Idle Days On The Yann is but one of many new records to have come out in the past few months from dope-fueled UK dronemetallers Bong, a band whose live performances are so filled with exploratory improvisation and deeply wasted formless heaviness that their live recordings are just as sought after as their studio creations. Yann is the latest slab of saurian psychedelia from band, taking its title from the work of legendary Irish fantasist Lord Dunsany, an ongoing influence on the band's weird dreamworld visions. I can't get enough of their intoxicating combination of droning, improv-heavy psych-doom, macabre imagery steeped in early twentieth century weird lit, and mesmeric classical Indian music; along with Queen Elephantine, these guys are crafting some of the most delirious drug-induced heaviness you're going to find.

This new LP features a single forty-plus minute song that is spread across the two sides of the record, beginning in typical Bong fashion with a soft haze of shimmering distant amp-whirr and rumbling bass, the wah-drenched psych guitars tumbling through the void, joined by the shimmer and buzz of Ben Freeth's droning sitar and the electrified thrum of his shahi baaja (a kind of amplified, modified Indian zither that has appeared throughout Bong's recordings), these sounds curling and coiling through the opium-den ambience of the first few minutes of the album. Eventually, this drugged-out haze of low-end rumble and metallic drone is joined by the wailing vocals of guest vocalist Holly Forster, her ghostly voice slowly drifting in as a series of ecstatic, prayer-like exultations that echo across through the depths of Bong's glacial psychedelia, and later, an even heavier rumbling presence begins to ever so slowly materialize across the length of the first side, a vast low-end drone that trembles through the muted, spaced-out roar amid waves of amplified Earthen raga-drone pulsating deep in the mix, becoming an almost orchestral wash of sound that, by the end of the first side, begins to really rattle your speakers.

The whole first half of the record is super abstract, eerie and atmospheric, with Forster's wordless, haunting cries a near constant presence echoing across this spaced-out raga-doom. But once the second side starts up, the music almost immediately begins to shift into something more propulsive, the vocals beginning to burn off as the entire rhythm section finally comes alive, heaving forward into an agonizingly slow processional pulse, the whole band shifting into a sinister cosmic dirge that begins to take over the album. The shahi baaja pulses within the billowing blackness like some warped electric piano, the phantasmal notes echoing over pounding slo-mo drums and creeping riffage, and it definitely feels as if you are listening to a band playing together in a live situation, the performance feeling really organic, almost similar to a free-jazz album, even as this crawls forward as a slow shambling psych rock fog that spreads out across the entire second side, emitting vast plumes of heavy droning dream-music weighed down with that rumbling amplifier drone, with no sense of resolution, the band simply descending slowly and languidly into oblivion.

While not as experimental and improvisational as Queen Elephantine, Gnod, Cosmic Dead or Naam, nor as doom-laden as bands like Whitebuzz or Sons Of Otis, Bong inhabits a strange, mystically-charged abyss of their own, though fans of all of that stuff would do well to check out this and all of the rest of the void-crawling heaviness that Bong has produced. Limited to seven hundred copies on 180 gram vinyl, and includes a digital download of the album.