Crown Of Bone — The Serpent & The Rainbow
As with anything put out by this Minneapolis based HNW and dark ambient/drone label the release is nicely presented. The double sided colour sleeve comes inside a clear DVD case, and the artwork takes in stills from the movie( on the front side), and some a sort of occult/ psychedelic rainbow painting( on the inside cover). The CDR takes in a red to black colour stretched image.
The forty minute track starts out with two very similar sounding black metal guitar drones that are laid on top of each other, and then are shifting from one stereo channel to the next- this creates a very shapeless mass of morose & dense tonality. As the track moves on you get slowly swirling shifts with in it's dense mass of: guitar tone, blacked noise electronics, from time to time buried & wonky horror keyboard dirges, jitter & juddering slow guitar damn harmonics, and other horror filed textural shifts.
To start with this track does nicely summon up a intense, over-loaded & horror drenched vibe of the unknown. But sadly (for the me) the track doesn’t really progress or develop much beyond it initial elements & it's rather muddled sonic feeling. Sure later on you get more sustained & clear sounding horror organ/ keyboard/ soundtrack elements in the mix, but sadly the track never seems to settle down in one more focused or interesting place. So it all sounds very muddled, & at times it just sounds like COB is randomly chucking on more & more layers with little thought about destroying the successful elements he’s already created.
So to sum-up- this release started off in a quite promising & intensely horror filled manner, but sadly it fairly quickly became a shapeless, over layered & unfocused mess that quickly lost my interest.