Posted in Whathaveyou on December 6th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
You know about as much as I do about the new palindromic The Mountain King release, WolloW. The German experimentalist doom outfit will issue the full-length on Feb. 22 as their not-first outing through Cursed Monk Records, and while I got a link to check out the record, it seems band founder and spearhead Eric McQueen isn’t quite giving away all the sonic details yet, because while the track “IV Sophos” is there in full, everything else appears in a minute-long snippet. A sampler platter, then. If you want a word for the initial impression, it would be “weird.” If you want two words, “weird” and “heavy.”
Bodes well, then.
Likewise prolific and insular even as McQueen sets about expanding the lineup from what used to be a solo-project, The Mountain King continue to build their hall release by release with no compromise in their conceptual purpose. I look forward to getting to know this one better.
From the PR wire:
The Mountain King – WolloW – Cursed Monk Records
Hello fellow listeners,
From the makers of “Wicked Zen” and “The Smell Of Stars And Vomit”, a new sound experience arises:
“Wollow”, the new mind- and time-twisting album by The Mountain King.
The album, a mixture of post rock, avantgarde black metal, stoner doom and shoe gaze, will run back and forth simultaneously as their first full palindromic album, while each direction offers a unique listening experience which will unfold its full picture on february 22nd, 2022.
Also we’re honoured to present a special guest on the bass guitar: Jack Cradock.
1. I Bongnob 2. II in girum imus noctem aram et consumimur igni 3. III Wollow 4. IV Sophos (Preorder Mix) 5. V DNA Sand 6. sohpoS VI 7. wolloW III 8. ingi rumimusnoc te mara metcon sumi murig ni II 9. bongnoB I
Mixing – Eric McQueen Mastering – Jan Grimm Mastering
Cover photo – Jane Cave Photography Layout – Eric McQueen
The Mountain King: Guitars, vocals, lyrics, programming – Eric McQueen Guitars – Frank Grimbarth Bass – Jack Cradock
Posted in Bootleg Theater on November 24th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Dublin-based Beneath the Sod — the mostly-solo-project of Raymond Keenaghan, also of Gourd — will release its self-titled EP on Dec. 17 through Cursed Monk Records. It is a work of atmospheric extremity, comprised of six songs running 28 minutes that, from opener “Silence of Lead” to finale “Deafness of Lead,” grips the listener with a lurching, semi-industrial sonic brutality. “Drooping Spirit” stinks of hot death. “Silence of Lead” rages to a forward riff and a drum-machine march that’s like Godflesh from the dark universe, and the cave-echo vocals, samples and rumbling, post-Khanate barely-a-song-ism of the piano-for-emphasis “Begotten of Grot” (video premiering below) — the first of two tracks to feature guest vocals from Unyielding Love‘s Richard Carson, the other being “Deafness of Lead” — follows with a further plunge into some oily abyss that only gets heavier and more maddening as it consumes across its five minutes.
It’s not so much a video premiere as it is a psychological test. A moving Rorschach of horrors across five minutes set to the audio from your deathly poetic nightmares. Though its underlying mechanized grit remains, highlighting (lowlighting?) the balance of rawness and concept that almost inherently coincides with something even partially industrial as Beneath the Sod is; that is to say, at some point during the process of making the thing, it’s likely Keenaghan looked at a waveform, and thought to himself that indeed this was the noise he wanted to make. That’s a jarring thought as “Expulsion of Revulsion” plays out its lumbering ugh-ness and “Rustling of the Spheres” kicks the tempo up but is almost so noisy in the process you’d hardly notice if not for the biting high frequency cut-through of the digitized cymbals. With “Deafness of Lead” — the EP running between silence and deafness, mind you — first calling back to (admittedly, a more active) Khanate before departing suddenly before two minutes in to a more disjointed version of the same progression on which it long-fades out, the proverbial last nail in the coffin proves no less rusty than any of the others.
It is well and truly fucked, on aesthetic terms, and “Begotten of Grot” should probably best be viewed in either a vomit-stank dungeon or a chic Dublin art gallery with the video projected on a white wall while viewers rest chins on their hands and discern whatever message from its raw scathe might be the most pretentious.
Not appropriate to say “enjoy” here, as I generally might, but if you can appreciate the expressive gruel of something so intended toward such punishment — and not everyone can, and that’s okay — well then, enjoy.
PR wire info follows the clip below:
Beneath the Sod, “Begotten of Grot” video premiere
Beneath the Sod is the one man project of Raymond Keenaghan, one half of Doom Noise merchants Gourd.
On December 17th we will be releasing Beneath The Sod’s new self-titled EP on CD and digital.
This will be Beneath The Sod’s third release after their debut album Circling the Drain (Fort Evil Fruit, 2017), and their split with Crypticum, Transmorphic Eye (Cursed Monk Records, 2018).
Featuring guest vocals from Richard Carson (Unyielding Love) on “Begotten of Grot” and “Deafness of Lead,” this latest offering from Beneath The Sod offers up an intense serving of Industrial Doom, a claustrophobic experience which sounds like the sonic equivalent of a panic attack. Quite frankly, we think it’s their best work to date.
Beneath the Sod scrape back the top soil to lay bare all that is repulsive and feculent beneath. Narcotic and eldritch, Beneath the Sod erodes the listener with a writhing tapestry of industrial doom, grinding noise and hallucinatory horror. Punishing and bewildering, with each release Beneath the Sod sinks deeper into their unique and singularly maddening mire.
Posted in Reviews on October 4th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Hope you had a good weekend. Hope your bank account survived Bandcamp Friday. I gotta admit, I hit it a little hard, made four $10-plus purchases. A certain rainforest-named mega-corporate everything-distro site has me out of the habit of thinking of paying for shipping, but that comes back to bite you. And if there’s a tape or a CD and the download costs $7 and the tape costs $10 and comes with the download too, what would you have me do? Throw another five or six bucks in there for shipping and that adds up. Still, for a good cause, which is of course supporting bands nd labels who make and promote killer stuff. I don’t mind that.
We’ve arrived at the next to last day of the Fall 2021 Quarterly Review. It’s a cool one, I hope you’ll agree. If not, maybe tomorrow.
Quarterly Review #51-60:
Hour of 13, Black Magick Rites
The history of Hour of 13, 14 years on from their self-titled debut (discussed here) is complex and full of comings and goings. With Black Magick Rites — which was posted for a day in Nov. 2020 and then removed from the public sphere until this Shadow Kingdom release — founding multi-instrumentalist Chad Davis takes over vocal duties as well, charting the way forward for the band as a complete solo-project with seven songs and 43 minutes of lower-fi classic-style doom that bears in its title track some semblance of garage mentality but avoids most of the modern trappings such a designation implies. Satan features heavily, as one would expect. “House of Death” leans on its chorus hard, but opener “His Majesty of the Wood” and the eight-minute “Within the Pentagram,” as well as the payoff of closer “The Mystical Hall of Dreams” seem to show where the long-tumultuous outfit could be headed melodically and in grimly grandiose style if Davis — also of The Crooked Whispers, The Sabbathian, countless others in a variety of styles — wills it. Here’s hoping.
Graceful death. 30 years later, one might expect no less from Finnish funeral doom progenitors than that, and it’s exactly what they bring to the six-song/48-minute Companion. “Calla” sets the tempo for what follows at a dirge march with keyboard adding melodies to the procession as “The Intertwined” continues the slow roll, with drums and piano taking over in the midsection before the full brunt is borne again. “The March of the Four” follows with church organ running alongside the drawn-out guitar movement, each hit of the kick drum somehow forlorn beneath the overlaid growls. At least superficially, this is the Skepticism one imagines: slow, mournful, beauty-in-darkness, making dirty sounds but emerging without a stain on their formalwear. Closer “The Swan and the Raven” is a triumph in this, a revelry-that-isn’t, and “Passage” and even gives the tempo a relative kick, but that and the consuming drama of “The Inevitable” feel within the band’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Or their mortuary, anyhow. Honestly, they know what they’re doing, they’ve done it for a long time, and they don’t release records that often, so there’s an element of novelty just to the fact that the album exists, but if you put on Companion and listen to it, they also sound like they’re taking an entire genre to school. A genre they helped define, no less.
Long-running Swedish doom traditionalists Count Raven are in immediate conversation with their own classic era with the album title The Sixth Storm serving as a reference to their 1990 debut, Storm Warning. Indeed, it is their sixth full-length, and it makes up for the decade-plus it’s been since they were last heard from with a 73-minute, all-in nine-track assemblage of oldschool Sabbathian doom metal, tinged with classic heavy rock and a broader vision that picks up where 2009’s Mammons War left off in epics like “The Nephilims” and “Oden,” the latter the album’s apex ahead of the Ozzy-ish piano/keyboard ballad “Goodbye” following on from the earlier “Heaven’s Door.” Some contemplation of mortality perhaps from founding guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist Dan “Fodde” Fondelius to go with the more socially themed “The Giver and the Taker,” “Baltic Storm,” opener “Blood Pope” or even “Oden,” which bases itself around Christianity’s destruction of pagan culture. Fair enough. Classic doom spearheaded by a guy who’s been at it for more than three decades. No revolution in style, but if you’d begrudge Count Raven their first album in 12 years, why?
Something for everyone in Owl Cave‘s Broken Speech, at least so long as your vision of “everyone” just includes fans of various extreme metallic styles. The Parisian one-man outfit’s debut release arrives as a single 43-minute track, led off by the sample “your silence speaks volumes.” What unfolds from there is a linear progression of movements through which S. — the lone party responsible for the guitar, bass, drum programming and other sampling, as there are obscure bits that might be manipulated voices and so on — weaves progressive black metal, doom, industrial churn, noise rock and other genre elements together with a willful sense of experimentalism and uniting heft. Some stretches are abrasive, some are nearly empty, some guitar-led, some more percussive, but even at its most raging, “Broken Speech” holds to its overarching atmosphere, grim as it is, and that allows it to ponder with scorn and melancholy alike before finishing out with a cacophony of blasts and wash leading to a last residual drone.
Sharply executed, uptempo heavy/desert-style rock in the Californian tradition as filtered through a European legacy of bands that spans no less an amount of time, Zeup‘s second EP, Blind, is an in-and-out kind of affair. Four songs, 17 minutes. They’re not looking to take up too much of your day. But the energy they bring to that time, whether it’s the swinging bassline in “Belief” or the initial jolt of “Illusions,” the rolling catchiness of “Who You Are” or the closing title-track’s more Sabbath-spirited stomp, is organic, full, and sincere. In terms of style, the Copenhagen three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Jakob Bach, bassist/backing vocalist Morten Rold and drummer Morten Barth aren’t trying to get away with convincing anybody they invented heavy rock and roll, but the stamp they put on their own songs is welcome right up to the capper solo on “Blind” itself. Familiar, but crisp and refreshing like cold beer on a hot day, if that’s your thing.
A drift calls you forward as Dark Bird‘s fourth album (amid many short releases and experimentalist whathaveyous), Out of Line, begins with “And it All Ends Well” and its title-track, the Toronto-based Roan Bateman pushing outward melodically before adding more fuzz to the shroom-folk of “Stranger,” an underlying sense of march telling of the made-in-dark-times spirit that so much of the record seems to actively work against. “Down With Love” is a dream given shimmer in its strum and no less ethereal when the maybe-programmed drums start, and “Undone” is the bummed-out-with-self ’90s-lysergic harmony that you never heard at the time but should have. So it goes en route to the buzzing finale “This is It,” with “Minefied” echoing “Out of Line” with a vibe like Masters of Reality at their most ethereal, “With You” making a late highlight of its underlying organ drone and the vocals that top it in the second half, and “The Ghost” somehow turning Western blues despite, no, not at all doing that thing. 43 minutes of a world I’d rather live in.
I’m not saying they don’t still have growing to do or work ahead of them in carving out their own approach from the elements their self-released debut album, Death Can Change, puts to work across its nine songs, but I am definitely saying that the Toledo, Ohio, duo of M.A. Snyder and Mike Mullholand, who’ve dubbed their project Hope Hole, are starting out in an admirable place. Throughout a vinyl-ready 37 minutes that makes a centerpiece of the roughed up The Cure cover “Kyoto Song,” the two-piece bridge sludged nod, classic heavy rock, progressive doom ambience, stonerly awareness — see “Cisneros’ Lament” — and a healthy dose of organ to result in a genre-blender sound that both chases individuality and manifests it in rudimentary form, perhaps arriving at some more melodic cohesion in the of-its-era closer “Burning Lungs” after rougher-edged processions, but even there not necessarily accounting for the full scope of the rest of the songs enough to be a full summary. The songs are there, though, and as Hope Hole continue to chase these demons, that will be the foundation of their progress.
Newcastle, UK, weirdo solo-outfit Smote released the two-part Drommon concurrent to March 2021’s Bodkin (review here), with tapes sold out from Base Materialism, and Rocket Recordings now steps in for a vinyl issue with two additional tracks splitting up the two-part title-cut, each piece of which runs just on either side of 16 minutes long. Drones and acid folk instrumentation, acoustics, sitars, electrified swirl — all of these come together in purposeful passion to create the textures of “Dommon (Part 1)” and “Drommon (Part 2),” and though it feels more directed with the complementary “Hauberk” and “Poleyn” included, the album’s experimental heart is well intact. Smote will make a stage debut next month, apparently as a four-piece around founder Daniel Foggin, so how that might play into the future of Smote as a full band in the studio remains to be seen. Drommon serves as argument heavily in favor of finding out.
East Coast dudes playing West Coast noise, it may well be that Gristmill deserve points right off the bat on their debut long-player, Heavy Everything, both for the title and for avoiding the trap of sounding like Unsane that defines so, so, so much of Atlantic Seaboard noise rock. They’re too aggro in their delivery to be straight-up doom, but the slower crawl of guitar in “Remains Nameless” and “Glass Door” adds depth to the pounding delivered by the initial salvo of “Mitch,” “Mute” and “Irony,” but the punch of the bass throughout is unmistakable, and though I can’t help be reminded in listening about that time Seattle’s Akimbo went and wrote a record based in my beloved Garden State, the drawn-out roll of “Stone Rodeo” and final nod-into-chug in “Loon” show readiness to encompass something beyond the raw scathe in their work. Yeah, if they wanted to put out like six or seven albums that sound just like this over the next 15 or so years, I’d probably be on board for that for the meanness and more of this debut.
This is a satisfying meat grinder in which to plunge one’s face for about an hour. A Buschemi-chipper. A powdering-of-bone that begins with the lurching of longest track (immediate points) “The Masque” — beginning with an acid-test sample, no less — and moving through “Gleancrawler” and the faster-for-a-while-but-still-probably-slower-than-you’re-thinking title-track, having just consumed half an hour of your life and a little of your soul. Hyperbole? Of course. But these are extreme sounds and extreme times, so fuck it. Melbourne duo Ivory Primarch, throughout As All Life Burns, demonstrate precious little regard for whatever standard of decency one might apply, and the deathly, fetid “Keeper of Secrets” and the keyboard-laced “Aetherbeast” — seeming to answer back to the opener — are self-aware enough to be willful in that, not to mention the fact that they top off with the noise-drone of “Aftermath,” as if to survey the devastation they just wrought, mangled and duly bludgeoned. Nothing sounds cruel enough? Try this.
Posted in Whathaveyou on September 16th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Despite the proverbial hell and highwater — also the literal fire, flood and plague, now that I think about it — Cursed Monk Records will release Ivory Primarch‘s debut album on CD Nov. 5, and preorders are up now. This was precisely the plan way, way back in July — ah, remember July? simpler times — when the label announced it had picked up the Melbourne-based bringers-of-bludgeon. The record is just under an hour long, six tracks, and mountainously heavy. I still don’t know jack about Warhammer 40k, but sample-laced mega-sludge is its own excuse for being as far as I’m concerned. As All Life Burnsis a monster. Hail “Aetherbeast.”
The label sent the following this morning down the PR wire. If you missed “The Masque,” which opens the record, last time, now’s your chance. Good luck:
Ivory Primarch – As All Life Burns – Nov. 5
Cursed Monk Records are proud to announce that we are working with the Warhammer 40k inspired, Australian harbingers of Doom, purveyors of Sludge, and alterers of reality, Ivory Primarch on their debut album “As All Life Burns”
Ivory Primarch is the Brainchild of Songwriter/Bassist Elzevir.
Through reflecting on solitude, pleasure, misery, excess, loss, space, reality and legacy, Elzevir attempts to explore and bring to light feelings of these concepts through Ivory Primarch’s oppressive and funeral dirge like compositions, flavoured with tinges of sludge and psychedelia.
Vorador takes the reins on vocals and lyrical arrangement. Telling stories of the people, beasts and places that personify the concepts, ideas, visions plaguing Elzevir’s mind.
Coming 3 years after the demo “Rituals of Excess” “As All Life Burns” is the first full length album from Ivory Primarch portraying and bringing forth the Representation of Elzevir’s wild envisionment.
“As All Life Burns” will be released on CD and digital November 5th, and can be preordered now! Each preorder comes with the immediate download of the first single from the album, “The Masque” and brand new track “Gleancrawler”
Posted in Whathaveyou on July 2nd, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Well, today I learned what Warhammer 40,000 is. Kind of. It was part of an attempt to search out an origin for the word “primarch,” as in the moniker of Melbourne, Australia’s Ivory Primarch, who are newly signed to Cursed Monk Records for the release this Fall of their debut album, As All Life Burns. There’s a track up now from the album streaming at the bottom of this post.
If you’ve never watched the video of the LSD experiment on William Millarc (also discussed here) from which the sample that opens this song is taken, I can only recommend it. Certainly the track that ensues offers its fair share of shifting realities as well, harsh as those may be. Aus sludge doesn’t fuck around, as history has shown.
The PR wire has info:
Cursed Monk Records are thrilled to announce that we will be working with Australian based Ivory Primarch on the release of their debut album “As All Life Burns.”
Ivory Primarch is the BrainChild of Songwriter/Bassist Elzevir. Through reflecting on solitude, pleasure, misery, excess, loss, space, reality and legacy, Elzevir attempts to explore and bring to light feelings of these concepts through Ivory Primarch’s oppressive and funeral dirge like compositions, flavoured with tinges of sludge and psychedelia.
Vorador takes the reins on vocals and lyrical arrangement. Telling stories of the people, beasts and places that personify the concepts, ideas, visions plaguing Elzevir’s mind.
Coming 3 years after the demo “Rituals of Excess” “As All Life Burns” is the first full length album from Ivory Primarch portraying and bringing forth the Representation of Elzevir’s wild envisionment.
“As All Life Burns” will be released in November with preorders beginning in September.
Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 28th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Look. I don’t know the cats from Belfast trio Nomadic Rituals at all. I was fortunate enough to see the band in Dublin in 2017 (review here), but it’s not like we hung out after the show or anything. Point is, for all I know, baritone guitarist/vocalist Peter Hunter (also synth), bassist/vocalist Craig Carson and drummer Mark Smyth could be absolute sweethearts — really nice guys. But their sound is nasty as fuck.
Crushing, wrenching, slow-motion-grinding atmospheric sludge is writ all across the feels-longer-than 45 minutes of their third full-length, Tides, released earlier this month through respected Irish purveyor Cursed Monk Records. The follow-up to 2017’s likewise gruesome Marking the Day (review here), the six-song Tides gives the listener hints in how to approach it in how it leads off. While it begins with an initial onslaught of noise meant to symbolize the ‘launch’ in the title of opener/longest track (immediate points) “Cassini-Huygens Part 1 (The Launch),” what builds up over the next few minutes from there is gradual, recalling some of We Lost the Sea‘s Challenger-themed post-rock, if in immediately heavier fashion. Shortly before three and a half minutes in, however, the switch is flipped and the thicker chug arrives, followed shortly thereafter by the harsh, barking vocals that will pervade much of what follows, adding to the extremity of the band’s approach overall.
But it’s in the pairing of “Cassini-Huygens Part 1 (The Launch)” and the subsequent “Cassini-Huygens Part 2 (Last Transmission)” that Tides tells you how to read it. Of course it splits in half to accommodate vinyl with three songs on two sides, but if you’re listening, say, digitally, it also functions as three sets of two songs each. You get the “Cassini-Huygens” duology named for the mission to study Saturn, and you get “Them” and Tumulus” paired, the one ending in silence, the other picking up from it, and you get the slow-building “Moving Towards Total Disorganization” feeding into closer “The Burden” — more than just an intro, but certainly complementary in how it rolls out, ending quiet and giving way to the more immediate low-end pulsations of the finale. Nomadic Rituals by no means go out of their way to make moves toward accessibility — even unto the depths of “The Burden,” they are ferocious, shifting between angular churn and sample-laced noise, only to end with scathing layers of feedback — but with a different understanding of how Tides might be intended to work, the perspective shifts accordingly, and the immersion that is so well enacted by the songs becomes even more vital.
However you go through Tides, one should be aware of the undertow that comes with the trio’s lumbering oscillations. That is to say, the album is one that does not blink as it pulls the listener into its sphere, at once broad and spacious and crushing and freezing the way one thinks of vacuum affecting lungs; gorgeous and destructive in kind.
You’ll find the Bandcamp stream of the full release down toward the bottom of the post, and I’m thrilled to host the premiere of the video for “Them” below.
However you approach, please enjoy:
Nomadic Rituals, “Them” official video premiere
Nomadic Rituals are a heavy 3-piece Sludge/Doom band from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Formed in July 2012 by Craig Carson, Peter Hunter, and Mark Smyth, the band started writing and gigging, when they released 3 self-recorded tracks that became their demo “DFWG”. This was followed up with the recording of a full-length album in late March 2013 with Niall Doran at Start Together Studios, Belfast. Released in September of that year, “Holy Giants” garnered a number of very positive reviews.
Gigging continued after release of the album, and the increasing attention received by the band opened up opportunities for shows further afield. Writing also continued, and the band returned to Start Together Studios to work with Niall Doran on the recording of “The Great Dying”. This was released in late February 2015 as a split 12″ vinyl along with fellow local Doom band Tome.
Further gigging and a lengthy period of writing followed, after which the band returned to Start Together Studio to record their second full length album ‘Marking the Day’ in late March 2016. As with the first two releases, the artwork and packaging for the new album was created, designed and screen printed by the band themselves. ‘Marking the Day’ was released in February 2017.once again to critical acclaim.
After several gigs in countries such as Denmark, Norway and Lithuania the band return with their third album ‘Tides’ which was released on CD, Cassette, and Digital Download on the 8th of January 2021 through Cursed Monk Records.
Posted in audiObelisk on July 14th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
Limerick, Ireland’s TOOMS will release their debut album, The Orb Offers Massive Signals, this Friday, July 17, through Cursed Monk Records. The acronym-monikered three-piece have already unveiled a couple tracks from the offering, as one will, but as the (I assume) last piece to a densely-weighted riffy puzzle, they offer the fitting summary “One Ton Soup,” and as you’ll probably expect given the context of the band’s name, the song’s title, the label putting it out and just about everything else up to the looks on their faces in their press photo, it’s rather heavy. They call it “thicc” and I’m not inclined to argue.
Something else “One Ton Soup” does, though is blend styles in some unexpected ways. The angularity of the opening progression, for example, and the manner in which it gives way to lurching extremity, the overarching weight seeming to rumble in the high end as well as the low, the whole thing sounding fierce and lurching with samples behind, obscured by the next round of pummeling that soon begins. The song runs seven minutes total, so it’s not a minor sampling by any means of the 10 track offering — though I’ll admit to no small amount of curiosity to hear “Megalobong,” especially given their stated affinity for earlier Mastodon — and as “One Ton Soup” breaks at its halfway point to crashes and snare march (and samples), the procession feels all the more extreme-sludge for its sense of militarism; the song almost sounds like it’s beating itself with itself. Like if you were to self-flagellate by slapping your own face, but with the riff.
Is it massive? Well it’s frickin’ called “One Ton Soup,” so yes thank you very much it is. A quiet line of Fender Rhodes comes in to finish, kind of out of nowhere, but the distorted underpinning remains, and the landscape over which TOOMS just marched for the last three and a half minutes of the track is duly flattened. I don’t know what happens when “Krokodil Den” takes hold as the next track on The Orb Offers Massive Signals, but I know listening to “One Ton Soup” makes me curious to find out, so I suppose that’s one reason to roll out the ol’ ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner, if you needed one.
Preorders are up now through Cursed Monk‘s Bandcamp, from which the following player also comes, bringing the premiere of “One Ton Soup.”
Before I turn you over to the music, I’d like to extend thanks to the band for the thought and detail and personality they put into the quote about it. Sometimes you ask a band for a quote about a song and they give you a half-sentence that equates to “duh we wrote it dude.” Fair enough, but it’s clear TOOMS took the time to really give some background — right down to the lyrics and the gear they used — and it is appreciated.
Enjoy the track:
TOOMS on “One Ton Soup”:
With “One Ton Soup” we basically tried to write the nastiest, heaviest choon possible at that time.
The intro was 100% inspired by High On Fire’s “Hung Drawn and Quartered.” The rest of the song? Not sure exactly where it came from, just carved itself out of the stratosphere by jamming, and we managed to stumble upon these riffs.
There is a chord in the slowed down part that we call the Lamb of God chord, and the main part of the song, in hindsight, was probably inspired by “Mother Puncher”-era Mastodon. There is also that black metal tremolo part before the thicc crushing S L O W outro, so we were certainly drawing from many different influences.
We actually recorded the drums for this way before we did guitars, and did this strange slow-down-speed-up thing with the drums during the bridge between main riff sections with vocals. It was super hard to recreate on guitar, and just didn’t seem right, so we chopped the drums a little for that part to make it feel less stumbling, and because of that it gives it a little feel of industrial/electronic music, which was totally a happy accident.
The guitars are layered much on the whole album with many many pedals, from wah-pedals cocked all the way down and drowned in distortion, to filter pedals mangled with custom built fuzz pedals,(“The Sodomizer” being a aptly named one) But on this particular song, the guitar tone is mostly just coming from overdriven amp distortion. Used a modded Bugera head that’s basically a Fender Bassman, and a Jch50 on the overdrive channel. Layered em both, used a 2×12 cab with celestions in it, and boom, TONE.
Our sound engineer and recording genius Chris also came up with some great ideas, one of which being to vari-speed the guitars; which is basically, play the riff twice as fast, record that, then slow it back to its written speed and pitch correct it. It gives a dragging, lumbering feel (have probably got that way wrong, but that is the jist). Chris also played all the nasty bubbling sounds that you can hear beneath the riffs during the bridge. He also followed the guitar’s melody line during the outro and played the Fender Rhodes that fades in and takes the song to a whole new level, which was a collective idea that stemmed from many hours together in little rooms making guitars sound horrible.
The sample just before the outro kicks into full gear is taken from Black Dynamite, just to remind us all that metal can be heavy as fuck, but doesn’t need to be super serious all the time (Looking at you death metal).
Vocal and lyrical wise, it’s a song basically about soup that drinks you and follows the description of you (the listener) becoming used as an ingredient in the Devil’s broth, and describes in detail all the gross ways in which you are dismantled and turned into a human crouton.
It had originally just been the first couple of lines repeated over and over. But on the day of tracking the vocals, it didn’t seem right or do the music justice, so the vocals were written as they were being tracked. As far as the vocal delivery is concerned, it was very much “vocals as an instrument” kind of approach. We thought about putting more vocals on the outro, but felt like it just didn’t need any there, it felt complete and once the Rhodes melody was added, we knew it was done.
Lyrics: One. One tone. One. Tone soup burns you. Burns. Boils teeth. Melts. Gums and scalds lips. You. You chose. The. Special of the day. Death. Death broth. Death. Death broth drinks you. Wake. Wake up. Wake. Wake up in wok. Now. Now your. Now. Now you’re sautéed. Shaved. And skinned. Hung. You been bleed dry. Blow. It’s hot. Blow. Or tongue get sore. Death. Death broth. Death. Death broth bubbles. One. One tone. One. Tone soup drank you. Your. Your blood. Your. Blood and guts gone. Hot. Hot oils. Skin. Crispy garnish. Taste. Taste good. Hu. Hu-man hot pot. Devil. Devil chef. Serve. You soup on plate. Death. Death broth. Death. Death rules world
Posted in Whathaveyou on June 8th, 2020 by JJ Koczan
With pieces of the album recorded in the US, Venezuela, Germany and Greece, it’s no wonder that The Mountain King‘s debut long-player, Wicked Zen, carries a marked sense of stylistic scope. The album has been snagged by Irish imprint Cursed Monk Records for a limited release on CD, and by “limited” I mean there are 50 copies on the band’s Bandcamp and the label’s Bandcamp, and that’s it. I’m not even sure if that’s 50 total or 50 each, but either way, it’s not a lot. 50 though is more than the handmade first-edition special book/CD version of the album the band put out themselves on CD, which was 33 copies, though there was also a digipak pressing that had 66 copies. Okay, so maybe add that all up and it comes out to “still pretty limited.”
There’s a tape, too. 66 copies.
I have no idea — how would I? — how many copies of any or all of these there are left, but the difference near as I can tell with the Cursed Monk version of Wicked Zen is it has two bonus tracks. That right there makes it worth chasing down in my book, whatever other options may coincide with it. And I’m not trying to spend your money or anything, but no one ever said you had to stick to one, either
I cobbled the following together from various announcements and whatnot:
CURSED MONK RECORDS – THE MOUNTAIN KING – WICKED ZEN
SURPRISE RELEASE!!! (We told you we had something cool planned.)
Cursed Monk Records would like to welcome The Mountain King to the cult!
The Mountain King play a heady mix of psychedelia tinged, mediative funeral doom. It is an awe inspiring sound!
Their album “Wicked Zen” is available from our store now on CD and DD. Recorded by The Mountain King in Germany, USA, Venezuela and Greece. Check it out below.
The band says: “The great Cursed Monk Records and we crossed paths and thus came into being an extended version of Wicked Zen with 2 bonus tracks and an exclusive artwork by Steffen and myself. We’re really stoked about all this, honestly.”
The Mountain King are: Eric McQueen: Guitars, Bass, Theremin, Hammond, Synths, Vocals, Lyrics Frank Gr’mbarth Dillschnitter: Additional guitar Daniel Gallardo: Drums Manuel El Churro Churión: Sitar Yorgos Mourkousis: Saz
