Heroin

It's irrelevant in many ways what you think of this album. Bongripper don't care. If they cared what you thought, they wouldn't have made a 76 minute track of weird noises and occasional music. They wouldn't have called it 'Heroin' and they wouldn't have released it with a special box set with the actual equipment for using heroin. I'm not the owner of that box set (it doesn't come with the download), but I don't think I need to try the kit since I imagine listening to this is sort of the same as taking the drug, even if it only sounds the same metaphorically. If Heroin aims for anything at all, it's surely for atmosphere and pure unease, two aims that it achieves in unequal measures.

The first thing you need to know is that, although Bongripper have made some great crushing sludge/stoner/doom metal albums, this has very little to do with big grooves and trippy guitar pedals, though we still get plenty of overspilling fuzzy bass. If there's a musical style to Heroin, I haven't found it yet, mostly because a large portion of the song is made up of low-level instrumental happenings, field recordings, and other sound effects. I guess I could say this was drone or ambient music, though I still feel that would be missing the point. By the half hour mark, we have progressed through a very slow creepy opening, some bass rumbles accompanied by the distant sound of a hospital heart monitor, and several stages of more deliberately constructed instrumental noise that I guess is about 50% feedback and 50% generated by effects. There are a couple of calm sections of ringing guitar chords, such as the one at around 32 minutes which dispels the built-up tension in favour of a weary, floating calmness that is much more pleasant to listen to but not much more diverting than the guitar noise before. Up to that point, the drummer was simply a name in the album sleeve but he turns up to tap pointlessly on his snare as his bandmates milk their strings for feedback and then settle into another calm section that could be mistaken for New Age ambient (there are even those fake jungle noises that kind of sound like birds or cascading streams) if it weren't for the underlying threat carrying over from the earlier parts. There's not really much else that happens, so I'll spare you the trouble of reading about the closing 30 minutes.

What we should gain by listening to Heroin is unclear. If this is supposed to mirror the feeling of being on heroin then I guess more people will be turned off narcotics than on, since the drug has just become almost intolerably boring in my mind and didn't seem to make Bongripper that happy or inspired. The only thing I can think of is that Heroin describes the sensation of the drug but backwards, making the hospital monitor slightly more understandable near the end of the experience, the floating mid-section a plateau of pleasure, and the squealing, bubbling feedback at the close the initial shock of its injection. However, if the album is named because the band were on heroin when they recorded it, that sort of makes sense too, though makes me question whether they were also high when they added all the effects, and when they edited it, and when they decided to release it, and when they actually released it, and so on. In a few simple words, this isn't worth listening to: it isn't good in a musical sense, doesn't have very much to grab the attention, and isn't good ambient music because it makes me feel weird and can't help me to relax. Try the other Bongripper albums, but stay far away from this nutcase.