Agaric Fly — Starless

Agaric Fly in the new doom drone project from New York based  experimental artists /maker-noise Robert Meldrum. Over the years I’ve enjoy many of Robert’s releases over his few project, in particular his grim walled noise project Unearthered, or his horror-fed harsh noise meets wall-noise project Corpse Candle. So when I saw this was out, and Robert was trying something a little different I was very keen to hear it

Starless is seemingly the first release from the project, and it comes in the form of a nine track CDR. Each of the tracks run between just over a minute to nearing ten, and I’d say you call what we have here is instrumental guitar based doom drone- with flavours of indie guitar drone, some slight experimental  guitar scaping & subtle synth elements, and the odd blacked ‘n’ crawling black metal edges. Each of the tracks here are based mainly around fairly thin guitar drone sound, which plays over & over the same repetitive melody line though-out each track. At times it almost sounds like this is literally just first take recordings, as this is mostly very stripped, sparse & lo-fi in it’s feel.

And I’m sorry to say the whole thing did little or nothing for me- I guess it doesn’t help I’m not the greatest fan of this rather one-dimensional type of doom/ drone sound. And something from this genre really has to stand-out, be a little different, or unusually to really pull me in. And I’m afraid to say Starless just feels very run-of-the-mill, & drab(in a bad way)

I think if it wasn’t for Robert’s involvement, and I’d played this blind I would have doubted if I’d  have got past a second play through. But as it was I did persevere with it & played it a few more times, but ultimately it’s just not for me….it’s certainly not the worse I’ve heard of this type of thing, then again it’s nothing special either. Really if you enjoy this genre, then maybe check out a few tracks, and see if you dig…otherwise just move on.