Trees

The mysterious Portland ensemble Trees returns with their second offering on Crucial Blast, Freed of This Flesh--two fetid death rituals scraped from the crypt. Both tracks average around fourteen minutes; extended death-rattles comprised of glacial riffs, tectonic percussive rumbles, anguished shrieks of torment and abject suffering, low-end growls and endless sheets of glistening, metallic feedback that spill across the distant edges of their sound. This is extreme, time-stretched ambient doom--a crumbling, blighted majesty adrift on putrescent tides. The austere slabs of crushing heaviness move so slowly that the music loses all sense of propulsion at times, becoming lost in a fog of howling amplifiers and buzzing feedback. Atmospheric guitars stretch into massive decomposing drones, the spaces between infested with controlled bursts of drums that skitter and rumble. Freed of This Flesh inhabits the same tar-black depths as Burning Witch, Monarch, Khanate and Bunkur, twisting slow-motion heaviness into their own skeletal configuration.