German Oak, Crash Worship, Twink, The Electric Prunes, Stooges, Nebula, Pungent Stench, Timothy Leary, Monster Magnet, Ash Ra Tempel, Sodom, Sleep, Amon Duul II, Exit-13, Cathedral, Joel Peter Witkin, Saint Vitus, Church Of Misery, Corrosion Of Conformity, Romain Slocombe, Jimi Hendrix, Gong, Funkadelic, Budgie, Guru Guru, Electric Wizard, Brutal Truth, the Beatles...
Solar Anus....
An essay by French writer/philosopher Georges Bataille... a burst of plodding pummel from UK freedrone outfit Skullflower... but more importantly, a band whose music conjures up a mysterious land of legendary monsters, ancient customs, cult beliefs and ritualized incest, all hidden just below the surface of our everyday world, a place only accessible through Matsuri, a group trance during which music and sound, lights and pictures help transport participants back to those mysterious other worlds and ancient times.
Such is the strange world of Japan's mighty tranced-out psychedelic doomlords Solar Anus, whose sound most definitely exists as Matsuri, a music designed to lull us into a trance and carry us off... mesmeric, hypnotic and HEAVY. Here, for the first time ever readily available outside of Japan, is the entire recorded output of the legendary Solar Anus, all collected into one massive head crushing, mind melting double cd.
Skull Alcoholic chronicles the band's dizzying trajectory, from stumbling, buzzing, bloody-stumped, sludge doom behemoths to druggy, tranced out psychedelic outer space visionaries, swinging wildly toward both extremes the whole time. An impossible blend of Black Sabbath, Hawkwind and the Boredoms, Flower Travellin' band, Pink Floyd and the Melvins.
Beginning life with 1997's ON, as a dizzy and druggy, slow motion stoner doom outfit, Solar Anus channelled both the garagey spacestomp of old Monster Magnet, the epic miserablist doomscapes of Candlemass, and the purposefully obtuse sludge riffery of the Melvins, taking all of these disparate but distinctly heavy sounds and incorporating all manner of primitive percussive rituals, drifting dronescapes, 16 rpm Krautrock groove, dreamy angelic female vocals, massive fuzzed out guitars, huge in-the-red monster drums and swirls of creepy crawly dirge into a truly epic dronedriftdoomgroove sound. The band's blend of propulsive tripped out krautrock, dizzying drum jams and glacial stoner sludge is at once ominous and swoonsome, crushing and psychedelic, lurching wildly from tripped out tribal Can worship to massive bulldozing metal grooves to super abstract druggy dreamscapes.
Album number two, 1999's TRANCE!! found the band trudging even more resolutely into a bleak and blown out world of dark doom, sounding more and more like classic doomsters, My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost and Cathedral, but completely tweaked of course, and confusingly blended with epic stretches of lurching lo-fi psychedelic Krautrock blow outs a la Amon Duul II.
By the release of their final album, 2000's NEXT WORLD NEWS, the band had stretched out yet again, dragging their druggy doom into a head spinning world of cracked skull outerspace trance, spinning even further into the void, not so much heavy as blissed out and psychedelic. Lots of abstract rhythmic workouts, like a more demented, damaged version of Finnish dronerockers Circle, a swirl of confusionally dense and relentless FX drenched Krautrock spacejams rife with belching foghorn brass, squawking birds, dizzyingly dense tangles of hippy drum freakouts, chanted vocals, as well as all sorts of studio fuckery, chopped up tape loops, warbly pitch shifts and layer after layer of fuzz and buzz and psychdrone blur.
Each languorous stretch of fuzzed out metallic groove is swathed in blown out clouds of Hawkwind bongsmoke, but broken up by bleary expanses of chilled out 4am trancemusic, but instead of a post-rave laid back Ecstasy come down, it's like crashing and burning in some dirty back alley from an all night PCP binge, silvery streaks of electronic glitch laid over a pulsing techno throb, surrounded by thick washes of processed tribal drums, the whole thing a very Boredoms like primitive percussive ritual, hypnotic and dense, sprinkled with all kinds of sparkling sonic twinkles and drifting chimes, and underpinned by a wasted moody muted sixties psychedelia.
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You guys are mad cool some of the best fuckin (doom) metal I ever heard! Skull Alcoholic is a good song but XX is way fuckin better lmao keep it metal dudes
Can't believe you hadn't heard Electric Wizard! Come My Fanatics..., Dopethrone, and We Live should definitely be albums you check out (Especially since EW were in the original Solar Anus "thank list" according to the Tumult bio).
Unfortunately neither of my neighbors have dogs, though. But I'll do my best to keep going another house over until I find someone with a dog!
yeah i found my way over to aquarius lastnight. ill also be grabbing up libido soul dimension and german oak if they ever get more copies. other recommendations?
