EARL SHILTON Two Rooms (Full Of Insects) (Invisible Spies) cd 11.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
This all time AQ fave and former record of the week continues to be super difficult to restock for some reason. But it's here once again, and any one who has yet to discover this disc, for chrissakes, pick it up. Definite contender for our lifetime top ten!! Also, there's a new Earl Shilton expected in the next little while so be prepared! Here's what we had to say about Earl Shilton when it was Record of the Week a long time back:
We somehow knew this was an Aquarius Record of the Week the minute we first laid eyes on it. Well, okay, maybe that's not entirely true. But it had the potential, that much we knew for sure, just from the cover: a huge double bass drumkit, set up in the middle of the forest with the name 'Earl' scrawled on one of the bass drums. A very evocative image, combining our love of heavy rock (the kit), with my personal thing for drums (the kit again) and our love of all things forest-y: nature sounds, field recordings, animal sounds and all that. My mind was reeling. Was it a drummer just playing solos out in the woods? Was it some sort of Jewelled Antler style rock band / field recording hybrid? Or something else entirely? Stranger yet, the song titles were all in German while the label was British. Intriguing. Better give it a listen... Well, the first track revealed very little. A weird minimal rhythmic workout composed entirely of backwards drums and cymbals. Thhwwp....thhhwwwwip...sssssssp.... Very cool, but was that the gist of it? After a minute or so of that, the record exploded into something entirely unexpected -- a crushing metal riff, with weird syncopated drumming, a sort of chunky Pantera / Prong meets the Fucking Champs vibe, with whispered vocals. Then it shifted gears again and entered into a super melodic Carcass-style death metal breakdown with howled black metal vocals before it shifted back to the machine-like opening riff. And then I knew for sure. Record of the Week!
Only later, with some Internet research, did we figure out what the heck was going on. The dedication on the inside to UK death metal crusties Bolt Thrower should have been our first clue, as it turns out that Earl Shilton is a pseudonym for Alex Thomas, former drummer for those very same metalheads. For some unknown reason, Earl Shilton is the name he has assumed for this project "of crushing death metal brutality and total corpse raping necro-blast carnage" as his website puts it. Indeed!
Furthermore, that website tells us that on tour, the band features a quite young, brother and sister rhythm section! Live, Earl steps from behind the kit to handle the guitars and vocals, while the brother plays bass, and the 16 year old sister mans the drums!!! Fuck yeah! This is getting more Record of the Week by the minute, we're thinking! And the music is well worthy too, lest we forget -- Two Rooms (Full Of Insects) is a blasting, hyper complex, super varied blast of metallic mayhem. From motorik, ultra-precise technical riffery, to stop/start math-metal complexity, from grooving, galloping death metal fury, to screeching blasting black metal, from eighties Earache style thrash to modern metallic fury, with all sorts of tripped out breakdowns, fucked up production and some really really weird parts, like the breakdown a little more than halfway through the album where everything drops out except for a simple, quietly played hypnotic tom tom rhythm, joined by backwards, super creepy Orcish vocals, and the hissing backwards drumming that started the record, before the whole thing bursts back into motion, in an explosion of grandioise Maiden-ish metal. Whew, so good. And while it may not be the best (or truest) metal record on this list, it certainly is the weirdest. And the coolest. And certainly the one most suited to being Record of the Week!
MPEG Stream: "Infrarot / European Kanone"
MPEG Stream: "Zwei Raume (Voller Insekten)"
MPEG Stream: "Schlachthaus Rock"
MPEG Stream: "Tu Es.../Entscheidungskampf"