A darker and more driven descent into the abyss than Mike Vest’s Blown Out project, Haikai No Ku nonetheless stays true to the guitarist’s ideal of formless, eternal sprawl. Clearly very much informed by the pitch-black, ‘crushing nihilist white-out’ vibe of classic Japanese psych-noise, Haikai are wise enough to retain the ‘feel’ of Haino and Mitzutani’s work without directly imitating them.

Instead, ‘Dead in the Temple’ sets the tone here with an evilly plodding, lock-step groove, over which Vest drops a gargantuan pure doom riff that could have been lifted straight from his work with Bong, instigating a solid ten minutes of black-hearted head-nodding as multiple layers of echoing vibrato lead shred and carefully manicured feedback shriek-drones accumulate, occasionally pulling together into a deafening, primordial uber-riff of malevolent awesomeness.

Subsequent tracks march forth with little in the way of variation - dense curlicues of manicured feedback howling at the desert sun as thunderous clouds of bass-heavy mega-skree throb and bleed beneath, the rhythm section pounding away in the distance, regimented and swing-less as a military parade trudging from the centre of some chaotic, Elder God-infested black hole.

In spite of all this apocalyptic jollity though, the slightly ‘shiny’, reverb-heavy production here sat rather poorly with me during my first few listens to this one, sounding rather too distant and well-scrubbed to really do justice to this kind of sonic blitzkrieg. But, as Vest’s label name so clearly implies, volume provided the key. Rescued from laptop purgatory and whacked through a mono guitar amp on the upstairs turntable, this shit hit big-time – as devastating a dark-noise blissout as you could wish for. If it lacks the overblown, beyond-the-red clippage of ‘Heavier Than a Death in The Family’ or Fushitsusha’s ‘Live 2’, the sheer density of sound that is revealed here when pushed through some appropriate speakers is almost as mighty.

More than anything in fact, ‘Ultra-High Dimensionality’ reminds me of Birchville Cat Motel’s classic ‘Our Love Will Destroy The World’ set. The pace is slower maybe, the riffs gnarlier, the basis in power trio rock more tangible, but the same power is there; that same sense of being sucked through a giant, cosmic vacuum cleaner, that same exhilarating vision of every self-described ‘shoegaze’ band in the world cowering in abject terror as their matchstick sonic cathedrals crumble to dust amidst the hundred-stack hurricane of some proper fucking cosmic noise.

In summary then: 2014’s best headcleaner / ear-wrecker – no contest.

Listen and buy from Visual Volume.

Labels: best of 2014, Haikai No Ku