| Sounds Like | ROBOT VS RABBIT Dos CD - Crucial Blast Review
Squirrelgirl
I loved Trading The Witch For The Devil, the deliciously murky debut from Carolina noise-sludge coven Robot Vs Rabbit that delivered awesome mangled basement-doom riffage, crackling instrument-cable ambience, and a psychedelic circuit-bent sludginess that reminded me of a fucked up fusion of early Industrialists SPK and Factrix with grimy Skullflower/Earth dronecrush. The sweet goatheaded cover art and ambiguous occult imagery certainly didn't hurt either. I had picked that disc up from Mandragora, the label run by sitar-wizard and all-around psychedelic sludge hound Erik Amlee, and although Trading... was waaaay heavier than even the heaviest sludgefloat found on Amlee's Paradise Camp 23 CD-R's, the general vibe of busted amplifier drones and low-end primitive tape-loop creep felt right at home amongst the more bonged-out fare on Mandragora. Since then, however, Robot Vs Rabbit has come up with a new album, Dos, which according to the band seems to be loosely inspired by the cold war-era space race, the Kennedy assassination, and the death of the "American Dream" in the 1960's. I haven't been able to sort out exactly how the music here ties in with all of that, since the album is all instrumental, but it certainly summons some dark clouds and weird coded threats. And they've gotten even heavier, REALLY heavy as a matter of fact.
Dos opens with sound of seriously heavy ambient powerchord drone and what might be drumbeats processed and played backwards, and then seques into the low-fi feedback/drone dirge of "Then The March Began", followed by more feedback clouds gathering around the shuffling improvised rock of "Now I Know Which Road". The following tracks continue to evoke tension-filled vibes through loose drone-rock jamming, some sinister uses of manipulated samples and loops, and tons of feedback. The middle of the album is where Robot Vs Rabbit drop in the heavy sludge, starting with the rumbling guitar tectonics and erratic drumming of "Crownless And Cloven" and "Hands Of Conjuration"; the crushing looped feedback drone and gorgeous disintegrating melodic roar of "Erecting A Fifth Column", which sounds like Growing passing through a black hole; and the Melvins/Earth dronemetal fusion of "The Endless Ocean". More heaviness ensues, as well as ghoulish dronescapes creeping out of the cellar, more paranoid tape-collages, and a heavy air of unrest and gloom hanging over the band's live basement jams. It's like they've turned into this creepy, metallic mixture of the Dead C, Throbbing Gristle, Earth, and Melvins, with some UK noise rock like Skullflower, Splintered, and later Ramleh mixed in, heavy and psychedelic, metallic and formless. The disc comes in a glossy black digisleeve illustrated with weird cover art of a squirrel and a rabbit. Recommended!
ROBOT VS. RABBIT Trading The Witch For The Devil CD - Crucial Blast Review
Mandragora
Here's the sole full length from long-gone North Carolina amplifier thugs Robot Vs. Rabbit, a massive 56 minute blowout of satanic feedback deathdrone and mangled occult dirge riffage that takes the heaviest powerdrones of Sunn O))), Skullflower, and Boris, dunks them in black oil, and runs it through the industrial creep of Throbbing Gristle, Factrix, or SPK. These are some of the murkiest speaker tones to hit our ears, total black basement amp chant and low-end feedback stroke that washes over you like a dead tide, but propelled sideways by chattering, smoking tape loops and obscured Japanese traditional melodies. Yep, Trading The Witch For The Devil is a high point in evil primitive psychedelic sludge, and the more we bomb our skulls with this album, the more we realize that this is like a kosmiche black-mass take on the missing link between the Midwestern noise skulk heralded by the likes of Wolf Eyes, Universal Indians, Hair Police, Gravitar... etc., Skullflower at their most brutal, the eeevil tarpit hate of Southern Lord's most extreme artists (Sunn O))), Khanate, etc), and the dense walls of sound of Soundtracks era SWANS. This concept will no doubt get many of you hot n' bothered, as it well should. This is definitely our favorite of the recent stack of Mandragora releases we just landed our mitts on, psychedelic and metallic, heavy as fuck but totally amorphous and otherwordly and evil. |
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