header_image
BLACK BONED ANGEL  Verdun  CD   (Riot Season)   17.98
Verdun IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

There are few bands heavier than the hellspawn dronemetal of Campbell Kneale's Black Boned Angel, and the project emerges again with a new disc called Verdun that reminds us of just how punishing it can be. I've been listening to that Black Boned Angel collaboration with Nadja that came out recently quite a bit, but even as heavy as that is, I've been looking forward to some brand new industrial doomdrone crush of BBA undiluted, all controls set for the heart of Wormwood, unleashing gargantuan waves of black guitar oppression. This, Verdun delivers.

The desolate atmosphere of the charred battlefield hangs over this album; the title is a reference to the infamous WWI battle outside of the French city of Verdun-sur-Meuse, where the corpses of over half a million soldiers rotted in the trenches, and nearly hour-long track is divided into three sections, "Prayer Sodden Holes", "Tears Strike The Mile High Gong", and "Creeping Barrage", which seem to reference different states of war. Like the last album The Endless Coming to Life, there is as much spacious emptiness and suspension here as sheer skull-crushing heaviness, the first few minutes drifting through vaporous clouds of black mist and distant rumble, taking several minutes to congeal into a deep groaning rumble while a massive plodding drumbeat stalks through fields of echo. It takes awhile for the riff to drop in, but once it does, it's absolutely devastating; one moment, we're guided through the bleak ashen wasteland by that loud, stripped down, vaguely dubby drumbeat, the snare cracking through the air, the bass drum echoing through space, and then the monstrous descending riff caves in, utterly massive and crushing, a strange processed trebly tone giving the riff an almost industrial edge, buzzing and almost synthetic, but RIDICULOUSLY heavy. That doom riff slowly grinds its way through fields of black reverb and faint electronic hum, not so much accompanying the spartan drumming as totally overwhelming it, the titanic minor key riff slowly wrapping it's black wings around everything, sending off tendrils of textural feedback that seem to form into lush harmonic overtones. After ten minutes or so, the riff starts to come apart, slowing down and spreading out as peals of howling feedback appear, slow shifting blurs of ominous high-end shimmer and siren-like feedback, almost sounding like an air raid siren on dying batteries, as if this could sound any more threatening and apocalyptic. And then, everything drops out completely save for some sheets of murky feedback, hovering in space above a vast empty chasm, layers of high end hum slowly twisting and warping in midair, stretching out into a dismal, depressing dronescape for several minutes. The sound goes through some more changes, entering even more spacious passages of orchestral guitar chords and celestial drones, everything sounding equally processed and synthesized, for a moment sounding like heavily distorted synths looping in slow motion over minimal kosmiche keys, becoming doleful and darkly beautiful...until the guitars shift once again, turning into another incredibly crushing doom riff, only this time it's even more depressing and mournful, a massive funeral doom riff drifting through space, the drums returning even slower than before. It's oddly melodic, glorious even, like hearing an epic doom riff from Solitude Aeturnus or some other similar band slowed down to a time-stretching crawl. This riff continues to roll on, oozing over the virtually formless glacial drums, and eventually begins to disintegrate, the riff crumbling into a slow-mo avalanche of black distortion as majestic choir vocals appear, immersed in waves of delay and sonic detritus. And then, bit by bit, we begin to hear the encroaching sounds of battle, the explosions of mortars, artillery fire, machine guns erupting beneath the roiling black drone, but rising slowly to the surface, until the last few minutes where the sound completely erupts into a cacophony of warfare and screams.

This is quite possibly the heaviest Black Boned Angel yet. We've heard drumming on BBA albums before, but it's never been as prominent nor as heavy as it is here, and the riffage and bleak black ambience is immense. It was kind of easy to compare the earlier Black Boned Angel stuff to the ambient riffs and abstract dronedoom of the early Sunn albums, but with each new release the project moves further out into it's own realm of extreme industrial-strength avant doom, the focus on the texture and weight of the riff, carefully constructed and forged into absolute black-hole density.


Track Samples:
Sample :