Furze's Psychedelic Black Metal Takes Flight on "Caw Entrance" (Early Album Stream)
Here at Invisible Oranges, we're strong advocates for black metal getting weird, and Furze has just plain stayed weird. Sole member Woe J. Reaper evolved the band through several iterations before the current moniker Furze emerged in 1998, and he's just about to unleash the project's newest album Caw Entrance early next month. It's heavy on hallucinatory atmosphere, but twice as laden down with riffs -- primarily a guitar-oriented offering, there's also a heavy focus on stretched-out exploratory passages that demonstrate Reaper's creative lead style and his knack for off-kilter melody.
Billed as 'black psych metal,' there's a certain thread of humor throughout the album -- from song titles like "Post Mortem Trippin'" to Reaper's darkly entertaining spoken-word vocals on "You Shall Prevail" -- that dovetails with the potent instrumentals to only reinforce a surreal state of being, At times, it can slip the listener into a half-dreaming, subconscious state, only to tear apart that suspension with a bracing, meaty riff. We're streaming the whole album below, and I'll echo Reaper's own suggestion: listen to it with headphones, and dig in.
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That suggestion is partially rooted in the album's mixing, which features fully mono-panned guitars as a prioritized, central element. Whether or not you believe, like Reaper does, that this was the only way to achieve the album's sound, it's emblematic of the passionate eccentricity that makes Caw Entrance so gripping. This fierce, atavistic album, with its drums tucked under a funeral shroud, echoing rasped vocals, and isolated guitars screaming in each ear, is a completely intentional, fully-realized vision that operates in a stylistic vacuum. That said, I guess it's not really earbud-sharing material.
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Caw Entrance releases April 5th via Devoted Art Propaganda.
