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This
one comes late but better late than never. I was talking
to The Mighty Mojon at the record store he works at a
few months ago when he brought up this album. He asked
me if I had received it. I didn’t think so, but I am
quite sure I get most of the stuff Southern Lord
releases, so I went on excavating through my trunk of
surprises and couldn’t find it. A couple of weeks later,
while cleaning up ‘the office’ and scrubbing the floors
a la Cinderella I found this promo under the
crawl space. It
had been collecting dust for at least a couple of
months. It was worth bending over.
I tell you
what. The Unkindness of Crows is one heavy mother. Even if that
mother is so fat she needs a tow truck to get out of the house.
This album is heavier than that Mexican dude on The Learning
Channel, the one who had to be transported in a semi just to
make it to church for his wedding. It is heavy, like stupid
heavy. And it pulls back just a few inches short of all that
heaviness becoming some boring drone kebab platter. In other
words, the songs still sound like they are made out of guitars
and drums. Very downtuned and slow and fuzzy. With a tired but
timely beat. And with a big, big bottomless ass. Admirably, the
guitars shape giant air waves that at their most dynamic seem
influenced, in beat and spirit, by Sleep.
Eagle Twin
is the combination of Gentry Densley, who most may know thru
Ascend, his collaboration with Greg Anderson, and drummer Tyler
Smith. While Ascend bordered on the permanently experimental,
Eagle Twin borders in the permanently rocking. Eagle Twin still
keeps certain patterns that approximate it more towards a
standard rock band though. Clearly, there are plenty of oddities
here; ”Storytelling of Ravens” is as thick and obtuse as it
gets. It’s a shapeless and gigantic blob of sound. But on most
tunes, we find this album closer to a standard sludge doom sound
than anything else.
Densley’s
vocals must be experienced. It’s all about manipulating the
resonance created as air travels from the lungs, past the vocals
folds and out the lips. Yes, Wikipedia rules. And Densley sounds
like he is from some Mongolian tribe and he is out either
invoking the gods or recording the soundtrack for Globe Trekker.
The combination rules. Eagle Twin eviscerates the process of
creation and has come up with a nice formula that it is as heavy
as it can possibly be without coming to a boring halt, dense
like the air in Sleep’s rehearsal room and intriguing like a
Shamanic session, where the wicked ones are erroneously
invoking the God of Thunder.
MySpace
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