Smolken returns to Aurora Borealis in the guise of his perhaps better known Dead Raven Choir project. Since the release of Wolfmangler's Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves Smolken has settled in Poland, and seriously begun to record as much as possible. Where Wolfmangler is slow and ponderous ("compost with a grudge" as Julian Cope stated in The Guardian last year) and could perhaps even be described as an obscure branch of Doom, how shall we classify Dead Raven Choir? An altogether noisier undertaking and unafraid of the heady heights of mid tempo, Dead Raven Choir has baffled, irked and aroused listeners for a number of years now. An unholy cross of Black Metal and Folk? Organically produced noise and scree? Doubtless many a consumer has been outraged by a lazily tagged Dead Raven Choir release, though with the countless CDr and micro label releases there grows a veritable army of supporters, eager to have their preconceptions smashed and ears damaged once more with every hint of new material.

And so to Surely My Firstborn Will Be Blind. The first thing to assault the listener is Smolken's disregard, nay contempt, for the concept, practice and orthodox theory of recording levels. In his own words "Everything was recorded using a Polish stereo microphone from the 1970s, mixed and mastered using headphones of roughly the same age and provenance and a more modern pair of PC speakers which I got for free from a guy who paid about $6 for them." The instrumentation is similarly basic, being entirely bass centred, be it the double necked electric bass guitar of which Smolken is so fond (though he is now the proud owner of a triple necked model...), or the more traditional bass fiddle. "I already knew from working with Wolfmangler that metal sounds better without guitars. Cleaning up the arrangements made things clearer and heavier."

Raw, violent and organized, Surely My Firstborn Will Be Blind grips the listener immediately and threatens to overwhelm them with its brute force. Clearly there is something to be said for the Eastern Bloc technologies that were so deftly abused, as this is truly a unique sound. Smolken has transcended the avant-garde and moved beyond:
Ladies and gentlemen, Dead Raven Choir has left the field.

Visit the band's site here.

"Holy crap. 30 seconds into track one of this new Dead Raven Choir opus and we're like, what the heck is goin' on? Is this really our Polish pal Smolken, the avant-folk poetry-readin' cd-r makin' black metal lovin' weirdo?? Well it must be, but that track he sure sounds like some sore-throated Japanese man, fronting an intense industrial distorto-drone metallic pipe-fight dirgerock explosion, with the sawing strings of a cello (or bass) suggesting the funereal-folk of another Smolken project, Wolfmangler. It's not like Dead Raven Choir wasn't scary before, either in acoustic Eastern European Jandek mode or doing the (Cask Strength) black-metal-as-sheer-noise thing, but good grief! In some ways, this is the perfect, sick hybrid of those two approaches, sounding something like a weird-folk version of Khanate or SUNNO))), with blown-out bulldozer bass frequencies utterly overrunning songs that Smolken probably originally composed on acoustic guitar, sitting on a back porch somewhere, staring at the sunset. What could have been sparse folk numbers are instead fully distorted and doomful and get a big thumbs up from us. Ok, we must admit we wrote all that before bothering to look at the song titles (or read the press-release). Now we know why some of these tunes maybe somehow sounded slightly familiar, or as if transposed from a less-dire domain... he didn't compose very many of 'em at all, instead My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind is for the most part an album of covers! 7 out of the 10 tracks here are Dead Raven Choir interpretations of some of Smolken's favorite country, folk, and popular tunes by artists/victims as dissimilar as Richard Thompson and Cole Porter (!!). They're all done in Smolken's special skewed style of outsider black metal, as described above, and needless to say most of 'em are darn close to unrecognizable! We liked this a lot to begin with, now we're even more into it knowing we're actually hearing songs by late great country western songwriter Townes Van Zandt (Smolken used to live in Texas after all), alt-country chanteuse Neko Case ("Favorite"), and even obscure New Zealand drone-pop artist G-Frenzy ("From The Stars", a song that originally appeared on an out-of-print PseudoArcana cd-r we reviewed a few years back). There's also a maritime ballad by Stan Rogers, and oh yeah, the vocals on that very first track sound Japanese 'cause it's a song, "Kigi Wa Haru", by PSF-label folk troubadour Kazuki Tomokawa, an sensible choice on Smolken's part since Tomokawa's work aligns closely with that of Kan Mikami, with whom we've compared DRC's starker acoustic guitar n' vocals tracks before." - Aquarius records.

BACK.