ooft. short of coming in a misfits-style coffin box, this record couldn’t be any more death obsessed. thanatology being a kind of psychological / sociological study of death. references to funerary texts (the tibetan book of the dead), freudian / jungian theory on death instinct and the underworld in mayan mythology. riffing on italian funeral marches. just drape the fucking thing in a shroud, give it the last rights and send it off on a burning longboat to valhalla and be done with it.
anyway not so much a morbid, death-metal corpse thang going on as a psych-doom transformative consciousness thang. y’know, death as change, as liberator. the whole bardo concept of liminality’s fitting here. that drift and betweening, mortality, rebirth, from body to spirit and all the hallucinatory oddness this entails. fitting coz while doom forms the molten core of thanatology, this beast jumps from om-ish mantras to badalamenti jazz drones to bob christgau’s pugfuckerry with numinous ease. an unpredictability that keeps you on yr goddam toes. i diggitt when you don’t know what’s coming next on first listen.
so yeah, this ain’t no beavis and butthead duhn-duhn-duhn-nurr-nurr–nurr-nurr-nurr headbanger. think celtic frost’s into the pandemonium or fellow italo travellers ufomammut or the uberchording/ambient workouts of neurosis (and their neurot spin-off). sturm und drang ritual music then. yup.
