I am going to try to start reviewing things that haven't been reviewed by Pitchfork yet. This doesn't mean they won't run a review but for now there doesn't seem to be one. I understand it is impossible for any website, PFM or other to review everything but where some might decide to be the 6754th to cover a well known major label band or mega popular indie band, it is still the underdogs that interest me the most.
This is my very first non pitchfork review and my rating system will be simple. The review will be in RED if I love it. MUSTARD if it leaves me feeling luke warm. And BLUE if it leaves me cold.
I can’t explain why I am attracted to a record where 2/3 of it sounds like bees tossing and turning on an organ bed with a rattlesnake pacing before it. There is a new genre radiating from its core of repetitive drone, something lighter than the traditional sound of doom. Posi-doom? I don’t know what else to call it without sounding like a ridiculous description from a Relapse mail order catalog. Maybe it has something to do with my affinity for two-piece bands. Maybe it’s the melody and notes that aren’t really there but my imagination fills in the blanks with. I can’t tell if new layers of sound reveal themselves with each listen or if I am genuinely making them up. In fact after 6 listens, this record hasn’t sounded the same twice and at the same time I am certain many people would listen to this padded mattress of thick tones and hear something that irks them like a car alarm with no owner to silence it in sight.
A mere 3 tracks clocking in under 30 minutes, I believe it was “Freedom Towards Death” that helped be decide this is my favorite Growing release to date, continents (and contents) away anything they have done for Kranky Records. Vocals, vocals where there have been none before; there is a lovely sadness buried but evaporating upward that I can only compare to a more stripped down but no less sonic Jesu.
Posi-doom. I hold the rights to that name but you may borrow it at will, ha! And while the subject is still fresh, file this under a descendent of Earth.
