DEAD RAVEN CHOIR - My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind on sale

DEAD RAVEN CHOIR - My Firstborn Will Surely Be Blind
Smolken returns to Aurora Borealis in the guise of his perhaps better known Dead Raven Choir project. Since the release of Wolfmangler's Dwelling In A Dead Raven For The Glory Of Crucified Wolves Smolken has settled in Poland, and seriously begun to record as much as possible.
Where Wolfmangler is slow and ponderous ("compost with a grudge" as Julian Cope stated in The Guardian last year) and could perhaps even be described as an obscure branch of Doom, how shall we classify Dead Raven Choir? An altogether noisier undertaking and unafraid of the heady heights of mid tempo, Dead Raven Choir has baffled, irked and aroused listeners for a number of years now. An unholy cross of Black Metal and Folk? Organically produced noise and scree? Doubtless many a consumer has been outraged by a lazily tagged Dead Raven Choir release, though with the countless CDr and micro label releases there grows a veritable army of supporters, eager to have their preconceptions smashed and ears damaged once more with every hint of new material.

And so to Surely My Firstborn Will Be Blind. The first thing to assault the listener is Smolken's disregard, nay contempt, for the concept, practice and orthodox theory of recording levels. In his own words "Everything was recorded using a Polish stereo microphone from the 1970s, mixed and mastered using headphones of roughly the same age and provenance and a more modern pair of PC speakers which I got for free from a guy who paid about $6 for them." The instrumentation is similarly basic, being entirely bass centred, be it the double necked electric bass guitar of which Smolken is so fond (though he is now the proud owner of a triple necked model...), or the more traditional bass fiddle. "I already knew from working with Wolfmangler that metal sounds better without guitars. Cleaning up the arrangements made things clearer and heavier."

Raw, violent and organized, Surely My Firstborn Will Be Blind grips the listener immediately and threatens to overwhelm them with its brute force. Clearly there is something to be said for the Eastern Bloc technologies that were so deftly abused, as this is truly a unique sound. Smolken has transcended the avant-garde and moved beyond:

Ladies and gentlemen, Dead Raven Choir has left the field.