Do not adjust your set. This is Noise tuning straight into your slaughterhouse with some darkly gothic drone that sounds like a depressed Danzig in one of his bleakest Samhain moments. Ritualistic (as the title might suggest), sparsely populated and with a level of production that sound like it’s been recorded behind the locked door of a concrete prison toilet. The strangest thing about it all is that, in its own strange way, it all works. This is music bereft of emotion other than those you’ll find lurking down somewhere in the pit of your stomach in the aftermath of something unpleasant happening.
Forgive yourself if you spend the first 30 seconds wondering if your speakers are broken. This is the kind of lo-fi ambient drone that you could imagine Patrick Bateman listening to (I never really bought into the whole Huey Lewis thing – he would definitely have been listening to dark ambient drone music) – mono-tonal and emotionally monochromatic and something you might even struggle to describe as music at all to your next door neighbour (“Hey, Roy, you really must come round and listen to my new horror noise collection while we discuss how many heads we could fit in the fridge) were it not for the droning bass, the slow, incessant drums with a hoarse, throaty, faded Danzig croon drifting along faintly in the background.
The second track, the eerie Percorrendo os Caminhos da Noite – which translates from the Portuguese as Travelling the Roads at Night – is almost certainly something you shouldn’t be listening to while travelling anywhere at night. It’s the perfect introduction to this unusual band which had me mesmerised like a swinging light bulb in the basement of a notorious mental institution. Why am I here, why is that light bulb swinging, and why are you playing that music by an obscure Portuguese ambient noise band and looking at me like that?
This is stylised music that you might find in one of the turbine rooms of the Tate Modern. And the fourth track, No Labirinto (The Labyrinth) I was kind of wondering where their bleak and ghoulish sound was going – which is the problem with this sort of stuff sometimes. The bottom line is that Dead Procession won me over with their singular take on life at the bottom of a god-forsaken barrel. It is what it is but its emotionless raft will remain somewhere in my brain even if I never heard the original again. Worth checking out if you feel like being shoved into a lonely, dark and ominously unsettling place knowing with certainty that the only thing you really know is something bad is going to happen – probably, let’s be honest, to you.
(7/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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