Laudanum / Coronation

20 Buck Spin

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 thing with the mournful, evil magick of life's coming oppression. This is The Coronation of the end.

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