Colour Haze - Tempel

Sweet Merciful Crap!  What a week.  Posting may be sporadic until the first of the month, wee ones, as your old Uncle Abdul is doing double duty outside the Swamp - burning the brazier at both ends.  All that will fit inside my enfeebled ears tonight is this soothing mystical album from Germany's premier desert rock band, Colour Haze.  Inspired by the power trios of yore and the powerful unnameable forces of the space-time continuum, the cosmic yawn filtered through flange and fuzz, they coax the listener into an out-of-body voyage through the four elements of matter and the various states of consciousness. 

Ozean

Muddy Waters - After the Rain

Muddy Water's Electric Mud was arguably the first example of post-war bluesmen adapting their sound to the burgeoning psych scene, and unlike many of his contemporaries, Muddy fully embraced the style.  After the Rain, the follow up album, gave Muddy a chance to compose in the style and adapt some of his older riffs and motifs.   Consequently the songs are a bit less far-out, but noticeably heavier and grimier.   With sidemen who played for everyone from Earth Wind and Fire to Miles Davis and early flower power group Rotary Connection, he brews up a potent stew of soul, jazz, rock, funk, and weirdness, stretching the limits of the blues and slicing razorlines in it with his slide guitar.

Bottom of the Sea

Fear No Pain

Lord Vicar is the group founded by former Reverend Bizarre guitarist Peter Inverted and vocalist Christian Lindersson, most notorious for replacing Wino in Saint Vitus on the under-appreciated "C.O.D." album. It's about what you would expect - molasses paced swaying doom riffs, eldritch lyrics, and crushing despair and hopelessness. Strangely it also sounds wonderful while I am sitting on a porch, sipping on a fruity girly drink, whiling away my first day of downtime in weeks. Ponder the futility of human existence and pass the pomegranite juice, you wanker!
Pillars Under Water

Nightmare!

Here's a moody little slice of cinematic horror jazz from Creed Taylor and his orchestra, simultaneously oozing hepcat cool and slithery menace. The third of three collaborations with film composer Kenny Hopkins, these albums are not connected to specific films but based on short horror stories and classic monster archetypes. Anticipating much strange fringe music of the next fifty years, the mix of creaky sound effects with abstract tone poems and lounge rhythm, along with occasional muffled voices, creates a delightfully eerie atmosphere that must've been a riot at cocktail parties and secretive black masses alike.
Red Eyed Rats

Black Land - Extreme Heavy Psych

Yet another self-explanatory doom album, but keep in mind that the Italians tend to do it weirder than anybody. So, how far out are you ready to go? Some minimal research reveals a mysterious history of typical opaque personal weedian occultism:
"....at the beginning the band started experimenting by fusing sounds of stoner and heavy psychedelic rock with the typical reflexive mysticism of doom, and it’s from those atmospheres and by the convergence of each own personal background that Black Land’s songs took their origin.
The first “confused” exibitions took place mostly in squats, and other underground locations in Rome and in the rest of Italy (without producing any record or demo)."
Gibberish or genius? Remember that Italian metal is famous for both.
Holy Weed of the Cosmos

Blind Willie Johnson

Ominous thunder and cold medication combine to cast an eerie pall over my evening, so I'll attempt to keep it brief. Blind Willie Johnson was a gospel street singer, possessor of a frightening rasp of a voice and razor-edged slide guitar, and the originator of songs as timeless as "Samson and Delilah" and "Nobody's Fault But Mine," who nonetheless led a short and brutal life. Legend has it that he started a riot on the steps of the New Orleans courthouse singing "If I Had My Way, I'd Tear This Building Down." His death is a particularly brutal story too: after his house caught fire while he was out busking, he was forced to sleep in the charred ashes of his bed during a monstrous thunderstorm. When he returned to the streets the next day he had full-blown pneumonia and died in a gutter. Of particular note to Swamp-o-philes are the delightfully Cthonian cautionary tale "God Moves on the Water" and the wordless wailing of "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground." Chilling stuff.
Everybody wept when the war was on.

Runemagick - On Funeral Wings

I was going to post something entirely different, something quirky and breezy, but as night descends and temperatures drop to an unseasonable chill, it resonates hollowly and I find myself returning to the realms of doom and death. Runemagick is a long-running player in the death/doom game, predating the current boom by two decades, yet they haven't quite received their due in my opinion. Nevertheless, they grimly soldier on, producing album after album of dense, occult misery reeking of Armageddon. This particular example, their eighth LP from 2004, is a sprawling and ambitious epic incorporating many diverse influences without straying too far from its plodding, elephantine gait. Preceded by the more straightforward Darkness Death Doom, and followed by the more funereal Envenom, this full length reflects a murky high-water mark from a band who has yet to produce anything of less than excellent quality.
Black Star Abyss

Wreck of the Hesperus - The Sunken Threshold

Tonight's invocation is a hefty slab of funereal doom courtesy of Ireland's literary-minded Wreck of the Hesperus on their only full length. While not quite the squishy amorphous ooze of Tyranny or Catacombs, this is certainly a far cry from the relatively upbeat stylings of your traditional doom ensemble. It's foul and raspy and stretched nigh to oblivion, and despite the sub-aquatic theme I get a dry dusty bone-rattle ambiance from it, but it still sounds like a live band playing in a room together. There's a distinct death/doom hue in keeping with the style all the wee ones are so in tune with these days as well - not exactly normative songwriting but not a random lump of squirtly noises either. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
A tomb won't be immune

When - Death in the Blue Lake

We return to Norway once again, as it our wont in the wintertime, and as usual we've got something pretty strange on our hands. When was a one-man psych/prog/classical/noise act from the eighties who went on to influence the young black metal musicians once they started experimenting with synthesizers, ambience, and weirder things. The first half of this particular album is a twenty minute titular soundscape inspired by a famous Norwegian horror novel of the same name. It's bleak and chilling and those of you familiar with Satyricon's early work may spot some sections lifted wholesale for Dark Medieval Times. Side B is all over the place: Bowie-like robot pop, ritualistic chanting and percussion, yodeling through layered effects and echoes, groaning drones, and a Christmas themed noise piece that could have appeared on The Black Rider.
Behold

Radio Birdman - Radios Appear

A classic first LP by legendary Sydney punkers Radio Birdman, Radios Appear is a whirlwind ride of surf guitars, psychedelic angst, and adventurous weirdness. Along with the Saints, Radio Birdman rescued the Austrailian music world from mediocrity and birthed a nationwide scene in a few short years. They were all dark sunglasses, swagger and sweat, twang and tweak. And there's a Roky Erickson cover!
Aloha Douchebags!

Vanquished - Habitual Severity

I can't seem to locate much information regarding this Canadian black metal act, but no matter: the music speaks for itself. Much of this album consists of fairly standard-issue black metal blasts, but the careful listener will discern subtle shifts in the chaos that slowly weave a tapestry of crystalline melody - it's like tectonic plates colliding underneath a glacier. In the absence of a lyric sheet, one must absorb the meaning through osmosis. Luckily the music is melodically evocative and clear enough to invoke images of chthonian beings encased in ice, of bending horizons and the whisper of the wendigo.
Amidst the Trees of Woe and Lament

Clagg - Lord of The Deep

Despite some carping from the peanut gallery, we live in a heady time rife with exciting new metal records - in fact, despite my interest in the rare and bizarre records of yore, I've noticed that many recent posts have been from 2010, and this is no exception. Australia's leading lights of sludge doom, have squirted out this new slab of fishy horror and it has been on repeated rotation here at the Swamp. Despite the relentless pummeling, there really is quite a variety of sounds here: quiet instrumental mediation, stoner swagger, death metal pounding, funeral throbs, subliminal sonar. Something for all forms of life! Of course, this being brand new, I encourage you to pick it up here, but if you're a cheap bastard you can always just get one here as well. However, be warned: the sea level rises a bit each day.

Septic Flesh - Communion

Greek symphonic death metal, pompous and menacing at the same time, like a foppish dandy in a toga who has you chained in his torture garden, pruning bansai and sharpening his implements of persuasion. I decline for now to make a judgement of this album, as I may be a easily persuaded by the odd hints of Lovecraftian cheer in any record, and it's no surprise to see some boil up to the surface here: each song pertains to a different set of myths, from Norse to Egyptian to possibly some sort of UFO cult. Lacking the grand sweep of a massive string section and presumably black-robed choirs, this might be a forgettable death metal album with no clear worldview. Likewise, were the actual death metal band this was framed around less precise, this could be a formless blob of muddled theology and hubris. Where on this bizarre scale the album lands may depend upon the listener, so I invite you to judge for yourself.
But beware, lest ye be judged.

Tem Eyos Ki - 2001 tour cd

A rare gem in a sea of slime, the lamented Tem Eyos Ki, Little Rock's reigning champions of twin-guitar sorcery, produced this forgotten and seemingly disposable cdr to accompany their tour of the United States in 2001. At one time this was playing constantly out of cracked windows and crackly boom boxes up and down the streets of our little hamlet, but, as is the nature of such materials, all copies were seemingly lost or worn down to translucency within a year. Imagine a female-fronted Iron Maiden writing songs for 8-bit video games and broadcasting out of a low-hanging UFO, hovering above the Tigris and Euphrates - this was Tem Eyos Ki, and they are missed.
Ogoni

Memento Mori - Discography

Another seemingly forgotten work of great beauty and darkness returned to light only yesterday (or was it the day before?), after considerable time in limbo, poking its serpentine head out from behind of mound of cobwebbed bones in a dank corridor long hidden from daylight. Memento Mori, appropriately named and ephemerally renowned, seem to have vanished into the netherworld of digital refuse: a relic of the time of the compact disc but predating the advent of obscuritan internet scribes, whiling away the weeks in darkened rooms thrown into sharp relief by the malignant glow of the monitor. Lo, give thanks that my monk-like scholasticism has brought forth tangible results, and then repent your ignorance as I wield this black-crusted lode of precious metal ore to bludgeon your feeble brain to a pulp. Winding sheets of thickly-woven guitar, wailing anguished vocals, and the rumble of elephantine stampedes shall echo in your numbed ears as you awaken into a new, hideous understanding.

Repent, but it is futile.

Electric Wizard and Reverend Bizarre

It is a benevolent ignorance we surround ourselves with. The monotony of day-to-day life, the roar of the highway, the greedy wail of the television, the clumsy thud of popular music: empty noise to block out the maddening silence of the void. Once these ephemeral distractions are allowed to fade from earshot, the subtle padding of drooling beasts can be just heard outside, malign and unseen. Audible here are an adaption of the William Hope Hodgson weird tale "The House on the Borderland" by noted Lovecraftians Electric Wizard, and a cultish ritualistic dirge by Reverend Bizarre, a spell originally crafted by occult entity Beherit. A holiday in a small fishing village inevitably goes horribly wrong, and stomps soggy footprints in the mud as it approaches shore.
Fortunately, this manuscript was recently discovered.

Giant Squid - Monster in the Creek

Questions upon conundrums dipped in riddles. Can a record based upon freshwater sharks preying on scrawny hillbilly children purely out of desperate hunger be considered beauiful? Could this happen again, and would it make a good concept album ninety years from this day? What would Lester Stillwell, who was eaten by the eponymous monster in 1916, make of this cerebral slab of chum? If you were eaten by a shark tomorrow, what would they play at your funeral?
Will there be sequels?