Ear Bleed on "The Crystal World"

Link here.

I’ve been pretty jaded/burned out from new underground music lately, and it seems like pretty much everyone else is too. Been talking to people about the negative creativity spawned by fame, as it seems like any underground musician who gets recognized lately and is thrust into blogger superstardom immediately stops growing as an artist and just churns out more and more of the same half-assed tropical/beach-pop/hypnogogic pop/shit-wave/cold-wave/chill-wave/whatever other stupid ghettoized genre music. Never been too interested in genres myself, as I’ve always felt like genrefication takes away from the music; Once it’s been stuck in a niche you have things that are expected of you and expectations of what you should sound like. And unfortunately it seems like lots of folks these days are more than happy to please the expectations of bloggers and other folks that don’t know anything about music.

Luckily none of this has anything to do with the new Locrian album “The Crystal World” on Utech. Having already neatly smashed out the walls of death metal, noise & power electronics on their previous albums, they wisely decide to keep smashing outward and take over whatever spectrums of music they end up in. Now a three piece, Locrian branch out into heavy psychedelic stoner rock (“At Night’s End”), kosmische synth jams (the instrumental title track), and strange as it may seem, psychedelic folk (“Elevation and Depths” towards the end sounds disturbingly like one of Bröselmachine’s better songs), with all 6 feet still formly rooted in the darkness and anguished screaming we know so well. Locrian’s music always has an unsettling presence lurking in the background, slowly spreading post-industrial pagan gloom over everything they touch, much like the Ballard novel the album is named after, and “The Crystal World” shows them seeping into new avenues of music and making them their own.

This is definitely the most musical thing I’ve heard from them yet, a nice change of pace in an era that doesn’t place much value on well-crafted music. Each track is a carefully-sculpted journey through Locrian’s signature sound that slowly unfolds to find something completly new hiding inside. It took me forever to review their last album, mostly because every review of it I saw was gushing praise out of every pore, and this one will probably get the same; but since they seem pretty immune to it so far I’ll go ahead and say that Locrian has once again raised the bar for themselves and suceeded in creating another incredible album that stays true to their aesthetic while still challenging themselves to make something different.