### Black Boned Angel: The witch must be killed

#### 02/12/10 || Khlysty

Black Boned Angel is a duo of New Zealanders, from Wellington. They took their name from a Godflesh song from the “Selfless” record. The band’s members are Campbell Kneale and James Kirk, who are also members of other bands and “projects”. Their music can be described as “drone/doom” with elements of noise, ambient, industrial and a bit of black metal, and follows the dictums of…

Hey, where’s everybody gone? Hey, guys! Guys!!! Oh, that’s not fair!!! Hey, guys, come ON, now!!! Yeah, I know it’s not death metal, or power metal, or black metal, or anykindyoulike metal, but, hey, that’s not the way to treat those guys! Shit! Everybody’s gone…

(Da Lord appears like a deus ex machina, a sad smile on his face. “How many fucking times have I told you not to scare away the readers of GD with the crazy shit that you review for us, huh? Now, look what you’ve done. Everybody’s gone. How am I supposed to herd them back to the site?”, he tells me. “Well, they do not call me DroneBone for nothing”, I tells ‘im. “I like this kind of music and I want to make other people like it, too. It’s not my fault that they chicken out of the real heavy stuff”. Da Lord tsk-tsks and fades away.)

Anyway, since I’ve already started the review, I’m gonna finish it, even if it’s just for two or three readers of GD. See, Black Boned Angel is one of the most interesting bands doing the drone thing and “The Witch Must Be Killed” is one hell of a behemoth of a record, displaying the band’s ingenious use of textures, repetition and slight variations of the super-slow riffs to create a suffocating, ultra-menacing atmosphere. Both members of the band have a long experience in experimental noise/drone/doom/ambient music and they put it to great use within the two 20-minutes-long-each drone-athons that make up this record.

The main difference that Black Boned Angel display from other drone luminaries, such as Earth, Sunn 0))) or Boris is that these New Zealanders use sounds that are a bit of a higher register than the bowel-crushing downtuning that characterizes drone-doom. Actually, there are times that the guitars sound like a more bass-heavy take on black metal. Also, the guys use a lot of noise background elements (scratches, bleeps, beeps, whathaveyou) that add to the menacing ambiance of the two tracks. Add to these the fact that there are super-distorted vocals during the second track and the whole becomes a nightmarish trip of titanic proportions through the sickest, heaviest ambiance possible.

The bottom line is that this is a record that is totally unapproachable for 99,99% of the listeners of heavy music. But, for the remaining few “The Witch Must Be Killed” is one of those records that can easily become landmarks in the drone doom sub-sub-genre of metal. Experimental, ugly, trance-inducing, brilliant. Give it a chance and you won’t be disappointed.

- Information
- Released: 2010
- Label: Conspiracy Records
- Website: Black Boned Angel MySpace
- Band
- Campbel Kneale: instruments, vocals
- James Kirk: instruments, vocals

- Tracklist
- 01. Untitled
- 02. Untitled