��Albatwitch's Only Dead Birds Sing Over the Graves of Fallen Kings is the first album from this new project from Stone Breath / Mourning Cloak / Time Moth Eye founder Timothy Renner, and continues to travel down the darker, noisier rural pathways that Renner has been increasingly drawn to in recent years. Taking its name from a peculiar, mythical Sasquatch-like being found in southern Pennsylvanian folklore, Albatwitch blends the sort of fractured graveyard folk and twisted Appalachian song craft that his other older bands are known for, with harsher sounds that include elements of blown-out, low-fi black metal and nasty electronic noise. Self-described as "blackened swamp crust noise drone folk", the music on Dead Birds invokes visions of a sinister shadow-world hidden beyond the rural byways and back roads of Pennsylvania, one inhabited by those titular mystical ape-men as well as undead crows and gaunt specters lurking in the shadows of Three Mile Island, the lyrics shot through with a scathing underlying environmentalist message.

�� The duo (which also includes multi-instrumentalist Brian Magar) uses a variety of instruments, from acoustic and electric guitars, banjo, stick dulcimer, harmonium, Celtic harp, banjola, electronic oscillators to more obscure ethnic instruments like dumbek and bodhran to craft their blackened, mutant folk-dirges. Tracks like opener "Die Gedanken Sind Frei" (an adaptation of an early 19th century German protest song), "Liar's Noose" and "Nomads" sound positively ancient, ghostly arrangements of withered bluegrass banjo and shadow-streaked Appalachian folk that skulk and slip between shifting twilight shadows. These moments are then followed by the occasional blast of utterly brutal blackened noise, like the ultra-distorted violence of "Break Apart" that sputters out of the speakers like a din of massively distorted blastbeats and Masonna-esque screech. There are many moments of mutant metallic heaviness to be found here as well, like the loping blackened sludge metal of "Beneath the Flood", a low-fi blast of Frostian heaviness and screeching ghastly vocals shrouded in murky, noisy guitar and rumbling feedback, Renner's deep monotone chant appearing later in the song to lend it a demented ritualistic vibe. There's some wretched blackened doom alongside the scorched black instrumental psychedelia of "Floodwaters", which blends the dry, weather-beaten plunk of the banjo with droning, almost raga-like strains of distorted electric guitar, a mixture of searing buzzing psychedelia and rural creep that sounds like the sort of stuff that Revelator did on his Time Moth Eye album, before drifting languidly into more of that gorgeous wraith-folk on the title track. It's stuff like that which gives much of Dead Birds a similar vibe as some early 90s Scandinavian black metal demos.

�� All throughout the album, the folkier tracks are layered with some seriously blown-out guitar noise and wrecked acid-shred buried way down in the mix, giving even these quieter, more solemn songs an utterly fried, corroded texture, hints of a possible Japanese psych influence creeping in. On "The Gods And The Apes", a female voice reads from the poetry of early American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre's as a savagely over-modulated synth chortles deep in the mix, playing a warped baroque melody bathed in bone-rattling speakerbuzz; that later transforms into a kind of skeletal doom, simple clanking percussion banging in slow motion beneath swooping terrifying shrieks and ghostly cries, like some junkyard funeral march. Prayer-bowl drones whirl around the lumbering psychdoom of "The Hanged Man", a murky, lethargic mantra of blackened buzz and meandering bass guitar, smears of feedback and shimmering guitar dissonance washing across the hypnotic slow motion pulse. "Rise!" is one of the few tracks where all of this stuff clings together, the banjo playing right over the lurching discordant sludge riffs, the songs suddenly eruoting into a blast of bizarre folk-flecked blackened violence, Timothy's droning chant like voice suddenly being replaced by harsh, frenzied screaming. "Frack-ture" is an environmentalist screed aimed towards the practice of oil fracking in Pennsylvania, a nightmarish miasma of recorded testimony regarding the disturbing effects of the drilling process on local communities and the environment, materializing as a nightmare of hissing blackened shrieks, tribal rhythms and rumbling dark ambience that leads straight into the final track "Black Waters Rise". All of these tracks are short, sometimes more like sketches of abstract sound than a fully fleshed out song, but each flows right into the next, casting a web of wispy reverb and crackling noise all across the album, transforming this into some bizarre, otherworldly combination of Skepticism-esque funeral crawl, Appalachian necro-folk, cemetery ambience and crushing blasts of Wold-like black static metal.

�� Comes in a screen-printed brown jacket with an eight page full color booklet with fantastic artwork, and a vinyl sticker.