Corpse Candle — Swamp Curse

“Swamp Curse”  is a C40’s worth of nasty, sometimes sludgy, but always horror ‘n’ bile soaked extreme noise matter and sickly caustic electro drone matter from London based Corpse Candle (aka Robert Meldrum who’s also in excellent HNW project Uneathered).

Side one offers up three tracks in all, and first of theses is “Boo Hag” which finds  just under seven minutes of : unhinged and boiling wind feedback, gothic seared wow-wow tinged roaring electronics and  dips into unwell sludgy old school industrial bass violation- before it runs into manically reverb  & yet quite eerier stuck  electro drum attack.  Then we have  the second track “Lurch”  which slowly winds up the intensity with the whirling casket wheel textured that builds into a thickening wall of : dental scraping, slowed circle electro bone sawing, dusty bone tapings, and  seared yet ghostly almost harmonic woops ‘n’ wails. Then side one  finished off with the two minute twenty of  “Soul Loss” which kicks straight in with a low down ‘n’ roasting juddering that’s squealed over by slipping fan belt feedback screams and murky almost voodoo drum clamouring.

Flipping over to side two and we only have one track  on offer here & it’s entitled “oodooV”. The track starts out with murky, unwell and quite stark voodoo drum hammerings, pretty soon Meldrum starts to reverb and run the drum textures into each other. Then at just after the two minute mark he starts feeding the drum textures through a feed back and crushing muffled textured effect which gives this great brutal and suffocating edge to the track. It feels your in a huge pot surrounded by drum beating natives who are getting ready to cook you; to make things worse  your body & mind is soaked  in bad Peyote comedown, so the drums keep stretching, bending and caustically  melting around you. The rest of the  twenty minute track sees Meldrum shifting from more clear rhythmic yet thick battering to more muffled, bent and sickly psychedelic noise hazes.

This is by far the best Candle Corpse release I’ve heard thus far, and it shows Meldrum pulling up this more extreme noise and caustic drone project up to the level of his excellent HNW only project Unearthered. The release is topped off with a great & grim black ‘n’ murky witches green screen printed sleeve.