Photo by Kristen Cleary
Everything Is Noise is currently streaming Drowner from Seattle blackened doom metal solo project, BLACKSTAFF, in its entirety. The premiere comes in advance of the EP’s official release Friday, July 10th.
Born in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State in 2022, BLACKSTAFF is the passion project of multi-instrumentalist and dark fantasy nerd Dustin Cleary. Inspired by thirty years of reading and writing horror and fantasy books, a decade of practicing Germanic heathenry, and a lifetime of video and tabletop roleplaying games, each record is an exercise in storytelling, world building, the occasional homage to other worlds dear to the writer’s heart.
Incorporating elements of many flavors of extreme music, BLACKSTAFF shifts from lurching, Sabbathian riffs to blastbeat crescendos and moody electronic passages as the story being told requires. With a focus on thick, wall-of-sound instrumentation and extreme vocals ranging from shrill whistle-shrieks to guttural growls and everything in between, it may seem surprising that Cleary’s songwriting sensibilities owe more to the riff-heavy rock bands of old than traditional death or black metal, favoring a clever riff or satisfying climax over an atmosphere of oppression for its own sake.
Writes Everything Is Noise in part, “Drowner takes slow, traditional sounding doom with lumbering riffs and throaty growls into black metal crescendos. There are interlude moments of spoken word and cleanly sung passages where the music shifts into atmospheric tone buoyed with found sounds, synthesizers, and keyboards. The result carries the world building and storytelling, centered around Will-o’-the-Wisps… with a sinister, cinematic quality. …regenerative eco-serial killer swamp reassembles the flesh of its victims into a monstrous, mobile pillar of writhing, reeking body parts as a reminder that we are ultimately one flesh at the mercy of our planet? Sounds like an incredible weird fiction tale, but here you get heavy-ass songs to narrate the harrowing plot.”
Stream BLACKSTAFF’s Drowner EP HERE.
Drowner was recorded at Dark Stick Studio, mixed by Todd Purnick/Beware Of Jesus, and mastered by Todd Purnick at Nettleingham Audio.
The EP will be released digitally on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms with a CD edition to follow later.
Find preorders HERE.
Fans of Thou, Mizmor, Chained To The Bottom Of The Ocean, Mortiferum, and the like, pay heed.
Drowner EP Track Listing:
1. Swamp Lights/Drowner
2. Godlike
3. Flesh Golem
Testing the boundaries of its own musical limits, increasingly incorporating “found sounds,” noise synth, and keyboard passages, with each new release BLACKSTAFF continually redefines its own artistic purpose, but the primary objective remains to take the listener on a journey to another world, and there to crush them into dust.
Elaborates Cleary, “The Drowner EP itself is a story inspired by a concept in folklore and expanded upon by my favorite nerd lore – Tolkien, Warhammer: Age Of Sigmar, and others – about the Will-o’-the-Wisps or ‘hag lights’ [atmospheric ghost lights seen by travelers at night, especially over bogs, swamps, or marshes].
“In the story, these lights lead unwitting travelers deep into the swamp and into a certain pond where something waits for them. Some are pulled down and consumed or made undead; others are delivered to the swamp’s true master, to suffer and be harvested for parts. In the closing track, ‘Flesh Golm,’ we see what ultimately becomes of these parts. This turn of events was inspired by a certain big news story, and this is my vision of the afterlife for one travel agent for the rich and famous who may have met a conveniently untimely demise before his day in court.
“My vision with this release,” he continues, “was to make something where each track flowed into the next effortlessly, and track numbers were just a place to jump in and revisit parts of the story. The flow of this record was greatly inspired by bands like Pink Floyd and Uriah Heep, while the style of music draws more from blackened doom and death records.”
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The post BLACKSTAFF: Everything Is Noise Premieres Drowner From Seattle Blackened Doom Metal Solo Project; EP To See Release Friday, July 10th! first appeared on Earsplit Compound.