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CAPRICORNS  River Bear Your Bones  CD   (Rise Above)   13.98


I love Capricorns. Over the course of an EP and two albums, this UK band has evolved their powerful atmospheric sludge into one of the best instrumental metal sounds out there. Well, mostly instrumental...on heir last album Ruder Forms Survive, Capricorns were joined by Oxbow frontman Eugene Robinson for the song "The First Broken Promise", but that was an anomaly, albeit a great one. Other than that, Capricorns operate sans vocals, and it takes a top notch rock band to keep yer interest with just the strength of their riffs. Capricorn's are masters of the riff, in my book. The last two records had great riffs, lots of sludgy, complex riffage that wrapped around itself and constructed into compact jams that tended to get in, pulverize, and get out. River Bear Your Bones gets even more complex. The hints of prog rock that I heard in their older stuff appear to be fully realized here. Check that title out - the album is a kind of concept record about the River Thames, and the relationship between river and the city of London. The eight songs are lengthy riff/rhythm workouts that average seven minutes in length, and each song is a complex clot of dissonant guitar lines and massive chugging riffs, tricky guitar interplay and spiralling mathy lines that crisscross one another and create these cool atmospheric sections that suggests a much more aggressive King Crimson. SOme other sounds enter the fray on River, synths and oscillators lending spacey whoosh and dark textures to the music, but even when the band gets really spacey, or calm and pretty, they always return to the crush at some point. I see Capricorns get compared to Pelican alot, and I think that fans of the one would probably really dig the other. But Capricorns sound so much more aggressive and feral than Pelican (or most other instrumental metal bands, for that matter), their long brooding jams cast in a darker light than most. The drumming on this album really stands out, too. Drummer Nathan Perrier brings a bunch of powerful moves to his kit, and the rhythms on River move back and forth between straightforward pummel and freer jazz playing, and even locks in to some crushing krautrock propulsion in a couple of spots, like in the ominous Hawkwind-esque space rock in the second half of "Owing To The Frogs". Probably my favorite track here is the last, the eleven minute jam "Drinking Water from the Skull of a Hanged Man". This epic dose of skuzzy freeform metal was recorded straight to cassette and it sure fucking sounds like it; bathed in a grungy low-fi haze, this has the band simplifying their sound and grinding through a stretched out monolith of scorched hypno-metal that combines muscular sludge metal with forays into trippy rhythmic trance and zoned out guitar effects that bears a resemblance to krautrock bands like Can or Neu!. Primo stuff. This has quickly turned into one of my favorite instrumental metal albums, nice and compact, with the spacey prog rock balanced perfectly with the crushing metal riffs. Highly recommended.


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