I'm backtracking from their EP, The Cold, the Remote, to this earlier recording, a full length album but this time lacking anything referencing the writings of Lawrence Miles. I was somehow under the illusion of the name having come from a role playing game, but it's actually a characteristically nebulous painting by J.M.W. Turner, and this information still doesn't provide much of a clue as to what the hell is going on here.
Hero of a Hundred Fights sound like free jazz melded in a transporter accident with Shellac, so obviously it makes perfect sense that the later work should be produced by Albini; but meanwhile in 1999, there was this album, just a beautiful recording so clear it feels as though we're there in the room, and not even any effects to speak of beyond natural valve amp distortion and the sound of a man screaming his throat out. The music, even at its most discordant, has the soft, injured beauty of a wound after it has healed and the pain has subsided to a dull warmth, all tied up in the staccato mathematical knots of a structure which seems to have involved one hell of a lot of algebra. There's not much to say about this one because the music has already said everything, even if it's in an unfamiliar language.
Who the hell were these people and what happened to them?
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