Century Plants / Locrian - Dissolvers (Tape Drift, 2010)

Century Plants - Delirium (excerpt)


When you've got two like-minded bands as awesome as Locrian & Century Plants, and a label that churns out winner after winner like Tape Drift, you know it's only a matter of time before the two shack up and squeeze out a monster like Dissolvers.

This is Century Plants' first vinyl adventure. You should be as excited as they are about it because it means they put on their game face and made some of the best drifty jams ever. Their two tracks are a perfect fit for a Locrian split. They're dark and moody as fuck, blending noise, metal, doom, drone, and throwing in some psych to spice things up. The first track is a wandering mess of clatter, hiss, & reverb. Not doing much but creating a weird atmosphere and being a creeper until 6 minutes in when it gets into a real groove and they start banging out those chords, bordering on blissful, but it stays rooted in a brown rusted drone. Their second piece is more cosmic, wonky bloops mixed with solid celestial guitar tones, just drifting through space dust, waiting to get sucked into the inevitable black hole. The pleasing guitars turn into a more evil buzzing beast, more feedback & distortion added to a layer of deep bass drone & static noise while a buried muffled guitar solo works its way through echoing vocals and ever increasing volume. This is some top notch shit as only Century Plants could do it.

Flip it over and you're treated to Locrian's latest mastery of indescribable black ambient noise metal. They start things off with a piercing tone, already more harsh than anything CP did on their side. Let it settle in, though, and some beautifully sad guitars show up with lazer feedback in tow. They crank that shit up, getting super evil, throwing around more & more crash & burn like it ain't no thing. It's noisy and loud and totally fucking badass metal without so much as tapping on a drum. Their second track has that same looped electronic scale that I think also showed up in some form on Rain Of Ashes. Then comes in some delayed picking & shredding and a wash of wind style static. Super hypnotic, a semi-psych jam pulsing through Locrian guitars, heavy on the harsh buzzing drone.

Dissolvers is a dark twisted piece of noisy psych metal drone that couldn't be any better. These two duos are forever at the top of their game, and even though they're both so goddamn prolific, this split is essential.