Locrian at Avant-Garde Metal

Locrian "Drenched Lands" reviewed on the avantgarde-metal.com site:

When Night
Is Mirrored in Oil on a
Parking Lot Surface
Leaving Behind a Trail
Transferred to the Ground

Wasteland
Sacrificed Upon the Altar
Karst Sterile
Civilization Crawls
Over the Country
Salting the Fields
Where Myth & Causeway Collide

Ghosts are wailing and winds are howling. White noise hissing through the air waves interrupted by automated transmissions calling out to no-one. A mid-west city ravaged by flood, dried up now, emptied of human presence, left to decompose and crumble.
A wretched creature, stumbling on an empty highway, who was human just a few years ago screaming his lungs out at night to the ghosts of those who are gone now. They never answer. No-one left to hear. The complete horror of the emptiness.
Slow melodies drift by like scattered grey clouds, evolving from nothing into nothing, the few keys and chiming bells appearing almost mockingly in the sparse, ghastly humanity, beckoning spectres and mirages. Like a nightmarish early KRAFTWERK. Jarring screeching guitar feedback, soothing drones. The desolate angst of XASTHUR and EARTH corroded and shrunk into a distant, almost abstract echo. Black metal and drone drained of every human aspect. Everything is distant, desolate, empty, post-apocalyptic. Read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and imagine a soundtrack; "The Drenched Lands" is not far away.
The centre-piece of the information pamphlet I received quite illuminates this LP. LOCRIAN's equipment set up symmetrically - almost ritually, as if by some sentient worshipper not knowing their functions - on an empty parking lot overgrown with weeds. Three amplifiers, three guitars, three keyboards, a semicircle of pedals, abandoned and left behind in front of a crumbling shopping mall, overthrown by nature's unavoidable and unforgiving entropy. Sad, spectral, sequestered, beautiful; LOCRIAN's "The Drenched Lands" is a delightful urban nightmare caught after the ravening.

aVoid