When I listen
to an album for the first time I do it with headphones, if possible. So I did
with Drug Honkey’s album “Ghost in
the Fire”. This was basically my first encounter with this band’s music. It was
twice, during this first listen, that I pulled the headphones from my ears to
check if the sensations happening in my head would go away when I do and I even
considered shortly to stop listening at all, but I continued (maybe addiction
had already set in?).
With
“sensations in my head” I don’t mean pictures and thoughts in my brain, but
rather in my head as a physical place, so that a strange desire appeared to open
my own skull to see if there are “things” in it that had no business
there,things that were able to unleash my carefully dungeoned demons.
Drug Honkey are a four piece Chicago IL. based band that
formed in 1999 and “Ghost in the Fire” ( May 2012) is their fifth album .
In terms of
genre categorization the music is something like experimental, psychedelic,
electronic, industrial, Sludge Doom, but actually it is a sonic mindfuck,
psychosis turned into sound, endless torture and pain condensed into a lysergic
addictive drug named “Ghost in the Fire”
The basic
structure of the songs is kind of minimalistic. There’s rarely something you
could call melody or a dramatic build up. The songs are somehow crawling,
creeping and wavering along, carried by riffs that are stretched and slow and
barely recognizable, fuzzy heavy bass
lines and an incredibly slow plodding drumming. An almost permanent, slightly
varying droning background sound induces an uneasy feel that accumulates into a
kind of sickness not unlike a naupathia from the soft but permanent sway on a
long time boat trip.
The multiple
layers of electronic effects, distorted sounds, industrial noise create an
incredible dense atmosphere, a lysergic hallucinatory disturbing soundscape
immersing everything in a boiling thick viscous filth, painfully slow, heavy
and dissonant.
The most
effective element enhancing the eerie psychotic atmosphere are the vocals.
These vocals that appear in nearly every possible form utterable by a human
being and often additionally electronically modulated sound strangely humanly
unhuman and really freak me out, scare the shit out of me and speak to my
unleashed demons.
All of this is put together so carefully and cleverly like a well directed
horror movie.
The first
extreme listening effects that caused me to pull off the headphones lessen, of
course later, which is a good thing... for one thing I have to cope with my
demons and get them back in the dungeon, and for another thing I can enjoy this
masterpiece of diabolical psychedelic heaviness much better when I’m not scared
to death.
words by Ulla Roschat
words by Ulla Roschat
Since Khanate I believe that bands can be formed by Zombies. Now this release is the second proof!!! This time they have got Androids and Mutants as guest stars.
ReplyDeleteNot sure if that's a compliment or not.. Haha.. Either way it was worded well!!
ReplyDeleteNot sure if you mean the review or the comment above. The first is meant in the most positive sense.
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