Alpha Drone

It's kind of strange that despite all this talk about not conforming, being an outsider, etc, metal can typically be forced into just a few genres. It's kind of sad that when people think 'outsider music', they typically think 'Dudes who can't sing in tune playing folk music' instead of, well, bands like this.

Yeah, who needs Daniel Johnson or whatever when you've got this!? This is really bizarre, not necessarily 'good' but definitely one of the most esoteric things I've ever heard, with a powerful and truly otherworldly atmosphere.

It helps that much of it has been executed quite well, though, and a lot of is actually quite a good listen. 'Akashaganga' starts off sounding like Tim Hecker covering some old LLN material, before everything gets all blasty and murky. The guitars are muffled to the point where they sound like (really poor quality) synths, and the drums rattle around way in the background of the mix, sounding like really grim tambourines. In the middle of the epic guitar 'n' tambourine storm, some very pitch shifted vocals come out of nowhere, abruptly, to impart to us some sort of wise/sage-like/drunken knowledge before it all goes back into the epic metal.

And so it goes. There are plenty of those aforementioned guitar/drum BM style workouts, but John Gill seems to love throwing everything else into the mix, whether it's some epic Tibetan Chants and Neurosis-ish piano work (well, it certainly reminded me off it) in the really, really overlong 'Shambant Serrano', or the perplexing, but nonetheless awesome noise of 'The Sophonaut', which does everything from strange spoken word, to a rather happy guitar passage, to some epic, hostile noise action. It's an amazing song where all of his strange experiments come together into something that sounds really, really good. It just works so well, and it's backed up by some more epic atmospheric action in 'Theozoology', were some epic marching drums are joined by a huge amount of sweeping noise, synths and some huge german-man-vocals.

Still, despite some truly amazing moments there's a fair bit of fail. There is no way that 'Shambant Serrano' should be 14 minutes long, as it contains maybe 7 minutes of ideas at the most. The production is really, really bad- no excuses for it. While the murkiness of it works well in the non metal sections, it fails hard when the metal comes along. I don't think I've ever heard such a muddy, flaccid guitar tone. I guess these guys haven't heard of 'treble'. They should wiki it sometime! It might make their music sound a bit better.

Terrible production, overlong songs and questionable screamed vocals aside, this is an excellent, bizarre slab of noise and metal that should appeal to everyone who likes their music to be as unlistenable as possible. Absolutely mind boggling, not something I'd call 'enjoyable', and not even good, but still an album that you should check out if you're feeling adventurous and/or masochistic.