Mike Pathos

Wow, a release of pure originality, and total lunacy! This is a crazy, insane album. It travels from calm, serene strangeness to a blasting, chaotic wall of total destruction, or sometimes both are just mixed together simultaneously. Blending piercing, harmful tones, screeching violins and washes of noise with the mellow instrumentation and classical-sounding calmness, a bizarre and mentally deranged type of folk music is created. Amid this emotional mess of chugging, mechanical weirdness, the vocals stand out as playing the most crucial role in this collection, relaying all sorts of moods. Some tracks having voices of distorted utterances of pain, some of kinetically sped up frenzies, others being sweet and song-like, and also low sounding grumbles and mumbles exist within. The vocals, when not affected, have a beautiful, androgynous quality to them, and at these times their expression is at its greatest. At times they sound like the mutterings of a reclusive, mentally broken person whose mind resides in some place other than this one, reaching out for help, or maybe not wanting any at all. A completely wacky and surreal, somewhat disturbing affair, that twists and turns in every direction defying all categorisation.