Charalambides — Strangle the Wretched Heavens

Strangle the Wretched Heavens is the third and final CDR in a recent series of archival discs, which document recordings made between 1994 and 1996. I'm not going to go into each track, but let me just say that of the three (the other two are Emerald Message and Glowing Raw), this is the best.

This material was meant to be a part of an album that was intended to be the band's "big rock statement" for Siltbreeze records, their label at the time.

For some undisclosed reason, the band scrapped the album. This music is so interesting it's hard to understand why.

While the Charalambides definition of "rock" does not necessarily correlate with the average use of the term, this release does have its share of relatively unrestrained guitar attacks. The material in general is direct and intense, and although it lacks a little bit of the mystery of their proper albums, it makes up for it with exciting performances.

This CDR could easily be released as a standard album, as it stands up with any of the Charalambides albums, which are almost uniformly excellent. There's 250 of these, with handpainted, signed covers by Christina Carter.