Deadwood - 8 19

Oh Boy! I have been waiting with anticipation to hear this for quite some time. Deadwood AKA Deadwood Murder is a side project of Nekro from Sweden's Blodulv, one of my very favourite black metal bands. In fact, 'Pagan Panzer' was a masterpiece, no matter how you look at it.

This is a Noise-emphatic album, which may take a bit of attention to win me over, as although I am not unfamiliar with Noise, I don't rate it as one of my favourite genres, (Control were fucking excellent though).

There is a very huge popularity with black metal artists branching out and recording ambient based music, especially among the Slavonic and Eastern scenes. One recent European success was Mikko from Clandestine Blaze's 'Alchemy of the 20th Century' project.

Six tracks at 50 minutes is very ambitious, in fact, apart from the final 4 minute number, the rest of the album has tracks at ten minutes or more.

'Antabus' is actually a very twisted and enjoyable piece, its noise, but it's low in the mix as to not deafen you, and the layers of static and chaotic noise are overshadowed by very disgusting spoken vocals, a real black metal element carrying over from Blodulv, and adding a nice shade of character to the album. Did I mention there's wonderful necrotic screams too? Just take a Grey Wolves style track and slap vocals like Xasthur over the top of it (but more finely tuned and established), and this is just the foundation of what you can expect here.

'8 19' carries a lot of ambient aesthetics, "Crushing On" is a quieter ambient track, with echoes of the Black Ambient terror that wouldn't be out of miss on an Amaka Hahina cd.

The title track takes us back to the roots, with more black noise, and the only words I can really use to describe this are fucking enjoyable. This will appeal to most fans of Black Metal, and perhaps even open the floodgates to a new collective genre to focus energies on.

I honestly didn't expect to like this, I expected to hear about two minutes of static hisses and loud guitar belches before getting bored and sitting in the corner, whimpering, but my mind has just been turned around. The Black Metal vocals really add a huge, necessary element to the album, and it is very likely to become a favourite.

At this point, I'll urge you to not just check out Deadwood, but to check out Blodulv too. Even if you don't like Black Metal, because being able to make the comparison between both projects, and see where the similarities lie adds a lot of appreciation to this release.

Another Cold Spring success. Sep 29 2006