"Harrumph. Rangda is the NAME OF THE BAND? That's terrible. It's a nonsense word. They're probably hippies. What a waste of a spooky tree."
With that, I turned the thing over. I found myself confronted by a photograph of the band in mid "rock-out". "Feh. They look like an all-dad blues band. Who the hell are these jokers OH SHIT THAT'S SIR RICHARD BISHOP." For indeed it was the guy from legendary avant-noise-arabic-art-weirdos Sun City Girls on guitar. And the other guitar? Ben Chasny, from likewise big-deal art-weirdos Six Organs of Admittance. Oh, and the drummer's some dude named Chris Corsano, who plays with meaningless nobodies like Thurston Moore and Nels Cline and Sunburned Hand of The Man and... look, if yr MOM was in a free-improv noise band in New York in the last ten years, he probs played with her, too.
So, yeah, I grabbed it. And it's great. Pretty much what you'd expect (if you were expecting three dudes just TACKLING their instruments for about forty-five minutes). Epic, shrieking walls of noise and drum abuse alternate with quiet, contemplative pools of gentle plucking and brushed snares. Sometimes it's sweeping waves of high-end scree, sometimes it's the vague desert motif of "Bull Lore" which sounds like a free-noise version of "Hotel California". Except, y'know... GOOD.
And "Rangda" isn't a nonsense word after all. It's the name of a Balinese Demon Queen (above left) who eats children and leads an army of witches against the forces of good. Which means I should probably take a seminar on Balinese Cultural Literacy, but my stupid job doesn't offer one. God, they're so backward. I mean, what century IS this?
For yr consumption: th' aforementioned "Bull Lore" and "Serrated Edges," the most... um, NUANCED of the batshit noise assault tracks.
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