To make up for my recent weblogging slackness I'm gonna vainly try to post a record review every day this week. Here goes;

ASVA – Futurists Against the Ocean (Web of Mimicary)

Aficionados of noise will have a good idea what to expect from this disc, featuring former members of Burning Witch and produced with the assistance of Billy Anderson and Stephen O’Malley. And indeed, the relentless doom guitar drone is present and correct. Initially though, the sound here seems disappointing – Asva’s axelords summon up neither the bowel-churning, primordial depths of Sunn 0))) nor the transcendent bliss-out of Boris, and charges of self-indulgence could well be levelled as they trudge monotonously toward the 15 minute mark, endlessly in love with the sound of their own decaying power-chords. But what they lack in brute force, they soon make up for in sonic variety, augmenting their sound with thunderous percussion echoing like a subterranean rockslide, some superbly ritualistic hammond organ drone and Jessika Kenney’s startling and operatic high priestess-style vocalising. The sounds mesh and the pulse rises as the album progresses, building an atmosphere that’s almost theatrical in its portentous bombast, evoking the suffocating hysteria of vintage ‘70s horror. It’s as if someone ordered an avant-metal soundtrack to pivotal sequences from ‘The Devil Rides Out’ and ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’. Via the Trojan Horse of a drab title and sombre post-rock sleeve-art, Asva have lured us slowly into something far more wild-eyed and evil – their own orgiastic midnight sabbat, where the dark rites are celebrated, and the Goat of Mendes himself begins to take form. Cool.