Lonesummer — What We Were

‘What We Were’ is the first highly off-kilter, unhinged & noisy  avant- grade black metal release by Philadelphia based project Lonesummer, which sees the project throwing all manner of surprising stuff at you along with often clamouring drums & blacked grunts.

We go from the opening track ‘The Ones who grab my hands, the lost soul’  with it’s punishing attack on the senses mix of: stuck distorted pop harmonics, pounding complete fuzzed up drums, bleak metal sheiks & most bizarre Carla Lane like jazz vocalising over & distorted/ total sonically abused jazz sample.  Through to slowish yet total feed-back engulfed meeting of  drum machine stream train beat, muffled eerier feminine vocals, and harmonic guitar chiming drone of ‘Make Life a Little Less sour’. Onto the totally crude, distorted & barely made out black metal guitar tone, clamouring drums of the title track which is cut, bent & general nastily fucked with by the singers extreme feed-back drenched vocals; before it drops mid-way into murky child like/ new age plod over which a barely heard self help speaker can be heard, before once more the distorted black metal noise knife stab back in. Yes this is a really mangled up, weird & off kilter take on Black metal at its most extreme & unbalancing, yet ever so often there are still dips into saner more atmospheric & tuneful riser like shoe gazing guitar like highs or wavering organ marches, or just ambient harmonic drift- though these never stay for too long before the feed-back, vocals & distorted elements Slam back in

A very noisy, often highly sonically unstable first brain- fuck & blacked metallic attack from this project which has to be heard to be believed- so if you like your black metal craft crazy, surprising & total unhinged this is a must have item.