The wonderfully-titled Burning Off Impurities, the proper album follow-up to last year’s highly-rated Black Tar Prophecies 1,2, and 3 collection, is a mass funeral pyre built from elements of folk, sludgy metal, Indian drone, electronic composition, and windstrewn field recordings.  After the fire, all is charred and barely identifiable, sinking into the ground and decaying…

It is a diverse set that wouldn’t have sounded terribly out of place on Revenant (sitting next to the No-Neck Blues Band in the catalogue); “Dead Vine Blues” underlines their Faheyesque credentials with deft fingerpicking, slide guitar and a spiralling sense of doom.  Speaking of doom, the awesome “Silk Road” is the track that the four horsemen of the apocalypse will be dancing to down hell’s disco after they have finished their earthly business, scythes left with black shawls in the cloakroom; the track gallops along despite the unsettling relationship between its undeniable funk and its queasy eastern drone.   In remarkable contrast, “Drawn Curtains” sounds close in ethos to something on Type, or Miasmah – electrical distortion, spooky flecks of guitar, drowning strings. 

The ashes of these impurities turn into some sort of black gold.  This is heavy, this is toxic, this is dense, this is very very dark.  Whatever they are selling the mining rights for in Portland, now is the time to invest.

 Listen to “Dead Vine Blues” courtesy of Temporary Residence.  Buy it, buy it, buy it.