Death Obsession

Brown Jenkins, the one-man Texas black metal project, calls a halt to its/his efforts with this third full-length. An exploration of mortality and darkness like every other black metal album on Earth, it casts the listener into a hazy realm of minimal bass-snare-cymbal drumming (possibly programmed) underpinning long tracks full of repetitive and multi-layered guitar riffing with barely perceptible bass, all of it slathered in fuzzy distortion. There are vocals, delivered in a harsh and guttural blast-furnace roar more indebted to death metal than to old-school black metal, but the focus is the guitars, which at times attain a sort of mesmerizing dissonance not that far from Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, or the three long, grinding tracks that open Neil Young's Broken Arrow. The songs have movements; they speed up and slow down, the nearly 11-minute "Ashes in Her Mouth" in particular, which goes from doomy crawl to punk sprint. "Lifetaker" is almost post-punk in the way its guitar riffs seem to echo and waver, and the bass is more prominent in the mix, but this creates a disappointing effect something like surf rock toward the middle of the track. The cosmically depressed song titles are only broken up by the surprising inclusion of a piece called "Bluebird," but musically that one's no outlier; it's another nine minutes of grinding guitars and thumping drums. This guy's really good at what he does. The question is, are you up for over an hour's worth, with little variation and no pause for reflection?