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BLOOD OF THE BLACK OWL  A Feral Spirit  CD   (Bindrune)   11.98


The second album from Chet Scott's arcane woodland sludge project picks up where the 2006 eponymous debut left off, tracking the strange mixture of primal slow-motion metal and evocative tribal ambience across nine songs of consciousness expansion and Nature-worship, and the sound has become even stranger and more discorporeal than the debut. One of the things that sets Blood Of The Black Owl apart from almost every other "metal" band is the array of primitive instruments that Chet uses, from native American flutes to wood and clay ocarinas, hand percussion, long horns, hoof shakers, antler rattles, and other shamanic tools; none of these will surprise anyone that is familiar with Chet's other project, Ruhr Hunter, whose ritualistic forest drones have long employed organic instruments alongside heavily textured electronic ambience. And metal-minded fans of Ruhr Hunter will probably find a lot to like about Blood Of The Black Owl, especially the dark, atmospheric ambient sections that are juxtaposed with the heavier metallic parts. This is Chet's "metal" band, though, so even with all of the spooky, shuffling ambience and mystical flutes floating around, the mood here is seriously heavy.

The album opens with the moody shadowdrift and spoken word of "Spell Of The Elk", which has Chet intoning a kind of prayer to animal totems in his deep, gruff growl over coarse rumblings, slow pounding tribal drums and ethereal flutes playing a lonesome Native American style melody, stretching out for nearly ten minutes before kicking in to the second track "Crippling Of Age", and here is where Blood Of The Black Owl shows it's real might, unleashing a wave of crushing distorted guitar over plodding machine-like dirge, the guitars huge and growling but slightly out of tune, like a weird mix of Skepticism's funereal plod and the chaotic black murk of Abruptum melted down and poured over passages of moody clean guitars, dreamy melody and jazzy percussion, the cleaner dark-rock interludes contrasting sharply with fuzz-soaked atonal sludge. As the album goes on, the songs become even more abstract and atmospheric, moving from tribal percussion and sinister rattles hovering over fields of dark ambience and time-stretched throat singing to blasts of massive, droning riffage and swirling distorted filth, eerie keyboard lines drifting through circles of thumping hand-drums, guided by those deep, ogrish vocals that paint visions of the wolf, of the elk, of the end times and of black soil swallowing generations. The nine tracks flow together as one huge cinematic piece, much more epic and thickly woven than the first album (as killer as I think that disc still is - I'll be listing that here in the store shortly as well), equally beautiful and introspective and apocalyptic and fearsome, played out as a weird ceremony with Native American sounds haunting the spaces between the grinding slow-motion dirge, like hearing bits of Godspeed You Black Emperor and Mary Youngblood appearing throughout the blackened doomy plod, a Neurosis-meets-Skepticism-meets-Abruptum wave of grim buzzing sludge. A Feral Spirit evades easy classification, and adventurous metal/doom fans should check it out.


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