The first of two amazing slabs of smoke-stained doomfolkdrone from Crow Tongue that we are listing this week, Ghost Eye Seeker wasn't my introduction to this new project from Stone Breath's Timothy Revelator (that was the more recently released Red Hand Mark disc, also reviewed in this week's list), but it's an equally lobe-erasing monument of fuzz-drenched trance that fans of kosmiche noise, heavy raga, and dour, doomy folk will want to inject into their heads ASAP. Devotees of the free-psych-folk thing probably will probably already know Timothy from his longrunning "folk" group Stone Breath, who have released a bunch of amazing, mysterious albums through his own Hand/Eye imprint as well as on Camera Obscura. Wandering somewhere at the twilight crossroads between old British folk music, early psychedelia, The Incredible String Band, buzzing drone music and "graveyard songs", Stone Breath's albums were filled with dusky hymns to nature and an ancient brand of Christianity, casting a pale lantern light across the shadowy corners of forest glades, ravines, cemetaries, and old churchyards. I've been a big fan of the Stone Breath albums despite my general aversion to the mucho-hyped "new weird America" neo-folk hoopla from a few years ago, which can be attributed to a) the fact that Stone Breath were doing their thing years before any of those floppy hatted new jacks started sprouting up everywhere, and b) the creepy graveyard haze that permeates their songs. In between crafting new Stone Breath albums, band leader Timothy Revelator has also been quietly putting together a body of work as Crow Tongue, where Tim and his bandmate A.E. Hoskin travel off into even darker territory, and the two full length discs that the band has released over the past year is some of the best music I have heard so far from Tim and company.

It was the comparison to Neurosis, Earth and Tabla Beat Science that a webzine had made in reference to Ghost Eye Seeker that had my interest stoked before I even heard the disc, but those references don't really describe the music so much as the atmosphere of the album, grim and haunting, filled with Indian percussion and drones and feedback. That said, the bands debut from early this year is a gloomy, apocalyptic raga that stretches out for almost an hour, a single unending piece of music formed out of a thick narcotic fog of guitar, tabla, shahi baaja, banjo, srutibox, bass dulcimer, broken machines, cymbals, recordings of a massive steam whistle blast, and deep, droning vocals. The music is dense and droning itself, and at first sounds like old Appalachian country stripped down to a skeletal, ramshackle folk pulse fusing it's molecular matter with the transcendent buzz of classical Indian music. A strange mix of Eastern mysticism and dusty rural roads. But as the album progresses through each track, other sounds begin to enter in and the music morphs into something darker and more alien sounding, as cracked electronics and deep, low-end distortion seep into Ghost Eye's twangy raga buzz, turning it into a simmering psychedelic folkdrone, like the spaced-out, fried electronics of Skullflower's Orange Canyon Mind melted over a slow-moving funeral march of muted, plunky fingerpicked strings, hallucinatory mantras rising from the throats of necrotic shamans, and simple, propulsive percussion. Tim's singing is a near-monotone chantsing that makes the music even more zoned out and trancey, and reminds me a bit of Al Cisneros from Sleep/Om. The very last track of the album "Candle Corpse And Bell" introduces some dub effects that foreshadow the experiments with dub that the band will engage in with their Red Hand Mark album.

This is a real spectral zone, an Appalachian drone-volk that reminds me of a searing mix of later Swans, Current 93, Pelt, Indian ragas and, yes, Neurosis' brooding acoustic-guitar based passages.

The disc is packaged in a black digipack with black and white artwork pasted to the front and back covers.