CRUELTY Presents:
Artist...: Burial Hex - Zola Jesus Album....: Split Label....: Aurora Borealis Size.....: 53,9 MB Source...: Vinyl Playtime.: 38:42 min Genre....: Lo-Fi Release..: Aug-28-2009 Encoder..: LAME V3.97 -V2 --Vbr-New Quality..: VBRkbps 44,1Hz Joint-Stereo
TrackList:
01 04:46 Burial Hex - Go Crystal Tears 02 14:26 Burial Hex - Temple of the Flood 03 19:30 Zola Jesus - Julius & Ethel
Release Notes: Burial Hex’s side of the record features two tracks, the first being the relatively short ‘Go Crystal Tears’, which evidently represents something of a new musical direction for Burial Hex. It’s much more musically conventional, in terms of having a recognisable song structure, in which brittle, brooding synthpop is combined with tormented black metal-style vocals. The music here is almost darkwave, with a distinctly 80s feel to it, and I've seen John Carpenter’s horror film soundtrack work and Dario Argento’s band Goblin specifically cited as influences. It’s startlingly different to anything I've heard from Burial Hex before, and it takes some getting used to, but it’s really good.
The second track, ‘Temple Of The Flood’, was recorded during the same period as the material on Initiations, and sounds much more like what I've come to expect from Burial Hex – fourteen minutes of incredibly dark industrial ambient and ‘horror electronics’, an unclean army of dirty, sinister little sounds which skitter, scrape and pulse under a stormy sky full of booming percussion and low-end drone. It’s not too dissimilar from what the Edinburgh band Wraiths (who’ve also been released by Aurora Borealis) do. Elizabethan composer John Dowland gets a credit for the lyrics. For some strange reason, John Dowland seems to be all the rage at the moment – I've recently reviewed albums by Damiano Mercuri and Werkraum which both used lyrics or music by Dowland. Around the midpoint of ‘Temple Of The Flood’, the analogue electronics give way to tribal hand-drums and church organ, a campy gothic combination which reminds me of early Alice Cooper, specifically the track ‘Black Juju’ from the 1971 album Love It To Death. (Alice Cooper, incidentally, like The Rolling Stones, gets totally underrated simply because he’s gone on for about 30 years too long. If Alice had quit after, say, 1973’s Muscle Of Love, he’d be a massive cult figure now. Things really started going downhill when Alice Cooper stopped being a group and started being just one guy.) The final section of the track adds some pensive piano, the sound of dripping water, and more electronic squibs and burbles before everything is reduced to a warm, purring wall of circuit hum and a final blast of organ.
