Botanist – Ganoderma Lucidum (TotalRust)

 
Fuck yes, alright everyone, pay attention. The one man nature themed hammered dulcimer & drums black metaller is back with his second/third album and he’s gone doom. Dreams can come true. Forget that Pallbearer shit, Doom In Bloom is this year’s best and weirdest doom record. Botanist has kept the two instrument thing for the most part, although I definitely hear some harmonium style reeds in there occasionally. His take on black metal, which is basically “fuck the norms I’ll make my own,” is exactly the same with his doom stylings. Most doom tropes are tossed out while still somehow keeping within the genre. Absolutely amazing stuff. I get some serious Jesu vibes on this, especially the opening track which sounds like it could’ve been a Silver demo, but that’s the closest comparison I can make and it’s a total stretch. Doom In Bloom is dissonant & destructive, with vocals that http://nygoodhealth.com/product/crestor/ range between creaking doors & torture victims, epic major key crescendos, wonky lurching brain fucks, rhythms & melodies that make absolutely no sense at first and sound like a fucking wreck, then everything clicks and it’s perfection incarnate.

But wait there’s more! This is a double disc. Allies, the companion, is like some weird covers/remix album, where Botanist gave his buds (GET IT???) the drum tracks for each of the songs and said do what you will, just make sure it’s about nature. So you get some black ambient, black metal, more doom, and all sorts of cool shit, from Matrushka, Cult Of Linnaeus, Ophidian Forest, Arborist, Lotus Thief, and Bestiary, all of which sound nothing like the originals, all of which is totally awesome.

Botanist is kicking so much ass and Doom In Bloom is absolutely incredible. Dude is essentially unstoppable and he’s only put out a few records. Do not miss out on this.

Moonshine Blues – Revelations (self released)

 
Killer new drones coming out of Ukraine from this dude Alex Sakevych (aka Endless Melancholy). Moonshine Blues is Sakevych’s, umm, other drone project with a sad bastard name. Not too sure of this distinctions between the two, but Through is some truly outstanding shit. Strings & reeds style lushness with dense dark sweeps of sound, some crackly Basinski rumble, cinematic mini-blowouts, all of this with a massive cloud of sadness that never leaves. Sakevych is playing like he knows true grief, his drones are choked up with a blissful despair that take gloom to the next level. This is the best kind of stuff, unbelievably gorgeous and overwhelmingly somber. Floating in the grey and rapt in heartache, while sheets & swells of euphoria shimmer in the dark, dragged to the edge of oblivion and left alone, regretting everything, hopeless. This is the real deal, top notch bottom dollar stuff, waiting for you to call it your favorite.

Damian Valles – Movement III (Experimedia)

 
Oh man, this is the besssst. Damian Valles, the multi-talented Canadian curator of the Rural Route series on Standard Form, has done some incredible reappropriating on Nonparallel. He’s taken a hefty collection of old classical Nonesuch LPs from the 60s & 70s and Jeckified them. Ripping the crackle straight from the dusty grooves and bathing the vintage strings in a dark glow, he gives a whole new meaning to neo-classical. And the drones Valles spins are some of my favorite kind, lush as fuck, buy cialis online overnight delivery with pops & clicks turned into a dozen muted typewriters, warm tones with buried melodies, vaguely threatening in the most blissful way, earthy & rich, layers and sheets of suffocating ambience, classical pianos melted in a cauldron of dark drones, something wholly original born out of forgotten thrift store relics. A fucking winner if I’ve ever seen one. Available in your favorite format at Experimedia very soon, but lets face it, if you pick this up on anything other than vinyl, you’re doing it wrong.

Richard Garet – Areal (23five)

 
Absolutely stunning drones on this one. Areal was originally an A/V installation (complete with fog machine), the audio portion of which has been transformed into this magnificent album length piece on 23five. Garet’s work has been focused on electromagnetic fuckery, specifically with messing up radio signals, and this is a further exploration. It’s an exceptionally precise record with a hundred different sounds working through cycles of hissing & clicking. Hyper focus on the details is the only way to fully appreciate this when everything is as subtle and delicate as dust floating in a patch of sunlight. Areal‘s sounds are the breath of a sleeping city, a digital microcosm of hidden harmonies and static clatter, a barely visible vertical sheet of ice that’s slowly melting, simultaneously warmed & chilled, stretches of hushed minutiae, cut through with shrill tones and cracked wind. Not enough good things to say about this. And not surprised in the least, as both 23five and Richard Garet are always on top of the game.

Toning – Ski Dubai (Skell)

 
Toning, a dude named Cody Brant, is tearing it up with weirdness on his recent tape on newish label Skell. All sorts of sounds on Paranormal Romance, made only with guitars & synths (and the occasional drum machine) but spanning enough genres that it’s damn tough to pin down. It’s got some drugged up Eric Copeland drips, buzzing Zomes drone jams, dusty & twangy Americana melodies, spaced out lazer burns, and everything in between, a dozen or so bite sized tracks for coping without your ADD meds, each looped in its own way, some blasted & crazy, others subtle & delicate, but mostly just hypnotic & engaging. Totally awesome stuff. Only 50 copies, of which I believe there are still some left. Definitely jump on this.

T.O.M.B. – Tribe Of The Corpse (Crucial Blast)

 
Normally these PA dudes (full name: Total Occultic Mechanical Blasphemy) do black metal type things, with some other strangeness thrown in. UAG (aka Undercovered Ancient Gateways, aka we get it you like acronyms) has them stripping all metal from their sound but going blacker than ever. Black noise, black ambient, black industrial, just completely fucking black. The metal fury is gone and replaced with a bleak industrial howl, a post-mortem skullcracking drone that rots your bones from the inside out. I’m not sure where UAG was recorded, but they’ve been known to do field recordings in asylums & crypts, so who knows the location of these haunted sounds. These guys can take the sound of the wind and turn it evil, and there’s lots of percussive elements, cemetery gates and butcherware clanging in an arhythmic lurch, and on one track it’s even akin to a faded blastbeat, heard through six feet of earth a thousand miles away. Boiling static and hissing rain, thick with decay, harrowing walls of death, so much creep & screech that it’ll be hard to sleep soundly after hearing this. There’s even a track that’s made from the sounds of scraping a contact mic “across the rotting flesh of an actual corpse.” It doesn’t get more fucking necro than that. T.O.M.B. really outdid themselves on UAG. So glad there are labels like Crucial Blast putting out awesome shit like this.

EUS, Postdrome, & Saåad – 3AM (BLWBCK)

 
A collab of crazy proportions! And quite worldly, a Costa Rican, a dude from the UK, and a French duo, making absolutely breathtaking drones of the highest order. This is some dark blissful stuff, which is the best kind of stuff right now. Dense and soaring, black anvil clouds rolling over open plains, always on the edge, seeing the sun rays glow and the grey mass shift, an impending fury that always threatens, never breaks, trapped in the undertow but wholly welcoming it, sheets of euphoria masked by the haunt of life, embrace the truth, let the stars rain down, pre-apocalypse enlightenment created by layers of heavenly darkness. It doesn’t get much better than this. This is what you see when you get to the top. A fluorescent green beast of a tape, only 66 copies and it drops in a few days. Preorder this hunk stat.