Trees have been residing in the roster of Crucial Blast since their debut, 2008 EP Light’s Bane. There the second EP too, 2010 Freed of This Flesh, saw the light. Crucial Blast released Trees’s third album, 2012 EP Sickness In, during 2012 in digital format on Bandcamp. January 2013 will see the release of Sickness In as solid, digipack CD by the label.
Similarly to the previous releases, Sickness In includes two monumental tracks that will keep what the title promised: you’ll plunge into a state of toxic and foggy darkness, of fierce sickness, a black tunnel along which you’ll proceed with huge difficulty and which has no light at its bottom. This will last for for about 28 minutes unless you are going to unplug your music player and in case you are able to come out of the sick hypnotic state induced by the music …With Trees and their two long tracks, “Cover Your Mouth” and “Perish”, you are going to suffer slowly and drowning into the cacophony of the pitchblack swamp of feedback. Almost solid vibrations of the achingly slow, ultra-distorted mastodonic riffs, L. Smith’s torn and evil invocations and the ritualistic slowness of drums and percussions will emerge from that feedback swamp like greasy bubbles of venomous gases. Yet there is a leading melody, some sort of groove emanating from the riffs, even if such melody tends to be swallowed by the psychotic and rumbling vortex of the drony background noise. When this happens the tracks seem to be governed by improvisation. However our animal mind is able to recognize the dull roars of the distorted doomy riffs as its own atavic language and eventually attention will not be lost in the obscure sonic chaos.
In such conditions, therefore, the insertion of atmospheric ambience is more than proper. For their heavy, ritual and minimalistic music Trees guys adopted atmospheric sounds that cope with majesty, like, for example, the peculiar and impressive chant emitted by the Tibetan monks. Such chanting can be caught in the long intro to the second track, “Perish” and represents a further link with band Atriarch and their great latest album.
In the intro of Perish the echoing Tibetan monk chanting is ghostly and almost irreal, but it is able to stand out over the noise created by the shrieking of the guitars, the low rumbling of the bass and the crushing and reverbered percussions. When those chants vibrate the black tunnel opens up and you are ejected into an airy infinity. But such vertigo is going to last a few moments. Then your mind and your body will be thrown back into the darkness, filth and pain narrated by Trees’ devastating music. If Noothgrush sound as too fast and happy to you, if you live on Corrupted, SunnO))), Khanate, Moss, as well as Stumm, Hell, Monarch, and if you get high on the blackened drone-doom moments in Reclusa (another of the mean Crucial Blast creatures), then get hold of Trees and draw out the suffering of your agony …
Words by Marilena Moroni
Trees | Myspace
Trees | Crucial Blast
Trees | Bandcamp