#primitive man

[depravednotdeprived]

[spacenoirdetective]

Alex Schomburg, cover art for "Amazing Stories", Aug 1965

[radiophd]

primitive man -- foul

[linguaignotakaraoke]

Tunesday #9

PRINCESS - CONTROL

Primitive Man - Observance

Ragana, Drowse - Ash Souvenir

Blackwater Holylight - If Only You Knew

Sisters In The Velvet - Mother's Octave

Bell Witch, Aerial Ruin - Stygian Bow Volume II

Gylt - I Will Commit A Holy Crime: Tandem

Traumatizer - Nuclear War Machine

chokecherry - Ripe Fruit Rots and Falls

Blackxwash - Only Dust Remains

🖤 Link 🖤

[quietuniversus]

I tried to humanize my sabertooth character. I think I made him too good looking ^^' Oops. I'm not good at clothes and clothing idea so don't judge too hard. It's not official either. Just needed practice drawing men again. He is pretty tatted up.

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[saintasela]

[dustedmagazine]

Primitive Man — Observance (Relapse)

Only in context of other records by Primitive Man could Observance be conceived as a relatively less bleak musical statement. With that “relatively” duly noted, we can assert that Observance is also relatively more amenable to melody than much of Primitive Man’s previous work, and the band’s thick, sludgy doom metal is bedizened (and sometimes coruscated) with sparking, sizzling, screeching textures of noise. None of those elements is completely new to Primitive Man, but their arrangement and the care taken with the record’s deep mix present them in sonic forms that seem to want to do more than brutalize. Observance is very much a Primitive Man record, in all the best ways. The Denver band has always sought spaces out on the margins of the listenable. But in this instance, the “listenable” is in greater proportion to the “marginal.”

In at least one other way, Observance is a return to form. After a 39-minute “EP” (Insurmountable, from 2022) and a 36-minute LP (Immersion, from 2020 — and good luck doping out the parameters of EPs and LPs from those examples), this new record sprawls across 68 minutes, just a minute or so longer than Caustic, the 2017 LP that brought the band to more national attention. The songs stretch out into that sprawl: among them “Transactional” at 14 minutes, “Devotion” at 12, “Social Contract” at 11. Slow, massive, perversely heavy—the songs do not compromise.

But there are noticeable contrasts with Caustic, a terrific record that impressed through the sheer force of its ugliness. See for instance the middle section of “Transactional,” which emerges from a characteristic (and hugely satisfying) bout of sludgy pummeling. Around the song’s halfway point, Ethan McCarthy’s guitar begins to emit a set of shimmering effects, on top of the blunt riffage. Soon that shimmer opens into a tonal space that recalls Sonic Youth, deep into tracks like “Mote” or “Karen Revisited.” It’s not tuneful or pretty, but it has an aesthetic quality that can only be called beautiful. A terrible beauty, perhaps, but beauty all the same.

The depths of “Natural Law” are not nearly so musical. The driving riff is relentless, violent, full of ill intent. But in the final four minutes, another teasingly melodic solo arrives, tempering the song’s abandon. The fact that the listener needs to endure the previous ten minutes of horrific hollering and the abuse doled out by the band’s bottom end (Jonathan Campos, who also plays in the brilliantly demented Black Curse, and Joe Linden) in order to encounter those final minutes makes them that much more thrilling, on the margins of the sublime.

It's an interesting maneuver, issuing this relatively (again, that’s a potent adverb in this context) more approachable record in socio-cultural conditions that are so full of resentment and misery. You can’t characterize Observance as a vehicle of escape into an artistic elsewhere, but there may be some wisdom in deriving moments of beauty from struggle with these heavy, heavy times.

Jonathan Shaw

[crashnburnwtf]