I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral – W

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The first side of I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral‘s W LP unfurls as if picking up from where Amaury Cambuzat’s last solo outing ended. A sound that slowly blooms in the ear, the muted grey/blue hues of the cover and its emergent greens curling round its gathering complexity as the thumping heartbeat at its core is steadily eroded.

A lot of drone-based music has a habit of slipping pleasantly by, but the growing anticipation here seems to be instinctively held, soberly teased. The way Amaury holds you in the prism’s flow, then texturally hooking you into the way things are layered up, the swelling accordion-like wash of the looped wares feeding you closer to some fluid finite, the sitar-like de-tunes metaphorically chinking the armour. A pulsing density that those downward strokes percussively push against to create a dirgic dagger consuming the space around you with a satisfying intensity. A circling insistence tugging at some deep rooted truth, eating its own oscillatory tail to an embered release.

In contrast, the second side despatches a Brian Eno-esque idyllic, as if twilight’s last were caught on outward ripples, its periphery tingling with the decorative colour of some imaginary sunset, as a fragmentary haze of frets firefly for your attention. Warm tangling blurs that have very little to do with the track’s title, “Fear & Disorder”; until suddenly you are chasm-shot, plucked out of that harmonic reverie into a sudden submarine of bubbling descent. A dramatic switch that has you falling through an asphyxiation of submerged sounds that throws you no lifeline as you are left to taste the disappearing light of the surface. Its spiralling contraction like the lost constellation of Marilyn Monroe’s smile, veining out in apocalyptic exploration and plunging curvature – their twisting, kelp-like currents keeping you from ever surfacing again.

W is another I Feel Like A Bombed Cathedral masterpiece worthy of your immediate attention.

-Michael Rodham Heaps-