Mouthus - Saw A Halo [Load Records - 2007]After to the melting sludge fest that was Follow this House from early on this year, Saw a halo sees this new York two piece creating a stranger more complex nightmare- built around; bent doomy harmony/chanted vocals, doomy avant industrial rhythmic work-outs, uneasy acoustic guitar or doomy organ sinister hovers and of course their trade mark buzzing & melting guitar weight. Imagine a mix of Black Dice & Animal collective really turning to the dark side, as if they'd been kidnapped tortured and dumped bloody and twitching finding out they had a really need to cause pain/ fear. With slashes of odd ritual ethic music say a more macabre take on the Resident’s mole music, With an (half severed) ear for atmospheric, cinematics and audio terror making. But all warped up in surgical tape and heavy suffocating, decaying and weeping guitar bandagers. The tracks often feel like slow body drags through overgrown rancid graveyards or liquefying human organ hang woodland. This feels like it could be the soundtrack to a film about a cannibalistic cum satanic family or cult living deep in dense overgrown forest, where daylight rarely touches. You can almost see their slow, deformed bodies hacking & ripping limb from limb in the half-light, as the beats stumble on and on and the guitar buzzers and drains. There are also surprisingly moments of sombre emotional grace in some of the dark harmonic organ droned tracks or dead light acoustic lined moments- giving this a wonderfull feeling of diffrent shades of grimnes & decay. This like Follow this House is an real album with a difined beginning and smouldering end, telling it’s bleak yet compiling tale, the tracks sequencing into each other perfect giving the album a bleak continuum or curve. It’s an album that’s sucks you in complete and utterly for it’s whole length- giving 44 minutes of captivating, harrowing, and sometimes poignant music and sound. Roger Batty
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