LOCRIAN - Drenched Lands

Lending itself more to the likes of House of Low Culture than to name drop contemporaries Sunn O))), there's a distant, resonant desperation to the music of Locrian that doesn't separate it from the later but is more closely related to the uniqueness of the former.

From their first full-length studio album, Drenched Lands, "Obsolete Elegy in Effluvia and Dross" is a straightforward soundscape that seemingly promises hope and refuge. A sublime turning point from a path one dare not take and a prologue to what lay ahead.
"Ghost Repeater" is drone the way it was meant to be ingested. Layers of sub-static and maddening free form synths echoed in the halls of a mind that could only belong to the introverted. Simple in it's essence, epic in it's delivery.
"Barren Temples Obscured By Contaminated" strums in the kind of terror that exists before the stalker attacks rather than punching us in the face with the kind of obviousness of where the song could go. This carries on, allowing us to savor the exhausting horror of anticipation, never dropping us into the pit over which we dangle.
"Epicedium" summons up beauty and serenity within subtle guitar tones and synths leading up to heaviness that never is overbearing but adds just enough flavour to an already appealing structure.
"Obsolete Elegy in Cast Concrete" is a return visit to the graveyards once strolled by a young Béla Lugosi type and is layered with the crush of guitar and tortured vocal misery the likes of which create pictures in ones mind of said graveyards slowly teaming with life made up of the dead... Brilliance by way of darkness and imagination.
The album is capped with the 30 minute, 9 second soundtrack-esque "Greyfield Shrines". This opus sums up the album (and band) as a whole, encompassing more than the mere sum of it's parts. Guitar and synth blend together inducing images of landscapes deserted and cold and home to the rust and decay of civilizations long gone. Half way through one is jarred from the ambiance and cast out into a furnace of Merzbow worship that will have you begging to have the spikes pulled from your palms and feet and have them inserted into the heart.

Locrian deliver audio that is not for the faint of heart, but rather for the strong of imagination. At no point in my frequent listens to Locrain did it not take me to places one would likely see in early Lynch or mid-career Tsukamoto.

Interesting facts: The Locrian mode is a musical mode or diatonic scale. It may be considered a minor scale with the second and fifth scale degrees lowered a semi-tone. The Locrian mode may also be considered as a scale beginning on the seventh scale degree of any Ionian, or major scale.

Examples of which are:
"Symptom of the Universe" by Black Sabbath is said to be in Locrian mode
The beginning of "YYZ" by Rush is in C Locrian
The main riff of "Painkiller" by Judas Priest
"Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" by Pink Floyd

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(((03)))