Ducks Battle Satan

In 2007 , Crucial Blast reissued Skullflower’s long out of print IIIrd Gatekeeper. Skullflower’s one fulltime member is Matthew Bowers who is know to many a noise freak as the  brains behind Sunrroof! and Hototogisu. I had always thought that Skullflower were a noise band and thought at some stage I’d get around to hearing one of their records. I decided to start with this one solely for the comment that Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club) made in an issue of the Wire. He described IIIrd Gatekeeper as “awful, ridiculous, Goth dogshit.” He’s wrong. What IIIrd Gatekeeper actually represents is an early, extreme example of sludge rock. It’s a total rock pig record and if you love those moments when Birchville Cat Motel gets his metal on, then this is well worthwhile checking out. There is still  a crap load here to keep noise freaks happy with massive walls of impenetrable feedback but it’s really a record for Melvins and Boris fans to wallow is and wonder what might have been.

This entry was posted on September 7, 2008 at 8:02 am and is filed under Music, noise, Sunroof! with tags Skullflower. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.