The few lucky souls among you privy to knowledge about France's demonic avant-prog behemoth Shub Niggurath will know firsthand that precious little in the annals of music history can compete with them for sheer soul crushing menace. That this post-Shub unit (featuring two former members) have jettisoned the overt malevolence and fearsome, forbidding gravity of their former ensemble is intriguing. That they've supplanted it with a disorienting exercise in freewheeling psychedelic abandon is just completely enthralling.
Flanked by Edward Perraud's roiling percussive onslaught and Vincent Sicot-Vantalon's swooping, keening electronics, Frank-William Fromy catapults his pulverizing lexicon of Fripp-addled acid axwork in blazing arcs across his bandmates expansive wide-angle architecture in a way that sound like nothing so much as the bastard love child of Fripp's post-Red-era Crimson jams on Exposure and the Boredoms' latter-day lysergic space trekking. On paper, this might sound like an awkward proposition. On the right sort of paper, however (the kind that comes in perforated sheets), it sounds like an epiphany.
Though there's enough coruscating guitar mayhem encoded within these attenuated, adrenalized plains to sate the palate of any listener with a yen for the ferocious and foreboding, those of you who are constitutionally predisposed to swoon in the presence of psychotropic excess will be falling all over yourselves with this soundtrack for the serotonin deprived.
(Originally published in Alternative Press #148, p.138; reprinted with
permission)
