First tape for this duo’s second outing, and it’s a pair of messily shifting black metal and noise-toned zone-the-fuck-out heaving coils of coal black doom. So, not too dissimilar from their debut, then.
Cinematic only in its most grainy, found footage sense, A Wheel of Burning Eyes is a submersion. It’s like someone drowned The Cure’s “Burn” as a witch and recorded the audio. Seemingly begrudging of another dawn, this record mines an underground elsewhere that never reaches the straight world’s version of paydirt.
The tinkling of a chain, the earthward notes, and an excavator track of grinding low end, “Usurper/Destroyer” is bad mood music; there may be a way out, but the light is a mile up ahead. Through the Torquemada cinders in the wind, there are howls and screams – Siouxsie behind concrete. Lulling tones flit by, too, temporarily calmer passages while post-industrial coastal towns burn toward the ground. The track ends in overdose bliss in the face of tidal obliteration.
Perhaps less single-minded than its sister, “Glowing light of Ophanim” has a tint of fx or maybe a pedal sheen and more of a sense of waves rather than the first track’s punishing brutalism. These two still feel like a pair, somehow replicating the sound of successfully Contact miced blood traveling across pavement.
A traumatic, weird, lonely end of a record.
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