Thursday, October 16, 2008  10:05 am 

Skull Soul & Birds of Paradise

We go together
Like sex and violence
Like death and silence

Listening to the grimly seductive funereal balladry of Prince and Pearl is like wandering through silent woodlands at night without any real purpose, only to come across a ramshackle old wooden cabin, barely standing buckling under the weight of it’s ghosts, wherein upon opening the door with some trepidation, eyes come to rest on a group of dead-eyed lost souls fixed in some kind of waking purgatory, held in suspension by unseen forces and covered in dust who detecting the entrance of a stranger, slowly reanimate and come to life like rusty, broken wind-up toys to perform their broken skull soul, a saxophone gasping for breath over an arrangement fit for a wake.

Prince and Pearl – Not A Gun

Where once something thrashed and screamed and contorted and foamed at the mouth, but now merely crawls and croaks and wreaks of decay, inside of Prince and Pearl beats a black metal heart that refuses to die, but that can barely keep the blood which has slowly over time transformed into a jet black molasses pumping through the veins, breathing a dry wheeze. If Low had developed an affection for Burning Witch the results may have sounded something like this, and it’s really quite a beautifully ugly thing to behold.

Equally as beautiful, but for entirely different reasons are the tropical psych folk ruminations of Congregacion aka Antonio Smith who made his first and only LP “Viene” in the mountains of Chile in 1972, and who subsequently like many Latin American musicians at the time found himself fleeing from a government who didn’t take too kindly to his forward thinking ways.

Congregacion – Arrebol

Taking in Congregacion’s mystical mantras is akin to floating down a river that cuts through a mythical mountain aglow with blue moss on a wooden raft that weaves through the dense terrain, air thick with humidity, sunlight cutting through the clouds like shards of glass, as a storm cloud of brightly coloured, spectacularly feathered birds forms above head creating an hypnotic kaleidoscope that grows larger and larger and gradually engulfs everything around it.

labels >> Congregacion, Prince and Pearl, xxjfg

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