IV: Mandragora is the fourth album from the San Francisco-based band Botanist, a peculiar one-man band that has brought together a strange combination of swirling waves of melodic sound and eerie dissonance fused to the twitching skeleton of black metal, and performed with a unique lineup of just hammered dulcimer and drums, all woven into a strange world of sound that evokes hallucinatory visions of ambulatory plant-beings and botanical invocations. Each new Botanist album has featured slight variations on the dulcimer-led sound, with this one heading into much more melodic territory than before. The presence of hammered dulcimer might seem odd when you first hear about it, but as soon as this album starts up, it makes perfect sense; the ringing, metallic tones of the instrument create unique buzzing overtones that slightly echo the buzzing of tremolo riffs, and Botanist layers these notes into massive blankets of droning buzz, the opener "Arboreal Gallows (Mandragora I)" speeding off into a swarming, majestic blast that almost feels like something from old NYC drone-rockers Band Of Susans meeting up with a furious black metal back-beat. In fact, a lot of this album feels more like an ominous sort of drone-rock, the sound richly layered and hypnotic, a surprisingly huge cloud of sound coming from this one instrument, but those sickening, croaking vocals and the evil atonal melodies that appear at the beginning of songs like "Nightshade" and "Sophora Tetraptera" continue to betray the bands roots in black metal. There's a shimmery quality to some of the dulcimer's higher register that start to sound like piano notes on "To Amass An Army", appearing on the songs utterly gorgeous, almost pop-like crescendo; it's an incredibly beautiful piece of music that seems like something you'd expect to hear from a band like Mono or Explosions In The Sky, but filtered through this strange, droning, slightly blackened buzz. The rest of IV: Mandragora is all like this, shifting between that gorgeous, soaring wash of distorted metallic melody and the harsher black metal elements, those scathing, reptilian vocals simply adding to the otherworldly atmosphere that surrounds this album. A minor masterwork of blackened avant pop, fused to a anti-human/plant-centric philosophy that is unlike anything else I've seen or heard.
Packaged in an arigato-style jacket with black and white printing on the interior, and a small black and white insert booklet.