Wednesday, January 2, 2013

... Playing slow, low and loud : BLACK TAR PROPHET / CRAWL split CD

After their interesting debut "Note to Nod" last summer, Nashville's instrumental duo BLACK TAR PROPHET just released a split with CRAWL from Atlanta (GA)... well, call it as you want, EP or not, but this has a total length of about 35 minutes and is almost equally shared, just that B.T.P. plays two songs and their colleagues one...

Despite the fact that guitarist Mark Owen left the band just before the recording, nothing much has changed in the dirty, straight and raw sound of BLACK TAR PROPHET. Greg is still a massive purveyor of slow, distorted noises, damn crushing and infectious...
While the overall remains elemental and plodding especially in "Judgement Whore" , the other song "Hypomania" has a more gnarly tempo in its mid-part, with even a crusty touch that fits well with their natural roughness and is pretty entertaining... There's certainly less prominent vocal samples and noisy feedback, which -to my ears- give a slightly more accessible dimension to their rumbling yet effective sound and good promises of new pounding songs in 2013 !

CRAWL is a new band which formed in Spring 2012 and has yet very solid arguments to value; after their 1st demo released this fall, they now include "Rise Feast" to this split affair and even if this is also extremely slow, low and loud, they're pretty different from B.T.P. which makes it complementary and in no case linear.
Here, on this song, CRAWL is more insidious than straight and raw, more into bulldozing sub frequencies that can leave corporal damages to non initiated people ! A strange and droning mix of influences ranging from Neurosis to The Melvins...  This is a nice song but I'm surprised that this is a long instrumental and sounds very different from their demo stuff which had a great southern tone with filthy vocals and pure sludge crudeness, amazingly mixed all together with short and striking songs (Buzzov*en being then another clear influence...). That's a bit disconcerting to wonder if this is the same band that you're listening to between their demo and this new song !

But, all in all,there's no problem at all towards this, the catchiness is here in all cases and this split release is really worth checking out !!!

https://www.facebook.com/blacktarprophet
https://www.facebook.com/CrawlDoom




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