Wednesday, October 29, 2008  1:05 am 

Curdlin’ Blood

Another week, another collection of wicked sounds from the American No Gaze/Pagan noise underground, this time framed in the context of the impending apocalypse of fear and blood which is our most favourite of dates, Halloween.

Ah, and vote Obama kids.

Strange monuments rise in recondite summits of the misty forests of Oregon, deformed totems of screaming wood stretch their arms towards an indifferent sky from the bald and grey hills where they stand, surrounded by rocks arranged in bizarre configurations. These eerily silent places are avoided by the wary locals, and on the rare occasions when a squad of DEA agents tread across them on their search for Marihuana plantations you can hear the dogs whimper and become uncharacteristically shy, the virile banter of the rugged lawmen fades into an unsettled quiet, they will joke about it in the bar tonight, after a couple of beers, but next time a bust is organised in the area, they will do everything they can to get off the shift.

That is no place to go, a few hunters slid into the thick forests never to be seen again, or to reappear pale-faced, rambling about the sight of a little barefoot girl in a white dress walking between the trees in the distance, her face always turned back, her slender silhouette somehow out of focus. A bad omen, if you ask Old Joe who runs a convenience store in the outskirts of this wild area. If you are patient with the old man as he spins his yarn, he might tell you about that time when some rocker types from New York City went into the forests, they were up to no good, they had heard about the legends surrounding this area at some happening, and had decided to check it out while touring the West Coast. They were all pale and emaciated, dressed in black, sunglasses and hip talk, the works. They walked into the forest carrying some bottles of cheap wine and laughing, the sun went down and a pale and gibbous moon rose in the black sky where constellations shimmered with a portentous and cryptic message.

They didn’t show up until the morning. Old Joe would swear that at least one of them was missing, and that he spotted some red stains caked in the cheek of another, as he shuffled for change to buy cigarettes.

Some time afterwards, those rockers made a song called Sister Ray, and rumour has that it was inspired by what went on in the forests that night, by their rendezvous with a little girl dressed in white whose face is always turned back, whose fingers are forever covered in blood.

Little Claw have also met that girl, look into the heart of darkness of the drone which infects their last Siltbreeze single like some sickly organic growth, and you will find her there, terrible and lonely, not staring at you. A bad omen, but one we want to hear.

Little Claw- Feeding You

We were having a drink at the pub last Halloween when the conversation turned, as one would expect, to ghost stories. You couldn’t think of a less suitable time and venue for such discussion, surrounded as we were by drunken lads with fake butcher knives hanging from their heads (if only those were real!), and obnoxious lasses in garish diabolique outfits. Alas, we tried to make the most of the situation, subsequent pints dulling the awareness of our surroundings, so Jake started telling us an apocryphal story about a street that we all know, ‘Thadeus’ straits’, a back alley in the olden lanes which slides like an oh so thin blade between the looming, forever threatening to collapse, ribs of the old and damp colonial buildings. So Jake told us, in a rather slurring way, that his street derives its name from one Thadeus Bruce, adventurous sailor and occasional pirate who had his residence there. He was one of those unsung proletariats of corsairdom who never arrived home carrying a trove of riches, and seemed to enrol in his trips to the Caribbean to ward off boredom and escape from the overbearing presence of his wife, one screaming Mary Bruce, more than anything else.

Well, apparently Thadeus returned on the Winter of 1752 from his last excursion in a mood less jolly than usual, and Mary didn’t seem to have been the cause. Upon knocking on the door of his house, Mary thought that it was a revenant that stood tall outside the door, eyes staring intense from the fathomless black pits, hollowed ridges surfacing into emaciated jowls which sank under the bristling beard like a drowning shape in the furious sea.

Thadeus barely abandoned the house after his arrival, the punters down at ‘The Spread Seagull’ wondered about what had happened, and wished he was sharing a pint with them and extolling the virtues of adventures in exotic and far-away places. Mary did reveal snippets of his ordeal at the market, from such trinkets the gossipy women pieced together the story of how Thadeus’ ship had crashed against the rocky shores of an uncharted island, a site of obscene geometry where things that shouldn’t be mentioned occurred. Suffice to say that less men left the island than those who had landed in it, seven big sailors crammed in a frail launch which had survived the shipwreck, all of them yelping screaming and crying save for Thadeus silent in the midst of the pandemonium, holding under his jacket a book he had brought from that terrible place. Ever since his arrival he had been locked in the attic of the house reading and researching, quite a transformation for an individual not particularly renowned for his scholarly inclinations.

But this was only the beginning, not a long time after Thadeus’ return, a string of children disappearances began, rumours spread about a conspiracy of slavers who took such little ones to the colonies, and sold them there. The masons were of course also mentioned. But no-one listened to Jebediah, one of the town’s least articulate drunks, when he muttered delirious about long shadows stretching and spreading strange across the quiet lanes, two milky orbs tittering like leprous will o’ the wisps over a white bundle advancing rapid in the darkness, the whole indescribable bubbling stream of slippery shadows climbing up a wall and spilling inside the window of one of the houses there, this the same night when a babe was abducted from the Joneses. And so the children kept vanishing into the night, and every day Mary Bruce looked paler and more distressed during her quick errands into the market, and least willing to trade jokes with the loud-mouthed porters and cheeky urchins. She seemed to have aged years in the past few weeks, and when her friends asked her about Thadeus she frowned horribly, as if a bloated and slimy rat had scurried down her throat. Only with Father Corden did she talk, and when she abandoned the confessional of St Patrick’s Church, he looked at her vanish small into the light outside, and then at the figure of Christ agonising in his cross over the altar, and one would have thought that, for the time first ever, there was a hint of hopelessness, or even spite, in the eyes of this devout priest.

It was with the 15th disappearance that the town finally exploded in a riot, and fires burned in the streets, cellars were searched and strangers cornered against the walls, but no evidence of the whereabouts of the children was found. As these events unfolded, Father Corden paid a visit to some burguers uptown, and serious things were discussed over copious amounts of brandy. Later that night a group of men disembarked from a carriage at the end of the Laines, and walked with grim faces towards the Bruces’ house, where they smashed the door down with an iron ram. Of what happened there, Jebediah was the only witness. He heard screaming inside the house, Mary Bruce howling and whimpering, and perhaps even the sound of a gun detonating, and then he saw it, through the window in the attic, and what he saw he would never forget, and very few would believe. He saw the face of what one day was Thadeus Bruce against the window, eyes glaucous deep set inside skin white and tattered like rotting parchment, his jaw wide open spilling a sea of black vomit, the thick pulsating body of perhaps a snake, but then snakes don’t shimmer in the air, or spread their sickly tendrils like grotesque branches from a putrefied tree, snakes don’t have white milky eyes like leprous will o’ the wisps, twin abysses which upon being beheld should surely vanquish one’s mind into madness, or thankful oblivion.

This is what happened to Jebediah, when he woke up in the morning, he saw a crowd congregating outside the charred remains of the Bruces’ house.

The men responsible for this deed never spoke of what took place inside the house, of the pile of little bones accumulating in a corner of the attic, or of what stood by the window, wings spread like an unholy angel, of the stench of that blasphemous book as it burned, of the diary covered in feeble scribblings where Thadeus Bruce described what had happened in that uncharted island somewhere in the midst of the Atlantic, the diary where he spoke of the thing that he had brought back from there, inside of him.

No more disappearances were recorded after that, but some say that on certain nights, when you walk lonely down ‘Thadeus’ Straits’, you can feel the murky shadows around you, particularly behind you, become somehow more solid, and change shapes subtly in ways that no configuration of lights should produce, and in the quiet you can almost hear children crying, far away in the distance.

The USA is a Monster- Ice Bridge

The USA is a Monster are back from some black hole of true zenta energy, carrying powerful spells of eerie psychedelic beauty in their medicine bag, we have missed their Goblin spinning in the midst of a ghost dance hurricane vibes. Get Space Programs from Load Records.

The text above contains substantial rip-offs from Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft. Guess which ones and get some gifts straight from the mouth of madness.

STUFF: 13 MONSTERS NOVEMBER- SCARIER THAN CLOWNS

We have a post-halloween thing going at the next 13M. We are putting the Monsters back into 13 Monsters. And dancing like crazy. You know the score, don’t miss out.

The Loft (formerly Enigma) at Ship Street, 11-3AM, £5 standard/4 NUS/3 if you send us a myspace message to get in the cheap list for awesome people.

See you on saturday!

labels >> Usa is a Monster, little claw

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