Newish double header of flattening ritual-doom ambience from Black Boned Angel, the ambient sludge-metal alter ego of Birchville Cat Motel and Campbell Kneale. Each side of this record was previously available as a limited edition CD from Kneale's excellent Battlecruiser label, a small press imprint that specializes in all manner of blackened outsider metal weirdness, like the black noise of Skullflower alter-ego Mirag, and Devoid Of All Mercy's rustic backlot murder hymns. We carried the Eternal Hunger disc here but only for a second...it sold out within a week or so of us listing in the Crucial Blast catalog. Eternal Love, I never got a chance to pick up. Lucky for me (and for you), Riot Season stepped up a few months ago to release this LP that features each of the previously out-of-print tracks on it's own side. There are only 500 copies of this pressed, on black vinyl in a black jacket printed in metallic silver ink, and I doubt we'll have this avai
lable for long.
Here's my previous lip service to Eternal Hunger: A brand new, 20 minute disc from Campbell Kneale's mega drone sludge beast, Black Boned Angel! Staring off with about a minute of churning, molten bass distortion and high register, piercing feedback tones, Kneale then swoops in with a monolithic reptilian riff that lumbers across a starlit waste like some ancient Cthulian form. The guitar tone on Eternal Hunger is a terrifying carnivorous, speaker shredding buzz, so thick and deep and downtuned that it rattles your ribcage, backed with spacious, sparse earthshaking drum thunder, a bestial subharmonic mantra that is the closest that Black Boned Angel has yet come to dredging up the gnarly void between Corrupted's Paso Inferior, Keiji Haino, and Sunn O)))'s OO Void. Then, abiut 10 minutes in, a repetive piano melody surfaces, reminiscent of some minimal John Carpenter horror movie theme, repeating over and over for a couple of moments, before the guitars and drums cra
sh back in, but this time with a gloriously melodic, beautiful riff, over a bed of heavenly droning pipe organs, streaming down like faint arcs of sunlight at the bottom of a deep impenetrable cave, like an even more epic Jesu, but cloaked in darkness and despair. Then, just after a few minutes, the riff shuts down, and an extended series of tolling bells, conjured straight off of the beginning of Black Sabbath, enveloping you in pure dread.
The Eternal Love side is just as outrageously crushing. A twenty minute track of shadowy free drone that starts off rather tranquil, a grim bassline plucked out over a super minimal drumbeat, huge stretches of silence between notes and beats, clanking metal and scraping iron gates grating on rusted hinges, a dark shadowy void of subtle ghostly drift with dank basement vibe that lurks for over half the track until it finally collapses into a massive black hole of ultra-distorted riffage. The last half of the track is an incredibly blown out, jet-black whirlpool of downtuned bass drone, plodding machine pulses pounding way off in the distance, and an impossibly slow motion doom riff grinding into the void. It all fades away into several minutes of what sounds like heavy rainfall that closes the side.
A crucial slab from one of the heaviest bands on the planet, whose mega pulverizing ambient dirge is as punishing and transcendent as anything from early Melvins albums, Sunn O))), Earth's 2, Skullflower, Boris, and other dealers in abstracted crush.