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World Premiere: Dark Castle - "I Hear Wind"

Painting by Stevie Floyd

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This is the world premiere of “I Hear Wind”, from Dark Castle’s new album Surrender to All Life Beyond Form.

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“I Hear Wind”
[audio: DARKCASTLE_IHEAR.mp3]

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Dark Castle’s Surrender to All Life Beyond Form (Profound Lore, 2011) is the sound of freedom. Guitarist/vocalist Stevie Floyd has fully absorbed sludge, doom, black, and death metal, and funneled those vocabularies into organic expression. She sounds like she is always learning. Exotic scales and acoustic instruments (guitar, piano) have crept into her playing. Floyd is not exactly John McLaughlin with Shakti, but I bet she’d crib a trick or two from him.

On record, Dark Castle was once potential. Now the band is force, moving and writhing with a desire so vibrant that it practically grips listeners and shakes them. “Live!” the force says. “Learn and do!” So Floyd paints (see above artwork) and tattoos and screams her heart out. She and drummer Rob Shaffer smash hard at metal’s walls. In their hands, metal is not preconceptions. It is breaking the shackles that keep humans from thriving.

Surrender arrives on May 31. Hear another song from it here. Pre-order the album here. Dark Castle will tour the US and Europe with YOB this year, with Shaffer on drums for both bands.

— Cosmo Lee

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