— out of 5

Label: Auris Apothecary

Produced by: Shrouded Elk (?)

I buy a fair amount of music, and it admittedly can take me a while to go through it all. So Shrouded Elk’s Earthen Cloak sat on my shelf for literally about 5 years, looking pretty cool and menacing, and I was looking forward to it! Despite following label Auris Apothecary’s output pretty blindly, I do like to sample what I’m going to be getting, so I listened to a few SE tracks and dug it: an interestingly melodic, song-y take on thrash / black metal, with a lo-fi recording aesthetic that worked for me, prioritizing the mix of the track over strict application of some genre touches. Their “nature first” doom and gloom lyrics seemed well represented by AA’s design for this 7″, which coats an entire side in…. moss…

Oh, right, it’s an anti-record. You can’t listen to it. Or maybe you could? If you didn’t mind getting moss everywhere? I don’t know. As usual, I’m not adventurous enough to try, but I love when bands will put out something like this alongside their legit catalogue, and that Auris goes whole hog on the design, even if I’m disappointed after half a decade when I realize I’ll never be able to hear the actual song trapped within.