Good first day yesterday. Good second day today. I’ve been doing Quarterly Reviews for over a decade now, and I’ve kind of learned over time the kind of thing I should be writing about. It might be a record that has a ton of hype or one that has none, and it might be any number of styles — I also like to sneak some stuff in here that doesn’t ‘fit’ once in a while — but in my mind the standard is, “is this something I’ll want to have heard and/or written about later?”

For all the terrors of our age, the glut of good music coming out means there’s more than ever I want to write about, and in a weird way, I look forward to Quarterly Reviews as a way for me to dig in and get caught up a bit. I’ve already been blindsided this QR and it’s the second day. I call that a win.

Quarterly Review #11-20:

Kal-El, Astral Voyager Vol. 1

There are few acts the world over who so succintly summarize so much of the appeal of modern heavy rock. Norway’s Kal-El offer big riffs, big hooks, big melodies, songwriting, and still manage heavy-mellow vibes thanks to an ongoing cosmic thematic that brings desert rock methods to more ethereal places. Is “Cloud Walker” the best song they’ve yet written? It’s on the list for sure, but don’t discount nine-minute opener/longest track (immediate points) “Astral Voyager” or the hey-that’s-a-Star-Trek-reference “Dilithium” with its dug-in low-distortion verses and the Captain‘s vocal outreach. All along, it’s never quite felt like Kal-El were reshaping heavy, but as time passes and they unveil Astral Voyager Vol. 1 with immediate promise of a follow-up, it’s curious how much Kal-El and notions of ‘peak genre’ align. Those of you who proselytize for riffs: even before you get to riding that groove in “Cosmic Sailor,” Kal-El are primed for ambassadorship.

Kal-El website

Majestic Mountain Records store

Blues Funeral Recordings website

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Bronco, Bronco

North Carolinian sludgethrowers Bronco take their name from their bassist/vocalist, who also goes by Bronco, and who in the 2010s cut a tone-worshiping generational swath through the Southern wing of the style as a member of Toke, proffering heavy riffs, harsh-throat vocals, and a disaffection that can only be called classic. With eight songs rolling out over 45 minutes, Bronco‘s Bronco picks up the thread where Toke left off with pieces like “Ride Eternal,” which crawls, or the declarative riffing of “Legion” (eerie guest vocals included amid all the pummel), or the closer “TONS,” which I’m going to assume isn’t titled after the Italian sludge-band, though if those guys wanted to put out a song called “Bronco” on their next record, they’d be well within their rights. A remarkably cohesive debut for something that’s so loudly telling you to fuck yourself. These guys’ll be opening for High on Fire in no time.

Bronco on Bandcamp

Magnetic Eye Records store

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Ocultum, Buena Muerte

Although one wouldn’t listen to Santiago, Chile’s Ocultum and be likely to have “refined” top the list of impressions given by the raw, rot-coated sludge of their third album and Heavy Psych Sounds debut, Buena Muerte, the grim-leaning atmosphere, charge later in the title-track, cultish presentation and the atmosphere emergent both from guitar-wail and yelling interlude “Fortunato’s Fortune” and from the material that surrounds, whether that’s the title-track or the just-under-12-minute “Last Weed on Earth.” The record finds the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Sebastián Bruna, bassist Pablo Cataldo and drummer Ricardo Robles dug in, stoned and malevolent. They’re not as over-the-top as many in cult rock, but one does get a sense of ceremony from “Last Weed on Earth” and subsequent capper “Emki’s Return” — the latter galloping in its first half and willfully devolved from there into avant noise — even if that’s more about the making of the songs than the performance of genre tropes.

Ocultum on Bandcamp

Heavy Psych Sounds website

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Fidel A Go Go, Diss Engaged

The grunge crunch of “Running With Secrets” and the Cantrell-y acoustics of “Push” are barely the beginning of the story as regards Fidel A Go Go‘s meld of sounds, which ranges from the willfully desert rocking “Sandstorm” to the proggy “Lil Shit,” the transposed blues of “Rainy Days” and the penultimate “Psychedelicexistentialcrisisalidocious,” which is serene in its melody and troubling in the words, as one would hope, and while the moniker and the punny album title speak to shenanigans, the Brisbane four-piece offer a point of view both instrumentally and lyrically that is engaging and draws together the stylistic range. There’s little doubt left to whom “A Stench of Musk” and “Barely an Adversary” are about, but even that’s not the extent of the perspective resonant in these 11 songs. There’s enough fuzz here for desert heads, but Fidel A Go Go are broader in attitude and craft, and Diss Engaged makes a point of its artistic freedom.

Fidel A Go Go website

Fidel A Go Go on Bandcamp

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Tumble, Lost in Light

Like their 2023 debut EP, Lady Cadaver, Tumble‘s second short offering, Lost in Light sees the trio of guitarist/vocalist Liam Deak, bassist Tarun Dawar and drummer Will Adams working with producer/engineer Ian Blurton (Ian Blurton’s Future Now, etc.) to hone and sharpen a classic, proto-metallic sound without seeing a dip in recording quality. As such, the five songs/20 minutes of Lost in Light are duly brash — looking at you, “Dead by Rumour” and the Radio Moscow-esque “The Less I Know” — but crisp in tone and execution. The mid-tempo “Sullen Slaves” picks up in its solo section later for a bit of boogie, and the slightly-slower metallic lurch of “Laid by Fear” sets up a contrast with the swinging closer “Wings of Gold” that makes the ending of the EP an absolute strut. They aren’t even asking a half-hour of your time, and the rewards are more than commensurate for getting down. They continue to be one to watch as they position themselves for a full-length debut in the next couple years.

Tumble’s Linktr.ee

Stickman Records website

Echodelick Records on Bandcamp

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Putan Club, Filles d’Octobre

Normally I might consider it a hindrance to have no clue what’s going on, but if you’ve never before encountered Italy/France semi-industrial duo Putan Club you might just find yourself in better position going into Filles d’Octobre as the avant garde radfem troupe unfurl a live set recorded at Portugal’s Amplifest, presumably in 2022. But if you don’t know it’s a live record, what’s coming musically, or that Filles d’Octobre is derived from their 2017 debut album, Filles de Mai, there’s a decent change your contextless self will be scrathing your head in wonder of just what’s going on with the bouncy lurch and maybe xylophone of “Filippino,” and that seems to suit Putan Club just fine. If you have to break something to remake it, Putan Club are set to the task of manifesting a rock and roll that is dangerous, new, unrepentantly socially critical, and ready to dance when you are. That they meet these significant ambitions head on shouldn’t be discounted. Not for everybody, but definitely for everybody who thinks they’ve heard it all.

Putan Club website

Toten Schwan Records on Bandcamp

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IAH, En Vivo en Cabezas de Tormenta

The first live offering from Argentinian prog-heavy instrumentalists IAH follows behind the band’s most expansive studio LP to-date, 2023’s V (review here), and brings into emphasis the group’s dynamic. It’s not just about being able to make a part sound floaty or to make the part next to it crush, but the character of a piece like the 24-minute “Noboj pri Uaset” (which might be new) is as much about the journey undertaken in their builds and the smoothness of the shifts between parts. They dip back to their earlier going for “Sheut” at the start of the set and “Ourboros” and “Eclipsum” the latter of which closes, and the bass in “Sentado en el Borde de una Pregunta” is worth the price of admission alone, never mind as a complement to the extended progression of “Noboj pri Uaset,” which is something of the buried lede here. So be it. On stage or on record, IAH offer immersion unto themselves. A little more tonal edge as a result of the live recording doesn’t hurt that one bit.

IAH website

IAH on Bandcamp

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Gin Lady, Before the Dawn of Time

Before the Dawn of Time is upwards of the seventh full-length from Swedish vintage-style heavy rockers Gin Lady, and in addition to seeing them make the jump from Kozmik Artifactz to Ripple Music, the sans-pretense 11-songer invents its own moment. It’s like the comedown era (from 1968-1974, roughly) happened, but happened differently. It’s another path to a heavy rock future. There’s ’70s vibes in “Tingens Sanna Natur” a-plenty, and if it’s boogie or push or hooky melodic wash you want, “Mulberry Bend” has you covered for that and then some, never mind the down-home strum of “Bliss on the Line” or the pastoral contemplation of “The Long Now,” as Gin Lady put a classy stamp of their own on classic aural ideologies, as what are no doubt hyperspecific keyboards make the production smooth and let “Ways to Cross the Sky” commune with Morricone while capper “You’re a Big Star” drops a melody that can really only be called “arena ready.” As it stands, it’ll probably go over killer at festivals across Europe.

Gin Lady on Bandcamp

Ripple Music website

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Adrift, Dry Soil

Duly apocalyptic for being the band’s first full-length release since 2019, Adrift‘s fourth album, Dry Soil, elicits an overarching doom that makes its tonal claustrophobia all the more affecting. The long-running Madrid outfit offer six songs that veer between the contemplative and the caustic as throatrippers worthy of Enslaved add an element of the extreme to the post-metallic intensity of “Edge” and “Restart” in the record’s middle. There are heavy rock underpinnings — that is, somebody here still likes Sabbath — but Adrift are well at home in all the bludgeonry, and “Bonfire” finishes by tying black metal, sludge, noise and darkly thrashing metal together with a suitably severe ambience. Are they torching it at the end? Kind of, but just replace “it” with “everything” and you’ll have a better idea perhaps of where they’re coming from on the whole. But for regionalist discrimination, Adrift would’ve conquered Europe a long time ago.

Adrift on Facebook

Adrift on Bandcamp

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Black Sadhu, Ashes of Aether

Berlin trio Black Sadhu — guitarist/vocalist Max Lowry (also synth, effects), bassist Alex Glimm and drummer Martin Cederlund — employ atmosphere to a point of cinematics on their second full-length, Ashes of Aether, following up the post-doom wash of 2021 standalone single “Mindless Masses” with plays back and forth between full-heft nod and take-a-breather meanderings. This cuts momentum less than one might think as the keyboard and drone and sample of “Tumors of Light” lend experimentalist verve to “Descent,” the next of the nine-track outing’s more-complete-song songs, as the latter unfolds with a shine on the crash that continues to cut through the surrounding rumble as the procession unfurls. Patience, then. So long as you know the payoff is coming — and it is; looking at you, “Electric Death” — and don’t mind being stretched and contorted on a molecular level between here and there, you should be good to go.

Black Sadhu on Bandcamp

Black Sadhu on Instagram

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Grados. Minutos. Segundos. is a multi-volume compilation assembled at the behest of Spinda Records, highlighting the label’s native Spanish underground scene across a series of 12 split seven-inch vinyls. Set for release between last Friday and next Spring, the pressing is one-time-only, limited to 240, hand-numbered and though I generally don’t post sale links like, available right here: http://spindarecords.com/grados-minutos-segundos/

I’m not the type to tell you outright to spend your money. I know everyone works hard and cash is hard to come by and capitalism is terrible, etc., but the reason that link is there is because I respect the living shit out of this project and the obvious love that birthed it. Spinda Records is no slouch when it comes to promoting Spanish heavy anyhow, but Grados. Minutos. Segundos. brings that to a different level entirely. Consider — it could’ve probably just been a 3LP box. Or a double-CD or something like that. But the focus here is so much on the lushness of presentation, and on highlighting the work of the bands. Every act is given their own space. It’s a beautiful concept, and if you snag one of these, consider yourself lucky.

My hope is that as each installment of Grados. Minutos. Segundos. comes out, I’ll have a corresponding track-by-track from the bands. You’ll find the first one below. My sincere thanks to Berto Cáceres from the label for putting it — and the compilation — together.

Enjoy:

Grados. Minutos. Segundos. Track-by-Track Pt. 1

MOURA – “Muiñeira da Maruxaina”

“[…] The “muiñeira” is one of the most popular Galician traditional music genres and we wanted to make an approach to it from “krautrock” and psychedelic perspective, respecting some of its characteristics. Lyrically, the song is about the folktale of the Maruxaina, a mermaid who lives in a cave in an island in San Cibrao (north coast of Galicia) and helps or confuse sailors by playing a horn or with her singing, depending on different versions of the tale. Galician traditional percussions were heavily used in the song and an arpeggiator to keep the pulse of the trance along with the guitar riff […]”

ROSY FINCH – “Black Lodge”

“[…] As a big fan of ‘Twin Peaks’, I always had the idea of turning into Laura Palmer and living inside a dark song. In “Black Lodge” you can see many references and symbology of Lynch’s universe. We tried to reflect the anguish but also the seduction undertaken by the characters. But not only the video has been inspired by the TV series; lyrics describe some moments and iconic quotes of the show but always through Laura Palmer’s voice […]”

ADRIFT – “Abracadabra”

“[…] On this track we don’t play around with long progressions as we are used to. Instead we play heavily from the very first second and there’s no time to relax at all. Going against our usual way of writing songs, we chose a couple of riffs and wrote the whole song around them without thinking too much and having fun trying not to get complicated. The lyrics talk about the current situation and how some media and “important” people manipulate the reality in order to control the people and do what they want with them. They’re kind of magicians doing tricks to make you think as they want you to think […]”

ADRIFT – “Lush Lands”

“[…] Inspired by the book ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad, this tracks talks about a situation in which you decide to go to the deepest darkness looking for somebody and how you can finish feeling attracted by the horror you see on your way to that person. This track stars as a good exercise of space rock, full of delays and reverb, to finish as a huge and repetitive wall of noise. It’s like a mantra to get into trance […]”

MONDO INFIEL – “Estigmas”

This track talks about those close-minded-people who are not able to see further than their own shoes, not being even able to question their way of thinking or understanding that not everyone else will think the same way. This can continue for years and makes them feeling attacked by others just for the fact of them having a different point of view about religion, politics or culture. Type O Negative and Killing Joke inspired the song a lot, although it doesn’t sound to those bands at all – I wish Pete Steele or Jaz Coleman took care of the vocals in the song.

PARTÍCULA – “La Fosa”

From the deepest and darkness roots of heavy psych and the most powerful ’70s hard rock, this track emerges like a cathartic experience, where frustration and hope return to our reality transformed into an authentic iron fist, ready to take you to another dimension.

MEDICINA – “Vilo”

This songs talks about the uncertainty and anxiety caused when things are out of your hands. This can happen on any aspect of your life. We do not attach to any sound in particular when writing but this reminds me to Steve Albini and Big Black.

Spinda Records on Thee Facebooks

Spinda Records on Instagram

Spinda Records on Bandcamp

Spinda Records website

Not exactly the most uplifting message ever put into a song, but Wino‘s take on Savoy Brown‘s “Shot in the Head” was nonetheless a highlight of the 2010 acoustic debut, Adrift. That record (review here) came out four years ago this month, and had its fair share of melancholy, with songs like “Whatever” and “Old and Alone,” but despite its foreboding title, “Shot in the Head” was actually more upbeat — frustration rather than depression — and its road-weary lyric fit Adrift‘s personality well, Wino taking the lines, “I’ve had enough of getting shot in the head/I’ve had enough and I wish I was dead,” and presenting them not with a downer woefulness, but something closer to the bluesy humor of the original.

The track opened Savoy Brown‘s 1972 full-length, Lion’s Share, which was the British outfit’s ninth album in six years. Understandable at that point why they might’ve “had enough,” but it’s worth noting that guitarist/vocalist/founder Kim Simmonds has toured and released music ever since, working with well over 60 musicians in various Savoy Brown lineups since starting out in 1967 — up to and including this year’s Goin’ to the Delta — so apparently he was still a ways off from his fill. Wino isn’t quite there in the number of people he’s worked with, though if you count both bands he’s been in and bands with whom he’s guested, he’s got to be over 40, but it’s plain enough to see a correlation there, and he seems to have a good time with the song, doubling his vocals to create a kind of one-man blues chorus and sneaking a plugged-in solo into the second half.

I looked for a live version of “Shot in the Head,” but came up empty. Could’ve sworn I saw him do this song at some point, but there doesn’t seem to be video to back that up. The album version’s plenty raucous, and I hope you enjoy it and have a happy Wino Wednesday:

Wino, “Shot in the Head” (Savoy Brown cover)

Hard to determine what’s my favorite thing about this clip of Wino performing the song “Manifesto” live at Substance Record Store in Vienna on his 2010 European tour. He laughs as he breaks a string about two minutes in, and that’s pretty enjoyable — probably less for him at the time — and he takes his guitar and walks out into the crowd, troubadour-style, toward the end. Plus the song itself, which lives up to its name in continuing Wino‘s penchant for socially conscious lyric-writing — something that arguably was most present in the word of The Hidden Hand but has been a factor all along — while the quick acoustic strumming provides a kind of tension that usually comes coated in fuzz where his songwriting is concerned.

Either way, it’s a winner, and for me, even more interesting in context. Toward the end of last year, I posted a video shot on the same tour of the same song, and he did basically the same thing — out into the crowd and all that. That video was shot in Belgium on Oct. 10. This one was Vienna just 10 days earlier, and what’s really great about it is Wino, fresh off a tour with Premonition 13, had been on the road for about two weeks at the time, so basically you get to see him become more comfortable with the idea as you go from the earlier video (this one) to the later one. Maybe that’s me putting a narrative to it, or just a bit of super-nerdery, but it’s pretty cool to see, either way, since by the time October rolled around, it was a spirited protest-song bit of populism and here it’s getting there, but not quite as triumphant yet.

Keep your eyes open for that and the broken string, and have a great Wino Wednesday:

Wino, “Manifesto” live at Substance Record Store, Vienna, Sept. 30, 2010

Yesterday the announcement came down the wire that Wino would be opening for Clutch‘s holiday tour this coming December. It’s the kind of news I like to get. If you missed the dates, here they are:

WINO w/ Clutch, Mondo Generator, Saviours:
12/26/2012 9:30 Club – Washington DC
12/27/2012 The Orange Peel – Asheville, NC
12/28/2012 Buster’s Billiards & Backroom – Lexington, KY
12/29/2012 Newport Music Hall – Columbus, OH
12/30/2012 Starland Ballroom – Sayreville, NJ
12/31/2012 The Palladium – Worcester, MA

It’s a pretty killer bill, and Wino will be performing solo acoustic to open the shows, as the PR wire confirms:

Following the ongoing Saint Vitus North American tour, his thriving recent tours of Europe and North America alongside his comrade Conny Ochs in support of their collaborative album Heavy Kingdom, preceded by several tours with close friend and Shrinebuilder bandmate Scott Kelly in support of their split 7” release last year, today the legendary SCOTT “WINO” WEINRICH confirms his latest round of live performances, as the man will bring his solo acoustic set to the road once again, this time in support of the almighty American rock machine Clutch.

WINO has supported Clutch on tour in recent years, with both his backing band as heard on his 2009-released Punctuated Equilibrium album as well as solo as his 2010-released debut acoustic album Adrift. On this special run of year-end dates WINO will join Mondo Generator and Saviours supply opening support for Clutch, with a six-show run from Washington DC up the East Coast and ending in Worcester, Massachusetts on New Year’s Eve. Tickets for this short but incredible tour will go on sale this Friday, September 21st.

Given all that newsly awesomeness, I thought it was a good time to take the opportunity to revisit Wino‘s 2010 acoustic debut, Adrift (review here). That record seems a long time ago now, but it’s only long in terms of all the stuff Wino has done since, with Saint Vitus, Premonition 13 and the Wino & Conny Ochs collaboration — not to mention touring for those projects and playing live with The Obsessed for the first time in more than a decade — and one track that has continued to stand out from it is the closer, “Green Speed.”

It helps that it’s a wailing heavy rock song — whatever kind of guitar it’s played on — with an uptempo chugging riff and buzzsaw-sharp electrified solo, but what really gets me in listening are the vocals, with have that seething underpinning of righteous anger that’s unmistakably his own. “Green Speed” was kind of buried at the end of Adrift, and sure enough, was different from a lot of the rest of the album, but it’s a cool track nonetheless, and seemed to me easily worth highlighting in honor of the upcoming tour.

Enjoy and have a happy Wino Wednesday:

After a couple starter splits, singles and EP releases, Spanish four-piece Adrift made their full-length debut in 2008 with Monolito, an album that wore its winding post-Mastodon neo-prog metal influence on its sleeve. The complexity of rhythm and overall extremity finds further push in the forthcoming Alone Records follow-up, Black Heart Bleeds Black, which is darker atmospherically and more conscious of but not modeled after mid-period Neurosis‘ apocalyptic churn. Doomed in mood and guitar-led sensibility, its songs follow progressive structures to vicious ends and offer little hope to those who’d take them on.

More importantly, the overall impression Black Heart Bleeds Black gives is more individualized than was the first record, and Adrift work within a variety of forms that maintain their pummel even as they change the direction from which that pummel comes. Tonally, it’s metal, and I hear a bit of Converge‘s bombast in the screams of “Mallet Man,” but there’s more happening in these songs than any one band comparison can really convey, the two guitars of Macon and Jorge (the latter also vocals) working into and out of tandem stretches with an ease that skillfully undercuts the difficulty of what they’re actually doing.

And where a lot of prog (neo- or otherwise) seems to forgo its sense of songwriting to convey musicianship, even on the trace-state instrumental “Erich Zann Movement,” Adrift don’t lose the human feel to what they do — they’re just reeling back for the next blast, which of course arrives in the form of the 9:48 “Fury Roof.” In terms of giving a concise impression of what Black Heart Bleeds Black does, though, the seven-minute “Wolves Searching Dams” is densely packed with aggression and ambience in kind, relentlessly driven forward by frantic guitars, Jaime‘s drums and Dani‘s bass, as you can hear for yourself on the player below:

[mp3player width=460 height=120 config=fmp_jw_widget_config.xml playlist=adrift.xml]

For CD and/or vinyl preorders of Black Heart Bleeds Black, click here. Much thanks to Alone Records for granting permission to host the stream, and to find out more about Adrift, be sure to hit them up on Thee Facebooks or their Something Called MySpace page.

Among the favorite four-letter words of doom and stoner heads out there, “Wino” has to be high on the list. For almost 30 years, Scott “Wino” Weinrich has built a legacy unequaled in underground rock and metal. Just because it’s fun to run down the list: The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, The Obsessed (again), Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, and most recently his own Wino solo band with J.P. Gaster of Clutch and the now-departed Jon Blank, the doom dream-team supergroup, Shrinebuilder, and his new jam project Premonition. He’s nothing if not prolific, and on Adrift (Exile on Mainstream), which he issues under the Wino banner, he presents his fans with his first acoustic album ever. Needless to say, if you’re a fan of Wino in any incarnation of his playing, Adrift is required reading.

Drum-less, bass-less and featuring only sporadic electric guitar, this is the raw Wino, and Weinrich’s songwriting is at the fore. The opener “Adrift” sets the tone for the record with a deeply personal, intimate vibe and classic feel, fulfilling both the function of opener and title track in embodying the mission of the album and starting it off in a way that provides listeners with an instant context for what follows. A folk ballad, it’s just one of the several song structures Weinrich works within on Adrift, and he follows it with the 12-bar blues of “I Don’t Care.” His voice, long a trademark in the sundry bands he’s fronted, is tenser than a lot of the kind throwaway Appalachian or Delta blues players, but he handles it well and the album’s first electric guitar solo, which fades the track out at the end, covers a lot of ground.

“Hold on Love” was an advance track on MySpace and a good choice by whoever picked it, either Weinrich or Exile on Mainstream, because after only listening to it once online and putting on the album for the first time, I immediately recognized it and remembered the double-tracked vocals of the chorus. Another storytelling song, it’s one of the most complete tracks on Adrift, and where some of the ultra-bare arrangements on the album feel like they could have been fleshed out or at very least would have been were this not Weinrich’s first exploration of the medium, “Hold on Love” is complete in every sense, soulful and sincere. Another, more mournful electric solo keeps the energy established in “I Don’t Care” alive as “Mala Suerte” comes on with what are probably the “heaviest” sonics Adrift has to offer.

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