Alexander Tucker – Old Fog (ATP)

Alexander Tucker is a forward-thinking doom metal scholar who dwells somewhere indeterminate along the South coast of England. The ATP record label here presents an album of his multi-layered modal acoustic guitar-based compositions. For the interest of anybody still reading after that description, I can confirm that this is indeed a thing of mighty greatness. In fact, It feels a bit like meeting a sulking Pagan god in a trench on Brighton beach in the depths of winter fifty years after an extinction level apocalyptic catastrophe. There are moments when Tucker’s guitar sounds like John Fahey playing Black Sabbath (no jive!), and violin, accordion, percussion and assorted other strings and drone textures are steadily added to proceedings, creating a distinctively weird sonic palette that will prove familiar to fans of other classification-defying folk-affiliates such as Scatter or Bablicon.

For me, the weakest element here is the vocals, with Tucker’s Fursaxa-esque mutated madrigals often seeming superfluous amongst the towering webs of instrumentation, his Vicar’s son pronunciation rather undermining the brooding, pagan atmosphere. Perhaps he just needs to work on this though, because when the vocals do find their niche within the music, on the relatively modest ‘Of Late’ or the overwhelming gothic dread of album highlight ‘Phantom Rings’, the results are incredibly impressive, illuminating a cross-roads between the dark medievalism of European folk and the ritualistic repetition of metal song structure so powerful and seemingly obvious that it’s surprising few other musicians have thought to set up camp there.

This is strange, stirring, ambitious stuff basically - I have a suspicion Alexander Tucker has been grinding down chips from monolithic standing stones and snorting them. My CD player may say 48 minutes, but this album seems like it goes on forever, drifting ever deeper into the darkest psychedelic winter reveries I’ve heard for many a moon.