So, what say you to the concept of a UK doom super-group of sorts, comprising Mark Greening (Electric Wizard/Ramesses) on drums, Adam Richardson (Ramesses) on bass/vox and Mike Vest (Bong) on guitar..? Fuck Yeah, clearly.

That this first record what they have made is exactly as monolithic as their collective pedigrees might suggest, mixing up elements of the protagonists’ other bands in precisely the way I might have hoped it would, is good news indeed.

Nuff said really, but I suppose in the name of content creation, I should go on.

More of a long-ish EP than an album as such (four tracks / under thirty minutes on the vinyl, plus alternate ‘rehearsal versions’ and a brief riff on Loop’s ‘Black Sun’ on the CD & digital versions), ‘Super-Unnatural’ still represents the heaviest, beastliest, most indigestible thing that hit my ears in 2013, fusing the dense mysticism of latter-day Ramesses with a white noise static burn of guitar noise that takes the drone-wall of earlier Bong material and considerably ups the violence to Skullflower-like levels of nastiness, whilst Greening – oh joy of joys, thank you sir, and Satan bless you – locks straight back into exactly the kind of evil, slow-motion groove that once powered classic-era ‘Wizard as they laid waste to our cold earth back in the late ‘90s. And fucking hell, how I’ve missed it.

Picking formats on this one is a tough gig, as whilst the vinyl obviously roars with dust-choked ultra-bass of the infernal pits, the CD/DL instead gives you those aforementioned rehearsal cuts, which are perhaps even better, adding a totally evil, ‘90s-BM-demo-tape extreme-treble type blast to proceedings that practically has me stripping off to my grave-clothes and howling into the frozen void on a nightly basis. Well, ya pays ya money and ya takes ya choice I suppose. Personally, I like it so much I bought both. Yes, I PAID TWICE. Maybe that will go someway toward assuaging the debts I built up through those happy years of file-sharing. Either way, the spirit of the Dopethrone lives on in these recordings, and that is all you need to know.

Listen on Soundcloud, buy from Ritual Productions.

Labels: 11 Paranoias, best of 2013