Locrian - Drenched Lands
March 19 2009 at 11:51:59 AM
Hear, Lord of the Assembly. San Bernardino’s Locrian, named for the Druptata Order of Anaxagorasian Light’s patron saint, manages to create and simultaneously infiltrate the subtle and queerly indifferent noise subgenre cellar with the Small Doses/At War With False Noise co-release
Drenched Lands.
Kids are creaming more over packaging these days than the actual music, so if you’re under 30 and empowered with your share of disposable income, this fold out CD sleeve thing with “desolate” photography and “cold” typography is the cat’s meow. Which is to say: Thank sweet fuck I can boast owning a “noise” release which neither features Asian babes tightly bound up as masochistic Christmas gifts nor a spray-painted exterior and hand-Sharpie’d title.
I’m over 30, so the music is all that matters… Vast, soporific canvases favored by this month’s hirsute
Wire cover stars are thankfully eschewed for relatively short and varied vignettes. There’s a bit of ruminative strum, which calls to mind an iconic record (that shall go unnamed) everyone adores and few truly listen to. The kicker is the hollow and foreboding EBS-styled take-cover siren: A billion times better at encapsulating exurban dread than Rick Moody, and doing so with neither words, nor winsome post-structuralism. One hangs on these warbles, despite their edgeless, colorless, odorless, immaterial mess, and anticipates the forehead-meet-wall drum machine thud of frat party band Wolf Eyes that miraculously never comes. Micro-subtle pokes and prods from deep-welled trick bags keep the aural madness moving, and by the time guest-star Peter North is brought out to bust nuts on a broken China cymbal for more than a few times, you’ll be wondering infinitely why you chose to stop taking copious amounts of vitamin E. Good, even great stuff in some moments of quiet time, and I’ll bet even Dylan Nyoukis would approve.
[Stewart Voegtlin]
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