Monday, October 15, 2007  12:15 am 

Holy Company

20JFG love the woods devoid of nice animals, the woods where you find skulls with hollowed out eyes dwelling of silently laborious beetles, the woods which never stay quiet, every step entails trampling on life which feeds on life, sleep on that damp soil and wake up in the morning feeling feebler and older, the earth has taken a bit of your soul unprotected by spells of pavement and distance with roots that spread around you like skeleton tentacles. These woods shine fosforescent in the night and talk with the wind about things you don’t know, maybe mankind’s war against them comes out not of an economic imperative, but of an unconscious fear of that knowledge, the truth that they are us inasmuch they are where we all end, dead and one.

Read Algernon Blackwood, it’s good for you.

And listen to these songs, there is something of that mystery I referred to shining through, over and inside them, like a luminiscent shroud enveloping that ghost approaching from between the trees, not a single leave turns on its wake.

Little Claw crawl and bite like a wild thing, they understand the secret totemic power of the tribal stomping drone, and transmit it through their flesh and blood turned music in the same way in which the Velvet Underground did from the secret tower of darkness gleaming above the labyrinths of Gotham, or Sun City Girls and Indian Jewelry do spinning lost in circular deserts where they befriend rattlesnakes and coyotes. Their new album, ‘Spit and Squalor Swallow the Snow’ released by Ecstatic Peace is a storm of wind and dust and twigs which get inside your eyes making you cry, through tears you see a mirage fortress raising over the heat devils, coming at you like this was a Jorodowski flick or something.

Little Claw- Domestication of Manchild

Fucking hell John Dwyer, fucking hell Yikes, if hawks headbutted their prey before tearing it to pieces, leaving entrails and skin hanging from the branches of trees like a banner standing for all that feasting entails, and a testimonial of their bad-assness, they would sound a bit like this, the noise shitstorm unfolds furious furious furious, say it three times, raising you in the air as the spirits of a religion called Garage (not least because of the grease) come out of every orifice in your body, blood, spunk, shit, snot, they are all there in a raucous glorious mess we can’t wait to see delivered live.

Yikes- Blood Bomb

From the Whoa Commas or Blood Bombs EP released by Kill Shaman Records, which doesn’t pull any stops in making you feel dirty.

20JFG’s fave Tickley Feather’s lo-fi psyche ballads are that broken toy you stumble upon in the middle of the forest, a mysterious message which upon deciphering brings forth a beautiful reverie, the memories of whoever forgot it there and your own reaction to colour and shape intermingle like streams of a collective river, we have been keeping an eye on this mysterious lady for a while, she is drawing pretty enigmas on the sand with a drum machine put together with elastic bands and matchsticks, and we keep falling inside them enthralled.

Tickley Feather- The Python

You can get this in her split EP with Serpents of Wisdom.

If there is a band (besides Liars, and maybe Earth) able to summon fantasies of utter ghostly strangeness with their music, then it must be Yellow Swans, these two men craft strange spells where humming reverb and dissonant spikes come together like tentacles of smoke swirling and intertwining in the cold air to coalesce into phantasmagorical shapes where you are free to read whatever you want, if you dare, personally, and fittingly for today’s mood, Mass Mirage makes me think of funereal marches through the woods, an even darker equivalent of the fox wedding Akira Kurosawa documented in one of his beautiful dreams.

Stray ramblers treading across the Galician countryside at night be wary of the Santa Compana, if you do stumple upon this silent procession of the dead you might have to join them, and lead them carrying a cross through the roads as they visit those houses where a death is due.

Yellow Swans- Mass Mirage

This tune is taken from their new album, At All Ends, released by Load Records, and it might well be the most tonal piece of majestic psychedelia they have unleashed upon the world yet, now really, get this, and turn your room into a carnival of spirits.

labels >> forests, ghosts, little claw, spells, tickley feather