The Janitors – Horn Ur Marken
Swedish gloom-rockers The Janitors call their brand of dark, heavy doom “stökpsych”, which roughly translates as “single pysch”, but which may be better understood as “single-minded psych”. This is because their new album, Horn Ur Marken (“Horn Of The Field”), while nominally a concept-record reaction to religious extremism and hard-right politics, has no real concern for anything except liquid streams of deep stoner meditation, tenebrous dirges and all-encompassing fuzz. It’s consequently black to the point of Goth-rock and Scandinavian metal, a reverbed vocal echoing on forever like it’s caught in a hall of mirrors.
One of a number of standouts, “Trojan Horse” hits a groove early on and ploughs it incessantly, razor-sharp jangle-riffs slicing pummelling percussion to ribbons. The ten-minute title-track slows it right down, building from atmospheric ambience to dank and dirty, mile-high drone. Spidery guitar structures and scraped strings drive “Neon Times” forward to intense passages of repeats despite the vocal’s monolithic monotone. That fuzz peaks on the blinding “Blizzard”; the aural equivalent of TV static, it dials in and out before an incandescent finale that culminates in an eerie invite to “meet me in the eye of the blizzard”. Slightly less evil, “Into The Woods” then dwells firmly in the doldrums until it fizzes into life with a great wall of distortion and feedback that hits like a brick to the face, once again proving these Janitors have the keys to the gates of hell.
Best track: “Trojan Horse”
~Horn Ur Marken is released in a full-colour UV printed sleeve with fluorescent printing April 24th 2017 via Cardinal Fuzz.~