Artist: Chainsaw x Shoggoth
Title: Dreams Of The Cosmic Tower
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Sokol Keep
Once more we abase ourselves at the feet of another Sokol Keep release but there can be no apologies. Here we have a split between the Chainsaw incarnation of Jax Meyer (Ancient Caverns) and Shoggoth (aka Ben Gray, Hecate) and this does not begin as a dungeon synth label release usually begins. Which is why we are here on Friday.
‘Dreams Of The Cosmic Tower’ from Chainsaw kicks off and.. damn me if the fuzzed out, crawling riff that seeps out and then utterlu hits the hammer doesn’t sound like something of the ilk of Sleep or Sergeant Thunderhoof having an absolute nightmare. The vocals are clean and clear and echoing. The sound is dark, cosmic psyched out stoner and in les than two minutes I’m adrift in mindbending dimensions. Keyboard whsiper a melody but for me it the the gorgeous, thick guitar tone that rides this track. And when the harsh vocals come in, howling behind the clean ones and the guitar, the chaos is palpable. Just under eleven minutes vanish in a nod. Otherworldly, sliding along the event horizon of chaos and with a glorious heft this is pure magnificence. And those harsh vocals….. man. Don’t enter the void unprepared.
Shoggoth lead on from this with ‘Dragged By The Astral Current’. There is no cosmic travel to this. This is a dark and bitter twist of black and death and doom. Unhinged, screaming vocals from the depths. A slow pounding riff. We have fallen from the tower and the place in which we find ourselves is in an inexorable current towards a place no one wishes to go. Horror, pain, madness and yet still an unsettling, disorienting tune to the black waters. We are on a trip indeed. ‘Jagged Light From Dead Celestial Bodies’ creeps around something whose shape I can not quite comprehend. This is just fantastic, teetering on the edge of madness blackened death/doom, smears of Khanate and the stink of unclean places.
Have you ever read William Hope Hodgson’s insane 1908 novel ‘The House On The Borderland’? This is the even darker world within the acid trip dream. The swine men are here somewhere but they are the least of our worries. This is a place where stars come to be tortured. Side A closes with Shoggoth in an utter, bleak stomp. ‘As I Climb The Tower My Mind Fades Further’ is the sound of stoner psyche rock trying to pull itself out the sucking pit but only towards a void that slowly peels everything from you. Moments of almost delicate melody and monstrous single chords. Clear vocals call to you, urging you further on, energy seeping into limbs that should be shattered bone… and still you climb the accursed tower.
Chainsaw return to begin side B. ‘Grasping At Infinite Death’. Somehow the simple clean notes disturb me after what has gone before and sure enough the thick dark keyboards usher in a dizzying cosmic riff and vocals which seem to circle around you, leave you teetering… untethered. There is only the tower. You can be nowhere else and yet you feel lost and only the slow beauty of folding and unfolding death is anchoring you to anything. ‘Corpselight Emanates From The Stars Above’ is the primitive shreds of reality, the things dead, seeping down as you slowly crawl by. Lovecraftian shapelessness, the endless nightmare dark of the cosmic and the last death rattle of the sun…
Finally we are ‘Atop The Tower, Digested By Solar Winds’ in the hands of Shoggoth. We are not even certain that the voice we hear is indeed a voice, or one that belongs to any version of the physical, the real. The sense of collapse, of breakdown and rendering of flesh to something far worse is like a stink in our nostrils. Guitars flail, fling runs that seem to surge our of the implosion, the last streaks of sanity.
This is a horrible and wonderful collaboration; a self destructive journey of the seeker of the cosmic horrors and the inevitable utter annihilation that it brings. Lovecraft, Hope Hodgson, Sleep and twisted blackened psyche. Screams surround you. Insane clean vocals bewilder you and the slow heft of the riff charts the path of insanity through the impossible with a thread that is strong enough to follow and impossible to leave.
Climb. The tower is everything. It offers nothing and takes nothing. It is the blind idiot god and it is nuclear chaos and nothing outside it exists. Ever.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 