Mamiffer - Hirror Enniffer

Artist: Mamiffer
Album: Hiror Enniffer
Label: Hydra Head Records
Year: 2008








Tracklist:
01. This Land
02. Death Shawl
03. Annwn
04. Black Running Water
05. Suckling A Dead Litter
06. Cyhraeth

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Like an adamant darkening mist, Mamiffer’s Hirror Enniffer is a skulking presence that persists in its sense of despair only to evolve into distant calm right at the point when all hope appears lost.

Mamiffer is Faith Coloccia, a Seattle-based pianist, and a collective of song-weavers and visionaries. Under the watchful eye of Coloccia and her trusty tape recorder, friends Aaron Turner from Isis and Chris Common from These Arms Are Snakes have gathered to compile an environmental scourge of noise and atmosphere that is elegant, striking, and evocative.

Hirror Enniffer is Mamiffer’s debut and it breathes with all of the artistic sensibility one would expect from a musical visionary like Coloccia. Her sense of sound, her sense of feeling through sound, is exhibited in profound ways that intensify the experience with portions of classical, noise, and atmospheric rock.

At times, the air feels close.

But Mamiffer’s command of the atmosphere and the music is strong and the group exposes the elements, strips them bare, and places intricate song structures on top of sound and fog that more than likely was recorded in a dark, friendless field or perhaps in a Desert Hot Springs storm tunnel…

Hirror Enniffer comes like a dream, like an unrelenting vision that persists in deepening the tunnel until the bottom is all but forgotten. The tones are lush and somewhat damp, offering a glistening haze that carries through all six hypnotic tracks.

What really matters for Coloccia and Co. is the mood and the insistence of the passage of time. Chords hold and fade, easing through new notes perhaps by accident (“Death Shawl”) while still providing a clear direction. Other moments cascade like overlapping dreams, coating the listener in an episodic drama (“Black Running Water”) that subsides only when the full story is told.

Mamiffer’s Hirror Enniffer is dream music. It is the soundtrack in one’s head that winds through scenes of open fields, through hands on blades of grass, through moonlit mysteries. It is also the last stop as the dream passes from glorious cheerfulness to disastrous nightmare. The eeriness is pitiless and the alluring tide of darkness is often interminable like an endless hall filled with locked red doors (“Suckling a Dead Litter”).

Music like this cannot merely be described; music like this must be felt.

Mamiffer’s debut is a beautiful piece of unremitting dream music, an arc of soft diaphanous emotion wrapped in pieces of classical music and brilliant noise. Hirror Enniffer is constructed out of the materials that engage our minds, fuel our dreams, and reveal our hopes. (blogcritics.org)

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Black Mountain - In The Future

Artist: Black Mountain
Album: In The Future
Label: Jagjaguwar
Year: 2008







Tracklist
01. Stormy High
02. Angels
03. Tyrants
04. Wucan
05. Stay Free
06. Queens Will Play
07. Evil Ways
08. Wild Wind
09. Bright Lights
10. Night Walks
Bonus CD
01. Bastards Of Light
02. Thirteen Walls
03. Black Cat

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During the nearly three years between Black Mountain's self-titled debut album and its sophomore full-length In the Future, there had been extensive touring, a first attempt at recording which proved to be a false start of sorts (though some of those songs ended up here), and a kind of development that would seem radical if these Vancouverites weren't so quirky to begin with. Certainly, the roots of this sound are evident on the debut album. It's loaded with trippy neo-psych folk and rock tropes. But these are counterweighted with a drenched-in-prog-and-Sabbath bombast that makes the title seem ironic. If not laugh out loud funny. That's right: prog rock and Black Sabbath-like riffery and knotty, multi-part structures worthy of Greenslade are all entwined with pixie-ish protocol, acid-laced folk (think Melanie meets Sandy Denny meets Grace Slick's early period duets with Marty Balin and Paul Kantner on the Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow and Volunteers). The weird thing is, despite its obvious nods to rock collections, including not only Sabbath's Master of Reality but Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, Hawkwind's Warrior on the Edge of Time, Peter Hammill's entire Charisma period, Eloy's first three albums, Rush's 2112 (where some of these rather drenched-in-warped-myth lyrics were derived from; but then they're Canadians too), and Led Zep's Physical Graffiti, with a touch of the optimism of Thunderclap Newman and Graham Nash -- all is tempered by Neil Young's sleepy delivery -- sometimes in the same song! The sheer heaviness of tracks like "Stormy High," that wails out of the gate with guitars in full pummel riffage, fuzzed out bassline, and floor tom, bass drum, hi hat fury are stretched out by layers of Mellotrons! Then, Stephen McBean and Amber Webber begin wailing wordlessly à la "Immigrant Song," before McBean takes the lead vocal and you're ready for your space rock pith helmet! Where's Michael Moorcock when you need him? He's about all that's missing. It gets more insistent before it lets up with the starting-in-fifth-gear "Tyrants," that winds and wends its way through a multi-dimensional journey densely packed with sonic wonkery, key and time changes, and the feeling of a journey through time and space for over eight minutes. The sheer sonic throb is balanced by long, droning Mellotron and analogue synth drones, tribal, chant-like drumming, and the pleading, world-weary, vulnerable voice of McBean. It's quite a thing, but it's only a precursor to the truly epic "Bright Lights" near the end of the set that rages on for nearly 17 minutes. Fuzzy electrics, shimmering acoustics, and trance-like keyboards flit in and out between the alternating vocals of McBean and Webber. The music picks up intensity, shifts direction numerous times, and careens across the rock and folkscapes of rock's history from the late '60s through the '70s with great focus, wit, and ambition. There are other things like this here, too, with the utterly beautiful and tender lysergic folk explorations in "Stay Free," where unplugged six-strings, tambourine, McBean's falsetto, and Webber's harmony are seamless, as of one voice. The lyrics are direct, but the sheer sparseness of the mix (organs hover in the backdrop) stands in such sharp contrast to "Wucan" and "Tyrant" that it's like a wake-up call from the ether. (Movie music directors, take heed: this is the one you want for those long reflective moments where the two main characters have parted to rethink their positions.) It picks up, but never too much; the bridge is wonderfully constructed with just enough ornamentation to take it up a notch texturally and dynamically. "Wild Wind," clocking in under two minutes could be a lost Kevin Ayers' outtake. It's only a shame it's so brief. "Evil Ways" -- no relation to the Santana number -- is all metallic stoner rock with rumbling, quaking tom toms, piercing guitars, and huge organs challenging one another to overcome the vocals. As atrocious as this all sounds, perhaps, it's actually quite wonderful and it works without faltering. For what it is, is a stunning extension of the root sound Black Mountain arrived with. Part of the credit has to go to John Congleton for his amazing mix. It's packed with stuff, but there's enough space here, and wonderfully warm atmospheres, to bring the listener right into the deeper sonic dimensions that Black Mountain is trying to create. That it's done without artificial sounding punch up or tons of digital effects makes it come together as a whole. There is no sophomore slump here. -by Thom Jurek (allmusic.com)

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