Atlantean Kodex - The Pnakotic Demos

One of my most played albums of 2010 was Atlantean Kodex's ambitious album The Golden Bough, one of those rare records to which the word "epic" can be applied without just meaning "long songs" and "attention-span challenging." This demo recording, released a handful of years earlier, showed them honing their chosen methods to a fine point with which to pierce dimensional boundaries. It's named for the pre-human manuscripts recording the secret history of the universe, having been added to and modified over many millenia, much like the human Bible, albeit on a much larger scale.
Similar perspective-shattering broadmindedness is a key factor here, and I must warn you that the depth and breadth do not begin to emerge until careful study is made. The devoted student will find much to absorb, however.
'neath shadow green and standing stone
Far from the rule of modern throne

The Ziggurat - Hymns of the Cthulhu Mythos

What can we say about the Ziggurat? Their palpable enthusiasm for Lovecraftiana is undeniable, and the primitive death metal approach is just on this side of competent, but something about this band just makes me smile and shake my head in amused bafflement. Everything about them, from the goofy song titles (my favorite, sadly not on this album, is "Chocolate Shoggoth Shake") to the requisite Geocities homepage to this photo of band leader Dwayne Boyd, screams unintentional hilarity. This particular LP might be less obviously amusing if the vocals weren't twice as loud as everything else and the drums didn't sound like rubber tubs, but then it wouldn't be as memorable either. Ah well, who cares what we think?
Into the Dank Abyss

Payne's Gray - Kadath Decoded

We've got a doozy for you today, little ones, so take a seat and perhaps do some breathing exercises to steel yourself against this onslaught on your earholes. Short-lived German prog band Payne's Gray (tellingly named after a muddy bluish-gray pigment) seemingly only ever managed to self-release two cassettes and this album before vanishing off the face of the earth, but they certainly left a...memorable epitaph. Certainly Lovecraft's crowning epic The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is prime material for an overblown concept album, ripe as it is with bizarre detail, episodic travelogue anecdotes, and sprawling geography, and surely Germany is as good as any place for pretentious puffy-shirted doofuses to make such an album, but when it's all said and done, how the hell does it end up sounding like this, especially in 1995? Far beyond your typical flute-happy technical pomposity (although there is by no means a lack of flute playing at any point), Payne's Gray is a virtual bubbling fondue pot in which the myriad concepts and styles are dipped and gummed together into one heart-attack inducing cheese-coated unidentifiable blob. Cheap synths, electronic drums, baroque acoustic guitar runs, wildly off-key wailing from not one but two mustachioed singers, impenetrable syncopated rhythms seemingly created to stifle foot-tapping or head-nodding, and a baffling central theme somehow all add up to create something even larger than the sum of its parts. Oh, my kingdom for a lyric sheet! The mind whirls.

I realize there's been quite a bit of questionable prog posted here in the past few weeks, but we can't just listen to stoner rock and Swamp Dogg all the time, it makes the brain lazy. No apologies.

Busy warrior during night
Changing paws to fearsome weapon
Jumping then on moonshine heights
Where you fight the terrors threat-on.

The Hastur Cycle - Mike, Shut the Fuck Up

Salutations, scumbags! I have returned from merciful oblivion carrying copious amounts of medicinal resinated heavy metal in a garbage bag slung over my shoulder, scraping down your chimney like a loathesome Santa. A recent re-reading of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath goosed your foul narrator to the fact that Unspeakable Hastur hasn't been spoken of enough here in the Swamp, so let's annihilate life as we know it with this wacky thrash record, which is brief but extremely memorable, like being headbutted by a goat. Note the two subtle puns - not only the drug related band initials but also the seemingly silly album title, obviously a sly nod to He Who Shall Not Be Named. Say it aloud with me:
Hastur Hastur Hastuuuuurrrrrrrrrr

Aldebaran - Dwellers in Twilight

Poetically named after the distant star circled by a dark planet ruled by The High Priest Not to Be Described, a.k.a. He Who Cannot Be Named, Portland's crusty doomslingers Aldebaran deliver evil with the patience of an undying embodiment, an apotheosis of gleeful, dancing chaos. Wikipedia would ignorantly have it that this nameless entity is an avatar of our beloved Nyarlathotep, but true scholars know that all signs point to Hastur the Unspeakable, the half-brother of Cthulhu. Much like the monstrous yellow-robed flautist himself, the band slowly allows its "music" to unfold over a seeming eternity, drawing the incautious into its sinister bliss while draining them dry of life and hope. The album begins simply, with ringing open whole notes, but slowly melodic fragments appear and eventually begin to overlap and intertwine, with sinister growls and bellowed cries competing for earspace in an increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere. Surrender to their charms and be lost, little speck.
A motionless descent sightless and silent into blackened gulphs

Khoral - Uniforms of Snow

Arcane and pleasingly atavistic instrumental music composed on primitive rhythm machines decades past their prime and sound-wave bending synthesizers from the remotest plateau of Moog, this is a concept album based on At the Mountains of Madness, a soundtrack to a movie remembered but never made. Eerie signals from another time, inscrutable hieroglyphics carved by an alien hand, widely shunned as somehow namelessly evil.
On the other hand, for the hoarder of bizarre materials...