King Crab – Moskoe-Ström



This three tracker from King Crab is a darkened pleasure, a coarse meltdown that would fit nicely with the stuff Southern Lord put out, the sort of gravel filled guitar that screams out anxious totems.

The disc starts with a dusky entwining of textures, growing all pensive, - a swaying lamp shade throwing out pissy glints and startled shadows…. The guitars, really corrosive, eating away in dirge like slashes and haunted sonics… The drums embodying the hopelessness of a window flapping to the wind’s mercy…

A stilt-skin procession, clawing the walls… everything glued down with its own impetus, like thumbing through a scrapbook filled up with sticky clay and bent hairpins. Fingers are marching time as the souring guitars scour the surface, their intensity burying the drums as they roll down the hillside – the vibe bringing to mind that bleating apocalypse in the Wasp Factory.

Clearing out to an oasis of ambient grumbles… the frets are run through with flashes of distorted highlight. Some aspects of a faded grandeur cling like a needy child as shivers of cymbal kiss out a pointillist bedspread, sounding like a samurai fight of shopping trolleys …. Drilling whispers and fringed distortion, the amps vibrate their sweetness and the dervish of guitar biting back over what it had previously chewed…right up to an abrupt end.

The second track breaks with the atmosphere, as if purging your palette - a small interlude of Xylo / tin keyboard duet over a wobbling heat haze …

Then you’re immersed into the screaming guitar desiccation of the final track. Everything is forking through a squalling bugle riff, whilst the feedback trimmings scream out a death’s head mantra. Pulled into a distorted whole, bubbling along on damaged keys and wispy spectres … I’m looking at the cover, those inky splatters are dancing to the textures flowing out of the speaker… space becoming fingers clogged up with iron filings and crimpled lightning, then a twilight aftermath of strings flickering amongst some absolutely delicious amp flux… A lush stigmata that bleeds out suggestion…

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