Contrastate — A Live Coal Under The Ashes

I’ll have to admit I’d been rather underwelmed  by the recent live come back album by uk dark ‘n’ surreal electronics/ folk/ what every collective Contrastate, But A Live Coal under the ashes is a whole different kettle of dark ‘n’ heady fish. It's really up their with some of coils best work and one of the finest examples of dark and psychodelic sound scaping your likely to find. The album was original  released in from 1992 here it’s reissued with an extra track from the same time.

The thing that’s most rewarding and compelling about the album as a whole is you just don’t know where they’ll twist off next, all of the tracks moving like a bizarre sonic sound ride, so you one minute you may be brooding in sinister dark carnival dread the next moving into heady ethnic lined drones undertied by world rhythms. Or stepping carefully through easy listening textures turned and bent to the dark and twisted side before dropping into evil sound drone pitched black lined with strange bubbling sounds and demented creepy laughter.  I guess another comparsent would be volcano the bear for the often weird world music edger’s, strange banks of vocal harmonies and hypnotic folk strumming. But really and truly with  A live coal under the ashes Contrastate have built their own strange very English, often dark but also a times brighter psychodelic universe that’s total and utterly of their own creation.

The only slight let down about the whole thing is the packageing which is just a card digit-pak, it would have been nice to have a had a booklet talking about the albums conception and the band it’s self. Never less if you have any interesting  at tall in dark, strange and surreal soundscaping of any form you need to pick this up. Really and truly a stone cold brain frying classic.