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BURNT HILLS  Alpha Seven  CDR   (Carbon)   7.00
Alpha Seven IS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE FOR ORDER

A new disc of heavy, drugged-out freeform psychedlia from the upstate NY band Burnt Hills, a prolific gang of improv sludgethugs who crank out long sprawling blasts of downtuned spacey heaviness that they jam out in the basement of their home base, Helderberg House. Some of Burnt Hills releases will serve up their extensive jam sessions in shorter tracks that are all connected, but on Alpha Seven, the band delivers a single sixty minute epic that's utterly massive. At first, this is a loose, sprawling mass of guitar feedback and random drumming, but it pretty quickly forms into a shambling sludgy psych rock dirge, the amps churning out wailing feedback drone, drums pounding away in spastic blurts of fractured rhythm, the guitar coalescing into huge droning distorto riff-rumble. It's like a much looser, lumbering Grey Daturas and just as heavy, the low slung bloozy soloing stretching out forever over Skullflowery waves of black-tar guitar roar and stoned trance-sludge. The guitars meander through layered noodling solos that are piled on top of one another, the sound often building into some serious acid guitar overload, and as the jam spreads out, the saurian drumming remains a driving, slow-mo engine pushing the band on through the opium fug. Later on this disc, they slip into passages of heavy Sabbathian swing and some chaotic krautrocky groove filled with wild slide-guitar skronk and a heavy propulsive bass line, and this becomes a major part of the disc, a massive propulsive hypno rock jam that stretches across the whole middle of the set, with more than fifteen minutes of this feedback soaked, heavy duty krautrock workout. From that point, it stays noisy, hectic, druggy, and LOUD, often collapsing into freaked out improv dins of racket, only beginning to fade towards the end when the band starts to space out, the groove starting to climb skyward on trails of metallic chiming and gusts of wah guitar, bits of pretty melody taking form, finally falling into some dark, lugubrious Hawkwind style psychedelia at the end.

Featuring members of Century Plants (who just released a split with Locrian), improv doom ensemble Twilight of the Century and free-sludge band Transcendental Manship Highway, Burnt Hills are real heavy improv-psych junkies, and their roaring, spaced out, crushing kraut-sludge freeform freak-outs are stunning things to behold, as heavy and flattening as Grey Daturas or Skullflower, but filled with the sort of exploratory acid jams that fans of Acid Mothers Temple and Heavy Winged will love. Comes in Carbon's signature full color sleeve for their 15YR series discs.


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