Sky Burial — Spectrehorse

Spectrehorse is sky burials second album, Sky burial is Michael Page of industrial noise purveyors Fire in The heads darker ambient project. Sadly it’s a rather hit and miss affair, relying  too much on genre clichés and often sounding like a low budget version of someone else- that said the there are a few tracks here that do offer some dark hope.

Also a whole the album relies to much on clearly sampled sounds, and often cringe inducing beat patterns that wouldn’t be out of place on a new age ambient album. In my eyes dark ambient/ drone music, almost has to have the feeling that it’s untouched by man, as if it’s part of nature or gargling away in the depths of some pitch black carven. Sadly more often then not with Spectrehorse,  you can picture a guy hunched over console or computers, not the lair of the unspeakable evil really. But as mentioned before  a few tracks do stand up to replaying and conjure up the odd chill or tow. Like the brooding and building atmosphere of  industrialised black ambient of down and down and drown- One feels like your getting near and near something very unnerving as you make your way though a decaying boiler room. Straight Jacket sonata feels like an oily spreading darkness oozing slow into listening space, that’s soon joined by effect altered guitar work, which sometimes sounds like strange calls and screams from the  other side, but more often it just sounds like altered guitar work. The guitar sadly appears again on a later track, in a real mood breaking almost rocking tuneful feedback mode.

It’s a real pity too little of this really jelled for me, as I really Enjoyed Pages other work with Fire in the Head. Hopefully future adventures into all things slow moving and dark, will be more focused and less manmade.