4 out of 5

Label: No Holiday

Produced by: ?

Early Skullflower: lo-fi waves of hazy and heavy guitar, plodding drums, and distorted vocals, played pacedly and with purpose but with all the edges jagged. It’s a lovely, noisy sound, made mysterious by the often rumbly recordings and given an undercurrent that’s either unsettling or meditative by the compositions’ relative unpredictability: they represent drone, or their are “riffs,” but it never quite exactly fits that form. The artwork having a rather subversive quality and track names like “Rotten Sun II” put one in a darker mindset, but I don’t necessarily think you have to take the music that way – rather, there’s something all-embracing about Skullflower (taking in the good and the bad), and I think this early era stuff can be a good way to hear that. Along the way the sound morphs to be more formal, heavier, harsher, but seems to come back around to a denser version of Last Shot At Heaven’s style, making it full classic, and enduring.

Even with tracks all topping six minutes, and often stretching to nine, the aforementioned unpredictability keeps the album quite immersive. Yes, you need to be given over to slow rumblings of noise, but assuming it’s at all within your wheelhouse, this is quite immersive, choicefully applying vocals and occasional sound-manipulation extras to the drums and guitar. While a remaster may have been cool, the distant, cavernous hiss of the recording is part of that experience, and having this on vinyl I think is a good way to give it some shape: getting up to flip the LP over provides a beat to absorb tracks individually.

With that, there’s one point where the rawness feels a bit smoothed: B-side’s Dufus is the most drone-y track here, and it comes across as slightly slower – funereal – and out of place with the more restless affair across the recording. Given that the song length is in line with several others (each side varies between a six and nine / ten-minute tune), that it’s the only one where you might get up to check how much is left seems notable, though if it was seated alongside a full album of straight drone, that wouldn’t be an issue. It’s a nice wave of sounds, just a pace / structure shift.

Otherwise, this might be one of the more accessible Skullflower recordings, wholly representative of their sound and timeless in its use of noise and atmosphere from listener-dependent effects, with a graspable sense of structure. “Accessible” isn’t a dirty word, here: just that it might not annoy your neighbors as much as others. This is still Skullflower, with piles of guitar and noise to sift through.