The producer/rapper collaboration is often so much more rewarding than a super group (*cough* Divine Fits *cough*), especially when the two parties seem so well matched. "Bookfiend," the recent collaboration between DOOM and Clams Casino is an excellent example of this. Clams Casino's hazy production and DOOM's easy muttering flow sync up nicely. Of course, since this is DOOM, little is known about the track's circumstances or if the pair worked on any more songs together. Let's hope they did if the results are like this.
Bell Witch’s gutsy entrance into the realm of full-length recorded
musiccontains only six tracks. Each climbing,
darkly poetic song on Longing,
funereal in tone, slogging toward the grave, stretches the album into epic
territory, giving the release an equally epic running time.
Like Japandroids, Bell Witch showcases a duo capable of
producing sounds much larger and more impaling than their size suggests. Using
only a distorted bass and drums combination, in a manner as menacing though
hardly as chaotic as noise rock outfits in the surging vein of Lightning Bolt, the act bring a heavy dirge-like sorrow to
their songs.A sense of weight and
tragedy is made palpably burdensome through the heft of the music alone.
Though the guttural growls and rocketing screams of drummer
Adrian Guerra, as noted by Pitchfork, are fairly standard for the doom metal
genre, Bell Witch is saved by bassist Dylan Desmond’s frailer, shriller, less
conventional voice. Desmond sings as if praying or offering up hymns to some ancient,
towering god. There is an accepting bliss to his calmer, more widened vocal
approach. On “Rows (of endless waves),” Desmond cries out across a sea of
troubles, an ocean of worry he must sail on, navigating the Scylla and
Charybdis of mental schism on his Odyssean journeys while exhibiting stunning
delivery.
Lyrical imagery on Longing
is violent and anguished, yet scenically expansive in a grand, historic way. An
audio clip from the Poe-inspired film The
Masque of the Red Death (1964) used in “Beneath the Mask,” further deepens
the album’s literate characteristics. Longing,
however, is more of a soundtrack to a postmodern retelling of a Greek classic, a
doom-rock ode to human despair as old as myth, than it is a collection of
memorable songs. It is music as experience, nearly symphonic in scope,
grappling with mortal misery with maximal expressiveness but limited foundational
variation.
We recently wrote about a collaboration between masked rapper DOOM and Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood for Lex Records' 10th anniversary. Well, you can hear it now by clicking here, and if you had an idea of what it would sound like, maybe you should've remembered that this is DOOM and members of Radiohead we're talking about - artists who never give you what you're expecting to hear. The song, oddly titled "Retarded Fren," sounds (at first listen) more like a DOOM/Trent Reznor collaboration, with its slow, churning, industrial relentlessness. DOOM's rhymes are in typical form - complicated and funny - and his fans will certainly like this track. Weird moment at the end when DOOM advertises for an appearance he'll make in the U.K. with Ghostface on Saturday.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of standout-record label, Lex Records, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead duh!) are teaming with DOOM for a brand new track. The yet-untitled jam will be part of an upcoming compilation called Complex along with several other artists. The plan is to release a track on a week by week basis digitally all the way until mid-January when it will be available on vinyl. This isn't the first time the artists have created together and it probably won't be the last (according to DOOM). Their last collaboration took place in 2009 when DOOM was MF Doom; Thom did a remix of one of his cuts, a track called "Gazillion Ear". Sure to be one of the hottest tracks going into the new year, keep your ear to the ground for this one. Something tells me it's going to be a firestarter.
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