Ice Dragon Tome of the Future Ancients
Self-Released
You never expect doom merchants to be terribly prolific in anything other than, say, inhaling copious amounts of green smoke and amassing an impressive cult horror movie collection, but it seems Ice Dragon produces an unnatural amount of black fuzz for a band that should be spending the majority of their time getting high and watching Suspiria. Tome of the Future Ancients is the Boston band’s third full-length in as many years (a digital only release for now; it will get a proper vinyl release later in the year on Yersinia Pestis Records) and the battery of torn-paged suspicions and spells it promotes are surely divined by some greater and sinister power. Their expanding canon is hell incarnate, and at 76 minutes, Tome doesn’t dare deign to loosen its grip, and thus Ice Dragon’s weird and wonderful shadow grows ever darker and longer. Much like their two previous albums, 2010′s The Burl, The Earth, The Aether and 2011′s The Sorrowful Sun,Tome masterfully blends the witchy metal of Black Sabbath, the crushing curses of Electric Wizard, and the thick dope smoke of Sleep, but it also integrates a phantasmagoria of heavy psych-drone (“Man Sitting in a Field of Green Grass,” “Astronomical Union,” “Adoration of Ra,” “Infinite Requiem”) into that formula for an all-together eerier descent into the mouth of ritualistic madness. Belly up to the altar, boy, for the Goat’s in league with the Ice Dragon and they’ve got (yet another) grand gift for you.
Listen to Ice Dragon’s Tome of the Future Ancients!
Before we’re hit with the new Melvins full-length, Freak Puke, in June, the mega-cult stoner/doom/sludge/grunge/metal band has decided to treat us to a free download of a new five-song EP, The Bulls and the Bees. Free, you say? Yes, and I know how much you want it, so go here and get it. Now, The Bulls and the Bees features the four-man lineup we’ve grown accustomed to in recent years, with Buzz “King Buzzo” Osbourne and Dale Crover being joined by Coady Willis and Jared Warren of Big Business, but that won’t be the case with Freak Puke (that album will see the Melvins as a three-piece again, dubbed Melvins Lite, with Trevor Dunn beside Osbourne and Crover), so if you love the extra sack kick you get from Willis and Warren, be sure to click on that link. With the exception of “A Really Long Wait,” which is about three minutes of ambient seance spook, The Bulls and the Bees is busting with enormous, Buzzo-nutty riffs, whether they be of the massive and groovy (“The War on Wisdom”), punishing and drum-filled (“We Are Doomed”), weird and spacey (“Friends Before Larry”), or psychedelic and fuzzy (“National Hamster”) variety. There’s also plenty of scary but melodic vocals and it all sounds like it’s gonna plunge the Pacific Northwest into the ocean, so basically what we’ve got here is some good ol’ Melvins fare.
Check out the video for “The War on Wisdom” from The Bulls and the Bees!
The strange, foggy prog of Mangoo’s second full-length album (and Small Stone debut), Neverland, is absorbingly complex, and a mere cursory listen would do it a great injustice. You need to remove your foil hat and step right into its tractor beam of ray gun fuzz and analog synth to experience what really lay beyond the flashing lights, and that’s some seriously heavy hooks and rowdy raunch n’ roll. Neverland is a blacktop spaceship running on intergalactic gasoline, driven by Finnish men in silver jumpsuits who know how to have a good time, even if it’s a totally weird one. Mangoo are the past and future all at once, neanderthals at a laser show, like Sasquatch playing 2112, but they make it sound so good, cohesive, and natural that you could put this one on at any point in space and time it would make total sense. While dominated by a cosmic-psych vibe introduced on the title track, Neverland does have some monumental brassy moments (“Deathmint”) and a quick hit of banjo (“Home”), but it’s the way songs like “Diamond in the Rough,” “You,” “Lose Yourself,” “You, Robot,” and “Moom” come together with the force of five meteors colliding that really defines this one. It mellows out near the end with wall melters “Painted Black” and “Hooks” before dropping one of the most epic closers I’ve heard in a long time, “Datzun”. It may take two or three listens to sort it all out, but Neverland eventually probes that sweet spot.
Ice Dragon
Mangoo