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Total Life
The project's name may have instantly rang a bell in my head as a nod towards the band Total, but I’m not sure that everyone lives in a world where that connection would have been made; sadly Matthew Bower is not yet a household name. Actually playing this vinyl took a step further in revealing a moderate debt towards Bower's drone projects. This debut release from Kevin Doria's (half of Washington's weighty Growing) extra curricular pursuit has been rescued from the 2005's graveyard of cassettes revealing two heavily gorgeous slabs of fucked modern prairiescapes.
This record seconds the idea that filthy buzzing feedback and high toned guitar like some windswept, ragged bagpipe can produce a comfortable satiety. The spiky hum of "A Thousand Lights" softens over time as it sinks into a great milky distraction or digital slough allowing a bed for heavily tranced rock-outs. FX pedals to the floor, seemingly heading for the metal white-out, neither side implodes into mere noise for noises sake.
The second side's single piece, "Peaks," is a little more open though with some mountaintop guitar work that squeezes itself flat through the record. There are plateaus of playing that feel thinned down due to lack of oxygen, the drones don’t sit still but are still the song’s unmistakeable root. Guitar notes are birthed like some immense multicoloured Simon Says toy. The simple blue sleeve artwork helps to spell out that this is no ride through stony despondency; no bleak handmade collages here.
