By: John Reppion
Album Type: Full Length
Date Released: 30/03/2018
Label: Southern Lord Recordings
“The Thundering Heard” is
a dense and rich record; full of aural and textual interest. It’s a record that
makes you think, makes you imagine. It
is a visceral, heavy, epic Riff Monster of a record with horns of flame and
hooves of stone.
“The Thundering Heard” CD//LP//DD track listing:
1).
Quanah Un Rama
2). Elk Wolfv Hymn
3). Heavy Hoof
4). Antlers of Lightning
The Review:
“Longhorn
running ‘cross the dead salt sea / Mountains rising up like beasts with horns
like trees / Antlers reaching high, like a forest… On fire!”
“The
Thundering Herd (Songs of Hoof and Horn)" is Eagle Twin's third full-length album,
following on from 2012's "The Feather Tipped the Serpent's Scale" and
2009's "The Unkindness of Crows". Like its predecessors “The
Thundering Heard " deftly blends crushing, yet hypnotic riffs and
beats, with American literary Folk Horror. Which is pretty impressive for
a two-piece, really.
“Quanah Un Rama” (a fittingly bicornuous title
based on Hellboy's Enochian name "Anung un Rama”, and Quanah Parker,
Comanche war leader of the "Antelope" people…possibly) opens
with a harmonic drone from vocalist/guitarist Gentry Densely’s throat. At
once bestial and like some primal religious vocalisation, this inhuman
sound underpins much of the record. Then a Big Fat Riff kicks in. And it
is Massive. Truly earth moving. The guitar sounds (right across the
record) are just… wow. More Om than Sleep, but with all the groove and swagger of the
latter. The track jams on and on moving from part to part, texture to texture,
but the same narrative remains throughout; every progression is a natural and
necessary, and another chapter of the same story. When Densely chants
“Come now / Thunder / Come now / Thunder cloud” over Tyler Smith's tribal
tom-work, it sounds like a genuine summoning. You will believe that
the sky above the studio was black that day.
“Elk
Wolfv Hymn” swells in
dreamily, yet ominously. We huddle close to the wilderness campfire for another
folk-tale of stags and vultures and trees, of mountains and antlers and
wolves. And in that same magical way Earth managed with “The Bees
Made Honey in the Lion’s Skul”l, there’s something so incredibly American
about the actual sound of the music itself. The wild, untamed, real America
where bears and mountain lions and alligators think nothing of cracking
and crunching the bones of humans to get to the marrow within. And crow
keeps watch all the while.
“The
Heavy Hoof clips / The Heavy
Hoof clops / And the Heavy Hoof stamps on your grave”.
Another massive riff. Another tom thumping groove. Another absolute belter
of a tune, which seems to threaten to evolve into the heaviest version of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” you
could possibly imagine at one point. But that doesn't happen.
“Antlers
of Lightening” begins as pure Sabbath Doom:
lumbering, tritone laden heaviness with proclamations of the terror to come in
the form of the lightning antlered one. Again through, as the music evolves,
the guitar becomes more frenetic, and everything builds and builds and builds,
we get an idea of the emerging narrative. We hear the destruction
wrought by the electo-horned deity, and the fate of those who dared to try to
stop it. About ten minutes in it seems for one moment like we're going to
get an actual “Children of the Grave” style chug-a-chug-a-chug-chug
breakout riff. Instead things slow back down and jam out until we reach the
bitter-sweet outro of the album. A gentle but melacholic ending, like a
cold dawn breaking.
“The
Thundering Heard” is a dense and rich record; full of aural and textual
interest. It’s a record that makes you think, makes you imagine. It very much
brought Algernon Blackwood’s Weird Fiction tales The Wendigo and The
Willows to my mind; tales of the wilderness and the things which
walked there long before man ever did. All that said, “The Thundering
Heard" is not some deep-thinking, post-something, soundtrack
to an unmade movie. It’s a visceral, heavy, epic Riff Monster with horns of
flame and hooves of stone.
