4 out of 5

Label: Turgid Animal

Produced by: Matthew Bower

An overwhelming 3-disc set from Skullflower, who are Matthew Bower and Lee Stokoe in this 2008 era edition of the band.

“Overwhelming” could be a pretty common descriptor for any Skullflower set (though the group / Bower had tended towards something like songs in the early years, and occasionally releases projects that are slightly more tempered), but, as you can imagine, extending the experience to 29 songs is a different story. There is a possible narrative here, though, with Bower translating the title as ‘god as a vicious circle,’ and offering – on the bandcamp page – a bit of a rant about perceiving life far beyond the beginning stages of psychology, with song titles evoking images of some aetheric travel into the netherealms, and references to Aztec gods, and spirits of the dead, and abysses…

None of that suggests something not overwhelming, but I at least point to it as indicative of the music soundtracking a journey, or a cycle of sorts, and indeed, each CD has its own title, and definitely sounds a bit different: ‘Circle Of Serpents’ is stripped down to feedback and reverbed guitar; ‘Valley Of Scorpions’ has a metallic feel, with pseudo-riffs; and the title album is noise – a complete barrage of Skullflower extremes, guitars battling one another in a war of distortion and volume. ‘Circle’ and ‘Circulous’ both wander a bit in their respective ways; nothing egregious but on their way to relative conclusions, I think Bower / Stokoe lose the thread, with ‘Circle’s drone effective but maybe just not needing to be broken up into tracks, and ‘Circulus’ painfully explosive conclusion feels like it only discovers its mission with a few minutes to go. But: noise music like this is surely subjective.

More positively, “overwhelming” is probably why one checks out a Skullflower release, and I was surprised how effectively harsh (and dark) sounding this record was, and how that’s properly introduced by the albums’ sequencing. Interestingly, Discogs lists the physical release in a different order, and it would be a curious one, placing the comparatively quieter tracks last; this is also an interesting spin, as it shifts the somewhat “accessible” riffs of ‘Valley’ to the front, then destroy us with ‘Circulus,’ then chills us out with ‘Circle.’ I do think I prefer the overall quiet > loud flow, though, and because that’s Bower’s sequencing digitally, it makes me think that’s the intended order.

While I’d say there are better individual Skullflower albums – one that tell their story more concisely – the three disc Circulus Vitiosus Deus is an undeniable experience, and one you can sit a fledlging SF fan in front of to give them a pretty full runthrough of the different dimensions of the band from this era.