Hiding in Light

Groningen, NL -- home of the bass/bass/drums trio Menhir, and also home to Tartarus Records, the label that has gone to great lengths to inject some creativity into their releases. Like their cassette version of Menhir's Uberlith II, back in 2014, which (possibly as a play on the band's name and/or the album title itself?) they sold completely encased within a plaster brick. Fortunately each order also includes a free download, because unless somebody was really skilled at deftly and delicately using a chisel and hammer, I suspect not very many of those actually made it into a tape player.

This time around, sticking with a similar theme but perhaps trying to keep things a little less destructive, the band's new album Hiding in Light has been made available with the cassette moulded inside a silicon rubber brick. There is a strict limit of 100 copies; the first twenty were done in an assortment of colors (and sold out instantly, before the label's official press release had even been sent out), and the remainder (of which very, very few are still available as of this writing) are in a black-with-gold configuration.

Hiding in Light, which should also be available in digital format via Bandcamp if you don't manage to get your hands on one of the physical copies, includes three songs which total approximately sixteen minutes. Although the music is produced entirely by two bassists, much of the time it manages to sound like a heavily distorted wall of space-rock-ish synth chords and heavily accented bass rhythms, leaving me to wonder whether there's a name for blending darkwave with shoegaze. Darkgaze, maybe? But then, as it turns out, I discovered that the band refers to themselves as "astrosludge" -- a much more perfect description than anything I could have invented. I'm also not sure how that really cool theremin-like sound that takes an extensive "solo" right around the center of the first song "Scalar Field" was produced, but it resembles a record-scratching DJ completely going nuts. Astrosludge, indeed.

Vocally, these tracks generally employ a powerful hollering style, a deep bellowing/yelling that brings to mind certain aspects of southern (U.S.) sludgerock, sort of like early (Red Album-era) Baroness, or Black Tusk. In the second song "Image from Void," the vocals are a bit deeper still, and rather echoey -- like they're emerging from the bottom of a pit -- while later in that same song there is some nice harmonized singing that's even more strongly reminiscent of Baroness!