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Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine: Rampton

12/05/10 || Khlysty

Addiction’s a bitch. No only because it makes you crave for something that will ultimately destroy you, but, mainly, because after you become addicted, you start looking for gradually harder stuff to reach the wished high. For example, you start drinking fancy-ass cocktails with minimum alcohol. After your organism becomes immune to them, you start drinking the heavier stuff: straight whiskey, straight vodka, straight gin. After a while, even these are not enough to satisfy your addiction: you move down to moonshine and rot-gut. You know that you’re just one step away of drinking antifreeze. But you can’t stop.

Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine is the antifreeze stage for doom metal. Taking their name from the second track of Earth’s landmark drone record, “Earth 2” (which yours truly had treated with a Class 6(66) review that has mysteriously disappeared…), this is a supergroup of sorts, featuring Greg Anderson and Stephen O’ Malley from Burning Witch and Sunn0))), Lee Dorian of Napalm Death and Cathedral (in)famy and Justin Greaves from Iron Monkey and Electric Wizard. Supposedly the boys from Sunn0))) met Lee and Justin when touring England and decided to form this one-off project, with the sole intention of taking doom metal to places where no man had ever even considered exploring.

If the three-songs-in-almost-one-hour record doesn’t tell you a lot about the nature of this beast, then maybe a detailed description of the first song will suffice: it takes more than six minutes of background drone and fractal drumming for the song to start taking its basic shape, in the form of a sluggish cyclic riff, treated through more flanger and compression that the law allows. This riff lasts for another three minutes, with gradually added funereal drumming, before the guitars come crashing down, with Dorrian growling, rasping and wheezing through nigh-unintelligible lyrics about a supposedly bad drug-combination trip. At the 12–minute mark the song totally breaks down into a squall of dirty drone and barely-controlled feedback, becoming even slower – if that’s possible… – and Dorrian going into mad-preacher mode. This thing goes on until the 18–minute mark, when we return to the initial riff for a few minutes, before even that disintegrates into droning guitar, burned-out amp static and feedback moaning.

The whole, ehm, experience lasts more than half an hour and, if you survive it, then you’re treated into one of the most fucked-up and left-brained covers of all time: the boys turn Killdozer’s “New Pants and Shirt” (a great song by one of the greatest “noise rock” bands of all time) into a seven-minute slugathon, totally covered with downtuned grime and tar, Dorrian roaring and burping through the thick sludge about how he “worked like a mule, down in the pit, for seven long days and seven lonely nights”. The original’s chiming guitar line is completely gone, leaving in its place Anderson’s sludgy growl, O’ Malley’s droning bass and Greaves’ hammer-down, sloth-like drumming. And the record closes off with the 18-minutes-long “The Smiler”, which starts with an amorphous riff, probably taken out of a drugged-out Sunn0))) session, before becoming a funereal doom song –replete with wailing organ- with Dorrian giving a desperate performance.

So, yeah, this is the last step for a doom-addicted person. You’ve already become immune to your Sabbaths and your Candlemasses and your St. Vituses and your Evokens and whatnot. Your thirst for total, all-encompassing misery cannot even be satiated with your Khanates and your Burning Witches and your Electric Wizards and your Buried At Sea. This is where you finally end your quest for the absolute in doom. This is where your bones will rest for all eternity, birds of prey picking them clean of withered flesh; while your brain is already eaten off by the worms of despair and hatred invoked by the “music” (I’m still reluctant to call the sounds emanating from this record “music”…). This shit is the last step downwards. And the question is: are you ready or willing to take it…?

Information
Released: 2002
Label: Southern Lord / Rise Above
Website: TOLRTD MySpace
Band
Lee Dorian: vocals
Greg Anderson: guitar, bass
Stephen O’ Malley: guitar
Justin Greaves: drums

Tracklist
01. He who accepts all that is offered (feel bad hit of the winter)
02. New pants and shirt (Killdozer cover)
03. The smiler

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