Skullflower

Tribulation

Crucial Blast Records 2006

Tribulation is a very appropriate title for the new Skullflower endeavor.  Skullflower has put together a massive 1 hour and 6 minute droning sonic assault on your ears.  Like the white noise representation of the scraping of of mammoth glacial sheets of ice upon the barren stone below, Tribulation slowly erodes all sanity and any semblance of discernable song structures.  No tracks on tribulation stand out as all 9 tracks pretty much grind into one another without much individual identity to separate themselves.  I think that is pretty much the point of this trance inducing album.  This is a very disturbing and mentally unbalancing album to listen to unless your sole goal is to surrender to the oblivion of a sheet of fuzzed out noise.  But this in itself is not necessarily a good thing.  All the feedback and mind numbing skree can be a little distracting not to mention, I can't imagine how often I would fall into this void.  There are times when I feel a bit of underlying sorrow or some other emotion but it is so distant and faint it gets lost in the frequency overload.  There are other times when my ears are actually hurt by the sounds emitted by this disk such as on Void of Roses.  I doubt I will be able to bring myself to listen to this album much at all.  This is for the pure drone/trance enthusiasts only.