Spider Kitten roams in familiar territory to those who hunt the doom laden swamps of psychedelia. I myself dig into this mud with pleasure on a regular basis. I first stumbled upon the feline early on in my bandcamp saga, and actually, if memory serves me right, Cougar Club was one of my first purchases on bandcamp in which I wrote a description down and actually one of the first times I publicly published a music review of any sorts on the internet. This spurred a downward spiral of addiction and continues to this day on the whim that I come across a worthy candidate to put forth the effort of endorsement.
Spider Kitten’s latest effort, “Behold Mountain. Hail Sea. Venerate Sky. Bow Before Tree” came to me without warning as I hadn’t been keeping a close eye on the band, which features ex-members of Taint, Acrimony, Iron Monkey, Blackeyeriot, Sigiriya, and Crippled Black Phoenix. The album title is a bit wordy, but fitting, as it basically conceptualizes the album within the 4 fragments, as one can imagine.
The new ‘mini-album’ renews the subscription that Cougar Club began with a dark and melodic twist on doom metal. To me it captures a vibe similar to the legendary Jerry Cantrell’s solo album “Degradation Trip”, only deeper into the bogs on permanent vacation. Prelude to an upcoming full length due out in 2015, Behold Mountain instills a gigantic sense of anticipation as its 3-songs serve up 28 minutes of foreplay hardening the muscles to the brink of explosion.
The album starts off as a demented display of sludge-soaked doom metal. Slathering the soul with an insatiable scent of psychotic ecstasy, Lindisfarena pummels the senses with tribal drums, harmonically destructive vocal chops, and riffs upon riffs galore.
Bearded Axe follows suit, with a reverberated salute to the patrons of prolific doom. Spooky melodies engulf the throbbing bass line ending with a classical norskish hymn.
A stoned crow’s symphony acoustically introduces Gore Swan which more than doubles the albums duration closing the journey out in style. Set to smoothly stroking satanic strings the cello creeps over the mystic landscape erupting into a bludgeoning pit of disparagement. Converging full circle, Gore Swan levels the battle field with a terminating riff of impending doom. The future is left up for the taking. The anticipation for what comes next to this land of filth is beyond enthralling. I for one am putting the apparent full length recording in the works at the top of my 2015 list of releases of note not only based on this 3-song masterpiece, but hinged upon the copious amounts of early material available on their bandcamp as well. Spider Kitten is definitely an under talked about band in today’s market. Keep your ears open and grab this 28 minute epic teaser out on October 27th via Undergroove Records. Superb!!!
-The Huntsman
http://spiderkitten.bandcamp.com/
