Heathen Harvest

For whom shall the bell toll? That appears to be the order consign inside this deathly opus, a guitar that strolls in a cadence similar to the stroke of a funeral bell, playing with feedback and subtly submerging itself in drone layers of its own aura. This is monumental doom and minimalist dark ambient edifications evoking the endless corridor after slimy catacomb’s doors, leading a path to the dormant yet fierce states of darkness, very Lovecraftian in aesthetic and full of gothic horror reminiscences. A must for the morbid necrophile auralist expecting extreme emotions and low frequency distensions, loving atmospheric darkness and elongated cacophonic guitar riffs that will lost his soul in inequity states of evil and torment.

Doom commonly deals more with existential terrors and mind paranoias (what could be more hideous that existential despair anyway?) but what if a good account on occult horror is added, not in a prosaic thus evident way though but in a more open-to-imagination form? Then the inferno of our mind is open wide, locking ourselves in their entrails where not even light can escape...

You will not find any remote identification with beat here, the dimension of the heart is ahead, no earthly rhythms inhabit, no drums at sight, no sign of life in the form of voice, only death, despair and horror fill the space in a relentless descent that finds no limit in its fatal dive. The disk constitutes just a song that runs for 46.23 minutes long and opens with a morbid guitar intro, a very slow arpeggio that serves as the last light resembling harmony you’ll hear before entering this obscure reign. Then the guitar slips in a cascade of elongated slow funeral riffs that allows space for feedback to come and close the door behind the listener. There are no sabbath-esque influences or the sort (an aspect that will bring a hint of groovyness) more likely the guitar serves a role in the representation of a sordid atmosphere, that at moments gets accompanied only by its own feedback trace and some others by eerie distorted noises that increases a scarce and pollute atmosphere. The sound is mesmerizing, tempting in its own perverted sonority submerging the listener in its nightmare without warning him about the hopelessness of his condition. What at first sounded like a guitar now sounds eerie, distant and strange, unrecognizable and inhuman, that’s one of the particular effects of this music, the evolving character of its darkness, you will never be sure when things change shape or cant be sure anymore of the whereabouts of your aural discovery. One thing is particularly interesting, every 11 minutes a pronounced mutation is appreciated, after the first part what seems to be a bell tangs its toll in the abyss seconded by something that resembles like echoes from a distant chamber music, then subtly the inhumane guitar appears again adhering to the decaying rhythm apparently imposed by the bell... a bell tang from hell. At 22 minutes the sound of the bell, the funeral guitar riff and the deathly atmosphere around them gets joined by a sorrowful violin dirge that fuses with them in an amalgam of taciturn ecstasy of darkness, this is the greatest momentum of the work. At 33 the violin lines get alone and conforms a whole structure of sound layers, a strategy that the band favourably manages on their side. From here on, the work descends into the most obscure stage; an atmospheric vibration covers the contours of our travel, relentlessly droning in what seems to be an infinite fall into the void where primal darkness inhabits. These sonorities subtly start to decrease until they disappear in the very finale. This is really sinister and intense music!

This is a very successful marriage between Doom & Drone, an attempt that seems obvious and easy but requires a resolved resolution in favour of atmosphere and imaginary excitement, something that Pussygutt achieved with expertise in here, they are able to combine the slow and simple heavy riffage from doom and adds a good portion of noise, drone and organic instruments that finally creates an interesting atmosphere that submits the listener not in a dream state but rather a lucid vision of evocative horror. One more time becomes indispensable to understand that a suggestion is better than a forceful direction. The precision of their atmospheres, the absolute lack of beat and the minimalist touch of their composition finally resolve in a magnificent display of unexpected dark beauty noticed equally by the neophyte or the expert. Experience this and you’ll understand the beauty of the dark side.

Aquarius Records

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http://www.aquariusrecords.org
A brand new single-track of sprawling blackness from this mysterious Idaho duo, offering up their own version of the template laid down by Earth way back around their album 2. Which as you probably already know means, metal riffs slowed down to tarpit tempo, the various notes struggling to move forward through a field of crumbling distortion and near static buzz, the riffs allowed to ring out and fade away almost completely, before the next one comes lumbering up behind it.
............................................................................The strange thing is that live, Pussygutt are a full on band, much more traditionally heavy, with a drummer and everything, even on their last record the epic double lp Sea Of Sand, the band was a lurching doomic behemoth, bordering on the industrial at times, but here, their sound is stripped way way down, and it suits them. They're able to evoke all sorts of moods with their carefully constructed downtuned ambience. This is some seriously sinister shit for sure, sweeping and darkly cinematic, the soundtrack to the eventual collapse of the universe, the sound of dying stars, or of some long slumbering beat awakening after millennia, or maybe Goblin at 16rpm, some haunted house music way too scary for any haunted house you'd ever want to visit.
........It's not all heaviness though. Long stretches of sound dip into hushed shimmer here and there, while elsewhere the low end slips away leaving a creepy string section do drift spectrally, like some secret Satanic classical music, but even these moments are always tense with the knowledge that right around the corner, could be lurking another churning black wave of slow motion doomdrone crush. Really fantastic, and more than most of this stuff, infused with a deep otherworldly beauty.
........Definitely require listening for folks whose cd racks/record crates/iPods' are packed with Earth, SUNNO))), Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, To Blacken The Pages, Hum Of The Druid, Expo '70, Nadja, Vulture Club, Hjarnidaudi, Monument Of Urns, Fear Falls Burning, Half Makeshift, Tunnels, Seconds In Formaldehyde, KTL, Light Of Shipwreck.......

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MetalReviews.com....

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The young label from Olympia, WA, 20 Buck Spin, surprised me before with their extreme groovy death metal from Japan Coffins and now they have done it again with an obscure drone/doom act Pussygutt. With the moniker like this one could have expected some "scream bloody gore", yet Pussygutt lays down some of the most profound and somber music I have heard in a while. And they do it with only bass and drums, as well as low frequency manipulations and violins making an appearance about half way into this one monstrous 45 min long track.

My feeble mind is separating this work by Brittany McConnell and Blake Green (who reside in the remote location outside of Boise, Idaho) into roughly three parts-movements. At first, we have the climbing wave of distortion periodically crushing, almost in relief, releasing lower sonic frequencies and waves of flickering cymbals. Throughout all this the melody is there, only it is crawling somewhere so deep and so slowly, you have to make an effort to uncover its inevitable tidal wave. Later, things climb deeper, if that was possible, into a crusty dungeon, from which eventually violins pull out this giant, turning the track into one pensive crusher, which is both classical music and funeral doom in approach. Regardless of the description you pick, in repeating its violin motions, She Hid Behind Her Veil … will suck the joy of life out of you until the last dying vibrating detuned violin melodies disappear.

SunnO))) comparisons clearly can be made, but She Hid Behind Her Veil … is more than pure amplifier worship. A few other reference points which came to mind are Asunder and Nadja, but the latter is electrically sizzling drone, while Pussygutt on this album ventures into the funeral drone territory, if there is such a thing. If not, well, I just invented a genre.

This foreboding extreme music is obviously not for everybody, but if you think today is the last day on Earth and the sun will not rise tomorrow, sample She Hid Behind Her Veil … as this requiem will provide you with both soothing and crushing way on the way to the void.....

Way Too Loud
When I popped this CD in, I saw one 46 minute song! It's tough stuff to pull off a single track album, and you need some cajones to do it. The flip side is that some bands already make albums that with a little bit of work, could easily be tied together as one song, in this case it's ambient.
It begins with an echoing guitar in the background, sting by hanging .. screaming into feedback, then going into some slow chimes from tubular bells, then the buzzing comes in the bass, that begins to distort. Time passes, and instantly sorrowful strings jump on top to scream and whine, until their crying by themselves, before dying off into silence, with barely audible sounds from the abyss.
It's a long depressing journey which of course takes it's sweet time getting to the end to kill itself. Ambient is a difficult genre to deal with sometimes, the main problem being that there's almost never any pickup to the action, which is the same downfall here, as well as the ten minutes of just about pure silence at the end. For those of you considering getting near this album, you'll likely love it, though the rest of the world might be scratching their head.

KINDA MUZIK

Tussen schoonheid en zwartgalligheid.
CD, 20 Buck Spin/Konkurrent

Tekst: Hans van der Linden

The Wire

The slow motion, downturned torpor of Pussygutt can be easily traced to the opiated heaviness of Earth and the vanguard sludge of Corrupted. But just as both of those influences recognised that they could not funtion simply for the sake of being slow, heavy and subharmonic, Pussygutt has transformed the dronedoom plod into a 21st century murder ballad on the sindle 45 minute track of She Hid Behind Her Veil. The album begins somewhat conventially with blackened waves of rumbling low end and lurking shadow - cast melodies. Yet, about halfway through the album, the group indorporate an urgent scraping of the violin, whose minor key melody repeats in a a woefully sad trill above the lumbering sound below. This haunting elegy of maudlin strings and crushing doom is sublime in its beauty, weeping that the end of the world is coming. ..

Crucial Blast

Took awhile to finally list this. She Hid Behind Her Veil is the latest full length from Pussygutt, a single sprawling track that stretches out for close to an hour, a massive hovering cloud of black fog summoned up by the Idaho-based duo that takes the crushing blackened drone of their previous releases and crafts it into something less abstract, more horrific, and definitely WAY heavier than before. A big part of Pussygutt's sound is based around the use of crushing, glacial sludgemetal guitar riffs that are strewn throughout a vast rumbling black void, taking the droning, ambient sludgedrift of early Earth and slowing the sound down even more, and draping the cavernous riffs in black ambience and veils of muted distortion. But it's the other string instruments that turn them into much more than just another sludgeonaut piloting their way through endless fields of subsonic drift, and on She Hid Behind Her Veil, Pussygutt go for a much more minimal approach. The dense, frightening industrial dronescapes of their Sea Of Sand double LP are here stripped down to bare riffs, groaning glacial chord progressions that float across a bleak ambient landscape of howling orchestral strings, and the atmosphere of desolation and dread that these cats create is exquisite. The whole piece reeks of malevolence and emptiness and loss, the masses of violins and cellos and other symphonic string instruments rising and falling in a simple, cinematic flow that washes over the crushing doomy chords in the first half of the piece, and then towards the later half the heaviness falls away almost completely, leaving behind long expanses of those haunting film-score strings, or dissipating into stretches of subdued metallic hum and resonant prayer bowl tones. I've been a fan of Pussygutt's music since hearing them on a cassette compilation that Not Not Fun put out four years ago, and this is yet another gorgeous piece of music from the band, imbued with a spectral beauty that you don't normally hear in other bands that traffic in this kind of abstract ambient heaviness. Much of She Hid... resembles both Llenandose De Gusanos era Corrupted and some evil modern classical music composed for a black mass - crucial stuff, obviously, especially for anyone into super heavy droneology a la Sunn, Earth, KTL, Half Makeshift, and Blue Sabbath Black Cheer. Comes in a black digipack with a multi-page booklet that includes liner notes and some creepy satanic-looking imagery.

PUSSYGUTT.... She Hid Behind Her Veil... CD – 20 Buck Spin.... Most drone/doom bands rely on walls of vintage....

amplifiers to stupefy audiences, but Boise, Idaho’s....

Pussygutt aren’t content with mere zap-your-brain....

soundscapes. Their latest release, She Hid Behind Her....

Veil..., consists of a single titular song, which uses the....

resonant space created by drones to heighten emotion....

and anticipation. Once the studio duo unleashes....

subterranean bass swells, they slowly integrate....

classical string playing and other production flourishes....

over the course of 47 minutes. It’s closer to the artsy....

styling of God Speed You! Black Emperor than horror....

movie soundtrack vibratos. The obvious juxtaposition....

is the gold standard of the genre, SunnO))). Yes, both....

bands use gigantic sounds to expand consciousness,....

however Pussygutt offer a less primal, more refined....

sound. Call it erudite, cerebral doom, if you will.....

While the album best functions as soundtrack to an....

old man pouring over tomes in his private study,....

Pussygutt are aware their musical aesthetics are....

not bar and club friendly. As such, they feature a....

guitar player and drummer when they perform live,....

unleashing new interpretations of their recorded....

sounds. She Hid Behind Her Veil... is a thoughtful,....

dramatic piece that unexpectedly functions as doom/....

classical crossover. (Nick DeMarino)....

pussygutt.com....