i went home last night, fell down on my bed, i got to dreaming so, i was talking all out of my head…
robedoor have only gone and bloody done it. fully embracing the lysergic blues hinted at on the transitionary exorcism blues joint. not that they’re playing some twelve-bar boogie, more an annexing of the existential howl and the eerie wail of blind lemon, that hissing otherworldliness of pre-war ghost recordings re-recaptured by alan lomax.
when you’ve made as definitive a statement as rancor keeper, the only aesthetic option is to keep moving, keep changing. you stop, you die. says the shark. and trying to follow that thuggish yowl of pure cthulhuan vinyl evil with more of the same would have been the most redundant move since lydon’s public image reformation (which i know is chronologically illogical but it sticks in my fucking craw…)
whereas old school robedoor was thick like tar and murky like crowley these new jams have a discernible stoned blooze throb, choking in a fug of hell-cellar trance moans. now they’re channeling the deranged almost-garage not-really-punk drone sprawl of suicide. i dig it. this is slightly less restrained than exorcism blues, less underdriven and semiblown amps-set-to-six. there’s an almost bardo pond third eye clarity to this collection. but more of a buggered bardo pond performing next door in a fog of hash plumes and miasmic bad vibes.
frankly it’s a kindof beautiful record, but an ugly beauty, a terrible beauty. like knowing the hot chick in ‘v’ has freaky lizard shit going on beneath the softsoft skin and totalitarian fetishistica. yup. from the first echoed morricone twang and splash incantation of countdown to depression, through the zonked vu / joy division shapes of indo shadow and people of the book to the monstrous chugging squall of the downcast eye, this is a swollen voodoo dream of a record.
maybe it was the pocahaunted / woods tour that injected a bit of organic head fuckerry into their cavernous soup. maybe it was the dead voice parade of ancient 78’s. maybe this damaged foetus has been growing in there all along. maybe. whatever. their scrawled signature is still smudge-smeared over this; the discombobulating echo and isolation, like the cavernous space within a space in house of leaves; the same psyched-out rumble and thud of satanik ritual discordia; the same sprawling grimy fog. ‘cept now it’s as much transcendental as physical, as much flickering light as nicotine dark.
