The Black Wood reviewed

A nice little review of the Stumps album from last year, The Black Wood, has turned up in the aQuarius Records catalogue:

In a dream, you've gotten yourself lost in an endless cavern... you've been curiously wandering in the darkness, down down into the earth, for a long long time. When you stop to rest, you realize that the silence that had surrounded you is different now. You think you can hear music... drifting from someplace deeper in the darkness. Drifting, droning, dark, dark, dark... that's this music, the reverberant, cavernous, quiet sounds of The Stumps. Sleepy and creepy at the same time. You move closer, and The Stumps get louder. Troglodytic thud and rumble begins to build. That's the beauty of this album, these tracks are part whale call mystery, part trashy crashy garage rock clangor. Ambient eeriness flows into plodding free rock chaos, with heavy distortion blanketing all. The twelve and a half minute untitled track number 5 (none have titles, as far as we can tell) is all about that drone-drift, whilst track 7, for instance, rouses itself to a spaced-out, slow-motion spasm of psychedelic guitar grind-gunk and percussive splatter-clatter.


The Stumps trio of drummer James Kirk (Sandoz Lab Technicians, Gate, With Throats As Fine As Needles), bassist Stephen Clover (Seht), and guitarist Antony Milton (Mrtyu, AM, Nether Dawn, etc.) is a New Zealand underground supergroup, by the way. No wonder they're so easily so shambolic, somnolent, and sinister sounding... Outside of their own cd-r littered island realm, we couldn't compare this to much else besides, maybe, Fushitsusha.


Welcome to the cavern, welcome to the dream.