Ocrilim

What if the Fucking Champs dismissed drummer Tim Soete and went black metal? Enter Mick Barr, guitar virtuoso of experimental band Orthrelm and occasional contributor to Crom-Tech, the Flying Luttenbachers, and Hella’s Zach Hill. His latest challenge as Ocrilim is just Barr without drum accompaniment, human or otherwise, and Annwn is at once epic, noisy, convoluted and robotic. With an average length of ten minutes, the seven tracks (titled "Part 1,” "Part 2,” etc.) completely fill the CD’s capacity at almost 80 minutes, but the songs tend to bleed into one another. No note, however, seems indiscriminate, as Barr layers multiple guitar parts in a sine-wave-like series of crescendos and dénouements. With equal amounts of black metal (somewhere between Blut Aus Nord and Xasthur) and guitar solo wankery (like Mattias IA Eklundh’s Freak Guitar vs. Fredrik Thordendal’s Special Defects), the album’s texture is noteworthy, luckily devoid of the yapping inanities of a vocalist. At the very least, Annwn is easy to pronounce, as opposed to Barr’s previous Uppragan Srilimia Ixioor Ocrilim Nollfithes Mrithixyl.