Skullflower - IIIrd Gatekeeper

Possibly Skullflower's finest moment. From 1992 and it still holds up. Not that I heard it back then. I was listening to Guns N Roses. I did hear it in the early noughties though. Back in the days before soulseek and mediafire when someone had to tape you things.

I'll happily stamp on them rose tinted glasses though. I reckon it's much better now that people can get access to underground music.

First heard Mr Bower's stuff when I ordered a split tape his Total project did with Merzbow after a reading a review in Terrorizer. Back when Terrorizer was worth buying and wasn't just about shit euro goth-metal. Blah blah blah moan moan moan.

Anyway, Skullflower and this album. Skullflower have churned out tons of stuff and their side projects release ridiculous amounts of stuff. No way of keeping it up with it all and no point either. If you're releasing tons of CDrs a year there's diminishing returns.

Nope, you can happily live with just this album. Total far out noise rock. Endless feedback. Churning proto-Earth/Sunn stuff with a no-audience UK underground stamp on it.

Column Of Heaven - Mission From God

OK, the tl;dr on this is ex-Endless Blockade/Shank and is top-tier 'power violence'. It'd definitely have got a 'brutal' description from Crass Menagerie.



Can I recommend you head on over to http://survivalist-deathcult.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/mission-from-god-lp-out-now.html and read what Andy's got to say about the LP and the ideas behind the music.

It explores the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the culture of 70s Yorkshire although explicitly not in a "duuuuude, serial killers man" way. Here's a quick excerpt from the explanation:-

The simpler impetus behind this album is that Sutcliffe’s murders are part of a larger, horrifying landscape… a bleak, ruined vista of grinding poverty, institutionalized racism and sexism, police brutality, pollution and inescapable decay. Quite simply, the Yorkshire of Sutcliffe’s day is probably unimaginable to those who weren’t there. It was a time and place that warrants examination and exploration. The environment of Yorkshire at the time and Sutcliffe’s crimes are deeply interrelated, perhaps even symbiotic. Some of this album is deeply personal, much is intentionally enigmatic and some is completely straight ahead. Our desire is not to decode or spell this album out, but to encourage one to consume it on a level that is deeper than a “fuckin’ grind/noise album about a serial killer, man!”.

There's a couple of more power electronics tracks with treated speech from the time. It sounds like one of the pieces utilises the infamous hoax tape where someone pretended to be the killer and rang the police taunting them. The other piece uses what seems to be an interview from a light entertainment TV programme with the presenter giggling about Sutcliffe not having sex in prison. It's definitely the most jarring, other-worldly part of the whole thing.

Musically there's a touch of death metal in with all the power violence. I say this only because it mentions that it's not their 'death metal album' and that there was only a bit of it in there. I probably wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been primed. We're talking maybe half a riff with a bit of an Autopsy rhythm. The rest is generally along the well thought out slow-fast Crossed Out breed (ie not superficial Spazz-isms).