It would be a stretch to call underground metal the new lo-fi. But just as there were droves of indie musicians in the early 1990s making bedroom pop on four-track recorders, there now seems to be a comparable amount of hooded heads grinding out CD-Rs of all kinds of sub-metal. Just check out some Aquarius Records mail-order updates from the past few years, and you'll see an array of names comprising a global army of basement metal-makers.
Most of these subterranean volume-pushers are pretty good-- at least most of the ones Aquarius champions are. Always clued in to the metal fringe, the San Francisco store has long extolled the virtues of Virginia's one-man behemoth Wrnlrd (whose name "can be pronounced any way you like"), and with good reason. His first five releases (from a nine-part series whose numerical order is tied to a "hypercube" of mystical concepts) are intriguing mixes of distorted black metal, overloaded riffs, harsh noise, and haunting hints of backwoods acoustics. Entry number six (representing "mystery, fire, and dreams") is also release number one for Flingco Sound, the new vinyl-and-digital label helmed by ex-Kranky partner Bruce Adams.
Though it's not quite as sludgy, Oneiromantical War evokes one of this year's best murky noise-metal LPs, the Goslings' Occasion. Both are drenched in bombed-out atmosphere and tinted with creepy acoustics (the man behind Wrnlrd apparently played bluegrass before he went black metal). But the six melted-together songs here can also be surprisingly straightforward. Every time you think Wrnlrd might have disappeared into noise quicksand, a tight riff and thunderous beat charge forward like a bicep-ripping workout. In fact, most of Wrnlrd's songs are built from basic metal blocks-- often they sound like 10 metal bands overlapping and blurring into howling abstraction.
Most intriguing is how Wrnlrd's huge sound rarely relies on bottom end. Lots of metal uses deep, dark notes to create hypnotic power, but the tone here is generally mid-range, sometimes even trebly. Wrnlrd does visit the low register, as in the shaking "Breath of Doors". But even there, everything is bathed in burning fuzz, making it all sound a few octaves higher than whatever key the original chords came from. The effect is a fascinating disorientation-- Wrnlrd's distortion chimes more than it drills, buzzes more than it burrows, and creates a texture that has been rightly compared to the ambient sheens of Fennesz and Tim Hecker.
At times this distortion-addiction can go from entrancing to grating, and it would be tough to call Oneiromantical War ground-breaking, steeped as it is in familiar metal riffs. Even "War", a 20-minute album-ending epic that dwarfs the preceding cuts, is more pastiche than original creation. But its journey from metal loops to near-classical bombast to fried atmosphere is intoxicating. It's also a strong indicator that, two-thirds of the way through his ambitious nine-point program, Wrnlrd's vault of ideas is nowhere near empty.
