Only one thing, with slight variations, really happens for the hour after this CD starts playing: a bass guitar riff... a massive, filthy, loping beast of a groove that's immensely heavy without being in any way 'metal', or even terribly aggressive. The riff is not complicated, but it is loud (as evidenced by the album's unrelenting near-bootleg-quality tape saturation distortion). The riff has no funk, no drive, it isn't headed anywhere; the guitar barely glides along with it, and the drums do not embellish it.Last Visible Dog
Sloppy repetition is the game here, and no frills, lyrics or showmanship get in its stubborn way. But lest you think that this is some slowcore sleepytime, let me be clear: Pharaoh Overlord, a trio from the (apparantly) fertile psych-rock scene of Finland, play rock n' roll as it's been written by Fushitsusha, the Stooges, Les Rallizes Denudes, and Black Sabbath. Thuggish, brutal, straight to the point, but also as minimal as one can get while still acting like a rock band. The songs are stripped down so bare that they are almost identical, changing in speed and length but remaining in roughly the same key and retaining the same non-structure. It's a miracle that this music works as well as it does, as it could easily have slipped off into dull-as-dirt potsmoke self-gratification (see Acid Mothers Temple). Instead, somehow, amazingly, Battle of the Axehammer is invigorating and alive. This was obviously a live concert that must have been excruciatingly loud in the room while it was happening. Alas, it doesn't seem that more than six people were in this particular room, as after the black hole of every tune ends (again, there are no verses, bridges, or breakdowns, or any apparent internal logic... the songs mysteriously decide by themselves that enough time has passed) and air is let back in, a pitiful number of hands are audibly brought together, and a few people shout their approval. Unless there were more people attending than can be heard on the CD, and everyone else was rendered too stupified to move. 
Read More
