(Dark Ambient / Drone / Experimental) Burial Hex / Zola Jesus - Split (aro37lp) - 2009, MP3 (tracks), VBR 192-320 kbps

CRUELTY Presents:

              Artist...: Burial Hex - Zola Jesus
              Album....: Split
              Label....: Aurora Borealis
              Size.....: 53,9 MB
              Source...: Vinyl
              Playtime.: 38:42 min
              Genre....: Lo-Fi
              Release..: Aug-28-2009
              Encoder..: LAME V3.97 -V2 --Vbr-New
              Quality..: VBRkbps 44,1Hz Joint-Stereo

              TrackList:

              01  04:46  Burial Hex - Go Crystal Tears
              02  14:26  Burial Hex - Temple of the Flood
              03  19:30  Zola Jesus - Julius & Ethel

              Release Notes:
              Burial Hex’s side of the record features two tracks, the first being
              the relatively short ‘Go Crystal Tears’, which evidently represents
              something of a new musical direction for Burial Hex. It’s much more
              musically conventional, in terms of having a recognisable song structure,
              in which brittle, brooding synthpop is combined with tormented black
              metal-style vocals. The music here is almost darkwave, with a distinctly
              80s feel to it, and I've seen John Carpenter’s horror film soundtrack
              work and Dario Argento’s band Goblin specifically cited as influences.
              It’s startlingly different to anything I've heard from Burial Hex
              before, and it takes some getting used to, but it’s really good.

              The second track, ‘Temple Of The Flood’, was recorded during the same
              period as the material on Initiations, and sounds much more like what
              I've come to expect from Burial Hex – fourteen minutes of incredibly
              dark industrial ambient and ‘horror electronics’, an unclean army of
              dirty, sinister little sounds which skitter, scrape and pulse under a
              stormy sky full of booming percussion and low-end drone. It’s not too
              dissimilar from what the Edinburgh band Wraiths (who’ve also been
              released by Aurora Borealis) do. Elizabethan composer John Dowland
              gets a credit for the lyrics. For some strange reason, John Dowland
              seems to be all the rage at the moment – I've recently reviewed albums
              by Damiano Mercuri and Werkraum which both used lyrics or music by Dowland.
              Around the midpoint of ‘Temple Of The Flood’, the analogue electronics
              give way to tribal hand-drums and church organ, a campy gothic combination
              which reminds me of early Alice Cooper, specifically the track ‘Black Juju’
              from the 1971 album Love It To Death. (Alice Cooper, incidentally, like
              The Rolling Stones, gets totally underrated simply because he’s gone on
              for about 30 years too long. If Alice had quit after, say, 1973’s Muscle
              Of Love, he’d be a massive cult figure now. Things really started going
              downhill when Alice Cooper stopped being a group and started being just
              one guy.) The final section of the track adds some pensive piano, the
              sound of dripping water, and more electronic squibs and burbles before
              everything is reduced to a warm, purring wall of circuit hum and a
              final blast of organ.