���The stunning second record from the husband and wife duo of Mike and Tara Connelly, performing their bewitching blend of eerie industrial music, classic gloomrock melancholy, and less ascribable heaviness under the name Clay Rendering. It would appear that Waters is already sold out at the source; the band has been causing something of a stir with their sinister psychedelic noise rock, and the four songs featured on this EP are pretty addictive, each one crafted from a blur of gauzy shoegazy distortion and swirling guitar noise, eerie droning riffs and clangorous rhythms. Fans of Connelly's previous work with Hair Police and Wolf Eyes expecting to hear more of the sort of discordant skull-scrape those projects produced are going to come up empty; on Waters, the duo play a much more ethereal strain of industrial-tinged music, fragments of percussion trailing off into the shadows, echoing waves of metallic shimmer that surge over the lush, harmonium-like drones that slowly swirl across the beginning of the title track, woozily warm waves of resonant sound that spread out into a gorgeous dark ambience. That dreamy formless drift is gradually joined by more menacing shapes, distorted chords forming into an ominous descending riff, the ghostly sounds of wind keening through the background as an almost funereal folk-flecked atmosphere is cast over the music. Parts of this are almost Troum-like, draped in vast textured drones, but the duo paint these eerie soundscapes with a richer palette, filling the space with washes of dimly luminescent dreampop that create some strikingly beautiful moments on Firmament.

��� From there the band follows with the morose "Temple Walking", where Mike Connelly's vocals finally come in, a distant distorted howl rising over the pounding rhythms and haunting keyboard lines that repeat their dark melody over and over. By this point, the record starts to vaguely remind me of some of the mid-90s Swans output, or maybe even the menacing, industrial-strength gloompop of Wings Of Joy-era Cranes, but with a different sort of urgency, the sound here more tense and droning and dreary. Indeed, the washes of cold guitar distortion and faint tremolo-picked buzz even give parts of this a vaguely quasi-black metallish feel, like on the strange, icy drone-rock of "The Pest" where booming drum machines and creepy clattery percussion are woven together into a ritualistic trance, those sinister droning guitars spreading out into a cloud of minor-key murkiness, while closer "Myrrh Is Rising" sets reverberant piano adrift over more hypnotic tribal drumming, spacey synth noise soaring suddenly overhead, the sound lovely and lonesome and laced with a wintry chill. Spellbinding stuff shot through with moments of sun-blotting heaviness, totally fantastic.