Trees

Trees

Sickness In

Flenser

***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! Sickness In is the third album from Portland’s most wretched, TREES. Following their similarly abject slabs of feedback-doused horror and quasi-formless dirge Lights Bane and Freed of This Flesh on Crucial Blast, the two-song full-length is a slowly rotting heap of droning, slow-motion death-doom riffs decomposing into clouds of black amplifier hum, shrieking voices and tortured screams drifting against the glacial roar of smoking amp stacks and short-circuiting hardware. This time around, the band drops some of their most leaden, majestic riffs yet into a slow-motion filth-storm. Massive, saurian doom rhythms slip way out of the confines of anything resembling a “groove,” deep into rumbling fields of charred, ritualistic chanting and Abruptum-like states of psychotic noise. Opener “Cover Your Mouth” crashes in on an avalanche of thrumming electricity and metallic noise; the crushing, abstract heaviness collapses in on itself while the rhythm section accentuates the rumbling black mess with thunderous blasts of anti-propulsion. Trees have always had a somewhat improvisational bent to their extreme doom-laden horror, but just when the track lies on the verge of a field of pure drone, the band unleashes titanic, earth-scorching riffage. On “Perish,” the resonant sound of throat singing introduces a new wave of howling, ambient feedback and speaker-hiss, soon transformed into another twisted, agonized pain-dirge as those tortured vocals scrape raw, pain-wracked screams that rise and fall behind the amorphous black sludge and diseased drones.

Trees

Sickness In

Crucial Blast

Sickness In is the third album from Portland’s most wretched, Trees. Following their similarly abject slabs of feedback-doused horror and quasi-formless dirge Lights Bane and Freed of This Flesh on Crucial Blast, the two-song full-length is a slowly rotting heap of droning, slow-motion death-doom riffs decomposing into clouds of black amplifier hum, shrieking voices and tortured screams drifting against the glacial roar of smoking amp stacks and short-circuiting hardware. This time around, the band drops some of their most leaden, majestic riffs yet into a slow-motion filth-storm. Massive, saurian doom rhythms slip way out of the confines of anything resembling a “groove,” deep into rumbling fields of charred, ritualistic chanting and Abruptum-like states of psychotic noise. Opener “Cover Your Mouth” crashes in on an avalanche of thrumming electricity and metallic noise; the crushing, abstract heaviness collapses in on itself while the rhythm section accentuates the rumbling black mess with thunderous blasts of anti-propulsion. Trees have always had a somewhat improvisational bent to their extreme doom-laden horror, but just when the track lies on the verge of a field of pure drone, the band unleashes titanic, earth-scorching riffage. On “Perish,” the resonant sound of throat singing introduces a new wave of howling, ambient feedback and speaker-hiss, soon transformed into another twisted, agonized pain-dirge as those tortured vocals scrape raw, pain-wracked screams that rise and fall behind the amorphous black sludge and diseased drones.

Trees

Freed Of This Flesh

Crucial Blast

***The mysterious Portland ensemble Trees returns with their second offering on Crucial Blast, Freed of This Flesh--two fetid death rituals scraped from the crypt.  Both tracks average around fourteen minutes; extended death-rattles comprised of glacial riffs, tectonic percussive rumbles, anguished shrieks of torment and abject suffering, low-end growls and endless sheets of glistening, metallic feedback that spill across the distant edges of their sound. This is extreme, time-stretched ambient doom--a crumbling, blighted majesty adrift on putrescent tides.  The austere slabs of crushing heaviness move so slowly that the music loses all sense of propulsion at times, becoming lost in a fog of howling amplifiers and buzzing feedback. Atmospheric guitars stretch into massive decomposing drones, the spaces between infested with controlled bursts of drums that skitter and rumble. Freed of This Flesh inhabits the same tar-black depths as Burning Witch, Monarch, Khanate and Bunkur, twisting slow-motion heaviness into their own skeletal configuration.  JUNE 2010 WEST COAST TOUR W/ BLOODY PANDA 6/2 * The Northern, Olympia, WA  6/3 * Rendezvous, Seattle, WA  6/4 * Plan B, Portland, OR  6/5 * Bijou Theater, Eugene, OR  6/7 * The Metro, Oakland, CA  6/8 * Voodoo Lounge, San Jose, CA  6/9 * Elbo Room, San Francisco, CA  6/11 * Relax Bar, Los Angeles, CA  6/12 * Soda Bar, San Diego, CA

Trees

Light’s Bane

20 Buck Spin

The darkened sky and rain-soaked soil of Portland, Oregon, gave birth to the sickly black doom of Trees. Their two-track debut is a shivering trudge through murky, thick, sub-bass sludge riffs with an occasional beat or two.   Recalling the early days of Sub Pop-era Earth and the diseased doom of Burning Witch, Trees continue in the fine tradition of low-end wreckage that the Pacific Northwest seems to breed in its purest (de)form. With a vocalist who would terrify even Graves At Sea with his depraved screams and oral exorcisms, Trees create an atmosphere of psychic terror, like an acid trip gone horribly awry. The members of the band are all long-time adherents to the art of the slow-motion concussion; some share time in Portland drone wizards Tecumseh.   This vinyl version of Light's Bane is strictly limited to a one-time pressing of only 500 copies.

Trees

Lights Bane

Crucial Blast