Kinich Ahau

Now this is The Real Shit! Here be one psycho motherfucker set of spaced-out raw black metal psychedelic noise that lost whatever moorings it had to Earth aeons ago. For 17 minutes you are taken on a trip aboard a UFO driven by a pack of aliens, all of whom convinced they can handle twisting trails around fast-flying asteroids and comets at speeds that make Formula One drivers look like sedated snails. A gorgeous vibrating steel-stringed guitar ripple surrounded by eerie space ambient effects that glide up and down introduces the track; soon enough the guitar melody gains a bleached-out acid psychedelic reverb edge that makes you see weird day-glo lime-green / hot purple / sky-blue cartoon colours in your mind. The echoes climb higher in scale until your ears almost bleed from the shrill, near-screechy edge.

The rhythm section joins in the fun and quickly a phantom vocal starts to screech and howl in the background while guitars and drums go hell for leather to their inevitable fate when they must surely disappear high in the cosmos and become part of its eternal fabric. About the halfway mark the track reaches a plateau and the pace slows down so the music coasts along while the weird bubbling and gurgling noises whirl wildly about in your brain and the vocalist groans and sighs as if suspended in an ethereal fluid bearing him to another plane of existence. Guitar shimmer and reverberation continue with the tone milked for all it's worth.

The track continues on and on, escalating in derangement and intensity ... I think you can tell where it's all going to end, it ain't gonna be peaceful ... the heart-rending screams go on and on as well ... sure enough, everything is rent apart and the very atoms and sub-atomic particles are cut asunder and dissipated throughout space until all is null and the universe carries on as before as if nothing ever happened.

I find it hard to fault this track as it is: I can see that some listeners might find the music a bit boring as about the halfway mark the musicians appear to noodle around a bit with extra melody that's not really needed; other listeners might wish the track was longer so that the droning effects could be extended and squeezed until every last bit of ringing or scraping noise was extracted painfully like blood from the proverbial stone and your ears are silently screeching for mercy. One other thing I notice, though this may not matter to most listeners, is that the ambient effects are not very original: I've hear similar effects before on other psychedelic recordings though not to the extent they are done here. The track might also benefit from slightly better production that gives it more of a 3D effect but then again it would lose its raw quality.

This might well be the ultimate existential / nihilist nightmare: music that promises transcendence and release from a drab and meaningless existence, taking you into what looks like nirvana ... only to reveal utter emptiness and no meaning at all.