Blackwolfgoat, Dragonwizardsleeve: True Cult Noise Worship Blues Drone Ambient Black Doom, and Other Stuff Too
Posted in Reviews on July 12th, 2010 by JJ KoczanBeing an entirely solo instrumental guitar venture, it’s clear right off the bat that Blackwolfgoat is never going to be for everyone, never going to be the band you put on to get the party going, not the drive fast, blast-it-out-your-window-on-an-open-highway American chronicle. Darryl Shepard, previously of notable Boston outfits like Milligram and Hackman (both also on Small Stone), helms and comprises Blackwolfgoat, and on his full-length debut, Dragonwizardsleeve, he reminds that loops, drones and noise aren’t necessarily relegated as tools only for hipster art students or freakout psychedelics. Somehow, this drone rocks.
Understand that’s a relative statement, but as Dragonwizardsleeve’s opening cut, “Risk and Return,” slowly fades itself out, one comes to understand in listening to it that the track does have structure, a gradual build, more like something off a King Crimson solo album than ambient drone. “Death of a Lifer” brings in distortion and a Neurosis Given to the Rising-type feel (the track I’m thinking of is “Origin”), but never seems settled on itself, even as the same riff cycles through the track with noises added on top of it. There’s an urgency here; a kind of hectic and unsettled feeling. The guitars (Shepard provides a couple) feel on-edge and are huge sonically where on any number of other ambient albums an understated minimalism seems to be the goal. Hearing the cabinet speakers rumble at the end of the track, that’s clearly not the goal for Blackwolfgoat.
The pun-titled “Tinnitus the Night” follows and keeps much the same atmosphere as “Death of a Lifer,” albeit with a somewhat busier execution. It is another distortion build that distorts even unto itself, and though the song is among the shorter on Dragonwizardsleeve at 4:18, it carries an atmosphere much heavier than its runtime. Notable that it fades on both ends, in and out, so that it seems to creep up on you as you listen. Blackwolfgoat is a sneaky project in that it injects complexity into these songs without seeming to do so, but some of the material itself also sneaks up on you.