The Red Hand Mark is the latest full length from Crow Tongue, the new "Appalachian Doom" group fronted by Timothy Renner aka Timothy Revelator, from dark acid-Christian-folksters Stone Beath. This is the second album to appear from the group since the beginning of the year, actually, the first being the amazing, Julian Cope-endorsed Ghost Eye Seeker that combined a spare, skeletal form of Appalachian folk music with tabla, handmade mutant instruments, and scorched low-end buzz that sounded like a strange mix of Skullflower's Orange Canyon Mind, the circular trance throb of Om gone acoustic, Indian ragas, and stripped-down country woven into a dense and hypnotic dronezone. The primitive trance folk was something different from Timothy, but it was actually this newer album that I had heard first after getting a copy of it in the mail. Packaged in a cool-looking foldout package that is adorned in images of crows and angel statues and woodcuts of humans turning into birds, sinister-looking Cherubim and scenes from Revelations, The Red Hand Mark features another six tracks of elongated acoustic trance. The raga quality that the previous album was so steeped in is much more subtle here, but still present; for these songs, the percussion comes to the forefront, and each song revolves around a pounding, layered tapestry of tabla beats and hand drums and the skin-covered djembe, powerful rhythms that move in pulsing circular forms and take on a heavily hypnotic state, while Timothy recites weird apocalyptic lyrics over top in that deep, almost monotone chant voice of his. It is really doomy sounding, simple and primitive and mesmerizing with that dark endtime poetry intoned over the circular beats, way more tribal-sounding than the previous album, and the plunky, meaty strum of the guimbri-banjo (a kind of bass banjo that Timothy invented) adds to the band's earthy, raw sound. Dark, trancey hypno-folk that sounds a little bit like a cross between the dire acoustic prophecies of Steve Von Till and Michael Gira, and the woodland narco-rites of Circle's Forest as fronted by Al Cisneros from Sleep/Om.

The version of The Red Hand Mark that we currently have in stock also comes with a second disc called Prophecies And Secrets: The Red Hand Mark In Dub, and just like it says, this CDR features nine tracks that take the original source material from the Red Hand Mark and filters it all through various dubby effects and mixing-board fuckery, remixing and "reinterpreting" the songs. The resultant tracks still retain the skeletal throb of the originals, but now they are veiled in echoey beats and trippy electronic textures, and become a druggy, darker doppelganger of Crow Tongue as whirring beats spinning from one speaker to another, the beats sometimes seeming to run backwards, heavy kosmiche drones previously hidden emerge from the depths of Crow Tongue's mutant hypnofolk. The album takes on a darker cast with these remixes, as the new titles attest: "Undead Voices", "Four Horses Ride", and "Corpse Candles" are all included on this companion disc. It's pretty intoxicating. This disc is housed in a simple wallet sleeve that fits inside of the Red Hand Mark package.