
