***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! LAUDANUM returns after belting out a thunderous split with STORMCROW and the criminally underrated debut CD, The Apotheker. The Coronation is a 40-plus-minute hell-ride into a bleak and vast forest of doom and despair, a serenade of blistering guitars, steamrolling distorted bass, vocals tainted with battery acid and a landscape of crushing electronic sine waves. Founding members BECKY and JUDD HAWK are now joined with GREG WILKENSON (BRAINOIL) and NATHAN MISTEREK (GRAVES AT SEA) to unleash this blackened opus of oscilloscopic doom. Edition of 500 copies packaged in wide-spine jackets, with lyric sheets and fold-out three-color silkscreened posters.
LP $18.95
12/14/2009
In April 2009, 20 Buck Spin released the Sacred Death split LP between Oakland's Laudanum and Stormcrow. That record featured two exclusive Laudanum tracks and led Cosmo Lee of the Invisible Oranges blog to claim Sacred Death "may be the heaviest split I've ever heard." While the band's two sludge / doom contributions clearly stood out from the pack, it is on their sophomore full-length album, The Coronation, that the band's world-eating heaviness is fully realized. Joining the husband-and-wife duo of Judd Hawk (overdriven string corrosion, ambient texture, and documentation) and Becky Hawk (battering ram and subsonic transmissions) are Greg Wilkinson (low-end frequency discharge, vocal disruption, and auditory experimentation; also of Brainoil, Pig Heart Transplant, Earhammer Studios) and the latest addition, Nathan Misterek on "battery acid, bellows, and blasphemy," or what most call vocals. Misterek, widely known as vocalist for the legendary Graves At Sea, adds an element of occult grimness previously absent from Laudanum's corrosive noise-doom wasteland--the final piece in the puzzle. On The Coronation, punishing, bruised sludge doom and bleak industrial noise experiments are fused ever more tightly together into a cohesive soundtrack for the slow collapse of modern life and culture. The intense low-frequency pummel of Wilkinson's bass rumble is itself an apparent cause for some of this collapse, such is its massive, earth-shaking power. Becky's crushing drum beats rival Dale Crover in sheer intensity and brute force; Judd's repetitive, stone-slab riffs carry the weight of the world; and Misterek's vocals, colliding with Becky's, coat the whole...
CD $9.50
08/25/2009
MP3 $7.99
08/25/2009