Inexplicable Hours
While Kevin Drumm has a reputation as a harbinger of doom, he also possesses an instinctive gift for quieter and meditative tones which are deployed to sublime, melancholy effect on this epic new double album. It generates a phosphorescent shadowplay of electro-acoustic tones and timbres comparable to his landmark releases Imperial Distortion and Tannenbaum in terms of their palpable yet somehow barely-perceptible spectral presence.
The first LP in the set is a special addition to the Drumm oeuvre. One of the most varied slabs in his catalogue, it moves in four parts from the keen of hollowed/hallowed resonance in The Forthright Fool to a transfixing pair of works entitled The Loop A + B, with the former sounding like Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement meets AFX’s SAW II ambience, and the latter deploying a gauzier sound sphere of coruscating tones and genteel chaos intensifying to a swarming panic attack, before the B-side-long Old Connections smears that tension with a paralysing, eviscerating force like being buried and slowly dissolving within a glacier.
From that subtle departure of the new paths of Disc 1, the 2nd plate returns us to more familiar Drumm terrain in all three sections. The longest, A Blind Spot hearkens to the supremely rare effect of Imperial Distortion, somehow coruscating yet amniotic - a proper metal ambience - while the final side’s Social Interaction feels like a smothered, internalized expression of Aaron Dilloway’s grotesque body gurns, and the near-static shimmer of Reverse Osmosis lends a suitably ambiguous close with an unyieldingly slow yet somehow lush strokes of genius.
Details of Gustave Doré’s wood-engraved illustration from The Rime of The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge adorns the sleeve and firmly hints at the poetic tempest and grain of Drumm’s work inside, which fixes its gaze not on the drama of the situation, but the tension and anxiety which frames it.
So good.
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Back in stock - 2LP in 6-panel double gatefold jacket with extra wide spine. Includes CD copy
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While Kevin Drumm has a reputation as a harbinger of doom, he also possesses an instinctive gift for quieter and meditative tones which are deployed to sublime, melancholy effect on this epic new double album. It generates a phosphorescent shadowplay of electro-acoustic tones and timbres comparable to his landmark releases Imperial Distortion and Tannenbaum in terms of their palpable yet somehow barely-perceptible spectral presence.
The first LP in the set is a special addition to the Drumm oeuvre. One of the most varied slabs in his catalogue, it moves in four parts from the keen of hollowed/hallowed resonance in The Forthright Fool to a transfixing pair of works entitled The Loop A + B, with the former sounding like Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement meets AFX’s SAW II ambience, and the latter deploying a gauzier sound sphere of coruscating tones and genteel chaos intensifying to a swarming panic attack, before the B-side-long Old Connections smears that tension with a paralysing, eviscerating force like being buried and slowly dissolving within a glacier.
From that subtle departure of the new paths of Disc 1, the 2nd plate returns us to more familiar Drumm terrain in all three sections. The longest, A Blind Spot hearkens to the supremely rare effect of Imperial Distortion, somehow coruscating yet amniotic - a proper metal ambience - while the final side’s Social Interaction feels like a smothered, internalized expression of Aaron Dilloway’s grotesque body gurns, and the near-static shimmer of Reverse Osmosis lends a suitably ambiguous close with an unyieldingly slow yet somehow lush strokes of genius.
Details of Gustave Doré’s wood-engraved illustration from The Rime of The Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge adorns the sleeve and firmly hints at the poetic tempest and grain of Drumm’s work inside, which fixes its gaze not on the drama of the situation, but the tension and anxiety which frames it.
So good.