father murphy

If like me you’ve ever lain awake at night trying to compose in your head an imaginary soundtrack for some nightmarish journey descending deep into the belly of the beast. Then stop. It seems Father Murphy may well have beaten you to the punch, either that or the resulting chamber doom score that is the cheerfully titled ’pain is on our side now’ is some demonic attempt to exorcise visitations of bad acid flashbacks. Pressed up on two single sided slabs of 10 inch wax via the combined might of celebrated eclectic record houses Boring Machines and Aagoo, this four track ceremonial gathering features by select invitation guest appearances by Ezra Buchla of the Gowns, Italo psych occultist Gianni Giublena Rosacroce and Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier – the latter mentioned agai providing mixing and mastering duties. Proving no easy listening experience, ’pain is steeped on our side’ is a bleakly beautiful opus of morgue recitals, not as forbidding as the press release would have you believe, while agreed daubed in macabre ceremonial fugues that one might incline to retire behind the nearest couch when listening, yet perched behind the doom dipped atmospheres and the rested panoramic disquiet of the broadly stroked industrial chamber grind there’s a dot connecting exercise underway drawing close upon the darker spheres of label mate Philippe Petit with the Wizards Tell Lies collective and the Alrealon Musique family. Here be mutant beats, subtronic groans and shock treated sonic head drills, immersed in a thickening ice shrilled claustrophobia impacted with hulking and abrupt symphonic slashes, the funeral ’let the wrong rise with you’ shape shifts ominously from moments of bleached out industrial snarls to hollowed ceremonial howls that you’d be forgiven for thinking had fallen away onto the cutting room floor of some abandoned Hammer cinematic as were rephrased by an ’Add insult to injury’ era Add N to X. Menacing by far are the deathly pangs that suck dry the life and light from the no waved dark ambience of ’bones got dry’ as it veers ever so subtle into the howling paranoia of PIL ’flowers of romance’. what makes Father Murphy such an intriguing proposition is the way the duo turn about tail pulling back just at the pint of carnage and collapse, retaining its uneasy strange hold the blood letting ’they will all fail you’ is awash in hysteria, hate and brutality, a festering screeching witch hunt soon mutes with the oncoming affirmation of Gregorian chants leaving the dread calm ’despite all the grief’ to run out to the groove ends though not before leaving you chilled to the core and unhappily given a brief vision of what lurks beyond.