"Celestial Highway" is a massive, stomping heavy metal riff, a bighairy acid-drenched slab of fuzzy blues cribbed from the Blue Cheerhandbook. The jacked-up shredding that twists around the centralrhythmic stomp is directly inspired by the third-eye Satanic soloing ofGlenn Tipton and Tony Iommi. That shit keeps cycling around, pulsatingfuzzy tendrils of bombastic riffage, hairy to the Nth degree, liftingup to the clouds on a silver machine of over-amped guitar wreckage. Andthen it repeats. Over and over. For nearly an hour. Matthew Bower'snewest album under the Skullflower banner earns its title. Not for thepatience-challenged, Exquisite Fucking Boredomtests the limits of repetition. Applying the techniques of theavant-garde repetitive techniques of Steve Reich and Terry Riley tonoisy psych-rock has been tried before, most memorably on Acid MothersTemple's reading of Riley's monumental In C. But I must confessthat Bower has done them one better with the four-part suite of"Celestial Highway," which sets a new record for trance-rock. Even moreexasperating that Spinal Tap's wanky Jazz Odyssey, Skullfloweris pushing the envelope of acceptability in terms of musical content. Ithink it pays off brilliantly, but whether or not the average listenerwill agree depends upon their temperament. The nuanced production is byColin Potter, the genius engineer and producer behind some of NurseWith Wound's best work. Potter's technique is to add sheets ofcompounding noise run-off to each successive riff, alternately buryingthe cyclical guitars in a pile of audio rubble, or uncovering andhighlighting them by pushing out the borders of distortion. It's notfor the faint of heart, but over the course of the album, it ascends toa hypnotic level of transcendence. Like a lot of ethnic and avant-gardetrance music, the eventual goal is for the listener to ignore thecentral repeating theme, which fades like white noise to thebackground, focusing instead on the gradual evolution of sound, or inthe case of Skullflower's album, the compounding noise, distortion anddecay that creep in over the course of the four-part suite. Patience isa virtue, and in the case of Exquisite Fucking Boredom, it's avirtue that eventually rewards the listener with some of the mostbizarre and unconventional "stoner rock" yet conceived.Read More
