Crowhurst – S/T
Sometimes you look at something and you know it can’t be anything but mind-bending. You know after listening you’re not going to be the same person, you’re going to be something else and probably won’t remember anything that came prior. Who am I? How did I get here? You move your eyes around the immediate environment, staring at a strange, glowing, box-like thing before you with a panel-like shape in front of that, covered in lettered buttons with no real organization. Is this the alphabet? Why, I certainly do not recall the alphabet being scribed in such a way… You place a finger upon this awkward alphabet and magically the letters appear before you on the glowing screen. What is this? Who am I and how in the hell did I get here? And then you hear it, there’s something playing there, coming from these smaller boxes next to these strange machines on this desk. That something must have led me to here, you consider, it must have erased the former me and created a clean slate, a new being. What am I? What will I be? Crowhust and this S/T is an example of such an occasion.
God, got to love that art. It’s almost infantile, but infantile in the sense that it looks to be made by someone who’s brain was melted during a routine state at a state hospital where haldol was the only food and they’ve been reduced to a weeping mass of flesh without bones. Or at least it feels that way when you hear the musical manifestation of it. Crowhurst proceeds from the visuals to create your new self, piece by piece. Once they’ve wiped your mind they do it again, and again, and this has been their modus operandi for several years now. Starting out as almost a music collective of sorts that dabbled in audio-visual blasphemy, you can find lots of their work online, including this bizarre, Harry Smith-esque brain drill that they used for a live set. The current inception for this S/T is more along the lines of post or experimental black metal. If you’re curious to see where they came from and how they got here, just scope the discography on their Bandcamp page. There’s years of stuff to be found there.
Now that you’ve done that and stripped yourself into an automaton waiting for its next program, it’s time to delve into the future and load the stack with the first line of code. Crowhurst is dominating on so many levels we almost wish we could stop with this sentence here, but substance and site content dictates otherwise. The bass comes in like bad opium, digging at your brain, the guitars bringing up the rear and slowly stomping over your nerves. The drums become your heartbeat, the pulse of blood in your veins is no longer your own, it belongs to Crowhurst. And once the album proper has started by track two, the opener “Penumbra” merely the glorious dawn on which you are awakening to your new life, it’s filled to bursting with fresh, ugly, dark life. Some of the major sections are so wrenching of essence there’s no comparison, such as the middle of “Black Oceans”. But why bother going on about the rest of it? You need to buy this, in any form, vinyl, CD, 8-track, that’s all there is to it. The riffs, the atmosphere, spectacular. We don’t toss out perfect scores lightly around here; this is one that deserves it. So let your mind be wiped clean of all your former grief, all your loss, all your mistakes, the people you’ve hurt, the lies you’ve told, and start anew. Become one, worship them. Crowhurst is all that’s left of our diseased species.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
Crowhust – S/T
Ivory Antler Records
5 / 5
