VARIOUS ARTISTS Whispers Through The Black Veil LP

VARIOUS ARTISTS Whispers Through The Black Veil LP

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(Wyrd War)
*** This is a new and unplayed item, direct from the CRUCIAL BLAST shop. ***

DESCRIPTION FROM CRUCIAL BLAST:
   Alas, I didn't find out about this amazing compilation until just now, several months after it had initially come out around Halloween of 2014, but what the hell - here at C-Blast HQ, every day is Halloween. It's one of the very first releases from Wyrd War, the new label headed by underground artist Dennis Dread, an impassioned advocate for original art in the punk/metal scene and producer of numerous album covers for everyone from Darkthrone to Abscess, as well as the editor of the killer art zine Destroying Angels. I love anything this guy smears his ink and fingerprints across, and with this LP, Dread has curated an eclectic assembly of exclusive tracks spanning extreme punk, metal, electronic music and other weirdness, all of it in celebration of Halloween. Lovingly assembled with his wicked sleeve art, Whispers Through The Black Hole explores the origins of the holiday while running through a wild track list that includes everything from gothic old-school country, creepy theme park music, classic heavy metal and blistering black thrash, sinister psychedelia, noisy deathrock, avant-garde electronic ambience, doom-laden prog rock, and more. And it's accompanied by a large eight-page booklet that features a great, in-depth essay by Dread that ties together the various artists with historical information on witchcraft and the origins of Halloween. This thing emanates an autumnal atmosphere from the moment you crack it open and drop the needle.
    Whispers opens with the wonderfully kitschy creep of Enchanted Forest's "Haunted House Theme", an original and never-before released piece of sinister organ music backed by a lone howling wolf, looped over and over, created for this long running family-owned roadside attraction outside of Portland. That's a perfect introduction for Dread's Halloween mixtape, followed by a diverse mix of sounds ranging from the sinister old-school gothic country of Hank Ray's "(They Call Me) Lucifer Sideburns", and the rollicking Swedish death metal of Vampire's "Pyre of the Harvest Queen" that combines a classic heavy metal hook with ghastly screams from beyond the grave, to Cleveland rippers Midnight who belt out an awesomely filthy cover of the Sonics' "The Witch", turning it into a thrashing blast of scummy necro garage punk. Infamous Oregon State Penitentiary inmate and Charles Manson / Kenneth Anger associate Bobby BeauSoleil offers a strange piece of driving, bluesy hard rock called "The Wailing On Witch Mountain" that's pretty fantastic, blending the sort of soaring, quasi-Floydian psychedelic hard rock heard on his mind-bending box set with a motorik backbeat and an almost proto-metal crunch that makes it one of the darkest things I've ever heard from BeauSoleil. And former Melvins/High On Fire member Joe Preston makes an appearance with his one-man sludgemachine Thrones, crafting an eerie mixture of ethereal, haunting voices, softly strummed harp, and sweeping kosmische synthesizers that's utterly bewitching, resembling some airy theme from a late 60's Satanic shocker, and is indeed a little reminiscent of Komeda's work for Rosemary's Baby.
    You also get an Italian horror ambient outfit known as Estasy, who appears with "Il Dio E' Nato", another highlight of the album that's over far too soon. A mixture of witchy vocalizations, creepy piano that slips in and out of tune, and a murky haze that hangs over the entire recording like decades of dust and rot, it's a strange but mesmerizing piece of music that again feels like a throwback to classic Euro horror scores but filtered through a warped low-fi industrial murkiness. Fans of Spettro Family would probably adore that one. Lebenden Toten does a killer combo of noise-damaged punk and reverb-fucked death rock called "At the Window" that sort of sounds like a cross between Rudimentary Peni and Confuse, leaving me wanting to track down everything from this band, and there's a cover of the old 60's era novelty tune "I'm The Wolfman" that is transformed into a slavering assault of drooling garage-thrash by Violation Wound, a new band from Chris Reifert (Autopsy / Abscess / Death). Orodruin offshoot Blizaro give us "Science of Darkness", another one of the band's delectable slabs of vintage 70's style doom a la Pentagram and Death SS, laced with their signature proggy weirdness, smokin' bluesy solos, and deranged throat-singing, and "Whispers Through the Black Veil" from Sweden's Rob Coffinshaker is pure goth-country creep, his deep, weathered baritone eerily reminiscent of Johnny Cash, the song itself a call back to the darker shadowy corners of classic 70's country music, a kind of funereal honkey-tonk.
The biggest surprise of the compilation though is the presence of acclaimed John Carpenter collaborator Alan Howarth, who worked alongside Carpenter on the iconic scores to Halloween II and III, Escape From New York, Christine, Prince Of Darkness and others, contributing a recent, unreleased composition called "Kill a Whole Family". It's a gorgeous and thoroughly gloomy mix of rumbling synths, minimal rhythmic programming and spectral piano from this horror-score legend, and obviously one of the highlights of the collection.
    Easily one of the best comps I've picked up in the past year, Whispers ticks off a lot of boxes for me, and is one that I'll definitely be pulling out on a regular basis, and not just when October rolls around. Limited to five hundred copies.   © CRUCIAL BLAST
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