OK firstly I’ve listened to this album intensely and, no, I still have no idea about that title. Actually I could probably say the same about the entire album but you and the band deserve more than that. Sooo…. Opium Warlords. Their debut passed me by so this sophomore album is my slow motion crash course introduction… and it appears to be another project by one of the more colourful characters that the underground throws up; the inimitable Albert Witchfinder.
I actually had a lot of time for slow, distorted proto-doom experiments of The Puritan and was curious as to what ideas warranted a new project. Still not sure about that if I’m honest. What I can say is that the five minutes of opening track ‘Ski-Meru’ and what sounds like a faint bit of distortion over which we get sparse random notes and the strumming of piano wires and sudden bursts of short, violent guitar strikes, was not it. Deliberately disorienting it does at least destroy preconceptions if oddly being a touch lacking in atmosphere for me. And it makes way for the organ, guitar and drum entrance of ‘Slippy’ which actually threatens to form a conventional song structure until it skips sideways into something which can only be described as 70s prog band Focus spliced with black metal vocals, separated by periods of single, repeated note plucking. It all seems a bit random and…er… slippy. I fail to fully grasp it I’m afraid despite it clearly being a very well thought out piece and actually quite good. In fact as you would expect the album does utterly convince when it comes to the thought behind all this, but the voice it chooses is far from conventional or easy to understand and the opening half seems a little random somehow if you fail to crawl inside it.
‘Lament For The Builders Of Khara Khoto’ is a much more focussed affair to me. Low, grim, slow and built on a riff it is more like the experimental doom of The Puritan; random bursts and screams, tumbling half heard melody and distortion building at last a disturbing, unsettling mind set and mood. This is carried forward in heavier, even more puritanical tones with ‘The Wind Is A Gift From A Distant Friend’ before closing with the enigmatic subtleties and discordant-then-melancholy post rock melody of the mournful ‘Satan Knew My Secret Heart’.
It is, as you would expect, a strange and difficult album. The opening half I find too disjointed but the second half works and flows really well and on the whole it’s just nice to have a different take on music. The world needs its visionaries.
(6/10 Gizmo)
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